Nixon dug deep for dirt on Ted Kennedy - Yahoo! News

I just came across this article today "Nixon dug deep for dirt on Ted Kennedy". I guess it is not a surprise to some but the dispicable levels that Nixon sank to, levels that you thought "na, even Nixon wouldn't do that" are amazing. These phone conversations are quite an eye opener, I just hope that the same information has been collected about Cheney and that they are published before he dies.

Nadof is corrupt its America's fault but...

So many people countries are blaming the "corrupt USA", but how many people would invest in Russia or China etc? Only a very *brave* few, why? because those places are risky

The latest scandal with Nadof is a great example of carelessness, everyone assumed those "greedy Americans" would not be corrupt so businesses/people/countries invested ****blindly***** you can find many examples of professional investors that didn't fall for the Nadof hype and looked at the numbers and said "something is off". The same for the sub-prime market, packaged debt where no one knew what was in the package... but invested anyway... wildly... and now everyone is crying that there is corrupt business in the US (duh, care to compare the US to some other countries?).

*Of*Course* I am not even attempting to justify any of the corruption here, one of the reasons i might have considered voting for McCain is his semi-tough (shall we say tougher than the average politician which is perhaps not saying much) stance on corruption, but this reminds me of the saying "lotteries are taxes on people that are bad at math" well perhaps this whole financial debacle is a tax on irrational investors (though of course the repercussions are much further reaching than just the jobs of those irrational investors).

How can you tell if a Politician is lying?

If their mouth moves, or so the joke goes.

At first it seemed like Obama might have a chance in the election but lately it seems that Hillary has a strong lead again (she has always had a lead but not always a strong one). Hillary would not necessarily be my first choice just because I don’t feel she is entirely trustable, or more actually she is a dyed in the wool politician.

My point of writing this though is my wish of an vote aggregation/statistic site that can list a bunch of topics and then show statistics on how the person voted in each of those areas. Example, during her tenure Hillary voted for 10 measures providing more environmental protections out of 13 so I would know that despite what she says (remember the moving mouth) she tends towards environmental issues. Showing something like this in a bunch of graphs etc would be great, and their might be such a site but I have yet to find it.

Since you can’t really trust what a politician says, you should be able to see what a politician does, or in the ideal world you should.

Another error of Iraq

I was catching up on my podcasts (not easy in a world of seriously limited bandwidth [an average of 1kbps]) and was listening to NPR’s “Ted Koppel Report” and “On The Media”. I consider Koppel’s commentary to be relatively fair (obviously leftist but in his case not unfair) and he made the mention of what Iran’s place was before 911/Iraq and what it is now, at least in terms of rhetoric and influence they are stronger now than before, why? Well there are no doubt a myriad of reasons but one of the reasons that Koppel points out is that Iran (Shite) was pretty much a balance to Iraq (Sunni) but now that Sadam has been toppled Iran is now somewhat unchecked. The balance held by these two countries was imperfect at best but would it not have been better to let them keep each other in check (neither has been found to ever have supported Al-Qaeda) than sacrifice our troops, reputation, and money to take out Iraq?

 

Another point that I seem to remember now but had forgotten is that the Bush administration (more like Cheney) originally said that Sadam was harboring Al-Qaeda, well it turns out Sadam wasn’t harboring Bin Laden’s cohorts but the irony is that now Iraq is crawling with Al-Qaeda “franchises”, the irony is painful at best.

 

How much is an immigrant's life worth, exactly? - By Steven E. Landsburg - Slate Magazine

I was recently catching up on my podcasts (not easy when you barely have any bandwidth) and I heard this segment from Slate Magazine's podcast "How much is an immigrant's life worth, exactly?" By Steven E. Landsburg.

I thought he did a damn good job of breaking the issue down using cold hard numbers and not all this emotionally charged (and oft misguided) rhetoric. Being in Agriculture I can tell you that there are many aggies torn on this issue, their conservative sides may say "don't want em'" (the Hispanics) but the business side of them says "we need em'". Being an Aggie in international development I can say that I have no problem with law abiding (excluding the "illegal" nature of how they got to the US, law abiding to me means no stealing or violent crime and hopefully in the future a sort of tax system that can incorporate these people) migrant workers.

Gore's gotta chance...

I will never forgive (or totally trust) the american voting process after the 2000 presidential election and the monkey (aka our esteemed king president) that it allowed into office but a new election is commig and people are talking. There are rumors about Hilary not running for president in the next election and it is thought that McCain might run again (not my first choice but my how past events have lowered the bar). All this makes me think that now is Gore's time to shine, the US is now leaning towards voting democrat (not because the dems have done a great job, more like its because they are the only alternative), many are finally starting to think alittle greener, and the war is not popular, Gore seems to have improved on his showmanship, all of which is in Gore's favor. The problem is Gore seems to have lost interest in running again, and who could blame him? Still, its a shame, I think he would stand a good chance, but he would be inheriting quite a mess. I don't think he would be able to do much for Iraq and would probably be severely critisised no matter what he did in/for Iraq but he could do so much in other areas like patching the runined relations with a countless number of countries, and improving the US's environmental policies, etc.