The Blaisdell Blog

I am a strong supporter of the Electoral College.   It has worked smoothly over 94% of the time.   If you want more faithful service than that you need a golden retriever.   Article II Section 1 of the Constitution is proof that the framers were both geniuses and masters of the all important concept of compromise.   There were some in 1787 who wanted the President of the United States elected by members of Congress.   Others thought he should be elected by direct vote of the people.   The common ground they came to was the Electoral College.   Each state was given a number of electors equal to its number of representatives and two senators .   The inclusion of the two senators is the mathematically significant piece.   It empowers the small states disproportionate to their size.   Wyoming , the Dakotas, Alaska , Hawaii , Idaho , all become a little more vociferous because we count not just their population, but their equal re...

On the morning of August 15, 1635, off the coast of Pemaquid, Maine a ship thrashed at anchor.   The 250 ton Angel Gabriel was a big ship with heavily gunned decks and a reputation for successful transport of immigrants and cargo.   It had arrived at one of the most beautiful harbors on the east coast of the New World the day before and on this morning the crew and passengers were busy off-loading people, possessions and livestock.   While those with a weather eye may have known that trouble was brewing, none could have guessed that the Angel Gabriel was about to be set upon by a storm that history would call the “Great Colonial Hurricane.” The hurricane is the first great storm recorded by the Europeans who were steadily populating New England and the Mid-Atlantic Seaboard. The hurricane was probably a Category 3. The eye passed between Boston and Plymouth with winds approximately 115 miles per hour.   As the men, women and children at Pemaquid frantical...

Since I am a political animal I have long been fascinated with the, “first in the nation” vote that comes out of Dixville Notch , New Hampshire .   Due to a curious New Hampshire law i.e. when all the registered voters in a precinct have voted the polls may close, the10 registered voters of Dixville Notch, started gathering at midnight on Election Day, voting as a group and then closing up.   They achieved notoriety as the first Americans to vote (they weren’t, but they had good press agents) and the media presented it as a grass roots event. In my naïveté I accepted this story as it was sold.   Here were the simple, down home folk of New Hampshire gathering around a wood fireplace in a cabin in the woods.   The whole thing was reminiscent of Calvin Coolidge being sworn in by kerosene lantern in his father’s Vermont home after Warren G. Harding died.   I ate that stuff up.   Americana at its simplest and best!   Wrong! This American versi...

I have owned two of the stupidest and most loving dogs that ever evolved on this planet.   The first was a white German shepherd.   The second had a shepherd mix for a mother, but his father was a traveling man.   They were healthy dogs, not like my niece’s Shih Tzu.   Here in lies the tale of dogs, medicine, and Mexico .   My niece was given her Shih Tzu, Bruno, by a boy friend.   She dumped the boy but kept the dog.   In all the years that my brother-in-law lived with that dog I never heard him call it anything except, “The Little Bastard.”   In the fullness of time, the dog (like all of us) grew ill.   The vet informed the family that The Little Bastard needed heart medication.   The medicine needed was a common vasodilator, long used in hospitals whenever blood vessels needed to be relaxed and widened.   The vet prescribed sildenafil for the dog.   You, of course, know the drug better by its market, not its generi...

The best television last Tuesday was not the Presidential debate.   Mind you that was good theater, but it was not the best.   If you really wanted to enjoy excellent television, you had to go to the History Channel’s new series, The Men Who Built America .   This series features the lives of America ’s titans: Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford.   I highly recommend it.   Which period of American history do you like best?   The history of our nation is generally divided into the Age of Exploration, the Colonial Era, the Federalist Period, the Age of Jackson, the Westward Expansion, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Prohibition and the Cold War.   Most of us have a period in which our favorite history, fiction, movies and television dramas occur.   My Dad was mad for all things Western; Mom loved reading about the common men and immigrants who became the understated heroes of the Industri...

I have no idea how tonight’s Presidential debate will unfold.   Debates hinge on so many dynamics, and the town hall forum of tonight’s debate has more wild cards than a canasta deck.   During one of Jimmy Carter’s town hall meetings (not a debate) I was able to ask him a question and I can honestly say that from that moment on I knew he would be a one term President.   I have been in the physical presence of four Presidents and poor Carter was the only one who didn’t awe me with his Presidential aura.   There is, after all, something about the office that carries its own prestige.   For Carter to be unable to wear even that given cloak of authority spoke volumes about the man and his leadership abilities. There are lots of questions I would like to ask both of these gentlemen and most of them would not be the ones being promoted by speculation in the media.   I wouldn’t ask about the Libyan Embassy killings.   We know the truth and the administ...

Paul Romer is a genius.   Since the Nobel Prize in economics is due about now, I am hoping that Romer is the man.    Here is a gentleman who looks continuously at the human condition and tries to make it better by making it more understandable.   He does it with numbers, cosmic thinking and tenacious research.   He embodies everything I love about economics.   Romer is the son of former Colorado Governor, Roy Romer.   He has an undergraduate degree in physics and a doctorate in economics.   He and I are probably not hitting for the same political team, but that doesn’t matter.   He is intelligent, hard working and plays by the rules.   That is all I ask from anyone.   This man speaks my language.   Since Romer started as a physicist he probably has heard that no one could explain Albert Einstein’s theories better than Einstein himself.   Likewise, no one explains Romer’s economics better than Romer.   ...

Malala Yousufzai is a slip of a girl.   She is 14 years old.   She dresses modestly, covers her hair loosely in a long scarf that wraps around her shoulders and speaks quietly but in a clear and direct voice.   She knows the Koran and readily points out that there is nothing which forbids girls from going to school.   On Tuesday, October 9, the Taliban, under the leadership of a pusillanimous pig named Maulana Fazlullah, sent a team of three assassins to murder this young girl.   They had warned her family three times that her, “Western thinking” would be punished.   Evidently the Taliban’s Fazlullah is not just a pig, he is a barrow.   Only a creature that has lost all of his masculine organs as well as his pride, humanity and character would send killers after a young girl.   You notice, by the way, that this walking latrine didn’t go himself.   Nor did he think that it would take any less than three full grown, armed men to take out...

In what seems like a life time ago, I was hired by Glencoe/McGraw-Hill to co-author a new science textbook for them.   It was to be written for middle school sixth graders, part of a new science series.   It had a red cover with the photo of a space walking astronaut as the main focus.    When you write such a text, you are also responsible for creating not just the body of the text, but the teaching materials, activities, lesson plan suggestions, tests and teacher’s edition as well as the student text.   It was a gang of work and took most of a year.   The money was good, but I wouldn’t do it again.               Evidently, the time of those paper textbooks is coming to an end.   In an article by Justin B. Hollander in the New York Times , Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, has declared that textbooks should be replaced by digital learning technologies, e-readers, the internet, Web site...

The Federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina was inadequate, untimely and ineffective.   The Libyan attack on our Embassy at Benghazi , which resulted in the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, is President Obama’s Katrina.             Let’s look at the facts: (1) Heavily armed Islamist terrorists overran a United States Embassy that had no Marines, and only lightly armed local security on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. (2) The embassy had asked for increased security on more than one occasion and had been denied.   (3) The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, led by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) cited 13 attacks on Western diplomats and officials in Libya , including two bombing attempts.   These attacks, dating from April 12, 2012, did not raise a red flag at State. (4) The embassy was guarde...

If you ignore a bully they think you are weak.   Being morally bankrupt themselves, they learn no moral lesson from deferment.   They will become more aggressive with each act.   Let us consider morning news anchor Jennifer Livingston (CBS-La Crosse, Wisconsin ).   Ms. Livingston chose to begin news coverage of October as, “National Bullying Prevention Awareness Month” by discussing a rude letter she got from a viewer.   The writer told Ms. Livingston that she was fat, indeed obese, and as such, was a poor role model for the youth of our nation.   The man who wrote the letter was, undoubtedly, a model of masculine beauty--probably an Adonis.   Oh, that my pulchritude starved eyes could behold him!   Oh—you think not????   Well, maybe, but he certainly felt qualified to criticize.   Maybe he is like Marie Claire magazine writer, Maura Kelly, who is disgusted by the sparkling comedy of Mike and Molly but admits to having an eati...

When I was in 2 nd grade my family lived across the parking lot from the creamery where my father worked.   You couldn’t keep me out of that building.   I knew every machine, every vat, and every worker.   When I informed my mother that some day I was going to be a dairyman like my dad, I was brought nose to nose with her.   She informed me in her urgent voice (I was always her, “difficult” child) that I couldn’t be a dairyman.   “You have to climb to the top of those machines, and the men can look right up your skirt.”   That pretty much settled it.   I went on to become a teacher, but the sexual stereotyping kept right up with me.   I had been married only two years when I became pregnant.   [I am one of those women who can’t drink out of the same glass as her husband.]    District officials expected me to sign a request for maternity leave starting in January.   My due date was June 9 th but school was out June 4 th...