Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Not Conservative Margaret Thatcher, nor Socialist Francois Mitterand: History comes back to haunt us. Just over 20 years ago, the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "Britain and western Europe are not interested in the unification of Germany. The words written in the Nato communique may sound different, but disregard …
Continue reading "The Hard Truth: Some Didn’t Want the Germans Back Together"
They're at it again with credit: Earlier this month, a congressional oversight panel released its first analysis of the Obama administration’s $75 billion Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), an effort to keep 4 million families from losing their homes. The analysis shows that the Treasury, in trying to keep people in homes they can’t afford, …
Continue reading "Our Subprime Federal Government, and a Lesson for the Church"
Yes, they do, as was probably the case in the Jundallah bombing on Sunday: This brings us to Saudi Arabia, whose relations with Iran are passing through a period of mutual antipathy bordering on hostility. Tehran has alleged that Iranian hajj pilgrims are being maltreated by Saudi authorities and that Saudi intelligence is accountable for …
Continue reading "The Sunnis put the Squeeze on Shi’ite Iran"
Well, that's what he did in the Huffington Post: But if Obama doesn't weigh in forcefully and say "no" to the hush money for Big Pharma, big insurance, and the AMA, America's middle class will get walloped. And if the walloping starts before 2012, Sarah Palin or some other right wing-nut populist will wallop Obama. …
Continue reading "Robert Reich Threatens the World With Sarah Palin"
The flap over Rush Limbaugh's exclusion from a share of the St. Louis Rams is absurd. American football has to be the worst place in our culture for liberals to make a stand like this. It is: Competitive, in a culture where cooperation has been deemed to be the norm. It has winners and losers, …
That's what American Prospect's Mark Schmitt is thinking about in his article "Left Without Labour:" The new progressive coalition follows the lines of the "emerging Democratic majority" that Ruy Teixeira and John Judis predicted in their 2002 book of that name: minority, professional, and younger voters, with help from a large gender gap. This is …
We're one step closer to "ignition" between the Muslim and homosexual communities: Creteil Bébel is excluded The amateur soccer team, primarily made up of Moslem players from the Paris region, was excluded from their league because they refused to play against a homosexual club, Paris Foot Gay. The Leisure Soccer Commission wrote: “The Creteil Bebel …
It's always been a puzzle to me (other than the Russians need for cash,) but this is the most sensible (and about the only) explanation I've seen yet: While Russia had, until recently, vetoed UN Security Council resolutions against the Iranian nuclear program, Medvedev suddenly hardened his rhetoric, mentioning sanctions as a possible course of …
I am sure that self-proclaimed evangelical Brent Childers is proud of himself for marching with the LGBT community in Washington: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Americans are a diverse, extraordinary, resilient, and passionate group of forgiving men and women. I wouldn't be standing beside them demanding full and equal treatment under the law and …
Roman Catholic blogger Ysais Martinez hits the nail on the head re Obama and the Middle East, in this letter to Asia Times Online: The problem with the Barack Obama administration is not its policy of containment, its biggest problem is its weakness. The Middle East is a place where you have to make deals …
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