Weekend Roundup 01-02May

Just catching up a bit from a short holiday with the family - some interesting bits from the weekend for you to read with coffee on Monday morning.

1. The Kingdom of Heaven trailer has looked quite appealing promising plenty of action, decent stars and a fascinating period in history. An LGF disciple, however, claims to have the skinny and accuses Ridley Scott of slanting the film to appease Muslim critics. I suppose I can't blame Scott. A few threats, or worse, an 'incident' or two could certainly kill the film. Disappointing.

2. The German Bundesbank was legendary for its fiscal conservatism. Inflation was the greatest of all economic enemies - fitting for a country whose older citizens remember Weimar. The Buba's fiscal discipline made the Deutsche mark the primary European currency for a generation before the Euro. When the Euro became the common currency the European Central Bank took over monetary policy. The Corner reports though that the this tradition may be coming to an end as an old-line monetary hawk might be replaced by a New Deal Keynesian. [By the way, the way out of economic stupor for Germany and most of Old Europe isn't deficit spending but dramatically reducing the drag of the welfare state and the socialist structure around it.)

3. It seems that UN peacekeepers have been abusing young girls in Liberia. But actually its not really that big of a scandal - nothing compared with what happened in the Congo. So why does Senator Biden and Boxer still insist on treating this organization with kid gloves?

4. On that note a good article on Bolton in OpinionJournal. Perhaps the best lines:

..In the indelicate phrasing of Sen. Joseph Biden, Mr. Bolton's penchant, when confronting a subordinate, is alleged to have been that of "reaming him a new one," and is "just not acceptable."
...
We may never know how mean Mr. Bolton has been to his subordinates, or, if he has been mean at all, whether they were deserving of his stringency. Besides, what do they mean by mean? There is the meanness--or is it the severity?--of those who do not suffer fools gladly, which is very different from sadistic meanness, which takes pleasure in bullying toward the end of humiliation. Somehow I am less interested in knowing how hard Mr. Bolton was on people who he felt had failed to do their jobs than he has been on secretaries, waiters, and others who cannot fight back, which seems to me a truer test of a person's decency.