Willis Conover is, or at least once was, one of the most world famous Americans for forty years, and yet unknown to all but a few Americans…

In a referendum Irish voters said no to the Lisbon Treaty (53,4%). This is a new blow for the EU after the trauma of the Spring of 2005 when the new European Constitution was rejected in referendums held in Holland and France.

EU leaders thought that they had figured it out this time. The Lisbon Treaty includes (1) some of the essential components of the rejected Constitution (institutional reform, stronger role for the parliament etc), (2) none of the focal points that plagued its predecessor (constitutional bells and whistles such as the EU flag and hymn) (3) many unreadable sections and undecipherable wordings.

Now who would object to such a fine document? EU leadership was not planning on giving voters a chance to object anyway. So far the Lisbon treaty had been ratified by 18 member states without organizing national referendums.

So it is painful for the EU that the outcome of the only referendum organized is negative- especially because Ireland is one of the countries that supposedly benefited a lot from the EU (40 billion euros in subsidies aided its visionary turn to IT-foreign investments).

What’s next? The Lisbon Treaty will certainly survive. What about Ireland’s position in the EU? Perhaps a slimmed down version could be adopted in Ireland including some of the essential institutional components.

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But there also seems to be something about the instrument of referendums. In Ireland, the political opposition was able to frame the vote of the Lisbon Treaty in terms of Ireland’s autonomy on diverse issues such as abortion, gay marriage – a bit of a stretch when looking at the Treaty’s content. Other than some of the more obvious arguments, what is it exactly about referendums that make them so easy to manipulate?

Americans are NOT stupid - WITH SUBTITLES.

(Note that the video seems about 18 months old. And KFC chicken doesn’t probably actually come from Kentucky. )

Thank goodness my exams are nothing like this.

• Lies, Damned Lies, a Searchable Database of Lies — links to and describes a new database of Bush administration lies about Iraq
• Computers piece together millions of shredded Stasi documents — unraveling Communist lies
• Why similar forensics may be needed here in the USA: Plame Investigation and Missing Emails: Analysis on Emails

What exactly is your position on Islamic extremism? … Your other postings about torture, surveillance and profiling are pretty meaningless as well, as you have never articulated your assessment of threat level. …

… A google search of your blog reveals no stated position on the Israel conflict, and little in reference to Islamic extremism. I am somewhat baffled how a discussion of contemporary civil liberties can be had without a statement of position on the threat (if any) to western freedoms posed by what is perceived to be a spreading doctrine of genocidal fascism. At a bare minimum, since a google search also reveals you to be Krugmanite economist, the profound affects on our economic stability (which I assume you’d agree is closely tied to viable liberal civil liberties) certainly bear mention with regards to oil prices.

I’m surprised this needs saying, but here goes: Since I’m not running for office, I feel no need whatsoever to have a position on every issue.

I write about the things that either interest me the most, or on which I think I have some value added to contribute. There are a huge number of issues that I think are important but that I don’t write about either because I don’t have the time, or because I don’t think my opinions are all that likely to be of interest to anyone. I have much more to say about domestic matters than foreign (as opposed to international) because I live and vote here: I’m concerned about and responsible for US policy in ways that don’t apply elsewhere, so naturally I write the most about the USA. I think the suggestion that a blogger has some sort of obligation to opine on every good or bad thing that every foreign government or organization does is a fairly risible idea. It’s a big world.

In any case, I don’t see “Islamic extremism” as a topic, much less one on which I have much that is unusual to say. It’s complex, not monolithic. Like, say, “modern capitalism” which is also complicated and varies from place to place.

I do, however, have the following opinions, which you may have free of charge:

Worth at least what you paid for them.

Now, however, there’s evidence that at all relevant times Yahoo! knew or should have known that this was a political case. The case is made out by Rebecca MacKinnon at RConversation: Shi Tao’s case: Yahoo! knew more than they claimed.

We give aid to Saudi Arabia???? A tiny nation awash with petrodollars?

While oil-rich Saudi Arabia has never been a large recipient of US aid, the Bush administration channeled a total of more than 2.5 million dollars to the kingdom in fiscal 2005 and 2006 as part of their partnership in the war on terror, congressional officials said.

Oh. OK. It’s walking around money.

Bush at a press conference on Saturday:

Q: And on the deadline [for Kosovo independence]?

Bush: In terms of the deadline, there needs to be one. This needs to come — this needs to happen. Now it’s time, in our judgment, to move the Ahtisaari plan. There’s been a series of delays. You might remember there was a moment when something was happening, and they said, no, we need a little more time to try to work through a U.N. Security Council resolution. And our view is that time is up.

Bush at a press conference on Sunday:

Q: Thank you, Mr. President. Yesterday you called for a deadline for U.N. action on Kosovo. When would you like that deadline set? And are you at all concerned that taking that type of a stance is going to further inflame U.S. relations with Russia? And is there any chance that you’re going to sign on to the Russian missile defense proposal?

Bush: Thanks. A couple of points on that. First of all, I don’t think I called for a deadline. I thought I said, time — I did? What exactly did I say? I said, “deadline”? Okay, yes, then I meant what I said.

At which point assembled reporters started laughing at him.

Kevin asked, “[I]s it really too much to ask the president of the United States to take his own policies seriously enough to actually know what they are?”

Apparently so.

The issue, though, isn’t so much whether Bush knows what ‘his’ policies are as what role he plays in setting them. Or, as Adam Kotsko suggests that The real problem with the Bush presidency is that it is conceptually unclear what kind of king he thinks he is — the absolute monarch of the Ancien Régime, or the Hegelian constitutional monarch who just “says yes and dots the i’s.”. But I prefer his other observation, that

The Democrats are now the party of continuing to have a constitution — paradoxically, they think that the only way to do this is by refusing to face down Bush’s gravest violations of the constitution. Hence no impeachment, no real investigation into intelligence manipulation, just this endless dithering with marginal scandals like the US Attorney thing. No one wants to “officially” expose the fact that the executive branch has been effectively treating the constitution as suspended for all this time, even though the information pointing to this conclusion is publicly available and overwhelming.

Meanwhile, I read in the papers that Bush received a rapturous reception in Albania. “Why did Bush go to Albania?” someone asked here. “It was the largest country he could find that approved of him,” someone else said.