1015 am 'Get This' news

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Produced by: 
KBOO
Air date: 
Sun, 10/14/2007 - 5:00pm

10/15/07 Get This
Chris Andreae
 

  1. 1.  Street of Bad Dreams:  Cesar Chavez Avenue is the new Malcolm X Boulevard, as it seems to be turning out.  Mirabile dictum, a simple name change from ‘Interstate Avenue’ – bland, generic, well, let’s just say it: White – to  ‘Cesar Chavez Avenue’.  One might think the change would be welcomed by the whole neighborhood.  One would, of course be wrong.  How anyone could conjure up warm, fuzzy sentiment for the word, ‘Interstate’ is hard to fathom…
  2. It’s Monday, and heeeere’s Martha Odom with the Activist Report:  Political activists in Denver hit the streets to make certain the citizenry clearly understands that Columbus was not the wided-eyed innocent abroad American history makes him out to be.  In Portland, the Immigrant Rights Coalition was blocked by Homeland Security Agents when they tried to pay a visit to the Social Security office with a message opposing DHS rules on unmatched Social Security numbers.  Opt Out volunteers visited schools with the message; Your future probably has more to offer than killing people for money.  PSU students held a Free Burma rally.  And that’s just the report for last week…You’ve got a whole new world of action coming on…
  3. Shopping for Rapture:  The Clackamas County mega-church, New Hope, is taking it to the next logical level.  The First Church of shopping is going to incorporate, well, church and shopping.  New Hope envisions a “civic center fully integrated into a commercial complex”.  (That’s a mall, to the rest of us…)
  4. Somewhere in a wildlife refuge near Corvallis, Hoffman Horse Works is on the job.  Some of the more invasive trees are crowding out an ancient stand of oaks, so it is being selectively logged – by horses.  Yes, a couple of Suffock Punch geldings are doing the heavy lifting.  (Logging with horses only seems exotic now.  If you peek over the edge of the petro-abyss, you’ll see a lot more horse power in the future…)
  5. Your Money or Your Life:  Former Del Monte workers are suing the company for back pay and overtime.  (As far as the slave wages and sub-human working conditions are concerned, that’s not a question of money:  Those aspects of immigrant life are the lies society chooses to live with…)
  6. Kevin ‘Mandatory Minimum’ Mannix is off the rails again.  (My guess is that he just took a major shareholder position in private prison management companies and wants to help out Mother Nature by shaking the old apple tree instead of waiting around for the windfall to drop into his hands…Just a guess.).  This time, Mannix wants minimum sentences for a whole new world of drug and property crimes.  Windfall from that?  The state is going to need three – at least – new prisons to accommodate the “criminals” Mannix needs to make book.
  7. Basic Rights Oregon is still fighting the good fight:  “In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;  And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;    And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;   And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up."   - Martin Niemöller.
  8. It’s raining “fake dirty bombs” in Oregon, but just across the river in Washington, the Sunshine Committee is prying away at the State’s Open Records laws.  Public discourse is drowning in governmental secrecy in the Shadow States of America…Anybody got a light?
  9. Righters’ Cramp:  It looks like the Pentagon sent out several hundred – perhaps  thousands -  of these secret “National Security Letters.”  The ACLU got hold of 455 of them and found most of thee information had been heavily redacted.  If you get one of these “letters”,  you can’t tell anyone – that way when you have an “accident” or “disappear” your friends and family won’t ask difficult questions…
  10. I Am Spartacus!  The military is trying to figure out if private security company contractors who routinely murder civilians – Blackwater USA – can be considered ‘Enemy Combatants.’  In which case, they could be sent to Guantanamo Bay.  (When the going gets tough, the tough Git-mo…)
  11. The Western hemisphere is plagued with attacks on free expression.
  12. America’s rivers are drowning in human waste.
  13. In Beaumont, Texas, the Rowan Oil Company is getting socked with three felony convictions for dumping hydraulic fluid into the Gulf of Mexico (The company would probably have used a convenient river if the water hadn’t all been used to water lawns in Phoenix and Los Angeles….).
  14. Vladimir Plotin:  The story is that there is a plot afoot to assassinate Russian president, Vladimir Putin when he visits Iran this week.  “The Kremlin confirmed that Putin had been informed of the alleged plot.”  Anybody smell CIA black ops/propaganda operation?   (In the old days, the Agency was not nearly so obvious and far more creative…)
  15. The New York-based One Voice organization had to cancel its Peace Concert in Israel due to threats of violence to Palestinians.  (It’s rather more complicated than that: One Voice advocates a two-state solution amounting to a sort of benevolent apartheid with no mention of right of return or reparations for Palestinians whose land was seized…)
  16. Israel’s Attorney General ordered new criminal investigations into Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.  Seems Ehud acted “improperly” when he was trade minister, steering government grants to friends:  Destroying the Palestinian economy and bombing Lebanon came later in his career…
  17. Fox’s Big Erection:  In Veracruz, Mexico, just hours after it was erected, protestors pulled down and destroyed a stature of Vicente Fox.
  18. In Iraq, two journalists have been killed in as many days.  Yesterday, it was Salih Saif Aldin of the Washington Post Today Abdel-Razak al-Dibo, a freelancer, died.  So far, nearly 200 journos and media people have been killed in Iraq – And we still don’t really know what the hell is going on over there.
  19. Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto also has assassination plots to worry over.  And given current events in Pakistan and past events in Ms.  Bhutto’s political career, I’d say odds are better on Vladimir Putin…
  20. “Who’s In Charge Here?”:  The Taliban sent Hamid Karzai a list of their demands.  (Someone shot the Taliban some bad intel;  Hamid Karzai couldn’t order a cheeseburger successfully.  What makes the Taliban think he could possibly do anything about addressing their demands is anybody’s guess…)
  21. You’ve Got Blood On Your Pants:  Gap workers in Bangalore, India have been dying on the job at an alarming rate.
  22. China has cancelled human rights talks with German Chancellor, Angela Merkel just a few weeks after Merkel met with the Dalai Lama.  This, because of fears that the association with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader would hurt Chinese people’s feelings. 

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