JUST a political rant, I won't feel bad if you don't want to read it

I wanted to add a couple addendums to my last post: first, I should have said the dems screwed up the economy 35 years ago, not 25. I said 25 because that's when the screwyness ended when Reagan got elected. One of the things Reagan did besides waste billions of dollars of public money on the Star Wars pipedream and commit impeachable offenses via the Iran-Contra scandal was to lift the price controls on gasoline, which were a bad idea since they caused shortages and lines for gas. Price controls on gasoline came from the Democratic Carter administration, as did Keynesian economic policies that resulted in the debilitating stagflation of the 1970's. While Keynesian economic theories were widely accepted in both parties, stagflation was occurring in the Keynes-based UK economy in the 60's, which should have tipped off US economic authorities that something was amiss. In short, I'd have been pissed off at Dems too if I'd lived through the 70's. Not because "I Heart Growth and Gas" but because inflation and slow growth hurts the poor the most and because waiting in line all day to fill the tank will make anyone cranky. So I was reading somewhere once about this guy defending his voting Republican, and he said something like 'you have to remember that the Democrats made a real mess of the economy in the 70's.' That they did, but like I said in the last post, that is hardly relevant in an election today, because both parties are part of the same corporatocracy, and hence they both obey the same rules of the game when it comes to economics.

I guess American voters couldn't find many reasons to not vote Democrat either, since the GOP is finally out of office and Bush is already trying to force last-minute legislature in the lame-duck congress. In other news, the USA continues to support Israel carte blanche:

U.S. Vetoes UN Resolution on Israeli Attack on Gaza
At the United Nations, the United States vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel's recent attack on the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun that killed at least 19 Palestinian civilians and left dozens wounded. One family lost 16 members when Israeli tanks opened fire on their house. Seven children died, the youngest was just a year old. The UN resolution called on Israel to abide by its obligations and responsibilities under the Geneva Convention. It also called on the Palestinian Authority to stop rocket attacks on Israel. The US delegation criticized the resolution for being one-sided.

One-sided?! The whole fucking conflict is one-sided, i.e. Israel blows the crap out of an entire family because the Palestinians continue to lob rockets of 19th-century technology into their territory - not their cities or their people, just their land (OK, rockets have killed 1 Israeli citizen since July 2005, and that was today). Not that the US cares about international law or the Geneva Conventions (Guantanamo, anyone?). Someday the United States government and the ultra-Zionist Jewish voting block will have to face the fact that a War on Terror is going to mean at the very least chastising Israel when they blow up entire apartment blocks because they had an oopsie with their radar. I mean it drives me crazy that about three-quarters of the US sympathizes more with Israel than with Palestinians, when the situation basically amounts to 'Israel has all the guns and money and the Palestinians have nothing.' Let's be clear, this is the only country that has LEGALIZED TORTURE (for most of the 1990's, a point which is not contended by former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami in this interview), and the US is going to criticize a resolution that asks them to quit killing children? Anyways, I'm no pundit, which is why I put this stuff at the end of my post. In fact, this will get moved to an entirely separate post.