To this day, that Halliburton subsidiary does business with Iran to the tune of $40 million per year, despite Cheney's current boss designating the country as a charter member of the"Axis of Evil." That $40 million helps Iran extract oil, which funds the Iranian government, which, if you believe the State Department, then funds the gamut of anti-American, anti-Israel international terrorism organizations.
All of this was uncovered by William Thompson, the current comptroller for New York City. Thompson discovered the Halliburton subsidiary while investigating where the 401(k) plans of New York City's cops and firefighters are being invested, to be sure none of that money is going to corporations that do business with states that sponsor terrorism.
Incidentally, while CEO of Halliburton, Cheney also furiously lobbied the State Department to lift its ban on doing business with Libya. The Buzzflash website reports a 1997 article from Oil and Gas Journal which said:
"Cheney said oil and gas companies must explore where the reserves are, and that means doing business in countries that may have policies that the U.S. does not like." Cheney said,"The long-term horizon of the oil industry is at...
I think it might be applesauce time for Mark Shields.
Now, it is an insult when President Bush says such things, as he did in the SOTU. Because he doesn't mean them.
But Shields was speaking more generally.
Have we considered the possibility that maybe the government really does know how to spend Mark Shields money better than Mark Shields does? I have been watching Shields on TV, off and on, for years and I have never heard him say anything remotely intelligent.
Rush needs a thoughtful antiwar competitor but unfortunately Franken is not likely to fill the bill. Even more than Rush, he has slavishly toed the party (in his case DNC) line on nearly all issues including those related to war and peace.
I have to admit, however, that I am not a neutral observer. Back around 1979, when I was in Minneapolis helping to organize protests against Carter's requirement that 19 and 20 year olds register for the draft, Al Franken, a fellow Minnesota boy, was in town. A reporter asked his opinion. He answered in stereotypical yuppie good form:"I don't care because I'm too old to register or get drafted."
The London papers come online the previous evening on the East Coast so you can read them before you go to bed. Unfortunately you have to subscribe to The Times online edition but access to The Guardian, The Independent and the Daily Telegraph is free, at least at the time of publication and for a short while afterwards. These, together with the Financial Times, are the so-called (up-market) broadsheets. (Two -- The Times and The Independent -- are now published in tabloid form as well). The FT prints few obituaries but it does offer what is arguably the best foreign news coverage in any English language newspaper.
Navigating the sites is pretty straightforward. Obituaries are under"People" at The Independent. Obituaries in the UK are often more candid than those that appear in the U.S. For example, the anonymous author of The Times obituary of Pamela Harriman identified her as a courtesan, which, of course, she was. Since this obituary is no longer accessible for free, see a short and candid account of her life and loves at...
David Kay, who led the American effort to find banned weapons in Iraq, said Friday after stepping down from his post that he has concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons at the start of the war last year. In an interview with Reuters, Dr. Kay said he now thought that Iraq had illicit weapons at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, but that the subsequent combination of United Nations inspections and Iraq's own decisions"got rid of them."
O-Kay... so, now. Tell us something we don't know. No nuclear capacity. No chemical weapons. No biological weapons. An army that was only a fraction of its 1991 size. No Al Qaeda ties.
After a while, repeating all this makes me feel like I'm a broken record. (I can get away with saying that because today's DJ's still use vinyl records to spin the latest dance music.)
David Kay, who led the American effort to find banned weapons in Iraq, said Friday after stepping down from his post that he has concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons at the start of the war last year. In an interview with Reuters, Dr. Kay said he now thought that Iraq had illicit weapons at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, but that the subsequent combination of United Nations inspections and Iraq's own decisions"got rid of them."
O-Kay... so, now. Tell us something we don't know. No nuclear capacity. No chemical weapons. No biological weapons. An army that was only a fraction of its 1991 size. No Al Qaeda ties.
After a while, repeating all this makes me feel like I'm a broken record. (I can get away with saying that because today's DJ's still use vinyl records to spin the latest dance music.)
David Kay, who led the American effort to find banned weapons in Iraq, said Friday after stepping down from his post that he has concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons at the start of the war last year. In an interview with Reuters, Dr. Kay said he now thought that Iraq had illicit weapons at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, but that the subsequent combination of United Nations inspections and Iraq's own decisions"got rid of them."
O-Kay... so, now. Tell us something we don't know. No nuclear capacity. No chemical weapons. No biological weapons. An army that was only a fraction of its 1991 size. No Al Qaeda ties.
After a while, repeating all this makes me feel like I'm a broken record. (I can get away with saying that because today's DJ's still use vinyl records to spin the latest dance music.)
Well, leave it to the most hawkish of the hawks to prove my point earlier today that nothing -- not the facts, not the disintegration of all their arguments for war with Iraq in the cold light of day, not the fact that our military is close to the breaking point now -- nothing will slow the hawks down in their plans to"remake" the Middle East.
Not content to leave bad enough alone, David Kay has some news for us, beyond the fact that with regard to Iraq's"large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq":"I don't think they existed." No, Mr. Kay has
This is the implication of one of Victor Davis Hanson's favorite statistical equivalency arguments which he uses to defend the U.S. military occupation of Iraq: "500 Americans tragically are dead [in Iraq], a fatality rate as great as those murdered in either Chicago or Los Angeles last year."
I suppose that this means that more folks from Heritage will be cut from White House dinner invitation lists. My guess, however, is that replacements will be found at the more reliably pro-Bush American Enterprise Institute .
In one of my very first undergraduate political science courses at New York University, I studied with H. Mark Roelofs, who wrote Ideology and Myth in American Politics. I'll never forget the first class: I swear ... he sounded like a villain out of an Ayn Rand novel."There is no such thing as objectivity," he bellowed."This class will be devoted to my opinion. You can certainly try to interject your own opinions, but I won't be listening." I figured it would be downhill from that point on.
The truth is that he was listening to our opinions, and out of the course came some of the most spirited and challenging discussions in which I'd ever participated.
One of the most provocative aspects of Roelofs' 1976 classic book was his view that the American political system's resilience camouflaged congenital problems in the American political mind. While I rejected Roelofs' leftish criticisms of Lockean liberal ideology, I appreciated, from a libertarian perspective, his stress upon the fundamental frustration embedded in the Madisonian universe of checks-and-balances. For sure, Madison's vision had frustrated—thank goodness—the emergence of totalitarian political movements. But Madison wrote during a time when the scope of government was much more limited. Upon constitutional contradictions and war-making capacity, the government gradually gained more and more influence over every aspect of social life. Madison's" checks and balances" gradually morphed into an institutionalized civil war among competing interest groups, each vying for some special privilege at the expense of the others.
That's why Friedrich Hayek had argued: The Worst Always Get on Top. As the...
Link courtesy of Alan Gura. Clever title courtesy of Max Sawicky, who proves that Walt Whitman isn't just for picking up interns anymore.
"University of Alabama administrators are being small-minded about faculty dissent on the Tuscaloosa campus. A university's role should be to stimulate discussion, not to suppress it. UA's target is the Alabama Scholars Association Read More Here
Nice to see Mencken crack the top ten on the editors' list, though. Sad to see Rachel Carson in the top five.
Hat tip: Marginal Revolution.
US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld is considering plans to expand the global war on terrorism with multi-pronged attacks against suspected militant bases in countries such as Lebanon and Somalia...
Sending US troops into lawless Somalia would not be new, nor is it likely to cause serious diplomatic waves. Covert US forces have periodically infiltrated the country over the past two years in order to conduct surveillance and even snatch [Al Qaeda] suspects...
However, sending US special forces into Lebanon - and in particular an area like the Bekaa Valley (which is virtually Syrian territory) and where the bulk of Damascus' military forces in Lebanon are deployed - would be an entirely different matter. Deployment of US forces in the area would almost certainly involve a confrontation with Syrian troops.
Thanks to David for inviting me in for permanent residence here at L&P. I'm honored to be in such esteemed company.
Your Cliff's Notes bio of Radley Balko: I was recently hired as a policy analyst for the Cato Institute (read my first paper for them here). My issues include the range of"nanny state" issues, which would include alcohol and tobacco control, drug prohibition, obesity, and to a lesser extent, issues like gambling, pornography, seat belt and helmet laws, and such. It's pretty much a dream job for me, so I'm very excited.
I'm also a columnist for FoxNews.com, a regular contributor to Tech Central Station, and I run TheAgitator.com weblog. Browse a collection of my most recent writing here.
I went to Indiana University in Bloomington, where I studied journalism and political science.
