Gulf Oil Spill

The Oil Spill: Good news for Elena Kagan

2 Comments / News, Politics, Women

Kagan Some eastern religions believe in the yin and yang of life: Every action or event has a positive and negative energy. By not letting the negative overwhelm you, and tapping in to the positive side, you can benefit from even the worse disaster.

Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, hasn’t needed to chant any mantras to benefit from the Gulf oil spill. The disaster knocked her right off the front pages and the 6:00 news. Even the release of the documents from the Clinton Library, reflecting her time in the While House, has barely received a mention. According to The Washington Post’s email blast wrap-up of the Sunday morning talk shows, “Sunday Roundup”, only CSPAN’s “Newsmakers” program had any discussion of the upcoming Kagan hearing which is scheduled to begin in one week. 

The Post reported that, “Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said he was unsure if Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan would serve as a consensus builder on the high court, but he said he would "like to see us go back to more consensus decisions." He said Kagan’s hearings, which are scheduled to begin June 28, "will last until we finish. I would hope they don’t last more than a week." He expects a vote on her nomination sometime in July.”

In political speak I think that means Kagan is going to get a pass and the hearings are a mere formality.

There is a case to be made for the fact that her appointment to the Court will not shift the balance; perhaps with so much else requiring our attention, from the Gulf to Afghanistan to the deterioration in Iraq, putting Elena Kagan through her paces is not a priority.

However I like to have a little bit of yin with my yang. At her age she could well sit on the Supreme Court for 30 years.

As much as I would like to see a historic third woman on the Supreme Court, I would also like for the person who is going to have that much influence over our future to have a known track record, a public airing of her record, and a very thorough Senate hearing.

Looks like the oil in the Gulf is covering up more than just birds, marshes and beaches.

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When You Wake Up In The Morning…

7 Comments / Life, News

pelican Even with a bad economy and a recession heading in to its second year, there’s a certain level of comfort and security most of us as Americans take for granted. But the truth is, when you wake up each morning you have no idea what fate or God or “Mother Nature” has in store for you.

Imagine what it must feel like to be one of those Americans who woke up six weeks ago with a beautiful spring day ahead and went to bed that night slowly sliding in to hell.

Watching the live video of tens of thousands of barrels of oil pouring in to the Gulf of Mexico every day makes me ill. I’m not kidding; I had to stop watching it. And now the horror show of suffocating wildlife, their eyes pleading for help, has started to appear everywhere. And I’m a thousand miles away. It’s not my life, livelihood, or culture that’s being destroyed. I don’t know how the people of the Gulf coast are hanging on to their sanity. I’m in awe of their courage.

The criminal negligence involved here is a subject for another time. For now it will suffice to say that for the fourth largest and highly profitable corporation in the world to have not had contingency plans for this magnitude of disaster is beyond anything for which money can compensate. I doubt anyone will go to jail, but they should.

As for our government; the lack of leadership has been appalling. The local Parish Presidents in Louisiana have shown more native ability to lead than anything that has been said or done in Washington.

And there’s the rest of us, those who don’t smell oil in our nostrils every day, who haven’t just lost our quality of life perhaps for a generation or more. We think it’s a shame, but it doesn’t really affect us. That’s until the ripples reach in to our food prices, until energy costs go up, until real estate prices dip….until the oil starts to wash up on east coast beaches.

If you’d like to help your southern neighbors and/or help the poor creatures who are drowning in oil, there are two good, vetted lists of options on the Fox News site and on CNN’s site. Please do what you can. It may be our turn next.

Blogger’s Note: If you want to get a perspective of what this would mean if it had happened to us. There’s a visualization tool on the web called “If It was my home”. Read it and weep.

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