They have done enough for us - it is time we take care of them!
With petty politics still dominating our national debate, confusion over our war policy, an economy that may be on life support, partisanship again dominating our election, and price gouging from our banks and credit card companies, how does that make those returning from the war zone feel about what little we do as a nation to honor our veterans upon whose back we have built this temple to the Gods of greed and malicious behavior. Don't you think we could do a little better?
Since hot air and no substance have ruled in our nation's capitol it seems the least we could do is take a few moments to pause and ask what have we done for those who risk their lives to defend us. If we were truly in to soul searching as opposed to partisan babble the answer would be clear. Our failure to address the cost of government, rising debt and deficit spending, greed mongering by the very banks we bailed out with tax payers money, and the entire specter of empty promises and political lies is a sorry testament to leadership, concern, compassion and honesty toward veterans.
Our new President elect Donald Trump, the People's President, has the opportunity to turn the page and get on with the business of helping save those who saved us. These past eight years after Obama took his Nobel Peace prize and then made mistake after mistake in foreign policy and war management as his Administration catered to the progressives and trillions of dollars in stimulus spending accomplished nothing more than to add $10 trillion more to the national debt. At the same time, billions and billions of dollars wasted on failed war policies of the Obama administration have sucked the lifeblood out of our domestic programs.
During that time not only did we lose several thousand brave men and women defending a bizarre foreign policy and a non-existent war strategy, but America brought back over 700,000 disabled veterans, meaning we now have over four million disabled veterans from wars since World War II.
What happens to them, they get lost in a bureaucratic maze at the Veterans Department where far more often than should happen, a veteran can die before they get through the waiting period to see a doctor. Not because they do not need the treatment, but because they cannot get an appointment for weeks and months because of so called administrative issues. Any administrative issue that costs us the death of a veteran, especially an injured veteran, is a disgrace to our character, ability, and broken promises to those willing to risk their lives to protect us.
Perhaps our new president can finally fulfill the empty promises to our heroes and their families which have been so long neglected.
Let us vow to not let our political failures of the past continue to harm our veterans, those proud souls who answered the call to arms and now cannot get help for risking and often giving their lives. Let us not let the malaise of failure continue to punish our veterans, and especially our wounded warriors and those suffering the many stressful results of war against terrorism. These brave men and women and their families who depended on them should be the first priority for our government, before big bankers, big pharmaceuticals, and those who profit from the fruits of war.
Our government has demonstrated nothing to give people confidence, certainly nothing to indicate it is any different than business as usual, and even less to demonstrate they have a clear policy and the ability to implement the strategy. Our veterans and the people deserved much better.
Eight years ago we opened the door to change and got nothing in return. We the people have been short-changed and many are truly suffering. This November 8 we opened the door to change again, through the People's Populist Donald Trump. He has vowed to fix the mess facing veterans, and never let it happen again. Godspeed.
The time is now to act.
Trump has promised to be the president of all Americans and we need him to be. He needs to be president of all the people. We don't anoint presidents we elect them and once elected we are their boss.
If our government wants to honor the veterans, truly honor the veterans, then stop playing politics with war and foreign relations and give our new president the chance to make decisions, act bold, and demonstrate leadership.
Trump may be the leader we expected, we were promised, and we elected? It is time for the change?
Every day we should wake up and remember that it is our Constitution our president pledged to defend, the people's Constitution. The president must be held accountable.
So Washington, DC, stop the partisanship. Stop the bickering over ideological nonsense. Stop taking care of special interests and protecting people who should be prosecuted. Listen to the pulse of the country, listen to the heartbeat of America and you will see how far you have strayed from our expectations. Give our new president a chance to fix the problems we have inherited.
When we reach that point we have honored our veterans by honoring their families and friends. To our new President Trump, be American, take responsibility, and fix this mess and you will have all the support you need.
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Yesterday we lost another of the most prolific songwriters and storytellers in music in Leonard Cohen, whose haunting songs became better known than Leonard. He will be missed but his difficult life path and his beautiful contributions to music history will never be forgotten.
Leonard Cohen - So Long Marianne
(Double click for full screen)
Yesterday, November 10, the following message appeared on the Leonard Cohen website.
Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet and novelist who
abandoned a promising literary career to become one of the foremost songwriters
of the contemporary era, has died, according to an announcement Thursday night
on his Facebook page. He was 82.
Mr. Cohen’s
record label, Sony Music, confirmed the death. No details were available on the
cause. Adam Cohen, his son and producer, said: “My father passed away
peacefully at his home in Los Angeles
with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest
records. He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of
humor.”
Over a musical
career that spanned nearly five decades, Mr. Cohen wrote songs that addressed —
in spare language that could be both oblique and telling — themes of love and
faith, despair and exaltation, solitude and connection, war and politics. More
than 2,000 recordings of his songs have been made, initially by the folk-pop
singers who were his first champions, like Judy Collins and Tim Hardin, and later
by performers from across the spectrum of popular music, among them U2, Aretha
Franklin, R.E.M., Jeff Buckley, Trisha Yearwood and Elton John.
Mr. Cohen’s
best-known song may well be “Hallelujah,”
a majestic, meditative ballad infused with both religiosity and earthiness. It
was written for a 1984 album that his record company rejected as insufficiently
commercial and popularized a decade later by Jeff Buckley. Since then some 200
artists, from Bob Dylan to Justin Timberlake, have sung or recorded it. A book
has been written about it, and it has been featured on the soundtracks of
movies and television shows and sung at the Olympics and other public events.
At the 2016 Emmy Awards, Tori Kelly sang “Hallelujah” for the annual “In
Memoriam” segment recognizing recent deaths.
Leonard Cohen -
Hallelujah
(Double click for full screen)
Mr. Cohen was an unlikely and reluctant pop star, if in fact he ever was
one. He was 33 when his first record was released in 1967. He sang in an
increasingly gravelly baritone. He played simple chords on acoustic guitar or a
cheap keyboard. And he maintained a private, sometime ascetic image at odds
with the Dionysian excesses associated with rock ’n’ roll.
At some points, he was anything but prolific. He struggled for years to
write some of his most celebrated songs, and he recorded just 14 studio albums
in his career. Only the first qualified as a gold record in the United States
for sales of 500,000 copies. But Mr. Cohen’s sophisticated, magnificently
succinct lyrics, with their meditations on love sacred and profane, were widely
admired by other artists and gave him a reputation as, to use the phrase his
record company concocted for an advertising campaign in the early 1970s, “the
master of erotic despair.”
Early in his career,
enigmatic songs like “Suzanne” and “Bird on a Wire,” quickly covered by
better-known performers, gave him visibility. “Suzanne” begins and ends as a
portrait of a mysterious, fragile woman “wearing rags and feathers from
Salvation Army counters,” but pauses in the middle verse to offer a melancholy
view of the spiritual:
And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon
the water,
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower,
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him,
He said “All men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them.”
But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open,
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.
In 2008, Mr. Cohen was inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which described him as “one of the few artists in
the realm of popular music who can truly be called poets” and praised him for
having “raised the songwriting bar.” In 2010, the National Academy of Recording
Arts and Sciences, the Grammys’ group, gave him a lifetime achievement award,
praising him for “a timeless legacy that has positively affected multiple
generations.”
Wearing a bolo tie and his trademark
fedora, Mr. Cohen dryly made light in his acceptance speech of the fact that
none of his records had ever been honored at the Grammys. “As we make our way
toward the finish line that some of us have already crossed, I never thought
I’d get a Grammy Award,” he said. “In fact, I was always touched by the modesty
of their interest.”
Leonard Norman Cohen was born in Montreal on Sept. 21, 1934, and grew up in the prosperous
suburb of Westmount.
His father, Nathan, whose family had emigrated to Canada
from Poland,
owned a successful clothing store; he died when Leonard was 9, but his will included
a provision for a small trust fund, which later allowed his son to pursue his
literary and musical ambitions. His mother, the former Masha Klonitzky, a
nurse, was of Lithuanian descent and the daughter of a Talmudic scholar and
rabbi. “I had a very messianic childhood,” Mr. Cohen would later say.
In 1951, Mr. Cohen was admitted to McGill University, Canada’s premier institution of
higher learning, where he studied English. His first book of poetry, “Let Us
Compare Mythologies,” was published in May 1956, while he was still an
undergraduate. It was followed by “The Spice-Box of Earth” in 1961 and “Flowers
for Hitler” in 1964. Other collections would appear sporadically throughout Mr.
Cohen’s life, including the omnibus “Poems and Songs” in 2011.
A period of drift followed Mr. Cohen’s
graduation from college. He enrolled in law school at McGill, then dropped out
and moved to New York City, where he studied
literature at ColumbiaUniversity for a year before returning to Montreal. Eventually,
after a sojourn in London, he ended up living in
a house on the Greek island
of Hydra, where he wrote
a pair of novels: “The Favorite Game,” published in 1963, and “Beautiful
Losers,” published in 1966.
“Beautiful Losers,” about a love triangle
all of whose members are devotees of a 17th-century Mohawk Indian Roman
Catholic saint, gained a cult following, which it retains, and eventually sold
more than three million copies worldwide. But Mr. Cohen’s initial lack of
commercial success was discouraging, and he turned to songwriting in hopes of
expanding the audience for his poetry.
“I found it was very difficult to pay my
grocery bill,” Mr. Cohen said in 1971, looking back at his situation just a few
years earlier. “I’ve got beautiful reviews for all my books, and I’m very well
thought of in the tiny circles that know me, but I’m really starving.”
Within months, Mr. Cohen had placed two
songs, “Suzanne” and “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” on Judy Collins’s album “In My
Life,” which also included the Lennon-McCartney title song and compositions by
Bob Dylan, Randy Newman and Donovan. But he was extremely reluctant to take the
next step and sing his songs himself.
“Leonard was naturally reserved and afraid
to sing in public,” Ms. Collins wrote in her autobiography, “Sweet Judy Blue
Eyes: My Life in Music” (2011). She recalled him telling her: “I can’t sing. I
wouldn’t know what to do out there. I am not a performer.” He was “terrified,”
she wrote, the first time she brought him onstage to sing with her, in the
spring of 1967.
Leonard Cohen - Suzanne
(Double click for full screen)
Later that year, after being signed to
Columbia Records by John Hammond, the celebrated talent scout who also signed
Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, Mr. Cohen released his first album. Its simple
title, “Songs of Leonard Cohen,” and its cover, a portrait of the artist gazing
solemnly into the camera, matched the music, which was spare and unembellished,
in stark contrast to the psychedelic style that then prevailed.
The record began with “Suzanne,” which was
already being performed by folk singers everywhere thanks to the popularity of
Ms. Collins’s version. It also included three other songs of great impact that
would become staples of Mr. Cohen’s live shows, and that numerous other artists
would record over the years: “Sisters of Mercy,” “So Long Marianne” and “Hey,
That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.”
His second album, “Songs From a Room,”
released early in 1969, cemented his growing reputation as a songwriter. “The
Story of Isaac,” a retelling of the biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac, became
an anthem of opposition to the war in Vietnam, and “Bird on a Wire” went
on to be recorded by performers including Joe Cocker, Aaron Neville, Johnny
Cash and Willie Nelson.
In 1971, Mr. Cohen released “Songs of Love
and Hate,” which contained the cryptic and frequently covered “Famous Blue
Raincoat,” but after that his production began to tail off and his live
performances became less frequent. He released three more albums during the
1970s but, amid bouts of depression, only two in the 1980s and one in the
1990s.
The quality of his songs remained high,
however: In addition to “Hallelujah,” future standards like “Dance Me to the
End of Love,” “First We Take Manhattan,” “Everybody Knows” and “Tower of Song” date from that era.
Mr. Cohen, raised Jewish and observant
throughout his life, became interested in Zen Buddhism in the late 1970s and
often visited the MountBaldy monastery, east of Los Angeles. Around 1994, he abandoned his
music career altogether and moved to the monastery, where he was ordained a
Buddhist monk and became the personal assistant of Joshu Sasaki, the Rinzai Zen
master who led the center, who died in 2014. He took the name Jikan, which
means “silence.”
During the remainder of the decade, there
was much speculation that Mr. Cohen, rather than merely taking a sabbatical,
had stopped writing songs and would never record again. But in 2001, he
released “Ten New Songs,” whose title suggests it was written while he was in
the monastery. It was followed in 2004 by “Dear Heather,” an unusually upbeat
album.
In 2005, Mr. Cohen sued his former
manager, Kelley Lynch, accusing her of defrauding him of millions of dollars
that he had set aside as a retirement fund, leaving him with only $150,000 and
a huge tax bill and forcing him to take out a new mortgage on his home to cover
his legal costs. The next year, after Ms. Lynch countersued, a judge awarded
Mr. Cohen $9.5 million, but he was unable to collect any of the money.
The legal battles may have soured Mr.
Cohen’s mood, but they did not seem to damage his creativity. In 2006, he
published a new collection of poems, “Book of Longing,” which the composer
Philip Glass set to music and then took on tour, with Mr. Cohen’s recorded
voice reciting the words and Mr. Glass’s ensemble performing the music.
In 2008, Mr. Cohen hit the road for the
first time in 15 years for a grueling world tour, which would continue, with a
few short breaks, through 2010. He was driven, he acknowledged, at least in
part by financial necessity.
“It was a long, ongoing problem of a
disastrous and relentless indifference to my financial situation,” he told The
New York Times in 2009. “I didn’t even know where the bank was.”
Combined with a pair of CDs and
accompanying DVDs recorded in concert, “Live in London” and “Songs From the Road,” the
constant touring, before audiences often larger than those he had enjoyed in
the past, clearly eased Mr. Cohen’s financial problems. Billboard magazine
estimated that the 2009 leg of the tour alone earned him nearly $10 million.
Over that three-year period, Mr. Cohen
performed nearly 250 shows, many of them lasting more than three hours. He
seemed remarkably fit and limber, skipping across the stage, doing deep-knee
bends and occasionally dropping to his knees to sing.
The shows were not without incident:
During a show in Valencia, Spain, in 2009,
he fainted, and early in 2010 one segment of the tour had to be postponed when
he suffered a lower back injury. He recovered, however, and in 2012 he released
“Old Ideas,” his first CD of new songs in more than seven years, and embarked
on another marathon tour.
That pattern of extensive touring and
recording continued into the decade. In 2014, for instance, Mr. Cohen released
a CD of mostly new material, “Popular Problems,” as well as a three-CD, one-DVD
set called “Live in Dublin.”
His final studio album, “You Want It Darker,” was released in October 2016.
Mr. Cohen never married, though he had
numerous liaisons and several long-term relationships, some of which he wrote
about. His survivors include two children, Adam and Lorca, from his
relationship with Suzanne Elrod, a photographer and artist who shot the cover
of his 1973 album, “Live Songs,” and is pictured on the cover of his critically
derided album “Death of a Ladies’ Man” (1977); and three grandchildren.
To the end, Mr. Cohen took a sardonic view
of both his craft and the human condition. In “Tower of Song,”
a staple of live shows in his later years, he brought the two together, making
fun of being “born with the gift of a golden voice” and striking the same
biblical tone apparent on his first album.
Now you can say that I’ve grown bitter, but
of this you may be sure
The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
And there’s a mighty judgment coming, but I may be wrong
You see, you hear these funny voices in the tower of song.
“The changeless is what he’s been about
since the beginning,” the writer Pico Iyer argued in the liner notes for the
anthology “The Essential Leonard Cohen.” “Some of the other great pilgrims of
song pass through philosophies and selves as if through the stations of the
cross. With Cohen, one feels he knew who he was and where he was going from the
beginning, and only digs deeper, deeper, deeper.”
The polls just closed in the East while remaining open in the Midwest and West, but the mainstream media has already declared Hillary Clinton the 45th and first female in our nation's history President.
Based on the results of Exit Polls throughout the country, most media declared Hillary the decisive winner. The Exit Polls are interviews with actual voters leaving the voting booths.
Unlike other political polls of which there are many, only one presidential Exit Poll exists and is taken. Since the poll is owned by a coalition of the major television networks, and it is not released in it's entirety to the public, there is no way to validate or verify the results.
In spite of the tremendous media bias against Donald Trump and media devotion to Hillary Clinton, it still seems a bit odd the networks declared her the winner with just below 5% of the national vote cast and counted.
Over 50% of the public still has time to get out and vote. One might suspect there is media collusion in trying to discourage possible Trump supporters in these states to give up and not vote for Trump.
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News Bulletin!
Dateline: Washington, D.C.
November 9, 2016 - 1:00 am EST
Historic Hillary Victory a Tidal Wave claim Pundits
The polls have now closed in the continental United States as the nation and world await the results of the presidential election. So far just 22% of the popular vote has been reported.
Early absentee voting tallies indicate a record number of Americans cast their ballots before election day. Political pundits say it is another great sign for a Hillary landslide. "Banner headlines" in the major newspapers early editions, along with a never ending stream of "braking news" bulletins on television networks rejoice in the Clinton victory over Donald Trump, as projected by the media.
No results are official until certified by the election boards in each state. None have been certified yet and the national tracking map indicates no electoral votes have been awarded.
--------------------------------
News Bulletin!
Dateline: Washington, D.C.
November 9, 2016 - 5:00 am EST
The national media continues to tout the Exit Polls and a Hillary landslide but the release of actual vote totals is at an excruciatingly slow pace by the states.
Those votes reported to the media indicate a much closer race than the Exit Poll blowout projection. No pattern is emerging in voting other than a near dead heat in national vote total while the seven key swing states remain too close to predict at this time.
Could it be the national news media Exit Poll is wrong? Early indications suggest if the TV networks actually reported the results received in Exit interviews, the voters were giving misleading answers to the media.
Perhaps voters believe they have a right to keep silent when it comes to elections, an exercise of their right to privacy.
At the same time, there are reports of much higher new voter totals than expected, and the turnout among Independents and Republicans is up significantly.
--------------------------------
News Bulletin!
Dateline: Washington, D.C.
November 9, 2016 - 10:00 am EST
Clinton Landslide fails to Materialize - Exit Polls Wrong - but How Wrong?
A haunting silence has overcome the nation as Americans wake up and go to work expecting to hear from our new President Hillary Clinton. Instead, there is a heightened sense of anxiety on the part of those prematurely declaring Clinton the victor.
After late night calls for a Clinton victory celebration, her failure to pull away in the electoral count has stunned and silenced her Establishment friends.
While all seven key swing states hang perilously in the balance, the leader in popular votes swings wildly from Clinton to Trump and back like a pendulum on steroids.
Perhaps the Populist Revolution did not fade away as predicted by the Establishment and their news media. Maybe the election has nothing to do with Donald Trump but is a referendum on Clinton and the Establishment.
If proven true, it will be the greatest upset in election history far surpassing the Truman - Dewey race in 1948.
---------------------------
News Bulletin!
Dateline: Washington, D.C.
November 9, 2016 - 6:00 pm EST
Populist Momentum Carries Trump to 270 electoral votes as America's Version of the UK Brexit Vote Stuns the World
“Elections belong to
the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire
and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.”
Abraham Lincoln
Following his brief
inaugural address to the Congress, President George Washington and his party
walked over to St. Paul's
Church for divine services. His prayer that afternoon was: 'Almighty God, we
make our earnest prayer that Thou wilt incline the hearts of the citizens to
cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to government; to entertain a
brotherly affection and love for one another and for their fellow-citizens of
the United States at large.'
George Washington
The elective
franchise, if guarded as the ark of our safety, will peaceably dissipate all
combinations to subvert a Constitution, dictated by the wisdom, and resting on
the will of the people.
Thomas Jefferson,
The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, John P. Foley, ed. (New York: Funk & Wagnalls
Company, 1900), p. 842.
“When the people find
that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic.”
Benjamin Franklin
The people who cast
the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.
Joseph Stalin
Bipartisan usually
means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.
George Carlin
We stand today at a
crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads
to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice.
Woody Allen
Don’t buy a single
vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.
Joseph P. Kennedy
By the time a man gets
to be presidential material, he’s been bought ten times over.
Gore Vidal
The best argument
against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Winston Churchill
But in this country we
have one great privilege which they don't have in other countries. When a thing
gets to be absolutely unbearable the people can rise up and throw it off.
That's the finest asset we've got -- the ballot box.
Mark Twain
"There is only
one redeeming thing about this whole election. It will be over at sundown, and
let everybody pray that it's not a tie, for we couldn't go through with this
thing again.
And, when the votes are counted, let everybody, including the candidates, get
into a good humor as quick as they got into a bad one.
Both gangs have been bad sports, so see if at least one can't redeem themselves
by offering no alibis, but cooperate with the winner, for no matter which one
it is the poor fellow is going to need it.
So cheer up. Let's all be friends again. One of the evils of democracy is you
have to put up with the man you elect whether you want him or not. That's why we
call it democracy."
