DeRosaWorld

Saturday Musings

- Senator Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. (D-IL) age 46 is the presumptive Nominee of the Democratic Party for President in 2008.

- Arianna Huffington can finally relax. Hillary won’t be the nominee.

- The white, male talking heads exploded all at once across the networks when Hillary gave her campaign wrap-up speech after the South Dakota and Montana primaries earlier this week and did not concede the election. Russert, Matthews, Obermann, Toobin, Gergen. It was awesome. You could see they wanted to kill her. MSNB even split the screen like Hollywood Squares so they called all scream at once.

- One thing to be concerned about, Senator Obama lost eight out of the last ten contests to Senator Clinton.

- The Senate Intelligence Committee finally gets to release its 2004 report that proved Bush, Jr. lied to America about the need to go to war in Iraq. Who arrests the President?

- NASA tells us that Bush, Jr. lied to us about their findings on climate change and even changed the data in their reports. Does anybody in the Press want to ask him about this?

- How about those gasoline prices? Ready to throw garbage at Bush, Jr. public appearances yet? No, let’s wait to blame the new President.

- Was talking to a 9/11 conspiracy nut and she said, If everything Bush, Jr. ever told us was a lie, and then challenged me to prove her wrong and I couldn’t, then why would he tell the truth about 9/11? The argument gave me pause.

- Don DeLillo’s Falling Man may be the first really big book about 9/11. I’m preparing myself to sit down and revisit that day. I think this read requires I sit in my chair over a long weekend and don’t get up until the end.

- Bo Diddley has left the stage. My introduction to him actually comes from George Thorogood’s cover of Who Do You Love. As a youngster, I loved to track back music I liked to its roots. Artists like Janis Joplin led me back to Bessie Smith. Elvis Presley led me back to Big Mama Thornton. Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac led me back to Etta James. Fleetwood Mac started out as a blues band with Peter Green that led me back to many of the great blues artists and guitarists from the 1940s and 1950s.

- Netflix movie review: There Will Be Blood coming from my eyes if I have to watch this movie to the end.

- This Saturday is Chicken Parmigiana day. First I make the tomato sauce. I have two double chicken breasts. I pound them. A little salt and pepper. I mix egg, milk and a lot of various Italian spices, especially oregano into the mix, dip the chicken. Coat the chicken in Progresso Italian Style bread crumbs, fry it up. Then I put the water on, cook the spaghetti. And of course Chianti.

The Fat Lady Sings

Eileen Farrell sings the aria 'Un bel di' from Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly for Senator Hillary Clinton.

Thanks, Hillary! 

Dear Jim,

I wanted you to be one of the first to know: on Saturday, I will hold an event in Washington D.C. to thank everyone who has supported my campaign. Over the course of the last 16 months, I have been privileged and touched to witness the incredible dedication and sacrifice of so many people working for our campaign. Every minute you put into helping us win, every dollar you gave to keep up the fight meant more to me than I can ever possibly tell you.

On Saturday, I will extend my congratulations to Senator Obama and my support for his candidacy. This has been a long and hard-fought campaign, but as I have always said, my differences with Senator Obama are small compared to the differences we have with Senator McCain and the Republicans.

I have said throughout the campaign that I would strongly support Senator Obama if he were the Democratic Party's nominee, and I intend to deliver on that promise.

When I decided to run for president, I knew exactly why I was getting into this race: to work hard every day for the millions of Americans who need a voice in the White House.

I made you -- and everyone who supported me -- a promise: to stand up for our shared values and to never back down. I'm going to keep that promise today, tomorrow, and for the rest of my life.

I will be speaking on Saturday about how together we can rally the party behind Senator Obama. The stakes are too high and the task before us too important to do otherwise.

I know as I continue my lifelong work for a stronger America and a better world, I will turn to you for the support, the strength, and the commitment that you have shown me in the past 16 months. And I will always keep faith with the issues and causes that are important to you.

In the past few days, you have shown that support once again with hundreds of thousands of messages to the campaign, and again, I am touched by your thoughtfulness and kindness.

I can never possibly express my gratitude, so let me say simply, thank you.

Sincerely,

Saturday Musings

- Sandra Day O’Connor has joined the ranks of Republican women raising their voices for Alzheimer’s disease research. Her fellow Republican stalwart and care-giver, Nancy Reagan also has pleaded the case for the proper funding of the proper research. I guess God doesn’t want Republican men to be haunted by their memories in old age.

- Invading countries and hanging their leaders is a new global benchmark for justifiable invasion. (See Iraq). It is being debating concerning Myanmar.

- The A-list progressive blogosphere has a new strategy for their Presidential hopeful, Senator Barack Hussein Obama. Ignore the fact that he has not secured the nomination and run stories and headlines that treat him like the candidate and ignore Senator Hillary Clinton…ignore at your own risk.

- Listen up fellow liberals. A progressive agenda the likes we haven’t seen since LBJ’s Great Society and FDR’s New Deal could be yours if the Senator from New York lands the Senate Majority Leader’s job. And if we have a veto-proof Congress, the President will be inconsequential….well he can go to parties and dignitary functions where he can drink and do the least harm.

Maybe the reign of the Imperial American Presidency is at an end. Bush, Jr. proved no one deserves the power. A new balance of power for a new American century.

- It is interesting watching Bush, Jr. trying to pull the gas pump out of his ass.

- Dick Cheney, anyone? Anyone seen Dick?

- I’m stumped. I can’t imagine who Senator Obama is going to pick for his Veep candidate. I don’t know enough about him to guess. I will make a crazy suggestion: Patrick Murphy, the young Congressman from Pennsylvania. (he’ll be 35 by election day) Hope and Change!

McCain will go with Joe Lieberman (I hope). And Senator Clinton, (yes, she still is in the damn race so we have to include her.) can go with Wes Clark. (John Edwards and Bill Richardson are out of the running for a Clinton II Administration) This should be interesting.

-Two words for Appeasers: Prescott Bush.

Saturday Musings

-The gruesome body count of US soldiers is on in Iraq as we approach the magic number 4,000 killed. Then we will forget again until 5,000. No judgments from the media. No condemnation. No protest. Dick Cheney fishes and parties with his freaky billionaire friends in the Middle East. The President is stupid and says mean, hurtful and foolish things.

-Barack Obama spoke this week in Philadelphia. It wasn’t quite the second coming or an Elvis encore, but the pundits liked it. We were told that history was spoken that day. My impression was that the Senator needs a psychiatrist.

-John McCain spoke this week, too. The stupid, old-man ramblings over Iran and the war in Iraq. Man, he seems old. President Reagan never gave off the impression of an old man. McCain oozes it. They say The Gipper’s mind was slipping during the second term. McCain seems to have lost his already.

-Senator Clinton seems poised to win big in Pennsylvania. This thing is a street fight. She spoke this week on Iraq, too. Her sensible moderation may be too little, to late. She seems to be the only person left standing who understands Iraq, but her words are no longer echoing.

I guess we leave it up to the racists to see if she can pull this out. Her strength is the economy, or lack of economy, right now. I think people are voting their pocket book when they vote for her, not their racial prejudices.

-Speaking of racism and economics. In Philadelphia, there was a plan to make the entire city WI-FI friendly. Internet for everyone, rich and poor…then the companies did the math and there was no profit to be made in the poorer, mostly black neighborhoods, so they are changing their minds. Something similar happened in the 1980s in Philadelphia when cable TV was being introduced across the country. No company wanted to lay cable in the poor neighborhoods where the population was mostly black. Philadelphia became one of the last major cities to have cable TV. So maybe the Archie Bunkers aren’t just living in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. They are also in the penthouse suites of communication corporations including some Gen-X and Gen-Y favorites.

-Arthur C. Clarke died this week. Kids today will have no idea what they have missed if they do not seek out his works. His fiction inspired reality in young scientists’ minds. Your cell phones and satellite technology for example.

Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three "laws" of prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Go for it! It’s the 21st century!

-Anne Garrels is a senior foreign correspondent for NPR's foreign desk. She has spent the past four years in Iraq. She did a retrospective series of reports this past week. What caught my ear at one point was a harrowing story in which her transport came under attack, but she said” Al-Qaeda was firing on our vehicle!” I thought, how did she know who was firing on her vehicle? Suddenly her story started to smell of propaganda. I just don’t trust NPR. I wish I could. Sorry Anne.

-Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico endorsed Senator Obama for President. He worked for President Clinton as Ambassador to the United Nations, and as the Secretary of Energy and it was expected he would throw his support behind Senator Clinton's candidacy.  Richardson said that Obama has ‘something special’.

No endorsement yet from John Edwards. No word from Al Gore either. I wouldn’t be surprised if Gore did not endorse anyone. Why should he? No one endorsed him after he won the election in 2000.

It should have been John Edwards this year. If Big Al didn’t want it, Edwards was the guy. Democrats have made an historic mistake, here I think.

-Wow, I actually saw a skull appear over hot Dana Perino’s face during her press briefing this week. It was just like the ending of the movie PSYCHO. She was stuttering and spitting trying to roll back Bush, Jr.’s lies and stupidity. It was really cool. They really are devils!

-Made Fallenmok’s Spaghetti Punttanesca last night and it was delicious. Some folks aren’t used to the olive, caper, garlic combination. Sometimes that taste clashes with red wine. But if you follow his recipe, I think you will be hooked. (Just ask the whores of Naples)

-Stop everything! Buy Gnarles Barkley’s The Odd Couple. For the kids today who don’t know what TSOP is. Check this out and then go download The Stylistics, The Three Degrees, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and The O’Jay’s.

iTunes has Stacey Keach reading The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. The drawback to this collection is the stories are not listed individually as tracks. It is one big track, so getting to a specific story is impossible. But Keach is the right person to read these stories. Hemingway's stories are very clear when read aloud.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke is among the stars now.

Saturday Musings

If  I Can Make It There, I’d Make It Anywhere. It’s Up To You,  New York, New York.

-New Yorkers in the news:

-The Greatest President who never was, Mario Cuomo, has a solution for the Democratic Primary. Instead of CNN and MSNBC debates, make the candidates answer long, substantial questions on the issues facing America today. Sorry, Mario, Not in our life time. It is all about the sound-bite. Besides, would the average American understand the answers?

Ok, that’s being cynical, but come on, we just had two terms of a retard as President, and we really don’t seem to mind. We also pay $4.00 for gas and don’t seem to mind. We also went to war on an admitted lie, and don’t seem to mind. Jr. got in on a stolen election and we don’t seem to mind….on an on and on.

In a nation where the answer to Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? is 'No', substantive policy talk is not going to help people decide who should be the next President. It is not a standard we ever held to Republican Presidents. Jr. has yet to form a complete sentence while in office. We mocked Bill Clinton and Al Gore for being policy wonks.

All politics are local and it’s the economy stupid work pretty well as a voting guide.

-Eliot Spitzer…WTF? You have a wife and three daughters.

-Geraldine Ferraro is not a racist. Neither is Ed Rendell or Bill Clinton. Josh Marshall and The HuffObama Post need to take a look in the mirror. Americans are not evil because they don’t necessarily support Senator Obama in the Democratic Primary. Americans are evil when they shout and point and scream like brats when they don’t get their way, like Rush Limbaugh and FOX News and the Republican Congress…not very good company, I’d say.

-Congress went into a closed-door session to debate the unconstitutional acts of the Bush, Jr. Administration when it comes to warrantless wiretapping, meeting in secret so national security can be preserved. Republicans hide behind national security when they’ve really done something bad. Remember, it became the motto of the Reagan Administration where everything from his Alzheimer’s to supporting Iranian Hostages and Contra Founding Fathers became matters of national security and could not be investigated in public. And how did that work out for us?

-Bush, Jr. is trying to keep another critical report by the military out of the hands of the public. Another report on how misguided and mismanaged our war in Iraq actually is and how there is more proof that the neo-con fascists that infest Washington are playing the American people for fools. The report is already on the internet, but CNN, FOX News, MSNBC can’t seem to find it.

-Bearn Sterns needs money. The Federal Reserve is going to give it to them. Okay, but when the average American can’t make a car payment, who do we call?

-The EPA is complaining that Bush, Jr. overstepped his authority again and made the air less safe for Americans and the world. We should add up all the damage this administration has inflicted on the world and compare it to the damage terrorist evil-doers have inflicted on the world. I would like to see a grid of damage: Bush, Jr. vs. Terrorists.

-Pope Benedict XVI has created some more sins. Ecological damage and genetic manipulation. How awesome is that? Catholics all over the world can no longer pollute nor grow or eat genetically modified foods! No more bovine growth hormones. They can only eat hamburgers made from organically raised cows.  Am I misinterpreting the new rules? Genetic manipulation covers our food too, right, Father?

-I’m reading The Life of Andrew Jackson by Robert Remini, not the three-volume set. I’m cheating and reading Remini’s one-volume version. I was watching television and The Wind and the Lion came on. One of those films that once I see a scene, I stay until the end. Mainly to watch Brian Keith’s performance as Theodore Roosevelt. In one scene he tells reporters that Andrew Jackson shot a man off the porch of the White House. When the movie was over I went on Amazon.com, looked up Andrew Jackson, read some reviews of his biographies, settled on Remini’s and ordered a nice used copy. Good reading.

Theodore Rex is coming soon, too.

- "I'm puttin’ on my top hat, Tyin’ up my white tie, Brushin’ off my tails." Tonight I’m getting out of the house and rubbing elbows at a concert of Respighi’s Roman Trilogy. Then off to a late dinner at a nice, local Italian restaurant. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a classical music concert. Too, long. In fact I haven’t been to one since I’ve moved to the West Coast. I’m excited.

Answering To A Higher Authority

"A leading Israeli rabbi has ruled that the anti-impotency pill Viagra can be taken by Jews on Passover, reversing a previous ban.

Viagra had been deemed not kosher since 1998 under strict dietary laws over the week-long Jewish spring holiday.

Rabbi Mordechai Eliahu said the pill can be swallowed if it is encased in a special soluble kosher capsule first.

Viagra's Israeli manufacturers said they sought an answer after receiving queries from worried religious men.

Forbidden foods : The drug was previously prohibited because its coating was considered inedible over Passover, when contact with everyday ingredients, known as hametz, is forbidden under Jewish law...

...Viagra's Israeli manufacturer, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals-Israel, said swallowing the capsule does not breach Jewish law because the Viagra would not come into direct contact with the body.

A prescription for Viagra is issued in Israel on average once every minute, the newspaper reports."

Side effects include...

Americans Get Pissed.

"A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas — from Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit to Louisville, Ky.

Water providers rarely disclose results of pharmaceutical screenings, unless pressed, the AP found. For example, the head of a group representing major California suppliers said the public "doesn't know how to interpret the information" and might be unduly alarmed.

How do the drugs get into the water?

People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue."

So half the country is seriously worried about their water supply and the other half damn well should be.

Patent Number 174,465

Patent Number 174,465 was issued to Alexander Graham Bell on March 7, 1876 by the U.S. Patent Office which covered "the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically… by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound."

They are hard to recognize today, but the corporate entity formerly known as Bell Labs has a long and interesting history of innovation.

Happy Birthday Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin, one of my heroes from American history was born on January 17, 1706. Here is a link to an on-line version of his famous The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

Ben was a revolutionary, and inventor, a scientist, a writer, a statesman, a printer and an all around cool guy.

Here are some quotes:

-Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security

-To Follow by faith alone is to follow blindly.

-Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

-Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.

-Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.

-Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

-Never confuse motion with action.

-This will be the best security for maintaining our liberties. A nation of well-informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the religion of ignorance that tyranny begins.

-If you would not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worthy reading,
Or do things worth the writing.