The Deutsche Welle tells a strange story about a man who refused to stop riding without a ticket:

From October 2006 to February 2007, he was caught riding the train without a ticket 102 times, often several times on the same day. The court, fed up with imposing fines and suspended sentences, finally decided to get tough and gave him a 22-month holiday behind bars.

Throwing himself upon the mercy of the court was likely not an option this time. It is not as if the man was riding ticketless due to a lack of financial means. According to his own statement, he repeatedly dodged fares “pretty much out of boredom.”

Boredom as a defense? Maybe something was lost in translation. Wonder if tried to argue how ticket sales should be made more entertaining.

The news in the Deutsche Welle is that Germany has been warning the US for a year about market failure and the need for tighter regulation:

Merkel said that she had tried to win support for greater transparency and regulation on international markets at the G-8 conference last year, but that governments including the US did not heed her.

They do not mince words in Germany about Bush’s so called “drunken” leadership:

On Sunday, Sept 21, US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson called for other nations to set up similar rescue plans.

He did not provide further details, but US financial authorities have been working closely with their counterparts in Europe and Japan over the past 10 days to prevent a collapse of the interwoven global financial system.

[…]

“The Americans can’t make Germany accountable for their failure and their arrogance,” Poss [deputy parliamentary head of the Social Democratic Party (SPD)] said. “A similar rescue package is neither planned nor needed in Germany,” he added.

The article also points out that the current package proposed by Bush will actually lead to greater crisis during the McCain administration:

“I have doubts whether that method is really the most clever one,” Michael Meister, deputy parliamentary leader of Chancellor Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Party (CDU) told business daily Handelsblatt.

Meister suggested that the $700 billion bailout by the US government could lay the fundaments for the next crisis. He compared it to the massive slashing of interest rates by the US Federal Reserve in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001 which he said had sowed the seeds for the current turbulence in capital markets.

I have seen some analysts already starting to suggest that disasters are all part of the underlying plan of the Bush administration. More market failure and more crisis creates the ideal condition for consolidation of power as well as an argument for extreme measures. After they failed to deregulate and privatize social security through normal legal means, they are hoping to declare an emergency and force a big sell-off to “save” America from the disaster they created.

Dick Cheney is apparently fighting a lawsuit with historians over the right to destroy his official records.

A judge has ordered him to preserve files:

The lawsuit stems from Cheney’s position that his office is not part of the executive branch of government.

This summer, Cheney chief of staff David Addington told Congress that the vice president belongs to neither the executive nor legislative branch of government but rather is attached by the Constitution to Congress. The vice president presides over the Senate.

The lawsuit alleges that the Bush administration’s actions over the past 7½ years raise questions over whether the White House will turn over records created by Cheney and his staff to the National Archives in January.

In 2003, Cheney asserted that the office of the vice president is not an entity within the executive branch.

Two historians and three groups of historians and archivists joined CREW in filing the suit two weeks ago.

He has such hubris. What does he want to hide from historians? Why is he so intent on achieving the right to destroy public records?

I get the feeling Cheney is the sort of guy who would try to drive a truck in order to claim that traffic laws are written for “cars” and he should be exempt from enforcement.