hatley.org

I’ve been reading Barron’s Business Review series lately, both to bone up for the new gig and to clep out of some more hours. I can’t imagine that this stuff would ever have been interesting at an earlier stage in my life, but the thought of competing with other companies is a shot in the arm for me.

Also had my head in the Economist for around six months and have to say it has been one of the better investments I have ever made. I originally started reading it for the superior writing of global politics but the business, finance, and economics articles towards the end of every issue are becoming more interesting. You start to see that at the heart of politics is economics, which is simple in concept but deep in application. Go get a subscription, it trashes everything else in print.

The spirit of competition - it is an energy producing system. The fight to be better, to be more creative, and to do it while being a responsible and compassionate member of society - it is the stuff. Ambition and compassion, social capitalism. It gives me a charge.

And on another front - what a mess we are in over in Iraq. From a CNN article:

An Iraqi police officer was shot and killed in front of his family in his Kirkuk home on Friday night and two people were killed in Mosul, authorities said Saturday.

Friday, an influential Shiite cleric in Iraq called Israel’s targeted killing of the spiritual leader of Hamas a “dirty crime against Islam” and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, “a miracle from God.”

Nice.

I’ve been critisized for comparing Iraq to Vietnam - and I wish more folks would read about the Gulf of Tonkin as well as what the Vulcans really are all about. A good starting point is the Washington Times article entitled Iraq and the Gulf of Tonkin:

When this writer first heard from prominent neoconservatives in April 2002 that war was no longer a question of “if” but “when,” the casus belli had little to do with WMDs. The Bush administration, they explained, starkly and simply, had decided to redraw the geopolitical map of the Middle East. The Bush Doctrine of pre-emption had become the vehicle for driving axis of evil practitioners out of power.

President Bush made clear Sunday the U.S. was justified in toppling Saddam irrespective of elusive WMDs.

The liberation of Iraq, in the neocon scenario, would be followed by a democratic Iraq that would quickly recognize Israel. This, in turn, would “snowball” — the analogy only works in the Cedar Mountains of Lebanon — through the region, bringing democracy from Syria to Egypt and to the sheikhdoms, emirates and monarchies of the Gulf.

All these new democracies would then embrace Israel and hitch their backward economies to the Jewish state’s advanced technology. And Israel could at long last lower its guard and look forward to a generation of peace. That was the vision.

The amateur strategists in the neo-con camp knew a lot more about Israel and its need for peace than they did about the law of unintended consequences, writ large in Iraq, and in the Arab world beyond.

And this was what leftists protested before the war, and still do. It isn’t because we aren’t willing to assert military power, it is because the plan is a scatterbrained package of turd. It makes no sense - and as we predicted hasn’t come close to working. You don’t fix up Israel’s neighbors and hope that fixes the situation, you address the root issue - the Likud party. I don’t think most people realize that Wolfowitz, the architect of the Iraq war - has ties like crazy to Israel and wrote the Bush Doctrine. It isn’t conspiracy theory, it is just the outright - plain as day realities of the situation.

Further - Republican leaders like to tout military support, but they rarely have served. Browse through this site and you see it is pretty skewed. The right likes to paint the left as a buch of wussies, but Gore was a Vietnam vet, Kerry was too with a bronze star. Carter wore the uniform more than any other president besides Eisenhower. Gray Davis, who was voted out under a load of hogwash was a Captain in Vietnam earning the bronze star himself.

And check out the Republican leadership of our country:

President GW Bush - shady National Guard service
Vice President Cheney - never served. As the most hawkish man in the administration, this has bearing to me.
Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert - avoided the draft, did not serve.
House Majority Leader Tom Delay - avoided the draft, did not serve.
Att’y Gen. John Ashcroft - did not serve - received seven deferment to teach business ed at SW Missouri State.
Karl Rove - avoided the draft, did not serve.
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich - avoided the draft, did not serve.
Sec. Wolfowitz - Dep Secretary of Defense - prominent Jewish scholar, author of the Bush doctrine - did not serve.

There are a bunch of notable exceptions on both sides of the aisle - Clinton a big one for the democrats. McCain, Powell, and Dole stick out on the Republican side (Rumsfeld did 3 years as a flight instructor). The thing that is important to note is that *both* sides of the aisle care about the safety of our people, and our troops. It is an outright lie and mass media horsepoo to swallow that Democrats are weak on defense…it would be much more truthful to say that the Bush administration is very very weak on diplomacy, which is an idiocy of the highest order in a hegemonic world.

Iraq is a bed of vipers that could have been avoided while we expended our global political capital from 9/11 to cement real change. Instead the Vulcans took gambles that have screwed us all - and the arguments I hear from Republicans are thin indeed.

Oh - and the first part of my camera rig gets here Monday