0429 am 'Get This' news

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Produced by: 
KBOO
Air date: 
Mon, 04/28/2008 - 5:00pm

 Get This: Vote.  What makes you so important that not voting is going to “send a message”? 04/29/08 Chris Andreae  

  1. Today is the deadline for getting your vote on.  If you have any changes in party allegiance to make, if you have not registered, this is it.  C’mon…You know you want to.  No,  Cynthia McKinney is not the front runner the last time I checked.  But if you let them steal it again, this is the last chance we’ve got before the final slide into fascist mayhem – and then it won’t matter how much you love the ‘third party candidate’ it will be All One Party, and that’s no party at all.
  2. Heavy-Hitters & Highest Bidders:  Portland’s got candidates galore running in all directions.  This is going to be fun!  Who doesn’t love a good sack race?  Joe Walsh vs. the mighty Earl Blumenaur?  The only mystery here is why a few heavy-hitters aren’t demanding impeachment.  (No mystery at all when you remember that “heavy-hitters” didn’t get that way without selling their souls.  And these days, it’s a buyers’ market.  ‘Follow the Money’ lead to one impeachment.  What’s stopping us now?)
  3. Ghost Town:  Rural Oregon is a strange state of mind:  Elected officials are quitting in droves.  Seems they don’t want anyone following their money.   The problem is they don’t want to file Statements of Economic Interest disclosures as mandated by the State’s conflict-of-interest laws.  (So in case you were planning on following that particular money, you can’t.  But I can tell you where it is going in two words:  ‘Destination resorts’.
  4. And the wheels on the law go…Oregon is facing off with the ACLU over a ridiculous law that “restricts the sale of sexually explicit material to children.”  Sounds reasonable.  But wait!  Are we all such children that we need Bible-thumpers conflating sin and crime in the name of grinding minds into ever-narrowing pointy heads (Pointy heads fit better in those hoods, y’know…)  The law is yet another way to legalize idiocy.  We shave laws created to prevent priests from bonking the choir boys.  We have laws prohibiting old Uncle Billy-Bob from bonking his niece.  And we have laws against bonking anyone if money changes hands.  So now we have a new law to stop kids reading Judy Blume books or studying the directions for inserting a tampax.
  5. Garbage In/Garbage Out:  The Feds are discovering all over again that if you make waste, you have to put it somewhere.  Hanford made a lot of seriously deadly waste that’s not going anywhere for a very long time.  Nevada is as good ass next door when the stuff gets loose…And even the Feds know that eventually it will…
  6. For my next trick, I’ll need a volunteer.:  An Egyptian-owned tanker piped waste oil into Oregon-owned coastal zone, got whacked $7.25 million dollars…And yet – mirabile dictum – the environmental disaster is still there!  The money did not make the poison vanish.  Want to see The National Navigation Company saw a lady in half?  Didn’t think so…
  7. On A Clear Day You Can See Gitmo:  This summer, Washington boaters are being asked to spot terrorists on the waters between Canada and the US.   (Picture Khalid al-Masri being accosted by a sunburned, overweight teenager wearing a ‘beer hat’ and riding a Skidoo…I feel much safer now…)
  8. First forest fire of the season!  At least in the Pacific Northwest.  This one’s in Idaho.  (Can you still call it a “forest fire” if half of the Los Angeles basin is burning?  If so, those SoCal bastards beat us to the punch once again.)  
  9. Praise The Lord And Pass The Ritalin:  See, there’s this family in Forest Grove, kid is out of control, they ask the school to do the parenting that the parents opted out of.  So the parents pack Sonny Boy off to a private school in Prineville and want their local school district to foot the bill.  The story is that the scion of this magnificent family unit has ADHD.  That’s like saying young gazelles are too ‘jumpy.’  Who doesn’t have it these days…(Hello young lovers wherever you are:  Don’t squirt one out unless you are prepared to undertake some serious parenting.  Forest Grove isn’t going to raise your child, and if the courts have anything to say about it, neither is Prineville…)
  10. Could be Worse Dept:  In Florida, a seven year-old child stole his granny’s SUV and went on (I wish I could truthfully say “drunken”) a savage rampage.  Police said the behavior was “out of character for a seven year-old.”  (Send that boy to Prineville:  They’ll handle it…)
  11. House Judiciary committee Chairman, John Conyers is going to subpoena John ‘TortureMemo’ Yoo and David ‘Call Me Daddy’ Addington (Cheney’s Chief of Staff) unless some serious quid pro quo happens…
  12. The Supreme Court approved Indiana’s voter ID law – and not a Neocon moment too soon.  The primary is May 6th.
  13. Why they call it a military “campaign”:   Soldiers deployed to far-flung places are allowed to vote – it’s just that their votes don’t get counted.  Oh, there are a number of official reasons for this.  But it boils down to the fact that the people who brought you the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections don’t want to know what the troops think about America’s Long War.
  14. Department of Not Surprising:  Now that the military is accepting recruits who are high school dropouts with drug busts, criminal records, the courts are beginning to cope with huge numbers of violent and/or suicidal veterans.  So what do we do about this?  Tighter requirements for soldiering?  Shorter deployment?  Better après-war training?  No war in the first place?  No, no, no and no.  Instead, we are going to have special courts for people with PTSD (Which, in my opinion, would include anyone who has ever had dealings with the criminal justice system)  where they can get help.  Couple questions:  Shouldn’t everyone have access to these kinder, gentler courts?  I mean who among us – including seven year-old children in Florida – is not a heartbeat away from running amok?  And secondly; what the hell did we expect, sending impoverished, ignorant  teenagers into a totally unfamiliar country where everyone hates them, give them speed and steroids, and guns, tell them to shoot anything that moves.  I mean, how’s that going to look on a resume?  “Homicidal dufus with eighth grade education seeks gainful employment”?  Or perhaps a simple sign held aloft while standing next to the on-ramp:  ‘Will Kill For Food.  God Bless’…
  15. Human Rights Watch says it has been watching something far from right – and not very human either - going on in American prisons in Iraq.  Turns out US soldiers are abusing Iraqi prisoners.
  16. The White House has drawn the attention of the Government accountability Office regarding it’s willful, deliberate undermining of the EPA.
  17. Tornados blasted Virginia.  No surprise there either:  It is well understood, though not so well known that air pollution causes violently weird weather.
  18. Australia is spending $13 billion dollars to secure its water supply – just as soon as it finds one.
  19. The former chief prosecutor for the Gitmo war crimes tribunals is going to appear as a defense witness.  (Air Force Colonel Moe Davis must indeed have “witnessed” something untoward going on down there in Cuba. 
  20. Tarik Aziz and “Chemical” Ali go on trial today.  I think we all know where that’s going.  The only question is Will either man’s head be accidentally snapped off during the Grande Finale?

 

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