Coming in second and Saudi oil

Letter to the editor February 26, 2006

Coming in second.

We didn’t lose, we weren’t beaten we just came in second. This seems to be the rallying cry of the Bush administration. It seems everything they touch comes in second, Iraq, Katrina, corruption, and now our dependence on Saudi oil.

Saudi oil is very venerable to disruption or destruction. We have seen the first attack and it failed. Next time the attackers will use a different strategy, maybe long range rockets that can’t be protected by wire fences, or maybe incendiary balloons like those the Japanese used in WW2. The point is that our supply is extremely vulnerable. We should be creating a Manhattan type project to make us independent of foreign oil. The government should be pulling out all the stops including better mileage on transportation, nuclear energy for stationary power plants, converting waste biomass to liquid fuel, massive wind farms in the plains states to provide electric power, drilling for oil along the continental shelf, building power plants using coal gasification at the mine head instead of transporting coal to distant power plants, better electrical infrastructure to allow more efficient power distribution from the generator to users. This is but a short list and if it sounds familiar, it is many of the same ideas created during the last oil crisis.

Unless we do something soon, the United States may have won the race, but it will come in second.

President Bush, get rid of your advisers and get some people on your staff that are interested in the welfare of the United States and not on how much power they can control for themselves.

Dumb and Dumber

From Press Enterprise 2/17/06

Duh! Who forgot to do their homework? Eight leading citizens of Riverside County (including Marion Ashley-County Supervisor) go to Washington to lobby for a program that was cancelled in February 2005. Can they explain who they were going to visit and why? Did their contact know that the program was cancelled or did they ask? The trip cost $10,000. Who paid for it and how much did the taxpayers pay?

Will their next trip be to the North Pole to lobby Santa Claus?

Pity the poor oil companies

As part of the administration effort to help the poor of this country, fight a war, and at the same time reduce the budget, they are allowing the oil companies to avoid paying royalties on oil and gas extracted from federal lands in the Gulf of Mexico. This could amount to $70 billion over several years.

Considering the extraordinarily high profits that the oil companies are producing as a consequence of the high price of gasoline and natural gas, they still need more. Instead of the oil companies using the additional profits to build refineries in the US, explore for additional sources of petroleum in the US, build additional pipelines to better distribute product, they are buying bigger and better lobbyists and distributing more money to congress (the best congress money can buy).

The administration supports the corporate donors and individuals who are willing to buy political capital.

Feb 08,2006

Attn: Parvez Ahmed cair@cair-net.org

I am interested in your comments on the published cartoon. I agree that printing material that mocks a religious belief is harmful. It would appear that the response by some Moslems in the Arab world is well beyond reason and that peaceful protest would have been appropriate. However, I must point out that many persons of the Moslem faith (primarily in the Arab world) think it entirely proper to print material that is offensive to those who believe in other religious philosophies. As an example, I point out to the article in the same paper wherein "Iran's largest newspaper announced an international competition for Holocaust cartoons".

When will the American Moslem community protest anti-Semitic and anti-Christian cartoons published in the Arab media? When will they rally for a democratic "Moslem" country? What is the American Moslem community doing to stop the killing that is being done in Africa in the name of Muhammad?

In summary, I think the Moslem world may claim the religious high road, but in practice, it is walking the low road in respect to improving the life of it's followers and that of non-Moslems that share the same planet.

Other peoples money

I worked as a poll worker in last Tuesday's Ward 4 election. We had approximately 107 voters. We had more absentee voters than came to vote in person. I don't know who to credit for changing from a mail in vote to one using voting machines, but the cost to the city must have been very high as there were 22 poling places for Wards 2 and 4. .I think the city council gives little thought to being good stewards of taxpayer money. They seem to have little interest in minimizing the cost of city government.

Growing economy vs. suicide bombers

The UN partitioned the piece of desert known as Palestine into a homeland for the Jews and a homeland for the Palestinians. Since that time, the Jews have produced cutting edge technology in science and medicine, a growing economy and a land of milk and honey. They have also absorbed displaced Jews from all Arab countries, Russia, and Ethiopia. By contrast, what have the Palestinians produced beside raising children to be suicide bombers and terrorists?

Money well spent

It's nice to spend other peoples money or so the Riverside Redevelopment Agency thinks.

The Fox Theatre may well be an asset to the city, but at a cost of $11.40 per resident I wonder! Especially when the Redevelopment Agency could have purchased it for $1.4m in 2001, or could have bought it for $2.0m in 2004. But wait, our elected officials finally stopped the bidding at $2,919.000 in 2005.

If any taxpayer ran a business as scandalous as the Redevelopment Authority, we would be bankrupt. Spending other peoples money is a skill well developed by the Redevelopment Authority, but useful projects are not always the result. The City of Riverside needs a regulation that would limit the Redevelopment Authority to spending no more than $100,000 without a vote by the residents.

"Tookie Williams"

The people wanting to honor Mr...Williams should carry on his wishes by choosing a project that would help keep young people from joining gangs. I would suggest that they contribute both money and time to forming and staffing after school programs that would educate and motivate young people to become productive members of their community. An educated person with expectations of a good future is a poor candidate for gang recruitment.