Herman Cain’s Ugh Oh Moment

Ugh oh.  Herman Cain pulled a big no-no and it came back to bite him in the candidacy.  He settled in a sexual harassment case.  Now, I am no F. Lee Bailey or juris doctor or anything, but this truth I hold to be evident:  settlements aren’t made unless there is plenty of evidence on the plaintiff’s side.  It is the last step before going to court.  Always.

Besides, if a candidate is going to show himself to be randy, it is best to do so once he is elected, a la Arnold and Bill Clinton, though it can be like holding a lit match to a stick of dynamite.  The thing is that this has been going on since Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, maybe even before especially in merry Old England with guys like King Henry VIII, who was hard to please in the wife department.  Had I been in line to marry someone like that, I would have thought about it two and three times.  Then, if I had no alternative, I would have run away from home or thrown myself into a moat.

Woman in Moat

I know that we all have urges.  Otherwise, no one would be here and you wouldn’t be reading this, but the best thing to do is not to nix them as they can become like TNT and a lit match.  On the positive side, it is a happy occasion for our current president who must be salivating over the news.  The best thing for Herman Cain to do is to hire the same PR guns that other big wigs hire when they have similar ugh ohs, though after doing lots of ‘splaining, it may not be enough, and he may wish he had taken several cold showers beforehand or gone swimming in a moat instead.

Halloween

Halloween used to be my favorite holiday, but no more.  It was in a time when no one had a computer much les the Internet, though we did have running water and indoor plumbing and electricity, washers and dryers and the like.

We seldom saw an obese kid back when Halloween ranked as among my favorites, and we didn’t have swagger, designer duds or rap.  Instead, we had times playing in forts we built under feet of snow in the winter and times exploring the neighborhood and ice skating in the street after a heavy frost and good, clean fun where no one thought about calling the police and Halloween was at the top of just about every kids’ list.

We took our store-bought costumes of a ghost or Cinderella or a pirate with their plastic faces and went trick or treating around the block.  There were no bloodstained costumes, no fake blood or severed hands or feet and no razor blades or drugs in candy.  About the only drug we knew about was the aspirin in our medicine cabinet or the penicillin prescribed by a physician.  Other than that, most of us had never heard of any street drugs.  They were saner, more innocent times.

Then the clock struck midnight, the coachmen back into mice, Cinderella ran from the ball and everything bottomed out.  The dividing line between decent and indecent began to shuffle and merge around the time of President Kennedy’s assignation in the 60’s.  Then came the era of free love and Woodstock and a time when freedom of speech eventually came to mean the right to be rude and indecent, and we morphed into a nation of slobs.

And Halloween went with it.  There’s a fine line between tales of haunted houses and hanging bodies, and we so long crossed it, it doesn’t look like we’re ever coming back.  And the only way that Cinderella is ever going to get into the ball is if she dresses as a hooker.

W. Buffet and I Are on the Same Page

(Warren Buffet)

“I could end the debt in five minutes,” Warren Buffet told CNBC.  “You just pass a law that says anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for reelection.  The 26th Amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) only took three months and eight days to be ratified.  Why?  Simple!  The people demanded it.  That was in 1971 before computers, cell phones, etc.  Of the 27 amendments to pass, seven took one year or less to become the law of the land… all because of public pressure.”

There is also the Congressional Act of 2011.  The author is an anonymous but G. Tzipporah Saunders, the lone blogger has added her ideas as well.

(G. Tzipporah Saunders)

1. No Tenure.  Congressmen collect their salaries while in office and collect a small portion of their pay when they are out of office in accordance with Social Security guidelines.

2. Congress (past, present and future) participates in Social Security.  All funds in the Congressional Retirement Fund move to Social Security immediately.  All future funds flow into the Social Security system and Congress participates with the American people.  It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise.  Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%, and they will receive the same pay as teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District.  (That ought to fix their wagon.)

4. Congress must equally abide by the laws they impose on the American people.

5. They will not hold the American people hostage over debt ceilings and things like that.

6. They will not talk just to keep the heating bills down.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12.  The American people did not make these contracts with Congressmen.  Congressmen made these contacts for themselves.  Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career.  The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their terms then go home and back to work.

Even though our (psychologically delayed) Congress would never pass this, there are always petitions and ballots and Obama Presidential vetoes with the backing of 99.999% of the American people.  Abstainers would include Michelle Bachmann, the Koch brothers, Texas Governor, Rick Perry and soon-to-be ex Wisconsin Governor, Scott Walker, as he rides along the coattails of the Koch brothers during his last months in office.  Aside from offing bin Laden, it would be the highlight of Obama’s political career.  And outside of his wife and kids, it could be one of the key points of his life.

Mr. Charm Could Strike Again

At this point, predicting the next election is like predicting a coin toss; it could go one way or the other.  If Obama wore nerd glasses and had adult acne and buckteeth and carried his pens and pencils in a little plastic protector in his shirt pocket, he never would have made it to city dogcatcher let alone to the highest office in the world.

The truth be told, he is one hell of a campaigner who has style, charm and good looks oozing from his every pore.  But the proof is also in the pudding, and those things do not a good president make.  He promised to change things, and lo and behold, we are in worse straits than before.  He has increased the national debt by four trillion dollars, and the unemployment rate is hovering around nine percent.  And he has alienated environmentalists and many Jewish voters by reversing allegiances mid-stream and siding with the wrong side.

Who will get those four coveted years for depends on whether the GOP and the ever- nutty Tea Party are able to put their differences aside and show leadership, foresight and brains, which is proving to be a long shot.

Some say that his problems are not only the residue of the Bush era and this may be partially true.  They also say that Congress won’t work with him, and this may partially be true as there are those members of Congress that would make a group of developmentally delayed five year-olds at a Halloween party look mature.  But it could also be that some of his ideas were bound to boomerang to begin with.  Though as a caveat to Congress, they need to remember that it is the people who put them in office, and it will be the people who will take them out of office unless they start behaving better than the aforementioned five year-olds.

In the end, a win for Obama also depends on how many talk show appearances he makes and how convincing he is.  And let’s face it; he was pretty convincing the first time around.  But unless the GOP churns out one candidate that doesn’t make Daffy Duck look intelligent, then Mr. Charm could easily charm us into four more years.  If that happens, let us pray that his learning curve will have kicked into high gear by then because we’re sure going to need it.

Reading Between the Lines

When the Founding Fathers were thinking about Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press, I doubt that they had Moammar Gadhafi’s demise in mind or any other of those sordid details.

I like my news, too.  I like to know what’s going on, so I sound urbane and informed, but the news has become like a frienemy who barges in with too much information.

There is our frienenemy at the window talking and yammering away about herself, her latest operation and the details of her divorce and/or colonoscopy.  We excuse ourselves for some herbal tea or maybe an Excedrin when she starts knocking on the back door.  We can hear her voice all the way from the medicine cabinet.

We open the door and say we need to take a nap, but she is as deaf as a doorpost, clueless, and does not stop.  Finally, we think about doing away with her or maybe sending her to the hospital.  Maybe a little strangulation or a slip or fall, but we don’t because we have dogs and kids to feed and a mortgage to pay.  Besides, orange or those awful horitintal black and white stripes aren’t good on most people, and on it goes with the news as well.

I understand their need and desire to impart the news.  I (sort of, provided it’s not too gruesome) want to know what’s going on, but do we really need pictures of Gadhafi and his son in their most current, unpresentable states when a nice general description would do?  Something like:  “Head Nut Offed Today” or “Head Nut’s Son Met His Maker after one Last Sip of Water and a Last Drag off a Cig” followed by some terse description.

I know that people were mad at him.  I know he was asking for it; I just don’t want to watch.

 

Steve Jobs for Patron Saint? Not.

If I see one more picture of Steve Jobs, the patron saint of technology, I’m going to throw a dart at it.  No one is arguing that he was a genius, but, let’s face it.  Geniushood does not always lead to sainthood.

A French Saint

The two things that knocked him down from getting cannonized were that he had an illegitimate daughter he never acknowledged and a father he never acknowledged, after he recently tried contacting him.

Maybe there is more than meets the eye here.  Maybe, as some have speculated, his father would have asked him for money and Jobs knew it.  While I don’t think that anyone should use anyone else, what would it have been to float him a small loan or buy him a small island.  It’s not like he was hurting for the money.

I also don’t understand why he didn’t acknowledge his illegitimate daughter.  No one asks to be here.  We just sort of show up to make the best of things, so to avoid her over something she had no say so in isn’t very helpful.  He was also illegitimate himself, so he knows what it’s like, though maybe he never quite got over it.

With all his money, he wasn’t the most charitable sort, either.  He did set up one eponymous foundation and hired Mark Vermilion, who worked for the charity Humanitas International, a charity founded by Joan Baez, who Jobs briefly dated, to run it, but the foundation shut down after he founded NeXT.  When Apple began donating computers to nonprofits, it was Vermilion’s idea and not his.  Generous he wasn’t.

His supporters say that he gave in other ways with life-changing inventions.  Yet in my humble opinion, 8.3 billion dollars is a lot to leave around when there are sicknesses to cure, hungry mouths to feed, and animals to rescue.

Vermilion thought that jobs would have been more generous had he lived longer.  “There are only so many hours in a week,” he said, “and he created so many incredible products.  He really contributed to culture and society.”  Still, it would have been better had he contributed to those who could not afford to buy retail let alone wholesale.

Of course Jobs’ genius changed the world to streamline communication, thought the Apple computer, the iPad and the iPhone, to name a few.  Even though he didn’t have an engineering degree, his name is on 200 patents.  Still, there is something to be said for giving to those who can’t afford electronic gadgets let alone a gallon of milk at the grocery store.

How to Lose a Zit

I’d like to give kudos to myself for winning at least one war, the War of the Zit.

It must have been lying in wait for a while and only chose to make its presence known before I went on vacation and met people I hadn’t seen in years.  And I wanted to go zit free.

Facing myself squarely in the mirror, I gave the bugger a little squeeze and got a welt right under the eye.  After searching in vain for a semi-sharp zit-operating tool like the good, old household tweezer, I came upon another solution, chemical warfare:  I would smite it for all it was worth.  Fortunately, I came prepared for just such emergencies when it made its presence known, so I laid down some rules for the freewheeling zit and me.

Rule One:  Let it think you are its friend.  That means no more roughness or squeezing.  Talk to it gently if you must by saying, “Here, zit, zit, zit.  Here, zit, zit, zit.”

Rule Two:  Blast it with zit bashing formulas every chance you get, and I don’t mean the cheap over the counter kind, either.  This is war, and it means something viable, practical and sturdy that will not take on a life of its own in a petri dish.  If sterile cotton is not available from the MASH, Mobile Army Supply Hospital, then a clean, sterile hand or makeup brush will do.

Rule Three:  Monitor the enemy’s counter-offensive movements in the mirror for at least the first forty-eight hours.  If it is taking over your whole face or has established a good counter offensive, it may be time to go back to the drawing board or up a battle plan.

Rule Four:  Measure it as part of your surveillance monitoring movement.  If it is shrinking, then that is a good thing, but if it appears to be growing, then it is time to change chemicals.  Some zits have a will of their own and are chemically resistant.

Because of a good military offensive, mine eventually went AWOL but not until after the meeting when it stationed one last hurrah, so I did what all good warriors do.  Eschewing the idea of a concealor because of the potential for flare-ups, I donned sunglasses and scarves and went out looking all chic and mysterious until it retreated to that great zit farm in the sky or where all zits go to die.

Poor Little LA Unified Darlings

So the report from the state said that LAUSD isn’t properly servicing their black and English language learners.  They obviously haven’t stepped foot on a campus since “Leave it to Beaver” aired on television.  For here, my friends, is what happens on the average campus in that beleaguered district, and probably most others, too, I’d be willing to bet.

Thirty seconds to the bell, the kids are still standing outside the room and are herded to classes that they don’t want to go to.  Arriving with only the basics, they show up with the clothes on their backs, an iPod or cellphone and a wallet.  The girls carry enough cosmetics to open a counter at Sacks.  Any pencils books, papers and supplies are MIA and absent.  And heaven help the teacher who suggests that the little darlings bring them, because this is part of their “free and appropriate public education.”  Fearing being branded as a racist, the teacher hands out the supplies and asks the kids to start the lesson on the board.  The kids continue to talk, a few girls apply lipstick and mascara and otherwise primp, a spitball flies across the room, and the kids pull out their cell phones and start texting like crazy.  And that is on one of the better days, too.

When report cards come out, many teachers who have the utter nerve, audacity and gall to give failing grades will promptly be dealt with by the administration or parents who show up at school beating their breasts and claiming that the teacher failed their little dumpling because she does not like him, which by that point, may be true.  And that is at the end of the average semester.

The missing link in all this is that the same opportunities, classes and homework assignments are open to all, but the kids (including the black kids and the English language learners) know that they don’t have to do anything aside from waiting for those in charge to cater to their whims while learning to be culturally sensitive.  We all have culture.  I had my culture, too, but if I ever would have had the utter nerve, audacity and gall to behave like many of these kids do, I would have been crowned at home so thoroughly I would have been sipping my lunch through a straw for the next five years.

Riding on Genius

Genius is a many splendored thing.  It is why we are no longer living in caves or yodeling and swinging on vines to get somewheres in a hurry.  It is why we have cars and car horns.  Genius is what got us light bulbs, umbrellas and galoshes; it’s what got us laptops and that styrofoam they use for packing.  It’s what’s got us bus passes and coffeemakers and red licorice, and it’s what got us police bait cars that are parked in plain view with lots of goodies that criminals love.

Two especially geniuses from somewhere in LA, got into a car they didn’t know was being used as bait.  A detective, dressed in baggy pants and dark sunglasses, had just wiped off his fingerprints away before getting into another car and speeding away.

Genius Extraordinaire, 23 year-old Edwin A. Hernandez, saw the man in the baggy pants and dark sunglasses leave a perfectly wonderful and beautiful abandoned Toyota Camry.  He sauntered on by and eyeballed the contents of the car.  It was a car thief’s paradise.  A carton of cigarettes.  Check.  A laptop in the front seat.  (Double check)  A key in the ignition?  (What the #$%^, man?!!!)

So he heeded the call of the wild and encouraged his buddy and fellow career criminal, 24 year-old Victor A. Vasquez, to join him.  Vasquez “had a bad feeling about it” but he ignored those gut instincts that counselors always advise their clients to listen to, and off they went.

When the doors locked and the car stopped moving a few blocks away, they realized that their derrieres were parked not in a normal car but in a baited one.  It rolled to a stop an elementary school where the two had probably spent about as much time in during their formative years as a skinhead at an Israel Bonds dinner.  Vasquez’s son attends the school, but he wasn’t outside, so he didn’t witness his father’s special brand of genius again as the police arrested him for grand theft auto and drug possession after finding two methamphetamine pipes in the car.

“My mind wasn’t on no robbing or nothing,” claimed Vasquez after his arrest.

Of course, though he might want to enroll in some jailhouse GED classes to work on his grammar.

The Curt Knox PR Machine

Hell hath no fury like a Curt Knox PR machine.  The father of formerly convicted murderess, Amanda Knox, knew no bounds when getting his progeny’s murder conviction overturned in Perugia, Italy last Monday.  I can (sort of) understand a father going to bat for his child; I don’t understand how a father could be proud to raise a daughter who does drugs and sleeps around, though maybe I’m just being too conservative.

I may be in the minority here, but I believe that if little dumpling Amanda didn’t actually kill her roommate, 21 year-old Meredith Kercher of Leeds, England, then she was an accessory to the crime, as an acquittal does not an innocent make.

Casey Anthony was acquitted of murdering her daughter, though common sense would dictate that a mother who was truly innocent wouldn’t lie about babysitters, keep her child’s death a secret or go out partying.  A truly innocent mother would be wracked with grief and despair.

O.J. Simpson was acquitted in Criminal Court, but most functioning adults know that he was guilty, whether or not the glove fit.

When the judge wouldn’t let them retest the scant DNA with more advanced technology, the prosecution knew the fate of their case was sealed.

But adequate DNA or not, I believe Knox is guilty because an innocent person does not change her alibi to remove herself from the crime scene once she realizes she’s in deep.  An innocent person does not give conflicting alibis that turn out to be false.  An innocent person doesn’t claim to be silly and spacey yet get a job to save money to travel abroad, and an innocent person does not wait for a grocery store to open at 5:00 a.m. so she can buy bleach to clean up the crime scene.

Now that the little dumpling is free, the prosecutor, Mignini is on trial most likely through daddy’s PR bulldozer.

I became suspicious when the headline to one story read, “Amanda Knox Freed:  Prosecutor of Perugia’s conduct bordered on the bizarre, observers say.”  (The “observers” were probably part of Curt Knox’s PR machine.)

The story then goes on to state how the prosecutor trotted out the satanic theory in other cases as well and that he is now awaiting trial for illegal wiretapping.  While he may have his foibles, it doesn’t mean that he was so far off about a woman who is so “innocent” she necked with her boyfriend in public shortly after her “friend” was murdered, who went out and bought sex toys and a vibrator (as a joke, she claimed) and who turned cartwheels in the police station before being questioned.  Knox said she doesn’t do well under pressure, but she sure seems to have straightened out when she realized the jam she was in.  They say that even a broken clock is right twice a day, and Mignini was probably right here as well.

Maybe I’d better knock it off.  If Curt Knox or his cronies read this, the parking ticket I got last year morphs into a full on felony.