Free Republic

Bunning Q&A summary: more Mutual Assured Destruction, more of the same Racketeering that we have all grown to love and respect from the Federal Reserve, more obfuscations, more Colonel Jessup bullshit (aka "You can't handle the truth"). With Bernanke's reconfirmation vote coming on Thursday, all Senators should read the latest garbled and encrypted pamphlet from the Fed as to why nobody in America is smart or relevant enough to have an understanding of the key items that determine US monetary policy (except for Goldman Sachs and its alumni, of course). Also, we are happy to announce that the questions proposed...

Multilaterals: If there's one lesson to be learned from the exit of World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, it's that the World Bank needs reform even more than do its Third World customers. Wolfowitz focused much attention on the World Bank's clients, talking up poverty eradication, corruption-control and forging ties with more reform-minded leaders on the African and Asian continents. These things all sound nice in the press but they have little to do with banking. In that, Wolfowitz was remarkably short on reforming how the Bank itself works. As he leaves, it remains a bloated, entrenched bureaucracy defending its privileges...

KUALA LUMPUR, July 21 (Bernama) -- With his good looks Dr Sashi Tharoor could have been a star in the Indian film industry. Instead, he choose to be a career diplomat and spent the last 28 years serving the United Nations (UN). Now he cherishes another ambition -- to lead the UN, the world's largest and vital organisation. The 50 year-old diplomat is India's official candidate for the UN secretary-general's post which falls vacant when Kofi Annan completes his second and final five-year term in December this year. The London-born United States-educated Indian, who will join three other Asian candidates...

The United Nations is out of touch with most Americans, who think the beleaguered organization has abandoned its mission to keep peace and protect human rights around the world, says U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's chief of staff. "In a very real way, we seem to have lost touch with the great middle in America, a middle which very much believes in the aspirational ideas of the U.N. ... and who feel that we've drifted away from a commitment to human rights, a commitment to help the poor of the world," Mark Malloch Brown said yesterday. The United Nations is under...