Michelle Bachman is a very simple person, and that's not a good thing....

Today, Michell Bachman declared her cantidacy for the Republican nomination for President.  Interestingly though, according to Wikipedia, Bachman was originally an activist for the Democrats and only decided to become a Republican due to an incredibly simply process of elimination. Having concluded that the Dem's were dissing the founding fathers, she seems to have assumed that her only other option on Earth was to become a Republican.  This is roughly the same as a German of a previous generation "realizing" that, as he could not be a Nazi, he would have to be a communist, and such simplified thinking may be a large part of our country's general incompetance in government.
     First of all, could we just stop kidding ourselves that the Republicans and the Democrats actually have standing philosophic viewpoints?  I'm old enough to remember when Republicans favored big government for the sake of defense and described a government deficit as something normal for any large economic organization while southern Democrats opposed any sort of equal rights legislation and the party as a whole pleaded for tax breaks.  Ms. Bachman, however, is apparently not well informed enough to see either party's hodege-podge of claims as a hodge-podge.
     Bachman does believe some things I myself find odd.  Quite frankly though, that is no reason not to nominate or even elect her.  Hell, I believe some odd things myself, and so in all probability do you.  If you, I or Ms. Bachman didn't, it would mean that we haven't been thinking enough about the current failures in our government, economy and defense or trying to find original solutions to them.  I'm a little worried, though, that Ms. Bachman may not overcome her oddness and may keep to it, jut like Barak Obama.
     Where's Ross Perot when you need him?  Or, did Ms. Bachman even notice his front-runner status of this founder of the Reform Party for much of the 1992 election, and so, would she even bother to learn from him?  He often claimed nothing more than a willingness to try to figure out what would work rather than to assume a set of answers to be correct.  Maybe we could use a leader like that....
     Just a thought.

Iraq and Afghanistan Aren't Going to Get Any More "Won"

As you can see from these maps, Allied forces now hold every part of both Iraq and Afghanistan.  We have no part of either of them left to conquer, not since Hamid Karsai rose to power and Saddam Hussein dropped out of office.  Still, with rebels sabotaging their own country's oil facilities, gas at four dollars a gallon and the Taliban having tea with the Afghani President, this doesn't feel much like victory.  Still, could it?
     Now I live for a while in Chicago, and ever so often I have to compare our victories in the middle east with the the Chi-Town police department's "victory" over the the street gangs.  Yes, on one hand, nobody actually puts "gangstuh" on his resume.  On the other hand though, the people in the city's west side are either too scared or too supportive of the Kings, the Bloods and the Crips to call the police, and so they go on selling criminal goods and services with almost no fear of a legal consequence.
     The countries of the Middle East may just be like the west side.  Basically, in both cases the people living there see the supposed forces of order as at least something of an occupying force and, even in clear evidence of the benefits of the presence of such enforcers, they prefer to avoid or possibly even subvert them.  Oh, we do have a few advantages in Chicago.  The population speaks the same language as the cops, and they usually have roughly the same ideas about God and democracy.  Still,we do seem to be losing that war simply because of our overall unpopularity with the general populace, and we probably shouldn't think we're going to do any better in a more complex place like Arabia.
     A side thought: we probably should've had a rotation policy in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Then our soldiers there would've had the same chance as Chicago cops to tell us when a policy was working and when it wasn't.
     Hell, maybe we just should've given Iraq to Kuwait.  Hell, in some ways they wanted to be together.
     Just a few thoughts....

Why No One Is Ever Going to Make a Good Jurror

Casey Anthony actually seems to have a pretty good defense. She's found experts willing to claim that the chemicals and insects found in her car trunk are not in fact reliable evidence of anyone having kept a body there, and for better or worse, under the presumption of innocence, that should, in the absence of a corpse, be sufficient cause for a jury to release her. Unfortunately though, she or her lawyer has decided to make a "positive defense," meaning one that does not simply refute the claims of the prosecution, but asserts its own claim, in this case one dealing with coyotes.  She probably should've seen that Meryl Street flick about the Australian chick who blamed the dingoes.  That didn't work out too well for her, either.
     Unfortunately though, simply refuting a case is probably not enough to get a verdict of innocence.  It didn't work for Jesus, after all, and he actually knew the guilty parties.  Unfortunately though, very few people sitting in that despotism called a jury seem to want to find anyone innocent anymore, and can we blame them?
     People on a jury are taking time out of their normal lives to perform a civic duty.  At best, they spend long hours waiting for some clerk to list them as a candidate for something, and if selected they have to face a lot of very presumptive questions about themselves from lawyers trying to weed out jerks.  Lastly, during the trial itself, they have to sit for hours at a time and listen to a disorganized presentation of claims and guess truth from lies while hoping not to look stupid by missing or misunderstanding anything.  Compare it to the most boring class you ever faced in high school but remember that you can't leave after forty-five minutes, that you can't tell anyone what happened to you at "school,"  and that failing this class will cause a hardship for someone and probably piss off Thomas Jefferson and Henry Fonda's character in 12 Angry Men.  In the face of all this pressure then, the average jury is going to want all that bother to serve a purpose, and for that reason they're going to want to do something big, like hanging somebody or exonorating them forever.
     Unfortunately though, having been through all  the aforementioned bullshit, they aren't as likely to save anyone as crucify them
     Just a few thoughts....