0414 am 'Get This' news

 Get This:  The world watches in mesmerized horror:  What is America going to do next with your tax money? Chris Andreae 04/14/08  

1. Taxes To The Dark Side:  Pacificorp is going to charge its customers more in order to pay off its 2006 taxes.   And PGE is charging less because it was ordered to refund the tax money it collected from customers in the high-flying Enron days, but never actually ‘rendered unto Caesar.’  Like most highwire acts, Don’t Look Down...
2. Washington Mutual “activist” shareholders are getting ginned up to vote against the WaMu Board of Directors.  This,  as one by one, the lights go out on a wide range of American industries – from airlines to Laz-zee-Boy recliners – and upper management continues to reward itself.  When ominous incompetence At The Top sends the bad news rolling downhill, it’s always those who toil at the bottom, building the wealth, who are crushed when the Towers fall.  No “terrorist” has ever done as much damage to as many lives as corporate America’s Deciders...
3. The word, ‘Utah’ doesn’t normally conjure up the terms, ‘sustainable’, ‘environmental,’ ‘progressive’ the way a name like ‘Oregon’ does.  But here we are teetering on the edge of an LNG terminal in Oregon waters.  While over there in Logan, Utah, the  Cache County Commissioners said No to a pipeline crossing their countryside from the natural gas fields that have ravaged Wyoming’s land and people, all the to – and through – Oregon to.....That’s right!  The Northern Californian border.
4. The chinook salmon fishing debacle is only a taste of things to come and it’s a rather rotten sort of fishy taste.  (Cheer up!  Once the Guv signs off on the LNG terminals, the taxes are deferred, a couple hundred workers get minimum wage jobs and the hunting and fishing across Cascadia is cancelled due to no fish and no animals...those chinook won’t have Oregon to push around any more...)
5. Summertime and the Living is AC:   The Rocky Mountain Climate Orgnization says this summer is going to be a hot one.
6. But here comes technology to the rescue!  We’re going to use solar power to purify water...and not a moment too soon.  We still have plenty of sun but we are rapidly running short of clean water.
7. Heaven Foreclose!:  Home-non-owners in Medford are abandoning houses – just walking away – not without vandalizing the structures on their way out in rage and despair.  (Think about this:  It is a vignette of the world we are making and unmaking with every mile we drive, every useless item we buy...As food and fuel dwindle the impotent fury and frustration are going to roar through society like a...a...house on fire...)
8. The Dalai Lama is in Seattle.
9. A man fell into the Mount St. Helens crator.  (We can only hope he was a virgin and that his plunge appeased the angry Sub-prime Mortgage Gods.
10. Tanked:  The New York Secretary of State has rejected Broadwater Energy’s idea to float a Liquefied Natural Gas terminal in Long Island Sound.
11. Protection money:  No less than fourteen conservation groups are suing the Environmental Protection Agency for – forget “protecting the environment” – actually doing more to harm the environment than any other agency in the government, with the possible exception being the Department of Energy.  (And that’s not even taking lobbyists into account, or for that matter holding them accountable, which in any case they aren’t...But I digress...Virtually nothing is left of the last law standing between the wilderness and Wall Street
12. Heckuva job, Nouri!:  Worst week so far this year for GIs in Iraq.  (And not so good for Iraqis either:  Same food and fuel shortages, same intermitent electricity and water, same non-existent sewage system – and to top it all off 13 hundred Iraqi troops got sacked for following the orders of their imbecile leader, Nouri al-Maliki and attacking Basra.  The original idea was to show America that he knew a thing or two about fighting in his own country.  (Another crashingly disappointing crony appointment, that al-Maliki...)
13. Lube Job:  It’s Open Season on Iraqi oil contracts.  (Thirty-five multinational gasbags all piled on the moment the whistle blew.)
14. Jimmy Carter is planning to have a litle chat with Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal.
15. Surprise meeting in Jerusalem!  Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas are sitting down for a little chat of their own.
16. Darfur rebels and Sudanese armed forces clashed in renewed fighting along the border with Chad.  (Must have had something to do with those big crates of weaponry with all that Chinese writing on them – that plus the oil and mineral contracts adorned with the same...)
17. In Kenya, Mwai Kibaki lined up a power-sharing cabinet yesterday with rival Raila Odinga as Prime Minister.  (What did you do this past weekend...)
18. Zimbabwe’s High Court is going to rule today on an opposition appeal to force election officials to at least release the result fer-cryin-out-loud...that way everyone can figure out what the fight is about.
19. Riots in Pakistan over power cuts in the textile manufcturing town of Multan.
20. And lastly, twelve hundred Uruguayan barbequers had a ‘Que-off’ that launched one Meatman into the Guinessphere of World Records.  Said the judge, one Danny Girton, “It’s all so beautiful!.”