Totally Irrelevant Matters

Usually when I can’t think of something to write about, I play a couple of games of Spider Solitaire, and something floats to the surface.  Today the surface is so congested with stuff that has floated up that so far I can’t pick one of them out.

Bill is watching the Giants v. Cincinnati game, hoping the Giants finally get their act together, but not with too much hope.  I don’t have to worry about what to have for dinner since Bill found a half a frozen BBQ chicken in the freezer, so that has thawed nicely.

We had a great day yesterday visiting with family.  We had a surprise visit from my niece and her husband, both absolute sweethearts, who, on finding it was Bill’s B-day, stopped in Santa Maria and bought and brought a flat of fabulous strawberries.  We shared with everyone who was here, and still have some left for us.  Where we were having our picnic the “no see ‘ums” were out, and they attacked my ear, so had to take off my earrings because they made my ear lobe itch like mad.  I am highly allergic to those little tiny gnats, and they seem to enjoy that. 

(Nothing has surfaced yet!)

Tried to watch the news because I thought I would get fired up about what is going on in the world, but all I got was disgusted, and it is such a gorgeous day (even without rain) I didn’t want to write about that.  Although the next time I hear some talking head compare the left and right in Congress as both being obstructionists I may throw my shoe at the TV.  Again.  They are Crocs so not a whole lot of danger to the TV, but it makes me feel better.

So far, nothing has surfaced, and the game is on, so this is truly a short, and “other totally irrelevant matter”. 

See you all next week.

A no-CARB Diet

(For my blog readers, I had major computer problems last week, up until Thursday evening when someone who knows computers helped me straighten it out.)

As anyone who knows me knows that controlling my weight has always been a concern for me.  For a long time I had a refrigerator magnet that said, “Ewe’s not fat, ewe’s fluffy”, with a picture of a ewe.  So, after this past week or so I have gone back to a mantra I used during the first decade of this century, using my body diet concerns for the body politic landscape of this country.  And that is, a no-CARB diet.

Why the capital letters?  They stand for Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Bush – CARB.  And all of the people who go with them – Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, and the rest of the empty calories that can cause so much damage to the body politic.  I truly wish I could use the past tense when talking about the damage to the body politic, but the CARBs have surfaced again. 

For our country alone they have caused so much anguish and heartache with their 19^th century robber-baron economic policies.  No taxes on the wealthy and wealthy corporations; allowing people and corporations to hide their assets overseas to avoid paying taxes on them; sending jobs overseas to countries with no unions for their workers in order to maximize profits for the corporations, profits which are then hidden in overseas banks; still working to gut our social safety nets that people not just want but desperately need like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP food stamps; trying to either get rid of completely or privatize every government service they can think of, including the Post Office.  And the heirs of the CARBs refusing to cooperate with President Obama to actually help everyday working Americans with government programs such as repairing our failing infrastructures, like bridges and roads.

These CARBS and empty calories lied us into a war with Afghanistan and Iraq on the contention that the Afghanis were the cause of the terror attacks on 9/11.  Completely ignored was the knowledge, known as a fact, that the terrorists on those airplanes on 9/11 were Saudi Arabians!!  But since the Bush family was and are friends of the Saudi family, since they are all ‘oilys’ together, we had to attack some other country.  So we chose a country still living for a good part in the 15^th century with our 21^st century military!  What bravery on the part of the CARBS.  Then to get the Iraq oil, lied us into a war with Iraq which has cost over 4,000 American lives, nearly 100,000 Iraqi lives, 35-40,000 Americans horribly wounded, and costing this country billions of dollars, but gaining Halliburton some 700 million dollars in profits - a corporation that Cheney is closely associated with.

Now the CARBS and empty calories have surfaced again to try to get President Obama and this country to once again militarily go back into Iraq.  What absolute gall!!  Everyone who could think knew what would happen when we left Iraq.  With our stupid policies in Iraq while were still there, we aggravated ancient antagonisms between Sunni and Shia Moslems.  So know they think we can go back in and smooth things over?  And why is the media even giving them one minute of time? 

Instead, in my opinion, we should all read very carefully the book by Vincent Bugliosi, famed Prosecutor, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder.  This book lays out in a very logical and legal manner why W. should be prosecuted for the deaths of so many people, Americans, Afghanis, and Iraqis and also for the crime of war profiteering.  When we send some poor schumck to prison for the possession of a few ounces of marijuana and let someone who has caused so much death and destruction to so many simply because he was president is criminal in itself.  In my opinion, all of the CARBS and empty calories ought to be put on trial for war crimes against humanity, and/or for war profiteering.

 

 

 

Test

This is a test to see if I have access to this blog.

Ideologues? Where? Everywhere!

After Newt Gingrich began preaching that the way to defeat Democrats was to denigrate them every time one needed to mention a Democrat, Democratic policies, or anything Democrat or Democratic, the vitriol and inability for Congress to do anything constructive has gotten worse and worse.  On July 13, 2011, as reported in ThinkProgress, Gingrich made the following comment:

 

“I believe we’re in the biggest crisis since the 1850s. You look at the spiritual collapse of America, you look at the social collapse of the American family, you look at all the problems we have economically, you look at the collapse of our governmental institutions, you look at our inability to control our own border, you look at the rise of China. And you have a Secretary of Defense who’s living in la-la land. I’ve known Leon Panetta for a long time. He is a nice man. But if he thinks we’re winning over al Qaeda, what I’m really frightened of is he may actually believe it. I mean, 10 years after 9/11 — I’m going to give some speeches on this in August — we’re in worse shape today than we were 10 years ago.” 

This is probably one of the most gentle of Gingrich’s comments about a Democrat.  To the radical conservative right, maligning, vilifying and degrading liberals, progressives, Democrats, or anyone caught talking to a person from the left was the name of the game. See Ann Coulter’s book, “If you have to talk to a liberal” as an example. At the same time, there have been innumerable whines from the right about how terribly Democrats talk about Republicans.  All one has to do is watch Fox News, and the constant excoriating of the left goes strong 24/7. 

It has gotten to the point now that every time the Republicans insist that President Obama is derelict in not doing something, and then he does it, they immediately freak out and begin all sorts of crazy-thinking verbal attacks.  This because President Obama is a Democrat, but also black.  I’m never sure which the right-wingers dislike more!  About equal, probably.  Witness the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, which the righties were screaming for last month, and then when it happened, they screamed that it was the wrong thing to do.  No thought, no analysis, only ‘group-think’. 

“A won because he is a registered Republican who was completely backed by the local Republican establishment. B is registered DTS (Decline to State or Independent), so he had no party backing. The Republicans have a 5% lead in party registrations in X County and quite frankly Republicans are very faithful to their party. Notice that 5% is exactly the gap between A and B. It is unfortunate that A chose to make this a partisan campaign (why would anyone think that a Republican would make a better DA than an Independent or a Democrat), but it was a smart move. He also knew that most loyal Republicans would overlook his ethical lapses.” 

So imagine my surprise when someone who is known to be a liberal, and an effective thinker, posted the above on Facebook.  I have changed the names of the candidates to A and B, and referred to our county as X.  Now it is true that many Republicans supported A, but so did many Democrats.  Some Republicans undoubtedly supported B.  And, the local Democratic Party put candidate B’s name on their circulars that were mailed out.  Now I have had lunch with both A and B and found them to be dedicated and very effective at what they do.  What disturbed me about the posting is the assumption that all Republicans are exactly alike, and therefore any Democrat who voted for A approved of an alleged ethical violation, even though if A had chosen to pursue it, so did B have one.   

When I was in office one of my strongest supporters on social justice issues was a Republican.  And earlier this year a very good friend of mine died who was a staunch Republican.  We all still liked each other.  In my family someone supported candidate B while I supported A.  So, I’m supposed to throw that person out of the house because she voted for someone that I didn’t?  I don’t think so.  As a matter of fact, we had a great 45 minute conversation this morning.  I don’t think she had an ethical lapse, nor does she think I did.  We simply believed that our candidate was the best for the job.  I think this is called democracy. 

Ideologues can be anywhere and everywhere.

 

 

It's That Easy

While watching All In With Chris Hayes the night he had the clip of the scruffy guys with guns shooting up a female mannequin while sniggering through the whole thing because they didn’t like the women from the organization Moms Demand Action for Sensible Gun Laws, or Moms Demand Action for short, I immediately went to the website: www.momsdemandaction.org and signed my name as a supporter.

 

And then after the horrible tragedy in Santa Barbara this past week a small group of us decided to take action and affiliate with Moms Demand Action here in our county.  We have received much help from the Moms group, and have been promised more.  And we have received much support via Facebook

 

With that being said, the following are the thoughts I have had regarding the 2^nd Amendment, gun violence, and mental illness.  First off, I carefully read the 2^nd Amendment again, and I was struck by the fact that the first four words are, “A well-regulated militia…”  Because of the tremendous pressure put on Federal legislators by the NRA, which is funded now by the gun manufacturers, we do not have a “well-regulated militia” we have unregulated vigilante individuals and groups who are not in place to insure the “…security of a free State…” but instead are terrorizing our homes, neighborhoods and schools with their completely irresponsible behaviors.  The NRA should go back to doing what it started out doing, and that is teaching gun safety and responsibility.  Frankly, as it is now, in my opinion, it should be listed as a terrorist organization.

 

The second half of this equation, however, is the status of our mental health system, or lack thereof, in our county, state and with the Federal government.  I was elected to office in 1999, which wasn’t all that long ago.  One of my fellow Supervisors commented to me when he assigned me to be on our Mental Health Board (now called Behavioral Health) that, “We probably don’t even need this.  People should just pull themselves together and get on with it.”  Since I had members of my own family who were battling mental illness, this comment didn’t sit well.

 

People who exhibit at-risk behavior which may indicate they are perhaps a danger to themselves or to others deserve, as human beings, the care and services they need.  This is where our priorities must be as well.  At this time there are many bills before our State legislature regarding both gun safety legislation as well as mental health issues, and this is very hopeful. 

 

As citizens, we need to keep up the pressure.  With those of us who still have busy lives, one way of doing this through computers, is to go to: www.momsdemandaction.org and sign up to support sensible guns laws.  It’s that easy.

 

Transitive Verbs and the Death Penalty

When I first got into politics years ago, the current mantra from those with a more conservative viewpoint in my county was that we “have to protect agriculture.”  That really brought me up short because in my mind “protect” is a transitive verb.  That is, it carries a thought from one side of the noun over to the other side.  Therefore, I kept asking, “Protect agriculture from what, or to do what?”  This didn’t sit well with a lot of people who wanted to protect agriculture’s right to develop the property willy-nilly for development.  But, they didn’t want to say that right out in front of God and everybody, so they hid it in what sounded like a really good thing. 

So, imagine my amusement when I heard a Tea Partier say the other day, quite pompously, “We have to trust people”.  That sounds really good, also, but what are we trusting people to do?  To further restrict women’s access to health care?  Restrict voting?  Even cutting taxes further for the wealthy and corporations?  We have to be really careful of those transitive verbs and use them correctly, and even more, demand that politicians use them correctly as well.  When you hear stuff like that, don’t assume you know what is meant.  Ask questions, and demand real answers. 

Which brings me to the death penalty.  Years ago when my own kids were quite small, there was a particularly gruesome crime in the San Francisco Bay area.  A man named Greg Abbott kidnapped and killed a little girl.  Or, that was what he was found guilty of doing, and he was eventually electrocuted.  He never confessed.  There was so much media frenzy over this that it even reached down to Fresno.  One of my daughters asked me what the word execution meant, so I was explaining that when a person did a really horrible thing like killing someone, that person was executed which meant that his life was taken away; that he was killed.  She didn’t answer for awhile, then asked, “Who kills that person?”   

Overtime I have given much thought to the subject of the death penalty because of that question, and because of other reasons.  Eventually I have become adamantly opposed to the death penalty.  Now we have the situation wherein much wiser people in Europe are refusing to sell the drugs in the United States that have been used to render the person being executed unconscious in order to administer drugs that will eventually kill him or her.  As a result we have the example of the botched execution in Oklahoma a few weeks ago wherein it took the man 45 minutes to die.  One state is considering bringing back the electric chair, and I believe it is Utah which is considering using a firing squad.   

We have all of these discussions on ways to implement the death penalty, when the subject ought to be why have it at all?  Some arguments are that it is a deterrent, but that doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny.  Others are that some people are so rotten they deserve to die.  Or that they must be gotten off the streets.  The last one is sort of silly because if someone is put in prison without possibility of parole, that certainly gets them off the streets.  The argument that some people are so rotten they deserve to die is the one that most people use.  I find this one the most difficult to explain.  Perhaps they are – but there have been too many people executed that have subsequently turned out to be innocent that the danger of killing even one innocent person ought to be enough to stop using the death penalty.   

But the strongest reason, in my opinion, is what it does to the rest of us.  Our society’s obsession with guns, violence and death are fueled to some degree with our callous disregard about whether a prisoner might be innocent.  And, we hear a lot from the right wing about abortion.  Life starts at conception.  But one of the great secrets of our time is that more main-stream churches, including, for some time now, the Catholic Church, are just as adamantly opposed to the death penalty.  If one is pro-life, then be pro-life.  Stop picking and choosing whose life has more value than someone else’s. 

 

All life has value.

 

 

 

Pistol Packing Mamas?

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I can remember when I was a very young child hearing my mother and my grandmother argue over whether women should vote.  My grandmother, apparently, was adamantly opposed to it, but my mother said she was going to vote anyway.  My childhood and young adulthood was pretty much dictated by what society expected of girls and young women.  When I was in high school I also remember my mother telling me that I must not let the boys know how intelligent I was because they wouldn’t like me, yet at the same time being expected to make all ‘A’s.  Talk about a double message! 

When we got to the 1960’s and ‘70’s and the rise of feminism, what a heady time that was!  We were encouraged to make our own choices about our lives, our bodies, our thoughts, and whatever we wanted to.  My parents had taken out a life insurance policy for me when I was about 10, and in the mid ‘70’s it became apparent it was not worth much, and the funds could be invested better elsewhere.  When I went to our insurance agent, who was also a fellow parishioner in Fresno, he told me I had lucked out – that the law had just changed and I didn’t need to have Bill along with me to sign that it was OK if I cashed it in.  I could just choose to do that all by myself!!  I also have some memories that were horribly denigrating to women regarding rape, and sexuality in general.

Consequently, the rise in the past 30 years or so on the part of the radical religious right to roll back some of the advances made by women have had me somewhat concerned for my beautiful great-granddaughters.  My daughters and granddaughters can really take care of themselves better than I ever could have at their ages, but it is the little ones I worry about.  Here in California we aren’t impacted so much by this roll back, but using Texas as an example, it really is worrisome that the state government is complicit in closing women’s health clinics across Texas that provide basic health screening to women.  They are being closed because they also offer abortions.  Forget that they provide screening for the cancers that are the most prevalent among women (breast, ovarian, cervical), but also diabetes and cardio-vascular health, and the education that must go along with this.  I have singled out Texas, but this attitude is also gaining ground in too many states to mention here.  It is indicative of an effort to prevent women from becoming equal to men in decision making.

My understanding is that the logic for this is that women need to get married and have their husbands take care of their health needs – they don’t need specialized clinics just for them because it encourages them to be independent of men, and to make their own decisions about their health care.  All of this under the guise of being anti-abortion.  When Bob McDonnell, the past Governor of Virginia, and his Attorney General, Ken Cucinelli, determined that a woman in Virginia who needed an abortion would have to undergo, at her own expense, a trans-vaginal ultra sound probe, in my mind I could hear them snigger behind their closed doors that they would show these women who was boss.

But the final straw for me was the clip from All In with Chris Hayes this past week that showed a bunch of scruffy men who are outraged over a group of young women who have formed a group, Moms Demand Action, firing multiple times at a naked female mannequin, nearly destroying the mannequin.

My grandfather and my dad taught me how to shoot a gun, but of greater importance, how to treat one with the great respect a gun deserves.  Not to respect the gun itself, but to respect the damage and horror the misuse of a gun could generate.  But this new gun worship really has me deeply concerned.  Responsible and mature male gun owners are not who I am talking about.  I am talking about the non-thinking male who believes that a gun is what makes him “a man”.  But turning a bunch of non-rational gun-toting men loose on women who they just might disagree with is terrifying.  Without ever turning back from any of these anti-woman decisions, our rights as women, and now our very selves have once again become endangered. 

I am speaking metaphorically, but we gun-toting women, so to speak, need to all join Moms Demand Action.  A pistol packing mama with a fast trigger finger might work, but what is better and more effective, an even faster mouth.