Sunday, August 8, 2010

Congress Sneaks Supreme Court Appointment Past Vacationing Citizenry!!

Congress must think we're ALL asleep at the wheel!!  They opted last week to approve the nomination of U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.  The reports I've read on Kagan indicate that she is an ardently-left-wing appointment who, in my opinion, could do considerable damage to the rights of individuals and to the rights of States.  I find the timing on this one VERY suspicious:

Constitutional oath: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God."

Judicial oath: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm), that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent on me, under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God."


LET'S HOLD HER TO IT!!

You Have the Right To Remain Silent..IF You Know About It!!

A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision has further whittled down the advancement of the rights of individuals and individual freedoms of the last 80 years or so.  YOU may know your "Miranda" rights.  But, chances are you learned them either by seeing them read to someone on TV or, yes, probably more than a few of us have learned them by having them read to US (do they still teach Civics in high school?  And how many of us remember it anyway?).  Plus, even if you know them, would you remember them in a time of duress?  How many of you can recite ALL of them??  Then, of course, there are cases which involve what the original decision involved:  what about people who are arrested here who do not know our constitution and perhaps have only a rudimentary understanding of English?  There are some very specific protections in the fifth and sixth amendments to our constitution which were intended SPECIFICALLY to keep government off the backs of the people and to prevent people from being "railroaded".  But, our "High Court", I suppose to be "tough on crime" or more likely to enhance their popularity or at least avoid public ridicule at a time at which much of the population, not to mention the federal government, seems to think the Constitution and the rights of the individual against the state are a matter of convenience, has decided to ignore the abuses of the past and undo the progress of the last 60 years:  http://www.csmonitor.com/From-the-news-wires/2010/0802/Miranda-warning-rights-trimmed-bit-by-bit-by-high-court  

They Fed A World..But They're Not Important Enough To Save..the Family Farm

Here's another piece of the America most of us have known and loved being allowed to just f-a-a-a-a-a-de away!!  I have many happy memories of spending time on my great-grandparents' farm, which, by the way, to my knowledge is still in operation.  It's been in my family since 1878.  My mom had already told me that, for example, milk didn't come from a carton; it came from a cow.  However, it was on visiting that farm that I learned just how HARD a farmer works to provide us with milk, eggs, cheese, and other food products, as well as, for example, leather and I'm sure some other products.  My great-grandfather was working that farm up until about two or three months before he died at the age of 91.  Yet, I NEVER heard him complain about how hard he worked.  Sure, he complained about the weather, crop prices, possibly that his back hurt, etc.  Farmers do that, especially, I think, as they get on in age.  But I never..and I mean NEVER..heard him complain about how hard the work was..or that he had to work too hard.  NEVER.  I wonder if we will enjoy low food prices and the quality and variety of foods from the corporate farms (foreign-and-domestically-owned) and farms owned by rich foreigners that we have enjoyed courtesy of the American family farmer.  Quality?  Perhaps.  But, is something really "quality" when it is genetically-engineered to be sterile, thus precluding the farmer from "saving over" seed?  Is it "quality" when the farmer is locked into BUYING all his or her (and there are a few FEMALE family farmers!) seed each season, thus raising the farmer's costs?  Is it quality when it tastes like cardboard?  A way of life and a dear ingredient of the American way of life is passing us by and we..and our government..are doing nothing..and I mean NOTHING..to stop it.  A nation can put nothing at risk (except perhaps its' air and water supplies) which is MORE DEAR and MORE BASIC than its' food.  We do so AT OUR PERIL.

GM's New Edsel

Here's GM's thanks to Daddy Government for the loan (part of the payback to the Obama Administration and the Democrat Party).  http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=542325&obref=outbrain

Thursday, July 15, 2010

New Name, Purpose And Other Updates

What is the purpose of this site?  I hope to provide to the blogosphere is my own ramblings and observations on our society as a whole.  My purpose is also to get comments from you, gentle reader, in reaction to my observations as well as to things going on in YOUR lives, and concerning your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations and your concerns.  I will probably venture, at least at times and perhaps frequently, into the political sphere, as it is one of my long-standing interests and as I believe that it is very important for the continuation of our nation in any form in which many of us who are over 40 would recognize it or care to live in it.  Some of you will agree with my views.  Some will not.  Be that as it may, I think that we all need to listen to each other.  Some of us are good listeners, though these seem to be in precious short supply in America these days.  Some of us need to become better listeners.  Some need to begin listening (or take it up again; let's not waste our time with superfluous details).

A little about me:  I am a 53-year-old white man (note I did not say "male"; there's a difference).  I live in the middle of the United States in one of those awful "red" states (so christened by our media.  Frankly, I never HEARD or SAW the term until election night, 2004).  "Flyover territory" to the more-benign or less-political of you on the coasts.  I am divorced; the father of two fine (grown) children, one of whom lives in my hometown and the other about 225 miles away.

Like many people here in America these days (and it seems more men than women if you watch the statistics) I am unemployed.  Well, actually, underemployed.  I have my little part-time job.  Oh, it pays 10 cents--oh, excuse me, did I say cents?  I meant dollars.  It pays 10 dollars an hour, which many of you will tell me is nothing to gripe at compared to unemployment.  This is true, and yet--ahem!!--let us still assume that this hardly supports the lifestyle which I wish to attain!!  Having had very little luck with getting full-time employment (with the unemployment--and it's "unemployment"--not "jobless"--much less "between jobs", "seeking opportunity" or any other of the euphemistic crap being floated by state bureaucracies and politicians) in an atmosphere in which the unemployment rate, when you count the chronically unemployed (those whose unemployment benefits have run out and have quit looking) and those who realize the hopelessness of trying to meet bills, maintain your independence and/or feed children on $7.55 an hour (or whatever ridiculous sum the minimum wage is these days).  Not to mention the equation which seems to run like this:  the less a job pays, the more of your time that they take and therefore the less time you have to seek meaningful, productive, fulfilling employment and the harder they work you.  Okay, I know I'm on a rag and not every low-wage job is like this.  Still, I think that there are enough to make the equation an accurate generality.  And no, that isn't an oxymoron!  Can't something be true let's say 66 percent of the time and be "generally" true?  So, I looked up some of these "work-at-home" or more accurately, "work-on-line" sites.  The one thing which I found consistently was that about the only thing available which wasn't either an outright scam or bugging my friends, trying to sell something I had absolutely no interest in, to people who probably wouldn't give a rat's patootie and worse yet would resent the intrusion, was writing.  I used to write for a living.  Really.  I was in the radio news business for nine years back in the early '80s to early '90s.  Yes, the world's changed quite a bit since then but I still figured that maybe somebody, somewhere would be interested in what I wrote or at least find it interesting or entertaining enough to resist the temptation to wrap fish with it or use it to train a puppy (I know:  old-fashioned analogies but you know what I mean.)  So, I visited some of the sites advertising for writers, and lo, what did I find?  First of all, let's ignore the sites the owners of which want you to complete a project and then they'll decide whether they want to pay you.  Let's also ignore the budding entrepreneurs who want to pay you a flat fee for writing on a specific topic.  The fee perhaps sounds at least acceptable..until you think about the hours you'll have to spend in research to write anything which sounds even halfway intelligent.  Next let's go to the online news sources and magazines.  A couple of the ones I've seen want you to write on a specialized area of expertise..three-to-four times a week.  Now, I don't know about you, but I can't come up with fresh stuff to write about three or four times a week on any subject!  Thus, we come to the subject of today's entry:  I will try to get to the blog at least several times a week but I may not be here every day.  Of course, the more response I get the more I will have to respond to and thus the livelier the blog will be.  I have written to friends and family members in the hopes that at least some will choose to respond.  I will pick and choose the comments to which I choose to respond, however.  While I trust the people I have contacted (pretty much, anyway.  Have to obey Google's rules.) to operate within the bounds of propriety, one only needs to take a short, short look around the web to see the lunatic mayhem which often passes for commentary.  It is frequently not a place in which one will find intelligent discussion.  In fact, on some sites and on some topics one is challenged to find anything resembling evidence of a normal thought process!  This being said, I don't mind if it gets a little crazy.  I'm capable of going there myself.  However, let's try to keep the discussion clean and avoid ad hominem (personal) attacks and I think we'll all be just fine!