Gleaning Facebook: It's Hot!

Lillian shared this meme.

This is insane! (I realize that SunTrust always registers high, but 117°!!!

Debby Brown shared this picture on Facebook today.

I'm sitting under the ceiling fan and sweatin' like the proverbial oinker! Comments

Bill Cox

you will be sweating more when your guys socialist agenda really kicks in remeber you heard it here first. Tax me too death but i still love you guys just disagree politically that is.

Terrell Shaw
Thanks for agreeing to disagree politely. At least you know where our guy stands. What does Mitt believe? I don't know.

How's your garden surviving the heat by the way?

Julie Ingram Gatanis
Oinkers don't sweat; that's why they lay in the mud. You're sweating like a lady of the evening in church on Sunday 

Barbara Jean Smith
whew!

Bob Doster
Ya'll installin air for ya'll's shindig next week?

Terrell Shaw
As always, plenty of air at my house. All of it hot.

Terrell Shaw
I speck we'll go thru lots of ice.

Wanda Mulkey Dagraedt
We are in St. Louis and it's around 105-108 and more of the same through next week. Whoopee!

 

It is a wonderfully historic day in America.

I am proud to support a former Constitutional law professor as President of The United States,

And I am proud to support the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (derisively called “Obamacare” by his political enemies). The American people support this act in almost all its parts, though a strong minority oppose it on principle amd a smaller group are confused about it and oppose the Act though they support its parts. A pretty large minority of the bill's opponents feel the bill does not go far enough!

First impression of the Results:

• it will energize the far right- but they are already pretty well all-out enthusiastic opponents of the President.
• it will also energize the President’s supporters. He has been validated as a Constitutional expert and as a leader. He has accomplished what Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, and Bill Clinton failed to do. What many of us have had as a major political goal for decades has been accomplished.
• many independents and conservative Democrats will change their opinions as they see the benefits of this act and it has the increased authority of having been tested and having passed Constitutional muster in the Supreme Court.
• the only part of the Act that was found wanting was the Romney/Republican idea of an individual mandate. The Democratic more-straightforward tax idea (which Roberts found in the Act de facto) has been accepted.

My joy is overflowing.  Just imagine:

• Health insurance providers can NOT cancel your policy because you get sick. 
• Kids won’t be denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions, NOW.
• Ordinary folks will be no longer be just one catastophic ilness or injury away from bankruptcy.
• Parent’s health insurance policies can cover young folks until age 26, NOW
• Grown-ups won’t be denied health insurance because to a pre-existing condition, as of 2014.

Thank you, Mr. President, for your leadership. You took a lot of grief from your base over your compromises, but I believe you got through a great, but flawed, reform that was probably about the best bill that could have gotten a majority in the Congress. You went for "what you can get" as Edward Kennedy advised you. The reform will be refined and improved over the years.

Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice, for putting, in this instance, right and law ahead of politics. I wish (barring an opportunity for another Breyer, Stevens, Souter, or Ginsberg) you had been on the Court in 2000. I wonder if things would have been different.

Gleaning Facebook: Celtic/Cherokee Festival at Chieftains

From Nick Douglas's Facebook:

Celtic Arms and Armor by storyteller Bob Harris. Not pictured, storytellers Terrell Shaw who told the story of the Spoorworm and Gary Greene who told of the Cherokee Removal and sang his Cherokee Names song which was inspired by the old man who told the soldiers who came for him, "You may take my people from their homeland but you'll never take our names from your waters.

Terrell Shaw
It was a great and pleasing surprise to recognize you in the audience, Nick. Great to see, and we're looking forward to seeing you on the Fourth again this year.

Amy Douglas Tapia
Nick, where was this? Let me know next year Please. If I am free I want to go too!! Amy

Nick Douglas
Amy, this might not be an annual event. I hope it will be. This was in Rome, Georgia, at the Chieftains Museum located in MajorJohn Ridge's home. 

Major Ridge was a Cherokee leader, a lawyer, plantation owner, ferry-operator, and author of the Cherokee law that forbade transferring Indian lands to white governments despite the 1802(?) Georgia Compact in which President Jefferson promised the state of Georgia that Cherokee lands would become Georgia's once they Indians were removed. 

After the removal of the Creek and other southeastern tribes and after the whites discovered gold near Dahlonega (Cherokee for yellow rock) and forcibly took those lands from the Cherokees living there, in accordance with nearly passed Georgia laws, Ridge came to believe that the only way to prevent complete extermination of the Cherokee people was to agree to move to Indian Territory (Oklahoma). When he and some others (without authorization from Principal Chief John Ross) signed the Treaty of New Echota agreeing to Cherokee Removal, he reportedly said that he had just signed his own death warrant. He was right. He was assassinated or executed (depending on your point of view) a few years later near the Arkansas - Oklahoma border.

Terrell Shaw
Nick, this was the second or third year of the event. I hope it will continue.

Fathers Day

Daddy with Brannon and Lisette 

Happy Fathers Day to all my daddy friends out there.

I still miss mine, Charles Shaw, every day, and his daddy, Grady Shaw, nearly as often. Their gregarious nature and joyous stories and huge hearts are such an essential part of me. Another big part of who I am is attributable to a father I never met, Wilson Baird. He died long before I was born, but his example to his eleven children, especially the youngest (my mother) still influences my world.

And here's to fathers-in-law, like Jay Matthews whose quiet integrity and work ethic and frugality helped form the wonderful woman who has shared my life for 41 years.

And to the two wonderful young women who once called me "Papa" -- I can still imagine those sweet little voices -- but now usually say "Dad", thanks for your kindness today. I hope I have been one-tenth the daddy that the above have been.

And Lil, I can't wait for the pot-roast lunch!

Happy Fathers Day

Happy Fathers Day to all my daddy friends out there.

I still miss mine, Charles Shaw, every day, and his daddy, Grady Shaw, nearly as often. Their gregarious nature and joyous stories and huge hearts are such an essential part of me. Another big part of who I am is attributable to a father I never met, Wilson Baird. He died long before I was born, but his example to his eleven children, especially the youngest (my mother) still influences my world.

And here's to fathers-in-law, like Jay Matthews whose quiet integrity and work ethic and frugality helped form the wonderful woman who has shared my life for 41 years.

And to the two wonderful young women who once called me "Papa" -- I can still imagine those sweet little voices -- but now usually say "Dad", thanks for your kindness today. I hope I have been one-tenth the daddy that the above have been.

And Lil, I can't wait for the pot-roast lunch!

Gleaning Facebook: Fathers Day 2012

That's me in my Daddy's lap with the rest of my immediate early fifties family. L-R: Joan, me, Daddy, Carol, baby Debi, Mother, Janice. (No Beth or David yet )

Happy Fathers Day to all my daddy friends out there.

I still miss mine, Charles Shaw, every day, and his daddy, Grady Shaw, nearly as often. Their gregarious nature and joyous stories and huge hearts are such an essential part of me. Another big part of who I am is attributable to a father I never met, Wilson Baird. He died long before I was born, but his example to his eleven children, especially the youngest (my mother) still influences my world.

And here's to fathers-in-law, like Jay Matthews whose quiet integrity and work ethic and frugality helped form the wonderful woman who has shared my life for 41 years.

And to the two wonderful young women who once called me "Papa" -- I can still imagine those sweet little voices -- but now usually say "Dad", thanks for your kindness today. I hope I have been one-tenth the daddy that the above have been.

And Lil, I can't wait for the pot-roast lunch!

Gleaning Facebook: Chemo Duck

 If you are in Walgreen's hunt up this pic of my Great Niece Lily on the Chemo Duck poster. Lily is a survivor of Leukemia and the namesake of Lily's Garden - a effort at raising awareness and money for a cure to this terrible disease.

Gleaning Facebook: Federal Spending

 To see the glee of some Republicans at the disappointing job figures today is revealing. Some among the "loyal" opposition are cheering for the President to fail. (Limbaugh and McConnell have been explicit about that.)

I would ask my Republican friends --- and I have many beloved GOP friends and relatives --- and independent friends to think of this chart; to think of the graph of job losses for the last four years; to think of the millions of jobs lost under the watch of the previous administration (including a MAJORITY of Romney advisors) leading up to 2009 and the millions of jobs gained (still not enough but a definite change of direction) under President Obama, despite consistent obstructionism by some in the opposition. We still have a long way to go, and the European mess may yet stall things, but the nation is demonstrably much better off than we were four years ago.