Memnison Journal

..of the Bush administration, a casualty of the war on terror, troubled and victimized soul that he is.

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 [...]

W. Mark Felt obituary in the Washington Post.
“As Deep Throat, Felt helped establish the principle that our highest government officials are subject to the Constitution and the laws of the land,” the prosecutor, John W. Nields, wrote in The Washington Post in 2005. “Yet when it came to the Weather Underground bag jobs, he seems [...]

Zimbabwe is a complex subject, and the complexities have gotten a whole lot rougher on the inhabitants as time passes by.   Europeans under Cecil Rhodes marched in in the ned of the 1800s and took control of the land from the local chiefs, and passed out all sorts of claims to white settlers, who set [...]

The US Customs office in North Dakota is now using a Predator UAV for patrol purposes.

From the New York Times…one more place for fear:
The origins of India’s Jews remain uncertain, but according to some accounts they may have come as emissaries from the court of King Solomon. They established communities and lived peacefully with Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and, later, Muslims. The absence of anti-Semitism throughout this history has been a [...]

Uniformed officers burst into Lulu Matheson’s house in the village of Shieldaig, Wester Ross, kept her son Gus in his bedroom for two hours, handcuffed her grandson Stephen, and turned the house upside down.
The high-profile afternoon raid involved three squad cars, seven officers and sniffer dogs. They told the family they were looking for cannabis, [...]

So here’s my ideas, half-baked:

Make the deal comprehensive, and mostly a take it or leave it scenario.  This sucker has been a political football for decades, and this ends here right now.
All three companies essentially go into a central, nationalized receivership corporation.
The equity in these businesses is pretty much gone, in any event.  [...]

I’m actively interested in your poisition on this matter.  Feel free to sound off inside *politely*.
My own struggles on this:

Details after the cut.

From Nico Pitney in HuffPo:
3) John McCain has skipped more votes during this session than any member of the Senate except for Tim Johnson, who had major brain surgery. He hasn’t cast a single vote in five months, since April 9. All of a sudden, McCain is demanding that the presidential race shut down so [...]

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

Airlines are majorly cutting international flights into LA because costs have risen dramatically for fuel and foreign demand for flights to the USA have dropped.
Noting the cyber-attacks on Georgia during the recent war, it’s starting to occur to people that the USA could be similarly hit.  Reports are coming in that while a few [...]

Julia Child, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Arthur Goldberg - spied for America. Amongst others…

The interesting part of the last week, of course, was to watch McCain be seriously stupid in the face of Obama’s trip to the Middle East and Europe. The whole thing started off with McCain double-dast-daring that gormless Obama guy to be a real man and walk down a Baghdad street like he did, [...]