June, 2004 Week 1
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June, 2004 Week 1
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Tuesday June 1 , 2004 Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900) The human capacity to believe they have a corner on the Truth Market is very annoying to those of us who know they are wrong... Time after time these two sites save my fragile ego and make me look smart: http://www.truthorfiction.com/ and There are five or six others but these are the best... I send them both money once a year... they are, by far, two of the most important sites on the Internet. What really clinches it for me is that their income depends entirely on their credibility... Wednesday June 2 , 2004 However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. Winston Churchill $600.00 for a Drug Discount card... oh my what a boon to the poor and elderly... let's see, I would need approximately 7 of them a month to keep Autumn in seizure medication... You must own les than $6000 in assets to be eligible... if you own a car, if you have furniture in you living room... sorry, you aren't eligible... what can these people be thinking!! If you live in a cardboard box and have enough money to by food, but not enough to by anything else you still wouldn't qualify... $600 worth of help... is nothing!... I have been trying to figure out what the Medicare site has to offer by way of explanation, I have been plugging away at it for two hours now and I am more confused now than when I started... and I consider myself to be reasonably computer literate. I picked up my new tire at Rider's Choice... expensive SOB... it's mounted and balanced and and put it on, when I reattached the master cylinder I noticed it had leaked some brake fluid, I had apparently loosened two bolts that weren't supposed to be loosened. I read the book about how to bleed the breaks and discovered that it is integrated with the front breaks and it has ABS on top of it... the book scared the hell out of me, I thought I had really screwed it up good... but just ti be thorough I checked out the Net ands discovered that it really isn't a big deal... you just bleed them like you bleed any other kind of disk brakes... I did and it appears to work fine. I had to restrain Cindy this evening. I think it all started after Monica refused to share candy with her... she started screaming and then started yelling at Autumn. In retrospect I suppose I should have just taken the kids out of the house and let Cindy rant for a while but I tried to quiet her down and the harder I tried the more she resisted. She raised her fists swore at me, called me a F'er and screamed at me and I really wasn't ready for that. I slapped her hands down and took her to my desk and made her sit on the floor by my desk and tried to get her to be quiet, I tried to talk to her but she just got more and more hysterical. She started accusing me of child abuse... damn... I told her to just back off. She told me she hated me and hated the whole family, I told her, there's the door and there's the road, she could take off any time she wanted. I sent her to her room. She took her brand new yearbook and a pair of scissors and threatened to cut it up... I took both away from her. She is asleep now and will be fine when she wakes up. It is now approximately 25 minutes later, she has had a nap maybe 15 minutes and she is now out back laughing and jumping on the trampoline and squirting water on herself like nothing had happened. Cindy gets like this in the afternoons on most days. Thursday June 3 , 2004 Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set. Raymond Thornton Chandler, writer (1888-1959)
Christian graduated from Junior High tonight... quite a production... I think it went on about an hour too long, Christy thought it was just right... Christian graduated with honors, the only one of my kids ever to do that... so far, I am very proud of him. He is still an exasperating blur of energy but it appears that he is beginning to focus it a little Friday June 4 , 2004 There are no persons capable of stooping so low as those who desire to rise in the world. Marguerite Guardiner, writer (1789-1849) Eventful day. Christy and I took the morning and spent it at Circuit City buying Verizon Cell Phones. We were going to go to the Verizon Store but after our experience there yesterday we decided to go to Circuit City, besides, with the rebate from Circuit City the phones were far cheaper. The extra money came from buying service contracts and accessories it was $743 - $440 in rebates is still a bunch of money... We spent until it was time to pickup the kids playing with the phones. I picked up "B" and found out from him that he had been in a fight... I heard his version of the story and then we called the school and asked the Principal what was going on it's, not good... "B" is in serious trouble this time. From what I understand he will be expelled from the School District at least, since he was with a friend, they may charge him with gang activity, since they ambushed the kid, they will get him for 'Laying in wait', if he used his feet they can get him for using a lethal weapon... He can be taken away... we may lose him to the system. We called the lawyer and his Social Worker... to see if we can get a taste for what's going to happen next but he wasn't much help. We will most likely have to wait till Monday to know more. This has just escalated to the point where we won't have much input. Leon Redbone will be on Prairie Home Companion [my favorite radio show] tomorrow... live at 1700 CST... Leon has been around for 30 years, he must be doing something right. Saturday June 5 , 2004 On June 5, 1968, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot and mortally wounded just after claiming victory in California's Democratic presidential primary. Gunman Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was immediately arrested. I wish I had written this... well, actually... I did, sort of. If you are masochist enough to go back over all I have written for the past three years since September 11, 2001 you could see my attempts at it. Leaders guard war's folly, not its dead The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Jay Bookman (deputy editorial page editor) Each morning, I take a moment to read the latest list of American soldiers who have died in Iraq, trying to note each person's age, hometown, rank and service, and whether the soldier was Reserve or active duty. It has become a little ceremony, a small, insubstantial way to acknowledge the sacrifice that these men and women have made on behalf of our country. The information in the listing is generally scant, but occasionally some detail will catch your attention and get you to wondering about the life that had led the person to that point. The 30-year-old private first class -- probably the "old man" in his outfit -- who came to the service late in search of something. The reserve sergeant in his mid 40s, who probably has grown kids back home and may have thought that he was long past the days when he would be called to war. Sometimes, by knowing their units, you can even identify the engagement in which they were killed. That kind of ceremony has a public counterpart as well. A year after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, family members and friends gathered at the World Trade Center site, at the Pentagon, and in an empty field in Pennsylvania to read off the list of victims as a way to commemorate our loss and to reassure ourselves that they had not been forgotten. The Vietnam Memorial in Washington lists 58,000 names of those who died in that war, neither to celebrate nor denigrate their cause, but to acknowledge what they gave in our behalf. Yet suddenly, in this war, we are told that it is inappropriate, verging on disloyal, to honor the dead in such a fashion. When ABC's "Nightline" devoted a show to a reading of the names of those Americans who have died in Iraq, the decision was denounced by some as an anti-war political statement. A similar logic has driven the Bush administration to impose a media blackout of pictures of flag-draped caskets being returned home to the United States. It took a Freedom of Information Act request to allow the American people to see military photographs of the caskets, and even then the Pentagon announced that the request was granted in error. It was a mistake to let you see that, our government said, a mistake that will not be repeated. That studied refusal to acknowledge our dead extends even to those running the war. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was asked by Congress recently for the latest casualty count. "It's approximately 500, of which -- I can get the exact numbers -- approximately 350 are combat deaths," he said. Perhaps I should have expected that from a man who has underestimated everything else about this war, but it still struck me as disturbing. Even in a strange time, this is strange stuff. It is an unfamiliar sort of patriotism that requires us not to mark the sacrifice that others are making in our name, that requires us to avert our national gaze when the bodies come home from war. The tradition of honoring those who have fallen is as old as war itself, and even today warriors will risk their lives to recover the bodies of their dead, so they can be celebrated appropriately. But there is, of course, a reason behind this attempted redefinition of patriotism. Our leaders fear that public support for this war is so fragile that it will crumble should we acknowledge the price we are paying. It may be that they are right. Public support is indeed falling, a fact that has led some to accuse the American people of weakness. That is not where the fault lies. In the wake of Sept. 11, no number of casualties would have dissuaded the American people from invading Afghanistan, which had lent shelter and support to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida organization. The cause was clear, the goal certain. We were angry and righteous in that anger. But the war against Iraq was an optional war, and some of us who opposed it did so out of fear of this very moment. It was foolhardy and irresponsible to commit our country to a war that the American people would support only if things went well, and our leaders knew the danger. That's why they tried for so long to disguise its cost and difficulty. Now we pay the consequences, and for some the price is very high.
Sunday June 6 , 2004 Christian [14] is going to Las Vegas with his girlfriend [also 14] (and her father). This will be an interesting experiment. I charged my phone last night, it was completed at 2130, it went dead at 1900 today... 21 and a half hours... that's pretty poor...
Fiscal Shenanigans Published: June 3, 2004 President Bush appears to be planning to run for re-election as a tax cutter without discussing what federal programs will be sacrificed to make up for the lost revenue. That can't be allowed to happen. Voters have the right to see the whole picture, including the downside. Chances are they won't like the view. While Mr. Bush has been out crowing about spending increases in some popular programs, his Office of Management and Budget was instructing federal departments to prepare to pare them down. In a May 19 memo that was first reported in The Washington Post, departments were told to trim domestic discretionary spending in 2006, the first complete fiscal year after the November election. And the administration recently submitted legislation to impose caps that would result in further reductions in every year after that through 2009. According to estimates by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Office of Management and Budget guidelines translate into inflation-adjusted reductions in 2006 alone of about $925 million for Head Start and childhood education. That would come at a time when schools are already struggling to meet the demands of Mr. Bush's No Child Left Behind initiative without adequate resources. College financial aid, mainly Pell Grants, would take a $550 million hit — at a time when lower-income students are dropping out of school because they cannot meet rapidly rising costs. The same projections show that veterans' medical care would be cut by $1.5 billion (after a planned $380 million cut in 2005). All told, under the proposed cuts, total funds for these and other affected programs — like environmental protection, housing programs and nutrition aid for poor pregnant women and children — would be $21 billion less in 2006 than today. By 2009, domestic discretionary spending, not counting homeland security, would be $45 billion below its current level and would be a smaller portion of the economy than it has been at any time since 1963. The budget-cutting exercise is undoubtedly inspired, at least in part, by complaints from conservatives about the enormous deficits being created by the White House's fiscal recklessness. They like the tax cuts, but want to match them with spending reductions. They have been demanding that the president start paring the budget, or at least demonstrate that he will be ready to do so after November. It's hard to imagine any realistic approach that would have the nation achieve fiscal responsibility with the tax cuts in place. First of all, even all of the proposed cuts in the memo would barely begin to make a dent in the annual deficits, which are likely to range from $300 billion to $400 billion for the rest of the decade. Second, although the fate of specific programs has not been decided, there is no way the administration can take a multibillion-dollar whack out of the relatively small budget for domestic discretionary programs — a mere one-sixth of federal spending — without hurting services that are both popular and desperately needed. Some of the staunchest tax-cut supporters in Congress are perfectly aware that the math doesn't work. They hope the accumulating pressure of the deficits will eventually force the federal government to go further and cut entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Very few of them, however, are prepared to run for re-election on that plan. Currently, tax cuts since 2001 account for 17 times as much of the swing from surplus to deficit as do increases in domestic discretionary spending. No one who refuses to face up to the root cause of our fiscal problems should be permitted to seek public office without saying where the money will come from. Candidates who insist on keeping the Bush tax cuts — whether they're running for Congress or the presidency itself — have to show us the math.
Can bin Laden Save Bush? By Marc Ash t r u t h o u t | Perspective Friday 28 May 2004
E-mail response.... It pissed me off... Bottom line... when the jerk that wrote the diatribe below (I took the pictures out, you have already seen them) gets stripped, beaten and has a broomstick shoved up his ass. Then he can tell me about Fraternity hazing vs Torture... To date there have been 33 deaths from mysterious causes, 9 of them have been proven to be from beatings or mistreatment. To tell me that what those 18 terrorists did to the World Trade Center, Pentagon and the carnage in the field in Pennsylvania somehow justifies and permits a bunch of perverts in American Army Uniforms in Abu Grabe,
Afghanistan and Guantanamo to torture and torment civilians in our name is just disgusting. If his sort of thing is what he believes America is all about then I have missed the point of what being an American is all about. Nothing in my Christian upbringing, or in the teaching I have received in school or anywhere else has taught me that brutalizing innocent or guilty civilians in the name of vengeance is permissible, let alone our Patriotic duty. The guilty are punished after a trial... period. We don't humiliate, abuse or torture people to extract information, we don't hold their families hostage till they confess, If we resort to the same tactics they use then we are no better than they are. Today I heard a teenaged boy who's family mother, father sisters and brothers (the oldest 13 the youngest 4) was slaughtered by an American helicopter attack while celebrating a wedding say; "I devote my
life to killing Americans" Multiply that by a few thousand and you can see what we are up against. |
