July 2007
Monthly Archive
July 16, 2007
President George w. Bush is the guy who gave us the “road map” for peace in the Middle East, the way forward to solve the Israeli/Palestinian conundrum. It’s an on-again, off-again ploy he likes to drag out just before he attacks some nation in the region.
Remember Iraq? Part and parcel of that grand adventure was Bush’s promise to deliver the Palestinians from their plight. Good optics with the Arab world, right? Then, when the Iraq business fell into the toilet, so did Bush’s interest in the Palestine promise.
So now Bush is making the same noises again. Must restart the Palestinian peace process. Let’s get it going, this fall at the latest.
Curiously, today’s Guardian quotes an administration official as stating that Dick Cheney has won Shrub’s support for military action against Iran next year. Bush/Cheney apparently don’t trust their successor, Democrat or Republican, to deal with Iran.
July 16, 2007
Canada’s furious leader, Stephano Harper, is in Bogata today to begin a five-day photo op to Latin America. It’s expected Harpo will pull out some sort of “free trade” gimmick from his bag of tricks to justify his airfare and hotel bill.
Now that Canada is a world leader, the Latin Americans are expected to make polite noises, accept a few trinkets and give Steve a friendly waive bye-bye.
The Harpie managed to put his civil rights torch discretely in his pants in order to focus on trade saying that it’s “ridiculous” to rein in economic co-operation until conditions are ideal. Gee, that sounds like the same spin he used with China, right? No, forget it.
Harpo’s concerns with civil rights seem inversely proportional to the ideological compatibility with the nation in question. Just another Bush toadie.
July 16, 2007
Ronald Reagan shifted his nation’s political centre securely to the right. In the process, US moderates transformed themselves into what would be recognized as conservative in other Western countries. “Left” and “Liberal” were smeared with negative connotations that were reinforced by a powerful fringe media to become popularly accepted reality.
Has that nonsense finally run its course? The New York Times reports that a lot of Democrats are now weighing the possibility due to an emerging populism among the American people:
Clearly influenced by some of their most successful candidates in last year’s Congressional elections, Democrats are talking more and more about the anemic growth in American wages and the negative effects of trade and a globalized economy on American jobs and communities. They deplore what they call a growing gap between the middle class, which is struggling to adjust to a changing job market, and the affluent elites who have prospered in the new economy.
So far, Republicans have, by and large, stuck by their free-market philosophy. They point to a rebounding stock market, declining deficits and steady if unspectacular economic expansion as evidence that conservative policies of tax cutting, less regulation and more trade are working.
But Democrats say they are responding to economic trends that the statistics in the headlines do not capture, including middle-class insecurity about jobs, the affordability of health insurance and the costs of education. The times have changed, these Democrats argue, and six years of Republican tax and economic policies have heightened the inequities.
It is not unusual for candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination to move left in the primary season; Mr. Clinton himself touched on some of these populist themes in his 1992 campaign. But all the major Democratic candidates for president are promising to use government to ease the insecurity of the middle class, on issues like education and health care.
Sixteen months before the election, with their domestic platforms being formed, these candidates are proposing, for example, to let the Bush tax cuts expire for the most affluent Americans and, in some cases, redirect that money to expanded health care. On the campaign trail and in Congress, Democrats are also talking about expanding assistance for college and help for workers who lose their jobs to cheaper labor abroad.
Democrats have also been pushing for legislation that would allow the federal government to negotiate drug prices for Medicare with the pharmaceutical industry, a favorite target of the economic populists.
Perhaps the silver lining of the Bush/Cheney neo-con excesses will be a renewed America substantially to the left of today’s abberation, a government genuinely “for the people.”
July 15, 2007
July 15, 2007
I’ll have the special, hold the shrapnel.Maybe George w. Bush is right, maybe there is progress in Baghdad. Why, within the ultra-secure Green Zone, for example, there’s a new dress code.
The US State Department has directed its employees to wear this season’s fashion statement, the PPE or Personal Protection Equipment look.
A McClatchey Newspapers reporter managed to get his hand on the latest directive from the US Embassy:
“As a result of the recent increase of indirect fire attacks on the International Zone, outdoor movement is restricted to a minimum,” it states. “Remain within a hardened structure to the maximum extent possible and strictly avoid congregating outdoors. Personal protective equipment (PPE) is mandatory until further notice.
“Public places that are not in a hardened structure – such as the Blue Star Restaurant – should be frequented only in conjunction with the use of your PPE.”
July 15, 2007
Fighting insurgents is enormously challenging and frustrating for conventional soldiers. Imagine enduring booby-traps, ambushes and firefights, losing friends, and later walking down streets knowing that some of the faces who watch you are likely those who try to kill you and will try again tomorrow.
A trial underway now in Camp Pendleton, California shows how this formula for disaster can go terribly wrong, especially if those soldiers are being shoved from higher-up. Several marines are being court-martialed for the execution of an unarmed Iraqi in 2006. The squad had gone out at night to locate a suspected Iraqi insurgent. When they got to the man’s home he was gone so they grabbed another man from the home, took him outside, killed him and planted an AK-47 near the body to reinforce their claim the victim had been killed in a shootout.
A marine corporal testifying at the court-martial gave chilling evidence that his fellow soldiers were being pressured from the top:
Cpl. Saul H. Lopezromo testified Saturday at the murder trial of Cpl. Trent D. Thomas.
“We were told to crank up the violence level,” said Lopezromo, testifying for the defense.
When a juror asked for further explanation, Lopezromo said: “We beat people, sir.”
Lopezromo, who was not part of the squad on its late-night mission, said he saw nothing wrong with what Thomas did.
“I don’t see it as an execution, sir,” he told the judge. “I see it as killing the enemy.”
He said Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency.
July 15, 2007
Russian president Vlad Putin is scrapping the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe treaty. the pact had been intended to reduce East-West tensions by restricting where each could deploy its forces. The idea was to prevent one side becoming alarmed by the other lining up army divisions along their common border, poised to strike.
Putin, of course, is miffed at Bush’s insistence on positioning parts of his anti-ballistic radar and interceptor system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Bush claims the system is intended to deal with a missile attack from a rogue state such as Iran. Putin sees it, instead, as an attempt to contain Russian military power and influence, especially after Bush rejected Putin’s offer to use a radar site in Azerbaijan better suited for monitoring the skies over Iran.
The Russian move has NATO and the US furious which is a tad strange given that Washington and several NATO states never ratified the treaty in the first place. Yet the Euros probably won’t do very much more than whine given their dependence on Russia for natural gas supply.
July 15, 2007
If as Pope Rat.. oh you know… is right, and the Roman Catholic Church is the only real Christain (that’s ‘Christian’ in ped-language) church, then his Los Angeles Diocese much be the churchiest of them all. On this Sabbath, the very day before jury selection, RCC-LA has announced a $660-million settlement. From The New York Times:
The Los Angeles cases have been particularly complex because they involve so many victims, multiple insurance companies, many Catholic religious orders whose own priests and brothers stand accused, and a prominent archbishop, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, who has cast himself as an ally of victims but has been accused by them of intransigence.
Many dioceses in California have been hit by large numbers of lawsuits because the state passed a law in 2002 that opened a one-year window for cases to be filed without regard to the statute of limitations.
A settlement would require the archdiocese to make public its confidential files that could shed light on which church officials knew of the abuse accusations, and when they knew, Mr. Boucher said. Many of the accused priests had multiple victims because they were moved by their superiors from one parish to another when accusations arose.
No word yet from the Big Hat, the Rat Zinger, about this little peccadillo. Hey, your Popeness, how bout chanting “We’re Number One, We’re Number One” oh, say, 660-million times!
July 13, 2007
Conrad the con Black, Lord Black of Crossharbour, has met his Waterloo. Like Napoleon, he cast himself as invincible and unquestionably right. It’s taken a Chicago jury to prove him wrong.
But what now for Lady Black or, as we knew her, Barbara Amiel. A former journalist and socialite who transitioned effortlessly from far left to far right as her matrimonial fortunes prospered, she is blamed by some for contributing to her husband’s downfall. Even Black’s former English flagship newspaper, The Telegraph, couldn’t resist publishing a few words about the self-described “North London Jewish girl.”
Derided as the ultimate hard-nosed gold-digger, Lady Black has yet to give her critics what they desperately want by leaving her husband as his fortunes take a dramatic dive.
Questions of sincerity aside, Lady Black, 66, has played a convincing role of the loyal wife.
That said, there was good reason for a little humility and understanding on her part. Not only was she a director of Hollinger International, but her flaunting of their extravagant lifestyle arguably first prompted shareholders to question the accounts.
Moreover, the conventional wisdom about Conrad Black’s financial difficulties is that the trouble only started when he met Amiel.
Having lived a privileged but relatively unostentatious existence, he suddenly became involved with a woman whose extravagance – as she famously admitted herself – “knew no bounds”.
It is often said that Amiel’s taste for the high life – multiple homes and matching staffs, private jets and lavish entertaining – pushed her husband into a high-spending league which he could only finance with considerable effort.
“My husband is very rich, but I am not… I have been a bitch all my life and did not need the authority of money to be one,” she once wrote.
“I am a North London Jew who has read a bit of history. This means I know this: in a century that has seen the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, British and Soviet empires. Reversal of fortune is the rich bitch’s reality.
“One might as well keep working and have the family’s Vuitton suitcases packed.”
And Amiel, the virulently right-wing journalist, did indeed keep working even as her husband stood trial. In a column earlier this month in Macleans, a Canadian magazine, she sketched a picture of her life far removed from the “rich bitch” of yore.
July 13, 2007
George w. Bush seems to have dodged a bullet, forcing weak-kneed Republican congressmen to back down over their demands that he wind up the failed Iraq War.
All Bush had to do was what he’s done so many times since 2001 – invent facts, conjure up favourable assessments and tell his Republican stooges, well, to go back and act like utter stooges.
Bush claimed that Iraq has made significant progress on 8 of the 18 benchmarks which are the essence of his “surge” in Baghdad. That the question of just how much progress was left up to Bush himself to define, says it all. Significant progress because George w. Bush needs to find significant progress to quell the sycophants and get his way. To reinforce this he threw in a dose of scare tactics about al-Qaeda and Iraq. Then there was the patriotism arm twister about supporting the troops. Bang, bang, bang and the Republican underlings ran to hide from the evil Count.
It is remarkable how a people will continue to tolerate a failed leader who has demonstrated his gross incompetence and dishonesty at every turn of his grandiose “war on terror.” If the Brits had had a George Bush instead of a Winston Churchill, they’d be eating schnitzel and speaking German today.
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