Tony Seton Communications

 

America Back on Track is presented every weekday by award-winning broadcast journalist Tony Seton (site/bio) to stimulate an informed discussion of where we are as a nation and how to get America back on track. America Back on Track’s focus is to reinvigorate our country by restoring America’s honest practices and good name as a nation and to pioneer a healthy and productive future for our children’s children’s children. Featuring news, interviews, and commentary, America Back on Track puts the day's headlines and the country's issues into perspective by exploring where we are, how we got here, where we want to go, and how to get there. If you would like to receive yours via email, simply enter your email address in the box below and click on "Go." Your information will never be shared.

 

America Back on Track... for Tuesday, August 19^th

Our Quote of the Day is from Edward Everett Hale who said, "Never bear more than one trouble at a time. Some people bear three kinds - all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have."

Some observations on the news...
[Thank you for the notes of despair at the announcement that the email version of ABoT will shortly cease. The timing is kinda on the basis of the monthly billing, plus I’m going to reune with a coupla college chums. And I’m not convinced that the 1800 or so words I’ve been publishing is serving a great many people. Granted there are some wonderful souls out there who have found the flow of information productive to their understanding of the world, and if you each paid a penny-a-word on a yearly basis, I would do nothing else. More to the point is that while I love the hours spent reading and writing about the events making history – or at least making the news wires – I need to be more fiscally productive with my time. There are the occasional hunger pangs and the landlord is curiously insistent upon a monthly stipend. That said, I may not disappear into ignominy. I’ve written some 1800 SetonnoteS of various lengths over the past nine years; an indication that I write in part for therapy. Back five years ago I produced a two-minute audio piece every day called SetonnoteS which played on a daily syndicated radio program. I may reprise that format. The Atlantic sea air wafting through my etymological gills this weekend may provide the next direction. If you’d like to receive whatever is next, or otherwise to stay in contact, please cast an occasional eye on the home site.]

There was an old joke about how the Germans managed to invade Poland so easily. They told the Poles they were retreating and walked in backwards. Hohoho. That thought came to mind when I read an AP headline that said "Russia claims pullback but forces move other way." The truth in both situations is that the overwhelmingly powerful military in both situations could do whatever it wanted, essentially. Now, for all the posturing by the White House and the squeaking of European leaders, the fact is that there is between little and nothing they can do to force the Russians to do or not do. Russia not only has the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world, they have enormous clout due to their immense petroleum and natural gas reserves. If Moscow so chooses, much of Europe will freeze next winter.

Michael Dobbs has an excellent piece in The Washington Post about the gross misstatement of the situation in Georgia by American leaders, both politicians and the media. "When it comes to apportioning blame for the latest flare-up in the Caucasus, there's plenty to go around. The Russians were clearly itching for a fight, but the behavior of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili has been erratic and provocative. The United States may have stoked the conflict by encouraging Saakashvili to believe that he enjoyed American protection, when the West's ability to impose its will in this part of the world is actually quite limited."

Pat Buchanan is sounding remarkably clear-headed of late. He used to be an anathema to common sense and decency, at least so it seemed to me, but lately he has been coming out with essays that put many of his progressive colleagues to shame. "If the Russia-Georgia war proves nothing else, it is the insanity of giving erratic hotheads in volatile nations the power to drag the United States into war. From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, U.S. presidents have sought to avoid shooting wars with Russia, even when the Bear was at its most beastly."

Judging from the tone of their lead, Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny of The New York Times sound like they think they have the facts. Datelined Washington – "Senator Barack Obama has all but settled on his choice for a running mate and set an elaborate rollout plan for his decision, beginning with an early morning alert to supporters, perhaps as soon as Wednesday morning, aides said." We shall see; the discipline in the campaign has been quite extraordinary in keeping this secret. The top three candidates, according to what the NYTers been hearing are Senators Biden (DE) and Bayh (IN) and Governor Kaine (VA). (Kansas Governor Katherine Sebelius is also frequently mentioned.) I won’t go through all of the speculation, but confess I find the reportage of the selection process far more interesting and exciting than the Olympics. And, for that matter, more important. If it’s among the three men, Bayh would make the most sense because he was a virulent Clinton supporter, he could probably deliver Indiana, he wouldn’t outshine the star, and he would provide more conservative voters with a sense of security .

Stories out over the last coupla days indicate that the FBI badly muffed the anthrax case. We knew that but we didn’t know how badly. We still don’t. We presume that Ivins was the single culprit, but with the FIB’s (sic) track record, we certainly can’t be confident that they (1) know what happened or (2) are telling us the truth. There is also a story about how the FDA messed up the investigation of the salmonella poisoning epidemic. According to what is being reported, they had tons of evidence to believe – at least to investigate – certain Mexican farms as being the source of the poisoning, and the information was there for months. I’m sure these agencies get some things right, but for goodness sakes, when their people are ignoring the obvious they need to be replaced with competent, intelligent people who are committed to protecting us.

In his OpEd today, Bob Herbert takes John McCain apart for his faux comparison of himself to Teddy Roosevelt. "Roosevelt believed passionately in regulating industry and curbing the excesses of the great corporations. He favored the imposition of an inheritance tax and fought his party’s increasing tendency to cater to the very wealthy. And, of course, he was a ferocious protector of the environment. Roosevelt was known as the ‘trust-buster,’ but it was in the area of environmental conservation that he really made his mark."

Also on the OpEd page, David Brooks bemoans McCain for failing to keep his campaign on a higher, maverick-style plane. Instead of challenging the crippled mainstream media and their preference for conflict-oriented coverage, the McCain campaign has given them what they want. "McCain and his advisers have been compelled to adjust to the hostile environment around them. They have been compelled, at least in their telling, to abandon the campaign they had hoped to run. Now they are running a much more conventional race, the kind McCain himself used to ridicule."

The corruption in politics is widespread – Surprise, surprise – and no where is it more obvious than on Capitol Hill, and ironically, right dead center in the House ethics (sic) Committee. As Zachary Coile of the San Francisco Chronicle Washington Bureau reports, "Congress, pledging to clean up Washington's culture of corruption, approved a rule last year to end the practice of lobbyists or their clients throwing lavish events honoring lawmakers at the parties' national conventions. But the House ethics committee opened a huge loophole in the rule by issuing guidelines in December saying it was fine for lobbyists or their employers to throw parties for a group of House members – just not for a single lawmaker....Good-government groups say the decision undercuts the pledges by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other House leaders to curb the influence of lobbyists."

I couldn’t tell the story any better than did Brad Stone: "The Princeton Review, the test-preparatory firm, accidentally published the personal data and standardized test scores of tens of thousands of Florida students on its Web site, where they were available for seven weeks. A flaw in configuring the site allowed anyone to type in a relatively simple Web address and have unfettered access to hundreds of files on the company’s computer network, including educational materials and internal communications. Another test-preparatory company said it stumbled on the files while doing competitive research. This company provided The New York Times with the Web address of the internal files on the condition that it not be named. The Times informed the Princeton Review of the problem on Monday, and the company promptly shut off access to that portion of its site." Ya gotta wonder how many zillions of pages of information are out there, accessible at some web address, upon which, by the grace of god, the wrong people aren’t stumbling. Perhaps it would be a better system if every page that’s uploaded that has personal information on it – like, um, about 34,000 public school students in Florida – should automatically be password-protected, and only when the computer barks "Are you sure you want public access to this page" and you click the "Yes, I’m purdy dang sure!!!" button will that page be made available to everyone, even competitors doing op-research on your company. Said the COO of the company with confidence-inducing freshness, "As soon as I found out about this security issue we acted immediately to shut down any access to this information. The Princeton Review takes Internet privacy seriously, and we are currently conducting a review of all of our procedures." Mistakes happen. More will. More serious will. A whole new branch of law will flourish.

There was a story a while back about a Florida game warden who, pending new regulations that would have barred hunting of black bears, went out and shot one to see how it felt. No kdding. Somehow I was reminded of that story when I read how the National Parks Service clear-cut 140 acres of rare oak trees in Virginia so that visitors could see what the soldiers at the battles of Manassas saw 150 years ago. The officials couldn’t do anything about the signs and the power lines that have gone up since, but they could cut down hundreds of "basic oak-hickory forest type" trees that are only in six counties, in Northern Virginia and Maryland, and are deemed globally uncommon to rare. Explained the park’s cultural resource manager, "It's crucial to the public understanding of what happened. It helps give the public a sense of place." Uh-huh. At the first Battle of Mansassas, people came from Washington by coach and wagon to picnic while they watched the Civil War get under war. Today, how many people could spell Manassas? Oh how the Bull doth Run.

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America Back on Track... for Monday, August 18^th

Our Quote of the Day is from Adlai Stevenson who said, "In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take."

Some observations on the news...

Russia appears to be withdrawing their troops from Georgia, although they are likely to leave some of them in South Ossetia. It was Georgia that started the war by invading the break-away region within their break-away republic. South Ossetia separated from Georgia in the early 1990s so the timing of the effort to get it back was questionable at best. The U.S. seems to have forgotten who initiated the current conflict and as we watch the Russian withdrawal, our Secretary of State is applying her digs, saying. "People are going to begin to wonder if Russia can be trusted."

The stakes are much higher than tiny South Ossetia. The Sunday Times of London reports that Russia is thinking about putting nuclear warheads on their Baltic fleet again, for the first time since the end of the Cold War. This, in response to the U.S. agreement to install (non-nuclear) missiles in Poland. The Russians have been near apoplectic about the U.S. move, with one of their generals saying over the weekend that it could make Poland a target of Russian nuclear weapons. The insanity of the U.S. plan – no one knows if the anti-missile system would even work – has been discussed here before, with the bottom line being that it needlessly exacerbates tensions with Russia. If the Russians do put nuclear warheads on their ships, it will only increase the danger of an accident or a mistake.

Will he or won’t or when will he? That was the question over the weekend, resolved today as Pervez Musharraf resigned as president of nuclear Pakistan. An aroused coalition of opponents was getting heated waiting for him to step down; else they would impeach him. The charges against him had to do with the unconstitutional seizing of powers last November which ultimately led to his downfall. Musharraf was corrupt and lethal, though probably somewhat less so than his predecessors. The U.S. funneled billions of dollars into his government, ostensibly to keep the Taliban and their fundamentalist Pakistani allies in check, but little of the money was actually put to such use. Condoleeza Rice declared, "President Musharraf has been a good ally. Everyone knows that we disagreed with his decision in terms of the state of emergency that he declared, but he was – he kept to his word. He took off the uniform. There's now a democratic government in Pakistan." And Washington and the world – particularly Pakistan’s neighbors – are praying that it lasts.

Frank Rich has an essay about how silly are some of the political survey numbers that are garnering headlines. "As everyone says, polls are meaningless in the summers of election years. Especially this year, when there's one candidate whose real story has yet to be fully told." He rues the failure of the mainstream media – the drive-by media, as my friend Jim Fuller refers to it though not in this particular context – to reveal the real John McCain, a man who is at best confused about the facts of today’s world and who regularly, almost incessantly, is making mistakes about names, places, dates and other points that a president should know as well as his own name. Another failure of the faux fourth estate is that they abdicate credibility to trash mongers like Jerome Corsi. Rich notes the irony that Corsi has spoken scandalously of McCain. "Corsi's writings have been repeatedly promoted by Sean Hannity on Fox News; Corsi's publisher, Mary Matalin, has praised her author's ‘scholarship.’ If Republican warriors like Hannity and Matalin think so highly of Corsi's research into Obama, then perhaps we should take seriously Corsi's scholarship about McCain. In recent articles at worldnetdaily.com, Corsi has claimed (among other charges) that the McCain campaign received ‘strong’ financial support from a ‘group tied to Al Qaeda’ and that ‘McCain's personal fortune traces back to organized crime in Arizona.’"

While Americans are focused on the economy more than any other issue, our foreign adventures continue to write headlines of death and destruction. Dozens of Iraqis have died and more than a hundred have been wounded over the past few days in a series of suicide bombings, most targeting Shia pilgrims celebrating a religious festival. In Somalia, an attack on two mini-vans filled with laborers killed at least 60. In Afghanistan, attacks on international aid workers and an increase in fighting with the Taliban has cost hundreds of lives and deprived many thousands of needy civilians of basic aid. More than 7,000 police have been ordered into the streets of Kabul to protect government officials celebrating Independence Day. It is also reported that fear of terrorist attacks have prompted the government to move the independence celebration to an undisclosed location. It’s not clear who was going to be informed about the new location so that they might, in fact, celebrate. Perhaps it will just be for cameras.

Here’s a dumb headline: "Time running out to make U.S. vice president pick." While I don’t pretend to know the political strategy of either Obama or McCain, I gotta think that both of their campaigns have a plan, and one that meets their needs. It’s not like they’re gonna show up at their convention saying, "Oops, I knew I’d forgotten something." It wasn’t likely they would announce during the Olympics, so it’s pretty likely that Obama will announce his choice in the coming week. As regards the Republican ticket, one can only hope they would have the good grace not try to encroach on the Democratic news coverage to tell us McCain’s choice during the Dem convention. Considering the dignity they have demonstrated this summer, that may be a vain hope.

No, not Slim Pickens the actor, but T. Boone Pickens the billionaire oilman who put $3 million into SwiftBoating John Kerry in 2004. Pickens is sorta redeeming himself in the eyes of some by pushing for wind power, in television ads that say America can’t drill itself out of the energy crisis. Pickens met with Barack Obama who announced that the two of them will work together on a new national energy policy. Said Pickens, "Any credible domestic energy policy must reduce our dependence on foreign oil by at least 30 percent in the next 10 years." Said Obama, "Everybody knows, if we keep on going on the same track that we're going and we are giving our wealth away, we're funding both sides of the war on terror."

A fellow who sends me emails copied me in a response to someone who had sent to him a fake Maureen Dowd column claiming that Obama had gotten his money from Arabs. My guy sent him the debunking Snopes link. I piled on, commenting, "I was convinced that Dowd and Michelle were lesbians who had hundreds of mixed race children whom they sold to Asian slavers to finance the campaign. Thanks for clearing it all up now." And then I head-shakeningly added, "Do you think there should be an IQ test for people to discuss politics?" To which he responded, "Yeah. And we aint seen nothin' yet! The McCain Forked Tongue Express is still alive and well. I'm waiting for Jesus to give a full, unqualified endorsement for McCain." But, he added, "An IQ test would be impractical, since most voters would not be able to read it, much less comprehend it."

The Associated Press has a report on the role of real estate appraisers in the building and bursting of the housing bubble. "After the nation's last major banking disaster, Congress set up a system to catch rogue appraisers. Their game: inflating the value of homes at the direction of equally unscrupulous real estate agents and mortgage brokers, whose commissions are determined by the size of the deals." They quote a former federal official as saying, "The system is completely broken. It's amazing that the system ever worked at all." Judging the results, just so far, maybe it never did.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the Olympics, this headline would confuse you: "He edges Liukin on uneven bars." He is China's He Kexin, and He is a she. He won perhaps the tightest competition in a tiebreaker against all-around champion Nastia Liukin. Nastia is also a she, of course, and she is of the United States. The tie-breaker was a highly-complicated scoring matter that very few people, including the athletes, understood but ultimately went to He. Prior to the 1996 Atlanta games, a tie such as was the result in Beijing meant that both athletes would have shared the medal, but officials subsequently set up this new system which defies good sense just as the gymnasts seem to defy gravity. By the by, the competition results may never be accepted by everyone as there are some questions about He’s actual age.

The AP also has been looking into some tragic stories about what happened at the outset of the Korean War that involved nefarious and horrendously murderous behavior by both the Seoul government and Washington. "The story of Kim Soo-im is a cautionary tale of political hysteria, fear-mongering and sensationalist media, from a time when historians now believe the Seoul regime secretively executed at least 100,000 leftists and supposed sympathizers. Those killings came en masse and long ago. But this one woman's death remains, for one American, a living, deeply personal story."

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America Back on Track... for Friday, August 15^th

Our Quote of the Day is from Carl Jung who said, "The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid."

Some observations on the news...
I know people suffering with dementia whose memory works better than does John McCain, which suggests that he is deliberately lying frequently because he doesn’t think his supporters – or the media – really care, or because his mental faculties are dangerously diminished. It’s probably both. Consider that when speaking to reporters about the situation in Georgia, McCain castigated the Russians, declaring that: "in the 21st century nations don't invade other nations." Kinda takes your breath away. What was Iraq, Senator?

McCain is not alone in forgetting recent history. Our Secretary of State proclaimed, "This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can invade its neighbor, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it. Things have changed." Um, where was Rice’s outrage when Georgia invaded their neighbor South Ossetia?

Suggested one wag who preferred to keep his name out of the press for obvious reasons, "If the Russians want Georgia, they should have to take Alabama and Mississippi, too."

This is about the other Thomas Hartmann, not the liberal radio host/author but the deranged general in Guantanamo who was just kicked off a second "terrorist" case. Hartmann’s notion of justice is rather perverse. The general didn’t include all of the defense evidence when he passed a file up to the official who decides what charges should be tried. The decision to oust Hartmann from the trial of an Afghani came after another U.S. general testified that he was "abusive, bullying and unprofessional."

When the story first broke about the shooting of the Democratic party leader in Arkansas, I noticed that the man also owned several car dealerships and I wondered which role drew the killer to act. Authorities are investigating for a motive in the murder. Of course it doesn’t matter a whit what the victim did – he didn’t deserve to be killed for either – but many people have had incredibly unpleasant dealings with car dealer and somehow that would be less onerous than if he were killed for political reasons.

So Democratic delegates will have a chance to cast their ballot for Hillary Clinton when they vote at the donkey dance in Denver in two weeks. While some folks are suggesting that the Clinton folks will be able to rig a theft of the nomination, it’s hard to believe that the Obama folks don’t know what they are doing. After all, they came from nowhere and overthrew the near-coronated front-runner in a year. Granted the last four months of the primary season didn’t seem brilliant, but they won the delegates they needed. So as much as the Clintons would love to seize what they seem to think is theirs by political birthright, the likely results of this whole thang will be to drain some of the anger of The Plumbing Vote. Shame on them from insisting that people should vote for a women simply on the basis of gender. Their insistence on supporting a woman of despicable character whose husband’s womanizing would have cost her the election is no less mindless than thinking Republicans supporting John McCain because they feel they must vote the party. Or for that matter, it is like those who would vote against Obama because he is black. If there are no major upsets in the general election and McCain beats Obama, it will be because the Clintons failed to campaign effectively for the Democratic candidate.

The recriminations aren’t over, nor should they be. Here’s the headline of a Los Angeles Times investigation into records of the tragically failed FBI investigation: "Anthrax scientist Bruce Ivins slipped under the radar because of FBI obsession." The FBI has been messing up hugely on critical cases, like the Olympics bomber, the Unabomber, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Nine-Eleven terrorists, to name just a few major cases in addition to the anthrax mailer that were mismanaged to degrees that defy imagination. If the bureau it is to be fixed – and we certainly should be able to have a domestic investigative agency that can do its job properly – then it needs to be sanitized of the corrosive incompetence and turfism of the Hoover culture. Robert Mueller has shown himself to be not up to the task and needs to be replaced with someone willing to roll empty heads and demand fealty to justice and commitment to competence.

Give Donald Trump some credit. For a man with of history of crass, he showed some class when he agreed to purchase Ed McMahon’s home, two weeks before it would go into foreclosure, and to lease it back to the aging former TV fixture. Said Trump, whose move is considered less of a sound investment and more an act of benevolence, "I don't know the man, but I grew up watching him on TV....When I was at the Wharton School of Business, I'd watch him every night. How could this happen?" Yeah, well, and to millions of other Americans, too.

Scientists are reporting that the number of dead zones in the world’s oceans may have doubled in just the past year. They’re not certain if they simply missed counting some of the areas in the past, but at least some of them are new. These are spots where pollution-fed algae remove the oxygen from the surrounding water and all other life ceases to exist. Said one researcher, "We have to realize that hypoxia is not a local problem. It is a global problem and it has severe consequences for ecosystems....It's getting to be a problem of such a magnitude that it is starting to affect the resources that we pull out of the sea to feed ourselves." The main causes of dead zones are fertilizer and other farm run-off, sewage and fossil-fuel burning.

It’s speaks ill of our society that Jerome Corsi’s books sell. Four years ago he Swift-Boat’d John Kerry. Now he’s after Barack Obama. "The Obama Nation" is a scurrilous pack of deceit, innuendo and slander, according to dispassionate reviewers. The Obama campaign spends 40 pages itemizing the errors on their debunking website. A spokesman added, "Jerome Corsi is a discredited liar who is pedaling another piece of garbage to continue the Bush-Cheney politics he helped perpetuate four years ago. His is just one of what will likely be many more lie-filled books rushed to print this election cycle, which are cobbled together from debunked Internet sources to make money and advance a partisan agenda. We will respond to these smears forcefully with all means at our disposal." Unfortunately, too many people who are looking for a fig leaf for their bigotry and ignorance will buy the lies. Maybe John McCain will show some character and denounce the book.

It speaks volumes about our society that millions of people listen to Rush Limbaugh. He told listeners earlier this week that the reason why John Edwards probably had an affair was that his wife Elizabeth drove him to it. "My theory that I just explained to you about why -- you know, what could have John Edwards' motivations been to have the affair with Rielle Hunter, given his wife is smarter than he is and probably nagging him a lot about doing this, and he found somebody that did something with her mouth other than talk." When I asked a well-informed friend if he could possibly have said something like that, she said, Oh, yes, that’s Limbaugh, all right. Limbaugh is a disgrace to the principle of free speech, and the fact that his advertisers haven’t been driven off suggests that their customers should be checked for internal head lice.

There is an old joke that asks, Why it is better to be black than homosexual? Because you don’t have to tell your parents. Hohoho. A column in the Los Angeles Times talks about how blacks are less supportive of same-sex marriage, which could make the vote on the issue in California problematic presuming that the Obama candidacy will bring out a higher percentage of black voters. The author believes that opinions on the matter in the black community are changing and the racial divide won’t be as significant as previously projected. The real sorrow, of course, is that any group that has been discriminated against should be so close-minded as to support discrimination against others. Then again, we shouldn’t perhaps expect people to be open-minded just because they have been victims themselves.

The Washington Post has an article slugged "In Africa, Fertility Clinics Bring Hope" which reports on how in Uganda, where the sole purpose of women is to "produce" (children), those who can’t are stigmatized. The obvious solution on the vastly overly populated Dark Continent – home, also, to female genital mutilation – is to change the thinking. But no, they are instead creating fertility clinics. The Earth is five billion people over-populated, and they’re trying to have more children. No aid should be provided to societies that promote population growth.

At a hearing last week here in The Golden State, a state senators interrupted the rather banal remarks of a pastor testifying about minority interests regarding global warming legislation. That might have been thought rude, but what she said was "Excuse me, but I think your arguments are bullshit." The comment which has been playing wildly on YouTube is part of a pattern of bizarre behavior by this woman over the past several months, according to friends and observers. Her husband insists that the problem is a severe hearing disability. He appears to be in denial. The longer it takes for him to accept reality, the worse the situation is going to get for this woman who is clearly in some kind of trouble.

A jury didn’t buy the flight attendant’s account of an incident when she claimed Victoria Osteen, wife of a mega-evangelist, had pushed and elbowed her trying to get into the cockpit. The flight attendant wanted damages because she’s been distressed by the incident for three years. She was backed up on the stand by another flight attendant. But the preacher, three other first-class passengers and the pilot all testified that there was nothing to the incident. It couldn’t have actually been nothing, since the Osteens paid the FAA a $3,000 fine for her interfering with a crew member. They explained that they plunked down the money to put the incident, such as it was, behind them.

There are energy grid points around the globe which show a particular propensity for either success or failure. Haiti, for example, will always have problems. If we were attuned to such things, we might recognize the wisdom of not settling on such sites. New Orleans – long a hot spot for murder, debauchery and ignorance – is another such place. Reuters has a discouraging piece on the Sisyphean struggle by The Big Easy to root out corruption; it may simply be too deeply entrenched. The city’s first-ever inspector general couldn’t even get phones installed.

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America Back on Track... for Thursday, August 14^th

Our Quote of the Day is from Jorge Luis Borges who said, "I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library."

Some observations on the news...
Pakistan’s president is reportedly expected to resign in the next few days. Pervez Musharraf is said to prefer that route to facing impeachment. Experts had earlier pitched the impeachment move as ridiculously dangerous because Musharraf had the authority to dissolve the legislature before it could pursue his impeachment.

The eurozone economy contracted for the first time ever...by .2% in the last quarter. Here in the U.S., the inflation rate was double what had been predicted, as food and fuel prices soared, pushing prices up at the highest rate in 17 years. Anyone who thinks the planet is going to escape a major and prolonged downturn isn’t paying attention, and hasn’t been for a significant number of years. The scope of the problems and the depth of the coming fall have been worsening as those in charge have refused to acknowledge the danger signs over the past ten years.

For those who insist that speculators aren’t dominating global markets, consider that while the war in Georgia seriously threatens oil and gas distribution from Russia, the price of crude is down, and while domestic inflation rate is the highest since 1991, the Dow is merrily climbing into the clouds. Crude is down not because supplies are expanding but because forecasters see a dramatic decline in demand as the world economy slows. And stocks are up because they have no relation to the economy.

House Democrats are shameless and shameful at the same time. Their flipflip to support offshore oil drilling is pandering in its basest form. Yes, gasoline prices are high, but offshore drilling won’t fix that, and the government’s own figures make that obscenely clear. Those who let them off the hook by saying they need to boost their membership numbers before they can really get anything done are praising them with faint damns.

Lie down with dogs and you'll get up with fleas. John McCain has shown his true colors by surrounding himself with lobbyists. They are trying to win this election with McCain so they can serve their clients with their boy in the White House. Whether he will win or not, the very fact that he might has meant huge fees paid to the public relations consultants who have guided many political campaigns – think of Mark Penn directing the Clinton effort – and have virtually taken over the McCain campaign. Oh, sure, the lobbyists say they have taken leaves of absence from their PR business, but if you believe that means anything, you have taken leave of your senses. Check the flow of checks from their clients to their temporarily de-affiliated companies. For instance, clients like the country of Georgia have been plowing huge sums into the corporate coffers of a company, one of whose principals is guiding McCain's bid. Randy Scheunemann's firm has deposited some $800,000 from the Georgian government. Do you think that the fact that Scheunemann has publically separated himself from his firm for the duration of the campaign means a damned thing? Do you think McCain's position on Georgia – "America is behind you" – might in any way have been flavored by the, um, past PR deal? It's just not plausible. It's like saying that some yahoo at a Clinton rally would have the same access to the candidate as someone who bundled $250,000 in contributions for her campaign. Read Rose Brooks’ column in today’s Los Angeles Times for more on the dangerously foolish support Georgia has gotten from McCain and the Bush administration.

McCain’s questionable – that's being generous – relationships are legion. Ralph Reed is holding a fundraiser for the Arizona senator. A renowned fundamentalist bigot, Reed was a close political advisor to Karl Rove who worked to grease the skids between Jack Abramoff and the White House. Reed and the imprisoned lobbyist made considerable efforts to benefit certain Indian tribes over others in the casinos game. Reed claims not to have a role in the McCain campaign, but staging a money collection isn't antithetical their purpose, for goodness sakes, and he has put his name out ostensibly linking himself with McCain’s White House bid. Ironically, it was Reed going to Rove on behalf of Abramoff a few years ago that seems to have blocked a McCain appointment – the wife of a former POW with McCain – to an Interior Department job. Reed said in an email to Abramoff, "Talked to Rove about this and I think I killed it. He's on it. Keep this between us, don't want to raise expectations, but I banged on this one hard."

Where did all the terrorists from Abu Ghraib – not the prisoners but the guards – go when they moved on. Perhaps to the immigration prisons here in our own country. Those hell-holes would underscore Mark Twain’s comment that if you want to see the dregs of society, go down to the country jail and watch the changing of the guard. What’s going on at the federal level, with would be immigrants awaiting processing and/or deportation, makes Guantanamo look like Club Med, according to some accounts. Okay, if it’s not quite that bad, it shouldn’t even be in the ball park; ill treatment crossing the line into torture. In yet another excruciating story of mistreatment of immigrants, The New York Times documents a case that should result in imprisonment of not only those who committed the horrors, but also those who knew about the atrocious behavior, and those who should have but maybe looked away.

Take two: If you wondered where those "just a few bad apples" from Abu Ghraib wound up, maybe they’re not all in the immigrant detention center. Maybe some are in the U.S. Navy. Six sailors who were functioning as camp guards overseeing prisoners in Iraq have been charge with abusing detainees. Among the allegations were that some prisoners were sealed in a cell with pepper spray and others were beaten. The use of pepper spray is banned by international treaty, which is hardly an issue under the current administration. You might also be surprised to know that the U.S. is holding 21,000 prisoners in Iraq.

The federal overseer of the California prison system has gotten fed up with the failure of the governor and the legislature to settle their budget matters and has asked a federal judge to provide him with $8 billion. Yes, with a "b" and at a time when the budget deficit for The Golden State is already pushing $18 billion. Legislators couldn’t agree where to find the big bucks, and maybe thought they could stall the overseer, or maybe just ignore him. Not bloody likely, since the man had been appointed to force the California prison system to provide basic health coverage for all the inmates, especially all those old guys so blithely sentenced to their own eternity behind bars and whose health is failing.

The Boston Catholic Church has paid out another bunch of millions of dollars to people who were molested by priests decades ago. We all certainly rue such behavior, but these pay-outs – usually a third of which wind up in the pockets of attorneys – are extravagant and misspent precious resources. First of all, we need to lower the heat on priests molesting their charges. If we did, it would reduce the onus of the crime, both on the victims and the perpetrators. This is not to let the molesters off the hook, but the more we play up the heinousness of the crime, the more the victims suffer and the less likely it is that would-be perpetrators will seek therapy. Our society is very screwed up about sex, pun intended. We need to get a better grip on our sexuality, leave most people alone about it, and provide mental help, rather than prison, to those who would transgress healthy limits. Second, paying out millions to individuals who in most case have been holding onto their suffering far, far too long is a mistake. Society makes such people heroes in their victimhood rather than edging them back toward normalcy. Wouldn’t the millions be far better spent on counseling, prevention, and other worthwhile churchly functions?

Wendy Orent has an opinion piece in the L-A-Times that points to the vast danger we have created trying to protect ourselves with an often-counterproductive bio-weapons program. As she notes, we now have 14,000 people involved in this game which we are funding to the tune of more than $50 billion a year. The enormity of the operation invites corruption and mistakes where there is no room for error. The irony is that we haven’t been attacked with germ warfare, except by one of our own; the investigation of which the FBI managed to muck up wholesale for seven years at a huge cost to taxpayers. We would be much better off applying those resources – researchers, labs and money – to the detoxifying of real threats, like drug-resistant superbugs.

A new federal government report found that even people with health insurance are using hospital ERs for basic care, rather than seeing doctors or visiting clinics. This compounds the use by the uninsured, many in serious condition for not having earlier access to alternative basic resources. What makes matters worse is that many hospitals and more emergency rooms are closing. The overload is so great that the average wait time to see a doctor in an ER is now over an hour. So much for the very notion of an emergency.

Some of the news reports about the fact that the producers of the opening extravaganza used one girl’s face and another girl’s voice have the sound of conspiracy and deceit. They did use two different girls, one with better voice than looks and the other the other way around. So what? How many entertainers haven’t been caught lip-synching? For that matter, who feels cheated that Marnie Nixon sang for Audrey Hepburn in "My Fair Lady" and for Natalie Wood in "West Side Story"?

Okay, so this guy goes to Barbados. He’s a scientist, specifically an evolutionary biologist, who when he gets back announces that he has identified a new snake, probably the smallest on the planet. He and his team have already discovered the world’s tiniest lizard in the Dominican Republic and the smallest frog in Cuba. But when he announced his discovery, including naming the four-inch monster after his wife, some of the island locals got very upset. Hey, they said, we’ve known about that snake forever. You didn’t discover anything. Said the ersatz discoverer, "I think they're carrying it a bit too far. Snakes are really apolitical." Yes, but apropos of nothing, politicians can be real snakes.

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America Back on Track... for Wednesday, August 13^th

Our Quote of the Day is from Oscar Wilde who said, "Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them so much."

Some observations on the news...
For anyone who thinks that Wall Street is anything more or less than a casino for rich people...I've got a bridge to nowhere to sell you. You can almost hear in the daily numbers the single questions that brokers are asking: "Is this it?" That is, they are playing along with the herd, hoping not to be caught at the back of the pack when The Big Sell-off takes place. You know, like the lame moose falling prey to the wolves. It's a multi-trillion dollar game of chicken, with the players obsessing about not getting out too early and apoplectic about getting out too late. The game is a constant back and forth of playing the shifts, using often-irrelevant new data to say, Let's stay in or Let's get out, desperately wanting to be somewhere inside the pack. Like the color commentators at the naked emperor's parade, they explain their buying and selling as though the moves up and down are reasoned. Oh, wow, retail sales in July were down. Um, yeah, like, once the sudden single influx of $150 billion in tax rebates were spent, where did you think consumers were going to get more money?

The Justice Department is inviting attorneys who were rejected for their political beliefs to reapply. However, they will not be weeding out those who were hired because of the beliefs. Meanwhile, the Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility has notified bar associations of their findings of misbehavior – but not necessarily crimes – of five former DoJ officials, Monica Goodling, Kyle Sampson, Michael Elston, Esther McDonald, and John Nowacki, in case those bar associations want to take action against them for their shameful activities.

One wonders if Bush-Cheney are feeling a need to speed up the apocalypse. The White House announced that they are sending troops to Georgia to, um, lead a humanitarian aid effort. "We expect Russia to ensure that all lines of communication and transport, including sea ports, airports, roads and airspace remain open for the delivery of humanitarian assistance and for civilian transit," said the president, declaring that U.S. air and naval forces will help to deliver aid, some 6,000 miles from our own shores. No, the Russians won't intervene, but there is a certain insanity to further stretching our depleted military forces, especially when European countries are more directly affected. And when our puppet/ally was the aggressor.

The AP headline atop a White House propaganda piece, read "US, allies weigh punishment for Russia." Cough, cough, like Europe and the Ukraine are going to stand up to Moscow? First of all, it was Georgia that foolishly invaded South Ossetia. Second, Russia is their major source of natural gas and petroleum, and winter is only a couple of months away. It’s easy for Washington to huff and puff, but its Europe’s house that would come down. Tragically, the Bush administration doesn’t recognize that this would be a tremendous opportunity to sit down with Putin and Medvedev and negotiate a deeper, longer lasting peace that would include canceling the mindless plans to install an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic. A visionary leader would recognize that we want fewer enemies and more allies to deal together with the crises – economic, environmental, and security – that are facing our planet.

Mikhail Gorbachev wrote about the Georgia situation for the Washington Post. His analysis was both pointed and accurate. The Nobel Peace Price winner noted that "Over the past few days, some Western nations have taken positions, particularly in the U.N. Security Council, that have been far from balanced. As a result, the Security Council was not able to act effectively from the very start of this conflict. By declaring the Caucasus, a region that is thousands of miles from the American continent, a sphere of its "national interest," the United States made a serious blunder. Of course, peace in the Caucasus is in everyone's interest. But it is simply common sense to recognize that Russia is rooted there by common geography and centuries of history. Russia is not seeking territorial expansion, but it has legitimate interests in this region. "

Thomas Friedman has a biting essay about the failure of John McCain and his colleagues to renew the solar tax credits that are essential to promoting alternative energy and weaning us from fossil fuels. "That is what this election should be focusing on. Everything else is just bogus rhetoric designed by cynical candidates who think Americans are so stupid — so bloody stupid — that if you just show them wind turbines in your Olympics ad they’ll actually think you showed up and voted for such renewable power — when you didn’t."

Here's a headline that should get your dander up: "Study says most corporations pay no U.S. income taxes." The story is about a GAO report that 57% of US companies doing business domestically and 72% of foreign companies doing business here paid no taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005. This, despite sales in the trillions. They were able to get away with paying no taxes by claiming operating losses, taking advantage of tax credits, and using loopholes to shift income to entities in lower tax rate countries.

Supporters of Hillary Clinton are pushing to have her name placed in nomination at the donkey conclave in Denver at the end of the month, and the want a role call vote, too. They say it is out of respect for the 18 million people who voted for her during the primary campaign, um, plus, it's historical. They further say that by going this route, her backers will be able to put the past behind them and unify the party. Not surprisingly, the Obama campaign would like there to be less about Clinton during the convention, though it's not known what they plan to do about this post-campaign campaign; except so far roll over for it. They are not only letting her have a prime time slot to address the convention, but also her husband. It kinda makes sense, on the basis of their titles – major primary winner and former president – but considering how sordid was their behavior, they don't deserve snake spit. Let's be clear, the Clintons would shoot Obama if they could get away with it, but since that's unlikely their fondest hope is that Obama is eaten by a shark while on vacation in Hawaii. They are upset that Obama hasn't done more to mitigate the squandering of $25 million of her own money that she invested in her losing effort, but they know that if they don't show a significant effort in Obama's behalf and he loses, they will be blamed. (Boil the tar, pluck the feathers...as a start.) That won't bother them unless it would impinge on their future political aspirations, at least with the Democratic Party. Maureen Dowd is at her best today in a column about the Clintons and their despicable behavior.

While the Olympics are certainly getting plenty of coverage, the Chinese can’t be happy with the fact that there was the murder by a likely-crazy person of a relative of a former athlete, lethal unrest continues to infect the western part of the country, and Russia has gone to war with Georgia. They’re also had to share headline space with the obituaries of entertainers Isaac Hayes and Bernie Mac, and (speaking of obituaries) the announcement that Hillary and Bill will be getting some prime time air time during the Democratic National Convention. All that, plus there’s that huge time lag which means that the results – and much of the coverage – of the games are appearing on-line many hours before the actual broadcasts.

It probably slipped right by your radar, that fighting in the Congo. It was actually a five-year war that started in 1998 and claimed over five million lives, most of the deaths from the indirect results of disease and starvation. Still, if you’re keeping score, that makes it the worst war since The Last Good War (WWII), and the horror didn’t stop there. An internal U.N. investigation has evidence that Indian peacekeepers may have been responsible for "sexual exploitation and abuse."Though the report didn’t provide details, aid workers in the area say troops were paying underage girls for sex. Virtue is another casualty of war. The U.N. has almost 20-thousand troops trying to maintain a degree of peace in a country torn by factionalism. Over 100 U.N. personnel have been killed in the Congo since 2000.

Complaints have been coming in from airlines pilots that they are being pushed to reduce the amount of fuel that they are carrying. They are certainly allowed to loaded up with at least the FAA minimums, which is to say enough fuel to take them to their destination, then to an alternative airport, and to stay in the air for an extra 45 minutes. In the past, when fuel was less expensive – both to buy and to transport – they would put more in their tanks. In point of fact, they don’t need to carry more, and this may be part of union bargaining with the carriers. On the other hand, the FAA said they would survey pilots but for five months they say they haven’t been able to figure out how to conduct such a survey. Which means that no one is dealing with the facts.

Half of Americans surveyed are opposed to allowing cellphone use on airplanes. It’s mostly younger people who favor the idea. Consider that the young think nothing of driving or walking and talking, loudly, regardless of the intrusive nature of their conversations on those around them, let alone their attention being diverted from conducting themselves in motion. The noise levels on planes are already high enough, especially with the yahoos wearing iPod ear pieces which seem to broadcast equally outward as in. If they allow cellphones to be used, there will be blood flowing in the aisles.

It's unfortunate that an area such as the Monterey Peninsula, with significant discretionary income and high education levels, doesn't have a quality newspaper. The age demographic is also high, which suggests that a good paper would succeed in the area, but the once heralded Monterey Peninsula Herald – now just The Herald – doesn't make the grade. No one with a sixth grade education would subscribe for information purposes, except to try to track local news stories. You'd think that would be a reasonable mission, but it is more often frustrating than worthwhile. Consider their lead story the other day about the California Coastal Commission granting approval for a hotel project because it will include its own desalination plant to supply the necessary 25,000 gallons of fresh water every day. Interesting and important, only there's not a word in the article about the desal plant.

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America Back on Track... for Tuesday, August 12^th

Our Quote of the Day is from Hermann Goering who said, "The people can always be brought to the bidding of leaders. That's easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Some observations on the news...
Michael Mukasey should be arrested. Our Attorney General, installed by Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein for reasons that had nothing to do with justice, has announced that there will be no prosecutions of the Gonzales, Goodling and others who illegally used political criteria to determine hiring at the Justice Department. Said Mukasey, "not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime. In this instance, the two joint reports found only violations of the civil service laws." Disgraceful doesn't being to describe this man's tenure.

Valerie Plame's legal efforts to hold Dick Cheney and others fiscally responsible for ruining her career by outing her to punish her husband for revealing the administration's fraudulent implication that Niger was shipping "yellowcake" to Saddam for nuclear weapons took another hit when a federal appeals court upheld a judge's ruling dismissing her lawsuit against the government officials. The court said the administration miscreants were acting in their official capacity when they leaked Plame's name to reporters. Their reading of the law is that government employees cannot be held liable for what otherwise might be considered crimes if they were acting in an official capacity. Said the court, "The conduct, then, was in the defendants' scope of employment regardless of whether it was unlawful or contrary to the national security of the United States." So, um, like what was Nuremberg all about then?

The merchants of death must be giggling into their sleeves at all the wars being waged around the world. As people fight, they use up their ammunition and need more guns and bombs and missiles. The hawkers of ordnance must be pressing their production limits to capacity what with all the fighting that's going on. One wonders if they promised advertising to those newspapers – especially the liberal media – who are promoting war with Russia. And they must be salivating over the new promise in the Middle East, where the Israelis are talking about building new permanent settlements on the West Bank. It is reported that Israel would take down some temporary sites not sanctioned by the government and expand existing settlements, but both the Palestinians whose land has been occupied and Israel's allies will be more than distressed by the move.

More mind-boggling by an administration which seems committed to destroying every vestige of environmental protection it can. The Interior Secretary has proposed to overhaul the Endangered Species act to enable federal agencies to decide for themselves if their projects might be destructive of the flora and fauna. The current law requires that the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service make such determinations. Environmentalists are incensed and Congressional Democrats will hold their obligatory hearings. Said the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, "I am deeply troubled by this proposed rule, which gives federal agencies an unacceptable degree of discretion to decide whether or not to comply with the Endangered Species Act. Eleventh-hour rulemakings rarely, if ever, lead to good government -- this is not the type of legacy this Interior Department should be leaving for future generations."

Is it pandering or fiscal foolishness? Barack Obama is suggesting that seniors making under $50,000 a year shouldn't have to pay federal taxes. The explanation by his campaign is that the program would give an average of $1,400 in tax relief to some seven million seniors, as well as lift the burden from their shoulders of having to file complicated returns. Pshaw. While one can appreciate that many seniors are on fixed incomes and facing higher food and fuel prices, these problems should not be dealt with on the basis of age but of need. And besides, it was the seniors who have over the past half-century voted into office the politicians who have gotten us into such deep trouble.

The Department of Homeland Security has stepped in it again. They were looking for a new site for a biolab to replace one on an island off the Long Island coast. They had fifteen potential sites. One in Mississippi ranked well down the list but it was chosen anyway. Perhaps because there is Mississippi Congressman who heads the committee that oversees the DHS budget and a Mississippi Senator who is the ranking member of the committee overseeing their budget on that side of the Capitol. The Congressman claims never to have talked about the new biolab site to anyone at DHS, although he seems to have met with the site decider at least twice. The staff at DHS thought at least eight other sites would be preferable but were overruled by a Bush political appointee. Congress may investigate the decision-making process. Of course, suggested one wag, Mississippi would be the best place to put the biolab if they were to be an accident.

I never could abide William Kristol’s thinking. A silver-tongued neo-con, he somehow got a slot on The New York Times OpEd page. Considering his antediluvian positions, he should never have been given such a platform. Journalism isn’t about tit-for-tat, right-and-left, it’s about facts-‘n-truth. Alas. So while I don’t read Kristol, I invariably do see his name and the title of his column every Monday, and yesterday’s typifies why I feel the antipathy I do. The title was "Will Russia Get Away With It?" and the tease line was "We owe Georgia, which has stood with U.S. soldiers in Iraq, a serious effort to defend its sovereignty." Um, well, in answer to his polemical query, get away with what? Georgia started this conflict by invading South Ossetia. And as regards our owing them for sending troops to occupy Iraq, that invasion was scandalously wrong and no reward is due them since they participated so that we would support their NATO bid and provide military training for their own troops. The U.S. has already been hugely generous to Georgia, and defending their aggression is antithetical to our own principles.

While we shake our heads and wring our hands over the increasing slaughter in Mexico related to the drug cartels, our responsibility in the thousands of killings is becoming ever more clear. As reported in an article in the Los Angeles Times, much of the armament for the murders is flowing south across our border, just as the drugs are flowing north. By some estimates, as much as 90% of the guns discovered after raids in Mexico were sold in the U.S. "More than 6,700 licensed gun dealers have set up shop within a short drive of the 2,000-mile border, from the Gulf Coast of Texas to San Diego – which amounts to more than three dealers for every mile of border territory. Law enforcement has come to call the region an ‘iron river of guns.’"

Cindy Sheehan managed to get herself on the ballot in the race for the Eighth Congressional seat here in California. The mother of a soldier killed in Iraq who became a national anti-war figure, she created more smoke than fire and was effectively marginalized by the media, supporters of the war, and her own actions. She will be running as an independent against a Republican, a Libertarian, and incumbent Democrat Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representative and second in line behind Dick Cheney for the presidency. Pelosi has severely disappointed many people, especially by refusing to pursue impeachment proceedings against the worst president in history. There was also the unremitting funding of the Iraq War, the disgraceful FISA capitulation, the $300 billion Ag Bill, the continuing power of special interests, and earmarks. But the chance of making a serious dent on her typical 85% of the vote is slim. Sheehan is remarkably disorganized, having neglected required filings, and only managing to get enough signatures to be on the ballot at the last minute; she'd earlier collected thousands of names from people who weren't in the district and not realized that wasn't allowed. Indeed, from a practical progressive political perspective – if that's not too much of an alliterative oxymoron – it is a tragic waste of time and money and effort. If she and the people behind her wanted to make a difference they would have gone after marginal GOP seats.

You can almost count on the fact that any measure passed by the California legislature will wind up putting too much money in the wrong pockets. I’m not talking about corrupt politicians. There are plenty of other miscreants stuffing wads of filthy lucre under their mattresses. Consider a 2006 measure called Jessica’s Law which requires all sex offenders to undergo mental health evaluations. Some might think that’s like closing the barn door after the horse is long gone, but it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Only it wasn’t a brilliantly written measure, so it has allowed some psychologists to take advantage. One of the 79 contract psychs pocketed $1.5 million from the program last year, which as the Los Angeles Times reported, "That's equivalent to working 100 hours per week for 52 weeks at nearly $300 per hour -- top-scale in the private sector." Second place went to someone who took in $1.1 million, including $17,500 for a single day. A part-timer billed the state for $900,000 last year. To put these numbers in perspective, a state employee of the same ilk is paid $110,000 for the year.

You might have seen the story of the woman who spent $53,000 for South Korean scientists to clone her dead dog, Booger, into five puppies. That warne’t the end of the story. Apparently she was recognized by a whole bunch of folks who had, um, legal issues with her. As the AP lead put it, "She may be the same woman who 31 years earlier was accused of abducting a Mormon missionary in England, handcuffing him to a bed and making him her sex slave." And that’s just part of a very bizarre story. If the implications are right - and the woman now admits she is the same person – the former Miss Wyoming is a person of interest for law enforcement in a number of venues on matters such as stalking the missionary, passing bad checks, an assault on a public officials, communicating a threat against another woman. One wonders how she got the money for the cloning.

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America Back on Track... for Monday, August 11^th

Our Quote of the Day is from George Gordon Byron who said, "Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company."

Some observations on the news...
The AP headline read "Bush says violence in Georgia is unacceptable" which makes one wonder if he knows what the word "unacceptable" actually means. He also thinks the Russian response to the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia was disproportionate. Well yeah, of course, and if we hadn’t invaded Iraq based on lies, we would have a moral basis for criticizing the behavior of others.

The U.S. has long backed Georgia against Russia, supporting its bid to become part of NATO, a point that the Kremlin regarded as a prelude to conflict. As in cutting off essential fuel supplies to Europe. That’s why Germany and other European nations have held off on a NATO ticket for Georgia. The U.S. has shown its direct support for the former SSR by sending more than 1,000 Marines and soldiers to provide training for Georgian troops, further exacerbating tense relations between Moscow and Washington.

Could the war between Russia and Georgia have been avoided or was it inevitable? Yes, with different leaders in both countries. Yes, with the current leaders in both countries, abetted by geopolitics. The Georgian leader, who has support from the West, has been at dangerous loggerheads with Russia for several years. His decision to invade South Ossetia was perhaps politically correct in Georgia but it necessarily meant war with its much more powerful neighbor. Thousands of civilians have been killed, buildings leveled, and all for naught. James Traub has a backgrounder.

Buried down in a story of a suicide bombing in Iraq that claimed more than 25 lives on Friday was this item: "Meanwhile, Georgia — the third largest contributor to the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq — said it's pulling out its 2,000-strong contingent from Iraq to join the fighting in the breakaway province of South Ossetia." Actually, U.S. planes ferried them back. Also, the Georgian Olympic team is looking at returning home to engage in a more lethal, thoroughly mindless battle.

Most people now have the sense that the main reason why we invaded Iraq was to get our hands on their oil. It was sorta presumed that for all our effort, expense, and loss, that at least what monies might be generated from the vast oil reserves under Iraq – the third largest in the world – that we would be paid back for our trouble. Since the Bush-Cheney folks had said it was only gonna be about $50 billion, well, that was thought to be a payable bill. In fact, our efforts there may wind up with a price tag of $3 trillion, but well, any little bit would help. But it turns out we’re not even getting that. According to new figures, Iraq has a budget surplus of $79 billion, and there are folks on both sides of the aisle up on Capitol Hill who think that money should be going to rebuilding their infrastructure so Americans don’t have to pay for it. Of course if the Iraqis had any sense of pride, they might tell us to take a hike and take our bills with us since they didn’t ask us to invade their country and destroy most of the infrastructure in the first place.

You may remember that when George Bush ran for president in 2000, he was against nation-building. There was a good reason. After he invaded Iraq, his nation-building program was a disaster. We have spent more than $30 billion ostensibly to rebuild the infrastructure there but the job was never done. The levels of incompetence and corruption were historic. The money stolen, the lack of security for engineers and contractors, the abject failure of the Iraqi government have the left the job incomplete and crumbling. Details are laid out in an Los Angeles Times opinion piece by T. Christian Miller.

Taking a wider view in yesterday’s New York Times is Nicholas Kristof who despairs the massive funding for our military while we give so little to diplomacy and to building schools and hospitals. "A new study from the RAND Corporation examined how 648 terror groups around the world ended between 1968 and 2006. It found that by far the most common way for them to disappear was to be absorbed by the political process. The second most common way was to be defeated by police work. In contrast, in only 7 percent of cases did military force destroy the terrorist group."

The Washington Post ran a piece entitled "After Anthrax Scientist's Threats, Counselor Faced a Hard Choice" in which they discussed the person who called the police about Bruce Ivins. It’s a remarkably tawdry tale, and everyone in the story – the counselor, the counseling service, the police, and the FBI – earn very poor markets for professionalism and even basic common sense. For instance, the $20-per-hour counselor actually agonized over whether to call authorities when Ivins said in a group session that he was suspected of being the anthrax killer and planned to kill his co-workers. What’s to agonize over? That shouldn’t have been a close call. Oh, and by the by, this counselor, who had minimal training, had an extensive record of substance abuse, including a 2007 DUI. Some of the details further underscore the insanity, not only of Ivins, but of the people who hired him and kept him on.

The Washington Post on Saturday for a time was leading with "Relatives of U.S. Coach Attacked in Beijing" and the first sentence said, "Stabbing of U.S. coach's in-laws at Drum Tower mars Chinese government's efforts to showcase the country as open and welcoming to foreigners." Horse-hockey. It's a country of more than 1.3 billion people, and so if their share of crazies is about equal to ours, they have four times as many, which would be far too many to identify and lock up even if they wanted to. Here was one of them. Tragic, yes, but hardly an issue of failed security.

The Washington Post also reported on Gary Russell, a bantam weight boxer who was thought a good prospect for an Olympic medal. But the morning he was supposed to go for his final weigh-in, he went to lose the pound or so that would have put him over the 119-pound limit and something went wrong with his body. For some reason he couldn’t sweat, and at some point he fainted. Very disappointing, of course, for the young man and his team mates, but maybe he should have moved up to a higher weight class. It seems that so much of sports these days involves abusing the body with various chemicals and regimens.

Consider this lead from Agence France-Presse: "Swiss banking giant UBS will unveil its second quarter results Tuesday still scarred from its subprime-related ‘annus horribilis’ and the loss of billions of dollars -- and wealthy clients." It’s not something an American wire service would ever come close to printing.

A bunch of American Indians sued the government for mismanaging their resources going back to 1887 and to the tune of $47 billion. The Interior Department manages more than 100,000 leases on Indian land, which generate revenues from mineral mining, oil and gas drilling, timber, livestock grazing, recreational and agricultural uses. The money is supposed to be deposited into a trust and them disbursed to tribes and individuals. It’s hard to imagine that the Interior Department were doing it right. A judge decided they didn’t have that much of a case and awarded them $456 million. Appeals of the decision are likely.

Kwame Kilpatrick got outta jail. The mayor of Detroit was incarcerated overnight last Thursday for having violated the conditions of his bail as regards charges of perjury. But while he was behind bars, he was arraigned on two felony assault charges that stemmed from his allegedly shoving a sheriff’s deputy who was serving a subpoena on a friend. Kilpatrick is the son of a Michigan Congresswoman who last week narrowly won a primary race against two other candidates with less than 40% of the vote. One of the candidates is promising to run against her in November.

AP, CNN, and Reuters led with the story. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and San Francisco Chronicle all had it high up in their digests. BBC and Agence France-Presse didn’t have it above the e-fold. The story was of John Edwards admitting in an interview on ABC that he had had an affair. The National Enquirer had broken the story last fall and picked it up again this spring when the former presidential candidate was spotted leaving a hotel where the other woman was staying. That meeting might have been a set-up, by the way. Edward denies having fathered a child by this woman and also declared that he started the affair before his wife’s cancer came back. So he believes that there are degree of truth and fidelity. Aren’t we all glad we didn’t choose another Bill Clinton? Hillary Clinton’s shameless mouthpiece asserts that if the mainstream media had reported the story last fall, Edwards would have been forced out of the race, and she would have beaten Obama for the nomination. Probably, and then during the fall campaign, a series of photos stretching to Mars would have been released one after another showing her husband in flagrante delicto..

You have to wonder for whom Stephen Johnson thinks he is working. He is already in very serious hot water – as in a Congressional investigation; well, for whatever that’s worth – for going back on his decision supporting a unanimous EPA staff position that California has the right to maintain higher standards regarding auto emissions. Now he is rejecting a bid to reduce the ethanol quotas that Congress once thought were a good idea but clearly aren’t. The use of corn for fuel instead of food has sent grain prices soaring. Johnson insisted that the Congressional dictum was "strengthening our nation’s energy security and supporting American farming communities" and was not hurting the economy or the environment. He’s clearly in error, again, on several counts, but the facts don’t seem to bother him.

In another late Friday let’s-hope-fewer-people-notice press announcement, the FBI said that it had improperly obtained the phone records from The New York Times and Washington Post reporters working out of the papers’ Indonesia bureaus in 2004. Doesn’t sound like much, and in the grander scheme of things it’s minor. But the grander scheme is all the illegal tapping and records-pulling that they did at other times and elsewhere to which they haven’t yet admitted. I mean, who can make a big deal over just these phone records from one foreign country? Um, well, anyone who values the Constitution.

There was a breaking news banner headline over the Yahoo news digests on Saturday that Bernie Mac had died. I'm sure I must have seen his name before but I hadn’t really noticed him until he made news by making jokes in poor taste at an Obama event last month. Was he worth a banner headline? There was no such coverage when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died or Isaac Hayes or George Carlin; all surely more famous. Usually such banners are reserved for people and events that are more newsworthy.

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America Back on Track... for Friday, August 8^th

Our Quote of the Day is from Sydney J. Harris who said, "Many a secret that cannot be pried out by curiosity can be drawn out by indifference."

Some observations on the news...
Citigroup is spending some $7 billion to buy back securities that were hawked to investors as safe despite inherent liquidity risks. The buy-back was induced by pressure from the SEC and state regulators. Citigroup is also to pay $100 million in fines.

Arnold Schwarzenegger upped the ante in his struggle with the California legislature to submit a long overdue state budget. Said the governor, he wouldn’t sign any legislation on his desk and he would veto any bills before they might automatically become law if the governor didn’t act on them in the mandated 12 days. So the senate leader announced that the bills would be withdrawn before the governor could veto them. Among the pieces of most urgent legislation that arrived on his desk were, as listed in the Los Angeles Times, bills that would "exempt law enforcement from a ban on weapons in state game refuges; deny dental licenses to people federally registered as sex offenders; and allow the Purple Feet Wine Boutique and Tasting Room to sell beer and wine at functions sanctioned by the city of Dana Point, revamp the California Seed Advisory Board and allow public safety officials to wear military decorations on certain holidays, and update state law enforcement training programs to include a course on interacting with autistic people." Further evidence of the nobility of state government was demonstrated by the DMV closing all of their offices on Saturday, except one in Sacramento which is only accessible to legislators and their staffs.

Back in 1975 when the president refused to help New York City get back on its financial feet, the headline in the New York Daily News read, "Ford to City: Drop Dead." That headline came to mind with the sentencing by the military panel in the first Guantanamo case, that of Osama bin Laden’s driver. They said the same thing to the government prosecutors by sentencing Hamdan to only five more months in prison, due to his time already served. This, when the prosecution was calling for a sentence of 30 years or life. It’s not clear what the Bush administration will do with this "small player" when Hamdan has finished his sentence – they would want to keep him in custody "until the end of the war on terrorism" – but they should be leaving office anyway shortly after his prison term is up.

Rosa Brooks has a very sharp take on the trial in the Los Angeles Times. She asks, "But are these guys really the worst of the worst, evil terrorist masterminds who so threaten ‘the continuity of the operations of the United States government’ that they couldn't possibly be tried in U.S. civilian courts? After 6-1/2 years -- after detaining hundreds of people at Guantanamo, after trying interrogation techniques adapted from the Chinese and the KGB, after countless protests from the International Committee for the Red Cross, after alienating close allies and creating a cause celebre for our enemies -- have the military commissions really been worth it?"

There were 18 suspected illegal immigrants in a 1990 Chevy Suburban when it went off an Arizona road, hit an embankment at a high rate of speed, and rolled over several times. Nine were killed as the roof collapsed; nine were injured.

The legislation that will put tobacco products under the FDA, finally, has a loophole in it that will allow the tobacco companies to come out with new products for 21 months without FDA approval. The supporters of the measure say it was what they needed to get the bill passed and the nearly two-year smoking break won’t matter much. Ah good, so when the new cigarettes come out and are successfully marketed, hooking people who wouldn’t have started smoking otherwise, we’ll just call that collateral damage.

In the wake of the latest developments, the widow of one of the people who was killed by Bruce Ivins anthrax mailings went public again about her suit against the U.S. government which she holds responsible for her husband’s death. Said Britisher Maureen Stevens of the Army scientist, "He was not just a little bit weird – he was certifiable, and he had been for years. It is now time for the United States of America to own up to its responsibility to my family and to right this wrong that resulted in the loss of my beloved husband and my children's beloved father." She filed her suit in 2003, and the statement came at a press conference yesterday in Florida where her husband had worked as a photo editor at American Media Inc. I don’t like lawsuits but I sure would like to think that (1) the people who hired Ivins and kept him in place would be held criminally responsible, (2) every government employee who works with dangerous components would be immediately removed if found to be even a little mentally unstable, and (3) criteria need to be redefined to prevent crazy people from getting anywhere near – let alone being left alone with – WMDs ever again. Of course there’s the problem that anyone who would develop this stuff would have to be crazy, so maybe everyone should stop playing these insane mega-death games.

"[Berwyn Heights, Maryland] Mayor Cheye Calvo got home from work, saw a package addressed to his wife on the front porch and brought it inside, putting it on a table. Suddenly, police with guns drawn kicked in the door and stormed in, shooting to death the couple's two dogs and seizing the unopened package." That’s the AP lead on a shocking story about the Price George’s County police making a drug raid. The package contained 32 pounds of marijuana, but the drugs were merely dropped off on the porch. The couple had nothing to do with stuff. The two black labs were known by everyone in the middle-class neighborhood to be gentle. The PGC police have refused to clear the mayor and his wife or to apologize for killing their dogs; the police thought they were in danger. They say everything they did was within the law. The mayor is asking the U.S. Justice Department to investigate, as well they should since the police have a couple of other serious blemishes on their record recently, including the death of a prisoner in custody. If what the police did in this drug case was actually legal, then the laws need to be changed.

A German bank is foreclosing on the $3.5 billion Cosmopolitan Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. The owner reportedly defaulted on a $760 million loan. Deutsche Bank is already in talks with several major gambling entities to arrange for someone to run the place for them. Said one analyst, "Deutsche Bank wants to be engaged in banking, not running a casino." The whole city, and particularly the gaming industry, is suffering because of the soaring costs of food and fuel, and rising unemployment. The Nevada Gaming Commission reported revenues down 16% in May for the fifth consecutive monthly decline.

Perhaps you’ve heard about a purportedly serious flaw in Internet security. It has to do with the DNS system. Now wait, don’t click away; I’m not going to explain it, I’m just reporting some facts that might be worth your attention. First, the problem was reported earlier this year but didn’t get a whole lotta attention. Second, the discoverer of the flaw says it’s more serious than people are taking it. Third, there’s probably nothing you either need to do or would know how to do, so you’re better off not worrying about it. And finally, you should always pay attention to the websites you visit, especially if you are asked to provide any personal information or to transfer money. Said the chief technology officer for Verisign, a major global player in Internet security, the threat has "been overplayed in a sense. I think it has served to confuse the consumer into believing there is somehow now a way to misdirect them to a wrong site. The fact of the matter is that there have been many ways like phishing attacks to misdirect them for a long time and this is just yet another of those ways that will be surgically exploited." So the same ole advice holds: Watch where you e-step.

Diggers in London say they may have discovered one of the original Shakespearean theaters. The Museum of London archaeologists say they think what developers stumbled upon as they were excavating underneath a vacant garage is The Theatre, which was built in 1576 and where was probably debuted "The Merchant of Venice" and "Romeo and Juliet." Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, had moved to The Theatre in the 1590s after having being forced to relocate from The Rose. While the Shakespearians owned The Theatre they didn’t own the land under it, so when a dispute later arose with the landowner, they dismantled the building, rebuilt it on the other side of the Thames River and named it the Globe. It is believe that The Theatre also saw productions of "Henry IV," "Richard II," "King John," and "the Merry Wives of Windsor."

In related news on The Continent, Bulgarian archaeologists have discovered what they claimed is a 1,900-year-old chariot. The well-preserved vehicle was unearthed at a dig at an ancient Thracian tomb in the southeast part of the country.

Finally, we all know some people have more money than brains. A new example is someone who spent more than a quarter-million dollars for Elvis Presley's favorite performance costume. His peacock jumpsuit was claimed for $300,000, elevating it to the status of being the priciest Elvis memorabilia auctioned.

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America Back on Track... for Thursday, August 7^th

Our Quote of the Day is from Wernher von Braun who said, "Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of the billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things within that enormous immensity."

Some observations on the news...

CBS News has no shame. Instead of respecting the profession, they are sounding more and more tabloidy. In a radio report on the Hamdan verdict, the opening line was "The White House says, ‘We’ll take it.’" That’s disgracefully cheesy. The bottom line on the verdict was that after years of holding this man, even the military jury was only able to convict him of "driving bin Laden around Afghanistan." The judge made clear his displeasure with the prosecution, calling Hamdan a "small player" and denying them the opportunity to have an FBI agent tell of taking bodies out of the rubble at the World Trade Center. Said the judge, he wasn’t convicted of that. He also said the five counts on which the man was convicted were the same and folded them into one. Referencing Congress passing its shameful Military Commissions Law in 2006, Deputy Chief Defense Counsel Michael Berrigan said of the jury’s decision, "The travesty of this verdict now is that had the case gone to trial in 2004 he would have been acquitted of all the charges." Said John Wesley Hall, head of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, "The Pentagon must be very proud of itself today. It convicted a truck driver of being guilty of driving a truck." Still, Hamdan faces life in prison. The New York Times has a most damning editorial of the whole process entitled "Guilty as Ordered" which reveals some of the depraved behavior behind these kangaroo courts. (NB: Both Reuters and AP headlined the only the fact of the conviction while other news sites headlined the split decision.)

The more that is revealed about Army scientist Bruce Ivins the louder is the question of how he was allowed to be playing around with biological weapons. The man was clearly unbalanced. Aside from bin Laden’s driver, who else would you not want with access to anthrax? Jeffrrey Dahmer? Ted Bundy? Dick Cheney? It’s also interesting to note that the FBI – or FIB – had been chasing Stephen Hatfill with such wrong certainly that he won a $5.8 million settlement for their harassment; that’s taxpayer money he and his lawyers got. How is anyone so sure The Bureau got it right this time, and though I presume they did, why didn’t they figure it out sooner that this guy was clearly such a crackpot?

There’s increasing speculation that one of the big three automakers is going to wind up going under. GM reported more than $15 billion in losses for the last quarter. Ford’s were nearly $9 billion. Both companies are on the ropes because for decades they have been run by idiots overseen by incestuous boards. Chrysler, too, but as they were purchased by a private equity firm last year, there are no reports of their financial condition. It might be noted, however, that the purchaser was Cerberus Capital. Cerberus was the three-headed dog that guarded the gates of hell.

George Bush may not be the anti-Christ, as some claim, but he sure doesn’t adhere to the Dale Carnegie notion of how to make friends and influence enemies. Hours before his arrival in Beijing, the American president chided the Chinese for its treatment of dissidents saying, "The United States believes the people of China deserve the fundamental liberty that is the natural right of all human beings." The Chinese government wasn’t pleased, issuing a statement defending its policies, and declaring, "We resolutely oppose any words or actions which interfere in the internal affairs of another country in the name of issues such as human rights and religion." Bush clearly doesn’t understand the appropriate manners of a guest, especially when visiting a host that holds $3 trillion dollars in American IOUs.

Nicholas Kristof has written a most powerful column today about negotiations between the Dalai Lama and China. What he outlines is an extraordinary possibility for reconciling the Tibet issue, if China will accept "An Olive Branch From the Dalai Lama."

I passed along to my news list the story of a lawsuit by a flight attendant against the wife of a mega-church minister. The suit claimed that back in 2005 Victoria Osteen got upset about a stain on her assigned seat and got physical with the flight attendant, shoving her against a door and elbowing her. According to the lawsuit, this caused the flight attendant her long term physical and emotional issues. The FAA fined Osteen $3,000 for interfering with a crew member. Of course we’re too suit-happy these days, but ya kinda feel for the service personnel who are abused by the rich folks. My colleague Steve Pizzo commented most succinctly, "a minister and his wife flying first class. says all I need to know."

The pigskin soap opera continues. The Packers, after welcoming the unretired Brett Favre back into their fold, have traded him to the New York Jets. In published statements that sound more boilerplate than what you find in Hallmark cards, the Green Bay organization said, "It is with some sadness that we make this announcement, but also with the desire for certainty that will allow us to move the team and organization forward in the most positive way possible." And the New York boss said, "I am looking forward to seeing Brett Favre in a New York Jets uniform. He represents a significant addition to this franchise, and reflects our commitment to putting the best possible team on the field." Blah-blah-blah. The media and especially the fans should require a higher class of behavior than they are getting from the millionaire practice dummies who have taken over this sport – on the field and in the skybox – as in most professional sports.

Greg Palast has an article today about John McCain’s dangerous lack of understanding of nuclear power. The Republican candidate wants to build 45 new nuclear plants in the U.S. in the next twenty years. Safe ones. Yeah, right. Despite improved technology, they are and never will be safe, as we have learned just in the past coupla weeks of a French plant leaking radiation, the IAEA’s own facility reporting a plutonium leak, and an American submarine radiating in three Japanese ports of call. Palast, an award-winning journalist who exposed the Shoreham scandal and knows whereof he speaks on the issue, also derided Barack Obama for supporting nuclear power. The Democratic candidate has received tons of money from nuclear interests, but a big difference from his opponent is that he wants more assurance of safe development and plan to deal with the waste. Meanwhile, as Palast noted, the feds have put a price tag of close to $100 billion for dealing with waste, even though they still don’t know how. As energy expert Elliot Hoffman reiterated at lunch yesterday, it’s still the most expensive way to boil water. Also, read Gail Collins column called "The Energy Drill" on the two candidates’ energy policies; bright, acerbic, and funny.

The Mayor of Detroit, who faces charges of perjury and other felonies, violated the terms of his bond by crossing the river to Windsor, Ontario. The judge ordered him to county jail for the infringement, saying he didn’t want to show favoritism just because the perp was the mayor. Declared the black-robed man on the bench, "If it was not Kwame Kilpatrick sitting in that seat – if it was John Six Pack sitting in the seat – what would I do?" John Six Pack? I thought his name was Joe Six Pack. In any event, today it was Kwame Six Pack. Take that Al and Jesse. The Mayor is expected to be released quickly by posting bail.

The man whose company designs Ferraris, Fiats and the Ford Focus died early this morning in a road crash near Turin while riding his Vespa scooter. Andrea Pininfarina’s death prompted speculation that new investors will infuse the company with capital which sent its stock price sharply higher. What a legacy.

The head of Freddie Mac wasn’t paying attention to some of the warning signs that others saw, and shouted about. Richard Syron is quoted as excusing himself saying, "If I had better foresight, maybe I could have improved things a little bit. But frankly, if I had perfect foresight, I would never have taken this job in the first place." And he’s still at Freddie’s helm.

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America Back on Track... for Wednesday, August 6^th

Our Quote of the Day is from H. L. Mencken who said, "Love is like war; easy to begin but very hard to stop."

Some observations on the news...

Mauritania has experienced another military coup, this time by the same general who overthrew an unpopular leadership three years ago. This time the coup was prompted by the civilian leader of this Muslim country going too far with his religion, cozying up to Al Qaeda and building a mosque on the palace grounds. The president is in custody; no damage or injuries were reported.

Paris Hilton has responded to John McCain with a one-minute video message of her own. The Republican candidate had run an ad insinuating that Barack Obama was just a celebrity like Hilton and Britney Spears. Earlier Hilton’s mother, who had contributed the maximum amount to McCain’s campaign, said her money had been wasted. The daughter’s take was more nuanced. McCain’s people said it was a virtual endorsement of his energy position, though most observers would see her message as less flattering.

Dan Walters is one of the finest columnists writing about California. He is non-partisan and to the point: In a piece entitled, "Governor's latest political stunt is a dud" Walters leads with "Arnold Schwarzenegger, it would appear, just can't help himself. The man who achieved success as a bodybuilder and action movie star with over-the-top, attention-getting stunts keeps trying to make them work in politics – and keeps failing." He is set off by the governor’s proposal to reduce the salaries of the lowest paid public workers.

A report from the Rwandan government claims that France was complicit in the 1994 genocide that resulted in more than 800,000 deaths. According to a justice ministry statement that accompanied release of the report, "French forces directly assassinated Tutsis and Hutus accused of hiding Tutsis....French forces committed several rapes on Tutsi survivors....Considering the seriousness of the alleged crimes, the Rwandan government has urged the relevant authorities to bring the accused French politicians and military officials to justice." The French adamantly deny the charges.

Here’s how two European countries are approaching the crisis of childhood obesity. The French are planning to triple the tax on food that is "too rich, too sweet, too salty and which are not strictly necessary." They banned vending machines in schools three years ago. Meanwhile, across The Channel, the British health authorities are fending off criticism of a policy to refer to children as "very overweight" instead of "obese" which, say officials, is regarded as "highly offensive" and "shuts people down" to the problem. Responded a member of the National Obesity Forum, "The Americans have gone back to using the term because it's the kind of shock word that makes parents sit up and take notice. It's a nasty word but by God it should sound alarm bells in parents' minds. I find this whole approach from the Department of Health a bit prissy and namby pamby."

A UNICEF report says that India isn’t doing nearly enough to help its poorest children. Despite what it calls robust economic growth, UNICEF says the benefits are not reaching the neediest. This resulted in 2,100,000 child deaths in India in 2006, the most in any country. China, with 30% more people, had 400,000 child deaths.

Wal-Mart has been conducting an internal campaign informing store managers and department supervisors that if the Democrats win in November they will likely reward their union supporters by passing legislation that will make it easier for employees to unionize. While the campaign was not about who to vote for, it warned that Employee Free Choice Act, as it is called, would drive up costs for the company while forcing a reduction in the number of employees. Said a Wal-Mart spokesman, "We believe EFCA is a bad bill and we have been on record as opposing it for some time. We feel educating our associates about the bill is the right thing to do." Logically speaking, unions should phase themselves out by integrating what value they offer into the company structure. When you have two competing forces within an enterprise, it necessarily diminishes the results. Companies should be forced to provide a healthy and productive environment for their workers by consumers refusing to buy their products and labor refusing to work for them if they don’t.

Giving credit where it is due, John McCain is continuing to campaign against the $300 billion agricultural subsidies bill passed earlier this year by the Senate. Despite risking the wrath of voters in the northern Midwest farm belt. McCain has objected to the pork in the bill and particularly the ethanol program, while Obama supported the measure. The ag bill was a disgrace, but was supported by the majority in both Houses of Congress who were supplicating for votes.

Giving credit where it is due in enemy territory, Iran has suspended death by stoning. While it wasn’t a punishment that had been carried out with any frequency recently, the program has been stopped for four people who had their sentences commuted and other cases that called for stoning will be reviewed. Most of those affected are women charged with prostitution or adultery.

Separation of church and state is limited, at least in The Golden State, where the California Catholic Conference has come out in support of a ballot measure that would change the state’s constitution to prohibit same-sex marriages. Apparently the church is barred from endorsing or opposing candidates but they can back propositions. That seems a curious distinction.

Ten was always a perfect score, whether it was Nadia Comenici or Bo Derek. But not any more, at least not in the Olympics. They will be using a newfangled system with two panels of judges to score the gymnasts this year, and there are plenty of folks who thinks the change is crazy, or worse. The objections are not simply because it is a change but because it is complicated, and probably beyond the comprehension of move viewers. Indeed, other than telling you that it’s about difficulty and execution, it’s too complicated to explain. You can read more here.

Delta is going to provide wireless Internet access on all of its domestic flights. Working with Aircell they will begin equipping their planes starting next month and expect to finish the retrofit next summer. Delta will charge $9.95 for the wifi service for flights under 300 miles and $12.95 for longer flights.

Maybe it’s something in the water in The Sunshine State – or maybe it’s the sunshine – but there have been three cases in the past week of people being arrested for misusing the 911 emergency system. One man called twice to complain that a casino slot machine had stolen his money. A second man called five times to try to get dispatchers to settle an argument with his brother. And a third called twice to ask that something be done about the Subway store that had left sauce off of his spicy Italian sandwich.

Yet another story of an animal saving a person’s life. A 97-year-old woman was awakened by her yowling cat. When she went to check on the cat she discovered smoke and safely escaped her burning house. Somehow she left the also-ancient cat inside, but Boo Boo was rescued by the fire department.

SetonnoteS

A company called Celestis offers an "Explorer Flight" space burial. Now you may not understand how dead people are going to explore, and yeah, well. It’s not even dead people. It’s just some of their ashes, not even all of them. That’s because (1) even the ashes of the whole human being are kinda weighty, and (2) what happens if the rocket ship carrying those ashes doesn’t actually make it into orbit? Like their flight on Saturday which contained not only the ashes – some of the ashes – of 208 former people, but also three small satellites, two for NASA and the other for the military.

A most bemusing article in The New York Times recounts the comments of those affected by the unsuccessful flight which was supposed to orbitalize a portion of the remains of astronaut Gordon Cooper – you think he would have known better – and TV astronaut James Doohan, who played Scotty in the Star Trek series. His son is having trouble with failure to get his father into space for real, complaining that "I think only Lenin’s funeral lasted longer."

The delivery company was founded by a man named Musk who owned PayPal and sold out to eBay for $1.5 billion. He has tried three times to launch rockets and each effort has come up a cropper. The latest launch had been delayed for hours and aborted once before it actually got off the ground. It followed two previous attempts, one which failed about a minute after its launch in March 2006 and a second last year which made it to space but was lost somewhere up there.

The Saturday failure happened only two minutes after the launch from the Kwajalein Atoll. Said the mission manager, "We are hearing from the launch control center that there has been an anomaly on that vehicle." That’s sugar-coating it. It’s not clear exactly where the most recent failure ended or where the rocket and its cargo wound up. Musk was upbeat, insisting that his company will go forward, "SpaceX will not skip a beat in execution going forward."

I suppose one should not make light of the trauma, such as was experienced by the families of the ashes, and of the space explorers except to say this. First of all, the idea of spending tens of thousands of dollars to send ashes into spaces shows a remarkable amount of money chasing very small thoughts. For goodness sakes, set up a trust and do something worthwhile in their name here on Earth. Second, why does anyone think it’s a good idea to send junk into orbit. With all due respect for the ashes, there are thousands of pieces of crap in space that are whizzing around threatening communications satellites and other actually useful devices.

Now I’ll push the envelope a step further, this one terrestrial, and suggest that we shouldn’t be burying people. Everyone should be cremated, all existing cemeteries should be dug up, the interred burned, and the places turned into parks in urban areas and agricultural plots in rural places. Bodies are bodies, dead and gone. Respect devolves to who they were and what legacy they left. It’s time to let go of their physicality. After all, if they are in fact in the heaven(s), they don’t need their bodies any more.

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America Back on Track... for Tuesday, August 5^th

Our Quote of the Day is from Winston Churchill who said, "The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."

Some observations on the news...

Surely the Iranians must recognize that warnings such as was delivered yesterday, that they could close the Straits of Hormuz, simply exacerbates the situation with the west. The warning came from the Revolutionary Guards, who seem to share some of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s predilection for shouting in the face of the United States and Israel. The Guards said they had weapons capable of sinking ships 200 miles away, and they could thus block oil shipments from the Persian Gulf. The presumption is the claim is supposed to be a deterrent to an attack on Iran for their continued nuclear power development. It’s not a practical tactic to use against cowboys with itchy trigger fingers.

It was probably produced on the same typewriter as the infamous "yellowcake" letter. In case you don’t get that reference, it’s important that you know. A letter, ostensibly from a government official in Niger, said the country would provide Saddam Hussein with uranium with which he could make nuclear weapons. The letter was on stationery stolen from the Niger consulate in Italy. It was signed by someone who wasn’t even in office on the date of the letter. Nonetheless, the clearly-fraudulent document was used by the administration – remember Colin Powell speaking at the UN? – as a reason to invade Iraq. Now, in a new book Ron Suskind says there was another fraudulent letter used to persuade America to back the invasion. This one was purportedly from the head of Iraqi intelligence and was said to prove a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam. Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and back-date the letter. In his book, "The Way of the World" the author also says that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official "that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion." This, along with other disturbing facts, are reported in the conservative Politico.

There’s a neat video on-line that explains how to generate low-cost, non-polluting fuel. "The Holy Grail in the renewable energy sector has been to create a clean, green process which uses only light, water and air to create fuel. Valcent's HDVB algae-to-biofuel technology mass produces algae, vegetable oil which is suitable for refining into a cost-effective, non-polluting biodiesel." Share this with all the double-digit IQs who insist that drilling for oil is the only solution.

Mother Jones has an article on how major civil rights organizations have gotten into bed with credit card companies and pay-check cashing chains which are notorious for fleecing minorities. The argument of the organizations, including CORE and the SCLC, is that minorities have trouble getting credit and these companies are the only way they can get cash to keep the electricity on. Of course, that’s not the whole story. The fleecers donate a ton of money and provide many jobs – especially in their PR offices – to the organizations that sanction their operations.

It could be the beginning of a sc