August 23, 2008 archive

Do you really need a Joe Biden Open Thread?

Summertime blues

A 51-year-old Nagasaki homeowner whose electricity had been cut off was busted for trespassing after sneaking onto a neighbor’s property and plugging an extension cord into an exterior wall socket. The man said he wanted to power an electric fan.

A thief using a stolen cash card managed to receive a ¥380,000 loan from the Japan Post Bank, even though he provided a false name, date of birth, telephone number and hanko.

A worker at a 24-hour fishing gear store in Sapporo was killed in a hit-and-run accident while chasing two shoplifters. Which begs the question: who the heck shops for bait at 3am?

Police suspect that a man who suffocated after being trapped under the automatic sliding shutter of a bookstore in Tachikawa had been out drinking with co-workers before the incident.

Cops in Hiroshima raided the offices of a company called Horkos on suspicion that it exported precision machine tools that could be used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons.

It was reported that a foreign ministry official failed to pay a ¥15.38 million bill that he had racked up at a Tokyo hotel over 239 days from June 2006 to April 2007.

A 31-year-old woman in Kawaguchi, Saitama, found a sewing needle in a watermelon purchased at the snappily named Belc grocery store. Police say it was the third recent tampering incident within a 1.5km radius.

In your musical meanderings, have you been impressed with a recent find? I have. He’s apparently been around for awhile, but I just discovered Ben Harper…and I’m hooked. Next time the wingnuts get you down, have this one ready.

Fight Outta You

 

I had thought about writing and posting about McCain and his constant reference to being a POW. Then the flap over not being able to remember how many homes they own. There are things about his POW experiences that need to be put into perspective, because being a POW doesn’t automatically make you a hero or presidential material. If this is true of any POW it is true of McCain in spades. Follow me below the fold for some straight talk about the “straight talk express.”

I keep thinking, for some reason, of Patrick Fitzgerald, as an authentic American.  I remember when he would give press conferences on the Libby case and no one was able to spin what he said.

And I think his acceptance of limitation had something to do with it.

The I-Ching says (Wilhelm/Baynes edition), in the hexagram of “Kou/Coming to Meet”:

The superior man always stays where he belongs.  He comes only into his own domain.  … The inferior man has to depend on a lucky chance.

I sometimes forget that Scooter Libby was convicted on four of five charges, convicted of lying and obstruction of justice in the Plame affair.  I sometimes forget this because, of course, Mister Bush immediately pardoned him.

But Patrick Fitzgerald was able to make the case and convict Libby.

I think of the word “limitation” because of how Fitzgerald spoke during those press conferences.  He didn’t try to moralize or speak politically.  He spoke only of his job and explained what obstruction of justice meant (the notion of “kicking sand in the umpire’s face”) and stuck to the facts of what he could say.  He never deviated from this no matter what the press asked him.  So there was nothing to spin.