Archive for February, 2011
Banned From Canadistan
On Thursday, February 24, I was denied entry to Canada. After six hours’ detention and sporadic interrogation at Vancouver airport I was escorted to the next flight to Seattle.
When 007 is caught with a smoking gun,
What do you do? The is the question that everyone should have been asking from the first news of Raymond Allen’s arrest in Pakistan three weeks ago.
Jerks on a Shopping Spree II
The adventure begins as you drive into the parking lot. In the many states where traffic laws do not extend to private property, the lot should have a large sign: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
The Tragedy of American Education
Robert E. Holloway is a high school teacher in suburban Northern Virginia. He is probably considered a decent man by his neighbors, a competent educator by his peers, and a figure of some authority by his students. He is the embodiment of much that is wrong with this country’s education system, however: a bigot, a genocide denier, and a disseminator of falsehoods.
Egypt: Steady As She Goes
Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman has announced that President Hosni Mubarak was stepping down from the office of president of the republic “and has charged the high council of the armed forces to administer the affairs of the country.” In other words, the Army has taken over. This is the least bad outcome on offer right now, and certainly not the one suggested by President Obama, Vice President Biden, or the Department of State over the past few days.
Bush’s New “Axis of Evil”
George W. Bush must have been the despair of the history department of every school his daddy managed to get him into. Consider his latest excursion into the history of the republic, at Southern Methodist, where the Great Man’s papers are to be housed.
“Finally We are Free”
The cry of the protestors in Cairo, as they greet the news of the military coup that has toppled Hosni Mubarak. What’s next? An interim government, perhaps the troika proposed by Mohammed El Baradei, with the reality of power remaining in the hands of the military. Then comes the countdown to the day when the [...]
Beware the Neocon Advocacy of Egyptian Democracy
It is essential to take William (“Bill”) Kristol seriously. He has been so utterly wrong on so many things (America’s ability to run the world, NATO, Turkey, the Balkans, Chechnya, Iraq, Sarah Palin, Russia, Iran, Georgia, John McCain, missile defense . . . ) that his pronouncements merit respect. Being consistently wrong—in the fleeting guise of things measurably empirical, that is—they contain a deeper wisdom.
Moldova: A Neo-Cold-War Battlefield
Recent developments in Moldova have placed the former Soviet republic, strategically placed at the hub of Central and Southeastern Europe’s energy corridors, at the center of Russia’s occasionally tense relations with the West. On February 7, Senator Richard Lugar, a leading NATO expansionist and Russophobic hawk, demanded that Obama put pressure on Medvedev to “solve” the issue of the Trans-Dniester region that seceded from Moldova in the early 1990s.
Jerks on a Shopping Spree
Every year on Black Friday, American shoppers brave the bad weather and go out to do battle with other shoppers in a contest that will determine who pays the least for the most stuff they are better off without. Twenty years ago, the worst these victims of modern marketing had to face was long lines, high levels of frustration, and exasperated clerks. Now, they can be assaulted by angry competitors or trampled to death by a mob of Jerks with greed in their hearts and blood in their eyes.
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