I've been waaaaay too busy these past few days with school and music-related stuff, but if I had been blogging, here are a few of the things I would have mentioned:
+ The fight to grant the telecom companies legal immunity for their assistance with the Bush Administration's FISA-violating surveillance program rages on. As Bush's tortured explanation at his recent press conference made clear, this really isn't about catching terrorists; it is about hiding the truth about the lawbreaking. If Bush's explanation doesn't convince you, the behavior of the telco's should: they aren't even bothering to fight for immunity. But don't get your hopes up - it isn't that they see how truly radical and authoritarian this program is. Far more likely, it is that they are already protected.
+ Karl Rove, math genius, has predicted that a US withdrawal from Iraq would send oil prices up from $100 to $200 per barrel. Some back of the envelope math.... The US consumes about 13 million barrels of oil per day, roughly 4.750 billion barrels per year. Assuming a $100 price jump, that's an additional $475 billion per year spent on oil, with roughly half of it being sent overseas. Meanwhile, we are currently spending about $12.5 billion per month, or $150 billion per year in Iraq, with recent estimates placing the total long-term cost of the war in Iraq at between $3 and $7 trillion. In other words, were we to forgone a war in Iraq and instead imposed a $100 per barrel oil tax, we would have saved money. Never mind what else we could have all that extra cash.
+ 1 in every 100 Americans is now behind bars. That's 1 in 54 adult males and 1 in every 15 black adult males. And in many states, spending on prisons is now equal to spending on higher education. If you don't see why this is a problem for our collective future, I worry about your sanity.
+ Back in 2004, Bill Clinton said the following:
Now, one of Clinton's laws of politics is this. If one candidate is trying to scare you and the other one is try get you to think, if one candidate is appealing to your fears and the other one is appealing to your hopes, you better vote for the person who wants you to think and hope.
I always knew there was a reason I liked him.
+ Wikileaks.org, a site that will likely be one of the lynchpins of future muckraking and whistleblowing journalism, is back online after a judge rescinded his previous order shutting the site down. His reasoning? No prior restraint. Well done, sir.
+ Many Americans laugh at the French for taking six weeks of vacation per year. Many of those very same Americans are devoted supporters of our current president. I wonder if they know he averages 9+ weeks of vacation each year?
+ Major media outlets are finally noticing that McCain has a long established habit of lying about his own record. Its a good start, but they need to dig deeper. The list is very, very long.
+ If you want to understand why so few Americans seem to actively care about the war, look no further than this:
It seems that whereas 12.2 percent of the population served in World War II, and 4.3 percent of the population served in Vietnam, just 0.5 percent of Americans have served in our current conflicts.
Subscribe to this blog's feed
