Well.

It looks like Obama vs. McCain, though Hillary isn't going to completely step aside just yet (who knows what asteroid might strike Obama's campaign between now and the convention).

So, the race will likely be between a far left liberal Democrat and a center leaning Republican. Some interesting questions will be:

1) Will the ultra-conservative Republicans vote for Obama (hah), McCain (and have to swallow their pride), or just stay home?

2) Will Hillary's supporters forget all of Obama's anti-Hillary rhetoric (that some saw as anti-female) and support him? And will the blue collar working class voters, who mostly supported Hillary, switch to Obama, or McCain or just stay home?

3) The war in Iraq (not so much the war in Afghanistan) was a huge issue when these campaigns started; but will it matter so much now that things are improving? I guess this is related to whether the low poll ratings for Bush have been a comment on the man or his mishandling of the war.

4) Will the economy, which is not in a recession, be a major issue, or will debate on economic issues focus on oil prices, the mortgage/credit industry and federal spending?

There are lots of other issues and factors that will affect the outcome of this election, like the boost candidates usually get after their convention (Republicans go second), but these four areas look to be hot topics on the "talking heads" shows this Summer and up to the Fall elections.

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June 13, 2008

Justices, 5-4, Back Detainee Appeals for Guantánamo

By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday delivered its third consecutive rebuff to the Bush administration’s handling of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, ruling 5 to 4 that the prisoners there have a constitutional right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention.

The court declared unconstitutional a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that, at the administration’s behest, stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions from the detainees seeking to challenge their designation as enemy combatants.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the truncated review procedure provided by a previous law, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, “falls short of being a constitutionally adequate substitute” because it failed to offer “the fundamental procedural protections of habeas corpus.”

Justice Kennedy declared: “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”

The decision, left some important questions unanswered. These include “the extent of the showing required of the government” at a habeas corpus hearing in order to justify a prisoner’s continued detention, as Justice Kennedy put it, as well as the handling of classified evidence and the degree of due process to which the detainees are entitled.

Months or years of continued litigation may lie ahead, unless the Bush administration, or the administration that follows it, reverses course and closes the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which now holds 270 detainees. Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court here said the court’s judges would meet in the next few days with lawyers for both sides to decide “how we can approach our task most effectively and efficiently.”

There are some 200 habeas corpus petitions awaiting action in the District Court, including those filed by the 37 detainees whose appeals were before the Supreme Court in the case decided on Thursday, Boumediene v. Bush, No. 06-1195.

Despite the open questions, the decision, which was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer, was categorical in its rejection of the administration’s basic arguments. Indeed, the court repudiated the fundamental legal basis for the administration’s strategy, adopted in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, of housing prisoners captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere at the United States naval base in Cuba, where Justice Department lawyers advised the White House that domestic law would never reach.

In a concurring opinion on Thursday, Justice Souter said the ruling was “no bolt out of the blue,” but rather should have been anticipated by anyone who read the court’s decision in Rasul v. Bush in 2004. That decision, part of the initial round of Supreme Court review of the administration’s Guantánamo policies, held that because the long-term lease with Cuba gave the United States unilateral control over the property, the base came within the statutory jurisdiction of the federal courts to hear habeas corpus petitions.

Congress responded the next year, in the Detainee Treatment Act, by amending the statute to remove jurisdiction, and it did so again in the Military Commissions Act to make clear that it wanted the removal to apply to cases already in the pipeline. The decision on Thursday went beyond the statutory issue to decide, for the first time, the underlying constitutional question.

President Bush, appearing with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy at a news conference in Rome, said he was unhappy with the decision. “We’ll abide by the court’s decision — that doesn’t mean I have to agree with it,” the president said, adding that “it was a deeply divided court, and I strongly agree with those who dissented.”

The dissenting opinions, one by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the other by Justice Scalia, were vigorous. Each signed the other’s, and the other two dissenters, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., signed both.

Of the two dissenting opinions, Justice Antonin Scalia’s was the more apocalyptic, predicting “devastating” and “disastrous consequences” from the decision. “It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed,” he said. “The nation will live to regret what the court has done today.” He said the decision was based not on principle, “but rather an inflated notion of judicial supremacy.”

Chief Justice Roberts, in somewhat milder tones, said the decision represented “overreaching” that was “particularly egregious” and left the court open to “charges of judicial activism.” The decision, he said, “is not really about the detainees at all, but about control of federal policy regarding enemy combatants.” The public will “lose a bit more control over the conduct of this nation’s foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges,” he added.

The focus of the chief justice’s ire was the choice the majority made to go beyond simply ruling that the detainees were entitled to file habeas corpus petitions. Under two unrelated Supreme Court precedents, formal habeas corpus procedures are not necessarily required, as long as Congress provides an “adequate substitute.”

Congress in this instance did provide an alternative procedure that might be viewed as a substitute. The Detainee Treatment Act gave detainees access to the federal appeals court here to challenge their designation as enemy combatants, made by a military panel called a Combatant Status Review Tribunal.

The detainees’ lawyers argued that because this process fell far short of the review provided by traditional habeas corpus, it could not be considered an adequate substitute. The appeals court itself never decided that question, because it ruled in February 2007 that the detainees had no right to habeas corpus in the first place, and that all their petitions must be dismissed. It was this ruling that the Supreme Court reviewed on Thursday.

Justice Kennedy said the Supreme Court, having decided that there was a right to habeas corpus, would “in the ordinary course” send the case back to the appeals court for it to consider “in the first instance” whether the alternative procedure was an adequate substitute.

But he said “the gravity of the separation-of-powers issues raised by these cases and the fact that these detainees have been denied meaningful access to a judicial forum for a period of years render these cases exceptional” and required the justices to decide the issue for themselves rather than incur further delay.

The majority’s conclusion was that the alternative procedure had major flaws, mostly because it did not permit a detainee to present evidence that might clear him of blame but was either withheld from the record of the Combatant Status Review Tribunal or was learned of subsequently. The tribunals’ own fact-finding ability was so limited as to present “considerable risk of error,” thus requiring full-fledged scrutiny on appeal, Justice Kennedy said.

Eric M. Freedman, a habeas corpus expert at Hofstra University Law School, said the court was “on the right side of history” to reject what he called “habeas lite.” Calling the decision “a structural reaffirmation of what the rule of law means,” Professor Freedman, who was a consultant to the detainees’ lawyers, said it was as important a ruling on the separation of powers as the Supreme Court has ever issued.

Mr. Bush, in his statement in Rome, said the administration would decide whether to ask Congress to weigh in once more. Success at such an effort would appear unlikely, given that the Supreme Court decision was praised not only by the Democratic leadership, but also by the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. Senator Specter had voted for the jurisdiction-stripping measure, but then filed a brief at the court arguing that the law was unconstitutional.

In addition to removing habeas corpus jurisdiction, the Military Commissions Act also provided authority for the military commissions that the court’s 2006 decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld said was lacking. The case the court decided on Thursday did not directly concern military commissions, which are due to conduct trials of the several dozen detainees who have been charged with war crimes. The Justice Department said on Thursday that the decision would not delay those trials.

Divided as the Supreme Court was in this case, the justices were unanimous, surprisingly so, in a second habeas corpus ruling on Thursday. Again rejecting the Bush administration’s position, the court held in an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts that two civilian United States citizens being held in American military custody in Iraq were entitled to file habeas corpus petitions.

Proceeding to the merits of the petitions, the court then ruled against the two men, Mohammad Munaf and Shawqi Ahmad Omar, who are facing criminal charges under Iraqi law. Their release through habeas corpus “would interfere with the sovereign authority of Iraq to punish offenses against its laws committed within its borders,” Chief Justice Roberts said.

The administration had argued in the case, Munaf v. Geren, No. 06-1666, that because the men were technically held by the 26-nation multinational force in Iraq, federal courts did not have jurisdiction to hear their habeas corpus petitions. Chief Justice Roberts said that, to the contrary, what mattered was that the men were held by “American soldiers subject to a United States chain of command.”

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I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that ...

Perot sounding budget alarm, again

DAVID S. BRODER
THE WASHINGTON POST

June 16, 2008

Sixteen years after he shook up American politics by launching an impromptu campaign for president, Ross Perot is about to dip a toe back into the public debates. And, yes, he's bringing his charts with him to make his point.

Beginning yesterday, people who go to http://www.perotcharts.com will find the Dallas billionaire waiting to challenge them on one of his favorite subjects – the “ruin” he says America is courting with its spendthrift ways.

“We are right at the edge of the cliff,” the voice with the unmistakable Texas twang informed me, when I called him the other day to find out about this latest venture. “We can't go on spending money we don't have.”

That is not a new theme for Perot. It was his core message when he did his on-again, off-again, then back-on-again race against George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in 1992. He led the field in the early months and, even after the confusing signals sent by his dropping out and coming back, won more than 19.7 million votes – almost 20 percent of the total.

His real triumph, however, was a policy victory. With simple charts that he designed and displayed on prime-time television “infomercials,” he managed to convey to millions of voters the stark reality of what the record deficits of the 1980s really meant.

It may well have been the first and only time that the abstraction of an out-of-kilter budget was communicated outside the boardroom or the economics classroom. People got it. A Washington Post poll taken in October 1992, at the height of Perot's public information campaign, found that 63 percent of those surveyed said they worried a great deal that the federal budget deficit would grow, and another 17 percent said it worried them a good amount.

The newly elected Clinton took note, and, prompted by Robert Rubin and other economists, abandoned his campaign promise of middle-class tax cuts and instead made his priority cutting the budget deficit. Within a few years, we had a brief and blessed run of balanced budgets.

But with the current president, deficits have returned with a vengeance – and no one seems to care. Current polls show that less than 1 percent of the voters call the budget deficit one of the major problems facing the country.

Part of the reason is that politicians of both parties are laboring to disguise the reality from public view. Both President Bush and the Democratic Congress this year have issued budgets that claim to achieve balance in 2012 – just four years from now.

But those budgets are based on blue-sky assumptions that have no grounding in the real world. When I asked Perot what he made of them, he replied, “It's an election year. What would you expect them to say?”

In recent weeks, when I have found myself in conversations with David Walker and other economists who know how grim the long-term budget picture really is, I have mused aloud, “We need Ross Perot back.” Turns out, he was quietly preparing his return. He took some of the basic work done by Walker and others, and had professionals turn it into 35 very clear charts and link them on a Web site with an equally simple narration.

Sadly, Perot hired a professional announcer, rather than reading the text in his own distinctive Texas way, but he told me he's willing to substitute himself – which would make it a lot less pedantic and a lot livelier. With a personal investment of some $300,000, Perot has built a real teaching tool.

Perot is not offering any solutions. But he is clearly pointing to what he says are the culprits, the big entitlements – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. As the narrator puts it with the first of the charts: “The United States faces large and growing budget deficits mostly due to an aging population and rising health care costs. Unless we solve the problems caused by entitlement spending, there will be little money left to do anything else in the future. Over time, our standard of living, our national security, our standing in the world and the value of our currency could all be threatened. The sooner we confront these issues, the better.”

So far, John McCain and Barack Obama are not doing that. Perot, now almost 78, says he has no desire to get back into politics. But he's doing a service by unleashing his favorite weapon: those charts.

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me@rescam.org

Civil liberties: U.S. critics should look within

Union-Tribune editorial

June 19, 2008

Americans who travel abroad these days routinely find themselves being lectured over the sometimes-grotesque abuses of civil liberties seen at the Abu Ghraib and GuantÁnamo Bay prisons. But when it comes to the most basic civil liberty of all – free speech – the United States continues to set an example that shames the homelands of many of our critics.

Consider what is now happening in Canada. British Columbia's Human Rights Tribunal is now deliberating whether Maclean's magazine should face punishment for running an excerpt from a book by columnist Mark Steyn. It warned that the expected steady growth of unassimilated Muslims in the West could lead to pressure for acceptance of sharia, the code of law based on the Quran, Islam's holiest text.

In America, this would have been considered provocative, but not especially so. But in Canada, several tribunal officials – and many politicians – believe that this constitutes hate speech. Maclean's may be forced to apologize, run a rebuttal and promise to never return to the topic again.

Or consider what happened recently in Birmingham, England. Two Christian preachers who were proselytizing for their faith in a mostly Muslim neighborhood were told they were engaged in a hate crime by a police officer, who ordered them to leave.

In America, this would have produced a huge controversy, with embarrassed authorities vowing it would never happen again. But in Birmingham, police offered no apologies, saying speech codes gave them wide latitude.

This is not meant in any way as an apologia for U.S. abuses. Instead, our point is that many of the nations that lecture us for our sins should look within. No liberty should be more basic than the right to speak one's mind without fear of sanction – and that is true whether you live in the United States, Canada or England.

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me@rescam.org

Or consider what happened recently in Birmingham, England. Two Christian preachers who were proselytizing for their faith in a mostly Muslim neighborhood were told they were engaged in a hate crime by a police officer, who ordered them to leave.



i would told them to leave where ever they happen to stall, cause i don´t believe in any kind of god, but i don´t make number of it.
what gives them rights to harass me with their leaflets when i don´t harass them. i have freedom(rights) to be let alone.

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"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exist elsewhere in the Universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
Calvin to the Hobbes

In America, this would have produced a huge controversy, with embarrassed authorities vowing it would never happen again.

Then a week later, after everyone forgets, they would do it again... Gotta luv those empty words... ;)

(When was the last time you saw a Catholic proselytizing in a Mormon church, or vice versa? Respect? Couth? Godliness? Christ-like?)

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It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

what gives them rights to harass me with their leaflets when i don´t harass them.

I'd be happy just to keep my mailbox free of all the junk mail... ;)

(What gives corporate america the right to harass everyone? and why does nobody ever seem to complain about that?)

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It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

what gives them rights to harass me with their leaflets when i don´t harass them.

I'd be happy just to keep my mailbox free of all the junk mail... ;)

(What gives corporate america the right to harass everyone? and why does nobody ever seem to complain about that?)

i have sticker " no junk mail, please" , and it is working, or then i just don´t have friends.

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"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exist elsewhere in the Universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
Calvin to the Hobbes

The politics of oil and energy

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
THE WASHINGTON POST

June 23, 2008

For a differing view on the politics of oil, please see Paul Krugman column on opposite page.

Gas is $4 a gallon. Oil is $135 a barrel and rising. We import two-thirds of our oil, sending hundreds of billions of dollars to the likes of Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. And yet we voluntarily prohibit ourselves from even exploring huge domestic reserves of petroleum and natural gas.

At a time when U.S. crude oil production has fallen 40 percent in the last 25 years, 75 billion barrels of oil have been declared off-limits, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That would be enough to replace every barrel of non-North American imports (oil trade with Canada and Mexico is a net economic and national security plus) for 22 years.

That's nearly a quarter-century of energy independence. The situation is absurd. To which John McCain is responding with a partial fix: Lift the federal ban on Outer Continental Shelf drilling, where a fifth of the off-limits stuff lies.

This is a change for McCain, but circumstances have changed. When the moratorium was imposed in 1982, gasoline was $1.20 and oil was $30 a barrel. Since the moratorium was instituted, we've had two wars in the Middle East, and in between a decade of garrisoning troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE to preserve the peace and keep untold oil riches out of the hands of the most malevolent of our enemies.

Technological conditions have changed as well. We now are able to drill with far more precision and environmental care than a quarter-century ago. We have thousands of rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, yet not even hurricanes Katrina and Rita resulted in spills of any significance.

McCain's problem is that he's only able to go halfway on energy production because he has locked himself into opposition to the other obvious source of domestic oil – the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

His fastidiousness on this is inexplicable. “I believe that ANWR is a pristine area,” he explains. Is it more pristine than the ocean, where he now wants to drill? More pristine than the Arabian Desert from which we daily beg the Saudi princes to pump more oil?

The entire Arctic refuge is one-third the size of the United Kingdom (which includes Scotland and Wales). The drilling site would be one-seventh the size of Manhattan Island. The footprint is tiny. Moreover, forbidding drilling there does not prevent despoliation. It merely exports it. The crude oil we're not getting from the Arctic we import instead from such places as the Niger Delta, where millions live and where the resulting pollution and oil spillages poison the lives of many of the world's most wretchedly poor.

Our environmental imperialism does not just redistribute pollution to people who can least afford it. It generally increases the total overall damage because oil extraction in the wealthier and more technologically advanced United States is far more environmentally sensitive.

McCain's unwillingness to include ANWR lacks even political logic. His policy on offshore drilling is a flip-flop from his past positions. Perfectly justified, but a reconsideration nonetheless. If you are going to take the hit for flip-flopping and for offending environmentalists, why go halfway?

The oil crisis handed McCain an unexpected and singularly effective campaign issue. A majority of Americans now favor drilling in the Arctic and offshore. Democrats stand in the way of increased production just as they did 13 years ago when President Clinton vetoed drilling in ANWR. Domestic oil production would be about 20 percent higher today if the Republican Congress had been allowed to prevail.

As expected and right on cue, Barack Obama reflexively attacked McCain. “His decision to completely change his position” to one that would please the oil industry is “the same Washington politics that has prevented us from achieving energy independence for decades.” One can only marvel at Obama's audacity in characterizing McCain's proposal to change our policy as “old politics,” while the candidate of “change” adheres rigidly to the no-drilling status quo.

McCain is a lot of things, but the man who opposed ethanol in Iowa – as Obama shamelessly endorsed the most abysmally stupid of our energy policies – is no patsy of the energy producers. Americans know that increased production is needed to complement reduced consumption as the only way to get us out from oil shocks, high prices and national security blackmail.

Alas, McCain's proposed reform is only partial. Still better than Obama, however, who refuses to deviate from liberal orthodoxy. But that is the story of his campaign, is it not?

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me@rescam.org

This is just spiteful and unnecessary...

Sewage plant may be renamed after Bush

SAN FRANCISCO, June 24 (UPI) -- A San Francisco group says it has collected enough signatures to put a measure on the ballot to rename a sewage treatment plant after President George W. Bush.

The Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco said they believe renaming the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant when the next president is sworn in would be a "fitting monument to this president's work" -- but they didn't mean it as a compliment, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Tuesday.

The group, which has collected 8,500 signatures that will be analyzed by election workers to ensure at least 7,168 are from registered city voters, said it also hopes to inaugurate the new name with a "synchronized flush" in January.

"It's a very simple yes or no question, and there's no real fiscal impact -- just the cost of re-lettering the sign in front of the plant," said organizer Brian McConnell. "This is the way the democratic process is supposed to work, even though it's a silly idea in some people's eyes."

San Francisco Republican Party Chairman Howard Epstein said the group is abusing the system with their proposal, which he pledged to fight if it makes it to the ballot.

"There's no use other than to make these nut cases feel good," Epstein said. "It's typical San Francisco crazies."

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Calm Chaos Forum...Join Calm Chaos Now

do you pay to steve breen for using his work here.

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"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exist elsewhere in the Universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
Calvin to the Hobbes

here you can find what usa found in iraq

weapons of mass destruction

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"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exist elsewhere in the Universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
Calvin to the Hobbes