Bad Poetry

A not ignoble sentiment that,
yet the writer skips o'er known fact;
in part because of our blockade,
bombs have been laid for the past decade.

Yeah, it's a terrible thing when I try to write poetry.*

It's a cute sticker, and it's very well executed (in the dim light of the subway station, it's impossible to tell that it's a sticker and not part of the sign); however, it's about 10 years out of date. Not that the general media has made much noise about the story (probably because it's an old story), but we have been dropping bombs on bits of Iraq pretty much ever since the end of the Gulf War, on and off. Mostly the bits that had radar installations pointed at our aircraft. Note the use of the past tense.

Of course, the whole Iraq scenario is an excellent smoke screen for what really matters, at least domestically.

Offhand, it looks like the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down about 22% on the year; the S&P 500 looks like it's down about 27%; and the Nasdaq has dropped a whopping 39%.

What was that line from the first Clinton campaign? It's the economy, stupid!

Now I'm not an economist, but IIRC, one of the major causes of the 1991/92 recession (the very recession that forced George Herbert Walker Bush into unemployment) was the Gulf War. OK, let's think about this for a second...

Enough political punditry. Don't forget that all of last month's exciting blogging (including a very special guest post by This Fish) can be found at last month's archive page.

*Be glad I couldn't work in a line about "ancient Sumer"