Foreign Policy Notes

Fifty years ago, the "Arab World" was ruled for the most part by hereditary monarch, inept, debauched and anti-semitic.
Twenty Five years ago the Arab was ruled by a hodgepodge of fidgety military autocrats, nationalistic in scope and again, anti-semitic.
Comes the "Arab Spring" and the "Reign of the Colonels" is ended so of course the Neocons are in a lather of fear over the coming ascendency of "Islamofascism".
Well... If King Farouk and Colonel Nasser couldn't destroy Israel, then what kind of odds should we give the Grand Imam or whatever Believing Mind is brought to power?
The response to this "because Iran wants the bomb and the bomb changes everything".
True
But not neccessarily in ways friendly to Tehran.
Nukes make dandy targets for other nukes, and entering the nuclear club today, means you are competing with actors that have a sixty year jump on you in the stratetic weapon's department.
Small nuclear actors have problems, they don't necessarily have the geography or technology to make credible threats of Mutually Assured Destruction.
They can make good "doomsday threats" though ,North Korea makes them every day, but that makes NK a problem not a world class playa nukes or no nukes.
My concern truly is that nuclear weapons might well be introduced into a national environment riddled with serious ethnic and class conflicts, that is a destabilizing factor to be sure.
But if you think Iran or the "coming wave of Islamofascism" can rule and or blackmail the world once they get the bomb think again...It hasn't guaranteed anyone's hegemony since 1944 and likely it never will.
"Deterrence is tested by things that never happen" so said Henry Kissinger in more comfy bipolar times.
The same can be said about nuclear non proliferation.

Just sayin'.

Taking the Day Off...

Ain't the Paramount Theater down town just garish?

Beats the living daylights over the ruin and squalor that ruled that end of Washington Street in the olde days though...

The Price of Friendship...

Ron Paul's cohort is fighting tooth and nail all over this country to get delegate's credentials for the republican national convention this summer.
Now, they are obligated to vote for Mitt Romney, but their mere presence on the floor opens up all sorts of potentially disruptive scenarios.
And to think a mere three months ago, Ron Paul was running all sorts of interference for Romney in the various GOP presidential debates.
They were best buds, then.
Now look at em', raiding GOP caucuses under the false flag of the Romney campaign, some friend eh?
Ron Paul is fanatical and weird, and you can't take the like at their word, if Romney was not such a hopelessly inept amateur at the game of politics he'd realize this.
Mind you, I don't believe all the diresome predictions about libertarians running amok at the RNC, history rarely favors the worst case scenario.
At the very least though, the presence of so many "Short Bus Republicans" and sundry Objectivist jihadists vastly complicates any attempt by Mitt Romney to shake that etch-a-sketch and track back to the center.
Moreover, it is just plain titillating to imagine Mitt Romney going Hat in Hand to Ron Paul to get the Best Deal He Can For The GOP.

Cancer Treatment Centers....

Incorporated, is lobbying the Tea Partei dominated New Hampshire State Legislature to establish a chain of boutique hospitals in Southern NH and grab off a bit of the high end healthcare trade from Metro Boston.
Fair enough, I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that there is no shortage of sick people or monied persons who want expensive elective surgery.
I think it is plainly appalling though, to think that New Hampshire's much praised "citizen state legislature" is jumping thru hoops of fire to please "Cancer Treatment Centers Incorporated" at a time when New Hampshire no longer has a worthwhile Veteran's Hospital of any kind.
You'd think these worthies in Concord, these pious puritan citizen legislators would be working 24-7 to get such a institution reopened, especially in a time of war when new veterans disabled and otherwise are being generated every day.
You'd think, Senator Kelly Ayotte that energetic young woman with an opinion about everything would be banging the pots for a full service Veteran's Hospital.
Nope.
Nothing.
Silence.
Shee-it folks, I wanna live in a country where the combat veterans have lobbyists at least as powerful the one's employed by "Cancer Treatment Centers Incorporated" is that so much to ask?

Mitt Romney is giving the Commencement

address at that bastion of Xian Rectitude, Liberty University today.
Given Mitt's tendency to grovel before hard right book worshippers we can rule out any sort of a "Sistah Soljah" moment in today's speech.

Mitt idea of a "Sistah Soljah moment" is denouncing gay marriage with all the phony righteous of AM radio prophet...in a voice dripping with "Father Knows Best" smarm.

***
Y'know, I'm beginning to think that maybe just maybe there is something to this whole "Mitt Romney is a bully" meme.
His career is littered with disquieting bully type incidents that likely only started when he incited a mob to give young Lauber a "haircut".
I mean recall please how he got the GOP nomination for Governor in 2002, by jacking up Acting Governor Jane "Jingle Money" Swift with all due brutality.
Anyone else recall Ardith Weiworka?
Former Head of the State's Child Services Office, fired allegedly by Romney because she wanted to marry her same sex life partner....
And two weeks ago, Grenell goes under the bus...
I mean anyone else sense a pattern emerging?
Me?
I offer this Meme Going Forward:

"BULLYING IS A SOCIAL ISSUE"

Mitt Romney has come under fire for

some loutish bullying behavior back when he was "The Governor's Son" at Cranbrook Academy in Michigan.
Lordy imagine what the Boston Herald would have done with this story if only it was perpetrated by a member of the Kennedy Family?
***
Back in the Day, Cranbrook was renowned at the time for turning out a particular type of overconfident twit armored with a thick protective layer of sheer entitlement.
And you can't get more entitled than Mitt Romney circa 1965, the Son of Michigan's Governor who was himself a likely Presidential Candidate in 1968.
So it is not surprising that Mitt Romney in a passive aggressive rage against the fabled "other" whomped together a crewcut Nadsat Gang that held some poor mook with a pompadour down and give him a nasty little haircut.
"Difference" was much much tolerated in America's Prep Schools back then and clearly Mitt Romney made himself the scourge of "nancy boys" and the like.
Y'know I snipe away at Mitt Romney and of course this story has much snarkage potential to it.
Romney is the poster boy for detachment, he is uncoupled from any emotional links to the issues he allegedly espouses, his wealth insulates him from he cares of everyday society and it's citizens and he has always been comfortable in the wealth, power & status that is his birthright. Anything else, just doesn't matter.
So I wonder...Can Mitt Romney learn anything?
Cuz a lot of learning goes down when you have "hostages to fortune" in play, if your life is lived at an Olympian Altitude, what is the impetus to question oneself?
My point, what if that kid that Romney held down and "barbered" had reared back and punched Willard in the nose, hard, real hard?
Would Mitt Romney had learned anything from the encounter?
I mean other than the perfidity of the gender-role challenging "other"?
Therefore, do we really want a President who is unteachable by nature?

Scott Brown...

wants Citizen Elizabeth Warren to release all her job applications and college transcripts in order to prove somehow she never got a McDonald's Happy Meal solely on the basis of her presumed Cherokee Indian ancestry.
I'm still waiting for Former State Senator Brown to release results of his last three I.Q. tests...

But I snark...it has been a good week for our boodling, chiseling, pension grubbing Junior Senator though, thanks to the above "birther" controversy AND the President's pro SSM announcement no one noticed that Scott Brown voted to double student loan interest rates.

Well what can I say?
Families groaning under the weight of student debt, graduates saddled with extortionate interest rates on tuition loans....they don't have nice pricey lobbyists who can bundle phat contribution's to Scott Brown's re-election campaign.  So of course, since Scott's "true north" always points toward's Big Money, the college students of the Commonwealth get shafted.
Let me make this brutally clear to all you undergraduates out there, Scott Brown (who loves money the way a hog loves slop) voted to Double Your Liability.
Now what are you gonna do about it?