STILL TESTING MY EMAIL ALERT PROGRAM

This is very funny!

I GOT THIS NEW DEODORANT TODAY. THE INSTRUCTIONS SAID REMOVE CAP AND PUSH UP BOTTOM. I CAN BARELY WALK, BUT WHENEVER I FART, THE ROOM SMELLS AWESOME!

AN INTERESTING ARTICLE

Here is an interesting article that everyone should read, especially some radical conservatives who, I fear, live in an alternative universe.  Unfortunately, they are exactly the ones who will not read it, and if they do, they will  not understand it.  They're not too bright, you know.

Chuckwagon Journal

Tom Teepen: Alternate reality confronts Obama and his yes-we-canners

By Tom Teepen

Posted: September 18, 2009 - 2:00 AM

In CrazyWorld, Barack Obama is a foreigner who has unconstitutionally usurped the presidency of the United States.

In Actual America, Hawaii-born Obama was elected president by his fellow citizens.

And so it goes on both sides of the mystic curtain.

In CrazyWorld, that recent Tea Party rally in Washington drew 2 million people and the failure of the ever-despised mainstream media to admit as much was one more example of their perfidiousness. An aerial photo, eagerly circulated on the political right, indeed did show a monster crowd, surely a million and more.

In Actual America, the photo turned out to be of the 1997 Promise Keepers rally. Old hands at guesstimating crowd sizes figure the Tea Party turnout at about 75,000. Most media skipped the numbers game, put the crowd in the "tens of thousands" and characterized it as "impressive" or words to that effect, hardly a negation.

In CrazyWorld, the federal government is being insidiously infused with "czars" and in the academies of right-wing arcana, the movement's scholars argue over whether there are just 32 or maybe as many as 140-plus, a parody of medieval monks bickering over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

In Actual America, the president has assigned various appointees to oversee a number of projects or programs — nuclear nonproliferation, the bank bailout, faith-based activities and so on. All modern presidents have done much the same. The appointees have standard-issue bureaucratic titles. "Czar" is the invention of fairway barkers at the right-wing carnival like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.

In CrazyWorld, Obama is surrendering to terrorism.

In Actual America, he has sent 21,000 additional troops into Afghanistan, home turf of terrorism and wellspring of 9/11, and seems likely to send more. He has increased the military budget.

In CrazyWorld, Obama is bankrupting taxpayers and the nation.

In Actual America, he proposed and Congress enacted a tax cut good for up to $400 per person for 95 percent of taxpayers and a $2,500 tax credit to offset college tuition costs. The Treasury calculates it will save 5 million families a total of about $9 billion.

The record deficit that he's presiding over is overwhelmingly a projection of previously committed entitlements (Social Security, Medicare and so on), of leftover Bush debt and of revenue losses from the recession, which recovery will largely make up.

In CrazyWorld, Obama — when he's not a fascist — is a communist, recently morphed from Marxist to Stalinist, pursuing an alien agenda.

In Actual America, Obama is a moderate-to-liberal Democrat carrying through on the platform he openly espoused to win election just 10 months ago.

In CrazyWorld, the fact that the House health care reform bill is 1,018 pages long somehow shows its hopelessness.

In Actual America, the format for congressional bills is about a third or more white space — 25 double-spaced lines per page, about six or seven words per line. President Bush's 1997 budget bill was 1,482 pages. So?

You know, we would be able to hear one another a lot better here on Earth if it weren't for all the static coming from outer space.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. E-mail: teepencolumn@earthlink.net.

TRAVELING BY CAR ACROSS THE U.S.

OK, so my "out of commission for a few days" turned out to be almost four weeks.  Sorry about that.

We did spend several weeks traveling from Colorado to Las Vegas, NV to Phoenix, AZ to Walkersville, MD, and that kept me from adding to my blog.  Aside from the time spent traveling, I failed to take into account how much time I would spend tending to other matters upon my return home: unloading the car, putting things away, yard work, garden work, getting caught up on local news from the neighbors, and so on.

Everything we had carefully packed in the car when we left the ranch in Colorado had to be unloaded and we had to put all of it away somewhere in the house.  Garbage couldn’t be picked up until I called the waste disposal people and let them know we were back in town; the same with newspaper delivery.  We had to stop by the post office to get our accumulated mail that the postman had been saving since we asked him to stop forwarding it and to ask that our regular mail delivery start again.  There was no food in the house, so grocery shopping was high on the list of things to do first.  And so it went.  Everywhere we turned we came up with another "do me first" job.

The lad I had hired to do the lawn had not kept up with the mowing because of the multiple rains they had in our area this summer, so the grass was way too long.  When I finally got to it (the first dry day) I had to stop repeatedly to empty the grass catcher.  A job that usually took 45 minutes or so took over an hour and a half! 

On to the garden.  Some of the weeds there had developed stems over one inch thick -- and an attitude.  It takes a brave man to tackle weeds that big.  They are tough and stubborn – and resist being pulled from the ground with, literally, every fiber of their being.  (I should apologize for the pun but, actually, I’m rather proud of it.)

But that’s enough about my home chores.  The title of this piece is about car travel and I want to tell you about our travels … by car.

Car travel for many of us conjures up those days from our youth when we sat strapped in the back seat of the family car and whined – because that was the only thing that would get out parents’ attention – “Are we there yet?”  Our parents played silly games with us to keep our minds off our leg cramps and numb butts, or our endless need to pee.  The games worked for a while, but we really wanted to get out of the car and move around.  Car travel was not our favorite mode of travel.

Planes and trains are nice.  Planes get you there faster.  On trains, at least, you can move around a little.  But cars?  Too slow.

Well if you have vertigo, as I have, or claustrophobia, as my wife does, plane travel is out of the question.  Besides, we have learned to relax and enjoy the countryside we are traveling through.  Car travel allows us to do that.

All that being said, we find that car travel offers additional things that other forms of transportation do not.  We could stop when and where we wanted, for one thing.  When we saw a road sign, country market or anything else that caught out attention, we could pull over and investigate it.  We stopped in Kansas, for instance, when we saw one of those brown government information signs that said “Pawnee Village.”  We looked at each other, nodded our heads and made a quick decision to check it out.  Eight miles down the road, we came to a museum constructed where archeologists had unearthed a Pawnee village.  The museum building was over just one of the villages large, domed shelters.  Since we were the only ones there, we got a special one-man tour from the interpreter-guide on duty.

Alas, I am out of time and space.  More on some of the special aspects of our drive across country in the next blog.  I try to keep these personal accounts brief so you don't get bored (well, too bored) reading them.