Monday, September 05, 2005

Venting

I try not to do politics here. My politics are, like my faith, my business, not yours. However, everywhere I go I'm seeing a lot of political frustration building, and I thought I'd post these two sites as a reminder that Americans do have a voice in the government:

Searchable database of all U.S. Senators -- find out who your state senators are and how to contact them.

Searchable database of all representatives to the U.S. Congress -- find out who your state representatives are and how to contact them.

When I was a kid we were taught to write to our Congressman or Senator to protest government decisions. I know this is an old-fashioned, rather patriotic approach, but it works. In case you've forgotten, we've seen how letters and e-mail have actually stopped offensive legislation. So next time you're writing up an outraged political post for your weblog, why not instead send it (or at least cc it) to your state rep or senator?

If you'd rather write directly to President Bush, check out the contact info here. Just remember to watch your language -- threats made against the President are illegal and the Secret Service takes them very seriously.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:26 AM

    I'd like to post a positive observation.

    After hurricane Ivan threatened NOLA and people spent 10 hours in the car getting to Baton Rouge (should be a 75-90 minute drive) local governments put a contra-flow plan in place. This is where both sides of I-10 are west-bound, both sides of I-55 are north-bound and people move out much faster. They documented this in free pamphlets that were distributed through every hardware store, grocery store, home-improvement store and library in the southern third of the state. The radio announcers repeated the instructions over and over to everyone that listened and televisions had great graphics showing how it worked.

    And it did work. It worked very, very well. When we evacuated from Katrina, we got to Baton Rouge in 3 hours. That's a long way from 10 and I am convinced it saved lives.

    It was something good and worth mentioning so, in the future, we don't loose it to some new plan that gets adopted just because it is new.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous10:35 AM

    Thanks, F -- we have similar evac plans here, and they work equally well.

    How are things going with you and yours? We've heard they're permitting some folks back into NO to see their property and retrieve what's accessible/salvageable.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous3:47 PM

    My parish (Jefferson) opened up this morning at 6:00 AM and the wait was hours long to get in. We decided to go in tomorrow in hopes of shorter lines at the check points.

    Details on what I find are still to come. The plan and progress is logged on my blog's comments section.
    http://www.fobrienandrew.com/soap

    ReplyDelete

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