0913 am 'Get This' news

evergreen_web_banner.png

KBOO is open to the public! To visit the station, contact your staff person or call 503-231-8032.


Produced by: 
KBOO
Air date: 
Wed, 09/12/2007 - 5:00pm

09/13/07 Get This
Chris Andreae
 

  1. Wired:  A judge has unsealed the charges against Jacob Ferguson.  Jacob is the arsonist-turned-informant who helped bring down the largest so-called “ecosabotage” ring in the nation – not counting the Bureau of Land Management the Army Corps of Engineers and the Energy Department, all of which have done more “ecosabotage” than a bunch of hippies armed with Zippo lighters…
  2. Sulfur and nitrogen from power plants and agriculture are turning coastal water into battery acid.
  3. The Copper Salmon region in southern Oregon is on track to become a permanently protected wilderness area.  So the salmon runs are preserved – at least until the fish hit Battery Acid Beach…
  4. Washington State’s greenish movers and shakers figured out how to avoid the dangers of chemical contamination of the region presented by tossing obsolete electronic equipment in the local dump:  Ship it to a foreign dump, Oh, say in China or Nigeria where the environment is so toxic no one will notice.  (See how easy that was? Now it’s off to Starbucks for a $5 dollar coffee…)
  5. Show Us The Body:  House Speaker Nancy ‘Silent’ Pelosi was at the convention center along with Earl Blumenaur and Darlene Hooley.  It was the usual clusterfuck:  Angry constituents demanding answers to questions outside Portland’s towering glass double fuck-you’s, protestors hanging off the walls, politicians dodging the hardballs and lunging after the slop.  The sordid spectacle of public radio down on its knees before the ‘Speakiness’ of it all.  The FOX affiliates crouched like gargoyles is lavatories tapping out their Speaker stories.  Cables snaking away into the shadowy arterial system pulsing below the Center’s shatter-proof skin….But I digress.  The reporter from the Portland Alliance was refused entry because Pelosi’s office hadn’t sent the paper a press release.  KBOO’s reporter managed to ask Pelosi about the Military Commissions Act and the Right of Habeas Corpus and Pelosi managed not to answer that one either.
  6. Former head of the National Endowment for the Arts (It actually has no ‘head’ anymore:  It’s all arse and shoulders…Hence the title ‘National Endowment for the Arse’) John Frohmayer is running for Gordon Smith’s Senate seat as an Independent.
  7. Oregon has more homeless students than ever before.  But if you call them ‘Housing-challenged Youth’ is sounds like more of a good cause to the NeoLiberals…)
  8. The Oregon Supreme Court is running the numbers once again in one of the nation’s biggest awards against one of the nation’s biggest tobacco suits.  They seem a little high don’t you think, since even without warning printed on the package, it’s fairly easy to determine that smoke is bad for you…and that’s just the kind you can see and smell;  The other sorts are an order or two of magnitude worse, but then why sue an oil company?  Where’s the fun in that?
  9. Following the bouncing ball from yesterday, the R.J. Reynolds company has been forced to admit it put up the money behind the ‘Oregonians Against a Blank Check’ anti-Measure 50 campaign.  Put briefly, A tobacco company paid for ads aimed at convincing gullible voters not to vote for children’s healthcare.
  10. The number of laid-off workers filing claims for unemployment benefits rose last week for the sixth time in about as many weeks.  And that’s not counting the vast army of Doomed who have given up hope of finding a job.  (Yet another in a string of amazing coincidences:  Right at a time when the military needs more warm bodies to replace the cold dead ones, at  a moment in American history when young people are seriously reconsidering a career in the military…)
  11. Mississippi Goddamn:  In Mississippi, the Development Commission wants to take the money that still hasn’t been distributed to the working poor to assist them in rebuilding their lives and their house, and hand it over to the likes of KBR and Bechtel to rebuild Gulfport.
  12. We’ve got a La Nina revving up in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.  (Helps spread the Dead Zone around and provide hurricane steam…)
  13. Most of the Midwest’s major aquifers are contaminated with the carcinogenic pesticide Atrazine.  But once again, American ingenuity rises to the occasion:  Farm Bill legislation approved by the House –the Democrats – would make it nearly impossible for the Department of Agriculture to encourage farmers to use environmentally sound pesticides through conservation programs. On the bright side, Atrazine is like a gallon of chlorine in the old gene pool…
  14. California’s Attorney General Jerry Brown got ConocoPhilips in a lock and forced the oil  giant to spend $10 million dollars to “offset” greenhouse gases. (How that works is anybody’s guess:  We stuff the money into refinery smokestacks to keep the pollutants from coming us?  We buy a lot of good drugs so we don’t have to think about it?  We buy everyone living down wind from the refineries a one-way ticket to someplace warm…like Greenland…?)
  15. The Justice Department is on a Mission from God to persuade Democratic states to purge their voter rolls…of Democrats.  It’s the only way Giuliani can possibly win the ’08 election….And he will win.
  16. Immigration rally in DC on behalf of Elvira Arellano.  It’s a good thing – except for the use of her own son Saul, who clearly is more interested in Playstation III than immigration reform…But who can blame him?  The president himself is more interested in World of WarCraft the immigration reform….
  17.  European researchers say the American healthcare systems is a complete failure  (But Wowie!  Do we ever know how to sue a tobacco company!)
  18. In Iraq it’s cigars and Champaign all around.  Someone found a rocket fired into Camp Victory with ‘Made in Iran’ stamped on it.
  19. Two US soldiers co-authored an article in the New York Times that excoriated every lie trumpeted by the Pentagon about the amazing successes the military is achieving in Iraq. Exactly two weeks later they are both dead, killed in a “single-vehicle crash” while driving a truck through Baghdad.  The grieving mother of Omar Mora said when his article came out in the Times, “Son, I don’t want you to have problems because of this.  Hopefully nothing will happen to you.”  Yes…That’s what she said…(www.guardian.co.uk)
  20. There was another tremendous earthquake in the waters off Indonesia, but I recommend you take a look at that story in the Guardian.  And while you are ‘On the Google’ – as the president says -  why not also check out the interview with Mora’s mother on the Army Times website.

 
 
 

Audio by Topic: