Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
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Sometimes You Just Gotta Feel For the Democrats:
They tried to have their little economic summit last week, and approximately NO ONE covered it. They try to tell us the economy is the worst it has been in 50 years- worse even than the last time they said this against a Bush, and the market goes up 1000 points. It is so desperate that Gephardt is proposing tax rebates. And what is on the front page of all the papers today?
North Korea, Iraq, and the U.N.
This post is in: Open Threads
I Forgot To Mention Yesterday:
That I really liked Tom Friedman’s op-ed piece. I write nasty things when they infuriate me, so I must be fair and admit when I really like the message. This time, Friedman was clear:
Memo to professors and students leading the divestiture campaign: Your campaign for divestiture from Israel is deeply dishonest and hypocritical, and any university that goes along with it does not deserve the title of institution of higher learning.
You are dishonest because to single out Israel as the only party to blame for the current impasse is to perpetrate a lie. Historians can debate whether the Camp David and Clinton peace proposals for a Palestinian state were for 85, 90, or 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza. But what is not debatable is what the proper Palestinian response should have been. It should have been to tell Israel and America that their peace proposals were the first fair offer they had ever put forth, and although they still fell short of what Palestinians feel is a just two-state solution, Palestinians were now prepared to work with Israel and America to achieve that end. The proper response was not a Palestinian intifada and 100 suicide bombers, which are what brought Ariel Sharon to power.
It is shameful that at a time when some Palestinians are writing that they made a historic mistake in not nurturing the Clinton peace offer, pro-Palestinian professors and students in America and Europe pretend that the only reason the occupation persists is because of Israeli obstinacy. This approach will never gain the Palestinians a state, and those who dabble in it are simply prolonging Palestinian misery.
You are also hypocrites. How is it that Egypt imprisons the leading democracy advocate in the Arab world, after a phony trial, and not a single student group in America calls for divestiture from Egypt? (I’m not calling for it, but the silence is telling.) How is it that Syria occupies Lebanon for 25 years, chokes the life out of its democracy, and not a single student group calls for divestiture from Syria? How is it that Saudi Arabia denies its women the most basic human rights, and bans any other religion from being practiced publicly on its soil, and not a single student group calls for divestiture from Saudi Arabia?
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Iraq and My IRA
Anybody else get this spam e-mail about the cost of the Iraq invasion and its effect on IRA’s?:
WAR AGAINST IRAQ AND YOUR IRA
A public service of Truths Press
What is the cost of war on Iraq? We hear occasional estimates tossed around in Congress… from 90 billion to 900 billion dollars…depending on how much fixing we do after we destroy Iraq. But no one truly knows, and these are only government numbers; they don’t have much to do with us… OR DO THEY?
Today on the brink of Congress’ acquiescence to the Warmakers’ demands for power, the ancient and honorable Dow Jones average has sunk to around 7500 with little sign of support. This probably means the big guys are selling. The market at best has lost about one third since Day911–most of it since President Bush’s “War on Terrorism.” Dozens of companies have gone into bankruptcy and more have threatened to do so including most of the major airlines, which are now taxpayer bail-outs. Many well-known stocks are down 80%. Does this have anything to do with war? We think so.
What about your IRA? If it is not down substantially since day 911 you are lucky. If your IRA has not dropped significantly it is probably because it is propped up by artificially by inflated government bonds. Some say they have already lost half of their net worth since the War On Terrorism began. War, if it can be called war, has been made to sounds patriotic, but how much more of this good deal can Americans stand?
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New blogs on the links:
Empire of Man, by Josh Martin
Steve Verdon’s Deinonychus antirrhopus
David Sim’s Club Beaux.
Go check ’em out.
This post is in: Open Threads
This post is in: Open Threads
No Watermelons comes to a conclusion:
My conclusion is that in fact there will be blood for oil. Our only choice is whose it will be, and where it will be shed.
His point being that if we were somehow cut off from a supply of oil, we would go to war over it. Probably accurate. I don’t like being cold.
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My Political Compass
Economic Left/Right: 3.38
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -5.41