Mitt Gives me Fits

I have always avoided writing anything political in my Blogs. For one, I don’t like politics. For two, I think it is a good way to lose friends. For three, no one seems able to discuss issues rationally. All people do is stick some brand on your hide and then they tell you what YOU supposedly think on every issue, whether you do or not. For four, I usually let anything these windbags of any and all parties say roll off my back blow away in the breeze.

But for some reason this Romney guy gets under my skin.

When asked recently if he thought he had the best chance to beat Obama, he said, “I don't think if I have the best chance, I think I have the only chance."

Maybe its just hubris, but we already have an egomaniac in the White House we don’t need another. He says things in a stupid way that can be used against him, maybe that’s why? A man running for President should know better how to phrase his remarks. “I just love firing people…”, “I don’t care about the poor…”, “I don’t think people want their President [paying more taxes than he owes…”

Opponents and Press took these out of context of what he meant, except the last statement where he was preparing everybody to hear just how little he pays in taxes compared to what he makes, yet he seems too dumb to understand that is the way his remarks will get played.

Now he tells us he is the only person in the whole wide world great enough to beat Obama. This guy doesn’t even know how to fake humility.

But he should learn or he shouldn’t give speeches in stadiums that make it look like nobody showed up to hear him. Maybe his ego told him 65,000 people would actually show up and fill the seats.

Personally, I don’t know why anyone wants to be President, but I really don’t know why this guy does. I can’t see where he has any strong convictions about anything. I get the sense of a salesman selling whatever is hot at the moment, but ready to switch his pitch as soon as it wanes. But his faulty marketing sense tells me he doesn’t understand the market he’s pitching too.

I think he wants to be President as a resume enhancement.

Now he is campaigning on rising both the age for receiving Medicare and Social Security. Well, isn’t that cute. If I had a quintillion dollars stashed away in the Cayman Island and a Swiss bank Account where I could avoid income tax maybe I wouldn’t care what age I got Social Security either.

To tell the truth, I think we might have all been better off never having the Social Security System. We would have been better off knowing it was up to us to set aside for our old age and as a society to look after each other within communities rather than ending up at the mercy of Washington politicians. But we DO have Social Security and just about every person living in the U.S. today has grown up under this system. It is what it is and I think we’re stuck with it. They promised us this would be there for us and forced by law to contribute to it all our working life. I am in my seventies collecting it, but also still paying into it when I work, and then paying some income tax on the portion I receive.

I remind those such as Mitt, rhymes with Nitwit, that I paid into this. I made premiums as I would into any annuity promising an investment to provide for my old age. I am sick and tired of politicians talking as if we are getting some kind of welfare. We are simply collecting what we paid for.  It was the politicians who cheated and took from the fund; it wasn’t my fellow seniors or I who not paying our premiums. We met our obligation; now the government must meet its own.

Mitt can run out there and talk about how everybody lives longer and therefore the age of payout should be later. Mitt finds that easy to say when he doesn’t have any worry about whether his car breaks down or the roof leaks or he gets sick, because he has a quintillion dollars. If I hadn’t been able to get Social Security when I did, I would have been in a world of hurt, maybe I really would be on welfare…and homeless. Mitt doesn’t have to worry about being homeless.

If you rich politicians, which is most of them and most of whom never did an honest days work in their lives, want to raise the age people can receive Social Security and Medicare, you better darn well do something on the other side of the equation.

You better tell those businesses out there not to terminate us old people. My friends and I talked about the fact that we don’t know anyone – NOT A PERSON – who managed to stay with a company and retire at 65. They could save a little in salary and benefits so bounced me out at age 60 after 21 years.

We can’t all get elected to the Senate and leach off the public until we die, now can we?

Many I know, including me, started working early in life. I began working in Grade School. I’ve worked continually ever since. I continued working after at 60. My jobs have been physical part time labor paying just above minimum wage. They keep laying me off because of the economy. You know, the ones on the bottom go first when the CEOs sees his or her stock options tail off. And you know at 70 it gets a little harder to get hired and a little harder to keep the body in working shape.

So, give me somebody with some positive ideas that help everyone, not the typical Corporate-think of let’s cut costs by cutting the employee health care and wages. Give me somebody who says what he means both today and tomorrow, and knows how to say it correctly so it isn’t misunderstood. And give me somebody who isn’t so rich they know knowing about the real world where most of us survive.

It is so sad if Romney is the best we can come up with.

This is not a Political Post.

My grandmother had an old country expression, “That man don’t have a lick of sense.” Now we all have slips of the tongue or say things without thinking, but if you are running for President and making public statements you need to have a good editor up in your brain.

Mitt Romney looks good. He cleans up real nice, don’t he? Has that little touch of gray at the temples, his tie on straight. He “looks Presidential” as they say. But he don’t talk good. (Yes, it is ungrammatical, but I’m not running for anything.) Romney is leading in the GOP circus right now, but his handlers better get him into Poli-Speak College for the course 101 - How Not to Give Your Opponents Negative Sound Bites.

This wouldn’t make no never mind (another old country saying) if we had an honest and decent Press in this country. We don’t. We have a bunch of vultures more interested in the gotcha moment than reporting fact or explaining anything fairly and at depth. If a candidate can’t grasp the need for caution when speaking to the Press, he is a fool.

Last week in the debates Romney made two comments about his tax statements that showed he is out of touch with the everyday working person in this country.

First he stated his 2010 tax return would “show he paid all the taxes he was obligated to pay.” Well, so do I. Of course, to do otherwise would be illegal and the IRS would be coming after me. I mean, what the heck is that? It sounds like every politician or business executive ever charged with cooking the books or fraudulent activity. “I have done nothing illegal. It was all within the law as it is written.”

In other words it sounds as if he is exploiting a bunch of loopholes to avoid paying tax. It may be legal, but it doesn’t look good and the average guy can’t do it. You know, like having a secret Swiss bank account or money stashed in the Cayman Islands.

Not realizing how such a statement would play in the press, he went up and compounded it with this quote, “I don't think the voters want a president who pays more than he owes." That quote just triggers people to be suspicious and look for something hidden.

Well, I suppose we don’t want anyone paying more than they owe, but why in the world would you make such a remark? It just reinforced the idea you pulled some shenanigans to avoid paying tax.  It also indicates a person knowing his returns are going to show something he wants to prepare people for because he knows it will look like he got off cheap.  It also says he is out of touch with the common man. It ranks up there with Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake," when people were asking for bread. As an old Credence Clearwater song goes, "I ain't no privileged son." Mitt is a privileged son.

Now a week later he opens his mouth and stupidity spews out. You would think he would have learned how the press, TV comedians and his opposition work from his previously and famously misquoted, “I love firing people.” You may be saying a perfectly reasonable and logical thing, but if you don’t frame it correctly, no one will hear the real message.

His “I love firing people” was only part of the statement, because he was referring to getting rid of service people who failed to provide the service promised. We all have done this at times. I switched phone companies some years back for service issues. It was the correct thing to do. But it was stupid to frame this very sensible and commonsense practice using the words “love” and “firing”.  And the predictable happened. Only that part of his comment was used in a totally different way than he used it to make him look like Ebenezer Scrooge rubbing his hands in glee because he loved firing poor Bob Cratchet. Unfair, untrue, but today’s reality.

Yet he made the same structural gaff again. He explained how he was concentrating on the vast majority of Americans, strengthening the middle class, an absolute necessity if we are to bring this country back to economic strength. He also said he would help fix any “holes in the safety net” for the poor. 


Unfortunately he again framed his statement stupidly. He began it by saying, “I don’t care about the poor…” That is all the reporter heard, not what he really said. Now that bad phrasing is going to show up on the lips of Colbert and Leno and Letterman and Fallon. Now those out of context words will become a nice sound bite for his opponents’ negative ads. I can hear the spots now: “Here is what Mitt Romney says, “I love firing people…I don’t care about the poor…”

Now this is not a political post. I am neither endorsing or non-endorsing any candidate of either party. I am angry that the press in this country does not bother to explain and illuminate rather than glory in “gotchas” and even will distort things in order to create one. But it is what it is and the fact Romney can’t seem to get a grasp on that fact bothers me. He manages to get his ties properly tied, but he needs to find a way to tie down his tongue.

Of course this constant distortion by the Press and others of what people actually say is what keeps good people from running for office. And look what we get stuck with.

Texting, Sexting and Kvetshn

In Arkansas and Texas it is illegal for a person under the age of 18 to text while driving.

This is the work of the people voted to office to make the laws.

Officer: "How'd you hit that tree?"

Teen: "I was texting lovey-dovey messages to my lovey-dovey and didn't realize I was driving on the sidewalk until I hit that tree."

Officer: "How old are you, son?"

Teen: "I'm nineteen, sir."

Officer: "Oh, why didn't you say so. That's all right then."

Texting is the in-thing now and some people are doing it while they drive. So the politicians have to jump up and act like they are doing something about it. A couple of years ago they were on their feet yelling about people driving while talking on cell phones.  Move to the future a bit and the politicians will be waving their fists about people reading Nooks and Kindles while driving.

What do we need these laws for?  53 years ago when I was learning to drive I had to memorize a booklet on rules of the road. There would be a test when I went for my Driver's License. It was made pretty clear that it was against the law to drive inattentively. You were required to maintain control of your vehicle at all times and if you failed to do so you could be in trouble; big trouble if you caused an accident. A decade ago when a woman caused an accident with my wife that totaled our car, that woman was cited by the police for "failure to maintain control of her vehicle." Apparently ten years ago it was still required that you drive attentively.

It would certainly seem to me that texting while driving would fall under the category "inattentive driving." Last year this state passed a law making it illegal to drive while on a cell phone. I'm still dodging drivers on cell phones. But apparently we have to have individual laws for every little inattentive practice when being inattentive ought to do the trick and cover it all. It doesn't really matter if the authorities are attentive in enforcing the law only that the politicians were attentive to the trends so they can claim they did something about being inattentive. (Case in point: Those condemned basketball nets remain long after their execution date. See Invasion of the Basketball Snatchers.)

So how do such laws get enforced then?

If the police can't grab a person steering with their knees while their eyes and thumbs are busy on a keyboard for inattentive (and reckless) driving now, how are they going to be more vigilant knowing texting is also specifically against the law? Will we have task force checkpoints to catch people texting as we do for catching DUI violators and (horror of horrors, apparently the worst crime against mankind ever) someone not wearing a seatbelt? These people can't even enforce the speed limit where speeding is pretty evident; how are they going to catch people texting below their visibility line?

Well, to add to the distraction, not only may they be texting while driving, they may be sexting. I am beginning to lose track of the "epidemics"(you know fat kids, pig flu, etc.) but I know sexting is on the list. In case you don't know, sexting is sending via phone naughty pictures of one's self. The photos may be scantily clad or not clad at all or not clad and doing bad.  Of course the concern is mostly voiced over teenagers sexting. Apparently a person of age sexting is appropriate behavior in our sophisticated culture, although if I were sexting it might be considered an act of terror. As usual, the usual suspects (re politicians) have to get in on the act. Not the act of sexting themselves, although that wouldn't surprise me in the least, but the act of pretense that they are doing something worthwhile about it. (The most worthwhile thing a politician can do, to paraphrase Old Man Potter in "It's a Wonderful Life", is to sit around on their brains all day and do nothing.)

Politicians are like the three characters who accompany Dorothy through Oz, except there is no Wonderful Wizard to help them out. You have a lot of politicians that don't have a brain, then you have a lot of politicians who lack any courage and you have very few politicians who have a heart. So you have some politicians actually, seriously, incredibly saying these sexting kids should be jailed for child pornography. There have even been several such arrests, one where two 14 and 15 year-old girls were arrested on such charges because they send nude pix of themselves to their boyfriends, who were 16 and 17. Everyone involved in both the sending and receiving was legally a child.

It reminds me of a few years back when some of our politicians proposed arresting and throwing in prison teens caught smoking.

Personally I think those people should be arrested for child abuse.

Why do we have laws against kids smoking and against child pornography?

Supposedly it is to protect children, which includes teenagers (and in cases of political unreasonable reasoning people of 24, 25, 28, and 35), because they are too young to make mature and reasoned judgments for themselves and thus will engage in activities that may be harmful to them.

But the politicians solution is to turn all this protection on its head and criminalize children for the bad judgement they are supposed to have for which such laws were made to begin with. Rather than protect the children from themselves they wish to throw them in prison. What does this protect them from? Here they can learn the economics of using cigarettes as currency and how to advance from recreational display of their bodies to a professional level. After all, they will need some sort of profession to fall back on once they return to society as ex-cons listed on the sex offender list, not to mention a lifetime of huddling in cold back alleys to sneak a smoke.

Now don't take this as an endorsement of texting while driving or sexting while showering or even smoking. Hopefully anyone who reads my writings realizes I often do so with tongue planted deeply in cheek. Texting while driving is very serious and dangerous, not just to the practitioner, but to others, including me. I just don't see the purpose of an additional law when it would seem to already be covered by existing ones. You can draw attention to the behavior through education and by having police pull over and ticket those they see driving inattentively. What does an individual law against talking on a cell phone, an individual law on texting while driving or so on add? If a woman is putting on her face in the rearview mirror and runs over a child is it somehow worse if she had been texting instead? If a truck driver has a head-on with a family of four while he is smearing Horsey Sauce on his Abby's Giant and ketchup on his curly fries worse if he was on his cell phone instead?

Be diligent in catching all inattentive drivers and that should cover it.

Sexting is also a stupid activity. Young people in the throes of hormonal development lean toward a lot of stupid behavior. I don't think most of these kids have child pornography in mind. They may not even think they are indulging in risky behavior. But they are.

If you have an accident while texting and you survive unscathed, you may still find your life ruined. You may have to live with the guilt of what you did to someone else. You may have financial obligations as a result of a lawsuit. You can suffer life changing consequences from sexting as well.

Recently one of the founders/heads of Google said in an interview he expected to see an epidemic (there's that word again) in a decade or so of people legally changing their names. He stated young people didn't understand the Internet. (Can you imagine that? Young people don't understand this technology. I thought it was only we Old Goats who didn't get it?) Young people have no idea what they are doing, so he said.

Why? Because of what they are writing in Blogs and the pictures they are putting out on MySpace and Facebook, because of such things as sexting. In another decade these young people will leave school for the job market. They will fill out applications and hiring managers will go online and Google their name and when they see those cute pictures of that applicant in the shower or whatever, there will go that job offer. Young people will be changing their names so prospective employers can't find what they wrote and imaged as a teenager.

But it goes beyond that, doesn't it? Take those 14 and 15 year-old girls foolishly arrested. Would it not have been better to handle this sort of situation more discreetly? Was it necessary to further splash these teens' faces and names across newspapers and the Internet? How does that protect them from themselves or from the predators out there?

What these kids need to learn is anything they put out in cyberspace goes everywhere in real world space. How would they feel to discover their little photos to tantalize their boyfriends were hanging in the bedroom of a pedophile?

I don't text and I don't sext. I do write Blogs and I've seen things I have put on my Blogs in many online publications around the world that I never heard of before. If I Google a subject for research and look at the images, I am often surprised to find images I have posted. I would never want to publish a photo of myself I wouldn't want my mother to see.

Don't do it.


(Kvetshn is the verb form of kvetch.)

First Time I Was Dead: Be Still My Heart

I wrote recently about my bout with an incorrigible thyroid. In that account I mentioned a nurse so stunned by my vitals she expected me to drop deep at her feet. But this was not the only time people pronounced my imminent demise. Some of the others did not build my confidence in or admiration for medical practitioners.

(Photo by Ronald Tipton Retired in Delaware Blog.)

In my callow youth I worked ten years for a very, very large company. When I took my first job there at age 18 it was known as The Atlantic Refining Company and was a regular sponsor of the Philadelphia Phillies radio and TV broadcasts. Part way through my tenure they began merging with certain other oil companies, most notably Richfield Oil Corporation. They then became known as ARCo and grew to be one of the 50 largest corporations in the country.

They have since disappeared as a separate entity, being swallowed up and becoming part of another oil refiner you may have heard of called British Petroleum or Barach Preferred or BP for short. They are known in the Gulf states as simply those _ _ _ _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _!

I worked for ARCo just short of ten years. If I had been thinking, I would have stayed a few more months because then my pension would have vested, but you don't have your mind on retirement when in your twenties.

Apparently during those Atlantic years I died.

You see a big corporation ARCo had its own in-house medical department with its own in-house health professionals -- presumably. They had a couple nurses and a doctor. Whenever an employee might complain of feeling ill, before those who be would grant the right to leave work, the complainant would be sent to the medical department for evaluation.

It so happened one fine day I felt a bit not so fit myself and off to see the health professionals I went. The nurse interviewed me and then the doctor popped out to give me the once other.

He was a shorter, squat, gray-haired man as I remember. He did the usual things. The stick in the mouth while you say "ah" and a few little hammer taps on the knee. Then he got his stethoscope out and pressed its chilly metal mouth against my bare chest. "Breath in and hold it," he said. "Now out and in again."

He then said, "Hmmm?'

Doctor's saying hmmm is seldom a good sign.

He now switched his stethoscope to my back and roamed it up and down, left and right, up and down, left and right,  each time punctuating the move with, "Hmmm?"

Now came the verdict.

"I can't seem to find a heartbeat," he says. "I'm going to send you home an hour early. I don't want you in the rush hour crowds."

Apparently dead men were a drag on rush hour crowds.

Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting

Okay, I admit it, we eat in a lot of bars.

The original reason for this is simple. We wanted to avoid squawky, shrieking infants and undisciplined wandering tots. The odds of avoiding these used to be better if you ate in the bar. The reason was the bar area was normally the designated smoking zone. Generally those bringing young children to sup avoided the cigar-cigarette crowd.

This all changed with the passing of smoking bans by the nanny-state. Now people will drag their infants and the infantile into any area of a restaurant. My suggestion was when smoking bans were implemented that restaurants should make the formally smoking areas child-free areas. But that didn't happen.

So why do we cling to eating in the bar area of restaurants?

More privacy and freedom to talk is the answer. Most bar areas have booths as opposed to the open tables in the dining rooms. You are presented with a buffer zone from the diners about you.

Now you might say, "Aren't bars noisy?"

Yes, often the bar is compared with the dining room. There is often music blaring and a dozen people about the bar itself chattering away at each other, but this just adds an extra layer of privacy. Who can hear your conversation over all that. Besides it is a different noise than that of a crying baby. Babies and young children can reach decibels in their wails and banshee shrieks that would down airplanes and break glass. Generally the bar sound morphs into a background hum, something like amped up white noisy.

Still and all, it is a bar and liquor is served. In our experience most nights have just been nice people getting together to untie the bounds of their daily stress, they chatter quietly, laugh occasionally and little more. Now granted, the Little Woman and I don't frequent Biker Bars and dives. None-the-less, once in a while there is an idiot in the house.

Thus it was this past Saturday night at our current favorite dining-out place.

We have a great fondness for this particular restaurant and its bar. It has booths in the bar with extreme high backs giving us that complete feeling of intimacy. The staff is always especially attentive and friendly. Even ones not serving you may stop by for a brief chat and wish you well. You are never rushed. The food is quite good and they have specials every night, which provides a nice variety when you dine often, and we do. And their prices are low.

Every place can sometimes make mistakes. On this Saturday our wait person messed up my order. I ordered a cajan burger, what I got was a fajita panini. I know, I know, how do you mix that up, they don't sound anything alike. Well, the Little Woman ordered a fajita salad and the young lady serving us simply got fajita stuck in her head. No big deal, they made it right and were very apologetic. The wait person was a bit upset, but we calmed her down and we were happy and at the end everyone was happy.  It wasn't the end of the world.

Then near the end of dining there was a ruckus at the bar. Some middle-aged guy was screaming at the barkeep, denouncing him in strong language, pounding and stomping about some mistake with his pizza. Everyone was looking at this clown demanding his money back and denouncing all the staff. There was no reasonableness here, just a self-centered (and perhaps tipsy) moron acting out.

The Little Woman doesn't take kindly to fools who disrupt her pleasant evenings. She let this bozo know he was a jerk, told him to hit the road and added on some descriptive characteristics far more saltier than the language I employ. The guy did stomp out of the joint.

You just don't rile the Little Woman's feathers.

The crowd at the bar applauded the Little Woman and at the end of the night the manager thanked us for having their back.

At the end my meal cost me only the tip I gave the wait person.

What more can one ask for a Saturday night but a dinner and a show for the price of the tip.




(Yes, the Little Woman - 5'10" - was once a mascot, a Road Runner, "Beep beep".)

Selfish SUV

So there I am on I-95.

It is a Friday mid-afternoon and I'm heading home from work.

Where I enter the Interstate it is five lanes wide and full of traffic. The speed limit is 55. You will get killed if you go that slow. The average speed is probably 80.

It isn't far from the toll booths on the Delaware-Maryland border. Traffic on the other side of the medium is at a stand still, lined all the way back from the toll plaza. Traffic going my way is moving, a hugh mass of cars, trucks and occasional buses all speeding to the Northeast like a strange metallic blanket on wheels.

The speed limit in Maryland is 65. You pay your toll, cross the line and suddenly it is 55. Nobody takes notice and nobody is only doing 65 either.

I have to cross all five lanes from the far right to the far left. Its part art and part daredevil act. If I don't slide down to the third lane I 'm going to find myself trapped going to New Jersey or New York via the Delaware Memorial Bridge. It's a Friday afternoon in the good ol' summertime. The seashore is beckoning, the outer lanes are already bumper-to-bumper and slowing to a crawl.

I've gotten pretty good at this and I make it down to the far left lane alive. Now around the bend another lane will appear and I will slide over once more.

I am coming toward Wilmington and around a bend I am suddenly in the middle lane. Five lanes went to six and now down to three. But the right lane is going to disappear down an off-ramp in a short distance and then we will be on a two-lane highway. Traffic is still heavy and fast and on the shoulder of the road is a sign. It says, "Road Construction Ahead - Right Lane Closed". That right lane is my lane now. Another sign warns us to "Merge Left 2500 Ft."

That's about a half mile, so I flick on my left turn signal.  I'm not one of those people who speed along as far as possible and then at the last moment zips into the other lane. They're the people who slow everything up or cause accidents. If everyone would ease over and each car in the open lane would let one car from the closed lane enter traffic would keep moving at a steady pace.

I know this won't happen and I am not going to get a half mile down the road and find myself trapped in the closed right lane.

There is a gap in the traffic to my left and I begin to slide in, but as I do a SUV in the left speeds up and closes the gap.  I am still trying to ease in, but now he beeps his horn at me. What is his problem? Doesn't he see the situation? Of course he does, he's just one of these selfish, self-centered losers who think they manhood is endangered if they yield to anyone.

I am still inching into the left lane, but now he speeds up a bit more trying to cut me off and I have to swerve back to the right. It is lucky I wasn't hit by the on-coming cars.

I am side by side with this guy now. I glance over. He looks like a yuppie-type. A woman is in the passenger seat. She looks yuppified as well.  The man is perhaps forty or late thirties, bald. He stares straight ahead.

I pull ahead in my lane. A sign on the shoulder says, "Lane Closed - 1500 feet".

I pull ahead of the next car in the left lane. A woman is driving alone. I pull ahead, my left blinker still blinking and she lets me over into the gap ahead of her. I am determined to let anyone needing to merge left to merge now.

Ahead is a large blinking arrow blocking off the right lane and pointing left. Now all those cars that have been whizzing past me and whizzing past the selfish SUV guy who wouldn't let me in are switching over to our lane. Traffic comes to a stop, then continues in a spurt and stop, spurt and stop.

The guy in the SUV is still one car behind me. This is what was ahead for him all along. What did it gain him not letting me merge?

It is one lane all the way through Wilmington. It seems to take forever to pass the city and the line of orange cones before we have two lanes again. Eventually we are out of the blockage and speeds pick up. There is far less traffic on this side and I am cruising along now. I look in my read view mirror and there is the SUV, trapped behind two trucks, slowly fading away in the distance behind me.

I couldn't be happier.