I see that the one of the prosecutors in the Zacharias Moussaouai trial said in his closing argument that Moussaoui could not be a martyr because "if he wanted to die, all he had to do was go and throw himself off the Eiffel Tower." This is such a basic misunderstanding of what martyrdom encompasses that I hope the jury votes to put Moussaoui in prison for life just because the prosecutor's argument was so stupid.
Martyrdom does NOT entail committing suicide per se. It entails either (1) killing yourself while at the same time killing a lot of your enemies, or (2) getting your enemy to kill you--the implication being wrongfully to kill you. And since that is precisely what Moussaoui wants, it should not be allowed to happen. One of the defense attorneys made this very claim in his closing. No wonder Moussaoui thinks his attorneys are out to destroy him--they are! They value his life above what he wants. Good for them.
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Dubya's response to the current "crisis" in gasoline prices includes relaxing the clean air standards imposed on oil refineries. La-di-friggin'-da.
He gets to keep his (blind trust) windfall oil profits, he gets to keep the support of the oil companies, he thinks he gets to improve his public standing, he gets to claim that he is "doing something," and he gets to gut the Clean Air Act besides . . . in other words, he gets exactly what he wants, at the expense of the common folk and the air we breathe.
I hope people finally see through this one and excoriate him for his hypocricy. And I hope against hope that the Senate and House finally impose a windfall profits tax on the oil companies. What's been happening lately to gas prices is just as much of a scam as what happened to electricity in California just before Enron collapesed. It's a cash grab by greedy, unregulated corporate interests-- again, at the expense of the people least able to afford it.
I wonder whether we will ever collectively take a good hard look at US history and realize that every time we deregulate some industry, we get this kind of financial rape and pillaging. I do not care what Adam Smith says: the "invisible hand" of economics does not lead to the larger social good. After all, the corporations themselves say their obligations are to their shareholders, and thus that their goal is to maximize returns for same. Why is it not an issue that they do this at the expense of the rest of us? The entire point of being "a society" is that we are united in important and fundamental ways for the common good. Heck, if today's corporate management had been alive 300 years ago, they'd all have been pirates. They would have been outlaws then--they were outside society, preying on its members--and they should for the same reason be outlaws now.
When do we say "enough is enough"? How many millions/billions/brazilians [there's a joke attached to that last that I may or may not iterate later in this screed.--Ed.] does it take to keep the corporate moguls happy? I'd settle for 1/100 of what any one of them takes in a year as my income for the rest of my life--and be very happy indeed.
I don't care what Michael Douglas's character said. Greed is not good.
[OK, here's the joke: Secy of Defense Rumsfeld tells Dubya that there were 3 Brazilian dead in Iraq today. Dubya, visibly paled, asks weakly, "how many is a brazilian?"--Ed.]
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Paul McCartney turns 64 in June of this year. AARP's magazine has a long cover story on it . . . and I devoured every word. I even scored 10/10 on the Paul quiz and completely solved the magazine's crossword puzzle (theme: Beatles songs). In ink. I am not even eligible to become an AARP member for more than a year yet. I am a totally hopeless mess.
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If you follow Nebraska politics at all, or even the national news in this case, you no doubt are at least somewhat familiar with the closing shenanigans of the most recent Nebraska Unicameral session. Yes, Nebraska has the only one-house state legislature in the country . . . allegedly because it is non-partisan. Talk about "things that make you go hmmmm . . ."
Anyway, there's been a huge fight over the composition and reach of local school districts in the state, prompted by what can be described only as an attempted money grab by the Omaha Public School district. The OPS board wanted to bring non-Omaha school districts under the OPS umbrella via an obscure state law that hasn't been enforced for nearly a century.
This, of course, horrified the about-to-be-taken-over school districts, which set themselves up to get out of the OPS bailiwick in the first place. Note that there's also a huge racial component here. The districts fighting the OPS takeover are in the predominantly white, western, financially well-off suburbs. OPS, of course, includes the poorer, more ethnically diverse sections of the city proper.
State Senator Ernie Chambers, Nebraska's own gadfly and liberal/radical-about-town, eternal [OK, nearly eternal. Ernie is being forced out in 2008 due to a term limits law the Unicameral passed, largely due to its collective irritation with Ernie, in an earlier session.--Ed] representative of the primarily black North Omaha district, proposed a bill that would instead divide OPS into 3 districts, one for North Omaha (as I said, primarily black), one for South Omaha (primarily Latino), and one for West Omaha (primarily white).
The stupid Unicameral passed the thing. LB 1024 is going to go down in Nebraska infamy.
Chambers said his goal was to return effective local control to school boards, and that he didn't care about integration or segregation . . . what he cared about was "quality education."
And if you believe that, I will sell you a bridge.
What he was really up to was saying to the overwhelmingly white rest of the legislature, "you're a bunch of racists anyway--now go and prove it." And--of course--they did. Now, the western parts of the state voted for Ernie's bill just to stick it to the "evil big city." But they're mostly white, too. Politics does make strange bedfellows.
I hope the bill gets tied up in adjudication for so long that everyone alive who voted for it dies before we finally get the official word that the thing is unconstitutional on its face.
I'd think this was majorly amusing if it weren't giving Nebraska collectively yet another black eye in the national news.
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