Obama is handsome and even tanned, says Berlusconi
November 7, 2008 - 6:47AM
Italy’s famously impolitic Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi described US President-elect Barack Obama today as “young, handsome and even tanned”.
Berlusconi appeared to be joking about America’s first black president at a news conference following talks with Russia’s president.
The Italian leader, who has a history of controversial remarks, was asked by a reporter about the prospect for US-Russian relations, which have plummeted to Cold War-levels in recent months.
Berlusconi responded by saying that the relative youth of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, 43, and Obama, 47, should make it easier for Moscow and Washington to work together.
Then he said, smiling: “I told the president that (Obama) has everything needed in order to reach deals with him: he’s young, handsome and even tanned.”
Medvedev did not visibly react to the comment.
Italian news agencies said Berlusconi later defended the remark to reporters as he returned to his hotel in Moscow, calling the statement “a great compliment”.
“Why are they taking it as something negative? … If they have the vice of not having a sense of humour, worse for them,” the ANSA news agency quoted him as saying.
Berlusconi is infamous for eyebrow-raising comments.
He once compared a German legislator to a Nazi camp guard, asserted after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks that Western civilisation was superior to Islam and more recently, that the new Spanish government had too many women.
Italy’s only black legislator, Jean-Leonard Touadi, called the comment embarrassing.
“In the United States, a joke like that wouldn’t just be politically incorrect, but a great offence to this amazing example of integration, which it seems the Italian premier should take as an example,” Touadi said.
We seem to have a small window of time to lay out and reflect on the facts of the melt-down situation, before they really hand the Crown to Barky… For clarity, I like this article I found at Kitco today; from “Tough Sleading Ahead…” by Chris Laird: http://www.kitco.com/ind/Laird/nov062008.html
The primary reason the USD has held up so well in the last decades, in spite of ever worsening US trade and budget deficits that add to over $1 trillion a year combined, is that the US was an export economy’s dream customer. Because the US was such a good customer to the world, they bought our US Treasury bonds, and lent trillions in other ways to the US consumer. As long as the US consumer could carry that process out, our trade partners could make bank on the US and USD. However, once the US consumer is tapped out, and cannot effectively make a return on investment of our trade partners,…”
He goes on to say:
“The recipe here is for a revolution in China if they cannot keep 800 plus million people working… and this is just beginning to happen. And this issue is widely known to scare the hell out of the Chinese government.
But, to avoid a revolution, they MUST have 8% economic growth indefinitely? That is not going to happen. The party is about over in China.
The point here of emphasizing China’s demographics is that, without big exports to the West, they cannot sustain stability economically or politically. They are the poster child to what happens when the export economies slow drastically when the US export markets slow significantly.”
Echoing LaRouche and Robert’s statements over these past four years, “America must re-group and concentrate on building infrastructure, railroads, bridges, -whatever it takes to sustain the automotive & steel production industries.”
The operative word is “production,” as in, we still need to provide something besides military gear in the global exchange. Thus, it has been utterly maddening to watch the BushCo clan rewarding all the wrong players in this process. Personally, I wouldn’t spend a minute blaming Greenspan for these recent past blunders, while I would insist on emphasising our dialogue with Russia and China on restoring faith in the dollar.
The Stock market has to crash, and *Nov. 14th* seems about as good a time as any to get the ’tilt-a-whirld’ spinning. Even assuming the worst, we could forego the calamity of World War if we all keep our hats on through this process.
What is the current betting (at Intrade, say) on Garry Kimovich Kasparov as the next Russian President with his democratic Matryoshka alignment, the Other Russia? An outside bet, of course, given the Putinisation of the media, the bureaucracy, the Duma, and the entrenchment of Putinism through youth groups such as ‘Nashi - Our Movement’ (Молодежное движение «Наши»), so the odds are presumably not high. But sometimes dark horses gallop into first place when everybody is looking the other way. In his book “How life imitates chess”, G.K. talks of how he won versus the Soviet academy’s finest product Anatoly Karpov, and says he likes “games where the pieces are flying all over the place”. A (relatively free and fair) Russian election where the pieces were flying all over the place would be fascinating. Putin has attempted to control access to cyberspace, of course, but Kasparov does have a Myspace profile (with nearly 1,000 friends) and is presumably very busy organising behind the scenes. As the finest chess player the world has probably ever seen, he understands patience and timing. And how to checkmate.
USan’s pay attention: this is what a REAL leader looks and sounds like. Not some propped-up, phony, obsequious, rhetorical clown spewing meaningless platitudes and bowing to Wall Street, Israel, and the military-security complex. Both Medvedev and Putin are serious men who have dragged Russia from the gates of US/IMF-imposed hell to prosperity.
The United Snakes should spend as much time attending to their own domestic problems as they do to trying to sabotage Russia, and interfering in the affairs of countless other countries.
Russia is sitting pretty good in my opinion. Something like 30 per cent of the world’s natural resources - oil, gas, gold, copper, platinum, uranium, forestry, fisheries, Lake Baikal alone contains 20 per cent of the world’s ground fresh water, 15 per cent of the world’s Arable land, and so on, along with proper public ownership/control of key resources.
By all indicators China should have the highest GDP by 2025 and Russia the highest Per Capita GDP by 2030.
The party is not “over”, TS Gordon, it’s just beginning in Russia.
See you in Sochi in 2014 - I’ll be the dude with the real estate agent at his side…
I say Kasparov is possibly the best chess player ever - debateable…Fischer and Polgar could put in big claims. And who needs a “best ever” concept anyway - everyone has different styles, like Karpov’s Academician style and Fischer’s New York Street Style. Multidimensional game, multidimensional styles.
Putin and Medvedev’s Academician style leaves much to be desired.
Gary Dorsch used Intrade data to plot Obama’s chances of winning the election over the past couple of months (http://tinyurl.com/57u6xj). Obama’s chances fell below 50% just before the Lehman bankruptcy, while afterward his chances rose steadily. Makes perfect sense: the bankruptcy caused financial turmoil, and bad economic news boosted Obama’s chances.
It was Timothy Geithner who told Lehman the Fed would not rescue them. (Bernanke wasn’t at the meeting, although Paulson was, doing his bit for Goldman by kneecapping their competition.) And now Geithner is the front-runner for Obama’s Treasury Secretary.
Kasparov is an idiot. A tool of Wall Street and the “west”. He is universally DESPISED in Russia. The only votes he received were from the Zionist class, less than half of one per cent. The asshole doesn’t even LIVE in Russia, but in NYC! George Bush has a better chance of becoming president of the RF.
What are you smoking, M.D. Edwards? Stop polluting the comments with this drivel.
PS Fischer was the best. Ever. There is no serious debate about this within the chess community. Hell, i could probably at least draw the fool on a good day.
Once we’ve ended Prohibition in London, Mr.Idaho, I hope to be smoking the occasional finest Moroccan in some very select and properly regulated cafe-houses somewhere on the Eastside of London town - after having feasted on the Max Keiser show on a revivified and rejuvenated BBC One on Free-day nights. Right now, I’m smoking nothing but the cool breeze of rapidly proliferating liberty, and the good sound of Japanese band United Future Organisation - a nation (Nihon, that of the rising sun) where I may or may not be located, depending on which ’security service’ are asking the question. Alternatively, I am located in a hole in the ground in Mombassa. Or nowhere at all, like the “Utopia” that Thomas More wrote of in the tyrannical days of King Henry the After Eighth. Cat, mouse, tiger, louse.
As for your contention that Medvedev is a ‘real leader’, do real leaders run gulag states? Do they ordain the murders of superb people like Litvinenko and Politvoskaya (allegedly)? Or do they nurture the growth and health and prosperity of their people?
And as for ‘East’ and ‘West’, Buckminster Fuller pointed out that for sailors (and their latter day counterparts, cyber-navigators) such concepts are not fixed entities, but dynamic points of compasses. Russia isn’t ‘West’ and the USA isn’t ‘East’. It all depends where you are positioned, and where you are moving. And who can know both simultaneously? Isn’t there a big old Heisenbergian uncertainty principle at work there? Or a version of Godel’s proof? Or Wittgenstein’s limits of the possibility of language? Isn’t THAT the real limit of the surveillance state - that the eye can no so much, but less than the belly?
As Hamlet said, enough “words words words”.
Antic dispositions tire for a while…now the likelihood of being bumped off in the night by Cheney’s operatives diminishes the range of possible public statements increases exponentially, and with it the glorious timbres of liberty…
I quoted an article from Kitco that said,- the party is over in China, –for now. I doubt Max is remotely concerned with going that ‘long’ 2030? on the Ruble. {Most of us will be dead within two weeks after the fat lady jumps off Moody & Poor’s mezzanine, just after lunch, come “Black Friday!” }
Furthermore, I wouldn’t back MEDVEDEV any more than I would Berlosconi, and I wouldn’t consider ANY chess player especially prepared to lead an industrial nation.
Our job, as ‘pawns,’ is to reclaim the power of the Fed, and to convince the neighbors that we are prepared to share the wealth. House proices will rise, but don’t anticipate the majority of buyers to be rosey cheeked white folks.
I like Sting’s summation from his song, Russians:
“I hope the Russians love their childeren too.”
Russia isn’t the one that has the world’s highest incarceration rate, that would be United Snakes. Nor does it have four PTZ cameras for every citizen, that would be United Kleptocrats.
“superb people like Litvinenko”???
A Traitor that sold Russian state secrets to Israel?…if it were me I would have executed his ass in front of the Israeli embassy. Regardless, the GRU would never use polonium. Probably he became expendable and MI6 decided to make political hay.
“Politvoskaya”?
I guess in Cheneyville and UKistan accusations alone are evidence.
17 Comments
November 6th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
S and M(rofl),
Peter Schiff on his radios how slap the deflationists in the face. Here is the link.
http://www.europac.net/media/PeterSchiff_11-05-2008.mp3
-Ben
November 6th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Gobsmaked
November 6th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Obama is handsome and even tanned, says Berlusconi
November 7, 2008 - 6:47AM
Italy’s famously impolitic Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi described US President-elect Barack Obama today as “young, handsome and even tanned”.
Berlusconi appeared to be joking about America’s first black president at a news conference following talks with Russia’s president.
The Italian leader, who has a history of controversial remarks, was asked by a reporter about the prospect for US-Russian relations, which have plummeted to Cold War-levels in recent months.
Berlusconi responded by saying that the relative youth of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, 43, and Obama, 47, should make it easier for Moscow and Washington to work together.
Then he said, smiling: “I told the president that (Obama) has everything needed in order to reach deals with him: he’s young, handsome and even tanned.”
Medvedev did not visibly react to the comment.
Italian news agencies said Berlusconi later defended the remark to reporters as he returned to his hotel in Moscow, calling the statement “a great compliment”.
“Why are they taking it as something negative? … If they have the vice of not having a sense of humour, worse for them,” the ANSA news agency quoted him as saying.
Berlusconi is infamous for eyebrow-raising comments.
He once compared a German legislator to a Nazi camp guard, asserted after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks that Western civilisation was superior to Islam and more recently, that the new Spanish government had too many women.
Italy’s only black legislator, Jean-Leonard Touadi, called the comment embarrassing.
“In the United States, a joke like that wouldn’t just be politically incorrect, but a great offence to this amazing example of integration, which it seems the Italian premier should take as an example,” Touadi said.
November 6th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Thanks very much for posting this Stacy, it’s a great find.
I wish the guy the best of luck with the currency moves. I fear it is only rhetoric…
November 6th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
We seem to have a small window of time to lay out and reflect on the facts of the melt-down situation, before they really hand the Crown to Barky… For clarity, I like this article I found at Kitco today; from “Tough Sleading Ahead…” by Chris Laird:
http://www.kitco.com/ind/Laird/nov062008.html
The primary reason the USD has held up so well in the last decades, in spite of ever worsening US trade and budget deficits that add to over $1 trillion a year combined, is that the US was an export economy’s dream customer. Because the US was such a good customer to the world, they bought our US Treasury bonds, and lent trillions in other ways to the US consumer. As long as the US consumer could carry that process out, our trade partners could make bank on the US and USD. However, once the US consumer is tapped out, and cannot effectively make a return on investment of our trade partners,…”
He goes on to say:
“The recipe here is for a revolution in China if they cannot keep 800 plus million people working… and this is just beginning to happen. And this issue is widely known to scare the hell out of the Chinese government.
But, to avoid a revolution, they MUST have 8% economic growth indefinitely? That is not going to happen. The party is about over in China.
The point here of emphasizing China’s demographics is that, without big exports to the West, they cannot sustain stability economically or politically. They are the poster child to what happens when the export economies slow drastically when the US export markets slow significantly.”
Echoing LaRouche and Robert’s statements over these past four years, “America must re-group and concentrate on building infrastructure, railroads, bridges, -whatever it takes to sustain the automotive & steel production industries.”
The operative word is “production,” as in, we still need to provide something besides military gear in the global exchange. Thus, it has been utterly maddening to watch the BushCo clan rewarding all the wrong players in this process. Personally, I wouldn’t spend a minute blaming Greenspan for these recent past blunders, while I would insist on emphasising our dialogue with Russia and China on restoring faith in the dollar.
The Stock market has to crash, and *Nov. 14th* seems about as good a time as any to get the ’tilt-a-whirld’ spinning. Even assuming the worst, we could forego the calamity of World War if we all keep our hats on through this process.
November 7th, 2008 at 4:07 am
Russian democratic Матрёшка election?
What is the current betting (at Intrade, say) on Garry Kimovich Kasparov as the next Russian President with his democratic Matryoshka alignment, the Other Russia? An outside bet, of course, given the Putinisation of the media, the bureaucracy, the Duma, and the entrenchment of Putinism through youth groups such as ‘Nashi - Our Movement’ (Молодежное движение «Наши»), so the odds are presumably not high. But sometimes dark horses gallop into first place when everybody is looking the other way. In his book “How life imitates chess”, G.K. talks of how he won versus the Soviet academy’s finest product Anatoly Karpov, and says he likes “games where the pieces are flying all over the place”. A (relatively free and fair) Russian election where the pieces were flying all over the place would be fascinating. Putin has attempted to control access to cyberspace, of course, but Kasparov does have a Myspace profile (with nearly 1,000 friends) and is presumably very busy organising behind the scenes. As the finest chess player the world has probably ever seen, he understands patience and timing. And how to checkmate.
Kasparov, G:
http://www.kasparov.com/
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=Kasparov&btnG=Search&meta=
Nashi:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashi_(Ours)
Kasparov, G (Myspace):
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=Kasparov&btnG=Search&meta=
Pravda (’Truth’ in Russian):
http://www.pravda.ru/
Matryoshka:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll
Forward the Other Russia!
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22Forward+Russia%22&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
November 7th, 2008 at 4:41 am
PLEASE JOIN THE FOLLOWING GROUP AND INVITE OTHERS TO JOIN
IT’S A MEDVEDEV SHAKEDOWN AND A PUTIN TAKEDOWN!
RUSSIAN Матрёшка ELECTION - FORWARD GARRY KASPAROV AND THE OTHER RUSSIA!
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=37609026173
November 7th, 2008 at 5:00 am
USan’s pay attention: this is what a REAL leader looks and sounds like. Not some propped-up, phony, obsequious, rhetorical clown spewing meaningless platitudes and bowing to Wall Street, Israel, and the military-security complex. Both Medvedev and Putin are serious men who have dragged Russia from the gates of US/IMF-imposed hell to prosperity.
The United Snakes should spend as much time attending to their own domestic problems as they do to trying to sabotage Russia, and interfering in the affairs of countless other countries.
Russia is sitting pretty good in my opinion. Something like 30 per cent of the world’s natural resources - oil, gas, gold, copper, platinum, uranium, forestry, fisheries, Lake Baikal alone contains 20 per cent of the world’s ground fresh water, 15 per cent of the world’s Arable land, and so on, along with proper public ownership/control of key resources.
By all indicators China should have the highest GDP by 2025 and Russia the highest Per Capita GDP by 2030.
The party is not “over”, TS Gordon, it’s just beginning in Russia.
See you in Sochi in 2014 - I’ll be the dude with the real estate agent at his side…
November 7th, 2008 at 6:07 am
BRILLIANT WORK FROM PHILIP SCOTT IN LONDON - ARGUING FOR MAX KEISER ON VANESSA FELTZ’S BBC RADIO PROGRAMME:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=745014031&ref=profile#/video/video.php?v=33947409031
November 7th, 2008 at 6:08 am
ANTI-PUTIN, PRO-KASPAROV FACEBOOK GROUPS:
KASPAROV/OTHER RUSSIA FACEBOOK LINKS:
Fan Club de Kasparov:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8704127345
Fans of Garry Kasparov:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10693749969:
Free Garry Kasparov:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2221277767
Free Garry Kasparov:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19881995072
Free Kasparov:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2310958320
Gary Kasparov Supporters:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=29851818379
Garry Kasparov check-mated my heart:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19881995072
Garry Kasparov for Russian Presidency:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19881995072
Garry Kasparov for Russian President 2008:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2221277767
Kasparov Chess Foundation:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8704127345
Kasparov for President:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19881995072
Kasparov for Russian President:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2221277767
Kasparov, we are supporting you:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8704127345
The Other Russia:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2383631271
Solidarity with Garry Kasparov:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6869894095
November 7th, 2008 at 7:50 am
I say Kasparov is possibly the best chess player ever - debateable…Fischer and Polgar could put in big claims. And who needs a “best ever” concept anyway - everyone has different styles, like Karpov’s Academician style and Fischer’s New York Street Style. Multidimensional game, multidimensional styles.
Putin and Medvedev’s Academician style leaves much to be desired.
November 7th, 2008 at 8:14 am
M&S - could you please open a book on the Russian Presidential election over at Intrade?
There is (potentially) money to be made on Kasparov, serious money.
November 7th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Gary Dorsch used Intrade data to plot Obama’s chances of winning the election over the past couple of months (http://tinyurl.com/57u6xj). Obama’s chances fell below 50% just before the Lehman bankruptcy, while afterward his chances rose steadily. Makes perfect sense: the bankruptcy caused financial turmoil, and bad economic news boosted Obama’s chances.
It was Timothy Geithner who told Lehman the Fed would not rescue them. (Bernanke wasn’t at the meeting, although Paulson was, doing his bit for Goldman by kneecapping their competition.) And now Geithner is the front-runner for Obama’s Treasury Secretary.
There’s some tinfoil in here somewhere….
November 7th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Kasparov is an idiot. A tool of Wall Street and the “west”. He is universally DESPISED in Russia. The only votes he received were from the Zionist class, less than half of one per cent. The asshole doesn’t even LIVE in Russia, but in NYC! George Bush has a better chance of becoming president of the RF.
What are you smoking, M.D. Edwards? Stop polluting the comments with this drivel.
PS Fischer was the best. Ever. There is no serious debate about this within the chess community. Hell, i could probably at least draw the fool on a good day.
November 7th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Once we’ve ended Prohibition in London, Mr.Idaho, I hope to be smoking the occasional finest Moroccan in some very select and properly regulated cafe-houses somewhere on the Eastside of London town - after having feasted on the Max Keiser show on a revivified and rejuvenated BBC One on Free-day nights. Right now, I’m smoking nothing but the cool breeze of rapidly proliferating liberty, and the good sound of Japanese band United Future Organisation - a nation (Nihon, that of the rising sun) where I may or may not be located, depending on which ’security service’ are asking the question. Alternatively, I am located in a hole in the ground in Mombassa. Or nowhere at all, like the “Utopia” that Thomas More wrote of in the tyrannical days of King Henry the After Eighth. Cat, mouse, tiger, louse.
As for your contention that Medvedev is a ‘real leader’, do real leaders run gulag states? Do they ordain the murders of superb people like Litvinenko and Politvoskaya (allegedly)? Or do they nurture the growth and health and prosperity of their people?
And as for ‘East’ and ‘West’, Buckminster Fuller pointed out that for sailors (and their latter day counterparts, cyber-navigators) such concepts are not fixed entities, but dynamic points of compasses. Russia isn’t ‘West’ and the USA isn’t ‘East’. It all depends where you are positioned, and where you are moving. And who can know both simultaneously? Isn’t there a big old Heisenbergian uncertainty principle at work there? Or a version of Godel’s proof? Or Wittgenstein’s limits of the possibility of language? Isn’t THAT the real limit of the surveillance state - that the eye can no so much, but less than the belly?
As Hamlet said, enough “words words words”.
Antic dispositions tire for a while…now the likelihood of being bumped off in the night by Cheney’s operatives diminishes the range of possible public statements increases exponentially, and with it the glorious timbres of liberty…
November 7th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
I quoted an article from Kitco that said,- the party is over in China, –for now. I doubt Max is remotely concerned with going that ‘long’ 2030? on the Ruble. {Most of us will be dead within two weeks after the fat lady jumps off Moody & Poor’s mezzanine, just after lunch, come “Black Friday!” }
Furthermore, I wouldn’t back MEDVEDEV any more than I would Berlosconi, and I wouldn’t consider ANY chess player especially prepared to lead an industrial nation.
Our job, as ‘pawns,’ is to reclaim the power of the Fed, and to convince the neighbors that we are prepared to share the wealth. House proices will rise, but don’t anticipate the majority of buyers to be rosey cheeked white folks.
I like Sting’s summation from his song, Russians:
“I hope the Russians love their childeren too.”
November 8th, 2008 at 1:34 am
“Gulag state”???
Russia isn’t the one that has the world’s highest incarceration rate, that would be United Snakes. Nor does it have four PTZ cameras for every citizen, that would be United Kleptocrats.
“superb people like Litvinenko”???
A Traitor that sold Russian state secrets to Israel?…if it were me I would have executed his ass in front of the Israeli embassy. Regardless, the GRU would never use polonium. Probably he became expendable and MI6 decided to make political hay.
“Politvoskaya”?
I guess in Cheneyville and UKistan accusations alone are evidence.
Leave a Reply