Forgetting Past Mistakes is to Repeat Them
Following in Jimmy Carter’s footsteps in yet another way, President Obama plans to lift travel restrictions to Cuba. In as far as it goes, this is a good thing. Unfortunately, Obama apparently doesn’t plan to call for an end to the U.S. trade embargo.
Jobsanger, the Texas Liberal’s guest writer, says that religion was what killed 300+ Muslims – and an uncounted number of Christians – in Nigeria over the weekend. The Nigerian conflict has been going on for some time and is at its core, as Jobsanger says, a religious war. Religions have been the source of fighting…
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, has died at the age of 89. Happily he lived to see the end of the Soviet regime that his books excoriated. Dry stuff, for those who haven’t read him, but his books revealed horrors that, by the end of Gulag, became completely banal as a result of…
Lately some on the left have been working hard at revising downward Ronald Reagan’s legacy of ending the Cold War and creating the opportunity, since lost, for the first period of extended peace since WW II. The Soviet Union, Kathy says, was never a threat at all. In fact, the U.S. was the antagonist all…
Taiwan’s March 2008 referendum will evidently take place without much support from the United States. Per the BBC: US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says Washington is strongly opposed to Taiwan’s plan for a referendum on United Nations membership. Ms Rice said applying to the UN in the name of “Taiwan” was a “provocative policy”…
The Venezuelan people emerged victorious after the referendum that would have granted President Hugo Chavez vast powers to further the conversion of the South American nation’s economy into full-fledged socialism. In Caracas, Valencia, Maracaibo and other major cities, large crowds spilled into the streets, shouting, chanting, clapping and waving flags. One man carried a sign proclaiming,…
Not long ago the NY Times wrote about Hugo Chavez’s “extraordinary experiment” in oil-fueled socialism thusly: In two weeks, Venezuela seems likely to start an extraordinary experiment in centralized, oil-fueled socialism. By law, the workday would be cut to six hours. Street vendors, homemakers and maids would have state-mandated pensions. And President Hugo Chávez would…
Reuters reports that the inevitable result of market price controls has occurred in Venezuela: Venezuelan consumers are increasingly facing periodic shortages of basic food products as the economy shows signs of overheating amid record revenues from an oil boom. The shortages have increased skepticism of Chavez’s economic policies and provided a political backdrop to campaigning…