I am in day 3 of my post-election depression. It scares me that G.W. (Shrub) Bush now has control of both houses of Congress. Look for more tax cuts for the rich, fewer jobs and less job security, more hunger, fewer people with health care insurance, reduced education spending (except to buy more tests!), increases in crime, and we will definitely launch a "preemptive" attack on Iraq now. (My prediction is February, 2003). A very sad day for America.

Wasting Utah

Well, the Senate voted to support the Republican House today and declare Nevada's "Yucca Mountain" to be the country's permanent nuclear waste repository. Of course, Utah's 2 Senators, Hatch and Bennett, voted in favor of transporting the nations's nuclear waste through Utah neighborhoods on trucks on their way to Nevada. The ludicrous thing is that they both claim that they voted for the Nevada site because it made the storage of Nuclear waste in Utah's Skull Valley (upwind form Salt Lake City) LESS likely. This is a joke because the Nevada site will be ready in 2010, at the earliest, while the Utah site will be ready in about 2 years. Is it that hard to guess where the Nuclear waste will be going "temporarily" for at least a decade?

Corporate Irresponsibility

I just heard on NBC-TV news that G.W.Bush is going to get tougher on corporate wrongdoing. The picture of him standing in front of a backdrop that said "Corporate Responsibility" made me laugh and laugh and laugh...
I'm sure we will all feel much safer now that the foxes are going to watch the henhouse even more closely!
In the meantime, more information is coming out about Bush's insider trading while he was on the Board of Harken Energy. You can read more about it at The Daily Enron web site created by the group American Family Voices

The cover story of U.S. News and World Report for May 13, 2002 is about War Profiteering. A series of articles point out how money is the name of the game in corporate America, and that tragedies such as 9/11/2001 are cynically used as excuses to grab even more money from the American taxpayer
The article called "The Pork Game," on how wasteful apending is inserted into Congressional money Bills at several stages, is most enlightening -- and depressing. If there is a hero anywhere in the series it is Senator John McCain who regularly stands up against wasteful spending.. However, his regular speechs decrying the behavior of his colleagues are now just ignored as background noise behind the business as usual.
Welfare for the rich is now more entrenched than ever.

Saudis Said To Let Girls Die in Fire
Monday, March 18,
2002


BY TAREK AL-ISSAWI

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Government-run newspapers in
Saudi Arabia have accused the country's religious police of preventing the
rescue of girls trapped in a school fire because they were not wearing the
long dresses and head coverings required in public.
Fourteen girls died in the catastrophe last Monday at the 31st Girls
Middle School in Mecca, about 470 miles southeast of Ri- yadh. Fifty
others were injured, while hundreds escaped.
The religious police, which have offices in every city, are routinely
criticized privately in Saudi society, but this was believed to be the first
time that newspapers in the kingdom have come out with harsh words
against them.
The newspapers accused members of the religious police -- the
Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice -- of
blocking rescue attempts by male firefighters and paramedics because
some of the girls were not wearing the mandatory Islamic dress, which
covers the entire body and hair.

It is difficult to comment on this horrifying news article. Ideally, the implications would be clear to everyone. Unfortunately they are not, so I add my thoughts here. This event was made possible by the fact that Saudi Arabia tolerates the existance of a "religious police" -- a better oymoron than even "military intelligence." I find the translation of the name of this police force, "The Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice," to be chilling.
Some may assume that conservative Mormon Utah communities have similiar "committees" -- informally if not formally. The truth is that they do not -- yet. But the seeds are there. Utah is, after all, the only state with a legislature-appointed "Porn Czar." I hope the would-be guardians of "public morality" in Utah will read this news story as a cautionary tale of a type of society we do not want to set up here.

Welcome to my new Blog! My name is Brian Ferguson and I am a Mormon Democrat. I realize that may seem like an oxymoron to some, but I not only believe that the two are not incompatible but that they positively reinforce each other.

I am currently wrting a book called "Why Good Mormons Must be Democrats" in which I will explain the above statement in detail. Here on the Blog I plan to offer commentary on items in the daily news and whatnot. We'll see if I have anything to say worth reading!