I'm not actually a big Dylan fan, but that was all I could think of for a title.
* Britney Spears' short-lived marriage, aside from being immensely entertaining to most of us, has dramatically recast the discussion over gay marriage/civil unions. To conservatives not obsessed with homosexuality, gays now look like less of a threat to traditional marriage than poor Britney. It's really a cultural phenomenon that a sweet Southern Baptist like Little Boo gets blamed for so much!
* New reports this past week about the absence of WMDs in Iraq. Some commentators are starting to express open exasperation that Administration spokespeople still keep up the pretense that we are still looking for them.
* Business analysts looking at the Bush Administration's Argentina-like borrow-and-spend fiscal management are starting to worry whether the sharp but steady slide in the dollar could turn into a nasty rout.
* Bush's political strategists are trying to change the subject of national politics from Iraq to an immigration policy they have no intention of enacting and an expanded space program they have no intention of funding. The Democrats tried something similar in the 2002 Congressional elections. (Reality check: there are probably some pork-barrel contracts for aerospace firms involved in the space-program idea.)
* Another orange alert has now come and gone. Did it accomplish anything (other than make local government deficits a bit worse)? Did we nail any terrorists? Does anyone know whether it was justified?
* It seems that more people are starting to realize that Colin Powell is more of a pathetic yes-man that the in-house champion of "realist" foreign policies in the Bush Administration. Cyrus Vance resigned as Secretary of State in 1980 when he strongly disagreed with a major policy decision of Jimmy Carter's. Did any senior Bush Administration official even consider resigning when they were asked to justify invading a country, going to war and killing people based on cooked intelligence claims about WMD?
2 comments:
Re: Orange Alert. I'm conflicted on these. On the one hand, when intelligence indicates a lot of "noise" out there, I'd like to know. Yet, knowing doesn't allow me to really do anything except be more alert. On the other hand, if something did happen, and I hadn't been warned, it wouldn't set well with me. It's always easy in hind sight to say, "Nothing happened so we shouldn't have had an alert." Possibly, the alert helped prevent something. But we'll never really know. It's a messy situation.
I saw that the orange alert was left in effect in at least a couple of locations. A targeted approach like that makes more sense to me. Because most local emergency responders have particular requirements for higher staffing coverage and different procedures during hightened alert, so there is a real cost involved. And there's also a "boy who cried wolf" problem if the alerts are always as vague as what we've seen so far. - Bruce
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