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,...

This week’s visit to our comrades from Pravda gives us this lengthy discussion by Robert Higgs of the implications of the Bush Administration’s re-branding efforts from the Global War on Terror to the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism. Mr. Higgs questions if Bush Administration officials can possibly be as stupid as they profess to be, that is, do they actually believe that the hearts and minds of people we are invading, bombing and torturing can possibly be won over simply because we have come up with a pithy new slogan (such as the 1962 slogan from the Coca Cola Company...

So, presumably, would one of OBL’s alleged aides, Tarik A. Hamdi, who is apparently now working for the new Iraqi government at its diplomatic facilities in neighboring Turkey. Supposedly, Hamdi provided batteries for a satellite phone used by the head Evildoer himself. Interestingly, evidence was released about Hamdi’s activities while he was living and working for an Islamic Institute in Herndon, Virginia (near the nation’s capitol). But somehow, Mr. Hamdi, regarded as a stateside contact for bin Laden and/or A.Q., was permitted to not only move around, but get a job with the new Iraqi government that we are propping...

It seems like being a blue state would be a state of mind if one’s state has any desire not to have its Air National Guard facility shuttered by the Pentagon, according to this Grey Lady piece. To demonstrate that the Pentagon’s commitment is to protect us from “threats of the present”, note that one of the facilities scheduled for mothballing (or at least, losing its main fighter contingents) is none other than Massachusetts’ Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod, which was the location from which fighters were scrambled to confront two airliners that eventually crashed into the World...

In addition to continuing carnage against American (and Iraqi) security forces, a leading Shiite militia decided to fight City Hall the old fashioned way: by deposing Baghdad’s Mayor and taking over its City Hall. My guess is 95%, if not 99%, of Iraq’s actual citizenry would rather the God damned insurgents (Saudi-sponsored foreign maniacs, Saddam-loyalist dead-enders, some Iranian-sponsored opportunists, a few plain old petty criminals…) would just stop, leave them alone, and let them get on with the business of trying to assemble some semblance of an orderly country and orderly lives. But, as we know, it doesn’t take all...