Sticks and Stones--HR 1592

Unlike the Republicans who wimped out on things they said they'd do if we elected them, the Democrats really are trying to rip out the freedoms we were guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, just like they promised in actions and words along the way to congressional control. Have you read the text of HR 1592--the so called hate crimes prevention bill? It is so preposterous, I almost can't believe it. Who kills the most black and gay men in this country? Other black and gay men (gay men as a group are the most highly educated and wealthiest of all our little diversity groups--so don't count on that to equal common sense when it comes to legislating hurt feelings). Aren't they just as dead as they'd be if the perp had called them a nasty, hurtful name, or if they perceived it right before the bullet, knife or club hit? Look at this text--

`(A) IN GENERAL- Whoever, whether or not acting under color of law, in any circumstance described in subparagraph (B), willfully causes bodily injury to any person or, through the use of fire, a firearm, or an explosive or incendiary device, attempts to cause bodily injury to any person, because of the actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability of any person--

You are really, really special and set aside for preferences in this bill if you are a mentally ill [disability], Muslim [religion] lesbian [sexual orientation] from Guatemala [national origin] who's had a sex change operation [gender identity].

Perception = full and fat employment for lawyers and out of control prosecutors. Remember, macaca and water buffalo are now hate words. Can chocolate and almond be far behind?

The Bible assures us that all sin originates in the mind first, and we are held accountable by God for what we think, not just what we do, but Biblical admonitions by pastors and leaders will also be outlawed in this bill.

Update: My representative, Deborah Pryce, was one of the few Republicans that voted for this ridiculous bill. I think she's a stand-in for the Democrat woman she narrowly defeated in a final count in November. "On the National Day of Prayer, a majority of the Members of the House of Representatives have slapped Christians in the face with passage of H.R. 1592. Though allegedly designed to help local law enforcement officials deal with violent hate crimes, this legislation actually creates two new federally-protected minority groups: “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” – both of which are undefined by the law." [Call to conservatives]

Although I think the special, bifurcated, bi-level system of justice is unnecessary, UnAmerican, and foolhardy, I think it is the "perceived" hate against the "disabled" that will bring the expensive lawsuits, and gays could be paying through the nose on that one too. Do you want a mentally ill person like Cho perceiving hate and bringing a lawsuit against anyone trying to help him? The big question: if your gay lover shoots you, is it done out of love or hate? And are you more or less dead? Will he serve less time in prison if you are both gay than if one of you were just pretending?

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What the President really said four years ago

"We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We're bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We're pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people.

The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq.

The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 -- and still goes on. That terrible morning, 19 evil men -- the shock troops of a hateful ideology -- gave America and the civilized world a glimpse of their ambitions. They imagined, in the words of one terrorist, that September the 11th would be the "beginning of the end of America." By seeking to turn our cities into killing fields, terrorists and their allies believed that they could destroy this nation's resolve, and force our retreat from the world. They have failed."

OK, so the terrorists got it right about the resolve of the Democrats because they do want to retreat and fail, but eventually I hope Bush will be proven right.

3778

Maybe they are in Aruba?

Two women from central Ohio disappeared about two weeks ago when they went shopping, and no one knows where they are. It wasn't reported immediately because one is a widow with no children, and the other's daughter just stopped to check on her mom and found out the neighbors hadn't seen her for some time. On April 19, Mary Ellen Walters, 68, and her friend, 80-year-old Ada Wasson, left their homes at the Otterbein Retirement Living Community in Lebanon in southwestern Ohio to go shopping, and seem to have disappeared. Walters' husband was in Florida caring for his 93 year old mother. We're still hearing on a regular basis about every clue in the disappearance of a pretty teen-ager Natalee Holloway 2 years ago in Aruba. Are these women less important? It seems Warren County is scaling back the search, which has been aided by Methodist church volunteers. Has Geraldo or O'Reilly or Greta reported on this? Have you seen them? Here's the photos from the CD.

3777

Women are the problem

"How do we start dealing with what's happening?" asks Roberta Garber in the April 19 Columbus Dispatch story about poverty's new address in Franklin County (Columbus) Ohio.

For starters, read your own research. You start with women. Dump the feminist, anti-male agenda, and start preaching and teaching marriage--in the schools, the homes, the churches, the housing codes, the books, the newspapers, the libraries and the community organizations. Stop promoting and glamorizing the celebrities who have 2 or 3 babies either before marriage, or skip marriage all together, whether Fiddy or Goldie or that smirky Sarandon. Call 'em what they are: The Pied Pipers of Poverty.

Nearly one half of all female headed families with young children lived in poverty in our county in 2004, while only 3% of married couples do. Hello! How much more writing needs to be on the wall, blackboards and social-worker flip charts to tell us that white, bored, middle and upper class women of the 70s and 80s fed the whole nation a huge plate of cow poopy, beginning with the idea that we had to kill babies first in order to have career choices and keep children from being poor or deformed, then rubbing our noses in it with trumped up salary discrepancy statistics.

Ms. Garber, look at your data dates. 1970-2004. Franklin County population grew by 27.9% and the poor grew by 59.1%. What else took off in those 35 years? Militant feminism. We had a Democratic congress for most of that time, a Democratic city government in Ohio's three largest cities, and tenured liberals in our state and premiere colleges and universities. All they've been able to come up with is more of the same.

Time to start fresh. Begin by admitting the women and all their male lackies in NOW, the unions, and universities, were wrong.

3776

Our class reunions

We're going to two high school class reunions this summer, one in June, one in July. Enrollment at Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis was larger than the town where I lived, Mt. Morris, Illinois. Tech is a fabulous place--and I love it. It is very different now than in the 50s, but you still feel and see the beauty, warmth and history when you step onto the campus. My husband was in a social club called the SLOBS, so many of his closest friends were not actually in his class, but the group has its own reunions.

So I've been looking for just the right outfit to wear. I'm waving the white flag. I've lost the battle on dressing up--no one does that anymore--not for church, or theater, or cruises or special events. Oh, maybe a wedding might the be last hold-out where you would see a skirt or dress. So I bought a cream colored pants suit, 3/4 length sleeves, and am choosing the color of blouse--I'm looking at red (not my good color, but one of the school colors), deep blue, taupe, or coral. I'm very pale, so coral or taupe are my colors. The taupe blouse really doesn't fit that well and will probably be too hot, so I think I've eliminated that. Here's the suit--ignore the paintings on the floor--my husband is getting ready for a show and has no place to put them. The walls are full.

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The Scarlet Letter - A

is for Amish. Someone should hang a big "A" on the back of their buggy. The Columbus Dispatch yesterday had an editorial about the terrible problem of puppy mills--the indiscriminate breeding of dogs, poor conditions, and the resulting auctions. Reading between and above the lines--Millersburg and Holmes County, the only words missing are, "Amish farmers."

But on Sunday, April 22, the Dispatch wasn't so reticent: "There are 186 USDA-licensed breeders in Ohio, and more than 100 of them are in Berlin, Millersburg and Sugarcreek, the heart of Amish country." The editorial in yesterday's paper says Holmes County licensed 478 kennels in 2006, a 40% increase. So a county license and a USDA license are not the same, if these numbers mean anything. Not only will these dogs not be healthy, but their resulting behavior problems will cause their early death at the hands of owners (who will have them euthanized) who wanted to save a few bucks by going to the pet store.

The photo says it all

from The World According to Carl

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Getting ready for the painter

We're trying to get as much out of the bedroom as possible to give the painter room to work. This morning I moved all the books, the shelves, paintings, and knick-knacks, and pulled things out from under the bed, like the old drapes, which have now left the house and are in a donation pile.

Faux combing, not wallpaper
One of the books is an oldie, The Outline of History by H.G. Wells, I bought at a yard sale maybe 20 years ago. I was going to put it in the pile to donate, then started leafing through. Look what they were saying about global warming in 1920 (or in the revision of 1949). It just seems so sensible, like maybe mankind isn't in charge:

About these changes of climate that are always in progress on the earth's surface: They are not periodic changes; they are slow fluctuations between heat and cold. The reader must not think that because the sun and earth were once incandescent the climatic history of the world is a simple story of cooling down. The centre of the earth is certainly very hot to this day, but we feel nothing of that internal heat at the surface; the internal heat, except for volcanoes and hot springs, has not been perceptible at the surface since first the rocks grew solid. Even in the Azoic or Archaeozoic Age there are traces in ice-worn rocks and the like of periods of intense cold. Such cold waves have always been going on everywhere, alternately with warmer conditions. There have been periods of great wetness and periods of great dryness throughout the earth. They depend upon astronomical and terrestrial fluctuations of extreme complexity.

And, in accordance, we find from the Record in the Rocks that there have been long periods of expansion and multiplication when life flowed and abounded and varied, and harsh ages when there was a great weeding out and disappearance of species, genera, and classes, and the learning of stern lessons by all that survived.

It is probably that the warm spells have been long relatively to the cold ages. Our world today seems to be emerging with fluctuations from a prolonged phase of adversity and extreme conditions. Half a million years ahead it may be a winterless world with trees and vegetation even in the polar circles. At present we have no certainty in such a forecast, but as knowledge increases it may be possible that our race will make its plans thousands of years ahead to meet the coming changes.

Isn't that interesting. The authors saw the warming as positive for mankind. Skipping ahead, he comments on the spread of Islam, which the author saw as a better culture to replace the decaying Roman system in the 7th century:

"While the armies of Islam were advancing triumphantly to the conquest of the world, this sickness of civil war smote at its head. What was the rule of Allah in the world to Ayesha [favorite wife of the prophet] when she could score off the detested Fatima [daughter of the prophet] and what heed were the Omayyads and the partisans of Ali [adopted son of the prophet and husband of Fatima] likely to take of the unity of mankind when they had a good hot feud of this sort to entertain them, with the caliphate as a prize? The world of Islam was rent in twain by the spites, greeds, and partisan silliness of a handful of men and women in Medina. That quarrel still lives . . . Shiites and Sunnites. To watch this schism creeping across the brave beginnings of Islam is like watching a case of softening of the brain. . . From the first the complicated household of Muhammad was like an evil legacy to the new faith. He was an illiterate Arab, ignorant of history, totally ignorant of all the political experiences of Rome and Greece, and almost as ignorant of the real history of Judea; and he left his followers with no scheme for a stable government embodying and concentrating the general will of the faithful, and no effective form to express the very real spirit of democracy (using the word in its modern sense) that pervades the essential teaching of Islam.

Maybe that's why they wrap their women in black robes--two women started this mess, so now they'll all have to pay. Interesting that he thought there was a spirit of democracy in Islam.

Roger Vernam, illustrator

Some of my biggest thrills in blogging have been e-mails from people who can answer some of my questions, or I have answered theirs. Recently I heard from a woman whose mother attended the same college as my parents--she'd found me looking for the Granddaughter's Inglenook Cookbook; another woman was looking for the lost chapters of Mary Margaret McBride's Encyclopedia of Cooking about which I had blogged; I heard from several people who loved and longed for Spudnuts [donuts made from potato flour]; someone wanted to buy my 17 year old first issue of Martha Stewart Living; my Fornasetti entry [I need to go in and change the link, which seems to have disappeared] gets almost as many hits as my "how to fix a broken zipper." And now, Roger Vernam. Am I excited, or what?

What little girl who loved horses wouldn't be crazy about this?
"Hi- saw your note about Eight little Indians and your comment about whether they(author and illustrator) were pseudonyms. Actually, Roger Vernam is real and was well know personally to my family-grandparents and mother. I grew up reading the books that he illustrated and they are still among my favorites. I’m re-settling my library after an annoying but much needed renovation and just came upon one of my most favorites, Monkey Shines, by Elinor Andrews. Always a joy to revisit and remember!!"

David M. Wood
Cape Cod Multi-Services

Thank you, Mr. Wood. And you have a nice web page--the type I wish libraries had. Attractive, easy to read, clear; even with some of your pages under construction I give you a B+. Most libraries get a C- or D+. Good luck with your business.

Happy First of May!

Can you believe we are so far into 2007? Time used to fly; now it just evaporates. Each morning I read a section in The One Year Bible (NIV), and a poem from A poem a day. Today's poem was "Happy the Man" by John Dryden (August 9, 1631-May 1, 1700). The notes say he was translating Horace, Odes, Book III, xxix. So here is me adjusting Dryden's pronouns translating Horace:

Happy the woman, happy she alone,
She who can call today her own:
She who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do your worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Monday Memories--The last May

This photo was taken at the retirement apartments lobby where my parents were living in May 1999. Mother died the following January. I think I had been in Chicago for the Medical Library Association meeting, and took the bus to Rockford, where my sister who lived in DC, met me. Mother's birthday was in May, and I think we had chosen that time, and I'm so glad we did. The four of us had a wonderful visit. I remember my sister, mother and I drove to Forreston where we had lived from 1946-1951 and drove around looking at our former houses and where we'd gone to church. Mom showed us a little garden plot she had behind the retirement complex, and we attended some of the special program functions with her that the facility offered. I think I arrived on a Friday or Saturday, so we probably went to church together. I would be back again in August, 1999, to celebrate their 65th wedding anniversary, but this was our last May. When your parents are in their 80s or 90s, you often wonder, "is this the last" birthday, concert, family holiday, mother's day, etc.

Mother's Day is coming up on May 13th. Go to church with your mom if you are fortunate to still have her with you. Even if you are no longer Baptist or Catholic, or have converted to another faith, or you have to rearrange your schedule, or you don't like her pastor, or you like informal music and she likes traditional. Honor your mother--be a blessing and get a blessing. It's the only commandment that includes a promise.

3769

Cleaning up the environment

Our local community paper showed the photos by a senior from Upper Arlington High School of her senior thesis of abandoned buildings in Columbus, titled "What about my generation." Her idea is that, "We should fix it up or turn it into parks." We shouldn't be building new shopping and housing areas in green farmland until we've restored these blighted areas, she proposes.

Do they teach civics, history or economics at UAHS? Does she realize she is making decisions about private property, or that some codes and regulations actually keep the less-than-UA-wealthy from improving their property? Or that if you improve your property your real estate taxes go up? Should she, or others on a board or committee of environmentalists, be making the decision on how and to whom a retired farmer east or south of Columbus should be selling his acreage if he can get market value from a developer? Does she know that huge parts of Upper Arlington used to be orchards and farm land?

Here's what I'd like to see for a senior thesis on the environment.

Get permission from the parents of 6 of your friends to go into their teen's bedroom and photograph the mess. I'm sure a lot of parents would be willing to cooperate and teach them a lesson that "environment" starts at home, in your own house.

Then move out into the community where you actually live. Photograph the trash and debris left after a community festival or art show.

Photograph the plastic bags and cups the teens leave just a block or two from the high school around Donato's or Wendy's or Giant Eagle.

Photograph the beer bottles left in the parking lots and streets for other people to drive over,

or the yards they "turf" when they are out having fun.

Ask the kids to ride the city bus to school for a semester instead of each driving one of the family's two or three cars--help with that carbon footprint stuff--photograph them in the snow and rain, waiting.

Photograph any of the hundreds of middle aged and older people working to landscape and beautify their yards and then contrast that with the young people helping them or chipping in on the cost.

3768

My son had a date with a stranger

the other night. By that I mean I don't know her (I never do). I wonder if he told her about the livestock, Rosa, who can knock down a grown woman with her tail, and Edie, who looks like a fat sausage link on toothpicks. Aunt Purl has a post about how to tell a guy on the first date (or first pick-up line) that you have four cats. A lot of people must identify, because when I read it she had 199 comments.

Samples:

When I was dating after my divorce, I used the cats to test the dates! If the cats didn't rub on them and totally fur-a-late them the first time they came over---no more dates! Bad mojo! If the cats didn't like them, I was suspicious. I swear, it worked! When I ignored the cat hate of one guy, he totally turned out to be a jerk later! I swear! When my now-husband came over, one of my cats sat on his lap and rubbed his face on his jacket zipper--love at first sight!

Sorry, I have you beat here :) I'm a librarian! Thankfully I only had one cat when I meet my husband. Now we have 3 adorable fur babies. And he kids me that he saved me from becoming "an old maid librarian with cats".

I will trade two teenage boys and dog for a cat. Any takers?

I only have 1 cat but 3 ex-husbands, and let me tell you, THAT is a serious dating handicap, in my mind, at least!

3767

Walking with 1776 by David McCullough

Four miles yesterday and two miles today, 45 miles for my 50 miles of Easter Walk (it started to rain so I quit). I'm in chapter two, "Rabble in Arms." Deeply moving to know the deprivation, hardship, and yes, ignorance that undergirded the poorly clothed and dirty men in the army of General Washington. It was a very long war, and the book just covers one year. Today I listened to the story of 16 year old John Greenwood, a fifer, from Boston.

"After reaching the army encampments, he was urged to enlist, with the promise of $8 a month. Later, passing through Cambridge, he learned of the battle raging at Bunker Hill. Wounded men were being laid out on the Common. "Everywhere the greatest terror and confusion seemed to prevail." The boy started running along the road that led to the battle, past wagons carrying more casualties and wounded men struggling back to Cambridge on foot. Terrified, he wished he had never enlisted. "I could positively feel my hair stand on end." But then he saw a lone soldier coming down the road.

. . . a Negro man, wounded in the back of his neck, passed me and, his collar being open and he not having anything on except his shirt and trousers, I saw the wound quite plainly and the blood running down his back. I asked him if it hurt him much, as he did not seem to mind it. He said no, that he was only to get a plaster put on it and meant to return. You cannot conceive what encouragement this immediately gave me. I began to feel brave and like a soldier from that moment, and fear never troubled me afterward during the whole war.

3766

Nancy Pelosi on partial birth abortion and your daughter

"Here is how the law defines partial birth abortion:

"An abortion in which a physician delivers an unborn child's body until only the head remains inside the womb, punctures the back of the child's skull with a Sharp instrument, and sucks the child’s brains out before completing delivery of the dead infant."

Here is what Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says about partial birth abortion:

"This is about a procedure that any parent would want her daughter to have access to if she needed it. And to frame it as an abortion issue is doing a disservice to medicine and to our young women and our country. So I hope we can get the focus back on the fact that this Supreme Court is deciding what medical procedures are necessary for child-bearing women."

from Denny Burke's blog

How could any abortion supporter say she would want her daughter, or anyone else's daughter to have this procedure, killing her grandchild in such a vicious, cruel way? Wasn't she parading her grandchildren before the TV cameras not too long ago?

3765

Will Sweden disappear? And who's next

"Sweden was presented during the Cold War as a middle way between capitalism and Communism. When this model of a society collapses – and it will collapse, under the combined forces of Islamic Jihad, the European Union, Multiculturalism and ideological overstretch – it is thus not just the Swedish state that will collapse but the symbol of Sweden, the showcase of an entire ideological world view. . . Native Swedes have thus been reduced to just another ethnic group in Sweden, with no more claim to the country than the Kurds or the Somalis who arrived there last Thursday. The political authorities of the country have erased their own people's history and culture." Read here about what's happening in Sweden's third largest city.

HT Mere Comments, which includes a lengthy poem about the requirement that Swedish men sit when urinating. Yes, feminism as come to this. Excerpt from Here sits Sweden:

"Should some Swedish Rip Van Winkle
Wake in Stockholm, all a wrinkle,
Still he'd have to sit to tinkle.

So he sits, obeys our rule or he
Finds how fast we punish foolery --
Confiscate his family jewlery!"

3764

No, it's not a good idea!

I was browsing a library blog today reading about all the things he'd seen at a conference. He said he could hardly wait to apply some of the new ideas to his library's web page. Thank goodness, I thought-- library web pages are often awkward and hard to navigate. Not the most exemplary sources of information I've seen on the web, especially for clarity and readability. So what was his brilliant idea? To jazz up his 404 page. That's the error page. No, a thousand times No. Get to work on correcting the four columns, the things that wiggle, and the no-way-to-contact-the staff-by-name problem.

Is your constipation contributing to greenhouse gases?

http://zebu.uoregon.edu/2004/es399/lec02.html
Another thing to worry about! OH NO! "The degree of breath methane production in patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) correlates with the severity of constipation, Los Angeles-based researchers report in the April issue of the American Journal of Gastroenterology 2007;102:837-841." [from Rueters story on Medscape.com]

Not to worry, though. The sufferers with IBS who have diarrhea instead of constipation have less methane produced by the bacteria in their intenstines, so maybe you can work out an exchange (we won't call it carbon credits--have to think on that one--maybe a stool swap?).

3762

Old photos of lighthouses are sought

On Friday I uploaded a photo of a small, historic moment in 1916--rural folks gathered for a ride in an airplane. Here's your opportunity to look through grandpa's photographs. In the latest Keeper's Korner of Lighthouse Digest written by Timothy Harrison, there is this note about the removal of the Vermilion Lighthouse.

What Happened To Moving Photos
We know it is difficult to locate photographs of lighthouses and keepers in the era when the camera was just becoming available to the average person. But, by 1929 the camera had been around for quite some time and many Americans owned and knew how to use a camera. However, photographs of the removal of Ohio’s Vermilion Lighthouse seem to be non-existent. In 1929 the lighthouse was removed from Vermilion and shipped to Buffalo, New York. In 1935 it was barged to its new location to become the East Charity Shoal Lighthouse six miles south of the St. Lawrence River on Lake Ontario. Someone must have photographed some parts of this historic move. Yet photographs seem to have disappeared. There are many mysteries like this. For example, what happed to the photographs of the first Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in North Carolina? It is amazing how much of our nation’s lighthouse history has been lost. Will it be rediscovered someday? We can only hope.

Someone somewhere (probably a young boy) had a camera that day.

If you vacation or own property near or just love old lighthouses, you'll enjoy Lighthouse Digest.

3761

Unintended consequences of emissions control

In my opinion, the most sensible gas saving regulation ever to go into effect was the 55 mph speed limit back in the 1970s. I'm sure it cut into someone's profits, but overnight it saved many lives--thousands a year--and miraculously, it seems to cut down on travel time because there were far fewer accidents holding you up on the roadways and interstates. One benefit never measured was that on the cardiovascular system of the drivers and passengers who weren't driving at 75 mph in a moving parking lot with their heart in their throats.

Now there are hearings for new regulations on emissions control of heavy trucks, which really are the life blood of this country. Virtually everything we eat, or wear or use one square of each time we go to the rest room, is shipped by truck.

Stricter emissions:

Worse mileage will mean more fuel. 1 mile less per gallon

Worse road conditions for other vehicles. Longer, heavier trucks will need to make up the added costs for everything moved by truck, tearing up our asphalt and concrete, causing more fatal accidents when we hit them.

More unsafe trucks. Current trucks will be kept in service longer because they will not be covered by the new regulations.

Hotter trucks. Engines need to burn at a higher heat with the new standards.

Reduced competition. New standards hurt independents and small truckers, and some will go out of business.

Stockpiles. Larger companies have stockpiled new trucks built before the new standards, raising costs for independents.

Add to this the cost of gasoline blends we're going to be forced to burn in our cars, and we're going to have a huge increase in food prices, hurting the poor who spend a larger percentage of their dollar on food.

I like clean air as much as the next gal, but green air costs you the green.