My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings: Recipes and reflections by Edward Espe Brown.

Zen offers a simple dictum for how to care for things, how to respect them: Carry one thing with two hands, rather than two things with one hand. p. 164

The Walrus and the Carpenter
      Were walking close at hand:
They wept like anything to see
      Such quantities of sand:
“If this were only cleared away,”
      They said, “it would be grand!”

“If seven maids with seven mops
      Swept it for half a year.
Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,
      “That they could get it clear?”
“I doubt it,” said the Carpenter,
      And shed a bitter tear.

From The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carrol.

Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.

2117 PostSecret: Racism
0847 Media blogs: when to publish secrets
0730 tripping through bohemia

Anonymous posters and commenters on blogs are often tagged as cowards for not standing up for what they say and while I know there are exceptions, I generally agree. And I’ve always thought it cowardly for newspaper publishers and editors to hide behind unsigned editorials. Now it looks like at least one newspaper agrees.

From Blogspotting:

Another [Boulder, Colorado] Daily Camera change. “Readers are sometimes confused by the unsigned editorials, which reflect the newspaper’s official stance,” the paper writes. From now on, they’ll put the byline of the member of the editorial staff who wrote each one.

Good for you guys!

Vengeance is a dish that should be eaten cold and former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown appears to be sitting down to a hearty meal. Yesterday the New Orleans Times Picayune reported on a talk Brown gave to a group of Metropolitan College of New York graduate students in which he said:

“Unbeknownst to me, certain people in the White House were thinking, ‘We had to federalize Louisiana because she’s a white, female Democratic governor, and we have a chance to rub her nose in it,'” he said, without naming names. “‘We can’t do it to Haley (Barbour) because Haley’s a white male Republican governor. And we can’t do a thing to him. So we’re just gonna federalize Louisiana.'”

Now that the Bush administration has received its thumpin’ at the polls and Republican politicians across the country are piling on I can only imagine the glut of tell-all books that are going to emerge over the next 18-months.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

Scenario: Susie turns up pregnant.

2006 – Middle School Counselor calls Planned Parenthood, who notifies the ACLU. Susie is driven to the next state over and gets an abortion without her parent’s consent or knowledge. Susie is given condoms and told to be more careful next time.

(For the record, I graduated from Warren High School in 1973 and I have no doubt that this is true.

That the advice from Andrew Sullivan after his review of Attorney General Alberto Gonzale’s testimony before Congress this week. I earlier gave my take on Gonzales’s shredding of our Constitution and the Great Writ. It’s starting to feel like the last act of The Crucible. When they come for you, will anyone be there to care?

Senator Leahy rightly dragged the legal lickspittle Gonzales over the coals. The rage in Leahy’s voice is completely justified: the idea that the U.S. sent a terror suspect to Syria for interrogation, and didn’t expect him to be tortured, is preposterous. Gonzales, Bush and Ashcroft were comfortable with that because they are comfortable with torture. There’s not a freedom Gonzales wouldn’t undermine, not a right he wouldn’t qualify, if his political patrons asked him to.

An attroney must provide a rightous defense for their client. The question becomes: who does Gonzales consider to be his client?

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings: Recipes and reflections by Edward Espe Brown.

When I got back to the kitchen, I began acknowledging other people”s abilities, and letting them make decisions of consequence. I started taking regular days off and turning the kitchen over to one of the other members of the crew, each in turn.

I felt an unfamiliar tenderness or compassion, since I knew that despite our best efforts, we can be so easily belittled or dismissed. p. 157

This morning my dad forwarded an email to me that I’d seen before but previously dismissed. I won’t post it here, but you can read a version of it on Snopes. The letter addresses a deep problem for us. What I want to do is reprint here my response to my dad’s friend who forwarded the email to him. Here is what I had to say:

Shalom Jack,

My dad forwarded the You Worry Me piece to me this morning and after I read it I wanted to respond to something that really does worry me: why is it that so much of what I read along these lines has to do with irrational fear?

We are a nation of adventurers and pioneers. We have done more and traveled further than any other nation in History. We come from people who took risks that no extreme sport enthusiast would ever consider. Yet someone believes that by circulating this fictitious letter they can frighten us.

After Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 American in Oklahoma City, I don”t recall any emails circulated warning us to be wary of white males who cut their hair short in the military style.

What is the purpose of those who want us to live in fear? What do they hope to gain by causing some to constantly look over their shoulders?

I don”t know.

But I do know that I refuse to live my life like some rabbit dodging my own shadow. I have a healthy respect for real danger, but no time for made-up boogie men.

That is not to say that there isn”t a miniscule yet dangerous cadre of extremists out there who would like to see our great nation fall. They exist. There may have been as many as 5,000 of them before we bombed their camps in Afghanistan into dust. And of course there are people like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who want to exploit fear as much as possible for their own purposes.

But we can”t allow the actions of people like this to cause us to cower every time we see someone who doesn”t look like we do.

More than 60 years ago we fought a war against a people who didn”t look like us after their leaders executed a cowardly attack upon our naval base at Pearl Harbor.

One of our responses was to round up those people who didn”t look like us an inter them in concentration camps. (Did you know that one of those camps was here in Ohio, the present day Ohio Army National Guard training base, Camp Perry?)

Amazingly, another response to that attack was the formation of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, then and still the most decorated unit in our armed services. The 442nd was made up Nisei: Japanese Americans. The 4,500 men of the 442 earned more than 18,000 decorations including: 9,486 Purple Hearts, 5,200 Bronze Stars, 52 Distinguished Service Crosses (our second-highest award), 20 Presidential Unit Citations and 21 Congressional Medals of Honor, our nation”s highest honor.

There are brave men and women of Middle Eastern descent serving in our armed services around the World today. How ought we to act if we see such a young man walking down our streets? Should we first consider that he might be a soldier or that he might be a terrorist? The chances of the former are greater than the latter, yet the people who want us to fear would have us think otherwise.

Does this do our Nation honor?

I don”t think so.

I will not wear blinders, ignoring real threats to my family, my community and my country; but neither will I dive for the nearest cover at the slightest provocation.

We are the greatest nation the World has ever known. We need to remember that and act accordingly.

B”shalom,

Jeff

The water it soon came in, it did,
      The water it soon came in;
So to keep them dry, they wrapped their feet
In a pinky paper all folded neat,
      And they fastened it down with a pin.
And they passed the night in a crockery-jar,
And each of them said, “How wise we are!
Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long,
Yet we never can think we were rash or wrong,
While round in our Sieve we spin!”

From The Jumblies by Edward Lear.

A Nurse: I had to make a trip to the hospital today. I was called by CPO (civilian personnel office) and informed I needed to come in person and fill out a DD75. Huh? Leave it to the military to number their forms. Everywhere else a form has a name. If a patient or family member has an “incident”, i.e. a fall, the form you fill out is called an incident report. In the Army it’s a 2218….

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

It’s Saturday and your condom of the week is brought to you by Energizer!

Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.

06476 Ewww….

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings: Recipes and reflections by Edward Espe Brown.

In a Zen parable this is the person who wakes up with a piece of shit on his nose. Throughout the day everyone he meets “stinks” and everything he does “stinks.” Many years may pass before he realizes the shit is on his own nose, and he must “wash his face.” p. 121

I’m a bit of a Constitution nerd. I carry a copy around with me at all times (thank you Sen. Bryd). I’ve actually read it cover to cover, several times. I once swore an oath to sacrifice my life if need be to protect it from all enemies foreign and domestic. I think it is the single most important human document in all history.

So was has our Attorney General been smoking?

From Constitution News:

“There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution; there”s a prohibition against taking it away,” [U.S. Attorney General, Alberto] Gonzales said.

Gonzales continued, “The Constitution doesn”t say every individual in the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn”t say that. It simply says the right shall not be suspended” except in cases of rebellion or invasion.

OK, what part of “shall not be suspended” does our nation’s top lawyer not understand?

Even Republicans are starting to understand how dangerous the current administration is.

SGT “Roy Batty”: So it is a new year, and once again I am disappointed that we are not all zipping around the skies in shiny silver jet packs. I thought we would be there by the impossible Year of Our Lord 2007. But no, here we are in freakin’ Baghdad, watching Mesopotamian hillbillies waste each other with assembly line machineguns designed in 1947, and trying…

The Los Angles Times and Washington Post both run stories this morning about proposed changes in Congressional ethics rules focusing on the power of lobbyists (which out number congresscitters 60:1), but Robert Reich had the goods first. And he wipes the lipstick off what is still a very ugly pig.

Democrats are eager to show they”re serious about reforming the way Congress does business. So they”re pushing a new ethics and lobbying bill that will ban gifts, meals, and free trips from lobbyists and their clients, and require that the legislative sponsors of all earmarks for pet projects be identified in the legislation.

But calling these reforms is like saying you”ve cleaned the house when all you”ve done is taken out the garbage.

If Congress were really serious about reform it would (figuratively) cut its political throat.

The real scandal in Washington is the everyday bribery that remains legal. I”m talking about campaign contributions given for legislative favors – a particular provision in this or that bill, an amendment here, an earmarked appropriation there. Lobbyists orchestrate this contemptible process. And members of congress keep it going because the money buys television time for their re-election campaigns, and television advertising keeps them in power.

The system is out of control. It cost the average candidate three times more to run for Congress in 2006 than it did in 1990, adjusted for inflation. Members now devote most of their time to fund raising instead of representing their constituents.

Reich offers real reform, but I doubt that he is holding his breath.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

Scenario: Mark gets a headache and takes some headache medicine to school.

2006 – Police called, Mark expelled from school for drug violations. Car searched for drugs and weapons.

(For the record, I graduated from Warren High School in 1973 and I have no doubt that this is true.