'One Voice' up and running

The new Website is up and running, although in sort of a skeleton form so far.

It's called "One Voice," and you can enter the following URL:

http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice

I'm not sure what we'll be doing here, but the new site is the place to be.

Thanks.

'One voice' will be the new site

Where do we go from here?

I'm hopeful the new site will be up by the end of the week, and this one will then either be a subset of the main one or will just be absorbed into it.

I'm hoping to put more of an emphasis on the theme of this site -- the things that really matter in life. I really don't intend to write about political issues here anymore; I do so much of that on AllVoices.com, where I have become one of the leading contributors in the never-ending battle between left, right and the middle.

I'm changing the name of the site, largely because I think calling a personal site "All that matters ..." is a little arrogant. Who am I to decide what matters for all of you?

I thought about "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche," because I love the title and I found that old book recently. I also thought about "How to Pick Up Girls," an amazing old book from about 35 years ago that you could only buy through mail order.

In the end, I settled on "One Voice," the title of a lovely song from about 10 years ago, mostly for the lyric "life's not that simple, down here on Earth."

And for your enjoyment while you wait, a lovely picture of the Amazing Baby.

Changes coming to the operation

Sorry I have been a little slack in posting here the last couple of weeks, but I have been involved with some other things and figured it wouldn't be the worst thing to back off a little.

Actually, over the next few days I'm hoping to revamp and redesign the entire operation. This site will remain where it is, but I hope to make it a part of a larger mikerappaport.com site. I posted on that site for five or six years before switching to Blogger, and I'm hoping to do more.

I'm also planning to start working with video and podcasts; AllVoices is giving me an HD video camera to do reports for them, and I can use it to get some additional stuff on my own site too.

So sit back and watch as we move forward into the future.

Beatles remasters sound wonderful

His name was Bob, but we always called him "Tunes."

He was always singing, or whistling, or humming, usually something from one of the popular songs of the day. Tunes loved the Beatles, and since we were growing up in an era when Beatles music was everywhere, we heard a lot of Lennon and McCartney songs.

I haven't seen Tunes in nearly 40 years and I have no idea how his life has turned out, but I'm sure he is really happy this year now that all the original Beatles CDs have been remastered and re-released for modern audiences.

Tunes really loved "Rubber Soul" and "Revolver," and both of those would show up on any list of greatest albums of the '60s. My favorite was always "Abbey Road," though, and I remember vividly listening to it for the first time in the fall of 1969.

I always thought George Harrison's "Here Comes the Sun" would be pretty close to the top of any list of greatest Beatles songs ever. It's certainly my favorite.

I never heard Tunes singing it or humming it, but I can only imagine.

Go Tunes go.

Music still has its charms ...

When my lovely wife and I decided to make our annual visit to the L.A. County Fair today, we figured it would only be for a couple of hours.

That's the way we usually do it. We walk around some and we visit the shopping buildings so that she can pick up the latest ShamWow or 1,000 thread count sheets or whatever it is they're selling this year.

But this time was a little different. When we got there a little before 3 p.m., we noticed that the featured concert at 7:30 p.m. would be the Beach Boys. Now I know the group is a pale imitation of the original, with Carl Wilson and Dennis Wilson dead and the others split into three different bands.

This one had Mike Love, though, and it had Bruce Johnston as well, along with a group of younger guys who weren't even born when Beach Boys songs were all over the radio all the time.

I had seen the original Beach Boys -- minus Brian Wilson -- three times before, in 1974, '75 and '76 in Washington, D.C. They were great shows, and the group had provided a major part of the soundtrack of my life since their first national exposure in 1962.

Still, Love and Johnston are 68 and 67, respectively, and I'm still getting used to the idea of senior citizens rocking and rolling. But in a pretty tacky week, culture-wise, I suppose I was willing to try it.

It couldn't be worse than Mackenzie Phillips going on Oprah (no, not really on Oprah herself) saying that someone needed to speak up for consensual incest victims or Tom "The Hammer" DeLay channeling his inner Travolta on "Dancing With the Stars."



So I definitely needed some of the wonderful, upbeat music that I loved when I was in high school. Without the three Wilson brothers, the soaring harmonies from the '60s weren't there, but the audience didn't seem to mind. I saw people from 15 to 65 on their feet dancing and singing along with song after song, crammed into a 90-minute performance.

Johnston sounded all right on the lovely "God Only Knows," but he knew he was just a fill-in. When he finished, he dedicated the song to the "one and only Carl Wilson, forever in our hearts."

It was a pretty nice evening, and I didn't hear one person talk about politics all day.

I needed that.

Million dollar shot great to watch

Talk about a dream come true.

I have been playing golf for 15 years and have never had a hole in one. I've come close a couple of times, including once on my favorite hole, the par-three No. 7 at Empire Lakes in Rancho Cucamonga.

I put a shot eight inches from the hole and tapped in for birdie. Close, but no ...

That's why seeing this shot from the Mark Eaton Celebrity Classic in Utah, in which a restaurant manager from Provo won $1 million, is so amazing.



The hole was 150 yards, just a little shorter than No. 7 at Empire Lakes, which is why it's obvious this guy is a much better golfer than I am.

You see, I use a five wood to clear nearly 150 yards of water.

He used a nine iron for his shot.

Amazing baby takes her first steps

Milestone, milestone.

Madison Nicole Kastner, aka The Amazing Baby, took her first unaided steps today -- five of them before sitting down. I wish I could post the video here, but if you're a friend of mine on Facebook, you can see it on my home page.

Since today is Sept. 16, little Maddie walked three days before her first birthday. She's also really close to speaking her first words, so she's right on target developmentally. With her parents in language training, Maddie is spending her daytime hours in day care. She started in a class for kids who hadn't started walking yet, but it looks like they're going to have to move her up to the next class now.

Yay, Maddie!

Am I crazy, or is it possible ...

I have decided I'm not going to go gently into that good night.

I want to learn to surf. I want to get a board, head for the beach and learn how to ride a wave.

Editor's note: Mike, you're an idiot. You're almost 60 years old. You can't learn to surf.

Why not?

I can swim, I'm strong enough to carry a board and I've got enough endurance to work out for an hour at a time. Why can't I learn to surf?

Heck, if a penguin can do it ...



Seriously, from the first time I ever heard "Surfin' Safari" in the summer of 1962 on high-flying WING radio in Dayton, Ohio, I dreamed of going to California and trying it myself.

Of course, at 12 I wasn't going anywhere, and other than 10 days in the state in the summer of '78, I didn't make it back until I was 40 years old. I could have tried it in the summers of '90, '91 or '92, but for some reason it never crossed my mind.

Maybe it was just that I didn't have the kind of car you could strap a board to the top of, or maybe I was at a point in my life when I thought I was past all that. Then I became a family man and didn't think of it at all.

But it can't be that difficult.

You paddle out, turn around and raise ...

Isn't that all there is to the coastline craze?

A life without memories ... maybe

One of the most difficult things about being human is the memory.

I always loved Annie Savoy's line from the wonderful movie "Bull Durham:"

"The world is made for people who aren't cursed with self awareness."

I remember mentioning that line to my sister Laura once. I don't know if she was in a bad mood or what, but her response was that she had never considered me particularly self-aware.

I wish she was right. I wish I were a year old, as my lovely granddaughter will be this Saturday. I wish I could sweep away all the mistakes, all the hurts and just live my life again from the start.

Of course, we don't get to do that. Even if we were in one of those goofy movies where the older person and the younger one switch bodies, it wouldn't be fair to Maddie to cheat her out of nearly 59 years.

I would actually be happy just to forget my past and live what's left of my life in clueless oblivion, to wake up to a new world every morning and just concentrate on loving the people I love and being good to the others.

Maybe I should try for that.

'Liberal' should not be a dirty word

One of the things that fascinates me, particularly in some of the comments to posts, is how many of you seem to see "liberal" as a dirty word.

I can't say I blame you. For the last 30 years, the right has been hammering away at the word, doing its best to equate "liberal" with "libertine" in people's minds, and completely ignoring the fact that there are shades of difference in those left of center on the spectrum.

One of the tactics talk radio hosts like Fat Man and Little Boy have used for years is basically saying that liberal, socialist and communist are all pretty much the same. There really aren't that many people except on the lunatic fringe who try to equate conservative with fascist and Nazi.

What have liberals done for America?

Well, even though they were Republicans at the time, they fought to end slavery. They fought for women to have the right to vote, and for a whole myriad of workplace rights from child labor to minimum wage to workplace safety.

They busted trusts and created the inheritance tax that at least limited the creation of a permanent American oligarchy. They created Social Security and Medicare, and they led the fight for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam.

They stood for food and drug safety and for consumer protection, and they battled for women's rights in the workplace and in reproductive freedom.

If you look at each of those issues, in almost every one of them, conservatives were opposed. They don't believe in the minimum wage and they have hated Social Security and Medicare ever since they were created. Look at one of their current leaders, Sarah Palin, who wrote in the last 48 hours that Medicare should be changed to a system of vouchers for people to buy their own health care.

I have never been ashamed to consider myself a liberal, although I think in some areas I would go beyond where liberals go and consider myself a European-style Social Democrat.

Here's what that means, according to the definition by the Socialist International, which supports social democratic and moderate socialist parties:

Social Democracy affirms three basic principles.

First, freedom — not only individual liberties, but also freedom from discrimination and freedom from dependence on either the owners of the means of production or the holders of abusive political power.

Second, equality and social justice — not only before the law but also economic and socio-cultural equality as well, and equal opportunities for all including those with physical, mental, or social disabilities.

Third, solidarity — unity and a sense of compassion for the victims of injustice and inequality.

That mostly adds up to two things -- we're all in this together and we are our brother's keeper.

I don't disagree with any of it.

A little wisdom from the South

I wanted to find out if folks really were as stirred up about Barack Obama as some are saying, so I went to my best source.

I called my friend Cooter Jackson. Cooter lives in a little town about 20 miles from Durham, N.C. He spent 30 years as a columnist for the Grits Advertiser ("All the news that fits, we print"), although he had to retire when he lost his sight in a fishing accident.

Some of you may notice that Cooter has a small resemblance to my friend Mick, who teaches at two community colleges in Southern California.

But it's obvious from the picture that the two men aren't the same. Cooter's hair is shorter, and you can tell from the dark glasses and the vacant stare that he's blind.


In fact, if you look at this picture of Mick teaching, his hair is longer and darker, and he clearly has his eyesight.

Now that we've settled that, it's actually sort of ironic. Cooter says being blind has actually helped him in a couple of ways.

"I was always purty good with the ladies," he said. "But now that I can't see, they're even more eager to come over. They say they don't have to put no makeup on and that's a pure pleasure."

So I called to ask him about Obama.

"Well, he surprised me some when he carried North Carolina last year," he said. "Part of it was McCain runnin' a bad campaign and part of it was folks bein' real fed up with ol' Dubya. Obama caught 'em at the right time, and there really ain't as much racism around here as there used to be."

And now, I asked.

"He wouldn't carry the state today," Cooter said. "Part of it is people thinkin' a president should be a miracle worker and he shoulda solved all the problems by now, and part of it is that he's probably a little more liberal than folks realized."

I asked him what he thought.

"Hell," Cooter said. "He's no more liberal than LBJ was, but Lyndon was a white Southerner, and back then conservatives hadn't turned 'liberal' into a dirty word. I think his biggest mistake is he left it to Congress to do health care instead of proposin' his own plan."

What about all the spending? The huge deficits?

"Bush ran the biggest deficits in history," he said. "He's the only president ever who cut taxes and went to war at the same time. Nobody was fussin' about it then. It's all about the propaganda, and Obama's losin' that battle to idiots like that Fat Boy on the radio and what's his name, Glenn Beck."

I knew Cooter had spent time with both Rush Limbaugh and Beck and he ddin't have much use for either of them. Rush had gone with him on one of Cooter's famous fishing trips.

"Worst one ever," Cooter said. "He just wouldn't stop talkin'. Scared all the fish away. And he kept smokin' those big ol' cigars."

Even so, he said he liked Rush a lot better than Beck.

"I met him at a party in Chapel Hill," Cooter said. "He has kind of a crazy look in his eyes, and I swear I never shook hands with anybody whose hands were softer and damper."

I asked him if he had any advice to pass along to Obama.

"He needs to get mad," Cooter said. "He needs to show some emotion, instead of just bein' so cool and collected about it all. Start runnin' people out there whose lives have been destroyed by insurance companies turnin' 'em down. Start askin' the folks on the other side what they'd do about that. He can still win this thing. He just needs to show he cares."

Howard Beale told the truth

Howard Beale, huh?

I can live with that. If you saw "Network," you may remember that Beale was killed for telling the truth and threatening to scuttle a major corporate takeover. Listen to the 1976 speech Paddy Chayefsky wrote for Beale and see how much of it was truly prescient.

I don't mind criticism, especially when I'm wrong, but I've read and re-read my original post and my response to Jim and I don't see anything I need to walk back. I said I was tired of haters and that they were bad people and liars, and I said something mean about Ol' Dubya.


Sorry, but I just don't much like the man. I thought it was a disgrace he was even nominated, let alone elected. The man just didn't have the gravitas to be president, and thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis paid the ultimate price for that.

As for being far left, uh, not so much. For one thing, I'm pro-life. For another, during the years I was writing a newspaper column, I called for Bill Clinton's resignation over the Lewinsky thing. I'm not a big fan of Nancy Pelosi, but I do think one reason so many people are so worried about Obama is the way the media is distorting the debate.

Two Ph. D's, huh Jim? Good on you. The closest I ever get to two Ph. Ds is when I go to bed at night. I dropped out of school in the seventh grade myself. Wanted to explore the exciting world of carnival geeks, but when I found out they wanted me to eat chicken every night, I couldn't handle it.

Besides, my old daddy used to tell me that arguin' about who's smart and who's not makes about as much sense as rasslin' with a pig. You get dirty and the pig enjoys it.

So no, I'm not insulting your intelligence or trying to claim I'm the smartest guy in the room. I am the smartest guy in the room right now, but that's only because I'm sitting here alone.

But I tell you what. If you're looking for fairness to Dubya or Dick Cheney, or measured commentary about Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter, you're probably at the wrong place.

I don't think I'm far left, but I am not ashamed to be called a liberal.

And Nan, in case you were wondering, I never censor comments or delete blogs.

I'm not afraid of words.

Time to put haters in their place

I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.

I'm tired of seeing people trying to do something good and then seeing the haters try to turn it into something bad or evil.

Demi Moore and Ashton Kutchner, along with quite a few other recognizable Hollywood stars, made a video called "I pledge," which is basically a lot of people pledging to be less self-centered and do good things for the country and the world.

It's a response to President Barack Obama urging people to look outside themselves and be a better neighbor.

Here are some of the things the people in the video promise to do:

1. Work to end hunger.
2. Smile more.
3. Laugh more.
4. Love more.
5. To be a great mother.
6. To be a great father.
7. To be an American, not an African-American.
8. To find humor in everything.
9. To consume less.
10. To volunteer time.
11. To show more love to others.
12. To meet their neighbors.
13. To be a mentor.
14. To help build a culture of intelligence, not of ignorance.
15. To understand that we're all in this together.

All good things, but in the last minute of this 4:18 video, two different people pledge to serve President Obama in what he is trying to do to change America. It's these two quotes out of nearly 4 1/2 minutes of quotes that the people who hate Obama are using to characterize the video as "indoctrination" or "cult-like behavior."

The media is doing what it always does -- covering the controversy. Instead of the truth of the video, which is that people are trying to get people to do good things, they're treating it as if it is something shameful.

I'm tired of it. I don't care if it's liberals or conservatives, if anyone in this country urges people to do good things to help others, I'm on their side. If Rush Limbaugh says we should volunteer at the local hospital, I'll praise him. Ditto if Jane Fonda were to say the same thing.

It's time to call the haters what they are.

Bad people.

And liars.

Movies can have lasting effects

It's funny how some things stick with you.

When Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" came out in 1960 with its famous shower scene, there were quite a few people who didn't take showers for months after that.

I was too young to see "Psycho" in its original release, but I know of one Brian DePalma film that still affects my behavior nearly 30 years after I saw it.



"Dressed to Kill" was released in 1980, and I have never looked at elevators the same way since. In the early part of the movie, Angie Dickinson has an illicit affair. When leaving the man's apartment, she learns that she has probably gotten an STD from him and also that she left her wedding ring in the apartment.

She takes the elevator back up to his floor, and when the door opens and she starts to get out, the killer slashes her throat with a straight razor and murders her.

It's quite a scary scene, and ever since then, whenever I am getting into an elevator or coming out of one -- particularly when I am alone -- I always look around before I take a step. Just making sure there's no killer with a straight razor waiting for me.

Silly?

Probably, but I'm still alive.

Wildfire threatens some lovely homes

When you live in the West, you always have to accept the possibility of wildfires.

And the last few days, with the humidity in single digits and the temperature in triple digits, fires have been burning all around the Los Angeles area.

We owned a home in La Canada Flintridge for more than 18 years. Homes in our small city have sold for a median price of more than $1 million, making it one of the most desirable areas in all of Southern California. That's why even though we were selling in the middle of a housing crash and a national recession, we came very close to getting the price we were asking.

Boy, did we sell at the right time.


Less than three weeks after we closed and collected the cash for our equity, wildfires have destroyed most of the forest above La Canada. Families living within a mile of where we lived have been evacuated, and firefighters have been working day and night to save their neighborhoods.

We haven't been through a lot of anguish, but if this fire had happened a month ago, we would have been right there with our tenants/buyers doing whatever we could to keep the fire from destroying our property.

Ah, Southern California.

It's definitely paradise, as long as you don't mind earthquakes, fires, mudslides and the rest.

To my son on his wedding day

My son got married today.

It wasn't the beautiful November wedding he and his fiancee had planned. That will still happen as a celebration of their love, but Virgile is leaving for Washington, D.C., in less than two weeks to start his career in the U.S. Foreign Service and he wanted to take Sterling with him as his wife.

We have come to know her well over the three years they have been dating, and we have seen how good they are for each other.

Things got rather hectic on our way to the courthouse in Lancaster, the only one within a reasonable distance that could fit them in. Our brand-new car conked out a few miles short of its destination, and we took a cab the rest of the way.

I didn't really have a chance to talk to my son about marriage, which disappointed me a little. We have had so many good conversations about life and what to expect. We even had the sex talk that so many fathers and sons struggle with.

I have seen marriage from both sides, from a failed one in my twenties to a good one that is coming up on 17 years this fall, so I probably wouldn't presume to give him much personal advice.

I actually would rather tell him about love, and I've never known a better description of love than Paul's first letter to the Christians at Corinth. Here's the famous excerpt from what he wrote in 1 Corinthians 13:

"Love is patient and is kind; love doesn’t envy. Love doesn’t brag, is not proud, doesn’t behave itself inappropriately, doesn’t seek its own way, is not provoked, takes no account of evil; doesn’t rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails."


I learned those lessons about love from a wonderful person -- Virgile's mother and my wife. Nicole is the most loving person I have ever known and God granted me the greatest blessing of all when he allowed me to meet her on Sept. 12, 1992.

She and our two wonderful children from her first marriage, Virgile and his older sister Pauline, have brought awe and wonder, grace and meaning to my existence. I have fallen short of glory so many times, including today when the car broke down and I lost my temper, but Nicole's love epitomizes all the best characteristics of the words in the Bible.

She will always be the best person I know, my favorite person in the world.

So the best blessing I can give our son on the day of his wedding is this:

"May you be as good a husband as you possibly can, and may you have a wife as loving and as wonderful as your mother."

Best to speak no ill of the dead

"De mortuis nil nisi bonum."
-- ancient Roman proverb

Ted Kennedy, a man who would almost certainly have been president if not for a wrong turn he took in 1969, died this week.

I have been wondering for a long time what some people will say when it happened, knowing that it is relatively traditional to speak no ill of the dead. Over the last 40 years, no one has been hated more by the lunatic right than the last son of Joe Kennedy.

No, not even Hillary Clinton.

It wasn't all about Chappaquiddick, although Kennedy's failures there gave the nuts the ammunition they needed to attack him without ceasing. It was also because he was the last son of what could have been a political dynasty, and that made him beloved to a lot of people in a way few other liberals were.

What did they say about him today? I don't know what the Limbaughs and Hannitys said; I don't listen to them anymore. But I did check in on Free Republic, the most "mainstream" of the lunatic sites, and they didn't disappoint me. A lot of "scumbags," and "good riddances" and a lot of talk about how the 77-year-old Kennedy is certainly frying in hell.


Far be it from me here to argue with them. I never expected them to be as gracious as liberals were when Ronald Reagan died and they didn't disappoint me. I always considered Kennedy a tragic figure, the least of the brothers who had to bear the burden of the family and the nation's hopes after his older brothers were murdered.

He made a fine record for himself in the Senate, and was considered by members on both sides of the aisle as one of the greatest senators ever for his 47 years of service.

Beyond that, let's just say rest in peace.

Pride goeth before a realization

I was feeling pretty good about myself for a while today.

My wife and I had gone to meet with two financial advisors -- with the object of choosing one -- to discuss our impending retirement. I'm not sure when exactly it will happen, but the odds are pretty good we're down to counting the months on our fingers and toes.

We're not incredibly well off, but we have been working very hard to build up Nicole's 401(k) account and it's looking pretty good. We're living within our means and saving a significant account of money each month.

We managed to impress the advisors with our frugality, but what impressed them the most was the total amount of our liabilities.

Zero.

We just completed the sale of our house, so we no longer have a mortgage. We own all three of our cars free and clear and we have no personal loans or credit-card debt.

Frankly, I'm amazed.

I think I may have been in the same position for a while in 1984, but I didn't have any assets other than a 1979 Subaru that had already blown one engine.

So naturally, I felt good.

Then I thought about how little I really had to do with it. All I really did was marry well; my wife's income in one year is nearly equal to what I made in my best three years. She's a world-renowned scientist. I'm an unemployed journalist.

I write the checks to pay the bills, but that's about it.

So I'm happy I have a wonderful wife and proud that she loves me enough to keep me around.

That's enough for now.

Twists, turns and 17 wonderful years

I was sitting in the front seat of my car a few minutes ago, waiting for a parking space to open.

My son and his fiancee were occupying the space, and they were carrying some things down from our apartment to load into the car. They're getting married Friday and moving to Washington, D.C., in about two weeks as Virgile starts his career in the Foreign Service. It means we'll have a true empty nest, with both our children traveling around the world for their careers.

Nicole carried a few things down too, and I found myself watching her in the headlights and remembering for about the one-millionth time why I love her so much. In 20 days, on Sept. 12, it will be the 17th anniversary of the day we met. Just 51 days later, on Nov. 2, it will be our 17th wedding anniversary.

Can a life really change so much in that short a time?

I'm here to tell you it can. When I married my first wife in 1975, I was 25 and she was 21. A month after my 30th birthday we had separated for good. I know I loved her -- it's tough to hear a lot of songs from the '70s without thinking of her -- but I know we got married for all the wrong reasons.

Nearly 13 years separated the end of the first marriage and the beginning of the second, and there were certainly other opportunities. For one reason or another, though, I was still single in the summer of 1992 when I met Nicole.

I used to occasionally wonder what it would have been like if I had met her younger and we had had a child of our own, but I rarely think of that anymore. I have the most wonderful daughter and the most amazing son; Pauline and Virgile are not just high achievers but geniunely nice people as well.

Now Virgile is getting married and I will have a lovely daughter-in-law. Someday, God willing, there will be a lot more grandchildren. They may not have my blood, but just like their parents, they will have my heart.

And as I sit and look at my wife through the headlights, I know one other thing.

I'm married to the most beautiful grandmother in the world.

A nice day, a nice new car

For the last couple of years, I have been driving a car with some weird defects.

Both of the back windows in my 1999 Pontiac Grand Am are broken -- they won't go up or down and have to be wedged shut with cardboard. My gas gauge doesn't work, so I have had to estimate when I need to fill the tank.

But I like the car. It's the first one I've had in 30 years that wasn't a compact or a subcompact, and as I get older, I've been feeling more and more overwhelmed by all the giant SUVs on the freeways.

Still, it has 134,000 miles on it, which is a lot for an American car, and I have been looking longingly at car ads ever since we put our house on the market a year and a half ago. As we got closer and closer to completing the sale, I started comparing small SUVs and thinking how well my golf clubs would fit in the back of one.

When we were visiting in Seattle earlier this month, the rental car that I drove a few times was a Hyundai Sonata. I was impressed with some of the features, and I started looking at Hyundai's small SUV, the Tucson.

After 17 months of struggle, we finally closed on the house last week. The amazing thing was that despite the economy, we wound up selling for only 2.5 percent less than we wanted in the beginning. Believe me, it really is true what they say about "location, location, location."

To make a long story short, we salted away most of the money we got so that we'll have it to buy our retirement home. We did save a nice little chunk to buy a car, which we did today.

I didn't participate at all. My wife Nicole and my son Virgile both love to haggle, while I'm probably the only guy in the world who sees the sticker price and thinks that's what you have to pay. They got me a nice 2009 Tucson -- the same color as the one in the picture -- for $2,000 less than the sticker price and also got the dealer to throw in a $2,000 navigation system for free.

The best part is that we wrote a check and paid for it all today.

No car loan. No mortgage. No credit card debt or anything else. For the first time in my adult life, I don't owe anyone any money for anything.

I could get used to that.

America has changed since 1961

I don't know that I've ever been particularly enlightened by Ronald Reagan, but this 1961 speech against Medicare is kind of interesting.

Not so much for its specific message. Conservatives fought as hard as they could to stop Medicare, and as recently as 1995 with Newt Gingrich, they were working to privatize it and gut it. That's no secret to anyone.

But what fascinates me so much about this speech is how much America has changed.

Before the 1930s, there was no government welfare in America. And even in 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt came along with the New Deal, he made a point that its programs were strictly temporary and designed to get people back on their feet.

Folks believed then that any sort of permanent welfare would simply destroy people's incentive to go out and work for themselves.

There was a feeling that we were different, that Americans were more self-sufficient and would be ashamed to have to be supported by their neighbors.

That's pretty much changed. Ask even conservatives if they would do without Medicare and they're likely to look strangely at you. Ask farmers if they would go without subsidies, or bankers without last year's bailout, or the millions of folks out of work without unemployment insurance.

Not a chance.

I worked without interruption for 29 years, only to find myself out of work in January 2008. I have been collecting unemployment ever since, and I have been paid at a higher rate than I earned until the fifth of my seven career stops.

When you consider taxes, I would have to make at least $14-15 an hour to make any more money, and even then I would be working 40 hours a week for a net gain of about $20.

Should I be ashamed? I've had numerous friends say no, that I paid into it for years and I ought to get it back. But my mother, who grew up in that different America, says that money should be for the truly needy and I should be working, even if it's for less money.

Have we changed?

You bet we have.

Living when you know you're dying

What would you do if you knew you had a year to live?

Would you walk away from all your responsibilities and spend 12 months doing everything on your "bucket list?" Would you do things that previously scared you too much, like bungee jumping or hang gliding, or would you double down on your efforts to make sure everything you needed to do was finished before you ran out of time?

You might think that last year would be all for you, but very few people actually see it that way.

Most folks live their lives the way they always have ... for as long as they can.

What would you do if you had a month to live?

Make sure your finances were in order? Take one last shot at trying to hook up with the love of your life? Go on one last vacation?

Would you spend a lot of time regretting the things you never did, or would you take pride in the things you managed to get done.

Although those 30 days would pass quickly, for a lot of us, routine would hold sway at least until the last couple of days.

What would you do if you had a week to live?

A week isn't all that long. Seven days, 168 hours ... you'd spend a good chunk of it just sleeping. But what about the time you're awake? A week might be devoted mostly to saying goodbye, both to the people and places that have made up your life.

Some fun, but probably not so much.

What would you do if you had a day to live?

A day isn't much, but I think you might try to stretch it by not sleeping. If you had 24 hours, my guess is you would try to squeeze as much living as possible into that time.

I doubt you'd want to spend much of the time traveling. There might be some place that you still want to see, but losing time getting there wouldn't be much fun. You might just want to spend that last day with someone you love.

In a wonderful 1998 Canadian film, Don McKellar's "Last Night," a group of people in Toronto know that the world is ending at midnight. Most of them look for people with whom to spend their final hours. That's very human.

What would you do if you had an hour to live?

I know I would want to spend that time with the folks I love most -- my wife, my children and my grandchild. If any part of me lives on after my death, it will be in the effect I have had on their lives and the lives of the other people close to me.

I wouldn't spend a lot of time giving them advice. In fact, I don't think I would do much talking. I would rather look at them and listen to them, memorizing their faces and voices to carry with me into eternity.

What would you do if you had a minute to live?

A minute can be the blink of an eye ... or an eternity. But if I knew I were about to die, I would spend the final 60 seconds praying. I would thank God for everything He has given me and I would ask His blessing and continued guidance for the people I love.

I think I could make that minute stretch long enough to get that done.

Have you noticed what's missing in all of this, whether a final year or a final minute?

Anger.

Hatred.

Revenge.

Some folks do spend time regretting things left undone or things poorly done, but not many people go to their death cursing old wrongs. I doubt that even Richard Nixon spent his final moments thinking of those folks on his "enemies list."

Life is a precious gift. There used to be a sculpture in the United Nations building -- I don't know if it still exists or not -- with a caption on it.

"It is a privilege to live this day and the next."

It really is.

Time for Democrats to get tough

There are apparently two kinds of people who are very vocal about not wanting any sort of health care reform.

One is real, the other isn't.

The real ones are mostly angry white people, many of whom would be opposed to anything proposed by the Obama administration.

Those folks are getting scary, many of them carrying guns to town hall meetings and bearing signs like the one in the picture that implies a message that Obama's blood should flow.

If you're not familiar with the reference, Thomas Jefferson once said that it was necessary from time to time to water the tree of liberty with "the blood of patriots and tyrants."

I'm sure this isn't true of all of them, but it's very apparent from some of the right-wing Websites, not to mention the words and signs of the protesters themselves, that there is more than a little racism involved here. Some of these people just cannot tolerate the idea that a black man is the face America shows the world.

Actually, they're not the worst. As vile and as ignorant as racism is, at least these folks are out there showing their true colors. The second type of protesters aren't even that; many of them have been recruited or hired by right-wing politicos or the insurance companies to derail reform. They're supposed to make it look like the grass roots are rising up against Obama, but it's actually a charade that Mother Jones magazine exposed 10 years ago.

It's called "astroturf" protests, aka fake grass roots.

These are the people carrying signs about death panels, or keeping government out of Medicare, or other ridiculous arguments.

It's time for supporters of reform to start turning those tactics against the people using them. Democrats need to get a lot more "in your face" with Republicans and stop treating lies as if they needed to be argued.

Why not just call a lie a lie?

Why not just call the people spouting them liars?

It's really the only tactic they fear.

Juvenile humor strikes again

Q: "What do the U.S.S. Enterprise and toilet paper have in common?" A: "They both look for Klingons around Uranus."
-- children's joke

Third graders all across America got a good laugh Wednesday.

After hearing Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., put down a protester at a town hall meeting by asking a woman who compared President Obama to a Nazi "what planet do you spend your time on, talk show bloviator Rush Limbaugh struck back quickly.

"Isn't it an established fact that Barney Frank spends his time hanging around Uranus?" Rush asked on his radio show.

Barney is gay, get it? I'd call it frat-boy humor, but Limbaugh isn't the fraternity type.

Ten million third graders and one retired MBA in Dallas are laughing their heads off.

Stay classy, Rush.

And remember, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

'Nazi' health care? Yeah, right

Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing.

It's often misunderstood; just because you have the right to say something doesn't mean there won't be consequences. I've heard people who have been fired for saying something argue that they were just exercising their freedom of speech. They misunderstood their right.

That's why I got such a kick out of Rep. Barney Frank's response to a woman's question at a Town Hall meeting in Dartmouth, Mass., when she asked why he supported a "Nazi program" like health-care reform.

Aside from the ridiculousness of the comparison, it has become increasingly weird to see the rise in paranoia at both ends of the political spectrum. Late last year, there were plenty of folks on the left who were at least somewhat concerned that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were going to declare some sort of martial law so that they didn't have to leave office.

Instead, we've learned from Cheney that he was disgusted that Bush "went soft" on him during his second term in office.

Now the right is wildly attacking "Obamacare," even though part of the problem is that there is no such thing. Part of the reason there's so much controversy right now is that President Obama didn't propose anything -- he told Congress to write its own bill as long as it followed certain general principles.

There is no "Obamacare," and even if there were, do we really think a liberal administration with numerous Jewish members would be writing a "Nazi" bill?

Nope, Barney Frank is right.

These people really do spend their time on some other planet.

The wilder the claim, the scarier it gets

I'm not sure why it is people can look at two sources of relative similarity and totally accept one while totally rejecting the other.

My friend Mitch is constantly sending me e-mails with things like "Isn't this scary?" in the subject line. When I open his e-mail to see what he's referencing, it's almost always some right-wing news source claiming that President Obama's health care plan will euthanize Grandma, sterilize the kid down the street and outlaw Christmas unless we agree that Santa Claus should be black.

Now Mitch, as you know, is a pretty intelligent guy. When leftist sources claimed that Dick Cheney ate boiled babies for dinner, watched snuff films for entertainment and led Dubya around on a leash when no one was looking, Mitch dismissed that as ridiculous.

Even when I showed him the evidence.

It's like the folks who listen to talk radio, left and right. Some take the words of Rush Limbaugh as gospel, while others wouldn't believe him if he said the sun was rising in the East.

Mitch's latest panty-twister was an editorial in the Washington Times citing some early writings by one of Obama's health-care advisors as proof that euthanasia and forced sterilization were goals of the left in the current battle over health-care reform.

Now I suppose it's always possible that some Democrats would love to see forced sterilzation of Republicans, and there are certainly plenty of conservatives wishing liberals weren't allowed to reproduce.

But if you look at motivations, it's easy to see that the Times -- owned by the Reverend Moon -- is opposed to health-care reform. And while it would be nice if both sides limited themselves to the truth in arguing their case, it just doesn't happen anymore.

Truth is nice, but to 21st century politicians, winning is much nicer.

Let's tell the truth about health care

Who would ever have believed that health insurance companies would have become a symbol of all that is good about America?

Sound crazy?

Listen to some of the people fighting against any health care reform and you'll believe that they're fighting to protect the right to have a family or to believe in God, not massive corporations who have turned health care into a cash cow.

In fact, they're fighting to hard to protect Big Insurance that they're telling out-and-out lies. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says she's worried that under a reformed system, she would have to go before a "death panel" to fight for the rights of her special-needs child simply to stay alive.

That's the new lie -- that reform would result in euthanasia, or even worse, eugenics.

As you can see from the cartoon, conservatives feel more comfortable surrendering constitutional rights than they do giving up any part of unfettered capitalism. By now we've all heard about the congressman who went back to his district for a town meeting on health care only to hear one of his constituents say, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare."

Then there's the woman who followed Obama around to town hall meetings until she got to ask the question "Name one thing the government does well."

Her question was straight out of Rush Limbaugh's mouth, and she seemed genuinely surprised by the answer. Obama named Medicare and Veterans Hospitals, but he could just as easily have named national parks, the interstate highway system, Social Security and a host of others.

Medicare works and it works well.

That's why conservatives have been trying to gut it or repeal it since it was passed in 1965.

The only way they can stop health care reform this year is to lie about it and scare the daylights out of people.

No, Sarah, there are no "death panels."

Just health care for folks who can't get it.

Any problem with that?

August escape is a wonderful time

We escaped Southern California at just the right time.

It has been a very hot summer, and spending the first two weeks in August a thousand miles to the north is just what the doctor -- Dr. Feelgood, that is -- ordered for me.

We have been up here eight days, and I haven't had a television set on once. I've only read two newspapers. I haven't even kept real close track of news on the Internet. I know Bill Clinton freed the journalists in Korea and Sarah Palin is lying about President Obama's health plan, but that's about it.

I've been hiking in the forests with the Amazing Baby. Oh, Pauline and Nicole have been with us, but most of the time I find I can't take my eyes off little Maddie.

She's much prettier than Sarah Palin.

A wonderful vacation in the green

This baby is just so incredible.

We're in Washington state for two weeks, visiting our lovely daughter Pauline and the Amazing Baby, little Madison Nicole.

Maddie is 10 1/2 months old now and is extremely close to both walking on her own and talking. She is becoming such an interesting person and is a delight to spend time with.

We're staying about 40 miles east of Seattle, near Snoqualmie Pass, and the one thing that is truly amazing is how green it is here. When you live in the Southwest, you get accustomed to duller shades of green and a lot of browns.

It's nice to relax, but nicer to be with Pauline and Maddie.

California's future isn't bright

"It used to be I'd go places and people would say, 'Where are you from?' I'd say 'California' and they'd be, 'Ah gee, aren't you lucky.' Now it's ridicule."
-- MERVIN FIELD

Mervin Field has been polling Californians since shortly after World War II. In fact, there may not be anyone alive who understands Californians better than the 88-year-old Field, who was interviewed in Saturday's Los Angeles Times.

He was here during the boom after the war, when the state's population swelled to 10.6 million in the 1950 census. He was here during the can-do governorship of Pat Brown, when most of the state's infrastructure was built.

And he's been here since, through Ronald Reagan, through Proposition 13 and all the boom-and-bust times until the current time. As of last year, there were 38.3 million people in California, and only 43 percent of them were non-Hispanic whites.

As usual, California leads the way in looking like the rest of America will look in 20 or 30 years.

And what it looks like is ... ungovernable.

Whether you want to blame it on too much spending, on too little taxation because of Prop 13 or on too many illegal immigrants, the fact is we don't have the money to pay for the government we want.

So we'll hit 40 million people soon and eventually 50 million. The hillsides will be covered with houses, and people will be living farther and farther out into the desert and eventually everything will fall apart.

Too many people, not enough water.

Too many students, not enough teachers.

Too many criminals, not enough police.

Yes, we will lead the way either into anarchy or into some sort of fascist state. Those who have the money will either leave or barricade themselves into walled enclaves, and everyone else will fight over limited resources and eventually try and storm those enclaves.

Anyone who thinks the future on the present course is bright is fooling himself. By the 1950s and into the 1960s, America had built maybe the most egalitarian free society in history. The middle class was thriving and so were the wealthy.

But the super-rich never stand still very long. Enough is never enough for them. If they've got $1 million, they want $10 million. If they've got $1 billion, they want $2 billion. They're the only ones who never seem to understand that we really are all in this together.

So bad things will ultimately happen, both here and in the rest of the country. Not because we couldn't have stopped them, but because too many people had too short-sighted a view and the folks cashing in truly did think it would last forever.

But damn, this used to be such a beautiful state.

Books, libraries still matter a lot

Some of the fondest memories of my childhood came in a library.

I always thought it was an old Carnegie Library, one of the 2,509 built in the U.S. with grants from the richest man in the world. It turns out Crestline, Ohio, wasn't on the list, but the library there -- whoever built it -- was one of the most wonderful places in the world to me.

Whenever I was visiting my grandparents in the summer, I would walk to the library, check out five or six books on my mother's old card and take them home to read them. It usually took me two or three days and then I was back for more.

I loved reading so much, probably more than anything in the world, and I enjoy it as much at 59 as I did at 9. Think about that for a minute. How many things other than eating and sleeping have you enjoyed for your entire life?

I was goofy. I thought all kids loved to read. How else were we supposed to develop our imaginations? How else could we visit any place in the world at any time in history? How else could we imagine ourselves exploring outer space?

Turns out I was wrong. Plenty of kids didn't enjoy it at all, and like me, they grew up and became adults. We live in a country where roughly two of every three adults don't read for pleasure, a country were 40 percent or more are functionally illiterate.

Now I see where Ohio is having big problems. The governor is cutting the budget for state libraries by 30 percent. Shorter hours, fewer days open, fewer people working there.

It's all pretty stupid and short-sighted. We've gone through it here in Los Angeles County and we may go through it again. Since so few people read anymore, libraries are a luxury. Besides, folks who enjoy reading can usually buy their own books.

But what about the kids who haven't discovered the joy of reading yet? If they're to find it, it's probably going to be in a library -- if it's open.

I would imagine if you asked Ohio voters -- or voters in a lot of states -- where the budget cuts should come, they probably wouldn't choose libraries. They might cut raises for prison guards, or ask state employees to pay more on their own health care.

At this rate, the odds are pretty good that we will eventually become a country where very few people read at all, and the majority get their entertainment only from flickering screens, or portable music players plugged into their ears.

There actually was a time before when almost no one read.

They called it the Dark Ages.

Jan Berry and the beauty of summer

"Two girls for every boy ..."

Are there still summer songs?

I don't know, but if there aren't songs that sing of the sweetness of summer, of sunny days, balmy nights and the girls on the beach, it would be a real shame. Because there's nothing like a summer song to help you rejoice in the time that stretches through June, July and August until the evenings get chilly and school beckons.


I think the first summer song I remember was "Surfin' Safari," which I heard in the summer of 1962 on "high-flying WING" radio in Dayton, Ohio. I believe it was 1410 on the AM dial, but it has been nearly 50 years and I'm not sure. I had a cheap little table radio that I had won selling band candy, and I listened to it day and night that summer.

A few hundred yards north of our house, they were building Interstate 70, which eventually would run from Baltimore all the way to the Great Salt Lake. I'd never been to either of those places, but I knew I would someday.

I was 12 in 1962, and I loved those summer songs. The one that was maybe the greatest of all came out the next summer, after we had moved to Virginia. I don't think I had heard much by Jan and Dean at that point, but as soon as I heard the first line of "Surf City," I was hooked.

"Two girls for every boy ..."



I was a huge Beach Boys fan at that point, and "Surf City" was supposedly a song Brian Wilson had given Jan and Dean to record. I remember the record label gave him the writing credit, although at that point I didn't know the politics of such things. I just loved the music.

I had never been near the Pacific Ocean when I was old enough to remember -- I was born in California -- but listening to Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys started a lifelong desire to return that finally came true in 1990.

It wasn't the greatest song musically, even though the melody would be recycled for "Drag City" later that same year, but nothing could match it for exuberance and joy.

Of course, exuberance and joy are pretty ephemeral. They rarely last long, and when I heard in 1966 that Jan Berry had been critically injured in an automobile accident, I thought of "Dead Man's Curve" for a few minutes and then moved on.

I figured that was it, but years later I heard that Berry had made a partial recovery and that Jan and Dean were touring again. I never got the chance to see them, but I just finished reading Bob Greene's wonderful book, "When We Get to Surf City," and it was so poignant it brought tears to my eyes.


You see, Jan never made it all the way back. If you watch the video, you can see him as he looked both after and before the accident. He talked a little slower and he battled all sorts of physical problems from the head injuries he suffered in the accident.

He had to relearn the lyrics of his songs every morning and there were times when he fell in his room and couldn't get up until someone came to help him.

But he toured and he sang. He kept doing what he loved the most and at one point he put together an album of songs all by himself.

Berry died in March 2004, and Greene, who had been touring with Jan and Dean since 1992, wrote of how much he had loved summer. In fact, for 38 years he had lived from summer to summer, battling to keep going. You could probably sum it up with one line from another song, "Ride the Wild Surf."

"Gotta take that one last ride ..."

If you're lucky, you get 75 or 80 summers in your lifetime. Some will be disappointing, others pretty good. If you're lucky, you get a few that are memorable.

Bob Greene has been called "America's poet laureate of summer," which seems to me like a pretty good thing to me, so I'll close this piece with something he wrote.

"If all of life were summer, then our world would have no texture, no context. Summer would not taste the way it does if we thought it would last forever."

"Two girls for every boy."

Medicare is a government success

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Rep. Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.”
-- PAUL KRUGMAN, New York Times

This story sounds almost too ridiculous to believe.

The idea that someone covered by Medicare wouldn't know that it was a government program and that he didn't want those bureaucrats in Washington to get involved in it, well, it shows us one thing.

What's that?

It shows us that largely because of all the demagoguery that's being used on this issue, government isn't getting credit for a job it does much better than any of the private insurance companies.

Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, points out that the only reason as many people are insured as there are now is because of government subsidies -- tax breaks for employers offering coverage. Part of the deal is that to get the tax breaks, everyone has to be offered coverage, not just the ones who are young and healthy.

That's the problem with not having a public option in the current reform effort. If private companies are all there is, then people who are old, unhealthy or have pre-existing conditions won't be able to get coverage.

That's the biggest obstacle to reform. If we can't cover everybody, we come up short.

More great news from great kids

We received a phone call yesterday with some wonderful news.

Our son Virgile, who has been traveling in Europe, told us that his security clearance had been completed and he would officially be starting his job with the Foreign Service in the middle of September.

He's also getting married this fall, and Sterling Miller (shown in the picture with Virgile) will be a wonderful wife for him and daughter-in-law for us.

As difficult as it is to become a foreign service officer, it makes me doubly proud that both of my children have qualified. Pauline had already been employed by the State Department for more than five years and has completed tours in Africa and in China.

Pauline is amazing in some of the same ways her mother is amazing. She's got incredible drive and the determination to do things correctly, and she has developed wonderful people skills. I know from her evaluations that she shows us that she is very highly esteemed by her employers, and it manifested itself in the fact that she has already received tenure in her job.


For all her good qualities, it has been the last year that she has really blossomed as a person. Having a baby and becoming a mother seems to have made my daughter's life complete.

Little Maddie has added so much to all our lives, and the joy I feel from being twice a parent and once a grandparent is more than I could possibly have imagined.

For all my pride in them, and all my pleasure in the times I have been called a good father, I know I am very lucky. I have friends who have done their very best and haven't had the same results. I am well aware that you can't really be called a good parent unless you have good children.

I don't have good children -- I have wonderful children.

Neither one of them has ever done anything really bad, and any parenting I had to do was usually just nudging them in the right direction once in a while.

I am a very lucky man.

Little kids make pool a splashy place

When I was in my teens, my family went to a swimming pool a few blocks from where we lived.

It was a community pool, and we paid a fee each year to belong. I remember many hot afternoons hanging out at the pool, swimming and playing games in the water and getting out for five minutes every hour when the lifeguard called out "Rest period!"

If I remember correctly, I think once kids turned 16, they didn't have to vacate the pool for those five minutes. It was always more pleasant during those few minutes that the little kids weren't in the pool.

I don't live in Virginia any more, and our neighborhood pool is much smaller than the one I used to visit. But it's still wonderful to get into the water in the late afternoon of a hot day and cool off some.

The only problem is that in the smaller pool, even a small number of children can make for an awful lot of splashing. The children tend to be a lot younger -- at least half of them appear to be 5 or 6 years old -- and they get a lot of joy out of making the water fly.

They don't seem to play organized games. In all the times I have gone to our pool, I haven't heard the words "Marco" or "Polo" even once. I suppose I could try to teach them, and as wary as kids are these days, I wouldn't be surprised to hear one of them yelling "Stranger danger!" the first time I said anything.

Actually, I did have a brief conversation with one little boy this afternoon. I was standing in water up to my shoulders at the edge of the pool, trying to keep my copy of John D. MacDonald's "The Dreadful Lemon Sky" from getting wet.

He walked up to me along the side of the pool and asked me a question?

"Can I jump in right here?" he asked, gesturing to a spot about a foot from me.

I didn't pause for a second. "No."

He looked disappointed, so I explained to him that I didn't want to be splashed, but if he went to the other side of the pool, the water was the same depth.

That's what he did, but I still felt bad.

You kids get off my lawn.

Some folks just don't want the truth

When I read Bob Greene's wonderful "Late Edition," which I wrote about yesterday, I was reminded of how newspapers have often been called the first draft of history.

Events are recorded for posterity, and while they may be revised, corrected or expanded at some point, it was reading them in the newspaper that told us they had happened.

That's why two newspapers from 1961, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser, pretty much blow away any possible legitimacy to any claims the "birthers" have about President Obama.

For all the claims that Obama's birth certificate isn't real, or that there have been forgeries (despite the Republican governor of Hawaii saying she has seen it and it is a legal birth certificate), the one thing the birthers can never explain is that within a day or two of Obama's birth, both Honolulu newspapers reported it in their vital statistics sections.

So ...

To believe that there is still some conspiracy, we now have to believe that the newspapers were in on this and that the conspiracy goes all the way back to the time of Obama's birth in 1961. I mentioned this to one "birther" I know, and he came up with a perfect knee-jerk response.

"The newspapers could have been photoshopped to include a fake announcement."

Maybe, but who could ever be sure there weren't other copies somewhere in files or on microfilm that would contradict them?

That's why I believe, as I have from the start, that what this is all about is people who lost the last election trying to find anything they can use to derail Obama's administration. I'm sure that once this fails, there will be people coming out of the woodwork claiming to have been his gay lover, or claiming to have been raped by him, or claiming to have been a member (along with Obama) in a subversive group.

The most disturbing part of it all is that a part of our electorate seems to have taken a very primitive attitude toward the facts in all this. What they're saying, in essence, is that they won't believe anything they haven't seen with their own eyes.

And sometimes, not even that.

Still something special about newspapers

I was 11 years old the first time I had the feeling.

I don't remember much about the newspaper, other than to tell you it was a local weekly in Huber Heights, Ohio. I opened up the sports page, looked at the bottom of the broadsheet and saw my name and picture with a column about junior high school sports that I had written.

I had a 1961 crew cut and the shirt I was wearing had red and white stripes. I looked like someone out of a barbershop quartet.

But I was a newspaper man. Or maybe more accurately, a newspaper reporter.

I wish I could say it was the beginning of a lifelong romance with journalism, but after that one season in Ohio, it was 17 years before I wrote for a newspaper again. That was when the real romance began.

From the fall of 1978, when I returned to college and went to work on the school paper to January 2008, when I was one of the first victims of last year's massive job cuts in the newspaper industry, I was a journalist.

I worked for wonderful people and I worked for people I'm pretty sure will roast in hell. I worked for terrific journalists and I worked for others who had been promoted well past the level of their incompetence. I even worked for people who seemed eager to hasten the demise of America's newspapers.

If I live to be 90 years old, and people ask me what I did, I will say proudly that I was a journalist. I didn't work in the media; I worked in the newspaper business, and if 30 years from now I have to explain to people what newspapers were, I will do so proudly.

I covered almost everything -- sports, business, politics, entertainment. I even got to write a column three times a week for the best five years of my professional life. I wasn't Bob Greene or Mike Royko, but I had a following.

I'm currently reading Greene's latest book, "Late Edition: A Love Story," about the four summers he spent at the old Columbus Citizen-Journal at the beginning of his own career, and the best compliment I could ever pay him is to say that he gets it. He understands exactly what it is -- what it was -- that made so many of us fall in love with deadline journalism.

He understands what we're losing, too.

Says Greene:

"We were not in the 'information business.'

"That is the phrase that newspaper executives often use today, to explain what they do. It is intended to be heard as a descriptive, even boastful phrase, but it can sound vaguely desperate. With the newspaper business in trouble, some publishers seem ever eager to proclaim to the public that they're not in the newspaper business at all. They're in the information business. Web sites, cable television channels, drive-time radio partnerships, e-mail editions, Internet entertainment offshoots ... a newspaper, the implication seems to say, is only a part of it. It's as if the publishers want the readers to translate that as" only a small part of it."

The last boss I had in the newspaper business, the one who ended my employment, gave us a long speech on more than one occasion to tell us we were not in the newspaper business, we were in the information business.

The sad part of it is that he was a frightened little man who covered his fear with bluster and meanness. He was far too eager to write off newspapers, and he even said several times that he didn't care about the print edition at all.

Sorry, Steve, but when I read the New York Times or USA Today on my BlackBerry, it just isn't the same as holding a newspaper and seeing words in print. Probably the greatest non-sexual thrill I ever had in my life was when I walked the campus on Mondays during the year and a half I was editor in chief of my college paper and saw hundreds of people reading my paper and discussing it.

I never reached the heights of a Bob Greene, but I got to be Bob Greene on the local level for five years and there is nothing like writing stories about people and knowing they meant something. Knowing that someone was paying me to use my judgment to choose subjects, research them and write them.

Being a journalist was wonderful, and seeing my picture with my column three times a week was as good a feeling as I ever had professionally.

It was almost as good as when I was 11.