Our Quote of the Day is from Harry Truman said, "Of course I believe in the free enterprise, but in my system of free enterprise, the Democratic principle is that there never was, never has been, and never will be room for the ruthless exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few."
Some observations on the news...
You may remember that during his confirmation hearings to succeed Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, when the Senate was trying to determine if Michael Mukasey had the integrity to be our top legal officer, the nominee came off as confused about whether or not water-boarding should be considered torture. If he really didn't know, he was the only one, and it looked as if the confirmation hearings might go against him in the committee. But suddenly Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein announced their support for Mukasey and he went on to win full Senate confirmation. Since he has been at the Department of Justice, he has made it clear that he was just acting the silly old man, and that he is a Bush loyalist who will wield his considerable power to prevent investigations into administration wrong-doing. The latest case of miscreance is his refusal to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the rendition of a Canadian man who was taken ast JFK from a flight to his home and instead sent to Syria where he was kept in prison and tortured for a year. The Canadian government investigated, apologized and gave the man millions of dollars, but our Justice Department refuses to examine the case further, saying whatever was done was to make America safer. Said an attorney for the victim, "Sending Maher to Syria instead of home to Canada was certainly not safer for him, and did nothing to make the United States safer. The tendency of the Department of Justice to cover up its crimes is exactly why an outside prosecutor is needed." Yep, but don't look to Congress to act since this Judiciary Committee matter is under the control of John Conyers, who is also blocking impeachment hearings.
One wonders if the Republican political machine thinks it's being smart or funny, or they’re just out of touch with reality. While Barack Obama was making a substantial public address in Berlin, John McCain was dining on bratwurst at Schmidt's Sausage Haus und Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, and the RNC was running anti-Obama spots in Berlin, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire. Of course there will be some people who think that's clever. Of course there are also some people who only vote Republican, who would never support a black, who think we should attack Iran, but we can always hope that they are all the same people and comprise a very small group. Police in Germany estimated the crowd listening to Obama, and cheering his call for global nuclear disarmament, at 200,000.
After his Berlin event, Obama was off to Gay Paree – no, the other gay – and a meeting and press conference with President Sarkozy. Le Figaro, commented that the visitor was keeping a relatively low profile in France "because he knows his huge popularity in our country could ill serve him with a part the American centrist electorate."
Obama was absolutely right to talk about eliminating nuclear weapons from the planet. It’s the only way we can be sure there wouldn’t be an accident. Otherwise, an accident is inevitable. While we haven’t been too worried about a nuclear war for a while, three reports have surface in just the past year of our Air Force mis-handling of nuclear warheads. They flew six warheads on a flight they weren’t supposed to, they delivered warheads to Taiwan that there weren’t supposed to, and earlier this month a missile launch crew was found asleep at the switch, so to speak. The circumstances of this latest incident are unclear, even if you read the story a couple of times. For instance, an investigation showed that the three men who fell asleep while holding the classified code devices were actually holding outdated codes. Why was that, one wonders, but it wasn’t explained? Anyway, the bottom line is that with all the secrecy and security, there are people involved who make significant mistakes. So far, those mistakes haven’t resulted in a disaster, but until we eliminate those weapons, the nuclear Damoclean Sword will always hang above our heads.House Democrats were unanimous in voting to pull 10% of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve into the market. The donkeys insisted that sale of the fuel would reduce prices at the pump and generate enough revenues to buy an equal amount of crude at a lower price. Of course this was all just posturing since the amount of petroleum delivered to market would be negligible. Also posturing because the leadership knew they couldn’t get the 2/3 vote that the House rules call for to move the measure without amendments. The Republicans would have voted for the bill – dozens did, ‘cause they’ve been hearing from their hurting constituents, too – but because no amending was allowed they couldn’t force the House to vote to allow off-shore drilling. It’s not really complicated. It’s really just cheesy. The Republicans have a right to be upset because superficially it makes them look bad, and they know that voters deal with serious issues superficially. But the truth is that the Republicans in particular have been the main obstacle to a saner energy policy for the past seven years and now they are likely to pay for it...at the polls in November, and for years to come.
One state where the Republicans aren’t holding great hopes for the elections is California. The Golden State has been showing a preference for Democrats for a while, with the gap between Obama and McCain widening. Indeed, a new Field poll shows Californians favor Dems over Reps 54% to 31% generally and as regards Congress, the numbers are 48% to 28%. Of course we don’t know how that will be reflected in the final make-up of the Congressional delegation, with the vote still months away.
The McCain campaign is undecided about when to announce who will take second billing on the ticket this fall. They jerked around GOP shill Robert Novak earlier in the week into writing that the announcement was imminent; the propagandist for things Republican wasn't pleased at being used. The current speculation is that McCain will announce after Obama gets back on Sunday but before the Olympics start on August 8th. Well, duh. You might think that perhaps they can't find anyone to run, but surely some elephant would grab at the chance, thinking that McCain isn't as healthy as he claims – in body or in mind – and that would vault them to the first seat. But then they'd have to defend the Republican record against an internationally popular Democrat. Um, maybe, who knows? Anyway, top McCain aide Charles Black indicated, perhaps truthfully, that "He's in a position to make [the decision] on short notice if he wanted to." From that one would infer that McCain knows his choices and they have been vetted, including a determination has been made about their ready-and-willing-ness.
You don’t need to understand British elections to appreciate how Gordon Brown’s Labour Party took it on the chin in a special election. Back in 2005 they won the traditionally-Labour Glasgow East constituency by 13,500 votes. They lost yesterday by 365 votes to the Scottish National Party. Of course it would help to know the total number of votes cast, but that wasn’t included in the story. But you can infer the meaning from a comment by the winning candidate, described understandably in the report as jubilant, "This SNP victory is not just a political earthquake -- it is off the Richter scale." Glasgow is Britain’s third largest city, and such a loss further undermines Brown’s leadership, perhaps to the point that the party will call for early elections.
A Qantas 747-200 suffered some kind of mid-air explosion en route from Hong Kong to Melbourne leaving a hole "the size of minivan" in its fuselage. The oxygen masks dropped, the plane descended rapidly, and then made an emergency landing in Manila. None of the 350 on board was injured. Those aircraft are amazingly sound, and Qantas has an impeccable safety record.
Three more fatal shootings in Oakland last night. The violence-plagued city has seen 77 killings so far this year, and the people are clamoring for the mayor to do something. So Ron Dellums will swear in 30 new police officers today. An overly optimistic police chief declared, "This is a day full of promise for the City of Oakland."
If it was worrying you that girls don’t do as well at math as boys, don’t worry, be happy. A report published in Science that compared seven million math scores concluded that girls are just as good at math as are boys. If that is comforting.
Well at least he maintained his honor. That's the way some very jaded folks are looking at a judge's ruling in the case of Max Mosley, who sued a British tabloid for printing a story with photos – they also posted videos on the Internet – of him engaged in five hours of sex-romping with a gaggle of willing participants. The victory was not over the report of the sex but of the more scandalous reports by the News of the World that Mosley and his friends were playing out Nazi fantasies in their sex play. Said the judge, "I found that there was no evidence that the gathering of March 28, 2008, was intended to be an enactment of Nazi behavior or adoption of any of its attitudes....I see no genuine basis at all for the suggestion that the participants mocked the victims of the Holocaust." The judge allowed as how the "bondage, beating and domination" with the 68-year-old businessman and his five companions was "typical of S and M behavior." Mosley, who managed to hold onto his position as the head of a major world racing association, was awarded $120,000 I damages plus legal fees that could exceed a million dollars, but he received no punitive damages. The paper claims its case fell apart because a witness refused to testify. Well yeah, but just because he didn't Sieg heil!" on camera – that is was just a standard S-and-M event – hardly smells of a great victory.
Apropos of nothing, just one wag's perception: The idea behind terrorism is to create such horrors among the civilian population that the people will force their leaders to change their policies. The only obvious solution to terrorism, in the eyes of the government of the terrorized, is to eliminate the terrorists by slaughtering the population in which they hide. If terrorists only attacked government targets, and if governments only killed terrorists, it would be a much more reasonable fight.
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