Memnison Journal

From Dick Meyer at NPR on Blago and Made-off:
As audacious as Blagojevich’s political gluttony is, it is easy to find far worse political corruption, much of it perfectly legal: Distorting intelligence to invade Iraq, torturing prisoners, failure to regulate Wall Street, and systematic pork-barrel boondoggling come quickly to mind. If you’re feeling expansive, how about [...]

Hedge Fund founder who lost a serious bundle in the Madoff ponzi scheme commits suicide, and no, he didn’t jump out a window.
The radical Israeli settlers in the West Bank are a political nightmare that any government will have serious problems with and neither main party coalition wants to deal with.  Of course, government policies [...]

Details after the cut.

Seems that the lack of vetting that McCain did was the same that Bush did. (starts singing from Fiddler on the Roof here)
Next time around, I suggest that they use a divining rod or the Urim and Thummim - especially if it’s Romney.

The name Yoshi Tsurumi is one you probably have never heard of; he was George W. Bush’s macroeconomics professor at Harvard Business School, and he presently teaches at CUNY.
He remembers Bush well - as one of his worst students ever:
Bush, by contrast, “was totally the opposite of Chris Cox,” Tsurumi said. “He showed pathological lying [...]

Going back to my response posts,  I want to stress that I never assume that anyone voting against Obama is a racist, or that Republicans are racists, or that either on the Republican ticket is a racist.  I know better.
I’ve lived with serious racists, had racism and sexism used against me and mine (you do [...]

And reformers can be undone by machines, when they trade their aspirations for power:

Recently, a good friend of mine who I disagree with politically laid out his concerns and objections around the present electoral cycle. I started to reply as a comment to his posting online, and then I quickly found that what I was saying was waaaaaay too long winded to work as a comment. For [...]

Sarah Palin, against all legal advice and court orders, decided to use the office of governor as a means to get back at an already went-through-the-system enemy who worked for the state of Alaska - and firing the people who refused to break the law to help her. If this is someone you want to [...]

“I mean, can we really hand over things to someone that inexperienced in government?”

From the Wall Street Journal:
Come November, voters will have a chance to rid themselves of a political order that they have come to hate. Sen. Obama’s task is to help them heave it overboard.
This is as it should be. From the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the Justice Department, our government seems to have been [...]

From the BBC’s news:
In a telephone call to Georgia’s leader Mikhail Saakashvili, the US Vice President, Dick Cheney, said Russian aggression “must not go unanswered”.   President Bush said he had expressed his grave concern to Moscow at the military’s “disproportionate” response.

And what, pray tell, do you two suggest as an answer?  Anything that isn’t [...]

Bushco: Ok, just sign here that we can stay as long as we like, do whatever we want in Iraq without being bothered, and sign over all your oil to our pals for development.
Iraqi PM Maliki: Screw that noise. No deal.
Bushco: Dude, we own you.  For good.
Iraqi PM Maliki: ‘Fraid not. Hey, Salim?
Assistant: [...]

…and besides, unlike the wife, I’ve never gotten through his works.
Regular readers will note that the tags I put on posts are plentiful and sometimes sound goofy; that may be because it’s conceptual shorthand to me. ‘kubler-ross’, ‘renmin’, or ’sep_reality’, for example. The first has to deal with posts on death and [...]

There was a revelation in the TODAY show interview of Scott McClellan that had Bush admitting to McClellan that he was the person who started the whole Plame leak fiasco going.  And so various people are now saying that ooh, caught Dubya in a impeachable offence, either the leak thingy or the pardon resulting from [...]