Invest in hope

I want to recommend that you click through and read a short article by Jesse Jackson entitled "Invest In Hope, America, Not Despair". Here's something he says about Alabama:

Per-pupil spending on elementary and secondary education in the state is about 60 percent of what it costs to cage a prisoner annually. Tuition at a public university is about one-third the cost of a year in prison, for an in-state student. Alabama is paying millions to house inmates in other states.

Discrimination pervades this system. African-American males are more likely to be stopped and searched, more likely to be arrested if stopped, more likely to be charged if arrested, more likely to be incarcerated if convicted. Of the total of 40 district attorneys, African Americans account for zero, nada, zip.

Now the system is collapsing on itself. There is no space in the prisons. The prison budget is now squeezing the education budget. Conservative judges and politicians are struggling to find ways to release nonviolent offenders early from long sentences to open up spaces for newcomers. And another generation is being tracked into the same mess.
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Alabama — and this country — could invest in hope on the front side instead. Prenatal care, parental education, infant nutrition, health care, day care and preschool, good teachers for the toughest neighborhoods, smaller classes in the early grades, after-school programs — these would give many a fair start and a chance to succeed. It would cost less and generate more productive citizens.

I agree. Investing in hope would cost less than housing people in prison. But as Rev. Jackson points out, the prison-industrial complex lobbies to to keep building more prisons - and to keep them populated.

Well, it's a start!

Take a look at an Reuters article entitled "Supreme Court Rules Against Bush in Global Warming Case":

WASHINGTON - In a defeat for the Bush administration, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that a U.S. government agency has the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions that spur global warming. By a 5-4 vote, the nation’s highest court said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency “has offered no reasoned explanation” for its refusal to regulate carbon dioxide and other emissions from new cars and trucks that contribute to climate change.

The ruling in one of the most important environmental cases to reach the Supreme Court marked the first high court decision in a case involving global warming.

President George W. Bush has opposed mandatory controls on greenhouse gases as harmful to the U.S. economy, and the administration has called for voluntary programs instead of regulation. The states and environmental groups that brought the lawsuit hailed the ruling.

“As a result of today’s landmark ruling, EPA can no longer hide behind the fiction that it lacks any regulatory authority to address the problem of global warming,” Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said.

“Today the nation’s highest court has set the White House straight. Carbon dioxide is an air pollutant, and the Clean Air Act gives EPA the power to start cutting the pollution from new vehicles that is wreaking havoc with our climate,” said David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

This is good news. Now let's see what comes of it.

Good Friday attack?

Frank Ford sent me a very disturbing article from the Jerusalem Post entitled "US ready to strike Iran on Good Friday". Here's an excerpt:

The United States will be ready to launch a missile attack on Iran's nuclear facilities as soon as early this month, perhaps "from 4 a.m. until 4 p.m. on April 6," according to reports in the Russian media on Saturday.

According to Russian intelligence sources, the reports said, the US has devised a plan to attack several targets in Iran, and an assault could be carried out by launching missiles from fighter jets and warships stationed in the Persian Gulf.

Russian news agency RIA Novosti quoted a security official as saying, "Russian intelligence has information that the US Armed Forces stationed in the Persian Gulf have nearly completed preparations for a missile strike against Iranian territory."

The Russian Defense Ministry rejected the claims of an imminent attack as "myths." There was no immediate response from Washington.

I really don't know what to say here except to hope that the report is wrong.

Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan

Just in case you didn't catch this on the mainstream news I really must make sure that you know of some new clues in the Amelia Earhart case. Take a look at this excerpt from a CNN article:

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- It's the coldest of cold cases, and yet 70 years after Amelia Earhart disappeared, clues are still turning up.

Long-dismissed notes of a shortwave distress call beginning, "This is Amelia Earhart ..."

The previously unknown diary of an Associated Press reporter, surfacing after decades.

And a team that has already found aircraft parts and a woman's shoe on a remote South Pacific atoll, hoping to return this year to find more evidence, perhaps even DNA.

If what's known now had been conveyed to searchers then, might Earhart and her navigator have been rescued? It's one of a thousand questions that keep the case from being declared dead, as Earhart herself was a year and a half after she vanished.

I really do recommend that you click through and read the whole article. It's fascinating.

Some wisdom

I wish the reactionary conservatives out there would ponder this:

Whatever is flexible and flowing will tend to grow, whatever is rigid and blocked will wither and die.

- Tao Te Ching

Plastic bag ban

This is good news from an environmental point of view. I am quoting from an article entitled "S.F. FIRST CITY TO BAN PLASTIC SHOPPING BAGS":

Paper or plastic? Not anymore in San Francisco.

The city's Board of Supervisors approved groundbreaking legislation Tuesday to outlaw plastic checkout bags at large supermarkets in about six months and large chain pharmacies in about a year.

The ordinance, sponsored by Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, is the first such law in any city in the United States and has been drawing global scrutiny this week.

"I am astounded and surprised by the worldwide attention," Mirkarimi said. "Hopefully, other cities and other states will follow suit."

Fifty years ago, plastic bags -- starting first with the sandwich bag -- were seen in the United States as a more sanitary and environmentally friendly alternative to the deforesting paper bag. Now an estimated 180 million plastic bags are distributed to shoppers each year in San Francisco. Made of filmy plastic, they are hard to recycle and easily blow into trees and waterways, where they are blamed for killing marine life. They also occupy much-needed landfill space.

I hope if you use plastic bags that you recycle them.

Good one from Bill Maher

Take a look:

And, indeed, the party that flatters itself that they protect America better is the party that has exhausted the military, left the ports wide open and purposefully outed a CIA agent, Valerie Plame.That's not treason anymore? Outing a spy? Did I mention it was one of our spies? And how despicable that Bush's lackeys attempted to diminish this crime by belittling her service, like she was just some chick who hung around the CIA.

- Bill Maher

Friday cat blogging!

Simon

Photo by Cynthia Burgess

Truth

Maimonides

The front wall of the library of Virginia Theological Seminary has this inscribed on it:

Seek the truth, come whence it may, cost what it will.

That has long inspired me. And today I came across this quotation:

Accept the truth from whatever source it comes.

~ Maimonides

Courage, my friends, courage!

Torture suit against Rumsfeld is tossed

Here's something I found in The Boston Globe:

Former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cannot be tried on allegations of torture in overseas military prisons, a federal judge said yesterday. US District Judge Thomas F. Hogan threw out a lawsuit brought on behalf of nine former prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said Rumsfeld cannot be held personally responsible for actions taken in connection with his government job. The lawsuit says the prisoners were beaten, urinated on, shocked, sexually humiliated, burned, locked in boxes, and subjected to mock executions. (AP)

My question is why? WHY can't he be held personally responsible for actions taken in connection with his government job? That makes no sense at all to me.

Leno's observation

This snark is purely tragic:

According to the L.A. Times, insurgents in Iraq are targeting educated people like professors and librarians. ... If the intelligent are targeted and killed, then the only ones left to lead the country will be the ignorant. So, at least they are getting closer to an American-style democracy.

--Jay Leno

Kangaroo court

I really want you to click through and read an article called "American Kangaroo Court Claims Its First Victim" by Amy Goodman. Reading it makes me realize just how far America has fallen from its once noble ideals. Here's how the article gets started.

It is appropriate that a person from Australia, home of the kangaroo, should be the first one dragged before the kangaroo court at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. David Hicks, imprisoned there for more than five years, pleaded guilty Monday to providing material support for terrorism.

The case of Hicks offers us a glimpse into the Kafkaesque netherworld of detentions, kidnappings, torture and show trials that is now, internationally, the shameful signature of the Bush administration. Hicks’ passage through this sham process affords us all an opportunity to demand the closure of Guantanamo and an end to these heinous policies. Conditions may soon exist to shutter the prison, with George Bush’s lame-duck status, the Democratic takeover of Congress, the possible departure of Guantanamo’s arch-defender and architect, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and, if recent reports are true, a desire to close the prison on the part of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. These bogus military commission trials amplify global contempt for the Guantanamo prison.

The Pentagon claims that Hicks was in Afghanistan fighting against the United States, then was apprehended by the Northern Alliance in late 2001 while fleeing to Pakistan. After transfer to U.S. military control, he was moved around various detention facilities and, he says, brutally beaten and sodomized. By January 2002 he was in Guantanamo. He was subjected to repeated interrogations. He witnessed other prisoners being beaten and terrorized with dogs. He was at times kept in total darkness, at times in continual bright light (he has grown his hair to chest length so he can cover his eyes to allow him to sleep). He had no access to a lawyer for more than a year or knowledge of the charges against him. Others, those lucky enough to have lawyers or to have actually gotten out, tell similar tales of continual cold, of desecration of the Quran and of sexual humiliation designed specifically to torture Muslim men.

Just go read the rest of it. It's not very long. And it will open your eyes.

Cheney visit is protested

Well, this is very interesting. Take a look at part of an article entitled "Cheney Speech at BYU Causes Outcry":

At BYU — in the heart of what has been called the reddest county in the nation — the mere possibility of Vice President Dick Cheney coming to campus is getting some blue blood boiling.

Cheney is scheduled to be Brigham Young University’s keynote speaker at this year’s graduation ceremonies. While it is a day of celebration for many, some BYU administrators and faculty, alongside parents and students, are expressing displeasure with the VP’s visit.
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BYU Marriott School professor Warner Woodworth said that he has received e-mails from all over the world expressing dismay over Cheney’s visit.

Woodworth said that some of those e-mails came from parents and LDS stake presidents, particularly in Latin America, expressing anger that Cheney — whom they called a “warmonger” — will be representing their children and their church.
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Nephi Henry, a BYU student who will be graduating next month, is working with other students in organizing opposition to Cheney’s visit.

Needless to say, there are no plans to cancel Cheney's appearance. But isn't it interesting how very much this man is disliked - among conservatives, no less.

Health care and unions

Here are some excerpts from remarks made by Stewart Acuff at the Health Care Industry Conference in Chicago on March 21, 2007:

Apart for the lack of national health insurance, one of the biggest reasons for the rising number of people without health insurance is the long-term corporate and right wing attack on the labor movement and collective bargaining in this country. Non-union workers are five times more likely to lack health insurance coverage than union members. So it is no coincidence that as the freedom to form unions has come under attack — as more and more workers are non-union while fewer are protected by a union contract — that the number of people in this country who lack health insurance has increased.

So if you want to fix the health care mess in this country — we not only need national health insurance — we need to restore workers’ fundamental human right to form unions and bargain collectively!
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The Employee Free Choice Act is the most important legislative proposal since passage of the Wagner Act to protect the fundamental human right of America’s workers to form unions and bargain collectively. Earlier this month, the Employee Free Choice Act – HR 800 – passed the US House of Representatives. This is a tremendous accomplishment. Who would have thought a year ago that in 2007 the House of Representatives would pass this historic landmark bill?

The Employee Free Choice Act does three critical things: it provides for union recognition based on democratic majority sign-up, it provides for first-contract arbitration, and it provides for stiffer and quicker penalties for illegal employer conduct.

Now, of course, the Senate needs to pass it.

Baltimore Orioles

Not the baseball team. The bird. Wouldn't it be something if orioles were no longer found in Maryland? Take a look:

Scientists say the state bird of Maryland, the Baltimore oriole, has been moving north while the state bird of Louisiana, the brown pelican, finds Maryland's climate appealing, The Washington Post reported.

About 1,000 brown pelican chicks hatched in Maryland last year while the Oriole might be forced to shift its territory north as Maryland warms.

"We certainly know that we've been experiencing climate change impacts," said Bill Dennison of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

Sad.