Da-daa Shuffle

Good Morning, World! Where I live, in north central Texas, we are having some of the most glorious, perfectly beautiful weather lately. The sun is shining, but it's not hot. There are light breezes, and the nights are not too cold. We started this year off getting a good amount of rain, but we are now 2.76 below normal. We seriously need some rain or we will shortly be in one of those droughts that we were in just last year, when we went for months without rain, and with record breaking heat. So when I take my walks, I feel almost guilty to enjoy the beautiful days, knowing exactly what this means to the long term narrative. We are in a period of climate change that will have drastic effects on the planet. Dangerous storms, record heat, some areas of increasing drought, and exponential increases in extinctions. I've talked about this before, and I still take a pretty controversial position (at least for a life-long, unabashed tree hugger) in that I don't believe we have the will to make the changes that would be necessary to prevent the change from becoming entrenched. Therefore, earth and humanity as we know it will be ending. Just as mammals were tiny, rat-like creatures during the rule of dinosaurs, and when the dinosaur became extinct, mammals began to evolve in size and intelligence and took over every corner of the globe. (Yes, that mixed metaphor was intentional.) As our intelligence increased, so did our arrogance, and our belief that the earth belonged to us to do with as we wish, no matter how obviously destructive our actions might be. Changes in climate do speed up evolutionary survival strategies, and what kind of humans survive to pass on their genes will be different. Life in the deserts will become impossible, and in a geologic blip, the humans of the future will be unidentifiable to the humans of the future without DNA testing. So, on that happy note, I will walk on such beautiful days. I do not expect to be here for those future humans, as we are talking thousands of years. That does not mean that I do not believe in doing the responsible thing. In the short term, I am just about to have my fourth grandchild. I do not want her to grow up with asthma, which is increasing in incidence and severity due to our unwillingness to curb certain pollutants. I do not want her to spend her life in a concrete jungle, though concrete seems to reproduce faster than any rabbit or krill, creating urban heat jungles everywhere. My stepson, the new baby's dad, and his family live in the farm belt, far away from me, and even that part of the country is growing concrete as more and more families leave farming behind, and their farms are mowed over to build new subdivisions. I don't want my two grandsons, both (about) one year old, having to go to war over water or energy rights. But wars will soon be waged clearly over life-saving resources such as water and arable land. So, whether or not it is too late to keep us from evolving into a more heat-tolerant, drought-tolerant species, with fewer prey animals to eat because animals don't survive as well as plants on a planet with carbon rather than oxygen in it's breathing gas mix, TODAY I don't want to live on a dirty, smoke filled, hot planet without wildlife. And I don't want that for them either. I've enjoyed parks and hikes and walks in places where green was set aside for human pleasure. I hope we don't let that completely die out before those grand babies, and their children get to play there too.

It was not my intention to start on such a heavy note. So, here is one of my light-hearted questions, just so any of my friends, readers or members will know I'm still here: I love my iPod. I love the music I've chosen to have on it. ALOT! I know the songs-when I walk I see drivers laughing at me because I am singing along with nearly every song. Sooooo, so I don't know every second what is coming next, I often pick a playlist and hit the shuffle button. In my mind, that should mean that the computer "cloud" picks songs at random and plays them, then shuffles and picks another song at random. How can "shuffle" mean that the player will repeat songs? That frustrates me all to pieces. Random and shuffle should not mean repeating songs!!!

Yesterday I wanted a nap. But I made the mistake of turning on the 2003 movie, "Love, Actually." This sweet, cheesy romance with an edge has become necessary fare for me to get into the Christmas spirit. Well, this one and "A Christmas Story," but that's another story. I've seen both movies many times, but yesterday, I was so very distracted by the character of Sarah, played by one of my all-time favorite actors, Laura Linney, being in the bed, half naked, with a breathtakingly gorgeous man, Karl, played by Rodrigo Santoro, and the phone started ringing, I don't care who it was. The ringer would be turned off. The schizophrenic brother for whom I could do nothing would be moved aside so that I could have one night of fantastic (in the most literal sense of the word,) passionate love with the man who was at that moment, a bird in hand. Every other love story in the movie makes sense on some level, but that one-no. No way. (Big, lecherous smile on my face!)

So, the lightheartedness is over. We should be over politics by now, and as Don Michael Corleone said in Godfather III, "I try to quit, but they keep DRAGGING me back in!" For those on the right, as I said on election day, I feel your pain. I've been there. But once George W. Bush won in 2004, though I almost always disagreed with his policies, he was my president. At least  until he wasn't. I criticized the policies I disagreed with, and I did give him kudos when I could find something to agree with. I did the kudo thing loudly when in the presence of my majority republican family so that they would know that on my side of the question, there could be agreement. I guarantee you that I am never shown the same respect, whether or not there is a republican president. And the disrespect opposing view points get from the right has been worse than ever since President Obama was reelected. But when I ask for specific disagreements, none are provided. Which, please note if you dislike Obama, only feeds the narrative that it is not his policies, but something else the right has decided to disfavor.

While on the subject of right versus left, much of the discussion during this election season has had to do with income inequality, and the attendant questions of class and race. But I found a term rather disturbing on the news this week; the "donor" class. So now the political power in this country is not divided by party, race or gender-it is whether or not one is a member of the "donor" class? What does that mean for all the people who gave President Obama an average of $200? Shouldn't they be included in the "donor" class?

One of the things people tried to use to campaign against President Obama is that the financial recovery in this country is moving so slowly. Every economist, talking head and politician have called this "recession" the worst since the Great Depression. Well, historically, the Great Depression lasted from the stock market crash of 1929 until WWII, 1939. Ten years. Ten. But we expect the economy (and business) to come back in FOUR years? My, my, we are an impatient people. This has been a growing problem for years, "I want what I want when I want it" doesn't work in the realm of economic downturns, and we need to team up and work together, or it will last more than ten years this time. Ten years. Remember that.

When I said in the above paragraph that we all need to team up and work together and find solution to move recession to economic solvency in this country, I need to include all the employers who have freaked out and punished their employees for Obama's reelection win by cutting hours and staff in order to avoid paying for their health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. So now, their employees qualify for food stamps, and government sponsored health care. Which means more people on the roles of taking money and health care from the government, against which those business owners rail, and it may mean that we need to increase taxes on the wealthy a tad more to cover those additional Medicaid recipients, which will hurt the business owners even more. Not only that, it means that the federal government, which the right keep insisting should be smaller, is subsidizing YOUR payroll. How dreadfully un-American! So it is clearly NOT Obama who is driving the country toward socialism, it is you. How dare you, Sir! How on earth is your behavior conservative in a small government, boot-straps way? Pay your workers a fair wage, let them have some benefits. They will have higher morale and productivity. They will have money to spend on your products, increasing your bottom line. They will be healthier, also increasing productivity. It's a win-win, for them, for you, for the economy...for the country. God Bless America!

Lastly, I have two comments to make on the abortion question, as this is one of the prime drivers, in my opinion, of President Obama's win, and his win may make this discussion less relevant. It has been nearly forty years since the Supreme Court of the United States decided for privacy in the "Roe vs Wade" 1973 decision. Why this is still controversial is beyond me. I do understand everyone who has a moral problem with having abortion. I also understand that in the United States we have freedom of religion, which means that you cannot push your religious beliefs on me. No one, but no one, is pro-abortion. But whether to have one is a question only for a woman and her doctor. But the two NEW points I want to make are these:
1. Some individuals I've known and had discussions with regarding abortion have asked, "What if my (or Beethoven's) mother had known we would have genetic health problems and decided to abort us? The world would have been denied Beethoven's music, for example. But this is a false comparison. The child of rape, or a child born to a mother or family that do not want or can't care for the child, will be very unlikely to grow up to accomplish stupendous things. They are more likely to be poor, possibly neglected due to being unwanted to begin with, and uneducated. Every child deserves to be loved and nurtured. This doesn't mean wealthy; many loving parents in this country are poor or working class, but unwanted children do not usually enjoy a healthy, positive upbringing. If the child is born of rape, how on earth can the mother look at that baby and not see the face of violence and misused power? What if the child was chosen over the health of the mother, and the mother died as a result of the pregnancy? I've read stories of widowed fathers who couldn't bear to look at the children whose existence cost him the life of his spouse, and left him to raise the child on his own. The life of the mother must be a factor when considering this question. Rape and incest must be considered if the majority of Americans (which they do not!) thought there should be limitations on access to abortion. But what was decided by the Supreme Court is that the choice not to carry a pregnancy to term is a matter of privacy.
2. I heard Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, and former presidential candidate, on "The Daily Show" this week talking about this issue. He claimed that "biologically, life begins at conception. Indisputably." And yes, he is sort of right, though I'm not sure it can be called "life." CELL DIVISION begins at conception. When sperm meets egg, cells begin to divide, and eventually, these ever-dividing cells begin to look more and more human. But that is not until a few months have passed. I have heard (though I can't document, since apparently there is no unbiased place to go for statistical information about the number of abortions performed in this country has dropped. I did some research to get exact numbers, but there is little un-slanted information available, and the best statistic I could find only covered 1996 to 2005. I don't like using such imprecise statistics here, because I continue to hope that I will have more readers and followers who will comment or call me on it when I am wrong. I have heard a theory that since the technology to discover the sex, hear the heartbeat, see the baby in utero has come so far, pregnant women feel that it is a human life growing there, and fewer choose abortion. I am okay with that. I am not pro-abortion, I am pro-choice. Especially since this is a country that claims to believe in freedom, and the constitution guarantees equal treatment under the law. No one would ever tell a man he can't have a vasectomy (except perhaps the Catholic church, which is another posting altogether.) But those little sperms do swim, and seem to be able to direct themselves to try and join an egg (do they think?) So essentially, all those white males who keep trying to deny a woman choice are trying to deny her the right to control her own destiny. Family planning has been proven over and over to allow women to pull themselves from poverty, increase their education levels, and have not proven to mean that women do not have children later, even after they have had an abortion. But to call the cell division that begins at conception "life" is not exactly a scientific position to take.


1. "Godfather part III," 1990, starring Al Pacino, quote from Al Pacino
2."Love, Actually," 2003, Made by Richard Curtis, ensemble cast
3. Michael Dale "Mike" Huckabee (born August 24, 1955) is an American politician who served as the 44th Governor of Arkansas(1996–2007).^[4][5] He was a candidate in the 2008 United States Republican presidential primaries, finishing second in delegate count and third in both popular vote and number of states won (behind both John McCain and Mitt Romney).^[6] He won the Iowa Republican caucuses.

It's a Conspiracy, And I Can Prove It!

Back to my questions format. It's been awhile, but there are so many things to question right now. What an eventful week-President Obama's health care bill was declared constitutional by a conservative chief justice. And I've waited til now to comment on this. I've actually tried to give myself a bit of a political news hiatus, but like any addict-it keeps DRAGGING ME BACK IN!!!*** I'm almost amused by the people who keep insisting that they don't want to see their hard earned money paying for people who are out of work or otherwise can't afford insurance. Some of these people who can't buy their own insurance may work for a small business that can't afford to provide insurance for all its workers. I ride the bus in the morning with a woman who works for a doctor's office; she gets no healthcare, no sick days, no vacation time-no benefits of any kind. This is quite a dilemma for very small businesses and their employees. If she or one of her children get sick, they would have no choice but to go to an emergency room, where they cannot be legally turned away. But the people who must use the emergency room as a primary care physician do not always get the best of care. They are sometimes given something for pain and told to go see a specialist. And the truth is, we are already paying for those people in higher medical care costs, and higher insurance and drug costs. I do compare it to government mandates to buy auto insurance. Someone challenged the validity of this position in a conversation on the day of the Supreme Court ruling by saying that driving is a choice, and therefore the auto insurance mandate does not apply to everyone. But someone who chooses not to drive can still be walking down the street and be hit by an uninsured motorist, and have to pay their own medical expenses. The thing I'm not sure that people think about is that everyone knows someone who has been hit by an uninsured motorist, has had to file on their own insurance, and then the victim of the uninsured motorist saw his/her premiums rise, or their policy get cancelled because of an accident that was not even their fault. We all pay higher premiums for drivers who do not buy auto insurance, but that same link between the cost we pay for healthcare and insurance, etc, is rather abstract and intangible. My question is, what was Chief Justice Roberts thinking when he wrote his opinion in a way that allowed it to be called a "tax?" Was he throwing the right a bone for their campaigns-a booby trap for Obama: "See, the democrats will raise your taxes!!!"

And by the way, why can't the Obama campaign make the distinction between Mitt Romney as a "job creator" and a "wealth creator?" There is nothing wrong with the latter-it plays within a system that we have created, it makes lots of money for himself, and his investors, but it frequently does not create jobs. In fact, it frequently eliminates jobs by downsizing or sending them overseas. That is what the president needs to capitalize on (excuse the pun.) We need a job creator to create jobs in America. Not Singapore.

Next question: Once again, the people telling women what to do with their uteruses, whether before, during or after conception are still middle aged white men. Consider the law about to be passed in Mississippi this weekend, unless it is stopped by a federal judge, that will make it impossible to get an abortion in that state by forcing the only remaining abortion clinic to close, has been touted all over the media by these same kind of white men. On May 10th, Time Magazine published an article entitled "Are You Mom Enough?" The guy whose work informed the article is Dr. Bill Sears, who advocates breastfeeding a baby until the age of two, sleeping with your children, and wearing them in slings around your body wherever you go. Some of this, I have no problem with. Entire clans traditionally slept together in one room-but do working mothers need anything else to feel guilty about?

When hominids first dropped out of trees and began to walk upright across the African savannas, did they worry much about how many ounces of water they drank a day? Or did they drink when they could find it, and be very grateful for every sip before being chased away by a predator looking to feast on their meat?

Speaking of eating, I am very concerned about the unnatural foods we put into our bodies. I am a firm believer that the closer your food is to where and how it originally looked is, the better it is for you. So imagine my shock when we recently had a breakfast at work for someone who was leaving, and the breakfast included biscuits and gravy from a large fast food chain. There was provided something to put on the biscuits called "honey sauce." I wondered what that could be, so I looked at the ingredients: honey, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, water, natural and artificial flavor.Are you kidding me??? Why not just honey? More proof of just how powerful the farm lobby is in this country, and the power of farm subsidies for corn farmers. I promise you, though I won't share the name of the business with you here, I will never eat anything from there again.

And again-I heard that some group that calls themselves something like "A Bunch of Mothers" is boycotting Oreo because they put out a rainbow filling in honor of gay pride month. To them I say, good. Your kids don't need to eat Oreos anyway-they are already overfed, under-active, and malnourished. Do they really need to eat chocolate cookies full of something called "edible oil" and sugar---or is it HFCS (high fructose corn syrup?)

I recently saw a commercial for a mechanic's technical school called Universal Technical Institute. I couldn't help thinking that I would never want to have a degree from a place whose initials are an abbreviation for "Urinary Tract Infection." Can you imagine the conversation? "I graduated from UTI." "Really? Graduated from what to what?" On that same note, not long ago I saw an ad in a magazine for tampons that come in a resealable package. I get it, I really do. But I shuddered at the thought of putting one away for future reuse. That will definitely get you a degree from UTI, won't it?

Lastly, a couple more political comments/questions. We've been hearing alot lately about the so called "Fast and Furious" program devised by the ATF to track the movements of guns sold in the US. Now the republicans in congress who wear aluminum foil on their heads to keep the aliens from exercising mind control have devised a conspiracy in which the Obama administration planned the whole botched program in order to prove that the ready availability of guns cause mayhem and murder in order to take away the Second Amendment right of American citizens to bear arms. Really? Sigh.....Really? On January 8, 2011 Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head, along with nineteen other people at a grocery store in Tuscon, AZ. She survived, but four others did not, including a child who was born on 9-11. There was some talk that after an event like that, perhaps the government should look into banning the 34 bullet clip that the gunman was able to buy (NO ONE EVER, EVEN AFTER THAT, MENTIONED ELIMINATING GUN RIGHTS, JUST CERTAIN TYPES OF AMMUNITION) in order to mow down that many people that quickly. No legislation was ever introduced-it was just the media talking. So now the Justice Department and the ATF are colluding to take away our guns based on the fact that 200 Mexicans have died from our weapons being bought in the US, transported to Mexico and used in their drug wars? Congressman Issa, I really thought you were smarter than that.

I can think of several times historically that the press has been used by the government or a corporation in order to further a program that they wish to pursue. The most recent was the use of Judith Miller of the New York Times to push the notion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The press was also used to discredit Jane Fonda, Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson. But now, in 2012, when we know what a terrible waste of time, treasure and human capital the war on drugs has been, when we have now had at least three presidents who admit to having used drugs in their youth, suddenly the press is telling tales of young men being made violent by pot!!! They are suggesting that Trayvon Martin, the seventeen year old who was shot by a neighborhood watchman, had pot in his system when he allegedly 'attacked' the man who shot him. When the Florida cannibal incident occurred they said at first it was the fake THC in the new drug called "bath salts," but this week they said it was not bath salts but marijuana in his system when he attacked a homeless man and chewed off the man's face, and was ultimately shot by police. Speaking as a child of the seventies (wink, wink) either they are buying pot that is dusted with something else, or this is one of those planted stories to justify the continuing drug war and the president's breaking of his promise to stop prosecuting people for possessing small amounts of pot, but in experience, and that of most people I know who have ever tried pot, it makes one mellow, not violent. Maybe hungry. Maybe a little horny. But not violent. So my last question for the day is: Is the press colluding with the government again on this one? Why?
***Al Pacino in the movie "Godfather Part III," 1990

I've Been Proven Right

My blog posts frequently try to use humor to make some points, and I often use lists of things that amuse, bemuse or befuddle me. There have been lots of those things since my lasts posts, but they all seem so shallow compared to the absolutely disgusting nature of the battle for the republican party nomination this year. I mean, what does it matter, in the big picture, that I was saddened to realize that I have a GPS that I never need? I go so few places that I seldom go anywhere that I don't know how to get to.

I was planning to ask why we in the United States need all those British chefs coming over here and cursing at us in order to make our restaurants successful? We are a nation of cookie cutter chain restaurants-we don't, as a rule, give a shit what food tastes like-we just want it to be cheap and plentiful. Are the "Brits Behaving Badly" in our restaurants simply getting us back for winning the revolution and overthrowing their monarchy here?

I was also taken aback when I noticed on the wrapper of a Hershey bar that I bought-it was made in Mexico! What about Hershey, Pennsylvania-the city of chocolate streets and chocolate sauna treatments? I couldn't finish the bar once I saw that. Is there no job in this country that is too sacred to outsource to another country?

But all that has come crashing down as I've watched the republicans desperately claw for a party nomination that will not matter to them one whit come November 6 or January 20 of 2013. President Obama gets mixed marks from me, but all-in-all, I think he's done a good job, especially considering what he's been up against.

What frightens me is that there are about ten or twelve million people who will vote for one of these three men, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum or Mitt Romney. I have never in my life seen such a rag-tag collection of liars and scoundrels-but they are exactly what the right has been asking for. Not in the sense of, "Please sir, I want some more," but in the sense of "Aright, you, you asked for it, now you're gonna get it!" In 2009 and 2010, I watched many stories about tea party gatherings across the country. My mother participated in some where she lives.They were mostly women, bad spellers, upper middle-aged, fat and white. I said "mostly," not all, so please don't say that I'm painting them all with a broad brush and saying that all tea party activists are one way or another. I'm a firm believer that an engaged, informed electorate is crucial to having a country governed by people who are worthy of their titles. But these folks were not informed; they watch only Fox News, which does not inform as much as it inflames. Fox is known for telling its viewers not to watch any other channels because "they won't tell you the truth like we do." Which is a crock-dictated by Fox's fear that their viewers will become informed and abandon them for their lack of truth or balance. No one channel tells the whole truth, and one MUST get one's news from more than one source, then sift through the blather to find the truth for ones self. This is why Fox viewers consistently demonstrate in studies that they are dramatically more uninformed about the real news of the world than viewers of any other news service.

All that aside, and what may appear to be an ADD rabbit chase, I have said for years, even when I was a practicing, though doubting Christian, that the bible (and pretty much all other holy books) were written by men in an effort to keep women in "our places." Ever since the republican victories in 2010, I have been proven right. Homosexuals are also among those whom religion has been meant to keep under control, and I've written about gay rights before; this is about a war on women. Since 2010, an election that was purportedly about the economy and what a bad job President Obama has done in restoring jobs to this country, all these newly empowered republicans have done is intensify its war on women and gays. Utterly dishonest attacks on Planned Parenthood, designed to offer low cost health services to low income women, has been under increasing attack,and is being portrayed in the media as a giant abortion machine, though abortion is only about 3% of Planned Parenthood's activities, and it gets very little funding from the federal government. Publicly funded media is also under attack and threat of defunding, though the truth, once again, is that NPR and other such organizations get very little money from the federal government. It is being attacked because it is "liberal." I know this because my mother says so-though I have personally invited her to watch any program or news show on PBS and point out anything they say that is "liberal." She refuses-back to the Fox dictum not to watch any other channels because they don't tell the truth as Fox does.

Now we have a big argument going on about whether or not insurance companies, not churches, should provide coverage for contraception to women who work for, again, not churches, but institutions owned by churches, such as universities and hospitals. I would venture to say that not every secretary at Notre Dame University is Catholic, and insurance companies should not be denying health care of any kind to women of any kind. This is not a First Amendment argument, though it is being promoted as such by the white men who wish to force their beliefs on every woman. Whatever happened to your god being a personal god who wants a personal relationship with believers? Whatever happened to human free will to choose to follow the dictates of your faith or not? Whatever happened to the belief that morality can't be legislated at all, particularly to unbelievers. Child birth is a health care decision, the United States in 2010 ranked fortieth in the world in maternal death rates (women who die within 42 days after giving birth.) So deciding to have a baby can be a life and death decision. We also have an economy in which having two parents working is no longer a "choice," it has now become a necessity in many cases to have two incomes. Birth control is a health care choice, and not simply a narcissistic way for a woman to have time to "find herself," through a career. It has been nearly fifty years since the advent of the pill, and people have used some kind of prophylactic or another for hundreds of years. But suddenly, in this war on women, birth control, and forty years after Roe vs. Wade, a woman's right to choose are in the forefront again. AGAIN!!! Get used to it, conservatives, this has already been decided-women can choose to prevent pregnancy, and if she chooses to, can end a pregnancy.

I would like to note that the very definition of conservative means keeping things as they have always been, and this is a highly unrealistic way of looking at the world. A conservative friend of mine once said to me, with great angst, the Obama wanted to "change America!!!" I'm fairly sure I know what this fundamentalist, tea party, deep South conservative really meant, and the advance of the rights of women is included in my assumption. I remember another conversation with her in which she vehemently criticized a woman who had dropped off her baby at a "Safe Baby" site. She said, "If you can't take care of a child, you shouldn't bring a child into the world." Really? This was a child that was not aborted. Parents were probably not using birth control, which now social conservatives are saying is a bad thing. So when the child is born in these cases, who takes care of it? There was, as is so often the case with these conservative positions, no logic to the argument whatsoever. But the greater point is that there is nothing in the world that doesn't change. I must add, that I was in a conversation with a conservative friend who is a woman last night, and she said that she disagrees with her party on these issues, so, again, I can't paint all conservative women with a broad brush. There was also the news story of the wife of a conservative legislator in Virginia, where a law was passed through their legislature and then pulled, forcing any woman who wanted an abortion to undergo a vaginal probe, who denied her husband sex because of his involvement in this legislation. Go Lysistrata!**

Women, I must add, have become quite angry in the last couple of weeks, about just how far these overwhelmingly white, middle aged males are willing to go to put the proverbial thumbscrews to women's rights. Even conservative women, by and large, have benefited from the advances produced by the women's movement from the 1960's and 70's. And over, and over and over again, studies prove that when women can plan the timing of their pregnancies and the size of their families, the children they have, the women, and the whole world benefits from it. Education and birth control have made, at least in part, the world a better place. But for at least one of the men currently running for president, that is the problem. He calls our president a "snob," because he wants every American to have the opportunity to go to college, and when people go to college they come out liberal. There is no way to type how funny I find that whole line of thought, especially when this man has three degrees, including an MBA and a law degree. So I guess higher education doesn't always turn one liberal. Or even smart.

The last point I'd like to make here is that the very use of social issues, whether it is gay rights or women's rights, or the liberality of Hollywood-whichever old red-herring  is used to stir up the social conservative base, this is always an act of desperation from the right. It has worked for them in the past, but maybe the anger among conservative women will break that cycle this time. I don't care to hear one more word about what Mitt Romney thinks about the federal bailout of the auto industry in 2008. I would like to know what he thinks of the bailout of Chrysler in 1980, under a republican president. The result is the same-Chrysler came through its crisis, became profitable again (for a time) and paid back the money to the government, with interest. But why doesn't anyone ask Romney about this? There seems to be no one who is willing to call them on this hypocrisy. But the desperation in the move away from talking about the economy and focusing on the "culture wars" is obvious: they can't get Obama on national security issues-he has won that battle, often using the same methods that liberals hated in President Bush. The economy is getting better, in part because of decisions made by Obama, and in part because these cycles occur naturally and economies routinely move up and down. The right has nothing on which to win against Obama, and so they convince the base that he is a foreign born Muslim socialist, who will force all white people to abort their babies, and will take all the surviving children and send them to re-education camps to turn them into gay socialist Muslim terrorists.

***Lysistrata is an ancient Greek play, written by Aristophanes, in which the women of Athens deny sex to their husbands until they cease fighting a war.  This same tactic was recently used by women in Liberia successfully. 

YeeeeeeHaaaawwwwww!!! Chicken Feet!

This weekend marks the beginning of the one-hundred-sixteenth Fort Worth Live Stock Show and Rodeo. For people from Fort Worth, that's a big deal. It's a fair in the middle of winter, with rides and horribly unhealthy, delicious food like funnel cakes. We get to walk through hundreds of pens and look at animals that will be auctioned at the end of the two week show. There is a rodeo, for those who enjoy such things. It brings lots of money into our local economy, and it's a throw back to when the country, and largely, states such as Texas, were driven by an agricultural economy. When I was a teenager, it was a much cheaper date than going to the theme park, and it was fun. I was very different as a teenager than I am now. Not only in that gravity has pulled all my body parts downward, but in the way I look at the world. I was a fundamentalist, anti-evolution believer who has since majored in science in college, and left those religious roots behind. It hasn't been too many years since evolutionary biology found that the birds we know are the descendants of some of the more fearsome dinosaur/raptors. My mother, one sister and Mom's brother used to take her mother to the Stock Show Rodeo every year until she died in 1998, and they have continued to go to the rodeo every year until this one-2012. I lived in Illinois from 2000-2008, and Mom took us to the rodeo with her in 2009. My husband had never seen a rodeo, so she thought he would enjoy it. We did enjoy it, though neither of us could see ourselves going every year. But I was struck by something very interesting, the feet of all the varieties of chickens and roosters. They did exactly look like the feet of dinosaurs. It was truly amazing to me how we could see the history of these birds in how they look today.

I also had another of those "Aha!" moments while listening to the news recently, the conversation being about jobs and our economy. It was brought up how many jobs are being replaced by technology. This is a fear that I remember hearing all the time when I was growing up, and it is apparently true. And becoming truer. And completely out of left field, I was tackled by and unexpected thought-this is another reason to reduce our population. My argument for having fewer children usually has to do with depletion of resources. But I also think it is fair to consider that the children we are bringing into the world may not be able to support themselves because too many jobs are being replaced by either computers or robots, which are cheaper and don't require health insurance, vacation pay, or retirement pensions. No one wants to bring a child into the world only to starve, and the more people on earth, the greater stress on natural resources. And now, the fewer jobs available to support themselves and their families.

I try to be aware of manners. I used to love reading books by "Miss Manners," and one of her repeated premises in her books was that the most important thing about manners isn't knowing which fork to use (furthest to the left goes first) but being aware of how my behavior makes other people feel. Once we are comfortable enough with each other, and have a feeling of trust, I can drop that wall and talk about things on which I know we disagree...politics, religion, what season is best, sports teams, music, whatever. But when two people meet for the first time, the old saw "Never discuss politics or religion with coworkers or people you don't know well." The importance of these admonitions came full blown to me on New Year's Day, when we were unexpectedly sharing a gathering with a couple we had only met once before. Before the day was over, the female half of that other couple had offended us on breaking these all important rules of etiquette. First, when the black coach of a certain football team was shown on screen, her male friend commented that he didn't think this man was a good coach. "She" said, "Oh, I guess they were just filling their black ratio." Now why would any reasonably intelligent person believe that remark was okay? Ever?! Then, in a discussion about a job her son had lost due to a freeze on federal hiring. Both of them said together, "We can blame Obama for that." Now, they said it as if they assumed that everyone in the room agreed, which they could not possibly have known. And for that reason alone, such a comment should never have been made. But since if anyone reads this post, I'm assuming we have a level of trust and I can feel free to speak-the right has spent 2011 accusing government workers of being the giant leaches that have pushed out economy to the brink of the great abyss, why would they complain? Oh yeahhhhhhh, because trimming the size of government in this case affected one of theemmmmmmmm. Lets just leave politics and religion out of the conversation when with people we don't know well. But in the meantime, your hangnail is not Obama's fault.

Every now and then I have to chew some tablets created to help with heartburn. Now it almost nauseates me to use the brand that makes those awful commercials with people being slapped in the face by their food. I'm amazed that the FCC hasn't shut those commercials down for their very phallic nature; there is one with a woman eating a corn dog that suddenly starts slapping her in the face-the message seems very clear. One is ribs-come on-am I the only one who's noticed this? ?e's not being slapped by a whole rack of ribs; just one rib. Again with the phallic symbol. Uh-oh-what if it is just in my head.

The other day I was buying some groceries, and I found myself inexplicably drawn to the cosmetics section. I picked up a lip gloss named "Forbidden." The rebel voice in my head said, "Sez who?" I was determined to buy that lip gloss just to show whoever put it there that I was not to be forbidden. But in the end, I couldn't.

Don't Look Back...

"Driving down the road today I saw a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. A little voice inside my head said  "Don't look back, you can never look back." Don Henley; "Boys of Summer" 1984

As I drove to work the other day I saw a Toyota Prius with a sticker on the back that said, "Paul Jr. Designs." I wondered if that bumper sticker seemed as incongruous to anyone else. Paul Teutle, Jr, and the whole Orange County Chopper family seem about the most anti-Prius group I can imagine. 

I hate the term "invasive species." Life as we know it originated in Africa. And invaded from there. We are all invasive species. When one species goes extinct, another one fills its niche. Sometimes an organism moves into a place that has no niche for it, and it drives out its competitors and takes over there niches. That's the law of the jungle, Folks. Kudzu and zebra mussels are only as invasive as their competition allows them to be. It is all about adapting to an environment, or adapting an environment to one's needs. It's not always pretty, it's not often kind, but the cycles go on. 

I've been seeing some disturbing commercials about the EPA and how it is killing jobs with its overarching regulations. I wasn't sure until the other day who was putting this garbage out-I figured it was one of the republican candidates for president-especially Rick Perry. Then I saw the end of the commercial a few days ago, and the sponsor was "The Coalition for Clean Coal." Sure, wasn't it cool when the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969. Actually, that river has caught fire thirteen times, but the one that sort-of triggered Earth Day and the current environmental movement was in 1969. Do we really want to go back there? Don't pregnant women get enough warnings about eating fish because of mercury poisoning? Don't enough babies spend time in the emergency room and hundreds of thousands of dollars in health care costs because of air pollution? America, do we really want to elect a bunch of people who think all regulations on industry are bad? They keep telling us that removing regulations will cause job creators to come back to the U.S. to put people back to work. Why not create "quality control" jobs that hire people to see that a company isn't poisoning us? If an industry can't live up to environmental protections, how about the government giving tax breaks or "stimulus funds" to companies that update their factories to improve their environmental impact? So you create jobs and a cleaner environment all at once. Then the "job creators" wouldn't be demonized, and wouldn't have to set aside so much of their income for lobbying. It all seems so simple to me.

Rick Perry stays on my mind a lot, and  I cannot help but comment on the story of how he shot a coyote that menaced his family dog while on a run. Everything about this story rings false. I know that coyotes can be a problem for small dogs or cats left outside unattended. I know that with urban sprawl, coyotes have fewer places to hide and avoid contact with humans. But the governor of Texas, running with a golden retriever, which would outweigh most coyotes by about thirty pounds, and a cadre of security men running with him...well, there is no reason whatsoever that safety was the reason that coyote had to be shot. Coyotes are afraid of people, and unless they are pack hunting, which is a rare event,  and fairly new evolutionary step for them, a solitary coyote would not approach a group like that-certainly not in a menacing way. Perry was trying to show what a tough Texas hombre he is. And from that point forward, no matter if he stopped every war, created a job for every American, paid down the deficit, and stopped all pollution in the world, I could never, ever respect him again. Yes, my reaction here is extreme, and says more about me and my attachment to wild animals and my fervent belief in their right to exist and survive than it does Mr. Perry. But I have also studied canines (all canines) and this is just camp fire talk from someone who thinks he is on a cattle drive from the nineteenth-century. I was born and raised in Texas, and I am familiar with the Texas macho ethos. It is an unnecessary, ugly anachronism. We certainly don't need it in the White House. 

Mitt Romney. Business man, job creator, executive experience. What he actually did is increase the bottom line for shareholders by sending jobs over seas. I can't imagine anyone voting for such a Stepford Candidate. But then, if I were a republican I would be in utter despair right now. But then, I'm not a republican and I'm in despair now anyway over the direction of the country. 

I remember hearing over and over and over about George W. Bush saying "nookyooler." Then I heard many, many smart people, including respected news anchor Bob Schieffer say the word "nuc-lear" the same way. So I've tried not to let that one bother me anymore. But I just don't know if I could ever vote for a candidate who wants to eliminate a "def tax." Not that I  knew we had a special tax on people who can't hear. 

In the meantime, I have a solution to the rich-poor divide. It seems that every single small company is actually owned by some giant corporation. So all that is necessary is to have that one big company-I'm thinking it's probably General Electric or Goldman Sachs, take a minor cut in pay, and cut the shareholder dividend by a tiny percent. Give the people below them a raise in pay, and cover a bit of their benefits. Problem solved. The business will still be profitable, but the salaries of the ninety-nine percenters would be better, they would be happier and we could be the UNITED States of America again. It is sad to me that we are all so angry at each other all the time. 

My husband has been off work with a worker's comp injury since February. He was recently told that when he goes back to work he will have a three-percent raise. Then he got a letter saying that his insurance rates will go up more than ten percent. In the last forty years, the poverty rates in this country have gone up, not down. In the last ten plus years the salaries of the so-called ninety-nine percenters have gone down seven percent. Fuel keeps going up thirty cents, and down two cents at a time. When fuel goes up, everything that is delivered by fuel-driven machinery goes up. So, why are people angry and protesting? I can't imagine. 

As anyone who knows me knows, I am an atheist. A few weeks ago I had a conversation with one of my sisters, who shares my non-theism. She was about to get married to a wonderful man, but was uncomfortable saying to me that she felt "blessed." Is it okay to say one feels blessed if one doesn't believe there is a magic man in the sky dispensing said gifts? I think it is perfectly understandable to feel "blessed " when something unexpected and wonderful comes one's way. I'm still not sure how I would be sworn in if I ever had to go to court. 

Well-I guess maybe we have to look back sometimes. 

"Ahh, these times are so uncertain, there's a yearning undefined and people filled with rage. We all need a little tenderness; how can love survive in such a graceless age?"  Don Henley 1989, song, "Heart of the Matter," album, "End of the Innocence."

***Based upon a 1972 movie, "The Stepford Wives," in which the women of a community are made robotically perfect by husbands who wish to be waited on by beautiful, "perfect" women.

Not My Cup of Tea

The world is making me tired. There hasn't been a day go by in the last few weeks that I haven't been shaken by something happening somewhere. I need a day of happy news. Just one. Is that unreasonable?

When I was in grad school, studying Environmental Policy, I was introduced to Thomas Robert Malthus. Malthus was an English scholar who proposed a theory of overpopulation, saying that at some point, the earth's population would grow beyond its ability to sustain itself. Once the earth reaches that point, the population would be checked by starvation, war and disease. Most of the twentieth century, economists and philosophers spent suggesting that Malthus was wrong; we were able to exponentially increase food production, and send minimum sustenance to every corner of the globe and prevent death by starvation. We are now in the third desperate famine in Africa that I can remember. We are doing the best we can to send enough food to the people in Somalia to prevent the slow, dreadfully suffering death by starvation and disease, despite the fact that many of the violent and corrupt regimes of the region are preventing some of the aid from reaching those most in need. Yesterday it was announced that on Halloween day, Sunday, October 31, 2011, the world population will reach seven billion. The world is on the downward slide with regard to potable water. Much of the farmland in Africa has been rendered un-arable because of war, drought, and the race for resources such as gold, oil and diamonds. Once the aid workers are gone, the same corrupt war lords will begin to kill with impunity again, using religion and race as an excuse, when resources are actually the reason for the brutal attacks. Malthus wasn't wrong, he was just early. We can increase our food production to a point, and we've come through so far. But those increases require more water and good land, which is becoming more and more rare as the population rises, the climate warms, and drought prevents the rain from watering the farms...and the circle is infinite.

Back in the 1980s I read several books by Stephen King. I loved the fact that, much like the television program, "The Twilight Zone," there was just enough reality to make his plots seem plausible. One of my favorites was "The Dead Zone." It was a story about a man who was in a terrible car crash and went into a coma for a long time. When he awakened, he could touch people and tell the future. One of the people he touched was a politician who was running for president. He touched the man, and knew that a nuclear conflagration would be the result of the election of that candidate. Something eerily like the feeling I got reading that story came over me when I saw this picture on the cover of Time magazine this week:

I'm sorry-there is just something frightening to me about this man. Despite the fact that, as Bill Clinton said, "He's a good lookin' rascal." It's not enough to make him un-scary to me.

I am an unabashed liberal. But I understand some conservative positions, and I come from a very conservative family. When political topics are broached, especially since I am usually outnumbered, I've become a master of the smile and nod, and the, "That's certainly a point of view," reply. But a conversation I had early in the Obama administration with a friend who is just as proud of her tea party activism and anti-Obama passion that was very telling to me as I look back. This particular friend lives in a very closed society-fundamental Christianity, in the deep south, and all of her world view is colored by that giant wall. I tend to believe this is true of all tea party members, including my mother. Most of this group decided that they hated Obama, and anything he might stand for well before he was elected and attempted to do anything. They have held their beliefs, no matter how often President Obama has done exactly the opposite of what anyone would expect of a liberal. But my friend exclaimed to me, when I asked her why, exactly and specifically, she disliked Obama so much, "He wants to CHANGE America." This remark has come back to me time and again, puzzlingly; and in the last month or so, it has come back to me again and again. I have realized that what the tea party wants is a return to an America that never really existed in the past, and certainly could not survive in the twenty-first century. In the days of fuzzy memory, blacks and gays didn't demand their constitutionally guaranteed civil rights. In fact, a black man walking down the street who looked at a white woman, or looked a white man in the eye, did so at his own peril. Homosexuals didn't want to get married-they wanted to hide their true natures so that they could keep their jobs. They never had "partners," they had "roommates." But the white folks lived well, and went to church every Sunday. They were there for their white neighbors, and their white neighbors were there for them. No one knew that George Washington didn't really chop down a cherry tree and tell his father the truth about it. No one ever questioned the Disney-fied history books, or dared to suggest that any of the founding fathers were promiscuous or flawed in any way. Men went to work, and good mothers stayed home and provided clean houses and good meals for the family. Freedom of religion was okay because everyone was Christian or Jewish. There were no atheists or agnostics, and certainly no Muslims or Hindus. There were no illegal immigrants-just gardeners and people who traveled around the country to pick fruit for a pittance that was impossible to live on. That was their problem though-white people had the right to make profit and do well. No one questioned that. But that world never truly existed, and most definitely does not exist now. American businesses can't make profits without going international. But in order to go international, we must learn something about the cultures with which we wish to do business. That may mean we can't steamroll over everyone in another country with the assumption that the only good country is the U. S. and the only good religion is Christianity, and the only good business model is the American one. Facebook and Twitter and the internet in general have made isolationism impossible. And the fact of the matter is, the world has changed, and was changing long before Obama was born in Hawaii. I've been told all my life that "Change is the only constant in life," and anyone who refuses to admit that is burying his head in the sand. Obama didn't cause this, but as the first president we've had in some time who is open to it, rather than trying to deny it, or forcefully and belligerently stop the change, he is still WAY ahead of any tea party candidate.

Where Do Idealists Get Jobs?

This is not a question regarding the current job market in the United States. There are several careers I can think of that require a certain idealism in order to choose them. Teaching, medicine (nursing in particular,) law enforcement, possibly political office. I know people in all of these careers, and after a certain number of years, each of them seem to lose at least some of the idealism, the desire to help others, that drew them to their career choices. There are others, myself included, who are generally idealistic, and try to always see the best in people, who just wind up having 'jobs' because there is no place for us to fit in with our idealistic natures.

In a conversation with a young friend, whose younger brother just graduated from high school, she told me that he is pursuing a degree in education, and that he hopes to teach in the inner city. He's done some volunteer work in that arena in Los Angeles, CA, and he absolutely loved it. I wonder where he will be twenty years from now, when he has seen just how many of those inner city children he will be able to 'save,' and how he will be the one blamed for their failures? The discussions being held in this country lately over what is wrong with our educational system, and why are children lag behind, is very telling. It seems that everyone, particularly legislators, want to blame teachers and teachers unions for our failures. Occasionally the home life, and participation of the parents is mentioned, but no one brings up the culture we live in. Who are the media heroes? Does our culture celebrate learning? Are the students who are motivated to learn encouraged and nurtured, or are they bullied by fellow students, and ignored by over-burdened teachers who must spend more time trying to keep peace from students with behavior or learning difficulties in their overcrowded classrooms? When they go home, are their heads filled with unchallenging programming on television and iPads? How any teacher can keep his or her ideals alive for an entire career would be beyond anyone's logic.

I'm close to some police officers and others who work for the police in civilian roles. It takes very little time for them to begin to see everyone they meet as suspicious. They spend their days immersed in the worst of what our society brings, and it colors their perceptions. Police officers take a pledge to "serve and protect," which takes a certain ideal of making a difference in society by removing crime so that the law abiding citizen can live freely. But their administrators are sometimes corrupt, they must become friendly and look the other way for some smaller crimes in order to get information on larger crimes, sometimes the people they've pledged to protect dislike them because THEY know someone who has been arrested, and on and on. Police officers traditionally hate the departments appointed to investigate crimes committed within their own ranks. Why? Because sometimes, after seeing how many criminals get away with it, and become rich doing it, and looking at how little they make for the amount of risk involved in their jobs, some policemen become corrupt, and rationalize doing so. Therefore they take the position that they should not be prosecuted if they 'take a little' off the top. How can one keep their idealism in such an unappreciated job. The corruption of the New York City police at the turn of the 20th century was a well known "wink, wink" fact. Police were typically paid for protection by organized criminals on a regular basis. But the city paid them almost nothing, and they were still expected, exactly as today, to put their lives on the line for the people. While police corruption can never be condoned, there were those who understood why police officers would be tempted to take bribes to supplement their paltry incomes.

One place one should be able to believe they can make a difference in the world around them is in politics. There was a time when I thought this would be my place to make a difference. But I have yet to see a single person in politics get elected and not soon be overcome by the amount of money it takes to win, which cannot come from "the people," because the people just don't have enough of it. Barak Obama probably came closer than anyone else during his 2008 election by taking so many very small donations from people online. But even he has taken money from corporations, and proven that the big donors, not the small ones, have more power over what is legislated. An example of this would be the deal he gave to the giant pharmaceutical companies before he even started negotiating his health care reform act. Politics is ugly-it always has been. I've seen some ads that were printed during campaigns in this country during the seventeenth century, and they were even worse than now in the names they called each other. At least now the mud is slung in real time-back then it took days for the ads to go out, and longer for them to be responded to, by which time the damage was often done. Newspapers were owned by business owners, not by idealistic journalists; they could say pretty much whatever they wanted without any challenge from other media sources, or "factcheck.org." So it isn't worse now with regard to mudslinging, but it is WAY worse with regard to the money involved. There will be no way to fix it as long as candidates have to raise more and more money to run for office, and as long as they owe favors to the ones who give them the big bucks.

Helping people by providing medical care ought to be a no-brainer. But after dealing with patients who are demanding when not really sick, patients who come to the doctor to feed addictions, insurance companies who stop real health care delivery, it is easy to see how the nurses and doctors in my orbit all over the country could develop a cynicism about the careers they chose in order to heal. Some of the stories I hear from friends who do home health care just rip at my gut. Some of the behavior of families I've seen who have very sick, disabled family members, does the same thing. I wonder sometimes when we stopped caring about our fellow man, and even more about our families.

In a previous blog I talked about how important a free press was to the learned gentlemen who wrote our constitution. But now the journalists are celebrities themselves,  and they party with the very government whose overreach the framers wanted them to protect us from. This is not true in every case-I have some journalistic heroes who put their lives in great danger to expose corruption at every level. But more and more, the people who report on the legislative class go to the same parties, travel in the same circles, and water down their stories and soft-ball questions to these people because they are 'buddies.' This makes idealism even harder because it diminishes the trust the people have in what they are hearing from the press. It also makes people who have, or might have, become journalists in order to expose corruption in our government, question that decision. I was in journalism school for a time, and when I saw the attitudes of some of the old-school newspaper men, I was disgusted. Even the word disgusted seems inadequate since one of those old newspapermen who had won a Pulitzer Prize for a series he wrote in the Washington Post, looked me in the eye and claimed that the fact that Sally Quinn and her husband, Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post, hosted some of the most famous parties in Washington, meant nothing when it came to reporting on these people. Really? Where were they before we invaded Iraq in 2003? Why did they wait nearly six years to expose the outing of Valerie Plame in retaliation for her husband opposing the invasion? The New York Times complicity with the invasion of Iraq is well known, but other papers, if they were following the ideals that framed the beginnings of the American free press were being followed.

I suppose the last area in which idealists should be able to work would be the non-profit sector. I have worked in two non-profits in my life. One was a children's home, in which the administration was so corrupt and dishonest that I quickly felt my idealism drain from me every time I faced one of them. The other was a food bank, that was run by some very odd characters for whom their mission seemed almost secondary. There was one person there who reinforced my ideals, and stayed sold on the mission no matter what. But she was only 20% of the entire staff. I hope she is still there, doing good.

My problem is that I hurt when my ideals are violated. I believe in the interwovenness of every living creature. I still have a, perhaps jaded, view of the 1960s, and wish that the hippies who were preaching peace and tolerance and equality hadn't gone on to become investment bankers and right-wing conservatives. Someone I work with recently quoted the old joke to me, "If you are not a liberal when you are young, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative when you are older, you have no brain." I told him I didn't find that at all funny, especially since my growth has been in the opposite direction. (...I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." Bob Dylan.)  I still have hope that people can change, and begin to care about each other. I don't see it happening in my lifetime. There are too many people who think the old way is better because that's the way things have always been done. I would like to ask them about certain things that were done in the past-slavery, driving native Americans off their lands, or poisoning them with illness, conquering civilizations that were already advanced beyond the conquerors, etc. Should those things come back just because it is good to hold on to the way things were done in the past? I think not. But where can an idealist go to work, and have ideals intact upon retirement? 

Demagogue Is Not a Verb

This has been a busy summer in every area of interest to me. Politics, music, my family life, religion, food...all of these things leading to question after question. So, if anyone has answers, I'm open. If not, well, I'm used to it.

1. There are so many things we can hate politicians for, and what they are trying to do to our education system is one of them. But could we PLEASE get over the fact that governors and presidents and congress people send their children to private schools? Can you IMAGINE how disruptive it would be for the children of state or national leaders to be in public schools? Really, let this one go. Focus on the other crap they are doing to us daily.

2. I love dill pickles. Recently I had one of those giant ones you can buy at the convenience store in the single serving plastic wrap full of pickle juice. Also being a long-time label reader, I made the mistake of turning the package around and reading this one. Did you know it does not contain one shred of dill? It also says on the nutritional information that it contains NO FIBER! Are pickles not simply cucumbers "pickled in brine?" Since when do vegetables not contain fiber?

3. Why does anyone mow in the dead of summer? During a severe drought no less? It's hard work that often leads to health problems for the out-of-shape. The machines most people use contribute a great many nasty emissions, and watering the grass just to keep it green in summer uses a great deal of a precious resource that we will one day not have enough of that is usable for the consumption of our exploding population. So, if we get rain, be happy, your grass will be green. If we don't, you save the air, water, reduce medical costs-everybody wins!

4. When did small business owners become millionaires and billionaires? I keep hearing the republicans talk about increasing taxes on millionaires and billionaires is raising taxes on "small businesses and job creators." What is the connection? The billionaires are the owners of really big businesses, and do not seem to be the target of any suggested new tax rates.

5. Speaking of the possibility of new tax rates; I think the top tax rate is either 35 or 39%. But you know what, it doesn't matter what the tax rate is if there are so many loopholes and the richest people and largest corporations pay none or very little.

6. This all brings up another question: The right keeps talking about how we have the "highest corporate tax rate in the world." So-which of these other countries would our republican brethren like to imitate? If the US is the best country ever made, and our people are the best and brightest, most fabulous people anywhere, which country would they like us to be like? Do they realize that most of those other countries also have completely different priorities for how their tax revenues are spent-some even including (HORRORS, GASP) health care for everyone? So-France? How about France? Italy? Germany? Pick one, Speaker Boehner. But remember, there is always a package that goes with such things, and if you don't like the package, don't try to imitate one little piece.

7. Do the anti-government right-wingers realize that people who hate the government and wish to dismantle it are called "anarchists?" Anarchists used to be considered left wing. Does anyone but me see the irony in that? Anarchy in the USA!! Brought to you by Sarah Palin.

8. Who are the people who have been unemployed for over two years? Are they from any particular sector of jobs? If it is the over-fifty crowd, infrastructure jobs might not really help. But we need to rebuild our infrastructure, no question. We need high-speed rail nationwide. We need to reorganize our cities to accommodate mass transit. But I am deeply concerned about the middle aged workers who have been unemployed for so long. Where can they go? I'm not sure that building highways and filling pot holes in roads are jobs that they can do.

9. What is the evolutionary purpose of women's attraction to shiny objects and adorning ourselves? It seems that every woman I know is drawn to jewelry and shoes. On the one hand, I can see that the adornment thing may be in order to attract a mate. But I don't know many men who say they ever notice a woman's shoes. But some women I know who never, ever wear makeup still love shoes. And if attracting a mate is the reason for attaching shiny objects to our ears, fingers, wrists and necks, why do middle-aged women still have this desire? We aren't looking for mates. We may just be hoping the ones we have don't last much longer. We can't reproduce anymore, so how does this characteristic help us pass on our genes?

10. Who is the governor of Alaska now?

11. When they were young, what did Pat Sajak and Vanna White want to be. Surely not the hosts of a stupid game show for the rest of their lives.

12. I watch Morning Joe most every morning. It is often just background noise while I get ready for work. But do the producers really think no one notices when they re-run first hour? They do it regularly, and I'm not sure why.

13. I'm a big fan of the Harry Potter series. I've read every book, and seen every movie. I've semi-followed the growing up of the three main stars. Last week I saw a story about Emma Watson, who has played Hermione since she was ten-years old. She came to the US to attend Brown University for a time, but it didn't work out. Anyway, the story last week said that Ms. Watson is going to study "abroad." At Cambridge. She's a Brit-how is Cambridge "abroad" for her?

14. Lastly for now, I have a question about the whole Rupert Murdoch British press tabloid scandal. The stories have to do with the management of these papers being invited to all the best parties, hobnobbing with politicians and the wealthy and famous. They then used these relationships to make big, splashy, ugly headlines. Well, hoodathunk? I've said for years that it makes me uncomfortable to see American journalists invited to these parties with the Washington elite-or any elite. But it continues. So why should anyone be surprised that the integrity of the press might be compromised by inside access?

Some More Questions, and MAYBE An Answer

If you don't have to weigh it, how do you know it's under 70 pounds?

I was at WalMart waiting for a prescription a few weeks ago, and noticed a sign on the wall. The sign said, "We are required by law to ask for identification when dispensing any controlled substance. We apologize for any inconvenience." Now, shopping at WalMart is, in every instance, a soul-crushing experience. The store is always hot, looking for a decent bunch of bananas is an adventure not unlike an Amazon River safari, the ratio of cashiers to customers is 1 to 473, and the pharmacy has a sign up apologizing for "inconveniencing" customers to show ID when taking home prescriptions of a controlled substance? Why?

Why is it that when walking on a trail, walkers are the friendliest, runners come in a distant second, and the least likely to be friendly to others on the trail are people on bicycles? 

Why does a smoothie from McDonald's have 54 grams of sugar? I thought I was doing the "healthier" thing by grabbing a smoothie made with yogurt and fruit. Should I just get an Egg McMuffin and be done with it when I run late and need to grab a bite for breakfast?

One of the best selling books of all times is "What to Expect When You're Expecting," and the series of parental guides it spawned. People who have children try to learn something about parenting; why don't people who have dogs? Dogs are our best friends-truly. But they are also descended from animals that can do great harm, and some bite. We have a neighbor whose dogs are so aggressive that last Sunday as I walked my dog past his window, his dogs were trying so hard to get through the glass to get my dog that the next sound I heard was glass shattering. There was a beautiful dog on the trail last week; possibly a St. Bernard mix. The gentleman owned by the dog was taking a breather on a bench, and as we approached, his dog began to lunge and bark ferociously. He told me that the dog was not dog-friendly; I just walked by and said, "Shame" If we will have our best friends around other best friends, they should be socialized. It's not hard in most cases, some breeds take a little more work. But it matters. 

I've asked this before, but why do conservatives believe there is only one amendment to the constitution, and it is the second amendment? I'm asking again because of a case in Florida that was discussed this week amongst some friends regarding a new law prohibiting pediatricians from discussing child-proofing guns in the home with the parents of their patients. While some agreed that the new law was problematic because of the first amendment, which says the government can't tell anyone what they can or can't say, they also said the conversation didn't belong in a doctor's office. Really? Does that apply to advising parents how to child proof their household cleaners with toddlers around? "Who knew my baby could get into the cabinet and drink the Drano?" "How could I know my child knew how to get into my bedside drawer and get my loaded gun?" Some parents are so blissfully ignorant, even the ones who have read the book described above, that the idea of removing a gun from harms way for their toddlers may not ever occur to them. If a child gets hold of a loaded gun and does him or herself some harm, or harms a playmate, that doctor would be called upon to undo the damage-IF the child survives. That negligent parent would then be arrested for child endangerment. What's wrong with preventive care? Aren't we supposed to be FOR trying to use common sense and create healthier lives for ourselves and our children? No one is saying to take the gun out of the home-just child proof the home so children don't have access to loaded guns. I'm pretty sure no one in a red state like Florida would DARE suggest getting rid of the gun altogether.

My dog-loving friends and I have had many conversations about scent-rolling, and some of the noxious smells our dogs come away with. One day I was on the way home with my dog after she had done that, and I thought I was passing an apartment in which someone had died, and it turned out she had scent rolled in something that smelled beyond horrible. I had to wash her three times, with Dawn detergent, to get the smell off. The funny thing was the smug look on her face as she wore the scent, and the extreme sadness on her as I took it away. I used to think it was something about wearing the smells of a higher ranking dog. But this past Sunday, I got another idea. Walking on a trail that we very much enjoy, we came upon the body of a dead squirrel. Her eyes glazed over, literally, and she dropped to the body to roll in it, and I shouted her out of her stupor before she could wear that maggoty smell home in the car with me. But I thought of all the times during the same walk that she saw a live squirrel and she took off like the 'great, white hunter,' to the end of her leash, and then sniffed the ground where the squirrel had been. What I realized was that perhaps her vestigial hunting instinct took over, and she wanted to scent roll in the odor of her prey-as a disguise! If she smelled like a squirrel, perhaps she could sneak up on one without them running up a tree! Human hunters do it all the time-rubbing ointment on their bodies so that they don't scare off deer; did we learn that from dogs 12,000 years ago? I don't know if my new theory is right or not, but I'll still hit the Dawn the next time she comes home smelling like that. 

Is It Irony-or Something Else Entirely?

I try to keep an open mind. Always have. Even about politics, about which I feel quite passionate at times. I know that there us corruption on both sides-no one needs to try to convince me that there is bribery and short-sightedness, and narrow mindedness on the left as well as the right. But I've been considering this essay for some months, and have waited til now to write this because I have been looking for some equal oddities on the left to the ones I will list here-I just can't find them. Perhaps if any of my friends on the right should read this, and know of some comparable ironies, you will let me know. I promise to keep an open mind. Promise.

1. I'm starting with one I've discussed with friends before. Many of my conservative friends like to complain about the poor-(though they also make clear that in this case, they do mean minorities) raising their children on public aid, and continuing to have children, even though needing public assistance should be a sign that one cannot afford to "properly" raise those children-providing for their food and shelter, and medical needs. Ronald Reagan, who used subtle racial tactics to win in 1980, turning the south away from democrats for the next many decades, also coined the term "welfare queen." Everyone I know who subscribes to this class warfare approach saw the picture in their minds instantly of a black woman with multiple children in tow, getting a larger welfare check for each one, driving a Cadillac, and no two of the children had the same, or a present father. Books were written at the time to dispel this myth, including one called "Myth of the Welfare Queen," but the idea persists. Which makes it seem odd to me that the right is against the funding of Planned Parenthood. I do understand the abortion issue; only 3% of Planned Parenthood services cover abortion, so the argument that funding Planned Parenthood is "federal funding of abortion" is wrong and dishonest. The purpose of Planned Parenthood is contained in the name-it is a service provided to help women and poor families who can't afford family planning services to access them. They off free or low cost birth control pills, educational services and women's health services. The education and birth control is the major key to why the conservative desire for defunding makes no sense. Study after study has shown that when women are educated and empowered to choose family size, they have fewer children. So, funding Planned Parenthood should provide a conservative dream come true-fewer welfare queens having baby after baby paid for by public money.

2. About a month ago, junior senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, made some comments that new regulations on coal companies to protect coal miners would prove too costly. On its surface, this comment makes sense coming from a tea-party darling like Paul. The tea party presents itself as "Joe Six-Pack," who is tired of government intrusion into the lives and choices of individuals and business. So, less regulation is better, right? Well, not for Joe-Six Pack. He is the guy in the mine who dies of black lung disease when he is 42, or when the mines collapse and he is trapped with several friends, no oxygen and poisonous fumes. It is definitely good for the people the tea party purports to hate the most-the East-Coast elites who never get their hands dirty, but make millions on the backs of working class stiffs-like Joe Six Pack. That is certainly what the fat-cats who run the coal companies want to hear their legislators say, "Read my lips-no new regs!" If those guys had their druthers, they would provide no health care at all for the guys who give us the source of over 50% of our electricity we love so much in this country. The lack of push for help for the working class from the tea party makes no sense to me at all...until one looks into their books and sees how many super rich far-right activists fund the tea party. Yes, Dick Armey-I'm talking to you. If the rich righties pay the tea party to push for legislation that works against the people's interests, doesn't that negate what the tea party says is stands for?

3. Speaking of the new conservatives: Ever since President Obama was elected, the republicans have suddenly become very anti-deficit. We do have a huge deficit, everyone knows it, and I do think blaming it on George W. at this point is an exercise in absurdity. That said, part of the reason the deficit sprang up like a corpse flower under Bush is because he sent our soldiers into two wars that he didn't bother to write into the family budget plan. Now that president Obama has sent us into Libya, and said basically the same thing when he told us about it, Bush can no longer be blamed for our budget shortfalls. But I think there is a language problem here. I'm not sure that most people really understand what is meant by a "deficit in the trillions." What it means is that we are spending more than we bring in. By a lot, and it is creating a debt. That means money we spend on a credit card, and we won't be able to hold on until we're dead to have it paid off because a nation's debt never goes away. We need the money we bring in to cover our household expenses, which are great. True, we can cut funding for Planned Parenthood and health care for people who retire without large pensions to sustain them. If this were an American family, someone would be looking for a part time job because there is not enough to help pay the bills we owe on what we've borrowed and take care of our regular obligations. Therefore, revenue must be raised. There is no logical argument to be made any other way. None. So republicans want to cut money to the old and poor (they want to pull the plug on Grandma!) And President Obama says he will go along with that. Why? Because that's what he does-goes along with the ugly, cold and hateful in order to keep his poll numbers up. (So, how's that working for ya?) He doesn't want the drama of ugly fights, or people in congress going before the "liberal media" and calling him a socialist, or saying that he's "anti-business." But I digress. We must raise revenue. Must. Gas prices are about to be higher than they've ever been-.25 away, and rising weekly. Higher gas prices mean higher food prices-food has to be transported, and trucks use fuel, therefore, higher prices going to the store. Higher fuel prices mean higher electricity, so the grocery store passes the cost of transporting their product, and keeping it safe to us. We've already spent the last 20 years with our incomes going down, while the richest have spent it with their incomes going up. Corporate profits have been obscene for ages comparatively. So the only way to increase revenue is to raise taxes on the wealthiest, and eliminate the loopholes that allow multi-billion dollar corporations to pay no taxes. When Representative Paul Ryan's budget plan was criticized recently, someone (I think it might have been Senator McConnell of Kentucky, not sure though) claimed that his plan "eliminated the loopholes that allowed General Electric to get a" "ginormous" refund from the IRS. "YOU LIE!" The only way to do that is to rewrite the tax code, which Paul Ryan didn't touch. He wrote a budget plan. Bottome line, we must improve our bottom line. We cannot do that without raising revenue, and the middle and lower economic classes in this country can't take anymore of the weight. Our backs are breaking as it is-even those among us fortunate enough to have a job. Taxes on the wealthy and giant corporations must be raise. The argument that this will cause small business to be broken by the burden, and prevent them from creating jobs is a non-starter. There are ways to protect small business and and the merely "comfortable" class from being harmed. Don't play games with our heads-find a way to make enough money to pay the bills, and still live a decent life. That's what real Americans do every day.

4. I have stopped looking when I see Donald Trump on my TV. I'm not going into all the arguments against him-they are well known and documented. But it scares me when he talks about going into Libya and "take the oil." Do we really need a rich imperialist running our government? Is being a deceitful jerk and a bully the best we can do for president? Haven't we learned lessons from annexing countries for their resources? It never works out well for the empire in the end. Never. Like it or not, Libya, Iran and Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and China are all sovereign nations. We do not have the moral authority to invade any of them for their oil, or any other resource. It's not ours to take. Just because we have no control over our addiction doesn't mean we are allowed to rob the drug store for our fix. If it was (once again) a poor heroin addict suggesting violently attacking someone to get his next hit of his drug of choice, he would go to jail. Trump, on the other hand gets taken seriously as a presidential candidate? Help me a little here-I don't understand!

5. Speaking of Libya. Have we spoken of Libya enough? Probably not. Especially from the perspective that keeps haunting me. I grew up in the Viet Nam era. The war ended when I was a sophomore in high school, and I've had relatives and friends who fought there, scarred for life. There are very few Americans that I know who have ever been taught about how we really got there. We went there to help our allies, the French. Who had invaded and colonized what later became known as "French Indo-China" for its rubber trees. This was before our insane craze to find ever more uses for petroleum products lead us to invent synthetic rubber-which may have saved many trees, but has not helped with our need for ever more petroleum. The Chinese wanted the French to leave Vietnam back in the 1940s. The French are our allies. We help our friends, even to keep their empires. So we sent in "advisers" under Eisenhower. Then Kennedy, then we entered a full-scale "police action," or some might call it a "war." We were there long enough to lose over 50,000 young American lives, and then to leave, bringing the wounded and the walking wounded home to disrespect and neglect. The United States only gets about 3% of its oil from Libya. That's all. The argument that we are skirmishing there, and sending in drones and so forth for humanitarian reasons is mooted by the plea I heard one week after we started bombing Libya from Ivory Coast that we please send help because a vicious dictator was killing his own people. It is also rendered moot by Sierra Leone, Darfur, Syria and others. So if we are not there for humanitarian reasons, we are there for one of two other reasons-either we have a national defense reason, or it has to do with resources. But Libya does not provide many resources for us, so that one doesn't work. Oh, wait-the French. They get much of their oil from Libya. We are helping them to keep their access to cheap oil (I guess they need the petroleum in order to make synthetic rubber since that whole colonializing French Indochina went so terribly wrong.

6. Barak Obama is a socialist. He is trying to take over the country for socialist reasons, and proof of that is that he is appointing people with the title "Czar." This one blows my mind completely. Didn't the communists march the last Czar and his entire family, including his children, to the woods and shoot them all? How can someone be both a communist and czar-happy? Not to mention, every president since Roosevelt has appointed people and given them the title "czar." Every one! To be sure, Obama has the most. But second behind him? George W. Bush. The only one who didn't have any czars in his cabinet since the 1940s was George H.W. Bush. Why not? Because the ones he nominated weren't approved by congress. Another proof that President Obama is a socialist is that during the campaign he made a poorly arranged comment about "spreading the wealth around." Now-most honest people admit that they know he is not a communist, and he did not in any way mean taking the profits from every American endeavor and spreading it around equally to every American. He was referring to tax rates for the wealthy, and to the vastly increased chasm between the salaries of CEO's and their lowest paid employee. It used to be about 40%. No one would argue that the owners who start companies should make the same money as those who work for them. No one-not even the most left-leaning American one can find. But to have grown from 40% to over 400% is insane. Those lowest paid employees are having a rougher and rougher time just getting by without losing their homes, or going bankrupt because of medical costs. The top CEO's get bonuses more than 100 times the lifetime salaries of the lowest paid employee in their companies. Those executives have long since lost the ability to understand what it is like for the real workers who make them so wealthy-even the executives who might have pulled themselves from poverty to wealth. All that Obama meant was that perhaps the gap between the two salaries could be a little smaller. If he were an applicant, perhaps on a second or third interview, it would be clear that what he was talking about is really a benefit the company might provide-profit sharing. Not taking the wealth away from the top and spreading it equally to everyone. Just simple profit sharing. Every move he has made since has demonstrated quite clearly that he is not a communist or a socialist. And the only excuse for anyone who still calls him that is that he/she wants to make people afraid. And a large number of the people afraid of Obama are of an age for whom the word "communist" is still the nastiest word in the English language.

7. Barry Bonds. Roger Clemens. Perhaps Mark McGuire, whose last game with the Cardinals I was present for. They beat Cincinnati. These guys have all been accused of lying to congress. Barry Bonds was found guilty of lying to a grand jury, but many baseball players of the era of the 90s and early 21st century have had all their games tainted by the whole scandal around the use of "performance enhancing" drugs. It's a sad state of affairs, certainly. I wish that I could now be as excited as I was that day in Sept. 1998, when I was on a plane to Casper, Wyoming, and the captain came on the speaker and announced that McGuire had just broken the home run record. The thing about the charge of lying to congress? How can any congressman sit with a straight face and accuse anyone EVER of lying? That's like Newt Gingrich leading the charge against Bill Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky while Gingrich himself was having an extra-marital affair. Lying to CONGRESS? What a joke.

I try most of the time to avoid conversations about politics with my family. For one thing, most of them are extremely conservative. But even the ones who lean a bit to the left are not as much "political junkies" as I, and so the conversation can be tiresome for them. But recently, without taking a left/right position, I was talking about Libya to one of my sisters. I said to her, "You know, you and I, regular people, have to learn from our mistakes to get through life. Why can't our elected officials do the same, and stop making the same mistakes over and over again?" One more piece of advice I'd like to give to everyone out there in the public eye if I had the chance: If you see a microphone, assume it is always on.