(17 years of informed commentary)
Nigeria's emirates date back to the early 1800s, when a jihadi leader called Usman Dan Fodio grew disgusted with lax enforcement of Islamic principles across the north and set out with his followers from the city of Sokoto to establish a new order.
After conquering much of the region on horseback, Dan Fodio left behind the emirs. The emirs ruled and also acted as the supreme religious authorities in the regions -- a comparatively rare relationship in Africa, where monotheistic religions were usually imposed from outside.
In the mid-1800s British colonialists conquered the southern, Christian areas, forever weakening tribal structures there.
Wurzelbacher told Couric that he had always wanted to question a presidential candidate "and really corner them and get them to answer a question of -- for once instead of tap-dancing around it. And, unfortunately, I asked the question, but I still got a tap dance . . . almost as good as Sammy Davis Jr."
The truth is, no one can really learn much about the candidates or their ideas when the format has such rigid time limits on answers and predictable questions from mainstream news anchors. The moderators are constrained from asking tough follow-up questions, and the audience is forced to sit like zombies in a funeral parlor. Even with the so-called "town hall meeting" format, there is no genuine back-and-forth dialogue between candidates and citizens. Nor are there any direct candidate-to-candidate exchanges. Third-party candidates have been summarily excluded, so there are no disruptive questions that might expose the limited vision of the two major parties. (Ralph Nader was famously excluded from the 2000 presidential debates because his citizen support was deemed too insignificant to make a difference in the election.)
Technorati Tags: Africa, governance, Obama
The story goes that when he was running for re-election to the Senate in 1954, Lyndon Johnson was opposed by a couple of non-profits that urged voters to reject him and his radical communist ideas. (And you thought things were crazy today.) In response, Johnson had new language inserted into the section of the IRS code, which defines a tax exempt entity. His addendum declared that an exempt organization “does not participate in or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”
Technorati Tags: 2008 US Elections
The greatest mistake was made in 2004, the year that Reagan died. That year the current Secretary of the Treasury, Henry M. Paulson Jr, was head of the investment bank Goldman Sachs. In the spring of 2004, the investment banks, led by Paulson, met with the Securities and Exchange Commission. At this meeting with the New Deal regulatory agency tasked with regulating the US financial system, Paulson convinced the SEC Commissioners to exempt the investment banks from maintaining reserves to cover losses on investments. The exemption granted by the SEC allowed the investment banks to leverage financial instruments beyond any bounds of prudence.
In place of time-proven standards of prudence, computer models engineered by hot shots determined acceptable risk. As one result Bear Stearns, for example, pushed its leverage ratio to 33 to 1. For every one dollar in equity, the investment bank had $33 of debt!
So the Christian parallel is broken. The moral in the above parable, Jesus explained (Matthew 18:35), was that “So likewise shall my heavenly Father do unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses,” that is, their debts. But Wall Street and Congress must be atheists, because the way that matters are working out today, only the wealthy are being forgiven their debts, not the poor. The big sinners are going free, their victims are being stripped of their assets.