THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Updates To Previous Posts
† Life Imitates “F Minus” (Sorta): After two hours of deliberation, a jury found Kevin Gartland not guilty of aggravated assault for (allegedly) biting off Ryan Kessler’s eyebrow. Gartland’s defense contended that he had acted in self defense during the fight he got into with Kessler.
† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: The New York Times reports that “[a]n itinerant, footloose army of available and willing retirees in their 60s and 70s [are] looking to stretch retirement dollars by volunteering to work in parks, campgrounds and wildlife sanctuaries, usually in exchange for camping space”:
Park and wildlife agencies say that retired volunteers have in turn become all the more crucial as budget cuts and new demands have made it harder to keep parks open.
Work-campers come together in one place — leading nature walks or staffing visitor centers, typically working 20 hours to 30 hours a week — then take off to their next assignments. As they move about, they keep in touch with one another through cellphone numbers, e-mail addresses and Facebook postings, creating virtual communities filled with the people they meet.
Camp life, especially in this bird-watching hotspot, revolves around the great outdoors: picking up trash, guiding visitors and, with luck, perhaps spotting the rare roadside hawk that has been reported in the
Estimates of the number of work-campers nationally vary, but a spokesman for Kampgrounds of America Inc., a private company that franchises camps, said that 80,000 or so might be a good guess, based on KOA’s percentage of the camping market and the number of its work-campers.
† Why Is Michelle Obama Saying All These Nasty Things About The U.S. - And Us?: Campaigning on behalf of her husband, Michelle Obama made a series of speeches in 2008 in which she characterized her fellow Americans as being ignorant, fearful and isolated. At the time, The Stiletto took exception to this distorted portrait of
To Americans whose families escaped natural and state-engineered famines; communism, fascism and totalitarianism; or pogroms, genocide, civil war and sectarian violence,
Another child of immigrants, Marco Rubio, who is challenging incumbent FL Gov. Charlie Crist in the Republican primary, gave the keynote address at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus reports that “some in the ecstatic crowd broke into a chant of “Marco, Marco” during his stirring speech:
He wove his only-in-America background - son of Cuban immigrants who fled Castro, his father working 16-hour days, his mother a K-Mart stock clerk - into a larger narrative of American exceptionalism. The 2010 election, he argued, is a “referendum on the very identity of our nation,” with the choice boiling down to this: “Do I want my children to grow up in the country that I grew up in or do I want them to grow up in a country like the one my parents grew up in?”
Here are highlights from Rubio's speech:
My grandfather was an enormous influence on me growing up. He was born in 1899 to a poor, rural family in
[B]ecause of where he was born and who he was born to, there was only so much he was able to accomplish. But he wanted me to know that I would not have those limits, that there was no dreams, no ambitions, no aspirations unavailable to me. And he was right.
See, I was not born to a wealthy or connected family. And yet I have never felt limited by the circumstances of my birth. I have never once felt that there was something I couldn't do because of who my parents were or weren't. Now, why is it that I've been able to accomplish the things that my grandfather could not? Why did my dreams have the chance that his didn't?
The answer is simple. Because I am privileged. I am privileged to be a citizen of the single greatest society in all of human history. There's never been a nation like the
Yeah. These principles embody the commitment to individual liberty which has made us the freest people in history. They also made possible our free-enterprise economy, which has made us the most prosperous people in history. The result is an
Simply put, there's nothing like
For many of us who were born and raised in this country, including me, it's sometimes easy - sometimes easy to forget how special
And they taught me, by word and by deed, that what makes
The final verdict on our generation will be written by Americans who haven't even been born yet. Let us make sure they write that we made the right choice, that in the early years of this century, faced with troubling and uncertain times, there were those who believed that the great American story had run its course. But we did not agree. Fear did not lead us to abandon our liberty. Uncertainty did not lead us to abandon the entrepreneurial spirit. We fought for and held on to those things that made us exceptional. And because we did, there was still one place in the world where the individual was more important than the state. Because we did, there was still at least one place in the world where who you come from does not determine where you get to go.
† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, Hunting Hokies): The Community College of Allegheny County (PA) has reversed course, and will allow Christa Brashier to form a campus chapter of Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, which advocates for the Second Amendment rights of college students. Backed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the American Civil Liberties Union, Brashier threatened to sue when the school originally refused to allow her to distribute pamphlets about the group.
† Updates To Previous Posts (When Healthcare Is Rationed, Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others): USA Today reports that “thousands of children and adolescents with neuromuscular disorders, asthma and other conditions … are suffering consequences of H1N1 that will linger long after the 2009/2010 swine flu pandemic ends”:
In some young people … H1N1 damages the central nervous system far more often than other forms of flu. …
During a typical flu season, one of every five childhood flu deaths occur in children with a neuromuscular disorder. "This year, it's almost one of every two," says [Lyn Finelli, head of the CDC's swine flu surveillance and response team].
No one knows exactly why flu has such a devastating effect on children with neuromuscular disorders. But the evidence has been mounting since late 2005, when Ron Keren and Susan Coffin of the Children's
Based on that evidence - and early reports of the effect of swine flu on children - the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended in June that the agency place children high on the H1N1 vaccine priority list. At the time, no swine vaccine was available, and none would be until the fall, when vaccine makers began slowly churning out their supplies. …
State vaccine coordinators, charged with supplying vaccine to those most in need, found themselves juggling competing demands. Health officials caring for high-risk children often found themselves waiting in line. [Emphasis, The Stiletto]
During the period that the vaccine was available only in small quantities, the CDC’s rationing guidelines prioritized children with neuromuscular, respiratory and other chronic illness ahead of all other children – including Obama’s daughters. Yet they got the vaccine before critically ill children did. Not that The Stiletto wishes swine flu on Sasha and Malia (even though she herself contracted it from one of the kids in her family after the virus cut a swath through his school) – she merely wants to point out that two other children may have become further debilitated or died because they did not get the shots given to the president’s daughters. When access to treatment is rationed – in this case because demand far outstripped supply - the wealthy and well-connected will always be at the head of the line.
† Updates To Previous Posts (seventh item, Is Obama Already A Lame Duck?): “Everywhere you turn, there's political stalemate,” observes The Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein – and he knows just who’s to blame:
I can genuflect with the best of them before "the basic decency and wisdom of the American people," but the truth is that on many issues these days, the American people are badly confused.
They want Wall Street to be reined in, but they're dead set against more regulation.
They want everyone to have access to affordable health insurance, but they're wary of expanding the role of government.
They want the government to do something to create jobs, but not if it involves spending more money.
They want the federal deficit brought under control, but not if it means cutting entitlement spending or raising taxes.
They want to do something about global warming, but not if it raises energy prices.
Pearlstein astonishingly claims: “Believe it or not, outside
Well, The Stiletto can’t speak to that bank supervision thing but people were thronging town hall meetings all last summer to vociferously voice their objections to the public option and in just about every speech Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) told voters he thought terrorists should be tried by military commissions and they sent him to the Senate to give Washington that message.
But in Pearlstein’s view, voters don’t elect members from their communities to act as their emissaries in
Just as The Stiletto was about to retort something snarky like, “Um, like that porkapalooza of a stimulus bill?,” Pearlstein himself disses the “good judgment” of elected officials:
Over the past year, Obama's singular mistake was to think he could rely on the Democratic leadership and a Democratic majority in Congress to deliver on his electoral mandate. Caught in crossfire between the House and Senate, liberals and centrists, Democratic special interests and independent voters, he wound up raising too much doubt about his most fundamental promise - to change the way business is done in
It should be obvious now that the president cannot leave it to Congress to sort things out.
Pearlstein thinks Obama should follow the leadership example set by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who “understood, or came to understand, an important truth: that only after they had demonstrated that they were willing to lead, and lead boldly, were the people willing to follow and drag Congress along with them.”
As for
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the
BTW, you know who doesn’t need lessons from Pearlstein or anyone else on how to be a leader? Former NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who - along with Ulysses Grant and former General Electric CEO Jack Welch - Gen. David Petraeus says taught him a thing or two about leadership. Here, the relevant snippet of the transcript from the latest in the WaPo’s “On Leadership” interview series:
David Ignatius: I'm sure a lot of people watching would be very curious to know who your role models are for leadership, who the people you have studied, read about, modeled yourself on. …
Gen. Petraeus: I remember when I was up in northern
This is the broken-window theory. Remember when he was the mayor of New York, he used to say don't let the broken window turn into the crack house. If you don't tend to these kinds of things when they first crop up, they get worse and worse and worse and all of a sudden you have a blighted neighborhood on your hands. In many respects that's what we're doing in northern
† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, NJ Taxpayers Must Choose Between Dollars And Dolphins): Another winter, another pod of dolphins where they don’t belong. The Associated Press reports that 8 to 15 dolphins were spotted in the
Editorial Note: As originally posted, The Stiletto typed a "D" instead of an "R" after Sen. Brown's name. It was 3:30 am, The Stiletto had been up for 21 hours at that point and the "D" looked just like an "R" to her bleary eyes.
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