A fact of life is that we don't get much in the way of real news on the network news. It runs a half hour but a lot of that is commercials, and there is also about half fluff filler material. One news item is that rendering case where a guy was "rendered" by the CIA and tortured for a while and dumped off in Albania with no ID to fend for himself. The Fourth Circuit Court of appeals has just ruled that "Official State Secrets" need to be protected and therefore the case can't be looked into because national security would be compromised, and the Supreme Court will not take the case. Of course this whole thing about not impeaching the President till there is an investigation is backward reasoning, because in the case of Nixon and Watergate they knew very little to start with. If you don't impeach (or indict) how can you get the ball rolling?
Thom Hartman knows his Bible rather well, particularly certain passages in Leviticus where it says you can't be gay, but also that you can't play football or sleep with your wife while she's having her period or eat shell fish. Of course there is a prohibition against the gay life style in Romans 1 by Paul and if you listen to Gene Scott's reason, you interperet Jesus's words in the light of Paul's letters and not the other way around because as a "Paulinist" you regard Paul as superiors to all those desciples who wrote the Gospels. In Gene Scott's reasoning therefore, Jesus has no a priori existance apartment from the status of the people who wrote about him. Therefore whether Jesus personally condemned homosexuals is not relivant.
Now that twelve year old boy has been attacked by conservatives, for delivering the democratic response on radio in an address last Saturday. People have come to his house and harrassed his family and said false things about him. This is the boy who was in a horrible accident and got that "S-chip" aid that President Bush vetoed last week saying the family income limit in the bill was too high. The father of the boy is a wood worker and owns a small, struggling business and has never earned over fifty thousand in any one year. The boy has a scollarship to a private school. The boy is a positive testimony to the beneficial things that government can do.
George Bush is stepping up enforcement of immigration laws rounding up aliens with new vigor. Now I'm wondering whether the President isn't doing this to go "See, our crops can't be harvested without hiring illegal aliens to do it". I guess they're blaiming the coming inflation of prices and food shortage on the fact that we don't have Mexicans to harvest our crops. Well, this could be a wake up call to American workers. But if we go out to work in the fields, do we get to join the United Farm Workers and get paid a decent negotiated wage? Allan Greenspan is wrong for once because we're starting to get that Jimmy Carter economic malaise back that we so dreaded thirty years ago. We could have the twin evils of inflation and recession at the same time. Our dollar is collapsing. We need to elect someone like Ron Paul as President to put our economic ship of state in right order. As I have said, the whole thing is going to blow up in Hillary's face in two years, just as the abuses of the Nixon adminestration blew up in Jimmy Carter's face, and he had to take the blame for decisions made before he was in power.
Of course we had that national heat wave a few days ago. It was ninety degrees during the Chicago marathon and people were complaining they shouldn't have to run in the heat and they were dropping out right and left, and I guess they finally ended the race early. Well, if temperatures thirty degrees above normal in most of the nation to alert to global warming, then I don't know what is. We're going to continue to see more flookish things like this.
The Republicans are having their debates but I'd like to know where a person can even watch them if you don't have cable and are still on dial-up. This is the first debate Fred Thompson has participated in and like the media has been doing they've been talking down Fred Thompson calling him lazy and ill-prepaired. Of course the better Thompson does the more he cuts into mayor Giuliani, and the media has a love affair with the ex mayor of New York. Now the Republicans are not debating in Hispanic formats, (except for Mc Cain) and also they all seem to be thumbing their noses at Blacks not debating in a Black forum. To me this seems like political suicide to just write off thirty to forty percent of the population before the starting gun. Of course three months before one vote has been cast the media has declared the winner as we continue to exist by government by polling. I'm hoping that some of these many candidates will come here to California so the local people can have a better hearing of them.
Of course my stance on Labor Unions is that I believe in their right to organize. But I also believe in a corporation or business's right to negotiate a wage with anyone they wish, and if the unions go on strike that substitute workers have the right to be employed by said business without being harrassed or threatened by goons at the picket line. In this I disagree with Thom Hartman saying that "government has to rig the game in favor of the middle class because otherwise they'd never exist". I've heard Thom's argument. The Black Death in Europe in the late 1300's and early 1400's killed off one third of the population which created a labor shortage and a middle class emerged and hence the renasance was born. Hartman has also talked about all the gold looted by the Spaniards creating trickle down wealth and how in general the only time we had a middle class here was before the Civil War and after 1945. My position on government and the economy is that they are to "promote the general walfare" with minimum wages and child labor laws and prohibitions against illegal ailen workers taking American jobs. We also need fair trade laws and terrifs with teeth. In all this I agree with Thom. But I don't agree with the rest of it, and I do not think government workers have the right to strike, because unlike private enterprize, there is no alternative competetion.
I continue to be amazed that they won't show smoking on TV and smoking is working its way twords universal abolition almost everywhere. And yet NBC thinks it's OK to show underage college students drinking. If I were Dean of the college I'd expel anyone caught drinking after the third citing. Better yet I'd say if you're caught once you could be expelled depending on how I feel that day. Imagine a fraternity haising that doesn't involving getting really drunk to the point of endangering your life. Probably rapes would drop and grades would go up, too.
Al Franken has stated that we should re deploy our troops in Iraq to the Kurdish border with Turkey, and I think that's a pretty good idea. If the Turks don't like us reminding them of the Armenian genocide I say, "tough, that's the price of being friends with the USA". I think it's time for the U S A to demand a little respect from our friends, if we're going to demand it of our enemies. I think the Kurds have the sort of democracy and prosperity that we've been hoping for and that we should tell Meliki to look north and "go thou and do likewise". If the Kurds want to take a chuck of Turkish territory, I think our country should support this. Nobody's holding a gun to our head are they? Can't the United States do virtually anything it deems "right"?
One way in which I'd at least psychologically get the US off a war footing is to roll Daylight Saving Time back to the first of April. And I'd also end it a lot earlier. I'd end DLST the second week in September or the week after Labor Day and when football season starts. I would like to kindly disagree with Rush about these school kids having to wait for the dark in places like Cincinatti and Fargo and San Antonio where it's virtually pitch dark outside. I just think it would be psychologically more healthy to see light when you got up in the morning to go to work or school. If I were the President I'd also get up and make a speech that we were NOT AT WAR with Iraq, and that any congressional resolutions to that end were null and void. I'd also say that Meliki was the duly elected president of Iraq and it was up to the Iraqi people to look to him for whatever solutions to "local" problems he might come up with.
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