Things I'm wondering today

Flipping through the news of the day...

-In reference to the slide of the Euro -- "Euro Falls on Talk of Its Demise":

Among the reasons for yesterday's slide in the euro was the publication in an Italian newspaper of comments by Roberto Maroni, the country's labor minister, who said that reintroducing the lira was "not such a crazy idea." That Maroni belongs to the smallest party in the governing coalition and that labor ministers don't set currency policy helped moderate the impact of his remarks.

I wonder....why is it that these kind of instantaneous clarifications never show up when talking about the US government? Whenever something is mentioned about our own gov't that people could easily misread, it's just left there nekked to be tripped over.


-Mahmoud Abbas moving back elections:

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday announced a delay in the Palestinian parliamentary election, angering the militant group Hamas which had been expected to do well in its first legislative race....
Hamas called the postponement a "violation of the Palestinian national interest" and of understandings it reached with Abbas to abide by a truce he declared with Israel in February....

Fatah officials said last week the parliamentary poll was likely to be put off because of discord within the party over reforms to the voting law sought by Abbas to give smaller factions like Hamas a better chance of gaining seats.

I wonder....how is it that anyone even remotely sane can look at the possibility of Hamas doing well in Palestinian parliament elections as anything but a bad sign? This would be like if election reforms were passed here because some racist extremist group held protests about access.

-Donald Rumsfeld providing his two cents on China:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld bluntly challenged China today, saying Beijing must provide more political freedom to its citizens. “Ultimately, China will need to embrace some form of open, representative government if it is to fully achieve the benefits to which its people aspire,” he said.

I wonder....since when did anyone care, or have a reason to care, about the thoughts of the Secretary of Defense on such an obviously out-of-bounds subject as how much freedom a regime recognizes its citizens to hold? Maybe it's just me, but unless it's about how to blow something up or how efficiently we can kill a threat, the Defense Department can basically shut up.
What's next, Condi pontificating about Education? Know your roles...

-Airline Security:

WASHINGTON, June 4 - Significant gaps in security at the nation's airports could be curtailed even at a time of rising passenger traffic by quickly making a wide range of relatively modest changes in screening people and bags, a confidential report by the Department of Homeland Security has concluded....

I wonder....is anything actually "confidential" anymore? I mean, I don't have a blanket beef with "leaking", sometimes it actually serves a purpose, but the extent to which confidential info ends up all over the place is just ridiculous. I don't know which is more offensive, that current-theater military tactics are divulged in real-time these days, or that someone was actually bored enough to think this minor story was worth releasing.


I also wonder why in June it's only in the low 70's here....

Sometimes even the pitcher hits one

Howard Dean, in the course of beating the same dead horse that the Dems have lost with the past two cycles:

Dean told the activists that it was important for Democrats to outline what they would do if they were in charge and not just criticize the Bush administration.

He called for making pensions portable so they could be taken from one job to the next *snip*


Great idea, I'd gladly support that. Ignore the rest.

A comparison lesson, and more

Two instances of voters saying "no". One in the US, one in Europe:

-First the French blast the EU "constitution", now the Dutch -- European Leaders May Scrap Constitution:

European leaders faced the possibility of having to scrap the proposed EU constitution Thursday after Dutch voters rejected it by a massive margin, voicing their concern over dwindling national identity in a rapidly expanding union and increasingly powerful bureaucrats.

Check out what's mentioned about Britain's upcoming choice...

Blair's government isn't saying yet what will become of its plans to put the constitution to British voters in a referendum that had been penciled in for next year, but most assume it's now certain to be called off. It's hard to imagine a "yes" vote in wary Britain after two of the EU's founding members resoundingly rejected the charter.

The possibility of the general public rejecting the EU "constitution" ends up making it unlikely they'll even be given the choice. Britain's government assumes the populace must be insane for being skeptical. Quite "undemocratic" & elitist.


Now in the US...

-The California legislature looks about to fail in legalizing gay marriage --
Same-sex marriage bill headed for defeat:

A bill to legalize same-sex marriage appeared headed for defeat in the state Assembly late Wednesday after a historic, at times personal debate that touched on themes of personal liberty and societal values.

The bill, AB19 by Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, was failing 35- 37 -- six votes shy of a needed majority. Eight lawmakers, all of them Democrats, including Northern California legislators Alberto Torrico of Fremont and Simon Salinas of Salinas, abstained, and five Democrats from the Central Valley and San Diego voted against the measure.

Using a parliamentary move, Leno held the vote open late Wednesday in hopes of persuading nonvoting members to support his bill, which must clear the Assembly by Friday if it is to advance to the Senate.

A comment from one of the opponents:

"The intent of Proposition 22 is very, very clear and very, very understandable," said Assemblyman Ray Haynes, R-Murrieta (Riverside County), who made one of many social conservatives' references to the state ballot measure approved by voters in 2000 that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. "The people knew exactly what they were doing when they voted for it."

Haynes, like many other opponents, argued against Leno's bill by saying it "flies in the face of the intent of the people" who overwhelmingly approved the measure. The Legislature, said he and others, has no right to interfere.

Here, in this case it's considered absurd for the legislature to try to approve what via referendum was rejected. This goes the other way, "populist".


Let's dispense with the inevitable red herring arguement about which makes more sense: Notice how in both cases the ones advocating each method of decision do so when it happens to agree with them? If the people of California had voted against defining marriage then the same cultural conservatives that enshrine the ballot box would be clamoring to override them. Likewise, if defeat of the EU "constitution" weren't such a sure conclusion then no one in the British parliament would be considering yanking the choice out of the public's hands.

A few points:

1) There's no unanimously more reasonable way here. Whether a public vote or the legislative body making the decision is better depends on the depth & scope of information needed, and the incentives that affect each.

2) In some cases, neither knows what they're doing, that is why we have an independant judiciary that settles contradictions & voids laws that go against the Constitution.


To make a slight tangent here, let's backtrack to the gay marriage thing:

With same-sex marriage wending its way through state courts -- and the federal judiciary yet to firmly weigh in on the issue -- the Assembly revealed itself Wednesday as a microcosm of a socially polarized society, unable to agree on everything from the definition of marriage to the role of government should play in defining it.

Note what isn't asked in this comment: Is defining marriage even within the scope of being a collective decision at all? Does the idea that the State can define it, by nature of the discussion involved, toe the line of the Establishment Clause?

I have my answers to those obviously. Too bad most haven't even brought themselves to ask...

Took long enough...

".xxx" URL ending created for porn sites:

Internet porn sites will soon have the option of buying web addresses that end in "xxx" to let customers find them more easily while helping families block such sites from surfing children.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers agreed on Wednesday to allow addresses ending in .xxx instead of the more common .com or .net suffixes.

Maybe now the busybodies out there can shut up about it.

This week just got more interesting...

After all these years....this is the man that brought down Nixon:

A long-held Washington secret was revealed Tuesday. The Washington Post newspaper confirmed that former F.B.I. official Mark Felt was their unidentified source for prize-winning articles more than 30 years ago. Known as "Deep Throat", he leaked confidential information about the Watergate political scandal, which led to U.S. President Richard Nixon's 1974 resignation.

You know what this means....an excuse for some funny headlines -- "Bush Anxious to Learn More of Deep Throat" -- followed by a genuine WTF moment:

President Bush said on Wednesday the disclosure that the former No. 2 official at the FBI was Watergate's "Deep Throat" source caught him by surprise and he's anxious to learn more.

"It's hard for me to judge" whether former deputy FBI Director Mark Felt provided a valuable public service or acted improperly, Bush told reporters.

Waitaminutehere. A guy exposes the f$%@#ing President of the US trying to pull some Gambino sh*t & pretty much saves the country, and Dubya actually has the nerve to consider "hmm, maybe what he did was wrong"?!?

When it comes to the leader of the free world stooping to petty crime in a paranoid fit of spite, I don't care how many rules or laws have to be broken to yank that f@#$er out of the Oval Office, long as he's gone. That Bush actually considers undermining the Constitution to be on an even level with the whistle-blowing on such really says a lot...

Politicians can't take a joke

What do Tom Delay & Jesse Jackson have in common?

Both are such self-absorbed egomaniacs that they catch feelings when fictional characters diss them:

DeLay wrote NBC to complain that one of the characters on "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" invoked his name on the show's season finale Wednesday in an episode that centered on the fictional slayings of two judges by suspected right-wing extremists.
In the episode, police are frustrated by a lack of clues, leading one officer to quip, "Maybe we should put out an APB [all points bulletin] for somebody in a Tom DeLay T-shirt."

DeLay, in a letter to NBC Universal Television chief Jeff Zucker, called that reference a "slur."

"This manipulation of my name and trivialization of the sensitive issue of judicial security represents a reckless disregard for the suffering initiated by recent tragedies and a great disservice to public discourse," he said.


Odd, I don't recall George W Bush barking about being ridiculed on Saturday Night Live. Those exterminator chemicals must make people thin-skinned.

Trade, Big Brotherized

The European Union: "Those eeeeeevil chinese are selling us too much cheap stuff!"

World Trade Organization: "Never fear, managed trade is here":

European and U.S. textile makers say their livelihoods have been threatened by a surge in Chinese exports since a worldwide quota system ended on Jan. 1. According to EU figures, Chinese imports of T-shirts rose by 187 percent in the first four months of 2005, compared to the same period last year, while flax yarn imports rose by 56 percent.

The EU took the dispute to the WTO on Friday, giving China 15 days to react. It also means that the EU will restrict imports of flax yarn and T-shirts to no greater than 7.5 percent above the amount entering its market between March 2004 and February 2005.

Funny how the WTO, supposedly an enabling arm of free-trade, actually has a built-in mechanism to prevent it when spoiled brats like us & the EU don't like the result. Clearly the moonbat constituency that thinks free-trade is evil need to get their glasses checked.

Under the terms of China's WTO membership, if another member state can establish that Chinese textiles are disrupting the market, it may request bilateral consultations at the WTO.

"disrupting the market"? Filling a need is distortion now?

Earlier this month, China announced a sharp increase in export tariffs in an effort to avert a trade war with the United States and Europe....China imposed a 1.3 percent export tax on textiles in December on the eve of the end of global quotas, but American officials said that was too low to make a difference.

I guess only the US & Europe are allowed to retain their sovereignty.

If we really wanted free-trade, we'd simply say the following: "No import tarrifs, no export tariffs, nothing to determine how much anything costs other than the prices derived from the market, period. Want to join up, then drop your protections too and jump right in."

Us not pulling our weight is not an excuse.