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If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theater operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2112 deaths, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000. Jim Richards In 2006, the United States was reported spending nearly $10 billion a month to sustain the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, up from $8.2 billion a year earlier.
That's with a Capital "B", people! OUR tax dollars. This is enough money to feed, clothe, house, educate and give free health care to every citizen of the United States! Jim Richards
With all the Doom and Gloom and War and Killings reported every day I thought I would share this pleasant real life story with all my fellow bloggers here: This is a wonderful piece by Michael Gartner, editor of newspapers large and small and president of NBC News. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Well worth reading. And a few good laughs are guaranteed.
My father never drove a car. Well, that's not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet. "In those days," he told me when he was in his 90s, "to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it." At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in: "Oh, bull----!" she said. "He hit a horse." "Well," my father said, "there was that, too." So my brother and I grew up in a household without a ca r. The neighbors all had cars -- the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford -- but we had none. My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines, would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together. My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we'd ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. "No one in the family drives," my mother would explain, and that was that. But, sometimes, my father would say, "But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we'll get one." It was as if he wasn't sure which one of us would turn 16 first. But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown. It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn't drive, it more or less became my brother's car. Having a car but not b eing able to drive didn't bother my father, but it didn't make sense to my mother. So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, and a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father's idea. "Who can your mother hurt in the > cemetery?" I remember him saying once. For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps -- though they seldom left the city limits -- and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work. Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn't seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage. (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.) He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin's Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish's two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home. If it was the assistant pastor, he'd take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests "Father Fast" and "Father Slow." After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he'd sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I'd stop by, he'd explain: "The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored." If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out -- and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, "Do you want to know the secret of a long life?" "I guess so," I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre. "No left turns," he said. "What?" I asked. "No left turns," he repeated. "Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn le ft in front of oncoming traffic. As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn." "What?" I said again. "No left turns," he said. "Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that's a lot safer. So we always make three rights." "You're kidding!" I said, and I turned to my mother for support. "No," she said, "your father is right. We make three rights. It works." But then she added: "Except when your father loses count." I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing. "Loses count?" I asked. "Yes," my father admitted, "that sometimes happens. But it's not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you're okay again." I couldn't resist. "Do you ever go for 11?" I asked. "No," he said. "If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can't be put off another day or another week." My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90. She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102. They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom -- the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.) He continued to walk daily -- he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he'd fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising -- and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died. One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news. A few weeks ear lier, he had told my son, "You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred." At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, "You know, I'm probably not going to live much longer." "You're probably right," I said. "Why would you say that?" He countered, somewhat irritated. "Because you're 102 years old," I said. "Yes," he said, "you're right." He stayed in bed all the next day. That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that w e sit up with him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: "I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet." An hour or so later, he spoke his last words: "I want you to know," he said, clearly and lucidly, "that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have." A short time later, he died. I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I've wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long. I can't figure out if it was because he walked through life Or because he quit taking left turns. Jim Richards
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert," Nobel economist Milton Friedman once quipped, "in five years there'd be a shortage of sand."
Jim Richards
I do not know Mr. Hall and have thankfully never needed the services of his Ambulance Company. However, As a Member of the Tehachapi Hospital Foundation I have a great interest in seeing that our ill and injured citizens be transported to the nearest hospital AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. After all, it could well be a matter of Life or Death! Until we are able to build our new hospital locally (perhaps another year...or two) we are at the mercy of Hall Ambulance to transport us to the nearest hospital. 50 miles away..and an hours drive. Why do we need to wait still another half hour for an ambulance to arrive from Mojave or Arvin? That's an hour and a half wait. Some of us will arrive at the hospital stone cold DEAD! We need a 2nd. ambulance Mr. Hall. Would you like to trade places with us? Jim Richards
This is a locked-in battle now fiercely raging: We, the voting and tax paying citizens of the United States of America vs: Our so-called government "Representatives", Federal, State, and Local. What are we to do about it? Throw the bums out. Again and again and again until we get back to our roots! Jim Richards Here is an artist rendering of the new Tehachapi Hospital. You can help bring this dream to reality by joining the Tehachapi Hospital Foundation team. Your ten dollar per year Membership will contribute. Help US to help YOU! Log onto: www.thfinc.org Or call: 661-822-6159 Jim Richards
The ONE thing all politicians have in common is they all play the "Numbers Game". We have to learn to beat them at their own game! Game numbers 1 and 2 are: Number of $$$ they can raise for their coffers and Number of Voters they can con into voting for them. But, Game Number 3 is not as well known. It is the number of contacts they get from constituents. It is generally agreed that for every ONE letter they receive, they count as 1000 who agree with the position of the letter writer but did not actually write. I think the same extrapolation can be made in today's e-mails. I regularly e-mail or call my Senator's, Feinstein and Boxer and even call the White House to record my gripes or good wishes. These calls and e-mails are ALL counted! I recently received an e-mail from Sen. Boxer about helping the people in Darfur. I wrote back that is was a noble sentiment but what about her own people in California being inundated with terrorists crossing our border? What is she doing about that? If all we ever do is moan and gripe among ourselves, we are just wasting each other's time and space. That only makes us part of the problem and not the solution. We CAN make a difference but we have to Stand Up and take an affirmative position. In Unity There Is Strength! Jim Richards
Through their citizen children, illegal immigrants in Los Angeles County collect $420 million annually in welfare and food stamps, according to a report requested by 5th District County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich.
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services told the supervisor that payments to illegal immigrants' children amount to approximately 24% of the county's combined CalWORKS and food stamps budget, officials said. "What we found was kind of astonishing," said Tony Bell, an Antonovich aide. Each month, the county doles out $77 million in CalWORKS assistance, $20 million of which goes to the citizen dependent children of illegal immigrants, said Helen Berberian, another Antonovich aide. CalWORKS is the state's welfare-to-work program. Along with CalWORKS assistance, the county approves $70 million every month in food stamps, with $15 million going to legal children of illegal immigrants, Berberian said. The welfare payments go to nearly 100,000 children of 60,000 illegal immigrants, Antonovich's staff said. His staff estimated that Los Angeles County has almost 12% of the United States' illegal immigrant population. The welfare payments are just a portion of the impact from illegal immigrants and their children, Antonovich said. "Illegal immigration continues to have a devastating impact on Los Angeles County taxpayers," Antonovich said in a statement. "When the nearly one-half billion dollars spent on health care is added to the costs of public safety and health care, this brings the total cost to nearly $1 billion a year. This does not include the skyrocketing cost of education." According to Antonovich's office, illegal immigrants annually cost the county $360 million in health care and $220 million in incarceration costs. Antonovich has spoken to Congress several times about ways to mitigate the country's illegal immigration problem, including the repeal of at least part of the 14th Amendment. "We would like to see the repeal of the amendment giving citizenship to children born in the U.S.," Bell said. "The purpose was to ensure that freed slaves were granted citizenship to rectify the evils of slavery, not to provide illegal immigrants with a legal way into our country through childbirth." State Sen. George Runner said such a move "is a very worthy issue to be addressed." "Just because you are born here, does it automatically give you the right to citizenship?" Runner said. "I think it's worth of having the discussion." Antonovich also has proposed a bonded guest worker program. "Bonded guest workers would have a bond to cover costs incurred while working in the United States," Bell said. Those bonds would cover health care and other major expenses, Bell said, adding that many illegal immigrants come to California because they can get free medical care. Bell said Antonovich will continue to work with state and federal leaders. Runner said that might be all the supervisor can do, as he is outnumbered by his fellow supervisors. "With health insurance, I know L.A. County does go ahead and pay beyond what the state would pay," Runner said. "I know Mike opposes that, but the problem is, he's like me in that he has a majority on his board that is willing to pay out those benefits." Jim Richards If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theater operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2112 deaths, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000. Jim Richards Click on this link and read what it says. There is something in it for ALL of us to start thinking about! Before it's too late! Jim Richards |
