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Citing his unassailable qualifications as a tortured POW, imprisoned U.S. citizen Jose Padilla has announced plans to run for U.S. President.

Spokesman Carolyn Jenkins said Padilla has proven his qualifications for President over the last several years, as he has been kidnapped, repeatedly tortured and then imprisoned. Jenkins said that Padilla main platform as a candidate will be to “Stop kidnapping, illegally holding, torturing and imprisoning U.S. citizens.”

Reactions to Padilla`s announcement were swift as many pundits quickly proclaimed that jailed terrorists have no business running for President.

“Padilla is a terrorist who wanted to kill as many people as he could for his own ideology,” said Charles Krauthammer. “The United States cannot afford to have a bloodthirsty ideologue run the nation.”

Jenkins reacted angrily to the disrespect shown to an American who has been tortured and held for years against his will by his own country.

“Right now there is a concerted effort on the part of the U.S. media and both major political parties to malign Mr. Padilla,” said Jenkins. “But without a shadow of a doubt, Mr. Padilla is uniquely qualified to be President due to his years of being held as a prisoner and his years of being tortured.”

Jenkins also was quick to brush aside arguments that Padilla was mentally incompetent and unfit for the challenges of the Presidency.

“First of all, as we have seen the last seven years, mental competency is not a prerequisite to becoming President,” said Jenkins. “Secondly, Mr. Padilla was pronounced to be mentally stable enough to be given 20 years in prison, so the argument is moot.”

A for profit corporation exists for one purpose, and if it deviates from that single purpose it can be successfully sued by its stockholders. That singular purpose is “make as much money as possible”. If breaking the law and paying the fines costs less than obeying the law they’ll break the law and pay the fines. If treating its employees well costs more than treating their employees poorly, they’ll treat their employees poorly.

For profit corporations are extremely good at fulfilling their singular purpose, and not so good at much else. It turns out that you can only “do no evil” when your profits are doubling every year. After that, evil becomes necessary to secure the bottom line.

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Tomorrow, popular software applications like Skype or even Firefox might be declared illegal in Europe if they are not certified by an administrative authority. This is compromising the whole open development of the internet as we know it today. Once the Soviet Union required the registration of all typewriters and printing devices with the authorities.”

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A college student claimed it was all a joke when he put his vote in this fall’s presidential election up for sale on the Web auction site eBay. But prosecutors didn’t see the humor.

University of Minnesota student Max P. Sanders, 19, was charged with a felony Thursday in Hennepin County District Court after allegedly asking for a minimum of $10 in exchange for voting for the bidder’s preferred candidate.

[..]

“We take it very seriously. Fundamentally, we believe it is wrong to sell your vote,” said John Aiken, a spokesman for the office. “There are people that have died for this country for our right to vote, and to take something that lightly, to say, ‘I can be bought.’

Could somebody point John Aiken to this?

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A federal judge in California said Wednesday that the wiretapping law established by Congress was the “exclusive” means for the president to eavesdrop on Americans, and he rejected the government’s claim that the president’s constitutional authority as commander in chief trumped that law.

The judge, Vaughn R. Walker, the chief judge for the Northern District of California, made his findings in a ruling on a lawsuit brought by an Oregon charity. The group says it has evidence of an illegal wiretap used against it by the National Security Agency under the secret surveillance program established by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Justice Department has tried for more than two years to kill the lawsuit, saying any surveillance of the charity or other entities was a “state secret” and citing the president’s constitutional power as commander in chief to order wiretaps without a warrant from a court under the agency’s program.

But Judge Walker, who was appointed to the bench by former President George Bush, rejected those central claims in his 56-page ruling. He said the rules for surveillance were clearly established by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to get a warrant from a secret court.

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This Bush-McCain-Obama line was underscored this week by one of Obama’s top foreign policy advisers, Anthony Lake, who said “the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is the biggest threat facing the world,” the Financial Times reports.  

Think of that: the biggest threat facing the world. Bigger than global climate change. Bigger than poverty and disease. Bigger than growing conflicts over shrinking resources. Bigger than terrorism (which was the last greatest biggest threat facing the world). Bigger than organized crime. Bigger than the Terror War operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia, which continue to spawn so much death, ruin, extremism and economic turmoil. Bigger than all of these — and all other threats facing the world — is the prospect that Iran might, in Lake’s words, “get on the edge of developing a nuclear weapon.”

The second bozo to die this week.

“I’ve been portrayed as a caveman by some. That’s not true. I’m a conservative progressive, and that means I think all men are equal, be they slants, beaners or niggers.”

– North Carolina Progressive, February 6, 1985

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This week the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey issued a stunning document to explain why Ground Zero has remained nothing but a hole for some seven years.

It is arguably the greatest political and bureaucratic fiasco in the history of the world. Remember the line about how if we don’t rebuild the towers “the terrorists will win”? The terrorists will be dead of old age before this project is finished.

Port Authority Executive Director Chris Ward, who did the remarkably frank report at the request of a frustrated Gov. David Paterson of New York, wrote that original estimates of time and cost (now at $15 billion) “did not reflect the unprecedented challenges associated with a project . . . involving so many different public and private stakeholders.” (Arguably the system began its decline when the vocabulary changed deadly “factions” into benevolent “stakeholders.”)

Ground Zero is a perfect storm of contemporary American politics. The report cites “19 different governmental entities from every level of government each laying claim to some component of the overall project.” And, “Each entity makes daily decisions about their individual projects, but no streamlined process or authority is in place to . . . ensure that each decision is in the best interest of the overall project.” This sounds eerily like the 9/11 Commission’s assessment of our dis-coordinated national security agencies.

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Officials unveiled the prototype of the first U.S. coin with readable Braille characters on Wednesday — a silver dollar commemorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Louis Braille, the creator of the alphabet for the blind.

The coin’s display opened the National Federation of the Blind’s annual convention in Dallas.

“This is going to put Braille in front of people in a very dramatic way,” said Chris Danielson, a federation spokesman.

Because everybody is always carrying a few silver dollars, right?

Oh, by the way, if you guessed “11 dollar” as the price for this dollar, please step forward to claim your prize.

Click here to view full image (271 kb)

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Can you guess what is shown in this photo? What is the plume extending upward from the ground? Why is the top of the plume brighter than its bottom? What is the bright object in the lower righthand corner of the picture, and what is the dark, cone-shaped feature that seems to be leaving the plume and converging on the bright object? Examine the picture carefully, look at the high-resolution version if you want to, and see if you can figure out the answers to these questions. Then, read the caption to test yourself.

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Once oil passed $140 a barrel, even the most rabidly rightwing media hosts had to prove their populist credibility by devoting a portion of every show to bashing Big Oil. Some have gone so far as to invite me on for a friendly chat about an insidious new phenomenon: “disaster capitalism.” It usually goes well - until it doesn’t.

For instance, “independent conservative” radio host Jerry Doyle and I were having a perfectly amiable conversation about sleazy insurance companies and inept politicians when this happened: “I think I have a quick way to bring the prices down,” Doyle announced. “We’ve invested $650bn to liberate a nation of 25 million people, shouldn’t we just demand that they give us oil? There should be tankers after tankers backed up like a traffic jam getting into the Lincoln Tunnel, the stinkin’ Lincoln, at rush-hour with thank-you notes from the Iraqi government … Why don’t we just take the oil? We’ve invested it liberating a country. I can have the problem solved of gas prices coming down in 10 days, not 10 years.”

There were a couple of problems with Doyle’s plan, of course. The first was that he was describing the biggest stick-up in world history. The second that he was too late. “We” are already heisting Iraq’s oil, or at least are on the brink of doing so.

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Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.

The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.

The figure emphatically contradicts the US government’s claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.

Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush.

“It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White House,” said one yesterday.

[October 14, 2001:]

”If bin Laden takes over and becomes king of Saudi Arabia, he’d turn off the tap,” said Roger Diwan, a managing director of the Petroleum Finance Company, a consulting firm in Washington. ”He said at one point that he wants oil to be $144 a barrel” — about six times what it sells for now.

To be fair, trickle down is a staple of theporn industry.

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• Mike Huckabee: “When Katrina, a Cat-5 hurricane, hit the Gulf Coast, not one drop of oil was spilled off of those rigs out in the Gulf of Mexico.”

• Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal: You know, that’s one of the great unwritten success stories, after Katrina and Rita, these awful storms, no major spills.

• John McCain: As for offshore drilling, it’s safe enough these days that not even Hurricanes Katrina and Rita could cause significant spillage from the battered rigs off the coasts of New Orleans and Houston.

• George Will: “Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed or damaged hundreds of drilling rigs without causing a large spill.”

• Wall Street Journal editorial: “Hurricanes Katrina and Rita flattened terminals across the Gulf of Mexico but didn’t cause a single oil spill.”

• Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne: “When Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast where we have about 4,000 oil and gas platforms, 3,000 were in the direct line of the storms - the most significant storms we’ve seen ever - and 3,000 of those had to be shut down. We had no significant oil spill. The system worked.”

• Fox News’ Dick Morris: “And by the way, the safety concerns, Hurricane Katrina didn’t cause any leakage or any spill in the Gulf of Mexico oil wells.”

VERSUS

A report prepared for the federal government by an international consulting firm, state that damages related to Hurricane Katrina resulted in 70 spills from outer continental shelf structures with a total volume of approximately 11,104 barrels of oil and petroleum products. http://mediamatters.org/items/200806270005?f=h_top

Satellite image with detail insets showing oil slicks in Gulf of Mexico following passage of Hurricane Katrina. Image taken on September 2, 2005. http://skytruth.mediatools.org/node/19981

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There is an old dieters’ joke that anything eaten directly from the fridge has no calories. Wrong. But surely anything in a teensy snack pack must help you lose weight, right? Wrong again.

Grocery aisles are full of small “diet packs” of candy, cookies or fried snacks, advertised as a guilt-free way of helping you eat less. But Rik Pieters and colleagues at Tilburg University in the Netherlands suspected that diet packs might in fact make people drop their guard and eat more.

Thanks, Andy

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White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Tuesday that Senate Democrats “put off a lot of work” when they left town last week without passing several pending bills.

“They’ve been in session for a long time, and some very critical pieces of legislation got put off for yet another recess,” Fratto said. “And now this last session is getting pretty close to the August recess. So the Senate is running out of time to get work done.”

[August 15, 2007, almost one year ago:]

“This place is abuzz with expectation,” said Bee excitedly. “It’s no longer a question of if the president will break the record, but when.”

“Most vacation days taken by a sitting president,” Bee explained when Jon Stewart asked what record she meant. “People said that Reagan’s 436 would stand forever, but right now, as you can see, this president stands on 423, meaning his record should fall less than two weeks from today. And they said it shouldn’t be done.”

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