There's not a lot new going on in the world today. The Russians are still occupying Georgia, and news of their atrocities are beginning to leak out; the EU is wagging a finger at the Russians; and the US is preoccupied with the play-by-play reportage of the Democrat Party Convention in Denver. The Chinese were able to close all their factories in Beijing to improve the air quality for the Olympics……..given the vapid and vacuous CO2 laden hot air now emanating from Denver, can we get the Democrats to shut down the podium and do the same for the rest of us?
Nothing new here citizen…..move along now.
Russian-backed paramilitaries are ethnically cleansing villages inside a buffer zone within Georgia. The South Ossetian militiamen have torched houses, beaten elderly people and even murdered civilians in the lawless zone just north of Gori, set up by the Russian army, close to the border with the breakaway republic whose independence Russia recognized this week, locals said.
Is the Ukraine the new Cold War front?
A day after Russia threw down a fresh challenge to the West by recognizing Georgia's breakaway territories as independent states, the (UK's) foreign secretary, David Miliband, was the first Western official in Kiev to show support for the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko. The US vice president, Dick Cheney, is travelling to both Georgia and Ukraine next week.
Mr. Yushchenko, who fell victim to a mysterious poisoning that almost cost him his life after he led the Orange Revolution in 2004, fears that his country could be next on Vladimir Putin's hit list. (Can't understand why he thinks that….)No real
(Who knew the Brits were so hot-blooded?)
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko called Russia's decision to recognize two Georgian rebel regions unacceptable today and threatened to raise the issue of a rent increase at a base for the Black Sea Fleet. (Yeah, that'll really get those KGB guys quaking in their hob-nailed boots)
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, spoke to President Dmitri Medvedev today, the first western leader to talk to the Kremlin since Medvedev announced the recognition of the two secessionist regions of Georgia. She made it plain she had voiced her strong disapproval to the Russian leader.
"I made clear above all that I would have expected that we would talk about these questions in [international] organisations before unilateral recognition happened," she said. "There are several UN Security Council resolutions in which the territorial integrity of Georgia was stressed, which Russia also worked on."
The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said Russia had broken international law and, along with other senior European officials, worried that Russia's decision to redraw Georgia's borders would encourage Moscow to act similarly with other former parts of the Soviet Union
such as Ukraine. (What would cause him to suspect that?)
The Wall Street Journal comments today that Big Labor is making a strong comeback in driving the agenda of the Democrats………States with more union households tend to be more Democratic. And groups like the Service Employees International Union and the AFL-CIO will pour hundreds of millions of dollars, and endless man hours, into getting Democrats elected this year. Those resources have simply overwhelmed the 1990s New Democrat movement that tried to tug the party toward freer trade and public-sector reform.
They want to pass "card check" legislation, which would eliminate the requirement for secret ballots in union elections, since they can't get members any other way. Passage of this would arguably be the biggest change to federal labor law since the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. The Democratic House passed card check last year, and Mr. Obama has pledged his support. With a few more Senators, it might pass. That should really help the US manufacturing industries, and cities like Detroit end their painful suffering – like a coup de grace.
The only sector of the U.S. auto industry that is prospering is the part not organized by the United Auto Workers. Likewise, Europe, with its high jobless rates and slow growth, argues against
unionization as a way to lift middle-class incomes. To the extent a country like Germany has modestly reversed some of this, it has been the result of recent labor-law reforms and labor concessions.
As for the U.S., the states with right to work laws have performed better economically for workers of all types. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy has shown that right to work states over the past 30 years have lower unemployment, higher rates of job creation, and faster growth in GDP and per-capita personal income than states with compulsory union membership.
What Americans need to know this November is that the Democratic Party wants to make it that much more difficult for them not to join a union.
It looks like T. Boone Pickens is going to have to put his plans on hold, and you're not going to be able to plug that car in for some time. Seems like the real problem is that you can't get it from there, to here. Wind driven electricity, that is. MORE
Now would be a good time to read Jon Stossel's perspective on Energy Independence:
Energy Independence
Now for some light diversion:
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