holiday weekend

7-7-08—Oil’s rapid rise is lending weight to predictions that prices could hit $200 a barrel this year.—WSJ A1

--“All I got left is a headful of memories/And a thought of my upcoming death”—“Don’t Need

This Body,” John Mellencamp [age 56] –NYT B3

7-3-08—Bush administration officials knew that a Texas oil company with close ties to President Bush was planning to sign an oil deal with the regional Kurdistan government that runs ounter to American policy and under cuts Iraq’s central government...NYTA1

--Declaring that there will not be “another colonization of Iraq,” Iraq’s foreign minister raised the possibility on Wednesday that a full security agreement with the US might not be reached this year, and that if one was, it would be a short term pact.—NYT A6

--Russia’s new president ... said in an interview than an American in “essentially a depression” was in no position to lecture other countries on how to conduct their foreign affairs. ... My Medvedev made his comments on Tuesday in a meeting ... a day after the American treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson, Jr., appealed in Moscow for Russian investment in the United States. –NYTA9

--The United Steelworkers signed a merger agreement on Wednesday with the largest labor organization in Britain and Ireland to create what union leaders said would be the world’s first global union. NYT A15

Year 2008. Part II, begins

July 1, 2008—In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

--The Pentagon has ordered electrical inspections of all buildings in Iraq maintained by KBR, a major military contractor, after several electrocutions of several US service members. NYT A10.

and so ends the first half of Year 2008...

June 30, 2008—Amind US policy disputes, Qaeda grows in Pakistan NYT A1

--US Advised Iraqi ministry on oil deals NYTA1

--School officials in Terrebone Parish are considering a policy that would require all commencement speeches to be in English. NYT A17 [how will they be able to tell?]

June 29, 2008—They are Jewish and Catholic, Hispanic and Asian, an Alvarez here, a Crowley there, with a Frumkin, a Strabone, an O’Male and who knows what else, all with at least one thing in common: They have semiofficially adopted the middle name Hussein in support of their preferred presidential candidate. NYT A1,A13 [I am Spartaus...]

June 28/29, 2008--With one trading day left in the month, the Dow is now down 10.2% in June, the worst performance for the month of June since 1930. WSJ A8

--June 28, 2008—There’s a 50/50 chance that the North Pole will be ice-free this summer, which would be a first in recorded history, a leading ice scientist says. SBT A6

USA trumps Spain!

June 26, 2008—A Spanish parliamentary committee voiced its support for great apes’ rights to life and freedom, opening the door for Spain’s legislature to become the first national one to call for such rights for nonhumans. NYT A8 [well, not really, the USA has been giving extra votes to GWBush voters since Year 2000...]

June 25/22

June 25, 2008—The centerpiece of the Senate package is a resume-refinancing plan aimed at stemming the tide of more than 8, 000 new foreclosures a day that lenders are filing across the country. –NYT A1

— Justice Department officials illegally used “political or ideological” factors in elite recruiting programs in recent years, tapping law school graduates with Federalist Society membership or other conservative credentials over more qualified candidates with liberal-sounding résumés, an internal report found Tuesday. The report, prepared by the Justice Department’s own inspector general and its ethics office, portrays a clumsy effort by senior Justice Department screeners to weed out candidates for career positions whom they considered “leftists,” using Internet search engines to look for incriminating information or evidence of possible liberal bias. One rejected candidate from Harvard Law School worked for Planned Parenthood. Another wrote opinion pieces critical of the USA Patriot Act and the nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court. A third applicant worked for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and posted an unflattering cartoon of President Bush on his MySpace page. Another applicant, a student at the top of his class at Harvard who was fluent in Arabic, was relegated to the “questionable” pile because he was a member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group that advocates civil liberties. And another rejected candidate said in his essay that he was “personally conflicted” about the National Security Agency’s program of wiretapping without warrants. NYT A1

--“Many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ‘70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime and decay.” Leinberger, cited at NYT A18

--June 22, 2008—If an American first lady, or would-be first lady, described herself as a “tamer of men” and had a “man-easting” past filled with naked pictures, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, sultry prone CD covers, breaking up marriages, bragging that she believes in polygamy and polyandry rather than monogamy, and having a son with a married philosopher whose father she had an affair with, it would take more than an appearance on “The View” the sweeten her image. It’s hard to imagine the decibel level of Fox News if Michelle Obama put out a CD this summer, as Carla Bruni-Sarkozy is, with songs featuring lyrics like “I am a child/despite my 40 years/despite my 30 lovers/a child; and this song, “Ma came”: “You are my junk/more deadly than Afghan heroin/more dangerous than Colombian white.../My guy, I roll him up and smoke him.” ... [Carla] charmed George and Laura Bush ... and then sitting next to the American president and keeping him entertained with a spirited conversation in English, one of her three languages and sort of his one language. Dowd, NYT WK 12

June 18

June 18, 2007—More than 10,000 dealerships, nearly all of which have sold American brands, have closed since 1970 .. NYT C10

--The revamped SAT, expanded three years ago to include a writing test, predicts college success no better than the old test, and not quite as well as a student’s high school grades, according to studies released Tuesday by the College Board, which owns the test. –NYT, A20

the empire wheezes

HARPERS, JULY 2008—Kevin Phillips: A major Republican weakness that doesn’t get noticed is their inability, despite all their macho muscle-flexing, to bring foreign wars to a successful finish. Our whole involvement in the Middle East, from the 1970s through the 2020s or however long it goes on, is going to do for the United States what two world wars did for Britain. It is a disaster. But it never gets examined in this way. ... Luke Mitchell: It seems that all decadent societies decline in the end. That is the story we know. But there have to be at least one or two that had a second act, when the people got it together. KP: There is indeed a second act for leading world economic powers, after they shed the burden of hubris and grandiosity, of being the world policeman and world banker. After thirty or forty years of adjustment, they come back in a less grandiose form. The Spanish and the Dutch and the British are doing pretty well right now. But they did have huge problems witih post-imperial withdrawal symptoms. pp 37-8, 40 “Why the GOP Must Die”