The Blaisdell Blog

Congressman R. Blake Farenthold (Republican, 27 th District, Texas ) is an example of what I like about the Republican Party.   He states passionately that the government is not supposed to be our ultimate source of earthly satisfaction.   We, the people, are supposed to look out for, and be responsible for, ourselves.   We are supposed to work for a living; educate ourselves and our children; succeed through our own effort.   If we do well, we deserve the reward for our efforts.   That will make us confident.   If we do poorly we deserve the punishment that comes with failure.   That should make us cautious.   A confident, cautious citizenry sounds like a good idea to me.   If we can not provide for ourselves due to ill fortune, diminished capacity, or even willful neglect, our families, communities and governmental bodies closest to the problem should provide minimal assistance.   We do these things out of compassion and dedicati...

Phil Mickelson is a class act on and off the golf course.   He is a great golfer, makes a tidy income, and has chosen to use his reputation and money to do good.   You can’t help but like someone like that.   I have been fascinated with the success and the outreach of his Exxon Mobile Teachers Academy .   Anyone who has watched a golf tournament this season has also seen the promotional ads for its National Math and Science Initiative.               This program (NMSI) is designed to train teachers to better serve their students in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.   This is an absolute necessity to save this country from going the way of ancient Greece , Rome , and the Victorian British Empire.   We are in danger of losing our edge because we are no longer a hungry, growing nation.   The proof lies in the fact that in international tests of science the U...

If you are a Florida fourth grader you just got smarter by an act of congress.   Well, not quite.   Instead of congress, it was the Florida Board of Education who, in a frantic and intensely embarrassing conference call on Tuesday, May 15, decided to lower the passing grade on the state’s writing test from a 4 to a 3.   It was the only solution they could come up with when almost three quarters of all students failed (!!!) the test.   These idiots actually think this solves the problem.   If the kids can’t write, just tell them it isn’t important.   Close counts.   Not your fault.   Pick it up later in your spare time between playing computer games and cashing your welfare check.               Remind me, eight years from now, not to hire anyone with a high school diploma from Florida .    Thanks to their school board they won’t know how to speak, read or write, compute, th...

In a little over two weeks my husband and I both lost our mothers.   One 89 the other 91 years of age, they died of the rigors and complications of old age.   No on lives forever, and if we do it right, our children bury us, never the other way around.   While I deeply, deeply appreciate the good wishes of all of our friends, the fact is that our mothers lived lives that are celebrated more than they are mourned.             These women were made of steel.   They had lived through it all: the great depression, the dust bowl, wars, economic and social upheaval.   They sent their husbands to battle in World War II and their sons to the jungles of Viet Nam .   They saw their grandsons—and granddaughters—put on the uniform of their nation and ship out to Iraq and Afghanistan .   When we were attacked on September 11th I called my mother and was steadied by her calm.   She had seen all this bef...

Our local paper ran two stories this week that brought me up short.   On Tuesday there was a disturbing article about the three fold increase in drug dependent babies being born each year.   These babies are born needing methadone treatment in intensive care for weeks if not months to ease them off the drug addiction they are born with thanks to their low-life mothers who deliberately use drugs during pregnancy.   [And do not talk to me about addiction being an illness.   Diabetes is an illness; influenza is an illness; the common cold is an illness.   Drugs are something you choose to use, knowing you should not, knowing you have been told not to, knowing they are illegal.   Drinking, smoking and using drugs are all things a person makes a conscious decision to do and, indeed, go out of their way to do.   So, no sympathy here.]    Even if the sight of these innocent newborns taking their dose of methadone didn’t make you righteously indign...

My husband, God bless him, keeps hoping I will become a Democrat.   Every time I go on a rant about some short sighted, vote losing, lunatic fringe pacifying action taken by the Republicans he gets a hopeful gleam in his eye.   He starts talking in tentative tones about what he sees as the laudable attitudes of his own party.   He forwards me columns from his favorite liberal columnists in the New York Times.   I read the columns, nod and smile during his evangelistic monologues and continue to vote Republican. One of the biggest reasons I continue as a staunch (if moderate) Republican is watching the idiots in the Occupy (insert demon of choice) crowd.   These people are uniformly spoiled brats who have been given too much and required to do too little.   When I was going to college on a $5/week food budget I didn’t have money to travel to New York , buy a Northface sleeping bag, and eat take-out.   I was either studying during the school year...

One of the nice things about being married to a member of the other political party is that it teaches you the importance of moderation, restraint and a sense of humor.   It also brings into crystalline clarity the differences in how we think.   We had a rich chance to view that difference this past week when Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute wrote an op-ed for the New York Times postulating that it would be a good thing if we offered voters a chance to win a million dollar lottery if they actually voted.                Ornstein’s argument is that if we get more people voting it would water down the strength of each party’s base extremists and give us a more moderate government.   Ornstein gives Australia as an example of a place where you are fined (about $15) for not voting with the result that Australia has a 90% voter turnout as opposed to the 50%-60% which is the best we get in ...

Both Mitt Romney and Warren Buffett pay their entire tax bill to the United States Government.   Because their income is derived from dividends instead of wages they pay at the highest rate allowed for capital gains, 15%.   If you don’t like the rate either of these men paid, change the law!   It won’t affect me at all; I am living solely on my teacher retirement.               Every time Democrats rail against, “wealthy” Republicans in general and Mitt Romney in particular I want to do two things: throw up and vote Republican.   These same Democrats don’t mind every union member, movie star, athlete or any other member of their pampered constituency getting a raise, whether or not it is based on merit.   Evidently it is okay for everyone to make money except Republicans.               Since when is being rich a bad thing?   If you are m...

One hundred years ago, the RMS Titanic, an, “unsinkable” ship went to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean , taking 1500 people to their deaths.    The ship was built to be the final word in luxury and modern opulence.   Yet she made her money in transporting hundreds of immigrants in steerage class.   Catering to the wealthy, the Titanic sought to muscle through on style and hubris instead of substance and careful planning.   It didn’t work.   Four days into the crossing and 600 miles south of Newfoundland , the Titanic hit an iceberg, flooding five of the sixteen, “watertight” compartments.   The supposedly unsinkable ship went down in two and a half hours.   Most of those who died did not drown, but died of hypothermia in the freezing water.   A few miles from the Titanic, and in a good position to save most, if not all of the passengers, was the S. S. California.   This ship had sent the Titanic its first warning of icebergs and shut do...

Hilary Rosen is an idiot.   She is also an angry, bitter and nervous woman who allowed a moment of personal vexation to expose her mean spirit.   I used to be a lot like her; but I got better.   I come from a long line of women who worked outside the home.   I spent 30+ years in education.   My mother was the head accountant for the City and County of Denver and later Stapleton International Airport .   Her mother was a farmer’s wife (now there is a full-time, “stay at home” job) but she also was the bookkeeper for the local creamery.   All of my children have professional jobs, my sisters worked and most of the women I know worked.   We were also wives and mothers.               There were many times in my life when I felt—as Ms. Rosen does—resentment and envy toward the stay-at-home Moms in my neighborhood.   They weren’t getting up at 5:30 to get themselves ready for work wi...

Mona Charen is a great columnist.   In her April 3, 2012 column, “If Obama Had a Son” she weaves good research into a solid commentary on problems in the Black community. “…thousands of young blacks are killed every year by other blacks without provoking…outrage…” “…African-Americans, with 12.6 percent of the nation's population, account for 50 percent of the murder victims…” “Among blacks, 72 percent of births are to unmarried women…only 31 percent of couples are married…” “…85 percent of youths in prison come from fatherless homes, as do 80 percent of rapists, 71 percent of high school dropouts, and 63 percent of teen suicides.” “In The Atlantic Monthly, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote that the ‘relationship (between single-parent families and crime) is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime . This conclusion shows up time and again in ...

I read The Hunger Games last week.   The books are well written, but I could not accept the major premise.   I could not envision a society—even a future one—so corrupt and totalitarian that it would entertain the masses by pitting its children in televised combats to the death.   How could the people allow such a regime to maintain power?   But the notion kept rolling around in the back of my head, and I started to connect some very uncomfortable dots.   There is the voyeuristic Survivor.   There is a society that continuously shortens, negates and cheapens its children’s childhood.   And then, in the book, there is the insistent message on the part of the government’s mouthpieces that unthinkable behavior is normal, right and, in fact, righteous!   The violent deaths of and by these children are made to sound so very mainstream!   Words have power.                Then, bei...

The Devil always seems to be in the details.   But sometimes the Devil telegraphs his punch.   There is, in the language of poker players, a, “tell.”   We know what he is thinking because of how he holds his cards, or lowers his eyes, or hunches his shoulders.   Well, an intelligent person would (and apparently did) pick up the long range dangers inherent in the 1943 Supreme Court decision Wickard v. Filburn .   The decision, a precedent for the scope of Federal power, told an Ohio wheat farmer that he could not grow unlimited amounts of wheat on his farm and would be fined for each extra bushel.               Let’s boil this down to its basic parts.   A man owns his own land, pays for it with his own money, works it with his own effort, grows a legal crop, and is told by the government that he has a limit on how much he can produce because his work affects the cost of the product nationally. ...

Are you a person who lives primarily in your heart or your head?   More about this later. I am a better person because of the company of good women.   These are not the women you party with.    Those girls best belong to the, “…misery loves company” category.   I am talking about the women who make you talk, think and laugh, ladies like the ones in my book club. One of the best things the book club has done for me is introducing me to a great deal of fiction that I otherwise would not have read.   I prefer nonfiction, defaulting to biography and history with a little science thrown into the mix.    ( Truman by David McCullough; A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester; and A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking are part of that list).    Since getting involved in this book club I have read some books I would not have wanted to live my life without ( A Prayer for Own Meany by Irving Stone; Alias Grace by Margare...

For obvious reasons, I never read the paper before church on Sunday morning.   This afternoon I headed for the porch with my cup of coffee and, sure as shootin,’ found something there that would have ruined services for me.   The, “Valley and State” section of The Monitor had an article about local legislative leaders giving commentary on Texas ’ new congressional districts.               The Democrats are using all of the usual hyper-emotional verbiage to complain about redistricting.   The article highlighted three Rio Grande Valley districts: the 34 th (primarily Cameron County ), the 15 th (a hodgepodge of counties both including and west and north of Hidalgo County ), and the 27 th (around the Corpus Christi area).   The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) General Counsel, Luis Vera, had a quote in the article that is both ridiculous and revealing.   In reference to the 27 ...

Some time ago a woman in Georgia won a restraining order against a man who had been stalking her for months.   She had met him when he answered her advertisement in a singles column.   In the ad she described herself as a, “wiccan” priestess—a witch!   She was then shocked that she didn’t attract an intelligent, emotionally mature male.   Instead she got a weird, obsessive stalker.   Whom did she think she was going to get? I realize that I am probably not being as tolerant as the times require, but it seems to me that any adult who calls herself a witch should not be expected to be taken seriously.   Do adults have to be told that there are no such things as witches?   Didn’t we learn that sometime between the Salem Witch Trials and the dawning of the nuclear age?   What seems to be going on here is that the mantra of tolerance which rightly began as a way to combat institutionalized prejudice has been carried to an extreme that says we can n...