The Mound of Sound

The US Constitution provides that only a “natural born citizen” can become president of the United States. There’s now some uncertainty over whether John McCain fits the bill.

McCain, you see, wasn’t exactly born in the United States but in a US military base hospital in the Panama Canal Zone.

Nobody seriously believes McCain will be disqualified but some argue the constitution is unclear. From the Washington Post:

“…Sarah H. Duggin, an associate law professor at Catholic University who has studied the “natural born” issue in detail, said the question is “not so simple.” While she said McCain would probably prevail in a determined legal challenge to his eligibility to be president, she added that the matter can be fully resolved only by a constitutional amendment or a Supreme Court decision.

“The Constitution is ambiguous,” Duggin said. “The McCain side has some really good arguments, but ultimately there has never been any real resolution of this issue. Congress cannot legislatively change the meaning of the Constitution.”

Senators sympathetic to McCain’s position, including Democrats Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), dropped an earlier attempt to quell the eligibility controversy with legislation. McCaskill acknowledged in an interview that there is “no way” to completely resolve the question short of a constitutional amendment, a cumbersome process which could not be concluded before November. “

Then there’s New Hampshire resident Fred Hollander who just won’t let it go. Fred has filed suit in a US District Court claiming that McCain isn’t a “natural born citizen.” Good luck with that one Fred.

McClatchey Newspapers reports that Mr. Straight Talk has done it again. He’s now calling for Russia to be ousted from the G-8.

They’re called “Dead Zones,” vast areas of ocean that are so hpoxic, lacking in oxygen, that they can’t support marine life. Global warming climate change models predicted that these dead zones in tropical areas of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans would expand and the latest research shows those predictions were spot on. From the Los Angeles Times:

“Oxygen-starved waters are expanding in the Pacific and Atlantic as ocean temperatures increase with global warming, threatening fisheries and other marine life, a study published today concludes.

Most of these zones remain hundreds of feet below the surface, but they are beginning to spill onto the relatively shallow continental shelf off the coast of California and are nearing the surface off Peru, driving away fish from commercially important fishing grounds, researchers have found.

Researchers believe these phenomena are linked to subsurface layers of hypoxic water in the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans that have been thickening over the last 50 years, according to the analysis published today in the journal Science.

The study, led by Lothar Stramma at the University of Kiel in Germany, warns that the spread of hypoxic waters that suffocate marine life is consistent with climate models forecasting what would happen as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere.

The trend, the study points out, eerily echoes a scenario that unfolded about 250 million years ago, when 95% of life on Earth went extinct after heat-trapping carbon dioxide spewing from volcanoes warmed the planet and the oceans became stripped of oxygen.”

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-deadzone2-2008may02,0,1285619.story?track=ntothtml

It’s laughable how Republicans and even some bottom-feeding Demutantes are playing up Obama’s former preacher Jeremiah Wright.

Anyone taking a “fair and balanced” look at the role of nutjob preachers in the circles of American power politics would conclude that these political vultures and the media that join them at the carcass are outright racists. You might be drawn to that conclusion when you notice that the only one who gets splashed on your TV screen or in political speeches is that black guy.

Meanwhile, as noted in Consortiumnews.com, the right stays tight with far more dangerous religious extremists of its own:

“… it’s not news that a viciously anti-American religious figure has invested billions of dollars in financing the U.S. conservative movement and put fat wads of cash into the pockets of many prominent Republicans, including members of President George W. Bush’s own family.

While Sen. Obama has to explain what he knew and when he knew it about Wright’s angry sermons, the Bush Family floats above its financial and political associations with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a South Korean theocrat who had denounced the United States as “Satan’s harvest” and likened American women to “prostitutes.”

In his angry sermons, Moon has gone further than saying “God-damn America” – as Wright did – to vowing to sweep aside American democracy and individualism as he builds a one-world state.

Once his plan to “swallow entire America” is complete, Moon told his followers in one sermon, there will be “some individuals who complain inside your stomach. However, they will be digested.”

But Moon’s hatred of America is not deemed news, in part, because Moon has financed the Washington Times since 1982 to the tune of more than $3 billion, according to former newspaper insider George Archibald.

Moon also has lavished many millions of dollars more to pay for conservative conferences and to bail out key right-wing figures when they have found themselves in financial distress, including Republican direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie and the late Jerry Falwell.”

The ConsortiumNews account is pretty revealing:

http://consortiumnews.com/2008/050108.html

As near as I can tell, the answer is “nobody.”

Hamid Karzai has been negotiating with the Taliban for quite a while. Karzai’s opposition, the United National Front, aka the Northern Alliance warlords, are trying to negotiate a separate deal of their own that would see an alliance of Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and Taliban warlords (there’s something to sit up and notice), the Brits have been dealing with the Taliban for a couple of years, we’re now trying to get into talks with them and even the Americans, for all their swagger and John Wayne “gung ho” every now and then let slip that they’re talking to the Taliban also. The Pakistanis are sure talking to them, even negotiating a ceasefire deal.

These must be heady times indeed for the Taliban leadership. So many calls, so many offers. That must be such a body blow to their morale, eh? My guess? I think they’ll find the United National Front overtures most enticing. It’s coming from their former enemies, the Northern Alliance tribal warlords, and it offers a means to marginalize both their Pashtun rival, Karzai, and the infidels, NATO and the US. I mean what’s not to like in that deal?

Is it just coincidence that, at this very moment, both the Russians and the Chinese are firming up their interest in the region? Ya think? Look at it this way, if you want to build pipelines across Afghanistan to Iran (Russia and China) and railroads into Afghanistan (China), are you going to back Hamid Karzai, the guy who, seven years down the road, is still struggling to keep a grip on square one? Or are you going to look for a deal with the locals who have expanded their power and who effectively control most of the country, the UNF?

The Russians know all too well what happens to infidels when the Afghan tribes get together. I’m sure the Chinese know the same thing. Karzai knows, he was in on the last one. Maybe we’re even figuring it out. That would certainly account for our recently lowered expectations, our seismic shift from idealism to realism. We’re keeping one eye over our shoulder as we’re busy with the other one looking for the door.

I think we’re going to pay a big price for our years of demonizing the Taliban when we ought to have been focusing our very limited effort on al-Qaeda. Now we’re trying to drive a wedge between the two of them after seven years of relentlessly driving them into each others’ arms. My Lord, what must they make of our clumsy childishness?

One other event that I just can’t write off to coincidence – the pending retirement of General Rick Hillier. Even ultra-right scribes like Peter Worthington were aghast that Hillier would step down after having just won a three-year extension on the war for his troops. No one can say for sure what’s in Hillier’s mind but I think he owed it to his soldiers to see this through – after all he expects nothing less of them, does he? Somehow my mind keeps coming back to that Vietnamese phrase – di di mau.

Memo to Lardo:

We’ve checked and, sure enough, you don’t pay the public and armed services of Canada, we do. Their job description requires them to work for the best interests of the country, not for the furtherance of your political fortunes.

Look here, you abysmal control freak, take the gags off the public service and the armed forces. If they’ve got something to say, let us hear it. When we want to hear from you, we’ll let you know.

Let’s have their opinions, their insights, their considerable experience and invaluable knowledge, not your censored, perverted version of what you would have us believe. You don’t have to agree with them and you certainly have every opportunity and the full means of Parliament at your disposal to explain your position when you disagree and choose another path. If you’ve got a case, make it and, this being a democracy, we’ll decide.

You see, Stevie, when you gag the public and armed services, you impose a form of partisan, political censorship on them and on us. That’s undemocratic and what’s undemocratic in Canada is unpatriotic. You’re being unpatriotic and those who shill for you are just as unpatriotic and even those who merely sit on their hands and support you are not one bit better.

Look here chum, we have plenty of reason to be suspicious of you and yours. If you’ll do something this egregious when you have only a bare minority government, how underhanded will you be if we ever give you a majority?

Every now and then, Steve, you can’t help but reveal just how deeply you hold the country and the Canadian people in contempt. It’s time you showed a little respect, Steve, for Canada, for Parliament and for us lowly Canadians. We’re not cattle and we’re sure as hell not your serfs either.

There are times when Canadians have to put aside their political affiliations and stand up for the country, its institutions and its very democracy.

In my opinion, it speaks volumes for the patriotism of Tories that they sit mute, continuing to support their Leader (do I need to translate that into the original German?) when he steadily gags our government, establishing himself as some sort of autocratic emir served by a cadre of faceless, unaccountable political commissars in the Prime Minister’s Office, the PMO.

The essence of democracy is the free flow of information and transparency. There is no free flow of information, no full democracy, when the flow of information is constrained and filtered and manipulated for political advantage. This is not democratic, this is not the Canadian way, but it is very much the way of the Conservative Leader, Harper.

First he gagged Canada’s environmental scientists, forcing them to communicate to the public only through the PMO. Information would be submitted to Harper’s political commissars to be censored, shrunken, warped and shaped, not to reflect the truth but to reflect Mr. Harper’s chosen message. That, friends, is thought control and nothing but.

How many conservatives did you hear howling in protest, coming to defend Canadian democracy when Harper raised that dark curtain around the environment ministry? How many conservatives finally rose up to defend Canada when he did the very same thing to the defence ministry? How many chose Canada over Stephen Harper? Damned few.

Now Harper wants to muzzle Parliament’s independent agencies, institutions such as Elections Canada and the Auditor General in the very same way. The Harper regime has issued draft rules that would require even those who are supposed to be independent, at arm’s length from the government, to submit their intended public statements to the PMO for vetting or filtering, blatant censorship.

Even with the Tory rank and file sitting mute in the face of this outrage, the rest of us, which includes the overwhelming majority that did not vote for this thug, need to yell “no, enough”. We need to show conservatives and their Leader that this is Canada, not Stevieland, and that he’s not the choice of most Canadian voters and he can damn well stop acting like he’s the Dick Cheney of the True North.

It’s time to take the gags off the environment and defence ministries and it’s time to stop Harper muzzling Elections Canada, the Auditor General and others.

Here’s something to think about. If Harper will so blatantly abuse Canadian democracy while he’s in a minority, what excesses will he resort to should we ever be blind enough to give the Tories a majority?