From RR

• Catastrophe for Gaza. The Israeli blockade curtails food, fuel and medicine.
• Big Three, meet the Little Eight. More. Foreign-transplant car factories mostly in the southern US. On the other hand for example Volvo is owned by Ford and Saab by GM.
• An armed society is a polite society.
• History lesson: FDR didn’t fix the economy. He made it worse. Suckering the country into a big foreign war (with the help of British spies in America) got it out of the Depression.
• A communications gap not a technology one. Not that I want the Republicans but good points. Having web sites and communication networks is a great thing, but what matters more is what you do with them. Trying to sell the wrong product, or selling a “me too” product for all practical purposes never works. In the end, John McCain was the wrong product and in many respects, he tried to present himself as a “me too.”
• A real community organiser not a hypocrite who lives with the rich and gets political cred by mau-mauing the government out of money, which doesn’t really help the poor. Meet Craig of Craigslist.
• Five government programmes that backfired horribly.
• Fed refuses to disclose recipients of $2 trillion.
• Scotus: smokers can sue over ‘light-tar’ cigarette adverts.
• Hang on, that’s not funny! National Lampoon execs are accused of stock fraud.
• Iraqis doubt US will honour withdrawal dates.
• Afghanistan: too much ground, too few soldiers. The war Obama wants.
• Disgusting political humbug. The Big Three auto makers begging the Bush administration to rescue them from the plight in which they now find themselves as a result of decades of poor management.
• Israel’s get-out-of-jail-free card.
• The unwisdom of crowds. In the name of justice we ought to recall that there was one candidate who did foresee our predicament with considerable accuracy when it still lay far in the future. Ron Paul, in almost every speech he made during the Republican primaries, spoke of bubbles, reckless credit growth, and the ‘unsustainability’ of present policy. So why isn’t there more demand for the common-sense solutions he put forward? Because common sense is not much use in a financial panic.
• Religion in US politics. What most Americans really want is a president who is a nice, honest-to-goodness Protestant. Which is why both Romney and Obama pretended to be that, O for most of his political career. They shouldn’t have to. Once more a secular (impartial — not secularist, anti-religious) state is a good thing and I belong to the secular right.
• Hooray for Muntadar al-Zaidi: here, here, here and here (www.sockandawe.com).
• Pelosi promises quick passage of $600bn ‘stimulus’ scam.
• More neocon rubbish going back to 1950s sovietisation reacting to the Red scare: I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system. RR’s editor: All those who think Shrub has the slightest CLUE what “free-market principles” are ... raise your blood-stained hands — and then jump off the nearest $%^&ing cliff!
• Alternative currencies grow in popularity.
• Not keen on Keynes.
• Inflation explained. Fiat money, counterfeiting, same thing.
• Top 10 US political ethics scandals of 2008.
• Prosecute Bush and company. It’ll never happen but they deserve it.
• Blighted Christmas. Lying is now considered simple corporate policy. In that way it dovetails neatly with government policy. But you have a natural right to the truth reinforced by the First Amendment to the Constitution. This year give Truth for Christmas. This year Americans are confronting a melting economy, the massing of troops within our own borders, aimed at us. We are losing our homes to foreclosure and the Chinese are coming over with the faux dollars issued by the FED to buy them up. The shock waves of reality are hitting even those who normally lose themselves in football.
• Obama looking at $850bn ‘stimulus’ scam.
• Iraq warrant accord worries US military.
• A country without mercy. Many Americans are wrongfully convicted, because they trust the justice system.
• UK: Goodbye, Woolworth’s.
• Killer job market. The inescapable reality of being a member of the government’s armed forces is that you serve some of the most corrupt and incompetent politicians known to history.
• Not home for Christmas again.
• Bailouts unconstitutional failures.
• Postponing reality. The triumph of the non-judgemental philosophy of high-toned circles.
• The minimal secularist agenda for religious belief seems to be common ethics. Get everybody to agree on John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ (evil not least because it’s beautiful music) and proceed from there, the frog-in-a-pot way. That doesn’t mean I’m going to chuck out classical liberalism and my membership in the secular (not secularist) right and go join the Christian Reconstructionist Protestants (or Jim Wallis and friends for that matter) or the drawbridge monarchist Catholics. (Classical liberalism is based upon the mediæval understanding of reason, conformity to objective reality, which is the faithful continuation of the church fathers.)