WHY I SUPPORT BARACK OBAMA

It certainly cannot be much of a surprise that I made the statement in the title of this post.  For months I’ve tried to state my concerns for our country and my lack of understanding of the positions offered by Mr. Romney, whatever those positions were at any given time, unless they were simply an emulation of the president’s stated policies. 

But I would wish that everyone supporting Mr. Romney would have seen the interviews with Bryan Williams that are posted on the NBC Rock Center website.  Of course the problem is that diehard Repubs will watch only Fox News, and Fox simply has their own ways of handling facts and reality.  The interviews to which I am referring show the president speaking specifically and directly, and without malice. 

Most particularly, at the very end of these interviews, the president made a statement I can only paraphrase, since it did not appear in text, only in the videos.  He said that he had made mistakes along the way, but that his compass had always been true.  Even if I weren’t already aware of his administration’s accomplishments, that one statement would win me.  Think of it.  Mr. Obama’s predecessor, Mr. Bush, could never think, when asked, of any mistakes he had made in eight years.  But Mr. Obama stated his humanity on-camera.  

I do not put Mr. Obama on a pedestal, no more than I would put any of my beloved family, or other public figures I admire.  Pedestals are only for people, we humans, to fall off of.  But I can state wholeheartedly that I admire him for his seriousness, his humor, his intelligence and integrity, his seemingly indefatigable efforts on behalf of our country.  And if Mr. Obama wins this election, America will be the richer for it.  And if Mr. Obama should not win this election, America, you and I, will be far the poorer for it, literally and figuratively.

MICE & POSSUMS & PROBLEMS, OH MY

The funny thing is that we live in a very suburban area, between two large cities, and maybe two blocks from a freeway.  But there are still critters who find their way toward us.  Now that we are heading toward fall, too many critters seem to be headed our way.  When the weather changes toward fall and winter, wild creatures naturally start looking for shelter.  We’ve had possums in the yard and once in the garden room, and spotted foxes and even a coyote once awhile back.  

  Then, within a one-week period, we found first a small rat and two days later a large rat, very dead and neatly lain by the door going out to our garden room by our beloved cat, Max.  We of course thanked Max nicely and took the carcass to the wild area behind us, which probably surprised Max but he didn’t seem to feel unappreciated.    And then a couple of days later, 2:00am, we were awakened from a very sound sleep by a shocking noise sounding like someone had stuck a stick in our outside compressor.  We immediately leapt up, quite disoriented from the sound sleep we had been in, and after all sorts of running around, found that still another rat had managed to enter the compressor cage, climb up the center thingy, and when the fan came on, the rat met its fate, over and over and over, until we stopped the fan, at which time its carcass fell into the bottom of the cage.  A lot of money later, the carcass was removed, one bent fan blade was repaired, and we had acquired a number of devices from the hardware store designed to entice rats and then dispatch them.

Our nerves were just settling down from all of these events, when wouldn’t you know it, we found a baby dead possum in a flower bed.  Our cat may have dispatched it or it may have sampled the rat stuff, we don’t know.  But we thought it was too small to bother the Animal Control folks and too large to dispose of easily, so we had to bury it.  Shudder.

We’re into autumn, the season of mists and spiders and all that, but it appears to be also the season of lots of uninvited critters.  At least this year.

ENOUGH ALREADY!

The following is an excerpt, by permission, from another and very fine blog, The Newsosphere (thenewsosphere.wordpress.com).  

  

ENOUGH ALREADY!  by clavius42

Romney recently said, and his ad claimed that "Obama approved Jeep, now owned by the Italians, of moving all production to China."  This has already been disproven by a wide number of sources.

Let me direct you to the first Romney ad, which had Obama saying "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose".

It was later discovered that what Obama actually said was:  "Sen. McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, 'if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose'."

Folks, enough is enough, and a lie is a lie.  He [Mitt Romney] has been lying since the start of the campaign, and it doesn't look like he's stopping anytime soon.

Look, these quotes and ads up, people. Do your own digging. It's all there.  I'm not taking anything "out of context".

I am fed up with this b*****t.  If someone is proven - again and again! - to blatantly lie, why in the name of God would anyone want that person to govern our nation?  End of excerpt

I just want to add a personal observation that while both campaigns have included errors and misstatements, the act of repeating deliberate inaccuracies, lying, is really a whole other thing, just as this excerpt so very clearly says.

Stories missed along the way

Like most folks, I dearly love family stories, and I’ve heard a lot of them, both about my own family and about others as well.  And like most folks, over the years I’ve completely failed to write those stories down, and with the passage of time, it’s simply too late to do anything about that now.  Because back when we are younger, we simply assume that our parents will live forever, that our aunts and great-aunts will do the same, that our dearest friends will still be around and we can go back to them and get those stories again but this time, write them down.

There are so many times when I can remember sitting with my mother and her telling funny stories about what a rascal she was growing up and how she mischievously dealt with a very severe father whom she loved but didn’t always know what to do with.  Or my quiet, rather shy father would tell stories about his adventures and what life was like for him growing up.  Or my Great-Aunt Pearl would tell stories about knowing bootleggers back in the days of Prohibition, and even giving an impression of sort of sanctioning such behavior herself, although the strongest thing she ever drank was tea but on the other hand she didn’t much like the government telling folks what to do.

One such story I do so wish I had details of concerns my dear late friend J. and the fact that when she was a young married back in the forties, and living on the near south side of Fort Worth, Texas, she actually babysat Lee Harvey Oswald, and remembered him as a nice young child.  On the other hand, even though J. was very kind and tactful, she didn’t have many good things to say about Lee Harvey’s mother.  That’s really all I can remember of a conversation that happened a long time ago.

That’s just about it for this collection of thoughts, except for this.  The next time someone, anyone, shares something interesting about their life, listen.  Listen really well.

Oh, Oh, Oh

Oh, and one more thing about dear Mr. Romney.

Recently, but just after the first debate and before the second one, when we were watching the discussion on ‘Up With Chris Hayes’, a wonderful program on MSNBC, the talk at one point centered on all the previous positions that Mr. Romney denied during that first debate, and what his big important donors would think about his denying what he had so specifically told them, especially during that infamous video known generally as ‘The 47 Percent Speech’.

One of the guests, Joseph Stiglitz, a very distinguished gentlemen with a Nobel prize for economics, chuckled and said there wouldn’t be any problem with Romney’s donors and Romney’s denials, simply because the donors would never believe Romney meant his denials!  Those donors indeed know Romney for what he is.

I have to say that the opinion was so ironic we had to chuckle, ourselves.