Word: failings
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...unclear what serious alternatives exist to the kind of painful mass evacuations Louisiana officials ordered last week. A politically tricky situation remains: If state and local officials fail to move residents out of flood-prone areas, they risk charges of incompetence, or worse. But their hesitance after Gustav to allow residents to quickly return to areas that lacked basic services like electricity, grocery stores and gas stations brought the same accusations. In addition, their heightened rhetoric as Gustav approached - New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin at one point said it could be "the storm of the century" - only hurts their credibility...
...take low-paying service jobs - but there weren't any new ones. McCain's energy plan sounded just like Obama's, without the closing of loopholes and tax breaks for big oil companies that Obama (and apparently Sarah Palin, who passed a windfall-profits tax) favors. But he failed to disarm Obama's most potent criticism: that he essentially favors the same policies - especially the economic policies - as George W. Bush. And it wasn't corruption that caused those policies to fail; it was the radical orthodoxy of the vision...
Economist Robert Shiller has a new book out. You'll be thrilled to learn that it doesn't contain any warnings about a looming market crash. Well, unless you count that bit about the "train of catastrophes" that might ensue if current efforts to stabilize the financial system fail. But that's not really a prediction...
...Russians fail to notice. "Israel armed the Georgian army," grumbled General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy chief of staff of the Russian military, at a press conference in Moscow earlier this week. An Israeli paper had, last weekend, quoted an unnamed official warning that Israel needed "to be very careful and sensitive these days. The Russians are selling many arms to Iran and Syria, and there is no need to offer them an excuse to sell even more advanced weapons." As if on cue, on Wednesday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad arrived in Moscow hoping to persuade Russia to sell him sophisticated...
...should wield greater power in a unity government. Underlining how the mood between the two sides has soured, one general in Zimbabwe's army reiterated a threat to defend Mugabe's regime "even if it means going to war," adding that Tsvangirai would be arrested if talks fail. And that would not appear to be an idle threat: the opposition leader, who won more votes than Mugabe during the first presidential ballot on March 29 (he withdrew from the subsequent runoff in the face of a campaign of violence against his supporters), was briefly detained by Zimbabwean security forces last...