Related tidbit from today's newspaper: Refugees who don't know what their birthday is get assigned January 1 on their official paperwork.
JAS@11: If Dubya wants to have "not as oppressive to Iraqis as Saddam Hussein" engraved on his tombstone, fine by me. But I personally would like my government, not to mention its client states, to reach for a higher moral standard than that.
Obama knows what a bubble sort is.
Lieberman supports a two-state resolution of the Israel/Palestine conflict (scroll to the bottom of here), which the Israeli Likud party opposes. (Yes, there are probably lots of American politicians who will pay lip service to a two-state solutions but advocate policies and conditions that make it highly unlikely that such a solution will actually be implemented. A true Likudnik won't even go as far as lip service.)
Besides, as pedantka said, aren't there enough other reasons to dislike Lieberman?
I think that once the rest of the economy has recovered, if the current bailout effort fails, then Congress will not be so interested in feeding more brains to the zombie. (In particular, note that the Congresscritters from districts with non-Big-Three auto plants have an incentive to shut off the spigot to the Big Three.)
I once read that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research was one of the only agencies that actually made the right call on Iraq, way back when. But I can't tell if they're hiring.
Nabakov @ 22: I once interviewed for a job that, if I had gotten it, would have required me to apply for a Secret clearance. The guy who interviewed me said that the security-clearance folks understand that "you've been to college".
So when Supreme Chancellor Valorum lost his vote of confidence in the Galactic Senate, why didn't they hold new elections before choosing a replacement? Why did Founding Parent-Sentiences of the Republic design their constitution this way?
I'm reminded of something Gary Wills pointed out in Head and Heart: American Christianities.
Seventeenth-century European Catholics believed in all sorts of Dark Powers working to make their lives miserable, and used all sorts of folk-magic amulets and charms and what-not to ward them off. The Puritans, being good Calvinists, believed that the amulets and charms were idolatrous and off-limits to Christians, but they still believed in the Dark Powers. This anxiety over demonic influence was one of the (15,000 or so) factors feeding into the witch hysteria.
Marko: It worked pretty well for Greenspan, didn't it?
Alex: is that true for other ministries as well? E.g., if the PM says "I think so-and-so ought to be prosecuted", and the Minister for Home Affairs (or whoever is in charge of prosecutions) says "I don't", can the PM overrule the other minister?
Christian dominionist leaders are "pro-Israel" in much the same way that oil sheikhs who finance Hamas are "pro-Palestinian". They stir up fights between a tribe they look down on and a tribe they despise.
Tim, I think you and I are pretty much in agreement.
The proposal that was bruited around yesterday afternoon was one that I could sort of accept with one hand over my nose. My fear at this point is that it will become the starting point for another round of negotiations, this time between the moderates of both parties and the wingnut faction of the Republicans. I don't want to see, for example, the provisions on personal bankruptcy to be thrown overboard for the sake of a deal with the wingnuts.
Tim: I accept that there needs to be a bailout. I even accept that the government might really need to commit something in the trillion-dollar range to the bailout. But I hope the Democrats have the spine to vote against any bailout for Wall Street that lacks meaningful help for the ordinary people who began suffering from this mess while Wall Street was still praising capitalism as usual.
If the banking-industry lobbyists are not seizing McCain by the lapels and saying "For God's sake, man! Just give the Democrats what they want!" then either they don't really need to be bailed out or the Democrats aren't twisting them hard enough.
The GOP rank and file in Congress need to hear that if they vote for a bailout, McCain will also vote for it, rather than voting against it and portraying himself as a hero who stood up to both parties in the name of fiscal responsibility.
One of my professors in college said that the real reason the Sages prescribed four cups of wine on Passover is because you're spending the whole evening with your relatives.
Fragano: isn't nepotism a value? I mean, if you can't use the power of your high office to benefit your friends, then obviously you must not be very loyal to them, and why should anyone vote for a politician with such a character flaw?
It seems to me that most of the mainstream tolerance for outright political whoppers can be explained by two factors:
(1) If McCain runs on his domestic policy proposals, he will lose. If McCain runs on his plan for Iraq, he will lose. If McCain runs on his actual record, he will lose. If McCain runs on his association with the Republican Party, he will lose. If McCain runs on "hey, look! terrorists!" distractions, he will lose. Lying like a rug is the only strategy left that has any hope of winning.
(2) McCain has spent a number of years assiduously cultivating a reputation with the press as a "maverick" and a "straight talker". Therefore, when he started kowtowing to the most reactionary elements of the party and lying like a rug, political reporters' first impulse was to rationalize the behavior, e.g., explaining that lying to the voters is not so bad.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 2 |
| 2008 | 29 |
| 2006 | 8 |
| 2005 | 7 |
| 2004 | 3 |
| 2003 | 1 |
| 2002 | 3 |
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