The Blaisdell Blog

Barry Goldwater is the reason I love politics.   His was the first Presidential campaign I worked on actively.   In 1964 I spent my first months at college walking the cold, dark streets of Greeley, Colorado knocking on doors and delivering the gospel of Goldwater to the reluctant occupants of each house.   They were not interested in the message.   I don’t know what kind of President Goldwater would have been, but El Jefe was one hell of a senator.   No day in the Senate, was he a better, greater or more prescient man of law, than on August 7, 1974.   It was on that day that Goldwater, accompanied by U.S. House Minority Leader John Rhodes (R-Arizona) and U.S. Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott (R-Pennsylvania) requested a meeting with President Richard Nixon. Goldwater’s August trip to the Oval Office was preceded by two years of ever more sordid and cynical machinations by a President that revealed himself to be embarrassingly paranoid.   This was the Watergate Scandal. On J

James A. Garfield has the second shortest tenure of any President.   He was shot and incapacitated by an assassin on September 19, 1881, just four months into his Presidency.   He died 80 days later, on July 2 after an agonizing, bizarre and medically dubious round of treatments.     Ohio has produced more Presidents than any of our states, and Garfield was one of that line.   A lawyer and ordained minister in the Disciples of Christ Church, he was opposed to slavery, volunteer to fight in the Civil War and did so with distinction.   He was probably a good man.   We will never know if he would have been a good President.               Garfield was shot by a disgruntled patronage seeker named Charles Guiteau. Even Alexander Graham Bell tried to help find the bullet lodged near Garfield’s spine, using a home-made metal detector.   It didn’t work.   Neither did the physicians prescribed doses of quinine, morphine, brandy and calomel.   Neither did attempting to feed the President th

Today is Labor Day.   Women know all about that.   Labor day is our specialty.   Of course there are secrets associated with the birthing room that we share with almost no one.   But I am in a feisty mood today and this Labor Day I am going to offer up a peek behind the curtain. First of all, take your visions of the Madonna and Child moment and set them aside.   Birthing is an earthy, messy business involving blood, flesh and bone.   Labor requires moving an extraordinarily large child through the birth canal.   [A newborn ape weighs just 3% of its mother’s weight, but a newborn human will weight twice that, about 6% of its mother’s weight.]                       As a result of pushing a large child through a confined body space anything not involved in the birthing needs to get out of the way.   That means that the stomach, bladder and bowels get pushed aside and frequently empty themselves.   Nobody tells you that little piece of cheer at the ribbon and balloon festooned