A report from The  Christian Science Monitor headlined, Supreme Court: US Muslim cannot sue Ashcroft for 2003 detention ordeal, leads to the stunning conclusion about holding people as a material witness and torturing them.

“Efficient and evenhanded application of the law demands that we look to whether the arrest is objectively justified, rather than to the motive of the arresting officer,” Justice Scalia wrote.

Apparently the following circumstances are objective reason to believe that a person was fleeing to avoid testimony:

The material witness warrant used to justify the Kidd’s detention contained substantial errors. It said Kidd was booked on a one-way, first-class flight to Saudi Arabia. (He held a round-trip coach ticket.) It also said Kidd’s testimony was crucial in the ongoing visa fraud investigation in Idaho.

Despite the aggressive actions taken by the government, Kidd was never called as a witness in the visa fraud case or any other case. Nor was he charged with a crime.

Apparently the Supreme Court and I don’t use the same version of the English language.  Perhaps we do need an English only law that applies only to the Supreme Court.

Despite the title of the article on Rawstory.com – Larry Wilkerson: Congress’s ‘remarkable’ reaction to Netanyahu might be explained by money – the more likely reason comes toward the end of the interview.

There is one action in the interview – that takes probably less than 10 seconds – that will spell the doom of Wilkerson’s career. The doom will not be from the meaning of what he did, but from the portayal of that meaning in the snippet that will be broadcast over and over again on Faux Noise and then taken up by the “serious” media.

Rita F. Redberg, a cardiologist, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and the editor of Archives of Internal Medicine wrote the article Squandering Medicare’s Money for The New York Times.

She describes procedures that Medicare pays for that have no benefit for the patient.  She said the following:

Changing the system would be relatively easy administratively, but would require a firm commitment to determining whether tests and procedures truly benefit patients before performing them. Unfortunately, in a political environment in which doctors providing end-of-life counseling are called death panels, and in which powerful constituencies seek to preserve an ever-increasing array of procedures and device sales, this solution remains hidden in plain view.

It is more than just the political climate that makes it difficult to solve this problem.  Culturally and economically there are forces that make this a natural outcome of health insurance.  The escalating cost of private health insurance demonstrates that it is not just a problem for Medicare. If it costs the individual patient nothing directly extra for his or her individual decision, then why wouldn’t the patient opt for any procedure that might have even the slightest possible benefit?  Efforts to make the patient pay something for making these kinds of decisions is fraught with its own set of problems.

It will take a very wise and creative person or group of people to figure a palatable way to solve this problem.  It is an easy problem to recognize, but a devilishly hard one to solve.  When the individual has no ability to change the costs and benefits by individual action,  but the group suffers the penalty for actions of the group,  this type of problem is classically a difficult one to solve.

It is easy to say that we ought to pay for outcomes rather than services performed.  In other words, a doctor or hospital gets paid in proportion to how much better the patient does than if the doctor or hospital had not intervened.   I suspect that this change to the system is much easier said than done.

I found a very intelligently written letter to the editor in the Boston Globe about the The Ills Of One-Party Rule in Massachusetts.

SCOTT BROWN is quite right that one-party rule by Democrats in Massachusetts causes problems for the state. The Republican Party could make itself part of the solution by nominating candidates to office whom residents would like to vote for.

When residents weigh the damage caused by one-party rule with the potential damage of voting for a Republican candidate whose ideas of governance would be even more damaging, they are forced to choose the lesser of the two evils.

One would think it wouldn’t be too hard to find nominees who would represent a lesser evil than some of our corrupt office holders. If the Republicans cannot find the way, perhaps another party will come along that can.

The author of said letter was some fellow named Steven Greenberg in some town called Fiskdale, wherever that is.

I found the article There’s a Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says on wired.com.

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden tells Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”

What Senator Ron Wyden is saying is that there is a law of the land that you are obligated to follow, but you cannot be told what it is.  It makes me wonder who is actually running this government. I am very unhappy to hear that this sort of thing continues under the Obama administration.  I was very naive to believe that getting rid of George W. Bush would put an end to this.

From the story Protester Who Heckled Netanyahu In Congress Allegedly Beaten, Arrested At Hospital, comes this quote:

Netanyahu said after being interrupted by Abileah. “You can’t have these protest in the farcical parliaments in Tehran or in Tripoli. This is real democracy.”

Ironic, isn’t it, that you can’t have these protests in a “real” democracy either.  In a real democracy they don’t injure and arrest protesters.  What happened to the people who tackled and injured the protester?

Maybe Israel can show us the way to do things in a “real” democracy.

On the 63rd Israeli Independence Day, Israelis defy the ban on mourning the Nakba in the heart of Tel Aviv

Then there is this story, Government Official Who Makes Perfectly Valid, Well-Reasoned Point Against Israel Forced To Resign.

Rabbi Lerner’s Response to President Obama’s Middle East Address is posted on the truthout web site.

The response has some good points, but expects an awful lot from President Obama.  This Palestinian/Israeli issue is such a tough one, that it may be too much to expect that anyone can come up with a solution that both sides will buy into.

As a comment on this article, I reiterated my thought about the position of denying the right of the UN to vote on a solution.

It is interesting that no vote in the UN should be allowed to create a Palestinian state although that is exactly how the state of Israel was created.

How convenient to realize that such an imposed solution is bad policy and should never be followed again just at the point where one side has already benefited from that policy and the opposite side is just now requesting the same.

In a less serious moment, I thought what poetic justice it would be to repeat the history of the formation of Israel.  Let the UN decide on the initial borders of the new Palestinian state and then let the people of the region fight a war to decide where the borders will actually be.  I am not an authority on the history of the beginning of Israel, so there is a good chance that my understanding of what happened has been warped by my upbringing.

Obama may have said that he was only stating publicly what has been assumed privately for a long time. In newspaper reports, I have read that this position has been stated openly by Presidents Bush, Clinton, and Bush during their administrations.

See the article Obama rejects controversy over his stance on Middle East peace talks.

If you go beyond the video clip above, apparently Obama also said:

“There was nothing particularly original in my proposal; this basic framework for negotiations has long been the basis for discussions among the parties, including previous U.S. administrations,”

Despite what I read on some blog comments, The Jerusalem Post is not in total agreement with Obama, but here is one of their more positive articles about what Obama said, PM: Disagreement with Obama blown out of proportion

In the article Obama: Borders will be different from June 4, 1967 lines, The Jerusalem Post quoted Obama’s speech

“Peace cannot be imposed on the parties to the conflict. No vote at the United Nations will ever create an independent Palestinian state,” he declared. “And the United States will stand up against efforts to single Israel out at the United Nations or in any international forum.”

I would think that such a comment needs a lot of explanation. A vote at the United Nations is exactly how the state of Israel was created. Maybe Obama is referring to how badly that turned out as far as creating peace in the middle east. Of course it is fine to say, well we made a mistake with that one, so we are not going to do the same thing to rectify that original mistake. However, that leaves the aggrieved people with with an unacceptable status quo. Not exactly fair. That is why I said the words need explanation. I did not say that they could not be explained.

I have always thought that the there is a reason why Republicans know how to pick the most awful thing to accuse the Democrats of wanting to do so that public emotions will be stirred up to reject the idea. They just pick something that they want to do that they would most like to hide from the public.

I am now getting to an age where that grandma and grandpa that go over the cliff could be Sharon and me.

I found the above clip on the pages of Rawstory.com

According to Paul Krugman’s piece, Making Things in America the answer seems to be not much.

First, what’s driving the turnaround in our manufacturing trade? The main answer is that the U.S. dollar has fallen against other currencies, helping give U.S.-based manufacturing a cost advantage. A weaker dollar, it turns out, was just what U.S. industry needed.

Yet the Federal Reserve finds itself under intense pressure from the right to make the dollar stronger, not weaker. A few months ago, Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, berated Ben Bernanke for failing to tighten monetary policy, declaring: “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens than debase its currency.” If Mr. Bernanke had given in to that kind of pressure, manufacturing would have continued its relentless decline.

This follows the thesis that I have been presenting here on this blog that in order for our manufacturing industries to become competitive again, our costs have to start to balance out with the competing countries.

I can think of  two ways to make this happen.

One way is to let the value of the dollar fall.  That will cut into everyone’s wealth that is denominated in US dollars.  However, the decline in wealth will be relative to people in other countries and will be little noticed by people here.  The workers and the super rich will all share in the decline.

Another way is to drastically lower the wages in this country in terms of a strong dollar whose value is not declining.  This will be rapidly be noticed by the workers in this country as their debts will stay at fixed amounts, while their resources to pay those debts will decline.  This seems to have the nice effect for the rich in that the money owed to them is not losing purchasing power.  As with the housing bubble, they seem to forget that it makes no difference if the money owed to you stays constant when the people who owe it to you cannot pay it back.  I cannot understand how people who are supposed to be capitalists have such little grasp of this elementary principle of capitalism.