Wednesday, July 7, 2010

100-degree Days

I was hoping that these temperatures would settle on back out to normal, but it looks like we're stuck for now. At least we're not suffering from the three "H's", Hot, Humid, and Hazy. Hot & Hazy I can handle it's the Humid that really gets us. I hope that everyone is staying cool.

Had and interesting day working at the front desk at the office. We were busy scheduling new patients and I've got a lot to learn beyond the very basics of working up there. Insurance, entering treatment information and a herd of other things. Some of the patients are just as sweet as can be, one gentleman brought us in freshly made brownies!! How thoughtful.

The mall was fairly busy at lunch time. I was out running an errand - to replace the new pair of flip flops that Walter bought yesterday. Bounce thought that the left shoe was tasty. Thank goodness they were on sale and on clearance.

Heard a term today used and I've searched for it on Google, but no luck. I even searched on the Urban Dictionary with no luck. Does anyone out there know what "Holly Hobbying" means?

Email & Newsletter Gleanings:

Thoughts For the Day:

Margaret Thatcher: "The trouble with Socialism is, sooner or later you run out of other people's money."

"When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both." - James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union

"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." – Tacitus

"A Liberal is a person who will give away everything he doesn't own." - Unknown

"How fortunate for governments that the people they govern don't think." - Adolph Hitler



The following is an interesting article. You might ask how long Dr. Hunt can remain at NIH once the White House gets wind of this article.

Dr. Hunt is a social and cultural anthropologist. He has had nearly 30 years experience in planning, conducting, and managing research in the field of youth studies, and drug and alcohol research. Currently Dr. Hunt is a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Scientific Analysis and the Principal Investigator on three National Institutes of Health projects. He is also a writer for American Thinker.
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An article from American Thinker by Geoffrey P. Hunt:

Anatomy of a Failing Presidency

Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed presidency since Woodrow Wilson. In the modern era, we've seen several failed presidencies--led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ. Failed presidents have one strong common trait-- they are repudiated, in the vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding a shove into oncoming traffic by his own party. Richard Nixon indeed resigned in disgrace, yet his reputation as a statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant overture to China .

But, Barack Obama is failing. Failing big. Failing fast. And failing everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in forging connections with the American people. The incomparable Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal put her finger on it: He is failing because he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed loathe them. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says he is failing because he has lost control of his message, and is overexposed. Clarice Feldman of American Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.

But, there is something more seriously wrong: How could a new president riding in on a wave of unprecedented promise and goodwill have forfeited his tenure and become a lame duck in six months? His poll ratings are in free fall. In generic balloting, the Republicans have now seized a five point advantage. This truly is unbelievable. What's going on?

No narrative. Obama doesn't have a narrative. No, not a narrative about himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn't connect with us. He doesn't have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us. All successful presidents have a narrative about the American character that intersects with their own where they display a command of history and reveal an authenticity at the core of their personality that resonates in a positive endearing way with the majority of Americans. We admire those presidents whose narratives not only touch our own, but who seem stronger, wiser, and smarter than we are. Presidents we admire are aspirational peers, even those whose politics don't align exactly with our own: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, and Reagan.

But not this president. It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, and is historically illiterate and woefully small minded for the size of the task--all contributory of course. It's that he's not one of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn't command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don't add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don't make sense and don't correspond with our experience.

In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he's dissed just about every one of us -- financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job.

Expect Obama to lament at his last press conference in 2012: "For those of you I offended, I apologize. For those of you who were not offended, you just didn't give me enough time; if only I'd had a second term, I could have offended you too."

Mercifully, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 devised a useful remedy for such a desperate state--staggered terms for both houses of the legislature and the executive. An equally abominable Congress can get voted out next year. With a new Congress, there's always hope of legislative gridlock until we vote for president again two short years after that.

Yes, small presidents do fail, Barack Obama among them. The coyotes howl but the wagon train keeps rolling along.


The Future
  1. The nicest thing about the future is that it always starts tomorrow.
  2. Money will buy a fine dog, but only kindness will make him wag his tail
  3. If you don't have a sense of humor, you probably don't have any sense at all.
  4. Seat belts are not as confining as wheelchairs.
  5. A good time to keep your mouth shut is when you're in deep water.
  6. How come it takes so little time for a child who is afraid of the dark to become a teenager who wants to stay out all night?
  7. Business conventions are important because they demonstrate how many people a company can operate without.
  8. Why is it that at class reunions you feel younger than everyone else looks?
  9. Scratch a cat and you will have a permanent job.
  10. No one has more driving ambition than the boy who wants to buy a car.
  11. There are no new sins; the old ones just get more publicity.
  12. There are worse things than getting a call for the wrong number at 4 am - it could be the right number.
  13. No one ever says "It's only a game." when their team is winning.
  14. I've reached the age where the happy hour is a nap.
  15. Be careful reading the fine print. There's no way you're going to like it.
  16. The trouble with bucket seats is that not everybody has the same size bucket.
  17. Do you realize that in about 40 years, we'll have thousands of old men and old ladies running around with tattoos? (And rap music will be the Golden Oldies ! ) No! Say it isn't so!
  18. Money can't buy happiness -- but somehow it's more comfortable to cry in a Porsche than in a Yaris.
  19. After 60, if you don't wake up aching in every joint, you are probably dead!
  20. This is my favorite one. Always be yourself, because the people that matter don't mind, and the ones that mind, don't matter.

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