0911 am 'Get This' news

09/11/07 Get This
Chris Andreae
 

1. The heat is on today.  Yes, there’s a heat advisory for most of Oregon today.  Well, that’s weather for you:  Everyone complains but nobody does anything.  On the other hand there’s climate, and it’s way past time to do something about that.  Last week, a Florida-size chunk of Arctic ice melted in 6 days.
2. Tommy Potter and the Election of Doom:  Tom Potter aka ‘Strong Mayor’ won’t run for re-election, leaving the field wide open to Vera Katz protégé, Sam Adams.  Trouble with relatively “good” politicos is that they are rarely good enough.  (Put another way, winning the hog-fucking contest doesn’t necessarily make a person beautiful…Not even to the hogs.)
3. Brandon Mayfield is going after the USA Patriot Act and he’s got Gerry Spence on his team.  (When the movie comes out Johnny Depp will play Mayfield, George Clooney will play Spence and Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper and Anthony Hopkins will represent the government.  There’ll be a lot of sex and maybe a good car chase – and that’s just the government side of things…)
4. The results of a homelessness survey for Marion and Polk counties is out.  And the envelope please…Turns out 2006 homeless people were counted, all with an assortment of personal problems, which can be summed up in one word, “jail.”  The numbers may be a bit low, however.  Turns out that the police staged raids the day before the survey was done, thus providing “housing” for who-knows-how many potential respondents.
5. Killed Willie:  Representatives of the Makah Tribal Counsel went to DC to explain to the federal government how it happened that five members of the tribe went “off the deep end”, so to speak, harpooning and then machine gunning a grey whale all in the name of “tradition”.  (Since when were AK-47s a “tradition” among America’s native peoples?)   
6. Could it get any worse?  It could indeed.  Pacific grey whale numbers are declining, contrary to the popular belief that the creatures were experiencing a comeback.  As it happens the only “comeback” the grey whales are destined to experience will be in the next life.  Thanks to climate change the whales are dying of starvation because the warming of the oceans has wiped out their sources of food.
7. A Zogby poll demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that Americans would make great whale food but they’re too big:  Other than that, they appear to have the intellectual capacity of zooplankton.  Eighty-one percent of Americans say that 9/11 was “the most significant historical even of their lifetimes” (I suppose there’s some truth to that if one has squandered one’s lifetime shopping and watching TV…).  Once they realize that 9/11 was an inside job we can expect that percentage to go even higher.
8. Protesters strategically arrayed around the right microphones got a word or two in edgewise during General David Petraeus’s PowerPoint presentation of the Iraq war yesterday.  For the most part, Code Pink staged the action.  Adam Kokesh was dragged away.  Congressional leaders said the protestors would be persecuted – s’cuse me.  I meant prosecuted – to the fullest extent of the law…and it’s a pretty extensive law at that.
9. Petraeus, like the schoolboy that he is, when asked if he was not merely regurgitating a White House script, insisted, “I wrote it myself.”  (I think he bought it online from a college paper mill…)
10. A New York couple – both of them mortgage brokers  - turned their own home into a knock-shop complete with a red ribbon to let the Johns know they were officially open for business.  At present they are officially under arrest.
11. In San Bernardino County there was a huge shoot-out this week.  We’ll never know what really happened.  But here’s the short of it:  California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection were on their way to destroy a marijuana plantation when they surprised the people guarding it…who opened fire with automatic weapons.  Sure enough, the Forestry guys returned fire.  One has to ask, What were Forestry officials doing out in the woods with automatic weapons?
12. In Alaska, a former state lawmaker said he had to “cheat, steal. beg, borrow and lie” to provide incentives for petroleum producers to build a natural gas pipeline tapping the vast North Slope reserves.
13. Hawaii is planning to turn a decommissioned naval vessel into a homeless shelter.  (Like prison, only with a fantail!)
14. The Pentagon is planning to build a new military base conveniently located four miles from the Iranian border.  (What?  Don’t we already have a couple of those in Turkey?)
15. OPEC is meeting in Vienna to decide the fate of the flagging US economy. 
16. Out Of Africa:  US officials are scrabbling to get ahead of yet another foreign policy/PR debacle.  The problem is that they need to explain why the launch of a new US military command for Africa is aimed at “helping”  (As the world now is painfully aware, American “help” bears a strong resemblance to a smoking crater…)  the continent boost its own security, not projecting American power (In much the same way that we are really only in Iraq to “help” the Iraqis build their own police and armed forces…)
17. And our own Top Spook, Michael McConnell says that the only reason Germany was able to foil a terrorist plot was because that nation had recently reconfigured its privacy and civil liberties laws to more closely resemble those of America.  Translation:  They permitted wiretapping.  (Note To Germany:  If it were not for America’s deplorable shambles of a foreign policy, you wouldn’t have to deal with “terrorist plots” in the first place…)
18. Cheeky Palestinian freedom fighters in Gaza managed to lob a Qassam rocket at an Israeli army base in southern Israel.  (Now if they’d hit a base in northern Israel from Gaza, the Israelis really would be in trouble.)  And of course as the Syrians know all too well, Israel itself has a bad habit of accidentally dropping armaments on other counties’ sovereign territory from warplanes. Not the same as bombing…not at all the same…
19. Libya is set to host multinational peace talks on the genocide in Darfur. 
20. “Let’s Give Them Something To Talk About”:  So Sudan figured, What the hell and bombed the town of Haskinita in northern Darfur.
21. The polar bears have Gone With The Great White Whale…