On the Democratic side, the surprise winner is Barack Obama, who is running for president on a long and impressive record of running for president. A mesmerizing speaker, Obama electrifies voters with his exciting new ideas for change, although people have trouble remembering exactly what these ideas are because they are so darned mesmerized. Some people become so excited that they actually pass out. These are members of the press corps.
Obama’s victory comes at the expense of former front-runner Hillary Clinton, who fails to ignite voter passion despite a rip-snorter of a stump speech in which she recites, without notes, all 17 points of her plan to streamline tuition-loan applications.
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In politics, Barack Obama addresses the issue of why, in his 20 years of membership in Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, he failed to notice that the pastor, Jeremiah Wright, is a racist lunatic. In a major televised address widely hailed for its brilliance, Obama explains that . . . Okay, nobody really remembers what the actual explanation was. But everybody agrees it was mesmerizing.
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On the Republican side, John McCain wraps up the nomination and embarks on a series of strategic naps.
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In economic news, the price of gasoline tops $4 a gallon, meaning the cost of filling up an average car is now $50, or, for Hummer owners, $17,500. Congress, responding to the financial pain of the American people, goes into partisan gridlock faster than ever before, with Republicans demanding that the oil companies immediately start drilling everywhere, including cemeteries, and Democrats calling for a massive effort to develop alternative energy sources such as wind, the sun, tides, comets, Al Gore and dragon breath, using technology expected to be perfected sometime this millennium. It soon becomes clear that Congress will not actually do anything, so Americans start buying less gasoline.
Noami Klein is the popular author of a few anti-freedom, anti-market books such as the Shock Doctrine (currently 163 in Amazon’s book ranking). Maybe she’s popular because she doesn’t let the facts get in the way of an interesting story:
I wish this story was a joke, but it’s not. Ten-year-old Alandis Ford took a toy gun to school. According to the police “some children” claim that Alandis threatened other children on the school bus and in his neighborhood-a claim that Alandis denies. To investigate, six sheriff deputies rushed into this 10-year-old’s home, arrested him, booked him, and charged him with possessing a weapon of school property and with terroristic acts.
But this isn’t the only silliness. The school district has suspended him for 10 days and may expel him. The school’s director of public relations, Sherri Viniard, told the TV news:
“Student safety is our primary concern, and although this was a toy gun, it is still a very serious offense and it is a violation of school rules. We will not tolerate weapons of any kind on school property.”
Apparently what the school district really doesn’t tolerate is thought and reason. Calling a toy gun a weapon does it make it a weapon. A pencil or a book make much better weapons than a toy gun, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the school district.
If you would like to tell the Sherri Viniard how silly her school district’s position is, her email address is viniard.sherri@newton.k12.ga.us. Or you can email the superintendent of Newton County Schools, Dr. Steve Whately at whatley.steve@newton.k12.ga.us or call him at770-787-1330.
The only way that schools are going to back off from their silly “no tolerance” policies if we protest and shame them for implementing unjust rules.
As we consider Blago’s criminal activities, we ought to think about other political wrongdoing. Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon:
The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report issued on Thursday — which documents that “former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba” and “that Rumsfeld’s actions were ‘a direct cause of detainee abuse‘ at Guantanamo and ‘influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques … in Afghanistan and Iraq’” — raises an obvious and glaring question: how can it possibly be justified that the low-level Army personnel carrying out these policies at Abu Ghraib have been charged, convicted and imprisoned, while the high-level political officials and lawyers who directed and authorized these same policies remain free of any risk of prosecution?
Greenwald has a decent point. But there is a difference between authorizing policies that can lead to abuses and actually carrying out abuses. Maybe I’m drawing a distinction without a difference. I’ll have to think about it some more.
