Presidents Delegate. Good President's Delegate Well. That's why Obama's cabinet picks have won such acclaim from both conservatives and liberals. And that's why the village idiot from Crawford does not deserve the P-word used in conjunction with his name. 'Nuff Said!

And now, a word about why Johnny can't read. I've long blamed the advertising industry for this problem, starting with Burger King's "Herb" advertising campaign from about 30 years ago. It seemed that EVERY point-of-purchase poster from that campaign contained errors in grammar and puntuaction. It seemed obvious to me that B-K had hired a minority advertising firm, possibly for the tax benefits that might yield. well, now it is getting far worse--and some of the problems seemed to come when GWB appointed Tomlinson to head the public broadcasting corporation. I started to hear the long "A" sound when newscasters were talking about a thing or an event. In fact, I once heard a newscaster pronounce the word "another" as if it were "a nuther"--with the long "A" sound--instead of "an other"! One reason why I always use the short "A" sound is that it does allow me the option of using the long "A" sound when I want to emphasize that I mean one and only one of that item. Same argument applies to pronouncing the word "the" as if it were "thee." The long "e" sound should be held only for emphasis. And it dawned on me that there was one well-known person who always talks that way--GWB!

But lately, it has gotten much worse. I saw  a T-shirt presumably licensed by the University of Florida recently while in gator country. It was an obvious takeoff on Miller Brewery's "It's Miller Time" ad campaign, and this shirt read "It's Meyer Time." That had a beer bottle cap alongside it, while under it were two more lines which read "Great Coach" and "Less Losses." Any damned fool knows that the word "less" applies only to indfinite quantities, and when the quantity becomes specific--even if the speaker does not know  the exact number involved--you have to switch to the word "fewer." For instance, if you turn over an hour-glass, and sand starts to pour from the top to the bottom, you have less sand in the top, but fewer grains or ounces of sand. How could a university--even one known as one of the top party schools in the country, allow their school to be associated with such an obvious error in grammar???? Similarly, I heard a newscaster from the ABC affiliate in the same town, say "we are dedicated to be your home team." How can a TV station--a network affiliate--hire someone who does not know that while you can be PROUD to BE something, you have to be dedicated to BEING that same thing? The difference, of course, is that proud is an adjective, while being is a verb form. But our schools are either simply not teaching proper lingual skills anymore (many children left behind under the GWB administration) or the children are simply refusing to learn those skills.... And the fact that our television and radio stations are using such horrid grammar only reinforces poor speaking skills on the part of our students. Another thing that gets to me like chalk screeching on a blackboard is the use of an appostrophe to indicate plurality, which was one of those errors seen in the Burger King "Herb" ad campaign. An appostrophe indicates either contraction or possession, but NEVER plurality. That is, if you write "the television's," you are referring to something that belongs to the television, but NEVER does that refer to more than one television set! Yet more an more, our children are not learning this, even at the college level!

This is simply a national disgrace!!!!

Did you know that GWB paid for his illegal war in part on the backs of people who draw Social Security? I know of one case where a person who was on SS retirement got a $33 or so Cost of Living Adjustment at the start of 2005. He then got less--about $26--in 2006, about $22 in 2007, and about $16 in 2008. Yet his 2009 COLA is much higher--about $47! Assuming that the cost of living jumped by an equal percentage each year, the COLA should have been higher each year, simply because the base amount was higher. And we all know that the actual cost of living, which varies with the price of oil, among other things, jumped by a higher percentage each year. Even if this person received a roughly linear increase each year, between the $33 and the $47, he'd have had an increase of, say, $37 in '06, $41 in '07, and $44 in '08.  To do equity in this case, they would have to give him about $9 for 48 months, $11 for 36 months, $19 for 24 months, and $28 for 12 months, for a total of about $1600 as a one-time payment, plus a monthly increase for the rest of his life of about $67. Since most of the people involved are poor, that would have gone right into the economy, since they would buy needed things with the money as soon as they get it. What an economic stimulus program that would be, and it would go to deserving people who got screwed by GWB and his illegal war!!!!!

More of my views

It's coming up on Thanksgiving, and I thought I should share my grandmother's secret for baking a pie. If you have a recipe for pie crust, and it says to add water, throw that recipe away. The author has no idea what he is talking about. Use MILK instead! I use two cups of unbleached flour, 1 stick of that wonderful buttery-flavored Crisco that comes in a pack of three sticks, and enough milk (added a few drops at a time) to make a good pie crust dough. Cortland apples are wonderful, but they are not available in my area now. There are some newer apples that are not supposed to turn brown when cut, but I use a mixture of about five large Granny Smith apples, and three large Golden Delicious apples, and I bake it in one of those 9-1/2" Pyrex pie plates. I add a few fresh cranberries, and each time I cut an apple, I put it in a bowl, then add a mix of sugar and Cinnamon, and I put a little loose flour in the bottom of the crust to help thicken the juice up a bit. A little brown sugar can be added, which will get a bit crunchy, so don't overdo it.... That should make the best apple pie you ever ate! Oh, yeah...don't forget to put a cookie pan under the pie plate, because this will bubble over and put a big mess in the bottom of the stove if you don't!

We need to bail out the auto industry. I remember telling my sister to buy Chrysler before the government bailed it out in 1980 or so. That bailout worked well for all concerned. It is stupid to think that this nation can get along without one or more of our auto manufacturers. After all, who builds our military vehicles in times of war? And what will happen if we let them die? all of their suppliers will die as well, and unemployment will drop to 15-20% overnight! What happens to our economy then? I have spent some time employed in car dealerships, doing everything from changing tires and oil, to running the desk when all of the real managers were in a meeting. Every dealership has about 20-100 employees even in the smallest towns in America, and those jobs will impact every town out there. And remember, the auto industry is often supported by the government in other countries! We need to make sure that the bailout money does not come from the $25 Billion already promised to help develop more efficient cars, or we will have bigger problems down the road. Other companies are already subsidizing their companies in the fight to develop more efficient cars. As far as the use of private jets to fly the execs to Washington goes, those jets were bought when there were profits being made, and they allow the execs to fly all over the place without bothering to check flight schedules. They can therefore be in more places in any given amount of time. If the man is earning over a million dollars (now there is an area where there is room for downward improvement), improving his efficiency justifies the price of those jets. The uproar over that is just people ranting without thinking!

The army slogan should be "You made them strong, now we'll make them army dead." Oops, that sort of hints at an idea I had for a Boston Legal show. When I tried to suggest it, they turned me down cold, and would not allow me access to anyone involved in planning the shows. So okay, here it is, open to the public. If anyone uses it, I want to be paid, however.... Son sees army ad aimed at black children in single-parent families, and convinces his mother to let him join the army, where he gets sent to Iraq and gets killed. Mother seeks the aid of Boston Legal (Crane, Poole and Schmidt) to sue the government for false advertising.

And by the way, the US already has one of the largest single-payer health plans in the world. It's called the VA! Why can't we model a universal health care plan on that one? Sure, there are long waits for service, and I would not want to trust them to make decisions for me were I on life support, but it seems to work out very well for our veterans in most cases. (Sure, there are horror stories now and then, but most vets are pretty happy with it.) One question, though, if Wal-Mart can give us generic drugs for $10 every 90 days, why do we have to charge our veterans $24 every 90 days for the same drugs????

Miscellaneous Thoughts

ON VOTER INITIATIVES:

Well, I see that the forces of hate have passed anti-gay initiatives in three states. Those who voted in favor of these abominations would, in almost every case, call themselves christians. But we know that Jesus Christ himself would have voted against every one of them, staunch liberal that he was, and would have advised his followers to do the same. Therefore, those who voted for these things were not following the teachings of Christ, and therefore are NOT Christians!

In Florida, the wording of the initiative was so bad that it would prohibit heterosexual "common-law" marriages, even longstanding ones. Were I, let's say, to move in with a widow in Florida, just so that we could each have someone there to call 911 if either of us had a heart attack or a stroke, and let's say that she had a pension from her husband, so cannot remarry without losing that, we would be screwed. Neither of us could make medical decisions for the other, and neither of us could inherit simply from the other.

I blame the passage on poor leadership from Obama and his workers. They had enough people on the ground to simply stop all three of these initiatives. I have already noted that Obama is no friend to gays, and to me, this proves it. Funny how there would not be black liberation today with Bayard Rustin, a gay black man, and top lieutenant to Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet blacks voted overwhelmingly in favor of these hateful, discriminatory initiatives. They don't even know their own history. In fact, the whole idea of black christianity makes no sense. The only reason we have a black christian church in this country is because the slave owners converted their slaves to christianity in order to control them--"you be a good slave, and obey the master, and after you shuck off this mortal coil you will spend eternity in heaven: but if you are a bad slave, you will spend eternity tending the hellfires of damnation." And to think that if I had not needed the money for college, I probably would have gotten on one of those busses to the southland to work for integration.

I remember a black guy I knew in Massachusetts in the sixties. He said that he had vacationed in the south the previous summer and that they were treating blacks much better than they had previously. He said that at one point on his vacation, he even had a black bus driver! "He looked funny as hell steering from the back seat...."

MY PERSONAL BOYCOTTS:

I have personal boycotts. I have never even contacted the people from the companies I boycott to tell them why I don't buy their products. I just feel good knowing that I have cost them thousands of dollars in business because of the way they have treated me in the past.

The first one would have to be Stouffer's and Lean Cuisine. I once stayed in a Stouffer's-owned motel in the Columbus, Ohio area, as a journalist covering a meeting in Westerville. I was packing a Kodak Retina IIIC camera to take pictures of the event. I went back to the motel room for something during the morning, and found the maid just finishing up in our room. I wondered why she insisted on staying until I left, but assumed that she had a pass-key. I felt her behavior was unusual, but did not know why. That evening, when we got back to the motel, my camera and strobe were gone, as were the similar items from a coworker's room. The police informed us that they had had a large number of reports of similar burglaries from the rooms in that motel. It turns out that the maids did not have keys to the rooms. Someone came in front of them and opened the rooms, and they were supposed to lock the rooms behind them when they left. They were packing the goodies into the dirty sheets, and the laundry crew came by and picked them up later from outside the room. Stouffer's had failed to notify us of the problem, of course, and refused to make good on the stolen equipment. I live alone, and buy a fair amount of products similar to what they produce, but I don't buy Stouffers! The have lost thousands of dollars in income just from my refusal to purchase their products. Still, I would rather have that camera back. It was a collectible camera even then, but it was also sort of a daily user. It took magnificent pictures, and folded up to fit into a pants pocket. It was beautifully machined in Germany, and had a Schneider lens with a Synchro Compur shutter. I used it a lot for available light photos outdoors at night, which is a hobby of mine. I loved that camera. I carried it with me that weekend in preference to my SLR because it was quieter and smaller, and just the ticket for the semi-casual shots I expected to take at the meeting. But shame on Stouffer's, and I will never buy another product of their as long as I live.

My bout with Ethan Allen is very similar. They owned a motel in Danbury, CT, next to their factory and offices there, where all of the people who call on them stay. I was a travelling salesman at the time, though I was not there to call on them. When I showed up to check in, I noticed that there were a lot of teenaged kids hanging around the parking lot. At the desk, I noticed that the manager had a monitor which showed the kids, in front of him. Since my car was plainly visible in that monitor, and my room was very close to my car, I did not bother to move my car to the spot in front of the room. The next morning, my rear(liftback) window was broken, and all of my samples were gone. I filed a report, and as I recall, my employer's insurance covered the damages, though in some cases--a motocross boot, for instance--where the product came in a pair, I only carried one with me, so they did the kids no good at all, and hurt me. (Policy was that I bought the samples, and could sell them or keep them for personal use when I was finished with them. I had intended to keep the boots for the occasional dirt ride, for instance.) Again, shame on Ethan Allen, and you don't have to worry about me buying anything from your company, either!

Another company I try to boycott, though it is more difficult, since few people know all of the companies they own, is Anheuser Busch. I drove 18-wheelers for a couple of years, and hauled a fair amount of Budweiser out of their plant in Baldwinsville, NY. They forced you to stay awake for hours and listen to the CB radio, over which they broadcast which truck they wanted to back up to which bay. Then you were still at least two hours away from loading, at that point, but they did not want you to sleep even then. No wonder every time it rained, there was always a load of beer overturned on NY Thruway exit 17, near Albany. It was a decreasing radius turn that was tough enough to negotiate when you were wide awake. It was a lot tougher when you had been unable to sleep the night before. People told me that the Miller brewery just up the street was a whole different story. There they told you to go to sleep in your rig, and when it was your turn to load, they would send someone to bang on your door to wake you up. You left that place refreshed, and ready to drive. Of course, since they treated the drivers so well, they needed any new drivers to pick up loads there, dammit.... Since Budweiser doesn't know enough to treat a trucker like a human being, I don't buy their product, either.

ON AGE OF CONSENT:

People in this country always seem to want to raise the age of consent. in fact, at least one state has an age of 16 on all of the individual laws, and then they have an age of 18 on their statutory rape law, thus creating what the legislators thought was an age of consent of 18. In actual fact, all of the district attorneys in that state--or state's attorneys, I think they call them--refuse to prosecute under the statutory rape law for a victim over 16, because they don't want to be known as the idiot who forced the supreme court to overturn the statute! Other states have lower ages of consent, and of course Canada is 14, and the Netherlands is 12, and THEY don't seem to have any problems! One thing here, of course, is that you would have to allow sex education in public schools in order to lower the age of consent that far, and most of these same idiots don't want the school educating their kids about sex! I have a neighbor like that--their daughter got pregnant a year ago by a 20-yr-old kid on the street, had the baby, left it at the guy's home while she went out with a friend, and the baby died, apparently with bruises on its neck. Well, the cops never arrested the guy, and now the girl is preggers again by the same guy! And is he ever UGLYYYYYYY! He's fat and useless, has never held a job in his life, and would not make a father at all. Why she would let him have priveleges I don't know. But the question I have--and assume a Click and Clack vocal here, as in "Doesn't anybody screen these calls?"--is "Don't they teach these kids ANYTHING about birth control in school????

The truth about McCain/Palin

Im no fan of Barack Obama. As a gay man, I realize that he is no friend of gays. And as an Atheist, I don't want to vote for an evangelical from ANY party! (Funny how most of the religious complaints about Obama say he's a Muslim, and here's a guy objecting to him because of his Xian beliefs....) But I certainly know that Jesus Christ was a liberal, if nothing else, and therefore there is not such thing as a conservative Christian, since a conservative does not follow the teachings of Christ. If I had my druthers I'd have just voted for Russ Feingold. But I'm smart enough to know that a vote for anyone else is a vote for McCain/Palin.

McCain says he is for change. So let's look at his appointments so far. His campaign HQ is staffed with former lobbyists (and maybe some present ones, too) and former Bush campaign staffers. How much of a change can we expect from one who stuffs his campaign staff with people who have a great deal of interest in the status quo. The man is simply a liar, just like the pathological liar now sitting in the white house!

As for Palin, AP discovered that she lobbied hard to get a friend to talk to the town council when she was mayor of Wasilla. The first thing he tried to do was to get them to advertise on his radio stations! Then she obtained a zoning variance which enabled her to sell her home without bringing it into compliance with zoning ordinances--something that someone not so well connected would have had a hard time obtaining. Then there was librarygate. She may not have gotten the ability to ban books--a clear first amendment violation that she was seeking--but she did get rid of the librarian who angered her. That was just a forerunner of Troopergate, in which a bipartisan commission said she abused her powers as governor. This woman has an absolute history of violating the powers of her office. She would be a disaster as VP and even worse than that if she ever became President. She would continue in the vein of Cheney, and is virtually a clone of him. The choice of Palin shows that McCain would make bad choices the whole time he was President, were he to be elected.

Have you seen the latest RNC advertisement, showing a picture of the President's chair (presumably) and stating that Obama has no executive experience? Well, just how much executive experience does McCain have? The usual objection to any Senator who is running for President, is that they have no executive experience, and that is true for McCain as well. One presumes that they want you to believe that as a navy officer, he had some executive powers. But didn't he spend most of his enlistment as a POW? Not much there that we can rely on as executive experience qualifying him as President.

No, we MUST prevent his ascension to the Bush Throne! Polls show Obama capable of winning. But to make this happen, we MUST get the people out to vote--especially those newly registered voters who put Obama over the top in the primary. If they fail to do their job, we will have four more years of McBush, and that would be intolerable. The present state of the economy is only the first outward sign of mismanagement by the village idiot of Crawford, TX. There are portions of the illegal Iraq war that were funded through hidden sources that may not come to light until our children's children are running things. Bush has set us up for decades of financial ruin, and McCain will only continue that.

And consider this: If the GWB (I NEVER use the P-word to refer to him) went out hunting with Cheney, and only Cheney came back alive, he could always get away with saying that it was an accident. Most people would consider that at least possible, if not plausible. If McCain went out hunting with Palin, and only Palin came back, the general consensus would seem to be that she hit what she was aiming at!