So where did all that come from?

Silly me. I actually thought last Tuesday's post was relatively innocuous.

I certainly didn't think I was plowing any new ground -- big cars, big houses, overweight Americans. It's all been said time and again by people both smarter than me and stupider than me.

I didn't even come to any big conclusions. All I said was that we might have to do something.

You would have thought I pissed on the Statue of Liberty.

I appreciated the long post that was essentially a pep talk about losing weight. I've actually lost about 500-600 pounds in my lifetime; I just keep gaining them back when I get sedentary. I made a decision this time to do something my son has been asking me to do. Virgile wants me to start training for a triathlon; he's currently building up to an ironman triathlon this summer in France.

Now I'm not going to swim 2 miles in open water, cycle 115 miles and then run 26.2 miles. I may be stupid, but I don't have a death wish.

I'm going to train for a sprint triathlon like the one he did last month -- a 5k run, a 15k ride and 150 meters in the pool.

The goal is for next March in Pasadena, when I will be 60 years old.

So losing the weight isn't a huge deal.

But I am surprised at how some people react whenever they think I'm saying something critical about this country. Sorry, but millions of people in this country are not just fat, they're obese. Millions of people spend billions of dollars on crap they don't need. Which part of that don't you get?

Yeah, I'm angry. Yeah, I despise commentators on the far right and the far left who distort issues and stir people up. If you like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, you're not my audience. I'm actually kind of bitter about how I lost my job too.

Afraid? No, I'm not really afraid of much. I'm too damned old to be afraid of anything in this world, and I'm too strong in my faith to be seriously afraid of what comes next.

So say what you want -- I love getting comments and I love it when those comments disagree with me -- but sorry, I'm not that fearful of anything more than keeping my wife healthy and making sure my kids get every advantage they can.

But thanks for asking.

Life has to be lived in the present

When I was working at the Reno Gazette-Journal in the late 1980s, I wasn't dating much.

I was actually in pretty good shape -- I got down to 160 pounds with a major diet in 1989 -- but I really couldn't find anyone to go out with. My interesting co-workers were mostly already spoken for, and for part of the 18 months I was there, I was still getting over a major disappointment that happened right around the time I left Colorado.

So I didn't date much. But when I got a job in Southern California in April 1990 and was getting ready to leave, a really attractive woman who worked in another part of our building told me it was a shame I had never asked her out.

"I really kind of had a crush on you," she said.

My heart sort of broke, even though I had no idea who she was.

Something similar happened today when I got an e-mail from an old high-school classmate who I vaguely remembered. I looked her up in the yearbook and noticed that she had been pretty, and when I read her second e-mail, she told me that she had sat behind me in English class and had had a crush on me but didn't do anything about it because she was too shy.

I think I considered retroactive suicide. To steal a line from a Woody Allen movie, my social life back then was "The Petrified Forest;" I dated exactly zero girls in my graduating class during high school. It wasn't a small class, either. There were 804 of us.

Actually, those two examples are pretty typical. The first 40 years or so of my life were all about missed opportunities when it came to the opposite sex, so it's a good thing I survived them.

Still, maybe I should have turned around.

Downsizing might be wave of future

"I am big. It's the pictures that got small."
-- NORMA DESMOND, Sunset Boulevard

Welcome to America 2009. Like it or not, we're on the verge of becoming the Norma Desmond of countries.

We've been living large for so long, and the bills are coming due. We've got our Hummers in the garages of our McMansions, and the kid from Domino's is about to deliver the 2-for-1 pizza special so that our chubby little kids can get even chubbier.

Where do we go from here? The CEO of General Motors basically got fired this week because he's the guy who took GM out of the electric car business in 1999 and put it into the Hummer business in 2001.

All together now -- "Americans don't like small cars."

That's true, but is it true because we like to live too large or because we are too large? Don't answer yet.

The 25-year-old son of a friend of mine is in the hospital right now -- without insurance -- basically because he caught a virus and the fact that he was about a hundred pounds overweight exacerbated its effects on him.

I don't want to be critical, but a 25-year-old kid who's 5-foot-10 should never weigh 290 pounds. I know he's working on it, and more power to him, but my son's friend is hardly the fattest kid in America. What's really terrible is that there are real kids -- 10, 11, 12 years old -- who look like they're mainlining Ho Hos.

If you're a family man with a wife and 2.3 kids, it's tough to fit them into a small car.

What drives me crazy is that we can't get any honesty from the folks who are leading us. There are basically two things everyone running for office -- left, right or middle -- are required to say. One is "God bless America" and the other is that America's best days are still ahead of us.

Now I'm not saying they're not.

I'm not that pessimistic. But what if, at the least, we have to adjust to a world of lower consumption, a world where we don't always supersize every order and where living in a smaller house or driving a smaller car might be more sensible.

Maybe we don't need to be quite so big.

Does politics really matter? Yes it does

I really wish I didn't have to spend so much time thinking about politics.

Even though I never cared for George W. Bush, I admired one thing he did when he first took office. Despite the fact that he had lost the popular vote, despite the fact that the whole Florida thing cast a major shadow on any "mandate" he might have had, Bush set out to govern as if he had won by a landslide.

He knew he wasn't going to get much out of the opposition, so he set out to do what he planned to do.

After all, our politics have been so toxic for the last 20-30 years that both parties spend more time thinking about the next election than about what they're doing in the current term. It's why President Obama can't get much Republican support; the GOP is afraid that if they help him accomplish things, he'll win even bigger next time out.

There have been many times I've been tempted to forget politics. When I named this Website, I intended to write about everything but politics. Unfortunately, politics does matter in our daily lives. I'm collecting an extra 13 weeks of unemployment checks because the stimulus bill passed Congress. So I can't say the stimulus bill didn't matter; my job loss in the catastrophic cuts by American newspapers in the last year and a half hasn't hurt me as much as it might have.

Admittedly, there are those -- Rush Limbaugh comes to mind -- who see what Obama is trying to do as anti-American, but it seems to me that unless you think the most important thing about our country is free-market capitalism, it's tough to make that jump.

French President Sarkozy thinks one of the priorities to be addressed at this week's G-20 meetings is reforming capitalism. I don't know if that will happen -- I sort of doubt it, in fact -- but when I see that 70 percent of American families are doing no better than just getting by, I think it's a question worth asking.

Our economy did pretty well from 1933 into the 1980s with a government-regulated free market. Plenty of folks got rich. I'm not sure that what we needed to do under Reagan, Bush and Bush was to repeal the New Deal.

So here's my question.

Is capitalism the most important freedom we have in America?

I'd love to hear what you have to say.

A serious search for a viable middle

Editor's note: About two years ago, on a previous Website, a group of 30 or so of us tried to put together a manifesto for what we thought would be a sensible start for a political party that would work for the betterment of society and protect the middle class. It's a little long, but I hope you'll read it.

There are times in history when groups established to further the aims of people either become unresponsive to those aims or inconsistent with the legitimate objectives they were conceived to pursue.

This has happened before, but few have become so distorted or misdirected as in the modern two-party system. We believe both the Democratic and Republican parties have been corrupted to the point where their only real value is to the large contributors who finance their operations and those who hold office under their banners.

We are convinced that while there are good people in both parties, the organizations themselves are corrupted beyond redemption and utterly unsuited to serving as vessels for change to benefit society at large.

It is because we as Americans are guided first and foremost by love of our country that we seek to find a middle ground where all men and women of good will can work for the common good.

We do this in the belief that in a successful political system, whether broken or healthy, no one is exempt from the effort to find common ground.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (and women) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

We recognize today, as Jefferson did in 1776, that men and women cannot choose to surrender these rights, and that as Benjamin Franklin said, people who would yield their freedom in hope of gaining security deserve neither. It is the responsibility of the government to protect its citizens, but it must do so in a way that respects our rights as Americans.

We have no complaint with the American system. Our "experiment in Democracy" that began in 1776 is the wonder of the civilized world and an example to all mankind. It is only the ways in which our current political system perverts that experiment that we intend to change.

We know that the ability of government to solve problems is far from unlimited. We believe that while there are few problems for which government action should be the first option, there are equally few in which it should never be considered as an option of last resort.

First and foremost, America relies upon individuals and groups taking positive action. We admire those individuals whose priorities include personal sacrifice for the greater good, those who willingly share their bounty with the less fortunate and work to improve the lives of those people with whom they come into contact.

We believe that government must not stand in the way of an individual's legitimate drive to succeed, that intelligence, determination, hard work and the entrepreneurial spirit are all positive qualities that should be encouraged. But we also believe that no one succeeds more nobly than when he or she improves the lives of others, particularly those who are less capable or less fortunate.

We recognize that most Americans are neither so rich that they never require assistance or so poor that assistance is always necessary. Most people consider themselves part of the middle class, needing help at times and giving help at others. There should be no actions taken by the government except in times of dire emergency that hurt the middle class to benefit others.

We encourage the behavior commonly known as the Golden Rule, stated in one form or another in almost every religion known to man, that actions toward others are best when they are those we would not object to others doing to us. Human improvement, love, respect for others and sharing other people's suffering are qualities agreed upon by people of good faith everywhere.

We understand that religion is an important part of life for many Americans and we believe that government must never stand in the way of religious practice in appropriate situations. We are disappointed that government often becomes bogged down in attempts to prohibit relatively innocuous displays of faith that offend only the most fanatical and believe, for example, that Christmas displays not supported by public funds should be allowed. Yet we also understand that America is a nation of many different religions, and we respect whatever peaceful, life-affirming ways people choose to express their faith in God.

We believe America stands tallest in the world when it stands for American principles. Those principles include working peacefully with friends and allies, standing up for human rights and helping other nations improve the lives of their citizens.

We have no desire to impose our system on anyone, but we gladly encourage those who wish to emulate our freedoms.

We insist that our government perform its fundamental responsibility or defending our territory and borders from outside invasion, whether that invasion is for the purpose of damaging America or simply of entering the country illegally.

We believe that those people who come here from other countries seeking better lives must do so legally, but they should not be scapegoated for political reasons or used by unethical employers looking to keep the cost of doing business down.

We demand that our government make efficient, effective use of the money provided for national defense. We reject sweetheart deals and no-bid contracts and believe that the so-called "military-industrial complex" is often a counterproductive force in the critical task of national defense.

Public service is an honor, and a career in public service should never be undertaken as a means for enriching oneself. While we do not expect political figures and government employees to take a vow of poverty, we recognize that corruption has added dollars to the national debt and subtracted from the public's trust of the people who serve it.

We recognize that all Americans have rights stemming from life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and we believe those rights should include basic health care, basic sustenance, basic shelter and the opportunity to get a free education that will help them compete in the modern world.

We hold no brief for those who have the ability to provide for their own needs yet choose not to do so, but there are too many times in recent memory that innocent children have paid for the shortcomings of their parents. That any children should go hungry, become ill or die because of lack of wealth is an abomination in a wealthy society.

We recognize that the problem of providing health care is a difficult one, and we believe that a society that spends one of every seven dollars on health care is dysfunctional in that area. This is a problem that must be addressed by people of good faith. As an intermediate step, however, we insist that no child be denied the right to basic preventative or remedial care, and that vaccinations and other such care be readily available to all Americans.

We know that our educational system has become dysfunctional and that too much money is being spent for purposes that are not productive. As parents and as community members, we demand that a way be found to better educate our children.

We believe that a system based on test scores only encourages "teaching the test" at the expense of other subjects and a system that discourages the natural desire of a child to learn is a complete and total failure.

We believe that bad teachers should be encouraged either to improve or leave and that good teachers, teachers who make children love learning, must be rewarded.

We accept that learning is a lifelong progress and we expect that our culture will encourage rather than ridicule that process. Although we respect the profit motive in entertainment and understand the goal of reaching the most people possible, we do not approve of a culture that exacerbates the problems of society and plays to our worst instincts as human beings.

We recognize that race should play no role as a determining factor in modern life, and that far too often, programs intended to encourage the integration of racial or ethnic groups into the mainstream have served exactly the opposite purpose. We encourage the efforts of immigrants to become part of the mainstream of American life.

We demand an end to discrimination, but believe that set-asides and most affirmative action programs no longer work. If such programs are to continue, they should be based economically rather than racially or ethnically.

Even those who argue for a limited system of government agree that the infrastructure is the responsibility of the government, and that one of the greatest domestic successes of the last half-century was the building of the Interstate Highway System. We have been living off money spent on our infrastructure in previous generations, and roads, bridges and tunnels from Maine to California are crumbling. We support a reasonable public works program to rebuild America for the needs of the 21st century.

We support a healthy respect for responsible, peer-reviewed science and are critical of those who attempt to twist facts to suit their political agenda. While there are certainly issues on which people of intelligence can disagree, not everything in this world is a matter of opinion. We support sound environmentalism and reject extremism on both sides.

We understand that both within our country and our world, there are a plethora of troubling issues on which Americans have not been able to compromise. Many of those are so-called "moral issues, and rather than take a stand on issues that really no have more than one side, we ask only that people come to their conclusions for reasons that exalt our common humanity rather than abase it.

We reject the politics of fear and hatred.

More than a thousand years before the United States of America was founded, a great philosopher was asked if there was one word that could serve as a principle for life. Confucius replied that the word was "reciprocity."

"Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire."

We accept this as a guiding principle for our efforts, and it is in that spirit that we establish the Western Independent Party.

Anonymous is just so ... anonymous

I'm happy to see that there are people responding to these posts, even though I sometimes think I've come across some right-wing coven.

But never mind. I know some of you are just trying to make me argue more rigorously, and it's only a few of you who worship the ground on which Rush Limbaugh stomps.

My problem is with "anonymous."

That's how most of you label your comments, leaving me to wonder whether they came from someone I know, from someone I would like to know or from Karl Rove or one of his minions. Seriously, I can understand why you don't attach your real name. For all you know, I would wind up on your doorstep asking to borrow money.

But the way I set up the response thing is that you can make up a name. You can do the "Penthouse Letters" thing and call yourself Horny in Harrisburg or you can call yourself Angry Conservative, Dave in Dubuque or just Mom. It would be so much more pleasant if along with your thoughts, I could get some idea of who was sharing them.

The guy who called me "comrade," for instance. It would really help to know if he was the regional president of the John Birch Society.

Yes, yes, I'm kidding, and I would rather have you stay anonymous than not comment at all.

But think about it.

After all, what's in a name?

What if they weren't allowed to lie?

"Fairness Doctrine? We don't need no stinkin' Fairness Doctrine!"

Lots of folks these days are urging the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, which disappeared during the Reagan years and resulted in the growth of talk radio. They think if balance were brought back, the Limbaughs and Hannitys, the O'Reillys and Savages, would just fade away.

I've got a better idea.

It's fair, too.

I've got no problem with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity saying whatever they want, whenever they want. It's called freedom of speech, and it's important. But so much of what they say is so outrageously untrue, and there's no one on their shows to call them on it.

For example, Limbaugh always has enjoyed treating three different words as if they meant exactly the same thing -- liberalism, socialism and communism.

Of course they're not. Imagine how he would howl -- like a stuck pig, perhaps? -- if we treated the words conservative, authoritarian and Nazi as if they meant exactly the same thing.

Ditto with Hannity, who had Rep. Michelle Bachmann (I-Minn.) on his show this morning. (She's a Republican; the 'I' stands for insane, or for idiot, you choose). Bachmann told Hannity, and he lapped it up, that she wanted to lead an "orderly revolution" to keep President Obama and the Democrats from turning this into a "Marxist state."

Now of course there are some folks who feel that anything that detracts from laissez-faire capitalism is a big step toward communism, but realistically the worst that could be said about some of Obama's plans is that they are steps toward a European-style social democracy.

Foolks in Europe aren't oppressed. They just pay higher taxes and get more in return from their government than we do. They've bought into the belief that it's up to the state to take care of the poor, the infirm and the elderly.

But listen to Bachmann:

"This isn't a game. this isn't just a political talk show that's happening right now. This is our very freedom, and we have 230 years, a continuous link of freedom that every generation has ceded to the next generation. This may be the time when that link breaks. And I'm going to do everything I can, I know you are, to make sure that we keep that link secure. We cannot allow that link to break, because as Reagan said, America is the last great hope of mankind."

Now she's allowed to say that. She's also allowed to say, as she did during the campaign, that Barack Obama's friendships show that he hates America.

Even it it's completely untrue.

That's why I would like to see a Truth Doctrine. If somebody's on television, or on the radio, or speaking in public, they get hooked up to an electrical source. When they say something that's a blatant lie, like Limbaugh equating liberalism and communism or Bachmann saying Obama is a Marxist, they get a jolt.

With each further lie they tell, the jolt doubles.

They're got a choice, either to shut up or to tell the truth. I recognize that there are obvious obstacles to overcome. You can't put someone like me at the controls with Limbaugh. Whether he was telling the truth or not, I would enjoy seeing him jumping around and eventually crapping his pants way too much.

But put good, nonpartisan people in charge, and I guarantee you -- public discourse would improve tremendously. An awful lot of annoying liars would either start telling the truth or stop talking at all.

Both work for me.