Summertime, and the livin' should be easy

Pardon me while I step away from the keyboard for a while. If you feel like it, check back in August. Perhaps I'll be here again. A few parting thoughts:

1. Sure hope they stop the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. While humans, thinking (as always) it's all about them, concentrate on whose fault it is, millions of innocent marine mammals, birds, crustaceans, and fish are dying awful deaths. Just stop the damn flow, that's all.

2. It seems to me that the Obama team did a good job "shaking down" British Petroleum, if that's what they did. The basis of the Republican criticism, and concomitant coddling of BP (for which I hope they pay dearly in November), seems related to their absolute determination to conclude that Obama can never be good at anything. He was good at this. Deal with it.

3. James Kunstler posted a blog today in which he compared Obama to Millard Fillmore, and likened the death of the Whig Party to current Democratic troubles. He used the phrase, "history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes." You tell me if you've read any of that somewhere before.

4. The American economy seems to have entered a spin cycle in which it goes round and round, squeezing the water out, keeping bank accounts as worthless assets while allowing high-speed computers to rule the stock market, and getting nowhere. It's become very boring to write about it.

5. I'll never understand why Barack Obama's administration thinks it's a good idea to keep innocent people locked up forever in its Cuban concentration camp, fighting tooth and nail against release, even when a court rules "emphatically" on a habeas corpus petition that injustice has been done, as a court just did in the case of Mohammed Odaini, a Yemeni who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, at the age of 17 while studying religion, and detained despite evidence throughout his imprisonment that he has done nothing wrong.

A federal court this month granted his habeas petition for release, finding that the evidence "overwhelmingly supports Odaini's contention that he is unlawfully detained."

Worse, the court described the multiple times over the years -- beginning in 2002 and occurring as recently as 2009 -- when the U.S. Government itself concluded that Odaini was guilty of nothing, was mistakenly detained, and should be released (see here for the court's description of that history).

In the absence of a better explanation, one must conclude that both the war in Afghanistan, now in its 9th year, and the deliberate policy of incarcerating innocent people in cages whom the government knows to be innocent, are undertaken as part of a program of pandering to the Right Wing. This is craven and evil. I suppose it's my status as an officer of the court, and my desire to behave as a decent human being, that compel me to point this tyranny out.

Not writing about such stuff will be a great relief. That such things continue is disturbing to the conscience.