Ruh Roh!

Niger cancels 'free-slave' event

The government of Niger has cancelled at the last minute a special ceremony during which at least 7,000 slaves were to be granted their freedom.

A spokesman for the government's human rights commission, which had helped to organise the event, said this was because slavery did not exist.

It is not clear why the government, which was also a co-sponsor of the ceremony, changed its position.

Maybe they heard Jesse Jackson was on his way over to demand reparations? Anyhow, I'm just glad that the goverment of Niger contributes its wisdom to the deliberations of the United Nations. Maybe Justice Kennedy could pick up some legal pointers too!

posted by Cracker Barrel Philosopher at 6:20 PM -

 
Chilling effects alert!

The usual suspects who are always whining about "chilling effects" are trying to get Boston Globe technology correspondent Hiawatha Bray fired:

Democrats heaped criticism on The Boston Globe yesterday for failing to more aggressively punish technology reporter Hiawatha Bray, who criticized Sen. John F. Kerry's campaign in Internet postings as he covered the race.

Former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, a close Kerry friend, said in a written statement, ``As someone who has seen what the right wing can do to destroy people and how the media can be complicit, I just can't get over the fact a reporter at a major newspaper was smearing John Kerry [related, bio] and he isn't even held accountable. Why does he have a job?''

Democratic National Committee spokesman Jano Cabrera said Bray's conduct ``merits more than a rebuke.''

Sheesh, he's a technology reporter posting in his personal blog. And someone please get an ice pack for Max Cleland before his brain explodes.

Here's an earlier article with some background:

A Boston Globe reporter who covered aspects of the presidential campaign was rebuked by his editors after criticizing Sen. John F. Kerry [related, bio] and promoting President Bush [related, bio] on Internet Web logs.

Globe editor Martin Baron issued a statement yesterday saying technology reporter Hiawatha Bray had been told in November his postings were ``inappropriate and in violation of our standards.''

Bray's postings were revealed by Media Matters for America, a liberal group which employs ex-Democratic staffers.

Ah, George Soros' butt boys. I thought they were busy outing gays.

Bray, who did not return calls yesterday, wrote a handful of technology-related stories for the Globe - including an August story about hackers altering the online cover of an anti-Kerry book by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group.

And the problem is what, exactly?

Two weeks later, Bray posted an item under his own name on a blog hosted by the San Jose Mercury News dismissing Kerry's strategy of promoting his Vietnam service record as ``moronic.''

Not an uncommon opinion on all sides of the spectrum.

Bray promoted many of the Swift Boat attacks on Kerry - some of which were proven false.

Must have misspelled "alleged false." Sounds like the author thinks John Kerry was wearing his magic hat in Cambodia on Christmas Eve.

He questioned his own paper's work, dismissing probes of Bush's National Guard service as ``innuendo.''

Proven right again - just ask Dan Rather.

And in another Web forum after the election, Bray identified himself as a ``Bush supporter'' and said he's ``feeling pretty good now.''

Gosh, they actually found a reporter who supported Bush! That'll never do!

The Globe statement said editors learned of the postings in November. Since then, Baron said, Bray hasn't posted politically related items and has not written about either Bush or Kerry.

Sounds like an equitable resolution according to the Globe's rules. But not for the moonbats who don't care what reporters do if they are leftoids.

Bray's blog is apparently at http://www.monitortan.com/ but the archives don't seem to be working.

posted by Cracker Barrel Philosopher at 9:45 AM -

 
Guess Who!

"There's still Iran and North Korea, don't forget. There's still hope for the rest of us."

There's sure no pond scum shortage.

posted by Cracker Barrel Philosopher at 10:33 PM -

 
On the road again. Spinning tall tales with their friends.

Democrats launch counter-Bush road trip:

The Democrats' battle for the hearts and minds - and wallets - of voters worried about Social Security hits the road Friday, with its first stop at a New York City college.

On the same day President Bush visits Westfield, N.J., to tout his plan for personal accounts within Social Security, Senate Democrats will bring their opposing effort to Pace University.

The Pace event, featuring former presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry and New York's two senators, Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton, kicks off a swing through three other cities: Philadelphia, Phoenix and Las Vegas.

``The facts will expose the administration's inflammatory and misleading sales pitch on Social Security privatization,'' Kerry said. ``Instead of trying to tear down Social Security, we are trying to give Americans the honest conversation deserve.'' [sic]

Pace University spokesman Chris Cory said about 20 percent of the seating at the 650-seat auditorium will be reserved for students, and the rest of the tickets will be distributed by the Democratic Policy Committee.
...
Susan Doha, executive director of the Center for the Independence of the Disabled, said she expected the crowd to be largely critical of the president's plan.

Ya think?

They must have convinced the President because ScrappleFace reports Bush Flip-Flops on Social Security, No Reform Needed:

I was wrong," Mr. Bush said, "In fact, things are going so well with Social Security that today I propose to put members of Congress on the same terrific plan enjoyed by the rest of our citizens. Since it ain't broke yet and there's no crisis yet, I know they'll embrace this equal opportunity proposal. Who could vote against it?"
...
"As our elected officials look forward to hauling down that kind of retirement loot," Mr. Bush said, "I'm sure the next piece of legislation will be a resolution thanking God for Social Security."

Actually, he should propose it.

posted by Cracker Barrel Philosopher at 8:31 PM -

 
A headline writer's dream

Breast for sale: $14,000 and rising:

Giving new meaning to the term "big news," a famous stripper is selling an oversized breast on eBay.

In an ongoing auction, the bidding price has risen from an initial $37 to more than $14,000. The auction is scheduled to conclude on March 5.

The breast -- or, to be technical about it, a big glob of silicone -- belongs to dancer Tawny Peaks and has a storied history.

Measuring a full 69HH, Peaks once had just about the biggest breasts around. But when the orbs became the subject of a 1998 lawsuit, they grew even larger than life.

Peaks was a dancer at the Diamond Dolls nightclub in Clearwater, Florida. While at a bachelor party there, a patron claimed he was given a whiplash injury by Peaks, who had been swinging her breasts across his face at the time.

Ok, who wants to examine the evidence? Place your bids here.

posted by Cracker Barrel Philosopher at 8:06 PM -

 
"Out of the mouth of babes..."

Or loonies - Gadhafi says the UN should abolish the Security Council. I'd ask "Why stop there?", but let's hear what the besheeted one has to say:

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was quoted as saying yesterday that the United Nations must scrap the Security Council and give its powers to the General Assembly, if it ever hopes to become a truly democratic organisation.

I love the way these dictators are always worrying about democracy.

In a full-page advertisement in The Guardian newspaper, Gadhafi called the UN Security Council "an ugly, forceful, and horrible instrument of dictatorship - an executioner's whip with no appeal against its judgment, even if its judgment is unfair, biased and harmful."

And I thought it was mostly a bunch of fussy ninnies! But catch this:

The world is better represented by the 191-member UN General Assembly, but "it has no powers, no responsibilities and no respect," said Ghadafi.

He compared it to "a Hyde Park Speaker's Corner, a fantasy," and was quoted as saying that it is a waste of money for countries to send delegates to New York "to take part in its ridiculous funny act".

What better place than Manhattan to pad the ole expense account?

Countries such as Germany, Japan, India and Brazil are also trying to become permanent members of an expanded Security Council.

"The notion of broadening the UN Security Council could expose world peace to new dangers and would initiate a cold war that may soon turn hot," Gadhafi was quoted as saying. Instead, he said, turning the world body's powers over to the more representative General Assembly would promote democracy and peace.

If that doesn't happen, he said, Libya and other countries on the General Assembly may simply withdraw from the United Nations.

Now yer talkin', Mo! The prospect of the thugs jumping off the gravy train is amusing, but I'm not holding my breath.

posted by Cracker Barrel Philosopher at 7:43 PM -

 
McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance "Reform" - What a joke!

And, as usual, the joke's on us - The coming crackdown on blogging

Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over.

In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign's Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines.

Smith should know. He's one of the six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission, which is beginning the perilous process of extending a controversial 2002 campaign finance law to the Internet.

Sheesh, not this pseudo campaign finance reform crap again!

In 2002, the FEC exempted the Internet by a 4-2 vote, but U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly last fall overturned that decision. "The commission's exclusion of Internet communications from the coordinated communications regulation severely undermines" the campaign finance law's purposes, Kollar-Kotelly wrote.

Smith and the other two Republican commissioners wanted to appeal the Internet-related sections. But because they couldn't get the three Democrats to go along with them, what Smith describes as a "bizarre" regulatory process now is under way.

I love a bizarre regulatory process, don't you?

Senators McCain and Feingold have argued that we have to regulate the Internet, that we have to regulate e-mail. They sued us in court over this and they won.

Not to mention McCain and Feingold who still can't find their butts with a roadmap.

Read the full interview by following the link, but my favorite part is:

What rules will apply to the Internet that did not before?
...
The real question is: Would a link to a candidate's page be a problem? If someone sets up a home page and links to their favorite politician, is that a contribution? This is a big deal, if someone has already contributed the legal maximum, or if they're at the disclosure threshold and additional expenditures have to be disclosed under federal law.

Certainly a lot of bloggers are very much out front. Do we give bloggers the press exemption? If we don't give bloggers the press exemption, we have the question of, do we extend this to online-only journals like CNET?

How can the government place a value on a blog that praises some politician?

How do we measure that? Design fees, that sort of thing? The FEC did an advisory opinion in the late 1990s (in the Leo Smith case) that I don't think we'd hold to today, saying that if you owned a computer, you'd have to calculate what percentage of the computer cost and electricity went to political advocacy.

It seems absurd, but that's what the commission did. And that's the direction Judge Kollar-Kotelly would have us move in. Line drawing is going to be an inherently very difficult task. And then we'll be pushed to go further. Why can this person do it, but not that person?

How about a link to my least favorite politician's website? Click on Empress Teresa's picture at the the top of the sidebar to see what I mean. Funny, she hasn't updated "her" blog since last April!

Update: Instapundit and Michelle Malkin weigh in.

posted by Cracker Barrel Philosopher at 11:03 AM -

 
The Pearcy's are even freakier than we thought

EXCLUSIVE: Former Renter Of Pearcy House Speaks Out [EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS] Can you say landlords from hell? I knew you could!

posted by Cracker Barrel Philosopher at 2:47 PM -

 
Ssssh! Don't tip the marks!

Spain's foreign minister got all sticky over his EU fantasy yesterday and couldn't keep his mouth shut. Unfortunately, The Sun was listening:

BRITAIN’S days as an independent country will soon be over, Spain’s foreign minister boasted yesterday.

Miguel Angel Moratinos said it is only a matter of time before we are swallowed up by a new European superstate.

And he admitted that the EU Constitution will be a death warrant for sovereignty of the 25 member states.

Mr Moratinos declared: “We are witnessing the last remnants of national politics.”

And asked if the treaty would strip parliaments like Westminster of the right to set their own laws he replied: “Absolutely.”

He said they had already signed away power to run their own economy, legal system and human rights rules.

The next step will be to form a Europe-wide foreign policy and merge the armed forces into a single EU army.

Mr Moratinos said the constitution would lead to “a surrender of member states’ sovereignty”.

He told an EU think-tank that patriotism will be swept away as we all become Europeans.

The minister added: “The member states have already relinquished control of justice, liberty and security.

Indeed. More juicy musings by following the link, and this:

Shadow Foreign Secretary Michael Ancram said last night: “Yet again a senior European politician has dared to tell the truth about the constitution, a truth Mr Blair is anxious to hide.”

Ruh Oh!

But if the suckers are scared off in the UK, the Euros have a secret plan - EU diehards 'ready to gang up' on Britain:

Plans have been drawn up to create an ad-hoc "core" of countries determined to pursue closer integration, in case Britain rejects the draft treaty establishing a European constitution, it was claimed yesterday.

Senior officials close to the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, have told a leading pro-European think-tank, the Centre for European Reform (CER), that a scheme exists for a new, inner-circle of true believers, ready for unveiling the "day after" a British No vote, said Charles Grant, the CER director.

Officials in Paris and Brussels have also contributed.

All the usual wussies. I would have thought they had enough to keep them busy at home, but perhaps I can't comprehend the bureaucratic majesty of their plans. Anyhow, one of the pro-EU folks in the UK says not to worry:

But Mr Grant dismissed talk of Britain being thrown out of the EU in the event of a No vote. "Nobody wants to kick us out, we have the best soldiers, the best diplomats, and one of the best performing economies in Europe."

Er, "best" doesn't seem to have high value in the halls of the European Union.

posted by Cracker Barrel Philosopher at 8:19 AM -

 
The Kumbaya Crowd on the Supreme Court Strikes Again

Europe confirms Supreme Court's disdain for American policy outcomes, high Court finds

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the practice of executing individuals for crimes they committed below the age of 18 is a violation of the Eighth Amendment. Justice Kennedy wrote for the 5-4 majority (Chief Justice Rehnquist heard the case, and thus voted even though there was no "tie" without him).

Justice Kennedy relied on international law and practice to "confirm" his view that the juvenile death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. He also cited the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the U.S. signed only subject to the reservation of its right to impose the death penalty for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of age.

Cut to Findlaw and Justice O'Connor for some details of the unruly tyke in this case:

Christopher Simmons' murder of Shirley Crook was premeditated, wanton, and cruel in the extreme. Well before he committed this crime, Simmons declared that he wanted to kill someone. On several occasions, he discussed with two friends (ages 15 and 16) his plan to burglarize a house and to murder the victim by tying the victim up and pushing him from a bridge. Simmons said they could " 'get away with it' " because they were minors. Brief for Petitioners 3. In accord with this plan, Simmons and his 15-year-old accomplice broke into Mrs. Crook's home in the middle of the night, forced her from her bed, bound her, and drove her to a state park. There, they walked her to a railroad trestle spanning a river, "hog-tied" her with electrical cable, bound her face completely with duct tape, and pushed her, still alive, from the trestle. She drowned in the water below.

Justice Scalia puts the hammer down on these ninnies:

In urging approval of a constitution that gave life-tenured judges the power to nullify laws enacted by the people's representatives, Alexander Hamilton assured the citizens of New York that there was little risk in this, since "[t]he judiciary ... ha[s] neither FORCE nor WILL but merely judgment." The Federalist No. 78, p. 465 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961). But Hamilton had in mind a traditional judiciary, "bound down by strict rules and precedents which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them." Id., at 471. Bound down, indeed. What a mockery today's opinion makes of Hamilton's expectation, announcing the Court's conclusion that the meaning of our Constitution has changed over the past 15 years--not, mind you, that this Court's decision 15 years ago was wrong, but that the Constitution has changed.

I must have missed the news!

The Court reaches this implausible result by purporting to advert, not to the original meaning of the Eighth Amendment, but to "the evolving standards of decency," ante, at 6 (internal quotation marks omitted), of our national society. It then finds, on the flimsiest of grounds, that a national consensus which could not be perceived in our people's laws barely 15 years ago now solidly exists. Worse still, the Court says in so many words that what our people's laws say about the issue does not, in the last analysis, matter: "[I]n the end our own judgment will be brought to bear on the question of the acceptability of the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment." Ante, at 9 (internal quotation marks omitted). The Court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our Nation's moral standards--and in the course of discharging that awesome responsibility purports to take guidance from the views of foreign courts and legislatures. Because I do not believe that the meaning of our Eighth Amendment, any more than the meaning of other provisions of our Constitution, should be determined by the subjective views of five Members of this Court and like-minded foreigners, I dissent.

What our legislatures decide must obviously be inferior to the sensitive ones and their foreign pals. Sheesh, I can hear the Founding Fathers spinning in their graves.

Oh yeah - here are some more tykes whose death sentences the sensitive ones revoked:

LOUISIANA:

Dale Dwayne Craig was convicted of the Sept. 14, 1992 killing of Kipp Gullet, a student at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, who was ambushed, abducted and had his van stolen after pulling into a dormitory parking lot.

According to co-defendants who testified against Craig, who was 17 at the time of the killing, the victim cried and begged for mercy. Craig fired three bullets into his head as the victim lay on the ground in a fetal position.
...
TEXAS:

Efrain Perez and Raul Villarreal were both 17 in 1993 when they joined three other teenagers in the gang rape and killings of Jennifer Ertman, 14, and Elizabeth Pena, 16. The girls were taking a shortcut home from a party and came upon Perez, Villarreal and their friends, who were drinking and fighting along a Houston rail line. The girls were repeatedly raped before being strangled and stomped to death.

The girls' rotting bodies were found four days later. Ertman's teeth were kicked in and she was strangled with a belt and Pena's jaw was broken before she was strangled by her shoelaces. The outspoken grief of Ertman's father, Randy, led to a law allowing families of murder victims to watch the execution of their loved one's killer.

How about a law compelling Supreme Court weenies to witness the autopsies of a few victims?

posted by Cracker Barrel Philosopher at 9:32 PM -

 
More Paul Martin Fun

I had my laugh at the expense of Canadian PM Paul Martin already, now Gary Dunford has a whack in PM confused - in general:

"General, this is Prime Minister Dithers," begins the PM. "Prime minister of Canada, the fly-over country? Northern neighbour? Under NORAD's missile shield, but not part of it?"

"Good morning, sir. Nice to have you not with us."

"This is a courtesy call," Dithers explains. "Just in case anyone at NORAD headquarters wondered about the new rules? What to do if a missile is sighted in Canadian air space?"

"Not to joke prime minister, but if a missile is sighted, I think it's wham bam thank you ma'am. We're pretty much autopilot down here."

"That's why I'm calling," Dithers explains. "We're out of the loop! Canadian air space is a sacred trust. Sacred to me, sacred to my caucus. I've got this big leadership gathering coming up and honestly, I can't leave the missile shield issue on the table. I've seen bad poll numbers. It's time to butch it up."

Just call him the macho man. More by following the link.

posted by Cracker Barrel Philosopher at 8:52 PM -

 
Some folks must have a lot of time on their hands

Game maker sues over nude volleyball:

Game publisher Tecmo announced Wednesday that it has sued users of an Internet message board that distributes hacks for its games, including several that remove the bikinis from players in a popular volleyball game.
...
Some of the most popular game hacks circulating on the site were for "Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball," which features scantily clad women. The hacks created new "skins" for the characters, rendering them naked.
...
Tecmo, a Torrance, Calif.-based subsidiary of Japan's Tecmo, said it has launched an investigation "to find and identify all offenders in this case." The lawsuit charges the defendants with violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and seeks unspecified damages.

I'm a tad puzzled as to how their copyright is being violated but lawsuits aren't about logic, in the USA at least. On the other hand, who's got nothing better to do than "spice up" the characters in some Xbox game?

posted by Cracker Barrel Philosopher at 3:41 PM -

 
There was at least one Oscar highlight

But Rodger beat me to it. Who knew there was a clown category?

posted by Cracker Barrel Philosopher at 10:43 AM -

 
Wilbur!



From the UK - They eat domestic solipeds, don’t they?

Eurospeak for "horses", just in case you were wondering, and from today it becomes law of the land that every horse should be the proud owner of a passport, courtesy of our government-over-the-water in Brussels.

To mark this occasion, the Daily Telegraph runs a piece in today’s edition, pointing out the penalty for disobeying the diktats of our masters, with the headline: "Horse owners face jail over passports".

Pray tell, how could they conceivably need passports?

The reason for this delicious piece of nonsense – to use an unfortunate phrase – is that the EU wants to keep track of medication administered to horses in case they subsequently end up in the food chain...
...
Thus are our masters in Brussels to be assuaged - and all because they eat domestic solipeds.

I'd like a Black Beauty Burger please!

posted by Cracker Barrel Philosopher at 7:56 AM -

 
Multilateral hijinks!

Bono, World Bank chief? A Los Angeles Times editorial proposes a new gig for the U2 frontman.

"Don't be fooled by the wraparound sunglasses and the excess hipness," the Los Angeles Times said. "Bono is deeply versed in the issues afflicting the least-developed nations of the world."
...
Los Angeles Times editorial page Editor Andres Martinez said the suggestion of Bono to head the World Bank was entirely serious, although he said the newspaper was also making an effort to "take chances" and be "less predictable" on its opinion page in recent months.

The taxpayers of the developed world kick in dough to World Bank bureaucrats who make "loans" to 3rd world thugocracies who have no intention of repaying them. Then after much wailing, the loans are "forgiven." Might as well flush the greenbacks down the toilet. Gosh, I think Bono could handle that!

Bono, the rock star and celebrity, Martinez said, might be able to shame the rich nations into meeting their devlopment [sic] aid goals, he told Reuters.

Or he might finally convince the taxpayers to deepsix this loser.

Meanwhile on the EU front - U.S. can sit back and watch Europe implode

Lester Pearson, the late Canadian prime minister, used to say that diplomacy is the art of letting the other fellow have your way. All week long President Bush offered a hilariously parodic reductio of Pearson's bon mot, wandering from one European Union gabfest to another insisting how much he loves his good buddy Jacques and his good buddy Gerhard and how Europe and America share -- what's the standard formulation? -- ''common values.'' Care to pin down an actual specific value or two that we share? Well, you know, ''freedom,'' that sort of thing, abstract nouns mostly. Love to list a few more common values, but gotta run.

Since it's Mark Steyn, I digress, but here's where I'm headed:

The president, in other words, understands that for Europe, unlike America, the war on terror is an internal affair, a matter of defusing large unassimilated radicalized Muslim immigrant populations before they provoke the inevitable resurgence of opportunist political movements feeding off old hatreds. Difficult trick to pull off, especially on a continent where the ruling elite feels it's in the people's best interest not to pay any attention to them.

The new EU ''constitution,'' for example, would be unrecognizable as such to any American. I had the opportunity to talk with former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing on a couple of occasions during his long labors as the self-declared and strictly single Founding Father. He called himself ''Europe's Jefferson,'' and I didn't like to quibble that, constitution-wise, Jefferson was Europe's Jefferson -- that's to say, at the time the U.S. Constitution was drawn up, Thomas Jefferson was living in France. Thus, for Giscard to be Europe's Jefferson, he'd have to be in Des Moines, where he'd be doing far less damage.
...
Most of the so-called constitution isn't in the least bit constitutional. That's to say, it's not content, as the U.S. Constitution is, to define the distribution and limitation of powers. Instead, it reads like a U.S. defense spending bill that's got porked up with a ton of miscellaneous expenditures for the ''mohair subsidy'' and other notorious Congressional boondoggles. President Ronald Reagan liked to say, ''We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.'' If you want to know what it looks like the other way round, read Monsieur Giscard's constitution.

But the fact is it's going to be ratified, and Washington is hardly in a position to prevent it. Plus there's something to be said for the theory that, as the EU constitution is a disaster waiting to happen, you might as well cut down the waiting and let it happen. CIA analysts predict the collapse of the EU within 15 years. I'd say, as predictions of doom go, that's a little on the cautious side.
...
Until the shape of the new Europe begins to emerge, there's no point picking fights with the terminally ill. The old Europe is dying, and Mr. Bush did the diplomatic equivalent of the Oscar night lifetime-achievement tribute at which the current stars salute a once glamorous old-timer whose fading aura is no threat to them. The 21st century is being built elsewhere.

Of course, the clueless weenies at the State Department had other plans - How British and American conservatives united to stop Bush endorsing the EU constitution as favour to Blair

Leading British Euro-sceptics were enlisted to help win a battle within the White House over how far Mr Bush should go in endorsing a more unified EU, after reports began to circulate in Washington that his planned speech would express backing for the constitution.

Members of the staff of Dick Cheney, the vice-president, are also said to have intervened with Mr Bush's speechwriters to ensure the removal of language which, conservatives say, would have given a powerful and explicit boost to campaigners for the EU constitution.

"The speech was being drawn up along State Department lines, with a view to backing the draft constitution," said one Washington official with close White House links.

"It was not until last weekend that we were given assurances at the highest level that this would not, after all, be happening."

But I'm a hopeful kinda guy. Maybe they'll come to their senses - Exit Strategy:

The continent of Europe changed on 10 June 2004. On that day the frustration of ordinary people at autocratic rule from Brussels finally made itself felt. The surge in the Eurosceptic vote may have been fuelled by different priorities in different lands (the desire for outright independence in Britain, concern at the cost of modernisation in the Czech Republic, alarm at Germans buying farms in Poland, and hostility to unfettered immigration in Greece), but it was still a firm vote against integration.

Yet, while the man in the street may be very clear about what he does not want, he is not so certain when it comes to positive alternatives. Again and again while canvassing, the same response is met: the EU is no good, but we're stuck with it - we're in too deep now to get out. It is this fatalism that this paper seeks to address by exploring the real practical alternatives to the European Union and assessing the impact of withdrawal.
...
Europhiles have repeatedly misrepresented the Eurorealist manifesto as xenophobic and nihilistic. In reality, Eurorealists are keen to maintain good trading relations with all neighbours, and have always qualified the demand for freedom from the European Union with the rider "and its replacement with a free trade area, which is what we thought we had voted for in the first place".

At the end of the day, then, the challenge of withdrawal boils down to just two fundamental questions: first, where do we go, and second, exactly how do we get out?

A possible blueprint by following the link.

posted by Cracker Barrel Philosopher at 10:05 AM -