The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Jim Crow Stories . Democratic Party | PBS “The South remained a one-party region until the Civil Rights movement began in the 1960s. Northern Democrats, most of whom had prejudicial attitudes towards blacks, offered no challenge to the discriminatory policies of the Southern Democrats.” Clearly the Democratic party is now the more tolerant party. When did it change?
UPI has compiled a list of the nationalities of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay from analysis of multiple news sources. The results: almost half the foreigners taken from Afghanistan were from the Arabian peninsula (160 from Saudi Arabia, 253, from the Arabian peninsula as a whole), less than 0.2% were from Iraq and there are more Brits than from any other European country. Going to war with Iraq, meant that you removed a tyrant and had control over almost exactly the same oil reserves (Iraq plus Kuwait) as Saudi Arabia. This would mean that you could tighten the screws there, or be covered if there were a revolution, without drying up the pipeline of oil. Playing hardball with Saudi directly would not have been possible. Just a thought. Saudi Arabia 160 Yemen 85 Pakistan 82 Afghanistan 80 Jordan 30 Egypt 30 Algeria 19 Morocco 18 Kuwait 12 China 12 Tajikistan 11…
The head of the BBC resigned over exactly the same allegation that the Independent makes today. So either the Independent is guilty of far worse than the charges levelled at the BBC, under which circumstances one would expect a gagging order – or – the BBC had covered the truth but couldn’t prove it.
“[I]ntelligence-gathering, like reporting, is an imperfect business”. After years of hide and seek with Saddam Hussein one might have some sympathy with intelligence services that may have made mistakes about WMD, particularly when interpretations of findings would naturally filter, like a game of telephone, to reflect what governments wanted to hear, as documents moved up the food chain. Sympathy for intelligence gatherers and reporters alike might also be needed for the usually bullet proof Bair. Just when he was riding high on the outcome of the Hutton report and a critical government vote, came the bolt. Blair’s accidental betrayal came from his main ally over WMD
I like America and I like France, and I am always amazed at how much the stereotypical view of one country persists in people from the other. Is France a totalitarian state barring individuality and commerce and is America a cultural desert of fast food and strip malls? No, France doesn’t look like Eastern Europe during the cold war, it functions much like America. Contrary to popular perception, the Socialists lost power in France years ago and the current government is to the right. Sure, France needs to take major steps to encourage more enterprise, but the popularity of French libertarian, Sabine Herold shouldn’t be a surprise (according to Jeff Jarvis, P.J. O’Rourke has some good insight here!). French stores are full of things to buy, with neon signs and billboard advertising and the world’s biggest retail chain after Walmart is French. Likewise, America is the cultural center of the…
Although the US has received most of the flak for not ratifying the Kyoto treaty, it is Russia that has effectively buried it. “Russia said it would not ratify the Kyoto protocol, the world treaty on global warming. Russian ratification is necessary for the treaty to take effect.” Kyoto treaty
“The mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only two cities in the world to have suffered atomic bombings, blasted Russia on Friday over its plan to consider restricted use of nuclear weapons to deal with regional conflicts and international terrorism” Japan Today-Hiroshima, Nagasaki mayors protest Russia nuke plan
Glenn Reynolds has missed the big picture in the latest events in the Hutton enquiry when he says: “Things just get worse for the British Broadcasting Corp., as the initial claim that Tony Blair’s government ‘sexed up an intelligence dossier about Iraq has exploded, and revealed a miserable tissue of lies and shoddiness at the BBC. “ Yesterday was a bad day for the BBC in an enquiry which has hurt both the BBC and the government in a game of political ping pong. Glenn either hasn’t been following the Hutton enquiry or is grinding a big axe.
Salam Pax attends the Hutton enquiry in London. “What I really don’t understand is the fixation on the 45 minutes. I mean, what does it matter whether it was 45 or a 100? The real question is whether Saddam had WMDs or not. Because that, in the end, was the main selling-point of the war.” This, of course, states the obvious, but UK politics are Byzantine
The Democracy Index measures how democratic individual US states are based upon variables such as seats-to-votes ratios. Is there such a measure anywhere for countries? This could be tallied with foreign trade, international aid receipts or donations and local subsidies to quantitatively measure an ‘ally’ (i.e. how much a country puts its money where its mouth is) and create a ‘Global Ally of Democracy’ index. If a country is both highly democratic and favors aid and trade to other countries which are also highly democratic without imposing tariffs or subsidizing domestic production then it would score highly as a Global Ally of Democracy.
Martin Walker suggests that coalition hand-outs over the rebuilding of Iraq will be worthless since it now looks like it will cost more to rebuild than near term oil revenue. Instead, he argues that France will need something else, and that the US will agree to keep quiet over French agricultural subsidies at the upcoming WTO summit in Washington.
The Moonie owned Washington Times reports: British asylum problem ‘out of control’ The source of this is a poll carried out by Britain’s most popular newspaper, the Sun (same owner as Fox), which has been using misleading information to whip up paranoia about immigrants. Subsequent to a propaganda campaign against asylum seekers, the Sun conducted a poll which showed that a majority of readers thought that immigration was the most important political issue, four times more than those who thought that the