Yes, You Are.

From Small Beginnings...

Happy Spring 2008!!



Just snapped this pic. Here come my Daffadils!
A Dozen are reaching for the sky.. a few Thousand
more to come!

Great things will Come

Obama Chooses Reconciliation Over Rancor

NEWS ANALYSIS


By JANNY SCOTT
Published: March 19, 2008 NYT


It was an extraordinary moment — the first black candidate with a good chance at becoming a presidential nominee, in a country in which racial distrust runs deep and often unspoken, embarking at a critical juncture in his campaign upon what may be the most significant public discussion of race in decades.

In a speech whose frankness about race many historians said could be likened only to speeches by Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, Senator Barack Obama, speaking across the street from where the Constitution was written, traced the country’s race problem back to not simply the country’s “original sin of slavery” but the protections for it embedded in the Constitution.

Yet the speech was also hopeful, patriotic, quintessentially American — delivered against a blue backdrop and a phalanx of stars and stripes. Mr. Obama invoked the fundamental values of equality of opportunity, fairness, social justice. He confronted race head-on, then reached beyond it to talk sympathetically about the experiences of the white working class and the plight of workers stripped of jobs and pensions.

“As far as I know, he’s the first politician since the Civil War to recognize how deeply embedded slavery and race have been in our Constitution,” said Paul Finkelman, a professor at Albany Law School who has written extensively about slavery, race and the Constitution. “That’s a profoundly important thing to say. But what’s important about the way he said it is he doesn’t use this as a springboard for anger or for frustration. He doesn’t say, ‘O.K., slavery was bad, therefore people are owed something.’ This is not a reparations speech. This is a speech about saying it’s time for the nation to do better, to form a more perfect union.”

Mr. Obama’s address came more than a year into a campaign conceived and conducted to appear to transcend the issue of race, to try to build a broad coalition of racial and ethnic groups favoring change. In the issues he has emphasized and the language he has used, as well as in the way he has presented himself, he has worked to elude pigeonholing as a black politician.

He has been criticized as “not black enough” and “too black,” he acknowledged Tuesday. In recent months, the issue of race has stirred up the smooth surface of his campaign and become a source of tension between him and his opponent, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the past week, videotaped snippets of the incendiary race rhetoric of Mr. Obama’s longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., seemed on the verge of tainting Mr. Obama with the stereotype he had carefully avoided: angry black politician.

He faced a choice: Having already denounced Mr. Wright’s ferocious charges about white America, he could try to distance himself from the man who drew him to Christianity, married him and baptized his two children. Or he could try to explain what appeared to many to be the contradiction between Mr. Wright’s world view and the one Mr. Obama had professed as his own.

To some extent, he did both.

In a setting that bespoke the presidential, he began with the personal: He invoked his own biography as the son of a black Kenyan man and a white American woman, grandson of a World War II veteran and a bomber assembly line worker, husband of a black American who carries “the blood of slaves and slave owners.” Seared into his genetic makeup, he said, is “the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts — that out of many, we are truly one.”

He condemned Mr. Wright’s remarks as divisive but at the same time embraced him as family, “as imperfect as he may be.” He traced the roots of black church preaching deep into “the bitterness and bias” of the black experience. He offered a primer on the link between today’s racial disparities and the system of legalized discrimination that prevented blacks from owning property, joining unions, becoming police officers and firefighters, and accumulating wealth to pass on to future generations.

“For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away,” Mr. Obama said. “Nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table.” And occasionally, he said, “in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.”

He acknowledged white anger, too — over things like affirmative action and forced school busing — but urged both sides to address the subject to find a way forward.

“Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,” Mr. Obama said. He said the controversies over the past couple of weeks “reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through — a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.”

Historians and others described the speech’s candidness on race as almost without precedent. John Hope Franklin, a Duke University historian who led an advisory commission on race relations set up by President Bill Clinton, said Mr. Obama pointed out how easily the question of race can be distorted in this country, “which has three centuries of experience with it and yet we act like this is something new.”

Julian Bond, the longtime civil rights activist, said the speech moved him to tears. Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, said he believed the speech would “go down as one of the great, magnificent and moving speeches in the American political tradition.”

“I hear so many people saying we want a national conversation on race but it’s never quite worked,” he said. “He was able to do this in one speech. But he was able to do it in a nonpartisan way in that he saw both sides.”

"A MORE PERFECT UNION"

Rhett Arrives

The First Day of the rest of His Life

The Plan

The Dining/Living Room of the Future.



The Cold retreats inside and out as the warmth of natural wood fills the house. I am so looking forward to sitting down at a table and having one of Jim's Specialties!

More...

...Progress

VoyeurCam Exclusive!

The Fireman awaits his Call.

TRAGEDY!

Shock and Horror Filled the bustling streets of the Big Apple this week when a beautiful Mini Cooper was Crushed by a falling construction crane.

No further details are available on the status of the Mini, though we are watching this story closely.

Updates as they come in....

Green And All

Really not sure why.. but..

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

What was in that Banana Cream Pie??

'Gilligan's' Mary Ann Caught With Dope

AP

Posted: 2008-03-11 17:54:18

DRIGGS, Idaho (March 11) - Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann on "Gilligan's Island," is serving six months' unsupervised probation after allegedly being caught with marijuana in her car.

She was sentenced Feb. 29 to five days in jail, fined $410.50 and placed on probation after pleading guilty to one count of reckless driving.

Under a plea agreement, three misdemeanor counts - driving under the influence, possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of a controlled substance - were dropped.

On Oct. 18, Teton County sheriff's Deputy Joseph Gutierrez arrested Wells as she was driving home from a surprise birthday party that was held for her. According to the sheriff's office report, Gutierrez pulled Wells over after noticing her swerve and repeatedly speed up and slow down. When Gutierrez asked about a marijuana smell, Wells said she'd just given a ride to three hitchhikers and had dropped them off when they began smoking something. Gutierrez found half-smoked joints and two small cases used to store marijuana.

The 69-year-old Wells, founder of the Idaho Film and Television Institute and organizer of the region's annual family movie festival called the Spud Fest, then failed a sobriety test.

Big Tex

Clinton Will Lose Texas

By David Knowles

The Texas Secretary of State will release the official results of the Democratic primary on March 29th. But if initial estimates hold, Barack Obama will beat Hillary Clinton in the race for delegates. CNN confirms what others have been seeing for days. While Clinton won the state's popular vote, Obama racked up more caucus support, so that, now that the dust is settling, the Lone Star state's delegate total reads:

Obama: 61 delegates from the popular vote + 38 delegates from caucuses = 99 delegates.

Clinton: 65 delegates from the popular vote + 29 delegates from Caucuses = 94 delegates.

So news people can now stop saying "two big wins in Ohio and Texas." Big win in Ohio, sure, but not Texas. Yes, Clinton could still pull it out, but that seems increasingly unlikely.

A further analysis of the delegate race over at DailyKos reveals that Clinton's supposedly big week has actually resulted in a net loss of 15 delegates to the front-runner. That's right, Obama continued to widen his delegate lead. Add to that another 5 delegate cushion after Mississippi, as well as another 99,000-vote-advantage to buttress Obama's overall lead in the popular vote, and one gets the feeling that Obama's momentum didn't really subside as much as was reported.

Who's the VP??

Current Delegate Count
	Barack Obama 1,510.5 74.6% of the 2,025 needed
	Hillary Clinton 1,403 69.3% of the 2,025 needed

Another Win for Obama

Senator Barack Obama won Mississippi’s Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday, building his delegate lead over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the final contest before the nominating fight heads to Pennsylvania for a six-week showdown.

With 99 percent of precincts reporting across Mississippi, Mr. Obama led Mrs. Clinton 60 percent to 37 percent.

“It’s just another win in our column, and we are getting more delegates,” Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said in declaring victory in an interview on CNN from Chicago, where he arrived Tuesday evening after spending the day in Mississippi and Pennsylvania. “I am grateful to the people of Mississippi for the wonderful support. What we’ve tried to do is steadily make sure that in each state we are making the case about the need for change in this country.”

- NYT (03/12/08)

Madonna Inducted into Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Leave it to Madonna to make the right gesture. For her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, she didn’t worry about whether her career as a pop hitmaker, image maker, sex symbol and provocateuse qualified her as a important figure in any narrowly defined genre of rock ’n’ roll. She just brought on an unquestioned rocker — Iggy Pop, the blunt, anarchic and durable songwriter and performer who’s a fellow Michigan-born musician — to sing punk-chorded versions of her hits “Burnin’ Up” and “Ray of Light.” He was shirtless, hyperactive and backed by the Stooges, who along with him have been nominated but snubbed by the Hall of Fame.

Madonna entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in its 23rd annual induction ceremony, held Monday night at the Waldorf-Astoria and telecast live on VH1 Classic. She was named to the hall alongside the Indiana rocker John Mellencamp, the Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen, the instrumental band the Ventures, from Tacoma, Wash., and the British Invasion band the Dave Clark Five, whose lead singer, Mike Smith, died on Feb. 28.

The Louisiana-born blues harmonica player Little Walter, a major figure in Chicago blues, was inducted as an influence on rock ’n’ roll. The songwriters and producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, whose Philadelphia International label was a 1970s soul powerhouse, were named as nonperformers; their award had been renamed the Ahmet Ertegun Award, after the founder of Atlantic Records and one of the founders of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

But it was Madonna’s night. She was introduced by the multimillion-selling pop singer Justin Timberlake, who collaborated on her coming album, “Hard Candy.” He said that while they were working together, he had come to the studio one day feeling ill, and Madonna had suggested a shot of vitamin B12. She didn’t call a doctor, he said. She took a Zip-Loc bag of B12 syringes from her designer bag, said, “Drop ’em,” gave him the shot, and added, “Nice top shelf.” Mr. Timberlake said, “That was one of the greatest days of my life.”

Madonna, calling herself a “control freak,” immediately corrected him. “I said, ‘Pull your pants down,’ ” she asserted, before starting one of the longest speeches given at any Hall of Fame ceremony. Among the people she thanked were naysayers: “The ones that said I was talentless, that I was chubby, that I couldn’t sing, that I was a one-hit wonder,” she said. “They pushed me to be better, and I am grateful for their resistance.”

The annual induction ceremony, for musicians whose first commercial releases were at least 25 years ago, took place as the recording business struggles.

- NYT (03-11-08)