Surprised? Why?

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. yesterday presided over the reading of some fascinating decisions. Not only did the Court cite Brown v. Board of Education while stomping on the underlying principle that segregated education is, by its very nature, unequal education, it used the resulting smoke to remove a piece of ant-trust law that has protected consumers for nearly a century.

The detail are in your local newspaper, and, for a change, I won't tell you what you already know. But the bottom lines here bear repeating.

Communities made an effort to provide for considering ethnicity in "all other things being equal" situations in order to provide some measure of diversity to combat a situation of increasing defacto segregation.

Merchants had been discounting prices (taking a lower profit per item sold) on products from automobiles to candy bars, to the benefit of the consumer.

In both cases, the Court decided such grassroots actions were occasionally unconstitutional. Not always, and the lower courts need to look at such issues on a case-by-case basis, but occasionally. So much for 6 years' worth of railing against the evils of "clogged courts and delayed justice" we have had from the Neo-Cons.

So we have a C.J. selected in a fog of rhetoric about the evils of "activist judges" the twin benefits of smaller government and "local control" blithely putting the Federal court system ever farther into local community actions, local business actions, and the private lives of citizens.

Concurrently, these decisions, and several others this term, virtually mandate an escalation of lower-court litigation.

The broadcast and cable media paid attention to the former decision while virtually ignoring the latter. Probably because this keeps a good face toward a consumer demographic while not irritating the major economic forces that seem to determine content in the "news mcnuggets" that compose the primary information flow for most of the nation.

But is anybody truly surprised? Keeping "those people" out of pretty much all-white schools and making sure nobody undersells Wal-Mart is hardly anything new. The Administration may be staffed and led by minds that have raised mediocrity to zenlike levels, but they are firmly rooted in the worldview of the oligarchy.

So why is it that when members of the Supreme Court, appointed primarily for their loyalty to the beliefs of people like the President (who describes his ideal audience as "the haves and the have mores") act precisely as expected, people are surprised?

Should there be an English proficiency test .............

...... for Conservatives?

For a crowd that wants everyone in the United States to speak only English, the Neo-Cons have some curious gaps in their command of the language.

As a retired military member, I am reasonably familiar with the operation called a surge. Obviously, nobody in the West Wing nor any of their cheering section have bothered to look the word up in any set of operational definitions. A surge is a temporary increase in strength within a defined theater of operations.

Prior to execution, the following elements must be agreed by all stakeholders:
1. The number and mission of the augmenting forces.
2. Arrival date of forces.
3. Departure date of deployed personnel.

The force strength at the end of the redeployment must be equal to that in existance at the start of the surge.

If none of these criteria are met, as in Iraq, the term to describe the operation is: escalation.

I was in an Air Force uniform when LBJ announced that the 50,000 troops being sent to augment existing forces in Vietnam were not an escalation. There was also a lot of talk about the necessity that the South Vietnamese forces should gradually become able to defend themselves.

Doesn't ANYbody on the right side of the political spectrum ever come up with a new idea?

While I was out of town............

I was asked about the line “that happened when I was out of town.” I am reliably informed I use some variant of it fairly frequently in conversation.

Basically, the U.S. Air Force was nice enough to let me see a fair amount of the world. During my 26 years of service (which they now call employment....interesting change of viewpoint), I spent roughly 21 years somewhere other than the United States.

I enlisted in 1966, did Basic and Technical Training in Amarillo, Texas, then went to Wiesbaden Air Base, Germany for what was supposed to be 3 years, and turned into 4.

During that time, I spent a few months in the States on temporary duty (various schools, for the most part), and a little under three weeks on a leave in California 1967 that featured my fiancee informing me (a) we were not going to get married the next week, as I had supposed, and (b) she was getting married to a draft-dodging weasel who convinced he was my best friend [insert the rest of that cliche here]. A couple of years later, I married a lovely lady from Ireland, who shared my life and travels for 26 years.

In 1971, I went to Fairchild Air Force Base, Washington. Late 1972 to early 1974 was Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, and various interesting points in between. From there, I went to England for just over 4 years RAF Alconbury), and was about to do a fifth when I got accepted to Officer Training School.

So mid-1978 to early 1980 was OTS in Texas and Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida. After that, 1908 to 1983 was Aviano Air Base, Italy, followed by RAF Mildenhall U.K., followed by NATO Air Base Geilenkirchen, Germany. Those last three locations included temporary duty to more locations than I want to remember. Mid 1991 brought us back to the States, where I did 1 year at Travis Air Force Base, California and then retired.

Out of 26 years in the USAF, I was in the States for about 5 years. The last stretch overseas was 11 years, with 2 weeks in California, and about 3 months total temporary duty at various Stateside locations.

The result seems to have been a mild disorientation, particularly regarding the eddies and swirls of the Mainstream during the periods 1973 to 1978 and 1980 to 1991. ....... and I’m not real sure about a lot of the 1990's. Just to add to the general fun, I spent four or five years in the middle 1990's bouncing in and out of clinical depression. I don’t recommend that.

As I said, I was out of town a lot.