Category: current events

current events, politics

My quick take on the news

After putting up 4 fairly long posts in less than 24 hours yesterday, I need to take some time to attend to the kiddies and my gardens. But I’d hate the leave my minions without their Upside Down World fix (that’s a joke, btw 🙂 ). So I thought I’d pass on my take on a couple of recent news events which have been bugging me.

1. Oil. Obviously oil costs too much. Obviously we need to find ways to cut back. Obviously what we are doing isn’t sustainable in the long term. However, the reality is that our best case scenario right now is to cut back and go through a transition period away from heavy dependence on oil. Which means that for the foreseeable future we will still need the stuff. So, it drives me nuts that we refuse to allow drilling and oil exploration either on or off shore in the USA. Now, I’m not saying we can become self-sufficient by drilling in the USA. However, the main protest against drilling seems to be environmental. Normally, I’m very sympathetic to environmental causes. However, do other oil producing countries not have environments? Are we to believe that Russia and Nigeria and Argentina are taking their oil from lifeless wastelands? Is the USA the only place on the planet where there is an environment worth preserving? Come on people! At least in the USA we can be assured that best practices will be used to protect the environment. Can we really have have any confidence that Gabon will do the same? It seems to me that from a global level, those who really want us to do the least amount of environmental damage possible would be trying to get oil production moved into the places like the USA. IMO, our current approach is silly and selfish.

2. Scott McClellan, as you have surely heard, has written a tell-all book which repeats the same things every other book about the Bush administration has said (ie he’s an incurious baboon). What I have found amusing about this is the press reaction to the book. Now, I know that the press, having dealt with McClellan as press secretary don’t care for the man. However, they keep saying, “why didn’t he say anything when he was in office?” Yeah, I can see how that would have worked: “Thank you for coming today, ladies and gentlemen of the press. The president has asked me to tell you that things are going well in Iraq and we’re making adjustments on the ground as needed. However, I would personally like to add that the president is delusional and he was picking lint from between his toes during the morning briefing, so I doubt he has any real idea what’s going on. I’ll open the floor for questions now.”

3. Kathleen Parker, the (I hate to say it) conservative columnist has apparently taken up the use of psychotropic drugs and is now acting as a propagandist for various white-power groups. If you were fortunate enough to miss it, Ms. Parker wrote a column about voters looking for a “full blooded American” to vote for. Continue reading “My quick take on the news”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter2 Comments
current events

See what happens when you work too much?

If it didn’t involve a real kid, this would be one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard.  Down in Texas, a 13 year old kid whose dad was too busy to remember his birthday, ordered an extra copy of daddy’s credit card and used it to live a poorly socialized 13 year old kid’s dream.  He and a friend got an Xbox, a hotel … Continue reading See what happens when you work too much?

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter1 Comment
current events, politics

God Bless Peggy Noonan

I mean that really. I hope that God has and continues to bless Peggy Noonan greatly. Because she has stood in the face of the ridiculous demagoguery which has surrounded the whole Obama-Wright debacle and spoken sense where sense has not been welcomed. Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan talks about her indifference to Pastor Wright’s ranting and puts it into some perspective:

I also think that if Hillary Clinton wins because of the Wright scandal, it will leave a sad taste in the mouths of many. Mr. Obama reveals many things in his books, speeches and interviews but polarity and a tropism toward the extreme are not among them. What happened with Mr. Wright should not determine the race. Mr. Obama’s stands, his ability to convince us he can make good change, his ability to be “one of us,” that great challenge for a national politician in a varied nation, should determine the race. . .

I do not feel a sense of honest anger or violation at his [Jeremiah Wrights’s] remarks, in part because I don’t think his views carry deep implications for our country. I have been watching America up close for many years – if you count a bright childhood, for half a century. I have seen, heard and respected the pain of a people who were forced to come here when they did not want to and made to live in a way that no one would want to. Who could deny them their grief or anger? I have seen radicalism and extremism, too. I have seen Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panthers, the Black National Anthem, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Louis Farrakhan. I came to see their radicalism as, putting the morality of policy based on rage aside, essentially unhelpful and impractical. It wouldn’t work as an American movement, not long-term. Hatred plays itself out, has power in the short-term but is nonsustaining in the long. America, and this is one of its glories, has a conscience to which an appeal can be made. It may take a long time, it may take centuries, but in the end we try hard to do the right thing, and everyone knows it. Hatred is a form of energy that does not fuel this machine and cannot make it run.” Continue reading “God Bless Peggy Noonan”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter4 Comments
current events, politics

I am sorry to announce . . .

that my dear sister Maggie will never be able to run for public office. You see a few years ago while attending UIC, she took a class taught by unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers. She even consumed a meal at his home. And laughed at his jokes! Obviously, there is something wrong with poor Maggie’s judgement and she just wouldn’t be fit for public office due to her “close association” with Mr. Ayers. A real patriot would have stormed out of the class in disgust and taken a bad grade for the country.

That’s at least 2 down for my siblings: Maggie has ties with an unrepentant terrorist and I have a long standing, personal relationship with a man who has been know to say that the government deliberately assasinated all the strong black leaders to protect itself and has uttered the words, “I hate white people” more than once. (That would be my husband.) Who knows what sort of evil malcontents my other siblings have associated with. Heck, my father once said that Jimmy Carter was the last good man in the white house. Surely the fact that his children still maintain relationships with him (and occassionally ask for money) is proof positive that none of us are fit for so much as a city council seat.

I can only hope that others have been wiser in their associations than my family or soon we’ll completely run out of people fit to serve in public office! What ever is this world coming to?

For the slow on the get-go folks out there, yes I am making fun of the brohaha over Barack Obama and his various unsavory associates.

Actually, I read the only in-contact-with-the-real-world explanation for Obama’s ongoing relationships which I have seen a couple of days ago. Dean Barnett over at the Weekly Standard writes that a couple of months ago he called dozens of Obama’s former Harvard Law classmates: Continue reading “I am sorry to announce . . .”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter2 Comments
current events

Dinner, Food Riots and You

By now you’ve probably heard about the hardships caused by rising prices on staple food items for poor people around the world. There have been protests and riots in Haiti, Bangladesh, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Indonesia and Senegal. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Sam’s Club and Costco have also placed limits on the amount of bulk rice which can be purchased at one time.

My question is how do we respond to these sorts of problems. President Bush has announced an increase in food aid, which might help NGOs whose work feeding people in danger of starvation continue their work in the face of rising food prices. However, it is hard to see how $200 million is going to fix the problem of people who are working and who had been self-supporting a few months ago, but are now priced out of the food market. Besides, we know from long experience that while food aid may be a necessary band-aid to prevent starvation, it doesn’t provide a long term solution and tends to come with many negative unintended consequences.

My question is if America is willing to actually sacrifice for the good of people a world away? Would you support a moratorium on the import of rice for 60 days (accompanied by tax breaks to help those in the industry who would be negatively affected) to take pressure off the international rice market? Continue reading “Dinner, Food Riots and You”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter5 Comments
current events, religion

Forget Stations of the Cross! It’s stations of the UN!

When I was a Catholic, I went through the stations of the cross several times, including a couple which included props and sound effects. It’s one of the reasons I never felt the need to go see Mel Gibson’s snuff movie – as a former Catholic, I was well aware of Jesus’ suffering on the cross. It was real for me already.

However, since The Passion of the Christ, the movie, accomplished the task of helping Christians experience the horror and suffering of Jesus’ passion and death, the Episcopalian Relief and Development Agency has apparently decided that they can move on other, important topics. Like reducing our carbon food print and promoting third world debt relief. From an article about it on Slate:

This year in time for Lent, Episcopal Relief and Development, the relief agency of the Episcopal Church, began offering a variation on the Stations of the Cross called the Stations of the Millennium Development Goals. It features eight stations, one for each of the global priorities identified by the United Nations in 2000, from eradicating poverty to promoting gender equality. Where each of the 14 stations of the traditional Stations of the Cross represents an event leading up to Jesus’ death—”Jesus is condemned to death” and “Jesus falls the first time,” for example—the alternative version, promoted by Episcopal Relief and Development, shifts the focus to righting global problems. At Station 8, “Create a Global Partnership for Development,” participants are reminded that a “fair trading system, increased international aid, and debt relief for developing countries will help us realize” the U.N. goals. An optional activity at Station 7, “Ensure Environmental Sustainability,” asks that “pilgrims calculate their carbon footprint and come up with three strategies to reduce it.” . . . A suggested activity for Station 4, on reducing child mortality, calls for participants to shade in drawings of children’s faces, coloring-book-style.

Goodness. Continue reading “Forget Stations of the Cross! It’s stations of the UN!”

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter3 Comments
culture, current events

Pornification goes to high school!

My goodness. A high school outside of Chicago has recently decided to move a piece of pornographic work (“Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Parts 1 & 2)”) from it’s “required” to its “optional” reading list for an AP Literature class after parents and an advocacy group spent months complaining. How good of them. I suppose that simply having access to porn … Continue reading Pornification goes to high school!

Unknown's avatarRebecca Trotter1 Comment
culture, current events

This seems creepy to me

There’s a story in the Chicago Tribune about scientists who have figured out how to get a computer to “read” brain scans to figure out which picture out of several choices a person has viewed.  This is considered one of the first steps towards eventually figuring out how the brain works, which I suppose if good.  However, it could also the be the first step … Continue reading This seems creepy to me

Unknown's avatarRebecca TrotterLeave a comment
culture, current events, politics

“RAM” Voters

Doug Shoen wrote a column in today’s Washington Post warning politicians to beware of what he is calling RAMs or “restless and anxious voters”. Aside from his nauseating fawning over his current employer, Bill Clinton, I think Shoen nails something important about the current state of the American voter – we’ve had it.

From the article:

Voters today aren’t just fed up with the status quo; they’re furious. In a Gallup poll last month, only 24 percent of Americans said they were satisfied with the state of the country — one of the lowest readings ever recorded. And it’s not just George W. Bush they’re mad at. Public approval ratings for the Democratic-controlled Congress are even lower than the president’s. According to a 2006 poll taken by my former firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, 61 percent of voters say the two major parties are failing, and a survey last year by the Republican pollster Frank Luntz showed that 81 percent of voters would consider voting for an independent this year.

Yep, that sounds about right. Continue reading ““RAM” Voters”

Unknown's avatarRebecca TrotterLeave a comment