Letters to the Editor
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Our junior senator is all grown up.
I don't think this has anything to do with Boxer's comments in the here and now. I believe that this is simply a reaction to the fact that Boxer has stepped out of the shadow of Feinstein, and aggressively and succesfully pushed a progressive agenda since the Democrats retook congress. The right-wing babble machine is looking for any chink, any opportunity to take her down a notch--and since she's been too savvy to provide them with any good openings, they're making one up.
All of which means: bravo, Barbara; keep it up. You're pissing off all the right people.
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Still clueless?
This, from a story on NPR this morning:
"David Paulison, a former firefighter who now heads the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the government has come a long way since the last time thousands of Americans were forced to take shelter in a football stadium.
"Somebody asked me earlier, 'What was the difference between what happened in Katrina and what's happening here today?' What we learned after Hurricane Katrina [was] we have to work together. We have to be organized," Paulison said."
It took Katrina to show that they had to work together and be organized? If they didn't learn it then, I doubt they will learn it now. This administration don't do too good at that there learnin' thing.
What a bunch of pandering, hat-in-hand, self-serving boilerplate
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You just don't get it
All statements made by Democrats are outrageous and undermine the troops. She could be talking about traffic on the freeway and it would still be outrageous and undermine the troops. The Republicans just push a button whenever a Democrat says anything, sending email to their Kool Aid drinkers that denounces the latest outrage.
So where is the Democrats' button?
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Clearly......
Senator Boxer needs to provide a weepy apology as Congressman Stark did.
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Something tells me...
...the response in San Diego will be very different from the response to Katrina, and everyone will say the Administration has learned its lesson.
What lesson?
The people in San Diego are middle-class white Republicans. The only lesson learned from Katrina was that if you throw enough poor black Democrats out of the state, you get a Republican governor. And being right there with the Guard and Presidential visits when middle-class white Republican houses in the hills burn doesn't mean any lesson has been learned -- going after the highest Democratic politicians with direct involvement, in an effort to prove that any government snafus and fubars are Democratic in origin, is a complete repeat of the tactics used for Katrina. Absolutely nothing has changed.
Sorry if I sound so cynical. After the last San Diego fire, I sat stupefied in a required management civility class at work while the instructor, a resident of the hills outside San Diego, took a half an hour of class time to bitch out the firefighters for not taking enough risks to save her neighborhood, the Red Cross for their lousy shelter accommodations, and the government for not covering all the costs of her rebuild (on god knows what tax revenue she didn't support collecting). Republican gratitude is frequently underwhelming.
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What I want to know is
where were the law enforcement personnel during the last two years?
If the FBI said Al Qaeda were planning on setting fires, I would think they would have been looking for them.
"From USA Today in July of 2003:
al-Qaeda Detainee Spoke of Fire Plot
The FBI alerted law enforcement agencies last month that an al-Qaeda terrorist now in detention had talked of masterminding a plot to set a series of devastating forest fires around the western United States. Rose Davis, a spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, told The Associated Press that officials there took note of the warning but didn’t see a need to act further on it.
The contents of the June 25 memo from the FBI’s Denver office were reported Friday by The Arizona Republic. Davis declined to share a copy of the memo and an FBI spokeswoman in Denver didn’t immediately return a telephone call. As we have stated before. If you see anything suspicious, report it to law enforcement immediately."
I realize California is a large state and this warning came ou in 2003, but they should have been on the lookout for this particularly in the season for fires!
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Boxer's Rebellion
we are down 50 percent in terms of our National Guard equipment because they're all in Iraq, the equipment, half of the equipment. So we really do need help. I think all of our states are down in terms of equipment.
I was wondering that when I saw footage of a DC-10 being used to combat the wildfires. Usually they use lots of C-130s for that kind of job, but then I wondered if the lion's share of the C-130s were being used in Iraq, requiring them to rely on other planes for that kind of measure.
For sure the Kool-Aid Kontingent in the GOP's brimstone base doesn't like to think about how an opportunistic foreign war might be a drain on domestic resources, but, sadly, it is. That's probably why they're howling about Barbara Boxer -- drawing too much attention to the impact of the war on our domestic infrastructure.
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Slackie Onassis
http://www.aviationtoday.com/categories/maintenance/13412.html
http://www.alabamaaviator.com/index.asp?record_no=7810
http://www.airliners.net/discussions/general_aviation/read.main/3458391/
http://cms.firehouse.com/web/online/Wildland-Firefighting/DC-10-Retardant-Jetliner-Used-First-Time-in-US/4$50320
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Boxer comments
"we are down 50 percent in terms of our National Guard equipment because they're all in Iraq, the equipment, half of the equipment. So we really do need help. I think all of our states are down in terms of equipment."
So are most of the states...but it seems to be working anyway:
U.S. Deaths In Iraq Continue To Decline
Officials Credit Troop Surge For Drop In U.S. Military And Iraqi Civilian Deaths
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/23/iraq/main3399446.shtml
Guess we can take comfort in this good news anyway, right?
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Fires
I've lived in Southern California all my 42 years and I assure you, no terrorists are needed to start fires when the Santa Ana winds blow. Downed power lines, a stray cigarette or a tailpipe backfire are sufficient.
That said, if I were al Qaeda, I wouldn't waste my time with bombs. I'd be wandering the back country with magnesium flares. You could create a catastrophe on the cheap.