 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Actually, looking at the map of my upcoming summer sojourn, it will be more of a katabasis, as I will be heading down south to my home country, New Mexico, and my folks’ soon-to-be new place in central Texas, but then Xenophon’s journey was mostly a katabasis, too. Happily, my trek will not involve […]
No Comments »
Filed under: miscellaneous
I’m beginning to think maybe God is watching over America. We are blessed with leaders — well, mainly one leader — so clueless, or perhaps so challenged in various ways that he can’t bring himself to do what he needs to do to save his unwise policies from rejection by the people.
Dubya simply had to […]
No Comments »
Filed under: politics
As Iraqis make progress toward a free society, the effects are being felt beyond Iraq’s borders. Before our coalition liberated Iraq, Libya was secretly pursuing nuclear weapons. Today the leader of Libya has given up his chemical and nuclear weapons programs. Across the broader Middle East, people are claiming their freedom. In the last few […]
No Comments »
Filed under: politics
The ABC News/Washington Post poll showed that 51 percent of Americans disapprove of the two-term president’s overall performance, with 40 percent strongly disapproving.
Comparatively, former president Bill Clinton’s highest strong disapproval rating peaked at 33 percent in 1994, while the strong disapproval rating for Bush’s father George H.W. Bush reached 34 percent in 1992, according to […]
No Comments »
Filed under: Uncategorized
Most Americans now believe that President George W. Bush’s administration “intentionally misled” the public in going to war in Iraq, according to a poll.
The ABC News/Washington Post poll came on the eve of a key speech in which Bush will seek public support for the war, which 53 percent of […]
No Comments »
Filed under: politics
In his radio address on Saturday, Bush warned that there is likely to be more tough fighting to come in Iraq. And, as he did in his meeting at the White House Friday with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Bush urged Americans to share their confidence in a positive outcome to the war.
“The Iraqi people […]
No Comments »
Filed under: politics
The toll has been tremendous, according to the AP count: From April 28 through June 23, there were at least 161 vehicle bombings that killed at least 586 people and wounded at least 1,747.
In total, for the year from the handover of sovereignty on June 28, 2004, until June 23, 2005, there were at least […]
No Comments »
Filed under: politics
The hardline Tehran mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sweeping toward a stunning presidential election victory over the former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, officials said early this morning.
“Ahmadinejad is well ahead and it seems he is the winner,” said an Interior Ministry official, who declined to be named. “Poor provinces have voted massively for Ahmadinejad.”
An […]
No Comments »
Filed under: politics
Beset by fading public support for the war and growing violence on the ground, President George Bush flatly rejected any timetable for troop withdrawal from Iraq, vowing the United States would stay until the insurgency was defeated and democracy had been established.
“This is a time of testing, a critical time,” Mr Bush acknowledged yesterday after […]
No Comments »
Filed under: politics
Rejecting pleas by homeowners fighting to keep their properties, the Supreme Court on Thursday said local governments could condemn a person’s home or business so the sites could be redeveloped for more lucrative uses. ~Chicago Tribune
The Tribune’s phrasing of the first sentence captures the matter surprisingly well for a modern piece of journalistic writing. […]
No Comments »
Filed under: politics
Rejecting pleas by homeowners fighting to keep their properties, the Supreme Court on Thursday said local governments could condemn a person’s home or business so the sites could be redeveloped for more lucrative uses.
In a 5-4 decision written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the court said the Constitution permits governments to condemn a person’s property, […]
No Comments »
Filed under: politics
A key Foreign Office diplomat responsible for liaising with UN inspectors says today that claims the government made about Iraq’s weapons programme were “totally implausible”.
He tells the Guardian: “I’d read the intelligence on WMD for four and a half years, and there’s no way that it could sustain the case that the government was presenting. […]
No Comments »
Filed under: politics
Indeed, the entire life of the Church as the theanrthopic Body of Christ lies in this truth. It is in the Church that humanity is united to divinity, since it is the body of Christ that was raised to the right hand of the Father. It is in the Church that the Holy Spirit breathes […]
1 Comment »
Filed under: religion
A bipartisan group of House lawmakers introduced a measure that would require President George W. Bush to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq no later than October 2006.
Republican Representatives Walter Jones of North Carolina and Ron Paul of Texas joined Democratic Representatives Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii in sponsoring the […]
No Comments »
Filed under: politics
The haggard patient heaves himself into a sitting position and, with painful slowness, takes a little gruel, swallowing the disgusting pap with difficulty. He who until recently was consuming rare beef and good red wine smiles wanly at this minor, toothless triumph. The relatives around the bed exclaim with forced delight how well he has […]
No Comments »
Filed under: politics
Laws authorizing a guardian to starve to death a ward are profoundly immoral, even as applied to those who would have wanted to die; we do not accommodate suicides. But in hundreds of cases around the country every year, such laws are enforced, and hundreds of people die like Terri Schiavo. The only extraordinary thing […]
3 Comments »
Filed under: politics
According to Americans United’s well-documented 14-page report [.pdf], the problem is not that evangelicals haven’t been able to speak about their religious beliefs; the problem is that cadets who aren’t evangelical Christians, and have no interest in converting, were dive-bombed by religious propaganda intended to convert them to the faith.
In 2004, when Mel Gibson’s […]
No Comments »
Filed under: politics
To conclude: Democracy has two faces—one is the face of Aristotle and Jefferson, a completely decentralized system in which power is exercised at the lowest possible level and is subject to law and tradition. As Aristotle noted, any democracy in which the will of the people takes precedence over law and tradition is only another […]
No Comments »
Filed under: Uncategorized
By late afternoon May 13, talks had stalled between Uzbekistan authorities and armed demonstrators inside a government building in Andijan. Speaking by phone to the gunmen, a top law-enforcement official used an Uzbek proverb to foretell the government’s next move:
“Your eyes will soon see what befalls you.”
Shortly afterward, gun-mounted armored personnel carriers raced up to […]
No Comments »
Filed under: Uncategorized
Nearly six in 10 Americans say the United States should withdraw some or all of its troops from Iraq, a new Gallup Poll finds, the most downbeat view of the war since it began in 2003.
Patience for the war has dropped sharply as optimism about the Iraqi elections in January has ebbed and violence against […]
No Comments »
Filed under: politics
Three historical topics make most modern conservatives terribly uncomfortable: the Civil War, the civil rights movement and WWII. They are uncomfortable because all their principles and their instincts tell them that the outcome of these events in American history were, in one way or another, ruinous for the Republic and the country that they […]
2 Comments »
Filed under: history
None of this was inevitable. If the horrors of the Napoleonic wars had remained fresh in people’s minds – rather than having conquests glorified by “progressives” – and if the laissez faire policies of Richard Cobden and John Bright had been continued, there never would have been a world war. Maintaining a separation of the […]
No Comments »
Filed under: history
After arriving a few days later in Washington, and reading neoconservative op-ed commentaries and watching the pundits on Fox News television, I had no choice but to conclude that the anti-EU Constitution votes in France and Holland were nothing less than a great victory for the United States.
Of course, many of the American foreign policy […]
No Comments »
Filed under: politics
In May, the Bush economy eked out a paltry 73,000 private sector jobs: 20,000 jobs in construction (primarily for Mexican immigrants), 21,000 jobs in wholesale and retail trade, and 32,500 jobs in health care and social assistance. Local government added 5,000 for a grand total of 78,000.
Not a single one of these jobs produces […]
No Comments »
Filed under: economics
The United States has come under fresh international pressure to close its military base in Uzbekistan and drop the country’s President as a strategic ally after Human Rights Watch released a damning report into the recent Andijan massacre.
The New-York based human rights organisation said its investigation into the events of 13 May left it in […]
No Comments »
Filed under: politics