Monthly Archives: September 2012

September 16, 2012 · 0:00

Something to Brag About?

If you’re sick, do you try to choose the smartest doctor or the dumbest?

When you want an accountant, do you want to feel confidence in the ability of that man/woman to add, subtract, multiply and divide?  Use excel formulas?

When you need legal assistance, do you want a wise man/woman or a dope?

These are not trick questions.

I’ve always asked myself similar questions about the people who want to run my country.  I want the smartest people in office, from Town Selectman to President.  Naturally, that means I’m a Democrat.

But you know, I always sort of figured that Republicans at least thought (mistakenly) that theirs were the smart candidates.

Ummm, not so much.  At least, not according to one of the GOP’s shining stars, Rick Santorum.  You know, Rick “Don’t Google Me” Santorum, the former Senator from Pennsylvania (who lost by 18 percent!) who was also a former GOP candidate for President just this year.

Listen up to Ricky speaking just the other day to the Values Voter Summit here in DC:

We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.

Well, Duh!!!!!  You got that right, Ricky.  But is it something to be proud of?

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September 14, 2012 · 0:00

Good Karma Needed!

Calling good Karma!

A beautiful girl, don’t you think?

This is Sophia.  She is the brand new granddaughter of my friend, colleague and right arm at work, Yenny.  Sophia was born on Wednesday, and her mom, Jessika, had an infection.  That infection was transmitted to Sophia during birth.  Today Sophia was diagnosed with bacterial meningitis.  That’s not good.

I’m just sending you this to ask you to send good Karma, prayers, happy, healthy thoughts to Sophia.

The prognosis is pretty good, even though meningitis is really nasty, especially so in a newborn.  But the doctors immediately put her on antibiotics and they are taking good care of her.  They seem to be doing everything right.  Folks in my office immediately rallied to reassure Yenny (and by extension, Jessika and their extended family).  Still, it will be a long couple of weeks for Sophia’s family.

Anyway, I just wanted to have you all thinking good thoughts in Sophia’s direction.  No baby deserves this.  Especially a baby with such a loving grandma.

Thanks.

Elyse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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September 13, 2012 · 0:00

Eye on the “Booker” Prize!

I am awesome.  Yup.  It’s true.  You see, well, I have a new prize.  A new award!

Yes, just the other day, I got A Booker Award!  Seriously!  Me!

What does that mean?  Well, it is awarded to a novelist of great achievement from the United Kingdom or from Ireland.  Cool!  I’ve been to both places.  I’m sure that qualifies.

The Man Booker Foundation awards the Booker Prize! But not to me.

Here is what it says on the Man Booker Award site:

Winning the Man Booker Prize is the ultimate accolade for many writers. As 1996 winner Graham Swift commented, “Prizes don’t make writers and writers don’t write to win prizes, but in the near-glut of literary awards now on offer, the Booker remains special. It’s the one which, if we’re completely honest, we most covet.”

Every year the Man Booker Prize winner is guaranteed a huge increase in sales, firstly in hardback and then in paperback. There is spin-off too in global sales of books, in future publishing contracts and in film and TV rights. Besides the fortune, the winner of the Man Booker Prize can also be sure of fame. The announcement of the winner is covered by television, radio and press worldwide.

Isn’t that cool?  Won’t it look great on my resume?

Janice, of Aurora Borealis actually nominated me for a Booker Award.  Pretty neat huh?  Especially since I will be the only novelist to win such a coveted award who has not, um, actually written a novel.  But hey, I won two Oscars without ever working on a movie.  Apparently I am multi-talented.

Oh wait.  I just looked at Janice’s post a little more closely.  Oh.  My bad.  I didn’t win the Man Booker Prize.  I won this one:

I got THIS one!

Cool!  Sorry for the confusion.  (But if you think I’m changing my resume, you’d better think again!)

I am delighted to accept it this award.  To do so, I need to

  1. Thank Janice for the nod.  Thanks so much for thinking of me, Janice.  For those of you who don’t know her, Janice is an amazingly good person, a writer of poetry, prose, of pieces that make your heart break, and your heart sing.  Of pieces that make you question the humanity of some humans, and soar at the gifts others can bring.  So thank you Janice.  You were one of my first followers.  And one of my first and best blogging buddies.
  2. I need to put a picture of the award on my blog – there it is!
  3. I need to tell y’all about five books I love.  That’s the hard part, because I love books.  I read two or three books a week.  Whichever one is in my hand is usually high on the list of my favorites – otherwise I would put it down and not bother with it.  But I will try to narrow my list.  Here are some of my favorites:

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stephenson  is the first book I remember.  My sister Beth used to read it to my brother Fred and me every night for years.  When I found the old copy of Treasure Island that Beth read from years later, the book fell open to the “Apple Barrel Chapter,” the one we begged for every night.  It was through the reading of this that Beth taught Fred and me to love books.  Good books.  She taught us to love stories and the magic you can always find in them.

Forever by Pete Hamill.  A young Irish man travels to America in colonial days.  Through an act of kindness, he is granted eternal life as long as he never leaves Manhattan.  The story traces the his and the city’s journey from colonial days to the present.  Magical.  When my sister Beth, who gave me books, was dying, this was the book I read to her in her last hours.  It is a beautiful story.  I wish I could have read her the whole book.

 

The Woman in White by Wilke Collins.  I’m a sucker for the classics.  Wilke Collins was a contemporary of Dickens.  He wrote beautifully about different problems in Victorian society, many of which we grapple with today.  The Woman in White deals with mental illness.  Poor Miss Finch is a blind woman whose life and disability is presented with dignity in a time when that wasn’t often the case in life or in novels.  No Name presents two upper class sisters who suddenly learn that by a trick of fate, their parents were somehow not legally married; The Moonstone set the stage for modern mystery stories.  He is a writer to check out if you love classic literature.  Collins’ protagonists are women and they are true heroines, all.

The Weird Sisters by ­­­­­­ Eleanor Brown.  Weird Sisters is the author’s first novel and it is so incredibly brilliantly (and differently) written.  The three sisters are complex and humorous and absolutely delightful, when you don’t want to kill them.  Just like real sisters.  The book is a gift to anyone with sisters.  Or anyone who likes to read.  Or maybe just a gift to me.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini.  A complex look at the lives of two women in Afghanistan before and during the Taliban’s rule of Kabul.

 

Ask me again tomorrow and, well, I’ll likely come up with a different group.  Because I love books.  I just can’t get enough of them.

Lastly, now I need to nominate five bloggers who can lie on their resumes, too.  It’s always hard because folks love or hate these awards, or fall somewhere in between, like me.  I tried to find folks who like awards and who haven’t yet received this one.  This is a challenge, you know!

Speaker 7 of Speaker7

Val of QBG Tilted Tiara

Frank of A Frank Angle

Cooper of Security is for Cadavers

Twin Daddy of Stuph Blog

Lorna of Lorna’s Voice

Totsymae of Totsymae

OK, so I can’t count.  Do not feel obligated to accept this award.  But I’d love to hear what you all like to read too!

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September 11, 2012 · 0:00

The View

Today at lunch, I am sitting in my office having my salad, looking out the window and reading the newspaper.  It is September 11, 2012.  Eleven years after.

My office overlooks the Capitol, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials.  The Washington Monument.  The Pentagon.

From here, I can just barely see the flag that was unfurled this morning on the side of the Pentagon that was struck that morning.  Another Tuesday.  Another beautiful, blue sky day.  Folks who still work in my office were here that day, I was not.  Of course they still remember.  (We all do.) They heard and felt the impact; nobody saw it hit, as everybody except me keeps their blinds down because the office gets the hot morning sun.

I have long felt that George W. Bush let us down.  That the attack shouldn’t have happened.  That it should have been foiled.

Remember this?:

On Aug. 6, 2001, President George W. Bush received a classified review of the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, Al Qaeda. That morning’s “presidential daily brief” — the top-secret document prepared by America’s intelligence agencies — featured the now-infamous heading: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” A few weeks later, on 9/11, Al Qaeda accomplished that goal.

Might they have prevented the attack?  We will never know.

Well, in today’s NY Times, there is more evidence that the Bush Administration had more than the one presidential daily brief.  There were numerous reports, meetings and presidential daily briefings:  ON May 1, on June 22, on June 29, on July 9, on July 24.  These are the ones the reporter, Kurt Eichenwald, saw excerpts from.

But, and there’s always a but, isn’t there.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat.  Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.  [Emphasis is mine.]

The link to the full article is here.

These neocons who got everything so disastrously wrong are the same folks that are working with Romney/Ryan on Foreign Policy.  This time they want us to go after Iran and Syria.

Elections matter.

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September 9, 2012 · 0:00

First Amendment Rights

Adlai Stevenson is one of my heroes.  I’m sure you remember him (well, probably if you are an American).  He was the Democratic nominee for president in 1952 and 1956 and ran against Ike.  Now, that was a tall order — running against the guy who led the Allied Troops in World War II.  So really, Adlai was a bit of a sacrificial lamb.

But he had a heart and a spirit and he didn’t take bull from anyone.  And he repelled bull with finesse.

Stevenson was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during the Cuban Missile Crisis and famously asked the Soviet Ambassador to explain why missiles were being put into Cuba.  When the Soviet Ambassador, Valerian Zorin, didn’t respond, Stevenson famously responded:

“I am prepared to wait for my answer until Hell freezes over.”

Stevenson was the sort of man who made up the Pre-Reagan government, actually.  The Best.  The Brightest.  The Most Articulate.  Smart folks who made the government work.  Who made our government the envy of the world.

Now, I’m not in Adlai’s class.  Nope, I’m not even close.  But as a concerned citizen, I feel compelled to watch what is happening and call out injustice when I see it.  I call a lie, “a lie.”  And shout to the rooftops when I see the bullshit that passes for public discourse coming from the GOP and its evil twin, the Tea Party.

You see, I really love my country.  I am a liberal Democrat and proud to be one.  And you know what?  I am angry.  And vocal.  I also take full advantage of my First Amendment right to Free Speech.  Now remember, I live near Washington, DC.  And I pay attention.  That’s important.

I see a lot of folks in and around government who believe it is their duty to make sure that President Obama fails.

Now think about that.  There truly are powerful people in the GOP who believe that the GOP is more important than the country.  That what they believe is more important than what the voters (YOU AND ME!) chose.  That the country can go to hell as long as the result is that they will get more power.  More money.  More, well who cares what else they’re looking for.

Yes, it’s true.  On January 20, 2009, the night Barack Obama was inaugurated, a group of Republicans meet and decided that, rather than giving the new president their backing to help the country, that — nope.  They weren’t going to go along with the mandate of the people of the United States.  Nope.  They would impede Obama in every way they could.  Invalidate him.  That way the GOP would retake the House of Representatives in 2010 (they did) and maybe the Senate too in 2012.  Paul Ryan was there at that dinner.  Yup.  A fine group of patriotic Americans.

Now think about that.

They didn’t give Obama a chance to succeed or to heal the country.  More importantly, though, they didn’t give the American people a chance.  Because by electing Obama, people chose his ideas, his plans, his hopes.  The People rejected those of the GOP.

Nevertheless, the power brokers of the GOP banded together to  stamp their feet and say:  “I don’t care if the American People decided that your way is what we should try.  WE SAY NO.”

And you know what?  They’re doing it again!  Yup it’s true.

Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has already stated publicly that even if Obama wins a second term, the GOP will not cooperate with him.

Can you say “gridlock”?  Sure, I knew you could.

So, when things like this happen, well, I get mad.  I get angry.  And I make my feelings known.  I have a platform.  I have a soap box.  I have a blog.  And while I will try to write about politics with humor, sometimes, dammit, it will be in anger.  Like tonight.

Because there is a hell of a lot to be angry about.

Take for example the latest example.

Saturday in Virginia, Myth Romney implied that President Obama, should he be re-elected, was planning to take the word “God” off our currency.  Off our money.

Huh?

Romney made it up.  Completely out of that whole cloth his underwear is made of.

Yes, this is the same guy who chose Paul “Sure, Vouchers for Senior Citizens is the best idea since sliced bread” Ryan as his running mate.

The same Myth Romney who went Birther on us all a week or so ago when he commented that he was in Michigan and nobody was asking for his birth certificate.  Ho ho ho, Mitt.  Good try at a joke.  Try another next year.  Maybe that joke will work.  Maybe that joke will be funny.

[Now I’m going to digress here a bit.  Because the whole Birther issue just makes me want to scream.  It points out the complete and total ignorance of those who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and that his Hawaiian birth certificate is a hoax.

Do these folks even realize that in order to be an American Citizen by birth and therefore qualify to be president, you have to be born to an American Citizen.  Yup.  It’s true.  The fact that Barack Hussein Obama’s mother was an American entitles him automatically to American Citizenship.  And she could have given birth on the moon; her son, Barack Obama would still be an American Citizen.  By birth.  The same as John McCain, who was born in Panama.  The same as George Romney, Mitt’s Dad, who was born in Mexico and who also ran for President.]

There has been much ballyhoo on the nets, in the press, on the TV about folks wanting us all to play nice and just get along.

No.  Sorry.  I am not going to play nice with the folks I think have damaged my country.  I would not play nice with folks who tried/succeeded in burning down my house; who killed a friend or family member.  So I am not going to play nice and polite with folks who have destroyed our economy, undermined our willingness to work together to solve problems, and the pride that made the American Dream a reality.

Nope.  Not gonna do it.

The folks who ask for that often tend to be folks who don’t want their opinions questioned or challenged, or folks who don’t want to pay enough attention.

I have a voice.  I have a First Amendment Right to voice it.  And I plan to us it.

So, as my hero Adlai Stevenson would have said:

If the Republicans will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.

*     *     *

Other wonderful quotes from Adlai:

  • Freedom rings where opinions clash.
  • A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.
  • A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.
  • A hungry man is not a free man.
  • I don’t want to send them to jail. I want to send them to school.
  • Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than the freedom to stagnate.
  • We have confused the free with the free and easy.
  • I believe that if we really want human brotherhood to spread and increase until it makes life safe and sane, we must also be certain that there is no one true faith or path by which it may spread.
  • Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.
  • Saskatchewan is much like Texas- except it’s more friendly to the United States.
  • As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end.

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