1005 am 'Get This' news

10/05/07 Get This
Chris Andreae
 

1. Trial Sample:  1st Lieutenant Ehren Watada’s attorneys are still struggling to explain jurisprudence to the District Court in Seattle.  It’s called double jeopardy, and it’s not the same as a double latte or a double-take or even a daily double at the track.  Watada is the voice in the wilderness screaming to the sky what even George Bush must surely know by now:  The war is illegal and it shames every citizen of the United States.
2. The Washington Supreme Court says it, I believe it, That settles it:  It’s Okay, legal, legit for politicians to lie.  That’s like making a law that bears have to shit in the woods…Free speech – It’s either with us or against us…
3. It Was the Breast of Times;  It Was the Wurst of Times:   Hurrah! It’s ‘Banned Book Week.’  So hi thee to a library and check out a few scorchers.  How about Huckleberry Finn?  Or the all-time favorite bodice-ripper, Little House in the Big Woods?  Picture Larry Flynt as Atticus Finch and you’re there, Baby, you’re there…
4. Hatching a Plot to Kill Salmon:  Turns out that hatchery fish are not the solution to dwindling wild salmon runs.  For starters, hatchery fish don’t do very well in the wild.  But Bush administration “scientists” are no doubt betting the fish farm that there won’t be any “wild” left at about the same time we run  - no pun intended – out of wild salmon.
5. Makah My Day:  The five rogue members of the Makah tribe are getting slapped with a whole panoply of charges for wreaking marine mayhem.  These are the guys who took it up on themselves to celebrate their sacred traditions by shooting a whale no less than 16 times with automatic weapons.  The California grey whale was attempting to escape to deep water when the boys brought out the big guns.  It promptly dove to the deepest waters of them all and dies.  That’s “tradition” for you – just like turkey on Thanksgiving.  (I will say this, if the Makah really do walk the dreamways, I hope their visions are a wasteland of horror for the rest of time.)
6. “It’s For Your Own Good”:  Oregon State officials are wrestling with a tough question:  The foster parents of a two-year old are trying to keep the boy with them or send to his grandmother in Mexico.    Because the boy’s father is a child molester who is about to be released from prison.  (Don’t we have some sort of vaunted ‘Watch List’ that covers situations like this?  Oh, wait…that’s just for protecting cute white kids…)
7. Not-So-Happy Valley:  The Happy Valley City Council is going to pass a law preventing residents from larking about on the lawn stark naked, doing the gardening,  if children are watching.   (How are the little buggers going to learn about pruning and weeds, if they are unable to make personal observations?  Who’s going to teach them to mulch what with the parents working three jobs to pay for their meth habits.)
8. You Have The Right To Remain Silent…:The House has approved a bill making private military contractors – ‘mercenaries’, to you and me – working in combat zones, subject to the same laws as everyone else.  (Not to suggest that “everyone else” get  pissed to the eyeballs and then drive through the streets in a massive armored vehicle randomly shooting at pedestrians and other motorist – never mind the fact that this happens all the time on the San Diego (the 405) freeway…)
9. What’s left of the National Guard stateside,  have been stationed on our southern border where they will be tasked with protecting America from immigrants.
10. Senate and House Democrats picked up their copies of the New York Times the other day and  - Holy Cow! – what’s this about two secret memos authorizing cruel and unusual interrogation techniques (That’s torture to you and me…)?  Didn’t Bush tell us, No, Nope, No way did America torture people.  Now of course, legislators what to get their eyeballs on those memos.  But, wait, we don’t have a new AG.  Seems that the one Bush proposed was as corrupt as the last two.  (Republicans, perusing their daily copies of US News and World Report, remained blissfully unaware of the existence of these memos.  And with only an “acting” Attorney General, who’s going to give lawmakers the key’s to the memos?
11. The Old College Try:  Because they don’t need to read the NYT to know that their party is about to go down in flames at the next presidential election, Republican king-makers are heading back to the old drawingboard.  In 2000 they used the Supreme Court to steal the show.  In 2004 it was the voting machines, gerrymandering and intimidation.  What’s left in thee Black Bag?  Why of course!  The GOP in California has set in motion a proposal to end the winner-takes-all electoral college system.
12. Billions of dollars have been added to the already bloated Farm Bill to keep agribusiness chugging along, swallowing whole economies in the developing world. 
13. The Feds are taking a look at the ties between Housing Secretary Alonso Jackson and a “friend” who was paid $392 thousand dollars by HUD to pretend to be managing  reconstruction in New Orleans.  (What next?  We organize and train anti-Castro Cubans for an invasion of Cuba which will be financed by the sale of heroin from Afghanistan?)
14. Sanction This!:  Iran has dropped the last of it’s US dollar oil contracts, in favor of “other creditworthy currencies.”
15. In Iraq, bombs killed the mayor of Iskandariya.  You see, the way it works is, Bush can’t pull troops out just yet because if he did the violence would spike briefly and then stop.  And that would remove the justification for attacking Iran.  So what he’s got to do is attack Iran, pull troops across the border into Iran to bring on the Democracy, at which point the chaos in Iraq will spike briefly and then fall off to virtually nil.  At which point, who ever is left standing will yell ‘I win!.’ and it will be time for milk and cookies and a nap.
16. In Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf is attempting to lure Benazir Bhutto into a trap – in much the same way he lured the US government into a different sort of cage…
17. China and Russia are still trying to be helpful by  suggesting that slapping sanctions on Burma isn’t going to help the average working Joe in that afflicted nation.  The generals will continue doing what they have always done;  send the ‘help’ on foot across the border into Thailand, to the nearest railhead and on to Bangkok where they will do the shopping and return with the Johnny Walker Red Label and State Express 555’s.  Same as always…
18. The whole Pinochet family tree was cut down.  All $427 million dollars the ‘fam’ had transferred to US accounts was seized.  (Amazing, isn’t it, that US banks didn’t notice the Pinochet accounts until they had made a few millions themselves on interest generated by overnight loans…)