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Priceless
From Vanity Fair:
80 minute flight from Amman Jordan......$630
15 minute taxi ride from airport...........$5,000
Cost to US taxpayers of one day military occupation....$200 million
An administration that still insists everything is going to plan ... Priceless!
Our best shot
Every blogger's computer keyboard should be programmed to type the words "George W. Bush" and "idiot" in a single keystroke. On my Mac, it could be F5, since I just pressed it and nothing happened. Think of all the time we could save. The latest F5 moment comes in this morning's Tom Friedman column in the NY Times, when we are informed that Congress has slashed the National Science Foundation budget by $105 million, at a time when we need more science and technology, not less.
Friedman returns to one of his favorite themes, that our foreign policy nightmare is attributable to our insatiable thirst for foreign oil. Reduce the petro dollars flowing to countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, and the bloody despots that run those countries would have to rely on their people, instead of our SUV owners, for their income. If President Bush is looking for a legacy, I have just the one for him - a national science project that would be our generation's moon shot: a crash science initiative for alternative energy and conservation to make America energy-independent in 10 years. Imagine if every American kid, in every school, were galvanized around such a vision. Ah, you say, nice idea, Friedman, but what does it have to do with your subject - foreign policy?
Instead, we get idiotic calls for drilling in Alaska, as if the extra 1.4 million barrels a day ANWR might give us have anything to do with the other 11 million barrels a day we import. Besides, the US has been extracting oil from Alaska's north slope for decades, and exporting about seven percent to Asia, because it's more cost effective than shipping it to the US. Exporting oil also helps keep west coast prices high. So much for energy independence.
Everything! You give me an America that is energy-independent and I will give you sharply reduced oil revenues for the worst governments in the world. I will give you political reform from Moscow to Riyadh to Tehran. Yes, deprive these regimes of the huge oil windfalls on which they depend and you will force them to reform by having to tap their people instead of oil wells. These regimes won't change when we tell them they should. They will change only when they tell themselves they must.
When did the Soviet Union collapse? When did reform take off in Iran? When did the Oslo peace process begin? When did economic reform become a hot topic in the Arab world? In the late 1980's and early 1990's. And what was also happening then? Oil prices were collapsing.
You got to love those market forces.
F5
Time wounds all heels
Dick Cheney just went up a shoe size, according to a press release issued by the people who sell him his shoes. And why is this important?Josh is on the case. Swollen feet are a symptom of congestive heart failure, and as we all know, Dick has a sick ticker. But how sick? And why do we have to rely on shoe store press releases to find out?
Rhymes with Cupid
Patriotboy is all about Sony Entertainment's request to censor Cupid:Certainly, there will be those who will argue that a 16th century tapestry depicting frolicking cupids does not qualify as pornography. Pay no attention to them. They underestimate the power of unclothed cupids. They do not understand how the cupids' disproportionately large willies subvert the biblically ordained relationship between a husband and his wife.
On the other hand, Sony, Cupid won't embarrass you with an unexpected wardrobe malfunction. He's already naked!
5.12.04 17:54