Limited, Inc.

Remora Limited Inc is boiling with indignation about the Middle East, and Bush, and Tony Blair (the Daily Mirror supposedly headlined their story about Blair's visit to Bush's ranch, Howdy, Poodle), but what the hell? We don't write well in the boiling mood. Ice, we prefer lots of ice in the veins. Besides, any piker with a clicker can move around the Web and compose an editorial view for himself, re the multifarious failures of US foreign policy this week. We will add our tinsel thunder to the obvious, soon enough, but not every day is a good day to go all red in the face. Limited Inc, instead, wants our readers to head over to a very nicely put together site about Dublin history put together by a Ken Finlay . We haven't explored the entire site (which seems to be a huge enterprise with links to a couple of very hard to acquire texts of Dubliniana) since we don't have that much time -- after all, there are only 200 more shopping days to Christmas. But we did

�Someone left the cake out in the rain�� Do you feel it? That auld MacArthur Park melancholy. In the spring of 1980, or was it 1981? In any case, Limited Inc remembers manning the paint counter at a Shreveport hardware store listening to Donna Summer dirging for this enigmatic gateau, since the radio station that was piped in for our customers� shopping pleasure was very big on Donna Summer. Is it an illusion, or is that same sweet sadness abroad in the US press? a feeling that the splendid little war our commander in chief, bless his 80 percent in the polls, has been all set to spring on Iraq, is now being derailed by a bunch of wankers over there in the Holy Land. I mean, the NYT, and in the Washington Post haven�t quite been open about it � rather, it�s the little asides, the way Tony Blair, for instance, seems to be abandoning ship at the very time we need him to buck us up, or the way the cartoon cutups at the Arab Summit mainstreamed the odious little Iraqis. And Kuwait

Remora Well, well. Limited Inc loves capitalism -- sometimes. The bottom line graphs, in its sphere, the very heartbeat of reason (though,as a proper lefty, we don't like to admit this too often). A Financial Times editorial sums up what is happening in Israel with admirable perspicacity. That means, companeros, that it adumbrates the essence of the 'wet' position, as Maggie Thatcher might have put it. Thatcher, of course, before she was the iron lady, was very much the dry lady. Dry down to the grayish bone. Acidulous, even. Well, here is the first killer graf. This reads like something from Limited Inc. "Ariel Sharon has embarked on a military folly that bears disturbing resemblance to his ill-fated 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The US, which was seen by many at the time to have given Israel at least an amber light to pursue its destructive Lebanon war, should not repeat the same mistake. For Israel's sake, Washington must intervene to halt Mr Sharon&

Remora McDonald's, McDonald's. Do read the story of the bad burger in the NYT today. A Chilean woman named Carmen Calderon went into a McDonald's to complain that her son had gotten sick after eating some Mickey D special. Some employee said look, it is cleaner here than in your house. Calderon then went to the municipal health agency, got them to make a sweep of the place. And Mickey D's responded by suing Ms. Calderon for 1.25 million dollars. Is this typical or what? "Because one of the icons of globalization is involved, the dispute has become a cause c�l�bre in Chile. McDonald's says it is merely trying to defend its reputation against a slander, but consumer advocates see sinister motives at work. "McDonald's doesn't have a prayer of collecting this money, so it is clear that what they really want is to send a message to every consumer in Chile," said Luis J�rez, legal director of the National Consumer Service, a governm

Remora Literally hundreds of my readers have been writing in demanding that I compare, point for point, Edmund Spenser's A Veue of the Present State of Ireland with the current discourse in the press about the 'terroristic" Palestinians. Okay, okay, maybe not literally hundreds. Maybe LI doesn't even have hundreds of readers. But still, if hundreds had written in to suggest this idea, it would have made sense to me. Since many of the rhetorical arguments rehearsed, in Spenser's text, to justify the English occupation of Irish territory and the abridgment of Irish rights, under common law, up to and including seizure of property, imprisonment, and death, resurface periodically like a chronic neural disease in the Western body. LI was thinking about this while perusing the bloodier effusions of the Washington Posts marching corps of conservative apologists, especially Michael Kelly and the always delightful Charles Krauthammer . For instance, here is Cha