Now he knows "The Rest Of The Story"

RIP Paul, it was a great run.

I missed out on the funny things kids do as it was sort of inserted into Audreys blog about the stray cats.  I wanted to share this but by the time I got back to it, the discussion moved back to it's original topic.  See below for my story.

I know this won't be one of the long running blogs but I still hope you folks will share funny stories of the things your kids said or did.

More race talk is the last thing we need

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
February 25, 2009

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/4...

"In things racial we have always been . . . essentially a nation of cowards" because "average Americans simply do not talk enough with each other about race." Thus spake Attorney General Eric Holder in a speech last week marking Black History Month -- a speech in which he also bewailed the fact that modern America frequently "does not . . . differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago."

Holder's racial melancholy struck many people as peculiar, inasmuch as he is the first black American to head the Justice Department, and inasmuch as the American president who appointed him -- a president elected by a healthy margin last November -- is the most celebrated black man in the world. Was such gloom really called for in a speech marking the first Black History Month of the Obama presidency?

Yet that wasn't the only message to come out of the Obama administration last week.

Though it didn't get the same media attention, an equally high-ranking Cabinet secretary gave a speech for Black History Month that suggested a somewhat different take on America's racial condition -- one more upbeat and appreciative.

"Race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion," he said, but "in racial terms the country that existed before the civil rights struggle is almost unrecognizable to us today. Separate public facilities, separate entrances, poll taxes, legal discrimination, forced labor, in essence an American apartheid" -- all of it, he acknowledged, had been relegated by the Civil Rights movement to the ash heap of history. Today, Americans of every color "work with one another, lunch together, and . . . socialize with one another," especially during the workweek.

The administration official who delivered those remarks? Attorney General Eric Holder. Both the racial lament and the glad tidings were part of the same speech. The obnoxious line about Americans being "a nation of cowards" drew the headlines, as perhaps it was intended to, but the speech as a whole was inconsistent and incoherent. Perhaps Holder intended to offer a nuanced argument about race in the Age of Obama. What he delivered was a muddle.

Every sensible American knows that racial problems still exist in the United States. But what can justify Holder's belief that the only way to surmount them is to have "frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us?" He has it exactly backward. Harping on old grievances, constantly revisiting past resentments, relentlessly picking at scabs -- those are a recipe not for social harmony but for social antagonism. To be sure, there are those who have made it their life's work to keep racial umbrage at a constant boil: men like Louis Farrakhan, David Duke, Al Sharpton. But is theirs the sort of "frank conversation" Holder thinks we need more of?

In any event, the notion that Americans can't bring themselves to talk about race is preposterous. Did we not just come through a seemingly endless presidential campaign in which race was a seemingly endless topic of discussion? Wasn't Barack Obama praised to the skies for giving a whole speech on the subject of race? Were Americans reluctant to discuss "things racial," as Holder puts it, when Don Imus slurred the Rutgers women's basketball team? Or when Jeremiah Wright damned the "US of KKK-A?" Or when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans? Or when John Rocker shot his mouth off? Or when three Duke lacrosse players were indicted for rape?

Americans have been jawboning about race for 2½ centuries, and we are in no danger of running out of things to say. More race talk is the last thing we need. As a nation and as individuals, the less race matters to us, the less thought we give it, the more racial progress we will make. Our goal should be not to dwell on "things racial" but to see beyond them.

Just as millions of Americans already do.

In the early 1960s, when Barack Obama's white mother married his black father, there were fewer than 15,000 interracial marriages in the United States. By 1980, there were 650,000. Today, there are nearly 2.3 million. Obama was only a toddler when Martin Luther King dreamed of a nation in which people were judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Day by day, we are becoming that nation.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)
 

http://l.yimg.com/k/im_sigg... width: 229px; height: 300px" />Barack Obama in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, DC on January 26, 2009.Us Magazine

Barack Obama said the first family will select a dog in the spring.

"I think the theory is the girls might be less inclined to do the walking when it's cold outside," he told CNN's Anderson Cooper in an interview on Tuesday.

Check out photos of the Obama girls

Will it be a Labradoodle or a Portuguese water hound?

"We're still experimenting," he said.

Check out all of the first children who have lived at the White House

Cooper also asked Obama if he's had a cigarette since he's moved to the White House.

"No, I haven't had one on these grounds," Obama admitted. "And, sometimes...it's hard, but I'm sticking to it."

Check out the Obama family's "Just Like Us" photo gallery

Replied Cooper, "OK, you said on these grounds. I'll let you pass."

Obama smiled.

 

Watching L&E this evening the defense atty is the same guy who joined the staff to take the place of Dennis Farina.     In another the woman who played the cop Nina  had previously played a real babe.

Way back on Mattlock he was bamboozled by a gorgeous woan who schmoozed him into defending her for killing her husband.  He got her off and then found out she really had killed him.  She later turned up as his daughter.

Do they think we have such short memories?  Aren't they able to find other actors to fill the roles? Ahhhh show biz.

I guess it could be worse, it could be like daytime soaps wehre children who parents forgot they had show up on a regular basis.

I was just reading about that and one of his comments struck me as being so true.

The enemies of Jim Crow

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Black History Month: In the long dark night that followed Reconstruction, what was the engine that drove Jim Crow? Did segregationist laws codify the existing social practice, or was it the laws themselves that segregated the South?The Strange Career of Jim Crow, his influential history of post-Civil War segregation, the idea of formally separating the races in places of public accommodation initially struck many white Southerners as daft. In 1898, the editor of South Carolina's oldest and most conservative newspaper, the Charleston News and Courier, responded to a proposal for segregated railroad cars with what was meant to be scathing ridicule:the objection of private-sector entrepreneurs.

Something to ponder during

Many people might intuitively assume that Southern racism had led to entrenched public segregation long before Southern legislatures made it mandatory. Not so. Separate facilities for blacks and whites were not routine in the South until the early 20^th century. Racism there surely was, but as C. Vann Woodward observed in

"If we must have Jim Crow cars on the railroads, there should be Jim Crow . . . passenger boats," he wrote. "Moreover, there should be Jim Crow waiting saloons at all stations, and Jim Crow eating houses. . . . There should be Jim Crow sections of the jury box, and a separate Jim Crow dock and witness stand in every court -- and a JimCrow Bible for colored witnesses to kiss."

Tragically, what the Charleston editor intended as mockery would soon become reality across the South -- "down to and including the Jim Crow Bible," as Woodward noted. But it wasn't an overwhelming grassroots demand for segregation that institutionalized Jim Crow. It was government, often riding roughshod over

Durham, North Carolina, 1940: Passengers wait in a segregated bus station

In a notable study published in the Journal of Economic History in 1986, economist Jennifer Roback showed that in one Southern city after another, private transit companies tried to scuttle segregation laws or simply chose to ignore them.

In Jacksonville, Fla., a 1901 ordinance requiring black passengers to be segregated went unenforced until 1905, when the state legislature mandated segregation statewide. The new statute "was passed by the Legislature much against the will of the streetcar companies," reported the Florida Times-Union. So well-known was the companies' hostility to the law that when a group of black citizens mounted a court challenge to overturn it, their attorney felt compelled to deny being "in cahoots with the railroad lines in Jacksonville."

In Alabama, the Mobile Light and Railroad Company reacted to a Jim Crow ordinance by flatly refusing to enforce it. "Whites would not obey the law and were continually . . . refusing to sit where they were told," the company's manager told a reporter in 1902. In Memphis, the transit company defiantly pleaded guilty to violating a Tennessee segregation statute, explaining that it believed the law to be "against the wishes of the majority of its patrons." In Savannah, the local black paper noted that streetcar officials "are not anxious to carry into effect the unjust laws . . . requiring separate cars for the races," since it would put them "to extra trouble and expense."

Eventually, of course, the government got its way, as companies surrendered to pressure from city hall and the statehouse. In a victory of government regulation over the free market, Jim Crow took hold across the South, where it would cruelly hold sway for the next 60 years.

Many Americans know that it took strong government action in the 1950s and 1960s to end segregation and bring civil rights to the South. Fewer realize that it was government action that established segregation in the first place. Today, when the power of the state is being aggrandized as never before, the history of Jim Crow offers a cautionary reminder: When the political class overrides the private sector, what ensues is not necessarily an improvement. It may even be a national disgrace.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

I was going through a drawer and ran across this article that someone sent me years ago and thought I'd share it with you folks.

Stop Complaining by Garrson Keillor;

When you hit 50, you have to stop complaining about getting old, the strangeness of it, the fascination, the horror, etc, etc,.  That was okay in your 30's and 40's, but now that you're old, it's time to shut up on the subject.  You shouldn't complain that nobody gives a hoot.  If you were to pay people to care, they might care a little bit for an hour or two, but you didn't, and they don't.  So learn to be cheerful about it.  When people ask you how you are, tell them, "absolutely great, Never better."

By 50, everyone can stand to lose 20 pounds, so do it.  The simplest way is to adopt a new philosophy of eating, which is revolutionary in America but which is essential for an older person.   Eat to satisfy hunger, if you're not hungry, don't eat.  Stop eating when your hunger is satisfied.  Except on Sunday or whichever day is your feast day.  As you get older, your metabolism changes, and now you can sustain yourself quite will on one meal per day and two snacks.  So that's what you do.

Fifty is the time to take a long, hard look in the mirror.  Especially for the aging bohemian.  A young person is allowed to dress up as Desperado, Punk Princess, Noir Poet or Frontiersman, but by the age of 50, you've wised up.  You're seen how ratty those old ponytails can look.  What was revolutionary at 21 can be rather stringy and pitiful at 50.  Make a pile of your regrets and put a match to them and let them blow away- the lost loves, the estranged friends, the botched education, the unwritten novels, the neglected guitar, the ruinous investments, the dear friend who committed suicide, the opportunities that sailed away without you.  Put that knapsack full of rocks on the ground and walk away and find something in the here-and-now that absorbs you and take up with that - a garden, a grandchild, a choir, yoga, knitting, amassing a collection of porcelain pigs, political agitation, learning the drop-thumb style of banjo.

Start telling the truth.  Do it in small doses at first and then gradually build up to one out of three, a decent batting average.  When you're young you're scared, you're trying to wend your way through the trees and not get shot at;  you're trying to stay on the warm side of the various big cheeses in your life;  you're wanting to be the good guy who everybody loves, not the jerk with the big mouth,  But when you hit 50, you're entering a new passage of life in which you can say what you really think.

You can also dare to express simple preference.  Do you want to go over to the Swansons for dinner:  No, I don't.  Why not?  I thought you liked them.  They complain constantly about aging, and I'm tired of looking at his hair.  Oh, okay.  What would you rather do?  Lie on a bed with you and talk and drink a little wine and listen to Frank Sinatra with the lights out.  Oh.  Okay.

Fifty is an excellent age for reform of all sorts.  You have enough experience and good judgment to know something about yourself and you can see the end of your life from here, and so, gauging your desires and your strengths, you adjust and straighten and balance and alter what needs altering and press on.  It's a time of marvels on every hand, great richness, emotional clarity, and great sweetness.

Sixty is even better, but don't hurry.

You may recognize some familiar names here.  A "Blue" friend sent this to me and I thought it was very interesting.  Hope you folks will find it just as interesting..and scary.

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Stolen tuck mystery solved.

http://www.nbclosangeles.co...

Choosing octuplets

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
February 11, 2009

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/4...

THE BACKLASH against against Nadya Suleman, the 33-year-old single mother of six who gave birth to octuplets on January 26^th, has been fierce.

The fertility doctors who impregnated Suleman have come in for nearly as much abuse as she has. The Orlando Sentinel blasted both mother and doctors as "indulgent, irresponsible, and unethical." Reason magazine's science correspondent, Ronald Bailey, wasn't nearly so restrained; he slammed the "idiotic fertility jockey" who made it possible for this "loony sad jobless single woman" to bear eight more children. Columnist Ellen Goodman suggested that the doctors were guilty of something "akin to malpractice" and that Suleman's decisions were "close to mal-mothering." And there have been calls aplenty for stricter regulation of fertility clinics. "The real issue here," wrote the San Francisco Chronicle's Debra Saunders, "is that we live in a country with so few regulations on the human fertility business."

What are we to make of all this criticism? It is once again acceptable in politically-correct society to disparage other people's unconventional or unwise reproductive decisions? Have the rules of engagement suddenly changed?

It was only a couple of weeks ago, after all, that the 36^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade was being commemorated with the customary paeans to the right of American women to make their own decisions about pregnancy and parenthood. Haven't we been told for years that society has no authority to second-guess what a woman does with her own body? Haven't the champions of "choice" and "reproductive freedom" repeatedly instructed us that what happens in a woman's womb is between her and her doctor? How is it that so many feel free to pass judgment on the choices made by Suleman and her doctors, let alone to call for new regulations banning such choices in the future?

It is easy to assert that Suleman's Beverly Hills fertility clinic should have refused her grotesque demand to be implanted with six embryos (two split and became twins), but it isn't clear that a court would have upheld such a refusal. The American Society of Reproductive Medicine recommends transferring no more than two fertilized embryos to a woman of Suleman's age, but when a patient insists on more, the physicians' hands may be tied. "Doctors' attorneys are advising them, `You have to do it,'" ASRM spokesman Sean Tipton tells Time magazine. "The courts have made clear that decisions about what to do with embryos are in the hands of patients, not in the hands of physicians."

Last summer the California Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a fertility specialist may not refuse, on religious grounds, to inseminate a lesbian. What would the law say if Suleman's doctors had refused to impregnate a woman who already had six young children but no husband? Discrimination on the basis of marital status is illegal in California, too.

It may seem reasonable to argue that women are not designed to bear litters. Or that society should not have to absorb the costs of indulging an unemployed woman's obsession for a "huge" family. Or that it is wrong to purposely bring 14 fatherless children into the world.

Those are all sensible opinions, and a sensible public policy would reflect them. But in the name of autonomy, privacy, and adult self-esteem, our public policies regarding families and reproduction have grown increasingly unmoored from good sense. From the campaign for homosexual marriage to the routine insemination of single women to the legality of abortion on demand, notions that would once have been thought outlandish have steadily been normalized.

Would that further industrial-scale pregnancies like Suleman's could be headed off with a new law or stepped-up regulation. But can law and regulation fill the void left when longstanding taboos and morals are cast aside? When society decides that families and child-rearing can be improvised at will, who gets to say what's "freakish?"

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

This is fun and not as easy as it looks.  Give it a try.

http://www.humorsphere.com/...

http://www.foxnews.com/stor...>http://www.foxnews.com/vide...

Obama's charm offensive and the global jihad

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
February 4, 2009

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/3...

EARLY IN HIS PRESIDENCY, Jimmy Carter set about to alter US policy toward the Soviet Union. Six days after his inauguration he sent a letter to Soviet ruler Leonid Brezhnev, hailing the two countries' "common efforts towards formation of a more peaceful, just, and humane world" and saluting Brezhnev's supposed "aspiration for strengthening and preserving . . . peace." In a commencement address at Notre Dame, he declared that Americans had shed "that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear." In the months that followed, Carter slashed the defense budget, scrapped the B-1 bomber, welcomed the takeover of Nicaragua by a Marxist junta, and launched diplomatic relations with the Castro dictatorship in Cuba.

'That inordinate fear of communism': Soviet troops seize the Kabul airport, 1979

It wasn't until the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 that Carter finally woke up to his naiveté. Moscow's brutal aggression had "made a more dramatic change in my opinion of what the Soviets' ultimate goals are," he admitted, "than anything they've done in the previous time that I've been in office."

Carter's failure to understand the threat posed by the Soviet Empire had costly consequences for America and the world. Will this pattern now be repeated with Barack Obama and the global threat from radical Islam?

Ever since taking office two weeks ago, Obama has been at pains to proclaim a change in US-Muslim relations. In his inaugural address he invited "the Muslim world" to embark on "a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect." Six days later he gave Al-Arabiya, an Arabic-language satellite channel, his first televised interview as president. This week he continued his charm offensive with a friendly letter to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represents 57 Muslim governments. He has promised to deliver a major address in an Islamic capital by spring.

The president cannot be faulted for using his bully pulpit to reach out to the world's Muslims, especially given his Muslim roots and family ties. But running through Obama's words is a disconcerting theme: that US-Muslim tensions are a mostly recent phenomenon brought on largely by American provincialism, heavy-handedness, and disrespect. Missing is any sense that the United States has long been the target of jihadist fanatics who enjoy widespread support in the Muslim world.

"My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy," Obama said, although "we sometimes make mistakes" and "have not been perfect," and even though "too often the United States starts by dictating" and fails to use "the language of respect."

Such apologetic pandering is inexcusable. For decades, as commentator Charles Krauthammer noted last week, "America did not just respect Muslims, it bled for them." To liberate oppressed Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Americans risked -- and in many cases lost -- their lives. Not even the Islamist atrocities of 9/11 provoked American leaders to treat Islam with disdain. "We respect your faith," George W. Bush earnestly told the world's Muslims in a nationally televised speech on Sept. 20, 2001. "Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah." Would that the Muslim world's leaders spoke with such courtesy about Christianity and Judaism

Even more troubling is Obama's seeming cluelessness about US-Muslim history.

"The same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago -- there's no reason why we can't restore that," the president said on Al-Arabiya.

Well, let's see. Twenty years ago, in 1989, American hostages were being tortured by their Hezbollah captors in Beirut and hundreds of grief-stricken families were in mourning for their loved ones, murdered by Libyan terrorists as they flew home for Christmas on Pan Am Flight 103. Thirty years ago, in 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah of Iran, proclaimed America "the Great Satan" and inspired his acolytes to seize the US embassy and hold scores of Americans hostage for nearly 15 months. That same year Islamist mobs destroyed the US embassies in Pakistan and Libya, and staged anti-American riots in other countries.

Jihad at sea: A US frigate battles Muslim pirates off the Barbary coast, 1803

The golden age of American-Muslim relations that Obama harks back to did not exist. Radical Islam's hatred of the United States is not a recent phenomenon, it has nothing to do with "respect," and it isn't going to be extinguished by sweet words -- not even those of so sweet a speaker as Obama. Sooner or later, Barack Obama must confront an implacable reality: The global jihad, like the Cold War, will only end when our enemies lose their will to fight -- or when we do. Let us hope he's a quicker study than Jimmy Carter.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for the Boston Globe.)

Related Topics: Barack Obama, Islam and Islamism

My last post was at 11:47 and when I just refreshed I had to sign in again.  Has anyone else had this issue today?