El Papa de los Desaparecidos

I don't care who is elected Pope, just like I don't care who is the Grand Mufti of Syria or the Chief of Hate for the Southern Baptist Convention. It really is none of my business.

I am interested, however, in the fact that many conservative, non-Catholic, Americans are enamored of the new Pope specifically because he may have been involved in the kidnapping and torture of liberal priests in Argentina during their brutal right-wing dictatorship.

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Queues in Nature

A couple of pictures while I recover from my father's 102nd birthday.

This photo is from the 1898 Yukon gold rush. Wannabe millionaires, virtually nobody came out of the Yukon richer than he went in, lined up to climb the Chilkoot Pass to the Canadian gold fields. The Canadian government required each man to have nearly a ton of food and equipment to cross the border so these men had to make several trips.

The National Park Service limits permits to climb Half Dome in Yosemite National Park to 300 daily visitors. Prior to that, on sunny summer weekend days climbers up this route lined with cables could number over 1000 and the scene up Half Dome would resemble the Chilkoot Pass in 1898.

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Rudy Wants My Help

Imagine my surprise this morning when I checked my inbox and found a message from Rudy Giuliani. How I got on his mailing list baffles me. It's not like I have expresses anything other than bemused contempt for the most corrupt New York mayor since Jimmy Walker.

Rudy wants me (Really? Me!?) to give money to an old buddy of his. Since I remember the last old buddy he supported, Bernie Kerik, went to prison for corruption and was described by the judge who oversaw his case as a "toxic combination of self-minded focus and arrogance" I'm sure this gumba, a dud named Liota, is of equal moral character.


Sorry, Rudy. I'd rather flush the money down the sewer.

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Drone Hypocrites

If I ever met Rand Paul, with his W. C. Fields nose and Doctor Who hair, I would have trouble resisting vomiting on his shoes. That said, I applaud his use of an actual filibuster, rather than the silent filibusters that most senators use, to point out vague hypocrisy from the Administration on killer drones.

Give this man a medal.

The Administration's position, reluctantly discussed, has been that using drones to kill Americans inside the US is just plain wrong and we are not in any way considering it...just now. But who knows if in the future the President might want to designate somebody in Des Moines an "enemy combatant" and shoot a Hellfire missile up his ass. Gotta keep your options open, don't ya know.

What the filibuster has revealed is the hypocrites on both sides. Many Republicans who defended President Bush's desire to torture Americans if needed supported the filibuster, even though drones and torture are the same thing. Conversely, many Democrats who oppose torture have stayed strangely quiet during the drone discussion.

Not everybody is a hypocrite. John Yoo, the notorious torture lawyer for George Bush who said the President can legally crush a child's testicles if the President wants to, supports drone attacks against US citizens inside the United States.

President Obama may want to reconsider any policy that John Yoo likes.

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Bits of Tid

Little noshes.

TSA Fatheads

New TSA rules will allow all sorts of weapons on airplanes including small knives, hockey sticks, and golf clubs. It seems nobody has every been attacked with pocket knives, bludgeoned over the head with a hockey stick, or had his wife attack him with a 9-iron. Shoes, however, will still be considered deadly weapons. And genitalia will still need to be searched.

Iraq Money Pit

By now its common knowledge that the Iraq War was a huge, fucking waste of money and lives. Except, of course, for Haliburton which made out like bandits.

Death From the Skies

For those of us who thought torture was unconstitutional how about using drone aircraft to assassinate Americans inside the United States without trial? I haven't decided if this announcement was meant to make Pakistanis feel better by assuring them that the US government is just as cavalier with American lives or to make American accepting of drone spy planes becoming common place over US cities because at least the President isn't dropping Hellfire missiles on us.

Bush III

Jeb Bush will run for President in 2016, guaranteed, because America's highest office is a hereditary position and it is his turn. He is already flip-flopping like a trout on the bottom of the boat.

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Justice Roberts and Justice Taney

Notorious Chief Justices

When it comes time to write the Supreme Court decision to overturn key elements of the Voting Rights Act, John Roberts will choose himself to author the decision. This will mostly be because Roberts will be afraid that Antonin Scalia will not be able to resist inserting the word "jiggaboo" into the text, but it will link Roberts for all time with that other great defender of legalized racism in America - Roger Taney.

Shelby Co. v. Holder, rightly, should be considered part of the Citizens United decision. Both have the clear intention of tilting election results in favor of privileged classes. The Citizens United case was insufficient alone in allowing Sheldon Adelson and and his ilk to outright buy the 2012 election. Coupled with large scale disenfranchisement of minorities the two Supreme Court decisions should allow white elites to own government for a couple more generations.

History will certainly link Justice Roberts with Justice Taney. Roberts, like Taney, will be vilified by history as a racial extremist.

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What Happened in March 1911

My father has his 102nd birthday this month which is excuse enough to look back.

• The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 garment workers because factory managers had locked the sweatshop doors. The tragedy led to the major reforms and the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union.
• The structure of the atom, electrons orbiting a nucleus, was first described by British physicist Ernest Rutherford.

Las Vegas in 1911.

• The city of Las Vegas, Nevada, population 800, was incorporated. Gambling was illegal.
• The US Supreme Court ruled that corporate income taxes were constitutional.

• Irving Berlin's first big hit, Alexander's Ragtime Band, was published.
• One quarter of the US armed forces (20,000 soldiers), the greatest troop movement since the Civil War, was dispatched to the US-Mexican border "on maneuvers." The real reason was to prevent the Mexican Revolution from spilling over the border.
• Congress failed to vote on statehood for New Mexico. It would not become the 47th state until next year.

In international news, the mayor of Jerusalem wrote to the sultan of the Ottoman Empire requesting he stop Jewish immigrants from entering Palestine.

The population of the United States was 93 million. The global population was 1.8 billion. The highest paid player in baseball was Ty Cobb, $9,000. The richest man in the world was John D. Rockefeller. President was Howard Taft.

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