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Some Jabs, Some Right Hooks, and a Good Uppercut (Or Two)

Sunday, December 12, 2004

The Question Is, Will It Be Hell First, or Damnation That God Rains Down Upon Canada?

Well, a Canadian court has cleared the way for gay marriages to be legal throughout their country. Prepare for 4 years of apoplectic fits being thrown by the lunatic right fringe of the Republican Party in this country as they demand Bush adhere to their agenda of Bible-first, U.S. Constitution-second, legislative needs (PV Notes to Sean Hannity and Al Gainey: Is that a vein we see popping out on your neck?).

Since this country experienced the tulip-bulb phenomenon when flavored-sparkling water Clearly Canadian hit the grocery-store shelves 16 years ago, we all know how susceptible Americans are to Canadian influences. In fact, from what we hear, the official Reverend of the Lunatic Fringe, Jerry Falwell, is busy drawing-up a proposal that widens the border between Canada and the U.S. to be akin to the Berlin Wall, with appropriate "kill zones" if gay married couples are seen crossing into the U.S.

In protest of this court ruling, the U.S.-based Organization for Real Good And Safe Marriages has issued orders to its members that whenever they sing, or observe anyone else singing, the Christmas song 'Tis The Season, that they are to substitute the line "...and now we don our gay apparel..." to be "...and now we don our Biiii-ble scarrrrrrves, fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-laaaa...".


Donald Rumsfeld - Nominee For Most Idiotic Statement of The Year

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's answer this past week to a front-line soldier's question about why do the soldiers in Iraq have to dig through scrap yards to retrofit their Humvees with more armor to prevent themselves from getting blown-up was the answer one MIGHT expect from the administration of former president Bill Clinton: "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have."

The truth that is becoming all too clear, and more accepted from even the staunchest blind followers of pro-everything-Bush, is that:

1) It was very possible that Saddam Hussein could have been "taken-out" with Special Forces rather than a cover of a full invasion. (Why is it that the Israelis can target their opponents with pinpoint accuracy? Well-organized intelligence. Why can't the U.S. accomplish the same? Because we got a bunch of neocons who don't want to fight wars with intelligence, but just want to drop shock and awe ordnance to destroy everything and rebuild at our expense.)

2) We had ZERO intelligence on the ground in Iraq and we didn't care enough to build any BEFORE an invasion. Blame Clinton all you want for the lack of intact intelligence, but that lack is no excuse for launching a war against Iraq without human eyeball intelligence.

3) No attempt was made to plan for the post-invasion "hold-'em" game of actually securing the country. The after-effects of the war (i.e., the insurgency by Iraqi militants) were NOT a "miscalculation," but a full-fledged IGNORING of what could happen if you invade a country without having your intelligence game intact.


Ah, but here's some happy news: The Pentagon is now quietly working on plans to push females into front-line combat. That's right. So many male soldiers are getting killed and injured from crappy equipment (a'la Donny's basic response of "Hey, don't blame me for your buddies' deaths. It's just the luck of the draw that you got sucked into fighting for a cause that we fooled you into believing. Now, where's my plane so I can fly back to D.C. and relax with my mistress...") that the Army has decided that G.I. Janes are well-suited to be tossed into the Fallujah situation.

PV Note: Yes, we are Republican, BUT we have an aversion to drinking the Kool-Aid swill that continues to flow out of Washington.

Want To Help The Soldiers In Spite Of The Fact That Their Leaders Are Morons?

There is a website called AnySoldier.com that gives you a wealth of information about sending care packages to members of the military who are in harm's way. The site gives instructions and provides a list of military personnel whom you can send stuff to. The soldiers have a "request list" in their profiles. And, as the site instructs, send these care packages with no expectation from the recipient of a "Thank you" or acknowledgment of your gift to them.

A subscriber to the PV, Jack Peevy, also has a battalion unit whom he is connected with that would love to get care packages.
The Plight of The Atlanta Firefighter - Let's Do The Math

"Black Female Democrat Atlanta Mayor Tells Union Firefighters 'Tough Luck' In Their Attempts to Secure a 4% Pay Raise in 2005". This is the headline that SHOULD have been run in the AJC last week. Why? Because it's not some "Republican" official out to screw the unions, but a Democrat one. And, a black one besides. Hmm...where is CBS News on their coverage of this story?

Where, for that matter, is the Democratic Party on THEIR coverage of this story? Ooo-boy. Those Democrats sure love to patronize the unions when they are running for office and want them to help do whatever they can to get their membership out, but, when faced with one of their own kind screwing the unions, it's "What? we can't talk about that right now...Help? You want our help? No, no...we can't help you...Why? Because, it's one of our own...we don't go after our own...that's not in our programming...we're like RoboCops and we have a Prime Directive that we must adhere to, else the others will turn on us..."

Now, we'd like to do a bit of math exercise to give the firefighters something more to get pissed-off (not because we're trying to taunt you firefighters, but because you need to know the truth about your breathren whom you elect to office). Here's the math: Assume the average firefighter pay is $35,000. A 4% raise per firefighter is $1400 more per fighter.

Now, let's take...say, the amount of money Mayor Shirley Franklin is paying Linda Hamrick's lobbying firm of $250,000 per year to lobby for all kinds of money from all kinds of sources for Shirley to stuff into the pockets of all of her corrupt friends in Atlanta City Government. How many times does $1400 go into $250,000...let's see...that's 1 carry the 1100...punch that...okay...178.6 times. So, theoretically, instead of spending 1/4 of a million dollars on hiring one lobbyist, the City of Atlanta could afford to give 179 firefighters a pay raise. This is Franklin's fault in prioritizing, not Hamrick's fault in securing a position.

This, by the way, is typical of, not only city government, but state government as well. There is all kinds of money buried in a budget, but it's being spent on frivolous crap rather than necessary infastructure (like, say, police, fire, and court system improvements).
Speaking of Linda Hamrick...

Did y'all happen to catch Senator Eric Johnson's words of wisdom (sic) last week about Georgia's judicial branch? In response to the state judiciary department requesting a 29% increase in budget, Johnson opened his mouth, and rearranged his feet, so that he could offer this opinion: "Justice isn't just blind, it's deaf and dumb too." (ooohh...we can't wait for Johnson to appear before a judge for a traffic charge. The judge will ask him something like: "Now, Mr. Johnson, tell us. Do you always drive HUA or do you only talk HUA?")

It's always fascinating to us that when Republican lawmakers make noises about being in favor of more "law and order," they seem to always give the short straw to the departments of government that are actually charged with the carrying-out of more law and order.

The GBI's Crime Lab is one of those departments in state government that legislators like to prevent money from finding its way to. Prosecutors across the state are waiting months for analysis to come back, or, just ending-up kicking suspects free. In fact, akin to the Atlanta firefighter story above, people SHOULD start asking why it is that legislators, city councils, county commissioners, etc. always see fit to screw the law enforcement/populace protection segments of government while making sure they re-direct more pork back home to the organizations and business entities who stuff their campaign bank accounts? (Well, we just answered the question within the question, didn't we?)

The problem with the judiciary, prosecuting attorney councils, and law-enforcement arms who must come to the Capitol to beg for more financial resources is that they haven't put their finances together and hired the right lobbyist to help them get mo' money.

Who is the "right lobbyist?" Who is the lobbyist who could not only likely get the 29% budget increase the court system wants, but perhaps get as much as a 50% increase for all other budgets?

The "right lobbyist" is Linda Hamrick. For it is Hamrick who can place one phone call to Eric Johnson and turn him from a frothing "Justice is not only blind, but deaf and dumb too" babbler into a docile "I'll do anything Linda Hamrick tells me to do" type of legislator.

We don't know the exact power Linda has over Eric (we've heard it may involve a nose ring and a tattoo in a certain place on the body...), but we witnessed the power she has over him in last year's minimal tussle in the state legislature over Mayor Franklin's demand that the state owes the City of Atlanta financial help in the repair of the sewer system.

This is the 'I'm a state senator and you will learn to properly address me, Mayor Franklin, when you want my help letter that Johnson e-mailed to the mayor in October 2003. Full of brash and bravado, ain't he?

Well, we all know what happened after that. Within a short time, it was Eric Johnson who was walking across the street to talk to Franklin. And then it was Johnson who was sponsoring bills to help repair the City of Atlanta's sewer system (while choosing to, again, follow Linda's direction to screw Joe Wilkinson and his silly attempts at trying to wrangle a vote on the City of Sandy Springs). All at the behest of Franklin's $250,000 per year hire of Hamrick as her lobbyist. SO, if anyone wants ANYTHING out of the state senate this year, don't waste money sending Senator Balfour to take tours of the Napa Valley wineries...just hire Linda Hamrick...she knows the right buttons to push to get Eric to get stuff to sail right on through.
Breaking News...UGA Diplomas Declared Worthless...UGA To Lose National Accreditation

Rumors have it that the UGA Administrators have been LYING for years about the curriculum at the state's (long-grounded) flagship university. While it may be a "tough school to get into," once an applicant has been accepted, it appears they do not receive an education worth more than one you can obtain from a 2-week correspondence college in the Cayman Islands.

News of this revelation broke in last Friday's AJC in the Metro section, titled "UGA looks to toughen courses...". It seems that an academic survey of freshman UGA students concluded that the freshmen were studying an average of 12.7 hours per week...half as much as the school's administrators recommended for academic success. A university "task force" (i.e., a bunch of people loading up on beer and pretzels) has been formed to explore ways to make the UGA academic experience more "interesting, relevant, and [cough! cough!] challenging."

Most interesting to the PV is there were students who dared to break the UGA cult's "Code of Silence" with regard to the fact that the education a person receives at UGA basically comprises of a re-hash of most private schools' 9th grade curriculums.

Hunt Revell, a junior at UGA told the AJC that "UGA is not as challenging as it could be..."

NOT as "challenging" as it could be?!?!? Shame, shame, shame! Mr. Revell needs to go back to freshman year and forced to re-read the entire Cat in The Hat series and write book reports on each book to get his head back on straight. The purpose of UGA is NOT to educate or challenge students, BUT to make sure that all money and resources go the maintenance of the athletic programs and ancillary expense departments! Geez!

A few weeks ago it was revealed by another AJC article that one of the toughest courses offered in the UGA freshman curriculum was one titled (we kid you not) "Chocolate Science". In this course, students get to eat chocolate once per week for an hour as they figure out the "aroma and texture" of the different forms of chocolate candy. They are also required to study the history of chocolate and then perform experi-mints to find out what happens when, say, one drops a Nestle's Crunchbar and a Peppermint Patti off of a 6-story building at the same time (where is Johnny Knoxville when you need him?).

The professor of this class, Robert Shewfelt, developed the grueling course requirements in order to try and inspire more students to enter the world of food science.

PV Offers A Nifty Idea For A Course: Since you guys run away from attending a school like Georgia Tech because "we gotta take all that math!", one of you UGA Accounting profs needs to develop a course whereby the students are required to spend 8 hours per week observing Bankruptcy Court proceedings since most graduates do not understand the theory of what happens when expenses are greater than revenues (as the observance of 100+ years of UGA-graduate controlled government in Georgia provides proof of).

Del Dunn, VP of Instruction had this TRULY amazing revelation to impart upon us about what might be an important skill to learn while at UGA: "It's something that is almost [emphasis added] universally agreed upon...You need to know how to write and how to speak." (In the words of Erin, a great friend of the PV, NFW!!!)

Actually, Dunn is dead wrong. Because, when it comes to the standards expected of UGA's graduates, you do not need to write, you just need to speak. Only on occasion does one UGA graduate out of 10,000 need to learn how to write, and, just barely at that. One need only take a look at the amazingly incoherent laws that people like Legislative Counsel (and, UGA law school graduate) Sewell Brumby has written for legislators, and one sees that mastery of such skills is so unnecessary, at least in this state.

Now, to add to the troubles of students like Revell who only spoke-out because they were desperate for a challenge, we hear the UGA Alumni Association is so furious that the Code of Silence has been broken with regard to the truth about UGA classes and the true nature of their curriculum, that they have hired Brandi Evans at the prestigious, UGA-graduate imbued law firm of McKaroni, Linguini & Alfredo, LLP to obtain a gag order on students like Revell and anyone else thinking of breaking The Code.

"It is absolutely instilled in every member of the UGA Family that once you crawl under the Arches, and you take a vow of loyalty, you NEVER break the Code," roared Evans at a press conference, a UGA graduate herself.

Evans continued her tirade: "This cannot continue. Do you know what would happen if those national academic ranking institutions found out that UGA isn't challenging our students? We would drop down to being ranked at...well, I don't know what level....but it would be really, really low. It might even be lower than those degrees you get from a 2-week correspondence course from the Cayman and Virgin Islands!..."

PV will keep you up to date with all breaking news you need to be informed of...By the way, you may notice a few new "boxes" on the site (one at the bottom and one at the upper-right). They are there for you to contribute to the ongoing success of the Political Vine. Because, you just never know when the Vine can be put to good use helping YOU on an issue of some import...an issue that no one else will care about... :-)

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