Central Perk

vineri, 7 noiembrie 2014

4 Tips for Producing Great Event Coverage - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 06 Nov 2014 04:15 PM PST

Conferences and trade shows can be sources of wonderful ideas, and covering these events in a way that spreads some of those ideas around is common practice. Not all event coverage is created equal, though, and in today's Whiteboard Friday, Kane Jamison details four areas you should keep in mind as you spread the wealth of knowledge.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video transcription

Hey, Moz fans. My name is Kane Jamison. I'm the founder of Content Harmony, and today I want to talk to you about four tips for producing really great event coverage. Specifically, I'm thinking of going to trade shows, conferences, those types of events and doing coverage for your company that's focused on your industry, your clients, or whoever you might be wanting to attract.

1) What type?

The first thing when you get into this that you really need to decide is what type of coverage you are going to focus on. What most people first think of is doing live tweeting or live blogging. Both of those are all right. I have a couple of problems with them. Live tweeting is really short-lived. It's great. You can build some followers, but unless you put it into Storify and then a blog post or something of that nature, it's gone. It's just in your tweet history.

Live blogging has a different problem. It's there. It's easy to access, but it's your notes, and it's not fun to read other people's notes. Unless you are really good at encapsulating what the speaker is saying and putting it into a narrative as you're typing, which most people are not, then it's just going to look like a bunch of bullet points and somebody's notes. I don't really enjoy reading those a lot of the time. I have done them both in the past and come across these problems.

2) Prepare everything!

The next stage that a lot of people will think of is what I would call a value-added recap. This is after the event, you go back and you write a narrative of what the themes were for the event that you were at, where your industry is trending, and you recap some highlights from individual speakers. This works really great. But usually after three days at a conference, I'm really lazy. I want to catch up on sleep that I've missed. I don't want to spend time writing 2,000 words about what happened at a conference that I just attended and putting all of my notes into a blog post. These can work out great. I'd refer you to Matt Gratt's, from BuzzStream, 2013 MozCon Recap. That's a favorite of mine for somebody who did a good job of pulling a lot themes together on an event recap.

What I prefer doing, and what we've done for MozCon at Content Harmony the last two years, is what I'd call live visuals or a visual recap. Live visuals, I mean Twitter images that are coming out on Twitter almost live with what the speaker is saying. A visual recap, another method we've used is putting quotes and speaker highlights into a SlideShare deck for each day of the event, so that users can look at those slides, paw through them, and see the event highlights in a visual format rather than trying to read a long form blog post. That's my favorite and what I'm really going to focus on today.

There's another fourth format that I have less experience with, but want to highlight, because if you have the manpower to tackle it, it's another great way to produce some visibility for you and your company, and that's just broader event coverage. A great example of this would be going to an event and filming Q&A and interview sessions with event attendees and maybe speakers as well. You might be talking with the speakers about what they are talking about on stage and kind of continuing it off the stage in a more casual format. You could just be asking people about their take on the speakers. Really, you're doing coverage that's less focused on what's being said on stage and more focused on who is there and what they think about everything. That's great, and it's a good way to meet people you want to talk to at the event as well.

As you're getting into something along the lines of live visuals or a visual recap post, you want to do your best to prepare everything that you can in advance. Specifically, you want to prepare everything except for what the speakers will actually say on stage. Anything that can be known in advance, you want to have that done, so that when you get there the first day, you can sit down, start typing notes into whatever your medium is and hit "Publish." You don't have to worry about formatting and all these other little quirks that come along with content assembly and creation.

The first thing, especially if you're going to be doing anything visual, is to have all of your graphics prepared in advance. For our coverage for MozCon 2014, we did live Twitter images. We had all of our Twitter images, everything except for the actual quote from the speaker, prepared in advance the week prior that we worked on with our graphic designer.

If you don't have a graphic designer, that's great. That's okay. There are easy ways to get around that without having a lot of design skills. My favorite is to just open up PowerPoint, use a nice looking color and big white or black font for your titles. Just type whatever you want into the slide. Right click on it, click "Save as Picture," and you can save that slide as a 4x3 JPEG, which works great for Facebook and Twitter, without having to pull some graphic designer in to help you. So it makes it really easy to produce nice looking visual coverage on the spot, save it, publish it, and you're good.

The next thing you want to do is pre-build your post. We like to host everything on one URL that people can tweet and share and come back to after the event. If you're doing this in WordPress or whatever blog, CMS, you want to pre-build everything that you can. For MozCon, what we've done is we'll have an introductory text about what it is. We'll have our image in the top right. We will have H2s down the page, marked up for the titles for every speaker name, their session title, and we'll have jump links created like you would see in a table of contents on Wikipedia. Somebody can go to the post, click on the speaker name, and they will go right down to whatever the notes or highlights are for that speaker.

We can build all of this the week in advance. We know what the speakers' names are. We know when they are going to be talking. We usually know the name of their session or what they're presenting on. All of this can be built out before we ever get in to the city or town where the event is actually happening. Getting all that done makes it a lot easier to sit down, start taking notes, and really do what matters, which is recording what the speakers are talking about.

The third thing you want to have handy while you're working is what I'd call a notes clipboard. This is just a quick, one-page text document that has all of the hashtags that you're going to use, all the URLs, like the short Bitly links to the posts that you're writing, and then finally micro-copy, so maybe 40 or 50 character type little bits that you will keep copying or pasting into Twitter or wherever else that you are sharing content. You know you're going to use this throughout the day.

The example for our recent MozCon coverage would be "See more MozCon coverage at" and then the short link to our post. MozCon was already a hashtag, so I know that it's going to be seen in that feed. Everything is all pre-built. All I have to do is around a hundred characters of custom content, add the photo, paste in our little suffix to the tweet, hit "Publish," and I'm good to go. I can move on to the next one. Having all of this prepped makes things a lot easier when you're actually there and live.

3) Buddy system (or automation if you don't have buddies with you)

The third thing you want to think about is how exactly you're going to take notes and record everything across a few days of speakers talking. The best way to do this to use a buddy system. Have one person that's taking notes, recording everything that's going on, taking down URLs, taking down quotes and tools mentioned by speakers, and have an opened, shared Google doc between the two of you so they can be taking notes in a bullet, and you can be taking those notes and publishing them either to the blog or to Twitter or wherever you might be doing the event coverage.

The backup option, if you don't have the buddy system, or even if you do and you want more comprehensive notes, is to automate the process. Zapier is a great tool, very similar to If This Then That, which most of you are familiar with from past MozCon content. Zapier allows you to take tweets for a specific hashtag and push them to a Google doc. Every time there is a new tweet, it will push it into a new row of a spreadsheet, and you've got full, live, automated robot notes coming through Twitter. If you miss a link that's shared, if you miss a quote, you can capture that from somebody else. If you do this, I highly recommend thanking the people on Twitter that helped you push through those notes, mentioning them in your posts.

The final thing, regardless of whether you've got a buddy or whether you're automating the process, is to just grab the speaker slides while they're talking. It's kind of cheating, but as long as you don't get ahead of yourself, it's a really easy way to rely on what the speaker's putting out in their slides. Whether they've tweeted a SlideShare link or mentioned a Bitly link on stage or whether the event has actually published a link to it, you can grab these, follow along while they're talking.

If you do this, you have to be careful not to get ahead of yourself and just start copying things from slides. You'll be sitting there. It'll seem easy to do so because it's right there and it's easy for you to get ahead. The problem with this and the danger is that you'll miss the context of what the speaker is actually saying. If you start putting out notes that are based off of the slides and not based off of the speaker and what they're actually saying, that's the fast track for danger and getting called out by somebody for publishing something that the speaker didn't intend, from what their slides may look like they meant to say. So be careful with that. Don't abuse it. But it's a great way to get backup notes while you're trying to take live quotes and coverage.

4) Optimize for the medium

The fourth and final thing that you need to focus on is optimizing for the medium. Specifically, the example I want to use is Twitter images, since that was our most recent focus. In advance, you want to create some kind of personal or fake Twitter account that you can do some testing on. You want to make sure that visuals are sized exactly the way they should be. After a lot of testing with our graphic designer and reading blog posts about ideal Twitter sizing, what we settled on, for MozCon 2014, was 880 pixels wide by 660 pixels tall, a 4x3 ratio, and an image that would scale down nicely on Twitter and look good.

What we did with that is create a header and footer that had information on MozCon and information about the speaker title and a URL to go find more information. In the center, we had the actual quote from the speaker, the speaker photo, and name. The reason we did this is from these cut lines you see, in feed when somebody is scanning through a hashtag or their own feed, they will see a smaller, cutoff version of the image that is more like a two to one ratio of width to height. We designed it in a way where they would see a nice slight border on the top and bottom of the image. The only thing they would see in their feed is the speaker, name, photo, and the actual quote from the speaker. The real substance, we're not forcing the MozCon imagery or our own logo and links on them each time they're looking through their feed. They're only seeing new stuff, even if they're seeing a lot of these images.

If they do click on the tweet or if somebody links them to the actual tweet URL, they'll see the full header and footer. They'll know where it came from. They'll know what the event was, and they'll know where they can find more similar images.

Another nice part about 880x660 for us was that this image size worked well on LinkedIn. It worked well on Facebook. So we could reuse the same image on other mediums as we were going as well.

The other part about other mediums is even if you're focusing on one, like Twitter, you need to optimize your actual posts across a number of mediums. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest all have their own graph metadata that goes into a post. You need to make sure, before the event even starts, that all of this is perfectly optimized in your CMS and that when you share this on different social networks, it's going to look great. People are going to want to share this content for you, and you want to break down all the barriers that are in their way to doing so. Make sure that all the descriptions look nice, titles aren't cut off, images are properly sized for each social network, and you'll have a lot better time getting coverage from industry peers and people that want to share that content.

Thanks for your time. I'd love to hear more feedback on what you think could improve a live event coverage and other tips and ideas in the comments, and have a good one Moz fans.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Seth's Blog : The tiny cost of failure

The tiny cost of failure

...is dwarfed by the huge cost of not trying.

This is news, a state of affairs due to the significant value of connection, to the power of ideas that spread and to the low cost of production.

Delighting a few with an idea worth spreading is more valuable than ever before.

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joi, 6 noiembrie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Obama's Secret Letter to Iran About ISIS: Good Idea? Foolish Cooperation? Hidden Agenda?
Riots in Brussels: 100,000 Protest Austerity, Overturn Cars, Throw Fire Bombs; Wherefore Art Thou Austerity?
"Whatever It Takes" Stage Two; Headwinds Explain Why Draghi Will Fail This Time
Prepare for War: Obama Asks Congress for ISIS War Authorization; Republican Hawks Have War Plan Prepared; Clinton-McCain?!

Obama's Secret Letter to Iran About ISIS: Good Idea? Foolish Cooperation? Hidden Agenda?

Posted: 06 Nov 2014 06:14 PM PST

Big splash in the news today following the Wall Street Journal report Obama Wrote Secret Letter to Iran's Khamenei About Fighting Islamic State.

Obama's exact letter has not been published (yet), but the subject matter includes shared interests in combating ISIS coupled with hope of progress on nuclear talks.

The Journal reports "cooperation on Islamic State was largely contingent on Iran reaching a comprehensive agreement with global powers on the future of Tehran's nuclear program by a Nov. 24 diplomatic deadline" according to correspondents briefed on the letter.

As with Russia more recently, the sanctions against Iran did not work, and will never work. Sanctions in general don't work, period.

The Republican response is as one might expect. Worse yet, Senators Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) and Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) introduced bipartisan legislation to intensify sanctions.

"The best way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is to quickly pass the bipartisan Menendez-Kirk legislation—not to give the Iranians more time to build a bomb," Mr. Kirk said Wednesday.

Good Idea to Open Dialog with Iran?

Was Obama's letter to Iran a good idea? Of course it was. Dialog is generally a good idea. Obama's letter opening up discussions with Iran is one of the few things he has done right.

Of course, this dialog comes on the heels of unwise sanctions, so all it does is get us back to where we should have been years ago.

In the meantime though, the odds of success have improved dramatically.

The Journal reports "U.S.-Iran relations have thawed considerably over the past year, following the election of President Hasan Rouhani. He and Mr. Obama shared a 15-minute phone call in September 2013, and Messrs. Kerry and Zarif have regularly held direct talks on the nuclear diplomacy and regional issues."

Foolish Cooperation

Instead of viewing dialog as an opportunity, Republican and Democrat economic illiterates attacked Obama.

The result was foolish bipartisan cooperation culminating in Menendez-Kirk legislation.

Lovely. Rest assured whenever Democrats and Republicans in Congress act fast on anything, the result can never be good.

Race is On

The race to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is on. Can Obama secure a deal with Iran before November 24? Will the deadline be extended?

Will the above questions be moot thanks to unusual bipartisan cooperation?

Hidden Agenda?

Behind all the hyperbole, one has to wonder if Obama has a hidden agenda.

If sanctions on Iran lift, the price of crude will likely sink further. In turn, that would hurt Russia pretty badly.

For further discussion, please see Ruble Slide Continues; Russia Forced to Abandon Currency Intervention as Reserves Dwindle.

Right for Wrong Reason?

Obama and McCain have been somewhat united on sanctions on Russia, with the McCain accusing Obama of not doing nearly enough.

So even if Obama is doing the right thing, I have to wonder if he is doing the right thing for all of the right reasons.

Regardless, the right thing is the right thing, and for that, Obama sees bipartisan legislation in the opposite direction.

Such is the extremely sorry state of US foreign policy.

History Lesson on Sanction Criminality

Many will disagree with my thoughts on dialog with Iran and sanctions. They are wrong.

One of the best posts I have ever seen on the idiocy of sanctions was a guest post on ZeroHedge, whose origin is the Tanosborn Online article Sanctions: Diplomatic Weapons of Mass Criminality.

I highly encourage everyone to click on and read link in entirety.

Here are a few snips:

Obama finds himself looking at Russia in much the same way as FDR did looking at Japan in 1941. In July 1941 the US imposed an oil embargo on Japan, demanding that it get out of China, de facto curbing any hegemonic aspirations or influence that nation might have or hope to have in Asia. The economic reality forced by the American sanctions on Japan left the Land of the Rising Sun with just two options in the summer-fall of 1941: surrender its aspirations or resort to war.

Seventy-three years later, America once again inflicts economic sanctions on another nation, Russia; a nation solely trying to defend its borders, perhaps also exercising the natural desire to influence, help create economic synergy in the Eurasian geopolitical region. Those aspirations of self-preservation and economic success should be judged at face value, and not antagonistically, as the US is now doing with extreme, venomous propaganda.

Sanctions are just another form of warfare, where the weapons can inflict destruction and pain, and be just as explosive.

One thing we can be sure of in modern times: sanctions will prove to yield long term ill will, in many cases providing multiplying seeds of vengeance and terrorism which we may not confront now but our children and their children certainly will. America has for decades plowed and seeded hostility with sanctions in fertile grounds where terrorism will thrive and come back to haunt us. And, foolishly, the US continues this idiotic practice.

America does not need a Sanctioner-in-Chief enacting foolish edicts from the White House, but a leader in international cooperation, a leader that will safeguard this nation's safety and legitimate interests, but also respect other nations… and their legitimate interests.

As of right now, the US has de facto declared war in Russia… and, unless Obama lifts the sanctions now in-place, the economic fate in Russia will soon likely determine that nation's willingness to bet all its nuclear chips and call America's bet at the political international poker table.

Sanction Idiocy

If you think I am wrong about sanctions, please read the article again and again until you comprehend. It provides a much needed history lesson on the idiocy of economic sanctions.

One more point: Events today have nothing in common with Hitler's "Final Solution" including a master race and extermination of Jews, so spare me the comparisons about Chamberlain ceding territory for peace.

Events today are a direct result of US meddling in Ukraine internal affairs with the usual bad consequences.

I strive to change opinions of others who see things differently, and Sanctions: Diplomatic Weapons of Mass Criminality is one of the best written arguments against sanctions I have ever seen.

Want more on the idiocy of sanctions? I can oblige: Mish Sanction Articles.

By the way, I had written everything above that snip and everything that follows before I read the article. My position on sanctions has not changed one bit as my previous articles show.

Question of Degree

Without a doubt, Obama is a warmonger. He is just not as big of a warmonger as Republican Senators McCain and Kirk, or Democrats Hillary Clinton and Senator Robert Menendez.

Unfortunately, the mid-term elections do not bode well for peace. Nor do prospects of Hillary winning the 2016 Democratic nomination.

Clinton-McCain?!

Hillary is every bit as bad as McCain. Political aspirations demand that position. They are a pair of like minds, made in hell, differing only on some social agendas.

As I said, Prepare for War: Obama Asks Congress for ISIS War Authorization; Republican Hawks Have War Plan Prepared; Clinton-McCain?!

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Riots in Brussels: 100,000 Protest Austerity, Overturn Cars, Throw Fire Bombs; Wherefore Art Thou Austerity?

Posted: 06 Nov 2014 01:43 PM PST

In Search of Austerity

In spite of the fact there has been little-to-no austerity to speak of in Europe, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, (rising government debt proves that claim), France moans about austerity, Spain moans about austerity, Italy moans about austerity, and economists like Krugman moan about austerity.

There is certainly no austerity in Belgium either. Nonetheless, the BBC reports 100,000 Protest Austerity in Brussels.

Riot police have fired tear gas and water cannon during clashes with demonstrators as at least 100,000 people marched through Brussels in the first mass protests against government austerity measures.

Protesters overturned cars and threw paving stones and fireworks during the protest against economic reforms that will extend the pension age, contain wages and cut public services.

The government says the austerity measures are essential to keep the budget deficit within European Union constraints.

In the above link, the BBC has a nice video of overturned cars and trucks. The riots are actually far worse as the following images show.

Gallery of Riot Images

Please check out the Sky News Gallery of Riot Images Here are two of six images.

Wherefore Art Thou Austerity?

Austerity, austerity, wherefore art thou austerity?

Austerity is a curious thing. It's nowhere to be found. Nonetheless, economists and governments constantly complain about it. Citizens in Greece, Spain, France, and Belgium have taken to the streets to protest it.

Today we have riots in Brussels. I sense this is just the start of the protest against austerity even though it's nowhere to be found.

At the heart of the matter is a lack of jobs and rising income inequality. Austerity caused neither. Central banks and government policies did.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

"Whatever It Takes" Stage Two; Headwinds Explain Why Draghi Will Fail This Time

Posted: 06 Nov 2014 11:55 AM PST

"What's it all about Alphie" is a sing-along that most have heard.

Take out the word "Alphie" and substitute "Draghi" and the answer is "Assuage Investors" in yet another can-kicking exercise.

ECB president Mario Draghi hopes that if he continues with his kick-the-can tactics long enough, that something good will eventually happen.

Hope is really all the ECB has.

Meanwhile, Draghi Reinforces ECB Stimulus Momentum to Assuage Investors.

Having already cut interest rates to record lows and saying they can go no lower, Draghi is now focused on boosting the ECB's balance sheet. He told reporters today that he expects to increase assets back toward March 2012 levels. That's 3 trillion euros, or about 1 trillion euros [$1.2 trillion] more than the current level.

The ECB has issued long-term loans to banks and started buying covered bonds in the hope of flooding the economy with enough liquidity to ease credit constraints. Purchases of asset-backed securities are due to start this month.

"We are quite confident that the impact on our balance sheet size will be adequate, will be significant, will be sizable," Draghi said. "The main message is that our balance sheet will keep expanding in the coming months and will continue expanding while the balance sheets of other central banks is bound to contract."

Berenberg Bank economist Christian Schulz said he sees a 60 percent chance the ECB will enter the 1.4 trillion euro market for investment grade non-financial corporate bonds next month.

"Whatever It Takes" Revisited

Draghi's famous "Whatever it takes ... And believe me, it will be enough" statement in July of 2012, resolved the Eurozone sovereign bond crisis (for now) (see Eurozone Target2 Imbalances Rise Again, Led by Italy), but it did not spur lending.

His move to boost the balance sheet of the ECB will not spur lending either. Headwinds explain why.

Headwinds

No structural problems in the eurozone have been fixed.
A lower Euro may help exports in general but it will do nothing to help the competitiveness of Spain, Italy, or France as compared to Germany.
Europe is a demographic mess. With an aging population and low birthrates, pension promises cannot possibly be met.
France and Germany are increasingly at odds.
The rise of Marine LePen in France, Beppe Grillo in Italy, and euroscepticism in general elsewhere.
The UK threatens to leave the EU.
There has been little real reform or austerity anywhere. Government spending accounts for 56% of French GDP. France, Italy and Spain fail year after year to meet budget requirements.
European banks are way over-leveraged, especially in so-called risk-free sovereign bonds. No one really believes the latest round of stress tests.
The global economy, especially China is slowing. Export growth will slow accordingly.
There is no juice, only risk associated in the ECB buying sovereign government bonds.

Let's explore point number 10 in more detail starting with a look at government bond yields.

10-Year Government Bond Yields

Spain: 2.16%
France: 1.19%
Italy: 2.38%
Germany: 0.83%
US: 2.37%.

Note that nearly all of Europe has lower borrowing costs than the US.

Spain 10-Year Bond Yield

click on chart for sharper image

Question of the Day

If a decline in yield from 7.74% in July of 2012 to 2.16% today did not spur lending, then why would any further decline, even to 0% spur lending?

The answer is "It Won't".

If you think otherwise, please note that German bonds have negative yields in every timeframe two years or shorter.

Germany 2-Year Yield

As remarkable as it may sound, you actually have to pay money (receive negative interest rates) for the privilege of lending money to Germany for two years.

Yet, economic dunderheads want Draghi to buy sovereign bonds.

Should the ECB do that (and it probably will), the ECB faces two risks.

European sovereign bonds are already way overpriced thanks to "Whatever it Takes" phase 1.
Buying bonds could trigger a constitutional crisis in Germany. Such actions are against Germany's constitution and the treaties that created the eurozone.

Of course, in these "Whatever It Takes" moments, no one gives a damn about constitutions, treaties, or anything else.

Worse yet, economic fools embark on policies that cannot possibly work even if they were legal. The higher inflation Draghi seeks is actually counterproductive! Europe's demographics make the matter worse.

For a discussion of that absolute absurdity in seeking higher inflation, I have some suggested reading.

Suggested Reading

Sisyphean Fed Struggle to Create Inflation

Here are a few snips from my Monday commentary Sisyphean Fed Struggle to Create Inflation.

My comments are in response to a statement made by Bill Gross in his Janus Investment Outlook that "simple math" shows the "real economy needs money printing".

Gross needs to replace "simple math" with "exponential math" coupled with the fact central banks can (for a while) target prices in general, but they cannot target wages or the prices they want.

Back to the Drawing Board

The Fed expanded money supply by $4 trillion dollars and the CPI is up less than 2%!

What's the Fed going to do for an encore when the global economy slumps, US jobs with it, and prices of goods services, and assets sink?

Expand money supply by $8 trillion? $16 trillion? $32 trillion? Buy equities? Buy more than 100% of debt issuance like Japan?

How nuts does it get?

Gross concludes with "The real economy needs money printing". I suggest Gross go back to the drawing board and come up with a different answer.

With Japan, Europe, and the US central banks all in economic wonderland, a currency crisis of immense proportions and a breakup of the eurozone are on deck.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Prepare for War: Obama Asks Congress for ISIS War Authorization; Republican Hawks Have War Plan Prepared; Clinton-McCain?!

Posted: 06 Nov 2014 12:37 AM PST

Prepare for war. Where? Syria, Iraq, Russia, Iran, China, anywhere and everywhere.

Warmonger in chief, senator John McCain wants troops in Syria, arms for Ukraine, an examination of "China's continued encroachment in the south China Sea", and an investigation into warming relations with Iran.

McCain is set to take over as head of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Expect the other party of war, the Democrats, to cooperate. On Wednesday, Obama Asked Congress to Authorize Islamic State War.

After insisting for months that he has all the authority he needs to launch the airstrikes already under way against the radical Sunni group, Obama reversed course and called for a new authorization for the use of military force a day after his party lost control of the Senate.

"The world needs to know we are united behind this effort and the men and women of our military deserve our clear and unified support," Obama said yesterday at a White House news conference.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold hearings on the U.S. role in Iraq and Syria beginning next week, Senator Robert Menendez, the panel's chairman, said in a statement.

The New Jersey Democrat has said a congressional authorization should be "appropriate in scope and duration to meet the threat and sustain the fight" without having an "indefinite duration."

Obama has approved airstrikes against the extremists who have seized swaths of Iraq and Syria, and he's deployed U.S. military teams to assess and advise the Iraqi military.

The administration has said it's carrying out the offensive under the use-of-force authorization Congress approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as well as under his constitutional powers as commander in chief.

Bill to Authorize Perpetual War

President Obama previously said that he does not need authorization to strike ISIS because of his "constitutional powers as commander in chief".

Excuse me for asking but what powers are those? Since when does the president get to declare war?

I guess it's time to formalize the transfer of power to declare war from Congress to the president.

Menendez wants a bill "appropriate in scope and duration to meet the threat and sustain the fight" without having an "indefinite duration."

Translation: Menendez wants an indefinite duration, an open ended agenda, and no cost limits. McCain will surely see the bill gets revised that way.

No president would ever refuse to sign such a bill. And when it happens, the power to declare war will formally be handed over from Congress to the president. Not that it matters in the least. Presidents do what they want, when they want.

Republican Hawks Have War Plan Prepared

The American public surely does not want war, and we cannot afford more wars either. But who gives a damn about that?

Multiple wars are now baked in the cake as Republican Hawks Already Have a War Plan for ISIS, Ukraine, and Obama.

The Republican victory in the 2014 midterms is less than 24 hours old. But already, the hawkish wing of the GOP is planning an ambitious battle plan to revamp American foreign policy: everything from arming Ukraine's military to reviewing the ISIS war to investigating the U.S. intelligence community's role in warming relations with Iran.

In an interview Wednesday, Sen. John McCain, the incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he has already discussed a new national security agenda with fellow Republicans Bob Corker and Richard Burr, the likely incoming chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

"Burr and Corker and I will be working closely together on everything," McCain said. "For example, arms for Ukraine's [government], examination of our strategy in the Middle East, our assets with regard to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin in the region, China's continued encroachment in the south China Sea."

McCain said his first order of business as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee will be to end the budget rule known as sequestration, which requires the U.S. military to cut its budget across the board. "I want to start an examination of our policies in the world and then find out whether we have the capability to meet these expectations," McCain said.

Rep. Devin Nunes, the Republican likely to replace Rep. Mike Rogers as the next chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told The Daily Beast Wednesday that he would like to begin digging into the administration's Iran talks—in particular, the role played in those talks by the U.S. intelligence community. "There is going to be real scrutiny from the House and Senate in what's taken place on the entire Obama administration's tenure dealing with the Iranians," Nunes said.

On Wednesday Obama said he would ask Congress to vote on the new war against ISIS during the lame duck session of Congress that starts in December.

"I think it's time for an AUMF [Authorization for the Use of Military Force], I do," McCain said. "The one passed after 9-11 specifically talks about the perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks and ISIS has exceeded that definition."

Budget-hypocrite McCain never says how he is going to pay for these wars. McCain even voted for sequestration.

To be fair, he called that his worst vote ever. But also to be fair, he should say how we pay for all this.

McCain Prefer Hillary Over Rand Paul?

Curiously, in a 2013 New Republic interview, McCain said "Tough Choice" Between Hillary Clinton and Rand Paul should those be the two nominees.

McCain answered "tough choice", when asked who he would support in 2016 should it come down to Hillary Clinton and Rand Paul.

Senior editor Isaac Chotiner who conducted the interview stated "in a way he seemed to be joking a little bit, but he didn't correct it at all."

Here's the video with Chotiner's explanation.

Clinton-McCain Axis

Said McCain of Hillary when asked about her performance as Secretary of State "I think she did a fine job. She's a rock star. She has, maybe not glamour, but certainly the aura of someone widely regarded throughout the world."

Distancing herself from president Obama, Hillary has since recommended nearly the same strategy as McCain when it comes to dealing with Syria and ISIS.

Clinton-McCain 2016 Anyone?

So which is the party of war? They both are.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

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WWE Wrestlers Before They Became Superstars

Posted: 06 Nov 2014 04:34 PM PST

In the wrestling business, it's a long way to the top. You've got to spend years in the business paying dues to become a superstar but big things come from humble beginnings.