At work on Friday nights, I listen almost exclusively to Joe Elliot until midnight. Joe is a local radio host and I find that I agree with him more often than not. Last night, he was talking about this past week’s Supreme Court ruling dealing with sodomy laws in Texas. This is a contentious issue because it almost always devolves into a discussion about homosexuality. And when it does, all the things I hate about the Midwest, and Kentucky in particular, come to the fore.

If you read the old laws concerning sodomy, you realize that they were written to ban not only homosexual sex, but any sex that was considered “deviant”. Most adults, gay and straight, have broken these laws if they reside in areas where they are still on the books. Why do we break them? Because we either don’t know they exist or we don’t care. For all practical purposes, these laws are unenforceable.

What ticked me off were the calls Joe was receiving. The largest group were the “Gay is a choice” crowd, none of which, I am positive, have any homosexual friends. The people I know who are public about their homosexuality are few and all of them are male; to a man, none of them chose to be gay. As one told me a few years ago, “I woke up one day when I was thirteen and I liked boys. It was never a question.” I think, maybe, it is easier for the fundamentalist crowd to call homosexuality a choice than to say that, golly, maybe God ALLOWED THEM TO BE BORN THAT WAY. Evidence of homosexuality among other animals doesn’t seem to sway the argument. Of course, when you start at a conclusion and work backwards, that kind of thing happens.

An upbeat piece from my favorite news agency, the (North) Korean Central News Agency:


Koreans vow to revenge themselves upon Yankees
Pyongyang, June 25 (KCNA) -- Agricultural workers held an indignation meeting in Sinchon and schoolchildren a meeting for a vow of revenge at the hall of the Kim Il Sung Socialist Youth League yesterday on June 24 on the occasion of June 25, the day of struggle against the U.S. imperialists. Speakers at the meetings said that the war of aggression unleashed by the U.S. imperialists 53 years ago was an unprecedented mass-killing war that inflicted immeasurable disasters and misfortune upon the Korean people.
Disclosing that those murderers are now imposing all sorts of misfortune upon the South Korean people and killing innocent people irrespective of men and women, young and old, they branded them as the most heinous harasser of peace in the world, ringleader of evil and human butchers unpardonable down through generation.
If the U.S. imperialists ignite another war of aggression in this land, agricultural workers and schoolchildren will pay off old scores upon them, they warned.
An indignation statement was read out and a poem carrying a vow of revenge recited at the meetings.


I suppose it’s too late to mention that it was the North Koreans who started the whole thing in 1950.


Peter Lorre was born today in 1904. Lorre was the actor who played the admiral in the film “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” in 1961. That film and the later TV series (‘64-’68) were my first introduction to life in our glorious navy (I only saw the reruns). Of course, I was seven or eight at the time. I didn’t know that flying submarines don’t exist and that giant squids do not regularly attack nuclear-powered submarines. The coolest thing about the show (and something the navy needs to think about) was that the bow of the submarine had....are you ready?....WINDOWS. The admiral’s office was up there. I don’t where the torpedo tubes were, but the office had cool wood paneling and a spiral staircase.
One more thing about the sub (named the ‘Seaview’ (?)): the ventilation ducts were big enough for a man to crawl through. If the ship was taken over by bad guys (which it was every third or fourth episode), someone would “out-flank” the intruders by crawling through the ventilation system. Greatness.

Apple, once again, claims to be selling the fastest PC on the planet. And, once again, everyone is questioning their data. If you’re interested, swing by the Apple web site and look at how much the new G5’s go for. $1999 gets you a stripped-down model. To get the big-daddy earthshaker, you have to spend almost three grand, and that’s without a monitor. For $2000, I could build a complete system that would bury that machine.

I think the folks at Apple would be better served by not going this route every three years or so. Unlike Intel and AMD, Motorola (and now IBM) does not roll out a new generation of chips once or twice a year. Thus, the all-new G5 will be yesterday’s news by August. Apple used to be about “the difference”----people buy Macs because they’re not beige boxes. Problem is, the beige boxes aren’t beige anymore, either. Thus, Apple must reinvent itself. The iTunes thing was a good start; it turned people away from thinking that Apple is just a computer company. On the other hand, it must continue to sell hardware in order to survive. So here’s my prediction: in three years, Apple will no longer be selling desktop computers. Its product line will consist of laptops and “convergence” devices; that is, equipment that merges computing with home entertainment. Sony and others are trying to do this now, but it MUST be Apple’s future if the company is to survive in the retail sector. You read it here first.


Today in 1942, Dwight Eisenhower was placed in command of American Forces in Europe. Looking back, this may seem logical; we all know Ike as a two-term President and a five-star general. However, he was a mediocre student at West Point and did not see combat in World War One (unlike many of his contemporaries). On Dec. 7, 1941, Ike was a colonel. By May, 1945, he was wearing five stars. He was world-famous and almost universally respected. I have often wondered if the vaunted “unseen hand” was work here. Those of you old enough to remember the end of Eisenhower’s second term will recall the speech he made warning of the perils of the “military-industrial complex”. Had he been a slave to that complex? Has every president since? George Noory, call your office.

An excerpt from the first chapter of Ann Coulter's forthcoming book, "Treason":

"Why is the relative patriotism of the two parties the only issue that is out of bounds for discussion? Why can’t we ask: Who is more patriotic -- Democrats or Republicans? You could win that case in court.

At least we can be thankful that in the war on terrorism, we were spared the spectacle of liberals calling Osama bin Laden an “agrarian reformer.”

While consistently rooting against America, liberals have used a fictional event forged of their own hysteria - “McCarthyism” -- to prevent Americans from ever asking the simple question: Do liberals love their country?

Phil Donahue asked rhetorically: “Are the protesters the real patriots? It is at least counterintuitive to say that it is more patriotic to attack America than to defend it.

[A]fter World War II, the Democratic Party suffered from the sort of pusillanimous psychosis that seized all of France after World War I. The entire Party had lost its nerve for sacrifice, heroism and bravery. Beginning in the fifties, there was a real FIGHT for the soul of the Democratic Party. By the late sixties the contest was over. The anti-Communist Democrats had lost.

Democrats are on the precipice of securing their reputation as the Chamberlains of our time. In fact, today’s appeasers are worse than Neville Chamberlain: Chamberlain didn’t have himself as an example.

Jimmy Carter couldn’t land a helicopter in a desert, but he seemed to imagine the public was hungry for his counsel in the war on terrorism. Carter is so often maligned for his stupidity, it tends to be forgotten that he is also self-righteous, vengeful, sneaky, and backstabbing.

Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America’s self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn’t slowed them down."

The Pope is the Anti-Christ. I always knew that old, little Polish man was up to no good. Seriously, people like Jack Chick are the reason why I have such a problem with fundamentalist Protestants. If you buy the bible word-for-word (even though it's been translated numerous times), then you are either misguided or a fool. Just an opinion.

My friend Gary is in town on business and we are getting together tomorrow night. He is the first member of the Texas crew to visit here since Kelli and I were married. There has been talk of a Fourth of July visit, but nothing official yet. We shall see.

Sleazy Sixties Smut Books! Don't click on the link if tawdry paperback covers offend you. My two favorites: "Satan was a Lesbian" and "Matador of Shame". I have always wondered if any "smut" authors went on to become well-known mainstream artists.

Tom Cruise wants federal funding for Scientology . This is one area in which I agree with the German government: label Scientology as a cult and ban its existence. Federal funding! Next thing you know, artists will want federal grants for displaying crucifixes in jars of urine.

Norma McCorvey, the “Roe” in Roe vs. Wade, announced yesterday that she is going to ask the Supreme Court to re-evaluate the case . Her contention is that much more is understood now about how abortion affects women physically and psychologically. She also believes that the court needs to consider the effect abortion has had on our society since 1973.

As well-intentioned as Ms. McCorvey may be, this case doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of getting anywhere. Even if the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case (which it can always decline to do), they are unlikely to reverse the previous ruling. But there is something else in all of this that many who are against abortion do not fully realize: abortion is no longer about sucking an unborn child out of women and flushing him down a sink. It’s about women’s “empowerment”.

Abortion will become illegal in this country when women stop having them. NOW and Planned Parenthood are pro-abortion (let’s not call it “pro-choice”, OK? Those of us with some intelligence know better) because it’s a very profitable business to have a hand in. If the profitability were taken out of abortion, doctors would stop doing them and these “free” clinics would soon lose interest in the procedure.

But there will have to be a cultural shift in this nation before any of this takes place. An entire generation of women born since 1973 has been bombarded with the message that abortion is not only a right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights (or it’s “penumbra”, as the Court decided) but, if that right is taken away, they will somehow be less free. Can someone explain this to me?

We hear the mantras all the time: “It’s my body” and “If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one.” Consider this: if I take my body to the top of the Kennedy Bridge in Louisville and try to jump off with a homemade parachute and someone sees me, the police will try to intervene because such an activity is illegal. But it’s my body, isn’t it? If my parachute fails, I will land in the river and be washed away. No one will be harmed but me, right? Now, let’s say I decide to put a gun in my hand and take my body to the bank and rob it. I put the unloaded weapon in the teller’s face and tell her to fill up my seabag with cash. Is this illegal? You bet. Is anyone harmed? Not really. The bank customers are covered by the bank’s federal insurance; they won’t lose a dime. The teller may be frightened, but I can’t hurt her with an empty weapon. Hey, if you don’t like bank robbery, don’t pull one.

And don’t tell me I don’t understand because I’m a man---that argument is weak, misguided and goes against feminist theology.

I’m sorry about the shortage of posts over the past few days. I had every intention of posting on Sunday night about Father's Day, but I spent the day with my two fathers (biological and through marriage) and didn’t have time to write. I have written about my father here before, but never about my father-in-law. John is a quiet, kind man who has treated me as a son since long before I married his oldest daughter. He is a father of four, a grandfather to wishes and a friend to the many he comes into contact with in his capacity as Family Life Coordinator at our parish. He is also an avid computer user, which means that many of our conversations revolve around the latest problem he has stumbled onto with his home PC (which I built in 1999 and re-built recently). He is easy to talk to; unlike my own father, John does not have “minefield” issues into which one should not stray. I guess the greatest compliment I can give him is to say that I feel at home when he is around.


So I joined an online “clan” that plays Medal of Honor: Spearhead online. Don’t laugh yet---it gets better. As I mentioned before, I am a casual online gamer. It’s a great way to blow off steam. But playing alone becomes boring in very short order. Thus, the clan. I didn’t join one before I didn’t know anyone who actually belonged to one. That changed a couple weeks ago when my friend Eric dropped me a line and told me that he and our mutual friend Shawn were joining a group. My mental image was of scruffy teen boys, smoking weed and figuring out ways to cheat the game. However, the clan they joined is populated by a couple of veterans and others who take the whole thing pretty seriously, so much so that they “practice” every night.

The first thing these guys did was set up a rank structure. Since one of the founding members is a former sailor, they decided to set up the whole thing like the UDT (underwater demolition) teams of World War Two. All was well until this history-buff asshole from Indiana who goes by the call-sign MattDatt showed up and questioned why the fellas (and one gal) were using current naval enlisted rates and not those in common use in 1944. You may now laugh.

So the “Vice-Admiral” running the show has asked me to get him a rate sheet that reflects enlisted rates and officer ranks from the war. The officer part is easy; naval rank has not changed for them since the 19th century. But the enlisted side is a different story. My first thought was to find my grandfather’s Blue Jacket manual from that time; however, I don’t know where it is. I searched on the ‘net and finally found what I was looking for. Stand by for heavy geekiness.

I knew you would want to know all that.

Check this out . While pretty smart, it’s also very disgusting. But one thing: where were the homeless go during the Clinton administration? Why did the homeless only reappear in January, 2001? Media bias? NO WAY!!!

DLP puts up an interesting New York Times editorial which insinuates that our current economic woes were created by this administration in order to cut social programs. It would seem that the wheels have come off the bus over at the Old Gray Lady. Thinking that the economy can be controlled from the White House is ridiculous on its face; then again, we are talking about Paul Klugman. By the way, does anyone else think that he looks like Ted Schmitt from 'Queer as Folk' with a beard? Just a thought. At least Teddy understands basic economic theory (when he's not getting tweaked).

Today in 1991, a guy named Tim Berners-Lee addressed a symposium at CERN, the European Particle Physics Lab in Geneva, Switzerland. Berners-Lee presented an idea that he called a “hypertext system”. This “hypertext system” was soon called the World Wide Web. While the internet, which is really the backbone of the web, has been around since the late 1960’s under various names, the World Wide Web has really only existed for about a dozen years. It’s hard to imagine life without it.

The first time I heard the phrase “World Wide Web” was sometime in 1992. My friend Steve called me one day while I was stationed in Charleston, S.C. He told me about someone he knew (the name escapes me now) who spent all his time posting information to this new thing called “The World Wide Web”. My knowledge of networks was non-existent and, thus, the concept of inter-connected networks spanning the globe was incomprehensible. I didn’t own a computer until 1993, just ten years ago. It was a Mac Performa 200 (Classic II) and I don’t think it had a modem. For all I know, it may still be in use somewhere.


My friend Art sent me this quote a few days ago:

"As people do better, they start voting like Republicans...
...unless they have too much education and vote Democratic,
which proves there can be too much of a good thing."

He had gotten it from a Bush-bashing site which attributed it to Karl Rove, a close Presidential advisor. I read this kind of stuff every day online, and it doesn’t surprise me---the world is full of angry liberals. What makes this text so unusual is that, to this day, I can not find the full quotation. I asked Art to get me a source on it, and he wrote to a professor who had used the quote in a write-up on about.com (I think; the trail is getting long). The quote originally appeared in The New Yorker and then in the New York Times, that bastion of accuracy. Both publications published the line exactly as you see it above. What’s between those ellipses? We may never know. I did finally get to read the entire paragraph the quote was taken from. It has to do with Rove making the point that spending money on education would be good for the Republicans because it would allow more poor people to live in suburbia, where the GOP made substantial gains in 2000.

It is this kind of manipulation that proves the Democrat/liberals in this nation have no plan and no future. When faced with a presidency that is both popular and focused, they can resort to nothing but name-calling and class warfare. When the was the last time you heard a Democrat make an argument against a Republican initiative that did not include the words “obstruction”, “rich” or “working families”? Of course, when your play book is only a paragraph long and was written by James Carville, you can’t expect too much.

Reese Witherspoon is one again great with child. This is the second time she has experienced an immaculate conception, which is, I suppose, some sort of record. But, you ask, what of her husband (who will forever go unnamed here)? Surely you jest!!! He is obviously a homosexual and is merely serving as a second source of income in the Witherspoon home. Any other situation would infer that the two of them have sexual relations and we all know that is an impossibility, right? Il mio Dio! Perché lei me ignora?!

I have a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Babylon Revisited’ at work that I read and re-read when the mood strikes. It’s a collection of his short stories written between 1920 and 1937, the best years of his career. I have been drawn to him and his work since I first had to read ‘Winter Dreams’ my junior year of high school. There was something about his writing that made me want to live in the post-Great War era when the rich were even more obscene than they are today and even the bartenders drove custom-built cars. I wanted to live in Manhattan and wear thick silk shirts under my Brooks Brothers suit and talk about my company as a “going concern.”

I wasn’t until I read ‘The Great Gatsby” that the cracks in that world began to show. It might have been my age and my growing cynicism towards the elitists of our day. Whatever the cause, Fitzgerald’s flaws were suddenly all around: women were fragile playthings who played tennis and cried a lot; Jews were always bankers or con men and always the evil behind the throne; blacks were just servants; Catholicism was always either just a mistake in someone’s past or a religion for immigrants. But Fitzgerald was a man of his time and it’s very easy to cast aspersions without realizing that many of those same stereotypes exist today, albeit with a thick coat of gloss on them.

When I read his writing today, I can’t help but see the historical similarities between the 1920’s and the 90’s. Both were economic boom times with little in the way of underpinnings. Both were times when foreign policy was seen as secondary to domestic affairs. Both ended with the economy on the decline. The 1930’s saw a depression that was only ended by the Second World War; we got a recession and a war at the same time, an idea that would have been economically impossible 70 years ago. With history as our guide, 2010 (like the late 40’s and early 50’s) will see the rise of a new superpower on the world stage. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Hillary's book is now on sale. If you can stand over 500 pages of, well, stuff, please pick it up and let me know how you like it. I will be reading it as soon as someone gives me a copy or I can steal it. Stand by for a week of softball interviews by they likes of Katie Couric, Baba Wawa and Larry King with questions like "What's your greatest accomplisment?", "What was it like to live in the White House?" and other tough gems. To borrow a phrase, "pfffft."

Israel attacked and nearly sank the USS Liberty today in 1968. I don't even want to get into it. This is one of those moments in history that won't even BE history in another fifty years.

Today is Joan Rivers' birthday. She has been completely rebuilt and should not need another overhaul until 2045. You heard it here first.

Weapons of mass destruction. What a phrase. I don’t ever remember hearing it before 9/11, but I’m pretty sure it was in common use in places like the Pentagon and the Rand Corporation. Now, it is part of every American’s vocabulary. Lately, most of our media and seemingly all of the British media are interested in where Iraq’s WMDs are. Every Democrat in the country is making his livelihood by pointing out the fallacy that, less than two months after the end of hostilities, our military has yet to turn up “a smoking gun.” (For the record, a gun that is smoking has already been fired. The phrase should be “a loaded gun.”). The fact that several pre-sterilized mobile labs have been found is, I guess, merely coincidental. We all know that fertilizer and baby medicine are produced the world over in labs towed behind trucks.

There are two points to consider here. First, this brouhaha is not really about chemical, biological or nuclear weapons; it’s about George W. Bush and war in general. The mainstream media is dying to relive the thrilling days of the Vietnam War when, as they believe, they were the only thing that stood between democracy and a military-led junta in this country. After all, this may be Dan Rather’s last war in the anchor chair. One only has to listen to a press conference with Donald Rumsfeld to hear the outright hostility many in the press feel towards the military. Why is this? Simple: the very existence of a strong military goes against the socialist notion that every problem in the world can be solved with a treaty or a new set of laws, preferably overseen by the UN. Add to that the annoying truth that our military is the finest on earth and you quickly begin to realize how intolerable the situation must be in the hallowed halls of The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, et. al.

My second point is one of conditions. What proof will have to found before Old Europe and the mainstream American media accept that the old regime in Baghdad had WMDs? If a few rockets full of VX gas are found, the amount will be too small to worth quibbling over. If the chemicals are less esoteric, it will be said that they were the work of fringe elements and not the government themselves. If a huge stockpile is found, it will be said that the entire thing was staged (I have already heard this, by the way). It’s a no-win for the Americans.

I believe the simple truth is this: the weapons are long gone. Hussein and his henchmen had nearly six months warning that the inevitable was going to occur. And since the weapons may have had the imprint of Paris, Berlin or Moscow all over them, it was in their best interest to see them destroyed or made to disappear. Hussein knew that an American invasion would mean the end of him, either physically or politically. But if the Allies found nothing to justify the war, they would have egg on their face and he might stand a chance of staying alive somewhere else in the world.


There is a pretty interesting article linked on [H]ardOCP that discusses a common myth that the human eye can not distinguish between 30 frames per second and higher frame rates. This has become an issue to many PC gamers in the past few years as the power of hardware increases to the point where a new game on a high-end system appears completely fluid. The end effect is one of total immersion, and really cool to those of us old enough to remember such time-wasters as Tank Battle and Asteroids on the Atari 2600.

Confession time: I play games on my computer. I don’t have as much time to do it as I used to, but I play online when I can. And since I have never really mentioned it here before, here’s my current rig’s specs:


AMD Athlon XP 2400+ Processor
ABIT AT7 Motherboard
1GB Mushkin PC3200 DDR Ram
120GB Western Digital SE ATA/100 7200RPM Hard Drive (running Windows XP Pro)
80GB Maxtor ATA/133 7200RPM Hard Drive (running Red Hat 9.1)
120GB Western Digital FireWire Drive (for backups)
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro Video Card with 128MB RAM
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Sound Card
TDK 52x CD-RW Drive
TDK 4X DVD+R/+RW Drive
Antec Mid-Tower Server Case with 400W Power Supply (Black)
Samsung SyncMaster 191T 19” LCD Display
Klipsch 2.1 Speakers



Oh, yeah, I’m a geek. This is the same setup (with the exception of a RAM upgrade and replacement CD-RW/hard drives {both of which I smoked}) I have had since the first of the year and I am doubtful that I will change it any time soon. The average home PC has become so fast and has so much storage space that it will take years for office applications to catch up. There are only three reasons to have the fastest thing on the block: you need to compensate for something missing in your life, like a girlfriend; you are a serious gamer and need those extra five frames per second; you do serious digital photo/video production/manipulation.

My wife bought a subscription to ‘Details’ magazine for me a few months ago. It’s not really in my reading wheelhouse, but it presents a diversion in the same way ‘Maxim’ does, albeit with more references to gay porn. But I digress.

This month’s cover lad is Josh Hartnett. Josh is only 24, so I’m going to go easy on him. His interview in the mag centered around his distaste for life as a celebrity. Evidently, nubile young women hound him wherever he goes and designers give him clothes to wear. I can only imagine his burden. In fact, when faced with the choice of a) deciding what time to have my driver pick me up b) deciding who I was going to “do” tonight or c) deciding which nostril to snort with first, I would probably have some sort of nervous collapse.

I’m just kidding. While many people desire fame, very few realize how brutal it can be. The fans who love you today will hate, or worse, ignore you if your next film isn’t a blockbuster. Once you reach a certain level of notoriety, your days of going to the grocery in sweats and an oil-stained t-shirt are over. And one day, you will get old and no one will hire you.

What poor Josh never learned in college was the basic economic theory concerning opportunity cost. Every decision we take has a cost, that cost being the thing we did not pursue with said opportunity. Josh pursued success in acting; in exchange, he gave up anonymity. What’s worse is that he said he wants to be like Al Pacino, a guy who is taken seriously by other actors. Oh, OK....now I understand why he made “Pearl Harbor”. Sheesh.


The 19th Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification today in 1919. It was ratified by August, 1920. The smart-ass part of me wants to say something about a kitchen and a lack of shoes, but I shall refrain.

Two important events of the Second World War occurred today. In 1940, the evacuation of Dunkirk ended. The Belgian port city was the end of the road for the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), having been pushed back across France during the month of May. Now, the only way out for the Brits and the remainder of the French army was by sea. Winston Churchill, knowing that the British Royal Navy did not have the resources to pick up over 300,000 soldiers, asked the public to help. As a result, nearly every vessel capable of crossing the English Channel—ferries, yachts, sailing ships, lifeboats, speedboats and tugs---made the dangerous crossing while under attack by the German Luftwaffe. The successful evacuation gave the British public a moral boost. Churchill, however, would have none of it. In one of his angriest speeches of the war (or any time, for that matter) he stated that “retreats do not win wars.”

Two years later, in 1942, the Battle of Midway began. Midway Island is a high spot in the Pacific Ocean, but was a crucial base for the American Navy. The Japanese planned to invade the island and use it as a base to subdue Hawaii. However, American intelligence types had broken the Japanese naval code and knew of the plan. So, when the Japanese sent a diversion force to the Aleutian Islands off Alaska, they were ignored. Admirals Nimitz and Spruance met the Japanese with everything the US Navy had left in the Pacific: three carrier battle-groups centered around the Enterprise, Hornet (just back from launching the Doolittle raid on Tokyo) and Yorktown (badly damaged at the Battle of Coral Sea in May but patched together in 72 HOURS by the shipwrights at Pearl Harbor). Ultimately, the Japanese were turned away after losing three carriers and over 300 aircraft. The Americans lost the Yorktown. Historians call this sea battle the turning point of the war in the Pacific. This is correct on two counts; first, it stopped the Japanese advance and two, it marked the first time that the Japanese incurred loses that their limited industrial capacity could not replace. They had indeed woken a sleeping giant.

Interesting tidbit for those of you keeping score at home. As mentioned above, the Pacific Fleet only had three carriers in June, 1942. By August, 1945, when hostilities ceased, it had 74. That’s a whole lotta steel.

Our society changed a little today. Allow me to clarify: the potential for that change was introduced today. The FCC loosened up ownership rules on radio/TV/newspapers, meaning that large companies (Clear Channel, Gannett and all the major broadcast networks) can buy an even bigger slice of the media pie an many markets. I say "many" because there are still limitations in place that keep one company from owning every media outlet in a smallish town. Take a moment and read the article I linked above; it does a much better job of explaining the ruling than I ever could.

There are three things about this that bother me. One is the reaction of the groups critical to the ruling. Where the hell were all these people when the rules were first loosened during the Clinton Administration? Answer: nowhere. That makes this protest anti-Republican and anti-Bush, not anti-"big business". If they were honest in their convictions, they would lay blame for this at the feet of The Bubba himself.

The second thing that bothers me is the overreaction of the media, both left and right of center. Understand this: NOTHING HAS HAPPENED YET. Clear Channel has not purchased every radio station in the United States, nor could they. They will be allowed to buy more stations, which, in my opinion, is not a good thing based upon what I know about the radio industry in the United States. More on that in the next paragraph.

Finally, this move by the Republican majority on the FCC board is NOT a move by true conservatives. The Republican Party in this country is viewed by the opposition as being all about "big business", and this plays right into their hands. A true conservative would want to see media outlets (TV, radio and newspapers) controlled by as many companies as possible. This promotes competition, which would lead us towards better, more balanced journalism and, in my opinion, a more diverse entertainment selection. With only four big TV/Cable media companies in this country, how many reality shows will we have to endure? How many times can a show like "CSI" be cloned? Where will the risktakers go? Why promote the formation of an oligarchy in media, especially when it is decidely liberal?


On another note, the USS Constellation sailed home for the last time today. She is an aircraft carrier, commisioned in 1961 and deployed 21 times. She served in Viet Nam and both Gulf Wars, as well as Afghanistan and other "brush fires" too numerous to mention. When she is retired in August, she will be replaced by the USS Ronald Reagan, the latest Nimitz-class carrier.

To most of you, this is not big deal. It's not really a big deal to me, either, but it will be to the many thousands of men who served aboard her. I was still in the navy when the last of the Iowa-class battleships, the USS Missouri, was decommissioned. The Japanese signed the surrender documents ending WWII on that ship, and she had served in every war since. One of my friends at the time had served aboard her when she had escorted Kuwaiti tankers in the Persian Gulf. He told me about the plaque on deck that commemerated the surrender and how they had strung lights all over her mast so that, at night from a distance, she would look like an oil tanker to a passing Iranian patrol boat. He had a tattoo of her on his forearm. It was a real attachment, albeit to something made of steel and painted haze grey.

I've been doing this for exactly one year today. I always like to start things on the first of the month, and this blog was no exception. It struck me a few minutes ago how temporary this thing is. Unlike a book, my musings will one day disappear into the ether----either I will lose interest or the hosting company will go out of business. Maybe all these blogs will become like the plans for the old Saturn 5 rocket: still there, but no hardware in existence to read them.