AI
Saturday, June 15, 2013 2:14:23 AM
Friday Night Music: More Zaz
June 14, 2013, 5:21 pm 3 Comments
What’s funny is that the lyrics aren’t all that different from Paula Abdul’s The Way That You Love Me. But somehow, even though that was actually one of Paula Abdul’s better hits, I like this a whole lot better …
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/friday-night-music-more-zaz/
Posted to your 2nd article .. Obama’s Way .. the 2nd article
in yours .. the picture at the top ..
[...] .. from about ??? 1.5 inches down ..
*
The second week in March of last year offered a nice illustration of a president’s curious predicament. On March 11 a tsunami rolled over the Japanese village of Fukushima, triggering the meltdown of reactors inside a nuclear power plant in the town—and raising the alarming possibility that a cloud of radiation would waft over the United States. If you happened to be president of the United States, you were woken up and given the news. (In fact, the president seldom is awakened with news of some crisis, but his aides routinely are, to determine if the president’s sleep needs to be disrupted for whatever has just happened. As one nighttime crisis vetter put it, “They’ll say, ‘This just happened in Afghanistan,’ and I’m like, ‘O.K., and what am I supposed to do about it?’”) In the case of Fukushima, if you were able to go back to sleep you did so knowing that radiation clouds were not your most difficult problem. Not even close. At that very moment, you were deciding on whether to approve a ridiculously audacious plan to assassinate Osama bin Laden in his house in Pakistan. You were arguing, as ever, with Republican leaders in Congress about the budget. And you were receiving daily briefings on various revolutions in various Arab countries. In early February, following the lead of the Egyptians and the Tunisians, the Libyan people had revolted against their dictator, who was now bent on crushing them. Muammar Qaddafi and his army of 27,000 men were marching across the Libyan desert toward a city called Benghazi and were promising to exterminate some large number of the 1.2 million people inside.
If you were president just then and you turned your television to some cable news channel you would have seen many Republican senators screaming at you to invade Libya and many Democratic congressmen hollering at you that you had no business putting American lives at risk in Libya. If you flipped over to the networks on March 7 you might have caught ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper saying to your press secretary, Jay Carney, “More than a thousand people have died, according to the United Nations. How many more people have to die before the United States decides, O.K., we’re going to take this one step of a no-fly zone?”
By March 13, Qaddafi appeared to be roughly two weeks from getting to Benghazi. On that day the French announced they were planning to introduce a resolution in the United Nations to use U.N. forces to secure the skies over Libya in order to prevent Libyan planes from flying. A “no-fly zone” this was called, and it forced Obama’s hand. The president had to decide whether to support the no-fly-zone resolution or not. At 4:10 p.m. on March 15 the White House held a meeting to discuss the issue. “Here is what we knew,” recalls Obama, by which he means here is what I knew. “We knew that Qaddafi was moving on Benghazi, and that his history was such that he could carry out a threat to kill tens of thousands of people. We knew we didn’t have a lot of time—somewhere between two days and two weeks. We knew they were moving faster than we originally anticipated. We knew that Europe was proposing a no-fly zone.”
That much had been in the news. One crucial piece of information had not. “We knew that a no-fly zone would not save the people of Benghazi,” says Obama. “The no-fly zone was an expression of concern that didn’t really do anything.” European leaders wanted to create a no-fly zone to stop Qaddafi, but Qaddafi wasn’t flying. His army was racing across the North African desert in jeeps and tanks. Obama had to have wondered just how aware of this were these foreign leaders supposedly interested in the fate of these Libyan civilians. He didn’t know if they knew that a no-fly zone was pointless, but if they’d talked to any military leader for five minutes they would have. And that was not all. “The last thing we knew,” he adds, “is that if you announced a no-fly zone and if it appeared feckless, there would be additional pressure for us to go further. As enthusiastic as France and Britain were about the no-fly zone, there was a danger that if we participated the U.S. would own the operation. Because we had the capacity.”"
.. and now Syria .. talk about being in between rocks and hard places .. whatever
happens i admire and appreciate President Obama for his standing against the hawks
for so long, and for the consideration and thought he puts into his Syria decisions ..
June 14, 2013, 5:21 pm 3 Comments
What’s funny is that the lyrics aren’t all that different from Paula Abdul’s The Way That You Love Me. But somehow, even though that was actually one of Paula Abdul’s better hits, I like this a whole lot better …
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/friday-night-music-more-zaz/
Posted to your 2nd article .. Obama’s Way .. the 2nd article
in yours .. the picture at the top ..
[...] .. from about ??? 1.5 inches down ..
*
The second week in March of last year offered a nice illustration of a president’s curious predicament. On March 11 a tsunami rolled over the Japanese village of Fukushima, triggering the meltdown of reactors inside a nuclear power plant in the town—and raising the alarming possibility that a cloud of radiation would waft over the United States. If you happened to be president of the United States, you were woken up and given the news. (In fact, the president seldom is awakened with news of some crisis, but his aides routinely are, to determine if the president’s sleep needs to be disrupted for whatever has just happened. As one nighttime crisis vetter put it, “They’ll say, ‘This just happened in Afghanistan,’ and I’m like, ‘O.K., and what am I supposed to do about it?’”) In the case of Fukushima, if you were able to go back to sleep you did so knowing that radiation clouds were not your most difficult problem. Not even close. At that very moment, you were deciding on whether to approve a ridiculously audacious plan to assassinate Osama bin Laden in his house in Pakistan. You were arguing, as ever, with Republican leaders in Congress about the budget. And you were receiving daily briefings on various revolutions in various Arab countries. In early February, following the lead of the Egyptians and the Tunisians, the Libyan people had revolted against their dictator, who was now bent on crushing them. Muammar Qaddafi and his army of 27,000 men were marching across the Libyan desert toward a city called Benghazi and were promising to exterminate some large number of the 1.2 million people inside.
If you were president just then and you turned your television to some cable news channel you would have seen many Republican senators screaming at you to invade Libya and many Democratic congressmen hollering at you that you had no business putting American lives at risk in Libya. If you flipped over to the networks on March 7 you might have caught ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper saying to your press secretary, Jay Carney, “More than a thousand people have died, according to the United Nations. How many more people have to die before the United States decides, O.K., we’re going to take this one step of a no-fly zone?”
By March 13, Qaddafi appeared to be roughly two weeks from getting to Benghazi. On that day the French announced they were planning to introduce a resolution in the United Nations to use U.N. forces to secure the skies over Libya in order to prevent Libyan planes from flying. A “no-fly zone” this was called, and it forced Obama’s hand. The president had to decide whether to support the no-fly-zone resolution or not. At 4:10 p.m. on March 15 the White House held a meeting to discuss the issue. “Here is what we knew,” recalls Obama, by which he means here is what I knew. “We knew that Qaddafi was moving on Benghazi, and that his history was such that he could carry out a threat to kill tens of thousands of people. We knew we didn’t have a lot of time—somewhere between two days and two weeks. We knew they were moving faster than we originally anticipated. We knew that Europe was proposing a no-fly zone.”
That much had been in the news. One crucial piece of information had not. “We knew that a no-fly zone would not save the people of Benghazi,” says Obama. “The no-fly zone was an expression of concern that didn’t really do anything.” European leaders wanted to create a no-fly zone to stop Qaddafi, but Qaddafi wasn’t flying. His army was racing across the North African desert in jeeps and tanks. Obama had to have wondered just how aware of this were these foreign leaders supposedly interested in the fate of these Libyan civilians. He didn’t know if they knew that a no-fly zone was pointless, but if they’d talked to any military leader for five minutes they would have. And that was not all. “The last thing we knew,” he adds, “is that if you announced a no-fly zone and if it appeared feckless, there would be additional pressure for us to go further. As enthusiastic as France and Britain were about the no-fly zone, there was a danger that if we participated the U.S. would own the operation. Because we had the capacity.”"
.. and now Syria .. talk about being in between rocks and hard places .. whatever
happens i admire and appreciate President Obama for his standing against the hawks
for so long, and for the consideration and thought he puts into his Syria decisions ..
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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