I voted early. Did you?

Yesterday afternoon after work, I went over to our county Board of Elections office to early vote, assuming that I'd whiz right on in and right on out again in minutes. Boy, was I wrong! There was a very long line of people waiting to vote who probably made the same assumption as I did, even on a cold and miserably rainy day. It did take a while to be able to get in and cast my vote, and I was disappointed to see that we were supposed to use the controversial Diebold touch-screen voting machines. I had assumed we'd use paper ballots in the old fashioned manner that would then be put in a box and stored in a safe until Election Day (that's what someone told me would happen if I early voted). Well, turns out we voted the same way we would have had we gone to the polls on November 4th. The Board of Elections folks told me that it had been a relatively light turnout day compared to what it has been since early voting began on September 30th. Still, there were lots and lots and lots of people and a good long line, meaning that interest in this election is very high, so much so that there are predictions of a record 80% turnout! Good turnouts typically favor Democratic candidates, so I hope that all of us of that party affiliation are out there getting out the vote and voting ourselves! Depending on which polls you're paying attention to, Obama's either got a double digit lead, or he's running neck-and-neck with McCain.

Here in Ohio, it's literally neck-and-neck, down to single digit percentage points. The candidates have been barnstorming Ohio in recent days and will be back in our state in the coming days to "close the argument" for their case for being voted our next President. Naturally, McCain is throwing everything he can at Obama, accusing him of fomenting socialism, of being just another tax and spend liberal, of "spreading the wealth" by taking people's money away and proposing job killing tax increases and so on. It's the same nonsense we've heard all along from Republicans for far too long now, and their legacy in this administration has been one big disaster. Naturally, as a result of our economic crisis, due to the terrible economic, free-market, deregulation policies of the Bush administration, McCain in recent days has tried to distance himself from Bush even though he has recently proudly admitted voting with Bush over 90% of the time in favor of Bush policies. All of which means that a McCain-Palin administration will basically be more of the same crap we've dealt with in the past 8 years. I don't know as Obama will have an easy time of it cleaning up the Republican mess left behind if he wins next week, and he's as much told us that it won't be easy, and not to expect overnight results. Here in Ohio, we really need change badly. We're an old industrial state that has seen its economic base eroded as heavy manufacturing has moved out of the state and gone south and to China and anywhere else cheap labor can be found. As a result, our state budget is in deficit and our job situation is grim. Unemployment is at 7.2% as of September and who knows what it will be this month. But it doesn't look good, and as you can see, a goodly chunk of the state is red and only a small portion is blue and the rest are "purple swing counties" that could go one way or another, depending on how people feel about the current economic crisis at hand. Well, with millions of people like me voting early, it bodes well for a Democratic victory next week, so let's hope that people don't continue to vote against their own self interest and instead look at their wallets and make their decisions on whether they are better off now than they were four - or even eight - years ago. Not many of us can say that we are, and I'm willing to bet that the good majority of us are not. I hope that this will tip the scales in favor of a big Democratic victory, but only time will tell. Next week will be the deciding factor as the still undecided voters finally start making their choices as to who they will vote for. They are the key to this election. Let's hope that they vote their pocketbooks instead of giving into fear and voting the wrong way. After all, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said it best when he told fearful Americans at the dawn of the Depression: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself!"

Lobbying the pols

This weekend, the Progressive Democrats of America's "Healthcare, Not Warfare" tour came to town, complete with the California Nurse's Association (featured in the Michael Moore film, "SiCKO") and a special visit from Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), sponsor of H.R. 676, the universal health care for all Americans bill. First stop was Obama HQ's in downtown Kent, and a small group of us health care advocates had a chance to meet with Congressman Conyers to discuss our concerns and talk about where things are going from here. It was quite an honor to meet such a legendary figure. Congressman Conyers has served 22 terms in Congress, and is one of the senior, if not the senior member of the House of Representatives. At age 79, he's still full of passion and energy and is ready to keep up the fight for ordinary people and their concerns. On Sunday morning, we met with the national leadership of the Progressive Democrats of America over breakfast at Mike's Place restaurant, a colorful local establishment in Kent, to talk strategy for winning more progressive seats in both Houses of Congress as well as how to put Barack Obama over the top in Ohio. We were told not to get too confident, as McCain has been, in recent days, tightening the race and now it's down to a dead heat here in Ohio to where either one could easily win this state. So we were encouraged to get out the vote and talk to undecided friends, family, co-workers and anyone else we knew sitting the fence. Then we adjourned to the Cuyahoga Falls Natatorium in nearby Cuyahoga Falls, for a town hall forum on health care. Well, there wasn't much of a turnout, but we had yet another visit from the legendary Congressman Conyers and had a small, intimate meeting with him to talk more about the health care issue and H.R. 676. He gave a very impassioned speech about how meeting with we few in just such a setting was more important to him than big rallies, because he had a chance to talk one on one with us and hear our voices, our stories and what we plan to do to turn things around. He called us "extended family" because we are doing the work to carry on the progressive message that he's fought for in his over 40 years in Congress. It was so neat to be able to introduce ourselves to the Congressman and to tell him what brought us to this point and why we felt so passionate about the whole health care issue to where we were willing to fight so hard for it. What was so cool was that his staff members were trying to hurry him out of the meeting to meet a plane to travel elsewhere, but he decided that he'd stay in Ohio to do more work with us to further the cause of health care, so we were blessed with having more time with Congressman Conyers than we expected. It was such an honor to meet him and to have a chance to speak to him face to face and to urge him to keep fighting the good fight in Washington to bring universal health care to all Americans.

And so, from there, we traveled to Hudson to the VFW Hall to attend a rally for Mike Moran, Democratic candidate for State Representative for the 42nd District. I live in the 68th District, represented by Kathleen Chandler, but I wanted to badger this Moran fellow to support universal health care for all Ohioans if he's elected to represent his district. I also wanted to meet the night's special guests, Senator Sherrod Brown from Ohio, retired Senator John Glenn, legend and astronaut, and Governor Ted Strickland. Naturally, I badgered all of these political figures about the health care crisis that our country faces and how important it is to support single payer, universal health care. I mentioned that it would make American businesses more competitive in the world markets because they would no longer have to be concerned about paying health care premiums for their active and retired employees, thus saving American businesses billions of dollars and quite possibly saving millions of American jobs from being shipped overseas. Well, I just hope that all of these important people listened to me. I know that the incremental approach is the one currently favored instead of going to a single payer system, and we were told by Congressman Conyers that we have to keep the heat on our legislators to sign on as endorsers of H.R. 676. Currently there are 91 co-signatories to this bill in the House of Representatives, which isn't bad, given that there are still a lot of people who don't understand what it is all about. One hears whispers of "socialism!", as if somehow that is a bad thing, but what is the massive government bailout of the failing banks but socialism? What is the GI Bill, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but socialism? So we've already got socialistic programs in place, so what are people so darned afraid of, anyhow? I don't know as we'll have universal health care in my lifetime, but all I can do is to keep being an activist for change and keep talking to those with the power to make that change. This weekend, I had more than my chance to speak to some pretty powerful people, and I am delighted at having had the privilege to meet such amazing people who listened to my story and who seem to want to help. It's going to take time, but I think that we can make the changes that so many Americans are calling for in our spreading health care crisis. I'm only one voice, but there are so many others out there who have it far worse than me, including "Eileen The Poor Person", a lovely woman I met at the Mike Moran rally who lost her job, and now, as a result, not only has no health care, but is about to lose her home to foreclosure as well. One crisis can cause a cascading effect like that, and it's not right and it's not fair and it must change. Hopefully in eight short days, that change will come about. Let's keep our fingers crossed that all the stars will align the right way to make it happen!

What "middle class"?

It seems that in the waning weeks of this L-O-N-G Presidential campaign, what was once known as the "middle class" is now on every candidate's lips, thanks to "Joe the Plumber", who gained his 15 minutes of fame during a campaign stopover in Toledo by Barack Obama. McCain is accusing Obama of "wealth re-distribution" via his plan to tax the more wealthy people to pay for things that would benefit those of us who used to inhabit that nebulous place once known as the "middle class". Well, the reason that there hardly exists a middle class anymore is because of the Bush administration's policies that redistributed so much of the wealth upward that, hey, isn't it time for those of us on the financial bottom rungs of society to benefit just a little bit? I was raised to think that if I went to school and got a good education, then went to college and got a degree and then started a career, that everything from that point on would be a bed of roses and that my life would be set for me in financial comfort. In point of fact, I played by the rules, did as I was told, got my college degree, started a career, but life has hardly been that financial bed of roses I was seemingly promised. Every month is a struggle to pay bills as costs escalate and my pay doesn't keep pace. I don't feel like I ever earned my way into that hallowed place called "middle class". I can't afford home ownership, I live in a tiny apartment surrounded by college students, and about the only perk of middle class-dom that I can even remotely claim is the ownership of a new car - but of course, I don't own it. The bank does, at least until the loan is paid off about the time I am scheduled to retire. But of course, the very notion of retirement is a mirage. My generation will not be able to retire. We'll be working well into our golden years and the workforce will be rapidly aging as a result, resulting in much higher medical premiums for employers to pay for their aging employees who would love to retire but can't. Co-pays and deductibles are also bound to rise as the workforce ages and younger workers won't have the pick of good jobs because we'll all be working well into our 70's and 80's, so it will all result in a spiral of higher costs for everything because aging workers will still be holding on to their jobs because expenses will prevent them from being able to afford to retire.

But then again, issues like health care have been debated for years, and so far, nothing's been done about it. And with the recent financial meltdown on Wall Street, I doubt that there will be enough money during the next administration to even think about addressing it. So in the meantime, we greying Baby Boomers who want to take care of ourselves are going to find it increasingly difficult to afford to do so. Co-pays and deductibles will continue to rise and the cost of health care will also continue escalating, and there just isn't the money in the federal budget to even remotely do anything about it. Since our current administration has thrown more money at Wall Street than even the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost, thus further increasing our burgeoning federal deficit, which in turn will further weaken our dollar in overseas trading...well, the whole picture is looking uglier and uglier as time goes by. Which means that whoever wins the White House in two weeks is going to have their hands full, no matter who he is. I find it hard to be terribly optimistic right now, even though some polls show Barack Obama holding a substantial lead over John McCain. I know how stupid people can be when they hear ridiculous things like "Barack Obama is going to redistribute your wealth!" and "Barack Obama is promoting....(gasp)....SOCIALISM!!!" As if he's somehow promoting Communism...and hey, we Baby Boomers all too clearly remember the long years of the Cold War when the "C" word was as much of a pejorative as the "L" word - "Liberal". And now we have the "S" word - "Socialism!!!!" Excuse me, so what was the New Deal? Wasn't that as much "socialism" as anything else? Those folks who collect Social Security ought to know better. Those folks who got their college educations thanks to the G.I. Bill ought to know better. If the New Deal had never happened, this would be a very different country, to say the least. And that was as much "socialism" as anything else, but then again, we all know that the main agenda of the NeoCons was to completely dismantle the New Deal once and for all and to privatize everything. Fortunately, people wised up to what was going on and it was soundly rejected, but still.....it was a close call there for a while. I just hope that people are smart enough on November 4th to see through the ridiculous arguments that the McCain-Palin campaign are using to try to turn voters off of Barack Obama. After all, some polls only have Obama ahead by 1 percentage point! In other words, a virtual dead heat. That's too close, and I just hope that this time, they're wrong, but then again, if this country elected Bush twice, they are capable of doing just about anything that is against their own self interest.

A tribute to old houses

I'm what some folks refer to as an "Old House Geek". I love old houses - and buildings. I've always believed that you cannot know where you're going until you know where you've been. In other words, if you don't know your history, you can't move forward with any sense of where you came from. If we tear down all the old houses and buildings, we won't have any sense of our heritage. And one of the houses threatened with extinction, unless something is done soon, is the house pictured here, build in 1828 by Colonel John Singletary of Streetsboro, OH. Already having been moved twice, it now sits up on a truck flatbed, lacking the funding to have a foundation built for it since its most recent move to make room for.....you guessed it, yet another Wal-Mart SuperCenter. Wal-Mart most generously paid to have the home physically moved, but.....not for a foundation on which to set it. So now it is being threatened with being burned down as a fire department exercise, unless some badly needed funding can be come up with very soon so that the home can be saved. It's a gorgeous old house that deserves to be saved. I just hope that some way can be come up with to do so. It's suffered enough in its 180 years and now it deserves a permanent place that could become a historical society and a building that could be open for tours to remind us from whence we Northeast Ohioans came.

This beautiful old house is on the near west side of Akron and was built in 1913, the home of a prominent Akronite. But over time, it fell into disrepair and neglect and was, not so long ago, falling down on itself despite still being inhabited by a lonely little old lady and her many cats. It was bought (for a real bargain) by Akron Beacon Journal columnist David Giffels and his wife and they set about spending many long years restoring it to its former glory, the subject of his touching new book, All The Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling Down House. It's funny, it's sad, it's touching and I just plain out could not put it down once I got into it. I live in an old house myself and I know what it's like to have to hassle with old house foibles. In the years that I've lived in my apartment, which occupies the front upper floor of the house, built in 1912 shortly after Kent State University opened, I have dealt with invasions of bats, squirrels, rats, mice, birds, yellow jackets, moths, carpenter ants.....and a leaky roof, funky wiring and unpredictable plumbing. Fortunately, the house has had considerable work done on it since I moved in, and is nice and secure now without all the numerous problems that plagued it in my early years of occupation. So I could perfectly identify with Giffels descriptions of life in a run down old house and the effort to fix it up, often learning how while he was doing the lion's share of the work himself, often scrounging and scavenging the materials needed to do said restoration. I really admire someone who has the courage to take what sounded like a perfectly horribly dilapidated old house and fix it up and make it liveable again. I'm sure that the work took both an emotional and physical toll at times, but the reward is a beautiful old house that is once again a home, occupied by a family who will care for it, and by someone who I have always felt absolutely breathes a love of Akron with every word that he writes, including this book. Sure, the city that once stunk of burning rubber has fallen on hard times in the past quarter century, but to read about someone who loves the city so much that they are willing to restore a part of its old forgotten glory reassures me that there is some small shred of hope out there. I loved this book and recommend it to anyone who has ever dreamed of buying a "fixer-upper" and doing an extreme makeover of it and restoring it to its lost glory. Thank you, David Giffels, for once again writing an inspiring work, like so many of your newspaper articles in the Akron Beacon Journal. You make me laugh, you make me cry, you make me smile. And that's what being a good writer is all about.

Autumn colors, Indian Summer

Last weekend we had a spectacular Indian summer of warm temperatures and blue skies that I took advantage of to complete the Summit County MetroParks Fall Hiking Spree. We had warm summer like temperatures and clear weather and leaves that are just beginning to turn and in some cases fall, so it seemed the perfect time to get outside and enjoy what is doubtless going to be some of the final nice weather of the season before dreary and overcast skies and chillier days become the norm. So, hiking staff and water bottle in hand, I took off on Saturday to hike the Silver Creek Pheasant Run trail, which is what began my involvement in the Fall Hiking Spree back in September of 1999. Some friends and I were driving back from Wooster along Rte. 585 and we stopped at Silver Creek to do some hiking. When we were done, my friends told me that I had just completed a trail for the Fall Hiking Spree and that I ought to do the rest that season and get a form to mark down the trails I'd hiked, so I was off and running and have successfully completed the Fall Hiking Sprees ever since. This year marked my 10th completed spree and I am grateful that I was able to do it this year, because I have been battling a painful Achilles tendon injury for some time now, and having just gotten out of a cast a month ago that I had to wear for 4 long months, I wasn't sure that my leg would be up to the demands of the trails out there, but sure enough, it held up, if occasionally reminding me that the injury, while doing better, isn't fully healed yet. Last weekend was a reminder of that. On my final hike, along the Cherry Lane/Fernwood trail at the F.A. Seiberling NatureRealm, my ankle pained me greatly and I was happy for the fact that I had my hiking staff with me to lean upon for support. By the time I was done, it was throbbing angrily and letting me know that perhaps I had overdone it just a bit, but still, the fact that I completed the spree on a perfect and beautiful summer like weekend was exactly what I could have hoped for, given that, owing to my cast still being on in early September, I was forced to get a little later start than I would have liked to have gotten.

As I commenced my hike along the trail, I came upon a bunch of people standing along a part of the trail who were holding out their hands and whistling. I wondered what was going on and I began to notice that little black capped chickadees were coming and eating right out of their hands! They had some sunflower seeds and they let me have a go at this, so I had to position myself to have the best opportunity to attract these adorable little birds to eat out of my hand. After a while, they began coming to me. It felt so amazing to hold a little chickadee and watch it nibble seeds out of my hand. To feel their little feet wrapping around my fingers and having such close contact with a wild bird like that was truly remarkable. They would occasionally chirp or sing to us as we fed them and then they would flitter away back up to the relative safety of a tree. I could hear the rush of their wings and even feel it as they flew away from my hand. I was deeply moved by this up close and personal experience with nature. I don't know if this would work at home or whether the birds there are just used to human contact, but I would love to try it. The closest I have gotten to a similar experience is to have squirrels and chipmunks up on the KSU campus eat out of my hands, but you have to be careful not to get bitten in the process! Since chickadees do tend to stick around during the winter months, and food does tend to be a bit scarcer during that season, I may try feeding them in my own yard or up on campus and see if they flitter up to my open hand. It's amazing how much deeper an appreciation you have for nature when you actually get to touch it and feel it up close. It increases your sense of how fragile each little creature is and yet how durable they are as well as they survive out in the wilds instead of in the comfort of a climate controlled house like we live in. Ah, if only Henry David Thoreau could have seen what we did last weekend, having birds come right up to us and eat out of our hands. I am sure that he would have approved!

It got personal: The final Presidential Debate

Wednesday night's final Presidential debate was marked by a lot of personal attacks rather than focusing on the fact that the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered another big loss the day before that, over 700 points, its second worst loss in modern history. McCain kept bringing up who Obama associated himself with, namely a former Weatherman named Bill Ayers and who McCain considers to be an unrepentant terrorist. Frankly, like most people, I could care less about Bill Ayers and would rather hear about how we are expected to pay our bills, what with the economy in a meltdown. That McCain resorted to outworn tactics shows his desperation in these waning days of the long and arduous Presidential campaign. I think that he knows that his poll numbers are dwindling since he added Sarah Palin to the ticket. Oh, sure, at first she gave him a big bounce, but then when people heard her open her mouth and babble nonsensically during televised interviews with people like Katy Couric, those poll numbers began to fall when people began to realize that she was a potential embarassment to the McCain campaign. McCain's desperation tactics are also wearing thin on a weary electorate that has had just about enough of this prolonged campaign that has lasted two long years. All we want now is an articulate President who can get this country back on track again after eight long and disastrous years of the worst Presidency in our country's history. McCain is also being harmed by the fact that the Republican Party right now is not very popular in light of what's happened to our economy thanks to their free-market, deregulation policies. He has boasted of voting with the President over 90% of the time, which means he's not the so-called "maverick" that he claims to be. Sure, he and Russ Feingold were the sponsors of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, and Russ Feingold is a super-liberal Senator, but still.....what McCain seems to be proposing is pretty much more of the same, tired old rhetoric about the war and the economy and such that we've been hearing. I think that his age and history of health problems also make people a tad nervous, given that it puts Sarah Palin one heartbeat away from the Oval Office. Yes, she didn't stumble and was poised and articulate in her debate with Biden, but still, she's just a bit over the top where certain issues are concerned and some of the accusations that she's flung at Obama have been an embarassment to the McCain campaign. She was also found to have abused her power as governor of Alaska, which means she has the potential to do that as Vice President or President, so.....no thanks, McCain, no thanks. It's looking more and more like this election belongs to Barack Obama. I hesitate to be so optimistic, but poll numbers are swinging his way lately. Still, anything can happen on election day, and like most folks who are still bitter over 2000 and 2004, I'm going to find it hard to completely trust our flawed electoral system until I know that this election was completely fair, open and honest and that no dirty tricks were pulled to ensure anyone's victory. T-minus 17 days and counting......

JOE THE PLUMBER'S 15 MINUTES OF FAME

One of the more ridiculous things that came out of this whole debate was the constant mention of a plumber near Toledo, Ohio that Barack Obama spoke to this past week while campaigning up that way. His name is Joe Wurzelbacher and he has suddenty rocketed to fame because of the fact that both candidates mentioned him over a dozen times during the debates. It all started with McCain mentioning to Obama that he had an "encounter" with this guy who said that Obama would raise his taxes since he dreamed of buying the business where he was employed for the past 15 years as a plumber. (McCain also referred to this guy as "My old friend Joe" like he'd known the guy personally - well, yeah, Wurzelbacher told Obama he still planned to vote for McCain, but is that any reason for McCain to refer to the guy as "My old friend Joe"?) Well, this "Joe the Plumber" became the "Celebre du Jour" and the media descended on his home and he was on national TV a number of times in the past few days being interviewed by no less than Katy Couric and others. Well, it turns out that the media thoroughly vetted him and found out that he's not a liscenced plumber and that he also owes over $1800 in back taxes. Naturally, late night comics had fun with this information and the guy is now nationally known and can probably never again live in complete anonymity. I have no doubt that Saturday Night Live will have some fun with "Joe the Plumber" tohight as well. Oh, and Sarah Palin is supposed to be on the show tonight as well. I wonder if Tina Fey will reprise her spot-on impression of Palin as well?

Well, all I can say is, "Joe, enjoy your 15 minutes of fame while you have it." But I'm sure that by this time next week, we will all have forgotten who he is and will move on to the next big thing that grabs our attention, whatever it will be. Americans, after all, are notorious for their short attention spans. We want everything neatly packaged in 3o second sound bites. "OK, that was interesting.....NEXT?" Too bad that people can't sit still for more than a few seconds to learn more about what's going on around them and why it matters to them. And it's funny how the media can go on such a shark feeding frenzy over some anonymous plumber from Toledo, Ohio who was mentioned a few times in a debate instead of paying more attention to what the candidates are saying and why it matters to really listen to them. Typical behavior of the media, sadly. They can rocket someone to fame in 15 minutes and then 15 minutes later, forget who they were. So by this time next week, Joe the Plumber will be a news "has-been", forgotten among the sound bites and jarring jangles of noise out there that populate the air waves.

Is the print media doomed?

This gravestone seems to indicate an ever increasing attitude toward our print media. Newspapers and magazines are reducing their staffs, downsizing their publications and becoming little more than a dinosaur in this day and age as people get more and more of their news from electronic media. But call me a print Luddite in that I love sitting on the sofa in the early morning hours before work, sipping coffee and reading my morning newspapers. Our local paper is made up of mostly wire report stuff that is repeated in the Akron newspaper, and the local paper doesn't even have a local editorial cartoonist anymore. They just pull stuff off of syndicated services that addresses national and international issues, but nothing local, and word now has it that the Akron paper, the Akron Beacon Journal, is headed for still more downsizing as it lays off still more of its staff. This time, it's some of my favorite writers and columnists - David Giffels, Carl Chancellor, Elaine Guregian, Brian Windhorst, sports writer Patrick McManaman, who took over from Terry Pluto, who bolted to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, editorial cartoonist Chip Bok (what are they going to do, replace him with a syndicated cartoonist that doesn't deal with local foibles?), Connie Bloom, Tracy Wheeler, and photographers Lew Stamp and Ken Love. I don't know what's going to be left of this newspaper when it finishes chopping out large sections of its news staff. It just depresses me to think of newspapers being reduced to a shadow of their former selves. It makes me wonder about what the future is for students of journalism. Will they become bloggers and Internet columnists? Will newspapers go the way of the dodo before long? Will they be reduced to little more than weekly broadsheets hardly worth reading? I guess more and more people are turning to the electronic media for their news, but I just can't fathom the idea of curling up on the sofa with a computer and a cup of coffee to read the daily news. I don't even own a laptop nor is it likely that I will be able to afford to buy one anytime soon, much as I'd like one to replace my oversized dinosaur of a desktop computer. I just wonder what the future is going to bring and if we'll see the end of books, magazines, newspapers and any kind of hard copy print. I hope not, but given what I'm seeing of late, I suspect that such a day is not far ahead of us.

THE OFFICE PRESIDENTIAL RIVALRY

OK, so it all started when I noticed that a co-worker had an "Obama for President" wallpaper on her computer screen. Then I found one I really liked, and changed my wallpaper to the one that I found declaring my desire to see Barack Obama elected President. So today, I walked by another co-worker's desk to find a McCain-Palin wallpaper on his screen. So I suspect that the political stakes in our office are being very clearly defined. This same McCain supporter daily seems to come up with yet another stupid rumor about Obama that he doubtless heard from some right wing screed, today's being some kind of alleged link between Obama and Kenyan Raila Odinga, who was in a disputed election in Kenya and, who this co-worker swears, favors a return to Sharia law and is a known terrorist and who Obama daily takes calls from because he's allegedly Obama's cousin, so therefore, Obama's a Muslim terrorist! Well, none of that's true, of course, but to have someone spreading those kinds of rumors in the office to potentially undecided voters is nothing short of just spreading lies about a candidate that it's been proven are not true. That's the problem with people who get their news from screeds like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, and who swear that everything those folks say is TRUTH! Sheesh! Well, all I can do is to smugly think to myself that this is just another blatant display of utter ignorance that people believe such trash about political candidates that has already been proven to be false and nothing more than smear mongering. Well, for that matter, I could say that Sarah Palin was found to have abused her power as Governor of Alaska (TRUTH!), and that McCain had ties to Charles Keating many years ago during the whole Savings and Loan blowout (TRUTH!) and that McCain favors more deregulation like the kind that has brought down so many venerable banks in the past few weeks (TRUTH!) and that he voted for Bush's policies 95% of the time (TRUTH!) even though now he seems to be suddenly distancing himself from perhaps the most unpopular and inept President in history, maybe because he's begun to realize that Obama's made crucial inroads to independent voters who have long supporter McCain's so-called "maverick" streak. So this inter-office Presidential rivalry will continue for a few more weeks until we know the outcome of the November election....and depending on which way the dice fall, some of us are either going to be elated on November 5th or cursing 4 more years of failed Bush policies, making at least the departmental Republicans (of which there are a surprising amount for a library) happy, but just wait until the economy sours again. Today the Dow Jones surged 936 points on the news that the Feds are going to, in part, nationalize some of the banks and inject an immediate (LARGE) amount of money into them to restart the frozen credit markets, and that surge may continue and there may well be a full recovery of everything that was lost these past few weeks, but who's to say how long that's going to last? Only time will tell...........

Wall Street's wild see-saw swing

Yesterday the Dow Jones Industrial Average went down, then up, then down, then up, then down....and ended up having a wild swing of some 1000 points before the day was out, ending "only" 128 points down, causing many to sigh in relief that it didn't end up as it did at one point in the day below 8000. The market's wild swing was the result of yet another plan by the government to buy up bank shares, and in essence, nationalize some of the banks that have been teetering of late, which I am sure will go over like a lead balloon with some of the hard core conservative anti-government Libertarian types. It'll be interesting to see how the markets fare on Monday after the opening bell, but no one expects any miracles to occur or a full recovery back to the level at which the DJIA stood a year ago, at over 14,000 points. The economy right now is just to shaky worldwide to expect that to happen and experts are already predicting a worldwide recession that, if it hasn't already happened, will happen soon enough. At least I have a job that (I hope) is fairly stable and faces no threats of a layoff or anything like that anytime soon....at least not until our next operating levy goes up on the ballot sometime in either late '09 or '10 (I can't remember which). What concerns me is that if the economy hasn't made a sufficient enough recovery by then, people will surely vote down the levy because they are tired of paying taxes on their property as it is for everything from school levies to mental health levies to park levies to library levies. I don't expect any levy issues on ballots this fall, if indeed there are any, to fare very well due to this economic crisis, and that won't bode well for agencies with their hands out looking for money. People want to keep more of their hard earned cash when times turn hard and the economy goes south, and that means that anyone who's looking for a handout via a tax levy can pretty well forget it this fall, sadly. So the election will be interesting both on a national level as well as a local one, given that there are levies coming up on area ballots that doubtless face failure by wide margins. Even more reason that Wall Street CEO's and greedy investment bankers ought to be punished to the fullest extent of the law for this massive screw up that is reverberating all around the world. I just hope that someone's got the cojones to bring them to justice and see that they are held fully accountable for their misdeeds. So many heads ought to be rolling over this, including some in our government.....and I think we all know who I mean......

DANIELLE'S MAGIC SOAP AND LOTION

A few months ago, I began going to our local Farmer's Market to see what kinds of offerings they had. I happened upon a vendor who was selling organic and homemade bath and beauty products. Well, I'm a firm believer in just such things because I've used a lot of natural products with amazing success, so when I explained to Danielle, the vendor, that I suffered from stubborn rosacea that ceased to respond to medication, she sold me a couple of bars of this wonderful soap, "Make My Skin Clear" that has since worked its magic in calming my rosacea down to the point where I've ceased using my medication entirely. While I still get flare-ups (primarily hormone induced, which I can do nothing about...grrrrrrr!), they aren't as bad as they once were. Washing my face with this soap feels like I am using some kind of really amazing cream. It's made of various herbs and plants and has been, for Danielle, a remarkably successful product. She told me today that she simply cannot keep it in stock anymore because the minute she has it, it sells out as fast as she can make it. She told me that she goes through 100 bars per week and no wonder - it's amazing stuff. She also made me a gift of a personalized skin cream to treat my rosacea that now people are beginning to want as well because they see how well it's working for me! It's remarkable that a local organic beauty product maker can create a soap and a lotion that are the best thing that has ever happened for me! I also bought some lavender massage oil from her a few weeks ago to treat my painful Achilles tendon injury and it works so well. I woke up one morning this week with the tendon all puffy, swollen and painful, and I massaged it with the lavender massage oil for 10 minutes and the swelling, stiffness and pain went away! I use it twice a day now to help to heal this problematic tendon that has been a problem for a very long time now. I bought some bath salts from her today that are supposed to work on arthritis stiffness, which I have in my left leg, the result of a long ago car accident, in my back and in my hands. I look forward to a good long soak in these salts to see what they can do for me. They smell wonderful and being very scent oriented as I am, I know that they will also provide me with some soothing aromatherapy as well. Interested and want to know more? Want to try some of her products for yourself? Check out her web site: Ferrell Family Farms. Her products work for me, and they might just do the same for you!

Attention, Henry Paulson, it isn't working!

First there was the $700 billion bailout. Then it was a lowering of the federal interest rate. So far, the markets aren't responding. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell another 678 points today to send it below 9000 points to a finish somewhere around the 8500 mark, give or take. In the past few weeks, we've seen trillions of dollars of wealth evaporate, and it is now being said that we're in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, because this is also being felt overseas. For example, Iceland may be forced to declare bankruptcy! Iceland! I mean, go figure, huh? Who would have thought that our financial woes would be felt all the way to Iceland, for crying out loud! But that's exactly what seems to have happened in the past few weeks. Stocks in Europe and Asia are also sharply down and the financial crisis is spreading worldwide now, signaling a possible onset of a global recession. How we're going to get out of this mess, I haven't a clue, but the government has hired a "Bailout Czar" to oversee the distribution of the $700 billion that Congress OK'd last week after much brou-ha-ha and the addition of much pork to inflate the thing and get it through our legislative bodies. You know, I find that term, "Czar", for various government positions of responsibility to be an odd one. Why do they use that term, "czar", when for years, the Soviet Union was our worst enemy during the prolonged Cold War? Couldn't they have picked a better term than "czar" for such jobs as Neel Kashkari - our new "Bailout Czar" will be assigned to do (a local boy made good from around these parts)? But anyway, I digress. I just find that term to be such a bizarre use of what used to be used for a Russian monarch to describe a government position of high responsibility.

Anyway, the silver lining in all of this mess is that a). the price of gas is down below $3 a gallon (I always knew that the price hikes we were seeing this summer were the result of ridiculous speculation and that the bubble they created would eventually burst) and b). this mess is happening on the watch of a Republican administration who for a very long time now has favored deregulation of just about everything, which is precisely what led to this mess in the first place, meaning that recent polls are vastly falling Obama's way and he's pulling ahead in some reliably "red" areas of the country. That can only be a good thing, that the economy is Issue Number One right now as people watch their 401(K)'s and retirement annuities tanking as the stock market continues its downward plunge. People are scared, they are, that they are going to lose homes, jobs, cars and everything that they have worked hard for. Democrats are generally favored in times when financial and economic issues are at the forefront of people's concerns, so this bodes well for Obama's chances in a few weeks (at least I hope so, anyway!). So for now, all we can do is to sit and wait out this financial "perfect storm" and hope that things will eventually turn around, but in the meantime, we have this "czar" guy who is some kind of whiz kid who's supposed to be the guy in charge of the money going to bailout Wall Street's woes. I just hope that it doesn't include any "golden parachutes" for the CEO's of these companies who screwed up and got us in this mess in the first place. They should be corralled and taken to Congress to testify about their misdeeds, and then thrown in jail without a key to sit and contemplate what got them there and what this whole thing has cost our country in terms of lost jobs, lost income, lost retirements, lost financial trust and lost prestige around the world. Our image is already in the tank from Bush's many lies and misdeeds over the past 8 years, and now this. Well, at least I have the comfort of knowing that history will not treat him kindly. May he be remembered as the worst President of the US in our entire history. That would only be a fitting end to his reign of terror as he skulks back to his "ranchette" in Crawford in a few months time, to spend his days clearing brush. Frankly, I think he ought to go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200, but that's my opinion, and I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that way, either!

The death spiral continues....

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged again today, down below 10,000 for the first time since 2004. Currently it's down 728 points as of this writing, a mammoth plunge downward despite the $700 billion rescue package passed by Congress on Friday. So what does this mean? It doesn't look good right now and it's becoming downright scary out there in the financial markets. Obviously, Wall Street isn't impressed with the rescue money and people are getting increasingly skittish about their investments, so today has been marked by massive sell-offs on Wall Street as people divest themselves of shaky stocks and investments. I can't remember a time when things seemed shakier on Wall Street than the past few weeks, as big massive investment banks have begun to collapse under the weight of all of the bad mortgage loans that they financed over the past few years. We can thank all of the years and years of deregulation for all of this mess. I wonder what that's going to do for the upcoming Presidential election? I hope that it will work in favor of the Democrats, who want to restore regulation to the markets and to banking that will set things to rights. Sure, it's probably going to take years to clean up the mess made by the Bush administration and it probably won't happen in a first term, but my hope is that if Obama wins, that he will put in place measures to staunch the bleeding on Wall Street and start turning things around little by little. Until then, though, it's getting downright ugly out there.

The only plus in all of this is that oil has dropped below $100 a barrel for the first time in a long time and this morning as I drove to work, it was even trading below $90 a barrel. I've seen gas as low as $3.06 a gallon lately, meaning that gas prices have receded almost a dollar a gallon since summer, a big relief to those of us who commute long distances. If gas had continued its upward swing past $4 a gallon as it was this summer, I was going to quit driving altogether and start taking buses as many places as possible. I probably still ought to, but it's nice to be able to run errands after work en route to home instead of having to go out later in the evening to do it when I am more likely to be tired and not wanting to leave my apartment. Plus I always have places that I have to go in the evenings and when I am coming home from them, I just want to get home and take a load off and relax instead of having to drive around and do tons of errands. So this entire financial crisis has at least had one silver lining in that it's taken a load of strain off of my finances by making it cheaper for me to buy gas. I'm still not driving as much as I once did just to do my part toward conservation, but still.....it's a relief to see gas prices coming down from their summer time high. I just hope that natural gas prices will recede as well, because I find it hard to believe that heating my tiny apartment costs so much per month when I turn back my thermostat to 58º when I am gone and only turn it up to 68º when I am at home, when I used to keep it at 70º before heat became such an expensive commodity. So for now, the financial crisis continues and it remains to be seen what affect it's going to have on the overall economy, but it can't be good. I suspect that we're in for a long, deep and painful recession regardless of which way the financial winds blow. Remember that, folks, when you go to the polls in November. Remember who brought you bank deregulation and subprime mortgages and what that has done to your 401(K) and annuity retirement accounts. And remember who intends to continue deregulation as it now stands and vote accordingly.

Buddy, can you spare $700 billion and change?

Wall Street got its long awaited bailout after the Senate and Congress approved a revised package that not only includes the asked for $700 billion......but had to be sweetened with $150 billion in earmarks and pork barrel spending for such nonsense as tax breaks on wooden arrows produced for use by children. I mean, really. Now we're looking at a much fattened $850 billion addition to the federal debt on the backs of American taxpayers that was the result of those much favored Congressional "earmarks", or pork barrel spending for pet projects in Congressional districts so that our Representatives can say that they brought home the bacon to their people. This just shows how totally desperate members of Congress are, as all 435 of them are up for re-election this fall and they want to be able to tell their voters that they funded stupid pet projects that will cost taxpayers far more money in the end. I doubt that this so-called "bailout" will do much of anything for homeowners facing foreclosure. I doubt that it will increase federal oversight of banks and lenders. I doubt that it will regulate predatory lending the way it needs to be dealt with. All it will do is to balloon the federal deficit to the point where generations after us will still be paying for this boondoggle of a bill. And anyway, economists have already said that it won't work in the long run and that it will plunge the economy into even greater crisis by increasing the federal deficit. We can't keep borrowing more and more money from China and Saudi Arabia without continuing to devalue the dollar to the point where it has become no better than a Third World currency.

And now we've got this $150 billion in pork barrel spending that had to be added to this egregious bill just to get Congress to pass it. Leave it to Washington to throw money around like it's growing on trees, regardless of what it's going to mean to average taxpayers like you and me. No, they couldn't just bide their time and try to construct a more sensible solution to this Wall Street fiasco that is the result of too many years of lax regulations of lenders and lending institutions. Oh, no. They listened to the cries of "Chicken Little" Bush who was running around screaming that the sky was falling (where have we heard that before?) and that if something wasn't done right here, right now, today, why, the world would end, the sky would fall and life as we knew it would be over. Piffle! That man has zero credibility left and I am quite sure that months or years from now, we're going to find out another smoking gun regarding this whole affair that was yet another series of lies and untruths from him and his cronies. If any good has come from this whole ugly affair, it's that Obama has opened up a lead in the Presidential race as a result of it all. But what amazes me is that Mr. "no pork barrel spending" McCain voted for this bill despite its fat $150 billion giveaway in pure pork. Unfortunately, Obama also voted for it, so he can't use the "no earmarks" thing against McCain since they both voted in favor of it. If I were Obama, I would have said "no" to this thing with the addition of the pork barrel sweetener. Of course, that would have been used as a weapon against Obama by the McCain campaign, so I guess he decided to strategically vote for it so as not to cause any finger-pointing by his opponent since the Bush administration has been so busy running around acting like the end of the world was at hand if this bill didn't pass.So, America, now we're really in a pickle. Where are we going to cough up $850 billion to bail out a bunch of Wall Street tycoons who refused to play by the rules? Naturally, from you, from me, from all of us who pay our bills on time and try to save a few pennies each month. Thanks, Uncle Sam, for saddling each and every one of us with this additional debt. As if we can really afford it.......there must have been a better way to deal with this. But sadly, now we won't find out because Washington wanted to hand a free gift to Wall Street and to their favorite pork barrel spending projects, and as usual, hang the rest of us out to dry. Well, this November, you can retaliate by throwing the bums out. Of course, all that's going to do is to bring in a new set of bums. Washington has a funny way of corrupting people, sadly. Even those with the best of intentions.