Nosemonkey's EUtopia

Dear God…

The film itself, the Bush dog Barney hitting the campaign trail, sounds amusing enough. But a Kerry dog called Fifi, replete with a beret? Oooh! Kerry speaks FRENCH! France is the most evil nation in the world!

Call me stupid, but having a head of state who is able to converse in more than one language strikes me as a benefit? Bush’s vague grasp of Spanish is one of the few things that almost elicits admiration. Kerry is fluent in French, and halfway decent in Italian, if I recall correctly. This can surely only be a good thing?

But that’s off the point. The comments to this innocent enough little article (“Who says Republicans are stuffy and no fun!”) are a classic example of the apparent mindset and “sense of humour” of your average Republican voter:

“WE [Republicans] are Red because we have American Blood flowing in our veins. They [Democrats] are Blue in deference to their European bluebloods.”

*sigh*

An interesting article in the Independent, which makes a change, uses the Republican “statistics” technique and turns it on Bush (on whom probably more later, once I’ve had a chance to read/watch/listen to his speech from last night).

A lot of this is a weak, Michael Moore-style attempt to hint at conspiracies (which does no one any favours), but there are some good ones scattered amongst the “Oh look, Bush and the Saudis!” nonsense:

14 Number of Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) agents assigned to track down 1,200 known illegal immigrants in the United States from countries where al-Qa’ida is active.

$0 Amount approved by George Bush to hire more INS special agents.

$10m Amount Bush cut from the INS’s existing terrorism budget.

$3m Amount the White House was willing to grant the 9/11 Commission to investigate the 11 September attacks.

$5m Amount a 1996 federal commission was given to study legalised gambling.

$50m Amount granted to the commission that looked into the Columbia space shuttle crash.

43 Percentage of the entire world’s military spending that the US spends on defence. (That was in 2002, the year before the invasion of Iraq.)

$2bn Estimated monthly cost of US military presence in Iraq projected by the White House in April 2003.

$4bn Actual monthly cost of the US military presence in Iraq according to Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld in 2004.

$120bn Amount the war and its aftermath are projected to cost for the 2004 fiscal year.

$401.3bn Proposed military budget for 2004.

5 Estimated Percentage of US air cargo that is screened, including cargo transported on passenger planes.

22,600 Number of planes carrying unscreened cargo that fly into New York each month.

95 Percentage of foreign goods that arrive in the United States by sea.

2 Percentage of those goods subjected to thorough inspection.

4.7m Number of bankruptcies that were declared during Bush’s first three years in office.

2.3m Number of Americans who lost their jobs during first three Years of the Bush administration.

$300m Amount cut from the federal programme that provides subsidies to poor families so they can heat their homes.

$489bn The US trade deficit in 2003, the worst in history for a single year.

$5.6tr Projected national surplus forecast by the end of the decade when Bush took office in 2001.

$7.22tr US national debt by mid-2004.

9.3m Number of US unemployed in April 2004.

There’s a lot of shite in there, and a load which are highly debatable, but also some fairly interesting ones. Especially when it comes to the economy. Quite why the Democrats are rising to the Republican bait and fixing on the “war on terror” angle when they could revisit Clinton’s technique of “it’s the economy, stupid” I have no idea…

Here he is. Now I’ll confess to never having registered this guy’s name before, not being one to follow American politics to the depth where I am aware of too many senators or representatives’ individual takes on policy. I’ve discovered this morning, since hearing him on the Today Programme, that I was loosely aware of him as the guy who called rap music “crap” on the floor of the senate (I have a tendency to agree). I imagine that most Americans would be more familiar with him.

The guy is a Democratic senator from Georgia, a former US Marine and arch conservative who has repeatedly rejected offers from the Republicans to switch allegiance. After his performance last night, I bet they’re glad he never did – after all, it’s far more powerful to have a sitting Democrat senator slag off the Democrats’ Presidential nominee at the Republican Party Convention than to have a former Democrat.

So basically the Republicans managed to get a Democrat to slag off John Kerry live on national television to a rabid congregation of pre-converted lunatics who actually bood when Miller stated the surely laudable aim that “Senator Kerry has made it clear that he would use military force only if approved by the United Nations”, and again when Miller made the – frankly bizarre and nonsensical – claim that “Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending.”

I’m trying to work out what Miller thinks he’s going to gain by doing this. He’s surely going to piss off the registered Democrats who voted him to office, as well as the rest of his party. So perhaps he’s finally going to switch to the party he evidently should be a member of, and try to gain swift promotion from a grateful post-election-victory George W?

Either way, the guy’s a tit.

Find out more about Miller here and here – it never ceases to amaze me how good Wikipedia is getting these days…

Accusations that are hurled on a regular basis (and, it should be said, often with justification) against the institutions of the European Union. How refreshing it is to see those pillars of integrity – the Eurosceptic media caught bang to rights.
The plight of Conrad Black, Hollinger and their associates such as Richard Perle is enough to make you feel warm all over. Ah, those eurocrats with their gravy train lifestyle and immense expense accounts. But wait! Black blowing $43,000 of Hollinger money on a birthday party for his wife among other things). To be fair, this was even reported in one of Black’s last few media possessions, the Chicago Sun-Times.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, and especially to hear the respective responses of Bush and Kerry to this attack on the Byrd Amendment.

The full text of Arnie’s prepared speech at the Republican convention. Some highlights:

“Here we can respectfully disagree and still be patriotic – still be American – and still be good Republicans”

Can you spot the subtle movie reference here?

“And, ladies and gentlemen, if you believe we must be fierce and relentless and terminate terrorism – then you are a Republican!”

And finally, best of the bunch:

“To those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say: Don’t be economic girlie men!”

The Republicans are great. In an atrotiously designed section of one of their websites they’ve compiled a load of statistics about mankind’s potential saviour. (How accurate they are I have no idea, but we’ll assume moderately to give the GOP the benefit of the doubt).

I must confess here to being one of those people who fails to see how “liberal” could possibly be interpreted as a bad thing, so mayhap I’m a tad biased? But even so, pretty much all the “facts” given here can surely only be good things?

What it basically says is that he disagrees with Bush most of the time, is against judicial killing, wants to protect the environment, provide women with freedom of choice, help out people at the bottom of the economic ladder, provide some kind of federal healthcare for the poor, can acknowledge when mistakes have been made, is against repressive and unconstitutional laws, thinks education reform requires proper funding, thinks persecuting a poverty-stricken country with sanctions because of an outdated political disagreement is wrong but thinks repressive and fascistic states should be subject to sanctions, thinks trade agreements should have environmental and labour protection clauses attached, would only appoint Supreme Court Justices who acknowledge current US law, is opposed to funding outdated defence systems, etc. etc. etc.

The man may be dull, but he has a lot of opinions I can happily agree with. Shame I’m not entitled to vote, really…

But seriously, can someone please explain to me how any of the above views are bad?

Just as the Republican Convention HQ at Madison Square garden is in full on protestor lockdown (NYTIMES REG REQUIRED) so the opening speeches have cast America in the role of a nation standing proud and alone against terrorism. Rudolph Guiliani, who resembles a skeletal Robert Duvall, launched a scathing attack on… well pretty much everyone other than the Republican administration. Of particular note was his blanket condemnation of Europe, following up mention of the 1972 Munich olympics massacre and the Klinghoffer murder (the assassination of a wealthy, wheelchair-bound American while on a Mediterranean cruise – since dramatised in opera form) with the critique:

‘So terrorists learned they could intimidate the world community and too often the response, particularly in Europe, was “accommodation, appeasement and compromise”.’

Leaving aside the what’s and the wherefores (the matter of domestic terrorism such as the Baader-Meinhof gang, ETA and the IRA among many others and also the touchy issue of sympathy for Palestinians) what’s been impressive about the Republican stance is its lack of compromise. Anyone whose view differs in the slightest (Democrat or European) is an appeaser, just as was the case in the 1930s. In the lingo of post 11th September, they’re either with America or against them. The scary thing is that this form of neo-isolationism is probably going to win the day in November.

While parliament is in recess, the Republican convention is available to view on BBC Parliament

Makes a nice wallpaper.

And with that, bed.

Did anywhere in the UK report this?

“Top diplomats and officials from thirteen countries in the Danube region met in Bucharest during July for the 2nd Ministerial Conference of the Danube Co-operation Process. The focus was on the Danube’s role as a future internal river of the EU, as a main communications and transportation link between the North Sea and the Black Sea, and as a European space, with countries sharing the same democratic principles, values and objectives, despite different stages of economic development and a complex historical legacy.”

As a few newspapers suggested before Europe’s expansion back when we still thought we might get a summer, the focus of Europe could be shifting eastwards. I thought Britain (and, indeed, Western Europe as a whole) was meant to be cultivating these new member states and their neighbours to get them to play ball?

Instead, the only representative of Western Europe at the conference was the German Ambassador to Romania.

All the portests in the Big Apple against Bush and his followers seem to be getting lots of coverage, despite being mostly peaceful and despite the 584 arrests so far largely appearing to be either for technical breaches of the law or for no violation at all.

But we seem to be forgetting the other protests going on slightly closer to home. It seems a bit odd that I find out about protests in Greece, a mere couple of thousand miles away, from a Japanese newspaper, but still…

As a Londoner utterly opposed to this city’s massively ill-conceived bid for the 2012 Olympics (which will see us Londoners paying higher taxes to pay for an event we don’t want), I find the fact that our dear Athenian cousins are a tad pissed off about the post-Olympics situation heartening.

But will the fact that the initial budget of 4.6 billion euros has risen by a further 2-6 billion deter the masterminds behind the London Olympic bid? Will the singularly underwhelmed response of the British public to our returning so-called Olympic heroes tell them that we just don’t care about grown men and women running round in circles?

It’s about time we had another protest over here. As we’re entirely in the hands of the American electorate when it comes to politics in this country, and as the last major political protest we had achieved precisely tit all, we should focus our efforts on something we may have a chance of affecting. The Daily Mail should get in on this one: Stop this Olympics madness!

at least I don’t live in America.