Hmpf…as I write this, it's 12:20 a.m. (blogger's hours) and both Blogger.com and the "*.blogspot.com" set of blogs are all unavailable. It's not on my end - I can get to loads of other sites just fine - but our corner of the blogosphere is (to steal a phrase) "uptight and outta sight." So when this finally gets posted, it will be a kind of "delayed-broadcast" blog posting….
Good moanin' - Got an email from my friend Kevin C. and Doug K. - one of those "you know you're from Chicago if…" kinds of things. For someone who's only been here 14 months, I scored pretty well on their little test. I still don't know my cross-streets well enough to know where many intersections are yet (thank you, God, for MapQuest and Yahoo Driving Directions!), and I still don't know which rail stations are Amtrak and which ones are Metra. But I'm gettin' there.
Moanin' - has anybody else picked up on this? Under our current administration, we've poured an obscene amount of money into our military over the past 4 years, even excluding the war effort. (In fact, even under Br'er Clinton, we poured an obscene amount of money into that segment of our government. It's just a much bigger obscenity, now.) And yet when we hear about the various failures of equipment, communications, etc. on the battle lines in Iraq, it's all about how the equipment or the networks (or whatever) weren't good enough for battlefield operations. Thus, bad decisions got made, and more people got killed than should have (however anyone figures out what that number is supposed to be...).
Does this seem problematic to anyone else besides me? Why isn't every thinking person throwing up their windows, leaning out and screaming, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it any more!!!"? How could we spend that much money, year after year, and still have insufficient means to wage war?
The news is full of this nonsense - $70 billion more for the war voted this week; a $136 billion corporate tax-cut bill approved, as the AP wire said, "without fanfare on Air Force One, quietly signing the most sweeping rewrite of corporate tax law in nearly two decades." Wonder what the working poor (of which I am now officially a member) are getting from the White House this year? Even if we split $136 billion by the 220 million Americans who aren't at the top of the heap, that's still $618 a person...I'd take a check or EFT transfer, personally.
Moanin' - Second verse, close to the first....the news tells me that the Army has agreed to a Pentagon investigation about Halliburton deals for war contracts.
Isn't that nice? I'm so glad they agreed...
Who's running this country, anyway? Why in the name of all that's holy does the Army have to agree to anything in this case?? Just go in and investigate the mess, wouldja please? There is every indication that somebody broke more than a couple laws - and trust me, they sure as the devil would never ask me politely if I would submit to an investigation! If I even park in the wrong spot, no one hesitates to haul my car off to the impound lot. (No resentment there, you understand...) Seems to me that the old "sauce for the goose" rule ought to apply here. But "the reasonable man rule" seems never to apply to government….Grrr…
Makes me want to dust off Tom Paxton's great marching song from the Chrysler-bailout years - too bad Halliburton doesn't fit the meter...
OK, I'm done. Much more of this, and I'm gonna get toxic. (or more toxic…)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment