Month: July 2007

Riding Amtrak is an experience. It is, however, one should experience if he or she has time and patience to spare.

Yesterday was one of those times for people in which both time and patience was needed after the West Coast bound Sunset Limited sat for hours surrounded by flood waters in southwestern Texas.

It probably sounds like something is always happening to Amtrak trains. Being stalled here, derailing there, leaving stranded passengers everywhere. But that’s probably no more the case than, or quite less the case, of air passengers getting stuck on their planes or in the airport for one reason or the other.

Personally I like traveling on Amtrak and that’s saying a lot being the impatient person that I am. Both times I traveled on Amtrak included some significant chucks of time which were way out of the boundaries of the trains’ schedule.

My first train trip was on the occasion of my 40th birthday. I took the Texas Eagle from Longview, Texas, to Chicago. From the Windy City I rode the Lake Shore Limited traveling the edge of some of the Great Lakes through places such as Cleveland, Buffalo and Albany before arriving in Pittsfield, Mass., where I spent the week with my friend Sally.

The train was about six hour late in arriving in Longview and I had zero time for a layover in Chicago, just catching the other train in time. On my return trip, I got to spend enough hours in Chicago just to get a bite and take the elevator up to the top of the Sears Building.

My next trip was for a newspaper assignment and I was unable to leave the night I planned so I took the bus to Austin a day later and rode back on the train.

But it’s a wonderful way to travel. You see sights you wouldn’t notice if you were driving or couldn’t see from the air if you were flying. It’s mostly a laid-back way to go and especially on longer trips you have the opportunity to make friends with various misfits.

Before taking my first train trip, I was a little nervous about Amtrak because I too heard nothing but bad things happening to Amtrak. But as misfortune would have it. A train wrecked out in the desert between the time I bought my ticket and departed for the east. I figured the possibility that I was on a doomed train had somehow lessened. Maybe that’s absurd, maybe not.

Still I imagine being cooped up on the train all day like the people yesterday were was no fun. But it’s like Mrs. O’Leary once said: S**t happens.

The president attempts to convince a young T-ball player that U.S. troops should remain in Iraq.

It seems as if old Gee Dubya has gotten us into a big, unsolvable mess in Iraq. The majority of Americans wants our troops out of Iraq yesterday. What the hell are they yelling about? Many of those same ones drank the Kool Aid and believed Saddam had WMDs when it all got started.

The truth is, or so it seems, that there is no good way for our troops to leave Iraq without a solid military conclusion. And that doesn’t seem possible short of either withdrawing and then dropping atomic bombs on Iraq or sending our entire military and mercenary forces there and show them what a jihad is all about. But both solutions, neither of which I am at all fond of, thankfully seem likely.

Being ever the cynic that my friends say I am, I have long thought that Bush will announce sometime — perhaps a week before the 2008 presidential election — that regardless of the status of the war, we achieved victory in Iraq. This will be followed by the first troops leaving on the Monday before that General Election day. Hell, he’ll probably march old Osama out around that time too.

I don’t know where my friends get it that I am such a cynical person. Oh well.

Reading my most recent presidential biography, a book about Andrew Jackson, I came across a reference to The Octagon House in Washington, D.C.

I stayed for two weeks in Washington in April, training for my part-time government job. On a Saturday I went sight-seeing and remembered passing by The Octagon House while walking from the Vietnam wall to the White House. I thought it was funny that it was so named because when I was a kid, anytime my parents mentioned the Pentagon I would ask them if there was the Octagon. You had to be there I suppose.

I think I read a marker telling about the house and I know I took some pictures but they are on my now crapped-out computer thus I will have to retrieve them later. The image above is courtesy of the U.S. Government.

The passage that I read in the Burke Davis “Old Hickory: A Life of Andrew Jackson” mentioned that President Jim and First Lady Dolly a.k.a. the Madisons, had lived in The Octagon House while the White House was renovated after the Brits torched it in the War of 1812.

Doing a little reading about the house today, I was astonished to find out that the origins of The Octagon House’s name was a mystery because it was “clearly not eight-sided,” according to the American Architectural Foundation, the organization that now owns the museum-home. Why that shocks me I don’t know. Perhaps it is that the house is called The Octagon and it really doesn’t have eight sides. Imagine how you’d feel if you found out the Pentagon didn’t actually have five sides? It doesn’t of course, but you probably would feel just a little … huh?

So that is where I am today — huh? The Jackson bio was great by the way. I don’t think I had ever known that Jackson was captured as a prisoner of war by the British at the age of 13. He bore a scar across his head that he got from being whacked with a sabre after he refused to shine a British officer’s boots. He also was very much the hot head and probably a functional illiterate if not just illiterate.

That reminds me of this kid I knew in high school. Bill was the boy’s name. A friend of mine remarked to Bill that he was an illiterate. Bill said: “Am not. I do so too got a momma and daddy.” Hell, that kid could have grown up to be president!

Today’s best news is the announcement by Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson that he is resigning.

Organizations reflect their leadership and the VA has gone to crap in a hand basket — to mix my metaphors — under the direction of Jim Nicholson who was of course appointed by good ol’ Gee Dubya.

Tony Principi, who came before the Republican hack Nicholson as VA secretary, at least seemed to have his heart in the right place. But after Principi left the nation’s second largest cabinet department had the misfortune of being led by a double whammy of disaster — Nicholson and Bush.

Perhaps the greatest problem under the Bush administration and its Republican minions in Congress has been the constant under-funding of the VA. The organization does more than just have hospitals for veterans. It also has a separate benefits administration and a veterans cemetery administration. In short, the VA has a lot on its plate and needs a lot of moolah to run the operation.

Personally, the VA has probably caused me the most distress this year, even more than being homeless. It’s come to the point that I dread dealing with the VA because it seems like their mission is specifically to piss me off.

Here’s hoping the new VA head will do better. But knowing who is at the top, I can’t say that I have much hope. I will just savor the good news of Nicholson’s departure for the moment.

Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., fends off a filibuster with his famed evil eye. Note: the video link doesn’t work. Sorry, I am not worthy of your readership. But what else is new?

Watching the Sunday morning TV talk shows isn’t normally a big past time of mine. But yesterday I did manage to catch a smack-down on “Meet the Press” as Virginia Democratic Sen. Jim Webb clearly got the goat of Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina during a debate on the Iraq War. I must clarify that by saying Webb got Graham’s goat shouldn’t be construed to mean that he stole or otherwise appropriated a goat that belonged to Graham because I don’t know if Graham actually owns any goats. For if Webb stole a goat, he might very well end up in jail and emerge as a now-forgotten country-western singer.

Graham, who became nationally prominent as a manager in the Clinton impeachment case, was taking the current Bush-ite stance on Iraq during the Sunday NBC program. Webb noted that some of the military personnel he had spoken to on Iraq said things were going to hell in handbasket. Graham then tried to bait Webb into an argument as to whether Webb had actually traveled to Iraq and the Virginia senator admitted that he hadn’t. Graham said that he had gone to Iraq as a reservist, adding “Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.” Afterwards, the debate promptly turned into a hellish miasma of unintelligible sounds until Tim Russert promptly knocked both senators out of their seats with a fire hose.

Now it sounds as if Graham clearly had the high ground since the senator had traveled to Iraq as a member of the military, although some distinctions need to be pointed out here.

Graham may have been to Iraq as a reservist, as he serves in the Air Force Reserves. But its not exactly like he goes out on non-stop missions as a gunner on an up-armored Humvee since he is an Air Force lawyer.

Webb, on the other hand, may not have yet been to Iraq but his Marine son has. Perhaps one might recall Webb’s little exchange with Gee Dubya about that subject. Webb also has seen war up close and perconal (that’s like personal on Percodan). Before serving as Secretary of the Navy under that mighty Republican Messiah Ronald Reagan, Webb led a Marine infantry platoon in Vietnam where he was awarded the Navy Cross, Silver Star and Bronze Star.

To be perfectly fair, however, Graham did receive a commendation medal during the first Gulf War when he served as staff judge advocate at McEntire Air National Guard Base in South Carolina, according to his official Senate biography.

So when you hear a debate about war between a Marine who won the Navy’s second-highest medal for valor and an Air Force Reserve lawyer who got kudos for drawing up wills during the Gulf War from his dangerous post in South Carolina, who would you choose to believe? You choose the lawyer naturally because attorneys stand for truth, justice and the American way, right? Right. Now step with me into the back room as I want to show you some magic beans for sale.