Monroe Anderson

Ten years after 9/11, America needs 911

 

 

    On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy, the Chicago Sun-Times assigned all its Sunday op-ed columnists to write on the subject. Below is what I wrote. I've cut and pasted it from a wingnut website, Free Republic. If you'll notice, I got honored with a very grown-up "Barf Alert."

    Well, five years have passed. We're Bush-free but still stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    We're also still afraid.

    We can't catch a flight without going shoeless first and we're more than likely to have to show our private parts to a TSA agent before we're allowed to board. Osama bin Laden is dead but his terror lives on. So does his toll on American freedom and finances. We've spent ourselves into a hole by occupying two countries in our pursuit of invisible men. While we've been blowing things up for the past decade, China has been building and building and building.

We're still stuck in the quagmire with President Obama afraid to pull the plug, rightly fearing that the Republicans will successfully label him our soft on terror, anti-American, pro-Arab, freedom-hating commander-in-chief.

Ten years after 9/11, we're still nation-building in the Middle East while the Midwest in our nation is falling apart. So, for this next presidential election, I think Obama should be making a 911 call for America--we need the emergency services.

   

Just in time for elections, Bush campaigns on fear (BARF ALERT)
Chicago Sun-Times ^ | September 10, 2006 | MONROE ANDERSON

Posted on Sun Sep 10 09:47:18 2006 by Chi-townChief

 

Just in time for elections, Bush campaigns on fear

by Monroe Anderson

Five years after the 9/11 tragedy, the kingpin of Abraham Lincoln's party is still dead set on fooling most of the people most of the time.

President Bush and his chorus of Republican pols, Cabinet members and neo-con sycophants would have us believe we're safer or, depending on political expediencies, not that safe. According to the president's pre-9/11 anniversary speeches on the progress of the war on terror, we're safer than we were before the attacks but not yet safe enough to steer clear of his failed stay-the-course strategy. As Bush explains it, al-Qaida's leadership is decimated but remains dangerous enough to destroy the entire civilized world.

There he goes again.

With midterm congressional elections less than two months away, the Bush subterfuge machine is in full spiel and spin. Too incompetent to manage problems that are all too real to mainstream America, such as high gas prices, 45 million citizens without health insurance and a sliding income for middle-class workers -- or capturing Osama bin Laden for that matter -- the president and his forces are back to wheeling and dealing terror. They're playing the same fear-mongering three-card monte game that worked so well in the 2002 and 2004 elections: See if you can find the terrorist threat under here or here or there. Find Saddam Hussein's ethereal weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Watch the politically timed color alert rise and fall on cue.

There's a book just out with a title that sums it all up: Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War. Authors Michael Isikoff and David Corn report that Bush hated Saddam so much that he privately let loose expletive-laden tirades against the dictator. In March 2002, months before Bush asked Congress for authority to attack Saddam, he bluntly exposed his true intentions in an unguarded moment with two aides. When told that White House correspondent Helen Thomas was questioning the need to oust Saddam, Bush snapped: ''Did you tell her I intend to kick his sorry m - - - - - - - - - - - - ass all over the Mideast?''

The president's anger was understandable. ''After all,'' Bush said six months later while speaking at a fund-raiser in Houston, ''this is the guy who tried to kill my dad.''

I think that's admirable that Bush 43 loves his dad, Bush 41, enough to try to revenge Saddam's botched assassination attempt in 1993. I loved my late dad as much as Bush loves his, and while I too would have been livid if the Iraqi dictator tried to whack my father, I wouldn't have set into motion a wave of international shock and awe that would result in the deaths of more than 2,600 U.S. military men and women and more than 41,000 innocent Iraqi civilians.

I also love my two sons as much as I'm sure he loves his twin daughters. If we're really in danger of Apocalypse Soon, as Bush keeps insisting, then we ought to act like it. The president should re-institute a mandatory military draft. I'll tearfully send my sons off to war, right after Bush tearfully sends his daughters to sign up in our co-educational military. If the war against Islamic terrorists compares to the fight against Nazis, as Bush insists, and if a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq would lead to its conquest by our nation's worst enemies, then we ought to have a military reflecting that clear and present danger. There were 16 million Americans fighting to keep the world safe for democracy in World War II. There are 130,000 in Iraq.

I'm afraid Bush's plan to save the world from Islamic fascism is way too modest. He wants Congress to pass his terrorist surveillance act and authorization to try the al-Qaida detainees held in his secret CIA torture prisons. For reasons too simple for many Americans to understand, he's not interested in following the 9/11 Commission's recommendations to shore up security at U.S. harbors or keep a close watch on checked airplane luggage. Those measures, which would obviously make America safer from the inevitable al-Qaida strikes in the future, would cost big business big money.

But what fool would want to take those measures when it's so much more politically practical to scare most of the people one more time?

'Fox And Friends' Defends News Corp. In Phone Hacking Scandal (VIDEO)

Fox and Friends clumsily defended News Corp. on Friday morning, inaccurately defending the company as a victim of hacking instead of the one that did the hacking. Host Steve Doocy said, “It’s too ...

Fox and Friends clumsily defended News Corp. on Friday morning, inaccurately defending the company as a victim of hacking instead of the one that did the hacking. Host Steve Doocy said, “It’s too ...

Dilenschneider also said that News Corp has done "all the right things" in its response to the scandal. He then likened News Corp. to companies that have been the victims of hacking, such as Citigroup, American Express and Bank of America. It was an odd analogy, given that News Corp is not a hacking victim, but has been found guilty of hacking others.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Looks like Rupert Murdock is going down. It's about time. But Fox and Friends are making a clumsy attempt to defend the big bad boss and the evil media empire's unethical practices. Is Doocy right? Is this much to do another nothing? Or should the MSM keep reporting on this and should the Justice Department make sure it gets to the bottom of the barrel of rotten apples.

The Chickens Come Home to Roost on Right's Hate Spews

    The blame game started Saturday within hours after reports of the Gabrielle Giffords assassination attempt in Tucson. The left correctly blamed the right for all the hate speech and political vitriol that may have fed the madness of accused murdered Jared Loughner. The right defensively played the moral equivalency card much like a bunch grade schoolers on the play ground, whining that while they got caught name calling, the other kids were doing it too.

What the right and left have done may be the same thing but was done at different times. In the late 1960's the left was almost as bad then as the right is now. I say almost because the left’s political leadership wasn’t behaving as badly back then as the right’s political leadership is right now. The Left’s extremist talk and actions some four decades back helped swing the nation to center right. My sense is that the right's extremism will surely move the pendulum back.

But while talking about bad talk is satisfying, we need to talk more about the pink elephant in the room: gun control.

A mentally ill, hate-filled 22-year-old armed with a butcher knife may have killed and maimed, but his toll would have been a lot less than six dead and 20 wounded. Here's a column I wrote four and a half years ago for the Chicago Sun-Times. It's painfully personal.

 

We're killing ourselves more effectively than terrorists

Chicago Sun-Times

July 30, 2006

by Monroe Anderson

 

My kid brother, Dariek, gave me the only handgun I've ever owned: a target gray, stainless steel .357 Magnum. This gun was the not-so- little cousin to the .44 that co-starred in "Sudden Impact," when Clint Eastwood, as "Dirty Harry," told a bad guy: "Go ahead, make my day."

The weapon came into my possession right after Dariek had a bad night. Voices from his stereo speakers had kept him awake, talking to him, telling him to blow his girlfriend's brains out. He had fought valiantly to ignore the voices but feared the next time he heard them he might not be as strong.

"Are you taking your medicine?" I asked.

"No," he grunted. "I stopped taking it. That stuff is poison."

"You've got to take your medicine," I said, worried but grateful he had managed not to become another statistic in one more tragic news story.

Back in 1977, Dariek dropped out of Indiana University to be all that he could be in the Army. About a year and a half into his tour of duty, he was yanked out of the American nuclear missile silo he was guarding in Germany after he suddenly suffered a mental breakdown. He was flown to an Army hospital in New York where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, then given a medical discharge.

By the time the voices in the stereo speakers were telling Dariek to shoot to kill, he had been in and out of the hospital and on and off medications designed to treat his delusions of grandeur, paranoia and schizophrenia several times. His nervous condition, as my mother always referred to it, had proved not to be a barrier to legally buying the .357 from an Indiana gun shop.

"I need to borrow the gun," I said, with all the authority a brother 11 years older can wield.

"Why?" he asked, distracted from repeating his descriptions of what the speaker voices had to say.

Knowing that Dariek kept up with the news daily and that there was yet another Lincoln Park rapist running loose, I told him we needed it so that my wife, Joyce, could carry it for protection. He understood. The next day, I drove to my parents' home in Gary, where he handed over the gun and the Indiana gun permit.

I recalled that unsettling episode last week as reports of sniper fire in Indiana hit newspaper headlines and broadcast news. Zachariah Blanton, 17, confessed to the series of Downstate Indiana highway shootings that killed one man, wounded another and left four vehicles shot up. He allegedly went on a shooting rampage after arguing with family members over gutting a deer during a hunting trip. Two days later, after the alleged Blanton sniping, a copycat sniper was reportedly taking potshots at vehicles in Northwest Indiana.

Gunplay in our nation is almost as much a national pastime as baseball. And, with the never-ending, inadequately controlled abundant supply of firearms, we're killing ourselves more effectively than any terrorist organization could. In 2003, the most recent year that data is available, there were 30,136 gun deaths in the United States. Forty percent were homicides; 56 percent were suicides.

When the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, stating that "a well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed," was ratified in 1791, the good citizens were worried about the Indians successfully stopping the theft of their land and the African slaves rebelling, violently reclaiming their freedom. Those are all dead issues now. And yet, even as tens of thousands of Americans die year in and year out from firearms, conservatives carp and babble about Second Amendment rights whenever any lifesaving gun control proposal rears its logical head. As the National Rifle Association likes to sloganeer, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."

But had the angry Indiana teenager bore stones instead of a firearm, he'd be charged with vandalism, not murder.

 

Thank the lord for the Teabaggers

 

 

I think I owe the Teabaggers an apology for all the nasty things I've written about them since they started stupidly protesting against the healthcare reform bill that will benefit them as much as most other Americans.

Sure, some of them may be racist. Others may be the dull knives in the drawer. A few may even be well-meaning but misguided in their cause without a cause. But no matter who they are or what they say, I've got two words that says they're okay with me: Rand Paul.

As a result of their successful effort to put one their own on top in the Kentucky Republican senate primary, the Teabaggers have accomplished what Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have only dreamed of doing: Leaving the echo chambering Republican establishment leadership speechless.

Within a 24-hour news cycle, Ron Paul's boy, Rand, had Michael Steele, Eric Cantor and Jim DeMint morph from their "just say no" political policy to a "no comment" stance on the the Kentucky Republican senate candidate's stance on the Civil Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act and The Americans with Disabilities Act.

Libertarian Paul has a nit to pick with all three established, USA seal-of-approval laws. When it a choice between the citizens or business, big or small, he's not with the citizens. Of course, less than a day after Paul confessed on NPR and the Rachel Maddow Show that he was in favor of the 1964 Civil Rights Act--except for the part that would allow businesses to prevent Americans who look like me from sitting at their lunch counters--he made a mad scrabble to a saner position.

But it's too late. He's now the poster boy of what the whole conservative movement really is about. And for that, we've got to thank the Teabaggers for giving us the gift that's bound to keep on giving.

In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse--Not anywhere where Glenn Beck just happens to be

 
 

    During yesterday's fleeting hour, while he was interviewing the very troubled former New York congressman, Eric Massa, Glenn Beck was out of his mind. 

This was the first time the whining, weeping conservative talk show host sounded, sounded, sounded, well.....thoughtful as he tried to get freshly-resigned Massa to dump all over his fellow Democrats and the Obama Administration.

When I say Beck sounded thoughtful, let me be clear: I'm speaking relatively here.

Any other time Beck favors staying stuck on stupid, saying stuff like President Barack Obama is a racist who "has a deep-seated hatred for white people."

As Media Matters points out, Beck "has flirted with the idea that FEMA is building detention camps, suggested that President Obama is purposefully "tanking" the economy to force young people to work for ACORN and AmeriCorps, and said that Obama and former President George W. Bush are 'moving us away from our republic and into a system of fascism.'"

Beck, who was named Media Matters' Misinformer of the Year, also thought the Tea Baggers march on Washington was 1.7 million strong--about seven times as much as the number of anti-reform protesters that actually showed up. He apparently thinks the ideas enumerated in his banal 912 Project, with its nine principles and 12 values, are something new, necessary or profound.

But right after I saw Beck's broadcast yesterday, which left me hoping against hope that he wasn't the dullest knife in the drawer, I read that on Monday he was urging the listeners of his syndicated radio show to leave churches that preach social justice.

As it turns out, Beck thinks that the term many Christian churches use to describe efforts to tackle poverty and promote human rights is a "code word" for communism and Nazism. 

Who would dare think the teachings of Jesus Christ were the ambitions of commies and Nazis? Glenn Beck.

This commentary was cross-posted on the AgoraVox website.

The Impeach Obama movement's impeachable motives

 
 

    Barack Obama has been POTUS for less than a year and a month and already the wingnuts have launched a slew of wacky Impeach Obama campaigns.

In Wisconsin, an Impeach Obama billboard mysteriously appeared last week on U.S. 41 near the Oshkosh Correctional Institution. And what are the grounds for this call to remove our nation's first African American president? This punch line on the billboard explains it all: "America's small businesses are failing. Help us spread the message." Oh, sorry, that was no punch line, these sorry folks aren't joking. There's also the Impeach Obama Campaign.com website that claims to have "Over 100000 signatures and growing."  Go there and you'll be able to read the revealing reasons why America's legally elected head of state should be removed from office:

Radio-personality Tammy Bruce may have said it best: 

---

"... ultimately, it comes down to... the fact that he seems to have, it seems to me, some malevolence toward this country, which is unabated."
Speaking of the best sayings of vitriolic, slime-spewing right-wing radio personalities, there's Michael Savage who demands that we "Impeach Obama now. Stop him before he kills this country."
Savage's padded-cell rants are kissing cousins to what's being sung by some jackleg rock group called Sleuth. If you're into poorly performed songs with poorly written propagandistic lyrics, then the group's Impeach Obama is the song for you.
And, of course, there's the Tea Baggers and the bumper stickers.
Why do a plurality of Republicans, according to a Daily Kos poll, want Obama impeached?  Why is there this wingnut zeal to topple America's freely elected leader? 
Has he been convicted of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors? Nope.
Has he lied to our citizens about WMDs so that we could invade and occupy an oil-rich, Muslim country in the Middle East? Au contraire.
Has he broken U.S. and International law by allowing POWs to be tortured in violation of the Geneva Conventions treaty? I don't think so.
Has he even been caught lying about getting some head in the Oval Office? No. No. No.
So why--just one-fourth through his presidential term--are these crusades to remove the Leader of the Free World out there? Keith Olbermann, my favorite cable TV host on the "whites only" MSNBC line-up, summed it all up in a special commentary, "Beware fear's racist temptation," on Countdown last  night. His commentary, I think, got to the heart of conservative America's thinking and to the soul of the Impeach Obama fantasy.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse--Not in the minds of the GOP

 
  

    Whether it's Sarah Palin, Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mike Pence, Michael Steele or Rush Limbaugh, you can almost always count on Republican leadership to say something stupid.

In some cases--take Palin for example--the simple-minded statements come from an uniformed mind. In other cases--take Limbaugh this time--it's a matter of fabrications, deceptions and out-right lies.

In the end it really doesn't matter rather it's an imbecile stuck on stupid or a madman on a misinformation mission: there are low-information Americans out there soaking it all up.  They all seem to be conservative and think they alone have ownership of all things American. Even so, I was shocked to find out how many Americans who call themselves Republicans know so little about so many things--or are just plain mad as a hatter.

And with that, I give you--

The 2010 Comprehensive Daily Kos/Research 2000 Poll of Self-Identified Republicans

OBAMA and AMERICA

Should Barack Obama be impeached, or not?

Yes 39 
No 32 
Not Sure 29

For what? Who the heck knows. Who needs high crimes or misdemeanors when...

Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?

Yes 63 
No 21 
Not Sure 16

That's the power of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, after one year of relentlessly claiming Obama is the second coming of Lenin ... and Hitler!

Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, or not?

Yes 42 
No 36 
Not Sure 22

We still have over a half of Republicans who don't think Obama was born in the US or think it's a matter open to debate.

Do you believe Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win?

Yes 24 
No 43 
Not Sure 33

Not just a quarter of Republicans believe this ludicrous premise, but another third think it's a matter open to debate. How do you negotiate with a party whose rank and file are that divorced from reality? And speaking of divorced from reality...

Do you believe ACORN stole the 2008 election?

Yes 21 
No 24 
Not Sure 55

One in five Republicans think ACORN is so powerful as to magically make 10 million votes appear. Another55 are open to the theory. In other words, just 24 percent of Republicans have an even passing relationship with reality.

Do you believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama?

Yes 53 
No 14 
Not Sure 33

Sigh...

Do you believe Barack Obama is a racist who hates White people?

Yes 31 
No 36 
Not Sure 33

I bet more people think Obama is racist, but were too afraid to tell a live operator the truth.

Do you believe your state should secede from the United States?

Yes 23 
No 58 
Not Sure 19

42 percent of Republicans aren't really patriotic. They pretend to love America only when they approve of the president. These traitors don't believe in democracy, in our nation's founding ideals, or in our flag. To them, those colors run. They are cowards.

Note, secession sentiment is MUCH stronger in the South than elsewhere -- 33 percent want out, compared to just 52 percent who want to stay. In the Northeast, "just" 10 percent want out, in the Midwest, its 18 percent, and in the West, it's 16 percent. Can we cram them all into the Texas Panhandle, create the state of Dumbfuckistan, and build a wall around them to keep them from coming into America illegally?

The comments following the polling numbers came with the Daily Kos report. To read more--and weep or laugh depending on your mood--click here.

I'm assuming the more extreme moronic thoughts belong to the Tea-baggers and wing-nuts. Other than that, what can I say? I could paraphrase Moma Gump with a "Stupid is as stupid thinks." Or I could point out that this proves the current axiom "Garbage in, garbage out?" 

But mainly it informs us that the GOP may not so much be the Party of No as it is the Party of Know Nothings.

 

 This column was cross-posted on the AgoraVox and UK Progressive websites.

GOP did a heck of a job on Dems for Brownie

 
 

We saw what was to come a year ago when Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. sworn in President Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. 

What should have been a smooth and seamless ceremony wasn't. Chief Justice Roberts got the words wrong. The new President had to go through the swearing-in later--one more time--in the Inaugural day to make sure everything was all right.

That omen to the chief from the chief would be replayed and replayed and replayed with different verses, but the same tune throughout Obama's first 365 days in office. While I seriously doubt that the swearing-in trip-up by Roberts, an activist conservative Supreme Court appointee, was designed to be an obstructionist gesture, it symbolizes what the activist, conservative Republican Party and its media movers and shakers had in store for Obama.

Since the double-dose Inaugural, day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, our nation and its chief executive have been bludgeoned by one Republican road block to the next in a right-wing plot to assure that Obama's promise for change goes nowhere fast.

Right off there was the Birthers. According to them, Obama was not born in the United States therefore wasn't a legal citizen therefore was ineligible to be president. A little more than six months into office, the first African American president was still in early attempts to get the health reform legislation he promised through Congress when GOP Sen. Jim DeMint declared if Republicans and conservatives stop Obama on health care reform, it would “break him” and be Obama’s “Waterloo.”

After DeMint's declarations, the Birthers were joined by the Deathers--those that claimed that the Healthcare Reform Bill was designed to let senior citizens die--and the tea-baggers who were mad as hell as not going to take it any more because Obama was a foreign-born, socialist who was out to kill the unborn, old folks and truth, justice and the American way.

All along, the Republicans voted no while providing no variable alternative to all they were rejecting. As we come to the end of Obama's first year, the Republicans have helped to assure that 177 of the White House's nominees have not been appointed--that's 107 more than the 70 Bush nominees that were still waiting after his first year in office and one heck of a way to make sure that Obama can't do a good job.

So when Massachusetts' Brownie became the first Republican to win a U.S. Senate seat since Edward Brooke retired in 1979, on cue the conservatives to healthcare. Following suit, many of the MSM reports failed to point out months before Scott Brown beat Democrat Martha Coakley that the majority of Americans were in favor of healthcare reform until the right-wingers nay-sayed it to its deathbed. Nor did enough MSM reports explain that Massachusetts already has a healthcare reform law in place so the voters in that state were either fearful that a national reform law may cost them more or were pretty much into a "I got mine, I could care less about yours" state of mind.

As if we didn't know, the main history we've learned in the past year is that negative works; that it's easier to tear down than to build up and that nice guys get to experience firsthand that old saw about if at first you don't succeed, then try, try, try again.

 
 

This column has been cross-posted on the Newsvine and the African American Opinion.com websites.

Movie Monsters, Barack Obama, Mother Nature and other terrifying things

 

The original The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff, was on satellite TV the other morning. My wife, Joyce, watched. I didn't.

Even when I was a young, easy-to-frighten child, The Mummy didn't scare me much. As long as I didn't let myself get cornered, The Mummy wasn't about to get me. I could outrun the dead man walking. Same thing with the Frankenstein Monster. He was way too slow and clumsy to catch me with the quick reflexes and the fast feet.

But, the Werewolf was different. He was fast, strong and vicious. Unlike the embalmed moving mannequin and the blockhead assembled from the booty of grave robbers, The Wolf Man was VERY scary--when the moon was right.

I remember my eight-year-old imagination playing havoc with me after seeing a rerun of the 1941 Wolf Man on our black-and-white TV set. During the next full moon, as I undressed for bed, I'd stare at my feet, just checking to make sure they were not sprouting wolf hair ala Lon Chaney. And I had no interest in wandering around our small, Gary, Indiana backyard when the moon was bright and round. I often would toss and turn before finally getting to sleep.

That fear, of course, was a once a month or so event. The rest of the time, I lived a fairly fright free life--unless I happened to catch a Dracula movie on the boob tube.

Talk about scary; there was no movie monster more blood curdling than the Count. He was lightening-fast. He could morph into a bat. He could vaporize into a mist and slip underneath your bedroom door. There was no evading or escaping him.

Thank God he feared the cross. I took to wearing one for weeks after seeing any of the Hollywood reincarnations of Bram Stoker's masterpiece. The Crucifix was comforting but not a panacea for the lingering terror the movie had injected into my psyche. Even now, as a card-carrying AARP member who's on the brink of senior citizenship, celluloid vampires can put me on edge. I watch True Blood for fun and for the sheer adrenaline rush.

All that's to say, when I hear the wingnuts going on about President Obama and how they fear for America, I understand. Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and Sarah Palin routinely contribute to the mass hysteria by summoning up imaginary monsters that make The Werewolf look like the family Labrador retriever and Dracula look like the Count Muppet on Sesame Street.

To hear the Birthers, the Deathers, the Tea-Baggers and the Republican leadership tell it, President Obama is a James Cameron creation. Or as Kyle Reese put it: "Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

The wingnut terrors, of course, are about as real as my youthful fears of the wolf man and the vampire.

Meanwhile, today's headlines force me to recall another low-budget movie monster: The Zombie. In these old black-and-whites, Voodoo sorcerers from Haiti summoned up the dead to wreak havoc and to reckon revenge.

The devastation and horror of the worst earthquake to hit Haiti in 200 years, and the countless number of lives lost, put fear and power in the proper perspective: There are real horrors in life; horrors that don't come with popcorn or silly little tea-bags hanging from your straw hat.

---

 

 This commentary was cross-posted on the AgoraVox and Newsvine websites.

My New Year's resolution: I'm back to whacking wingnuts

    

    It's that time of the year again. January 2, the day I resolve to do things I haven't done or to stop doing things I do. Lately, each year has begun with the same resolutions: I'm going to exercise more, lose a few pounds, get my house in order, read and write more and watch TV less.

    Each year starts out with a bang and ends with a whimper. That's why I get to make the same old resolutions again come the next January 2. Last year, I recorded the days I exercised in a pocket calendar. My aerobic exercising and iron pumping was a regular routine until May Day. Except for a few outings on my bicycle there are a lot of blank papers in my calendar after May 1. I fell way off the wagon. Again.

    But although this day could easily be declared my annual day for future failure, I celebrate it as my great day of the big past success. 

    In 1975, exactly 35 years ago to the day, I quit smoking cigarettes. 

    It was no easy feat. I went cold turkey. I went through a nasty withdrawal. I fought off capricious cravings for years. I know that I am healthier and wealthier for my suffering. Definitely wealthier. When I quit my pack and a half to three packs a day habit, cigarettes were 55 cents a pack. You could pick up a carton for about eight bucks. A smoker today, thanks mostly to sin taxes, pays more than that for one pack. Had I kept my old bad habit, I would have been burning up between $4,380 to $8,760 a year. That's two top-shelf 55-inch flat screen plasma TVs a year. Or an annual cruise to Tahiti for two. Or three months' worth of dining out at five-star restaurants.

    That's a whole lot of dough that didn't go up in smoke...for one year. Multiple that by 35 and we're talking real money. So, whatever New Year's resolution I make today and break tomorrow, not smoking makes up for it. Still, I'd like to succeed at something else. This will be my year. Last year, I all but quit posting on my blog about halfway through. It wasn't my intention but when you've been paid to write for all of your professional life, doing it for nothing is no easy task. Beyond  
  that, the Wingnuts took their toll. The antics of the Deathers, the Birthers, the Tea-baggers, the Cheneys and their ilk left me dumbfounded and speechless.

    So on this day, I resolve to get down to my fighting weight and get back into the fray. This is my first post of the year. Many more will follow. The dumbbells are calling me out.