Saturday Morning Quick Hits

The Charlie Black Connection Now that Jesse Helms, Charlie's former benefactor and boss is sailing on the river Styx, it might be a good time for us to look at Chuckle's body of work. He has been behind the sledge hammering the racist wedge into the body politic. Helms was the ultimate "identity politician" and Charlie Black helped him mine that vein shamelessly. Now Black is a top adviser with McSame and the Democratic nominee is a black man. Here is hoping that this trip to that poisoned well is one too many and it backfires big-time.


You can exhibit political courage when you are less than 200 days from retirement Retiring Republican Senator John Warner has asked Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman to look into what speed limit would provide optimum gasoline efficiency given current technology. He said he wants to know if the administration might support efforts in Congress to require a lower speed limit. Warner cited studies that showed the 55 mph speed limit saved 167,000 barrels of oil a day, or 2 percent of the country's highway fuel consumption, while avoiding up to 4,000 traffic deaths a year. "Given the significant increase in the number of vehicles on America's highway system from 1974 to 2008, one could assume that the amount of fuel that could be conserved today is far greater," Warner wrote Bodman.



Rebuked. (Again) A federal judge appointed by bu$h 41 has issued bu$h 43 a bitch-slapping from the bench., letting the little idiot know that he doesn't have the authority to decide arbitrarily what is legal and what isn't. He can't just ignore the law and institute warrantless surveillance of Americans. US District Court Judge Vaughn R. Walker confirmed that the 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the "exclusive" means for domestic intelligence collection. Walker, chief judge for the Northern District of California, is hearing legal challenges to the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program as well as lawsuits against telecommunications companies AT&T and Verizon.


Shameless In the waning days of Bu$hCrimCo, the dipshits in charge are making one more pass at complete deregulation. The goal of these people is to dilute securities rules passed after the collapse of Enron and other large companies — measures that were meant to forestall accounting gimmicks and corrupt practices that led to those corporate failures. The changes that the bu$h administration wants to push through would put American investors at the mercy of overseas regulators who enforce weaker rules and may treat investment losses as a low priority, and foreign regulators are out of the reach of Congressional oversight. James D. Cox, a securities law expert at Duke Law School who returned this week from teaching corporate law in Europe, said the shift to international rules amounted to an outsourcing of safety standards. “We would not for a moment tolerate having American auto safety standards set by China or India,” he said. “Why should we do it for financial safety standards? There has to be some accountability.”