Usa Thread

[kamui]

I just had a look at Fox News' website. I understand why research found out the Fexnews audience is much less informed than the average. If you look at the politics section all major headlines quote the GOP camp and of course are all anti the current government.

 

Which of course means the Foxnews audience must think that the GOP has the upper hand all matters politics, while Obama and the White House are just screwing up everything.

And that explains why the right had to develop the idea that all polls are screwed: the polls show a very different reality: Obama still has strong support among the majority of the electorate. Otherwise even the Fox audience (at least two or three of them) might get the idea, that they are misinformed about US politics and the election.

 

On the other side, Huffington Post has a much easier job producing a positive image of Obama and the election campaign and attacking Romney and co, since the polls go in their direction. But of course HuffPost is a much lesser force in the US media since it only exist online and neither doesn't influence the Dem politics like Foxnews tv/radio personalities do.

[unit731]

As I've stated before, it is the genius of Roger Ailes and his boss Rupurt Murdoch.

All has to do with the money. The advertising income. The profits Fox News creates for Rupurt Murdoch.

Both educated and dump folks watch and listen to Fox News.

Mostly a caucasian protestent audience.

They craft the news so that folks all reinforces listeners opinions.

Subtle racism. Big government. Welfare cheats. Food stamps.

The "Main Stream Media" executives and reporters somehow sit down every morning and decide what good news to report about Obama, Democrats, liberals/progressives. And Fox News must somehow counter this with the "real" news.

Tune in any time any day. Every story will have an Obama element, Democart element, or liberal/progressive element.

If there is a forest fire in Colorado - Fox News will somehow relate this to Obama, Democrats, or liberals.

Before Obama - just substitute the word Pelosi or Ted Kennedy or Barney Frank.

It was Roger Aisles that created "Fair and Balanced".

 

How could it not be true if it is on TV?

[kamui]

The parallel universe where Mitt leads all polls

By: Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns

October 1, 2012 04:27 AM EDT

 

To talk with any working Republican political operative these days is to hear the same tale of woe: a grim accounting of the past few weeks, a dash of gallows humor and a measure of hope that President Obama is still beatable. Never in question is that Mitt Romney is trailing — the private surveys these strategists see for their down-ballot clients make that clear. The only question is by how much.

 

But hanging up the phone or clicking out of e-mail is to find a parallel universe on the right. On TV, talk radio and especially the Internet is a place where the swing-state polls that show Romney losing are not just inaccurate but part of an intentional plot by the heretofore unknown media-pollster axis to depress Republican voters. In this other world, Romney not only isn’t losing — he’s on the verge of a convincing victory.

 

“I believe if the election were held today, Romney would win by 4 or 5 points,†trumpeted Dick Morris on Fox News last week, predicting a win for the GOP ticket in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada and Pennsylvania. In public polls right now, Romney is losing in each of those states. But, Morris said, that’s because the data are all wrong.

....

 

Politico

 

[Bangkoktraveler]

ALEC is going to run the country

so the election iks of no concern.

 

Will ALEC turn the country over to the Mormons?

[Flashermac]

Univision report connects Operation Fast and Furious scandal to murders of Mexican teenagers

 

 

The Spanish language television news network Univision unleashed a bombshell investigative report on Operation Fast and Furious Sunday evening, finding that in January 2010 drug cartel hit men slaughtered students with weapons the United States government allowed to flow to them across the Mexican border.

 

“On January 30, 2010, a commando of at least 20 hit men parked themselves outside a birthday party of high school and college students in Villas de Salvarcar, Ciudad Juarez,†according to a version of the Univision report in English, on the ABC News website.

 

“Near midnight, the assassins, later identified as hired guns for the Mexican cartel La Linea, broke into a one-story house and opened fire on a gathering of nearly 60 teenagers. Outside, lookouts gunned down a screaming neighbor and several students who had managed to escape. Fourteen young men and women were killed, and 12 more were wounded before the hit men finally fled.â€

 

Citing a Mexican Army document it obtained and published, Univision reported that “[t]hree of the high caliber weapons fired that night in Villas de Salvarcar were linked to a gun tracing operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).â€

 

That operation was Fast and Furious.

 

The “massacre,†as Univision described it, was not the only bombshell the network unveiled in its Sunday evening report.

 

“Univision News identified a total of 57 more previously unreported firearms that were bought by straw purchasers monitored by ATF during Operation Fast and Furious, and then recovered in Mexico in sites related to murders, kidnappings, and at least one other massacre,†the Univision report reads.

The network also uncovered another Fast and Furious weapons “massacre.†On September 2, 2009, 18 young men were killed at “El Aliviane, a rehabilitation center in Ciudad Juarez,†according to the report.

 

Univision found many of these victims through “access to the list of serial numbers for weapons used in Fast and Furious†and the “list of guns seized in Mexico,†according to English subtitles on the Spanish-language video.

 

“After cross-referencing them both lists, it became clear that a least a hundred of them were used in crimes of all kinds,†the subtitles read. “We found 57 weapons that were not mentioned in [the U.S.] Congress’ investigation.â€

 

Though Univision tracked many more victims down, it said that “the death toll that this free flow of weapons authorized by ATF had in Mexico has not been tallied.â€

 

Univision held nothing back in its broadcast, airing images and video of bloodied, dead bodies. The network showed the faces of the dead and walked viewers through how cartel operatives hunted their victims down with the weapons President Barack Obama’s administration allowed straw buyers to traffick to them.

 

One photo, for instance, showed pools of blood in the streets of a Mexican town after a “massacre†committed by murderers armed with Fast and Furious weapons. Video footage showed where some of the victims were killed and how the cartels chased their helpless victims to their deaths.

 

The Univision broadcast implicitly suggested that Americans have no regard for the victims of violence American policy helps fuel — that is, until one of those victims ends up being an American.

 

It wasn’t until U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry’s murder prompted whistle-blowers to come forward to Congress to publicly voice concerns about ]he program that the Obama administration stopped allowing firearms to flow into Mexico.

 

One victim’s father, Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, told Univision he thinks “Americans are not often moved by the pain of those outside [their country].â€

 

“But they are moved by the pain of their own,†Sicilia added.

 

“Well, turn around and watch the massacres.â€

 

Univision says the Obama administration’s actions “inadvertently†helped fuel violence and a war between the cartels.

 

“In Mexico, the timing of the operation coincided with an upsurge of violence in the war among the country’s strongest cartels,†according to Univision.

 

“In 2009, the northern Mexican states served as a battlefield for the Sinaloa and Juarez drug trafficking organizations, and as expansion territory for the increasingly powerful Zetas. According to documents obtained by Univision News, from October of that year to the end of 2010, nearly 175 weapons from Operation Fast and Furious inadvertently armed the various warring factions across northern Mexico.â€

 

An English-subtitled translation of one expert’s comments indicated that the weapons the Obama administration allowed to flow to the cartels through Fast and Furious were “capable of not only penetrating an armored vehicle but also a whole house from wall to wall.â€

 

According to the Univision report, it wasn’t weak gun laws that made Fast and Furious possible, as some liberal commentators have suggested.

 

“If up to this point drug dealers could easily obtain and smuggle guns, the United States government made it easier,†English subtitles on one part of the report read.

 

“When Fast and Furious began in 2009, the ATF and Arizona prosecutors told [gun] store owners to sell weapons without restrictions to suspicious buyers.â€

 

Univision also said that it was Phoenix ATF office leader Bill Newell who ultimately concluded that “the only way to track the guns was to wait for weapons to be recovered in crime scenes in Mexico.â€

 

That charge, if true, would mean the Obama administration decided to allow cartel operatives to kill and injure people with the weapons it gave them, and to recover the guns only after criminals ditched them at brutal — often deadly — crime scenes.

 

Univision also found additional details about other gunwalking operations the Obama administration undertook.

 

“In Florida, the weapons from Operation Castaway ended up in the hands of criminals in Colombia, Honduras and Venezuela, the lead informant in the case told Univision News in a prison interview,†the network reported. The informant Unvision interviewed was “Vietnam veteran-turned-arms-trafficker†Hugh Crumpler.

 

“When the ATF stopped me, they told me the guns were going to cartels,†Crumpler said. “The ATF knew before I knew and had been following me for a considerable length of time. They could not have followed me for two months like they said they did, and not know the guns were going somewhere, and not want for that to be happening.â€

 

 

My link

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univision

 

 

[unit731]

ALEC is going to run the country

so the election iks of no concern.

 

Will ALEC turn the country over to the Mormons?

 

 

I don't think that any know what ALEC actually is.

 

Which is exactly what ALEC wants !

[Flashermac]

Obama waives sanctions on countries that use child soldiers

 

 

U.S. President Barack Obama issued a new executive order last week to fight human trafficking, touting his administration's handling of the issue.

 

"When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed -- that's slavery," Obama said in a speech at the Clinton Global Initiative. "It is barbaric, and it is evil, and it has no place in a civilized world. Now, as a nation, we've long rejected such cruelty."

 

But for the third year in a row, Obama has waived almost all U.S. sanctions that would punish certain countries that use child soldiers, upsetting many in the human rights community.

 

Late Friday afternoon, Obama issued a presidential memorandum waiving penalties under the Child Soldiers Protection Act of 2008 for Libya, South Sudan, and Yemen, penalties that Congress put in place to prevent U.S. arms sales to countries determined by the State Department to be the worst abusers of child soldiers in their militaries. The president also partially waived sanctions against the Democratic Republic of the Congo to allow some military training and arms sales to that country.

 

Human rights advocates saw the waivers as harmful to the goal of using U.S. influence to urge countries that receive military assistance to move away from using child soldiers and contradictory to the rhetoric Obama used in his speech.

 

"After such a strong statement against the exploitation of children, it seems bizarre that Obama would give a pass to countries using children in their armed forces and using U.S. tax money to do that," said Jesse Eaves, the senior policy advisor for child protection at World Vision.

 

The Obama administration doesn't want to upset its relationships with countries that it needs for security cooperation, but the blanket use of waivers is allowing the administration to avoid the law's intent, which was to use force the U.S. government to put a greater priority on human rights and child protection when doling out military aid, he said.

 

"The intent in this law was to use this waiver authority only in extreme circumstances, yet this has become an annual thing and this has become the default of this administration," Eaves said.

 

The Romney campaign has made Obama's record on human rights a feature of its foreign-policy critique, with top advisors accusing the president of deprioritizing the issue, often in sweeping terms.

 

"Barack Obama has broken with a tradition that goes back to Woodrow Wilson about human rights and values animating our foreign policy. This administration has not been an effective voice for human rights," said Romney campaign senior advisor for foreign policy Rich Williamson, who also served as George W. Bush's special envoy to Sudan, told The Cable in July.

 

Bush signed the child-soldiers law in 2008. It prohibits U.S. military education and training, foreign military financing, and other defense-related assistance to countries that actively recruit troops under the age of 18. Countries are designated as violators if the State Department's annual Trafficking in Persons report identifies them as recruiting child soldiers. The original bill was sponsored by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL).

 

Obama first waived the sanctions in 2010, the first year they were to go into effect. At that time, the White House failed to inform Congress or the NGO community of its decision in advance, setting off a fierce backlash. A justification memo obtained by The Cable at the time made several security-related arguments for the waivers. Sudan was going through a fragile transition, for example. Yemen was crucial to counterterrorism cooperation, the administration argued.

 

But NSC Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs Samantha Power told NGO leaders at the time that the waivers would not become a recurring event.

 

"Our judgment was: Brand them, name them, shame them, and then try to leverage assistance in a fashion to make this work," Power said, saying the administration wanted to give the violator countries one more year to show progress. "Our judgment is we'll work from inside the tent."

 

But the next year, in 2011, Obama waived almost all the sanctions once again, using largely the same justifications, except that the administration argued that the law didn't apply to South Sudan because it wasn't a country until July 2011. Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) tried to pass new legislation to force Obama to notify Congress before issuing the waivers.

 

Fortenberry called the decision an "assault on human dignity," and said, "Good citizens of this country who do not want to be complicit in this grave human rights abuse must challenge this administration."

 

This year, the State Department held a briefing for NGO leaders and human rights activists to answer questions about the waivers and try to ally their concerns.

 

"They are addressing the concerns of the legislation in a more pragmatic and useful way than in the past, but they still have a ways to go and this was a clear missed opportunity," Rachel Stohl, a senior associate at the Stimson Center who attended the briefing, told The Cable. "You want the waivers to be used very sparingly but some of these countries get the waiver every year."

 

Stohl rejects the administration's argument that countries like Libya and South Sudan are so fragile that they can't be leaned on to do better on human rights.

 

"I would argue that this is exactly the right time to make clear to Libya what the parameters are," she said.

 

Jo Becker, advocacy director for the children's rights division at Human Rights Watch, told The Cable that where the United States has used some pressure, such as in the DRC, where there was a partial cutoff of military aid last year, there was a positive effect.

 

"After years of foot-dragging, Congo is close to signing a U.N. action plan to end its use of child soldiers," she said. "But in other countries with child soldiers, including South Sudan, Libya, and Yemen, the U.S. continues to squander its leverage by giving military aid with no conditions."

 

NSC Spokesman Tommy Vietor did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

 

My link

 

 

[Steve]

I would like to hear the administrations response.

[Redbaron]

Anyone else think BKK traveler has a phobia of mormons?

[Flashermac]

Amongst other things ...