One just exploded on him....
More broken promises and perversions from this president? Imagine my surprise.
"Formerly a leader on land mine ban, Obama now balks" by Bryan Bender | Globe Staff June 22, 2014
WASHINGTON — In 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama wrote to a constituent that he would use his influence to help advance an international treaty banning land mines, decrying what he called the “horrific injuries and loss of life” among civilians long after wars end.
But in his five-plus years as president, Obama has not asked the US Senate to ratify the pact signed by 161 other nations, showing an unwillingness to take on military officials who assert that the devices, which the Pentagon last used in battle in 1991, are still needed. Instead, his administration has repeatedly delayed a review of the issue initiated early in his first term.
Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who has spent more than two decades directing federal funding to clear minefields and provide victims with wheelchairs, prosthetics, and job training, is so frustrated at Obama’s lack of action that he is complaining bitterly and publicly about it.
He's one of the best antiwar dove senators we got!
Related: Licking the Pentagon
Well, to a point I gue$$.
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Indeed, what is most vexing to many treaty supporters is that the United States has done more than other countries to address the problem, but still hasn’t taken up the treaty.
In addition to spending more than $2 billion over the last two decades to reduce the threat and aid victims, the United States has halted the production and export of so-called “persistent” or “dumb” mines that have no disarming mechanism and can remain a danger for unsuspecting villagers for decades.
“The United States has actually probably lived up to about 90 percent of the requirements of the treaty,” said Lloyd Axworthy, the former foreign minister of Canada who hosted the treaty negotiations, expressing incredulity that the United States has nonetheless long resisted giving up the weapons.
What a racket! Rip off the taxpayers to clear and pay for the damage while being the source of the problem. That's some trick!
Although it was among the first to call for a treaty banning land mines, the United States is now the only member of the NATO military alliance that has not joined the pact.
Look, laws are for other people, not the empire and it's pilots.
The only other nation in the Western Hemisphere to refuse is Cuba.
Then we are in good company.
When treaty signatories meet on June 23 in Mozambique to discuss ways to accelerate the destruction of mines as well as strengthen the pact, the United States will attend only as an observer.
“It was US leadership that really got the ball rolling,” said Bobby Muller, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, who was a key organizer of the original movement to ban the weapons. “But the United States is shamefully behind the curve.”
The killing continues
I guess that's one reason I'm kinda down on the Boston Globe and the blogging after eight years. What little change there has been has been for the wor$t in more ways than one.
In late May, a six-year-old girl was killed and five other villagers wounded in Myanmar when they came upon a land mine near the border with Thailand.
Related:
Myanmar
Thailand
A couple of nations you really don't read much about, although I suppose that is completely understandable these days.
The same week the US State Department dispatched a “quick reaction force” to Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina where flooding had dislodged land mines left over from the civil war in the former Yugoslavia.
Related: Big Gulp in the Balkans
Coverage dried up right quick, didn't it?
Advocates for the ban believe America’s continued reluctance to embrace the treaty is slowing momentum to render politically unacceptable a weapon that kills or injures an estimated 10 people every day in the 60-some countries where they remain in the ground. For example, US allies Ukraine and Finland have recently signaled they might withdraw from the treaty out of military necessity.
Three dozen countries still remain outside the treaty, according to a recent report by the Arms Control Association, a nonprofit advocacy group, including the United States, China, Russia, India, and Pakistan. Together they collectively account for an estimated stockpile of 160 million landmines, while experts say there is no reliable way to estimate how many landmines are still littering global battlefields.
At first, some high hopes
I used to have them when it came to politics and my propaganda pre$$. No longer.
The “Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Antipersonnel Mines and on Their Destruction” was proposed in 1997, requiring member nations to no longer use land mines, destroy all remaining supplies, and remove those planted on their territory.
The so-called Ottawa Treaty was heralded as the first global arms treaty to emerge from civil society, as opposed to governments. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines, a coalition of 1,400 nongovernmental organizations from around the world — led by American Jody Williams — was awarded the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for spearheading the effort, which also benefited from high-profile advocates like the late Princess Diana.
With all due respect, it all means nothing. Look at the world today.
The treaty’s unique evolution is viewed as a possible reason why the American military brass is still resisting; the thinking goes that commanders fear that giving up land mines could encourage similar efforts by human rights groups to seek to ban other types of controversial weapons, such as drones.
And they can't let that happen because that is how they intend to subjugate and spy on the planet.
The United States initially was a leading advocate of the pact; then-US President Bill Clinton called the land mine problem “a global tragedy.”
“In all probability, land mines kill more children than soldiers, and they keep killing after wars are over,” Clinton said.
But he opted not to sign the treaty and seek its ratification after US military leaders insisted that they needed time to develop alternatives to mines.
What good is all this then? The war machine plows forward and our presidents won't stand up to it? What's the point of purchasing or reading a Boston Globe anymore?
The Bush administration also adhered to that position, while the US Army began developing so-called “smart” mines as a replacement, devices officials say are now ready to be part of the arsenal.
Related: Obama W. Bush
And he's just as popular as the last guy.
One alternative, called the Spider, is designed to detonate only by command and to self-defuse after a limited period. It is designed and built in part by Textron Systems in Wilmington, Mass. Textron officials did not respond to a request for comment.
But it is a liberal, antiwar state.
When Obama came into office in 2009 there were high hopes that he would seek to join the treaty; he instead ordered up a review that has gone on for five years.
We all had them.
Asked about the assessment, Edward Price, a spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council, said, “We are pressing forward to conclude our review of US land mine policy” but declined to provide details.
“The United States shares the humanitarian concerns of the parties to the Ottawa Convention,” Price added, noting that “the United States is the single largest financial supporter of global humanitarian demining efforts.”
After having helped placed so many, either directly or indirectly.
A Pentagon spokeswoman, Lieutenant Commander Amy Derrickfrost, defended the military’s position. She said that in addition to ending the use of so-called “dumb” mines in 2010, the US military also no longer uses plastic mines, which cannot be identified with a metal detector or other mine surveillance technologies.
But the military continues to say that it must have the ability to use anti-personnel land mines.
“I consider them to be an important tool in the arsenal of the armed forces of the United States,” General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a congressional hearing in March, especially on the Korean penninsula, where they are intended to help blunt an invasion by the North Korean army.
The Pentagon position has its share of supporters on Capitol Hill, including Representative Randy Forbes, a Virginia Republican, who calls land mines “vitally important to the defense of South Korea.” Fearing that Obama will sign the treaty, he has proposed an amendment to a new defense bill that would prohibit the administration from implementing the treaty.
So forget all the blather about wanting peace on the planet, blah, blah, blah.
It's one reason I'm angry and dejected at the same time.
Many observers, however, remain surprised at the extent of opposition at the Pentagon to the treaty.
I'm not, not at all.
“Some of the guys that wrote the [Korean] war plans were advocates of the mine ban,” said retired Army Lietenant General G. Robert Gard, who traveled to South Korea in the late 1990s at Leahy’s request to make an assessment.
Gard, who is chairman of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, a nonprofit think tank, said commanders asserted “we could accomplish the things that land mines were purported to do for us by other means.”
A veteran of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Gard believes that the continued Pentagon resistance is driven by fear that giving in could embolden human rights groups to try to ban other weapons.
He described the argument: “If you give in to those flaky nongovernmental organizations they will try to to make us get rid of other weapons we really need.”
Meanwhile, the ongoing land mine policy review — the third such assessment since the Clinton years — has treaty advocates such as Williams, the peace prize recipient, deeply frustrated.
She said in an e-mail that she “does not understand why this review has taken place at all and even less do we understand or accept why it has taken five years already and President Obama still seems unable to bring it to a conclusion that can be shared with the American public.”
‘Life forever ruined’
The gruesome photographs, blown up to nearly life size for maximum effect, line a small, cluttered office of the Senate Appropriations Committee. One depicts a pair of legless men looking up from their wheel chairs, another a woman hobbling along with the help of a stick.
The images were all captured by Leahy, an amateur photographer who has personally chronicled dozens of innocent war victims from Central America to Southeast Asia.
His crusade against land mines began more than two decades ago in a jungle village in Nicaragua, at the height of its civil war.
“There was a little boy, probably 12 years old, one leg, homemade crutch. He’d lost his leg from a landmine,” Leahy recalled in an interview in his Senate office, where some his war victim photos hang at eye level above his desk.
Leahy asked the boy if he was injured by the forces loyal to the Sandinista government or the so-called Contra rebels. “Well, he had no idea. He just knew that his life was forever ruined.”
Leahy later used his perch on the panel overseeing the State Department budget to establish a US fund to help the most vulnerable victims of war, which was later named the Leahy Victims Fund. He also provided money for mine clearance groups around the world.
Maybe we should stop manufacturing them for use first.
Oh, right, that would run up against war-profiteering campaign contributions and damage the economy. Better we spend even more trying to heal people after blowing them up.
Leahy later proposed legislation prohibiting the United States from exporting land mines. To help convince a skeptical Senate, he persuaded DC Comics to publish a Batman comic edition in which the caped crusader, in his effort to rescue a child, had to walk through a minefield.
The last panel depicted the child reaching for a shiny object and being warned by Batman not to pick it up before there was a “Kaboom.”
Leahy provided a copy of the special issue to every senator; his legislation passed by voice vote without opposition. He now remains optimistic that if Obama would sign the land mine treaty and send it to the Senate for ratification it has a good chance of garnering the required two-thirds, or 67 votes, to pass — despite the overall partisan rancor.
“I don’t want to sound like I am on a crusade but nothing has gripped me as much since I have been here,” Leahy said, tearing up when recalling how he lifted a Vietnamese landmine victim into his wheelchair. (“He grabbed my shirt, he pulled me down, and he kissed me”.)
“This is today’s poison gas,” Leahy said. Failing to join the treaty, he believes, “is a moral failure of our country.”
And we have so many.
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"Without fanfare, Obama advances transgender rights; Bars job bias against workers in government" by Lisa Leff | Associated Press June 22, 2014
SAN FRANCISCO — President Obama, who established his bona fides as a gay and lesbian rights champion when he endorsed same-sex marriage, has steadily extended his administration’s advocacy to the smallest and least accepted-band of the LGBT rainbow: transgender Americans.
With little of the fanfare or criticism that marked his evolution into the leader Newsweek nicknamed ‘‘the first gay president,’’ Obama became the first chief executive to say ‘‘transgender’’ in a speech, to name transgender political appointees, and to prohibit job bias against transgender government workers.
In more ways than one. Bath house good for blackmail.
Also in his first term, he signed hate crime legislation that became the first federal civil rights protections for transgender people in US history.
I don't hate them; I just think they have mental problems and are easily swayed by agenda-pushing perverts.
Since then, the administration has quietly applied the power of the executive branch to make it easier for transgender people to update their passports, obtain health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, get treatment at Veteran’s Administration facilities, and seek access to public school restrooms and sports programs — just a few of the transgender-specific policy shifts of Obama’s presidency.
More dictatorship.
‘‘He has been the best president for transgender rights, and nobody else is in second place,’’ Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said of Obama, who is the only president to invite transgender children to participate in the annual Easter egg roll at the White House.
Religious conservative groups quick to criticize the president for his gay rights advocacy have been much slower to respond to the administration’s actions. The leader of the Traditional Values Coalition says there is little recourse because the changes come through executive orders and federal agencies rather than Congress.
The latest wins came this month, when the Office of Personnel Management announced that government-contracted health insurers could start covering the cost of gender reassignment surgeries for federal employees, retirees, and their survivors, ending a 40-year prohibition. Two weeks earlier, a decades-old rule preventing Medicare from financing such procedures was overturned within the Department of Health and Human Services.
This as Medicare and Medicaid is being cut under Obummercare because costs need to be reined in!
The priorities of this administration are screwy to say the least!
Unlike Obama’s support for same-sex marriage and lifting the ‘‘don’t ask, don’t tell’’ ban on openly gay troops, the White House’s work to promote transgender rights has happened mostly out of the spotlight.
For good reason!
Some advances have gone unnoticed because they also benefited the much larger gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities.
That was the case Monday when the White House announced that Obama plans to sign an executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against employees on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
In other instances, transgender rights groups and the administration have agreed on a low-key approach, both to avoid resistance and to send the message that changes are not a big deal, said Barbra Siperstein, who in 2009 became the first transgender person elected to the Democratic National Committee.
Yeah, we all know it is that tribe behind culture-destroying perversions.
‘‘It’s quiet by design, because the louder you are in Washington, the more the drama,’’ said Siperstein, who helped organize the first meeting between White House aides and transgender rights advocates without the participation of gay rights leaders.
The 2011 meeting came 34 years after Jimmy Carter’s administration made history by meeting with gay rights groups. Obama’s Cabinet and federal agencies have followed up with actions significantly expanding transgender rights without congressional approval.
For instance, Health and Human Services said in 2012 that it would apply the nondiscrimination provision of the Affordable Care Act to investigate federally funded health plans and care providers that refused to serve transgender individuals.
Earlier this year, the US Education Department informed public schools that under its reading of Title IX, the 1972 law that bans gender discrimination in education, transgender students are entitled to federal civil rights protections. The information was included in a memo on schools’ obligations to respond to student-on-student sexual violence.
Obama has made clear the guidance has potentially broad implications.
‘‘Title IX is a very powerful tool,’’ he said last week. ‘‘The fact that we are applying it to transgender students means that they are going to be in a position to assert their rights if and when they see that they are being discriminated on their college campuses.’’
I would advise the colleges to get ready for the lawsuits.
Just watch the tuitions $urge, too!
Meanwhile, religious conservative groups’ opposition to transgender advocacy has trickled in.
Like a sorry cum shot!
The Traditional Values Coalition has lobbied against a bill that would provide federal workplace protections for gay and transgender people by warning that it would require schools to let teachers remain on the job amid gender transitions. Andrea Lafferty, group president, said no one should mistake the absence of vocal opposition for acquiescence.
‘‘There are other people who are concerned about these things, definitely. I think America is just overwhelmed right now,’’ she said. ‘‘Everybody is going to have to take a step back, and that step back is going to be this November.’’
I hope so, if for no other reason than this fringe issue.
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Also see:
5 things to know about transgender people
During his boyhood in Indonesia, President Obama’s nanny was a transgender woman who told the Associated Press two years ago that she did not dress as a woman around her young charge but that he ‘‘did see me trying on his mother’s lipstick, sometimes.’’
Sort of explains everything.
And Zionists must be jealous; this 0.3% of the population seems to have more pull and leverage than the 1-2% Jewish lobby.
A transformative change
Obama says US should have paid maternity leave
France also figured out good, decent, single-payer health care but somehow you couldn't, sphincter!?!
