How Unexpected

Here is the opening of a fascinating column by Glenn Greenwald regarding Virginia Senator Jim Webb's bill to create a National Criminal Justice Commission, a bill whose ultimate goal is to reform the criminal justice system in this country. It's a long dissertation, but so, so worth your time. As you can tell from the title of the article, it's really about more than just the obvious need for reform.

Jim Webb's courage v. the "pragmatism" excuse for politicians - Glenn Greenwald

There are few things rarer than a major politician doing something that is genuinely courageous and principled, but Jim Webb's impassioned commitment to fundamental prison reform is exactly that. Webb's interest in the issue was prompted by his work as a journalist in 1984, when he wrote about an American citizen who was locked away in a Japanese prison for two years under extremely harsh conditions for nothing more than marijuana possession. After decades of mindless "tough-on-crime" hysteria, an increasingly irrational "drug war," and a sprawling, privatized prison state as brutal as it is counter-productive, America has easily surpassed Japan -- and virtually every other country in the world -- to become what Brown University Professor Glenn Loury recently described as a "a nation of jailers" whose "prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history."

You can read the rest here:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/28/webb/index.html

Howdy Neighbors

My neigbhors were walking through the woods, heading home after taking a walk with the kids and the dog. I was in the yard with the boys, and Bailey and Fred went bonkers barking at them. Shocking, I know. Miller was like, "What up?" They came to the fence, thinking that maybe if the dogs met them, saw them, that those crazy woofs would calm down. Snort. Well, they only had eyes for Nitro, my neighbors' wonderfully gorgeous Great Dane. They gave me the terrible news that they had to put their other Great Dane, Sapphire, down last week. She had bone cancer and she had deteriorated rapidly. It's so sad. Nitro and Sapphire were quite the pair. But my neighbors said that Nitro had been feeling out of sorts with Sapphire now gone. I invited everyone into the back yard to see how the dogs would get on, and to just have a visit.

What a great time we all had. My three guys got on famously with Nitro. Fred and Nitro played. Bailey and Nitro played. Nitro sniffed all of my dogs, and they all sniffed back in return. Fred zoomed around, showing off his toys (and his athletic skills). The kids had fun, Fred got lots of petting (he's very soft!) and we had a really nice chat. My neighbors were so happy to see Nitro playing with the other dogs; he'd really been down since losing his best pal. We broke up the party when it started to drizzle, but we made plans to have another play date real soon.

I just love the dogs.

There Are No Words, Really

A Great Gardening Weekend

Yes, in spite of today's little hail storm in Willsboro, it was still a great gardening weekend.

On Friday, Darryl and I went to Beebe's Sawmill in Moriah to pick up my rough cut wood for the raised beds. My raised beds are 16" high so that I can keep tall dogs from peeing on my vegetables. We picked up this beautiful hemlock, pre-cut to 4 foot lengths. That's 32 4 foot lengths of 2 X 8 wood, rough cut so some of the bark still shows, which is cool, and 16 2 X 4 posts, for $136! That is an amazing price, plus, the wood is really 2 inches because it's not finished or planed down like you get with store-bought lumber. It was great going there, the people are very friendly, and the resident dog Sarah was a sweetheart.

Then on Saturday, Darryl came over and he, Dana and I started building the beds. We finished two of the 4 foot by 4 foot beds. Darryl and I are hoping for nice weather on Wednesday so that we can get the other two done.

After our labors, Darryl cooked up some bratwurst on the grill, and I made some potatoes and we had some sauerkraut for a nice German dinner. With beer, of course!

And today, I spent most of the day in the basement. Dana helped me get the lights positioned properly from the ceiling over the table that will hold my seedlings. Today I got a whole bunch of different tomatoes, yellow and red bell peppers and rosemary seeds into pots. I am doing this for the first time, so I am sort of keeping my fingers crossed. My basement stays at a consistent 60 degrees, so I fear it might be too cool. I'm back and forth about buying the heat mats, but I think I should, at least for the peppers and tomatoes.

So, even though we had snow and hail today, it was still all about gardening for me! And as the season progresses, I'll be putting a few more things in the basement to get a head start on the garden. How exciting!

Making Every Moment Count

Natasha Richardson's death, the unexpected and random nature of her passing, is just one more lesson for all of us. As trite as it might sound, it is important that you do the things that are important, spend the precious time with the people who mean something to you, reach out and stay in touch with all of the ones that you cannot spend one-on-one time with. Of course, since I'm the one writing this, I include the precious pets that mean so much to us. I never take for granted that I am the lucky one to have Miller, Bailey and Fred in my life. I love my family, and would like to see some of them more. But I try as much as I can to stay in touch with the people that I have met and cared for over the years. I think we all need to be diligent about doing this, especially in light of what happened with this family. A family is now without its mother, a good man is without his beloved wife. A famous family has lost a cherished daughter, sister...and the world has lost a beacon of goodness in Natasha Richardson. I only recall ever seeing her in "Nell", but from what I have read, this was a very special person, someone who, along with her husband Liam Neeson, knew how to live life, knew what was important in life, and managed the balance living in New York and a small town upstate, raising their sons and keeping the hype and stupidity of the entertainment world in their dust. Such a horrible shame that this has happened.

I think that what I take away most from this tragedy is that the change I made in my life last year, choosing to downsize it, choosing to leave the rat race of consulting, moving to the mountains and my nice little town, and living a smaller life, a resultant richer life, was the right call. I have made a point of staying in touch with the important people in my life, though I know in some ways I could do better. I don't stay in touch with my brother the way I should, though that's not new. I need to be a little more pro-active with Sharon, as I know that her attention is taken up by her upcoming marriage to the dear Simon. I do keep in touch with a whole lot of people that I've met over my life and who have been important to me: to say that the internet, my blog, Facebook are modern-day wonders is an understatement.

But I still need to do better. I think that we all could do better. And I hope that everyone who has felt badly over the last few days over what has happened to Natasha Richardson, and understands how her family and close friends must be so shocked at what has transpired, should make that extra effort to contact folks in the days ahead and remind them how important they are. I truly hope that everyone who I stay in touch with understands that I do it because they have brought something special to my life. I feel lucky to have known such good people. Distance and time are no reason not to remember to tell people how special they are to you.

Finally, my last word on making every moment count. Work is not everything. I know that may seem easy for me to say as I live my downsized life, working my part-time job, and prepare for getting the vegetable garden going here in Willsboro. But Natasha and Liam definitely understood this. I understand that she was quite the gourmet cook and they worked hard to arrange their lives so that they could have dinner at their home, together as a family, as often as possible. I suspect that we saw less of Natasha in film because there were things that were far more important to her. I get the sense that though Liam Neeson and his children must be shocked, stunned by what has happened to them, that there was no regret that they did not live their life as they wanted, and that is certainly something to be grateful about. I want to believe this, and I do sense that it's true. So, please, please, think about what's important, and do something about it so that you can say that you are making every moment count.

Wow. Just...wow.

I stole this from Andrew Sullivan's blog. It is absolutely amazing.

Now I REALLY Don't Want Any More Snow

Boy was today a nice day in Willsboro. Actually, Dana and I started in Willsboro, headed to Essex for our twice a month visit to the transfer station (where we take the trash!), and then to Plattsburgh for some shopping. The shopping was mostly to get some supplies for gardening: chain, hooks and s-hooks to set up the lights for my seedlings, a couple of barrels for flowers or herbs. I almost picked up some more seeds, but seriously, I have LOADS of seeds. I will be getting the lights set up over the table where I will be starting my seeds tomorrow. This week I will wash all of the containers I've been saving in my 10% bleach solution to get them all ready. My plan is to try to get the tomatoes, peppers and rosemary in their pots by the end of the week. Then next week I'll start on other things, some vegetables, some flowers. I'm not in a huge rush because I can't put anything into the ground until I come back from Spoleto Festival after Memorial Day weekend. But having nice plants ready to go will be awesome. I can't wait to see how the garden grows!

Dramatic Vistas

Even though I am looking forward to spring, I do still appreciate the beauty of winter in the north country. My drive in to work today was beautiful, the snowfall from yesterday just enough to make everything pretty again, thick snow weighing down the tree limbs, mountains in the distance snow covered, the apple orchards dotted with tufts of snow on the bare but soon to be budding branches.

Here is a picture I took a few weeks ago of the drama inherent up here in the snow, and the melt. I don't have pretty pictures of the melt in my yard - that's mostly just mud. This was on the drive from Keene to Lake Placid on route 73. Striking, isn't it?



Yes, I will miss these pretty pictures of winter. But I suspect there'll be lots of nice things to see in the spring and summer, too. Plus, there's gardening!

The Right Wing Mindset

It's kind of like they've lost their minds. I had mentioned Roger Kimball in my post yesterday. Here is a rebuttal to his diatribe about Obama the Leninist, copied from Damon Linker's blog at The New Republic (a link to his blog is now available to the right here on my blog site):

The Meltdown of the Conservative Mind

Roger Kimball has been a strident, highly polemical right-winger for a long time. But he's also very smart and highly literate. He writes with authority about art and philosophy, literature and politics. He knows a lot about history. And the quarterly he co-edits with Hilton Kramer (The New Criterion) has published erudite commentary and criticism on culture and the arts for more than a quarter century.

What, then, are we supposed to make of this astonishing post? Not only does Kimball endorse the view, expressed repeatedly by right-wingers over the past couple of weeks, that Obama deserves the blame for a stock-market collapse that began and accelerated months before Election Day 2008. And Kimball does not merely suggest, like many other (so-called) conservatives, that we can already, fewer than six weeks (!) after Inauguration Day, judge Obama to be an incompetent president. No, Kimball goes much further than these comparatively level-headed expressions of dissent to suggest something far more sinister. Yes, it's true: Roger Kimball -- accomplished intellectual and cultural critic -- believes that Barack Obama is a Leninist.

Now in fairness to Kimball, I should note that he's merely endorsing a tirade by that paragon of political and economic good sense, financial guru and CNBC loudmouth Jim Cramer. But Kimball not only endorses Cramer's vulgar and philistine analysis (I mean: "analysis"); he also provides readers of his blog with an informative quote from Lenin himself on the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat to impose "a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists." You know, just like Obama! It's perfectly fitting, then, for Kimball to conclude his post by quoting Article II, Section IV of the Constitution on the requirements for impeaching the president and by calling on "some clever legal talent to show how deliberately sabotaging the United States economy [sic] counts as Treason, a high Crime, or at least a Misdemeanor."

Here is Andrew Sullivan's incredulous response to Kimball's suggestion:

Obama's predecessor secretly invoked the power to suspend the First and Fourth Amendments for seven years, authorized the seizure and torture of American citizens, launched two decade-long wars of attrition, doubled the national debt, presided over the worst financial bubble since the 1930s, provided the weakest level of economic growth in decades, and left the US in the grip of the steepest depression since the 1930s. But after five weeks, it's Obama who should be impeached?

Well put. But I think something more needs to be said in response to Kimball. Something more needs to be said because Kimball's post raises important questions about just how far the American right is going to go in marginalizing itself during the Obama era. Are its leading intellectuals going to engage in constructive, thoughtful, informed debate about the policies proposed by the president? Or are they going to become indistinguishable from populist rabble-rousers like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin -- men who routinely confuse venomous, paranoid ranting with thinking? Because here's the thing: If Roger Kimball really believes that Barack Obama is a Leninist who deserves to be impeached for deliberately sabotaging the American economy (presumably as a prelude to imposing communism), then he has definitively demonstrated that he has a reckless, irresponsible mind and a temperament ill-suited to serious intellectual engagement in our public life.

The right can certainly afford to have a few cranks running around. (The left certainly has its share.) But how many is too many? When will sensible citizens conclude that the right simply should not be trusted with political power -- not because its policies diverge from what the American majority prefers, but rather because the right is in the grip of a form of ideological madness that renders it incapable of governing -- or even thinking -- responsibly? Five-and-a-half weeks into the Obama administration, I fear we might not have to wait very long for an answer.


(This is Denise again) I find it absolutely amazing that just five short weeks into a new administration that these idiots could call Obama the worst president ever, especially after what we have had to go through these last eight years. It's one thing for people to hate Obama because they see things differently, that they are afraid of new big government because that is what they think of when they think of a Democrat. But it is something completely different to call Obama the worst president when we have just finished two terms of a man who cared nothing for the Constitution and recreated his own idea of what the president could do. Trampling the Constitution became de rigueur for George Bush. That he will most likely not be held accountable for his crimes is despicable. History will certainly tell where Bush stands against his predecessors; he's already been dubbed one of the worst by many historians. How he compares against Obama is years away to be properly analyzed. But only insane people would have the nerve to judge him after only five weeks in office.

Reading and Thinking

I don't think enough people do either of these things these days. If they did, they would be able to find out that the drivel that the right is spewing about how Obama is Leninist, Socialist, whatever, is just that. Drivel.

Here is an interesting snippet from Andrew Sullivan's blog:


No Empty Wallets responds to Jim Manzi's argument (and Jim responds in the comments). The data on job growth in the Bush and Clinton years are interesting (Clinton wins). I'm not sure that returning marginal rates to the levels of the 1990s is that big a deal. But long-term creep in government spending as a share of the economy is troubling, if it pans out. Matt Miller urges calm:

"We know from the Clinton boom of the 1990s that marginal tax rates of 39.6 percent put no brakes on entrepreneurship or growth. And the modest limits Obama is proposing on the value of itemized deductions for mortgage interest and charitable donations puts their value exactly where they were under Ronald Reagan, which no one would say was a 'socialist' interlude for the U.S. economy. So everyone jumping up and down about how supposedly 'radical' Obama's plan is should calm down and look at the facts."

You can get to more links if you go directly to Andrew's blog post here:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/03/taxes-and-entre.html

More reading, less listening to assholes like Rush Limbaugh or Roger Kimball or Ann Coulter. As you can see, Andrew is still skeptical, but he's certainly not stupid enough to think that there does not exist the possibility that what worked during the Clinton years might work now. Because only idiot ideologues would ever try to argue that times were better during the eight years of Dubya than they were during the eight years of Clinton. And the situations that these two presidents left for their predecessors were light years apart.

Oh, Phooey!

Yes, Tom and Dolores, the weekend was beautiful. Really beautiful. And fun. I spent a few hours with some Master Gardener brothers and sisters at The Wild Center in Tupper Lake. We had fun talking about extending the gardening season, and it was so nice seeing some of my friends from the Cornell Cooperative, but the true find of the day is The Wild Center ( http://www.wildcenter.org/ ). It is the 'Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks' and wow are there some great exhibits. And they have an otter tank! Oh, they are so cute. When they're all stretched out, swimming from one end of the tank to the other, they so reminded me of Fred. See?


Isn't he just the cutest boy? Look:


Good heavens.

Anyway, back to the weekend. The Wild Center, a must see.

Then Darryl and I went to a concert at The Recovery Louge in Upper Jay. We saw Tom Akstens and Neil Rossi. They are musicians and singers who perform country, folk, bluegrass type music and are full of fun stories of the musicians they've played with over the years. They each played four different instruments throughout the course of the evening. Very impressive. They will be performing at Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs in October. I may just head down to see them again, they were that enjoyable.

On Sunday - remember, another beautiful day - I made a roasted vegetable soup and Darryl came over to have some. Dana wasn't all that crazy about the soup, but I thought it was tasty, so did Darryl, and after dinner we went outside to see the damage that some damned woodpecker is doing to one of the giant trees out back and also to let the dogs play a little. They loved being outside; they always love playing with Darryl. We looked over the fence and saw a huge pile of sawdust and chips from the havoc the woodpecker has been wreaking over the winter on that poor tree. Ugh. The melt was coming along nicely; not too much, too fast, you know?

And now we are getting another five inches of snow today. Grrrr. Or, rather, phooey!

Conservatives Who Matter

I have been a fan of Andrew Sullivan for a while now. Today, he said something on his blog that I have been thinking is true at least throughout the course of the presidential election: "I'm glad we have David Brooks these days."

Me, too. Here is a link to Andrew's blog about why, but you should continue on to David Brooks' column in the New York Times to read about how David spent a recent visit to the White House. The Obama White House, that is.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/03/obamacon-pepto.html

Direct link to David Brooks' column in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/06/opinion/06brooks.html?_r=2

These are conservatives who don't say stupid things like "I hope Obama fails." These are men who have serious disagreements with the President but so want Obama not to fail. They want this country better; they want to heal what has put us in this horrible state. Why anyone would want the President to fail in trying to right this dangerously listing ship is incomprehensible to me. Only an idiot, a fool would say it. Only traitors to their country would believe it.

An Average Late Winter Day in Willsboro

It's hump day and a very nice day in Willsboro, New York. The sun's been shining much of the day, and Miller, Bailey, Fred and I have been watching the mud grow with each visit we make to the back yard. But I'm happy for the melt and am starting to look forward to thinking about spring. I've been trying real hard not to think of spring, since you never really know if the winter is just playing around with you up here.

When I brought the guys in a little while ago, I had to wipe off muddy paws (and Fred's belly) before I let them into the house proper: praise Enoch for porches! Miller and Bailey proceeded to their respective dog beds (actually, all dog beds are Miller's and Bailey just takes advantage when he feels like it - he prefers the leather sofa or loveseat), but Fred decided he needed to go on a tear around the living room/dining room. He started with a growl, sort of like this: Grrrrowl-er-rowl-er-rowl. And then he zoomed around the sofa, then the dining room table, around the sofa, down the hall, back around the dining room table, another time around the sofa and the table, and then flew into the club chair, where he has now settled into a ball on his fleece bed. So cute.

So, I hit the post office and the bank, checked the mail.

It's been a nice, quiet day.