Navigation
More About This Website

 

"Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore

Send these, the homeless, tempest-toss'd to me

I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door."

Hundreds of Oregon Corporations Escape the Minimum Tax

---------------------

Half of the US Is Broke

------------------------

The myth of the Christian country

----------------------

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

FDR, 2nd Inaugural Address, Jan 20, 1937

-----------------------

Middle East friendship chart

--------------------------------------

Corporations enriching shareholders

--------------------------------------

Facts not fiction on universal gun background checks

------------------------


-----------------------------

"Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere"

Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The GOP - Not One of US.

Wall Street, our new criminal class...       

   Business in the USA is sitting on $2 trillion dollars refusing to invest their own funds in expanding and hiring workers.  

   When one adds to this the reserves that banks, equity firms and hedge funds have - the picture is clear - "capitalism in the USA is on strike." 

   The engine of our economy - the spirit of entrepreneurship is not in evidence today.  So much for business being dynamic and risk taking. 

   They hire K- Street lobbyists and their ilk at the state level because they are averse to risk taking - pleading for tax breaks, tax credits and endless loopholes. 

   The "business of business" in America today is not about job creation, it's about wealth hoarding and redistribution from the middle class to the top 1%. 

   So for those who claim government doesn't create jobs, my response is that business doesn't either until given "corporate welfare" by government.  The fact is that the private and public sector are highly integrated, something the anti-tax, anti-government Tea Party types don't understand. 

   Job creation requires public/private partnerships but the benefits of such collaboration should go to the 99% not just the 1%.  

 

RAD'S

WEBSITE PICKS: 


 

  • A Middle East View      

Rami G. Khouri

  • RealClearPolitics:

Realclearpolitics

  • Jim Hightower:   

Jimhightower.com

  • Robert Reich:

Robert Reich

  • Thomas Friedman: 

Friedman Column

  • Nicholas Kristof: 

Kristof Column

Oregon's Motto: 

She flies with her own wings! 


Hard Times in Oregon: 

Hardtimes

The Oregon story - the rich get richer, the poor and middle class lose ground.  Check this front page Oregonian article out. 

Oregon wage gap widens

Homelessness in Oregon - a call to action

Chuck Currie The crisis of homelessness


  

      Oregon's coming 34th out of 41 states in the Obama "Race to the Top" illustrates the failure of leadership from Governor Kitzhaber and his predecessors as they have built an educational bridge to nowhere called high stakes testing.

   Instead of being in a race to the top we seem to be dumpster diving to the bottom despite doing education reform since 1991.  Insanity is termed doing the same thing over and over again.  When can we put a fork in this stupidity? 

   To confuse matters more the Oregonian's editorial board has pontificated that this was a lost opportunity to get federal funding for innovation.  How firing principals and teachers equals innovation is a mystery to me.   

   The way to reform schools is to reduce class sizes, to encourage teacher collaboration and to support their continued education.  High stakes testing and performance based assessment of teachers are NOT the answer!    

   If you want students to succeed you first have to resolve the issues they confront before they come to school.  Children who face poverty, hunger, homelessness, health care issues and family instability require wrap around services for them and their families, 24/7.   

   Every child needs a safe home of their own and parents who know how to be good parents.   

There is only one way to address this impending crisis.  Schools must have a stable source of funding. Until that happens - we will limp from crisis to crisis.   

 

 

    

    Why does the richest nation in the world have the moral blight of homeless people?

Invisible People

http://www.npr.org


 Homelessness

    Connecting the dots between homelessness & hunger in Oregon and Washington County: 

Homelessness:  

•    The faces of the homeless are families with children, single men and women, vets, and many who are impaired. It is estimated that in Washington County up to 56% of homelessness occurs to families.

Hunger:

•    Hunger is highest among single mother households (10%) and poor families (15%) as well as renters, unemployed workers and minority households. 

     In Washington County, Oregon's "economic engine," the divide between the affluent and the working poor continues.  We have a 19,000 unit gap in affordable low income rental housing.  County political and business leaders are indifferent to this crisis...   

----------------------------

If you want to e-mail me "comments" use my Yahoo back up e-mail address russdondero@yahoo.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RAD Lines

See my FACEBOOK @ Russ

------------------------------

 

 

Trump & The Mob

http-//www.politico.com#13C5A6C


Trump's role models are Vladmir Putin and Benito Mussolini.  He has contempt for our checks and balances system.  He wants to "rule" not govern like a strong man, a despot.  He will shredd the Constitution anytime he feels the urge to do so and like all despots he only listens to his inner circle.  And he is paranoid and narcissistic. 

     

Hundreds of Oregon Corporations Escape the Minimum Tax

---------------------

Half of the US Is Broke

------------------------

The myth of the Christian country

-----------------------------

Housing Needs in Oregon 

-----------------------------

 

---------------------------

"There are men who believe that democracy... is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate [and that] tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future..." 

FDR, 3rd Inaugural Address, Jan 20, 1940

  • "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." - Mayer Amschel Rothschild


  • Miguel de Cervantes, from The Duke - "I accuse you of being an idealist, a bad poet and an honest man."  Cervantes' response - "Guilty as charged, I have never had the courage to believe in nothing."   from Man of La Mancha  


Professor Kingfield, from the Paper Chase

   "I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you." 

- George Bernard Shaw

 

BLOGS:

From the Left Wing:

Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman - The New York Times

Democracy Now
democracynow.org

The Daily Kos

dailykos.com

Blue Oregon

blueoregon.com

 

"Children are made readers on the laps of their parents." 

- Emilie Buchwald 

 


    "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." 

- Justice John Paul Stevens, Bush v. Gore, 2001

    The state of our union - check out the map, it's a reality check for those who can't figure out why people are so ticked off... 

americanobserver

 



"Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war"

- John Adams

"Loyalty to country always.  Loyalty to government when it deserves it."  

- Mark Twain  

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”  

- George Santayana 

"The love of one's country is a natural thing.  But why should love stop at the border?" 

- Pablo Casals

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." 

- William Butler Yeats  

 

"You see things; and you say, 'Why?' 

But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"  

- George Bernard Shaw, "Back to Methuselah" (1921) 

"...the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society...  The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government..."  

- James Madison, Federalist Papers #11 

"Why … should we have government? Why not each individual take to himself the whole fruit of his labor, without having any of it taxed away?”   

The legitimate object of government, is to do for the people whatever they need to have done, but which they can not do, at all, or can not do, so well, for themselves – in their separate and individual capacities … There are many such things … roads, bridges and the like; providing for the helpless young and afflicted; common schools … the criminal and civil [justice] departments."    

- Abraham Lincoln 

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society  

- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 

"Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates, but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole..." 

- Edmund Burke  

“It is a maxim among these lawyers that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again, and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.  These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions.”  

- Jonathan Swift 

A RAD rhetorical question - Were Madison & Marx "Marxists"?  

 

"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments."   

- James Madison

 

FYI:  

Squareapace has closed the "comments" section on my blog as a way around this contact me via my Yahoo e-mail address posted on the left sidebar...   

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 


 

 

  

 


  

 

« A FORD, NOT A LINCOLN | Main | MERRY CHRISTMAS »
Wednesday
Dec272006

WHAT WOULD JESUS SAY?

By Floyd J. McKay / Guest columnist - "What would Jesus do about religion's evolution?"
    Listening to a glorious Christmas concert, my thoughts turned to how religion has come to dominate the news of the 21st century in ways I would never have dreamed as a youngster growing up in the clapboard Baptist church of my North Dakota family.
    That news is not uniformly good. Some of it is bizarre, or merely tragic.
    One cannot help but wonder what Jesus would think of today's religion that bears his name, let alone the other two monotheistic religions that emerged from his homeland.
    Certainly there is no peace on the troubled earth that we call the Holy Land. Nearly a quarter century ago, I produced a television documentary I called "Holy Land, Bloody Ground," for which I journeyed to the Middle East. If the ground was bloody in 1982, it is saturated in blood today, and all three monotheistic religions have a hand in the carnage.
    We kill, they kill, we all kill in the name of God. Christians are squeezed from the birthplace of Jesus by militant Zionist Israelis on one side and Islamic militants on the other. Ironically, Christian fundamentalists are egging this on in hopes that it will trigger the Rapture, when the chosen will have box seats as unbelievers are barbequed by a righteous God.
    Not to be outdone, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad favors an Islamic version of the End Times in which he nukes Israel and prompts the return of the Mahdi, a prophet of particular importance to Shiites.
    In Iraq, devastated by a war prosecuted by right-wing Christian politicians in league with neoconservative Zionists, an Islamic theocracy is likely to result, widening divisions within the region and putting women back in their proper place behind veils and walls.
    Even in this country, sometimes cited as the most religious in the Western world, the body of Christ is torn and tossed from one extreme to another.
    Episcopalians, a denomination that in my youth was associated with an upper class viewed only from afar, are splitting on the question of homosexuality. To accommodate their homophobia, some American parishes are turning to a Nigerian bishop, the fruit of 19th-century Anglican evangelism in Africa.
    In a peculiar religious soap opera, the family of America's Protestant icon, Billy Graham, is caught up in a bizarre debate over where the esteemed evangelist is to be buried — although he has not had the good grace to die, bless his heart.
    Graham's son, Franklin, who claims the mantle of evangelist leader but shows none of the compassion or humanity of his father, wants to bury Graham and his wife (also undead) in a strange memorial in Charlotte, N.C., that novelist and Graham friend Patricia Cornwell calls "a mockery."
    It is, indeed, somewhat bizarre, a Disneylike barn and silo where visitors are greeted by a talking cow. Graham's younger son sides with Graham's wife, who wants their burial places to be simple graves near their rural home.
    This drama is symbolic of what has come upon the Christian faith in this country. Summed up, many modern churches are modeled more closely on Adam Smith than Saint Peter. Franklin Graham is an entrepreneur, in the manner of Jerry Falwell, Billy James Hargis and a host of market-driven preachers. His dad did well financially, but it is extraordinarily hard to imagine him wanting to be remembered by a talking cow. As Cornwell told him, the whole affair is a travesty.
    How much of today's commercialized religion is just that?
    How many of Christianity's battles are fought to build market share? It would seem the moneychangers have returned to the temple along with disgraced evangelists, pedophile priests and intolerance.
    When the next Congress convenes in January, a Muslim congressman-elect from Minneapolis will swear his oath on the Quran. From the reaction of the Christian right and its talk-radio acolytes, one would think he was planning to swear on a portrait of Satan — or at least Saddam. "One nation under God" has come in recent years to mean "One nation under my God."
    Having achieved political power here and abroad, Christians, Muslims and Jews squander it by reaching for more. Christ, were he here today, might identify with penitents of all three religions, people of good will and good works of charity and brotherhood.
    But I suspect he would shun many of their self-righteous leaders who have sold their birthright for a pittance of political or financial power and who kill in God's name.
    They are giving religion a bad name.
    Floyd J. McKay, a journalism professor emeritus at Western Washington University, is a regular contributor to the Seattle Times editorial pages
    Editor's Note:  Amen brother Floyd!  Our family attended an Episcopal Christmas eve service at Portland's Trinity Church. One of my former students sings in the choir. From the make-up of the audience Blue Oregon was much in evidence!  Open and affirming is the buzz word in these parts including our own hometown United Church of Christ. Several years ago we attended a show at the Portland Art Museum of Russian art.  One set of lithographs was a beautiful chart listing the lineage of Abraham.  The sad fact is that the problems in the Middle East are a family feud.  Judaism, Islam and Christianity all come from the same source.  And the last time I checked, they affirmed the same God.  It goes to show that the best laid plans of the divine don't always work out when the hand of man enters the picture.   

Reader Comments

There are no comments for this journal entry. To create a new comment, use the form below.

PostPost a New Comment

Enter your information below to add a new comment.

My response is on my own website »
Author Email (optional):
Author URL (optional):
Post:
 
All HTML will be escaped. Hyperlinks will be created for URLs automatically.