Tony Blair's Kazakh
ConnectionsKen
SilversteinKazakhstan's vast oil reserves and proximity to
Afghanistan have made it a crucial ally in the past decade, but few observers
have any illusions about its corrupt, despotic ruler. President Nursultan
Nazarbayev has led the country since its independence from the Soviet Union in
1991; in 2011 he was reelected with 95 percent of the vote. The rubber-stamp
parliament has granted Nazarbayev the permanent right “to address the people of
Kazakhstan at any time” and to approve all “initiatives on the country’s
development.” Yet Nazarbayev has found one important Western cheerleader, former
British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Ever since leaving office in 2007, the former
P.M. has been on a buckraking spree around the world. Blair’s ambition to create
a more democratic world may have shrunk, but his bank account has certainly
grown. Here's the inside look at the sanctimonious P.M.'s big business with
dictators.
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Our New Iran Plan is to
Help a Cult Gain Power. What Could Go
Wrong?Owen
Bennett-JonesLeaks from State Department officials indicate that,
after years of delay, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has finally decided to
remove the Iranian opposition group, the MEK, from its list of designated
terrorist organizations. In recent years the group, which has around 3,000
active members living in Iraq and other supporters all over the world, has
mounted a high profile and well-financed lobbying effort to achieve delisting.
At first glance Ms. Clinton’s decision changes little. The ban against the MEK
never really worked. However, now that the MEK enjoys remarkable levels of
enthusiastic support in the U.S. Congress, and there is a real prospect that it
will become the U.S.’s favored Iranian opposition group, attracting significant
funding, strategic questions arise over whether now's the right time to prop up
a controversial cult amid the unfolding nuclear issue in Iran.
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Romney Was Against
Punishing China Before He Was For ItAlec
MacGillisMitt Romney kicked off a three-day tour through Ohio, a
state he badly needs to win, where Barack Obama has held a stubborn lead for
months. Not surprisingly, Romney’s arrival coincides with a new ad hitting Obama
for being too soft in pushing back against China’s trade violations. Romney’s
been hitting this protectionist line since early in the Republican primaries,
which has raised eyebrows coming from a man who has thrived on the realities of
global capitalism as much as he has. A recent remarkable video clip from just
three years ago shows just how radically Romney has shifted on the subject of
trade with China.Read more »
From The Book: A
Biography of Kerouac, Written By His
Ex-GirlfriendAdam
PlunkettJoyce Johnson, née Glassman, was raised on the Upper
West Side by a mother whose commitment to high culture was absolute. When she
met Jack Kerouac in 1957, on a blind date set up by Allen Ginsberg, she had
dropped some of her old disdain for Bohemia and embraced Kerouac's precipitating
force, a force greatly affecting a culture ready to be nudged toward the
lifestyle revolutions of the 1960s. What he meant to her—a way of life without
the bourgeois constraints of Johnson’s time and place—was what he meant to many,
especially once On the Road was published, in 1957. The presumptive
reason to chronicle a life is to get to know a person better, but the great
irony of Johnson’s new biography of Kerouac is that her previous memoir shows
and communicates a much richer knowledge of the man she loved. In short, her
biography presumes the interest her memoir compels. The Voice is All
expects that we already care about Kerouac; Minor Characters, Johnson's
1983 memoir, makes us care. Even readers skeptical of Kerouac’s literary
significance can feel through Johnson’s memoir why Kerouac was a force. But in
Johnson's new biography intimacy is pitched uneasily between analysis and story,
and this intimacy prevents Johnson from digressing to explain why we
should care about Kerouac.
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