An American Reach

Mark Tuesday, November 3 on your calendar and reminder.

We will learn a lot about America’s Excellence, her Vigilance, her resilience and her ability to differentiate between watercress and raw meat.

There are three elections coming up, and I suspect their imminent concatenation is at least one reason for the president’s dithering on Afghanistan and other matters, even though he is more accomplished as a campaigner than a decision maker.

According to Scott Rasmussen’s New Jersey polling (of CERTAIN voters, not “breathers”), Democrat Jon Corzine is down at least three points to Republican Chris Christie, in the race for governor and a third “independent”, Cris Daggett, is fading fast. New Jersey votes caught on to the “Cris” name similarity “split-factor” pretty quick.

And another less well known poll has the margin at 4.8.

In Virginia’s gubernatorial contest, Rasmussen has Bob McDonnell, a conservative Republican, up 14 points over Democrat Creigh Deeds. That is a show of independents fleeing the party of the left for less turbulent policies and spending restraint.

Virginia is where the guru of political junkies, Dr. Larry Sabato lurks, and he has used the voters there to knell the hazards for the GOP...until now.

Most important, and most exciting of all is the race in the 23rd Congressional District of New York, where GOP party hacks have a liberal in a Halloween Fright-Mask (Dede Scozzaflava) running against old line Democrat Bill Owens.

Republican congressional campaign money has poured into Dede’s camp and she has just rested there, plopped, like a stone.

Until the past three weeks, that is.

Enter Rush Limbaugh. Enter Glenn Beck. Enter Fred Thompson, Dana Rohrbacher, and Sarah Palin, raising money and proclaiming endorsement.... NOT of Dede, though.

All political addicts know that New York has a “Conservative Line”, valid in all state elections.

And in the 23rd district, the Conservative candidate is longtime conservative activist Douglas Hoffman.

And Hoffman is on the receiving end of the thunderous movement of fiscal and social conservative principles that has energized millions of Americans since the August Town Halls and the Tea Parties that climaxed in the nation’s Capitol the second week in September.

Hoffman is being buoyed aloft by the same people, in and outside of the 23rd district, who have been reviled by frightened Democrat hacks and things...whose fervor has provoked a “War” on talk radio and on Fox News Channel, and an attempt to lock certain newsmen out of presidential news briefings.

Contestants in Virginia and New Jersey are prominently Republican or Democrat. Winners in these races will send “messages”.

But, if the most recent poll in Upper New York is anywhere close to the result...if Hoffman beats Dede Scozzaflava, then its shock therapy for the tired old GOP hangers-on.

And, were Hoffman, now with more campaign cash than both of the others, to beat the Democrat candidate Bill Owens and win the Senate seat ? With dollars and dimes from Tea Partiers nationwide ?

Why, that would mean the White House has lost TWO wars ! Maybe, three.

And even the most blind and biased media maggot would then understand the “uprising” is not partisan.

It is, totally, an American reach for Excellence.

Who's the Fooler ? Who the Foolee?

Everybody's repeated the Mark Twain saw about getting in a fight with someboy that buys ink by the barrel...and dodging anyone who does noy NEED ink.

But the stupid, MonkeyMedia, struggling in its devouring tarpit of leftwing ideology, has been burnt again by a slip of a girl named Hannah Giles.

Yesterday, all the lovers and defenders of A C O R N, the most UN-Excellent thing in America these days, reported that the ACORN office in Philadelphia had "kicked out" Hannah and her "pimp poseur", Jimmy Okeefe.

Not so fast there, boobs !

Andy Breitbart posted 42 minutes of video and audio Thursday evening that tells a different story. The muckraking duo had an extended meeting with ACORN people in the City of Brotherly Love office, lasting three quarters of an hour!

And, it ended very harmoniousy and graciously, contradicting the video account given by ACORN that was gleefully received, swallowed and endorsed by mouldy media..

Check out the latest Okeefe-Hannah Giles video-audio here: http://biggovernment.com/#

Why do they try to outsmart Hannah and Jimmy?

My guess is that they're acting out the definition of derangement: Try the same thing again and again and again ...until it works!!.

But the odds are ALWAYS against "false witness"...Pathetic.

A Prize for Neda...Next Year ?

When Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter and Al Gore were announced as Nobel Peace Prize laureates, I felt betrayed and a bit queasy in my entrails.

When Mother Teresa of Calcutta was honored with the award, I laughed and wept.

But when President Obama was announced as the 2009 choice, I just suspended belief. Then I went to the files and came up with the calculation that the nominations for this year’s “election” closed eight days after Obama was sworn in.

Who knew ?

Well, even though my favorite woman commentator on the passing scene, Peggy Noonan called this happenstance “absurd”, "wicked" and “mischievous”, I reserved the right to call it Nefarious Extortion” and “ Bill of Attainder Blackmail”.

Like Ms. Noonan, I am innured..yea, bored with the procession of vacuous “liberals” with whom the Nobel people are preoccupied. Carter hated Jews and built boxes for the poor to live in. Gore invented the internet and a new, false religion to scare hell out of ignorant people.

But every Nobel Peace laureate until now, has done something besides talk !

I cannot get the sight out of my soul of Neda Soltana, an Iranian lady who was brutally pummeled and then shot to death on June 20, this year by Ahmadinejad’s thugs in black for protesting against oppression and asking for a reassessment of the just-past election.

Her name, incidentally, translated from Persian (Farsi) means “Voice”.

I watched the video of her murder over and over again last June and July, especially on my 84th birthday a week after her shameful murder.

My first reaction to the Nobel announcement was “Why Not Neda ???”

But, of course, she had not “qualified” or been nominated last February.

That is Very, Very important to these people in Oslo, Norway.

Maybe (like the Dodgers in pre-World War II Brooklyn) or the Pittsburgh Pirates of today...

Maybe Next year for Neda ????

Sharing Corruption, Not Accountability

Of all the things that are wrong in our nation’s capitol, I can find nothing worse than the fact that the U.S. House of Representatives voted not to remove a man from the chairmanship of what is arguable the most important committee in Congress, even though he was guilty of:

(1) Failure to report over $1 million in outside income and $3 million in business transactions as required by the House,
(2) Failure to disclose at least $650,000 in assets he had previously failed to list on his House financial disclosure forms,
(3) Failure to disclose to the IRS or on his financial disclosure forms $75,000 in rental income for a beach villa in the Dominican Republic,
(4) Violation of state laws by claiming three primary residences and breaking New York City regulations by maintaining four rent-controlled apartments,
(5) Violation of House rules by using congressional letterhead to solicit donations for an education center bearing his name at City College of New York, and
(6) Delinquency in paying his property taxes on two New Jersey parcels and failure to report the sale of a $1.3 million brownstone.

This is of course, Charles Rangel, Mogul of the Ways and Means committee, where every single disbursement of every single taxpayers’ dollar is written / originated.

Doubtless, all of these discrepancies or lapses in ethical and moral judgment are traceable to RACISM on someone’s part.

Either that, or it’s Bush’s fault.

Print this and save it for next years political season.

The Monkey Media will not bring it up again. That is a certainty.

Is Your Congressman your LEADER ?

I am having a very hard time with someone I really love and appreciate who has a discerning mind and deep unexploited understanding about national and international policies and governance.

She INSISTS that when we elect someone to a political office, they become our "leader".

I insist that the person I vote for, if elected, becomes my "servant" and that my role is employer to the extent I share employer status with thousands, and the elected person must make some sense of our cacophony. That is a JOB, and not an easy one. But he is an employee and not a leader.

That's why he / she gets the Big Bucks, right ?

Here is what Merriam Webster says:

Main Entry: leader
Pronunciation: \ˈ'lēe-də?r\
Function: noun
Date: 14th century
1 : something that leads: as a : a primary or terminal shoot of a plant b : tendon, sinew c plural : dots or hyphens (as in an index) used to lead the eye horizontally : ellipsis 2 d chiefly British : a newspaper editorial e (1) : something for guiding fish into a trap (2) : a short length of material for attaching the end of a fishing line to a lure or hook f : loss leader g : something that ranks first h : a blank section at the beginning or end of a reel of film or recorded tape
2 : a person who leads: as a : guide, conductor b (1) : a person who directs a military force or unit (2) : a person who has commanding authority or influence c (1) : the principal officer of a British political party (2) : a party member chosen to manage party activities in a legislative body (3) : such a party member presiding over the whole legislative body when the party constitutes a majority d (1) : conductor c (2) : a first or principal performer of a group
3 : a horse placed in advance of the other horses of a team
— leaderless \-lə?s\ adjective

In the beginning of this Republic, the authors of the Constitution (none of whom was T.Jefferson---he was in Paris) had the idea that congressmen in the lower house were answerable to the voters in the district in the state they came from; and the Senators, who were supposed to be wiser (Senator comes from the same root as "senile") would be answerable to the state legislatures that elected them.

This certainly iplies that the founding fathers generally took the John Marshall and Patrick Henry view that the legislators were servants of their electors.

Now, when one of these legislators was chosen to chair either the whole Senate (as president, pro-tem) or the House (as Speaker, THEN that member became the "leader" of that restricted entity which so chose him.

But not the "leader" of the people.

In a republic, the citizens pay the bills and the citizens are the bosses....At least that is the way it was dreamed of and originally fleshed out.

In what time remains (for me or for the Republic), I will still treat things that way.

I only wish my Sainted Friend could see it my way. For, SHE really IS a "leader".

Hey, Craven Crowley, Here's History 101

When Henry L. Stimson first served in a President’s cabinet, he dismissed espionage by famously and fatuously saying:

“Gentlemen do NOT read one another’s mail !”

In early 1917, President Woodrow Wilson was presented with an intercepted diplomatic message from German Kaiser Wilhelm to Mexico promising all of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California to our southern “Neighbor” if they would declare war on the United States and he pooh-poohed it until a friendly Mexican official confirmed its validity.

Sadly, this is the way we WANT to be in “peacetime”. But we have come a cropper every time we played Wishful Wonderland.

Military and diplomats argued about signals they were receiving from the Pacific the whole year of 1941, until the Empire of Japan struck Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

Even in the months before September 11, 2001, while the Jihadist Murderers-Assassins were rambling over the countryside of the United States prepping for their Gotterdammerung Downtown, the knowledge that they were up to something was floating around, dismissed in counter-intelligence limbo.

All this history, which has been collected by men who were there---most elaborately by Allen Dulles in his “The Craft of Intelligence”—is apparently never taught in the Ivy League Bastions or, for that matter, in Congress or the State or Justice department.

Speaking to the press this week, in answer to the question of what is being don with the terrorists detained at the Guantanamo Bay Naval base, one of the Foggy Bottom’s “brightest, best” referred to these rapacious marauders as “Refugees”.

His name is Philip J. Crowley, and I want him to answer for it. I want Hillary Clinton to answer for it. Who was this moron trying to “please” ??

This attempt to lull everyone to sleep, treat people who would consummate Ahmadinejad’s Dream and bring down ALL of America as if they were mere scofflaw guilty of some minor disgusting misdemeanor in the Metro.

If we refuse to sit silently and allow Big Government to ram down or shove up a venal plan to dissolve and co opt 0ne-sixth of our economy—and we DO so refuse!—why do we accept docility in the face of this OTHER summons to serfdom ?

The school system may be lost to the indoctrinators temporarily. But history is irrevocable.

It is there to be learn from....or repeated.

Spores of Tyrannical Suppression

Did you know that the narcissistic impulse to statist censorship is aggressively contagious?

It appears that the spores or viruses or whatever other carriers of Hunger-to-Coerce-and-Suppress free activity and speech can leap a whole half-continent in a nanosecond.

From the offices of ACORN in Maryland where the corrupt seek to punish those who unmasked them and from theCongressionally de-funded precincts of ACORN in California to Washington D.C., the Kill-Messenger Malady has spread to Austin, Texas.

The Austin American-Statesman reports that Art Acevedo, the Chief of Police there, is announcing a full investigation of internet postings which Acevedo claims threaten public trust of police and undermine authority.

Acevedo claims some city employees may be parties to the defamation and suspected subversion, and that his investigators will seek search warrants and subpoenas to root out the offenders on the Internet.

This is just another tin-badge Chavez type who has read more liberal claptrap than he has digested American Constitutional Law. And, of course, his yammerings will come to naught if the columns of comments from, Austin and other Texas citizens count for anything, ( SEE http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/2009/09/18/0918comments.html)

This is NOT the Tiny Teapot Tempest it appears.

Non-success to the contrary notwithstanding, the suppressors of free speech is all around you. They have been comfy with the indolent and corrupt Monkey Media that hides truth and dispenses haft-truths, untruths and insincerity daily.

There is a large hunk of the citizenry who actually resent the truth telling of the free Internet and the whirlwind world wide web that embarrasses the ancient dying slavish “libruhl” .

Horror is that these people WELCOME Art Acevedo’s attack on Internet freedom. They are eager to accommodate the silencing of Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Michael Savage, David Horowitz, Neal Boortz and Laura In graham.

Vigilance is the only antidote. Mow the Acevedos and the FCC bullies down as they raise their tyrannical tentacles. The spores are in the air.

Do You Smell What I Smell ???

When the New York Times broke a story Tuesday, September 22 that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is going to seek a bailout for itself from "healthy" banks it is tasked with protecting from failure, I actually sobbed.

It was easier than laughing.

Just the day before, the United States attorney in Manhattan got a Grand Jury to augment its indictment of an Iranian slush-fund donor of millions to Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry while he defrauded banks of $297 million-plus.

Hassan Nemazee, who is listed as a half million contributor to the president’s successful campaign, $100,000 to Hillary's primary fight and $200,000 to John Kerry in 2004 was first fingered by Citibank for taking $75 million of its money in loans for which collateral was nonexistent.

Then, Bank of America and HSBC joined the whining, raising the reported theft-cum-fraud to four times its original tote (or $297 million).
You can read all about it here: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a9e4hFSFhjdw .

We must smile when we learn that the U.S. DA in charge of the case is one Preet Bahara.

Now add to these two "banking" stories that have all kinds of "bailout" and political implications another bubbling cauldron of investigation into thick and indigestible ACORN coddling by the U.S. federal government, and you have a really burgeoning backlog of smelly stories for the Monkey Media" to catch up on.

They are the Monkey Media because they do not SEE, HEAR, or SPEAK OF evil in the present administration. We are about to discover if their olfactory receptors are intact.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine, Darrel Issa of California and Lamar Smith, Texas all oversight committee members in Congress asked nine independent Inspectors General to investigate U.S. government funding and involvement with the embattled community organizing group ACORN by the respective agencies / bureaus overseen by the IGs.

The Department of Justice is first on the list. That should burn Eric Holder a new one. Then comes the Treasury department (Geithner), and several that I had never even heard of.

This blogger has been one of many to forecast that sooner or later the logjam of misinformation and indolence on the part of the alphabet TV and the craven AssPress will be broken by sheer tonnage of the sleaze and corruption
So far, only Bloomberg and Reuters wire services carry all the information above. The UK Telegraph and Times of London have had better coverage than 99% of US papers.

We will soon see if the stink will pry them out of the trance.

Meanwhile, here's a late Flash !!! The left wing British paper "Guardian" Tuesday morning called our president irrelevant and "impotent". Spot on, old chaps....

Subverted By the Blind Pretenders

When I was in my second or third year at Emory, our Abnormal Psychology professor—and that is NOT necessarily ambivalent syntax—took us to the State Hospital for the Insane at Milledgeville, Georgia.

That was before all suspects were totally medicated or homeless.

We saw one man all bandaged up with blood soaking through the bandages. He was moaning unintelligibly. The attending psychiatrist told us they had found him with some broken glass sawing away at his genitals around midnight the night before.

The White House today provoked the stark memory of that mad man.

Why doesn’t Hillary Clinton just resign and make space for the senile jew hater who is now seeing things that are not there? He descends daily into puerile pusillanimity.

Carter is a natural for this administration, having emasculated himself long ago with the help of Zbigniew Brezhinski, who did not believe—and would not let Carter believe—that the Ayatollah Khomeini had won Iran, until long after he had arrived in Teheran from Paris and the Sha was gone. Check our ambassador there at the time, William Sullivan, in his memoir.

Now, the administration in Washington is “killing” the missile shield deployment in Poland and the Czech republic.

Left wing liberals have hated the Strategic Defense Initiative since the late Teddy Kennedy misnamed it “star wars”. That it is working efficiently, that Japan is very happy with its performance and promise means nothing at all to these haters of America.

Bent on some crackpot carnival mirror image of “revenge”, these people have:

(1) Renounced our close kinship with Israel, in place for 61 years of Democrat and GOP majorities and presidencies.

(2) Cozied up to statist and fascists, both in this hemisphere and the Mideast.

(3) Agreed to “talk” with Iran’s unbalanced leadership which has promised to “end America”

(4) Allowed the Homeland Security secretary to blunt and dull its mission and malign American citizens.

(5) Play sycophant to Vladimir Putin’s Russia instead of calling him on his slide into totalitarian rule. .Now, if that is not self-mutilation, then no man or nation has ever done it.

And the “alphabet” TV nets and the newspapers and wire services of record applaud.

They are pretending (In Peril, I fear) that the Mass Tea Party in the Capital did not occur.

Fallout Abounds....Mostly Good

Fallout abounds from posts here, the 9-12 protest in Washington DC and PEW research on News Media acceptance in the United States released Monday September 14.

First of all, this viewer of the passing media moneys ( hear-no-see-no-evil) is not alone. Pew researchers, who check out many thousands of people—not just 600 or 900 like most pollsters–say that only 29 per cent of the public BELIEVES what they are fed by newspapers and television news and news magazines. Even 59 per cent of Democrats are leery of media content.

And, it has not to do with bias in policy matters alone. The bulk of Americans question the accuracy of reporting on ALL subjects: crime, courts, legislation, book reviews and “celebrity”
reportage. Here’s a link to the whole report: http://tinyurl.com/pj5nql.

I had three friends attending the Big Tea Party protest march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Saturday, September 12. Two came away overjoyed and energized.

One was a bitter man when he called me Monday.

“The freebie USA Today newspaper at the Hotel had not one word about the protest march. The London Mail, Telegraph, Times all had huge stories, according to my laptop. One London paper said there were one and one half million people in our march. But this US daily with the largest circulation (they say) in our country has not a word on it ?! Is this Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba, or the USA ?”

While only one Baltimore radio station (WBAL) carried the story about ACORN counseling the phony pimp and hooker on money laundering, it HAD to quote the DA’s threat to “prosecute” the secret taping by the whistleblowers.

Meanwhile, at the White House, a double barreled POW! Reaction ensued. The CENSUS of 2010 broke all ties with ACORN and the White House kicked the census out of the White House.

Despite no Media coverage. So, maybe when a tree falls in Maryland, only the White House hears it.

And, then on Monday, in Brooklyn, N.Y., a borough of the Big Apple, a third video surfaced of the pimp and hooker getting money laundering counseling from ACORN officials, and this time a metropolitan daily newspaper with 700,000 circulation broke the story—the NY Post.

Will the Borough District Attorney prosecute the ACORN people? Or the investigative journalists posing as brothel-keepers-to-be ? It is better than any soap opera tease.

And just think...n alert, non-lazy, unbiased Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, or New York Times could have broken the same story any time within the last year or so.

That is what continues to be scary to me.

Will They Swaller Themselves ?

The BIG scandal about the people at the National Endowment for Arts (and for the Humanities) is NOT that they “reassigned” Yosi Sargeant, who intimidated and hustled recipients of federal grants—instead of just firing the offending Obama appointee.

The horror is that you could only read about the corrective action on the Internet.

None of the alphabet networks and none of the “journals of record” reported the story. It WAS available here on E I A.

And, looky here ! It took TWO hidden-camera videos surfacing on successive days to attract any media attention to the scurrilous activity of the ACORN subsidizers of pimps and prostitutes and phony tax preparing money launderers in Baltimore and Washington D.C.

Sure, it is exciting to be part of the blogosphere that shakes things up and gets the truth on the information superhighway.

But the deepest, most fetid and rancid scandal in the United States is not the rapacity of the “progressives” like Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and Harry Reid in congress. Nor is it the misleading jig-bob-and-weave of the White House TOTUS (None Dare Not Call it All A Lie !)

It is, as was the case in Watergate, the Cover Up that is worse than all the corruption, power overreaching and insidious assumption of unconstitutional powers.

But this time, Bob Woodward’s newspaper is NOT in the vanguard of the gadflies and scum-sifters. Woodward is gelded...silent. And the holy altar of investigative journalism has been usurped by the World Wide Web.

And the newspapers bleed and shrink. I am reminded of James Whitcomb Riley’s
Skwidgey-cum-Skwees” that “swaller themselves...”

Can;’t wait to see the AssPress perform that trick.

Dirty Tricks by George and Ben

Academic as well as anecdotal historians have pretty well established the fact that information gatherers in Naval intelligence, Army G-3, and the State department all had scraps of information that, cobbled together by a fifth grader, would have forewarned the U.S.A. about the Pearl Harbor attack by Japan on December 7, 1941.

That’s why we have the CIA today. That’s why FDR tasked his Harvard classmate and political adversary Colonel “Wild Bill” Donovan to create and develop the CIA’s precursor Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

This infuriated the Army, Navy and Diplomatic establishments all of which laid claim to the important job of analyzing and evaluating information from overseas for the Chief Executive’s National Security Council.

America had never had a central clearing house for espionage, covert operations or “dirty tricks” before, and it all tehn accreted rather like “Topsy” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

But the military intelligence and espionage work has a long history, of which many Americans in 2009 are not aware.

George Washington was a magnificent and successful Spymaster—as every one of his biographers attests. He hanged every British spy he caught, despite whimperings of many lily-livered colleagues, who begged him not to. We only have full account of the handsome, debonair John Andre’ who was very popular among America’s new politico-military elite.. He was General Benedict Arnold’s cohort on the Hudson and elsewhere.

But General Washington had a genius for disinformation and strategic and tactical legerdemain also. He could “shuck and jive” with the best of them, poker-faced.

That is one of the secrets behind his losing so many battles and winning a war of revolution.

His manipulation of the Hessian mercenaries was one of his masterstrokes.

Well, they weren’t REALLY mercenaries, because they got none of the paid money. King George III, who was Hanoverian Prussian himself, made a deal with Prince Frederic II of Hesse-Cassel for about 30, 000 soldiers to bolster the British expeditionary force in the “colonies”. In the deal, the Hessian Prince received a flat sum for the lot and a BONUS payment for each Hessian killed by the Americans.

Having learned all this from some of the 900 Hessians he captured on Christmas Day at the Battle of Trenton, General Washington got Benjamin Franklin to craft a letter, in the best traditional Teutonic-Hessian style, (and in diplomatic French) ostensibly penned by Prince Frederick, complaining that “not enough of our officers and soldiers are in harm’s way” and “we are not receiving the promised amount of bonus” agreed upon for use of our army”.

Dissemination of this letter, printed by Franklin in Philadelphia and circulated throughout New York and Pennsylvania brought about the disaffection, mutiny and surrender to Washington of 6,000 Hessian officers and troops in 1777 and 1778 and declining morale on until 1781. There were only 13, 000 of the original 30,000 Hessian troops remaining to be captured at the final battle of Yorktown in 1781.

The rest were already either supporting Washington’s army or setting on their 50 acre far-acre farms in Pennsylvania—in the heart of what is now “Pennsylvania Dutch” Country.

Therefore, the CIA did NOT (as the bed wetters would have you believe) invent horrid, nasty, ungentlemanly, unsavory “Dirty Tricks” in U.S. armed combat.

Prescient Policeman ?

Tonight, it has been difficult to grasp real things.

First within a few hours I heard of the deaths of two people close to me. I was able to digest those with some aplomb.

Then, I saw a VERY unsettling video posted on YouTube of a protest at Reston, VA outside Democrat Congressman Jim Moran’s “townhall” meeting.

A man was carrying a poster opposing “Obamacare”.

A policeman started hassling him, ordering him to “put down” the placard, or else he would be arrested for “tresspass”. They exchanged questions and the policeman got VERY agitated and threatening.

The protester asked, plaintively, “Isn’t this America ? ”

“No !” the policeman announced, “It aint no more…
Okay ??? !”

I have played it four times. Is this cop a prophet ? He IS of pro-Obama persuasion, apparently.

Does he know a secret the rest of us have not been told yet ? Or is he just a prescient seer ?

See the video at: http://tinyurl.com/ly6t2g

Captain! O My Captain !

When George Stephanopolis on ABC’s morning show divines from an “in-house” poll of bodies on the street (showing approval for Obama at 56%) that “Americans think he’s in over his head...”.....

AND, when liberal pollster John Zogby’s Interactive Internet poll comes up with only a 47% approval rating for Obama....

And when, for nearly two weeks, Scott Rasmussen’s daily tracking pool of 1,000-plus Likely-and-habitual” voters hovers between 47% and 49% for the president....

THEN you may pay attention.

And you may be sure that the president and David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel are paying attention, because THEIR “in house polls” are producing much more dire information that ABC Steffy’s or Gallup’s historically tortured figures.

Then you hear Obama using words like “wee-wee” and savaging Sara Palin and “Republicans”. We get intimations that the president has not read ANY of the five “health” bills stalled in Congress when he must be corrected or have his slaveys explain “misspeaks”.

And this is just the third week in August.

Dr. Charles Krauthammer is explaining that while there are no “death panels” actually spelled out in Section 1322 of the House “health” bill, there IS a provision to pay physicians a bonus for “counseling” the elderly REGULARLY on living wills and life-end choices. A tortuous exercise, and irrelevant Dr. K agrees.

And finally, Peggy Noonan a level headed and generous patriot, has decided that the best decision is to “pull the plug” on Obamacare.

From This day, Friday, Aug. 21, the fog is definitely clearing for the passengers on this Ship of State.

There be BERGS!..Large, craggy, threatening monstrosities, fully visible:

Unemployment in California at 11.6 %.

Cash for Clunkers on the ash heap–an awkward and costly failure.

A “ruling” majority party chasing its tail and cannibalizing.

And, who is in charge of the ship ? Its Amateur hour, with mutterings about “wee-wee” !

And as the fog thickens again, we can only see one-tenth of the icebergs’ bulk.

Pressure ? Sure...But Whose ?

First the White House solicited myriad sneaky snitches, spies and trolls to rat out their neighbors and co-workers who opposed DeatCare.

Next, the Chief Magistrate and all his sycophants averred that there was no provision for end of life counseling in euthanasia for the elderly. (THERE IS ! IT’s Section 1322.)

Then, He and They dismissed Townhall protestors as “orchestrated” yawpers.

Next, this servant of the Republic's citizenry announced he did not want people talking…he wanted them “out of the way”.

Now cometh his slavish lower house legislators in a SUNDAY newspaper editorial branding all who oppose DeathCare as “Un-American”.

Will all this work?

Well.... I am an ancient watcher of the American “passing parade”. I can remember in 1941, when every third adult in Georgia was suspected of being a Klansman, and the Governor threatened and intimidated and, finally, PHYSICALLY removed professors from their University positions. It did not work. The voters threw him out.

FDR tried to enlarge the Supreme Court to bypass SCOTUS edicts that his policies were unconstitutional. At the zenith of his popularity, he was trumped and sent to "reset" by a national uprising and despite some media hysteria in his favor.

There are all kinds of overreaches in American history that were rebuffed. World history is cluttered with them.

The best known and most grimly impressed on our political psyche is the Richard Nixon crowd’s stupid, blind, tonedeaf exerecise in Hubris.

It just will not work, no matter how hard they try to fix the wheel with union thugs, Acorn and media whores.

In this republic, the embers of Liberty always flare into a blaze of Triumph.

Tyrants are always tone deaf, and eventually defeat themselves. Watch !

Wake up Frank and Sam...Their Law's Broken...

This is where I came in.

Are they changing reels yet ?

Where are Frank Church and Sam Ervin ?

They broke all records for hurry-up legislating, back in 1974 collecting a consensus in Congress to pass statutes making it illegal for ANYONE in the Untied States Federal Government to send out a clarion call for a list of enemies, or to collect such a list...OR to expunge one once it is / was collected.

Now we have the ward rat hustlers in the White House and the Chief Magistrate also, using the White House Internet Site (paid for by taxpayers) to recruit sneaks, snitches and tale bearers to spy on and , probably, defame ordinary citizens availing themselves of the protection of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

I do not remember even Jimmy Carter or Lyndon Johnson doing this.

When Code Pinksters assailed George W, Bush with unfounded lies I do not believe his White House ever sought to take names and do dirt in return.

Even the Clintons' Craig Livingstone did not "recruit". Whatever computer files he had around were collected during political campaigns and NOT with taxpayer funds.

This may seem a smudge of smoke from a distant Native American's blanket signal right this moment .

But I have seen this show before. Put my slippers on. I'm outta here !

Orwell & Jane; Mike & Charlie

“In a time of Universal Deceit, telling the truth is a Revolutionary Act.” runs a quote from George Orwell that I use in my email signature.

I was thinking about this...again...and I remembered another precis on the subject.

It’s a short story by W. Somerset Maugham titled “Jane”, about a rather plain lady who became the toast of the upper crust society salons as a superior wit and humorist. The story’s raconteur was baffled at this phenomenon, until the “secret” exploded on him:

She spoke the truth, always, and in matter-of-fact manner no matter what the subject being discussed, without artifice or subterfuge !

Voila !, she was absolutely unique in those circles.

This accounts for the indestructible and devastating effect of a select few commentators on the political scene these days. Two are especially noteworthy.

Michael Barone, a former Democrat pollster, researcher and author of the seminal political Encyclopedia of American Politics is rarely off base. He is so effectively honest and detailed in his analyses that he produces pain on the Left that is palpable.

Dr. Charles Krauthammer, whose years as a psychiatrist of note, published in the journals of that discipline long before he wrote speeches for a Democrat presidential candidate, is another truth teller of note. His epeé intellect is both disarming and unassailable.

Here is an exercise for you. I do it regularly, utilizing the Real Clear Politics website.

On days after a Barone or Krauthammer tour de force appears, survey the output of the bedwetters. Like frog carcases assaulted by galvanic current, they will jerk and snatch and twitch with paroxysms of defensive dudgeon.

This liars' drivel is often veiled, but it is always there. They are so very afraid someone will take Mr. Barone or the Good Doctor as “gospel”.

It is good that some of us do. And it is good for the corps politique bon nationale, also.

Strange indeed are the masks of confirmation.

Perversity IS Vulnerable...

There is a perversity that persists in this society that tends to restrict the free play of common sense and logic.

Small nuggets of truth are presented almost secretly by researchers, scientists and historians, and are constantly and willfully ignored, in really bad faith, by persons and institutions who boast that they are “Opinion Makers”.

Here are a few facts that have not been widely disseminated by any of the vaunted wire services or “journals of record” :

1. About 60 nations recognize English as their national language. The United States is NOT one of them.

2. More people may have voted in the presidential election in 2004, won by George W. Bush than voted in the 2008 election won by Barrack Hussein Obama. Until now, only "estimates"of 2008 have been available. Latest expert compilations show fewer voted than the enthusiatic talking heads claimed originally.

3. The most accurate opinion polls in the past six national elections query only “habitual and likely voters” , rather than “adults”. Screening for these “likely voters” is NOT based on whether they “plan” to vote, but on their dedication to voting in ALL elections, habitually.

4. Congress maintains the highest negative rating , compared with the executive (past or present) in ALL opinion polls.

5. News reporters rank below auto salesmen and telemarketers in all opinion polls.

6. In a recent UNSCIENTIFIC poll of readers, with nearly four million respondents, A USA Today / Gannet poll reported that 97% of those responding believe the Second Amendment to the Constitution “guarantees the right of an individual American to bear arms”.

That last one was not touted or spread widely by the AssPress, Reuters ----or even Gannett and USAToday. They were apparently poleaxed.

Which more or less begs my question.

If the media “powers that be” do not accept the population’s disagreement with distortions and prejudices so dear to the heart of the communication media, then who is doomed ?

The free public? Or the Liars?

Aha ! Dickens Lives !

One of the strangest episodes in my life occurred during a strategy session involving approaching a politician.

To one of the very closest friends and mentors I ever had, I suggested, brightly:

“We might be able to get some real inside track in Washington if we can get Senator (Bob) Graham interested....He’s Phil Graham’s half-brother, you know...the late husband of The Washington Post publisher, Kay Graham....”

“THAT’S NOT SO, “ was the immediate reply.

Well, I KNEW it was so, having delved into the lives of the half brothers through my interest in old “Cap” Graham, the Miami wheeler-dealer who sired them. Phil was born, however in South Dakota, Bob on Miami.

My friend was a bright professional man, an innovator and a risk taker. But he did not know what he did not know.

This country is at the mercy of people just like that right now.

The Great Charles Dickens, in “Little Dorrit”, caused quite a row in Parliament when he set up these people in the Department of Circumlocution.

They were all specialists in HOW NOT TO DO IT. (Finding out how to do it would have put them out of business.) And none of them know what they do not know.

Sound familiar ?

Yo' Lyin Eyes ?

There is something very comforting about being convinced that it is okay to believe one’s own “Lyin’ Eyes” rather than some spastic knee-jerk scam from a jive Con.

There are a lot of them around, even teaching in gubmint schools and in academe.

This whole country has been hammered by a plethora of globaldygook for more than 16 years about the melting of the ice caps and subsequent inundation of Boston, New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego ALLEGEDLY attested to by “30,00 scientists” (some without a degree) whom no one can find or identify now that the ice caps are growing.

A young "college man" of 42 started to “uncover” something a CIA director had allegedly done; speechifying to me, but he did not know that the man he was about to “nail” served for only an event-less nine months more than 34 years ago. Whe HE was eight.

The worst disease our society—--our whole COMMUNITY, to use a revered term----is the bold pronunciamento with authority of something that is not true, is without foundation or reason, and the sheeplike acceptance of it and subsequent dissemination of it as “fact” by a lazy, whorish communication elite....the DriveBy Media.

Veritable fountains of WISDOM hold sway over us , who do not even BELIEVE in anything that happened before 1968----and would be shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, to have to admit that it is Historical Fact that John Fitzgerald Kennedy sent the first 35,000 U.S. men into VietNam combat.

Well, I am sick of it.

As annoying as it may be...as offensive as it appears to be, I will begin to isolate and bring to the attention of this page a succession of these travesties, for as long as I can.

The first one is that our president was never enrolled in an educational institution as “Barrack H. Obama” until he matriculated at Columbia University. All the records that I have been able to pry lose have him listed as “Barry Soetoro.”

Did you read that in your local fish wrapper?

Stay tuned.

Nocturnal Visitations

Visitations and bad dreams, escalating into nightmares are plaguing me, although I haven’t eaten any Thomas de Quincey opium, or consumed a Doctor Jekyll potion in 34 years, now.

They always begin the same way..with my grandmother, “Mur-Mur” opening her illustrated volume of Bullfinch’s Mythology . Or the classical History of Athens.

“Here”, Charlot Miller Allen announces in her rich contralto that she cultivated by smoking Murad Turkish cigarets, “ is Prometheus !”

When I looked at the illustration of the “Titan” it was a Michael Ramirez cartoon of a sad Ol’ Uncle Sam, dressed in Old Glory uniform, chained to Washington’s monument, with his liver being eaten by flying Congressmen...The liver regenerates and the carrion feed on.....

WHAM ! I wake up.... and am really afraid to go back to sleep, so I run to the computer, go to Wickipedia and check my memory of Prometheus. This is worse than the nightmare. Prometheus really COULD do anything. He stole fire from Zeus / Jupiter, the Chief God of the Athenians and gave it to mortals. But he was subverted and chained by Zeus, angry with Envy. ENVY...

My eyes faded and back on my pillow, I dropped off.

Only to be confronted by Mur-Mur again, this time with her classical history tome. She opened it languidly and pointed to ANOTHER frightful Mikey Ramirez cartoon. I shrieked, and could not hear myself.

It was Uncle Sam in his Stars and Stripes garb again. He had a coon-hunter’s long-john six cell flashlight in his hand, wandering around the Mall in D.C., gazing at the capitol dome. The sun shines brightly at its zenith.

My grandmother asked, “ This is Diogenes, at the center of Western Civilization. Do you want me to read the words in the Balloon over his head ?

“It says, ‘I been searching around here a long time. These are the last of my batteries, and my light is almost out, and I can’t find ary- one !”

In a cold sweat, I woke up again. I didn’t have to check Wikipedia this time.

We all know Diogenes never found his “honest” man...And he wasn’t foolish enough to search Sodom-on-the-Potomac.

My "Tolerance" Wager

It was certainly informative to hear the president speak at Cairo Thursday.

I obsessed on just one statement that was more grievous than just misleading.

It was a Lie.

He told the crowd and everyone that heard him that "Islam has a long history of Tolerance..."

Well, I did not have to look it up, but I did, in the Free Online Dictionary. But..Dean E. Heber Rece first taught it to me in 1943 at Emory University.

The word "Islam" in Arabic translates to "SUBMISSION" in English. And, according to the Prohet that is on the pain of Death. That is how the "religion" got its jump-start in 622 A.D. Submit or...adios !

So to ingratiate himself with Muslims, our president would try to lie to us and to the whole world.

Well, if this is some kind of poker game, I will see his "Tolerance" and raise him, one suicide bombing mission (say, 9-11 frinstance ?) and two beheadings, three fatal stonings and a cloakroom full of Burkhas and a chorus of mutilated teen girls.

That;s my bet and I believe I win the pot.

How's Yo' MANDATE, Kiddo ?

Despite the speed of the world wide web, the blogosphere, all the TV news channels and thousands of pseudo reporters underfoot, everyone appears to be asleep to my way of seeing it.

Neil Cavuto gave 'em all a shot in the head, as Milton Berle used to say, when he pointed out Friday that the Congress, the Media (such as it IS) and even the Hip White House is following a seven month old "Mandate".

I mean, what has the Populi VOXED lately ?

On April 15, somewhere between a half million and three quarters of a million people turned out to protest runamok spending and stratospheric taxes in cities (San Antonio and Atlanta, markedly) and hamlets (Lima and Lake Azu) all over America.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet (II) Napolitano warned of "dangerouus terrorist right wing extremists" and MSNBC yammerheads made nasty homophobic jokes. The president pretended he was "unaware".

Then, just this week---last Tuesday, the citizens of California (the most "Hip" of ALL states and the "Garde" than which there IS no more "Avant" --voted hugely, 66% to 30% (Two to One) against four large tax increase and spending propositioins.

So, are MY ganglia more raw than the average American? Is Neil Cavuto an alarmist, right wing extremist BOO!-boy ???

Or has the paradigm of the popular mandate shifted...and is it still hurtling ?

We will probably find out for certain on July 4, Independence Day.

And, also...next September 11. Another painful day of memories for America-Lovers.

Do stay tuned for the mating call of the Mandate.

Vast, Indeed

Among the many sentences this struggling scrivener wishes he had come up with is this description of an itenerant farmhand by Stanley Taylor:

"His mind was a vast and hollow cavern with small crannies of resolute ignorance...."

We were re-introduced to this phenomenon recently with the re-emergence of Janeane Garofalo giving America a glimpse of her wasteland.

Content of her dribble-babble is less important than the fact that a cable television network obstensibly attempting a commercial presentation of discussion would allow her a michrophone-platform.

My exposure to this hag was on YouTube. Like millions of cable watchers, I prefer even the Mississippi simpleton Shep Smith to the cellar dwelling molerat Ms. Garofalo was visiting.

What baffles people who think like me---indeed, people who THINK at at all, is how the ailing, failing media (and NBC eminently qualifies), continues to grimly clutch and cling to these suicidal practices.

Maybe like the people they hustle, they look forward to a "stimulus" or "bailout" from the new Socialist-collectivist theroriticians in Washington. It beats thinking and working, they opine.

But... wouldn't that be morphing Socialism into Fascism, just like Jonah Goldberg of the LATimes predicted, in his bestseller "LIBERAL FASCISM" ?

That's the only way these helium heads will get another gig, right ?

Is the Law the Law ?

Frequently, posting here, it has been stressed that Islam is more correctly defined as a SYSTEM than as a "religion".

New and scary evidence erupts that this fact will sneak up and gnash---if not, indeed, CRUSH---some clueless, nice people in the very near future.

"It" can happen in the USA, you know. Look around.

Over in Pakistan, a very articulate and literate member of the "moderate" muslims being appeased by the new Pakistani Regime, on Saturday, Apeil 18, announced to the Appeasers and to the World, that Sharia Law will not allow him to "lay down or relinquish" his guns or those of his Taliban cohorts, no matter what Islamabad says.

Now what this means, my children, is that when the Hope and Change administration makes nice with the so-called "moderste Muslims" in the United States, the Department of Homeland Security,(Janet II), will disarm all the EXTREMIST RADICAL demobbed military veterans, under emergency unconstitutional "regulations" while the "nice, moderate Muslims" invoke Sharia Religious Law to keep their AK-47 cache (s).

Thus, the SYSYEM, under guise of religion, trumps Constitutional guarantees WITH constitutional guarantees.

Hey !!! Was that Alice and the Red Queen I just saw on stage ?

A Vote For the Green Death & Kicking "A"

For some time now, I have suspected that the PeeCee virus and state socialism are cut from the same cloth.

An encroaching choking globbby fog of Nannyistic cold shoulder and tin ear to natural giggles, chuckles and simple sense of humor has accompanied the trend.

Everyone knows fascists, communists and similar doctrinaire totalitarian types are humorless.

As, a matter of fact, very serious historians believe the anti-statist jokes in Spain, Italy, the Soviet Union and East Germany to have been as important as western efforts in dismantling the dictators' yokes and chains.

Now we have, in the American state of Taxachuesetts, a prime example of the death dealing unsmiling joykillers of the stupidity so unaware of its own unlovliness.

A wittyu young man coaching a kiddies' soccer team of six-and-seven-year-olds in Quincy, nicknamed his charges The Green Death and, in an email to the parents, enthused that he expected them to consistently "KICK ASS!"

For that, he was forced to resign as coach of the Kinder Kickers.

Somewhere the ghost of Mark Twain, who lived his last days in New England, is sobbing...if not blubberiung.

A society that has lost its ability to relax and smile is already in the throes of death.

Old Media Flunked Math

They do not teach math in journalism schools...

If we take the 2008 election results, 53% of the adults agree with and believe in the mainstream media, the alphabet networks, Time and Newsweek.

Thirteen percent of the voters are black dependents on the Marxian Plantation, and half of them have no money at all. So, we subtract 7 from 53 and got 46 %. Then, we face facts that half the legal Hispanic population has no money, and are illiterate in English, so we subtract another 6% from 46 and get 40%.

Of that 40%, probably 10% were teens and near-teens who do not read ANYTHING but the labels on hip-hop CDs.

Now we are down to 30%.

Newspapers cannot survive with just three out of ten people buying the rags...and so there goes the Audit Bueau of Circulation rating and the advertising and the Sunday paper sells for $5 in a losing deal.

If the media bigwigs who have bashed Bush since 2003, had just "balanced" their approach to at least RECOGNIZE a solid 46% of the potential readership, they would not be dying.

But they're dead because they failed math.

I want to live long enough to see what a world without TIME, Newsweek, the New Yorker and the other socialist rags will be like.

When hatred of entrepreneurs, small businessmen, and gritty, empty envy of the successful, driven man and woman is gone or at least muted...TRUTH will stagger naked to the Dais and receive the Sceptre.

A Snob

It is a terrible admission.

When I began reading a polemic screed that began in a way that promised it would agree with ALL my prejudices, and came across the word "fosted" obviously meant to be "foisted", I just deleted it.

When I read the lead paragraph in an AssPress Sports story that announced Phil Mickelson had "blown his largest-ever lead" (when I saw him leading by eight in Atlanta the year he first won the Masters), I deleted it without going on.

When I heard a screamer on cable TV claiming Israeli aggression in Gaza, when I had SAVED five years of 6,000 enumerated Gaza-based rocket assaults on Siderot (where I have a real, live Israeli friend who emails me) I clicked the remote to the TRU channel.

When I got a cassette tape that mislocated three Alaska population centers, and mispronounced the names of Russian-Aleut historical figures, I sent it back.

The world is---more amd more---the victim of poorly informed, partially educated, narcissistic people hell-bent on bending our mnds.

This behavior was a tipoff, a hallmark you might say, of falsification by journalists who celebrated Mussolini's fascism and Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party (NAZI) in the 1930's and Nicky Lenin's Bolshevik communism in 1917.

It is subtle, feckless, ignorant and clumsy in the beginning. But once you accept and make way for the small lie, the eager overkill, the decoration, you give it growth and before you can regroup, numbness spreads and the Foggy Lie is accepted as "The Way"...Like in Chicago.

So, about spelling, about grammar, and certainly, about facts, I plead guilty.

I am a Snob

A Very Bad Year: 1957

They just don’t make years like 1957 any more.

It's lodged prominently because I left the daily newspaper / wire service whirlwind and opted for magazine writing.

But some other stuff happened that year:

The Russian Soviets crushed the Hungarian Freedom Uprising, and publicly lynched the student leaders.

Israeli, French and British troops fought on the same side in the Suez War to stop the Nasser / Naguib grab by Egypt of the "international" waterway.

(The U.S.A.’s Secretary Of State, John Foster Dulles just admonished everyone for being like “naughty children”. A huge turning point squished...muffled.)

And Soviet Russia's German rocket scientists beat the U.S.A.’s German (Werner von Braun) into outer space with the “Sputnik” metal basketball.

All very exciting stuff. I am surprised no one talks about all that at all any more, because all across this Earth of ours, all the America haters of the day were celebrating the demise of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.

And this was compoundedly strange because it was about this time that Kruschev deep-sixed the Stalin myth. And, stories were being VERIFIED about Siberian concentration camp slaughter and torture.

Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn were putting together indictments of the Gulag. Piecemeal revelation of the hitherto cemented-by-Fear Potemkin nation was in silent progress.

The international communications conspiracy of silence would not begin to crumble until after Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel prize (in 1970) and all three volumes of the Gulag Archipelago were available everywhere and he was exiled by the hapless Kremlin.

It was 42 years after Sputnik, and 20 years after the World heard Solzhenitsyn’s historical account of mass murder, torture and atrocity before the Evil Ghost died at the fall of the wall at the Brandenburg gate.

In the meantime, millions of America-haters, and even one American president announced the decline and fall of the United States. Jimmy Carter bemoaned what he christened a fatal desuetude...a “malaise” dooming the nation!

How many “recessions” have we had in the United States since the Fabulous Fifties? One in Eisenhower’s last years, one hidden by Vietnam; one in Tricky Dick’s watch, all of Carters four years, early in Reagan’s time, blunted by tax cuts; another for Bush 41, and another as Clinton faded. Now we have the Bush low point.

But, the machine is still laboring away, albeit missing a beat or so.

But all those people who are applauding the trouble in the USA are echoing one another from their respective toilet bowls.

The “invisible hand” of the market is driving its dagger deep into the gross economic and totalitarian plans of Red Hugo Chavez and Iran’s I’m-a-Dinner-Jacket blowhard.

I...WE... have seen much worse. I was around and VERY alert when the whole world went to Hell and America was “through” in 1957.

Fifty two years ago.

Where is Sam ?

Other than all the Uhs and Ums and y’knows and word searches, the president-elect’s news conferences are as exciting as watching paint dry.

He obviously has a list of attending reporters he is going to call on. They, obviously, have been alerted. Sooooooo...

Why the room full of newspaper people? Why not just send the ones who get the face time and one extra pool man for the wore services and keep it cozy?

It’s the old Ben Hecht-Charlie MacArthur “Front Page” coming out in me. I used to cover the state Capitol when Georgia had two...no, THREE... governors, 52 years ago. I followed Atlanta mayors like Ivan Allen, Jr., into angry student mobs. I scooped the wire services on tornado deaths by 45 minutes from my assistant state editor’s desk.

But, I was watching his “briefing” and I wondered:

Where is Sam Donaldson when we need him ? Man, he could stir things up, tormenting presidents like no other newshawk in history.

There was a post online from a Chicago (hometown ??) Sun-Times reporter predicting an era of Lap Dog journalism. She was really shrill about it. As if to threaten she might roil the waters.

Stay tuned. Somebody will. They will catch Hell when they do.

But it’s inevitable that some unruly wretch will refuse to worship.

Have a Thoughtful Christmas

“O grandfather, how old is Christmas ?”
Her eyes were bright and dark blue at once,
A Wonder as well as a wonderer.

How should I answer ?
For the longing for forgiveness was always there
Wasn’t it?
No one gave it worth or voice in the Maelstrom
Of Creation and its early aftermath.
And little was known of forbearance or redemption for Aeons, even.

Not even when the Macabees won righteous Way
Over pagans and repristinated a Temple.
For Vengence ruled all struggle and all men all those years.

And then, the very Essence of Forgiveness came, as a Child
To flesh out the bones that never knew a pardon or an unencumbered Death.

So was that Christmas just two thousand of our “years” ago ?
Or have we celebrated Hope and Love without account ?
And do these years of lying to our best efforts fade
In misplacement to the Winter solstice?

How can I tell her that it limps on Mammon’s fuel ?
She’s waiting. So I say:

“Your Christmas is as young as your delight in giving...Today.
“And it is Timeless as your longing for a love...and peace...and your rebirth...”

Habitual Grateful Hearts

So, along comes the second of Thanksgiving pieces---This one, inspired by real people who live their grateful Hearts.

Live into your eighties and you will discover there is an excess of baggage and garbage slung at the young.

That's why every “Older” generation loses contact with its offspring, in most cases, however temporarily or unnecessarily.

I know I am not the Archimedes, or the Columbus or the Newton in this deal...the first to Discover, that is. But I lay claim to being in a shriveling minority.

What separates the successful enthusiast from the unsuccessful, but doggedly determined One with a good Plan is...

Gratitude.

If you think I mean some militant ritual genuflection to Bright or Dark invisible powers, you are wrong.

I sent out an announcement of a Heavenly Celestial Display Sunday night or the Crescent moon and two plants (Venus and Jupiter) in near-collision type "conjunction".

One beautiful Lady out west; Lea Archer, immediately replied as soon as she had run outside from her keyboard to see the delight. Another important friend, Dr. Charles Hjerpe also thanked me. Like me, hr had never seen Jupiter "bare-eyed" before.

I wrote Lea that I very humbly believed the unbidden, joyful free expression of Gratitude, and the delicious personal gift to ones self of a grateful heart “is transcendent, and probably just a hair’s breadth below Immortality itself, in the total scheme or things...”

I pass this on to those of you who still have some children handy you may infect with the idea.

My Red Headed Goddaughter, Betty Taylor is my favorite template for Gratitude and her adult sons and nephews reflect it. Lucky men.

It wont work on those over 10, inoculated with the ME-ness, of acquisition and greed without right reason. Indeed, after age 12, the lack of the habit of gratitude must be repaired by purchase of it with boundless sin and sorrow.

And...you will probably forget this.

Gratitude and Thanksgiving

There have been a lot of souls in my life that have had more to do with sculpturing my concept of Gratitude than all the poetry and speechifying that surround Thanksgiving season.

Some, still hanging around, will read this.

One quote that hammered me into a grown-up type person was my mother, Dottee’s admonition : “Be yourself !”

Later, my bride, Betts, whom I met when she was 15 and married when she was 17, famously stated: “Wht is....IS !”

My granddaddy, Victor Allen advised: “Don’t kid yourself...especially about yourself....”

Ruth Blackmon, who dispensed sanity casually pointed out: “Humility is not bootlicking or being a doormat. It is living honestly to your best self knowledge.”

John Tucker told me: “Folks who try to make a big impression usually don’t.”

Jim Williams said: “If you think you know, then you don’t know...But if you KNOW you don’t know...why THEN, you KNOW !”

And Don Lee said: “To remain sane and calm, you almost HAVE to assume—no matter the evidence—that no one means you ill or harm.”

So, this Season, my Gratitude is boundless. By myself, I am nothing. The Master of the Universe---Ribbono Sel Oylem--- sent all these Pilgrims into my life and me into theirs.

I am thankful and grateful that I have really “Got It”.

The Message, that is.

To be Teachable is to be Spiritual. To be Spiritual is to be Teachable.

Michael Crichton R.I.P

Surely, you have heard Michael Crichton finally expired , "battling" as the dumbasses in media say, cancer.

I never thought of him as just a writer, though he was an excellent, polished one.

To me, Crichton was a scientist. He wasn't "just a medical doctor". He worked in the Salk Institute, and did serious research in anthropology, paleontology and immunology. Also that new craze, Climatology.

He was the most eloquent, best prepared de-bunker of the religion of man-made "global warming".

Sure, he was a great director, creator and producer of "film" successes (ER, Jurassic Park, Twister to name just three) but he was a marvelous "Renaaissance Man.

At six feet eight inches, he was somewhat of a "Lurch" despite his handsomeness. He was married five times.

My favorite Crichton story is a true one from his days as a Harvard undergraduate. He believed that a certain professor was sandbagging him with unfair, depressed grades out of some personal pique.

He went to another professor--a close friend and confidante--and unveiled a plan by which he would unmask his tormentor.

Crichton found a "suitable" essay by George Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm author) and copied it on his typewriter and turned it in. This was in about 1964.

The pompous prof gave Crichton a B-minus for the work, adding superfluous critical notes.

GOTCHA !

In front of a class and some instructors, Crichton confessed his plagiarism...After he had graduated Summa cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

He and his "baby" brother co-authored under the name "Michael Douglas". He also had nom de plumes cribbed from the names of a famous giant and a dwarf.


Just as an after stroke, it should be noted that immediately following his baccalaureate, Michael Crighton was made a "fellow" and was called to lecture in Anthropology at Cambridge University in England.

He wrote the best "How To" book I have ever seen on programming either AppleII or IBM / PC computers.

If you've missed reading him and getting to know his mind, get cracking! NOW !

Lowest, Worst Journalism is at CNN

When I got my first newspaper job, I was told the story of John Peter Zenger, who, long before there was a United States, refused to print lies and refused to twist facts. He was jailed by King George III.

Zenger and his attorney Andrew Hamilton (no kin to Alex) set the standard for freedom of speech and the press. AND they lay foundation for the First amendment in the Bill Of Rights.

As I compose this, just minutes ago, I saw an interview by a person who climed his name was "Griffin" with Governor Sarah Palin.

He asked her what she had to say about a renowned Conservative, writing in National Review (The Flagship of the "Right").

He told her thje writer could not decide whether she was stupid, poorly informed, dishonest and corrupt or...

Here she interrupted him and asked "Who wrote that ?"

"Well, they...uh...they..."

"Who wrote that?" Palin rerpeated. "I would like to talk personally with them."

Griffin said he didn't know, didn;t have the name of the author, but he demanded her reaction... She gave it in a kind, softly voice, dripping with pity: disbelief, some concern "if what you say is true".

But it turns out that Byron York, who SOMETINES writes for NR did not write the quote in NR. He wrote in a post on the internetg, and what he was doin when he used those words was saying that if one believed everything that had been written by reporters for AssPress, the four big left wing dailies, one would be led to believe:"b;ahblahb;ahblahbla..."

So, CNN aired a torturously twisted-backwards quote whose author they could not identify, gave a source that never offered the words in ANY form, and tried to play "GOTCHA" with them.

Now, millions and millions of people have been leaving the old three alphabet networks and clicking their remotes to cable. You can get the figures at DRUDGE or the NIELSEN site.

And they get, not just garbage, but manipulated, deliberate Lies.

Is this a preview of the "Fairnedd Doctrine" that RTeagan ridded us of ??

As Sam Goldwyn famously said:

"You should just include ME OUT..."

Bureaucrats....The Plague Quickens

Gilbert Keith Chesterton on bureaucrats:

"They fight by shuffling papers.

"Have bright, dead, alien eyes.

"They look at our labor and laughter

"As a Tired Man looks at flies..."

A nice creative articulate lady named Jessica Hughes was minding her own business this week when her cell phone interrupted her thoughts.

"Hello", said the bright voice of a young lady, Are you a supporter of Barack Obama?"

"No," Jessica said. Silence.

"Well, why not ?" the voice sounded different to Jessica. So, she replied, "Because he voted four times in his political career to let many infants die unnecessarily..."

"Well," the voice said, "I am a volunteer for Obama in Texarkana and we..."

"Pardon me," Jessica interrupted, "You should find something better to do with your time !"

And, she hung up her cell phone.

Then, Jessica was visited by two Secret Service agents who told her they were investigating a "death threat" she had made against Barrack Obama. They said the Texaekana volunteer told them Jessica said that "your candidate will end up dead on a hospital floor."

"That is not true, Jessica told them. She enlisted her husband as witness, and asked who made the coimplaint.

(This was all taking place on the Hughes front porch.

The agents ignored her question began to ask about her "thought patterns" and her "feelings".

She clammed up. She asked for their badge numbers. They refused. Jessica asked for cards. The female agent said: "You gettin' no card."

The male agent gave her his card and said: "If there is a problem, you can contact Houston."

She says she also will contact Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, and probably the Center for Law and Justice and Judicial Watch.

Later, on a conservative thread, several postings wondered about the politics of the Secret Service agents. Were they "leftists"? What was the agenda when they attempoted to police Jessuca Hughes' thought-and-feeling processes ?

I can solve that one. Just as the Great G.K.Chesterton did.

They're not "left" or "right"...They're bureaucrats.

Like the men who dressed in plain clothes and crushed Jew skulls and gutted others on Kristallnact in Germany, and who directed millions into the gas chambers and ovens of the camps. Nothing personal. Just policy.

Bureaucrats' only weapon is...intimidation. They curdle and melt like a salted slug without it.

But tyrants have built many empires with bureaucrats as "point men".

Stick around....Stay tuned. America at the tipping point. Some show !!!

<<---*--->>

(Jessica Hughes' Blog is: http://ywc.blogtownhall.com/)

Criminal Threats and Edits

It's just too delicious not to bite into again.

Although The Chosen One served on TWO boards of TWO community and school orgaizing and reform groups with bomb-thrower Bill Ayers in Chicago, the NYTimes and the AssPress call the relationship "tenuous".

Although Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn hosted political fundraising inttroductions for Barry OPbama in their home, Obambi says anti-American Ayers "was just a guy in thje 'hood.."

We are waiting with bated breath to hear the explanations of his sponsorship at Colimbia, and elsewhere in the world by the America-hating, jew-baiter Professor Khaled..or Khalid..or whatever.

Although the revered Washinton Post called the disgraced Franklin Raines an Obama advisor, he claims not, now. Raines helped drive Fammie Mae mortgage giant into BailoutsVille, and was fined millions for "accounting errors" and escaped prosecution.

The volume is being turned up on these "incidentals" as we post.

Leading crier..."Point-Zamboni" if you will...in trumpeting these morsels, which have been hitherto ricocheting around the blogosphere, is Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican veep nominee.

She will again be accused of being "shrill" and "strident" and "reckless".

Will she be threatened with criminal prosecution like the anti-Obama citizens of Missouri? Or the non-camopaign groups pursued by frothy-mouthed lawyers for daring to produce truth-based videos about the Democrat candidate's past?

Stay tuned here and to Druge and Real Clear. They are fearless.

Meanwhile, do you reckon the American people realize the difference between the Palin of the "Melting Biden" debate and the recorded-on-tape "pincushion Palin" of the Gibson and Couric appearances was....was....lost on the cutting room floor?

In other words, poisonous editing ???!!!

Validation & Vindication

Last year--in July of 2007--we republished here a story from the UK that established clinically the FACT that at least one in seven schizophrenic onsets were TRACEABLE to use of marijuana (cannabis sativa). Now, from researchers comes further damning evidence. The Japanese have known this for many years. Dr. Gabriel Nahas died before convincing the right people in the USA. I have known it since 1982. Every time another clinician gets it RIGHT, it will be noted here.

CANNABIS LINKED TO EARLY PSYCHOSIS ONSET

Wed Sep 10, 2008 3:04pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Researchers from Spain have found a strong and independent link between cannabis use and the onset of psychosis at a younger age. The association, they say, cannot be explained by chance, and is not related to gender or the use of other drugs. It is, however, related to the amount of cannabis used.

"The clinical importance of this finding is potentially high," Dr. Ana Gonzalez-Pinto from Santiago Apostol Hospital in Vitoria, and colleagues write in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, given that cannabis use is extremely prevalent among young people."

The researchers also report that "estimates of the attributable risk suggest that the use of cannabis accounts for about 10 percent of cases of psychosis."

The findings are based on 131 patients ages 15 to 65 years who needed inpatient care for a first psychotic episode during a 2-year period. The subjects were evaluated using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders, and clinical and demographic data were also collected.

The results showed a significant gradual reduction in the age at which psychosis began that correlated with an increased dependence on cannabis. Compared with nonusers, age at onset was reduced by 7, 8.5, and 12 years among users, abusers and dependents, respectively, the researchers report.

In further analysis, the effect of cannabis on age at onset "was not explained by the use of other drugs or by gender," they also note. The finding was similar in the youngest patients, suggesting that this effect was not due to chance.

These results "point to cannabis as a dangerous drug in young people at risk of developing psychosis," Gonzalez-Pinto and colleagues conclude.

SOURCE: Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, August 2008.

Feynman's Admonition ! Media, Heed !

There are some really great men whose lives and words affect us all forever and inform our existence in ways we never know and most of us pass on before we ever know their names.

One such man, whose name I came to revere was Richard Feynman who won the Nobel prize for Physics, worked on the Manhattan project (A-Bomb) but who most famously translated the abstruse and chaotic world of Quantum Mechanics and particle physics into plain language “suitable for college freshmen” as he was wont to say.

Despite being a celebrated “popularizer” of difficult subjects, he was a joyful fellow, a prankster, an accomplished percussionist, picker of locks and a monogamist who lost his bride to wasting illness while he was at Los Alamos.

From a marginally observant Jewish family in Far Rockaway, Queens, Feynman wanted to go to Columbia University, but that August successor to Alexander Hamilton’s King’s College had a restricted l “quota” for Jews in the late 1930's and early 40's, so he went to a struggling Massachusetts Institute of Technology and helped make that fine place famous.

At one time, Albert Einstein, who bad great affection for him, begged him to come back to Princeton, where he got his PhD in physics—to lecture at the Institute for Advanced Studies. He was ending a five year gig at Cornell at the time.

But he almost froze one night in Ithaca, NY trying to put sleet chains on his auto, and he promised the Heavens he would never be cold again. So, he took a position in Pasadena, at Cal Tech. There he dueled with his friend Murray Gell Mann. Murray once said Richard Feynman was “half genius and half buffoon”, but by the time they BOTH had brought many honors to CALTECH, Gell Mann revised: “I was wrong...Dick is 100% genius and 100% buffoon...”

Feynman’s videotapes, and editions of The Feynman Lectures have sold three million copies in English, one million copies in Russian and nearly 750 thousand in other languages. Nanotechnology and the discovery of the sixth Quark are due to Feynman’s thought and equations. And, much more.

All this is prelude to my offering you a quote from his last commencement address at Pasadena to all the young scientists:

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."

Darned B I G order...

I suggest all Journalism schoools adopt this admonition for graduating “media” professionals from this day on.

Not an unreasonable standard for THEM, either, is it ?

Mercy Now

In delirium, seeing and hearing things that were not there,
I screamed, It isn’t Fair !

A broken neck, the shattered vertebra collapsed,
Led to paralysis. I whined : not ME!!

And Anger and resentment followed me when I lost sight
For just a flicker of a cry
For Justice !

Ah, yes. When I was green, with no experience in Life,
I sought an equilibrium,
With rosy dawns to even out my dark tornadic fear.

That’s IT! Why it could come out even !
“It isn’t Fair, where’s Justice?” was my wail.

But all those times were my agnostic days...
I opt for Mercy now...

Closed System = Closed Minds

Convergence...

Things occasionally DO come together, and coalesce into a rational whole. Sometines the result is unsettling.

This week there was a query in which the writer was making painful efforts—a;; in vain—to draw some sort of parallel between the “religions” of Islam and Christianity.

His effort lays bare the reason why that particular exercise in Diversity Construction will be fruitless.

Islam is a System, NOT just a religion like Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism or Baha’i. And, it is a CLOSED Sstem.

Muslims all are part of an intricate, complicated structure of laws, educational strictures, rituals, traditional family rules and practices, and...yes, beliefs and a Faith, of course. And, within the system, there are internecine wars of murderous intensity over which sect of Islam descends from the True Caliph–which sect Allah smiles upon to inherit the palpable pre-Paradise World.

That was with, also is systemic and systematic.

And, then, there is AQIYYAH—the doctrine beloved of the Shi’ia and coveted by many Sunni, which allows any but the infidel non-Muslim to lie, misrepresent, swear falsely and perjure one’s self
with impunity in Allah’s name, for the good of Islam.

That is the way I understand it. All this becomes obvious and underscored as Muslim taxi drivers in St. Paul refuse to haul people with alcohol breaths. when girls absent themselves from school when they are denied head scarves, when more and more, Sharia law sneaks into small town city council meetings amid heated debate.

It becomes more and more difficult to see this whole system as simply a religion, does it not?

As I was answering my correspondent in this vein, a bulletin from Gaithersburg, Maryland caught my attention. A high council of construction engineers, metallurgists, disaster specialists and academics presented the DEFINITIVE explanation for the implosion and destruction of WTC-Seven on September 11, 2001.You can see the report here: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/4278874.html

You may not have noticed, but a strident, moiling group calling themselves “”“truthers””” have long advanced a conspiracy theory that this particular building, which housed some U.S. Government offices, was the site of an immense detonation of explosives that brought down the WTC.

Ms. Rosie O’ Donnell, allying herself with their cause without proffering any credentials from Carnegie Tech or Cornell, affirmed:

“Everybody knows fire won’t melt steel....” Or something to that effect. I may have the video somewhere...

Well, all the specifications are there, including temperatures, frangible exponents...all of it, including draftsmen’s art and animation as well as video. It’s available online. Just Google WTC-7 Explained.

But here is the point. Any and Every conspiracy theory is an impregnable system, as intricate as the mighty, 1300-year old system of Islam.

And every healing balm, every painstaking attempt to take the pain and death dealers out of the mix is doomed to fail.

Systems without ventilation, renewal and repristination are all durable unto themselves only.

The Big Hell-Low

You would think, wouldn’t you, that those inscrutable, immutable Control Freaks, the Chinese communists and their Red Army could impose law and order and successfully ordain that all American tourists would be returned to the bosoms of their terrorized Detroits, Miamis, D.C.’s and New Orleanses unscathed by Oriental hands.

But, one lone crazed 47 year old man stabbed three admirers of the 800 year old Drum Tower outside Beijing Saturday, 8-9-08, killing one. Teo others, one American and a Chinese guide were slashed.

Then the attacker leaped off the tower, 130 feet to his death.

And thereby casting a fecal stink over what Matt Drudge called “the Greatest Olympics Opening Ceremony in History...”

So, what I am getting at...asking, in fact, is:

Is there ANY security, available ? Any personal safety ? Anywhere ?!

One of my Gurus in the 1980's--- a psychologist named Sheldon Kopp-- rather famously put it this way:

“This is it. You cannot ‘hide’. Besides, there is nowhere to go. When you get ‘there’, you will still have ‘You’ and another ‘Here !’. And, anyway, safety, security and progress are all Chimeras—-mirages...”

There is a great deal of evidence to support this theme. Yea, even in the Old Testament, and the New Testament. All of History, of course.

Maybe we’ve been indoctrinated in a lottery-anchored materialism that leads us to believe in “luck” and possible physical Forever-ness.

But, as it has been written since Moses, Lot, Job, James, Peter and John, there is no Earthly Physical defense against Human Evil.

Not even by Mister Wu and the Chinese Red Army.

It Ain' Necessarily So...

A lovely, gentle and thoughtful email from a favorite correspondent nudged my memory toward one of the most brilliant insights a tutor ever entrusted me with, and it is so fragile that I hesitate to limn it now, for fear I may bruise it.

Viewed alongside the matrix of “Political Correctness” or the collateral fear of “Offending Others”, my guru’s dictum is startlingly instructive.

He said:

“Others cannot, REALLY ‘hurt your feelings’. Only YOU can hurt your OWN feelings by the way you consume and use--what you tell yourself ABOUT --- what they say or do.”

This is of course a more firm and basic locution than the singsong “Sticks and Stones may break your bones” jingle, which no one ever really internalizes.

To liberate psyches, I used to–in my other life as Therapist–tell Pilgrims “If Joe or Sally calls you a paper clip, does that make you a paper clip ?” Or, I’d press on with: “Does anyone’s opinion trump a fact you have bought with your own pain?”

For there ARE a great many FlimFlam artists around who will always get some poor brain weary fellow’s fat wallet by saying: “I am your BETTER! Are you going to believe ME?..Or your lying eyes ?!!”

So it is with political correctness and offending. If a man or a woman or even a youngster in school, does not perform assigned tasks efficiently and / or profitably, then we cheat them when we do not correct them, restart them or...*gasp*..replace them after repetition of failure.

The corrected person knows, at some level, whether a judgement by another is a canard or an opportunity to learn.

Well, if one cannot learn at all, that is another galactic sphere of reality, after all.

But the point of it all, is that the way a person “factors” the words one hears, the deeds one does and sees, is subjective, personal and sculpturing of personality.

If you tell me a behavior is “creepy” I WILL react to what you say. But I am not required to go into a depression or self destruct or hate you. I am required to silhouette your judgement against my own—AND my experience. You could be wrong.

I may not BE a paperclip.

It is very liberating, to the same extent that “political correctness” is restrictive, muzzling and basically cowardly. It causes more hatred than it ameliorates.

Just think....All those scornful schoolyard jibes, teachers’ hurtful stereotypes, kinfolks' put-downs and the wild gossip that your “clique” and those “others” spewed...all of it was so shattering and tumultuous. But mostly garbage.

That email said we should completely forgive those who have hurt our feelings.

I suggest we forgive OURSELVES for what we said and did to ourselves about what THEY said and did !

That’ll teach us !

A Thousand Phantom Summers

Here it is July the Fourth and Summer almost half gone and I haven’t caught my first frog !

After 83 summers, (79 of which I cam remember something about) and because I can remember so many things about so many summers, it seems like I’ve lived a thousand.

And like all older people I am going to say it—and say it in a new way: “We just don’t MAKE summers like we used to make ‘em !”

Because, we DO make them. God PROVIDES them, but we fashion their flavor by the way we run out and away through the dew and return in the dust, searching for shade, a breeze, a spring of natural water.

The first summer I can remember well was in New Jersey on the tar and pebble roof of an apartment house, and walking to Caruso’s pasta restaurant several blocks away...AND going to Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus in Manhattan at Madison Square Garden...AND getting a neat little sour-smelling whip that I used to terrorize another boy in the apartment building.

I’m sure the NEXT summer was the first one I remember in Georgia, the aroma of gardenias in bloom under the window of the room where my most favorite person on earth, my Mur-Mur grandmother, lay dying.

They wouldn’t let me go to the funeral, and my young Uncle Royce made me a sprinkler truck from a grapefruit juice can. I can SEE myself in that backyard drive, forlornly watching them hide Mur-Mur in the hearse and go away. I can smell my sun hot sandals, feel the tears.

Next, the summer of fishing for the first time from the red clay bank of a pond that smelled like nothing I had ever smelled before...last year’s leaves, damp moss, scummy green water and “Turtle” Briard, who gave me Kipling’s Just So Stories, trying to help me get a wriggling catfish off my hook, and both of us getting finned, and he made my puncture bleed more and his puncture swelled up badly and mine didn’t. I can smell it all, close and funky, now.

The first summer I had to wait for, imprisoned in Miss Daisy Shadburn’s classroom, was so delicious that all I remember is that it actually ARRIVED. Miss Daisy, who also taught my three sons in first grade, said she could not keep me quiet. This accounts for the fact my handwriting has always been poor, despite the fact Miss Johnson spanked me quiet the next year.

That post-first-grade summer, James Tapp, Martin Lawler and the Puckett boys and I discovered the Tarzan Woods behind my grandfather’s house—--some hardwoods canopied by Kudzu vine so that very little sunlight got in.

We invaded a small branch running through the jungle and captured what we called “spring lizards” until we were in our 30s and using them for troutbait. They were several species of salamanders and newts, some with spidery “ears” that hypnotized us.

We invented a game we had no name for that involved taking prisoners and four or five years later, as Boy Scouts, I remember we thought “Capture the Flag” was too restricted by rules...almost sissy.

In May, corralled in that old dusty red brick school house and rock infested game area where we played dodge-ball in the elementary grades, you could smell June coming through the windows in the breezy midafternoons.

Marbles were just interim and schoolyard competition, because the woods, willow-cushioned creeks and small ponds beckoned.

As did baseball by the time we were in the fourth grade. We never saw a softball until I was 16 or more. There was a semipro team in our town, and the great prize was a big league bat splintered at the handle. We all know how to cut a wedge, glue and screw the splint back, tape it with friction tape and wear them out.

All Louisville Sluggers, they had strange big leaguers’ names like Pepper Martin, Jim Bottomley, Joe Cronin, Paul Waner and, mirable ! George Herman (Babe) Ruth. This was in the middle of the depression, 1935 when I was ten.

I remember an uncle sold bats made in Athens, Georgia, called “Bat-Rite” and one of the semipro players, Red McSwain, shattered as many as my uncle would give him. They had no “hard’ face.


I don’t think the Athens people understood about “curing” ash and large willow.

The smells are haunting. I remember them, but only experience the nostalgic jolt when I an in the North Georgia and North Carolina mountains, looking for Lady’s Slippers in the coves, marveling at the huge tulip popla r trees, or stumbling along the stony banks of Fodders Creek or the Soque, or the head of the Nantahala in the Whitebark Bottoms, under Chunky Gal’s shadow.

Then, and there, I can sense the presence of lacewings, dragonflies and waterbugs crazily etching the still slack pools...though I can no longer see them. The smell of mountain water changes, markedly, from the swift current’s rush to the still, almost stagnant pools ringed with multicolored moss. The smell also changes from April to late June and July, and again, in Autumn, when the trout spawn.

First frost on the Tallulah or upper Chattahoochee is a distinct, unforgettable aroma. Undescribable and not explicable, even for this connoisseur and sometimes wordsmith.

Smells are what shatter the summers into thousands, I believe.

The odor of the plastic-cloth first baseman’s mitt I bought at Sam Singer’s dime store with money I earned digging “Wriggler” earthworms near our swimming hole on Tarzan Branch and collecing spring lizards that the older Puckett men used for bait.

I preferred the mitt to a nice leather glove, and I was exactly 51 years old and doing some soul excavation before I realized I loved that ten-cent-store mitt more because it was MINE, and that it was the first thing that was not a boon of my family’s fawning generosity. That cheap mitt probably saved me from a shroud of privileged “Liberal” soul-death. The point is, it smelled horrible when it got hot in the sun.

Later, with a professional level glove from A.G. Spalding’s in Atlanta, I learned to lose my dreams in the aroma of neat’s foot oil and genuine calfskin along with the mythical horsehide essence of the new baseball.

And, though my extended family owned the semipro baseball team, the only new baseball I ever owned in my life, I got one memorable summer for selling Saturday Evening Post magazines. On Saturday.

The magazine man’s name was Ed Winship, and he had a 1934 Ford Coupe. I can see (and smell) that baseball now, in a box lying in the back space, behind the seats. Unlike the standard “big-league” baseballs used by the semipro team, Reach, Rawlings or Spalding, with stylized red stitching–-this Saturday Evening Post ball had blue-green and red-orange stitching.

I thought that was really neat and distinctive and I busted my chops, legs, and back selling magazines, got the ball, and never wavered in my dedication to it when the stitching colors faded in the first foggy dew, the cover split when Franais Lawler orbited it onto Wynelle Shadburn;’s porch, or when it went lopsided like an ancient Irish potato.

I just taped it up and remained staunchly loyal to it. I couldn’t SMELL it any more through the friction tape, but I loved it because I earned it.

I like to believe I earned all the smells and textures of all my summers. They will always be more than phantom to me.

No Accidental Successes

An erstwhile Texas drinking buddy who once helped me pack a sedan with 18 cases of Coors to take home to Jekyll Island from Denton, north of Fort Worth, sent me an internet puzzle last week.

He is obviosly still sipping Coors. Either that or he forgot I am blind. The puzzle involved maneuvering similar to Chinese Checkers, of which my late, Beloved Princess Betts was the undisputed intergalactic champion.

When I reminded my sons of this, they turned to the task of defeating the puzzle in less than two minutes, which was supposed to be the “second grade test” for Asian children.

Well, hell yes. They learn the matbles-jumping game before they can walk, I thought.

It took us all day to do it in four minutes. Actually, that is not fair. One of us obsessively cleared it up in less tan Five minutes the first time. That was NOT me.

During all this nostalgic replication of hours, days, years of defeat at the feet of our Number One Lady, one of the fine men confessed:

“I know solving it wasjust a great accident...”

And I pounced on him. When I shared my “pounce” with the Golf Editor of ESPN.com, Jason Sobel, he said:

“Bill ! You save and use that good prose. You tryin to make me jobless ?”

So, I pass it on to readers of the blog. Might be worth saving:

"In the well-intentioned or Spiritually fueled life, there are no coincidences and no accidental successes.

"That is why Golf at its best is so Spiritually pure. A hole-in-one or a double eagle is exactly what one most desires, and is attempting to accomplish, and sometimes deserves !"..

In the Midwest, a very close friend complained that if she had a perfectly tuned, equipped auto, made no errors and was crashed into by an idiot THAT would be no “successful” accident.

But that is a purely pessimistic, plan-plus-doom approach.

What I have in mind is the fruit of concerted effort, like tying on an Adams bi-visible, casting it past riffles until your arms are leaden and retrieving s20-inch, four pound rainbow from a pool that had heretofore produced only a pounder in the odd year.

Or walking into a fraternity house sock hop and meeting the girl you’ll spend 57 years with, after she tries to teach you Chinese Checkers.

There just ARE no “accidental” successes.....



.

Heroic ? Or..Criminal ?

I am not convinced that the majority of even those franchised to elect governments in the West are well informed enough to save the civilization they now enjoy.

Thus, it is true that we get the governance we “deserve”, huh?

Now, WAIT a minute...in case you think I am dealing in an elitism I abhor, I have a particular dilemma in mind.

There are three outworn polemical artifices that come to mind:

(1). Free speech does NOT extend to the person crying “FIRE!” in a crowded theater.

(2). Chicken Little was an unwitting idiot for warning the barnyard the “Sky is Falling” when a flax seed struck her comb.

(3). The venal shopkeeper who amplified and puffed up the dangerous invasion of snakes, rats, wolves, panthers...whatever...to increase his sales of traps, weapons, ammunition and boots.

The latter is venal...corrupt...criminal, actually.

But are we equipped to tell the difference in our empirical (dare I use the word “environmental”)
situation, as regards which of the three listed mechanisms are at work on our “will-to-action” these days?

I sincerely doubt it.

We are pummeled and pelted with exhortations to:

“Tax every fart and exhalation of CO2 gas !

“Drill offshore and in Anwar Now!”

“Punish people who eat beef as we do smokers”

“Cripple the Big Carbon Footprint Makers”

“Boycott Gasoline manufacturers”

And on and on...

But where is the thoughtful, objective, humane compass? All the hot button shrieking transfers money or power from the productive, wealth generators to an arid bureaucratic Gobi-Sahara.

( Right here, I can hear the echo of a 21st century “skool poison” asking “WTH is a Gobi-Sahara???” and I die a little.)

And, THAT is the point.

The people who will make the ballot choices that will limit and expand governance just are not equipped with historical information or empirical wisdom to make those choices in their own best self interest—or the best interests of civilization.

The soft fascism of the gangsta media and the Marxist political educators has delivered an erstwhile free people into the dungeons of the Thieving Shopkeeper, Chicken Little, and the Manic Fire-Screamer in the Theater.

Vigilance is always Heroic. But venal fearmongering is criminal.

Is it too late?

A Kinda Hypothetical

Lets’s say my grandson reports he is accosted at school by an older fellow who tries to sell him hard drugs, threatens him, extorts money from him and then destroys his textbooks and other possessions.

Now, with my stellar academic background, I am involved in a political campaign as principal candidate for school superintendent.

Will it be unwise for me to “stick up” for my grandson, encourage his parents to take their complaint to the school’s bureaucracy ? Or, failing to receive proper hearing or favorable action from that bureaucracy, to take civil legal action against the school, and lodge criminal complaint against the bully with juvenile authorities ?

Should I just decide to withhold my emotional support, shirk family involvement and counsel that we should “talk” to the miscreant ? Without pre-conditions, you understand. Should I opt for a “dialogue” instead of firm response?

And, whose good and great admiration and trust am I seeking here ? Whose best self interest should I serve ?

Would it be “pandering”, or “weasel-wise” to put aside confrontation in favor of...maybe, just MAYBE...salvaging the beginning of a Thuggish career ?

I am lost in these hypothetical moral and ethical complexities when I hear and read the news these days...