You will note that the Potpouuri Poll has disappeared from the blog. Responses were minimal, but we may bring it back as the Presidential election draws near. Also, we have added some advertisements to the blog. We neither select nor endorse the ads. As for the location we ask you to try to identify, there's a new picture off to the right. The boulevard previously shown was in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
And now, here's a 2008 short story by Sid Bolotin and some political thoughts as well. Please send your opinions on to me at riart1@aol.com and they will be published.
Jack Lippman
Some Political Thoughts
The Republican Party is at a crossroads. It must decide what kind of party it wants to be.
The Democrats faced a similar challenge during the Seventies when the left-over turbulence of the Sixties was still present. George McGovern, heir to that movement, was trounced by Richard Nixon in 1972, and since then, the Democratic candidates, while nominally liberals, have veered to the center and supported business and the free market as strongly as they have advocated a "safety net" philosophy. Just look at the support Barack Obama and Bill Clinton received from Wall Street and the banking industry.
The Republican Party must choose between representing "true conservatism," as represented by Rick Santorum or Ron Paul, or a candidate who merely purports to support conservative ideas, like Mitt Romney or a "white knight" chosen at their Tampa convention, but who in reality will move the party toward the center in an effort to gain independent votes. In such a situation, the conservatism of the Republican candidate will be as hypocritical as the liberalism of the Democratic candidate. But this is the way it should be: two centrist parties, each influenced but not dominated by the ideas of their more extreme wings.
Should the G.O.P. nominate a true conservative, however, they will duplicate the debacle of 1968 when Lyndon Johnson got 61% of the popular vote and carried all but six states in the electoral college in his rout of G.O.P. candidate Barry Goldwater. This may please the true conservatives of the party because they very well may inherit it, or what remains of the G.O.P. at that point. If that should happen, look for a realignment of parties in the nation. We might even end up with three parties, a dominant Democratic Party, and two smaller spin-offs of the present G.O.P., one conservative and one centrist. It might, population-wise, look something like this:
Democrats - 40%
Centrist Republicans - 20%
Conservative Republicans - 20%
Independents - 20%
In a nation with a "parliamentary" system, this would result in a coalition government. In our system, however, it means that all three parties would be appealing to the independent voter and dissidents within the other parties. It will be interesting, but my guess is that the Republicans will not nominate a "true conservative" and we will remain with a two party system, with independent voters making the difference.
JLEmail - Take it With a Grain of Salt, Mes Amis
I received an Email the other day deriding the French for referring to Israel as "a shitty little country" and pointing out the tremendous scientific, technological and economic accomplishments of Israel to negate such criticism.
On investigation, I learned that the comment came from an interview the French Ambassador to the UK gave to a British newspaper in 2001, eleven years prior to my getting this message. Such Email, with no indication as to the authorship nor date of its content, should be taken with a grain of salt. This is not to excuse the French, who by the way have been trying to increase their trade with Israel lately, but it is a criticism of those who are gullible enough to blindly accept anything they get over the internet at face value and pass it on to others.
If you recently got an undated Email saying some South Carolinians were so fed up with Federal interference with their state that they were considering seizing some local Federal government facilities, please ignore it. It refers to something that was happening about 150 years ago at a place called Fort Sumter. Passing the Email on to ten of your friends who are annoyed by government interference in their lives won't help change the results of the Civil War.
JL
Al stopped digging to answer his cell phone
seeing that it was his youngest brother: “Hi, Mitch. Thanks for returning my call. Yeah, I’m still here at Cascade Lakes. The papers are signed. You, me, and Scott are the new owners. Dad and mom?
They’re on the patio watching me dig.”
“Dig?
What the hell are you digging?” Mitch interrupted.
“Well, I’m not so much digging as removing a
large, potted plant that is sunk into the ground beside the screen door. Dad insisted that I do it now while they
could watch. As best as I could
understand he says that he buried something under the pot about 15-years
ago…about 7-years after they moved in.
Can you believe it’s been 22-years since they bought here? Mom says that over the years he periodically
pulled up the pot, futzed with it, and re-interred it. She thought he was just tending to the plant
and is pooh-poohing his insistence that there’s stuff under the pot. She claims that he’s all mixed up. Mitch, let me attach my hands-free gizmo so I
can talk while I work. Where’s our bro,
Scott?”
“He’s right here. I’m in Vermont
on his farm. I’ll put on the speaker
phone so he can hear us. We both
appreciate that you popped down to Florida
to take care of transferring ownership and make arrangements for the
folks. How are they doing?”
“They seem okay, considering that he’s 90
and mom’s 89. Getting a tad
forgetful. Mom got herself a new-fangled
tricycle, a three-wheeled version of the Segway People Mover that was all the
rage in the early 2000’s. She uses it to
tool over to tennis and the clubhouse.
Dad still shoots pool, but his knees finally forced him to give up
tennis. He still walks three mornings a
week though. Okay, guys, I’ve freed the
pot and lifted it out. Wow! There is
stuff in the hole. I can see a box and
some plastic bags.”
“Hey, Al, wait,” squawked Scott, “maybe you
should wait until I fly down to make sure you don’t steal my share of the
gold.”
“Oh, Scott, shish-up.” Mitch yelled. “You haven’t strayed off the farm more than a
hundred miles in years; now for gold you’re jabbering about flying. Al’s digging in the Florida heat, and you’re making jokes. Cut it out.”
“C’mon, guys, let’s not get into a row. Supposedly we should know better now that
we’ve matured. How old are you now,
Mitch? 60? And you, Scott, 64?”
“Shish-up, Al.” answered Mitch. “Don’t go into your oldest brother
patronizing role. Being 66 doesn’t
automatically make you the wisest owl on the branch. Just friggin’ pull up what’s buried. Maybe it is gold that they squirreled
away. You better check the mattresses
and pillows too.”
“Okay, okay, enough with the bullshit. I’ve got the first bag out, and there’s a
note inside that says ‘read this first’.
It’s a note from dad that’s dated July 2008.”
Settling into a patio chair Al began
reading: ‘Hopefully, one, or all of you have found this cache of goodies. It’s July 2008, and I’ve been trying to write
a story for the upcoming contest by our community’s magazine, News and Views. The lead-in has to be about a resident
digging and finding something. Well,
I’ve struggled mightily for weeks without stumbling on a story line that
resonated for me. What could be
buried? Cash? Jewelry?
Stocks? Body parts? Finally, I just gave up the effort, but
decided that I’d bury something for you guys…sort of my own time capsule. I figured that I’d put stuff in that had
meaning for me and hopefully for you…maybe your children. So here’s the inventory list that I started
with in 2008: CD’s with my stories up to July 2008…maybe your kid’s will morph
them into posthumous best sellers; some small tools that belonged to my
father…knowing that Scott especially has an affinity for such items; the
collection of letters that I wrote to you over the years in my attempts to pass
on wisdom and humor; your letters to me; and a collection of your mother’s
recipes that you or your children slavered over. Oh, yes I threw in that special tie-clip made
from a section of the Doom’s Day Death Ray Laser that I designed back in my
Aerospace Engineering days. I also
included my reference folder of research papers that I used to create the
family tree that I sent you. Maybe you
or one of your kids might want to put our history up on the computer. I hope that one of you still have your copy
of the 6-foot long newsprint that I used to scratch out our family lineage that
sprang from my grandfather and his three brothers after they came over from
Russia in the 1920’s. Well, that’s it
for now, guys. I plan to add to this
buried treasure over the coming years. I
wonder if I’ll be around when it’s dug up.’
“Al,” Mitch sputtered, “are you going to go
through all the stuff now?”
“No, I think I’ll just pull it all up and
put the pot back. Dad couldn’t have been
adding too much as he got older…the pot’s too heavy. I’ll bring all of it back with me so we can
sift through it together. Besides,
Anita, the caretaker we hired should be here any moment, and I need time to
settle her in with the folks before I dash over to PBI to catch my flight
home.”
“How’d she check out when you interviewed
her?” asked Scott.
“She seems fine.” Al answered. “I feel comfortable with her. She’s a former nurse that dad met when he was
volunteering at Hospice. He says that
she’s a sweetheart who’ll take good care of them so that they can still live
here and not have to go to a facility.
There’s the bell, guys. It must
be her now. I’ll call you when I get
home.”
Honda Classic Picture
A few weeks ago, the people at the Honda Classic would not let me and two of my buddies compete in their golf tournament. They claimed the slots had to be kept open for Rory Mcilroy, Keegan Bradley and Tiger Woods. So we put our clubs away and settled for having our picture taken in the Honda race car Mario Andretti drove in the Indianapolis 500.
Most readers of this blog are alerted by Email every time a new posting appears. If you wish to be added to that Email list, just let me know by contacting me at Riart1@aol.com.
Also, be aware that www.Jackspotpourri.com is now available on your mobile devices in a modified, easy-to-read, format.
Our family of web sites includes: www.computerdrek.com - www.politicaldrek.com - www.sportsdrek.com - www.healthdrek.com.
Check all of them out, find out what “drek” really means and feel free to submit your thoughts and articles for publication on these sites, which, while still “under construction,” already contain some interesting content.
Jack
Lippman
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