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The Washington Post this weekend ran an interesting but rather mixed-up report on the Japanese health care system and whether something like it could, or should, be adopted in America. The Japanese live longer than Americans, their health care system costs less, and they have full choice of doctors. What’s not to like?
Well, there’s this: [...]
That’s my suggested word for oblivious to irony.
An example. Republican Congressman Eric Cantor, in Israel as part of a 56-member Congressional contingent summoned by AIPAC, repeating a theme developed there to criticize US foreign policy:
“I’m very troubled by that, because I don’t think we in America would want another country telling us how to implement and execute [...]
Filed under: Foreign policy, Politics, War, World
“Mr. Treehorn draws a lot of water in this town. You don’t draw s—, Lebowski.”
–The Sheriff of Malibu, TBL
Is this where the overthrow of dollar hegemony will be said to have begun in earnest, after much throat-clearing, with Red China throwing a BRIC through the window at the IMF? Less apocalyptically, in competing with US treasuries as a safe means of global exchange, Special Drawing [...]
George Will has had sensibly critical things to say about the Iraq War for a few years now, and in his column today he extends his critique to nation building in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the half-measures he recommends for accomplishing whatever mission it is in Afghanistan that he thinks is necessary are bound to be counterproductive. [...]
The war in Afghanistan appears to have settled into the category Delbrueck called “wars of exhaustion.” If it remains there, the U.S. cannot win. The American people will become exhausted long before the Pashtun do.
In this respect America’s situation is similar to that Germany faced in World War I. Germany knew she [...]
The Guardian is reporting that “The Obama administration has moved to grant political asylum to foreign women who suffer severe physical or sexual abuse from which they are unable to escape because it is part of the culture of their own countries.” Traditionally, political asylum was just that, providing a refuge for individuals being persecuted [...]
Filed under: World
So grave was the crisis in western China that President Hu Jintao canceled a meeting with President Obama, broke off from the G8 summit and flew home.
By official count, 158 are dead, 1,080 injured and a thousand arrested in ethnic violence between Han Chinese and the Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uighurs of Xinjiang. That is the huge [...]
Filed under: Foreign policy, Immigration, Trade, World
According to the July 3 Cleveland Plain Dealer, President Barack Obama said something very interesting last week. He told the AP that he has “a very narrow definition of success when it comes to our national security interests” in Afghanistan. “And that is that al-Qaida and its affiliates cannot set up safe havens from which [...]
President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger were realists in their approach to foreign relations, realism meaning analysis of the power relations among major nations in the world and addressing them, and trying to deal with them according to the American national interest. The following episodes belong in the history of the [...]
Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race has finally, mercifully come to an end. The Minnesota Supreme Court voted unanimously to reject Norm Coleman’s court challenge which means Al Franken is the winner by a little over 330 votes.
Lincoln-Douglas this U.S Senate campaign definitely was not and serves well as an example to why the 17th Amendament needs [...]
Filed under: Election, Foreign policy, World