A couple of years back I took an EPA class on Risk Assessment given by one of the Agency toxicoligists that did the risk assessment on air quality at Ground Zero. He stated unequivocaly that the EPA misled the firefighters doing the Rescue and Recovery an the WTC. He said there would be hell to pay.
While I think the writing here is a little clunky and unfinished, it gives voice to a nagging suspicion I have been having for .....the length of the BushCorp administration.
Overtly, an unofficial Bush advisor Grover Norquist has said "we want to shrink government to the point that it can be drowned in a bathtub". Covertly, I have a nagging suspicion that BushCorp is teeing all of the major entitlement programs, the legacies of FDR and the Great Society; Social Security, Medicare etc, up for failure. BushCorp can't overtly go after these beloved and needed programs but if you set them on a path to failure you can look back, nod knowingly and say: "See? What did I tell you!"
Carrion Crows
It now costs me over ten dollars a day to commute back and forth to work. This expense has caused me to adjust my lifestyle, from the way I drive to contemplating moving or changing jobs. I'm angry, my savings account is deflating at an alarming rate and I want to kick someone's ass. So...who's it going to be? China? SUV drivers? Shrub? The auto industry? All likely culprits, but as a wise person once said, if you want to find a battle field, follow the carrion crows, and if you want to find out who started the war, follow the money. Last year, the most profitable company in the US was Exxon Mobil and I'm pretty sure the other oil companies did pretty well, too.
I have always harbored a love/hate impression of John McCain over my many years as an Arizona voter. I respected his drive to implement real campaign reform, because I believed (and still believe) that campaign money is, if not the root, one of the roots of the ugliness that is Washington politics. I also was impressed by McCain's recent break with the Bush Whitehouse over global warming. I thought McCain was the type of conservative that I could respect, someone who thought long and hard about the positions that they took and went with the data rather than what was politically expedient. While the only way that I would even consider voting for McCain instead of a Democrat would be if he were running against Zell Miller, I still felt that he was a person that I would feel marginally less enraged by than the usual neo-Nazi Arizona tends to elect.
Please, as an Arizonan with a long career of watching this guy say one thing in public and do another in the Senate, I urge you to grab anyone who is flirting with voting for this guy and slap them silly.
Interesting stuff here. I was amazed to see the statistic that in the states with the largest increase in voter turnout, the majority went to Shrub. I'd like to match that data to states with anti-gay legislation...
Low tech solutions in a high tech world.
Just like that protagonist in Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" the terrorists know that in a world of high tech weapons and surveillance, sometimes simplicity is the most productive tactic. Bombs on trains and busses are simple, efficient and almost impossible to guard against. There are a million ways to outwit a slow, cumbersome high tech security apparatus. Think: mortar, cheap pickup truck and a full football stadium.
The only way to guard against this is to not give them reasons to hate us.
We took our eye off the ball. While we were busy prosecuting Chimp-boy's private dick waving exercise in Iraq, we were not paying attention to making our homes safer and to the big picture. We cannot simultaneously, to paraphrase Rummy, "Create terrorist faster than we can kill them" while we are ignoring vital strategies to make our home and the world a safer place.
Yes, this was a barbaric act. No, I would never say that anyone could deserve such barbarity, but yes, I think I can understand why it happened. If you want to make a Karl Rove-esque "Therapy" reference, make it now and get it out of your system.
Bad Déjà vu. I woke up early this morning and stumbled out to the kitchen to the sound of the bubbling coffee maker, Morning Edition on the stereo. The coffee cuts the haze slowly and the central processor begins to tag and catalog the incoming data. Bombs. Umpty dead. Al Qaeda. England. Immediately the frames of New York, Washington, Madrid coalesce around the data and impressions and ideas begin to form:
The Chimperor is resolute.
Traffic is backed up on the I-17.
NPR is playing the Sad Music Segues.
My mind races ahead. Visions of post processing by Brit Hume and Joe Connason. Crafting the message around the goal. Sales of SUVs take a slight dip and GM lays off 30,000. Musicians cut a tribute album. Sales of duct tape spike. The stock market soldiers on. We collectively come to the conclusion that least interrupts our lifestyle.
