Conservatively Speaking July 1, 2010

· Byrd’s Death Sets Up Delay and Dithering

· SIGAR Report And A Brief History of Afghanistan

· NYT Krugman Warns Of Coming Depression

· Supeme Court Upholds 2^nd Amendment Rights

· MIT Study Pushes For Natural Gas As “Green” Fuel

· Supreme Court Rules Against Christian Group’s Bans

· FBI Uncovers Russian Spy Ring: 11 Arrested

Scatology (skuh-TOL-uh-jee) noun: 1. The scientific study of excrement.
2. An obsession with excrement or excretion. 3. Language or literature dealing with excretory matters in a prurient or humorous manner. From Greek skato-, combing form of skor (dung). Ultimately from the Indo-European root sker- (excrement) that is also the source of dreck and scoria. :

“One fund will be left empty, while the second will contain a steaming pile of what, at the risk of descending into scatology, can only be described as two-year Greek government notes.” Mark Gilbert; Hedge-Fund Guy Seduces Buffett to Safeguard Bonus; BusinessWeek (New York); Jan 14, 2010.

A special election to replace the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D) WV will be held in 2012, not this fall as some had speculated. Calling the state election code an “interesting” document, Tennant said that because the filing deadline for this election had long passed that the “next” election for a special to be held was not November 2010 but November 2012.

Democrats had predicted Tennant’s decision, insisting the law was clear and citing a 1994 case decided by the state Supreme Court that affirmed the idea of a delayed special. It’s not immediately clear whether Republicans — either at the state or national level — will challenge Tennant’s ruling.

Byrd’s death removes a reliable Democrat vote from the Senate defacto giving Republicans a 42^nd vote making it even more impossible for Democrats to end a filibuster. But, that won’t last long because West Virginia’s Governor Joe Manchin is a reliable partisan and will appoint a reliable Democrat.

General Stanley McCrystal’s head had barely stopped bouncing down the White House’s driveway when his “retirement” from the U. S. Army was announced Tuesday.

Afghanitan was once described to me by a woman who lived in Kabul as petty warring tribes and arguing prienthoods surrounded by hostile foreign countries. For nearly 100-years it has been a cork in the rectum of Soviet communist expansionist ambitions.

On the heels of McCrystal’s replacement Tuesday’s Washington Post cites a report by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) dated June 29, 2010 saying the U.S. military has systematically overstated or failed to adequately measure the capabilities of Afghan security forces, whose performance is key to the Obama administration’s exit strategy for the war, according to a new government audit.

In my opinion the SIGAR report is an entangling, rambling example,of bureaucrat speak arguing about how to measure success and if necessary change the rules to declare success. In any case it seems useful to remind ourselves about Afghanistan’s history.

The first people into the Afghan territory were nomadic tribes, settling down in the mountains about 1500 BC. It later belonged to the Persian Empire and lasted until the arrival of Alexander. Later It was conquered by the Bactrians and the Kushans, who were Buddhist. Halfway through the 7th century, Islam penetrated it through the Turks and dominated the territory until the arrival of the Mongols from Gengis Khan who dominated a great part of which today is Afghanistan. The rest of the territory was taken by the Persian Sofawíes in the 18th century.

Afghanistan was created by the union of all the tribes in 1747, fighting Persia and India, establishing a monarchy that lasted until 1973. During the 19th century, the Persians attacked the country with the aid of Russia, in an attempt to expand itself towards the Indian Ocean. Great Britain sent troops and restored the situation of the country and named governors who sympathized with the cause.

The Afghan tribes never accepted the English constantly battling them. In 1921, the Afghans recovered the sovereignty. In 1973, after a military coup the monarchy collapsed and a nominal republic settled down that quickly was coopted by communist influrnces..

In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded in support the collapsing communist government and with the covert help of the CIA it was defeated. Between 1986 and 1989 the Soviet army withdrew, but another civil war erupted between the factions. In 1992 a government coalition between the guerrilla factions formed. In 1996 the Taliban took Kabul, establishing a Islamic fundamentalist government. Since then, Afghanistan has been governed by an iron religious and political fundamentalism, while opposing guerrillas harassed the government until 2001, when Kabul was taken by U. S. and NATO forces without much resistance on the part of the Taliban.

Fighting has continued without resolution since.

Read SIGAR at http://www.sigar.mil/pdf/audits/SIGAR%20Audit-10-11.pdf

Russia will return to its program of building a space shuttles and super-heavy carrier rockets after 2018, the Interfax news agency reported on Friday.

New carrier rockets will have a workload over 24 tons, director of Moscow’s Central Machine-building Institute, Gennady Raikunov, said during the Strong Russia business conference.

According to Raikunov, the tests of the rocket will start in 2015 and its commercial exploitation will commence in 2018.

Russia ended its space shuttle program in 1988 after only one flight. Obama has ended the US Space shuttle program next year.

NEWSMAX reports New York Times’ Paul Krugman thinks the U.S. economy is in the “early stages” of a third depression, one which will be much more severe than the pre World War II Great Depression.

“We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression,” Krugman writes in the New York Times.

“But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense,” he wrote in the Times.

This third depression will emerge as a result of the failure of government economic policy. Krugman says there have been two other depressions one in 1873 and one in the 1930s.

“Around the world … governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending,” writes Krugman.

“Unlike governments of the past, which tried to balance budgets in the face of a plunging economy, today’s governments allowed deficits to rise. And better policies helped the world avoid complete collapse: the recession brought on by the financial crisis arguably ended last summer.”

But, Krugman notes, future historians will say that this wasn’t the end of the third depression. “After all, unemployment — especially long-term unemployment — remains at levels that would have been considered catastrophic not long ago, and shows no sign of coming down,” writes Krugman.

Other elite opinion-makers seem to concur with this tragic hypothesis. The Washington Post is reporting that this past weekend’s G-20 Summit was a “prelude to a depression.”

Meanwhile, Vice President Joe Biden defended the Obama administration when it comes to fiscal restraint in a year when spending is polling higher than usual among voter concerns, swamppolitics.com reported.

Biden said the Obama White House has introduced a proposed budget freeze and pushed for a debt commission that Republicans ultimately rejected, swamppolitics.com reported.

“We are on our way out of this recession,” Biden said.

Coprolalia (kop-ruh-LAY-lee-uh) noun: An uncontrollable or obsessive use of obscene language. Eythmology from Greek copro- (dung) + -lalia (chatter, babbling), from lalein (to talk). A related word is coprolite.

In a narrow 5-4 vote the Supreme Court held Monday that Americans have the right to own a gun for self-defense anywhere they live, advancing a recent trend by the John Roberts-led bench to embrace gun rights.

The justices cast doubt on handgun bans in the Chicago area, but signaled that some limitations on the Constitution’s “right to keep and bear arms” could survive legal challenges.

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the court, said that the Second Amendment right “applies equally to the federal government and the states.”

The court was split along familiar ideological lines, with five conservative-moderate justices in favor of gun rights and four liberals opposed. Chief Justice Roberts voted with the majority.

Two years ago, the court declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess guns, at least for purposes of self-defense in the home.

That ruling applied only to federal laws. It struck down a ban on handguns and a trigger lock requirement for other guns in the District of Columbia, a federal city with unique legal standing. At the same time, the court was careful not to cast doubt on other regulations of firearms here.

Gun rights proponents almost immediately filed a federal lawsuit challenging gun control laws in Chicago and its suburb of Oak Park, Ill, where handguns have been banned for nearly 30 years. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence says those laws appear to be the last two remaining outright bans.

Lower federal courts upheld the two laws, noting that judges on those benches were bound by Supreme Court precedent and that it would be up to the high court justices to ultimately rule on the true reach of the Second Amendment.

On March 30, 1981 both President Reagan and his press secretary, James Brady were shot; by mentally deranged John Hinkley Jr. in his attempt to impress actress Jodie Foster. Hinkley has been in psychiatric care since and most recently has had release time. President Reagan recovered quickly, but Mr. Brady, shot in the head, was paralyzed for life. Brady and his wife Sarah. Began a campaign against gun violence sprouting organizations nationwide.

President Obama met with the Russian president at the White House and afterwards, took him out for a burger. It was a bit awkward because Gen. McChrystal was working behind the counter.- Leno

An 83-page MIT report authored by 30 faculty members, researchers and graduate students says that natural gas will play a leading role in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions over the next several decades, largely by replacing older, inefficient coal plants with highly efficient combined-cycle gas generation.

The two-year study, managed by the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), examined the scale of U.S. natural gas reserves and the potential of this fuel to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Based on the work of the multidisciplinary team, with advice from a board of 16 leaders from industry, government and environmental groups, the report examines the future of natural gas through 2050 from the perspectives of technology, economics, politics, national security, and the environment.

The report includes a set of specific proposals for legislative and regulatory policies, as well as recommendations for actions that the energy industry can pursue on its own, to maximize the fuel’s impact on mitigating greenhouse gas. The study also examined ways to control the environmental impacts that could result from a significant expansion in the production and use of natural gas—especially in electric power production.

“Much has been said about natural gas as a bridge to a low-carbon future, with little underlying analysis to back up this contention.  The analysis in this study provides the confirmation—natural gas truly is a bridge to a low-carbon future,” said MITEI Director Ernest J. Moniz in introducing the report.

A common misconception about natural gas is that we are running out, and quickly. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Study estimate 749,000 trillion cubic feet in the lower 48 states , and 200,000 trillion cubis feet in Alaska plus 155,000 trillion methane coal gas. Most of that onshore although a lot is offshore. Fourteen times as much is in Europe and the former Soviet Union. Much of the natural gas in in Western Pennsylvania; Texas (on and off short) , and in the Rocky Mountain region.

The new report emphasized the great potential for natural gas as a transitional fuel to help curb greenhouse gases and dependence on oil, it also stresses that it is important as a matter of national policy not to favor any one fuel or energy source in a way that puts others at a disadvantage. The most useful policies, the authors suggested, are ones that produce a truly “level playing field” for all forms of energy supply and for demand reduction, and thus let the marketplace, and the ingenuity of the nation’s researchers, determine the best options

This all begs the question of whether or not America will be permitted to access these vast reserves of clean energy or be penalizedfor some sort of harebrained scheme to develop fairy tale energy sources like capturing livestock flatulence. And burps.

An Iowa couple whose passion for bowhunting encouraged Cupid’s arrow to strike wore camouflage to blend in with the wooded backdrop at their treetop wedding. There is a smart aleck comment to be made – but I can’t get it.

By a 5-4 vote, Supreme Court justices upheld a U.S. appeals court ruling in favor of the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. It denied recognition to the group because of a school policy that membership should be open to all.

The high court’s ruling was a defeat for the Christian Legal Society. It argued the U.S. Constitution does not allow a school to deny recognition to a religious student group which insists its members agree with its core views.

The group requires members to sign a statement of faith that vows devotion to Jesus Christ. It bars those with what it defines as a “sexually immoral lifestyle,” including gays and lesbians.

Founded in 1961, the Christian Legal Society has law student chapters across the country. Its members hold Bible study meetings and discuss ways to apply their religious faith to the practice of law.

The Hastings College of the Law chapter initially was open to all students, but in 2004 began requiring members to endorse a statement of faith and barred anyone who engaged in “unrepentant sexual conduct.”

It’s so hot down in Washington D.C. today that President Obama was fanning himself with his birth certificate.- Letterman

The FBI said on Monday it has broken up a Russian spy ring that carried out deep-cover work in the United States to recruit political sources and gather information for the Russian government. Russia contends it is horse hockey. Reportedly the ring has been in place since Putin headed the KGB.

Nevertheless authorities charged 10 individuals with the plot all of whom were arrested on Sunday in Boston, New York, New Jersey and Virginia on charges including conspiracy to act as unlawful agents of the Russian Federation and money laundering. Another man was arrested on Cyprus. Most are couples working under deep cover.

The group, dubbed the “Illegals”, was accused of being tasked by the Russian intelligence agency SVR to enter the United States, assume false identities and become “deep-cover” Americans, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

Their goal was to “become sufficiently ‘Americanized’ such that they can gather information about the United States for Russia and can successfully recruit sources who are in, or are able to infiltrate, United States policy-making circles,” according to criminal complaints filed in U.S. federal court.

However, they were not assigned to collect classified, secret information, a Justice Department official said. Most are believed to be originally from Russia and trained to secretly infiltrate the United States.

News of the bust comes just days after President Barack Obama met with Russian Dmitry Medvedev to continue repairing a relationship between the two nations that has been fractured over diverging foreign policies and business matters.

U.S. law bars individuals from acting on behalf of foreign states without notifying the U.S. government.

Americans are divided on Afghanistan. Twenty-five percent (25%) want troops to come home immediately while 28% favor sending more troops to that troubled country. The schizophrenia closely follows along partisan and racial lines.