Yesterday - - and the Day Before

This is not an R I A A approved Blog

Spock says that any object with a positive mass when in a positive gravitational field will continue to fall to the surface of the planet. You may remember the song by Jay and the Techniques, “Keep the Ball Rolling”. This is what Obama and the democrats want to keep doing in terms of all of the political hot button issues of today. One issue on the minds of some of us is when the government is going to release all of the secret information they have on the Kennedy and King assenations. Back on March 5, 1967 Tom Green told us the government would release all the secret information after fifty years or something. One would hope that a Presidential administration would not try and block a scheduled release of information. The Church Senate Committee formed various conclusions thirty years ago, where they didn’t rule out conspiracy. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look up the conclusions this committee came to as to both the assassinations of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King. After all, the wheels of progress should bring about total enlightenment. Once the snow ball gets rolling, who knows what the final result might be. But the specter of 1966 looms in the air and Republicans see this congressional election as a continuing beacon of hope. In this year the Republicans won about 46 seats in congress and Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California, which are two things nobody thought would happen. Liberals look in the abstract and reason that if an idea is basically sound, and people are encouraged to act on this idea, then the momentum for this idea or ideas should continue to accelerate. If you’ve seen rivers in Southern California during and just after a rain storm you know what I am talking about. They become raging rapid rivers and death traps for all who enter. And so it is that Democrats logically would expect Republicanism to be swept away by the liberal tide. For instance as I said above, we have decided to hike fuel efficiency standards to 35 miles per gallon, and we have tightened up air standards. To a liberal this is just the natural progression of events. To be fair, this efficiency bill will add $1,500 to the price of every vehicle you buy, but this will be more than compensated by the savings in gasoline. Ironically the auto makers themselves are not the ones who opposed this mileage legislation but only the reactionary republican block in congress. The auto makers are for this bill because it will unify the standards in the whole country and end confusion. People will also be buying an investment in the future. The credit card bill is another badly needed piece of legislation whose provisions should have been enacted into law a long time ago. But sometimes a faulty premise interferes with the natural course of events. Take the plot of “Dial M for Murder”. It was character Mark Halliday who said, “The reason why the jury found Margo guilty is that they didn’t believe her story”. (testimony of the wife) If you knew as a premise that the wife were telling the God’s honist truth, then you’d have to conclude that someone else was lying, somewhere. In like manner the key to Double Indemnity was unlocked when Edger G Robinson came up with the idea that the murder victim “was never on the train”. Sometimes a key premise can straighten out a whole lot of other thinking. In the case of early Christian Church history one big premise was that Marcion was ex-communicated by the Pope as a heretic in 144 AD. Of course this to the, I believe, wrong conclusion that the Church even had a Papacy in 144 AD. Thom Hartman has based in part his opinion on the death penalty on the premise that one and eight prisoners who are eventually executed were wrongly convicted. If I were to buy wholly into this premise, I would be out signing petitions today to ban the death penalty. Hartman points out the arbitrariness of the Death Penalty and how few people who commit capital crimes are actually subjected to the ultimate penalty. Democrats in congress who pride themselves as centrists - - often work from the premise that “The past is the past” and “we shouldn’t go digging it up” or we shouldn’t “obsess over the past” when it comes to crimes of the Bush Administration. A bad premise can gum up the works and put a slamming halt to needed action. There is really no reason why the democrats shouldn’t continue to win and win big in the next congressional election of 2010. There is still a lot of needed work to be done, and the rate of accomplishment is still sluggish. If we allow republicans to raise doubts and introduce negative thinking, progress could grind to a halt altogether.

Thom Hartman led off his radio program this morning with two topics. The US Supreme Court has decreed (ruled) by a five to four decision that you don’t have the power to sue an official of the Federal government. Justice Kennedy, as usual was the swing vote. Justice Brier wrote the strongest dissenting opinion, Hartman says. The case involves an Islamic Pakistani who was thrown into jail and beaten up for several crimes. Most of the crimes he doesn’t contest but he said that John Ashcroft and another guy, Robert Muller III from the FBI personally had it in for him. Brayer’s dissenting opinion offered extensive case law involving being able to sue subordinates for abuse of power. People are disgusted with this supreme court. People like Clarence Thomas apparently are utterly lacking in curiosity and don’t ask any questions, but Thomas rules how his worker subordinates tell him to rule. The other story involves Donald Rumsfeld and his introducing of religious propaganda into the workings of the Defense Department. He would cite epistles of St. Paul used to justify the crusades, and have various pictures of Saddam Hussein with an appropriate scripture, or show a rolling tank and have the caption, “Put on the full armor of God”. Hartman has wondered whether Bush was just a willing idiot-figur-head in this whole affair. Is Rumsfeld the “brains” of the outfit (and I used that term advisedly) just as Chaney was the “brains” of how we treat our military prisoners, or what? From the very first cabinet meeting Bush asked people “Tell me how I can invade Iraq. When are we going to do that?” My hope is that these two stories will get the proper scrutiny by the media, so that the people will realize the issues involved.

. Randi Rhodes on her show today was talking about how no state can pass a law contrary to any federal law. That’s not what the constitution says. The constitution cedes all power “to the states or to the people” all powers that are not specifically spelled out or prohibited to the states. Therefore air standards are none of the Federal government’s business if you’re in San Bernardino choking on our smog, you should have the right to regulate your own air or your own airports, if you don’t think federal laws are up to the task. Likewise today the Supreme Court affirmed this states rights principle in their medical marijuana ruling that I’ve very happy about. The court refused to even consider a case that challenged California’s right to regulate or not regulate marijuana as they choose. If you are a city and don’t want guns in your city, just as you may not want them in your private business, I would say that you have the right to set your own standards. Proposition 2 pertains to the powers of the Federal government only and specifically mentions the states as having rights. In terms of the FICA law, I always regarded the de-facto tax as fourteen percent or so. If I were an employer and told the tax were abolished tomorrow, I would give back the money to the payee.

Apparently that My Space case where the woman pretended to be a teenage boy to induce a thirteen year old troubled girl to commit suicide isn’t as cut and dried as we all thought. I would have considered this a major felony case. But first of all the girl isn’t even considered the victim; My Space is. Secondly they reduced the charges to a misdemeanor, and the judge is considering throwing out the charges altogether. This would be another in the long list of cases of, “Justice denied”.