A long-awaited trip 'across the pond'

I'm not sure how much we will be carrying on this conversation of ours over the next two weeks or so.

This Saturday, Nicole and I will be flying to London for a scientific conference (hers, not mine). We'll spend six days in the United Kingdom and then a week in France, first in Nice and then in Toulouse.

I usually write these posts from my desktop computer, which of course is not portable. I have a laptop, which I will be taking with me, but I don't know what my Internet access will be like. I have unlimited access through Verizon, but I'm pretty certain that's only good in North America.

It's quite possible I'll have access at our hotel, and if I do, I'll try to post at least two or three times a week while we're in Europe.

This will be my fifth trip to Europe, although the first one lasted almost two years and cost me a marriage. I actually lived in Vienna from the summer of 1976 till the spring of 1978, and we did some traveling around while we were there.

Nicole and I went for the first time in 1994, although that trip was only to Paris and Toulouse. It was on that trip that I first met my in-laws, and I was actually given a bottle of French wine by a neighbor caught up in the 50th anniversary of the Normandy landings. He thanked me for saving his country, and I accepted on behalf of FDR, Ike and all our troops.

We spent a couple of weeks in Oxford, Paris and Toulouse in the summer of 2001. One of the things I remember most about that trip was French relatives and their friends sincerely trying to understand what it was Americans saw in George W. Bush.

My last previous trip across the pond was in May 2003, when we spent 10 wonderful days in Venice. Nicole generally goes to Europe for one conference or another at least once a year, but 2003 was the last time I went along until this year.

I'm looking forward to it, and I'll try and come up with some interesting things to share with all of you.

Of all the places in the world ...

If I could choose one place in the world to live, I'm not sure where it would be.

There are so many places I have been fortunate enough to visit that have seemed so wonderful to me. Moorea, the big island of Hawaii, London, the South of France and Colorado are all places that live on in my heart. Even Vienna, where I was both happy and sad during two years there, was named in a survey by a British newspaper as the best city in the world in which to live.

In fact, just about the only place I've visited outside this country where I can't imagine myself living is Beijing, and that's for political reasons as much as any thing else.

The picture is of Cook's Bay in Moorea, which has been called the most beautiful place in the world by quite a few people. I had the opportunity to see it for a week in 1999 when Nicole and I visited Club Med.

It is definitely breathtaking, but Moorea -- the next island over from Tahiti in French Polynesia -- is somewhat off the beaten track.

That isn't altogether bad. I have lived right in the middle of the beaten track for the last 19 years, making my home in one of the world's great cities, and I think I have been about as entertained by great cities as I care to be.

Actually, where I choose to spend the remainder of my days depends on one thing -- whether Nicole and I are still together. I'm not talking about divorce. We will be together as long as we are both alive. But my life will be very different if I should ever have to be alone.

If we are together, we will probably retire to Northern Colorado, an hour or so north of Denver. Close enough to a great city to enjoy the benefits, but far enough away to escape the pollution and the traffic.

If it's just me, I may move far from the madding crowd. I don't think I'd ever want to live without electricity or running water, but I think I could be very happy passing a few days at a time without the milk of human kindness.

Of course, I'm rooting for Option A.

Sorry, Sarah, the jokes were funny

If somebody were to ask me about my beliefs, I would tell them three things:

I believe in the law of reciprocity, otherwise known as the Golden Rule. Life works best when we treat others the way we would like to be treated.

I believe that nothing matters more than family and friends.

And I believe in the power of laughter to entertain us, to help us through the day and even to heal our wounds. Sir Donald Wolfit reportedly said it first, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." There are few things more blessed than the power to make people laugh, which is one reason I'm on David Letterman's side in his recent dust-up with Sarah Palin.

It wasn't a tough choice. I don't believe in political correctness of any kind when it comes to humor, and I'll give you an example in a joke by comedian Robert Schimmel about 15 years ago.

"I heard on the news that Ronald Reagan has Alzheimer's Disease. I wonder how that makes him feel. I wonder if he hears it and says, 'Uh oh.' Or maybe he just hears it and says, 'Hey, honey. Ronald Reagan has Alzheimer's Disease.'"

That to me is funny.

So when I heard Letterman's top 10 and his other jokes about Gov. Palin earlier this week, I laughed at all of them. I thought they were funny.

Palin obviously didn't, but I wonder how much of it was real outrage and how much just desperation to stay in the news. She chose to misinterpret more than one of them. When Letterman said she went shopping for makeup to "update her slutty flight attendant look," Palin called it an attack on all the hardworking flight attendants."

No, just the slutty ones. You can't build your image on things like "Coldest state, hottest governor" and "GILF -- governor I'd like to ..." and then object when someone picks up on it.

As for her choosing to say Letterman had made a disgusting joke about her 14-year-old daughter Willow (who, oddly, is 15 1/2) being "raped by Alex Rodriguez," most people who heard it understood it was about 18-year-old Bristol, who got pregnant at 17 and was used by Palin to preach abstinence.

Actually, when you consider that it was a New York audience in the theater, the joke was as much a shot at A-Rod for all the catting around he has been doing.

Watch the YouTube clip at the beginning of this post and you'll see plenty of comedians -- Jay Leno, Bill Maher, Conan O'Brien and yes, Letterman -- making Palin jokes, including jokes about Bristol.

"Sarah Palin dropped the first puck at the Philadelphia Flyers hockey game. Then she spent the rest of the game trying to keep the players out of her daughter's penalty box."

That was O'Brien. When Palin was in the news all she wanted to be, she never complained about the jokes. Now she goes around dressing like, yes, a slutty flight attendant and tries to make a fuss.

No way, governor.

Humor is humor, and while young children certainly ought to be off limits, Republicans don't always think so.



Not only did John McCain make that joke about 18-year-old Chelsea Clinton, Rush Limbaugh called Chelsea "the White House dog" when she was only 13.

And it isn't as if Palin didn't drag her entire family into the spotlight to burnish her own meager credentials last year.

There's only one sin when it comes to humor.

Not being funny.

America is pretty much the same all over

"This used to be a hell of a good country."
-- Jack Nicholson in "Easy Rider," 1969

I was reading an entry on Huffington Post about restaurant chains that are in danger of going out of business, and one of the ones they mentioned was "Krispy Kreme."

The southern donut chain expanded too far and too fast and is carrying a large amount of debt. Servicing that debt cuts way into the company's income.

For some reason, that made me think of Coors beer. Anyone who came of age in the East in the '60s and '70s probably remembers that Coors was only sold west of the Mississippi River. Folks who traveled out West would invariably bring back a six-pack of Coors -- "Colorado Kool-Aid" -- and we would marvel over its good taste.

I hesitate to say those were the days, but there was something very interesting about this country in the days before everything from coast to coast and border to border became homogenized.

If you grew up in California, you raved about In 'n' Out burgers, while folks in New England loved Friendly's ice cream. I remember the first time I came out West in 1978, I was surprised to see that you couldn't get Stroh's beer.

One thing changed all that -- shopping malls. About 25 years ago, I started using a term that I had never heard before. Ten years ago -- or so -- George Will started using it.

"The mallification of America."

I believe that if you were to be blindfolded and dropped into most shopping malls in this country, and you weren't allowed to ask anyone where you were, you wouldn't be able to figure it out from the stores, from the way people dress or even the way people talk any more.

Regional accents certainly aren't what they once were. Most people are influenced by what they hear on television, and everyone from network anchors to characters on situation comedies seems to talk with that flat Midwestern twang now.

Local bookstores have become endangered by Barnes & Noble and Borders, and local sporting goods stores are being eliminated by the big chains as well. As for the old downtown areas, I'd be willing to be that if your town has a Wal-Mart, there's no thriving downtown shopping district.

I suppose this is a really minor thing to rant about, and it isn't as if I find myself brooding on the subject. But it was wonderful to be a kid growing up in Dayton, Ohio, and to travel to New York and see all sorts of stores I couldn't see at home.

Or to move from Ohio to Northern Virginia when I was 13 and find a lot of different chain restaurants than I knew back in the Midwest.

For about a decade, from 1981 to 1990, I moved a lot for my career. I lived in seven different states, and I saw a lot of different things. When I left Virginia and moved to Gastonia, N.C., I discovered the wonderful barbecue joints and the terrific fish camp restaurants, both there and in my next move to Anderson, S.C.

When I went to St. Louis in 1984, I found the wonderful Italian cuisine in the part of the city known as The Hill. A move to Greeley, Colo., in 1986 taught me about Rocky Mountain oysters, among other things, and Reno in 1988 showed me all the wide and varied casino buffets as well as authentic Mexican food.

L.A. in 1990 had pretty much everything, but there was one thing I found every time I moved. There was always a McDonald's, always a Burger King, always a TGIFridays or a Sizzler. Go to the mall wherever you are and 90 percent of the stores would be national chains.

I understand it, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Successful businesses try to expand their territory as much as possibly, and if they drive out small local businesses in the process, well, c'est la vie.

It certainly makes it easier for people who are traveling. If you're old enough, you might remember the old adage, "never eat at a place called Mom's, unless your only other choice is a place called Eat."

You never know what you're going to get.

But if you go into a Burger King, that Whopper with cheese is going to taste the same in Oregon as it does in Mississippi or New Jersey.

Well, maybe not New Jersey.

I just think it's a shame that taking the uncertainty out of life also takes away some of the adventure.

It's difficult, but I still believe

"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. ... I think peace and tranquility will return again."
-- Closing paragraph, "The Diary of A Young Girl," Anne Frank

So where do we go from here?

I remain basically an optimist about the good hearts of most people, and I was definitely taken aback -- and seriously flattered -- by Amy's comment about being the "last best hope for a permanent MIDDLE viewpoint."

And anyone who doesn't believe in the basic goodness of people -- especially in view of the fact that a young girl hiding from the Nazis can feel that way -- is either seriously afraid or a serious misanthrope.

I even believe that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush had basically good hearts, although I'm not at all sure about Dick Cheney. (That's a joke, Ernie)

But what do you say to someone visiting a museum if they're shot or killed by some lunatic who believes the Jews are out to get him? Too bad? Tough luck? You should have ducked?

What do you do when you encounter hate like that?

In the fall of 1989, I was covering a 49ers football game for my employer, the Reno Gazette-Journal. After I filed my story, I walked to the Candlestick Park parking lot to find that someone had smashed the passenger window in my car. Since I faced a 220-mile drive across the Sierras to get back to Reno -- in December, at night -- I was also faced with basically freezing.

When I got into the mountains, I couldn't take the cold any longer. I pulled off I-80 and went into a convenience store to buy a pair of cheap gloves and a ski cap. A perfectly nice-looking man, manning the cash register, made conversation with me and asked me why I was buying those particular items.

"Somebody smashed my window and broke into my car at the 49ers game," I said. "I'm freezing."

"Probably your ni**ers," he said. "Your ni**ers will do stuff like that."

(If you can't figure it out, the * replaces the letter g)

I knew I wasn't going to convert this individual to tolerance, and I was getting tired, so I just thanked him, got my change and went back to my car.

If I had been younger, if I hadn't been a tired 40-year-old who had seen too much, I probably would have criticized his racist remarks. But except for the racism -- and I know that's an "except for that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln" remark -- he didn't seem like a bad guy.

He didn't say what he said in an angry voice. He was more old and ignorant than anything else, and I'm not convinced we should hate people for being old or ignorant.

I hate what James von Brunn did yesterday, and I hate the intolerance on both the far left and the far right.

But when it comes down to it, I have to agree with Anne Frank.

In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.

Obama haters on right getting scarier

Some of you have been critical of me when in previous posts I have written about the extreme right. You've told me it's only a fringe and it doesn't say much about the way our society really functions.

After Wednesday's murder at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., I'm not so sure.

An 88-year-old white supremacist walked into the entryway of the museum and opened fire. He reportedly killed a guard and wounded one other person before one of the other guards shot him and stopped him.

James Von Brunn, and didn't you know he would be of German descent, is also a Holocaust denier who once tried to kidnap the Federal Reserve Board. He also wrote an anti-Semitic book and said that Jews were "trying to destroy the Aryan gene pool."

Don't kid yourself that this guy is some lone lunatic. There are thousands of people like him in this country and they are all heavily armed. These are people whose hatred of people different from themselves has been festering for years and now they are forced to accept the indignity of a black man as president of the United States.

Surf the Internet a little. Enter words like "Aryan," "racist," "hate" and "white supremacy" and you will find folks who could easily live right down the street from you, spewing the most vile lies about Jews, people of color, people of ethnicity and of course, the president himself.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has a Website that exposes some of the worst of them. They have names like Stormfront, the National Alliance, the 11th Hour Remnant Messenger and that old favorite, the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

It's weird how people are perverting Christianity these days. I'm sure somewhere in Heaven, Jesus is weeping at Pastor Wiley Drake, a Buena Park, Calif., minister who admits he is praying for President Obama to die.



We're growing a strange crop of Christians these days, and a stranger crop of Americans.

I know the hosts on mainstream right-wing talk radio aren't saying things like that, but I'm sorry, when the Rush Limbaughs, Sean Hannitys and Glenn Becks call Obama a Marxist and say he wants to take away our freedom, they have to know it's a call to arms for the lunatic right.

Even on Fox New Channel, no friend of the president, anchor Shepard Smith said he is getting hundreds if not thousands of horrific e-mails every day attacking Obama for non-policy reasons.

I'm worried. There are too many crazy people and too many guns in this country. If we get through Obama's tenure in the White House without an attempt on his life by the rabid right, I will be surprised.

I blame the Internet for a lot of it. For all the wonderful freedom the Net provides, it still serves as an anonymous meeting place for criminals, pedophiles and the scum of the Earth.

You think I'm kidding?

Check out these Websites and then tell me I'm overreacting.

I am reminded of W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming."

"What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem, waiting to be born?"

'Woodstock' a sad reminder of a time

I have spent a good part of the day today watching an extremely sad movie.

It wasn't intended that way when it was first released 39 years ago, but the four-hour director's cut of "Woodstock" almost made me feel like crying.

Not just for a time gone by, not just for the fact that so many of the wonderful artists who performed there are no longer with us, but for the loss of all that optimism.

If most of the kids who went to Woodstock were between about 18 and 30, that means nearly all of them are in their 60s now.

I wasn't there, but I was 19 that summer and I know how they felt. I felt the same way. We were living in an era of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and we honestly thought we would change everything.

No more sexism, no more racism, no more greedy corporations dominating our economy.

Oh, a few things changed. Last year we essentially decided between a woman and an African-American man to be our president. If sexism and racism haven't quite gone away yet, they are clearly on the wane.

But who would have figured we would have two presidents -- 16 years -- who were even worse than Nixon? And who would have figured the government would be controlled by people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for eight years?

None of us would have believed that the '60s would be the high-water mark of egalitarianism, and that the middle class would be as threatened as it is 40 years later. How could we have comprehended the "Greed is good" culture of the '80s and the second Gilded Age that follows?

Listen to the interviews in the movie.

Listen to the music.

So much optimism.

So much hope.

Part of the problem is that the counterculture, as it was called then, was never really a unified movement. Blacks cared more about racism, women about sexism and white men about the war in Vietnam.

We couldn't keep it together, so it all fell apart.

But watch the movie if you get a chance. For one brief shining moment -- three days at least -- it was all there to be won. It was a glorious time, and maybe someday it will come again.

I still believe.

Remembering what is really "wonderful"

When my lovely wife leaves for work each morning, I always say the same thing to her:

"Have a wonderful day."

In the context in which I say this, "wonderful" is a synonym for "terrific" or "great." I think that's probably the way most of us use the word "wonderful" these days.

Of course, that's not what it means.

Merriam-Webster's online dictionary says the following about "wonderful:"

won·der·ful

Pronunciation:

\ˈwən-dər-fəl\

Function:

adjective

Date:

before 12th century

1 : exciting wonder : marvelous, astonishing wonderful to behold>
2 : unusually good : admirable wonderful job>

It's pretty clear that most of us all but ignore the first meaning and have adopted the second one, but the origins of the word "wonderful" come from "full of wonder."

Is there anything that fills us with wonder anymore? There ought to be.

-- I own computers, and so do most of you, that are more powerful than early models that filled entire rooms. Using them, I can communicate almost instantaneously with almost anywhere in the world. I own a pocket device -- a BlackBerry -- that is more powerful than the computers that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon.

-- Vehicles weighing hundreds of tons fly overhead, high in the sky, delivering people from one part of the world to another faster than we could ever have imagined a hundred years ago. I can have breakfast in London and be back at my home in Southern California in time for dinner.

-- We can control the climate in our own homes to the degree. Two hundred years ago, it was either sit by the fire and roast or sit away from the fire and shiver.

-- With the right kind of cellular phone, we can talk to people hundreds of miles away from any electrical source, whether they're on a ship in the middle of the ocean or climbing some tall mountain somewhere.

Of course there are plenty more, but those are only technological advancements. Think of the wonder of a painting by a Rembrandt or a Van Gogh, of a symphony by a Beethoven or a Bach, or a sculpture such as Michelangelo's "David," and wonder at the incredible talent that went into them.

Or wonder at the dark side, at man's ability to kill millions of people at once with a nuclear weapon where at one time killing was truly one at a time -- with rocks and clubs.

Think of the most wondrous things of all -- the development of helpless babies into strong, intelligent adults.

Think of man's humanity to man, of men and women who sacrificed their lives so that others might live.

We live in a truly wonderful world -- in the real meaning of the word.

I hope you all have a wonderful day.

Every day.

Songs evocative of a strange time

I've been watching Season One of "The Paper Chase," barreling through one episode after another and enjoying the heck out of good intelligent television that just isn't around anymore.

That first season aired in 1978-79, and there was one thing common to every episode -- the song that played over the credits by Seals and Crofts. To me, at least, theirs was a unique sound that more than any others, says "1970s" to me.

From "Summer Breeze" and "Hummingbird" in 1972 to "You're the Love" in 1978, with three or four other hits in between, the harmonies of Jim Seals and Dash Crofts were all over the radio for the better part of the decade.



"Summer Breeze" in particular was a wonderful song; I was 22 that summer and it wasn't one of the summers I remember all that fondly. I was still getting over the lovely Joyce Sonnemann and it wasn't until that fall I would meet the woman who would become my first wife.

Ah, the '70s.

I wonder where my old albums are.

A memory of intelligent television

The release of the first season of "The Paper Chase" this spring was really a nice surprise.

The series, based on the 1973 movie of the same name, wasn't a hit. It played for one season on CBS and an additional 35 episodes over three years on Public Broadcasting and never got great ratings. But it was an incredible example of just how good television could be.

Imagine a series based on law school, one that had its funny moments but wasn't goofy or wacky. In fact, the plot line in many of the episodes involved legal principles. Nearly every episode was set at least in part in a classroom, with professor and students using the Socratic Method.

Of course this was 1978, and for all the talk of the goofiness of the '70s, television in general was of much higher quality.

Check it out, and then hope for those next three seasons that PBS owns to be released soon.

Housing decline good for some folks

When you look at the prices of homes in California, it's important to remember that old Paul Simon line.

"One man's ceiling is another man's floor."

A few years ago, at the peak of the housing bubble, the median price of a home in the Golden State reached $580,000. Affordability was at an all-time low and wealth -- at least on paper -- was flowing to people who owned homes.

Many of them took advantage and refinanced their mortgages to pay for remodeling, new cars, vacations and other luxuries. They figured if the bills came due, they could always refinance again or sell their homes at a profit.

Then the bubble burst.

The economy fell apart, unemployment went up and the state budget incurred massive deficits. And in the process, all that wealth disappeared. In April 2009, the median price of a home in California was $256,700. That's a drop of more than 55 percent from the peak, and there's no guarantee that the bottom has been reached.

Bad news, huh?

Not for the people who couldn't afford houses before and have seen them drop into their price range. They may still have trouble getting loans with the current tight credit market, but when it starts to loosen, there will be many new homeowners.

And that's certainly not a bad thing.

Media only makes Tiller story worse

I don't know if I have ever agreed with Brent Bozell.

Until now.

Bozell is about as far to the right as they come. He ghosted Barry Goldwater's "Conscience of a Conservative," and his Media Research Center is a right-wing "media watchdog" that continually whines about the so-called "liberal media."

I read his weekly column, just as I read Ann Coulter's column and some of Rush Limbaugh's transcripts. I think it's important to be aware of what the other side is saying.

But in his column this week, Bozell made a lot of sense. He wrote about the media reaction to the shooting of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas, and he started with this:

"In the very heart of the pro-life community, there is nothing they wanted less than another shooting of an abortionist."

He's right, of course. Recent polls show somewhat of a change in the country, with 51 percent now saying they think abortion is wrong. Of course, this is one of those issues where you can ask the same question different ways and get very different responses. Try asking whether a woman and her doctor should make the decision or if the government should force women to have babies and you won't get 51 percent.

Still, there are tens of millions of people in this country who believe abortion is wrong.

I'm one of them, as I have explained before.

But not only would very few people kill an abortionist, most of them wouldn't even think it was a good thing that he was murdered.

You see, at the heart of this whole abortion thing is "Thou shalt not kill." That means everyone, not just the babies. I think most folks see the death of Tiller as relatively meaningless to the number of abortions performed; someone else will take his place as long as abortions are legal.

But Bozell's point, and it's a good one, is that Tiller's death hurts the pro-life movement far more than it helps. Once again the media is talking about religious fanatics. Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, who ordinarily I like very much, spoke of a "religious Jihad by fundamentalist crusaders."

Coulter, who is way crazier than Bozell, wrote in her column that Tiller had bragged of performing "more than 60,000 abortions." She also pointed out that for all the furor about killing doctors, Tiller was only the fifth abortionist killed since the enactment of Roe v. Wade nearly 40 years ago.

Don't get me wrong here. Five is still five too many. There's no reason to kill doctors, but five in all this time is probably no more than any other random sampling of people killed by lunatics over the same period.

This issue is a little bit like the Middle East, with two irreconcilable positions. You're never going to get hard-core pro-choicers to agree abortion should be banned, and you'll never get hard-core pro-lifers to say it isn't murder.

But is it too much to ask the media not to stir things up more than it already does? Do we really need people looking at fundamentalist Christians as if they're as dangerous as Osama bin Laden?

Frankly, no.

In the Tiller case, we ran up against the media's longtime "if it bleeds it leads" mantra. I'd rather the media adopted a slogan that's far older, from the oath doctors take.

"First, do no harm."

Tienanmen's 20th traumatic for Chinese

In 1989, hundreds of thousands of Chinese people held massive protests in favor of Democracy in Beijing's Tienanmen Square.

It was a time of hope, if you recall. Most of the satellites of the Soviet Union had broken away and established fledgling democracies, and even the USSR itself was on its last legs. Later that year, the chief symbol of Communist repression, the Berlin Wall, came down.

The Chinese protesters -- many of them young students -- thought they could have the same effect on their country. We all know what happened after that. The government cracked down quickly, and on June 4, 1989, the authorities cleared the square of protesters.

China has never admitted that anyone died in the crackdown, not even the young man above who so bravely stood up to a row of tanks, but there is much that is not yet known about what happened.

Last fall, my wife and I visited our daughter Pauline in Beijing. We went to Tienanmen Square as tourists; of course there is no sign, no commemoration, of what happened there in 1989. What I remember most is all the street vendors selling Chairman Mao watches and English translations of the Little Red Book.

Clearly, China has changed a great deal in 20 years. There's a great deal of what looks suspiciously like free enterprise. You can buy a knockoff set of Callaway golf clubs for $200, about a tenth of what they would cost here. You can buy DVDs of movies just barely released for about a buck and a half.

There is at least some personal freedom, but not the kind that matters. You can't write anything critical of the government, and free speech is only a rumor. When my wife and I wanted to attend Mass on Sunday, we had to show our passports to prove we weren't Chinese.

China also heavily censors the Internet. If 1.6 billion people ever realized the way the rest of the world lives, their government might have trouble keeping them under control.

That censorship has been stepped up seriously in recent days as the 20th anniversary of Tienanmen Square approaches. Chinese people can't use Facebook or MySpace. They can't visit this Website.

I wish I could say I had come to the attention of the Chinese government, but they ban all the Google Blogger sites.

But just as much of the news of Tienanmen Square in 1989 got out to the world through the use of new technology -- at the time, fax machines -- eventually the Chinese government won't be able to stop the flood of information that's out there.

A change is gonna come.

Reverse racism? Don't be ridiculous

I am so tired of hearing about reverse racism.

That's the big new thing on the right, since they realized that all their cries of "socialism" weren't resonating with the American people, who apparently decided they had enough of eight years of unbridled capitalism under George W. Bush.

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., got a big surprise when he went home to talk with voters. Baucus represents one of the more conservative states in the union, and he told voters he was opposed to single-payer health insurance. Montana voters were angry, and polls in the state showed that a solid majority favored what the right loves to call socialized medicine.

Ditto with President Obama's nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. A Gallup poll released Tuesday said 50 percent approved and only 22 percent opposed Sotomayor, a higher number than approved of any of Bush's nominees to the court.

So despite the controversy the media loves to highlight, a lot of Americans seem to approve of the direction Obama is taking us.

So the right wing is playing the race card.

If you listen to them, Obama hates white people and so does Sotomayor. In fact, if you listen to them, nominating Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is the moral equivalent of a Republican nominating former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.

Now you might be surprised to know that I'm not all that disappointed -- and certainly not surprised -- to hear Rush Limbaugh saying that about Sotomayor. He is what he is, and he has his audience.

But it's only been this year that the mainstream media seems to be playing up whatever he says. In fact, Rush has gotten more press coverage this year than any year since his arrest on prescription drug charges.

I'm sure he's loving it.

I'm sorry, though. The last thing we need is white people at the bottom of the economic spectrum thinking that the reason they're not getting ahead is someone else's reverse racism.

In my entire career, I lost out on one job because I was white. And I never really wanted to be president of the NAACP anyway.

Seriously, for all the talk of affirmative action, there is no doubt that being a white male is still the most advantageous position to hold in this society.

So let's not whine about reverse racism.

My guess is it's about 97th on our list of national problems, right behind whether we have enough calcium in our diets.

Amazing baby will be back soon

The amazing baby, aka my beautiful little grand-daughter Madison Nicole Kastner, will be returning to the United States in about a month.

I can hardly wait.

Little Maddie is now 8 1/2 months old and she'll be spending the next year or so in the USA. She may not take her first unassisted steps here -- she's pretty close to that now -- but she'll probably do her first talking this summer in Washington state.

After two months up there, Maddie will follow her parents to Washington, D.C., where her mother -- my wonderful daughter Pauline -- will have nine months or so of language training for her next posting.

We're looking forward to spending two weeks with her in August, and we're hoping we can get back east for Christmas as well. We're probably still a year or two from a Christmas that Maddie will actually remember, but it should still be fun.

I never really believed people who said how wonderful it was to be a grandparent, but yes, they were right.

And then some.