Mama Grizzly In 2012? Iraq, Govt Or Corruption? Bomb Iran Or Palestinian State?

Paul Krugman
John Batchelor

"In an upcoming interview with Barbara Walters, Sarah Palin says she believes she can beat Obama in 2012. The way things are going right now, Bristol Palin could beat Obama in 2012." – Jay Leno

"I'll tell you how confident Sarah Palin is. She's already started writing her inaugural address on her hand." – Jay Leno

"Sarah Palin says she's going to run for President in 2012. 2012. Donald Trump said he's going to run for President in 2012 against Sarah Palin. Nice to know there will somebody equally unqualified." –David Letterman

"Now that would be some presidential race. You've got Donald Trump and Sarah Palin and the debates. Get there early and get some seats down front for those debates. 'You're fired, you becha.'" –David Letterman

"There's going to be problems when Donald Trump runs. They had a lot of problems with Obama, you wait until Donald Trump runs because the rumor is that thing on his head was not born in this country." –David Letterman

"Donald Trump wants to see if people think he should run for President. So a website has been launched called 'Shouldtrumprun.com.' Yeah, don't worry the American public has responded with their own website 'No.com.'" –Conan O'Brien

Mike Huckabee thinks Sarah Palin will run away the 2012 nomination. He's saying that hoping she will remember he said this so early and pick him as her running mate... Pundits are already writing articles on who they see as the candidates for the next election, or who the dark horse candidates for the Republican Party might emerge as the frontrunner. Given the fact that Barack Obama will run for re-election, unless he gets tired of all of the opposition to every move he makes and says screw it, and drops out to raise his family in peace. I've spent this last weekend with a cold/flu, uncomfortable if I sat or lie down, could barely focus on the Sunday paper, so I let my mind drift a lot while listening to music, and I was able to drift up to Wasilla, Alaska... Whether I like it or not, I've decided that Sarah Palin will win the GOP's presidential nomination. More interesting is who she would choose as her running mate. Instinct tells me that she is more comfortable with a Michelle Bachmann or a Nicki Haley, making history with the first all female candidacy. There would be too much friction with Michelle, who thinks she is a conservative diva in her own right, so campaigning with Ms Haley would be more fun. But she may also end up choosing Marco Rubio, who at this time, seems to be the most popular person she could choose, again making history with a Cuban-American VP... Sarah's only real opponent is Mit Romney, and he isn't a winnable candidate because he is a member of the Mormon cult. I don't see how he could run and keep a debate about the Mormons out of the media. It's bad enough that they have taken over the Boy Scouts; I shudder to think what kind of decrees they might make once they have taken over the White House and C Street...

David Letterman's "Top Ten Surprises In Sarah Palin's New Book"

10. It's one, long run-on sentence
9. Lists her favorite things to gut
8. In 2008, she voted for Obama
7. She plagiarizes the stuff George W. Bush plagiarized in his book
6. Averages six "You betcha's" per page
5. In high school, was voted "Most Likely to Serve Half-Term As Alaska's Governor"
4. Comes with a caribou jerky bookmark
3. There's also an edition that's been translated into English
2. Explains why they call her Baba Booey
1. Palin recently worked as a Tina Fey impersonator

So, of course, the perfect vice presidential candidate to run with Sarah Palin is Tina Fey...

For the past several years now, Iraq has been named one of the most corrupt countries in the world, despite all of the money the US poured into it to promote democracy. Cynics among us say that it was the American easy money that made it more corrupt than it ever was under Saddam, and now your average government official has to be more creative to find his cash cow to provide the millions of US dollars that his family has become accustomed to. A perfect example how this relates to the current situation that has befallen the Iraqi Parliament was reported this Sunday in the NT Times. A new president had been elected, Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader who also had been the previous president. He was supposed to ask Nuri al-Maliki to form a new government, where al-Maliki would have 30 days to name a new set of government officials and cabinet members. These are the guys who traditionally rip off the most money for their families... But Parliament decided to postpone this process for a few days to make sure that al-Maliki had all of his ducks sitting in a row, and he may have problems if he just keeps many of the old officials in power. For example: "Although government operations have continued during the eight months since the election, the price of the stalemate is being felt on the streets, as evidenced by a statement on Sunday by Osama al-Najafi, the new speaker of Parliament, that said he had received a letter from the government admitting it no longer had enough money to make welfare payments to widows, the unemployed and other needy Iraqis.


He said Iraq would not be able to resume that aid until a new budget was passed. Some lawmakers called for an investigation into the shortage of money; others said they were not surprised to learn that the well was dry.“It’s expected,” said Ayad al-Samarrai, a former speaker of Parliament. “When Parliament is delayed for all these months, it also stops monitoring the government and holding them accountable.” There is currently about $130,000 in the fund, where before there was over a billion. I seriously doubt that much effort will go into recovering the money when everyone knows who was responsible for monitoring the fund and who stole the money. This is the crux of the Iraqi problem: as long as there are large amounts of money that can be stolen without repercussions, then the government will continue to allow the widows of its soldiers to die along with the poor, as an acceptable collateral to getting rich. In Western style democracies, the government is supposed to be more honest and caring for the poor, letting the private sector do all of the stealing, and is why it will never really catch on. In an Islamic country, the only place left for an honest man to go is religious study, to become an imam or ayatollah, and even there...

Well, we're pretty much back to where we started in the Israeli - Palestinian negotiations process, deadlocked. We're not going forward because Mahmoud Abbas is back to whining about no moratorium on the construction of settlement sites in the West Bank. I've already solved that. Because you are not going to get the settlers to leave, let them build, but then they have to pay rent on the buildings to the Palestinian government. They also will have to live under Palestinian law, etc. If the Palestinian state is to be separate from Israel with different laws, then the settlers will have to give up their Israeli citizenship in order to live in the West Bank. Logical and fair...

The Netanyahu government is playing head games to postpone making any weighty decisions like the ones I mentioned above, since it would affect 60 - 100,000 people. Too bad there isn't some higher authority that can declare a Palestinian state, since most of the boundaries have already been previously agreed to. Even the Israeli government can just declare hey, there is the Palestinian state, and these are her boundaries... then, invite the current Palestinian leadership groups to hold another election, since there hasn't been one since 2006... This isn't a difficult thing to do, negotiations could be over in two weeks, with a new government up and running... oh yea, we don't do this because we are scared that Hamas would win. Well, they might, then after a few years being forced to be responsible for a large population, it will become less antagonistic, like Arafat did... and he was a lot worse than any current Hamas leader...

Of course, now the added argument is to wait until after Israel wages war on Iran to go ahead with the negotiations. Well, that should never happen. Iran really isn't that much of a threat as the press has been making her out to be. Israel is enjoying its current role of sending saboteurs into Iran from its submarines in the Persian gulf, that it's itching to take the next aggressive step... but what if the US takes its nuclear toys away? After all, it has never signed the non-proliferation treaty and is working hard lobbying Republicans to let the recently negotiated treaty by the Obama administration with Russia die on the floor of Congress. Maybe we need to reign in our wayward step-child and make it be more polite towards its neighbors, not the spoiled brat it is now... as for Iran, as long as it uses telephones or communications satellites for its computers to talk to one another, we will be able to mess with their nuclear program. We have lots of other monkey-wrenching programs in place that will cost them time and money to find and fix, and keep our intelligence community up to their chins in jokes in Farsi...