Democrats who worry that Barack Obama is untested can put their concerns to rest. The inflammatory rhetoric of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has confronted Obama with the most severe test of his presidential campaign and, quite likely, of his public career. He is now facing a full-blown and fast-moving political crisis in which his reputation as a leader with a singular ability to transcend racial divisions and unite Americans is in jeopardy. A convergence of factors - a media firestorm, a Democratic rival eager to exploit his stumbles and, most of all, a Republican opposition eager to rough up the man they expect to face in the general election - have raised the stakes to new heights for Obama with the speech he will deliver in Philadelphia on Tuesday morning. A successful address would go a long way toward answering Hillary Rodham Clinton’s complaint that Obama has never shown he can handle the rough-and-tumble nature of modern political combat. A failure could leave many of the white independent voters - a key group behind Obama’s swift rise in national politics - doubting whether he is really the bridge-builder and healer he has portrayed himself to […]
AMSTERDAM — The U.S. dollar’s value is dropping so fast against the euro that small currency outlets in Amsterdam are turning away tourists seeking to sell their dollars for local money while on vacation in the Netherlands. ‘Our dollar is worth maybe zero over here,’ said Mary Kelly, an American tourist from Indianapolis, Indiana, in front of the Anne Frank house. ‘It’s hard to find a place to exchange. We have to go downtown, to the central station or post office.’ That’s because the smaller currency exchanges — despite buy/sell spreads that make it easier for them to make money by exchanging small amounts of currency — don’t want to be caught holding dollars that could be worth less by the time they can sell them. The dollar hovered near record lows on Monday, with one euro worth around $1.58 versus $1.47 a month ago.
BAGHDAD — Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday made a surprise visit to Baghdad, where he pledged that U.S. forces would ‘not quit before the job is done’ and said that a massive troop buildup had achieved ‘phenomenal’ improvements in security. At sunset Monday, however, a female suicide bomber killed at least 40 people and injured more than 50 when she blew herself up in a crowded pedestrian area near a Shiite Muslim shrine in the southern holy city of Karbala, according to government and hospital officials. Among the victims were several Iranian pilgrims who’d come to worship at the Imam Hussein shrine, one of Islam’s most sacred sites. And the U.S. military announced the deaths of two soldiers who were killed Monday when their Humvee struck a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, bringing the number of American troop deaths to at least 3,990 since the war began. Cheney told a news conference in Baghdad that the invasion of Iraq five years ago this week was a ‘difficult, challenging, but nonetheless successful endeavor.’ However, he said that obstacles remain and that the decision on whether to begin reducing forces depends on political reconciliation and the ability to […]
Today’s edition of SR is focused on Iraq. The war seems largely to have left the public conversation, which I find unacceptable, given that young Americans and many Iraqis continue to die because of this conflict. Also whomever is the next President, this issue is going to haunt them, and us, until reality enters our evaluation of what to do.
The war in Iraq has been one of the most disastrous wars ever fought by Britain. It has been small but we achieved nothing. It will stand with Crimea and the Boer War as conflicts which could have been avoided and were demonstrations of incompetence from start to finish. The British failure in the Iraq war has been even more gross because it has not ended with a costly military victory but a humiliating scuttle. The victors in Basra and southern Iraq have been the local Shia militias masquerading as government security forces. Britain should immediately hold a full inquiry into the mistakes made before and during the war in Iraq out of pure self-interest. Gordon Brown’s suggestion that holding such an inquiry now would somehow threaten the stability of Iraq is either a piece of obvious prevarication or, if taken at face value, a sign of absurd vanity. Iraqis show not the slightest interest in British policy and assume it will simply be an echo of decisions made in Washington. I have watched this war being fought over the last five years and I never for a moment felt that the Government in London had the […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
