Proper Dog Car Riding Etiquette

Mad Dog has felt the pressure from certain quarters, including the estimable blogger, Maud, to address the critical issue of proper technique for transportation of dogs as relates to automobiles.

This particular dog uses this technique at bars and brew pubs around Portsmouth. He is standing in a crate, which is hidden behind the back seat, inside the car and when the car is in motion he lies down to enjoy the ride.

Note the roof of the car is above the dog, not below him. 

--Cave Canem

Unwavering

Mr. Tugboat, canvassing a voter on Plaice Cove Beach, Hampton

Last night, on The News Hour , Ruth Marcus, playing the role of the liberal voice opposite David Brooks, said "I know this is supposed to be a civil discussion, on this show, but really, what Mitt Romney did with the news of the killing of our ambassador was--there is simply no other way to put it--disgraceful."   

Then she noted that for the first time in many elections, the percentage  of "undecided" voters is in the teens. Usually, two months before a presidential election, it's 30-40%. 

Much pondering ensued, about why people have already made up their minds, if this poll accurately assesses the public mind. No firm conclusions were drawn.

I hope this reflects a widespread awareness that  Romney/Ryan would kill Medicare first and then, likely, Social Security.  But,  if the ladies in my office are any barometer, this is not true. Only one of the nine ladies I work with had any idea Romney/Ryan had ever said anything about Medicare. 

I do know certain voters make up their minds over issues which do not capture the spot light. Take the citizen pictured above, who has been unwavering in his opposition to Mr. Romney ever since his consciousness was raised a year ago by Gail Collins,  about an incident he considered revelatory of Mr. Romney's character, concerning a certainly family vacation and a roof rack.  I have pointed out this incident was entirely consistent with the oft expressed Republican conviction there is simply not enough room in the life boat, not enough room on the wagon train, for everyone and we have to pick and choose, make hard decisions about who we will favor in this life.  And, after all, the dog was not thrown under the wheels, or left behind at a gas station. He was given an opportunity, for Pete's sake.
Unimpressed by this line of reasoning, the pictured Hampton citizen,  is also pretty upset about the New Hampshire voter ID law, which likely will disenfranchise him.  Only certain classes of dogs are eligible for  a government issued ID--working dogs who accompany patients, usually blind patients, to their doctors' appointments.  

No poll has been taken of these working dogs with respect to party affiliation, but I suspect they are mostly Republicans, because some of the most ardent Republicans, who are most indignant about government control of our lives,  have been sucking on the government teat for years--they tend to be ex soldiers, who often had 20 years in the service, who got out and worked for the state department of roads, then the VA, then got a job with a factory that made parts for airplanes on a Defense Department contract, and then they worked for the Portsmouth shipyard before they retired on a Federal government pension we could all envy, especially when supplemented by Social Security.

But they built their lives and their fortunes and their financial security, all by themselves. And don't try to tell them the government had any hand in it.

Dog On Roof

"They clearly--they clearly sent mixed messages to the world. And--and the statement came from the administration--and the embassy is the administration--the statement that came from the administration was a --was a statement which is akin to apology and I think was a--a--a severe miscalculation."
                          --Mitt Romney

The embassy's comment "is like the judge telling the woman that got raped, 'You asked for it because of the way you dressed.' That's the same thing."
                            --Senator John Kyl (Arizona-R)

"It was disheartening to hear the administration condemn Americans engaging in free speech that hurt the feelings of Muslims."
                                --Senator Jim DeMint (? Demented--South Carolina-R)

"We deplore the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims--as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions."
                                   --statement United States embassy, Cairo.


But the best comment on the murders of an American ambassador and 3 other diplomats, comes, not surprisingly from Gail Collins, who actually wrote an article about Mitt Romney without once mentioning the dog strapped to the top of the car.
She wrote:

"All the uneasy feelings you got when he went to London and dissed the Olympic organizers can now come into full bloom. Feel free to worry about anything. That he'd declare war on Malta.  Lock himself in a nuclear missile silo and refuse to come out until there's a tax cut. Hand the country over to space aliens."

The best line was probably from President Obama, who noted Mr. Romney "Tends to shoot first and aim later. This is something you learn not to do, if you want to be President."

My only regret is I have not hear Rush Limbaugh on Mitt's comments.  You know he is capable of making Mitt look thoughtful and judicious. 

The Man Can Write

One of the best American writers of the 19th century was an American President, and that's saying something given who was writing in America in the 19th century: Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, just to name a few.  But none wrote more powerfully than Abraham Lincoln.

In the 21st Obama contends among our best writers, although you never really know how much of what you hear from a President he actually wrote himself. But, at the very least, you can say the man knows good writing when he sees it and he claims it.

Consider:
"We, the people, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense."

Can you imagine George Bush, or even Ronald Reagan, Inc. or any Republican alive today saying this as simply, forcefully, directly and evocatively?
Not a chance. None of them have it in them. They are, down to the last of them, empty suits.
No so,  for the leader of the Democratic Party and the President of the United States.

The man can write.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

Emerging from the Constitutional Convention in 1787,  Benjamin Franklin was stopped by a woman who famously asked, "Well, Doctor, what have you given us--A Monarchy or a Republic?"
To which Franklin replied, "A Republic, madam,  if you can keep it."

Today, I voted in the primary for the nomination for governor from the Democratic party. Apart from my wife, I saw only one other person in the voting booths. Across New Hampshire, voters were few and far between.  At work, I asked if any of my co workers had voted, intended to vote, had any idea there was an election or who was running. None did.

We have Free Staters who have taken over the House of Delegates, who believe public schools are an anathema, that food stamps are the equivalent of feeding stray dogs, which is a bad idea, because they breed. We have a Congressman in Washington, D. C.  who wants to end Social Security and Medicare. We have a US Senator from New Hampshire, who smiles sweetly as she extols the virtues of a  sheriff from Arizona who rounds up Mexican looking people off the street and throws them into open air concentration camps.

And we take our kids to day care, to school, and we go shopping at the malls, and we remain blissfully detached and unconnected.

There was a wonderful scene in The Band of Brothers, where Private Webster, bursts into a bakery in a German town, to seize bread for  concentration camp prisoners he has just discovered outside town. The baker objects to the soldiers commandeering his bread, and Webster, who speaks German, pulls out his sidearm and shoves it into the baker's face. 
 "Don't shoot!"  The baker begs. "Ich bein kein Nazi.  Nicht Nazi." 
And Webster screams in his face, in English,   "Not a Nazi? That camp can't be more than half a mile from this bakery. You had to smell it, when the wind shifted. Don't tell me you're not a Nazi. If you didn't know, it could only be because you didn't want to know!"

And that's us, right here in picturesque New Hampshire. Not knowing because we don't want to know.  Or because we are too busy with our doggy lives. 
Not that we are Nazis, but if there were any around, we wouldn't care to find out.

Republicans and the Reichstag Fire Down Below

Once upon a time, there was a nation, struggling to have a democracy and they built an admirable edifice, a building to house their representatives, where the business of government could be done. But then, men who wanted to seize power, to steer the government in only one direction, the direction they saw as imperative, burned the building and pointed to their opponents as the ones who had set the fire. 

And the rest is history.

And this fairy tale repeats itself in every nation which is afflicted with amnesia. Not global amnesia, mind you, but selective amnesia.

So when you have an economy built on debt backed by rising housing prices, which are, after all, an illusion, because your house is not worth more than you paid for it until you have sold it, then you have a sense of wealth, which is, in essence, an illusion, and when you have termites in Wall Street firms eroding the essential value of mortgages--which is the arduous process of verifying the credit worthiness of mortgage holders--then you have a very sad history.

But ask the man in New Hampshire whether he remembers the role played by deregulation of the markets, by the repeal of Glass Steagel, and he says it was all the government's fault. What he remembers is the Federal Government through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made banks make loans to the undeserving and Clinton and the Democrats voted to repeal Glass Steagel, which had since the Depression separated the world of banking into the banks which made mortgage loans and business loans in the community and commercial banks, which were allowed to create whatever risky schemes they desired.

So memory, like history is one long argument.

This is why eyewitness testimony in court, often rendered with great conviction, is such a problem. It seems so real, so undeniable, and it is often so wrong.  You have people who are so sure of what they saw, and who they saw do it, and it is only with cross examination you have any hope of showing how uncertain their recall, that reconstruction housed in neurons and drenched in a bath of prejudice and unstated belief and self interest, really is.

So the Republicans want you to believe Medicare is burning and Social Security is burning and only they can "save" either one, by destroying both.

And our fellow citizens stand up and raise an extended arm, locked at the elbow and shout, "Hail Blue Eyed Leader! Only you see clearly into the past and into the future."

And the blue eyed leader tells the story of his mother, who, after his father's early death, got on a bus to Madison, Wisconsin, so she could go to the  state college and earn a degree, rode 40 miles a day, five days a week,  so she could learn new skills and start her own business. Now, of course, what he doesn't remember is the bus, the road, the public university which taught her those new skills were all government products. He only remembers his mother's individual effort, not the group effort which helped her, which was just there, the way a mother is just there for her child, or the way a father just gives his son a car. That son remembers the 40 mile trip, the individual perseverance, not the group will, which is so big as to be invisible.

No income tax. No sales tax. Cut taxes and the deficit will shrink. Drown government in a bathtub. Live Free or Die. 

Let us sit in our rocking chairs around the wood stove and admire the rich and denigrate the poor and talk about the weather, a safe subject about which every opinion is equally valid. 

Getting Real The Dems Come Out (Finally) Swinging

John Kerry said, "Why don't you ask Osama Bin Laden if he's better off now than he was 4 years ago?"

Bill Clinton said a lot of things, and he sounded like he knew what he was talking about, because he can use numbers without putting people to sleep--and he can slyly put in front of people the chutzpa of Paul Ryan, who attacks President Obama for cutting "to the dollar" the same amount Paul Ryan had cut from Medicare.

But most of all, the President himself finally swung into high gear and said, "They want your vote, but they don't want to you to know their plan. And that's because all they have to offer is the same prescription they've have for the last thirty years:
'Have a surplus? Try a tax cut.'
'Deficit too high? Try another.'
'Feel a cold coming on? Take two taxes cuts, roll back some regulations, and call us in the morning.'"

These are the lines we can use around the water cooler the next morning with our co-workers, who are quoting Rush Limbaugh.

"If you reject the notion this nation's promise is reserved for the few, your voices must be heard in this election."
"If you reject the notion that our government is forever beholden to the highest bidder, you need to stand up in this election."

I also like the phrase, "Trickle down tax cut pixie dust." 

So, okay, now we've got a gun toting leader who knows what it takes to play the game. 

NPR this morning was all about the potential political effect of the disappointing unemployment numbers which came out  after the President's speech. You would think the speech was not news, only the jobs report.  But the President, speaking here in Portsmouth, put today's report in perspective. When he took office, 800,000 jobs were being lost every month.  Today we have a report of 95,000 jobs being added in a month, and that's supposed to be devastating news.

One wonders what they are thinking at NPR, or if they are thinking at all. Probably, they are simply wimping out, afraid the Republicans will be angry at them and try to cut their funding again, as if by showing fear, NPR can tame the bully.

But President Obama is doing better now, in the late rounds. For the first half of the fight, he was simply covering up and taking punches. Now, he's starting to bounce off the ropes and throw a few combinations.