Sherry Chandler » Tuesday morning browsing
Tuesday morning browsing
Matthew Yglesias elucidates the Bush foreign policy:
It’s worth saying at the get-go that this doesn’t merely reflect some kind of cynicism on the part of Karl Rove or an eccentricity of George W. Bush. It’s part of a considered, and wrongheaded, view of America’s foreign policy which holds that reaching diplomatic agreements with “evil” regimes is always a bad thing. The preferred method is the use of force and intimidation. The problem is that neither the American people nor the international community is prepared to endorse fighting wars for no reason at all. Thus, when the Iranians approach us with peace feelers, the offers must be rejected out of hand. Iranian intransigence at the IAEA isn’t a problem, but an opportunity for war. I don’t say that everyone in the administration thinks this way, but many of them do, and they’re joined by many conservatives outside the administration. It’s no secret, for example, that lots of folks have been pushing for action against Iran since long before the current iteration of the nuclear crisis broke out.
The key question facing the country at the moment is whether or not those people — the ones who view a conflict with Iran as a good thing — will drive national policy.
Kevin Drum sheds some light on the gloom and doom of the social security projections:
The 2006 Social Security Trustees Report is finally out, and the headline number is that the projected “exhaustion” date for the trust fund has changed from 2041 to 2040.
Why the gloomy news? There were two big changes in SSA’s actuarial assumptions. On the plus side, they finally increased their projection of long-term productivity growth a bit, from 1.6% to 1.7%. On the negative side, they reduced their projection of long term real interest rates from 3.0% to 2.9%. The overall impact was to make the solvency of the trust fund look a bit worse than last year.
Laura Rozen posts a reader’s reaction to the Darfur rallies:
But now it’s Monday and the rally is over and famous people like George Clooney are on flights back to L.A. - and what is going to happen? Never mind the fact that we’ve so screwed up in Iraq that people won’t trust us to intervene even if we wanted to (which I don’t think we do). Russell Simmons spoke and was the only one to speak out against some kind of intervention force. It was weird - Darfurian after Darfurian asking for some sort of NATO/Bosnia style response, and then Russell Simmons going up there talking about Uranium deposits under the ground, and not to trust the government and that there can never, ever be any military force used to end this conflict.
MoveOn.org is sending out this quotation from Snopes:
Simply put, network neutrality means that no web site’s traffic has precedence over any other’s…Whether a user searches for recipes using Google, reads an article on snopes.com, or looks at a friend’s MySpace profile, all of that data is treated equally and delivered from the originating web site to the user’s web browser with the same priority. In recent months, however, some of the telephone and cable companies that control the telecommunications networks over which Internet data flows have floated the idea of creating the electronic equivalent of a paid carpool lane.
Snopes is a trusted source in this household for debunking urban legends and bringing some sanity into the internet conversation.
MoveOn has a petition to sign at this link. Or you can send a message to your Congress Critter through Save the Internet.
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