Hurricane Maria Is Now a Category 5

Captions: 1. Maria Houser Conzemius biking along the Mississippi River 9/2017. Photo taken by Jim Conzemius. 2. Jesse Lee Conzemius, our son. 3. Sarah Conzemius Quinn, our daughter.

This morning I got a message from Jesse, my son in Charlotte, North Carolina:

“http://myfox8.com/2017/09/18/extremely-dangerous-huuricane-maria-now-a-category-5-storm/

‘Extremely dangerous’ Hurricane Maria now a Category 5 storm

Lol”

I replied, “I’m so honored! Lol. I knew I had it in me….”

Daughter Sarah piped up, “Yeah, what do you have against the Dominican Republic, Mom?”

Jesse laughed, “Ha ha.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just felt this urge to lash out, and the Dominican Republic happened to be in my way.”

Sarah smiled.

“Who else am I threatening?” I asked.

Sarah said I was also threatening “the Leeward Islands, Turks, and Caicos, the usual.”

Not knowing whether they’d been hurt already, I said, “Oh no! They’ve suffered enough, haven’t they?”

Sarah replied, “Yeah, I heard some of them haven’t recovered yet from Ericka in 2015.”

Ericka? I don’t remember Ericka, but I’ll bet the islands in the way of Hurricane Maria remember Ericka.

I confessed to feeling a little self-conscious when I saw the “USA Today” headline yesterday, “The Menace of Maria.”

I’m not that mad about the Iowa City Community School District bond vote. After all, my favorite nonfiction writer is Tom Frank, and when you’re reading a humorous cynic writing about the capacity for conservatives and liberals to delude themselves into folly, nothing surprises you.

I just finished rereading Tom Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America” for the third or fourth time (in 2004 he as good as predicted the election of 2016). Then I began Frank’s “Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right.” It’s a sobering treatise of the 2008 crash on Wall Street and how we didn’t fix the problems that preceded that crash. Dishonest Wall Street CEOs laughed all the way to the banks-too-big-to-fail. Bonuses were given out bigly to the very financial services people whose fraudulent transactions tanked the economy.

Does anyone blame former Pres. Obama or his former Attorney General Eric Holder, a Wall Street white-collar defense attorney whose law firm job was held open for him while he failed to prosecute Wall Street criminals as AG? Of course not. Obama was the greatest president in modern times, neo-liberals tell us.

If you want to know what’s wrong with neo-liberals, read Frank’s “Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?” Neo-liberals abandoned the working class and the working class is aware of it. So when Obama cozied up to Wall Street and abandoned Main Street in the process, Main Street felt aggrieved, believed in Donald Trump’s populist lies, and fell for the biggest con job in history.

So why wouldn’t Iowa City’s liberals fall for the biggest ($191.5 ICCSD bond) scam, “it’s for the kids,” and ignore the past actions, sins of omission, and federal law violations of the district’s superintendent and physical plant director?

It’s an easy one-step emotional process to “it’s for the kids.” It takes thinking and research to find out otherwise. That’s a two- or three-step process.

I feel sorry for those on fixed incomes who can’t afford the recent rise in property taxes without the increased cost of taxes added by the largest school bond in Iowa’s history.

It’s up to all of us to keep the school district and the school board accountable for spending that money. They certainly haven’t been made accountable for past mistakes and violations of federal law so far.

It's unlikely they will be, since fools and their money, so much money, are soon parted.