1106 am 'Get This' news

11/06/07 Get This
Chris Andreae
 

1. Hot Flash:  After vast swaths of southern California covered with houses burned down, residents of Nedonna Beach looked around and noticed that they too lived in wooden houses surrounded by fuel and that, in the event of a fire, there was only one way out for non-swimmers.  They raised hell at a Rockaway Beach City Hall meeting, which was supposed to rubberstamp another housing development.  Nedonnians beg to differ.  They see the writing on the wall and the flames on the roof…and developers swarming like locusts on the horizon.
2. Salmon advocates filed a lawsuit yesterday to force the Bush administration to obey a 5-year-old court order requiring it to make permanent rules to keep agricultural pesticides from killing salmon.  (When all the fish are gone, we’ll still have the pharmaceutical industry that has never seen a disaster it didn’t learn to love.  Test tube trout, anyone?)
3. Blount International has sold its forestry division to a subsidiary of Caterpillar Inc.  (See that way, the merger will promote industry cross-pollination:  Easier to mow down Palestinians mean easier to mow down trees means easier to mow down protestors trying to protect trees and Palestinians…)
4. Bottoms Up!  When two state regulators (That’s about all there actually are…) visited the Lakeside Reclamation Landfill in Washington County unannounced last month, what they found made them worth their paychecks:  It appeared that the hole was not bubbling with yeasty compost, but in fact was contaminated with industrial waste.  And get a look at the news photos!  Right next door there’s a vineyard…
5. Up In Smoke:  PGE says you are going to be footing the $300 million dollar bill for pollution controls at the power plant in Boardman.  Good idea, PGE – except for the part about customers paying through he nose.  Shouldn’t the polluter be cleaning up its own mess?  Carbon trading is coming to dinner.
6. “Don’t Ask”:  Multnomah County also has an idea.  The thing about jail and/or prison, is that it guarantees that those unfortunate thousands who get in and get out are going straight back.  Because people who have criminal records can’t get jobs that pay a living wage.  Crime doesn’t pay, but no crime pays even worse for ex-cons.  So the county has removed the incriminating question from its job application forms.  (It seems that if the idea of incarceration is to redress crimes against society, society really ought to reciprocate by overlooking past crimes – that or else do away with viciously debilitating terms of imprisonment…)
7. Because here’s just one of the things that can happen to an inmate at one of the nation’s many fine Houses of Correction:  An inmate contracted a flesh-eating bacterial infection which the prison doctor misdiagnosed as “an allergic reaction.”  The infection progressed to the point that the man is permanently disabled and disfigured.
8. There’s No Such Thing as Free Advice:  The Oregon Department of Human Services is spending $3.2 million dollars to hire a California consulting company to tell it how to spend less money.
9. Water Under the Bush:  President Bush is about to lose a veto fight for the first time.  Today the House will vote to override George’s Big V of a $23 billion dollar water projects bill, and the Senate will soon follow.  The bill provides for wetlands restoration and new locks on the Mississippi and other items on the plus side of the environmental ledger.
10. Cronies On The Run:  House Dems are threatening to hold Bush’s closest confidants – Josh Bolton and Harriet Miers, to be specific - in contempt of Congress unless they comply with subpoenas for information on the Justice Department’s Purge of the Prosecutors.  (The best thing one can say about Miers and Bolton is that they haven’t been caught bribing defense contractors or soliciting in public toilets like the rest of the Bush administration…)
11. Of course there’s always the covert support of genocide and the grotesque interference in the affairs of sovereign nations coupled with war crimes of epic proportions…But who’s counting?  A federal judge has ordered Condoleeza Rice and other senior colleagues to testify in the trial of two pro-Israeli lobbyists.  They are accused of passing classified information to government officials and journalists in Israel and their Name is AIPAC.  (Let’s get on with it and move Israel to Texas where it will fit perfectly with the cultural zeitgeist of violence, arrogance and corruption.) 
12. Putting Up Your Dukes:  Another One Bites The Dust:  A defense contractor with ties to Randy ‘Duke Cunningham has been convicted of bribery.  (Wait till the lid blows off all those ‘qui tam’ cases involving contractor fraud in Iraq…)
13. A US jury has awarded a $3.3 million dollar settlement to six Nicaraguan farm workers who were rendered sterile after working for years for Dole and Standard Fruit.  What crop were they growing?  Bananas. 
14. Slavery USA:  An Indonesian servant for a millionaire couple testified that she was forced to eat vomit, scalded with boiling water and required to watch American Idol – kidding, but it’s probably true.  The good news is that the shitbirds who enslaved the woman are on trial and may well wind up in prison.  We can only hope the flesh-eating bacteria know a great place to eat when they see one…
15. The National Guardsmen in California for the big fire (Presumably, they were there to stop the looting…) are going to have to give back all the “gifts” they helped themselves to.
16. Trick or Treat:  Top ICE-er, Julie Myers awarded “most original costume” to a Homeland Security employee who showed up at the office Halloween party dressed in prison stripes, fake dreadlocks and blackface.  The not-so-bright but deeply bigoted Miss Julie had to apologize to all employees and the National Association of African Americans in DHS to let them know that “Some of her best friends are black, wear dreadlocks and are incarcerated.”
17.  In Pakistan, two thousand lawyers led demonstrations in the streets, while another two thousand or so demonstrators were rounded up and thrown in the slammer.  I think I can see an angle here that the activist attorneys might want to play….
18. Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert – two of the weakest patsies ever to walk the earth – will probably be the only guests at Condoleeza Rice’s vaunted Peace Party.  Still no invitations out, so be sure to keep your schedule clear…the State Department is going to need warm bodies to fill those empty seats at the conference.
19. Aaaargh!  Somali pirates have freed the Taiwanese boat and crew that they captured about six months ago.
20. Sixteen people are missing after a mudslide hit a village in Mexico.  Reports say the rain has stopped but there’s still way too much water on the ground.
21. China and the US have agreed to establish a military hotline (So we can tell each other when we’re going to war?  Hotlines :They’re sooo Cold War.)
22. And here’s why we might be using that hotline in the near or distant future:  The Chinese oil firm PetroChina has trumped Exxon-Mobil as the world’s largest by market value.  This on its first day of trading in Shanghai.  Not bad for an upstart. 
23. Norway’s private security firm,  SIG has quite likely been carrying out assassinations on behalf of the US.  (I thought we used the Mossad?)
24. That’s What They Get Paid For:  A former employee of Blackwater Worldwide -  formerly Blackwater USA - is being charged with “mercenary activity” (Assassination) in Switzerland, a fact that has seriously disrupted his plans to join the Foreign Legion. It’s the Legion or Multnomah County – no one else is going to hire him after this…