Republican Strategy for Winning Future Elections:

The next step in disenfranchising voters is to create a requirement for proof of citizenship at the poles. Currently, it can take months for people to acquire a copy of their birth certificates from county courthouses. It should be a simple step to extend that period of time.

Missouri is set to pass the law to require proof of citizenship in time for the next presidential election. Florida, Kansas, Oklahoma and South Carolina all have bills in place that could be passed in time to disenfranchise Democratic voters for the 2010 midterm elections.

Only the Supreme Court, the same people who provided the legal coup for Bush to acquire the White House in 2000, stands in the way of the disenfranchisement act, and they demonstrated their part to be played in the destruction of democracy recently in the Indiana case.

Notice the states (above) that have such bills pending, states that have long histories of racism.

(See The New York Times story.)

Earthquake in China Kills More Than 10,000:

An earthquake in western China is reported to have taken the lives of more than 10,000 people, according to today's New York Times. Early estimates were that the quake reached a 7.9 magnitude. The epicenter is near the Wolong Nature Reserve, which is the largest panda reserve in China. The Three Gorges Dam, the largest in the world, is a few hundred miles east of where the epicenter occurred, but there was no reported damage. (New York Times photos.)

China Facts: "The number of China's elderly is ballooning … while the number of people born after the government's one0child policy … is dwindling. [The] immense workforce, key to today's boom, will shrink after 2015. … [B]y 2050 close to a third of China's citizens will be over 60." (Source: ngm.com)

Oil Prices Drop?!!

You couldn't prove it by me. As I walked back from the Post Office today, a worker was raising the price of gasoline at the pump by six cents a gallon to $2.75.9, but the price of oil per barrel dropped from $126.40 (an all time record high) to $124.23 as the stock market closed this afternoon.

The New York Times' Paul Krugman has an interested Op-Ed piece in today's paper, in which he argues that the higher oil prices aren't simply a matter of wild speculation on the part of future's buyers. The interesting part is about how the price of oil was at $50 per barrel back in 2004 when the National Review published an article declaring oil was "a bubble about to burst." Instead the price rose to $70 per barrel. At that point Steve Forbes, the businessman's magazine publisher, argued that the oil bubble would certainly burst. Instead, … well, you know the story.

What Krugman doesn't mention is that the Saudis think the price of oil ought to be at $80 per barrel.