SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Susan Page writes at USA Today that Leon Panetta, former head of the CIA and Secretary of the Department of Defense, says Americans should be braced for a long battle against the brutal terrorist group Islamic State that will test U.S. resolve. "I think we're looking at kind of a 30-year war," says Panetta, one that will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere. Panetta also says that decisions made by President Obama over the past three years have made that battle more difficult — an explosive assessment by a respected policymaker of the president he served. Not pushing the Iraqi government harder to allow a residual US force to remain when troops withdrew in 2011, a deal he says could have been negotiated with more effort "created a vacuum in terms of the ability of that country to better protect itself, and it's out of that vacuum that ISIS began to breed." It is no surprise to Panetta that the assessment in his new book "Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace" is drawing White House ire. "Look, I've been a guy who's always been honest," Panetta says. "I've been honest in politics, honest with the people that I deal with. I've been a straight talker. Some people like it; some people don't like it. But I wasn't going to write a book that kind of didn't express what I thought was the case."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:11AM
I had a helluva time on that last election. I had absolutely no respect for either. I saw one as someone completely ignorant of resource management, trying his best ( and succeeding ) in winning the election by buying welfare votes... I saw the other as an extremely greedy 1%-er all out for using power of government to wrangle the last drop of blood out of the workingman - and by workingman, I do not mean "work" to be crafty ways of indebting people into servitude by penmanship, knowing who to shake hands with that can grant one the power to issue money he doesn't have - then collecting usury on it.
As far as I was concerned, it was an election of having the three stooges or having a hungry and clever lion on the loose to be our leader. I chose the former as it least it would not be quite as destructive, but it was definitely a lose-lose situation for me...
I felt like I was given the choice between being gutpunched or losing a finger.
But as long as the whole world whores after the US Dollar, which we print at will, we can afford the military might to enforce the pens of the bankers. If there is one thing that last financial shock demonstrated... the bankers own us. They can print money, collecting usury on that which never was, and we can't... by order of our own government.
Its the same damned thing that enslaved the French 200 years ago.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:40AM
There is no need to rig the actual polls, you see. It's so much cleaner to rig it earlier.
Just make sure that the two idiots on the ballot are BOTH your men, then you can relax and it doesnt matter which one the cattle vote into office. That's how it's actually done. That's how the Chinese Communist Party intends to control the elections in Hong Kong, and the natives there are rioting in the streets over it, but here in the land of the free and the home of the brave we are too busy watching football to notice, let alone care.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Kell on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:23AM
So why not vote for someone else? "You're throwing your vote away on a third party candidate" is only true if people believe it. If enough people stop accepting and start exerting their voting power, they might see change.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:47AM
> I felt like I was given the choice between being gutpunched or losing a finger.
So you wasted your vote by choosing the status quo.
Vote your conscience even if they have no chance of winning because what matters is the long game. The more votes the big 2 lose to 3rd parties the more motivation they have to incorporate policies of those 3rd parties into their platforms the next time.