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The Expansionist
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
 
Shut Down WikiLeaks, Execute Everyone Responsible. It is not for private persons to declassify classified documents just because THEY think there is no need for secrecy. If the policies by which materials that do not need to be classified ARE classified, needs to be changed, that is a case that can be made without STEALING documents. The publication of 92,000 classified documents by a website is wholesale ESPIONAGE, and should be punished by DEATH to everyone responsible.
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If a Taliban spy who somehow managed to penetrate the Pentagon or CIA, stole those documents and turned them over to the Taliban's leadership, no one would have any difficulty in classifying that as espionage. Ergo, if ANYONE steals such documents and turns them over to the Taliban and other enemies, he is EQUALLY guilty of espionage. Everyone who participates in such transfer is as well guilty of espionage, including any media outlet, including The New York Times. The Times is not entitled to receive classified documents; it is not entitled to reveal for the whole world, including the Taliban and Pakistanis cooperating with the Taliban, what those documents contain. The Times is guilty of espionage, and should be punished with extreme severity, up to and including death to the writers and editors involved, and the seizure and closure of the entire New York Times news organization. (FYI, I worked briefly for the NYTimes company many years ago, in a noneditorial capacity. I was very happy there. I walked to work and was paid more than my job paid in other types of companies.)
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The paper edition of the Times is in any case threatened by the same forces that have shut down other newspapers. We would simply be hastening the process, and shutting down TNYT's electronic publishing operations as well. It's not an issue of freedom of the press. It is an issue of ESPIONAGE. Would anyone have trouble condemning the Times if it published, on June 5th, 1944, the plans for the D-Day invasion of June 6th, 1944? I don't think so.
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The Afghan war is not yet over, and the revelation of secret U.S. military documents may empower the Taliban and Pakistanis in cahoots with the Taliban, to wage their war against not just the United States, not just NATO, but also the world more effectively. This is not a trivial matter, but IS espionage in time of war, and a comparison to June 5th, 1944 is entirely apt.
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This mass espionage is not just espionage. It is indeed treason under the definition in the Constitution: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." No honest person can pretend that this mass release of documents has not given the Taliban "aid and comfort". Ergo, the spy who stole those documents and any U.S. news organization or individual American reporter or editor who published them is guilty of both espionage and treason, and should be executed for those crimes. Quickly. Let's behead them, as their friends in Afghanistan so like to do to their enemies. (The only possible "out" is that the Afghan war is not a declared war. For reasons I do not understand, Congress has given up the power to declare wars but just gone along with what are, as a consequence, arguably illegal military actions.)
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The website WikiLeaks.org should be shut down, and every mirror or backup of the stolen documents destroyed. Anyone who tries to protect a copy of ANY of those documents should as well be executed, preferably by beheading.
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The hypocrisy of the managers of that site is astounding: they reveal secrets, but protect their sources! That is, they have the right to violate other people's secrets but keep their own. KILL them.
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Were Soviet spies, or Americans spying for the Soviet Union, entitled to claim as legal defense that the Soviet Union had a right to know about U.S. or NATO plans of every type that involved the Soviet Union? No, they were not. And WikiLeaks just does not have any defense for revealing secret military documents in time of war. It is espionage on the grandest of scales, and should be punished as grave espionage has always, and properly, been punished: by death.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,413 — for Israel.)

Friday, July 23, 2010
 
Lessons from the Sherrod Affair. The folly of a "rush to judgment" is one of the lessons to be drawn from the firing of U.S. Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod because of an edited videotape that misrepresented what she had said in public, in order to portray her as an anti-white racist, whereas the full tape shows that she had an epiphany 24 years ago (when an employee of a George state government entity, not USDA), that enabled her to rise above her own prejudicial inclinations.
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'Fire in haste, repent at leisure' (an alteration of an old saying, "Marry in haste, repent at leisure") might also apply.
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But the indignation has gone a tad far. We need to bring back balance.
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Yes, the behavior of the Department of Agriculture in forcing Ms. Sherrod to pull off the road, when she had been driving somewhere, and text-message a resignation to the Department, was preposterous, ill-considered haste.
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But once the facts of the case had been made known to Agriculture Secretary Vilsack, he publicly repented, apologized, and offered Ms. Sherrod another job. I haven't heard why he didn't just reinstate her to the job she was forced to resign from. Nor do I know if the job offered as replacement was a step down, a step up, or a simple lateral move. Still, Vilsack did NOT repent at leisure, but acted quickly, once the scam had been revealed. That is to his credit, so we should be glad of that and thus not kick ourselves too hard over his initial bad judgment. He could have pridefully tried to cover his ass and justify his unjustifiable behavior. There are lots of places and lots of governmental functionaries where that would have been the response, and Ms. Sherrod would have remained falsely accused and out of work. So let's congratulate ourselves on having an Administration that quickly saw what the right thing was to do, and did it.
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Second, the scam held for less than 24 hours, before it all unraveled. That's good too.
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Plainly the head of the NAACP should NEVER have issued a statement without contacting the local branch where the speech in question took place, to ask if the video, as edited, fairly represented what Ms. Sherrod had said. Once the local branch notified him that the edited tape was UNfair, Ben Jealous, President of the national NAACP, did apologize for his own rush to judgment. A blogpost by Dr. Jonathan David Farley on The Huffington Post today says Jealous should resign. It provocatively concludes:
NAACP president Ben Jealous should resign for slavishly [interesting choice of word, no?] serving right-wing racists, and the now embarrassingly useless NAACP should disband.
I wouldn't go that far. I hate to sound moderate, because any regular reader of this blog will know that I am an extremist. But it might be enuf for Jealous to have been humiliated by rightwingers. Perhaps he now knows not even to try to reach out to the Radical Right with any kind of mollifying rhetoric. Perhaps a successor to a resigned Jealous would be more circumspect when the next attack on a black official by rightwingers rears its ugly head, but still be inclined to try to be 'measured' in his own rhetoric. The NAACP needs to act with zeal, fervor, indignation. And perhaps Mr. Jealous will brook no further bull from the Radical Right, in the fashion of "Once burned, twice shy".
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As for the lessons of believing the worst about someone without due diligence, I think many people in media are now on notice that they CANNOT take at face value just everything a rightwing blogger or 'news organization' like Fox 'News' says, but will know to do their own investigation, from primary sources, before passing along rightwing propaganda.
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There is one last point I'd like to make: Ms. Sherrod should have REFUSED to resign, but gone to the media herself and threatened legal action for wrongful discharge. She may be too sweet for her own good — and ours. She had the kind of national attention to expose fraud and cowardice in the Federal Government, which lower-prominence people unfairly treated do not have. Her refusal to accept injustice would have emboldened other people to stand up for themselves, even against the might of a massive Federal bureaucracy. No one should ever consent to be wronged, if they can do anything about it. Some people might need to hire a lawyer, which they cannot afford to do, but all she had to do was contact the Georgia NAACP group before which she made her remarks, or CNN, or the Atlanta Constitution. As it turned out, those last two groups did expose the truth, without financial cost nor years in court for Ms. Sherrod.
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What would the USDA have done if Sherrod had said, "No way in hell am I resigning! I did nothing wrong, and the full tape will show that I was making exactly the opposite point, that I had an epiphany and grew from this challenge to my prejudices. If you fire me, I will sue, and not just to get my old job back. Once the truth comes out, it will be you who is humiliated, not me."
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In a Special Comment on Wednesday nite's Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, Olbermann berated the Obama White House for trying to remake President Obama into a bland moderator between the factions in today's political landscape. "It is a freakin' war out here!", said Olbermann, and the President has got to stop trying to make nice with his enemies, who are the Nation's enemies too.
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I concur. Obama gains nothing by trying to be above the fray. He's never going to win over his enemies. All he does, thru inadequate counterattack, is encourage further first-attacks. That is not in the Nation's interest. What we actually need now is a pit bull. No lipstick.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,413 — for Israel.)

Monday, July 19, 2010
 
Lies Per Square Inch. Blowhard British Petroleum is one of the world's biggest producers of lies and nonsense. Everything it has done in the nearly three months since the Deepwater Horizon oilrig explosion and resulting undersea oil eruption started, has been idiotic, and the company's public-relations strategy has been to divert attention from obvious questions rather than answer them. The Obama Administration, caught flatfooted with a regulatory agency that did not have the expertise to regulate intelligently and decisively, pre-empting the feeble and incompetent response of a private, and FOREIGN, corporation, has played pattycake with BP in fouling the Gulf Coast and putting forward absurdly inadequate countermeasures.
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Now BP is pretending that the wisest course is to keep the cap that finally stopped the massive eruption of oil, in place until the well beneath it can be sealed off. What kind of idiot would stop a producing oil well, whose structure is already in place and is already almost certainly better understood than any other on Earth?
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BP knows that there is a big oil reservoir in that location. BP, or some other oil company, will want to drain it of its Black Gold. So why would they want to "kill" it and have to drill ANOTHER well into that same oilfield?
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The present cap has four valves that can carry crude oil out from the wellbore into waiting ships. Isn't that what any oil platform would do, direct oil into tankers? Or perhaps into a pipeline to containers and/or refineries onshore? The well is drilled. It has produced oil. Oh, brother, has it produced oil. So what possible good-faith reason could British Petroleum have for not taking the oil from the well already drilled, and putting it into the world's oil-supply pipeline?
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BP pretends that in order to connect, to the cap, the floating pipes that lead up to the surface, they would have to open the cap for three days. That cannot be true. MSNBC's oil expert says he knows of no reason such a thing would have to be done, inasmuch as there are already valves built into the cap for up to four lines. Those valves are presumably DESIGNED to accept hoses/pipes and open into those pipes once they are connected. So there would be NO need to open the top of the cap, in anyplace but the valves. BP is lying.
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Think about the "pressure" excuse. Pressure means nothing unless it is confined. A pipe from the surface to the wellcap would at most have only the pressure of a column of water in the pipe itself. Water does not keep oil from rising, so a rising column of oil would simply push the water out of the way, with only such pressure as the column of water itself constitutes, and only for that short time, a matter of what? 90 seconds?, before the oil reaches the surface. If that water-column pressure were dangerous, the pipe could be EMPTIED of water before the oil started to flow. Then there would be NO confinement, and only the relatively trivial outward pressure of a rush of oil almost all of whose pressure is directed upward, thru an empty pipe, to the surface. If at the surface it is not confined either, but flows without opposition into a waiting tanker, there is NO pressure problem whatsoever.
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It is essentially impossible to believe anything but that the real reason BP wants to "kill" an oil-producing well rather than collect oil from it, which is the very PURPOSE of oilwells, is that if it starts to harvest oil from that wellbore, there would be an accurate count of how much oil is presently coming out. From that, the wildly varying estimates that have been bandied about, of oil flow in the time the well was pouring oil into the sea, could be firmed up from what is MEASURED as the oil pours into tankers. From that measured flow, mathematicians, working backward, would be able to calculate the outpour thru all the days of various caps and no-caps, and come up with a reasonable estimate of how many barrels of oil BP permitted to foul the Gulf. And each such barrel would produce a fine of $4,300. The total estimated fine I have heard is about $20 billion.
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If, however, BP is permitted to "kill" a producing well solely to destroy the evidence of the size of its misdeeds, then the Government can only ASSERT a best-guess, and BP can counter with its own massively understated 'estimates'. The Government says 60,000 barrels a day; BP says a barrel and a half; and we are to draw a compromise figure midway between the Government's and company's estimates: 30,000 barrels a day. No.
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$20B sounds like an astounding amount of money. And it is, except for a company of British Petroleum's size. BP had revenues last year of $74.4 billion. Its profits for full-year 2009, as reported on its own website, were $14 billion, "down 45 per cent on the record full year profit of 2008". If I have done my math right, and $14B = 55% of 2008 profits, then 2008 profits were $25.45B. A news story says BP's 2008 profit was actually $25.6 billion. I don't know why there's the discrepancy ($14 (billion) divided by 55 = 0.2545, times 100 = $25.45 (billion). Tho $0.15 may not seem like a big discrepancy, if you put "billion" by it, it becomes $150 million, a nice chunk of change. I could live on that for over a year!
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BP already forwent one quarter's profit payout to shareholders, in creating the $20B trust fund for compensation to Gulf Coast residents injured by its oil spill. If it had to forgo another three, or even four quarters of profit payout to shareholders, BP itself would easily survive as a corporate entity. The people, mainly in Britain, whose retirement income is partly dependent upon BP payouts could suffer, unless the retirement fund in which they are invested unloads BP stock for something deemed more solid. Still, BP's prospects beyond this momentary catastrophe are good. What major transnational oil company has bad prospects?
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Plainly it makes best economic sense now simply to regard the Deepwater Horizon well, as capped, as a well in regular production, and sell its production on the open market. Thus BP's economic self-interest would seem to require it to open the well to production. That would, incidentally, give us an actual measure of what is happening today.
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Is BP going to assert that a present, controlled flow is GREATER than the eruptive flow of the 85 (86?) days the well was uncontrolled? On what basis could BP make such a claim? If anything, the controlled flow into tankers would be LESS than the earlier, uncontrolled flow, if the reservoir has been at all significantly drained, as would reduce the upward pressure on what remains.
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The Government of the United States must not permit BP to get away with "killing" a producing well that is 'well' controlled, instead to tap into that very same reserve by means of other wells that use the same kind of "blowout preventer" (it is to laff!) that failed in the Deepwater Horizon well, and which could ALSO fail, presenting a whole new problem! You don't plug a producing well, if your purpose is to produce oil. You harvest the oil that comes out of it. That's what oilwells are for. You never drill an oilwell just to seal it.
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The Obama Administration does indeed face a second "Katrina" in the Gulf Coast region. It must not let the people of the Gulf down, but must have their back and be their champion. And not just because it is the right thing to do, but also because it is the wise thing to do in a midterm election year. Tell them,
The Republicans gave you lax regulation. They told you that 'regulation' is a bad word, and that enlightened self-interest will always ensure that corporations behave in everybody's best interest. What a bunch of bull. It is that baloney that produced the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. And because the regulatory environment of the Bush years gave us a regulator that did not have the expertise it should have had, and the ability to leap into action the instant a crisis occurred, we were unable to step in and control operations in the first 24 hours after the blast. We had to acquire the expertise that should always have been in the hands of the regulators but which the Republicans didn't want regulators to have. We did acquire that expertise, but it took weeks, wasted weeks we shouldn't have had to waste, and wouldn't have had to waste if the regulatory authority under the Republican Administration that preceded us was robust and familiar with the state of the art in deepsea oil-drilling.

We also got BP to set aside $20 billion to compensate you for the harm they've done. No Democrat apologized to BP for insisting it set up a compensation fund — which some Republicans slanderously called a "slush fund" — for YOU. Now we're going to see that you get every dime you're entitled to, because Democrats care about the little guy. Republicans care only about the big guys, the BP's of this world. BP can take care of itself. You, however, cannot protect yourselves against BP. That's what we're here for: a Democratic White House and Democratic Congress to tell BP that they don't own us, they don't control us. We work for the people, of the Gulf Coast and every other square inch of the Nation.

You know why we have Big Government? Because we have Big Corporations, corporations so large that the revenues of individual corporations are greater than the gross national product of entire countries. We never had such large corporations until recently, because we used to have rigorous enforcement of antitrust legislation, so no bank, no oil company, no any-kind-of-company could become "too big to fail". Now we've got to break up these huge, abusive corporations, within the United States, and forbid those based outside the United States from operating here, which will in itself induce many of them to spin-off many of their units into separate companies, which would give the whole world more competition, lower prices, and better services. We've got to make sure that no company thinks it can shut the people of the United States, acting thru their Government, out of the control structure that deals with major catastrophes such as the Gulf oil spill. And we've got to do a better job, from our own, in-house expertise, in handling such catastrophes, not rely upon what the offending corporation says is the best thing to do without being able to make our own independent evaluation of every single word they say.

We admit that we weren't prepared for this horrendous oil spill. But neither was British Petroleum. We held hearings in Congress that indicated that not one other major oil company, nor all of them put together, really knew how to deal with such a catastrophic event. Until they DO know how to handle such a thing, we cannot permit them to use inadequate technology with devices that have just PROVED defective, as might produce another Deepwater Horizon catastrophe — or two more, or three more, or a hundred more.

Are you so desperate for work that you would gladly see your shoreline coated in oil, your fishing and tourist industries destroyed, millions of pelicans, fish, crabs, dolphins, and other wild creatures killed in more catastrophic oil spills; and gladly smell toxic, and potentially cancer-causing fumes from omnipresent oil, every day for the rest of your (shortened) life, and the shortened lives of your children or grandchildren? We, Democrats, are guardians of your economic interests, to be sure. But we are also guardians of the beauty of the sea, the shore, the wetlands, the birds that fly over the sea, the fish within the sea, and the crabs and young creatures of a thousand species in the bayous and wetlands of the Gulf. Given a choice between a few thousand jobs in an occupation that is inherently dangerous to the environment, on the one side, and all the hundreds of thousands or millions of jobs that depend on the beauty and riches that nature bestows upon the people of the Gulf, on the other side, we will choose Nature's riches over technological disasters every time.

You may not have voted for us last time around. We hope you will, however, vote for us this time around, in November, so we can fite even harder and even more effectively, for YOU. Unlike Republicans, we have no trouble choosing between BP and you. We choose you. We'd sure appreciate it if you'd return the favor.
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,412 — for Israel.)

Wednesday, July 14, 2010
 
Trivial American Loss of Life in Afghanistan. The cowardly — or subversive — U.S. media are talking about "an especially deadly 24 hours" and issuing other alarmist and exaggerated reports about casualties in the Afghan conflict. (Curiously, the reports I have seen about a rogue Afghan soldier killing allied soldiers do not say what happened to the attacker! Nor did the CBS report today about that "especially deadly 24 hours" (8 American deaths) say how many of the Taliban fiters were killed. None? 8? More? The news we are getting is ENORMOUSLY suspicious.)
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In World War II, we would have regarded ourselves as extremely lucky if only 8 U.S. soldiers were killed in any given day. So why are the media making a huge stink about a total U.S. death toll in the entire course, to date, of "our longest war" (less than 9 years), of 1,184. That's about 1/6 the death toll of the entire Revolutionary War (8 years). The two current wars together have killed 5,914 U.S. soldiers, as against at least 7,000 and possibly 25,000 for the Revolutionary War, over 405,000 for WWII, and 625,000 for the Civil War.
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Wikipedia has broken down the figures for the daily death toll of our various wars. So how does Afghanistan compare in simple numbers to our other significant wars? "Dead" last. The next lowest toll was the Revolutionary War, at 11 per day. But the population of the U.S. at that time was about 2.5 million, so the death toll as a percentage of the population in the Revolutionary War was 0.899%; that for the "war on terror" (which apparently includes both the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions), a negligible 0.002%. What a bunch of pussies Americans have become, that they are appalled by the infinitesimal death toll suffered by our all-volunteer military.
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Postscript, July 17th: I should have mentioned three individual days in recent U.S. history in which the death toll was greater than that of the entire course thus far of the Afghan war: (1) 9/11 (c. 2,800, on U.S. territory), (2) Pearl Harbor (c. 2,400, also on U.S. soil), and (3) D-Day (2,500). Each of these one-day death tolls was more than TWICE the total death toll in Afghanistan over the course of nine years. So why on Earth are the media and certain groups in the larger society bitching and moaning about 1,184 U.S. deaths over nine years? That is truly disgusting and contemptible.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,730 — for Israel.)

Friday, July 02, 2010
 
Incompetence on Oil Spill. Every day that goes by without anyone containing BP's grotesque, massive oil spill, I am astonished at the stupidity of British Petroleum and the U.S. Federal Government. There have to be ways to contain the leak, but the best BP has managed in 2½ months was to capture around half (if that), before its employees stupidly and incompetently caused a mini-submarine to stop even that collection rate. I'm not even sure there has been any reattachment of the cap that was working partially for a while. Certainly the video we see every day does not appear to show a cap in place.
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Why is this so difficult? Oil is lighter than water, so would rise even without pressure from deep under the sea floor, which expels it forcefully and directly upward. So why can't BP simply place a circle of barges around the surface area onto which the rising oil erupts, with deep and tall booms between barges, as to create a capture field from which skimmer hoses can remove it to nearby tankers? Why can't they put a giant funnel over the broken pipe? A funneling structure need not be solid metal, but could be a metal ring with some kind of heavy sheeting — plasticized canvas, plastic, light aluminum sheets cobbled together somehow. It need not even feed into a pipe connected to a tanker hose, but just control the flow to channel it into a floating containment area created by barriers of size, say 20 feet below water, 10 above. Barges could serve as the above-water bulwark. They could lower and hold in place curtain walls underwater. Skimmer hoses could then vacuum up the oil from that containment area. Reports early in this emergency indicated that what had been a larger oil spill in the Persian Gulf had been successfully contained by a circle of tankers, skimming. Why wasn't that plan followed?
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I don't know how far above the sea floor the broken pipe is. If it were very near the floor, you'd think we could just dump the kinds of huge rocks we build jetties from and fill in the spaces between them with sand and mud, then inject concrete as well to encase the leak in a chunk of artificial sea floor. Instead, they tried to seal the leak mechanically by injecting various materials into the blowout "preventer" alone, in a single weekend. Might they have been able to create a new, artificial sea floor over the entire area by now, after more than two months?
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I'm certainly not an expert in containing oil leaks, but it is plain that BP and the Federal Government aren't either. Both should be, and they should have a stockpile of many alternative methods ready to deploy, ten or fifteen deep, not one or two.
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Beyond containing the spill, there is cleaning it up. We were told, early on, that there are bacteria that can eat oil, but we now hear nothing about bacteria being sprayed onto the oil, not at the source, not as it floated away, not even just as it approached landfall. Are they using bacteria or not? All I have heard of, being sprayed onto the oil at sea, is chemical dispersants. It would not astonish me if the chemical dispersants actually kill oil-eating bacteria, so stupid have the oil executives proven in this calamity, tho I haven't heard anything at all about the compatibility of the two things: that is, whether dispersant and bacteria would work together, in double-whammy fashion, or one would interfere with the other.
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The pressure from media and government seems to have moved completely away from the idea of containing the oil, to merely cleaning up what gets to shore instead. Here again, we hear not one word about oil-eating bacteria. Bacteria being what they are, if they really work you don't have to use a lot in any one area, because if they eat oil and there is lots of oil to eat, they will naturally reproduce massively, to take advantage of that food source.
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What we see is frustration from the public and abysmal incompetence from BP and the Government. Shouldn't there be some kind of governmentally-coordinated Task Force of ALL the major oil companies, to bring together the best minds and the resources of oil-spill experts and equipment available at BP, Exxon, Shell, Chevron, and every other major oil producer?
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The Louisiana government is actually spending time, money, and energy trying to increase the exact same kind of deep-sea oil drilling that blew up in Louisiana's face, and the people of Louisiana have been split into people so worried about unemployment in the oil industry that they do not unite to insist that the vast unemployment in other industries produced by oil catastrophes is just not worth the relative few jobs in deep-sea drilling. Divide and conquer is still the rule. BP sets the public against the Federal Government to take the heat off itself and its incomprehensible stupidity and incompetence. And it's actually working. The people who caused the problem are not being held to account for it, but are blaming the Government for something in which it has no expertise. Should the Federal Government have such expertise? It would appear that now, and going forward, it must. But the Feds didn't blow up that oil well.
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There are two things we have in excess: incompetence and spilled oil. What the public does not have is a clear sense of whom to blame, and whose heads, if any, should roll, come this November's Congressional elections. Republicans in Congress and the Louisiana or nearby state governments haven't come up with any more solutions than have Democrats in the White House, Congress, or Department of the Interior. Indeed, many Republicans have taken a kneejerk pro-business, pro-laissez faire capitalism stance that says it is BP's job to explore for oil, not clean up its mess, which we are to believe is the Government's responsibility — even tho Republicans aren't supposed to want Government to do even more than it has already been doing, as a general principle. That tack is at present producing backlash on the part of people in the areas affected or threatened by the present oil mess. But it's a lot easier to blame the Federal Government for not cleaning things up in a hurry than it is for Republicans to admit that laissez-faire capitalism is a monster that devours everyone and everything, and spits out toxic waste.
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It's easier to fix blame than to fix oil spills. There is an expression in the South, "fixing [or "fixin'"] to" do something. The Republicans are fixing to win a majority in both houses of Congress by fixing blame rather than fixing the problem. Will it work? Is blaming more valued by the electorate than solving? We shall see in November — especially if the relief wells, after their anticipated completion in August, do NOT stop all the oil.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,411 — for Israel.)

Thursday, July 01, 2010
 
Judicial Dictatorship. The United States is constantly dictated to by unelected judges, doing things that the people don't want. And everyone feigns impotence: "There's nothing we can do about a Supreme Court decision." Bull. I have addressed aspects of this problem in the past, but no one has done a thing to remedy it, so I feel compelled to address it again.
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Here are four things we can do ANY TIME we are enraged by a preposterous decision of the Supreme Court.
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(1) Ignore a plainly unconstitutional ruling. Nowhere does the Constitution authorize the Supreme Court to void a law duly passed in accordance with the procedure set out in the Constitution itself, which entrusted interpretation of what is and is not Constitutional to the elected representatives of the people. Further, the Constitution nowhere gives the Supreme Court any jurisdiction whatsoever over either of the other branches of Government, the Executive (President and executive departments) and Legislative (Congress). No, the branches were supposed to be separate and equal. One is not supposed to interfere with either of the others. The Supreme Court is supreme among Federal courts, not over the other branches of Government, nor the states, nor the people.
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The Courts have NO jurisdiction over, for instance, the day-to-day operations of the Executive Branch as regards, for instance, whether to permit or forbid oil companies to drill on Federal territory. The Department of the Interior cannot tell the Federal Courts how to rule on cases before them; the Courts cannot tell the Department of the Interior how to run its operations. Period.
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Nor is the Court authorized to void a gun-control law passed by Congress or any other governmental legislature, that restricts gun ownership to anyone who is not part of a "well regulated militia". Contrary to the Supreme Court's preposterous ruling this week, individuals who are not part of a governmental militia, or even police force; who may never have had so much as one second's training in the use of firearms; and who are not subject to direction by a militia command, do NOT have a right to bear arms. The introductory language of the Second Amendment is plain. It is there ONLY because it constitutes a caveat, a limitation, on what follows: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." There would be no reason whatsoever for such language to be in the text of the Second Amendment if it had no meaning. So the Supreme Court is 100% wrong to find that it means nothing, and that everyone, whether part of a militia or not, has the right to keep and bear arms.
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So the first defense against judicial tyranny is disobedience. In the immortal words of President Andrew Jackson, "John Marshall [then-chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court] has made his decision. Now let him enforce it."
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The Constitution gives the Supreme Court ZERO power to enforce its decisions. Therefore, WHETHER to abide by a Supreme Court decision and enforce it upon ANYBODY is wholly within the POWER of the Executive Branch. If the President, or other executive authority, decides that the Supreme Court is just plain wrong, it has the actual, physical POWER to IGNORE that decision, and any decision of the Supreme Court. That is the reality. But we don't live in reality. We live in fantasy, in which we "have" to do what the Supreme Court says. No, we really don't.
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There's another quotation relevant here, this one, alas, from Josef Stalin: "How many divisions does the Pope have?" He properly dismissed the notion that lectures from the Papacy had any real force in the world. The Pope thus has only such influence as he is given. In exactly the same way, the Supreme Court does NOT determine what the law is when it stands AGAINST the Executive Branch, or the Congress, and pretends the right to interpret the Constitution. It does not have that authority under the Constitution, and if other people, far more numerous than five old fools, should decide that the Constitution says no such thing — read it for yourself — then they can simply ignore those old fools and tell them to go f*k themselves.
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(2) Forbid Court Review. Congress can pass legislation with a proviso that it cannot be reviewed by the courts. The Constitution, in Article III, section 2 states:

In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction . In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

Texas Republicans want to restore sodomy laws and criminalize same-sex marriage, and want Congress to use this provision to forbid the courts from voiding such statutes.
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This means that Congress does NOT have to permit the courts, including the Supreme Court, to review everything but can specifically provide exceptions, forbidding courts to rule on whatever Congress chooses to put beyond the courts' reach. This provision was inserted in the Constitution to ensure that elected officers of Government, not unelected judges, have the last word in what the Government does. That principle has been lost, and the notion has arisen that unelected judges are the be-all and end-all of Government, and the electorate has nothing to say about what Government may and may not do. NEVER was that intended by the Framers of the Constitution.
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So the quick fix to any offensive ruling by the Supreme Court is to pass a new law that contains the provision that courts are forbidden to review that law. It can even provide that any attempt by a judge to void that law is an act of insurrection against the duly constituted legal authority of the Government of the United States, punishable by DEATH.
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(3) Impeachment. Congress has the right to remove any Federal judge for any reason (or pretext) it chooses, on the ground that s/he has misused or failed to use properly the authority vested in him or her. The relevant language in the Constitution is this, from Article III, section 1:

The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior[.]
This is a much lower standard than set out for impeachment of a President or other officer of the Executive Branch:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Judges can be removed any time their "Behavior" ceases to be "good".
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Perhaps we need to remove half the Supreme Court — or every single member, and START OVER. Even a single impeachment would warn the Supreme Court in perpetuity that it had better watch its step, lest its members be removed from office — and possibly jailed for abuse of authority, which Congress can define as ever it wishes.
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(4) Constitutional Amendment. Since putting any legislation beyond judicial review entails the risk of Congressional tyranny, rather than judicial tyranny, at the expense of the citizenry's basic rights, it is probably not a good idea to encourage Congress to forbid judicial review as a general remedy. The wisest of the four courses I outline here is thus to amend the Constitution to expressly permit judicial review but allow Congress, with or without the President, to overrule the Supreme Court on anything and everything whatsoever, by specified supermajorities. For instance, 2/3 of both houses of Congress plus the President, or 3/4 of Congress without the President.
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Such an amendment would grant the courts a right the Constitution does not presently grant at all, but force the Supreme Court to watch out, and not abuse its new right to void legislation, lest Congress start overruling the Court as a habit they resort to with ever-increasing ease. In the present Constitution, the one supreme branch of the Federal Government is CONGRESS, which is given the power to pass legislation over the veto of the President, and to put legislation beyond the reach of the courts. The Supreme Court has undone the intent of the Framers, and since there is no provision GRANTING judicial review within the Constitution, there is equally no provision to check the power of the Court. Had the Framers intended the Court to have the right to veto legislation, they would have provided as well a mechanism for override of a Court ruling just as they provided a mechanism for overriding a Presidential veto.
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Override of a Supreme Court veto of legislation would complete the system of checks and balances the Framers intended to keep the behavior of the Federal Government moderate and democratic. The Supreme Court has seized and usurped authority the Framers never intended it to have. You have to remember that they were writing the Constitution from the vantage point of their traditions. Since the United States was new, the only legal traditions of long standing in their universe were British. And there was no judicial review in Britain. The Framers of the Constitution did not anticipate that the courts would dare even to try to void a law passed in accord with their new Constitution, and they certainly did not authorize courts to do any such thing.

The power of courts of law to review the actions of the executive and legislative branches is called judicial review. Though judicial review is usually associated with the U.S. Supreme Court, which has ultimate judicial authority, it is a power possessed by most federal and state courts of law in the United States. The concept is an American invention. Prior to the early 1800s, no country in the world gave its judicial branch such authority. [Emphasis added] * * *

The most important rule of judicial restraint is that statutes are presumptively valid, which means that judges assume legislators did not intend to violate the Constitution. It follows that the burden of proof is on the party that raises the issue of unconstitutionality. In addition, if a court can construe a disputed statute in a manner that allows it to remain intact without tampering with the meaning of the words or if a court can decide a case on nonconstitutional grounds, these courses are to be preferred. Finally, a court will not sit in judgment of the motives or wisdom of legislators, nor will it hold a statute invalid merely because it is deemed to be unwise or undemocratic.
Alas, there IS NO RESTRAINT in the U.S. Supreme Court. As Britain's Lord Acton famously observed, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Why should the Supreme Court restrain its tyrannical impulse, when nobody does a damned thing to stop it, no matter how preposterously and arrogantly it may act?
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Thus have we arrived at the absurd situation where a Nation of 308 MILLION people is tyrannized by five old fools. Lord Acton had something to say about dictatorship we, and those five old fools, need to consider.

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist.
This is a polite way of saying that if ever the American people get angry enuf at the arrogant tyranny of the Supreme Court, we can extremely easily kill every member of the Court who infuriates us. We could do it legally, by passing a law that states that voiding a law is punishable by death. Or we could simply storm the Supreme Court building, drag the tyrants out, and hoist them all by a stout rope around their neck. Quick fix.
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The Supreme Court's tyrants are very certain that Americans are gutless losers who will take any abuse the Court may wish to dish out. The American Revolution was, they know, a very long time ago. But in granting every private citizen a right to bear arms, aren't those insane Supreme Court "justices" risking their very lives? They would be, except that Americans really have lost either their will to be free, or their guts.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,409 — for Israel.)


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