The End Of America's Superpower Status

President Obama. Photo by Courtesy Pete Souza

US Government Shutdown: Barack Obama Is Presiding Over The End Of America's Superpower Status -- Con Coughlin, The Telegraph

For a country that is supposed to be the most powerful in the world, the fact that Americans have today woken up to find large swathes of their nation closed for business is humiliating.

Thanks to President Barack Obama obduracy over his flagship healthcare policy, Democrats and Republicans have failed to reach agreement in Congress on the federal budget, forcing the US Government to close down for the first time in 17 years, with around 700,000 federal workers being placed on indefinite leave.

While the White House insists that essential areas of the government, such as the military, will continue to function, the shut down represents yet a further blow to the prestige of the Obama administration at a time when it is still reeling from its inept handling of the recent Syrian crisis.

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My Comment: As I have mentioned many times in this blog over the years .... the U.S. is on a slow but precipitous decline on the world stage. It no longer is the economic role model for countries to follow .... and it certainly is no longer the political model to emulate. And while the U.S. military is still the mightiest in the world .... what made the U.S. a superpower were the principles and ideals that the founders debated and enshrined in law when they founded the United States ... not the strength of its army. The U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights are documents that the world should follow for it is what made America exceptional .... but today .... the U.S. now has a government ruled by two corrupt political parties that the people must serve instead of the other way around. A few days before he was elected in 2008 .... President Obama pledged to transform America .... and on that promise he has succeeded beyond his imagination. The philosophy, culture, and mindset has certainly changed in America .... and this change (and decline) is now being noticed on the world scene.

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Pulitzer Prize Winner Seymour Hersh Unleashes On The Media, President Obama, And The NSA

Photo: Seymour Hersh at the 2004 Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award. Wikipedia

Seymour Hersh On Obama, NSA And The 'Pathetic' American Media -- The Guardian

Pulitzer Prize winner explains how to fix journalism, saying press should 'fire 90% of editors and promote ones you can't control'

Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.

It doesn't take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist".

He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.

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Update #1: Sy Hersh on Osama bin Laden raid: “Not one word of it is true” -- Elias Isquith, Slate
Update #2: Seymour Hersh Rips US Media: 'Carrying Water for Obama' -- John Nolte, Breitbart

My Comment: What a strange day for me .... I have been agreeing to articles (or at least some parts of it) written by far left journalists who I have never been in agreement with before. Here is another.

Update: I should mention that unlike Seymour Hersh I do believe in the White House version of what happened during the Bin Laden raid .... but aside from Bin Laden .... Seymour Hersh is dead-on-right in his analysis on how the mainstream media has been behaving and reporting on this White House).

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Americans Are More Interested In Miley Cyrus Than Syria

Final Tally: Americans Were 12 Times More Interested in Miley Cyrus Than Syria -- NYMag.com

That Miley Cyrus captures more attention than escalating war in Syria is, by now, conventional wisdom. But an exhaustive survey of news sources now reveals exactly how much attention Miley steals: Americans viewed twelve times as many pages about Miley Cyrus as they did about Syria — even though the news sources published 2.4 Syria articles for every one about Miley.

Outbrain supplies "related links" modules to a network of 100,000 publishers, including major news sources like CNN, Fox News, and ESPN. On any given day, 87 percent of Americans who browse the web will view a page with an Outbrain module, explains the company's vice-president of global marketing. They collect traffic data from every site in their network, which they use in a variety of algorithms to generate recommendations.

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My Comment: Sighhhh .... what can I say.

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