Over at TPM Cafe, Charlie Savage has an interesting take on Bush's Supreme Court nominations:

...the Bush-Cheney legal team’s strategy of picking presidential lawyers to fill court vacancies has been an integral part of the groundwork it has laid for a long-term expansion of White House power.

Savage uses the term "Presidentialist" to describe Roberts and Alito (and Harriet Meyers!) - as in someone who will cede to the White House discretion in most matters involving presidential authority.

Go have a read - it's an intriguing look at what this White House has always been about - unfettered power exercised as it - and it alone - sees fit.

There are other considerations as well. The physical location matters, as does the economic circumstance - in at least these ways:

1) The highest population growth right now is in the areas least able to supply a decent standard of living to all residents.

2) Somewhere around half the world's population lives within a meter or two of sea level*.

3) Fresh water is becoming an ever more precious resource. This will continue to deteriorate, as many rivers are supplied from glacial sources.

4) Many of the resources (see "water" above) now in the world are overused or misused, and there will inevitably be less of the non-renewable ones remaining to serve a population that is estimated to be around 9+ billion by 2050. (We are at approximately 6.5 billion now.)

5) By that same 2050, projections are that ocean food-fish stocks will be either extinct or seriously depleted. Many, if not most, of the people referenced in #2 above rely on fish as a protein source.

6) The amount of dislocation effected by half the world's population having to move or face potential inundation will create massive food, water, and housing crises, at the very least. Outright warfare, with its attendant human disasters, is not out of the question in some of those areas.

If anyone's read John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, you've seen a rough look at the future.

* Sea level is expected to rise steadily over the remainder of the century, and outright inundation is not necessary to render many low-lying coastal areas uninhabitable. Tides and storm surges will do that, as will increasing salinity in many affected wetland areas.

I do recall hearing that roughly half of the world's population lives within a meter or two of sea level. Any storm surge going beyond that will adversely affect them. Sea levels rising with melting icecaps over the coming years will affect them globally, not just locally, as storms will.

And I believe a typhoon is just a hurricane-force storm on the other side of the International Dateline.

Did he give the order to go in in 2003? Did he set the policies that allowed wholesale looting, left ammunition and explosives depots unguarded, and sent the Iraqi army home without so much as a "see ya later"? Did he short-staff the occupation?

There is one lesson, and one lesson only, to take from the debacle that Iraq has become: The responsibility rests with the very top. Generals don't lose wars. (Battles, yes...) Ground-pounders certainly don't lose wars. Political leaders lose wars. And George W. Bush (with a little help from his fiend - oops, "friend" Cheney!) has lost Iraq. Nothing he or his numerous apologists can ever hope to say will change that fact.

The buck stops in the Oval Office, on its way to Crawford, Texas.

Now, instead of some amorphous package defined by the Republicans and the insurers, through their spokes-actors "Harry and Louise", we get HillaryCare 2.0, a massive welfare program for the insurance industry.

What horrors does version 3 hold for us?

I am not here to address the kid's "comments" or "questions". That's fodder for other discussions.

What most of us who live in the real world know is this: Resisting arrest, in addition to being another charge once you hit the police station for booking, is liable to get you decked, and maybe tasered. Police training for such things is about them taking control of a situation, quickly, without necessarily having the time to ascertain whether the "offender" is just some loudmouth nitwit or an unstable guy about to produce a handgun from a pocket or belt. Those are niceties that wait until later. An escalation of force to enforce compliance with lawful orders is SOP.

I hesitate to bring this up, mostly because it's obvious: Had this guy been a poor black (or white) kid on some nondescript street corner, and been tasered while resisting arrest, it would have received no notice whatsoever in the press. He's a white college student, so it's news.

And yes, he did set out to create an incident. Citing him as an exemplar of "civil disobedience" misses one very important point: Civil disobedience is not simply about raising a ruckus, it is about accepting the consequences of your actions. Sit-in participants were carted off to jail. They went, having gone limp and requiring three and four officers to carry (and sometimes drag) them. They did not shout and struggle and then proceed with planned media campaigns to gain notoriety. And they generally did it for a cause far more worthy than self-aggrandizement.

Those of you (you know who you are) equating this with rape are out of your minds.

To explain further, since it is obviously necessary for anyone who would make such a comparison: The proper logical equivalent would be a young woman going into a known "trouble spot" bar, jumping on tables, tearing off her clothing, and writhing around in the laps of a group of assorted intoxicated ruffians. She might not be asking for it, but it is fairly easy to presume that bad consequences will follow.

Right? No. Predictable? Sadly, yes. And that is the point far too many people are missing.

Really, why is this even considered important?