Zeitenwende
Something happened to my Zeitenwende-reply post. I don’t know what. It will be online again later today. No comments are lost.
read onZeitenwende. End Of An Era.
It took some time and more of their money to make Germans understand. It took more than ten years of subsidizing consumption and unemployment in a previously bankrupt former communist economy and virtual non-growth to make us see that it is not only necessary to think about the problematic long-term consequences of the current incentive [...]
read onInabilty? Or Willful Wreckage?
So Colin Powell and the German chancellor tried to look forward, not to explain, and not to complain. And what does Geroge W. do? He behaves like a spoilt kid trying to get even by chatting for fifteen minutes with Roland Koch, the premier of the German state of Hessen, a leading figure of Germany’s [...]
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Veto Players On The Move.
Democracy is a tricky thing. That is true not only for the Middle East, where the current US government claims to be implementing it. That is apparently also true for the current US president’s home state of Texas, where the Parliamentary opposition, more than 50 Democratic politicians, has turned into extra-Parliamentarian opposition by fleeing the [...]
read onPaul Krugman Agrees With Me
that increased scrutiny of media control issues is one of the major policy lessons of the Iraq war [see my recent post]. In addition, his current NYTimes column, “The China Syndrome“, adds an interesting analysis of corporate regulative bargaining with governments. Whatever your opinion regarding the “biased BBC” – or for that matter, biased German [...]
read onCriticising the Critics.
The Washington Post’s Jonathan Chait has written an article critizising liberals for the fact that they are allegedly blinded by Bush-hatred – “Perhaps the most disheartening development of the war — at home, anyway — is the number of liberals who have allowed Bush-hatred to take the place of thinking. Speaking with otherwise perceptive people, [...]
read onI’m frightened.
Fair enough, all this is probably even more speculative than the much debated question how long the US will stay in Iraq. Now that a lot of people believe that Joschka Fischer will go to Brussels next year to become the first ‘European Foreign Minister’ once the Constitution will be ratified, the establishment of his [...]
read onI’m not sure Henry Kissenger
I’m not sure Henry Kissenger is right here. According to SPIEGEL ONLINE, he criticised the German foreign policy for allegedly not understanding “the American psyche” and not trusting “the American motives”. So good ol’ Henry tells Gerhard and Joschka to flagellate themselves for not being able to see the truth. Just wondering – if the [...]
read onWho likes Iceman?
This time Maureen Dowd got it wrong. W’s campaign video shooting on the American aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln just off the Californian cost may be provoking comparisons to ‘Maverick’, the protagonist of Don Simpson’s and Jerry Bruckheimer’s 1985 hit-film TopGun – but it’s dead wrong. ‘Maverick’ is a good cowboy, not a bad one. He’s [...]
read onMuch Ado about not much.
The McKinsey Quarterly looks at the incentive effects of the Bush dividend-cut proposal and decides that it, well, is largely a placebo. Won’t hurt, won’t heal, as most shares are held by tax-exempt entities anyway – “The fact, however, is that tax-paying US individual shareholders own a minority of all US shares?28 percent in 2002, [...]
read onSaddam Hussein, MBA.
This is good. Condoleeza Rice has presented a new rationale for the current lack of Iraqi WMDs – while admitting that “Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program is less clear-cut, and probably more difficult to establish, than the White House portrayed before the war”, she readily explained why that should have been expected anyway – [...]
read onLearning English in the USA
has apparently become more difficult than ever ( via Spiegel Online).
read onGo Gerhard! Go. Finally the
Finally the chancellor is doing what he was elected for: to explain the world to the loony left within his own party and to demonstrate that Germany does not need a Margaret Thatcher to rebrand the SPD. The loony left is not happy to face realiy, to say the least. But making Germany’s economic more [...]
read onDoes it matter…
that I forgot to mention Paul Krugman’s latest column so far? It probably doesn’t. The very fact that I am reading his columns confirms that Paul does get sufficient public exposure even without my mentioning him [I wonder - does this sound pretentious or merely ironic to your ears ;-)]. But as Paul Krugman wonders [...]
read onBush vs. Masturbation
Following on Sen. Santorum’s recent intervention concerning the legal status of homosexuals’ privacy in the US, “President Bush is proud to introduce an ambitious new phase in the fight to preserve all that is decent in America. Conceived and championed by the revered Republican think tank Americans for Purity, ‘Operation Infinite Purity‘ is dedicated to [...]
read onAAAAAAAAAAction!
Two weeks or so ago, a friend asked me if I knew anything about the budgetary problems California is facing during the current economic bust given a rapid fiscal expansion during the previus – particularly Sillicon Valley powered – economic boom. Well, I had to admit that my knowledge of US state budgetary affairs is [...]
read onUS Senator Santorum’s fashistoid remarks
You have probably heard about US Senator Santorum’s fashistoid remarks about homosexuals having no right to privacy for their alleged attempt to destroy “healthy family values”. Himself being gay, Bruce Bawer, an American poet and literary critic living in Olso, does not exactly agree with the Senator here – but being a proud American he [...]
read onQuicklinks, Tony Blair, And The Borg
Sorry for the apparent recent lack of updates. Not that there’s not enough stuff I’d like to comment on, I just did not find the time lately. But there’s exciting news, too. Look to your left, my gentle readers, and you’ll find a seamlessly integrated second blog called “Link Of The Minute.” This is where [...]
read onOskar Lafontaine and the “loony left”
Whenever people start talking about the “loony left” I can’t help but thinking about Oskar Lafontaine, the former chairman of the Social Democrats and German finance minister who luckily stepped down in March 1999. This week’s English edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeie Zeitung reports that I am not the only one who is being driven [...]
read onPride Goeth Before The Fall
Lillimarleen points to a Salon.com article by Arianna Huffington that begins with this quote from the Bible and deals with the increasing smugness of the Beltway neocons – “From the moment that statue of Saddam hit the ground, the mood around the Rumsfeld campfire has been all high-fives, I-told-you-sos, and endless smug prattling about how [...]
read onReality Construction.
One of the currently more popular theories of US-war-blogosphere regarding the German and French government’s opposition to the war is that they opposed it in order to conceal the extent to which they were involved in the built-up of Iraq’s pool of WMD. This theory has been prominently publicized by Steven DenBeste. For all those [...]
read onToo Big? Too Small!
I contend that the United States of America might be not powerful enough. And Henry Kissinger – whatever your personal take regarding his personal moral responsibility for doubtful US foreign policies, he is clearly someone with a certain grasp of international realities – would probably agree with me. After all, it was he who once [...]
read onA Tale of Perle and Pirls
So Baghdad sort of fell today. The Iraqi regime seems to have disappeared overnight. This is clearly a very good thing. I still believe that this war was unnecessary as well as unwise and I still believe that it is going to be far more costly – monetarily as well as in lives and in [...]
read onAnti American Room Cleaning.
Although it could be, this entry is not about the certainly soon-to-be-amended amendment to the White House war financing budgetary requests excluding German, French, and Russian companies from receiving US funds for the future Iraq reconstruction that the American legislature passed two days ago. In these times of increasingly global interaction, there are more and [...]
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