Hasta La Gadget!

Ex-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said that Obama doesn’t love America. But you know who actually doesn’t love America? Secessionists don’t. And it wasn’t too hard to figure that one out.

At a fundraiser for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, here’s what Giuliani had to say about Obama, according to Politico.

“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said during the dinner at the 21 Club, a former Prohibition-era speakeasy in midtown Manhattan. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”

Giuliani then tried to walk back his comments with a series of backhanded compliments, claiming Obama was technically a patriot, but added “President Obama was brought up in an atmosphere in which he was taught to be a critic of America,” Giuliani told CNN. “That is a distinction with prior American presidents.”

Giuliani, who looked to be a promising presidential candidate before flaming out dramatically,
missed a really obvious group who, unlike Obama, actually hates America. They’re called secessionists.

A former Giuliani opponent from 2008, ex-Texas Rep. Ron Paul, recently addressed a pro-secession conference, calling secession “good news,” according to MSNBC. But he’s not the only one extolling the virtues of leaving America.

Ex-Reagan aide Dennis MacKinnon, now a conservative columnist, told a radio show that he wanted several Southern states to secede and form a new country called “Reagan,” to exclude gays, according to Salon. He also said he wouldn’t admit Texas because it had too many Mexicans.

As the Huffington Post points out, there are a lot of secessionist groups in America. They range from the Alaska Independence Party, liberals from Vermont, Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and, of course, Texans. Though they range from the very liberal to the very conservative, they all have one thing in common that separates them from Obama: they want to leave America. It’s what secessionists do.

Giuliani could have taken shots at Senator Rand Paul over his dad’s comments, to boost Walker. Here he would have had actually anti-American comments. But he went after the term-limited lame duck Obama over unsubstantiated claims of unpatriotic beliefs, instead of the low-hanging fruit neo-Confederates offer.

It’s sad to see how Giuliani has gone from being “America’s Mayor” and darling of moderates (Democrats and Republicans) to becoming the Westboro Baptist Church of pundits.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Ga. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu.

February 26 is Tell a Fairy Tale Day, so I’m going to share one with you. Once upon a time, there was a perfect mother. She loved days her children didn’t have to go to school because of holidays, teacher training days and parent-teacher conference days. But most of all, she loved those unexpected days off due to snow or very cold weather. She and her children frolicked at home, doing all manner of creative activities. And her family lived happily ever after.

But wait. That may describe one type of parent, but to most, it is simply a fairy tale. While these parents love their children very much, days off of school can be more of a nightmare than a fairy tale.

I wrote a post recently lamenting the disrupted school calendar in my community. Between the cold and snow, the children lost four days of school. Add that to the planned school holidays, conference days and half days due to teacher training, and that’s a pretty choppy attendance schedule. In fact, in the seven weeks since returning from winter vacation, there has only been one five-day week.

I know some folks out there love these days off of school. They are all over Facebook writing about what they baked, which board games they played and how their kids staged plays or built snowmen. One such parent wrote to me complaining that it was “wrong” for me to blog that I thought kids needed to be in school more. She suggested that school could be boring and uncreative, and I don’t disagree. But here’s where we part ways.

The implied message was that parents who were upset about the inconsistent attendance this winter wanted to be rid of their kids and hated the notion of being home with them. These parents simply did not love their children or cherish their creativity and free exploration as much as she did. And that really misses the point.

In a way, this has become the newest version of the Mommy Wars. Social media provides parents with new ways to continue judging one another, and Mom-shaming is still an art form. So, to parents who post glowing reports of frolicking with their kids on these non-attendance days, please consider this:

Almost 70% of mothers with children under age 18 are employed outside of the home. Chances are, their employers do not care about snow days or half-days of school or school holidays. If these mothers can’t go to work, most of them don’t get paid. If they miss work too often to stay home with their children, they risk losing a job that is providing for their children. These mothers love their children as much as you, but staying home is not a choice for them.

Mothers of the 8.4% of public school who children have special needs are often not able to engage them in fantasy play, cooking or art projects. Their children thrive on consistency. Chances are they are so thrown off by the inconsistency of school attendance that they are more likely to be having tantrums, banging their head or destroying their toys than engaging in fun family time. Boredom does not lead to creativity for these children. These mothers love their children as much as you, but staying home on non-attendance days makes their children confused and unhappy.

More than half of all children in public school come from low-income families and qualify for free or reduced cost lunches. Some schools also provide breakfast or even dinner. That means when these children go to school, they will not go hungry. Kids living in poverty depend on school for safety, stability, and survival. These mothers love their children as much as you, but they need school to be open to make sure their kids have enough to eat.

If you are condemning other parents for not being as excited as you are to have a fun-filled day off of school, please stop. Unless you have walked the proverbial mile in someone else’s shoes, you have no idea. By all means, enjoy the time at home with your children. Those who see your pictures and read about the great time you are having with your kids are genuinely happy for you. Just don’t judge parents whose lives don’t match the fairy tale version of being home with their kids on these school non-attendance days as being less loving than you.

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Unless your team wins or your bets pay off, the Super Bowl is almost never as super as it’s hyped to be. This year, with 26 seconds left, much of the joy was sucked out of the game by a strange goal-line pass and interception that made the outcome seem goofy and arbitrary. America is left with the empty feeling that we wasted a billion collective hours on something not quite worth it — the Dexter or How I Met Your Mother finale of professional sports.

The solution is to go bigger. Football is the only major professional sport with a single-game championship. And any single NFL game including the Super Bowl is likely to fall short of greatness. But a multi-game NFL Championship Series would be impractical as well as brutal for the players. So go just a little bigger — make the Super Bowl six quarters long.

A six-quarter Super Bowl would have 50 percent more football and double the halftimes. It would take about five hours. New records would be set in just about every category. Who wouldn’t want to watch a Super Bowl with a final score of 73 to 68? (Nobody you’d want to know.) If the game is tied after six quarters, make both teams champions. They had co-champions in this year’s National Spelling Bee. Football players take good spellers’ lunch money — why not take the possibility of co-champions?

The sheer bigness of a gridiron marathon would leave us punch-drunk and feeling that we’d really been through something, regardless of the actual quality of the game. By national agreement, we would be excused from the first two hours of work or school on post-Super Bowl Monday — the Super Bowl is already one of our biggest unofficial holidays — we could make it semi-official.

An enlarged Super Bowl would show the rest of the world that we’re not afraid to go big — a shock-and-awe campaign without expensive and inconvenient bunker-buster bombs and invasions. And just imagine the counter-programming — not just Puppy and Kitten Bowls, but also Bunny, Piglet, Penguin, Wombat and Baby Hedgehog Bowls.

But wouldn’t six quarters of football be exhausting and dangerous for the players? Well, how about this: out of the additional $200 million in ad revenue a super-sized Super Bowl would bring in, each player gets another $100,000 for two extra quarters of work. (That’s equivalent to a salary of $3.2 million for a 16-game season.) And each team gets to draft five extra players from the rest of the NFL to help out in the game — just no quarterbacks or kickers. And if you really want to go nuts, teams that go to the Super Bowl are excused from a pre-season game in the following season. Nobody wants to play those, right?

An economy-sized Super Bowl would be slightly more likely to be won by the better team. You don’t think that more playing time leads to a more legit outcome? Then how come the NHL, MLB and NBA Championships are up to seven games long? And in a longer game, the impact of any iffy call or fluky play would be proportionately reduced.

C’mon — let’s make the Super Bowl the Super Bowl-and-a-Half. We don’t have much time left — there are only about 35 more Super Bowls before robots and genetic engineering and safety concerns shut down the NFL or make it too weird to care about.

The Super Bowl is our last fun holiday before the bummer holidays of Valentine’s and Groundhog Day. We deserve more of it. And while we’re at it, let’s add an extra Halloween.

It comes too late to be a factor in today’s mayoral election in Chicago, but this story will give you a sense of why I voted against the incumbent. The Chicago police operate a “black site” to which they take suspects for interrogation without booking them or giving them access to their lawyers. Please take one moment to read that sentence again. It’s not enough that a former Chicago police officer has been outed as a Guantanamo torturer, also by the Guardian; next it emerges that right now, at this very moment, even as we speak, current Chicago cops are holding themselves above the law and violating the most basic rights of American citizens.

The person willing to put himself on the record about this was a protester at the NATO summit held in Chicago in 2012. The mayor — then, as now, Rahm Emanuel — welcomed NATO delegates and protesters to the city with an over-the-top display of cops in riot gear, who spent most of three days watching while a few thousand protesters performed some street theater. Perhaps to justify this gigantic waste of police time and municipal money, the city arrested and tried “the NATO Three,” who were surely less than half as threatening as 1968’s Chicago Seven.

Now we learn that at least one of those not tried was nonetheless taken to a site other than a police station, where instead of being booked he was shackled to a bench for 17 hours and denied a phone call to his lawyer despite repeated requests. Once his lawyer finally found him it took another three hours to get him out there, presumably because if there’s no record of your having been arrested it’s complicated to arrange the paperwork which will set you free. Paging Franz Kafka!

Was the creation of a domestic Guantanamo-style “black site” made inevitable by the Pentagon’s practice of unloading military surplus weapons on local police departments? Maybe — but it’s remarkable how many inevitable things can be avoided if the people in charge just refuse to misbehave.

A defense lawyer (who was also an ex-prosecutor) told me once that we could eliminate police torture entirely by making individual cops personally financially liable for any proved cases. Perhaps we should extend that and make Mayor Emanuel and Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy personally financially liable for whatever immense settlement will ultimately be required to make amends for what’s happened on their watch on Homan Avenue.

Or maybe — today being Election Day — we could just throw the bums out.

Six months ago, I wrote an essay about my son’s injury at Mt. Hood. I called it “Broken,” and you can read the original piece here. It was hard for me to write; I was going through some emotional times during the summer, and, as with any time a parent sees their child injured, his accident really shook me up. I needed to figure it out.

As with all my writing, I wrote it for me. I wasn’t out to impress anyone with his injury or our story. I didn’t intend to make my life seem harder/more painful/more dramatic or fill-in-the-blank with whatever word you would like. I was simply telling my story, my experience, and sharing how it made me feel. No judgement, no pity party, nothing but sharing my love for my son, and no evaluation or proclamation that our situation was more traumatic than any other.

My story was about healing, change, and adapting to the ‘new normal’ – something I was dealing with on several levels in my life. At the same time this happened, I was reading a blogpost by one of my favorite writer/bloggers, Katrina Kenison, who so eloquently pens the exquisite agony we feel as mothers adapting to different experiences with our children. It felt like the Universe was speaking to me, sending me ways to cope with my situation.

I ended my story with healing, with gratitude, and with thoughts of moving forward.

last week, my blog post was published on The Huffington Post, with the title “The Phone Call No Parent Wants To Get.” Provocative title, I agree — that’s what happens when stories get published online.

Within minutes, there were dozens of comments. Surprised, I clicked over. I didn’t think it was the kind of post that would garner much commentary at all. It was just a retelling of an experience of motherhood.

What I saw was full of hate.

I fully realize that the Universe deals out trauma much more intense than what we were experiencing. No one wants to see their child — or any other child — experience pain, fear, or injury. I know that some have more than their share of heartbreak, suffering, and agony. I would never presume to understand the pain of losing a child, or watching a child suffer through any trauma.

But that’s not what my essay was about.

It’s too bad that those people who clicked on my post were “infuriated”, as one reader expressed. It’s too bad that they felt they just wasted their time reading it, or that they somehow had to insert their ego/story/opinion into mine.

Why they would waste more of their time spewing hate and vitriolic comments to me is amazing.

Kindness matters.

Kindness matters, people. Read closely:

You absolutely have the right to say what you think, just like I do. But please, think about how you say it.

This essay wasn’t a piece about politics or religion. It wasn’t a controversial topic. This was a reflection, a memoir, a snapshot of time. It was my experience, not meant to be evaluated or judged against anyone else’s. What would be the point in that? How could one possibly believe that their pain is any greater than another, that their suffering is any stronger? We never know each other’s back story.

While the internet offers an amazing opportunity for people to communicate and connect, why not do so with kindness and seek to understand and be understood? Why hide behind anonymity, freely condemning people for their ideas? Would you yell at me like that in person? Would you hunt down a book author, and plaster your words all over their home?

I’m not impressed by your hate. I’m not even agitated enough to write back and engage in any sort of debate. It’s pointless. I’m even laughing at much of your poorly written, ignorant assumptions you make about me and my son. You have no idea. You don’t know me, you don’t know my story — and to engage with you would be to proclaim that I know yours. Your assumptions make you look like an ass, and give you no credibility. Who are you to judge me?

Life is hard. We all have different challenges. In no way would I equate my son’s accident as anything even close to what many parents deal with on a daily basis.

THAT’S NOT THE POINT.

We are all on this life journey together. We all have a voice. I use mine to communicate, to understand others, and to make the world a kinder place to live in. By spewing your commentary, it makes me wonder what else you do in life that pushes us all backwards in anger, instead of forwards in compassion.

Remember, kindness matters. Maybe I could learn from you — but not if you try to teach me with your hate.