I lost four friends in six months

The Internet is a wonderful tool of discovery and research.  It can also lead to some sad findings. Yesterday I was searching for an old friend to try and reconnect only to discover he had passed away in California.

In fact, within the time span of six months I lost four very close friends.  Del Threadgill, Jud Griffin, Paul Miller and Larry Corby. All good buds and all gone.

In the course of six months life changes drastically.  A phone call from a son.  A note form an old friend. A middle-of-the-night text from a business associate. And a lone search on the web.  And they all lead me to the same bit of information. A part of my past has been buried in Mother Earth. Gone, but certainly not forgotten.

Each of these guys held a special bond with me.  Each was part of my life at an important and defining time. Threadgill, Griffin and I grew up together in East Texas under the oil derricks of Kilgore. We attended UT at various times together and they were in my first wedding. We had a bond that went way, way back. The “Threader” and I were even roommates for a while in Austin.

I learned to play the guitar on Griffin’s Silverstone archtop. Also had my first beer with him.  We had a lot of firsts together, I jut can’t remember them all. Same is true with Delmar Ray.

Miller lived with me for a year in Austin and became one of the packrats, as we called ourselves. He and I would get close, then drift apart and then get close again.  Distance would always separate us and suddenly something in life would lead us back together. We were working on a movie-book deal when his life was taken away on a CA highway.

And Corby was one of those people who came along later in life; who inspired me, made me laugh, made me cry and made we want to do new things every day. I propped him up during his divorce and we turned around and offered me the same comfort and strength during mine. My job, my career, my neglect separated us.  The miles and the years between us lead me to wonder what he was up to.  A Google search brought me to tears.  Larry, like the other three musketeers from my life, was  gone.  And it all happened in a six-month period of time.

So my advice to you: reach out and connect with your old friends.  They are precious.  And you’ll never know when they might not be on that other end of the line when next you call. 

Life is that unsure and that perplexing.

Now is not the time to wag the finger, Mr. President.

Now I don't want to take side with Russia in this mess in the Crimea, but this headline seems to forget that our own country invaded a non-hostile, non-threatening sovereign country with a preemptive force a few years ago under the W. There are actually Russians living and in danger in the Ukraine. I am not so sure how much in danger Americans were in Iraq prior to our invasion...We have a very short collective memory as Americans and a very warped worldview.

Before we point the finger at Putin we need to look in a collective mirror. I am afraid with Iraq and Guantanamo, our national moral compass is a bit off true north.


This was the entry that started an entire Sunday's worth of discussion on Facebook.  Many people were incensed that I would make a comparison between the W's actions and Putin's. I for one think they are similar.  I believe both Presidents invaded sovereign nations.  I think both are acts of aggression. but we don't see it that way because we are Americans and our leaders can do wrong. And the others are Russians and can never do right.  True, Putin is a bit of an old school KGB thug, but we still have our human rights issues, like the most imprisoned population in the world and that glaring human rights conflict in a place called Guantanamo, Cuba. 

The idea behind this comment was not that Putin is right. I do not believe he is. I just don't think we have the moral compass any more as a nation to tell other countries what they can and can't do.  that is a shame.

Plus, I don't think there is a soul outside of Washington who is not a Tea Bagger, who wants to go to war over this.

If America wants to police the world, we'd better be ready to pay for it— in dollars and in moral currency, as well.

Let's keep our nose and troops out of the Ukrainian mess.

Saber rattling. That is what they call it when a despot moves his troops around to scare neighboring countries and states into believing he means business on such and such an issue.  It also is usually an empty gesture.

Putin his rattling his sabers and so, too, is Obama.

Everyone knows the last thing America wants right now is another armed conflict.  Our economy couldn't stand it nor could our national desire for more blood on our hands.  In fact, a recent poll showed that more Americans favored pulling our troops out of danger zones than advancing the numbers.

War is not a good policy; especially for a country who has no vested interest in the outcome of that conflict.  And the Crimea is of no concern to Joe and Ester in Kansas. They are much more concerned about getting this season's planting in ground and avoiding another drought.

So we strut around voicing our displeasure about the Russians moving troops to protect a southern state of some country that has a lot of Russians living there. The last thing Putin wants is an armed conflict in the Ukraine. He is smart enough to know he can’t win in the long run. He, like us, can remember Afghanistan. He might overpower the locals, but soon they would rot the infrastructure of society from within and the Russians would have an even bigger mess on their hands.

So, maybe this time it is best that the U.S. keep out of this.  Shut up in fact.  Say nothing. go about our business of drawing down the troops abroad and working on finding them jobs back here at home.

In fact that would be a good foreign policy for us.  Let us first look at home to make it stronger.  Let the world care for its own.  Sorry. We're busy.  We've got problems of our own and we plan to fix them first.

How 'bout them numbers, you Republicans?

It has just been reported that the national deficit is now lower than at any time since 2008. It was also reported that if the GDP and the CGI (Combined Growth Index— something the Federal Reserve uses) continue to grow, even at the paltry rate of sub 3%, America will work itself out of indebtedness in 19 years. That's at sub 3%!  Should those same indices move above 5% the rate of payoff goes to 11-12 years.



What does this mean?



President Obama, while lowering taxes on the middle class and investing in infrastructure has also set the ship right after the debacle called the George W Bush spend and slash years. Obama is actually the most fiscally conservative president we have had since Bill Clinton. By far and away more financially conservative than Ronald Ray Guns, who dubled the US indebtendness in less than four years.



Let's look at some more numbers.  The reduction in armed forces spending will equate to twice that amount needed to pay for the overhaul of the expanded Medicaid program in all 50 states.  (Remember that there are many renegade states including most of the old Confederacy who have opted not to cover their poorest of the poor with this program and most of them have hidden behind the argument that it is too costly.) Well, now it is paid for and a reserve in the bank on top of that. No more argument other than to thwart the President and to hurt poor people.  A very Christian thing to do…

When your local politicians running for Governor and Lt. Governor start spouting about the liberal, one-size fits all socialist programs like Obamacare, remember they are paid for and are based entirtely on private market sector of funding, except for the poorest people, whose coverage is now in the bank. 



If we can stay out of invading countries aboard and the indices we spoke of above continue to grow at a 4-5% rate, and the savings from the sequestering is allowed to take place (something that Democrats railed against, but not this guy) then the 11 years quoted earlier would go to something like 9.5 years.



Think of that.  The good old USA could pay off its bonds in less than a decade.  Countries like China, Russia and Germany would be vindicated in investing in America.  Once again our financial footing is looking solid.



Just thought you would want to know this as we go into a cycle of election rhetoric that is sure to heat of the liars on the rightwing.  I am sure they will be calling Democrats "Tax and Spend Liberals"…they should be calling us tax cutters, budget cutters and nation builders. Liberal is okay to call us.  We believe in open discussion of new and exciting ideas. Like national healthcare and a reduction of the huge wastes in our Pentagon budget. 


If you do not like President Obama that is your free choice.  And I stand by you and your right to a nearsighted view.  You have that right to be wrong. But don’t call the man a communist or a socialist or un-American. He has done more to turn this country around than any president in three decades.



Now if he would only close Guantanamo.

God bless Jan Brewer. (This time.)

In the 1960’s our country had a major uprising and we decided who could and who could not sit at the lunch counter.  In the end, it was decided that in a land of the free, everyone could sit at the lunch counter or ride anywhere they wished on the bus, or drink from any fountain or stay at any hotel. (Hell Augusta National even has black and female members now.)

Then came the crazies of Arizona. (Not all that dissimilar from Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, as well as Tennessee and Missouri.) They decided that by a vote of the legislature, they could force their Tea Party will on the public and make it okay to discriminate against gay people, based on religion.

Now to be fair, I know some good Christians (a bit of an oxymoron there...)who are just down right incensed at the gay lifestyle.  And that is their business and their right to be turned off by it.  But they would never stoop to exclude these people from the sect of potential shoppers for their commercial establishments. They may be small minded, but they are good bueiness people and they can count the money as well as the next guy.

But here is the bigger problem...if you took this law to its utmost realm of possibility, then one could say that a doctor or a hospital or a pharmacist  could refuse service of anyone it deemed did not fit their religious beliefs. Not Mormon enough for you?  Sorry no pre-school inoculations for your child.  Too off colored in humor for you?  Sorry, no coffee for you at the local caffeine dive.  Haven’t been fully immersed in baptism only sprinkled?  Sorry, we can’t operate on your appendix inn our hospital. That is how ridiculous this law could have made it.

Not just gay people.  But anyone that even remotely rubbed you and your religious views the wrong way could be excluded from services rendered and products sold in Arizona.

Luckily, their bat-shit crazy governor, Jan Brewer, had a moment of clarity, or a frightening dose of reality when she realized the economic impact this stupid right-wing law was going to have on her state, and she vetoed the measure. 

A bullet was dodged.  

But why was this insidious piece of legislation even brought to floor of a lawmaking body, let alone passed?  Aren’t we, as an educated, civilized  people beyond all this hate and bigotry?  Haven’t we learned our lessons well enough to know right from wrong?

Had Governor Brewer signed the law into place, Jim Crow would once again be alive and well OFFICIALLY in America.  To be sure, Jim Crow still exists just under the surface in some areas.  Just visit Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and East Texas. Crow has much support in these dark corners of failed enlightenment.

But Arizona can breathe a bit easier.  Their state will not be humiliated (too much) on late night talk shows, nor made fun of (too much) by comedians and editorial cartoonist. And the real winner, the real winner is not the LGBT community, even though the law was aimed at them: no, the real winner is the U.S. Constitution. We the people are still a collective until not segregated by race, religion, creed or lifestyle.

Thank you Jan Brewer.  You helped make America a better place to live.  For once, you acted like a true leader.

I Beleive in Jesus, Ted Nugent, the NRA and my Glock 9mm.

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you may have missed the fact that Texas is about to hold election primaries.  And the bigger news is the GOP and its right-wing zinger little brother, the Tea Party, are about to have a family feud that rivals the Hatfields and McCoys. Every commercial you hear some would-be candidate is expounding on how he individually got Ronald Ray Guns elected President (some, even before they were born).

All ads have this in common… “I will work to kill anything that has the slightest stench of Obama on it.”  Even senators and state legislators who cried out for federal funds from the Obama administration during the years for emergencies and for economic recovery, are now staunchly anti Obama. In fact that word has become the “O” word.  Kind of like the “N” word in Texas politics. You would think each of these candidates is running against Obama himself. They are all trying to squeeze into th tightest corner in the right hand side of the box, that I am surprised the damn box has flipped over.  (It may well in the general election.)

The claims and the in- party partisan bickering has leapt to all time highs.  Conservatives like John Cornyn are being called liberal because they voted for a tax increases or for budgets ceilings to be raised or for simply being there when Congress was in session... and those are just the starters.

No one has chronicled this better than Jacqueline Floyd of the Dallas Morning News.  As a public service for those of you not living in the DMN area, here is her column today.  Enjoy:

Floyd: Texas primary election is a wild-eyed race to the far right.

Every time we got comfortable this weekend — for a meal or a nap or a backlogged TV episode — the phone rang.

It was never a person. It was a steady barrage of push polls and robo-calls, all meant to influence us in the state primary election, which is still an interminable week away. I may be influenced to jump off a building before we get there. 

As every Texan is painfully aware, tea party challengers are going after “establishment” Republicans across the state. The result is a frenzied, squealing race to the right as candidates vie frantically to be the most bona-fide rock-solid hard-core conservative in all the land. 

A Houston Chronicle editorial this week called this year’s GOP primary campaign a “googly eyed, wagging-tongue ritual,” one that turns otherwise sensible adults into screeching bug-eyed zealots. 

A colleague over at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported last week on a Tarrant County tea party official who warned followers against voting for Methodists, claiming that they’re more likely to be tarred with the taint of liberalism than God-fearing Southern Baptists.

You can’t tune in for a traffic report on the radio without hearing dark accusations that this-or-that Republican is a closet liberal who doesn’t love guns enough, doesn’t loathe the president enough, hasn’t thought of enough ways to punish and humiliate unauthorized immigrants. 

Some candidates have declined to stoop to this absurdity — there are several incumbents I can think of who are grimly enduring hysterical demonization from the way-out-there right. But plenty of them are running scared enough to be suckered into this craziest-candidate-standing competition. 

The proof is in our mailbox, which daily disgorges a plentiful stack of slick campaign mailers. A surprising number of them fall back on a nearly identical formula: The candidate is described as a “proud conservative” beloved by abortion opponents and pro-gun groups; the opponent is excoriated as, if not an outright friend of (title conspicuously omitted) Obama, at least a jelly-kneed moderate; a photograph is shown of the candidate posing at some fundraiser or pancake breakfast or turkey shoot alongside U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.

Those that can’t produce a photo with Cruz are pictured with the family or a shotgun or a pickup truck, but these are poor substitutes for the genuine me-’n’-Ted money shot. 

Candidates for all kinds of office follow variations on this script:

I will stand tall against Washington, “Obama,” liberals and every combination thereof. No matter how much chaos it causes, I will never cooperate or work with them in any capacity. If they get on the same elevator as I’m riding, I will not push their floor button.

My all-time favorite constitutional amendment is the second. I love it more than all the other amendments put together. I support a constitutional amendment that would replace the First Amendment with the Second Amendment so that the Second Amendment would come first.

My opponent says he is a lifelong Republican — if this is true, why did he appear in a 1971 grade-school history pageant as Grover Cleveland? Why has he offered no explanation for this troubling contradiction?

If elected, I will seal off all 1,900 miles of the Texas-Mexico border with a wall made of red-hot cast iron and topped with live flames and protected by a 50,000-member armed security force. This will be funded by my plan to raise new Homeland Security funds by eliminating entitlement benefits to anyone whose cellphone ring tone plays the opening bars of “La Cucaracha” or who owns one of those oversized souvenir sombreros with “Hecho en Mexico” embroidered on the brim.

I will stand very, very tall to define marriage as being between one man and one woman. The only legal exceptions will be the case of a union between one person and one firearm or between me and Ted Cruz — I’m just crazy about that man. 

I believe life begins not just at the nanosecond of conception, but when your great-great-great grandfather was conceived. I would support the concept of all human life beginning at the conception of the first single-celled organism to crawl forth from the primordial ooze — if I believed in evolution, which I don’t.

Well, it can’t be just us here in Texas. I suppose there may be places in this country where frantic left-wing candidates are trying to position themselves as stand-tall anarchists and demonizing their opponents as wavering in their perpetual outrage toward (title conspicuously omitted) George W. Bush. But we don’t live in that neck of the woods. 

What we’re getting is our great democratic process in its gaudiest and most exotic plumage. It can’t end soon enough.

Want a fight? Pick on someone your own size.

For some people, they don't like how the cookie crumbles.  Take the Girl Scouts and their current attack by extreme right wing religious Taliban in the USA.  It is despicable.

And in a rare case I am not going to use my words about it, but rather let you enjoy a wonderful column by Jacqueline Floyd of the Dallas Morning News. She said it better than anyone I've ever run across. And to think it was published in a Pro-Life  daily like the Morning News is all the more powerful.

BTW: this is rerun without permission but i do it as a public service for those of you who do not get this newspaper.

Floyd: Girl Scout cookie boycott is crazy; upsetting kids is cruel

By Jacquielynn Floyd

Columnist

If the witch-hunters and monster-shouters among us want to demonize Girl Scout cookies, there’s probably no point in trying to talk sense to them.

Once that kind of hysteria gets out of the barn, the stampede is on, shaking its horns and rolling its eyeballs and slinging long strings of slobber in its wake.

So if a noisy sect of cranks is truly determined to believe that Thin Mints came straight from Satan’s lunch box, well, that’s just more cookies for the rest of us.

Dark suspicion over the Girl Scouts, fueled by an extremist sliver of Waco-based conservatives, has been simmering for a while now. This time around, the epidemic of paranoia stems from one tweet and a single Facebook post.

Late last year, the national scouts organization’s official Twitter account cited a Huffington Post article about well-known and influential women of the year. The article named several women, including gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, who favors abortion rights.

The organization also posted a link on its Facebook page to a Washington Post article about seven “women who made a difference in 2013.” One of the seven was U.S. Secretary of Health Kathleen Sebelius, who has called for mandatory insurance coverage of contraceptives.

Out of the thousands of links-’n’-tweets the scouts organization issued, these two secondhand mentions were meant to reference lists of prominent and influential women.

These were not endorsements. No abortion-rights screeds. The Girl Scouts organization patiently if wearily reiterates that it doesn’t endorse candidates, doesn’t take a stand on abortion or contraception, does not involve itself in political issues.

Girl Scouts USA spokeswoman Kelly Parisi told the Associated Press that the articles were cited to highlight the year’s women newsmakers and “to encourage conversations about what it takes to be a female leader.” That’s it.

No matter. Pants-on-fire opportunists are using this nonissue to persuade the credulous that the Girl Scouts are actually a secret indoctrination conspiracy run by godless infidel feminists. They’re demanding a cookie boycott.

Demonizing Girl Scout cookies, I guess, is harmless-enough nonsense. Demonizing Girl Scouts, though, is a different story.

After buying groceries this weekend, I walked out of the supermarket, where a suburban mom was manning a card table while her sweet, eager scout daughter tried to drum up cookie sales.
The girl, who was no older than about 9, hopefully approached a woman shopper, asking if she would like to buy cookies.

The woman answered loudly: “I don’t contribute to groups that support abortion!” She fixed the girl and her mom with an angry, bug-eyed marmoset stare.

The unhappy mom said, stammering, “Really, that’s not true. I’ve researched it myself. It really isn’t true.”

The angry woman talked right over her: “I’ll never give a nickel of my money to a pro-abortion group! Never!”

It was awful. The little girl and a younger sister, who was about 5 or 6, looked stricken.
“Mom?” asked the scout, anxious and worried, as if she had done something wrong. “What’s abortion?”

“I’m not telling you,” the mother said miserably. The woman, clearly anxious to keep broadcasting her views to everybody within a mile, did not budge.

At this point, I jumped in. “I want cookies!” I said with hearty enthusiasm. “Show me what kind you have!”

Back on familiar turf, the sweet Girl Scout went smoothly into her sales spiel: “These are good if you like peanut butter. Or if you like caramel, these are really good, too.”

I emptied my wallet to buy cookies and scraped up change from the bottom of my purse to buy another box for U.S. soldiers fighting overseas. I hovered over the cookie table until the cruel, crazy woman had stalked off to the parking lot.

It should be an elementary point of civilized behavior, but for anybody who needs a refresher, there is a correct answer to someone offering you something that, for whatever reason, you do not want to buy. It’s “No thank you.”

You do not engage in political arguments about contentious, adult topics with unsuspecting children, ever. Even if your poor tortured head is honeycombed with crazy Internet rumors and outright lies, you say, “No thanks” and walk on.

I was so angry that I (girlishly) cried a little bit in the car. I cried because that sweet girl thought she had said or done something wrong and because her mom was in the hopeless position of trying to talk sense to someone determined to believe nonsense and because the younger sister couldn’t understand why everybody was upset when they were supposed to be having fun selling cookies.

I cried because the one person in this awful little drama who ought to have been embarrassed was the one person who wasn’t.

Next time the demon-shouters get good and worked up, remember to ask yourself: Who’s the real demon here?