Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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In signing the latest war funding bill extending the US occupation of Iraq, President Obama issued a signing statement announcing his intention to ignore portions of the legislation. So the Bush era lives on — the Obama administration, which says it can't possibly ignore "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" or the Defense of Marriage Act, can and will ignore legislation it really doesn't like. There was a time when administrations which objected to bills containing objectionable parts used the veto. Bush's and now Obama's use of the signing statement to be in effect a line-item veto should be challenged as unconstitutional, but of course, the Constitution is no longer the law of the land. The Washington Post says the Obama administration is drafting the legal framework for Bush-Cheney-style pre-emptive imprisonment of people alleged to be terrorists. The Obama administration says the Washington Post is full of crap on this.
In 2006, as the Justice Department was investigating then-Congressman Rick Renzi (R-Arizona), word of the investigation was leaked in a chorus to the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Associated Press. Curiously, the leaks downplayed the severity of the allegations and suggested, falsely, that the allegatiuons were probably unfounded. Career staffers at the Justice Department now say that the Bush-Cheney administration orchestrated the leaks, which, as intended, led Arizonans to rally behind Renzi, who won re-election and went back to DC for one more term of corruption and ineptitude before being indicted. No-one who watched the Bush-Cheney administration in action for eight years has the slightest doubt that this could be true, though it hasn't yet been proven. Unfortunately, we'll probably never find out, because nobody who's watched the Obama administration in action, or the inaction of Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder, can seriously expect any meaningful investigation. Does the last sentence of the previous post need some explanation? It might, if you're not up to speed. During the Bush-Cheney era, elected Democrats were seven times more likely to be prosecuted than elected Republicans. Consider please, the curious case of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman (D), or the odd matter of Paul Minor. Why has Attorney General Holder shown no interest in these cases, or even indicated that he's aware of such matters? There was a symposium on the corruption of the Justice Department during the Bush-Cheney years, held at the National Press Club in Washington, DC last Friday. I don't know whether anything worthwhile was said, but it was announced that the keynote speaker would be Rep. John Conyers, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee. You might remember Congressman Conyers — when Republicans were in power he wrote a book about the rock solid reasons to impeach President George W Bush, but after Democrats took control of Congress and Conyers became Chair of the House Judiciary Committee — where impeachment begins — he did all he could do to block Bush from impeachment, and he was successful. By having Conyers as the keynote speaker, this symposium is basically announcing that it's fraudulent. Corrupt Federal Judge Samuel Kent (Bush41 1990) has resigned his seat on the bench, and the timeline is a hilarious head-shaker. The Justice Department started its investigation in December 2007, and Kent was indicted in August 2008. More indictments came down in January 2009, and as his trial began in February Kent pleaded guilty and agreed to resign. But he still didn't actually quit. He was sentenced in May to 33 months in prison, and offered to resign his judgeship (and its $174,000 annual salary) provided his resignation wasn't effective until some time in 2010. That last move annoyed the House of Representatives enough that last week they began impeachment proceedings against Kent. This week Judge Kent wrote his letter of resignation — from his prison cell — effective at the end of this month. This guy has so much chutzpah leaking out his ass, someone should be following him around with a mop.
Peter Lance, author of the exposé that US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is trying to have suppressed, has asked the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate Fitzgerald. Such letters requesting an investigation are presumably tossed in the trash unless they're sent by someone with buckets of clout, and Lance has none, but as we've mentioned in the past, Fitzgerald seems at least incompetent and quite possibly corrupt, and Lance's complaints sure look valid to us. The FBI tried to suppress Deep Throat, the porn hit of 1972. I'd be surprised, nay, amazed if they hadn't, since the FBI has always been consistently opposed to freedom and democracy. The United Nations has done an about-face in its 2009 World Drug Report, acknowledging the success of drug decriminalization in Portugal. This analysis from the The Huffington Post makes it sound like the UN is endorsing the idea, and that's far too intelligent to be true. Still, by the standards of stupidity in the drug war, if the international powers that be are just taking a momentary break from decades of snickering at the notion of freedom, that's the equivalent of an apple hitting Isaac Newton's noggin. The US Supreme Court says schools can strip search 13-year-olds for marijuana, but not for Advil. Please note, this wasn't one of those 5-4 decisions, it was 8-1, with Clarence Thomas opining that strip searches for Advil are OK, too.
Theresa Anthony was sentenced to 2½ weeks in jail for possession of pot. She died in jail, and police won't say how. It's just another marijuana-related death, and like all the others it's a death caused by prohibition, not by the drug. In Hamilton County, Tennessee, a man is being prosecuted for child pornography, for using Photoshop or some similar program to stick the faces of adolescent girls onto photos of nude women. Boy, they must really have no real crime in Tennessee these days, to use the full power of the state's court system to ruin the life of an ordinary garden-variety semi-perv whose "crime" harms no-one. Navanethem Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, says that the Bush-Cheney administration lawyers who authorized torture and the American doctors who supervised such war crimes must be brought to justice. She used the word torture, not the namby-pamby lie "abuse", as American officials and reporters routinely do. For a politician, Pillay spoke quite bluntly: "People who order or inflict torture cannot be exonerated, and the roles of certain lawyers, as well as doctors who have attended torture sessions, should also be scrutinized." And later, "There should be no half-measures, or new
At the Washington Post, this was buried this under the rather mundane headline "U.N. Human Rights Chief criticizes handling of detainees". As you might have predicted, the CIA has yet again postponed the release of that 2004 report on torture, which purportedly (accurately) paints former Vice President Dick Cheney as some kind of a monster. The document is now expected to be released, albeit heavily redacted, next week. Former prisoners (BBC calls them "detainees") at the American-run Bagram prison in Afghanistan say they were tortured (BBC says they were beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened with dogs, physical abuse, the use of stress positions, excessive heat or cold, unbearably loud noise, being forced to remove clothes in front of female soldiers, etc.). US officials say everyone at Bagram was treated just swell. Amnesty International says they've been denied access to the prison.
US District Court Judge Richard Leon (Bush43 2001) has ordered the Obama administration to release Abd Al Rahim Abdul Rassak, a Syrian who was held captive and tortured by the Taliban, and has been held captured and presumably tortured by Americans since 2002. Don't let that one glide past without stopping and thinking — the prisoners at Guantanamo are "the worst of the worst", we were told for years by the Bush-Cheney administration, which had a policy of never telling the truth about any matter of policy, but Bush & Cheney et al couldn't have not known that this man was despised and tortured by the people Americans take pride in despising and torturing.
Here's a bright but problematic idea for geo-engineering a solution to global climate change. Sulfur-aerosol injection, basically mimicking a volcano and spewing hopefully harmless ash in the upper atmosphere, is pretty cheap, definitely effective, and scary as hell, because it needs to be done perpetually, and if or when humans ever *stop* spewing sulfur-aerosol into the stratosphere, we'll get the accumulated global climate change all at once. I tried to read the article in The Atlantic, but found it, ah, difficult, so I extra appreciate Gerry's explanation here. Several protesters against coal mining companies' ghastly process of mountaintop removal were arrested last week, including usual suspects like Daryl Hannah and an unexpected name, NASA brainiac James Hansen.
We're losing a good man as Mohammed ElBaradei ends his tenure as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). It's going to be hard to find a replacement who will stand up to the pressure of parties trying to use IAEA investigators to manipulate their political or national agendas. ElBaradei has steadfastly fought those who tried to sway his reports.
After years of dumb, unnecessary slaughters, the US government is now reconsidering and "tightening" its policy on drone attacks in Afghanistan, where who knows how many hundreds of innocent people have been killed by American attacks from above. "When we shoot into a compound, that should only be for the protection of our forces," says Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the new commanding officer for the US occupation in Afghanistan. "I want everyone to understand that." Well, I've got two lingering questions: First, why did it take years to put together enough common sense for the American military to figure out that murdering innocent civilians is counterproductive and just plain wrong? And second, will the American military officers who ordered sloppy and deadly drone attacks in the past ever face any form of punishment for killing innocent people time after time after time? Also in Afghanistan, American drug warriors have seized 101 tons of alleged "narcotics", though the vast majority are harmless and utterly non-narcotic poppy seeds like you'd have sprinkled on a bagel. And then, a few days later, the US somehow figured out that "eradication programs weren't working and were only driving farmers into the hands of the Taliban."
June 30 is the promised date for American troops to be withdrawn from major Iraqi cities and towns. That's Tuesday, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has declared it a holiday, National Sovereignty Day... while canceling all police and army days off and asking American forces to remain in Mosul. Iraqi security personnel continue to be trained by the American military, as if Iraqis are incapable of training their own cops and soldiers, but these training sessions will now be moved to US military bases. This means that American troops will be less frequently (and Iraqis presumably more frequently) exposed to attackers while travelling to such sessions. Meanwhile, an American soldier complains of the "lack of action" in Iraq. "They train you for it and you come here and it is a whole different war. It's like you put pit bulls in a cage and shake it up for months at a time. These guys come here ready to fight and there's no fight." The new American warrior — he or she is looking for a fight, not to end the fight.
Kyrgyzstan has signed a deal that lets the US military continue operating the Manas air base there. In the sixth paragraph of the New York Times' report we find the price tag: "annual rent for using Manas will increase to $60 million from $17.4 million". Of course as always it comes down to a matter of MONEY.
Marie K. provides a solid grounding for the current chaos in Iran, including a few facts I hadn't been aware of and a quick overview of the rarely-mentioned history that brought us to this point. Well worth clicking. The Iranian government has admitted to some massive irregularities in its recent Presidential election — upwards of three million missing votes in 50 cities. But they're still killing people who protest the apparently rigged outcome.
Sixty or so innocent people were killed by an American drone strike in Pakistan on Tuesday, an utterly ordinary event. Happens all the time. This particular strike came the day after a US official announced that similar drone attacks would be curtailed in Afghanistan, but neener neener neener nobody said anything about exercising any restraint in Pakistan, so, wheeeee! Death from above!
The US is sending weapons to the Somali government, to help it fend off al Shabab fighters. I don't know enough about the situation to know whether this is smart or stupid or in between, but everything I've read about the al Shabab bunch suggests that they're real bastards.
Callixte Kalimanzira, a former interior minister in Rwanda, has been convicted for his apparently rather small but still ghastly role in his country's infamous 1994 genocide.
More than two dozen people are dead from swine flu in Argentina, and the country's leaders are considering declaring a nationwide health emergency.
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa is threatening to boot oil conglomerates out of the country if they sue the government in international courts. "If (those companies) sue us, let them sue us ... but they can get out of the country. I'm not going to let these oligarchies sue the country while they continue to exploit our national riches," Correa said during his regular Saturday report.
Manuel Zelaya, formerly the President of Honduras, has been toppled in a military coup and replaced with Roberto Micheletti, who ran for President last year. There a definite whiff of CIA in the air, and as of Sunday night, the nation is under curfew restrictions.
Venezuela and the United States will again send ambassadors to each other's countries, suggesting that after the Bush-Cheney administration staged a coup that briefly toppled the Venezuelan government, President Hugo Chavez is still willing to give the Obama administration a chance.
Taiwan has passed legislation that regulates prostitution instead of criminalizing it. There's no doubt that sex work has a slimy, disgusting underside, and that this is a huge step forward for civil rights and the safety of sex workers and their customers.
 In the wake of a recent nuclear bomb test by North Korea, South Korea is ratcheting up its war of words against its northern neighbor, announcing plans to accelerate the deployment of defense  Uh oh! Remember what I wrote a week or two back about how Obama might suddenly get unexpectedly tough with North Korea — especially if he got the cooperation of other nearby players like South Korea, China, and Japan for it?
British rum-maker Diageo got $2.7-billion in TARP funds. A lot of people should be sent to prison over this ongoing ginormous swindle. Including laid-off workers who have given up looking for new jobs or have settled for part-time work, the so-called underemployment rate would be 16.4 percent in May, the highest on record dating to
The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association is readying a fake "grass roots" campaign to make Americans forget how bankers sank the economy. The bankers have screwed America so many times, all they want now is a hug... and a few trillion more in bailouts. The next time a pundit claims that a public option will put private health insurance companies out of business and lead to socialized health care, I hope someone asks them how UPS, FedEx, DHL, and hundreds of other smaller delivery companies are still in business, despite having to compete with the US Post Office.This is actually a good analogy, since the USPS provides universal service — delivering letters to anywhere in the US for the price of a stamp (even remote locations) — while private companies provide enhanced services to those people who are willing and able to pay more. This is how it should be with health insurance
Dr David Scheiner was President Obama's doctor until Obama moved into the White House, and Doc Scheiner thinks the proposals for "ObamaCare" sound wrongheaded. He favors instead "Medicare for all," a common-sense system with the federal government as a single-payer system, with all Americans covered, and reimbursement rates that discourage physicians and pharmacists from gouging. The left-wing wants universal health care, but has virtually no voice in American politics or the Democratic Party, so universal health care is simply not going to happen in present-day America. The right-wing has always opposed all government assistance for health care — they fought Medicare, they fought Medicaid, and they've fought against universal health care since Truman proposed it. Too many boobs, Obama among them, are suggesting that a kumbaya compromise can be reached, but that's bogus and balderdash. We've said it before, but let's say it again: The public option is the compromise position. Any further compromise from the Obama administration or from Democrats is just capitulation, allowing the Republicans to win again, and denying health care to another generation of poor Americans.
A right-wing group called Conservatives for Patients' Rights is airing a political attack ad against the idea of a public option for health insurance by turning upside down an analysis showing that 119 million Americans would jump from their private health insurer to a government plan if one
Pardon me as I get all obvious here, but the most heavily promoted political arguments of the American right-wing are always lies. Proposals from America's left-wing usually make more sense, as with health care in my opinion, but you can count American left-wing politicians on your fingers (Dennis Kucinich, Russ Feingold, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Bernie Sanders, Maxine Waters ... is there anyone else?) so such proposals go nowhere in Congress. As we're seeing in this health care debate, and as we see in virtually all issues, America's choices are limited to lies from the right-wing vs half-hearted compromises from the centrists, who are usually eager to further compromise their compromise if it'll keep the rabid right from snarling. And so it goes. National Public Radio is asking for the public's help in identifying the lobbyists and other certifiable turds present at a Senate hearing to block health care reform. Our prediction: NPR can expect a funding cut in the next round of budgeting, and the photographer should start tidying up his or her résumé.
The California Supreme Court has ruled that it's perfectly legal for banks to collect bounced-check fees by seizing money from widows' and orphans' Social Security checks. How very American. Nokia Siemens, a joint venture between the Finnish and German electronics giants, has sold Iran a high-tech product that allows the government to listen in on virtually all electronic communications, including voice calls, text messaging, instant messages, and web traffic. The parent companies deny culpability but anyone who knows anything assumes that they're lying. As a company spokesman explains, perhaps too honestly, "Western governments, including the UK, don't allow you to build networks without having this functionality." My dog is tied to a tree. He is completely free to move about... as long as he doesn't try to venture out past the limit of his lead. More and more I feel the same about us.
Of course, similar companies make and sell similar governmental eavesdropping and suppression programs to virtually every technologically-advanced nation, and you'd have to be disconnected from the news of the past several years to pretend that doesn't include the United States of America. As most polls suggest that America is becoming a bit more progressive, Reader's Digest is adjusting its political slant sell itself to a more conservative audience. So far as I can tell, this change already happened YEARS ago. Burger King is using oral sex imagery to sell sandwiches. Dan Froomkin's last column at the Washington Post is a very good going-away present. It's an overview of the Bush-Cheney catastrophes and the media that enabled those catastrophes, and a quick round-up of the problems evident in the Obama administration so far. It's to the point, no bullsh*t journalism of exactly the sort that the Washington Post doesn't want, which is why it's Froomkin's last column. It's worth reading in its entirety, but here's the crux: ... But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Murray Waas, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (better late than never), Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, Charlie Savage and Philippe Sands; there was also some fine investigative blogging over at Talking Points Memo and by Marcy Wheeler. Notably not on this list: The likes of Bob Woodward
Mr Froomkin says he's taking a few weeks off, before he resumes his writing and we resume reading it, elsewhere. National Public Radio's ombudsman Alicia C. Shepard explains why NPR couldn't possibly tell the truth by calling torture torture. Reading this, my response was just to roll my eyes, mutter and curse under my breath, and root for budget cuts at National Public Radio. Fortunately, Glenn Greenwald took the trouble to respond much more intelligently. Col. Gary Volesky, commander of a unit in Iraq, has ordered the "un-embedding" of Stars & Stripes reporter Heath Druzin, because of the reporter was reluctant "to discuss story ideas" and "refused to highlight" aspects of the Mosul campaign that Volesky and others wanted him to promote. An embedded journalist is a compromised journalist, so it's a little to the reporter's credit that he's been "un-embedded", and it speaks well of Stars & Stripes that they've refused to replace him.
When The Ann Arbor News publishes its last edition next month, Ann Arbor will become the first big or biggish city in America without a daily newspaper. That scares me, at least briefly. We've all heard (mostly from newspapers) how essential newspapers are to local coverage, and it's true. Most local scandals are broken in local newspapers, and for the most part you'll find only the local papers' reporters at city council meetings and other generally boring political events. But that said, I've lived in several different big cities — Seattle, Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Oakland, San Francisco, Kansas City — and as I think back on those places, the best coverage of local issues by far in all those places was in local alternative weeklies, not the daily papers. We're living in Madison, Wisconsin now, a mid-sized city where there's one newspaper and two alt-weeklies, and the best local coverage is in The Capital Times, a former newspaper that now exists only on-line. So yeah, we should all be mourning the end of the daily newspaper era, but most of daily papers are just running Associated Press news and doing a half-assed job covering local events. I wish daily newspapers were as good as they claim to be, but most of 'em aren't, and in a lot of cities it's mostly a myth that daily newspapers are your best bet for covering local news. The St. Petersburg Times has prepared a bang-up exposé of the Church of Scientology, and the blatant criminality that permeates its highest levels. Scientology, of course, is a swindle which presents itself as a religion, and as a matter of policy the Church of Scientology responds to those who tell the truth about it with lawsuits, so I expect the Times will be served soon.
It's worth noting that the St. Petersburg Times is one of, to my knowledge, three newspapers in America that are published by non-profit entities — a for-profit paper would never have published this. A Milwaukee journalist who wrote a fawning profile of the city's police chief turns out to have been sleeping with him. There's your present-day journalism in a nutshell — nominate her for a Pulitzer. After eight years of being blithely unconcerned about a completely staged Bush-Cheney administration, the New York Times is troubled by President Obama's rather nominal "staging" of tipping off one reporter that he'd get to ask a question at a press conference, . It was a small but distinct pleasure watching President Obama answer the tediously hollow recitation of a Republican talking point by MSNBC's Chuck Todd's, about why the Obama administration wasn't laying down the law with Iran. Pretty much all throughout organized journalism, nobody wrote or said a word for months about the Taliban's kidnapping of New York Times reporter David Rohde. This code of silence may well have contributed to saving Rohde's life, but still — would all of American journalism have been silent if a businessman or a bartender had been kidnapped by bad guys?
CNN put a hack and liar on the air, unchallenged, and let her lie and lie about health care reform. Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz says he's "amazed that ABC is being bashed for its White House health scare special before a single minute has aired — but not by the fact that the GOP is trying to score points in advance." But he won't say that in the Washington Post. Once again, the satirical newscast The Daily Show kicks "real" journalists in the backside, this time by sending comedian Jason Jones to Iran, where he filed a week's worth of tongue-in-cheek reports that conveyed more straight-ahead truth about Iran than any other reporting I've seen in American media over the past several years. Seriously, if you missed The Daily Show last week, watch it now. Meet the Press is bleeding out, losing close to a half million viewers since MC Rove's dance partner took over from the late [Tim] Russert. Clearly the bizarre strategy of packing every show with right-wing pundits and spewing right-wing talking points immediately following an election where the country told the Republican party to go to hell is paying dividends. Clearly what Meet the Press needs is more appearances by President Gingrich. ... This week's guests — Mitt Romney and Lindsey Graham. Atta' boy, Stretch. You can lose another half million if you
There's something very Book of Revelation in reading the New York Times' glowing account of how TMZ scooped everyone in mainstream media on the death of Michael Jackson. Thomas Frank is bringing back The Baffler. I haven't seen much of Meghan McCain, and as with Liz Cheney, I don't understand what beyond nepotism makes her a credible pundit. From this clip of her appearance on Real Time last week, though, it's difficult not to notice that she's a bit dim. For what's about the sixth time by my count, the perpetually incompetent allegedly-liberal radio network Air America has ended a pretty dang good radio show. This time it's Ron Kuby, joining previous pretty-goods including Mike Malloy, Sam Seder, Randi Rhodes, the Young Turks, and Al Franken. Of these, only Franken left of his own free will. The end of Kuby's show was apparently a surprise to its host, as he signed off his last show the same as he'd signed off all his shows, promising to be back tomorrow "unless something really good or really bad happens". He's a passionate civil rights attorney who never took himself too seriously, and his show was usually interesting and, in a rarity for political talk, funny. "Ron remains a member of the Air America family as we discuss his future role," says an Air America press release that sounds like typical corporatespeak. His replacement is Jack Rice, a former CIA agent who now espouses left-wing perspectives. I've heard Rice when he's filled in for other hosts in the past, and he seems like a decent human being but he's more than a bit monotonous on the radio. I listened to the first two hours of his first show, and he just talked and talked and talked, with no guests, no callers, and really nothing interesting to say. There are now exactly zero shows worth listening to on Air America Monday-Friday. Phoenix is about to get progressive radio back, with a round-the-clock left-leaning talk station that, perhaps wisely, includes no Air America programming at all.
Detroit City Council Critter Monica Conyers, the wife of US Congressman John Conyers, has pleaded guilty this morning to conspiring to commit bribery. I don't know anything about Monica Conyers, except that she's married to a colossal scumbag (see above). Cynthia Davis, a Republican state rep in Missouri, says hunger among children "can be a positive motivator". Sally Kern, an Oklahoma state politician and of course a Republican, has blessed the people of her fine state with the "Oklahoma Citizen's Proclamation for Morality". She deeply troubled that America "has become a world leader in promoting abortion, pornography, same sex marriage, sex trafficking, divorce, illegitimate births, child abuse, and many other forms of debauchery". The city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is taking the lead in omnipresent surveillance in America, with 165 CCTV cameras in public spaces, and no government oversight. The Georgia Supreme Court has overturned a lower court ruling that barred a gay father from letting his children meet his gay friends. The US Supreme Court has declined to hear Valerie Plame's civil lawsuit against the Bush-Cheney administration officials who endangered America's defense by blowing her cover as a CIA agent, de facto ending her work against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. As everyone involved expected, this means the Bush-Cheney administration gets away with it, again. The President and the Secretary of Defense want to junk the F-22 fighter boondoggle, but Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia, where the planes are built) wants the project to proceed. The Republican-controlled Congress is following Chambliss's lead, approving funding to continue building F-22s, and President Obama has promised to veto the legislation if it passes. We're about to see whether the President has any guts.
At least half of self-identified Republicans favor a public option in health care reform, while to my knowledge, every single Republican official on the national level is opposed. I wonder if or when average Republicans will notice this sprawling gap? OK, I guess we need to say something about South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's pecker problems, and the first thing I want to say is that it's really disappointing how much time Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and the other few voices of left-wing radio have devoted to this relatively minor story. And how grotesque and wrong it is for media outlets to be publishing his love letters for purposes of mockery. Really, it doesn't matter how low your opinion of corporate-controlled media is — they're always capable of stooping lower. It is a serious problem when a head of state up and disappears — there are some functions of state that can only be addressed by a Governor in an emergency, and he used state funds to fly to his Argentine lover. And of course, Sanford called for President Bill Clinton to resign after Clinton's extramarital affair came to light, but hypocrisy is a requirement for Republicans. For the most part, though, the talking heads don't care about any of that, they're just roasting Sanford for the fun of it. I could not possibly care less about Sanford's marital woes. The Governor's confession of an affair will probably scuttle his hopes of the Republican Presidential nomination in 2012, and to me that seems sad and bizarre. Sanford has made it obvious for years that he's a political lightweight and the few ideas he's had have been generally stupid, but that never disqualified him from high office — quite the opposite, as a Republican such shortcomings only added to his stature. But now, because Republicans have shouted about phony morality for so long, an ordinary human frailty is what disqualifies him for higher office. What a crazy place America is.
On the other hand, the scandals swirling around Senator and former Presidential frontrunner John Ensign (R-Nevada) continue to look like a lot more than merely an affair ... Rather remarkably to me, the Republican frontrunner for 2012 is still Sarah Palin, by a country bumpkin mile. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are neck and neck for second place, 15 or so points behind. It's easy, I suppose, to read such polling and conclude that most Republicans are stupid, and it sounds rude to type it, but it's true. To the surprise of zero cognizant observers, Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) continues to put his personal grandstanding above the good of the nation. I've got a lot of problems with the Obama administration, but every time McCain goes on television and opens his mouth I realize again just how close America came to greatly accelerating the Bush-Cheney administration's gleeful dash toward armageddon, instead of merely continuing it, as Obama has done. Senator John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) has proposed a ten-year waiting period before there's any meaningful health care reform. He wants to give the insurance industry ten years to stop gouging and killing Americans (of course, they've already said they won't stop) before any public option insurance becomes available. Kerry is, of course, a colossal douchebag and the Democrats' idea of a Presidential candidate in 2004.
As ex-Sen John Edwards was running for President and cheating on his cancer-stricken wife last year, he made a sex tape with his mistress. Or so says Andrew Young, the ex-aide who was fingered by Edwards as the father of his mistress's child. You know, I'm beginning to think that Edwards might not have been as fine a candidate for President as I thought when he was running. This study from the University of Toronto links childhood abuse to adulthood cancer, which suggests (to me, not to the scientists here) that some cancers might be rooted in trauma. In Amsterdam, bike use has surpassed car use. A Japanese study finds that folks who are mildly obese at age 40 live longer than folks who are fit and trim. Consider this a counterbalance for the omnipresent warnings of the dangers of obesity. This newfangled washing machine allegedly uses just one cup of water. I'm highly skeptical. The beads may work on ladies unmentionables but I'm quite sure they wont work on my undies. RIP, Farrah Fawcett. Charlie's Angels was mindless drivel, and most of her movies sucked, but she starred in The Burning Bed, a TV movie that brought domestic abuse to the forefront of America's consciousness. That movie saved lives, undoubtedly. Fawcett was excellent in the leading role and the movie probably wouldn't have been made if not for her participation, and for that she deserves to be remembered with respect. In addition to their innate smartness, whales might have enough self-awareness and cognizance to be classed as dang close to human, like apes. Movie stars Michelle Pfeiffer and Kathy Bates have called for legalization of prostitution.
The geeks at NASA think they've solved the 101-year-old mystery of what the heck happened at Tunguska, Siberia in 1908. Why do conservatives hate soccer? Wading through the voice-maze system at Charter Communications during this week's routine down time in our internet access, the company's listening device seemed to have more than its usual problems understanding my plain, ordinary spoken commands. After a few minutes of trying to work with the machine's options and inability to understand my words, I responded to the machine's next query with one of America's most popular profanities, the one that starts with the f-word and ends with 'you'. To my surprise, the voice-maze machine's immediate response was "I'll connect you with a service technician". Seconds later I was speaking with a (surprisingly, for Charter) competent and cordial human. Have voice-maze systems now been programmed to recognize obscenities? Have I discovered a back-door way to reach a human being at a giant faceless corporation? Since it's Charter Communications, I'm sure we'll have the opportunity to try this technique again in the next few days, and we'll let you know. 
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