Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
I can't much blame this ex-Marine (if such exists) for throwing in the towel: When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan. A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in …
Continue reading "Matthew Hoh’s Resignation: Losing Our Focus in Afghanistan"
But former McCain-Palin staffer Robert Heiler does it just the same: In many countries - as the history of Latin America alone illustrates - the institutions and the culture offer a weak defense against personality cult movements. In America, the defense is strong, buttressed by the First, Second, Fifth, Eighth and Tenth Amendments to the …
Continue reading "Underestimating Obama’s Personality Cult is Dangerous"
I've gotten a couple of "canned" comments (they sure look like they're canned) about my piece on Rush Limbaugh and the NFL. I think I've found the cannery. In looking at the IP info, both of them come from the "Palomar Community College District" in California. Obviously one or more people with connections to this …
Continue reading "The Palomar Community College District, Rush Limbaugh and the NFL"
White House Communications Director Anita Dunn needs to think twice about quoting Chairman Mao. Let's consider these two well-known quotes, from Mao's 1927 classic "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan:" For the present upsurge of the peasant movement is a colossal event. In a very short time, in China's central, southern …
Continue reading "Reply to Anita Dunn: Quoting Mao Cuts Both Ways"
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 …
Positive Infinity 