”They’re not debates,” Paul Begala, one of the party’s leading debate strategists, said. ”You have a collection of people with their canned lines, some of them good and some of them not good, and they just recite them in random order. In fact, maybe we should just do that. ‘Senator Kerry, could you please give us your line on Medicare?”’
Begala said the best way to fix this mess would be to somehow winnow the field, giving a smaller number of candidates more time to answer each question. When I repeated this suggestion to Sharpton, who has clearly been the most agile debater thus far, he scoffed. ”What are we really talking about?” he asked. ”A minute or two? It’s not like some of them were on the verge of brilliance and then somebody cut them off!”
It’s the night of the long knives and we’re still over a year out from the election. And think about the fact that the most articulate and interesting Presidential candidate in the Democratic Party is a lieing, race baiting scum who despite his association with murder by arson is considered a legitimate candidate. Makes the Peltier / Mumia thing [via CommieWatch] a bit less surreal.
The Cato Institute’s 21st annual monetary conference Thursday, on the future of the euro, achieved more or less unanimous consensus: the euro can be expected to be very strong against the dollar in the next two years, soaring to $1.50 or more, but is in severe danger of disintegration in the long term. […]
[According to] Jose Pinera, Chilean health minister 1978-1980, and instigator of the world’s first privatized pension system, […] [t]he long term solution [to the pension crisis for core EU states] is for these countries to move to a privatized, fully funded pension system, similar to that now found in 23 countries, and abandon the pay-as you go system, originally invented by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who now “threatens to damage Europe in the 21st Century by this invention as much as he damaged it in the 20th by his other invention of a militarized German super-state.”
That’s just cold, man.
The Vienna-based European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) decided in February not to publish the 112-page study, a copy of which was obtained by the Financial Times, after clashing with its authors over their conclusions. […]
Following a spate of incidents in early 2002, the EUMC commissioned a report from the Centre for Research on Anti-semitism at Berlin’s Technical University.
When the researchers submitted their work in October last year, however, the centre’s senior staff and management board objected to their definition of anti-semitism, which included some anti-Israel acts. The focus on Muslim and pro-Palestinian perpetrators, meanwhile, was judged inflammatory.
Apparently the researchers weren’t instructed that the goal was a politically acceptable report, not an accurate one.