As expected, the BBC reports that Russian Church enthrones leader

Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad became the 16th leader of the Church, succeeding Patriarch Alexiy II, who died in December.

Kirill is supposed to be a “liberal” because he talks on television, as opposed to Alexiy who was waiting to see if it was a passing fad before getting involved with it. This may mean a major leap forward for the Russian Orthodox Church, possibly even to the 18^th century. “Liberal” is a relative term.

Why does the media assume that the views on the economy of an individual with a BA in English from Yale are worth hearing. Amity Shlaes is a writer, not an economist. It doesn’t make any difference who prints her columns, she doesn’t have the credentials to be taken seriously.

On Saturday, July 12, 2008, she had a piece on page A13 in the Washington Post titled. Phil Gramm Is Right. She was defending the former Senator’s remark that Americans were “whiners” for questioning the health of the economy. Her main argument was her belief that you couldn’t call it a recession unless there were two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth and that hadn’t happened.

Except that the National Bureau of Economic Research has declared that the recession began in December, 2007, more than six months before her article appeared. While two consecutive bad quarters is definitely a recession, those are not the only criteria, which Ms Shlaes would know if she were an economist, or just some guy with a blog on the Gulf Coast of Florida, rather than an English major.

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Griff Witte of the Washington Post probably didn’t intend to make it so obvious, but his article on the election campaign, Key Israel election issue: Did war end too soon?, certainly points to the election as the main reason for the attack on Gaza.

So long as the leaders of all of the major parties in Israel delude themselves into believing that you can bomb your way to peace, there will be no peace.

Netanyahu apparently thinks that it would be a wonderful idea to attack Iran, a move that could cost the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan major casualties. The Hedgemony encouraged this kind of foolishness, and the US had better come down hard on this, or withdraw all forces from the area.

It’s Groundhog Day and some of the militant marmots object to being disturbed.

Update: The most famous varmint in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania predicted six more weeks of winter [and returned to watching the new plasma TV “donated” by the local fuel oil dealers].