Politics

Without a qualm, or a thought to the people’s lives he was affecting, Governor Schwarzenegger signed an order yesterday to reduce government employees salaries to the minimum wage of $6.55 an hour, (which could affect 200,000 people) because of the budget stalemate.  Luckily, State Controller John Chiang, who writes the checks, is refusing to comply with the payroll cuts.  (I think Chiang and Nancy Pelosi should get Government Employee of the Month award!)   

But am I the only person who remembers this Arnold Schwarzenegger campaign mantra, “I understand business.  I will make the economy and budget of California work.”

Then, why doesn’t he institute tax credits for the movie business and bring business back to California?  The movie business, that funny business that was so lucrative and employed so many people. And that is supposed to be a business he does understand.  

Checks and balances.  Have you ever thought about how amazing those two words are?   In the simplest sense, writing checks and figuring out how much money you have left after you’ve written them.  In the larger sense, if something is depleted or out of whack, something comes along to reestablish order.

Which brings me to AANWR....

On the northern edge of our continent, stretching from the peaks of the Brooks Range across a vast expanse of tundra to the Beaufort Sea, lies Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. An American Serengeti, the Arctic Refuge continues to pulse with million-year-old ecological rhythms. It is the greatest living reminder that conserving nature in its wild state is a core American value.
                    (National Resources Defense Council)

From the Dallas Observer 

Winner of Best Feature in the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies 

Elias dangles the dead iguana by the tail. His friends close in around him, watching hungrily. With a knife he slices through scaly green skin and peels it back to reveal bloody meat, dark red and glistening in the sun. Working quickly, he carves the lizard into sections—head, front and back legs, upper and lower torso—and drops the parts in a pan. Then he places it over the fire they've made near the train tracks. Sweat trickles down his forehead, stinging his eyes. The men are quiet while they wait for the lizard to cook. Sometimes they sing and tell stories, but for now they're too hot and hungry. They sit and watch the fire.

For three days they've been camped here, in the jungle of southern Mexico, about 40 miles from the Guatemalan border in a town called Tenosique. Hundreds of people sprawl in the dirt along the tracks. Many are young men, shirtless in the sticky heat, wearing tattered Nikes and grimy backpacks. But there are women and children too, teenage girls with painted-on jeans and mothers balancing kids on their hips. They lounge on pieces of cardboard and plastic, squat on porches, smoke in the awnings of makeshift storefronts. They wait.

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From the Dallas Observer 

"Stacey, what do you see?" Sergeant Jonathan Markham asked his wife.

He stopped the white Volvo. It was a sunny December day in 2006, and they'd been driving through Burleson as he prepared to finish his second Iraq tour after two weeks of leave. Stacey looked out the window at the clear sky and leafless trees. A petite brunette with dimpled cheeks and a soft girlish voice, she said nothing. Her eyes welled with tears.

The couple called them her premonitions. In the two years since Jonathan had strewn rose petals on her snow-covered doorstep and given her a ring engraved with the words, "True love waits," he had come to accept the images that occasionally popped into his wife's mind.

At first he teased her and said she was nuts. But then, before she became pregnant and they moved in together, she described to him the apartment where she would give birth to their son, and she turned out to be right. Devout Christians, they put stock in the visions and considered them to be God-given. Yet she refused to tell him about one image—a casket draped with an American flag.

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