My Senator

Posted on September 23, 2005 by ginny

Obama: White House blind to poverty in U.S.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Barack Obama on Wednesday night again criticized the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina and urged a black policymaking conference to make sure the poor are not left behind again.

“The incompetence was colorblind,” said Obama (D-Ill.). “What wasn’t colorblind was the indifference. Human efforts will always pale in comparison to nature’s forces. But [the Bush administration] is a set of folks who simply don’t recognize what’s happening in large parts of the country.”

MSNBC: The Other America

“I hope we realize that the people of New Orleans weren’t just abandoned during the hurricane,” Sen. Barack Obama said last week on the floor of the Senate. “They were abandoned long agoâ€”to murder and mayhem in the streets, to substandard schools, to dilapidated housing, to inadequate health care, to a pervasive sense of hopelessness.”

Barack Obama, US Senator for Illinois

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), echoing language from Clinton, said the crisis should inspire the two parties to bridge the “false dichotomy” over whether the key to reducing poverty was more government help or greater personal responsibility among the poor. For challenges such as improving schools in poor neighborhoods, he said, both would be required.

“I think a good place to start would be for both Democrats and Republicans to say … we are willing to experiment and invest on anything that works,” Obama said.

The poverty level today is within a range common over the last 35 years, Census Bureau figures show, but recent trends are moving in the wrong direction. In the last 35 years, the poverty rate has twice peaked at about 15% — during the economic slowdowns at the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s presidential term and the end of George H.W. Bush’s.

As the economy expanded through Clinton’s two terms, the number of Americans in poverty dropped by nearly 8 million, and the poverty rate fell to just above 11% by 2000. Those were the sharpest reductions since the 1960s.

Since George W. Bush took office, the share and the number of Americans in poverty have increased for four consecutive years. The overall poverty rate remains lower than during most of Clinton’s presidency. But at the same time, 5.4 million more Americans are living below the poverty line today than when Bush took office, and the poverty rate has climbed back to 12.7%.

Google: Obama + poverty

That’s my Senator. If he’s decided to tackle poverty, I’m in all the way.

Not A Good Or Joyful Thing

Posted on September 23, 2005 by ginny

Chicago Tribune | School Expels Girl for Having Gay Parents

ONTARIO, Calif. — A 14-year-old student was expelled from a Christian school because her parents are lesbians, the school’s superintendent said in a letter.

Shay Clark was expelled from Ontario Christian School on Thursday.

“Your family does not meet the policies of admission,” Superintendent Leonard Stob wrote to Tina Clark, the girl’s biological mother.

Stob wrote that school policy requires that at least one parent may not engage in practices “immoral or inconsistent with a positive Christian life style, such as cohabitating without marriage or in a homosexual relationship,” The Los Angeles Times reported in Friday’s edition.

Shay’s parents have been together twenty-two years – longer than many morally clean, straight Christian parents stayed married. They have two other daughters.

I don’t know why they chose to place their child in the Christian school; perhaps they thought she would learn the virtues of charity, compassion, and tolerance there.

Rocky Rules

Posted on September 20, 2005 by ginny

Salt Lake Tribune – Salt Lake Tribune Home Page

On Wednesday, Rocky Anderson will make history.
At noon in City Hall, the Salt Lake City mayor will quietly sign an executive order to offer a handful of health benefits to gay and unmarried heterosexual partners of city employees.

This won’t last long – probabably not through the end of the next legislative session – but it’s nice to see these two categories together for the first (and probably last) time.

A Matter of Timing

Posted on September 20, 2005 by ginny

This weekend is going to be pretty busy. I’m not looking forward to all of the meetings and running around, plus it gives David and me very little time to take care of an essential item on my agenda.

I’ve got an all-day meeting Saturday that’s a kind of retreat for Holy Moly, and to be ready for that I’ve got some formatting to do for fliers and things that we’ll be handing out in bulletins. The meeting goes from 9am to 3pm and is supposed to be a planning event. We had better get some actual planning done, rather than endlessly discussed numbers. I’m kind of done with numbers.

Sunday, we’re going downtown to the Art Institute to meet David’s parents for the Toulouse Lautrec show.

Which doesn’t leave a lot of time for this. There’s more than one agency that does this important work, though, so maybe we have more options that at first appears. But I like these guys.

Oh My: Cat 1 White House Scandal Blowing

Posted on September 20, 2005 by ginny

Scandal Visits the White House:

The Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal reached into the White House yesterday, picking off President Bush’s top procurement official — who just barely had time to resign before being arrested.

The federal charges against David Safavian stem from his tenure as chief of staff of the General Services Administration, predating his arrival at the White House a year ago. But his arrest nonetheless draws renewed attention to the ongoing corruption and influence-peddling inquiry swirling around Abramoff, a lobbyist well known for his connections to conservative Republicans in the White House and Congress.

And for a White House so desperate to build public confidence in its ability to respond to the Gulf Coast disaster, it doesn’t exactly help that the man who up until Friday was overseeing contracting policy for the multi-billion dollar relief effort has now been charged with lying and obstructing a criminal investigation.

Oh, my! Oh my, my my! The Abramoff scandal turns out to have a slight bearing on the Katrina debacle? And oh my, this David Safavian’s wife Jennifer, “is chief counsel for oversight and investigations on the House Government Reform Committee, which is responsible for overseeing government procurement and is, among other things, expected to conduct the Congressional investigation into missteps after Hurricane Katrina.” Oh, there really can’t be a whiff of impropriety or conflict of interest there.

Here’s another item from the same column: the administration is attempting to appoint Julie Meyers, a lawyer with no immigration experience as the head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the TSA (why don’t they just cally it the Department of Cronyism and Payback?). A howl of protest has already gone up from employee groups, homeland security types, and immigration advocates. Past experience includes the last 4 years bouncing around from the White House to Commerce and Justice and Treasury. Before that? 16 months working for Kenneth Starr. Yes, that Kenneth Starr. Smells like post-Lewinsky team spirit to me.

Crazy Cat Lady Seeks Cat

Posted on September 19, 2005 by ginny

See the pretty lady about to adopt a cat? Not me, the lady on the poster behind me. I’m just holding a kitten and wondering if I can get David to hold it and go all skwoogie for it. As it turns out, David managed to avoid entanglement, but it was a nice cuddly kitten and not all wiggly and ‘put-me-down’ like kittens often are. This was Sunday at the local Petsmart – they generally have cat adoption events by various groups on the weekend.

We took stock of things tonight – we still have a litter box and a carrier up in the rafters out in the garage, which will need to be cleaned up and sanitized.

I’ve become pretty familiar with the cats “in residence” at the two area PetSmart stores that PactHumane works with, but they have a bunch of other cats and kittens in foster homes at the moment. They’re also visible via the excellent Petfinder site. When I read their stories I get sad for the ones that got a raw deal in life, and hope they all find “forever homes” soon. We’ve already discussed in general what we’re looking for – after caring for Stuey after his diabetes was diagnosed and until the end, we’ve both decided we need an “easy” cat.

Violent Faith

Posted on September 19, 2005 by ginny

Under the Banner of Heaven : A Story of Violent Faith This book, like a lot of others in the “expose'” genre, attempts to explain the background of a small, intense, and very insular subset of the dominant faith of Utah. Actually, it attempts to explain the connections and rivalries between several similar but different subsets of same, and how they all disavow each other and the “mainline” faith.

Oh, and how certain kinds of unethical, criminal, and horrific acts of violence and mayhem can somehow be justified by said faith(s). I grew up in Utah, so some of the background from the 70’s and 80’s was vaguely familiar, and even so it’s very complicated and confusing. It’s based on a notorious murder case, but that’s only the starting point.

Not long after finishing it, a couple of news stories cropped up in the Trib:

Marshal mum on abuse cases Well, he would be, seeing as he’s hip-deep in it. He admitted he’s probably been too long in “Hicksville.”

FLDS fighting Arizona state takeover of school district, with mention of some odd financial goings-on. The private plane seems like an extravagance, until you consider the other enclaves in Canada and Texas.

Yeah, it’s a weird place, Utah. Isolated pockets of extreme weirdness are tucked away in the oddest corners there.

Anyway, this book does a pretty good job of explaining what the basis is for the thread of violence that runs through the fabric of religious life in isolated parts of Utah, Arizona, Canada, Mexico, Texas… actually, in a lot of places scattered around the West. Also, at the end there’s an interesting afterword by the author, responding to criticism from the expected quarter.

Jill Was Right

Posted on September 19, 2005 by ginny

Jill, you were right about the lights in New Orleans being turned on just for the Presidential speech the other night:

Daily Nightly: Friday Morning (Power) Line

I am duty-bound to report the talk of the New Orleans warehouse district last night: there was rejoicing (well, there would have been without the curfew, but the few people I saw on the streets were excited) when the power came back on for blocks on end. Kevin Tibbles was positively jubilant on the live update edition of Nightly News that we fed to the West Coast. The mini-mart, long ago cleaned out by looters, was nonetheless bathed in light, including the empty, roped-off gas pumps. The motorcade route through the district was partially lit no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through. And yet last night, no more than an hour after the President departed, the lights went out. The entire area was plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans. It’s enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it… jump to certain conclusions.

One of those conclusions is “All show, no go.” Another one is “If it looks good, everyone will think it is good.” A third one is “All the world’s a stage.”

And finally, “No one should be there, so why should we leave the lights on?”