Month: November 2008

Pope Benedict XVI gives his weekly general audience on November 19, 2008 at St Peter’s Square at the Vatican. By Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty.

"This last point is the one that gnaws. Thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds have been expended to provide Iraqis the opportunity to live freely. And this despite the facts that (a) the U.S. interest in Iraqi democracy remains tenuous (our interest was the elimination of Saddam’s terror-mongering, weapons-proliferating regime), and (b) Americans were assured, when the nation-building enterprise commenced, that oil-rich Iraq would underwrite our sacrifices on its behalf. Yet, to be blunt, the Iraqis remain ingrates. That stubborn fact complicates everything." – Andy McCarthy, NRO.

Churchill said the same: an "ungrateful volcano". And the Brits were stuck there for decades.

First Read reports:

McCain is setting up a PAC, which some are seeing as a first step for McCain in running for re-election in 2010. And/but sources tell Roll Call that McCain has made clear his intention to run for re-election when his Senate term is up in 2010. "McCain, 72, announced the decision during a meeting Tuesday evening with top ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), advisers Rick Davis, Charlie Black, Carla Eudy and other aides."

Yglesias is slightly puzzled.

Bitter much? I have a great deal of respect and admiration for Steele’s work. But he cannot let go. He needs to grasp that he helped make Obama possible. And instead of constantly venting, he should own it, and feel proud.

Buddhist monks from Thailand’s Sisaket province built the Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple out of a million green Heineken and local brown beer bottles.

The undisputed star of the election just had a marvelous run-in with one John Ziegler. The Atlantic, with our customary prescience, profiled Ziegler three years ago. Even better, the profile was by the late David Foster Wallace. Money quote:

KFI’s John Ziegler is not a journalist—he is an entertainer. Or maybe it’s better to say that he is part of a peculiar, modern, and very popular type of news industry, one that manages to enjoy the authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved. It is a frightening industry, though not for any of the simple reasons most critics give.

… sues author:

Claiming that he has been unfairly branded a "douchebag" in the book "Hot Chicks with Douchebags," a Las Vegas man has filed a libel lawsuit against the volume’s author and publisher. Michael Minelli, a 27-year-old club promoter, claims that the inclusion of his photograph in the book has subjected him to "hatred, contempt, and humiliation" and has resulted in "friends, acquaintances, coworkers, employees, and strangers alike" calling him a "douchebag."

K-Lo’s latest:

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It is simply inarguable that the Bush administration has authorized torture. There is no factual or empirical doubt about this. But Perino is required to utter untruths that reflect merely her boss’s psychological denial of his own crimes rather than anything that could be faintly deemed reality.

Dean Baker argues progressives should be friendlier to true deregulation:

"In fact, progressives very often get the story quite wrong in characterizing issues as "government versus market." Certainly the current financial crisis provides an obvious example of such confusion. No one was really pushing for "deregulation" in the sense of getting the government completely out of the market. The financial industry’s agenda was to get one-sided deregulation. They wanted to preserve the government security blanket of "too big to fail," while removing prudential controls that limited their ability to take on risk. In effect, what the financial industry wanted (and got) was government insurance that they didn’t have to pay for. This surely is not the libertarian agenda; this is the agenda of a politically powerful industry (with allies in both major parties) that will get everything it can out of Washington."