i'll get them to fit me a pair of wings while they give me breasts.

thoughts on barracks speech in cairo?

Boring rethoric.
Will probably be hailed as a great speech, ZOMG awesome, look how great he is.
Pretty awesome that he balances it with coming here next and wasting our tax money and visiting concentration camps.

the fact that he is wasting your tax money just makes it sweeter for me.

Personally I thought it was a very good speech (all caveats about the limitations of speeches being in full effect, etc, etc)

it was something that's needed to be said by the US for a long time and its pretty great that Obama finally said it.

I realize that the right views everything obama does as a priori wrong, but it was a damn good speech. Lets hope we follow through with actions.

Yeah exactly the reaction I expected. Nothing needs to be said. Stuff needs to be DONE. Fyling around the world to give fun little speeches is useless PR.

you don't think it will ease the minds of the billions of moderate-ish muslims in the world to hear the US finally engaging them and treating our conflicts as wars on terror as opposed to wars on Islam? You don't think it may have a counterbalancing effect to the radicalist imam's recruiting teenagers? Or it won't have a calming effect on those sitting on the fence about how to deal with US agression?

Nothing a US president says means anything to anybody outside the US.

Not a damn thing.

Not until there's actions to back it up.

This. Well it may make me suspicious if I was a Muslim but what can I say I'm a cynic.

i haven't listened to anything obama says apart from the short clips they play on democracy now! but i listened to this because you guys were talking about it and it's an extremely well-written speech, and at least the guy is talking about the glory of islamic culture rather than demonizing it. of course he says this during the process of moving the war-for-profit from one islamic country to another under the guise of a war on terror.

so of course nothing in this speech means anything, and the US government will take no action to reduce their military activity against islamic populations, but it was rhetorically sound.

orly?

yarly

That's what happens when you do whatever the **** you please for years on end, and who gives a damn what everyone else thinks

i was going to have something to back the orly part up but then i got lazy and realized i don't really care all that much.


I'm a lot more interested in wtf happened tot he Air France plane at the moment. All I can think about is Lost right now.

lol, me too

so i've read a couple of things about obama/us politics of late, which i haven't been following closely because uk politics is so ****ed up atm, but a couple of things seem interesting.

I was wondering about the amount of time cheney seems to be getting atm. When he was first on, talking about some of the cia/terrorism nonsense, i thought it was just covering his back, but i just read something in the economist which makes me think he's being more overtly political than that. I kinda figured that it was one of those unspoken things that, once you were out of office, ex-presidents and vice-presidents become beyond day-to-day politics but became statesmen. Like gore, focusing on the environment, or carter just being a general do-gooder. But from what i read cheney seems to be spending time now deliberately breifing against obama. Am i wrong, or is this unusual?

it's evil dick ****ing cheney, he doesn't have an ounce of statesman in him

and what gore does is hardly nonpolitical imo

carter is a good guy though

maybe nonplitical is the wrong word, but he did stay out of day to day affairs.

I'm a little surprised on your Carter position Amp.

As far as Cheney/Obama

its just theatre

he also equated people who don't believe in global warming with holocaust deniers on 60 minutes

if i had to eat lunch with either dick cheney or al gore i'd chew my own veins open

i could eat with carter

At some point soon I think I'd like to talk about Gorbachev and what he's doing right now and who he's involved with

one thing is the Kosmos journal which you may or may not find spooky

http://www.kosmosjournal.org/index.shtml

Gorbachev is also a huge global warming guy

hmm, so it seems like the people of yorkshire are morons. morons that allow me to win a bet, but morons regardless.

In case anyone is interested in the results of the European Parliament elections (not final yet):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europea...election,_2009

Turnout was pretty sucky and it was spun as "people just don't understand how important the EP is for their day to day lives" here. I'd say it's more "people don't give a damn about Europe and since the people who vote against it just get ignored why bother".
I think the most interesting thing is that the pirate party got one seat in Sweden. They were on the list here, too. Some other interesting parties on my ballot:
- Party for the separation of Bavaria from the rest of Germany
- Violetts for a spiritual Europe
- Three or four Christian parties
- Two parties for the retired (retired party and grey panthers)
- Pirates

Probably missing a couple. 33 total. Notably absent were Trotzkist (there was one Communist party and one radikal Socialists as well as the moderate socialists (Die Linke) that are a mainstream party here these days) and the party for the reestablishment of the Kaiserreich.

I did vote but may or may not have picked a goofy small party or invalidated my ballot.

+1 for the pirates

sometimes I wish the US had European style elections just so I could read about all the funky platforms some of these parties have.

I once ordered a collection of all the parties' programs for the federal election. I think it was 50 or so and came in a massive package delivered for free (and by free I mean payed by other folks tax money since I wasn't paying taxes then). Pretty fun read :P