An American reader writes:
We’re drinking the Monkish Blonde this Easter season and giving thanks for all the good people in the world trying to keep the faith.
Amen, sister! I wish a blessed Easter weekend to all my readers observing the holy day.
I’m overdue to follow up on my lament for the end of the Obama Administration, specifically with respect to foreign policy, and to respond to Daniel Larison’s cogent criticisms of that piece.
Precisely because I think Larison’s criticisms are cogent, I don’t feel the need to rebut them. President Obama has been anything but anti-interventionist, and specifically started at least one outright dumb war (against Libya) of the precise sort that he ran for office claiming he wouldn’t launch.
But I do want to defend my Eisenhower comparison a bit. Larison says:
Submitted by Russell Whitehouse via OrientalReview.org,
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.
While the US manufacturing sector has been in a clear recession for the past year as a result of the collapsing commodity complex, so far the stable growth in low-paying service jobs - at least according to the BLS' statistical assumptions - such as those of waiters and bartenders have kept the broader service economy out of contraction (even though recent Service PMI data has been downright scary).
This is now changing: as we showed a month ago, according to the lagged effect of the collapse of the Restaurant Performance Index, that party is over: