9 Smokers

Don’t stop me, if you’ve heard this one. I just have to tell new versions, because things keep looking different the more I look at them, and maybe sometimes something has changed for other people, too. So, I turned 65 my last birthday. Getting old is not for the faint of heart, but consider the alternative. Four years ago next month, I went to bed one night complaining of my worse headache ever and flu, and it was almost my last complaint. The ambulance came. I was in the ICU in a coma for three weeks, woke up alive but 100 percent unable to hear anything. Another three weeks in rehab, trying to learn how to not fall down when I walked, from the bed to the bathroom, so that nobody would have to pamper me. Watched a lot of baseball on television, because it was the only thing I could understand in total silence. One of the first articles I read in the hospital began, “So, you had spinal meningitis, and now you are deaf. Boy, are you lucky!”

Nine months later I received a cochlear implant, electronic bionic hearing, an ear bypass. Everybody sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks announcing the concourse stops on the airport subway. So, Puccini may never be exactly as beautiful again. My 1991 Honda Accord station wagon with the plumbing parts, 2x4’s, and tools sat in the driveway undriven for a year, before I sold it. I became a regular at the DeKalb Wellness Center, the only place I know with as many parking spaces marked handicap blue as unmarked. Inside, survivors of major medical crises, mostly no longer young, limp and gimp around the track and on the workout equipment with walkers, oxygen canisters, and body parts that either won‘t bend or won‘t straighten out. The indoor track is 1/15 of a mile. A banner on the wall reads, “Triumph of the Human Spirit.” On my first visit, I could barely walk around the track once. I have built up to 15 laps. Now, I include eight laps, over half a mile, at a jog. If I stopped working out for six months, I am certain I would be a bed-ridden invalid.

I needed a replacement car to carry the tools and equipment required for my rental property maintenance and repairs, and I found a 1999 Saturn station wagon, on Craigslist. I used my caption telephone to call the number. A trained operator repeats the other end of the conversation to me, and voice-recognition technology transcribes it into captions. The seller described the car. Automatic transmission. Very clean and well maintained. A 9-smoker vehicle. I envisioned a line of circus clowns exiting the car with big cigars, corn-cob pipes, and lit Winstons and Marlboros puffing away. Maybe non-smoker vehicle would be a better selling point. Best guesses are what I do myself all day every day.

As I drove the 1999 Saturn station wagon home for the first time, I listened to the radio broadcast of Simon Boccanegra with Plácido Domingo. It sounded a little like music. Every little bit helps. Every step counts. Like a journey of a thousand miles.

Blowing Smoke Up My Asp

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, maybe my friend Carl Bergman, an informed and insightful political observer, will blush that I have stolen an idea he posted on his blog, including comments I could not resist making. Carl quotes U.S. Department of State briefing officer Ian Kelly blowing smoke up every available orifice of Foggy Bottom press corps members inquiring about how underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab slipped through the cracks of watch lists, visa requirements, and alarms sounded by his own father, then boarded a flight that was ready to land in Detroit when the would-be terrorist tried to light his own fuse. Exactly what the State Department’s Visa Viper program is designed to prevent.

QUESTION: What does VISAS VIPER mean? Is that some slick acronym?
MR. KELLY: Yeah. Well, it’s not an acronym, no. It’s – I remember when I was in Moscow, they – it’s just a – it’s a tradition in the State Department. I was in Moscow and I was the educational exchanges officer, and I would get cables that were – the subject line was “Visas Donkey Chipmunk,” and it had to do with Soviets applying for exchange visas.
QUESTION: Ian –
MR. KELLY: It’s just a category.
QUESTION: So what’s viper mean?
MR. KELLY: It doesn’t mean anything.

As a former State Department employee myself, I can not resist offering a guiding light to a lost brother.

The Visa Viper program is a State Department initiative created after the World Trade Center Bombing in 1993, when the State Department realized that hundreds of cables discussing terrorists had been initiated, but did not necessarily direct an individual to be watch listed. As a result, the Visa Viper program required Consular Affairs posts and other participating agencies to coordinate the submission of cables providing this specific direction on known or suspected terrorists. The program is congressionally mandated, and reports on program activities must be submitted to Congress on a monthly basis.

From the State Department's own Foreign Affairs Manuals:

“VISA VIPER” TERRORIST REPORTING PROGRAM
9 FAM 40.37 RELATED STATUTORY PROVISIONS
(CT:VISA-1214; 05-06-2009)
Section 304 of the Enhanced Security and Visa Entry, Public Law.
107-173 (8 U.S.C. 1733).
Section 304. TERRORIST LOOKOUT COMMITTEES.
(a) ESTABLISHMENT- The Secretary of State shall require a terrorist lookout committee to be maintained within each United States mission to a foreign country.
(b) PURPOSE- The purpose of each committee established under subsection
(a) shall be--
(1) to utilize the cooperative resources of all elements of the United
States mission in the country in which the consular post is located
to identify known or potential terrorists and to develop information
on those individuals;
(2) to ensure that such information is routinely and consistently
brought to the attention of appropriate United States officials for
use in administering the immigration laws of the United States; and
(3) to ensure that the names of known and suspected terrorists are
entered into the appropriate lookout databases.
(c) COMPOSITION; CHAIR- The Secretary shall establish rules governing the composition of such committees.
(d) MEETINGS- Each committee established under subsection (a) shall meet at least monthly to share information pertaining to the committee's purpose as described in subsection (b)(2).
(e) PERIODIC REPORTS TO THE SECRETARY OF STATE- Each committee established under subsection (a) shall submit monthly reports to the Secretary of State describing the committee’s activities, whether or not information on known or suspected terrorists was developed during the month.
(f) REPORTS TO CONGRESS- The Secretary of State shall submit a report on a quarterly basis to the appropriate committees of Congress on the status of the committees established under subsection (a).
(g) AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS- There are authorized to be
appropriated such sums as may be necessary to implement this section.

Personally I do not believe the Underwear Bomber failed to get the attention of the system. Notwithstanding tough talkers like Dick Cheney, I believe the system will not embolden itself to the point of preventing an airline from earning a paid fare.

Premises Protected by Johnson & Johnson

My yard, front, back and two sides, is under constant threat of being reclaimed by nature. Thanks to the inability and/or unwillingness of the U.S. Congress to enact functional immigration laws, I can always find help in front of the Stone Mountain Cut Rate 24/7 Magic Quick Stop Generic Gas Station and Georgia Lottery Franchise. I always wonder, when the swarm encircles my car: does this represent merely the disadvantage of those needing work expressed as a ratio to the jobs available? Or do I look like the kind of guy who will not only have his own leaf blower but also will buy lunch at McDonald’s and pay for a full eight hours even if I knock off at 3 p.m.? After only a couple of hours clipping hedges, my helper ran screaming up the street. When he returned, cautiously, he pointed out to me a hornets nest the size of a basketball hanging under the window box. I told him to keep a wide path away from it the remainder off the day.

Meanwhile, I looked on the internet for ways to destroy nests of hornets, wasps, yellow jackets and other flying insects with stingers. Leave the job to a professional, according to the overwhelming consensus. The kind of advice that fell on deaf ears with me even before my ears fell deaf. I am the guy the petrochemical manufacturers had in mind when they refined the accuracy of a stream of pesticide spray that can shoot down a flying object no bigger than your fingernail from 20 feet away. This product stands proudly alongside their contributions such as furniture polish and baby lotion as comfort to modern human life.

I bought several cans of SharpShooter Wasp and Hornet Spray at the Half-Price Store. I planned to saturate the wasp nest hanging from my window box, killing everything inside or likely to go inside. Then I would knock down the nest and discard it in the trash. If you intend to destroy a wasp/hornet/yellow jacket nest as a do-it-yourself project, cover yourself completely. All the articles agree. I donned my thickest blue jeans, sweatshirt, and hat. That still left my face and ears exposed. In the absence of a beekeepers helmet and veil, I cut some eye holes in old pillow case, but upon seeing myself in the mirror wearing it, I could tell right away this was not a good idea. I backed the car into the yard, within about 15 feet of the nest. With the engine running, I rolled down the passenger side window about six inches. Then I emptied two cans of SharpShooter Wasp and Hornet Spray in steady streams through the window opening accurately and directly into the access hole of the nest. My speeding getaway looked like Bonnie and Clyde. When I returned much, much later, the ground under the nest was covered with dead carcasses.

I am thinking about this, because the little city of Pine Lake, Ga., population 621, where I live, is struggling with law enforcement and security issues. The usual stuff, robbery, rape, dogs without leashes or anyone able or willing to control them. My buddy Luther, who does not live in Pine Lake, has a sign on his front door: “This property protected by Smith and Wesson.” Even one of the gentlest of my neighbors tells me that when she walks her dog, she carries a mini-stun gun (on the internet, Mini-Thunder, available, 100,000 volts $11.95). Now I receive an e-mail suggesting wasp spray for self-defense as superior to mace or pepper spray both in cost and safe distance required to be effective. Hey, I’m already an expert. Maybe I should make some signs for the front door: “These premises protected by Johnson & Johnson.“

Haiti 1492 - 2010

As every school-child knows,

In Fourteen-Hundred-and-Ninety-Two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
And discovered…
Haiti.

Right? Look it up. Columbus had navigated west to his destination, the East, an untested route at best. When he arrived wherever, he called the people who already lived there "Indians," though they had never heard of India or even Spain. Within 25 years, the Spanish colonized the new land, the island of Hispaniola, shipped everything of value back to Europe, reduced the native population to virtual extinction, and began importing kidnaped Africans as slave labor.

According to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, “In 1697, Spain ceded to the French the western third of the island, which later became Haiti. The French colony, based on forestry and sugar-related industries, became one of the wealthiest in the Caribbean,” through slavery and environmental degradation. Nearly half a million slaves revolted, and “Haiti became the first black republic to declare independence in 1804. The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti has been plagued by political violence for most of its history.”

An international relief agency professional said on television that Haiti was “the saddest” place on the face of the earth, even before the earthquake. President Obama enlisted his two immediate predecessors Bush and Clinton to lead the effort to raise funds for Haiti. Pat Robertson contributed his belief that the earthquake was how God punished pacts with the devil.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune published the following letter:

Dear Pat Robertson,
I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I'm all over that action.
But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I'm no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished.
Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth -- glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven't you seen "Crossroads"? Or "Damn Yankees"?
If I had a thing going with Haiti, there'd be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox -- that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it -- I'm just saying: Not how I roll.
You're doing great work, Pat, and I don't want to clip your wings -- just, come on, you're making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That's working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.
Best, Satan

Violate My Copyright

By William C. Cotter

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. It is humiliating enough just to have an idea, without bringing unnecessary attention to the inability to enact it. Nonetheless, I have resolved to quit including any sort of copyright notice on my blog.

Abbie Hoffman wrote a best seller entitled Steal This Book, do-it-yourself instructions on cannabis cultivation, pirate radio, communes, shoplifting, and applying to the Interior Department for a free buffalo. "It's embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on the Best Seller's List," said the 1970’s hippie radical, who did not embarrass easily. Rolling Stone magazine exposed how he had plagiarized the book. I just checked; on-line downloads of Abbie Hoffman’s magnum opus are available free. Amazon.com and others advertise copies for sale.

Judson Jerome, the poet, my professor and best friend at Antioch College, published two dozen or so books. To call him a prolific writer does not scratch the surface. I have seen him spend the morning at a meeting, then come back from lunch with a multi-page essay examining all the ideas nobody had thought of during the morning. Jud knew how to get published. He was poetry editor of the Antioch Review during two decades, and his poems appeared in every respected literary quarterly and Boston and New York slick magazine that published poetry. His articles on higher education and utopian communities showed up in Life magazine and elsewhere. For 30 years he wrote the poetry column for Writer’s Digest. That is where I first found him, on the display racks at Tenth Street News and Novelty, alongside baseball magazines, Mickey Spillane paperbacks, and plastic piles of doggie diarrhea, eye-catching as the real thing. I was still in high school, and I would serve three years in the U.S. Army, before I could go to Antioch on the Vietnam War Era GI Bill.

In his 1984 book On Being a Poet, Jud wrote: “Ladies Home Journal once paid me $10 a line for a twenty-five line poem. Several anthologies paid me $25 to $50 for reprint rights to individual poems. These were top rates at the time, and it is a good thing I wasn’t trying to feed my family on the proceeds—or indeed from the proceeds of writing….A dozen acceptances in a year from respected, paying markets (e.g. Harpers, The Atlantic) at less than $100 a poem would mean a year of dazzling success for the best-known poets in the country. An advance of $500 on a collection of poetry from a major publisher would be generous, and the book would be almost certain to earn no royalties beyond its advance.”

I tagged along with Jud to a poetry reading he gave near Cincinnati, only a couple of hours drive from Antioch in Yellow Springs. He carried a professorial book satchel, worn leather with straps and buckles. Inside were his reading manuscripts and a few copies of his book of poetry Light In The West, which he set out on display to his audience like tupperware. Nowadays, if there are more writers than readers, certainly there are more writers than teaching jobs. If you can learn to write a sentence that somebody else can understand, you might also be able to learn a paying trade like plumbing or auto repair. “I have deliberately put much of my work into the public domain (with Shakespeare and The Bible) because I want people to spread it around, and there is so little money to be made on poetry at best, I don’t see much reason to protect it,” Jud said. When he died in 1991, he was already surfing the internet for his audience, before Blogger, Facebook, My Space, Create Space, iUniverse, Xlibris, Lulu Enterprises, and other digital magic and POD’s (Print on Demand).

Two Old Guys at The Waffle House in Hapeville

You never know what you might overhear at the Waffle House. Two old guys sat at a booth by the front window. They huffed and puffed like characters in a Hemingway story remembering the great DiMaggio.

“Pavarotti is not the only one who ever lived. Placido Domingo is my favorite.”

“Placido Domingo won the Birgit Nilsson prize. A million dollars, provided by her will. He was her own first choice.”

In my youth, I used to call her Beer Gut Nilsson. Like those who say it isn’t over till the fat lady sings.

Here is a link to the story covering the prize.

Here is a link to a you tube of Birgit Nilsson singing Puccini.

Here is one of Placido Domingo singing Puccini.

And here is one of Luciana Pavarotti singing Puccini.

Who cares if DiMaggio is better than Domingo or Pavarotti better than Provolone. Just listen. Maybe you will wake up one morning deaf, and you’ll kick your own butt.

How about this one? Luciana Pavarotti singing a duet with his father. Can you imagine the Papa Pavarotti household?

Three Holiday Wishes

My favorite Christmas wish is Peace on Earth and Goodwill Towards All Mankind. A hard hunt, if you can find any. Happy Birthday, Prince of Peace. Not prince of profit motive, or even making the world safe for shopping malls and drive-thru fast food.

In Oslo, President Barack Obama recently accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and told the Norwegians that “Evil does exist in the world,” as if they might not know, or perhaps he thought they might think he does not know. Just to make his point, he is sending another 30,000 U.S. military personnel to Afghanistan. Evil always seems to raise its ugly head in places like Afghanistan, a pop up target from behind something you hadn’t noticed.

At least President Obama will not send 40,000 troops. And they’ll all get to come home as soon as we win. Whatever that is. And whenever. Except for the ones who don’t ever come home again. Like the 58,195 names on a wall in Washington, D.C., near the Lincoln Memorial. In the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan 5,290 Americans have died already. Plus everyone else. According to lowest credible estimates, 753,399 people have been killed in the Bush-Obama wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If you count non-Americans. Do non-Americans count?

One thing about the 58,195 names on the Vietnam Memorial was that every family in America was at risk of sending someone to that war. Well, there were some exceptions, dodges, and angles. As noted: Dick Cheney, George Bush, Bill Clinton. But the rest of us all got drafted, and by the time everyone in the United States of America knew someone whose name would eventually go on the wall, the war was over. Enough was enough. Look it up. Even if you don’t actually remember. Even if you never heard of flashbacks.

An act of Congress abolished the draft. Like that would put an end to war. At least maybe it would put an end to complaining. Noticing. Let some other families, some other neighborhoods, some other home towns send their sons and daughters, spouses and grandchildren. Out of sight, out of mind.

Maybe for the New Year, when Congress finishes bailing out all the businesses with their hands out and passes health care reform legislation overweight with benefits for insurance companies, maybe they can put their courage to the test and re-instate the draft, so that everyone in our American democracy will have an equal opportunity and personal interest in when and where and for how long and why there will be a war.

I am wishing a Merry Christmas and blessings for long life to all the boys and girls, at war and at peace. Happy Birthday to the Prince of Peace.

Turn up the volume on your speakers, and listen to this.

My Sister Martha 8/8/38 - 12/5/09

Before Martha Cotter Kirkland was a writer, she was a singer with a voice so beautiful that when she gave her first classical recital, her self-centered teenage brother could not hide from public view his tears of awe and pride. The first time he, I, ever realized she could sing in any special way, she performed in her high school talent show: the Edith Piaf international smash hit La Vie En Rose. Martha’s beret was black. Her French was nasal where French is nasal, throaty where French is throaty.

Martha was the only one of my sisters who ever attended the same school at the same time I did. She was in the seventh grade, when I was in the first grade. We walked to and from school together. Many years later, I became the first one in my family to graduate from college, but Martha, married and the mother of two school-age daughters, became the second.

When Martha was only 16 years old, she worked part-time as a telephone operator for Southern Bell. She took weekend and holiday shifts split 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. till 10 p.m. She did her school work and took naps in the operator’s lounge between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. She rode the bus home late at night. She paid her brother’s little league baseball fee, and when he was a self-centered teenager, she gave him money to take girls on dates to movies and to the Varsity.

Martha and two of her friends sang the McGuire Sisters songs Sincerely and Sugartime on a local TV show. In private, the trio called themselves “The Dripettes.” Martha entered the Miss Atlanta contest. Why not? She was beautiful and talented.



Martha telephoned me one day and informed me she might do some writing. What was the best advice I had ever received? Put your butt in a chair and your fingers on the keyboard, I replied. According to the website Fantastic Fiction, Martha wrote 26 books, including romance, historical, and mystery novels.

She was devoted to our mother. Martha died in her sleep at age 71.

Dash Away All

Did you get the e-mail calling itself “Getting to Know Obama’s Czars?” The extensive list names appointees of President Obama’s and shamelessly describes their backgrounds with loaded labels, booby-trapped, ready to explode at the slightest touch: ultra liberal, pro-abortion, Black radical, Communist, homosexual, gay activist, socialist, radical environmentalist, and “married to a reporter for the New York Times.” Included are Richard Holbrooke and Dennis Ross, not czars at all but assistant U. S. Secretaries of State, distinguished and experienced diplomats, either of whom was fully qualified for the position of Secretary of State that went to Hillary Clinton. I retain a special interest in the U.S. Department of State, where I worked for several years, and have the greatest respect for those who devote their lives to diplomacy and foreign affairs. Also on this dishonor roll by e-mail is George Mitchell, special envoy for the Middle East, who brokered peace in Northern Ireland after decades of bitter religious civil war, Catholics vs. Protestants, both against the English occupiers. After Mitchell retired as U.S. Senate Majority Leader, he wanted to be Major League Baseball Commissioner. He has also served as chairman of The Walt Disney Company.

The internet and e-mail campaigns to discredit President Obama’s choices for important government positions would be laughable but for the fact that they originate not from basement computers belonging to fruitcakes and losers of no consequence but rather from well-financed and organized devil’s workshops on K Street and Madison Ave. These cynical and sinister opinion manipulators know very well what they seek to do. It is not “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

Just in time for the holidays, I have received an e-mail entitled “Here Comes Santa Claus,“ forwarded to me and three pages of other addressees, not a single one known to me, and originated by someone who had neglected to include a name on the “From” line. This e-mail sounded the alarm that Santa Claus should not be taken at face value, no matter how jolly that face may appear. Pointing out Santa’s choice of red suits, the e-mail resurrected the 1950’s rallying cry, “better dead than red.” Now wait a minute. Santa is a communist? Indeed the e-mail calls the idea “socialism” that every little boy and girl all over the world should receive presents. Further, Santa’s socialistic giveaways lower holiday sales levels for merchandise at the malls, an unpatriotic consequence during the current difficult economy. Call out the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Santa Claus is a known intruder into private homes, according to the e-mail sent to me. He practices witchcraft and magic black as soot, conjuring himself by pressing his finger to the tip of his nose in order to use chimneys as his method of entry and exit. His well-known transportation by airborne sleigh is pulled by reindeer, among whom are those with the pro-gay names of “Dancer” and “Prancer.” The Santa Claus Toy Shop employs only elves, to whom he provides uniforms with logos saying, “Santa’s Little Helpers.“ For the Christmas rush, he often stops at curbside of his nearest Home Depot to pick up day labor, laid off from productions of “The Wizard of Oz.” Santa offers no hope of a Social Security check at retirement and hourly wages a factory worker in China would not chance. Worse of all is the conspiracy of silence about Santa’s unwholesome preoccupation with children, including keeping predatory lists of which ones are naughty and nice. Contrary to popular myth, Santa does not hail from the North Pole but rather from a place called Lapland, a geographical location allowing him to see Russia from his back porch, without having Sarah Palin at the neighborhood parties. Lapland? Just exactly what anatomical part is the lap, anyway?

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

A Day I Can't Forget

Today’s current generation may well be defined by 9/11 for the rest of its life the way my parents’ generation was irrevocably shaped by December 7. For my own generation, the unforgetable date was November 22, the day in 1963 that John F. Kennedy was assassinated as his motorcade drove past the Texas Book Repository in Dallas. That anniversary comes and goes with a certain memory of being stunned and never quite being the same again.

Just after lunch on Nov. 22, 1963, I was standing at my desk in the city room of The Atlanta Journal where I worked as a very junior reporter for that newspaper. I had my desk telephone to my ear and was talking to my Daddy. He often made a point of mentioning to me that one of his friends would show him an article in the Atlanta Journal with a By-Line of the same name as his. These articles might be about anything that was the news of the day, but much of the news of those days was about the end of racial segregation in its many forms. The Atlanta newspapers were known to be supporting it. My Daddy’s friends were not. Nor was he. Still, he liked to call me at work and pass a few minutes. I always had the sense, despite everything, he was proud of what I did. As we spoke on the telephone that after-lunch hour on Nov. 22, 1963, the bells on the teletype machines in the newsroom sounded an alarm. Somebody shouted something, and I said to my Daddy, “I’ve got to go. The President has just been shot.” I’ll never forget the moment or the words.

In a matter of minutes, the newspaper shifted gears. Just like in the old movies. I actually heard, “Stop The Presses.” One of my ongoing assignments was to do the daily feature called the “Street Poll.” Take a photographer to the streets of downtown Atlanta and ask six or eight people their opinions on some current topic. That day, at that hour, Harold E. Davis, City Editor of The Journal, dispatched me immediately to get people-in-the-street quotes on this obviously historic event. By the time I returned from collecting these reactions on the corner of Forsyth and Marietta Streets, John F. Kennedy was dead. My minor journalistic contribution to a historic edition of The Atlanta Journal ran on page one, down at the bottom of the page, well below the banner headline “KENNEDY KILLED” and the masthead “EXTRA.”

The assassination of John F. Kennedy, actual dates notwithstanding, ended the era of the 1950’s and began the 1960’s. It ushered in a parade of nonsense, typified by explaining that Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln, and President Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, and somehow this information was worthy of consideration. Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, The Warren Commission, Jim Garrison, Oliver Stone. What a cast of characters! Maximum heat, minimum light. The Kennedy Administration was no Camelot. After the Peace Corps, his New Frontier proposals bogged down in Congress. Only national mourning and the legislative skills of Lyndon Johnson passed the 1964 Civil Rights Bill.

I watched a documentary on TV the other night about the assassination of President Kennedy. For 40-plus years, I’ve never been able to keep my eyes off those familiar, old grainy black and white television recordings, newspaper photographs, and 8mm home-movies turned historical documents. Ruby shooting Oswald. Gruesome impact of the bullet that took the back of the President’s head off. Mrs. Kennedy’s heroism, beginning with her pulling the Secret Service Agent into the open-top car as it rushed the wounded President to the hospital. The full color newsreels of the handsome, young President and his much photographed, thirty-something wife arriving in Texas that morning and walking down the stairs of the airplane, she in her pink suit, spotless.

Copyright 2007 by William C. Cotter

Toxic Xmas Tree Trimmings

Will Rogers, Oklahoma Cherokee cowboy humorist, social commentator, vaudeville comedian, and movie actor, always said he avoided Washington, D.C., because he did not want to compete with the professional clowns. “All I know is what I read in the papers,” Will Rogers would say as he twirled his lariat. Congress is still congenitally incapable of resisting loading down the legislative Christmas tree with toxic shiny ornaments, bling for its paramours and cash contributors. No idea is of such high merit or national need so urgent that the U.S. Congress can not find a way to pass a toxic waste dump of legislation in its name. Remember the U.S.A. Patriot Act? The creation of the Department of Homeland Security? The Wall Street and bank bailouts? Now comes Health Care Reform. The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill so toxic that popular left-leaning Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, voted against it, because it is worse than the status quo.

Says Rep. Kucinich:

We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are…. When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit. That is our system. Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution. But….the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers.

By incurring only a new requirement to cover pre-existing conditions, a weakened public option, and a few other important but limited concessions, the health insurance companies are getting quite a deal. The 'robust public option' which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry was whittled down from an initial potential enrollment of 129 million Americans to 6 million. This health care bill continues the redistribution of wealth to Wall Street at the expense of America's manufacturing and service economies which suffer from costs other countries do not have to bear, especially the cost of health care. America continues to stand out among all industrialized nations for its privatized health care system. As a result, we are less competitive in steel, automotive, aerospace and shipping while other countries subsidize their exports in these areas through socializing the cost of health care.

Dr. Marcia Angell of the Harvard Medical School offered this simple and elegant idea in The Huffington Post:

Drop the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 55. This should be an expansion of traditional Medicare, not a new program. Gradually, over several years, drop the age decade by decade, until everyone is covered by Medicare. Costs: Obviously, this would increase Medicare costs, but it would help decrease costs to the health system as a whole, because Medicare is so much more efficient (overhead of about 3% vs. 20% for private insurance). And it's a better program, because it ensures that everyone has access to a uniform package of benefits.

Is there a white Christmas snowball’s chance in hell Congress might stumble on such a solution? Do we or do we not have the best Congress money can buy?

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

You Can't Say That In The L.A. Times

As day leads on to day, and the years pile up, I experience a greater investment and interest in the obituary pages. Jack Nelson, 80, Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Washington, D.C., for over 20 of his 35 years with that newspaper, died recently at his home in Bethesda, Md.

Jack Nelson was a hard-hitting newspaper reporter of an old school before hairspray and endless television cable chatter impostored as news. Nonetheless, you may have seen him on the PBS Washington Week In Review, where he was a distinguished and regular fixture. Nelson was a news reporter’s news reporter when news reporters were not hard to find. Historic news he covered for The Los Angeles Times included Watergate (the break-in and the great fall), Bloody Sunday in Selma, Ala., the KKK, and the civil rights movement throughout the South.

One of his news reports quoted an Alabama county sheriff ordering his deputies: “Get those niggers off the courthouse steps.” When he dictated the story over the telephone, his editor told him that he could not use that word in the L.A. Times. Nelson responded, “You mean you want me to quote Sheriff Jim Clark as saying, ‘Get those KNEE-GROES off the courthouse steps?’” The quote was printed as Nelson filed it.

Jack Nelson recalled covering civil rights in the South in the 1960’s: "A reporter likes to pride himself on being as objective as he can, and tell both sides of the story. Well, there's hardly two sides to a story of a man being denied the basic right to vote. . . . There's no two sides to a story of a lynching. A lynching is a lynching."

Jack Nelson could be measured by his enemies. Alabama Governor George Wallace once pointed out Jack Nelson at a public rally as “an outside agitator” and called him by name. Notoriously legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover tried to smear Nelson as having a drinking problem. "What they didn't realize is that you can't ruin a newspaperman by branding him a drunk," Nelson later laughed.



Eugene Patterson, Ralph McGill, and Jack Nelson, Pulitzer Prize winners all at The Atlanta Constitution in the 1960's--AJC Photo.

Nelson was born in Talladega, Ala., graduated from high school in Biloxi, Miss., and immediately talked his way onto the local newspaper as a sports reporter. In 1952, he began working for The Atlanta Constitution, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in 1960 for his series of articles on Georgia's Milledgeville Central State Hospital for the mentally ill. The abuses he exposed included experimental treatments without patient consent, doctors on-duty under the influence of alcohol and drugs, and nurses performing major surgery.

As a very young person, I was privileged to breath the same air as Nelson, McGill, Patterson and other honorable and admirable journalists who worked in The Atlanta Journal and Constitution building on Forsyth St.

My own enduring personal memory of Jack Nelson is an incident in which he invited a bully outside who had been trying to pick a fight with me at the Press Club bar. I had made every effort to avoid having the fight, because I was in fact in the bar under age and feared losing my job if I became involved in any such incident. Nelson, who barely even knew me but recognized my disadvantage, stepped in between me and the guy, who was a radio station disk jockey, and challenged him to pick on somebody his own age.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Only an Emergency

Don’t Panic. It’s only a National Emergency. President Obama has declared the H1N1 (Swine) flu threat a National Emergency. However, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the National Emergency designation just allows hospitals to cut through the red tape, set up triage centers, determine levels of care, and treat the sickest patients first, as well as establish alternate care facilities for swine flu victims in schools, nursing homes, and elsewhere off-site, without jeopardizing reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid.

Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate about 36,000 in the U.S. die annually of flu. So far in 2009, swine flu deaths in 46 states have reached 1,000.

OK. So I tried to get a swine flu shot. My neighborhood mini-mall, walk-in healthcare provider had swine flu vaccine Friday two weeks ago, but they ran out by the time the weekend was over. Calls to the DeKalb County health department reported no vaccine, call back tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, until finally they quit answering their phone. My regular family doctor has not ordered any swine flu vaccine, and even my pulmonary specialist does not want to fool with it. Not enough incentive in vaccines at $25 an injection.

Take a tip from the telecommunications industry: bundled services, cable tv, internet, cell phone and unlimited long distance all for one package price, a savings over the total of the individual features. Doctors who cannot be troubled with even ordering swine flu vaccine might be attracted by bundling swine flu vaccine with higher profit items like MRI and CT-Scans, which they do not seem to mind scheduling at the drop of a hat, no matter the complaint. MRI and CT-scan tests vary from $1,000 to over $8,000, according to one hospital billing clerk. If the doctors threw in a $25 swine flu vaccine, they could still offer the package at the same price as an MRI or CT-scan.

The U.S. government has purchased 250 million doses of 2009 H1N1 vaccine, so anyone who wants to get the vaccine will have the opportunity to do so, the CDC says. The CDC website publishes figures about the number of doses of swine flu vaccine that have been ordered, delivered, and are scheduled to be manufactured. If you can make sense of it, let me know. Meanwhile, CDC says as soon as vaccine is available, school children, pregnant women, and people under 65 years of age should take it.

I am not under 65 years of age. The CDC says the “best way to prevent seasonal flu is by getting a seasonal flu vaccination each year.” Yeah. Right. How about swine flu? “When the 2009 H1N1 vaccine becomes available for people 65 years and older, you should get that vaccine also,” CDC advises.

Meanwhile, wash your hands. You might even ask other people to wash their hands before shaking your hand or preparing your food or giving you change at the store.

Older people are at greater risk of serious complications from the flu compared to young, healthy adults. An estimated 90 percent of seasonal flu deaths and more than 60 percent of seasonal flu hospitalizations in the U.S. each year are those 65 and older.

Small consolation: CDC guidance prioritizes the over-65 population to get antiviral drugs if they become sick with the flu. A WHO medical health officer said his biggest concern is that the H1N1 virus could mutate and become resistant to Tamiflu, the antiviral drug.

Flu symptoms, including 2009 H1N1: cough, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue, with or without fever, sometimes vomiting and diarrhea.

(Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter)

Cowboy Festival at Booth Western Art Museum

Blessing enough to be a cowboy or a poet. Baxter Black answers to both identities. In addition, he is a former large animal veterinarian, DVM. I guess that means horses and cows.

On National Public Radio, Cowboy-poet Black says things like, “Always drink upstream from the herd.” If you‘ve heard his cowboy twang on NPR, you probably remember. He says he still doesn't own a television or a cell phone, and his idea of a modern convenience is Velcro chaps.

Black will be one of the featured artists at the 7th Annual Southeastern Cowboy Festival and Symposium at the the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville Thursday through Sunday, Oct. 22-25. His concert is scheduled at 7 p.m. Saturday Oct 24.

Featured Painter and sculptor Buck McCain, currently a resident of Santa Fe, will present a lecture Thursday at 7 p.m. on his artistic style and career highlights and will be available to sign copies of the official Festival & Symposium poster in the Museum Store afterwards. McCain will present an artist’s workshop from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Friday, October 23

Other highlights of the festival will include art lectures, cowboy and cowgirl singing, fast draw competitions, three performances of re-enactments of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, traditional Native American dances by the Big Mountain Family, and living history encampments with demonstrations of pioneer skills.

The Kids Corner of the Festival and Symposium will feature a variety of free activities: creating a slinky snake or a hand print horse, painting the “yard art” ponies, calf roping, and face painting. There will also be pony rides available for a small charge.

For detailed schedule, click here.

I have mentioned previously how much I love this museum. In case you missed it, click here. Directions: Via I-75, exit for Main Street, Cartersville. Signs downtown point the way.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

The Audacity of Peace

President Barack Obama recently traveled to Scandinavia to try to bring home the Olympics but got the Nobel Peace Prize instead. Critics have complained about both. In fact, pretty much the only thing for which President Obama has not been criticized since being sworn in as President was taking his wife out to dinner on their anniversary. No, I stand corrected. I actually I did hear somebody criticize him about that, too, because he did not wear a tie.

At the White House, the un-Peace councils are trying to decide whether to send 20,000 to 60,000 additional U.S. troops to the poppy fields of Afghanistan now that Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden have fled to Pakistan and elsewhere. Maybe the Nobel Peace Prize committee is trying to influence discussions to which they were not invited. A surge in Afghanistan would provide something to do with the U.S. military personnel to be withdrawn from Iraq. Also it would help prevent a recession in what General/President Dwight Eisenhower in the innocent 1950’s termed modestly “the military-industrial complex.”

Obama is only the second sitting President of the United States to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The other was Woodrow Wilson. Two former U.S. Presidents, Jimmy Carter and Theodore Roosevelt, were named Nobel laureates, as well as Al Gore, who was almost President. Humanitarian icons Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel, Mother Teresa, Andrei Sakharov, Linus Pauling, Albert Sweitzer and Martin Luther King, Jr, are also on the list. Since it takes two to tango, make war, and sign a peace treaty, add Yasser Arafat, F.W. de Klerk, Michail Gorbachev, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, and Le Doc Tho. Five U.S. Secretaries of State have received the Nobel Peace Prize: Henry Kissinger, George C. Marshall, Cordell Hull, Frank B. Kellogg, and Elihu Root. Are you paying attention, Hillary?

If you’re like me and can’t resist, click here for the complete list.

The Nobel Prizes were provided for in the last will and testament of Alfred Nobel, Sweedish chemist, engineer, armaments manufacturer and the inventor of dynamite. According to his will, the Peace Prize is for "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses". During World Wars I and II, 1914-18 and 1939-43, no Peace Prize was awarded. Also the years 1923, 1924, 1928, 1932, 1948, 1955-1956, 1966-1967 and 1972 were Peace Prizeless.

If you gave a war and nobody came, would everybody get a Nobel Peace Prize?

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Georgia Democrat at the Fair

By Kristina Simms
guest columnist

I had fun decorating a booth at the Georgia National Fair for the Democratic Party. I brought tables and chairs and flags and posters from home. Then I stopped by Kroger and bought blue and white balloons. My friend Fenika Miller brought a life size stand-up of President Barack Obama as a finishing touch for the booth.

And that’s when the vitriol began.

Grown men raised in the South whose mamas must have taught them better stopped by the booth on a regular basis and made rude, aggressive, and sometimes violent comments.

One sneering man approached the booth and said, “You better take that down.” He pointed at the Obama stand-up.

“Are you threatening me?” I asked. Twenty-three years in the public schools did not make me a shy person. I am a retired educator, age 73, with a head full of white hair but I will still stand up to bullies.

“I’m threatening him,” said the visitor. I’m coming back and I’ll pour gasoline on him and burn him up.” This sounded a bit like Mississippi in the 1960s to me.

After that, I had a chat with the manager in the McGill building and with fair security. Some nice guys at a nearby booth offered to help me if I had more trouble.

And there was more trouble, most of it occurring when women were volunteering at the booth. I guess the bullies weren’t up to trying to intimidate the men volunteers.

At one point a guy who apparently had gone obsessive on the subject of communism stood in front of our booth hollering, pointing, and doing everything but making good sense for what seemed like ten minutes, but had to be shorter. Two real Southern gentlemen helped me out by approaching the booth and standing next to him, one on either side. The ranter became quieter and quieter and finally slunk off. The presence of two men, both bigger than he was, seemed to have a calming effect.

Let me insert here that the Republicans that I know personally have manners and class and would be ashamed to act like those ruffians who taunted the Democratic women at the fair. If they are disappointed over the outcome of the 2008 election they are not showing it by snarling “You don’t believe all that crap, do you” when a Democratic woman asks, “Are you enjoying the fair?”

Another older man said he wanted to borrow our Obama image so he could hold its head under water at a nearby hot tub demonstration. Said this grandpa, “I would hold him under the water for ten minutes and smile the whole time.”

I would like to say that this rude behavior surprised me. I would like to say that it surprised me when a young man stood in front of our booth and went through the motions of firing an imaginary rifle in the direction of an image of the President of the United States. It doesn’t surprise me because I saw at the same booth last year and encountered the same type of verbal abuse.
What does surprise and shock me is the culture of violence and disrespect for the Presidency that is taking root in my beloved United States of America.

Kristina Simms is a retired educator and state president of the Georgia Federation of Democratic Women. She is the author of a history of Macon, GA and several other books, and also an advocate for the mentally disabled.

The Met: Live in HD

At a Shopping Mall Movie Theatre Near You

Tosca – Giacomo Puccini
1 PM Saturday October 10, 2009
Encore: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 6:30 PM

Aida – Giuseppe Verdi
1 PM Saturday October 24, 2009
Encore: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 6:30 PM

Turandot – Giacomo Puccini
1 PM Saturday November 7, 2009
Encore: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 6:30 PM

Les Contes d’Hoffmann – Jacques Offenbach
1 PM Saturday December 19, 2009
Encore: Wednesday, January 6, 2010 6:30 PM

Der Rosenkavalier – Richard Strauss
1 PM Saturday January 9, 2010
Encore: Wednesday, January 27, 2010 6:30 PM

Carmen – Georges Bizet
1 PM Saturday January 16, 2010
Encore: Wednesday, February 3, 2010 6:30 PM

Simon Boccanegra – Giuseppe Verdi
1 PM Saturday February 6, 2010
Encore: Wednesday, February 24, 2010 6:30 PM

Hamlet – Ambroise Thomas
1 PM Saturday March 27, 2010
Encore: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 6:30 PM

Armida – Gioachino Rossini
1 PM Saturday May 1, 2010
Encore: Wednesday, May 19, 2010 6:30 PM

Click Here For Details and Tickets

When I entered my zip code, I found my closest movie house broadcast would be at Hollywood 24 @ North I-85, 3265 N.E. EXPRESSWAY Access Road, CHAMBLEE, GA. Tickets are $22 adults, $20 seniors, and $15 children for the Saturday showings. Wednesday encores are $18. English language captions are provided.

I asked my friend Wayne Gibson, retired chairman of the Music Department at Kennesaw State University, if I had to wear my opera tuxedo or could I dress just like I was going to a Bruce Willis movie. He said, "Totally movie attire is my experience! Everyone has popcorn, hot dogs and giant cokes! The world is certainly changing! I think I like it."

(Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter)

Health Care Option

Health Care Reform rally on the grounds of the Georgia Capitol. Thomas Watson looms over Paw Paw Bill's head.

Here’s what will happen to you in America when you get sick. Not IF you get sick, but WHEN you get sick. Human organisms, even Americans, are born guaranteed to get sick and die.

First you will lose your job. After you have exhausted your sick leave and all the protections provided by the Federal Government meddling with personal freedom, you will be terminated from the job you have held, no matter how long, and performed no matter how faithfully and at personal risk and sacrifice to your loving family, who could have used some of your attention.

When you are terminated from your job, your medical insurance will be cancelled because it is provided by your ex-employer as a benefit to its employees.

If you have disability insurance, the insurance conglomerate that is supposed to pick up only a fraction of your income to replace your lost wages now that you are unemployed, that conglomerate will insist that you apply for Social Security Disability. If Social Security denies your claim, the insurance conglomerate will use that denial to maintain you are not really disabled. If you are awarded SSDI, the insurance conglomerate will reduce their payment to you by the amount provided by the Federal Government.

If you had the option and forethought to pay extra for an employer health insurance plan with a fixed deductible rather than something like a 20-percent co-pay, you are out of pocket a $1,000 or so. If you now must pay 20-percent of a hospital bill that can easy amount to a million dollars, you will probably end up in bankruptcy court.

You will, of course, not be able to get any more private health insurance, because you now have a pre-existing condition. Meanwhile, if your sickness requires prescription medications to keep you alive or prevent intolerable pain, you will pay half your reduced income for those prescriptions, even though the same medications are available elsewhere, including Canada, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Switzerland, at a cost 25-percent or less of what you pay in the United States.

If you are declared eligible for SSDI, after two years, you will become automatically eligible for Medicare, no matter what your age. At that time you will, like Paul on the road to Damascas, convert to belief in single payer, public option, socialized medicine.

I am not making any of this up. I am telling you exactly from my own experience, also shared by countless others. If you do not want to believe us, I hope you will never get sick, but your chances are not even slim and none. Your chances of never getting sick are only none.

Of course, if you are already without a job and/or without health care insurance, you still have the option of just going off into the woods when you get sick to die like the wild animals.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Flannery O'Connor's Milledgeville

I am writing an article about Flannery O'Connor for the print world, as if a good enough excuse were needed to visit some of the landmarks of her life.


Flannery O'Connor lived out the last years of her all-too-short life and wrote many of her stories in this farmhouse. She called the farm Andalusia. It is located on U.S. Highway 441 North, about four miles north of historic Milledgeville, a quarter-mile north of the Wal-Mart.


At the kitchen table, morning coffee was served from a thermos. Regina Cline O'Connor, Flannery's mother, made the coffee each night to serve the next day.


Flannery O'Connor wrote every morning in her bedroom, with her back to the window and her desk and typewriter walled behind the clothes chest.


Regina O'Connor operated Andalusia as a working dairy farm, with tenant labor. Today Andalusia is maintained by the underfunded Flannery O'Connor Foundation and is open to the public.


Peacocks, absent from Andalusia for some years, recently have been re-introduced.


The barn has a loft, a challenge to climb with a wooden leg, a dangerous descent hard to explain, without it.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Flannery O'Connor's Savannah

I just returned from Savannah, its historic squares and boulevards, canopied with centuries old live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, excuse enough for a trip only slightly over four hours drive away. Even so, I wanted to focus on Flannery O'Connor, who was born there and lived her childhood at Lafayette Square.



This is the living room of the O'Connor house, family photos on display.



The Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home at 207 E. Charlton St., on Lafayette Square.



The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, also on Lafayette Square, a short walk from home for an impressionable little girl.



The backyard of Flannery O'Connor's childhood home, immortalized by Pathe Newsreel of Mary Flannery's pet chicken, which she had taught to walk backwards. The old newsreel pokes a little fun at this oddity, but Flannery O'Connor cited it as the beginning of her lifelong love of birds, including her famed collection of peacocks at Andalusia, her farm home outside Milledgeville.



Guido Gardens, Metter, Ga., "Home of the Sower," a lovely place to stop for a picnic lunch between Atlanta and Savannah. Guido Gardens is maintained by the Guido Evangelistic Association. Flannery O'Connor would not have missed it.

I am writing an article for the print world about Flannery O'Connor. Please share with me your favorite uniquely Georgia quote, paragraph, scene, etc. from her writings. Click comments or send e-mail.

(Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter)

Sixty-Five

The armada of American Allies invaded the coast of France at Normandy 65 anniversaries ago. Omaha Beach, Utah Beach, Sword Beach, Pointe du Hoc. Paratroopers and gliders floated silently from the sky into French farm fields and towns. Sainte-Mere-Eglise, Bayeux, Carentan. The charming fishing village of Arromanches was turned into an instant deep water port. Sixty-five birthdays ago for me, as I was born the same day. Sixty-five. Retirement age. It is too late for me to think about retiring, since I already left the employment roles three years ago when I was hospitalized, in a coma for three weeks, woke up deaf. Nowadays I stay plenty busy. I just don’t have a job. Lately, I have been remodeling the condo that belonged to my oldest sister, who died the day before Christmas Eve 2007. I am almost finished with that project and look forward to some quality time this summer with my grandchildren, spending some of their inheritance on sunscreen, floppy straw hats, and restaurant meals. I also want to re-read one of my favorite writers, Flannery O’Connor, do some research for an article. Retired is in the eye of the beholder.

Three years after my Daddy retired, I received a letter saying he would come to visit me in Europe, if I invited him. I worked for the U.S. Department of State in Brussels, Belgium, at the time. My Daddy had crossed the ocean borders of the U.S.A. only once before, in WWII when the Marine Corps had put him on a troop ship as cannon fodder for the invasion of Japan, just before Hiroshima. From Brussels, my wife and I took my Daddy to the Ardennes and Amsterdam. We went to Paris and drove to Normandy. We visited the American Cemetery, 172 acres of white markers, on a cliff, overlooking Omaha Beach.

We stayed at a charming hotel in the waterfront village of Arromanches, location of the D-Day Museum. My Daddy and I posed together for a photograph in front of the museum, with the large letters prominent behind us, 6 Juin 1944, D-Day. In the picture, my Daddy is 68. I am 35. At sunset, my Daddy and I stood each with one foot resting on the rail of the sea wall, wordlessly smoking American cigarettes and watching the ocean channel. Our hotel was four stories high across the narrow street from the waterfront. During the night, the crashing waves alternately kept me awake and drummed me to sleep.

At the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, my Daddy, drew stares by complaining about the crowded attraction in terms that would be overly dignified by suggesting an analogy to moneychangers in the temple. I can only think he believed that nobody could understand him, since he could not understand the other languages being spoken all around him. In France, the steaks were cooked too rare for him, and he missed his bacon and eggs for breakfast. “How long did it take you before you could stand this coffee?” he asked me. I was happy to tell him, “Daddy, the first time I ever put it in my mouth, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.” I always remember this as a substitute for the discussion we never had about French wines, which my Daddy never tasted, and the special quality of light in northern France captured by Impressionist paintings, which never caught my Daddy's eye.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Flanders Fields

The city where I live, population 621, kicks off the Memorial Day weekend with a Children’s Parade, little flags, bunting decorated bicycles, wagons, scooters, skateboards. The parade convenes at the Pine Lake Community Center and winds its way two blocks to the Beach House for hot dogs, hamburgers, and pot luck. Krogers and Publics do booming business for Memorial Day weekend. So does NASCAR and baseball double-headers. Nationwide "Click It or Ticket" campaigns welcome the beginning of vacation driving season. Will there be $4 per gallon gasoline again by the end of summer?



In my childhood, Memorial Day was observed on May 30, no matter what day of the week, but now the last Monday in May is celebrated, in the interest of a long three-day weekend. Originally called Decoration Day, the purpose was to remember those who have died in our nation's service. Before the end of the Civil War, groups of women in the South decorated the graves of their fallen. Union Army General John Logan ordered Memorial Day observance on May 30, 1868, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery, a commemoration continued there today with small American flags at each of the more than 260,000 Arlington burial sites. Several southern states still have an additional separate day for honoring the Confederate war dead.

Congress diluted the special significance of Memorial Day by lumping it into a three-day weekend. “No doubt, this has contributed greatly to the general public's nonchalant observance of Memorial Day," according to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, a decorated World War II veteran, who lost his arm in combat in Italy, has introduced legislation repeatedly since 1987 to return Memorial Day to its traditional day.

Some people confuse Memorial Day, which remembers those who have died in U.S. military service, with Veterans Day, which honors all those who have served the U.S. in the military. The total number who have died in service to their country is much smaller than the total number of those who have served. This is a significant recruitment tool.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
--John McCrae (1918)

This much does not change, no matter where the poppies grow these days.

Memorial Day 2009, Monday, there will be ceremonies at the final resting places of those who gave what Lincoln called, the "last full measure." Drop by one near you. They may play "Taps." Take a handkerchief, just in case.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

H1N1 Swine Flu 4U2

I have been busy remodeling the condominium that belonged to my sister, who died at the end of 2007, naming me as executor of her estate, with instructions to sell her condo, which had fallen into disrepair during the years of her declining health. In addition to executor, I am thus the contractor preparing the property for the market. For years, I have employed day labor help with real estate repairs and remodeling, the guys you see in front of Home Depot, mostly natives of countries south of Texas. I have recently come upon my best luck yet, Jose Lupe, a skilled ceramic tile craftsman, tireless at all other tasks, a valuable contributor of his experience and ideas. I am working Jose every day against a deadline that he has already bought a bus ticket to return to Mexico the Friday before Memorial Day Weekend. “My baby,” Jose explains of his seven-year-old son, has had the flu. Jose’s family lives near Vera Cruz, in a town referred to by CNN as “Ground Zero“ of the Swine Flu epidemic. Jose thinks his son is better, but he is just too worried about his family. When he goes back to Mexico at the end of the month, he does not expect he will return to the United States.

The World Health Organization is focused on whether or not to declare a global swine flu pandemic, while some scientists say that the H1N1 virus may be no worse than the average annual flu season. About 36,000 flu-related U.S. deaths occur each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A WHO medical health officer said the biggest concern is that the virus could mutate and become resistant to Tamiflu, the antiviral drug.

In Mexico, the government has revised downward its toll of suspected swine flu deaths from 176 to 101. So far, 17 countries have reported 653 cases of H1N1, and 17 Mexicans have died, including one child visiting Texas. CDC reports 68 confirmed cases of H1N1 flu in five states. Some New York students tested positive after a trip to Mexico. President Obama asked Congress for $1.5 billion to fight the flu. Mexico opened its national naval hospital to civilians. Patients crowd the waiting rooms, and on public streets many wear surgical masks, supplies of which are low. An estimated $57 million a day is lost due to the closing of Mexico City schools, theaters and other public places.

U.S. officials want to abandon the term "swine flu" for fear of confusing people into thinking they could catch it from eating pork. Of course, all of this is a public relations nightmare for the pork industry. China, Russia and Ukraine have banned imports from Mexico and parts of the U.S. In Cairo, Egypt, the only pork is raised by non-Moslems, who also have historically enjoyed the exclusive franchise for garbage collection, but all pigs reportedly have been ordered destroyed.

The infamous influenza epidemic of 1918 was the background for Katherine Anne Porter’s classic short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider. The main characters, a newspaper woman and a soldier, discover love in the time of influenza. Porter vividly depicts the delirium of the influenza through her heroine, who survives, only to discover her lover has died of the illness, apparently caught taking care of her. Pale Horse, Pale Rider takes place in Denver, Colorado, where Porter herself lived while writing for the Rocky Mountain News, Colorado's oldest newspaper, which recently died in the current epidemic of terminal newspapers in America.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Dunking Stool

Our American pilgrim forbearers, between arriving at Plymouth Rock and becoming colonial revolutionaries, felt threatened by witchcraft. In their zealous self-defense, they resorted to all manner of, what shall we call it, torture? Root out the names of all the witches. There was something called a dunking stool or ducking stool, a chair at one end of a see-saw, teetering over the water. Confessions took on a sense of urgency. Long lists of names might spill out of the mind. For the stubborn, let the underwater ordeal reveal the truth. If they drowned, it proved they were guilty. Heads I win. Tails you lose.

The Geneva Convention defines torture as psychological or physical stress designed to bring fear of unendurable pain or death. The Geneva Convention outlaws torture against the enemy in time of war, if you capture them. It is ok to kill them beforehand. Failing that, you just can’t torture them. Prisoners of War are what the Geneva Convention is all about. The Bush administration had a problem. It had gone to a lot of trouble to round up would-be 9/11 terrorists, Al-Qaeda operatives and sympathizers from back alleys in bad neighborhoods around the world and store them in Guantanamo and various secret locations. The problem was if these captives were covered by the Geneva Convention. So the Bush administration invented a new category, enemy non-combatants. A thorny rose by another name. Then, the Bush Justice Department decided it’s only torture if we call it torture. To try to follow the philosophical and legal logic of the Bush administration is itself torture.

Dick Cheney, former President Bush’s Vice-President, insists that torture works. He has requested the release from government secret files of documents he says prove torture results in protecting all of us from attack by the enemy. He says current President Obama only shows his weakness by closing Guantanamo and speaking out against torture, a weakness the enemy will use to its advantage and attack. Cheney knows secret files do not get declassified and published just for his convenience. He also knows if there is an investigation about torture, George W. Bush will be bypassed, because everybody believes he is just clueless, the amiable cowboy in way over his head, doesn‘t know Shiite from Shinola. A Watergate-style congressional committee can ask, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?“ Nothing. And still doesn’t. All roads will lead to Cheney.

What Americans don’t like about torture is that we don’t want to see ourselves as the sorts of people who would do such things. Everybody who doesn’t mind seeing himself as the sort of person who would do such things, go ahead and raise your hand. Ok, we knew about you, Mr. Cheney.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Banking Crisis

I opened my first bank account with less than five dollars at the Citizens and Southern Bank branch on Peachtree and 12th Street. I cut through their parking lot every day on my way to and from Clark Howell Elementary School 50-plus years ago. The school, on 10th Street between Juniper and Piedmont, is long-gone in favor of a fire station and the old brick bank building replaced by a sleek, modern structure that fits in with the new skyscrapers in my old neighborhood. After a generation or so of cross-breeding the bank now calls itself the Bank of America. BOA is a whale of a bank. It swallows up all the little Jonah Banks and Trusts, Pinocchio Savings and Loans. Which is their right and manifest destiny under every economic theory with the possible exception of Socialism and taxpayer bailouts, whichever comes first. Since they are so good at doing the things banks do, lend money to people who can and will pay it back, safeguard deposits, and provide customer service with a smile rather than resorting to automated telephone labyrinths.

Bank of America has been among banks criticized recently in a couple of states that issue debit cards for payment of unemployment benefits. Although unemployment checks can take 10 days or more to arrive, debit cards are issued immediately upon application. Additional attractions of the debit cards instead of unemployment checks include convenience for those without checking accounts, as well as avoiding the need to carry cash. The nation’s largest banks have contracted with those state unemployment departments to provide the debit cards. However, the banks are charging fees against the debit cards, "A $1.50 here, a $1.50 there. Forty cents for a balance inquiry. Fifty cents to have your card denied. Thirty-five cents to have your account accessed by telephone," according to a report on CNN.

I’ve had some troubles myself with Bank of America. They quit sending me my cancelled checks, a major inconvenience for me, because I sort my checks like a game of solitaire to allocate my expenses according to my income taxes, Schedule-C, Schedule-E, Itemized Deductions, separate piles for medical expenses, mortgage payments, charitable contributions. For a while, BOA sent me little Monopoly Money photocopies of my checks printed front and back on standard size stationary. Then they quit sending those. I called the bank several times. The last time, they promised to send me copies of my checks. Instead they sent me about 25 envelopes with printouts saying most of my checks were unavailable. So I set out one morning last week to move my account to a different bank. Of the 8 or nine bank branches closest to my home, more than half are owned by Bank of America. All but one of the remaining banks are either in danger of going out of business or are in the process of being taken over by a national mega-bank, which is itself in need of a bailout from the federal government. Two banks told me they could not return my cancelled checks or provide me copies. One said they did not know if they could or not. The other wants to charge me $3 per month for the special service.

After I finished my banking business, way into the lunch hour, I was hungry. Maybe I could find some place where I could have it my way.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Pirates of the Arabian

Pirates off the coast of Africa have attacked a cargo ship flying the U.S. flag and taken its captain hostage. The vessel, named the Alabama, is owned by Maersk Line Ltd., of Denmark. This was the sixth attempted seizure at sea in a week by pirates in the area where the rhinoceros horn of Africa tries to bump the bulge of Arabia. The attack on the Alabama was the second in two days. Captain Richard Phillips of Vermont ordered his crew of 20 to lock themselves in a room, but he permitted himself to be taken hostage in order to save the ship, which was reportedly carrying humanitarian food aid to Africa. Capt. Phillips tried to escape from his captors in view of the USS Bainbridge, only a few hundred yards away with rescue helicopters. He jumped off a lifeboat and began swimming, but the pirates opened fire with automatic weapons, and he returned to the lifeboat. FBI hostage negotiators are on board the Bainbridge.



Somali pirates have extorted tens of millions of dollars in ransoms on this busy highway for Asian manufactured consumer goods and Arab oil shipped from the Indian Ocean to the Arabian Sea to the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean. Often as few as four to eight armed pirates are all it takes to seize control of massive commercial vessels. Low-paid and under-trained merchant sailors have been told by ship owners to offer no resistance to avoid loss of life. Crews are unarmed by choice of ocean shipping businesses and insurance companies willing to pay ransoms rather than liability judgments in court.

I can hear the Marine Corps Hymn from my Daddy’s grave. He was a WWII Marine in the Pacific. “From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.” Even before Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi, there was trouble along the Barbary Coast. Thomas Jefferson, while serving as U.S. Ambassador to France, had been involved in negotiations with Barbary Pirates, operatives of North African states in the Ottoman Empire. Upon Jefferson's inauguration as President in 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli, demanded $225,000 to guarantee safe passage of U.S. ships. Jefferson refused. Two Barbary Wars followed, establishing the U.S. Navy as a military force to be reckoned with.

Today’s Pirates of the Arabian Sea are not part of anybody’s empire, except maybe the devil’s. Poverty, perpetual civil war, and the absence of any functioning governments have turned the waters around the Horn of Africa into a crime-infested malestrom. Somali pirates chase ships by speedboats and scale the ships' hulls using grappling hooks. They have typically anchored vessels off the coast and negotiated ransoms. These are not swishbuckling Johnny Depps. They are failed fishermen in beggars rags, fodder of Somali warlords, and criminal gangs that flourish in corrupt and disintegrated states like Somalia.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Din! Din! Din!

I just finished "The Snow Leopard," the Zen adventure classic by Peter Matthiessen. I saw the movie "Slumdog Millionaire" only recently. Inevitably, depictions of life outside North America and Europe remind me of Cairo. "The Snow Leopard," particulary its closing homage to the author's favorite porter, brings to mind my friend Sheroni, whose full name was Mohammed Ibrahim Hussein Sheroni, a black African. Egypt is very multi-racial, Africans, Arabs, a small minority who likely can trace their ancestry to Alexander the Great. Sheroni always dressed in starched and bleached, white galabeya robes, dashing against his blackness, and a white cap with no brim. He worked as a domestic in the households of foreigners, the British before the Americans. His English was excellent, and he had a great sense of humor, as we discussed Egypt, Americans, his pilgrimage to Mecca (the pigeons do not shit in the courtyard of the mosque, he informed me with reverence in his voice and a twinkle in his eye). He was an almost daily visitor in my home, an apartment compound, shared by several American Embassy families.

One day Sheroni knocked on my door in great distress. He had been accused of stealing a bicycle from the compound. He wanted me to go with him to the police station. When I got there, an open-court investigation had already been convened by a young officer with a college education and caution of Americans. Sheroni's accuser was the caretaker of the apartment compound, well-known to me as Brahim. Many caretakers, domestics, and neighborhood street people suplemented their incomes through odd-jobs and some not so odd for the police and other government security agencies. I explained to the polite police officer that Mr. Sheroni was a good man, and Mr. Brahim was a good man, but there had been a misunderstanding. Mr. Sheroni visited me regularly and was always welcome. Simply sighting him on the premises at the time something went missing did not make him a thief. In the end, everyone smiled, bowed many times, and went home free. I have no idea if Sheroni had stolen the bicycle or not. Thievery was fairly common in Egypt and not always easy to define or assign guilt.

When I was scheduled to leave Cairo (my wife and children had already taken the first airline departure the day after school let out), Sheroni invited me to his home for a farewell dinner, the only invitation into an Egyptian home I ever received or frankly heard of any American receiving outside of Embassy officialdom. Sheroni did not live in a luxurious part of town, but he had built his house with his own hands from Nile mud and bricks, and it had three levels, including the usual flat rooftop open to the sun and stars. Sheroni, who was a cook by trade, had prepared a chicken himself, although it and the accompaniments were served by his wife Bedoea, famous for her homemade bread (like Pita), with which Sheroni had kept us supplied throughout our stay in Cairo. Sheroni and I ate sitting on the floor. His eldest son, age 12, was allowed to join us, but Sheroni's wife and the rest of his many children watched us eat and served us, presumably taking their meal from what was left of the bountiful feast. After the meal, my stomach was upset, but no worse than I had become accustomed to in that land of "Pharoah's Revenge." My last morning, the embassy driver picked me up at 4 a.m. to ride to the airport. Sheroni stood by the front gate to say goodbye. We hugged and cried. I emptied my pockets of all my remaining Egyptian money and gave it to Sheroni. He refused it again and again, but in the end accepted it. I don't know. There may have been some American money in there also. It was a long time ago. I hope there was, anyway.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

All Aboard

On television, 14 busses per day are reported leaving Winston-Salem, N.C., destination Mexico. They are all full. Busloads of construction workers, dishwashers, landscapers, chicken-pluckers. Maybe this is happening in other parts of the country as well, but something about Winston-Salem will always occupy a special place in my heart and lungs.

Business is bad all over. Gone are the free-spending days. Anybody who has any money holds on to it tightly. Home-grown tomatoes expects a boom. U.S. News and World Report cites research by Atlee Burpee, the world's biggest seed company, that “$50 of seeds and fertilizer can yield $1,250 worth of produce.” Starbucks is leaking profits, down 69 percent in the fourth quarter of last year. Meanwhile, home coffee makers are selling faster than they can be shipped; Mr. Coffee is up five percent from last year. Other stay-at-home pleasures thrive during hard times. Netflix subscribers increased 26 percent. Harlequin publishers sold $3-million more romances, and the Borders book chain says science fiction, fantasy, and humor were up. Rounding out a list of businesses doing well these days were sales of chocolate candy and condoms.

Of course, demand is high for businesses such as employment counseling and resume writing. Nielsen Online reports traffic to job sites increased 20 percent in January 2009 from the year before. The March unemployment rate rose to 8.5 percent, the highest in 25 years, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Unemployment increased from February’s 8.1 percent. Some 663,000 additional jobs were cut from payrolls in March, the fifth straight month with job losses of 600,000 or more. Since the recession began in December 2007, a total of 5.1 million jobs have vanished. The last time U.S. unemployment was as high as 8.5 percent was in November 1983 when the economy was recovering from a recession in the early 1980s. Ronald Reagan was President. During that downturn, unemployment rose as high as 10.8 percent in November and December 1982.

U.S. Department of Labor unemployment statistics are based on applications for payment of unemployment benefits. Not included are those who do not apply or are ineligible for benefits, those who have put together two part-time jobs to replace lost full-time income, those who have given up and stopped looking for work, or those who have been out of the work force for a long period of time. President Obama recently fired the head of General Motors. I do not think the failed automobile executive will be counted in the statistics, even if he does not immediately find a new job or try to look for one. I suspect his golden parachute will provide him a plenty soft enough landing.

In America, at least you know you are free to believe anything you want. If you do not have a job, there is only one thing to believe.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Emerging Writers Network

I bought a new computer a couple of weeks ago, and it has not yet broken me in correctly. It sent out my blog to everyone with whom I have ever exchanged an e-mail. Customer Service Chat Reps. Yard Sale Scavengers. Republicans. So now I am fielding angry complaints like hard grounders at third base and removing the names of the grunting disgruntled as quickly as I can, but it is like pulling burrs out of your butt after stumbling in the woods. Not all of these unintended recipients wanted to tar and feather me. One who works with the Let Them Hear Foundation thanked me and planned to read all my previous blog postings. I never would have presumed to send my blog to Let Them Hear, whom I sometimes, refer to as my California do-gooder insurance advocates. Bless them one and all, busy as they are jacking up insurance companies caught trying to leave the scene of expensive medical treatments such as cochlear implants.

In another case, I did intentionally forward a copy of my recent posting Our Fathers to someone I did not know personally and who certainly had not asked for it. Nonetheless, he replied with an e-mail that his own father was “also WWII, Mason, baseball fan. But maybe a more troubling person to be the son of.” I might not concede that claim without a struggle. My reader included a link to the Granta on-line series of essays about fathers. My favorite was by Hal Crowther, the wonderful author of Cathedrals of Kudzu. A little internet cross-reference about Granta, of which I was shamefully ignorant despite its prestigious literary genealogy, led me to a posting on the Emerging Writers Network, another hole in my literacy. I could not help but linger and look around, wondering if emerging from 30-plus years of working for a living at other things would qualify me. Dan Wickett hosts the Emerging Writers Network site, which grew from his e-mail distribution of book reviews and interviews from 1999 – 2002. Wickett’s “backgrounds and qualifications to be judging the works and words of others?” He says, “They are nothing I have proof of - no University degree in Literature or English. No MFA in Creative Writing, or job history as a book reviewer. My qualifications are a long history of reading literary fiction, in large volumes, and the dedication to passing along my views on such, at as rapid a pace as I can, until the writers of such fiction get more recognition.” This reluctance to engage in own-horn tooting is the only shortcoming of the Emerging Writers Network, a sparking mine of gems. Reviews. Announcements. Litblogs. Author websites. The difficulty is knowing where to start. Pick anywhere.

My first attention was caught by Bonnie Jo Campbell through Wickett’s review of stories from The Southern Review. Bonnie Jo is not a Southerner, but the characters in her stories are the natural neighbors of Flannery O’Connor. Campbell has her own website, where I read two spectacular stories available there. Solutions to Ben’s Problem, takes the form of a bullet point list of advice to a man with a drug addict for a wife. The story begins, “While Connie is at the store buying formula and diapers, load up the truck with the surround-sound home entertainment system and your excellent collection of power tools, put the baby in the car seat, and drive away from this home you built with your own hands.” It ends some-agonizing-and-sweet-where else. Boar Taint, is about farm life for those born there and those who graduated in to it from a Big-10 university ag school. Click on these stories now, if you didn’t already. Get in line behind me on the wait-list at the library for her short-story collection Women and Other Animals. Campbell also writes a blog called The Bone Eye: A Writer’s Adventures.

Legendary Antioch College writing professor Nolan Miller became convinced before he died that there were “too many writers, not enough readers.” Nolan spent more than half his life as fiction editor of The Antioch Review. Students in his cozy college class over the years included Rod Serling, Herb Gardner, Lawrence Block. Nolan had a gift for making all his students feel as special as those famous writers. His life of more than 90 years was not quite long enough to see the internet become the best friend of writers and readers since the invention of the library.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Virtual Silence

I logged on to whitehouse.gov for President Obama’s virtual Town Hall Meeting, only to discover the video feed was not captioned. My cochlear implant, a miracle but far from perfect, makes me a member of the statistical 10 percent of the population which is hearing disabled. Thanks for network television. How can I utter such an absurdity? Life is full of contradictions and puzzlements. Congress required commercial television to provide captions. Thanks for Congress. Another two-edged utterance. Most new movies for rent at Blockbuster and Hollywood Videos are captioned. A limited few shopping mall movie houses offer captioned showings. Last week, my wife and I enjoyed Slumdog Millionaire, Oscar winner for best film, during lunchtime on Sunday at Atlantic Station. It has been a while since we went to a theatre to see a movie that was not a foreign language film with English subtitles. Check out my blog NOW SHOWING…With Captions, which I update weekly with times and locations of local movies captioned for the hearing impaired. Would you want to see those movie selections at those times of day? Worse is the situation with videos on the internet, virtually never carrying any captions.

The behind the ear processor of my cochlear implant can be connected directly to the audio of my television set, cassette tape or cd player, and some landline telephones. However, I am not able to hook up to my cell phone. I have to turn on the speaker-phone feature, and my guess is not as good as yours as to what the person is saying on the other end of the phone call. I wanted to get one of those little portable, battery operated televisions for picnics and other outdoor fun. However, the requirement to make televisions capable of displaying captions does not apply to screens smaller than 13 inches. My universal television remote contains 45 buttons in black, gray, orange, red, green, yellow, and blue. None of them will turn on the captions.

Many federal laws have been enacted over the past 20 years to require greater access to telecommunications. However, fast-paced technological advancements outrun the laws. Television programs re-shown on the Internet are not covered by caption requirements, even if originally broadcast with captions. Small TVs, cell phones, PDAs, and other mobile devices are not required to display captions, despite the technical capability. Emergency 9-1-1 call centers cannot accept calls from people who need to communicate via video, pagers or other assistive devices.

A 21st Century Telecommunications and Video Accessibility Act, introduced in the last session of Congress, would correct some of these exclusions from modern media. I signed petition by The Coalition of Organizations for Accessible Technology (COAT) to have the bill reintroduced in the current session of Congress and ensure that people with disabilities have access to evolving high speed broadband, wireless, and other Internet-based technologies.

Here are some of the issues advocated by COAT:

Hearing Aid Compatibility.

Accessibility to internet-based communication products and services, if "readily achievable," the same requirement currently imposed on all telecommunications manufacturers and service providers.

Equal access to 9-1-1 emergency call centers through voice, text, the Internet, video, and any other new technologies.

Universal Service Fund (USF) coverage for video calls, as well as specialized equipment for deaf-blind consumers.

Caption decoding and display capability for all televisions, recording, and playback devices, with screens of any size.

Captioning obligations for Internet-based video programming.

Control buttons to turn captions on and off.

Copyright 2009 by Williaqm C. Cotter

Whistling Past The Gutenberg Graveyard

Before I became Paw Paw Bill, I always included my middle initial in my writing byline, William C. Cotter. I grew up reading the legendary foreign affairs correspondent Joseph C. Harsch in The Christian Science Monitor, even before I discovered Ralph McGill and Furman Bisher in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Monitor arrived in my childhood home delivered daily by U.S. Mail. The subscriber, my mother, was a Christian Science Practitioner. I left the church the same year I quit my high school football team after four seasons. This was the year I read Huck Finn and learned my favorite jester was serious as shackles. My football coach telephoned again and again, but I could not talk to him, did not know how to explain. The only time I ever went back inside a Christian Science Church was the October 1962 Sunday of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Don’t bother to tell me the old one about how there are no atheists in foxholes.

The Christian Science Monitor will cease publication as a daily newspaper next month. It will concentrate on providing news via the internet and will begin a weekly newsmagazine under its 100-year-old name. The Monitor says it may be “the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day.” But not likely the last. Look for the long line. Journalistic respect for The Monitor has been reflected in seven Pulitzer Prizes, elections of three of its editors as president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. However, most of today’s newspapers are sinking from their own weight in dinosaur technology, ink, newsprint, and gasoline fueled distribution, while advertising adapts, evolves, and migrates to other media. The Monitor will lose $18.9 million this year. "A modest reduction" in the editorial staff is to be expected, but all hands will contribute to the new formats. The Monitor weekly print edition will be priced at $3.50 per copy, a year's subscription $89. The last full-price subscription to the daily newspaper has been $219. The new daily electronic edition will be offered by subscription also, price yet to be announced.

When New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., was asked recently whether The Times would still be printing in 10 years, he answered, “We can't care." He said that he expects print to be around for a long time but "we must be where people want us for our information." The Times is already largely available on the internet. Here’s the real unanswered question: Will internet users pay money to read the news and other information? You can be sure that is the discussion going on at newspapers all over the country. Not will the news go on-line or when, but how to make any money. I suggest the model already used by the music business, which licenses its products to users, radio stations, bars and restaurants, barber and beauty shops, even the internet, then keeps aggressive accounts. For decades, ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) have successfully insured that all songwriters, composers and publishers have the right to be paid for the use of their work. In the same manner, news publishers could license their products to Google, Yahoo, AOL and others, collecting some modest sum, pennies per browse, that would add up to support for the news business.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Bait and Crumbs

Elie Wiesel, born in Romania, author, professor, and Nobel Prize winner, survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, before he met Bernie Madofff, native New Yorker and a former chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. Wiesel invested the Norwegian Krones he received from his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize and established a humanitarian foundation whose mission was “to combat indifference, intolerance, and injustice around the world.” The money was entrusted with Bernard Madoff Investment Securities. Madoff madeoff with $15.2 million, “substantially all of the Foundation's assets.” Wiesel and his wife also lost their lifetime personal savings to Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. What is a Ponzi scheme? Something like the miracle of the loaves and fishes, only Ponzi keeps the feast to himself, and all you get is the bait and crumbs.

Madoff has turned himself in and pled guilty in Federal Court to 11 felonies, including securities fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, perjury and false filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. His clients number in the tens of thousands. Other people’s money was never invested. Instead Madoff pocketed it, spent it to support his lifestyle of the rich and famous, including penthouse on Park Avenue and country club membership in Palm Beach. He is currently in custody in the maximum security wing of the New York Metropolitan Correctional Center, historic home of terrorists, gangsters, and drug dealers. He occupies a 8 x 8 foot cell with white cinderblock walls, double-decker bunk, sink for two, and stainless steel toilet. There are 750 inmates at the facility. It remains to be seen if Madoff will do his time at one of the federal facilities such as Ft. Walton Beach, Fl., often called “Club Fed,” or a hard-time hell hole like the U. S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Ks. Wherever, Madoff, age 70, will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Prosecutors are investigating Madoff’s family, as well as his accountants and other business associates. Bernie who? The sums of money involved are in the hundreds of billions, enough to bail out a failing segment of the U.S. economy. Prosecutors also want restitution from Madoff of approximately $170 billion. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, "incarcerating him for life" sends a message to other white-collar criminals. "Vengeance is one thing, but it's making sure that other people understand that they can't go out and ruin people's lives and take away their savings," the Mayor said.

If you work the assembly line at Ford, Chrysler, or General Motors, and your company executives need government bailout to stay in business, you get to take pay cuts and other givebacks. Over the past six months, non-union working stiffs have seen their 401k’s, their stock-market based retirement savings systems, shrink by almost half as Wall Street has crashed. If you are a whale of a bank, having swallowed other banks, and lend money for people to buy houses they cannot afford, you have become too big to fail. If you invent a new kind of stock that has nothing to do with ownership of any company but rather is some gambler's hypothesis about the value of a bundle of loans for houses people can not afford and then issue insurance policies on the derived speculation into the infinite possibilities of a financial universe light years away, you get a retention bonus when the bubble bursts, to bring you to your senses and help you resist the temptation to rush into the nearest unemployment line.

Bernie Madoff needs a cell-mate. There are candidates aplenty.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Dennis Crews Stained Glass

Photos copyright by Dennis Crews.

When Dennis Crews was commissioned to design and install new stained glass windows, the artist told the pastor and his committee that if the windows made their children look forward to going to church every week, he would feel he had done his job well.


The new windows for Southern Asian Seventh-day Adventist Church in Silver Spring, Maryland were installed in February. Seven sanctuary windows commemorate Creation. Two additional windows were also included for the foyer, with plans for more to follow.

The windows were built by Salem Stained Glass Studio in East Bend, North Carolina, “a great bunch of folks, a real pleasure to work with,” the artist says. “Back in the seventies I built all my own windows, but nowadays it's nice to have a crew of great craftsmen I can trust with the detail work and installation.”


“Two years ago I was approached through an intermediary to do windows for this church…. I said "no thanks" - not once, but three times. Seven months later I learned they were still waiting for me, so thought maybe I should meet with them. I decided that if I could find a studio I had confidence in, I would design the windows and oversee their production,” Mr. Crews explains. “Salem Stained Glass in East Bend, NC, has proven to be a wonderful working partner, and we have done several jobs together already. They built and installed these windows and did a superlative job - I cannot say enough for them.”

“The dynamic qualities of the glass and the flow from one window to the next can't really be captured adequately in photos,” according to Mr. Crews. “If you're in the area try to visit the church and see them with your own eyes.“ The suburban Washington, D.C., location is 2001 E. Randolph Rd, very close to Rt. 29. The church is usually staffed weekdays during normal business hours.

A complete selection of photos are available on the artist’s Facebook Album at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=12843&id=1539188074&l=c9a0e.


The installation team from Salem Stained Glass on location in Silver Spring, Md., Dennis Crews on the left; Al Priest, owner and founder of Salem Stained Glass, second from the right.

As a young child, Mr. Crews lived in India and Pakistan, where his family were missionaries. He has written extensively about the role of religion in government. "I've written more commentary critical of Bush administration policies than anything else over the last six or seven years," he notes, but "now finally feel I can give that a rest, and devote my attention to being an artist again."

Mr. Crews, who calls Frederick, Md., his home town, also designed windows for the renovation of Annie's Paramount Steak House, near DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C., another collaboration with Salem Stained Glass.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Mark My Ear

I get confused about earmarks. Sometimes I think maybe they’re some kind of tattoo. Then I get mixed up, wondering if it's the same thing as pork, and if somebody is trying to make a silk purse from a sow’s earmark. Thankfully, Congress knows the difference and can pass legislation like the current fiscal year budget, a physical year late, of $410 billion, which includes, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, 8,570 “disclosed” earmarks totaling $7.7 billion. President Obama signed the bill, calling it “imperfect.”

Three Republicans joined the Democrats in passing the bill in the U.S. Senate, Richard Shelby of Alabama, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, and Olympia Snowe of Maine. Taxpayers for Common Sense reports Sen. Shelby added 64 earmarks accounting for $114 million in the budget, and Sen. Cochran 65 earmarks for $76 million. Sen. Snowe was not associated with any earmarks .

Don’t be misled into thinking voting for the bill was the price paid for bringing home the bacon for the folks that elected you. Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnel held his Republican Caucus close against passage of the bill, though he added 36 earmarks of his own worth $51 million to his fellow citizens of Kentucky.

Rounding out the top five total ear markers who voted against the budget bill were Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, Bob Bennett of Utah, and Sam Brownback of Kansas, who contributed 35, 34, 23, and 21 earmarks respectively. For total price-tag of earmarks among opponents, Inhofe led the list with $53 million, followed by Minority Leader McConnell, again, ($51 million), Mel Martinez of Florida ($18.8 million), Bennett ($18 million), and George Voinovich of Ohio ($13.5 million).

Other Republicans voting against the bill but not before remembering to front-load a little something for the pork lovers back home were both Georgia Senators Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson. Here‘s the rest of the list of ear markers who voted nay:

Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), Jon Kyl (Arizona) Jeff Sessions (Alabama), John Thune (South Dakota), David Vitter (Louisiana), Richard Lugar (Indiana), John Barrasso (Wyoming), John Cornyn (Texas), Pat Roberts (Kansas), Judd Gregg (New Hampshire), Mike Enzi (Wyoming), Richard Burr (North Carolina), Bob Corker (Tennessee), Jim Bunning (Kentucky), Orrin Hatch (Utah), Susan Collins (Maine), Chuck Grassley (Iowa), and Mike Crapo (Idaho). Democrat Evan Bayh (Indiana) also voted against the bill that contained his own earmarks.

What is this? A cable-tv episode of The Last Comic Standing? The things elected officials say for the news media. They are joking, right? They just make me fall down laughing. Hall of Fame humorist Will Rogers said he did not like to compete with dedicated professionals like Congress. Or maybe it’s what Tennessee Williams, not a Congressman, called “the smell of mendacity.”

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Yes She Said Yes

I sometimes tell people I was an English major. It is a lie, but it simplifies explaining my employment history. Everybody understands and laughs at Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion repertoire joke that English majors never have any problem finding a job, as long as they can remember how to say, “Do you want fries with that?” Nonetheless, I was not an English major, because I loved reading good writers. One of the best I have discovered recently is an Irish writer named Anne Enright.

Anne Enright sure canwrite. She is extraordinarily original. Because she is Irish, James Joyce comes to mind. And W. B. Yeats. She deserves to be in their company. Enright is a former Dublin television producer and director. Her early books earned high praise but “extremely modest” sales, according to her publisher. Her novel, The Gathering was introduced as a paperback original, with a first printing of 8,000, to avoid the difficult life of a non-celebrity hardback. The story of suicide in an Irish family of 12 siblings, mothers, fathers, grandparents, and household visitors, the novel won the Booker Prize as Britain’s best. Sales have now reached 230,000.

Enright’s collected short stories, Yesterday’s Weather, include her special view of husbands, wives, children, college room-mates, lovers, infidelity, and numerology. In “Luck Be A Lady,” the gambling heroine with a knack for numbers bets, “With a little bit of luck, my luck will run out.” The opera house cleaning lady in a different story, “What You Want,” knows if an angel or the devil offers you three wishes, remember to use one to ask for three more. A gentleman walks by in his full opera rig:

‘You’re singing!’ And I said, ‘Am I? I didn’t even notice,’ and he says, ‘Ah, you’re Irish. Isn’t it marvelous the way the Irish sing while they work?’ And I said, ‘Yes, isn’t it.’ And you know, I have about sixteen things to say to him if he ever stopped by again. Like, ‘Oh, that’s not me, that’s just a tape of Maria Callas I’ve got stuck up my arse.’

Her three wishes?

All right. I’ll tell you what I want. I want a small win on the lottery, just a small one, just a few thousand, so I could feel, for once, LUCKY. I want my son to call me on the mobile phone he bought me for a present, that never, ever rings….More than anything, I want grandchildren. Because grandchildren are simple. You wish for them and you have them. And I don’t care if they are ashamed of me. I want my son who has everything to have something, for once. Something real. To have a heart that isn’t withering in his chest.

The author arranges Yesterday’s Weather in reverse chronological order. Notably this gives the impression for much of the book not of short stories exactly but some narrative form of her own invention, with the rich language, development, and arc of poems. That’s fine with me, because she does it so well. Then toward the end of the volume, as the work dates back a decade, the short stories are more traditionally conceived and executed, like the paintings of Picasso before cubism.

Here are her other titles: The Portable Virgin (1991), The Wig My Father Wore (1995), What Are You Like? (2000), The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002), Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004), and Taking Pictures (2008).

Do yourself a big favor. Go to the library, and check out something she has written. Better yet, go to a bookstore or on-line and buy yourself a copy. You’ll want to have your own to enjoy again later.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Limbaugh Limbo: How Low Can You Go?

Minnesota Democratic Senator-elect Al Franken, the former television comedian from Saturday Night Live, wrote a best-selling book entitled Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot. You would think that just about says it all about the radio talk show super mouth of right wing conservatism. Limbaugh was recently the star attraction at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where his declared wish for “Barack Obama to fail” drew enthusiastic cheers from the audience. As a consequence, Democrats gleefully labled Limbaugh the leader of the GOP. In the absence of serious challengers. The Republican National Committee chairman used the words “incendiary” and “ugly” to describe the radio talk show star, who rejoined that the new chairman was “off to a shaky start.” The chairman immediately issued apologies. Just to make it clear who is the boss.

Paul Begala, former strategist for President Bill Clinton, hopes that Rush Limbaugh will be seen and heard as “the bloated face and drug-addled voice of the Republican Party.” Begala’s telephone calls to the White House are answered by his former Clinton buddies. He says, “Along with lots of others, I intend to continue to turn up the heat until every alleged Republican either endorses or renounces Rush’s statement that he hopes our president fails.”

Rush Limbaugh has tried to clarify that he wants President Obama's policies to fail, not the country. “So what is so strange about saying I want Barack Obama to fail if his mission is to reconstruct and reform this nation so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation?” he asks. Gee, I wish Limbaugh had been protecting capitalism and liberty during the eight years before Obama became President.

Some Republicans are doing some fancy steps dancing around Limbaugh’s comments. “I know what Rush Limbaugh meant,” House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence of Indiana told CNN. “Look, everybody wants America to succeed, but everyone like me, Rush Limbaugh and others who believe in limited government, who believe in conservative values, wants the policies this administration is bringing forward … to fail.” However, not everyone agrees that it is that simple. David Frum, the “axis of evil” speechwriter, acknowledges that “if you’re a talk radio host and you have 5 million who listen and there are 50 million people who hate you, you can make a nice living. If you’re a Republican Party, you’re marginalized.”

Limbaugh challenged President Obama to come on the radio and debate. It is a call-in show. The President would not even have to leave the Oval Office. Safe to say, chances for such a Limbaugh ratings pot of gold are slim. However, I, Paw Paw Bill, hereby challenge Rush Limbaugh to a duel. In keeping with the dignity of his office. He can choose the weapons: cream pies or seltzer bottles.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Pine Lake, Ga., Swiss Chalet

What does Switzerland have that Pine Lake, Georgia, usually doesn’t? Fondue? National Healthcare? Yes. Yes. Also snow. Except for this past weekend.


I have lived in Maryland, which is still among my favorite places. One of the main reasons was the snow.


For a while, I lived on a farm in Poolesville, about an hour plus outside of Washington, D.C. I rented the 100-year-old farmhouse in Montgomery County. The acreage was leased to neighbors who raised cows and grew hay. I looked at the cows and hay for free. The regular winter snows covered everything with that special beauty and peaceful quiet.

My dog Sam, a big, black, Bouvier des Flandres lumbering fur, leaped across the white fields. At the door, he would appear with his frozen, dripping beard looking like Dr. Zhivago.




Is this a Christmas card, or what? I amlost did not take this picture, because I could tell it was such a cliche. But what's a cliche between friends?



Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Jump Out the Back, Jack

I had just finished the fourth grade on Friday before the Monday first thing in the morning bright and early when my Mother left my Daddy. That Friday had also been payday, and my Daddy had cashed his check and dutifully brought home the housekeeping and grocery money, such as it was. My Mother put me and my sisters on the bus with a transfer to make at Five Points in downtown Atlanta, as the moving van pulled away from the house where my Daddy would return after work to learn the empty truth.

Maybe that’s why I say it is ok with me to leave Iraq while nobody is looking. The dead of night. Or lunch time on the next to last dizzy day of the month of Ramadan self-denial and fasting. Just leave. Think of the traffic jam. I-285 and Spaghetti Junction, only no 8-lane super-highway modeled after the German Autobahn by General Eisenhower when he became President Eisenhower, just an old two-lane in the desert with sign posts pointing this way to Turkey, that way to Kuwait, the other way to Jordan. Of course, there will have to be a cease fire. Everybody freeze. Don’t anybody move. Not even an eyelash. Who is going to cover the back of the last American on the helicopter?

But on Day One, the new President did not ask me. Instead the Commander-In-Chief summoned his generals and ordered them to submit plans for ending the War in Iraq. Now he has announced withdrawal of all but 50,000 American troops by August 2010. Eighteen months. Not the 16 months he promised in the campaign. Why quibble and castigate? It is the end to the war we have but do not want by the duly elected government we have in the only world we have.

American power does not travel light, and not all of the $12 billion per month sent to Iraq has disappeared into thin air. Do the math. Six years, times 12 months per year, times $12 billion. I get $864 Billion. The kind of money being thrown around to Bail Out the current U.S. economic messes. In addition to uniformed American troops in Iraq, there are 100,000 contractors, 40,000 aircraft and vehicles, and 80,000 containers disbursed across more than 280 installations, according to Wired Blog Network.


U.S. Army Photo

The Baltimore Sun quotes one general as saying, "one Army office at one base is tracking 1.2 million items of property worth $14 billion, a partial list of materiel that includes objects such as dentist's chairs, chapel pews, swimming pool filtration systems and surveillance blimps. Separately, the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, which operates military supermarkets and shops across Iraq, holds an inventory that includes 2.7 million candy bars, 15,000 strips of beef jerky, 1.6 million cans of soda and 330,696 CDs and DVDs."

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Dear Senator Shelby

Get a life. Even better: Get a brain.

Maybe you are just an old fool and missed all of the 885,000 entries listed by Google on the web about this subject. Here is only one.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Contaminated Nuts

How nutty can it get? More than five hundred people in 43 states and one Canadian province have gotten food poisoning, and eight have died from salmonella contaminated peanut snacks. You’d think that it could not be worse. However, it turns out that the company was aware of the contamination prior to shipment of peanut butter products, including packs of crackers, snack bars, and dog biscuits to convenience stores, hospitals, nursing homes, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture school lunch program.

The company involved released a statement saying: “We at Peanut Corporation of America express our deepest and most sincere empathy for those sickened in the salmonella outbreak and their families. We share the public’s concern about the potential connection to Peanut Corp. of America’s products. Our top priority has been — and will continue to be — to ensure the public safety and to work promptly to remove all potentially contaminated products out of the marketplace.”

The salmonella was traced to the Peanut Corporation of America plant in Blakely, Ga., which calls itself the Peanut Capital of the World, and the town square displays a peanut sculpture monument in case you don’t think peanuts are serious business. Almost half of all the peanuts in the United States come from Georgia, about two billion pounds last year produced in the counties of Worth, Mitchell, Miller, Decatur, and Early. Blakely is in Early County, along the Alabama border, south of Columbus, west of Albany, which real Georgians know is not pronounced like the capital of New York State.

When the salmonella hit the fan, the Peanut Corporation of America plant in Blakely shut down, and its 50 workers were laid off. Whistles are being blown about poor sanitation practices and non-existent training. Workers can kiss those jobs goodbye. Maybe Georgia Obstructionist Party legislators in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., will become born again bailout boosters for peanuts. Or the peanut workers can get retrained as computer nuts.

The president of the Peanut Corp. of America, Stewart Parnell, serves on the USDA’s Peanut Standards Board, which advises the secretary of the USDA on “standards intended to assure that satisfactory quality and wholesome peanuts are used in the domestic and import peanut markets,” according to the USDA.

Now the Peanut Corporation of America has declared bankruptcy, and the Hartford Insurance Company, policy carrier for PCA, claims prior knowledge of the contamination invalidates the insurance coverage. Don’t bother to sue anybody, even if you are not dead.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it is working with the Department of Justice on a criminal investigation of the Peanut Corp. of America. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation also is looking into whether the company may have broken any state laws. The FBI has carried off files and other evidence from the Blakely plant. PCA president Parnell, called to testify before Congress, took The Fifth, just like a mobster or former White House advisor.

Eventually, one of these cases of shameless and outrageous business practices that threaten public health and safety, ruin the economy, and violate the law will send somebody to jail. The sooner the better for these nuts.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

King of the Road

Craigslist is a great place to buy and sell things on-line. Too bad for the incredible shrinking want ads in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I’ve been looking for a small utility trailer. Some asking prices, near retail new, make me wonder if I’m the only one who heard the news about hard times. I found two trailers listed to my liking, so I answered the ad by e-mail.

I would be interested in taking a look at these. I live near Stone Mountain but am in your area several times a week. When would be a good time?

about any time just give me a call.

I would like to try to come by at 10 a.m. Monday. Also please provide an address, with directions, if possible, via US 78 and Hwy 316. I am severely hearing disabled, so I do not use the telephone if I can avoid it.

any day after 3 pm. take 441 toward Madison around 15 miles from loop 10 you will come to a convient store on left just past it there is a old train depot turn left go to stop sign turn right when it forks take your left and look for the trailers on the right.

I never found your place. I want to try again Wednesday I understand current law requires registration of utility trailers. Do you have titles? If not, I think an affidavit that it was "home-made" is acceptable.

i do not have no titles both of them will be homemade trailers.

I am interested in the little green metal one. Since there are no useable tires on this one, could you swap the tires from the other trailer. If you can do this, and I could pick it up and drive off with it one day next week, I can pay $150.

i will put the tires on it but i will need $200.

OK. That's a deal. I can come pick it up on Tuesday after 3 p.m. For filling out Homemade Trailer Affidavit, I will need Your Full Legal Name, day, month, year trailer built, trailer weight empty.

i dont know what year it was built or the weight i got the trailer to pull behind my golf cart and was not planning on putting it on the highway if this is a problem i will understand.

I will just fill out the form with my best guesses, age of the trailer about 12 years, weight 600 lbs. I assume your full name is what’s on your e-mail address. One other thing. I have a 2 inch ball on my hitch. Is that ok, or do I need a different size ball?

That my name and it takes a 2 inch ball.

The seller and his four strapping teenage sons coupled the trailer and hooked the safety chains to my hitch. I drove about 30 miles pleasantly surprised how smoothly the trailer pulled behind my car. I have rented trailers from U-Haul, and sometimes it is hard to know who is hauling who. At the Monroe intersection of US 78 and Hwy 138, a wide cloverleaf like the interstate, a school bus whooshed along side me, and I could feel the wind resistance differential between my car and the bus. Then my car got heavy, and I looked in my rear view mirror. The trailer bounce twice and took off in a direction which was not the same as the one towards which I was driving. The trailer twirled like a Cossack dancer with one leg extended and spun across the wide median and into the two lanes for oncoming traffic, miraculously unpopulated at that moment. Finally the trailer came to rest on the opposite shoulder of the road. I pulled into the median about the time two blue-light specials appeared. The first Georgia State Highway Patrol Officer said he saw everything. “Looked like the wind just picked you up,” he said. Both Officers were absolute heroes. They directed me to a turnaround, re-connected the trailer for me. This time, I added a second safety chain. I thanked the Officers for their help. “You be careful,” they said.

Come the weekend, I purchased a one and 7/8 inch trailer ball, scraped the flat anthills of rust from the trailer, and my grandson Chance helped me paint it for five, maybe ten minutes. First we spray painted our names in the bed of the trailer. To christen it and bring good luck, I told Chance. I do not get many projects he can participate in at age five, but I thought about plastic Coke bottles, a moment on the lips, a lifetime in the landfill of memories.



Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Art Buddy

My art buddy Richard did the heavy lifting to bring his two latest paintings, already framed, over to our house for a private showing before dinner. “Will Paint For Food,” he jokes.


Richard Cecil, neo-classical painter and sculptor, is a neighbor of mine in Pine Lake, Ga. I call him my art buddy, because he’s not my baseball buddy or my drinking buddy, since those are not the things we do together. Instead, we go to art museums and galleries, and he takes us on field trips, like the time he brought my wife and me along to The Inferno Art Foundry in Union City, where he was casting his Centaur in bronze.

Our favorite local museum is The Booth Museum of Western Art in Cartersville, to which we are multiple return visitors. We love the cowboys and Indians, the deserts and mountains. Sometimes before our excursions, my art buddy likes to take us to brunch at the Golden Corral on U.S. 78 in Snellville. If we arrive at just the right hour, we can begin with pancakes and eggs as appetizers, followed by a main course of fried chicken, collard greens, and cornbread.

Richard Cecil is a widely known and extremely versatile artist. He received his early training at the Mona Lisa School of Art, and he had his first work published at age twelve. Richard also studied at the Chicago Art Institute and the Milwaukee Museum of Natural History. Along with his academic background, Richard has traveled extensively, studying and developing his knowledge of form and color principles that result in his current unique style. Richard is especially recognized for his mastery of anatomical compositions and his ability to capture the physical movements and reactions.

Richard says, “Visions of fine art have been flowing through my soul since I was a young boy. It is a wonderful gift to be born with and to this day I remain in humble awe of the creative process. I don’t want people to simply walk by one of my paintings or sculptures but stop and spend time with it as you would an old friend and enjoy the moment.”

Richard is equally comfortable with painting and sculpting. “Sometimes I feel that the proper expression should be shown in a painting while others become sculptures. It is never a conscious choice but rather an inner feeling about what is to be expressed and shown to the world,” he explains.

Richard has a wonderful website The Cecil Gallery, Investment Quality Paintings and Sculpture, and arranges private showing, a great treat as he describes his artwork and gives mini-seminars in the processes of their creation. His Pine Lake house itself is a delight to view, designed by Richard, a cottage imagined in Nordic children’s fables.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Images of original artwork copyright by Richard Cecil

The Brig for Brigands

All during the Presidential Campaign last year, I kept my disagreements to myself about the Obama strategy. Too easy on Hillary. Too easy on McCain. Leaving Sarah Palin to Tina Fey. Nobody would listen to me anyway, and if he won, that was all that mattered. He was welcome to have the last laugh on me. The proof is in the pudding.

I read the business pages instead of the comics, because that is where all the most outrageous jokes are, even if they are on us. Hewlet-Packard 4th Quarter earnings were up, but their profits were down. Delta Airlines lost money because of a fuel contract signed when prices were at their highest. Who’s in charge at these places? Chrysler chairman Robert Nardelli, who hammered Home Depot into near-uselessness before he became an auto expert, tells his employees that more union concessions are needed, as he also looks to the taxpayer for help. I guess that means auto workers will pay twice.

Wall Street gave out more than $18 billion in bonuses last year while markets crashed and 401Ks crumbled. I thought a bonus was a reward and pat on the back for good work. What is it going on here? President Barack Obama called the corporate behavior "the height of irresponsibility." Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, an Obama ally, said, “We have a bunch of idiots on Wall Street that are kicking sand in the face of the American taxpayer. They don't get it... You can't use taxpayer money to pay out $18 billion in bonuses." She proposes pay caps at any company accepting taxpayer bailout funds, limiting executives to the same salary as the President of the United States, $400,000. Vice President Joe Biden, drama understudy for no-drama Obama, said of corporate brigands, “They belong in the brig.”

Obama is trying to pass an economic recovery plan in Congress to "save or create more than 3 million new jobs over the next few years." The U. S. Department of Labor reports 4.8 million Americans, an all-time high, currently receiving unemployment benefits. Obama has tried to reach-out to Republicans. He even invited both Republican Senators from Arizona to a Super Bowl Party at the White House to watch their home team the Arizona Cardinals play the Pittsburgh Steelers. Dear Mr. President, we regret we will be unable to join you for chips and dips and a couple of cool ones.

The GOP (Grand Obstructionist Party) only knows one song. When they have the keys to Ft. Knox, they know how to steal everything in sight. Now, all they can do is oppose condoms and favor even more tax cuts for the wealthy. Somewhere there is an intersection of financial failure and fraud. Listen for the crash. Here's wishing Obama's Attorney General well. Much as bipartisanship sounds like a step in the right direction, I suspect somebody will have to go to jail before any lessons are learned. And I’m not talking about the impeached Governor of Illinois.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Not To Be Confused With Journalism

I started writing this blog just a few months after I came home from the Emory East rehab center in Snellville, following my near-death experience at the DeKalb Medical ICU. I did not really know what a blog was. I thought finding out might focus my attention occasionally against the fog of recovery from illness. Additionally, I needed to exercise my brain and see if any of it still worked, the same way physical therapy retrained my body and tested its limits.

Last month, I made my first penny off the blog. Three of them, in fact. I have not yet received payment, but I am told it has been credited to my account. There has never been any money in writing. I’ve known that a long time. That is why I have worked in other fields and was lucky to find things I could do that earned me an acceptable living and were interesting enough to keep my compass pointed to going to work every day. As a very young person, I wanted to be a journalist and was one for long enough to know to find another road that needed taking and to never look back. Many of my blog postings discuss current events, mostly politics, a lifelong interest. I do not confuse my blog postings with journalism. Certainly I do not put in the long hours of drudgery, drive time, travel, sleeping in hotels away from home, eating bad food on the road, a drink or two. Even the big stars of TV journalism are on the air morning, noon, and night. No wonder so many of the things they have to say are numb-skulled. At least they are paid well. I do not have any carefully cultivated and guarded sources. I use generally available information and my own experiences and knowledge to have a little fun writing, maybe express something in a way interesting enough to make a reader want to come back again.

I have developed a small but loyal readership, for which I am humbled and grateful. Sometimes I take a great notion to try to come up with ways of attracting more readers. I have a small mailing list, but the statistics indicate a very high rate of logons from my mailings. When I don’t write anything, people don’t read it. Thank you, Yogi Berra. I could write more often or concentrate on more subjects of local interest. I could try to hitch a ride with a bigger, more widely read blog.

One guy who did not like something I had written said I should stick to things I know something about. Not really bad advice. I have owned rental property for the past 20 years, and I know a lot about that and the things that go along with it, like fixing toilets. I also am highly trained and experienced in the science and technology that makes your telephones work, officially known as telephony. Sometimes I like to pronounce it tell-a-phony. I specialized in multiplexers and Digital Access Cross-connect Systems. Somehow I doubt blogs about these subjects would make you beg for more? I have received several requests to “Please remove my name from your mailing list.” Easier done than said. The biggest criticism I get is, “So what’s your point?” If you think you saw something out of the corner of your eye, maybe that was it.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

I Could Have Danced, Danced, Danced All Night

Thanks to our new President of the United States, I have been introduced to an exceptional new poet. New to me, anyway. I can’t remember ever learning of a poet through a President. OK. There was Lincoln. O Captain My Captain. But that was not exactly the same. I only just believed that was about Abraham Lincoln. I did not understand about the poet until I heard him sing of himself. Elizabeth Alexander, like Walt Whitman, did not need my discovery. I needed to discover them. Ms. Alexander, chosen to compose a new poem for the Inauguration, used to be a Chicago neighbor of Michelle and Barack Obama, and her father is former Secretary of the Army Clifford Alexander.

A multiple Pulitzer Prize poetry nominee, Ms. Alexander is scheduled to read at Emory University in Atlanta on Feb. 11. She says, “Poetry is not meant to cheer; rather, poetry challenges, and moves us towards transformation. Language distilled and artfully arranged shifts our experience of the words – and the worldviews – we live in.” She is the author of four books of poems, American Sublime, Body of Life, Antebellum Dream Book, and The Venus Hottentot, in the title poem of which, she writes:

Monsieur Cuvier investigates
between my legs, poking, prodding,
sure of his hypothesis.
I half expect him to pull silk
scarves from inside me, paper poppies,
then a rabbit! He complains
at my scent and does not think
I comprehend, but I speak
English. I speak Dutch. I speak
a little French as well, and
languages Monsieur Cuvier
will never know have names.

Two million people were expected in Washington, D.C., for the Inauguration. I settle for watching every cozy minute on my TV, with captions for the hearing impaired. I shopped at the Kroger on North Decatur Road and DeKalb Industrial Way carrying a list: nachos, two ripe avocados, one lemon, and Caffeine-Free Diet Cokes. In the party snack isle, two rambunctious little boys, no older and no more rambunctious than my own grandson, only darker, grabbed bags of chips from the shelf and chased one another, quite a handful for their mother to control. I confess, in times past, I may have averted my eyes, ashamed of my own fearful thoughts at what lay ahead for them. Social problems? Violence? Brushes with the law? Thanks to our new President, now my heart beats like the flutter of wings with the audacity of hope. From rambunctious little boys grow Presidents.

Thanks to our new President, Americans are proud of their country. Not for the first time. Born Again Americans.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Cotton Exchange

I spent six months of 1964 at Ft. Gordon, Ga., near Augusta. I took Army Basic Training there, then went to Signal Corps School to learn the new job chosen for me. In Signal School, I was allowed to leave the post on weekends. Sometimes I rode into Augusta on the free Army bus, the late night return trip of which earned its nickname as the Vomit Comet. There was not much to do in Augusta but walk up and down Broad St., maybe see a movie. I was under 21, the legal drinking age in Georgia at the time. Once I joined a group who pooled a few dollars each to rent a hotel room to watch football games on TV and drink beer we had purchased through an intermediary. It was better than hanging around the barracks, but after a while, a little fresh air was called for. One of the guys read a sight-seeing brochure. “What’s the Cotton Exchange?” he asked me, as the Georgia native. I had no idea. We proceeded to an address along the Savannah River. The old building had been the historic site of trading when cotton was king. Inside were artifacts and documents about cotton business, agriculture, and harvesting. At this riverside location, according to the displayed bills of sale, cotton bales were shipped, slaves bought and sold.

Like This:

Received of D. M. seven thousand dollars in full payment for the six following named slaves.
MARIAH, black girl 16 years old at $1250.00
MARYAN, black girl 16 years old at $1250.00
LUCY, grif girl 14 years old at $1150.00
BETTE, grif girl 14 years old at $1150.00
JANE, black girl 12 years old at $1000.00
JOHN, black boy 14 years old at $1200.00
All of said slaves are warrant sound and healthy in body and in mind and slaves for life and will forever warrant the rights of said slaves to the said M., his heirs , against the claims of any and all persons this the 18 day of March, A.D. 1858.

Slavery is the original sin of the United States, the greatest experiment in democracy and equality in the history of the world, this sin chiseled in stone in the U.S. Constitution, alongside freedom of speech and habeas corpus. I try to imagine the great American contributors to The Age of Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson, et al, who did not quibble over whether it was ok to enslave human beings, only how much they would count for. Three-fifths was the number agreed upon. Perhaps Hieronymus Bosch could have depicted the discussions of the merits of 3/5 over 2/3, or 3/4, the calculations of common denominators, and debates over differences of 1/15 or 1/20?

Article. I.
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Four of the first five U.S. Presidents came from the crop of landed Virginia gentry, which is to say, slaveholders. After generation upon generation, now comes the 44th President of the United States, born Barack Hussein Obama, not Cassius Clay or Le Roy Jones, or even George Washington Obama or Franklin Roosevelt Obama, without a drop of slave blood, father from Kenya, mother from Kansas, truly African-American.

I offer my toast to the Inauguration: Here’s to Truth and Reconciliation.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

The Spy Who Had Sense Enough To Come In Out Of The Rain

I got hooked on spy novels about the time I turned 21, when John le Carre published The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. I’ve grown old with Smiley and his people. I enjoyed Graham Greene, too, but le Carre is the best. I am a sucker for those far away places with strange sounding names, the international political intrigue, slightly seedy characters, ripe for disillusionment again, despite knowing better. At one time, I actually knew some spies. I worked for several years with the U.S. Department of State as a Telecommunications Specialist. When John le Carre’s characters visit the Embassy code clerk, I actually know what one does, because my job description included being one. I was not a code clerk for the spies; they had their own code clerks. I just knew some of the spies. And suspected others.

While I was working at the American Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, I bought a new reel-to-reel tape deck from the U.S. military P.X. mail order catalog. Consumer indulgences such as electronics did not exist in the shops of Cairo in those days. I had also ordered several reels of blank tape, but I had neglected to stock up on empty reels. I played catcher on the American Embassy softball team, sponsored by TWA. Our best pitcher was also a big country music fan, like myself, and an audiophile. I asked him did he know where I could get some empty take-up reels. He shifted his red baseball cap with the white letters TWA and said he would get back to me. There was a one-foot square door like a wall safe between his office and mine. One day the door flew open, and he shoved a box through it that was full of empty tape reels. I was overwhelmed.

“Where did you get these?” I asked.

He just put his index finger to his lips. “I didn’t get them, and you don’t have them,“ said TWA.

Let’s call him TWA, because alternative initials might violate the half-life of security clearance paperwork I once signed. He was one of many embassy personnel listed as working in my office but who did not, highly skilled and intelligent people, often multi-lingual, who just did not have known titles or offices. Beyond TOP SECRET, they did not openly exist. Like wire-tapping, arms smuggling, tampering with governments, rendition, torture, and airplanes full of money that take off but never land.

President-elect Obama has named Leon Panetta as his Director of the CIA, an appointment which has met with some criticism, because Panetta is not a member of the traditional defense and intelligence establishment. Obama is keeping as Secretary of Defense a former CIA Director, in addition to other high level national security posts that have gone to CIA and military intelligence careerists. Panetta was White House Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton, after serving as Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget before the last balanced budget. President Nixon appointed Panetta to the Office of Civil Rights, which Panetta believed included enforcement of Civil Rights Laws, creating controversy in the Nixon Administration and resulting in Panetta’s switching to become a Democrat when he ran for Congress, where he served as chairman of the caucus of Vietnam Era Veterans. Congressman Panetta was a budget wonk. CIA budgets traditionally get little scrutiny and less publicity, information available on a Need To Know basis only. If secrecy corrupts, and it surely does, absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely.

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Bunker Mentality

I’ve been in the bunker, keeping my head low, and listening to the old Merle Haggard holiday season dirge, “If We Make It Through December.”

“I got laid off down at the factory,
And their timing’s not the greatest in the world.
Heaven knows I been workin' hard,
I wanted Christmas to be right for daddy's girl….

“If we make it through December.
I got plans of bein' in a warmer town come summer time,
Maybe even California.
If we make it through December we'll be fine.”

The stock market crash, bank failures, mortgage foreclosures, credit collapse, Detroit auto industry bankruptcy. Now the Israelis have invaded Gaza. I am afraid to come out of the bunker until Jan. 20.

The diplomatic achievements of the Obama era may begin with a cease fire of the Israeli offensive in Gaza, one of the most densely populated strips of land on the planet, little more than a Palestinian refugee camp, forsaken by everyone but the terrorists Hamas. I expect the Israeli cease fire will begin around 12:00 noon Jan. 20, the way Iran released the American Embassy hostages in 1981. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will still be touring her new offices, and all President Obama will have to do is raise his right hand and solemnly swear. Indeed the Israelis are not the first to take opportunity where it presents, and the Black Hole of American leadership between election day and inauguration has only made the final daze of the Bush administration worse.

Left to ponder for another time: how does Israel defend itself against women and children suicide bombers and rockets launched from the courtyards of schools and mosques? And what will I do for fun when I don’t have George Bush to kick around anymore?

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman writes that problem is Bigger Than Bush. “Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision,” said Krugman in his New Year’s Day column for the New York Times. “Today, Republicans have taken away almost all those Southern votes — and lost the rest of the country.” The hypocrisy of fiscal conservatism has been discredited by the economic crises and exposed as pure code. According to Krugman, “Government is the problem,” means, “it takes your money and gives it to Those People.” Republicans “need to get in touch with the real “real America,” a country that is more diverse, more tolerant, and more demanding of effective government than is dreamt of in their political philosophy.”

Copyright 2009 by William C. Cotter

Neighbors and Heroes

Pine Lake kids of all ages know the house on Lakeshore Dr., across the street from the gazebo, with the most extraordinary display of lights and decorations, yard art, life-size figures, blow-ups, and cut-outs every Christmas, Easter, and Halloween. Paul and Dorothy Gumz were not shy. They celebrated generously for everyone’s viewing enjoyment. The work involved in putting out these displays, not to mention storage and keeping up with it all, was enormous.

Paul Arthur Gumz, Jr., age 86, of Pine Lake, died Saturday December 20, 2008.

A native of Chicago, Mr Gumz retired in 1992 from the U.S. Postal Service, where he had worked for 37 years. He was also a WWII veteran of service in the U.S. Army. He was a dedicated Atlanta Braves baseball fan. He loved trains and especially his family.

He is survived by his wife of 56 years, Dorothy Wilkinson Gumz of Pine Lake, children, Richard Gumz of Social Circle, Terry Gumz of Rowell, Reece Gumz of Commerce, Sherry Garmon of Logaville, Debra Young of Monroe, and Vincent Gumz of Box Springs, a brother Bernard Gumz of St Petersburg, Fl., and sister Dorothy Perry of Chicago, Il., and 14 grandchildren and 12 great grandchildren.

Pine Lake friend and neighbor Paul Jasionowski writes, “I am very sad that one of my heroes passed away on December 20, 2008. Paul Gumz, of Pine Lake, GA, was a World War II veteran who served with the 56th Medical Battalion of the U.S. 7th Army. They were the first battalion to liberate the Dachau Concentration Camp on April 29, 1945. I interviewed him in 2005 for an article which was published in Plaintalk. He had a portfolio of pictures that he took during the liberation. I asked him why he took pictures; he replied, “No one would have ever believed me.” His portfolio is on display at the Jewish Studies Center at Emory University and the Andersonville Prisoner of War Camp Museum.”

“I considered him a friend who shared with me a firsthand testament of war and man’s inhumanity toward man, which was a haunting reminder to him for most of his life and should be a reminder for all of us as well. It is my hope that a Grateful Nation will acknowledge him and remember him for the freedoms that he, and others like him have fought to give us.”

"He will be greatly missed.”

Paul Jasionowski published his interview with Mr. Gumz in 2005 in the Pine Lake PLAINTALK. Click here to enjoy this tribute.

Pragmatist In A Pear Tree

I am disappointed with President Obama so far. My buddy Luther says I should at least wait till he has been sworn in on Jan. 20. Obama himself keeps offering the excuse, “We only have one President at a time.” I think Barack Obama mis-overestimates the numerical value of George Bush in his final daze as President.

Obama has invited Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren to say the prayer at The Inauguration. Warren suckered Obama into participating in a debate on religious values during the election, and it was one of Obama’s worse performances. Let those Evangelicals get their own President, if they want one. There are plenty of Obama- supporting clergymen and clergywomen to choose from out in San Francisco. And what kind of name is Saddleback, anyway? Sounds a lot like that movie about ambiguous cowboy behavior?

Obama should get busy taking care of the country. Plenty of problems have been piling up. Mortgage forclosures, stock market failures, dried-up credit, business falling apart right and left, unemployment.

Why is Obama keeping Bush’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates? Of course Gates looked like an improvement over that arrogant and wrong-headed Donald Rumsfeld. Who wouldn’t? Obama promised a 16-month timetable to get U.S. troops out of Iraq. Now Iraq and the U.S. have signed an agreement that looks a lot like the Obama plan. The Bush Administration calls it something else. You can call it “Mission Accomplished,” if you want. But why not turn the process over to somebody who never liked the war in the first place? Robert Gates, a career CIA officer, named assistant Director of the CIA by one Republican President, and Director by another, is mighty cozy with the Defense Establishment. Retired Marine Corps Gen. James L. Jones Jr. will be the new White House National Security Advisor. Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano has been nominated for Secretary of Homeland Security. At least she is not a former CIA agent or military general. I don’t see why there have to be so many military people in charge of national defense.

I also don’t get it about Obama’s naming Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Then on top of that, he goes and gives Tom Daschle two jobs, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as any desk he wants for work space in the White House where he can spread out his blueprint for the overhaul of the Health Care System. Hillary Clinton was ready on day one to pick up where she left off 15 years ago with Hillary Care. Now, she will be so busy globetrotting, looking into every hopeless international mess caused by bullies and psychopaths from one world capital to the other, she will be lucky to ever be in the same room with a discussion of U.S. healthcare reform. Tom Daschle, former Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, is just another deal-maker and horse-trader.

All in all, Obama’s cabinet will include five women, four blacks, three Hispanics, and two Asians.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Press Bias

When my sister Ouida died the day before Christmas Eve 2007, I became the executor of her estate. I filed a change of address in her name to have her mail forwarded to me and keep it from piling up at her condo in Decatur. Big mistake. I was not aware that she had been a regular donor to a list of charities and causes. Five dollars here, and five dollars there. The volume of her mail continues unabated, despite my requests to have her name removed from the lists. In addition to health associations such as cancer and diabetes, of which she had first-hand experience, she received solicitations from AARP, Planned Parenthood, NOW, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, ASPCA, Save the Polar Bears, and Native American Tribal Schools. My sister was outed posthumously as a closet Liberal. She also subscribed to magazines, including many with beautiful photographs of birds and other wildlife and nature scenes, consumer reports, and The Progressive, celebrating its 100th anniversary after the New Year.

The Progressive was founded by "Fighting Bob" La Follette, Congressman, Governor, and U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, an advocate of women's suffrage and Native American and African-American rights. In the early 1890s he believed that his own Republican Party had abandoned the ideals of its anti-slavery origins and had become a tool for corporate interests. As Governor, he promoted the idea of basing legislation on thorough research and consultation with experts. Who ever heard of such a thing? La Follette ran for President in 1924 as the Progressive Party nominee. He won Wisconsin, as well as 17% of the popular vote nationwide. Of the sinking of the Lusitania, La Follette declared “the small right of American citizens to ride on a ship carrying munitions and flying a foreign flag” did not justify U.S. entry into World War I. He fought against military conscription, the Espionage Act, and President Wilson's measures to finance the war. Many newspapers of La Follette’s day portrayed his anti-war positions as unpatriotic.

La Follette’s Magazine from Madison, Wisconsin, November 1920 (Price Ten Cents) said, “If the press were honest, if it printed the uncolored news, the real essential facts without bias, democracy would be safe.” However, La Follette wrote, “When truth is distorted, when lies pass current for facts, when white is made to look black, and black white by a press that poisons its readers day by day, then the public is drugged into apathy or befooled into a wholly false opinion.

“The people know the press is owned or controlled. They know that it is the servant of the combined groups which control Big Business….So potent is the psychological effect of the printed lie, when artfully and persistently repeated, so destructive of all soundness of judgment are the deadly half-truths, the ‘doctored’ news, the sly insinuations, the sensational falsehoods, retracted after they have served their purpose, and all the varied and multiple forms of spurious, deceptive fabrication, willfully and wickedly printed from day to day by the Kept Press, that however thoroughly it be discredited, it is still the most powerful influence for evil, which menaces American democracy today…. The sources of current news are poisoned, and editorial comment controlled by sordid and mercenary influences. That control need not be through open ownership of the newspaper or magazine, though in many instances it is. But it is more frequently achieved through that community of interests, that interdependence of investments and credits which ties the publisher up to the banks, the advertisers and the Special Interests.”

Nowadays, I pretty much avoid reading anything to the left of the New York Times. It only makes my blood boil. To no purpose. Like getting all dressed up with no place to go. You could find yourself like William Ayers, trying to explain things you can barely remember to people who were not there.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Dear Santa:

First things first. Please bring world peace and good will towards men, women, children, and all creatures great and small. If you can. Even before you fill the stockings of good little boys and girls, including my wondrous grandchildren, who are, of course, too young to understand how much more they would benefit from peace and good will rather than the latest Bratz Doll. Then, if you still have some time and energy, here’s my Christmas wish list.

You could drop off an application for a job with the new administration in Washington. I understand they have openings. I previously worked for the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Veterans Administration. Maybe this time I should try something else. I was watching a re-run of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Is there still a Ministry of Funny Walks, or was that just in England? I am fully qualified. I lost 100 percent of my balance function in both ears when I was sick a couple of years ago. I can walk now, but I wobble and weave and stagger and stumble like a drunk leaving the bar at closing time. Every now and again, I see a cop watch me get into my car, and I know he is trying to decide if he should pull me over the moment I drive off. I contributed $25 to the Presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Twice. Of course, I would not want that to be interpreted as trying to influence anybody reviewing my job application. I heard what happened to the Governor of Illinois.

The number one thing I wish for is a national health care plan for the United States. It does not even have to be as good as the ones in Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Scotland, or England, just to mention our friends and allies in Europe. Only good enough to keep people from having to chose between death, pain, incapacity, and bankruptcy in the event of a major illness. After I spent three weeks in the ICU and another month in rehab, my medical bills exceeded a quarter of a million dollars. I was lucky. I had a good job with an insurance plan, on which I had paid the high option premiums, so that my actual out of pocket expenses were no worse than an unexpected car repair bill for a new transmission. I also had some California do-gooder lawyers in my corner when the insurance company tried to leave me lying in the ditch on the side of the road.

You might remember something nice for all my doctors, not just the ones who saved my life and the ones who gave me my miraculous new, bionic hearing. Cheer up the grumps and those in such a rush to be somewhere else and who just ignore the pain that brings you to their office. You might consider gift certificates for having their hearing checked. I swear sometimes I think when patients talk, doctors go deaf.

I’m not going to bother to put in a good word for Wall Street, banks, insurance companies, or Detroit auto makers. They do not need Santa Claus. They’ve got Congress. One so-called expert, as if pronouncing the street name of a pile of feces in the middle of the living room floor, said on television that government meddling in the automobile business would end up with everyone driving a beige Taurus that got 100-miles-per gallon. Santa, make mine the station wagon. I need the extra room for my landlording equipment and my grandchildren.

Pa rum pum pum pum.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Heir Apparent

Brilliant British actress Helen Mirren won an Oscar for her chilling and insightful portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in the movie The Queen, providing a rare glimpse at a historical figure faced with the inexorable movement of time passing them by. The real QE II, the monarch, less than 30 years old at her coronation, now 82 (her mother lived to be 101), may well outlive her son, Charles, Prince of Wales, next in line for the throne of England.

The United States at its birth revolted against leadership by dynastic inheritance. Nonetheless, John Adams, the first Vice President, became President, and so did his son John Quincy Adams. William Henry Harrison, affectionately known as Old Tippecanoe, caught pneumonia at his March inauguration as President and died a month later, the shortest U.S. Presidency. However his son Benjamin later was elected President and served out his full term. And, of course, there are the Presidents George Bush, father and son, not-so-affectionately known by some as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumber.

Bill and Hillary Clinton tried to establish the first husband and wife Presidential dynasty. Powerful as they were, they failed to see the Barack Obama train coming. At the last minute, they managed to jump on board. Now Hillary will be Secretary of State in the new Obama administration. Some people noted that Hillary did not have on her smiley face at the announcement ceremony for Obama’s national security team. Some have said it was the look of someone seeing the end of their elected political career. Others said, not a moment too soon.

Hillary wanted to be the first woman President. In order to become Secretary of State, she will resign her seat as U.S. Senator from New York, and the Governor will appoint a successor to serve the remainder of her term. The latest name mentioned for the Senate vacancy from New York is that of Caroline Kennedy, the only surviving child of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy. There has been a Kennedy in the U.S. Senate for as long as I can remember. Caroline’s Uncle Bobby served as U.S. Senator from New York. Uncle Teddy, the senior Kennedy currently in office, faces serious health problems likely to end his long dominance in Democratic politics.

Jacqueline Kennedy had once been a news-photographer. She allowed a gallery of cute photographs of her young children playing in the White House and on its grounds. One famous photo of Caroline and her pony inspired the hit song Sweet Caroline, according to Neil Diamond, who wrote it. For many years, Caroline Kennedy stayed out of the public eye, but she has taken an active role in the Obama campaign, a page turned, torch passed. If Caroline Kennedy becomes the new Senator Kennedy of New York, can the Presidential election of 2016 be far behind? I’ll bet the farm on who will be the first woman President of the United States, and it will not be Sarah Palin or Hillary Clinton.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Oil Price Mumbo Jumbo

Last week, I paid $1.78 per gallon for gasoline. Just a few weeks ago, I sweated finding a place to buy any gas, anywhere, at twice the price. Did I miss the news on television the night somebody explained what happened? The default in economics is always supply and demand. Somehow, I can’t really put that together. The most interesting report I have read is that the current collapse of credit has taken the oxygen out of the fire-storm of speculation, therefore forcing the price of oil to actually reflect supply and demand. Maybe. Who knows? Certainly not anybody I know. It is still a pretty safe bet that any society able to wean itself from oil dependency may stand half a chance of survival in the future.

According to the Sierra Club’s The Green Life, “oil prices will rebound to more than $100 per barrel as soon as the economy recovers.” Will somebody please wake me when we get there? It is already hard enough to know what to wish for. By 2030, the price of oil will naturally exceed $200 per barrel, as standards of living rise in China and India. Americans will recall with nostalgia the good-old-days of $4 a gallon gasoline. However, by 2030, alternative fuel vehicles, like plug-in hybrid, electric, natural gas, and fuel cell cars may rule the road, according to The Green Life, making “oil price mumbo-jumbo moot.” Projections that plug-in vehicles alone will eventually account for 50 percent of U.S. transportation argue that household budgets will not be chained to the price of oil. Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so? Where are the corporate clowns at General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler? Out lobbying the U.S. government for some sort of taxpayer dole.

One my enduring memories of the early 1950’s is of guys older than I was, teenagers, in their front yards taking cars apart and putting them back together again. Just for the fun of it, as best anybody could tell. They dressed in blue jeans and white t-shirts and looked like young Marlon Brandos and James Deans even before the images of young Marlon Brando and James Dean had been invented by Hollywood cameras. Where did those guys go? Did they get swallowed whole and end up in the belly of the whale in Detroit? I’d like to think that they, or maybe their children and grandchildren are still tinkering in garages and tin-roof buildings on secondary highways along the railroad tracks all across America. Moe and Molly the mechanics refuse to accept the lazy corporate response and are building and/or converting their own cars that run on something other than gasoline. Electric, natural gas, cooking oil recycled from do-you- want-fries-with-that. A guy in Douglasville, Ga., has converted his own S-10 pickup to all electric. Cost $12,000, including the used truck. A company in Canada will sell you your own natural gas fueling device to hook up to the natural gas utility line service in your house. This is on sale now, available by mail order at about $3,000. I want to talk to some of these folks, learn more about how they did it and what they have to say. If I do, Paw Paw Bill will let you know. Now that the election is over, this is the most important thing I can think of.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Pass The Dog Food Bowl

The wonderful little town where I live, Pine Lake, Ga., nestled in the shadow of Stone Mountain, just off Memorial Drive, seems to have a recurring dog problem. Of course, everybody loves dogs. Me included. I have owned a couple of dozen dogs during my lifetime. I even owned two at a time once when I lived on a farm that provided them with 160 acres in which to run. However, most of the houses in Pine Lake are on lots increasingly not much bigger than the buildings themselves. Our current dog problem concerns strays and what to do about them. I do not know how we get so many strays. Some people think they are dumped in Pine Lake. Maybe the dumpers have gotten tickets from the Pine Lake police taking the easy pickings on Rockbridge Rd. Maybe they just think Pine Lake is full of suckers.

Here’s my plan. Pine Lake should expand its Police Department to include a special Animal Control Unit. We can staff this 24x7 for about $250,000. Then we could convert the Club House into a facility which we can call the Pine Lake Humane Society. The Club House is only used on voting days and for public meetings and the occasional birthday party. We could probably keep the renovations of the Club House to a couple of hundred thousand dollars, not counting the special equipment. Oh, and I guess we will need to staff the Pine Lake Humane Society facility, unless we can get enough volunteers to take the animals for walks. Then there is the cost of leashes and feeding the strays. I think we could do this for little more than a half a million dollars. Say about $1,000 per resident of Pine Lake. I am personally not in favor of paying any taxes of any kind to any government. So, somebody get a hat and pass it around. Or maybe we should use the dog food bowl.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Pardon My Turkey

Not much on television will make me Laugh Out Loud. Recent broadcasts of Sarah Palin’s photo op ceremonial pardoning of a turkey were a rare exception. The Alaska Governor and shooting-star Republican Vice Presidential candidate babbled on and on, oblivious to the feather-flying struggles and squawking taking place in the slaughterhouse and on camera as the less thankful began the journey to holiday dinner tables. One commentator said he thought it was Tina Fey on the video, a prank. I was struck not only by the disconnect between Gov. Palin’s vision of reality and that of the other turkeys but also by the great symbolism of politicians and the meaningfulness of their pronouncements.

The Constitution of the United States vests in the President the absolute, unchecked power to pardon crimes ranging from misdemeanors to felonies, even those for which someone may not have been charged yet. I expect to see a stampede of pardons at the January 19 finish line. Scooter Libby. Alberto Gonzales. Private contractors. Armed Hessians. Maybe the entire executive branch, if they can figure out a way. I have a way. Stay with me; it is easier to follow than the Wall Street Bailout.

First off, Dick Cheney resigns as Vice President. Bush issues a blanket pardon to Cheney for anything and everything he has done, may have done, or even thought about doing. Bush appoints Barack Obama to be the Vice President, according to the 25TH amendment. Then Bush himself resigns. Barack Obama thus becomes immediately the new President of the United States, eliminating the tortured process of the Lame Duck Presidency of George Bush limping and quacking its way toward Jan. 20. Obama still takes office Jan. 20 to begin the term for which he has already been elected. There is nothing to prevent this scenario except lack of imaginaion itself.

In olden times and in less democratic countries, when all confidence in a leader was lost, the replacement would just summon the army generals and take over the palace. We don’t do things that way. I have always maintained that what I love the most about our democracy is how the winners do not get to take the losers out behind the building and shoot them. I have lots of experience at deeply and sincerely appreciating this aspect of our system of government. All things considered, my idea follows the U.S. Constitution perfectly and provides an orderly transition, reflecting the currently declared will of the voters in our democratic electoral process.

Finally, I accept, under my proposal, the new President can pardon all the Lame Ducks, turkeys, chicken-hawks, and any and all other various and sundry fowl species.

Oh, one other thing, even so. When the new administration arrives at the White House, count the silverware.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Team Play

Team player Bill Clinton came to town to campaign for Jim Martin in his Dec. 2 runoff against Saxby Chambliss for the U.S. Senate from Georgia. Speaking at Clark Atlanta University, the former President said, “The person who wins this election will be the one whose supporters want it the most. You can win in this thing if you want it bad enough. You just have to decide how bad you want it.” Also scheduled to appear on behalf of Martin later this week will be Al Gore, who came close to being elected President himself after serving as Vice President for eight years under Clinton.

Big name backers of incumbent Senator Chambliss who have already campaigned in Georgia on his behalf include John McCain and Mike Huckabee, as well as Wayne LaPierre of the NRA, with future trips planned by Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani. Neither Martin nor Chambliss won the required 50 percent plus one in the general election. The runoff is scheduled for Dec. 2. While Democrats currently control 58 seats in the new Senate, the Georgia and Minnesota races remain undecided and prized, because they represent a potential 60 seat, filibuster-proof majority.
Chambliss became Georgia’s U.S. Senator when he defeated former Sen. Max Cleland by raising questions about Cleland’s patriotism. Cleland, a decorated U.S. Army veteran, lost three limbs in Vietnam. Not enough, said Shameless Chambliss in chicken hawk squawk. Martin, also a Vietnam veteran “is the kind of guy we ought to have in public life,” Clinton told 3,000 supporters. “His opponent was elected on a false premise six years ago and is running on a false premise today.”

Bill Clinton campaigned for President-elect Obama in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida during the general election, and Obama won all three states. Obama may name New York Sen. Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State. She also campaigned for Obama, after their closely contested rivalry for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Now that Sen. Clinton is under consideration as Secretary of State, the former President reportedly has turned over fund-raising records for his Presidential Library and other activities. He says he will do anything necessary to help his wife become Secretary of State.

My buddy Luther has suggested that if Hillary Clinton becomes Secretary of State, Bill Clinton should be named Ambassador to the United Nations. He calls it the mother of all two-fers. I’ve known Luther pretty much my whole life, and sometimes I still can not tell if he is pulling my leg or tugging at my sleeve. I agree that Bill Clinton needs something useful to do that would keep him out of the way, and he could make important contributions at cabinet meetings. My problem is that all this political clout elbows out even high profile professional diplomats like Dennis Ross and Richard Holbrooke, who should be taking prominent foreign policy roles in the new administration.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Road Test

Alright, $25-billion here, $170-billion there, pretty soon we’re talking about some real money. Everett Dirkson, the late Senator from Illinois with the beautiful hair and even more beautiful voice, assured himself a permanent place in American history with the model for that analysis.

If we are going to socialize the U.S. auto industry, maybe we should just pick one company, let the others sink or swim. They could draw straws, or at least let’s take them for a road test. Here’s my plan. The Big Three from Detroit meet at some NASCAR venue like the Indianapolis Speedway or Daytona. Bring their best cars. Give each car 10 gallons of regular gasoline (up to 10 percent ethanol allowed). Gentlemen, start your engines. Let them drive around the track at Interstate Highway speed until they run out of gas. The last car still moving wins for its manufacturer the honor of becoming the new taxpayer owned auto maker. The others can live or die by old fashioned capitalism. If they can’t survive, let them go the way of the tyrannosaurus rex. Once the tax-payer buys its own auto manufacturer, maybe the government will be able to regulate gas standards and alternative fuel vehicles enough to give the country half a chance of survival beyond the next holiday shopping season.

If the U.S. Congress comes up with an auto industry bailout, Speaker Nancy Pelosi says the plan would require use of existing funds from the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and have many strings attached, including restructuring company finances, meeting new standards for gas mileage and requiring advanced technologies "to compete in the domestic and global market." What about the SUV’s and big macho trucks Detroit has clung to like they could not see it coming? Democrats also said they would include new limits on executive pay at the Big Three auto companies.

Auto executives, corporate clowns and empty suits to the bitter end, are fear mongering and threatening the loss of millions of jobs, added to an economy already crunched by the credit crash. Detroit’s Big Three also provide healthcare benefits to almost 2 million Americans and pension benefits to 775,000. Many politicians and other free marketers believe America cannot afford a collapse in the car industry. Others think, “Taxpayers should not be on the hook for bailing out businesses that have made very bad decisions and deserve to face the consequences.” According to Cato Institute associate director Dan Ikenson, a bailout will just delay the inevitable. “If all three went down and all the parts’ suppliers went down at the same time, yes we are talking about millions of jobs. But that’s not going to happen. What should happen is one of the Big Three should go down and liquidate. Then prospects for the other two would be much brighter. Quite frankly, the US economy could survive without an auto industry. It’s not going to happen, but we could survive. We would not survive without banks or a credit system.”

Congress already set aside $25 billion to help pay for government-imposed fuel-efficiency quotas. This was before the $700 billion TARP. Now Detroit wants a share of the $700 billion intended to bailout the stock markets. Or was it for the failed mortgages? I get confused. The Secretary of the Treasury keeps moving the shell, and I lose track of the pea. I just hope there is still some of the $700 billion left when these lame ducks limp and quack away.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Hillary Close At Hand

A popular phrase during WWII was “Loose lips sink ships.” Today’s world is usually more likely to “Tell All.” Still, the highly disciplined Obama navy is preparing to pull into port, tight lipped as ever. Except for the current chatter that Hillary Clinton may be his choice for Secretary of State. Makes you wonder. Is this a trial balloon, testing public reaction? My bet is more that it is a strategy to convince her to accept the position. She has other options: a leadership role in the U.S. Senate, perhaps, later, the U.S. Supreme Court.

George Stephanopoulos, former Bill Clinton insider, reported on ABC’s Good Morning America last week that Hillary’s name was being mentioned as the chief foreign policy representative for the United States in the Obama administration. Meanwhile, New York Senator Clinton flew to Chicago on business. Although Clinton and Obama squared off in the Democratic Presidential Primaries, both Hillary and her husband, the ex-President, campaigned on behalf of Obama in the general election, notably in critical states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, all of which Obama won. Sen. Clinton needs no introduction to many of the world leaders the next Secretary of State will meet with to discuss the most serious matters of interest to the United States. She is ready on day one.

Thomas Jefferson was the first U.S. Secretary of State, followed by James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams, suggesting early in American history that the post was the natural stepping-stone to the Presidency. Secretaries of State Martin Van Buren and James Buchanan also eventually became President. Famous Secretaries of State Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, William H. Seward, James G. Blaine, Elihu Root, William Jennings Bryan, Charles Evans Hughes, Edmund Muskie and Alexander Haig might have been but weren’t President, as each ran for the Oval Office but got no closer than the cabinet room.

President Lincoln recruited all his political opponents as members of his cabinet, Pulitzer Prize winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin points out in her book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Keep your friends close at hand and your enemies closer. The state of Illinois, which calls itself the Land of Lincoln, is also, of course, the home of President-elect Obama, who walks carefully and purposefully in the footsteps that preceded him.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Billy Shoolbred 3/1/43 - 12/9/07

Photo Courtesy of Ralph McConigly. Used by Permission.

Billy Shoolbred and I used to strike out early on a Saturday morning, meeting somewhere in the neighborhood between where he lived on Juniper, between 10th and 8th, and I lived on 14th Street to ride our bikes down the center line of Peachtree Street to the Paramount Theatre, across the street from the intersection of Forsyth St, Carnegie Way, and Peachtree. We leaned the bicycles against the side of the building, no bike racks, no locks. We spent the day inside watching adventure serials, cartoons, and double-feature Tarzan movies and westerns. The price of admission was a dime. When we left the movie in the late afternoon, we climbed back on our bikes and rode home down the center of Peachtree St. The year was sometime during the second quarter of the Presidency of Dwight Eisenhower.

Billy was the first friend I made when I started the fifth grade as the new kid at Clark Howell Elementary School, which once existed on 10th Street, between Juniper and Piedmont. For the remainder of my elementary school years, whatever I did, Shoolbred was at my side. His mother worked for her cousin, Mary Mobley, who owned a picture framing business and adjacent real estate on Peachtree, including a large and rambling apartment building with a courtyard in the back, the site of countless cookouts at which I was a regular guest, almost a member of the family. The first baseball glove I ever owned was a hand-me-down from Shoolbred, as were all the part-time and after-school jobs of my teenage years, working for Mary Mobley’s fellow members of the Tenth Street Business Association. When Billy turned 16, he became the owner of the 1949 Pontiac station wagon that had been the delivery vehicle for Mobley Frame Shop. He and I spent an afternoon painting over the business logo on the front doors. I learned to drive in that station wagon, well known at Henry Grady High School as “The Jungle Cruiser,” after an indestructible tank featured in an adventure movie serial called Tim Tyler’s Luck. I attended countless high school football games, proms, and other social events double-dating in Shoolbred’s “Jungle Cruiser.”

When we graduated from high school, neither of us any longer going by the name of “Billy,” except within our own families, Bill Shoolbred did what young folks often have the internal imperative to do; he re-invented himself. He joined the U.S. Coast Guard, although I have no knowledge that he had ever been on a boat before doing so. He navigated a successful career for himself in the Coast Guard and retired as a Chief Warrant Officer. The last time I saw Bill Shoolbred, he came to my house for a farewell party in 1976, before I went to Egypt to work for the American Embassy in Cairo.

Last week, Ralph McConigly, another grade-school friend, contacted me on behalf of our high school graduating class, planning its 50th reunion, scheduled in four years. Ralph had located me through my blog. This is the second time this year I have been hunted down on the internet. Ralph reported that Bill Shoolbred had died almost a year ago. I am not surprised to learn that people my age die. I came very close to doing it myself in 2006. What I mind is the thought that my old friends might die without my knowing it. Vanish without a trace. As if somehow I need to salute and honor them and whatever our lives meant. In my heart, and if possible, in writing, which is one of the ways I get to my heart.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Not For The First Time

I was flag captain in my seventh grade class at Clark Howell Elementary School, long since torn down in favor of a City of Atlanta fire station at that site on Tenth Street, between Juniper and Piedmont. As flag captain, I was in charge of daily mounting of the flag to fly from the schoolhouse flagpole. I was given access to the second floor storage room and permitted to climb out the window to the brick-walled patio from which the pole protruded. Each morning, I snapped the flag to a rope and pulley and ran it to the end of the pole. As the school day closed, I reeled the flag in. The flag was not to be dropped, allowed to touch the ground, or left out in the rain. If it began to rain during school, I was to excuse myself from class and bring in the flag. The flag had to be folded a certain way before it was put back on the shelf. Two people were required to do this correctly. My buddy Luther was the flag lieutenant. Holding the flag from each end waist-high and parallel to the ground, we folded it in half lengthwise. Twice. With the blue field and stars on the outside. We made a rectangular fold in the striped end, then a triangular fold, from left to right. We created a smaller triangle out of the first then folded the triangle end over end, tucking any excess into the last fold. If you do this right, the successful result is a triangle of blue with white stars. Being in the seventh grade involved a lot of responsibility.

This experience came in handy a few years later when I went into the Army, where duty orderlies and other volunteers served to raise and lower the flag. The U.S. Army allocated training in rules and procedures about the flag. The Army scheduled a lot of time to teach me things I already knew how to do. Like typing. I scored above the minimum required typing speed on the first test. From then on, I was reassigned to busy-work details, picking up cigarette butts, raking leaves, sweeping sidewalks that had been swept already that day. The right way, the wrong way, and the Army way. Still, I have spent most of my life earning a living doing the main thing the U. S. Army trained me to do, working as a telecommunications equipment operator, technician, and engineer.

I can get emotional when The Star Spangled Banner plays before baseball games. I am always stirred by the famous photograph of Ira Hayes at his bravest with his buddies on Iwo Jima raising the flag, as well as the monument to it in Washington, D.C. Back in the days before 24-hour television, stations signed off every night with the National Anthem, amber waves of grain, and Old Glory. It was the best show on television. I can barely watch the movie From Here to Eternity when Montgomery Clift plays Taps on the bugle. I was at Arlington National Cemetery once, and they played Taps. If you’re ever around when they play Taps, don’t look at me. Just don’t look.

Popular history says Betsy Ross sewed the first U.S. flag of 13 stars and 13 stripes based on a pencil sketch by George Washington. It does not matter if this is true. People like to believe it. Today’s 50-star flag was adopted in 1959 by Presidential proclamation, upon the admission to statehood of Hawaii, birthplace of Barack Obama, President-elect of the United States. Last week, I bought a new flag just in case, not a picture of a flag printed overseas on starched cloth but a real flag made in America by a company that has been stitching together stars and stripes since 1847. My beautiful flag is 3 feet by 5 feet, with a 6 foot pole and mount for the front window sill of my house. This morning I am flying it in celebration and in our honor.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Joe The Plumber's Friend

Joe the Plumber was a no-show at a McClain rally in Ohio. When the plumber’s friend called Joe’s name, nobody answered. Joe was out trying to trade his 15 minutes of fame for a recording contract as a country singer. Joe came to public attention when he engaged Barack Obama in a discussion of tax policy in front of network television cameras. “I just happened to be here and Barack Obama happened to show up,” Joe explained. Joe said he wanted to buy the plumbing company he worked for but would be prevented from doing it because of Obama’s tax plan. Ignore the fact that Joe did not have the down payment to buy the company even if he could find a sub-prime, no doc loan somewhere. “I asked the question but I still got a tap dance ...almost as good as Sammy Davis, Jr.,” Joe said. Joe the Plumber was also mentioned prominently in the last Presidential debate between Obama and McCain. After the debate, Joe called Obama’s plans “one step closer to socialism.” He also supported the view that "a vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Israel." I think maybe it’s time to just move to a different bar stool.

In our democracy, people love to believe one person’s opinion is as good as another’s. However, the U.S. Constitution only guarantees your freedom to express your opinion and protection from government reprisals for that expression. Even if the media catapults you to national fame, because it did not have anything easier to do that day, your opinion may yet fall into that category of anatomical comparison that everybody has one, and they all stink.

Lester Maddox, governor of Georgia from 1967 to 1971, was the son of an Atlanta steelworker and followed his father in that job. Maddox eventually opened the Pickrick Cafeteria on Hemphill Ave., near the campus of Georgia Tech and not far from the Atlantic Steel Mill neighborhood where he was raised and next door to the less economically grounded neighborhood in which I grew up. Maddox, working side-by-side with his wife and children, made a success of the restaurant. For years, Maddox advertised his specialties, skillet-fried chicken, ax-handles, and segregationist politics, in double-wide columns entitled Pickrick Says in the Saturday Atlanta newspaper. During those days of the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement, many segregationists found refuge and comfort at the Pickrick Cafeteria and in the words Maddox published in the bought and paid for rants of his weekend newspaper advertisements. The ax-handles Maddox sold at Pickrick were widely known by the nickname “N…. Knockers.”

In September of 1963, four Sundy School children were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. I worked for The Atlanta Journal at the time as the most junior of young reporters. I helped put together the reaction story about the bombing, a collection of quotes from elected officials, business leaders, clergy, civil rights groups, anybody famous with something to say in response to a big news event. For the first, last, and only time in my life, I spoke to the chicken restauranteur who sold ax handles. What was his reaction? Did he condemn the domestic terrorists from the Klu Klux Klan who had murdered the four little girls? No. He blamed the victims, said they had “brought it on themselves.” With righteous indignation, I reported his remarks in the newspaper. Nonetheless, it still haunts me that uncritical and easy media publication of this sort of ignorance was what made Lester Maddox Governor of Georgia.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

A Second Spring

His Mother’s Place

By Kristina Simms

It was his mother’s place,
With scuppernongs and pergolas
And Japanese magnolias, Rose-of-Sharon,
The old fashioned white and purple kind
And, of course, lycoris and
Camellias and azaleas.

And now it’s his place:
Sawhorses, a stack of splintery pallets,
Two trucks—one dead, one with a busted muffler—
Gutters full of leaves, pecans unharvested,
Cannabis, of course, and
Methamphetamine.

(Copyright by Kristina M. Simms. Used by permission.)

I already had a copy of Tina’s poetry book, A Second Spring, before she sent me the announcement of its availability as a Kindle download. Internet bookseller Amazon came out with its Kindle e-reader just in time for the holiday gadget season last year at $399 each. Tina says, “It so happens that I bought one in a burst of extravagance and just absolutely love it. It is very easy on the eyes and you can enlarge the font if you wish.” Furthermore, “The neatest thing for writers is that you can put your own books on Kindle for free”

Here is the link for Amazon’s Kindle downloads.

http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA

Tina says it is easiest to look up her book on Kindle by the author’s name, Kristina Simms, as the title may produce results only close enough for horseshoes. If you are like me and still whistling past the Gutenberg Graveyard, you can order a copy in paperback.

A Second Spring offers ironic musings on Elvis at the Dentist, the portrait of Robert E. Lee at the Georgia Capitol, and Hollywood celebrities, as well as “finding the unique in the ordinary, beauty in the commonplace.”

Tina also intends to upload to Kindle her nature journal, A YEAR AT THE LAKE. “Whee! Retirement is so much fun,” says the former middle-Georgia schoolteacher who lives in Perry. In addition to her writing, Tina is “a community organizer and proud of it,” a political activist with the Georgia Federation of Democratic Women, an advocate on mental health issues, and a photographer with a beautiful website.

(Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter)

Favorite Five, Top Ten, or Dime a Dozen

I have moved some of the blog furniture around, trying to clear out clutter, make things more comfortable. Blogger controls a lot of the format, and to their credit they launch ideas faster than I can keep up. I was thinking maybe a new reader might want to sample some Paw Paw Bill postings that have been around a while. My Blog Archive and Labels lists have become like staring at crowded book shelves. How would you pick, even if you were interested? So, I plan to add to the side bar a feature I could call "Favorite Five," "Top Ten," or "Dime a Dozen." If anyone still wants more after that, click away at the long lists.

I could just select my own favorites, rank each posting by its number of log-ins, or weigh comments and e-mails. I used all of those to create the list below. However, a new gadget from Blogger allows me to conduct a readers’ poll (see the top of the blog). Vote for as many as five of your favorites. Or just vote for one or two. Anything will help me cull down to a smaller sampler. Here are some reminders, in reverse chronological order from the most recent:

Get Over Myself. I try not to dwell on my deafness, but I know I have a few deaf readers, and I want share my progress.

Don't Bet On It. I do not gamble in Las Vegas or on Wall Street.

Heartbeat. Should the Vice President know spit?

Alpo On Sale. Lessons from The Depression.

Noel Petrin, 10/29/32 - 9/14/05. A personal memory that had big response from readers. I should have known better than to be surprised. Edgar Lee Masters did.

Only In Your Head. Barack Obama’s Dream Team.

Best Kept Secrets. Miss Universe enhanced beauty contest.

SUV Wars. After the elections, I plan to write more about alternative fuels.

Your Father's Oldsmobile. No matter how anybody votes, this is my favorite.

Rhymes with Burden. Why I admired Hamilton Jordan.

May I Play Through, Por Favor? Worker, be my guest.

Shiite from Shinola. Not-so-potent-tetes.

Fall of the House of Homer. Home Depot used to be a great store.

First Line. My Mother. My list.

Follow the Money to Iraq. Will the real excuse for this war please stand up?

Warning: Read At Your Own Risk. Silly is as silly does.

The Size Of The Fight In The Dog. Journalism 101: Anything about dogs will attract readership.

Bluebird On My Shoulder. Br’er Rabbit, Joel Chandler Harris, Walt Disney, and James Baskett.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Unhatched

I’m really starting to get nervous. It looks like my guy is going to win. I’m not used to this. For a long while, the skeptics asked, “Why can’t Obama close the deal?” Now Obama himself cautions against overconfidence, which is another way of saying don’t count your chickens before they hatch. Polls show Obama with more than enough electoral votes, some estimates as high as 330, a comfortable margin over the 270 needed to win. Nonetheless, remember Republican President Thomas Dewey. Democratic President Al Gore does. Possibly the earliest Presidential poll, conducted by The Harrisburg Pennsylvanian in 1824, showed Andrew Jackson leading John Quincy Adams 335 to 169 in a local straw vote. J.Q. was inaugurated as President in 1825. It took Old Hickory another four years.

On Meet the Press, Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama for President. Gen. Powell has made a successful career, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as Secretary of State, by casting his lot with Republican administrations. He said Obama was in a better position to repair U.S. relations around the world. “This is the time for outreach,” he said. He supported Obama on being open to direct diplomacy to “talk to people we haven’t talked to,” including Iranian leaders. Obama “has a definite way of doing business that will serve us well,” Powell said, questioning some of McCain’s judgment during the campaign. Powell mentioned bluntly the GOP VP nominee: “I don't believe she's ready to be President of the United States, which is the job of the Vice President.” Powell, who once was considered by many of us the most likely public figure to become the first African-American President, said he was “troubled” by the irrelevant personal attacks on Obama, especially false accusations that Obama is Muslim. “Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he's a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America,” Powell said. “I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine…a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture… was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery… her head on the headstone of her son's grave…. you could see the writing on the headstone…Purple Heart, Bronze Star…he died in Iraq… 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn't have a Christian cross, it didn't have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey.”

Also, an Obama rally in St Louis drew a record 100,000 people and another 75,000 in Kansas City. The campaign has announced it raised more than $150 million in September, breaking the previous record of $66 million it set in August. According to Obama’s campaign manager, 3.1 million people have contributed an average of $86 each, with students and retirees comprising the two largest groups. Obama has bought 30 minute ads on network television for the closing days before the election. He is currently airing four times as many TV ads as McCain, including in West Virginia and other traditional Republican territory.

McCain was asked by Fox News if he had considered the possibility that he might lose the election. "Oh, sure. I mean, I don't dwell on it. But look, I've had a wonderful life. I have to go back and live in Arizona, and be in the United States Senate representing them, and with a wonderful family. I'm the luckiest guy you ever interviewed," he said. "Don't feel sorry for John McCain, and John McCain will be concentrating on not feeling sorry for himself." McCain never looked less sorry for himself than at the Al Smith Dinner, laughing at all of Obama’s jokes. Maybe he was remembering how a score of Presidential elections ago New York Governor Al Smith, the first Catholic to run for President, lost to Herbert Hoover.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Get Over Myself

Another cochlear implant anniversary has come and gone, two years now. In case you were getting popcorn during that part of the show, I lost my hearing in March 2006 due to meningitis, a dangerous illness I was lucky to survive. I lost all useful function of both ears, except to keep my glasses from falling off. The cochlear implant is a miraculous electronic device. Sometimes called a “bionic ear,” it is actually an ear bypass, mini-electronics transmitting sounds directly to the brain without traveling through the ear. One of the interesting things about my cochlear implant is that I do not believe I hear anything differently or better after two years than I did the first day it was activated. What changes and improves are the ways that my brain recognizes and deciphers sounds.

The first music I listened to after my cochlear implant was hopeless. A jumble of noise. There have been milestones. I first realized I could pickup the rhythms, but I could not tell the difference between a drum and a guitar. If I distinguished notes at all, a scale consisted only of root and something that was not the root. I have spent hours driving down the road in the car singing scales, trying to make eight notes and hearing their intervals. I like to turn off my cochlear implant processor and try matching the physical note in my throat with the way I remember it feeling and imagining the note in my brain. God knows what it sounds like, but it is a thrilling exercise, almost as good as actually being able to do it. Last week, I was listening to the radio and a piece of music came on, and I just was certain it was Mozart. I could not believe the joy, noting this and that signature of Mozart, believing myself close to actually hearing something beautiful. If the radio identified the music, I failed to understand. Who cares? I came as close to enjoying a musical experience as I have in two and a half years.

I recently received a You Tube link from Dennis Crews. With my hearing, I usually don’t do You Tubes, because, unlike regular television, You Tubes are rarely captioned. Nonetheless, I am always interested in what Mr. Crews finds noteworthy. Not only is Taking it back with Barack, Jack (For Swing Voters) great fun, I immediately recognized the song, “Choo Choo Chaboogie” and added the video to my sidebar. Years ago, I played “Cho Choo Chaboogie” countless times, along with “San Antonio Rose,” “Crazy Arms,” and “Bubbles in My Beer,” all of which were on my practice tapes from the Nashville, Tn., Jeff Newman College of Pedal Steel Guitar in which I once had matriculated.

Having a telephone conversation continues to be unpredictable. Sometimes I think the conversation has gone well. Other times are discouraging, and I do not understand anything I hear. I carry my cell phone when I leave the house but only expect to use it in case of emergency or brief calls to family. At home, I love my new CapTel landline phone, which displays captions of the conversation I may or may not be understanding. I posted a blog about this wonderful device. Eat Blackberries, Get Bluetooth was reprinted in the annual report of the Georgia Council for the Hearing Impaired. Previously they had invited me to appear on a local radio program discussing telephone operator assistance provided by Georgia Relay. Now they have also asked me to help them “begin a late deafened social group” and be one of the “coordinators.” My friends at GCHI said, “You have a wealth of information on resources and coping that would be useful to many hard of hearing and late deafened people.”

Wait a minute. That deer frozen in the headlights is dear me. “You have probably asked the one thing of me that I have the least confidence about,” I replied. “Social interaction, certainly coordinating anything, is not something I do well. I would be happy to participate, share my experiences, etc., but I am not prepared to be in any sort of dependable leadership position. While I am able to conduct somewhat successful conversations face to face, one on one, because of my cochlear implant, groups render my hearing very unsatisfactory.”

I am so embarrassed. Maybe I should do some research on support groups and get over myself.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Rally Round the Gene Pool

John McCain misses out on some great stuff, because he does not do e-mails. Here are some examples that have come my way recently.

I was sharpening my chain saw when they called me from Washington, D.C., to ask me how to fix the economy. This request focused my thoughts…. cutting half a cord at least, to keep the wood stove going through October. The economy, yes: $700 billion is more than enough money to buy every able-bodied American a chain saw, a solar-powered generator and a stake in a communal well and windmill. That would probably only cost about $100 billion, and you can use the other $600 billion to buy everybody their house outright. Now everybody can own their house and be green and self-sufficient, and can go back to whatever they were doing before the world ended: watching TV.

Read the complete version of what Andrei Codrescu says from there. NPR listeners will be familiar with his unique voice. New Pine Lake neighbor Maia Rahman sent the Codrescu musings. A school teacher herself, Maia has two beautiful and very intelligent daughters, ages 5 and 4, who have immediately become favorite friends of my grandson Chance when he visits. Maia’s husband Mohammed has opened the LUNA NUEVA, Authentic Mexican Bar & Restaurant, 150-B Euclid Ave., in Little Five Points.

Wayne Gibson of Brookhaven e-mailed the following:

PBS has an online poll posted asking if Sarah Palin is qualified. Please do two things -- takes 20 seconds.
1) Click on: http://www.pbs.org/now/polls/poll-435.html and vote yourself.
2) Then send this to every single Obama-Biden voter you know, and urge them to vote and pass it on. The last thing we need is PBS saying their viewers think Sarah Palin is qualified.

Tina Simms, "Community organizer and proud of it," writes from Perry:

Since no one from Gallup or Rasmussen has called to ask my opinion, I thought I would just volunteer it. There has been a lot of talk lately about the possibility of a "Bradley effect" in the coming presidential election...i.e., white people telling pollsters that they are going to vote for Obama and then stealthily voting Republican when they get in the booth. As a Georgian who has been a Democrat since I was 18 (and white for 71 years). I don't think this will happen in Georgia or other Southern states. Instead, I think more Georgians than expected will vote for Obama-Biden in the privacy of the voting booth. We will see people whose neighbors think they are Republicans going to the polls and stealthily voting for Obama-Biden. :-)
For the past week I have been volunteering at the Democratic booth at the Georgia National Fair. It has been quite an interesting and informative experience. Over and over I heard statements like these from white voters who stopped by our booth :
"I'm for Obama but I can't wear an Obama pin to work because my co-workers would be mean to me."
"I don't have an Obama yard sign because somebody will pull it up."
"I put up an Obama yard sign and my neighbor ran over it with his pickup truck."
"We've voting for Obama but we're not telling the people at our church."
Our Democratic booth seemed to take on a quasi-confessional aspect.
People would come up to our table and say "I'm glad you're here" or, quietly, "Obama's the best candidate...I've already voted for him." Many were older couples or young men and women.
It is a shame that some Georgians feel they will be ostracized for voting Democratic. On the other hand, it surely is good to know that so many have decided to vote for Obama. :-)
Yes we can!
Georgia may be a big "November surprise"!

Sometimes I also receive e-mails from the other end of the gene pool, occasionally premised in hate and bigotry. For those, John McCain does not need to do e-mail. He has his campaign rallies.

Art Up Front

Images Copyright 2008 by David Battle

The Springfield (Ohio) Museum of Art presents David Battle’s original drawings and paintings created specifically for covers of the Antioch Review. "Art Up Front… and What’s Behind It” shows the evolution of the artist’s creative process, from rough sketches to finished magazine covers. The exhibit continues through Nov. 15.

According to Robert Fogarty, Antioch Review Editor, the cover art is as much a part of the creative heritage of the Antioch Review as the notable literary works they have published over their 67 year history. “We wanted to call attention to the magnificent work David had done on behalf of the Antioch Review over the past several decades. This is our way of honoring him and his wonderful contribution,” says Fogarty. Mr. Battle has been Design Editor for the Antioch Review since 1978. He also designed the Peace Corp poster and commemorative stamp. A graduate of the Central London School of Art, he has won five Graphis Annual awards, received three Ohio Arts Council project grants, and has seen his work exhibited in England, Ireland and Israel. He has won thirty art director awards and was a winner in an international ICOGRDA competition.

Fogarty and Battle will team up to provide a Guided Gallery Tour of the exhibition October 23 at 6:00 p.m. The event is open to the public and free of charge. Visitors can view the David Battle exhibit free at The Springfield Museum of Art, located at 107 Cliff Park Road, Springfield, OH, one block north of West North Street (state route 40), between North Fountain Blvd and Plum Street. It is easily accessible from Interstate 70 and routes 68 and 72. Springfield is convenient to Dayton and Columbus. Museum hours are Tuesday-Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. The museum is open until 9 p.m. on Thursdays and closed on Mondays. Call 937-325-4673 for more information.

The Antioch Review, founded in 1941, is one of the oldest, continuously publishing literary magazines in America. Ranked among the elite literary journals, it publishes fiction, essays, and poetry from both emerging as well as established authors. Mr. Fogarty, editor since 1977, hopes to see the David Battle exhibition travel. Inquiries can be directed to the Antioch Review at P.O. Box 148, Yellow Springs, OH, 45387, (937) 769-1365. www.review.antioch.edu.

Don't Bet On It

I helped close and lock up the Kroger store at Peachtree and 8th. Streets in Atlanta on Saturday night of the Fourth of July weekend the year John F. Kennedy was running for President of the United States. I got the job as a grocery sacker when my buddy Luther was promoted to produce clerk. I had all the right qualifications. First in line with my application because of insider knowledge that the job was even coming vacant, I was 16 years old and willing to work for 52-cents an hour, almost half the legal minimum wage. Many shoppers tipped “sack boys” just for loading the groceries into the car. When elderly ladies walked to the store, you carried their groceries all the way home for them, and they snapped open coin purses to dig around for a dime. I worked part-time, five hours on Friday till closing, then all day Saturday. My paycheck each week averaged just over $5, after taxes. I usually matched or doubled that amount in tips. The checkout Queen Bees cashed my paychecks and exchanged my nickels, dimes, quarters, and occasional half-dollar for folding money. Because of the busy holiday shopping crowd, I had more than $25 in my pocket that July Fourth, the most money I had ever earned or even seen at one time.

Four of us from the grocery store, headed over to Luther’s. He lived on Juniper, less than a block away. His mother was out of town for the weekend. I had told my mother I was spending the night at Luther’s, neglecting some of the details. Joining us was A. J., the senior sack boy, and the other produce clerk, Mark, age 19. None of us was old enough to get our hands on beer, but Luther said his mother would never miss a few shots from her liquor closet. We brought sodas and chips from the store, as well as two brand new decks of cards. I had played penny-ante card games after school since I was 12, draw poker, deuces and one-eyed- jacks wild, seven card stud, blackjack, dealer’s choice. I liked blackjack when it was my turn to deal. I could count to 21 and had developed a belief in luck smiling at me more often than not. Luther, A.J., Mark, and I played cards till dawn. I lost $25 and change. The next week Mark showed up at work wearing a new pair of Thom Mccanns. Shiny as dancing shoes. Probably cost $75.

I swore off gambling, the way some people swear off alcohol or other things that will get them in trouble. Never again. I’ve never been to the casinos of Las Vegas, Atlantic City, the Gulf Coast, Mississippi River, or Native American Reservations. I have never bought a lottery ticket, no matter how big the jackpot. Two different companies I have worked for awarded me stock bonuses, and I sold the stock immediately. I also cashed out my 401K’s the day I turned 59-and-one-half and could do so without tax penalty. I am not offering any financial advice. I am just telling what I did. Most people won’t tell you, even if you ask. Maybe they’ll say something they read somewhere or some salesman said. Someone at the workout center recently volunteered, “I came into this world with nothing, and I’ve still got some of it.” The stock market dropped like a rock down a hollow hole the day Congress voted against the current $700-billion bailout for Wall Street or Main Street in search of the sunny side of the street. Then Congress voted for the bailout. Stocks dropped some more. I have considered it a sure thing that I would never agree with Alabama Republican Senator Richard Shelby and two-thirds of the members of the House GOP caucus. Good money after bad. Don’t bet on it.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Heartbeat

John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas enjoyed a successful Congressional career, rising to the powerful position of Speaker of the House. Then he served twice as Vice President for FDR. Garner said the Vice Presidency was “not worth a warm bucket of spit.” Reporters may have cleaned up the spelling for newspaper decorum of the day.

Vice-Presidential candidates do not usually swing elections. They should. They are a heartbeat away from being President.

In my lifetime:

FDR died in office. Truman became President. Dwight Eisenhower’s Vice President Richard Nixon ran for President three times, won twice. JFK was assassinated. LBJ was sworn in as President on Air Force One. Nixon resigned, under impeachment threat. Gerald Ford assumed office. In addition, Ronald Reagan’s Vice President George H.W. Bush was elected President. Bill Clinton’s Vice President Al Gore was an important member of the Clinton team and lost his bid for the Presidency by the narrowest and most questionable of margins. George W. Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney may have been the most powerful Vice President in history and certainly one of the most controversial.

The televised Vice Presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin has made Republicans happy, because Gov. Palin exceeded expectations after the merciless exposure of interviews by Katie Couric, that infamous journalistic brute. Palin raised the bar from babbling ignorance to perky wrong-headedness. Asked about how she saw the job of Vice President, Palin said the Constitution was “flexible” and allowed “whatever we have to do to administer very appropriately the plans for this nation.” Not exactly. The U.S. Constitution actually says the office of Vice President shall exist. Otherwise the Vice President is a bench warmer, presiding officer of the Senate but unable to vote except in a tie and standing by in case the President dies.

Palin also declared her support for building an American Embassy in Jerusalem, a world-class diplomatic nightmare second only to stationing U.S. troops in Mecca. She offered a peculiarly ambiguous statement in favor of legal rights for gay partners to inherit property and visit in hospitals. Somebody must have coached her on an old memo from Vice President Cheney’s office. Nonetheless, conservatives will be able to look on the bright side. She accused Obama and Biden of waving “the white flag of surrender” in Iraq. She banished the ghost of Tina Fey that has haunted her recently, replacing it with the reminder of George Bush back when he was full of the confidence of the clueless. If the election were for captain of the hockey moms or which Joe buys the next six-pack, she wins. But we already know what eight years would be like having a President the guys and gals at work would want to have a beer with. Maybe we should elect somebody who knows spit.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Welcome Find

I saw the gas station lines on Friday and Saturday as I went about my business. I drove from my house in Pine Lake to visit my sister, who lives in Roswell, one of Atlanta’s always thrilling routes including both I-285 and Ga-400, then on Saturday to pick up my grandson in Marietta, another journey via I-285. So I left home Sunday before dawn to fill up. Traffic was unusually heavy for so early on a Sunday. It quickly became clear that I was not the only one cruising for gas. I visited several stations all the way to Emory, then Briarcliff Rd, North Druid Hills Rd., Lawrenceville Hwy. Plastic bags and yellow tape covered the handles at the pumps.

On my way home, I stopped at the Kroger where we often shop. By then, the time was after 7 a.m.. Four lanes of vehicles lined up for the 10 Kroger pumps at North Decatur Rd. and DeKalb Industrial Way. I got in line behind a dozen others. Red-shirted Kroger employees tirelessly directed traffic to the next available pump. I waited about half a hour for my turn. The lines extended out of the shopping center onto the main roads by this time. I usually make great effort to try to avoid lines. This was the second extraordinary one I had joined this week, the other being at the DeKalb County Registrar’s Office for early voting. Both lines were handled efficiently and helpfully, and I left both feeling victorious. I believe the high turn-out of voters in DeKalb County will overwhelmingly support Barack Obama. As a Kroger-Plus Card Customer, I paid less than $4 per gallon for my gas, $3.969, to be exact.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports the current gas shortages are due to the back-to-back hurricanes in the petroleum rich Gulf Coast states of Louisiana and Texas. You would think hurricane season did not come every year, regular as Columbus Day and Halloween. Power outages have shut down the refineries. Maybe they should spring for some emergency generators, like telephone companies do. I understand the hurricanes missed New Jersey. The last time I was on the Interstates between Atlanta and the Jersey Turnpike, the tanker trucks seemed to know the way just fine. No estimate is available at this time for the end of the current situation, but production should resume faster than after Katrina and Rita because the refineries weren’t damaged as badly, according to the AJC. Only four of 56 refineries were still closed on Friday.

One petroleum executive suggested cancelling the football game between the University of Georgia and University of Alabama for fear that footbal fans would leave all the gas pumps in the Athens area on empty. "That gas needs to be used for people to go to work, and for people to take care of their families," Tex Pitfield, president and CEO of Saraguay Petroleum in Atlanta, told WGAU radio in Athens. Listen, Mr. Oil-Tycoon, just because you can’t run your own business doesn’t mean we’re going to let you mess with SEC Football. Some things are more important than the economy. Even the office of Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue said cancelling the football game was "a ridiculous idea.” The Georgia Bulldogs closed an Alabama Crimson Tide first-half lead of 31 points, but it was too little, too late, and the final score was 41-30 in this gridiron rivalry that often determines the SEC as well as National Championship. Gas stations between Athens and Tuscaloosa did a booming business in beer, soda pop, chips, peanuts, and moon pies. Those that had gas to sell were welcome finds also.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

There They Go Again

I tried to watch the debate between Obama and McCain as if I had not already taken advantage of early voting. Would I be swayed if I were still an undecided voter? Not much. Despite the scheduled focus on foreign policy, the economy was the genuine elephant in the room. McCain and Obama equally evaded the question from moderator Jim Lehrer of PBS, “What will you be forced to eliminate from your plans for the country as a result of the financial crisis?” Otherwise, there was a lot of chanting my dog’s bigger than your dog. Pat Buchannan, veteran of Republican politics, says McCain won the debate on points, round by round, but Obama probably took the decision, because voters could imagine him as President. Indeed, the Obama campaign strategy to show him as calm and steady contrasted favorably with McCain’s irascible demeanor.

The next scheduled debate is between the Vice Presidential candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin Oct. 2 at Washington University in St. Louis, moderated by Gwen Ifill of PBS. The remaining Presidential Debates are scheduled for Oct. 7 in Nashville and Oct. 15 at Hofstra University, moderated respectively by senior television newsmen Tom Brokaw of NBC and Bob Shieffer of CBS. ABC representation is notably absent, perhaps in response to the widely criticized Democratic primary debate co-hosted by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos.

The first and most famous Presidential Debates took place in 1858, two years before the Presidential election. Upstart Illinois legislator Abraham Lincoln ran for the U.S. Senate seat against incumbent Stephen A Douglas, who advocated that each state should decide for itself if it wanted slavery to be legal. Lincoln believed that the country could not endure “half slave and half free.” Lincoln lost the Senate election, but this was not the end of the discussion. Lincoln and Douglas were the opposing candidates for President of the United States in 1860. You can look up the rest. How it turned out is a long and interesting story, hard to forget.

A hundred years later, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon agreed to debate. Radio and television carried their 1960 debates live, and people who heard the debates on the radio generally said Nixon won. The television audience saw something different. Kennedy was handsome and poised. Nixon sweated, and his eyes shifted one way and then another. Kennedy cornered Nixon into taking the trigger-happy position that the United States should go to war to defend two tiny, unfamiliar islands, Quimoi and Matsu, off the coast of China. Nixon licked his wounds for eight years before he was elected President but never debated again.

The nonpartisan civic organization the League of Women Voters sponsored the Presidential Debates in the 1970’s and 1980’s, but withdrew in 1988 “because the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter. It has become clear to us that the candidates' organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.” The Commission on Presidential Debates was formed at that time, composed of representatives of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Blank Check

Is there a pattern here? Government by historic disaster: 9/11, Wall Street collapse, Mortgage meltdown, Oil Crisis. No plans. Nobody sees anything coming. Then when the front wheels leave the ground, somebody shouts, “We’re going off the cliff.” No time to think or ask questions. The end of the world is at hand. Send the troops to war. Socialize the economy. Before the election. Conclusion 1: George Bush is the worse President ever. Conclusion 2: Republicans are wrong; the United States does need a government. Conclusion 3: Somebody stole the money. Take your pick.

So the Bush administration is asking Congress to write a check to cover Wall Street’s bad debts. Estimates reach $70-Billion, or even a trillion. I can’t even count that high. How many zeros in a trillion? At first blush, the bail-out will cost each and every American family $2,000 to $5,000. Then, who is next on the list of big businesses run aground and asking for help from the taxpayer? Some say auto makers. Another $25-Billion or so for this sad collection of suits who cannot keep their eyes on the road. The cost for refusing to do it? Auto workers without jobs, maybe 250,000 of them. Look, this is not creeping socialism. This is socialism with the pedal to the metal. Who do we think we are, China?

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, suggests, “The public doesn't like a blank check. They think this whole bailout idea is nuts. They see fat cats on Wall Street who have raked in zillions for years, now extorting in effect $2,000 to $5,000 from every American family to make up for their own nonfeasance, malfeasance, greed, and just plain stupidity. Wall Street's request for a blank check comes at the same time most of the public is worried about their jobs and declining wages, and having enough money to pay for gas and food and health insurance, meet their car payments and mortgage payments, and save for their retirement and children’s college education. And so the public is asking: Why should Wall Street get bailed out by me when I'm getting screwed?”

Here is Reich’s five point plan to guide Congress through these uncharted waters:

Any taxpayer bailout must give the government a proportionate equity so that after the economic recovery, taxpayers, the new stockholders, receive profits, dividends, and bonuses.

CEOs, executives, and fat cats who got us into this mess should relinquish their stock options and salaries, and future salaries should be linked to profitability.

Prohibit campaign contributions from Wall Street executives and PACs. Taxpayer dollars used to get our nation out of a crisis cannot be used to prop up lobby operations.

Regulation, regulation, regulation. Wall Street can not expect to take taxpayer dollars without increased transparency and more oversight, the absence of which caused the current mess.

Bankruptcy judges get broader leeway to help homeowners. Why should working families lose our homes so CEOs can keep theirs, even if they do not know how many they’ve got.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Alpo On Sale

For the last 15 years of his life, my Daddy lived in a brick ranch house, 1,700 square feet, not including the full basement, in Cornelia, Ga. Outside was parked a two-year old Chevrolet Suburban with three rows of seats and a motor boat big enough to take out deep-sea fishing. House, car, and boat all paid for. Overhead in the basement was the most elaborate HVAC duct work I have ever seen to this day. All the insulation, every strip of shiny duct tape, diverters and controls, all personally and painstakingly installed by my Daddy, whose training as an air conditioning tradesman was obtained under the WWII GI Bill. One-third of the floor space in my Daddy’s basement was devoted to work benches and storage of his large collection of tools. The rest of the basement consisted of shelves full of canned food, both commercially produced and home-made in Mason jars. String beans, lima beans, and navy beans. Black-eyed peas and crowder peas. New potatoes. Yams. Hominy. Corn. Bread and butter pickles. Watermelon rind pickles. Chow-chow. Corned beef. Spam. What was he expecting? Nuclear attack? No, he had lived through The Great Depression, and these were the scars to prove it.

My Daddy was not quite 20 years old when Herbert Hoover announced “The fundamentals of our economy are sound,” despite the stock market crash, banks closing, people losing their homes, no jobs, no money. Franklin D. Roosevelt came along and saved everybody’s bacon, including the Republicans, with government regulation, work programs, and social welfare. Maybe it will see us through things yet. All my life I’ve thought it could not happen again. How could anyone gamble borrowed money on the stock market? Who could let all the money just disappear? Margins. Derivatives. Hocuspocus. Now you think you see it. Now you wonder what happened.

Now the U.S. government, the insurer of last resort, is taking over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Of course this will not impact the federal budget, because it will just not be reported on the books. Like privatizing the war in Iraq by hiring private security forces. Hessians. Keep it off the books and keep it quiet. Government by administrative fiat and secrecy. While we are at it, we will lend $85-Billion to giant insurance company AIG to keep it from going broke. Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi describes this new economy, “All the profits are privatized and all the losses are nationalized.” You would think George Bush and the Republicans would be too ashamed to show their faces in public. John McCain’s chief economic spokesperson, who was fired from her last corporate job, says none of the current candidates for President or Vice President would be qualified to run a major corporation. I guess any jackass can run one into the ground. It takes special qualifications to run the entire country into the ground.

The only good thing about the Wall Street meltdown is maybe now the silly talk about privatizing Social Security will be too self-evidently preposterous and embarrassing even for Republicans to try to sell. Maybe seniors who support John McCain will get real. If Social Security had been in the hands of Wall Street, the September surprise would have been the lines of seniors at the grocery stores stocking up on Alpo.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Noel Petrin, 10/29/32 - 9/14/05

Thirty years ago, I worked for the U.S. Department of State and served in assignments at the American Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels, Belgium, and at the State Department in Washington, D.C. My job was in telecommunications operations, not diplomacy. Among other things, I was a teletype operator until that equipment was replaced by computers. I operated, installed and repaired telephone equipment, radios and other communications equipment. I am still a big fan of spy novels, and when they mention “code clerks,” I actually know what one does, because I was one. This is the same kind of work Julia Childs did at the American Embassy in Paris, while she spent her off-duty hours learning about French cooking.

In Cairo, I had a friend and co-worker named Noel Petrin. Noel had already retired from a successful career as a senior Non-Commissioned Officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. Noel was nothing like the cartoon image of a big, tough Marine Sgt. He was soft-spoken and intelligent. He and his family were also neighbors of my family, and we cooked dinners for one another and shared more than a few beers and cups of coffee. American Embassy workers are a close-knit group, strangers in strange lands together. When I was scheduled to leave Cairo, the Deputy Chief of Mission had a farewell party at which I and a couple of others were guests of honor. He asked if there was anybody special he should be sure to invite. I gave him the names of Noel Petrin and his wife Ardith.

Noel stayed in the Foreign Service long enough to retire again, after serving also in Tokyo, Geneva, and even back to Egypt, in the coastal city of Alexandria. Over the years, I lost touch with all my contacts in the State Department, not counting the ones who occasionally turn up in news reports about international affairs and security. But this year, Noel’s daughter, Sarah, in a stunning bit of internet detective work, located me via my blog and asked if I had known her family in Cairo 30 years ago. She has become a loyal reader and sometimes leaves comments signed “Sarah in Switzerland.” Here is the e-mail I received from her today:

Today is the 3 year anniversary of my Dad’s passing.
As you were so kind to pray for his soul when he passed, I ask if you would say a prayer for his soul today.
He is deeply loved and still so very much missed.
Thank you for thinking of him.
With love,
Sarah.

I am the dust in the sunlight, I am the ball of the sun . . .
I am the mist of morning, the breath of evening . . . .
I am the spark in the stone, the gleam of gold in the metal . . . .
The rose, and the nightingale drunk with its fragrance.
I am the chain of being, the circle of the spheres,
The scale of creation,
the rise and the fall.
I am what is and is not . . .
I am the soul in all.
- Rumi

Drill, Drill, Drill

Democrats just don’t seem to be able to learn. They keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Unlike the Republicans, who keep doing the same thing and wanting the same result.

David Plouffe, Obama for America Campaign Manager, has sent an e-mail entitled “Lies to Nowhere:”

The McCain campaign has finally admitted that this election is about change.

Their new ad uses what news organizations are calling "naked lies" to reinvent two politicians whose records embody the same culture of corruption and far-right policies we've seen from the Bush administration.

The biggest whopper in the ad (that's still being repeated day after day by McCain and Palin on the campaign trail) is that Governor Palin stopped the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" -- in fact, she supported it, and even hired a lobbyist in Washington to get more pork-barrel projects like it.

If the McCain-Palin campaign wants to have a debate about who is prepared to bring the change we need, we're more than ready.

Democrats think if they tell the truth, mostly, and offer some ideas that make a shred of sense, they will win the election. Republicans know better. Drill, drill, drill. If Obama talks about pigs wearing lipstick, he needs to make it clear he is referring to somebody McCain dated while still married to wife number one, preferably while on R&R from the Hanoi Hilton. If you can’t lie to save the future of your country, maybe you deserve to lose an election. The Georgia Federation of Democratic Women says, “A woman voting for McCain-Palin would be like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.” Now there’s the spirit.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama, who wants to be the next president, and Bill Clinton, who is sorry he is the ex-President, do lunch. I can imagine the conversation.

“How are the bruises?” asks Clinton.

“They’ll heal.”

“I told you politics was a contact sport.”

“Sarah Palin caught us by surprise. “

“You should have picked Hillary.”

“We expect the new will wear off.”

“I’ll give you the same advice I gave Hillary. Hire my team. Carville and company,” says Clinton.

Obama responds, “I’ve already got a loyal team in place, and I don’t think they really need any help.”

Clinton gets that look that says he is about to tell you an inconvenient truth, “That’s the same thing Hillary said.”

St. Paul Appeasement

Maverick McCain wanted Joe Lieberman for his Vice President. Military McCain, not the first in his family to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy, trusted that he would always have his back covered by his Independent buddy from Connecticut. Senior Republican fundraiser Charlie Black, hack-in-chief, said, no, and Karl Rove, GOP Wizard of Oz, said, hell no. Machiavellian McCain appeased his right-wing and announced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate, and the Republican convention in St. Paul loved it. McCain and Palin together on the podium gave the photographers few opportunities for the classic poses. No joined hands raised in victory and promise, no arms draped over one another’s shoulders like teammates. In fact McCain looked awkward as a school boy, avoiding standing next to her, even guiding his wife Cindy between them.

In his acceptance speech, John McCain, decorated POW survivor, vowed to put his country first, not his party. His Presidency would reach out to Independents, even Democrats. I must have blinked. I missed the wild demonstration of enthusiasm by The Republican Convention for this proposal of post-partisanship. Sen. McCain included the nomination of the first African-American for President among things that made him proud to be an American. I must have blinked again. McCain believes he is a bi-partisan maverick with nothing but the patriotic interests of his beloved country at heart. McCain is the nominee, but it remains to be seen if he can lead the Republican party in his direction. Mike Murphy, manager of McCain’s 2000 campaign against George Bush, was caught on an open mike, the landmine of taped television broadcasting, expressing his unguarded opinion of the choice of Gov. Palin as the Vice Presidential nominee. “This is cynical,” said Murphy. That’s the problem. Even if McCain really wanted to bring the country together, he is the servant of those who do not.

McCain told the convention about his POW experiences in modest terms, with a touch of confession that heroism is not without its failures and weaknesses. No doubt POW McCain suffered at the hands of his Vietnamese captors. When Bob Dole, a WWII hero, ran for President against Bill Clinton, a veteran of college deferments from the Vietnam War, the voters were not swayed by Sen. Dole’s service and sacrifice. Of several U.S. Presidents who served in WWII, the one whose wartime experience may have been a serious qualification was Dwight Eisenhower, General of the heroes in the field.

Honorable as McCain’s service to his country has been, suffer as he did, a grateful nation will not likely elect him President as its way of saying thanks. He will need an idea or two for cleaning up some of the messes left by George Bush. Even if the polls show voters are ready for change, McCain can not just christen himself the candidate for change, while clinging to the failed policies of the Bush economy and Bush war. He will need the cynical Wizards of Oz to produce incriminating photos of Barack Obama or at least a swiftboat full of eye-witnesses willing to swear on everything that is sacred.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

GOP VP

In Barack Obama’s first Presidential decision, to pick Sen. Joe Biden for his Vice President, he “hit one out of the park,” according to Bill Clinton, who has been there and done that. So what is Republican nominee McCain’s choice? A bunt? A pop-up behind home plate?

Is Alaska Governor Sarah Palin a play for the Hillary Clinton vote? Even before the more controversial aspects of Gov. Palin’s nomination surfaced, the joke sprinted out of the block that at the Vice Presidential debates, Joe Biden would say, “I have served with Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine. Madam, you’re no Hillary Clinton.”

Palin is a former athlete, a moose-hunter and card carrying member of the NRA, and a pro-lifer who has put her motherhood where her mouth is. She is a beauty contest also ran, having been voted “Miss Congeniality.” She has five children, about whom headlines have already been written. Barack Obama felt the need to call a press conference and reiterate his position that “Families are Off-Limits.”

McCain’s tail will always be wagged by the right wing, that astonishing segment that not only disbelieves in Darwin, sex education, and birth control but also thinks the earth revolves around the U.S.A. McCain himself is stuck in the 1950’s politically, intellectually, and, it now comes clear, in the women he gravitates to, his wife Cindy, and his choice of Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate. Maybe it’s just me, but the Governor of Alaska reminds me of another right wing icon of times gone by, Anita Bryant, who also gained fame as a beauty contestant, Florida orange juice spokesmodel, and gay basher.

Palin has been Governor of Alaska, a position she won with less than 100,000 votes, for a year and a half. Before that, she was an elected official of a small town somewhere off the snow-packed path of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race. Such a thin resume for someone who might be a heart-beat away from the Presidency of a 72-year old with a history of cancer suggests McCain is devaluing the currency of experience. Give me a minute while I scratch my head. Do his pollsters and other crystal ball gazers tell him to go with the Barack Obama generation and message? Maybe McCain is turning the page back to the time when the Vice Presidency was “not worth a warm bucket of spit.”

McCain’s could have picked former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney, to help nail down western states, as well as Michigan, where his father was Governor, Joe Leiberman, McCain’s caregiver, New York 9/11 Mayor Rudy Guilliani, or Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas who did well among Southerners in the primaries. What McCain can not resist is an impulse to shoot from the hip. And denial that any Vice President of his might actually face short odds of becoming President before McCain’s 76th birthday.

As Steve Bell, the brilliant cartoonist of The Guardian, correctly reports in his Republican Convention Sketchbook, “These hicks are not to be underestimated.”

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Volt Waggin

On this Labor Day, let us pause to eulogize the 1,500 jobs at the General Motors Assembly Plant in Doraville, Georgia, jobs at American-dream wages that once paid 30-year mortgages without gimmicks or foreclosures, sent kids to college, and, yes, deluded UAW members into mistaking themselves for Republicans. Since 1947, your fathers’ Buicks, Oldsmobiles, and Pontiacs rolled off the assembly line in Doraville. For much of that time, General Motors made more than half the cars on the road in the United States. Then things changed. Look around today. In your driveway. Cars made in Japan, Korea, Germany, Sweeden.

The Doraville GM Assembly Plant will close down this month, and the 165 acre site it occupies will become prime real estate for For Sale. It is within easy walking distance of an existing station of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority north-south line. During any morning or evening rush-hour you can safely direct your gaze on the location as you sit hopelessly in gridlocked traffic on I-285, near Spaghetti Junction. GM is in the market for a real estate venturer with deep pockets and experience redeveloping “brownfields,” a charming invention to describe abandoned industrial carcasses likely containing pollution hazards. Potential developers see the site as another Atlantic Station, mixed-use urban commercial, residential, shopping, and entertainment. Lame duck DeKalb County CEO Vernon Jones expects the redevelopment to create several thousand more jobs than the 1,500 lost. Get a clue, Mr. Jones. Service jobs. No unions.

Corporate clowns at GM clung to their BOPs and SUVs till gas prices skyrocketed out the sun-roof and profits fell through the floorboard. The suits in Detroit never saw the train coming and are still in denial. Now GM plans to make the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in electric hybrid, due to be in the showroom of your nearest Chevrolet dealership on a timetable by the end of 2010 or at the latest George Bush’s time horizon for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq six months later. However, the Chevy Volt will be made at the Detroit plant, not in Doraville. GM does not want to call the new Volt a hybrid, preferring instead extended-range electric vehicle. The Volt will run on batteries for up to 40 miles, the distance of 75 percent of U.S. daily commutes, which average about 33 miles. On the open highway, the potential range increases to 360 miles by using a small internal combustion engine to run a generator to resupply the batteries. Overnight recharge using a standard 120-volt, 15-amp household outlet will take a 10 hour plug-in at home. A half charge can be accomplished in 50 minutes.

The four-door sedan is expected to get 150 miles per gallon if the battery is fully charged every 60 miles. It will be capable of speeds up to 120 miles per hour. According to GM, the sticker price of the Volt will be in "the mid to high 30's," although some other estimates say more like $48,000. Maybe you better plan to get two of those new jobs at the mixed-use development that will replace the Doraville assembly plant. Nissan , Toyota, and Mitsubishi also have announced their own electric cars. If they can’t undercut GM’s price, the Chinese or somebody will.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Democratic Families in Denver

When the Democratic Convention in Denver began, I surfed between MSNBC and CNN, but by Tuesday I had to switch to C-SPAN, to get away from the knee-jerk superficiality of the commentators, Republicans presented as somebody’s idea of two-sides to every story, and last but not least the hired character assassins. Then Thursday afternoon, only hours before Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, my satellite system stopped working, as it does every time it rains, except Thursday was the first sunny day in two weeks. DirecTV is going to send somebody out to fix their equipment next Monday, if I agree to pay them $79 for the repair. So I watched Barack Obama’s acceptance speech on my computer.

Everybody knew this was going to be historic, the first time ever a major U.S. political party has nominated for President a person born in Hawaii. All things considered, I thought the high points of the convention were the political families, the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Bidens, and the Obamas.

Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, despite serious illness, heroically appeared at the convention to give the Obama nomination the stamp of approval from the Democratic party’s long-time most admired family. Television cameras on Kennedy nieces Caroline and Maria spotted them among those for whom there was not a dry eye in the house, aware that this might well be Ted Kennedy’s last hurrah, at the very least the twilight of a long political career, such as was taken from his brothers and us.

Hillary Clinton told the convention, “I'm here tonight as a proud mother, as a proud Democrat...as a proud senator from New York...a proud American...and a proud supporter of Barack Obama.” She did not want “to see another Republican in the White House squander our promise of a country that really fulfills the hopes of our people…no way, no how, no McCain. Barack Obama is my candidate, and he must be our President.” Sen. Clinton’s name was placed in nomination along with Sen. Obama’s, but when the roll call of the states came to New York, she personally rose to ask the convention to declare Obama the nominee by unanimous consent.

Former President Bill Clinton demonstrated his unmatched political skills and ability to connect. ”Last night, Hillary told us in no uncertain terms that she is going to do everything she can to elect Barack Obama. That makes two of us. Actually, that makes 18 million of us. Because, like Hillary, I want all of you who supported her to vote for Barack Obama in November. And here’s why,“ he explained. “I have the privilege of speaking here, thanks to you, from a perspective that no other American Democrat, except President Carter, can offer. Everything I learned in my eight years as President, and in the work I have done since in America and across the globe, has convinced me that Barack Obama is the man for this job. And in his first Presidential decision, the selection of a running mate, he hit it out of the park. Barack Obama is ready to lead America and to restore American leadership in the world. Barack Obama is ready to honor the oath, to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Barack Obama is ready to be President of the United States. My fellow Democrats, 16 years ago, you gave me the profound honor to lead our party to victory and to lead our nation to a new era of peace and broadly shared prosperity. Together, we prevailed in a hard campaign in which Republicans said I was too young and too inexperienced to be commander-in-chief. Sound familiar? It didn't work in 1992, because we were on the right side of history. And it will not work in 2008, because Barack Obama is on the right side of history. Barack Obama will lead us away from the division and fear of the last eight years back to unity and hope. So if, like me, you believe America must always be a place called Hope, then join Hillary and Chelsea and me in making Barack Obama the next President of the United States.”

Then there was the excitement and pride of the families of Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Joseph Biden, III, Attorney General of the State of Delaware, introduced his father, the Vice Presidential nominee. Sen. Biden kissed his son Beau, who is a Captain in the Army National Guard, scheduled for deployment to Iraq this year. Beau told of his mother’s death in a car crash, his father’s dedication as a single dad, and then how they all “married our new mom.”

Nonetheless, Barack Obama’s beautiful and brilliant wife Michelle, and their two unselfconsciously impish daughters always steal the show.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Witness

I graduated from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, which will not open for business next month after 156 years. Don't get me started. One summer in the self-centered sixties, students and faculty at Antioch, boys, girls, poets, playwrights, and physicists got together and built an amphitheater on campus with bags of cement, construction blocks, wheelbarrows, and shovels. Maybe you saw the movie Witness and remember the Barn Raising and thought just for a moment there might be something special about being Amish. Or maybe you live in Pine Lake, Georgia. Last Saturday, in an outpouring of communitas, private citizens of Pine Lake built a new playground for its children, with equipment provided by Kaboom, the culmination of a lengthy organizational and fund raising effort. Handy Ann and Andy assembled and shoveled and hauled. Cooks provided good eats. At the end of the day, participants resembled the shift-change at the coal mine. Look at some of these great pictures, and read some of these experiences and observations:

It took the mind a few beats to take it all in: the masses of intensely motivated people hard at their tasks, the piles and stacks of materials, the seemingly unending number of separate projects and respective teams all working apace toward the mutually hoped for outcome. The sign-in table was located, t-shirt and bandana procured and soon the mind became focused and a workng part of one of the production teams, hard at work on assembling apparatus. Memories of Santa nights past (place tab A into tab B, etc) accompanied the translation of assembly instructions. Work. Good work done together with neighbors and friends. The day wore on as did the old muscles. Most of all, at the ending ceremony, there was a palpable sense of the joy in community. Our community. Place. Who we are. It was a beautiful moment which further defined the lives we live together.--Jonny Hibbert

I sit here in awe, just awe, of all that was accomplished today. I am simply amazed. I know that there were months of planning and fundraising and then a very hectic month of finalizing and revising plans, but the effort today just astounded me. This was not a small, core group, this was a huge part of the village out on the beach for an amazing playground-raising. My kids are in your debt. The future kids of Pine Lake are in your debt. What a truly amazing gift you have given us!

I cannot adequately express my gratitude to all the volunteers. Please, stop me and tell me your playground story. What you learned, who you met, what you think.--Gwyneth

In an enterprise culminating in a 200+ volunteer one-day-only Build,
it's impossible to name all the "unsung heroes," if such a
melodramatic phrase is even apt. Regardless, there is one resident
that I'd like to name: Jonny Coe. In my mind, he represents what
happens when adults figure out how to play well with others.
Eighteen people helped Jonny make the new site happen, not including
the grading professionals he hired to match the necessary specs, not
including the day and a half he took of from work to oversee the site....
In the end, Pine Lake has a playground that is scenic and
partly shaded and an uninterrupted stretch of beach. In no way
do I intend to minimize the efforts of Beth, Kris, Allison,
Miranda, and JJ for conceiving and executing this amazing result. I
thank them and I thank all the core volunteers that spent months
making this happen. I know they will continue to be thanked.--Melanie

Photos for Pine Lake Witness provided by Gwyneth.

Photos by Gwyneth

Photos by Jonny Hibbert

Photos by Kevin Liske

Photos by Lawrence Andrade

Video by Rob Butera

Witness by adding your comments.

Running for Running Things II

What do I think of Barack Obama's choice for Vice President? This question has been asked by a quorum of loyal readers. Easy answer. I wrote about Joe Biden a year ago in the second posting to this blog, the first after introducing myself and explaining how I came to take up blogging.

RUNNING FOR RUNNING THINGS

Sen. Joeseph Biden, Democrat from Delaware, wants to be President. He has
wanted to be President before. Like political consultant James Carville,
Democrat from the Bayou, says, “Running for President is like having sex.
Doing it once is just not enough.”

Sen. Biden may be the most qualified candidate in either party. Nonetheless.
What’s that got to do with it? To paraphrase Tina Turner, Godess of Soul,
from a place in the South called Nutbush, and who now shops in the South of
France for her croissants and fromages.

The biggest problem with Joe Biden is that he sometimes tells the truth.
Well, actually, this big problem has to get in line behind his number one
problem Hillary Clinton, Democrat, who owns a house in New York, and both of
their biggest problem Barak Obama, Democrat from Illinois, who was raised in
Hawaii and other parts of the Pacific Ocean. Turn the page.

If Sen. Biden cannot be the next President, maybe he should be the next
Secretary of State. Maybe that is even what he wants. He believes Iraq
should be divided into separate countries, one for the Shiites, one for the
Sunni, and one for the Kurds. He is a pragmatist, perhaps even a realist. If
he had been President on 9/12, Joe Biden says he would have convened all the
countries threatened by Jihadists, invited them all to Brussels to come up
with a unified plan of mutual defense. I lived in Brussels for a while,
working for the U.S. Department of State, assigned to NATO Headquarters.
Brussels is not as sexy as Paris or Amsterdam, but the restaurants are
excellent, and their specialty is moules et frites, with the world's best
beer and fresh-made chocolates. Brussels is a great place for diplomacy.

Biden’s son is Attorney General of the state of Delaware and a JAG Captain
in the National Guard, scheduled for deployment to Iraq in 2008. “I don’t
want him going,” a report on Radio Iowa quoted Sen. Biden. “But I tell you
what, I don’t want my grandson or my granddaughters going back in 15 years,
and so how we leave makes a big difference.”

Maybe we could just sneak out in the dead of night while nobody is watching.
Maybe we should have just left them alone. Before the present President Bush
took an interest, Iraq and Iran were doing a very successful job of
destroying one another without any help from us.

Posted by Paw Paw Bill at 1:57 PM
Sunday, August 19, 2007

Copyright 2007 & 2008 by William C. Cotter

Only In Your Head

Because Moses had a persuasive reputation as an interpreter of dreams, he was able to tell old Pharaoh to let his people go. Sigmund Freud made a practice of looking for the meaning of dreams and created an industry of followers. Bob Dylan said, “Them old dreams, they’re only in your head.”

I have the same recurring dream, which I call my Hillbilly Heaven dream. I call it that because of an old song from Tex Ritter, singing cowboy actor in my childhood. Dolly Parton, incomparable but never unnoticed gift from the Tennessee mountains, has updated the song. It goes something like this: “I dreamed I was there in Hillbilly Heaven." With Luke the Drifter himself, old Hank Williams, and Blue Yodeling Jimmy Rogers, and Sweet Dreams Patsy Cline. You get it. Of course, Dolly’s more recent roll call includes the great Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Tammy Wynette. The tag line of the song is, “Oh, what a star spangled night.”

Actually, I had versions of the Hillbilly Heaven dream even before I ever heard the song. As a kid, I used to dream that I was kneeling in the on-deck circle, as if posing for a baseball card, glancing back in the dugout, where side by side were Mickey Mantle, Roberto Clemente, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. From time to time, I still have a variation of the dream in which I am at a table in the Tabac Tuilleries in Paris drinking vin rouge with Ernest Hemmingway and William Faulkner. Hemingway challenges everybody in the café to arm wrestle. Faulkner is going on and on, and nobody has any idea what he is saying, but I am laughing so hard I am afraid I am going to spring a leak.

Last week I dreamed that I had been hired making a dollar-a-minute as a fly on the wall in the Cabinet Room of the President Barack Obama White House.

Meeting around the table:

Vice President Joseph Biden of Delaware, former chairman each of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Chief of Staff Tom Dashelle of South Dakota, former Democratic Leader of the U.S. Senate.

Secretary of State Lee Hamilton of Indiana, former 9/11 Commission co-chairman and previously longtime chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Secretary of Defense Sam Nunn of Georgia, former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and probably the most qualified defense expert ever to be in charge of the Pentagon.

Secretary of the Treasury Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor of New York City, successful businessman, former Republican, and no stranger to money.

Secretary of Homeland Security Bill Richardson, former Governor of New Mexico, former Ambassador to the United Nations, as well as other important positions during the Clinton administration.

Energy Czar Al Gore, Nobel Prize winner for Everything Green.

“Leading our agenda today,” began President Obama, “Is the announcement of our first appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Has the nominee arrived at the White House yet?”

“There has been a delay,” explained Biden. “Her husband wandered off to see if he still knew the way to the Intern Lounge.”

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Georgia On Our Minds

Russia has invaded Georgia. Again. This has been going on since the 19th Century. The nation of Georgia, with a shoreline on the Black Sea and Russia just over the Caucasus Mountains, is an old song but not a sweet one. Regarding the recent military conflicts, Russia claims Georgia started it. French president Nicolas Sarkozy has negotiated a cease-fire. To help resolve the current crisis, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have made personal visits to Georgia to meet with President Mikhail Saakashvili. Joseph Biden, chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and minister without portfolio for Barack Obama, also has travelled to Georgia. “I’m just here to learn,” Sen. Biden told reporters. Even if the cease-fire holds and Russia withdraws from the areas of its incursion, Russia will still maintain a peace-keeping force in Ossetia, as it has for years. Many citizens of Ossetia will still consider themselves Russians.

Donald Rayfield, emeritus professor of the school of modern languages, Queen Mary University of London, proposes Georgia give up the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, in order to find its own national identity, as did the Czech Republic by going its separate way from the old Czechoslovakia. Professor Rayfield, editor of the Comprehensive Georgian-English Dictionary and author of Stalin And His Hangmen, depicts Georgia’s President different from Larry King Live and other U.S. television. Saakashvili, “behind his multilingual fluency and American lawyer's education,” is “a dangerously unstable and sometimes ruthless politician,” says Rayfield.

According to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, construction of pipelines and railroads are part of a strategy to capitalize on Georgia's strategic location between Europe and Asia and develop its role as a transit point for gas, oil and other goods. Since the dissolution of the USSR, progress on market reforms and democratization in Georgia has been complicated by the ethnic conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. “These two territories remain outside the control of the central government (of Georgia) and are ruled by de facto, unrecognized governments, supported by Russia,” the CIA says.

Georgia was the birthplace of the Soviet Union’s dominant 20th Century leader, known to the world by his nom-de-guerre, Joseph Stalin. Stalin’s homeland was not named after any king of England but rather St. George, the slayer of dragons. In 1956 Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, Hungary, to crush a revolution led by students, who fought the tanks at close enough range to set them ablaze with Molotov cocktails. The U.S. condemned Moscow’s actions, which were repeated in 1968 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, again provoking U.S. condemnation. Times have changed. The U.S. now plans to deploy Patriot missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic. Secretary of State Rice signed the deal with Poland on her way to visit Georgia. The Missile Shield is to protect NATO against attack by Iran or other potential upstart developers of nuclear capabilities. Russia, however, believes the missiles will be pointed at Russia. Georgia on the Black Sea wants to join NATO. If that happens, the next time Russia invades Georgia, the United States, the backbone of NATO, will be obligated by solemn treaty to respond militarily.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

If You Drink, Don't Drive

This is very painful to have to write. This time last year, I supported John Edwards for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He advocated all the right things. His family story was heroic, his wife intelligent, charming, and courageous. Even with everyone prepared for the worse news about Elizabeth, bad news has no mercy.

Now former Senator and Vice-Presidential nominee Edwards makes a full confession of his arrogance and stupidity, as exposed by grocery-store gossip The National Enquirer. “It is inadequate to say to the people who believed in me that I am sorry, as it is inadequate to say to the people who love me that I am sorry. In the course of several campaigns, I started to believe that I was special and became increasingly egocentric and narcissistic. If you want to beat me up, feel free. You cannot beat me up more than I have already beaten up myself. I have been stripped bare and will now work with everything I have to help my family and others who need my help.”

Elizabeth Edwards released a statement asking “that the public, who expressed concern about the harm John's conduct has done to us, think also about the real harm that the present voyeurism does and give me and my family the privacy we need at this time."

Fair enough. But what in blazes was he thinking? OK, so the organ in charge was not his brain. Maybe he was thinking about Thomas Jefferson, or FDR, or JFK. Jefferson, a charter member of The Age of Enlightenment, acted out his own special interpretation about what it meant to be a Founding Father. JFK was serenaded by Marilyn Monroe, “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” as highly charged as if she had just sprung from a cake, and the Huntley-Brinkley NBC Nightly News broadcast the scene at the time, with such snickers and snorts all around that they could barely sign-off, “Good night, Chet. Good night, David.” The day FDR died, his last girlfriend, Lucy Mercer, was at the Warm Springs, Ga., Little White House, with no pretense of secrecy, just the good old days before supermarket tabloids, 24/7 cable news, and the blogesphere.

I know politicians are only human, no better than the rest of the flesh and blood population. Politicians spend way too much time on the road, like traveling salesmen or entertainers, in and out of hotels, far from the comforts of home. Bill Clinton was impeached. He beat the rap, but two Speakers of the House subsequently perished by the sword as payback. The real loser was anybody interested in the political goals of any of the central players. Don’t blow hard about the poor, healthcare, taxes, national defense, and then let a titillation just blow it all to rubble.

Is there something in the personal constitution of politicians that seems to make it so difficult for them to keep their pants on? Years ago, I asked that question to Atlanta Journal Political Editor Charles Pou, who sat at the desk in front of me in the news room. “They are adoration addicts,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it is the roar of a crowd or just a whiff of perfume.” Politicians have poor records at just saying, no.

A good old rule: If you drink, don’t drive. The life you save may be mine. I want to propose a new rule: If you run for public office, don’t load your philandering into your political pistol and play Russian roulette. The rest of us may be standing in the line of fire.

Or else, go run for President of France.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Cowbows and Artists

The Booth Museum of Western Art, located in Cartersville, will celebrate its 5th birthday Saturday, Aug. 23, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. Maybe you are like the skeptical visitor who said, “SURELY YOU JEST? I am from the REAL AMERICAN SOUTHWEST - cowboys & Indians, cactus & diamondbacks, mesas & O'Keeffe, mountains & green chile . . . . what in heavens name would make you think I would enjoy a visit to a two-bit-beside-the-road-tin-horn-pretend western museum?” But after seeing the Booth, she took it all back, “I was totally blown away by the quality, quantity and western beauty…. You could plop this place down in Santa Fe or Albuquerque or Phoenix and you would be none the wiser.” Via I-75, exit for Main Street, Cartersville. Signs downtown point the way. I promise; this is the real deal. Beautiful bronze sculptures. Powerful paintings of Indians and horses, buffalo and buffalo soldiers, cowboys and cowgirls. My favorite is “Her Father’s Daughter,” painted by her mother.

I can not draw a recognizable stick figure, and of my many hours in classrooms, none has been to study art, art history, or art appreciation. I am like the avid sports fan who lives for the Olympics, Word Series, and Superbowl but who personally never competed on the field or in the gym. I love art museums and have been fortunate enough to have visited some of the best, in Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid, London, New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., as well as the special treasures like the Picassos in Barcelona, the Dalis in St. Petersburg, Fla., the Remingtons at the Richardson Collection on Sundance Square in Ft. Worth, Tx., and the Booth Museum of Western Art in Cartersville, Ga.

Regular hours for the Booth are Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., Thursday 10 a.m. - 8 p.m., Sunday 1 - 5 p.m., and closed Monday. Admission is FREE on the first Thursday of each month 4 - 7 p.m. and always free for children 12 and under, active duty military personnel, and museum members. Otherwise, $8 is the adult admission charge, $6 for seniors, $5 for students and groups of 15 or more. There is no bigger bang for your entertainment buck. A guided tour of the permanent collection is offered daily at 1:30 p.m.

The Store in the Museum offers books and prints. Sandwiches, salads, and deserts are available in The Café.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

No, Thank You, Please

Historic British bulldog Winston Churchill pulled his countrymen through World War II and is probably the reason why the German language is not more widely spoken in the world today. Immediately after the war, he was voted out of office. Democracy is the worse possible form of government, he noted, except for all the others.

Georgia’s runoff will be Tuesday for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate. Turnout may not reflect the importance or complexity of this election between Jim Martin and Vernon Jones. Remember, the incumbent Republican should never be forgiven for suggesting his opponent, former Sen. Max Cleland, had somehow failed to lose enough limbs in combat for his country to check the Patriot Column, Yes. Jim Martin, a former veteran state legislator and Georgia Department of Human Resources Director under two governors, a Republican and a Democrat, ran for Governor unsuccessfully. In the current primary campaign for the U.S. Senate, Martin has been endorsed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Rev. Joseph Lowery, and the DeKalb County Sheriff. A lawyer friend of mine tells me he has known Martin personally for many years, has the highest respect for him, and praises, among other things, Martin’s known legal representation of people who were never going to be able to pay him. Jim Martin is also a Vietnam veteran.

If Vernon Jones, CEO of DeKalb County, runs on the platform of wanting to do for the country what he has succeeded in doing for the county, I would have to say, no, thank you, please. In the past, I have often joked about Vernon Jones that leading his accomplishments for DeKalb County is the regulation that you cannot sell your home now without replacing the toilet with a low-flow model, what I call flush-light. Advocates insist this is a water saver, but how can it save water if you have to flush twice to clear it? Still, my desire to dismiss Vernon Jones as a laughing matter is as dangerous as ignoring a loaded gun in the hands of a child. DeKalb Officers Speak, the website privately put together by a police officers group, lists among its favorite links Vernon Jones Facts, consisting of detailed criticisms of Jones and his record, including spending improprieties, management abuses, and a “long record of mistreating women.” Bumper stickers for Jones show him side-by-side with Barack Obama, but Sen. Obama says, "I do not endorse him. I have not endorsed him. He put my picture on his literature without asking me. I think he may have come to an event of ours a while back. The reason I think I may have met him is I know somebody told me as I was shaking his hand that he had taken pride in voting for George Bush twice." Cynthia Tucker, editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, writes that if Jones is the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, it will alienate potential Georgia voters for Obama in the Presidential election, because Jones is so divisive politically and racially. Nonetheless, both Jones and Martin declare themselves strong supporters of Obama for President.

Did I mention that Mr. Jones has particular problems with women? These include abusive confrontations and even an allegation of rape, which Jones claims was consensual. In fact Jones explains the sexual encounter as a menage a trios, presumably posing the proposition to ponder, how can you rape two women at the same time? The best thing about Vernon Jones running for the Senate is that he will no longer be in charge of my county government.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Dog-Fight III

From: A Concerned Citizen:
I was just out loading up for work and there were four dogs on the front porch. These appear to be the same pack that have killed the 10+ cats in the past 2 months. Will someone remind me again why nothing can be done? It is getting closer & closer to dawn. Will it take a child or elderly to be harmed before action is taken?

From: Paw Paw Bill
I regret to say that I believe it will take a violent and ugly incident to wake up the irresponsible dog owners and their misguided apologists. If you have any thoughts about preventing such a shameful outcome, I welcome knowing them. I will be on your side. At city council meetings or wherever.

From: Another Concerned Citizen
I commend your news writing and enjoy your presence on my screen when the occasion arises that you write here. Thank you for your ongoing outpouring of interesting news.

I feel quite certain that these dogs are NOT Pine Lake citizens. Dogs easily range in and out of Pine Lake. I have noticed strays wandering past my door as well. We live in a county where dogs are not cared for or prized for their ultimate value. We live in a county where even the humans live like poorly kept dogs, in many cases.

Please don't disparage your neighbors in Pine Lake, without knowing that the offending pack is from within our borders. This county, in the span of my lifetime, has gone to the dogs in more ways than one.
Blessings.

From: Paw Paw Bill
Thank you for your comments and for your readership of my blog. If you read some of my older entries, you will see that the subject of dogs is one that always generates strong reaction, almost never in support of my opinions. It is the one subject about which I sincerely hope I am always wrong, but the experiences of a lifetime make me believe that I am not.

Indeed I have not checked the citizenship of any stray dogs in Pine Lake. Nonetheless, I am keenly aware of resistance to any attempt to restrain, leash, or even enforce ownership of otherwise domestic animals. I have personally had occasions when I could not and would not take my grandson to the lake because someone had large and aggressive dogs running loose on the beach. Our community needs to come together and control the dogs, no matter to whom they do or don't belong.

From: Pine Lake City Official:
I was informed by the one of our police officers that there are 4 animal control officers for the entire county and they only work daylight hours. I want to encourage everyone to take the high road and call 911 or animal control when you have an animal problem. We have to attempt all legal and ethical avenues or the system will stop working entirely. The direct number for animal control is 404 294-3090. Please call 911 and give it a chance. If that doesn’t work we’ll try to figure out something else to do.

Not-So-Easy Pickens

I’m already driving a Honda Civic, but when I fill my gas tank lately, I pay with Ulysses S. Grant and get back change in George Washingtons. According to T. Boone Pickens, “this is one crisis we can’t drill our way out of,” and he has been an oil-man his whole life. Except when he was a natural gas man, a corporate raider and hostile-takeover pirate, and hedge-fund douser. Now he is a prairie wind man and a solar energy man. He wants to build a nationwide network of filling stations pumping All-American natural gas, generate electricity with wind, solar, and other technologies, like nuclear power plants. Pickens has long been active in Texas Republican politics and was a major money source for the candidacies of George Bush, both for Governor and President. T. Boone Pickens staked the Swift Boat squads against John Kerry.

Pickens is 80. His first entrepreneurial enterprise was as an eleven-year-old newspaper delivery boy, taking a route of 28 subscribers and building it to 156, an early introduction to "expanding quickly by acquisition," he explains. My buddy Luther did the same thing when we were kids. My first job was helping Luther deliver his Atlanta Journal paper route on our bicycles. He paid me 25-cents per day. In two years Luther doubled the size of his paper route and my pay. Every job I’ve ever had since was one working for somebody who had more money and was better at making it than I was. T. Boone Pickens has described his business philosophy as, “Anybody made money today … Anybody got an idea for how we can make any money … Am I the only one trying to make money around here?” I have to confess, I have more faith that the current energy crisis is more likely to be addressed by the itch to make a buck than to make a law. This faith is not worship of unbridled laissez-faire capitalism; it is just reality.

T. Boone Pickens promotes alternatives to oil. He wants to use windmills to generate the 22 percent of U.S. electricity currently provided by natural gas, then burn that natural gas in our cars and trucks instead of 38 percent of imported foreign oil. Pickens is spending many millions on television advertising, probably more money than all the Presidential candidates will have at their disposal for campaign advertising. Pickens personal wealth is estimated in the billions. Maybe T. Boone Pickens will give us a better shake than the sheiks of Araby. I can just hear some wisecracker standing in the Oklahoma-Texas border country dust, “If we could figure a way to make money out of the whirling wind and blistering sun, we’d be rich.” And T. Boone Pickens’ eyes light up.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Obama Over There

Barack Obama visited in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait on his weeklong tour of seven foreign countries. Sen. Obama said he wanted to see “the situation on the ground… talk to the commanders and get a sense, both in Afghanistan and in Baghdad, of… their biggest concerns… And... to thank our troops for the heroic work that they've been doing." He met with the Presidents, Prime Ministers, and high level military. He shook hands and chatted with the U.S. troops in the field, ate with them in the chow hall, and showed off his basketball skills in the gym, sinking a three pointer.

John McCain has criticized the trip. Previously he criticized Obama for not going to Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, he was for it, before he was against it. He needs to talk to John Kerry. George Bush has sent a U.S. diplomat to sit in on talks about nuclear issues with the Iranians. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has acknowledged plans to open a U.S. Interests Section in Iran. Not an embassy or a consulate, just an office in another country's embassy, usually the Swiss, where a U.S. Foreign Service Officer can look after our interests. A few weeks ago, President Bush called talking with Iran appeasement, a highly charged description. In a major speech last week, Obama renewed his call to end to the war in Iraq and withdraw combat forces on a 16-month-timetable. Meanwhile, the Bush administration has moved closer to Obama’s stated plans. Bush calls for a time horizon, not a timetable. Or a time frame or a time line. No wonder things get lost in translation. Maybe the convergence is just politics. Nonetheless, one might ask, who is following whose leadership?

Obama listened to military commanders and foreign leaders. Before the trip, he said, “I'm more interested in listening than doing a lot of talking. And I think it is very important to recognize that I'm going over there as a U.S. Senator. We have one President at a time, so it's the President's job to deliver those messages." In fact, Sen. Obama traveled to the Middle East as a member of an official Congressional Delegation, which included Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, both combat military veterans and names floating around any talk about who might be Obama's pick as Vice Presidential Nominee. Rumors circulated that John McCain might go ahead and name his Vice Presidential choice, just to snatch back some headlines during Obama's overseas trip. McCain needs to announce somebody more exciting than Romney or any of the other usual suspects, if he wants many headlines. Also on the itinerary for the Obama foreign tour are France, Germany, Great Britain, Jordan, and Israel. Travel outside the war zone is sponsored by the Obama presidential campaign. Don’t be surprised if his European reception conjures up memories of the President who said he accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris. McCain has warned in advance that Obama is not running for President of the United States of Europe.

The Huffington Post recently predicted that Sen. McCain would withdraw from the Presidential race before November, giving reasons of health in explanation. I think this qualifies as a SWAG (Stupid Wild Ass Guess), at best. Obama’s foreign affairs speech prior to his trip gave prominence to nuclear arms, loose nukes in a world of loose nuts unimpressed by mutually assured destruction. This important subject is not one we have heard much about in the campaign. The very mention by Obama bears the fingerprints of Sam Nunn, former Democratic Senator from Georgia, and Richard Lugar, Republican, who together with Nunn focused on securing a disbursed nuclear arms storehouse after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nunn, a policy advisor for the Obama campaign, is also a recurring name in Vice Presidential speculation about Obama, although I believe Secretary of Defense is more likely and absolutely appropriate. Barack Obama, in his best-selling books, expresses high admiration and respect for Richard Lugar, whose face is also seen in Obama campaign commercials. I do not think this is just Senatorial courtesy. Here's my SWAG. Barack Obama will make his own big headlines soon by picking Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana as his running mate and therefore his White House inner circle's senior advisor. Lugar’s national defense credentials are tops. And his age, older than John McCain, and party affiliation prevent him from being seen as Obama’s heir-apparent. There are important Democrats who will find this to their liking. You could not drag her name out of me with a team of horses.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Best Kept Secrets

I heard Frederico Fellini was dead, but I don’t believe it. I watched the Miss Universe Beauty Pagent on television, live from Vietnam, and if that was not Fellini, Marcello Mastrianni never trembled as Anita Ekberg emerged from a shimmering swim in the fountain.

Miss Venezuela, 5’ 10”, took the crown as Miss Universe 2008. Four of the top five were from Latin America, including Miss Mexico, a 6’ beauty. The only non-Latino finalist was from Russia. Miss U.S.A. took a pratfall as she walked across the stage in her evening gown at the ceremonies, held in the seaside luxury resort town of Nha Trang, Vietnam. Perhaps the venue is unlucky for the U.S.A. The new Miss Universe, Dayana Mendoza, said once being a kidnap victim in her homeland had taught her to remain poised under pressure.

Diamond Bay Resort and Golf course hosted the event. Diamond Bay covers an area from the center of Nha Trang City 10 minutes towards South of Nguyen Tat Thanh Boulevard, just 15 minutes away from The Cam Ranh Airport by car. The Bay is surrounded by the mountains and sea, to form separate zones. The terrain is in perfect harmony with mountains, hills, brooks, rivers and plains, bringing it splendid and poetic landscapes serving as a beautiful tourist destination, especially eco tourism. Cool and temperate climate all year round makes the Bay an ideal destination, according to promotional material. Further south, bombard your senses in vibrant Ho Chi Minh City. Take a boat to the floating markets of the Mekong Delta. Discover pristine Phu Quoc, one of the best kept island secrets of Asia. I promise; I’m not making this up.

NBC broadcast the enhanced beauty pageant to hundreds of millions of viewers in 170 countries worldwide. Master of Ceremonies for the show was Jerry Springer, famous for talk shows featuring siblings and cousins from the shallow end of the gene pool, a silver-haired favorite dancer with the stars, and perfect character core for television today. Springer introduced infomercials for motor scooters as the vehicle of choice in Vietnam, where the streets are teeming with millions of them, and the luxury hotel accommodations available, each with a portrait of Ho Chi Minh in the lobby. Fifteen semifinalists in the Miss Universe competition strutted across the stage in yellow, green, and orange bikinis made in Thailand, just like the ones available at discount stores all over the U.S.A.

They performed in front of a panel of judges that included international fashion experts and Donald Trump Jr., whose father, the real estate magnate and TV star, co-owns the pageant with NBC. Springer introduced the Ho Chi Minh Chamber of Commerce and socialist paradise country club crowd and spouses with smiles and waves all around. I apologize. I’m trapped in the 1960’s. I have flashbacks. I see Madame Nu and the one-eyed bookies from “The Deer Hunter.”

Rumor has it the Donald Trump high-rise real estate, casino, and tourism empire has its eye out to cash in on Iraq’s Persian Gulf Coast Cote d’Azur and the snow capped slopes of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, I can name names who will never be tourists in Vietnam. For starters, you can find 58,195 of them on a wall in Washington, D.C., near the Lincoln Memorial.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Democrats against Chambliss

Georgia Democrats get to go to the polls on Tuesday and vote for someone to have the honor of ending the political career of Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss. This is a noble venture, since Sen. Chambliss was elected by shameful and not even veiled suggestion that the prior occupant of that office, Max Cleland, was not patriotic enough. How many arms and legs does a Democrat have to leave in Vietnam to make the Republicans ashamed of themselves?

On the Democratic primary ballot for this sweet revenge are Dale Cardwell, former Atlanta TV newsman; Vernon Jones, DeKalb County CEO; Rand Knight, Ecologist & Business Executive; Josh Lanier, a former aide to Sen. Herman Talmadge; and Jim Martin.

Cardwell is a familiar face on Atlanta television, having worked for WSB-TV as an investigative journalist. Perhaps this accounts for polls suggesting he leads all Democrats against Chambliss. Cardwell himself claims he leads his other Democratic primary contenders among voters who say they support Barack Obama. Dale says, “I'm honored and humbled with the continued support of Georgia's likely voters. It shows the special interests and insiders might control the lion's share campaign cash, but they don't control me, and they don't control the people of Georgia

Vernon Jones, the current CEO of DeKalb County, says, “I believe Georgia needs a conservative democrat in the United States Senate.” He reportedly voted for George Bush for President, but “I share your concerns with the direction in which our country is going,” he says. “I believe in a strong defense and unconditional support of our armed forces no matter where they are deployed."

Atlanta native Rand Knight vows to be a true champion for hardworking Georgians. An ecologist, technology consultant and entrepreneur, Knight claims experience in agriculture, the environment, alternative energy, and economic development. A self-styled mainstream progressive, he says he “is committed to keeping the special interests and the divisive partisanship out of the legislative process.”

The website for Josh Lanier of Statesboro calls itself “The Un-Campaign.” He served in the Army in Vietnam and visited Vietnam again as a congressional staffer for Georgia Sen. Herman Talmadge. As a businessman, Lanier has been a consultant on water treatment, reuse, and safety standards. He is also a writer.

Jim Martin served many years in the Georgia legislature and as head of the Georgia Department of Human Resources under two Governors, one a Democrat, the other a Republican. He was later a candidate for Governor. He is also a veteran of the war in Vietnam. Critical of the Presidency of George W. Bush, Martin has been endorsed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The safe bet is that this election will likely result in a runoff because of the crowded field of candidates. My bet is Martin and Jones will go head to head. Cynthia Tucker of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution believes the presence of Jones on the ballot in the general election could negatively impact Barack Obama’s prospects in Georgia.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

With Soul So Dead

If you want to know what people think, ask. They may tell you. A recent poll wondered if Barack Obama and John McCain were patriotic enough to be President. No, 25 percent said of Obama, 9 percent no for McCain, a grand total of 34 percent, over one-third, signifying sound and fury.

Time Magazine featured a discussion of patriotism in its Fourth of July issue, including invited statements from both Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain. Time explained two versions of patriotism, conservative and liberal. Hey, it’s only journalism. According to Time, “Conservatives think patriotism is a tribute to the past. Liberals believe it’s a key to the future.” McCain wrote, “If you find fault with your country, make it a better one. If you are disappointed with the mistakes of government, join its ranks, and work to correct them. I hope more Americans would consider enlisting in our armed forces… running for public office or working in federal, state and local governments. But there are many public causes where your service can make our country a stronger, better one than we inherited.” Obama offered, “The true genius of America—a faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles…that we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm; that we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door; that we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe; that we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution; and that our votes will be counted.”

Sen. Obama further addressed the subject of patriotism in a speech delivered in Independence, Mo., just before July 4. He paid homage to the patriots at Concord and Lexington but also Martin Luther King, Jr., the freedom riders, and the whistleblowers at Abu Ghraib. “Throughout my life, I have always taken my deep and abiding love for this country as a given. It was how I was raised; it is what propelled me into public service; it is why I am running for President. And yet, at certain times over the last sixteen months, I have found, for the first time, my patriotism challenged - at times as a result of my own carelessness, more often as a result of the desire by some to score political points and raise fears about who I am and what I stand for.”

“But surely we can agree that no party or political philosophy has a monopoly on patriotism,” Obama said. He explained his “loyalty and love for country rooted in my earliest memories... sitting on my grandfather's shoulders and watching the astronauts come to shore in Hawaii… the cheers and small flags that people waved, and my grandfather explaining how we Americans could do anything we set our minds to do... my grandmother telling stories about her work on a bomber assembly-line during World War II... my grandfather handing me his dog-tags from his time in Patton's Army, and understanding that his defense of this country marked one of his greatest sources of pride.” Quoting Mark Twain, Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it, Obama adds, “But when our laws, our leaders or our government are out of alignment with our ideals, then the dissent of ordinary Americans may prove to be one of the truest expression of patriotism.”

Sometimes people confuse patriotism with political partisanship, militarism or jingoism. Not just my country right or wrong, but my country is never wrong or I’m never wrong. However, patriotism comes in more than just one flavor, or even two. Think Baskin-Robbins. But mainly don’t think you get to tell me if my patriotism is good enough. I love it about America that Walt Whitman loved Abraham Lincoln and that e e cummings sang of Olaf glad and big, who would not “kiss your f…ing flag.”

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Nader Unsafe At Any Speed

Perennial Presidential candidate Ralph Nader claims Barack Obama has done little or nothing on behalf of minorities and the poor. Nader's Green Party candidacy in 2000 attracted enough votes to account for the narrow loss of Democrat Al Gore for President, resulting in the reign of George Bush, which could hardly be called an achievement on behalf of minorities and the poor. Nader says Obama is trying to "talk white" by avoiding poverty and inner city issues. "He wants to appeal to white guilt," according to Nader. “You appeal to white guilt not by coming on as black is beautiful, black is powerful. Basically, he's coming on as someone who is not going to threaten the white power structure, whether it's corporate or whether it's simply oligarchic. And they love it. Whites just eat it up." Right. Ok. Like, anybody whose trousers are not falling down so fast they have to grab their crotch just to avoid indecent exposure, or anyone who is not flunking out of school, they’re just “trying to act white.” Ralph Nader should know better. He is first Arab-American to run for President of the United States. Son of Lebanese Maronite Catholic immigrants, Nader speaks six languages, including Arabic, the language of his childhood home.

Nader went into politics with no illusions that his brand of straight-talk would ever get him elected to office. His declared goal was to express views not supported by corporate dollars. Nader, now age 74, even older than Sen. McCain, has run in every Presidential election for two decades but made his name attacking corporate practices that disregarded consumer safety and rights. He was probably single-handedly responsible for the removal from the market of the 1960’s sub-compact Chevrolet Corvair, which he labeled “Unsafe at Any Speed.” General Motors retaliated with private investigators, wiretaps, and employing prostitutes to entrap and discredit Nader, thinking him to be only human. They misread the nature of a man who dressed like a missionary off the budget rack at Sears and was a workaholic with blinders. Nader sued GM for invasion of privacy and won, forced it to publicly apologize, and used the $284,000 from his settlement to fight for consumer rights. Nader was probably instrumental in the establishment of the Occupational Safety Hazard Administration and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In 1972, NTSA reported the 1960-1963 Corvair no more unsafe than its contemporaries.

Consumer icon of the 1960’s and role model for countless idealistic advocates to poke their noses into the secret places of business and government, Nader’s scrutiny has focused on the Federal Trade Commission, Food and Drug Administration, air and water pollution, nursing homes, deforestation, workplace safety, and nuclear power plants. Somehow failing to catch Nader’s eye has been the War in Iraq, drug addiction, AIDS, healthcare, the insurance industry, the oil industry, and of course the fact that George Bush has been President of the United States. In the 2000 election, George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by 537 votes in Florida. Nader as candidate of the Green Party received 97,421 votes. Even Nader admits “exit polls reported that 25 percent of my voters would have voted for Bush, 38 percent would have voted for Gore and the rest would not have voted at all." Nader's votes in New Hampshire as well exceeded the difference in votes between Gore and Bush. Winning either Florida or New Hampshire would have made Gore the President, not Bush. Time Magazine named Nader one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century and one of the "100 most influential Americans" in history, saying “He made the cars we drive safer; thirty years later, he made George W. Bush the President."

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Friday the Fourth

I’m happy for the Fourth of July to fall on Friday, giving us a nice mid-summer, three-day weekend, without having to make a special law. Besides, who wants to celebrate the Fourth of July on the third or the fifth? I do not like generic holidays, even for an extra day off, mixed up, so that I don’t know the difference anymore between Memorial Day and Veterans Day or Christmas and Easter. July 4th is America’s birthday, July 4, 1776, when the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, with full knowledge aforethought that a price in the King’s gold would be set on the head of each signer.

Nowadays, we remember Independence Day with fireworks and double-header baseball games, parades and outings. Politicians and candidates to be politicians give speeches. Barbeques and picnics feed people in backyards and parks from coast to coast. The biggest celebrations are on the San Francisco Bay, the East River in New York, Lake Michigan in Chicago, the Charles River in Boston, and on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., including patriotic music concerts and fireworks spectaculars. Atlanta runs a 10k Road Race down Peachtree Street. Brooklyn’s Coney Island hot dog eating competition started on July 4, 1916, among four immigrants to prove who was the most patriotic. The town of Bristol, Rhode Island, may have the oldest, continuous July 4th celebration, begun in 1785.

In 1776, John Adams believed Independence Day “will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.” In 1778, General George Washington authorized a Fourth of July double-ration of rum for his soldiers and an artillery salute. Ambassadors to France John Adams and Benjamin Franklin gave dinners for their fellow Americans in Paris, starting a tradition that continues today at American Embassies worldwide where the Fourth of July celebration is a favorite of the diplomatic community in all the world capitals. Founding Fathers and Presidents of the United States John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence both had signed. James Monroe, also a Founding Father and President, died five years later, on July 4, 1831.

George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “real live nephew of my Uncle Sam” was artfully born on the Fourth of July, but not the songwriter himself, whose actual date of birth was the 3rd.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Hatchet In A Haystack

The powerful pictures of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in Unity made a believer out of me. They had the look, with relaxed, friendly, body language, and even a warmth of touch. Yes, they can. Yes, they are the Democratic Party’s Dream Ticket. Some 6,000 people gathered in an open field in Unity, a town of 1,700, which cast 107 votes each for Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama in the New Hampshire Primary last January.

Bill Clinton was missing from the Unity photos. He did not want to upstage his spouse in her hour of power. He was an ocean away, in London to celebrate the 90th birthday of international icon Nelson Mandela, remembering the good old days, back in a prior decade, a previous century.

Also not visible in the Unity pictures is the pile of campaign cash, high as a haystack, in which they buried the hatchet. New York Senator Hillary Clinton, who, shall we say, reluctantly conceded the Democratic nomination for President to Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, has spent about at least $20 million or so more on her campaign than her fund raising collected. She even had to lend her own campaign money from the Bill and Hillary personal joint-checking account, reportedly amounts in the tens of millions, but who’s counting? It’s only the Mother’s Milk of Politics. Obama’s innovative fund raising has mined a new lode via the internet from $10, $15, $25, and $50 donations. He has raised so much money that he has opted out of the public campaign financing system. So now, as a matter of party unity, Obama has called on his more traditional sources to pitch in and help retire the Clinton campaign debts. My fungible fundraisers will call your fundraisers. Maybe Hillary and Bill will get some of their own money back before the legal deadline, which is when the Democrats officially nominate Barack Obama as their candidate. Presumtive Republican Presidential Nominee John McCain of Arizona loudly criticized presumptive Democratic Presidential Nominee Obama for going back on his pledge to accept public campaign funds, along with their limitations. Candidate Obama will take his lumps and go for the unlimited funds. He will not shoot himself in both feet and tie both arms behind his back. Clearly Sen. Obama does not want to just run for President. He wants to win. Bring on the American flag lapel pins. There are voters who care. Deeply. There is no point in disrespecting them. Obama wants to be their President. Bring on the Clintons.

In Unity, New Hampshire, Sen. Obama paid homage to the Clintons. “We need them. We need them badly. Not just my campaign, but the American people need their service and their vision and their wisdom in the months and years to come, because that’s how we’re going to bring about unity in the Democratic Party. And that’s how we’re going to bring about unity in America.” For her part, Sen. Clinton said, “To anyone who voted for me and is now considering not voting, or voting for Sen. McCain, I strongly urge you to reconsider.” She asked her supporters to join with Obama’s “to create an unstoppable force for change we can all believe in.”

In Unity, N. H., Senators Obama and Clinton did not raise their arms together in the classic pose. Maybe they wanted to save something for the Denver convention.

Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter

Georgia Officials in State of Denial

The Seal of the State of Georgia still crowns abandoned buildings in Milledgeville, artifacts attesting that responsibility for providing mental health services once focused there. Closed long ago, those doors shut on a sometimes shameful past, and hopes opened for a better way. Now, once again, controversy and criticism surround Georgia Mental Health Services.

AJC writers Alan Judd, Andy Miller, and James Salzer have recently documented state government neglect, budgetary shell-games, and oversight failures, including loosing track of the whereabouts of patients, $8.4 million in funding cuts, and Georgia officials not even having an original idea about mental health or actual experience to fill their own report rather than plagiarizing from the findings of another state. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a long and honorable history of holding officials’ feet to the fire on Georgia mental health. Jack Nelson, distinguished, chief Washington correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, won a Pulitzer Prize when he worked at The Atlanta Constitution in the 1960's for his reporting on conditions at Milledgeville State Hospital.

I asked my friend Kristina Simms of Perry about the current crisis, because she is an activist and advocate for mental health and mental health services. She told me, “Over the past decades there has been a move toward de-institutionalizing mental patients in Georgia, so that services could be rendered in the community. The problem is that the money did not follow the consumers into the community. Community mental health did not grow.”

She acknowledges that “Georgia is not the only state that has an underfunded and inadequate mental health delivery system. Nor is it the only state in which the criminal justice system has become the shadow mental hospital system. The problem is national. Available treatment for mental illness in terms of medicines is better than ever, but the delivery system is not reaching enough people.”

“Money saved on mental health treatment and facilities is money spent in the criminal justice system, the emergency rooms, and police and EMT calls,” Ms. Simms points out. “For so many areas that need reform, best practices are already known from research --- but will such practices be funded and implemented? That's the biggie. Like with Georgia's mental health system. They know better but they just won't fund and implement.”

Eric Spencer, Georgia director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, says, “It shouldn't surprise anyone that Georgia's mental health care system is in crisis. It's not just failing. It's broken.” He writes in an editorial in The Atlanta Journal Constitution, “One in four Americans struggle with mental illness at some point in their lives. In Georgia, approximately 623,000 people struggle with major depression, 242,000 with bipolar disorder and 93,000 with schizophrenia... For schizophrenia alone, more Americans live with the disease than those who live with HIV/AIDS.”

"Mental illness does not discriminate between Republicans and Democrats," Mr. Spencer notes.

(Photo of old Milledgeville State Hospital by Kristina Simms)


Copyright 2008 by William C. Cotter