Archives for September 2008

Biden complains that his GOP rivals virtually ignored the economy in favor of snarky personal attacks. At a time when the Republican Party is forced into socialist policies in taking over two major mortgage companies to prevent a general collapse of the mortgage market, you’d think a proposal for fixing it would be more important […]

Joe Biden wants to know what exactly John McCain’s plans are for Iraq, beyond this vague claim of ‘victory.’ Iraq has approved a preliminary deal with Royal Dutch Shell to develop its natural gas fields. Shell recently pulled out of a deal to develop Iran’s much more extensive gas fields, out of fear of being […]

New Pakistani president Asaf Ali Zardari will face the challenge of a struggling economy. The stock market has lost 40% of its value since last March, currency reserves are deplete, and high energy and food costs are hitting ordinary folk hard. Aljazeera English examines the remarkable victory of Asaf Ali Zardari in Saturday’s presidential election […]

For the nine years before 2005, Asaf Ali Zardari, widower of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, was in prison facing corruption charges. On Saturday Zardari was elected president of Pakistan. Ironically, given Bush’s neoconservative agenda of democratizing the Muslim world, the most significant steps toward genuine parliamentary governance and rule of law, in Pakistan during […]

A conservative Republican woman who idolizes Margaret Thatcher decries McCain’s choice of Palin as cynical and dishonorable: ‘ In choosing a woman he doesn’t know or understand, purely for electoral advantage, he reveals a dishonourable lust for office, a disrespect for women generally and a dishonourable indifference to the future of his country. After all, […]

Russian archeologists are saying they have found the capital of the Khazar state. This largely Turkic state was multicultural, but its ruling sept converted to Judaism, which it used as the state religion. If it is borne out, this discovery will shed loads of illumination on Jewish history as well as on early medieval life […]

Reactions to Sarah Palin: Rick Steiner at Seattle P.I. slams the governor for her poor record on the environment. He says she has not taken climate change seriously, despite the thinning of the arctic ice cover; has sued Bush to stop polar bears being declared an endangered species (and lied about the scientific evidence); opposed […]

This story has been around for a week or so, alleging that Israel was planning to strike at Iran from Georgia. Arnaud de Borchgrave put it more cautiously, that the Israelis thought of their jets in Georgia as useful in case they decided to do a preemptive strike on Iran. More recently, deputy speaker of […]