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.

The Matarese Circle

Now I’m not absolutely sure that I am right, but it has occurred to me that the radical right in Congress actually manipulated President Obama to approve the sequester provision under the guise of it being such a terrible thing that certainly something could be done before it ever was put into action.  In short, it was a trap that the President walked into because he couldn’t, at the time, conceive of anyone being that Machiavellian.  Remember Speaker Boehner commenting after the sequester provision was first passed way back when he stated that he had gotten “98% of what I wanted.  I’m pretty happy”.  I do believe that the President has learned.

We know that it is the Koch brothers and other billionaires who control the Tea Party who control Congress.  That has been confirmed.  Stop and think a minute just what might happen if the economy of this country collapsed after the sequester kicks in completely.   Many of the essential services on which the populace has come to depend would be greatly weakened.  These billionaires could offer to privatize them through their companies, initially at a competitive price, and slowly take over the responsibilities of government, except for national defense. 

You think I’m a conspiracy whacko?  Take a look at the great State of Michigan.  The Republican Governor and Legislature voted in a law that allowed the Governor to abolish any local government that he perceived to be unfit.  The people of Michigan rightly were distressed over this and got a provision on the November ballot last year to overturn that law.  The provision passed.  So, in December, the Legislature passed almost exactly the same law, but with the added provision that it couldn’t be overturned by referendum.  Now the Governor is eyeing the City of Detroit as being ripe for a takeover.  And of course (sarcasm) it is only a coincidence that all of these areas are populated by people of color.  Now these areas are being managed by one person, not elected but appointed by the Governor, leaving the people with absolutely no voice in how their communities or cities are governed.  Schools and other essential services can be closed or cut, all in the name of the economy.  The people will have no say.  And now I am going to digress a bit.

One of the greatest spy thriller writers of all time, in my opinion, was Robert Ludlum.  He could weave the most intricate stories with a myriad of story threads, which he then turned into a marvelous verbal tapestry.  His most famous are the Bourne Identity, Supremacy and Ultimatum.  The rest of the Bourne novels that he wrote are really good, but the author of the later Bourne books would probably agree that they cannot match Ludlum’s, although they are good reads.

I have read many of Ludlum’s many times, but there is one novel that I have read many more times than the others for its sheer tapestry of intrigue.  Much to my surprise, when I pulled it up off the internet just now I find that is being made into a movie, probably starring Denzel Washington.  I’m sure it will be a good movie, but I strongly recommend reading the book, either before or after.

The reason I’m writing about this book is that I have been thinking about it lately.  The book is not current, is about a time in our recent history when Russia was our strongest enemy, and is sort of an outlandish story.  Basically it is about a cabal of economic moguls who want to control the world economies, and thus the world.  They go about it by wrecking economies.

I keep thinking of the State of Michigan.  Then I think of The Matarese Circle.  Then Michigan.  I really wish Spring would get here, and I can go outside.

 

 

 

 

 

Memories, Memories

As a result of living in a small town where we spent many years as young people, last night for Valentine’s Day my husband and I had a delightful dinner at the location where we used to buy gasoline.  At other times we have had dinner in my cousin’s former bedroom – the old Galbraith dairy, of many years ago.  We have had dinner in the old medical building, and been to the dentist in the bedroom I shared with my cousin.   Although my all time favorite was the Friends of the Library fundraiser in the old Bucket of Blood Saloon.

We find this sort of amusing, and spent some time laughing about it last night.  Time marches on, and we have found the secret to not wishing things were the way they used to be, is to enjoy most of the changes.  As I said, the dinner last night was very good.   

One memory, however, that has surfaced recently dates back to when I was about 8 years old.  I was listening to the adults discuss how the country was going to be in real trouble and might go back to the worst days of the depression when it looked like things might finally be getting better.  Businesses were going to close, there would be massive unemployment again, the government had no business passing such a law when it would do so much harm.

Needless to say, I was quite frightened.  I waited for all of these dire predictions to come to pass.  Over time, I forgot to be frightened about this law because apparently none of the dire predictions came to pass.  My father still had his job, I didn’t notice that many businesses were closing, my teachers were still teaching at my school that hadn’t closed, and life went on pretty much as before. 

On Wednesday of this week, however, I heard those same arguments all over again, and my memories surfaced of how frightened I had been, only this time all I felt was sort of disgusted.  It has been 75 years since the minimum wage law was first passed in 1938, and the Republicans are using the same old tired fear tactics they used then to prevent the $0.25 an hour minimum wage from going into effect.  (Oregon State University) 

In fact, most of the economic and no government involvement issues the Republicans are raising I have heard for the past 75 years.  Isn’t it about time they evolved into something more productive?  After all, when the owners of the gas station we had dinner in last night recognized, for whatever reason, that it was no longer to their advantage to use it as a gas station, someone came along with a creative idea and with some remodeling turned it into a restaurant. 

Memories are great, and add a great deal of pleasure to life.  But to hang on to the way things were and the ideas that were around 75 years ago is stupid.  But then I’m not the one who called the Republican Party the Party of Stupid.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This Morning Was a Beautiful Morning.

This morning was a beautiful morning – it was raining, but not hard; just enough to keep the grass on the hillsides nice and green, and ready to grow when slightly warmer weather comes.  Since this is cattle grazing country this was a beautiful morning.  Just the kind when one can stare out the window with the morning coffee and wonder what in the heck one is going to write about today!  My mind began wandering and reviewing some of the major events of the last 10-12 years, and I came up with some really atypical thoughts.

Some terrorists came to this country on commercial airplanes from Saudi Arabia and eventually blew up the two Trade Center towers in New York, killing some 3000 people.  Our forward thinking Republican Administration immediately began ranting about the border between Mexico and the United States being a gateway for terrorists, and over the past however many years, both the Bush and Obama Administrations have spent billions of dollars building a fence to keep out terrorists.  Since the fence takes a bit to get over, or under, now, no doubt if a terrorist wanted to come into the United States, they would have to walk across the border from Canada.  That is, if they didn’t want to fly in on a commercial airplane from Toronto.

Even though the Trade Center terrorists came from Saudi Arabia originally, the Bush Administration drummed up some excuses that they had trained in Afghanistan at terrorist training camps, so we invaded Afghanistan.  They said nothing about the fact the Saudi terrorists had trained in the United States to fly the airplanes.  So, using that logic, are we going to invade ourselves, or just the states they trained in.  Perhaps this is why the gun-lovers are ranting about the Second Amendment – so they can protect us from invading ourselves.

Saddam Hussein made the gross mistake of wanting to assassinate Poppy Bush, so son George made up stories about weapons of mass destruction which any mother of a bunch of kids could tell was hogwash because of the “lying kid” look on his face every time he started talking about them.  So we invaded Iraq, and killed some 600,000 Iraqis.  And of course, Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s favorite corporation could make millions, if not billions, contracting to do work through their subsidiary, KBR, which of course was either never done, or shoddily done. 

Now we have a Republican Party which is so divorced from reality that in an effort to make itself more attractive to the average voter in this country, who is no longer a Protestant old white man with English ancestry, it is trying to rig elections through one means or another, and they don’t think anyone is watching!!  In an effort to woo women voters, Republicans in some states are either requiring transvaginal ultrasounds for women who seek an abortion or in other states are trying to make a human fertilized egg a person.  An unwanted transvaginal ultrasound is nothing more than mechanical rape for the woman required to undergo one.  I can just hear these immature men sniggering in the coat closet about showing these women who’s in charge here.  As for the personhood laws, what about the 1/3 of all pregnancies that naturally end up being miscarried?  Will the parents of these miscarriages be required to have funeral services for these little persons? 

My God!  I hope the sun is shining tomorrow morning!!