The story of the week, for sure, is nukes in North Korea, but I suspect it’s really the non-story of the week. The raw facts are that the North Korean government bragged that it had fired off a nuclear explosion underground, but there’s no known scientific confirmation of that boast. Nevertheless, all of Korea’s Asian neighbors expressed their outrage, and the United States, the world’s leading exploder of nuclear bombs, called for an international economic sanctions against North Korea, supposedly to persuade the government of that little country to stop lighting such firecrackers. If you dig a little beneath the headlines, you discover that firecrackers probably is an apt description. The science guys say that if a real nuclear weapons program was underway, there would be multiple tests in a variety of environments instead of one blast in a mine shaft.

If we assume, anyway, that North Korea is serious, why? Would it be self-defense? I haven’t heard about any other countries threatening to conquer North Korea. The media spin obviously is designed to sell us the idea that North Korea is a loose cannon about to unload its nukes indiscriminately on the rest of the world. Can you really imagine North Korea trying to conquer China or Japan? One explosion in a mine shaft isn’t a threat to anyone. I’m curious about why these guys might be making bombs, but I’m more curious about why the mainstream media wants me to be afraid of North Korea. Do they have oil? Is Korean crude the future source of fuel for your Hummer? I can understand why the US government wants me to believe that Iran is my next enemy, but I’m still waiting for someone to explain why I should care who explodes what in Korea.

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So far as we know, Venezuela doesn’t have the bomb, but it has some pretty good baseball players working in this country, a popular president who calls Dubya the devil, and it has plenty of oil. US based companies are pumping and selling a lot of Venezuelan crude, but ironically, Venezuela also is giving the stuff away in the US. The story is that about 150 villages of native Alaskans, hit with heating oil prices they can’t afford from the other US companies, have accepted donations of fuel from Citgo, a Texas based corporation that’s actually an arm of the Venezuelan government selling fossil fuel in the US. It’s a bizarre world where people in Alaska are watching oil flow through an enormous pipeline to be shipped to the lower 48, while oil is being given away in Alaska by a country in South America.

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I like to talk about public education occasionally, and I was slapped by the irony of three different news stories on the same day this week. One was about a movement among a few Bay Area teachers to abolish homework. Another was about some teachers who are removing the teacher’s desk from the classroom. They want to teach on their feet. Pretty radical. Then I looked at the Grass Valley Union and I see a piece describing the effectiveness of a new policy at Nevada Union High School about being late for class. I’m not against kids showing up for class on time, but reading about the penalties for tardiness reminded me that the public schools really are more like penal institutions than educational institutions. For the chronically tardy, a lot of slack is cut, but eventually they are imprisoned for time after classes end, then imprisoned on Saturday, then they get an on-campus suspension, which I assume means they sit in a room at the school but don’t go to class, then they get off-campus suspension which means they don’t go to school and do whatever else they want to do instead. Finally, after all of that, if they still don’t make it to the classroom before the bell rings, they get demoted to one of the "alternate" school sites.

Parents respond to this sort of mentality by running charter schools. Kids respond by dropping out.

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Our congressman, John Do Little, ducked out of an event scheduled by the League of Women Voters tonight in Grass Valley where he could have a face-to-face in front of a live audience with his Democrat opponent, Charlie Brown. Doolittle’s been saying all year that he would debate with Brown, but he’s been evasive about where and when. Then he said he would tape a cable television appearance with Brown Wednesday night in Rocklin. As I record this commentary, I don’t know if that appearance materialized. It was supposed to include call-ins from viewers, but the live audience was limited to about 20,000 subscribers to a particular cable service in Placer County. Brown’s been badgering Do Little for live audience debates, but Do Little is laying low. I imagine Brown has a few tough questions the congressman would prefer not to answer. Doolittle has won eight elections for his Congressional seat without ever appearing at a League of Women Voters debate.

In his byline column this week, Union publisher Jeff Ackerman, a self-proclaimed independent conservative, gave a ringing endorsement to Brown. I don’t know if Doolittle actually is in trouble. He’s got a lot more money to spend, thanks in part to Jack Abramoff, but Brown is giving him a little more grief than he’s used to getting from the Democrats. Placer County is where most of votes are in Placer County, and you have to beat the bushes to find a Democrat there.

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You knew that the guy who thinks he’s the president made a quick swing through California last week in which he made a speech to raise some more money for Doolittle. He did the same for East Bay/central valley congressman Richard Pombo, and this is a sobering message about spin control. The organizers allowed the press to attend, but they made sure the reporters and the fat cat contributors didn’t get to talk to each other. Each reporter had an escort at all times, even in the bathrooms. So much for freedom of the press. How can you speak freely if you can’t even pee freely?

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