A Rose to Say Thank You!

It has been one of those busy – at just what I’m not sure – but busy days and when I was finally able to sit down this evening, I looked back over the truly lovely comments that so many of you left yesterday and this morning on my blog. And, again, it has been and is such a real pleasure for me to have made contact with you, exchanged ideas and thoughts and concerns and I feel such a sense of gratitude – humbling really. So, I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you. I feel very blessed. In the difficult times that we are living in now, there are so many of us that may feel the negative effects of what is happening within our country and it is good to know that we do have the support of friends who share our concerns and understand what many of us feel. Those things alone can make many of the burdens, trials and tribulations – whatever, seem lighter and more bearable. So, I wish you all a peaceful evening and a very lovely tomorrow.

Chicken Instead of Politics

I got up this morning ready to hammer politicians and particularly Republicans. I was ready to rant about the financial crisis. I was prepared to do more research into the martial law threat and the Northern Command. First, though, there was laundry to do – you can’t rant effectively in dirty clothes. But for some reason the drive to hammer and nail the bad guys was lacking – not enough to fuel it? Surely that wasn’t the case. Roger Cohen had an interesting article, “History and the Really Very Weird”, Paul Krugman, our new winner of the economics Nobel Prize, had a great column praising Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, and the Brown government for being willing to think clearly and act quickly regarding the world financial meltdown – I won’t even mention Paulson in that regard. But for whatever reason, I was lacking inspiration, or maybe I was just tired of being pissed off from sun rise to midnight. Whatever, I couldn’t stir up the anger, disgust and frustration, and since that has never been a problem for me, I reached for the thermometer; I must have collided with a virus from the kiddies in the Jump Start class. But, no, my temperature was quite normal. Hmmmm

It was gray and chilly and windy and suddenly I was already hungry for dinner and decided to make a trip to one of my great finds here in our neighborhood – Better Meat Store. We don’t eat a lot of meat, but when we do, I want the good stuff and I only want to buy what I need, not packages of four to six.

The store occupies a small building made of concrete blocks in the middle of a residential neighborhood where it has been in business since 1949. They’re not open on weekends – and, as I found out this morning, on national holidays either. Today is Columbus Day and they weren’t open.

When they are open and you step inside, it isn’t exactly impressive; small offices to the left, a counter down the middle of the relatively small room and a chopping block. Two doors side by side lead into two huge freezers. And that’s it.

They primarily sell meat – all natural, no preservatives – to restaurants, some grocery stores and to the public, those of us lucky enough to find them. It’s a family business and they take great pride in their products.

It’s been a great find and, if tomorrow I still can’t locate my zest for the political scene, I’ll take my shopping bag and load it up with meaty treats for Adam and I and cut to order, perfectly sized bones for Sam and Mojo – it’s their favorite store, too.

Mmmmmm! Hungry Yet?

This is how we eat in the northwest -- not at my house
you understand, but it can be had. Can you tell I've been
obsessing about food today? It's got to be the politics!

Reflective Musings for a Sunday Afternoon

I began blogging fairly recently – in early July. I had never even thought about doing it, had no real interest or even any curiosity, until a friend gave me an article about and written by older bloggers. It did prick my curiosity at that point primarily because I’ve always loved to write and have since I was a child. It had always been my escape from unhappy times, a way to sort out feelings, as well as just for the sheer fun of it. It offered a creative outlet that was important to me. I have published a few things, articles on parenting when my kids were growing up, some children’s stories, but I never really pursued publication for the eight books that I have written over the past forty or more years. Why? Because I was assured by nearly everyone from parents, to well meaning friends that it would just be a futile effort that would leave me frustrated, would eat into the time I needed to – depending on the stage of my life – concentrate on my studies, on my job, on my family. So, I put thoughts of writing for publication pretty much behind me and got on with my life. But I still wrote whenever I could find a few extra hours.

I never felt that I was missing anything as my life was busy, with college, with jobs, more college, teaching, raising a family, getting back into the work place and then suddenly I was retired – well, not suddenly I was sixty seven, but it was retirement I hadn’t planned on, but as those of you who’ve read my blog for a while know, the company was caught in, yes, another of those financial disasters and I found myself without a job. I was devastated, but decided I’d take a year off and then start looking for another job. You see, I didn’t really believe that age discrimination would have any effect on me! I was healthy, active, I had just learned to snorkel, I danced a wicked tango, I spoke Spanish, a little German and a little Japanese and figured I could learn more if I needed to. So, after a year in Mexico, I was ready to tackle the project of finding a new job. It took nearly three years for me to finally concede that there was indeed age discrimination and that regardless of how I felt and thought and/or believed, I was still getting ready to turn seventy!! Me?? Seventy?? Surely not!!

The next four years were difficult, painful, destructive in some ways because I let it all get to me and I felt much of the time that life – or at least an interesting one was pretty much over for me. Oh, I’d get it together much of the time – I took swim classes, I took short trips, went river rafting over class four rapids, jet boat cruises up the Columbia River to Astoria. I took poetry and life writing classes, got to California to spend holidays with my youngest daughter, and to Texas to visit my oldest son, made new friends – good stuff. But there was always that occasional dark night of the soul that led me to wonder what in the hell was I going to do with whatever time I had left.

Then my youngest son, who lives in Seattle, decided that I needed a keeper, built me a lovely space at his house and finally, after three years of talking it up, I was persuaded that perhaps it would be a good move – for both of us. It’s had its difficult moments – we had both lived on our own with only our dogs for company for a lot of years, we both accustomed to having our own space and sometimes the dark clouds would make it difficult to see the light.

And then I found blogging! What started out as a casual glance, was soon occupying most of my days and I had to make myself stop and take time to go my Tai Chi classes, do the volunteer work with the Jump Start program. Suddenly, my life was and is full, exciting, challenging, stimulating and, yes, fun! Even at seventy-five!

So, I’d like to thank my friend, Linda, for opening the door to blogging, and thanks to all the lovely, interesting, fun people that I have met through my blog site. It has become my voice, my place to vent the frustration with, not only growing old, but these days – politics; it’s a place to exchange ideas, to challenge me mentally and emotionally. It’s the best reason in the world to get up early and stay up late, for reading and learning, for sharing laughter and frustrations, for meeting new people, discovering new ideas and best of all providing me with a whole list of new friends.

So, we blog on Elders, just think how much worse off the world would be without our combined wisdom – whether anyone listens to it or not!

Joe Sixpacks, Soccer and Hockey Moms – Pay Attention

I’m not sure what it is about our current economical crisis that some people don’t understand and I’m surely not wise enough or patient enough to try to convince them that their view of the country is badly screwed. I think people everywhere are feeling frustrated, angry, scared, confused and uncertain, but for those who still think that Republicans are the answer, you probably need to see a psychiatrist – and soon.

I could feel some of my own frustration in Bob Herbert’s column today and rather than give you a few quotes, I feel it is well worth the whole read.

October 11, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist

The Mask Slips

By BOB HERBERT

The lesson for Americans suffused with anxiety and dread over the crackup of the financial markets is that the way you vote matters, that there are real-world consequences when you go into a voting booth and cast that ballot.

For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be.

Voters in the George W. Bush era gave the Republican Party nearly complete control of the federal government. Now the financial markets are in turmoil, top government and corporate leaders are on the verge of panic and scholars are dusting off treatises that analyzed the causes of the Great Depression.

Mr. Bush was never viewed as a policy or intellectual heavyweight. But he seemed like a nicer guy to a lot of voters than Al Gore.

It’s not just the economy. While the United States has been fighting a useless and irresponsible war in Iraq, Afghanistan — the home base of the terrorists who struck us on 9/11 — has been allowed to fall into a state of chaos. Osama bin Laden is still at large. New Orleans is still on its knees. And so on.

Voting has consequences.

I don’t for a moment think that the Democratic Party has been free of egregious problems. But there are two things I find remarkable about the G.O.P., and especially its more conservative wing, which is now about all there is.

The first is how wrong conservative Republicans have been on so many profoundly important matters for so many years. The second is how the G.O.P. has nevertheless been able to persuade so many voters of modest means that its wrongheaded, favor-the-rich, country-be-damned approach was not only good for working Americans, but was the patriotic way to go.
Remember voodoo economics? That was the derisive term George H.W. Bush used for Ronald Reagan’s fantasy that he could simultaneously increase defense spending, cut taxes and balance the budget. After Reagan became president (with Mr. Bush as his vice president) the budget deficit — surprise, surprise — soared.

In a moment of unusual candor, Reagan’s own chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Martin Feldstein, gave three reasons for the growth of the deficit: the president’s tax cuts, the increased defense spending and the interest on the expanding national debt.

These were the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives who were behaving so profligately. The budget was balanced and a surplus realized under Bill Clinton, but soon the “fiscal conservatives” were back in the driver’s seat. “Deficits don’t matter,” said Dick Cheney, and the wildest, most reckless of economic rides was on.

Americans, including the Joe Sixpacks, soccer moms and hockey moms, were repeatedly told that the benefits lavished on the highfliers would trickle down to them. Someday.
Just as they were wrong about trickle down, conservative Republican politicians and their closest buddies in the commentariat have been wrong on one important national issue after another, from Social Security (conservatives opposed it from the start and have been trying to undermine it ever since) to Medicare (Ronald Reagan saw it as the first wave of socialism) to the environment, energy policy and global warming.

When the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the discoverers of the link between chlorofluorocarbons and ozone depletion, Tom DeLay, a Republican who would go on to wield enormous power as majority leader in the House, mocked the award as the “Nobel Appeasement Prize.”

Mr. Reagan, the ultimate political hero of so many Republicans, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In response to the historic Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation ruling, William F. Buckley, the ultimate intellectual hero of so many Republicans, asserted that whites, being superior, were well within their rights to discriminate against blacks.

“The White community is so entitled,” he wrote, “because, for the time being, it is the advanced race...” He would later repudiate that sentiment, but only after it was clear that his racist view was harmful to himself.

The G.O.P. has done a great job masking the terrible consequences of much that it has stood for over the decades. Now the mask has slipped. As we survey the wreckage of the American economy and the real-life suffering associated with the financial crackup of 2008, it would be well for voters to draw upon the lessons of history and think more seriously about the consequences of the ballots they may cast in the future.

Surprising Critics

I’m not usually a reader of, or fan of Gail Collins and David Brooks, both staunch Republican Op-Ed Columnists for the New York Times, but even they have surprisingly strong criticism of Sarah Palin and the Republicans of today, in their columns for the past two days. They are worth reading. I know I was surprised by what they had to say, but I was particularly interested in Brooks’ column.

He began by talking about the fact that there have been substantial changes in the Republican Party over the years, changes that many Republicans are not particularly happy with. Apparently, according to Brooks, conservatives, driven by a need to engage elite opinion, tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the ideal of a cultivated mind.

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had, says Brooks, many causes, but the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

He goes on to say that over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from thousands of politicians and hundreds of talk-radio jocks. Now the nation is divided between the “wholesome” Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts. Hmmm, well, I don't know about you, but I know who I would prefer.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Brooks says that Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.

According to Fred Barnes, who wrote in his book, “Rebel –in-Chief”, George Bush “reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast majority of Americans who don’t live along the East or West Coast. He’s not a sophisticate and doesn’t spend his discretionary time with sophisticates. As First Lady Laura once said, she and the president didn’t come to Washington to make new friends. And they haven’t.”

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4 to 1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. Brooks says, it took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican Convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

Brooks says that while Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable – I have to question that description, but then I’m a Democrat – and her convention and debate performances were impressive -- his words, not mine. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite. Now, on that we can agree!

So, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission – because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission – by telling members of that class to go away.

A pretty sad picture, at least for Republicans, but hopefully it means a brighter day for the Democrats and this country.

Body Politics: Sarah Palin's Body Language And Why It Should Worry You

A friend sent this to me and it's worth reading. You can check out more at this website.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathlyn-and-gay-hendricks/body-politics-sarah-palin_b_132785.html


Since our last post, we've been asked many times to comment on Sarah Palin's mannerisms. Her Body-Talk is not as blatant as her running mate, probably because she has a background as a performer in beauty pageants and television. She has learned to conceal the smirks and clenches that play so openly across the countenance of John McCain.

In our work we call body language the Five Flags, because there are five major ways human beings react when they're not speaking the authentic truth. Twitches and jaw-clenches are examples of Flag #1, Body-Flags. To understand Sarah Palin, though, you need to understand Flags #2 and #3, Voice-Flags and Attitude-Flags. The English word 'personality' comes from two Latin words, per and sona, "through sound." The Romans knew that the personality comes through in the tone of voice and other vocal aspects.

From thirty-five years of clinical experience, we can tell you a lot about Sarah Palin's real personality and why it makes many people even more nervous that John McCain's.

Attitude-Flag #1: The Aggressive Confidence Of The Con-Person

Sarah Palin has mastered one fundamental requirement of a Republican president: she can smile and look you directly in the eye while telling an outrageous lie. At least when John McCain lies, his body screams his discomfort by putting on an eye-catching display of twitches, phony smiles and robot moves. McCain's body language is so strange that it's easily observable; he appears to be operated by a puppeteer who is a couple of triple-espressos over the line. That's a good thing, though. We'd much rather have a presidential candidate who reads like a comic book when he's lying than one who conceals those whoppers under a grin and a wink. Sarah Palin belts out her deceptions and distractions with a radiant confidence we usually only see in sociopaths and infomercial pitch-persons. The last public figure we saw who could grin and lie with that kind of sunny confidence was O. J. Simpson.

Voice-Flag #1: The Exaggerated Folksiness Of The Huckster

Our partisan colors may peek through subtly from time to time, but we do our best to be non-partisan lie-catchers. We cringed when Bill Clinton did his famous "I did not have sex..." line. We immediately looked at each other and said "uh-oh," because his body language let us know loud and clear that he did indeed have sex with "that woman." About ten minutes after Clinton's declaration, our phone started ringing from producers of talk shows wanting us to comment on Clinton's body language. They knew they'd seen something, but they couldn't figure out exactly what.

More recently, we cringed when we heard Sarah Palin start using more of those pseudo-folksy expressions such as "You betcha" and "doggone-it." She was droppin' so many g's on-stage at last week's debate that the janitorial staff may have had to work over-time pickin' 'em up, by gum. The last eight years have taught us all a sobering lesson: you don't have to be smart to be the President of the United States. However, we hope that America is smart enough to see Palin's exaggerated folksiness for what it is, a cheap trick to cozy up to us so they can sell us four more years of Bush Lite. We hope America will hear those "You betchas" and send Mc Cain/Palin a message right back: Just because you pretend to be dumb and folksy, you don't automatically get to live in the White House.

Voice-Flag #2: The Metallic Shriek Of The Fear-Monger

To emphasize certain points, Sarah Palin takes her voice up the tone scale to a metallic shriek. This tone will be familiar to many of us: it's the voice your mother employed as a last resort to get you out of bed when you were a teenager. It's designed to scare you, to rake fingernails across your inner chalkboard. She often uses this voice when she first takes the stage at a rally. It works quite well there, because it cuts like a knife and jolts any of the faithful who might be dozing to sit up in their seats. We hope Americans are not so sleepy as to vote in favor of hearing this tone of voice for four years.

Here's the bottom line: The McCain/Palin campaign strategy is based entirely on stirring up fear. It's a classic way to distract people from thinking about real issues and to cover up the lack of any real solutions. Their thinking goes like this:

•If we can get people scared that Obama might secretly be a Muslim or a terrorist, maybe we can get them not to think about the real issues.

•If we can get people scared that Rev. Wright might turn the inaugural benediction into an anti-American rant, maybe we can get them to believe America's economic problems are just something cooked up by the elite media as a way to play "Gotcha" on poor Sarah and John.

•If we can scare people into thinking Barack HUSSEIN Obama is going to put Louis Farrakhan in charge of the annual White House Easter egg hunt, maybe people won't notice that we have absolutely no solutions to the real problems they face.

Barack Obama has so far opted to run a positive campaign based on hope and thoughtful solutions. It's our fervent desire that he continue to do so, because it's about time we turned our national attention to positive possibilities. Over the past eight years we've had enough fear-mongering to last a lifetime.

TAKE ACTION!

What an unbelievable response! In just 24 hours, more than 100,000 folks sent messages to ABC in support of airing our Repower America ad (see below for more information). But we still haven't heard from ABC.There are only a few hours left before the next airing of 20/20. Let's work to get another 50,000 public comments by then.Will you help? Just go to:
http://www.wecansolveit.org/ABCIt only takes a minute. Thanks.-----------------------------------

Tell ABC to air the Repower America ad this Friday on 20/20.Take Action!
Did you notice the ads after the presidential debate?ABC had Chevron. CBS had Exxon. CNN had the coal lobby. But you know what happened last week? ABC refused to run our Repower America ad -- the ad that takes on this same oil and coal lobby.I sent a letter asking ABC to reconsider their decision and put our ad on the air, but still we haven't heard back more than a week later. I think they need to hear from all of us. Can you help? Please send a message to ABC and tell them to air the Repower America ad this Friday on 20/20. Just click here:http://www.wecansolveit.org/ABCWe're working to get 100,000 public comments to ABC before 20/20's next airing.Our Repower America ad has a clear and simple message -- that massive spending by oil and coal companies on advertising is a key reason our nation hasn't switched to clean and renewable sources for our energy.Here's the script of the ad:
The solution to our climate crisis seems simple.Repower America with wind and solar.End our dependence on foreign oil. A stronger economy.So why are we still stuck with dirty and expensive energy?Because big oil spends hundreds of millions of dollars to block clean energy.Lobbyists, ads, even scandals.All to increase their profits, while America suffers.Breaking big oil's lock on our government ...Now that's change.We're the American people and we approve this message.
You can view the ad on the ABC petition page, here.As our country faces deep economic problems, we need to be able to have an honest debate about the root causes of our problems. As Al Gore has said, "We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization. And every bit of that has to change."As oil and coal backed groups outspend even major party committees in this political year, it's outrageous that ABC would deny our ad. Let ABC know what you think. Just click here.Thank you,Cathy ZoiCEO www.wecansolveit.org

Why Women Must Vote

See the pictures that Dianne has to go with her story at http://www.hihidi.blogspot.com/ that graphically displays what women went through to earn the right for us to vote.

See this site for more information about our need to vote in this election.

http://www.fwhc.org/why-women-vote.htm

This is why we vote: Because we can!

The women were innocent and defenseless. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and with their warden's blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of "obstructing sidewalk traffic." They beat Lucy Burn, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.

Thus unfolded the "Night of Terror" on November 15, 1917 (a mere 87 years ago), when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote. For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their food -- all of it colorless slop -- was infested with worms. When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.
So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year because--why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining?

Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new movie "Iron Jawed Angels." It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder. All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote. Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes it was inconvenient.

My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women's history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was -- with herself. "One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie," she said. "What would those women think of the way I use -- or don't use -- my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn." The right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her "all over again."

HBO will run the movie periodically before releasing it on video and DVD. I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum.We are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order. It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. The doctor admonished the men: "Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity."Please pass this on to all the women you know. We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women.

-Connie Schultz, The Plain Dealer, 1801 Superior Ave.,Cleveland, OH 44114, Cschultz@plaind.com, August 2004

Sky Watch

Skies and clouds over Oregon