The Plame season finale: Suspense builds as Rove & Cheney turn on each other. Who will win?
It's that time of year -- when Desperate Housewives and Survivors and Apprentices all have their season finales. But they are not the only ones gearing up for that last nail-biting final episode. It looks like there's going to be a HUGE season finale on CSI Washington DC as well.
The suspense has been building all season. Fitzpatrick has already nailed Scooter Libby. Who is going to be indicted in the last climactic episode? Cheney or Rove?
All season long, Fitzpatrick let us believe that he was gunning for Cheney but subtle hints in last week's episode point to a dramatic last-minute indictment of Rove.
And if it comes to a stand-off between Cheney and Rove, who is going to survive? And who will be fired? I bet you anything that if I'm right and there IS a final showdown between Rove and Cheney in the last episode of CSI Plame, Rove will NOT be the one going to jail.
Here's how I predict the final episode will go: As Fitzpatrick gets closer to the truth of who leaked the Plame documents, Rove will point the finger at Cheney in order to save himself. And Cheney will try to have Rove take the fall.
Can Rove rat out Cheney fast enough to save his own skin -- if Jason Leopold is right and Rove has already been indicted? Or will Cheney be able to outwit, outplay and outlast? I bet you ANYTHING that it will be Cheney whose torch will be doused.
Why?
Because when Leopold claimed that Rove had already been indicted, what did Rove do (besides of course getting TruthOut's unlisted cell phone number from the NSA)? Rove swift-boated Leopold. REALLY swift-boated Leopold. And he will try the same trick on Cheney. If Rove is cornered, he will turn ugly. What do you want to bet?
If Cheney thinks he can go up against The Karl and win, of course he's not gonna Survive. If we know anything about Rove, it's that he plays dirty. And he plays to win -- no matter the cost. Rove won't be fired. My money is on Rove.
However, the final episode could prove to be even MORE exciting than that. Suppose Rove and Cheney formed a last-minute alliance and double-teamed Condi and Bush!
One bet is sure, however. This season's finale of Plame CSI is gonna be the most gripping finale of all.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
My new best friend: How I learned to love job interviews
Through absolutely no fault of my own, I found myself out of work last July. And from that day to this, I've been pounding the pavements. It's been an interesting experience. What have I learned?
I have learned that job interviews are really really really fun!
You go to this place. You meet this person. They spend over an hour hanging on your every word. They are good listeners. They are interested in ME. They offer me tea. They want to know all about me. It's like making a new instant best friend.
If you are one of the three million victims of George W. Bush's disastrous outsourcing policies and you DREAD job-hunting, just change the way you look at it. Stop thinking of this as some horrible degrading and humiliating experience that you are forced to drag yourself through just to be able to eat and pay the rent -- and start thinking of job hunting as an exciting new opportunity to add some bounce to your social life!
Instead of looking for someone to bolster your poor sagging jobless unemployed ego on My Space or Yahoo Online Dating or Friendster, go to the employment section of http://craigslist.org or http://monster.com and look for a job! Someone from Human Resources will gladly give you their total attention. And, after they are finished making you feel all wanted and meaningful and at ease, they may even offer you a job....
Through absolutely no fault of my own, I found myself out of work last July. And from that day to this, I've been pounding the pavements. It's been an interesting experience. What have I learned?
I have learned that job interviews are really really really fun!
You go to this place. You meet this person. They spend over an hour hanging on your every word. They are good listeners. They are interested in ME. They offer me tea. They want to know all about me. It's like making a new instant best friend.
If you are one of the three million victims of George W. Bush's disastrous outsourcing policies and you DREAD job-hunting, just change the way you look at it. Stop thinking of this as some horrible degrading and humiliating experience that you are forced to drag yourself through just to be able to eat and pay the rent -- and start thinking of job hunting as an exciting new opportunity to add some bounce to your social life!
Instead of looking for someone to bolster your poor sagging jobless unemployed ego on My Space or Yahoo Online Dating or Friendster, go to the employment section of http://craigslist.org or http://monster.com and look for a job! Someone from Human Resources will gladly give you their total attention. And, after they are finished making you feel all wanted and meaningful and at ease, they may even offer you a job....
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
More bloody than Carrie: Bush's revenge on the National Guard
Remember that horror movie back in 1976 where a girl who was humiliated and made fun of comes back to seek revenge? Well, we got an update on that plot. And George W. Bush is now playing the role of Carrie.
Here's the new script: Back in 1968-73, Bush served in the Texas National Guard where he was teased and humiliated when he scored 25% on his pilot aptitude test and was suspended and grounded from flying duty.
Well, Carrie, er, I mean George waited a long freaking time to get his revenge on the National Guard -- BUT HE DID. America's National Guard is now almost completely destroyed after being sent to Iraq with unprotected Humvees and inadequate body armor.
But was that revenge enough? No.
George went further and administerd the coup de grace. This week he assigned the remaining tattered remnants of the National Guard -- who had somehow managed to survive being butchered in Iraq, cut off economically at home and strangled in New Orleans by FEMA -- to the ultimate humiliation: Border patrol. And if the National Guard somehow manages to survive trudging through the Arizona desert in 140-degree heat while leaving their home states undefended (again), I'm 100% sure that Bush will figure out some other humiliating and/or deadly revenge to finally finish them off.
Trust me. Carrie will not rest until there is NOTHING left of the National Guard.
Remember that horror movie back in 1976 where a girl who was humiliated and made fun of comes back to seek revenge? Well, we got an update on that plot. And George W. Bush is now playing the role of Carrie.
Here's the new script: Back in 1968-73, Bush served in the Texas National Guard where he was teased and humiliated when he scored 25% on his pilot aptitude test and was suspended and grounded from flying duty.
Well, Carrie, er, I mean George waited a long freaking time to get his revenge on the National Guard -- BUT HE DID. America's National Guard is now almost completely destroyed after being sent to Iraq with unprotected Humvees and inadequate body armor.
But was that revenge enough? No.
George went further and administerd the coup de grace. This week he assigned the remaining tattered remnants of the National Guard -- who had somehow managed to survive being butchered in Iraq, cut off economically at home and strangled in New Orleans by FEMA -- to the ultimate humiliation: Border patrol. And if the National Guard somehow manages to survive trudging through the Arizona desert in 140-degree heat while leaving their home states undefended (again), I'm 100% sure that Bush will figure out some other humiliating and/or deadly revenge to finally finish them off.
Trust me. Carrie will not rest until there is NOTHING left of the National Guard.
The dollar's evil twin: Exploring the Bush bureaucracy's private monetary system
I was happily hiking through Tilden Park on Mothers' Day when all the stuff I have been reading on the internet regarding the sorry state of the American economy suddenly coalesced inside of my head. "Aha!" I said to the tree next to me as suddenly everything started to make sense.
Here's what I had learned from the internet:
From Mike Whitney I learned that "Currently, the world is drowning in dollars, even a small movement could trigger a massive recession in the United States." I also learned that "There's no prospect of the US running a trade surplus anytime soon. Bush has savaged the manufacturing sector, outsourcing over 3 million jobs and shutting down plants across the country.... Currently, the national debt is a whopping $8.4 trillion with an equally harrowing $800 billion trade deficit."
Whitney also taught me that "the profligate spending, budget-busting tax cuts, and the shocking increase in the money supply (the Fed has doubled the money supply in one decade) has the greenback headed for the dumpster. Already, China and Japan (who hold an accumulated $1.7 trillion in US securities and currency) are gradually moving away from the dollar towards the euro."
From my friend Joe Thompson, I learned that "3.9 trillion dollars a day in wire transfers are going through the Federal Reserve of New York. No greenbacks, just digits." The Federal Reserve is apparently printing greenbacks like alchemists who have finally learned how to make gold out of air.
Joe also said that, "There's no way the stock market could continue to advance while buying inflated oil futures at the same time. Even with margin trading there is just so much money to go around. So the money had to come from really deep pockets -- which the oil companies have. They couldn't lose because they were feeding themselves with their own money."
Then of course Michael Rupert has taught us the critical lesson that drug money pouring in from Afghanistan and Columbia is what really keeps our economy afloat.
And I also got an interesting lesson from the Washington Post. "A $2.7 trillion budget plan pending before the House would raise the federal debt ceiling to nearly $10 trillion, less than two months after Congress last raised the federal government's borrowing limit." What lesson is this? That America's federal credit cards appear to be totally maxed out?
And economists are predicting another economic crash like the one in 1929. "The crisis won't come immediately," stated Paul Krugman back in 2003. "For a few years, America will still be able to borrow freely, simply because lenders assume that things will somehow work out. But at a certain point we'll have a Wile E. Coyote moment.... Mr. Coyote had a habit of running off cliffs and taking several steps on thin air before noticing that there was nothing underneath his feet. Only then would he plunge."
I put all these facts into my brain, stirred them up and added a few more facts that I stole off of Google. "America's total national income is approximately $2,100 billion a year but our debt is approximately $8 TRILLION." That means that we taxpayers are only making enough salary to pay off less than one percent of our debt. And yet our economy hasn't crashed?
What does THAT mean?
What IS keeping our economy together?
Is there some secret underground world of money that we average Americans know nothing about? Is there some private monetary system that really runs the economy -- and has nothing to do with the "dollar"?
Or does the U.S. dollar have an evil twin?
Still deep in thought, I walked over to the park's Little Farm and looked at the chickens, pigs, rabbits and cows. "No one is gonna believe this," I told a chicken that had just pecked at my shoe. "They are all gonna just think that I'm paranoid. But seriously. Look at the evidence...." The chicken looked.
"The American economy is in deep trouble but it hasn't crashed. That's against every law of economics since Adam Smith! The feds SHOULD be bankrupt. Yet they are not." The chicken nodded its head.
"There must be money pouring into the system from somewhere." The chicken agreed.
"But where?" No-bid contract money-pits, drug money, petro-dollars, money-laundering schemes, off-shore hidey-holes, safety-deposit boxes full of gold, numbered Swiss bank accounts, artificial money creation, the outrageous use of credit, Enron-style boondoggles.... If you add in all these shadow sources of revenue, NOW the booming U.S. economy makes sense." Holy sheep dookie. "That means that corruption and nepotism and crony-ism and bribes and embezzlement and money-laundering and drugs are holding our economy together!" The chicken nodded again.
"Since we stopped taxing the rich and 'offshore' corporations, the money hemorrhaging out of OUR wallets is only a drop in the bucket in staunching the flood of national debt. If the national economy was only financed by us measly taxpayers, this above-ground economy would be a train-wreck waiting to happen. Yet the underground economy of billionaires just keeps chugging happily along." The chicken agreed.
But wait. It gets worse. "If the dollar crashes tomorrow, none of the Bush bureaucrats will be effected. WE depend on the dollar. We would go belly-up. THEY depend on a shadow economy and the dollar's evil twin who they keep locked up somewhere in the Caymen Islands -- or in the new mega-embassy in Baghdad. They will be fine." The chicken squawked.
"But how did we Americans allow this to happen? How did we degenerate into a bunch of poor little match girls, standing in the snow and staring longingly through the window as the dollar's evil clones live high on the hog?" The chicken had no idea.
Then I thought of one of Whitney's other comments. "By collapsing the dollar, Bush can shift the wealth of the American middle class to corporate mandarins in the blink of an eye. Industry profits will soar while working class people drown in an ocean of red ink."
Then the chicken pooped on my foot.
I was happily hiking through Tilden Park on Mothers' Day when all the stuff I have been reading on the internet regarding the sorry state of the American economy suddenly coalesced inside of my head. "Aha!" I said to the tree next to me as suddenly everything started to make sense.
Here's what I had learned from the internet:
From Mike Whitney I learned that "Currently, the world is drowning in dollars, even a small movement could trigger a massive recession in the United States." I also learned that "There's no prospect of the US running a trade surplus anytime soon. Bush has savaged the manufacturing sector, outsourcing over 3 million jobs and shutting down plants across the country.... Currently, the national debt is a whopping $8.4 trillion with an equally harrowing $800 billion trade deficit."
Whitney also taught me that "the profligate spending, budget-busting tax cuts, and the shocking increase in the money supply (the Fed has doubled the money supply in one decade) has the greenback headed for the dumpster. Already, China and Japan (who hold an accumulated $1.7 trillion in US securities and currency) are gradually moving away from the dollar towards the euro."
From my friend Joe Thompson, I learned that "3.9 trillion dollars a day in wire transfers are going through the Federal Reserve of New York. No greenbacks, just digits." The Federal Reserve is apparently printing greenbacks like alchemists who have finally learned how to make gold out of air.
Joe also said that, "There's no way the stock market could continue to advance while buying inflated oil futures at the same time. Even with margin trading there is just so much money to go around. So the money had to come from really deep pockets -- which the oil companies have. They couldn't lose because they were feeding themselves with their own money."
Then of course Michael Rupert has taught us the critical lesson that drug money pouring in from Afghanistan and Columbia is what really keeps our economy afloat.
And I also got an interesting lesson from the Washington Post. "A $2.7 trillion budget plan pending before the House would raise the federal debt ceiling to nearly $10 trillion, less than two months after Congress last raised the federal government's borrowing limit." What lesson is this? That America's federal credit cards appear to be totally maxed out?
And economists are predicting another economic crash like the one in 1929. "The crisis won't come immediately," stated Paul Krugman back in 2003. "For a few years, America will still be able to borrow freely, simply because lenders assume that things will somehow work out. But at a certain point we'll have a Wile E. Coyote moment.... Mr. Coyote had a habit of running off cliffs and taking several steps on thin air before noticing that there was nothing underneath his feet. Only then would he plunge."
I put all these facts into my brain, stirred them up and added a few more facts that I stole off of Google. "America's total national income is approximately $2,100 billion a year but our debt is approximately $8 TRILLION." That means that we taxpayers are only making enough salary to pay off less than one percent of our debt. And yet our economy hasn't crashed?
What does THAT mean?
What IS keeping our economy together?
Is there some secret underground world of money that we average Americans know nothing about? Is there some private monetary system that really runs the economy -- and has nothing to do with the "dollar"?
Or does the U.S. dollar have an evil twin?
Still deep in thought, I walked over to the park's Little Farm and looked at the chickens, pigs, rabbits and cows. "No one is gonna believe this," I told a chicken that had just pecked at my shoe. "They are all gonna just think that I'm paranoid. But seriously. Look at the evidence...." The chicken looked.
"The American economy is in deep trouble but it hasn't crashed. That's against every law of economics since Adam Smith! The feds SHOULD be bankrupt. Yet they are not." The chicken nodded its head.
"There must be money pouring into the system from somewhere." The chicken agreed.
"But where?" No-bid contract money-pits, drug money, petro-dollars, money-laundering schemes, off-shore hidey-holes, safety-deposit boxes full of gold, numbered Swiss bank accounts, artificial money creation, the outrageous use of credit, Enron-style boondoggles.... If you add in all these shadow sources of revenue, NOW the booming U.S. economy makes sense." Holy sheep dookie. "That means that corruption and nepotism and crony-ism and bribes and embezzlement and money-laundering and drugs are holding our economy together!" The chicken nodded again.
"Since we stopped taxing the rich and 'offshore' corporations, the money hemorrhaging out of OUR wallets is only a drop in the bucket in staunching the flood of national debt. If the national economy was only financed by us measly taxpayers, this above-ground economy would be a train-wreck waiting to happen. Yet the underground economy of billionaires just keeps chugging happily along." The chicken agreed.
But wait. It gets worse. "If the dollar crashes tomorrow, none of the Bush bureaucrats will be effected. WE depend on the dollar. We would go belly-up. THEY depend on a shadow economy and the dollar's evil twin who they keep locked up somewhere in the Caymen Islands -- or in the new mega-embassy in Baghdad. They will be fine." The chicken squawked.
"But how did we Americans allow this to happen? How did we degenerate into a bunch of poor little match girls, standing in the snow and staring longingly through the window as the dollar's evil clones live high on the hog?" The chicken had no idea.
Then I thought of one of Whitney's other comments. "By collapsing the dollar, Bush can shift the wealth of the American middle class to corporate mandarins in the blink of an eye. Industry profits will soar while working class people drown in an ocean of red ink."
Then the chicken pooped on my foot.
Apocalypse or no Apocalypse: Have DC's Armageddon contestants chosen the wrong case?
On the TV game show, "Deal or No Deal," contestants have to guess which case contains the big payoff. If contestants guess right, they walk away with big bucks. But if they guess wrong, they get nothing.
Well, there are people in power in Washington DC right now who are playing a game too. Only it's called "Armageddon or No Armageddon". And these people are betting their lives -- and our lives too -- that they will be raised up and glorified on Judgment Day if they can just bring about the end of the world.
But what if they are wrong?
What if they blow up the world only to discover that "God doesn't like ugly". And that the "Left Behind" series is the work of the devil and that they have been duped?
"Deal or no deal?"
What if these fans of world destruction tried to second-guess God and then found out the hard way that they were DEAD wrong? And then Jesus Himself lays down the Law: Playing God with others' lives is a definite religious no-no. "You have been sorely mislead by Satan," adds St. Michael. "No Rapture for you!"
"You claim to have read the Bible? Then you should have made a better choice," admonishes St. Peter. "The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, not blow them up. This was a test. You failed. No deal."
PS: God is also righteously angry because the United States has the second-highest infant mortality rate in the industrialized world. Crying to the roof-tops that one is "pro-life" yet letting thousands of new-born babies die needlessly? That's choosing the wrong case for sure. "No deal!"
On the TV game show, "Deal or No Deal," contestants have to guess which case contains the big payoff. If contestants guess right, they walk away with big bucks. But if they guess wrong, they get nothing.
Well, there are people in power in Washington DC right now who are playing a game too. Only it's called "Armageddon or No Armageddon". And these people are betting their lives -- and our lives too -- that they will be raised up and glorified on Judgment Day if they can just bring about the end of the world.
But what if they are wrong?
What if they blow up the world only to discover that "God doesn't like ugly". And that the "Left Behind" series is the work of the devil and that they have been duped?
"Deal or no deal?"
What if these fans of world destruction tried to second-guess God and then found out the hard way that they were DEAD wrong? And then Jesus Himself lays down the Law: Playing God with others' lives is a definite religious no-no. "You have been sorely mislead by Satan," adds St. Michael. "No Rapture for you!"
"You claim to have read the Bible? Then you should have made a better choice," admonishes St. Peter. "The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, not blow them up. This was a test. You failed. No deal."
PS: God is also righteously angry because the United States has the second-highest infant mortality rate in the industrialized world. Crying to the roof-tops that one is "pro-life" yet letting thousands of new-born babies die needlessly? That's choosing the wrong case for sure. "No deal!"
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Grey's Anatomy: Time to do some surgery on the White House
I am a big fan of the TV show "Grey's Anatomy". It teaches me lessons about life -- and what to do in an emergency. Here's an example: Despite all his rhetoric to the contrary, George Bush is no Dr. McDreamy. So. What would Dr. Webber do about that? Take GW off the surgery scheduling board and put him on the "prison track"!
And what did George tell Izzy in that episode where there was a bomb in the hospital? "Some people are watchers and some people are do-ers." That's deep.
Up until now, America has been a nation of watchers -- watching silently while our Constitution gets eroded, our tax money is given away to the rich, we live in fear and our military is systematically looted. So. How can we turn America into a nation of do-ers, a nation composed of people like Christina, Dr. Bailey and Dr. Burke? Can you for an instant imagine Dr. Bailey putting up with the utter greed, sadism and incompetence that is pouring out of the White House today?
How can we possibly turn America into a nation of do-ers who will throw Bush, Rumsfeld, Rove, Cheney and Rice out on their ears?
"We" don't have to do anything. Bush and his cronies have already done it for us -- have sealed their own doom. They themselves changed America from a nation of lurkers into a nation of do-ers. And I know exactly when the change happened. They did it at 3:15 pm last Saturday afternoon.
That was when I, me, Jane Stillwater, went to fill up the tank of my 1990 Toyota Tercel and discovered that a measly eight gallons of gas was gonna cost me $30. That's when I immediately became a revolutionary. A do-er. A Meridith Grey. (Forget about the false Dr. McDreamy. Let's switch to the vet!)
And same thing happened to the guy in the Lexus at the gas pump next to me. $60 to top off his tank? I watched in wonder as he changed from Izzy to Dr. Bailey before my very eyes. "Nice bumper-sticker," he said, pointing to the one on the front of my car -- the one that read "Bush knew".
I am a big fan of the TV show "Grey's Anatomy". It teaches me lessons about life -- and what to do in an emergency. Here's an example: Despite all his rhetoric to the contrary, George Bush is no Dr. McDreamy. So. What would Dr. Webber do about that? Take GW off the surgery scheduling board and put him on the "prison track"!
And what did George tell Izzy in that episode where there was a bomb in the hospital? "Some people are watchers and some people are do-ers." That's deep.
Up until now, America has been a nation of watchers -- watching silently while our Constitution gets eroded, our tax money is given away to the rich, we live in fear and our military is systematically looted. So. How can we turn America into a nation of do-ers, a nation composed of people like Christina, Dr. Bailey and Dr. Burke? Can you for an instant imagine Dr. Bailey putting up with the utter greed, sadism and incompetence that is pouring out of the White House today?
How can we possibly turn America into a nation of do-ers who will throw Bush, Rumsfeld, Rove, Cheney and Rice out on their ears?
"We" don't have to do anything. Bush and his cronies have already done it for us -- have sealed their own doom. They themselves changed America from a nation of lurkers into a nation of do-ers. And I know exactly when the change happened. They did it at 3:15 pm last Saturday afternoon.
That was when I, me, Jane Stillwater, went to fill up the tank of my 1990 Toyota Tercel and discovered that a measly eight gallons of gas was gonna cost me $30. That's when I immediately became a revolutionary. A do-er. A Meridith Grey. (Forget about the false Dr. McDreamy. Let's switch to the vet!)
And same thing happened to the guy in the Lexus at the gas pump next to me. $60 to top off his tank? I watched in wonder as he changed from Izzy to Dr. Bailey before my very eyes. "Nice bumper-sticker," he said, pointing to the one on the front of my car -- the one that read "Bush knew".
America's nightmare: If something happened to the White House, would we even care?
This morning, I woke up with a start from one of those really lucid nightmares that we all dread. Some man was running down the street screaming, "Run for your life! A bomb is in the United States!"
Then a man in a cowboy masked turned to me and said, "If something bad happened to the White House, would anyone even care?" What in the world brought on that dream? It must have been the olallieberry pie that I ate last night instead of dinner.
"Did you read in the newspaper about that construction firm in New Orleans that ripped off a bunch of money from the Katrina funds?" asked my friend Sonya. "This whole country is riddled with corruption." Geez Louise. How could anybody sink so low as to steal from Katrina victims?
According to Pratap Chattergee of CorpWatch, "the track record of private contractors and federal agencies in Iraq and now in the Gulf states bodes ill for the likelyhood that the public will enjoy [the right to expect an effective response in a time of emergency]. The Corps contracts and those awarded FEMA replicate 'the same flawed contracting strategy that produced disastrous results in Iraq,' Conresssman Seny Hoyer wrote to the Government Accountability Office."
More corruption: Bush's pals at Diebold have conned American taxpayers into purchasing a whole bunch of malfunctioning voting machines. In a recent Ohio primary, for example, Diebold touch-screen machines failed so badly that election officials in Cuyahoga County had to hand-count 17,000 ballots. And Lord knows who we really elected to the White House in 2000 and 2004. (Hint: It wasn't George Bush.)
Carpetbagging close to home: In my home state of California, we can't even get the levees repaired because the federal funds to do it with are tied to a Congressional pork barrel bill giving fabulous bonuses to Donald Rumsfeld as a reward for his failures in Iraq.
For the sake of my blood pressure, I'm not even going to mention the billions of dollars disappearing down Dick Cheney's Halliburton rat-hole while our troops languish in hellholes near Baghdad without even minimal essentials such as clean water and sanitary food -- let alone bullet-proof vests.
And to quote CitizenDC, "Have you ever wondered how a man who owns a $1,500,000 house in DC, a $1,000,000+ house in Florida and a $48,000 cottage in Texas manages to survive on a $161,000-a-year federal salary? It's odd." He's talking about White House employee Karl Rove. "Would it raise questions if that same man had sold a property to a shell company controlled by his former business partners and that man made between $250,000 and $750,000 profit?" Apparently not. Bush hasn't raised any questions at all.
The Bush bureaucracy's "strip America down to the floorboards" carpetbagging policies have become a national shame. And despite all the cover-ups, Americans know that their wallets are being stolen from under their very noses. And NOBODY likes George Bush. His popularity ratings have sunk so low that if he was a TV show with those kind of sorry bottom-of-the-barrel numbers, it would have been canceled right out the gate.
Still and all, I love the White House itself and what it used to stand for. If something bad EVER happens to the White House, they will be in big trouble from me.
****
From Aprille: Well, it isn't "W's" house Jane. It STILL belongs to everyone of US and stands for what this country is all about, or used to be all about. That is not to say it won't need a thorough scrubbing and total fumigation services once the 'Deciders' are back in Texas. The squatters that are in residence now are just like the crooked, evil guy that moved into the house in 'Pacific Heights'.........Michael Keatons' character managed to strike fear and loathing into our hearts even tho we never really BELIEVED anyone could get away with what he did to the owners. Who knew we, as a country, were in for the same treatment but with the damages and the backlash being on a worldwide scale?
Who knew? WE did!
Who listened? Nobody.
Who pays? EVERY ONE of us.
This morning, I woke up with a start from one of those really lucid nightmares that we all dread. Some man was running down the street screaming, "Run for your life! A bomb is in the United States!"
Then a man in a cowboy masked turned to me and said, "If something bad happened to the White House, would anyone even care?" What in the world brought on that dream? It must have been the olallieberry pie that I ate last night instead of dinner.
"Did you read in the newspaper about that construction firm in New Orleans that ripped off a bunch of money from the Katrina funds?" asked my friend Sonya. "This whole country is riddled with corruption." Geez Louise. How could anybody sink so low as to steal from Katrina victims?
According to Pratap Chattergee of CorpWatch, "the track record of private contractors and federal agencies in Iraq and now in the Gulf states bodes ill for the likelyhood that the public will enjoy [the right to expect an effective response in a time of emergency]. The Corps contracts and those awarded FEMA replicate 'the same flawed contracting strategy that produced disastrous results in Iraq,' Conresssman Seny Hoyer wrote to the Government Accountability Office."
More corruption: Bush's pals at Diebold have conned American taxpayers into purchasing a whole bunch of malfunctioning voting machines. In a recent Ohio primary, for example, Diebold touch-screen machines failed so badly that election officials in Cuyahoga County had to hand-count 17,000 ballots. And Lord knows who we really elected to the White House in 2000 and 2004. (Hint: It wasn't George Bush.)
Carpetbagging close to home: In my home state of California, we can't even get the levees repaired because the federal funds to do it with are tied to a Congressional pork barrel bill giving fabulous bonuses to Donald Rumsfeld as a reward for his failures in Iraq.
For the sake of my blood pressure, I'm not even going to mention the billions of dollars disappearing down Dick Cheney's Halliburton rat-hole while our troops languish in hellholes near Baghdad without even minimal essentials such as clean water and sanitary food -- let alone bullet-proof vests.
And to quote CitizenDC, "Have you ever wondered how a man who owns a $1,500,000 house in DC, a $1,000,000+ house in Florida and a $48,000 cottage in Texas manages to survive on a $161,000-a-year federal salary? It's odd." He's talking about White House employee Karl Rove. "Would it raise questions if that same man had sold a property to a shell company controlled by his former business partners and that man made between $250,000 and $750,000 profit?" Apparently not. Bush hasn't raised any questions at all.
The Bush bureaucracy's "strip America down to the floorboards" carpetbagging policies have become a national shame. And despite all the cover-ups, Americans know that their wallets are being stolen from under their very noses. And NOBODY likes George Bush. His popularity ratings have sunk so low that if he was a TV show with those kind of sorry bottom-of-the-barrel numbers, it would have been canceled right out the gate.
Still and all, I love the White House itself and what it used to stand for. If something bad EVER happens to the White House, they will be in big trouble from me.
****
From Aprille: Well, it isn't "W's" house Jane. It STILL belongs to everyone of US and stands for what this country is all about, or used to be all about. That is not to say it won't need a thorough scrubbing and total fumigation services once the 'Deciders' are back in Texas. The squatters that are in residence now are just like the crooked, evil guy that moved into the house in 'Pacific Heights'.........Michael Keatons' character managed to strike fear and loathing into our hearts even tho we never really BELIEVED anyone could get away with what he did to the owners. Who knew we, as a country, were in for the same treatment but with the damages and the backlash being on a worldwide scale?
Who knew? WE did!
Who listened? Nobody.
Who pays? EVERY ONE of us.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Lost: Why I will NOT abandon America
"You abandoned me when I needed you most," cried my daughter. She thought that she was referring to an incident that had happened last year but I think that subconsciously she was referring to something that happened a long time ago, the day she was born.
"I did not abandon you," I told her.
"When you were born, the hospital told me that you had a high Billiruben count and that they needed to keep you in isolation for five days 'for your own good'. And in the name of sanitation, the cold-blooded bastards who ran that hospital unilaterally declared that I, your mother, would not be allowed to see you, hold you, touch you, nurse you, sing lullabies to you, change your diapers or cuddle you -- for the crucial first five days of your life." And they instructed me to stop making a scene and do what I was told.
BUT I DID NOT ABANDON YOU!
I did everything I could to be allowed to hold my newborn child. I stormed at the administration. I wrote letters. I made phone calls. I haunted the halls of the maternity ward. I cried, I pleaded, I begged. "We are doing this for your daughter's own good," they kept telling me.
Finally, the best that I could do was to go down to the hospital during visitors' hours each day and ask to see my wonderful baby girl through the nursery room glass so that a nurse would hold her up to the window so that at least twice a day for five minutes I would know that my baby was being held.
I was never able to get those cold-blooded bastards to allow me to hold my own child. BUT I DID NOT ABANDON HER. And I made that administration fully aware that I was one pissed-off mom. And other mothers joined me. And the hospital's policy changed. And the way that the bureaucracy acted back then is now considered barbaric.
Like the hospital control-freaks of 35 years ago, the same cold-blooded bastards have gotten their hands on my country right now and they are systematically isolating US too -- and using the same phony scare tactics as well. "This is for your own good," they tell us. "We are only protecting you." By taking away our privacy, our income, our savings, our education, our jobs, our health, our elections, our morality and our rights.
I did NOT abandon my daughter back then and I will NOT abandon my country now.
Most Americans, like my poor baby daughter, are alone and afraid and isolated right now but there are still some of us -- just simple men and women like you and me -- who still care.
And we have not abandoned our country. We are not lost. And it is our privilege, right and patriotic DUTY to make those bureaucrats in Washington know that their current policies are barbaric too.
"You abandoned me when I needed you most," cried my daughter. She thought that she was referring to an incident that had happened last year but I think that subconsciously she was referring to something that happened a long time ago, the day she was born.
"I did not abandon you," I told her.
"When you were born, the hospital told me that you had a high Billiruben count and that they needed to keep you in isolation for five days 'for your own good'. And in the name of sanitation, the cold-blooded bastards who ran that hospital unilaterally declared that I, your mother, would not be allowed to see you, hold you, touch you, nurse you, sing lullabies to you, change your diapers or cuddle you -- for the crucial first five days of your life." And they instructed me to stop making a scene and do what I was told.
BUT I DID NOT ABANDON YOU!
I did everything I could to be allowed to hold my newborn child. I stormed at the administration. I wrote letters. I made phone calls. I haunted the halls of the maternity ward. I cried, I pleaded, I begged. "We are doing this for your daughter's own good," they kept telling me.
Finally, the best that I could do was to go down to the hospital during visitors' hours each day and ask to see my wonderful baby girl through the nursery room glass so that a nurse would hold her up to the window so that at least twice a day for five minutes I would know that my baby was being held.
I was never able to get those cold-blooded bastards to allow me to hold my own child. BUT I DID NOT ABANDON HER. And I made that administration fully aware that I was one pissed-off mom. And other mothers joined me. And the hospital's policy changed. And the way that the bureaucracy acted back then is now considered barbaric.
Like the hospital control-freaks of 35 years ago, the same cold-blooded bastards have gotten their hands on my country right now and they are systematically isolating US too -- and using the same phony scare tactics as well. "This is for your own good," they tell us. "We are only protecting you." By taking away our privacy, our income, our savings, our education, our jobs, our health, our elections, our morality and our rights.
I did NOT abandon my daughter back then and I will NOT abandon my country now.
Most Americans, like my poor baby daughter, are alone and afraid and isolated right now but there are still some of us -- just simple men and women like you and me -- who still care.
And we have not abandoned our country. We are not lost. And it is our privilege, right and patriotic DUTY to make those bureaucrats in Washington know that their current policies are barbaric too.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
