Category Archives: Holidays

Giving Thanks

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AAA predicts that 43.6 million Americans will travel 50 miles or more from home during the holiday weekend. That’s up about 1% over the 43.3 million who traveled last year, mostly because of “lower gas prices.” This is the fourth consecutive year for holiday travel growth since 2008, when Thanksgiving travel plummeted 25% as the economy tanked. Nationally, 90% of travelers will take to the road rather than fly, up about half a percent.

The Associated Press says “filling up the tank will take less money than people expected” when AAA conducted the survey early last month “because of a dramatic drop in gas prices.”

Dramatic? Drop?

Gasoline cost $2.87/gallon for Thanksgiving, 2010.

Gasoline cost a record $3.32/gallon on Thanksgiving Day last year.

How is it that gas prices “dropping” to $3.44 is better?

Ben Franklin thought the turkey should be America’s bird so I’m thankful to have found a big inflatable turkey in a local yard for this week. The real Thanksgiving column is here.


ahh, supper

We are staying put for the day but I am thankful that we have friends coming from afar. Joe will join us. He lives next door. Ed says he is very, very hungry. He lives across the street.

There’s An App For That

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On this day that we rest from our labors, 23 million Americans don’t have labors to rest from.

Actually, that’s a bad number. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that “Both the number of unemployed persons and the unemployment rate were essentially unchanged in July. Both measures have shown little movement thus far in 2012.”

boatbuilding142,220,000.
243,354,000.

The bottom number is what the BLS calls the “civilian noninstitutional population” (no, I don’t know how we institutionalized 68 million people, either). The top number is the number of people employed, the “civilian labor force.” What we really know is that 12,794,000 people are collecting up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits and the rest, 87,340,000 men and women, young and old, either don’t have, don’t want, or can’t do a job.

“President Obama is creating jobs!” my liberal friend Fanny Guay said.

Good spin.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has an anonymous source — popularly believed to be Al Sharpton — who whispered that he has proof that Mitt Romney never paid income taxes for the past 110 years.

Really good spin.

Sen. Reid again refused to release his own tax returns, even as he continued to demand that Gov. Romney make his own public. Rev. Sharpton, by the way, has a new tax lien to pay; he still owes $359,973 to the IRS for 2009 personal income tax. He also owes a total of $3.7 million in city, state and federal taxes, including penalties, dating back to 2002.

My new friend Ashley Proctor has been out of work in Madison, Wisconsin, since the Scott Walker cuts eliminated her job at Wisconsin Community Services.

“Losing my job is partly Gov. Walker’s fault,” Ms. Proctor said, “but it’s really the Koch Brothers who got him elected!”

That would be the same Scott Walker pranked by a left-wing blogger who posed as David Koch in a call to the governor. The blogger published that Gov. Walker was gonna take the money. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) later claimed that the Koch Brothers bankrolled Gov. Walker’s campaign to the tune of $8 million.

Great spin.

politifact.com rated Rep. Wasserman Schultz’s claim False. So did the New York Times.

Meanwhile, Darcy Burner, a candidate for Congress in Washington state echoed Ashley when she said, “Our democracy has been bought and sold by people like the Kochs.”

machinist“So basically the Koch Brothers are the George Soros of the Right?” Rufus asked her.

Ms. Burner wrote an app that helps good travelers boycott Koch Brothers’ products while shopping.

“Oh, wait,” Rufus said. “They’re like Soros except for being on the Right and in that they make their money by manufacturing stuff? So she wants us to boycott the poor schlubs who are actually working???”

Ahh, George Soros. “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England” did it by short selling more than $10 billion in pounds sterling which devalued the pound and in a few days put more people around the world out of work than Bain Capital did in all the years Gov. Romney was there.

In 2005 the French Court of Appeals convicted Mr. Soros of insider trading. The French Supreme Court confirmed the conviction the following year.

Even left wing darling Paul Krugman wrote about Mr. Soros, “[N]obody who has read a business magazine in the last few years can be unaware that these days there really are investors who not only move money in anticipation of a currency crisis, but actually do their best to trigger that crisis for fun and profit. These new actors on the scene do not yet have a standard name; my proposed term is ‘Soroi’.”

Mr. Soros, like Democrat Joseph Kennedy before him, became busily engaged in buying approbation after looting the financial markets so they could run what Sen. Bernard Sanders (S-VT) always called the “good PACs.”

Simply unbelievable spin. Except for a True Believer

Rufus has bought and used equipment from Koch Engineering. The rest of us have probably sipped from a Dixie cup, wiped up with Angel Soft™ toilet paper or Brawny™ paper towels, pulled up socks containing Lycra™ and walked on a Stainmaster™ carpet. All told, the evil Koch Brothers Empire™ employs about 67,000 people most of whom have a paid day off today.

Not bad for Labor Day, eh?

My 2011 Labor Day column about how politicians create jobs is worth rereading today. You might also enjoy the 2010 Labor Day reminiscence, Milestones.

Memorial Day

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Today is Memorial Day in the United States. The holiday once known as Decoration Day commemorates the men and women who perished under the flag of this country, fighting for what sets our America apart: the freedom to live as we please.

“Holiday” is a contraction of holy and day; the word originally referred only to special religious days. Here in the U. S. of A. holiday means any special day off work or school instead of a normal day off work or school. Politics that once trusted in God is long since unholy.

The Uniform Holidays Bill which gave us Monday shopaholidays moved Memorial Day from its traditional May 30 date to the last Monday in May.

Editorial cartoon from Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Lest we forget, the Americans we honor did not “give their lives.” They did not merely perish. They did not just cease living, check out, croak, depart, drop, expire, kick off. kick the bucket, pass away or pass on, pop off, or bite the dust. Their lives were taken from them by force on battlefields around the world. They were killed. Whether you believe they died with honor, whether you believe our cause just, died they did.

Today is not a “free” day off work or school. Today is not the big sale day at the Dollar Store. Today is a day of Honor.

“All persons present in uniform should render the military salute. Members of the Armed Forces and veterans who are present but not in uniform may render the military salute. All other persons present should face the flag and stand at attention with their right hand over the heart, or if applicable, remove their headdress with their right hand and hold it at the left shoulder, the hand being over the heart. Citizens of other countries present should stand at attention. All such conduct toward the flag in a moving column should be rendered at the moment the flag passes.”

The American flag today should first be raised to the top of the flagpole for a moment, then lowered to the half-staff position where it will remain until Noon. The flag should be raised to the peak at Noon for the remainder of Memorial Day.

There are those in this country who would use today to legislate the man out of the fight. They can do that but the men and women we honor today knew you cannot legislate the fight out of the man. They have fought and they have died to protect us from those who would kill us. And perhaps to protect us from those who would sell out our birthright.

There is no end to the mutts who would kill our men and women and would kill their own. We have pledged to leave one such place by Memorial Day, 2014, but the mutts there will not have left and the mutts there will not give up killing our men and women and killing their own.

If I had but one wish granted on this day, I wish not one more soldier die. Ever. But die they did around the world again this year and die they will. For us. For me.

Because those men and women died, I get to publish these words again this year. And you get to read them. Please pause and reflect as you go to a concert, stop at an artist’s studio, or simply read a book in the sunshine the price we pay to keep our right to do those things.

Editor’s Note: This column is slightly updated from one that appeared first in 2008.

Giving Thanks

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Thanksgiving is a patriotic holiday, sandwiched as it is between Veterans Day and the “official” beginning of the Christmas Shopping season.

Pilgrims, Progressing SouthI’ll come back to the sandwiches.

Everyone not living under a rock knows that Thanksgiving Day is America’s primary pagan festival, celebrated to show thanks, gratitude, and love to the gods for a bountiful harvest on a New England day that fields have been barren for weeks and are now mostly covered in snow. This holiday has moved away from its religious roots and is now a time to participate in the largest single slaughter of fowl in the universe.

Here in the States, we mark Thanksgiving Day on the fourth Thursday of November each year. Our Canadian neighbors celebrated it six weeks earlier, on the second Monday in October. The snow falls earlier on Canada’s by-then barren fields. We saw one of those neigbors at the Kmart yesterday, looking for a potato masher. She was pleased to get two thanksgiving meals; she was less pleased to cook two thanksgiving meals.

Our collective memory of the holiday is sort of wrong. In American as Pumpkin Pie, Plimoth Plantation tells us that

Prior to the mid-1800s, Thanksgiving had nothing to do with the 1621 harvest celebration, Pilgrims, or older immigrants. Thanksgiving started as a traditional New England holiday that celebrated family and community. It descended from Puritan days of fasting and festive rejoicing. The governor of each colony or state declared a day of thanksgiving each autumn, to give thanks for general blessings. As New Englanders moved west in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, they took their holiday with them. After the harvest, governors across the country proclaimed individual Thanksgivings, and families traveled back to their original homes for family reunions, church services and large meals.

I expect to have a “traditional” Thanksgiving meal this year, whether I cook it myownself or drive over to the Cracked Conch with Nancy and Joe and Willie and maybe Ed if he makes it back from Provo. We’ll have a small turkey with bread (not oyster, thank you very much) stuffing, cranberry sauce, smashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes, cole slaw, and pumpkin pie for dessert.

That basic menu has remained unchanged for a couple hundred years but that’s all the older our menu is. The three-day pig-out of 1621 at Plymouth (the “First Thanksgiving”) may have had ducks or geese, but yes they had no potatoes, and bananas were equally scarce. No apples. And no pumpkin pie. Likely no turkeys who were wily even then.

I don’t care. I shall have pah.

I AM™ a lucky boy lucky. My family is scattered across a couple thousand miles but we are all speaking to each other. Anne’s broken leg is healing. My island house value sank a little more so my future property taxes may be lower and I did not get four inches of snow yesterday. The insurance company finally decided I really should have had collision coverage and paid the shop. Next week, I shall have white meat turkey sandwiches slathered with mayonnaise on good crunchy sourdough bread for lunch every day of the week. Most important, I have been blessed by friends.

People decorate for Halloween and for Armistice or Remembrance Day and for Christmas but Thanksgiving, not so much.

Ben Franklin thought the turkey should be America’s bird so I’m thankful to have found a big inflatable turkey in a local yard for this week.


ahh, supper