#2
With Castro Failing, what's Raoul's life expectancy? (barring assasination)
find that, add 30 years, and you've gotten a rough estimate of cuba's expected "Recovery time".
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
02/19/2008 16:22 Comments ||
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#1
Glad to see my two personal favorites, Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson, are included.
I wasn't around during Buchanan's term and don't know much about that period of history. But I have to wonder if the American Civil War would have been as horrific as it was if Buchanan had been more proactive against slavery. Seems as though he followed the Democrat tradition of doing little to nothing while a problem festers and eventually necessitates a war that might have been avoided.
#2
Ebbang Uluque6305 what was the last straw for the South was the Republicans' vow to pass the Tarrif of 1860 which made it impossible for the South to do business with any other than Northeastern business by imposing a 48% tarrif on imported goods. In other words, if I sent 1 million bucks worth of raw materials to England and the company that took them sent me back 1 million bucks worth of finished goods I would have to pay the Government $480,000.00. Slavery was a big issue but not the one that pushed the South over the edge. Buchanan was one of the worst Presidents though.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
02/19/2008 16:23 Comments ||
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#3
Carter's greatest achievement was leaving office.
Old Frank Roosevelt deserves a high place in infamy, for destroying the US constitution, delaying the national recovery from the Great Depression, and sacrificing millions of people to the Soviet Bear.
LBJ, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Jackson, and Andrew Johnson all deserve recognition for their arrogance, short sightedness, placing politics above principle, and in the case of the Democrats, naive idealism.
#5
FDR should get some credit for not losing WW2. I don't disagree with his list of failures but there was one serious test during his administration and he got us into the war so all the other stuff fades.
This is how Bush will be seen in time.
LBJ should get some credit because he made an absolute hash of everything and yet still is loved because he "tried" with his social programs and managed to transfer much of the blame of Vietnam onto Nixon somehow. Not saying he's great but teflon can't hold a candle to this fellow.
#6
Buchanan was one of a string of Dem presidents (Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan) who aggressively enforced the Fugitive Slave Act in the North and otherwise worked to expand and protect and privilege the Peculiar Institution. Used to being indulged, the South grew to acting very spoiled and petulant--"Give us what we want RIGHT NOW or we'll secede!"--so that the relationship between the slavery interests and the national government became much like a co-dependency, with Pierce and Buchanan as enablers. This was not a stable situation because the North had a larger population and a larger economy, and the trends were going in its favor. When Lincoln won, the very thought of having to deal with a non-enabler president was too much for the South to bear, so the Southern states started seceeding--but if it hadn't been Lincoln, something else would've pushed them to it eventually.
The best explanation I've ever seen of the pre-Civil War political situation was in James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Check it out.
Posted by: Mike ||
02/19/2008 17:52 Comments ||
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#7
In 1860 80% of Federal revenue came from the Southern States but money from the government to provide for increased infrastructure (roads, railroads, and other transportation projects) was almost solely spent in the Northeast. The Tarrif of 1860 would have been way more devastating than either the Tarrif of 1828 or the one in 1832. Those two bankrupted a lot of Southerners. They were not about to let that happen again. The biggest crisis of Jackson's Presidency, started by South Carolina opposition to the tariffs leveled in 1828 and 1832 by Jackson supporters. "Nullifiers" thought that a state could nullify a federal law within its own borders if it so desired. When South Carolina, led by John C. Calhoun, announced its intention to nullify the tariffs in the fall of 1832, it touched off what almost developed into a civil war, as Jackson massed military resources on the state's borders. Finally resolved in the spring of 1833 when South Carolina agreed to a new fairer tariff passed by Congress.
The Southern states were not the first to threaten to secede, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and New York all threatened to secede at some time prior to the Civil War.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
02/19/2008 19:06 Comments ||
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#8
1) Jimmy Carter
2) Jimmy Carter
3) A player to be named later
Charles Dew was a believer in the tariff hoo-ha until he actually went back and studied the contemporary speeches of the secessionist commissioners, which he describes in Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. A Nation Divided: New Studies in Civil War History. (Charlottesville and London: University Press
of Virginia, 2001)
As one reviewer notes
"Dews principal target is the somewhat shadowy "Neo-Confederate" movement, including the League ofthe South and the patrons of "Neo-Confederateweb sites, bumper stickers, and T-shirts" (p. 10).He notes correctly that secessionists themselves"talked much more openly about slavery thanpresent-day-neo-Confederates seem willing to do"(p. 10). The books first chapter makes clear therelevance of his discussion to recent controversiesover the Confederate flag in a number of states and Virginias Confederate history month, among others. The author writes with some obvious passion. A native southerner he recalls "my boyhood dreaming about Confederate glory," and confesses that he is "still hit with a profound sadness when I read over the material on which this study is based"
#1
There is an interesting story around that, and I wonder if any Israeli 'burgers can tell me if its true:
As late as 1967, all Arabs were taught that the world was flat and the Earth was the center of the solar system (as taught in the Koran). Then, during the war, the troops found they could not navigate using the stars because angles changed with the Earth's orbit (not to mention curvature of the surface).
As a result Egyptian universities changed their advance Astronomy classes to teach the Earth revolved around the Sun, and had prospective pilots, ship captains etc learn this. Meanwhile the courses for non-majors continued to teach Koranic Astronomy.
Is this still going on?
Al
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
02/19/2008 14:11 Comments ||
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AFTER the notorious Hezbollah commander Imad Mugniyah was killed in a mysterious car bombing in the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Tuesday, a storm of accusation and counteraccusation quickly arose back here in Lebanon. Hezbollah, the radical Lebanese Shiite movement, predictably blamed Israel. Some Western-allied political figures blamed Syria, their own favorite nemesis. Still others saw the killing as the first part of a sinister deal between Syria, Israel and the United States, in which Lebanon would be the loser.
It is a familiar ritual in the Middle East, and especially here in divided Lebanon. No one here can point to any real evidence in the death of Mr. Mugniyah, a famously ruthless and elusive figure. No one has taken responsibility for killing him.
But the accusations proliferate. And while they may look to outsiders like plausible explanations, they are often seen here as something different: a kind of road map to the accusers social and political identities, pointing to their fears, enemies, friends and, perhaps, their next moves.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
02/19/2008 00:00 ||
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#2
Safer reported that the Danes get a free education through college, free health care and free elder care.
We did a double take, then turned to each other and said, "We should move to Denmark!"
It took all of three seconds to google 'Tax Rate Denmark' to get: Denmark has the highest income tax rate, with its top-taxed citizens paying 68% of their hard-earned crowns. The basic tax rate begins at 42%.
Free, uh? when government takes more than 50% of your earnings, you work for the government. Tax thrall.
#4
Sure, free education, free health care and free elderly care all sounds great, but why stop there? As someone proposed:
In a perfect world, we'd all lie blind and motionless in stacked coffins filled with pudding. It would be dark and warm and nobody would have to compete with anybody and also the government would pay for the pudding.
EFL Very long but go ye there and read of it, for it is good.
What is the point of a paper of record that decides the untarnished record is too much for readers?
By Christopher Hitchens
Do you ever wonder what is the greatest enemy of the free press? One might mention a few conspicuous foes, such as the state censor, the monopolistic proprietor, the advertiser who wants either favorable coverage or at least an absence of unfavorable coverage, and so forth. But the most insidious enemy is the cowardly journalist and editor who doesn't need to be told what to do, because he or she has already internalized the need to pleaseor at least not to offendthe worst tyranny of all, which is the safety-first version of public opinion.
Take, just for an example, the obituaries for Earl Butz, a once-important Republican politician who served Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford as secretary for agriculture until compelled to resign after making a loutish and humorless observation in the hearing of the Watergate whistle-blower John Dean. In the words of his New York Times obituarist, Butz (who "died in his sleep while visiting his son William," which, I must say, makes the male offspring sound exceptionally soporific) had "described blacks as 'coloreds' who wanted only three thingssatisfying sex, loose shoes and a warm bathroom." There isn't a grown-up person with a memory of 1976 who doesn't recall that Butz said that Americans of African descent required only "a tight pussy, loose shoes, and a warm place to shit." Had this witless bigotry not been reported accurately, he might have held onto his job. But any reader of the paper who was less than 50 years old could have read right past the relevant sentence without having the least idea of what the original controversy had been "about."
What on earth is the point of a newspaper of record that decides that the record itself may be too much for us to bear? My question is prompted by some recent developments from a previous front-page sensation. In Denmark last week, the authorities detained three people in an alleged plot to murder a 72-year-old Dane named Kurt Westergaard. Westergaard is an illustrator who lives peacefully in a university town. Not very long ago, he joined with other cartoonists in an open society in drawing some caricatures of the alleged "prophet" Mohammed. The object of the satire was to break the largely self-imposed taboo on the criticism of Islam and its various icons. The satire was wildly successful, in that it resulted in hysterical Muslims making public idols out of images they had proclaimed to be unshowable lest they became idols. Much nasty violence and intimidation accompanied this stupidity.
Anyway, last week, almost every Danish newspaper made a deliberate decision to reprint the offending cartoons. Perhaps, if you live in most of the countries where this column of mine is syndicated or reprinted, you wonder what all the fuss can have been about. Certainly, if you live in the United States or Britain, you will be wondering still. This is because your newspapers have decided for youas with Butzthat you must be shielded from the unpalatable truth. Or can it really be that? We live in the defining age of the image and the picture; how can it be that the whole point of an entirely visual story can be deliberately left out? (To see the original cartoons, by the way, click here.) I have a feeling that the decision to protect you from the images was determined this time by something as vulgar as fear.
The cowardice of the mainstream American culture was something to see the first time around. The only magazines that bucked the self-censorship trend, or the capitulation to undisguised terror, were the conservative Weekly Standard and the atheist Free Inquirytwo outlets (for both of which I have written) with a rather small combined circulation. Borders thereupon pulled Free Inquiry from its shelves, with the negligible consequence that I will never do a reading or buy a book at any of its sites ever again. (By the way, I urge you to follow suit.) I think it's pretty safe to say that most Americans never even saw this sellout going on. But that was because their own newspapers were too shamefaced to report a surrender of which they were themselves a part.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
