Posted by lil' jimi on May 17, 2003, at 14:54:28
In reply to Re: more replies » lil' jimi, posted by mair on May 16, 2003, at 22:43:55
hi mair ...
you wrote:
> Jim
>
> Thanks for the Texas civics lesson. I guess i had read about the redistricting controversy - I didn't realize that Mr. Delay was behind it.
>i only hope it was at all helpful .... i am far from being an expert, but believe we must know our enemies, ....anyway.
> It's always boggled my mind how politicians of both stripes can spend so much time on relatively unimportant matters to the exclusion of far more crucial things. My state has been trying to deal with some awful school funding problems for the last couple of years and yet the republican controlled house ate up most of last year's session trying to do away with a law that recognized gay "marriages" (civil unions). By the time they realized they weren't going to be successful, there was no time left to deal with any substantive money issues. I think the only reason they didn't try the same thing this year was that we elected a Republican Governor in the interim who said he wouldn't support any efforts to overturn the civil union legislation.
>this is the chronic problem:
far too many chickens with their heads cut off, screaming about everybody else's morals;
far too few public servants,
drudging through the budget numbers,
working to make funding public schools equitable,
et cetera ...> I've never been in your part of the world - I suspect that if I went there, I might feel like I was in a foreign country, Austin excepted perhaps. The politics in your state have always sounded wild too. I just have a tough time dealing with the glee with which Texas seems to mete out its death penalty and the mentality of judges who see nothing all that harmful about a death penalty handed down in a case where the defendant's attorney fell asleep during critical stages of the trial. It's not that the rest of the states are all that much more enlightened - they just maybe do a better job of keeping their injustices out of the limelight.
>i have driven across a lot of our country .... for as vast as the beautiful diversity as our land is rightfully famous for, it seems to me to be getting more homogeneous by the minute, kind of like domestic globalization .... while just off the beaten path, delights of local variations await .... i remember the "eh-too-fey" (sorry, i do not know how to spell this cajum dish's name) was delicious in eunice, la .... and a 'fish sandwich' i enjoyed in a little diner in a small village in upstate Ny: the fresh just-baked, hand-sliced bread slices, barely holding an inch-thick slab of realy fresh cod .... here it would more likely be some barbecue or mexican food ..... but it is still macdonalds-walmart-target-wendys-dennys-cable-tv-et=cetera, ...pretty much anywhere you go.
i find the diversity politically and culturally show parallel variations .... except i find a lot gteater commonality among the local/ small scale / people-to-people scale socially ,
versuses more adversarial regional friction on the larger scale, like state to state.
all of which is my long way of saying, (and, yes, this is the same anthropological kind of interest we would bring to going to visiting a foreign land):
"Come on down! The folks are fine!
(you may have to ignore the ocassional redneck or bigot or pundit, sorry 'bout that!)"> Thanks again for indulging my curiosity.
>
> Mair
>Mair, it has been a pleasure and a healthy catharsis for me to vent my views here ....
> PS: Whatever happened to the concept of checks and balances?
interesting question .... in regards to ?
texas' civics?
national govt?
budget concerns? (a ?joke?... "checks", "balances" ...sorry)happy trails,
~ jim
poster:lil' jimi
thread:226565
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20030517/msgs/227278.html