Stuck in my head

It happens to all of us at one time or another.  That one song and your grey matter will NOT let go.

Sometimes its just you humming, or it rumbles in the background.  Other times it echo's and threatens your sanity.  Hearing the song will sometimes help.  Singing the song usually helps.

Some are not too bad others are nightmarish.  XTC's "The Mayor of Simpleton" rocked my cortex the other day.  Worse was the replaying of ABBA's "Mama Mia" a while ago.  The Toy Dolls "Nellie the Elephant" worked its way from Temporal to Frontal lobe.  The Cures "Friday I'm in love" has made an apperance as well.

The worse one ever was Blondies "One way or another" which took a week to drive out of my skull.

(Links provided for attempted Occiptial reconciliation).  

Anyone care to share?

100 days of this!

Looks like WaPo has something:

He is spending more then anyone has ever. Plans on spending even more.  And its not his money...

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has pwnd him. Fidel Castro, just called him superficial. 

Originally he said, "We can't keep looking to the past. We've got to look to the future here. So I don't think it would serve any purpose to prosecute or investigate former administration officials on these interrogations the CIA did." All of a sudden he changes his mind! 

Obama doesn't know what he's doing, he has no clue what's going on in his own administration. Janet Napolitano said the 9/11 hijackers actually got into our country through Canada. The National Post in Canada has a piece asking how did this woman get her job? She says it's not a crime to illegally enter the country, she is in charge of Homeland Security! 

If Eric Holder or Conyers does investigations of former Bush administration officials, It will be about destroying and criminalizing policy circumstances with which you disagree. Nancy Pelosi signed off on all of this in 2002. When they were explained waterboarding and all this, nobody in Congress objected. So if Holder proceeds, he's going to have to send out subpoenas not just to the executive branch, he's going to have to send out subpoenas to the lawyers, the White House counsel and anybody else who had anything to do with this!

 Nobody's going to go work for the executive branch ever again.

During a photo-op with King Abdullah, he says, "I'm going to let Holder go ahead and do what he wants to do. If he wants to investigate these people in the Bush administration, fine.” (paraphrased) 

The White House press office was just blindsided by this. The director of communications in the White House, she quit. She resigned the White House! 

It's embarrassing incompetence and inexperience. 

Admiral Blair admitting the CIA received high value, lifesaving information from terrorists, while President Obama is condemning the same interrogations as immoral and counterproductive. 

President Obama is throwing grand White House parties with Kobe beef, a hundred bucks a pound, while telling the nation to cut back in order to survive the greatest economic downturn supposedly since the Great Depression.

Bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia!

Listening patiently and respectfully while Daniel Ortega talks for 50 minutes about the “criminal country” he leads, Obama does not stand up for his country at one point during the Summit of the Americas. 

He has run around the world and apologized for the greatest, most compassionate, most innovative and freedom-loving country in the world.

Then we have the nominations of five tax cheats to his cabinet, including the man who oversees the IRS. 
We have Obama's press spokesman, who makes a complete idiot of himself daily. 

He sends back a symbol of freedom, that bust of Sir Winston Churchill to Great Britain just after moving into the White House. 

He insulted the prime minister of England, the queen of England, with embarrassing, thoughtless gifts. 

We have the French president Sarkozy ridiculing Obama's messianic complex, inviting him to walk on water at Normandy beach. 

We have Iran taking a hostage, an American journalist, as Obama promises better relations. 

We have North Korea humiliating Obama with their missile launch. 

We have Obama putting the country in debt for generations to come while promising fiscal responsibility, offering up laughable budget cuts, 

Banning lobbyists from his administration, while appointing them left and right. 

Lying that Caterpillar would hire more with the stimulus bill, then watching while that company lay’s off thousands after the bill passes. 

He pledges to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. But then he keeps it open with no plan for its future. 
Proclaiming total transparency, while keeping secret who got the TARP funds, when, where, why. 

He is incapable of communicating without a teleprompter. 

He attacks a private citizen broadcaster from the White House. 

He makes a ham-handed attempt to nationalize the banks preventing financial institutions from paying back TARP money they don't need or want. 

He has made bad situations worse with car manufacturers, and the worst is yet to come. 

He has sparked hundreds of protests involving hundreds of thousands of Americans at tea parties regarding irresponsible government spending.

His Homeland Security chief labels peacefully demonstrating Americans and veterans as security risks. 
Moved the census over to the Commerce department to politicize that.

This was orignally my Rant on the Wizars blog.

UK Political humor.

The year is 1945 Clemente Attlee is prime minister. One day he is relieving himself in the restroom at the House of Commons. The door swings open; it’s the leader of the opposition, Sir Winston Churchill.   Churchill spy’s the Prime Minister at the urinal and he strides purposefully to the furthest end.  “Feeling a bit stand-offish today are we, Winston?”  Asked Attlee.

“No” said Churchill majestically unbuttoning his fly. “But, whenever you see anything big, Clemente, you nationalize it.”

Notation: PM Attlee was Labour (Progressive party).  Churchill was, of course Tory (Conservative)

The story thus far

I have been working on loosing mass for some time now.  Recently an old childhood friend helped with a battle plan that I could really wrap my head around.

so thats were I am at currently.  I have a ways to go, but I am doing okay so far!

I guess you have to play wow to get this...

This is dedicated to Boans:

Druid to mage: Rez me please.

Mage: Crap it failed, wait a few seconds and I'll try again.
Druid: Okay
<1>
Druid: Fail again? Want me to run back?
Mage: No...no. I'll get it. It just that my heals aren't very good at healing people.

Dat's spicy!

I enjoy hotter foods.  That is to say spicy hot foods.  If it makes your forehead sweat and lips burn, that is good stuff!  I was blessed with a family of culinary wimps, so I have to doctor up my own dishes, which is fine.

Of the five of us, I have the highest... er... tolerance;  second in line would be daughter Diana, with a two way tie between Trevor and Tina.

As I have been carefully watching my caloric intake, I try to get a lot of flavor in my dishes.  So vinegars, dried chili's, hot sauces, BBQ sauces, Salsa etc. are added to the veggies in liberal amounts.  I have come to find that many of the products labeled "Hot" do not live up to the hype.

This could be regional...  Last August while in California we stopped at a Taco Bell.  I grabbed the Fire Sauce Packet and noticed it actually had some lingering burn!  The same packet we get in Oregon cannot do much in that regaurd, unless you let the content of four packets sit in your mouth for a couple of minutes.

Trampoleaning

With Summer, the tramp-o-lene Connor was gifted from a group of family friends is getting more use.

This means we each take turns jumping around with Connor who can almost do a front flip...

Jumping is quite a bit of physical activity and you quickly find your heart rate going up along with your breathing.  Having recently dropped some weight makes it much easier on my knee's.  Yet, they still let me know how unhappy they are with jumping.

Still if you get enough height going and land in a small enough package you can impact on the ground below.  This not only is a rude thing for the Earth to do, your innards will let you know how little they liked the impact for the next day or so.

Obama's massive budget cut in Pictures.

Happy Birthday Tina!

It's my BFF\wifes birthday today.  Her blog is linked over on the right as 'Tina'. 

I got her a gift cert. for a massage.   

How to make your bank profitable

First of all, get rid of that silly notion that you need to generate more revenue.  Comon, that is Old fashion Free Market kind of stupidity that has never worked in the last 300 years.  Right???

If your Goldman Sachs, you change your reporting calendar, effectively erasing the impact of a $1.5 billion loss in December.

Or like Bank of America sell your shares in China Construction Bank to book a big one-time profit! you could also book a $2.2 billion gain by increasing the value of Merrill Lynch assets higher than Merrill kept them.

Ugh...

Some day, some year in June

I really will have to head out to Minnisota.  

Should we learn from history?

We have found that President FDR maintained the great Depression by a good seven years with his administrations policy until World War II got us back on track.

What about other countries and recession?  This is from Historian Paul Johnson:

"In 1931 the prospective national deficit was a mere £170 million, less than is now spent on freebies for New Labour parliamentarians. But in those careful days it was regarded as catastrophic. Urgent action was required, and it was taken. Snowden, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the National Government, raised income tax to five shillings in the pound (about half what it is now). Even more shocking, everyone in the state sector, from cabinet ministers to the unemployed, had to take a cut of from 10 to 20 per cent. The only exception was the police, who took a cut of only 5 per cent. This was because Samuel, the home secretary, told the House it would be that figure, then said he had to 'honour my mistake'. In fact it may have been deliberate, to keep the police loyal to the regime. All those affected (including the teachers who were cut by 15 per cent) accepted the cuts loyally. The one exception was the judges. They claimed the reduction was an attack on judicial independence, and unlawful as contrary to the Act of Settlement. As judges they were among the highest-paid people on the state pay roll, £5,000 a year, and therefore cut by 20 per cent, £1,000 a year. This still left them with 20 times the average wage. But they whined and howled and threatened. Lord Sankey, the Lord Chancellor, wrote a memo to the Prime Minister (15 January 1932, reproduced in Heuston's Lives of the Lord Chancellors, 1885-1940, pp.513-15), saying they were in a 'mutinous mood'. The controversy subsided into a morass of incomprehensible legal argument, leaving the country with the impression that judges were the most selfish group of people in the country."

Out spending the cuts and engaging the enemy.

“The administration’s new talk of trimming a meager .0025 percent from the $4 trillion federal budget just doesn’t square with its reckless record on borrowing and spending,”  “Washington Democrats have spent the past three months doling out more taxpayer dollars than every previous president combined, and the administration is clearly feeling the heat.”  --House Minority Leader John Boehner.

“More money has gone to Rep. John Murtha’s pet airport in Pennsylvania than the federal government will save over the next 90 days under President Obama,” --Eric Cantor

Thus Republicans point out the lack of spending control and propagandising of a trivial cut.  As we all know the Republican party knows all about lack of fiscal control.  Let's hope this is the start of actual commitment, for when they win back the Senate in 2010

Still in all, 100 million trimmed is $ 100 million.  If this is the start of going line by line, great!

Also, Obama meeting with all these Anti-American "leaders."  Most of these guys make me feel sick.  The approach President Obama is using makes me uncomfortable.  Yet, there is value in talking .vs. not talking. 

Like the Heritage Foundation, as it continues to put a Latin American team in place, the Administration needs to concentrate on four basic challenges

1. Exercise Caution on Cuba. President Obama must now give his new policy time to work and discourage Congress from seeking to unilaterally lift restrictions on U.S. tourism and end the embargo. He should continue to press for reform, drawing high-level attention to Cuba's human rights situation and emphasizing the need for a democratic transition on the island.
   
   
2. Keep Mexico on the Front Burner. Mexico is by far the most pressing regional challenge, one that requires the steady application of the Oval Office's influence. The Administration needs to focus on the delivery of promised anti-drug assistance. It can help by using the President to deliver a powerful message against drug abuse in the U.S. as a first step toward demand reduction.
   
   
3. Complete Free Trade Deals. The Administration should avoid shadowy rhetoric about "partnerships" and "a new era in the hemisphere" and seal the deal by working with Congress to deliver approval of free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama.
   
   
4. Tough Love for Chávez, Morales, and Ortega. Latin America's populist-authoritarian left says it wants good relations and its own "restart button." The Obama Administration must develop a results-oriented, "show-me" policy in response. Security concerns, economic policy issues, and the loss of democratic freedoms are challenges that must be addressed if there is hope for genuinely constructive relationships to develop between the U.S. and nations governed by the Latin American left. Photo-ops and populist dramatics make good media story, but they accomplish littl
   

If you pay people to be poor, you'll never run out of poor people

Taken from that spended conservative MP from the UK, Daniel Hannan.

"For most of my life, the question of how to relieve poverty has been owned by socialists. You might vote Conservative because you believed in low taxes, strong defence, controlled immigration, free enterprise or school discipline. But if you were chiefly interested in how to improve the condition of the indigent, you'd almost certainly end up voting Labour (read: Progressive)."

"Poverty is not simply an absence of money. Rather, it is bound up with a whole set of other circumstances: lack of qualifications, demoralisation, family break-up, substance abuse, fatherlessness. It follows that you do not end poverty by giving money to the poor: a theory that British welfarism has amply demonstrated over 60 years. Only when you tackle poverty holistically will you facilitate meaningful improvement."

"Conservatives naturally grasp the connection between living in an independent state and living independently of the state. IDS has done the poor the greatest service anyone could do them: he has ensured that they will no longer be left to the Left."

What would you think of this man???

Who did more to free the women of Afghanistan from oppression, then anyone?

Who established the first functioning democracy in Islam?

Who contributed more to the fight against AIDS than all of Europe put together?

 (Thus is responsible for the saving of millions of lives in Africa). 

You would equate him with Nazism, call for his demise, refer to him in derogitory fashion at every oppertunity...

The most noxious and rabid smear campaign I've ever witnessed has been against this president.

Obama against?

This was said yesterday and it struck a solemn chord.

"President appears to be against three things, Life, our Liberties and the pursuit of happiness."

It was said in humor, I almost laughed.  Then the truth of it struck me.

The Holiday Conundrum

 Holiday time comes with the inevitable claiming that commercialization has ruined the celebration.  Sometimes this comment is greeted with a chorus of agreements and nods.  One has to ponder why someone would decry yet participate in such a decision.

Keeping the holiday spirit is an internal endeavor. By celebrating in tradition and holding it within oneself you transcend the materialistic.

The next time there is a distressing cry about the holidays, I hope to hear a voice state, that they choose not to participate with the commercialization.  With luck that voice will not be mine alone.

Graham Norton Show

As stated before, I am loving BBC America.  One of the surprise  shows was Graham Norton.  This is a sit down interview show two celebrities and a musical guest.  Very informal and very funny.  There are lots of interactions with the audience and some of the funniest impromptu sketch work.  

How can you tell???

Q: How can you tell when a politician is lying?

A: His lips move.

Old joke, has that ring of truth that makes it funny.  Campaign promises are made and broken depending on what side of the aisle your on you either, acquiesce, point your finger or just go about your life.

When it becomes pathological, you start wondering what is going on with this elected official.

Little Green Footballs has a good read on our Vice President.  As does The Gay Patriot, who goes after the MSM for its lack of integrity.

Even a bastion of liberal pontification like the Slate has some articles on Joe Biden's colorful past  exaggerations (plagiarism).  It makes me feel uncomfortable when I consider the human Gaffe machine representing the USA in the world.

Charles Krauthammer, telling it like it is. Taking it to the "Man"

Charles Krauthammer, columnest for The Washington Post, has done an excellent job eliminating bias and spin from the above linked artical.

While the rest of the MSM spouts and spins off propaganda on how wildly sucessful or most beloved, hallowed, President Obamas triumph in Europe has been, Mr. Krauthammer has gone right down the middle.

It has been up to Radio and the New media to fill in the information void the MSM is creating, seemingly deliberately, around, beloved, hallowed, President Obama. 

We the people should NOT have to work so hard just to get the basics, but like it or not, it's the reality.

No Healthcare left behind.

77% of Americans feel the quality of their own health care is good. The 'wrong' bit is access and increasing costs.  The solution that President Obama touts will jettison the good stuff.

The Health Policy Consensus Group in a joint statement on Health Reform six seriously flawed heathcare ideas for change:

• A new government health insurance plan.
  
• An employer “play-or-pay” mandate.
  
• A uniform, government-defined package of benefits.
  
• A mandate that individuals must purchase insurance.
  
• A National Health Insurance Exchange extending federal regulatory powers over private insurance.
  
• Federal interference in the practice of medicine through a federal health board, comparative effectiveness review, and other government intrusions into medical decision-making.
  

Pres. Obama included $1.1 billion for comparative effectiveness research. This means  “those that are found to be less effective and in some cases, more expensive, will no longer be prescribed."  The decision is taken out of the hands of Doctors and Patients.  

This mirrors the UK system, which  produces some of the worst health outcomes in the industrialised world.  Where thousands of people are killed in hospitals for reasons unrelated to their original condition. 

The establishment of a “single payer” health care system would  lower payments for physician and health care providers. This would be lower incomes for physicians and reduce the supply of active physicians, impairing access to health care for all patients. 

More government might seem like a good solution to health care.  Unfortunatly, the government is horrid at running things.  We have to preserve what is good about our healthcare:

Fact No. 1: Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers. Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States, and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the U.K. and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

Fact No. 2: Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians. Breast cancer mortality is 9 percent higher, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher and colon cancer mortality among men is about 10 percent higher than in the United States.

Fact No. 3: Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries. Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit are taking statins, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease. By comparison, of those patients who could benefit from these drugs, only 36 percent of the Dutch, 29 percent of the Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Britons and 17 percent of Italians receive them.

Fact No. 4: Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians. Take the proportion of the appropriate-age population groups who have received recommended tests for breast, cervical, prostate and colon cancer:

• Nine of 10 middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to less than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent).
  
• Nearly all American women (96 percent) have had a pap smear, compared to less than 90 percent of Canadians.
  
• More than half of American men (54 percent) have had a PSA test, compared to less than 1 in 6 Canadians (16 percent).
  
• Nearly one-third of Americans (30 percent) have had a colonoscopy, compared with less than 1 in 20 Canadians (5 percent).
  

Fact No. 5: Lower income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians. Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report “excellent” health compared to Canadian seniors (11.7 percent versus 5.8 percent). Conversely, white Canadian young adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower income Americans to describe their health as “fair or poor.”

Fact No. 6: Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the U.K. Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long - sometimes more than a year - to see a specialist, to have elective surgery like hip replacements or to get radiation treatment for cancer. All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada. In England, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.

Fact No. 7: People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed. More than 70 percent of German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and British adults say their health system needs either “fundamental change” or “complete rebuilding.”

Fact No. 8: Americans are more satisfied with the care they receive than Canadians. When asked about their own health care instead of the “health care system,” more than half of Americans (51.3 percent) are very satisfied with their health care services, compared to only 41.5 percent of Canadians; a lower proportion of Americans are dissatisfied (6.8 percent) than Canadians (8.5 percent).

Fact No. 9: Americans have much better access to important new technologies like medical imaging than patients in Canada or the U.K. Maligned as a waste by economists and policymakers naïve to actual medical practice, an overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identified computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade. The United States has 34 CT scanners per million Americans, compared to 12 in Canada and eight in Britain. The United States has nearly 27 MRI machines per million compared to about 6 per million in Canada and Britain.

Fact No. 10: Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations. The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other single developed country. Since the mid-1970s, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to American residents more often than recipients from all other countries combined. In only five of the past 34 years did a scientist living in America not win or share in the prize. Most important recent medical innovations were developed in the United States.

Imagine that we had created a Government Food Service. We make it "fair" and not on ability to pay, so foodstuffs would be rationed by the Feds. Each American had been allocated one butcher, one baker, one resturant etc. 

What would happen? Huge bureaucracy, duplication of effort, too much of this and not enough of that, the rise of a black market, and people going hungery. In other words, Government at its finest.

USA looses at the G20 .

Our Rookie President did not work for the USA's best interests at the G20.  Europeans did the best Chinese did the worst.  The G20 has agreed to increase the resources of the International Monetary Fund to $750 billion, to fund $100 billion for multilateral development banks, and to increase trade finance to poorer countries. 

The G20 claims this will grow to $5 trillion by the end of the year, raise output by 4 percent, and accelerate the change to a green economy.

If only we could learn from history, THIS DOES NOT WORK!   Development aid has been tried repeatedly since the 1940s: it has failed so many time that there is no reason to believe that it will work now. And claims that any of this spending will bring a ‘green economy’ into being ignore the  economic fallacies of the concept.

So the Europeans get regulations, Americans get a watered-down endorsement of stimulus spending, the Chinese get a bigger role in international financial institutions, and the developing nations get more politically corrupting development aid. 

So we got took.

Anti-Market and Anti-Consumer, 2009 Energy Bill

American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES). Has a taxpayer funded mandate for unproven energy sources jacks up taxes on current energy sources. So you will get hit twice for unproven, unsuccessful, technology that has to get government subsiding to compete.

Title 1 of ACES also includes incentives to facilitate the transition to a smart grid.  While upgrading the nation's electric grid has merit, such a project should not be approached bureaucratically. More efficient grid technology should be an investment made by the private sector, and if upgrading the grid will save consumers money—as Congress purports it will—consumers will respond to price signals and buy it.

A new grid could help store large amounts of electricity for the first time, which would benefit unreliable sources such as wind and solar power. 

Any federal policy should focus on removing regulatory barriers to upgrading the grid to allow for more consumer choice and protect private property rights.

Spritual beings having a human experience

In my previous posting Shoo put together a splended answer (which I prarphrased in the title).

I know we have are spritual beings, I know God,  I also know that there is the prospect of eternal life through God. I know this cannot be "proven".  As someone posting on man made global warming said, wouldnt you want to err on the side of caution?

Enter Entertainer Penn Jillet.  He profoundly put on video something I was struggling to put on my blog(NSFW for language):

Latest Global Temperatures.

Since 1979, NOAA satellites have been carrying instruments which measure the natural microwave thermal emissions from oxygen in the atmosphere. The signals that these microwave radiometers measure at different microwave frequencies are directly proportional to the temperature of different, deep layers of the atmosphere. Every month, John Christy and DR. Roy Spenser update the global temperature data sets that represent the piecing together of the temperature data from a total of eleven instruments flying on eleven different satellites over the years. As of 2008, the most stable instrument for this monitoring is the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU-A) flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite.

The graph above represents the latest update; updates are usually made within the first week of every month. The smooth curve in the graph is a fourth-order polynomial fit to the data, which smooths out the large amount of monthly variability in the data and helps reveal the underlying ‘trends’. (There is no claim that this curve has any predictive power for the coming months or years.)

(Directly taken from Dr. Roy Spenser's excellent blog)

Reliable Resources.

The best news is from an earnest reporter who has multiple sources who independently confirm the information.   Over time this reporter would gain a reputation for providing unassailable information.  

There are obviously tainted organizations, which internally can have some good reporting.  Seperating the wheat from chaffe is where the work begins.

As the Devils Dictionary defines: REPORTER, n. A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.

Value in meaning

 On the very basic level, humans tend to look for meaning in existence. This is not something quantifiable. Philosophy, is that attempt to make sense of existence, truth, beauty or the search for wisdom.

Philosophical pursuit is done via a well reasoned argument. Every culture that advanced beyond the stone age has had theories of philosophy. These have been expounded upon by individuals and countered by other individuals. There has never been a consensus of thought for the reasons behind existence. I highly doubt there ever will be.

In reading about all the "isms" Rationalism, Empiricism, Skepticism, Idealism, Pragmatism and Existentialism. You realize this is all a spiritual pursuit. There are profound implications for how we could and should conduct ourselves, how we view and treat others. This enterprise can become quite absorbing.

It is a deeply rooted portion of our very nature. Why, do you suppose, we have such a deeply embedded need

Learning from History on Recession Fix

This is a very straight forward explination of why government bailouts and stimulus has never worked.

I am not sure if you have seen this excellent chastising of the British PM by Daniel Hannan.  It is very significant to the situation the USA is heading.  Further it shows a lack of strong conservative voices currently in our representatives. 

Imagine if...

It is very evident that the MSM treated Ashley Biden much better and very differently then Bristol Palin.

In a perusing of the top right blogs and a few fringe ones, the right is not eager to pounce.

Following Shoo's lead on ODS

If you cannot honor the man, then honor the office. If you cannot honor the office, then one more patriotic bond has been severed.

The office of the president has meaning and importance that transcend the views of its current occupant. Though elected by a part of America, the president becomes a symbol of its whole. The respect we accord him does not imply agreement or endorsement. It reflects our appreciation for constitutional processes. So a presidential visit is always an honor. The televised arrival of Air Force One, the motorcade, the playing of "Hail to the Chief," the audience standing as the president enters -- all these express a proper respect for presidential legitimacy.

special thanks to Mr. Gerson

Welcome to the First of April

Google has it's usual, unusual treat for us: Meet CADIE