3 years or 30,000 diapers

Bedtime has been a battle for many children for many years. Our daughter, Cassie, appears to be no different. I'm not certain if it's as much a struggle for power, or considering the bed to be boring. When you are three years old, life is always full of adventure. I imagine that as a toddler one's imagination is still going full blast.

In the last month, Cassie has been inundated with wonderful new toys, from all sorts of relatives. These range from crayons to cooking gear. All of these things are brand new, and she, like most youngsters is able to use these toys as a jumping off point to keep herself amused. Add this to the fact that reruns of television shows must not seem nearly as dated, if you yourself are still just at the 3 years or 30,000 diaper warranty. Everything being so new and interesting must make the idea of bedtime a remarkable drag.

I remember being a bit older, than Cassie is now, and sitting on the upstairs landing, in my superman underoos, my legs dangling over the ledge, watching whatever my mother had on the television (I always wanted the Six Million Dollar Man). This exercise taught me how to be quiet if nothing else, because the slightest noise could get me shooed back into my bedroom to sleep. It also taught me that women in their early 30s did not necessarily have the same taste in television as 5-year-old boys.

My wife, Elizabeth, has shared stories of her stalling tactics. Whether it was the desire for an apple, or a drink of water, everybody had his or her own style. Cassie is at the bargaining stage now. She always wants just one more minute of playtime, or one more book read. I'm certain that she will be a very successful salesman, if her career in nuclear engineering bores her too much.

So it is quite common for toddlers to avoid bedtime. Now if that were my problem, then I would be your normal, parent of a young child. But this is not the case. This is not the reason (at least not entirely) for this blog. No, in an attempt to make bedtime more acceptable to Cassie, we got an attachable railing for the extra twin bed we have in the house. We even outfitted the same bed with all sorts of Disney related bedding. This fascination with all things "Princess” has now made her room look as if a giant cotton candy machine might have exploded on her bed.

I blame the "Princess" obsession on a friend of hers in nursery school. This girl and Cassie play very nicely together, and get along wonderfully. However, Cassie was not showing a significant interest in all things "Princess", until she met this friend. This little girl is very nice, but I saw her getting dropped off at school recently, and there was a mysterious mouse driving the S.U.V. she was exiting. I also saw her pick up list, and it had an M. Eisner named. Granted, this is all circumstantial, but I've got my suspicions.

Back to the bed.... Both Elizabeth and I thought that most kids liked the idea of sleeping in a bigger bed. Not only is it a sign of growing up, but also doesn't everybody want a bigger bed? Well, we start to put this railing on the bed. We bought it at Babies R Us, the box talked up the ease of assembly. We did not notice the second line that said if you are a master craftsman with 30 years experience and an ability to read Chinese.

We struggled and strained, cursed and grumbled, begged and pleaded, and finally got help. Someone else attached the easily attachable railing. Our 3+ college degrees combined did not help much. A friend of ours was able to put it together without much trouble. Boy, did I feel useless. I can discuss, intelligently, the importance of Kirkuk, to the Iraqi economy, but cannot with any degree of confidence attach a railing to a twin bed.

Now, as I sit here at my computer, there is a bed with pink "Princess" sheets, and a railing for safety. Where does my daughter sleep? Well, she slept on a two-piece love seat when we were on vacation recently. She has slept numerous times in numerous cars. She has slept in pack and plays all over the country. She has to this day never actually slept in two places in this house.
Obviously, she has not slept in this new bed. She still prefers her crib. But, more importantly, she has never slept in our bed all night; she again, prefers her crib.

I don't support the Admininistration but I do support the troops

you stay up for 16 hours
He stays up for days on end.



You take a warm shower to help you wake up.
He goes days or weeks without running water.




You complain of a 'headache', and call in sick.
He gets shot at as others are hit, and keeps moving forward.



You put on your anti war/don't support the troops shirt, and go meet up with your friends.
He still fights for your right to wear that shirt.



You make sure you're cell phone is in your pocket.
He clutches the cross hanging on his chain next to his dog tags.



You talk trash about your 'buddies' that aren't with you.
He knows he may not see some of his buddies again.



You walk down the beach, staring at all the pretty girls.
He patrols the streets, searching for insurgents and terrorists.



You complain about how hot it is.
He wears his heavy gear, not daring to take off his helmet to wipe his brow.



You go out to lunch, and complain because the restaurant got your order wrong.
He doesn't get to eat today.


You don't have to email this. It's not like you know the men and women that are dying to preserve your rights.



REMEMBER our Troops, and do not forget them LATER


Lest we forget -

Huckabee is thinking outside the box

I was watching CNN this afternoon. Governor Huckabee was being televised giving a speech. He was discussing tracking illegal aliens in this country. He suggested that it would be a top priority for him as President. He went on to say that if the federal government could not track these people, then he might farm the reaponsibility out to Amazon.com . If they can track all of the items they sell through the mail, then maybe they can do a better job tracking illegals.

Way to make a joke of a serious problem, Governor.

It was a joke, wasn't it?

Good News for Louisiana

I thought this was worth posting...


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FRIDAY, JANUARY 11, 2008
www.gov.state.la.us
CONTACT: MARIE CENTANNI
225-342-9037

Louisiana Receives High Ranking for Economic Development

BATON ROUGE - Louisiana has been awarded fourth place in the Business Facilities Magazine, a publication that provides relocation information for businesses, first ever State of the Year Award.

According to the magazine, the award recognizes the hard work of economic developers and singles out the state with the most economically significant relocation and expansion projects of the year.

"This ranking is really a story," Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said. "It tells how Louisiana kept at its economic development mission, even in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, to move ahead of the nation in delivering quality jobs for our people. This was my goal, this was LED's work, and this will be our legacy."

The publication polled each state about the five largest projects for the most recent 12-month period for which they had data. Questions included number of jobs created and investment totals and at the conclusion of the polling, twenty-six states had responded. The results were computed using a predetermined, objective formula that treats jobs and investment equally.

Louisiana came in fourth with a total of $5.75 billion in investments and nearly 2,000 jobs created.

Business Facilities Magazine is a full service media brand specializing in the site selection marketplace distributed in key executives and corporations interested in site selection or relocation. To visit their website, please click here.

###

Big Political Gamble

Washington Post Editorial... Impeach both Bush and Cheney

Why I Believe Bush Must Go
Nixon Was Bad. These Guys Are Worse.
By George McGovern
Sunday, January 6, 2008; B01

As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.

After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign. I thought that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an expression of personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me.

Today I have made a different choice.

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising.

But what are the facts?

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon administration. But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?

How could a once-admired, great nation fall into such a quagmire of killing, immorality and lawlessness?

It happened in part because the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an "imminent threat" to the United States. The administration also led the public to believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks -- another blatant falsehood. Many times in recent years, I have recalled Jefferson's observation: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

The basic strategy of the administration has been to encourage a climate of fear, letting it exploit the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks not only to justify the invasion of Iraq but also to excuse such dangerous misbehavior as the illegal tapping of our telephones by government agents. The same fear-mongering has led government spokesmen and cooperative members of the press to imply that we are at war with the entire Arab and Muslim world -- more than a billion people.

Another shocking perversion has been the shipping of prisoners scooped off the streets of Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other countries without benefit of our time-tested laws of habeas corpus.

Although the president was advised by the intelligence agencies last August that Iran had no program to develop nuclear weapons, he continued to lie to the country and the world. This is the same strategy of deception that brought us into war in the Arabian Desert and could lead us into an unjustified invasion of Iran. I can say with some professional knowledge and experience that if Bush invades yet another Muslim oil state, it would mark the end of U.S. influence in the crucial Middle East for decades.

Ironically, while Bush and Cheney made counterterrorism the battle cry of their administration, their policies -- especially the war in Iraq -- have increased the terrorist threat and reduced the security of the United States. Consider the difference between the policies of the first President Bush and those of his son. When the Iraqi army marched into Kuwait in August 1990, President George H.W. Bush gathered the support of the entire world, including the United Nations, the European Union and most of the Arab League, to quickly expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The Saudis and Japanese paid most of the cost. Instead of getting bogged down in a costly occupation, the administration established a policy of containing the Baathist regime with international arms inspectors, no-fly zones and economic sanctions. Iraq was left as a stable country with little or no capacity to threaten others.

Today, after five years of clumsy, mistaken policies and U.S. military occupation, Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism and bloody civil strife. It is no secret that former president Bush, his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, and his national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, all opposed the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: "I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans." Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.

As former representative Elizabeth Holtzman, who played a key role in the Nixon impeachment proceedings, wrote two years ago, "it wasn't until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country's laws -- that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate. . . . A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law -- and repeatedly violates the law -- thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors."

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and Congresses. At age 85, I won't be around to witness the completion of the difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I'd like to hold on long enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II. We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered.

anmcgove@dwu.edu

Iowa Results... Are you surprised?

I guess I'm a bit behind this story. Obama winning in Iowa is quite a story. His relative inexperience, and his ability to beat the Clinton machine were both at least a bit of a surprise. Huckabee was not nearly as surprising. Regardless of the media reports of utter surprise, Huckabee is a Christian Conservative, and his message is going to play well with the Republican base who are the most likely to vote in the caucuses.

I would be surprised if Huckabee and Obama won New Hampshire. But I would not at all be surprised if they won their respective party nominations.

Email humor

Children 's Science exam answers

If you need a good laugh, try reading through
these children's science exam answers.

Q: Name the four seasons.
A: Salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar.

Q: Explain one of the processes by which water
can be made safe to drink
A: Flirtation makes water safe to drink
because it removes large
pollutants like grit, sand, dead sheep and
canoeists.

Q: How is dew formed?
A: The sun shines down on the leaves and makes
them perspire.

Q: How can you delay milk turning
sour???(brilliant, love this!)
A: Keep it in the cow.

Q: What causes the tides in the oceans?
A: The tides are a fight between the Earth and
the Moon.??All water
tends to flow towards the moon, because there
is no water on the moon, and
nature hates a vacuum.??I forget where the sun
joins in this fight.

Q: What are steroids?
A: Things for keeping carpets still on the
stairs.

Q: What happens to your body as you age?
A: When you get old, so do your bowels and you
get intercontinental.

Q: What happens to a boy when he reaches
puberty?
A: He says good-bye to his boyhood and looks
forward to his adultery.

Q: Name a major disease associated with
cigarettes.
A: Premature death.

Q: How are the main parts of the body
categorized???(e.g., abdomen)
A: The body is consisted into three parts -
the brainium, the borax and
the abdominal cavity.??The brainium contains
the brain; the borax contains
the heart and lungs, and the abdominal cavity
contains the five bowels A,
E, I, O, and U.

Q: What is the fibula?
A: A small lie.

Q: What does "varicose" mean???(I do love this
one...)
A: Nearby.

Q: Give the meaning of the term "Caesarean
Section."
A: The Caesarean Section is a district in
Rome.

Q: What does the word "benign" mean?'
A: Benign is what you will be after you be
eight.

I got a new computer

After 1 full year of complaining and bemoaning the cost, I broke down and got a new computer. It is my 1st Macintosh. The problem is I've not fully grasped how to use it, and therefore I will probably be a bit slower in blogging for a week or so.

Other than that, Happy New Year to everyone, and good luck Bill Richardson... Although he is probably overqualified.