November 30, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Throughout the siege of Mumbai, we have been hearing that India suspects the plot must have had its roots in Pakistan. Between Friday and Saturday, we began to hear Indian diplomats expressing concern that reflexive anger might cause people not to distinguish between Pakistan’s government and militant groups operating out of Pakistan. Now, we are seeing increasing concern that the attack could be designed to destabilize Pakistan itself and create an opportunity for Taliban-linked groups to seize control of some parts of the country.
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November 30, 2008 :: Anjika Sridhar :: Comments Off
For days, news reports heralded the end of the Mumbai siege, though it continued, with fierce gunbattles and intermittent explosions, amid a raging inferno, at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel. There was death and destruction at no less than 9 separate locations in what some headlines termed “the battle for Mumbai”. Diplomatic tensions were high throughout, as foreign governments sought to ensure the safety of their citizens. The dead were of many distinct nationalities, including highly publicized French, American and Israeli victims.
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November 30, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
The three-day siege of Mumbai has come to a fateful, bloody end, leaving at least 183 dead and over 270 injured. The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, a 105-year-old landmark, the scene of the worst fighting, was described by one witness as “totally burnt”, with bodies bloodied and badly damaged by fire, strewn around. The attack began Wednesday evening as 8 to 10 gunmen reportedly landed in a small inflatable boat on a city beach, and proceeded to assault civilians at cafes and hotels, using high-powered automatic weapons and grenades.
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November 30, 2008 :: Denver Lessing :: One Comment
We have to think very carefully about what it would mean if we took the accusations of some political leaders in India seriously when they say the origin of the attacks can be linked to Pakistan. More careful, more thoughtful intellectual lights in the Indian diplomatic corps or in party politics, have noted that while it is likely fair to say the official government of Pakistan was not responsible, it may also be true that there are militant “roots” somewhere in Pakistani society that supported or enabled the attacks. It must be said, there is no publicly known evidence to date.
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November 29, 2008 :: Webb Tisch :: One Comment
E pluribus unum: of the many, one. We often forget the meaning of this legacy. We often conveniently slip into ignorance about the aspirational nature of the American political system. American democracy was designed to be everything that feudal monarchies, whether they included parliamentary processes or not, could not be, or had refused to be. It was designed to be a system in which authority was distributed across as wide a swath of the social landscape as possible, in order that fewer people suffer injustice, and that no one suffer injustice without recourse.
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November 28, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Faultlines are lifegivers, places where deep primordial energy comes up to the surface of the living world and makes more world; flaws in the perfectly smooth terrain are landmarks and give meaning to the surrounding landscape, become nameable places and so exist at the root of language… we are wrong to want to ‘get beyond’ or even ’smooth over’ the imperfect, because that separation between one thing and another, even between ideal and actual, is what gives the constellation of difference in which we all come to be, in which all human relations situate both the core and the outer limits of their reason for being…
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November 28, 2008 :: Evelyn Winston Perez :: Comments Off
Warning that a military crackdown in the wake of last week’s failed coup attempt could destabilize the West African country, the UN Peace-building Commission has called on teh government of Guinea-Bissau to guarantee civilian rule and the rule of law. The sitting president, João Bernardo “Nino” Vieira, initially came to power in a coup, was ousted during the 1998-99 civil war, and returned to power in the 2005 elections.
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November 27, 2008 :: staff :: Comments Off
Gunmen have taken positions in at least nine sites across Mumbai, where civilians have been killed and Indian security forces now battle to regain control. Media reports suggest there are confirmed attacks at the following locations: Chowpatty Beach, Dockyard Road, Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, Gokuldas Tejpal Hospital, Cama and Albless Hospital, Municipal Corp. of Greater [...]
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November 27, 2008 :: staff :: Comments Off
A band of as yet-unidentified terrorists have attacked between 7 and 9 locations around Mumbai, India’s financial capital and a city roughly twice the size of New York. One group of gunmen reportedly came ashore in an inflatable dinghy, while authorities have suggested others were lying in wait to rise up and contribute a significant amount of stockpiled weapons to the fight. Indian authorities are struggling to regain control of various locations where hostages have reportedly been killed in large numbers.
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November 27, 2008 :: staff :: Comments Off
The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.
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November 26, 2008 :: staff :: 2 Comments
Today, I’m pleased to announce the formation of a new institution to help our economic team accomplish these goals: the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. This Board is modeled on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board created by President Eisenhower to provide rigorous analysis and vigorous oversight of our intelligence community by individuals outside of government — individuals who would be candid and unsparing in their assessment. This new board will perform a similar function for my Administration as we formulate our economic policy.
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November 26, 2008 :: Denver Lessing :: Comments Off
President-elect Barack Obama, in his third press conference in as many days, has announced a new entity, the independent Economic Recovery Advisory Board (ERAB), to be headed by former Fed chairman Paul Volcker. ERAB will include individuals from government, private business, organized labor and academia, pooling the knowledge and analysis of individuals with a wealth of experience and who are not bound by being employees of the president, in order to get the best advice for weathering the storm.
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November 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
As the “perfect storm” gathers from inchoate, deceptively non-threatening winds, we can look ahead, backward and into the mirror and ask how crisis comes, or why, if it is inevitable, if we might just fall right out of it, as we fell into it. But the answer is simple: human crisis comes from excess, from inordinate ambition, from misplaced aggression, from over-exploitation of resources, each of which generates real and problematic tension across the landscape of human experience.
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November 25, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
The issue is not, as so many would like to believe, whether carbon-based fuels are affordable to the end-user. They are not. The total costs per gallon of gasoline are estimated at more than $11, covered by government subsidies, public-private research funding, tax incentives, military spending, public health funding, and funds devoted to cleaning up the ill effects of pollution. Capitalist markets need not be dependent on unsustainable excesses in resource use, but we are in the current global economic crunch, because they have been.
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November 24, 2008 :: Evelyn Winston Perez :: Comments Off
As civilians have fled clashes among rebel militia and government forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo, calls have been mounting for UN intervention to restore peace, prevent atrocities against civilians and ensure the delivery of much needed humanitarian aid. The UN Security Council (UNSC) voted last Thursday to send reinforcements of 3,085 additional soldiers to try to better secure the region now inflamed with rebel-government clashes.
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November 24, 2008 :: staff :: Comments Off
President-elect Barack Obama has officially named a team of top economic officials and advisors which has been well-received by political leaders, market analysts and the press. Timothy Geithner, president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, will serve as Secretary of the Treasury, while former Treasury secretary and onetime Harvard president Lawrence Summers will serve as chief of the National Economic Council.
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November 24, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
TheHotSpring.com is forming an ongoing research community project to develop zero-combustion energy sourcing technologies. The first phase of the project entails filling in the conceptual space of the zero-combustion paradigm for energy generation. Next, we propose thinking toward the “jump generation” technologies, which emerge from advances still not in practical application, but which will enable us to vastly expand the energy-productivity of our resource base.
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November 24, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Pres. George W. Bush has been planning a broad array of sweeping rules changes, related to environmental regulation of industry, and the protection of wildlife and unspoiled natural preserves. One rules change would open 2 million acres of protected parkland across three states to oil-shale development, which is one of the dirtiest, least efficient fuel production methods in the world.
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November 23, 2008 :: staff :: One Comment
President-elect Barack Obama said yesterday in his weekly radio address —now also a video staple on YouTube— he has already tasked his economic team “to come up with an economic recovery plan that will mean 2.5 million more jobs by January 2011″. Obama has long pledged he would incentivize development of a green-energy economy, as a response to the imperatives of economic sustainability, job-creation and reduced environmental impact. The president-elect added that “it will be a two-year, nationwide effort to jumpstart job-creation”, ostensibly a first building-block in what may be a broader economic recovery, which he hopes will be in full swing before the end of his first term.
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November 23, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The media are ablaze with speculation about whether President-elect Obama will be able to “control the Clintons”, whether his stature is so monumental and secure, after an admittedly meteoric rise, that the vanquished senator from New York will devotedly voice his foreign policy and look good doing it, whether the White House will be infiltrated by “re-treads” from the Clinton years, whether the socialist bailouts of George W. Bush’s own red October are enough to give Obama a pass on the anti-supply-side dictates of a potentially necessary “new New Deal”.
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November 22, 2008 :: staff :: Comments Off
According to the Associated Press, around 500 people gathered in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, to honor President John F. Kennedy, exactly 45 years after he was assassinated there. The nature of the killing has been in doubt from the moment it was carried out, and the official history of a lone gunman, one Lee Harvey Oswald, has been disputed by independent investigators, a New Orleans prosecutor, numerous conspiracy theorists, Oswald himself initially, the US Congress and the Oscar-winning film, JFK, by Oliver Stone.
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November 20, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Superávit (surplus energy) is an exhibit to be organized and hosted in Barcelona, in 2009-2010 to feature painting, photography, books, short film, discussions, regarding ways in which the pace of prevailing lifestyles causes breakdown in our sense of cohesion, morally, economically, and in the visionary sense of one’s own purpose. We are at the focal point of a vast combining and stitching-together of resources and approaches, and the nature of life in the human world is, as a result, now constantly redefined.
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November 20, 2008 :: Denver Lessing :: One Comment
Cable news yesterday and today’s newspapers are full of references to the embarrassment Detroit’s “big three” automakers’ chief executives occasioned by flying to DC in 3 separate private jets to ask for a $25 billion “bailout” bridge loan. Pleading poverty while showing off the extravagance of one’s expenditures is poor form, no matter what the season, but it clearly displays a lack of awareness of how much the economic culture of the nation has changed.
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November 19, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
President-elect Barack Obama is reported to be filling out his cabinet with prominent and experienced appointees. Some critics are already alleging ther are too many “Washington insiders” getting positions, but the transition team insists there is a new tone being set and these individuals will be ideally positioned to effect key reforms. Former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) has been offered the post of Secretary of Health and Human Services, and has reportedly accepted. Longtime Justice official and Obama aide Eric Holder is expected to get the nomination to serve as attorney general.
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November 19, 2008 :: Denver Lessing :: Comments Off
US vice president Dick Cheney has been indicted by a Texas grand jury for crimes related to an alleged prison-profiteering scheme, including but not limited to charges of “at least misdemeanor assaults”, due to his investments in certain firms. Former US attorney general Alberto Gonzales was also indicted, along with 5 other individuals. The indictment is connected to the dealings of an investment company, involving privatized federal prisons in Texas.
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November 18, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
Despite urging from the Russian prosecutors and the potential national-security implications of a case involving at least one former FSB (successor to KGB) agent, the trial of those accused of conspiring in the killing of journalist Anna Politkovskaya will be held in open court. The first trial hearings began “behind closed doors”, and Karina Moskalenko —a human rights lawyer working with Politkovskaya’s family— was allegedly poisoned while in France.
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November 18, 2008 :: Evelyn Winston Perez :: Comments Off
A federal judge in Miami has ordered the Curação Drydock Company to pay $80 million in damages and fines for enslaving workers shipped to Curação from Cuba. The workers were reportedly forced to work up to 112 hours per week at just 3 cents (US$0.03) per hour. As CSM reports: “Their passports were seized at the airport and they were rarely allowed to leave the shipyard complex…”
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November 18, 2008 :: staff :: Comments Off
Rumors have been swirling for a little under a week that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) has been offered the position of Secretary of State by her former rival, the US president-elect Barack Obama. Now, the Guardian newspaper is reporting, even as msot media continue to focus on the vetting of former Pres. Bill Clinton’s financial dealings, that “Hillary Clinton plans to accept the job of secretary of state offered by Barack Obama”.
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November 17, 2008 :: staff :: 4 Comments
In Alaska, 7-count convicted felon Sen. Ted Stevens had narrowly led Anchorage mayor Mark Begich, but counting of early-cast paper ballots and absentee votes has favored Begich, a Democrat in a Republican-controlled state, and Begich is now favored to win. Georgia Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss is now facing a heated runoff, in which more campaign cash is being spent than in the first round and John McCain has taken to the campaign trail. In Minnesota, author and radio-host Al Franken trails Republican incumbent Norm Coleman by just 200 votes, the count ongoing.
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November 17, 2008 :: staff :: Comments Off
Obama/McCain: “At this defining moment in history, we believe that Americans of all parties want and need their leaders to come together and change the bad habits of Washington so that we can solve the common and urgent challenges of our time. It is in this spirit that we had a productive conversation today about the need to launch a new era of reform…”
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November 17, 2008 :: Evelyn Winston Perez :: Comments Off
Socio-economic issues linked to the disparate treatment of racial groups still plagues much of Brazil’s population and impedes the modernization of its economy. Though the Amazon nation is booming, and has become a world leader among developing market economies, the current president, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, took office promising to finally rid the dense, remote rainforest of de facto slavery.
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November 17, 2008 :: Denver Lessing :: One Comment
The cloud of soot and smog choking India and China and their neighbors is worsening. The massive brown cloud hovering over Asia now poses serious long-term health risks and environmental dangers to much of the continent, according to a new UN report. The world’s largest pollution phenomenon already drastically reduces the amount of daylight reaching ground level in many Chinese cities, and there is concern the sunlight-blocking effects could impede agricultural production.
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November 17, 2008 :: staff :: Comments Off
The Iraqi cabinet has approved a security deal with the US, governing the role of US forces in the country. According to the deal, the US will withdraw its soldiers from Iraqi streets sometime in 2009 and will withdraw entirely from Iraq by the end of 2011. The Associated Press has circulated a photo of Iraqi police dancing with a US soldier in apparent celebration of the withdrawal agreement.
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November 17, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Poetry is the frontier where language in use comes in contact with future meaning, and in the process, when best executed, brings a wealth of transcendent truths into the present. Poetry is relevant to all uses of language, though there may be trends that suggest popular culture is looking to new forms of poetic activity to replace specific old models: many musical artists now play the role of mythic historian or wandering troubadour, but poetry is not confined to these purposes.
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November 17, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Just a couple of years ago, the conventional wisdom dictated that financial minds must view “green technology” as pie in the sky, an unaffordable idealistic quest for something beyond the “easy” solution of endless oil. Then, almost overnight, the financial markets discovered that oil was not infinite, that the entire US economy was beholden to the pricing whims of an international cartel —this was long known, but tolerated—, and failure to go green could cripple the world’s most powerful democracy.
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November 16, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
A “wave election”, with public sentiment clearly moving in a new direction, calling for principled governance, with a new focus on progressive aims… economic crisis, having built up over a decade, hidden in the esoteric workings of financial instruments reliant on advanced physics for mathematical proof of viability, worsened by unprincipled exaggerations and manipulations… the potential for a major swing in global opinions about the meaning of political systems… the climate is ripe for change, and we now face the problem of conceptualizing change, in order to see and understand its implementation.
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November 16, 2008 :: Denver Lessing :: One Comment
Since California voted to ban same-sex marriage —legal there since a state supreme court ruling finding in favor of gay marriage rights on constitutional grounds— on 4 November, there have been daily demonstrations against the ban. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has expressed his hope that the ban will be overturned or repealed. On Saturday, 11 days after the ban was voted in by referendum, a nationwide rally for same-sex marriage rights achieved unprecedented numbers, with a presence in all 50 states.
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November 14, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
President-elect Barack Obama’s healthcare proposal, as laid out, aims to expand availability of safe generic prescriptions drugs, in order to bring down costs across the system and help secure full treatment for all Americans. High prescription-drug costs inflate insurance premiums and often determine whether patients will receive adequate treatment for sometimes serious health conditions. A prescription-drug plan, passed by George W. Bush, in concert with a bipartisan coalition in the then Republican-controlled Congress, aimed to help increase availability, but was not aggressive in reducing costs.
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November 14, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
Critics have sought to characterize President-elect Obama’s healthcare proposal as “socialized medicine”, despite its relying almost entirely on market dynamics and the private sector. Government spending is considered to be one area where Obama’s plan could be unacceptable to fiscal conservatives, though Obama’s fiscal policy is largely in line with conservative fiscal policy and aims to cover new spending with spending cuts elsewhere. New analysis suggests there is already money to cover his plan and to reach near universal coverage with a few workable adjustments in current legislation.
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November 14, 2008 :: Denver Lessing :: Comments Off
The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that shortfalls in food aid to Zimbabwe could leave as many as 5.1 million people at risk of starvation by early next year. The southern African nation, beset by incomprehensible rates of inflation and an agricultural crisis, is now facing what may be the single most severe food security crisis in the world. WFP has made the announcement in conjunction with a cut in aid to Zimbabwe, due to lack of funding and a failed drive to raise funds to increase aid to the troubled state.
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November 14, 2008 :: staff :: Comments Off
The United States Army today made Ann E. Dunwoody, a Lieutenant General, the first woman to reach the rank of four-star general in the history of the United States military. She is said to have thus broken the “brass ceiling”, which has prevented women reaching the highest ranks, in part owing to their being legally barred from serving in “front-line” combat.
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November 13, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Complexity is not an outlandish tendency of troubled souls and pretentious intellects; it is the basic state of nature as we know it. The more we discover, the more certain we can be of this: even elemental particles are less solid than they seem, behaving like tightly bound arrangements of spherical bodies —irreducible monads—, they apparently achieve this physics by behaving like something they are not (now widely accepted in particle physics, “string theory” proposes that elemental particles are actually 2-dimensional vibrating “strings” whose vibration causes them to interact as if they were not strings at all).
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November 11, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The “conservative movement” in America is struggling to understand its most important setback in a generation, in part because its worldview takes for granted that what has happened simply cannot be real. In today’s New York Times, David Brooks writes about the growing rift between the conservative “Traditionalists” and the “Reformers”. He suggests the traditionalists, who say their losses come from not clinging firmly enough to the tax-cutting, slash government, immigration-crackdown agenda, will prevail in coming years, due to institutional entrenchment.
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November 10, 2008 :: staff :: Comments Off
President-elect Barack Obama has been welcomed by Pres. Bush as the two confer on the work of governing, the process of transition, the inner workings of the residence and security issues. It is Obama’s 8th trip to the White House, his first to the Oval Office itself. Reuters reports that Bush and Obama “were expected to discuss the global financial crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other challenges the Republican president will bequeath to his Democratic successor”.
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November 10, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Knowledge is wealth in its purest form, fully possessed by and inseparable from the individual. As noted in previous sections of this essay, the application of deliberately obtained knowledge to complex situations establishes the sovereignty of the individual. Variety is wealth insofar as it offers an array of options which may be combined in countless ways to confront the problems of living in the world. Variety in knowledge offers adaptability, and adaptability is the key to survival and prosperity at all levels. Ultimately, resilience, rooted in such flexibility, is the real meaning or value of wealth, of any kind.
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November 10, 2008 :: Denver Lessing :: Comments Off
A new report —drawing from “More than a half-dozen officials, including current and former military and intelligence officials as well as senior Bush administration policy makers, [who] described details of the 2004 military order on the condition of anonymity because of its politically delicate nature”— says the United States has conducted more than a dozen secret special forces raids, across borders around the globe to target Al Qaeda or other terrorist-linked sites, since 2004.
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November 10, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
To understand the relevance and virtues of Barack Obama’s economic vision, we have to look at the long history of struggle between American laissez-faire capitalism and American middle-class capitalism. We are on the verge of what is likely to be a comprehensive philosophical shift in economic policy toward generative investment, which means counting as economic imperatives the resilience and productive expansion of the positive bases of economic growth, i.e. human and environmental health and well-being, resource-density and cyclical models of resource use and reproduction.
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November 7, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 4 Comments
Barack Obama’s election victory, making him 44th president of the United States, was resounding not only for its historic significance, not only because the nation faces monumental crises and is calling for serious reform at a potential turning point in political trends, but because mathematically, it was decisive. Obama carried at least 28 states —with Missouri still in recounts—, won more than 65.1 million votes —nearly 8 million more than McCain—, and if McCain takes Missouri and the one unassigned Nebraska vote, his Electoral College margin is 364 to 174.
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November 7, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The Republican party has seen virtually every one of its over-arching policy assumptions discredited or rejected, in the 2006 and 2008 elections. It now faces an historic challenge, to reinvent itself in a climate where the other party dominates both houses of Congress and has elected a popular new president by a wide margin. The campaign of Sen. John McCain struggled to overcome the Obama message, in part because it was relying on the assumption that specific Republican party platform planks were the political ideas most en vogue with the electorate, when they were in fact at odds with current economic and political reality.
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November 6, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 5 Comments
Sen. Barack Obama, as president-elect, now faces the daunting task of staging a transition from campaign to governing, and from the Bush years to the Obama years, in what must be the most artful and adroit performance of the task seen in decades. Facing two wars, looming multifaceted economic crisis, and the need to overhaul national energy policy and fight environmental degradation on an unprecedented scale, Obama is faced not just with forming a cabinet and White House team, but formulating a strategy for enacting the change he has promised in a time of historic difficulty.
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