0712 am 'Get This' news

Produced by:

KBOO

07/12/07 Get This
Chris Andreae

Eugene’s diehard cadre of Norquistas send round a petition via gas stations asking people for their signatures in order to put a measure on the ballot that would roll back the gas tax. They got plenty of signatures but about a third of them were not valid. Proving that the anti-tax crowd is so dumb it can’t figure out how to sign a petition properly.
But that’s okay, because Oregon now has yet another committee comprised of representatives of all manner of interest groups. Said committee is going to sit down – sometime after Labor Day – and figure out what to do about the state’s tax problem…which can be summed up thusly: Oregonians want all sorts of services, roads, good schools, parks, libraries and healthcare. They just don’t want to pay for these “perks”. It’s a Perfect Storm, if you believe the Bush administration cant: Either way voters are encouraged to hate the government…
Ambulance workers are ready to go out on strike. And good for them. It’s a rough job putting up with people who get to the hospital and discover that their insurance doesn’t pay for the ride there. (Plus accident victims are notoriously drunk and tip badly)
BioFools: Our Backyard: KBOO’s Edison Carder pulls the pants off the biodiesel Divas. It’s a scam, a con, a shell game, the old ‘three card Monte’ and another impending environmental disaster. Biodiesel is the latest product of the political dream factory. Notice how it’s a machine for printing money and sunlight is free….?
Convicted fraud artist and former Republican lawmaker, Dan Doyle still hasn’t paid his debt to society or any of the other entities he ripped off.
Seattle has a “zero waste” plan (And if it hadn’t announced said plan, most Oregonians would have remained blissfully unaware of the fact that almost a billion pounds of garbage from Washington winds up in a land fill in Arlington, Oregon.)
The fires that have been burning Burns are almost under control thanks to the 600 people who took time out of their schedules to build a firebreak.
Guts: Homeland Security Grand Poobah, Michael Chertoff says he has a “gut feeling” that al-Qaeda is going to attack America again this summer. (Haven’t we learned by now that ‘al-Qaeda’ only attacks America when the weather in the Middle East is nice for fighting?) But I digress…Let’s see, is it possible that ‘Guts’ Chertoff knows something that the rest of us do not know? Just wondering….
Old Dirty Bomber: Congressional investigators set up a sting operation that used a bogus company with only a postal box address to get a license that allowed them to buy enough radioactive material to make a ‘dirty bomb.’ (So does this mean that Congress now has nuclear weapons? Might they attack the Senate? The Supreme Court? Let’s ask ‘Guts’ Chertoff; He may not know, but he’s probably got that ‘feeling.’
‘A Message For You, Rudy’: New York firefighters have produced a video that debunks the ‘America’s Mayor’ urban myth. Among many high points, the flick shows Giuliani ordering firefighters to rescue $200 million dollars in gold from one of the buildings, while at the same time abandoning 242 of their co-workers and countless civilians in the rubble.
Moon Over Washington: Yesterday, president Bush appeared at the dedication of the renovated press briefing at the White House, metaphorically ‘mooned’ the media.
Who’s Laughing Now?: In Brecksville, Ohio, Bush made a little girl cry by making fun of her question about immigration….Never mind the fact of the president’s risible ignorance of the underlying issues in the ‘immigration debate’, which is more precisely a matter of economic refugees fleeing the devastation wreaked by free trade agreements.
Bush ordered his harpy minions, Harriet Miers and Sara Taylor not to testify or else…(Insert implied threat here).
Hoo-wah!: A military judge has cleared the decks for the court martial of the only officer to be charged in the Abu Ghraib torture case.
And the officer investigating the Haditha Massacre has recommended that the battalion leader responsible be court martialed.
The Nixon Library goes public! All that dirty laundry is under federal control. This will be good….But not as good as the Bush records – but we’ll all be dead and gone before those are released. (As a private institution, the ‘Nixon’ told visitors that Watergate was a ‘coup’ by The Gin-Man’s political rivals and that Woodward and Bernstein were paid shills….)
Ahab Lives: The Navy is going ahead with its pans to deploy whale-killing sonar.
Pine beetles have destroyed Colorado’s forests.
In Lebanon at the moment, the Army is pounding away at the all-but-vacated Nahr al-Bared refugee camp. Lebanon’s US-backed stooge government says that the Palestinian camp is infested with al-Qaeda operatives. (But why would al-Qaeda be hanging around a miserable Palestinian refugee camp when they could just rent a postal box in the US…?)
Refugee Round Up: Here’s a brief summary of the global state of disintegrating human decency: The number of refugees worldwide increased by almost 2 million – most of them Iraqi. So far, Syria has taken in 500 thousand, Jordan 250 thousand, Egypt some 80 thousand and - the envelope please – the US, a whopping 202.
And the United Nations is none too happy with US “policy” (And I use the term very loosely) in Iraq.
The dollar continues to lose value on world markets.
Britain and Russia are at one another’s’ throats over the Litvenenko murder.
The Indian chemical giant Tata is planning to destroy the breeding ground for most of the world’s flamingos. They’ve got a joint venture going with the Tanzania government to mine potash around Lake Natron.
A Chilean judge has blocked the extradition of former president and all-round criminal Alberto Fujimori.
In Greece, the forest that has sheltered Athens from scorching temperatures for thousands of years has burned flat.
And Lady Bird Johnson, former first lady and nature lover, has died at the age of 94.