It's Spring and I'm Blossoming Somewhere Else

Spring comes to our yard

Hi, loyal readers, it's me. (You still there?  Hello??)  I know. I haven't been spending much time here and so neither have you. I don't blame you. The truth is, I've found another place.

A place where writers gather, along with readers. Because after all this time of going it alone I'm finding I miss my community. I need that interaction, that commiseration when things go wrong, that cheering on when things go well. I need them.

But I need readers even more.

So it's time to move on.

Cut River Bridge

Oh, you've all been nothing but kind, but the truth is, I don't always know you're here. I needed to get away from the Trump nightmare for a while and I did that. I'm writing about other things now,  including writing about writing--my first, my own true love. Writing.

I won't say I'll never write about politics again. Who would I be kidding? I sweat politics, even when I'm not talking about it. But if I do it, I probably won't be doing it from here. This door is closing.

I'm sad about that. This has been my headquarters for more than 10 years and it served its purpose, but it's a house, not a home. The life has gone out of it, just as the oomph has gone out of me when it comes to politics. I started this blog to talk about politics and now I no longer want to do that.

For those of you who come here for the sidebar links at Necessary Voices, you'll still find them here. They're all pretty great. I'll be reading them, too.

I'm temporarily headquartered over at Medium now, but I'm spreading my wings, sending out pieces to other places and not relying on any one blog, on any one website. I'm excited and I hope you'll come along with me.

I'm keeping my other blog, Constant Commoner, open for a while, but mainly I'll be at Medium.

This blog will be my archives now, unless I can't stand it and I change my mind and open the doors again. (Which could happen. I'm only closing it, I'm not locking it.)

Ready to fly

You can also follow me on Twitter and on Facebook. I'll always be there. I think.

I'm thinking about starting a newsletter but it's at the very beginning stages. In the  meantime, you can write me at ramonasvoices dot com. I love mail! Keep in touch!

So here I go. Wish me luck. And thanks again. 💘

Hello Civility, Goodbye Rage

I'm sick to death of having to see, hear, and worry about Donald Trump.  I'm sick of having to wonder how we got here, living in a country where a ludicrous, ignorant madman is in power, where the party in power is turning a blind eye, and where midterm elections are only days away and we're still not sure the good guys will win.

We're living through times so crazy we couldn't even imagine them three short years ago. We were different people before Trump crashed through seemingly impenetrable barriers to get to the White House. We were nicer. Now even the best of us have become loud-mouthed name-callers. We use F-bombs and C-words as safety valves. We look to settle arguments by twisting knives in already gaping wounds. We work hard at it, to the point of neglecting real issues.

 We spend hours on Facebook and Twitter savoring the need to turn the air blue. We can't get through the day without using CAPS and exclamations (!!!!!!), posting links and memes intended to satisfy our rage--as if that's even possible.

We gladly follow people whose strength lies in clever insults, expressing the kind of vitriol we say we're working against. When they insult fellow followers who dare to disagree with them we give them a pass, hoping against hope we never say anything they might take wrong. (You know who you are, Twitter denizens.)

I don't want that anymore. I don't want to do it anymore. (Because, yes, I have.) I want to be among people who fight for decency by being civil. I want to go back to being strong without being cruel. There's enough cruelty out there without it stinking up my own circles.

On both Facebook and Twitter, I'm dropping or blocking people who use rage as their only tool. I don't want to be around them anymore. Rage is contagious, it's exhausting, it's meaningless in the long run.

Rage is a catalyst. It's never a solution.

I'm not going to drop either Facebook or Twitter. Wouldn't think of it. In times when we need more than smoke signals to get to the truth, both sites become useful war rooms.

But I'm tired of fighting the good fight through muck and mire. Starting today, I'm looking for civil warriors. No name-callers, no body-shamers, no sniffy moralists with axes to grind.

I'll see how it goes.

So it's Clinton vs. Sanders. Can't We Just Be Frenemies?

Yesterday Joe Biden stood in the Rose Garden with his wife Jill and President Obama and announced he wouldn't be running for president. (Thank you, Joe, you did the right thing. I love you.) It's still early in the election season (WAY early.  Did you know Canadians can only campaign for 78 days? Must seem like a damned eternity, right?) but unless a dark horse comes up from behind, it looks like it'll be a run between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.

Way back in 2007-08, Hillary Clinton was one of the two front-runners as she battled it out with Barack Obama for the top Party position. The fact that neither of them were white men made the whole contest especially interesting, but the unofficial skirmishes between the Clinton supporters and the Obama supporters were, let's just say, spectacular!  (I learned bad words I didn't even know existed.)  The miff factor was so strong, so relentless, you can still hear echos today.  Some have never forgotten, never forgiven.  And they're b-a-a-a-c-k. . .

I have to admit, they scare me.  Now they're Hillary and Bernie supporters--fervent, passionate, TYPING-IN-ALL-CAPS supporters--and if that's not bad enough, (Not that either Bernie or Hillary are bad. . . No, I will NEVER say that. I've seen bad and they're not it.) they're on Twitter and Facebook.  And so am I.

Facebook and Twitter, I don't have to tell you, are like vast out-of-this-world megalopoli full of creatures who may or may not be what they seem.  On Facebook we "like" people we don't even know.  We do the same on Twitter except we don't "like" them, we "follow" them.  Sometimes we actually grow to like the people we "like".  Ditto the people we follow.  It works magnificently as long as we don't talk about religion or politics or the Kardashians.  (I'm kidding.  We don't talk about the Kardashians.  We don't even know who they are.)

I, a known political junkie, have chosen to "like" a whole lot of people whose topic of choice is politics.  We do the happy stuff, sharing cute pet memes, taking those tests to show how smart we are, but that's because it's hard work trying to save an entire country. Sometimes we need a break.

Most of the time, when we're on the topic of politics, we agree on almost everything, including the right to disagree.  We're liberals and progressives, Democrats and Independents, religious and not, with a few conservatives, Republicans, and agnostics mixed in, just for flavor.

Until now, it's been good.  But now we're getting into presidential politics.  The big time. The elections aren't until November, 2016, but we've already begun to get testy.  I see trouble ahead.

I've been defending Hillary as if she's an underdog and needs my kind of help.  I've been looking for any little thing to prove that Bernie isn't a saint.  I hate myself already and it's not even Christmas. (By the way, I'll be taking a short break from politics around Christmas to fight for our right to say "Happy Holidays". I'll be back some time after December 25.)

It's early yet.  So far the barbs are polite:  "I'm disappointed to hear you say that."  "I know you're smarter than that."  "You can't really mean that!"  "Sad. . ."  

But we're reaching the point where we're setting up camps and gearing up for battle--against each other. Whichever candidate we're behind is the absolute best.  The obvious choice.  Anyone who can't see that is. . .(fill in the blank, the rougher the better.)

I wish I could just sit one this out.  (I can't, of course.  I couldn't.)  I like the people I "like".  I want us to stay friends, but I can see already that as the months go by our affection for each other, our respect, will dwindle. I don't know if we'll ever get back what we had before.

When the primaries are finally over, one of two people, either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, will be the Democratic candidate.  If the candidate we wanted doesn't win we won't pick up our toys and go home.  We'll stifle our fury and do what we have to do--we'll work to make sure our next president is a Democrat.

It's not enough to win the argument.  We have to win this election.  I hope we can remember that.


(Also published at Dagblog and Crooks and Liars.)

Todd Courser: You're Sure That's Just Tea You're Drinking?

Here's a question:  If you were a state lawmaker (male, married) known for sniffy, holier-than-thou, just awful Tea Party politics and you were having an affair with another sniffy holier-than-thou Tea Party lawmaker (female, married) and you realized you were about to get caught, how would you handle it?  Would you think, seriously, that the best way to deflect from the real affair was to invent a phony story about being accused of a liaison with a male prostitute and then get really pissed at the person spreading that story, even though that person was you?

If you answered "no", you can pride yourself on the fact that you are among the multitudes.  Only one person on the entire surface of this earth can (and would) answer "yes", and his name, if you haven't heard, is Todd Courser.

You couldn't have missed the stories coming out about this whole tawdry affair.  (Don't you love that word, "tawdry"?  Couldn't you see someone like Todd Courser using it?)  The stories are everywhere now, all over the national airwaves, with our friends at Eclectablog staying right on top of it so we don't have to. (updates galore!)

(Photo:  Dale G. Young/AP)

Todd Courser appeared on the scene in Lansing on January 1 of this year, when he was sworn in as a Freshman legislator (along with said inamorata and all-around legislative partner in crime, Cindy Gamrat).  Before the month was out he was throwing his weight around about his office furniture (he didn't like it) and about the seating arrangement in the House (he was offended by his placement).

Twenty days after he and his pal Gamrat were sworn in, they were already responding to the governor's State of the State message.

"Greetings friends and fellow Patriots, We want to first thank God and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ for our salvation and His abounding and generous gifts, blessings and His grace, and mercy on our state and nation. It is important to acknowledge that it is only by His power and might that our state and nation remain. It is not the bills or the laws or the regulations that make our state and nation great, rather, it is recognizing who God is and submitting to His authority and dominion in our lives and as a state and nation; without this acknowledgement and also valuing God’s gift of life, then all other steps to set our state on the right course will be amiss."

From there they went on to the hazards of a bloated government,  the constant collecting and shameful misuse of our taxes, the need to move away from "cradle to grave" government care-taking (As if!)  and an entreaty to trust in the Lord.

Which led, of course, to this:

America is a Christian nation founded on Judeo-Christian values and God has given us incredible freedom and opportunity.  Let us enjoy all that we have been blessed with as we carry forth with the responsibility to bestow these same freedoms and opportunities to future generations.

They did actually mention corporate welfare, and for that I was forced to give them brownie points.  Which I promptly took away after reading their core liberties in something called The Contract for Liberty Project.  (See State of the State response, linked here, in case you missed it above.)  The list begins with "The freedom to be born" and "The freedom to defend ourselves" and ends with "Free from government intrusions" and "Free and independent states".

And we're paying them for this.

Ordinarily, I'm one of those people who doesn't give a flying foofoo about who's sleeping with who.  Whom.  Whatever.  It's a personal matter, affecting only the injured private parties, and as long as it doesn't affect their ability to govern it's none of my business.  In this case, I'm making an exception. Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat are such insufferable Right Wing pseudo-religious hypocrites, I can't think of anyone in my state who deserves this kind of exposure more.   It couldn't happen to two more narrow-minded, ill-equipped, pretend-politicians.

Joshua Cline, a former staffer for both Courser and Gamrat, quit in disgust in April, just months after the new session began.  He recently agreed to an interview with the Detroit Free Press. The article  focused, of course, on the inside story about the romantic hi-jinks, leaving what I thought was the real gem for later:

Cline, a Lapeer County native, knew Courser before he became a legislator and worked on previous campaigns for the Lapeer Republican. So, he said, he was shocked to become a staffer and encounter a boss who treated his staffers with disrespect and adopted a 'haughty and elitist' attitude.
"We had a staff meeting in early January and [Courser] said, 'Let's get it straight boys. We're not here to pass legislation. We're here for the messaging moments and media,' Cline said. He said the decision to quit was wrenching."

So the newly elected taxpayer-employed public servant thought he'd found the perfect pulpit.  Fancy that.

But when the feces hit the fan,  Todd couldn't leave well enough alone.  He couldn't just go into his closet and pray quietly (Matthew 6:6) like Cindy apparently did.   No, he had to take to Facebook (where he seems to spend a lot of time) and do a little crying out loud

My lack of righteousness does not negate God’s righteousness –
In all of this – it is nothing short of a massive earthquake for me and my family and those who have supported me and even to those who hate me; thru this a series of common themes have emerged and many will take days weeks months and generations to see the full fruit of, but one that is clear is that I am now the poster boy for those who would say “God is dead,” or “ Christians are failures,” or “Christians are hypocrites.”

I didn't say that.  Did you?

Two days ago Todd told his Facebook followers that there would be an announcement on his website. Naturally, everyone thought for sure he was going to resign.  But, no.  No, he didn't.  Instead, he announced that he was requesting an Attorney General investigation into the purchase of an expensive and unnecessary legislative office building in downtown Lansing.  (You go, Todd!)  But at the very bottom of the announcement--easy to miss if you neglected to read the whole thing--was this sentence:  "I am also working on a statement in regards to this current call for my censure..."

Oh dear.  This doesn't look good.  But then neither does Todd's website page, where his Fourth of July greeting called for Privatizing Marriage:

We are living in the last days...
2 Chronicle 7:14 - if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sins, and heal their land…Please sign the Religious Freedom Petition Now!

At least I think that's what he was doing.  I don't exactly know how one goes about keeping marriage private and still legal.  If it's marriage in the eyes of God, they tried that.  Stamp your foot three times, turn your back on your spouse, and the marriage is annulled.  (Male foot-stampers and back-turners only.)

Betcha Todd wishes there had been something like that in place for affairs. Huh?


(Cross-posted at Dagblog and Liberaland.  Featured on Crooks and Liars MBRU)

FRIDAY FOLLIES: On the Palin Docudramody, the Cantor uninvite, and Will Rogers' finest moments

 All alone, I'm so all alone...  When the Sarah Palin docudromedy "The Undefeated" debuted last week, Conor Friedersdorf happened to be visiting his parents in All Red All the Time Orange County.  He went to see the Sarah movie hoping to interview Sarah fans to find out what the hell they're thinking.  Except he didn't find any.  In fact, he didn't find anyone at all--hardly.  He wrote about it in the Atlantic and -- I don't know -- I just wanted to cry.  I mean, an entire movie about Sarah Palin and even the Orange County gushers can't bear to watch it?  That's just sad.

But wait.  That can't be right. It's La Belle Palin we're talking about here.  So, okay!  The Washington Times says the lamestream press got it allllll wrong.  As usual.  On purpose.  It may not have been boffo, but it did pretty good compared to that movie about Eliot Spitzer or that movie about Jack Abramoff.  But the last Harry Potter movie debuted on the same weekend.  Harry Potter!  So what would you expect?  Jeez.

And here's the other thing (sniffle):  If hundreds of thousands of people had only read Ben Howe's pre-review on Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood, Harry Potter would be eating dust!  The movie is brilliant!  Dammit!

Eric Cantor, in true democratic spirit (how'd he let that get by?), invited everyone (not just his nearest, dearest, most oblivious fans) to his Facebook page for a confab on whether he and his buddies should destroy the country swiftly or take the chance that the voters might not notice the country's going down the tubes and and let it dangle in the wind a while before tightening the noose.

Well, those damned liberals got wind of it and got a flash mob going, trying to disrupt the whole exciting exercise.  Honestly, there's only so much tolerance for that sort of thing when you're a Republican, so Eric's peeps got busy deleting all the leftist comments, ruing the day they ever got the silly idea of opening it up to anyone, just anyone, in the first place.

So if you look today you'll see it's still open, but they've figured out that allowing one or two Commie comments (out of thousands submitted, I'm guessing, if our guys are doing their jobs) will draw 10 or 20 delightfully defensive comments from their nearest and dearest.  Works like a charm!  Woo hoo!  (I would try out the commenting but I would have to "like" Eric Cantor and I'm not ready to go there yet.)

"Will Rogers and American Politics" was on our local PBS station last night. (Another fine program from the folks having to spend way too much time fighting the privateers in order to bring us public television.) Will started out as a soft-spoken, lasso-twirling Vaudeville comedian and became America's foremost political humorist.  (He was the Jon Stewart of the 1930s, come to think of it.) There was plenty to make fun of when it came to politicians and politics, but he was a gentle man, a compassionate man, and the Great Depression tore at him until he could no longer take what was happening in his beloved country.  He took to the airwaves and talked about it seriously.  Listening to the audio of his speech about unemployment, I'm hearing a man who is almost done in by the enormity of the suffering caused by that era's masters of greed and avarice.  (The radio broadcast was filmed and is shown on the PBS documentary.  It's almost unbearable to watch, Will's pain is so palpable.)

I didn't hear that same hopelessness when he spoke before a group of bankers (who must have decided to invite him after a late night of illegal hard stuff), calling them "loan sharks" and "interest hounds". 

You are without a doubt the most disgustingly rich audience I ever talked to, with the possible exception of the Bootleggers Local Union #1 along with the enforcement officers.

Now I understand you hold this convention every year to announce what the annual gyp will be.  I often wondered where the depositors hold their conventions.

I see where your convention was opened by prayer.  You send outside the ranks to find somebody that knows how to pray.  You should have had one creditor there to show you how to pray.

I see by your speeches that you're very optimistic of the business conditions of the coming year,  Boy, I don't blame you.  If I had your money I'd be optimistic, too.

You have a wonderful organization.  I understand you have 10,000 here and with what you have in various federal prisons brings your membership up to around 30,000.

Well, goodbye, paupers.  You're the finest bunch of shylocks that ever foreclosed upon a widder's home.

Will Rogers on an early laptop.  (I own that exact make and model.  It's almost as if Will himself is here with me.)

Moment of Sublime:  A freed humpback whale thanks the crew who saved her.  This is a feel-good story that may or may not be what it seems.  The crew of a fishing boat found the whale so entangled in fishing line it was probably hours away from sure death.  It took them about an hour to free the whale, and when they finally did, it swam a short distance and then put on an enthralling performance, convincing the crew that it was for their benefit.

Far be it for me to be cynical (and I can't believe this is me writing this) but it could be that that was as far as the whale could swim right then, and the glorious leaps could have meant it was gasping for air, trying to get its lungs and other internal parts working again.  But the visuals are stunning and I hate myself for thinking such doltish thoughts.

Cartoon of the week:

1922 cartoon.  Some things never change

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*(Cross-posted at Dagblog here)

In Our Own Voices: Getting it Right While Blogging

 Once there was a post by Simon Dumenco called, "Poor Steve Jobs Had to Go Head to Head With Weinergate in the Twitter Buzzstakes. And the Weiner Is ...."  It appeared online on June 8.  The next day The Huffington Post published a piece by Amy Lee called, "Anthony Weiner vs. Steve Jobs: Who Won On Twitter?".  The thrust of the Lee article was the same as that of Dumenco's.  In fact, nearly the entire article consisted of quotes from Dumenco's piece.  There was a link at the end, but, as Simon Dumenco saw it, why bother?  Everything that needed to be said was already in Amy Lee's piece.  No need to go off-site to read the rest.  There was no "rest".  (The clicked links from the HuffPo piece to his own numbered a mere 57 -- a pitiful number, considering the source.)

That was bad, and HuffPo's Executive Business Editor Peter Goodman promptly apologized, but there are stirrings out there that this isn't the odd blog out over at Arianna's place.  HuffPo has done this many times before.  Former NYT editor Bill Keller wrote about it in the NYT magazine last March:

“Aggregation” can mean smart people sharing their reading lists, plugging one another into the bounty of the information universe. It kind of describes what I do as an editor. But too often it amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model.


The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come. How great is Huffington’s instinctive genius for aggregation? I once sat beside her on a panel in Los Angeles (on — what else? — The Future of Journalism). I had come prepared with a couple of memorized riffs on media topics, which I duly presented. Afterward we sat down for a joint interview with a local reporter. A moment later I heard one of my riffs issuing verbatim from the mouth of Ms. Huffington. I felt so . . . aggregated.

 Oooo.   Ouch!  I confess I've heard the word "aggregate" bandied about before but didn't really understand how it might actually apply to a lowly blogger like me.  Now, with the brouhaha over HuffPo's publication of a post composed almost entirely of paragraphs from someone else's article, I've been thinking about what blogs like mine -- where other voices are prominent, where links are leading everywhere, where not all of the content is original to me -- might actually fit in with journalistic ethics and rules, even though, in the end, as chief writer/editor/publisher, I'm pretty much free to do almost anything I want on my own pages.

What is my obligation as a blogger?  Mine is a political blog, not a personal one, and I've known from the start that if I want my blog to be taken seriously (even though I'm fishing for smiles now and then) I have to be mindful of what I'm putting out there.  I know when I link to and/or quote someone else's work, it's not mine to mess with.  I can't change the words, change the meaning, put it on my page without attribution, or -- perish the thought -- print the entire piece.  It doesn't belong to me.  (I suspect in some cases I should get permission to use them, but I rarely do. I figure as long as I'm using a paragraph or two and as long as I tell where it came from,  preferably with a link, I should be okay.  I could be horribly wrong about that, too.)


So, okay.  That's bad enough.  But what about when we grab something from another site or via the social networks that looks legitimate, seems plausible, but turns out to be all wrong, and we've passed it on?  We part-time, unpaid opinion bloggers already have to work hard at overcoming our dillettante reputation.  It doesn't help when the facts go by the wayside in order to get to the clever, hopefully brilliant observations we all want to be singled out and known for.

On Poynter I found an article that answers some of the questions about what to look for in order to verify a piece you want to share or quote.  (It's written for journalists, but I personally think political bloggers have the same obligations to their readers.)  It specifically zeroes in on social networks like Twitter or Facebook, where I admit I spend a good amount of time scouring the snippets for leads to stories that might interest me enough to write about.  I also admit I'm astounded by how much misinformation there is in just those two places.

From Jeff Sonderman's Poynter piece (relevant to what I'm talking about here) :

Evaluating credibility

Consider the social history of the source. Has this person been on the network for years, or is this a brand-new account with no profile photo, friends or history? Has the person regularly posted information that was credible? In the rare case that someone deliberately tries to spread false information, it will probably be from a newly created or fictitious account, not from a social profile someone spent years building up.

Seek social corroboration. Are other social network users posting similar, independent reports from the same location? If a tornado really touched down in a city of 8 million people, for example,  there ought to be more than one photo of it. Be sure to look for other primary-source reports, not just retweets or messages based on the account you already have.

 Without naming names or even going into the entire story, I read on FB the other day that a famous news person I really admire had been canned.  I was pretty sure it didn't actually happen, and when I looked at the provided link, it clearly showed that the startling new information was in a piece written over a year ago in a piece published by The Onion!

That's why I wrote this, in fact. That sort of thing doesn't go unnoticed.  Sometimes it grows wings and flies.  I love blogging and I'm all for encouraging more of it.  I just want us to get it right.
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