Happily, this prediction was correct. Arthur Ponzarelli, aka The Ponz, aka Bernie Madoff, just got the full 150 years. They didn't just throw the book at him, they threw all 20 volumes of the Encyclopaedia, the dust jackets, and the Cliff notes.

Madoff Hit With 150 Year Prison Sentence

Hey, don't do the crime if you can't do the time, as Robert Blake said, and he should know.

A reason why the length of the sentence matters. If, hypothetically speaking, you knew somebody was going to live for 8 years, then how is a 150 year sentence any different from an 8 year sentence? Read on...


Prison Survival Tips For Madoff

Here's an interesting article on how Obama, without much help from Congress, can tighten the screws on the Iranian regime:

http://www.slate.com/id/2221547/pagenum/all/#p2

I saw another article making the point about cutting off their gasoline supplies, which seems deliciously ironic. Of course that assumes that Obama wants to tighten the screws on Iran, and he seems to have been on the side of the mullahs so far, though he did finally speak out on the crackdown on their citizenry, so we'll see. But he certainly doesn't seem to have the emphasis on human rights that Jimmy Carter had.

Gad--Jimmy Carter without human rights. How low have we sunk?

Of course, the Islamic Republic may be the new Ottoman Empire, exercizing the tyranny of the weak. Obama may not want to collapse the Islamic Republic for fear of creating a much larger Afghanistan. Personally, I think it is a risk worth taking; I bet a royal restoration would be easy to engineer, especially a constitutional one.

Ya gotta love this: in South Carolina, adultery is a crime! Guess Mark Sanford needs to brush up on the laws he's enforcing.

http://www.slate.com/id/2221854/

Here's a shocker: Palin resigns as Alaska governor!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090703/ap_on_re_us/us_palin_resigning

Here is a Wall Street Journal editorial article, which is titled, "Russia Is Back on the Warpath."


Chess Fan

I've still been torturing myself by listening to Michael Savage spottily on the evening drive. I was starting to think I'd been too hard on him. I've heard a few shows since then where he actually said things, and gave a few facts to support his statements.

But it was a buildup for the big letdown. I tuned in for the first time in a while yesterday, and he hit bottom. He was going on about the arms reduction treaty, which I have some reservations about myself, what with Iran and North Korea's recent activity, but that's not the point. The point is that he argued it completely disingenuously, claiming we were "giving away our strategic advantage", and creating analogies that were all predicated on the assumption that we were giving up missiles and Russia was giving up nothing. Exactly what they were giving up and how it stacked up against what we were giving up was a question that he gave the widest possible berth to, so in fact he never made any argument of any kind to demonstrate that we were giving up a strategic advantage, only insisted that it was true.

But the real crown jewel, the one that's made me regard him as outright untrustworthy, was his claim that Obama was acting illegally by signing the treaty at all, and citing it as proof that we were now living in some kind of dictatorship. He quoted once, very quickly, Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution:



Obama signed this treaty on his own, so he's breaking the Constitution. So says Savage. He let one caller on, who started to challenge him on it, but as often happens on that show, the caller was shouted down halfway through his point and never got to make it at all. As I've mentioned before, Savage is cursed with the feeling that all his beliefs are too obvious to need any explanation, so he spends more time getting angry about them than explaining them. (Side Note: Back when I used to hear Limbaugh, I recall that he was almost always very polite to his callers, and would often roll out the red carpet and devote extensive time to callers who disagreed. Savage is horrible to his callers, and usually ends up in shouting matches even with people who halfway agree with him. Savage often loses even arguments that he should have won because he gets so worked up he forgets to make a case for his viewpoint. I could imagine myself calling the Limbaugh Show, but I'd never waste the time to try to call Savage).

Anyway, back to the main point. I think all of us, with only the slightest effort, can recall hearing stories about every President in their lifetime signing a treaty. It's not something new, it's not something illegal. The Senate does have to ratify the treaties, true, and if I saw any evidence that the Senate wasn't going to ratify this one and that Obama had acted on his own, then I might buy into the dictatorship talk. But I've heard no such evidence, and Savage presented none. Instead he assumed that it hadn't, and tried to put the onus of proof on a caller to show that it had. He asked if they'd heard anything about the Senate discussing any such thing. Of course he hadn't, the media hasn't cared about reporting on anything but Michael Jackson for the last week. But that doesn't prove it hasn't or won't happen, only that the media is sloppy, which I already know.

I think I liked savage better when he was talking without saying anything.

Oh, don't worry, we've got enough conventional weapons to destroy both of these countries many times over. Even so, I doubt we'd go to zero nukes without first gettingall state actors on board.

Our strategic advantage in my view is due to geography more than anything. First, the US has boarders with only two countries. This makes any sort of "containment" strategy, like we used against the soviets, nearly impossible. Russia tried to put missiles in Cuba, and Germany tried to get Mexico to declare war on the US during WWI, but other than this no other attempts have been made, any future ones don't seem feasible, giving Mexico's economic dependence on the US, and the slow but steady opening of Cuba. In short, the US has established complete hegemony in the Western hemisphere.

Secondly, and very important as well, as a result of this hegemony, and simple geography as well, the US is best suited to dominated the seas. It has excellent to both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and since there is no power in the neighborhood to challenge the US, US naval dominance goes unchecked.

Russia could never dominate Eurasia the like the US dominated and still dominates the Americas. True, Russia made progress, it pushed into central Asia and Eastern Europe, but there was still all of Western Europe, China, and Japan. These countries were all used by the US to successfully contain Russia.

Capitalism or nukes did not win the cold war, geography did.