Unconventional Wisdom

When I first heard this news all I guess the news wires knew was that he fell. Then when the network evening news came on they talked about how he had seisures in the past and it led me to conclude that apparently he had a seisure. I’m not an ardent follower of the Supreme Court, but I’m certainly glad he’s not in bad shape.

From the Chicago Tribune again…

Chief Justice John Roberts walked out of a hospital in Maine Tuesday, released a day after he suffered a seizure. The White House said he told President Bush he was doing fine.

Roberts strode briskly out of the Penobscot Bay Medical Center in Rockport, Maine, wearing a blue sport coat, open collar shirt and slacks. He waved to onlookers before getting into a waiting sports utility vehicle.

The chief justice, 52, plans to continue his summer vacation, Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said. She said that doctors found no cause for concern after evaluating Roberts.

Roberts was hospitalized after he fell on a dock near his summer home on Hupper Island, near Port Clyde, Maine. He had a prior unexplained seizure in 1993. Bush had called Roberts earlier Tuesday, and press secretary Tony Snow said that the president was assured the chief justice was doing well.

Snow said that Roberts “sounded like he was in great spirits.”

Doctors who examined Roberts after his seizure said they found no tumor, stroke or any other explanation for the episode.

Snow told reporters that the White House had been aware of the previous seizure when Bush nominated Roberts to the nation’s highest court. The seizure did not prevent Roberts from getting a clean bill of health at the time, recalled a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid pre-empting the expected release of more details by the White House.

By definition, someone who has had more than one seizure without any other cause is determined to have epilepsy, said Dr. Marc Schlosberg, a Washington Hospital Center neurologist who is not involved in the Roberts case.

Whether Roberts will need anti-seizure medications to prevent another is something he and his doctor will have to decide. But after two seizures, the likelihood of another at some point is greater than 60 percent.

I often listen to Rush Limbaugh who often talks about how the left in this country continues to play from the same playbook. Well this story should clinch it. From the Chicago Tribune…

In the newspaper photographs, they are frozen in time confronting police, taking to the streets, staging teach-ins and leading universitywide strikes. Now gray-haired, these members of the original Students for a Democratic Society are teachers, artists and activists. As they look at a new generation of student activists, they see changed circumstances but a similar struggle.

Forty-five years ago, students gathered in Port Huron, Mich., to draft a statement of principles around which the SDS would organize. This past weekend, the new SDS’ four-day national convention opened in Detroit.

Tom Hayden, who wrote the Port Huron statement and is the author of a new book, “Ending The War In Iraq,” said the most obvious differences between then and now are the absence of a military draft and that, until 1971, the voting age was 21. That meant that 18- to 20-year-old men could be sent to fight in Vietnam but could not voice their opinions at the ballot box.

“You can’t imagine what it is like to feel like everyone on your campus was going to be drafted and here was a war that didn’t make any sense,” Hayden recalled of the campus protests four decades ago. With an all-volunteer military force, there have been few ’60s-style street protests even as polls show that a majority of Americans has turned against the Iraq war.

Hayden said he gets e-mails almost every week from students who are writing papers about the Port Huron statement as a historic document. But former SDS members said that doesn’t mean that the anti-war sentiment animating the SDS has receded into history, just that today’s circumstances are markedly different.

He said that as the ’60s activists grew old enough to vote, they saw many of the politicians and public figures killed that they believed would have brought changes in American policy. “We gradually overcame our disenfranchisement as young people only to be disenfranchised as the top leaders who could have been elected were killed,” he said.

President John F. Kennedy, who Hayden said might have ended the war, was assassinated in 1963, as were Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in 1968.

Students involved in today’s SDS are certainly opposed to American involvement in Iraq, but, like their SDS elders, are focused on broad societal change.

The new SDS, announced in 2006, says it has 265 registered chapters. Beth Blum, who recently graduated from Drew University in New Jersey, said she joined out of a desire for a network of like-minded people who were more focused and less frustrated than the anti-war movement.

“People get frustrated with the anti-war movement because there is no visible change,” she said.

Blum and others also cited the new SDS’ broad agenda. Pat Korte, one of the founders and a student at The New School in New York, said he hopes to create “a long-term vision of what a better society could look like,” and he ticked off a list of problems he sees: capitalism, racism, sexism, patriarchy. “We wanted to put forth a vision that would replace the institution that would keep producing these horrors,” he said.

Mark Tribe, an artist who teaches at Brown University, organized a re-enactment last Thursday on the National Mall of a 1965 speech by then-SDS President Paul Potter. The re-enactment was part of an art project that came out of Tribe’s surprise over the lack of anti-war protests on the Brown campus. “In the middle of a war that my students say they oppose, the campus was quiet,” he said.

His project, he said, is not aimed at increasing activism but at finding a way to express his own reaction to the Iraq war and to the differences between now and the protests of the 1960s and early ’70s, which he vaguely remembers attending with his parents. The re-enactment attracted about 30 people, but Tribe said he thought it was effective in echoing the frustration felt by 1960s activists before the anti-war movement evolved into national protests.

One of my favorite blogs called Uptown Avenger based out of Chicago had this post about a protest that resulted in exposed old woman cleavage. There was some point to be made with this, mainly to get our troops out of Iraq. I just want to know what the point of the topless protest was.

ZombieTime.com

I was watching Meet the Press yesterday morning and I’m not sure what to make of the Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Yeah he seemed to be very crafty with his answers. More like contenuous to the point where even I’m starting to wonder if he knows what he’s doing. Is it the right thing to do to give a hostile Congress some more ammunition to hammer an already battered administration.

I like President Bush, but I don’t know why he won’t just get rid of this guy. I know the President is a loyal guy and will be dragged kicking and screaming before he jettisons someone from his administration, but Gonzales’ performance at Congressional hearings so far just have to leave much to be desired.

If there was one guy who was considered incompetent by some in the MSM it was Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense. I liked him, too bad he can’t continue in the role, but he always gives you the best answer he can. Gonzales isn’t even close.

Of course I think someone discussed that Gonzales is running interference for President Bush and his battered administration. Well I can believe that, but who knows if I can take that suggestion seriously. Then again after the Attorney General has done his job protecting the Bush administration, then I guess the President can jettison him.

I don’t know but all I can ask you to do is read this Washington Post article and come to your own conclusions.

This photo was chosen by Little Green Footballs as their photo of the day. Check out this write up over at Atlas Shrugs who talks about a rally for Cindy Sheehan as she considers a run against Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Hmmm, wouldn’t it be funny if Sheehan effectively wipes out Pelosi, but the district that I assume covers the city of San Francisco is represented by a Republican. Think of the possibilities here.

If you read this story then you might see this as an overreaction. Besides, I’m subscribed to an ABCNews e-mail list and all I saw was that some DC Metro stations were closed because of some dead birds. Here’s a piece of the story…

Two Metro train stations were closed Sunday while hazardous materials crews investigated a number of dead birds and a substance at one that was identified as a commercial rat poison.

The Greenbelt station on the Green Line in suburban Maryland and the Takoma Park station on the Red Line in the city were closed, said Cathy Asato, a spokeswoman for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.

There were as many as 20 dead birds outside the Greenbelt station and one to three outside other stations, Asato said. The Anacostia and Naylor Road stations on the Green Line also were affected.

Investigators determined the substance at the Greenbelt station was d-Con rat poison, said District of Columbia Fire and EMS spokesman Alan Etter.

“We suspect very strongly that it’s the same chemical at the other stations,” Etter said.

He said investigators were looking for a person in a black pickup truck who witnesses saw spraying the material.

“Metro will have to figure out if this person works for them or is a contractor or what,” Etter said.

No injuries were reported.

Still can’t get WordPress up over here. I got the info I need but I don’t know. See WordPress is a lot more work than I wanted to do. I might figure this out yet, but perhaps I need to just stick wtih the Blogger platform.