Congress Archives - Page 9 of 9 - Ramblin' with Roger

April Rambling

Truth is that I purchased it mostly because I hate it when Mike Sterling cries.

As a friend noted, “If this occurred randomly and naturally, it’s amazing. If it was done with Photoshop, it was inspired.”

‘Cheap flights’ song (and dance)

Rivers of Babylon a capella by Amy Barlow, joined by Kathy Smith and Corrine Crook, at Amy’s gig in my hometown of Binghamton, NY, July 2009.

Star Wars, the complete musical?

Many people use the terms science fiction and fantasy as if they are interchangeable or identical when they are actually related, not the same. Author David Brin illuminates the differences.

Superman: citizen of the world

Re: World Intellectual Property Day and Jack Kirby

As a Presbyterian minister, I believed it was a sin. Then I met people who really understood the stakes: Gay men.

Susan Braig, a 61-year-old Altadena cancer survivor, takes old pharmaceutical pills and tablets and mounts them on costume jewelry to create colorful necklaces, pendants, earrings, and tiaras that she sells. It’s a way to help pay off her medical debt. By Bob Pool, Los Angeles Times, March 29 2011

Jaquandor does a weekly burst of weird and awesome, but this particular collection was more than usual.

I wasn’t a huge Doctor Who fan, but I was touched by the outpouring of emotion over the death from cancer of Elisabeth Sladen, among the most beloved of the Dr. Who companions and star of The Sarah Jane Adventures. A post by Chris Black.

SamuraiFrog on Weird Al and Lady Gaga.

I’m not a huge fan of Mike Peters’ comic strip Mother Goose and Grimm. But you should check out the episodes for April 12 through 16, when he deals with Sesame Street in the age of this Republican Congress. Also, see your favorite arachnid in the April 18 strip.

I bought a new book this month, Write More Good, by a consortium of folks known as The Bureau Chiefs, despite never having followed their meteoric success with their Fake AP Stylebook Twitter feed. I bought it primarily because I was familiar with a number of the Chiefs, even following the blogs of Mike Sterling’s Progressive Ruin and Dorian Wright’s Postmodern Barney. Truth is that I purchased it mostly because I hate it when Mike Sterling cries. I haven’t read it, but I’ve gotten more than a few laughs when I’ve skimmed it.

Google alert finds: Separating science from attitude By Roger Green. Re: an airplane parts firm: The company folded in 2007 and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is now investigating company officers Roger Green and Victor Brown on a variety of potential charges, including grand theft and racketeering

Finally, from the royal wedding you weren’t invited to.

Cranky

Computer problems gave me, quite literally, such a raging headache that I went to bed Sunday night at 9 pm, which is VERY early for me.

I see that Arthur is cranky; maybe it’s the summertime blues for him.

I’m cranky too, and it’s not just the cold and snow.

*The shooting of nearly two dozen people, including a Congresswoman, with six deaths, including a guy who shielded his wife from gunfire, and the nine-year-old granddaughter of a former MLB pitcher who was the only girl on her Little League team, made me more than just cranky; I found it emotionally devastating.

What made me extremely cranky, though, is the attempt by that so-called church from Kansas to picket the girl’s funeral today.

Earlier, I was also appalled by the insistence of several news organizations to pronounce the Congresswoman dead, when, in fact, she was not. Somehow, in the throes of the chaotic situation, the need to be first trumped the need to be accurate. It’s an error for which “oops” just doesn’t cut it.

I wrote a little something for our local newspaper’s blog, more as a way for me to cope than anything else. I used the now-infamous graphic targeting members of Congress, including Gabrielle Giffords, but the text, I thought, was rather restrained. In any case, all I needed to do was post and (mostly) get out of the way.

I did note in the comments, however, that the First Amendment-protected right to free speech is not absolute. What I didn’t say, because I did not know the facts at the time, is that the Second Amendment right to bear arms can be limited as well; the weapon the assailant used was banned in the US until 2004. Somehow, I DON’T feel safer now.

Incidentally, I found the most useful information about the shooting on C-SPAN, the website dedicated to Congress. For at least part of the time, it was using the feed of the ABC-TV affiliate in Tucson, the unfortunately named KGUN. Oddly, I had been watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy that afternoon, in which a young gunman shot up a campus; miraculously [spoiler alert], no one died, which, unfortunately, did not extend to the real-life drama.

*I get these e-mails about 365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy. Most of them are pretty lame, such as “Quote G. Gordon Liddy: ‘A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.'” Or “Always refer, in pitying, sympathetic tones, to the ‘Liberal psychopathology.’ This implies that liberalism is a form of mental illness. Which it is.” Or “If it’s cold outside, deploy Global Warming Fun…Say to every liberal you meet, at every opportunity: ‘Brrr, it’s cold. Makes you think we could do with a bit more global warming.'”

Oh, I’m SO crushed by these mean comments. What makes me cranky is the notion that 1) it should be one’s goal to annoy others, just because of political differences, and 2) that the examples are so reductivist.

*We’ve had a real winter this season, with weather forecasters having to do some heavy lifting (figuratively, at least). And, from my vantage point, they’ve been reasonably accurate. Yet I heard just this week that meteorologists are paid “$80,000 to be wrong 90% of the time.” Unfair, and untrue. What is particularly difficult in this particular region, is that, because of the topography, the snow amounts in the area, even in certain counties, could vary by half a foot.

*I’m having computer problems. When we (OK, I) got a virus in the laptop, it got scrubbed by the techie at the purchasing locale. Suddenly, we don’t have any word processing applications. The techie at Staples says we need to bring in the installation disc, but my friend says that Windows Vista doesn’t come with an installation disc, that I have to find the info on the computer and burn it onto a disc. Well, I can’t find it in there; maybe it got wiped, too. In any case, this gave me, quite literally, such a raging headache that I went to bed Sunday night at 9 pm, which is VERY early for me.

*The stationary bike is broken. One of my church buddies took it apart and found what seemed to be the broken part, but getting all the information necessary to identify the problem has turned out to be more laborious than I could have imagined.

*Sooner or later, we’re going to have to buy a new television, my first new one since 1987. When the volume is up moderately, it just kicks out periodically. You have to crank it up high enough for the set, which is downstairs, to be heard upstairs for the volume to be sustained.

L is for Loving Day

As late as 1987, a full 20 years after the Loving v. Virginia ruling, only 48% of Americans said it was acceptable for blacks and whites to date. That number has since jumped to 83%, according to the Pew Research Center.

I can’t believe I missed it. OK, until I read about it in TIME magazine, I’d never even heard of it, though it’s been going on for a half dozen years. There’s a group that has called for Loving Day Celebrations around June 12th each year “to fight racial prejudice through education and to build multicultural community.”

The celebration is named for Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, who had the audacity to fall in love with each other. Unable to get married legally in their native Virginia – he was white, she was black – they got hitched in Washington, DC and “established their marital abode in Caroline County”, Virginia.

Ultimately, on “January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to the charge” stemming from their interracial marriage, “and were sentenced to one year in jail; however, the trial judge suspended the sentence for a period of 25 years on the condition that the Lovings leave the State and not return to Virginia together for 25 years. He stated in an opinion that:

“‘Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.'”

The Lovings moved to DC, and in 1963, took legal action against the state of Virginia. Meanwhile, Mildred Loving also wrote to US Attorney General Robert Kennedy for assistance, and he referred the Lovings to an ACLU lawyer who took the case pro bono. The Lovings lost at every court, with the primary reasoning being that “because its miscegenation statutes punish equally both the white and the Negro participants in an interracial marriage, these statutes, despite their reliance on racial classifications, do not constitute an invidious discrimination based upon race.”

However, their case made it to the US Supreme Court, and on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled, in Loving v. Virginia, that the anti-miscegenation laws of Virginia and 15 other states were unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the Court, concluded:

These statutes also deprive the Lovings of liberty without due process of law in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

These convictions must be reversed.

Interestingly, the polling I’ve seen suggests that at the time of the ruling, less than 30% of Americans favored mixed marriages. From TIME:

As late as 1987, a full 20 years after the case, only 48% of Americans said it was acceptable for blacks and whites to date. That number has since jumped to 83%, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2010, the center estimated that 1 in 7 new marriages in the U.S. is now an interracial coupling. In 1961, the year Obama’s parents married, only 1 in 1,000 marriages included a black person and a white person; today, it’s 1 in 60.

In statistics for 2008, 14.6 percent of all marriages were between spouses of different races.

In 2010, there is a Republican running for Congress, Jim Russell, who wrote in 2001, “In the midst of this onslaught against our youth, parents need to be reminded that they have a natural obligation, as essential as providing food and shelter, to instill in their children an acceptance of appropriate ethnic boundaries for socialization and for marriage.” I wrote about him extensively here, and he is hardly alone. So I guess the Loving Day folks still have much work to do.
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Pete Seeger – All Mixed Up

ABC Wednesday – Round 7

Technology and Me

Once again, this weekend, I was the technological hero, getting papers to print for my wife.

As you may know, about three years ago, Congress banned incandescent bulbs in the energy bill by 2014 (or 2012; i’ve read both). Recently, a couple Republicans have offered up legislation called the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act (or BULB Act, which would “repeal the de facto ban on the incandescent light bulb contained in Subtitle B of Title III of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.” Frankly, I’m not unsympathetic to their position. Unfortunately, that ship has sailed. I read that in the last month, the last major U.S. factory making the traditional light bulbs has closed, with a “Virginia manufacturing plant [taking] its jobs to China, where making eco-friendly CFLs is cheaper.”

I must admit that I have not yet warmed the new CFLs for at least two reasons:
1. They take longer to illuminate a room, more noticeable with my aging eyes.
2. There are trace amounts of mercury in the bulbs, and I don’t know where/how to throw them away.
And the need to throw them away has already occurred; despite supposedly lasting 10 times longer – a good thing since they cost about four times as much – we’ve had a couple go on us already, and just don’t know what to do with them. I suspect there is/will be massive hoarding of incandescent bulbs, the epitome of the “good idea”.
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I was riding my bike home from church this week and I saw someone’s Blackberry lying in my path. It looks as though it had been severally damaged, either from the fall, or possibly from a car running over it. I couldn’t turn it on. I realize that, in all possibility someone is going to be devastated by the loss of their tool, and it made me think – do I really want one of these things? I’m likely to lose the damn thing. Then where would I be?
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Tuesday night, I want to record both The Good Wife and Parenthood, Tuesday at 10 pm. Normally the DVR would allow this, but no. And it’s because the Dancing with the Stars results show is running until 10:01 pm and I can’t record three shows at once; there’s no option to shorten the programming of DWTS back to 10 pm. And for a brief moment, I was a bit annoyed by this until I thought, “Hey, I can record two shows at once. That’s pretty remarkable!” Would have saved me some grief in the 1980s when St. Elsewhere and the Equalizer were both on Wednesday at 10 pm. In any case, the solution to the current issue is simple; stay up until 10:01 pm, record one of the shows and go to bed. In case you thought, “Stay up and watch it on our (non-existent) other TV,” I don’t watch TV in real time anymore, with the rare exception of some sporting events. In case you were suggesting, “Don’t record DWTS” – hey, it’s my wife’s show, not mine.
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Once again, this weekend, I was the technological hero, getting papers to print for my wife. And here’s the great secret: I cold rebooted the computer (Ctrl-Alt-Delete was NOT working); I unplugged, then replugged the printer, which bizarrely seems to have no on/off switch. In retrospect, I could have just shut off and turned on the surge protector. Here’s to rebooting, which people STILL insist has NOTHING to do with actually kicking your machines.
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I haven’t switched to WordPress 3.0 yet. I asked a techie if I should and he said, “Sure, just make sure you don’t lose anything you want.” Which, to my ears means, “Leave the damn thing alone.”

August Ramblin’

Daniel Schorr was possibly best known for his coverage of Watergate for CBS News.

In July, David Warren, inventor of the flight data recorder, or “Black Box,” passed away at 85. His prototype was not warmly received, and as an employee of the Australian government at the time, he made no money from what is now considered a critical invention. He did, however, receive a rather nice obituary in The New York Times.

That gave me a bit of perspective. Looking at multiple news sources does that for one, too.

The big news in this neck of the woods is that New York State got some federal education money. But this is the same story in the Los Angeles Times:
California loses bid for Race to the Top federal education grant
California has fallen short in its efforts to secure a federal Race to the Top school-reform grant. The winners of the controversial federal grant program, just confirmed by federal officials, are Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia. If California had been chosen, it could have won as much as $700 million in one-time funds.
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It’s been five years since Hurricane Katrina. Initially, before I got a sense of the true measure of the devastation, I understood it as how it was affecting our wallets. We were traveling from Albany to New Jersey and Pennsylvania and weren’t really watching TV. We could not help but notice, though, how the price of gas jumped from about $2.65 per gallon when we left just before the storm to about $3.25 when we returned less than a week later.

Only when I got home and got to watch the news did I recognize the full impact of the destruction, and our government’s inability to cope with it. Bless the victims of Katrina, many of whom are STILL dealing with the aftermath.
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I understand why people tire of politics, I really do. From the open letter to Lincoln, to Who let the dogs out, it can be a pretty awful game. But I’m inspired by more positive stories:
Is FOX News Stupid or Evil?
The Australian Time Warp (you don’t have to be from Australia to appreciate)
Target boycott flash mob; great video.
Glenn Beck is NOT Martin Luther King Jr.. Not even close.
2009 National Environmental Scorecard “illustrates the extent to which the Obama administration and the 111th Congress began to move our nation towards a new energy future”

Besides, despite my protestations, I’m a political junkie at heart. Which reminds me, a couple journalists covering politicians died in the past 5 weeks.
Daniel Schorr (July 23), possibly best known for his coverage of Watergate for CBS News, and discovering, on air, that he was on Richard Nixon’s enemies list. One of my journalistic heroes who was most recently on National Public Radio.
Whereas James Kilpatrick (August 15) I thought was almost always wrong. From his defense of segregation to his appearances on TV shows such as 60 Minutes’ Point/Counterpoint segment to Agronsky & Company, which I watched religiously, I loved to disagree with him. He did seem to mellow in later years.
A couple of pols died:
The former powerful chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski (August 11), like a predecessor in that office, Wilbur Mills, and a successor, Charles Rangel, all had Congressional legal troubles.
Ted Stevens (August 9), former US Senator famous for wanting a “bridge to nowhere” for his state of Alaska was lauded by the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association as a great champion of the sports industry. He predicted his death by plane, which is how his first wife perished.

While I’m thinking of the recently deceased:
Jack Tatum (July 27) – a nasty football player.
Mitch Miller (July 31) – watched a LOT of Sing Along with Mitch, even as I thought he was rather “square”. No more so than in this cover of Give Peace a Chance.
Patricia Neal (August 8) – I cannot recommend enough A Face In The Crowd, also starring Andy Griffith. Here’s the trailer.
Abbey Lincoln (August 14) – underappreciated jazz singer-songwriter and civil rights activist.
Bobby Thomson (August 16) – The shot heard ’round the world when “the Giants win the pennant” in 1951 after the baseball team was so far behind the Dodgers in August.
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The Fantastic Four As A Model For Gay Acceptance

An 83 song setlist coming to Rock Band 3. Not that I play, of course.
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Things that struck me as funny and/or weird:

For a smile, you can send a Hug-Egram. Unfortunately, you can also read the URL as “huge gram”; make of that as you will.

My favorite spam comment of the month: “Next time you should condense your post, try to leave out the parts that people skip.” Not incidentally, 25 Ways to Stop Spam

OMG WWII on Facebook! A modern adaptation of World War II for the American teenager.

What Cigarette companies don’t want us to know… (hate that phrase): “Direct E-Cig is a revolutionary electronic smoking device designed as a better smoking alternative to traditional tobacco cigarettes.” Video interesting, as it shows mixed results for the product, which according to a story I read in the Wall Street Journal this week, has NOT been approved by the FDA.

When I was looking up things for my English language post this month, I found this NOT in the least bit SAFE FOR WORK video about the versatility of a popular English language word that begins with the letter F. (Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)