Blithering On

In 1989, SimCity, a city-building simulation computer game, was released. The point of the game was to get the player to design and create a city by adding buildings, creating power grids, establishing transportation systems, adjusting the tax rate, zoning property, and more. The player could expect to encounter a number of calamities like floods, earthquakes, plane crashes, fires, and more. In some cases, these disastrous occurrences could generate other hardships that the player had to deal with. As the player played, he or she needed to establish a tax basis, a zoning plan for the kind of growth that would encourage and support production and consumption, and make growth decisions his city could afford to purchase and  maintain. In light of the budget and spending battle underway in the Congress, it occurred to me that it would be great if there was a simulation our Congressmen could plug their proposals into to see what exactly they should expect in the way of outcomes of all of

I don't have a problem with guys getting emotional at times. If the tears are genuine, they sometimes and in certain circumstances show a depth of passion and feeling that words don't adequately describe. There are other times when it doesn't matter what the tears mean to the crier because they hold an entirely different meaning to others who see them. When people want empathy, they'll indulge the tears; when they want leadership, they don't want tears, they want to see you pound the table instead. Representative John Boehner, the Speaker of the House-in-waiting, is taking some heat over his most recent well-publicized bawling episode. The videos and pictures of Rep. Boehner are getting a lot of air time; they show this weekend's watering, aired on 60 Minutes, as more than a chin-quivering, moist-eyed moment of sensitivity. They show him in a complete teary breakdown. I don't believe for a second that Mr. Boehner's tears are contrived so I don't fa

This morning, Justice Stephen Breyer took to the Sunday news shows to promote his new book, "Making Our Democracy Work." In the course of his interview with Fox's Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday," Justice Breyer indicated the Founders never intended for as free an application of the right to bear arms as many citizens today insist upon. He said that James Madison, in writing the Second Amendment, wrote the right to bear arms into the Bill of Rights more out of an interest in getting the Constitution ratified than an interest in granting citizens the right to bear arms. Justice Breyer hinted that Madison was more interested in appeasing the states than he was in granting this right since the states never would have ratified the Constitution without it. Well, Justice Breyer is probably right, but it's not exactly an OMG revelation as much it is a DUH moment. Most of the men we know as the "Framers" of the Constitution were not only opposed to add

The Federalists believed the Articles of Confederation, our first constitution, made the national government too weak. Thus, they pushed for a new constitution. The Anti-Federalists, on the other hand, believed the constitution that was proposed to replace the Articles of Confederation would make the national government too strong and would essentially create a monarchy. After a near-civil war over the issue of a proposed new constitution, the Federalists and Anti-Federalists came together with a compromise. The Federalists would get their constitution and the Anti-Federalists would get a bill of rights that amended the Constitution and limited the power and authority of the government in favor of the rights and responsibilities of states and individuals. The Constitution was ultimately ratified and the Bill of Rights became the first ten amendments to the Constitution. That was the compromise that set the standard for all government compromises in this country. The compromise that p

Most polls have Congress' approval rating hovering below 25% and its disapproval rating somewhere around 70%. I believe those marks are representative of two general sentiments: first, of those who pay attention and really don't like the job Congress is doing, and second, of those who don't have a clue and chime in against Congress because it seems to be the thing to do. For those of us who are paying attention, we need to continue to vote our representatives out of office if they fail to represent us as they should. We ought to set high expectations and take our representatives to task when they don't meet those expectations. For those who aren't paying attention and just like to bellow about Congress, I don't know what to say except this is a great time to start paying attention. In the past two years, we've seen the Executive Branch move on its agenda at a feverish pace with barely a hint of dialogue and debate in the halls of government. Sure, the med

The two candidates had been friends for years and had a long history of setting aside politics in favor of finding common ground for the benefit of the people whose interests they represented. They were intelligent, courageous visionaries although they had quite different temperaments and philosophies in many ways. While they were different in many ways, they seemed always to find a way to get along. They got along, that is, until they decided to run for the same political office. During the campaign, one claimed that the other had such a weak character that he had neither the "firmness of a man" nor the "sensibility of a woman," asserting in very clear terms that his character had a decidedly hermaphroditic quality. Not to be outdone, his opponent accused him of being a mean-spirited low-life whose mother was a "mixed-breed Indian squaw." His description of his father was equally insulting. As the barbs amplified, one candidate claimed the other was a

With the new Congress about to be seated, the health care issue is sure to come up again. The issue is worth another look before the fur really starts flying. First of all, I'm not an insurance guy, but I think I get how it works...I take out a health insurance policy so my medical bills can be covered in case I get sick or hurt. An insurance company will write an insurance policy on me if it believes it will make more money from my premiums and their reinvestment of my premiums than they pay out for my medical bills. That's fair enough. They take a risk on me and their confidence in my good health. I'm fine with that. We both hope I'm a good risk, but for different reasons. I'm fine with that too. In an odd twist of irony perhaps, I hope my insurance company is REALLY good at minimizing its risk exposure because if I ever need to collect on my insurance, I want it to have PLENTY of money available to pay up. I want them to be very successful and profitable. But

The word "quagmire" is thrown around quite a lot these days in an attempt to relate our current conflicts to Vietnam in a negative way. For many critics, Vietnam is the poster child for quagmires, and the use of that term is a discrediting stigma. In my view, Vietnam is still very much misunderstood, which means that we are probably less than a generation away from seeing a good bit of folklore about the war become recorded history . Vietnam was a quagmire in the minds of many because it required the protracted commitment of our military forces and there were no "legitimate" strategic benefits from our involvement there. Critics saw Vietnam as a perpetuation of the military industrial complex's insatiable desire for conflict with which to fuel its engine. I think there is much more to it that than that, but I admit that my sense of that war is not as cynical. In my mind, what made Vietnam a quagmire - to the extent that it was - were the limitations placed o

I heard this on the radio tonight: "We're a nation of laws, but at the same time, our Constitution isn't a suicide pact either." My take: True. Treacherously slippery, but true.

We all remember the terror attacks of 9/11. We also remember that in the immediate aftermath of those attacks President Bush declared a Global War on Terror which essentially broadened the potential battleground in the campaign on terror beyond the rugged countryside of Afghanistan. We remember the suspicion that Iraq produced or possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). We had reason to believe it had them. The Iraqis had used them on the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq War, they had used them on the Kurds in their own country in recent memory, weapons inspectors were obstructed in their efforts to get to the bottom of the issue in Iraq before being tossed out of the country on a number of occasions, and we now know from Saddam Hussein's own mouth that he intentionally led the United States to believe Iraq had these weapons because he wanted Iran to believe they had them. That turned out to be a significant and tragic gamble for him. So, we attacked Iraq on the pretense that it was

Don't tell my wife I've written this because it will make her unnecessarily self-conscious about her "situation." You see, over the years, she has learned to become quite dependent on me. She needs me, and I don't want to burden her with the thought of it now. There's no point in stirring the pot and making her self-conscious. The story begins in 1980 when I found her as a shiftless wandering waif on the campus of the University of Missouri where we were both students. We met one day when I rushed in to her rescue as she brooded over a college algebra book. I've always been a humanitarian. Well, those few minutes of assistance turned into a lifetime of dependency for her. She spent the next two years stalking me relentlessly until she broke me down. Not able to take it any more, I finally asked her to marry me, and so at the ripe old age of 19, she had found and married the man of her dreams. After about a year of marriage, I saved her from the dreary

Something stinks here. About every other week or so, we hear that the website WikiLeaks has bared another bundle of secrets on its website. By the time the reporting is completed on one of these episodes, we're often reminded that Army PFC Bradley Manning has been charged with feeding secrets to the website with the implication that he and WikiLeaks are solely to blame for the security breaches. Manning is a PRIVATE FIRST CLASS. Nothing against PFCs - I used to be one - but how did this one work around so much classified material without supervision and oversight? Who was in charge of him? Any idea how many tens of thousands of soldiers outrank PFC Manning? I'm becoming very concerned about what is  not  being said by the government and what is not  being asked by the media. Why isn't the media pressing the government for answers regarding how the release or compromise of this information to WikiLeaks could have ever happened in the first place? Who was the accountable cu

I had never been to combat before I was deployed in support of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in late August of 1990. I had flown quite a lot of rather difficult tactical missions, however, where we needed to be intense and absolutely focused on what we were doing. The missions we flew as we trained to deploy and those we flew while on deployment were especially challenging because of all of the moving parts and because of the complexity we deliberately dialed into our scenarios. Before launching from the ship on those missions, I used to go down to my state room (living quarters) to gather and put on my flight gear and to "get my mind right" for the mission. A lot of pilots listened to a little bit of "mood music" before flying. In my own case, I usually cranked up the volume to U2's "New Years Day" before heading to the flight deck to start the mission. Most of us believed getting zoned in with good mission planning and the right mood was

A headline last month read, "Obama: Abraham Lincoln Would Have No Place in Today's GOP." The suggestion, of course, is that not even Lincoln would be comfortable in today's "party of Lincoln." It seemed to be a provocative statement in a way so I thought I'd look into it to see whether Lincoln really would not have fit in with today's Republicans as the President suggested. History tells us the Republican Party was formed in 1854 at a convention of disgruntled Whigs and Democrats who disagreed with the standard Democrat position of the day supporting the expansion of slavery west of the Mississippi. The Republicans presented their first presidential candidate, John C. Fremont, in 1856 who lost a three-way race that showed that if the Republican candidate in 1860 could carry two more large states like, say, Illinois, it could win in 1860. In 1860, the Republicans trotted out a relatively unknown senator from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, as its presid

Some thoughts about the TSA body scan/radical pat-down drama. Change you can believe in . It's ironic that the same people who squalled on and on about the Patriot Act think it's okay to conduct revealing body scans of every person who passes through certain airports whether there is probable cause or not. Of course, the safety and security argument prevails; it's just interesting to see these people use that argument. Let's be dignified about this . Of course, we need to conduct these expensive and technologically elaborate full body scans because we believe it's beneath the dignity of our national security initiative to extract a template of our enemies and apply that profile to travelers.  We have the odd sense that it is better to impose radical search techniques on the general public than it is to know our enemy well enough to recognize him, his behaviors, his patterns, etc. True believers . I wonder to what extent the commercial interests of former politici

I'm sure you've seen the GEICO Insurance commercial where the squirrel runs out into the middle of the road, causing a car to swerve and run off the road. After the car crashes, the critter's little squirrel buddy runs out and they high-five and dap each other. They're pretty proud of themselves as GEICO goes on to preach about how easy it is to get GEICO. So, I was driving down a narrow road early yesterday morning when a squirrel ran out in front of my car just like that one did in the GEICO commercial. The road was fairly narrow so I didn't even hesitate in my decision to bear down on that squirrel rather than steer out of my lane to miss it. Before you judge me as insensitive and cruel, let me say that there was no way that I was going to veer off the road into a ditch or a tree and leave a couple of tree-climbing rodents to high-five each other in the middle of the street at my expense. Instead, I lined up on that squirrel. He got all bug-eyed when he realiz

As I walked into the grocery store the other day, I stopped to grab a shopping cart at the same time a woman next to me reached for one. As we turned to walk into the store, three women walked out. I didn’t really take note of them because they were fairly unremarkable to me, but the woman standing beside me did. As I turned toward her to allow her to enter the store ahead of me, she just looked at me and shook her head as though we shared a sense of dismay at something we had both heard or seen. I had no idea what specifically she might be shaking her head about, so I simply greeted her with a “how’re you doing today?” She answered that she couldn’t believe the way women dress when they go out today. I assumed she was referring to the three women who had just left the store, so I went along and shook my head saying as sincerely as I could, “it’s amazing, isn’t it?” I still really had no idea what she was talking about. She went on to tell me that she is a 73-year old woman and t