Random Thoughts On A Friday

It seems that the U.S. Treasury Department is now investigating film-maker Michael Moore. Evidently, during the filming of his latest documentary SICKO, Moore took some ill 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba for medical treatment. In doing so, he violated Bush's travel restrictions to Cuba.

Cuba offers free medical care to all of its citizens, and Moore was contrasting that with our own ridiculous system, which favors the rich, bankrupts the middle-class, and ignores the 45 million people we have without medical insurance.

Doesn't the government realize that all it's doing is giving Moore a ton of free publicity for his movie? I didn't even know he was making the movie, but now I can't wait to see it.

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It looks like the Iraqi Parliament has about as much respect for Dick Cheney as Americans do. One of the reasons he went to Iraq was to talk the Parliament out of taking a two-month vacation this summer.

Even Bush and Cheney know that it doesn't look good for the Iraqi government to go on a two-month vacation while American soldiers are dying there. But Cheney's visit did little good. The Parliament listened politely, but still plan to take their extended vacation.

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Tony Blair, or "Bush's lapdog" as he is known as throughout the U.K., has announced his retirement. Yesterday, Blair said he would step down on June 27th. It is expected that Gordon Brown will be his replacement.

Blair showed a lot of promise when he was elected a few years ago. In fact, his first election very nearly wiped out England's Conservative Party. But he threw all this promise away by falling for Bush's lies and supporting his invasion of Iraq. Following Bush's lead, he has refused to withdraw United Kingdom troops even though the English people have wanted him to do it for years.

Blair has taken his Labour Party from a position of dominance to a point where it is in doubt whether they can even hang on to power. History will not be kind to Blair.

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It looks like even the Republicans are starting to tire of Bush's miserable little war. A group of moderate Republicans took him to task in a closed meeting the other day. They warned him that he cannot expect to have their support much longer if the war continues to go badly (and there is no reason to believe it won't).

These Republicans are scared because there is an election coming up and the vast majority of voters in their districts are opposed to the war. One of them said the war has only 8% support in his district. Another said most of the people in his district want our soldiers to come home, even if it means "losing" the war.

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The Pope put his foot in his mouth the other day by saying he believed that politicians who support abortion should be excommunicated from the church. What a bonehead!

It's OK for him to have been a Nazi supporter during the last world war, but it's a mortal sin for a politician to support a woman's right to have control of her own body.

The people he wants to excommunicate are in many instances better and more loving people than he is.

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It doesn't look like our economy is doing too well at this time. We learn this morning that retail giant, Wal-Mart, announced their April sales were down 3.5%. This is the largest drop in sales they have experienced since 1978. Target did even worse. Their sales were down 6.1%.

Gas prices have set new records. Here in Amarillo, they average $3.07 a gallon. Experts have been on TV the last couple of days predicting that they will go down soon. But this is just the beginning of the summer driving season, so I doubt that is true. There's just too much money to be made, and you know how the big oil companies love their windfall profits.

Couple all of this with the fact that the bottom seems to have dropped out of the housing market across the nation, and it looks like our economy is starting to stumble. The head of the Federal Reserve said the other day that he gives 2-1 odds that we won't have a recession. Right now, I'd take that bet.