This morning I read a distressing article in my morning paper, the Baltimore Sun.  According to the article, Bush and his five hacks on the Supreme Court are about to prohibit law suits against drug companies once FDA has approved the drug.  Sorry, I can't find the article posted online, but here's an excerpt from this morning's Baltimore Sun:

Charlie Chaplin was an agnostic, and there is no evidence that he had any Jewish ancestry.  Yet throughout his life rumors circulated that he was a Jew.  The Nazi propaganda machine regularly denounced Chaplin as a Jew, and even the FBI during the McCarthy era in the 1950's, while investigating Chaplin for his alleged Communist ties, noted in the investigative file that Chaplin was a Jew, born under the name Karl or Israel Thonstein.  

Throughout his life, Chaplin was often asked if he was a Jew.  Charlie Chaplin always answered, "I won't deny being Jewish."  Charlie Chaplin was offended at these rumors because of what they revealed about Christian and American society.  Chaplin felt strongly that there was nothing wrong about being Jewish.  Even though he was not a Jew, he was not going to appease these bigots by denying a fact for which one should feel no regret or disgrace.   There was nothing wrong, nothing negative, about being Jewish, so why should he deny it?  And he never did.

Barack Obama could learn a lesson from Charlie Chaplin.

When the Vickie Iseman scandal broke, posters here repeated without dissent that they could care less whether or not McCain was faithful to his wife.  I think folks here are missing the one potential problem with adultery by a politician, and that is the potential for blackmail.

The Seventh Commandment, by the traditional Jewish enumeration, is the prohibition against adultery.  The Rabbis of the Talmud noted that adultery leads to lying, because the adulterer, when confronted, will almost always falsely deny his or her adultery.  1,700 years later, Bill Clinton would prove their point.

Yesterday Maryland State Senator Gwendolyn Britt of Prince Georges County passed away after a short undisclosed illness.  She had been a lifetime champion for equal rights for all Americans, regardless of race or sexual orientation.  

As a child growing up in Northeast Washington D.C., in the 1940's and 1950's, she had experienced first hand what it meant to be a black child in a segregated city.  She and her family were not allowed to even enter one of Washington's major department stores, Woodward & Lothrop.  In summer, she would watch white children being bused to beautiful swimming pools, while she was forced to use Washington's very unequal pool for "coloreds."

This evening while driving to the store I was listening to the news on NPR, and the local NPR outlet here in Baltimore broke away for a local item.  The story was about a dispute between Bush and Congressional Democrats over NASA's funding, with Bush threatening to veto the increased budget for NASA proposed by the Democrats.  A key item was funding to replace the Columbia spacecraft, which was destroyed with all aboard on February 1, 1986.  The report said that this dispute was of interest to Maryland because a number of jobs at the NASA's Goddard space center at Greenbelt, Maryland, were at stake.  The announcer stated that the Goddard center was in Congressman Steny Hoyer's district.  

A few weeks ago, Mitt Romney defended the failure of any of his sons to enlist in the military, because his sons were serving our country by working on his campaign.  A lot of us, myself included, commented negatively, but I now realize how unfair we have been.

First there was the tragic bridge collapse in Minnesota.  Yesterday I picked up the morning paper here in Baltimore and learned that a chunk of the Greenbelt Road bridge over the Baltimore Washington Parkway fell onto the Parkway.  Fortunately, there were no vehicles under the bridge when the chunk of concrete fell, but this near disaster caused me to rethink the dangers which Mitt Romney's sons face as they travel our nation's highways, driving over and under bridges, working on their dad's campaign.

From 1910, when Oregon became the first state to set up a presidential primary, until today, the states have largely controlled their own presidential primaries.  This year, in the race to be first, or at least early, primaries are being pushed back earlier and earlier.  It now appears there may be one or more primaries before Christmas.  The time has come to make our selection of the Democratic and Republican party nominees are truly democratic, meaningful, and national process.

While an undergraduate in the 1960's, I took a course on post-Colonial Mexican history.  The professor required each of his students to write a term paper, so I selected the topic "Mexico in World War II." Since 2003, it's occurred to me that this history could have been very different had Bush and Cheney, or two folks equally deceitful, been in office when we were attacked at Pearl Harbor.

U.S.-Mexican relations had begun to decline following the election in 1934 of leftist President Lazaro Cardenas.  Although clearly not a Communist, Cardenas shared with other leftists of the time a naivite for the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin.  Prior to the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression in August of 1939, Cardenas was outspoken in his condemnation of Nazi Germany, but when war broke out shortly after the two dictators reached their Pact, the war for Cardenas became an internal affair between decadent capitalists.  

The Senate has already passed an Energy Bill that mandates 35 mpg in autombiles by 2020.  This week the House of Representatives will be voting on two bills on mandatory fuel standards.  

One bill, H.R. 2927, Hill-Terry, will raise mandatory fuel economy by the year 2022 to a minimum of 32 miles per gallon.  The Secretary of Transportation may by regulation provide for a greater fuel standard, but cannot go above 35 miles per gallon.  This is the bill supported by John Dingell and the auto industry, including the UAW.

The second bill, a far better bill, is H.R. 1506, the Markey-Platts Bill, which will provide for a mandatory fuel standard of 27.5 miles per gallon by 2012, and 35 miles per gallon by 2018.  

On Tuesday evening (June 5th) I attended the Baltimore Council of Foreign Affairs presentation by Frederick Kagan, the guy who came up with the bright idea of the surge and who sold it to Bush-Cheney to avoid following the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group.  The presentation lasted one and half hours, about equally divided between his speech and Q & A.

Although I detest his views, I will say that he made a convincing presentation.  I was most impressed by the fact that he spoke for 40 minutes, spewing out one alleged fact and one statistic after another, without a prepared speech or even notes, maintaining direct eye contact the entire time with his audience.

I'm giving a summary of his speech and the Q & A with little or no comment and I am going to avoid the "he said this, he said that", so don't assume I agree with what follows (and don't troll me).

I started to add a comment to Devilstower's diary, "Redeeming Realism", but decided this would be better expressed as a diary:

In 1930 Thurgood Marshall was rejected by University of Maryland Law School because he was black.  The rejection letter told Marshall he was fully qualified for admission but the University of Maryland Law School did not accept black applicants.

In 1930 segregation, and lynching, was a way of life.  Late in life, Marshall would tell the story how, as a young boy, he would visit his father while he was at work as a janitor in a downtown Baltimore department school, but he could not use the department store's bathroom because of the color of his skin.  His rejection from Maryland Law School was only the latest indignity.  

In recent weeks there has been considerable outrage here about Rush Limbaugh's bigoted song, "Barak the Magic Negro."  Yet the problem is not merely Rush Limbaugh and his three hours of hate filled propaganda.  Nor is the problem merely Sean Hannity.  After all, we live in a country founded on the First Amendment and the Right to Freedom of Speech, and the radio spectrum should be sanctuary for all responsible viewpoints.  

But in reality, the entire AM radio spectrum is filled not just with Limbaugh and Hannity but their local imitators who, 24-7, gurgitate the right wing talking points and turn AM radio into agitprop radio that rivals the Communist agitprop advanced by Lenin and Trotsky in the early 1920's.  Only when one of these AM stations offers a sports talk program is there a break in the agitprop.

This morning the Baltimore Sun is reporting that Ellen Sauerbrey, by the typical recess appointment the Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration, will officially represent the United States government, at taxpayer expense, at a conclave of European wingnuts in Poland.  Link is here:  

http://www.baltimoresun.com/...

The article states that Sauerbrey will be joining such worthies as Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, who has opined that condums are useless in limiting the spread of AIDS, Steven Mosher, who asserts that Moslem immigrants are causing the "demographic destruction of Europe", and yet to be named representatives of James Dobson's Focus on the Family and the anti-evolution Discovery Institute.

Most of us are concerned that Bush/Cheney may be planning to start a war with Iran.  Most of us question the wisdom of starting a war with Iran when we are unable to win the war we started in Iraq. This diary looks at five historical precedents, three in some detail.

I start by briefly noting the two most obvious precedents from World War II.  First Hitler, unable to defeat Britain, launched his war of aggression against the Soviet Union that would ultimately spell well-deserved doom for the Third Reich.  Second, fascist Japan, unable to complete its aggression against China with a knockout blow to end Chinese resistance, attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor and the American territory of the Philippines.  

Today is the second day of Hannukah, a very minor Jewish holiday that is widely celebrated today mainly so that Jewish children do not feel left out during the annual burst of commercialism known as the Christmas season.  Hannukah and all major and minor Jewish holidays are observed according to the Jewish lunar calendar, in the case of Hannukah from the 25th of Kislev to the 2nd of Tevet - the first day of a Jewish month being the New Moon.

The historical events remembered on Hannukah are recounted in the Books of Maccabees, particularly the first Book of Maccabee, believed to be an accurate historical account of these events shortly after they occurred.  These historical events provide lessons on the current horror in Iraq, and the need to preserve freedom of religion and freedom from religious establishment.

One reason some liberals took this snakeoil back in 2002-03 is that the neocons promised to redo what we did in postwar Germany and Japan.  In both countries (in Germany with the help of Britain and France) we maintained an enlightend occupation and helped in the foundation of these new democracies, in Japan we Americans even wrote the constitution which the Diet then adopted.  These were great liberal achievements and this neocon rhetoric obviously conned some who should have known better, as there were massive differences between post-war Germany and Japan and Iraq.

Until the recent linkup between the Christian Right and the Right-Wing Jewish Orthodox, the Judaism has never viewed abortion as murder or as otherwise sinful.  

By way of general background, Jews look upon the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, as the basis of the Jewish faith.  The traditional view is that these are the words of God dictated to Moshe Rabenu (Moses our teacher or rabbi), who, like a good stenographer, copied God's words verbatim.  In the Torah, Exodus 21:20-24, we read:

And if men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart, and yet no harm follow, he shall surely be fined, according as the woman's husband shall lay upon him, and he shall pay as the judges determine.  But if any harm follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

I am a Jew.  Maryland has never elected a Jew to the U.S. Senate.  Maryland has never elected a black to the U.S. Senate.  One of these sentences will no longer be true after next Tuesday.

If Kweisi Mfume were the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, and if my fellow Jewish Baltimorean Ken Mehlman were the Republican nominee, there would be no question as for whom I would work for, and vote.  I would cheerfully and enthusiastically support Mfume.  I would not vote for Mehlman for dog catcher.  (The difference between Mehlman and Joe Lieberman is that I would cheerfully vote for Joe Lieberman for dog catcher.)