Polish President to Appoint His Twin as Prime Minister

July 10, 2006

That's for D.C. chumps who don't know how to do the ancient "one hand washes the other" NYC thing, those that don't know that nobody in the hood cares if you're ripping off "the man." Just a little income re-distribution:

July 11, 2006

Brooklyn Legislator Charged With Taking Bribes to Aid Land Deal

By MICHAEL BRICK

A state assemblywoman from Brooklyn was charged yesterday with conspiracy and receiving bribes, accused of having sought a $500,000 home from a developer in return for helping the builder acquire city land. The assemblywoman, Diane M. Gordon, Democrat of East New York....

...“I’ve been around long enough to know, “ Ms. Gordon said on one recording, “that if you want a dream to come true, you got to keep your mouth shut.”....

According to prosecutors, Ms. Gordon promised to help the developer secure a vacant tract of land on Livonia Avenue from the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development. The parcel, which is intended for low-income housing, was valued at $2 million.

“There was a quid pro quo,” said an assistant district attorney, Kevin Richardson.

In exchange for her help, investigators said, Ms. Gordon requested a $500,000 single-family home that would be built to her specifications in a gated community in Queens; she marked up schematic renderings of the home with stairs, balconies and measurements in square feet, investigators said. Prosecutors said that she had also accepted a set of French doors for her office, worth $600, as part of the bribe.

The plan to execute the deal on the house shifted over time, but the terms remained the same, prosecutors said. At first, Ms. Gordon offered to pay $1. In later meetings, she asked to set a price of $200,000, with a mortgage held by the developer and canceled after the developer received his city property, prosecutors said.

Later, Ms. Gordon took her mother, Helen Staggers, to meetings. Citing advice from an unnamed lawyer, she suggested consummating the transaction in Ms. Staggers’s name to conceal it, prosecutors said. “Because anything I purchase, buy, whatever like that, he says they check,” Ms. Gordon said on the videotape. “The state has the right to check into everything, the whole company, the history, this, that.”....

P.S. I know, innocent until proven gulity, but there's those videotapes.

Her background? A liberal Dem with ruthless ambition, more into making powerful friends in the Brooklyn Dem machine than in doing any legislative work.

This morning I found myself getting mega-bored with  traditional media fare. Switching to blogs is proving informative and fun. I know, I know, I'm weird.

I'd been wondering why blogs are superior.

I just came across a post  that seems to nail down a good portion of the answers for me.

The blogger not only agrees with me she had to go and tell everybody.

Are bloggers mean and do they suck?

Well, yes. We are. We do.

We can't help it. We're shrill and extreme. We refuse to see all the good that comes out of maintaining the status quo - even though the status quo we once knew is nowhere to be seen these days.   -- Bloggers Are Mean and They Suck

on Talking Points Memo here and here bring up important "big picture" points for me, opinions formed over a middle-aged lifetime of reading the news and studying cultural history and the markets associated with them.

The Iraq fiasco just ended up verifying all my previous suspicions for me: you can't force culture change by law or arms. (I try to keep an open mind on that, but it's getting harder all the time.) If you try that, you better be prepared for the blowback, blowback which you may not be able to predict. There are other ways to change culture, but it takes time. George Washington figured it out after a lifetime of experience: set an enviable example, and then communicate and trade; meddling is usually a real foolish gamble. (It also applies within our own nation to sub-cultures: was the blowback from forced integration of the schools worth the results? In that case, I myself would say yes, it was, but it is something to seriously consider before doing something like using Federal enforcement. "Communication" these days is, of course what is know as "media," but is breaking down into sub-culture echo groups for all your info. needs aiding communication or hindering it? Thank god Iranian youth like western music as well as their own...)

What came to mind for me with Josh's posts was what I considered to be truly "bleeding heart liberal" arguments made by people like Paul Wolfowitz and many of his Iraqi exile friends at the time of the build-up to the war: the challenge that people who suspected that Iraqis may not be ready to handle being happy little democratic capitalists after decades of welfare dictatorship were being racist, that all people want to be free to make their own choices.

Well, East Germany came to mind right off the bat. After an initial burst of P.R. about "happy freedom," I saw lots of East Germans struggling to change decades of thought patterns and many not wanting to try. You cannot force culture change; people are not all alike on this issue, they are not all dying to be democratic capitalists, they don't even see the potential.

Call me a racist, but judging from what I've read about both North Korea and South Korea, I really don't think that the majority of the North Korean population would transfer easily to democratic capitalism tomorrow if Kim was overthrown. Something just tells me that it would not work out that way, that it will take generations. They will not be "just like us," many may be considered quite nasty by liberal western standards. I have no links for that.

What Josh is bringing up for me with this discussion is what bothers me about many neo-liberal vs. liberal dove views in the field of International Relations. Kaplan is setting up a scenario where the term "racist hypocrite" can be used once again against liberals who have a core belief that all people and cultures are alike, equal, want the same things. It's setting up a manichean situation where you chose between "kill them all, all the bad people" and "kumbaya, everyone is your brother, wants the same thing." And indeed, it can be easily be argued that liberal hawks are being more true to the grand theoretical principles in the Declaration of Independence, elsewhere know as "liberte, egalite, fraternite," and dare I say it: the whole problems encountered in Marxism moving from socialism to the supposed ideal of communism.

It's the problem with taking an ideological view of the world and thinking that the study of the interaction of the leaders of governments and their leaders will tell you a damn thing about how best to proceed without also studying the cultures of the peoples involved and realizing that they are the most important factor, i.e., there are people in those countries, and they do not always think the same way you do. Even with studying them, meddling, it's a crap shoot, a fortune telling game. There is at least a small handicap given to those who communicate, trade, and act only upon gaining strength in worldwide majority numbers through Socratically-challenged agreement (i.e., something like the U.N.)

A related note: I am most pleased to see Ernest Wilson contributing here again. Sometimes I find the Amero-centrism of foreign policy commentary here dragging many further into unreality land, including me. If you're going to talk "I.R.," might as well include the whole world; everything is not about "America."

copied from July 9, 2006

Keep Pressing on U.N. Reform (2 Letters)

To the Editor:

Re "Crisis Postponed at the U.N." (editorial, July 3):

The European Union concurs with your view on the importance and necessity of United Nations reform.

The share of the member states of the European Union in the United Nations budget is 37 percent and more than 40 percent of the financing of United Nations peacekeeping.

The European Union is the single largest contributor to the United Nations budget. We attach great importance to reforms that would bring about efficiencies under budget and management rules.

For the European Union, management reform is also central. We have welcomed the proposals put forward by Secretary General Kofi Annan. We are disappointed that more far-reaching results have not yet been achieved.

The lifting of the spending cap was important because it is in our shared interest that the United Nations continue its crucial mission to deliver services around the world.

All the member states must now redouble their efforts to reach concrete results soon. Reform is a continuing process, and a lot remains to be done.

Kirsti Lintonen

New York, July 6, 2006

The writer is Finland's ambassador to the United Nations. Finland holds the rotating six-month presidency of the European Union.

To the Editor:

Your editorial unfairly tends to stereotype developing countries as blockers of United Nations reform.

Pakistan has played a useful and constructive role. For a vast majority of the United Nations membership, progress on development resolution and implementation of agreed development commitments is a matter of the highest priority.

As co-head of the mandate review process, Pakistan, along with Canada, has made a significant contribution toward advancing the process despite major disagreements among the membership.

On management reforms, Pakistan and other members of Group of 77 recognize the need for managerial discretion for the secretary general. But we believe that delegation of authority must be accompanied by robust accountability mechanisms.

Pakistan supports an efficient, accountable and effective United Nations Secretariat and is committed to carrying out all reform decisions adopted by the World Summit last September.

Mansoor Suhail

Minister (Press)

Pakistan Mission to the U.N.

New York, July 5, 2006

New York Times July 9 "Week in Review":

by James C. McKinley, Jr., from Mexico City:

...the voters have pulled the curtain back on a new political landscape for the country. In the end, who won may not be nearly as important as who lost. The candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled the country with an iron hand for 70 years, did not win a single state. Worse, the P.R.I., as the party is known, lost its hold on Congress, slipping from the largest faction to third largest.....

"What's happened, I think, is that in fact we have a new panorama," said Daniel Lund, a pollster and political analyst. "Two parties have emerged that are not the dual heirs of the P.R.I."

And they look a lot like the Republicans and Democrats or Britain's Tories and Labor....

Photo caption:

In Chiapas in the south, where leftists did well in last weekend's election, rural poverty is common, and some villages lack electricity. Mexico's conservatives did well in areas near the United States, where free trade promotes industrial jobs.

By KIRK SEMPLE for the New York Times, July 10:

....even by recent standards the violence here on Sunday was frightening, delivered with impunity by gun-wielding vigilantes on the street. In the culture of revenge that has seized Iraq, residents all over the city braced for an escalation in the cycle of retributive mayhem between the Shiites and Sunnis that has threatened to expand into civil war...