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Happy Holidays — WWJT?

Watch out everyone! The liberals are out to steal your Christmas again. They already stole your flawless healthcare system. Next thing you know they’ll come for your kids.

Yes, just as Christmas trees and mistletoe have come to signify the approaching holidays, so has the right-wing’s pre-Christmas hysteria that the liberals want to abolish the celebration of Jesus’ birth. Some folks are always up in the air, more and more each year, at the thought a vast conspiracy exists to exchange the greeting of “Merry Christmas” with the more secular “Happy Holidays.”

Now I don’t know how long the term “Happy Holidays” has been around. It may have started or at least gained prominence with the popular Irving Berlin World War II tune “Happy Holiday.” The song was sung by Bing Crosby in the film “Holiday Inn.” The film title supposedly inspired the name for the hotel chain. Part of the song’s meaning expressed the wish that the joy of the Christmas and New Year’s season could last all year. It certainly must have been a bittersweet song for Berlin considering one particular Christmas past.

Berlin came from a Belarus-Jewish background and though known as America’s first Jewish songwriter, he and his Catholic wife celebrated Christmas while their children were growing up though they stopped the practice once the children were grown. Though “celebrating” the holiday it was surely a sad occasion for the couple. Their only son died on Christmas Day in 1928 at the age of three-weeks-old. Berlin, of course, wrote a number of other popular songs relating to Christian holiday themes such as “White Christmas ” and “Easter Parade” as well as “God Bless America.”

I never really thought much about the greeting “Happy Holidays” any more than I did “Season’s Greetings.” I found it a practical wish for those who celebrate both Christmas and New Year holidays. I can understand those of faith who see Christmas the more important of the two. Though as I also grew up I came to understand the celebrations of other faiths during the “Season,” for instance the Jews.

What I can’t understand is why many who profess they are Christians today back Israel? I say that because I remember many Christians I knew while growing up found little tolerance for Judaism, or even some religions within the realm of Christianity for that matter.

Granted, the celebration of Christmas does not carry the gravitas for me as it does for those who profess Christianity. I see Christmas more as a secular holiday, while I also celebrate the birth of Jesus who I see as a great prophet. I like and always have liked New Year’s for the revelry and the day to toast that the coming year will be better than the last.

Frankly, I sometimes wonder what Jesus would think about people so bent out of shape over semantics when it comes to “how” one should greet others in celebration of his birth. Jesus just never seemed as if he let petty matters get to him. And, in a world where there always is turmoil, would not its people do much better by focusing on those things that perhaps Jesus viewed as more important?

 

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A rude awakening

A good antidote to spending an evening at work is a nap. Or maybe it isn’t I don’t know and I won’t know, at least in the short term. That is because a phone call on my iPhone awakened me just awhile ago with an apparently excited and definitely fast-talking man saying Ted Cruz needs money to fight Obamacare. Yeah, Ted. I got my checkbook on my desk … There it will stay, unopened, at least for anyone or anything associated with Ted Cruz. That is, unless the call wants a donation to defeat Ted Cruz, or run Ted Cruz out of Texas and back to Canada, or at least as far as Ok-la-homa.

To make matters worse this robocall was made on a supposed “Do Not Call” registry phone. It seems a lot of people don’t know that or choose to ignore it. I have received more and more unsolicited phone calls as of late. This started when I was furloughed from my job. That, of course, is the absolute best time to call someone to ask for money.

The call on Cruz’s behalf came from the Restore America’s Voice PAC. The link is to OpenSecrets.org. It has information that has been filed, so far, for the 2014 election cycle to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Some 362 individual contributions over $200 received by the PAC, whose treasurer is located in Stafford, Texas. Stafford is located in Harris and Fort Bend counties, in other words, a Houston suburb. Those of you familiar with the area may take that fact for what it is worth.

I have filed a complaint with the Do Not Call registry and am pondering a complaint with the FEC, for all the good it will do me. I can easily look up the phone numbers of those 362 donors, though not listed in the OpenSecrets.org information. I am pretty good at finding phone numbers. I have even improved my methods since leaving my job as a full-time reporter. So maybe I should find some of those numbers and call them during times they might be setting down for the evening meal or perhaps when they are asleep and say:

“This is the Committee to Run Ted Cruz Out of Texas and All The Way Back to Canada At Least As Far as Oklahoma Ted Cruz is a weaselly-little ambulance chaser or corporate attorney not that there is anything wrong with that and needs to go back to the country where he was born because we need a real American for president and U.S. Senator from Texas and not someone from Alberta that’s in Canada So send me all your money NOW NOW NOW!!! Paid for by the Committee to Run Ted Cruz Out of Texas and All The Way Back to Canada At Least As Far as Oklahoma.”

Except I can’t talk that damned fast. Maybe I will just ignore it.

 

 

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A man can only stand a mule’s kick so many times.

Our great national nightmare is over — for now at least.

Some confusion surrounded the question of whether I should go to work this morning or tomorrow morning. It’s one of those bureaucratic things. I ended up going this morning although I had little sleep. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the culmination of ending this whole shutdown. And perhaps we will turn around and have to do this again in January. President Obama said “No.” Republican Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky also said that it wouldn’t happen again.

 “One of my favorite old Kentucky sayings is there’s no education in the second kick of a mule. The first kick of a mule was when we shut the government down in the mid 1990s and the second kick was over the last 16 days,” McConnell told The Hill. “There is no education in the second kick of a mule. There will not be a government shutdown.”

But Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said don’t be so sure.

Cruz was the one who got us there in the first place. It makes one think, if just one senator can pull some type of procedural shenanigan along with a few of his Senate cronies, then doesn’t this seem more like a fascist state than a democracy?

Many people and a number of institutions were hurt during these last 16 days, not the least of which were people like myself. My financial situation was no good to start with, only to have a personal foul committed by piling on upon my economic life. This makes me wonder what I am going to do to survive during the rest of my life.

Yes, you are quite right Sen. McConnell, the first kick of a mule is quite enough. We have all been educated quite enough.

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The government goes back to work. Or not.

Well, it’s nearly over.

I speak of the government shutdown that this part-time government employee has struggled through and will continue to do so until my finances and my expenses match each other. The Senate passed the law to re-open government, pay the employees back pay and extend the debt ceiling. The funding for keeping the government open and the debt ceiling extension are, of course,  temporary. These will be revisited at the first of next year.

The House still has to pass the bill and it requires the President’s signature. Something could put a monkey wrench into it all but hopefully it will happen soon. My question is when?

When these measures take place, the government should open the next day. Since the House won’t look at the bill until tonight it is unknown whether the “can” will be officially kicked once again. It matters because if it happens before midnight we go to work tomorrow, at least I do. If it happens after midnight, then one would think this means the government would re-open on Friday. With the congressional propensity for stepping up to the plate at the last minute, the House may wait until 11:59 p.m. Our elected officials don’t give a rat’s ass for their employees. I’ve known this now you know for sure.

While emphasizing my part-time status that doesn’t mean it is an insignificant part of my life. I live off my part-time salary. It would be a pretty fair salary, $40,000-something a year, if I worked 40 hours a week. But I don’t. The most I can work is 32 hours per week. So you do the math, minus the deducts. Often the job seems like it is more full-time than part-time. Add my voluntary union duties and I stay fairly busy. I need to do more freelancing but my part-time job plus a few health problems all conspire to limiting the time I have to write (for money.)

So there you have it. If we go back to work, then yaaaaa. But I am still struggling to survive and will remain that way for some time. But, I am ready to go back to work, so bring it on Congress and President Obama! We may now plan for the next shutdown showdown in February.

 

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The lockouts, they’ve been many. Those I remember, few.

Going through the government lockout now going on 15 days — as a part-time employee — it sort of amazes me that I recall very few of the past 17 times a shutdown has happened. I suppose I shouldn’t be totally surprised.

Even though I have long been a student of politics I didn’t always give newspapers a thorough study in younger days.

The first of the 17 happened, literally, on my watch. A detail of each shutdown is profiled in this “Wonkblog” piece in The Washington Post. During the 10 days in late September and early October of 1975 in which the government ceased operation I was a young Navy sailor and Gerald R. Ford was in the White House. The cause was a budget showdown in Congress over funding the then-Department of Labor, Health, Education and Welfare. Thank heavens they eventually took Labor out of that bunch. I suppose that even as callous that the American public was during those days about the military — the Vietnam War aftermath — Congress must have seen fit to keep the military up and running. At least, that’s how I remember it.

I was at sea, mostly poking around New Zealand and Australia, when a series of shutdowns took place in the fall of 1977. I don’t remember those. Can you blame me? Also, unlike these days of email, we received very little news from the U.S. during the time I was overseas for those seven  months.

Maybe I recall a bit of the funding gap during the next year since it was over funding for an aircraft carrier. But I don’t remember what fully transpired.

For those Reagan years during which some five or six shutdowns happened I was going to college and living la vida grande. I read newspapers and watched TV news somewhat during those years and was a journalism student. But my life in the Navy had kind of soured me on following the antics of government. So I probably knew what was happening, but I just sort of let much of life go in one ear and out the other.

A couple of one-day shutdowns happened in the late 1980s. I don’t remember much about the one over abortion. But I do vaguely remember the kerfuffle over Contra funding for Nicaragua. I was interested in the whole Contra scandal involving Poppy Bush, Oliver North and others. I thought we, our nation, was headed headlong for a war in Central America. I didn’t want to see another Vietnam for a number of reasons.

Finally, the two Clinton-Gingrich era shutdowns were memorable. I was a reporter by then and i likewise highly amazed how the Republicans had a blinding hate for President “Bubba” Clinton and the First Momma. Maybe the rage that was heaped upon the Clintons subsided a bit in more recent years. There was a logical reason over this. First, another Republican Bush was in office during eight years that time. The wars that George “Dubya” Bush began also captured our attention. And, of course, the first black “Kenyan Muslim” was elected president. I am joking about the Kenyan Muslim, in case you for some reason didn’t figure it out.  I never though the Republicans and ultra-right could “out-hate” Bill Clinton. But with, President Obama whew!

So here I am, working part-time for the government. Involved a bit in a public employee’s union. And I have been furloughed 15 days and got a check for the first time today. A partial paycheck with a grand total of $430. I’ve got rent covered for a little longer. But it’s time to re-evaluate the other bills. Oh and my TV is on, watching the drivel on TV that passes as governing.