On the occasion of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s visit to fellow pain-in-the-ass leader Fidel Castro of Cuba, some words of welcome from televangelist Pat Robertson, who called for Chavez’s murder. No, for those of you not aware of this leading story of the blogosphere, Pat Robertson, a guy who told us that God brought 9-11 upon us because we just has too many faggots, and a leading figure in the Republican Party (note the nice try by the White House to distance themselves from this homicidal psychopath)… Pat Robertson, one of the most watched and influential of the hard-ass Christian...

The Iraqi National Assembly decided to respond to U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad the way many of my classmates back at dear old Columbia did when he taught political science there: cram for a few nights in a row, and declare the paper finished whether it is or not. In this case, its not finished, of course; the Iraqi politicians needed to say it was finished in order to buy three more days to make it look pretty (which right now it does not, what with an alliance of Kurds and Shia more or less cutting the Sunnis out, just to...

As the price of oil (as measured by the cost of my filling up the tank of the TD-station wagon) hits a new record ($34.00, at $2.99 per gallon at the local self-service), and oil is in the mid $60’s/bbl., it’s a pretty good time to take a look at this lengthy article by Peter Maass of the Grey Lady‘s Sunday Magazine on whether we have reached “peak oil”. It’s a fascinating article: Maass speaks with many in the oil-patch, including Saudis, and we have an interesting discussion of a phenomenon that dare not speak its name. That is, Saudi...

The U.S. Navy hasn’t used that particular tagline for a while; my favorite Navy ad remains one I saw on a billboard over the Brooklyn Queens Expressway which appeared shortly after 9-11 (and well before our invasion of Iraq), and then not much thereafter, i.e. “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of those who threaten them.” In any event, we’re back to the adventure part as some maniacs fired katyusha rockets (the kind favored by Palestinians lobbing things at Israel) over two U.S. Navy vessels docked at Aqaba, Jordan. For good measure, they managed to kill one Jordanian soldier and seriously...

Evidently, American heavy-handedness regarding the International Criminal Court has had another effect: resentment of nations in the Americas because we have reduced aid packages to them in petty retaliation for refusing to grant Americans blanket immunity from the I.C.C. This is reminiscent of all that good will we got by cutting out countries not members of the “Coalition of the Billing” from bidding on Iraqi reconstruction contracts. In the case of the I.C.C. aid cut-offs, however, it jeopardizes relationships with nations that help us battle things like, oh, drug trafficking and terrorism. Worse, it creates a vacuum where our strategic…...

While the President blames trial lawyers for just about everything from terrorism to poverty to high health care costs to the heartbreak of psoriasis, because, for no other reason, the American Trial Lawyers’ Association is the second most loyal donors to the Democratic Party coffers (behind the schoolteachers of the National Education Association), statistics come out showing that, in fact, tort trials are down over 80% in the nation’s federal courts. While there are a lot of explanations for this, such as the Supreme Court’s ruling in Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals (Daubert is designed to permit a federal judge...

I thought that slogan of the Microsoft company might be appropriate to the story about a world-wide worm attack on computers running Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system, but, alas, the tag-line seems even more appropriate for this horror show of today, a bus station bombing in Baghdad that has resulted in at least 43 deaths. Of course, both stories kind of come down to the same two word phrase: American arrogance. Microsoft has gone on to be the biggest success story in American financial history not by giving the world a better product, but by being an aggressive monopolist (occasionally...

This just in: the Iraqi parliament has failed to meet the August 15th deadline to adopt a proposed constitution, voting instead to give itself another week to reach a draft accord. Dog Run Member and regional expert Professor Juan Cole asserts, based on, you know, the interim Iraqi law we stage-managed, that the failure to adopt the constitution on time should result in the dissolution of parliament. Americans, not living in a parliamentary system, might not be sure what that means. But everyone else does: new elections. Which, in the case of Iraq, mean another national lockdown, and, if we...

And so its on… Israel’s absolutely unilateral, absolutely unconditional pullout from the Gaza Strip… David Kuttab writing in the Jerusalem Post gives us this observation of the utter confusion among Palestinian national leaders as to how to react. While some (like Hamas, for example) advocate a raucus celebration of successful resistance to “the Zionist Entity”, others realize (rightly) that Israel will likely dig in even harder on the other “drop dead” issues to Palestinians, i.e., the West Bank and Jerusalem. I don’t know how to break this: but this doesn’t have to be a zero sum game. Israel (and the...

It’s a mad, mad, mad world… so a few disparate links drawn from the front page of our comrades’ in Beijing’s house organ People’s Daily: first, this lamentation from the PRC on the occasion of the assassination of the Sri Lankan Foreign Minister in Colombo (naturally, Tamil separatists are suspected). Then, we have this, proposing to shoot down Taiwan’s bid for a U.N. seat before it manages to get anywhere… We get this discussion of an American-born Chinese industrialist, who laments American waste and proposes that China develop a “recycling based” economy; and this prediction for strong, if not brilliant,...