0719 am 'Get This' news

07/19/07 Get This
Chris Andreae
 

1. A River Runs Through It:  Oregon and Washington have one main attribute in common and two ways of seeing it:  Washington views the Columbia as a river of cheap electricity.  Oregon’s Columbia River is salmon habitat.  Oh, the irony!  Because Washington is on board with the Bush administration’s mysterious energy policy, it gets federal funds for “salmon habitat restoration.”  What Oregon gets (Thanks to the persistence of environmentalistas, fishermen and Native Americans) is habitat that doesn’t require massive federal restoration because it hasn’t been entirely pillaged by ruinous greed and ignorance.  When the salmon are gone, Washington will still have Starbucks, Bill Gates and Vancouver.  That’s karma for ya…
2. Oregon’s Republican land use Czar is resigning to spend more time with his torts.  Yes, Lane Shetterly is going back to his roots as a lawyer, now that the State is stuck with a legacy of unbridled development.  (With a lawyer in charge of land stewardship, what the plain hell did we expect?)
3. PGE is celebrating the State’s new renewable energy legislation by opening a natural gas-fired power plant.  (Picture the scene:  A private dining room at Salishan, the exotic flower arrangement, the tinkle of china, crystal and heavy silverware, servants discretely refilled glasses and proffering hors d’heuvres.  Representatives of PGE, former Enron vampires, company men from Oregon LNG, TransCanada and the Palomar pipeline along with Ron Wyden and the Oregon Economic Development Commission  - Use your imagination and fill in the blank seats at the table with lobbyists, trophy wives and procurers of contraband…).  But I digress…Put all the pieces together and you a scary vision of Oregon’s future:  Huge freighters standing off-shore flushing their bilges waiting to off or on load, LNG tankers closing the Columbia so they can turn around, Molalla blown off the map when the pipeline explodes.  You want salmon?  Here, go have a
4. Edison Carder’s piece ‘Our Backyard’ took apart the reports that have been surfacing of Chinese pollution showing up on top of Mt. Bachelor.  The chickens have come home to roost and Wow-wah-wee-wah, these are some dirty birds.  The rest of the world wants what we have and it is willing to make the same mistakes the West is making in order to get it.  with the same results…
5. Gordon Smith says Bush has an obligation to lead US forces out of the “quicksand” of Iraq before thousands more Americans are killed and he loses his Senate seat.
6. A little rain is a dangerous thing if you are a forest fire in Oregon.
7. Representative Pete DeFazio finessed $11 million in federal funds for dredging Bandon, Siuslaw, Umqua, Brookings Harbor, Gold Beach, Port Orford and….wait for it…Coos Bay.  Let’s not forget that the Oregon Legislature has committed $60 million for the dredging of the Coos Bay channel, attempting to lure Maersk-Moller – world’s largest – shipping company to Coos Bay.  (Be sure to bring your bucket and shovel to clean up the foetid mess this adventure will deposit on Oregon’s beaches….)
8. Dennis Kucinich has “food poisoning”  (In much the same way that Paul Wellstone was in a “plane accident”?)
9. If you are a disabled veteran, it pays to plan ahead when considering where to live.  And be sure to get legal help when filling out the disability claim forms.  Depending on where you live and how much justice you can afford, your payments vary by thousands of dollars.
10. A steam explosion in New York caused one person to die of a heart attack (And thousands to experience ‘unexpected underwear events.’  Those in the vicinity were advised to burn the clothes they were wearing – especially the underwear, I imagine – because of asbestos.  This time around, no one told people the area was completely safe.
11. Majority leader, Harry Reid was the only Democratic “no” vote on the Pull-Out-Now defense bill.  Irony of ironies, it’s the only way back to the defense bill and the Iraq debate..  Reid tried to get consent to move the fiscal 2008 Homeland Security appropriations bill, but Republicans blocked that too.  (How are you going to stage a ‘Reichstag’ if you have all this security crap going on, right?)
12. Indicted money launderer and conspirator, Tom DeLay says that immigration and abortion are just part of the same problem:  If those 40 million fetuses had not been aborted, they could be picking your fruit, mowing your lawn and cleaning your house at this very moment.
13. Out On A Limb:  Dick ‘dick’ Cheney’s office has this to say:  Even though the VP is not part of the Executive Branch, he still gets executive privilege – minus the branch.
14. While the Senate was eating pizza, sleeping on cots, singing ‘Kumbayah’ telling ghost stories and making lanyards, Bush was busy appointing Nashville lawyer Craig Morford as acting Deputy Attorney General, replacing Paul McNulty at the Justice Department.
15. And while Morford was being screwed into McNulty’s shoes, the Justice Department was busy pressuring ten states to purge their voter rolls of poor people (They tend to vote Democrat) and looking the other way while state welfare offices “forget” to offer their impoverished clients the opportunity to register to vote (They tend to vote Democrat).
16. Turkey has gone and bombed Northern Iraq just as we knew it would.  (Those 140 thousand Turkish troops weren’t there to sleep on cots, eat pizza and sing Kumbayah…)
17. Five more US soldiers, who-knows-how-many ‘contractors’ and untold hundreds of Iraqis were killed in Iraq during the past 48 hours.
18. Seven of the most important Sunni resistance organizations have formed a political alliance with the goal of kicking out the Americans and al-Qaeda.  (Funny how the latter two entities showed up at roughly the same time, yet we never see them at the same time and in the same place…)
19. Here’s an American idea:  We’re going to dig a big trench around Kirkuk (To keep the oil from running out?)
20. Virtually all the Gaza border crossings have been closed, which almost guarantees the collapse of an economy that is already on its knees.  (But that is the whole point, isn’t it?  One sure way to cripple a nation or a people is to render it dependent on foreign “aid.”  And you can take that to the World Bank…)
21.  One country that sees the picture clearly is Britain.  a new report finds the situation in Afghanistan “dire.”
22. Measure Twice;  Cut Once Dept:  The Japanese nuclear power plant that was recently shut down indefinitely following a magnitude 6.8 earthquake turns out to have been built on a fault line in one of the most seismically active regions in the world.