The BigAss 2nd term thread

[Scoooter]

Patrick you need a Snickers.

[KevinNYC]

Ugh you're such a slime ball dude. Your gross admiration for everything Obama and the party makes me sick.

I'll assume you missed the post immediately before yours?

Or does the Rice promotion offend your delicate, nonpartisan sensibilities?

See here among others

[gigantes]

game change was a great movie. i didn't even know it was adapted from a book lol

orly? i didn't even know there was a movie! hah!

but really, i think they could have made a movie about almost anything and called it "game change." at best they prolly would have been able to cover .1% of their favorite chapter in the book.

...

power does have a pretty mannish face, but very interesting eyes / eyebrows. like a throwback to reality... setting aside all the idiotic things women do to their eyebrows and eyes (reams or black eyeliner, etc) to attract us idiot males these days.

[KevinNYC]

orly? i didn't even know there was a movie! hah!

but really, i think they could have made a movie about almost anything and called it "game change." at best they prolly would have been able to cover .1% of their favorite chapter in the book.

...

power does have a pretty mannish face, but very interesting eyes / eyebrows. like a throwback to reality... setting aside all the idiotic things women do to their eyebrows and eyes (reams or black eyeliner, etc) to attract us idiot males these days.

HBO made it and they focused it on the Sarah Palin pick. Julianne Moore was quite good as Palin. Oddly enough, I just came across this quote about Samantha Power.

Quote of the Day: She’ll Be Played By Julianne Moore in ‘Libya: The Movie’

Also the HBO show VEEP is hilarious about politics

[RidonKs]

check that movie gigantes, it's really funny and like kevin said moore is outstanding. woody harrelson is also good and i thought whoever played mccain nailed it.

You're lost me at rambouillet which I had to google. You're getting well into the argument and your response to it, before explaining what the argument is. Do I need to watch the video first?

yea i suppose. honestly they don't get much into rembouillet, i just consider it important which is why i launched into it. essentially it was the nato agreement offered to milosevic that authorized nato forces to basically go anywhere they wanted in the country.... on the premise of stopping a kosovar genocide, which is the point power invokes. when milosevic rejected the proposal, he supposedly "rejected peace". they just touch on it at the end a bit, the conversation is more about the current situation on the ground. scahill sounds a bit scattered. i meant to post the link before my ramble lol


re: rice.... obama was initially intending to make her secretary of state right? before the republicans went on their crusade? so that's what i was referring to and that's why i feel it's an important side issue that i would have expected to get more media coverage.

i'm not exactly sure now why i was under the impression state would play a major role in the final decision... maybe i just got confused on the basis of it being the department that released the initial environmental assessment. maybe you're right that it'd be unlikely to sway the collaborative decision in one way or the other, but having somebody with that particular background that high in cabinet in the midst of, as i said, a ridiculously important and public decision about to be made.... it warrants exposure and we didn't get any in the run-up before she was scared away.

as far as notable points of her career, maybe you can fill me in. i don't keep much up to date on particular american reps at the un. i heard her name once or twice and maybe a speech or something over the past few years but it all just blends into general american obstructionism at the un, mainly offering the same old talking points on the same old issues. at a certain point the person making them doesn't matter unless they're particularly passionate about the issues one way or another... in which case maybe something interesting gets said. rice didn't fit that bill. power sounds like she might though, to my mind she's clearly much more engaged with these issues, even if i wholeheartedly disagree with where she stands on them.

but we have completely different perspectives on that stuff so it's hardly worth getting into.

Also after you posted it I found that Found out she's worth about $20-40 million bucks. Her husband is a producer for ABC, don't know if it's mostly his money or her money. He's Canadian and most of the energy/oil investments seem to be in Canada. Her $300,000 to $600,000 investment in TransCanada is represent something like 1-3% of her wealth. So it doesn't seem like a big to deal to her to divest.

i just hate how wealth like that seems to springboard people right into high government jobs. it's not a direct cause or anything but the correlation really stinks. the latest example is that penny hotel heiress getting the commerce secretary bid.... after she was directly involved in the subprime mess.

Obama has already shown that doesn't also take her position. She was very much in favor in intervening in Syria for example.

have you heard his secretary of state lately? kerry is calling for the overthrow of a dictator, characterizing the situation in the same light as the arab spring, completely misrepresenting what just about every journalist on the ground in syria has been calling a civil war. the admin press releases have been very careful with their words but i think obama is more or less on the bandwagon of 'humanitarian intervention'.... which would be absolutely devastating to the coutnry and the region as a whole, not that it's not already devastated.

[gigantes]

thanks, kevin. i don't have TV these days (everything internet) but will take a look at some clips.

i'm a bit sheltered in life, but even as a kid i used to be quite fascinated with louis rukeyser's show... later gwen ifill's and bill maher's. every time i see a clip of jon stewart nowadays i promise myself to start watching the show on replay. i mean, f--k.


EDIT: omg, ridonks... did you say woody harrelson?? with amber waves and maude lebowski as a bonus! jesus christmas, i need to get myself together stat.

[RidonKs]

haha yea man, he's the campaign strategist who sorta triggers the palin selection and then deals with the meltdown aftermath of it, based on this guy

[KevinNYC]

haha yea man, he's the campaign strategist who sorta triggers the palin selection and then deals with the meltdown aftermath of it, based on this guy

Dunno if the book gets into it, but Sarah Palin was "discovered" on this cruise hosted the neoconservative Weekly Standard. They went to Alaska in 2007, the idiot editors couldn't believe a purty gurl was smiling at them at talking politics. The best parts of Game Change are when the staffers assigned to work with Palin find out how woefully uneducated she is.

Then reality began to sink in: Palin knew virtually nothing about current events, world politics, history, geography. Wallace and Schmidt share their astonishment: She didn't know what the Fed was. She thought Korea was one country. She believed Queen Elizabeth was the British head of government.

Here's the guy Harrelson plays explaining that Palin as President "frightens" him.

The film actually revealed something that is not in the book, Nicole Wallace, who was Palin's handler admitted that by election day she couldn't cast a vote for John McCain for President, Palin scared her so much.

[Nanners]

Its funny seeing both the white house and senate republicans coming to the defense of this unconstitutional verizon surveillance program.

spying on american civilians and feeding the war machine, these are the only things that democrat and republican leaders can agree about these days.

[KevinNYC]

re: rice.... obama was initially intending to make her secretary of state right? before the republicans went on their crusade? so that's what i was referring to and that's why i feel it's an important side issue that i would have expected to get more media coverage.

i'm not exactly sure now why i was under the impression state would play a major role in the final decision... maybe i just got confused on the basis of it being the department that released the initial environmental assessment. maybe you're right that it'd be unlikely to sway the collaborative decision in one way or the other, but having somebody with that particular background that high in cabinet in the midst of, as i said, a ridiculously important and public decision about to be made.... it warrants exposure and we didn't get any in the run-up before she was scared away.

Since Secretary of State is mostly about foreign policy, I think that the press is unprepared to think about energy issues with regard to them. Also since the media loves conflict, the fight over Benghazi was always going to be issue number one, that and the fact she was never officially chosen are probably the reasons that activists like the one you linked to would be the first to bring up the pipeline. State is the agency that will give the final verdict, however, they are supposed to seek out other opinions and build a consensus. On a smaller issues, they could probably play around with this, if they wanted to be a dishonest broker, but I think Keystone is too big to hide.

as far as notable points of her career, maybe you can fill me in. i don't keep much up to date on particular american reps at the un. i heard her name once or twice and maybe a speech or something over the past few years but it all just blends into general american obstructionism at the un, mainly offering the same old talking points on the same old issues. at a certain point the person making them doesn't matter unless they're particularly passionate about the issues one way or another... in which case maybe something interesting gets said. rice didn't fit that bill. power sounds like she might though, to my mind she's clearly much more engaged with these issues, even if i wholeheartedly disagree with where she stands on them.

There's been two big profiles of her. Both of which I read yesterday.
One by the New RepublicAnd one in Foreign Policy. Here's a quicker summary.

Takeaways.
She doesn't back down from confronting powerful people and seems to relish confrontations. She was described as fearsome. Obama is said to admire her toughness. (She once told Richard Holbrooke to **** off in a meeting.)
People still don't know why McCain and Graham seemed so desperate to take her down. (Rather than say focusing on Obama. I was wondering why they were so pissed at this woman I hadn't heard of.) Some people think this was simply personal, she didn't defer to them.
Nobody seems to be lukewarm on her. You either hate her or are a big supporter. One of the folks on National Security Council said he would walk through fire for her.
Samantha Power is a big, big fan of Susan Rice. She now says what she was told by her sources back when she wrote that article on Rwanda, doesn't match the person she worked with the last four years.
She was very effective at the UN, getting the Libya agreement through the security council. It was not just NATO acting unilaterally. She got the security council to act and it was a unanimous vote. She also helped get stronger sanctions against Iran through the Security Council on a 12-2 vote. That is she helped Obama fulfill one of his foreign policy promises of using the UN as a place to resolve big issues.
A lot of commentators have talked about her thinking has evolved since Rwanda, towards a greater inclination towards intervention and the doctrine that is called Responsibility to Protect

It consists of an emerging norm, or set of principles, based on the idea that sovereignty is not a right, but a responsibility.[1] RtoP focuses on preventing and halting four crimes: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing, which it places under the generic umbrella term of Mass Atrocity Crimes.[2] The Responsibility to Protect has three "pillars".
A state has a responsibility to protect its population from mass atrocities;
The international community has a responsibility to assist the state to fulfill its primary responsibility;
If the state fails to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful measures have failed, the international community has the responsibility to intervene through coercive measures such as economic sanctions. Military intervention is considered the last resort.[3][4]

This idea came out of the failure in Rwanda and invoked in Libya. It was not invoked in Syria, because Russia and China vetoed it.
Somebody pointed out yesterday that the new Obama foreign policy team is now all loyalists, people who actually wanted Obama elected president the first time.
Rice was Obama's foreign policy advisor during the campaign and took a risk to her career by siding with him over Clinton even though her career started in the Clinton White House. She did this because she was on Kerry's team in 2004, but didn't want to walk for a Democrat who voted for the Iraq war.
Powers actually had to leave the Obama campaign after she called Hillary Clinton a "monster" during the primaries and then tried to get that made into an off-the-record comment.

In his first term, he appointed Hillary to State (for Democratic Unity and thanks for Bill's support), he kept Bush's last Secretary of Defense Gates (for bipartisanship and continuity and a nod to the old-fashioned realist Republicans) and he passed over Susan Rice for NSA in favor of General James Jones who was apolitical and whom he had only talked to twice (looks good in a suit??)

I think this foreign policy team is going to be a little tighter. Do you ever remember a Presidential picture like this?

[rufuspaul]

I think this foreign policy team is going to be a little tighter. Do you ever remember a Presidential picture like this?

God help us all.

[KevinNYC]

God help us all.

They released another photo from behind which is even weirder.

Other than say disaster victims or maybe Sandy Hook parents, I don't remember any president posing that way with anyone really.

This is your not your previous president's foreign policy team. The Bush group even had a cool name: The Vulcans.

[gigantes]

the vulcans = two outright twits, a bitter old elitist, and a person of some real capability, perhaps?

t'pau's ashes must have been agitating in their priceless urn when that name got chosen.

[Nanners]

the vulcans = two outright twits, a bitter old elitist, and a person of some real capability, perhaps?

t'pau's ashes must have been agitating in their priceless urn when that name got chosen.

more like 4 murdering sociopaths.

closer to 8 if you include the other picture.

[KevinNYC]

more like 4 murdering sociopaths.

closer to 8 if you include the other picture.

Yeah, but three of the 8 are having sex with each other from those photos.

One unmarrried one of the 8 did call the president her "husband" once.