AN ODE TO AMERICA (from Romania)

Earlier this month, columnist Jim Davidson shared with us an editorial from a Romanian newspaper, reflecting on the 9/11 tragedy. It is titled, "An Ode to America". Here it is:
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"Why are Americans so united? They don't resemble one another even if you paint them! They speak all the languages of the world and form an astonishing mixture of civilizations. Some of them are nearly extinct, others are incompatible with one another and in matters of religious beliefs, not even God can count how many they are.
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"Still, the American tragedy turned three hundred million people into a hand put on the heart. Nobody rushed to accuse the White House, the army, the secret services that they were only a bunch of losers. Nobody rushed to empty their bank accounts. Nobody rushed on the streets to gape about. The Americans volunteered to donate blood and give a helping hand. After the first moments of panic, they raised the flag on the smoking ruins, putting on T-shirts, caps and ties in the colors of the national flag.
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"They placed flags on buildings and cars as if in every place and on every car a minister or the president was passing. On every occasion they started singing their traditional song: 'God Bless America.'
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"Silent as a rock, I watched the charity concert broadcast on Saturday twice, three times, on different TV channels. There was Clint Eastwood, Willie Nelson, Robert DiNiro, Julia Roberts, Cassius Clay, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Springsteen, Sylvester Stallone, James Wood, and many others whom no film or producers could ever bring together.
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"The Americans' solidarity spirit turned them into a choir. I don't know how it happened that all this obsessive singing of America didn't sound croaky, nationalist , or ostentatious! It made you green with envy because you weren't able to sing for your country without running the risk of being considered chauvinist, ridiculous, or suspected of who-knows-what mean interests...Imperceptibly, with every word and musical note, the memory of some turned into a modern myth of tragic heroes.
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"What on earth can unite the Americans in such a way? Their land? Their galloping history? Their economic power? Money? I tried for hours to find an answer, humming songs and murmuring phrases which risk of sounding like commonplaces. I thought things over, but I only reached one conclusion. Only freedom can work such miracles."
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And here is Jim Davidson's conclusion: "While tragic things are happening in the world today, we all need to be reminded that freedom is never free."

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CINNAMON CRISPS...as promised

For each 2 (10") flour tortillas you will need:

• 2 Tbsps. sugar
• 1/4 tsp. Cinnamon
• 1/4 cup unsalted butter

Preheat oven to 475 degrees. Mix sugar and cinnamon together. Using a cookie cutter or other means, cut tortillas to desired shapes. Melt butter in a jelly roll pan ( 1-2 minutes in the oven). Place tortilla pieces in butter and turn to coat both sides. Sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon mix. Bake until browned (3-5 minutes). Remove to paper towel lined serving plate. Good with vanilla ice cream.

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Heaven bless you...just for being you.

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THEN AND NOW

THEN AND NOW

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by Clyde Stark, 100 years old

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The horses stood harnessed in the barn,

After feasting on oats and hay,

Just waiting to work on the farm,

Which seemed to be the same every day.

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Here comes their master to take them out,

And water them before they work,

Then they will be hitched to the plough,

The willing horses never shirk.

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At noon it's more oats and hay,

So they start toward the barn,

Where they're watered right away.

An hours rest done them no harm.

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Their master also needs some food,

That his good wife has fried for them,

Chicken, and pie for the right mood,

Before they have to go again.

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Now this was horse and buggy days,

We were simply reminiscing.

Just showing you our former ways,

And appreciate our modern blessings.

~~~

Copyright (c) Clyde Stark

All rights reserved

CLIMATE CHANGE??

Here is an excerpt from Glen Beck's newsletter of July 15, 2009:
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"‑‑ apparently word is out that there was a runaway spurt of global warming 55 million years ago that turned Earth into a hothouse. Hang on. A runaway spurt of global warming 55 million years that turned Earth into a hothouse. The planet surface temperature blasted upwards between 5 and 9 degrees Celsius ‑‑ that's 9 and 16.2 degrees Fahrenheit ‑‑ in just a few thousand years. On a side note the article explains manmade global warming, A/K/A what we're supposedly experiencing now is driven mainly by the burning of oil, gas and coal and has amounted to around .8 degrees Celsius, 1.2 Fahrenheit over the past century. You may recognize that as less than the 16.2 degrees that the Earth did all by its lonesome. And no one knows how or why."
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Interesting, isn't it?

EXPLAIN!! EXPLAIN!!

I just want to let you know that the following post about the treatment of Governor Sarah Palin is quite long and if you decide against reading the whole thing, PLEASE scroll down to the 'Climate Change' video also posted today. THANKS!!

SARAH 'BARRACUDA' PALIN AND THE PIRANHAS OF THE PRESS

This is from an article in "Politics Daily" by Carl M. Cannon. It's rather lengthy, but I hope you will take the time to read it, a journalist exposing the biased reporting of Govenor Palin, and he states further, "In the 2008 election, we took sides...we simply didn't hold Joe Biden to the same standard as Sarah Palin:

...last Aug. 29 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, in an uphill fight against an attractive and front-running Democratic candidate, tapped the little-known governor of Alaska to be his running mate.
* * * * *
From the beginning, and for the ensuing 10 months, the coverage of this governor consisted of a steamy stew of cultural elitism and partisanship. The overt sexism of some male commentators wasn't countered, as one might have expected, by their female counterparts. Women columnists turned on Sarah Palin rather quickly. A plain-speaking, moose-hunting, Bible-thumping, pro-life, self-described "hockey mom" with five children and movie star looks with only a passing interest in foreign policy -- that wasn't the woman journalism's reigning feminists had envisioned for the glass ceiling-breaking role of First Female President (or Vice President). Hillary Rodham Clinton was more like what they had in mind – and Sarah, well, she was the un-Hillary.
"The fact of the matter is, the comparison between her and Hillary Clinton is the comparison between an igloo and the Empire State Building," Chris Matthews said on MSNBC's "Hardball" last October. (Note to Chris: That's not a "fact;" it's closer to a simile, and an ad hominem one at that.) But Matthews was hardly alone.
"This is not a serious choice," said Eleanor Clift, a regular on "The McLaughlin Group." "It looks like a made-for-TV movie. If the media reaction is anything, it's been literally laughter in very, very many newsrooms."
Howard Fineman, Clift's Newsweek colleague, in an appearance on MSNBC, said that McCain's choice of Palin undermined the planned story line of the GOP convention, which was going to be that Obama lacked the readiness to lead the country. "Well, Sarah Palin makes Barack Obama look like John Adams."
The first thing reporters and commentators seemed to have noticed about Gov. Palin was her physical beauty. The second was that she had a bunch of kids, the last one born with Down's syndrome in spring 2008. For some reason, these two facts infuriated many Democratic activists and bloggers – and some liberal journalists.
The most egregious example was posted on Daily Kos on Sept. 12, 2008 by Paul Lewis Hackett III, a trial lawyer and U.S. Marine Corps veteran of Iraq, who ran in 2005 for a vacant seat in the House from Ohio's second congressional district, losing narrowly in a district President Bush had carried easily just a year earlier.
Fretting that the Obama campaign was going to lose Ohio to McCain, Hackett proposed his own solution: A series of savage attacks on the GOP ticket focusing on Sarah Palin and her family. Here is what he wrote:
The message (would be) simple and the professionals can refine it but essentially it should contain these elements: Sarah Palin? Can't keep her solemn oath of devotion to her husband and had sex with his employee. Sarah Palin? Accidentally got pregnant at age 43 and the tax payers of Alaska have to pay for the care of her disabled child. Sarah Palin? Unable to teach her 16 year old daughter right from wrong and now another teenager is pregnant. Sarah Palin? Can you trust Sarah Palin and her values with America's future?
Apparently, Hackett took the rumors of an affair from the National Enquirer, which offered no proof, or even evidence. He then segued into an even uglier line of attack, arguing that it's irresponsible to bring a handicapped baby into the world. This is not "pro-choice," it's pro-eugenics. It's also creepy and illiberal, and reinforces conservatives' worst fears about Democrats and the issue of abortion. And, oh yes, Bristol Palin's age was wrong. She was nearly 18 when Hackett wrote this screed, not 16. This proved a harbinger, too, as misinformation slipped easily from the left blogosphere into mainstream coverage.
This New Journalism, if you can call it that, exhibited in 2008 was epitomized by an eradication of the lines between fact and opinion – and, even more troubling, between reporting and propaganda. Some journalists were content to repeat Democratic Party talking points or bloggers' rumors as though they were established fact, interspersing them with ideological commentary in a kind of toxic stew.
"She is a far-right conservative who supported Pat Buchanan over Bush in 2000. She thinks global warming is a hoax and backs the teaching of creationism in public schools," wrote Jonathan Alter in Newsweek on Aug. 29, 2008. Actually, she did not support Buchanan, she questioned whether climate change is man-made (not whether it's occurring) and gave creationists the most minor of rhetorical nods – and never questioned the teaching of evolution in schools.
But so it went.
She was a book burner, you know. How do I know this? Like many Americans, I received numerous emails telling me so, and found a hundred liberal Web sites that mentioned it. They even listed the books Palin wanted to ban from the public library in Wasilla, Alaska, classics and best sellers, ranging from "Huck Finn" to "Catch-22." The list was a hoax, of course, a deliberate smear, and none too clever, either: It included books published a decade after Palin served as mayor. When questioned by their own audiences, these bloggers would point to stories in the mainstream media, including one in Time magazine quoting a man named John Stein, the bitter ex-mayor whom Palin defeated when she ran for office. This is from Time:
"Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. 'She asked the library how she could go about banning books,' he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them.'"
This turned out to be about half-true, as what Palin really did was ask the librarian "if she would object to censorship even if people were circling the library to protest about a book," according to a contemporary account in the local newspaper. Yet this symbiosis between the mainstream media and the blogosphere raged throughout 2008, almost always to Palin's detriment.
Remember her callous decision as governor to cut Alaska's special education budget by 62 percent? After receiving emails to that effect, CNN's Soledad O'Brien cited the figure on-air. Oops. Palin actually tripled the state's spending on special needs kids.
Did you hear the one about her membership in the Alaska Independence Party, which favors secession from the union? That made The New York Times, and it was wrong, too.
But it was in the area of her family life where the press really lost its bearings.
"A day of stunning Palin disclosures," was how the Associated Press greeted the news that Bristol Palin was pregnant. "A political stunner!" echoed CNN's Campbell Brown. In one 30-minute stretch, CNN reporters and anchors referred to the teen's pregnancy as "a bombshell" four separate times.
Personally, I had always stood with the late, great Molly Ivins when it came to kids of politicians. The legendary Texas newspaper columnist was as liberal as they come, but her view about such matters was straightforward and unambiguous. "I don't do children," Molly said. (Barack Obama, by the way, agreed. Campaigning in Michigan when the Bristol Palin "bombshell" broke, he said, "People's families are off-limits and people's children are especially off-limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Governor Palin's performance as a governor or potential performance as a vice president. So I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories.")
His admirers in the press didn't heed their hero's warning. The Times, for example, which found the alleged transgressions of an actual presidential candidate (John Edwards) unworthy of investigation, managed to find room for three Page One stories touching on the sex life of a vice presidential candidate's daughter.
Also, it's important to remember why the Palin family even acknowledged Bristol's pregnancy: Because a thousand "liberal" Web sites, led by Daily Kos, the favored site of leftist Democrats, filled cyberspace with off-the-wall theories that Trig Palin was really Bristol's child and that Sarah had faked her own pregnancy. This was truly ugly territory, and nutty besides. It's not terribly different from the Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim-not-born-in-this-country stuff, with one crucial distinction: The Obama Muslim stuff was either debunked or ignored by the media --not the conspiracy theories about Trig Palin's birth. In some quarters of the evolving new media – The Huffington Post and Bill Maher's HBO program, to name two – the Palin pregnancy hoax was repeated. Some traditional outlets, including Vanity Fair and, most inexplicably, The Atlantic blog written by Andrew Sullivan, kept hammering away at it after it was proven false by photographic evidence and by Bristol's own pregnancy.
* * * * *
How much did this matter, in the end, to the outcome in 2008?
I really don't know. I do know this, however: The story line recited by my media brethren, naturally, absolves us of any wrongdoing. The narrative goes like this: Bristol's pregnancy notwithstanding, Sarah Palin and her family galvanized the Republican faithful in St. Paul, where the candidate showed great poise in her first national address, while attracting 32.7 million TV viewers – only 1.1 million fewer than had watched Obama a week earlier in Denver. By the end of the GOP convention, Palin had pulled ahead of Joe Biden by nine points in a poll asking who Americans would support if they could vote for the vice presidential nominees separately. She was doing fine, until....
...The Interviews.
The first of her in-depth network sit downs came with ABC's Charles Gibson. In those sessions, Palin came across as iffy, just barely treading water. But the press dunked her, particularly after witnessing this exchange:
GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?
PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?
GIBSON: What do you interpret it to be?
PALIN: His worldview?
GIBSON: No, the Bush Doctrine, enunciated in September 2002, before the Iraq War.
(Palin, clearly not knowing what he's driving at, responds with generalities before Gibson interjects as though he's a civics teacher and she's a lazy student.)
GIBSON: "The Bush Doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense. That we have the right of a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?"
This was widely cited in the media as proof that Palin was unready and over her head, and that McCain had done something "cynical" in choosing her. Except that Bush never said that, exactly, and certainly never suggested Iraq was one of many nations to be invaded. Gibson was simply wrong in suggesting the so-called "Bush Doctrine" was as immutable as the Monroe Doctrine. The "Bush Doctrine" was always a fuzzy concept, usually described that way by the president's critics as a way of expressing disagreement with his approach to foreign policy.
I remember seeing the phrase for the first time in a think piece by Steven Weisman in The New York Times in April 2002 – the very time frame suggested by Charlie Gibson. Weisman, writing about Ariel Sharon and the Middle East, defines the "doctrine" much differently than Gibson. ("Washington is filled right now with speculation about the state of Mr. Bush's thinking and which of his advisers have gained the upper hand," he wrote. "Vice President Dick Cheney and the hawks in the Pentagon are said to have encouraged Mr. Bush to support Mr. Sharon's military drive, arguing that it was simply an extension of the so-called Bush Doctrine, which holds those who harbor terrorists accountable for terrorism.")
Okay. Despite how it was portrayed in the press, perhaps Charlie Gibson didn't really expose Palin as an ignoramus. Maybe he tipped off his own private political views instead. No matter, the story line was set. Then came the much-parodied Katie Couric interview, where Palin couldn't name a single publication she reads as a source of news, struggled to provide an example of McCain standing up to Wall Street, and rambled semi-coherently when Couric asked Palin why on the campaign trail she cites Alaska's proximity to Russia as a foreign policy credential. It was this exchange that led to the most memorable line of the entire campaign: "I can see Russia from my house!" It came, of course, not from the candidate herself, but from her body-double, Tina Fey.
It must be said that no matter what one thinks of Couric's style of interrogation, Palin bombed in that interview. Clearly, the lack of lead time afforded her by the McCain camp, as well as her own lack of preparation, was showing. More disconcerting, she was still winging it when she should have been cramming furiously. So, the coverage of that interview may have been fair, up to a point. My beef with my colleagues in the press is that we copied Palin's very mistake: We thought after that session that we knew all we needed to know about Sarah Palin. Helen Thomas, old enough to just let it fly, spoke for many journalists when she said. "The ballgame was over after that. (Couric) saved the country."
That's one view. Another is that we chose sides in that election, and when our side pulled ahead, we stopped keeping score. The next time the Republicans showed strength (or, more precisely, when Palin's Democratic counterpart goofed up) we'd already become cheerleaders instead of judges.
Before I explain what I mean by that, it's important to remember that those weirdly personal attacks on Palin began before the Gibson and Couric interviews. "I'm not convinced that's her baby," Bill Maher had said on HBO. That was Sept. 5. The following day Mort Kondracke called Palin "this wacko right-winger." Then movie star Matt Damon gave a television interview, saying he thinks the possibility of Palin becoming president is "a really scary thing." He went on in this vein, using words like "terrifying" and "totally absurd" and saying the possibility of a "hockey mom ... facing down President Putin is like a really bad Disney movie." Then, and only then, did the interviews take place. In other words, Palin's detractors had already made up their minds before she'd flopped in two interviews. Were her tormentors prescient? Or were they close-minded?
We were about to find out. As the truncated 2008 general election campaign raced by, Palin's critics in the Fourth Estate maintained that they were simply doing their job in ferreting out the qualifications, experience, temperament, and knowledge base that Sarah Palin would bring to national office. I'm not a Republican or a conservative; I'm a lifelong journalist who was born and raised in this profession and normally I'd defend the media in this argument. In this instance I cannot.
The reason is what happened when the battle over Sarah Palin came to a head on Oct. 2, 2008, in St. Louis, Mo. That night, the press showed its colors – and they were Democratic blue. That was the night that Palin cleaned Joe Biden's clock in their only debate, and nobody in the media could even see it, let alone report it. That was the night that the dual blinders of ideology and elitism prevented us being honest brokers.
* * * * *
Gov. Palin certainly had her sketchy moments that night. On one occasion, she called her opponent "Senator O'Biden." She referred twice to the top U.S. military officer in Afghanistan as "General McClellan." (His name is David McKiernan). She claimed as mayor to have reduced taxes "every year I was in office," an assertion that is accurate only if one ignores sales tax increases. Likewise, she maintained that McCain's $5,000 tax credit for health coverage was "budget-neutral," which is only possible by repealing the laws of mathematics. She gave McCain more credit than he was due in blowing the whistle on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while repeating a misleading claim against Obama used by Hillary Clinton and McCain on an energy bill. She also exaggerated her own accomplishment regarding a $40 billion proposed pipeline in Alaska.
Sen. Biden, however, was in a place by himself when it came to bogus claims, absurd contentions, and flights of rhetorical fancy. He threw out several assertions that were so preposterous that – had Palin made them – they would have prompted immediate calls for McCain to dump her from the ticket.
The good senator from Delaware warmed up slowly, erroneously claiming that McCain voted with Obama on a budget resolution, and asserting wrongly that Obama wanted to return to the Reagan-era marginal income tax rates. He also embarked on an appallingly wrongheaded monologue about the constitutional history of the vice presidency. But when the talk turned to national security, presumably Biden's purported area of expertise, he went completely off the grid.
• "John McCain voted against a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that every Republican has supported," Biden stated. (Actually, in a 1999 vote in Congress, McCain sided with 50 other Republicans to kill the treaty. Only four joined the Democrats.)
• "Pakistan already has deployed nuclear weapons," Biden said. "Pakistan's weapons can already hit Israel and the Mediterranean." (Pakistan has no known intercontinental missiles. The range of its weapons is thought to be 1,000 miles – halfway to Israel.)
• "When we kicked--along with France--we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, 'Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don't...Hezbollah will control it.'" Biden recalled. "Now what's happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel." (Except that the U.S. never kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon or anywhere else. They've been entrenched in Lebanon since 1982. Actually, Hezbollah, insofar as it was responsible for the 1983 suicide bombing at the Marine barracks that killed 241 U.S. servicemen, kicked America out of Lebanon, not the other way around.)
• "The president...insisted on elections on the West Bank, when I said, and others said, and Barack Obama said, 'Big mistake. Hamas will win. You'll legitimize them.' What happened? Hamas won," Biden said. (Only the last two words of Biden's strange soliloquy are true. The rest are false. For one thing, Fatah controls the West Bank. Biden was thinking of Gaza. Secondly, neither Biden nor Obama predicted the 2006 victory for Hamas in Gaza's legislative elections. Third, McCain and Obama – but not Biden -- signed a letter urging the president to pressure Palestinians to require that candidates adhere to democratic principles before being allowed to run for office. Fourth, Biden served as an election observer and later wrote an article expressing high praise for Bush's actions. To sum up: One factual error and three fibs in only 31 words. Pretty impressive, in its way.)
• "With Afghanistan, facts matter...we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spend on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan. Let me say that again..." (He did say it again, but that didn't make it true. It's wildly and weirdly off the mark. Yes, facts matter. The facts here were that at the time Biden was speaking, the U.S. had spent $172 billion in Afghanistan. The Iraq War consumes between $7 billion and $8 billion every three weeks. Biden's math was off by 2,000 percent.)
• "Can I clarify this? This is simply not true about Barack Obama. He did not say (he'd) sit down with Ahmadinejad." (He most certainly did. And among those who criticized him at the time for it was Joe Biden, who told Byron York of National Review that the idea of a president meeting with the likes of the Iranian president or Hugo Chavez was "naïve.")
Those were alarming mistakes. To me Biden's most discordant claims concerned his Animal House-like history lecture about the office of the vice president. It came while Biden was dressing down Dick Cheney, who was not present, for supposedly being unfamiliar with the Constitution. "The idea (that) he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States – that's the executive branch – he works in the executive branch," Biden said. "He should understand that. Everyone should understand that. And the primary role of the vice president of the United States is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and, as vice president, to preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there's a tie vote. The Constitution is explicit....He has no authority relative to the Congress. The idea he's part of the legislative branch is a bizarre notion invented by Cheney to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive, and look where it has gotten us."
Lord, would Tina Fey have had fun with this jumble of misinformation – if only Palin had said it! Article I defines the legislative, not executive, branch. The vice president is, indeed, mentioned there. What Biden finds "explicit," hasn't been so to previous vice presidents or to most constitutional scholars. Prior to the 20th century, vice presidents didn't even have offices at the White House compound – they were housed in the Capitol. The notion that a veep's constitutional authority is to provide advice to a president springs from Biden's brow; it certainly isn't mentioned, or even contemplated, in the Constitution, which doesn't even say whether the vice president should receive a salary.
Should Joe Biden have known this stuff? Since he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, you'd hope so. But even if he didn't, you'd think it would be news when he unleashed a veritable fount of misinformation to impugn Palin's knowledge of the federal system while attacking a sitting vice president. It barely rated a mention in the collective mainstream media.
Facts matter, the man said. But they didn't in 2008, not when it came to Joe Biden (our guy) against Sarah Palin (odd outsider). The ladies and gentlemen of the press were more interested in her hair, her glasses, her wardrobe, he accent, her sex life, her kids' sex lives, and her hunting habits than in whether her opponent knew anything about foreign policy, the Constitution of the United States, or the job he was running for. They still are. The relentlessly negative coverage of Palin goes on unabated -- she's the subject of a much-ballyhooed hatchet job in Vanity Fair this month -- even as Biden makes minor news from time to time by continuing his penchant for gaffes, this time while serving as the second most powerful person in the federal government.
I must say, however, that when Palin announced her resignation last Friday, one of the few people who commented on it without saying something snarky was the only man who ever defeated her in an election. Asked for a comment by ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Vice President Biden replied that although he didn't necessarily see Palin as a victim of political bloodletting, he accepted her judgment on this matter and assumed she was doing it out of concern for her family.
"I don't know what prompted her decision...so I'm not going to second-guess her," Biden said. "And I take her at her word that (there was) a personal ingredient in it. And you have to respect that."

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My comments: There is no way to estimate how many people were swayed by the twisting of the truth or down right un-truths about Governor Palin or how much heart-ache, time and money it has and still is costing her and her family. I wish her the best.

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DON'T MISS THE 'CLIMATE CHANGE' VIDEO LISTED

BELOW !!!!!

CLIMATE CHANGE AND MORALITY

Here is a video for you to watch and see if you think there are two sets of rules:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESxvY1tQHTo&eurl

~~~And a quote to think about: Be the change you wish to see in the world.~~Mohandas Gandhi

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THAT'S YOUR SMILE

THAT'S YOUR SMILE

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by Clarence Tresler

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Songbirds in natural harmony,

beautiful music they sing.

Feelings of rapture strong and serene,

within my heart they bring.

That's your smile.

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Days beginning in glorious color,

nature's beauty all around.

Days ending quiet and still,

all the feelings still abound.

That's your smile.

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Nighttime dreams of angels,

beautifully attired in silk and gold.

Floating gently on quiet wings,

carrying hearts with love untold.

That's your smile.

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Hours of quiet contentment,

dreaming of the beauty I see.

My life enriched by your presence,

my heart as full as can be.

That's your smile.

~~~

Copyright (c) Clarence Tresler, all rights reserved.

~~~

~~~

And here's something else to make you smile:

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The story of the preacher who wanted to check out his son's vocational leanings:

One day, the preacher put a Bible, a silver dollar and a whiskey bottle on the kitchen table. Then he hid and waited. He figured that if the boy picked up the Bible he was going to be a preacher; if he took the silver dollar he was going to be a banker; and if he took the whiskey he was going to be a drunk.

Eventually the boy came in and walked to the table. He put the Bible under his arm, put the dollar in his pocket and un-corked the bottle and took a drink.

"Lord, have mercy," the old preacher said to himself. "My boy's gonna be a politician."

~~~

This is from a column by David Waters, Memphis ,TN

A SOLDIER'S TAKE ON MICHAEL JACKSON'S DEATH

Here is an article I received, you guessed it, in an e-mail: Your thoughts?

"This is written by a young soldier serving his third tour of duty in Iraq. Thought you might find his take on the Michael Jackson news interesting .....

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"Folks,

Okay, I need to rant. I was just watching the news, and I caught part of a report on Michael Jackson. As we all know, Jackson died the other day. He was an entertainer who performed for decades. He made millions, he spent millions, and he did a lot of things that make him a villian to many people. I understand that his death would affect a lot of people, and I respect those people who mourn his death, but that isn't the point of my rant. Why is it that when ONE man dies, the whole of America loses their minds with grief. When a man dies whose only contribution to the country was to ENTERTAIN people, the American people find the need to flock to a memorial in Hollywood, and even Congress sees the need to hold a "moment of silence" for his passing? Am I missing something here? ONE man dies, and all of a sudden he's a freaking martyr because he entertained us for a few decades?

`

What about all those SOLDIERS who have died to give us freedom? All those Soldiers who, knowing that they would be asked to fight in a war, still raised their hands and swore to defend the Constitution and the United States of America. Where is their moment of silence? Where are the people flocking to their graves or memorials and mourning over them because they made the ultimate sacrifice?

`

When did this country become so calloused to the sacrifice of GOOD MEN and WOMEN, that they can arbitrarily blow off their deaths, and instead, throw themselves into mourning for a "Pop Icon?" I think that if they are going to hold a moment of silence IN CONGRESS for Michael Jackson, they need to hold a moment of silence for every service member killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. They need to PUBLICLY recognize every life that has been lost so that the American people can live their callous little lives in the luxury and freedom that WE, those that are living and those that have gone on, have provided for them. But, wait, that would take too much time, because there have been so many willing to make that sacrifice. After all, we will never make millions of dollars. We will never star in movies, or write hit songs that the world will listen too. We only shed our blood, sweat and tears so that people can enjoy what they have.

`

Sorry if I have offended, but I needed to say it. Remember these five words the next time you think of someone who is serving in the military; "So that others may live.." ~~Isaac"

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Coming soon: a recipe for easy Cinnamon Crisps.

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INVITATION

Join Bev's Booth

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To join just click on the Friend Connect Icon

I would love to have you!!

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Comments are soooo welcome !!

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Just click on 'comments' at the end of the post, enter your comment and

sign or not as you see fit. Click on 'Post Comment'.

I will, if needed, reply in the same block and you can read by clicking on 'comments' again.

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MID-SUMMER REQUIRED TEST

1. Is Sarah Palin really who the media says she is?
2. Have you read the article by Carl Cannon on July 13th that details the bashing of Governor Sarah Palin?
3. Do you believe in man caused global warming, aka climate change?
4. Is too much time and money being spent on the Sonia Sotomayor hearings? Especially when we KNOW that she will be appointed anyway?
5. Can we afford government health care?
6. And finally, does the federal government as yet, have any programs planned that are designed to take control of our pets? Or will that be slipped in with the health care bill?

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Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't. ~~Erica Jong

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TIME FLIES

"It doesn't matter how many face lifts you have, you can't fool two flights of stairs." ~~Max Bygraves

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"When I was a young man I vowed never to marry until I found the ideal woman. Well, I found her - but , alas, she was waiting for the perfect man." ~~Robert Schuman

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"To remove worry wrinkles, get your faith lifted." ~~Unknown

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"Old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man." ~~Leon Trotsky

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Life begins when a person first realizes how soon it ends." ~~Marcelene Cox

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Hope your weekend didn't go by too quickly!!

ORANGE GLAZE FOR CHICKEN

Pre-heat oven to 325*

BROWN CHICKEN PIECES IN A BIT OF CANOLA OIL, THEN PLACE THEM IN A GLASS BAKING PAN.

• You will need:
• 1 small can frozen orange juice
• 1 small can Mandarin oranges
• 1 Tbsp. cornstarch

Mix the cornstarch with juice drained from the oranges. Place in a pan with the frozen juice and orange pieces. Heat and stir to thicken. Pour over browned chicken and bake covered for about 1 hour. Good with steamed white rice.

~~~

"Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing."

~~Robert C. Benchley

Many are the times I wish I had done that!

~~~

WHY WE WORRY ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING

No More Green Guilt
July 1, 2009 - 2:02 ET
By Keith Lockitch

~
Every investment prospectus warns that "past performance is no guarantee of future results." But suppose that an investment professional's record contains nothing but losses, of failed prediction after failed prediction. Who would still entrust that investor with his money?
Yet, in public policy there is one group with a dismal track record that Americans never seem to tire of supporting. We invest heavily in its spurious predictions, suffer devastating losses, and react by investing even more, never seeming to learn from the experience. The group I’m talking about is the environmentalist movement.

`
Consider their track record—like the dire warnings of catastrophic over-population. Our unchecked consumption, we were told, was depleting the earth's resources and would wipe humanity out in a massive population crash. Paul Ehrlich's 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, forecasted hundreds of millions of deaths per year throughout the 1970s, to be averted, he insisted, only by mass population control "by compulsion if voluntary methods fail."

`
But instead of global-scale famine and death, the 1970s witnessed an agricultural revolution. Despite a near-doubling of world population, food production continues to grow as technological innovation creates more and more food on each acre of farmland. The U.S., which has seen its population grow from 200 to 300 million, is more concerned about rampant obesity than a shortage of food.

`
The Alar scare in 1989 is another great example. The NRDC, an environmentalist lobby group, engineered media frenzy over the baseless assertion that Alar, an apple ripening agent, posed a cancer threat. The ensuing panic cost the apple industry over $200 million dollars, and Alar was pulled from the market even though it was a perfectly safe and value-adding product.

`
Or consider the campaign against the insecticide DDT, beginning with Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring. The world had been on the brink of eradicating malaria using DDT—but for Carson and her followers, controlling disease-carrying mosquitoes was an arrogant act of "tampering" with nature. Carson issued dire warnings that nature was "capable of striking back in unexpected ways" unless people showed more "humility before [its] vast forces." She asserted, baselessly, that among other things DDT would cause a cancer epidemic. Her book led to such a public outcry that, despite its life-saving benefits and mountains of scientific evidence supporting its continued use, DDT was banned in the United States in 1972. Thanks to environmentalist opposition, DDT was almost completely phased out worldwide. And while there is still zero evidence of a DDT cancer risk, the resurgence of malaria needlessly kills over a million people a year.

`
Time and time again, the supposedly scientific claims of environmentalists have proven to be pseudo-scientific nonsense, and the Ehrlichs and Carsons of the world have proven to be the Bernard Madoffs of science. Yet Americans have ignored the evidence and have instead invested in their claims—accepting the blame for unproven disasters and backing coercive, harmful "solutions."

`
Today, of course, the Green doomsday prediction is for catastrophic global warming to destroy the planet—something that environmentalists have pushed since at least the early 1970s, when they were also worried about a possible global cooling shifting the planet into a new ice age.

`
But in this instance, just as with Alar, DDT, and the population explosion, the science is weak and the "solutions" drastic. We are told that global warming is occurring at an accelerating rate, yet global temperatures have been flat for the last decade. We are told that global warming is causing more frequent and intense hurricanes, yet the data doesn’t support such a claim. We are warned of a potentially catastrophic sea level rise of 20 feet over the next century, but that requires significant melting of the land-based ice in Antarctica and Greenland. Greenland has retained its ice sheet for over 100,000 years despite wide-ranging temperatures and Antarctica has been cooling moderately for the last half-century.

`
Through these distortions of science we are again being harangued to support coercive policies. We are told that our energy consumption is destroying the planet and that we must drastically reduce our carbon emissions immediately. Never mind that energy use is an indispensable component of everything we do, that 85 percent of the world's energy is carbon-based, or that there are no realistic, abundant alternatives available any time soon, and that billions of people are suffering today from lack of energy.

`
Despite all of that, Americans seem to once again be moving closer to buying the Green investment pitch and backing destructive Green policies. Why don't we learn from past experience? Do you think a former Madoff investor would hand over money to him again?

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It's not that we're too stupid to learn, it's that we are holding onto a premise that distorts our understanding of reality. Americans are the most successful individuals in history - even in spite of this economic downturn - in terms of material wealth and the quality of life and happiness it brings. We are heirs to the scientific and industrial revolutions, which have increased life expectancy from 30 years to 80 and improved human life in countless, extraordinary ways. Through our ingenuity and productive effort, we have achieved an unprecedented prosperity by reshaping nature to serve our needs. Yet we have always regarded this productivity and prosperity with a certain degree of moral suspicion. The Judeo-Christian ethic of guilt and self-sacrifice leads us to doubt the propriety of our success and makes us susceptible to claims that we will ultimately face punishment for our selfishness--that our prosperity is sinful and can lead only to an apocalyptic judgment day.

`
Environmentalism preys on our moral unease and fishes around for doomsday scenarios. If our ever-increasing population or life-enhancing chemicals have not brought about the apocalypse, then it must be our use of fossil fuels that will. Despite the colossal failures of past Green predictions, we buy into the latest doomsday scare because, on some level, we have accepted an undeserved guilt. We lack the moral self-assertiveness to regard our own success as virtuous; we think we deserve punishment.

`
It is time to stop apologizing for prosperity. We must reject the unwarranted fears spread by Green ideology by rejecting unearned guilt. Instead of meekly accepting condemnation for our capacity to live, we should proudly embrace our unparalleled ability to alter nature for our own benefit as the highest of virtues.

`
Let’s stop wallowing in Green guilt. It’s time to recapture our Founding Fathers' admiration for the pursuit of each individual's own happiness.
**************
Keith Lockitch, PhD in physics, is a resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, focusing on science and environmentalism

~~~

MY DESTINY

WHITE VELVET

Each morning dawns draping velvet, pure white
And billowing gently, waiting as I lay
Dispelling chills and terrors of the night,
Destined to embrace my design for the day.

Will I sketch in regrets for yesteryear
Or pen deep frown lines meant for tomorrow?
Certainly not huge ink spots dark with fear
Or jagged streaks of hate engulfed in sorrow!

Could it be a white elephant of nothing
Or a freeway skirting the edges of life,
Ignoring gardenias and love birds that sing,
With pearls over-looked in the onslaught of strife?

No, this day I will choose with care a brush
And colors pastel to create a design
With careful strokes befitting the billowing hush
Of white velvet, for each new day is mine.

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll splash on pigments bright
Commanding full attention, daring and bold,
For the velvet returns each dawn in white
Allowing me, reborn, my destiny to mold.

Copyright (c) Beverly J. Caligaris 1996, 2008

All rights reserved

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"The wonderful world of home appliances now makes it possible to cook indoors with charcoal and outdoors with gas." Hope your weekend was great - either way.

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POLITICS -cont'd

QUOTES WORTH THINKING ABOUT

• A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government.~~Edward Abbey
• Anybody that wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.~~David S. Broder
• We must not continue to be charmed by politicians, we must elect LEADERS.~~Bev Caligaris
• It may be laid as a universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought, will perform less.~~Thomas Babington Macauley
• The more you observe politics, the more you've got to admit that each party is worse than the other.~~Will Rogers

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"Tyrants fear the people they oppress because they realize that someday many will rise against them and strike back."

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THE PROMISE OF AMERICA IS ALIVE

"May the road rise to meet you,

May the wind be always at your back,

May the sun shine warm upon your face...

And, until we meet again,

May God hold you in the palm of His hand."

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~~Please forgive me, at this moment I do not know the source

of this beautiful quote.

~~