Day: August 18, 2006

It was the day before Christmas Eve 2005 when John Mark Karr sent an e-mail to University of Colorado professor Michael Tracey, seeking a strange favor.  He asked Tracey to visit JonBenet Ramsey’s old house in Boulder and read aloud an ode he called JonBenet, My Love. “JonBenet, my love, my life. I love you and shall forever love you. I pray that you can hear my voice calling out to you from my darkness — this darkness that now separates us,” it read, in part.

President George W. Bush Friday, as expected,  attacked a federal court ruling that found his warrantless wiretapping program unconstitutional, declaring that opponents “do not understand the nature of the world in which we live, ” but at the same time he avoided the Constitutional questions raised in the judge’s determination.

President George W. Bush

If a judge’s ruling that declares President George W. Bush’s domestic spying program unconstitutional holds up under appeal, the President will be guilty of violating federal law at least 30 times and that could provide grounds for impeachment, says a leading Constitutional scholar. Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University and a recognized expert on constitutional law, says the ruling Thursday by a federal judge in Detroit raises “serious implications for the Bush administration” and indicates that the President “could well have committed a federal crime at least 30 times.” “This ruling is a bad situation that just got worse for the White House,” says Turley. “These crimes could constitute impeachable offenses.”

It seems the Bush administration’s attitude is to convince the people that we can deal with our oil gluttony if we just focus on drilling the last reservoirs of oil under our control. This blind charge doomed any Senate discussion of sensible provisions to address our addiction to oil, leaving only a misguided attempt to feed it.

My mother’s home and her family and her children were her lifeblood. Now that’s different than saying her children were intrinsically interesting to her. I never felt she was particularly fascinated by any of us. I sense she saw her job as helping us to become people who would one day become intrinsically interesting. What a difference from so many of today’s parents.

To paraphrase the late Sen. Everett Dirksen, “400,000 barrels here, 400,000 barrels there. Pretty soon, you’re talking about a lot of oil.”

Progress is prompted by problems, and the huge airport backups and delays caused by the British bust of alleged terrorists have security experts considering new screening techniques.

Democrats have a valid point in arguing that the middle-class family is stressed. But they will not win new votes by reaffirming their old stereotype as the anti-business party or by telling people who are barely scrapping by not to shop at Wal-Mart. A mother with a minimum-wage job is not going to pay $7.99 for a shirt for her second-grader when she can buy the same shirt for $3 at Wal-Mart.

In 41 years in politics, Lee Hamilton must have made some enemies. It’s just so darned hard to find them.

American men and women tend to embrace many well-known sexual stereotypes, admitting to patterns of behavior commonly attributed to their gender, according to a Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll of 1,010 adult Americans interviewed last month.