Dick Cheney – Obama’s worst nightmare By Nile Gardiner World Last updated: February 14th, 2010 Former Vice President Dick Cheney stormed the beachheads of the liberal US media again today with a fiery performance on ABC’s This Week. He offered a stinging rebuke to current VP Joe Biden’s ludicrous claim that Iraq may end up as one of Barack Obama’s “great achievements”, as well as blistering criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of terrorist suspects. He also launched a strike on Biden’s recent comment that another 9/11 scale attack was “unlikely.”“I just think that’s just dead wrong. I think the biggest threat the United States faces today is the possibility of another 9/11 with a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind. And I think al Qaeda is out there — even as we meet — trying to do that. You have to consider it as a war. You have to consider it as something we may have to deal with tomorrow. You don’t want the vice president of the United States running around saying, ‘Oh, it’s not likely going to happen.’”The Daily Telegraph was right to name Cheney America’s most influential conservative in its recent ranking of the top 100. He was the first opposition figure of weight to seriously dent Barack Obama on national security issues when he unleashed a ferocious attack on the president’s policies last May in a major speech at The American Enterprise Institute. The speech was significant, because it sparked a largely successful counter-offensive against the Obama administration’s weak-kneed counter-terror strategy and dominated media coverage just after Obama gave a far less impressive address on the same issue across town at The National Archives.As I wrote at the time:“There is something very reassuring about a leader who never apologizes for America’s actions, possesses no self-doubts about defending his country, and who believes his nation must do what is necessary to crush al-Qaeda. The spectacular return of Dick Cheney on the political stage is a huge breath of fresh air after months of suffocating liberal dominance in Washington. Let’s hope he’s here to stay.”In many respects, Cheney’s vision is the antithesis of that of Barack Obama. In contrast to the current occupant of the White House, Cheney firmly believes the West is engaged in an epic global war against a vicious, Islamist enemy. It is striking for example how the recent 108-page Quadrennial Homeland Security Review omitted the words “Islam”, “Islamic” or “Islamist”, preferring to use the term “violent extremist”, a revealing insight into the Obama administration’s refusal to publicly acknowledge the Islamist nature of the enemy the US is fighting in the form of al-Qaeda and its affiliates.Dick Cheney is a refreshingly forceful advocate of American exceptionalism, and the idea that the United States is a special country with a unique role to play in shaping history. He also understands…

 What really scares Goldman SachsOnce the Feds are sniffing around inside the world's most powerful investment bank, this civil suit could escalate quickly John Lanchester guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 April 2010 Article historyOne of the most famous things written about any financial institution is the line of the American writer Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs: "A great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." It seems that the Securities and Exchange Commission, the body that polices the US financial industry, agrees. Friday's news that the SEC has launched a civil action against Goldman Sachs was astonishing to the world of money, not so much because the underlying events were astonishing, but because of the SEC's manifest determination to come after the world's richest and most powerful investment bank.The sort of activity Goldman is alleged to have committed has already been the subject of a roasting for the bank's boss, Lloyd Blankfein, at the US Congress hearings on the credit crunch. The nub of the charge was that Goldman was helping some clients to make huge bets against the very same mortgage-backed assets that it was energetically selling to other clients. As the inquiry chairman put it, the bank was "selling a used car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on those cars".Blankfein didn't even pretend to hide his irritation, and replied: "That's what a market is." The buyers knew what they were doing, and the sellers were free to take a different view. Is it really a market, though, if one side knows what is happening and the other doesn't? That is the argument – not far off being a philosophical debate – on which the case will turn. Goldman's line of defence is already clear from its PR material. The first three sentences of its press release twice mention the fact that the fraud case concerns a transaction between "two professional institutional investors". In other words, Goldman is planning the 10CC defence: "big boys don't cry".The very best book about this whole affair is Michael Lewis's new book The Big Short. Lewis worked at Salomon Brothers in the early 80s and wrote a brilliant book about it, Liar's Poker. Lewis now admits that he thought he was writing a furious anti-money diatribe, but his book was instead treated as a manual about how to get ahead in the amoral financial world of the 80s and after. Now he's gone back to Wall Street to write a kind of follow-up, about how the excesses he had described went unchecked for more than two decades, and ended in disaster. The heroes of the story are the people who diagnosed the credit bubble early, and bet hugely against it.The Big Short is, among other things, a blistering, detailed indictment of the way Wall Street does business, and its particular villains are the investment banks. One thing that emerges clearly…

Enjoying the show, avoiding the flamethrower: life inside Apple What's it like working inside Apple when the MacWorld announcements are made? The man who set up many of its email systems and worked there 17 years explains the inside story of the preparation, the unveiling – and why it's sometimes best to avoid Steve Jobs Comments (13) Chuq von Rospach guardian.co.uk, Friday 2 January 2009 10.54 GMT Article history A worker cleans the logo on a wall of the new Apple store in Beijing, China Photograph: Cancan Chu/Getty Images Even two years after I left Apple, I still feel like I celebrate two Christmases: the one I celebrate with my family, and the one in January that we celebrate when Steve Jobs gets up on stage and says: "I have a few things to show you today that I think you'll really like."When I worked there, the MacWorld speech was always the point at which most of us stopped work and gathered around the screens – there was always a big gathering and a special screen in the restaurant. Work would stop for a while as everyone enjoyed the surprise. And for most of us it was a surprise; only for those in the small teams working on, say, the iPhone or the new release of Apple's office suite iWork would know precisely what was coming; and even they didn't know what the other teams had. And afterwards people talk about it for days; and the staff discount means that there are plenty of orders right after the speech ends.Only, of course, this year it won't be Steve. It'll be Phil Schiller, Apple's own Vice President of Demos, as we liked to call him, because he'd always be the second guy who'd come out to help Steve out.I'll still tune in with great anticipation, and while people are already predicting there will be no major announcements, I'm not so sure. Instead, I think this is the first step in proving to the Apple community (and investors) that while Steve's vision is important to Apple, Apple is not Steve, and Apple will not disappear when Steve retires from the company – which he is going to do, sooner or later.Lots of people are making noise about this change, because they find change unsettling – but Apple's history shows that these kind of changes are common, and once people settle in and get used to the changes, they generally find they had nothing to worry about and that the new Apple is pretty good. We'll probably look back to this event in a couple of years and wonder why we were so worried, too.The fact is, MacWorld causes all sorts of problems for Apple's workers, and is an expensive proposition for the company to be ready for. It usually meant a bunch of people had to work through the Christmas break to make deadlines, and then get compensatory time later. It's terribly timed…

       Foes and Supporters of New Immigration Law Gather in ArizonaThe demonstrators against the law were mostly Latino, with young people and families making up a large share. They played drums, whistled and chanted and gave speeches in Spanish and English denouncing the perceived racism behind the law. Many carried posters or wore T-shirts with the message: “Do I look illegal?” At the rally in favor of the law, which began with the pledge of allegiance and the national anthem, any mention of Mexico or supporters of the law brought lusty boos — a video clip of President Felipe Calderón of Mexico especially fired up the crowd, which was mostly white and middle-aged or older. Placards like “Illegals out of the U.S.A.” were typical, though speaker after speaker ridiculed the idea that the crowd was racist. Read Article