Wishes and Prayers

To all of my Jewish and Christian friends, I pray for you a Holy and Happy Passover and Easter.  And to all of my friends who are neither, I wish for you a very happy and late vernal equinox.  More next week.

Decisions, Decisions Made And Not Made

OK.  What to write about this week?  The Pope?  Enough already.  Like anyone who has lived in public life, he has baggage that comes with him.  Although the assertions that he needed to do more to end the “Dirty War” in Argentina when he was Archbishop is sort of specious, since he wasn’t the Archbishop yet.  All I have to say about him is that he is certainly, in some respects, a breath of fresh air.  We can all hope that he will be like Bishop Oscar Romero, who when he became Bishop was very conservative.  His experiences as Bishop, however, caused a conversion, and he became a very outspoken advocate for economic and social justice for his people.  But, to condemn Pope Francis for not doing more would be to condemn Archbishop Dolan for not doing more to stop the Bush administration from invading Iraq. 

How about gun control?  I’ve written about that already.  Except I was really ticked off at Harry Reid for not having a vote on banning assault weapons.  So there were not enough votes to pass.  We need to know who would have voted for or against banning them so we could hold our elected officials accountable for that vote. 

Holding elected officials accountable brings me to the next issue I have been thinking about.  Rachel Maddow’s documentary:  Hubris: Selling The Iraq War.  I have watched it twice now, and it pretty much confirmed what I had determined as these events were occurring in real time.  That Bush, et al, were lying in their teeth.  I was discussing this with my daughter who is in law enforcement one day.  My comment was that any mother who really pays attention to not only what her child is saying, but the facial expressions, eye movements, etc., that are going on at the same time could tell when George was lying.  Her comment was that whenever someone is lying their speech patterns also indicate that.  And his speech patterns were lying patterns. 

But some other information has surfaced recently.  I remember when VP Cheney had his secret Energy Task Force meetings.  According to Marjorie Cohn, writing in Reader Supported News, 3/20/13, “A War of Aggression”, a document produced for the task force, “…included a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals as well as charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects and ‘Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts’.  This document was dated 3/2001, six months before 9/11 and two years before Bush invaded Iraq.”

Another article from Reader Supported News by Angelo Young, International Business Times, titled “Cheney’s Halliburton Made $39.5 Billion on Iraq War” was really interesting.  It was during this time that many of the services provided by troops in past engagements were sent out to be privatized.  Oddly enough, it was Halliburton, Cheney’s old company, which was the No. 1 recipient.  These privatized contracts were on a no-bid basis, and, “Acccording to the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the level of corruption by defense contractors may be as high as $60 billion.  Disciplined soldiers that would traditionally do many of the tasks are commissioned by private and publicly listed companies.”

But back to the war itself.  In 1945 the United States signed onto the United Nations Charter which permitted nations to use military force against another country only in self-defense or with Security Council permission.  But according to the above-mentioned article by Marjorie Cohn referring to the UN Charter, “But the evidence indicates that the US-led invasion satisfied neither condition and is therefore a war of aggression, which constitutes a Crime Against Peace – exactly the kind of war the Charter was meant to prevent.”

There is more than enough evidence by this time that what I used to call our low-carb administration (Cheney Ashcroft Rumsfeld Bush) violated all criteria for a just war, if there ever could have been a just war, by invading Iraq.  They violated every decent human impulse in order to acquire the Iraqi oil fields for their own aggrandizement.  Does anyone else remember that Iraqi oil was supposed to pay for the cost of the war, so it wouldn’t cost the American people anything to invade? 

I haven’t figured out yet whether it was gross incompetence or gross greed that caused the Bush administration to kill nearly 5,000 American service people, wound nearly 40,000 more, kill nearly 600,000 Iraqi civilians, and nearly bankrupt the United States.  But does it make a difference?  They need to be held accountable for crimes against humanity.  For two reasons.  The first is they committed crimes.  And second, if they aren’t held accountable, then that means any future administration can get away with whatever crimes against humanity they happen to commit. 

Why aren’t these loathsome people in prison!!

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

I have been a tad under the weather, so rather than incoherently maunder on about nothing, I have reposted one from a year ago February.  I can't believe that this is still relevant!!

 

Wackadoodles!

Some conservative last week commented that California didn’t count in the conservative primary race because it was just all full of wackadoodles.  For those whose native language is not English, a wackadoodle is definitely not a term of endearment.

OK.  We do have at least one wackadoodle – Darryl Issa of this week’s Congressional fame.  Issa, Chair of the House Oversight Committee, held a hearing without one single woman on the first panel, and only two on the second.  And those two had been vetted to insure that they agreed with the result Issa wanted for the panel’s decision.  Needless to say, women were outraged since the subject was whether President Obama’s decision regarding birth control coverage for Catholic institutions infringed on the First Amendment of the US Constitution that Congress “…shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”  Regardless of the subject matter, or in this case precisely because of it, women should have been at least half of those testifying.  If a woman had been there to testify, perhaps Bishop Lori would have been taken to task for comparing a government involvement in birth control to requiring a Kosher deli to serve pork.  Talk about wackadoodles!!

With California out of the way, the political landscape all over this country is liberally dotted with wackadoodles.  Rick Santorum actually thinking that taking away birth control is a hot button issue for evangelical voters, and that this will actually get him elected.  Of course, evangelical voters are only about a third of the electorate, and since they do not have huge families one can only assume it has not been abstinence that made the families smaller. Santorum also wants to take away state and federal funding for education.  This would eliminate public schools from K through PhD for most Americans.  A few would be able to afford private schools, or some neighborhoods and small towns might be able to fund their own schools, but basically what we would have would be an uneducated, illiterate citizenry.  At the same time he wants to make America economically competitive.  So how can that happen with not enough people to staff the research and development labs that are required to come up with innovative new ideas.  Santorum is a wackadoodle par excellence.

But my all-time favorite is Mitt Romney.  This morning he gave a campaign speech in Michigan talking about why he loves Michigan.  One of his points was that the trees are the right height.  Right height?  For what?  For Michigan?  That then leads to the next question, “Does every state have to have trees that are the right height for that state?  And if so, how is that determination made?”  In California, for example, we have trees called scrub oaks.  They grow to no more than four to fight feet in height, and grow relatively near the ocean.  Then in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, also in California, we have the gigantic and ancient Sequoia.  These are the tallest trees in the world, attaining a height of 379 feet, or 115.5 meters.  They can reach 23 feet in diameter at the base.  So which is the right height tree for California?  This is the same man who, when questioned about strapping his Irish Wolfhound to the roof of his car for a 12 hour drive, said there was no problem.  The kennel the dog was in was airtight.  Airtight?  After 12 hours in an airtight container that dog would have been dead. 

Don’t tell me that California is full of wackadoodles.  We don’t hold a candle to the Republicans running for the Presidency this year.  In my youth I was a Republican.  I thank God from the bottom of my heart that I became older and wiser.

 

 

The NRA and Mental Health

The crazy NRA aside, the issues surrounding gun safety are many and varied.  In my mind, however, the issue of mental health programs is paramount.  When I was first was sworn in as a County Supervisor on the first Monday of 1999, the Mental Health Board of the county was where the Chairmen, and I use that term advisedly, always assigned the newest Board members who hadn’t a clue what they were doing to that Mental Health (MH) Board.  In California, there is a state law that requires that a certain number of members of the MH Board be made up of clients of the services the county offered.  At that time, the clients were referred to as “consumers”, a term to which I heartily objected.  Turning people into economic ciphers really upset me.  One of our County Board members made the comment one day that these people should just pull themselves together and get on with their lives.  This did not sit well with me since we have members on both sides of our families who suffered from mental illness.  One is schizophrenic and the other bi-polar.  Obviously this was an area of county government over which I had a great interest.

A few years before I was elected one of our daughters and her husband adopted three little girls.  The girls were half-sisters.  They were from Santa Ana in Orange County, California, and had lived in a city all of their lives.  The first morning they were here on a visit, one of them got up early with my husband, stared out our window for a long time, looking at about the 1,000 acres of watershed owned by various ranchers which could be seen from that window and commented, “Boy, do you have a big backyard!”  We knew the girls had problems, but assumed that these problems could just be overcome by love from us.  But we learned soon that love was not enough.

To make a very long story short, the youngest girl, who had wormed her way into our hearts in a very special way, on the first day that her parents had left her alone for about 20 minutes, went out into their garage, took a bungee cord, and committed suicide.  She was 11 ½ years old.

Not too long after that, our Public Health Director started fussing at me that I should attend a workshop with other county staff at the Children’s Research Triangle in Chicago, operated by Drs. Ira Chasnoff and Richard McGourty.  After some nagging by our Director, I agreed to go.  During that workshop I realized that what the girls underlying problems were, other than their horrific first years, was that their birth mother was an alcoholic and substance abuser, and had been that way through all three pregnancies.  The eldest daughter was not as impacted as the younger girls, and of course, Martha, the youngest suffered the most from Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, or FASD, as a result.

After many years of organizing, finding funding, and all of the many, many things that were required, with the county’s help, we opened Martha’s Place on 1/7/2007.  Martha’s Place is now the portal where any child between the ages of 0-5 exhibiting at-risk behaviors or obvious FASD, is admitted for both physical and emotional evaluations, and then either referred out into the community for treatment, or if there is nothing, receives treatment in-house.  I am still on the coordinating committee for Martha’s Place, and it is through my contacts there that I have come to realize that very small children can suffer from emotional trauma and mental health problems.  Consequently, when we all became concerned for the younger surviving daughter’s son because he seemed to be almost at times out of control, we brought him down to Martha’s Place for an evaluation.  His mother, the younger surviving daughter, has both emotional and mental health issues.  Sure enough, our boy had some real anger problems, at the age of three years.  With appropriate therapy he is progressing nicely and getting his anger under control.

But what if we didn’t know what to look for and what to do about what we saw?  We shudder to think what he could have become in ten to fifteen years with all of that anger lurking inside of him.  Would he have taken a gun and taken his anger out on anyone in his chosen location of mayhem?  Maybe not, but then again, maybe yes.  My point in talking about something we know very well, and have experienced very well, is that in all of the talk about mental health issues, the major problem is funding.

There should be a concerted effort to educate women and the men with whom they live, that drinking during pregnancy is a big no-no.  Some women might be able to metabolize the alcohol without too much damage to the developing brain, but the horrible part is that the effect on the developing fetus will not be known until well after birth.  This educational effort should be intense and ongoing, and be on a national scale. 

And there should be enough funding so that every community could have its own, geared to its own needs, center for the evaluation and treatment of children from 0-5 who exhibit at-risk behaviors.  We tailored Martha’s Place to our county.  With organizing help, every county in this United States should have their very own Martha’s Place.  After all, there was a concerted effort to educate people on the dangers of smoking cigarettes, and also of second-hand smoke from those doing the smoking.  Can we do any less for our children?

That we need to regulate the sale of weapons, the sale of magazine clips that hold over 6 bullets, and ban completely the sale of military style weapons is a given.  We also need to revise our tax code so that on a national level we can have the educational program concerning pre-natal alcohol and substance abuse and its effect on the developing brain, and on the local level, in every county in this nation, an evaluation and treatment center for children 0-5 exhibiting these at-risk behaviors.

After all, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

 

 

The Sun is Shining!

The sun is shining today, and contrary to the belief of some residents of the East Coast, California is welcoming spring.  The flowering plum trees have their not lavender but not quite purple blossoms out; the willows in the creeks are beginning to leaf out, making their silhouettes look like a green mist; the deciduous oak trees have their little green leaves out, as do the sycamores.  This year because it is so dry, the creek has already closed the sand bar before it reaches the ocean, which means a very limited supply of water for the community which is dependent on the creek’s aquifer for water, but that has nothing to do with spring!  The bulbs are up, or coming so, and the flowers should be quite beautiful. 

More good news on the home front, an excellent long-time SLO County journalist has started an online newsletter, SLOSense.com, to discuss the local political scene.  It can also be accessed through Facebook.  It is really needed in our county because we are the last place on the California Coast that the developers are lusting over to make into still another asphalt parking lot.  And the local Chamber of Commerce exerts an undue influence on what is printed. 

 We have had a politically difficult situation here in our county when one of our more liberal, rather than right-wing, County Supervisors announced that he and his Legislative Assistant were having an affair and he was divorcing his wife of sometime.  The legal arm of the County Counsel’s Office has exonerated them from absolutely no wrong doing as far as using any county funds, sending any inappropriate e-mails, etc., using county time or equipment. But that exoneration has not stopped the local right-wingers from taking out after him during the local Board of Supervisors meetings in a concerted effort.  Although I hate repeating what one of the agitators said during a public meeting, it is only by repeating it that the magnitude of the problem becomes apparent.  He wanted to know if the Assistant had been hired to be a prostitute and a whore.  The Public Comment period of the Board had become a real cesspool of comment on that issue.  It had already become a looney-bin on another issue.

Our county has a policy of Smart Growth.  That is, put the growth which we know will take place where there are sufficient resources, both natural and human-made, to sustain the growth without burdening the rest of the populace with having to suffer the consequences.  When I was in office, I was a great proponent of Smart Growth because it seemed to me to be a reasonable policy to have.  In the State, it was proposed by the Local Government Commission, comprised of locally elected officials  state-wide at their annual meetings at the Ahwanee Hotel in Yosemite.  Thus, known as the Ahwanee Principals. 

Much to my surprise this year, some 8-10 years after I first heard of Smart Growth, I find that the United Nations has what is called Agenda 21, which proposes somewhat the same thing.  This Agenda 21 has some people in our county absolutely bonkers over our Smart Growth policies.  They apparently think the UN is going to swoop in with their black helicopters and steal our “Private Property Rights”.  And some members of our Board apparently agree with them! 

We also have a local organization, Coalition of Labor, Agriculture and Business (COLAB), which supports this opposition to both Smart Growth and Agenda 21.  I have found it quite interesting that there is very little in the way of Labor, more private property rights (pro-development) owners of ag land, and a whole lot of Business.  They have been here in this county for many years, coming and going with the political winds, and have surfaced again.  And COLAB is a proponent of doing away with Smart Growth.

The other more liberal Supervisor has been working some three years on a proposal for the county in cooperation with local NGOs to create a homeless shelter on land that the county already owns.  There has been a task force meeting during this time that has been open to the public and has encouraged public input to insure that the public’s concerns were all taken care of.  All of a sudden, after the majority of the Board of Supervisors became right-wing, the local right-wing business people decided to jam the process.  I know someone who has been attending the task force meetings, and her comments about the jamming just about follow the text book on how to jam a process.  Complain that they weren’t included, that no one listened to them, that….  The jamming so frustrated the Supervisor that he lashed out at the jammer.  The local media took out after the Supervisor rather than the jammer!!

Thus, with the sun shining, the advent of SLOSense.com, spring beginning to spring, things may be looking up in this county.  Of course, we could use some more rain.  Never satisfied, I guess.