WELL, IT'S THE SAME OL' SAME OL'. Don't you get tired of news that's in constant rerun. I sure do. It's like a radio man calling a baseball game play by play only he's getting his information long distance and suddenly the connection is broke. So all he can do is review old plays or tell what he "expects" to happen, or perhaps report the hitting of a foul ball, since they are the only things that don't change the count after a while. We were all waiting for that magic two week period to elapse so that Congress could have a knock down drag out debate on the national budget. But now that's not going to happen, because guess what? They passed another three week extension. It seems that C-Span has very little of congress actually in session making speeches and debating various bills these days. Is there nothing to talk about? Well, you have Governor Scott Walker. OK we know he can't be recalled till he's been in office a year. Who made that rule? If you learned your husband was a homocidal maniac the day after you married him and he was wanted for five murders and is suspected for others, would you have to wait a year before you could get an anulment? I don't think so. All we hear is that Governor Walker is getting his way and will continue to get his way for the foreseeable future. We keep clinging to the promise of a left wing "tea party" of our own this year. There are a lot of recall efforts in the pipeline, but how many are becomming reality? We have a lot of people on death row here in California, but how many people have you heard of being exicuted lately? Sometimes the wheels of justice grind oh so slowly. Randy Rhodes was chiding democratic voters for not going to the polls last November. Well that's because they were disgusted with this fence straddeling president and feared even if things stayed exactly the same that nothing would get done because this President is content to twiddle his thumbs till the next election. Oh, by the way, whatever happened to Joe Byden? He was the one ray of hope. He is more popular with many Americans, myself included, than the President himself. But Thom Hartman believes he has been muzzled by the powers that be, because now is not the time for directness and honesty, or getting to the root of the real problems. (Selah)

Of course we have the whole nuclear reactor melt-down saga playing itself out in northern Japan. I guess there have been three major explosions in the four reactors in the complex. One of these knocked out the protective lining of the fuel rods, and also the water above the spent fuel rods is gone.They say this thing could actually end up worse than Cheyrnoble because there is more radioactive fuel involved. People wonder why spent fuel rods are a problem. That's because there is a threshhold point where the Uranium mixture is effective, and that is at about 3% uranium 235. I guess they isolate or enrich the uranium for more 235 in a centrafuge or something. And when the rate falls below 2% 235 and the rest the standardl 238 (with a half life of over a hundred years) according to Hartman then the fuel is no longer effective for sustaining a fission reaction. It it obviously is still radioactive. Hartman says that there is no "safe" level of radioactivity. He says that cancer is a manner of probabilities and that even one alpha particle could knock out a key component in a DNA strand. It seems the way DNA cells become cancerous is that the element that governs the rate of mitosis is not there and so the cell divides uncontrolably. If another part of the DNA is missing the cell eventually ceases to function and dies, and the body destroys it. But when it's caused by radioactivity, the body doesn't know what to do with it so ignores it. The three key dangerous substances among many are radioactive Iodine, Strontium 90 and Cesium 137. You heard about these latter two in that Barry Goldwater commercial in 1964. Strontium 90 replaces Calcium in bones. And the body thinks Cesium is Potassium. And the body treads radioactive iodine like regular iodine and it does right to the thyroid and causes cancer. Normally uranium decays into lighter substances. But sometimes plutonium is spontaniously formed. Usually you have to deliberately create plutonium in a cyclotron bombarding uranium atoms with alpha particles. I believe Plutonium gives you "more bang for your buck". Of course alpha particles are released in radioactive decay and strike other atoms and makes them unstable. A uranium atom left on its own will continue to transmute into elements two places over on the periodic table, until it comes to lead where it stops. On the other end of the spectrum lead is the heaviest of all standard metals, if you don't count bismoth, which I know little about. Lead will stop gamma rays. Hartman was talking about photons being the problem. However for instance even though in a medical X ray it's photons that react with the film to produce an image, it is the shortness of the wave itself that carries the photons that is the problem. Besides all this there are things called comic rays, also known as cosmic particles. These particles are neither stopped by lead, nor by the earth itself, but come from space in all directions. I believes these are the things Chuck Smith contains nutrinos. These nutrinos are things that can change a computer disc so that no disc is safe. They say "errors" occurr all the time in computers, but the computer sees the problems and "fixes them" kind of like the human body. For instance if you enter the command COMP DISC or whatever in DOS and enter "This is a sample test" on one disc and "This is a simple test" on another" the computer will assume that a nutrino flipped the eight place from a zero to a one, and say an error has occurred. But unlike computers this won't work with DNA. You can't change some mystery murderors DNA into O J Simpson's DNA by the "decay" process. It just won't be readable at all.

You know this brother of Raphael on Days of our Lives isn't all bad. Raphael is the new chief of police in Salem, and his brother was just caught by a security camera trying to pass stolen goods at a pawn shop. It seems he wanted the jewelry to get money to hire a P I to find the killer of his sister, Adriana. I guess his sister, who herself had engaged in drug running activities, was someone he could identify with. Of course the others seem to be able to forget about Adriana with ease, because she is the one person who knew the truth about Samantha. She knew Samantha was guilty of attempted murder. Of course now due to an easy touch judge, the guy is out walking the streets ready to mennace other women. Now they want Raphael to let the brother "Dabio" (?) live with him and his wife in their spartment with two small kids. Why do I get this feeling the nuttier an ideas in on a soap opera, the more likely it is that it will happen?

You all may have seen last Sunday's Sixty Minutes episode. I'm talking about the one with the Iraqi informer who admitted the whole story about Saddam Hussein producing weapons of mass destruction. This man used to work in this vitamin factory, which he later said was just a cover. But he left and traveled to other Islamic nations including Morocco. He ended up in Germany, but the German government was thinking of expelling him. So he made up the most spactacular hoax story this side of Clifford Irving. He said he was a personal Eye Witness to the delivery of toxic substances in the lab and produced elaborate schematics of the lab and said exactly how it was carried out. Our CIA interviewed him. They had fierce internal debate among themselves but in the end said the guy's story was credible. Of course this is something that George W Bush was just waiting to hear, because he had professed a desire to go to war in Iraq as early as 1999. I guess you should never elect a man with a triggerable obsession as President. I can only wonder in the case of my own life whether that Reverand - - a "man of the cloth' I keep referring to, the Asshole from El Paso, didn't receive some phone call by some guy with bogus information about me. It had to be someone who really despzized me and wanted to get back at me. I have a couple of candidates. Any how, if you already have a proclivity twords hate, then all you need is something to trigger it. Many of you are wondering how I got back from dinner so fast. "Just how early do you eat there, anyhow". Oh didn't I tell you? I actually moved back to Chicago in 2005 and didn't tell anybody. I've been working with Howard Richards' old buddies from the Wrigley dynesty. The organization has been working on long term plans to overthrow the U S government. We'll have one more posting in this blog and then we'll switch blogs.

"If you don't want to be a bum you better chew gum"