only on guam?!

A couple of years ago, GOP Vice Presidential candidate and Governor of Alaska, Sara Palin, dismissed Alaska's police commissioner for not playing ball when he did not reprimand or fire Palin's former brother-in-law for a personal family matter.

Around the same time, democratic Presidential hopeful John Edwards was found to have cheated on his ill wife, fathered his mistress' child and paid another man working with him to publicly claim that the child was his and not Edwards'.

Edwards wasn't the only one tangled with someone who was not his spouse. New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was found with an pricey call girl. Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was convicted for lying under oath about his affair with his chief of staff. And this was all in 2008. Very recent history.

Let's not forget that famous blue dress and cigar that Clinton made popular; Marion Barry's now famous "Bitch set me up." phrase uttered after he was caught with crack and a woman who was not his wife; JFK's numerous alleged affairs, including one with Marilyn Monroe. There are clearly many more well-known affairs in and out of the political office.

The current governor of California gained fame as a body-builder turned mediocre action movie star. I guess if Ronald Reagan can do it, so can the man who uttered deep, memorable lines like, "I'll be back." and "It's not a toomah!!!"

I'd mention even more political scandals and simple WTF moments but I don't have enough time in my life to mention them all, from our most recent government dating back to a time well before Thomas doubted, Simon Peter denied and Judas betrayed their homeboy Yeshua.

Outside of the political world, there are even more scandals and crimes that rock civilian lives. If I mentioned all of those, my grandchildren would have to take over this blog entry.

So what about recently? As in today, around the nation. What's going on?

A toddler fell to his death at the Staples Center and was met with claims that the center met all building codes, leaving many people to wonder how a toddler could get past coded railings. A narcotics agent was charged with grand theft and embezzlement after accusations of stealing money and accepting bribes from drug suspects were brought up. The water in Barstow was recently cleared after a previous contamination, not from fecal matter (no hanom taki for them) but from a chemical used in rocket fuel, very likely the byproduct of meth labs that run rampant in that part of the nation, as it does in many other states. There were 17 reported homicides in one week in LA county bringing up the homicide rate for the year to 563. A man and his son, in attempting to rob a bank, set off a bomb that killed two officers. Members of the US Army's Fifth Stryker Brigade were charged with drug use, slaughtering Afghan civilians for no reason and defiling corpses.

That's not all the news, of course. That's not even all the news from two West-coast states today.

But that's just crime and scandal. What about crimes that seem too ridiculous to be true? Such as a kung-fu student in Australia in the 80s breaking and entering into a zoo because he was told he could fight a wild animal with his bare hands. He was never tried for trespassing, of course. Because he died. Because he tried to wrestle a lion.

What about the idiot who, long ago, stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and attempted to sell it to another gallery?

Crime. Scandal. There's more to it than that, isn't there?

Our nation's capital can proudly boast the worst school district in the country with three out of four students falling below math test standards. With nearly $13-thousand-per-student costs, a pittance goes to the actual schools or students. The DC district ranks as the highest paid to administration and the lowest spent on the actual students or their needs. They wait, on average, just over a year for structural repairs to buildings that should otherwise be condemned.

The commonwealth-run states in the US make up the worst cases of healthcare in the nation. The average wait in a Nevada ER is five hours and 15 minutes. The same could be said about Arizona. Texas has the most uninsured residents in the 50 states. You also have to wait a really long time in their ERs. The wait is not much better in New Mexico, Arkansas, Utah, Oklahoma and Idaho.

There are wars erupting all over the world, countries where more than half of the citizens are living well below poverty, leaders with iron fists and heavy artillery, coups, abandoned and abused babies as the norm, rampant diseases with no local health officials trying to curb the spread, mothers who fear that they and their daughters will be raped while their young children are slaughtered and their husbands are ordered by threat of torture to take part in wars they want nothing to do with, children armed with semi-automatic weapons, censored media and news that is completely denied and death tolls that rise by the hundreds within weeks.

And, quite shockingly, none of these things take place on Guam. They had absolutely nothing to do with Guam outside of our local soldiers fighting under the American flag.

Yet people still seem to enjoy uttering the phrase "Only on Guam" as though we have a monopoly on idiotic and corrupt government leaders, crime, a poor state of education and healthcare, on top of many other issues. More disheartening is when such utterances come from local people, born and bred on an island that they continue to scorn and in an open forum where anyone from any part of the world can view such nice sentiments about the people and culture who raised such jackasses.

I wonder, really, if the one thing that exists on Guam and nowhere else are people who are oblivious to the world around them who choose not to open a paper or turn on the news and see, very clearly, that these things do not exist only on Guam.

I guess I'd have to ask those OOG people. Apparently, they're the real experts.