Boys and Girls on the Supreme Court.

President Barack Obama is considering nominees for a seat on the Supreme Court. He is considering Diane, Nancy, Elena, Sonia, Jennifer. Obama is not considering John, James, Eric or even Juan or Mohammad. All girls, no boys.

New Justice Could Hold the Key to Presidential Power. The New York Times

The article does not mention the gender restriction. Apparently the restriction is understood, accepted and approved. How did we get here: a society that has lost its ability to reason?

Maybe Obama just wants to appoint someone like his two children, both of whom are girls. Maybe he wants to make nice to Hillary and her injured supporters who thought during the 2008 presidential primary that the boys were being mean to Hillary. Maybe Obama is doing a Bill Clinton deal and trying to make the Supreme Court look like America. That will be difficult with only nine members.

Do we want emergency room doctors restricted to girls only? Or do we also want to allow boy doctors to save our lives? Obama grew up in a society that had stuff like "bring your daughter to work". Omit the boys, bring the girls. This was being done by the parents, mostly mothers, of these boys. With that type of illogical thinking ingrained, restricting Supreme Court nominees doesn't seem so wacky.

What the heck is this? Obama is eliminating about half the population? OK, about now is when some of you reading this are screaming: hey, that's what happened through most of U.S. history. Yeah, right. We had slavery and lynching, too. Should we now make up for that by enslaving white people and hanging a few of them?

Grow the heck up!

I'm less outraged about Obama than I am about the lack of reaction. Obama is doing his political thing. If he could, he would appoint a Spanish, homosexual woman. He can safely ignore Asians because they are not vocal. What a mess.

How about considering really good Americans for the Supreme Court? That's good enough for me.

Torture: yes we can.

In the second Godfather movie there's a scene in which Tom Hagen asks Michael: why do this; you've won; do you have to wipe everybody out?  Michael responds: I don't feel I have to wipe everybody out, just my enemies.

Barack Obama seems to agree with Michael.  Obama just does it in such a nice way.  Obama and his Democratic party have won, both the presidency and control of Congress as exemplified by the continuously embarrassing speakership of Nancy Pelosi in the House.  Pelosi continues to insist that she is the only House member briefed on torture policy by the CIA during the Bush administration who was not told that it was happening.  Pelosi's problem is that she has been insulated far too long in a weird congressional district that is geographically and socially apart from most of the rest of America.

Why do the Democrats insist on speaking in public about the prisoner and torture policy of Bush and Cheney after those two have left power?  It's clear that Obama has no real plan for dealing with the war prisoners (I deliberately avoided the more specific phrase prisoners of war) who have been kept at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

More alarmingly Obama appears to be well defined by the Republican campaign phrase "dangerously naive".  Nancy Pelosi is all that and delusional.  Even Obama's Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, implied this during the primary.

Especially irritating is the insinuation that Obama and those who agree with him are morally superior to those of us who are honest enough to admit that we understand the sad reality forced on us by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  There really is such a thing as evil and it cannot be fought exclusively by platitudes mistaken for our ideals.

Of course we oppose torture.  We want our own prisoners of war to be treated according to the Geneva Conventions that the United States signed.  The terrorists did not sign those or any agreements to behave in a civilized manner even in war.  Most of us were embarrassed and concerned for members of the U.S. military when the prisoner abuses in Iraq came to light.  We immediately thought of Senator John McCain who had been tortured as a prisoner in North Viet Nam forty years ago.  We were concerned also because it seemed low level and pointless, torture just to torture.  Americans oppose that.

However, we are realistic and any rational person can define circumstances in which torture would be used, not by sadistic criminals, but by reluctant citizens doing their duty to protect and defend the American people.  To deny this is dishonest.  Here are two examples.

1. Ticking time bomb.  This has been presented by many others yet Obama and others continue to consider it an unrealistic example.  It is a situation that calls for strict code of conduct to get information in an emergency to save lives.  Suppose we capture Osama bin Laden and he tells us that his terrorists will begin a series of attacks on American civilians starting at noon the next day.  Would President Obama authorize torture to make him divulge the information that could prevent those attacks?  If this were all known and being covered by the media, would instant polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans  approve torture in this specific case, not to punish bin Laden, but to get information that would save lives?  How intense would the pressure be for President Obama to torture bin Laden after the first attack occured?  After the second?  The third?

2. Sasha, Obama's younger daughter, is kidnapped by four people, one of whom is captured.  The world wide web soon begins to show a live web cam with the president's daughter and statements that body parts of the little girl would be cut off starting in one hour.  Sasha is pleading: Daddy, please save me.  How long would it take for Obama himself to torture the captured kidnapper to get the information to save Sasha?

Of course we have ideals.  But we also deal with real world problems.  Some of those problems cause conflict between our ideals and our actions.  We can try to define circumstances when our ideals must be compromised, to limit the digression as best we can.  Denying this dilemma does not help.  It just makes for a more difficult time when the situation arises.

What's bad for General Motors is good for the country.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,827790,00.html

Dwight Eisenhower first encountered Wilson while serving as the Army's Chief of Staff in the postwar years; in 1952, after Ike was elected President, Wilson was his choice for the job of Secretary of Defense.

"You Men." Washington, although it eventually became quite fond of him, never understood Charlie Wilson—and Detroit's Wilson certainly never understood Washington. The Wilson remarks that would have passed for wry banter in a General Motors boardroom became matters of controversy in the capital's political climate. During the closed hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee on his confirmation, Wilson made a comment that was widely misquoted and was to dog him throughout his governmental years. According to the press, Wilson told the Senators: "What's good for General Motors is good for the country." What he actually said: "For years I thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa."

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Times have changed.  The opposite is true.  GM and Chrysler should be driven out of business.  Instead President Obama and Congress are spending unimaginable sums of tax payer money to save these companies.  They will remain more unchanged than the President would like to admit.

The auto industry is joined at the hip with the oil industry.  I can understand why oil wants to cling to auto but why does auto continue to cling to the fuel source that is its ruin?  It suggests a level of mismanagement that is still pervasive.

Former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich has been accusing the Democrats of wanting to punish the American people, equating any policy that discourages certain activities with punishment.  There are many Republican backed examples but the most appropriate is their perpetual opposition to universal health care.  If a citizen becomes unemployed that person must then start to pay for health care.  Now that's punishment.

If the United States had universal health care there would not be contention between two natural allies: retired auto workers and those currently employed.  The worst of the Chrysler creditors are resisting the federal government's attempt to ease Chrysler into organized bankruptcy.  Some speculators recently bought Chrysler debt at bargain rates figuring the feds would pay off when bankruptcy came.  Obama is now caught in an embarrassing position, one of many, as he suffers from his congenital condition of trying to split every hard decision down the middle and making a mess of the whole thing.

Why do conservatives love pollution?  They use every excuse no matter how silly to protect it.   They would have us believe that we need to keep the polluting auto industry in tact to protect its suppliers and dealers.  We need to continue polluting the galaxy and weaken national defense to help car dealers?

Bite the bullet.   In 18-24 months the pain will be over.  Suppliers will have adapted or changed to other business.  Dealers?  Who cares?

Obama is doing what Bush was doing when the financial industry began to crumble in September.  Obama protects unworthy industries and their rich leaders.

What is good for this country is to break with the past.  Let dieing industries die a natural death.  Help new industries replace them.   General Motors has been bad for the country for a very long time.