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0122 am 'Get This' news
sui generis 01/22/07

Got pus? Wealthy to keel over from expensive disease

Summary of the KBOO am news for Monday, January 22nd, 2007.

1. Now that we are actually dipping a big toe into the dark waters of annual legislative sessions, the State of Oregon is just running wild. Next up: Democrats and Republicans are talking about earlier primaries. (Let's just get it over with and secede... .)

2. One of Oregon's Own is off to Guantanamo Bay... .No, he did not get picked up by over-zealous Feds and shipped to Gitmo for questioning. Brigadier General Cameron Crawford is going to be on the other side of the razor wire running the show.

3. A salvage company from Florida is going to have a go at pulled the New Carissa off Coos Bay's North Spit. I suspect they'd be happy to just leave it there were it not for the effort to site a Liquefied Natural Gas terminal in the vicinity... ..Hulks of wrecked ships look bad on the covers of corporate annual reports to shareholders... .

4. The federal government has given the go-ahead to a new plan to save Chinook salmon from Puget Sound. If Puget Sound doesn't stop killing fish, the salmon are going to be extinct - and sooner rather than later.

5. Got Pus? Safeway says that milk suppliers for the grocer's Northwest processing plants have stopped using recombinant bovine growth hormone (RBGH). Dairymen inject the stuff into cows to make them produce an unnatural amount of milk, augmented by pus. The huge quantities of milk irritate the animals' teats causing... ..Well, just don't drink the stuff... .

6. Salem is testing the old Boise-Cascade facility site in the downtown area for dioxins and other highly toxic contaminants. Actually the company is paying for the testing just as it is about to cut and run leaving hundreds of people without jobs. Why test when you're leaving? Because the city wants to turn the site into condos and up-scale businesses which won't cause the wealthy to keel over from some expensive disease... .at least not until they move out...

7. What's That Rustling I Hear? In Enterprise, Oregon they have cattle rustlers, shoot-outs from horseback on the open range, and sheriffs deciding what happened once the dust settles... .Ahhhh, the joys of civilization.

8. Bush is going to take another stab off putting words together into coherent
sentences, saying them out loud and passing it off as a speech.

9. Hillary Clinton has got her 'exploratory committee' on and so does New Mexico governor, Bill Richardson... ..So what's stopping you? Looks and brains are obviously no obstacle in the American struggle for power... .

10. Republican Senator (And co-power-struggler) John McCain says he just might not vote for General George Casey's nomination as Army Chief of Staff. Good idea John. On the other hand, if as the President says, this is going to be a long and truly mismanaged military engage for the foreseeable future, then Casey is the man for the job.

11. McCain is said to be powering up his own presidential media team, most of whom were drafted from the Bush 04 campaign. (Man's been unstoppable ever since

12. Nineteen US soldiers were killed in Iraq on Saturday and this morning two almost simultaneous bombs went off in a crowded market, killing more than 78 people. (Thank, George Casey... )

13. A prominent New Orleans advocate and lobbyist says that since Katrina, only a fraction of the money for reconstruction has been delivered to the citizens, very little of the money has been used to rebuild infrastructure, practically nothing has been done in the name of providing citizens with basic services. And yet contractors are making out like, well... like looters. What this is called, is, the Halliburtonization of New Orleans... .

14. The World Social Forum begins today in Kenya. Economic Partnership Agreements or EPAs are going to be top of the agenda, I'm guessing. EPAs are the 21st century's answer to colonization. They are instruments that penalize developing nations by requiring them to open up their markets to unfair foreign competition.

15. Iraq's Not-So-Democratic government has drafted a law that appears on the surface to settle the burning question: Who, exactly, control's that nation's oil. Regional powers? Central government? America?

16. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, says he is pushing for talks between America and Syria. (Seems like the wheels are coming off America's latest adventure in imperialism. But at least it isn't out of gas... .yet.)

17. The political movement of Iraqi cleric and militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr says it is ending its two-month boycott of parliament yesterday.

18. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas' exiled political chief have failed to agree on forming a national unity government during talks with Syria. Must have been some talks. I suppose what the US figures is that what the US does not know can't hurt it. Must be "the Unknowns That We Know We Don't Know."

19. Balkanized Yet Again: The Serbian Nationalist Party has claimed victory in that nation's recent election but they aren't expecting to find partners too form a governing coalition.

20. Kidnapped Yet again: Six foreign workers have been kidnapped from a cargo ship in Nigeria's Port Harcourt war zone... .Oops! I meant Nigeria's 'oil0rich Niger delta.'

21. Let The Forced Be With You: The Czech government has announced that it wants to host a large US military site for every Republican's wet dream: a great big Star Wars radar site. (What coincidence! China just blew one of it's own satellites out of the sky just as a sort of "routine maintenance" sort of thing... .Spring cleaning, you might call it.)

22. Germany's Foreign Minister is on the hot seat. Reporters want to know why he helped block the release of a German-born Turkish man detained for five years without charges at Guantanamo. (Let me take a stab at that one: Because Angela Merkel wants closer ties with the US - just not quite as close a back-rub... .)

23. Hugo Chavez: "Go to hell, Gringos!"

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