Earthquakes and Tornados

There are so many things to write about this week that I am really in a quandary as to where to start.  So, I thought I would start with my older brother’s first grade classroom.  Fortunately for our family and many others, the Long Beach earthquake, magnitude 6.4, struck at 5:55 PM.  The reason it was fortunate that it struck at that time is that he was not in the famous first grade classroom that simply collapsed like a pancake.  He actually was sitting in front of our big upright radio listening to Little Orphan Annie.  I was in a highchair under the cabinets watching my mother make dinner.  I still remember, when the dishes from the cupboard fell to floor in front of me, yelling, “I didn’t do it”.  The wonderful, egocentricity of childhood!

As a result of that earthquake, California established some standards in the Uniform Building Code regarding safer buildings.  The standards have been updated several times since then, and except for some unscrupulous builders, they have been pretty well adhered to.  Right after the Long Beach event Los Angeles passed an ordinance that no building could be taller than four stories.  I was really shocked the first time I saw a high rise in Los Angeles.  Recently in 2003, after our local San Simeon earthquake, magnitude 6.3, our General Hospital was declared unsafe to be used as a hospital. 

The fact that Oklahoma does not have a strict requirement in its building code requiring a small underground tornado cellar for homes or engineered safe rooms in its schools and hospitals blew my mind.  The reason I heard is that people there don’t want the government to tell them how to spend their money! What that means to me is that they prefer their money to the lives of their children.  For an individual house, I heard, it costs some $8-10,000 more.  One assumes that this cost would be added to the house payments and would be spread over 25-30 years. 

The one thing I do not want to read or hear is that it is God’s will that those children died in Plaza Tower Elementary School.  There was no safe room because “it cost too much”.  If there is any blame anywhere it is on those who didn’t want to spend money to protect their children.

Don’t unload the responsibility for those tragic deaths on God.  She had nothing to do with it.

 

Scandals, Scandals and More Scandals

Years ago when Richard Nixon was President I attended a rather progressive, very pro-Vatican II, parish in Fresno, CA.  Although I only half believed it, we were assured by some political activist that our phones had been tapped by the FBI because we were thought to be anti-American.

At first I was pretty distressed because I had a really peculiar faint clicking on my phone, this being before the age of digital anything.  A very good friend of mine suggested that if in fact my phone was tapped, let’s give the listeners something to do.  So a couple of times a week we would scour our cook books for really long recipes, call the other one, and read the recipes in a sort of conspiratorial voice.  Occasionally one of us would say, “Oh, I can’t finish this now.  Someone is coming.”  Fortunately I had a really long cord on my phone and a dog who would bark whenever the front doorbell rang, so I would go push the button, the doorbell would ring, the dog would bark, and I would say, “The doorbell rang and the dog is barking.  I have to go”.  I never knew whether my phone was tapped, but it was fun to pretend, anyway.

We all know what eventually happened to Nixon because of all of his shenanigans.

Sometime after Nixon we managed, in our united idiocy, to elect Ronald Reagan.  We got all sorts of bad stuff with Reagan, but the very worst was the Iran-Contra Scandal.  While Carter was President, Iran took 51 Americans hostage and held them for 444 days.  This scandal was one of the major reasons Carter lost the election, and on the day Reagan was sworn in, Iran released the hostages.  Well, this old cynic even then smelled a rat, and a rat it was!! 

“The Iran-Contra Affair involved a secret foreign policy operation directed by White House officials in the National Security Council (NCS) under President Ronald Reagan.”  And I have lost who the quote is from, but all one need do is google Iran-Contra Affair and all sorts of history comes up.  The point I wish to make is that The Iran-Contra Affair was directed by the White House, and its chief person was Oliver North who had his own office in the White House basement.  This scandal broke all sorts of laws, was ethically devoid of any, and Ronnie Baby managed to brush it off.  Eventually he claimed he couldn’t remember anything because he had Alzheimer’s!!  How convenient was that?  By the way, G.H.W. Bush was also involved in Iran-Contra.  Poppy Bush.

From the National Security Archive, dated 11/25/11, Washington D.C., “President Ronald Reagan was briefed in advance about every weapons shipment in the Iran arms-for-hostages deals in 1985-6, and Vice President George H. W. Bush chaired a committee that recommended the mining of the harbors of Nicaragua in 1983, according to previously secret Independent Counsel assessments of “criminal liability” on the part of the two former leaders posted today by the National Security Archive.”  “This posting was on the 25^th anniversary of the 11/25/86 press conference during which Ronald Reagan and his attorney general, Edwin Meese, informed the American public that they had discovered a ‘diversion’ of funds from the sale of arms to Iran to fund the contra war, thus tying together the two strands of the scandal which until that point had been separate in the public eye.”

Now this was a scandal!  The President was directing it, a law passed by Congress called the Boland Amendment was broken, there was talk about mining the Nicaraguan Harbor.  According to the Archive’s, the criminal liability charges were drafted by a lawyer, Christian J. Mixter.  “On the contra operations, Mixter determined that Reagan had, in effect, authorized the illegal effort to keep the contra war going after Congress terminated funding by ordering his staff to sustain the contras “body and soul.”  But he was not briefed on the resupply efforts in enough detail to make him criminally part of the conspiracy to violate the Boland Amendment that had cut off aid to the Contras in October 1984.  Mixter also found that Reagan’s public misrepresentations of his role in Iran-Contra operations could not be prosecuted because deceiving the press and the American public was not a crime.” 

Then we get down to G. W. Bush, or W and the politicized Department of Justice under the W administration.  To take pertinent facts from a Huffington Post article, written by Matt Apuzzo and Pete Yost, 7/21/10, “Bush DOJ’s firing of U.S. Attorney David Iglesias Was Inappropriately Political But Not Criminal, Obama DOJ Says”.  David Iglesias, New Mexico US Attorney, was fired because he refused to buckle under to the head of the New Mexico Republican Party who had complained to the White House that Iglesias was soft on “voter fraud”.  Eglesias and nine other US Attorneys were fired, and the resulting scandal required that US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resign.  Then “New Mexico Pete Domenici , R, also became a focus of the investigation because he made three phone calls to the attorney general and on to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty complaining about Iglesias.  McNulty didn’t mention Domenici’s phone calls when questioned by Congress, leading to accusations over a coverup.”  The decision that this was inappropriately political but not criminal, was, in my opinion, a crock.

I bring all of this up because of what has been happening this week in Washington, and the three supposed scandals.  The IRS scandal appears to be a few rather dim-witted IRS bureaucrats trying to figure out a way from out from under the thousands of 401©4 applications from groups that were obviously going to try to use these organizations for politics.  After having been in public office, I used to quip that the last person to know anything about how the county was run would be the Chairman of the Board of Supervisors, and at the time we only had 2700 employees.  This particular decision never rose to Obama’s level.  Some potential organizations may have been frustrated, but no one was killed, and no laws were broken.  Obama took the right action to see to it that this doesn’t happen again because it could happen to your organization, regardless of who you are.

Relative to the Benghazi e-mails having been re-written many times.  My God, that is what good writers do!  They write, leave it alone for a while, read it out loud to someone, send it over to another agency to make sure you aren’t stepping on toes or saying something out of line.  I would be more distressed if these e-mails hadn’t been reviewed and rewritten.  This is truly a non-issue.

And finally, the DOJ should have discussed what it was doing to try to locate the leak in its own department to the press prior to issuing the subpoenas to the phone company for the telephone numbers to and from the reporters.  But it is hardly an impeachable offense after Congress demanded that the DOJ do whatever it could to find the leaker! 

These last three items are not scandals.  They are serious mistakes that need to be cleaned up, for sure, but hardly on the level with Watergate, Iran-Contra, or lying us into a war that killed so many thousands of people – ours and theirs, and indulging in torture.

People are always ranking on the Catholic Church, and for some things it definitely needs ranking on, but then on other matters it has now, and had, good things to say.  Theologians used to divide sins up into venial and mortal.  A venial sin was really not all that bad – one should not do it because it didn’t make the sinner a better person.  But a mortal sin put our immortal soul in danger.  What has happened this past week has been some serious venial sins, but definitely not mortal. 

The Republicans need to get a life!!

 

 

On Being An Elected Official

I have been out of public office now since January, 2007, so I have had plenty of time to reflect on my years in public service – both the good and the bad.

The bad part is really something that most people never think of happening.  I’ll start out with the beginning of a campaign.  One organizes, of course, and hopes one will win.  But the public, including the media, expect you to know everything including the names of the newest threat to agriculture in the area, including but not limited to the glassy-winged sharp shooter.  This has nothing to do with guns, by the way.  And they question all words that you say.  Also, people will say the most outrageous things to you as a candidate.  At the end of a rather tiring day years ago as a candidate some lady approached me and said, “I can’t vote for you because you are related to large ranchers”.  I’m afraid I snapped back with, “Not really.  We all watch our weight carefully.”  I doubt if she understood, but I felt better.

But, if one manages to get elected, the media and everyone else assumes that day you have become absolutely, suddenly brilliant, and that you are perfect.  You are treated like royalty, given special treatment and perks.  Of course, if you happen to be a human and lose your temper, the sky falls.  That is unacceptable, especially for a liberal.  Outrage is acceptable for conservatives. 

It is this royal treatment, I think, that is the downfall of a lot of elected officials.  They begin to believe the hype.  And that is dangerous.  Because of this putting up on a pedestal the elected official believes that whatever he or she does cannot be wrong.  Accepting gifts from constituents begins to be OK because, after all, you are special.  The gifts grow, and I truly believe that when the public and media find out that these gifts have been accepted and are outraged, many elected officials are stunned at this.  After all, they deserve these gifts.  They are special. 

I recently gave a small talk to a small group of women about being in office, and I emphasized that elected officials need to have a have a rational solid core from which they operate.  Not as an ideologue, but a strong sense of the moral and/or ethical fitness of actions.  How one determines if a candidate has this core is something I haven’t figured out yet, but it should be essential. 

On 1/6/2007 I was still one of the most brilliant people around.  On 1/8/2007 I had lost all of my intelligence because I was no longer in office!!  This is a little confusing, to say the least, but since my sense of who I am did not come from being in office, I soon overcame it.  The one thing that I really missed was my own private, designated parking space in our downtown area.  Now that one perk was almost worth all of the rest!

Gun Insanity

”A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”.  Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.

It seems to me that the NRA, et al, are so focused on the rights of the people that they forget that the initial reason for the establishment of that right is for a well-regulated militia.  Except for one reason, for the life of me I cannot understand the hysteria surrounding back ground checks for gun purchasers.  That one reason is the gun manufacturers.  They are so sure that they will lose profits if any regulations take place that they have become absolutely insane, and have infected the NRA with that insanity.  I think it is the only time I have heard of insanity being contagious!

In several blogs ago I once again waxed eloquent on gun control, and how I think that it is imperative to teach young people responsibility long before they can be allowed to own, or use, a gun.  That guns should be the result of an evidence of responsibility rather than a precursor to it.

Two things have occurred in the media these past couple of days that bear mentioning.  The first was that finally someone, Donny Deutsch on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ this morning, 5/3, stated in public what I have been ranting about here at home for some time, and that is there is a direct connection between the non-action Congress just took on background checks and gun deaths that will take place between then and when Congress will decide to act.  The blood of those killed by guns is on the hands of these Congressional wimps who have the spines of jelly fish.  This guilt needs to be conveyed over and over and over whenever there is another gun death at the hands of someone who should never have had a gun in the first place, and could have been prevented from having one by background checks.

Which brings me to the second point.  Manufacturing guns specifically for children.  This is insane as well, and manufacturing pink small rifles for girls certainly doesn’t make it OK.  One comment I noted on one news page was that it hadn’t been determined yet whether charges would be filed in the case of the five year old who took his rifle and accidently killed his two year old sister with it.  The five year old certainly should not be charged with anything, but his parents certainly should for creating an atmosphere of child endangerment.  To leave a gun “in a corner”, thinking that made it a safe place is beyond belief.  That gun should never have been purchased in the first place, but if so, should have been kept on the top shelf in a locked gun case until taken out by a responsible adult.  This last, however, probably excludes the parents.  What possible relevance does a rifle for a small child have to do with a well-regulated militia?

Once again, I am certainly not anti-gun.  For us, and for our family, guns are tools that we need to keep predators (four-legged ones) away.  It was good to have one the night a cougar was screaming near our house and our beloved house cat decided to drive that interloper away!  Shooting that gun into the hill side scared them both.  The one ran away, and Big Mo ran back into the house! 

The radical gun wing-nuts are so zeroed in on their “rights” they have forgotten the intent of the 2^nd Amendment – a well-regulated Militia.  We need fairly strict gun regulations to insure that we have that “well-regulated Militia”. 

Incivility Revisited

This blog is a tad late today.  I play the mandolin in our church music group, and we were honored to sing and play at the funeral of one of our congregation this morning.

Here in what is locally known as SLO County – San Luis Obispo – we now have at least two on-line news and opinion sites.  The first one cannot be trusted.  The second one, SLOSense.com, is just a few months old, if that.  It was begun by a friend of mine who had been living elsewhere for a time, and had just moved back to SLO.  He was appalled by the change in the political discourse at the county level since he is back from what it was when he left, so he started SLOSense.com as a place where people can bring up issues in a safe spot.  When I was Chairman of the Board of Supervisors I did not allow incivility from the public, either when there were public speakers on the various subjects we would be voting on, or from members of the public making cat-calls from the audience.  When we were still in our much over-crowded old Court House, I looked up to see a Deputy Sheriff standing outside the windows watching what was going on.  He was probably on break.  At the same time, I was having trouble getting someone to speak in a civil and respectful manner, so I just motioned to the deputy to come in, which he did, then I motioned him to escort the gentleman out.  Which he did.  Worked really well because people recognized that my bite was as bad as my bark!

Recently we have a majority on our Board who are quite conservative, and the one woman is so far to the right she believes the United Nations is going to come in and take all of our property rights because of something at the UN called Agenda 21.  I always assured the public they could discuss the subjects and express their opinions, but they must do it in civil and respectful manner.  There were no such instructions from the current Board Chairman.  One of my daughters attended a meeting and was so distressed she nearly threw up.  I finally agreed to attend one of the meetings and express my displeasure.  My instruction to the Board Chairman was to, “Pull up your big-boy jeans and take control of these meetings!” Another thing that was lacking at the meeting was any acknowledgement to the people who did get up to speak.  A simple, “Thank you for your comments” is all that is called for.

Recently I posted something on SLOSense about how foolish the City Council was to have initiated two measures, A & B, to take away binding arbitration from the police and fire department unions.  The campaign was so vitriolic against the first responders that a great many of the senior, experienced officers resigned.  A few immediately, and more over-time as they attained the years to do so.  One of our daughters was one of the senior officers who had been assigned to the downtown area of SLO City to manage, whenever possible, the problem with both the transient population as well as the homeless mentally ill.  She retired some two years ago.  A month or so ago the SLO City Downtown Association requested two officers for the downtown area to deal with the transient population and homeless mentally ill.  As her mother, I, of course, thought this was hilarious that it would take two officers to replace what my kid had been doing.  And also, the equipment, salaries and benefits for two officers would be way over what one senior officer would cost the city. 

I posted this info on SLOSense because I wanted to, and I made sure it was a civil posting because my friend had stated that incivility would not be tolerated.  Well, someone, probably using a pseudonym answered my posting in a most insulting and belittling manner.  He was warned about the posting, and then insulted the host of the site.

What this man, at least his name indicated he was male, doesn’t realize is that when you are in politics, for sure, you delight in the fact that someone has freaked out, simply because then you know you are right in what you said.  If someone says, “Oh, that was an interesting comment”, you can be sure what you did or said was not particularly noteworthy.  But if someone comes back and calls you “pathetic” and a “hypocrite”, and uses such words as that you know you have really hit the mark in what you said.  In other words, you know you are being particularly effective when the comments become particularly virulent.  A sort of sick way of knowing how effective you are, but then that is politics.

The lack of civility in much of our public discourse really bothers me in the sense that I know from experience how destructive to the effective work of governing it can be.  Some people are intimidated by just being in the same room with a rude person, much less attending a public meeting rife with incivility.  It is a very effective way of discouraging citizens to come to the meetings to speak their minds.

Let us all demand that our public sites, either on the internet or at a government meeting, be conducted in a respectful and civil manner. 

 

 

Thoughts on Boston

A few years after I was elected but before we had moved into our new government building, we had a bomb threat.  Our protocol was followed to the letter, except for me, and I did what I shouldn’t have, which was to run back about 30 feet to my office to grab my purse!  As a result I was the last one out of the building.  As I got to the exit door a car pulled up to the curb and a lady jumped out, saying she couldn’t believe that she had found a parking place right in front of the door.  I explained that she couldn’t stay there, nor could she go into the building because of the bomb threat.  Visibly shaken, she asked, “Terrorists?”  Nah, I replied.  Probably just some home grown nut.  “Oh, that’s OK then”, she said, quite relieved. 

I am constantly amazed at people’s reactions to unsettling events.  My response is to go into a “dealing with it now” mode, and I don’t fall apart for a couple of weeks, when, of course, everyone else is over it and I get absolutely no sympathy.  Other people fall apart instantly.  Others sort of panic.  Others seek someone or something to blame.

It is this last reaction that has me worried about what happened in Boston this week.  Immediately the radical right wanted to stop the immigration reform legislation, name the surviving bomber an enemy combatant so that he can be tried by a military tribunal, and because I don’t frequent radical right wing blogs, I’m sure there are many comments that it is all of Islam that is at fault, and we as a Christian nation must fight Islam to the core.

To take these in reverse, we are not a Christian nation.  We were not founded as a Christian nation deliberately.  Europe had not too long before emerged from a religiously motivated 30 year war, and our nation’s founders wisely did not want sectarianism to infect our body politic. 

Also, radical Islam has about as much to do with main-stream Islam as the Westboro Baptist Church has to do with my own Catholic parish, which is nothing at all.  We have in this country people who in the name of being Christian pro-life blow up abortion clinics, kill doctors who provide women’s health care, which may include abortions, and other atrocities. 

Senators Grassley and McCain, and the others who want the bomber to be named an enemy combatant so that he can be tried by a military tribunal can only see one solution to any problem the United States has, and that is a military one.  This lack of any thought that there might be a more peaceful solution to problems than the military is really sort of frightening.  So far, these old guys are in the minority, and let us all hope that is where they stay! 

Stopping the immigration reform legislation because two immigrants perpetrated an absolutely horrific thing is absurd!  There are 11 million undocumented immigrants in this nation who have not blown anyone or anything up.  And one of the two immigrants is a naturalized citizen.  To put the fates of 11 million people up against the actions of two people is about as asinine as one can get. 

Let us pray for the complete recovery of the victims, and for their ability to overcome the horrible trauma to their bodies.  And let us remember that there are radical Muslims, radical Christians, radical Jews, radical secular humanists, radical what evers.  Let us not be caught up in the same mindset as these two young men who see a whole group of people as the enemy.  It is too easy a step from that to violence.

Deviousness At Its Best!

Since I am an acknowledged political junkie, I have been watching with a great deal of amusement all of the political posturing over the President’s proposed budget.  If you continue reading this, remember that the President cannot be reelected.

The political right is having a fit because the President got a significant tax “increase” the first of January.  They, of course, don’t mention that it is truly not an increase because the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire so the tax rates simply went back to what they were in 2003.  Hardly an increase.  The political left is having a fit because the President has proposed a “chained CPI” to Social Security, which would eventually lower the amount of payments seniors dependent on Social Security would receive. 

But stop to consider for a moment what is happening.  The right is saying they will not vote for the budget because of the added revenue from more taxes, while the left is saying they will not vote for the budget because of the “cuts” to the social safety net.  This budget hasn’t a snowflakes chance in the hot place of ever being passed, and I’ll bet the President knows that by putting in the “chained CPI”, he made sure it didn’t pass.  Why would he do that?

Easy, if you are a devious soul like me.  He took a terrible drubbing in the 2010 mid-term elections, and he would certainly not want to do that again.  What better way to give those candidates on the left who will be running against conservative office holders a campaign issue.  “My opponent was willing to let the sequester continue, damaging the economy of the country, because they wouldn’t raise taxes on the wealthy, but at the same time were willing to cut Social Security and Medicare, and make us more vulnerable to a terrorist attack by cutting the Pentagon budget”.  I, of course, would like to have the Pentagon’s budget cut, but it makes a great talking point in those states that tend to vote Republican.

And, the candidates on the left can pound their respective chests (yes, even the women) and proclaim how they “saved” Social Security and Medicare.  And then, one would hope, when he has a liberal majority in the House and Senate in 2015/16, they can finally get something done, including but not limited to: real immigration reform, real gun safety reform, an overhaul of our health care system, a revamping of the tax code to stop the wealthy and corporations from hiding their billions so they don’t have to pay taxes, and one that I think is absolutely vital, funding a massive country-wide infrastructure system that will last us into the 22^nd century, at the very least, while providing an enormous amount of jobs, and prosecuting Wall Street bankers to the fullest extent of the law. 

If this is in fact the President’s ploy, I certainly hope it works.