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Member since: Wed Aug 13, 2003, 08:17 PM
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Ferguson grand jury won't reconvene until Monday at the earliest, sources say.

Source: CNN

This is breaking news with no further elaboration.

UPDATE: Ferguson waits: No decision this weekend


NEW: Sources: Grand jury will not reconvene until Monday
Grand jury did not reach a decision Friday, sources say
More businesses have been boarded up
Three people are arrested in Friday night protests

Ferguson, Missouri (CNN) -- Anticipating a grand jury decision at any moment, more businesses boarded up their doors and windows and residents hunkered down in their homes on two of Ferguson's main roads.

On Saturday, the city learned it will have to wait a little more.

The grand jury convened on Friday, but did not reach a decision, federal and local law enforcement officials told CNN.

Friday came and went with no decision, and the grand jury will not reconvene until Monday, federal and local law enforcement sources told CNN.

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/

This means that the jury is taking its time and doing its job. I see that as a good thing.

AFP, AP and BBC are all reporting convoys of unmarked vehicles, including Grads, moving

into eastern Ukraine.

Your summary of the election conditions in eastern Ukraine are very reminiscent of those in Crimea.

It sound like there will be another military offensive, probably moving to enlarge the Donetsk and Luhansk pockets and then to move south from there and east from Russia to grab the port of Mariupol and on to the land bridge to Crimea. My understanding is that the waters of the Sea of Azov and of the Black Sea in general freeze in the winter, thus cutting Crimea off from supplies from Russia.

Putin may be feeling quite angry since the sanctions are starting to hurt and the price of oil is $20 below the level he needs to keep his foreign exchange afloat. He will probably mess around with the gas supply somehow to get not only Ukraine, but also Germany and other western and southern European nations to reject requests from Kiev for aid.

The questions will be how long the Europeans will hold out since the sanctions are hurting some of them, too, and how much we will help.

Of note is the fact that Poland is now strengthening its military presence in its southeastern border with Ukraine. It's difficult to tell whether Poland is expecting Russians or Ukrainian refugees.

No surprise there.

Also, no mention of all the manufacturing jobs, particularly in the auto industry, who relocated to Mexico after NAFTA. I'm from Michigan, and it was sucking sound from a galactic-class vacuum that hit my home state.

NAFTA may have been good only for shareholders who had nothing to do with the towns that they destroyed, the investment bankers and lawyers that managed the deals, and of course, the very top execs of the auto industry.

All else was laid waste.

For DC//NOVA/Maryland PBS Masterpiece Mystery fans,

Maryland Public Television, channel 22 in the DC area, I think, will be showing the PBS Masterpiece Mystery Series "Inspector George Gently" starting tomorrow on Saturdays at 7 pm. The show until a couple of weeks ago was shown on one of the WETA 26 digital channels. I'm thrilled to see it back.

For those of you unfamiliar with the series, it is set in the 1960s in northeastern England. It weaves '60s themes with the relationship of an old-school WWII vet detective inspector formerly of London with a conservative (!) local much younger detective sergeant. The topical plots and often not so neat endings often leave me with something to really think about to compare with what I remember about those times here in the US.

I'm a big fan of the PBS British mysteries. For comparison, my other favorites are Foyle's War and Inspectors Lewis and Morse.

I hope that you Maryland/DC/NOVA mystery fans will give George Gently a look! You won't be disappointed.

What Russian state media sources are allowed to be posted in LBN?

My recollection is that RT.com is out, but I've been seeing ITAR-tass being used as LBN. My opinion is that all state sponsored media should not be posted in LBN because they are propaganda to a much, much greater extent than private sector media, whether profit or non-profit.

There are a handful of pro-Russian posters who are posting ITAR-tass and making very derogatory comments toward anyone who would object.

My Mom made bullets and land mines in a factory in Jackson, MI.

She started the war as a teacher in a rural one-room school house, but quit to do her part in the factory. The factory was integrated, and it was the first time that my Mom had come into contact with blacks. She grew up in a small farming community and there were no blacks in her neighborhood or in her school system, and she just didn't know much about Black America. When she has talked about the war years, she has always said that the Black women that she worked with were just as bright and capable as she and the other white women. She became very friendly with one of the black women who talked to her a lot about what it was like being a black woman. Being a white woman then was difficult enough, but it was clear to my Mom that being a black woman was much more difficult. My Mom went back to teaching in a country school after the war but only for a year. She didn't like going back to a rural area again, and soon made her way back to the plant, which was making locks for cars, and was rehired, unlike most other women. One day, she was walking along the street, and came upon her black friend. She asked her friend what she where she was working. Her friend acted very uncomfortable, and said that she was working as a domestic, and it was hard for my Mom to realize why she herself was in the factory, and her friend, who was an excellent worker, was not. Mom never saw her freind again.

Mom went back to teaching after another year or so--she decided that factory work was too boring-- before she met my Dad, who who had been stationed on an escort carrier patrolling the southern US coastline and the Caribbean for German subs. He finished the war doing what he was trained to do, which was fixing the exteriors and frames of beat-up planes at Naval Air Stations up and down the East Coast. Dad passed years ago, but Mom is 92 and still drives and lives independently.

Her middle sister, Millie, was a high school student in Fremont, Michigan, home of Gerber Baby Food. During the war, there were few babies born, and Gerber changed all but one of its lines from canning baby food to canning all kinds of food, from apples to beef, for the war effort. When school let out, Aunt Millie and many of her classmates walked to the Gerber plant where they did a full shift. They then did their homework, got some sleep, and went back to school. The baby food line was staffed by volunteer German POWs, who lived in a camp outside town, and were paid a bit to work in what was obviously a non-military job. Aunt Millie said that the Germans were very young, and she and the other girls would smile and wave at them, which the young Germans appreciated very much. She said that it was hard to imagine that they had been shooting at our young men. It was a very awkward situation. WWII was a just war, but many regular people died, along with the baddies.

Aunt Millie became an Air Force nurse, and was stationed in Guam during the Korean War, where she met her husband, who was a pilot. Like my Dad, she and her husband have passed, but like Dad, are with me in my memories.

I originally wrote this post without mentioning my Mom's black friend, but I decided that I wanted to honor her, too, since my Mom thought so highly of her.

Go Mom and Aunt Millie! And go Mom's Friend and all her friends, too!

When I think of it, I get dizzy and nauseous.

I turned 13 that summer, but my friends all made fun of me because I watched the news and read the newspaper every day. We got quizzes from the newspaper in school every week. I didn't bother to study, because I knew all the answers. My friends memorized the answers (a, d, c, etc.) from the paper, but when the teacher mixed up the collection, everyone in the class failed but me. I also read Time, Newsweek and US Snooze and World Report every week, but a week late because my parents got them from my uncle.

For me, 1968 really started in the summer of 1967 with the Detroit riots. I'm from a small town in Michigan, but every city in that state with a black population rioted that week. That Sunday evening, I watched a line of thunderstorms come in off Lake Michigan cutting the lower peninsula in two--the north with no cities and no riots, and the south, being burned. At 9:00, the Smothers Brothers came on, much to my parents' chagrin. They let me watch sometimes, but ignored the TV until we started getting emergency bulletins directing all national guard troops and state police officers to report to their posts immediately. They kept coming every five minutes, and parents started to get nervous. We normally went to bed at ten, but we all stayed up for the 11:00 news because obviously something bad was happening. At 11, our northern Michigan station showed some rioting, and that was all that was on all week during the news. It looked really bad. The Dad of one of my friends was a state trooper and got called down. I got a very santized version from her, but that was bad enough. We did our back-to-school shopping in the small city 40 miles to the south, but that city saw very bad rioting that went on for 3 weeks at least. The shopping area was completely closed off. Finally, two weeks before school, the local police opened up an area in the southern outskirts with a JC Penney and a Meijers (local Wal-Mart-Target-ish thing) just so kids and parents could get clothing and supplies. I can't imagine what it must have been like to be in the riot-torn area. I just can't.

I remember that the war just kept going like it would never end. I remember looking up the population of Vietnam in the World Book Encyclopedia that we had a home, and judging that by Gen. Westmoreland's body count numbers, we'd killed just about every military aged male in Vietnam. Then I put up an LBJ dartboard in my school locker. Then the assassination of Dr. King with more riots, waking up to a dead RFK, more war. It just never stopped.

For me, though, it was the '68 Democratic Convention. I had an aunt and uncle in the Chicago area who LOVED Mayor Daly. That's Hizzoner, the First Mayor Daly. I watched that convention all the time, and my parents let me stay up late again. The baby blue helmets, the kids, only a couple years older than me, getting heads bashed in in the parks that I had visited during many summer trips. The mules in downtown Chicago, and my aunt calling and crowing about how wonderful Mayor Daly was. I thought that she had lost her mind.

Then the police rioted on the floor of the convention! They were breaking the heads of the delegates! The delegates! And there was Mayor Daly egging them on. It was so wild that I can't remember who it was who kissed the TV screen showing some sort of riot, maybe Daly, maybe HHH.

I was so burned out after that. I couldn't even feel the horror of Nixon getting elected in November. I was just numb. Just numb. I loved my aunt and uncle, but it took time before I could look at them and not see Mayor Daly's screaming face.

During the time of the 2008 election, I had a Turkish roommate. She was terrified with the raucous election. She asked me if the country was going to fall apart and civil war break out. I told her that 2008 was nothing compared to 1968, and related a bit about that. She was dumbfounded that we'd survived. I told her not to worry until there were deadly fights on the floor of Congress and aggrieved citizens had broken into the armories and stolen military equipment. Frankly, those were about the only things that didn't happen in 1968. And I hope that they don't happen anytime soon, either.

I don't like the way the words "hate" and "haters" are used in our current political

discourse to drive people into an absolute emotional frenzy. This negative emotional frenzy only feeds upon itself. Once you say that a person who disagrees with you hates you, or that a person whose viewpoint is different from yours is a hater, you hammer an iron wedge between you and that person that is almost impossible to withdraw. Is that what DU wants? Is that what the President wants? Is that the best thing for this country?

I don't care who is using it--Dem, Rep, Libertarian, Naderite--or what position he or she has. And yes, this means the President. Especially the President.

There hasn't been this much discord in the country since the late '60s, but even then, our political leaders, even Nixon, did not publicly refer to political and policy disagreements as "hate" and those who did not agree with them as "haters," even if that's what they were. Because words count.

Words count, Mr. President. Words count, DU. Words count, Sen. Cruz. Words count, Rep. King.

Yes, those that disagree with us, our political opponents, use crude words, and yes, some are racist, but mostly they are people who see things differently, and unless we have another civil war, we have to live in the same country. Why should we, with our choice of words, do more to tear this country apart? Why should we be as uncivil as some of our opponents?

Tomorrow night, CNN will re-air the episode of its documentary, "The Sixties," devoted solely to the year 1968. A few DUers, like me, are old enough to remember at least some things about that horrible year. For those who are too young to remember, both the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy gave their lives for their causes in that year.

Does anyone here really think that either of those two great men would cheer the divisive language of our current political discourse, particularly in a speech made by our wonderful President?

I think not.

Wake up, people, before you tear your own hearts apart with your hate for your fellow misguided citizens.

The Europeans may have to make at least some economic

sacrifices with respect to Russia, we may be in their situation with respect to China and our treaty allies in east Asia.

There are increasing territorial dispute between Japan and China over control of some small islands and air and maritime rights in the East China Sea. There have been no shots fired, but a small miscue on the part of either party could change that in an instant. We are obligated by treaty to defend Japan, and Japan has asked for assurances that we will come to their aid in the event that they are attacked by China. We've made comforting noises, but not much else.

A similar situation pertains in the South China Sea. China claims almost the entire surface area of that body of water except for 12 mile boundaries off the beaches of the other nations surrounding that sea. These include Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei and our treaty ally, the Philippines. The Chinese and the Vietnamese recently engaged in some hostile, but non-shooting activity when China towed an oil drilling rig into place in waters also claimed by the Vietnamese. Vietnam, of course, wants our help against their historical enemy, China. A couple of years ago, the Vietnamese asked the US Navy to make a port call at our old Navy base, Da Nang. We obliged them, and sent a carrier and smaller ships. We entertained the local Vietnamese dignitaries on the carrier. They loved the take off and land show, apparently. Closure of the South China Sea would cut off our increasing imports from Vietnam and other places. Check the labels on any garments that you have purchased recently--more and more are coming from SE Asia.

Everyone here understands just how dependent we are on China for every conceivable type of manufactured product. Our dependency is not unlike that of the Europeans' dependence on Russian oil and gas and investment opportunities.

If fighting breaks out in the East or South China Seas, the container ship pipeline between us and China will not be able to sail in a combat zone. Indeed, commercial ship traffic in and out of East Asia would be severely hampered by any shooting on the part of any nation. Walmart will not be the only store with few items on the shelves.

How willing will we be to defend our treaty allies Japan, South Korea and the Philippines as well as other friendly countries if it cuts off our supplies of iPhones and auto parts?

Russia is doing what its somewhat paranoid (IMHO) leader wants to do and the Europeans are essentially cowering.

But if China flexes its muscles, what will we do and are we willing to make some preparations now?

Current Israeli/Palestinian/Lebanese conflict escalation

Things seem to be getting extremely hot in LBN. At what point may posts concerning the most recent escalation of the continuing conflict be returned to the I/P forum?

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