I would say one President really. George W Bush, and his administration lying to get us into Iraq. If not like you said OP, Saddam still has blood in his hand, but he would still be in power.

debit cards are what people are accustomed to, these could be a great transition for people who are apprehensive to transitioning to BTC, one they can start using it like a card, they will realize its just like any other form of payment!

There are many things I like about Texas Gov. Rick Perry, including his stance on the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. But apparently his new glasses haven’t altered his perception of the world, or allowed him to see it any more clearly.

There are obviously many important events going on in the world right now, but with 60,000 foreign children streaming across the Texas border, I am surprised Governor Perry has apparently still found time to mischaracterize and attack my foreign policy.

Governor Perry writes a fictionalized account of my foreign policy so mischaracterizing my views that I wonder if he’s even really read any of my policy papers.

In fact, some of Perry’s solutions for the current chaos in Iraq aren’t much different from what I’ve proposed, something he fails to mention. His solutions also aren’t much different from President Barack Obama’s, something he also fails to mention. Because interestingly enough, there aren’t that many good choices right now in dealing with this situation in Iraq.

...

Jewish donors to the 2016 presidential campaign, wary of Sen. Rand Paul's (R-Ky.) longstanding reputation for isolationism, are trying to figure out how a Paul presidency might treat Israel differently than previous presidencies. It doesn't take much figuring.

Had the famously libertarian Paul been president instead of Barack Obama or George W. Bush, he wouldn't have stopped Israel from taking out Iran's nuclear bomb capabilities when the taking was easy. Iran, as a result, would have been greatly diminished, rather than ascendant as it now is, in control of much of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon and in pursuit of others.

Had Paul been president instead of Bill Clinton and George H. Bush, he wouldn't have forced Israel to make the many concessions that led to the disastrous Oslo Accords, which reinstated Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat in power, triggered intifadas that took 1,000 Israeli lives through bombs planted in buses and restaurants, and taught radicals that terrorism pays.

Had Paul been president instead of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, he wouldn't have tried to prevent Israel from taking out Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's Osirak nuclear reactor, and then punished Israel when it went ahead anyway by embargoing delivery of the F-16 fighters Israel needed for its defense.

...

In 2008, Barack Obama was the candidate of change, first for Democrats and then the nation. For 2016, those same political stars, to be the agent of change, appear to be lining up behind Rand Paul, Kentucky’s Republican U.S. senator.

Yes, that Rand Paul, who is more accurately labeled as a shrink-the-government Libertarian and has a long history of questionable statements on race. Just as there are signs that Americans are not enthralled by Hillary Clinton’s likely return to the presidential fold (In June, it was Monica Lewinsky; in July, it’s her book), there are signs that Paul is pulling ahead of better-known Republican rivals.

It’s not just that Paul is the clear frontrunner in a new and credible national poll. He has supporters across every key GOP demographic by age and faction, from Tea Partiers to corporate America to the religious right. Younger men, who aren’t likely to vote for Clinton, find his "maverick" personality new and appealing. Similarly, the millennial generation is superficially embracing the Libertarian idea that the government should leave them alone to do as they please. Marijuana laws are one example.

“This guy can win the nomination,” pollster John Zogby said Friday, adding he did not have that view until he took a deeper look at a June 27-29 nationwide survey he conducted. Paul was not only in first place with 20 percent in a crowded field of 10, he had deeper support than “establishment” Republicans. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and ex-Florida Jeb Bush each polled at 13 percent. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker had 8 percent, while Florida Sen. Marco Rubio had 7 percent. Five others had even less support. Other national polls put Paul in the lead, but Zogby has him clearly out front.

...

The world economy is just as vulnerable to a financial crisis as it was in 2007, with the added danger that debt ratios are now far higher and emerging markets have been drawn into the fire as well, the Bank for International Settlements has warned.

Jaime Caruana, head of the Swiss-based financial watchdog, said investors were ignoring the risk of monetary tightening in their voracious hunt for yield.

“Markets seem to be considering only a very narrow spectrum of potential outcomes. They have become convinced that monetary conditions will remain easy for a very long time, and may be taking more assurance than central banks wish to give,” he told The Telegraph.

Mr Caruana said the international system is in many ways more fragile than it was in the build-up to the Lehman crisis. Debt ratios in the developed economies have risen by 20 percentage points to 275pc of GDP since then.

Credit spreads have fallen to to wafer-thin levels. Companies are borrowing heavily to buy back their own shares. The BIS said 40pc of syndicated loans are to sub-investment grade borrowers, a higher ratio than in 2007, with ever fewer protection covenants for creditors.

Pope Francis has been quoted as saying that reliable data indicates that "about 2%" of clergy in the Catholic Church are paedophiles.

The Pope said that abuse of children was like "leprosy" infecting the Church, according to the Italian La Repubblica newspaper.

He vowed to "confront it with the severity it demands".

But a Vatican spokesman said the quotes in the newspaper did not correspond to Pope Francis's exact words.

The BBC's David Willey in Rome says there is often a studied ambiguity in Pope Francis' off-the-cuff statements.

He wants to show a more compassionate attitude towards Church teaching than his predecessors, but this can sometimes cause consternation among his media advisers, our correspondent adds.

It doesn’t take a PhD in Sociology to conclude that Iraq was better off with Saddam Hussein than it is today.

It’s not that Saddam was a great leader without blood on his hands. It’s just that what six US presidents have done to Iraq over the past 35 years has been much worse than anything Saddam ever did to the people of Iraq.



Under Saddam, Iraqis had a thriving economy that included a wealthy middle class, a high functioning infrastructure on par with the most developed nations of the world, and free healthcare and free education through graduate school. Today, Iraqis have an effective unemployment rate of 50%, a difficult time getting water and electricity, and bombed out hospitals and schools.

In Saddam’s Iraq, women’s rights were guaranteed in the constitution, religion played virtually no role in government, Sunni and Shia got along relatively well, and al-Qaeda didn’t exist. Today, Iraqis are facing Sharia law, Sunni and Shia are killing each other, and al-Qaeda in Iraq (now known as ISIS) has become arguably the most powerful non-government force in the world.

Good job, America

The reason Iraq is in the mess it is today is not because of some long-standing feud between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, it’s because six US presidents, spanning ten terms, have created a situation that made today’s Iraq inevitable.

The people of Iraq should be applauded for going this long without imploding. They obviously are more peaceful and have more fortitude than Americans. The United States would be in a state of anarchy if bombs were dropped on its major cities, crushing sanctions were levied that killed hundreds of thousands of its children, they were occupied by a foreign military, a puppet government was installed by another country, and arms were given to Republicans to shoot Democrats, and vice-versa.

But Americans can’t imagine that type of scenario, and they choose not to think about what their tax dollars, their elected officials, and their willful ignorance has done to another civilization.

And to add insult to injury, Americans, particularly Democrats, are essentially quiet now that their president is about to do the same thing to Iraq that five other presidents have already done.

So working chronologically backwards, here’s how six US presidents have destroyed Iraq.

Barack Obama

The US is at war in Iraq. Nobody wants to acknowledge it, possibly because this is not a war with Iraq, it’s a war inside Iraq.

Maybe people actually believed Obama two weeks ago when he said, "American combat troops are not going to be fighting in Iraq." But on Tuesday it was announced that armed drones and Apache helicopters are being flown by US military inside Iraq.

Since when do "advisers" fly Apache helicopters and armed drones?

Also on Tuesday, The Hill reported that Obama is sending 200 more US troops to Iraq, bringing the total number of US ground forces in Iraq to 750. And on Wednesday, the State Department stated that the Obama administration wants to sell 4,000 more US Hellfire missiles to the Iraqi government.

At what point will "progressive" news outlets like Democracy Now and CommonDreams talk about "mission creep" and Obama doublespeak? It may be a while given they are currently talking about immigration, the NSA and the Hobby Lobby. Important issues, yes, but when your country is starting another war in a place it has already terrorized for 35 years, those issues need to be moved down the priority list.

If a Republican were in the Oval Office it’s a guarantee that the supposed left-leaning media and national antiwar groups would be going berserk, and might actually play a role in stopping the US from going back into Iraq.

But they won’t because their funding largely comes from Democrats, so they can’t go after Obama with the same vigor in which they did with Bush.

Even Kirsten Powers, who writes for the USA Today questioned the integrity of fellow liberals in Wednesday’s paper when she wrote, "Liberals who obsessed over President Bush’s abuses of executive power are suspiciously silent now, or worse, defend the same behavior they found abhorrent in a Republican."

George W. Bush

Not much needs to be said about what the younger Bush did to Iraq. Based on the lie (not bad intelligence, it was a lie) that Saddam had WMD and was a threat to the US, and on the ruse of tying Iraq to the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush whipped Americans into a frenzy and got them to go along with the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Bush’s war left at least one-half million Iraqis dead, forced nearly 4 million to become refugees, destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, and created an untold number of enemies of the US, including ISIS.

Bill Clinton

It was the Clinton administration that first perpetuated the myth that Saddam had WMD. "Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons," Clinton stated in 1998 in justifying missile strikes on Iraq.

And even after the Clinton presidency had expired, former Clinton VP Al Gore supported George W. Bush on the issue of Iraq WMD, saying, “We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.”

But the most extreme form of terrorism carried out by Clinton was with the use of sanctions on the civilians of Iraq that killed 500,000 children. "Medieval," and "unconscionable" were words used to describe the slow, painful deaths Iraqi children suffered due to the absence of food, basic medicines and anesthesia, which the US prohibited from being imported into Iraq.

Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright showed the true face of American compassion when she was asked about the deaths of a half million Iraqi children – more than the number who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – when she told 60 Minutes in 1996, "This is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it."

The humanitarian disaster resulting from sanctions against Iraq has been frequently cited as a factor that motivated the September 11 terrorist attacks. Osama bin Laden himself mentioned the Iraq sanctions as a reason for the attack against the United States.

I'm ready for another summer rally to 3k.

Who's in?

the worst? i don't think so.. but he's horrible. the guy before him was the one who cut taxes and then sent trillions of dollars to iraq and pakistan.

3.7 billion for immigrants.. wtf is obama thinking? i don't even get what his angle is here.

As a person who thinks it is insane for the citizens of the country to be searched ant treated like criminals for no reason at the Airport.  But if you an illegal alien they let you on the plane no problem.  I honestly wonder if these people are paying for any tickets.  Something tells me the answer is no.  Why would you buy a ticket if you don't have the propper ID?  This whole thing is sick.

it's funny how mccain has been wrong with virtually everything, and yet he still acts like he's some sort of foreign affairs expert.

McCain: Paul a part of ‘Fortress America’ wing

By Martin Matishak - 07/13/14 10:03 AM EDT

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Sunday waded into a brewing foreign policy debate inside the Republican Party, saying Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) represents a more isolationist outlook.

Paul is “part of a wing of the party that has been there prior to World War I, that is a withdrawal to ‘Fortress America,’” McCain said on CNN’s "State of the Union."

...

McCain, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with Paul, acknowledged the freshman senator has a “far different view than mine of the world.”

But, McCain said, he understood Paul’s appeal to Americans “weary of involvement” after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"So I'm not particularly interested in getting between Senator Paul and Governor Perry, but I do believe that the things we're seeing in the world today, in greater turmoil than at any time in my lifetime, is a direct result of an absence of American leadership," McCain said. "And we are paying a very, very heavy price now, and we will in the future, until we decide to understand that America is an essential role in maintaining peace and stability throughout the world, and that does not mean sending combat troops everywhere."

I think altcoins are all going south, to be honest. Spend a bit of time looking into the market and you will find a whole heap of disillusionment. It's the biggest feeling out there by far.

"Will 5% or higher annual return enough incentive for me to change my policy? I don’t think so. After experiencing several boom-bust cycles, seeing my coin’s value rising and falling is something that I can live with, but losing them for over-trusting is something that I just can’t forgive myself doing."

"The wallets look like small sheets of aluminum with a QR code, a bitcoin address, and the hunt's twitter handle. Each wallet is reported to contain 0.0333 bitcoin, or about $20, which goes to those clever enough to figure out the clues. They can be discovered by following the hunt's Twitter account: @SFHiddenBitcoin."

That is really fun, especially for the people who find one.