Michigan man bowls third 300 game of life, then dies
Associated PressDec. 30, 2005 12:00 AM
PORTAGE, Mich. - A bowler collapsed and died at a bowling alley shortly after rolling the third perfect game of his life.Ed Lorenz, 69, bowled a 300 on Wednesday in his first league game of the night at Airway Lanes. When the retiree got up to bowl in the fifth frame of his second game, he clutched his chest and fell over, and efforts to revive him failed."If he could have written a way to go out, this would be it," said Johnny D Masters, who was bowling with Lorenz.Friends said Lorenz started bowling in 1957 and ended last season with a 223 average. He rolled his first two 300 games over a one-week period in 2004.In May, Lorenz was inducted into the Kalamazoo Metro Bowling Association Hall of Fame.
Somehow, I feel like I am becoming a geezer. After my bike accident, I have used a cane. I feel like poking a young whipersnapper...
Friday, December 30, 2005
Us geezers just like cool stuff too!
Boomers like cars geared to younger setCross between Hummer, minivan misses mark.
It wasn't until Jim Tudor got his new Honda Element that he noticed a quirk in its design. Why was the boxy vehicle's sunroof over the empty back seat instead of his spot up front?"I found out that it's supposed to be for my surfboard," says Tudor, who's 56, the grandfather of two and never surfs anywhere but the Internet. "It was really only after the fact, when I started doing a little reading on the car, that I found out I wasn't supposed to be the one driving it."It turns out many of the people buying the Element -- which looks like a cross between a minivan and a Hummer -- aren't the young surfers and mountain bikers Honda expected. It's the same for many buyers of Toyota's Scion models.
Those vehicles were designed and pitched by automakers to capture the hearts and dollars of consumers in their 20s or even younger.But a funny thing happened on the cars' way to the youth market -- people in their 40s, 50s, or 60s found the vehicles suited their lifestyles, too. Honda was "hoping to get parents to buy it for their kids. It didn't work out that way," says Art Spinella, president of CNW Marketing Research, which tracks consumer spending. "The parents who bought it decided they wanted it. The whole car got hijacked by the baby boomers."The demand for these cars from older buyers has thrown a small curve to Honda, Toyota and others trying to broaden their appeal and build allegiance with consumers who will be key to their future business. Automakers are hardly upset that boomers are buying their youth-themed cars. On the contrary, they're happy to sell cars to whoever wants one, manufacturers say.But the embrace of the Element, Scion's xB, Pontiac's Vibe and other cars by drivers across the age spectrum reveals some of the unpredictabilities of the marketplace. Mainly, that in this age of highly targeted marketing and myriad product choices, consumers will often make purchases that fit their lifestyles and self-image, even if it's not exactly what manufacturer had in mind.Take Tudor, who lives in Newborn, Ga., and drives 40,000 miles a year for his job running a state trade association. He never opens the sunroof on his Element. He has no intention of sleeping in the vehicle, although the seats are designed to fold back for exactly that purpose.But he loves the car because it has loads of room to fit all the stuff he carts around for work. Tudor, who frequently drinks coffee or eats french fries while behind the wheel, also likes the upholstery and flooring that's easy to clean. "It just met my needs," he says.Those are very different needs than the ones Honda created the Element to fit.The automaker designed the vehicle for college-age men who participate in lots of active, outdoor sports, said Chris Naughton, a Honda spokesman."We also had a name for it during its creation -- that it was a dorm room on wheels," he said.Toyota had similar thoughts when it created its Scion brand. "There are 142 million people in the U.S. who are less than 30 years old," said Mark Templin, vice president of Scion. "They grew up in a different era. There are things going on around them that we didn't grow up with. It's important for Toyota's future to understand those people."The cars are also marketed at younger consumers. The Web site for Scion thumps out a rap beat. Element's site offers a link to an online mountain-biking game.The strategy has, in many ways, succeeded. Toyota and its sister Lexus brand traditionally sell to older consumers. But Scion's average age is the youngest of any brand, analysts say.Not as young as Toyota expected. By one calculation, the average Scion buyer is about 39, according to the Power Information Network, a subsidiary of automotive market research firm J.D. Power & Associates. For the Element, it's 43.Many older buyers of the vehicles were likely drawn to them by their price. Others were probably buying for their children. Still others buy because they think the cars make them look or feel younger, said Tom Libby, a PIN analyst. Other automakers are looking to follow suit with their own stylish compact cars, as a way to bring in new buyers regardless of age, he said.Jack Dear, of San Antonio, long a Ford owner, bought an Element this year, partly to save on gas. But Dear, 55, also was attracted to the vehicle because it reminds him of the VW Microbus he and friend piloted to California in 1971. They drove it right on to the beach and slept in the back until a police officer chased them away. The Element taps into a self-image that hasn't change all that much since then, he says."I think a lot of us never grew up," Dear says. "We cut our hair, but we never grew up."Tudor has already moved on to his second Element, this one bright red. Driving cars whose shape makes it stand out in traffic, he and other Element owners have been quick to spot one another, exchanging honks and friendly waves of solidarity."Then I noticed that everybody I was waving at was my own age," Tudor says. "That's why my kids call it the Elder-ment."
It wasn't until Jim Tudor got his new Honda Element that he noticed a quirk in its design. Why was the boxy vehicle's sunroof over the empty back seat instead of his spot up front?"I found out that it's supposed to be for my surfboard," says Tudor, who's 56, the grandfather of two and never surfs anywhere but the Internet. "It was really only after the fact, when I started doing a little reading on the car, that I found out I wasn't supposed to be the one driving it."It turns out many of the people buying the Element -- which looks like a cross between a minivan and a Hummer -- aren't the young surfers and mountain bikers Honda expected. It's the same for many buyers of Toyota's Scion models.
Those vehicles were designed and pitched by automakers to capture the hearts and dollars of consumers in their 20s or even younger.But a funny thing happened on the cars' way to the youth market -- people in their 40s, 50s, or 60s found the vehicles suited their lifestyles, too. Honda was "hoping to get parents to buy it for their kids. It didn't work out that way," says Art Spinella, president of CNW Marketing Research, which tracks consumer spending. "The parents who bought it decided they wanted it. The whole car got hijacked by the baby boomers."The demand for these cars from older buyers has thrown a small curve to Honda, Toyota and others trying to broaden their appeal and build allegiance with consumers who will be key to their future business. Automakers are hardly upset that boomers are buying their youth-themed cars. On the contrary, they're happy to sell cars to whoever wants one, manufacturers say.But the embrace of the Element, Scion's xB, Pontiac's Vibe and other cars by drivers across the age spectrum reveals some of the unpredictabilities of the marketplace. Mainly, that in this age of highly targeted marketing and myriad product choices, consumers will often make purchases that fit their lifestyles and self-image, even if it's not exactly what manufacturer had in mind.Take Tudor, who lives in Newborn, Ga., and drives 40,000 miles a year for his job running a state trade association. He never opens the sunroof on his Element. He has no intention of sleeping in the vehicle, although the seats are designed to fold back for exactly that purpose.But he loves the car because it has loads of room to fit all the stuff he carts around for work. Tudor, who frequently drinks coffee or eats french fries while behind the wheel, also likes the upholstery and flooring that's easy to clean. "It just met my needs," he says.Those are very different needs than the ones Honda created the Element to fit.The automaker designed the vehicle for college-age men who participate in lots of active, outdoor sports, said Chris Naughton, a Honda spokesman."We also had a name for it during its creation -- that it was a dorm room on wheels," he said.Toyota had similar thoughts when it created its Scion brand. "There are 142 million people in the U.S. who are less than 30 years old," said Mark Templin, vice president of Scion. "They grew up in a different era. There are things going on around them that we didn't grow up with. It's important for Toyota's future to understand those people."The cars are also marketed at younger consumers. The Web site for Scion thumps out a rap beat. Element's site offers a link to an online mountain-biking game.The strategy has, in many ways, succeeded. Toyota and its sister Lexus brand traditionally sell to older consumers. But Scion's average age is the youngest of any brand, analysts say.Not as young as Toyota expected. By one calculation, the average Scion buyer is about 39, according to the Power Information Network, a subsidiary of automotive market research firm J.D. Power & Associates. For the Element, it's 43.Many older buyers of the vehicles were likely drawn to them by their price. Others were probably buying for their children. Still others buy because they think the cars make them look or feel younger, said Tom Libby, a PIN analyst. Other automakers are looking to follow suit with their own stylish compact cars, as a way to bring in new buyers regardless of age, he said.Jack Dear, of San Antonio, long a Ford owner, bought an Element this year, partly to save on gas. But Dear, 55, also was attracted to the vehicle because it reminds him of the VW Microbus he and friend piloted to California in 1971. They drove it right on to the beach and slept in the back until a police officer chased them away. The Element taps into a self-image that hasn't change all that much since then, he says."I think a lot of us never grew up," Dear says. "We cut our hair, but we never grew up."Tudor has already moved on to his second Element, this one bright red. Driving cars whose shape makes it stand out in traffic, he and other Element owners have been quick to spot one another, exchanging honks and friendly waves of solidarity."Then I noticed that everybody I was waving at was my own age," Tudor says. "That's why my kids call it the Elder-ment."
Thursday, December 22, 2005
I guess Richland County did not vote overwhelmingly Bush....
Washington, DC - U.S. Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI) issued the following statement today after receiving news that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has denied the state of Wisconsin's appeal for federal assistance following a string of severe storms and tornados that tore through Vernon and Richland Counties in late August: "I believe today's news that Wisconsin will not receive disaster relief aid has been made in error and at the expense of communities truly in need of federal assistance. The decision is extremely disappointing, especially in light of reports that FEMA has mismanaged relief funds, sending millions intended for disaster victims to areas where there was little to no damage in the wake of severe weather. Despite this news, I remain moved by the unrelenting optimism and resilience of the people of Viola as well as the way people throughout the area came together to roll up their sleeves and help their neighbors in need."
Saturday, December 17, 2005
How santa gets his presents....
Santas go on rampage in New Zealand
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- A group of 40 people dressed in Santa Claus costumes, many of them drunk, rampaged through New Zealand's largest city, robbing stores and assaulting security guards, police said Sunday.
The rampage, dubbed "Santarchy" by local newspapers, began early Saturday afternoon when the men, wearing ill-fitting Santa costumes, threw beer bottles and urinated on cars from an Auckland overpass, said Auckland Central Police spokeswoman Noreen Hegarty.
She said the men then rushed through a central city park, overturning garbage containers, throwing bottles at passing cars and spraying graffiti on buildings.
One man climbed the mooring line of a cruise ship before being ordered down by the captain. Other Santas, objecting when the man was arrested, attacked security staff, Hegarty said.
The remaining Santas entered a downtown convenience store and carried off beer and soft drinks.
"They came in, said 'Merry Christmas' and then helped themselves," store owner Changa Manakynda said.
Alex Dyer, a spokesman for the group, said Santarchy was a worldwide movement designed to protest the commercialization of Christmas.
Three people were arrested and charged with drunkenness and disorderly behavior.
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- A group of 40 people dressed in Santa Claus costumes, many of them drunk, rampaged through New Zealand's largest city, robbing stores and assaulting security guards, police said Sunday.
The rampage, dubbed "Santarchy" by local newspapers, began early Saturday afternoon when the men, wearing ill-fitting Santa costumes, threw beer bottles and urinated on cars from an Auckland overpass, said Auckland Central Police spokeswoman Noreen Hegarty.
She said the men then rushed through a central city park, overturning garbage containers, throwing bottles at passing cars and spraying graffiti on buildings.
One man climbed the mooring line of a cruise ship before being ordered down by the captain. Other Santas, objecting when the man was arrested, attacked security staff, Hegarty said.
The remaining Santas entered a downtown convenience store and carried off beer and soft drinks.
"They came in, said 'Merry Christmas' and then helped themselves," store owner Changa Manakynda said.
Alex Dyer, a spokesman for the group, said Santarchy was a worldwide movement designed to protest the commercialization of Christmas.
Three people were arrested and charged with drunkenness and disorderly behavior.
His hair plugs are buried
I always enjoyed shaking his hand at the Wisconsin State Fair. That was one of his main campaign efforts, to shake the hand of fairgoers as they entered the flower exhibit.
One year, he got hair plugs inserted before the fair since he was going bald. It was the talk of the fair. They were literally hair plugs, plugged into his scalp. It looked painful...
rest in peace....
Maverick Sen. Proxmire dies at 90
Associated PressDec. 15, 2005 07:40 AM
WASHINGTON - Former Wisconsin Sen. William Proxmire, a political maverick who became Congress' leading scourge of big spending and government waste, has died, a congressional official said Thursday.The 90-year-old Proxmire, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease, had been living at a convalescent home near Baltimore. The official who told The Associated Press of his death insisted on anonymity because no formal announcement had yet been made on behalf of the family.Over the years, the rebel Democrat developed an image of penny-pinching populism that played well with his homestate voters. But his support of the expensive system of dairy price supports - widely criticized by others as symbolic of government largess gone amuck - won him strong backing from his state's dairy farmers.
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The senator's monthly "Golden Fleece" awards, which he began in 1975 to point out what he thought were frivolous expenditures of taxpayers' money, became a Washington tradition.Proxmire, who also became a familiar face on the television network Sunday news shows, was elected to the Senate in 1957 in a special election to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.He was re-elected in 1958 to his first six-year term and was returned to the same post in 1964, 1970, 1976 and 1982.Long before the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law was a twinkle in the eye of lawmakers, and at a time when millions were spent campaigning for Senate seats, Proxmire made a point of accepting no contributions. In 1982 he registered only $145.10 in campaign costs, yet gleaned 64 percent of the vote.The son of a wealthy physician in Lake Forest, Ill., Proxmire graduated from Yale University and Harvard Business School. He served with military intelligence in World War II and later moved to Wisconsin to begin a career in politics.After three unsuccessful attempts at winning the governorship, Proxmire won McCarthy's vacant seat.Soon he carved out an independent streak on Capitol Hill by introducing amendments without consulting the party heads, filibustering, and even criticizing the dictates of then-Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson.In that respect, he resembled to a certain degree the style of a latter-day maverick and government spending critic, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain.Proxmire remained dogged in his determination to represent his constituents as best he might. Despite his attacks against waste in the Pentagon and elsewhere in government, he remained tireless in his defense of milk price supports.But he did vote in 1975 to kill the $50 million Kickapoo Dam in his own state, which he contended was a waste of taxpyers' money.In more than two decades, Proxmire did not travel abroad on Senate business and he returned more than $900,000 from his office allowances to the Treasury.He repeatedly sparked his colleagues' ire by staunchly opposing salary increases, fighting against such Senate 'perks' as a new gym in the Hart office building and keeping the Senate open all night long - at a cost of thousands of dollars - so he alone could argue against increasing the national debt limit.Even so, his reputation was that of a workaholic and even his strongest critics found him to be one the the chamber's most disciplined, intelligent and persistent members.
One year, he got hair plugs inserted before the fair since he was going bald. It was the talk of the fair. They were literally hair plugs, plugged into his scalp. It looked painful...
rest in peace....
Maverick Sen. Proxmire dies at 90
Associated PressDec. 15, 2005 07:40 AM
WASHINGTON - Former Wisconsin Sen. William Proxmire, a political maverick who became Congress' leading scourge of big spending and government waste, has died, a congressional official said Thursday.The 90-year-old Proxmire, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease, had been living at a convalescent home near Baltimore. The official who told The Associated Press of his death insisted on anonymity because no formal announcement had yet been made on behalf of the family.Over the years, the rebel Democrat developed an image of penny-pinching populism that played well with his homestate voters. But his support of the expensive system of dairy price supports - widely criticized by others as symbolic of government largess gone amuck - won him strong backing from his state's dairy farmers.
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The senator's monthly "Golden Fleece" awards, which he began in 1975 to point out what he thought were frivolous expenditures of taxpayers' money, became a Washington tradition.Proxmire, who also became a familiar face on the television network Sunday news shows, was elected to the Senate in 1957 in a special election to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.He was re-elected in 1958 to his first six-year term and was returned to the same post in 1964, 1970, 1976 and 1982.Long before the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law was a twinkle in the eye of lawmakers, and at a time when millions were spent campaigning for Senate seats, Proxmire made a point of accepting no contributions. In 1982 he registered only $145.10 in campaign costs, yet gleaned 64 percent of the vote.The son of a wealthy physician in Lake Forest, Ill., Proxmire graduated from Yale University and Harvard Business School. He served with military intelligence in World War II and later moved to Wisconsin to begin a career in politics.After three unsuccessful attempts at winning the governorship, Proxmire won McCarthy's vacant seat.Soon he carved out an independent streak on Capitol Hill by introducing amendments without consulting the party heads, filibustering, and even criticizing the dictates of then-Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson.In that respect, he resembled to a certain degree the style of a latter-day maverick and government spending critic, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain.Proxmire remained dogged in his determination to represent his constituents as best he might. Despite his attacks against waste in the Pentagon and elsewhere in government, he remained tireless in his defense of milk price supports.But he did vote in 1975 to kill the $50 million Kickapoo Dam in his own state, which he contended was a waste of taxpyers' money.In more than two decades, Proxmire did not travel abroad on Senate business and he returned more than $900,000 from his office allowances to the Treasury.He repeatedly sparked his colleagues' ire by staunchly opposing salary increases, fighting against such Senate 'perks' as a new gym in the Hart office building and keeping the Senate open all night long - at a cost of thousands of dollars - so he alone could argue against increasing the national debt limit.Even so, his reputation was that of a workaholic and even his strongest critics found him to be one the the chamber's most disciplined, intelligent and persistent members.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
sad day, he was a nice guy
I got to meet him in Wisconsin during his campaign. He was very nice....we should have elected him President.....
Former Sen. Eugene McCarthy, 89, dies
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, whose insurgent campaign toppled a sitting president in 1968 and forced the Democratic Party to take seriously his message against the Vietnam War, died Saturday. He was 89.
McCarthy died in his sleep at assisted living home in the Georgetown neighborhood where he had lived for the past few years, said his son, Michael.
Eugene McCarthy challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination during growing debate over the Vietnam War. The challenge led to Johnson's withdrawal from the race.
The former college professor, who ran for president five times in all, was in some ways an atypical politician, a man with a witty, erudite speaking style who wrote poetry in his spare time and was the author of several books.
"He was thoughtful and he was principled and he was compassionate and he had a good sense of humor," his son said.
When Eugene McCarthy ran for president in 1992, he explained his decision to leave the seclusion of his home in rural Woodville, Va., for the campaign trail by quoting Plutarch, the ancient Greek historian: "They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view."
McCarthy got less than 1 percent of the vote in 1992 in New Hampshire, the state where he helped change history 24 years earlier.
Helped by his legion of idealistic young volunteers known as "clean-for-Gene kids," McCarthy got 42 percent of the vote in the state's 1968 Democratic primary. That showing embarrassed Johnson into withdrawing from the race and throwing his support to his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey.
Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York also decided to seek the nomination, but was assassinated in June 1968. McCarthy and his followers went to the party convention in Chicago, where fellow Minnesotan Humphrey won the nomination amid bitter strife both on the convention floor and in the streets.
Humphrey went on to narrowly lose the general election to Richard Nixon. The racial, social and political tensions within the Democratic Party in 1968 have continued to affect presidential politics ever since.
"It was a tragic year for the Democratic Party and for responsible politics, in a way," McCarthy said in a 1988 interview.
"There were already forces at work that might have torn the party apart anyway - the growing women's movement, the growing demands for greater racial equality, an inability to incorporate all the demands of a new generation.
"But in 1968, the party became a kind of unrelated bloc of factions ... each refusing accommodation with another, each wanting control at the expense of all the others."
Although he supported the Korean War, McCarthy said he opposed the Vietnam War because "as it went on, you could tell the people running it didn't know what was going on."
Former Sen. George McGovern, D-S.D., said McCarthy's presidential run in 1968 dramatically changed the antiwar movement.
"It was no longer a movement of concerned citizens, but became a national political movement," McGovern said Saturday. "He was an inspiration to me in all of my life in politics." McGovern won the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, when McCarthy ran a second time.
Former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., who ran for vice president in 2004, said McCarthy "was a remarkable American, a man who spoke his conscience, and he was a great leader for my party."
In recent years, McCarthy was critical of campaign finance reform, winning him an unlikely award from the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2000.
In an interview when he got the award, McCarthy said money helped him in the 1968 race. "We had a few big contributors," he said. "And that's true of any liberal movement. In the American Revolution, they didn't get matching funds from George III."
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, McCarthy said the United States was partly to blame for ignoring the plight of Palestinians.
"You let a thing like that fester for 45 years, you have to expect something like this to happen," he said in an interview at the time. "No one at the White House has shown any concern for the Palestinians."
In a 2004 biography, "Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism," British historian Dominic Sandbrook painted an unflattering portrait of McCarthy, calling him lazy and jealous, among other things. McCarthy, Sandbrook wrote, "willfully courted the reputation of frivolous maverick."
In McCarthy's 1998 book, "No-Fault Politics," editor Keith C. Burris described McCarthy in the introduction as "a Catholic committed to social justice but a skeptic about reform, about do-gooders, about the power of the state and the competence of government, and about the liberal reliance upon material cures for social problems."
McCarthy was born March 29, 1916, in Watkins, a central Minnesota town of about 750. He earned degrees from St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., and the University of Minnesota.
He was a teacher, a civilian War Department employee and college economics and sociology instructor before turning to politics. He once spent a year in a monastery.
He was elected to the House in 1948. Ten years later he was elected to the Senate and re-elected in 1964. McCarthy left the Senate in 1970 and devoted much of his time to writing poetry, essays and books.
With a sardonic sense of humor, McCarthy needled whatever establishment was in power. In 1980 he endorsed Republican Ronald Reagan with the argument that anyone was better than incumbent Jimmy Carter, a Democrat.
On his 85th birthday in 2001, McCarthy told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis that President Bush was an amateur and said he could not even bear to watch his inauguration.
In an interview a month before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, McCarthy compared the Bush administration with the characters in the William Golding novel "Lord of the Flies," in which a group of boys stranded on an island turn to savagery.
"The bullies are running it," McCarthy said. "Bush is bullying everything."
McCarthy was an advocate for a third-party movement, arguing there was no real difference between Republicans and Democrats.
In 2000, he wrote a political satire called "An American Bestiary," illustrated by Chris Millis, in which high-level advisers are portrayed as park pigeons - "they strut and waddle" - and reporters are compared with black birds who flock together.
He blamed the media for deciding who is and is not a serious candidate and suggested he should have kept his 1992 candidacy a secret, since announcing it publicly did no good.
McCarthy also ran for president in 1972, 1976 and 1988.
For McCarthy, the 1950s and 1960s were the Democratic Party's high points because it pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress and championed national health insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.
"I think he probably would consider his work in civil rights legislation in the 1960s to be his greatest contribution," his son said Saturday.
The bad times, Eugene McCarthy said, began with America's increased involvement in the Vietnam War and the simultaneous failure of some of Johnson's Great Society social programs.
Instead of giving people a chance to earn a living, McCarthy said, the Great Society "became affirmative action and more welfare. It was an admission the New Deal had failed or fallen."
In recent years McCarthy had lived at Georgetown Retirement Residence, an assisted living center in Washington. He and his wife, Abigail, separated after the 1968 election. She died in 2001.
Survivors include daughters Ellen and Margaret and six grandchildren, Michael McCarthy said.
A private burial is planned for next week and a memorial service in Washington will be scheduled, Michael McCarthy said.
Former Sen. Eugene McCarthy, 89, dies
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, whose insurgent campaign toppled a sitting president in 1968 and forced the Democratic Party to take seriously his message against the Vietnam War, died Saturday. He was 89.
McCarthy died in his sleep at assisted living home in the Georgetown neighborhood where he had lived for the past few years, said his son, Michael.
Eugene McCarthy challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination during growing debate over the Vietnam War. The challenge led to Johnson's withdrawal from the race.
The former college professor, who ran for president five times in all, was in some ways an atypical politician, a man with a witty, erudite speaking style who wrote poetry in his spare time and was the author of several books.
"He was thoughtful and he was principled and he was compassionate and he had a good sense of humor," his son said.
When Eugene McCarthy ran for president in 1992, he explained his decision to leave the seclusion of his home in rural Woodville, Va., for the campaign trail by quoting Plutarch, the ancient Greek historian: "They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view."
McCarthy got less than 1 percent of the vote in 1992 in New Hampshire, the state where he helped change history 24 years earlier.
Helped by his legion of idealistic young volunteers known as "clean-for-Gene kids," McCarthy got 42 percent of the vote in the state's 1968 Democratic primary. That showing embarrassed Johnson into withdrawing from the race and throwing his support to his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey.
Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York also decided to seek the nomination, but was assassinated in June 1968. McCarthy and his followers went to the party convention in Chicago, where fellow Minnesotan Humphrey won the nomination amid bitter strife both on the convention floor and in the streets.
Humphrey went on to narrowly lose the general election to Richard Nixon. The racial, social and political tensions within the Democratic Party in 1968 have continued to affect presidential politics ever since.
"It was a tragic year for the Democratic Party and for responsible politics, in a way," McCarthy said in a 1988 interview.
"There were already forces at work that might have torn the party apart anyway - the growing women's movement, the growing demands for greater racial equality, an inability to incorporate all the demands of a new generation.
"But in 1968, the party became a kind of unrelated bloc of factions ... each refusing accommodation with another, each wanting control at the expense of all the others."
Although he supported the Korean War, McCarthy said he opposed the Vietnam War because "as it went on, you could tell the people running it didn't know what was going on."
Former Sen. George McGovern, D-S.D., said McCarthy's presidential run in 1968 dramatically changed the antiwar movement.
"It was no longer a movement of concerned citizens, but became a national political movement," McGovern said Saturday. "He was an inspiration to me in all of my life in politics." McGovern won the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, when McCarthy ran a second time.
Former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., who ran for vice president in 2004, said McCarthy "was a remarkable American, a man who spoke his conscience, and he was a great leader for my party."
In recent years, McCarthy was critical of campaign finance reform, winning him an unlikely award from the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2000.
In an interview when he got the award, McCarthy said money helped him in the 1968 race. "We had a few big contributors," he said. "And that's true of any liberal movement. In the American Revolution, they didn't get matching funds from George III."
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, McCarthy said the United States was partly to blame for ignoring the plight of Palestinians.
"You let a thing like that fester for 45 years, you have to expect something like this to happen," he said in an interview at the time. "No one at the White House has shown any concern for the Palestinians."
In a 2004 biography, "Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism," British historian Dominic Sandbrook painted an unflattering portrait of McCarthy, calling him lazy and jealous, among other things. McCarthy, Sandbrook wrote, "willfully courted the reputation of frivolous maverick."
In McCarthy's 1998 book, "No-Fault Politics," editor Keith C. Burris described McCarthy in the introduction as "a Catholic committed to social justice but a skeptic about reform, about do-gooders, about the power of the state and the competence of government, and about the liberal reliance upon material cures for social problems."
McCarthy was born March 29, 1916, in Watkins, a central Minnesota town of about 750. He earned degrees from St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., and the University of Minnesota.
He was a teacher, a civilian War Department employee and college economics and sociology instructor before turning to politics. He once spent a year in a monastery.
He was elected to the House in 1948. Ten years later he was elected to the Senate and re-elected in 1964. McCarthy left the Senate in 1970 and devoted much of his time to writing poetry, essays and books.
With a sardonic sense of humor, McCarthy needled whatever establishment was in power. In 1980 he endorsed Republican Ronald Reagan with the argument that anyone was better than incumbent Jimmy Carter, a Democrat.
On his 85th birthday in 2001, McCarthy told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis that President Bush was an amateur and said he could not even bear to watch his inauguration.
In an interview a month before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, McCarthy compared the Bush administration with the characters in the William Golding novel "Lord of the Flies," in which a group of boys stranded on an island turn to savagery.
"The bullies are running it," McCarthy said. "Bush is bullying everything."
McCarthy was an advocate for a third-party movement, arguing there was no real difference between Republicans and Democrats.
In 2000, he wrote a political satire called "An American Bestiary," illustrated by Chris Millis, in which high-level advisers are portrayed as park pigeons - "they strut and waddle" - and reporters are compared with black birds who flock together.
He blamed the media for deciding who is and is not a serious candidate and suggested he should have kept his 1992 candidacy a secret, since announcing it publicly did no good.
McCarthy also ran for president in 1972, 1976 and 1988.
For McCarthy, the 1950s and 1960s were the Democratic Party's high points because it pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress and championed national health insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.
"I think he probably would consider his work in civil rights legislation in the 1960s to be his greatest contribution," his son said Saturday.
The bad times, Eugene McCarthy said, began with America's increased involvement in the Vietnam War and the simultaneous failure of some of Johnson's Great Society social programs.
Instead of giving people a chance to earn a living, McCarthy said, the Great Society "became affirmative action and more welfare. It was an admission the New Deal had failed or fallen."
In recent years McCarthy had lived at Georgetown Retirement Residence, an assisted living center in Washington. He and his wife, Abigail, separated after the 1968 election. She died in 2001.
Survivors include daughters Ellen and Margaret and six grandchildren, Michael McCarthy said.
A private burial is planned for next week and a memorial service in Washington will be scheduled, Michael McCarthy said.
sad day, he was a nice guy
I got to meet him in Wisconsin during his campaign. He was very nice....we should have elected him President.....
Former Sen. Eugene McCarthy, 89, dies
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, whose insurgent campaign toppled a sitting president in 1968 and forced the Democratic Party to take seriously his message against the Vietnam War, died Saturday. He was 89.
McCarthy died in his sleep at assisted living home in the Georgetown neighborhood where he had lived for the past few years, said his son, Michael.
Eugene McCarthy challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination during growing debate over the Vietnam War. The challenge led to Johnson's withdrawal from the race.
The former college professor, who ran for president five times in all, was in some ways an atypical politician, a man with a witty, erudite speaking style who wrote poetry in his spare time and was the author of several books.
"He was thoughtful and he was principled and he was compassionate and he had a good sense of humor," his son said.
When Eugene McCarthy ran for president in 1992, he explained his decision to leave the seclusion of his home in rural Woodville, Va., for the campaign trail by quoting Plutarch, the ancient Greek historian: "They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view."
McCarthy got less than 1 percent of the vote in 1992 in New Hampshire, the state where he helped change history 24 years earlier.
Helped by his legion of idealistic young volunteers known as "clean-for-Gene kids," McCarthy got 42 percent of the vote in the state's 1968 Democratic primary. That showing embarrassed Johnson into withdrawing from the race and throwing his support to his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey.
Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York also decided to seek the nomination, but was assassinated in June 1968. McCarthy and his followers went to the party convention in Chicago, where fellow Minnesotan Humphrey won the nomination amid bitter strife both on the convention floor and in the streets.
Humphrey went on to narrowly lose the general election to Richard Nixon. The racial, social and political tensions within the Democratic Party in 1968 have continued to affect presidential politics ever since.
"It was a tragic year for the Democratic Party and for responsible politics, in a way," McCarthy said in a 1988 interview.
"There were already forces at work that might have torn the party apart anyway - the growing women's movement, the growing demands for greater racial equality, an inability to incorporate all the demands of a new generation.
"But in 1968, the party became a kind of unrelated bloc of factions ... each refusing accommodation with another, each wanting control at the expense of all the others."
Although he supported the Korean War, McCarthy said he opposed the Vietnam War because "as it went on, you could tell the people running it didn't know what was going on."
Former Sen. George McGovern, D-S.D., said McCarthy's presidential run in 1968 dramatically changed the antiwar movement.
"It was no longer a movement of concerned citizens, but became a national political movement," McGovern said Saturday. "He was an inspiration to me in all of my life in politics." McGovern won the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, when McCarthy ran a second time.
Former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., who ran for vice president in 2004, said McCarthy "was a remarkable American, a man who spoke his conscience, and he was a great leader for my party."
In recent years, McCarthy was critical of campaign finance reform, winning him an unlikely award from the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2000.
In an interview when he got the award, McCarthy said money helped him in the 1968 race. "We had a few big contributors," he said. "And that's true of any liberal movement. In the American Revolution, they didn't get matching funds from George III."
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, McCarthy said the United States was partly to blame for ignoring the plight of Palestinians.
"You let a thing like that fester for 45 years, you have to expect something like this to happen," he said in an interview at the time. "No one at the White House has shown any concern for the Palestinians."
In a 2004 biography, "Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism," British historian Dominic Sandbrook painted an unflattering portrait of McCarthy, calling him lazy and jealous, among other things. McCarthy, Sandbrook wrote, "willfully courted the reputation of frivolous maverick."
In McCarthy's 1998 book, "No-Fault Politics," editor Keith C. Burris described McCarthy in the introduction as "a Catholic committed to social justice but a skeptic about reform, about do-gooders, about the power of the state and the competence of government, and about the liberal reliance upon material cures for social problems."
McCarthy was born March 29, 1916, in Watkins, a central Minnesota town of about 750. He earned degrees from St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., and the University of Minnesota.
He was a teacher, a civilian War Department employee and college economics and sociology instructor before turning to politics. He once spent a year in a monastery.
He was elected to the House in 1948. Ten years later he was elected to the Senate and re-elected in 1964. McCarthy left the Senate in 1970 and devoted much of his time to writing poetry, essays and books.
With a sardonic sense of humor, McCarthy needled whatever establishment was in power. In 1980 he endorsed Republican Ronald Reagan with the argument that anyone was better than incumbent Jimmy Carter, a Democrat.
On his 85th birthday in 2001, McCarthy told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis that President Bush was an amateur and said he could not even bear to watch his inauguration.
In an interview a month before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, McCarthy compared the Bush administration with the characters in the William Golding novel "Lord of the Flies," in which a group of boys stranded on an island turn to savagery.
"The bullies are running it," McCarthy said. "Bush is bullying everything."
McCarthy was an advocate for a third-party movement, arguing there was no real difference between Republicans and Democrats.
In 2000, he wrote a political satire called "An American Bestiary," illustrated by Chris Millis, in which high-level advisers are portrayed as park pigeons - "they strut and waddle" - and reporters are compared with black birds who flock together.
He blamed the media for deciding who is and is not a serious candidate and suggested he should have kept his 1992 candidacy a secret, since announcing it publicly did no good.
McCarthy also ran for president in 1972, 1976 and 1988.
For McCarthy, the 1950s and 1960s were the Democratic Party's high points because it pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress and championed national health insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.
"I think he probably would consider his work in civil rights legislation in the 1960s to be his greatest contribution," his son said Saturday.
The bad times, Eugene McCarthy said, began with America's increased involvement in the Vietnam War and the simultaneous failure of some of Johnson's Great Society social programs.
Instead of giving people a chance to earn a living, McCarthy said, the Great Society "became affirmative action and more welfare. It was an admission the New Deal had failed or fallen."
In recent years McCarthy had lived at Georgetown Retirement Residence, an assisted living center in Washington. He and his wife, Abigail, separated after the 1968 election. She died in 2001.
Survivors include daughters Ellen and Margaret and six grandchildren, Michael McCarthy said.
A private burial is planned for next week and a memorial service in Washington will be scheduled, Michael McCarthy said.
Former Sen. Eugene McCarthy, 89, dies
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, whose insurgent campaign toppled a sitting president in 1968 and forced the Democratic Party to take seriously his message against the Vietnam War, died Saturday. He was 89.
McCarthy died in his sleep at assisted living home in the Georgetown neighborhood where he had lived for the past few years, said his son, Michael.
Eugene McCarthy challenged President Lyndon B. Johnson for the 1968 Democratic nomination during growing debate over the Vietnam War. The challenge led to Johnson's withdrawal from the race.
The former college professor, who ran for president five times in all, was in some ways an atypical politician, a man with a witty, erudite speaking style who wrote poetry in his spare time and was the author of several books.
"He was thoughtful and he was principled and he was compassionate and he had a good sense of humor," his son said.
When Eugene McCarthy ran for president in 1992, he explained his decision to leave the seclusion of his home in rural Woodville, Va., for the campaign trail by quoting Plutarch, the ancient Greek historian: "They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view."
McCarthy got less than 1 percent of the vote in 1992 in New Hampshire, the state where he helped change history 24 years earlier.
Helped by his legion of idealistic young volunteers known as "clean-for-Gene kids," McCarthy got 42 percent of the vote in the state's 1968 Democratic primary. That showing embarrassed Johnson into withdrawing from the race and throwing his support to his vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey.
Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York also decided to seek the nomination, but was assassinated in June 1968. McCarthy and his followers went to the party convention in Chicago, where fellow Minnesotan Humphrey won the nomination amid bitter strife both on the convention floor and in the streets.
Humphrey went on to narrowly lose the general election to Richard Nixon. The racial, social and political tensions within the Democratic Party in 1968 have continued to affect presidential politics ever since.
"It was a tragic year for the Democratic Party and for responsible politics, in a way," McCarthy said in a 1988 interview.
"There were already forces at work that might have torn the party apart anyway - the growing women's movement, the growing demands for greater racial equality, an inability to incorporate all the demands of a new generation.
"But in 1968, the party became a kind of unrelated bloc of factions ... each refusing accommodation with another, each wanting control at the expense of all the others."
Although he supported the Korean War, McCarthy said he opposed the Vietnam War because "as it went on, you could tell the people running it didn't know what was going on."
Former Sen. George McGovern, D-S.D., said McCarthy's presidential run in 1968 dramatically changed the antiwar movement.
"It was no longer a movement of concerned citizens, but became a national political movement," McGovern said Saturday. "He was an inspiration to me in all of my life in politics." McGovern won the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, when McCarthy ran a second time.
Former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., who ran for vice president in 2004, said McCarthy "was a remarkable American, a man who spoke his conscience, and he was a great leader for my party."
In recent years, McCarthy was critical of campaign finance reform, winning him an unlikely award from the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2000.
In an interview when he got the award, McCarthy said money helped him in the 1968 race. "We had a few big contributors," he said. "And that's true of any liberal movement. In the American Revolution, they didn't get matching funds from George III."
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, McCarthy said the United States was partly to blame for ignoring the plight of Palestinians.
"You let a thing like that fester for 45 years, you have to expect something like this to happen," he said in an interview at the time. "No one at the White House has shown any concern for the Palestinians."
In a 2004 biography, "Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism," British historian Dominic Sandbrook painted an unflattering portrait of McCarthy, calling him lazy and jealous, among other things. McCarthy, Sandbrook wrote, "willfully courted the reputation of frivolous maverick."
In McCarthy's 1998 book, "No-Fault Politics," editor Keith C. Burris described McCarthy in the introduction as "a Catholic committed to social justice but a skeptic about reform, about do-gooders, about the power of the state and the competence of government, and about the liberal reliance upon material cures for social problems."
McCarthy was born March 29, 1916, in Watkins, a central Minnesota town of about 750. He earned degrees from St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., and the University of Minnesota.
He was a teacher, a civilian War Department employee and college economics and sociology instructor before turning to politics. He once spent a year in a monastery.
He was elected to the House in 1948. Ten years later he was elected to the Senate and re-elected in 1964. McCarthy left the Senate in 1970 and devoted much of his time to writing poetry, essays and books.
With a sardonic sense of humor, McCarthy needled whatever establishment was in power. In 1980 he endorsed Republican Ronald Reagan with the argument that anyone was better than incumbent Jimmy Carter, a Democrat.
On his 85th birthday in 2001, McCarthy told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis that President Bush was an amateur and said he could not even bear to watch his inauguration.
In an interview a month before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, McCarthy compared the Bush administration with the characters in the William Golding novel "Lord of the Flies," in which a group of boys stranded on an island turn to savagery.
"The bullies are running it," McCarthy said. "Bush is bullying everything."
McCarthy was an advocate for a third-party movement, arguing there was no real difference between Republicans and Democrats.
In 2000, he wrote a political satire called "An American Bestiary," illustrated by Chris Millis, in which high-level advisers are portrayed as park pigeons - "they strut and waddle" - and reporters are compared with black birds who flock together.
He blamed the media for deciding who is and is not a serious candidate and suggested he should have kept his 1992 candidacy a secret, since announcing it publicly did no good.
McCarthy also ran for president in 1972, 1976 and 1988.
For McCarthy, the 1950s and 1960s were the Democratic Party's high points because it pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress and championed national health insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.
"I think he probably would consider his work in civil rights legislation in the 1960s to be his greatest contribution," his son said Saturday.
The bad times, Eugene McCarthy said, began with America's increased involvement in the Vietnam War and the simultaneous failure of some of Johnson's Great Society social programs.
Instead of giving people a chance to earn a living, McCarthy said, the Great Society "became affirmative action and more welfare. It was an admission the New Deal had failed or fallen."
In recent years McCarthy had lived at Georgetown Retirement Residence, an assisted living center in Washington. He and his wife, Abigail, separated after the 1968 election. She died in 2001.
Survivors include daughters Ellen and Margaret and six grandchildren, Michael McCarthy said.
A private burial is planned for next week and a memorial service in Washington will be scheduled, Michael McCarthy said.
Friday, December 09, 2005
Hey, I am not a near-elderly
This article is an INSULT to geezers everywhere. Our 95 year old neighbor thinks we are merely children. Certainly, boomers are not NEAR-ELDERLY. Maybe we ain't kids anymore, but give us a break!
Turn up the music, burn some cars, riot! Be in bed by nine.....
Don't mess with my social security!
Many boomers facing health woes
Associated PressDec. 9, 2005 12:00 AM
U.S. life expectancy has hit another all-time high, 77.6 years, and deaths from heart disease, cancer and stroke continue to drop, the government reported Thursday.Nonetheless, the march of medical progress has taken a worrisome turn: Half of Americans in the 55-to-64 age group, including the oldest of the baby boomers, have high blood pressure, and two in five are obese. That means they are in worse shape in some respects than Americans born a decade earlier were when they were that age.The health of this large group of the near-elderly is of major concern to American taxpayers because they are now becoming eligible for Medicare and Social Security.
The report presents data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics and dozens of other health agencies and organizations.Among the new data: Deaths from heart disease, cancer and stroke, the nation's three leading killers, dropped in 2003 between 2 percent and 5 percent.Also, Americans' life expectancy increased again in 2003. According to the government's calculations, a child born in 2003 can expect to live 77.6 years on average, up from 77.3 the year before. In 1990, life expectancy was 75.4.For men, life expectancy in 2003 was 74.8, for women 80.1.Life expectancy in the U.S. has been rising almost without interruption since 1900. Those trends may allow life expectancy to continue to inch up despite the increases in obesity and high blood pressure.
Turn up the music, burn some cars, riot! Be in bed by nine.....
Don't mess with my social security!
Many boomers facing health woes
Associated PressDec. 9, 2005 12:00 AM
U.S. life expectancy has hit another all-time high, 77.6 years, and deaths from heart disease, cancer and stroke continue to drop, the government reported Thursday.Nonetheless, the march of medical progress has taken a worrisome turn: Half of Americans in the 55-to-64 age group, including the oldest of the baby boomers, have high blood pressure, and two in five are obese. That means they are in worse shape in some respects than Americans born a decade earlier were when they were that age.The health of this large group of the near-elderly is of major concern to American taxpayers because they are now becoming eligible for Medicare and Social Security.
The report presents data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics and dozens of other health agencies and organizations.Among the new data: Deaths from heart disease, cancer and stroke, the nation's three leading killers, dropped in 2003 between 2 percent and 5 percent.Also, Americans' life expectancy increased again in 2003. According to the government's calculations, a child born in 2003 can expect to live 77.6 years on average, up from 77.3 the year before. In 1990, life expectancy was 75.4.For men, life expectancy in 2003 was 74.8, for women 80.1.Life expectancy in the U.S. has been rising almost without interruption since 1900. Those trends may allow life expectancy to continue to inch up despite the increases in obesity and high blood pressure.
Monday, November 21, 2005
God says Pi is 3, period
Evolution start of intelligent crusade
By Josh Steichmann / Rhetoric ninja of great renown MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2005
As you may have heard, the Kansas State Board of Education finally rendered their verdict on teaching Intelligent Design, a hypothesis that promotes the idea that the universe and life specifically is "too complex" to have arisen through evolution. With a resounding six-to-four vote, Kansans will no longer have to suffer under the tyranny of observable evidence, testable hypotheses, or repeatable data. Rejoice! This is a victory against the Godless, who insist on forcing their rational empiricism down the throats of wayward students. They even redefined the word "science," away from a definition of "seeking observable explanations for natural phenomena." But, like many of the decisions in this so-called Christian Nation, it did not go far enough. While students here at Eastern were no doubt heartened by the Kansan victory, they must redouble their efforts to change the curricula at our university. And they must not stop at the relatively minor accomplishment of Intelligent Design being democratically voted in as a possible argument for the origins of life. No, for if that is the end of teaching based on what we don't know, we will have achieved less than half of the necessary changes for a true religious republic. Intelligent Design is well and good, a perfectly cromulent approach to scientific learning. But what of the other disciplines? Should we falter in applying the strenuous logic of Intelligent Design to other areas of study? We would be remiss and hell-bound should our only accomplishments come on this narrow front. What of Intelligent Mathematics? If anything, this is an area that strikes at the true heart of the dogmatic atheocrats and their enforced rationality. Even more than biology, which acknowledges that different theories may simply be the best representation of current knowledge, mathematics insists that there is one right answer to every problem, even when that right answer directly contradicts the Bible. Take, for example, 1st Kings 7:21: "And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about." Even a brief mathematical examination can show us that in the Bible, pi is clearly exactly three. For years, mathematicians, a study commonly associated with paganism and licentiousness, have been deluding us with the story that not only is pi slightly higher than three, but that we cannot know it in its entirety. If, by following the rubric of Intelligent Design, we cannot know pi, then it must have been designed. And, if it must have been designed and the Bible was dictated directly from that designer, then it clearly shows that pi is exactly three. The fine state of Indiana tried to espouse this clear and inerrant logic not too long ago, only to be beaten back by the Godless hordes of sodomites who demanded that their perverted interpretation of pi be recognized, lest they bar students of Indiana from higher education and well-paying jobs. This aggression cannot stand, students of Eastern. Demand in your math classes that pi be presented to the Biblical standard of exactly three. No doubt many of the faithful have noticed another discipline long under assault by the liberal idolaters: linguistics. Nowhere has their influence been more pervasive than in the spelling and grammar of our language, and their attempts to wrest the common bond of all pious men from the true root of the King James Bible. If given even a glancing examination, we will find that the English language is too complex to have arisen through random acts of phonemes and glottal stops. Why, if language arose spontaneously, as some of the loony left would have you believe, does "I" come before "E" except after "C?" Why isn't "wife" spelled "wyf"? If one looks back at pre-Biblical spelling, such as the Canterbury Tales, it can be clearly seen that the language was nearly incomprehensible. And if you listen to the pagan moon-worshipers, they'll even posit Beowulf as an example of "Old English," the supposed roots of our modern tongue! Have you ever tried to read Beowulf? It's clearly not in English, despite the secular lies of those who wish to bring us back to Gomorrah. I shouldn't be surprised if these aren't the same liberal "environmentalists" that have killed off the behemoth and leviathan. Be happy for Intelligent Design in Kansas, but don't forget to demand your right to a pi of exactly three and the right to use "ye" and "thou" as pronouns in your English classes. To do any less would fail God, and that wouldn't be "intelligent," would it?
By Josh Steichmann / Rhetoric ninja of great renown MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2005
As you may have heard, the Kansas State Board of Education finally rendered their verdict on teaching Intelligent Design, a hypothesis that promotes the idea that the universe and life specifically is "too complex" to have arisen through evolution. With a resounding six-to-four vote, Kansans will no longer have to suffer under the tyranny of observable evidence, testable hypotheses, or repeatable data. Rejoice! This is a victory against the Godless, who insist on forcing their rational empiricism down the throats of wayward students. They even redefined the word "science," away from a definition of "seeking observable explanations for natural phenomena." But, like many of the decisions in this so-called Christian Nation, it did not go far enough. While students here at Eastern were no doubt heartened by the Kansan victory, they must redouble their efforts to change the curricula at our university. And they must not stop at the relatively minor accomplishment of Intelligent Design being democratically voted in as a possible argument for the origins of life. No, for if that is the end of teaching based on what we don't know, we will have achieved less than half of the necessary changes for a true religious republic. Intelligent Design is well and good, a perfectly cromulent approach to scientific learning. But what of the other disciplines? Should we falter in applying the strenuous logic of Intelligent Design to other areas of study? We would be remiss and hell-bound should our only accomplishments come on this narrow front. What of Intelligent Mathematics? If anything, this is an area that strikes at the true heart of the dogmatic atheocrats and their enforced rationality. Even more than biology, which acknowledges that different theories may simply be the best representation of current knowledge, mathematics insists that there is one right answer to every problem, even when that right answer directly contradicts the Bible. Take, for example, 1st Kings 7:21: "And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about." Even a brief mathematical examination can show us that in the Bible, pi is clearly exactly three. For years, mathematicians, a study commonly associated with paganism and licentiousness, have been deluding us with the story that not only is pi slightly higher than three, but that we cannot know it in its entirety. If, by following the rubric of Intelligent Design, we cannot know pi, then it must have been designed. And, if it must have been designed and the Bible was dictated directly from that designer, then it clearly shows that pi is exactly three. The fine state of Indiana tried to espouse this clear and inerrant logic not too long ago, only to be beaten back by the Godless hordes of sodomites who demanded that their perverted interpretation of pi be recognized, lest they bar students of Indiana from higher education and well-paying jobs. This aggression cannot stand, students of Eastern. Demand in your math classes that pi be presented to the Biblical standard of exactly three. No doubt many of the faithful have noticed another discipline long under assault by the liberal idolaters: linguistics. Nowhere has their influence been more pervasive than in the spelling and grammar of our language, and their attempts to wrest the common bond of all pious men from the true root of the King James Bible. If given even a glancing examination, we will find that the English language is too complex to have arisen through random acts of phonemes and glottal stops. Why, if language arose spontaneously, as some of the loony left would have you believe, does "I" come before "E" except after "C?" Why isn't "wife" spelled "wyf"? If one looks back at pre-Biblical spelling, such as the Canterbury Tales, it can be clearly seen that the language was nearly incomprehensible. And if you listen to the pagan moon-worshipers, they'll even posit Beowulf as an example of "Old English," the supposed roots of our modern tongue! Have you ever tried to read Beowulf? It's clearly not in English, despite the secular lies of those who wish to bring us back to Gomorrah. I shouldn't be surprised if these aren't the same liberal "environmentalists" that have killed off the behemoth and leviathan. Be happy for Intelligent Design in Kansas, but don't forget to demand your right to a pi of exactly three and the right to use "ye" and "thou" as pronouns in your English classes. To do any less would fail God, and that wouldn't be "intelligent," would it?
Monday, November 07, 2005
Think about it....
If everything the administration does is correct, it cannot be torture.....no moral problem on his part....it is not his fault if Dick directs the torture....
Our country is at war and our government has the obligation to protect the American people," Bush said. "Any activity we conduct is within the law. We do not torture."
Our country is at war and our government has the obligation to protect the American people," Bush said. "Any activity we conduct is within the law. We do not torture."
Saturday, November 05, 2005
Bush and ethics
Too late, he abandoned those after he was elected. Just make his friends rich, the ethical refrain of the Republicans in power.....
Resignation would work, though.....
WASHINGTO -- President Bush, reacting to the indictment of a high-level White House aide in the CIA leak case, has ordered his staff to get a refresher on ethics rules.
In a memo sent to all White House aides on Friday, the counsel's office said it will hold briefings next week on ethics, with a particular focus on the rules governing the handling of classified information. Attendance is mandatory for anyone holding any level of security clearance.
"There will be no exceptions," the memo said.
The week after, the counsel's office is holding sessions on general ethical conduct for the rest of the staff.
"The president has made clear his expectation that each member of his Executive Office of the President (EOP) Staff adhere to the spirit as well as the letter of all rules governing ethical conduct for EOP Staff," the memo said.
After a two-year investigation, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted last week, charged with lying to investigators and the grand jury about leaking the CIA status of Valerie Plame, who was a covert officer. Plame's CIA status was exposed in July 2003 after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting intelligence before the war to exaggerate the Iraqi threat from weapons of mass destruction.
Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is said to be still considering whether Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser, illegally misled investigators. Libby has resigned and Rove remains on the job.
The case has had some Republicans inside and outside the White House grumbling that Bush needs to take more aggressive steps to confront the fallout, which has included a drop in the public's confidence in the president's credibility.
Resignation would work, though.....
WASHINGTO -- President Bush, reacting to the indictment of a high-level White House aide in the CIA leak case, has ordered his staff to get a refresher on ethics rules.
In a memo sent to all White House aides on Friday, the counsel's office said it will hold briefings next week on ethics, with a particular focus on the rules governing the handling of classified information. Attendance is mandatory for anyone holding any level of security clearance.
"There will be no exceptions," the memo said.
The week after, the counsel's office is holding sessions on general ethical conduct for the rest of the staff.
"The president has made clear his expectation that each member of his Executive Office of the President (EOP) Staff adhere to the spirit as well as the letter of all rules governing ethical conduct for EOP Staff," the memo said.
After a two-year investigation, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted last week, charged with lying to investigators and the grand jury about leaking the CIA status of Valerie Plame, who was a covert officer. Plame's CIA status was exposed in July 2003 after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting intelligence before the war to exaggerate the Iraqi threat from weapons of mass destruction.
Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is said to be still considering whether Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser, illegally misled investigators. Libby has resigned and Rove remains on the job.
The case has had some Republicans inside and outside the White House grumbling that Bush needs to take more aggressive steps to confront the fallout, which has included a drop in the public's confidence in the president's credibility.
Friday, November 04, 2005
Feds being mean to Wisconsin
If Wisconsin had voted for Bush, I bet help would have been there instantly. This will teach them a lesson, says the neocons.....
Where do we go from here?
Already reeling from August tornadoes, victims were hit again: no federal aid.
By MEG JONES
Posted: Nov. 3, 2005
Town of Dunn - The 27 twisters that tore through Wisconsin Aug. 18 flattened subdivisions, leveled farms and left municipal budgets in tatters, but, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, it wasn't enough to warrant federal aid.
Wisconsin Tornadoes
Stripped trees remain Wednesday as a reminder to Cindy and Jim Ace of the destruction tornadoes caused to their Dane County home and farm more than two months ago. The Aces have been trying to sort out how to rebuild their lives and business after federal aid for storm victims was denied.
Nearly 25 years of work on Jim and Cindy Ace’s farm was wiped out when tornadoes hit Aug. 18. The couple’s farm machinery was damaged and they lost 13 of 17 buildings. The couple figure they’re underinsured by $150,000 to $175,000. "We’re not looking for a handout," said Cindy Ace. "But a low-interest loan...that would be a godsend to us."
Wisconsin's History of Federal Aid
Don't tell that to Cindy Ace. Driving up to their Dane County farm just hours after the storm, she and her husband, Jim, found farm machinery tossed like toys, trees snapped like matchsticks and a brand new shed picked up and dumped on a pickup truck. Of the 17 buildings on their farm, just four were still standing.
The tornado that devastated the Ace farm plowed through the towns of Dunn and Pleasant Springs, north of Stoughton, killing a man, destroying 69 homes and damaging 304 others, causing almost $34 million in damage in Dane County alone. It was just one of 27 tornadoes that whipped through Wisconsin that day. Damage estimates statewide topped $40 million.
In the past five years, FEMA had approved Wisconsin aid for storms that caused quite a bit less damage than that, and the agency has recently come under fire for approving millions in aid in other states for people who weren't directly affected by disasters.
Given all of that, many Wisconsin officials expected that FEMA would declare a disaster here and open the federal spigot for reimbursement of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cleanup costs and offer low-interest loans.
Then, almost two weeks after the tornadoes, Hurricane Katrina hit. A few weeks later, Wisconsin's disaster request was denied.
Hurricane influence denied
FEMA said the mounting costs of Katrina had nothing to do with Wisconsin being shut out. The tornado damage, the agency said, "was not of such severity and magnitude as to be beyond the capabilities of the state and affected local governments."
Officials in the Town of Dunn disagree. The community of 5,300 is facing a cleanup bill of $273,000. The Town of Pleasant Springs rang up cleanup costs of $945,000. Same thing in Viola in southwestern Wisconsin, where the cleanup cost $1.3 million. The village of 700 has an annual tax levy of about $57,000.
Those communities cannot pass the bill on to property-tax payers. Because state law limits how much communities can raise the tax levy, local leaders are hamstrung, said Rick Stadelman, executive director of the Wisconsin Towns Association.
If they cannot get other aid, such as Small Business Administration disaster funding, communities will have to borrow. But if they're nearing their debt limits, that's another problem.
"I don't know that there's a lesson to be learned. I think those towns did what they had to do," Stadelman said. "It may show that we can't rely on FEMA."
A FEMA spokeswoman said the agency used a number of criteria to determine whether Wisconsin was eligible for federal aid. Among them: state and local response to the disaster, available assistance from charities and other federal agencies and whether most victims had insurance.
"The fact that there were hurricanes in the Gulf states had nothing to do with the decisions made in our district," said Gay Ruby, public information officer for FEMA Region No. 5, which includes Wisconsin. "We look at each disaster totally on their own merits, and we did so in the Wisconsin tornadoes."
For uninsured losses, FEMA looks at the per capita cost for the entire state. At the time of the tornadoes, the threshold was $1.14 in uninsured damages per person in Wisconsin. FEMA inspectors determined that the tornadoes caused only 58 cents per person in uninsured losses.
"It's not that we begrudge the victims of Hurricane Katrina, Rita or Wilma, those are truly disasters as well," said Kathleen Falk, executive of Dane County. "For the same reasons we think the federal government should help those citizens, so should they help ours."
Gov. Jim Doyle immediately appealed the denial Sept. 23, and a FEMA team was in Wisconsin this week to gather more information before ruling on Doyle's appeal. Few past appeals by Wisconsin governors have been granted, however.
Little to appeal
Not that Wisconsin has had much to appeal in the past.
In the five years before the tornadoes, the state requested nine federal disaster declarations and was denied just once.
"We don't apply every time there's a storm for federal disaster aid," said Lori Getter, Wisconsin Emergency Management spokeswoman. "With the magnitude, the number of homes damaged and destroyed, the fatality, the economic impact and agriculture loss, we really believe we were eligible for federal disaster assistance."
The toll of the Aug. 18 tornadoes is more than $40 million statewide - easily dwarfing other bad weather damage that in previous years quickly earned federal disaster aid for the state:
• In 2002, victims of tornadoes and storms in 19 counties that caused $27.7 million in damage got federal assistance.
• Victims of flooding and storms in June 2002 that caused $14.3 million in damage in eight counties received federal aid.
• Heavy rains and flooding that caused $8 million in damage in 10 northern counties in July 1999 earned a federal disaster declaration.
Ruby said it's possible the uninsured losses in the flooding incidents were higher than they were for the Aug. 18 tornadoes.
Elsewhere, FEMA has come under fire for being overly generous. An investigation this year by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel found that the federal agency had paid millions to people who had been virtually untouched by major disasters, including $32 million to Miami-Dade County for Hurricane Frances, even though the storm came ashore 100 miles to the north of Miami.
News like that makes FEMA's denial that much harder to swallow in towns such as Pleasant Springs, where much of a subdivision full of two-story homes was wiped away. The town will probably lose as much as 15% of its equalized value because of all of the vacant lots, said Donna Vogel, the town's clerk/treasurer.
While a disaster declaration often means municipalities will get help to rebuild, it also often paves the way for low interest loans for people such as Cindy and Jim Ace.
The couple figure they're underinsured by $150,000 to $175,000.
"We're not looking for a handout," said Cindy Ace. "But a low-interest loan, if that would be available - that would be a godsend to us."
Though the Aces are staying, they won't build new tobacco sheds and won't rebuild two greenhouses that Cindy Ace used to grow flowers for a side business. When the tornado swept away their farm, it also destroyed the business and life they had worked so hard to achieve.
"Jim and I have been married almost 25 years. It has taken all of that to get where we are," Cindy Ace said. "We're back to square one."
Where do we go from here?
Already reeling from August tornadoes, victims were hit again: no federal aid.
By MEG JONES
Posted: Nov. 3, 2005
Town of Dunn - The 27 twisters that tore through Wisconsin Aug. 18 flattened subdivisions, leveled farms and left municipal budgets in tatters, but, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, it wasn't enough to warrant federal aid.
Wisconsin Tornadoes
Stripped trees remain Wednesday as a reminder to Cindy and Jim Ace of the destruction tornadoes caused to their Dane County home and farm more than two months ago. The Aces have been trying to sort out how to rebuild their lives and business after federal aid for storm victims was denied.
Nearly 25 years of work on Jim and Cindy Ace’s farm was wiped out when tornadoes hit Aug. 18. The couple’s farm machinery was damaged and they lost 13 of 17 buildings. The couple figure they’re underinsured by $150,000 to $175,000. "We’re not looking for a handout," said Cindy Ace. "But a low-interest loan...that would be a godsend to us."
Wisconsin's History of Federal Aid
Don't tell that to Cindy Ace. Driving up to their Dane County farm just hours after the storm, she and her husband, Jim, found farm machinery tossed like toys, trees snapped like matchsticks and a brand new shed picked up and dumped on a pickup truck. Of the 17 buildings on their farm, just four were still standing.
The tornado that devastated the Ace farm plowed through the towns of Dunn and Pleasant Springs, north of Stoughton, killing a man, destroying 69 homes and damaging 304 others, causing almost $34 million in damage in Dane County alone. It was just one of 27 tornadoes that whipped through Wisconsin that day. Damage estimates statewide topped $40 million.
In the past five years, FEMA had approved Wisconsin aid for storms that caused quite a bit less damage than that, and the agency has recently come under fire for approving millions in aid in other states for people who weren't directly affected by disasters.
Given all of that, many Wisconsin officials expected that FEMA would declare a disaster here and open the federal spigot for reimbursement of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cleanup costs and offer low-interest loans.
Then, almost two weeks after the tornadoes, Hurricane Katrina hit. A few weeks later, Wisconsin's disaster request was denied.
Hurricane influence denied
FEMA said the mounting costs of Katrina had nothing to do with Wisconsin being shut out. The tornado damage, the agency said, "was not of such severity and magnitude as to be beyond the capabilities of the state and affected local governments."
Officials in the Town of Dunn disagree. The community of 5,300 is facing a cleanup bill of $273,000. The Town of Pleasant Springs rang up cleanup costs of $945,000. Same thing in Viola in southwestern Wisconsin, where the cleanup cost $1.3 million. The village of 700 has an annual tax levy of about $57,000.
Those communities cannot pass the bill on to property-tax payers. Because state law limits how much communities can raise the tax levy, local leaders are hamstrung, said Rick Stadelman, executive director of the Wisconsin Towns Association.
If they cannot get other aid, such as Small Business Administration disaster funding, communities will have to borrow. But if they're nearing their debt limits, that's another problem.
"I don't know that there's a lesson to be learned. I think those towns did what they had to do," Stadelman said. "It may show that we can't rely on FEMA."
A FEMA spokeswoman said the agency used a number of criteria to determine whether Wisconsin was eligible for federal aid. Among them: state and local response to the disaster, available assistance from charities and other federal agencies and whether most victims had insurance.
"The fact that there were hurricanes in the Gulf states had nothing to do with the decisions made in our district," said Gay Ruby, public information officer for FEMA Region No. 5, which includes Wisconsin. "We look at each disaster totally on their own merits, and we did so in the Wisconsin tornadoes."
For uninsured losses, FEMA looks at the per capita cost for the entire state. At the time of the tornadoes, the threshold was $1.14 in uninsured damages per person in Wisconsin. FEMA inspectors determined that the tornadoes caused only 58 cents per person in uninsured losses.
"It's not that we begrudge the victims of Hurricane Katrina, Rita or Wilma, those are truly disasters as well," said Kathleen Falk, executive of Dane County. "For the same reasons we think the federal government should help those citizens, so should they help ours."
Gov. Jim Doyle immediately appealed the denial Sept. 23, and a FEMA team was in Wisconsin this week to gather more information before ruling on Doyle's appeal. Few past appeals by Wisconsin governors have been granted, however.
Little to appeal
Not that Wisconsin has had much to appeal in the past.
In the five years before the tornadoes, the state requested nine federal disaster declarations and was denied just once.
"We don't apply every time there's a storm for federal disaster aid," said Lori Getter, Wisconsin Emergency Management spokeswoman. "With the magnitude, the number of homes damaged and destroyed, the fatality, the economic impact and agriculture loss, we really believe we were eligible for federal disaster assistance."
The toll of the Aug. 18 tornadoes is more than $40 million statewide - easily dwarfing other bad weather damage that in previous years quickly earned federal disaster aid for the state:
• In 2002, victims of tornadoes and storms in 19 counties that caused $27.7 million in damage got federal assistance.
• Victims of flooding and storms in June 2002 that caused $14.3 million in damage in eight counties received federal aid.
• Heavy rains and flooding that caused $8 million in damage in 10 northern counties in July 1999 earned a federal disaster declaration.
Ruby said it's possible the uninsured losses in the flooding incidents were higher than they were for the Aug. 18 tornadoes.
Elsewhere, FEMA has come under fire for being overly generous. An investigation this year by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel found that the federal agency had paid millions to people who had been virtually untouched by major disasters, including $32 million to Miami-Dade County for Hurricane Frances, even though the storm came ashore 100 miles to the north of Miami.
News like that makes FEMA's denial that much harder to swallow in towns such as Pleasant Springs, where much of a subdivision full of two-story homes was wiped away. The town will probably lose as much as 15% of its equalized value because of all of the vacant lots, said Donna Vogel, the town's clerk/treasurer.
While a disaster declaration often means municipalities will get help to rebuild, it also often paves the way for low interest loans for people such as Cindy and Jim Ace.
The couple figure they're underinsured by $150,000 to $175,000.
"We're not looking for a handout," said Cindy Ace. "But a low-interest loan, if that would be available - that would be a godsend to us."
Though the Aces are staying, they won't build new tobacco sheds and won't rebuild two greenhouses that Cindy Ace used to grow flowers for a side business. When the tornado swept away their farm, it also destroyed the business and life they had worked so hard to achieve.
"Jim and I have been married almost 25 years. It has taken all of that to get where we are," Cindy Ace said. "We're back to square one."
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Maybe W is drinking again.....
Would you blame him? Nasty way for God to treat him....
Nora Ephron Mon Oct 31,11:09 PM ET
I'm sorry to have to return to what continues to be, for me, the Rosebud event of the second Bush term, but since I live in New York and am free from the kind of facts and "inside information" that burden most people who write about politics, I keep thinking about the day the plane flew into the airspace while the President rode his bicycle.
As you may recall, on May 11, 2005, a small plane made an unauthorized detour into the air space over the nation's Capitol, setting off a red alert. The
Secret Service' Laura Bush to a bunker in the White House. The President was not there. He was off riding his bicycle in Beltsville, Maryland, and the Secret Service didn't notify him about the incident until it was over. At the time they claimed they didn't want to disturb his bicycle ride. It's my theory that this incident was one of the reasons for the rift between Bush and Cheney -- a rift, I'm proud to say, that I was one of the first to point out (on the Huffington Post), on the basis of no information whatsoever, and which now turns out (according to this week's Newsweek) to be absolutely true.
Emboldened by the success of this deduction, I would like to ask another question that I've been wondering about for some time: What's wrong with the president? Is he fighting depression? Is he being medicated in some way that isn't quite working? What's up? I even bought a copy of one of the supermarket tabloids that alleged he'd started drinking again, but the article (like all articles in supermarket tabloids) was extremely disappointing; even the over-exciting picture of the President on the front page, holding a glass of wine, turned out to be an old irrelevant photograph of him making a toast at some banquet; there was no real evidence in the article that he was back on the sauce.
But I've been wondering about what's going on with W ever since he emerged from his bizarre groundhog-like vacation and responded to Hurricane Katrina as if he were under water. He had no affect at all. He was almost robotic. His meager vocabulary seemed to have shrunk even further. He conveyed no feeling for the victims -- and this was early on, way before anyone realized how many poor people were involved. It was strange. What's so hard about cranking yourself up for hurricane victims, especially when you think they're mostly white people who have lost their second homes on the Gulf Coast?
At the time I wondered if Bush was on Paxil or Lexapro, drugs that several of my friends are taking and that seem to have turned them into strangely muted versions of themselves. I asked my friend Rita, who's a shrink, but Rita is very careful about committing on subjects of this sort. She did point out, though, that sometimes, when the President talks, his mouth has a strange sideways twitch, which is apparently common in people who are on antidepressants. Actually it might have been my husband who said this, I can't remember.
But I started thinking about all this again on Sunday. On the Chris Matthews Show, there was some old footage of the president from last year's presidential campaign. He was outdoors, talking to a group of people in hard hats; he was energetic, focused, confident, on top of the world. Now you could easily counter: of course he was, it was a lovely day, he was surrounded by supporters, things were going well. But the President we're seeing these days is a completely different man.
He has, of course, a lot of reasons to be depressed -- no point in enumerating them, you know what they are. But most of all, I think he's depressed because the job has turned out to be so much more onerous than he expected -- he said as much to a friend of mine in September. "You have no idea," he said, "how hard these five years have been." This is a fairly breathtaking remark given the number of people who, thanks to this president, are now dead as a result of his five years in the Oval Office, but never mind.
The point is that it seems possible to me that when
George Bush gave up alcohol in 1986, he dealt with the depression that often accompanies sobriety by becoming an obsessive exerciser. And that's what he's essentially done ever since. He's never held anything that could be confused with a job. Owning a football team is not a job. Even being governor of Texas takes only a couple of months a year, it turns out. So he was free to exercise.
But at some point this year, something happened and the exercise regimen stopped working. Bush started becoming depressed. My theory is that a certain amount of panic ensued, and more exercise was prescribed: hence, the afternoon on the bicycle in Maryland, and the reluctance to disturb an already disturbed, irritable man. (Interestingly, the incident happened just after the President returned from a four-day trip to Europe, which had not only required him to work several hours each day but undoubtedly interrupted his exercise routine.) Then came the vacation in August, the odd, sequestered vacation, a perfect time for the President's doctor to try medication, or change medication, or adjust medication. Then Katrina and the emergence in the fall of an unenergetic, irritable, muted, unfocussed President, the man you see today.
Look it up: depression + symptoms. You'll read it for yourself: loss of energy, irritability, feeling "slowed down," inability to concentrate.
Not that I'm an expert on any of this, of course. But it's possible, isn't it? Just asking.
Nora Ephron Mon Oct 31,11:09 PM ET
I'm sorry to have to return to what continues to be, for me, the Rosebud event of the second Bush term, but since I live in New York and am free from the kind of facts and "inside information" that burden most people who write about politics, I keep thinking about the day the plane flew into the airspace while the President rode his bicycle.
As you may recall, on May 11, 2005, a small plane made an unauthorized detour into the air space over the nation's Capitol, setting off a red alert. The
Secret Service' Laura Bush to a bunker in the White House. The President was not there. He was off riding his bicycle in Beltsville, Maryland, and the Secret Service didn't notify him about the incident until it was over. At the time they claimed they didn't want to disturb his bicycle ride. It's my theory that this incident was one of the reasons for the rift between Bush and Cheney -- a rift, I'm proud to say, that I was one of the first to point out (on the Huffington Post), on the basis of no information whatsoever, and which now turns out (according to this week's Newsweek) to be absolutely true.
Emboldened by the success of this deduction, I would like to ask another question that I've been wondering about for some time: What's wrong with the president? Is he fighting depression? Is he being medicated in some way that isn't quite working? What's up? I even bought a copy of one of the supermarket tabloids that alleged he'd started drinking again, but the article (like all articles in supermarket tabloids) was extremely disappointing; even the over-exciting picture of the President on the front page, holding a glass of wine, turned out to be an old irrelevant photograph of him making a toast at some banquet; there was no real evidence in the article that he was back on the sauce.
But I've been wondering about what's going on with W ever since he emerged from his bizarre groundhog-like vacation and responded to Hurricane Katrina as if he were under water. He had no affect at all. He was almost robotic. His meager vocabulary seemed to have shrunk even further. He conveyed no feeling for the victims -- and this was early on, way before anyone realized how many poor people were involved. It was strange. What's so hard about cranking yourself up for hurricane victims, especially when you think they're mostly white people who have lost their second homes on the Gulf Coast?
At the time I wondered if Bush was on Paxil or Lexapro, drugs that several of my friends are taking and that seem to have turned them into strangely muted versions of themselves. I asked my friend Rita, who's a shrink, but Rita is very careful about committing on subjects of this sort. She did point out, though, that sometimes, when the President talks, his mouth has a strange sideways twitch, which is apparently common in people who are on antidepressants. Actually it might have been my husband who said this, I can't remember.
But I started thinking about all this again on Sunday. On the Chris Matthews Show, there was some old footage of the president from last year's presidential campaign. He was outdoors, talking to a group of people in hard hats; he was energetic, focused, confident, on top of the world. Now you could easily counter: of course he was, it was a lovely day, he was surrounded by supporters, things were going well. But the President we're seeing these days is a completely different man.
He has, of course, a lot of reasons to be depressed -- no point in enumerating them, you know what they are. But most of all, I think he's depressed because the job has turned out to be so much more onerous than he expected -- he said as much to a friend of mine in September. "You have no idea," he said, "how hard these five years have been." This is a fairly breathtaking remark given the number of people who, thanks to this president, are now dead as a result of his five years in the Oval Office, but never mind.
The point is that it seems possible to me that when
George Bush gave up alcohol in 1986, he dealt with the depression that often accompanies sobriety by becoming an obsessive exerciser. And that's what he's essentially done ever since. He's never held anything that could be confused with a job. Owning a football team is not a job. Even being governor of Texas takes only a couple of months a year, it turns out. So he was free to exercise.
But at some point this year, something happened and the exercise regimen stopped working. Bush started becoming depressed. My theory is that a certain amount of panic ensued, and more exercise was prescribed: hence, the afternoon on the bicycle in Maryland, and the reluctance to disturb an already disturbed, irritable man. (Interestingly, the incident happened just after the President returned from a four-day trip to Europe, which had not only required him to work several hours each day but undoubtedly interrupted his exercise routine.) Then came the vacation in August, the odd, sequestered vacation, a perfect time for the President's doctor to try medication, or change medication, or adjust medication. Then Katrina and the emergence in the fall of an unenergetic, irritable, muted, unfocussed President, the man you see today.
Look it up: depression + symptoms. You'll read it for yourself: loss of energy, irritability, feeling "slowed down," inability to concentrate.
Not that I'm an expert on any of this, of course. But it's possible, isn't it? Just asking.
Monday, October 31, 2005
Still same ol Madison
The smell of teargas on State Street brings back memories of the early 70's. Going to the Capitol to be with the Guardsmen that had just come back from Vietnam. They were worried that they would shoot the protesters since they even admitted they were triggerhappy from their year in Vietnam. They figured that if there were people they knew in the crowd, they could resis the temptation to fire. Fortunately, that worked.....
Are we getting close to this again? I imagine this is just too much liquor before the snows come. This can be the most beautiful time in Wisconsin. The time of year I actually miss....
Hundreds arrested in raid on Halloween revelry crowds MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Police used repeated bursts of pepper spray early Sunday to break up a crowd of Halloween celebrants, part of a weekend of revelry in which more than 400 people were arrested.
Police made hundreds of alcohol-related arrests over two days of Madison, Wis. annual Halloween bash.
No serious injuries or property damage were reported. Police declared an unlawful assembly early Sunday and used officers on horseback to move chanting and beverage-tossing revelers off State Street. The pepper spray was used after cups filled with beverages and ice were thrown at officers. Most arrests were for alcohol-related offenses, said Lt. Pat Malloy. He said the local detoxification center was filled to capacity and some people had to be taken to emergency rooms. There were 269 arrests overnight and 178 the night before, Police Chief Noble Wray said. Madison is the home of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Elsewhere, police in Athens, Ohio, home of Ohio University, made 95 arrests at a Saturday night Halloween block party. Police described the crowd as belligerent but smaller than in previous years. Forty-eight of those arrested are college students, officers said. One man was stabbed in the hand and a woman was injured escaping from an attempted rape, Athens police spokesman James Mann said.
Are we getting close to this again? I imagine this is just too much liquor before the snows come. This can be the most beautiful time in Wisconsin. The time of year I actually miss....
Hundreds arrested in raid on Halloween revelry crowds MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Police used repeated bursts of pepper spray early Sunday to break up a crowd of Halloween celebrants, part of a weekend of revelry in which more than 400 people were arrested.
Police made hundreds of alcohol-related arrests over two days of Madison, Wis. annual Halloween bash.
No serious injuries or property damage were reported. Police declared an unlawful assembly early Sunday and used officers on horseback to move chanting and beverage-tossing revelers off State Street. The pepper spray was used after cups filled with beverages and ice were thrown at officers. Most arrests were for alcohol-related offenses, said Lt. Pat Malloy. He said the local detoxification center was filled to capacity and some people had to be taken to emergency rooms. There were 269 arrests overnight and 178 the night before, Police Chief Noble Wray said. Madison is the home of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Elsewhere, police in Athens, Ohio, home of Ohio University, made 95 arrests at a Saturday night Halloween block party. Police described the crowd as belligerent but smaller than in previous years. Forty-eight of those arrested are college students, officers said. One man was stabbed in the hand and a woman was injured escaping from an attempted rape, Athens police spokesman James Mann said.
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Time to impeach Bush?
I suspect things are looking very, very, grim at thw White House.
The indictment of Libby for lying is huge. Why was he lying. Who was he lying for? This certainly brings Cheney under the gun of directing Libby on this whole thing. However, the real direction could have come from the top. Time will tell. It would be ironic if tapes get them too, but it will probably be emails....
Then today came news that Saddam had accepted an escape plan from Iraq. The only thing that didn't occur was the meeting of the Arab nations. The offer was not submitted properly so they could not consider it. The war started before the next meeting.
There you have it. Saddam was out. Elections would have happened sooner if the country did not stumble into civil war. 2000 juds wiykd not have died. Billions would not have been spent. Lies would not have had to be told....
Clearly, the people involved in this lie should not be in power. The honorable thing would be for the administration to resign. However, pride will force them to hold on until impeachment.....
We are on the trek to that horrible showdown....I notice McCain is not standing for his 'old' friend. Like Goldwater, will he have to tell the President to hit the road, Jack?
The indictment of Libby for lying is huge. Why was he lying. Who was he lying for? This certainly brings Cheney under the gun of directing Libby on this whole thing. However, the real direction could have come from the top. Time will tell. It would be ironic if tapes get them too, but it will probably be emails....
Then today came news that Saddam had accepted an escape plan from Iraq. The only thing that didn't occur was the meeting of the Arab nations. The offer was not submitted properly so they could not consider it. The war started before the next meeting.
There you have it. Saddam was out. Elections would have happened sooner if the country did not stumble into civil war. 2000 juds wiykd not have died. Billions would not have been spent. Lies would not have had to be told....
Clearly, the people involved in this lie should not be in power. The honorable thing would be for the administration to resign. However, pride will force them to hold on until impeachment.....
We are on the trek to that horrible showdown....I notice McCain is not standing for his 'old' friend. Like Goldwater, will he have to tell the President to hit the road, Jack?
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Another racer gone
Manzanita is a local racing legend track here in Phoenix. A great dirt track that is being pressed by subdivisions that will probably soon gobble the land up. It will be a great loss to those of us that like dirt racing....
Reidus Gene Gunn
Reidus Gene Gunn passed away on October 18, 2005 at his home in Gilbert. He was born March 21, 1925 in Alva, Oklahoma. Gene, who has lived in Arizona since the 1940s, was a pioneer in the auto racing community in Arizona. He was one of several individuals instrumental in converting what was a dog track into Manzanita Speedway. He raced in the very first race at Manzanita on August 25, 1951. During his career he raced throughout Arizona, California and surrounding states, and for many years held the record at Manzanita for the 100-lap race. Gene worked throughout his life as a heavy-duty mechanic and retired in 1987 as shop superintendent for Calmat Cement (now Vulcan Materials). He was a devoted husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather. He was preceded in death by his wife, Joann and son, Gary Reeves Gunn. Family members who will miss him greatly are children: Richard (Linda) Gunn from Oregon, Deborah (Elden) Letner from Gilbert, Jana Gunn from Glendale, and David (Teresa) Gunn from Utah. Other surviving family includes: brother, Glenn (Donna) Clary from Utah and brother-in-law Roger (Babe) Netz from Phoenix. He had 10 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. Gene miraculously survived a severe brain injury in 1987 and spent five months in Barrow Neurological Center. The family asks that donations be made in Gene's name to the Barrow Neurological Foundation, 350 W. Thomas, Phoenix, AZ 85013. Funeral services will be held on Saturday October 22, 2005 at 10:00 AM with a visitation one-hour prior at the LDS Elliot Ward Building, 10256 S. Greenfield Rd in Gilbert.
Reidus Gene Gunn
Reidus Gene Gunn passed away on October 18, 2005 at his home in Gilbert. He was born March 21, 1925 in Alva, Oklahoma. Gene, who has lived in Arizona since the 1940s, was a pioneer in the auto racing community in Arizona. He was one of several individuals instrumental in converting what was a dog track into Manzanita Speedway. He raced in the very first race at Manzanita on August 25, 1951. During his career he raced throughout Arizona, California and surrounding states, and for many years held the record at Manzanita for the 100-lap race. Gene worked throughout his life as a heavy-duty mechanic and retired in 1987 as shop superintendent for Calmat Cement (now Vulcan Materials). He was a devoted husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather. He was preceded in death by his wife, Joann and son, Gary Reeves Gunn. Family members who will miss him greatly are children: Richard (Linda) Gunn from Oregon, Deborah (Elden) Letner from Gilbert, Jana Gunn from Glendale, and David (Teresa) Gunn from Utah. Other surviving family includes: brother, Glenn (Donna) Clary from Utah and brother-in-law Roger (Babe) Netz from Phoenix. He had 10 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. Gene miraculously survived a severe brain injury in 1987 and spent five months in Barrow Neurological Center. The family asks that donations be made in Gene's name to the Barrow Neurological Foundation, 350 W. Thomas, Phoenix, AZ 85013. Funeral services will be held on Saturday October 22, 2005 at 10:00 AM with a visitation one-hour prior at the LDS Elliot Ward Building, 10256 S. Greenfield Rd in Gilbert.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Race those offy's Wayne....
I happened to meet Wayne a few months ago in connection with the improvement of a street. We talked briefly about racing, but he lived a fine life on a farm. Development was beginning to encroach onto their rural lifestyle. Subdivisions were going to become their view and ultimately overtake their farm.....
Ex-Indy driver diesWayne Weiler, a two-time starter in the Indianapolis 500, died of an apparent heart attack near his home in Phoenix, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway said Friday. He was 70.Weiler, who died Thursday, first drove at Indianapolis in 1960, when he finished 24th in a car co-owned by Mari Hulman George, daughter of the late Speedway owner Tony Hulman and mother of current Speedway boss Tony George. Weiler was 15th in his final race at Indianapolis in 1961. Two weeks later, he suffered serious head injuries in a USAC sprint car race at Terre Haute, Ind., which ended his racing career except for a brief comeback on the West Coast in the late 1960s.
Ex-Indy driver diesWayne Weiler, a two-time starter in the Indianapolis 500, died of an apparent heart attack near his home in Phoenix, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway said Friday. He was 70.Weiler, who died Thursday, first drove at Indianapolis in 1960, when he finished 24th in a car co-owned by Mari Hulman George, daughter of the late Speedway owner Tony Hulman and mother of current Speedway boss Tony George. Weiler was 15th in his final race at Indianapolis in 1961. Two weeks later, he suffered serious head injuries in a USAC sprint car race at Terre Haute, Ind., which ended his racing career except for a brief comeback on the West Coast in the late 1960s.
Saturday, October 15, 2005
Pi for geezers
Fun with numbersThe numerical value of pi has baffled scientists and mathematicians for many years. Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. For most calculations, the numerical value has been assigned as approximately 3.14. Scientists and mathematicians have used computers and algorithms to calculate millions of digits beyond the decimal point.Eighty-year-old Oscar Dorr of Punta Gorda thinks back to earlier times in mathematic history, eons before he taught Navy students the physiology of aircraft systems. He's been a member of Mensa for more than 35 years and working with numbers since he was no more than single digits old.He said, "You know, I remember when math was simple. I remember when the value of pi was only 1.75..."
Sunday, October 02, 2005
How cool is this?
One of my favorite sections in Newsweek is the Perspectives Section that lists unusual quotes from around the country. The last couple of months, they have asked readers to send in a quote and get attribution for it. Well, when I was doing my program on Sunsounds of Arizona http://www.sunsounds.org a couple of weeks ago, I saw a great quote from a legislator. It was about the controversy where the government wants, in fact they have banned machines in grade school, middle school, and junior high; to ban fast food machines in schools. Some legislators want to extend the ban to high schools. Common sense tells you that this is rediculous. However, Republican common sense apparently dictates putting their nose in the midst of a lot of other peoples business.
So, I sent the quote in. They called late Friday and said it should be in the Newsweek that hits the stands tomorrow, monday, morning. How cool is that?
Here is the request from the guy at Newsweek. Nearly dumped it since I did not know who he was. He had left a message on my work phone....
Hi Mike, We're interested in using the quote you submitted for next week's Perspectives page! I left a message on your voicemail--I just need to confirm your information (name, hometown, source). Thanks for replying soonest.
Nick Summers Newsweek
perspectives@newsweek.com Subject: quote from Arizona
"We trust 16 year-old students to drive a 4000 pound vehicle on the highway, but not to eat a Snickers? They can join the Army and handle an M-16, but they can't handle a pack of Skittles?" Senator Dean Martin, R-6 commenting on proposed Snack ban in High School. www.Arizona capitoltimes.com
How weird our world is.....
So, I sent the quote in. They called late Friday and said it should be in the Newsweek that hits the stands tomorrow, monday, morning. How cool is that?
Here is the request from the guy at Newsweek. Nearly dumped it since I did not know who he was. He had left a message on my work phone....
Hi Mike, We're interested in using the quote you submitted for next week's Perspectives page! I left a message on your voicemail--I just need to confirm your information (name, hometown, source). Thanks for replying soonest.
Nick Summers Newsweek
perspectives@newsweek.com Subject: quote from Arizona
"We trust 16 year-old students to drive a 4000 pound vehicle on the highway, but not to eat a Snickers? They can join the Army and handle an M-16, but they can't handle a pack of Skittles?" Senator Dean Martin, R-6 commenting on proposed Snack ban in High School. www.Arizona capitoltimes.com
How weird our world is.....
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Tommor is talk like a pirate day!!! arrrghhh
You are The Cap'n!
Some men are born great, some achieve greatness and some slit the throats of any man that stands between them and the mantle of power. You never met a man you couldn't eviscerate. Not that mindless violence is the only avenue open to you - but why take an avenue when you have complete freeway access? You are the definitive Man of Action. You are James Bond in a blousy shirt and drawstring-fly pants. Your swash was buckled long ago and you have never been so sure of anything in your life as in your ability to bend everyone to your will. You will call anyone out and cut off their head if they show any sign of taking you on or backing down. You cannot be saddled with tedious underlings, but if one of your lieutenants shows an overly developed sense of ambition he may find more suitable accommodations in Davy Jones' locker. That is, of course, IF you notice him. You tend to be self absorbed - a weakness that may keep you from seeing enemies where they are and imagining them where they are not.
What's Yer Inner Pirate?
brought to you by The Official Talk Like A Pirate Web Site. Arrrrr!
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Football season is over....
This won't hurt,' Thompson wrotePublished September 9, 2005Rolling Stone, which for years was home to Hunter S. Thompson's work, is publishing a note written by the gonzo journalist days before he committed suicide in February.The Feb. 16 note, which may be Thompson's final written words, reads:"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun--for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax--This won't hurt."He left the note for his wife. Thompson, suffering from several physical problems, shot himself four days later at his home near Aspen, Colo. The note was titled, "Football Season Is Over."
Thursday, August 18, 2005
There is HOPE for old guys!
I guess I can still plan my across the country ride for another 25 years oir so! Sweet!
78-year-old plans bicycle trekBy JON ERICSON, Courier Staff Writer
LA PORTE CITY --- At 78, some would think Bob Mott a little crazy when he says he's going to bicycle from Canada to Mexico.But for a man who already bikes about 60 miles a day anyway, it's just a shift in geography.A former Iowa State athlete, Mott is 6-foot, 3-inches of toned muscle. While living in La Porte City, he often bicycles to Cedar Falls to use the bike trails there."I'll definitely make it in less than 30 days, but hopefully in three weeks," Mott said.He will get on his bike either late this month or in early September to ride through Minnesota and on to Thunder Bay, Ontario. The schedule isn't set in stone. He will watch the Weather Channel and wait for conditions that suit him. He wanted to do the ride late in the season to avoid stifling heat in Oklahoma and Texas.From Thunder Bay, he will start his journey southward through the United States.His plans call for travel through Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas. He expects to finish in Matamoros, Mexico.Mott started bicycling in earnest in 1993."I consider it a lifesaver for me. When I quit working, I became the fastest fork in the West. I got on the bathroom scale one day and it said 281, so I got on a bike," Mott said.For the last eight years, Mott says he has bicycled 8,000 to 10,000 miles annually. This past June and July he bicycled about 60 miles per day.He pedals a Specialized Sirrus, a hybrid bike that tends more toward road bike than a mountain bike.Mott hasn't driven in years. He rides his bicycle everywhere he needs to go."This is what I've decided to do, and I think it's a good move healthwise," Mott said.Mott played one year of basketball for the Iowa State Cyclones. He made the most of it, being named all conference and helping the team win the Big 6 Conference title in 1945. He still holds the NCAA record for being the youngest ever named to an all-conference team, at age 17.He didn't return to play the next year as he gave up his amateur status.In the years since he worked in a number of fields, including farming, firefighting and working as a pilot.In recent years Mott has been on a campaign to fight against drug use, particularly meth."The message for everyone is life will be a lot better and you have a good chance of longevity and a good long life if you lay off the drugs," Mott said. "I try to be living proof of that."Mott printed up his own T-shirts that says "USA Legends Say No." He traveled to the hometowns of various star basketball players from Iowa State's history to speak with children and hand out the T-shirts.He plans to use his long-distance bike ride to campaign against drug use.
78-year-old plans bicycle trekBy JON ERICSON, Courier Staff Writer
LA PORTE CITY --- At 78, some would think Bob Mott a little crazy when he says he's going to bicycle from Canada to Mexico.But for a man who already bikes about 60 miles a day anyway, it's just a shift in geography.A former Iowa State athlete, Mott is 6-foot, 3-inches of toned muscle. While living in La Porte City, he often bicycles to Cedar Falls to use the bike trails there."I'll definitely make it in less than 30 days, but hopefully in three weeks," Mott said.He will get on his bike either late this month or in early September to ride through Minnesota and on to Thunder Bay, Ontario. The schedule isn't set in stone. He will watch the Weather Channel and wait for conditions that suit him. He wanted to do the ride late in the season to avoid stifling heat in Oklahoma and Texas.From Thunder Bay, he will start his journey southward through the United States.His plans call for travel through Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas. He expects to finish in Matamoros, Mexico.Mott started bicycling in earnest in 1993."I consider it a lifesaver for me. When I quit working, I became the fastest fork in the West. I got on the bathroom scale one day and it said 281, so I got on a bike," Mott said.For the last eight years, Mott says he has bicycled 8,000 to 10,000 miles annually. This past June and July he bicycled about 60 miles per day.He pedals a Specialized Sirrus, a hybrid bike that tends more toward road bike than a mountain bike.Mott hasn't driven in years. He rides his bicycle everywhere he needs to go."This is what I've decided to do, and I think it's a good move healthwise," Mott said.Mott played one year of basketball for the Iowa State Cyclones. He made the most of it, being named all conference and helping the team win the Big 6 Conference title in 1945. He still holds the NCAA record for being the youngest ever named to an all-conference team, at age 17.He didn't return to play the next year as he gave up his amateur status.In the years since he worked in a number of fields, including farming, firefighting and working as a pilot.In recent years Mott has been on a campaign to fight against drug use, particularly meth."The message for everyone is life will be a lot better and you have a good chance of longevity and a good long life if you lay off the drugs," Mott said. "I try to be living proof of that."Mott printed up his own T-shirts that says "USA Legends Say No." He traveled to the hometowns of various star basketball players from Iowa State's history to speak with children and hand out the T-shirts.He plans to use his long-distance bike ride to campaign against drug use.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
I once met Frank Lloyd Wright
A 60-mile stretch of highway that honors Frank Lloyd Wright offers fun diversions
By James DannenbergSpecial to the Star-Bulletin
Wisconsin -- and this comes from a guy who moved away decades ago -- is a vastly underrated destination. In spite of what you might surmise from "Monday Night Football," there's a lot more to the place than dairy products. Certainly there are the well-known attractions of Door County, the Dells, the Great Northwoods and mega-events like Milwaukee's Summerfest, not to mention Packer tailgate parties, fish boils and the frigid lure of ice fishing, but much of what Wisconsin has to offer is less conspicuous and more genuine than mere tourist amusement.
Should you find yourself with a day or two on your hands in Madison, the cosmopolitan state capital, you might want to check out a 60-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 14 due west of town -- the Frank Lloyd Wright Memorial Highway.
Born in nearby Richland Center, the highway's western terminus, Wright still manages to arouse the passions of those who remember his Wisconsin years. Not all of those feelings are warm and fuzzy. The world's best-known architect, he needs little introduction. Nevertheless it's always entertaining to revisit his life, as locals are prone to do on a regular basis.
My late father-in-law Don Jones, like Wright a southern Wisconsin Welshman, used to disparage him as an egotist, womanizer and maybe even a murderer, referring to a 1914 fire that killed Wright's mistress and six others. History seems to have absolved Wright of responsibility for the fire, clearly the work of a crazed employee. My guess, however, is that the great man might have pleaded guilty as charged to the other counts.
His libidinous nature might not raise many eyebrows in today's world, but however much the world still pays homage to his reputation almost 50 years after his death, Wright's opinion of himself was second to none. One well-traveled story, the truth of which is of marginal relevance, suggests that when asked his profession on a witness stand he answered, "I am the world's greatest architect."
A friend later asked why he said that.
"I was under oath," Wright replied.
By James DannenbergSpecial to the Star-Bulletin
Wisconsin -- and this comes from a guy who moved away decades ago -- is a vastly underrated destination. In spite of what you might surmise from "Monday Night Football," there's a lot more to the place than dairy products. Certainly there are the well-known attractions of Door County, the Dells, the Great Northwoods and mega-events like Milwaukee's Summerfest, not to mention Packer tailgate parties, fish boils and the frigid lure of ice fishing, but much of what Wisconsin has to offer is less conspicuous and more genuine than mere tourist amusement.
Should you find yourself with a day or two on your hands in Madison, the cosmopolitan state capital, you might want to check out a 60-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 14 due west of town -- the Frank Lloyd Wright Memorial Highway.
Born in nearby Richland Center, the highway's western terminus, Wright still manages to arouse the passions of those who remember his Wisconsin years. Not all of those feelings are warm and fuzzy. The world's best-known architect, he needs little introduction. Nevertheless it's always entertaining to revisit his life, as locals are prone to do on a regular basis.
My late father-in-law Don Jones, like Wright a southern Wisconsin Welshman, used to disparage him as an egotist, womanizer and maybe even a murderer, referring to a 1914 fire that killed Wright's mistress and six others. History seems to have absolved Wright of responsibility for the fire, clearly the work of a crazed employee. My guess, however, is that the great man might have pleaded guilty as charged to the other counts.
His libidinous nature might not raise many eyebrows in today's world, but however much the world still pays homage to his reputation almost 50 years after his death, Wright's opinion of himself was second to none. One well-traveled story, the truth of which is of marginal relevance, suggests that when asked his profession on a witness stand he answered, "I am the world's greatest architect."
A friend later asked why he said that.
"I was under oath," Wright replied.
Monday, August 08, 2005
crossing the road
GREENSBORO — A 75-year-old man pushing his bicycle across High Point Road died after he was struck by a car this morning, police report.Kermit L. Jenkins, of 4720 Bowman St. in Greensboro, was taken to Moses Cone Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, according to Greensboro police.According to police, Jenkins was pushing his bike east across High Point Road near Marchester Way when he was struck by a 2001 Mazda 626 traveling south on High Point Road.The driver of the Mazda was Devon Deonte Sowers, 21, of 5600 Weslow Willow Road, Apt. 215 in Greensboro, police said.Police did not immediately say whether charges would be filed.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
Get it on!
GALLOPING GEEZER: An 83-year-old German woman has divorced her no-good 81-year-old husband after 60 years of marriage because he was caught getting it on with his mistress at work.
Georg Meister met his lover, 30 years his junior, while doing voluntary work at an animal breeding centre. The affair was exposed when the breeding pair forgot to pull the curtains while having an, ahem, quickie in one of the centre's offices.
His wife Ruth, who was told about the hubby's antics, threw him out of the house and he's now moved in with his younger lover just two doors down the road.
"I showed no mercy. I just threw him out. I see them kissing on the streets and it is disgusting," bleats Ruthy.
Georg Meister met his lover, 30 years his junior, while doing voluntary work at an animal breeding centre. The affair was exposed when the breeding pair forgot to pull the curtains while having an, ahem, quickie in one of the centre's offices.
His wife Ruth, who was told about the hubby's antics, threw him out of the house and he's now moved in with his younger lover just two doors down the road.
"I showed no mercy. I just threw him out. I see them kissing on the streets and it is disgusting," bleats Ruthy.
Sunday, July 03, 2005
Gaylord would always answer your letters....
Gaylord Nelson dies at 89Environmental leader was a former Wisconsin governor, U.S. Senator
By Bill ChristoffersonSpecial to The Capital TimesJuly 3, 2005
Gaylord A. Nelson, former Wisconsin governor and U.S. Senator who founded Earth Day and launched a new wave of environmental activism, died today at his home in Kensington, Md.
He was 89 and had been in failing health from cardiovascular failure for several months, his family said. His wife Carrie Lee was with him as he died at 5:10 a.m. today.
Nelson, one of the leading environmentalists of the 20th Century, joined The Wilderness Society in Washington, D.C. upon leaving the U.S. Senate in 1981. He served first as the organization's chairman and later as counselor, and continued to work there on environmental issues until recent months, when his health declined. He continued to go to the office at age 88, he said, because, "Our work's not done."
Nelson held elective office for 32 years, including two two-year terms as Wisconsin governor (1959-1963) and three terms in the U.S. Senate (1963-1981). He was defeated in his bid for re-election in 1980 by Republican Robert Kasten.
He served 10 years in the Wisconsin State Senate before becoming only the second Democrat to be elected Wisconsin governor in the 20th Century, and the first to be re-elected.
An early voice for conservation and environmental protection, Nelson laid out a far-reaching, comprehensive environmental agenda for the Congress in 1970, and saw much of it became law before he left the Senate in 1981, at the end of what became known as the Environmental Decade of the 1970s. In the 10 years after the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, 23 major pieces of environmental legislation became law.
He sponsored, co-sponsored or helped pass dozens of environmental laws aimed at conserving resources and preventing pollution, including the Wilderness Act and bills preserving the Appalachian Trail and establishing a national system of hiking trails. Nelson authored legislation that preserved the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Lake Superior and designated the St. Croix River, which borders Minnesota and Wisconsin, as a wild and scenic river.
Many of Nelson's ideas were visionary. He fought a long battle to ban hard detergents containing phosphorous, and was the first member of Congress to propose a ban on the pesticide DDT, which took years to accomplish. He once proposed a ban on the internal combustion engine as an amendment to the Clean Air Act, to get the automobile industry's attention, and sponsored a constitutional amendment to guarantee citizens a right to a clean environment.
Nelson established himself as a conservationist, as environmentalists were then called, as Wisconsin governor, winning passage of a landmark program to acquire and preserve open space and recreational land. The $50-million program passed in 1961 was funded by a one-cent per package tax on cigarettes and became a model for other states. The program continues today as the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program.
Nelson's goal as a U.S. senator was to elevate environmental issues and make them a permanent part of the nation's political agenda.
He persuaded President John F. Kennedy to make a national tour to discuss conservation in 1963, hoping that would ignite a response. When that brought disappointing results, Nelson continued to press the issue and in 1969 hit upon the idea of holding a national teach-in on college campuses on environmental issues, modeled on teach-ins against the Vietnam War.
On the first Earth Day in 1970, some 20 million Americans 10 per cent of the nation's population participated in a wide range of activities promoting a cleaner Earth.
Earth Day has since grown into an international event, observed in schools and by organizations on April 22 each year. In 2000, an estimated 500 million people took part in Earth Day activities in 174 countries. This year, 80 percent of the schools in the U.S. held Earth Day activities, organizers said.
Although best known for his environmental work, Nelson also was a key player in the Senate on consumer protection, civil rights, poverty, and civil liberties issues. Nelson took on the tire industry on safety issues, and held 10 years of subcommittee hearings that spotlighted abuses and problems in the pharmaceutical industry.
He was one of the earliest opponents of the Vietnam War, and drafted an amendment to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution to make it clear the resolution did not authorize a ground war, but Sen. J. William Fulbright assured Nelson the amendment was not necessary because President Lyndon B. Johnson had no intention of escalating the ground war. When escalation came, Nelson cast one of three votes against an appropriation for the war in 1965, saying, "You need my vote less than I need my conscience."
The son of a country doctor and a nurse, Nelson was born on June 4, 1916, in Clear Lake, Wisconsin, a village of 700 in northwestern Wisconsin. His parents were active Progressives who supported Robert M. (Fighting Bob) La Follette, the populist Wisconsin governor and Senator who ran as a third party candidate for President in 1924.
He received a bachelor's degree from San Jose State College and a law degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1942. He served in the Army Quartermaster Corps during World War II, commanding a company of black troops in the segregated Army, and was discharged as a first lieutenant in 1946. When he was elected to the Wisconsin State Senate in 1948, one of the first bills he introduced was one to desegregate the state's National Guard.
Nelson met his future wife, Army nurse Carrie Lee Dotson, at a Pennsylvania Army base but he soon shipped out and did not expect to see her again. They were reunited on Okinawa, where both were stationed in 1945. Their story is featured in the best-selling Tom Brokaw book, "The Greatest Generation."
Nelson's many honors included the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, presented in 1995 by President Bill Clinton. A Wisconsin state park, the Apostle Islands wilderness area, and the Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin all are named for him.
When the Audubon Society recognized 100 people who had shaped the environmental movement in the 20th Century, it said the two political figures on the list who stood out were Nelson and President Theodore Roosevelt.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked a panel of historians and other experts to name the century's 10 most significant people in Wisconsin. Nelson ranked fourth, behind Robert M. (Fighting Bob) La Follette, naturalist, philosopher and author Aldo Leopold, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
Surviving are: Nelson's widow, Carrie Lee; two sons, Gaylord Jr.(and wife Mary), known as Happy, of Dane, Wis.; and Jeffrey (and wife Laura), of Kensington, Md.; a daughter, Tia, of Madison, Wis.; and four grandchildren, Kiva, Jason, Benjamin, and Julia.
Memorial services will be in Madison. Arrangements are pending. Burial will be in Clear Lake, Wis.
The family asks that memorials in Nelson's name be made to: the Gaylord Nelson chair at the Gaylord A. Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin; the Gaylord Nelson Studio of WisconsinEye; the Friends of the Apostle Islands; or the Wilderness Society.
By Bill ChristoffersonSpecial to The Capital TimesJuly 3, 2005
Gaylord A. Nelson, former Wisconsin governor and U.S. Senator who founded Earth Day and launched a new wave of environmental activism, died today at his home in Kensington, Md.
He was 89 and had been in failing health from cardiovascular failure for several months, his family said. His wife Carrie Lee was with him as he died at 5:10 a.m. today.
Nelson, one of the leading environmentalists of the 20th Century, joined The Wilderness Society in Washington, D.C. upon leaving the U.S. Senate in 1981. He served first as the organization's chairman and later as counselor, and continued to work there on environmental issues until recent months, when his health declined. He continued to go to the office at age 88, he said, because, "Our work's not done."
Nelson held elective office for 32 years, including two two-year terms as Wisconsin governor (1959-1963) and three terms in the U.S. Senate (1963-1981). He was defeated in his bid for re-election in 1980 by Republican Robert Kasten.
He served 10 years in the Wisconsin State Senate before becoming only the second Democrat to be elected Wisconsin governor in the 20th Century, and the first to be re-elected.
An early voice for conservation and environmental protection, Nelson laid out a far-reaching, comprehensive environmental agenda for the Congress in 1970, and saw much of it became law before he left the Senate in 1981, at the end of what became known as the Environmental Decade of the 1970s. In the 10 years after the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, 23 major pieces of environmental legislation became law.
He sponsored, co-sponsored or helped pass dozens of environmental laws aimed at conserving resources and preventing pollution, including the Wilderness Act and bills preserving the Appalachian Trail and establishing a national system of hiking trails. Nelson authored legislation that preserved the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Lake Superior and designated the St. Croix River, which borders Minnesota and Wisconsin, as a wild and scenic river.
Many of Nelson's ideas were visionary. He fought a long battle to ban hard detergents containing phosphorous, and was the first member of Congress to propose a ban on the pesticide DDT, which took years to accomplish. He once proposed a ban on the internal combustion engine as an amendment to the Clean Air Act, to get the automobile industry's attention, and sponsored a constitutional amendment to guarantee citizens a right to a clean environment.
Nelson established himself as a conservationist, as environmentalists were then called, as Wisconsin governor, winning passage of a landmark program to acquire and preserve open space and recreational land. The $50-million program passed in 1961 was funded by a one-cent per package tax on cigarettes and became a model for other states. The program continues today as the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program.
Nelson's goal as a U.S. senator was to elevate environmental issues and make them a permanent part of the nation's political agenda.
He persuaded President John F. Kennedy to make a national tour to discuss conservation in 1963, hoping that would ignite a response. When that brought disappointing results, Nelson continued to press the issue and in 1969 hit upon the idea of holding a national teach-in on college campuses on environmental issues, modeled on teach-ins against the Vietnam War.
On the first Earth Day in 1970, some 20 million Americans 10 per cent of the nation's population participated in a wide range of activities promoting a cleaner Earth.
Earth Day has since grown into an international event, observed in schools and by organizations on April 22 each year. In 2000, an estimated 500 million people took part in Earth Day activities in 174 countries. This year, 80 percent of the schools in the U.S. held Earth Day activities, organizers said.
Although best known for his environmental work, Nelson also was a key player in the Senate on consumer protection, civil rights, poverty, and civil liberties issues. Nelson took on the tire industry on safety issues, and held 10 years of subcommittee hearings that spotlighted abuses and problems in the pharmaceutical industry.
He was one of the earliest opponents of the Vietnam War, and drafted an amendment to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution to make it clear the resolution did not authorize a ground war, but Sen. J. William Fulbright assured Nelson the amendment was not necessary because President Lyndon B. Johnson had no intention of escalating the ground war. When escalation came, Nelson cast one of three votes against an appropriation for the war in 1965, saying, "You need my vote less than I need my conscience."
The son of a country doctor and a nurse, Nelson was born on June 4, 1916, in Clear Lake, Wisconsin, a village of 700 in northwestern Wisconsin. His parents were active Progressives who supported Robert M. (Fighting Bob) La Follette, the populist Wisconsin governor and Senator who ran as a third party candidate for President in 1924.
He received a bachelor's degree from San Jose State College and a law degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1942. He served in the Army Quartermaster Corps during World War II, commanding a company of black troops in the segregated Army, and was discharged as a first lieutenant in 1946. When he was elected to the Wisconsin State Senate in 1948, one of the first bills he introduced was one to desegregate the state's National Guard.
Nelson met his future wife, Army nurse Carrie Lee Dotson, at a Pennsylvania Army base but he soon shipped out and did not expect to see her again. They were reunited on Okinawa, where both were stationed in 1945. Their story is featured in the best-selling Tom Brokaw book, "The Greatest Generation."
Nelson's many honors included the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, presented in 1995 by President Bill Clinton. A Wisconsin state park, the Apostle Islands wilderness area, and the Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin all are named for him.
When the Audubon Society recognized 100 people who had shaped the environmental movement in the 20th Century, it said the two political figures on the list who stood out were Nelson and President Theodore Roosevelt.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked a panel of historians and other experts to name the century's 10 most significant people in Wisconsin. Nelson ranked fourth, behind Robert M. (Fighting Bob) La Follette, naturalist, philosopher and author Aldo Leopold, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
Surviving are: Nelson's widow, Carrie Lee; two sons, Gaylord Jr.(and wife Mary), known as Happy, of Dane, Wis.; and Jeffrey (and wife Laura), of Kensington, Md.; a daughter, Tia, of Madison, Wis.; and four grandchildren, Kiva, Jason, Benjamin, and Julia.
Memorial services will be in Madison. Arrangements are pending. Burial will be in Clear Lake, Wis.
The family asks that memorials in Nelson's name be made to: the Gaylord Nelson chair at the Gaylord A. Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin; the Gaylord Nelson Studio of WisconsinEye; the Friends of the Apostle Islands; or the Wilderness Society.
Saturday, July 02, 2005
Geezer memory still fine!
Japanese man sets record in pi recitation
July 2, 2005
TOKYO --A Japanese psychiatric counselor has recited pi to 83,431 decimal places from memory, breaking his own personal best of 54,000 digits and setting an unofficial world record, a media report said Saturday.
Akira Haraguchi, 59, had begun his attempt to recall the value of pi -- a mathematical value that has an infinite number of decimal places -- at a public hall in Chiba city, east of Tokyo, on Friday morning and appeared to give up by noon after only reaching 16,000 decimal places, the Tokyo Shimbun said on its Web site.
But a determined Haraguchi started anew and had broken his old record on Friday evening, about 11 hours after first sitting down to his task, the paper said.
He reached the 80,000-digit mark after midnight early Saturday, according to the paper, which had a photo showing Haraguchi with his eyes closed, his face contorted in concentration.
If verified and recognized by the Guinness Book of Records, Haraguchi's feat would beat his own previous best -- currently under review -- of 54,000 digits. The official current record-holder, also Japanese, calculated pi from memory to 42,195 decimal places in 1995.
Pi, usually given as an abbreviated 3.14, is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. The number has fascinated and confounded mathematicians for centuries.
Aided by a supercomputer, a University of Tokyo mathematician set the world record for figuring out pi to 1.24 trillion decimal places in 2002.
Researchers say that calculating pi to more than about 1,000 decimal places has not much purpose in math or engineering, though mathematicians have done so to test the accuracy and limits of supercomputers.
July 2, 2005
TOKYO --A Japanese psychiatric counselor has recited pi to 83,431 decimal places from memory, breaking his own personal best of 54,000 digits and setting an unofficial world record, a media report said Saturday.
Akira Haraguchi, 59, had begun his attempt to recall the value of pi -- a mathematical value that has an infinite number of decimal places -- at a public hall in Chiba city, east of Tokyo, on Friday morning and appeared to give up by noon after only reaching 16,000 decimal places, the Tokyo Shimbun said on its Web site.
But a determined Haraguchi started anew and had broken his old record on Friday evening, about 11 hours after first sitting down to his task, the paper said.
He reached the 80,000-digit mark after midnight early Saturday, according to the paper, which had a photo showing Haraguchi with his eyes closed, his face contorted in concentration.
If verified and recognized by the Guinness Book of Records, Haraguchi's feat would beat his own previous best -- currently under review -- of 54,000 digits. The official current record-holder, also Japanese, calculated pi from memory to 42,195 decimal places in 1995.
Pi, usually given as an abbreviated 3.14, is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. The number has fascinated and confounded mathematicians for centuries.
Aided by a supercomputer, a University of Tokyo mathematician set the world record for figuring out pi to 1.24 trillion decimal places in 2002.
Researchers say that calculating pi to more than about 1,000 decimal places has not much purpose in math or engineering, though mathematicians have done so to test the accuracy and limits of supercomputers.
Saturday, June 04, 2005
geezers need for speed
A German pensioner was arrested after fitting a chainsaw engine to his wife's bicycle and hurtling down the road at 40mph.
The 73-year-old man, from Ulm, said he was only testing the bike out but now faces charges of operating a motor vehicle without a licence.
He told officers he meant his creation to be nothing more than a conversation piece.
But police disagreed and told him the 2.3 horsepower petrol motor attached to the bike's rear wheel constituted a motor vehicle.
Police confiscated the bike and sent the man on his way - with a summons and a borrowed bicycle.
The 73-year-old man, from Ulm, said he was only testing the bike out but now faces charges of operating a motor vehicle without a licence.
He told officers he meant his creation to be nothing more than a conversation piece.
But police disagreed and told him the 2.3 horsepower petrol motor attached to the bike's rear wheel constituted a motor vehicle.
Police confiscated the bike and sent the man on his way - with a summons and a borrowed bicycle.
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
cheeseheads are using wackos from Arizona - will the madness ever stop!
Assembly Speaker John Gard's decision to appoint an extremist group as the Legislature's counsel in the fight over whether to extend health benefits to the domestic partners of state workers has evolved into a national embarrassment for Wisconsin.
Unwilling to trust Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager and the state Department of Justice to do their job, Gard brought in the Alliance Defense Fund, an Arizona legal firm that is closely tied to far-right religious and political groups, to oppose a lawsuit that seeks health insurance for domestic partners. Gard, who seems to have become obsessed with denying protections to gays and lesbians, is concerned that the lawsuit might force the state to stop discriminating. And, apparently because its principals share his homophobia, Gard believes the Alliance Defense Fund team will do a better job of promoting his agenda than Wisconsin lawyers would.
Unfortunately, the Alliance Defense Fund has been associated with some of the wackier instances of anti-gay extremism to surface in recent years. The fund's co-founder has devoted inordinate amounts of time to arguing that the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants is gay. He has also called for a "second civil war" - over cultural issues - in the United States.
As Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison, correctly noted after the controversy heated up last week: "If bringing in fringe extremists who think cartoon characters are gay is the only way to fight providing health care benefits to Wisconsin families, it is a sad day in Wisconsin."
Just how sad is rapidly becoming evident.
Gard's decision to make Wisconsin the first state in the country to align with the extremists at the Alliance Defense Fund is drawing negative attention far beyond the state's borders.
Noting the legal firm's history of fierce opposition to equal treatment for all citizens, Joe Solmonese, the president of the Washington-based Human Rights Campaign, condemned Gard's move. "This group is far from unbiased and the people of Wisconsin did not elect it to speak for them," Solmonese said. "Wisconsinites did elect the attorney general, who should be the one seeing this case through. The Legislature has seriously overstepped its bounds."
Solmonese, who heads the nation's largest lesbian and gay political organization, explained that "Wisconsin's interest is best served with an unbiased, thoughtful assessment regarding equal employment benefits. Employees with same-sex partners are now doing equal work for less compensation. Domestic partner benefits make good business sense. They enhance an employer's overall compensation package with negligible cost to the company and are a hallmark of whether a company values diversity. If the Legislature is hearing from the Alliance Defense Fund, I urge legislators to also hear from companies in the state that have already learned these lessons."
More than 60 major corporations in Wisconsin offer domestic partner benefits to their employees. They include Miller Brewing Co., American Family Insurance Group, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance, and SC Johnson & Son Inc. In addition, 11 states - California, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington - provide these benefits. In Massachusetts, where same-sex couples are allowed to marry, equal access to benefits is also assured.
The debate over same-sex marriage is far from being settled in Wisconsin, or nationally. But Wisconsin, which has a better history than most states of protecting against discrimination based on sexual orientation, ought not be bringing in extremist groups to represent the Legislature in this fight.
Gard should back off his relationship with the Alliance Defense Fund. If he fails to do so, then legislative Republicans really need to ask whether they want the state's good name to be associated with a fringe group that specializes in "exposing" cartoon characters and calling for a new civil war. In particular, Senate Majority Leader Dale Schultz, the Richland Center Republican who is one of the Legislature's saner members, needs to distance himself from Gard's madness.
Unwilling to trust Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager and the state Department of Justice to do their job, Gard brought in the Alliance Defense Fund, an Arizona legal firm that is closely tied to far-right religious and political groups, to oppose a lawsuit that seeks health insurance for domestic partners. Gard, who seems to have become obsessed with denying protections to gays and lesbians, is concerned that the lawsuit might force the state to stop discriminating. And, apparently because its principals share his homophobia, Gard believes the Alliance Defense Fund team will do a better job of promoting his agenda than Wisconsin lawyers would.
Unfortunately, the Alliance Defense Fund has been associated with some of the wackier instances of anti-gay extremism to surface in recent years. The fund's co-founder has devoted inordinate amounts of time to arguing that the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants is gay. He has also called for a "second civil war" - over cultural issues - in the United States.
As Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison, correctly noted after the controversy heated up last week: "If bringing in fringe extremists who think cartoon characters are gay is the only way to fight providing health care benefits to Wisconsin families, it is a sad day in Wisconsin."
Just how sad is rapidly becoming evident.
Gard's decision to make Wisconsin the first state in the country to align with the extremists at the Alliance Defense Fund is drawing negative attention far beyond the state's borders.
Noting the legal firm's history of fierce opposition to equal treatment for all citizens, Joe Solmonese, the president of the Washington-based Human Rights Campaign, condemned Gard's move. "This group is far from unbiased and the people of Wisconsin did not elect it to speak for them," Solmonese said. "Wisconsinites did elect the attorney general, who should be the one seeing this case through. The Legislature has seriously overstepped its bounds."
Solmonese, who heads the nation's largest lesbian and gay political organization, explained that "Wisconsin's interest is best served with an unbiased, thoughtful assessment regarding equal employment benefits. Employees with same-sex partners are now doing equal work for less compensation. Domestic partner benefits make good business sense. They enhance an employer's overall compensation package with negligible cost to the company and are a hallmark of whether a company values diversity. If the Legislature is hearing from the Alliance Defense Fund, I urge legislators to also hear from companies in the state that have already learned these lessons."
More than 60 major corporations in Wisconsin offer domestic partner benefits to their employees. They include Miller Brewing Co., American Family Insurance Group, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance, and SC Johnson & Son Inc. In addition, 11 states - California, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington - provide these benefits. In Massachusetts, where same-sex couples are allowed to marry, equal access to benefits is also assured.
The debate over same-sex marriage is far from being settled in Wisconsin, or nationally. But Wisconsin, which has a better history than most states of protecting against discrimination based on sexual orientation, ought not be bringing in extremist groups to represent the Legislature in this fight.
Gard should back off his relationship with the Alliance Defense Fund. If he fails to do so, then legislative Republicans really need to ask whether they want the state's good name to be associated with a fringe group that specializes in "exposing" cartoon characters and calling for a new civil war. In particular, Senate Majority Leader Dale Schultz, the Richland Center Republican who is one of the Legislature's saner members, needs to distance himself from Gard's madness.
Friday, May 27, 2005
Yes, a spill does change everything...for awhile at least....
A spill on a bicycle in spring changes everything
By Michele Herman
I’m lying in a pothole on Bleecker St. stopping traffic, which is interesting because a second ago I was traffic. A second ago it was an ordinary sunny April Sunday and I was riding my bike right behind my husband, as always. We were headed to Bigelow Pharmacy for an embarrassingly ordinary middle-aged errand: shopping for reading glasses. What was I thinking and where was I looking when I rode into a pothole big enough to swallow my front wheel and reconfigure my season? I have no idea.
Here’s what I do remember. Something big and soft plops onto my head. Ah, I think. Here comes my knapsack from the baby seat. I reach instinctively for my left elbow — my dominant elbow, my writing elbow — and find it, but not in the right location at all. I am suddenly overcome, not with pain, anger or fear, but gratitude for my long unbroken string of good fortune and health, my 20-odd years of uneventful daily bicycling, my comfortable life. Lying with the sun on my face and the Bleecker St. strolling fashionistas looking quite concerned, I wonder how I got lucky enough to live in a world that grants me a hot shower every day. If a broken bone or two is the price I have to pay, I tell myself, no problem! I can do this! I can do it with grace and good humor!
I calmly watch the day’s plot change, as if the editor has yelled, “Get me rewrite!” My husband, noticing I’m no longer behind him, comes back for me. A kind (and fashionable) stranger calls an ambulance. The saleswoman from Marc Jacobs brings me a bottle of water (what, no handbag? says a friend later). It’s a good day at the St. Vincent’s E.R.: only three-and-a-half hours. My thoughtful husband leaves to shoot pictures of the hole for possible lawsuit purposes. When the resident finally tells that I’ve broken my olecranon bone and will need surgery, I say, “Olecranon. That’s a nice word.”
Shock is a beautiful thing. Mine, wearing its clever disguise of lucidity, carries me through the day. But as I leave with my husband, the name of a surgeon and the general idea of wires or plates and screws in my future, new feelings pry at its edges. I try to hold them at bay, but when do nausea and discomfort and worry take no for an answer? I am wearing a hand-to-armpit plaster cast. Inside I’m wrapped tightly in synthetic cotton and outside in synthetic ace bandages. I have a slippery synthetic sling held in place with a hard square of velcro. They might as well roll my arm in poison ivy and saw my shoulder open. Seventh Ave.’s surface has been roughened in preparation for repaving, a sight any cyclist loves to see. I realize with a pang that this is irrelevant to my life.
The orthopedic surgeon is kind and professional and metes out bad news in small doses. Oh, bone pain, he says. It’s on a whole different scale from soft-tissue pain. Later he tells me about the stagnancy of elbow skin, sitting there right on the bone with no blood supply to renew it. That, and the swelling, are why I have to wait two weeks for surgery.
The day after the pothole, Ruggles the puppy is scheduled to be neutered. The whole household is bollixed up. Unused to walking on my right side, he insists on coming around to my left. All spring long, every few steps I have to untangle us.
Back for pre-surgery X-rays, they cut off my bandages (before I’m done I’ll have four casts; they toss out plaster and bandages around here like candy wrappers). I carry my denuded yellowish arm in my good one, cradled like a wounded waterfowl, shrunken in the bicep, enlarged at the elbow. I walk slowly to the X-ray room praying: please don’t touch me; please don’t hurt me.When I wake up, the recovery nurse, the friendly face of post-op, keeps asking if I feel pain. I nod. She turns up the morphine drip and shakes her head with increasing disapproval. Dry-mouthed, I ask about the friend who agreed to pick me up. No one’s arrived and no one’s called, she insists. I defend my friend. Again she shakes her head as if to say, what do you know about friends? Turns out my friend has been in the waiting room all along. Before she’s done, she will make a pharmacy run, button my jeans, dispose of my barf basin and other unsavory tasks only a good and reliable friend would perform.
I can’t bike, can’t run, can’t lift weights, can’t do laundry but, oh, can I ever walk. I become a student of the sidewalk. One Duane Reade goes by, then another and another. “Eyebrow threading” businesses, whatever they are, are everywhere; how have I missed this? Whole days slip by. Thank heaven for the long and sunny spring.
At the surgery follow-up, the surgeon says, “Manage the pain however you have to. You have to get the motion back.” I begin occupational therapy and move to a hard plastic splint, removable, that looks like a giant bone. I like my therapist. I like her receptionist and her other patients and their stories. If only she didn’t hurt me on purpose. The therapist says it’s a terrible strain physically and psychically to navigate the world without your dominant arm. It’s true. Sleep is the bonus. My body craves it, my bones demand it. Once I was a writer; now I am a napper.
I stand in the bathroom, toothbrush in hand. I move my head forward and to the left like an Egyptian; I Mick Jagger my lips. The toothbrush is still a foot from my mouth. Just because you can’t do it now, I tell myself, doesn’t mean you will never do it. You have to be patient and have faith. No wonder my kids scoff at my lectures. It’s obvious I will never brush my teeth left-handed. My right arm is a good sport, but it’s gawky and dumb.
One pothole, and I spend a season devoid of my two most trusty tools, two of the things that make me most myself: my left arm and my bike. Without my writing arm, my conduit between my inner and outer selves, I clog up with words. My old friend the keyboard taunts me. I hunt-and-peck an occasional e-mail, all lower case, and need a nap. Bicycling seems like Anatevka, a homeland far away that I was forced to vacate without notice.
This morning in the shower, doing deep cleansing breaths, I succeed at thumbing my nose. How can I have criticized my right arm? My right arm is brilliant; how easy it makes everything look! I hold thumb to nose for a count of 30, though my bones and joints, down to the wrist, tell me this is wrong, this is too taut, I will crack open. I emerge triumphant. A month ago my world was wider and my goals loftier: novels, story collections, political actions. For now, I stand in the hot shower counting my blessings and taking my successes where they come.
By Michele Herman
I’m lying in a pothole on Bleecker St. stopping traffic, which is interesting because a second ago I was traffic. A second ago it was an ordinary sunny April Sunday and I was riding my bike right behind my husband, as always. We were headed to Bigelow Pharmacy for an embarrassingly ordinary middle-aged errand: shopping for reading glasses. What was I thinking and where was I looking when I rode into a pothole big enough to swallow my front wheel and reconfigure my season? I have no idea.
Here’s what I do remember. Something big and soft plops onto my head. Ah, I think. Here comes my knapsack from the baby seat. I reach instinctively for my left elbow — my dominant elbow, my writing elbow — and find it, but not in the right location at all. I am suddenly overcome, not with pain, anger or fear, but gratitude for my long unbroken string of good fortune and health, my 20-odd years of uneventful daily bicycling, my comfortable life. Lying with the sun on my face and the Bleecker St. strolling fashionistas looking quite concerned, I wonder how I got lucky enough to live in a world that grants me a hot shower every day. If a broken bone or two is the price I have to pay, I tell myself, no problem! I can do this! I can do it with grace and good humor!
I calmly watch the day’s plot change, as if the editor has yelled, “Get me rewrite!” My husband, noticing I’m no longer behind him, comes back for me. A kind (and fashionable) stranger calls an ambulance. The saleswoman from Marc Jacobs brings me a bottle of water (what, no handbag? says a friend later). It’s a good day at the St. Vincent’s E.R.: only three-and-a-half hours. My thoughtful husband leaves to shoot pictures of the hole for possible lawsuit purposes. When the resident finally tells that I’ve broken my olecranon bone and will need surgery, I say, “Olecranon. That’s a nice word.”
Shock is a beautiful thing. Mine, wearing its clever disguise of lucidity, carries me through the day. But as I leave with my husband, the name of a surgeon and the general idea of wires or plates and screws in my future, new feelings pry at its edges. I try to hold them at bay, but when do nausea and discomfort and worry take no for an answer? I am wearing a hand-to-armpit plaster cast. Inside I’m wrapped tightly in synthetic cotton and outside in synthetic ace bandages. I have a slippery synthetic sling held in place with a hard square of velcro. They might as well roll my arm in poison ivy and saw my shoulder open. Seventh Ave.’s surface has been roughened in preparation for repaving, a sight any cyclist loves to see. I realize with a pang that this is irrelevant to my life.
The orthopedic surgeon is kind and professional and metes out bad news in small doses. Oh, bone pain, he says. It’s on a whole different scale from soft-tissue pain. Later he tells me about the stagnancy of elbow skin, sitting there right on the bone with no blood supply to renew it. That, and the swelling, are why I have to wait two weeks for surgery.
The day after the pothole, Ruggles the puppy is scheduled to be neutered. The whole household is bollixed up. Unused to walking on my right side, he insists on coming around to my left. All spring long, every few steps I have to untangle us.
Back for pre-surgery X-rays, they cut off my bandages (before I’m done I’ll have four casts; they toss out plaster and bandages around here like candy wrappers). I carry my denuded yellowish arm in my good one, cradled like a wounded waterfowl, shrunken in the bicep, enlarged at the elbow. I walk slowly to the X-ray room praying: please don’t touch me; please don’t hurt me.When I wake up, the recovery nurse, the friendly face of post-op, keeps asking if I feel pain. I nod. She turns up the morphine drip and shakes her head with increasing disapproval. Dry-mouthed, I ask about the friend who agreed to pick me up. No one’s arrived and no one’s called, she insists. I defend my friend. Again she shakes her head as if to say, what do you know about friends? Turns out my friend has been in the waiting room all along. Before she’s done, she will make a pharmacy run, button my jeans, dispose of my barf basin and other unsavory tasks only a good and reliable friend would perform.
I can’t bike, can’t run, can’t lift weights, can’t do laundry but, oh, can I ever walk. I become a student of the sidewalk. One Duane Reade goes by, then another and another. “Eyebrow threading” businesses, whatever they are, are everywhere; how have I missed this? Whole days slip by. Thank heaven for the long and sunny spring.
At the surgery follow-up, the surgeon says, “Manage the pain however you have to. You have to get the motion back.” I begin occupational therapy and move to a hard plastic splint, removable, that looks like a giant bone. I like my therapist. I like her receptionist and her other patients and their stories. If only she didn’t hurt me on purpose. The therapist says it’s a terrible strain physically and psychically to navigate the world without your dominant arm. It’s true. Sleep is the bonus. My body craves it, my bones demand it. Once I was a writer; now I am a napper.
I stand in the bathroom, toothbrush in hand. I move my head forward and to the left like an Egyptian; I Mick Jagger my lips. The toothbrush is still a foot from my mouth. Just because you can’t do it now, I tell myself, doesn’t mean you will never do it. You have to be patient and have faith. No wonder my kids scoff at my lectures. It’s obvious I will never brush my teeth left-handed. My right arm is a good sport, but it’s gawky and dumb.
One pothole, and I spend a season devoid of my two most trusty tools, two of the things that make me most myself: my left arm and my bike. Without my writing arm, my conduit between my inner and outer selves, I clog up with words. My old friend the keyboard taunts me. I hunt-and-peck an occasional e-mail, all lower case, and need a nap. Bicycling seems like Anatevka, a homeland far away that I was forced to vacate without notice.
This morning in the shower, doing deep cleansing breaths, I succeed at thumbing my nose. How can I have criticized my right arm? My right arm is brilliant; how easy it makes everything look! I hold thumb to nose for a count of 30, though my bones and joints, down to the wrist, tell me this is wrong, this is too taut, I will crack open. I emerge triumphant. A month ago my world was wider and my goals loftier: novels, story collections, political actions. For now, I stand in the hot shower counting my blessings and taking my successes where they come.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
This sucks
Anderson, Indiana - A man who pedalled across the United States after heart bypass surgery gave him a second chance at life has died of a heart attack, one day after completing the 3 900km trip.Broc Bebout, a 57-year-old retired engineer, died on Thursday on the drive back to his home in Anderson, about 40km north-east of Indianapolis, one day after completing the ride from Carlsbad, California, to Brunswick, Georgia.His wife, Patricia Brinkman, said cycling became Bebout's ticket to nearly 20 years of good health after quadruple-bypass surgery at age 39.He also learned to eat right and take care of himself, she said.
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Feeling happy, or feeling sad?
Where can you find happiness? Texas, that's where. Three of its cities placed in the top four: number one, Laredo; number two, El Paso; and number four, Corpus Christi.
The 20 Happiest Cities
1. Laredo, TX: A+
2. El Paso, TX: A+
3. Jersey City, NJ: A+
4. Corpus Christi, TX: A+
5. Baton Rouge, LA: A
6. Honolulu, HI: A-
7. Fresno, CA: A-
8. San Jose, CA: A-
9. Lincoln, NE: B+
10. Bakersfield, CA: B+
11. Buffalo, NY: B+
12. Anchorage, AK: B+
13. Stockton, CA: B+
14. Shreveport, LA: B+
15. (3-way tie) Madison, WI: B, Montgomery, AL: B, and Des Moines, IA: B
18. Wichita, KS: B
19. (tie) Sacramento, CA: B and Omaha, NE: B
The 20 Most Depressed Cities
1. Philadelphia, PA: F
2. Detroit, MI: F
3. St. Petersburg, FL: F
4. St. Louis, MO: F
5. Tampa, FL: F
6. Indianapolis, IN: F
7. (3-way tie) Mesa, AZ: F, Phoenix, AZ: F, and Scottsdale, AZ: F
10. Cleveland, OH: F
11. New York, NY: D-
12. Salt Lake City, UT: D-
13. Atlanta, GA: D
14. (3-way tie) Yonkers, NY: D, Pittsburgh, PA: D, and Kansas City, MO: D
17. (3-way tie) Long Beach, CA: D, Los Angeles, CA: D, Nashville, TN" D
20. Portland, OR: D
The 20 Happiest Cities
1. Laredo, TX: A+
2. El Paso, TX: A+
3. Jersey City, NJ: A+
4. Corpus Christi, TX: A+
5. Baton Rouge, LA: A
6. Honolulu, HI: A-
7. Fresno, CA: A-
8. San Jose, CA: A-
9. Lincoln, NE: B+
10. Bakersfield, CA: B+
11. Buffalo, NY: B+
12. Anchorage, AK: B+
13. Stockton, CA: B+
14. Shreveport, LA: B+
15. (3-way tie) Madison, WI: B, Montgomery, AL: B, and Des Moines, IA: B
18. Wichita, KS: B
19. (tie) Sacramento, CA: B and Omaha, NE: B
The 20 Most Depressed Cities
1. Philadelphia, PA: F
2. Detroit, MI: F
3. St. Petersburg, FL: F
4. St. Louis, MO: F
5. Tampa, FL: F
6. Indianapolis, IN: F
7. (3-way tie) Mesa, AZ: F, Phoenix, AZ: F, and Scottsdale, AZ: F
10. Cleveland, OH: F
11. New York, NY: D-
12. Salt Lake City, UT: D-
13. Atlanta, GA: D
14. (3-way tie) Yonkers, NY: D, Pittsburgh, PA: D, and Kansas City, MO: D
17. (3-way tie) Long Beach, CA: D, Los Angeles, CA: D, Nashville, TN" D
20. Portland, OR: D
Save Oil, legalize hemp!
Hemp industry poised for a comeback
Ron Chepesiuk, Vermont Guardian
Industrial hemp has long been a lucrative crop for farmers in Canada, Europe, and Asia, and governments in many countries have encouraged research into its development. In April, for instance, the Government of Canada’s Scientific Research and Experimental Development Program awarded Hempton Clothing, Inc., the world’s largest hemp T-shirt apparel brand, a $223,118 grant in recognition of the company’s work in developing environmentally friendly fabrics and garments in 2002 and 2003.
This is one of many such grants the Canadian government has made available for hemp research.
In the United States, however, the forces of drug prohibition have long associated hemp with marijuana, and the U.S. government has blocked its use. Yet, hemp and marijuana come from different varieties of the cannabis plant, and low THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) varieties of cannabis are cultivated for non-drug uses, such as soap, paper, food, and even high tech bio composites used in automobiles. THC is an active ingredient found in hemp, marijuana, and hashish.
“There are millions of cars on the road with hemp door panels, tens of millions of dollars spent annually on hemp food and hemp body care, and hemp paper is being made in the U.S., ” said Alexis Baden-Mayer, director of government relations for Vote Hemp, a Washington, DC, nonprofit dedicated to the acceptance of industrial hemp. ”So people are asking tough questions about why the U.S. government won’t distinguish low THC hemp from high THC drug varieties.”
But it looks like this state of affairs is about to change. Hemp industry spokesmen are optimistic that hemp farming is about to make a comeback almost 50 years after federal law prevented U.S. farmers from growing the crop. The end of its three-year battle with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and recent pro-hemp, state sponsored initiatives are the two big reasons for the hemp industry’s optimism.
The hemp industry’s battle with the U.S. government ended in February when the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered the DEA to pay $21,265 in legal expenses to Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps. The Escondido, CA-based company, which has used hemp oil in its soap products since 1998, largely financed the Hemp Industries Association’s fight to overturn DEA efforts to ban the sale of foods containing hemp products. The association is a trade group of hemp businesses that represents the interests of the hemp industry and works to encourage research and development of new hemp products.
Earlier, the 9th Circuit ruled that the DEA had ignored Congress’s exemption to the Controlled Substance Act, which specifically exempts hemp seed, fiber, and oil from government regulation, and agreed with the association that hemp seed contained just minor traces of THC, much like poppy seed contains insignificant amounts of opiates. In regulating the manufacture and distribution of controlled substances, the Controlled Substance Act provides the legal foundation for the U.S. government’s war on drugs. Then, on July 2, 2004, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied the DEA’s petition for a re-hearing of the case. The DEA had the option of appealing the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the allotted time for an appeal expired on September 28, 2004.
“Nobody has ever been able to block the DEA in court from interpreting the law the way it wanted,” said Adam Eidinger, Vote Hemp’s communications director. “The court decision was 3 to 0, and even the Reagan appointee on the court agreed with us. It was a reality check for the DEA.”
David Bronner, president of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, added, “It’s a sweet victory and certainly an embarrassment to the DEA. It proves that the DEA’s attempt to ban hemp never had any legal merit.”
In making its case to ban hemp, the DEA claimed that the use of hemp products could cause a false positive reading of drug tests. Hemp activists maintain that companies in the hemp industry voluntarily observe reasonable THC limits similar to those observed by hemp businesses in Canada and European countries, and that these limits protect consumers with a wide margin of safety from workplace drug testing interference.
Manufacturers of hemp nut and oil products in North America also participate in a TestPledge program, hemp activists pointed out. Manufacturers pledge to hold the THC in hemp nut and oil below levels that makes failing a drug test extremely unlikely, even when a person consumes large amounts of those products on a daily basis.
As for personal care products made with hemp seed oil, Eidinger said, “In recent years, a handful of people have alleged that they failed workplace drug tests because of using hemp oil products on the skin. Such allegations were routinely proven false, and there has yet to be a case in which someone was excused [from work] due to the use of hemp oil personal care products.”
As the hemp industry savors its court victory, it is making gains in the legislative arena. This year, several state legislatures are considering hemp legislation that would allow farmers to grow industrial hemp. Five states (Hawaii, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia) allow for hemp farming on a commercial or research basis, but hemp can’t be legally grown in the United States without a permit from the DEA. According to Vote Hemp, the agency has allowed only an experimental plot in Hawaii.
In California, Assemblyman Mark Leno introduced a bill that would allow the California State Department of Food and Agriculture to issue licenses to grow and process hemp. Companies that sell hemp products must now contract with Canadian farmers for their hemp. Nutiva, a California-based organic food company, estimates that it would save more than $100,000 in transportation and related costs if it could buy hemp seeds from California growers and process them at a plant the company plans to build in California.
“We pay Exxon and Chevron a lot of gasoline for truckers,” John Roulac, Nutiva’s president and founder, told the Sacramento Union newspaper. “We’d rather pay that money to California farmers to grow a sustainable crop.”
Leno’s bill bans anyone with a criminal conviction from getting a license to process or grow hemp and requires that the hemp be tested in the fields so as to ensure that the THC levels don’t exceed the prescribed limits. A hearing of the bill before the Senate Environment and Wildlife Committee was scheduled for April 19.
The California initiative is similar to other bills introduced in North Dakota, New Hampshire, and Oregon.
In North Dakota, House Bill 1492 passed Feb. 16 by a vote of 87 to 3; a similar bill passed in the Senate on March 1 by 46 to 0, and is awaiting the governor’s action. In 1999, North Dakota became the first state to pass hemp farming legislation, but it hasn’t challenged the DEA’s authority in the courts. The proposal allows North Dakota State University to begin storing “feral seed hemp” in anticipation of the day the growing of industrial hemp becomes legal.
The bill in Oregon allows the State Department of Agriculture to administer a licensing, permitting, and implementation program for growers and handlers of hemp. On April 6, the state Senate Environment and Land Committee took testimony.
The New Hampshire proposal requires qualifying farmers with no criminal convictions to plant at least five acres of hemp annually. A bill passed the New Hampshire House on March 23 by a margin of 199 to 68, and has moved to the Senate for consideration.
Vote Hemp is currently working with Congressman Ron Paul, R-TX, to introduce the Industrial Hemp Farming Act, which aims to distinguish hemp from marijuana and legalize the former for U.S. farmers to grow.
Hemp advocates say these legislative initiatives make them excited about their industry’s future. “We want American farmers to have the opportunity to grow industrial hemp without being harassed by the DEA,” Eidinger said.
About
Ron Chepesiuk, Vermont Guardian
Industrial hemp has long been a lucrative crop for farmers in Canada, Europe, and Asia, and governments in many countries have encouraged research into its development. In April, for instance, the Government of Canada’s Scientific Research and Experimental Development Program awarded Hempton Clothing, Inc., the world’s largest hemp T-shirt apparel brand, a $223,118 grant in recognition of the company’s work in developing environmentally friendly fabrics and garments in 2002 and 2003.
This is one of many such grants the Canadian government has made available for hemp research.
In the United States, however, the forces of drug prohibition have long associated hemp with marijuana, and the U.S. government has blocked its use. Yet, hemp and marijuana come from different varieties of the cannabis plant, and low THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) varieties of cannabis are cultivated for non-drug uses, such as soap, paper, food, and even high tech bio composites used in automobiles. THC is an active ingredient found in hemp, marijuana, and hashish.
“There are millions of cars on the road with hemp door panels, tens of millions of dollars spent annually on hemp food and hemp body care, and hemp paper is being made in the U.S., ” said Alexis Baden-Mayer, director of government relations for Vote Hemp, a Washington, DC, nonprofit dedicated to the acceptance of industrial hemp. ”So people are asking tough questions about why the U.S. government won’t distinguish low THC hemp from high THC drug varieties.”
But it looks like this state of affairs is about to change. Hemp industry spokesmen are optimistic that hemp farming is about to make a comeback almost 50 years after federal law prevented U.S. farmers from growing the crop. The end of its three-year battle with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and recent pro-hemp, state sponsored initiatives are the two big reasons for the hemp industry’s optimism.
The hemp industry’s battle with the U.S. government ended in February when the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered the DEA to pay $21,265 in legal expenses to Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps. The Escondido, CA-based company, which has used hemp oil in its soap products since 1998, largely financed the Hemp Industries Association’s fight to overturn DEA efforts to ban the sale of foods containing hemp products. The association is a trade group of hemp businesses that represents the interests of the hemp industry and works to encourage research and development of new hemp products.
Earlier, the 9th Circuit ruled that the DEA had ignored Congress’s exemption to the Controlled Substance Act, which specifically exempts hemp seed, fiber, and oil from government regulation, and agreed with the association that hemp seed contained just minor traces of THC, much like poppy seed contains insignificant amounts of opiates. In regulating the manufacture and distribution of controlled substances, the Controlled Substance Act provides the legal foundation for the U.S. government’s war on drugs. Then, on July 2, 2004, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied the DEA’s petition for a re-hearing of the case. The DEA had the option of appealing the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the allotted time for an appeal expired on September 28, 2004.
“Nobody has ever been able to block the DEA in court from interpreting the law the way it wanted,” said Adam Eidinger, Vote Hemp’s communications director. “The court decision was 3 to 0, and even the Reagan appointee on the court agreed with us. It was a reality check for the DEA.”
David Bronner, president of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, added, “It’s a sweet victory and certainly an embarrassment to the DEA. It proves that the DEA’s attempt to ban hemp never had any legal merit.”
In making its case to ban hemp, the DEA claimed that the use of hemp products could cause a false positive reading of drug tests. Hemp activists maintain that companies in the hemp industry voluntarily observe reasonable THC limits similar to those observed by hemp businesses in Canada and European countries, and that these limits protect consumers with a wide margin of safety from workplace drug testing interference.
Manufacturers of hemp nut and oil products in North America also participate in a TestPledge program, hemp activists pointed out. Manufacturers pledge to hold the THC in hemp nut and oil below levels that makes failing a drug test extremely unlikely, even when a person consumes large amounts of those products on a daily basis.
As for personal care products made with hemp seed oil, Eidinger said, “In recent years, a handful of people have alleged that they failed workplace drug tests because of using hemp oil products on the skin. Such allegations were routinely proven false, and there has yet to be a case in which someone was excused [from work] due to the use of hemp oil personal care products.”
As the hemp industry savors its court victory, it is making gains in the legislative arena. This year, several state legislatures are considering hemp legislation that would allow farmers to grow industrial hemp. Five states (Hawaii, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia) allow for hemp farming on a commercial or research basis, but hemp can’t be legally grown in the United States without a permit from the DEA. According to Vote Hemp, the agency has allowed only an experimental plot in Hawaii.
In California, Assemblyman Mark Leno introduced a bill that would allow the California State Department of Food and Agriculture to issue licenses to grow and process hemp. Companies that sell hemp products must now contract with Canadian farmers for their hemp. Nutiva, a California-based organic food company, estimates that it would save more than $100,000 in transportation and related costs if it could buy hemp seeds from California growers and process them at a plant the company plans to build in California.
“We pay Exxon and Chevron a lot of gasoline for truckers,” John Roulac, Nutiva’s president and founder, told the Sacramento Union newspaper. “We’d rather pay that money to California farmers to grow a sustainable crop.”
Leno’s bill bans anyone with a criminal conviction from getting a license to process or grow hemp and requires that the hemp be tested in the fields so as to ensure that the THC levels don’t exceed the prescribed limits. A hearing of the bill before the Senate Environment and Wildlife Committee was scheduled for April 19.
The California initiative is similar to other bills introduced in North Dakota, New Hampshire, and Oregon.
In North Dakota, House Bill 1492 passed Feb. 16 by a vote of 87 to 3; a similar bill passed in the Senate on March 1 by 46 to 0, and is awaiting the governor’s action. In 1999, North Dakota became the first state to pass hemp farming legislation, but it hasn’t challenged the DEA’s authority in the courts. The proposal allows North Dakota State University to begin storing “feral seed hemp” in anticipation of the day the growing of industrial hemp becomes legal.
The bill in Oregon allows the State Department of Agriculture to administer a licensing, permitting, and implementation program for growers and handlers of hemp. On April 6, the state Senate Environment and Land Committee took testimony.
The New Hampshire proposal requires qualifying farmers with no criminal convictions to plant at least five acres of hemp annually. A bill passed the New Hampshire House on March 23 by a margin of 199 to 68, and has moved to the Senate for consideration.
Vote Hemp is currently working with Congressman Ron Paul, R-TX, to introduce the Industrial Hemp Farming Act, which aims to distinguish hemp from marijuana and legalize the former for U.S. farmers to grow.
Hemp advocates say these legislative initiatives make them excited about their industry’s future. “We want American farmers to have the opportunity to grow industrial hemp without being harassed by the DEA,” Eidinger said.
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