Monday, October 18, 2004
Kerry Served
Why it matters
"Bring it on": President Bush, to terrorists and their ilk.
When you take the opportunity to address that kind of message to a foe which is implacable and murderous it is going to have the effect of waving a red flag in front of a bull. What purpose other than provocation is served by this presidential chest-thumping?
Our military is resolved. The fake heroic challenge is extraneous to its mission in Iraq and even the morale charge of a pumped-up chief executive won't provide one more competent decision, workable plan or one more unit of support to the fighters there on our behalf.
Any commander who issues that kind of a provocation to an enemy this treacherous had better be standing with a m16 in front of soldiers like my 19-year-old niece. She's a certified combat medic and any retaliatory fire aroused by Bush's hot-dogging for the cameras of a ferocious press corp will be aimed at her. She will be standing there.
If I felt George Bush understood that the cost of taking on a war; then tossing that challenge in on top of the undertaking, could be her life, I'd understand why this man is commander-in-chief.
Irresponsible. That's what that is.
Monday, October 04, 2004
I'm reading in the Oregonian on 10-04-04 that the plague of meth users who are in turn generating a plague of car thieves, identity theives and child abusers has been aided and abetted by a wholly legal effort by pharma to kill efforts to trace and stop the sale of the precursor drugs used in the manufacture of factory size batches of meth. The movement of those precursor drugs was stopped at one point by legislation introduced to control the spread of the epiphedrin and pseudophedrin from producers to the criminal cartels which run meth production on a wholesale basis.
Drug company lobbyists objected to the added burden which would have been placed on the legal drug manufacturers to document the distribution of their product and to the stricitures which would have been placed on over-the-counter purchase of products containing epihedrine and pseudophedrine. Members of both parties in the government and both houses of the legislature in Washington DC yeilded to the legal, though not legitimate, wishes of pharma to safeguard profits made by drug manufacturers. The Drug Enforcement Administration then watered down proposed legislation and eviserated what has in the past been effective control of the means of production and distribution of illegal drugs at the source of the production of raw materials.
The forces which came together in Washington DC to derail a promising plan to stop the meth epidemic were a perfect storm of self-interest which ignored any concern for anything else. The greater good of our civil society was abandoned.
When powerful lobbyists, weak-kneed politicians and ineffectual regualtors combine to allow the disaster of methamphetamine addiction to play out on neighborhood streets it has to be called what it is, corruption.
Did you think that corruption only occurs when a cash-stuffed envelope is passed from one grubby hand to another in some back room?
No. Corruption happens when politicians who know what watering down a potentialy effective law will do to the ability to enforce that law choose to vote to anyway because they are hoping to salvage their big campaign donation from pharma.
Corruption happens when the unholy diety of any and all drug profit must be protected at the cost of the safety of whole communities.
Corruption comes when those who are entrusted with the enormous task of creating an effective set of regualtions to help law enforcement and medicine get at the crushing societal burden of drug addiction don't speak truth to power in the hearings in which the weak-kneed legislators and the amoral lobbyists collude to ignore the evidence of illegitimate use of legal precursors to create a death dealing and community destroying product.
Call it what it is. Corruption
Drug company lobbyists objected to the added burden which would have been placed on the legal drug manufacturers to document the distribution of their product and to the stricitures which would have been placed on over-the-counter purchase of products containing epihedrine and pseudophedrine. Members of both parties in the government and both houses of the legislature in Washington DC yeilded to the legal, though not legitimate, wishes of pharma to safeguard profits made by drug manufacturers. The Drug Enforcement Administration then watered down proposed legislation and eviserated what has in the past been effective control of the means of production and distribution of illegal drugs at the source of the production of raw materials.
The forces which came together in Washington DC to derail a promising plan to stop the meth epidemic were a perfect storm of self-interest which ignored any concern for anything else. The greater good of our civil society was abandoned.
When powerful lobbyists, weak-kneed politicians and ineffectual regualtors combine to allow the disaster of methamphetamine addiction to play out on neighborhood streets it has to be called what it is, corruption.
Did you think that corruption only occurs when a cash-stuffed envelope is passed from one grubby hand to another in some back room?
No. Corruption happens when politicians who know what watering down a potentialy effective law will do to the ability to enforce that law choose to vote to anyway because they are hoping to salvage their big campaign donation from pharma.
Corruption happens when the unholy diety of any and all drug profit must be protected at the cost of the safety of whole communities.
Corruption comes when those who are entrusted with the enormous task of creating an effective set of regualtions to help law enforcement and medicine get at the crushing societal burden of drug addiction don't speak truth to power in the hearings in which the weak-kneed legislators and the amoral lobbyists collude to ignore the evidence of illegitimate use of legal precursors to create a death dealing and community destroying product.
Call it what it is. Corruption
Monday, February 09, 2004
"Bring it on": President Bush, to terrorists and their ilk.
When you take the opportunity to address that kind of message to a foe which is implacable and murderous it is going to have the effect of waving a red flag in front of a bull. What purpose other than provocation is served by this presidential chest-thumping?
Our military is resolved. The fake heroic challenge is extraneous to its mission in Iraq and even the morale charge of a pumped-up chief executive won't provide one more competent decision, workable plan or one more unit of support to the fighters there on our behalf.
Any commander who issues that kind of a provocation to an enemy this treacherous had better be standing with a m16 in front of soldiers like my 19-year-old niece. She's a certified combat medic and any retaliatory fire aroused by Bush's hot-dogging for the cameras of a ferocious press corp will be aimed at her. She will be standing there.
If I felt George Bush understood that the cost of taking on a war; then tossing that challenge in on top of the undertaking, could be her life, I'd understand why this man is commander-in-chief.
Irresponsible. That's what that is.
When you take the opportunity to address that kind of message to a foe which is implacable and murderous it is going to have the effect of waving a red flag in front of a bull. What purpose other than provocation is served by this presidential chest-thumping?
Our military is resolved. The fake heroic challenge is extraneous to its mission in Iraq and even the morale charge of a pumped-up chief executive won't provide one more competent decision, workable plan or one more unit of support to the fighters there on our behalf.
Any commander who issues that kind of a provocation to an enemy this treacherous had better be standing with a m16 in front of soldiers like my 19-year-old niece. She's a certified combat medic and any retaliatory fire aroused by Bush's hot-dogging for the cameras of a ferocious press corp will be aimed at her. She will be standing there.
If I felt George Bush understood that the cost of taking on a war; then tossing that challenge in on top of the undertaking, could be her life, I'd understand why this man is commander-in-chief.
Irresponsible. That's what that is.
Sunday, January 25, 2004
Oh for goodness sake. I was reading an article about the completely admirable organizaton, Heifer(they do completely admirable economic development in third world countries), and what should intrude on my train of thought but my Dad's dismissive reference to our local, busy, church lady as "that old heifer".
Come to think of it, he refered to many of the sociable and social ladies of "a certain age" as heifers. Apart from the usual mild misogyny common to men who were farmers and ranchers during that part of the 1960s, what made these particular people worthy of dismissal?
I'm wondering because I am now of "a certain age" and am quite content to resemble those energetic and earnest gals. Of course I'd never refer to myself or anyone else as a gal and I certainly wouldn't ever wear those pointy-eyed, rhinestone trimmed glasses. You know, the 4H leader, precinct chairman, neighborhood association treasurer type of women.
Since I refer to myself as a general busybody I guess it is time to claim my own heiferdom. We heifers are certainly not at the head of the herd leading the charge. There are some pretty amazing women who are these days and good on them. No, we're pretty evenly distributed throughout the herd. We may not be the leaders but we're going to make dang sure that the herd keeps moving apace as we fill in, take up and start new civic enterprises; the budget committee sign-up sheet never has enough names on it. You'll add yours if you're really a heifer. You will, however, be hard pressed to get the whole motley assortment that makes up our society to your goal if us heifers get our heads down and refuse to go along.
It is not impossible to move right on past us and leave all us middling and careful examiners of position papers and voting records behind in the dust but you want to be especially careful of anyone who wants you to go there. Many of us heifers have been there and done that. At "a certain age" you've been you've been down some long dry trails. Remember Consciousness Raising? The very fact that we're here- we're participating, means we haven't been led over those cliffs of religious extremism, political extremism, apathy and self absorption. Go heifers. And Heifers.
Come to think of it, he refered to many of the sociable and social ladies of "a certain age" as heifers. Apart from the usual mild misogyny common to men who were farmers and ranchers during that part of the 1960s, what made these particular people worthy of dismissal?
I'm wondering because I am now of "a certain age" and am quite content to resemble those energetic and earnest gals. Of course I'd never refer to myself or anyone else as a gal and I certainly wouldn't ever wear those pointy-eyed, rhinestone trimmed glasses. You know, the 4H leader, precinct chairman, neighborhood association treasurer type of women.
Since I refer to myself as a general busybody I guess it is time to claim my own heiferdom. We heifers are certainly not at the head of the herd leading the charge. There are some pretty amazing women who are these days and good on them. No, we're pretty evenly distributed throughout the herd. We may not be the leaders but we're going to make dang sure that the herd keeps moving apace as we fill in, take up and start new civic enterprises; the budget committee sign-up sheet never has enough names on it. You'll add yours if you're really a heifer. You will, however, be hard pressed to get the whole motley assortment that makes up our society to your goal if us heifers get our heads down and refuse to go along.
It is not impossible to move right on past us and leave all us middling and careful examiners of position papers and voting records behind in the dust but you want to be especially careful of anyone who wants you to go there. Many of us heifers have been there and done that. At "a certain age" you've been you've been down some long dry trails. Remember Consciousness Raising? The very fact that we're here- we're participating, means we haven't been led over those cliffs of religious extremism, political extremism, apathy and self absorption. Go heifers. And Heifers.
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
I have two of four grandparents who came over on the boat. That should moderate my response to the waves of immigration which are forming the economy that I and my children must wrest a living from. It doesn't.
We have 8 million undocumented workers now and the president's proposal will remove whatever legal barriers there are to a huge increase in those numbers. Other barriers to immigration which kept wholesale exchanges of populations between every corner of this globe and our nation have also disappeared.
When the last large wave of immigration occured, during the turn of the century, contemporaries of my Grandma Amelia (from Germany) and Grandpa Joe (from Ireland) made the decision to emmigrate as a permanent committment. There are commuter illegals now, who divide their time, loyalty and homeland between two countries, and one characteristic of the illegals whom I know personally is an almost complete lack of civic involvement in US public life. It is very difficult to get undocumented residents of the community in which I live to report criminal activity, move to correct inequitable actions by community leaders and make an investment in the neighborhood when their residence in Mexico, their church and community are all hundreds of miles away and their primary interest is in that identity rather that the civic life of this place where they spend the large majority of their time.
We have 8 million undocumented workers now and the president's proposal will remove whatever legal barriers there are to a huge increase in those numbers. Other barriers to immigration which kept wholesale exchanges of populations between every corner of this globe and our nation have also disappeared.
When the last large wave of immigration occured, during the turn of the century, contemporaries of my Grandma Amelia (from Germany) and Grandpa Joe (from Ireland) made the decision to emmigrate as a permanent committment. There are commuter illegals now, who divide their time, loyalty and homeland between two countries, and one characteristic of the illegals whom I know personally is an almost complete lack of civic involvement in US public life. It is very difficult to get undocumented residents of the community in which I live to report criminal activity, move to correct inequitable actions by community leaders and make an investment in the neighborhood when their residence in Mexico, their church and community are all hundreds of miles away and their primary interest is in that identity rather that the civic life of this place where they spend the large majority of their time.
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Any self-respecting child of the 60s will greet the news that the FBI is shadowing anti-Iraq war demonstrations to investigate the ... the what?-demonstrators, leaders, tactics? with a shudder. Now we find the the NSA has been doing illegal phone surveillance of American citizens within the boundaries of our country.
I am proudly liberal, Anti-WTO, Pro-choice, Anti-war; you name it. That's just a sampling of the issues for which I have demonstrated, petitioned and written forceful letters to the editor. Anyone who values her skin wants the punks, anarchists and vandals that are eager to attach their caboose to her train when a demonstration is under way, out. If not, your principled protest and damned hard work gets labled "radicalism" and you're lucky if you don't get maced. Immedialte crowd control, applied with proper restraint, is the province of the local constabulary, not the Federal Bureau of Investigation and certainly not the National Security Administration.
Police are who one usually wants to take on the immediate and forceful dampening of illegal acitivity at your average rally. Surveilance can contribute nothing to the forces of order because the guys are undercover. Being undercover and accountable to no one but John Ashcroft and George Bush, I have little confidence that I will ever know how the information gained by this surveilence is used. The FBI has, in past decades, been used to illegally spy on civil rights organizers and supress completely legal protest activity.
Tell you what Mr Rumsfield, since you're so interested in the anti-war Americans, save yourself the trouble of creating one of those damnable files that keep getting revealed in the bowels of our federal law enforcement agencies. The ones enumerateing participants in completely legal protest activities who are assumed to be: secretly breaking laws and plotting in conspiracies to break laws and advocating the breaking thereof, on the sole authority of the list compiler, by virtue of the fact that whomever is compiling the list disapproves of the views of the compilees. To save you the trouble I'm creating the ultimate and all-inclusive registry of anti-Iraq war protesters. I hope to publish the list and let you get back to the task of hunting real terrorists. Perhaps each registrant would contribute a small amount of money to help the anti-war effort as the cost of being included on that list of those who oppose the war in Iraq.
I am proudly liberal, Anti-WTO, Pro-choice, Anti-war; you name it. That's just a sampling of the issues for which I have demonstrated, petitioned and written forceful letters to the editor. Anyone who values her skin wants the punks, anarchists and vandals that are eager to attach their caboose to her train when a demonstration is under way, out. If not, your principled protest and damned hard work gets labled "radicalism" and you're lucky if you don't get maced. Immedialte crowd control, applied with proper restraint, is the province of the local constabulary, not the Federal Bureau of Investigation and certainly not the National Security Administration.
Police are who one usually wants to take on the immediate and forceful dampening of illegal acitivity at your average rally. Surveilance can contribute nothing to the forces of order because the guys are undercover. Being undercover and accountable to no one but John Ashcroft and George Bush, I have little confidence that I will ever know how the information gained by this surveilence is used. The FBI has, in past decades, been used to illegally spy on civil rights organizers and supress completely legal protest activity.
Tell you what Mr Rumsfield, since you're so interested in the anti-war Americans, save yourself the trouble of creating one of those damnable files that keep getting revealed in the bowels of our federal law enforcement agencies. The ones enumerateing participants in completely legal protest activities who are assumed to be: secretly breaking laws and plotting in conspiracies to break laws and advocating the breaking thereof, on the sole authority of the list compiler, by virtue of the fact that whomever is compiling the list disapproves of the views of the compilees. To save you the trouble I'm creating the ultimate and all-inclusive registry of anti-Iraq war protesters. I hope to publish the list and let you get back to the task of hunting real terrorists. Perhaps each registrant would contribute a small amount of money to help the anti-war effort as the cost of being included on that list of those who oppose the war in Iraq.
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
How do I justify the opinion that I, a liberal Democrat with a wide interest in internation affairs, am forming that it is time to limit my comfortable level of consumption to items and services that are produced near to home?
Silicon Valley surveys predict that 500.000 American service-sector jobs will be moving overseas to join the manufacturing sector which has already booked for low-wage, regulationless profitability. Large chunk of the economy that. Will the jobs left onshore be sufficient to employ the high school and college student who will be leaving my household within the next 6 years?
I'm beyond forming protectionist opinions, and all the way to looking for practical ways to screen the products that I buy and services that I use for American content. I don't shop at Wal Mart, but I don't intend to and I can't afford to consume only American-made.
Even the highest skill level of engineering at the most cutting edge technology companies is being performed by an international work force supplemented by bargain level workers from developing countries. The solution may be to create home-grown engineers and, on the whole, that may be what needs to be done. One problem with that, locally, is that the dominant company in my home town makes computers with the imported labor force because "we can't get local talent with skills that are advanced enough to perform for us". Then the company holds my local government hostage to a demand for property tax relief when it locates its factories in my town. Schools are financed by local propery taxes and lo and behold these are the same schools that are going to an eight month school year because they can't finance nine months for above-mentioned high school student. Bummer
Silicon Valley surveys predict that 500.000 American service-sector jobs will be moving overseas to join the manufacturing sector which has already booked for low-wage, regulationless profitability. Large chunk of the economy that. Will the jobs left onshore be sufficient to employ the high school and college student who will be leaving my household within the next 6 years?
I'm beyond forming protectionist opinions, and all the way to looking for practical ways to screen the products that I buy and services that I use for American content. I don't shop at Wal Mart, but I don't intend to and I can't afford to consume only American-made.
Even the highest skill level of engineering at the most cutting edge technology companies is being performed by an international work force supplemented by bargain level workers from developing countries. The solution may be to create home-grown engineers and, on the whole, that may be what needs to be done. One problem with that, locally, is that the dominant company in my home town makes computers with the imported labor force because "we can't get local talent with skills that are advanced enough to perform for us". Then the company holds my local government hostage to a demand for property tax relief when it locates its factories in my town. Schools are financed by local propery taxes and lo and behold these are the same schools that are going to an eight month school year because they can't finance nine months for above-mentioned high school student. Bummer
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