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POPSWhy America Will Survive George W. Bush Otto von Bismarck saw how American blunders led to American power and allegedly said that God has a special providence for drunks, fools, and the United States of America. Walter Russell Mead (of the Council on Foreign Relations) puts Bush's 8-year stint in the White House into proper perspective. America's foreign policy has been short-sighted and often self-defeating from the get-go, alternately collaborative, passive, and interventionist. And, yet, miraculously, we always come out ahead. With the unstoppable rise of a global capitalist economy, Mead makes the case that America, for all its past and current faults, will continue to be the inevitable leader of this new international buoyancy. Not even our latest mistakes (unprecedented though they may be) can derail such a powerful incentive that is the modern American world trade system. Which means, more than ever, we're literally all in this together.
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POPSIs the Search for Aliens a Good Idea? One thing is clear from our searches for ET - there is nobody transmitting strong interstellar beacons in our local vicinity. If "they" are out there, they are keeping quiet, prompting the question that they might know something we don't. Listening for transmissions from space is rational; intentionally announcing our presence to unknown civilizations borders on irresponsible. On Earth, radio technology and nuclear weapons were invented within only 50 years of each other. Any civilization with the capability to receive and understand our beacons will likely have figured out worse. Humans are bad enough at co-existing as it is without near constant war. Could you imagine being forced to enter foreign policy negotiations with another species like our own? It would be calamitous.
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POPSWrong Woman; Wrong Message Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, "I still can't answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?" When asked about Iraq, she said, "I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq."
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POPSHoly Warriers Set Sights on Iran Check out some of our fellow clipper's comments: "Willhelm, there is no stopping this war. The players are all falling into place. At least we know how it will end." "i agree this could be the final piece to the beginning of armagaddon" "but in the book of revelation and some other books in the new and old testament percieve the bear of the North or the great bear as Russia! Russia is in no way to be taken lightly."
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POPSIsrael gives its American sugar-daddy the finger The Israeli settlements are built on illegally occupied Palestinian land. Plain & simple. If it's illegal to start with, why should a settlement be allowed to grow naturally? The Occupied Territories are not part of Israel, they are conquered land. Palestinian land. And international law forbids military occupiers to colonize foreign territory. This the the basic fact that The Israel Lobby 's propaganda campaigns aims to obscure. This is what all those UN resolutions condemning Israel and their brutal Apartheid (the ones the US AUTOMATICALLY blocks) are about. The settlements, and the illegal colonists who live in them, have to go. And don't get started on the "This is the land God promised to us" bullshit. Go ask God for billions of dollars a year, not the American Taxpayer.
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POPSThe Answer Terrifies Them Foreign terrorism against Americans would disappear along with the need for a "war on terror." Civil liberties that were suspended could be restored. A sense of balance and harmony could return to our lives. Ending interventionism would mean that the era of big government in foreign affairs could be brought to an end.
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POPSCensorship in American Universities: Harvard But is it anti-Semitic to ask why the Palestinians should pay the price for the ghastly crime of the Germans? Why were the property rights of the German perpetrators sacrosanct and those of the guiltless Palestinians adjudged an acceptable casualty? In U.S. foreign policy, not all racial groups are guaranteed the same rights and protections. Otherwise, why does the U.S. rightly defend Jewish people’s claims on EU bank accounts, property, and compensation for labour expropriated during the 1930s and 1940s, while quashing the rights of millions of Palestinians refugees to lands, houses, and goods stolen as a condition of Israel’s founding in the late 1940s? As a nation we seem unconscious of the hypocrisy. The convention that persecuted Europeans had the right to safe havens on lands stolen from non-EU was, by the mid-20th century, as outmoded as the Confederacy’s defence of slavery in the mid-19th. ...Harvard Crimson
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POPSPalin, aside from being a woman... Obviously a lot has been said about the fact that McCain picked a woman as his VP. That is no doubt an interesting fact that can be interpreted in a few different ways. But putting that aside, i think the facts that matter most are those in this clip. These come from a comment by debbyski and i think they represent the reasons people will or won't support her. I would certainly be shocked if anyone who voted for Hillary would support Palin based on these specific differences in beliefs and policies.
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POPSWhat percent of US budget goes to foreign aid? Most Americans drastically over-estimate it. Despite laudable recent increases in US giving to poverty, US aid as a percent of personal income is second to last among wealthy nations; most of that doesn't go to the poorest countries. We give about 25 cents per American per day ] day in foreign aid; with private giving, another dime. It's a lot, because there are a lot of us. But it's far behind the level of sacrifice made by people in most developed nations.
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POPSMcCain's plan to kill the UN The article is hilarious in it's bias, though in fairness I do not think the writer pretends to be neutral. Still, it is so petty and outlandish in it's assertions. That said, I think this dude his given me a reason to vote for John McCain.
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POPSStudy Of Countries I do not claim that sites such as this are the be all and end all of research regarding any given country. But still they are fairly comprehensive. If any given country or nation intrigues you then I recommend further research. If this site creates a even greater thirst for knowledge then I will have done something useful.
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POPSI now have foriegn experience similar to Palin's
So, in order to get a grasp of Sarah Palin’s impressive foreign policy experience, particularly her unique perspective on Russia, I decided to visit Google Images and take a look at some pictures of Russia. Incredible how seeing what a place looks like from afar can enhance your understanding of their strategic place in the world and prepare you to deal with them in international affairs. Honestly, after taking a hard look at these pictures, and realizing that Sarah Palin has actually seen Russia from miles away with her own eyes, I feel entirely confident that she has the proper experience and expertise necessary to be President. In fact, I’m thinking that Russia must be shaking in their boots at the prospects of someone with such a unique perspective on their landscape being in the White House. You know what, this has me thinking that maybe i could be President. I’ve started a business, I take my daughter to soccer practice (I guess that would make me a soccer dude) and I
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POPSUS No.1 BoogieMan? A bantam Cock? Worth WAR?
"The right has decided it is at war with Iran, so a routine visit by Iran's ceremonial president to the UN GA has generated sparks. The foremost cheerleader for such a view in Congress is Sen Lieberman, who recently pressed Gen. Petraeus on the desirability of bombing Iran in order to forestall weapons smuggling into Iraq from that country. American hawks are beating the war drums loudly because they are increasingly frustrated with the course of events. They are unsatisfied with the lack of enthusiasm among the EU and UN for impeding Tehran's nuclear energy research program. While the Bush administration insists that the program aims at producing a bomb, the Iranian state maintains that it is for peaceful energy purposes. It wants tighter sanctions on Iran at the UN but is unlikely to get them in the short term because of Russian and Chinese reluctance. They may attempt to create a "coalition of the willing" of Iran boycotters outside the UN framework."
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POPSForecasts for the 25 Years... From the page: "A Crisis or an Opportunity? What Makes the Difference? The critical difference is whether you are prepared. If you’re aware of possible developments… if you see changes coming… you can take action and prepare yourself. In a rapidly changing world, new opportunities are emerging everywhere. If you get an advance notice of these possible changes, you can be ready. You can ride these waves of change to benefit your career, your business, your family and your investments." Why not changing ourselves as well? it seems as if all that will come should not affect us on deep levels, but why? part of preparation is accepting the changing of human that may come.
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POPSRe-Thinking The War Here's looking forward to a time when clips on America's reputation are more fitting for the nation we aspire to be. When the next major terrorist attack comes, the question will simply be how much liberty Americans have left. That is a victory al Qaeda could not have achieved by force of arms. It is something they have achieved with our witting and conscious help.
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POPS The New Nostradamus For the record, this man is not some lunatic soothsayer sequestered in a musty, forgotten basement office. He is the chairman of New York University’s Department of Politics, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the author of many weighty academic tomes. He regularly consults with the CIA and the Department of Defense—most recently on such hot-button topics as Iran and North Korea—and has a new book coming out in the fall that he cowrote with his pal Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. His curriculum vitae, which details his various Ph.Ds, academic appointments, editorial-board memberships, writings, honors, awards, and grants, runs 17 small-font pages long.
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POPSThere are more Slaves Today Than at Any Time in Human History
During the four years that Benjamin Skinner researched modern-day slavery, he posed as a buyer at illegal brothels on several continents, interviewed convicted human traffickers in a Romanian prison and endured giardia, malaria, and dengue. But Skinner is most haunted by his experience in a brothel in Bucharest, Romania, where he was offered a young woman with Down syndrome in exchange for a used car. We in America are not affected by this, right? On average, every half-hour, one more person will have been trafficked to the US into slavery. About 14,000-17,000 are trafficked into the U.S. each year and forced to work within U.S. borders under threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking and Free the Slaves both work to bring attention to this modern day horror. Barack Obama is still setting his foreign policy agenda. He needs to hear from all of us that the true abolition of slavery needs to be a part of his legacy.
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POPSIsraeli PM Ehud Olmert Claims to be Able to Order Bush Around Olmert reports that Bush had no idea what the substance of the resolution was, and this anecdote is consistent with what we know about how this White House has functioned. Bush admitted to Bob Woodward that an important decision on sending some troops to Iraq had been made by National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and that Bush had not sat in on the relevant meetings. So Rice was at the UN on her own, thinking she was a plenipotentiary of Bush, and Olmert was annoyed at this attitude and decided to put her in her place.
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POPSBUSH Best at American tradition: TORTURING since 1946 at least What is unique is Bush making torture official government policy! What he said may never have in reality had any effect on how others treated captured Americans. BUT, now they have an excuse to justify their behaviour. In time his words may cause a large loss of US soldiers' lives. It was one thing to be torturing but very much different to make it US policy. This a clever man, at least in slippery sly way, behind the moronic appearance and demeanour and the consequences of his words should/would be known in advance of his flawed delivery. He has insured that there never will be American hostages, just dead ones, tortured for fun. This may have been the whole point. His job will be even easier now. No crying family member seeking their loved one's return. They are dead. Cindy Sheehan said he was a cold fish, deadly cold. He doesn't do funerals either. The president of DEATH doesn't do dead. Nor did he serve, unless holding up a bar counts. Some commander-in-chief. 'Elect' TWI
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