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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...   

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 


 

 

  

 


  

 

« BELABORING THE OBVIOUS | Main | NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE REPORT »
Saturday
Dec082007

TRUST ME

    In this week’s edition of the JOURNAL, Bill Moyers asked Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Melissa Rogers about Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s high-profile speech regarding religion and politics. In the program they reprised portions of the famous JFK speech in the 1960 campaign before the Southern Baptist convention in Houston, Texas that year.
    The Kennedy and Romney approaches are quite different in tone and substance. Kennedy emphasized the separation of church and state arguing that his Catholicism would have no relevance to his decisions as president. Romney (a Mormon) by contrast suggests as does Mike Huckabee that as a "Christian leader" their religious values will shape how they govern or look at major issues like abortion or gay rights.  
    Romney claims that in "recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning.  They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God.  Religion in seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life.  It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America, the religion of secularism.  They are wrong." 
    Huckebee, who was formerly a Baptist minister, takes another approach in a campaign commercial being aired in Iowa suggesting that he doesn't have to question where he stands he knows presumably because of his Christian faith. In this sense Huckabee is referencing his religiosity much like President Bush did in the 2000 and 2004 campaigns. And like Bush, even more so to RAD, Huckabee comes off as being very authentic - much more so than Romney.
    Now the question which Moyers et al did not address is what should the role of religion be in a presidential campaign? The problem is that such discussions often fail to make a clear distinction between the Founders' belief in the absolute separation of church and state, one of the hallmarks of American government and politics. The Founders forbade the establishment of a state religion, but they did not prohibit freedom "of" religious expression from the pulpit or in the public square.
    This is a crucial distinction. Had they not made such a decision it's quite likely that the 13 colonies would have split up into warring factions based on the dominant religious preferences in each colony and the United States would have never been able to form "a more perfect union" as a constitutional republic. But the establishment clause has nothing to do with freedom of speech, including religious speech within a church, synagogue or mosque or in the public square.
    The critical question each voter must ask of all the candidates is what is the foundation of your ethics or moral belief system?  For George Bush, Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee the answer is fairly straight forward - their claims of a belief in God and the divinity of Jesus Christ are their moral center.  For Rudy Giuliany (a Catholic), Fred Thompson (a Baptist) and Hillary Clinton (a Methodist) the issue is more complex since the correlation of their private and public lives is more opaque. 
    For Barack Obama, a member of the United Church of Christ, the question of religiosity as a ground of one's ethical core is less conflicted or so it appears to this commentator perhaps because we share the same faith journey.  How religious preferences inform the world view of John McCain (an Episcopalian) Joe Biden (a Catholic), Chris Dodd (a Catholic), John Edwards (a Methodist) Bill Richardson (a Catholic) and Dennis Kucinich (a Catholic) are less clear. 
    The issue is NOT the question of the separation of church and state. Any candidate in the field who does not understand this is NOT qualified to be president and those who claim to be running as "Christian" leaders come very close to disqualifying themselves as candidates.  Huckabee and Romney come close to this perilous line.  While their stance will not bite them within the GOP battle for the nomination, it will if either becomes the GOP nominee.
    Romney's inclination to bring "God" into the public square begs the question - "whose God" is he referencing?  Is he talking of a Christian, Jewish or Islamic God?  And where do the "Godless" citizenry fit into Romney's vision as a would-be president?  To ground one's decisions on one's private generic or particular religious faith is one thing, but to invoke the word "God" in issues of governance is to violate the separation of church and state. 
    When one takes the oath of office (forget about the symbolism of placing a hand on the Bible) - a would-be president is declaring to be the president of ALL the people with or without a religious faith belief system.  As the GOP has morphed into "the" party of fundamentalist or evangelical Christians its platform and candidate rhetoric raises all kinds of red flags on this issue.  How can a "Christian" leader be a president of ALL the people? 
    However, if the question is what is the core of a candidate's moral beliefs - one's personal faith is a legitimate political issue because it may inform his or her decisions as president and the public deserves to know that up front what that system of belief is.  For those on the political "left" this is often a dicey issue either because Dems come from a broader sweep of the population in terms of faith or lack thereof than GOP candidates.
    But just because Democratic candidates often choke on this subject does not make it irrelevant. For example, Bill Clinton and Al Gore invoked their own Baptist roots on the campaign trail. So this is not a simple GOP or Dem dividing line. Now whether President Clinton in particular deported himself consistently as a Christian is in considerable doubt to say the least.  But his Baptist roots clearly had traction throughout his presidency. 
    And if we go deeper into the intertwining of religion and politics in American history the evidence of cross fertilization is clear. The Abolitionist movement was rooted in both a religious and secular based aversion to slavery which was also reflected in the modern Civil Rights movement and within even the Black Power movement - where traditional African-American roots in the Christian tradition were challenged by the Nation of Islam.
    For candidates of other faiths or who profess to be agnostics or atheists the challenge is similar - what provides you a moral core upon which to make tough political decisions? Those of the Jewish faith would have no problem answering this question; neither would Muslims, Buddhists nor Hindus. As far as RAD knows all religions of the world have some basic principle which mirrors the Ten Commandments.
    For the secular humanists among us who would be president - whether or not they might be agnostic or atheist - what philosophical well do you go to in keeping your moral-ethical compass alive and well?  That is not an unfair question. Do you reach out to an Eric Fromm, a Martin Buber, a Paul Tillich or a Ludwig Feuerbach (RAD's own choices when so inclined).
    My own faith journey as a youth involved being baptised by his Baptist maternal grandfather (before my age of consent, 1942), being raised in a Congregational Church in Seattle (1948-50), then attending Stanford's non-denominational campus Cathedral church in Palo Alto for a year (1951) and then a Presbyterian Church in Roseburg, Oregon (1952-60).
    In college at Whitman and the University of Minnesota (1960-69) RAD wavered between agnosticism, atheism and Unitarianism having been dismayed in my early life in the "church" by the moral and religious hypocrisy among the adults and my peers.  It wasn't a belief in God or Jesus that I found wanting among the "faithful" but their inability to walk the talk of the Sermon on the Mount.  
    Nevertheless my own moral compass focused on a personal morality and a passion for social and economic justice.  So religion rubbed off on me despite my leaving the "churched" community. Growing up as a hyphenated American who identified subliminally with his Italian roots more than the German side of the family tree added "honor" and "loyalty" as moral/ethical benchmarks.
    As the Civil Rights movement matured and the Vietnam Peace Movement came on - connecting with Martin Luther King Jr. and/or A.J. Muste made sense to me in the mid 1960s as a I struggled with my own political identity. One didn't have to be a person of "faith" per se to oppose racism or an imperialist war.  But Martin Luther King's transition from Civil Rights to anti-war leader and the role of the Clergy & Laity Against the War helped me understand that people of faith, along with we "secularists" could do the right thing!
    Being married in an Episcopal Church and then being a parent would re-connect me with a "church" experience from the mid 1970s on.  Today I fluctuate from "active" to "lapsed" church attendee.  But my secular and faith based moral compass is clear as I lobby for affordable housing as a member of the Washington County Interfaith Committee on Homelessness. 
    The point is that whatever the great issues of the day might be - making up one's mind on whether to go to war against Iraq or to declare Iran a "rogue" nation should not be simply a question of "political triangulation" or a knee jerk response to a simplistic faith that asserts the immanence of the "end of time" - Armageddon.  Such decisions should be based on sophisticated and carefully crafted thinking processes, not knee jerk litmus test inclinations! 
    In that sense, one's personal moral code in whatever form - faith-based and/or secular - is important and the more we know about the moral calculus used by candidates - the better. But to appropriate the term "God" for partisan purposes crosses the line.  Otherwise campaigns will default into vacuous rhetoric where candidates use coded "God talk" as a thinly veiled appeal to voters to just "trust me."  

 

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