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"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

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Half of the US Is Broke

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The myth of the Christian country

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“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

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Middle East friendship chart

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Corporations enriching shareholders

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Facts not fiction on universal gun background checks

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"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...   

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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

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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

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Half of the US Is Broke

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The myth of the Christian country

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Housing Needs in Oregon 

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"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...   

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 


 

 

  

 


  

 

« THE GREAT COMMUNICATOR | Main | NORTH OF THE BORDER »
Tuesday
May232006

POLITICAL POTPOURRI

    K-12:  Monday’s Oregonian editorial said it best.  K-12 graduation standards “…only work when they’re connected to a fully functioning school system – one with qualified teachers, defensible class sizes and adequate funding.  If Oregon wants to have any real standards for its graduates, it needs to reinvest in its public schools…”  
    How true.  Unfortunately the editorial writers of our state’s paper of record are still transfixed by the idea of high stakes tests, including proficiency tests for graduation.  And our state board of education wants to add to the list of required courses in English and math while considering tiered diplomas.  
    Again, the cart is before the horse in these discussions.  If you have high quality teachers, small class sizes and adequate funding – you will get good educational outcomes – just as the post WW II generation did in most cases.  We met the challenge of Sputnik not by high stakes testing but by investing in K-12 education and higher ed.  
    What we need is a governor who will to make such an investment in our future.
    Now which one of the three in the arena do you think is up to that task?  Democrat Ted Kulongoski, Republican Ron Saxton or Independent Ben Weslund?  
    Here’s the choices:  an incumbent who has been saying for 4 years – wait until my second term.  The past chair of the Portland Public school system that is barely on life support?  Or a state legislator who has chaired the Joint Ways & Means Committee and is willing to think outside the box about funding?  
    Autocracy:  Syndicated columnists, Robyn Blumner and George Will offered contrasting views of the state of the nation in Monday’s Oregonian.  Blumner rails against the current administration’s seemingly inexorable increase of power while the Congress slips into oblivion.  
    She argues that the Congress is “…MIA.  They have handed the game board to Bush and he has taken it and gone home.  He now controls his pieces and theirs.  But it wasn’t their game to give away.  It was ours…”  
    She reminds us that the Founders reasoned that liberty could only be protected by a system of checks and balances system where as Madison said “ambition would check ambition.”  Well somewhere along the post-9/11 roadmap, the Congress had a testosterone loss. It's lost its will to perform its constitutional duty. 
    We live in an Orwellian society of warrantless wiretaps and a nationwide system of data mining with no clear restrictions except the assurances by the former head of our top spy agency NSA, soon to be the head of CIA – that “probable cause” determines how far the government snoops.  
    Now isn’t that reassuring?  When the fox is in the hen house, he then warns the assembled masses that only if “probable cause” exits will he eat you!  Question, whose “probable cause?”  I thought that was for the courts to determine, not the NSA, CIA, FBI…  
    But dear old George Will assures us all is well with the Republic.  In a column titled “Liberalism’s new civil war” he waxes eloquently about the latest power struggle within the ranks of modern liberalism.  Funny, Will is not a liberal, unless you’re talking about the 18th century version thereof.  So why does he care?  
    He talks about some obscure fellow, Peter Beinart, editor at large of the New Republic – once a bastion of 20th century liberalism but more recently a captive of more centrist DLC types.  According to Will, Beinart “excavates” how a virile liberalism can win the war of terror and make the USA stand tall again.  
    Beinart argues that muscular liberalism that took the USA through the Cold War era began in 1947 when “liberal anti-totalitarians convened at the Willard [a famous hotel and watering hole in downtown DC] to found Americans for Democratic Action.”  
    According to the Beinart thesis, the ADA mission impossible was to rescue liberalism from the clutches of what Arnold would term “girlie man” libs like Henry Wallace and other progressives at the time who were not too hot to engage the Soviets in the so-called Cold War.  
    Beinart according to Will then connects the dots between mamby pamby libs of the ‘40s to their ilk today – the George McGoverns to the Michael Moores.  These “doughfaces” (a term attributed to historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.) flinch from the ‘fact’ that “…America could not have built schools for Afghan girls had it not bombed the Taliban first…”
    Ironic factoid. NPR interviewed two male teachers in Afghanistan this morning whose lives have been threatened by the “remnants” of the Taliban for teaching ideas antithetical to the Taliban’s restricted version of Islam. If the USA “kicked butt” so well 3 years ago, why is the Taliban so robust now?  Afghan girls and boys are not that safe and neither are their teachers!  
    Beinart argues, according to Will that “…liberals have lacked a narrative of national greatness that links America’s mission at home and abroad…”  The McGoverns and Moores like isolationists of the right in the ‘30s want to distance themselves from the world.  
    But Beinart admits he was wrong about supporting the invasion, wrong about Saddam, wrong in giving up on containment of Iraq and wrong about the Bush team’s competence.  Bush et al are guilty of hubris and impatience.  
    Echoing Blumner, Beinart argues that Bush “…has stripped away the restraints on American power, in an effort to show the world that we are not weak.  And in the process, he has made American power illegitimate, which has made us weak…”  
    But Beinart worries that today’s "doughfaces" in the Democratic party will repeat the errors of ’72 – ’76 in ’06 and ’08 given the rise of the Deaniacs. Will cites the famous line of McGovern’s ’72 acceptance speech during the "sunrise service" in Miami – “Come home, America”.  
    Will misrepresents McGovern’s message in doing so.  McGovern was not embracing retreat from the world, he was simply asking Americans to return to basic principles of governance – respect for the loyal opposition, quit spying on Americans, quit lying about the reasons for war, quit spending our human treasure and money in a war that was a quagmire.  
    It’s time we again, came home America.  Beinart and Will misread history.  But then again, that’s what neo-cons do even when they admit their mistakes.  They keep on making them!  Funny, George Will never went to war, George McGovern did.  McGovern was a decorated bomber pilot in WW II in the German theater.  
    Talk is cheap for George Will, just like it is for Dick Cheney.  
    Nonpartisan Primaries:  The public commission on reforming the legislature is cranking out its recommendations.  They’ve officially endorsed moving to annual legislative sessions; adopting open primaries, which allow independents to vote; and/or having a non-partisan primary.  
    The problem is that open primaries and non-partisan primaries are two different types of primary elections.  Oregon’s two major political parties can opt for an open primary any time they want to.  Both have played the game of allowing, then disallowing (a closed primary) independents to vote in their primary.  
    However, a non-partisan primary is a radical change.  It pits all candidates for the same office at all levels – local, state and federal against each other.    
    If a non-partisan primary had been in effect several weeks ago – Ron Saxton, Kevin Mannix, Jason Atkinson, Ted Kulongoski, Peter Sorenson, Jim Hill and Ben Westlund plus minority party candidates from the Libertarian, Green and Reform parties would have all been in the race for governor.  
    The top two candidates would emerge from the field for the November runoff election.  Theoretically, two Ds or two Rs might face off in the general election. It’s all about the math of plurality voting. Given the anemic turnout in May, this might have added some zest to the contest.
    Who do you think would have won such a wide-open election this time around?   
    However, there is a downside to non-partisan elections (though RAD has reluctantly thrown in the towel because things are so dysfunctional is Salem and favors them).
    Candidates with name familiarity and big money will have an advantage. Organization will also be important. This naturally gives PACs a huge roll in the game.  The unions that didn’t engage in May would be forced to pick a winner then and hope their guy is among the top two. There will be nothing cheap about these non-partisan battles.  
    RAD hopes that if we do pass a non-partisan primary that the ballot will show the party affiliation of the candidates as well as which candidates have secured a party endorsement (if any).  Removing party labels denies voters important information or cues. 
    Finally, while the intent of the proponents of non-partisan primaries – former Secretary’s of State Norma Paulus (GOP) and Phil Keisling (Dem) et al – to bring more moderates into the legislature – the challenge of leadership in such a legislature will be daunting.  
    You will still have party caucuses and partisanship factored into the organization of the legislature as the leadership is chosen and committee assignments are made.  That inevitable and necessary.  But hopefully, the politics of this will be less poisonous that it has been in recent years.  
    But parties will be weakened and with that the institutional memory of the legislature will shift to the lobby, agency heads and the erstwhile media who cover Salem inside the beltway. The hope is that with moderates in control, ideology will decline and comity will rule.  Gridlock will end.  We’ll see when the new reality hits Salem, if it passes the voters sniff test in November.  
    But there will be winners and losers in this game. As with past reforms business interests will see their already sizeable political stock go up, unions will lose.  The upper middle class voters will gain, working poor will lose.  Why – because money talks in elections. And those who have the money to spend will be rewarded, as they always are.  
    Reforms always have their costs.  
    

Reader Comments (1)

Didn't I read somewhere recently that the Taliban beheaded a teacher in front of his students? We still don't understand guerilla warfare-- when they choose not to fight today, it is because they know they can't win today, so they drift away and come back tomorrow. Afghanistan is not a democracy, the war there isn't over, the Soviets couldn't win there, and , probably, neither can the west. This isn't how you fight the 9/11 terrorists.
May 23, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterWard N. Mowry

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