Compare the two leadership styles and learn, because this relationship will guide the world:

“Observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership.” — China’s former Communist Party Leader, Deng Xiaoping.

“But I can say that the president of the United States said during his campaign and in the debates that if there is an actionable target, of a high-level Al Qaeda personnel, that he would not hesitate to use action to deal with that” — Vice President Joseph Biden.

As even a sole nation’s history demonstrates, depressions were neither unknown or infrequent before the 1930s. The witnesses just weren’t as likely to live long enough to see the end of a second economic cycle! Methinks we’d do well to remember about our real roots without the glorious inbetween sections.

I have below a half generation’s worth of disparate plague, horsies, fire, massacre, union politics, extravagance, silver, financial wizards, cronies and price deflation bound together under contemporaneous ages of American History: The Gilded Age, the Long Depression and The Second Industrial Revolution.  

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“the major virtues of liberal society in the past was that it made possible such a variety of styles of intellectual life – one can find men notable for being passionate and rebellious, for being elegant and sumptuous, or spare and astringent, clever and complex, patient and wise, and some equipped mainly to observe and endure. … It is possible, of course, that the avenues of choice are being closed and that the culture of the future will be dominated by single-minded men of one persuasion or another. It is possible; but insofar as the weight of one’s will is thrown onto the scales of history, one lives in the belief that it not be so” — Richard Hofstadter.

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Let’s get one thing straight, now.  There are no liberal Republican Senators.  But the GOP’s got a secret-play in its handbook: the media carte-blanche from being an “independent”-minded poseur.  And 2006 showed us it works for Republicans..

It is not enough to simply have ‘good’ people or experienced people in Washington.  Without fundamental change Rwanda and Darfur are going to happen again and again. If a candidate can deliver on that change, I don’t care if their name is Clinton or Obama.  But neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama are wonks on conflict and genocide, so if they’re going to make proposals you and I should be asking very earnestly where these ideas originate.

The Nobel prize-winning president of East Timor, Jose Ramos-Horta, is in critical condition, breathing on a ventilator.  Timorese Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao survived an attempted coup against him and Ramos-Horta. Ramos-Horta was shot in the back of the head and the stomach…  Now Gusmao has declared a 48 hour state of emergency.

Rebel leader Major Alfredo Reinado and another insurgent are dead.

Much more below…