The buck doesn't stop; it's lying in wait for YOU to stop and bend over to pick it up

Let's face it. Much of what I throw up on my blog (I didn't say "chunder", so hold all your rude remarks), is just other people's stuff, with my take on it. There's an element of unique-ness, but often nothing really original. Most blogs are that way, I reckon, from the professors of blogdom to the little girly and girly-men blogs that over-analyze their relationships and repeat ad nauseum the "and then I said, and then she said" stuff of their daily lives.

It's hard to be original. But it is easy to be opinionated, and one of the joys of bloglife is the buzz you get from networking your own spin. Yeah, you do tend to get a bit up yourself and start to imagine that other people are actually reading this stuff and thinking, boy that guy's good, and then passing it on and talking about it. Gotta getta real life one of these days. Nah, we're all cyber Walter Mitties here, and it's good enough to just have this pretend frontline journalist/commentator/preacher thing going. It's taken the place of playing at cowboys and indians, doctor and nurse, etc. from our younger days, that's all.

That said, I try (really, I do) to avoid just passing on spin. I see and hear much that "deserves" my learned or cursed "insight", but in my heart I know that it has already been said either to the point where it doesn't matter any more or better than anything I might add. And, quite honestly, I try to avoid material that a random blog hopper would instantly recognize as being the propoganda of this side or that so as to immediately cut and run without even considering. We don't like folks what cut and run without even considering.

But that's not what this post's about. It's about "who's in charge here"? I'm not talking about where some political buck stops or doesn't, but who is making the decisions that are actually affecting our lives, AND TO WHAT BLOODY END?

Because everyone already talks about Molly Ivins and her invocations, and because I don't really take issue with her, and because many people see her as being branded by a particular camp and would tend to throw you in that same corral by association, I really did not want to bring her into this, thanks anyway Mom. But then I checked the news from Guam today and this popped up:

"Thousands of outgoing parcels have been delayed on Guam because of an "unexpected decision" made by the Transportation Security Agency, according a U.S. Postal Service release.
"The end result of this decision has been to create a tremendous inconvenience to the more than 200,000 U.S. citizens who reside in Guam, Saipan, Rota and Tinian, including military personnel and their dependents stationed in those areas," the release stated.

Within a week of the decision going into effect on Sept. 2, some seven tons of parcels had been held on Guam awaiting shipment via air freight to Honolulu, the release stated.
Yesterday afternoon, few more facts about the situation were available. Guam's postmaster, Tony San Nicolas, said he could not provide more information and referred questions to a Honolulu spokesman. Local TSA officials also refused to comment: Nestor Licanto, local TSA stakeholder manager (sic), referred questions to a Los Angeles office." http://www.guampdn.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050915/NEWS01/509150304/1002

You know TSA. Those are the terrorists (and I'm not talking about the guards at the coal face, I'm talking about the folks on top who design the policies and specify the practices) who humiliate, intimidate and inconvenience airport passengers (see a prior rant of similar vented spleen at http://guambatstew.blogspot.com/2005/08/nothing-to-fear-but-fear-itself.html). They're part of the Homeland Security crowd who distinguished themselves so handily with Katrina.

And that's where Molly comes in. And for those who don't know her, know that she has been around Texas politics so long that she knew W. when he was just a (pedigreed) pup. And that she has the fangs and venom of a rattler. She probably knew Harry Truman, so she would know where the buck stops. And she knows that George W. Bush is no Harry Truman. (With apologies to her fellow Texan, Lloyd Bentsen: http://www.historychannel.com/speeches/archive/speech_222.html)

Assessing the Katrina fallout she said, amongst other pithy things (http://www.alternet.org/katrina/25421/):

"Some of you may have heard me observe a time or two -- going back to when George W. was still governor of Texas -- that the trouble with the guy is that while he is good at politics, he stinks at governance. It bores him, he's not interested, he thinks government is bad to begin with and everything would be done better if it were contracted out to corporations.
"We can now safely assert that W. has stacked much of the federal government with people like himself. And what you get when you put people in charge of government who don't believe in government and who are not interested in running it well is ... what happened after Hurricane Katrina", and I would add what is happening on Guam and probably throughout the rest of the country.