Category Archives: Personal

The first Republican President’s speech: the Gettysburg Address

On this day, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg address to a deeply divided country.  It wasn’t a long speech – 278 words, total – but it continues to be one of the most enduring.

Not once does the President use “I” or a teleprompter.  He doesn’t come to divide the country based on the color of skin.  He comes to unify.  He uses the word “we” over and over again to talk about a unified country.  Both the idiot who occupies the White House and all elected members of Congress could learn quite a bit from this speech and this man.

Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, and his ideas weren’t popular; liberals didn’t want to end slavery.  They were fighting and dying to save their way of life.  Republicans were a new party, and didn’t garner much favor in the south.  In fact, it was specifically because of the Republican party that liberals created the Ku Klux Klan.  Liberalism was then, and continues to be today, the most divisive and un-American ideal that was errantly imported to this great country.

The country has drifted far from where it was in 1863.  Liberalism continues to be a disease that spreads hate among the uneducated, and continues to insist on dividing people based on race, creed, color, religion, and sexual preference.  Once liberalism and all of it’s vitriol is removed from the landscape, we can have peace, unity, harmony, and a nation based on the belief that all men are, truly, created equal.

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Happy Birthday, United States Marine Corps!

On this date in 1775 Captain Samuel Nicholas formed two battalions of Continental Marines into the first naval infantry.

Since their inception, the United States Marine Corps (USMC) have helped to found a country, beaten back evil and tyranny and create men who stand head and shoulders above the rest. They truly are the few and the proud.

It pissed my Air Force colonel father off to no end to know that I was born on the same date as the United States Marine Corps. I’m not a Marine, but I proudly share their birthday every year.

Happy Birthday Devil Dogs!

OS X Mavericks is here, and it brings iBooks to the Mac!

Apple announced new hardware and software today, including the FREE release of OS X Mavericks available on Apple’s website HERE.

For authors, Mavericks brings iBooks to the Mac.  From the Apple press release:

With OS X Mavericks, a new chapter in the iBooks story begins. Now you can launch the iBooks app on your Mac and the books you’ve already downloaded on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch will automatically appear in your library. And there are over 2 million more books in the iBooks Store, ready for you to download with just a few clicks.1 Reading books is intuitive and easy — turn pages with a swipe and zoom in on images with a pinch. If you’re a student hitting the books, keep as many open as you like and search through them with ease. And when you take notes, highlight passages, or add a bookmark on your Mac, iCloud pushes them to all your devices automatically. iCloud even remembers which page you’re on. So if you start reading on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, you can pick up right where you left off on your Mac.

You can find out more about the new products HERE and OS X Mavericks HERE.

You can find out more about iBooks HERE.

Where Walt Disney Ate

Hadley Meares has posted a new article at KCET.org about one of my personal heroes, Walt Disney.  I’m always fascinated by the intricacies of Disney, and finding out that he ate at the same places I like – like the Tam O’Shanter that was right up the street from one of my parent’s apartment buildings on Los Feliz – builds a stronger bond within me, linking me to those great people who shared the same likes, dislikes, and views as I do.

From the article:

“Walt didn’t like fancy stuff. . . . He was a very complex man, but his tastes were very simple.” — Songwriter Richard Sherman, 2009

The original Imagineer found inspiration everywhere he ate.

For all his fantastic dreams, Walt Disney was a mid-century man, with a middle-class, middle of the road taste in food. “Before he married mother, father had eaten in hash houses and lunch wagons for so many years in order to save money that he’d developed a hash house-lunch wagon appetite,” his daughter Diane wrote. “He liked fried potatoes, hamburgers, western sandwiches, hotcakes, canned peas, hash, stew, roast beef sandwiches.”

His favorite meal was a can of Gebhardt’s chili mixed with a can of Dennison’s chili, which he often ate at his desk. He was also a big fan of V-8 juice, which he would offer to visitors at the studio, who were often disappointed that there was nothing stronger available.

To read the whole article and find out more about where Walt Disney ate, go HERE.

Two very different ways of celebrating Yosemite’s 123rd Birthday

Today – October 1st, 2013 – Google is celebrating Yosemite National Park’s 123rd birthday with a Doodle.

Also today Yosemite (and other national parks) are closed due to the government shutdown.

The federal government partially shut down at midnight on Tuesday because of the continuing zany antics of the most hate-filled and divisive President and the Senate democrats (the Senate has the lowest approval rating of all time right now … go figure), who can’t pass a budget and who think that raising a debt ceiling is how you balance the books.  If you raise the debt ceiling you don’t run out of money, right?

As Jay Leno put it a few weeks ago: “The government will run out of money in just 3 weeks. I’m no financial whiz, but we’re 16 Trillion Dollars in debt. Doesn’t that mean we already ran out of money? Like 16 Trillion Dollars ago?”

Because of 536 inept elected officials, over 800,000 government employees can’t work and our national parks, monuments, and museums are closed.

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