Bail Out the Hurricane Ike Victims--NOW!

By Si Dunn

Two months after Hurricane Ike slammed into Texas' Galveston Bay area, many people are still waiting for help from the Federal Emergency ("You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie!") Management Agency (FEMA).

Coastal residents who live and work in fishing communities especially have been hit hard and remain caught up in a vortex of federal buracracy and red tape that has delayed the arrival of the infamous FEMA trailers. According to the Dallas Morning News, at least 2,000 families are still without FEMA trailers in areas devastated by Ike.

"People's lives are literally stacked up on the side of the road," Anahuac, Texas' mayor, Guy Jackson, told the Morning News.

Still Stuck in the Mud

On tiny Oak Island, for example, what once was a bustling fishing community "is now a giant mud flat, dotted with cheap tents and interrupted by heaping mountains of debris," according to Morning News reporter Emily Ramshaw.

In a few cases, FEMA trailers have been delivered but must remain padlocked until inspectors show up and okay them for occupancy. So some families are having to keep living in tents right next to trailers that are supposed to be helping them.

Meanwhile, their houses, jobs and belongings have been swept away, and they are trying to restart their lives literally from nothing.

Many Americans generously have donated food, clothing and other items to Hurricane Ike's victims, and this assistance has reached even remote locations such as the Oak Island community, which is settled by Vietnamese and Anglo commercial fishing families.

But, too often, the federal government still can't seem to organize a one-car parade when it comes to delivering disaster relief. We are supposed to be the world's greatest and most capable nation. Yet what kind of great and capable nation forces its disaster victims to camp in the mud for two months until somebody "official" shows up with a clipboard?

Can't Others Help?

And why wait for FEMA? Surely there are Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine and Coast Guard personnel in need of training in debris removal, reconstruction and taking care of refugees--just as our military units are doing overseas. Why can't more of our stateside military help here now and get that training?

The State of Texas has provided some relief, but more aid must be forthcoming from the federal government. According to the Morning News, Gov. Rick Perry has asked for additional federal aid to fund costly removal of Hurricane Ike debris. But a month after making the request, Gov. Perry--a Republican--still has received no response from fellow Texan George Bush's FEMA.

Many private relief agencies have been doing what they can to provide assistance, but their resources are limited and their roles often are constrained by the very federal government that is still printing out and stacking up forms to deal with Hurricane Ike, which blew ashore in September.

Show Them the Money

The private relief agencies need more cash donations as soon as possible to help the victims of Hurricane Ike, the recent wildfires in California, and many other calamities, past, present and future. These private agencies, such as the American Red Cross, often have online sites where donations can be made.

Contributions frequently can be targeted to one specific need or disaster area. But you may have to follow a procedure that is less convenient than simply entering some credit-card digits online. For example:

"If you wish to designate your donation to a specific disaster," the Red Cross website points out, "please do so at the time of your donation by either contacting 1-800-REDCROSS or mailing your donation, with the designation, to the American Red Cross, P.O. Box 37243, Washington, D.C. 20013."

A dollar, five dollars, ten, twenty. Anything you can afford to give in these economically troubled times can help private agencies provide a measure of comfort and relief to those facing the holidays and winter with much bigger worries.

As for FEMA, the Obama-Biden Administration hopefully will figure out how to kick it into gear again, so its good people can start reclaiming--and redeeming--their battered and troubled agency.

#

Undecided? Just Take a Harder Look Around You

By Si Dunn

My mind was made up long ago. I wanted Hillary Clinton to win, and I wanted Barack Obama to be Vice President. I was hung up on the narrow notion that experience trumps almost everything else.

When Hillary lost, it took me a while to warm up to Barack Obama. But the more I watched him and listened to what he has to say, the more I realized that the man is the leader we need for these greatly troubled and hugely challenging times.

John McCain has served his country with honor and distinction. But now is not the time for Republican solutions, particularly narrow-minded neoconservative solutions. The Republican Party has splintered into factions and completely lost its compass. It may take years to rebuild itself, or it may spin off into two or more political parties.

At a time when Americans are fearful for their familiess, their jobs, their retirement savings, their homes and the very future of this great nation, the current Republican leadership keeps railing about tax cuts, socialism, abortion and 1960s radicals.

As a result, John McCain and Sarah Palin seem to be harping at us from other dimensions and other planets. They want us all to just sit on our little piles of money (if we still have any) and not let any of it get (horrors!) spread around.

Government? Hey, don't need it. Taxes? Evil! Don't need 'em. Change? The economy is fundamentally sound, you betcha. Especially if the wealthy get to keep their tax cuts forever and ever, amen. Iraq? There is only one victory, and that is the victory where we stay there for up to a hundred years and keep blowing up people and goats and things until somebody important says: "Okay, okay, you win! Thank you very much!"

We need experience and leadership in Washington. But more importantly, we need someone with the ability and courage to tell us that we have to make a few sacrifices and do a few things to help our nation out over the next few years. That may include paying a few taxes to help fund government services. And it may include--horror of horrors!--spreading a little of our money around to help our less-fortunate neighbors.

After 9/11, George Bush looked out over a nation angered and ready to fight back. Americans were motivated and eager to do their part for a war effort. Our fearless leader seized that moment and told us all to go out and...shop.

Huh? Fight Al-Qaeda and the Taliban with American Express? Just party hardy and pretend they don't exist? Have the difficult and painful lessons of World War II already been forgotten?

Now we are in a major economic crisis, and the Republicans are raging against government spending--the very spending that they exploded to unbelievable levels. Yet government spending on infrastructure and other job-creation programs may be almost the only tool left for resuscitating the economy.

The Republicans have had their time and opportunities for economic and social experiments, and they have made an utter mess of things. Now they want four more, or even eight more, years to create an even bigger disaster.

Just look around and take a hard look this time. Our nation is in peril on several fronts, and the party that has lead us to the precipice now wants your permission to take us all over the cliff to complete ruin.

Stand up, fight back and say "Hell, no! We won't go!" to the Republican Party in its present, bastardized form.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden can lead us away from that precipice and toward better and more sensible times. And they'll ask for--and need--our help.

Many of us are ready to be be part of the solution, even if it means making some personal and financial sacrifices on behalf of our country. We are patriotic Americans, not just mindless shoppers looking for the next sale on tax cuts.

#

Sarah Palin: Will She 'Win' Just By Showing Up?

By Si Dunn

Republican operatives, deathly worried about Sarah Palin's absence of knowledge and experience in any areas vice presidential, are desperately trying to cram some complete talking points into her head, while also working feverishly to lower the bar for her "debate" against Democratic rival Joe Biden, Oct. 2.

According to some sources, the performance bar is now "on the ground" or "maybe even a couple of inches beneath the surface."

Her handlers will hail her as "The Winner!" immediately after she shows up and opens her mouth, and they will keep drumbeating that message no matter what she actually says in the debate.

The idea, of course, is to ensure hardcore conservative Republican voters continue listening to the drums and not to what their candidate actually is saying--or not managing to say in a coherent fashion.

However, if she does stumble through something about divine intervention and overturning Roe v. Wade as peachy-keen ideas for resurrecting America's economy, watch for Republican operatives to immediately release an edited quote beneath the following banner headline: "Sarah Palin Shows She's the New Spirit of St. Louis!"

Joe Biden will be the actual winner in the debate, of course. But he still won't get much respect, or attention, from his performance. All eyes will remain on Sarah Palin, waiting for something to happen to her hair, her glasses or her lipstick as she recounts how Vladimir Putin gave her important foreign policy experience just by flying over Alaska at 38,000 feet.

For the battered Republicans, their message no longer will have much resonance amid the economic wreckage they will leave the next President. So their new mantra will have to be: "All hail the (former Alaska beauty queen) messenger!"
#

Putting Lipstick on This Pig of an Economy

By Si Dunn

Here come the Republican Swift Boats, right on schedule, firing tubes of lipstick at the Obama-Biden campaign.

That's all they've got, folks. Lipstick. They're trying to smear lipstick on the pig of an economy they have created (and looted) over the past eight years. They desperately hope you won't notice how ugly it is--and keeps becoming.

But lipstick attacks or no lipstick attacks, they can't hide the deep pig plop they will leave behind as their legacy once they finally get their butts booted out of Washington in 2009.

The Rove-McCain-Palin-Bush-Cheney ticket is smart enough to realize "It's still the economy, stupid." But with their long track record of economic misfires, lipstick is now all they have left to put into the Swift Boats' torpedo tubes.


#

Special Education: The New Political Football...Again

By Si Dunn

So now we have Sen. John McCain's campaign rebuking Sen. Joe Biden for "raising a debate over who cares more for special needs children," according to a CNN report.

"The Republican camp's sharp response came after Biden said GOP advocates for children with birth defects should support stem cell research," CNN explained.

In my view, stem cell research should be conducted with the same scope and urgency as the Manhattan Project. I have never seen any signs that our Creator personally is attempting to block us from using our God-given brains and compassions to solve the sad, painful mysteries of birth defects. All I keep seeing are people who think they can speak for God and make rules on His or Her behalf.

Rather than shoot labels and accusations at each other, I would urge both political campaigns to immediately dispatch some of their aides to spend a day trying to help out in America's underfunded, understaffed special education programs in the public schools.

"Special needs" and "birth defects" stop being simple power plays in a political football game once you are inside the door of a special-education classroom.

Until you have spent at least one long, hard, challenging day working alongside special-education teachers and their aides in a public school, you really have no idea what "who cares more" for special needs children really means.

To both campaigns, I say: Quit using your fingers to merely point. Try using them, instead, to actually lend some helping hands to special needs children.

#

Karl Rove: The King Who Would Be Doofus?

By Si Dunn

So now we have the once-vaunted "architect" of the current Bush Administration calling Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden a "big blowhard doofus," at least according to CNN.

Biden has responded to the reported name-calling by wryly terming Rove "a great American..." and managing to keep "...pain in the ass" under his breath.

Over time, as the incredible wreckage from eight years of Rove-crafted neocon rule slowly is cleaned up, history likely will become less and less enamored of Karl Rove. (Already, it doesn't exactly think he is peachy keen.)

For starters, various committees and agencies with subpoena and indictment power will be looking at records and compelling sworn testimonies. And investigative journalists and determined historians will have greater access to people, papers and political autopsies left behind by Rove's "architecture" during George W. Bush's two four-year terms in the White House.

Will Karl Rove ultimately emerge as the biggest "blowhard doofus" of them all?

Stay tuned.

#

Hurricane McCain

By Si Dunn

I dislike and deeply distrust neoconservative Republican politics. But I give good marks to John McCain for his level-headed decision on Sunday to abbreviate the Republican National Convention and send some delegates home as Hurricane Gustav approaches the Gulf Coast.

I hope the GOP will be able to resurrect at least some of their convention plans after the storm and have their fair shot at good media coverage during the runup to the Nov. 4 general election. I also hope they can mitigate the unintended financial damage to vendors and hotels in St. Paul and Minneapolis now that nature has chosen to trump the Republicans' political spectacle.

I still believe Barack Obama and Joe Biden represent the best hopes for change to the nation's broken economy, trashed political system and deeply damaged international standing.

But score one for McCain and the Republicans for putting nation ahead of party as Gustav roars toward a fragile coastline still trying to recover from hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

#

McCain-Palin: A Big Snowball's Chance in Hell?

By Si Dunn

Is it bold...or just bizarre?

John McCain's pick for vice president appears to be both at the same time.

Ultimately, however, it will turn out to be just a slightly bigger snowball, once it starts melting in the hell of American presidential politics.

These amazingly troubled times cry out for a stronger and more qualifed #2 to stand a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Calling up the "aggressively pro-life" commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard--brave and noble though that unit may be--is not a sound act of presidential decision-making on Maverick McCain's part.

Gov. Sarah Palin surely is a rising Republican star (particularly with her political nickname, "Barracuda"). But a bolder and more grounded pick would have been Glenn Close, who, after all, has more national, international and universal experience, serving both as Harrison Ford's vice president in Air Force One and Jack Nicholson's First Lady in Mars Attacks!, AND as a Supreme Court justice in The West Wing. Hey, and she also has narrated a documentary on George and Martha Washington. That, my friends, is experience.

Faced with new threats to European security by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his presidential da-man, Dmitry Medvedev, what would a President Palin do, based on her national and international track record thus far? Aggressively condemn their stances on abortion? Throw snowballs across the Bering Strait and send dog-sled troops into Siberia to try to force regime change?

Bottom-line predictions from this pundit: (1) Joe Biden's gonna make moose-burgers out of her in the vice presidential debate. And (2), the Bush/McCain-Palin ticket will have only a big snowball's chance in hell once it starts melting down over the next few days and weeks.

Gov. Sarah Palin indeed may be a political barracuda. But the media's thousands of tiger sharks now are circling, and they just see a fresh new fish sandwich in the sea.

In the new age of instant journalism, instant Swift Boating, instant attack ads, and instant disinformation campaigns, it's still a long, long time until November.

#

The Next Clinton Administration

By Si Dunn

Yes, the next presidential election is still many months away. But I am already thinking that a Clinton-Obama ticket will bury Romney-Huckabee deep under a landslide of votes for drastic change and new directions.

Predictions are cheap and easy, so I am predicting Hillary Clinton will be the first female President of the United States, and Barack Obama will be America’s first black Vice President. Might as well get two precedents out of the way for the price of one.

Suggestions also are cheap and easy, so I am making some suggestions for who I would like to see in the next Clinton Administration. You, of course, you are free to post your own predictions and suggestions and to vehemently disagree with any and all of my views. That is one of the great features of our democracy.

Bill Richardson, I think, should serve another stint as Energy Secretary. This position will be more critical than ever to America’s national and international security and to the battle against global warming. The job will require strong international credentials, as well as many domestic leadership skills. Gov. Richardson has a very rich and varied resume that could help him serve America well in a time of increasingly complex challenges.

Madeline Albright should be brought back as the Clinton-Obama Administration’s Secretary of State. She knows and is respected by many of the key international players, and she has the right combination of skills and knowledge to help rebuild America’s tattered international reputation and leadership abroad.

John Edwards could be a very effective Secretary of Health and Human Services, if he wouldn’t view the post as a great demotion after competing so long and hard for the presidency. His comprehensive health plan focusing on revenue sources and cost containment could become a key part of the national debate over how to provide affordable medical coverage to all Americans.

Joe Biden believes strongly in working to improve America’s economic competitiveness. He could make many contributions as Labor Secretary, a post that also will have to deal heavily with illegal immigration and guest worker issues, as well as outsourcing, strengthening unions and domestic job creation, to name just a few.

Christopher Dodd has campaigned forcefully against constitutional encroachments and abuses of executive power. As Attorney General, he could work to help restore constitutional balance and bring a new focus on decency, honesty and fair play in the Executive Branch. He is fluent in Spanish, so he also could help the Clinton-Obama Administration tackle some increasingly thorny immigration issues.

Dennis Kucinich has made peace and international cooperation the centerpiece of his campaign. He should be appointed United Nations Ambassador, so he really can give peace a chance in a very troubled world.

Mike Gravel has been an outspoken advocate for better veterans’ care and for full disability payments for victims of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He should head the Veterans Administration and try to help bring new resources and efficiencies to that long-troubled agency.

As previously noted, we are still many months away from casting votes for President and Vice President of the United States. But, with many critical issues becoming more pressing by the day, it is not too early to start casting grassroots votes for the other key players we would like to see in the next Administration.

Don’t just sit there stewing, disagreeing and being mad. Make your own choices known, now.

#