And my dossier at the NSA just gets bigger and bigger

I don't understand all the stink about Benghazi.  It seems that in trying to police the world....north Africa in this case....we botched security at one of our diplomatic missions.  A bunch of #$%^& Libyans attacked and killed 4 Americans.

At the time, it seems that an Administration official at some level decided that the American people wouldn't care if they thought our people were killed by a crowd spontaneously angered by some movie or some such nonsense vs an out-and-out terrorist attack, which would be horrible.  So they lied.

Why would one be worse than the other?  Our people are still dead, regardless.  

"Hello, Mrs. Widow.  I have some good news and some bad news.  First, your husband's dead.  But the good news....it was just a spontaneous demonstration."

So a bunch of politicians lied.  Lying is what they do.  *yawn*

Somebody please tell me again why we give a rats ass what happens in Libya?  The f__kers just fight for the sake of fighting.  That seems to be the #1 pastime in that part of the world.  Why don't we seem to get that?  You scramble an ant pile with a stick, you're gonna get stung.

Why was security botched in the first place?  Didn't Congress vote to cut back funding for State Department security to help reduce the deficit?  Then this happened, and they're surprised?  Really?

Attacks on Americans overseas have been happening since the Reagan days, maybe before....I can't remember.  Here's one for you:  How come every time something bad happens in their back yard the Europeans expect the US to come and "fix it"?  Do we ask them to come over here and slap around the drug cartels in Mexico for us?

Republicans are just looking for something to throw in the face of the Democrats, just like the Democrats had a field day complaining about how NJ Governor Chris Christie (R) caused a traffic jam on some bridge to NY.  This whole thing is just sleazy politics.

You're on a slippery slope, Republicans, feigning outrage over Democrats lying about Benghazi.  Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!  You ALL lie!  Nixon lied, Reagan lied, Clinton, Bush, and Obama lied also.  And it is with great confidence that I can predict the president after Obama will lie to us, too.

Instead of distracting us with more Benghazi BS why not get your house in order?  Do your job....let me rephrase that.  Do the job THE AMERICAN PEOPLE sent you to Washington to do.  NOT the job the special interests (think: Goldman Sachs & Friends) are paying you to do now that you're there.

S

Globalization....two thumbs up or a giant disaster?

Depends on where you're sitting.

I recently thought of Thomas Friedman's 2005 book The World is Flat that told us, like we didn't already know, that we're living squarely in the Age of Globalization.  And that reminded me of 1992 presidential candidate Ross Perot's warning that "that giant sucking sound you hear" will be American jobs being sucked south and eventually overseas if the US passed the North American Free Trade Agreement.  

Perot lost, Clinton and Congress passed NAFTA, and he (Perot) was essentially proven correct.  New industries have since been created to make up for many of the lost jobs, but it's been an ongoing gut-wrenching transition.

International trade has been around for thousands of years, but things really kicked into high gear after WWII when America's revved-up wartime economy had the capacity to produce much more than we could consume at home and the world found itself with an abundance of surplus cargo ships.  

At first lots of our "stuff" went over there (thanks in large part to a Europe rebuilt by the Marshall Plan), and a few early VW Beetles and assorted cheap junk began coming back over here.  By-and-large, though, we were the big international trade winners.  Payback has been hell ever since.  

The irreversible tipping point came in the 1990's when the world's telecommunications companies grossly over-estimated the future demand for new world-wide fiber-optic cables.  Rates charged due to the glut of new capacity fell through the floor.  Now it wasn't just merchandise that was flowing back and forth across oceans, but ideas, aided by the fledgling internet, too.

Supporters of globalization say it's been a good thing because the choice of goods available to us here has multiplied exponentially, while costs have come way down.  Others say prices had to come down in order for us to afford them as the purchasing power of American middle class consumers has been essentially stagnant for the past 20 years.  

I personally don't see globalization as having been particularly kind to the American middle class, all things considered.  Sure, we have more "stuff", but at what price?  (Globalization isn't just about ideas and goods, but the flow of capital and jobs, too.)

I suppose whether globalization has overall been a good or bad thing (for Americans) will ultimately have to be reviewed over a number of decades by future historians, but from where I'm sitting today I see it as a prime example of unintended consequences run amok.

Regardless of what historians determine, all I know is the Globalization Genie isn't going back into the bottle. 

More on this subject tomorrow.  (Another snoozer, right?)

S