Ten years ago, the Rwandan genocide began. On April 6th, 1994, Juvenal Habyarimana, President of Rwanda, was killed when his plane was shot down. On April 7th, the Hutu militia began slaughtering Tutsis. Over the course of the next three months, approximately 800,000 Tutsis were killed.
The West, including the United States, did very little to prevent this.
Well, this is an alarming new trend. That’s a total of thirteen foreigners kidnapped in Iraq in the last week or so. Hopefully it’s coincidence rather than a concerted effort, and hopefully everyone kidnapped will make it through the ordeal.
The victims include Christian evangelists, journalists, and human-rights workers. Doesn’t look like any common thread except that they’re foreign.
Glenn Reynolds finds the differences between the popular reaction to Senator Chris Dodd’s statements and the popular reaction to Senator Trent Lott’s statements "particularly disturbing." I’m not entirely sure why, as the two cases aren’t all that similar beyond the initial foolhardy statements.
Well, OK, I am sure why. There’s a rapidly spreading meme which makes Lott look a lot better, and it goes like this: “Lott suffered for saying nice things about Strom Thurmond.” There’re also a lot of right-wingers who don’t know why Senator Robert Byrd, former KKK member, gets a free pass for his history. There are times when I’m not sure either, just like I wasn’t sure why Strom Thurmond got a free pass.
Anyhow, the assertion that Lott got in trouble for simply praising Strom Thurmond is blatantly untrue. Lott got into trouble a) for saying nice things about Thurmond’s segregationist past, followed by b) revelations about his association with the Council of Conservative Citizens, c) the discovery of his racially-inflected interview with Southern Partisan; and d) relevations about his efforts to keep blacks out of his college fraternity. Lott turned out to be a long-time associate and friend of white supremacists. That’s why he’s not Senate Majority Leader anymore.
Dodd’s comments were dumb and he should issue an apology immediately. However, you can’t really compare the two situations unless Chris Dodd proves to have fairly recent ties to the KKK or other white supremacist groups. If he does, the two situations are comparable. Otherwise — not quite.
Excellent second to last episode of The Apprentice tonight. I’m already looking forward to the next season, when competitors will know the format better. There wasn’t a lot of metagaming in this season, and that’s got to be partially due to the lack of information about the full rules. Next year, contestants will know that they’ll see their fired peers again, and they’ll know that they can keep allies on their team safe even when it gets down to three people per team. More important, they’ll be more confident about the twists.
I also enjoyed the interviews, and wouldn’t have minded watching more of them. There’s no question but that this episode demanded a completely different set of skills than previous contests. In particular, Amy’s lack of substance showed up in a big way. Given what Trump’s looking for, it’s going to be very clear who has no chance next year.
I liked Kwame’s tactic of hiring his old team, since they weren’t as ego-ridden as Versacorp. Most of Bill’s people were pretty clearly unhappy about losing. Of course, Omarosa’s screw-ups may have blown that tactic. Albeit… he picked second, so he was going to wind up with Omarosa no matter what. So the real question is whether giving Omarosa a little egoboo was worth not picking Nick. And I think it was; Nick was showing some serious attitude at Bill. So since Kwame was going to get Omarosa no matter what, he was smart to get Heidi over Nick.
Now, why Bill would choose both Nick and Amy is beyond me.
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