In Case You Were Wondering

Here are some revealing data a friend sent me. I have to say, this doesn't surprise me in the least. Just think what kind of shape we'd be in if George W. Bush had not loafed for a third of his time in the White House.

Here's the tally on George W. Bush's vacation time while he was in office:

Number Of Visits To His Texas Ranch: 77, totaling all or part of 490 days
Number Of Visits To His Parents' Home In Kennebunkport, Maine: 11, totaling all or part of 43 days
Number Of Flights On Air Force One: 1,674
(Source: Presidential Airlift Group)

Veteran CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller, a fastidious keeper of presidential statistics, has kept count. By his tally, Obama has embarked on nine "vacations" since taking office, bringing his total days off to 48. Some of those trips lasted a day and some, like his Christmas holiday in Hawaii, more than a week.

By comparison, Bush had visited his ranch in Crawford, Tex., 14 times at this point in his administration and spent 115 days there. And yes, Democrats let him have it, too, complaining that he was a chronic vacationer.

Here are the stats on recent presidenti­al vacation time:

George W. Bush eight year totals:
487 days at Camp David
490 days at Crawford Ranch
43 days at Kennebunkp­ort Compound
Total: 1020 days, more than 1/3rd of his presidency­. 

Bush set the record for most vacation time taken by any president.

Carter took 79 days in 4 years.
Clinton took 152 days in 8 years.
Reagan took 335 days in 8 years.
Bush Sr. took 543 days in 4 years!

In their first year in office:
Obama - 26 days
Clinton - 19 days
George W. Bush - 69 days

Every Now and Again . . .

. . . comes a poem that just grabs you. The one below did me. There's no explaining why. There's nothing particularly extraordinary about this poem. It is technically competent and, I think, metaphorically brilliant. But it's not profound and certainly not difficult. And therein, I think, resides its artistry.

I discovered George Bilgere, the poet, some time ago when I read that Billy Collins, who is among my favorite practitioners of the craft, thought this guy was good. Collins was right. Bilgere has a sense of humor and writes about the everyday stuff no one notices. I get the sense that he and I are somewhere near the same age, but maybe not. At any rate, I have gotten to the stage of my life where I am pretty skeptical of what anybody proclaims as truth. But I do not doubt for a moment that truth resides in art: music, literature, poetry, painting, etc. I don't look for it anywhere else, though I do have a soft heart for scholarship.

Joy

by George Bilgere

Today I sit on the sun porch
with my body, just the two of us
for a change, the flu
having left me for someone else.

I'm thinking about how good it is
to have been sick, to have been turned
inside out. Until we are sick, says Keats,
we understand not. and for four or five days
I understood. Fully and completely.
There was absolutely no ambiguity,
no misunderstandings of any sort whatsoever.

For awhile I thought I'd never get better.
I'd be that sick eagle, staring at the sky
on a permanent basis. But
we're living in the age of miracles:
another jetliner smacked into New York,
only this time nobody got hurt. A black guy
thoroughly fumigated the White House.

And this morning I woke up
feeling like a little French village
the Nazis suddenly decided to pull out of
after a particularly cruel occupation.

The baker has come back to his store
and everything smells like warm baguettes.
The children are playing in the schoolyard,
the piano bars along the river
have thrown open their doors.

And here you are, with coffee
and an open blouse, and two cool breasts
from the land of joy.

"Joy" by George Bilgere, from The White Museum. © Autumn House Press, 2010.

Why Doesn't This Happen to Poor People?

 I really cannot believe what I just read on the Net. Roger Clemens, another cheater in baseball who took steroids to enhance his performance and then has continued to lie about it now for at least a couple of years, was about to go on trial for lying to Congress and perjury. I say "was about to" because the jury had been selected and the trial was in its second day of testimony when Judge Reggie Walton declared a mistrial. He had barred testimony from the spouse of Andy Pettite, and he halted the trial when in video evidence someone referred to what she had said. The prosecution in this case, which apparently had built a very solid case against Clemens, either was incredibly stupid or careless. The judge said that any first-year law student would have known better and declared that it would be impossible for Clemens to get a fair trial now. Maybe not, legally he cannot, but that doesn't change the fact that the odds are now that Roger Clemens is going to skate for lying about his cheating in baseball. And instead of a conviction on his record that would prove he cheated, future generations will only have his steroid-enhanced numbers as a baseball player.

I'm not taking issue with the legal ruling here. Just with the uncanny good luck that seems to adhere to lying millionaires. Don't you think the millionaires of Wall Street, who are again enjoying obscene salaries and bonuses, two years after they brought the world to brink of financial ruin, have been lucky? A couple of centuries ago pitchfork-wielding mobs would have torn them to pieces in the street for what they did.

And let me just wonder out loud: are judges accustomed to being super diligent about fair trials for, say drug offenders? Petty criminals? I'm just saying . . .

Are You a Netflix Person?

And are you pissed off? Well, join the club. The Net today is full of articles like this one recounting the overwhelmingly negative reaction of hundreds of thousands of Netflix customers, by all accounts among the most loyal of all, to a substantial across-the-board price hike. You can read the actual amount of the price increases--in some cases an up to 60 percent bump, but suffice it to say, people are not happy. About the only "bargain" left is unlimited streaming of the movies and TV shows for $7.99 a month. The minute you add a DVD to this capability, you're talking twice as much. And DVD only options are up too. And with the streaming only option, there's a catch there too. You could safely characterize what's available for streaming as mostly second-rate with an occasional exception. The TV shows available are passable.

I'm as angry as all the rest. Netflix was the one company among the few that I actually have kind words for. Not any more. They look like just any other corporate shark now, the same reaction everybody else is having. I have already changed my plan to streaming only. I'll give it a whirl for some months and see what happens, especially to see if Netflix increases the quality of what it's got available for streaming. If it doesn't improve, I'm gone. And I suspect many are gone already, as we speak.

Related articles

• Netflix's 60% Price Hike: You've Gotta Be Kidding Me! (pcworld.com)
• Thinking about Netflix Pricing (laf.ee)
• Netflix Gets Greedy, Boosts Price Of Unlimited DVD + Streaming By 60% (reelseo.com)

I Open My Mouth

. . . and out comes a torrent of lies. Did you know that's the motto of congressional Republicans these days? Hell, it's been their motto for as long as I can remember.

I was watching the news tonight, PBS News Hour, and here's a story about the continuing negotiations between the White House and congressional leaders about raising the debt limit. Let me say here that I think there is going to be some last minute deal struck. These Republicans cannot be so insane as to let this country default on its financial obligations. I keep telling myself. But maybe that is whistling through the graveyard. These people have already demonstrated they don't give a rat's ass about the good of the country.

But to listen to them, you would think that Obama has been responsible for the entire frigging mess that is our national finances right now. As if the eight catastrophic years under that vile little pretender in the White House, George W. Bush, did not happen. Two wars--still ongoing, two massive tax cuts for the wealthy--still ongoing, and one hugely expensive new drug benefit for Medicare--still ongoing, and not one penny raised to pay for any of it. Add to this the Bush administration's dogged refusal to regulate the financial industry, which of course the Democrats abetted, that greatly assisted the kind of greed-driven activity by Wall Street that brought the world to its knees in 2008, and you will understand my rage at scumbags like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner who have the gall to stand before the cameras and posture about fiscal responsibility. These guys who block attempts to remove sweetheart subsidies for the energy industry, who refuse to even listen to any talk about raising revenue to reduce the deficit, who continue to sustain the unconscionable Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

Trouble is, Obama has shown himself to be such a pussy, these trolls can hold out from the slightest cooperation, just like they have done ever since Obama took office, in the almost sure conviction that the president will cave in and kiss their asses again and call it bipartisanship.

Oh, Let's Elect Her Next Time!

Christiana Fallin

And who in the hell is Christina Fallin you say? Well, this vamp you see above is the daughter of the governor of our great state of Oklahoma, "Oklahoma’s first woman governor, conservative Mary Fallin, who ran on the values of 'Faith, Family, and Freedom,' and whose husband Wade Christensen has received $1.9 million in federal farm subsidies. Gov. Fallin divorced her first husband in 1998, during her second term as Oklahoma’s lieutenant governor (she was the first woman to hold that office in Oklahoma’s history and later only the second woman Oklahomans ever elected to US Congress) amid rumors of an affair with her her bodyguard, who resigned over “improper conduct.”

Newlywed Christina Fallin-Bacon–named August’s “Girl of the Month” by Twenty-Something Magazine–certainly exemplifies her mom’s motto: Daughter = “family;” dancing in a transparent dress in the Governor’s Mansion=”freedom;” and “faith” — in her looks." (Source: here)

Aren't you just tickled to your core that we've got a staunch FAMILY VALUES executive down here in Okieland? I sure am.

What you see here is the Pee Tree. This "toilet" is from the Netherlands, somehow that doesn't surprise me. But you will be entertained, I think, by the eleven other fabulous (or not so much) toilets that you can find right here. And yes, I am restraining my impulse to subject you all to a torrent of crappy puns.

Why We're Paying Through the Nose for Health Care, Part II

Hey, I discovered how to make the graphic bigger. Just a little tinkering with the HTML code. (I'm going to apply the same method to the post from yesterday, but we're still not perfect sized.) Anyway, yesterday were the lies. Here's the truth today. If you will notice, there's a common denominator to all of these truths. To wit: somebody is getting a lot of money out of the current system, and it ain't the people who most need the health care. And it ain't the people sweating to pay the ever-increasing premiums for health care insurance. And it ain't the thousands of small businesses straining to provide health benefits to their employees. The people getting fat off the broken-down health care system we have are . . . the already fat cats. Which will come as no surprise to anybody who's been paying attention. 

Why We're Paying Through the Nose for Health Care, Part I

Another neat graphic that I can thank one of my family members for. This time my sister who lives in Utah. She and I are pretty simpatico on lots and lots of things, political views among them, for the most part. This is the kind of information that it really doesn't matter how true it is. People who are informed know about these things. But it's becoming increasingly obvious to me that what is true, what can be proven, doesn't make the slightest bit of difference to the vast majority of people. They hold to their prejudices and their erroneous information for dearest life. There's an old saw that goes: "My mind is made up, don't confuse me with the facts." I always thought it was trite and corny, but turns out it is true. Here's the link to the source article. I'm going to post the second half of this graphic tomorrow. I'll just let the content speak for itself. Sorry about the size of the post; it's as big as I could make it, without it looking like a fun house mirror or overrunning the banks. Either consult the original at the link above, or hold down the control key and roller the roller on your mouse. You did know that shrinks and expands things, didn't you?

Believe It or Not, Bad Things Can Happen at Ballparks

Fans react after Shannon Stone's fall over the railing in left field
at Ranger Ballpark in Arlington. The little boy in
the red Ranger hat and red shirt is his son Cooper 

Ballparks are some of my most favorite places in the world. I love the crowd at a ballpark, the beautiful expanse of Lots of times, most of the time, when I watch the Rangers on TV, it's late at night or early in the morning. I record the games and watch later. So last night I watched the first game of a four-game series between Oakland and Texas, in The Ballpark at Arlington. And I was happy with the result. Very happy because the Rangers won in convincing fashion, 6-0, and the winning pitcher, a guy named Derrick Holland pitched the whole game, a four-hit shut out. And this game was his first after the worst start of his career, which I also saw. He couldn't get out of the first inning, couldn't find the plate, gave up walks and hits and five runs.

It wasn't until this morning when I picked up the USA Today that I discovered to my horror that during the game a fan named Shannon Stone, a fireman who was there with his six-year-old son, had been killed by a fall from the stands in left field. My God, what a tragedy! I think of all the times I drove with my boys down to Arlington to watch the Rangers. It was, and is, a father-son ritual for millions of dads. Stone had reached out for a ball tossed into the stands by Ranger left-fielder Josh Hamilton. The incident has been a searing experience for Hamilton, who normally does not toss balls into the stands. But he responded to Shannon Stone's request in the first inning when he saw him there with his son. So in the second when a foul ricocheted to Hamilton, he tossed it to Stone. It was a little short. The man caught the ball and flipped over the railing, falling to the concrete 20 feet below. Hamilton says he can still hear the little boy screaming for his dad. (See this article as well.)

Related articles

• Dad, son went to Rangers game to catch foul ball (boston.com)
• A few final thoughts after the fall (BBTIA blog)