In fact, his father, Phillip of Macedon conquered Greece, but this does not stop the Greek government from objecting to Macedonia joining NATO because they have the name Macedonia.
Alexander spoke Greek. He was educated by Greeks, but he was not Greek. He was Macedonian.
Morons.
Yes, Bush and His Evil Minions™ are asserting that the original authorization to invade Iraq gives him the authority he needs to sign a deal on a permanent military presence.
Seriously, when he gets out, we need to find the laws that these folks have broken, and throw the lot them in gaol for a very very long time for breaking those laws.
Representatives of Treasury Department, SEC and Fed told Congress that it was crucial to the economic health of the United States to all sovereign wealth funds to have free reign to purchase US companies.
Congress is concerned after Abu Dhabi bought a significant portion of Citi, and other sovereign wealth funds have done so with other financial institutions, as a result of fall out from the credit implosion.
The regulators basically said, without foreigners buying this stuff, we’d be flat broke.
What they neglected to say is that we are flat broke anyway, from years of budget and trade deficits.
They are actually going to the Cayman islands on legitimate business…no…really…I mean it.
Congress had decided to go after tax havens, and they have sent GAO investigators, and they will be visiting the infamous Ugland House, corporate headquarters for 12,748 companies.
Good for Congress, and good for GAO, it’s investigative arm.
If the Republicans were in charge, this would never have happened, because they believe that, “only little people pay taxes.”
FWIW, offering bounties for tax cheats, as German investigators did with records of trusts in Lichtenstein, would be a very good thing.
Nicolai Sarkosy is intends to renegotiate its military relationships in Africa, along with changes in economic policies to better involve African nations in world economic negotiations.
This is an artifact of the collapse of US Diplomacy brought about by Bush unilateralism. It has created a diplomatic vacuum that France intends to fill, and is just one area, beyond Roberts and Alito, where the damage done by Bush and His Evil Minions™ will last for years.
So reprots CTV News.
There are three possibilities.
The first is that these discussions never happened, in which case both Obama and Goolsbee deserve an apology.
The second is that Goolsbee did talk to the ambassador with the approval of the campaign, in which case everyone in the campaign deserves a dope slap and a severance notice.
This would be unnecessary and stupid, and I do not think that the members of Obama campaign are that stupid. (If they are, then they deserve to lose)
The third possibility is that Goolsbee decided to do this unofficially on his own.
If that’s the case, he needs to be dropped in an ostentatiously public manner, because you can’t afford to have someone freelancing like this on policy or diplomacy.
I do know that Mr. Goolsbee has occasionally read my blog, so if he wants to make a statement, I will post it unedited.
This could be bullsh&^, or it could be some staffer or economic adviser freelancing.
Or the report that a staffer told the Canadian ambassador that, “criticisms would only be campaign rhetoric, and should not be taken at face value“, could be true.
CTV is fairly reliable, and I think that Obama is way to savvy to knowingly let someone do this, even if that [b]WAS[/b] his real position (which it probably is, he voted for CAFTA).
It’s simply too politically stupid.
I think that it was one of his economic advisers freelancing, and whoever it was, they should be fired today.
Specifically, they are close to a deal on Bush’s European missile shield.
This is stupid for the Czech Republic. Russia is accurate when they consider this provocative, and it is very likely that whom ever succeeds Bush will backtrack on these plans.
Brad Delong points to a series of very interesting critiques Walt and Mearsheimer’s book, The Israel Lobby. Specifically, he cites a quote from their original paper, “The mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest to bring it about.”
This would of course apply to NOW, NARAL, the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Humane Society, etc.
They must necessarily be acting against the interests of the US, because otherwise they would not need an organized special interest to bring it about.
It is utilitarianism taken to absurd extremes.
It is the idea that the national best interest is immediately apparent to any policy maker, and so the only time one needs a lobbyist is when one wishes to make the government operate in a member contrary to government interest.
This is tremendously naive at best.
This is the fruit of the simultaneously Triumphalism and Oppression myths that Serbs hold about themselves.
The independence of Kosovo is the fruit of attempted genocide against the Kosovars, and it is justified.
Matthew Yglesias wonders why Castro was so prominent on the world stage.
The answer is that it was not him, but rather the fact that he made so many people in the US power establishment crazy.
His conclusion is spot on:
I think there’s probably a lesson to be learned with regard to current issues with Islamist political movements around the world. For good reasons and for bad ones, the romance of thumbing one’s nose at the USA has powerful and important resonance for a lot of people around the world. Under the circumstances, it rarely serves our interests to get into dramatic confrontations with leaders who are far too puny to objectively threaten our interests. After all, what significance would Castro have without his superpower adversary? US persecution of the Communist regime in Havana is really the only thing it has going for it.
No surprise. Ever since Bush toadie John Howard was driven out, a withdrawal has been a forgone conclusion.
After Serb mobs burnt down UN border posts in northern Kosova, NATO troops took control of the crossings, and sealed them off.
Good.
Well, it appears that Germany is going after a bunch of tax cheats based on a DVD acquired from a paid informant for $6 million, and the leaders of Lichtenstein are upset.
I have no sympathy. Money laundering has been the Lichtenstinian economy for decades, and it’s time that they started unraveling this mess.
First, you have to read what Lower Manhattanite of the Group News Blog said. The short form is, that that the US is in the position of a stalking ex-boyfriend. To true.
Then we have Ben Sargant’s editorial cartoon:
Hoisted from Brad Delong’s comments, it’s an excellent historical perspective:
And I think he knows that he has fallen short and is pained by that. And to have his life evaluated by a moral midget like George Bush and his ilk must gall him.
Having said that, the real decision on Castro will be made by the Cuban people and above all I wish them as much freedom as possible to do this. Freedom from their own government trying to hold on to power the old way even if that is no longer appropriate. But even more, freedom from those in our country would be willing to slaughter large numbers of Cubans and destroy what good Cuba has created over these past.Whatever Castro has been, the Cuban people have paid a high price and achieved genuine social development. The worst tragedy would be for this to be taken from them in a wave of Thatcher-Reagan-Yeltsin privatization combined with America bringing “freedom” to Cuba the way we have brought it to Iraq.
(emphasis mine)
Finally, I have a thought on why the Cubans are way more batsh%$ insane 50 years after Castro left than, for example, my Estonian acquaintance was about the USSR and Estonia 40 years after Stalin invaded:
It’s more than that with the emigres.
You have to understand that Cuba has a heritage of Spanish rule.
For 300 years, when the British Crown got too autocratic, the refrain was, “This isn’t Spain”.
Spain bought into divine right big time, and it got passed down from the Spanish crown to the despotic successors of the crown.
A coup was OK, because that was just the man at the top changing, but Castro, he broke up the estates, and gave them to the peons, some of whom were n***ers (IIRC, Cuba is now majority Afro-Cuban).
That is an affront to God, and cannot be tolerated.
My guess is that he is not long to this world. Ill health is the best explanation for his retirement.
Hopefully, this will lead to some reforms.
If the US is interested in helping the Cuban people and hastening reforms, it should take steps to formally abandon the claims of US Cuban emigré community.
The comment that Talleyrand made about the Bourbon restoration (aka Bourbon Renewal*) applies here, “They have learned nothing and they have forgotten nothing.”
While any people who wish to return should be free to do so, and any investment should be allowed, allowing old claims to be pressed will damage the country, and it is a most powerful argument against reform, that old crazies, and (in some cases) outright terrorists, would come back and take it all.
*Yes, I know, bad pun.
The US Military’s new Africa Command (Africom) was to have been relocated from Germany to an African nation, but only Liberia was willing to be a host, I guess that that whole illegal war of aggression in Iraq probably put other host nations off.
They don’t want to be a part of future colonialist military actions.
The US government is claiming that Africom is, “not about militarisation but consolidating existing operations under one single command, while helping Africans with military training and supporting peacekeeping and aid operations”.
And no one believed this, largely because of recent behavior.
Well, it appears that the US and Iraq are in the process of renegociating their security agreements, and the Iraqis consider the removal of immunity for contractors to be non-negotiable.
I think that this is the first time that the representatives of the Iraqi government are behaving in a way that is both beneficial to, and supported by its citizens regardless of ethnicity.
Good for them. As for the mercenaries, the rules in a foreign country are that if you do the crime, you do the time, in that country’s jails.
The Russians believe that a declaration of independence is a bad thing, but they have ruled out sanctions against Kosovo.
This is a very positive development. One of the political imperatives in Russia is that it sees itself as a “Protector of the Slavs”, particularly those who subscribe to Orthodox Christianity, such as the Serbs.
They are behaving moderately because they recognize reality, and because, despite what the “very sensible people” in Washington say, Russia is not looking at reestablishing the USSR or the Warsaw Pact.
Their hostility toward the current path in US policy is because they feel that US policy is hostile towards them.