Our farmers are paid by the US government to build a corn syrup monument to ethanol and junk food, but French farmers prefer a subsidy for “luxuries” like fresh fruit and vegetables.
Ah, but Brussels says this is illegal, and wants the French to claw back their subsidies from French farmers!!!
Gorilla says: “Michelle Obama, when will you take your good food battle to our cheese eating subsidy monkeys? Let’s claw back some of their cash and put Sophie Tucker on the case!”
Venezuela’s providing arms, succor and advice to the FARC, the Colombian rebel group.
More interestingly, we learn this time that Swedish arms were involved. Apparently, the Swedes, who sold the arms to Venezuela, have been asking the Chavez government for 2 years to explain what happened, without apparent success.
Gorilla says: “Post-modernism makes everything harder to root for. You’ve got a socialist caudillo who wants a life term trying to undermine a conservative caudillo who wants to overturn a ban on term limits, while a neutral European power unknowingly greases the wheels. Frankly, I’d rather play chess with death!”:
In a best case scenario, how many prostitutes can your villa hold?
In a worst case scenario, how many prostitutes will contribute to your ex-wife’s bank account?
Which nether region of Italy will benefit most from a stimulus package: your own or L’Aquila’s?
Gorilla says: “Enough of these old spicy meatballs, Silvio spells relief: T-E-E-N-A-G-E.”
In the bad old days of 2001-07, the Fed and the taxpayers were fleeced by the combination of a housing bubble and Alan Greenspan’s rigid ideological predisposition to let a “self correcting” market do pretty much whatever it wanted.
Several trillion dollars in bailouts later, everything old is new again.
Gorilla surmises this time it’s agricultural: “When the sheep replace the barn door, the jockeys ride horses for courses”.
Ginning up car sales temporarily through bribery is one idea, but what better way to help the woeful Michigan economy than to fix up a prison there to try and house Guantanamo detainees?
This arises because, yet again, the President really doesn’t want to take on the mantle of leadership when that might lead to accusations of being soft on terrorism. It has yet to be explained why a country with as many first-rate maximum security prisons as the United States cannot find a way to house a couple of hundred bad guys, even supposing there was evidence to convict them.
We’d all have to hide under our desks if these frightful men were released and not immediately put on flights to Bermuda and Ireland!
So, we remain short on terror and long on screwing around with the Constitution. Our allies merely laugh and harden their negotiating positions. Our enemies continue to use Guantanamo and the denial of human rights as both recruitment tools and pretexts for the next bombing.
Gorilla suggests: “Why not simply include Guantanamo detainees in the Cash For Clunkers program? For every car sold, a writ of habeas corpus will be included, enabling non-surviving local dealers to blame al-Qaeda for the bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler while attracting stimulus money for a refit of the ever-profitable service department?”
The Obama Administration apparently wants to cut off gasoline supplies to Iran if the Iranians don’t come to the table to negotiate on the nuclear issue.
How this is supposed to happen, when the Russians, a very large Iranian gas supplier, have never indicated the slightest support for “tougher” sanctions is well beyond comprehension.
We seem to be stuck in a post-9/11 trap of our own making: Countries that 10 years ago would have been seen as fifth-rate, marginal regional threats have been conflated into America’s existential nightmares. How else to justify the massive expenditure of lives and treasure on such total failures as Iraq (slowly descending back into civil war) and Afghanistan (never left civil war) while not actually catching the very terrorists who attacked us?
The real winners in this have been Islamic extremists (no difficulty attracting new recruits or undertaking bombings worldwide), Pentagon budgeteers (now spending 10 times what any other country does) and several right-wing Israeli governments (why be good?).
The working policy principle is: “We don’t talk, so they must scare us”.
Gorilla thinks: “One day we’ll decide to sit down and cut a deal with Iran and North Korea. They know it, the Russians and Chinese know it, and one day so will we”.
Gorilla’s Blog