Veterans Wear BS-Protector Ear Guards in Salt Lake City

There's a beautiful picture of a 73-year-old veteran at the Salt Lake meeting wearing "Bullshit Protector" ear flaps during Pres. Bush's 9-11, WW II, 9-11, Iraq, "heroes of our nation's history"(see Ecclesiasticus 44:1) speech. It's at CapitolHillBlue.com, on both the main page and the story link I give here.

There's a more disturbing "rumor mill" story on that site, Is Bush Out Of Control?, which actually made it into the Harper's Weekly email news summary yesterday ("It was reported that Bush is losing his mind [link], and a man in Georgia..."). Talk about "in passing!" Maybe he thought if he inserted it casually most people would not notice?

Finally, let's get everybody out for The Colorado Walk to pass C and D and end the "permanent bad year" of TABOR's effect on public funding. Sign up for a short walk between Monument and the north end of the Air Force Academy, or any other segment: 9/20, 9/21, 9/22 and 9/24 will be segments in and through Colorado Springs. Check out the website! I heard about it from Ed Gordon's spot on Air America radio (AM 760 out of Boulder - yes, we get it here).

TABOR and why this is SO BAD: In case you're new to this, TABOR has a lot of sensible stuff, and each year the spending on services and programs is increased by basically a cost-of-living increase, but the idiotic thing which got through was that if the economy has a BAD year, the scale for allotments to programs and services slides back down to that lowest point, and if the economy then has a few GOOD years, services are completely hosed - because the increase is very modest, and is NOT pegged to economic growth! Get it? We start losing the best employees, and then MOST employees, as our wage scales slide below the average once the economy gets going again. Isn't that intelligent?! The people who wanted that in there either were not thinking it through, thought there would never be economic dips or times of faster economic growth, or ...

...they want to destroy and privatize tax-funded institutions such as our public schools. They want a real "ownership society." Privatize fire services? Ooh, good idea, then if a poor neighborhood catches fire, they aren't paying for fire service, so it just burns down - isn't privatization great? Poor kids' schools, lacking funding, disappear for non-performance, and voila! Huge numbers of uneducated and undereducated teenagers wandering the streets with bleak futures... just who I want to meet when walking with my kids around Acacia Park.

These privatizers seem to have no concept of public spaces, public good, or community, outside of their particular church. And relying on churches for social services works so well: that poor New Life Church volunteer - Julie Rifkin - who lost her job with The Navigators Ministries and wound up shooting herself and her two sons (whom she had had to withdraw from the Evangelical Christian Academy because she couldn't pay) last spring is an excellent example of the effect this attitude can have. Her New Life preacher (Ted Haggard) was attacking Memorial Hospital for letting her go home - he should have been looking within and asking why one of his devoted flock was *in* such desperate straits, why she had to pull her kids out of the school they attended with *his* kids, even why she eventually left his enormous congregation for another church. Instead, we get a "Memorial hospital should have taken care of her" spiel. So often, when things go wrong, the same people who don't want to actually pay taxes for public services are wondering aloud why the public services are failing them.

Excerpt from The Colortado Springs Independent after the Rifkin tragedy:

"As funding for mental-health and substance-abuse programs has been cut by 30 percent in the last three years, patients are increasingly being turned away, she said. Many wind up in emergency rooms, like Memorial Hospital's, which deals with 400 patients with such problems each month -- a staggering 13 a day.

About a third of them are held for further evaluation.

Last week, Ted Haggard, the pastor of New Life Church, where Rifkin attended, publicly scolded the hospital for not holding Rifkin.