Week of May 20: News Round-up...pathetic political leadership in too many places

News roundup...week of May 29, 2013...
Chris Hatfield returns from his spacestation/cyber network star trip and ship...
Obama dives deeply into U.S. Counter-terrorism proposals for the next two decades...
Obama lectures U.S. military graduates on the mountain of sexual abuse complaints in the "greatest military" the world has seen...
Rob Ford denies he uses crack-cocaine and denies he is addicted to crack-cocaine, without actually denying he did use crack-cocaine in a video from a party which allegedly demonstrates him using the illicit drug and casting homophobic slurs...
Kathleen Wynne says she has no intention of intervening in the Rob Ford scandal...
Nigel Wright resigns as Stephen Harper's Chief of Staff, after writing a $90,000 cheque to pay outstanding living expenses for Mike Duffy...
Duffy himself, along with fellow journalist Pamela Wallin resign from the Conservative caucus in the Senate, and sit as independents...
Harper, for his part, waits until he arrives in Peru, to answer questions about the Duffy/Senate/Wright debacle...presumably because he thought reporters there would not understand English...
John Kerry attempts to talk to both Israeli Prime Minister Netanyhu and Palentinian leader Abbas, in hopes of re-igniting, for the nth time, peace talks between the two hated enemies...
David Cameron cuts short a trip to France to attend to the public outcry over a meat-cleaver hacking murder of a British soldier, not in uniform, by Islamic radicals who conduct their own "private" spontaneous interview, caught on cell phone video, promising more vengeance on "collateral damage" so long as the west continues to kill Muslims in Afghanistan and elsewhere...
British police shoot the two suspects in the leg, wounding but not killing them, in order to preserve their lives, and their prospective testimony in court...
While in Florida, after feeling threatened by a Chechnyan radical friend of one of the Boston Marathon bombers, FBI investigators shoot and kill their interviewee, precluding the acquisition of additional evidence of his relationship to both the Boston bombings and their perpetrators...
Apple chief executive answers questions at a Senate hearing on tax sheltered paper companies, providing a cave of tax avoidance, while calling on the U.S. Congress to enact lower corporate tax rates, as if by not paying their full share, Apple is most appropriately suited to decry the tax system in the U.S...why not pay up first, and then have your say? Isn't that the way the rest of us have to do it?
IRS chiefs also submit to questions from a House Committee of Congree about the agency's pursuit of information from organizations applying for tax-exempt status with the agency, in their futile and boggled attempt to extricate the activities of those applying betweeen the Sylla and Charbdis of "social welfare" organizations and "political action" organizations, another morphing boondoggle that has grown over the last decade, capped by the more recent Supreme Court decision on Citizens United, which opened the floodgates to private cash for political purposes, much of it hidden behind the secrecy of "social welfare" camouflage....
Meanwhile, the Congress appears blameless as they cast about for  guilty culprits among the civil service, one of whom claimed the Fifth Amendment after telling the House Committee she had done nothing wrong nor broken any laws...
Seems that "social welfare" organizations began to offer public support for individuals and families in distress, through teaching programs, and support programs...but then morphed over a century into teaching about proposed legislation, as part of their "social welfare" and now the country has to go back to the drawing boards and redefine the language that establishes and confirms their purpose unequivocally...something  politicians are almost predictably unlikely to do, given their penchant for the ambiguous, to placate their financial supporters requirement for secrecy.
Toronadoes, specifically one EF-5, swept through Moore, Oklahoma on Monday, killing 24, nine of them children trapped in an elementary school, precipitating a national debate about whether public buildings must have "secure rooms" to protect children from such carnage...
Sounds like the national debate prompted by the killings of children by a mass-gunman in Connecticutt back in December, from which no change in any legislation has been achieved, although the killing of those children was supposed to be a water-shed moment, in the issue of gun control in the U.S.
Spent Victoria Day weekend in the Haliburton bush, listening to city-dwellers set off their fireworks, evoking images of gunshots in an American ghetto, in the bounty and beauty of that verdant landscape, spoiled for the "locals" by the impolite, insensitive and immature adolescence of the city dwellers, there only for the weekend, but determined to make their own noise...
With the bumbling, and the political obfuscations and obstructions and the ineffectual 'tracings of suspected terrorists' by authorities who only later prove their true identity, in their brutality, and then the hubristic pontificating of the talking heads of government leaders "determined to get to the bottom of this" (whatever "this" happens to be)...little wonder that people are turning off politics in droves, literally. They see nothing happening, while those in power increasingly seem like eunuchs, emasculated both by their politcal opponents and their complete lack of courage to face the truth head-on, with legitimate plans for effective governance...
Remember when governance actually accomplished some good things for all the people....
Now, it seems that government serves those "on the inside" while those of us "on the outside" watch their pitiful and deceptive manipulations of both the facts and the public, powerless to throw the bums out and replace them with people who are determined to serve the public interest....
Perhaps the Occupy Movement has even more justification in many countries as the days of summer begin their stage entrance....