Monday, June 29, 2015

Looking back: Is Roberts becoming an Earl Warren?


U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts might be the last person to surprise a nation like Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Both Republicans, they have surprised the nation, though Warren may have been more of a shock and delivered on the promise of civil liberties faster.
Being a California Republican, Warren probably should not be considered as paterfamilias with an Indiana-grown party member, a “professional Republican.” Roberts’ birth in New York state may have confused him more than Notre Dame high school in Long Beach, Ind., could sort out.
Throw into the algorithm that Warren was a member of a secret Gun club, whose union-leading father was murdered, before becoming a World War I veterans, the future Supreme Court justice was an enigma.
His political future might have been guaranteed after being elected governor of California three times, even tough President Dwight Eisenhower defeated him in 1952, except for one miscue.
He ordered the internment of 120,000 Japanese after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Later, he conceded he had made a human rights’ error of huge proportions.
More importantly, after Eisenhower rewarded him for backing off in the presidential campaign by making his chief justice, Warren’s court turned the nation around more than any American since President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He didn’t always write the majority opinion, but he led the way.
Warren is perhaps best known for ending school integration, but he also insisted on one-person, one vote, rights of due process, the Miranda warning to defendants and rights of free speech.
He will be forever denounced by evangelicals for banning school prayer.
Harvard graduate Roberts hasn’t gone as far as Warren, but perhaps he didn’t have as much to make up for.
Roberts and fellow Republicans repeatedly backed off on civil rights’ guarantees.
But more recently he has bucked his Republican supporters by twice. And even though he voted with the minority, his court approved same-marriage. The court, returning to a Warren theme, knocked down a common practice for gerrymandering, with Roberts again voting with the minority.
Had the chief justice taken bullet for his country? Conservatives felt betrayed. Some said he lacked courage.
The Jeffrey Toobin wrote in the New Yorker: “For today, it is enough to say that the Chief Justice and the Court did the right thing in one of the most important cases that they will ever decide. That was by no means inevitable or even foreseeable. It is, rather, something to savor.”






Sunday, June 28, 2015

Cape Canaveral - A rocket launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX exploded Sunday, the third ship to fail to reach astronauts on the International Space Station in eight months. No one was on board.
Officials said the trio has plenty of supplies, and can last until October. A Russian rocket is set to launch Friday.
American officials had been hoping the success of SpaceX _ including 18 straight successful launches _ would mean less reliance on Russia as relations have soured to their worst stage since the Cold War.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 exploded 139 seconds into the flight. Musk Tweeted: “There was an overpressure event in the upper-state liquid oxygen tank. Data suggests counterintuitive cause. That’s all we can say with confidence right now. Will have more to say following a fault three analysis.”
Debris tumbled into the Atlantic off Cape Canaveral.
Bill Gerstenmaier, Nasa's associate administrator for human exploration and operations,
called it a blow to the space program.
"Through these failures and events we can learn more, and come back stronger," he said. "It's not easy living on the frontier of space."
The crew, one American and two Russians, was not considered in any danger. Scott Kelly, representing the U.S. was to spend a year in space to compare his experiences with his twin brother on Earth.
Now the space program must conduct a rapid review of all rockets, as well as decide whether to go ahead with plans to send three more astronauts.
"Once we identify the issues we will submit that documentation to the FAA and it will be considered prior to the next flight," said SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell.
"I don't have a timeline for that right now. It certainly isn't going to be a year - (more likely) a month or so."
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Thursday, June 25, 2015

U.S. changes direction as sacred cows die



First a bayonet was stuck in the heart, if it had one, of the Confederacy. Then Obamacare was cleared. Now gays can marry.
Friday's attention was on a 5-4 vote allowing gays to marry across the land. There was no symbol more important to rightwing Christians who believe it is a sign American is going straight to hell
In a majority opinion written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, as expected, the court said:
"No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.”
It  had the ring of the U.S. Constitution: "we the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity..."

Obama crystalized what the nation was feeling.
As Mark Twain said, “Truth is stranger than fiction…”
Instead of celebrating the victory of Obamacare, the president was in Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., celebrating the life of murdered pastor/public servant the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney in a service televised throughout the world.

“God works in mysterious ways. God has different ideas. He (the killer) didn’t know he was being used by God.”
Even Pope Francis has gotten into the act, declaring humans are responsible for the Earth’s environment, as well as suggesting divorce might not always be a bad thing.
No matter how many black churches are burned in the South, the genteel “Gone With the Wind” and Robert E. Lee version of Johnny Reb died when nine blacks worshippers were murdered by a young white man who worshipped apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia. No such mass murder was committed by whites in apartheid South Africa, though they committed more than their share of brutal murders of blacks. And that included a few whites like Dr. Neil Aggett, a medical doctor who became a union organizer.


Not only will marijuana be legalized, but so will drug testing and Why should a paraplgic be barred from answering the phone at the Dish network, selling “Grace and Frankie?” Did Lucy van Pelt have to undergo drug tests to offer psychiatric advice in “Peanuts?”
Fox News needn’t fear. Being completely off the page of an evolving America will guarantee them a market. Like the Betamax.


I

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Natalie Wood a modern day Anastasia


For all but Baby Boomers, it is probably puzzling to see murder headlines about a starlet who allegedly drowned drunk when she fell off her yacht “Splendor” near Santa Catalina 43 years ago.
But no actress who lived such a short life figured more in the lives in those born after World War II than Natalie Wood.
There were no videos and not much TV. Just the movie show or the drive-in.
Orson Welles said even as a youngster she was “so good she was terrifying.” She earned three Academy Award nominations before she was 25.
Wood had just turned 43, virtually completed her 56th film, while working in film 39 of those years with few breaks.
She was headed to Broadway for her dream role: the mysterious Anastasia. There have been many claims, none proven, that Tsar Nicholas II’s youngest daughter survived a massacre by Russian Bolsheviks.
Wood, who was born in San Francisco of Russian parents who had fled Siberia, had taught herself about movies while watching them on her mother’s lap. She thought the cast was talking to her.
Who can forget John Wayne chasing her down on horseback in “The Searchers” in 1956 as she ran away to stop him from killing her in revenge for having been kidnapped and living with a tribe of Comanche led by the warrior Scar? Wayne’s character, Civil War veteran Ethan Edwards, had just scalped Scar for murdering his family and others.
But instead of killing his niece, Wayne lifts her up and says: “Let’s go home Debbie.”
In 1981, many movies later, including the storied “West Side Story,” and the generation-defining “Rebel Without A Cause,” she starred with Steve McQueen, James Dean, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon. and Laurence Olivier, Welles, James Garner, Christopher Walker and Robert Wagner, who married her twice. Wagner was eight years her senior, and Hollywood wags said the studio arranged their marriage when she was 18.
When she was found drowned Nov.  29, 1981, police treated it as an accident brought on by drink. Wood could not swim. There were many unanswered questions, most important why no one noticed her missing overnight on a small boat.
Friends and family never bought that narrative.
Wagner kept quiet until giving an interview to the Daily Mail, in which he admitted there had been angry words with yacht guest Christopher Walken, mostly over whether Wood she devote more attention to her career.
Three years ago police began revisiting the case, partly because the yacht’s captain doubted the official version of events.
Celebrity Journal claims Wood’s body will be exhumed to determine the exact cause of death and whether there were any injuries.
Homicide detectives investigating the mysterious death of NATALIE WOOD 33 years ago should exhume the body to determine whether or not Robert Wagner killed her.
“That’s the bombshell demand from the chief investigator on the cold case who claims to have unearthed new evidence suggesting the screen siren’s skull was brutally bashed in before she plunged to a watery death off Catalina Island in 1981,” The National Inquirer said.