The Chorus Line

2009-09-29T19:18:00.003-04:00

You have to see the irony in the Georgia officials who have wanted to refuse stimulus funds for Georgia and have been campaigning against a role for government in health care to suddenly cry out that they should receive millions in a government bailout because Georgia got a heavy rain last week. If we don't want government money going to those without health care, why should we want government money going to people who got flooded last week. Didn't they make poor choices by buying those pricey homes next to river banks and then not buying flood insurance? Isn't a flooded home a pre-existing condition? Now they want the effects of insurance, a bail-out, when they never paid any premiums. And don't be fooled about this one, it is mostly rich people and commercial property and state infrastructure that needs money now. So of course the Governor is first in line, hat in hand at the door of congress saying bail out my buds.

But still, no government health care for the poor, those who have lost jobs and those who have a pre-existing condition.

Now to tell the truth. I think the government should play a major role in "disaster" relief, but they should also make sure healthcare is available for all.

2009-09-29T11:46:00.002-04:00

I enjoyed going to the Tour Players Championship Final Round on Sunday and watching Phil Mickelson. Turns out he won the tournament. Very cool.

I get tired of seeing Repubs on TV and the internet trying to convince everyone that what they have to say is important. They keep running polls and saying, "See how Obama has fallen in the polls? Americans don't want his policies. We must go back to doing things the Repub way."

Talk about being out of touch. Since they have put themselves in such a weak position that they can't even slow down legislation in the House of Representatives or the Senate, (nor do they have any influence with the Whitehouse), they are trying to con Americans by ruling the media wars. But the only poll that matters, last November's election, didn't come out the way they were hoping.

How far out of power are they?
In the house of representatives they have 78 fewer voices than the Democratic Party: 256 to 178 (59% Democratic 41% Repub*)
In the senate they trail 60 to 40, obviously by the same percentages.
It is surprising that there is that consistency in percentages whether you figure it by states or by congressional districts.

On all the TV shows we get a representative of the Repubs and one from the Democrats. The Democrat answers questions and the Repub shouts down his/her answers. Civility and logic are lost characteristics for Repubs. But that distribution of voices isn't fair. It doesn't represent the country. There should be 3 Democratic voices for every 2 Republican. That would represent America.

Now the Democratic Party has been trying to play nice with the Repubs, accomplishing little and winning over only Olympia Snow on any issue, but the time has come to push the noisy bums out of the way and vote in the new Democratic agenda. It is what the people voted for. Change. Without regard to the haranging, threatening voices of the right, it is time to vote in change. They are threatening to withdraw from the Union (Uh, that's already been tried and didn't work). They are threatening to kill the president (the secret service stands directly in their way on this one). They are threatening to march on Washington (Did you see their pitiful march? About 70,000, heavily financed by big oil and the health insurance industry and that's all they could rally. 100 times that many Americans went to a ball game this week.)

The polls are irrelevant. Change is now coming. If they do it well it will steer America into safe waters for the next 50 years. Be fearless Democrats. Legislate.

*(I'll remind you that I've taken to calling the GOP "Repubs" because of the slanderous way they chosen to call the Democratic Party the "Democrat" party, as though it were some evil undemocratic entity).

2009-09-16T04:50:00.002-04:00

The end of civil discourse.

I've long thought that the Republican method of argument was to call names rather than offer a reasoned response of any kind. Rep. Wilson, now celebrated as a hero by the right for screaming out at our President, calling him a name, a liar, was either making a desperate attempt to call attention to himself, or having a temper tantrum. As always, the President was gracious.

I wish there had been more coverage of the tea-party convention last Saturday. I watched in vain for a shot from the air of teeming thousands covering the national mall (the million man march came to mind). The crowd was called alternately "thousands" and "tens of thousands." So how many were there? Apparently not that many. I was distressed by what they looked like. They were old. They were fat. (Older and fatter than me even). When interviewed they seemed confused. They didn't even have talking points. Maybe that was the liberal media trying to make them look bad. They were name callers.

If someone says something you disagree with, don't bother to explain your position, simply call them a name. Any name will do. A Nazi. A Communist. (Does any conservative know that those ideologies are extreme examples of right and left? Is there anyway to represent both at the same time?) An Indonesian Welfare Thug? Say that one is a discussion ender.

The conservatives could not elect a President. They cannot organize a march on Washington. Is there any reasonable person that can put together an argument against any initiative by the Democratic Party. I'd love to see ideas, discourse, and argument replace, ranting, posters, and tantrums.

I feel that the current political situation can be summed up as the party of ideas versus the party of temper tantrums. (It is almost the debate of reason against emotion). I pray that reason wins.

2009-09-03T11:17:00.003-04:00

No "argument" that I have heard so far against a national healthcare coverage plan has been a serious idea for discussion. The right wing won't discuss healthcare for everyone as a possibility. They are fearful of the redistribution of the pie. Years and years ago, I sat in chapel at Southern Seminary listening to Duke McCall speak. I can't remember what he was talking about exactly, but he used a profound example that I remember often. It was an example that was about pie. He said that many people fear that if the poor are going to have pie, then they will take a portion of their pie. They have worked hard and earned their pie. They feel they deserve their pie. They do not wish to share with drug addicts, no accounts, thieves, and rascals who could have pie if they would just straighten up and fly right for a change. Duke said the answer was not to redistribute the pie. The answer was to make more pie. He was of the "more pie" philosophy and so am I.

The right tells us that we have the best healthcare in the world, yet thousands die every year, deaths that would have been preventable if the person had any health care. Our system is not the best in the world. No one but right wing Americans rank it as the best. Capitalism and healthcare have not mixed well except for drug company and insurance company executives.

Socialized medicine will be a disaster. They will kill Grandma.

I suppose socialized fire protection has been a disaster? Would it be much better if we all had our own fire insurance companies to call when our house was ablaze? Of course some fires would not be covered and no one would respond. And fire insurance execs would make 15 million a year.

I suppose socialized police protection has been a disaster too. Everyone knows that crime would be much lower if we all hired our own personal police. Everyone's policy would cost a different amount. Many people couldn't get coverage because their neighborhoods would just be too dangerous.

I suppose it would be terrible if we had socialized road building. That would be a disaster. Roads wouldn't go anywhere and they'd all be falling apart if they were socialized. Lucky we can have capitalism driven roads paid for by the people who live on each street. Oh wait, that's how it was in pioneer days when they were up to their axles in mud. It was that old rightwinger Eisenhower who thought up the interstate highway system. I always thought of him as a commie.

I sure hope we don't ever go to socialized emergency response. The government would totally mess that up. A single responder idea! What a joke. Like just dial 911 and someone would come immediately to help. No way we could afford something like that. Ridiculous.

And socialized healthcare would surely fail too. It would be the end of us all. Just look at how poorly medicare is run now. Oh wait. Medicare is rated higher by its participants than private health insurance, higher by 20% than private insurance.

So all of this stuff in the media is for show. Scare the people and maybe they'll vote Republicans back to power to steal more of America's treasures for the rich. That's what happened in '94. The Republicans are still crooks and liars, America. Don't listen to them.

2009-08-27T10:22:00.002-04:00

The loss of Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate has made me sad. Living in Georgia, I never have any chance of having an elected representative who actually represents my views. But Senator Kennedy has represented me. I have even written him to explain that since Georgia will not elect anything other than rightwing nuts, that I have adopted him as my senator. The Kennedys have always influenced my life. Somehow, at only 9 or 10 I was mesmerized by JFK. I remember staying up late watching the tv returns hoping that he would be elected president. It was not decided until the next day. Senator Edward Kennedy has had a life like David, in the Bible. He has acted in the worst possible ways and brought about the death of a young woman. Whatever happened, his conduct was reprehensible, indefensible. Yet he continued and became more and more an advocate for those with no voice. Truthfully, he has been God's advocate. He fought for civil rights, rights for the handicapped, and most of all, for healthcare to be a right and not a privilege. With enormous wealth and power he should by rights have been a Republican, but at the expense of his family, he has been dedicated to the poor and needy.

He was a lion. The Lion of the Senate. I will miss him.

2009-08-16T07:55:00.000-04:00

A dog is worth 14 belly laughs a day.

2009-08-15T08:59:00.002-04:00

It's not like the Republicans have not effectively used the "fake grassroots" rallies before, and to their great advantage. I remember clearly the media coverage of dozens of "citizens" protesting the way ballots were being counted in Florida, the day after the polls closed for Bush's 2000 election. Angry, shouting, people, appeared to have poured out of their homes and into the streets to cry out that Al Gore's people were stealing the election. (A good rule for thieves is to always say the opposite of the truth). Much later, months later, the truth came out. When you ran those videos in slow and stop motion researchers could identify all those protestors. They weren't from Miami. They were from Washington. They were dozens of offices staffers of one Republican bigwig after another who looked at all their interns and said "Get on the first plane to Florida, raise a ruckus." Videos even showed protestors on different days in the same clothes. The staffers went straight to the airport with no bags. In just hours they were a grassroots movement.

This time we are calling them what they are, an astroturf movement, that is "fake grass." These poor "Tea Party" pawns are being fed their lines from the voices of the Repub party, Shawn and Rush, and they swallow it hook, line, and sinker.

A whole segment of the American population is now so brainwashed that they think FOX NEWS is presenting news instead of propaganda. If you believe what they project as truth, then NPR news must be in the service of the Dark Lord Obama.

There is no grass roots movement against health care. We need non-profit health care in this country for a change. If these guys are grass roots, I say it is time for a prairie fire.

2009-08-14T08:33:00.002-04:00

I don't know if any health national care program at all will be allowed for the citizens of the United States. I do not understand why we can't have dialogue about a process that would work for us however. The democrats are discussing and the republicans are just cussing. Their histrionics can only remind one of a ill-mannered and angry four-year-old who screams and cries and smashes things because they cannot have their way. The question seems to be, will the screaming child get their way and remain in charge of the family, or will there be enough of us to let reason prevail. There certainly seem to be a lot of stooopid Americans.

I'm not crazy about Paul Krugman sometimes, but he is calling a spade a spade in this NYT opinion piece. The republicans have no leadership and they have no purpose except to destroy. If they can't have their way they may take up arms and kill us all. Read Paul. He says what I feel about today's situation in the battle for health care reform.

2009-08-09T05:58:00.004-04:00

Concerning the Republican Party attacks on healthcare, Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post says it much better than I do. Read it here.

Since defeating healthcare in 1992 was followed by mid-term election victories for Republicans that allowed them to seize power for years to come, the Repubs are hoping that deja vu will occur if they can somehow defeat healthcare again. History will repeat and they will be right back in power. But I don't think the country is going to fall for it this time. These protesters are the same people who stopped the election in Florida and threw the 2000 election for the shrub.

The clearest voice of all is the president's. While there is no such thing as Obamacare (If you can remember back to 1992 the slanderers called it Hilliarycare), the congress, representatives of every American, are hammering out the beginning of healthcare as an American right instead of an American privilege. If you missed the President's concise explanation, here it is.

2009-08-08T17:34:00.003-04:00

First things first. The crape myrtle is the grandest plant in the south. Introduced to America in 1747, they have endured and spread everywhere, known for flowering throughout the summer, their brillant blooms in a variety of colors, and the beautiful wood. As I walk every day, I'm impressed that no matter how unimaginatively they are pruned they remain beautiful.

There is an all out assault going on by the Republican party to try and prevent any movement by the government that would provide health care for people who do not have it. 50 million people who cannot afford to go to the doctor. I often hear Republicans boast that we live in the greatest nation on earth. If that is true, then we must have reached moral banckruptcy to allow the current situation to continue year after year. I hear people spouting that they don't want to be taxed to pay for someone else's healthcare. They must see healthcare as a product that people should want, they should work to have, and that everyone should provide for themself. No one should be burdened with another's healthcare. Of course, we already pay in spades for the healthcare of the poor and needy. A poor person with the flu who walks into the doctor's office, cannot be seen without insurance or prepayment. So that desperate, sick individual will instead call 911. When the paramedics bring him to the hospital, they will be treated by the emergency room at ten times the cost. The cost is then added on to my bill and yours. Anyone who thinks we are not already paying for the healthcare of the poor is simply stupid. The only difference is, the healthcare industry makes a profit ten times as great on that patient taking the ambulance ride as they would on the same patient walking into a clinic.

So it is capitalism that oppresses peoples healthcare. I recently heard a discussion on television that explained that government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid run on a 3% cost for administration. Private health insurance runs on a 23% overhead. The extra 20% of the money goes to insurance executives salaries and to stockholder's profits. Since I am heavily invested in mutual funds in 401k and 403b accounts, I must be a stockholder in some of these companies. I do not wish to continue making that money by denial of healthcare to the poor.

And even if you think you have healthcare, you may turn out to be wrong. Get the wrong disease, of lose your job and then get sick, and you'll be denied coverage by health insurance bureaucrats (who are somehow different from government bureaucrats?), and lose you home and savings trying to fund treatment to keep yourself alive. If you live, you'll have nothing. Sixty percent of all bankruptcies are the result of medical emergencies carried to worst case senarios.

This is not right. President Obama's leadership is the light on the path to a better day in healthcare in America. The people disrupting town hall meetings are terrorists and should be imprisoned.

2009-07-09T09:31:00.001-04:00

There are a lot of mysteries going on right now.

Why has the untimely (though hardly unexpected) death of Michael Jackson been front page news day after day after day after . . . you get the idea. It is as unexplainable as the cheers for O.J.'s acquittal on murder charges. As a performer he had successes, though no one will ever know how much of his success was from his own ideas or whether he had handlers, but as a person, he was a disaster. Accused as a pedophile repeatedly, he was acquitted in a criminal trial but forced in civil cases to pay millions in retribution. Then his more or less constant plastic surgery turned him from a cute brown boy with a round nose into a female impersonator looking white person with a perky nose and cleft chin. MJ was a psycho.

Another mystery is the recent resignation of Sarah Palin as governor of Alaska. You have to wonder if she had been elected Vice-President of the United States, would she have resigned by now as well. I've not seen a single commentator who has a clue as to why she has resigned, nor could she explain it cogently herself. She doesn't want to be a lame duck? Someone should explain to her what a lame duck is. She doesn't qualify. If she remains there will be all these continuing ethics investigations that will cost Alaska millions. But if she has broken laws shouldn't the investigations go on any way? No person more stupid than her has ever been in the public spotlight running for political office. The fact that she had any backers at all is a great sadness to me. Thoroughly unqualified for any public office, she is simply a cute chick with extreme right wing ideals. A wing nut. A poster child for extremism. Remember the tough hockey mom she was supposed to be? All that remains is a quitter. But why is that a surprise, she quit 4 colleges before she eked out a bachelor's degree in the fifth one. Even more sadly, her PAC is raising money this week as she now has free time to start running for President of the United States of America. You quit the governor's office of our smallest state government and we should consider you for president. Quite a mystery.

The mystery of the Republican Party is greater than either of the last two. Blasted by the electorate in the last election, the 28% of the country that back all things Republican seem to think that they lost because they were too middle of the road in their platform. Had they been more radical (they were already radical) in their conservatism, people would have swung around to their ideas. The elderly are now hearing frightening things from the spokespersons of the party (talk show hosts) about how OBAMA is taking over the country--everything from he's raising your taxes, stealing your heath care, bowing down to other countries, taking away your firearms, abolishing the constitution. Republicans call everything by the opposite of what it is. His Hispanic woman jurist, Sotomayor, given the highest rating by the American Bar Association and the first Hispanic nominee to the court in history, is dubbed by the Republicans as a racist. Her crime? Saying aloud that an Hispanic woman is in a better position to view Constitutional rights than White men. If you insult White people, you must be racist. (If we extend her comments to mean that the poor, downtrodden, and those who face daily discrimination have a better understanding of freedom than those who take freedom for granted because of the color of their skin, then I think it is clear that Sotomayor is correct with her comment, politically correct or not.

In a completely different vein—we got a lovely thank-you note from a former student. The sentiments she expressed were appreciated. She recently graduated from high school and as the salutatorian of her class. Yet her thank-you knote had fore speling erors, in one paragraf. How can she be Salutatorian of the class and not be able to spell? She had “learning disabilities” and was given extra time on tests, and apparently teachers were not able to count off for little things like spelling. The problem is she must now go into the real world, unprepared for being judged by the standards her peers have been held to all along. Education is now totally litigation driven. Results are irrelevant. That is a mystery to me.

2009-06-05T07:21:00.003-04:00

Sarah Palin is still buying the idea that she is a serious national politician. And media outlets are still covering her.

"Some in Washington would approach our economic woes in ways that absolutely defy Economics 101, and they fly in the face of principles, providing opportunity for industrious Americans to succeed or to fail on their own accord," she said. "Those principles it makes you wonder what the heck some in Washington are trying to accomplish here."

Now I get from this that she is vaguely negative about someone in Washington, but when you get right down to it, her words mean nothing. They reflect no particular issues. They raise questions, however. Did she take Econ 101? How about 102? or how about Econ 423-424 and Econ 812, like Ben Bernanke did? Okay, back to Econ 101. What principles are espoused by this class and how are these principles specifically being violated? Her words make us wonder "what the heck" she is trying to accomplish all the time.

I know we see beauty queens caricatured as being dumb as a post, but Sarah Palin is an embarrassment to beauty queens.

2009-06-02T07:13:00.002-04:00

Okay. If it were 65 in the house in the winter time, everyone would expect me to turn the heat on. We went to the Fox yesterday and the place was so cold, all that 55 degree air blowing on you the entire show, that we were chilled to the bone leaving the place. Now today we are staying in a hotel in Augusta and the air conditioning in our room is turned off. Yet the neighbors are all running their air conditioning at such a low temperature that it's no more than 68 in here. I didn't even bring anything with long sleeves since the temps are all supposed to be in the 80's this week. I'll have to turn the heat on and it is 78 outside. Seriously, the walls are cold to the touch and you can hear the airconditioners grinding away. There must be a lot of people with high blood pressure.

2009-05-25T22:13:00.002-04:00

I had my doubts about whether or not I could manage to safely get up and down my ladders at age 57 and get the foyer painted. It is the largest room in the house and has an 18 foot ceiling. The unexpected problem for me became the ladder climbing. On the first day that I worked on it I was surprised to find how difficult it was for my knees to go up and down the blasted ladder. Today I did better but my legs are really hurting. Hope I can walk tomorrow.

I had a friend build a box for me (and upside down stair) that fit on the stairs and made a platform for the ladder that made cutting in the stairs a snap. The box worked like a charm. Every house with stairs should have one of these stair platforms thrown in by the builder.

Next problem--The dining room. Some new challenges since the ladder won't work on one spot. I'm mulling this over. No solution yet.

In 8 years when the foyer needs painting again, I don't think I'll be able to scale the ladder. How sad. But 65 year old guys on big ladders are not a good thing.

2009-05-23T08:31:00.003-04:00

A Truth Commission about the Bush administration is needed. Take 17 minutes and 21 seconds of your time to listen to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former assistant to Secretary of State Colin Powell, talk about how the administration was run. This man is a life long Republican and he is calling for a truth commission with power to refer discoveries for prosecution. Listen here.

Bottom line. Cheney dies in jail.

2009-05-21T09:11:00.002-04:00

The testimony of an eloquent soldier who questions our country's mission in Iraq and Afghanistan after serving a tour of duty in both countries and retiring--His comments are startling, a slap in the face to those of us who have been watching the war on TV. Read his comments from the nation here.

2009-05-17T07:27:00.002-04:00

The new "normal" for political discourse is crazy. The kind of political rhetoric that is taking place today is new in public discourse. I think you can trace lunacy in compaigning back to the beginning of the country, when one politician would accuse the other of killing babies and eating them and such. But in those days when the media had less impact on society, not so many of us were affected by the claims of lunatics. Of course the politicians weren't lunatics at all. Their game was and still is "say anything and someone will believe it." Their hope is to create enough doubt in the minds of those in the middle to turn elections in their direction.

The conservative "twenty-eight percenters" are an interesting bunch. During the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency, even when it was clear that the ship of state had been run on the rocks, approximately 28% of the country (according to the polls) continued to say that the country was headed in the right direction. As the stock market crashed in the final months of the administration, those numbers did begin to slip lower, but only then. Opinion polls had settled at 28% in favor of Bush policies years before. Those 28% see the world through different eyes. They are a noisy group as well and celebrate their place in the world, believing that the 72% who do not share their beliefs are simply "stupid." The "we are smart, you are dumb" defense of their position creates a fortress around their monologue. That's right, I said monologue. They do not hold dialogue. Their leaders, like Rupert Murdoch (owner of Fox News) Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh, hand out "talking points" with the order to their minions to "repeat these words and phrases as often as possible in the media." By media, they mean every media possible. Get on local TV, call in radio shows, write letters to the editor, write in the "free speech" portion of community papers, write comments on blogs, set up "informational" web pages. The twenty-eight percenters are charged by their leadership to flood the market with their message. One of their latest spoofs is to refer to the Democratic Party as the "Democrat Socialist" Party. Of course one of their favorite fantasies is that all media outlets favor "liberals." A liberal is anyone who is not a twenty-eight percenter. I saw a good one today that said "60% of Americans didn't vote for Obama." Nevermind that about 52% who voted, did vote for him, and a landslide vote in the electoral college gives him a mandate not seen in many years.

Now all they have done by holding their untenable positions during a series of national crises is to lose their hold on congress and the presidency. Things have been so bad for them that we are about to see a filibuster-proof majority (a 60 to 40 majority) in the United States Senate to go with the Democratic Party led House. In these rare times, legislation may actually be enacted. Changes may be made.

"WHAT! OH NO!" The fact that change is now imminent has raised the vitriol of the few to levels not seen since the pamphlets in early America. The Republican Party's current attacks are on the level with Obama kills and eats babies.

Are the twenty-eight percent a solid group? No. Without all the rhetoric they'd lose many members. But their core groups are those who weep for every abortion and those who fear the government will come after their machine guns and rocket launchers. Ah yes, and one other group, the uber-rich, who finance the right-wing monologue.

Cross your fingers for national health care that works lowering the cost and increasing the benefits. Cross your fingers for a national energy policy that is neigher oil or coal based. Go hydro, wind, solar. Cross your fingers for an end to senseless American agression overseas.
Cross your fingers that we will build allies once again. Cross your fingers for policies that will reduce global warming. Cross you fingers for a reduction of global polution. Cross your fingers for financial regulations that will protect us from fraud and stock market crashes.

2009-05-09T08:07:00.002-04:00

It wasn't that long ago that Republicans were boasting of a permanent Republican majority. What happened? It turns out that Republican principles are impossible to adhere to. Medicare is socialized medicine and wasteful government health care until . . . you need it. Cutting the federal budget for roads, schools, research, etc., is a fine idea until . . . it affects your town, your project, your child's school. Chanting "tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts" might be as good as "hari krishna, krishna hari," as a mind numbing mantra, but the bottom line is that government needs money to work and just borrowing money from China to fund government spending doesn't feel that good after awhile. In response to their series of defeats (lost the congress, lost the presidency, losing sitting party members across the aisle and any hope of having an actual role in federal government during the next three plus years), the Republicans hold fast to their same principles, saying "we weren't conservative enough last time and that's our failing." They can't see, or won't say, that they weren't inclusive enough last time and "we excluded too many voters to be considered a realistic governing choice."

Now people are writing of the extinction of the Republican Party as the Republican Party members write of secession and refusal of federal grants. It may be early to write about extinction. If there is no one to balance Democratic Party control, it may well go out of control. Obama will not be able to corral them by himself. (I see democratic congressmen opposing almost every program cut that he has proposed). I'd be happy to see the Republicans abandon all their conservative principles and jump into the fray of government in a point/counterpoint manner, examining legislation and refining it, adding good ideas to it, and culling out things that are excessive or unworkable. As long as they are simply opposed to anything the other side proposes, as long as they are the party of filibuster (oops, that one slipped away from them), the party that hopes the government will fail, we risk that the complete Democratic control may careen out of control and provide the same failing federal spending that we experienced with the Repbulican majority under President Shrub.

2009-05-02T10:06:00.002-04:00

Who would think that Arlen Specter, Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, could roll the Republican Party right off the political landscape. With a 59 to 41 vote cushion in the Senate, the conservative Republicans were still holding sway on every vote of any kind in the U.S. Congress. Sometimes they held up a bill because they were mad about something unrelated to the bill. Just because they could. As long as the 41 held firm together they could stymie all efforts by what the Republican media called the "Democrat congress." The Republicans have not gotten over their losses in the last election and their anger management has been weak at best. Mostly they have not managed anger at all but have run from side to side of the arena blaming everyone but themselves for their losses. McCain was too liberal so we lost. Palin too provincial. The media too . . . well too uncooperative for ourside. I have never heard a Republican say "We are out of touch with the American people in the majority of the districts in the country and if we don't find out what they want so we can represent them soon then we will go the way of the Whig Party." And it wasn't that long ago I heard them talking about a permanent Republican majority.

But in all their anger they have been attacking and killing their own too. Arlen's crime was that he broke ranks. By voting for the president's budget he broke their ability to threaten filibuster. Now he wasn't the only one who voted that way, but he was the only one who could be threatened by the party. The others who broke ranks have safe seats and will be re-elected no matter what. But because Arlen was weaker, the national party allowed him to be attacked. But when it looked like they would tear him to pieces in their frenzy, he simply stepped aside and called on the Democratic Party to accept him. Oddly, that's what the Democratic Party does. It accepts people. Anyone. Everyone. That's why you don't see the ability in that party to hold the line on voting for this or that bill. They have many different opinions and they voice them. And they accepted Arlen.

Stunned silence has come from the right. Oh there was a little name calling--good riddance, etc. But Arlen left and took them out of the game. I suppose they will put all their efforts into denying Al Franken his court contested seat in Minnesota. Perhaps the governor will defy the courts and refuse to sign an election certificate for Franken creating a constitutional crisis. But with a little patience, the Democrats should see the sixtieth seat on their side of the aisle filled soon. Republicans will ramp up their secession talk again for certain. The media however, except for Fox FauxNews, will no longer need to cover them. All the discussion for every bill will be on the Democratic side of the aisle.

The good that may come for this may be in finally breaking the logjam on nominations. Perhaps the government will get to work because people nominated by the President can actually take their places at work. Federal judgeships which have been backlogged since Gingrich began the tactic of stalling any of Clinton's appointees back in 1994, may finally be able to be appointed, allowing the federal court system to work once more.

The moral of the story is don't push a guy into a corner. He may hurt you.

All I have to say is "Thanks, Arlen."

2009-04-20T09:41:00.003-04:00

A photograph I saw made me think of summer reading at the Maud Burrus Library. When I was a child I remember going to the library in the summer and looking longingly through the stacks of books for children, trying to discover which ones were the ones I could check out. I read books about sports, adventure, and mystery. I loved Hardy boy books and many were loaned to me by my friend Philip Mattox. He would loan me 10 or 15 at a time and I would devour them, trying to figure out the mystery before Frank and Joe Hardy did it for me. I remember that the books were a dollar to buy in the store and I only ever bought 2 or 3 because of the cost. My allowance growing up was $.50 a week, and I had to tithe, $.05 to the church each week, so I only cleared $1.80 a month. So a whole dollar for a book was too much except for the rare occasion. I remember other kids saying that they got $10 for every A on their report card or that their grandmother gave them money for Christmas or a birthday. I can't remember anyone ever giving me any money.

I loved the summer reading club at Maud Burrus. You logged the number of pages you read throughout the summer. My sister and I read thousands of pages.

I have loved photographs since I was young too. I got a little gray camera when I was ten or eleven. It was a big deal to take a photo because there were only 11 or 12 shots on a roll I think. 12 black and white pictures. They were out of focus at best and sometimes came back mysteriously white or grayish. Since it cost several dollars to get prints and more film, photography was a rare thing. On Easter, when we all had new clothes to wear to church, Dad might take our picture. We might see those pictures some months later, maybe in the late summer or early autumn, when the roll of film was finally completed and went to be developed. Developing took awhile--a week, ten days, or two weeks. If you dropped the film off on a Tuesday and the film pickup was on Monday ("Sorry, you just missed the pick up man."), your film cannister just sat in the store for a whole week. Then we might go back to the store and they would look through the envelopes and shake their heads and say, "Nope. They aren't back yet." Another week would pass and we'd try again. Usually we had forgotten what photos were on a roll of film long before we got it developed, so there were some nice surprises when we opened the package. Also some great disappointments, odd colors, closed eyes, or harsh expressions of us squinting into the sunshine. A photo of the family squinting into the sun seemed to be my dad's favorite shot.

There are drawbacks to digital photography. But not many.

My son grew his beard for a play. He cut it off the next day. I did not. A day earlier Mrs. G took this photo of me with a former student. I taught her for a couple of years--her senior year of highschool and I think sophomore year of college. She needed encouragement and was thinking about dropping out. Now she is Metropolitan Opera Soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird. How nice to know her.

2009-04-13T14:00:00.002-04:00

We had a lovely Spring Break. We traveled to Spartanburg to a birthday party for great neices, who were three. Then to Athens to UGA to hear Anne-Carolyn Bird sing a recital in Ramsey Hall. Anne sang wonderfully, with three of her former teachers in the audience. I saw Miss Strahl and Miss Reinke there at the recital. It is hard to understand how Anne could have become such a fine singer. They change so much over the years. We went to hear the Dunwoody Players perform at Dunwoody Methodist. Carter played the role of Judas in the Last Days of Judas. Kent was Jesus. It was a good production with many laughs and many saddnesses. After resting we began painting our foyer, quite a job, but we made a good start. Then at the end of the week we were back at Dunwoody celebrating Easter and we were joined by Kent, Rachel and John at Carter's condo for Easter lunch.

We've finished our plans to go to the Spoleto festival in Charleston, SC. We have tickets for events on 6 days and will stay at the King Charles Inn. I'm excited about this trip. We'll hear Anne again there since she is scheduled to be the soprano for their Mozart Requiem.

2009-03-25T13:51:00.002-04:00

Not that anyone reads my sporadic musings, but I have this thought. When someone is mean to you I offer only this advice. What goes around, comes around. If you just wait, jerks get their comeuppance.

The Lexus Scholarship Competition was a tremendous amount of trouble for me. I thought it would be easier that last year, but alas, no. The students were much harder to deal with this year than last. I'm hoping that is an anomoly. My own students won 1st and 3rd place in the vocal division and won $5000 and $2500 respectively. Thanks Randy Knapton for making such an event possible.

You don't get every job you apply for. You don't get every job you are qualified for, even when you are the most qualified for the job. No one knows how you get jobs. It is a mystery.

I see that Dell computers are up again on the stock market. That's good for them, but I don't know why they are up. They sold me a broken computer and then for six weeks have stalled me in endless hours on the phone about fixing it. It has sat like a lump on the floor, a giant doorstop, waiting to be used. Finally a tech came out this morning at 7:30 A.M., what an hour, and replaced hardware. Instantly the machine sprang to life and even now I am writing on it. The Dell technicians in India have insisted from the first day that their computer was working perfectly and the only problems had to be with my internet provider. They have been rude to me, insulted me, and wasted my time. They have lied to me, cut me off, failed to call me back even when we have had appointments to talk. They have forced me to dissassemble the machine and put it back together. Only when that failed did they send out a tech and then "poof" everything worked. Everything the techs on the phone told me was a lie. Everything. Not just wrong, but a lie. I expect them to go out of business.

I hope we have enough money to retire soon. That may be impossible and I may end up working at Wal-Mart as a greeter. I know we'll have almost enough money to make it. But almost isn't enough now is it? Our finances looked pretty good when we turned into the new millenium, but the Bush era has been ruinious for ordinary people. If I had the money in a mattress instead of having it invested, we would have considerably more. Even if the stock market returns to profitability, years of growth have been lost. So what kind of job will I do in my 60's? Will children still want me to teach them to sing? Will that be enough?

2009-02-24T09:57:00.002-05:00

Bobby Jindal has bought into the Republican Party mantra of the eternal campaign. George W. Bush never took time to govern as President of the United States, but rather continued his political campaign for eight years. He appointed political hacks to important public jobs and failed in his due diligence over the health of the country. He is now off the scene. The damage is obvious. Almost immediately on the defeat of John McCain, a name already almost forgotten, Bobby Jindal began to travel the country (Iowa first) making speeches, beginning his campaign for president in earnest by sticking to the political points of George W. Bush, Richard Cheny, and Rush Limbaugh, and being quick to oppose anything that appears to have come from democrats, including money to support the unemployed in his own state of Louisiana. Why oppose it? Simple. If you accept, you have to also change the antiquated rules for unemployment that still exist in Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, that exclude most people from drawing unemployment compensation. If you are only able to secure part-time work and lose your job in Louisiana, no compensation. If you have to leave your job because your child is gravely ill and needs your full time care, no compensation. If you have to leave your job because you are a victim of domestic violence and are hiding from the spouse who beats you and your children regularly, no compensation.

Most other states have changed these policies. Louisiana has not. Under Bobby Jindal's leadership they are standing against these people, the poor, the beaten down, refusing any aid now or in the future.

No wonder Louisiana has not recovered from hurricane Katrina. Look at the leadership of that state.

2009-02-15T07:48:00.002-05:00

I could spend the next hour fixing this blog so it is more reader friendly, but I have confidence in you. I think you can get the message if I do nothing more to it. The link is to a Frank Rich NYT column in today’s paper. The black print below is all quoted from Rich. The red print is from me. Don’t miss the opportunity to click the link and read the whole article.

The public, in defiance of Washington’s condescending assumption, was smart enough to figure out that the government can’t create jobs without spending and that Bush-era Republicans have no moral authority to lecture about deficits. Some Americans may even have ancestors saved from penury by the New Deal. [I would laugh here and say, ALL AMERICANS have ancestors saved . . . ]

This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/opinion/15rich.html

Unfortunately the question is for whom the bell tolls. (Remember the answer? It tolls for us.) We sit just like the Jews in the ghettos during the holocaust. We hear of others losing their jobs. Millions out of work in China, 25 % unemployment in Detroit, but we remain delusional, looking around our own neighborhood saying things aren’t that bad here. The Jews heard the rumors of horrible things that had happened, some survivors even returned to the ghettos and walked the streets telling of mass murder. No one believed them. As this economy spirals downward, banking continuing to fail, housing continuing to foreclose, we are dancing around the edge of the back hole pointing to others disappearing into it’s depths and saying, “that is not me.” Even when 175 Fayette county teachers face dismissal before next year and all teachers face a 5% cut in salary, even with fire stations being closed in Atlanta, firefighters laid off, we still don’t believe that the Gestapo will come for us. The GOP is dancing on TV saying ridiculous things about the New Deal not working (this is historical revisionism plain and simple), insert links and reveling in their ZERO votes for economic stimulus. Do nothing and the freemarket fairy will save us, they say. Cut taxes for the rich.

While I heard repeatedly that the public had turned against the stimulus package, apparently only the Rasmussen poll showed that. In all the other polls, stimulus support was in the majority and Obama support is in the high 60s and low 70s. Amazing.

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.
Judgment day is coming in about 20 months when we get to go back to the polls and remove more of the GOP. Do your little dance, you obstructionist little GOP so and sos!

The country wants health care reform. The country wants changes in the tax codes. The country wants restrictions on Wall Street greed. The country wants banks responsive to people. You want to help the country. Put a moratorium on foreclosure for the next year. Without foreclosures flooding the market, the market clears up and rebounds. Spirits lift.

2009-02-14T07:01:00.002-05:00

It is easy to stop blogging. I'm going to try to blog every day this week. It is a holiday week for us with school out for a totally bogus Winter Break, designed just to make the school year longer. Someone somewhere thinks students retain more information in their heads if the don't have a summer break. The interesting dicotomy in that is that the person who had accumulated enough information to make this pronouncement, got his or her education, with summer breaks. Perhaps if they had not had summer breaks they would be so smart that they'd realize that it doesn't make a difference. Getting a vacation didn't make me stupid.

I wanted to blog about the birds. You hear bad things about the birds all the time. Nesting areas destroyed. Massive declines in bird counts. Song birds dissapearing. I can't dispute any of that. When I walk Patches in the morning right now it is still pretty cold. Usually below freezing or close to freezing. We walk just after sun up with the glare of low angle sun casting looooong shadows interspersed with golden blasts of light. While we walk we hear the birds. There are so many bird calls that it can only be described as "the bird orchestra, warming up." You know how the orchestra sounds sitting on the stage waiting for the maestro. They create that unique aleatoric music (okay I'm being intentionally ironic here) that we associate with orchestras. Trumpets blaring, strings in chaos as though all tuned to different pitches. The birds sound like that. Scratching strings, blaring calls, and an occasional player, flying on to the stage from the wings to take their place. If they made much more noise it would be scary!

Our student Johanna was in Lie to Me on TV recently. She is soon to be in 9 episodes on Greek, another TV show and she's in all the promos for the new season. It is good to see her shining face.

2009-02-01T08:36:00.001-05:00

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

The story of the total collapse of the opposition party in America.

2009-01-31T15:13:00.002-05:00

Of course the five ways to reach first base without striking the ball are, BB, IBB, K/PB, (or technically also K/WP), I2, HBP. It is a scoring issue and those are the ways of scoring it. That's actually six ways if you think about it.

Can you believe that the Repubs in the house whine and cry about the stimulus bill for the economy. The Democrats cave and put in stuff to mollify them. And then not one of the Repubs votes for the bill. It is not as if any one needed their votes. They have totally no say in the house of representatives, the Democrats were just being bi-partisan in accepting suggestions from people with absolutely no power. Then the Repubs vote in lock step. What is that? And how much do you think you'll get listened to on the next bill. Why, not at all.

Meanwhile President Obama has come up with a crafty way to break the deadlock that might occur in the Senate on the bill. First, Sen. Gregg, R-NH is appointed Commerce Secretary. Gregg is 61, facing a difficult re-election in 2010. After 8 years as Commerce Secretary he'd by 69, ready to retire well after serving his country in the executive branch. Then, the Democratic governor of NH will appoint a Democrat to that senate seat, making the ratio in the Senate, 60 Democrats, 40 Repubs. And there goes the ability of the Repubs to derail any piece of legislation they like for at least the next two years. Two years of congress non action in the current crisis will be seen as a failure of the Obama administration. But if Gregg accepts, then Obama gets two years to govern. It will be time to judge him then.

2009-01-22T07:16:00.002-05:00

One out of every 200 people in the United States attended the inaugaration of President Obama. Reports are coming out that the crowd was a joyous, mellow, model crowd.

2009-01-15T09:01:00.002-05:00

Okay it is downright cold out there and is supposed to get colder all day! We are looking for a low of 11 tonight and about the same tomorrow night. That is going to test my furnace and R value of our home's insulation.

Our Governor is just about as incompetent, corrupt, and evil as our outgoing president. His new policies for this year include cutting another hundred million plus from schools for the current year, plus even larger cuts for next year. Meanwhile he's planning a "stimulus package" to create jobs around the state by taking the education money to build pet projects for his friends. A library here, a golf course there. Meanwhile raising class sizes of the worst school system in the nation to historic highs, bypassing established state regulations for class size in order to do so, and even cutting school nurses.

Hundreds of millions in cuts for public education will then go to construction companies to build buildings or upgrade facilities for colleges around the state. So my buddies construction company gets millions, class sizes swell and teachers get cut. And he'll claim he's the education governor.

Plus! 52 million dollars goes to spiff up the capitol. Couldn't you build a completely new capitol for that much. Last time I checked, the capitol was looking pretty good. This is a heck of face lift.

Make no mistake. The goal of this governor and the Rebulican Party nationwide, is to run public education's ship on the rocks, to cause it to be so ruined, so septic, that no one can any longer say that public education is a good thing. Then finally the religious right can claim goverment vouchers to support their segregated, parochial, even hate mongering schools.

And Georgians are among that minority of Americans who cannot see that the time for racial prejudice is past so they will elect another Republican, perhaps even a worse one, when this good ole boy is finished.

2009-01-05T07:56:00.002-05:00

Al Franken's book title Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them comes to my mind as I hear the spin being put out by the Bush administration to the news media by virtually all members of the Bush administration during these "legacy" days of W and his cronies. While he seeks to secure his place in history, most of the rest of us are looking for a way to imprison him.

Some big lies that don't get talked about any more, or have never gotten talked about. I'm not citing a source for my conclusions here, because they are my conclusions, based on my experience.

Sometimes people tell you things and you just can't figure out how they could be possible. I remember the line "She went to Julliard School of Music." But in my experience, the 75 year old church organist was both borderline delusional and a terrible musician. It was hard to reconcile how any one could be this incompetent a player and every have studied at Juilliard. It would be like looking at a 400 pound man and saying, "back in the day, he won the Boston Marathon." Naaaaah. Something is wrong with that. Turns out she actually wanted to go to Juillard, in oboe, but never did. Myth explained.

You hear that George W. Bush is a brilliant man. I've even heard him described as "the most brilliant man I ever met." (How sad). We know he graduated from Yale and also from Harvard Business School. We also hear that he was a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard.

We his National Guard service is still a matter of lawsuits. Maybe that will get sorted out. It is usually pretty easy to confirm someones service. Their buddies can tell you about serving with them. Bush buddies step forward please.

But to graduate from Harvard and Yale, my guess is you would have to write papers and give presentations. After listening to his many public presentations in the past 8 years, it is my firm belief that he was not capable of college level work with the English language and like his National Guard service, he did not do the work. He was either waved on through by people who were paid off or looked the other way, or more likely, he turned in excellent papers that were written by someone else, and he read (poorly), presentations written by someone else. I've graded a lot of students and never had one quite as stupid as George W. Bush.

2009-01-01T09:42:00.002-05:00

If you missed seeing Jupiter blazing beneath a brilliant crescent moon last night, it would be worth it to bundle up tonight and wander outside around 7:30 or 8:00 and look for it. It is amazing to see those extra terrestrials hanging in the sky, glowing in the sun that is hitting the back side of our planet. The enormity of Jupiter, being so far away in the frozen outer space of the solar system and yet reflecting back so brilliantly in our night sky is food for wonderment.

It is 2009. I didn't think about what I'd be like in 2009 when I was a boy. I do remember thinking about that I'd be 49 in 2000. Now at times I wonder how long I will make it. Our good friends Pat and John lost her mother yesterday. My dad is talking about the pain in his hips that nearly paralyze him and he wonders about hip replacement at 85. I saw that the clocks are being corrected a leap second as we go to 2009. Seems the earth's rotation is slowing and we will lose a whole hour in the next 1000 years, without corrections that is. There is little that is certain in life. Plan for retirement--don't count on it. Your best plans may fail. Money in the bank or your mattress, about the same it seems, is fairly safe, but diminishing in relationship to what you can do with it as sure as the earth is turning. The stock market--well that is ridiculously scarey, down 40 to 45 % this year. It will be awhile before we see 14,000 on the Dow Jones average again.

The only certain thing is that I am alive and feel healthy at this moment and I must wring as much joy out of today as I can. We have had a joyful holiday, filled with beautiful singing, hugs, and smiles. Old George Bailey really was the richest man in Bedford Falls.

2008-12-15T19:15:00.001-05:00

George W. Bush finally found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No wonder they were so hard to find. Everyone had them on their feet.

2008-12-15T09:32:00.001-05:00

Why did the auto bailout get blocked?

"Why was the plan blocked? An e-mail message circulated among Senate Republicans declared that denying the auto industry a loan was an opportunity for Republicans to “take their first shot against organized labor.”"

From the New York Times.

2008-12-14T09:28:00.002-05:00

Let me explain capitalism to you. Success is determined by what people want. And people are struck by fads. If you catch a wave, you become wealthy beyond imagination. Sometimes hard work and intelligence play a role in success. Sometimes . . . they don't. Hard work and intelligence alone result in a life lived on the edge. Your job is always insecure, even if you work for the country's or the world's largest company. Downsizing, bubbles, shifts in the fads (goodbye typewriters hello pc) . . . all can sweep away your security. How could bad loans made to people who can't pay their mortgage wipe out ordinary Americans home values and destroy their ability to sell their homes and go to another place. Today the invention of a new software makes another obsolete and 100,000 lose their jobs.

Teddie Joe Neely sings the role of Jesus in Jesus Christ superstar. He has had a successful career in pop music / Broadway singing. He really has no training as a singer. He just sings like he sings. This morning I heard women talking about how his voice is just a beautiful as it was 30 years ago (he's 65 now), the narrator spoke of his high notes being as good as ever, and pregnant women apparently come to him back stage and ask him to bless their babies. The thing is he has a gravelly, underpitch, uninteresting, untrained sound. The people who like him are as nuts as the pregnant ladies wanting blessing. But he's rich and famous.

Capitalism.

2008-12-14T07:28:00.002-05:00

How can you give $700 billion to banking and then filibuster to stop the auto industry from getting any. The Repubs learned nothing from the election and are still at war with the American Middle Class.

As for the ruse that UAW wages and benefits are what is dragging the companies down, wages only make up 8% of the cost of a car and many Detroit models are already priced lower than their non-American counterparts.

And as for the economy myth, as in not enough fuel economy in Detroit models, well guess who makes the most 30 mpg cars. Ford. Hmmm.

If the Auto Makers fail, they will suck the American economy into a black hole. And is there any escape from a black hole? The suppliers to the auto makers will fail with out them to sell to and guess who these same suppliers also sell to--Toyoto, Lexus, Honda, Saab, etc. So those guys will go down the same drain at the same time. What maker would survive? I don't know. And the loss of a million high paying middle class jobs would start a new round of foreclosures, a new spiral of home prices falling, and perhaps the end of the American dream for the next 50 years.

Senator Shelby and his ilk must be stopped at all costs. If it takes throwing Alabama out of the union, do it!

2008-12-10T09:07:00.003-05:00

Nothing but retribution.

The current wailing in the congress by Republicans against any bailout of the auto industry is just payback to the United Auto Workers Union for supporting Barack Obama. The treasury department just got $700,000,000,000 from the same people with hardly any complaint to help keep bankers and hedgefunds afloat. Senator Shelby from Alabama was not on TV every other day advocating that we just let those banks fail. But now he is on full scale attack. Well he's angry that his party has been reduced so greatly by the recent elections and that the UAW backed the democrats. Now he has the chance to hurt the UAW, perhaps even break their back, by simply stalling what is an inevitable rescue plan for automakers. Truthfully, they were making a profit in the first quarter of 2008 but with the downturn they have dropped 40%. I talked with a Lexus dealer who is a friend last week and asked him how was business. He said "We are down 40%, just like everyone else." Shelby also doesn't point out that he has 4 non-union auto manufacturing plants in his state that will benefit by hard times for Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors.

Retribution and payback is business as usual for Repub politicians. So no lesson was learned by their massive defeats in the last two elections. They are still playing the same games.

As for the lies put forward that the autoworkers are making $77 an hour, see the real scoop here.

2008-12-06T09:40:00.002-05:00

I was alive and going about my business. I had heard of the Students for a Democratic Society. I heard of the Weather Underground on TV. I had a draft card and after being 1-A for a time I was reclassified 2-S (student deferment) after it became clear from my lottery number (23) that I would be drafted in January of the next year. I think that was 1970. I walked in candlelight vigils protesting the Vietnam war and was amazed to see hundreds of protesters on North Campus at UGA. We sang songs and heard speakers. As my graduation neared I was called by the army to take my army physical at the induction center in the old Ford Plant building down on Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta. I passed the physical. I was told to be prepared to be drafted as soon as I graduated. But fate intervened and in January of 1973 or thereabouts, they stopped the draft, the war ending at last. I've been to the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington D.C. and found the name of my boy scout and school friend Michael Turner who died in Vietnam on his seventh day of service there as a U.S. Marine. The Vietnam war stirred strong emotions.

I have wondered who Bill Ayers was during that time because of the recent political campaign that called him an "unrepentant domestic terrorist." I wondered why there were no interviews with Professor Ayers. I read nothing from him, saw nothing of him, and I guess I thought he probably was a pretty bad guy who seemed to have changed his ways over the years to become an education professor. Now "education professor" really makes me think he is a very dull guy today. But finally Mr. Ayers has spoken. He waited until after the election. He is eloquent in describing himself and it appears that although he was a radical guy in the Vietnam War period, he was probably never a terrorist as we think of it today. His words however do express regrets, many regrets for his behavior, and he says that he can not imagine acting in such a manner today. So I guess you could say that he condemns his own behavior. I'm glad that he has spoken up about himself. I agree with him on one salient point. I too wish I knew Barack Obama better.

Read his short article in today's New York Times.

2008-11-28T07:10:00.002-05:00

Under the Bush administration the pentegon's budget has increased from $300 billion to $541 billion. This sixty per cent increase does not include spending on the wars, $171 billion, or veterans benefits, intelligence gathering, nor security costs. Repubs are paranoid. This total is half of the defense spending for the entire world and more spending than the next 45 nations on the list combined. Okay it's not paranoia, it is insanity.

2008-11-23T09:07:00.002-05:00

This is my 600th blog post.

There is a kind of lull in the national news now that the post election fingerpointing has died down. The Repubs had a couple of weeks of blaming John McCain, then Sarah Palin, and laying out future plans for them. The pundits had lists for Barack Obama, who to appoint, what to do first, etc. Luckily Obama seems to be pretty much ignoring them and making his own way. Palin has wandered back to the obscurity of Alaska with no hope of appointing herself to the Senate, and McCain has gone underground, "poof", vanished.

Now we have the wait to see if the House that Bush built will fall over before the Obama family can move into the Whitehouse and start proping things up. Some say we won't make it. I see that our State School Superintendendant has declared personal bankruptcy. And she just gave away 1 million dollars that she won on the game show, Are you smarter than a 5th grader. She is. But apparently needs a good accountant.

I like the sound of an acoustic guitar. This sound was the rage in the late 60's and early 70's but it keeps making comebacks.

I enjoy getting out and walking the dog and go between 3 miles and 5 miles a day. However, it has been so cold lately. Ugh. How can it be 16 one day and 17 the next day in November in Georgia. That would be brutal on a peak in NC or TN, but is ridiculous on the coastal plain of Georgia. We've already had more freezes this year than we have had throughout the entire winter in some years. And winter doesn't start for a month. I have a system though and do not get cold--Two pair of socks in heavy shoes, flannel longjohns and jeans, a long sleeved T, a collared shirt, a cotton hoodie, hood up, ear muffs, wraparound sunglasses, down coat zipped up tight around my neck, and a baseball cap. I do not get cold on a halfhour walk at 16 degrees.

I have a birthday coming up this week and it is nice to reflect. I wish that the boom 90's had continued through the "oughts" but that 12% annual return from the stock market which was seen in the 20th century has evaporated. In fact the stats for the last 100 years don't look so hot right now. If there is a bounce, perhaps things will work out okay for retirement. No bounce? I don't know what we'll do. Find a new job amid 10% unemployment? Let's hope for a bounce, not a cliff. But for now, we have a nice life.

We visited with Mrs. G's roommates from college and another old friend last night for three hours at supper and had a lovely time. They all looked good. Unfortunately the friend has lost his wife this year, and the husband of a roomie is here in town for a heart procedure at Piedmont Hospital. No worries they say. Old friends are a nice reward for living a long time.

2008-11-11T10:19:00.002-05:00

It is pretty amusing that Republicans have so much to say after the recent election. Some of them, I’ll have to admit, are practicing a little silence. Thank you all for that. But many of the others are rattling on as if what they have to say is important. Let’s be clear, the only Republicans in the Federal government that have any power at all are the thirty something Republican Senators. If they end up with 41 votes, and it is likely that they will, then they are the only Republicans that may have something to say for the next two years. The democrats have taken a thrashing from Republicans since 1994, but this convincing electoral victory has them in position to do what they want.

I keep seeing recommendations for Republicans in the cabinet--John McCain as Secretary of Defense? Keep Gates as Sec. of Def? Colin Powell for Education Secretary? Sunday’s news shows listed shortlists of potential candidates. Oddly these lists were almost all white men. I think they missed the point of the election. Get ready to see some women. Get ready to see some color.

I hear on TV and see in the press that America is a “center-right” country. If that were true, wouldn’t we have elected John McCain. Isn’t he center-right? Conservative columnist David Brooks (NYT) says today that there was no movement to the left in this election. Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Whew! He said he is hoping for meaningful dialogue between parties. (But why David? The Repubs have frozen out the Democrats for a decade. Why should the dems play nice now?) Brooks says “The Obama administration of my dreams . . . [wi]ll invite GOP leaders to the White House for real meetings and then reinvite them, even if they give hostile news conferences on the White House driveway.” It sounds like David is advocating that the Obama administration remain calm and include everyone while the Repubs continue to act like children and throw temper tantrums in their front yard. Oh sure, that sounds wonderful.

Georgia Representative Paul Broun (R) is also in the paper today, saying about Obama, “I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may . . . have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.” He speaks for Obama’s call for civil service by all young Americans by saying “That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany . . .” Come on Rep. Broun, get your metaphors straightened out. Is Obama Marxist or Facist? Broun also said he believes Obama will move to ban gun ownership. Sheeeeeesh. Don’t these guys every shut up? The election is over, you can quit your campaigning. Paul Broun is a Republican in the House of Representatives. He’s going to be 80 votes on the losing side of every issue, possibly for the rest of his political career. He can shut up and sit down now.

Let’s say this. Any offerings democrats give to repubs, meetings, offices, deference of any kind, is an undeserved kindness. Bush has clearly used the work "bi-partisan" to mean "Do it my way or else." The Republican party marginalized itself through corrupt and incompetent governing and it is not the Democratic party’s responsibility to console them and freely offer them another chance to have a role in this government. If they behave themselves and work hard, if they show good faith instead of throwing tantrums and threatening to kill the President, then maybe. But right now, they just don’t play nice and they should be pushed out of the school yard like the bullies they have been.

This is not the time for Republican advice to Barack Obama.

2008-11-05T09:49:00.002-05:00

I am pleased that democratic candidates did so well in yesterday's election. Yet . . . I am amazed that Alaskans may have elected a convicted felon rather than vote for any democrat. (I see their logic. Elect Stephens, the Senate expells him and he goes to jail, Palin appoints herself to fill his seat and gets to go to Washington after all. But yech! How convoluted and sad).

I am amazed that white voters in Georgia, Alabama, SC, TN, the old south, voted against Obama in such numbers. Their cousins in the north and west voted overwhelmingly for Obama. The big difference in the groups is 230 years of racial hatred in the south.

I am sad that in all likelihood repubs will block vote trying to obstruct every change that the democrats put forward in the Senate. I believe that if the repubs want to filibuster, the democrats should make them actually do it. Make those old guys stand in the floor of the Senate hour after hour. Make it a brutally difficult physical exercise. Make them pay with a week long filibuster and then two days later, put them back out there again. Break the rascals down. The only real power of the democrats will be the power of appointment to the beauracracy that is government. Perhaps the democrats can trade pork to repubs for their votes to change our government.

It now appears that 200,000 + people came out to Obama's block party in Grant Park. After the party, police reported that they arrested . . . no one.

You can be sure that the repubs are already preparing to attack this new administration as they attacked the Clintons. Soon you'll hear nothing but Barack the socialist, communist, muslim, anti-American, baby-killing, racist president. Hopefully, like the boy who cried "Wolf!" They will have no audience this go around. And hopefully President Obama will do so well that the racists will begin to admit that "that black man did okay."

2008-11-03T11:13:00.002-05:00

I'm going to say Obama 55% McCain 43%. No democratic candidate has gotten this high of a percentage in 40+ years. This will qualify as a landslide. About 350 electoral votes.

59 senators who caucus with democrats, 57 demo 2 independent
There will be runoffs in Minnesota and Georgia. Georgia will go Repub, Minn. to the Democrats.

McCain is losing because he has little substance. He chose Sarah Palin because she is an icon for women, but she has only one tenth the substance of McCain. He's for something different every day. Mostly he's against something new about Obama every day. Obama's a muslim, a socialist, a communist, a Kenyan.

Actually Obama is a brilliant intellectual with a heart for American people. He has surrounded himself with brilliant people. He is calm in the midst of trumoil. He is so organized that he has won the presidency without any reasonable chance that he would do so. He wants to make government work. If you think about it, government should work. It should serve. It should defend those who are defenseless.

McCain crashed 3 U.S. aircraft and flew another one through powerlines causing a blackout in Spain. People don't ususally get to keep flying U.S. aircraft if they crash them. One crash per pilot is the rule. But McCain's daddy said he was untouchable, so he was. Family connections got him into and out of Annapolis. He didn't deserve to be there. He didn't deserve to graduate. Same thing for his appointment to the War College after his return from being a POW. I wonder if he did any studying there either. No wonder his campaign has been so helter skelter. And he is the best the Repubs could offer. Palin 2012. Let's hope for that.

Another subject:
Why should taxes be highest on the richest people? Because they benefit most from public projects. If you a selling widgets nationwide and you become rich, your money comes from the availability of publicly funded infrastructure, roads, rails, air planes. Great wealth is fine. It comes not from hard work, but from hard work and from America's capitalism. If you are rewarded with wealth, the greedy think they deserve all the money. Actually America deserves most of it. They deserve enough to make it interesting, but they owe a great debt in return.

2008-10-30T09:10:00.003-05:00

The young woman who said she was sexually assaulted by a 6'4" black man who carved a B (for Obama?) into her face because she has a McCain sticker on her car, has now been charged with making a false police report.

And it turns out she is a paid staffer for . . . the College Republican National Committee.

2008-10-30T08:51:00.002-05:00

It has been just over 5 years since my mother died. She lived 76 years and influenced me for almost 53. I think about her every day. I see people doing things that remind me of her. We make her recipes, we use some of her pans, I have flowers in her vase in the music room. She is ever present in my decisions.

2008-10-30T08:22:00.003-05:00

It's pretty clear that at least 1/2 the registered voters in my county will have voted before election day. It stood at 36% a week before and the lines were long at all the polls, all day yesterday and presumably will be so every day. I remember hearing one woman say that yesterday was her only chance to vote. Every other day she would be working during the voting hours. If there is a three or four hour (seven hours in Cobb County, GA a few days ago) wait and you work and have children, you just can't vote. That isn't right.

We need even more opportunities to vote. More locations, more machines, more workers.

We also had to vote on those horrible touch screen machines that give no receipt, even after it is clear that they can be sabatoged, corrupted, and rigged, with no way to check the results. It is horrible.

2008-10-30T08:11:00.003-05:00

The past quarter for America's economic industry seems to have been the worst in my memory (which admittedly only goes back about half a century). Yet Exxon Mobil yesterday reported the largest quarterly profits for any company at any time in history.

There IS something wrong with that.

2008-10-29T11:06:00.002-05:00

Thanks Sarah for the terrific presentation of the issues in this national political campaign in your recent blog. I think you have a thorough understanding of the important issues and agreed with you point for point. Mrs. G and I went and voted early today, so our voices have been added to the over 36% that have already voted in Georgia. We waited in line for just under an hour.

Barack Obama probably has no chance in Georgia, a solidly repub leaning state, but we took our stand for him anyway.

2008-10-26T09:49:00.002-05:00

You may not remember what a scandal it was in the newspapers when John Edwards paid $400 for 2 haircuts during the presidential primary campaign. It apparently showed how out of touch he was with reality. That's about 10 times as much as I pay for a haircut.

Sarah Palin's hairdresser is being paid $5000 a week to fix her hair. She spent $150,000 on clothes for the campaign, provided by the Repubican National Committee. I usually pay a maximum of $35 for a shirt, but go crazy and say I found some reeeeeeally nice shirts at $75. Let's get 15 of those suckers. That's $1125 for shirts!!!!! And hey I'd be wearing suits and might need, going crazy, 15 suits. Let's go beserk and buy $750 suits. That's $11,250. So I have $137,625 left for shoes and ties. I'll have to be a careful shopper.

According to the Republican Party, if I notice that Sarah has spent money wildly on clothes, I am a sexist. If Sarah is this wild on her outfits, imagine what she would do with the U.S. treasury to play with.

2008-10-22T09:22:00.003-04:00

I've curtailed my blogging to a large degree because I'm overwhelmed with trying to process what is going on in the country.

At this point I do believe that Barack Obama will soon be the President of the United States. That at least is good.

I'm appalled at the Republican voter suppression effort that must be costing them millions of dollars. I can't imagine what it will be like for a first time voter when they go to the polls and some Repub hack standing behind the poll worker says, "No. We challenge this registration." Literally millions of voters are going to go to the poll on election day and find that Repubs have removed them from the voting lists. In some cases, whole streets of voters have been removed. On the basis of some government record that shows you at an old address, or because you've moved across the street, or there seems to be a slight change in your signature from a recorded signature five years before, your registration can be challenged or has already been removed. You have to see this article in Rolling Stone by Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Greg Palast. Or watch the video.

Forgive the stream of consciousness that follows. Back to being overwhelmed. It's not by the failed Bush presidency, now acknowleged to be the worst in history. But what about the crash on Wall Street. A big ouch for me since I'm three years from retirement. Does the bailout make it better, or reward the rich for their bad judgement? Why doesn't the 700 billion go to the people being forclosed on so they can pay their mortgages instead of letting them be kicked out on to the street and reimbursing mortgage lenders for their losses? Isn't something wrong with this? If the home buyers (poor democrats) made a judgement error, didn't the lenders (rich repubs) make the same judgement error?

How about a major candidate choosing someone like Sarah Palin and all she represents, and spending $150,000 on clothes for her (talk about putting lipstick on a pig). About all the illegal things that Palin has done as governor, taking per diem for working at home, doing state business via personal email to shield her dealings from open records requests, firing people who won't do personal vedettas for her? About having two "D" students running at the top of a ticket. I can only surmise that good Republican candidates just wouldn't run this year because there was no chance of winning.

It is about voter suppression. It's about Afghanistan. It's about health care. It's about firing attorneys general who won't abuse the law for political purposes. It's about screaming "baby killer" and "socialist" and "muslim" and "kill him" at rallies. Its about people saying "I could never vote for a black man."

I'll tell you what I want. I want 350 electoral votes. I want 61 senators (so we can kiss Joe Lieberman goodbye). I want Iraq to be over. I want Osama hunted down and killed. I want health care for all Americans. I want the right to vote for all Americans. I want a graduated tax system that doesn't tap out while still in the middle class. We have had tax rates in the past as high as 94% on the uber rich, 91% during the Eisenhower administration (the definition of the good old days). It is currently 36% on the uber rich with loads of loopholes. Poor school teachers are paying 28%. I'll tell you, there is more than 8% difference in our salaries, but not in our tax rates.

2008-10-17T14:01:00.002-04:00

Joe Sixpack, Joe the Plumber, Can I call you Joe?

Who goes to a political rally? Fans of the candidate, that's who! And, protesters. So we get this video sound bite of a plumber talking with the candidate on the ropeline saying how he works long hours and wanted to buy the plumbing company that he has worked for for many years, but with Obama's tax increases on small business, he cannot buy the company. Well the tax increase on small companies making over $250,000 a year is only going up three percent. And only 3% of small businesses make that much money.

When you check on Joe you find that:

1. He has no plumbers liscense at any level and he isn't even qualified to work legally in Toledo with a plumbing company.

2. He makes far less than $250K a year. His company does not make this amount either. His taxes are actually going to go down under Obama.

3. The company itself might cost Joe $250K if he were a plumber and could buy it.

Face it. Joe the plumber is a political plant. He was there to say his words to Obama on the line, get it recorded, and turn it over to the Repubs so McCain could use his name 25 times in the debate. It was supposed to anger small businessmen. It was all a lie. Joe doesn't like Barack Obama, but it isn't because of the reason he gave on camera. His real rationale remains a secret.

How about the ACORN accusations on Fox News. Now mentioned over 1200 times on this "news" channel. This group is supposedly stealing the election for Obama. This is nothing but crap. ACORN itself is identifying names that are registered and appear spurious. They have flagged about 1% of their new registrations, approximately 13 thousand of 1.3 million names. Nevertheless laws require that all the names be submitted to state registrars. Micky Mouse has been registered. While this is stupid, it will not result in voter fraud because Micky Mouse will not show up at the polls with identification and vote. It is clear that ACORN employees have found a way to get paid more by making false registrations, but making up names for a list does not constitute voter fraud. These made up names will not vote. It is just annoying.

The real travesty is that voter registration is so difficult to do that only 71% of qualified white Americans are registered, only 61% of black Americans, 50 and 40 % of Hispanic and Asian Americans. Now that is a story about voter suppression and election fraud. We need purple finger dye and no registrations so the people can vote.

Fox is busy pushing this story because it is now clear to them that Obama is going to win this election in a landslide. Their story will be that the greatest election fraud in American history has stolen the presidency. That is actually true. It happened in 2000.

2008-10-14T07:40:00.001-04:00

Christopher Buckley, son of the late bastion of conservative thought, William F. Buckley, came out in the last week to say that he would be voting for Barack Obama for president. He said it will be his first vote ever for a democrat. Christopher Buckley is a novelist and was a speechwriter for George H.W. Bush.

2008-10-08T11:20:00.002-04:00

Palin's unAmerican activities--deep ties to the Alaskan Independence Party, who favor violent overthrow of US government to make Alaska an independent country. They see Palin as a kindred spirit. Husband Todd was an active member of this party for 7 years. In the past, the AIP has sought help from the government of Iran.

Read it in Salon.

2008-10-04T09:34:00.000-04:00

Sarah Palin is an empty suit. It was difficult to understand where she was going in her meandering answers to Gwen Ifill’s questions the other night, but at the time I thought I was having some attention deficit problems and I just wasn’t getting it. I was getting plenty of “Joe Sixpack, God bless her, Say it ain’t so, Joe, now doggone it, darn it,” and “aw hec,” with lots of winking at me. (Then I thought, she’s not winking at a person, she’s winking into a camera. Who does that?) As I have begun to read over the transcripts of what she said, I have discovered that there was nothing wrong with me. Her sentences didn’t make any sense.

This is an actual quote: “Say it ain’t so, Joe! There you go pointing backwards again ... Now, doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and God bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?”

The italics are mine. Reread the italics carefully. What does this sentence mean? And don’t you find the condescending comment about teachers offensive. It is like saying, “Well we aren’t going to pay you a decent wage, bless your heart, but surely God will take care of ya.” This is a load of crap.

If we had grabbed a bright kid from any local high school, spent 3 weeks coaching them, written all her answers on index cards, told her to disregard the questions that she didn’t have an answer for and just to give one of her programmed answers that she had on a card when they hit her with a puzzler, couldn’t an 18 year old girl have done better than Palin did? Anne Buckle would have been better by far. Craig Kleimeyer would have been better.

I’ve taken a few tests. Sometimes you sit down and open that college final exam and whew, the essay questions aren’t quite what you studied for. You have 4 or 5 great answers in your head, but the professor only asked 2 of those questions. The third question is from outer space. Ugh. You have to decide. Leave it blank? Write the two sentences you know about this question and try to fill in with a load of crap? Or Sarah Palin’s choice, just write down the answer to a different question, one that you knew the answer to.

When your knowledge base is grossly insufficient, you can’t discuss a subject coherently. This resulted in the deer in the headlights answers Governor Palin gave Katie Couric, “Well let’s see Katie, since I’ve never heard of any Supreme Court cases, I’ll just say there’s probably lot’s of them I don’t agree with . . . maybe.

You know Palin may be a nice person, even though she goes to a holy roller church and has taken blessings from witch chasers. Forgive her for her upbringing. She may be intelligent, even though it took her 6 years and 5 colleges to get a degree. There is no doubt she’s cute and folksy, has a bunch of kids with hippy names (aren’t you dying to find out what their middle names are?), and is a beauty queen. (Cue wolf whistle). But does any of that qualify her to run the United States of America. I’m pretty smart. I’m educated, keep up with current events, and have some time on my hands. But if Barack Obama came calling at my door and said “Billy Bob, I think you should be my Vice Presidential running mate,” I’d have smiled, gotten an autograph, and told him “Thank you, Barack, but no. This is way out of my area of expertise.” Sarah should have done the same when they came to her.

At some point John McCain sold his soul to the devil. He’s risking our world so he can be president. Please, God, don’t let them win.

See this link to Bob Herbert’s incisive commentary in the New York Times.

2008-09-25T07:41:00.002-04:00

We have been wondering what October Surprise the Repubs would bring to try and influence the presidential election. Okay, so they are a week early. Every few hours now the preznit comes on TV with a regal backdrop to read slowly and carefully through the script someone has written for him. He repeats the word "crisis" for effect. I have to admit, he makes me nervous. Should I go to the bank today and take out all my cash? Will Wachovia be open on Monday? Or will I have to figure out how to apply to the FDIC to get my money at some future date, maybe months from now. Will my credit rating be destroyed by then because we can't pay our bills? I don't know what to do. But I'll say this. If you have money that you can take out in cash today and you don't have any operating cash at home. Go get several thousand dollars in cash and take it home today. If the banks are fine on Monday, you can put it back. If the Banks fail this week end, neither your checkbook nor your debit card are any good.

I heard yesterday that about 1/3 of the banks failed to create the great depression. There was no FDIC at the time and all investors just lost all their money. Hopefully the FDIC will work.

So with the boy who cried "Wolf" still running the show (Weapons of mass destruction! I'm a war president! Stockpiles of chemical weapons! Nucular weapons! The war will pay for itself! Al Quaida in Iraq!) there is zero confidence that the ship is actually about to run on the rocks. He has no standing to say anything and even the 28% approval rating crowd is abandoning him in his final days. While I'll continue to call them the 28%ers because ALL my relatives seem to be in that crowd wholeheartedly and it seems like they alone are 28%, the preznit's actual approval rating was at 19% yesterday.

McCane was down 12% in a new poll out today and he's suspending his campaign to rush to Washington (actually he hasn't made it there since April, but maybe they'll hold the vote for him) and appear to be leading the Repubs somehow. He's cancelled the Vice Presidental debate because of the crisis.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! That is a funny one don't you think? You had to know that was coming. She's in a political science rehab program trying to teach her something about the way the government works, because she knows NOTHING ABOUT ANYTHING (5 colleges in 6 years to get a bachelor's degree. Who does that? Do you know someone else who went to 5 colleges to get their bachelor's? I don't. Why do you go to 5 colleges? Well it's because you flunked out of several, maybe 4. We'll wait on the release of her transcripts).

And did you see the conditions under which the Treasury secretary wants to accept 700 billion dollars!!!!!!!? First and foremost . . . (you guessed it) NO OVERSIGHT. So he's standing there saying. "Look, we absolutely wrecked the ship of state, the USS United States of America. She's on the shoals. But you give me 700 billion to spread among my campaign supporters (Believe me Haliburton subsidiaries will get their share) or else I condemn you and you leftist leaning citizens to the great depression on steroids."

You've done a heckofa job Georgie.

2008-09-17T07:17:00.002-04:00

Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, have all failed creating an unparalelled financial crisis in our history.

Who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that oversees banking deregulation?

John McCain

2008-09-16T15:33:00.002-04:00

Is the Bush administration capable of killing Osama bin Laden at any time but waiting until October, a couple of weeks prior to the election to blast him to bits? There are those who think that is the plan.

2008-09-16T15:21:00.003-04:00

I read the book "Escape" this weekend. The writer was the first woman to escape from the polygamist group, the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints which is now located in Texas. She managed to get away with her children while they were in Arizona a couple of years ago. This biography is a harrowing, unbelievable story of greed, power, mind control, sexual abuse, verbal and physical abuse. It starts out bad and then gets worse on every page. If everyone had read the book, the government would be intervening. It is shocking that children have been placed back in the homes of polygamists. They are not having a different but normal life. It is a cult in the worst sense. Their beliefs are shocking, all designed to keep women and children in slavery. Young men are routinely exiled when in their teens.

It is difficult to read because of the unrelenting abuse, but we all need to read it. I'm especially disturbed that some of the belief structure may come from the LDS that we see all around us. They should be leading the fight to end the FLDS unless of course, they support them.

2008-09-16T15:12:00.002-04:00

I read today that "Drill, baby, drill," is about as useful as saying "typewriters, baby, typewriters." It is the answer for the last century. What if we could increase our oil production by the maximum, 3%? What difference would that make? How do we balance the loss of jobs and income of a spill on the Gulf Coast to having one more well to pump crude. I had a neighbor talking to me Saturday about how the Exxon Valdez spill and how little impact that actually has over time. Guess what? He's a retired Exxon employee. Exxon has agreed to pay about 375 million in clean up costs. The actual costs are 33% higher than that. Not to mention the lost jobs. Let's ask the fishermen and the tour guides if it made a difference to them.

We are always gearing up to fight the last war.

I say "hydrogen, baby, hydrogen!"

2008-09-16T12:27:00.002-04:00

The lies being put forward by the McCain-Palin campaign are astonishing and go beyond anything that I have ever seen before in my lifetime. I thought Bush 44 was an amazing fabricator of fiction, but the entire McCain-Palin campaign now seems to be based on falsehoods.

See this website for lies. Don't fail to look at this link!

Palin claims that her state produces 20% of America's energy and is the number one producer of energy. Actually . . . no. Alaska produces 3.5% of the nation's energy, ranking 9th among the states, producing only 1/5th of the amount of Texas, 1/3 of Louisiana's contribution. Less than Pennsylvania or Kentucky. When confronted with the facts she revised to say that Alaska produced 20% of our oil and gas. Actually . . . no--Only 7.4% of the oil and gas, And these numbers are declining every year. This chart is stunning.

2008-09-13T07:11:00.004-04:00

The woman from nowhere. Read to the end.

http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=12066224

New York Times editorial

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/opinion/13sat1.html?_r=1&ei=5070&oref=slogin&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print

2008-09-13T07:11:00.002-04:00

Let's be clear. Sarah Palin is the queen of earmarks. She has never been against earmarks, rather as mayor of a small Alaskan town and as governor of Alaska, she has worked actively to successfully secure more Federal money for her constiuents than any other politician. She made $200,000,000.00 in requests this year for her 600,000 population state and that request is down $50,000,000.00 from last year.

Sarah Palin campaigned for governor by supporting the bridge to nowhere. She wore T-shirts to support it, made speeches. When it became a national embarrassment the U.S. Congress withdrew support for the project, but allowed Palin to keep $230,000,000.00 for that project or any other project she wanted. Since the bridge was going to cost an additional hundred million or so that the state would have to bring to the table, Palin withdrew her support, kept all the money and spent it elsewhere. She spent $10,000,000.00 plus on a road to the bridge after it was clear there would be no bridge. Go figure. I mean it was just ten million, right?

As an executive, she has fired numerous career employees, some because they would not take illegal orders from her. She has harrassed a former brother in law with all the power of the governor's office. She has an attorney on a
hundred thousand dollar retainer to defend her from criminal charges in this matter.

Sarah Palin has a checkered past at best, attending 5 or 6 colleges (no one seems to be sure how many) before graduating. She eloped as a pregnant young woman herself and her daughter is reliving that difficulty now thrust on a national stage by her unthinking parents.

Sarah has for most of her life been a member of the Assembly of God denomination. Pentacostal. Holy Rollers. Charismatics. They have very specific and unusual beliefs that most Christians, if they knew about them, would find ridiculous or even stupid. The hair style is part of her religion. Just as weird as the Mormon cult that was recently in the news. Videos of what passes for worship at her church are nothing less than shocking--members claiming to heal cancer victims in healing services.

What Sarah Palin does not lack is self confidence or an ability to smile while telling outrageous lies to TV cameras. At best she is a minitature Jesse Ventura style governor. At worst she a pitiful woman thrust forward in the falsehood that the Republican party represents women in some way, when it actually hates women. Palin herself is described as the anti-feminist.

Palin is an advocate of teaching creationism in schools, she is for abstinence only sex education (worked well for her family), and she raised taxes in Alaska by a large amount. She is a faux candidate.

When confronted by the lies about her campaign positions, she and John McCain have said they are not lying that they are telling the truth. Everyone can see they are lying.

Say the lie. Own it. Repeat it. Defend it. Be indignant when challenged. Condemn those who challenge you. Repeat the process as often as possible. Thank you Karl Rove.

Please America, don't fall for it again.

2008-09-08T06:23:00.001-04:00

Why didn't the repubs just put up Ann Coulter as VP?

2008-09-05T00:20:00.003-04:00

Vanity Fair gave this assesment of the outfits worn by Mrs. McCain and Mrs. Bush to open the Repub convention.

"So we asked our fashion department to price out their outfits.

Laura Bush
Oscar de la Renta suit: $2,500Stuart Weitzman heels: $325Pearl stud earrings: $600–$1,500Total: Between $3,425 and $4,325

Cindy McCain
Oscar de la Renta dress: $3,000Chanel J12 White Ceramic Watch: $4,500Three-carat diamond earrings: $280,000Four-strand pearl necklace: $11,000–$25,000Shoes, designer unknown: $600Total: Between $299,100 and $313,100 Wow!

Good middle class values represented there.

From the Washington Post: Only 36 of the 2,380 delegates seated on the convention floor are black, the lowest number since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies began tracking diversity at political conventions 40 years ago.

2008-09-04T15:37:00.001-04:00

I'll bet you $1000 that Sarah Palin couldn't take a blank map of the world and place 50 countries on it correctly.

2008-09-03T10:31:00.002-04:00

In his article in Military.com, Phillip Butler, a student at the U.S. Naval Academy with John McCain cites that McCain graduated 795th out of 800 in his class. He also questions whether he would have graduated at all had he not been the son and grandson of admirals.

Read his article here.

2008-09-03T09:03:00.003-04:00

Sarah Palin has had 20 months of executive experience as governor of Alaska. She is commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard! Woo Hoo! She has more military experience than even George Bush.

Unfortunately Alaska has only about 1/5th of one percent of the people in the United States of America--.22 percent. The mayors of Austin, TX, Jacksonville, FL, and San Jose, CA are bigger executives.

Under Sarah Palin, Alaska has received more dollars per person than any other state in federal ear marks. Alaska has no state income tax, but 11.2 Billion in income, largely from the oil industry.

Oh and by the way. The wikipedia bio was scrubbed clean by someone the day before she was announced as the vice-presidential candidate. Lots of cool comments were added, like her nickname, Sarah Barracuda, for her intense play in basketball.

Let's see if I were a presidential candidate, I'd look for someone with a four month old infant and an pregnant unwed teenager to look after. I wonder who I'll pick for attorney general or head of the CIA.

2008-09-02T13:25:00.000-04:00

Sarah Palin on the war in Iraq--

"I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq."

2008-09-02T11:28:00.003-04:00

A while back I completely stopped reading the magazine I get from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. You'd think that as a graduate I'd want to see what was going on. But I don't wish to follow them anymore. It was the article by the president of the institution, Albert Mohler, that advocated no use of birth control methods as being what God intended. He said that every act of sexual intercourse should carry with it the risk of pregnancy. Albert wants his women subservient and pregnant. I guess he's envious of all those big Mormon families and their subsequent increases in baptisms as the Southern Baptist Convention has slipped into decline. Mohler is another member of the "Flat Earth Caucus," (okay so I stole that from John Kerry) denying science in the same ways that Christians fought against evolution in the 1890's. She denies global warming and species extinctions as well.

There are lot of these flat earthers. Sarah Palin certainly is a poster girl for them. An anti-feminist, she bore her 5th child, a Down syndrome boy, at age 44, and now we are subjected to watching her 17 year old daughter, 5 months pregnant herself, holding the baby so Mom can speak to the media. You have to realize that Bristol is going to raise both babies so Mom can go be powerful. Palin is, of course, against teaching birth control methods to children. She'd rather her own unmarried teenaged daughter were pregnant than that she understood birth control. Why if she knew anything about birth control, she might be promiscuous. Wait . . .

So the poster we will look at for this Vice-Presidential candidate is the woman standing in front of her five kids, one of them pregnant holding the baby, Dad standing behind in his waders, and gun racks and American flags filling the background. Palin has only been a Republican for 12 years. Before that she belonged to the Alaska Independence Party, that advocates that the vote to make Alaska the 50th state was illegal. The party calls for the seccession of Alaska from the United States. Palin gave the opening speech for the party convention in 2008. Yes, 2008. She attended four colleges before graduating from the Unversity of Idaho with a B.S. in Journalism. I wonder what her rank in class was. Why did she leave those first three colleges? (There is a question about whether she atted four or five colleges--isn't that unbelieveable?)

Sarah Palin had never been out of the country until she became governor, when she traveled to Kuwait and Germany to visit Alaskan soldiers. Have all the governors been to the middle east to visit their soldiers? She was a beauty pageant winner and then Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, a town about 1/4th the size of my town, Peachtree City, Georgia. So logically, any former mayor of PTC is 4 times as qualified as Palin to be Vice-President. If you read over her biography on Wikipedia, you'll quickly get the picture of a ruthless, dictatorial, leadership style, that destroys her opponents, and fires underlings for political reasons. Thus she fits right in with what has been going on in Washington for 8 years. She has lobbied against putting polar bears on the endangered species list because it might hurt oil and gas industries to do so. Alaska is so awash with money from the oil and gas industry that they have given $1200 to each taxpayer from taxes paid by this industry.

As mayor of Wasilla she lobbied for and got Federal emarks totalling 27 million dollars for the 9000 population town. That is $3,000 for every man, woman, and child in town, coming from the federal government. Sweet.

Radical right winger does not begin to describe this woman. Vicious, gun-toting, Cro-Magnon bible thumper, might be close. Fear her. She is no sweetie pie.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin

2008-08-29T10:59:00.002-04:00

McCain picks a pro-choice, NRA member, drill, drill, drill, 44 year old, mother of five, including a down syndrome child, former beauty queen . . . as his running mate? Before being governor of Alaska for almost 2 years, she was mayor of one of America's smallest towns. Her husband works in the oil industry on the north slope. This is the best pick for a job where the primary responsibility is that you are a heartbeat away from the presidency. And McCain would be our oldest president elected to a first term (nearly four years older than Reagan). He has reoccuring melanoma skin cancer, bad colesterol numbers. Not really the picture of health. Can you see this vice president assuming duties of the presidency and conducting the war in Iraq, staring down Vladimir Putin, making decisions about America's economy, health care, and education? There is no one more qualified? Did all the decent people see it as a lost cause and turn him down. No Romney? No Huckabee?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The Democratic National Convention was like nothing else I have ever seen in the way of conventions. Night after night it was mesmerizing with brilliant speeches and a clear unified purpose. Last night's production in the stadium was a masterpiece. It is impossible to put on a show like that. The film introducing Barack Obama was just amazing. Did you hear the opening music and make the association with the music in Cast Away, of Tom Hanks standing at the crossroads, looking one way and then another. Could you hear the unspoken question--America at the crossroads, which way do we go?

Wow.

And what a speech. Depend on John McCain's judgement? Well probably not. It's Obama time. Now let's turn over the senate too and get some work done.

I was concerned that McCain seemed to be so close in the polls to Obama. Obviously he wasn't that close because this is clearly a desperate move. All the eggs are in one basket and that's picking up disaffected Hillary voters.

2008-08-24T09:34:00.002-04:00

What follows is a comment posted in the Washingtonpost.com on the article "Analysis: Why the Home Debate Matters." It is interesting because Obama would actually help this person, providing tax relief, reducing the national debt, thus freeing up money for the mortagages and small businesses. This guy is another representative of the 28%ers--people who still support the Republican Party point of view and George Bush 44. The article has many comments with similar invective.

"The Democratic Party is extremely misguided - they are deceiving themselves into believing that they can make up for history by voting for Obama - what a joke.

The democrats want to nominate a black so badly - Jim Crow happened, slavery happened - voting for an underqualified cocaine snorting empty suit slimy fish Obama is not going to help race relations.

If ANYTHING, Obama's campaign tactics have HURT RACE RELATIONS IN THIS COUNTRY. Obama is not even a descendent of slaves. Obama is simply trading off the REAL SLAVE DESCENDENTS - Obama comes from a BLACK MUSLIM SOCIALIST FAMILY.

The Democratic Party is jumping and gushing at Obama who has no experience in running anything not even a dog catching department and no economic experience except for buying cocaine -

Can anyone please explain this CLEAR DELUSION?

The democrats have not noticed yet that Obama is a Black Muslim whose father was a Socialist and Obama is probably a great deal closer to being a Socialist himself than most people imagine."

2008-08-23T06:48:00.002-04:00

A time table is a time table. Since Mr. Bush declared that it would be surrender to announce a time table of withdrawal to our enemies, I guess he is finally surrendering. It means nothing of course, except that that pressure from Barack Obama is forcing the change in policy, just as it forced high level meetings with leaders of Iran. So Bush is now a surrender monkey.

Mr. Obama will shorten the time table. Mr. McCain will keep us there 100 years.

2008-08-22T23:10:00.002-04:00

Ms. Downey,

Thanks for your reply. Industry and Education are fundamentally different types of organizations. No business requires one employee to work with substandard raw material while the person at the next desk gets to work with excellent raw material. Education does. You can't resolve this problem when considering merit pay. Saying lawyers have merit evaluations or journalists have merit evaluations and educators will have to do it too is a cop out. If your raw material is bad you cannot produce a good product. What's more, of the dozens and dozens of parent-teacher conferences that I have attended, I've never seen a single case where a student was doing well in all their classes except one. Uniformly at those conferences every teacher addresses the same issues with the parent and the student. Pay attention in class, turn in your homework, use the study guides to prepare for tests, come for extra help before or after school if you are struggling with anything. But the same students, skip class or go to sleep, chat with friends constantly when awake, fail to turn in any work, never ask a question or come for help, and fail miserably. Blaming the teacher is not logical.

Teachers are already evaluated on the basis of their organizational skills, their adherance to the curriculum, their classroom management, their cooperation with colleagues and administrators. If they fail in any area, they don't keep them on board. My experience has led me to believe that giving administrators merit pay as an additional weapon will drive more of the good teachers into industry and out of education. It is just the last straw. I was an excellent teacher. I had remarkable credentials and success in the classroom. I would have received every possible merit pay increase. I am totally against merit pay.

When I was young I played racketball. I loved the game and really worked on my game. I played at the Norfolk YMCA and the players there took racketball and handball seriously. I remember playing with one of the more expert players and he told me, "Son, it takes five years to learn how the ball bounces." As odd as that sounds, I noticed that after five years, my judgement of where the ball was going came to be flawless. It really took five years to learn the basics of the game. Teachers are not currently averaging five years in the profession before they leave to do something else, anything else. They leave because they are assaulted by students, administrators, parents, and members of the press. I'm telling you the teachers are not the problem. Sure you can find a teacher who is worn out and hanging on for retirement and another who is incompetent and has been protected by someone so they still have a job, and you can point at them and say, "Ooooo, bad teacher." But generally, teachers are doing okay. Money is the problem.

I'm convinced that there is a national Republican Party strategy to reduce funding to public schools at the state level and break the back of public education. In the name of "school choice" these people want tax support for parochial, segregated, education, just like it was in the old days. It is not an accident that Governor Sonny keeps reducing the program budgets of schools and it is not related to the economy. It is a Republican Party strategy. Personally I don't think the schools need a little more money. I think they need twice as much money. Thirty thousand dollar starting salaries, that do not increase until the 4th year of teaching, drive sane people to do other things. I taught for ten years and each year I saw more regulations piled on teachers, more cover your ass paperwork, larger class sizes, less administrative support, less money for copy machines, paper, and supplies. Workbooks--forget about it. Lab equipment--not a dime. Software to support the curriculum--if you can raise the money privately. I've seen defeated schools. There a lot of good teachers working there, but they are overwhelmed. We need more money in those schools. They need 3 or 4 more security people, several more discipline administrators, more in school suspension teachers. They need twice as many teachers in those schools. The break down of discipline in the hallways and the classroom breaks the spirit of the teachers over time. The principals can't solve it either. Clayton County is a disaster area. South DeKalb is a tragedy. And there is no miracle cure like the we see in the movies.

But money absolutely solves the problem. Smaller class sizes, more supplies, up to date equipment and texts. Sonny Purdue and the Republican legislators want to make sure this doesn't happen because their consituents want public schools to fail. If you really want improvements, there have to be some forums to study the problems and demand solutions from our politicians. A good project for the AJC I think. I'll be there to add my voice. Let me know when to come.

I actually think we'd have better schools the moment we allowed collective bargaining by teachers. If you want to compare educators to businesses, why is it illegal for teachers to unionize and strike? Georgia teachers unions are a total joke. And why is the law written so that teachers have to pay social security but then can't receive social security? Another horrible consequence of being a teacher. Why did I sign a blank contract every year that I taught?-- A contract that guaranteed no salary, no grade level or subject. Indeed a contract that was meaningless if the county wanted to rif me, but was used as a bludgeon against me if I wanted to change jobs. Teachers are treated like crap in Georgia.

You may feel that I am messing with you here--that I'm getting in your kitchen on this stuff. But I've been thinking about it for a long time and I have ideas. You could lay off the teachers in your column. I think they are just an easy target and that if you went after Sonny Perdue and the Republican legislature your job would be in jeopardy. But hey, I'm going to evaluate YOU negatively until you do something besides jump up and down on teachers. They are getting beat up enough without you.

2008-08-22T23:08:00.001-04:00

Subject: Re: Report cards on teachers
From: mdowney@ajc.com
Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:19:37 -0400

Mr. G,

Many of your comments about the shortcomings of teacher evaluations and the shortcomings of the administrators who do them apply to other industries as well. (I could say virtual the same things about journalism. My friends make the same complaints about law and advertising.) Yet, somehow all these other industries conduct performance-based evaluations and measure employee merit and have been doing so for decades. And it has worked. As a longtime education writer, I can tell you that public schools in Georgia are facing a serious threat from vouchers. If public education does not change, I think we will see vouchers eventually - and I fear that will undermine any chance of reform or more financial aid to schools. I will also tell you that many superintendents complain to me about teacher quality. It is a concern of more than just journalists. By the way, I want more for my children, your children and everyone else's. I visit many schools and I can tell by walking through the halls and visiting a few classes whether the belief system is that the students - no matter how poor, no matter how many came to school without breakfast, no matter how many come from single-family homes — are capable of great things or if the belief system is that it's hopeless. The difference rests entirely with the principal and the staff. Between undergrad and graduate school, I taught high school. I know the challenges. But I also know that teachers have to be seen and treated as professionals, and that means meeting the same sorts of evaluations that other professionals meet.

Maureen Downey.

2008-08-22T23:07:00.002-04:00

Ms. Downey,

I read your comments on the editorial page and I find that I believe your opinions are not only wrongheaded but damaging to public education. You have repeatedly lobbied for merit-based pay for teachers and your latest essay entitled “Report cards on teachers needed,” reinforces your position as one who wants to evaluate teachers because teachers are “the problem” with public education. (I take a different view. I believe that teachers are doing an adequate job and “the problem” is that less and less money in real dollars is being allocated to student education. In fact, a doubling of the amount spent on education would be just about right. It’s money not teachers that should be your focus.) The truth is teachers are already among the most evaluated of all employees anywhere. They spend four or five years being evaluated by professors in specialized programs to prepare them for teaching. The incapable, the disinterested, the unrealistic, are removed from the programs. Prospective teachers repeatedly take part in practicums and are evaluated. If their abilities are substandard, they are asked to repeat the experiences, or retake the class. Furthermore, having graduated with a degree in education is not enough, then there is standardized testing administered by the state in order for a hopeful teacher to be certified as a professional. When teachers begin teaching, the only thing they lack is experience. In addition to all this evaluation, when new teachers are finally placed in the classroom, they are mentored, have 4 formal evaluations the first year, and usually have numerous drop-in evaluations by grade-level chairs, lead teachers, or administrators. You expressed in your recent article that you have seen teachers removed from the system. This is an example of the system working.

I think there are a number of logical fallacies in the positions that you have taken. A problem that you ignore in both the merit-based pay essays and in Report cards for teachers, is that because of differences in raw material, measuring one teachers ability against another is both unfair, and pointless. Teachers tend to get pigeon-holed in a certain grade level and a certain skill level, because basically, each level is a different experience. They don’t get random students every year. Rather, they get students at a certain level each year. Those learning disabled students go to the same teacher each year because he or she has the experience to work with them. The same teacher has the low scoring students year after year because they are willing to accept and teach those students. So a teacher with lots of patience and little ego will accept the principal, lead teacher, or counselors' office loading their classes with low achieving students. So of course comparing their student achievement scores with the scores from the teacher of the high achievers’ class will reveal that one teacher is more “successful” than the other. If you have been dissatisfied with some of your own children’s classes, it may be that the make up of the class is largely responsible for the lack of performance by the children. Some classes are less disciplined, less mature, more needy, or economically or emotionally disadvantaged. Not to mention that one year’s class may end up two or three weeks behind a seemingly identical class from the year before. No two groups are the same. I’ve had classes that allowed me to teach as fast as I possibly could. They could keep up and follow no matter what. I’ve had classes that totally stopped me from teaching. Some students didn’t want to learn and they didn’t want me to teach anyone else either—they were little anti-education revolutionaries. I was the same teacher in both classes.

A second fallacy in your ideas about evaluating teachers is that you think teachers can be adequately evaluated by administrative staff. I’m sure that in your mind, that is the administrator’s job. You may imagine administrators as super teachers, understanding the techniques and ready to aid in instruction no matter the subject. Alas, they are not. They are not even close. Great teachers never become administrators. Good teachers rarely become administrators. What can administrators evaluate? Administrators are able to measure classroom control. They can measure teacher organization. They can see if students are engaged in a learning process. They can look at the records and see who comes in early, who stays late, and who volunteers for extra duty. Above all, administrators want calm waters. They want control and no surprises. They don’t want parent complaints, they don’t want inter-departmental jealousy, they don’t want new ideas and innovations, they don’t want challenges to their ideas, even when, or especially when their ideas are wrong. Point out to your administrator that they are doing something illegal and you’ll likely get fired or at least transferred to another school. Your evaluations will suddenly be inadequate.

What’s more one good teacher and another good teacher, while achieving similar end results, may go about the practice of instruction completely differently. When I first realized this I was astonished. Here was a teacher who did nothing that I did. His process was completely different. At first I thought he was just wrong in what he was doing. The end result however, was almost exactly what I would have hoped for. He had learned to do it in a different manner and he was terrific at it. It is difficult then, even for one professional in the field to evaluate another.

I understand your point of view I think. I’ve been a parent of two children. And I understand something of teaching. I was considered a “successful” teacher for 10 years. My experiences lead me to classify you as one of those parents who “wants more.” No matter what your school provides, you want more. You want more freedom to choose your child’s pathway. You want more subjects taught. You want the best teacher. You want the best classroom. You want your student to be in class with his or her friends. You want a biography of all the teachers so you can choose which teacher you child gets. How could we ever hire a new teacher? No one would choose to be in their class.

If there were a way to have all teachers work with the same raw material, then and only then could you compare them. But there is no way to do that. Merit-based pay is a bad idea precisely because of the lack of any reliable instrument of measurement. Merit-based pay also hands the principal even more power than they currently have. Principals are dictators in their little kingdoms. Some are benevolent. Some are evil.

There are circumstances under which I would think that some part of pay raises should be based on merit. But I’ll go ahead and tell you, these are not practical ideas. Expert teachers, master teachers, could be hired out of retirement as consultants to evaluate in the same subject and grade area that they themselves taught in. They could do extensive evaluations, living in teacher classrooms for days at a time, maybe sitting for several days without making a comment or a note. Real experts would be able to rank teachers in a school in a certain area. This ultimately is impossible because guess who would choose the expert evaluators? Right. Administrators. They’d pick their friends and they’d pick bean counters. “Messy desk, tsk, tsk. How can you be doing your best?” What’s more the real expert teachers would see the futility of the process and refuse to participate.

My public school would strive for adequate teachers at all levels. Great teaching can emerge under certain circumstances: when discipline can be maintained, when supplies are adequate, when building and grounds are adequate, when parental support is present. But great teaching is a bonus. By definition the great ones are few and far between. What we strive for is a school of professional teachers, doing their job, and getting paid like professionals.

If you were able to get to the end of my essay, I challenge you to immerse yourself in discussions with friends of education—teachers, parents, administrators, community members—to discuss the needs of education. Have you done that? Has their been a forum on education sponsored by the AJC, an ongoing series of discussions around town discussing things like class size, funding, red tape, curriculum, discipline, merit pay, etc., etc. If there has been such a thing I have missed it. And I would gladly participate and add my comments and questions. I long for Maureen Downey to express something different and really meaningful about education. I challenge you to hear from more circles of thought before proclaiming yourself in the newspaper. In my opinion, you keep asking for things that someone on the inside would know are just not workable and not desirable. I expect more from the person who writes about education for the AJC. Do better.

2008-08-20T13:11:00.002-04:00

Wow! I missed the coded message. But millions did not. When John McCain called Barack Obama "The One" in a recent television advertisement, followed by footage of Charlton Heston as Moses, parting the waters of the Red Sea. He was not saying "Obama thinks he is a messiah figure." Rather, he was referring to the series of books Left Behind, which appeal to rightwing fundamentalist Christians who interpret the book of Revelations as a prophecy about how the world will come to an end and how Jesus will return to earth to reign. Now the book of Revelations has absolutely nothing to do with any of that. It is a coded book of history about things that were going on in the first century. The things have already happened and are over. But the fundamentalist wing of millinnialism has the future all mapped out and they use their "interpretations" of Revelation to make their plans. Sects of these guys are the people who every year or so gather on hillside waiting to be taken into heaven on someone's prophesy. They go home disappointed. The Left Behind books feature an evil character, the Anti-Christ, and guess what he is called--"the One." He is the leader of an evil world religion that promises to heal great divides.

So McCain called Obama "The One" and then played back speechs of Obama where he speaks of healing the nation.

The message. "I'm with you, fundamentalists. Obama is evil. He may be the embodiment of evil. He may be Satan himself." But I'll protect you.

Well I'll say this. If Obama is the anti-Christ, he'll win for sure. No worries.

2008-08-19T17:49:00.003-04:00

When asked to differentiate between the middle class and the rich, John McCain said this week that those making $5 million a year were rich, but any less than that were middle class. So if the wife and I are only bringing down $2 million a year each, we should be safe from tax burdens because we are middle class.

What could I possibly add to make the point that McCain is totally out of touch with America and Americans.

2008-08-19T14:08:00.003-04:00

Make war. Be tough. It is the American way.

John McCain, in an effort to portray himself as a military leader made the statement this week that "we are all Georgians." In the absence of any presidential leadership, McCain is assuming the mantel, hoping that by pretending to be a tough guy he can win more votes. He even sent envoys, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham to Georgia. McCain slandered Obama by saying that Obama was willing to lose a war to get votes. Well McCain is willing to start a war to get votes.

Senators do not send envoys nor negotiate peace accords. McCain will use equally poor judgement as a president.

He also claims to be a Teddy Roosevelt Republican. But he better look at Roosevelt again. Roosevelt was one of America's first and best conservationists and returned campaign contributions from oil companies. McCain's "drill here, drill now," comments were clearly an appeal to oil companies and they promptly responded with millions of dollars of campaign contributions.

Why give away more public land to oil companies that already own 68,000,000 acres of oil leases on land that they are not drilling on. Don't be mistaken, they think there is oil on that land or they wouldn't have leased it. They just aren't drilling. Why. To keep oil prices high. Sixty-eight million is an unfathomable number. They are allowed to drill in 95% of the artic, so of course, they want access to the other 5%. Sad.

I'll add my voice to the calls for a Manhattan project for alternative fuels, especially hydrogen which seems to already be working but only lacks a delivery system, i.e. hydrogen stations. We could use the money that we have been giving in subsidies to the oil companies, or tax the record profits they have made on the hardships of Americans.

2008-08-16T10:16:00.003-04:00

I have very strong recollections of buying "back to school" clothes one year when I was a boy. We were shopping in an old Belk Gallant store in Decatur. I think I was about 7 or 8. Mama and Daddy were there with me and I had tried on clothes. I'm pretty sure I was growing a bit and had grown out of most of my clothes, but I can't remember that part. We had bought jeans and shirts, t shirts and underwear. I was thrilled with the clothes. I wore a lot of hand me downs from my cousins, but this was all new stuff. I remember it being piled on the counter and the clerk beginning to ring it up on the cash register. I'm really clear on the next part and I think this is why I remember this image so strongly. The total came up to $26 and change, and I was horror struck. I knew that we didn't have that kind of money and I immediately grabbed some of the pairs of jeans to go put them back in the stacks. What was I thinking? Thinking that I could buy all those clothes? But my mother stopped me and told me it was all right. And my dad took out money from his wallet and paid that enormous bill. I was shaken by the cost.

2008-08-16T09:56:00.002-04:00

Who would think that I would feel disconnected from evangelical Christians? My parents didn't select their churches based on whether they were rightwing fundamentalists or not, because we were members of a right wing church and then a moderate church. It was based on the worship style and the youth programs for my sister and I. The evangelical right wing base which was highly influential on my life as a child and teenager is today a stranger to me. I can't figure out their issues. I can't figure out why they think it is okay to lie and cheat to try to hold on to their position. Why is it important to them that Darwin's theory of evolution be false? Why would they take their child out of school where evolution is taught? Darwin didn't even believe in his theory. He said that if it were true then the geological strata would be filled with missing links and they are not. It is a theory and all. The natural selection part of it seems clear enough. Everyone can see that. The species jumping part is more problematic. Maybe such a thing happens. Maybe it doesn't. Who cares?

How did abortion get to be such a big issue? It wasn't an issue at all when it was a crime. Yes we did have piles of kids in orphanages, dropped off unwanted. Yes we had girls who died by the thousands from back alley abortions--girls who couldn't risk going forward with a baby. So they died taking a chance on living. And lots of married ladies died during pregnancy because of complications that today are solved by abortion. Too bad for all those women and unwanted orphans. But they had no advocates. They didn't get in the newspaper. They inspired no protestors.

How did gun ownership become such an issue? Are we really concerned that if they government knows about our guns that they will come and take them from us? Do we need secret guns? Do we need machine guns? Do civilians need armor piercing bullets? Isn't it funny that the political party that advocates for guns has largely destroyed the check and balance system of government and moved us three giant steps toward fascism and away from democracy. I find that ironic anyway.

How can 25% of the country still think that invading Iraq was a good idea? The same people are glad the preznit made a speech this week telling Russia not to invade Georgia. What are you Russians thinking? What would it mean to "win" the Iraq war? Couldn't we just say we won and come home? Why aren't we trying to catch Osamma Bin Laden?

There are actually people, evangelical Christians mostly, who believe George Bush 44 will go down as one of America's greatest presidents.

I think it's possible that I never knew these people, I just hung out with them for awhile as a kid.

2008-08-13T20:03:00.003-04:00

You know, I have a lot to say about the political process that is going on in our country right now. Both the death throes of the Bush administration as he continues to thrash about creating hardships for people and the attack ad policies of the Republican party. If you want to know what McCain stands for, well, he stands for making fun of Obama. He's elite, he's an empty-headed celebrity, a Paris Hilton clone, he's arrogant and thinks he's the Messiah, he's not ready to lead.

Obama ads on the other hand talk about what Obama wants to do. There is nothing about McCain's changes in position, about his age and countless mental lapses as he struggles along the campaign trail. Nothing like "Well at Harvard, they have a mandatory retirement age of 70." Why do you think those colleges have those mandatory retirement ages for their scholars? Is there a reason? I'm 56, but I'm afraid there is a reason. Obama talks about his ideas. McCain talks about Obama. Does McCain have any ideas?

Apparently yesterday or today he made remarks about the Republic of Georgia to the media and it turns out he was quoting from Wikipedia. Seriously. A presidential candidate, a member of the United States Senate, hears about the crisis in Georgia, and he Googles it to formulate what to say.

It might be time for him to drop out and let them pick someone else.

There is no reason to talk about George Bush and his administration right now. But, the time is coming when the investigations will take place. Bush and Cheny are criminals. They are war criminals. They have aided and abetted theives. They have made a run at destroying our system of checks and balances. They have given away the treasury. The investigations will begin soon. The attorneys general firing scandal should put a number of people in jail.

I just can't bring myself to go into the travestry of this administration. The election is coming.

2008-08-10T18:36:00.001-04:00

My Plan for Iraq
By BARACK OBAMA
CHICAGO — The call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated, and that is needed for long-term success in Iraq and the security interests of the United States.
The differences on Iraq in this campaign are deep. Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Since then, more than 4,000 Americans have died and we have spent nearly $1 trillion. Our military is overstretched. Nearly every threat we face — from Afghanistan to Al Qaeda to Iran — has grown.
In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge, our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda — greatly weakening its effectiveness.
But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we’ve spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq’s leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.
The good news is that Iraq’s leaders want to take responsibility for their country by negotiating a timetable for the removal of American troops. Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, the American officer in charge of training Iraq’s security forces, estimates that the Iraqi Army and police will be ready to assume responsibility for security in 2009.
Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country. Instead of seizing the moment and encouraging Iraqis to step up, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition — despite their previous commitments to respect the will of Iraq’s sovereign government. They call any timetable for the removal of American troops “surrender,” even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government.
But this is not a strategy for success — it is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of the Iraqi people, the American people and the security interests of the United States. That is why, on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war.
As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal.
In carrying out this strategy, we would inevitably need to make tactical adjustments. As I have often said, I would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected. We would move them from secure areas first and volatile areas later. We would pursue a diplomatic offensive with every nation in the region on behalf of Iraq’s stability, and commit $2 billion to a new international effort to support Iraq’s refugees.
Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won’t have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq.
As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there. I would not hold our military, our resources and our foreign policy hostage to a misguided desire to maintain permanent bases in Iraq.
In this campaign, there are honest differences over Iraq, and we should discuss them with the thoroughness they deserve. Unlike Senator McCain, I would make it absolutely clear that we seek no presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea, and would redeploy our troops out of Iraq and focus on the broader security challenges that we face. But for far too long, those responsible for the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy have ignored useful debate in favor of making false charges about flip-flops and surrender.
It’s not going to work this time. It’s time to end this war.

2008-07-31T13:26:00.002-04:00

Forget the surge. As is not getting reported enough, reductions in violence in Iraq are not because of the surge, but rather because the violence of ethnic cleansing has been so efficient that the country is now divided into camps of the same faith--Sunni or Shiia. The drop in violence happened two months prior to the suggestion of the surge. Once again the preznit's plans were too little, too late, rather like shutting the barn door after the horse is gone. Furthermore the decrease in violence emphasizes that there is access to remove American troops from this immoral war for oil. And the preznit's lies to justify the war are still just that, lies, so there is no justification for the war, the illegal treatment of captives, and the seizure of power by the Whitehouse.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/93081/forget_the_surge%2C_violence_is_down_in_iraq_because_ethnic_cleansing_was_brutally_effective/?page=entire

2008-07-29T10:39:00.002-04:00

Just in case you wondered who the attack dogs for John McCain are: Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has for years been a reasonable voice against the shrill pantheon of Repub Sirens, has taken up the gauntlet and is now a leader in the harsh rhetoric against Barack Obama. Reason is no longer his foundation. His job is to attack and say the talking points loudly and angrily. Likewise in the media, David Brooks at the New York Times has clearly identified Obama as the enemy of America and castigates him now in ever column. This is a departure for Brooks, who has been conservative always, but has not been on the attack until the last month or so. These two are using their past lives to attrack media attention, but their message of harshness and name calling is new and reflects their allegience to the McCain campaign.

Brooks once again reinforces the Repub talking point (attempting to make History in a Repub image) that Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union in the cold war and was responsible for the disapation of the Iron Curtain. Nothing could be more bogus. The Iron Curtain crumbled from within because of generations of corruption. The Soviet Union crumbled from the sheer weight of its ridiculous task, holding its people hostage. But any one who thinks that Ronnie Reagan deploying a few missles defeated them hasn't read his history books. The Soviets lost 21 million people in WWII. Seven million died in the Siege of Stalingrad. The mighty German army met its humiliation in Russia.

They took down the wall because they changed from within. Reagan just happened to be standing there when they changed. What logic is it that congratulates, yea deifies Reagen for "winning" (one of their favorite words) the cold war, yet place no blame on Bush for 911. They have no problem blaming President Carter for the Iranian hostage crisis and the gasoline crisis of the seventies. But Bush bears no responsibility for today's problems.

Sheesh.

2008-07-25T06:50:00.002-04:00

John McCain's chief economic advisor for the last FIFTEEN YEARS, Phil Gramm, got canned this week for calling today's economic difficulties a "mental recession" and calling America a "nation of whiners." He promtly wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal and said, that the former chief executive of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, was “probably the most exploited worker in American history” since he received only a $158 million pay package rather than the “billions” he deserved for his success in growing Southwestern Bell.

One of the most exploited workers in American history. . . and this man would be Treasury Secretary under John McCain.

2008-07-24T11:21:00.002-04:00

My dad is a complicated man. I know less about him than I would like, but his secretiveness is part of the enigma. He opens his life in carefully measured bits and pieces, often telling you that he'll never tell you about this or that. He is gentle with animals and children, though he was not gentle with me. He misses my mother greatly these past four years. I don't know how he goes on day to day after the end of their fifty-six year marriage which ended with her death Oct. 27 of 2003. He has little shrines to her around the house and keeps the living room as she had it with her best furniture and the piano.

Dad has lasted a long time. He'll be eighty-five on September 30. He lives alone like a hermit on a woefully unkempt, sixteen-acre tract in Waycross. But he drives, half blind as he is (he had a mini-stroke on the retina of one eye years ago and can't make out anything with it). He makes his own meals. He takes care of a dog and a cat, both of whom wandered into his care. He makes his own agenda. He punches out emails and watches the weather channel on dial-up because he doesn't want the expense of DSL. He also doesn't want anyone coming to his house either, another reason not to have DSL--they have to install it. We harassed him until he bought a new fast computer--a year ago, and it still sits unconnected in his living room. He refuses to use it or it's flat screen monitor and don't ask to help him. Lord knows that he doesn't need help with anything.

We'll have a party for him soon to celebrate the milestone of his age, but he shows no signs of not continuing on his merry way until he's at least 100.

2008-07-19T03:03:00.005-04:00

Going to see the Mikado tonight. Remember that the first production of Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan is the subject of the movie Topsy Turvey. For many reasons, TT is one of my favorite movies, but primarily because of how it deals with so many aspects of production. As a producer myself, I am well acquainted with the jealousies, inequities, the skills, the personalities involved with putting on a musical performance. I'll be thinking of those things as we watch--lines, pitch and rhythm, costumes, manner of inflection, egos, conducting, back ups to the primary singers, opening the house, costumes for the ticket takers, ushers, choreography, props, seamstresses, wigmakers, make-up artists, movement backstage, stagehands, sets, painters, the audience and their response, the feelings of the composer and librettist (not in this case for they are long away from us), the people related to the players and how they feel about the performances.

Before we hear Mikado there are many photos to take at the Southern Living Idea House this morning, and along the Blue Ridge Parkway this afternoon. Accomodations were impossible in Brevard, but we finally managed something not very grand.

Today we bought a treasure as we often do on our travels. All 'round our house are examples of our trips, watercolors from Kill Devil Hills, chalk drawings from NYC and SF, photos, a quilt, and furniture from the Amish country, pottery from New Orleans, now a platter from Highlands, phabulous photos of Yosemite. Here is a photo from Tallulah Gorge. You gotta love the Nikon D-200 which grabbed this shot without a flash in a woefully underlighted setting. Getting some other wonderful pictures too.

2008-07-14T11:14:00.003-04:00

Watergate was small potatoes compared with the criminal activities of the Bush administration. I know it is a challenge to read a long article from the New York Times, but you owe it to yourself to review this material.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/opinion/13rich.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print

It appears to me that George Bush and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others are probably guilty of war crimes. The question becomes, will the Democrats have the guts to go after them when if they get in power after the election. Certainly the FBI and Justice Departments will come back to doing the business they are supposed to do instead of being a wing of the tsarist Repubs.

You won't be sorry if you read the entire article. The government has put so much focus on Iraq that Al Qaida is once again in position to strike at America. Why trillions in Iraq and in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Al Qaida lives and breathes, we aren't going after the bad guys. Ugh.

2008-07-08T09:24:00.002-04:00

"Elite." You are going to hear that a lot during the next few months. The democratic party is led by New England elitists (leftist, communists, socialists). "Harvard" is a big scarey word. We went to Harvard while in Boston a few years ago. It was like college, but bigger. Huge buildings. Beautiful campus. I tried to walk into the Library, but alas, no ID, no admittance, not even to walk around. Lots of tourists I guess. I'm depressed that people who have college degrees (journalists, republican politicians) would use education as a wedge issue. They always talk about getting vouchers for the children to go to private, religious, creationist, no sex education, all-white, all the same economic class, schools, so they can get the "proper" education at a government subsidized cost, but even assuming that that is a good thing (gag, wretch), apparently they would also warn you about that child going on to college where the liberal professors might turn their little pliable minds into socialists and make them "elitists." Apparently if you struggle and grow up in a single parent household, earn your way to college and get into Harvard, you are not living the American dream, rather YOU ARE AN EVIL ELITIST.

Ask every mom and dad in America if they would like it if their kid grew up and went to Harvard. See how many would cower back and say "Ooooo. Noooo! Not that." They'd all say, "Wow! My little Johnnie. My little Susie."

In the future, when you read the word "elitist" in the paper, just substitute the word, college-educated.

2008-07-08T09:21:00.003-04:00

We had a cool July 4th with parties on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th. We had a group of seniors and college freshmen over on the 3rd for burgers, went to the golf cart parade the next morning and over to the park for fabulous fireworks right over our heads that night (with Amanda and her children), and down to Barnesville to the mountain for dinner and more explosions on the 5th.

2008-07-03T10:36:00.002-04:00

"Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn't commit."

Muhammad Nazirul

Taken from a caption on the national geographic "your shot" web page

2008-07-02T22:44:00.001-04:00

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808

If waterboarding is not torture . . . nothing is torture.

http://www.alternet.org/election08/89686/?ses=e918a4e8abdaec17ee7764e3fc376f33

The top ten worst moments of the Bush presidency.

2008-07-02T09:17:00.002-04:00

From today's New York Times

China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

2008-06-30T06:50:00.002-04:00

If you tell the truth . . . you are liberal. (You may be elitest, islamic-commu-terrorists too.) I used to have a friend who said he was a Baptomethapalianpresbygationist.

Liberal media . . . those are the guys and girls who just report what is going on. The conservative side has "defined" what liberal means. They say that the truth is news that flatters the Republican Party, the preznit, and his buddies. Anything that doesn't flatter them, or that reveals the secrets of this administration, which are legion, well that is "liberal" media. Liberal media is proclaimed to be evil, terror-sympathizing, weak and cowardly, educated elitist. Hmmm. So telling the truth gets a lot of adjectives thrown at you. Takes me back to elementary school when the bullies ruled the playground. It feels the same now. Dick Cheney is that older kid who has been kept back twice and spent 6 months in reform school. He'll sucker punch you in the stomach if he thinks you looked at him funny. And he's paranoid so watch out.

I was just reading an article in the Washington Post about people in a mid-American city who just can't vote for Obama because . . . he was born in Africa, he's a gay muslim, he won't wear a flag pin, nor say the pledge of allegience. No matter that those "rumors" are bunk. The 28%ers are sending it round and round the internet, "and with all those good patriotic Americans forwarding the information, it must be true." Of course the Liberal media says Obama is a self-made American, with war hero grandparents, who went to Harvard, loves America and the flag and is a committed Christian. That PROOVES that Obama is false. The Liberal media lies about everything. Or . . . not. Reread the first sentence of the blog.

So what is truth these days. Don't the Supremes decide the truth? (The Supreme Court). Then why is it that almost every decision is 5 to 4. The conservative 4 always vote against the liberal 4, on every issue, no matter what. Justice Kennedy always makes the difference. He's the decider (Don't tell George Bush). I wonder why they all don't have more independent judgement. Why the make up of every decision doesn't come out with different combinations of judges on every vote. But every vote seems the same. How can that be? The only way that can happen is that the decisions are made before the cases are tried. Sheesh! The Supremes are a kangaroo court. If only they were as funny as the Braves Kangaroo court.

2008-06-27T11:19:00.002-04:00

A question for Kent or Sarah. When I jump into the air, at the point where I am at the top of the arc, neither rising nor yet falling, am I experiencing zero G? Am I floating?

To see jumpers as I am describing, view this website:

http://www.jumpbecause.com/

2008-06-27T10:59:00.003-04:00

One of my favorite blogs to read is http://www.mildlymelancholy.blogspot.com/, written by Susie Julie, a 28 year old middleschool teacher in Manhattan. I've been following her since her first year teaching. She is interesting. It's a bit like following Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables. At somepoint I became aware of her photo journalism as well and I like to look at her photoblog too. I think that I need to start a photo blog. It seems very cool and is both a form of information and artistic expression. Some bright technological wizard should help me do that. Julie's photo blog is located here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/susiejulie/ .

She's trying to decide whether or not to return to teaching next year. That is where they usually drop out. Right about 5 years.

I suppose that one day her blog will just disappear from the net. What a sad day that will be.

2008-06-22T09:41:00.002-04:00

They're back. The U.S. oil companies that were kicked out of Iraq when Sadaam Hussein nationalized the oil production. The preznit is on the verge of giving no-bid contracts to the same companies to "service" the oil production in Iraq. In case you were wondering why all the people needed to die. Oh and we'll need 58 permanent military bases in Iraq to protect our oil production.

The war is not about oil?

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/tucker/stories/2008/06/20/tucked_0622.html

2008-06-19T11:13:00.003-04:00

Been reading the new Scott McClellen book. It's a wonder that he hasn't been murdered--either by the administration or by a radical 28%er (now down to 24%) that thinks the shrub is a great prez.

There is nothing new in the book. He just confirms what we already knew was the truth. The preznit is a criminal.

2008-06-18T16:37:00.003-04:00

Has occurred to you that the Repub party has been wailing about opening up drilling all over the Atlantic coast and in Alaska for years, never worried about despoiling American beaches, tourism, animal and plant life, the economy of the beaches. And too bad about the wilderness of Alaska. Wilderness is overrated anyway don't you think?

And we have a preznit who cuddles up with the oil industry for 8 years, letting them set policy for America's energy. Mysteriously, the price of oil triples, crippling the American economy. The solution, let us drill those wells. Wells that will have no impact on gasoline prices for a decade at best, still with all the downside that I have already mentioned.

Even Newt Gingrich suggests that we "transistion" to Hydrogen cars. He suggests it will take many years. Meanwhile the Japanese are already rolling out Hydrogen powered cars. About 5 grand more than our current models, but hey, no polution, no dependence on foreign or domestic oil. Hydrocarbons no longer needed. Arabs go broke. Only problem in the U.S. is no hydrogen stations. Couldn't we take the subsidies we are giving to the oil industry and build hydrogen plants and stations with that money? Oh right. The preznit is in bed with the oil industry.

Time to roll these boys out of bed.

2008-06-18T16:22:00.003-04:00

It is great to be present when a voice student turns a corner. It happens like this. They are doing well, but working too hard. The muscles in the back of the tongue and jaw are tightening as they rise up higher in the voice and they choke themselves as they come to the upper passaggio. But when they make that transistion to the upper voice, the jaw relaxes, the back of the tongue and the larynx stay low and the voice floats up into a new resonance in the head. They are both delighted and startled by the change. Suddenly the voice is "on the breath." And it turns them instantly into a diva.

I've been working hard with Ashley for years. She has always done her part and made steady progress. She's in the summer of her 17th year. Today she turned the corner into the upper voice and became a diva. Suddenly a huge resonant, easy, beautiful, perfectly in tune sound. She could not do it every time at first, but she did it over and over again. Amazing how simple it is once you figure out what to do. It's like stepping over the threshold onto the stage. You just go through a door and there you are. There is still plenty to work on, but you are in the room with the big boys and girls. And you belong there.

2008-06-18T10:00:00.002-04:00

The "do nothing" democratic congress? Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma has placed holds on EIGHTY bills in the senate. The republicans can use various strategies to keep any of these bills from coming to a vote. These are controversial bills like: establishing a national registry for Lou Gehrig's disease, designating new national parks and scenic areas, to expand research for paralysis, and to provide grants for close captioning of broadcasts. If Coburn doesn't like it, he takes it upon himself to stop it rather than letting the congress vote. EIGHTY bills. Can Oklahomans be proud of this guy?

This speaks more and more of the need to have an overwhelmingly democratic senate in order to pass legislation that is good for the country. The GOP has decided that bipartisan means democrats agreeing with them. They don't believe in compromise to move forward on legislation, any legislation. Even when in the minority they have decided to be obstructionists. What horrible people.

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=news-000002898898&cpage=1