0914 am 'Get This' news

09/14/07 Get This
Chris Andreae
 

1. Dear Santa Claus:  Sixty-one County and State officials from every corner of Oregon signed a letter urging Congress to end the war in Iraq.  (And they won’t get a pony either….)
2. The ACLU isn’t buying the Ashland police’s story that a Taser victim committed suicide.  Bad timing isn’t necessarily better than no timing at all:  This, at the very moment when Ashland Police Chief Terry Holderness plans to ask the city to…that’s right, buy more Tasers.  (We have Rudy Giuliani’s old partner in crime, Bernard Kerik to thank for police nationwide getting their Taser on. That Bernie, such a salesman…)
3. Look!  Up in the sky!  It’s a bird!  It’s a plane!  It’s….a lawsuit:  An American Indian group says that the religious significance of a chunk of historic meteorite is being ignored by selling the rock to the highest bidder.  The owner of a small piece of the ‘Willamette Meteorite’ expects the sale to bring something like a million dollars.  (Which he will probably blow at Spirit Mountain Casino…)
4. Grover’s Corners:  Eighty year-old Grover Palin is the State’s first Measure 37 jackpot winner.  You go, Grover!  Too senile to see the big picture; too old to care.  Don’t bet money that age always brings with it wisdom and a good heart.  What’s that line about the land not belonging to us but we hold it in trust for future generations?
5. You Can’t Go Home Again:  Turns out that a larger than expected number of Oregon’s school children can’t go home after school because they have no home to go to.  Sort of blows a hole in the concept of “homework,” doesn’t it.  What are they going to call it?  “streetwork”, “shelterwork”?
6. Frankenfish:  The Japanese – always a step ahead of the rest of us – have come up with surrogate parenting for fish.  Yes, it’s called “surrogate broodstocking” and what happens is this:  They inject newly hatched but sterile Asian masu salmon with sperm-growing cells from rainbow trout and somehow you wind-up with sockeye salmon.  I may have left something out.  Bottom line:  Don’t eat sockeye salmon or you could give birth to a trout…
7. Sins of Emission:  A federal court in Vermont sided with a growing number of states that have adopted new clean air emissions standards like the ones enacted by California.  The automakers are yipping, but who told them to make cars people don’t like in the first place.  “Market research” need have proceeded no further than the morning papers…
8. Aloha and Ahoy:  Hawaii’s new “superferry” is set to sail – without the environmental assessment it needs by law, to operate.  (I’m sure the thing will ‘wow’ the tourists …until it hits a whale, hopefully an angry Moby Dick-type whale with a chip on its fin…Perhaps a relative of the one the Makah just killed?)
9. Autoworkers are talking strike at General Motors.  (Thing is, the American labor movement is virtually D.O.A., thanks to abandonment on the part of workers.  And the American car era is similarly out of gas because management is incapable of listening to what people want.  Or even looking out the window of the corner office at their own parking lot…)
10. “Truth?  You Can’t Handle the Truth”:  Even CNN is getting “curiouser and curiouser” about that ‘mystery plane’ that was seen in restricted airspace over the White House on 9/11.  No mystery about it actually…For the record, it was an E-4B.  It’s a flying command post built and equipped to keep the government running no matter what.  This piece of evidence was deemed “unimportant” by Lee Hamilton of the ‘9/11 Commission’.  (Name of that aircraft?    Need you ask!…The ‘Doomsday Plane.’ 
11. More on the story of the two soldiers who were killed in a “single-vehicle crash” in Baghdad just two weeks after their article eviscerating the whole war in Iraq paradigm appeared as an Op-Ed in the New York Times.  Here’s – again – what one of those soldiers mother’s had to say  after the article came out:  “Son, I don’t want you to have problems because of this.  Hopefully nothing will happen.”  Well, something happened…
12. Bush says he’s going to reduce troop levels.  And by cracky, he kept his word: Two down tens of thousands more to go…
13. The Pentagon censored the audio of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s testimony – we don’t want to upset the public with vivid tales of torture.  But you can read the text.  (News outlets gloated that Sheikh Mohammed’s English was not up to snuff…Well slap-me-silly, the man has been tortured for years at some the CIA’s blackest Black Sites, he’s confessed to everything from the first attack on the World Trade Center to killing Phil Spector’s girlfriend, and from what I heard, his English was better than that of The Decider.  Don’t even ask if any of his interrogators speak fluent Arabic…)
14. Consumer confidence is down.
15. You Know You’re In Trouble When:  America’s top diplomat in Iran told the Washington Post that it looks pretty much like we’re going to attack Iran. (Just as soon as we get that new military base four miles from the border up and running…) That’s American diplomacy for ya!  
16. Gallows Humor:  Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says Bush should be tried in court, just as Saddam Hussein was.  (Couldn’t agree more!  And how about a spectacular grande finale like the one…)
17. Now we’ve got Canada worried about immigration. 
18. It’s Getting Hot In Here:  In Pakistan, at least fifteen soldiers have been killed in a suspected suicide bombing at an army base south of Islamabad.  Most of the victims were officers from an elite counter-terrorism force, the Special Services Group. 
19. Things are so bad in Zimbabwe that people are eating their pets.  (Is it red or white wine with cat?  I can’t ever remember…)
20. After 22 years of dithering bigotry,  the United Nations General Assembly has adopted a declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples.  The intention is to protect the their human rights as well as their land and resources.  (What’s left of them anyway, after decades of globalization and climate change…)
21. A Sway of Life:  Another earthquake hit Sumatra and the parts around Indonesia. 
22. Hurricane Umberto made  new land speed records by going from a tropical storm to a full-blown (No pun intended) hurricane in “sixty seconds.”
23. And finally, one in three Americans think Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for 9/11.