America, “To be or not to be…”

The retardant of nations?
America has always been a nation but never a functioning one. There is lots of talk of late conferring our country as dysfunctional and, in my opinion, something with prolong dysfunctional elements also has elements of retardation; benign or otherwise.

Further, something dysfunctional was at one time functional. When something has been labeled “dysfunctional” you make efforts to restore functionality when and wherever possible. One may ask was this country functional from its beginning killing the original inhabitants? Was there ever optimum functionality during its three hundred years of having human slaves? Was there functional rational going into the various wars we wholeheartedly embraced? One may ask is America being functional now with concerted efforts to deny all its citizen full health coverage?

I posit this country is not nor has it ever been a functioning nation and we have to learn to live with it the best we can.

I always say, “If you start off wrong, you end up wrong!” I say this due to the fact there is no positive back ground for America to pull upon. There is no “Good ol’ days” to model but alas, there is the constant “Carry me back to ol’ virginny” and “Oh, I wish I was in the land of Dixie” pervasive and dysfunctional mentality.

Many citizens of America and well wishers elsewhere do not want the fate of this country to continue the inevitable road to its demise but most of us know you can not change either background nor DNA. Where is this country’s “Role model” era? Many of us believe there never was one nor will there be one in the distant future. Authentic history combined with cold realities is a bitch! Sad.
Fighting for the dignity of my Ancestors,
God bless Bill Gates, WPFW, C-SPAN and the spirits of the unborn for the help,
BB

Mr. President: The Republicans Want To Destroy You
by Turkana
Example:
Despite his attempts at bipartisan comity, the Republicans have undermined President Obama in every way they have deemed it possible. They spent half a year pretending to negotiate health care reform, and then, despite his compromising and capitulating in countless ways, they didn't give him a single vote. No matter his intentions, theirs remain singular and monomaniacal. They want his presidency destroyed. They want his agenda destroyed. And as they proved with President Clinton, if they consider it necessary in the pursuit of their aims, they won't hesitate to try to destroy President Obama, personally. That's who they are. If they weren't that despicable, they could not perpetually pursue their despicable agenda.
Read more at:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/12/26/819404/-Mr.-President:-The-Republicans-Want-To-Destroy-You

And
DSCC - Please, for the love of God, stop calling me.
by Steaming Pile
Excerpt:
One reason for this is because when the Republicans ran the Congress, they could usually count on peeling off a small, but usually sufficient bloc of Democratic votes for just about any idiotic thing they were trying to do at the time.  I might guess that this was sufficient proof in some people's eyes that the converse was true, that one or two moderate Republicans could be enlisted to support the Democrats.  Uh, no.  Not the case.  This was already evident back in February or March or wherever it was that the economic stimulus bill was passed.  When I think back on it, the fact that the Republicans could usually get their four or five Democratic votes to give their dumbshit a thin veneer of bipartisanship should have clued me in that 60 votes wouldn't be enough to do jack squat.  Anything likely to reach the floor would have to meet with the approval of the same handful of Democrats that enabled the Bush administration all these years.  I'm sorry, but you can get somebody else to pay for that, because I have better things to spend my money on, thanks.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/12/26/819443/-DSCCPlease,-for-the-love-of-God,-stop-calling-me.

My macaroni and cheese and a fighting nephew

It’s a good feeling when everybody in your small family tells you that you make the best macaroni and cheese they have ever tasted. When they all tell you no festive occasion is complete without your macaroni and cheese and you are “De man,” its hard to be modest.

In my experience, macaroni and cheese and potato salad can make or break a festive occasion. They are your “tour de fort” when planning an occasion for our family. No good macaroni and cheese or no good potato salad bumps anything else you may have. Whether glazed ham, hansom turkey, good greens or the best fried chicken in the world, for us, if the macaroni and cheese or potato salad do not work, you have wasted good chewing time and a few of us get a bit agitated.

I tell them you have to use Cracker Barrel Cheese and grate it and not Velveeta or “Store brand” cheese.

Awhile back and when I was boasting at one of our events, my son said you have to also use Hellmann‘s Mayonnaise. I have always used Hellmann’s Mayonnaise and did not realize it may also make a difference in preparing the dish along with the other ingredience but I surmised he and his wife had, at one time or another, used a Brand X mayonnaise and were not satisfied.

My very social Nephew always tells stories about being confrontational with people after tasting their macaroni and cheese pronouncing, “It does not taste as good as Uncle BB’s!” and the challenge is on with him and his friends. I have not personally witnessed him saying this to his host or friends but from hearing him tell it, the debate gets pretty heated and, of course, he ignores my cautions not to continue making people angry at him and me. (Smile)

I got up early this morning to make my macaroni and cheese and just have to wait for someone to pick me up to go to dinner. I sprinkled a little paprika and parsley flakes on top to give it a holiday look. Merry Christmas!
As always,
BB

Pres. Obama learning to dance the Washington Pretzel

I call it the Washington Pretzel due to the intricacies of the steps, the agile positioning of the body and inordinate pressures on one’s memory banks while executing this courtly circle dance accompanied by the harpsichord and a few wind instruments.

There are few I have seen execute this dance as perfectly as "Madame Secretary" herself, Ms. Madeleine Albright. Her grace and majesty has been the envy of the Beltway society for decades.

In my opinion, Sec. Hillary Clinton never mastered the dance due to the fact she inserts what some say are “…. awkward steps, perhaps reminiscent of her days in Arkansas!”

One’s ability to dance the Washington Pretzel is the only ticket to inside Washington, Georgetown and nearby Virginia. There is no substitute.
Observers are kind when they spot Alan Greenspan on the ballroom floor dancing the dance wherein one may also bare witness to men finding lint to pull off their sleeves and women quietly reading the beads on their bracelets.

So it appears Pres. Obama has presented his credentials and abandoned the dance he danced on the Ellen Degeneres Show last year putting his dancing future in the hands of dancing master, Rahm Emanuel. Walking the halls of the White House early on a Saturday morning, the music has stopped and one may, quite by accident, observe loud “discussions” from the rehearsal room; it seems Pres. Obama refuses to add Hora steps to the Washington Pretzel dance, insisted on by Rahm.

The President gets quiet when Rahm tells him Henry Kissinger incorporates the Hora steps when he dances the dance but alas, Obama wants to be a purist. He insists on perfecting the original dance “..as he wonders if Rahm is the best teacher for him to learn such a crucially important Washington insider dance.” The President does get Rahm to admit Ronald Ragan also perfected the dance without inserting Hora steps. The President often fantasizes seeing Madeleine and Ronald dancing the Washington Pretzel together. He wipes his brow, walks to the middle of the floor to continues his rehearsal. The music begins. Rahm smiles.

UPDATED: Candidate Obama DID Campaign On The Public Option!
by slinkerwink
Excerpt:
This revisionist history has to stop. Back then, what we call the public option was called the public plan, and it was a major mark of his health care plan and his speeches, including his campaign stops such as this one in front of Planned Parenthood in 2007. Yes, you read that right, 2007.
And
For starters, Obama's proposal would require that all children have coverage. He would expand the tax-funded children's health-insurance program to make sure that those unable to join private plans were covered. Although Obama would not require adults to have insurance, he would mandate that large businesses either provide coverage to their employees or pay into a new public plan through which anyone without coverage could buy it. Small-business owners would be exempt and would get a 50 percent health-care tax credit to help ease their cost of employee coverage. People without coverage could buy insurance through new public and private plans. Key to Obama's plan is creation of a National Health Insurance Exchange in which private insurers would offer coverage as generous as the government's plan, with new regulations requiring them to accept and not penalize anyone regardless of pre-existing conditions, Tanden said. [Columbus Dispatch, 9/23/08, via Lexis]
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/12/22/818186/-UPDATED:-Candidate-Obama-DID-Campaign-On-The-Public-Option!

As always,
BB

HCR: Lessons!!

The Montessori School of learning for pre-schoolers has/had as one of its tenants the philosophy a child learns by doing. The child learns by auto-discovery, trial and errors and happenstance. The teacher is instructed to intervene as little as possible during the child‘s “learning” process. My daughter went to one for a few years.

There are a lot of teachers teaching in colleges, community colleges and universities who never took the series of training course required for teachers. Having a love for teaching and just loving yourself some students does not do it; as the song from the musical “South Pacific” goes, “You have to be carefully taught!”

I clearly remember Rev. Jesse Jackson saying his run for President of the United States of America was to show people the political process of running for the office. There were Rev. King‘s “Letters from a Birmingham Jail” teaching us the process.

So it was, I expected our President, a teacher of Constitution Law at a United States prestigious university, to “learn” me a hell’ova lot of stuff regarding our government. I expected him to learn me things beyond what I learned from Rev. Jackson and Rev. King. The word “ecstatic!” comes to mind. Therein lies my rub with Pres. Obama! He did not help guide me through the learning process and especially not through this latest boondoggle called HealthCare Reform aka Sausage Making and I am pissed like you would never believe!

It is going to take me a while to get over the traumas learning those lessons but what hurts most of all is the teacher, Pres. Obama, did not help me learn throughout the learning process. I was left on my own. Left to sink or swim. Literally abandoned! Not only did I feel abandoned in learning the lesson but also helplessly frustrated time and time again and to forgive a teacher for doing that to you is truly a hard pill to swallow.

Serious questions are raised when a student has these feelings about a teacher when something like that happens to him. There are questions regarding the teacher’s competency and dedication and the list goes on and on well into the negative. To repeat, it is going to take me a while to get over this. As they say about us Capricorns, we may forgive but we never forget. When you turn your teacher off, your role model, you have a problem.

Fighting for the dignity of my Ancestors,
God bless Bill Gates, WPFW, C-SPAN and the spirits of the unborn for the help,
BB
P.S. I felt a little cheered up this morning hearing Elliot Spitzer saying this was not a HealthCare Reform Bill but rather an expansion of HealthCare. That made me feel kind’a better.

Bad Theater

Preparing a bill in Congress is colloquially called “Sausage Making”. I respectfully address the need for a new and improved sausage making machine.

I signal the fact the current Congressional sausage making machine is not a twenty first century state of the art product and could possibly make good theatre; it is hand cranked by workers in shifts and has no scheduled maintenance times. Most of its existing working parts are now unrecognizable relics of the originals, mindful of the brilliance and creativity of the Cubans in keeping their old American Chevrolet cars running. A further analogy could be made invoking memories of sketches of DaVinci’s flying machine as a stage production.

Show Time: Making Sausage
I do not understand why Pres. Obama and Company wanted to come on stage making sausage, of all things, and with an antiquated monstrosity. What were they thinking? Who did they think it would impress? For sure the box and front row patrons are not impressed at this point and there are loud boos coming from the distant balconies. Who would want to vicariously buy and eat sausages made under such unsanitary conditions?

Who is to tell Pres. Obama and Company there are newer sausage making machines? That some machines are computer run and small enough to sit on a counter-top? Sleek and shiny products that would look better on stage? That they can make the finest sausage in a fraction of the time it is taking their 19C prop? That they could experience much less frustrations and faux theatrics and also have improved dialog because what they are calling dialog is becoming tiresome and, worst, predictable?

Who will tell them? Will it be the mystery guest we are told lurking behind stage door #1, 2 or 3? Will act three bring this show to a satisfying ending? If not, will this much talked about and highly anticipated farce of a show close right after the New Year in 2010? (Anyhow, whoever heard of a show about making sausage?) Dumb!
Intermission!
As always,
BB