We all thought that maybe this time, this president would be different.

Hope that this president would at least keep the interests of those who need it most and change that would at least take some measure of those who gain the most from this country to start to pay for what they keep...

Well, we can all gather, there truly is one continuum, one that we could stretch all the way back to those who came to this country. That continuum has, more and more, etched the reality that class mobility, once the American Dream, is a nothing more than myth.

Sisyphus comes to mind.

I have been at this game since I, a lad of 11, joined up with some Hippies to bring environmental issues to the good people of the Western suburbs of Cleveland.

When I was 13, I organized a five minute walk out from my Junior High to protest against the Vietnam War.

The more that things change, the more they stay the same...

But in the end, what shades of brutality crosses the line of "civil" warfare?

To tell the truth, there are probably ten's of thousands of civilians in the general area around Syria who have been brutalized beyond the bounds of civility via torture, confined to filth, missing limbs, mental shock and just life down to the most base level that none of us here in the US of A can even fathom.

So what's one more indignity to be suffered.

Believe me, I am not saying we should do nothing. But what? You know that we are going to end up killing more people who are not involved with the military or political leadership in Syria.

We all know that a lot of this months outrage is because Israel could someday be attacked with the gas or aerosol or the mustard gas and we can't have that happen.

So we bomb Syria after much deliberation. What will really change?

Meanwhile there is a whole continent full of cruelty that we have, for the most part, completely ignored. Think about it, if entertainers from the 70's hadn't made such a big dust-up over Apartheid, would that have changed?

I am sure he writes a good chunk of his stuff simply because of the Persona he carefully built on the Daily Show...

Of course he has a great team of writers behind him and Twain did all of his writing. But if you compare the total amount Twain created over his years as an Entertainer with Colbert's 13 or so years of creating at least 100 daily shows each year, well, you would have to say Colbert is at the very least in Twain's league.

So, I think it is safe to say that Colbert, and not to forget Jon Stewart, are both a national treasure and make the madness coming out from our political, media and business leaders a little less bitter by giving us the chance to laugh. Otherwise, so we could easily go crazy.

That happened 50 years or so. This was the pivotal event that ended up with the Voting Rights Act.

The VRA is probably the singular moment in the 60's because it showed that defying entrenched power was possible and that the country was energized.




With the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by five of the most privileged men in this country, men who never had to jump through hoops to exercise their rights, the US could very well fall back into way it was.

I know that sounds like hysteria but several states have already moved to reinstate purging of voters, barriers for registration and limiting vote by mail.

I'm not a young man anymore. And here in Ohio there is no real push for drastic change in how we conduct election so far. So I wish for those DU'ers who live in states that have already implemented changes that throw up so many barriers to voters that it will be hard to keep the Democratic Party viable in some of these states to keep the faith and do something, anything to stop the madness.

I honestly thought this was stuff that was settled, that the US would never go back to segregation and wide spread voter suppression.

Fuck!

Just so you know, I am a candidate for a lung transplant. In fact I could be going under the knife as early as this Fall.

I asked a long time ago, when I first was being tested for the transplant, what would happen if my body completely rejected the lungs. I was told, with no if ands or buts about it, that I would get one set of lungs and if that operation didn't take,well, that was it...

I understand that this is a "special" case, afterall, telling a ten year old that they had their chance sound cruel. But I ask you, what about the person who was passed over in order to give this child another chance? What if that person died waiting for a set of lungs?

Just something to ponder.

Tread carefully as these quagmires appear to suck the life out of our country.

To me, this is worse than the 60's. We knew there were racial problems in the country, we knew that the Vietnam War was sucking the life blood of our "republic", we knew there was a great ecological crisis foaming on the beaches of the world.

But now....

The war against terrorism is the way world wars are fought these days. Proxy armies or terrorists, depending from which magic tube you gaze through, keep the tension of war percolating all the time, off in the corner so we all feel threatened.

Unbelievable malfeasance has been unleashed and we just let it plop all around, the bank crisis, the voting purges, the creepy concentration of lady parts and the threat of terror permeates everything...

These are interesting times, indeed....

street sounds are mute, out to the edge of my eye, I noticed rustling off in the far corner of the neighbors back yard.

We have gotten spoiled of late with all the wildlife that has taken residence in the two stands of wood that surround our suburban development. By our count, we have checked on the list Deer, Rabbits, Ground Hogs, a Fox, Chipmunks, an Owl or two, high flying Hawks, skunks, feral cats that take to taunting our domesticated pets and a porcupine.

Yesterday evening, we were treated with something special; two fawns barely a foot high. They were tentative as was the mother. I went to get the camera and they were gone. We had them for about 10-15 seconds before they made there way to the other side of the street where the small stream is released from the corrugated piping.

Suburbia has it pluses and minuses. But all that time I lived on the fringe of the suburbs, I never saw nearly as much of nature as I do now. Perhaps we have semi-domesticated nature and the wild life has adopted survival skills.

What ever it is, I sure am glad we bought this house. Pizza and a mini-version of Wild Kingdom...

He had such promise. When he was blotto he was intolerable but on those rare occasions when he felt comfortable, he could be charming, funny and productive.

I remember him hitting my mother, having fist fights with his sister, who also was a drunk.

There were times when he was charming, engaging and smart, very smart.

He was a man of dreams but never had the ability to stay on task long enough to reap what he had sown.

There was this eight year period when he stopped drinking. He didn't go to AA. He stayed sober by working his ass off to pay my brothers way to John Carrol University.

He was a modern John Henry, trying to compete against the computers that were taking the skill out of the Tool and Di profession.

He finally got a shot at something big. He won a bid to make molds for aluminum casings for X-ray machines. He underbid and over promise but he worked like a man possessed. The tolerance was tight, less than .02 of a millimeter either way. He had to take the blueprints and then calculate by hand, no affordable calculators back then, what he was going to cut the next day.

He stopped drinking.

But when the company making these X-ray needed more molds to be made, they cut my dad out of the bidding process and so he was defeated.

Soon enough, he started to drink again. About three years later I was living with him. I was drinking hard then. I fooled myself that I wasn't an Alcoholic because I didn't drink to oblivion like my dad did night after night...

I got up one day to go to work and I saw my dad passed out on the floor. This was a crucial time in my life. When I came home that night I saw he was still on the floor. He had had a stroke. well, I drank that weekend and showed up to my job drunk. They sent me home and the next day I signed up for AA.

As soon as my dad recovered enough to go home, he started to drink again.

He died shortly after my wedding two years down the road.

I don't have many fond memories of my father but every now and then I am reminded of how he could be but chose not to be, if that makes any sense.

So happy fathers day to all of you dad's out there who take your role seriously but not too serious. Sometime it's just fine to enjoy being every sons first best friend.

Raising the cost of College by increasing the interest rates new students coming on line will charged, lets face it, for the bulk of their lives and Drilling baby Drilling so that we can push forward the implementation of clean energy when they can gain control of that as well.

This, to me at least, sounds like a recipe for disaster especially in a country that has become nothing more than a small number of money changers at the top while everything else for the rest of us 99% is stagnating or crumbling.

I went to this Church on the Rise here in Westlake, Ohio for over a few months, I wrote an on-line piece about the pastor and other church speakers going right up to the edge of non-partisan and stuck a toe or two over the line.

For instance, they would set up special political forums that were non-partisan in name only. There would be nothing but republican elected officials as well as GOP candidates. They never mentioned the political party but there were no democrats in any of the three or four "non-partisan" forums we attended.

These mega churches collect gobs of tax deductible "offerings" and pay their preachers hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary and percs, such as luxury cars for the church big wigs to motor around in because nothing says Jesus than cars that cost more than the shelters for the poor.

It sickens me. BTW, the UU church I was a board member also paid the pastor very well although we did not get into any political stuff. We did have democrats and republicans out to talk to the flock after services on Sundays. We did it as well just not as brazen or as pervasive.