2003-12-08

Points To Ponder – I

Union Minister Murasoli Maran died last month. Other Indian politicians should follow the example set by him.

Whenever somebody related to the film industry dies, it is customory to show one of their films on TV. Maran once produced a porn movie called Vaaliba Vekam, which did not do well. Sadly, it was not shown on Sun TV. And ironically, not a day passes without a sequence from some old Jayalalitha movie being shown on Sun TV, KTV or SCV!
Jayalalitha’s acquital in the Tansi case was upheld by the Supreme Court. Newspapers like the The Hindu must have been sorely disappointed they could not write her political obituary. They will have to wait for another day.
The Congress lost the elections in MP, Rajasthan, and Chattisgarh. For Sonia Gandhi, the results must have been disappointing, as she was seriously misled by her sychophants.
The BJP conducted a sting operation on their own and caught Ajit Jogi, Sonia’s pet, trying to lure newly elected BJP MLAs with money. Former CM of Chattisgarh is alleged to have claimed that the plan had the blessings of Congress President, Sonia Gandhi. More evidence has since emerged on that score.
Bush made a secret 2-1/2-hour visit to Baghdad and newspapers were plastered with a photograph of his holding a platter weighed down by a golden-brown turkey. The Washington Post says that the bird was fake and was part of a PR photo op. Even the British Airways pilot story was phoney. A large number of people in Bush’s hometown, Crawford, fell for it and bought large pins featuring the president’s plane and the purported BA pilot’s words — Did I just see Air Force One?
Like Saddam Hussein, Paul Bremer is also busy minting money for his cronies. Read Rober Fisk’s Meet the new Iraqi strongman: Paul Bremer and Paul Krugman’s Cronies reap Iraqi contracts.
According to the Washington Post, the American military has established an office to act as a central place for managing contracts and reconstruction work hoping to address concerns about the oversight of the contracting process. They have also established a website for the purpose at www.rebuilding-iraq.net. The site is yet to become fully functional. UPDATE: When checked after almost 4 months (in April 2004), the site still is not yet fully functional. The pages under the section Concepts of Operations say “Content for this page is currently in development.”
Howard Dean, a contender for the Democratic Party nomination for the US 2004 presidential elections, quoted George Bush Sr. from his book on Fox News Sunday:

To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us, and make a broken tyrant into a latter- day Arab hero. It would have taken us way beyond the imprimatur of the international law bestowed by the resolutions of the Security Council, assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator, and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerrilla war.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party swept the country’s parliamentary elections. The US government was predictably upset as its stooges, Yabloko and Union of Right Forces, lost their seats in the Duma. For a typical American-style whining, read U.S. Concerned By Russia’s Political Direction. Yabloko and Union of Right Forces were part of the Yeltsin government. Their shock-therapy approach to economic management almost ruined the Russian nation. Their privatisation program allowed characters like Mikhail Khodorovsky and Victor Chernomyrdin gain control of large state enterprises and the country’s abundant mineral wealth. American oil companies have been courting the modern Russian Czars (see Profiles Of Leading Russian Oligarchs) and Putin is a great stumbling block for them. This is the reason why the US “concerned” about the state of democracy in Russia and is unable to accept the verdict of the Russian people.