Cat-E-Whompus: The Double-O Decade

Cat-E-Whompus: The Double-O Decade

The Double-O Decade

Its Been a Killer
Those who read Ian Fleming or who are fans of James Bond movies know that the agents with ‘Double-O’ numbers in those stories were licensed to kill. In a lot of ways, the decade ending at 12 midnight tonight with all its ‘00’ years has been a killer in its own right: a presidential election with hanging chad that was contested to the Supreme court, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Middle East wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a meltdown in the nation’s economy that rivaled the scope and scale of the ‘Great Depression.’

Sitting down to write this, I reflected that this New Years is a decadal one, and since decades last ten years, we only get to experience a few decadal New Years in our lifetimes. Ten are a couple more than most of us live to see. I feel indeed fortunate to be around for my seventh decadal New Years eve. My sixth one in 2000 went by, I confess, distressingly fast.

Remember Y2K?
Ten years ago tonight as midnight approached, the world was holding its breath waiting to see if all the worlds’ computers were going to seize up due to a Y2K glitch in their programming. Sensational media stories abounded about the bad things that could happen—power outages, planes crashing, radio and TV stations abruptly shutting down, cars stranded unable to start on the freeway—when computer clocks rolled over at midnight on December 31.

Fortunately, midnight of New Years Eve in 1999 came and went, with lots of celebrating and computer clocks that kept on ticking. Worldwide telecasts of special Y2K lighting and pyrotechnic celebrations went off as planned, at the Eiffel tower in Paris, at the harbor in Sydney, Australia, and in Times Square in New York that year.

An Era of Bad Feeling
All the good feeling of New Years Eve in that year Y2K didn’t last long, however. In the fall of 2000, we found ourselves in the midst of the terribly unfunny joke that was our presidential election that year. That election and its outcome infuriated many—yours truly included—but it was just a harbinger of what was to come.

On September 11, 2001, our nation was attacked by a shadowy group of Islamic religious extremists. Unlike the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in World War II, this attack targeted ordinary citizens, working (or travelling) while doing ordinary jobs, taking care of their families.

The 9/11 attacks had a huge impact. The airline industry in the US was decimated, and has yet to recover almost nine years later. The economy, already declining due to a severe stock downturn as the dot com bubble burst, now tumbled headlong into recession that the nation didn’t emerge from until 2004. Daily, we were bombarded by our government with code orange terror alerts, bellicose rhetoric about the threats. The Bush administration unleashed our war
machine on the Taliban in Afghanistan, and then in April, 2003, on Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army.

Bellicosity and Missed Opportunities
Our nations fine young men and women in the armed services quickly rolled up the Taliban’s organized resistance in Afghanistan, and soon had Osama bin Laden himself trapped—like the rat that he was and still is—in a cave in remote Tora Bora mountain region that straddles the border between Afghanistan and Iraq. But then our tough talking President and the leadership in the Pentagon and US Army Central Command did an unthinkable and the almost unforgivable thing.

Having tracked Osama Bin Laden to his lair, our Bush, Rumsfeld, and four star general General Tommy Franks held our American soldiers back from the fray, instead sending in poorly trained, inept and none-too-loyal Afghani substitutes. As a result of this totally missed opportunity, Osama bin Laden managed to steal away into the darkness, where he remains to this day—still at large.

Tough on terror is as tough on terror does.

The Menace That Wasn't
But Bush, Rumsfeld, and the rest told us in no uncertain terms that OBL, as he had come to be called, had been so marginalized and isolated that he was not worth worrying about. Soon a media blitz by the Bush Administration, along with speeches at the UN by Bush and Colin Powell that indicted Saddam Hussein as a menace to the world. Unfortunately, almost everything that was communicated, and the decisions that were taken, relied on what turned out to be incorrect and false ‘intelligence.’ This intel was intended to convince us and the UN that Saddam Hussein had or was about to obtain ‘WMDs,’ weapons of mass destruction, that he would give to the terrorists, unless our military stopped him.

And so, in the spring of 2003, we bombed the living hell out of Baghdad, and other target areas in Iraq. Some six weeks later President Bush was standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier deck decked out in a leather flight jacket, telling us and all the world that ‘major combat operations in Iraq are over’.

Bush was right in the sense that the easy part of dismantling the inept and poorly organized Iraqi military was done for, but he was very wrong about combat operations, as these wore on for almost all the rest of the double-o decade. As time went by, it turned out conclusively that reality was that Saddam had had WMDs only in his dreams.

Justice Is Done
After much searching and many failed attempts, U.S. soldiers located that great dictator unkempt, unshaven, dirty, and wild-eyed, cowering in an underground ‘hidey-hole’ in the backyard of one of his minions. He was taken into custody; the new Iraqi government eventually tried him for his many crimes and brought him the justice he richly deserved at the end of a hangman’s rope.

The Cost, Oh the Cost
The Iraq war ground on and on, longer than all of World War II, and coffins containing the bodies of precious young men and women, soldiers all, each loved by someone, arrived home in flag draped coffins. In a PR sleight of hand move, the Administration forbade the media from photographing them as the big C-5 transport planes carrying them arrived at Andrews AFB.

Medical care for battlefield casualties had improved markedly since the last big conflict in Vietnam, and many soldiers survived horrific wounds—mostly from explosive IEDs, an acronym for ‘improvised explosive devices.’ These wounds would have killed them outright thirty five years ago, but now in the double-o decade left them alive but with horrendous, missing body parts replaced by prosthetics, and all to often, with deeply and perhaps permanently wounded psyches.

If all the carnage and the wounds resulting from the Iraqi war wasn’t enough to turn our collective stomachs, we also witnessed the spectacle of a few of our soldiers graphically humiliating and mistreating prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison—Saddam’s infamous former torture and execution center. While the entire truth about the Abu Ghraib story has yet to be made public, there is considerable circumstantial evidence that the troops who performed these acts were acting, if not under official orders, at least under official ‘encouragement’. Some of these soldiers went to jail for their misdeeds; one cannot help but strongly suspect that there were higher-ups in the government—indeed some very high higher-ups—who ought to be doing time for the Abu Ghraib fiasco as well.

Tally
In 2007, the Iraq war at long last began to wind down after controversial and politicized ‘surge’ of troops along with an underlying change in military tactics. Now, at least, our soldiers can now come home from this unnecessary, miserable and probably useless war without carrying the stigma of defeat that lingered over soldiers returning from Viet Nam. When all is said and done, we have lost 4,357 casualties in Iraq and 936 in Afghanistan, as of this New Years Eve. They were all alive in 2000 and now they are not, along with the 2,973 civilians, firefighters, and police who died in the 9/11 attacks. (Some add in the 19 hijackers to the 9/11 total, but I will not combine a count of murderers with the count of innocents who died in that event.) In addition to these deaths, there are counts of Iraqi deaths that considerably exceed 100,000.

Our national treasury spent somewhere north of a trillion dollars of our national treasure on this war. If someone knows what our nation has received for all this blood and treasure besides sadness and loss, please let me know. I haven’t been able to think of anything.

Our Attention Turns
In the fall of 2007, fuel prices spiked and the real estate market began to tank in earnest. This was followed in 2008 by the most devastating disruption of global financial markets since the Great Depression. Many—indeed most—of us saw our home values and retirement accounts decimated, if not destroyed outright. During those scary months, no matter what one was invested in, except for cash or cash equivalents, the value of the investment plummeted.
As the crisis unfolded, it became obvious that much of the blame lies with Congress and with federal regulators. They had allowed financial institutions to make trillions of dollars of bad mortgage loans, and then package these bad loans along with a few good loans into deceptive investments. The Wall Street geniuses didn’t stop there; they wrote hundreds of billions of ‘credit default swaps’—insurance policies—against losses by the investors and institutions who bought these so called investments.

Rottenness Exposed
Like the corrupt house of cards that it was, this rotten financial edifice came crashing down, its structure mortally wounded when the air all went out of the real estate bubble. As happens sometimes when structures are suddenly catastrophically torn down, ugly unsavory denizens who normally keep out of sight in dark hidden places are exposed to bright lights. They blink, they stammer, and they look guilty as hell. Remember Bernie Madoff.

Repulsive as Madoff was, the sight of our high government officials in the Treasury Department and elsewhere doling out hundreds of billions in bail out fund to institutions that were deemed ‘too big to fail’ was even more disgusting. And to add insult to what was already an outrage, the government mostly looked the other way when unconscionably large bonuses were handed out to the very perpetrators of this greatest debacle of our time.

Misery Has Lots of Company
The last two and one half years of the double-o decade have been really miserable for a lot of people, and really, we the citizens had every right to have taken to the streets. Job losses that ran into the millions and an unemployment rate exceeding 10%; entire neighborhoods, and in some cases almost entire communities were abandoned, empty, decaying, and dying due to foreclosure. Our most needy citizens were stripped of needed resources, teacher ranks were decimated, libraries and other essential services for children have been shuttered by state and local governments. All this was due to lack of tax revenue.

And even worse, transient tent communities sprung up occupied by foreclosed, unemployed, the desperate people.

Through it all, however, the Wall Street fat cats mostly got even fatter.

A Little Healing
Only in the last few months of 2009 have we begun to see some healing seem begin, and very slowly. In some cities, house prices have actually gone up a bit, as have sales. The economic metrics that tell such things show that our economy is finally growing again, at least a little. Unemployed workers are claiming benefits at a lower rate, and if you left your retirement fund invested rather than pulling it out, the stock market has managed to rally back approximately sixty percent of its loss since it bottomed in March, 2009.

We aren’t out of the woods yet, but finally things do appear to be looking up. We have a President now who actually can talk and chew gum at the same time, and who seems to have learned to listen some before he starts talking. We have a badly needed healthcare reform bill; its not all that I or a lot of people wanted, but it is a start.

Moving On
I’m not sorry to see the killer double-o decade come to a close. On a personal level, against the backdrop of all the national ‘sturm und drang’ that I just outlined, I had several wonderful things happen in my life, including marrying my beautiful and wonderful wife and moving to my beloved North State California. But I’m ready to move on and begin my seventh decade.

Always the optimist, I like to think of the possibilities.

Blog Comments and the Lack of Civility

A word to those wishing to comment:

I just deleted another snarky, 'anonymous' comment that was left sometime back. To roughly paraphrase, the comment said: "You're a total blithering idiot. Somewhere but not here there is a village that needs you." It went into more sarcastic detail. The language used wasn't profane, but it was mean spirited, condescending, and generally disrespectful. And like practically all the comments that people leave, it was signed 'Anonymous.'

Here's where I stand on comments. I WILL delete any comment that I don't feel adds something to the thoughts expressed here. I don't expect commenters to always agree with me; in fact I hope they don't. I had a debating scholarship when I was in college, and I love to debate. But debate is done by rebutting the points made by your opponent, and making your own points--not by trying to belittle or disrespect the person you are debating with. The essence of debate is overcoming another's points with your own better thought out, more logical, and better presented points.

Comments left on this blog need to address the issues I have raised, or raise new issues relevant to the discussion. Also, comments must be civil in both language and tone. Otherwise, the commenter is wasting key strokes and can save themselves the trouble.

Will I EVER post a comment here from someone who is 'anonymous?' The answer is yes, I will, and I have provided the poster had something of substance to say and is civil in their manner of saying it.

But I am amazed at how uncivil, disrespectful, sarcastic, snarky, and downright hateful people get under the cover of being 'anonymous.' It isn't just this blog; check out the posts against articles on any newspaper's web site and you will see the same kind of disrespectful incivility in a huge number of comments that people leave.

If anyone reading anything here this feels compelled to tell me that how stupid my opinion is, and/or that I am a fool for daring to expressing it, and/or that my mother drove a beer truck, or other disrespectful or hateful things, you should know this:

You will impress me a lot more--and come a lot nearer having your comment see the light of day instead of being lost forever in my bit-bucket--if you sign your real name.

Its Time For Democrats To Get Going On the Public Plan

Despite the fact that the Democrats seated their 60th senator this week in the person of Al Franken, thereby creating for themselves a filibuster-proof 'super-majority', they certainly are proceeding timidly and slowly towards health care reform.

I keep wondering how much longer they will continue bowing down to the great god Bi-Partisanship. Lord only knows, the Repubs weren't very respectful of it when they had control of Congress and the White House so why should the Democrats be so now.

Seventy percent of American's during a recent poll indicated that they wanted a single payer option, meaning that everyone in the country goes on Medicare or something very like it and we raise taxes accordingly to pay for it.

Considering the health insurance for my wife and I with Blue Cross under a group plan costs runs well north of $1600 a month, if someone in government will make that cost go away, they can raise my taxes quiet a bit and I won't complain, not even a whimper. Our medical insurance cost in total for a year is far more than our federal income tax. My point is there is a lot of room here for negotiation. I don't wish my life away, but from a pure dollars and cents standpoint I can't wait to get on Medicare.

Socialized medicine...at $1600 a month and climbing, BRING IT ON! Right now!

What we seem to be getting from the Democrats in Congress however, is an apparent lack of political will with a 'public option' which is a total no-brainer. Without a public option, the health insurance companies will not only continue to exist, they will have every incentive to find ways around whatever reform is passed to deny people coverage, to deny them care, and to enrich their stockholders and executives.

Health insurance companies are a lot like tobacco companies. They both injure people some to the point of death. They vary in their modus operandi. Tobacco companies make an addictive product that addicts people and keeps them using the product for years until it kills them. Health insurance companies refuse to sell policies to anyone but well people, cancel their coverage at the first sign of health problems, and try to deny or nickle and dime as many claims as possible. You can't tell me that people don't die because of the actions of these insurance companies; they die indeed, and plenty of them.

Why do the tobacco and insurance companies do that? Because they want to make a profit. Profits literally taken over the bodies of their customers. How disgusting is that?

Getting back to the main point here: the Democrats are supposed to be the liberal party, the party of the poor and the middle class. So why aren't they acting timid and bi-partisan on an issue that is killing and bankrupting their party members?

For example, why is our California Senator Dianne Feinstein not in the thick of battle here to at least get a public option enacted. I got a letter from her when I asked her what her position was and here's what she said:

"One of the many proposals being considered to reform our system is to create a health care plan that is publically operated. Please know that I am reviewing all health care reform options and I will keep your comments in mind as the Senate continues to work to improve health care for all Americans."

Boy, I feel better knowing that!

So far I haven't even received a response from Barbara Boxer.

Come on...these women senators are two of the most prominent women in the Democratic party. Why aren't they in the forefront of fighting this battle--perhaps the most important domestic issue in the first half of this new century--on their constituent's behalf.

Senators...please, I implore you, get going on this issue. Today. Now.

Letters On Health Care

I just found a set of letters to the editor on the subject of health care that were published today by the New York Times.

Some highlights:

"...I don’t understand why America is still talking about providing all its people with health insurance, as opposed to providing them with health care. Health care is a necessity of life..." ~ Vicki Riba Koestler, Alexandria, Va.

"Why can’t the United States accept health care as a natural right for all citizens and not a tortured compromise between the government and business profit? In Canada, when we turn on a tap we expect water. When we flip a switch we expect light. When we get sick, we expect health care..." ~ Peter Ryan, Vancouver, British Columbia

"...Health care is already being rationed. Major health care decisions are already being made every day by insurance companies, not doctors." ~ Dzung Vo, San Francisco

There is more...read the whole thing.

There are awesomely good insights; these folks cut right to the heart of the health care issue. If these folks were in Congress right now, I would feel a lot more comfortable about where the whole health care issue is going.

Sarah Palin's Next Move

I remember a popular computer game from the 1990s called 'Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?' Lots of folks--myself included--would paraphrase that in relation to Sarah Palin: 'What in the World is Sarah Palin Doing?'

Opinions abound and the press and the blogosphere are full of them. Jonathan Alter at Newsweek thinks that her resignation is the opening shot of a presidential bid for 2012. Over at Slate, Mickey Kaus has documented some fourteen Palin theories and is still counting. Andrew Malcolm on the LA Times blog page asks a question about Palin: Timeout or Flameout?

Who knows what Palin is up to. Whatever it is, this exceedingly unflattering--to Palin--Vanity Fair article "It Came From Wasilla" gives a good indication of what the public is likely to continue to see from Palin in the future:

"The clouds of tabloid conflict and controversy that swirl around her (Palin) and her extended clan—the surprise pregnancies, the two-bit blood feuds, the tawdry in-laws and common-law kin caught selling drugs or poaching game—give her family a singular status in the rogues’ gallery of political relatives. By comparison, Billy Carter, Donald Nixon, and Roger Clinton seem like avatars of circumspection."

It will not be surprising if Palin does plan a run in 2012. If so,more power to her. Her political sweet spot is the most unappealing and marginal--yet vocal portion far right wing component of the Republican base.

Sarah Palin in 2012: She'll be Dan Quayle in high heels with special guest appearances on Jerry Springer.

TANC Has Tanked

We wish that we could claim that because Cat-E-Whompus wrote about TANC, that the walls of Jericho had come tumbling down. However large our ego here at the blog, we can only take credit for being one voice speaking out against this big lumbering dinosaur of a project that threatened to trample the rights thousands of property owners in the North State.

Collectively, however, our voices have been heard--at least in Sacramento. The Sac-Bee reports here that SMUD--aka the Sacramento Municipal Utility District--has 'pulled the plug' on TANC.

Apparently, SMUD decided that the TANC project wasn't going to 'pencil out' for them and pulled out, leaving TANC with a gaping 35% hole in the project's budget. I suspect that SMUD figured out that there was a gathering storm of opposition by property owners and North State environmentalists to TANC that was going drag the name of SMUD through the political mud.

So, for now TANC has tanked; their existing schedule 'public outreach' has been cancelled.

TANC's dead for now, but like Frankenstein, it could lurch back to life via the machinations of its remaining municipal power company backers, which includes the city of Redding's power company. We can sleep better for now, but we still need to keep and eye out for signs of life in this thing down the road.

TANC's Lines of Mass Destruction

If you live in that part of California commonly known as the North State--including Redding, Cottonwood, Red Bluff, Corning, Chico, Orland--and many other towns and cities in the area, you should make it a priority to get up to speed on the plans of TANC, which is an acronym for the Transmission Agency of Northern California. Here is a link to their web site. Below is a picture of what you may be looking at out your front window if TANC gets their way.



TANC has a plan to run approximately 600 miles of 230-kilo volt (kV) and 500-kilo volt transmission lines and substations through the North State. Following is an overall map (courtesy of Stop TANC!)




These proposed transmission lines will--if built--transmit so-called 'renewable energy.' This energy will be generated in northeastern California and northwestern Nevada, and then carried by the proposed lines down to Sacramento and the Bay Area.

The North segment of the line is planned to run from the point of origin through Burney to Redding where it will connect into a substation in Olinda. From there, there are three proposed routes between Redding and Tracy. This segment is called the the Central Segment on TANC's web site. Their site says about this segment:

"The Central Segment would begin at the Olinda Substation and extend south to Tracy. It would include a new, 160 to 180 mile, double-circuit, 500-kV transmission line through the Central Valley, with an interconnection to a new substation in southern Sacramento County. Three alternative corridors have been preliminarily identified for the Central Segment: the western, central, and eastern alternatives. From the proposed new substation in southern Sacramento County, each of three alternative corridors would continue 40 to 45 miles southwest to a proposed new substation near the Tracy Substation."

Readers, please note this carefully. There is a VERY LARGE amount of private real property threatened by the TANC project. TANC can and will use the power of eminent domain to seize your property if it is located in the path of the route that they select. While TANC must compensate you if they take your property, the fact that they will be doing this is taking of property at a time when property values are very depressed is no accident. You can bet your bippy that TANC is looking to secure the routes for their big ugly power lines at today's depressed real estate prices; this way, we as citizens of the North State will be even bigger losers in this deal than we otherwise would be.

However, residents of the big metro areas to our south stand to benefit a great deal from our misfortune if this project goes through.

Kick us while we are down, seems to be the TANC philosophy.

You can go to here to see Google Earth Maps depicting the three alternative TANC power line routes. You can enter your street address and email id and the site will display a map that zooms in, showing you where your property is situated relative to the TANC routes.

If you haven't done this, you should; its an eye-opener. In my case, I found that the westerly route bypasses my property by about a half mile (whew!) but many are not so lucky. Depending on the route that TANC selects, thousands of people could find their property value destroyed--at least what little remains here in the depth of the recession--to provide homeowners and businesses in Sacramento and the Bay Area with so-called 'Green Power.'

There is a Stop TANC! web site; you will find it here. If you are concerned about TANC like I am, the site has a number of public officials you can call, write, or email. Congressman Wally Herger leads the list in my book. You can email him to express your dismay at this project here.

Support a Public Health Insurance Option

Dear Readers and Friends,

With nearly 50 million Americans lacking health insurance, and premiums rapidly rising, it's time to address the health care crisis in our country. All Americans deserve access to affordable, quality health care -- and today, nearly one-in-six of us don't have it.

This month, Congress is working on new reform legislation that will make quality health care available and affordable for all Americans. In particular, Senators Dick Durbin, Patrick
Leahy, and Chuck Schumer are working for a public health insurance option that would foster greater competition in the marketplace, create more choices for consumers, and lead to
lower costs and better quality.

Please join me in supporting their work to pass strong health care reform legislation this year by signing the online petition at http://ga3.org/campaign/healthpetition?source=hc_taf

Or, click the link below:
http://ga3.org/campaign/healthpetition?rk=odtv479aen1DW