http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMnk7lh9M3o

Want to learn how one of the world’s chief economic researchers feels about things?

Or just read the article discussing it…

Who the hell thinks it’s expensive to host a party for 111 guests, working out to $85.69 per person, where guests include the POTUS and US Secretary of State?

We’ve had bar bills that were more, per person, than this!

If Jesus were running things in Washington, I would bet that all Americans would have health insurance, and government would be spending more money on the needs of the poor and less on war and tax breaks for the well-off. And the debate over illegal immigration would be grounded in compassion instead of political calculation and resentment.

THE GOOD INSPECTOR: “I think Mr. ElBaradei, frankly, is wrong.” So said Dick Cheney on Meet the Press in March 2003, on the cusp of the US invasion of Iraq. Four years, one war and a Nobel Peace Prize later, Mohamed ElBaradei has most emphatically been proven right. Cheney, Judith Miller, Ahmad Chalabi, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal were, frankly, wrong. There were no WMDs in Iraq; the infamous aluminum tubes were duds; the Niger documents were a forgery. As director of the IAEA, ElBaradei testified to all this in the run-up to war. For insisting on the virtue of diplomacy, he was condemned in the press for abusing his “technical position” and making “a public fuss.”

History repeats itself: now that ElBaradei has negotiated an inspections agreement with Iran and opposed the “crazies” who want to “go and bomb Iran,” the press has launched another smear campaign. ElBaradei is a “rogue regulator” who “considers himself above his position as a U.N. civil servant,” opines the Post. He is an “accommodating Egyptian” with “pro-Iranian machinations,” warns the Journal. Even the chastened New York Times–which recognizes ElBaradei as “everyone’s best hope”–repeats the Administration line that he has inappropriately become a “world policy-maker, an advocate.” The obvious lesson from 2003–that it was the neocons who politicized inspections in Iraq, to ruinous effect, while the inspectors rightly resisted–seems to have been lost.

Gandhi said “Poverty is but the worst form of violence”. I suspect that poverty played a factor in this (and where was the education system, to teach this woman not to trust white people in the forest?)… but inbreeding (which I propose played a factor) probably helped this tragedy along.

As someone who has worked with many many governments, I can say authoritatively that 90% of people who are elected work for themselves and their friends, and 10% work for ‘everybody else’ (and surprisingly, not themselves and their friends). There are ‘liberals’ that love big business, and ‘conservatives’ who are pro-social assistance. The only question (even in multi-party states like Germany and Japan), is who is the lesser of the available evils, on average. Hence why so many people liked Churchhill, Roosevelt, Suharto and Arafat. There are, tragically, no solutions; there are merely lesser problems (from an individual’s perspective).

Sigh.