yet another blog

Newsvine - Left versus right. No matter who is the winner we all lose.

Everyday I feel this dread creeping up on me. The dread of losing a country I still love and believe in. I see the left and the right duking it out over what “they” think is best for the U.S. While we fight in a war no one has a clue how to end, yet we keep getting “issues” like gay marriage brought up, as if another persons choice of spouse is the governments business anyway. When we have Americans fighting and dying in another country. We live in a country where politicians would rather point the finger of blame and argue party line BS than fix our issues. Why? What about the people who elected these people into office? We are being screwed daily by them wasting time with all the congressional committees and BS study groups. Nothing ever gets solved, we are always waiting for the next session. Am I a pessimist? What does the future hold?

Read the full post…

So the situation is as bad in the US as it is here in the UK. No surprise there then.

Its just that I’m afflicted (and have been for some time) with this increasingly depressing feeling that, regardless of party, there’s a huge divide between the politicians and the public.

And the line that “we’ve only got ourselves to blame, cos we voted them into office” is beginning to wear incredibly thin.

Iran to replace dollar with euro - Al Jazeera

The Iranian central bank is to convert the states foreign dollar assets into euros and use the euro for foreign transactions.

“The government has ordered the central bank to replace the dollar with the euro to limit the problems of the executive organs in commercial transactions,” Gholam Hossein Elham, a government spokesman, said on
Monday.

“We will also employ this change for Iranian assets [in dollars] held abroad.”

Elham said that Irans budget would in future be calculated in euros.

“Until now the budget has been calculated according to revenues in dollars but this calculation will now change,” he said.

Oil revenue

The move comes amid pressure from the United States for the UN Security Council to agree sanctions against Iran over its controversial nuclear programme.

The US alleges that Iran is covertly building a nuclear weapon. Iran says that its nuclear programme is purely for civilian use.

Elham implied that the move to the euro would also apply to Irans oil revenues.

“Foreign income sources and oil revenues will be calculated in euros and we will receive them in euros in order to put an end to our dependence on the dollar,” Elham said.

Bankers in Iran have said it has become difficult to receive Iranian-held money denominated in dollars from European bank accounts.

They said that this was because of US pressure on European banking giants not to allow dollar-denominated funds to be sent into, or out of, the Islamic republic.

Watch this one cos it could turn out to be really significant.
Of course, it may just be Iran playing politics and using this ploy as a muscle-flexing demonstration to the US in the escalating Iranian nuclear programme issue.
Nevertheless, it’ll still be worth keeping an eye on this one, and in particular Washington’s reaction

The questions in my mind are, does Bush still have the international support - or even simply US military manpower given the fiascos in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc - to attempt to start yet another war? Or would Israel act as a proxy?

And if Bush did try it again would we (i.e., the UK) support him? My guess is probably not this time. Seems to me that in the short time left to Blair as PM he couldn’t rustle up sufficient support for such a caper either in his own party or in the mass media, and I doubt whether any succeeding Blair lookalike (whatever their nominal political persuasion) would want to run the gauntlet so soon after Blair’s “adventures”.

Or is that just wishful thinking on my part?

For an insight into some of the possible implications should Iran change from dollars to euros, check out this article (discovered courtesy of a seed by NewsVine columnist Claus Jacobsen).

Within the past few weeks my aimless wanderings around the web have caused me to stumble upon two absolutely excellent sites, well worth checking out…

The first is a sort of community news-sharing site, a bit like a social bookmarking site - but infinitely better. It seems to be aimed at established and wannabe citizen journalists, but there’s so much more stuff there as well that no-one should feel excluded. The appearance and features are excellent, all the interactive gizmos work amazingly well, and you really should pay it a visit.

So without further ado, go now to NewsVine

The other one I’ve discovered is Virtual Citizens

It presents itself as a sort of free news syndication site, containing a lot of articles relevant to US foreign policy, but not toeing the normal mass-media line.

I’ll be mirroring some of the articles on our own Tilting at Windmills site, but treat yourself to a few absorbed hours at the source.

Both sites highly recommended!