"You can tell the people falsehoods, and deceive them"
The reality for the neocons is that some in the media have developed a little with the times. Analysis these days from The Economist occasionally stumbles towards being balanced, thoughtful, even - dare I say - informed. For example, this recent entry from Lexington's blog, as shockingly naive as it is in many respects . . ."So Mr Bush is vindicated? Not so fast. Yes, those who mocked his belief in the Arab appetite for democracy were wrong; he is to be admired for championing reform and nudging autocrats towards pluralism. But keep things in proportion. The big thing Bush did in the Arab world was not to argue for an election here or a loosening of controls there. It was to send an army to conquer Iraq. Nothing that has happened in Tunisia or Egypt makes the consequences of that decision any less calamitous.
"The war poisoned the Arabs’ reaction to everything America later said or did. Iraq is now a fragile democracy, but precious few Arabs (and rather few Europeans) believe that Mr Bush invaded Iraq for democracy’s sake. Many think the non-existent weapons of mass destruction were a pretext, too. In Cairo in 2009 Lexington let a pro-reform academic, Nader Fergany, still seething six years on. “The Americans are the Mongols of the 21st century,” he said, “and now Barack Obama is trying to put the icing on this dirty cake.” Whatever they think of the freedom message, most Arabs utterly reject the messenger."
"In other words, for all its many missteps of the past two decades, America is remarkably well placed to win the war of ideas now unfolding in the Middle East. This is not because Arabs are fond of America. Most aren't, right now. But thanks to globalisation, education, satellite television and the palpable failure of the local alternatives, most Arabs (and Iranians) are fully aware of what sort of societies the Western democracies are, and they would like some of the same fresh air for themselves."
. . . seems counterbalanced - somewhat at least - by consideration of the actual facts on the ground:
A definite improvement, but I'm not quite ready to renew my subscription just yet."Arabs (and Iranians) look around them and see many different political systems claiming ascendancy. These range from Shia theocracy (Iran and Hizbullah), Sunni Islamism (Saudi Arabia, Hamas, al-Qaeda), secular dictatorship (Syria, Libya) and traditional monarchy (Morocco, Jordan, the Arab Gulf). But guess what? By far the strongest of the ideas currently on offer—and the one for which most Egyptians seemed to be clamouring these past few weeks—is none of the above. It is liberal democracy."
The hacking scandal matters because it makes it seem that, in Britain, some people are above the law, and others are content for them to be so. The truth must out.
I remain inexpert on Egypt, I can't help but remember the words "rendition" and "Egypt" being used in the same sentence quite a lot over the past decade. I don't know if this has anything to do with the U.S. government's tepid non-opposition to Egyptian regime change: it may just be a coincidence. But then along comes Omar Sulemein, Mubarek's first-ever deputy and apparent successor: that name rang a bell and I did a quick google. Yep, this is the man we want for Eqypt: Ron Suskind, author of the book The One Percent Doctrine, called Suleiman the "hit man" for the Mubarak regime. He told ABC News that when the CIA asked Suleiman for a DNA sample from a relative of Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Suleiman offered the man's whole arm instead."He's a charitable man, friendly," said Suskind. "He tortures only people that he doesn't know."
Thank you, Common Cause. And thank you, NYT, for - finally (at last!) - shedding a little light on the travesty of letting these clowns continue to run amok on the Court. 
"You walk out into the street without looking for traffic and get run over. Your fault. Now another example. You look one way then the other and then walk into the street and get run over. Not your fault? Maybe not. But who cares? Your problem. You're still run over. And maybe both ways wasn't enough. Maybe you needed to look one way, the other and then back again. Not your fault doesn't make it not you problem.". . . and so it goes for Israel's hapless foreign policy, and this assumes a maxed-out charitable view rating.
I don’t know anything, have no expertise, haven’t even ever looked at the economic situation. Hence, no posting. If there comes a point when I have something to say, I will.
Our so-called economic growth has powered along based on a series of financial bubbles, leading to ever-increasing instability, mass unemployment, and misallocation of capital. All things our vaunted financial innovation and market liberalism were supposed to cure. My best efforts to ease the burden of this calamity were thwarted by fools in both parties. The stimulus effort was of insufficient magnitude, while tax cuts and quantitative easing are ineffective. The result is sustained, record-high unemployment. Morever, the financial risks built into the system were transferred to you, the proletariat.
As my predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower had foreseen, our military industrial complex has grown obese in the marketing of its herd of sacred cows. All manner of malfunctioning weapons systems that aren't needed continue to be churned out of the nation's factories. Missile defense that doesn't work against missiles that our enemies do not possess, and wouldn't use if they did possess them. And you voted for it, my friends. Yes, you ordered this shit sandwich. Whatever piece of crap is manufactured in your neighborhood has proven to be sufficient inducement for you to vote for whatever politician is more adept at prostituting himself to its promotion.
DUPNIK: Let me just say one thing, because people tend to poo-poo this business about all the vitriol that we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech. But it's not without consequences.
REPORTER: How do you know that that's what caused it.
DUPNIK: You don't.
“Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws.”
By Scalia's reckoning, the 2nd Amendment would be limited to blunderbusses since more modern weapons had occurred to no one.The 14th Amendment provides:
New Jersey allowed women to vote from 1790 until 1807. The Washington Territory proposed granting women the vote in 1854; it failed in the territorial legislature by only one vote. The Wyoming Territory granted women the vote in 1869, and the Utah Territory did the same in 1870, though Congress killed that in 1887 with the Edmunds-Tucker Act. Colorado granted women the right to vote in 1897.Scalia is the worst kind of clown: a clown with lifetime tenure.
. . . I find it ludicrous to say that nobody had any inkling of expanded rights for women in 1868. It was a hot topic. The 14th amendment specifically mentions only men in Section 2, but it makes no such specific exclusion of women in the rest of the amendment. Why doesn't it? Why should the only "proper" reading be that any group not specifically mentioned (except white men, of course) were intended to be excluded?
"[Julian Assange] didn't care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone."
If anybody bothered to read the Iraq war stories they're now so busy criticizing, they would see that Julian Assange and I were involved in very different kinds of journalism. They are not morally equivalent. While we both sought to publicize official secrets, I and my co-authors at The NYT spent enormous time trying to verify the secret government reports and other WMD-related stories we published. Every exclusive story of mine appeared with a discussion of its context, the difficulty involved in corroborating the highly classified information, and an assessment by at least one independent expert and likely skeptic, often identified by name and organization. Julian Assange, whom I have repeatedly defended, did none of these things. He engaged in data dumping and left these vital journalistic tasks to the papers that used his information. I stand by my criticism of this aspect of his work, as well as by my conclusion that he should not be punished or even faulted for trying to ferret out government secrets. That is what journalists do. Rather, our government is to blame for failing to safeguard truly sensitive information, for grossly over-classifying too much of it, and now, I fear, for deciding to circulate less of it rather than figure out a smarter way to share more of it safely, as the 9/11 Commission recommended almost a decade ago.
Hard-liners are alarmed that American intelligence underestimated the pace and scale of Iraq's nuclear program before Baghdad's defeat in the gulf war. Conscious of this lapse in the past, they argue that Washington dare not wait until analysts have found hard evidence that Mr. Hussein has acquired a nuclear weapon. The first sign of a ''smoking gun,'' they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.
He was absolutely on the money when he warned in this January 2009 NYT commentary that Obama's initial fiscal stimulus package didn't go nearly far enough. One aspect of the damage of the Bush years can be measured in terms of its unpardonable fiscal profligacy, mostly thanks to stupid, misdirected tax cuts coinciding with stupid, expensive wars, which the White House tried to keep off the books at the time. From the Center on Budget and Priorities:Just two policies dating from the Bush Administration — tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — accounted for over $500 billion of the deficit in 2009 and will account for almost $7 trillion in deficits in 2009 through 2019, including the associated debt-service costs. (The prescription drug benefit enacted in 2003 accounts for further substantial increases in deficits and debt, which we are unable to quantify due to data limitations.) These impacts easily dwarf the stimulus and financial rescues. Furthermore, unlike those temporary costs, these inherited policies (especially the tax cuts and the drug benefit) do not fade away as the economy recovers.
Bear in mind just how big the U.S. economy is. Given sufficient demand for its output, America would produce more than $30 trillion worth of goods and services over the next two years. But with both consumer spending and business investment plunging, a huge gap is opening up between what the American economy can produce and what it’s able to sell.
And the Obama plan is nowhere near big enough to fill this “output gap.”
Earlier this week, the Congressional Budget Office came out with its latest analysis of the budget and economic outlook. The budget office says that in the absence of a stimulus plan, the unemployment rate would rise above 9 percent by early 2010, and stay high for years to come.
Grim as this projection is, by the way, it’s actually optimistic compared with some independent forecasts. Mr. Obama himself has been saying that without a stimulus plan, the unemployment rate could go into double digits.
Even the C.B.O. says, however, that “economic output over the next two years will average 6.8 percent below its potential.” This translates into $2.1 trillion of lost production. “Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity,” declared Mr. Obama on Thursday. Well, he was actually understating things.
To close a gap of more than $2 trillion — possibly a lot more, if the budget office projections turn out to be too optimistic — Mr. Obama offers a $775 billion plan. And that’s not enough.
"If Paul Krugman has a good idea, in terms of how to spend money efficiently and effectively to jump-start the economy, then we’re going to do it. If somebody has an idea for a tax cut that is better than a tax cut we’ve proposed, we will embrace it . . . Just show me. If you can show me that something is going to work, I will welcome it."
The real story of this election, then, is that of an economic policy that failed to deliver. Why? Because it was greatly inadequate to the task.
Three books out writing the epitaph for America's leading role on the world stage. One of them - the last of the three reviewed, The Frugal Superpower, by Michael Mandelbaum - strikes me as getting it right:The Frugal Superpower argues that the Afghan War is no aberration. It marks the beginning of a new era of constraint in US foreign policy. After the crash, it is increasingly apparent that “mounting domestic economic obligations will narrow the scope of American foreign policy”. In a brief but remorseless work, Mandelbaum first sets out “the tyranny of numbers” and the growing claims on America’s budget. In his view this will make America less able to play the central role in the international system that the US, and the rest of the world, has come to take for granted. America will “no longer provide as large a market for other countries’ exports”. And there will be no further Iraq or Afghan wars, since the US will lack the resources to embark on expensive exercises in state-building.
The Iraq and Afghan wars have hardly been advertisements for the beneficial use of American power. So many people, both in the US and around the world, might greet the prospect of a new era of American foreign policy restraint with applause and relief. Mandelbaum believes, however, that a diminished American global role will destabilise international relations and will open the way for Russia and China, in particular, to challenge the global order established by the US in the aftermath of the cold war.
In the mean time, the hope that China is just another Japan-style bubble strikes me as ephemeral at best.
