What does it say about me that my television viewing is limited to MSNBC, CNN, FauxNews and Family Guy? That’s it. Did you know you can program a Comcast remote to cycle between 2 or more channels with the “Fav” button? Oh yeah… On primary nights my ADD goes off the Ritalin and on the crack pipe as I lay mesmerized by the “objective” reporting of Keith Olberman, Bill-O, Pat Buchanan, Chris Matthews, Wolf, and representing the Nazi’s, Sean Hannity . And I don’t know who I find more compelling, Olberman ranting a “Special Comment” or Stewie Griffin inquiring about Brian’s book. You tell me.
Author: fifteenkey (Page 50 of 95)
CNNMoney.com reports the average obligated consumer will spend nearly $123 on today’s festivities, and when all the chocolates, flowers and pork rinds are counted, Americans will have contributed $17B towards averting a recession. That is marketing.
“Golf is a game you can’t win” said Larry plainly. Larry’s 73, and while I’ll likely never see the man again, it was a fun three hours of golf with him, his son Mike, and my dad. Before the round, Dad asked if I wanted to hit some balls over at the practice tee… “Nah, I’ll be fine,” I said with a smile, even though it had been over a year since I’d touched a club. The curious thing was Dad’s sincerity. That was contrast to the last time we played the Baseline Golf Course when my desire to hit a few warm-up balls was met with angry objection. Dad’s neighbor, Dickie Greene was “up Maine” visiting family and brought his clubs over to Dad’s before he left in case we decided to play. Dick’s a great guy and I’m glad Dad has him as a friend.
On to the first tee… Dad’s always been competitive on the links, and we’ve had fun over the years trying to psych each other out. On occasion, the trash talk had resulted in some bruised egos, so I had no intention of kicking things off by reminding Dad of the left side body of water… After about 4 holes I was up 3 when Dad banged one on the green from about 160 yards and said, “Don’t let that put any pressure on you.” I wasn’t biting, but my shot fell short about 20 yards right. I chipped on and then watched a 12 footer lip out. I tapped in for a 4 and then watched the old man drain a 10 footer for par. Ouch.
The next hole was a short par 3, playing about 120 yards. Dad popped one up that landed about 20 yards from the green. I pushed my shot and it lofted to a grassy spot 30 yards to the right of the green. I chipped on and then turned to watch Dad top his ball and roll it into a sand trap. He has to get over a pretty steep lip of the trap so he took a healthy swing. When the sandstorm subsided, the Titleist was wedged right up in the top of the lip… Rut-Roh. I could sense Dad’s blood pressure medication was really going to earn it’s co-pay now. He stepped forward in the sand and took a half swing to pop the ball onto “the dancefloor.” Cool. I turned back at the sound of a thud and saw Dad face down, half in and half out of the trap. I think he was a little embarrassed and hastened his way onto his feet. I made sure he was OK and with no sarcasm said, “forget about it and focus on the putt.” He did and never let it get to him. We didn’t speak about the little mishap for a couple holes, but it lingered. Finally I couldn’t resist: “It looked like you got the first down.” Dad laughed. And smiled. It took him nearly all of his 74 years to mellow out, but he really has.
Larry is right. Golf is a game you can’t win, but when you’re out on a 74 degree day with your dad who matched the warmth in years, winning’s not the point.
With a post title stolen from Mick and Keith, I bring you lies. On Wednesday, I opened an email titled, “Military Deaths.” My friend’s comment was “Interesting!!!,” followed by a forwarded email introduced by slamming “The Jim Lehrer News Hour” as “Just one example of today’s biased press,” and noting the show is “partly funded by all of us who pay taxes.” Are you with me so far?
The introduction goes on to criticize Mr. Lehrer for doing “moments of silence” to honor American soldiers killed in Iraq because he never did so during “Clinton’s military operations.” In a second forwarded email came the “proof” titled “MILITARY DEATHS FOR TWENTY YEARS” that included “military fatalities” from 1980 to 2006. Yeah, it’s actually a 27 year span, but that’s not the lie, that’s just stupidity. The numbers suggested more American soldiers died under Clinton than Bush, by 13,417 to 9,016. Toward the end of the email, there was an invitation to confirm the statistics via a linked report. I accepted the invitation, read the report and discovered the numbers as reported are highly distorted. They contain “total fatalities” by any means… illness, accident, etc. “Hostile action” deaths during the Clinton years were actually 148, not the 13,417 bullshit slant put forth by the author. I think we’ve lost a few more than 148 under Dubya and Dick…
Finally, the piece of fiction; undoubtedly read and believed as fact by many red-state drones asked a couple questions that I’ll answer:
- “Why does the mainstream Print and TV Media never provide statistics like these?” Well, because they’re lies intended to lessen the horror over American Military deaths perpetuated by the Bush Administration, but you can probably find them on FauxNews.
- “Why do the mainstream media hate the war as much as they do?” Maybe because the war was unjustified, has turned much of the world against us, and was sold to the American public with lies just like yours.
We can expect much more of this creative writing coming out of undisclosed right wing locations over the coming months. The smear campaign they’ll wage against either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama will be furious. Oh, and there’s dirt under Senator McCain’s fingernails as well. I do have some hope that the Democats will rise above it, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Speaking of lies, have you ever wondered how historical events would have been reported by Fox?
Congratulations to the World Champion New York Giants. They kicked the Patriots ass.
In other news, Bill Belichick should be fired for his latest classless display of poor sportsmanship. He left his team on the field to lose while he ran off like a petulant Pee Wee. Disgraceful.
Later today there’s a football game of no real consequence. Sure, I’ll watch and root for the Patriots to make history, but the outcome will have little impact on the infant I hold watching all the highly-defined, fast moving colors. The contests on Tuesday will move our nation closer to November 4th when we’ll all decide whether we all wish to remain the crash test dummies of destructive Republican policy, or exit the highway to hell and reverse direction. The most important thing about Tuesday is that Democratic primary voters get it right and cast the affirmative for a candidate who can win in November and then bring people together to clean up the toxic and smoldering mess left us by the Bush Administration. Yeah, it’s a big one…
While oil prices have squeezed the American family by adding cost to nearly everything, our benefactors at Exxon-Mobil announced an all-time annual profit record of $40.61 billion. Yeah… $40,610,000,000.00
Moving on to war profiteering, Raytheon’s 4th-quarter profits shot up like a Patriot missile 63%. Isn’t it heartwarming that while poor American teenagers and Iraqi civilians are dying in Iraq, Raytheon is profiting.
Speaking of the “military-industrial complex,” the Republican grand-daughter of the Republican President who cautioned us about it, has endorsed Barack Obama. Quoting her Grandfather, she wrote: “As we peer into society’s future,” he said, we “must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”
Finally, there’s an effort by the Administration to provide criminal immunity to our large, corporate telecommunication corporations (Verizon, AT&T;, Comcact, et al) against any charges related to their helping George and Dick spy on you and me. In a “Special Comment” segment broadcast January 31st, Keith Olbermann rants on the issue and describes the actions of an AT&T; whistleblower:
Mark Klein is the AT&T; whistleblower who appeared on this newscast last November, who explained, in the placid, dull terms of your local neighborhood I-T desk, how he personally attached all of AT&T;’s circuits — everything carrying every phone call, every e-mail, every bit of web browsing — into a secure room…
…Room Number 641-A, at the Folsom Street facility in San Francisco — where it was all copied so the government could look at it.
Not some of it; not just the international part of it; certainly not just the stuff some truly patriotic and telepathic spy might be able to divine had been sent or spoken by or to a terrorist.
Everything.
Every time you looked at a naked picture, every time you bid on eBay, every time you phoned-in a donation to a Democrat.
“My thought was ‘George Orwell’s 1984,’” Mr. Klein told me, reflecting back, “and here I am, being forced to… connect the Big Brother machine.”
Here’s all of it:
They spy on you and me, then call us un-Patriotic when we challenge them. That is part of the “change” you’re hearing about and the next opportunity to support it is Tuesday. Go vote.
Oh… Pats 45-10.
No, not what the “right” accuses the “left” of professing, but my own efforts toward “living by talking around.” The “business problem” needing a solution is too much time interacting with technology including HDTV, the LeoTreo and this keyboard, and not enough with people. It’s not that I don’t have human contact. I’m not in my mother’s basement and I do spend the workweek with other bees. At home, usually within ten feet from me are my children, grandchildren and their friends. I often joke, “I don’t like people.” That’s not really true, but I’d rather abstain from the masses of uneducated, celebrity obsessed, McDonald’s munching drones our culture produces to vote with Republicans. For the minority not falling into that crass categorization, I’m there. I mean, I’d like to be there and I’d enjoy it. In fact, one of my StrengthsFinder Signature Themes is “Relator: People who are strong in the Relator theme enjoy close relationships with others.” Unfortunately, I also strongly relate to Seth Godin’s statement, “The web is like crack for someone with ADD, I’ll tell you that.”
It’s obvious people with social connections do better than “loners.” In business, a “network” is critical to success and even from a health perspective, there’s evidence people with more friends are healthier. I do try to establish social connections. Recently a line in Bob Lefsetz’s blog nailed it with a wink to Pete Townshend, “Can you see the real me? I’m trying so hard to reveal it. That’s why I write this shit. I crave attention.” The sad truth is blog built social connections are hidden behind a force field of electrons unless the blogger has the courage to step outside. The post also got me thinking about the correlation between “The Punk Meets the Godfather” and the relationship between Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, but that’s a post for another day…
All the blah, blah, blah up to this point is nothing but a rambling intro to my week of real life social calendar entries that have enriched my life.
Tuesday night was a talk filled dinner with Jeff and Dave. We spent about three hours catching up and actually little time on the notes of life that bind us together. We covered kids, jobs, politics, a battle of gay moguls, the Packers, and of course, former body cavities. The little time spent on music covered the Avett Brothers “Emotionalism” and the Drive By Truckers new one. Our discussion led me to Dave’s page where rock and roll lives:
Thursday I took my team of three offsite to clear heads and envision how we can make the greatest impact to the business we support. The day began at the
Yesterday my boss took her entire team offsite for a belated “holiday lunch.” It was a long fun lunch with about a dozen of us. What pleased me is that I stepped out of my comfortable circle and moved around the table to chat more with the folks I don’t know well. One conversation was with Jack and the subjects flowed mainly through family matters, but one tributary veered off to whether I’d pay $200K to experience weightlessness for up to 6 minutes on the Virgin Galactic spaceship. My answer was affirmative, but while weightless words flowed, my minds mission control was running a background simulation process including an assumption that six minutes with a woman in orbit would be plenty of time for me to parlay a book deal documenting the experience: “Docking the Soyuz.”
Emerging from that black hole brings us to right now. Finishing this post will make me late for today’s festive fright train, Barb’s 40th birthday. Barb describes it as her “world’s colliding” with a group of freehold, NJ friends identifying themselves as members of “Institute for Making Boston an Infinitely Better Excursion” (IMBIBE), mixing with her Boston friends aboard a rented trolley destined for Irish pubs throughout the city. Yeah, scary, but I’m going. Speaking of world’s colliding, this brilliant video blends Kyle’s world of Harry potter with my world of music. It’s a beautiful place.
I grew up in the bluest state that singularly could affirm, “Don’t Blame Us” on a bumper sticker following Richard Nixon’s 49 state landslide in 1972. By that time, my cynicism in government was already developing. I recall a moment in 6th grade when Ms. McCarthy called Mr. Lentine into our Greenwood School classroom to hear my perspective on writing to our Congressmen. I uttered something about the effort resulting in nothing but a “form letter reply,” and the looks on their faces reflected a bleak picture of an 11 year olds government view.
My early journey into government faithlessness began with the tears of my mother in November of 1963 and concluded with my dulled, impassive response to the news that Bobby Kennedy had been killed after winning the California primary in 1968. Between the bookend deaths of those Massachusetts sons were an unending parade of casket flags and more bullets that bled dry the dream of Martin Luther King. The hope of my youth, embodied by the national pursuit of landing a man on the moon and the possibility that RFK would end a senseless war, slowly withered under the strain of Munich, Richard Nixon, Watergate, a gas crisis and blindfolded Americans in Iran.
I was ambivalent to the Iranian students marching on the postcard University of Arizona campus, but the A’s I pulled in political science classes hinted the soul of an idealist wasn’t quite still. I rejected the negative politics of both major parties and voted for independent John Anderson in 1980. Reganomics, dead Marines in Beirut and boycotted Olympics sprayed the embers of optimism, and the election of 1988 featuring a Massachusetts Democrat in a tank pierced by the politics of cold Willie Horton fear fueled my apathy.
William Jefferson Clinton inspired some, but not me, and while the Clinton years were marked by a strong economy and a non-imperialist foreign policy, a stained blue dress and the lies of Bill Clinton produced a Republican Watergate payback and increased the divide between red and blue. (As an aside, I do think the refusal of most Congressional Democrats to pursue impeachment against Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush is to immunize the next Democratic President from retribution efforts by the right.)
The contentious election of 2000 delivered us George W. Bush by a hanging Florida chad and a stacked Supreme Court. The Bush administration has led by fear, lies and contempt for the voice of opposition, whether from its own citizens or long time global allies. In spite of a disastrous war in Iraq, corporate criminality empowered by their impotent Justice Department, and arrogant rejection of our Constitution, their swift boat lies managed to turn John Kerry from a Vietnam War hero to an anti-American loser. My hope is that the administration is not allowed to further damage our country in the long year left they cling to power.
A friend once explained to me that although she sometimes couldn’t articulate emotions, her actions defined them for her. I’ve been swaying between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for a while now, and while I’d be happy with either winning in November, I have a decision to make prior to casting a real vote on “Super Tuesday.” Yesterday in South Carolina, Mr. Obama earned more than twice the votes of Mrs. Clinton and perhaps more importantly, his vote total of 295,000 was more than the top two Republicans combined. Mrs. Clinton didn’t show much class in the 2 seconds she conceded out of a 45 minute speech to acknowledge the Obama victory. I’m sure she’d rather forget the reality of the results.
I guess my actions now define my beliefs. For the first time ever, this morning I made a financial contribution to a political candidate. For the first time ever, there’s a candidate running that I believe can make a difference to this country that will benefit my children and grandchildren. Since death in the 60’s wounded idealism and tears left an indelible impression on a toddler, I believe again in a leader to make a difference. I believe that leader is Barack Obama.
After watching the Democratic debate last night, I was left feeling positive about Barack Obama and impressed by Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. With the Dow Jones futures pointing nearly 500 points toward South Carolina this morning, I’m beginning to sway toward Mr. Obama’s message of optimism and unity. His candidacy is energizing young people in this country in a way reminiscent of John F. Kennedy in 1960. After seven years of Orwellian drudgery known as the Bush administration, I’m thinking that regardless of how competent she is, Mrs. Clinton is a polarizing figure who will not be able to bring people together to solve our mounting problems. The Republicans HATE her and her husband and unless the Democrats sweep to a 2/3 majority in the House and Senate, political cooperation with the Grand Old Party will be a prerequisite to getting anything accomplished.
As for experience, recent articles I’ve read cite the thin experience of Abraham Lincoln, while another concludes if experience was all that mattered, Dick Cheney is currently the most qualified person to become our next President. That puts the whole experience thing in some perspective, doesn’t it?