An amazing call, an amazing feeling

I got a phone call Thursday that at first I thought was a crank call.

Somebody told me to hold on, and then I heard someone crying. Not just crying, squalling. The first voice, which I hadn't recognized, was my son-in-law. The second was my granddaughter, who was exactly 10 minutes old.

Wow.

One of the great regrets of my life is that I wasn't around for my two children's early years, so I never went through the whole delivery-room, brand-new-baby thing. The closest I ever came was inadvertent. I turned a page in one of my friend Mick's photo albums and saw a color picture of his firstborn child coming out of his wife.

Definitely too much information.

This was different, as you can see from the picture. My first grandchild, Madison Nicole Kastner, was born Friday in Beijing, China, and it looks like I'm finally going to have to come to terms with the fact that I'm not 22 years old anymore.

I'm a grandfather.

I couldn't be happier.

We should want leaders better than us

When Sarah Palin suggested that she was a good candidate for vice president because people could "relate" to her, I had to wince.

It seemed like another example of George W. Bush winning in 2000 because more people thought he was the kind of person they would like to have a beer with, another example of why America has far more problems than it did eight years ago.

I'm not even sure folks were right about the beer.

Here's the choice: Al Gore might have been pedantic, the kind of person who went on and on about boring subjects, but Ol' Dubya would have been snarky and sarcastic and might also have stuck you with a nasty nickname.

Throw in VP candidates Lieberman and Cheney and 2000 might have been the all-time worst year for guys you'd want to share a beer with.

Here's the question, though. Think of the people in the world with whom you most enjoy drinking beer, and then picture them in the White House. When I think about my three closest friends, I wouldn't want any of them within five miles of the Oval Office. All three of them have been through personal bankruptcies and two of them totally lack even a modicum of common sense.

The irony of it is, I can picture all three of them enjoying the heck out of Dubya's Flightsuit Adventure.

I don't want people like me running the government.

I want experts, people who have trained for it, and yes, wanted it badly.

I don't want a vice president who can't raise her own children well enough to keep them from getting pregnant or getting arrested.

I don't want a president whose only success in life came from using his father's name.

Jimmy Carter had the right slogan -- "Why Not the Best" -- even if he wasn't the right guy to fulfill it.

We ought to demand the best.

Not the friendliest.

"A republic, if you can keep it"

With all apologies to Benjamin Franklin, we're losing it.

When Old Ben, the sage of Philadelphia, came out of the meetings designed to put together a constitution and a system of government for the brand-new United States in 1787, someone asked him what sort of government it would be.

"A republic, if you can keep it," Franklin answered.

Well, Ben, it's almost gone.

Thomas Frank, whose amazing books "One Market Under God" and "What's the Matter With Kansas" have chronicled so much of what's happening in America over the last 25 years, has come out with a book that's even scarier than those two.

"The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule" describes what has been happening for the last 30 years or so as the Reaganauts, the Gingrichites and the Bushmen have taken over Washington. Frank tells us how they've hollowed out government departments, failed to enforce regulations or collect fines from corporations and just basically put foxes in charge of all our henhouses.

It's as good an explanation as any of how we have been sliding farther and farther down the slippery slope toward oligarchy since the mid 1970s, and how it's extremely difficult to imagine getting back so much of what we've lost.

What are some of the cornerstones of a true republic, one in which the weak are protected from the strong?

I would guess that an educated electorate is the first one, and anyone who doesn't think people are getting stupider over the last 30 years isn't paying attention. What kind of America is it where 65 percent of adults don't read books, and a good chunk of the ones who do read only pulp fiction and political polemics?

An independent media serving as a check on corruption is another. The independent, non-corporate media is all but gone. All that's left is five or six big companies more concerned with their stock prices and balance sheets than covering the news.

Real religious values matter too, and too many of our people have either lost their values or fallen for those who say either than the apocalypse is coming or that Jesus wants them to be rich. Whatever happened to being our brother's keeper?

Nope, we've slid so far and yielded so much that it probably will take some sort of revolution to get it back.

Quite frankly, I'm not expecting one -- at least till "American Idol" is canceled.

Abstinence only training is naive

Sarah Palin is the subject of this post, but it isn't about politics at all.

It's about raising kids.

As a proud member of the Christian Right, the GOP vice presidential nominee is opposed to abortion, not so high on birth control and very much against sex education in schools. The Alaska governor supports so-called "abstinence only" education, as do many conservative Christians.

And she has a 17-year-old daughter who is five months pregnant.

I don't want to be critical of young Bristol Palin, who probably never asked her mother to become a national candidate and make her a national scandal. Kids make mistakes, and at least she has a supportive family who will help her with the issues involved with being an 18-year-old mother.

But I'm highly critical of abstinence-only education, because once you get past that, you're left with nowhere else to go. You teach your kids to "just say no" to their hormones, and once a "maybe" or a "yes" has slipped in there (no pun intended), that's it. They don't know how to cope.

I raised two children, and I was pretty much the one responsible for their sex education. What I told both of them was that it would be a terrible idea for them to have sex while they were still in high school. I told them that they weren't mature enough emotionally to deal with it, and that there were all sorts of possible bad consequences -- pregnancy, STDs, loss of reputation, etc.

I told them in no uncertain terms that having sex in high school was a bad idea.

Then I told them that if they were going to ignore me, they ought to be aware of things like birth control and so-called "safe sex."

My friend Mick -- my own link to the Christian Right -- told me I was giving my children mixed messages, that by telling them about condoms, I was telling them -- wink, wink -- that it was really all right.

I told him I was treating them like intelligent human beings and respecting them as individuals. My daughter did get pregnant, but it wasn't until she was 27 and had been married for more than a year. My son is 23 and engaged, and as far as I know has no offspring running around.

God may give absolute messages.

We shouldn't.