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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, September 24, 2005

The Rich's Recovery Role 

...I was commenting the other day over at the other place where I've been blogsitting for oh so very long about the transparent games that fiscally and socially conservative Republicans were playing with the need for some offset to the $200 billion of hurricane recovery promised by Gee Dub. Instructive in all their proposals for offsetting the proposed expenditure was the absence of any sort of sacrifice by the well-to-do in the way of things like...oh, say, roll-back of Gee Dub's tax cuts. I've been struggling deep down inside with this seeming refusal to force the wealthy to bear much - much less "any" - burden in this difficult time, but it all became clear to me yesterday...

My epiphany came during a trip to a remote housing subdivision high up on the Oregon Cascade crest. I was reviewing a proposed emergency evacuation route with a state fire protection fellow (wandering around in a driving snow-storm while a hurricane was approaching the Texas/Louisiana Gulf Coast; we all have different realities) when it dawned on me: We need to avoid eliminating tax cuts on the rich so they can help us set goals. Goals are good. They can lend direction to our lives. In this particular instance, this little enclave of real estate lots represents just that sort of thing. They are small lots, by traditional rural Central Oregon standards, and most of them have not yet been sold or built on. But a good number have, and almost all of the houses are - quite simply - spectacular. A couple thousand square feet, cedar or custom log built, mostly; some with garages bigger than a couple of houses I've lived in. There are two are three dozen of these marvels sprinkled across the hillside, wildly expensive and incredibly lavish residences sitting on two hundred thousand dollar quarter-acre lots out in the middle of a kind of nowhere that only an understanding of the remoteness of the setting can explain. The punchline? With exactly two exceptions, these are weekend retreats rather than full-time homes. They are the places where certain Willamette Valley residents go for the occasional get-away. They are the wealthy's version of 'the little cabin in the woods'...

This is why we need to protect these people from the brutal sacrifices of participating in the recovery of suffering Americans. These people have a job to do. They need to build these remarkable occasionally used second homes out in the high country, far away from even the most mundane services such as a grocery store, so that we can see the reward that we, too, can receive as a result of hard work and wise investment. Medicare drug plans, public broadcasting, early childhood programs for the disadvantaged, or federal employee retirement programs are obviously budget line items that we can lay the meat axe to. Hillside weekend getaway mansions out in the middle of friggin' nowhere....well, those tax cuts need to be preserved so these people can continue to show the rest of us where right living could possibly lead us. It's so clear to me now...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:50 PM 0 comments

Friday, September 23, 2005

Serendipity Takes a Vicious Turn 

...right now in Galveston the temperature is 84 degrees and the humidity is 70 percent. At my perch on the east slope of the South Central Oregon Cascades the temperature is 39 degrees and the ununpredicted snow that has been falling since 0630 has switched finally to rain. Over the next several hours the weather here is going to change to partly cloudy and the high is supposed to be in the 60's. In Galveston, over the next several hours a hurricane, perhaps rating a '4' on the Saffir-Simpson scale is going to come ashore with the potential to wreak the kind of havoc not seen since September of 1900. If you are so inclined, now is way beyond being a good time to pray for the safety and well-being of the residents of Galveston, Houston, and other communities along the Texas/Louisiana Gulf Coast, not to mention those woe-begotten folks in New Orleans who are dealing with a repaired levee that has failed. If you are not generally so inclined, maybe now would be a good time to ponder whether or not it would hurt anything to try; these people need all the help they can get....
Posted by: Jack K. / 10:46 AM 0 comments

Thursday, September 22, 2005

And You'll Be Wearing This WHERE??!! 

...it's the hot new clothing item amongst with-it trendy Oregon teens. It's a tee-shirt...with a slogan. My teenagers are in near revolt, of course, for the twin reasons that 1) we don't have ready access to this particular example of civic pride, and B) Dear Ol' Dad, despite all the biting references to the physical condition of the refrigerator carton that his children will eventually force him to live in, has made it more that abundantly clear that they will neither be buying or wearing this particular example of civic pride...

And, no, it doesn't matter that we are Number 2 in the nation in per capita number of strip clubs. Some things just don't need the sense of celebration or recognition that pure numbers might suggest. And I don't need the calls from the school...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:49 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Deficit Spending and Deficient Policies 

...it's always sad to watch families fight over money issues, but some episides are far less tragic than others. Watching Congressional Repbulicans and the White House squabble over how to pay for Hurricane Katrina relief - even as Hurricane Rita appears poised to add some more zeros to the bottom line - is way less tragic than watching mom and dad hissing at each other over the utility bills. As has become the norm for the Bush administration, there isn't anything approximating an actual plan for how to account for a couple hundred billion extra unanticipated dollars of expenditures. Honoring fundamental principles of physics, this void refused to remain unfilled, resulting in every kind of wack-job right-wing fiscal tradition rushing in to take up space. Tax increases? Forget it, even though a few "moderate" Republicans have suggested such a heresy. Instead, the call is for cuts to other less essential federal budgets, possibly even including the oft-ridiculed "porkbarrel" earmarks in the transportation reauthorization bill (even though the pork cuts wouldn't even make a scratch in the suggested recovery cost)...

There are even efforts afoot to tilt the playing field a bit by playing the ol' blame game against state and local officials:
"The question is do we really want to flood New Orleans with money," said Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.).

Kingston said he has detected a building hostility toward New Orleans among his constituents, based on reports that local officials mismanaged the crisis, along with federal dollars that had previously flowed the region's way. "What we are hearing from constituents is: 'Wait a minute, slow down on this,' " Kingston said.

It's hard to know which way to go with this one. Is he stupid? Is he playing some sort of simple, transparent game? Or is this statement factually correct and he actually represents a district teeming with the sort of Billy-Bob cracker racist white trash constituients that one normally only sees in some Jean Claude Van Damm flick. It frankly escapes me why all but that handful of New Orleans residents who actually were in control of things should be blamed for their massive misfortune, but I've never claimed to understand the twisted malfunctioning traits of the right-wing mind...

We will lose the next World War. Or at least we will if Republicans are running the show. There's no way around that simple inelegant fact. Having sat on their hands for four years (although now we learn that they were disgruntled by all they saw going in the the budgeting process), the Republican majority parlayed a combination of tax cuts, spending increases, and a grand but unnecessary nation-building experiment into a degree of national debt that can only be expressed in numbers for which we have names but no real human comprehension. Now we have a real live local emergency with real live Americans' well-being on the line, and the only apparent sacrifice that's going to be made is by other Americans who rely on those "unessential" programs that Republicans are so eager to cut. The rich will not only get to keep their tax cuts, but they may even get more beyond that. This isn't the sort of approach that drove the Nazi's from the Normandy beaches across western Europe all the way back to the outskirts of Berlin. Inclination toward the societal sacrifices that were endured to make that happen don't run deep in today's Republican leaders. Sacrifice is not a comfortable concept to these people, nor is it indiscriminately applied...

The only grim benefit to all of this is the pleasure of watching that finely crafted Republican machine starting to throw itself seriously out of balance and threatening to fly apart in chunks from the hellacious vibrations. And so they turn on each other like wharf rats in a warehouse fire, desperate to get around or ahead of but most certainly away from the collapsing Bushco empire. A little Republican disunity is good for the Democratic soul, and it may also be helpful for the occasional Democratic office-seeker, too, if prospective candidates can figure out how to manage it...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:27 AM 0 comments

Sunday, September 18, 2005

The Carpetbaggers Ride Toward Oregon 

...it seems we are going to have visitors. Freedom Works, a D.C.-based group led by Dick Armey and wedded to the proposition that government most certainly is not for the people, has decided to drop in to try to get a measure on the 2006 ballot that would create stringent caps on government spending. Where do these people come from? How is it they decided that Oregon is such a great place (though not the only place, apparently) to try out their wing nut philosophies? And why isn't the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife giving some guidance in this matter, supplying the Hunting Guide with important information like when the season is open on Freedom Works-ers and what the bag limit would be?

The model for this effort to choke state government is Colorado, widely viewed by conservatives as a shining example with it's 1992 Constitutional Amendment. Sadly, this shining example only shimers in the eyes of folks who don't - like - actually live there. The so-called "Taxpayer Bill Of Rights" (TABOR) has forced painful reductions in state services from school funding to highway maintenance, and is actually the target of an effort led by the outgoing Republican Governor to at least suspend TABOR for several years so state government can at least struggle back to its knees...

...it's hard to imagine anyone who has been in Oregon for the last few recession years - with the possible exception of the methamphetamine crowd - actually thinking that what we need is some sort of draconian cap on state spending. We already have the punishing but much-beloved kicker rebate, wherein state economists play a guessing game with revenue forecasts and - if they underestimate by more that 2% - all tax revenue above their estimates is refunded to the tax payers. The hopefully soon to be former Republican leadership in the state legislature has already shown itself more than capable of wreaking havoc on state-funded services without the help of a bunch of snooty, fancy-pants big-city outsiders. The state police has roughly two-thirds the number of patrol officers that it did just a few years ago, even with the continual increase in population. The funding for transportation system maintenance is a shambles. The once-touted Oregon Health Plan keeps hacking away at covered services with a meat axe as funding for it continues it's downward slide. Oregon's is the only school system in the nation to earn a full week of attention by Doonesbury for its inability to actually remain open for the entire school year because of insufficient funding. We're good, thanks; we don't really need any outside help destroying our quality of life through insufficient government funding...

The logical response would be to meet these political carpetbaggers at the airport armed with pepper spray and cattle prods. Drive them back into the plane and force it to take off without food or drink and the toilets plugged and fouled, only allowing enough fuel to get back to where they came from. Beat at 'em with pictures of Tom McCall while wildly chanting "Enjoy your visit but don't stay!" We don't need these crackheads coming into our state to tell their sugary lies and force their stern, child-hating political beliefs on us; we can screw things up ourselves, thank you. At the very least, we need to start the rumor that they're all from California. That just might finish them off right there...
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:25 PM 0 comments

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