HIGH COURT OVERTURNS SOTOMAYOR

This posting was typed around June 30th 2009

This whole cap and trade bill is becoming a bad joke. Of course if you didn’t think jobs were going to China fast enough this bill will only accelerate that out flow of jobs overseas. Some Republican pointed out that for this thing to work at all, China and India have to be in on it, since they are the major polluters. I’ve said all along I thought this was premature given the delicate state of our economy now, and that a broad round of regressive tax hikes would kill the recovery off completely. I had Rush Limbaugh on a while- -and he and Thom Hartman both agree that the cap and trade bill is bogus saying it’s a give-away and sell-out to Wall Street. For two such diverse minds to come to this same conclusion ought to give anyone pause. It seems that polluters are given just as many if not more carbon credits than an outfit using windmill energy. So it would seem that the primary purpose of the measure has been completely abandoned, and it’s just amounts to more money for the big boys to play with that isn’t their own. The Republicans watered down and watered down this bill till it ended up useless. They had to do this to appease the growing “blue dog” democratic constituency, who nowdays outnumber true progressives in congress. Even with the gutting of the bill it only narrowly passed the House, and experts say that it has even less of a chance in the senate.

The Supreme Court has struck down that Justice Sotomayer ruling today on those white firemen who claim they were discriminated against in Connecticut. It was a 5 to 4 decision, which I approve of. But it may adversely affect Justice Sotomayer’s chances at confirmation. The Ruling stated that chapter 7 of the Civil Rights bill of 1964 had been misapplied. The justices “tried to keep this ruling as narrow as possible”. Both Hartman and Rush would have liked more generalized constitutional issues to be addressed, such as the fourteenth amendment. Justice Ginsburg in her dissent sounded like she was almost agreeing with the majority saying the case for the City was really screwey.

Thom Hartman says there are only about four banks that rule the roost in this area. First of all the banks are just sitting on all the low intrest money they’ve received. They are not lending it out (at a handsome profit, I might add) but just hording it. In this say inflation fears are now out the window but Judy’s prediction of a renewed downward direction in the economy may be a reality. It’s all in the power of the banks but for some reason they are just choosing to hord all the money they’ve been given, and not using it for its intended purpose. These four banks if I’m right are Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Chase-Manhatton.and let us not forget Goldman Sachs, who will benefit most from cap & trade. Certainly this is a time to bring in the Shermon Anti-Trust Act into play, which was originally passed in 1881. (I thought it was 1890) Thom Hartman says he is more optimistic than ever. Geoblesr said that on Hitler’s birthday in 1945 right before the end came. For Hartman’s words to have any validation at all the democrats have to win big in the election of 2012. Because the revolution is still incomplete because the republicans still feel way too secure about being able to call the shots. We need another repeat of 1934. And hopefully President Obama will get on the stump himself and attack these Goliath corporate interests the way Roosevelt did. He needs to really go after them and put them on the defensive. I’ve said all this before in my blogs. This time I hope it sinks in.

As you know a second autopsy of Michael Jackson’s body was conducted by a private firm hired by the family last Saturday. (there is no news two weeks later) They are hoping for both “a second oppinion” and also to get quicker toxicology results than were promised by the County. But there have already been leaks. There are needle marks all over Jackson’s body. There are also pin pricks near the heart indicating that adrenaline has been injected to jump start Jackson’s heart on previous occasions. They said the scalp only had peach fuzz growing on it, and that Jackson has been wearing wigs. Of course you know about the oxy-conten and the Demerol and whatever other drugs these mixed with. The family does not trust this attending physician. I don’t want to make allegations of mal-practice, but it seems that the facts are pointing in that direction. By the time I ever get this into a blog it will probably be all over the media, plus a bunch of new leaks I haven’t yet heard.

Bernie Madoff today was sentenced to 150 years in prison for running the world’s biggest Ponzie scheme. The only unhappiness the victims would have about this is that the man is already 71 and will die and “get off paying the rest of his sentence”. Of course if they ever perfected reincarnated soul tracing you could nab him and place him behind bars for another whole life-time, and a good part of another. If only- - .

Getting back to that Sixty Minutes thing about computers reading your mind. There would be limitation. First of course is the fact that a simple term like “screwdriver” is stored in scattered sections of the brain. There is the word, there is the visual image, and the tactile information, and then there is the associative aspect of what a screwdriver does. If you are a fuzz-brain to begin with all of those “artist renderings” of various rooms might confuse you and one may start to look like another so that you could not be sure whether you’d seen this exact room or not. Still the software would be good at finding out what mischief your teenager was up to while you were gone. And it would also work for terrorists in deciding whether to “cut a deal” with them or their intent was to break it at first chance. Instead of climbing into one of those big magnetic resonance tubes (a major hassle) what if they could just shine a red laser dot on your frontal lobe and find out the same information? They said that it’s an open question whether the fifth amendment right against self intimidation would apply. The logic would be used that if you were in the South and raped a young girl you could come back and tell the Sheriff “You specifically told me that all voluntary sex with an under-aged girl was rape. Well this sex wasn’t colentary”. So if being tortured to get oral information is a violation of rights, what would a wholesale “raping of the mind” amount to?

They say that most pedophilias are actually heterosexual. Some people have said that Michael Jackson was gay and yet there is no flood of men coming forth to say “I have had sex with Michael” as one would expect of a gay man. Certainly if Michael is gay he has certainly never “come out” and nobody around him (in the family) has alluded to anything but his being a perfectly “normal” heterosexual.

Leo Le Port has the same problem I do with stereo-scopic vision that I do. The condition is called ambliopia- - and I remember when I was around six still living in LA the eye doctor tried having me wear an eye patch on my better eye to correct the situation, but it didn’t work. The funny thing is that HD TV actually heightens the “flat look” of a TV image. The only thing where 3 D actually “worked” for me was that Michael Jackson thing at Disneyland. With everything else the effect has been lost on me. They have three methods of 3 D. There is the red green bit. There is polarized lenses along different planes, and there is actually some plug in device that lights up the screen for you before your eyes. This last technique seems needlessly cumbersome. It would seem many people have the same condition I do and 3 D never did catch on. Sometimes wearing glasses, for instance in gym class when playing baseball actually messes up what depth perception I had not wearing glasses, when you’re used to doing that.

The US has apparently completed a long anticipated phase of the Iraq War by withdrawing combat troops from the cities of Iraq. So the Obama administration was able to keep at least one campaign promise completing this phase of the withdrawal.

Last night’s Law and Order is a glairing case in point as to what is wrong with certain “anti terrorism” laws passed right after 9 – 11. There is a case where a man was killed in an organized fighting contest. The other guy kept pummeling him after he had officially “tapped out” to end it. Later a plea to a lesser charge involving no jail time was accepted by the DA on the misguided belief that the guy was not a professional fighter, which violated the rules of these “matches”. In revenge for this miscarriage of justice there was a spontaneous “gang rumble” which was a free-for-all of violence and some killing. They tried to prosecute for this incident using a video but once again the prosecution failed because they could not identify the video to be used in evidence, and without it it was impossible to know which individual committed which act of violence to pin a specific charge on them. They “solved” the problem by invoking this “anti terrorism” act, which was never intended for street brawls. In this act you could indict and convict a whole group giving them all life sentences without connecting one individual to a specific act. Such is the rather sick state of “Bush justice” in the U S A today.

I would like to just say in conclusion of this entry that I hope tonight is the night I am back on the internet. This and the last two paragraphs is being typed Tuesday June 30, 2009. Each time I think my internet problem has been solved, some new previously unknown wrinkle inserts itself. If so I plan to make three new postings of the current blog and then switch to “Cosmic Tides” or the next “black” blog that’s due up now.