WCGreen
WCGreen's JournalI have this curse which I have turned into a gift...
The gift of knowledge and awareness.
You see every day I have to do these breathing treatments in order to clear out my lungs. I do four sets spaced out throughout the day, Each one taking 20 minutes.
At first it was boring because part of the treatment means wearing a vest that is filled with air and then vibrates so as to loosen up the gook in my lungs to ultimately stop me from drowning. I know, I know, TMI.
But, I discovered a wonderful time to make it pleasant and fruitful.
We have full on set cable with all the movie channels and most of the regular cable. I think we have over 350 channels.
At first I would watch junk but after awhile that proved boring and as monotonous as the sitting there with no distraction. So what I did was added th digital copy feature to our cable box and each week I scour the offerings on all channels and usually find four or five things that will get me too the next weeks fair.
In the last three year I have seen almost every Shakespeare play, for good or bad, every great movie from the earliest days of cinema to the latest blockbuster as well as informative and other dramatic shows.
Of course I watch crap, I have a fondness for super hero shows so I record all of them. But my life has been made more satisfying with my LED 40" window on the world.
From the beginning, I was against the Iraq War. Most people on this board probably share this view...
I knew that we would fall down a very deep and very dark rabbit hole once we sent the first sorries over the border.
I knew, like probably everybody else on this board would agree, that new tactics, new impersonal ways of waging war, new guidelines would be offered along new and closer lines to be drawn in the sand once the shooting started.
Why I was, as most of the people on this board would surely agree, so opposed to the state sanctioned violence projected from my country to settle international disputes is because of the blow back that will surely come our way. Not tomorrow, not next year and maybe not for decades, but mark my word, we will be judged in the future for the particular dogs of war we let loose in the guise of drones.
The creeks flowed a lifeless blend of yellow and orange...
Sometimes they smelled like rotten eggs but most of the time they just flowed down from the mountain were the coal mining was done. This was before fracking, before mountain top mining, before strip mining had come in to favor.
There were deep mines around, many abandoned when they the seem petered out. They just left all their stuff and moved on, chasing after another seem. There were a lot of abandon mines shouting out from the sides of the mountains. We were warned to stay out of them mines which made them all the enticing.
Right around eight o'clock they would sound the lunch siren for the second shift which my grandma called the go to bed siren. That's when we all came into the house after running around the yard, chasing the chickens or standing to count the coal cars on the train as it ran by. Most of the little ones got to the teens and lost interest but the older kids counted them down and argued how man cars that train was pulling. Sometimes there was two locomotives and we would try to get the engineer to wave and blow his horn.
All the ground water at the borough level reeked of farts. The conditioners got most of the stink out but couldn't rinse the taste away.
So we drove up into the mountains, higher than the mines, with gallon plastic jugs to get the cooking and drinking water from natural streams. Up home in Cleveland we drank kool aide, at grandma's house we drank sweet drinks from the supermarket over at the county seat.
I have seen this disarray before in American Politics...
You know, when one party seems to be self imploding because there are intractable southern conservatives proving to be more than a nuisance to one of the two major party's.
Up until the election of 1968, most Southern states could be carried by only one party and that party was the Democrat. Sure there were occasional out layers just as the Northeast would occasionally go for a Democrat.
But after Segregation became the rule of the land, the Democratic States switched to the coded language of the GOP, Law and Order was their main theme starting with Nixon and reinforced by Reaagan's so-called Welfare Queen, the South went Red.
Now the last remnant of those Bible Belt have formed, with the help of DC Conservative organizers, into the Tea Party.
Without a doubt, the Tea Party will insist on fealty to their cause and if there is no satisfaction, they will split and form their own party.
We are in a realigning election cycle and the Conservative Coalition is starting to fall apart. It usually splits between the intractable and the pragmatic, the ideologue and the deal makers, and culminates with dominance of one party rule for a decade or so and then the seems start to fall apart again.
The last realigning cycle was played out with the help of Ross Perot which saw the House switching over to the GOP because of the dominance of the GOP controlling the District Drawing process in 92, 02 and then again in 12.
If the dem's can hold the Senate and take the 2016 president ency then the House can be had and the realignment will have played out.
The snow last night was beautiful...
It was slowly, steadily accumulating and yet I couldn't see the snow falling, it was like a wispy cloud hovering. We have a wall of windows pointing out onto a very leafy, mature, development so the trees are majestic and gnarled, 70-80-90 feet tall. Sometimes, when it gets like this or when in the heights of summer, when ever thing is so vivid it makes me feel what Adam must have felt when he looked out over Eden.
The falls are spectacular, a wild jumble of autumns palate.
It may be one of the least expensive homes in Westlake, as our broker pointed out 20 some years so, but I have a million dollar view right outside my home...
When people ask me if I believe in God because I am not religious...
I always answer that if there is a god, wouldn't that god be more interesting in the way I live my life than how I worship that god.
Throughout history, so many absolutely vile people killed, maimed and tortured people in the name of "god" and believed that what they were doing is righteous.
Just wanted to put that our there...
I have said this more than a few times on DU and I will keep pointing this out...
When I was running for state rep and state senator in the western suburbs of Cleveland, I would make my rounds of the Union Meetings.
In those meetings, for about 40% of the folks gathered for the meeting, didn't even want to shake my hand or take my lit because they were certain that if I was elected, as a Democrat, I would take their guns.
They rallied around the GOP even though the party of Lincoln was dead set against workers rights. They would vote against their economic interests to safe guard the right to bear arms as they were sure the imaginary talk about confiscating guns on talk radio was true. They wouldn't even listen to me. Didn't care that the president and business managers said I was a Union supporter, came from a family of Union members. None of that made any difference.
The payroll "tax" is not really a tax...
It's your mandatory contribution to the Social Security fund and determines your benefits when you retire.
It's called the payroll tax but it's real name is FICA or Federal Insurance Contribution Act.
It was lowered by 2% when the economy was on the skids to immediately get money into the hands of people who would actually spend it on stuff. This probably put an immediate floor on the downturn and was one of the reasons the Recession didn't turn into a Depression.
It was never meant to be permanent. If it was made permanent, it would have undermined the Social Security Trust Fund and cost more to future retirees more than any chained COLA.
A light beautiful snow is falling now...
Right in the gloaming made more so because of the heavy sky.
There is no wind, not a hint of breeze, just snow gently fluttering about, accumulating.
All the trees are bare from the back of the house and all the pine trees in the front are loaded down with accumulated snowfall.
There is just a hint of the deer tracks, results from the in between houses yard path that is one stand of wood to another.
It's times like these that I love, sitting in my home, with the wall of windows the only thing that separates me from the elements.
I am lucky to be on this side of the cold winter snap we are in.
Peace, calm and reflection on this midwestern winter night.
My letter to Ohio republican Senator about voting against Aid for the Sandy disaster....
What exactly were you thinking when you cast a vote AGAINST federal aid for the Sandy hurricane disaster? Did it ever occur to the Esteemed Senator from the great state of Ohio that we might one day face a devastating natural disaster? By not voting for the assistance, are you comfortable setting the precedent that natural disasters are well natural and must be handled by those afflicted and those who would give private monies.
By your action, I guess you would be all right if the Senators and House members in the afflicted area might remember that vote and vote against aid for Ohio?
Again, being that this is my second time contacting your office, I thought you would be a thoughtful and reasonable Senator being that Ohio is pretty much a bi-partisan state. But I have to ask, when did you decide to embrace the idea of too much spending as damaging the National Economy.
You see I remember you were in the Bush Administration as the head of the OMB participating in developing the massive build up in budget deficits thinking that money would just appear via increased economic activity. But then again, you probably wanted to run up the debt to make it easier to take federal money off the table for anything but defense spending. You supported trillions for an unfunded and unnecessary war and unfunded tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and yet not a cent for people in New York and New Jersey.
Shakespeare said it best when he said "What a piece of work is he.."
You, Senator Portman are some piece of work…
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Gender: MaleCurrent location: Cleveland Ohio
Member since: 2003 before July 6th
Number of posts: 45,558
