Showing posts with label Cast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cast. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Monday, November 25, 2013
Travelers cast wary eye as storm moves eastward
Travelers cast wary eye as storm moves eastward
DALLAS (AP) — A winter storm system blamed for at least 10 fatal accidents in the West and Texas threatens to dampen the Thanksgiving holiday for millions of Americans traveling this week.
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Tuesday, October 22, 2013
VIDEO: Once Upon A Time Adds Marilyn Manson To Season 3
Once Upon A Time Adds Marilyn Manson To Season 3
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Sunday, September 22, 2013
Blame already being cast over budget fight
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, left, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, during a news conference with conservative Congressional Republicans at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 19, 2013. Cruz and Lee stand as the Senate’s dynamic duo for conservatives, crusading against President Barack Obama’s health care law while infuriating many congressional Republicans with a tactic they consider futile, self-serving and detrimental to the party’s political hopes in 2014. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, left, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, during a news conference with conservative Congressional Republicans at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 19, 2013. Cruz and Lee stand as the Senate’s dynamic duo for conservatives, crusading against President Barack Obama’s health care law while infuriating many congressional Republicans with a tactic they consider futile, self-serving and detrimental to the party’s political hopes in 2014. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Even before a budget deadline arrives, leaders from both parties are blaming each other — and some Republicans are criticizing their own — for a government shutdown many are treating as inevitable.
The top Democrat in the House says Republicans are “legislative arsonists” who are using their opposition to a sweeping health care overhaul as an excuse to close government’s doors. A leading tea party antagonist in the Senate counters that conservatives should use any tool available to stop the Affordable Care Act from taking hold. President Bill Clinton’s labor secretary says the GOP is willing “to risk the entire system of government to get your way,” while the House speaker who oversaw the last government shutdown urged fellow Republicans to remember “this is not a dictatorship.”
The unyielding political posturing on Sunday comes one week before Congress reaches an Oct. 1 deadline to dodge any interruptions in government services. While work continues on a temporary spending bill, a potentially more devastating separate deadline looms a few weeks later when the government could run out of money to pay its bills.
“This is totally irresponsible, completely juvenile and, as I called it, legislative arson. It’s just destructive,” House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said in an interview that aired Sunday.
The Republican-led House on Friday approved legislation designed to wipe out the 3-year-old health care law that President Barack Obama has vowed to preserve. But the House’s move was more a political win than a measure likely to be implemented.
Across the Capitol, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said he would keep the health law intact despite Republicans’ attempts, in his words, “to take an entire law hostage simply to appease the tea party anarchists.”
One of those tea party agitators, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, showed little sign on Sunday that he cared about the uphill climb to make good on his pledge to derail the health care law over Obama’s guaranteed veto.
“I believe we should stand our ground,” said Cruz, who already was trying to blame Obama and his Democratic allies if the government shuts down.
Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, said Cruz’s efforts were destructive and self-serving as Cruz eyes a White House campaign.
“I cannot believe that they are going to throw a tantrum and throw the American people and our economic recovery under the bus,” she said.
“This is about running for president with Ted Cruz. This isn’t about meaningful statesmanship,” she added later.
The wrangling over the budget comes as lawmakers consider separate legislation that would let the United States avoid a first-ever default on its debt obligations. House Republicans are planning legislation that would attach a 1-year delay in the health care law in exchange for ability to increase the nation’s credit limit of $ 16.7 trillion.
Obama, speaking to political allies on Saturday evening, showed little patience for the GOP efforts to undermine his legislative accomplishment by either avenue.
“We will not negotiate over whether or not America should keep its word and meet its obligations,” Obama told the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation dinner. “We’re not going to allow anyone to inflict economic pain on millions of our own people just to make an ideological point.”
Congress doesn’t seem eager to help Obama, although there are deep divides — both between parties and within them — over who deserves blame.
Rep. Tom Graves, R-Ga., said the goal was to defund the president’s health care legislation for at least one more year if not forever.
“We do have eight days to reach a resolution on this, and I propose an idea that kept the government operating and opened for an entire year while delaying and defunding Obamacare for a year so that we could work out those differences,” Graves said.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose faceoff with Clinton led to government shutdowns that inflicted significant damage on the GOP and helped resurrect the then-president’s political fortunes in time for his 1996 re-election bid, said his GOP colleagues should not yield.
“This is not a dictatorship. Under our constitution, there should be a period of tension and there should be a compromise on both sides,” Gingrich said.
Robert Reich, who was Clinton’s labor secretary, said that works only if both parties are willing to negotiate.
“Sorry, under our constitutional system you’re not allowed to risk the entire system of government to get your way,” Reich said.
It is likely that when the House legislation arrives in the Senate, Democrats there will strip off the health care defunding mechanism. Democrats plan to send back to the House a bill that prevents disruptions in government services but not the health provision they championed.
Cruz, however, said Senate Republicans cannot allow that to happen and should mount every procedural hurdle available. Cruz, who pushed lawmakers to tie a budget bill with health care hurdles, said Republicans should mount a procedural roadblock that would require 60 votes for any changes to the House bill.
“You know what? If Senate Republicans stand together, we can stop Harry Reid from doing it,” Cruz said.
But within his own party, Cruz faced skepticism.
“It’s not a tactic that we can actually carry out and be successful,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. “The answer now in the Senate, by those who propose this strategy, is to filibuster the very bill they said they wanted.”
Pelosi spoke to CNN’s “State of the Union.” Cruz and McCaskill were interviewed on “Fox News Sunday.” Reich, Gingrich and Graves appeared on ABC’s “This Week.” Coburn was on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
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Blame already being cast over budget fight
Saturday, August 31, 2013
From Suez to Iraq, the lessons of our past cast a long shadow over Syria | Peter Beaumont
Public opinion, like old generals, is always preparing to fight the last war
When it turns its attention to thinking about conflict, politics – and public opinion – is an oddly backwards process. Journalists and other analysts tend to look for guidance on future developments from past events. Egypt is compared to Algeria in the runup to the civil war; Syria to the Balkans.
History and experience act as a filter that can distort as much as elucidate. It is largely forgotten now, overlooked in the one-line description of Tony Blair and George W Bush as the men who lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, but there was a wider context to their conviction. Many spies, politicians and military men believed that the Iraqi dictator held such weapons, because their experience of Saddam’s use of poison gas in Halabja and during the Iran-Iraq war, and his headlong pursuit of weapons of mass destruction technologies, made it inconceivable that he might disarm.
Because they thought that he must be hiding something, there was a built-in confirmation bias to the hunt for what they believed was hidden.
Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have shown how badly military interventions can go wrong. After a decade of pointless, counterproductive wars, the public and politics in the western countries involved are sick of war, dubious of the promises made for humanitarian intervention.
And what we have forgotten is where the doctrine of the “responsibility to protect” came from – not from the often shabby little wars of the 2000s but from real humanitarian catastrophes where intervention was late or absent and genocidal acts took place – in Rwanda and in Bosnia.
The Syrian conflict confirms many of our prejudices. For those on the left opposed to intervention, who see any military strike as rash and illegal, it appears to provide the pretext for the latest in a long series of attacks on Muslim and Arab countries, led by an overreaching US, a willfully selective and hypocritical affair.
For those who believe in intervention on humanitarian grounds, the case is made equally strongly. A country disintegrates, 100,000 people die, poison gas appears to have been deployed and the burden of the worst atrocities seems to fall on the country’s dictatorial regime.
If it’s easy for those with set ideological ideas about how the world works to come to their conclusions, Syria is less easy to interpret for those of us who want to try to see it not as a reflection of something else, but for what it is – a horrible conflict that in many ways demands a forceful response, but where any such response is so fraught with risk as to make it difficult to contemplate.
The question then – as put by the always thoughtful veteran journalist Robin Lustig on Friday – is this: “Is doing nothing really an option?” Clearly, it is, but then another question immediately follows: is there any point, any further escalation in horror, at which doing nothing will no longer be an option? What if there’s another chemical weapons attack, in which 5,000 people are killed? 10,000 killed? Is there anywhere you would draw a red line? Might MPs have cause to regret their vote in the weeks and months to come?”
In a way the difficulty is that when we make judgments such as this we cannot separate ourselves from the prevailing mood. For societies, the experience of war alters the assumptions that guide how we consider the risk involved. Like a kind of psychotropic drug, it alters political and cultural perceptions. Looking at Syria we can’t help but see it through the filter of Iraq, through a mood of sharpened scepticism of the media, politics and intelligence agencies.
In some ways it has always been thus. The old military maxim about generals always preparing to fight the last war, has been echoed in the cycles of public opinion in the past century.
The terrible cost of the first world war saw a rise in interest in pacifism, which by the 1930s saw a significant faction in the Labour party around George Lansbury, who opposed rearmament, and who led the party until being replaced by Clement Atlee in 1935. It was a mood music that fed into Neville Chamberlain’s desire for appeasement. To avoid war. To negotiate a settlement.
Britain’s role in the second world war, and the heroic narrative that took shape around that victory, permitted the UK to ignore its declining international role and to behave with the swagger of an imperial power.
If there is a flip side to this kind of imperial hubris, it is over the long shadow cast by conflicts that either are wrong or come at too high a price in the modern era. Events such as Suez, the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the US experience in Vietnam and, later, Somalia, all cast the same long shadow.
To answer Lustig’s question – at which point do we change our minds? – history, that unreliable guide to the future, suggests it is often when we are taken by surprise. US isolationism in the 1930s largely imploded with Pearl Harbour, echoing a similar trend in the UK.
All we can really say today is that the vote in parliament finally internalised all the lessons of Iraq for Britain’s political classes. For Syria, poor bleeding Syria, the past and present are awful. Its future and how the international community might have to respond – despite the acres of predictions in the past few days – remains unwritten.
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From Suez to Iraq, the lessons of our past cast a long shadow over Syria | Peter Beaumont
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Doubts Cast Over Reported S-300 Deliveries to Syria
16:05 30/05/2013 MOSCOW, May 30 (RIA Novosti) – Reports that Syria’s president had confirmed receiving a consignment of Russian-manufactured S-300 air defense systems emerged Thursday, but were quickly brought into question.
In comments widely reported across the world, Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar quoted Syrian President Bashar Assad as saying Damascus had received initial deliveries of the S-300 system.
Assad’s remarks were allegedly made during a pre-recorded interview to be aired on Hezbollah-controlled Almanar television channel on Thursday evening at 10:00 p.m. Moscow time.
But a high-level source at Lebanon-based Almanar, who said he had been present throughout the interview, told RIA Novosti by telephone that at no point did Assad explicitly confirm any S-300 deliveries.
When Assad was asked about the delivery of the anti-missile systems, the source – who requested that his name not be printed – said, the Syrian president replied that “everything we have agreed with Russia will be implemented, and a part of it has been implemented already.”
By Thursday afternoon, the Al Akhbar newspaper, which reported Assad’s comments as an exclusive, appeared to backtrack on the veracity of its story, which also included a statement attributed to Assad that the rest of the S-300 equipment “will arrive soon.”
The Assad quotes were “professionally stolen” through sources at Almanar and any information provided by the television station is more reliable, an Al Akhbar employee told RIA Novosti in a telephone interview, also requesting anonymity.
Documents revealing the existence of an agreement between Russia and Syria to supply the sophisticated S-300 air defense system, which can target ballistic missiles as well as aircraft, were first reported in the Russian press in 2011, but official confirmations have been scant. However, earlier this week Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov mentioned the deal’s existence, according to Russian media, saying a contract for providing Syria with S-300s had been signed “several years ago.”
Reached by telephone Thursday, Russian state-owned arms exporter Rosoboronexport declined to comment on whether elements of the S-300 system had been successfully delivered to Syria.
The shipment of the S-300s is a source of contention between Moscow and Washington. Last week US Secretary of State John Kerry said the presence of the anti-missile systems in Syria would be “destabilizing” for the region.
Russian officials publicly refuse to confirm or deny the S-300 deliveries, but argue that they would be legal under international law and would help to contain the Syrian conflict.
Steps such as the delivery of S-300s are restraining some “hot heads” from turning the Syrian conflict into an international conflict with the participation of outside forces, Ryabkov said Tuesday.
S-300 missile systems, which are capable of simultaneously tracking up to 100 targets while engaging 12 at a range of up to 200 kilometers and a height of up to 27 kilometers, could dramatically raise the risks of a potential airstrike against Syrian targets.
Israeli jets have reportedly launched attacks on Syria, including the capital Damascus, several times this year. Tel Aviv said recent strikes in May were targeted at weapons being transferred to Hezbollah in Lebanon, according to Western news agencies.
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Doubts Cast Over Reported S-300 Deliveries to Syria
Doubts Cast Over Reported S-300 Deliveries to Syria
16:05 30/05/2013 MOSCOW, May 30 (RIA Novosti) – Reports that Syria’s president had confirmed receiving a consignment of Russian-manufactured S-300 air defense systems emerged Thursday, but were quickly brought into question.
In comments widely reported across the world, Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar quoted Syrian President Bashar Assad as saying Damascus had received initial deliveries of the S-300 system.
Assad’s remarks were allegedly made during a pre-recorded interview to be aired on Hezbollah-controlled Almanar television channel on Thursday evening at 10:00 p.m. Moscow time.
But a high-level source at Lebanon-based Almanar, who said he had been present throughout the interview, told RIA Novosti by telephone that at no point did Assad explicitly confirm any S-300 deliveries.
When Assad was asked about the delivery of the anti-missile systems, the source – who requested that his name not be printed – said, the Syrian president replied that “everything we have agreed with Russia will be implemented, and a part of it has been implemented already.”
By Thursday afternoon, the Al Akhbar newspaper, which reported Assad’s comments as an exclusive, appeared to backtrack on the veracity of its story, which also included a statement attributed to Assad that the rest of the S-300 equipment “will arrive soon.”
The Assad quotes were “professionally stolen” through sources at Almanar and any information provided by the television station is more reliable, an Al Akhbar employee told RIA Novosti in a telephone interview, also requesting anonymity.
Documents revealing the existence of an agreement between Russia and Syria to supply the sophisticated S-300 air defense system, which can target ballistic missiles as well as aircraft, were first reported in the Russian press in 2011, but official confirmations have been scant. However, earlier this week Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov mentioned the deal’s existence, according to Russian media, saying a contract for providing Syria with S-300s had been signed “several years ago.”
Reached by telephone Thursday, Russian state-owned arms exporter Rosoboronexport declined to comment on whether elements of the S-300 system had been successfully delivered to Syria.
The shipment of the S-300s is a source of contention between Moscow and Washington. Last week US Secretary of State John Kerry said the presence of the anti-missile systems in Syria would be “destabilizing” for the region.
Russian officials publicly refuse to confirm or deny the S-300 deliveries, but argue that they would be legal under international law and would help to contain the Syrian conflict.
Steps such as the delivery of S-300s are restraining some “hot heads” from turning the Syrian conflict into an international conflict with the participation of outside forces, Ryabkov said Tuesday.
S-300 missile systems, which are capable of simultaneously tracking up to 100 targets while engaging 12 at a range of up to 200 kilometers and a height of up to 27 kilometers, could dramatically raise the risks of a potential airstrike against Syrian targets.
Israeli jets have reportedly launched attacks on Syria, including the capital Damascus, several times this year. Tel Aviv said recent strikes in May were targeted at weapons being transferred to Hezbollah in Lebanon, according to Western news agencies.
NEWSLETTER |
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Doubts Cast Over Reported S-300 Deliveries to Syria
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