Tag: Politics World
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Sinking like a Northern Rock
The sub-prime mortgage lending bubble continues to bite back, with the news of Northern Rock’s misfortune – a temporary cash flow problem which arose because they expected the market to recover sooner than it did. Indeed – I’ve got news for you lads, the market won’t recover for a long time yet. Commentators this evening…
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The best way to win is by..declaring a truce
Moqtada al-Sadr is what we’d call a ‘cute hoor’ – we’d also call him a ‘bad bastard’ but his announcement of a 6 month truce by his Mahdi army is a smart move if he can make it stick. In the old ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ novels, it was referred to as a ‘policy of masterly inactivity’.
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Resistance to terrorism is always also an affirmation of humanism
There is a connection which I’m afraid many people do not make in this quote, from an Adam Kirsch review of the new DeLillo book in the New York Sun. It strikes me as powerful and true, and deserves to be a bumper sticker.
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The Next War 2007: Iran
The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that Bush will start a war in Iran this year in order to escape from the bunker.
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Democrats ‘win’ by 10,000 votes
Looking at the results from the US mid-terms on Wednesday, it seemed that the Democrats were going to win the Senate by the thinnest of margins – about 10,000 votes determined the result in the key polls in Montana and Virginia – but did they really win?
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Let’s not hang Saddam…
Even apart from the moral issue – the death penalty is simply wrong – there are many pragmatic reasons who sentencing Saddam Hussein to death by hanging is wrong.
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Disaster in Darfur
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that Darfur is well on the way to becoming another disaster of Rwandan proportions. The difference in this case is that although in this case everyone is willing to use the ‘G’ word, no one will actually act on it.
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Nannystate meets Minority Report
No matter how deeply ‘New Labour’ buys into the Thatcherite free market legacy, if you scratch a bit, you’ll always find the residue of Gosplan hanging about. Tony Blair has thrown out a remarkable speech about targetting future problem children prior to birth.
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Divorced from reality and owing alimony
Only a politician could be so far removed from the reality the rest of us live in to suggest, as Israeli justice minister Haim Ramon did, that the world supports his governments actions in Lebanon. It does raise questions about the language of diplomacy though.
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Boots and bodybags
Yesterday’s fighting in Bint Jbeil has brought home a harsh truth about boots on the ground in war – they come with a quota of bodybags attached.
