Too Old. Too Fat.

I am now officially depressed.  A friend of mine had posted a job opening in the Sports Department of a small-market TV station and given my vast experience as a sportscaster, my skill set, and my work ethic, I'd be the perfect hire.  Not to mention my attitude.  I love everything about everybody.  All the time.  So I sent the guy an e-mail saying hat given my experience, skill set and work ethic, I'd be the perfect hire. 

He writes me back and says, "Like me you are over 50.  Like me you are overweight.  I would not be hired in an open market."

The meaning was clear.  I was being told that I was too old and too fat to come to work for him, even though he's known me for 20 years and knows first-hand the quality of the work I do. 

What a kick in my (large) gut.  I can lose weight, that's no problem; but how can I get younger?  Answer me that.

I felt better when I got to the part in his e-mail about how the job was only going to pay $8.00/hour, but only a little.  The fact that an on-air position at any TV station was going to pay only a few cents over minimum wage was somewhat depressing in its own right.

Even if I am over 50, I'm thinking hard about going to law school.  That way, the next time I'm told I'm too old and too fat when I'm applying for a job which does not involve playing Major League Baseball I can sue the guys ass myself.  Don't get mad, get even, right?

Easter

I don't know what it was like where you were, but here in the greater Detroit area yesterday--Easter Sunday, the temperature was in the upper 20's and there was snow on the ground as we made our way to church. Not very Easter-like.

I sing (if one is willing to accept a very liberal definition of the word "sing", that is) in the choir and as we waited in the narthex to process into the sanctuary, I amused some (but not all) of my fellow parishioners by observing that, had the actual Easter Morning been as cold as it was yesterday, "Jesus would have stayed in tomb."

I figure my mock chilly Savior would have said something like, "Roll that stone back into place, will 'ya? It's freezing out there. Let's try it again Tuesday or Wednesday, okay?"

As I mentioned, many around me laughed. A few did not. In fact, one or two people shot me a dirty look. People are funny about humor and religion.

I read the "created in His own image" clause of the Bible to mean that God, in addition to ungodly good looks, gave me a sense of humor. If I'm wrong about that, well, we'll be seeing you in the Lake of Fire. My bad.

Others see virtually any attempt to make a funny when it comes to matters involving religion as sacrilege. I understand. Of course, the chance that I might offend those around me has not and will not prevent me from joking about God, Heaven, Hell and all the rest of it, but I do understand. They can pray for me if they want to. I can use all of that I can get.

Father of the Week

I know I should be watching the BCS Championship game, Ohio State's getting an ass-kicking of historic proportions and all; and I know I should be paying attention to the weather since we've got a Tornado Watch in effect here on a January 7 which, unbelievably, saw the temperature hit the mid-60's, but on this evening this is more important.  You see, The Lauroo was today named "Student of the Week" at Power Middle School (PMS).

When so informed of this most momentous development after school today, first by her and subsequently in a personal phone call from none other than the principal himself,  my reaction was what anyone who knows me--especially Laura,  would  expect it to be.  I said to her,  "What does this mean to The Dad?"

In mere moments though it occurred to me exactly what this meant to me and as soon as I came to that realization my face brightened. Beaming, I looked at Laura and exclaimed, "This makes me The Father of the Week!"

Laura found this disconcerting, asking, "What did you do, exactly?"

"Well," I said, "Quite literally for starters as far as you are concerned, I had sex with your mother."

"What else?"

"I'm sure I'll think of something."

I kid, of course.  She knows I was kidding, too, so don't worry about that and don't think bad thoughts about me.  Not any worse than the thoughts you usually think, anyway.  The fact is that I could not have been prouder.  Actually, the fact is that I could not be prouder of her whether she's "Student of the Week" or not.  While my bias is as obvious as is the reason for it, I'm her father for crying out loud, I can tell you that I have never once had to worry about this one, save for the day she was born.  And even then she was thoughtful enough to see to it that I only had to worry for half a day.

Laura was born early--a preemie.  She weighed in six weeks early.   Almost seven, in fact.  This, as you might imagine,  took Jeannie and me completely by surprise.  We were very decidedly not yet ready for a baby.  Hell, we still had two sessions left  in our "So You're About To Be Parents For the First Time" class, the last of which involved a tour of the nursery and birthing areas of Beaumont Hospital. 

What happened was that the baby doctor told us to proceed directly to Beaumont after examining Jeannie during a regularly scheduled visit when we still thought we had a month-and-a-half left to prepare for the arrival of our baby.  She had developed a condition and, unless labor could be induced, they were going to have to go and get the baby straightaway.

Now, that worried me. 

We spent the rest of the day in a hospital room waiting to see if those inducing drugs would in fact induce, having been told that if the baby wasn't born that night, a C-section would have to be performed first thing the next morning.

Early in the evening, one of those birthing classes we still needed to take to complete our parenting course came through the delivery area and I told Jeannie that with nothing better to do I may as well join them and off I went.  The last stop was the nursery.  I stood there looking at all those brand new babies and I had no emotion whatsoever and it scared me to death.  I knew for a fact that I had a baby just like the ones I was looking at coming into my life the very next day and those babies in the nursery did nothing for me.  Nothing at all.  Was this how I was going to feel the next day?  My blood ran cold.  I was worried I'd made a huge mistake.  Having a baby had been my idea, after all.  I knew Jeannie had her worries, too.  She'd ask me from time to time, "What if we don't like having a baby?  It's not like we can give it back, you know!"

Other than making her feel like crap, the inducing drugs had no effect on Jeannie and the next morning they took her in for her emergency C-section, leaving me to wait  in the hallway.  I spent what seemed like the longest time sitting there in my scrubs contemplating what I felt was the distinct  possibility that I could lose my wife and my baby in one fell swoop if things weren't going right in that operating room. 

Finally, the nurse came to take me into the operating theatre, which I am pretty sure was an afterthought.  I think they forgot about me, because by the time they came to get me the doctors were well along in the procedure.  When I walked in and glanced over at my wife I saw what looked to me like a huge incision.  I remember thinking, "My God, they are cutting her in half!"  I'll never forget the speed with which the surgeon worked.  I swear you could hear the knives clanking against one another.  Honest to God, the closest thing I'd ever seen to it  involved a spectacle I'd taken in one night at a restaurant in Peoria where a professional hockey player I knew cut up and ate a 60-ounce steak in under eleven minutes.  Fast, man. 

And so, within a minute of my sitting down next to Jeannie, they pulled Laura out.  The surgeon held her aloft, like he was hoisting the Stanley Cup it seemed to me, and announced that we had a baby girl.  The baby girl had what appeared to me to be a look of shocked surprise on her face.  As in, "Just what in the hell do you people think you are doing?"  And, "What's a people, anyway?  I have no idea, you know.  I've never seen one before."  It was 11:04 in the morning and my life had changed forever.

Jeannie's reaction surprised me.  "A daughter?  I have a daughter?"  I could tell she was happier than she would have been had we had a son.  Which, by the way, is what we had been convinced we were going to have.  For my part, I was surprised that I didn't seem to care if it was a boy or a girl.  I was just happy, more than happy, with the baby we had.  I mean, instantly happy. 

A nurse took the baby off to the side and I could tell things weren't perfect.  They were working her over pretty good.  They let me hold her for about five seconds and show her to her mother and before she even got a decent look at her baby girl they'd snatched her right back from me and went right back to working on her.

"She's a little blueish," one of the nurses said.  "She's not getting  enough air."  They give all newborns something called an APGAR test.  I can't remember if that's an acronym or not, nor can I remember on what criteria they test the baby.  I can't remember Laura's APGAR score but I remember asking and I remember being concerned when I was told that the number, which was on the scale of one-to-ten, was lower than the number should have been based on what we had learned in the Learning To Be A Parent class and the pre-birth reading and research I had done.  Besides, truth be told, the baby did look a little on the purple side to me even if I didn't want to admit it.

Within a moments I found myself walking alongside a little gurney which was taking Laura off to Baby Intensive Care.  They'd put a little tiny oxygen mask on her little tiny face.  It looked like it was squishing her tiny little left eye.  I felt bad for her (I don't think I thought of her as my daughter yet, not enough time had elapsed for that mental adjustment to take place) and asked the nurse to readjust the mask but she said it was the best they could do given her size.  Laura had indeed weighed in, but she didn't weigh in much:  only four pounds, two ounces.  There was just not a lot of baby there. 

They popped her into an incubator and I watched her sleep for a while and then went off in search of my wife.  She was in post-op on a different floor drugged to the brink of incoherency and when I walked in I looked at her and I said, (and this is a direct quote): "OHMYGOD!SHE"SSOBEAUTIFULshelooksjustlikeyou!and shehasthecutestlittlehandsthatlookjustlikeyourhandsand            theprettiestlittleeyesthatlookjustlikeyoureyesanddidImentionshe'sjustBEAUTIFULandarewestillgoingtonameherLauraanddidItell youthat'sshe'sjustBEAUTIFUL?"

Jeannie looked up at me like she had just learned that her husband was from freaking Mars.  I didn't know at the time, but all I had done was convince her that something was terribly, terribly wrong with her baby daughter.  She'd had, after all, never seen me in such a state.  She'd never heard me talk so fast and mind you, I announced professional hockey games for a living and as such was trained to talk fast.  But never, ever as fast as I was banging on then. 

I left her and went off to find her mother in the waiting room.  There were about ten people there and when I spotted her I told her, "You have a granddaughter!" and everybody else in the room burst into applause and you should have seen the look on Edith's face!

Then the oddest thing.  I knew one of the people in the room.  He was a PR guy for one of the teams I covered and I was still all excited and I started to tell him how great it was and how happy he was going to be and he had to stop me to tell me that he and his wife were there because their baby had died in the womb and they were there to have it removed and I just felt so bad and I just had no idea what to say. 

There was one other odd thing. We lived only a couple of miles from the hospital, making it easy to run home on errands.  I had gone to the house for something and when I was getting in the car to go back to the hospital for some reason, probably having something to do with the fact that I was pretty goofy that day, I left my wallet on the roof of the car as I drove off.  That evening I got a call from a reporter at WWJ which was strange because I was working at WJR, a competing station.  We were colleagues.  He didn't want a quote for the news about our newborn, he wanted to tell me that he had found my wallet lying on Coolige Road.  What are the odds on something like that?

Blissfully unaware my wallet was missing, I got back to the hospital around four o'clock, just in time for them to take the baby out of the incubator.  I looked down at her and she was all pink and perfect  and I just knew that that kid was as healthy as a horse.  There was no doubt in my mind.  I stopped worrying right then and there.  Like I said, half a day, that's all I  had to worry about my Laura.  It's all I've ever had to worry about her.  A nurse started to put an IV needle in her little forehead. I asked why.  She told me it was for antibiotics.  I told the nurse she didn't need them, that she was perfectly healthy.  The nurse didn't much seem to care about my opinion for some reason and so Laura spent the first few days of her life with that needle stuck in her head.  It's okay.  She doesn't remember.

Over the course of the next few days I would pick her up and hold her tiny little self in my arms all the time and I would softly sing to her: "She's just a little woo baby girl, living in her little woo baby world.  And she's doing little woo baby things..."  I sang that song I'd made up on the spot to her over and over and over.  I always thought additional verses would come to me, but they never did.  And they never have. Not to this day.  And I'm going to stop now because the memories are making me cry, I love her so much.

Except for this one little memory.  Before one could enter that special care nursery where Laura spent the first ten days of her life, it was mandatory to wash your hands using a special soap and a special little scrubbing sponge with hard plastic bristles which were provided by the hospital.  I was fanatical about it.  If I saw somebody try to go into the nursery and I didn't think they'd spent the full 8 or 10 minutes washing, whichever the sign said was the required time to spend at the task, I'd call 'em on it and make 'em go back and wash their hands some more.  I didn't care. 

A day or so after Laura was born our pastor drove all the way over from Farmington to visit us at  the hospital.  I was sitting in a chair in the nursery rocking Laura (singing the Woo Baby song, no doubt) when I looked up and there he was.  Before I even knew what the words were that were coming out of my mouth, I demanded of him, "Did you wash your hands?"

Like I said, I'm Father of the Week. 

Dreams

Did you ever see "The Lonely Guy"?  It's not the best comedy ever, but it does have its moments.  Such as when Steve Martin tells Charles Grodin that he's going to go take a nap and Grodin responds by saying he doesn't like to nap.

"You know that feeling you have when you wake up and realize who you are?"  he asks.  "I only like to have to go through that once a day."

My love of and appreciation for a good nap non-withstanding, I find myself approaching a similar line of reasoning.

There was the day before yesterday, for example, when what Grodin described became my literal experience as I awoke from a wonderful dream, the best I'd had in months.  I was working, doing a stand-up, a live shot, from the Super Bowl.  Sadly, with consciousness came  my reality, that being that I was not in fact at the Super Bowl and that it was just  another day of my not working: another day with no show for me to do, no live shot to perform on-site at a sporting event.  No nothing.  It actually took me a few minutes to get over it.   To quote from another movie, in this case the classic Airplane, "What a pisser!"

Then there was last night and a dream which I must consider to be, at the very least, unsettling.  I was at a baseball game.  Because I recognized the players' uniforms, I'm pretty sure I was at the Big A watching the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim or whatever in the hell they are calling themselves these days play the Detroit Tigers.  In the bottom of the 8th one of the Halos clobbered a homer with one out and two aboard to erase what had been a 3-2 Detroit lead. The Tiger pitcher must have hung one because he flat-out hit the snot out of the thing.  Way back into the seats in left.  The thing is, as the hitter made his way around the bases I couldn't help but notice that the batter-runner was, in fact, a dog.  A dog who bore an uncanny resemblance to a beagle I'd seen earlier in the day in a TV ad.  It must have been, now that I think of it, a three-dog homer!  The little guy was so excited that when he rounded third, bounding in the air and barking with the sheer delight of the moment, he ran past the dog ahead of him, failing to heed my shouts of, "Don't do it!"  He realized his mistake and fell back behind the dog who had been in front of him, but I don't have to tell you that it was already too late.  He was, of course, out for passing a teammate on the basepaths.  Then the lead dog, the one who had occupied first when the homer was hit, turned around and scampered back to be with his buddy the homer-hitter. He  was also declared out for violation of the same rule.  The dog in the middle simply turned and trotted into the dugout without touching home plate although that faux paws didn't matter so much since the inning was by now all over.  The Tigers went on to win.

Moments later, I found myself being excoriated for all of this by Angels manager Mike Scioscia.  He was livid, screaming at me while making  generous use of every bad word known to  Organized Ball while all the while managing to maintain flawless grammar.

I have no idea what to make of any of this.  I wonder what tonight will bring.  Unless I take a nap before then, and in spite of it all, I'm not at all ruling that out at this point in time.

Flashbacks of a lost cause

Here's an interesting discussion of history from The Boston Globe today which, if one shares the view of the writer (and I do), has a bearing on the situation in Iraq.  It's about the occupation of Palestine by the British.  You can read a lot of thoughtful stories like this on at a site I check just about every day, True Blue Liberal.  The address is http://www.trueblueliberal.com/

As for the Boston Globe piece...

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/07/17/flashbacks_of_a_lost_cause/

By H.D.S. Greenway  |  July 17, 2007

AT FIRST the template was Germany and Japan in 1945. As we turned those defeated tyrannies into successful democracies, so would we create a new Iraq, and by so doing transform the entire Middle East. Now we are told that Korea might provide an example for a long-term America presence.

As Washington struggles with what to do with a lost war, consider the British experience in Palestine and their 30-year mandate after World War I. The British entered Palestine believing that they were liberating the land from Ottoman tyranny. Britain, "with its technological and military superiority . . . its entrepreneurial and missionary zeal, its largely democratic institutions, was to take the once-great peoples of the East into tutelage and direct their slow but sure progress under stable and just government," A.J. Sherman recalls in his book, "Mandate Days." "This clashed almost immediately with the reality of Palestine."

Although favoring a Jewish homeland under the Balfour Declaration, the British genuinely hoped for national reconciliation and peace in Palestine between Jews and Arabs. But from the beginning the soldiers found themselves in a dilemma because, as Tom Segev writes in "One Palestine Complete," "the government expected the army to impose peace between the Jews and the Arabs, as a result of which it had to fight both of them."

At first the British "reflected indefatigable optimism," Segev writes, and were slow to realize that they were in the middle of a civil war in which neither side would compromise. Both sides were "wedded to their national identity and committed to victory."

First came the Arab revolt of 1936-1939, which was marked by cruelty and torture of Arab prisoners -- including simulated drowning. Later on, even before the end of World War II, came terror from the Zionist side. When Arabs and Jews weren't fighting each other they attacked the British, who were still trying to create space for national reconciliation.

Casualties mounted as the British tried troop surges to get on top of deteriorating security. An additional 25,000 soldiers sent to Palestine became the biggest troop deployment sent overseas between the two world wars.

The British were blown up in terrorist attacks, their soldiers kidnapped and killed. When they weren't surging, they holed up in Green Zone-like enclaves called "Bevingads," after Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin.

After World War II, support for the mandate quickly eroded. Winston Churchill complained about this "squalid warfare with terrorists."

"Security continued to erode despite the presence of over 100,000 troops," Sherman writes. "The sense of constant menace (was) heightened by the ubiquitous roadside mines, against which no British vehicle could be adequately armored."

Toward the end, Chief Secretary William Battershill wrote that the British were staying because "they just did not know how to pull out," according to Segev. Bevin admitted to David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel's first prime minister, that "Palestine is not vital to England, but England does not want to have to admit failure."

Both Arabs and Jews were ready and anxious to have the British stay on as long as a British presence could further their cause. But once the British seemed to be favoring one side, trouble came from the other.

A principle reason for staying on was fear of the chaos that would follow a retreat. But after 30 years of trying to engineer compromise, the British left with their tails between their legs when support on the home front collapsed. Once they were gone, the feared upsurge of bloodshed between Arabs and Jews was realized, and the nightmare of outside intervention from neighboring states came to pass. The ramifications are with us still.

Ben-Gurion had predicted it all in 1919. "Everyone sees the problem in relations between the Jews and the Arabs," he said. "But not everyone sees that there's no solution to it . . . The conflict between the interests of the Jews and the interests of the Arabs in Palestine cannot be resolved by sophisms . . . I don't know of any Arabs who would agree to Palestine being ours . . . We want the country to be ours. The Arabs want the country to be theirs." In the end, Ben-Gurion was willing to divide the land. The Arabs were not.

There may be little comparison between the two national movements who fought the British and each other over Palestine and the contentious groups struggling for power in Iraq today. But the danger of a foreign power fighting a long war to force compromise on combatants who have no interest in compromise is hauntingly similar.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.

While Europeans Holiday, Americans Toil

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070709_while_europeans_holiday_americans_toil/

 

Posted on Jul 9, 2007

By Marie Cocco

If you’re reading this while on vacation, great for you. If you’re reading this at work, having just finished a vacation or a five-day weekend cobbled together around last week’s celebration of Independence Day, I hope the time off was as spectacular as the fireworks.

If you won’t get another day off work until December’s holiday season, you’re not alone. Americans and vacations just don’t mix.

This may surprise those who have just spent hours stranded at airports or idling in a hot line for a ride at an amusement park. But a quarter of American workers get no paid vacation or paid holidays. And on average, those private-sector workers who do get paid time off are granted only nine vacation days and six paid holidays each year, according to government statistics analyzed by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The liberal-leaning think tank analyzed paid vacation and holiday leave policies among the U.S. and nations with comparably developed economies—the European Union, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.  The predictable portrait is one of the United States as a nation of workaholics—a syndrome related less to the archetype of a striving executive than it is linked to government policy.

In the rest of the industrialized world, a month or more of paid vacation is typical, and often required. Many Americans know that. And there are can-you-top-this supplements to this surfeit of paid time off. Such as: In Austria, workers who labor at “heavy night work” get two or three extra days off. Also in Austria—as well as in Sweden and New Zealand—workers are actually paid at a higher rate when they’re on vacation than when they’re at work.

In France, workers get extra paid time off if they take some of their vacation days outside of the summer season. In Norway, those 60 and older get extra time off. And of course, your vacation could be ruined if you get sick while you’re away. So Sweden guarantees that if a worker becomes sick while on leave, the days of the illness don’t count against vacation time.

Stingy leave policies in the United States go hand and hand with weekly work hours that exceed those in many industrialized countries. And they parallel skimpy sick leave and family leave policies that give millions of Americans no effective safety net when illness or emergencies strike. Nearly half of private-sector workers—57 million people—have no paid sick days, according to Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., a chief sponsor of a measure to require at least some sick days for employees who work more than 30 hours per week. The problem is particularly acute for low-wage workers, more than three-fourths of whom get no paid leave when they are ill.

In theory, all this hard work is supposed to spark a more robust economy that is, in turn, an engine of greater upward mobility than what is found in the supposedly coddled precincts of, say, the European Union. But lately, it hasn’t. An ongoing, bipartisan study of intergenerational economic mobility conducted jointly by conservative and liberal-leaning researchers for the Pew Charitable Trusts has found the myth of superior American mobility to be—a myth.

Researchers for the Economic Mobility Project studied the relationship of adult children’s incomes to those of their parents and found that the United States now lags behind France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark in this measure of upward mobility. “There is little available evidence that the United States has more relative mobility than other advanced nations,” the group reported in May. “If anything, the data seem to suggest the opposite.”

Comparing the incomes of American men who were in their 30s in 2004 with males who were in their 30s in 1974, the researchers found that today’s men actually earn about 12 percent less, after inflation, than their fathers’ generation did. “There has been no progress at all for the youngest generation,” the group reported. The American family stays afloat because its total income has been swelled by women’s paychecks.

The sober statistics should lead toward saner economic policies. Europe, Canada and the rest of the industrialized world are doing just fine with guaranteed health insurance, pensions, maternity leave and sick time—not to mention a month at the beach. Here at home, nothing threatens the American dream so much as political disinclination to cast off old thinking and demand change for new and harsher economic times. 

What's the Biggest Story of the Day?

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

 

This is just what I've heard on the radio today.  It's like this pretty much everyday.  What I will do is jot down a brief notation about these items I find to be important off the top of my head every day for a week or so and we'll see where we stand...

Everybody on McCain Staff Quits or is Fired:

I'm not sure if it was firings or resignations this time around, but after 50 campaign staffers were "cut loose" last week, John McCain's campaign manager and all top staff today announced they were leaving the campaign, too...The suggestion is being floated that McCain may drop out of the presidential race by the weekend. It's that bad.  How long ago was it that McCain was the favorite to win the '08 GOP nomination? 

LA Senator (R-Naturally) Named Client by DC Madam:

I'll have to look the guys name up on "ThinkProgress" or "Huffington Post, but it's true.  One of Louisiana's two United States Senators has released a statement to the Associated Press expressing regret for "the harm he's done to his family, etc." after it became known or was about to become known that his name was the "DC Madam's" address book. 

The story is that Senator got a call from "Hustler Magazine" (did "Hustler" publisher Larry Flynt buy that address book?  I may have read that he had).

Within hours of the call from the magazine, Senator's office released a statement in which he expressed regret the way you want to see it expressed, not merely "profound" but "profound" and "heartfelt".   The phrases "years ago" and "I asked for the forgiveness of God and my wife" were prominently used. 

Here's the best part: this guy got into congress when he replaced a congressman (Livingston?) who had been forced to resign when his extra-marital affair had been made public by "Hustler" publisher Larry Flynt.  He just looked like too big a hypocrite.  Whining about Clinton's dalliance by day, banging a whore by night.  It was all so, You know, unseemly.

Here's the second-best part:  on "The Stephanie Miller show this morning, they read a quote from the John's wife you had to like.  Back in the 90's, during her husband's first term in the house (where he spent plenty of time on the record calling for Clinton to quit over a, well-you-know, the wife gets asked if she would be as forgiving of her husband as Mrs. Clinton had been of Prsident Clinton.  She  said something along the lines of how she'd be more like Lorena Bobbitt.  Lornea Bobbitt got in the news a number of years ago (but they never leat you forget, do they Lorena?) by cutting off her cheating husband's, you know.  Ouch.  I saw the procedure called a "bobbittectomy" on a post at the popular "Jesus' General web site. 

Iraq "Oh-For" in Benchmark-Meeting

The troublesome mainstream media reports today that when President Bush reports to congress Sunday on the situation in Iraq he will reveal that the Iraqi government has achieved exactly none of the benchmarks by which their progress of lack thereof is being measured.  The report was mandated by congress as part of a previously-approved  Iraq spending bill.

Former Surgeon General Decries Political Meddling

The former Surgeon General of the US testified congress that political considerations routinely won out over public health policy considerations during his four-year tenure as the nations top doc. 

Bush Blames Al-Queda for Iraq Violence

In a speech in Cleveland the president said, "the crowd (oh, that crowd) who are attacking us there is the same crowd that attacked us on 9-11." 

And With All That Going On...

The lead story on the ABC Evening News on Monday the 1oth and the lead story on all three of the morning shows on Tuesday the 11th was none of the above. 

Chertoff, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, told a Chicago newspaper that he had a "gut feeling" that there could be a significant terrorist event on US soil this summer, noting that terrorist are "active" during the summer months.  He said, apparently missing that the point he was making is that the current administration has done nothing, no thing, to make us safer in the last 6 years, "We are at as great a risk of attack today as we were on Sept. 10, 2001."

 

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Again, this is just what I've heard on the radio or seen on the internet today: 

New Orleans Hooker says Louisiana Senator Was Customer

Same Senator who was busted  yesterday, just to update that another call girl, this one in the home district New Orleans, says the GOP Senator was a regular john there, too.

I have got to get this guys name.  Stephanie Miller, on Guess the Quote today, read a long list of 1990's quotes from this twit when he was a congressman calling for Clinton to resign the presidency because he had cheated on his wife.  Hi again, everybody. 

Rachael Maddow cited five instances where hookers and the repubs have had brushed up against one another, so to speak.  Let's see, there was Jeff Gannon/Guckert, the White House "reporter" and gay escort who, if the Visitors Log is accurate, may have had numerous sleep-overs at the White House itself;  The Fabulously Revered Ted Haggert who was president of the largest evangelical Christian organization in America, busted for drugs and hanging with a male prostitute; the State Department official previously disclosed to have been a "client" of the DC prostitute, and I can't remember the others although Dusty Foggo's name came up in connection with the defense contractor scandal which resulted in the conviction of San Diego congressman Duke Cunningham because there was some whoring around going on there, too. 

I Don't Recall

A former aide to Karl Rove testified before the US Senate today regarding the US Attorney resignations, but in the main couldn't remember anything of significance about her days in the White House.  The Bush White House had demanded that the woman not testify, but there she was today so I'm not sure what the deal was.