No one likes to see animals of any kind — including humans — needlessly die. However, when men — why is it always men? –  go out into the woods with guns, hide in trees, and use other means to create an unfair advantage over trusting animals that are then killed, I am not going to lament the death of such a person.

According to today’s Union Leader, a New Hampshire hunter shot and killed himself while he was acting out his childish hunting fantasy. I am sorry for his family. On the other hand, I rejoice that another deer — supposedly being “managed” with these government-sanctioned slaughters — escaped to see another day.

On the same day, according to the newspaper report, another hunter in a separate incident shot himself in the hand.

Given the number of hunting accidents each year, I wonder if most hunters are both cruel and stupid. Or perhaps the two character flaws always go together?

Posted in Hillary Clinton Quarterly, Hunting, New Hampshire, Vegetarian Tagged: deer hunts, hunters shooting themselves, national rifle association, NRA, wildlife management

Ran into a Gallup Poll video today. They surveyed some 600,000+ Americans to see who was happy and who wasn’t.

Turns out that young people are the happiest group. Is that a surprise? Probably not. What’s there to do but party, have sex, watch TV, text your friends, and get drunk. Not a bad lifestyle!

What did surprise me was how much the “happy meter” dropped when they got to the Baby Boomer age group. Does that mean fewer parties, less sex, no friends to text, and too much sobriety? I don’t think so. I really don’t have a clue, except that I suspect some Boomers are dismayed at how their lives turned out after having started off as the most idealistic generation ever, only to turn out taciturn and cynical in late middle age just like their parents.

As for me, I am as happy now — or as miserable — as I was when I was 25. So I guess I am happy that I am still unhappy. . .or whatever.

– Rake

Posted in Hillary Clinton Quarterly, life Tagged: baby boomers, Gallup poll, happiness survey

(In case you missed it. . .)

Those of us who have known Hillary for a long time are not surprised that she can pull off such a deadpan swipe at Conan and Mayor Booker.

Thank goodness she means this in a nice way. I would hate to be on the receiving end if she were really pissed off.

Know what I mean, Bill?

Posted in Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton Quarterly Tagged: Conan O'Brien, Newark Mayor Booker

From my friend, Frank Marafiote, comes this article posted today in the Village Blog —

As much as I love New Hampshire, living in the “Live Free or Die” state can sometimes be frustrating.

Case in point: in the conservative hamlet of Raymond, New Hampshire, just on the outskirts of our largest city, Manchester, the town’s selectman turned down a request to have a peace rally on the town commons to support the UN’s International Day of Peace.

“What kind of crowd is this going to gather? This is a peace group, we are at war and I wonder if this is going to bring a crowd of people into town on both sides of the issues and whether we need police down there,” selectman Jack Barnes said.

Anyone who knows these old-timers could have predicted that anything associated with the United Nations didn’t stand a chance of being approved. Many people in this state still believe the UN is a Communist plot to take over the government.

As details of the subversive event came to light, it was clear that there were other sinister, terrorist overtones to this so-called peace rally.

Resident Molly Schlangen sent a letter to the board requesting use of the town common for a brief gathering with complimentary yoga classes to “promote peace in our community and in our world.” Schlangen, a local yoga instructor and formerly the school nurse at Lamprey River Elementary School, held the same event last year. About 20 people attended and took part in a 45-minute outdoor yoga class.

Imagine: a yoga class in public to support peace! It’s pretty obvious that those 20 people in tights doing the Warrior pose would be sending signals to Al-Qaeda operatives across the U.S.

Perhaps more amusing than the reaction of the town fathers (the town mothers, in the minority, voted in favor of peace),  is the reaction of local cheerleaders to the ruling. Here’s a taste taken from the comments section of the Union Leader article:

“Peace” rallies have been violent in the last few years, just look at Code Pink. They’re also populated by pot smokers.”
- Jason Entres, Hollis

We don’t need people out there not supporting our troops in public. it sends the wrong message to them and they are fighting to keep us safe from terrorists. Terrorists do yoga in iran an iraq, not in america.
- HunterMike, Raymond

Please….since when does the UN actually promote peace? It’s comprised up of some the worst civil rights abusing countries. It’s a total façade. You want to promote peace – more power to you. Just stop promoting the UN fallacy. It’s time the U.S. pulled out the one-world-government UN / World Bank. UN treaties are a dangerous threat to our national sovereignty and our Constitution – stop selling us down the road to the New World Order government. Do our own research on this subject, the lasting they actual want is peace.
- Mac Wade, Newmarket

In all fairness to my home state, many people commented in support of the rally. Maybe there’s hope, after all.

Posted in Hillary Clinton Quarterly, New Hampshire, Politics Tagged: Al-Qaeda, give peace a chance, international day of peace, jack barnes, live free or die, molly schlangen, New Hampshire, peace, raymond nh, terrorism, un, united nations, yoga for peace

For years I have been belaboring a point that some adults refuse to accept: any kind of physical discipline of children is a form of abuse. Worse, what starts out as “harmless” spanking escalates over time into serious emotional and physical injury to the child.

Now a new study of toddlers shows that even spanking kids at that early age can have long-lasting consequences.  According to CNN, the study from the Journal of Child Development shows –

Children who were spanked as 1-year-olds tended to behave more aggressively at age 2, and did not perform as well as other children on a test measuring thinking skills at age 3. . . . Spanking, moreover, reinforces negative memories in the child’s mind. Parents should aim instead to build “prominent, happy memories” of childhood for their kids.

The study also concludes that parents who spank are more likely to be younger, less educated, single, and/or depressed and stressed.

Susan Newman, social psychologist and author of “Little Things Long Remembered: Making Your Children Feel Special Every Day,” said parents should discourage bad behaviors by taking away privileges such as dessert, or setting an earlier bedtime. Newman believes that children are too young to understand when parenting behavior is wrong, even at the level of abuse.

Physical violence, Newman says, gets passed down in families because the only parenting skills people know are the behaviors that they saw at home. So, if you want your children to abuse their children, keep hitting them. Your grandchildren will thank you for it!

Posted in Alice Miller, Child abuse, Children, Parenting, Physical abuse of children, Physical discipline Tagged: journal of child development, spanking

From The Village Blog today, a great post asking why we should let those two small states — and their reactionary senators, Grassley and Enzi — have such a major role in health care reform.

It sounds as if the Obama Administration is finally coming to its senses and is ready to dump the anti-reform tag-team of Grassley and Enzi in favor of health care policies that actually help 300 million Americans, especially the 47+ million uninsured.

After so many years of listening to all the reasons why my home state of New Hampshire and that corn-field known as Iowa should not have the first primary and caucuses for president, it is astonishing that two Republican senators from states with a total population of about 3.5 million should be allowed to have such a major impact on health care policy for the rest of the country.

How David Axelrod and Company could have missed the major lesson of the Clinton reform effort is equally astonishing. It was not that Hillary held “secret meetings,” or that the reform plan was too complicated, or that it was “socialistic,” or that she did not include enough politicians in her deliberations (she did). It failed because the Republicans wanted it to fail. And they wanted it to fail because they do not believe that the poor deserve health care. In other words, like most Republicans, they were greedy and did not want to pay for someone else’s health insurance.

They still don’t. Nothing has changed folks. The GOP is still the party of the rich, the entitled, the haves. And they will do everything they can to keep their stash as safe as possible, the rest of the country be damned.

Grassley and Enzi?

Let ‘em go home and shuck corn and shovel cow shit. That’s where they belong.

Posted in Barack Obama, Health Care, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton Quarterly, Iowa Caucus, New Hampshire Primary, Politics, Republicans Tagged: Charles Grassley, David Axelrod, health care reform, Iowa, Mike Enzi, universal health care proposal, Wyoming

What an excellent question!

As someone who has been posting to this blog for almost five years now, I can vouch for the challenges of proofreading posts and otherwise being ready for the blog traffic we bloggers try so hard to achieve.

The Marketing Taxi, a marketing planning consultancy, recently reviewed a business coaching blog that still had the infamous Latin fill-in “Lorem/Ipsum/Dolorem” as its tag line.

Not throwing stones exactly, the author admits his own fallibility in this area and knowingly writes:

Most of us with blogs have had this experience: we edit, proofread, spell check, read it again, and feeling we’ve covered all the bases push that “publish” button. Only then do we see the mistake, the name we didn’t get right, the link that isn’t working, etc. So, back we go, hoping we can correct our errors before anyone sees it.

What is perhaps less realistic is his idea that a blogger’s “friends” should tell a blogger about mistakes they find. Unless it’s your wife or husband — someone who really enjoys pointing out your faults — don’t count on getting much feedback about your spelling or grammar. Most of us are lucky just to get an angry right-winger to damn us to hell for our opinions.

In the meantime, I will content myself to use the spell-checker, try to catch the more outlandish errors, and hope that my perspicacity as a commentator about politics and life make up for errant ways as a copy editor.

Posted in Writing Tagged: blogging, blogs, coaching blog, Marketing Taxi, proofreading