Tiger & Sergio

This blog isn’t here for me to write about golf – but sometimes golf has a social connection to it and at this moment it does and it isn’t pretty.
by Charlie Leck

Sergio and Tiger apparently don’t like each other. Tiger, to his credit, tries to keep it (the dislike) at least in the civil range. Very recently, Sergio let it all slip into the nasty area and it made me sad; for, after all, this is supposed to be a gentleman’s game.

As the Huffington Post reported it…

“The British newspaper The Guardian reported Garcia was asked in jest if he would invite Woods to dinner during the U.S. Open.

“The Guardian reported Garcia said: ‘We will have him round every night. We will serve fried chicken.’”

Ooops!
Now, let’s give Sergio the benefit of the doubt… as a Spanish fellow – a Catalan – he might not know how touchy that remark is in America. Yet, he was quick to apologize when he realized he had spoken poorly…

"I apologise for any offence that may have been caused by my comment on stage during The European Tour Players' Awards dinner. I answered a question that was clearly made towards me as a joke with a silly remark, but in no way was the comment meant in a racist manner."

A lot of golfers have had trouble liking everyone else on the golfing tour. There are just some guys (or women) you are bound not to like, but the practice has been to keep it quiet and out of the news. Sergio Garcia has broken that code wide open and has let his dislike for Tiger Woods spill out into plain view. Too bad! Sergio is a good guy, but he is easily distracted and the distractions hurt his golf game. He has now got a big time distraction.

A way out?
Come on over here and win the U.S. Open that starts in just a few weeks, Sergio. And at the award ceremonies offer your apologies to Tiger and suggest that you both bury the hatchet and start all over in building a relationship. Your both too good to act like brats! Stop it!

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Buzzfeed

When you are an old timer, such as I, you catch on to these high tech things rather slowly. I still haven’t caught on to Facebook and don’t understand for a second what the big fuss is all about. I do my facebooking every morning, over coffee, with my wife. Now there’s Buzzfeed; and I’m giving it a try.
by Charlie Leck

So, how far behind the times am I? I am hopelessly behind. For instance, I just found out about Buzzfeed yesterday and, of course, that’s an elementary (kindergarten) approach for most people. I mean people are talking about Smart TVs soon being obsolete and I don’t even know what they are yet. The fellow who installed my DVR (I don’t know what the letters stand for) and my Blue Ray player told me I was now equipped to receive programming via wi-fi on my TV (whatever that means). Of course, he also mentioned that my “provider” would probably have to increase my “connection speeds” to “10 to 15 megabits” for me to use it effectively. My speeds, he said, are good enough for things like Hulu (what?), it isn’t good enough for “streaming high-definition.”

It was quite enough for me to venture over to Buzzfeed yesterday. Once there, I had to go to a its “help page” (“How to use Buzzfeed”) to try to figure out what it was all about.

So, this is a great one (I just found it on Buzzfeed yesterday): George Bernard Shaw sent a message to Winston Churchill: “Have reserved two tickets for opening night. Come and bring a friend, if you have one.”

Churchill then replied: “Impossible to come to first night. Will come to second night, if you have one.”

I would not want to get into a cat fight with Churchill. Here’s another little repartee…

Lady Astor sent him a message saying: “Winston, if you were my husband, I’d put poison in your coffee.”

And, Churchill replied: “Nancy, if you were my wife, I’d drink it.”

So (don’t you just hate people who begin every paragraph with the word “so?”), just what the heck is Buzzfeed anyway? Well, it starts off as a web site and it has a help page designed to assist one such as I in using the web site. I felt very stupid that I had to go to that “help page.”

So, how the hell did I even get on to Buzzfeed? Well, I was listening to Minnesota Public Radio yesterday and there was this wonderful interview of Slate’s editor-in-chief, David Plotz, and he had great praise for Buzzfeed. As I listened to him, I said to myself: “What the hell is Buzzfeed?” [P.S. I got hooked on Slate four or five years ago and I’m a very frequent visitor to that news site.]

You see, about this Buzzfeed thing, it was almost as if a friend had called me up and said: “Why aren’t you using email? Email is really cool and I think you’d be good at it!” It was as if Mr. Plotz was talking directly to me during his interview yesterday, telling me Buzzfeed was made just for me. Now, however, just like Facebook, my dilemma is this: “Okay, here I am! Now just what do I do?”

I decided I needed to begin on this Buzzfeed slowly. Once, I jumped right into Facebook cold turkey and it went very badly – so badly they I had to go into anger management treatment as a result. Facebook and I don’t get along – unless I come upon one of sweet Laurence’s wonderful contributions that make me so happy that I go through all the rest of the useless stuff people put up there just so I can find her postings (I’m really sorry if I’m offending anyone. It’s something that I do quite frequently and then I always feel terrible about it afterward – or afterword). Laurence is a French woman and you know how the French women are – ooh, la, la! And, if you knew her like I know her, you’d be willing to fight your way through Facebook posts to get to her too.

So, this is my Buzzfeed game plan. For awhile, I’m going to just visit Buzzfeed every day and see what its citizen reporters are reporting on – turning in, as I understand it, items they find on many parts of the web and sometimes posting scoops about crazy things someone did on the web or said on the web – could be just a written report or it might be a video. I guess some of these Buzzfeed contributors sometime win little badges of honor and thus notoriety. The rules are simple – like, don’t post porn and don’t try to plug your own blog or commercial products or you’ll be banned forever from the Kingdom of Buzzfeed.

Some fellow posted this wonderful repartee of Winston Churchill that I’ve quoted here today. Wonderful stuff. It’ll draw me back to Buzzfeed a couple of times. I may find it’s nothing but a bunch of poppycock. If so I’ll let you know.

So, Bessie Braddock, a Member of Parliament, said to Winston Churchill: “Winston, you are drunk!”

Church replied to Ms. Braddock: “You’re right, Bessie. And you’re ugly. But tomorrow morning, I’ll be sober.”

Ooh!

I’ll just add this little note about what I found this morning on Buzzfeed about Facebook…
33 Ways Facebook Ruins Your Life (check it out).

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Once in a while, tired of the daily paper and the constant haranguing it brings, I must rely on better sources to fill me up (re-energize myself) and get me going again.
by Charlie Leck

I read this yesterday in my daily Rilke readings (taken from the Ninth Duino Elegy) and I liked it very much…

“A hunger drives us.
We want to contain it all in our naked hands,
our brimming senses, our speechless hearts.
We want to become it, or offer it – but to whom?
We could hold it forever – but, after all,
what can we keep? Not the beholding,
so slow to learn. Not anything that has happened here.
Nothing. There are hurts. And, always, the hardships.
And there’s the long knowing of love – all of it
unsayable. Later, amidst the stars, we will see:
these are better unsaid.”

It’s a nice break (no?) from the daily head-slaps that we get from the newspapers – especially on this day following the horrible storm in Oklahoma and the sorrow that the reports are bringing.

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

The Scandal that Wasn’t

I have a feeling – a feeling, mind you – that the current IRS/Tea Party scandal is going to turn out to be a mighty flapping of buttock cheeks as air escapes through them.
by Charlie Leck

As it often does, the New York Times put some of its best reporters on a big story! The newspaper wanted a careful look at the current talk of scandal inside the IRS having to do with various Tea Party groups’ applications for non-profit (charity) status. A story in this morning’s NY Times is well worth your attention. It may make you shake your head. Further, you may sit back and ask “what scandal?” It made me ask: Why were people fired over this?

Nicholas Confessore, David Kocieniewski and Michael Luo were the writers on the story. It was first filed yesterday [18 May 2013] but appears in a more complete fashion in this morning’s paper.

A statement, quoting Phillip Hackney, a former IRS Tax Lawyer who now teaches law at Louisiana State University (LSU), kind of sums up the entire and very long article…

“We’re talking about an office (Cincinnati) overwhelmed by 60,000 paper applications trying to find efficient means of dealing with that.”

Applications to the IRS for non-profit status went through the Cincinnati office. Following what I have often called here “the utterly stupid ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court” on political contributions by corporations and political fund raisers (Citizens United), the stream of applications to the IRS increased to an enormous level. The specialists in Cincinnati who looked at these applications were not exactly highly trained and not at all fully qualified to make decisions about these matters without technical advice from Washington.

In this you have the beginning of a non-scandal scandal. Poor schmucks in Cincinnati were trying to do their work at a terrific pace. They wanted to make sure everything was on the up-and-up and they worked hard to do it. Did they make mistakes? Probably? Were they working for the White House in an attempt to stop conservative groups from organizing to raise money to elect Mitt Romney to the White House? I don’t thiiiiink so!

The resulting clap was so seriously loud and forceful that it gently and momentarily lifted the entire roof off the church.

Cancel the call for Woodward and Bernstein! What we have here is not a scandal but just one more example of government inefficiency.

Believe me, the majority of Republicans are not going to let it go so easily. We’ll need to spend millions upon millions on an investigation and in committee hearings designed to provide a stage for congressional representatives who will be running for office in 2014.

I suggest you just crank up the old computer this morning and get on over to this New York Times article and find out for yourself what went wrong in Cincinnati.

Here are some highlights from the article…

“Overseen by a revolving cast of midlevel managers, stalled by miscommunication with I.R.S. lawyers and executives in Washington and confused about the rules they were enforcing, the Cincinnati specialists flagged virtually every application with Tea Party in its name. But their review went beyond conservative groups: more than 400 organizations came under scrutiny, including at least two dozen liberal-leaning ones and some that were seemingly apolitical...”

“…I think that what happened here was that foolish mistakes were made by people trying to be more efficient in their workload selection,” Mr. [Steven) Miller [former IRS Commissioner] testified before a House committee Friday. While “intolerable,” he said, it “was not an act of partisanship...”

“..But the Exempt Organizations Division — concentrated in Cincinnati with fewer than 200 workers, according to I.R.S. officials — is staffed mostly with accountants, clerks and civil servants. Working for one of only three I.R.S. divisions not charged with collecting tax revenue, specialists in the Determinations Unit in Cincinnati primarily review and process roughly 70,000 applications for exemptions each year, relatively few from groups engaged in election activity…”

“…It is not unusual for I.R.S. specialists to search for patterns in applications, in part for clues toward fraud and scams — a single tax preparer employing the same tax gambit for multiple clients, for example — and in part to ensure that similar groups are treated in a consistent way, the former officials said…”

“…Some former agency officials and outside advocates said they worried about the chilling effect the controversy could have on legitimate enforcement. Even as the agency was scrutinizing small nonprofit organizations, critics say, it appears to have done little to crack down on large 501(c)4 groups that spent at least half a billion dollars on political advertising during the last four years, some in seeming defiance of the I.R.S. rules. Efforts by the agency to clarify those tax rules — a potential first step toward curbing abuses — began last summer but are still in the early stages…

These excerpts should not be regarded as the summation of a very serious, complex, unbiased and lengthy article.

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Time for Woodward and Bernstein

It’s time for a Woodward and Bernstein team – or for a team like Woodward and Bernstein.
by Charlie Leck

I can’t tell you how many hours I spent in front of the telly in the early seventies – ’73, to be exact – when I should have been out, productively working. I caught the Watergate disease and became fascinated with the extraordinarily colorful Senator Same Erving. On those days when I had to beat the streets, making my calls, I tried to have dinner in front of the television so I could watch the public television replays of the day's hearings, when the Senate committee chaired by Erving delved into the whole murky Watergate affair.

I don’t think many of you who remember the times will disagree with me when I give credit to those two young, energetic reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Berstein, for breaking open the entire mess and bringing down the President and all his men. I don’t know where the whole investigation might have gone had it not for those two tenacious guys.

Woodward and Bernstein set out to find out what the President knew about the whole, rotten business and when he knew it. I’ve read their book, All the President’s Men, a number of times and I’m always fascinated by it. It would take us nearly 35 years to find out who Deep Throat was! Remember?

Enough reminiscing about those days! I’ve written about them here before. Now I just want to say we need another Woodward and Bernstein – or perhaps they need to team up again and find out for us just what has happened in the whole IRS vs the Tea Party Scandal.

I’m here to admit that it is messy and that it was wrong! However, I’m not yet ready to admit the President had a hand in it. If he did, the nation needs to know just how and how much he was involved.

No one has supported or cheered for the President more than I; yet I must know, beyond question, that he is innocent and unstained by the shameful actions of the Internal Revenue Service. It isn’t that the validity of their applications for non-profit status should not have been investigated; it is just that Tea Party organizations should not have been investigated while such organizations in the center and left of the political spectrum were ignored while doing the same thing. Is that what really happened? We must know! Was the President aware? We must have the answer! If so, when was he aware and what did he do about it? Every American needs to know – every American of all political persuasions!

We must not allow Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and her type to make these damning accusations if they are not true. She has no idea whether they are or not! She is merely a dunce! The U.S. Senate must find out the truth and report it clearly to the American people; and they need a leader as tenacious and honest as was Sam Irving. (You children don’t know about him, but we old geezers will never forget him. Nor will we ever forget Woodward and Bernstein! Bring them on again!)

I should only add that I am not afraid of the truth on this one.
There is a world of difference between Richard Nixon and Barack Obama!

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

I Blogged My Heart Out Yesterday

I am avoiding this scandal in Washington, when I ought to be confronting it and writing about it. I wrote, instead, a strange blog yesterday, meaning to post it today. It was far too intimate and personal and revealed some of the little problems my aging has brought along. Who cares? That is what I finally asked and then I set aside the blog, putting it instead in my daily journal. I must write about this stink in our nation’s capitol! Why am I avoiding it?
by Charlie Leck

“Sit! Write,” I told myself!

There are politicians comparing it to Watergate? Watergate! Do you remember Watergate and the slime of it?... how it brought down the President and labeled him a criminal forever after?

I am like the proverbial ostrich! I do not want to face this – not the slightest possibility that my president could be involved in anything so awful. He is not! I am certain! He could not sink so low as Richard Nixon did!

Yet, of course, Republicans are running around, happily, and comparing this current dust-up to Watergate!

I do not believe it for a second! I realize something went terribly wrong, but I do not believe it was orchestrated from or by the White House – though all the motive in the world seems there for this administration to do such a thing. The constant frustration brought on by the Tea Party types. Those inside the White House must have asked myriad times about whether the far right might be raising funds illegally to oppose the President’s actions. Why not loose the FBI and the IRS on them – the dirty bastards? Yet, I cannot believe this president – this man – could be capable of such a misuse of power. However, the Republicans will make it seem so! They have an important mid-term election coming up in 2014. What a body blow it would be to the Democrats if the nation suspects them of such foul play. Just the hint of a stink – or the unlikeliest suspicion – would be enough for the Republicans to win back both houses by a wide margin.

As I think about it, is this not motive enough to cause scoundrels to create such images of a president gone bad. Oh, Lord, not Obama! I cannot believe it of him. I will not!

Who knew what and when?
Of course, President Obama must act with immediate efficiency to lay bare all that went wrong. What was happening at the IRS? We must know every detail and how such things began – who knew what and when did they know it? Remember than constant tune from the Watergate scandal?

There can be nothing hidden! Everything must be open to the inspection of the American people as well as the Congress.

I will write a number of times in the next few days about the scandal in Washington and who is behind it. Full disclosure!

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

Free at Last! Free at Last!

I listened to a good many of the comments and debate from the Minnesota Senate on Monday regarding the new marriage law. I was often touched and moved – by both Republicans and Democrats – by those who planned to vote against the proposed law and by those who would vote for it.
by Charlie Leck

When the vote was taken, I was in my car driving along in busy afternoon traffic. Just as I realized the bill had passed and it was announced on the radio, I heard car horns honking all around me. The Monday afternoon rush hour turned into a celebration for a good number of the drivers who were headed home from work. I began tapping my horn with the other drivers.

On the radio, I could hear the general celebration in the Minnesota capital building. It was quite loud and very joyous. The sounds were echoing around in the big, open structure, bouncing off the walls and cascading here and there.

Minnesota will, beginning on August 1, allow gay and lesbian marriage. We are the first Midwestern state to allow such marriages. I am a very happy and proud Minnesotan. I have friends who will take advantage of the new law and I am very, very joyful for them. I called one of them to share the news. Of course, he had been listening carefully on public radio and knew what had happened. He said that he and his partner had been hugging and dancing ever since the vote tally was announced.

I called one of the organizers of the political strategy to get this bill voted into law, to congratulate him. His phone was busy and his voice mail was jammed. I sent him a text message instead.

I was stymied in my attempts to contact any of the other happy friends who were so impacted by this new law. So, I turned instead to the magnificent but mysterious big-guy who oversees the planet. I gave him the thumbs-up and the biggest smile I could muster.

“Great goin’, I said. “You did good! Real good!”

On a freeway overpass, under which I drove, a group of young fellows were waving and dancing with wild happiness, waving rainbow banners. Cars were honking at them in congratulations.

People interviewed on the radio were saying things like… “This is how it feels to be equal… to be a full citizen.”

“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!”

It was a wonderful, extraordinary feeling. Now I sit quietly thinking about the long and difficult journey that’s been made to here.

At 5 p.m. today, at a public ceremony on the steps of the Capital Building, the Governor will sign the bill into law. Freedom! Freedom! I can only imagine that there will be some wonderful parties late this afternoon that will go on into the morning. I’ll just sleep well and peacefully.

_________________________

Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.