Michael Jackson is dead. That makes me sad. His music lives on. For that I am thankful! However, many people including myself have wondered what motivated Michael Jackson to become...frankly...so bizarre. I have discovered perhaps the best hypothesis that I have seen to date. Michael Jackson was a homosexual autohebephile. Find out what the heck that is here...

http://www.scientificblogging.com/j_michael_bailey/was_michael_jackson_pedophile

Fascinating.

My father enlisted in the Army in July 1948 shortly after graduating high school. He was assigned to the 24th Infantry Division Artillery then on occupation duty in Japan.



( The rest moved behind this cut... )

What is there not to love about Saint Patrick's Day? It isn't celebrated as a "religious" holiday. There is fun to be had all around. And it is the one time of the year I get to make this!




Corned Beef, cabbage and Irish soda bread made the (almost) proper way! How can things this simple be so good!

Here's hope'n' the devil finds out your dead a year after you make it ta heaven!

I do not normally read the Huffington Post. To be honest I find it too liberal for me. I am a left leaning centrist but above all a pragmatist like our President. However, this article which I found in Google News really does a nice job of summarizing the problem with the republican Party. To be sure there is some glee between the writer's lines of text but I believe he essentially has it right. It is worth a read regardless of your political convictions. For those those who want to save the GOP read it. For those who want to gloat...read it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-jenkins/the-republican-partys-dea_b_174779.html

I heard on the NPR yesterday that the number of Americans on food stamps is at a historic high. There are 31 million American families in need of food stamps. That did not surprise me in these difficult times. What surprised me is that Texas is the state with the most families on food stamps. In fact, this shocked me. My best friend since the Academy is a Texan. My first posting was in Texas (Fort Hood.) I have family what lives in Texas! They are very independent conservatives who believe whole heartedly that a) you don't live off the state and b) you handle things privately. I would have expected a liberal powerhouse like California or New York to lead the roster of those on the dole. I am not sure what I make of Texas being there. Especially as I saw an unemployment map the other day and Texas has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country. I just don't get that. I would guess that Republicans must not pay all that well except my friend assures me that is not the case and supplied facts to back it up. So what gives?

Of course, I am still trying to figure out the tax question from before. I found this entry on fivethirtyeight.com to be very interesting. It shows who voted for whom in each state based on income bracket. Poor people really like Obama. The rich favored McCain except in the most liberal of states (read: California.)

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/03/rich-and-poor-voters-in-2008.html

I think the real question here is not about poor people. They seem to be fairly consistent in their patterns across the country. I think the real question here is why some rich people throw the vote liberal in some states and conservative in others. I think that shows poor is poor but rich must be a multicolored landscape of political motivations. It just leaves me scratching my head. Of course, history is replete with many very rich men trying to atone for their youth through acts of philanthropic largess during their end years. However, I do not think that swayed their voting pattern all that much. Who knows?

As mentioned in a reply to my last post http://www.fivethirtyeight.com is a great progressive blog. They have an article up right now about "The Obama Code" by George Lakoff that is just excellent. It gave me several new ways of looking at the current political divide in the country as well as a new way of thinking about my leaving the Republican party in disgust 8 years ago. It seems I am truly an American after all. You should read the article if you wonder what that means.

However, that is not the point of this post. The point is to provide a URL with more data (confusion?) on why Republican States who are against big government take more tax dollars than taxes paid. Here it is!

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2008/01/rich-state-poor-1.html

What this points out to me, being a student of history, is that the plantation system is alive and well. The south is made of a few wealthy people who intend to stay that way. The rest are poor...serf poor to my way of thinking. The tax base in these states is already low due to their impoverished nature so they easily require more money than they contribute just to survive. Simply put, if it takes $5 a day to live and you only make $4.97 that looks okay because you can always make those shoes last another month. However, even with a tax rate of only 1% you still pay 5 cents in tax (the IRS makes you round up.) Now you won't make it even by going barefoot. The federal government has to subsidize you up to the required $5 poverty level. You get an extra 3 cents in the deal! I think I now get the meaning behind the map in my last post. Most people in Republican states must live on the razor's edge financial. A quick check of yearly income seems to support this conclusion.

What vexes me now is why those states haven't turned to "tax and spend" liberal states. If most people in Republican states are so poor they require federal assistance to "make it" why have they not embraced the liberal left who wants to give them even more aid than they currently get? Any one have any ideas?

To get a clearer picture myself to what I stumbled on yesterday I decided to take a map of last year's Presidential election results and post to it the 2005 taxes paid versus used information from The Tax Foundation.



I find the result to be astounding. Now, being a former conservative who was driven out of the party by the hypocrisy and deceit of that past 15 years this didn't shock me. It should though. The ones who scream less tax, more tax cuts, smaller government, less welfare, etc., etc., etc., are the ones who really seem to be on the dole. I wonder what their excuses are. I can see places like Alaska getting Federal aid for the native population but aren't these the same people who pay no state income tax because of oil revenue? The same might be said for New Mexico except they have no oil revenue. I really don't know what to think about many of these states. Farmers in the corn belt maybe. Coal miners on West Virginia. Regardless, how can the Republicans keep up their mantra in public but in secret spend, spend, spend without giving back. I wish someone would ask them.

While I was doing some catch up reading at lunch today I came across a statement in a commentary that made me grin. One of the CNN liberal commentators was basically telling the Governor of South Carolina that if he really, truly, honestly felt the stimulus package would cause more harm than good then he had it within his power to stop it. Simply put, don't take the money. If all those that feel we are spending ourselves into financial Armageddon simply did not take the federal money offered it would significantly lower the total cost. Problem solved. But wait, there was, of course, a catch. The commentator already knew that South Carolina took more federal dollars in aid than it paid in taxes...considerably more. "Huh? Come again?" I asked myself. The source of the information was a non-profit organization named The Tax Foundation. Sounded familiar. I surfed over to its website. It took just a minute to locate the link for the information that was being quoted. It covered two decades worth of comparisons for federal taxes paid per capita versus federal dollars received. I was pleased to see that Oregon was a donor state...more taxes paid than taken...for most of the past 20 years. That also surprised me to be honest. Then, as I read down the list, I was surprised again at how the rankings fell out. Almost every single republican state in the last election took more federal dollars every year for the past 20 years than they contributed. I don't know which makes me more sick to my stomach: the hypocrisy or the fact that I am supporting those dead beats! Look it up for yourselves:

http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/22685.html#ftsbs-timeseries-20071016

Irismoonlight and I are off the mountain and back in the valley. It was a very nice 4 mile hike. Down is NOT easier than up. It is only shorter in duration. There is still snow up there. It is about 4500 feet. The wild flowers were all blooming their leaves off. One interesting side note, we counted rings on a tree the snow had brought down across the trail and the Rangers had cut out of the way. The last 25 years have been VERY dry. They covered the outer 2 inches of a 12 or 14 inch tree. Previous rings were 4 times the width. That confirmed for me that in my teenage years it WAS wetter here in western Oregon. Interesting.

And when Irismoonlight and I got to the top...after crossing over a field of snow...the view was socked in by a big white cloud almost immediately! *LOL*

Irismoonlight and I are heading up highway 20 out of Sweet Home for an early afternoon hike. We will be somewhere between Rooster Rock trail and Iron Mountain trail. We forgot to tell anyone where we were going and last friends and family knew we were heading for the coast. Well, the coast is cool and windy today (as opposed to warm and windy) so we went the other way. I will post more specifics if I have cell phone reception where ever we end up.

 Rest in peace Sir Arthur C. Clarke. We will remember you.