sfarber

Given that the President and his team have declared August an official “slow news month” (and certainly, there will be no new major product launches, let me tell you…) , let’s talk about the most important event happening in the universe: Michael Jackson and a couple of jurors from his recent molestation trial are out shlepping the rights to their book deals. Recall what an impressive cottage publishing industry the O.J. trial proved to be, what with Darden and Clarke and Judge Ito and Cato and the Green Hornet and the rest of them, all with big-buck book deals. So…....

I really don’t want to think too much about the fact that NASA is deliberately risking the lives of seven people on what amounts to a publicity stunt (even if it appears that Astronaut Stephen K. Robinson may well have successfully performed the exterior repair he set out to do) or that the bad guys in Iraq seem to be improving their game. No. I’d like to discuss what really matters, and what might be the only good news I’ve seen today: Michael Jackson is buying a house in Bahrain, and might just move there. He and his three children...

Well, not that far beyond… crude oil prices spiked to close at a record $61 and change today, part of the pot pourri of events that included the death of Saudi King Fahd, concerns over refinery capacity and fears about Iran’s nuclear program. Given the President’s close ties with the House of Saud, and of course, the oil industry, one might think that the policies which have continued to drive oil prices higher– the Iraq war helping keep the world’s second largest reserves unavailable to world markets, an America committed to wasting ever more energy, and no efforts whatsoever to...

This week’s visit to our comrades at Pravda gives us this sober, but accurate view of the American decision to ground future space shuttle missions (the earliest being the Atlantis, which could have been ready to launch in around a month). It means at some point very soon, NASA must make a decision as to whether it wants to risk the current crew of seven astronauts in a reentry of the Discovery, which suffered damage to its heat shields during lift-off, pretty much the same problem blamed for the deaths of seven astronauts in the Columbia disaster, or does NASA...

“It” is China’s currency, at times referred to as the yuan, and at others, the renmindi or “RMB”… China abruptly announced that it was going to permit some measure of “free-floating” in response to market conditions of its long-pegged currency. Well, well. China (unlike, say… the United States…) has come to the conclusion that it is attached to the rest of the world, and in the end, sucking up all of the world’s reserve currency… might pose as much risk to China as to everyone else (what good is owning all the money if you can’t buy anything with it?)...

The U.S. House of Representatives passed “CAFTA”, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, by a face-saving 217-215 margin; a few Republicans from protectionist favoring districts (meaning contributors in the textile industry) were “permitted” to vote against the measure. House Dems actually held pretty firm against the measure. Why? Becuase Democrats are idiots, that’s why. The fact of the matter is, as the Grey Lady piece notes, the combined economies of the six nations (five in Central American plus the Dominical Republic) total barely the size of Greater Tampa’s economy (or Connecticut’s)… around 1% of the American economy, if that, combined....

One suspects that this has to be Karl Rove’s idea. Jane Fonda has announced plans for a nation-wide bus tour to protest the Iraq War. There’s just no other explanation for this. None.

From the poetic justice files comes this Wapo piece detailing the rather deliberate efforts underway in S.Ct. Justice David Souter’s hometown to arrange for the local municipality to seize the good jurist’s home for either a hotel, or a park project, in a most unveiled reaction to the outrageous decision reached by the Supreme Court in Kelo v. New London, to wit, that any well-connected developer can get any local government to seize any private property it wants, as long as the takee is less politically influential. Again, I tend to consider the Kelo case a bit of anomolous for...

It seems like just yesterday that Judge John Roberts, Jr. had his nomination to the nation’s highest profile intermediate appellate court, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, tied up for nearly two years amidst political wrangling. Well, Judge Roberts, who was part of that crack legal team that successfully wrested victory in the 2000 election on behalf of the Bush-Cheney team (and away from those irritating voters) now gets his justest recompense (at least, if you’re him): an all-expense paid invitation to be the President’s nominee for the current opening on the United States...