I was stunned. I read it again.
Sure enough, there in the How Your U.S. Lawmaker Voted report put out by Roll Call to the media was a listing of the vote in the third week of May on the 2009 military budget.
I had quickly scanned the first part. “By a vote of 384-23, the House on Thursday authorized a $601 billion military budget for fiscal 2009, including $70 billion to fund war in Iraq and Afghanistan for part of the year.”
It was the next part that had me reaching for the telephone. Voting yes: Inslee, Larsen, Baird, Hastings, McMorris, Rodgers, Dicks, McDermott, Reichert, Smith.

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It is too bad that it takes soaring fuel and concomitant food prices to get people to do what they should have been doing all along: buying local.

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There is global warming. Plus a world-wide energy crisis.
There is an antidote, conservation.
So in a well-intended but ultimately hopeless and pathetic effort to do something about it, I chose to take public transit yesterday from Vancouver, B.C. to Indianola, rather than drive I-5. Here’s a log, like a captain’s log, of my experience.

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What does a press secretary do?
“Well,” Jody Powell once told me, “if you remember the circus parades that came through town in your youth, the scruffy guy at the tail end, with the half-pint in his back pocket and a bucket and a shovel for picking up after the elephants and horses, that guy was a press secretary.”

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Editor’s note: This is the complete text of North Kitsap senior Talitha Aban’s speech she delivered to the North Kitsap School District Board of Directors at its June 5 regular meeting.

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Gasoline now averages $4 a gallon. It is a level that most thought they would never see in their lifetime. And, it is expected to go higher – possibly to $5 per gallon by the end of the summer.
The price hike has far exceeded any cost of living adjustments people get in their pay or retirement incomes. It is making it much harder for people to get by and causing many to cut back on things that make life enjoyable such as vacations, family outings, visits to family and friends.
It is putting a big crimp in the national economy. People are now beginning to discover how much of our daily lives use petroleum-based products: roads, driveways and tennis courts that use asphalt; plastics in piping, containers and molds. It is a reliance on items that most cannot conceive of doing without.
So, it begs the question – how far can this go before everything really goes south?
Of course, if there are major changes in government policies on energy use and consumption and the public takes its blinders off by realizing it is a big part of the problem, then something can be done to avoid a calamity.
The oil embargo/crisis of the 1970s could have been the turning point on putting the US onto the road of energy self-sufficiency. Instead, we blamed Carter and his seemingly unfeeling response to people not wanting to turn the heat down: “put on a sweater.” We wanted Reagan and his view that America can do no wrong and that whatever path we take, it is the right one. We didn’t need to conserve energy or look at requiring fuel-efficient cars. We should let the marketplace decide what we should have. If we wanted to drive fast in big heavy vehicles that consume gas, then so be it. What matter that oil is a finite resource and when it runs out, that’s it. Since it would not happen in the foreseeable future, why worry about it?
Well, that time is approaching far more rapidly than anticipated. The energy consumption of China now rivals the United States and its economy is much stronger than ours at this point. The demand has exceeded the available supply and with the free market in action, prices have gone up dramatically.
Just as the conclusion reached in “Who Killed the Electric Car?” pointed to all facets of society, so, too, can the culprits in the price hikes in gasoline and petroleum production be identified. The oil industry has been likened to a drug pusher by getting the United States hooked on gasoline for powering its transportation vehicles. Consumers have become heavy users, ever demanding bigger size and comfort over fuel-efficiency and smaller cars. Government policies have kowtowed to the automobile and energy industries, thereby stymieing any real progress in making the United States energy independent.
For too long we have been told we can have whatever we want without any cost to ourselves. And, certainly, we don’t need to pay attention to what may happen in the future since that will be someone else’s problem, not ours.
It is a selfish, self-serving approach to life that we are loath to give up.

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