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THE LEFT HAND COLUMN

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Would You Buy A Used Car From This Man?

(No, but you'd let him run your country)

This just in from one of my conservative readers who asked if this was all true. Not being a professional researcher I cannot vouch for every word but we all know what we've seen and heard on the news.

I squished the Presidential Accomplishments together to try and save space but there are just so darned many!

RESUME
George W. Bush
The White House, USA

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE:

LAW ENFORCEMENT: I was arrested in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1976 for driving under the influence of alcohol. I pled guilty, paid a fine and had my driver's license suspended for 30 days. My Texas driving record has been "lost" and is not available.

MILITARY: I joined the Texas Air National Guard and went AWOL. I refused to take a drug test or answer any questions about my drug use. By joining the Texas Air National Guard, I was able to avoid combat duty in Vietnam.

COLLEGE: I graduated from Yale University with a low C average. I was a cheerleader.

PAST WORK EXPERIENCE:

I ran for US Congress and lost. I began my career in the oil business in Midland, Texas, 1975. I bought an oil company but couldn't find any oil in Texas. The company went bankrupt shortly after I sold all my stock. I bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using taxpayer money. With the help of my father and our right-wing friends in the oil
industry (including Enron CEO Ken Lay), I was elected governor of Texas.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS GOVERNOR:

I changed Texas pollution laws to favor power and oil companies, making Texas the most polluted state in the Union. During my tenure, Houston replaced Los Angeles as the most smog-ridden city in America. I cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas treasury to the tune of billions in borrowed money. I set the record for the most executions by any governor in American history. With the help of my brother, the governor of Florida, and my father's appointments to the Supreme Court, I became President after losing by over 500,000 votes.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS PRESIDENT:

I invaded and occupied two countries at a continuing cost of over one billion dollars per week.I spent the US surplus and effectively bankrupted the US Treasury. I shattered the record for the largest annual deficit in US history. I set an economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12-month period. I set the all-time record for the biggest drop in the history of the US stock market. I am the first President in US history to enter office with a criminal record. I set the all-time record for most days on vacation in any one-year period. After taking off the entire month of August, I presided over the worst security failure in US history. In my State of the Union Address, I lied about our reasons for attacking Iraq and then blamed the lies on our British friends. I set the record for most campaign fundraising trips by a US President. In my first year in office, over 2 million Americans lost their jobs and that trend continues every month. I set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a 12-month period. I appointed more convicted criminals to administration than any President in US history. I set the record for least number of press conferences of any President since the advent of television. I presided over the biggest energy crisis in US history and refused to intervene when corruption involving the oil industry was revealed. I presided over the highest gasoline prices in US history. I have cut health care benefits for war veterans and support a cut in duty benefits for active duty troops and their families -- in wartime. I have set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously protest against me in public venues (15 million people), shattering the record for protest against any person in the history of mankind. I've broken more international treaties than any President in US history. I'm proud that the members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in US history. My "poorest millionaire," Condoleeza Rice, has a Chevron oil tanker named after her. I am the first President in US history to order an unprovoked, preemptive attack and the military occupation of a sovereign nation. I did so against the will of the United Nations, the majority of US citizens, and the world community. I refused to allow inspector's access to US "prisoners of war" detainees and thereby have refused to abide by the Geneva Convention. I am the first President in history to refuse United Nations election inspectors (during the 2002 US election). I am the all-time US and world record-holder for receiving the most corporate campaign donations. My largest lifetime campaign contributor, and one of my best friends, Kenneth Lay, presided over the largest corporate bankruptcy fraud in US history. My political party used Enron private jets and corporate attorneys to assure my success with the US Supreme Court during my election decision. I have protected my friends at Enron and Halliburton against investigation or prosecution. More time and money was spent investigating the Monica Lewinsky affair than has been spent investigating one of the biggest corporate rip-offs in history. I garnered the most sympathy for the US after the World Trade Center attacks and less than a year later made the US the most hated country in the world, the largest failure of diplomacy in world history. I am the first President in history to have a majority of Europeans (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and security. I changed the US policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts. I have so far failed to fulfill my pledge to bring Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to justice.

RECORDS AND REFERENCES:

All records of my tenure as governor of Texas are now in my father's library, sealed and unavailable for public view. All records of SEC investigations into my insider trading and my bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view. All records or minutes from meetings that I or my Vice-president attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public review.

Please consider my experience when voting
in 2004.

Posted by: Likes2mtnbike at December 10, 2003 09:27 | link | comments

How About A Little Hepatitis With That Salad?

I've always had a problem with imported goods.  Give me Made In America anytime.  That way, at least, when something goes wrong there is a person or agency there to handle the situation.

Not so with NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement).  You know, that nasty little piece of legislation signed to encourage trade with Mexico.  Florida farmers have a problem with it and so do I.  It becomes more nasty when I read articles like this.  Hepatitis A outbreaks caused by nasty vegetables watered with nasty water handled by nasty hands and transported to our grocery stores.  It's not the first article I've seen and I'm sure it won't be the last.

I say if Mexico can't get it's s*** together (pun intended) then NAFTA should be wiped.  Why agree to trade with countries who can't get their workers to wash their hands or even water their crops with clean water?  If their products are infected they should be impounded and their exporters fined and banned until they can produce consumables that are safe to eat.

It's ridiculous.  When was the last time you read about tomatoes from the United States causing hepatitis outbreaks?

Posted by: Likes2mtnbike at December 09, 2003 16:55 | link | comments (2)

Dru Sjodin

There's another terrible story unfolding in North Dakota.  In case you've been Rip Van Winkling for a while, college student Dru Sjodin was abducted from a mall parking lot in Grand Forks after leaving her job at a Victoria's Secret, allegedly by current and former sexual predator Alfonso Rodriguez.  New information indicates her DNA matches blood found in the suspect's car.  She has not been found.  The police had previously claimed that Rodriguez was "cooperating" with the investigation.

If by cooperating they mean that he has lawyered up and is refusing to speak, I think the perfect Christmas gift for the police department there would be a dictionary.

Unfortunately, my guess is that, in order to locate Dru (or, sadly and more likely, her remains) the local police will make a deal with the accused:  if you tell us where she is we'll seek life in prison rather than the death penalty.  Her family has my deepest sympathies but I hope desperatly that they do not agree to this.  Our prisons are clogged with lifers living off the state who should, in a perfect world, have been put to death.  I believe in the death penalty.  I believe in an eye for an eye.  Dru appears to be a beautiful young woman but her body is only a container for her soul and, if she has been murdered, that soul is already set free-albeit in the most horrible, unimaginable way ever.

Closure is one thing, justice is a whole other story.

Posted by: Likes2mtnbike at December 09, 2003 13:06 | link | comments

Hey Ya!

If anyone was wondering what Rosa Parks is up to these days ask OutKast. They're being sued by Miss Parks for "violat(ing) her publicity and trademark rights."

Did she sue anyone for Barbershop? Hey-ya, Miss Parks, lighten up. Well, not literally.

Posted by: Likes2mtnbike at December 08, 2003 17:43 | link | comments (2)

Bush, Bush, In the Bush

I'm just wondering what is up with AARP? Did someone from the Bush administration infiltrate the organization and start practicing voodoo economics out of their offices? Or are they just selling out, frightened as the rest of us by a man who has managed not only to bulldoze his way to the presidency but has also been part and parcel of a sea-change in attitude by the government towards its own governed? (Although there are some who say it has always been thus).

First AARP appeases the Bushies with their belly-roll on the Medicare package just signed into law (congratulations Squibb, Bristol-Myers, Pfiser and all ya'll) then they do a double flip on nursing home reform, looking to agree to certain lawsuit award caps in exchange for a few-but needed-improvements in regulation (as usual, woefully shortsighted).

I never had concern to be interested in AARP until I turned 35 and began thinking about the future (mom always said I was a late bloomer). Now I look at that future and wonder how anyone is going to make it who may NEED Medicare and its now attendant prescription drug benefit (gappy as an 8 year-old's smile) while the lobbying organization which ballyhooed itself as the voice for the elderly in America continues to acquiesce to big losses in the hopes of making a few throw away gains.

Maybe they're trying to change the system from within...

And speaking of the Bushies, there's this from Jeannette Walls' The Scoop on MSNBC about unreleased Eminem anti-Bush lyrics. As usual, anything negative about the administration which they want you to hear (the implication is that they are "breaking" a blatantly liberal story, lol) is leaked to the appropriatly named Matt Drudge for his up-to-the-minute (as well as fair and balanced) Drudge Report. A source comments that the lyrics are the stuff of which boycotts are made.

Yeah, I know loads of conservative Republican wind bags who listen to Eminem.

Posted by: Likes2mtnbike at December 08, 2003 13:53 | link | comments (2)

The Simple Life (?)

Blogless for Thanksgiving and World Aids Day. Sorry about that, folks. A little preoccupation this side of the screen. I'm trying to figure out what is wrong with our neighbors. Not all of them. Just a little problem with the one known only as "The Preacher" and his family. Actually, not even his family, just him and his son.

We've never been introduced, The Preacher and us. His way of saying, "welcome to the neighborhood" was to call our leasing agent our first day here and complain that we were parking our vehicles over the septic tank. Not his septic tank. Nowhere near his septic tank. Believe it or not, OUR septic tank, the one we apparently don't want to work. Uh huh, right, sir.

By way of explaination, this is nowhere near the city. Not even in the suburbs. We moved to Zephyrhills initially because a great house became available through my sister-in-law. Room enough for our dogs and available at the last minute-our previous landlord had, surprise!, leased us her home then failed to make any mortgage payments while claiming homestead exemption. In Florida, a HUGE no-no. So we had to move. We lease, by the way, because I was foolish enough to sell my condo and move to North Carolina for love. NEVER do that. If you are used to making, say, $35-40,000.00 per year in Florida you will make less than $27,000.00 for the same job, besides having to learn to drive in the snow in the mountains. And NEVER sell your home for love. That's all I have to say about that particular incident.

So we moved to Z-hills, as it is fondly known. Cue Green Acres music. Personally, I love it. If you can overlook the kids who are just getting around to laser-tag and hip-hop music and try not to notice that nearly everyone is a racist, it's beautiful (mostly) and peaceful (mostly). We had great neighbors at our first home which was closer to town. Anything we didn't know how to do, they did. Turned out to be permanent friends and I like that. After our first year the home we were living in went up for sale so we began looking farther out, nearer to Dade City, another pretty little town.

We wind up on 10 acres far from the madding crowd only to find we moved 5 acres away from the maddening individuals. There's a flag of Dixie flying in the valley behind us (yup, valley-why do you think it's called ZephyrHILLS?) and dogs roam through the property like some redneck version of The Incredible Journey. I dug a garden only to discover that the more I watered the plants, the more stunted they grew. We stopped drinking the well water-it's a huge problem in Florida, bad wells from overpumping by places like Zephyrhills Water (boycott it) and Crystal Springs Water (boycott them even more).

I also discovered The Preacher. He has a son who enjoys pulling his pickup truck near the fenceline and staring at our home. We don't know at what. We don't know why. We don't even care. But we notice. This past July 4th we caught The Preacher and his family, his whole family, mind, shooting bottle rockets at our house. Not those baby Black Cats. The really big ones. The ones that can start a prefabricated home on fire. Could it have been a mistake? Well, The Preacher himself lives on 20 acres. Our thought was he could have aimed into his own pasture rather than ours and our vacationing neighbor's. It took my partner walking outside with one of the blogdogs (a rednose pit bull) with a verbal request to, please, knock it off to get them to stop. They did not apologize. They didn't even speak.

The Preacher's son recently returned from active duty in the military. We don't know what branch or where he served. We do know that he either left as an asshole or just came back as one. I am against the war but this person has nothing to do with it. I have, on several occasions, been tailgated home by him-him and his shiny brown pickup truck (brown, can you imagine?). We have been, as they say, looked at hard by him many times. He goes hunting in the dead of night. I know this because I hear him crank up the rap (country white boys and rap music, I still don't get it...) when he leaves at 2am and see him return home-truck filthy and gear hanging over the sides-in the wee coffee hours. I always figured this meant he was poaching, but I'm no hunter.

They have dogs, The Preacher and his family. One is a bred-out female pit bull who once paid us a visit. She was friendly and silly so I took her by the collar and walked her home. At first, The Preacher wouldn't answer his door. I could actually see him through the door-glass. I persisted and, when he opened his door, he took his dog as though I had stolen her. No thank-you, no hello, no get your ass back on yer own property, nothing. He also owns a little brown jug of a dog of unknown origin-maybe 5lbs tops. The son recently brought home a black pit bull puppy which he allows to roam freely. This arrangement lets the puppy and the littlebrownjug wander onto our property-even though The Preacher's (and our) property is fenced with field fencing. This is because The Preacher has a gate which he never closes. And if you know anything about male pit bulls (we have one, unaltered) you know that as soon as this pup's walnuts drop and he lollygags over here, if Big Black Blogdog is outside, that puppy is a snack. His youngest son (we assume, as we've never met or been spoken back to) came walking through the property the other day with a pellet gun, two little kids and this puppy. My partner challenged him and he said he was going to hunt doves (he was about 13). Not on our property you're not, she told him. She also passed on the above information about our male blogdog. The kids picked up the pup and ran. The boy sauntered off, looking back over his shoulder the whole time.

All this whining is compounded by my oldest friend's father passing away a couple weeks ago and my continued concern over her grieving process (different, to say the least), my partner's back injury, my own obvious insanity (did someone say psychiatrist?) and my growing panic the longer George Bush serves as President (c'mon big guy, resign, take one for the team). Being funny was a little out of my reach for a while there.

And thanks for listening. Preacher updates as they occur.

Posted by: Likes2mtnbike at December 07, 2003 17:54 | link | comments