As a moderate, rational, and constructive Republican Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna has shown a lot of promise - but has he followed through on that promise as Attorney General. Has he finished the job?

Personally, I think he still has the **potential** to be a great governor, but not yet.

Props to Attorney General Eric Holder for renewing the investigation into the assassination of US Attorney Thomas Wales, ten years ago now.

Wales, a tenured, liberal, community connected white collar prosecutor was killed in his basement office only weeks after the Al Qaida attack on the World Trade Center - and within weeks of the nomination of John McKay to fill his bosses chair by George W. Bush.

I do have to wonder though if the reason that the investigation has not been successful is that the perpetrator is closer to the DOJ than they'd care to admit possible. As a white collar corporate prosecutor Wales stood against everything, locally, that the G.W. Bush administration would come to nationally, and historically, represent.

My thrift store find, a pair of Nike 'Air' high top basketball shoes passed their first test in their new occupation - 'wet' canyoneering waders. Thanks again to Phil Knight!

Also a tip of the hat to the Emery County Road crew who paved the road here (Little WildHorse Canyon), the 'Nike' of Utah road operations!

"For as a citizen who violates the Civil Law for the sake of present utility, destroys that institution in which the perpetual utility of himself and his posterity is bound up; so too a people which violates the Laws of Nature and nations, beats down the bulwark of its own tranquility for future time...."

Hugo Grotius (one generation after Martin Luther), The Law of War and Peace (1625) addressing the subject of lawful relations of the emerging nation states.

In memoriam to Steve Jobs, a never aired TV Commercial, from 1997.

I am also reminded of Apple's vivid '1984' SuperBowl ad, not all that long before his ouster as CEO in 1985, during the Reagan Wall Street era. Perhaps coincidentally, this was not all that long before the collapse of the Massachusetts High Tech industry, circa Dukakis, running to replace Reagan.

I used Apple products as an undergraduate studying in Mass in the early 1980's, so I am very much a product of his era, and genius. The Macintosh, the first graphical computer, was perhaps the biggest foreshadow of his future successes, including at Pixar, during his hiatus from Apple.

I was inspired to read Lisa Napoli's book 'Radio Shangri-La' having visited recently opened Tibetan areas of Nepal in 1981, as well as spending a month in the Thamel district of Kathmandu. My personal favorite book of that trip was James Joyce's 'Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man' - a decidedly different phase of life from that of the author's.

But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god; he is no part of a state. A social instinct is implanted in all men by nature, and yet he who first founded the state was the greatest of benefactors.

Aristotle, 384-322 B.C. The Politics, Book 1.

Congressman Jay Inslee is leaving his Washington D.C. Office to run for Governor in Washington State. Here, the former Prosecutor writes to Attorney General Holder regarding his performance in the 'prosecution' of the Mortgage crisis.

You may have already seen the video of Marine Sgt. Shamar Thomas confronting abusive NYPD officers. Either way this Keith Olbermann interview, with clips, is relevant.

FWIW, it appears Sgt. Thomas is not the only one in the military who feels this way.