Pixels, Politics, Posies and Pussycats

2:57:10 PM EDT

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.

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12:29:08 AM EDT

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

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4:32:36 PM EDT

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.

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4:24:55 PM EDT

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.

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2:19:26 PM EST

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.

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12:00:01 PM EST

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.

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8:45:01 PM EST

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.

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2:06:35 PM EST

This entry is sort of a hybrid. On the grounds that it's all political in the end, this is ending up here instead of Cottage.

I’m still on the fence, sort of. Exploring alternative ways for my spirit to walk, but not closing the door on the traditions I was raised in. I’ve found a few good books and some really helpful websites. There’s Wicca of course, (it's a fair place to start but it isn't calling me)  and the Native American wannabees. But I’ve also found sites for Celtic and Hellenic reconstructionists. There are a lot of folks out there who searching for the roots of the beliefs that Christianity and Islam displaced, often violently. They’re smart and proud and moving past the “just leave us in peace stage” to the “you are welcome to walk your path, but I’m claiming the right to walk where my spirit leads me.”

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry whenever I run across the latest claim of a “War on Christianity.” Who got the blame after September 11? After the militants of course. It was God’s judgment on America for tolerating gays, liberals, lesbians, witches, and whatever. Toleration, what a terrible word. If I keep my mouth shut, you won’t kick me. Perhaps it's time to say no. And keep saying it. And to insist on respect, no matter who we are. We expect nothing more and we will accept nothing less. And offer the same in return, when it's earned.

I sympathize with my mom, she’s happy in the church she attends. The Methodist Church does a lot of good internationally through their relief programs and locally through United Methodist Women. I don’t dispute it. It’s just getting too hard for me to put the good on one side and the centuries of destruction on the other and tell myself that it all balances out in the end. John Wesley was well into his sixties and still tromping through the snow putting the bite on passersby for donations to help the poor. He didn’t leave much in his will because “I’ve given it all away.” And what was left he directed to be divided among the six poor men chosen to carry his coffin to the cemetery.

How many William Wilberforces does it take to offset the Inquisition? 1492 was not only the year Columbus set out for Asia and ran into a new world, it was the year the Jews were expelled from a newly united, Christian ruled Spain. How many Martin Luther Kings does it take to offset over a century of persecution? They all claim inspiration from the same root, but too many of the branches appear to be twisted and fruit is tainted.

We look back at the beliefs of the past and count ourselves superior to our ancestors. We don’t haul animals to the alter and sacrifice them. But most of the meat was shared by the followers of the God or Goddess as part of the celebration. If one of our factory raised steers had the choice between our factory meat packing system and the sharp knife of a ritual sacrifice I wonder which it would choose. (probably tell us to go eat our veggies and leave him in peace, actually)

We don’t practice human sacrifice. At least not openly. What else would you call centuries of pogroms, religious wars and expulsions? What else do you call the hundreds if not thousands of people who just didn’t fit in who were accused of heresy or witchcraft? When the Thirty Years was over in the 1600’s nearly seven million Germans were dead. When the Battle of the Bulge was over and the siege of Bastogne was broken, the city was destroyed and twenty five thousand civilians were dead. Those were the ones they knew about. Another fifty thousand were never accounted for. What other name is there for the eleven million who died in Nazi Germany’s death factories? The list is endless and while some of the causes were good, we need to grieve for the lost.

Our ancestors have their own butcher’s bill to answer for. Wars of conquest, civil wars, and slavery. Makes a quite a list doesn’t it. And still, there was much good to their credit. We can claim the same. Just don’t claim that our actions are superior because they didn’t happen two or three thousand years ago.

And I think there is an element of fear in their claims. In this country and in Europe the church can no longer rely on the power of the state to compel conversion or obedience. And I thnk it scares them as much as it gratifies the rest of us.

My this entry did kind of meander didn't it? For now you’ll find me working my way through my books on herbs, doing a little research to see if there really is a way to talk to the animals, and waiting out this spiritual dry spell to end.

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3:57:19 PM EST

I’ve ended up with the work equivalent of a snow day. I checked the road we live on this morning. Frozen but chunky. I figured I could probably get out of the driveway by 9:30 or so and amble into work for a four hours or so. My supervisor called and left it up to me. It’s not what the weather is doing right now that worries me. It’s the front that’s due in later this afternoon with some wind and a mix of rain and snow. It’s not the getting to work that worries me; it’s the getting home part. So I embraced my inner chicken and stayed home. The prediction is that it will be above freezing in the morning. And above freezing for the rest of the week. It’s about five weeks since the solstice and the sun is high enough in the sky now to really make a difference. At least the ruts in the street have been leveled out a bit.

 

That gave me time to go out and clean off the car and use the non business end of a broom to work a lot of the snow of the shrubs and bushes. I also cleaned off a couple of areas on the ground for the birds. I think the jays listen for the sound of the peanuts in the shells hitting the feeders because they show up right away. And there must be other sounds that announce “diner’s open” because the chirping sounds around the neighborhood got louder. So the little ones will have awhile to stoke up before the next front hits.

 

Got a kick out of reading some of the comments on the AOL article about the Kennedy’s endorsing Obama. And actually the comments you find on any article about Obama. Since anyone with an ounce of curiosity, a shred of integrity, and some time to do a little web surfing can get the name of the church he goes to, find out that his father came from Kenya, and that he isn’t in the market for a Muslim wife (although that would be his business not mine) I have to conclude that the Swift boaters are out in force. I wonder how many of these posters are pulling a paycheck from the Republicans.

 

 I guess they have to do something. They’re stuck with Mitt Romney’s imitation of a robot, September 11 Giuliani, and Mike “let’s amend the Constitution to bring it in line with the Bible” Huckabee. We’ve got Bill sticking his foot in his mouth, and I don’t care what he “intended” to say, if you have to explain what you meant you might as well shut up. When you’re in a hole stop digging.

 

If you meant to say that LBJ managed to guilt trip congress into passing JFK’s civil rights bill after his assassination then that’s what you should have said in the first place. Add in this campaigns’ version of the Swift boaters and that sucking sound in the distance is getting awfully loud. For both parties.

 

And I think my last entry ties into Huckabee's campaign. I'm willig to bet that if he asked his audience to rank their concerns gay marriage would not be near the top.

 

And that is what's driving so many voters like me up the wall. What worries us isn't what you guys are talking about. How do we end a war that's coming up on five years? How do we get decent jobs back in this country? Why did it take so long for "official Washington" to notice a mortage crisis that's been coming on for several years? How do we get our food supply out of the hands of corporate multinationals and back in our backyards (or at least the next county) where it belongs? And it goes on and on and on.

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7:03:10 PM EST

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of entries. I’m not sure what the subject really is and knowing me, it’ll end up somewhere I never expected it to. But, it revolves around women (and men), food, nurturing, and surprisingly how what we define as food does more than just fill our stomachs.

The combined blog never did get off the ground did it? Jobs, housecleaning, business running, pets, yards and kids tend to take priority over research projects. I still have some ideas. There’s a line from Fiddler on the Roof. The young student radical is hemming and hawing, trying to work up the gumption to propose to one of Tevye’s daughters. He tells her he wants to ask her a question, a political question, a question about marriage, actually. At her surprised “marriage is a political question?” He tells her (with a shrug and a sort of well, duh) “everything’s political.”

I have a hard time seeing food as political, but it is. The respect we show for food is reflected in how we treat the people who grow it and the people who prepare it. Small farmers and subsistence villagers are under corporate pressure all over the world. The almost endless varieties of food grains and oil seeds are being reduced to a few varieties of each. Tenant farmers are being forced off the land as coastal land is sold off for shrimp and fish farms or farm land is sold to grow crops for export. The former farmers or fisherman find themselves working for wages to buy what they used to grow or catch for themselves. Or worse, they’re forced into the city slums to compete for low wage jobs, if they can find jobs at all.

Women have made progress in this country, but we’re still the ones who do the majority of the cooking, housekeeping, chauffeuring, and everything else it takes to keep a family running.  I know my mom worked just as hard as a stay at home mom as she ever did cooking in a dorm kitchen at the U of O. But her cooking, cleaning, gardening, sewing, preserving and child care work never appeared on a balance sheet because she didn’t get paid for it.

I’m coming to believe that there is something fundamentally, perhaps fatally flawed in an economy that values a parent’s contribution to the state of our nation if there is a paycheck involved and doesn’t even take notice when no money changes hands. Goddess knows I don’t want to go back to a time when a woman’s place was only in the home. But I pray for the day when contributions everyone makes to our families are counted, whether money changes hands or not.

And I also pray for the day when the definition of family goes beyond husband, wife, 2.5 kids, a dog, a cat, a minivan, and a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence. It already has for many of us. It’s the getting the rest of the kids to agree on who’s allowed in the sandbox that seems to be sticking in some folks’ craws. Here’s hoping they wake up before they choke the rest of us.  There’s more to family than a shared set of genes and more to love than any of us can imagine.

Anyway, I thought I’d pour a little water in the sandbox and start building a sand castle. If somebody wants to help build one castle, come and play. If you want to build your own castle and build a bridge between the two, it works for me. Heck, if you want to build the village tavern, I’ll stop by for a drink.

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