Bohemian Mama

Intel asked for the extension in February and received broad support from civic officials and business leaders in Washington County, who welcome the prospect of continued corporate investment. The company's annual payroll in Washington County tops $1.5 billion.

Social activists and education boosters are more wary, concerned Intel isn't paying for the burden it creates in the community and schools, but there have been fewer objections than when Intel signed its last deal six years ago. Washington County commissioners and the Hillsboro City Council plan to vote on the new agreement after a public hearing May 17.

Intel hasn't actually committed to any new Oregon investment, and, as with the existing package of tax breaks, the exemptions apply only to money the company spends in Washington County. Also, like the current agreement, the new deal would require Intel to pay millions in fees to the county and to Hillsboro but nothing to the area's schools.

What are one or two concrete things you think the state or local governments could do?

At the risk of simplification, I'd say there's two things: One is to establish both the vision as well as the funding mechanisms to lead in K-12 education. . . . The second thing is to develop a set of policies for the formation of new businesses that at a minimum does not competitively disadvantage a business in Oregon relative to anywhere else in the world.

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Are corporations paying their fair share financially?

Everything begins with jobs and education. People get educations, they get good jobs. They get good jobs, they buy nice houses. Property values go up, property taxes flow into the school system, and that's kind of the circle of life in my book. . . . I think what you want to do is bring the best jobs you possibly can to your neighborhood. It's that simple. . . . You can't competitively disadvantage businesses if you wish for them to locate in your state.

Above all, Marla Ruzicka had a mission. She believed deeply that the families of civilians killed by the U.S. should receive compensation. She forcefully argued that the U.S. government had a duty to all innocents injured by its weapons, especially children who needed urgent medical care from decent hospitals. These simple principles cut straight to the heart of our collective responsibility during wartime.

She lobbied Congress, raising the most uncomfortable questions about our involvement in Iraq, and then demanded justice for the people forgotten in government policy. She won. Tens of millions of dollars were set aside to assist Iraqis who were the victims of the war.

But Marla didn't stay in Washington. How many innocent people have been killed by U.S. forces? Marla wanted to know the answer to that ugly question and so she returned to Iraq. She started looking for the truth by going door to door in Baghdad, taking a survey. She just started asking Iraqi families how many people they were missing. Of course, it was so simple -- this was her human approach.

Marla spent a great deal of time trying to help Iraqis who lost family members to the war. During the first siege of Fallujah, I once found her screaming at the director of the Iraqi Red Crescent, demanding that he organize a way to bring supplies to refugees. She was furious at his apathy. It drove her crazy.

Marla told me how hard it was to try to wring compensation payments from the U.S. military and what it was like to lobby Congress for Iraqi civilians rights. To get her projects through, she described to anyone who would listen the cases of injured Iraqis and the families of those killed. She would lean on her point, even when surrounded by experts who were supposed to know the deal.

The only thing we can say now is at least she died doing what she wanted, doing what she really, really believed in. If she were still here, she'd be most worried now about her driver's family and who will take care of all the other Iraqi families she was working with.

She would point out, this happens to Iraqis every day and no one notices or even cares. There are no newspaper articles or investigations into what happens to them. For most of them, there was only Marla.

On the fiscal front, Greenspan said the persistence of swollen budget deficits in the years ahead "would cause the economy to stagnate or worse" unless the situation is reversed.

The budget deficit is a problem because it is projected to rise significantly as the first of 78 million baby boomers start to retire in 2008.

Last year, the government produced a budget deficit of $412 billion, a record in dollar terms. The deficit this year is projected to shatter that record, coming in at an estimated $427 billion.

Greenspan's call for fiscal prudence touched a nerve with Democrats who still sting from Greenspan's endorsement of President Bush's $1.3 trillion tax cut in 2001. It was proposed at a time when the government was expecting a decade of budget surpluses, which didn't materialize.

"I was wrong like everybody else on the issue of surpluses," Greenspan said.

"As I stood before the gates I realized that I never want to be as certain about anything as were the people who built this place."
-Rabbi Sheila Peltz, on her visit to Auschwitz

But other current and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered "Patterns of Global Terrorism" eliminated several weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.

"Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public," charged Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report in The Counterterrorism Blog, an online journal.

Rep. Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., who was among the leading critics of last year's mix-up, reacted angrily to the decision.

"This is the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around the world. It should be unthinkable that there would be an effort to withhold it - or any of the key data - from the public. The Bush administration should stop playing politics with this critical report."

Well before gas and diesel got so spendy, the district canceled afternoon kindergarten classes to make fewer bus runs. It also reduced field trips. Classes now must raise the money themselves -- or send parents the bill -- if they expect to take a bus on a field trip, says Robin Biden, director of transportation for the district.

Jay Rowell, superintendent of the La Grande School District, says his district spends about $200,000 busing children. The amount will increase about $20,000 this year because of the higher gas prices and other factors, Rowell said.

"Whether you are coming or going, you're making an enormous difference for the security of our nation and for the peace of our world," Bush told them. "I want to thank you for extending freedom to millions, and I want to thank you for making America proud."

The first debate came Tuesday over a proposal by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., to provide an additional $1.98 billion for veteran's care. She said VA hospitals are underfunded and overcrowded.

"There's a train wreck coming," Murray warned.

Republicans denied the VA had such serious problems. They noted the Bush administration said the additional funding wasn't needed and that it had enough money to cope with emergencies.

Murray's proposal was defeated in a 54-46 vote, mostly along party lines.

That was to be a subtle message. It is unfortunate that today my message must be less subtle because things are very quickly spinning out of control.

First, the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, Tom DeLay, made the outrageous statement, and apparent threat, that "the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior." When given repeated opportunities to disavow the interpretation of his comments as a threat or incitement to violence, DeLay has repeatedly declined to do so.

Tonight, my staff showed me a quote from Senator John Cornyn (found on Americablog) that speaks for itself: "And finally, I – I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that's been on the news. And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in -- engage in violence. Certainly without any justification but a concern that I have that I wanted to share."

This apparent effort to rationalize violence against judges is deplorable. On its face, while it contains doubletalk that simultaneously offers a justification for such violence and then claims not to, the fundamental core of the statement seems to be that judges have somehow brought this violence on themselves. This also carries an implicit threat: that if judges do not do what the far right wants them to do (thus becoming the "judicial activists" the far right claims to deplore), the violence may well continue.

If this is what Senator Cornyn meant to say, it is outrageous, irresponsible and unbecoming of our leaders. To be sure, I have disagreed with many, many court rulings. (For example, Bush v. Gore may well be the single greatest example of judicial activism we have seen in our lifetime.) But there is no excuse, no excuse, for a Member of Congress to take our discourse to this ugly and dangerous extreme.

My message is not subtle today. It is simple. To my Republican colleagues: you are playing with fire, you are playing with lives, and you must stop.

Senator Cornyn and Congressman DeLay should immediately retract these ill considered statements.