As it happens, a member of my family has worked for the IAEA at 2 different times over the past 25 years, so I’m quite pleased to see this today:
Bravo.
I can’t help wondering, though, what are they going to do with the $1.3 million dollar prize? That would buy one heck of a staff pizza party….
Apparently the BBC is doing a series on President Bush and the Middle East. From their press release:
[Palestinian Foreign Minister] Nabil Shaath says: “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, “George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.” And I did, and then God would tell me, “George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq
Four decades after a U.S. president declared war on poverty, more than 37 million people in the world’s richest country are officially classified as poor and their number has been on the rise for years.
Last year, according to government statistics, 1.1 million Americans fell below the poverty line. That equals the entire population of a major city like Dallas or Prague.
Since 2000, the ranks of the poor have increased year by year by almost 5.5 million in total.
Per Yahoo/Reuters.
Per the WaPo:
Roy Moore, who became a hero to the religious right after being ousted as Alabama’s chief justice for refusing to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse, announced Monday that he is running for governor in 2006.
I’m sure the candidate debates will be hysterical.
And another year rolls round.
May this one be better than the last and bring peace, happiness, and fulfilment to all.
Avedon Carol kindly responded in the Comments to yesterday’s post citing Jon Stewart about why so many Americans are so uninvolved with politics. Her thoughts:
There’s also the part where in an oppressive state, keeping your head down is the only protection you might have. Such a state will go after its enemies. If your first allegiance is to your family or to your own survival, the last thing you want to do is draw the government’s attention to you by criticizing them.
Seems to me that this POV is part of the disconnect between many left-leaning bloggers and that vast swathe of America that gets them so riled up. If you buy into that point of view, you’d have to be a person who believes that America is today a neo-Fascist state with such tight command and control over our daily lives that the average citizen rightfully fears the repercussions should s/he speak out against the state. I seriously doubt that mindset pervades Middle America today. Hell, even I don’t believe it.
Yes, I’m aware of Gitmo and situations like Jose Padilla’s, and the super-secret monitoring devices the NSA has that can read all our emails, and the provisions of the Patriot Act, and I am concerned about the state of civil liberties in America today. And who knows? It might even be possible that somebody in a back room in Washington DC is putting me on an “Enemies of the State” list because I’ve expressed my opposition to the war in Iraq.
But it seems to me that a left-leaning blogger like me is much more likely to run into trouble in the workplace because of my blog than any other possible outcome. I don’t see anything going on in America today that makes me feel that my own physical security is in any way at risk by the state for my point of view.
There’s a passage in the William Gibson novel “Pattern Recognition” that bears repeating here:
Win, the Cold War security expert, ever watchful, had treated paranoia as though it were something to be domesticated and trained…. he wouldn