Inch by Inch, Obama is Moving Mountains

There are many whom I enjoy reading, and whom write far better than I could ever hope to. There are also many that know more than I could ever know, or hope to know. I am not claiming that what is below is right, wrong, or somewhere in between, well probably somewhere in between, but I also know that Mr. Sullivan presents a good argument, and packages it well, so thought I would share.

Thank you again for getting this far with me, and thank you to my sister Tina for sending me the link, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article6968384.ece.

From The Sunday Times article by Andrew Sullivan

Between Barack Obama and Tiger Woods, it wasn’t such a good December for idolised, lean, brown golfers. Tiger, however, can hide. Barack, alas, cannot. The venom against Obama has been right up there with that directed against, well, Bush, Clinton, Nixon, Johnson ... America is, after all, a tough political arena.

The right treated the Senate passage of health insurance reform — a bill that essentially subsidises private health insurance for the working poor — as if it were the new dawn of bolshevism. Actually, that would be too mild. “Two-thirds of the country don’t want this. And one-third of these jihadists, these healthcare jihadists, do,” opined the Republican commentator Mary Matalin.

The left, however, was no kinder. Many leading liberal lights called for the bill to be killed because it gave too much to insurance and drug companies and failed to provide a publicly funded alternative to private insurance. The columnist Arianna Huffington lamented: “If the miserable Senate healthcare bill becomes the law of the land, it’s only going to encourage the preservation of a hideously broken system.”

My favourite splutter came from the Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson, who declared the entire bill an encomium to Obama’s self-centredness. “It is about him: about the legacy he covets as the president who achieved ‘universal’ health insurance,” Samuelson inveighed. Then — hilariously — he added: “To be sure, the [proposals] would provide insurance to 30m or more Americans by 2019.” What did the Romans ever do for us?

The bill is not perfect and will need work in the next few years — on cutting some entitlements and controlling costs in other ways. But the law remains largely what Obama promised in the campaign.

As with most attempts to judge Obama, a little perspective helps. So let’s review, shall we? This is the biggest single piece of social legislation in 40 years. The Congressional Budget Office predicts it will indeed insure 30m people.

And this is only the end of year one. In the stimulus package in the spring, Obama invested an unprecedented amount of federal money in infrastructure, with an unsung focus on noncarbon energy sources. He engineered a vast and nerve-racking banking rescue that is now under-budget by $200 billion because so many banks survived.

He organised the restructuring of the US car industry. He appointed Sonia Sotomayor, a Latina Supreme Court justice, solidifying his non-white political base. If market confidence is one reason we appear to have avoided a second Great Depression, then the president deserves a modicum of credit for conjuring it. Growth is edging back into the picture.

No recent president has had such a substantive start since Ronald Reagan. But what Reagan did was to shift the underlying debate in America from what government should do to what it should not. His was a domestic policy of negation and inactivism, and a foreign policy of rearmament and sharp edges.

Obama has, in a mirror image of 1981, reoriented America back to a political culture that asks what government will now do: to prevent a banking collapse, to avoid a depression, to insure the working poor, to ameliorate climate change, to tackle long-term debt. The point about health insurance reform, after all, is that it represents a big expansion of government intervention in the lives of the citizenry — and that’s a game-changer from three decades of conservative governance.

Abroad, the shift has been even more marked. From his Cairo speech to his resetting of relations with Russia, an era of polarisation has ceded to one of intense engagement. We have had the supplanting of the G8 by the G20, a dramatic upgrade of public opinion towards America across the globe, an overhaul of the war in Afghanistan, an end to torture as an instrument of US government and the slow unwinding of Guantanamo.

On Iran, Obama held out what he called an open hand, managed to dislodge Russia a few inches from its usual anti-sanctions approach, busted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations on the Qom nuclear site, and held tight as the coup regime was assailed from within. If Tehran’s international position has veered between rank belligerence and confused drift, it is because the regime itself is far weaker than it was a year ago, and may not last another year.

The disillusioned are those who weren’t listening in the campaign or not watching closely in the first year. The right has failed to register his steeliness and persistence and the left has preferred to ignore his temperamental and institutional conservatism. Both sides still misread him — hence the spluttering gloom. And there is indeed something dispiriting about the relentless prose of government compared with the poetry of the campaign. But Obama is a curious blend of both: a relentless pragmatist and a soaring rhetorician.

In time, if the economy recovers, if black, young and Hispanic voters see the benefits of their new healthcare security, if troops begin to come home from Iraq in large numbers next summer, if jobs begin to return by the autumn, then the logic of his election will endure.

His care to keep the tone civil, to insist on impure change rather than ideological stasis has already turned the Republicans into foam-flecked nostalgics for a simpler, whiter, easier period and has flummoxed those left-liberals who wanted revenge as much as reform. Both are part of an embittered past that Obama wants to leave behind. His clarity on this, and his refusal to take the bait of divisiveness and partisanship is striking. That takes an enormous amount of self-confidence and self-restraint.

He has failed in one respect: the political culture is still deeply partisan, opportunistic and divided. But this, I believe, is not so much a function of his liberal pragmatism as it is a remnant of an American right in drastic need of new intellectual life and rhetorical restraint. In this respect, Obama has made the right crazier, which may be a necessary prelude to it becoming saner.

It’s worth remembering that America is a vast and cumbersome machine, designed to resist deep change. That this one man has moved the country a few key, structural degrees in one year, and that the direction is as clear and as strategic as that first embraced by Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (in the opposite direction) is under-appreciated. But the shift is real and more dramatic than current events might indicate. I wouldn’t bet on its evanescence quite yet.

andrewsullivan.com

...Too the Devil

Not doing what is meant
Not doing what is wanted
Not sure what that is
Sure this is not it
Not the worst just not the best
Just playing another role
Been playing them forever
Never really been me
Always been what was supposed to be, expected, planned

Forgot how to think long ago
Forgot how to decide
Do for others, what is best, what makes them happy
'Till it doesn't
Try to figure out why, what did I do wrong? What is wrong with me?
Nothing for a moment
Then start again

So much in me has never come out, not enough anyway
Little glimpses now and again
Just enough to know I don't know, am not me

Not crazy
Not wacky go nuts
Not loud
Not fun
Not funny
Just not
Should be, but just not

Too late
Too old
Too tired
Too broken

Bones
Joints
Muscles
Ligaments

Just broken
Just not
Just
Me...

Thank you again for getting this far with me.

A Good Day

Thanks to the Sage's help, a nice new place to live, with a nice new kitchen, and a pretty cool new town in Boise, Idaho, Thanksgiving day was in fact a good day.

So, having purchased "all the right stuff" to make pancakes with the night before, and having allowed myself to slumber for a bit, not sleep mind you, but slumber, once I wandered downstairs and ponder the prospect of pancakes, French toast, omelet, and so on, I eventually settled on the making of one pancake, yes I said one. I did not want a big breakfast, which is why I had put the bacon, and the sausage and all sorts of other potential food nightmares back on Thanksgiving Eve, and so I decided I wanted one pancake and only one.

My plan was simple, start backwards, put in an egg, and slowly add pancake mix until I had a bit of a paste, and then add the melted butter and thin with milk until the perfect consistency. The plan worked flawlessly except for the fact that the melted butter alone, I like butter, loosened up the mixture too much...so I added a bit more pancake mix, Aunt Jemima by the way, like there is any other, and then I thinned with milk. So four medium size pancakes without bacon is not so bad for a light breakfast.

I took my pancake pan, washed the dust off, and then heated gently while "greasing" with an appropriate amount of butter. Slowly distributed the batter in four strategically placed locations on the griddle, and away we went. Waited for the air bubbles to pop, turned them over to discover the golden brown tops, the crispy edges, mmmmm. I added the obligatory pat of butter per cake, and then removed them from the griddle. "Drizzled" the appropriate allotment of syrup on top and magic. I sat, I ate, I savored, I devoured.

That was stage one. Then, after cleaning up fro breakfast it was on to boxes of stuff. The goal, essentially, was to clear out the living room, where most boxes were first moved into, and in so doing put things away as I went. Mission accomplished. It was nice to be able to empty some boxes and move some stuff out, even just to find some things that had been missing, or at least not yet found.

Stage three was more food. The ham I had purchased, with the pineapple slices surrounding it, and a homemade maple, honey glaze thanks Gram. I prepared the ham, applied the glaze, figured out how to set the oven that I had not yet used. Did not set a timer because I was going to watch this process closely. I applied more glaze a few times, while continuing to move stuff around and put things away. I quickly checked the movie times and did some math and decided that the first showing would be too early and so got myself fixed on 4:45. Stage four was, had always planned to be, an early showing of The Blind Side with Sandra Bullock, yes she is still on my list, and always will be.

Anyway, the ham was nearing completion, or as best I could tell, so I put the Bush's Baked Beans in the pan, doctored them a bit, some butter and some maple syrup just to sweeten them up a bit, and then it was time. I pulled the ham out to inspect and see if it was done. Seemed to be, looked nice on the outside, a bit of a crispy skin, but looked good. Went to begin carving and noticed a bit of a...well...almost a...shell. The ham had been wrapped completely, and that had all been cut away, the label, instructions, warnings, and so on, only once all that was removed there apparently was a thin wrapping to seal in the juices and such, and that had escaped me. Don't know if it was supposed to come off before or after, but that was moot. I cut that off, sliced two slices of ham, put that on the plate with the beans and the pineapple and there was Thanksgiving dinner.

I am still here, so I would have to say that the ham wrapping thing was pretty much a non issue, especially since I have had it for lunch since as a sandwich, and twice in a fritata, Italian omelet sort of, I will write more on this later.

Making the 4:45 movie was easy, popcorn, Junior Mints, and away I went. Aside from the mother and daughter that I ended up sitting next to and had to keep from strangling on a couple of occasions, this was the perfect end, or almost end, to the perfect day. A great movie about someone nice, and with means, doing something for a person that by all accounts should have been a hard a-- from the projects, but instead was a well mannered quite giant. And Sandra Bullock is awesome.

Came home, lit the fired, well turned on the switch, and had some left overs, played with Bella a bit, and then crashed early. Yes it is hard to not be with family, or friends, or significant other (s) at the holidays, but this was a good day.

Thank you again for getting this far with me.

Twas the Night Before Christmas (well actually Thanksgiving)

This day really started last night when, on my way home from Barnes and Noble’s, I was fortunate to have some help making an absolutely critical decision. See, on the night before Thanksgiving, the grocery store is only so long, and then it is closed on Thanksgiving. Now you are all sitting there saying “tell me something I don’t know,” but this is what made last night’s decision so critical to today truly being a good day.

See, I realized yesterday afternoon that I had, essentially, no food in the house and that meant a very hungry Thanksgiving Day given that the stores and the restaurants would all be closed. Once this dawned on me I ran out to the local food coop and bought some veggies and snack food and what not, then because I am knew to this area I took the receipt over to the closest large grocery chain and checked the prices of the two stores. In so doing, I learned two things, the coop is cheaper, again, you may be thinking “yeah so,” but this was news to me, I also learned that the grocery was open until 1:00 AM. This meant that I could stay at Barnes and Noble’s until ten and then still have time to go get some additional items if I so decided. We are sneaking up on the most critical and urgent of all decisions.

So I rang my trusted “Sage,” and wished him an early Thanksgiving and then began our rather non-senseacle and innocuous conversation. Mainly, I was taking advantage of the fact that he gets funnier the more tired he is and he was exhausted. I drove to the store, having realized that I had only bought basic items for food, and nothing “special” for Thanksgiving Day, no Turkey, no fixin’s, just stuff. I also had nothing but the recent breakfast winners in English muffns, Thomas’ of course, and some mutli-grain bread, plus a newer addition in the Thomas’ seven grain bagels, or something like that.

It had been suggested that I might make some pancakes for breakfast, and treat myself, and thus the entire late night shopping spree had its source, but an ill advised plan. This is where the sage comes in. As I entered the store he was trying to guide me on what I might get to make the Thanksgiving breakfast special. Somehow our focuses diverged for a bit, we were both still on breakfast, but he was trying to cover as many country with breakfast as possible, such as French Toast, and Canadian Bacon, Belgium Waffles, and some kind of eggs with hollandaise sauce and Swiss Cheese. The hollandaise I don’t quite get because I thought that was French and we had the toast, but never doubt the sage.

While he was on this country quest, on the Bluetooth which was in my left ear, I was selecting my own items, going with an all-American theme, sort of, and flirting a bit with a few of the patrons, I am my father’s son.

My choices were far simpler, Oscar Myer bacon, Hormel link sausage, Aunt Jemima pancake mix and syrup, and so on. I even went so far as to choose Pillsbury Cinnamon Rolls, which are very good, but a coronary in a can. Anyway, at some point along the way, with the Sage making me chuckle as I walked through the aisles looking like a nut, laughing out loud, I decided to put everything back and left the store. The Sage was stunned.

I drove back to the front of my house and sat there trying to decide what to do. It was come inside and get to bed at a reasonable hour or make a decision on what I really wanted to eat on this Thanksgiving Day and go back to the store with some focus and get what I needed. A decision was made; pancakes for breakfast with lots of butter and syrup, and ham and beans for lunch. Back to the store I headed.

Meanwhile, the Sage, in his delirious state, was still entertaining me, and educating me in my left ear. Both would happen in greater quantities once back in the store. For instance, I learned a tremendous more than I ever knew about butter, and what makes butter butter, and about milk and the origination of the 1 %, 2 % approach to life, something about the butter fat floating on top of the bottles of milk and someone realizing that they could remove some or all of that butter fat. And Sage you thought I never listened.

There was also a lengthy discussion on hams, and big versus little, good versus bad, both in taste and byproducts, and in why there is water added to every ham?? I think I missed that one. Anyway, I did manage to complete a focused shop, with the Sage’s help, and returned home with pancake mix, syrup, butter, a ham, baked beans, the “original” black bread, not sure what made it original, and a couple of other things that I do not remember at this time. It was the latest I had been up in a very long time.

Thanks for the help Sage, a job well done.

Thank you again for getting this far with me.

Amish is As Amish Does

Ok, so I have a question, is it not true that the Amish people are not supposed to drive automobiles, or use anything that can be described by the word "auto" in it at all.

I realize that I am not an expert in all things Amish, in fact I am not an expert in any things Amish, but I have to say that when I saw an automobile the other day that read "Amish Quilts" on the side of it this struck me as quite funny. of course this was not just any automobile, no, this was a very black, very large, full size Hummer, with the tinted windows, and the "tricked" out, or "pimped" out wheels and hubs and so on...and on the side, in nice bold white stenciled lettering were the words "Amish Quilts."

Just had to share.

Thank you again for getting this far with me.

My Cousin Vinny

This is how it feels sometimes. We are all related right. All the Vinnies and the Michaels, and the Anthonys, and the Josephs. Anyone with the vowel on the end of their name, only this Vinny was Spanish, not Italian, and he wasn't a cousin, he was a barber, and that was just the beginning, well I guess the beginning and the end.

Understand, that in the time I had been here, exactly a week, I had not seen much traffic in his shop (read none), and Monday afternoon when I decided I needed to "trim" there was one person in the shop, and he was not getting his hair cut, but rather sitting against the wall looking very dead. I later found out that I was not far off, he had stopped in to sit for a minute because he wasn't feeling well having just spent four days in the hospital.

When I opened the door this wave of nausea came over me, instantly. It had to be four hundred degrees in the shop, and there was an odor that could not be placed, described, or believed, but it was sort of a combination of dirty sweat socks, gingivitis, and roadkill. I pressed on.

I actually said out loud "feel like cutting hair," and the dead guy answered, just raising his head up ever so slightly, and in a very breathless manner, "of course." At this point I was not sure if anyone in the place was alive, and feared that I was soon to join them. I pressed on.

Vince rose up out of the chair, painfully slowly, and just stood there, apparently waiting for me to take the seat he had been occupying. I did so feeling like if there was a way I could run without being incredibly rude, and hurting this old gentlemen's feelings I would do so. I put my foot, heel first, on the foot rest and placed myself gently, cautiously, into the chair.

Vince shuffled over to the counter, minutes passed, and he came back with a towel, a full sized towel, and wrapped it around my neck, then the black barbers apron, and some sort of pin. I was in, and he pressed on. I was holding my breath.

Vince reached for the clippers, big, heavy, and long guide. He dove into the back of my neck, not my hair, my neck!! He eventually got the angle right to start cutting some hair, some?? Next came another pair of clippers, with a smaller guard, and then another one smaller yet, and virtually no guide. I was doomed, and stuck. He pressed on, I still did not have the ability to breath.

At this point the dead guy rose...he spoke..."thanks Vince," and he was gone.

Behind me I noticed this noise, getting louder and louder. I was trying to figure out what it was. At first it sounded like the TV at three o'clock in the morning, after the test pattern is gone and the National Anthem is over, and all that is left is static. Does that even happen anymore?? Then I began to pick out sound bites, first Kenny Rodgers on what turned out to be a soft country station, and then someone talking about the BCS standings on ESPN Radio, and then a song that came out when I was in college, early 1980s, and on and on. An infinite loop of three intermingled, and very ill matched radio stations, plus tons of static, to go with the blasting heat and the odd, sickening smells. he pressed on, and I still had not taken a breath.

There was the moment when the chair started to spin, and I with it, because the clippers were pressing into the side of my neck, and with the resistance Vince pushed harder and harder. There was the moment that the sheers came out and I realized that they had never been sharpened, not since he came to this country in 1955. There was the truly unbelievable moment when, like any good old time barber, he took out the straight razor to clean up the back of my neck. If I had not felt like running before I certainly did at this point, but I figured I was in this far I was going to see it through, or quite literally die trying. The straight razor was no sharper than the clippers, or the sheers, or any of the inhabitants of the shop were, your truly very much included.

When he was finished I thanked him, gave him ten dollars, which meant a two dollar tip, and then listened as he told me of when he had come over, and where he had lived in Spain, and of his kids that were born here and now are grown and gone away...to California. I then walked up the street to the "salon" and made an appointment for the next day. My hair is very short now.

If I were rich I would buy this man a palace, and hire him maids, and butlers, and drivers, and whatever else he needed in an attempt to allow him some time to not sit in that shop and wait for someone to walk in.

Thank you again for getting this far with me.

Something Barrowed

I am not the smartest person on the planet and I know that. As a matter of fact all of the people that I consider friends are far smarter than I in some way or another, or mostly many ways. The below is from one such person in response to one of my blogs. What she has to say is very powerful, but how she says it is what is amazing to me...far beyond eloquent...enjoy.

Thank you again for getting this far with me.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
Amen. ~Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi

I agree. A high "moral code", or whatever name it is given, should be the standard of humans relating. Muffled under the vogue of acceptance .. this cheaper version of freedom appears to allow everything in a denied reality of bondage. If I stand for nothing, I fall for anything ... that's not freedom, it's chains of compliance. If each perspective maintains a reality in and of itself and I am to accept perspectives as individual truths, where as a communal body of individuals may we possibly relate without harm?

Morals, manners, human relationships are the outpouring of our inner lives. How and what I think about has direct correlation to whom and how I interact. If I think positively with gratitude for the people & gifts God has placed & will place in my path, then my actions and words will reflect. If my mind lingers on lewd fantasy, negative responses & darkness, again my actions and words will reflect. I wil not stand to be subject to bondage. Fall the walls of vain acceptance and stand up for what is uplifting, that is what is right. Bring back the moral code.

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"There is something else I am after, out here in the wild. I am searching for an even more elusive prey ... something that can only be found through the help of the wilderness. I am looking for my heart." ~ John Eldredge Wild at Heart

Follow the winds that be, fly your kite, sail it high, let it lead, flitter by.
A search, a quest, unsettled yet certain ... run fast, run wild, run
Without baggage, worry free, it's all as it's supposed to be
Blocks of building, buildings demolished, closer now, beautifully polished