There are elections and there are elections. The President of Iran's former job was mayor of Tehran which he won with a 6% voter turnout. If Iranians actually wanted a different outcome one suspects they could done that. Either elections are irrelevant or the person who's elected to be the spokesman for the Supreme Mullahs is irrelevant, or both.

Seems that hoping for a sea change in Iranian politics is pointless or a misdirection.

Next, it's what, Day 1107 of Absolutely We're Going to Bomb Iran 7:30am local time tomorrow, I guarantee it, bet the farm I have absolutely positive proof.....

....Uh maybe not so perhaps the Bush rhetoric is really just nonsense. I mean isn't the job of the State Dept to actually talk to other countries, to some extent even through back channels?

Next, what do we actually owe them? They have reasonably strong realtions with Russia, who's building their nuclear infrastructure, and China, who's selling them weapons and related technology. And the EU which in practice doesn't have much in the way of actual sanctions in force. One wonders what a country like that actually needs from us vis a vis internal economic viability? Years ago a study by ELF Aquitaine noted that Iran needed to sink more than 20-30 billion dollars into their oil infrastructure to make up for disprepair since 1989. Since the end of the Iran Iraq war, Iran could have but didn't invest in economic capacity instead electing to sink bilions into a nuclear weapons program. Which of course is their choice to make. It's simply a bad choice.

Perhaps they'd like to dial back the 350 million + investment in Hezbollah to occupy southern Lebanon and operate by proxy the Syrian army. Again, that's their political choice to make, it merely seems to be a bad choice.

They seem to be good at making typically bad choices.

Unlike the quaternary mixed partial differential equations that are, apparently, at the root of the vagaries of female sexualilty. One wonders at the picture of nearly depopulated world if it depended on female arousal for conception.

If she can strong arm her parents into a mortgage size wedding and act like an Alpha Bridezilla to everyone, especially her husband to be then, more power to her! She's their problem. May they live happily ever in whatever screeching over medicated ashtray throwing hell they've mapped out for themselves.

In that the compact which asserts that those most likely to consume health care, e.g. the poor, are least likely to pay for it. That's a societal norm of whatever society you happen to live in. Whether it's the US or Indonesia or Switzerland.

An make no mistake, it' not simply a middle class issue. It's an issue for the poor first, then the middle class. We can safely assume that any sort of national plan would involve those who don't actually have any health care now, the poor and lower middle class to get theirs before the middle class underinsured get their parity. We just need to understand that the middle class will be tapped to subsidize the poor before they ever seen a benefit to themselves. And then when it's their turn, it will cost even more.

Now having said that some societies have shown a higher tolerance for that than others. For instance France and Israel with their very high tax rates have helped shape such a society. They also happen to have poverty rates on par with the US circa 1960, about 22-24%. So in a big way, a quasi socialist plan comes at the expense of income compression nad with the risk of a lower overall standard of living, in the aggregate.

Again, not an inherently evil thing, but, I wonder what the response of the already kicked in the head middle class will be when they are required to pay for someone else. I know that at this point I would seriously consider emigrating; either to a low tax high income country like Uruguay, a low income low tax country like Portugal, or a middle income high tax socialist country like Israel or France. There's no downside to it at that point.

They're all pretty much the same.

In the church parking lot. Attire is formal camo. The bride wore a rebel flag and Dale Earnhardt #3.

I think Salon is at the tipping point. Seems that the entire middle column today is scratched from someone's female oriented agendized screed. Between the 50% Iraq coverage and the 50% radical feminism coverage I'm left scratching my head what the target demo is here? Middle aged female antiglobalists? Is Salon slowly becoming a parody of itself?

That most Americans no longer have a clear memory of Reagan. I doubt any Republicans under the age of 30 even know who he was, in fact, apart from what they read on the web. So it's really more mythmaking isn't it? In either case what is true is that 99% of all 'political' TV coverage is utterly unwatchable. The RNC will soon fall into the trap of simply becoming the same 100,000 people all talking to, about one another on Sunday morning news political news shows and on the web. An endless sewing circle of extremists, fools and tools who all clatter to one another in an arcane code.

I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would watch any of these so called debates, either the Republicans or the Democrats. It's just prepackaged sound bytes and carefully fundraised opinion snippets. It has almost zero content. And the people who have nothing to lose, the truly and honestly unelectable ones come across a little strident and looney as is their assigned role.

I truly think that in my lifetime national politics will become absolutely meaningless to most Americans and Presidential elections will become ceremonial affairs. Whomever we stick in the Offal Office it won't make no which never mind. It's politics by Hallmark Card.