July 2008 archive

Mostly I like to whiz along the information superhighway, short concise comments and even short rambles, but move along and rarely just savor a dialogue, like I was reading it in a good magazine or something.

So long comments, in the heat of the conversation, I’ll read ’em real fast and somtimes, I admit, they’re so good I find myself slowing down and really reading, not just gulping the knowledge offered, as I sometimes gluttonously do.

I know we are in weird, grim times.  And we need to be serious in a way we never thought we’d have to be.

So although this is indulgent, I don’t think it’s harmful to dealing with these grim times, and may even give us more of a wider view than we normally get in our sick culture.

Or I’m just goofing around and want to indulge myself.  Heh.

If you’re still interested, the rest of this indulgence is below.

Special guest host?  Nah, It’s just me.

Welcome to the Four at Four, at Five (Four Central).

• George Bush has decided that the House of Representatives may not have access to documents from the CIA leak investigation, because the documents contain classified interviews with the Vice President and other White House officials, which are protected by executive privilege.

  So the FBI can ask questions, and write down the answers…but they can’t tell anybody about what was said…because of executive privilege…so, what was the purpose of that investigation, if no one but the President is allowed to see the findings?
  

  Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the panel’s chairman, said in a statement today that Bush’s claim of executive privilege in the case is “ludicrous” and vowed to move ahead with a contempt citation against [Attorney General Michael B.] Mukasey.

  “This unfounded assertion of executive privilege does not protect a principle; it protects a person,” Waxman said. “If the vice president did nothing wrong, what is there to hide?”

  Exactly.  Thank you, Mr. Waxman.  Now do something about it.

• The Consumer Price Index, a measure of inflation, among things, has risen 5% over the past year, and in June rose at the highest rate in 17 years…since the end of the last Bush’s reign, in fact.  This report comes just a day after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that inflation posed a serious risk to the US economy.
  

  The report reinforces what many economists, including those at the Fed, have warned about for months: Americans are being forced to pay significantly higher prices even as the job market weakens and big employers like General Motors are laying off thousands of employees.

  “There’s not enough lipstick to put on this pig,” Richard Moody, an economist at Mission Residential, wrote in a note to clients. “No matter how one slices and dices,” he added, “the bottom line is that U.S. workers are falling farther and farther behind.”

  I have no idea what pigs wearing lipstick have to do with this; all I know is, it doesn’t sound good.

• A meta-analysis of existing research has concluded that monthly breast self-exams do not necessarily lead to cancer detection or prevention, and may instead result in unnecessary medical procedures.
  

  “At present, screening by breast self-examination or physical examination [by a trained health worker] cannot be recommended,” two of the study authors, Jan Peter Kosters and Peter Gotzsche of the Nordic Cochrane Centre, stated in the review.

  …

  The current review included two studies of almost 400,000 women in Russia and China. Women who did self-exams had 3,406 biopsies compared with only 1,856 biopsies in the group that did not do the exams. Differences in biopsy rates did not translate into differences in breast cancer mortality.

  The China study found that rates of mastectomy and lumpectomy (or “breast-conserving” surgery) were similar regardless of whether women were doing self-exams or not.

• Kirk Radomski, who has been convicted of distributing steroids, found and turned in evidence against Roger Clemens while moving a broken television.
  

  “The investigators knew from day one that I sent a package to Clemens’ house,” Radomski told ESPN.com. “They knew before the Mitchell report was released and before Brian went before Congress. So this is nothing new to them.

  “I just couldn’t find the receipt. And just by [accident] this weekend, I moved my TV and whatnot and I found the package, an envelope, and it had [Clemens’] receipt and about seven or eight other receipts.”

  It sounds a little staged, but if it isn’t real I’m sure his attorney will figure it out.

Bonus story!

• Analysis of new pictures obtained by the satellite orbiting Mars indicates that Mars used to be very wet.
  

  The key to the finding is the discovery that rocks called phyllosilicates are widespread on at least the planet’s southern hemisphere. The water present on Mars from about 4.6 billion to 3.8 billion years ago transformed some rocks into these phyllosilicates, which include clays rich in iron, magnesium or aluminum, mica, and kaolinite (an ingredient in Kaopectate).

  “In a phyllosilicate, the atoms are stacked up into layers, and all of the phyllosilicates have some sort of water or hydroxyl [oxygen and hydrogen group] incorporated into the crystal structure,” said study team member Scott Murchie of Johns Hopkins University.

  Previous data from an instrument called OMEGA – Observatoire pour la Mineralogie, l’Eau, les Glaces et l’Activite on the Mars Express spacecraft had revealed only a few large outcrops of phyllosilicates, suggesting they were a relative rarity on Mars.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler,(NY) member of the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary, the committee whose Constitutional duty it is to bring impeachment charges against criminal presidents,  says it as baldly and plainly as it can be said:

The Bush Administration has committed War Crimes.The only thing stopping him from being impeached is politics.

War Crimes. The ultimate crimes. THE definitional worst thing you can do as a human being.

I ask you now to stop for a second, take a deep breath and really think about that.

Party politics and base political expediency is halting the trial of a War Criminal.

Not in some third world banana republic. Here. In America. Not because we can’t find him, or because their is not enough evidence…but because it is not politically advantageous.

The Democratic Party Leadership (Hoyer and Pelosi) is refusing to prosecute a War Criminal…..because of mere politics. The rule of a single man is being allowed to supplant the Rule of Law …because of politics. A War Criminal is not just walking free in plain sight, he is the President of the Land of the free and the Home of the brave. Because of politics….

….when did politics become more important than the law?

By what right do sworn Constitutional officers get to make the decision not to prosecute a War Criminal…ONLY because it is to their advantage?

We are through the looking glass.

Nadler says that when Obama is elected, he HOPES there will be prosecutions. I suppose that depends on if it is politically comfortable to prosecute War Criminals then.