MARTHA STEWART DON’T GET IT

Darling Martha, how can you say that, “A small personal matter has been blown out of all proportion and with such venom and gore.” (Newsweek, July 26, 2004, p.40)

I want to be on your side on this issue, but I can’t because you don’t get it, and you do need to get it. Otherwise, I condemn you to conservative hell.

I’m a small investor, myself, and the whole set of laws you’re supposed to honor is there to make it fair for my investments to have an equal chance in the market place with yours. Insider info makes investing unequal. Since I can’t fly around the country and be in personal touch with the presidents of companies I invest with, then you should not be allowed to profit from contacts with them either. If you don’t get it, then damn it to hell. Maybe you need to be a Republican. They don’t believe in fairness and economic justice for all. To them, it’s the Darwinian survival of the richest.


GANGS AND CONTROLLED SUB
STANCES

I must not read the right news sources. It should be headline news. It’s bleeding obvious that the mobs arose very much as a result of alcohol prohibition. Now, as our local paper in Spokane talks of increased gang violence (July 2004), we need to see that all those illegal drugs, those “prohibited” drugs, are the cause of this new arrival of gangs into our culture.

What would gangs do if all drugs were legal, controlled and dispensed along with advice for breaking the habit? Think of all the cops who’d be freed to pursue violent criminals, how much our prison population would shrink, the taxes we could raise, and all the money we’d save for other important social needs. Who’s against this legalization and why? We know the gangs are against it. They’d have to get honest jobs. So, who else is on the side of these gang bangers? And why?


THE HOMELESS 9/11

It’s good to know the recently released report says that we’re safer now than before 9/11 but that we still need to be safer.

Someone ought to ask the homeless how safe they feel in this culture. The average poor person, living in substandard housing in substandard neighborhoods or the homeless person, sleeping on a winter heating grate, most likely stands a greater chance of being mugged and murdered in the street by a criminal than he does of being harmed in the next terrorist bombing. Yet we spend lots of tax dollars to make New York and Washington safe while leaving the poor out in the cold, suffering 9/11 after 9/11. Again!


IDEOLOGUES AND THE CONSTITUTION

These religious ideologues just won’t give up in their efforts to destroy our American Constitution. The House of Reprehensibles, full of flaming neo-conservatives, has just passed an unconstitutional law to strip the courts of jurisdiction over marriage laws. They actually would turn the Constitution upside down and open it to further depredations just to do harm to homosexual American citizens.

The knowledge we must all hold close is that the Bible has no standing in the Courts of Law. The courts must be religion blind in all its dealings with American citizens. The neocons would do anything to destroy that impartiality which stands between them and putting the Bible above the Constitution in American law. (Spokesman Review, July 23, 2004, p. A1)

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"The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around." —Herb Caen