Category: Politics

Edwards set to run as a Bull Mousse

Edwards set to run as a Bull Mousse
Here is a man with a net worth of at least $40 million, with cash stuffed in offshore hedge funds, with a basketball court off his living room, with a haircut debutantes would die for, charging a public university $40,000 for his ideas on combating poverty.

Shouldn’t the first idea he gives the poverty center be: Get rich guys to donate their service and don’t write them $40,000 checks for ceremonial jobs?

It could be that the YouTube video has captured the John Edwards voters need to see. If the nation’s ready for a pretty president, this could be the man.

Opensecrets.org–Money in politics data

Opensecrets.org–Money in politics data

Tom Cruise was forced to scream “Show me the money!” .

“Deep Throat” advised Woodward & Bernstein to”Follow the money”to uncover the Watergate scandal. Now you can yourself by following a few clicks of your mouse at the opensecrets.org web-site.

Verio to Shut Off Controversial Web Site

PC World – Verio to Shut Off Controversial Web Site
Cryptome.org, a Web site that sometimes posts documents about government policy and intelligence, received a short letter from its ISP (Internet service provider), Verio, indicating that the site would be terminated on Friday. Verio, owned by NTT Communications Corp., said the termination is due to violation of its acceptable use policy.

Cryptome.org has run afoul of Verio’s policy before but historically the ISP has allowed the site to rectify the violation either by removing a document or proving that posting the document doesn’t breach any laws. This time, Verio hasn’t offered Cryptome.org that opportunity and also hasn’t specified how exactly the site violates the rules, said John Young, Cryptome.org’s founder, in a note on the site.

Another Inconvenient Truth

Another Inconvenient Truth  Behind the feel-good hype of carbon offsets, some of the deals don’t deliver
More broadly, the proliferation of suspect RECs and offsets may persuade consumers and businesses that preventing climate change comes cheap, says Anja S. Kollmuss, outreach coordinator of the Tufts Climate Initiative, an advocacy group affiliated with Tufts University. “We cannot solve the climate crisis by buying offsets and claiming to be climate-neutral,” she adds. “Nature does not fall for accounting schemes.”

Many people have commented that modern environmentalism is basically a religion. The carbon offsets are the modern equivalent of the Catholic Church selling indulgences.

The Undercover Mosque

The New Horizon The Undercover Mosque «

When I first posted this video it was quickly replaced with this message: “This video has been removed at the request of copyright owner Hardcash Productions Ltd. because its content was used without permission”.

So even though it is 48 minutes long, it may not be posted on Google Video much longer. Fox news bought the US rights and used many portions to create their own version about the enemy within.

After seeing these hidden camera videos shot by UK Channel 4, you will understand why British Muslims are considered by the Zogby Poll to be the most radicalized in Europe and why “assimilation” is their greatest fear.

The Iran Option That Isn’t on the Table

Vali Nasr and Ray Takeyh – The Iran Option That Isn’t on the Table – washingtonpost.com
Paradoxically, to liberalize the theocratic state, the United States would do better to shelve its containment strategy and embark on a policy of unconditional dialogue and sanctions relief. A reduced American threat would deprive the hard-liners of the conflict they need to justify their concentration of power. In the meantime, as Iran became assimilated into the global economy, the regime’s influence would inevitably yield to the private sector, with its demands for accountability and reform.

It is important to appreciate that Iran has a political system without precedent or parallel in modern history. The struggle there is not just between reactionaries and reformers, conservatives and liberals, but fundamentally between the state and society. A subtle means of diminishing the state and empowering the society is, in the end, the best manner of promoting not only democracy but also nuclear disarmament. Credit Photo Sack/Star Tribune

Why do they hate us?

Bin Laden, The Left and Me – washingtonpost.com
The thrust of the radical Muslim critique of America is that Islam is under attack from the global forces of atheism and immorality — and that the United States is leading that attack.

WTC1Contrary to President Bush’s view, they don’t hate us for our freedom, either. Rather, they hate us for how we use our freedom. When Planned Parenthood International opens clinics in non-Western countries and dispenses contraceptives to unmarried girls, many see it as an assault on prevailing religious and traditional values. When human rights groups use their interpretation of international law to pressure non-Western countries to overturn laws against abortion or to liberalize laws regarding homosexuality, the traditional sensibilities of many of the world’s people are violated.

In other words, bin Laden believes that the United States represents the pagan depravity that Muslims have a duty to resist. The literature of radical Islam, such as the works of Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, resonates with these themes. One radical sheik even told a European television station a few years ago that although Europe is more decadent than America, the United States is the more vital target because it is U.S. culture — not Swedish culture or French culture — that is spreading throughout the world.


 20 Face Lash for Dancing in Saudi Arabia

Re-inventing the notorious Carlyle Group

Carlyle Changes Its Stripes
n the two decades since private equity firms first stormed the business world, they’ve been called a lot of things, from raiders to barbarians. But only one firm has been tagged in the popular imagination with warmongering, treason, and acting as cold-eyed architects of government conspiracies.

Its ranks were larded with the politically connected, including former Presidents, Cabinet members, even former British Prime Minister John Major. It used its partners’ collective relationships to build a lucrative business buying, transforming, and selling companies–particularly defense companies that did business with governments. 

Carlyle might have continued happily in that niche except for the confluence of three events. First there were the terrorist attacks of September 11. In the aftermath, conspiracy theorists seized on Carlyle’s huge profits, intense secrecy, and close dealings with wealthy Saudi investors. The scrutiny reached a crescendo in Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which made Carlyle seem like the sort of company image-conscious investors like public pension funds might choose to avoid. The second factor was the tsunami of capital that has been sloshing around the globe for five years, providing almost limitless funding for the kind of dealmaking that is Carlyle’s specialty. All that liquidity has brought with it immense opportunity as well as stiff new competition. Finally, there’s the succession issue. Carlyle’s baby boomer founders can see retirement around the corner. And they badly want the firm, their legacy, to outlast them. Continue reading “Re-inventing the notorious Carlyle Group”

Cuba Waiting game

FT.com / Arts & weekend / Magazine – Waitinggame

Good British insight into the changing face of the Miami Cuban experience.
Television reports on Cuban Miami traditionally take in Versailles, a 1950s-style Cuban restaurant on Calle Ocho, itself the imitation of an old restaurant on the island. Every time Castro is rumoured to be dead, historicos wearing the guayabera shirts popular in pre-revolutionary Cuba are interviewed outside Versailles’s coffee-window. But these old men are no longer representative: the exiles who arrived before 1980 now account for perhaps a third of Miami Cubans. Versailles might die with its customers.

Cuba is no longer the Cuba that the early exiles knew. One thing that has changed is skin colour: almost all the Cubans who left were white. “Always forgotten, and that’s a very key factor,” says Gomez. “Eighty-six per cent of the Cuban-American community is Caucasian. Sixty-two per cent of Cubans on Cuba are black. These are the guys who were promised the most by the Castro revolution.”

El exilio is dying and becoming a Miami tribe: just another American ethnic group with roots in a messed-up country and Americans for children. Fidel Castro can die knowing that just as he is falling victim to the “biological solution”, so is the generation he banished. Thanks to Sixto Labiste for this.

The Ideological Animal

Psychology Today: The Ideological Animal
We think our political stance is the product of reason, but we’re easily manipulated and surprisingly malleable. Our essential political self is more a stew of childhood temperament, education, and fear of death. Call it the 9/11 effect.

As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.