Category: Politics

First, racist language in the constitution. Then trying to ban books with homosexual characters in them. And now we have the Alabama judge in court “wearing a judicial robe with the Ten Commandments embroidered on the front in gold”. (As one wag put it, “don’t worry as long as the robe isn’t white and doesn’t have a matching hood”.) What next, I wonder?

When their own ballots are affected, naturally! From The Seattle Times: “The King County error came to light Sunday when Larry Phillips, chairman of the Metropolitan King County Council, was looking over a list of voters from his neighborhood whose ballots had been disqualified. Phillips spotted his own name on the list, prompting an investigation by King County elections workers that turned up 561 improperly disqualified ballots.” So Gregoire may still win….

(Via E-Voting News. Their story included a grammatical howler: somebody used the word fluctuant, presumably under the impression that it was an adjectival form of fluctuate. In fact it’s a term from biology, meaning “movable and compressible — used of abnormal body structures (as some abscesses or tumors)”.
UPDATE: The author of the piece assures me that the usage is blessed by the OED, even if it is a little archaic. My apologies: I have no objection to the creative revival of archaic language.)

The Economist on what happens if the dollar’s fall means that it loses its status as the reserve currency for the world: “The dollar’s loss of reserve-currency status would lead America’s creditors to start cashing those cheques — and what an awful lot of cheques there are to cash. As that process gathered pace, the dollar could tumble further and further. American bond yields (long-term interest rates) would soar, quite likely causing a deep recession. Americans who favour a weak dollar should be careful what they wish for. Cutting the budget deficit looks cheap at the price.”

(Via Talking Points.)

According to San Diego’s 10News: “Kenneth Starr says he never should have led the investigation that resulted in the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton.”

(Via Salon.com.)

Not content with preserving the racist language in their state constitution, those wacky Alabamians are at it again. State Representative Gerald Allen is proposing to burn (OK, ban from libraries) all books that include homosexual characters. Neil Gaiman has blogged about it, as has Sully. So much for Tennessee Williams’ southern classic “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof”, Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” and Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”. (And Dave Thompson’s book on “Last Tango in Paris” would also be excluded: the proposed ban would also cover books containing heterosexual “actions prohibited by the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws of Alabama”.)

The Guardian reports that a ballot initiative in Alabama has failed (despite a recount), which means that the state constitution will still contain language such as: “Separate schools shall be provided for white and coloured children, and no child of either race shall be permitted to attend a school of the other race.” Since this racist claptrap has already been declared unconstitutional, why would Alabamians want to retain it? The mind boggles. But when I saw that former Alabama Chief Justice Roy “Ten Commandments” Moore was involved….

(Via Salon.)

The Guardian reports that an incident in which soldiers forced a violinist to play at a roadblock is causing an uproar within Israel. Recent IDF abuses such as the shooting of a young girl and the mutilation of corpses generated less angst than this: “If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible. Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering; by Jewish violinists in the camps.”

(Via Juan Cole.)

The Guardian has a report on an incident in which an Israeli officer emptied his automatic rifle into a wounded thirteen-year-old girl. His explanation (over the radio): “This is commander. Anything that’s mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it’s a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over.”

Back on November 5th I blogged about the likely consequences of the “perfect storm” of the trade deficit, budget deficit, and oil prices, particularly the collapse of the dollar. Others have the same idea. In today’s Boston Herald, Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, waxed apocalyptic: “To finance its current account deficit with the rest of the world, he said, America has to import $2.6 billion in cash. Every working day. That is an amazing 80 percent of the entire world’s net savings.” Roach predicts a major slump, with a massive wave of bankruptcies.

Interestingly, the article concludes: “But […] there may be an alternative scenario to Roach’s. Greenspan might instead deliberately allow the dollar to slump and inflation to rise, whittling away at the value of today’s consumer debts in real terms. Inflation of 7 percent a year halves “real” values in a decade. It may be the only way out of the trap. Higher interest rates, or higher inflation: Either way, the biggest losers will be long-term lenders at fixed interest rates.”. And this is exactly the “stagflationary” scenario that I predicted.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Here‘s a powerful thesis about red America and blue America. It isn’t about the north vs. the south. It isn’t about slave states vs. free states. It isn’t (primarily) about religion, or guns, or gay marriage. It’s about cities: an archipelago of blue cities in a sea of red suburbs and rural areas. It’s about the Urban Archipelago. Worth reading.
(Via Sully, who also has a link to this really cool graphic.)