Actually, we had an incident at a festival in Cumberland Furnace a few years ago in which a musician was showing too much interest in a young girl. Two or three of the men went over and told him they knew how to calm a man who was interested in young girls and that if he kept it up, they would take him up in the nearest cornfield and show him.  After they walked away, he packed up and left.

The most fun news article I have heard in weeks was reported on either CBS or NBC. It seems a group of elderly ladies, probably at a cocktail party, were sorrowing over the recent death by cancer of one of the husbands, a Mr. Baker. Wondering how they could raise money for cancer research, one said that people liked nude calendars, so these ladies, aged fifty to seventy, decided to produce one. They were the models. To date, they have raised more than a million dollars, had and provided a lot of amusement. It is true they were all nude, but the photographs were shot in such a way that the television station was able to show many of them. Laughing about it to Andrew, he wasn’t surprised. He said people were tired of pornography and would like something that satirized it.

Not at all humorous has been President Obama’s vacillation on troops to Afghanistan. Six months ago he said he had clear goals and a clear strategy to achieve them. Now he says he doesn’t know what to do. Granted, it is a difficult choice. He must send in another fifty or hundred thousand troops to – maybe – win or withdraw acknowledging that he was wasted the time and lives of the those additional twenty thousand he has already sent.  

Currently the Senate is considering a health bill that has the blessing of President Obama. What I found interesting was that a Democratic Senator on the committee writing the bill said he hadn’t read it, it was too confusing, that no one could read it. And the Senate will pass this with the President’s support?  I didn’t want McCain for president because I was afraid he would “shoot from the hip” without thought. Considering the trillions of dollars in “stimulus” passed at his demand over night and the above, maybe the nation elected an immature McCain, one with a lot of corrupt friends.

I tuned in to the Rush Limbaugh program during lunch and heard him say that the Sixty Minutes show of 27 September had reported that President Obama had not spoken to the top commanding general, who has been asking for help, in the past 70 days. To me, this is incredible, if true. He had time to praise himself at the UN, visit Chicago about the Olympics and fly to Denmark to campaign for Chicago, but did not have time to speak to the Commanding General in Afghanistan where we have between forty and sixty thousand young men and women fighting and dying – twenty thousand of whom he sent. I hope someone can tell me this is false.

On the other hand, I must respect Michelle Obama. After flying to Denmark with her friend Oprah Winfrey in the presidential private four engine jet, she said she made this “sacrifice” willingly for the children of Chicago. We should have a national “Michelle Obama Day” for this sacrifice. It was really tough on her: that taxpayer paid luxury flight, the dinner with the nobility of Denmark, the wine and cheese tasting party. Her life is hell.

In preparation for this walk, the Secret Service and the DC police brought in three dozen vehicles and shut down several streets, H Street, Vermont Avenue, two lanes of I Street and an entrance to MacPherson Square Metro station (Richie Rich, Bizblooger, Sept 18). They also sent in bomb sniffing dogs, had snipers on roof tops and put up barricades. It was, of course, too far to walk, so she was transported that block and a half in her armored limousine from the White House to the shop accompanied by her photographer and a sign language interpreter. Note that this did not include helicopters for low level protection and jet fighters for high level protection.  She did not want her lunch to cost the taxpayers too much.

Michelle graciously selected a black cabbage and a few other vegetables, permitted an assistant who accompanied her to pay for the vegetables and gave a spontaneous speech to an assembled crowd on healthy eating. 

I have tried to find the humor in this, considering adding that perhaps she had to walk through a black neighborhood, which would have made all of the protection understandable considering it was DC and what her husband had done to the black school children there, but I can’t. This incident is not laughable, it is not stupid, it is frightening. Has any empress in history been so protected? And for such a stupid publicity stunt? Face the fact that she has over twenty personal assistants making more than a hundred thousand dollars a year. They probably all have secretaries and clerks and, in addition, there is a large kitchen staff. All she had to do was say, “I want some black cabbage,” and any of those underlings would have run to the store and gotten some to please the princess. That two block trip was more than a publicity stunt, it was a demonstration of her royalty, of how important she is in relation to the common herd, of how she disdains us, including those who elected her husband. 

The problem is that this cannot be written off as the action of a sick, emotionally disturbed, perhaps paranoid woman who happens to be the wife of the President. It is true of too many of the leading aristocracy of the Democratic Party, the Party that formerly identified itself with the working class. Consider the Kennedys. I lived in Massachusetts for a few years where I learned of the special treatment that they expected (expect?) and received (receive?). Once, eating in the Oyster House, the waiter proudly told me that Jack Kennedy used to eat there. He added, “Of course, when he and the family came this floor was closed off to other customers.” There are numerous such examples if one chooses to hunt them down. The Kennedys are better than anyone else. The same appears true of Pelosi.  Her husband’s factories in Samoa were exempted from the minimum wage she forced on companies headquarters in the States.  The airplane that transported her and her entourage on a weekly or semi-weekly basis to her home in California wasn’t good enough. She wanted, and received, a four engine plane equipped like the Presidential plane, and then complained because it did not land closer to her home – it was too large for the air field. Are they simply the tip of an iceberg that could sink our freedom.

I recall with fondness President Truman’s solitary morning walks: a group of construction workers noticed him and placed a pile of debris in his way one morning. He walked around it, out into the street, while wishing them “Good morning.” He was the elected servant of the people, and he knew it. Now we are entering a time when the people serve the officials. It is not too late too change, we still have a vote but face the money and public power of organizations such as the NEA and other important unions as well as ACORN. Somehow the word must be spread. We need representatives, not rulers. 

I would never have heard of Empress Michelle’s visit to the peasants had it not been for the Limbaugh and Hannity radio broadcasts and it took a search of Google to find an incomplete report in the blurb by Rich. Where are our watchdogs, our guardians of democracy, the powerful, all encompassing press? Fawning at the foot of the wealthy and the powerful may be pleasant, but it is always temporary. They should remember that slaves, no matter how privileged and important are still slaves. 

Voters should remember that also.