Monday, September 8, 2003

Pop Goes the Scoundrel It has been a year, but now is a good time to re-read Joshua Micah Marshall's "Confidence Men" from the Sept. 2002 issue of The Washington Monthly: Today, however, its signature domestic accomplishment--the 2001 tax cut--seems destined to yield dividends of deficits and political fallout for years to come. When you look past the promises and the tough talk and the spin, you see an administration whose major policy initiatives are stalled or postponed to some unspecified point in the future. Until now, the Bush administration has been trading on the promise that all of these things would work out. But that leaves them in the position of a company that borrows against future profits (Enron, for instance) or an overextended investor who is buying stock on margin. When the bubble bursts, they will have a long way to fall. And now, Marshall is looking pretty damn prescient: We went into Iraq to eliminate Saddam's stock of weapons of mass destruction, to depose a reckless strongman at the heart of a vital region, and to overawe unfriendly regimes on the country's borders. Agree or not, those were the prime stated reasons. Now we've got a deteriorating security situation and a palpably botched plan for reconstruction. And our effort to recover from our ill-conceived and poorly-executed policy is now the 'central front' in the war on terror, which is among other things extremely convenient. The president has turned 9/11 into a sort of foreign policy perpetual motion machine in which the problems ginned up by policy failures become the rationale for intensifying those policies. The consequences of screw-ups become examples of the power of 'the terrorists'. We're not on the offensive. We're on the defensive. A bunch of mumbo-jumbo and flim-flam doesn't change that. And Billmon is saying similar stuff: In a sense, Bush's speech legitimized all the questions and criticisms that have been percolating in the blogosphere and the (real) liberal press. It's as if the White House said, "OK, you can now talk about how bad things are in Iraq. And you don't have to keep giving equal time to the Rosy Scenario." In other words, the Speech officially made Shrub's U-Turn a Big Deal, whereas the previous strategy had been to describe it as no change at all . It was pretty quiet , but I think that Sunday night we heard the bubble pop. 10:03:26 PM    comment []trackback []

Savina Yannatou In August, NPR's Morning Edition aired a lengthy review of Savina Yannatou's US debut CD Terra Nostra. Typical for an NPR piece, the music samples are generous, so you can get a feel for her music (sort of a Mediterranean Lorena McKennit). She draws her inspiration not just from Greek music, but from across the Mediterranean, and mixes it with her background in both modern jazz and medieval and renaissance music. Far from typical Greek pop music, this CD is diverse and engaging. Related Links Savina Yannatou.com BBC's The World: Savina Yannatou 8:29:26 PM    comment []trackback []

Hey Bub, This is a Family Weblog Sometimes you learn more than you want to know from your referer logs. According to Google, I'm the person t consult when looking for a list of Greek brothels. Search Google for Greek brothels Sadly, I have no knowlege of any brothels, Greek or otherwise. Too bad, because I've always wanted to be an expert in something. 5:48:47 PM    comment []trackback []