Cheap Political Theater

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

The loony fringe of the Republican Party has been waging such a dirty and mean-spirited war against women, children, workers, minorities, and the poor for so long and with so much fury that they have begun to look foolish to almost every segment of American society – as well as to a good portion of their own national party.  These zealots have pulled their presidential front runner, Mitt Romney, so far to the right that when the general election rolls around, he will be hard pressed to extricate himself from some of the extreme positions that he has had to take in order to secure the nomination.  In fact, Romney’s nomination will be a textbook Pyrrhic victory.

But that’s fine.  2012 will be a learning experience and the two-party system will undoubtedly survive.

According to a couple of recent press reports, Democrats are beginning to learn from some of these Republican excesses.  While Democrats have been more comfortable debating political issues with facts and logic, the GOP learned a long time ago that shameless theatrics will capture voters’ imaginations much quicker and more effectively than any boring old speech or pie chart.

Case in Point:  Republicans would have us believe that anyone who requires government assistance in order to survive is lazy and just wants to live high-on-the-hog at the taxpayer’s expense.  They want us to know that these aren’t good people, and to make sure that we see the welfare or unemployment recipients as borderline criminals, many Republican-controlled state legislatures have begun to impose requirements for anyone seeking public assistance to take a urinalysis to screen for drugs.  (That applies only to individual welfare, and not to corporate welfare which Republicans enthusiastically support as being good for America – even when many of those same corporations move their jobs and their profits overseas.)

And did I mention that these drug screenings are paid for by the welfare applicants?  One more needless expense, one more unnecessary hassle, one more indignity to be suffered by those with no means to fight back.

Fortunately for those welfare applicants and for society in general, a few brave Democratic state legislators have decided to use a little theater of their own to highlight the foolishness coming from their Republican colleagues.  The rogue politicians are saying if the poor need to take a drug test in order to receive their government checks, then elected officials should be required to do the same thing before receiving theirs.   Not surprisingly, the Republican politicians are less than enthusiastic about peeing in a cup themselves.

Second Case in Point:  One of the myriad of ways that state politicians have come up with to interfere with a woman’s Constitutional right to an abortion is to heap unnecessary and often expensive requirements on the woman before she can access the medical procedure.  The Republican controlled state legislature of Virginia recently decided that any woman who wanted an abortion must first undergo a highly manipulative and medically unnecessary ultrasound prior to the procedure.

But Virginia State Senator Janet Howell threw an amendment onto the ultrasound bill that would have required all males to have a rectal exam and cardiac fitness test before they could be prescribed any medications for erectile dysfunction. 

Want that Viagra, buddy?  Bend over and spread ‘em! 

Senator Howell’s amendment failed on a close vote of 21-19 with six of the senate’s seven female members voting in favor!  What’s good for the goose ought to be good for the gander - just not in Virginia!

It ain’t Lincoln-Douglas, but it ain’t bad.  Cheap theater begetting cheap theater.   Maybe someday we will find our way back to the high road – but it’s going to take a bi-partisan effort and a strong national will to get there.  And right now one political party in particular seems to lack the judgement and integrity to move us in that direction.

God Save the Queen, the Arts Club, and Uriah Heep!

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

There have been three stories regarding the cultural history and social life of England on the Internet this week,  and all three tie together into a nice little package.

Central to the collection was an item about Prince Harry and soccer star David Beckham having a boys' night out at a member's-only watering hole in the Mayfair District of Central London.  They were spotted at a newly renovated bar called The Arts Club - which was founded in 1863 by novelists Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope.  Apparently it was the second time that this pair of celebrities, Harry and Beckham, have hung out there - until three in the morning!

And then yesterday, February 6th, Harry's grandmother, Queen Elizabeth, celebrated her Diamond Jubilee as Queen.  She has sat on the throne for sixty years and still looks constipated.  (Did I just type that?)  Elizabeth II is the second-longest reigning monarch in British history, close behind Queen Victoria who held the position for sixty-three years and change.  The current Queen's mother lived to be one-hundred-and-one, so there is a good chance that Elizabeth, who is currently just eighty-five, will break Victoria's longevity record for throne-sitting.

If I could ask Queen Elizabeth one question, it would be this:  "Your Highness, if you had it all to do over again, would you have reproduced?"

Seriously the Queen is loved and well respected by her loyal subjects and her children.  Why just last summer her daughter-in-law, Camilla, the Duchess of York, adopted a Jack Russell terrier from the pound and named her Beth!

Today, February 7th, marks another very famous British milestone.  Charles Dickens, the novelist and co-founder of The Arts Club, was born two-hundred years ago today.  I came across the results of a survey conducted by Penguin Books asking which of Dickens' nearly nine-hundred fictional characters was the reader's favorite.   Ebenezer Scrooge of A Christmas Carol won big, followed by Miss Havisham of Great Expectations, Sydney Carton of A Tale of Two Cities, The Artful Dodger of Oliver Twist and Fagin of Oliver Twist.  Little Oliver Twist himself came in at number eleven.

My favorite Dickens character was the "very 'umble" Uriah Heep of David Copperfield.   While the gangly and cadaverous Mr. Heep was a bit conniving and sinister, he was certainly no match for villainous of Ebenezer Scrooge in his prime.   But I just like the sound of his name.  "Uriah Heep!"  It literally just rolls off of the tongue!   I understand that there is a band called Uriah Heep, which is great, but I would like to see Charles Dickens further honored by parents starting to use that wonderful name for their offspring.

"Uriah Heep Johnson!  Get your butt in here for dinner!"

But, alas, that would probably be a bit too literary for our modern world!

Monday's Poetry: "The Bee"

by Pa Rock
Poetry Appreciator


The is Monday morning on Okinawa and many of the Americans on the island are waiting breathlessly for the Super Bowl XLVI to begin.  The excitement of an event as big as this may lose a little something by airing in the morning, but I suspect that Americans on Okinawa watching the game during daylight hours will be nearly as wild and volatile as their friends who are partying back in the States.

I scoured the Internet in search of an appropriate poem for today's big game.  Most football poems, of course, are not really about football at all, but paeans to soccer.  I did locate "American Football" by Harold Pinter, but it was too raw even for my tacky tastes.  Finally, however, I came across "The Bee" by James Dickey, and like Baby's Bear's porridge, found it to be just right!

In this piece, Dickey, who in his youth played football for Clemson, sees his young son attacked by a malevolent bee and chased toward a busy California highway.  In order to reach his son in time, Dickey channels the spirit of his old Clemson coach to get him moving.  It is a very inspiring and exciting account of an incident that actually happened.

Enjoy the poem and enjoy the big game!


The Bee
by James Dickey


To the football coaches of Clemson College, 1942


One dot

Grainily shifting we at roadside and
The smallest wings coming along the rail fence out
Of the woods one dot of all that green. It now
Becomes flesh-crawling then the quite still
Of stinging. I must live faster for my terrified
Small son it is on him. Has come. Clings.

Old wingback, come
To life. If your knee action is high
Enough, the fat may fall in time God damn
You, Dickey, dig this is your last time to cut
And run but you must give it everything you have
Left, for screaming near your screaming child is the sheer
Murder of California traffic: some bee hangs driving

Your child
Blindly onto the highway. Get there however
Is still possible. Long live what I badly did
At Clemson and all of my clumsiest drives
For the ball all of my trying to turn
The corner downfield and my spindling explosions
Through the five-hole over tackle. O backfield

Coach Shag Norton,
Tell me as you never yet have told me
To get the lead out scream whatever will get
The slow-motion of middle age off me I cannot
Make it this way I will have to leave
My feet they are gone I have him where
He lives and down we go singing with screams into

The dirt,
Son-screams of fathers screams of dead coaches turning
To approval and from between us the bee rises screaming
With flight grainily shifting riding the rail fence
Back into the woods traffic blasting past us
Unchanged, nothing heard through the air-
conditioning glass we lying at roadside full

Of the forearm prints
Of roadrocks strawberries on our elbows as from
Scrimmage with the varsity now we can get
Up stand turn away from the highway look straight
Into trees. See, there is nothing coming out no
Smallest wing no shift of a flight-grain nothing
Nothing. Let us go in, son, and listen

For some tobacco-
mumbling voice in the branches to say "That's
a little better," to our lives still hanging
By a hair. There is nothing to stop us we can go
Deep deeper into elms, and listen to traffic die
Roaring, like a football crowd from which we have
Vanished. Dead coaches live in the air, son live

In the ear
Like fathers, and urge and urge. They want you better
Than you are. When needed, they rise and curse you they scream
When something must be saved. Here, under this tree,
We can sit down. You can sleep, and I can try
To give back what I have earned by keeping us
Alive, and safe from bees: the smile of some kind

Of savior--
Of touchdowns, of fumbles, battles,
Lives. Let me sit here with you, son
As on the bench, while the first string takes back
Over, far away and say with my silentest tongue, with the man-
creating bruises of my arms with a live leaf a quick
Dead hand on my shoulder, "Coach Norton, I am your boy."

Religious Hate

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist


I knew an older couple in Arizona who had lost their home due to the bad economy and not being employed.  He was disabled and couldn't work, and she had medical issues as well and worked part-time taking care of others who were no worse off medically than she was.  The couple was also burdened with serious medical bills. Their situation was hard, but instead of being angry at corporate America for systematically destroying the American job market, or at the nation's unfair medical system, or the insurance industry - these good, God-fearing people who went to an angry Baptist church several times a week, blamed all of their problems on liberals, and particularly the black man sitting in the White House.

I always got along with this couple, choosing to ignore their (particularly his) preachifying.  Now that I am overseas I don't have to hear the little rants or make excuses why I don't want to visit their church, but I still am subjected to their silly harangues courtesy of email.  Today I received a pair of emails from my friend (and he is my friend) that were so outrageous I feel the need to purge them from my system by means of this blog.

The first email was a copy of a piece by Bill O'Reilly entitled "Political Correctness and Muslims."  (My friend hates Muslims even more than he does Obama.)  O'Reilly's diatribe focused on the recent "honor killings" in Canada in which a mother, father, and adult son were convicted of killing the three daughters of the family because they adapted too easily to modern ways.   O'Reilly was incensed that American media primarily described the family as "Afghan" and not as "Muslim."  The erstwhile sage of Fox News went on to say the "political correctness is dangerous because it obscures the truth."

The "truth" apparently was not that a family suffered a grievous tragedy due to fundamentalist and anachronistic views, the "truth" is that these were Muslims - and they were evil - and therefore...

The second email was based on a report from...you guessed it, Fox News.  My correspondent stated that Fox News was "brassy" because they were the only news channel that reported the story.  It was based on an email that a man supposedly received from a friend that described a purported incident that occurred on a passenger plane at Atlanta's airport.  The email supposedly said that the writer was sitting in first class waiting on the plane to load when eleven "Muslim" men got on the plane in full "Muslim attire."

Apparently, again according to the email, two of the Muslim men in full Muslim attire seated themselves in first-class (oh, my!) and the rest sat throughout the plane.  One of the first-class Muslims then telephoned one of the tourist-class Muslims on his cell phone.  (How the other passenger knew who he was calling was never explained, and they were undoubtedly speaking "Muslim.")

(No, wait, I just found it.  They were speaking Arabic, "very loudly and very, very aggressively.")

As the story continued, a couple of stewardesses got involved and tried to get the first-class Muslim to get off of his phone, and he reportedly then called one of the ladies an "infidel dog."  Then a big Texan got involved, and then the guy who wrote the email got physically involved, and it all turned into quite a circus.  TSA was summoned and took all eleven Muslims off of the plane, but after searching their bodies and baggage they returned them to the plane.

The flight crew put up some objections, the man who wrote the email used some inappropriate language, and the passengers righteously marched off of the Muslim-loving airliner!  The email writer went on to declare, "If that wasn't a terrorism dry run, I don't know what is!"

And, of course, it had to be a terrorism dry run, because they were Muslims in full Muslim attire!  (Alec Baldwin might be a bit juvenile and boorish, but he was not a terrorist because he was not a Muslim in full Muslim attire.)

Is there any doubt why Fox ran with this story?

I feel sorry for my friend back in the States.  To him, these stories prove conclusively that Muslims are scary and evil people not fit to live in a good Christian country like his.  I wonder how he would feel if every time a serial killer was identified in the United States, he was labeled as a Christian serial killer, or a Christian rapist, or a Christian pedophile?  Clearly good people subscribe to all religions, as do many bad people - and it makes no difference at all what language we speak or what clothing we wear.

And Muslims are not a race of people - they are members of a very large organized religion known as Islam.  They come in a variety of colors and dress in all manner of clothing.  And some of them worship their God just as fervently as my friend worships his.

Komen Caves

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist


Nancy Brinker, the CEO of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation and sister of the late Ms. Komen, spent most of yesterday telling journalists that her organization had made the right decision is their move to stop providing money to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screenings.  And, she crowed, the Komen foundation was receiving plenty of new donations.

But as Brinker was claiming that things were never better, the blogosphere and mainstream media were having a heyday shining a light on the charity.  Suddenly people were learning things about the hard-line right-wingers who have been quietly moving into positions of power at Komen.  Suddenly the public was learning that Komen was also no longer funding stem-cell research.  Suddenly people knew that the sanctimonious Ms. Brinker was hauling in personal salary and benefits of a half-a-million dollars a year from the "charity."  Suddenly people were talking seriously about boycotting the corporate sponsors of Komen for the Cure.

Today Ms. Brinker issued an apology to Planned Parenthood saying that the decision to quit funding their breast cancer screening program had not been political in nature.  She said they had reworked their policy about groups under investigation and would no long penalize groups who were only being subjected to political investigations.  And, she apologized to Planned Parenthood and said that they would now be eligible to submit new grant requests in the future.  (Of course, the same group of right-wing zealots who made the decision to quit giving money to Planned Parenthood will be deciding which grants get approved - so it remains unclear whether anything has really changed or not.)

But it was nice that she apologized.

That apology, however, has now stirred up the conservatives who were busy yesterday giving money to Komen.  And many of the liberals are still pissed as well.  All-in-all it probably wasn't Komen's best week.

The Komen foundation hurt itself with the hard right and the hard left, as well as with the general public.  It clearly lost all the way around.  Planned Parenthood, on the other hand, came out smelling like a big red rose.  The group had been receiving about $600,000 a year from Komen for breast cancer screenings, but this senseless action by Ms. Brinker's group stirred up many Americans to donate to Planned Parenthood.  Net result:  over $3 million in new donations!

Thank you, Nancy.  Thank you very much!

Susan G. Komen Gets Ugly

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist


I only use one email address and it gets inundated daily with requests for money and support from a wide assortment of groups that fight poverty, advocate for quality health care, and promote political causes.  Sometimes I send a few dollars, or sign a petition, or regurgitate information about the cause into my Twitter account (@PaRock) or onto the pages of this blog.  If I get really fired up, as I am today, I am likely to do all of the above.

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation raises money to fight breast cancer through research, education, and political lobbying.  One of their primary ways of raising money has been through their famous "walks" for the cure  - big pink affairs sometimes lasting for multiple days in which those participating gather pledges and then walk to earn the donations.

(I participated in one of these walks in downtown Phoenix in the fall of 2007 with my daughter, Molly.  It was fun - and a very moving experience as we strolled and chatted with many marchers who were carrying signs and wearing homemade tee-shirts honoring relatives or friends who had suffered through the awful experience of breast cancer - some successfully, others not so lucky.  It was a good bonding experience for Molly and me.)

But I won't be walking with Susan G. Komen any more because the old bitty has turned mean and hateful.

The most venerable Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation has bowed to right-wing pressure and cut off funding to Planned Parenthood's breast cancer screening program - an absolutely essential program that provides women of low and modest incomes with a  life-saving medical procedure.  That deserves repeating:  Susan G. Komen, a charity whose sole purpose is the defeat of breast cancer, has suddenly quit funding a program that offers breast cancer screenings to women of modest means!

What's up with that, Sue?  Are the poor not worthy of a cure?

The political back story is that the various conservative movements in America have targeted Planned Parenthood for elimination through starvation, and they have been busy trying to stop government funding of the organization at all levels.  Now these extremists have extended their tentacles and  focus into charities that have been helping Planned Parenthood survive and fulfill its mission to women.

The political "logic" for the elimination of funding to Planned Parenthood is this:  A Florida congressman has started an inquiry in Congress to determine if Planned Parenthood is using public funds for abortions.  It is currently against the law to do so, and the "inquiry" is basically just a smear to keep the knuckle-draggers and mouth-breathers who fund American's conservative politicians  and movements stirred up.  Suddenly though, the Komen board instituted a policy stating that the group will not donate to any organization that is being investigated by Congress.

Nicely done, Sue!

The Komen organization has been quietly tacking right.  Last year the group hired Karen Handel, a former Georgia Secretary of State and unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor, to be its vice president for public policy.   Handel is vocally anti-choice, and during her failed gubernatorial campaign she vowed to eliminate any state funding to Planned Parenthood.  Jane Abraham, the General Chairman of the anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List, is a member of the Komen governing board - the group that ultimately made the decision to end research funding to Planned Parenthood.

Oh, and the Komen organization, a group whose sole purpose is the elimination of breast cancer, has also stopped all funding for stem-cell research - a move that shows it is much more interested in kissing conservative butt than it is in actually finding a cure for breast cancer.

Shameless, Sue, absolutely and utterly shameless!

So today I will send some money to Planned Parenthood, sign an on-line protest petition to Susan G. Komen, put up a couple of tweets, publish this post, and bask in the warmth of righteous anger for a brief while.  But soon it will all start to subside and the emails from Planned Parenthood will again begin to resemble the entreaties from so many other organizations.  And when that happens the people of our country, particularly the women of our country, will be the poorer for it.

There are alternatives to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure organization.  May I recommend:  the National Breast Cancer Foundation, Army of Women, and Breast Cancer Action.  The cause is too important to be held captive by extremists!

Are Racists Dumb?

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist


A former college instructor of mine, a psychology professor, used to say that psychological research was necessary, if for no other reason than to confirm what Great Aunt Edna touted as commonsense fifty years before.


A new study by Brock University in Ontario has been published in Psychological Science and is making quite a splash across the Internet.  It apparently shows that people who score low on IQ tests in childhood are more likely to develop prejudiced beliefs and become more socially conservative in politics as adults.

The study's lead author, Dr. Gordon Hodson, a psychology professor, said that the findings actually represent evidence of a vicious cycle in which people of low intelligence gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies - which, in turn, stress resistance to change and fuel prejudices.  Dr. Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia, also a psychologist, tried to further illuminate Dr. Hodson's concept of the cycle in which people of lower intelligence might tend to drift toward conservative ideologies.  Dr. Nosek said:

"Reality is complicated and messy.  Ideologies get rid of the messiness and impose a simpler solution.  So, it may not be surprising that people with less cognitive capacity will be attracted to simplifying ideologies."

Yes, all of that - and thinking Fox News is real news!

There are, of course, some problems with all of this.  First of all, no one really knows if IQ tests measure intelligence or not, but people who do well on them often wind up in the better schools and making the better incomes.  But, even if the tests do measure intelligence, there are also many other factors that contribute to success in life - family wealth, skin color, and the money spent on local schools, for instance.  Conservatives probably won't appreciate the implications of this study, but some members of that end of the political spectrum like to tout IQ tests when they show certain racial groupings doing less well on the tests than other groups.

Also, correlations by themselves, do not prove cause and effect.

But it is still sort of comforting to see something in print, from a university no less, that indicates stupidity may lead to racism, birtherism, and religious intolerance!  It is something that Great Aunt Edna figured out for herself long, long ago!

Strawberry Fields Forever!

by Pa Rock
Navigator of Nostalgia


There was an article in the Los Angeles Times today regarding a truck spilling its cargo on a busy California roadway.  The cargo wasn't toxic, but it did create what the local television station in the Roseville area called "quite a mess."   The truck dumped 43,000 pounds of strawberry puree near the intersection of Interstates 65 and 80, not too far north of Sacremento.   Most of the product was in large plastic containers, but it was beginning to melt by the time the clean-up got underway.

I'll wager that the smell was wonderful!

All of that put me in mind of my short term as a farm laborer picking strawberries on a massive strawberry farm. It would have probably been the early summer of 1958 just after school let out.  My aunt, Christine Dobbs, took me and her oldest son, Bobby, down to the Haymes Strawberry Farm just south of Goodman, Missouri, where we picked berries for a couple of weeks.  I think I lasted two weeks, and Christine dragged Bobby back for a third.

If I have the year right, I would have been ten and my cousin was nine.

The strawberry fields meandered up and down hard Ozark hillsides and seemed to go on forever.  There was a berry shed where we would pick up a large wooden tray that had low sides and held six or eight berry cartons.  We had to fill all of the cartons and then heap a pile of berries on top of them so that what we turned in at the shed was essentially a big mound of strawberries carefully covering all of the cartons beneath that were also full of strawberries.  When a person turned in their full trays and they met with the bosses' approval, the pickers were rewarded with tickets that could be turned in for cash at the end of the week.

Some people elected to work for the berries themselves instead of cash.  I believe that is how Christine took her wages.

To this day, picking strawberries is some of the hardest work that I have ever tackled.   The work was back-breaking because it could only be accomplished through bending and stooping.  If a person sat, they were constantly having to move to  keep up with the berries, and they wound up making far less money than someone who was mobile.  The sun was brutal and constant, and there were always reports of snakes.  I remember finding a box turtle one day who was dining on the plump red berries.

So today when I heard about the strawberry spill in California, one of my first thoughts was about the amount of labor that went into picking enough berries to make 43,000 pounds of puree.  Would the owners be able to salvage some or most of the product?  Would my labor from all of those summers ago have filled even one of those large buckets?

The incident in California, combined with my own personal memories of being a strawberry picker, has left me feeling even more respectful of the people who follow the harvests to scratch out a meager living and put food on our tables.

Si se puede, mis amigos!  You have my respect and gratitude!

Orly Taitz Rides Again!

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Orly Taitz, a California dentist,lawyer, and shameless self-promoter, has been in court (yet again!) trying to get somebody (anybody) to understand her argument that Barack Obama is not the legitimate President of the United States - regardless of what his birth certificate (even the long form) and local newspaper announcements from the time of his birth would try to have the American sheeple believe.  Barack Obama, you see, was born in Kenya and is therefore ineligible to serve as President because the Constitution says that the President must have been born in this country.  He was born in Kenya because Orly Taitz says he was born in Kenya!

(Reality Check:   Contrary to Ms. Taitz's never-ending delusion, Barack Obama was born in the United States.  John McCain, the man Mr. Obama defeated for the Presidency, was born in Panama.  But hey, her issue is not with McCain.)

This week Ms. Taitz has been in court in Georgia arguing to keep the President's name off of the Georgia ballot. She managed to get him subpoenaed, but the President wisely decided not to perform in her circus.  Should the suit be successful - it is Georgia, after all - and his name is not permitted to go on the ballot, the matter will be referred to the Federal courts in a matter of nano-seconds where it will be quickly rectified.

Ms. Taitz, who has the tenacity and staying power of a good case of genital herpes, has been beating this particular dead horse for three years now.  She tried to parlay her "fame" into a statewide office in California, but could not even win the Republican primary election.  She is currently making noises about running against Diane Feinstein for her California Senate seat - a move that would undoubtedly thrill the veteran senator because of the ease of which she would win reelection!  One thing is certain however, Ms. Taitz will never run for President because she was born in the Soviet Union one year and twenty-six days after Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.

Last week's case in Georgia was argued before a crowd of about 100 individuals described by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as mostly "older white Americans."   The newspaper failed to mention whether they doffed their hoods and ball caps when the judge entered the room, but one must hope that being of the "older" generation they were respectful.  I know I always am!

Monday's Poetry: "Bluebird"

by Pa Rock
Poetry Appreciator


Sometimes I look at the vilest among us and wonder what they were like as children.  I don't subscribe to the notion that people are born as haters.  Bigotry, criminality, and just being plain offensive are all learned behaviors.  But if we have it within us to turn into rotten individuals, is there not a chance that the spark of goodness with which we were born still resides somewhere within and may one day seize the opportunity to reassert itself?  Of course that is possible.  It's called rehabilitation or having a massive change of heart.  People change for many reasons, from finding the right person to share life with, to a life-altering medical crisis, to a sanction by society such as time in prison.

Today's poem, Bluebird, was written by Charles Bukowski in the early 1990's.  It addresses the little spark of goodness that we all possess, however deeply hidden away or forgotten, and characterizes it as a bluebird.  I found this piece to be particularly thought-provoking and moving.


Bluebird
by Charles Bukowski

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

Our Government Bites Itself!

by Pa Rock
Frustrated Consumer


I have started a college savings plan for my grandchildren, and the way that I fund it is to buy a $100 Series EE savings bond for each of my five grandchildren every month.  I have been doing that since my oldest grandson, Boone, was just a few months old - so he has over twelve years' worth piled up waiting to be turned into books, tuition, or dorm rent.

Buying these bonds has been a very simple process.  My hometown bank would automatically make the purchases out of my checking account on a monthly basis, and the Feds would send me the bonds.  It was a good system that worked very smoothly, so, of course the government had to screw it up.  (What would be the point in maintaining something that actually worked!)

Beginning January 1st of this year, banks were no longer allowed to sell savings bonds.  Now if a person wants to invest some of their hard-earned money in paying off the national debt through the purchase of savings bonds, they must do it electronically over the Internet.  That might work if the government had the sales and technological smarts of a private business, say Amazon.com or any other business that actually cares about turning a profit.  Sadly, however, the federal government has no interest in making anything user-friendly or even accessible.

I spent most of the day yesterday figuring out how to register at www.TreasuryDirect.gov, the place where one now has to go to purchase savings bonds.  I finally got registered (I think), and then spent the remainder of the day trying to figure out how to buy savings bonds at the site.  I finally had to throw in the towel.  Today I wrote to Senator McCaskill and asked that she have a member of her staff see if they figure out how to navigate the site.

Here I sit with five college degrees and am unable to purchase the bonds issued by my government, bonds designed to promote citizen involvement in our nation's finances and to help reduce the national debt.  If I can't figure out the confusing  and cumbersome system, how many others are also struggling with the same problem?  How much money is this bureaucratic "simplification" costing our government each day?  Each year?

If Senator McCaskill can't help me resolve this issue, I am going to look into investing in Canadian savings bonds.  Somehow I doubt that the Canucks are as anal as the ego-maniacal functionaries of my own government.

Brewer's Finger-Pointing: The Real Story

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist


When Air Force One landed in Phoenix last week it inadvertently plopped down on a fat woman riding a broom, squashing her into a large oil stain on the runway.  The old witch, Josephine R. Piehole, was struggling to get her broom airborne when the President dropped in and ruined her day.  By the time the President finally stepped down from his luxury airliner, Josephine's little sister, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, was waiting on the tarmac to have words with the elected leader of the free world.

Turning ever so slightly to make sure that the gathered press photographers had a view of her profile, the craggy old politician then pointed her finger directly in the President's face while asking quietly if he had had a pleasant flight and inquiring after his family.  The President, to his credit, resisted the urge to bite off the offending finger, and engaged the governor in a few pleasantries of his own.

(We know of their exact comments because Channel 57's weatherman, Dusty Haboob, was in a weather chopper on the other side of the runway with his binoculars focused on the pair.  Haboob lipreads both Harvard English and Cackle.)

According to the weatherman, things quickly lost their cordiality when Brewer handed President Obama an empty envelope and told him that he would have to fill it with proof of his citizenship or immediately leave her state.  When he told her that she was standing in his jurisdiction, the United States of America, Arizona's Chief Executive snapped back, "I'll get you for that, My Pretty!")

After storming out of the airport, the governor called a press conference and said that the President had been rude to her and told her that he had been offended by what she had written about him in her book.  (Really?  What are the odds that a former editor of the Harvard Law Review would even own a book by Jan Brewer, much less read it?)

The latest word is that the Arizona's governor is holed up in Bisbee training her flying monkeys how to fire automatic pistols so they can head south and protect the border.   She'll teach those terrorist housekeepers and gardeners a thing or two when they try to walk across the burning sands of her state to earn less than minimum wage - you betcha, she will!

Pitt's Dead Cat

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist


William Rivers Pitt has become my favorite political journalist.  His articles on U.S. politics and economic policies are always spot on, and he is one helluva good writer.  Mr. Pitt's work can be found at www.truthout.org where he posts every two weeks or so - and for those unfamiliar with Truthout.org, you need to stop by and get acquainted with the work of Pitt and all of the other columnists who contribute to that most excellent site.

Mr. Pitt had a new article posted today entitled "Staring at Empty Pages" where he credited the Occupy Movement with having an impact on President Obama's State of the Union speech.  Toward the end of that piece, Pitt referenced a political story out of Arkansas that was new to me.  It seems that earlier this week, on the same night that Gabby Giffords resigned from Congress, the campaign manager for a Democratic Congressional candidate returned to his home in Russellville, Arkansas, with his four children in tow, and discovered the corpse of the family cat on the front porch.  Someone had smashed in the cat's skull and painted the word "liberal" across its body.

The campaign manager, Jacob Burris, has been working for his candidate, Ken Aden, for several months.  As near as can be determined, the cat had no role in the campaign, and likely had no political philosophy or agenda, but was simply the children's pet.

William Rivers Pitt stated in his article that a "talk show host" for Arkansas radio station KURM, one Kermit Womack, has been releasing the addresses of political opponents he doesn't like over the air.  Pitt added:

"While no firm, direct link has been established, it can be assumed that someone decided to take violent action after the location of Mr. Burris' home went out over the air.  It was a cat, this time...but given the gruesome nature of the act, Mr. Burris must correctly be wondering if it could have been one of his children."

Yes, if I were Mr. Burris I would be fearing for the safety of my family.  In fact, if I were anyone on the list of people whose home addresses were spewed out over radio station KURM, I would be very, very afraid.  That is a tactic that the so-called "Right to Life" movement has used to intimidate doctors and women's health care providers for several years now- and it is shameless!  It is also terrorism.

But, as Paul Harvey used to say, here's the rest of the story.

I am from that area and have listened to radio station KURM out of Rogers, Arkansas - so I decided to see what the local press had to say about the incident.  Kermit Womack is not only a talk show host on KURM, he also owns the radio station.  Not only that, but (and this is a great big "but") he is the father of Congressman Steve Womack of Arkansas's third district - the man that Ken Aden is trying to unseat!

Stay tuned.  There just has to be more coming on this story!

At Home with the Grandkids

by Pa Rock
Proud Grandpa


Next week (February 2nd) will mark forty years to the day since I first arrived on Okinawa - as a twenty-three-year-old Army lieutenant.  Things were so much different back then.  I remember sending two telegrams home in the nineteen months that I was here - and making two telephone calls back to the States - when Nick was born.

Making calls then was an expensive proposition, and the most reasonable way to do it was to go to what was called a MARS Station (shortwave facilities) where the operator there would contact a shortwave operator in the States, and that person would call the number you were trying to reach over their US telephone.  It wasn't quite as expensive as an overseas telephone call, and the quality of the call was fairly crappy most of the time.

Today I have "Magic Jack" and the call goes through my computer and is somehow digitized and routed through cyberspace - and the connections are almost always good.  I pay a small fee once a year to use it - $20 or so, and I can buy 5 years of service for around $60 or $70.  (It gives me a US number, so my kids can also call me on their regular phone plans.)  Someone was complaining to me recently that Magic Jack will cut you off after an hour-and-a-half - and she would have to redial.  Needless to say, I told my friend that she needed to get a  life!

And Skype!  For a very small fee a person can call from here to the States and watch the person on the other end of the line as they visit!

Oh, yes - things have changed a great deal in forty years!   (Most communication home back then occurred by letters.  Remember letters?)  And if a military spouse wanted to talk to her husband at work, she had to call the orderly room and explain to the First Sergeant why he needed to be pulled away from work and brought to the office to talk to her.  Now the poor soul's cell phone just keeps ringing or vibrating until he or she answers it - and the mission be damned!

All of the above was written as prologue for a discussion of my grandchildren.  Most weekends I am able to speak to all of my children and grandchildren, and many days I receive photos or movies of them just moments after they are filmed.

Tonight I came home to pictures and a movie of Baby Willow.  In the video I watched Willow laugh at her mother as Molly made funny sounds, and I could hear Sebastian running around the house talking to "Daddy" and "Molly."    Then I watched a movie of Baby Olive jumping in her jumper and just having a grand old time!  After that I pulled up an older video of Judah eating dinner just as he was starting to learn to feed himself.

It's hard to put stuff like that into letters - and if a person does print off a few photos to mail, it takes more than a week to get them here.

Things change - often for the better.  It is definitely much easier being overseas today than it was forty years ago!

A Few Thoughts on Oscar

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist


The nominations for this year's Academy Awards were announced today, and being out here on the world's elbow, it was not surprising that I hadn't seen many of the movies and performances that made the list.  Military theatres like to show action flicks, so not every great movie makes in onto our local screens.

Of the nine movies nominated for Best Picture, only three have played in the military theatres on Okinawa:  The Help, War Horse (currently playing), and Moneyball which only played here very briefly.  I saw Moneyball back in the States while I was home on leave, and  I watched The Help at the theatre on Camp Foster, and have yet to see War Horse.  I also saw a fourth nominated film, Midnight in Paris, on a long plane ride across the Pacific.

If I had to choose the winner among the three that I have seen, it would be difficult because they are all very good.  But of those three, the one that moved me the most was The Help.  It was such a great movie on so many levels and tugged at a variety of emotions.  Moneyball would be second on my list.  This was a film about athletics, something that I did not anticipate liking - but I did.  The movie sucked me right into the story and had me rooting for the Oakland A's.  Midnight in Paris was the movie about which I was the most hopeful, and it too was very good.  Woody Allen tells a sweet tale in most of his movies, and this was no exception - and the backdrop of Paris in the twenties was very appealing to the senses - but the story was just not as gripping as the other two.

The other films nominated for best movie were The Artist, The Descendants, The Tree of Life, Hugo, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  When I was living in Arizona, I would always try to see all of the nominated films before the awards were announced, but that isn't going to happen here.

One comment on the Best Actor:  I was surprised that Leonardo DiCaprio did not receive a nomination for his portrayal of J. Edgar Hoover in the Clint Eastwood film, J. Edgar.  I saw that movie on Guam and said at that time that it was a disappointment - but, that said, DiCaprio nailed his part.   He came across every bit as evil and odious as the famed G-Man.  I also felt that Armie Hammer's Clyde Tolson was worthy of a nomination.

Maybe this will be Brad Pitt's year with Moneyball.

And speaking of war horses, the Best Actress category contained two legends of Hollywood:  Glenn Close and Meryl Streep.  Close is being nominated for her work in the film Albert Noble.  This will be her third nomination for Best Actress, and she has also been nominated three times for Best Supporting Actress - with nary a win.  Meryl Streep was nominated for her role as Maggie Thatcher in The Iron Lady.  This is her fifteenth nomination for Best Actress with only one win - for 1982's Sophie's Choice.  She was also nominated twice for Best Supporting Actress and won in that category for 1980's Kramer vs Kramer.

Viola Davis, from The Help, will, I suspect, make this one more "also ran" year for Glenn Close and Meryl Streep.

Beyond that, I can't predict.

Advantage Obama

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist


At this point with the last four Republican nominees spilling out of their clown car every couple of days and rolling around in the mud, it would seem that all President Obama would have to do to win re-election in November would be get his name on every state ballot and then go on a nice, long vacation.  If ever there was a political party hellbent on self-destruction, it would have to be this year's teabagger-infested GOP.  Clearly the base is in control and will be satisfied with nothing less than an ideologically pure, mouth-breathing racist wearing a ball cap and packing a handgun - as the Republican Party's nominee for President, and the final four are furiously slugging it out in a sordid attempt to be that man.

But in the event that the Republicans eventually nominate somebody who is able to move at least somewhat closer to the center of the political spectrum, the President is still in a relatively strong position based on the record of his first four years in office.  Yes, he was a disappointment in some respects, but he was not a constant, day-in-and-day-out disappointment like his immediate predecessor.  This President does have some positives that he to which he can point.

Today there was an article on the Internet at  theweek.com  by Paul Brandus entitled  "Obama's Top 5 Successes."  I agree with the author's selection and ranking, but want to embellish liberally with a few points of my own.  Those "successes" follow in reverse order.

5.  Getting Out of Iraq:  George Bush started the war with Iraq under the pretext of that country having weapons of mass destruction.  (It had absolutely nothing to do with Bush's daddy issues of one-upping the Old Man by going further than Pappy Bush had done in his own war with Iraq.  No sir, this was a necessary war to rid the world of a menace.  And if you believe that horseshit...), but Bush went to war against Iraq while our forces were already at war in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban and ostensibly looking for Osama bin Laden.  Many of the young Americans who fought in Iraq did so with the notion that it was somehow payback for 9/11, when, in reality it had nothing at all to do with 9/11 - and George Bush and Dick Cheney did nothing to disabuse them of their misconception.

The figures out of the Bush wars, according to Paul Brandus, are 4,484 American deaths, 32,000 wounded, expenditures of $806 billion, and an estimated $1 trillion needed for the future medical care of the wars' veterans until 2050.  That insane price tag does not even address the deaths and injuries of Iraqi men, women, and children, and the near-utter destruction of their infrastructure and economy.  But, hey, Junior got Saddam when his daddy couldn't.  That's got to be worth something!

Of course, as Paul Brandus points out, the eventual Arab Spring would have undoubtedly toppled Saddam as well, but what would have been the glory in that?

Good for President Obama for getting us out of Iraq.  He could have done it quicker, cleaner, and more completely, but he did finally manage to extricate our fighting forces from a war quagmire that could not be won in any conventional sense of the word.

4.  Improving America's Image Abroad:   America had a lot of goodwill from around the world after the attacks of 9/11, but much of that goodwill quickly evaporated as we began showing our uglier side in the prosecution of the wars.  Suddenly we associated ourselves with things that were insults to humanity:  secret prisons, prisoners without rights, images of Abu Ghraib, water-boarding, and the practice of extra-ordinary rendition.  We had always been the good guys, but something happened on the way to the Middle East.

President Obama came into office and the world heaved a literal sigh of relief.  He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, some would argue before he even had a chance to earn it, and during nearly four years in office not a single person, foreign or domestic, has lobbed a shoe at him.  The man  has legitimate international chops and is respected in places where we need to be respected.  His superlative choice of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, also served to greatly increase the importance of our nation in the world.

3.  Passing Health-Care Reform:  The President made good on his pledge to sign a universal health-care bill into law during his first term.  The bill and the process were bitterly attacked by the health-care and insurance industries through their allies in both political parties in Congress, but the will of the people and the President ultimately prevailed and the Affordable Care Act became the law of the land.  True, the bill was not perfect, but a product was ultimately passed that mandated that every American have health insurance (which may yet be overturned by a tone-deaf Supreme Court), allowed young people to remain on their parent's health insurance policies until the age of twenty-six, did away with denial of coverage due to existing pre-conditions, made it much harder for insurance companies to rescind coverage, and did away with lifetime limits on insurance coverage.

2.  Getting Osama bin Laden:  Osama bin Laden was a member of a well-respected Saudi business family who went off to do his own terrorist thing.  The first reaction of the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks - which were carried out almost exclusively by Saudi's - was to get important Saudi's, including members of the royal family, out of the country and safely back to Saudi Arabia.  Then the administration turned its focus toward Afghanistan and declared war on the Taliban.  One of the goals of that effort was to track down and capture or kill Osama bin Laden.  At some point early on, that focus began to wane, and the Bush administration seemed to change their target of choice to Saddam Hussein in Iraq.  When Bush left office years later, Saddam had been captured and executed, but Osama remained at large.

Under the policies and leadership of Barack Obama, the American focus returned to Osama bin Laden, and he was ultimately cornered and killed.  Mission accomplished!

1.  Preventing a Depression:  Paul Brandus compares the economy that Obama inherited from Bush as being a house on fire,  and notes that Republicans got out by "the scruff of their necks - and now don't like the way Obama put out the fire."  He quotes GDP figures that indicated the economy was in free fall when Obama became President.  Obama used the "much maligned" stimulus bill to save the nation from tumbling into a catastrophic depression.  And yes, Brandus admits, money was wasted, but ultimately it kept things, such as unemployment, from becoming much worse.

My own measure of President Obama's economic savvy is that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen from just below 8,000 on the day he took office to nearly 13,000 today.  Real numbers equaling real economic growth.  Also, General Motors was on the verge of bankruptcy when Obama came into office.  The new President made a decision to help the automaker stay in business with government loans.  Today America's largest car manufacturer is leaner, meaner, and well on the road to complete recovery - and it is pumping out thousands and thousands of beautiful pay checks every week!

So, if the Republicans get their act together and challenge President Obama with a candidate in November who is not completely nuts, the President will still have a formidable record on which to run.  And while President Obama may not have been all that we had hoped for, he is definitely head-and-shoulders above what the loyal opposition has coughed up so far.

Four more years!

Monday's Poetry: "Pastures of Plenty"

by Pa Rock
Poetry Appreciator

There was a time in the not too distant past when America was still expanding – geographically, emotionally, and intellectually.  After the Civil War and well into the first part of the twentieth century, many poor blacks headed north looking for opportunities that were denied them in the southern states.   Sometimes they found jobs and homes, and other times they succeeded only in transporting their poverty and perilous living conditions into a colder climate.   But there were also those times when the move north resulted in breathtaking achievement – such as the Harlem Renaissance.

World War I introduced many heretofore isolated Americans to the wonders of Europe, and as a popular song of the day foretold, it was going to be hard to “keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree.”  It was in those heady days just after the Great War that several famous American writers and entertainers sailed off to Europe (particularly Paris) and started creating some of the century’s most enduring work.  A good depiction of these willful and fun-loving expatriates can be seen in Woody Allen’s latest film, Midnight in Paris.  Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein referred to their expatriate cohort as “the lost generation.”

The Great Depression and the unrelenting dust storms that tore through the American heartland in the 1930’s were a one-two punch from Wall Street and God.  The response from poor Americans, particularly the “Okies” and “Arkies” of the Midwest, was to throw everything and everyone into old claptrap vehicles and head west to California – the promised land, the land of milk and honey, the home of sunny skies, warm weather, the blue Pacific, palm trees, Hollywood, and endless dreams.   John Steinbeck, himself a former expatriate and member of the lost generation, explored that tragic and complex era of American history in his classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath.

The great westward migration of the twentieth century was interrupted by World War II, but when the war ended many of the young veterans and their working wives headed to California where they found good jobs in the booming post-war economy, bought homes, and raised their families.  My dad’s brother Wayne, and his pretty wife, Mary, were two of those adventuresome young people who were drawn to the Mediterranean climate and plentiful jobs of San Diego at the war’s close.  Wayne died of leukemia a few years later, but my Aunt Mary (now in her eighties) and their two grown daughters and their families are all Californians.

My parents never did pack up and move to California, although I remember my mother begging to move there on numerous occasions.  Later she shifted her focus to Florida, but she was never able to get my dad to move south either.  While they did not completely relocate, my parents did travel to California to pick fruit the first two summers that they were married – 1946 and 1947.  (By 1948 I had joined the family and they apparently did not want to try caring for an infant in a migrant camp.

What I know about those summers that my parents were migrant farm workers is embarrassingly scant.  I wish now that I had asked more questions.  If memory serves, and at my age it doesn’t always, at least one of those summers they took my dad’s dad – Chock Macy – with them.  I know that at least one of those summers my dad’s job was to ride around on the back on a tractor with a long stick that he would use to beat the branches of English walnut trees, a job that sounds more glamorous than having to be one of the guys on the ground scurrying around dodging and picking up the falling nuts.  Mom’s job, I suppose, was picking fruit directly from the trees or packing it for shipment. 

I remember once when I was  ten or so, my mother looked at me and suddenly asked, “Do you remember  Spike?” 

“Spike?” I asked. 

“Oh,” she said, “He was a young boy at the camp who was always getting into trouble – but you weren’t even born then so I guess you wouldn’t remember him.”  Her senior moment was funny at the time, especially since she was not all that old!

John Steinbeck was not the only chronicler of the westward migration of America’s poor.   Woody Guthrie was also hard at work telling the story of those same people in song.  Today’s poetry selection is actually a song by Guthrie that celebrates the energy and sweat of those poor Americans who made their livings by following the harvests.

Please enjoy Pastures of Plenty.

Pastures of Plenty
by Woody Guthrie

It's a mighty hard row that my poor hands have hoed
My poor feet have traveled a hot dusty road
Out of your Dust Bowl and Westward we rolled
And your deserts were hot and your mountains were cold

I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes
I slept on the ground in the light of the moon
On the edge of the city you'll see us and then
We come with the dust and we go with the wind

California, Arizona, I harvest your crops
Well its North up to Oregon to gather your hops
Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine
To set on your table your light sparkling wine

Green pastures of plenty from dry desert ground
From the Grand Coulee Dam where the waters run down
Every state in the Union us migrants have been
We'll work in this fight and we'll fight till we win

It's always we rambled, that river and I
All along your green valley, I will work till I die
My land I'll defend with my life if it be
Cause my pastures of plenty must always be free

Some Thoughts on Equality

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

For the past month or two I have been reading a collection of African American novels written in the 1920's.  The book that I am currently enjoying is Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset, and although I am only a couple of chapters into it, I found this poignant passage of a young black girl's thoughts on equality:

"At a very early age she had discovered that the good things of life are unevenly distributed;  merit is not always rewarded;  hard labour does not necessarily entail adequate recompense." 

Just a few years ago the social and economic inequalities were seldom brought out into the sunshine and discussed.  The Occupy movement with its "in your face" dramatics has now focused attention on what is, in some respects, a national caste system.  Add to that the Republicans' all out war on unions, public pensions, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, public healthcare, education, and any attempts to force the rich to pay their fair share of taxes, and it is suddenly quite clear that those in control of the national wealth are hellbent on staying in control.

America is at a crossroads.  Will we continue to cede control of the economy and the political process to the people who ship jobs overseas, do their banking in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, pay lower tax rates than those of us who actually work, and love to fire people - or will we finally begin to acknowledge how things really are and commit to making serious change?

Having an intelligent President committed to making positive social change is not enough.  As we have learned over the past four years, the Republicans in Congress will vociferously oppose anything the President supports - even legislation that they once proposed themselves.  Their agenda has been one of obstruction and destruction.

The approval rating of Congress is now somewhere in the high single digits.   If ever the time was ripe for change, this would be it.

It is time that we began placing the same level of scrutiny on our Representatives and Senators as we do our presidential candidates - focusing on where their campaign cash originates and how those donations correlate to votes in Congress.

It is time to kill Citizens United - either through a Constitutional amendment or a second hearing in front of a more intelligent Supreme Court.

And it is well past time to occupy Congress with real people whose loyalties are to the people back home and not to the armies of lobbyists who infest our nation's capitol.

Only then will we have a shot at equality.

It's Newt!

by Pa Rock
Political Prognosticator


Mitt Romney must be wondering what happened.  Just a few days ago he was basking in the glow of victories in the first two voter showdowns of 2012, Iowa and New Hampshire, and his well-paid staffers were blanketing the airwaves with stories of his "inevitability."  But now suddenly the rush to crown him King of the Krazies seems to have hit an snag, and his inevitability is evaporating faster than a snowball rolling into hell.

And Mitt must feel like he has been run down by that very snowball.

So many things have happened that were not part of the highly scripted Romney campaign.  Who knew that Newt Gingrich would get off that great shot at Juan Williams, a black journalist who called him out on his unabashed bigotry, and get a standing ovation from the peckerwoods in South Carolina.  Mitt's mama, God rest her, raised him better than that.  And then a few days later  Gingrich tore into another journalist, CNN's John King, and got his second standing ovation from people who vote for Neanderthals like Joe Wilson and Jim DeMint.

Yesterday the Republican Party of Iowa had a change of heart and announced that they recounted their votes (still at a secret location) and Little Ricky Santorum is now the winner of Iowa - while Mitt slumped in a corner wistfully singing, "No, no, they can't take that away from me!"

And then there were those cruel endorsements of Gingrich from the absolute creme de la creme of the Republican Party.  The giants of GOP electoral politics, people like Todd and Sarah Palin, rushed to endorse Newt Gingrich.   When Rick Perry quit the race, he threw his support to the Newt also.  (With all of that going for him, there was no need to ask "What would Jesus do?")  Who would be next?  Tebow?

Well, actually Chuck Norris was next - and with that bombshell it is literally all over.  Joe Arpaio, a supporter of Rick Perry, will undoubtedly soon call a news conference to announce his support of Gingrich - and as Arpaio goes, so goes Steven  Seagal!

It's dominoes, baby - dominoes!  And they're starting to fall!

Mitt One-Percent

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist


To refer to ultra-rich presidential candidate Mitt Romney as being among the wealthiest members of our society is actually quite disingenuous.  Not only is Mitt in the top one-percent economically, he is in the top one-percent of the top one-percent!  The man who loves to share an aw-shucks smile as he states that he is unemployed, is filthy rich.

But we all know that, and we have known that all along.

Now, however, as the Republican race tightens, more of the candidates are beginning to lob insults and accusations at the front runner - and much of that political vitriol is focused on Romney's obscene wealth - money he says he did not inherit but rather made himself.  Though that claim is specious at best, even if the Mittster did make his own money, the methods in which he made it are now coming into question - and into daylight.

We have been hearing stories for weeks now about Romney's company, Bain Capital, buying distressed companies and then selling off assets and firing people in order to make a profit for Bain - and for Romney and his partners.  Romney, of course, is trying to claim that Bain was actually creating jobs, but the evidence for that appears to be scarcer than rainfall in Phoenix.

Now the focus is shifting to tax returns - an objective measure that can be used by average Americans to make their own determination of a candidate's income.  Romney said that he didn't make much actual money by working last year- just some speaking fees.  That "not much"  is apparently $374,000 - a figure that, by itself, would place him in the one-percent category!  (According to PolitiFact.com, Mitt and Ann Romney own three homes worth a total of about $14 million, so $374,000 really isn't much considering the upkeep that would have to go into residences like that.  Maybe he used illegal immigrants as groundskeepers because they were all that he could afford!)

But of course Mitt Romney made much, much more than $374,000 last year.  Well, he didn't roll up his sleeves and make it, he put his musty money to work making more money.  He is an investor, a rentier.  But just how much money did his money make?  We won't know that until he tells us - or until he releases his tax returns.

Newt Gingrich has just released his tax returns and has challenged Mitt Romney to do likewise - but Mitt is resisting.  He says now that he may release his current return in April (probably long after he has been crowned King of the Krazies).  He also has begun desensitizing that information by announcing that he pays a tax rate of around fifteen percent.  He gets away with that outrage because the tax rate on money "earned" from investments in fifteen percent.   Members of the United States military pay considerably more, but they have not had lobbyists in Congress for generations writing tax law that favors them.

President and Mrs. Obama pay 26% in income taxes, and even that is lower that what some in the true middle class pay.

Mitt Romney may be able to cruise all the way to November without ever having to stand firm on any issue or tell Americans how he really feels about the big concerns of the day, but he will not be able to escape the numbers.  Sooner or later the public will see him for what he is - a child of privilege who is protected from the realities of the world by immense and vulgar wealth, a dilettante who feels some sort of divine right to rule based on his position in society - another George W. Bush.

And do we want or need another George W. Bush?

Hey Mitt, show us your money!

2012 Pa Rock's Dead Pool Entries

by Pa Rock
Dead Pool Master

This year we had twenty-one entries in the Dead Pool, down a few from last year, but still a decent showing.  I credit the slight decrease in entries to the uptick in the economy – which is recovering thanks to the hard work of our President and in spite of Congress. 

The first (and most unique) entry was from my three-month-old granddaughter, Olive.  Her selections included Elmo, Big Bird, the Monster under her bed, the Vacuum Cleaner, Dora the Explorer, the Neighbor’s Dog, her stuffed armadillo animal, Kermit the Frog, Oscar the Grouch, and Kim Jung Un.  Good luck, Olive.  Pa Rock loves you!

The other twenty were somewhat less daring. 

Rod B:   Bobby Knight, Mel Gibson, Queen Elizabeth, David Letterman, Joe Paterno, John Madden, Burt Reynolds, Joan Rivers, Bill Clinton, and Willie Nelson.

Judy B:   Steven Tyler, Betty White, Charlie Sheen, Dick Cheney, Bernie Madoff, Gloria Vanderbilt, Michael Douglas, Magic Johnson, Dick Van Dyke, and Larry King.

Odessa B:   Antonio Banderas, Nick Cannon, Kate Moss, Elton John, Queen Elizabeth, President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, David Letterman, Robin Williams, Magic Johnson,  and Lance Armstrong.

Brenda K:   Walter Mondale, Adam West, Ray Bradbury, Billy Graham, Loretta Lynn, Wynonna Judd, Andy Griffith, Stephen Hawking, Garrison Keillor, and Andy Williams.

David S:   Rosalyn Carter, Nancy Reagan, Brian Wilson, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Lindsay Lohan, Annette Funicello, Shirley Temple, Etta James, Robin Gibb, and Dick Cheney.

Darby G:  Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Charlie Sheen, Steve-O, Rush Limbaugh, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Dick Cheney.

Ron H  (hoptwo):   Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Billy Graham, Muhammad Ali, Pope Benedict, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Jerry Lewis, Annette Funicello, Hugh Hefner, and Aretha Franklin.

Breanne:  Paula Deane, Oprah Winfrey, Magic Johnson, Lindsay Lohan, New Gingrich, Kirstie Alley, Ed O’Neal, Dr. Phil, Dolly Parton, and Lil’ Wayne.

Ricardo:   Barack Obama, David Letterman, Brittney Spears, President Calderon of Mexico, Carlos Slim, Dog the Bounty Hunter, Hulk Hogan, Allen Greenspan, Joe Torre, and Hillary Clinton.

Charles B:  Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen, Courtney Love, Dick Cheney, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Betty White, Ashton Kucher, Tom Cruise, Bob Barker, and Wilford Brimley.

Leslie K:  Joanne Woodward, Etta James, Kirk Douglas, Chuck Yeager, Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen, Oprah Winfrey, Nancy Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and Aretha Franklin.

Tim:  Bill Clinton, Ron Paul, Dick Cheney, Andy Griffith, Larry King, Pope Benedict, Fidel Castro, Henry Kissinger, Stephen King, and Queen Elizabeth.

Erin:   Chris Christie, Nancy Grace, Ringo Starr, Fidel Castro, Tiger Woods, O.J. Simpson, Charlie Sheen, Artie Lange, Frank Martin, and Hugo Chavez.

Don H:  Fidel Castro, Muhammad Ali, Prince Philip, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Billy Graham, Hosni Mubarek, Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Kirk Douglas, and Saif al-Islam.

Mike B:   Fidel Castro, Dick Cheney, Fats Domino, Aretha Franklin, Peter Fonda, Hamid Krzai, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jerry Lewis, Mickey Rooney, and Margaret Thatcher.

Molly:  John Goodman, Courtney Love, Nancy Reagan, Charlie Sheen, Dennis Leary, George Wendt, Lindsay Lohan, Snooki, Ozzy Osbourne, and Seth Binzer.

Nick:   Clint Eastwood, Marilyn Manson, Danny Devito, Bill Cosby, Val Kilmer, Wee Man, Jack Black, Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson, and Alan Alda.

Tiffany:   Betty White, Michael Douglas, Craig T. Nelson, Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen, Bill Cosby, Roseanne Barr, Paula Abdul, George Lopez, and Willie Nelson.

Boone:  Bette Midler, Kirk Douglas, Louise Rainer, Charlie Sheen, Ben Stiller, Larry King, Britney Spears, Dick Cheney, Analena Joe Lee, and Willie Nelson. 

Pa Rock:   Celeste Holm, Ted Turner, Cloris Leachman, Rupert Murdoch, Sophia Loren, Dick Cheney, Shirley Jones, Jim Carrey, Jean Stapleton, and Clint Eastwood.

The top vote-getters appear to be Lindsay Lohan in third place with six votes, Charlie Sheen in second place with eight votes, and Darth Vader’s evil twin, Dick Cheney, leading the pack with nine votes.  All three are perennial favorites in this contest.

If the group’s instincts are any indication, it might be a good year for Dick Cheney to take some of those millions that he received from Halliburton while serving as Vice President of the United States  – and use those ill-gotten gains to take Lynn on a Grand Tour of Europe.  I recommend that he start with Holland because The Hague is so beautiful in the spring!

(Please print a copy of the entries and post on your refrigerator so that you can keep up-to-the-minute track of the results.  That will also let anyone walking through your kitchen know just how sick you really are!)  (Just kidding!)

(Note:  I misplaced one entry, found it, and added it to this post on 20 Jan 12.  Welcome aboard, Boone!)

Costa Concordia: The Tale of the Coward and the Hero

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist


Shareholders in Carnival Cruise Lines (CCL) got a sobering reality check yesterday when shares in their stock dropped from $34.28 a share to $29.60 - a drop of $4.68 per share during one trading day.  The cause of that precipitous drop was, of course, the capsizing of the cruise ship, the Costa Concordia, off the coast of Italy.  The Costa Concordia is owned and operated by Carnival Cruise Lines.

For the past couple of days we have all been transfixed by images on the Internet of the big, beautiful cruise ship lying on its side in the Aegean, mostly submerged.  There were at least eleven deaths in the incident, and possibly more than twenty.

Today two tales have emerged regarding employees of the ship, one a tale of cowardice and the other a more uplifting story of heroism.  Sadly, the coward was Francesco Schettino, the ship's captain.  When he realized that his ship was in trouble, Captain Schettino wasted no time in getting himself aboard one of the lifeboats - hours before some of the passengers were able to do so.  None of that "Captain goes down with his ship" for that old sailor.  Today a tape was released in which a member of the Italian Coast Guard was heard ordering the Captain to return to his ship, but the Captain was refusing, saying that he could be of more help directing the recovery operation from the lifeboat.

Captain Schettino was arrested by Italian authorities for dereliction of duty, but today he was released into a program of house arrest.  He continues to deny that he did anything wrong.

The other employee of the ship who made news was a British teenager named James Thomas who was working as a dancer on board the vessel.  He discovered that some passengers had gone to the wrong floor and could not reach the lifeboats.  Young Thomas turned himself into a human ladder allowing passengers to climb down his body in order to reach the safety of the lifeboats.  The 6-foot 3-inch physically fit young dancer told the Daily Mirror:

"We couldn't get the lifeboats off and the life rafts the staff use were stuck to the side of the ship.  It was frightening.  People couldn't get down, the drop was too far, so I lowered myself into position.  I grabbed the lifeboat with one arm and the upper deck rail with the other and let people climb on my shoulder and down my body."

One of the passengers that James Thomas helped to rescue ultimately pulled the hero himself into a lifeboat.

The Costa Concordia had a staff of 1,023 - but many of those were involved in running the bars, casinos, theatres, shops, restaurants, and swimming pools on board the cruise ship.  Very few were qualified seamen, and most did not have sufficient training to deal with a sea-going emergency - including, it would seem, the ship's captain.

Fortunately for several of those on board, a young dancer mustered the courage to act courageously in the face of danger and save lives.  James Thomas is his name, and he is a hero!

A Stage Full of Crackers

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist


The Republican Presidential field has devolved into something that rank-and-file Republicans and teabaggers can readily support:  a stage full of hate-spewing crackers.

Last night's Republican candidate debate in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, featured the final five:  Romney,  Gingrich, Santorum, Perry, and Paul - and, not for the first time, the audience inserted its own bigoted views into the debate process.

Apparently the most "newsworthy" moment occurred when Fox commentator Juan Williams, a black man, tried to take Newt Gingrich to task over his earlier remarks that poor children in low-income neighborhoods should be given janitorial work in local schools.  Williams asked the former Speaker, "Can't you see that this is viewed at a minimum as insulting to Americans, but particularly to black Americans?"  Gingrich shot back, "No, I don't see that,"  to the loud approval of the crowd.

Williams countered with a suggestion that Gingrich's comments had been "intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities."  The crowd booed loudly.  Gingrich, then smelling blood, began a grand diatribe designed to marginalize and vilify the poor - and received a standing ovation!

Happy Martin Luther King Day from South Carolina, ya'll!

(I wonder if Juan Willliams is yearning for the good old days at NPR?)

Monday's Poetry: "Comes the Colored Hour"

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist


Monday evening, and as the national holiday honoring American civil rights visionary, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, draws to a close, I feel that a selection by Langston Hughes is in order.  The following, Comes the Colored Hour, is a bit of satire that looks at an America where the roles and rules of skin color are reversed.  Mr. Hughes undoubtedly smiled sadly as he held the America that was up to a mirror and saw the opposite image, an image that would have been no more fair or just than the one to which he and his race has been consigned by fate.

America is a better place today thanks to the work of people like Langston Hughes and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  There is still much left to overcome, but many significant barriers between the races have fallen thanks to the bravery and determination of people like them.

Comes the Colored Hour
by Langston Hughes 

Comes the Colored Hour:
Martin Luther King is Governor of Georgia,
Dr. Rufus Clement his Chief Adviser,
A. Philip Randolph the High Grand Worthy.
In white pillared mansions
Sitting on their wide verandas,
Wealthy  Negroes have white servants,
White sharecroppers work the black plantations,
And colored children have white mammies:
Mammy Faubus
Mammy Eastland
Mammy Wallace
Dear, dear darling old white mammies--
Sometimes even buried with our family.
Dear old
Mammy Faubus! 

Culture, they say, is a two-way street:  

Hand me my mint julep, mammy.

Hurry up!
Make haste!

Racism from the Heartland

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist


How many times over the last three or four years have we had to watch in astonishment as some blustering political figure, always white and usually old, had to come out and apologize for a racist and stupid email about the President that they circulated to their friends.  It would appear to the rational mind that the morons would eventually figure out that someone will take offense and forward it on to the press.  But it just keeps happening - they never learn!

And the people who send those things around always bristle at being called racist - even though that is exactly what they are.  (One woman wrote to me and declared that she was not a racist because she had a Negro friend.  Sorry, honey, but having a black housekeeper doesn't do much toward breaking the color barrier!)

This week there is another example of a white power-broker having to apologize to the First Family over a piece of "humor" that he forwarded to his friends.  Fortunately one of his friends turned out to be a Judas and shared it with the press.

Mike O'Neal, the (old, white, male, Republican) Speaker of the Kansas House of Representatives, has issued an apology for an email which he forwarded to friends that referred to Michelle Obama as "Mrs. YoMama" and compared her to the Grinch.  (Okay, maybe there is a bit of humor in any Republican elected official calling anyone a Grinch - after all, the only "people" they seem to give two shits about are rich ones - and corporations and fetuses.   Certainly the real Grinch is a card-carrying Republican.)

But, unbelievable as it may seem, the Grinch email about the First Lady was not Mike O'Neal's low point for the week.  A few days prior he had sent around an email that quoted from the Bible -Verse 8 of Psalm 109 - a hate-filled diatribe that is a prayer for the death of a leader, the meat of which is listed below:

Let his days be few, and let another take his office
May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.
May his children be wandering beggars;  may they be driven from their ruined homes.
May a creditor seize all he has;  May strangers plunder the fruits of his labor.
May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children.

Speaker O'Neal added his own postscript:

"At last - I can honestly voice a Biblical prayer for our president!  Look it up - it is word for word!  Let us all bow our heads and pray.  Brothers and Sisters, can I gen an AMEN?  AMEN!!!!!!"

Nice one, Mike!  Your family must be so proud.

Mike O'Neal, the Speaker of the Kansas House of Representatives, is declining to apologize for the Biblical email, probably believing that one should not have to apologize for spreading the word of God.

No word yet whether Kansas governor Sam Brownback is on O'Neal's email contact list, and if he is, what he chose to do with the controversial communications.

(Note:  Much of the information for this post came from ThinkProgress and my favorite Kansas newspaper, The Lawrence Journal-World.)

Ie Shima: Ernie Pyle, Mountain Climbing, and Giant Tortoises

by Pa Rock
Cultural Explorer


I spent the entire day today on the  island of Ie Shima with my friends Valerie and Murphy.   It is about a thirty-minute ferryboat ride from Okinawa.

Ie Shima is relatively small, containing one town, a U.S. Marine Corps training area, lots of farmland, and one tall mountain that looks very incongruent on the flat island.  The primary crop appears to be peanuts, and huffing and wheezing up the mountain is certainly one of the more popular entertainments.

We met Valerie's friend, Atsuko, on the ferry and followed her to the community center where she teaches little children to speak English.  We interacted with the children for an hour or so and had just as much fun as the kids did!

Our next stop was at the memorial that marks the spot where journalist Ernie Pyle was killed by a sniper during the Battle of Okinawa.  I had read several of  Pyle's war dispatches this morning on the long ride to the port at Motubu, including the last one that he filed from Okinawa, and I found the combination of those readings coupled with actually being on the spot where he was killed to be a very moving experience.

We had lunch and walked along the beach at the YYY Resort.  This is their slow season so we basically had the place to ourselves.  Valerie and I managed to gather a pocketful of sea glass.

This afternoon Valerie and I climbed Mount Gusuku while Murphy stayed in the car and tried to sleep off the motion sickness meds that he took for the boat ride over.  We were able to drive halfway up the mountain and then park at the gift shop.  The rest was conquered by marching up a long series of zigzagging cement steps that went all the way to the summit.  Valerie said there were 298 steps, but it felt like a million!  We were the only two on the summit for a few minutes, but then a busload of Japanese students began showing up.  By the time we headed down, twenty or thirty of the healthy teens had gathered on the peak!

The rest of the afternoon was spent driving around the island while we waited on the 4:00 p.m. ferry to show up to take us back to Okinawa.  (Valerie was chauffeuring us in a rental car.)  As we were coming down a narrow street in the town, Murphy spotted a group of kids gathered around a fence taking pictures, and he was certain that he had seen some giant tortoises on the inside of the fence.  Valerie quickly cut her 48th illegal u-turn of the day, and we headed back to see if our friend was hallucinating on his motion sickness meds.

But those extra-big turtles had not been hallucinations.  There were at least nineteen giant tortoises roaming around a large fenced-in area eating greens that had been cut and strewn into their enclosure.  It was an amazing sight.  I haven't researched them yet, but they were approximately two feet in height, and more than three feet in length.  They had to be Galapagos tortoises - which I have heard are disappearing.  There were no signs or any indication of this being a commercial activity - just some private collector hoarding an endangered species.  They did appear to be healthy and well cared for.

That was our day.  It was a long one.