It's Time To Close Guantanamo Bay

I guess I’m officially changing my position on Guantanamo Bay.  As you know up till now I saw no problem with leaving things the way they are now because the prison serves a good function right where it is.  And if terrorists dread being sent there, then so much the better.  But they held a hearing by Dick Derbin.  For some reason Ted Cruise was the highest ranking Republican on the committee.  How did he get such a plum assignment being a freshman senator, and how did he get to be as it were the minority party leader of it?  Most of the witnesses called were learned men and women- - in areas such as the military- - or being a JAG defense council- - or a medical psychiatrist- - or a human rights representative.  However this one old gizer was called and I wasn’t sure what reason he had for eve being there aside that he was head of a lot of conservative action committees.  He and Cruise issued what appeared to be a lot of “canned” inflamed rhetoric and the usual diatribes against the President- - and saying that we are virtually in a perpetual war with terrorism.  So not even when the “War” is over next year, can Prisoners hope to get justice.  It makes no sense.  The situation appears to be complete chaos with people held there on little or no grounds, and of course George Bush released a bunch of people and wanted to release more.  But all that old guy could think of was “We are sending these Imams into the prisons and they are a recruiting basis for terrorism”.  He spoke of nearby cities to Federal prisons being in a state of constant danger from terrorism.  He also spoke of how prisoners if they “had more rights” would organize terrorist groups from within the prison walls.  Dick Derbin had to set this guy straight about a lot of things, and the guy plainly admitted he’d never been inside a Super-Max federal prison.  I guess I didn’t know that MOST of the CIA torturing took place right at Guantanamo Bay.  I thought it may have taken place at diverse locations.  Apparently rather than being less expensive- - as I had supposed- - it’s MORE expensive to house prisoners at Guantanamo.  I figured since it was an old prison not in the best of repair- - that we were housing all these people on the cheap.  So I myself was set straight about a few things.

I continue to have a problem with raising the minimum wage in this country to nine dollars an hour.  Perhaps though the President could have made it a less threatening $8.75 and then negotiated it down to a manageable $8.25 - which I could live with.  They say that this minimum wage hike will give the working poor more spending money but these hikes in the minimum wage have a long track record of raising the national unemployment rate.  As the saying goes "You don't get something for nothing".  Of course Preident Clinton reminded us a while back that had the minimum wage kept up with inflation since 1968 that the minimum wage would stand at $10.40 an hour now, which sounds good to me at the moment.  Just think of what all of that additional money could buy.  Everyone agrees that worker production has gone in a straight line upward, whereas wages have not kept up with inflation.  You'll remember that Paula Dean when she talked about her Grandfather losing his - - - "Workers" she was referring to Slaves, a word that doesn't appear in the body of the Constitution.  That's how self conscious the Founding Fathers were about the word.  These Republicans aren't t all against the presence of "Minorities" in this country if they "stay in their place" as hotel maids and the like, driving down the wage base.  But heaven forbid any act of congress that would enable them to hold their heads high as proud Americans on an equal footing with Whites.

This is just after one thirty on Saturday 27^th.   They had women’s beach volleyball on four and one wonders whether those skimpy bathing suits make it more inconvienient to play.  They held the annual Surfing contest last week in Huntington Beach and I’m told the water was around seventy.  Of course they finished up the Tour de France last weekend.   Dr. Levy has gone six Saturdays without showing up tying last year’s record.  My blogger numbers have shot way up the past couple of days, which surprises me because I didn’t think the last two postings were that good.  Of course the information in the latest posting is actually from an earlier source than information in the previous blog post.  I had Leo Le Port on after noon and he states that he doesn’t like Outlook calendar.  I’ve heard a lot of people say they don’t like to use Outlook and I’m not sure why but I don’t use it either.  They say that USB drive powered aux hard drives are OK but they spin at the “slower rate” of 5600 rpms instead of the higher 7800 rpms of drives you plug into a power source.  I don’t see why that would be any particular problem.  Now they have a gadget that lets you gesture with your hands that reads your body motion via infrared rays- - that you can buy for seventy dollars and Leo will give it a proper review “just as soon as I can get it to work”.   New inventions always take time.  Leo had to remind people that when all else fails look in the DOS directory.  I guess I’m one of the few “geeks” who still makes use of that. 

Last night there was an exchange on the show that went like this.  “Just because Time Travel is a theoretical impossability, that doesn’t mean that couldn’t happen”.  And Bones correctly said “That’s Exactly - - what it means”.  If she hadn’t said it, I would have”.  Just remember the thought image of the kiddy’s alphabet blocks.  You can rearrange the order of a series of them without pulling one or more blocks out of the line, and this violates the axiom of linear time.  James Dobson, in order to cover for God says that “All things are possible with God” in scripture has to be taken with more than a few grains of salt.  For instance were you to ask God “How many Jews was it possible to save from the Nazi extermination camps”.  And you could repeat the same exchange Abraham had with God in Genesis.  “Could you save perhaps half, a quarter, a tenth - - - ten Jews?”  And God would have to say “I could not save Ten Jews.  This would be a theoretical impossibility.  Prior to the discovery of the Higg’s bozon last year, it would have been argued that - - - travel ten thousand times the speed of light through space was a virtual impossability.  But the Higg’s bozon changed all that for the reason that “Q” mentioned in a Star Trek episode in which he’d lost his powers.  He said, “Oh that’s easy to solve - - just change the gravitational constant”.  Now we can do that.  Hence we can now throw out the old rule book where formerly theoreticians were trapped by their own mathematical equations. 

Chris Matthews seems to have developed an almost unhealthy Wiener fascination on his past two shows.  But I would like to focus in on his closing remarks about the fact that the tea party Republicans have always hated this president.  You’d think they would have worked with him when he first got elected and given him the customary “honeymoon” period that’s given to new occupiers of the White House.  They didn’t.  Do they hate him for capturing Bin Laden and removing that as a political issue?  Do they hate him because he doubled the capital worth of so many of them when the stock market and their 401 K’s doubled?  Do they hate him because he]’s an educated, well spoken man whose anger threshold is lightyears ahead than mine, let me tell you.  Do they hate him because Eric Holder wants to look into the Texas voter rediscricting scandal?  Let’s keep in mind Holder is doing this because redistricting for purposes of gaining a racial advantage is prohibited, and Texas knows that.  Do they hate Obama because he wants to bring eleven million minorities out of the shadows of legality?  Do they hate Obama when he says “If you don’t like my economic ideas, then lets see you offer your own economic plan”.   Do they hate him because “Texas is in danger of turning from red to at least purple now with all these Mexican minorities”.    They have done some really acrobatic jerrymandering of districts to cheat Latinos out of their due representation.  Maybe they hate the President for some of these reasons but most of all they hate him because he’s Black.  There is just no way to get around this sad fact of American politics in 2013.  No other President aside perhaps from Andrew Johnson was subjected to the kind of pandemic vitriol that President Obama has.  It’s fueled by the burning fires of racism that just won’t go away.  That burning natural gas on that platform in the Gulf last week was extinguished but you can’t extinguish the racism of these people.  Trying to reason with ANY of them on matters of economics is pointless.  So much is riding on the 2014 elections not just in Congress but in State houses such as Michigan and Wisconsin, which formerly were blue states and now have been hijacked by republicans.  They don’t just want to do damage now, but want to do the sort of damage that will be in effect way after they have been voted out of office.  None of them can hold a civil conversation.  Every word out of their mouths is so steeped in lies it’s hard to unwravle them all in just one sitting.  John Boehner and others lied when they said “We gave you your tax hike at the beginning of the year so don’t complain about that”.  They didn’t GIVE us squat.  They had no choice.  We GAVE they the 400,000 figure when if we had not acted the figure would have been $250,000 and up for a hike in federal income taxes.  Yet every yahoo out there in the southern states with a limited mental capacity from education in inferior schools - - these yahoos believe that somehow John Boehner made some sort of “concession” last December on the tax issue, when it’s the farthest thing from the Truth.  Some of these hicks and hay seeds in middle America are probably so DUMB that they actually believe that President Obama is responsible for the drop in median national income and the tight job market over the past twelve years or so.  They don’t analyze.  They don’t investigate any more than the George Zimmerman did the least bit of independent, logical, deductive thinking.  These red state hicks just aren’t wired that way.  They seem possessed of a phobia of “ever learning anything new” that is exceeded only by the Christian Church officials, and that’s a story for a whole other day.  They appeal to an America that never existed.  Even if they themselves have been screwed over by their own politicians they’ve got their heads up their butts and dare not even pull them out and take a look at the world the way it is around them.