From the Washington Post, Oct. 7:
On Hermann Cain:
"He has committed some early missteps, saying he would not appoint a Muslim to his Cabinet and stumbling on questions about the Middle East and the war in Afghanistan. He has since said he is aggressively studying up on foreign policy and that he meant to say he would not appoint a “jihadist” to his Cabinet."
Right. As if the other candidates would. Cain is a smarmy, lying neocon.
Since there are numerous mentions of the anniversary of the Berlin wall I thought I'd share my experiences. In 1961 I was an exchange student in Paris and decided to go to see the wall for myself. (Berlin in December was the coldest I have ever been.) Passing through Checkpoint Charlie I entered Communist territory for the first time. It was as I'd expected: the universal hopeless shabbiness of the city and the people. I spoke with as many as I could. No one criticized the regime, of course. One old man said, gratefully, "Sie geben uns alles was wir brauchen." (They give us everything we need.) I maliciously asked another man where THEIR Kurfürstendamm, the Fifth Avenue of West Berlin, was. He replied, abashed, "Well, we don't have anything EXACTLY like that." I visited a few bookstores, noting the endless shelves of works by Marx, Lenin, and the then East German leader, Ulbricht. I was hoping that they might have Mises's Socialism, misled by the title, but they weren't fools—they knew their enemy. I had a crummy lunch at one of their elite restaurants, and decided to go back. Still on East German soil I encountered a soldier. Idiot that I was—I could have been detained for trying to subvert their military—I looked him in the face and said, "Komm mit." (Come along.) He replied, "Kann nicht." (I can't.) I sauntered back past Checkpoint Charlie, feeling a burden lifting from my shoulders, and went home .
Radley Balko describes what happened:
SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family’s pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on.
They found a “small amount” of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment.
So smoking pot = “child endangerment.” Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone’s safety.
Just so we’re clear.
AN 80-year-old grandmother who doctors identified as terminally ill and left to starve to death has recovered after her outraged daughter intervened. Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex, is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding.....Doctors say Fenton is an example of patients who have been condemned to death on the Liverpool care pathway plan. They argue that while it is suitable for patients who do have only days to live, it is being used more widely in the NHS, denying treatment to elderly patients who are not dying.
In the"City of God," St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. The Emperor angrily demanded of him,"How dare you molest the seas?" To which the pirate replied,"How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor." St. Augustine thought the pirate's answer was"elegant and excellent."
