Countries with "Democratic" in their official name

It used to be said that if a country's full name includes the word "democratic," then it probably isn't. I was looking over a list that included the full name of countries of the world and realized that is not completely true anymore. It used to be a word that communist block countries liked to put in their formal name. (think the German Democratic Republic) I guess they protested too much. But now many of those countries are gone or have changed into something else.

These days, I would count Algeria (the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria), East Timor (the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste), Nepal (the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal), São Tomé and Príncipe (the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe), and Sri Lanka (the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka), as functioning or partially functioning democracies.

Congo-Kinshasa (the Democratic Republic of Congo), Ethiopia (the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia), Laos (the Lao People's Democratic Republic), and North Korea (the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea) are all essentially authoritarian, notwithstanding the democratic name. But they are now a minority of the "democratic" countries. So I hereby proclaim that old saw to be officially out of date.

Sensenbrenner talks sense

I doubt if it will happen, but it's nice to see a member of Congress jumping onto the prosecute James Clapper bandwagon.

Actually, what's surprising is that more members of Congress aren't clamoring for his prosecution. You can argue that the victim when someone lies to Congress is the American public at large, but the more obvious victim are the people in Congress who are getting lied to. If Clapper can admit that he lied and get away with it, why would Congress critters believe anything any other witness from an intelligence service ever tells them?

Why Barack Obama Can't Lose

The WaPo's "the Fix" blog has a piece titled "Why Barack Obama Can't Win." But that's an easy question to answer: it's because of the Twenty-Second Amendment.

But it turns out that's not what the Fix was talking about. It was referring to Obama's bad poll numbers overall as well as on specific issues. But does that really matter? He's not running for reelection. The midterms are a year away. Congress didn't respect his mandate all that much even when he was popular.

If there was a different political dynamic in Washington right now, I would see the significance of the President's bad poll numbers. In the past, members of Congress would pay attention to the amount of support a president had and it might influence their decision making on particular issues. But the Republicans oppose-anything-the-President-does-under-all-circumstances strategy makes the question whether Obama has the public behind him a moot point.

(via Memeorandum)

Sounds more like a hospital

I'm not questioning the veracity of this report, nor am I trying to suggest they should not have been there or anything like that, but what were 52 doctors and nurses doing in the Ministry of Defense?

UPDATE: Nevermind. It was a hospital, one that was located within the Ministry of Defense compound.

C'mon KazPost!!!

When I read stories like these, it gives me hope about both that postcard I sent to myself from Uzbekistan in September 2003, and that package I mailed to myself from Kazakhstan in November 2010.

Stealing

It remains a mystery to me why raiding pension funds isn't viewed as stealing. Employers contribute to pension funds as part of employee compensation. Some money that could have been paid as salary was instead paid into a special fund to pay for the individual's retirement. It is the individual's money just as much as a wage would be.¹ No one would ever ask a bankruptcy court to authorize debtors to raid the private bank accounts of employees and former employees, on the theory that those accounts are filled with money that originated from the Employer. And no bankruptcy court would ever okay such a thing.

1- Okay, I realize this gets a little messy when you're talking about a defined benefit plan as opposed to a defined contribution plan because each individual dollar paid to an employee is not necessarily vested with that employee. But I think the same idea would still apply. Pension credits in a defined benefit plan are earned and paid by employers as compensation just like wages or salaries are. So why isn't taking that away years after the pension is earned considered to be stealing?

John Hawkins doesn't get out much

John Hawkins at Townhall:

Liberals dream of one day seeing all Americans permanently locked in the smothering, cradle-to-grave death grip of the nanny state. Nothing excites a liberal more than the idea of controlling where you go to school, regulating your work and play, deciding what type of health care you're going to have and then deciding when you get to retire and how much money you have when you do.

Passages like that make me wonder if Hawkins has ever met an actual liberal. I mean, I'm "liberal" but I have never dreamed of making the country into a smothering nanny state. Controlling where other people go to school, or what they do for work or play doesn't interest met at all. I honestly don't know anyone who wants that stuff, liberal or conservative.

So what is Hawkins' deal? Is he so cut off from contact from people with different politics from his own that he honestly believes those ridiculous caricatures? Or does he realize that he is exaggerating a bit but thinks that the Townhall audience is so ignorant and isolated they won't notice the exaggeration?

(via Memeorandum)

Today, they get one hour per week at the pool. Tomorrow, people will be stoned for watching TV

I guess any religious accommodation of Muslims is what counts as "creeping Shariah" these days.

Obscure fact: In Syria, student's examination cannot be scheduled on a Saturday. The rule was intended to accommodate the ridiculously small remaining community of Syrian Jews. It was also a propaganda tool for Hafiz Assad (father of the current President) to claim that he was anti-Zionist but not anti-Jewish. I wonder if Hafiz was aware that he was aiding "creeping rabbinical law" in Syria.

Any problem with the health system will hereafter be called an "Obamacare problem"

One annoying thing about the ACA is anything bad related to health insurance is deemed to be an Obamacare problem even if it is a problem that long predated the health reform law.

For as long as I have been aware of this stuff, companies have cut employee hours to avoid giving them benefits. Just after I graduated high school, a friend of mine worked 29 hours per week at a book store. Why such an odd number? The company gave benefits to "full time employees" and defined people as full time if they worked 30 hours or more. This was in 1988. But when it happens today, it is all Obamacare's fault. Labor stats don't back up the notion that the ACA is causing any cutback in hours. But any company that cuts its hours has an incentive to say that it is doing the cuts because of Obamacare because then the law, and not the company, becomes the bad guy.

Likewise, business have been reducing the number of employees who get health insurance for decades. That phenomenon is what people were calling the "health care crisis" back in the early 1990s and the reason that Obama campaigned on health care reform as an issue which led to the ACA's passage. But whenever any employer drops health insurance after the ACA's passage, it must be Obamacare's fault.  And private insurance carriers have long been restricting the doctors and medical facilities you can visit (in-network vs. out-of-network), changes in policies, etc. This stuff was not invented by the 2010 law.

And, as Southern Beale points out, it's the same thing with identity theft. In the years before health reform passed, private insurance companies' security was often compromised. But when that stuff happened back then, it was viewed as a local problem of a particular insurance company. When this happened, the problem was Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Tennessee. But hey, I don't live in TN, so it didn't seem all that scary to me, even though I do have BC/BS. If that happened today, it would be reported as an instance of compromised security with "Obamacare", so now everyone can panic.

This is a serious political downside with the approach to health care reform that preserves core elements of the pre-reform system. Even though the health insurance industry has long been awful, the new law built upon what was already there. That included some of that system's problems. Now everything in it is now referred to as "Obamacare," even if the issue was not started by the new law.

Cut it out

Can we stop talking about the presidential campaigns of people who have never expressed an interest in being President? It always annoys me when I see that happening. Someone says, "hey, wouldn't it be great if X ran for president" and then suddenly that person is listed as a possible contender in every subsequent article about the race. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that most people do not want to be President (it doesn't seem like a very appealing job to me). But the political press just assumes that is what everyone wants to do even though it comes with some pretty major downsides, like the complete loss of any ability to ever lead a normal life.

It happens all the time, but lately the one I keep noticing is Elizabeth Warren. Sure I would probably support her if she did run. But has she ever expressed even the slightest interest in the job? Why not assume that she is out of the running until she says something or does something (like go to Iowa for no apparent other reason) to indicate that this is something she wants to do? I could have missed it, but I have not seen any reason to believe that Warren might do it. So leave her alone ferchristssake.

Being President is important but it also sucks. And frankly, I don't want a President who isn't interested in the job.

44

It's not just Thanksgivikkah, it's also my 44th birthday! Apparently this confluence of two holidays and my birthday won't happen again until I turn 77,798. I don't know if I will still be keeping up this blog then, so this could be my only chance to write this post.

previously: 43, 42, [41], 40, 39, 38, 37, 36, 35, 34