LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT

Too bad there isn't a mood entry for "totally pissed off." 

I haven't been posting too many straight political entries for awhile. I got tired of repeating myself, I figured other folks didn't need to read me repeating myself.  I've been spending more time reading history trying to figure out how we got in this mess. And, as the gardner's (mom) apprentice (me), frankly I've had a head full of perrenials, annuals, bark and weeds this summer. Actually the way things are going gardening and canning could be considered radical acts.

BUT THERE ARE TIMES WHEN I COULD JUST............

Phil Gramm, former senator from Texas, 

1. Worked like a good little beaver to rewrite the banking laws    to breach the firewalls between separate types financial institutions

2.  Tried to help deregulate the power industry leading to the Enron meltdown

3. Left the senate for a cushy job with Switzerlands' biggest bank

4. Was, and maybe still is, John McCain's point man on the economic matters and

5. When all the vultures come home to roost tells us the problems are all in our heads and we're a nation of "whiners."

WTF is wrong with this picture?

And the bail out for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is attached to a housing bill with block grants to help people facing foreclosure and the current occupant doesn't approve of block grants so he's threatening to veto it. The man is the lamest of ducks but he can still blow up the bridge in front of the out of control train. Who needs Bin Laden to wreck the country when we're doing such a great job of cutting ourselves off at the hips.

Hold the damn election next Monday. Certify the winner on Tuesday or ASAP considering possible electoral college questions and swear the winner in the day after. Phil Gramm, former senator from Texas, 

1. Worked like a good little beaver to rewrite the banking laws    to breach the firewalls between separate types financial institutions

2.  Tried to help deregulate the power industry leading to the Enron meltdown

3. Left the senate for a cushy job with Switzerlands' biggest bank

4. Was, and maybe still is, John McCain's point man on the economic matters and

5. When all the vultures come home to roost tells us the problems are all in our heads and we're a nation of "whiners."

WTF is wrong with this picture?

And the bail out for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is attached to a housing bill with block grants to help people facing foreclosure and the current occupant doesn't approve of block grants so he's threatening to veto it. The man is the lamest of ducks but he can still blow up the bridge in front of the out of control train. Who needs Bin Laden to wreck the country when we're doing such a great job of cutting ourselves off at the hips.

Hold the damn election next Monday. Certify the winner on Tuesday or ASAP considering possible electoral college questions and swear the winner in the day after. Under the circumstances, a gala "aren't we just the greatest thing since..... "inagural ceremony and ball would not only be tactless but tasteless in the extreme.

RATHER TASTELESS BUT TRUE?

I stumbled across this on a website linked with lolcats. I was looking for the lolcats actually. Certainly a different take on history.

aoljurlAdd, aoljurlAdd_1

LOCK THE DOORS

About that last entry. I'm reminded of a quote Harry Truman attributed to his father or grandfather. I believe it went something like this. "When somebody goes out their to way to tell you how honest they are it's time to go home and lock the smokehouse. "

We've been suckered in the old shell game. While we've been looking for the terrorist pea under the cup, every smoke house in the neighborhood has been cleaned out and the crooks are well over the border. Literally.

BRIDGE OUT AHEAD

Well, there’s another train wreck on the horizon and suddenly the hyper capitalists who were opposed the “government interference” in their business are begging for the bailouts. And of course it’ll happen because if it doesn’t the economy will tank.

What kills me is that a lot of folks saw this coming two or three years ago. I read articles in the Oregonian about the problems older neighborhoods were experiencing as the speculators bought up houses. Not to live in, not to remodel and resell, not to rent out, but leave sitting empty while the market went up so they could flip them and make a profit. The tube and papers were full of ads offering to teach me how to make a mint in real estate. I remember thinking, here’s the new gold rush and it’ll probably end the same way the others did. In the meantime, the neighbors were left with all the fun things that happen in old neighborhoods with vacant housing.

Let me backtrack a little. When my cousin couldn’t stay home anymore, mom and her niece sold the house to pay for her care. We had several options. A realtor wanted to buy the property, planned to rehab it (it needed it) and figured he could sell it for about $125,000. Since it needed about $40,000 in work, he offered $85,000; in cash.

A neighbor said he was interested, but it would have to be mortgaged. Considering the way his place looked we were 1) not sure he could get the financing he wanted 2) knew we’d have to pay for inspections that would tell us what the realtor had already told us about, dry rot and termites 3) needing cash not a mortgage. If we’d crossed our fingers and gone with the mortgage we would have had to turn around and sell the mortgage to a broker for the cash, taking a discount on the paper. In the end we went with the cash offer since it was simpler and we probably would have ended up with the same amount of money.

It’s the option of selling the paper that’s causing so many problems now. Those subprime mortgages have been sold, resold, bundled and sold again. They’re seeded through the economy like termites in the foundation of that old house. Hell, some of them are probably part of my 401K account.

Frankly, part of me hopes that the worst hits before the election. Because, if the shitstorm is bad enough no power on earth will get another Republican in the White House. And with luck it’ll wash enough of them out of both houses of congress.

In the meantime the Shrub is doing his Louis XV “Apres moi, le deluge.” Loosely translated? “After me, the shit really hits the fan. But hell, I have my pension, my oil stocks and the ranch in Texas. So long sucka’s."

What’s hard for the average citizen to realize is that the execs running the multi-national corporations may have American citizenship but their loyalty is to the corporation, not this country. And frankly, I believe they’re more dangerous than the terrorists ever could be. If a weak dollar allows overseas companies they have interest in to buy up American assets dirt cheap, it’s no matter to them who gets hurt in the fall out. They’re the ones that blew the bridge, disconnected the brakes and sent these overloaded train cars heading down the hill at ninety miles an hour with nothing to stop them.

And too many voters were too busy obsessing over who was going to survive "Survivor" and who was going to get dumped on "American Idol" to give a shit.

OPEN LETTER CONTINUED

I would also like to ask the former senator how the so called homosexual agenda caused any of the problems I listed in my last entry and how preventing same sex unions would solve these problems. The answer is that they didn't and it won't. All it does is show that the emperor really doesn't have any clothes on and never has.

These politicians had a chance to address these problems when they were in office and they didn't. to do so would have meant deviating from their narrow, no tax increases for any reason agenda. That is a very real agenda and enough Oregonians got tired of the legislative in fighting to kick some of their asses out of office in '06.

Tags: OREGON, CIVIL UNIONS, ANTI TAX MOVEMENTS

OPEN LETTER TO A FORMER SENATOR

There is an old saying, “where there is one, there is a majority of one

 

I remember the campaign to limit access to marriage. I also remember that some of the supporters used the argument that the winners wouldn’t try to block civil unions if the ballot measure passed. Now the winners argue that we can’t ever rethink or revisit an issue because the majority has spoken.

 

I suspect that if the original ballot measure had failed, it would have been recycled to the next election. And the next, and the next, and the next. As long as there was money coming in to pay the people holding the pens and petitions.

 

I wrote this letter to the Oregonian this morning. It might even get published. I wrote it in response to an op-ed piece from the former state senator helping to ramrod attempts to repeal access to some kind of same sex union here in Oregon. If I could use more than a hundred and fifty words and I wanted to get more personal it might have run something like this.

 

Dear Ms Shannon,

 

……..continued from original letter.

 

For the record I am a single, hetero woman who has lived in Oregon all her life. I haven’t noticed any “social upheaval” because a fellow Oregonian who is a man or a woman happens to love another man or woman and wants the whole world to rejoice with them.

 

Here’s what I have seen.

 

A brokenfoster care system that can’t keep track of its charges because quite frankly the system is busted and there’s no money to fix it.

 

An epidemic of drug use because there’s no money for prevention or intervention. Yippee, putting the Sudafed behind the pharmacy counter may have driven out the mom and pop meth labs, it didn’t put a dent in what’s coming over the border.

 

A state mental hospital so old, dirty, and decrepit even the feds want to close it down.

 

A state more willing to spend money for prisons than schools.

 

A school year shorter than many other states. (and a sister and brother in law who are totally exhausted at the end of the school year, teaching is no profession for wimps.)

 

Conservatives who have no problem with insurance companies who pay for Viagra prescriptions but don’t pay for birth control supplies.

 

Families who fall on hard times only to be told that “you never should have had kids if you couldn’t support them.”

 

Too few places in emergency shelters for shattered families needing to get out of abusive situations.

 

A recession that will probably put a dent in my 401K account, at least I have one.

 

An increasing deduction from my paycheck for health insurance. I don’t mind, at least my employer still offers health insurance.

 

Frankly, Ms Shannon, I could fill a book before I got to domestic partnerships causing social upheaval. Help fix these problems and maybe I’ll listen to your arguments. Of course, by then we’ll al be a lot older and a lot grayer and we’ll discover that this particular problem was a tempest in a teapot. A very small teapot.

 

And after working through two pages of entries on Ms Shannon on Google I haven’t been able to find out if she was defeated for re election or didn’t run again. Either way she’s one of a stable of ‘Pubs who were elected in the mid nineties. Most of them were kicked out in the last couple of election cycles because they didn’t get anything done. See the above list. These are all problems that could have been on the table when Ms Shannon was in the state senate. I could only find one bill attached to her name in my very limited search. A bill to legalize road side memorials for accident victims. Important, perhaps. A better memorial would be a better Oregon.

Tags: OREGON, MARRIAGE RIGHTS

MEAT RECALL

Frankly I hope nobody reads this during or after a meal. I’ll be honest I haven’t gone looking for links to the video the humane society put out. I’m sure it’s on YouTube or some place like that.

 

This ties in with some of the things I’ve been commenting about. There’s been a huge meat recall out here on the west coast. The LA Times had a good version of this story.

 

I think about the descriptions in Renault’s books of the animals offered at the festivals in early Greece. They offered the best they had and treated the animals with respect. The meat was shared with the celebrants. And frankly most of the meat people got probably came from the festivals. Heaven knows they seem to have had enough of them. Heck, we’re not vegetarians yet, but we’re as careful as can be about where the meat and poultry comes from.

 

But what pisses me off goes beyond the relatively small chance that one of these animals might have something like mad cow disease. It’s the unspeakable disrespect the cattle owners and this company has shown for everything and everyone involved. And this meat is specifically made for school lunches.

 

 I’m sure these animals weren’t in the best shape when they were shipped but they put them on the trucks anyway. To treat any creature like this is an abomination. To treat creatures meant for the food supply is a double abomination. To feed this meat to our children is……well words fail me.

 

And the interviews I’ve seen on the tube show people concerned about their kids getting sick, I haven’t seen any comments of concern about how the animals themselves. I don’t know about anyone else, but the idea of eating meat from these poor, tormented creatures is nauseating.

 

It is disrespectful to the animals, it's disrespectful to the employees who have to deal with these poor beasts, and it's disresptful to the captive consumers of this meat, our school children.