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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...   

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 


 

 

  

 


  

 

« BRAVO | Main | OREGON'S KIDS: THE INVISIBLE POOR »
Thursday
Sep132007

SAYING "NO" TO "W's" WAR

    Editor's Note:  Any reader of this blog knows that RAD has agonized over which Democratic candidate to support in the '08 presidential race.  Initially I endorsed John Edwards, then Barack Obama.  For a variety of reasons I become disillusioned with both of them.  But among the Democratic contenders I've reserved my harshest criticism to Hillary Clinton for reasons I need not belabor.
    I think Senators Chris Dodd (Conn), Joe Biden (Del) and Governor Bill Richardson (NM) are quality people, but none of them have a chance for the nomination but they can play a pivotal role after the election in the US Senate or in the case of Governor Richardson, as our next Secretary of State.  Congressman Dennis Kucinich as a moral gadfly is a gem of clarity, principle and passion.  But he will never get the nomination.  So at the end of the day who should one support?
    Well last Friday I joined a friend from my local church and went to hear Barack Obama speak at Portland's Convention Center.  As we hopped on MAX I was amazed how crowded it was!  In a sea on young faces, I thought WOW Barack has really got it going.  Then we learned that most of the "kids" were headed to a Justin Timberlake gig at the Rose Garden!  But not all of them!  We joined 4000 metro area folks, mostly 20 somethings, to hear Barack. 
    Frankly Barack Obama is not a charismatic speaker.  I was underwelmed by his speech until the very last salvo.  It was the same stump speech I've seen again and again on the tube.  But there was nothing of the passion one gets from Jesse Jackson or Bill Clinton.  But as I've thought about it since then maybe that's the key!  Barack is a cross-over candidate, he's neither the "Black" candidate nor the "front runner" - he's simply Barack!  That's enough.
    At the end of his stump speech he told a story about a state senator from South Caroline whose endorsement he wanted.  But to get it he had to travel to Greenwood, SC - a long 2 hour drive from anywhere.  But he did it.  And when he entered the rather non-descript rural building where the meeting was to be - all he saw was 20 people!  But then something really funny happened.
    Somebody shouted behind a screen "Are you ready?" and the folks responded "Let's go."  Then out of the dark emerged the petit lady senator.  And like a cheer leader she got them going by shouting "Are you ready?"  And their response, "Let's go."  Well folks that sounds like a good motto for us all.  After two terms of Dubya the central question is "Are you ready" and if so, then "Let's go." 
    And then tonight President Bush topped off a week of political spin over the war in Iraq by his two latest front men Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General David Petraes by appealing to Americans to once again stay the course.  My response was simple - "Liar, Liar, pants on fire."  So I'm ready to say NO to Bush and his cronies.  But now I have a candidate who I can say YES to.
    So Barack, RAD "is ready", so "Let's go." 
    When one gets to the core of the dilemma we face over Iraq it's very clear that the new president-elect will inherit all the issues involved with the war and occupation of Iraq.  Two huge issues emerge from that conundrum:  1) will a new administration be able to focus on a wider view of our role in the world or 2) will we continue to be bogged down with the Iraq quagmire?
    And if Iraq continues to be our focus, then what pray tell is the mission?  It's clear that the administration and Congress have given up on trying to turn Iraq into a model democracy.  Regime change has failed.  The best we can hope for is to stop the devolution of Iraq and the region into chaos.  After six years, 3700 lives and billions that's pretty slim pickings!  As the Peggy Lee song goes "Is that all there is?"
    So should the mission be to - stay the course; have a total pullout;  allow a de facto "soft" partition; or fall back to containing the chaos within Iraq.  It appears both the Congress and President Bush are quietly moving to some version of the two latter options fearing more ethnic cleansing or worse, genocide; the spill over effect of the civil war; and preventing Iraq from becoming a safe haven for Al Qaeda.
    If the option is containment then as Ambassador Crocker and General Patraeus implied in their testimony we will be in Iraq for a long, long time well past 2009.  Has Iraq become in effect the staging ground for a new "Cold War" between the US and worldwide terrorism?  If so what happens to other foreign policy challenges - the emergence of a stronger Russia, trade policy with China, global warming and relations with our allies in Europe?
    An answer to this "no good choices" option came over my e-mail this week from Barack Obama!  Finally somebody is saying what needs to be said and is willing to put it on the line and arguing that conventional thinking will not get us out of the Iraq quagmire.  Check Barack's letter out and then go to his website for more info http://my.barackobama.com/iraqplan
    Barack Obama on the war in Iraq: 
    I have spoken out against the war in Iraq since before it began.  Today, I outlined a plan to turn the page in Iraq and end the war.
    The saddest thing about the Bush administration's surge of public relations in favor of the war in Iraq this week is how predictable it has become for them to make their case for war around the anniversary of 9/11.
    Five years ago today -- September 12, 2002 -- President Bush made his case for war at the United Nations.
    He was wrong. The people who attacked us on 9/11 were in Afghanistan, not Iraq, and his case was built on exaggerated fears and empty evidence.
    But conventional thinking in Washington lined up for war. Too many politicians feared looking weak and failed to ask hard questions. Too many took the President at his word instead of reading the intelligence for themselves. Congress gave the President the authority to go to war, and our only opportunity to stop the war was lost.
    I made a different judgment. I opposed this war from the beginning. I opposed the war in 2002. I opposed it in 2003. I opposed it in 2004. I opposed it in 2005. I opposed it in 2006. And I introduced a plan this January to remove all of our combat brigades by March 2008.
    The time to end this war is now.
    My plan for turning the page in Iraq is clear:

  • remove our combat troops from Iraq's civil war by the end of 2008
  • take a new approach to press for reconciliation within Iraq
  • escalate our diplomacy with all of Iraq's neighbors and the United Nations
  • confront the human costs of this war directly with increased humanitarian aid

    Our troops have performed brilliantly, but let me be clear: there is no military solution in Iraq, and there never was.
    The best way to protect our security and to pressure Iraq's leaders to resolve their civil war is to begin to remove our combat troops immediately.
    Not in six months or a year -- now.
    We must get out strategically and carefully, but our drawdown should proceed at a steady pace of one or two brigades each month. If we start now, all of our combat brigades should be out of Iraq by the end of next year.
    While we change the dynamic within Iraq, we must surge our diplomacy in the region.
    We need to launch the most aggressive diplomatic effort in recent history to reach a new compact in the region. This compact must secure Iraq's borders, keep neighbors from meddling, isolate al Qaeda, and support Iraq's unity.
    Conventional thinking in Washington says Presidents cannot lead this diplomacy. But I think the American people know better. Not talking doesn't make us look tough -- it makes us look arrogant. And it doesn't get results.
    Strong Presidents tell their adversaries where they stand, and that's what I would do. Now is the time for tough and sustained diplomacy backed by real pressure. It's time to rally the region and the world to our side.
    The final part of my plan is a major international initiative to address Iraq's humanitarian crisis.
    There's no military solution that can reunite a family or resettle an orphaned child. It's time to form an international working group with the countries in the region, our European and Asian friends, and the United Nations.
    We should increase our support for displaced Iraqis and expand access to social services for refugees in neighboring countries.
    It's also time to go to our friends and allies -- and all the members of our original coalition in Iraq -- to find homes for the many Iraqis who are in desperate need of asylum.
    As Americans, we must keep faith with Iraqis who kept faith with us and take responsibility for our own actions:
    I welcome all of the folks who have changed their position on the war over these last months and years. We need more of those votes to change if we're going to change the direction of this war. But if we've learned one thing from Iraq, it's that the judgment that matters most is the judgment that's made first.
    I opposed this war from the beginning, and I want to bring this country together to end this war now. The American people have the right instincts on Iraq. It's time to heed their judgment.
    We have the power to do this -- not as Republicans or Democrats, but as Americans. We don't have to wait until George Bush is gone from office -- we can begin to end this war today, right now.
    It's time reclaim our foreign policy. It's time to reclaim our politics. It's time to lead this country -- and this world -- to a new dawn of peace and unity.
    RAD:  So "Are you ready," if so "Let's go."  Barack Obama for President! 


Reader Comments (2)

Howdy Dr. Dondero! From a long ago student, the former Rhonda Connell (first president of the Politics & Law Forum). Little did I know what you were on to with that organization!

Congratulations on making your decision for the 2008 presidential election! Any suggestions for us Republicans? I'm at a loss! I like Fred Thompson but I think maybe that's because The Hunt for Red October is one of my very favorite movies. Not much of a basis for making such an important decision.

I'm glad I found your blog!
September 15, 2007 | Unregistered CommenterRhonda Witt
Rhonda,

Great to hear from you! I've been out of town for 3 days so was I surprised to see you "comments."

What are you up to these days and where? Tell me what you've been doing all these years...

Now I thought daughters of UCC ministers HAD to be Dems! My advice, don't waste your vote - change parties! If I were an R I'd be likely to vote for Rudy G.

The rest are way too conservative, support the war, anti-choice and cater to the radical right.

My home e-mail is dondero1@easystreet.net
September 18, 2007 | Unregistered CommenterRAD

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