Links June 5 09 – Moon of Alabama

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June 5, 2009

Links June 5 09

Whither Pakistan? A five-year forecast Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – Good overview of Pakistan's past, present and future.
Bring it Aoun The National – Portrait of the Lebanese General Michel Aoun.
Meshaal on Obama speech: Good, but– Helena Cobban – Interview with Hamas' political bureau chief.
Neocons for Ahmadinejad LobeLog.com – Daniel Pipes votes.

Report: US to go for own sanctions on NKorea AP – China would not play, so the U.S. again goes it alone.
West miscasts Tiananmen protesters FT – The demonstrations were not 'pro-democracy'.

UK government heads towards cliff edge FT
The half-dead prime minister Guardian – The Gordon Brown zombie.

The Bond War Slate – Inflation, defaltion: The discussion continues.
Plan to Help Banks Clear Their Books Is Halted NYT – PPIP and TALF a too obvious fraud, dead.
Keeping Them Honest Krugman/NYT – Why health care reform needs a public insurance option.
The con is on: how carbon credits neuter Cap & Trade Mavercon/FT.

Please add your links, views and news in the comments.

Posted by b on June 5, 2009 at 05:34 UTC | Permalink

Comments

b) you’re getting like Huffington, a hard act to follow, or a hard to follow act?
Here, listen to this financial minister from Singapore. It’s down to who survives:
http://www.pressrun.net/weblog/2009/05/economics-101-by-singapores-finance-minister.html

Posted by: Risck Reprise | Jun 5 2009 5:48 utc | 1

Our Senators are happily pouring more billions of our last remaining life savings into “Transportation Safety Inspectors”, having found that TSA has so many agents now they’re cluttering up every corner in every air terminal, laughing and joking
with their squawk radios ready to hoot, “Grab that guy going back to the terminal!” I actually saw two TSA thugs haul off a businessman who turned around in mid-terminal because he lost his cell phone, other TSA agents shouting, “Move towards the exits, move towards the exits” to all the arriving passengers.
Now they’ll have hundreds of additional “inspectors” walking up to you and putting
their hands on your heart (even women’s chests) to see if you’re ‘biometrically stressed’ and profiled as a ‘trouble maker in their facial recognition spy cams.
Tell you what, if a dink TSA inspector comes up to me and puts his hand on my chest I will take him/her down the way I’ve been trained, and they won’t be returning to work anytime soon. Everywhere, every airport, bus terminal, train terminal, all over America will be crawling with TSAs maggots, feeling you up.
At least in China, they wear white gloves when they shove you into the boxcars!
This was all predicted in 2005:
http://deconsumption.typepad.com/deconsumption/2005/03/the_most_import.html
Nice:
http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/06/how_to_keep_the_us_from_turning_into_the_soviet_union.php
More TSA agents!!!!!!!!

Posted by: TS Elliot | Jun 5 2009 6:50 utc | 2

Anybody want to laugh at the team blowing out of the ADL’s Abe Foxman’s ears?
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-domestic5-2009jun05,0,6200838.story
Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti- Defamation League and one of America’s most ardent Israel supporters, said Obama’s remark that Jewish aspirations for a homeland were “rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied” was incorrect and “legitimizes the Arabs who say Israel has no place there.”
Foxman said that Obama’s views — among them seeing lessons for Palestinians in the struggles of oppressed blacks and others with a moral high ground — stem from his biography. “Every individual brings his own baggage,” Foxman said. “He’s an African American . . . and he has rediscovered his Islamic roots after two years. I don’t like it, but I understand it.”

Posted by: Arnold Evans | Jun 5 2009 7:37 utc | 3

Browns cabinet is quickly falling apart: British Defense Secretary Resigns

LONDON – British Defence Secretary John Hutton resigned from the government June 5. Family reasons are believed to be behind his departure, although a statement issued Hutton declined to go into specific reasons for leaving.

Posted by: b | Jun 5 2009 11:13 utc | 4

Very good article on Pakistan, thanks for the link. It’s hard to find much about that country’s situation which isn’t biased or alarmist.
One thing I find a bit hard to understand is the characterization of Pakistan as “probably the most anti-American” country. Wouldn’t Iran be much, much more so?

Posted by: Peter | Jun 5 2009 16:41 utc | 5

@Peter – no the Iranian people are quite pro-American – if only the U.S. would open up…
They do not like Brits and Saudis though.

Posted by: b | Jun 5 2009 17:08 utc | 6

there is a sublime irony in Barack Obama forcing Angela Merkel to give a – strange – speech full of historic holes – in Buchenwald concentration camp
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=news-000003136262
for those who do not know what Buchenwald really was, because the MSM does not tell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchenwald
and – a survivor who does not seem to have been invited
http://www.zeit.de/2009/24/Ueberlebender

Posted by: outsider | Jun 5 2009 17:22 utc | 7

@outsider – yep – the MSN will certainly not tell the Buchenwald story. There were hardly any Jews at that camp. German anarchists and communists most of them, later a lot of east European folks and Soviet POWs (many of whom were killed at arrival). After the war the Soviets took over and imprisoned (again) German anarchists and non-Stalinist communists plus some half baked Nazis. The kill ratio under the Soviets in that camp was about as high as under the Nazis.

Posted by: b | Jun 5 2009 18:02 utc | 8

Notice how elitists like Niall Ferguson wait until after we’ve finished spending billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars shoring up our banking system and just as we’re about to spend lots of federal dollars to shore up our schools and health care system before going on a fear-mongering crusade about how Washington’s huge spending spree is causing inflation to rise to dangerous levels. This goes to show that people like Niall Ferguson are in favor giving out federal handouts, only if they are given to the financial elites of our country.

Posted by: Cynthia | Jun 5 2009 18:49 utc | 9

California firebug gets the death sentence

Posted by: Obelix | Jun 5 2009 19:22 utc | 10

Aha! We NOW know the reason behind the crash!

The Airbus telex has revived a long-standing debate among pilots over whether the Airbus planes are overly complex.
More than 300 aircraft similar to the missing Air France jet are in service worldwide.
Investigators do not know if Flight AF447 was travelling at an incorrect speed as it crossed a storm cluster.
An aviation expert, who declined to be named, said the plane’s airspeed sensors, called pitot tubes, work on air pressure and might provide incorrect readings if they get obstructed by objects such as ice.

Posted by: D. Mathews | Jun 5 2009 22:35 utc | 11

Ex-U.S. State official, wife face Cuba spy charges

A former U.S. State Department official and his wife have been arrested for spying for the Cuban government for nearly 30 years, the Justice Department said on Friday.
Walter Kendall Myers, 72, aided by his wife Gwendolyn Myers, 71, used his Top Secret security clearance to pass on classified information to the Cuban government and at one point met with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, according to court documents…
They face up to 35 years in prison. The two pleaded not guilty and will be held until a detention hearing on Wednesday, a Justice Department official said.

So, if convicted, he’ll be 107 when he gets out?

Posted by: Obelix | Jun 6 2009 2:30 utc | 12

The spying for Cuba sounds very similar to spying for Israel. However for the one you get 35 years, and for the other you get let off.

Posted by: alex_no | Jun 6 2009 4:17 utc | 13

my brother showed me this little comedic gem. enjoy. Henry Rollins writes letter to Ann Coulter

Posted by: Lizard | Jun 6 2009 6:21 utc | 14

@11 – that is a fine piece of propaganda quoting a Boeing pilot on the “complexity” of an Airbus plane.

Posted by: b | Jun 6 2009 8:35 utc | 15

Maybe George Will is right in saying that the green bubble has already burst, leaving the green industry in a bubble-less state. But since very few people are making a living by greening the world with even fewer of them making a killing at it, the fallout from this will be so negligible that it would only appear as a mere blip on the radar which tracks the making and breaking of bubbles throughout the global economy. The same thing can’t be said about the bubbles forming to their fullest in both health care and higher education, making them fully ripe for a bursting.
Unlike the green industry, the health-care and higher-ed industries employ lots of people, many of which are pulling down 6 to 7 figures a year. And unlike the cost of green technologies, the cost of health care and higher ed are outpacing inflation by a long shot. So when the health-care and higher-ed bubbles do hit the fan and burst (and I predict they’ll soon do this back-to-back, if not simultaneously), the fallout from this will be enormous. But I, for one, am kinda looking forward to the day when the cost of health care and higher ed is more in line with the cost of, say, buying a cart full of markdowns at WalMart.;~)

Posted by: Cynthia | Jun 6 2009 15:24 utc | 16

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