Kissinger visited my school this weekend....
comments to come....

Fog of Peace
David Brooks takes the anti-war crowd to task and proves he is one of the smartest living conservatives. His criticism is right on, the peace movment is blinded by its hatred for Bush, its dislike for America and the West, abstract and largely meaningless agruments about international law, and refuses to consider the consequence of not acting.

I don't really like Andrew Sullivan, but he recently put up a good post on his "daily dish" about his visit to NYU with Christopher Hitchens for the Orwell debate:

On the way there, we were confronted with protestors with "No War On Iraq" posters. Hitch noticed the Orwellian resonance of this slogan. The slogan, strictly speaking, is a lie, one of many promoted by the anti-war left and right. There is no possibility of a war with "Iraq." Half the country - inhabited by the Kurds and Shia Muslims is already protected from Saddam's murderous designs by British and American air-power. The remaining rump is not a country as such; it's a population terrorized by a police state run by a sadistic maniac. We are not therefore at war with the country or people of Iraq; and by equating Saddam with Iraq, these so-called "peace-protestors" are de facto parties to his vile propaganda, the notion that Iraq is Saddam and Saddam is Iraq. That lie was recently displayed in the humiliating spectacle of grown human beings not simply being required to vote for Saddam, as Hitch observed, but actually to dance in the streets to celebrate him, to humiliate themselves out of terror. This disgusting spectacle wasn't like "1984." It was "1984." And this is what the anti-war movement now finds itself defending. I watched part of the anti-war rally in DC on C-SPAN this weekend. Not a single speaker even addressed the evil in Baghdad. In their attempt to derail any attempt to disarm Saddam, and in their facile equation of Saddam with Iraq, they show the empty, bitter center of their alleged morality.

I couldn't agree more, the left is on a sad and pitifull decline.

What Bush Isn't Saying About Iraq
Michael Kinsley raises an interesting point about two reasons for war which have been entirely left out of the Iraq debate: Israel and Oil. Speaking of which, those are the two main reasons to be worried about Iraq, especially a nuclear armed Iraq, in additition to the humanitarian aspect (which is very important to a liberal interventionist like myself). I figure that if Iraq gets the bomb, it'll be even more aggressive in its attempts to destabalize (and eventually) Israel with strong support for the Intifada madness, a much more practical approach than direct confrontation. Saddam would probably move to gain control over a significant portion of the world's oil supply, not through invasion, but via proxy, vichy-style slave states. I wouldn't doubt for a second that the Saudi or Kuwaiti royal families would become the puppets of a nuclear armed Iraq if they still got to drive around in cadillacs. These possibilities are both very bad things and ought to be avoided and it is unfortunate that they are absent from the current discussion about Iraq.

Money and Momentum Elude McCall
Mr. McCall has been hamstrung by a lack of money since he won the September primary.
And who's fault is that? Oh yes, what's-his-face, you know that egomaniac ex-Clinton cabinent member. Ah, Andrew Cuomo, the Mark Green of the gubernatorial race, exhausting McCall's money and energy before dropping out and running like a rat from humilation on primary day. Yep, Andy, you really did it. Congradulations, you've helped hand the state over to the GOP for another 4 years. I'm sure the children who are only guarenteed an 8th grade education will really appreciate your hard work.

Cuomo is a worthless, overly ambitious punk and Democrats shouldn't forget what he has done.

Global Macroeconomic and Financial Policy Site
Lots of news from the exciting (exciting to me) world of economics. If you share my perversions, I strongly recommend it.

US Posts $159 Billion Budget Deficit
Remember back on the campaign trail when Bush said he wouldn't run deficits? He was lying. And No, he never made any exceptions, his "trifecta" anecdote aside, which is also a lie.

Protesters Mach Against War in Iraq
Bums.

Stop reading my nonsense
and start reading anything by Erich Fromm

90 hostages killed in Moscow siege
Well, Putin will be Putin. What did you expect? A compromise? This strong response was necessary and even with the accidental deaths (of the hostages, not the terrorists, all those deaths were quite intentional), the Russian actions were for the best. I like his [Putin's] style. While the Russian war in Cheneya is brutal and slightly crazy, I think that we have to oppose terrorism wherever it is. We have a lot more in common with the Russians than those suicidal screw-ups, I am becoming much more sympathetic to those on the side of order. This isn't about the movements of national liberation, but the need to show that intentionally targeting innocent civilians for slaughter is unacceptable and won't be tolerated. While its alright to negotatiate with guerrilla fighters, any attempts at a settlement with butchers (or people who'd be butchers if they could) is just cowardly appeasement and by now we ought to know that kind of gutless behavior will not cut it.

Wellstone
Paul Wellstone Dead in Plane Crash
Since I am a misanthrope at heart, you can trust me when I say Senator Wellstone was a right guy, he was driven by conviction, not polls and put the interests of his country before his own. This is a damn shame.

Unrelated, but...
I wrote this for school and I wondered what the harm was in exposing it to the terrible light of day...

Mr. President, Have Pity on Working Man
The Failure of Supply Side Economics

Ronald Reagan practiced “supply-side economics” even though George Bush, his own vice-president described the theory as “voodoo economics” and Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman confessed that it “was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top [tax] rate” for the richest Americans. Supply siders fall short of their lofty promises, their only achievement is having shoveled money to those who were already wealthy at the expense of the rest of the country.
Supply side economics was a poorly thought out theory and failure. It is a fringe theory peddled by cranks and has never been accepted by the vast majority of economists. The early 1980’s only 12 out of the 18,000 members of the bipartisan American Economics Association identified themselves as supply siders. There is no major college economics department that is considered supply side and there is no supply side economist in any major department. Arthur Laffer was a very notable supply sider. He was one of the supply side movement’s few academics, but he was not a member of the economic mainstream. While he frequently gave lectures and wrote for popular periodicals, he contributed very little to peer-reviewed journals.
The fact that supply side economics was rejected by most economists, including prominent conservative economists and supported largely by members on the economic fringe or non-economists like publisher Irving Kristol, did not prevent opportunistic politicians from embracing the theory. The Republicans found it a convenient justification for cutting taxes. One of the first politicians to be converted to the supply side school was congressman Jack Kemp and by the start his presidential California Governor Ronald Reagan was under the spell of “voodoo economics”.
Its not hard to blame the Republicans for falling in love with supply side economics, it is a very attractive theory. While traditional conservative economics dictated austerity and “caster-oil” treatment for an ailing economy, supply side offered a fat free hot fudge sundae.
To understand supply side economics, it is important to be aware of the economic situation it was conceived in. In the 1970’s the United States economy was experiencing from serious inflation, sometimes as high as 13% a year. Inflation is caused by the inability of the supply of goods to meet consumer demand; such was the case in the 1970’s. At the same time the economy was sluggish. When this happens, the economy suffers from stagflation, a condition where prices rise, but the economy fails to grow. In stagflation slow growth and inflation feed off of each other. Attempts to expand the economy through traditional stimulus, such as increased spending fail, business owners have an “inflation mentality”, which means they expect wages and prices to rise, so they raise their prices accordingly, because of the inflation mentality, the stimulus is simply absorbed by the price increases without actually invigorating the economy.
According to supply side theory inflation could be beaten back without an increase in unemployment. The theory also maintained that it is possible to greatly reduce taxes without having to cut spending or run budget deficits, because the tax cuts will spur enough economic growth to significantly boost tax revenues. All of these great things could be done without any cost because the tax cuts would spur investment and savings among the upper class. The investments would boost productivity, causing the supply side of the economy of the economy to grow. The growing supply side would keep satisfy demand and thereby beating inflation. More investment would also create jobs as businesses flushed with cash expanded and hired more workers. Using this as its rationale, the Reagan administration enacted a series of tax cuts that reduced the top marginal rate from 70 to 28%.
When put to the acid test of reality during the Reagan administration, the supply side theory proved to be as weak as straw. It is true that the administration cut inflation off at the knees, but that was largely through the actions of Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul Volcker. He employed harsh, demand curbing, interest rate cuts. These cuts triggered the recession of 1982. The downturn of 1982 was the most severe recession since the great depression. During the 1982 recession unemployment jumped as high as 10%. Inflation was defeated, but by boosting the supply side of the economy, but rather by painfully restricting demand with a deliberate recession.
The end of Reagan’s presidency shattered the optimistic predictions about balancing the budget and reducing taxes at the same time. The national debt nearly skyrocketed in the 1980’s, by 1988 it was equal to 54% the Gross Domestic Product, compared to 34% just eight years earlier. The Annual budget deficit ballooned by more than a hundred billion during the Reagan years and still haunted the country into the 90’s, when it was beaten by Bill Clinton and his 1993 upper-income tax hike.
The promise of record economic growth also proved to be hollow. While the stock market rallied during the “7 fat years” of the Reagan presidency, the economy did not grow much faster than in the 1970’s. In the 1970’s the average per capita GNP growth was 1.7%, while in the Reagan 80’s it was 1.9%. Nor was this growth spread evenly, it accumulated at the top of the income ladder and stayed there. Poverty rates proved to be immune to the rising economy, the real after-tax income of the poorest 10% of Americans declined by 11%, the second poorest 10% saw a similar decline, and the middle class just about broke even. The Richest 1% of Americans, however, enjoyed a bonanza, seeing their income rise by 53%. While the very rich became even richer, the poor lost ground and the middle class treaded water.
Given the disastrous results of Reagan’s economic policy, we can only conclude that supply side economics is a failure. It is a nice theory, offering painless inflation reduction and budget balancing, but has as many holes as Swiss cheese and disintegrates on contact with the real world. To prevent such impractical theories from becoming the basis of our countries economic policy again, I recommend that people understand better acquaint themselves with economics, an educated voter is a good voter, but perhaps the best advice is to remember what your mother told you, “if its too good to be true, it probably is”.

Recommendations
I'd like to recommend maxspeak.org
its a top notch website with a blog
and currently features an interesting series of the fiscal crisis and economic troubles of the states
So go, now! What are you doing? I'm an amateur! He's a real economist! Really! Unlike me, who does not even take economics, yet.

HITCHENS: WE MUST FIGHT IRAQ

WE have inherited, along with the right to destroy an illegal system of aggressive weaponry, a responsibility for the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples.

They are compelled to live with scarcity and fear in their daily existence, as a result of the policies of a homicidal megalomaniac.

One day, this man's rule will be at an end. On that day, we want to be able to look these people in the eye and tell them that we cared about them, too.

Right On!

And Now for some Jingo Dark Humor!

Political Science
by Randy Newman

No one likes us-I don't know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
But all around, even our old friends put us down
Let's drop the big one and see what happens

We give them money-but are they grateful?
No, they're spiteful and they're hateful
They don't respect us-so let's surprise them
We'll drop the big one and pulverize them

Asia's crowded and Europe's too old
Africa is far too hot
And Canada's too cold
And South America stole our name
Let's drop the big one
There'll be no one left to blame us

We'll save Australia
Don't wanna hurt no kangaroo
We'll build an All American amusement park there
They got surfin', too

Boom goes London and boom Paree
More room for you and more room for me
And every city the whole world round
Will just be another American town
Oh, how peaceful it will be
We'll set everybody free
You'll wear a Japanese kimono
And there'll be Italian shoes for me

They all hate us anyhow
So let's drop the big one now
Let's drop the big one now

With the North Koreans up to no good, a looming war with Iraq, ankle-biting Europeans and resugent terrorists, "dropping the big one" sounds pretty damn tempting...

TAPs for a Magazine
Apparently the American Prospect is being defunded and scaled back and key talent is fleeing. First the New Republic got sold to Republicans (I still haven't forgiven Martin Peretz) and now this, at this rate their won't be any liberal media for the GOP mongrel dogs to bash...

Is Iraq the New Japan
The similarities between post-war Japan and a post-Saddam Iraq.

False Alarm
The New Republic's Johnathan Chait makes an excellent case for a war with Iraq and refutes many common criticisms.

Josh Marshall is doing an excellent job covering the South Dakota Senate race. Where the republican candidate John Thune has been whipping up allegations of absentee ballot fraud.

Bad Korea Move
So they were trying to build the bomb after all! Those insolent punks have been lying to us for nearly a decade and voilating the anti-nuclear agreement they made with us. Anyway what's this mean:

-Given what happened with North Korea, I wouldn't really trust making some kind of diplomatic settlement with Iraq. We wouldn't want to make an agreement with Saddam and find out a few years later that he has a handful of nuclear bombs.
-What is the difference between Iraq and Korea? Why is it more urgent to invade Iraq and remove its thugs from power? Well, I think the big difference is that North Korea's Kim Jong-il has no established pattern of aggression. He talks big, he's arming himself and killing his countrymen, but he has no history of starting wars with no reason or almost suicidal miscalculation like Saddam does. Saddam has attacked the Iranian. the Kurds and invaded Kuwait and frequently makes judgments that are so poorly thought out their almost insane, which would make a policy based on detterence and containment especially risky. However, I don't think we should let North Korea off the hook and punitive measures ought to be taken (bombing campaign anyone?) to show that the US won't tolerate hostile dictatorships aquiring atomic arms.

Showtime Iraq
On network news, war's a spectacle and debate's a bore
To no one's suprise, the TV networks fail the public again, shriking their responsibility to inform them about the debate over war with Iraq.

US Judge to Settle Commandments Case

MONTGOMERY A federal judge will be asked this week to decide whether Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore was promoting religion when he placed a granite monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments in the lobby of the state judicial building.

Do the 10 Commandments promote religion? Is this pope catholic?

Jeb to Scotus: Thanks But No Thanks
One of the things that may prevent a Republican sweep is Torecceli's withdrawl from the race. According to the New Republic

Democrats are in a win-win (or, rather, win-win-win) situation when it comes to New Jersey: Either the U.S. Supreme Court will refuse to hear the case, in which case the state Supreme Court ruling stands and Frank Lautenberg is the Democratic candidate. Or the U.S. Supreme Court hears the case and rules in favor of the Democrats, which is possibly even better since it arms Lautenberg with the high court's imprimatur. Or the Court hears the case and rules against the Democrats, in which case you can expect turnout among the Democratic rank-and-file, a group still stewing over the 2000 election, to go through the roof, assuring Democrats control of the Senate and possibly even handing them the House.

Which is certainly good news. Now, if only the Dens could show an ounce of toughness when dealing with Bush, rather then let his tomfoolery go unopposed.

One Vote Away
Republicans could win control of the entire federal government in November. Why won't Democrats talk about it?
Full republican control of the federal government is a very disturbing thought, one that haunted me through out 2000 and is stalking me again during the midterm elections. The results of a few years of Republican rule could be terrible, the image its self is horrible, the foul moneychangers polluting the temple, causing permament harm. Its unpleasant to even think about, but just keep the possibility of one party-rule in mind when you get into the voting booth this November.

There is a very interesting and lively debate between the writers at Slate about going to war with Iraq. I strongly recommend looking into it, its far more intellectually honest and revealing than what's going on in Washington right now.

The Atlantic Monthly also has an important article on Iraq by James Fallows, discussing the aftermath of Iraq and taking a sober look at the reconstruction of the nation that will be necessary after the war.