Thread for the Undecideds

Am I the only one out there that is truly undecided for the the Primary?

At this point, I just really want to see what policies Hillary proposes and if she can handle/survive the pressures of a General Election campaign... Can her health and focus last on the campaign trail? Can she overcome her perceived 'negatives' and put forward her vision of the future?

For Sen. Sanders, I want to see if he is truly a Democrat... or a Democrat of convenience. Can he forge a message that can get broad appeal across the electorate? I also have questions about his age and health... can he hold-up under a tough campaign?

Even some of the lesser candidates, I could also live with... but they need to show why in the heck are they even running... or are they just jockeying for 2020, or a VP spot.

I also like the two other 500 lb. gorillas sitting it out currently: Biden, and Gore.


So far, no one has shown me that they have what it takes in 2016. Time to get to work folks. In the meantime, I am watching and waiting.

My take on Gov. Scott and the fan

British human rights activists feared detained by police in Qatar

Source: The Guardian

Two British human rights activists have "disappeared'"in Qatar while investigating the treatment of the country's migrant workforce. The Global Network for Rights and Development (GNRD), which employs the men, has not heard from them for more than four days and fears that they may have been detained.

Krishna Upadhyaya, 52, and Ghimire Gundev, 36, arrived in Qatar on 27 August to research a forthcoming report on the working and living conditions of Nepalese migrant workers in the Gulf emirate. Qatar's treatment of its migrant workers has drawn widespread criticism from human rights groups as it prepares to host the 2022 World Cup...

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/04/qatar-british-human-rights-activists-feared-detained-police

Enjoy Florida's Beautiful Beaches- Catch a Flesh-eating Bacteria

Be afraid to go back in the water... very afraid...

Paul Wolfowitz thinks 'you' are too stupid to know the difference between Sunni and Shia (MSNBC)

Just now with Chuck Todd... Wolfowitz just said that telling people the names Sunni and Shia is too complicated for Americans... they just need to know 'terrorism', 9/11 ... (paraphrase)...

Who Funded the Sunni Warlords in Iraq? the USA Did...

Gen. Petraeus' policy (and Maliki's arrogant incompetence) have led directly to the the Sunni warlords and ISIS knocking on the door of Baghdad:

We were paying the warlords off to the tune of around $150 Million per year....

This strategy has combined with other developments -- especially the fact that so much ethnic cleansing has already occurred and that violence in civil wars tends to ebb and flow, as the contending sides work to consolidate gains and replenish losses -- to bring about the current drop in violence. The Sunni sheiks, meanwhile, are getting rich from the surge. The United States has budgeted $150 million to pay Sunni tribal groups this year, and the sheiks take as much as 20 percent of every payment to a former insurgent -- which means that commanding 200 fighters can be worth well over a hundred thousand dollars a year for a tribal chief. Although Washington hopes that Baghdad will eventually integrate most former insurgents into the Iraqi state security services, there are reasons to worry that the Sunni chiefs will not willingly give up what has become an extremely lucrative arrangement... http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/63398/steven-simon/the-price-of-the-surge

ISIS is Being Exploited in the Media as a Bogeyman- Iraq in on the Brink of Full-Blown Sectarian War

Here are some key points to keep in-mind from the Brookings Institute:

It’s a Coalition, not a Single Group. First, ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) is essentially the “lead dog” of a larger Sunni militant coalition—hence my preference for the latter, more accurate description. ISIS has been fighting in conjunction with a number of other Iraqi Sunni militant groups. Effectively the entire rogue’s gallery of Sunni militias from the 2006-2008 civil war have been revived by Prime Minister Maliki’s alienation of the Sunni Arab community since 2011. AQI, the Naqshbandis, the Ba’th, Jaysh al-Muhammad, Ansar al-Sunnah, and all of the rest are back in operation in Iraq, in at least tacit cooperation with a number of Sunni tribes.

These groups are key members of the Sunni militant coalition. They have done a great deal of the fighting, dying and occupying. Often they are indistinguishable from one another to outsiders or even Iraqis who are not themselves Sunni militants.

These are Militias First and Foremost, Terrorists only a Distant Second. Here as well, Prime Minister Maliki and his apologists like to refer to the Sunni militants as terrorists. Too often, so too do American officials. Without getting into arcane and useless debates about what constitutes a “terrorist,” as a practical matter it is a mistake to think of these groups as being principally a bunch of terrorists.

The problem there is that that implies that what these guys mostly want to do is to blow up building or planes elsewhere around the world, and particularly American buildings and planes. While I have no doubt that there are some among the Sunni militants who want to blow up American buildings and planes right now, and many others who would like to do so later, that is not their principal motivation... http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2014/06/14-iraq-military-situation-pollack

Florida (of Course), Vampire Wannabe Running For Congress (GOP, of Course)

Of course he is running against Ted Yoho (R) who is more of a closet zombie...

Fla. poll: Clinton leads Bush, Rubio in matchups (2016 Presidential match-ups)

Robots are stealing your job: How technology threatens to wipe out the middle class

...Automation is destroying jobs, but in contrast to past history, new jobs are not being created in adequate compensation for what’s lost, (a point all too well underlined by the latest jobs report). “The Second Machine Age” reexamines this relentless march of the robots, but in the context of a technological landscape in which change is accelerating significantly faster than what could even have been imagined just a few years ago.

The emergence of Big Data, the exponential growth unleashed by decades of Moore’s Law (more and more computing power for less and less cost), and the logic of what the authors call “recombinant innovation” — the mixing and matching of our powerful new tools into a bewildering array of even newer, even more powerful tools — have replaced hype with a bewildering new reality. We’re headed somewhere new at high speed, and with no apparent ability to put on the brakes... The key economic fact is that technology can make the pie bigger, it can make the economy richer, but it doesn’t necessarily help everybody, in fact some people, even the majority of people, can be made worse off, even if the pie grows bigger.

That’s not what happened for the past 200 years, with the first machine age, but it does seem to be what’s happening now. In the second machine age we have a bigger pie but also more concentration of wealth. The median income is now lower than it was in the 1990s... http://www.salon.com/2014/01/17/robots_are_stealing_your_job_how_technology_threatens_to_wipe_out_the_middle_class/