With Alaska Governor Sarah Palin added to the Republican ticket one may justifiably assume that there will be more pressure to drill for oil in ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) despite the fact that oil companies are already sitting on 68 million acres of leases that they aren’t even drilling. The graphic at the top of the page is based on 2008 data from the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service and Bureau of Land Management records.

Art McEldowney sent me the map with this note:

Seventy-five year old Inocencia Coto in South Florida who has always supported Republican candidates in a district of predominantly Cuban Americans who usually vote 90% Republican in national elections won’t be supporting the Republican in her district this year. She’s actively working for the Democratic challenger, Raul Martinez, who is within four percentage points of eight term Republican incumbent, Mario Diaz-Balart.

Coto and many of her friends say the same thing.

The Beijing Olympics ended as a global public relations success. Everyone who watched filtered what they saw and heard through the prisms of their own experiences. From my experiences here in the United States and from my years in Taiwan I couldn’t help but watch with a cautious eye.

China went all out on the Olympics. The decision to award the games to China was made seven years ago, two months before 9/11.

The question is: why would Georgia's president Saakashvili invade a sworn enemy, which has a Russian peace keeping force stationed there to defend Ossetia's autonomy? It would appear to be a suicide mission.

Likely reasons: Either Saakashvili was totally deluded, and/or he gambled that Russia would not stand behind their word to the Ossetians, and/or he believed that the U.S. would support him and Georgia in a war against S. Ossetia and possibly Russia.

These are the words of Sharon Tennison, friend of a good friend of mine.

On January 2, 1960, John F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. A month later—on February 1st, 1960—four African American college students asked to be served in an all-white restaurant at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, an act that gave birth to the Sit-In movement. Those two events had a great impact on me at the time and have since then, but there is no way I could have imagined how they would cast forty-eight year old shadows across the presidential election of 2008.

In my first year of graduate school in a Methodist seminary in Dallas, Texas, the 1960 presidential election was my first opportunity to vote. My social ethics professor, the one who a year later would take me to hear Dr. Martin Luther King at a voter registration rally, was also instrumental in getting me involved in JFK’s campaign in Dallas. When I volunteered to help, I was given a car full of JFK/LBJ signs to give to friends who would put them up in their yards. I didn’t know anybody but students in Dallas and so didn’t do a very good job. But I was committed to the JFK candidacy and embarrassed by the anti-Catholic bigotry all around me.

“Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1970

“The UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, and we recommend that the Government does not rely on such assurances in the future.” British House of Commons, July 9, 2008

Who is not hurting from the high gas prices? Forgive me for wondering if our President and Vice President are bothered at all. Well, they may be bothered just a tad by the anger directed toward them because they have looked after the interests of Big Oil for the past seven years with narry a nod to consumers.

This report may only be encouraging to United Methodists who have been struggling for years against their denomination’s stand on homosexuality. As delegates meet in five regional (jurisdictional) conferences around the country this week, their main task is to elect and assign new bishops. But, as was evident yesterday from the conference in Dallas approving the Bush library at SMU, electing bishops is not their only business. In sharp contrast to the action taken at the United Methodist General Conference last spring, delegates to the denomination’s Northeastern Jurisdiction Conference meeting in Harrisburg, PA voted Thursday to support clergy in California who choose to perform same-gender marriages.

Today, the delegates to the South Central Jurisdictional Conference of the United Methodist Church meeting in Dallas affirmed their Mission Council’s earlier decision to lease land to the President George W. Bush Presidential Center. It also passed a petition said to protect the integrity of both SMU and the jurisdiction itself by indicating that the proposed institute “does not speak” for either.
This is the petition approved by the conference:

What Iran and Other Nations Are Learning from North Korea

I may be going out on a limb here, but I’m guessing that the fireworks around my neighborhood on July 2nd were not in celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the agreement in which the United States and other nuclear powers agreed to eventually eliminate their nuclear weapons, and non-nuclear states that signed onto the treaty agreed they would not seek to develop nuclear weapons capabilities.

As treaties go, this one

Catching up on some of the issues I’ve been following, several things caught my eye. I’ll be writing briefly about some of them in the next few days. One of them was Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed column in Sunday’s New York Times. If you read it, I wonder what you thought about it. If you didn’t read it I encourage you to do so and then let me know what you think.