I just wanted to take a minute to say hello and to see how things have been for you lately, and to maybe bring you up to date on a bit of news from here.
Well, right off the bat, we hear you have a new Conservative Prime Minister and that his Party and Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems are in partnership, which I'm sure will be interesting; you probably heard that us Colonials are again having Tea Parties, which has also been very interesting.
I have a Godson who's getting married this September, so we're all talking about that, and I hear Graham Norton was even better than last year at hosting Eurovision, despite the fact that it's...frankly, it's Eurovision.
Oh, yeah...we also had a bit of an oil spill recently that you may have heard about-and hoo, boy; you should see how the Company that spilled the oil has been acting.
While many of us were very disappointed in the decision to escalate in Afghanistan by 30,000 troops officials are saying that their will be some kind of exit "envisioned". Before getting to excited however, other details sound much less promising, bringing out both Democrats and Republicans in response.
The Republican Party as a whole is suffering from a huge case of mass amnesia. They seem to forget that they are the ones that crashed our economy. They seem to forget that they are the ones that made the whole world hate us. They forget that every policy they enacted was a miserable failure and that our country is paying huge, steep price for it now. In the case of Dick Cheney, he has forgotten that he was the one that dropped the ball on Afghanistan by insisting on a failed, costly in lives and treasure, war in Iraq.
One issue in last years campaign was the tarnishing American prestige took at the hands of the Neo-Conservative Bush Administration. Every viable candidate spoke of improving our image in the world from the debacle that history will remember as the Bush years.
It has been an amazing week in Iran, and you are no doubt seeing images that would have been unimaginable just a few weeks ago.
For most of us, Iran has been a country about which we know very little…which, obviously, makes it tough to put the limited news we’re getting into a proper context.
The goal of today’s conversation is to give you a bit more of an “insider look” at today’s news; and to do that we’ll describe some of the risks Iranian bloggers face as they go about their business, we’ll meet a blogging Iranian cleric, we’ll address the issue of what tools the Iranians use for Internet censorship and the companies that could potentially be helping it along, and then we’ll examine Internet traffic patterns into and out of Iran.
Finally, a few words about, of all things, how certain computer games might be useful as tools of revolution.
After rubber-stamping the disgraceful failed Bush years in foreign policy Republican leaders are trying to act like they know what they are talking about and that thinking folks have not seen through their facade. Across the board they offer no new vision on any issue foreign or domestic and still continue to spew forth the same failed policies that voters rebuked. You would not know that they are so void of real ideas though, because they sure can critisize those that do have a few.
Former Vice-President and full-time nutty neo-con Dick "Shotgun" Cheney made plenty of news in office. Whether lying about the dangers of countries that did not attack us, or lying about the fact they did attack us, or shooting elderly men in the face, America's version of "Darth Vader" was a constant newsreel. Well, forced retirement in the disgrace that was the Bush/Cheney Administration has not keep his sunny disposition off the airwaves.
After the attacks of 9-11 Muslims were maligned in America because of their beliefs. Especially after the Bush Administration embarked upon it's failed "War on Terror" that never seemed to end. Terrorism exists among all religions and one need only look at the rash of gun-related homicides in this country the last few weeks to realize that.
