Yes, the sun shines on the Gulf of Mexico, and shines on the hungry in Darfur as well as the unemployed in the US and the bombed in Afghanistan. The sun shines everywhere, so who can complain about the sadness?

By “here on the Stanford camp” Schultz presumably meant the Hoover Institution which, if the many op-eds by its fellows are any guide, provides the Funny for the Farm.

George Schultz assigned Condi Rice as George W Bush’s foreign policy tutor.
Kind of a blot in his copybook, I’d say.

However, he has a Princeton tiger tattoo on his butt. Not sure that outweighs the other, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

From Spencer’s keyboard to God’s portfolio manager.
Study: endowment hit harder than average

A study by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) and the Commonfund indicates that Stanford’s endowment took a significantly greater hit than the national average in fiscal year 2009. The University endowment was valued at $12.6 billion, a 27-percent decline from the previous fiscal year.

What’s maddening about all this is that invading and destroying Iraq as a power was not only the wrong move morally, it would have been the wrong move for an evil dynastic power bent on strengthening itself and its allies. Removing a key foe of bin Laden and al-Qaeda did nothing to make the US or Israel more secure, but it sure helped Ahmad Chalabi’s buddies in Iran.

It was, in essence, the Ledeen Doctrine: Smashing a smaller country just because we thought we could so easily and at little cost to ourselves (or at least to the powers that dreamed up the idea).

The first time I was aware of the word terrorist used as an obfusication for anyone engaged in armed conflict not supported by the US, it was coming from the mouth of George Schultz, during reagantime, I think.

I think it was one BIG, nebulous, committee…and it encompassed most of Bush’s minions, and a lot of other people, too, including some of the heaviest hitters, including a lot in the MSM. (Tom Friedman, at the NYTimes, comes instantly to mind. So does Colin Powell, for closing the invasion deal, as only he could have, by putting on the UN dog-and-pony show.)

But they are gone, and the man we helped put in the White House is sustaining and ratcheting up Bush’s war; now, HIS war. That is our problem, not what Bush’s sweaty-thighed, glassy-eyed “invaders” were doing.

Using those people as red-herrings to drag across Obama’s feckless trail is wearing thin, Spencer. You and your ilk have worn it to a frazzle.

You should be helping us try to figure out how to jumpstart Obama’s centrist ass, if it’s not too late.

Perhaps OT, but perhaps apropos, I had this forwarded to me by a Bay Area labor activist.
Maybe it has been noted here already. If so, my apologies.

Hmmm,
Stanford is the location of the Hoover Institute, one of the right-wing, predatory-capitalistic policy think tanks. You’ll see many rightist pundits posting in newspapers and on blogs who are fellows there. They’re all supporters of Bush’s war (AHEM, Steele), opposed to Obama and his economic policies (since they’re mostly Freidmaniacs). Probably Schulz hangs out there, too. I feel kinda sorry for my progressive friends in San Mateo County.
Of course, we know the place of Herbert Hoover in history (as an Oregonian, I have to say that he lived in Newberg, Oregon as a child. There’s a museum located in his boyhood home there. About his only claim to positive fame, LOL). Hard to believe that a policy institute bears his name, geez, he was SO successful.

Michael Whitney has a fresh cross-post available: BP Copied Mailing List Database in Oil Disaster Website Divorce

Howard, I think that building is known on campus as:

“Hoover’s last erection.” :o)

The HI tries to maintaina veneer of reason (as does George Schultz) rather than ideology. For example, ex-San Jose police chief, who was progressive on some issues (drugs and immigration) became an HI fellow. There may be others. Condi Rice was their poster child. How’d that work out?

Hmmm … head of Bechtel (privatizers of water supplies amongst other things), advocate of war on Sandinistas, supporter of Bush’s “preventive war” … a real reasonable fellow indeed.

Please note I said veneer. George Schultz, scion (late sprouting) of the SF social set. Soft spoken. Soft-shoe. Whisperer into the ear of Ronald Reagan. Father of the misuse of the word terrorist, to my thinking. Husband of Charlotte Malliard, a notable sociallite.

I do not recall that he was “uninvolved in Iran-Contra”? Is this based on testimony at the hearings?

Siun and jcinOR have anticipated my comment: Although it’s tangential to the topic at hand, it’s dead wrong to describe Shultz (note correct spelling) as uninvolved in Iran-Contra. This merely perpetuates the carefully cultivated and orchestrated myths that

1. “Iran-Contra” was the work of a small circle of “men of zeal” within the Reagan administration, and

2. That the scandal’s label, “Iran-Contra,” delineates the crime; sadly, too many people today think that the “Iran-Contra” scandal merely consisted of the funneling of funds from an arms deal with Iran to the contra rebels. That was a sideshow. The full scandal consisted of a systematic effort to pursue “low-intensity” wars throughout the world with privately solicited funding, in defiance of Congress and the Constitution. Shultz, Weinberger, and the rest of the senior leadership of the Reagan administration were neck deep in all of that, as Lawrence Walsh and journalists like Robert Parry have well documented.

Schultz and Weinberger merely opposed selling weapons to Iran for profits to the Contras. At least they opposed it until they approved it. They actually allowed it to go through, the DOD supplying the weapons. Then there was the crack cocaine introduced to America’s ghettos by the CIA. It is not known what Schultz thought about Ollie North’s stand-alone off the shelf secret army to do the neo-con’s dirty work.

Ralph and Frank,
Thanks.

I have no problem believing that Shultz and Weinberger were unaware of the little scheme of diverting profits from the Iran arms sales to the contras. But again, that was a sideshow; those funds were a drop in the bucket compared to the major funds supporting the contra war funneled from the Saudis, the Sultan of Brunei, and other foreign sources, plus the same circle of private right-wing donors in the US depicted so colorfully in Charlie Wilson’s War.

Please don’t conflate Shultz and Weinberger’s supposed disapproval and eventual accession to the arms-for-hostages deal as implying complicity with the very minor, though additively diabolical, diversion of funds from that deal to the contras. My point is that they were quite guilty about the big stuff without need to invoke complicity with the diversion subplot.

The sun shines all over the world…so why aren’t we using it for energy? Solar collectors in dought and poverty plighted countries could create the new fair-trade energy supply. But no, the clones Schultzes, Cheneys and Rices of the world will corporate colonize to squeeze away that resource too.

God knows how much of all that private money was skimmed to put into people’s UBS accounts or to use in Republican political campaigns.

Foreign financial interests have been funding Republicans a long time…ask Bob Dole.

A recent issue of the Stanford Alumni magazine had an article about memories and stories of the old Lake Lagunita which has been allowed to stay almost always dry for many recent years. The Stanford Admin. ever corporate and ever clever, realized that by being “environmental” about the streams and lakes on the Stanford Campus, that they could buy off criticism of progressives and environmentalists, locally, while continuing to support and enhance the rape of the third world resources by corporate America. This whole “environmentalist” ploy is such a lot of crap. Stanford should just drop this pretense and go back and fill the Lake every winter so kids and students can swim and sail as in the days of yore. Filling the Lake every year didn’t do anything to the local ecology, at least not in any seriously negative way.

PS. at least I had some great fun around Lake Lag back in the late sixties and early seventies before all this new “thoughtfulness” took over.

George Schultz runs around in women’s clothes at the Bohemian Grove with other neocons and Masters of the Universe. He’s a dishonorable man, though, whose every utterance should be taken as seriously as Killer Kissinger’s.

He’s a menace. Why can’t you see that, Spencer?