I will, of course, be there to gather jail petition signatures. Getting to watch a little highschool hoops is just the duty to be endured... I love this stuff.
I know you guys are tired of this jail issue....Me too. But what must be done, must be done.
Good people have let themselves be used as pawns in the Corporate/Right wing ideological battle against public schools for too long now and it's time to fight. The secret goal is to overload government with debt so deeply, that the great moral issue of working for the common good cannot be funded. This is the Conservative plan as espoused by Newt Gingrich so long ago. Corporations Good, human beings Bad.
Why else do you think there is such a push to load us up with debt on such a transparently stupid prison project, when our schools are in serious need of attention?
(Well ok, I know that the consulting firms make a killing on these projects and push the hell out of them, but can't I indulge myself on the right wing nut jobs at the same time? Thank you.)
We're on the home stretch in the jail referendum petition drive. This has really brought our county together, in an odd way. For the first time in memory, we have the Young Republicans and the Young Democrats standing shoulder to shoulder calling for signatures.
If I were a County Commissioner and had refused to vote to allow the people to decide for themselves whether or not to spend this huge amount of money on a prison...I might be thinking about making a public announcement Today, that I would rescind my vote! ...Or whatever it would take to get on the right side of this issue. Roane County voters will remember who voted against them in the next election.
I'll make sure of that!
Sign and deliver your petitions, as soon as possible. Call us and we'll come get them.
603-6981 (update: this is the correct number)
*****
Glad to see Facing South back up and running. Here's a couple of clips from a bit about the Bush Administration's pathological obsession (stole that phrase) with destroying all that is good about America:
"I worked for four Republican Presidents and two Democrats and during the course of that career, never have I witnessed such an ideological war on the natural resource laws, policies or practices or institutions," Mike Finley, former superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, said in a speech today. "Even our national parks are not safe from this assault."
Preliminary assessment of the Department of Interior’s proposed revisions to the existing (2001) Management Policies raises concerns that the overall impact of the language changes in the draft weaken protections for our national parklands, in particular, park air quality and wilderness, and could lead to increased use of Jet Skis, off-road vehicles, commercialization, and grazing at the cost of preservation.
Parks Under Attack
Here's a quick overview of Republican scandals over the last year. There are sooo many....
scandalous
Peace,
Steve
"You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!
ReplyDeleteYou are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused."
Scary, eh? Nostrodamus prescient...well except for the 21 inch tv. My cad laptop is almost that big.
ReplyDeleteI think that the mark of the beast has changed. No longer does 666 strike fear into my heart (if it ever did). The scariest symbol on earth is:
INC.
I'm in the middle of transcribing from online audio a discussion of Alito's qualifications.
ReplyDeleteIt's a long discussion -- about 45 minutes -- and though I type fast and fairly accurately, it's often hard to work fast because some of the debaters are on not high quality cordless phones, I'd guess. So the words come into my tape machine from a modest computer speaker, hooked to a fairly secure satellite connection, which reaches into an audio file in Southern California of a discussion in which most of the people are not in studio (nice and clear) but on the phone (iffy).
That makes me accutely aware of who speaks clearly and succinctly, and who hems and haws. The right wing guys are very, VERY clear, very easy to transcribe, speak slowly and with conviction, repeat phrases (canards) so often that I can often finish their sentences without listening. Over here on the left we have the thinkers, people who want to get it right, people who want to be intellectually sound in their statements, so their sentences are made up of clauses and rewordings, enough to drive a transcriber nuts. Type, delete, listen, try to reconstruct, where to put the comma, that sentence had no verb.
The difference between right and left is the difference between spooning simple, reheated, high sodium, canned concoctions into your mouth (easy! treacherous!) and going out to the kitchen, cutting up fresh veggies, braising them slowly, adding liquid, allowing the soup to meld and strengthen and mature before ladling it into your bowl and eating it.
There are always going to be people who depend on corporate products -- be they ideologies or soups -- because they're easier. Until,that is, the product makes them sick. When it's too late.
Bottom line: What is it that most drives me nuts? That the left has the tools (economic boycotts) to rein the bastards in, but does not use them. The poison is in us...
Yrs. Anonymously,
PW
Have you come across this website?
ReplyDeleterestaurant interior design