My Dad, Father’s Day, Menace to Society

This was taken on Christmas day, and he’s dressed in anticipation of the Great Blizzard of 08, in Southern California. 

Which never happened. 

Father’s Day

We spent Father’s Day at his house.  I took some steaks and fixed lunch for everyone, and it’s just wonderful when you do something like that and it all comes out just right and the steaks were not over-done.     No one argued about politics, nor even brought it up.  I helped my sister hang new curtains in his bedroom to keep the room a little cooler in the afternoon, then Mr Pie installed tiebacks for the curtains and a handrail in the bathroom.  He has trouble rising from a chair now, and I wonder how much longer my sister will be able to take care of him without outside help.

He’ll be 90 in four weeks. We are planning a large party; it was originally going to be a surprise party but we discovered that we needed his help with the guest list because we didn’t know whom to invite: we were worried that he’d outlived all of his friends and most of his relatives.  So, yesterday we let him in on the secret and he was thrilled. 

Then today I got an invitation to a birthday party for his cousin’s husband Max, who will also be 90, and the date is two weeks before his birthday.  I laughed a little because they are stealing Dad’s thunder.

Menace to Society

He’s still driving.

I tried to get his doctor to help us out and ask the DMV to have him tested behind the wheel, but no dice.  I have kept an eye on his driving skills for the past five years, but recently the skill level has dropped and I’m alarmed, so I called around today and discovered that I can send a letter to a Safety Bureau and they will request that he come in for a drivers’ test. 

He just announced that his license is due to be renewed on this birthday, and bragged that he only has to take the written test.  I don’t know how the state can allow something like this, but I know that they do. 

Dad told me yesterday that an acquaintance had his license taken away.  Doug is younger than Dad, and Dad was a little horrified that it had happened.  I pointed out that Doug’s license should have been taken away 30 years ago for general incompetence having nothing to do with age, because Doug is an idiot.  Dad had to agree with that, but I know that he is worried that he will lose his license, and I know that he will take it very badly if he does.  He lives with my sister and her daughter, and I visit him at least once a week; there are neighbors who will give him rides if we aren’t there, as well as a local shuttle bus, but all of these will feel like a poor substitute to him. 

  He’s never been a sissy.  He had a massive stroke nearly 25 years ago, was paralyzed on his left side, and you’d never know it unless you knew him really well.  The only tell is his left hand  which doesn’t work too well these days, only because he didn’t keep up with the exercises. 

It isn’t just the getting old that’s hard, it’s the being old.

Imaginary Friends Update

An update on the comment I sent to an on-line friend earlier this week, who assumed that since I was nice to her, our politics would be the same. Below is an excerpt of the letter she sent back, after assuring me that she would not remove me from her mailing list:

“McCain is not the best candidate for president, and I would be very surprised if he or any other Republican candidate wins in November.  Aside from that, I will not vote for Obama.  I don’t know much about his background, or even where he stands on important issues like abortion, war, economy, etc. In a nutshell, McCain is the lesser of two evils.”

She won’t vote for Obama, believes him to be the lesser of two evils,  but admits that she doesn’t know anything about him.  Part of me is just twitching right now, wanting to email back the obvious question: If you don’t know anything about Obama, then how did you decide that he was the greater of two evils?

She then goes on to say that she thinks God has a plan for our country.   I believe he has a plan for the whole world, and few are following it.  A lot of people are sitting around waiting for him to fix everything for us, but I suspect that the movie “Oh God!” got it right,  that God gave us the world and it’s up to us to fix what’s wrong.  

Orange County’s New Sheriff

There’s a new sheriff in town and she’s……. that’s right, I said SHE. 

Sandra Hutchens, a retired Division Chief of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department, is our new sheriff, and some of the Good Ol’ Boys down at the GOP are claiming that it’s all the fault of the womenfolk in the county, namely the California Women’s Leadership Association, a group of south Orange County Republican women whose goal is to increase the presence of women in office. 

The other candidate, Santa Ana Police Chief Paul Walters, was equally qualified (aside from being a man) and I thought he’d do a good job too, and expected the board to choose him.  Both had excellent credentials.   You will recall (or maybe you won’t) a previous set of entries regarding “America’s Sheriff”, one Mike Carona who is no longer our beloved sheriff and is almost certainly heading to prison after his case is tried.  His wife and his mistress, two or three of his assistants and several other players to be named at a later date will certainly be joining him, although probably not in the same cell, when the Grand Jury has a chance to listen to the secret tapes made by Mike Carona himself, of conversations with visitors in his office. 

These GOP gentlemen are disgruntled because they say that gender played a role in the selection of Hutchens, meaning that a man didn’t get the job and it must be the fault of the two women on the board of supervisors who voted for her, along with one of the men.  The vote was 3 to 2, so it was the fault of those meddling women.   Right.

The extremely fair-minded Orange County Register referred to Hutchens as an “affirmative action hire”.  The similarly fair-minded political blog, Red County, called it “gender driven”.

Oh, waah waah, boys.

See, this is what you risked when you gave women the unrestricted right to vote back in 1920.   I’m waiting to see if they now call for a repeal of the 19th amendment.

 

Non Sequiturs R Us: Email from Uncle Dummy; and, The Political Influence of Imaginary Friends.

DNA makes us all the same

Just because someone shares DNA with me they seem to think that my political views will match their own, or that they can send me something that will change my mind about a candidate. The fact that so many of my relatives are semi-literate does not phase them; they sent me the Swift Boat letter four years ago and threatened to stop speaking to me when I sent them a link to the refutation of those claims. 

This belief that we will agree politicaly seems to  include some online friends, but there is a good reason some of us refer to online friends as Imaginary Friends, but more about that later.

Non Sequiturs R Us: Email from Uncle Dummy:

My dear uncle, the lone surviving member of that generation other than my father, sent me a screed yesterday that insisted that we shouldn’t be complaining about the cost of the Iraq war, because illegal aliens cost us even more.  It cited statistics that claim that illegal aliens cost us $338 billion a year, but if that’s true we should be outraged about the cost of both.  I haven’t been able to find reliable sources to either support or refute his numbers, and some of the links given didn’t work, usually a sign of unreliability. In my feeble attempts to research the claims of this rant, I ran across several sites that seemed focussed entirely on Mexicans, some to the point of outright racism.

What’s interesting about that is that while most people in the Southwest think of Mexicans when the term “illegal alien” is used, when we lived near San Francisco, the term usually made people think of Asians. There was a steady stream of reports of Aisan refugees being smuggled aboard boats, but no word of a sea wall being built as of this date.

Uncle-in-law:

Saturday we went to a party at Mr Pie’s cousin’s house, in honor of the cousin’s parents.  We absolutely love them.  These are good people, but Mr Pie’s uncle has decided in recent years that he has a religious duty to make sure we vote the way he thinks Jesus would want.  His idea of Jesus’s political beliefs is quite different from mine, even though Unc and I share the same political party.  The last time he cornered me was four years ago at lunch following Mr Pie’s mother’s funeral.  He wanted to know how we were going to vote in the upcoming election, which is not usually the sort of subject one brings up at these events.  I told him John Kerry and he nearly choked on his iced tea.  He tried to point out the vile canard(s) of the Swift Boat Veterans but I wasn’t having any, and when he saw this he retorted, “Well, his wife is ugly!”  Right.  That was the entire reason I shouldn’t vote for Kerry.  If I hadn’t been so annoyed I would have seen how amusing this was. 

So, on Saturday he wanted to find out who I’m voting for, because, I mean, he just doesn’t know what he’s going to do about the election this time.  I wondered if this meant that he was actually considering voting for Obama, but I quickly realized that he meant that there was no one candidate who was willing to do Jesus’s bidding. He made it clear that he couldn’t vote for Obama because the man was so awful.  So awful?  I was afraid to get into that with him, and just told him that I didn’t want to argue politics with him.  He smiled.  I did tell him that I did vote for McCain in both this primary and the one in 2000, but that I was worried that McCain might be too friendly with the wrong people.  This satisfied him, since he could imagine that I was as worried as he was that McCain might not be as attentive to the Evangelical Right Wing as Bush pretended to be.  That is one disillusioned bunch of people, as they well should be.  I am not one of them.  My Christian beliefs align more with policies on the Left than on the Right these days, and I was not disillusioned at all by what W & Co. have done. 

Mighty disturbed, but not disillusioned. 

Imaginary Friends

And then there are my online friends who think that because they have my email address I would welcome a much-forwarded letter about, oh say how Obama is a Muslin (sic) sympathizer.   I have little sympathy for muslin; as a fabric it serves its purpose, but that’s about it.

Oh, you meant Muslim.  Right.  That group of people that is the current favorite bogeyman of people who have never met one. They’re different from us therefore we fear/hate them. 

Today’s email brought me a wonderful article about how McCain is not using his son’s military service in his campaign (although today’s paper cites Lieberman as doing so), and how this is noble of him, etc. so we should vote for him. 

Um, explain to me why he would cite his son’s service in his campaign?  I expect better from him and I am glad to see that he isn’t disappointing.

This is the letter I sent back to my friend, who is my friend because I purchased a photograph ($65) in an antique mall that had a name on the back of it,  tracked down the descendants, and sent it to her for free: 

Thank you Traci, but despite my great respect for McCain I will  be voting for Obama.  I voted for McCain in the 2000 primary, when George W Bush’s loyalists smeared him as “too angry to be president” and even referred to him as the Manchurian Candidate.  I also voted for him in this most recent primary, because I am a lifelong Republican, but I won’t be voting for him come November because of his vote on the issue of torture.  He, of all people, should have stood fast against that bill and he didn’t, and it makes me think that he is willing to abandon all principles in order to be president; I worry that the same Neo-Cons who brought us the Iraq war will still be hanging around the White House.

 

I admire the fact that McCain has decided not to kowtow to the Evangelicals, but I worry about his “100 years of war” statement.  I am also disturbed by the way he treated his first wife when he returned from Vietnam to discover that she had been disfigured in a car accident while he was a POW.  When I read about his behavior I wondered aloud that only the Democrats seem to have intact marriages, and that’s a shock considering what my party is supposed to stand for. 

 

The main reason I’m voting for Obama, though, is that I think the Republican Party needs a good shaking-up.  It needs to return to the middle, it needs to shed the Neo-Cons who are so willing to send other people’s children to war but unwilling to make a similar sacrifice themselves. 

 

Now even though your first impulse after reading this may be to strike me from your list of contacts, but I hope you don’t.  I would like to remain your friend even though our political goals are different. 

 

Thanks,

Jeanne

It would have been too ironic for words if this son, Jimmy McCain, had been his son by his first wife, but this is Cindy’s boy.

 

Super Tuesday, Is Reuters Smoking Crack? Torture.

I voted.  

I went to my designated polling place and voted, despite the address being wrong on the voter’s guide. 

I’m still a registered Republican, so I voted for McCain whom I saw as my only choice.  8 years ago I would gladly have voted for the man.. no, wait, I did vote for him in that primary but California’s was so late and there was so much dirt already slung that he had no chance.   Now I’m worried about some of his stances and I will be watching the Democratic nominee, more than likely voting for him/her.

Have They Been Smoking Crack?

I saw last night that Reuters was calling for Obama and Romney to take California.

Seriously, what polls are they  using?   Do they really think that a majority of California Republicans wants to put Mitt in the White House?  Have they not noticed how motivated the Hispanic vote is, and that it favors Hillary by a lot?  I was calling it for McCain and Clinton a week ago, based on what I’ve read and not on my personal preferences.  

I noticed the dishonesty in the MSM reporting over the past few weeks, not listing super delegates so that it would look like  Obama and Clinton were nearly tied when at that point there was still a sizable gap between their delegate numbers.  It looks like it may be a narrower gap tomorrow after the counting finally stops sometime in the wee hours; I have to wonder if those reports were made to make the primaries more “interesting”, to sell papers.

Granted, it is an historic moment if Barack Obama wins the nomination, but it also is if Hillary wins the nomination.  I am fairly certain that we will have either a woman or a black man for our next president.  I sincerely hope that this next president is not just another jerk in the pocket of Big Business.  

My niece asked us last week what we thought about Obama and Hillary Clinton, and we told her that either one will be fine.  She needed reassurance, needed to hear that the world would not end, having only heard the garbage being spewed about both by her parents and grandfather, as well as the hyper-conservative Christians who attend her college.   She called me today to tell me she’d voted, and I don’t think it was for Huckabee, a minor miracle. 

 She supports torture… WTF?

During the BBC America news last night, I heard an idiot woman caller on a far-right-wing talk show in Arizona saying she supported torture and John McCain didn’t support torturer so she couldn’t support him.  WTF is wrong with people?

John Cole of Balloon Juice Just Changed Parties

 From Republican to Democrat.

I started reading his blog a couple of months ago, and I liked it because he was honest.  I didn’t always agree with him, but more than most Republican bloggers. As a Republican myself I find it almost impossible to agree with most  people who identify themselves as Republicans these days.  I keep asking myself, “Who are these people; where did they come from? Are they really this intellectually and morally dishonest?  Or is it simply stupidity?”

I didn’t start this blog with the intention of discussing politics at all, but it has crept in here because some days it’s impossible to avoid politics.

Here is his commentary, in regard to the death of a woman in Missoula, Montana, but I think it applies across the board:

a word to the Republican party

“Go fuck yourself. To death.

I am tired of being patient with you nannies and your stupid self-serving rules and your slippery slopes and your bullshit and your need to be tough on crime and your earnest concerns about society. Mind your own business, get your own house in order, stop fucking interns and little boys and cheating on your wives and on your taxes and being found dead wearing two wetsuits with a dildo shoved up your ass. Just mind your own damned business, and let people do what they must to deal with their own screwed up lives, and let people handle their pain the best way they can.”

My adult kids wonder why I haven’t changed my registration, and I wonder why myself.  One look at the corruption in the OC Sheriff’s office, the understaffed fire departments in Orange and San Diego Counties as a result of local Republican policies, the fact that every person on the Orange County Board of Supervisors is a Republican, the fact that the OC Republican Party almost, almost  endorsed Bill Hunt instead of Carona in the last election and so many still insisted that Carona  was innocent until around 10 am today, the party that gave us B-1 Bob Dornan and John Schmitz, right here, in this county….  well, these people bear no resemblance to what I grew up believing was the Republican party, let alone what I believe about Christianity.  The message they’re getting at church is very different from the one I’m getting.  

 Maybe I’ve been blind, that’s very possible and entirely likely, but  I really think the party has changed a lot since I was a kid. It’s apparent that the OC branch was always tweaked toward the extreme and a lot of the rest of the country has followed, but how any party could ever endorse Schmitz is mind-boggling. 

You Couldn’t Make This Stuff Up!

Carona Indicted, Finally!

Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona was indicted today for accepting bribes.  We, Mr Pie and myself, have thought this guy’s behavior was questionable for a long, long time, but we’re just some unimportant people who happen to live in OC and based that opinion on a long list of articles appearing in various newspapers. Apparently the Powers That Be thought so too.

That’s our own dear Governator, Ahrnie, scowling in the background.  I’m going to guess that this was shot last week during the wildfires, but I’d like to think that the scowl is directed at Carona.  I rather like Ahrnie these days.

Two former assistant sheriffs, George Jaramillo and Don Haidl, had pled guilty earlier to several other charges, some of which may be the cause of a rift between Carona and Haidl.   You can read about it here, and it’s a fairly juicy read: 

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j6Fx5S8CI-46foMqU-Ibv53XgjwgD8SJTKAG0

 What’s not mentioned in that article is that Don Haidl, one of the gentlemen named in this current indictment, called up Carona last August and suggested they “mend their fences” and have dinner.  While they were at dinner is when Carona allegedly asked Haidl to lie to the Grand Jury. How do we know?

 Haidl was wearing a wire! 

This little detail was reported on KNX 1070 radio this evening, about an hour ago.   I guess Mike got a bit snippy with their reporter at the press conference, and threw another reporter out for not asking softball questions.

George Jaramillo was fired back in 2004 for misuse of public funds to the benefit of a private firm that paid him a $25,000 fee to be a consultant for them, and used a county helicopter to demonstrate the company’s product.  This was after the Los Angeles Times pointed this information out to him, in a publication called The Orange County Weekly.

The Nut Doesn’t Fall Far From The Tree:

The story mentions Haidl’s son Gregory in relation to a gang rape in 2002, when he was in high school, which he and his buddies videotaped and then showed to other kids.  Gregory wasn’t just arrested, he was eventually convicted and sentenced to 6 years; the first trial ended in a hung jury, and the jury was predominantly male.  There was a story that some members of this jury were offered a fee to become consultants for Haidl’s defense for the next trial.    

While young Haidl was out on bail he was arrested on a drug charge, and yet again for another rape charge; this time he didn’t tape the encounter.  He met this second girl at a party to celebrate the hung jury in his first trial. The party was held in his father’s house, the same house where the rape took place.    In all, this gentleman was arrested on 6 different charges in 3 years, and it is claimed (by people who claim to know) that he was given preferential treatment by the OC Sheriff’s office, because of who his daddy was.  His daddy was a very rich man, but didn’t get that way by working for the sheriff’s department. According to that article his daddy was a car dealer who made a fortune before his appointment as Assistant Sheriff.  Haidl may have influenced that decision by making Mike Carona a member of the board of directors on a company he owned.

The point I was going for was not that Haidl is bad because his father is wealthy, nor is his father  bad because he is wealthy, although he may have become wealthy by being bad.  The son is bad because he was taught to be bad.  Someone modeled bad behavior for him when he was little, someone didn’t pay attention to what he was doing or who he was hanging out with as he grew up, someone neglected to teach him about ethics and character, someone raised him to believe that rules and laws are for other people, someone raised him to believe that “justice” can be bought. 

I’m going to take a wild guess that that someone was (were?) his parents.

They Indicted Carona’s Mistress?

I noticed that among the people indicted for various bits of misbehavior are Carona’s wife, Deborah, and one Debra Hoffman, identified in the indictment as Carona’s mistress.  Not his lawyer, his mistress. For Hoffman to be identified in that way in an indictment is …. interesting, and wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall when this is discussed at the Carona home?  And they’re both named Debbie.  Debbie and Debbie did Mike?  It may not be discussed for very long, since he is expected to surrender to the Feds tomorrow.

We have a lot to be thankful for

He can’t run again.

What Can I Say?

I know the firefighters have to eat and rest.  Some of them have not had any sleep in 36 hours or more.  At least Bush didn’t take them away from the firelines for too long. 

About Those C-130s Sent To Fight The Fires…..

I am in full rant mode right now.

On Monday we were told by the media that two C-130s had arrived to fight the fires raging in Southern California, but by Tuesday I hadn’t seen or heard that they were being used.  All of the news sources had scads of live coverage showing tiny airplanes dropping  red fire retardant in the hills, and helicopters and that strange yellow airplane dumping water on the fires, but nothing larger, nothing the size of the C-130s.  I figured it was a crewing problem, but why hadn’t they sent a crew and an extra pilot when they sent the plane?  How hard is that to figure out?

Today it was announced that we had gotten 6 of these planes, and that they arrived on Tuesday, but I still didn’t see them in the air.  The same small planes and helicopters were flying over the fires, in the areas where it wasn’t too dangerous to fly, but no bigger planes.

Granted, there were some issues between the forestry service and the marines that kept their copters grounded for a while, but they worked things out.  There was a claim made that by the time the red tape was sorted out it was too dangerous to fly them and I know that there was a point when the planes were directed away from the fires in the Lake Arrowhead area, but I kept seeing those tiny airplanes and helicopters working like mad over the other fires. 

The following excerpt from MSNBC answers my questions regarding the C-130s… sort of.  I’ve seen hours of news coverage yesterday and today.  I have still not seen one single frame of footage of the C-130s flying over the fires. 

Not.

One.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21478621/page/2/

An excerpt from the above site.

“…….‘Design difficulties’ plague upgrades
The C-130 saga is a much different story.

More than a decade ago, Congress ordered replacement of the aging removable tanks for the military planes because of safety concerns and worries that they wouldn’t fit with new-model aircraft. California’s firefighting C-130 unit is one of four the Pentagon has positioned across the country to respond to fire disasters.

New tanks were designed, but they failed to fit into the latest C-130s. Designers were ordered back to the drawing board. Republican Rep. Elton Gallegly said Congress was assured the new tanks would be ready by 2003.

Four years later, the U.S. Forest Service and Air Force have yet to approve the revised design. Air Force spokeswoman Capt. Paula Kurtz said “technical and design difficulties” have delayed the program.

Rohrabacher and Gallegly are angered by the delay, which has left no C-130s capable of fighting fires on the West Coast. The last of the older-model C-130s with an original tank was retired by the California National Guard last year.

“It’s an absolute tragedy, an unacceptable tragedy,” Gallegly said.

The situation meant that rather than deploying C-130s from inside the state, Schwarzenegger was forced to ask Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to call in the six remaining older C-130s from other states as far away as North Carolina.

None of them began fighting the fires until Wednesday afternoon.

Big difference in aircraft’s ability

In the meantime, the state relied mostly on smaller retardant tankers that carry about a third of the C-130’s 3,000-gallon capacity.

Gallegly said such firepower was sorely needed earlier.

“I have actually flown in one and pressed the button,” he said. “I know what they can do.”