Personal stuff – Page 3

Wishes for a Merry Christmas 2020

Perhaps this is the perfect metaphor for this bastard of a year: I write remotely (socially distant) from the readers.

Maybe this is a question for those who are north of 80 years of age, but was Christmas during wartime like this? I sometimes feel like this is the style of holiday we may have commemorated circa 1942, a point where the shock and novelty of volunteering after Pearl Harbor wore off and people whose hometowns lost their native sons in the Second World War were commemorating an otherwise solemn holiday. Instead of a war against imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, though, we’re fighting this time against a Chinese germ that’s fighting dirty with increased overdoses and suicides taking quite a toll on our youth.

Regardless, we must press on, and our biggest asset in that regard is the One who sent His son to be our sacrifice, that Savior whose birth we are celebrating tomorrow. In a time where the highway signs are telling us to stay home, they don’t quite get the message right. My simple prayer this Christmas is that my readers come home, returning to a life with its priorities in order: God and family first, “stuff” somewhere toward the end.

I don’t recall where I got the suggestion from, but back around Thanksgiving I saw an item where it was suggested that beginning December 1, people read a chapter of the Book of Luke each night. This story of Jesus would culminate on Christmas Eve since there are 24 chapters, beginning with the angels visiting Mary to tell her she would be the virgin mother and concluding with His resurrection after the Crucifixion. Yes, I’m giving you a really late start for a lengthy read in one evening but it’s definitely doable, and illustrates well why we celebrate.

So tomorrow my site will be dark. Over the weekend I may come up with something, but for this moment: Merry Christmas.

Hard to believe: monoblogue turns 15

I’m definitely into the moody teenage stage now.

Pretty much every year on December 1st I do a retrospective of where monoblogue has been and where it might just go in the next year. While I actually began this a few days in advance because our family’s plans included a trip away, the fact remains that 2020 and the CCP virus definitely affected my initial plans. (Well, that and a few technical hiccups and the need for a new laptop.)

So I really haven’t made it into some of the internal plans I had regarding creating my author site, and updating photos and such on old posts…truth be told, I sort of forgot about it with everything else going on. (We had these local and national political races, don’cha know?) Maybe this coming year, if I can find the time – you never know when you may need that author site. 🙂

One thing I can say about 2020 is that what seemed like a so-so year for readership has really caught fire in the last three months. Turns out that year-to-date I am already at my best year since 2016, which was when I stopped doing daily posts. And this came to pass right about the time I was doing my dossier series, which is probably the most lengthy-term, multi-part project I’ve ever done on this site insofar as focusing on one subject. It was sort of a blessing in disguise that I did not have Shorebird of the Month to deal with; however, that’s not to say I didn’t miss doing them!

In looking up my post output, though, that dossier series made a serious dent in my numbers. Once upon a time I came close to a post a day, but so far this year it’s only about a post and a half a week – granted, I essentially did my dossier series two to three times but all that counted as one post since I simply updated. Since I don’t see a similar series until 2024 because there’s neither a governor’s race nor a scheduled Senate race, I think posting in 2021 will get back to its 2 to 3 times a week, Good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. It depends as always on how inspired I am.

One thing that inspired me recently is rereading some of what I wrote the last time our nation was in this particular pickle of shifting from Republican to Democrat, the early part of 2009. In truth, perhaps I should freshen up the three lessons I provided because I think they still mostly ring true. There is definitely the potential for TEA Party 3.0 if we can do it right this time and kick out the grifters and con artists.

While this website has always been about what interested me, longtime readers know about my fondness for thinkers like Newt Gingrich, Thomas Sowell, and Victor Davis Hanson. They’re the type whose understanding of history makes their commentary timeless and evergreen. In doing a post a day I sort of got away from that, but at this slower pace I’d like to believe I can provide this service to readers who wish to be missionaries for the secular cause of Constitutional thought. (In part, that’s because it paves the way for the more traditional role of missionary as one who brings the Good News of Jesus Christ.)

So I suppose I am off and running on year number 16 – the website domain was renewed and it’s still with the same server company (or, actually, its successor since they’ve changed hands a couple of times.) As long as the Good Lord gives me life and the ability to convert my thoughts into these blog posts I’ll be here, standing athwart of what seems to be a trend in history to backslide toward tyranny. It’s still a lot of fun for me, so why stop now?

The exodus

There’s little question this election season will rank among the most divisive in our history. The seemingly irreconcilable differences between the populists and conservatives who backed Donald Trump and the liberals and bohemians who either supported or held their noses to vote for Joe Biden have qualified this as perhaps the most bitter balloting since 1860 – and we all know what happened after that one.

I would also submit to you that the amount of yellow journalism in this election was comparable to those long-ago races where partisan newspapers were unafraid to make up or amplify rumors about the opponents of their favored candidates. After all, we went through three-plus years of a trumped-up (pun intended) media-driven impeachment while those same organs basically ignored a potential blackmail scandal affecting Joe Biden and his son Hunter that erupted just three weeks before the election. Maybe they “learned” their lesson from the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal that came to a crescendo just days before the election in 2016 and perhaps cost her an election that the media assured us was in the bag for her.

The biggest differences, however, between the modern day campaign and those elections of long ago are the speed of communication and lifestyle. In Lincoln’s day, the telegraph was in its early stages of development and news more often came from local newspapers. It may have taken a week for some to find out who won the election, and that’s if they purchased a copy of the local newspaper. While the newspaper industry of 1860 may have pitted rival against rival because they preferred different papers that backed opposing politicians, the news didn’t dominate the lives of common folk who were more interested in working for their survival as farmers or laborers or headed a household full of children to raise. It was truly the 1% who had enough leisure time to debate the political.

Now we have 24/7 cable news, but more importantly we have social media as a means of information and communication – and the reason we have social media is because we have evolved our lifestyles to a point where even those on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder have time to follow the news or at least keep up with the culture. No longer are religion and politics taboo subjects for discussion; in fact, having no political opinion makes you the outlier. Either you’re on the red team or the blue team these days. (By not voting or voting third party, in the eye of the beholder you are the opposition.)

So if you’ll pardon the long introduction, my point is that, over the last month or so, we have seen a breakup that follows the political in the arena of social media, one which has accelerated since the election and grown to include the modern-day equivalent of the local newspaper.

I had never heard of Parler before this summer, but back in June there was an early move toward the social network based on issues with Twitter, for which Parler is considered the closest cousin. I jumped onto Parler on June 22, but to be honest I use it much the same way I use Facebook except I don’t post as much. (Part of this was that I never cared for Twitter.) Since the runup to the election with its constant reminders to go vote and the so-called “fact checking” exceedingly applied to conservative viewpoints – while liberals are unquestionably taken at face value – the growth of Parler has been exponential.

Joining Parler on the growth list are a couple of news channels. All summer there were rumblings among the conservative set that “fair and balanced” Fox News was no longer as fair or balanced. These rumblings grew louder with Chris Wallace’s hard-hitting interview of President Trump in July and his widely panned mishandling of moderator duties during the first Presidential debate. Strike three, however, was Fox News’s willingness on election night to call Arizona quickly for Joe Biden while slow-walking calls on states Trump eventually won handily, such as Florida.

Since the election, thousands of Trump supporters have vowed to stop watching Fox (even if it’s only the programming outside popular shows they still have featuring Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity) and they’re flocking to upstarts One America News and NewsMax TV, which have featured a more pro-Trump viewpoint. (It’s not that much of an achievement, considering the 90-plus percent negative coverage Trump receives from the legacy media.)

The problem for Fox News, of course, is a little like the issue faced by the anti-Trump Republicans in the Lincoln Project. Now that they are useless to the Democrats because the election is over, they’re going to find they have no friends on either side. The Republicans now see them as disloyal and the Democrats will simply call them useful idiots who outlived their usefulness. I don’t expect any mass exodus from CNN or MSNBC to a more “woke” Fox News. Why go for the imitation when you have the real thing?

The $64,000 question then is whether these splits become permanent or not. There are many skeptics who laugh at those leaving Facebook and Twitter, saying either that they will be back after their tantrum is up or that they won’t be missed anyway because they’re uninformed hicks. (I see that out of a lot of #NeverTrumps that I know.) And while there are many thousands who vow to dump Fox News, we haven’t seen the ratings for OANN or NewsMax TV to know if this is a new habit.

One thing that worries me about this trend is the potential for slipping into an information silo, although it certainly could be argued that those who rely solely on the traditional media outlets (as the social media outlets Facebook and Twitter do) are already trapped in one that reflects a left-wing, pro-Democrat viewpoint. Too many people are letting those outlets do their thinking for them, and it’s to the detriment of our republic that they cede that right.

As for me, I’ll try and do a little more on Parler and perhaps join MeWe, but for the immediate future I’ll also stay on Facebook until my friends and family abandon it. I also have a couple pages I curate there so there’s that factor, too. Guess I will be living in two worlds for the time being.

Overdue like a library book

Did you all miss me while I was gone the last couple weeks?

I realized I missed a deadline, but I have a good excuse besides the CCP virus or the dog eating my homework: my venerable old laptop of almost five years decided it was time to develop a sporadic issue with the power supply (at least that’s my best guess on the situation.) When I tried to use it one day it was dead as a brick, and after a couple tries with my good friend Elbert attempting to bring it back to life and keep it going to no avail (after fixing the issue of a couple weeks ago), it was clear that Houston had a problem. So I decided it was time to break down and buy a new one, which is almost identical to the old one aside from having silver keys with black letters rather than the inverse. (I’m sure the processor is better and so forth too.)

So I have a little catching up to do, in particular my endorsements for the Delaware races. Having the time away gave my a bit of time to consider my choices further and perhaps come up with compelling explanations as to why you should vote for them. Once I finish this post that’s what I’m going to begin working on, but I thought I owed you an explanation as to the long break.

The absence

You may have noticed I haven’t updated my blog or my dossier in awhile. Well, I have a very good explanation for that: my trusty old laptop needed to be fixed. The jack that accepts the charger cord went bad so I couldn’t charge the battery up. As always, these things occur at the most inopportune time but a good friend of mine could fix the issue and I got this old HP back tonight.

So I’ll be pretty busy this weekend trying to update the governor’s race dossiers with the idea of doing endorsements in the next couple weeks. I also have another piece or two to work on that are unrelated to Delaware elections so that will liven things up a bit.

Thus, this three-week hiatus from posting has come to an end – and not a moment too soon.

A day for adulting

In most of the years since I began writing my words here I have done a post commemorating 9/11 in some fashion. I’m sure my grandparents’ generation felt the same way when Pearl Harbor Day came around seeing that it occurred when they were in their adult years. (I know my mom’s mom and dad were in their late 20s, but I don’t recall when my dad’s parents were born – I think at the time they were in their late 30s since they both died fairly young, before I was far along in school.)

This year I’m reflecting more on the aftermath, once the initial shock of watching the World Trade Center collapse and realizing that the death toll would be in the thousands from the attack wore off. After we finally slept on what had occurred that fateful day, we were truly united states. There was a new respect for first responders and righteous anger at those who perpetrated the attack – it really didn’t matter if you were well left or well right on the political spectrum.

Oh! how the circumstances have changed in 19 years. If 9/11 were to happen tomorrow, the left would be wanting to hang Donald Trump for treason while the right would declare it open season on terrorists, defined as those who were insufficiently loyal to America. Because we were just a few months into the first term of George W. Bush, we didn’t have the specter of an upcoming national election, although this did affect some primaries going on across the country – including Toledo, where I lived at the time.

Be that as it may, in 19 years we have gone from united to divided, sort of like being in our own respective Twin Tower. In that regard we may be ripe for another terrorist attack although the measures put in place after 9/11 have done a good job with homeland security. Add in the pandemic and our issues are much more broad-based. All this is why I saw adulting as a logical extension of my remarks on the occasion last year.

Finally, over the last few months I’ve found myself in prayer more often and one thing I pray for is a revival in this land. If a terrorist attack could unite us for just a few weeks imagine what turning ourselves over to our Lord can do.

9/11 is always a good time for reflection, so perhaps this is something worth a devotion.

A weekend to remember, 2020 edition

This has been one of the more unique Memorial Day weekends in recent years and likely will remain so for some time to come.

Traditionally I paid my respects by attending the Wicomico County Memorial Day ceremony at the Civic Center but this year that was postponed until further notice thanks to the pandemic. To be honest, though, I was hoping there was some memorial service a little closer to our new home in Sharptown or Laurel anyway.

Instead, we got the day off but, aside from a church service which touched on the subject with patriotic hymns and the singing of the Star-Spangled Banner, it’s been more like a normal weekend. So this is my way of personally reflecting.

The fact that I am here after my dad’s two-year hitch in the military as a pre-Vietnam Army draftee (he was in at about the same time Elvis Presley was, if that gives you an idea) means that he survived his military service. Insofar as I know, I have no ancestors who were killed in battle unless we go back to my grandfather’s generation and no one’s ever spoken about that.

Surely, however, there are families on the other end of the spectrum who may have the misfortune of losing family members each generation thanks to a desire to serve. Whether those family members died making the ultimate sacrifice and saving others despite knowing their demise was impending or just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the pain for the surviving family is just as great.

It can be annoying for some to see the constant reminders in some media quarters that we should be grateful that others sacrificed so we could grill our burgers or stand in line waiting to get into Home Depot. But in this time where military casualties are the “dog bites man” story due to the winding down of our foreign military excursions, we can’t forget that there have been other times when our nation was in a hot war not necessarily of our choosing, whether via direct attack or the threat to our freedom-loving allies around the globe. It’s happened before and for all we know it may happen again, although I pray not.

Moreso, however, I pray that the sacrifice of so many is not in vain and that we restore and preserve our shining city on a hill in acknowledgement of their loss and for His glory. God Bless America.

Programming note: my series on Delaware political races resumes tomorrow.

The rearview mirror

This was one of the copies I initially received from the publisher. If it’s copy 1 like I think it is then I believe it’s still in a box someplace from our move. It was the markup I used for the reading last June and the reference copy I kept for doing radio gigs.

I placed this photo on my social media page a year ago today. It was the first book out of the box of copies of my book that I kept for hand sales and promotions. So let me tell you about being an author and what a long, strange trip it’s been since that book came out 366 days ago.

When I put the book out after 2 1/2 years of writing it, I felt reasonably good about its prospects. I thought it was rather topical as it came out a decade after the initial TEA Party protests, and the peer reviews I had on it were positive. And the initial sales were actually encouraging after I did my first radio gig on it a couple days afterward (it was actually 52 weeks ago today, the same day Joe Biden made his formal announcement.) I had a lot of encouragement from friends and supporters, but of course I had no idea what sort of sales to expect.

Well, it’s disappointing to say that I’ve sold 26 copies through Amazon. However, I can at least say that’s more than my previous book has sold in almost eight years (a total of 18 copies.) But that doesn’t count the copies I have hand-sold in person, most of which I autographed as well. Somewhere in our house (or maybe out in the shed, who knows?) I have about 8-10 copies of my first book, which came from an original stock of 20 or 25. This time, though, I started with 25 and bought another 10, leaving me about a dozen remaining. Their disposition is an interesting story.

Out of the original stock of 25, I numbered each book from 1 to 25. I kept number 1 as my copy, tithed 2 through 4 to charity (still have those), and sent most of 5 through 10 to those who contributed to the writing. (I still have one because I’ve never been able to get a contributor’s home address even in several attempts to ask.) Out of 11 through 25 I have just a few remaining – many of them were sold at my reading back in June.

Among the second batch were a few I sent to various radio personalities who requested them. As I recall all but one of those eventually resulted in an interview, and that adds to the story.

Believe it or not, I’m way more comfortable with writing than I am with public speaking, even though I took a class in college to conquer that fear. (Shocker, huh?) I’m sure that comes through over the phone, but I also figured it was a job I had to do in order to try and spread the word given my marketing budget, which was basically zero. (I did find out it costs $3.27 to send my book anywhere from California to across town, not that I had to do the latter.)

So I spoke to various people everywhere from California to Delaware, for anywhere from seven minutes or so to a whole hour. It was a “virtual book tour” which took me from my adopted hometown to my real hometown, and from where I went to school to places I’ve never visited (or, frankly, heard of) before. There were small towns and big cities on the docket, but the last stop was a national one on an internet radio station called Southern Sense Radio. I did find out from doing sixteen or so shows that the longer I knew I had, the better the conversation flowed.

While all this was happening, I went through a move (hence, why I can’t find the spare copies) and went on vacation twice. Could I have been more diligent at marketing? Perhaps, but I also work full-time. (You may gather I’m that diligent at unpacking. But I told my wife we have the rest of our lives.)

A few months after the release, I decided it would be a good idea to follow up on the loose ends I had to leave untied to finish the book by last April. Thus was born the quarterly State of the TEA Party updates, the last of which I did a couple weeks ago – a little early but necessary to be topical. It’s been a concept that’s evolved a little bit and probably will some more before it’s through.

It’s been a tremendous and tumultuous year since I put out this book. It’s interesting to ponder how the release of the book would have gone over had it come out this year, but it’s still out there if you want to read it for the history. I think I’ll go onto Amazon tonight and give you a little incentive by cutting the price. (Hey, I have reached triple digits in royalties, at least.)

As for the next book? Honestly, I can’t say for sure whether I have another one in me. Over the years I have kicked around a couple concepts, and I got as far as a couple chapters on the Indivisible movement. (I still owe you one last part on that story – maybe in the next couple weeks.)

If anything, I have the most desire to write a sequel update to my first book, So We May Breathe Free. Once upon a time I had thought about writing a tome on the struggle between Big Oil and the green energy movement – something more on my radar when I had Marita Noon (now Marita Tedder) as a columnist, but not so much now. (I still keep a few tabs on energy, but to turn a phrase I don’t have as much energy as I used to.)

The other idea I’ve had from time to time is a project I call 600 Words. It’s been over a decade now, but once upon a time I toiled as an (unpaid) columnist for an outfit called Liberty Features Syndicate. (The title refers to their optimum column length.) Most of the time these once- or twice-weekly pieces ended up on the website of a group called Americans for Limited Government, but once in awhile I would find out some small-town newspaper also ran my column. I think it would be an interesting idea to follow up on what happened to the subject of the columns, as history may or may not have been kind to them, and maybe it would have the autobiographical element of perhaps one of the most uncertain times of my life. Between 600 Words and the sequel to So We May Breathe Free, 600 Words is definitely more the vanity project.

I guess that’s the life of a part-time author who’s become a (very) part-time blogger too. If you have pity on me and want to buy the book – or if you like a good read on history (yeah, that’s the ticket!) the link to Rise and Fall remains above the fold on my front page. Let’s see if I can beat my year one sales in year two.

Where’s the reset button?

It’s fascinating to me how sometimes the most random things inspire me to write. First of all, it has to be a topic which is interesting to me and secondly there has to well up in me a feeling that I would have something relevant to add to the conversation. So I was sitting with laptop in lap the other night and saw two articles – a John Mauldin article posted by my friend Bob Densic and a Forbes piece by Carol Frazier – back-to-back on my social media and thought it a sign. So go ahead and read them, I’ll wait patiently for your return.

Sobering enough? I thought they were. They paint a much different picture than the good tidings promoted by the current administration, but they aren’t as pessimistic as one may think aside from the means of solution to the perceived problem.

The paragraphs that finally inspired this piece came from Jack Kelly’s Forbes post:

Ironically, the younger generations may be in for a windfall in the future. As their Baby Boomer parents pass away, they stand to receive a large inheritance. It could be the largest wealth transfer in American history.
The catch is that if the market goes down appreciably or crashes, like in the 2008 financial crisis, the parents will sell their stocks at fire-sale prices and there won’t be much left over for their children. If all of the Boomers start selling their homes when they retire—which they are now doing in large numbers—to downsize their lifestyles, housing prices may collapse. This will also lessen the amount of money that could be transferred over to their kids.
“Why Young Voters Are Embracing Bernie Sanders And Democratic Socialism,” Jack Kelly, Forbes, February 5, 2020.

From the sounds of these articles, the problem seems to be that those who are struggling are having issues with several different expenditures, number one being student loans but also the costs of rent and health insurance. So when Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, et. al. go out and pledge to wave a magic wand and eliminate two of those three expenses by forgiving student loans and “Medicare for All,” well, that’s an appeal which sounds mighty good to those who wrestle with these things each month.

I’m no Boomer, but I did live through a time when I was relatively fresh out of college, newly married with a five-year-old daughter by another father, and wished to pursue the American Dream of home ownership. The year was 1990, just 30 years ago. Of course, we didn’t have a large nest egg for a down payment but there were programs out these to assist those in our situation.

However, the bank told us no. They took one look at our credit and said, “work on paying this stuff off and come back in a year.” So we did. It meant we had to be more diligent with our finances but we pulled it off and a year later we bought our first house – which was a better one than the place we were denied.

Having said that, let me tell you about that house: it was nothing fancy to look at. The biggest criteria we had was to live in the high school district we believed would give our then-second grader the best possible educational outcome. So we were willing to settle for a three-bedroom, one-bath home on a 25′ x 120′ lot that was built in 1925, in a nice neighborhood of similar houses. We made it into the desired school district by five blocks.

It’s worth adding that, at the time, I was also paying off student loans. However, the rules for student loans were different back then, as were the rules for being a success: it was widely understood that success could be achieved in modest, incremental steps. The large house in the suburbs wasn’t out of play, but it was assumed to be your step to take after establishing equity in a starter house. You stepped your way up through newer and newer second-hand cars or bought the low-priced base model Ford or Chevy before you got to the car you really wanted out of the showroom. And while life for me has taken its share of unexpected twists and turns, the Michael at age 55 isn’t really all that far away from what the Michael at age 25 expected him to be – it’s just that the cast of characters has expanded and the stage has changed. Overall, I don’t have a ton of bells and whistles and I’m quite cool with that.

So consider this perspective of expectations as you read on with my analysis, and let’s go back to the blockquote. While my parents aren’t Boomers (they are part of the Silent Generation as they both are in their eighties as of next month) they do have a house and someday it will be passed on to my surviving brother and I (my other brother passed away nearly a decade ago.) Whether he decides it’s a fine place for him and his wife to relocate to (and buys me out) or if we just sell it and split the proceeds, yes, it may be a nice nest egg. Now I can’t speak for him, but as long as the house isn’t underwater (figuratively and/or literally) my wife and I will do just fine.

Naturally I realize not everyone is as fortunate as I am with regard to that potential windfall, but it’s worth pointing out that my parents weren’t (and still aren’t) bells and whistles types either. We had the modest two-bedroom, one-bath house until I was seven and it got to the point the second bedroom was just too small for kids nine, seven, and three to share. Yes, there were two cars in the driveway but oftentimes at least one of them was second-hand, and the rare family vacation was often a week at a rented cottage on one of Michigan’s many inland lakes. But we had food on the table and a roof over our head, culminating in their dream of a house on enough land to placate the ball-playing needs of three growing boys – five acres was plenty enough.

That’s how I was taught, and while I didn’t take those Depression-era lessons completely to heart, I remembered enough to be prudent at times when the chips were down as I made my way in life.

So let me return to Kelly for a moment:

A combination of crushing student loan debt, low-wage jobs and escalating home and rental costs has a huge impact on Millennials and Gen-Zers. If a person does not feel financially secure nor confident about their future, it’s natural to hold off making big commitments, such as getting married, purchasing their first home and having children. These things were once taken for granted by older generations. Now, it’s a hard-to-reach and nearly impossible dream for many people.
“Why Young Voters Are Embracing Bernie Sanders And Democratic Socialism,” Jack Kelly, Forbes, February 5, 2020.

I think Kelly definitely overstates the “taken for granted” because older generations were taught that achieving those milestones took hard work, patience, and sacrifice.

No one is putting a gun to your head to take out student loans in order to afford college. There are several alternatives:

Begin your college career at a more affordable state school or community college
Attend part-time and work full-time
Embark on a career that doesn’t require a college degree, such as a trade
Join the armed forces and eventually attend on the GI Bill

Yes, this is a sacrifice in some respects – but perhaps it’s better to sacrifice now when the stakes are low than chain yourself to decades of debt.

When it comes to the other two aspects Kelly cites, getting married and having children, we’ve often found that the younger generation does this in the wrong order by having the kids first. Now while I remind you I keep a (pretty much) family-friendly, PG-rated shop here, I have to bend the rules for a moment for a reminder:

Guys: think with the head on your shoulders, not the one between your legs.
Ladies: you have the ultimate say in the matter, and I’m not talking about abortion as birth control. If you don’t want to have a child yet, then keep those legs together.
I don’t care what brand of condom you use, if you’re on the Pill, or whatever method you may think will cheat the inevitable. It’s gonna fail. Remember, when it comes to birth control, only abstinence works 100 percent of the time it’s tried.

And let’s talk about high rent and health insurance costs. Has it ever occurred to our little snowflakes that perhaps part of the problem with high rent is the overhead a landlord has to deal with: taxes, upkeep, perhaps his own mortgage? A landlord also has to build in a little bit of cost for the possibility someone skips on their rent or trashes the place before they go. Yet if you can get something that may not be the newest thing in the hot development but otherwise fits your needs, that’s a little extra to save for a down payment.

Regarding health insurance, let’s just say that thanks to health insurance being mandated, there are a lot of greedy little tongues trying to lap up that manna from heaven called taxpayer money. Some of it comes from Medicare and Medicaid, and some of it comes from subsidies. Plus don’t forget that some medical payments come from dollars you weren’t taxed on. The system hasn’t been a free market in decades, which makes it way more expensive than it would be in a simple fee-for-service world. Indeed our system is broken but Medicare for All isn’t the fix for it.

I’m well past 1500 words of advice here, so I suppose it’s time to cut to the chase: the appeal of socialism is the desire to have reward without responsibility. Working to build up savings isn’t fun, and there is no shortage of people who will tell you that’s old-fashioned and the debt isn’t really that bad. Waiting for marriage to consummate a relationship is a sure ticket to being socially outcast in this day and age, but perhaps in thirty years you’ll find out your marriage is a strong one because you built it on the ground of waiting until you had the emotional part down to begin with the physical part. Now that you have a rock-solid family unit that was raised properly you can look back and laugh about it.

Perhaps I am the worst person ever to give all this advice, but in five and a half decades on this rock I’ve kind of figured out that maybe our parents and the values and morals instilled into them by previous generations were (by and large) right.

The path to socialism is the path to an epic fail. Don’t doubt me. If we’re dumb enough to set foot that way, I fear for this land I love.

A rush to condemn

Like millions of other Americans, I was stunned by the news that Rush Limbaugh has been stricken with advanced-stage lung cancer, as he revealed on his show last week. I was just as stunned to learn that Limbaugh was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom as part of the State of the Union address by President Trump. (In part this is because I never watch the SotU show – I would rather just save myself the 90 minutes and read the transcript. Same goes for State of the State, county, city, etc.)

First, though, I should tell you how I was introduced to the Maharushie, and how he helped make me the political person I am today.

Back in 1993, when I changed jobs and joined a small (but rapidly growing, which is important to this part of the story) architectural firm, I met my friend Bob Densic. As it turned out, the company I worked for was growing so quickly it had to sublet a small office from another business in the building we inhabited, where four of the firm’s employees worked – no phone, and we had to be fairly quiet to not interfere with the very occasional consultations of the social workers from whom the space was subletted.

Bob was the leader of this group, and as such I quickly learned that the four of us in what he called the “Rebeldome” – in part because it was on the south side of the building, and in part from the inhabitants – were in the building’s “Rush Room.” (At this time, Limbaugh’s show was also increasing in popularity such that restaurants, coffee shops, and similar outlets had what they called “Rush Rooms” where patrons could listen in. This was before the era of widespread cell phones and way before podcasts.)

So from 12 to 3 each day, I got a dose of a “relentless pursuit of the truth” and it didn’t take me long to get hooked! I didn’t stay too long at this firm, particularly since Bob left a few months after I was hired. At my next stop I was deprived of my Rush fix (this was a company that piped in Muzak, believe it or not) so, like the nicotine addicts who stepped outside at lunchtime and the scheduled breaks, I would often be in my car with the radio on to catch the first half-hour. By the time my career had moved into my Hobbs+Black phase (the last firm I worked for in Toledo, when they had an office there) I had a good system down – headphones to listen to CDs in the morning and late afternoon, but Rush was on my old clock radio – with the volume respectfully turned down somewhat low – from 12 to 3. Years later, when I reached the career detour the good Lord gave me to take, all that windshield time between Lewes and Exmore was perfect for listening to the EIB Network.

And I think that having that exposure to political ideas through Rush inspired me to join the Young Republicans in the mid-1990s. From there I became a precinct chair and eventually a member of Wicomico County’s Republican Central Committee. More importantly for this venue, Rush was the inspiration for the name, as I wrote in 2005 on the original “about” page – the first page I ever wrote for this website, even before it went live. (I reached back into the internet archives for this one, in case you’ve never seen the earliest rendition of my site.)

Although I haven’t been nearly as faithful a listener to El Rushbo as I once was – I was repelled by what seemed to me his slobbering embrace of Donald Trump as the 2016 campaign unfolded, particularly when the field was chock-full of solid conservatives like Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, et. al. – every so often when the opportunity arises I still check in to see what he has to say. I have to admit he was on to something with Donald Trump.

I know a little bit about cancer from being married to an oncology nurse, enough to know that stage 4 lung cancer can be deadly serious. We all have our time to go, but for Rush making it to the November election, let alone his 70th birthday next January, is now quite the dicey proposition. (I noticed in the photos and videos from the ceremony that he now looks a lot older than 69, at least to me. It seems to me like he’s aged two decades in the last five years, even with the beard.) Granted, he’s been blessed to be in a financial position to be able to procure the most advanced treatments from the world’s best doctors, but his days as a radio icon are of a much smaller number than we believed he had before last week. (After all, longtime radio commentator Paul Harvey broadcast regularly until he was nearly 90.)

Yet the fact that Rush is in his final days was the source of glee to many on the Left. Needless to say, their TDS, combined with the surprise presentation of the Medal of Freedom at the State of the Union – Limbaugh states he was aware he would receive the award, but thought it would be in a more subdued ceremony later this month – brought out some of their most toxic venom on social media. It was shameful, but at the same time pitiful.

Look, you will not find me as the member of any major Democrat politician’s fan club. Following them on Facebook is about as close as I get. But, like politics used to stop at the water’s edge, the same goes for personal vendettas. Would I be pleased if Nancy Pelosi resigned tomorrow? Of course. But I would not be the one celebrating if she were diagnosed with cancer and given months or weeks to live, or collapsed suddenly from a coronary and died. That’s just not cool. It’s like the vultures on our side who pine for Ruth Bader Ginsburg to pass away so another Supreme Court seat becomes available; that really bothers me. I’d rather she enjoy a few years of retirement.

At some point, everyone of every political persuasion goes to meet our Maker. I’ll miss Rush when he’s permanently departed from being behind the golden EIB microphone, even if I didn’t always agree with him. So why can’t we remember we’re all human and we’ve supposed to love thy neighbor as thyself? It’s a struggle to keep our schadenfreude to a minimum when someone on the Left passes away, but we really should try to lead by example.

The new direction

Back in the last decade (a few days ago) I alluded to the fact I would talk about a new direction for this site, which actually extends to other aspects of my writing career. So here goes.

Last summer I did my famous (or infamous, depending on perspective) reading of The Rise and Fall of the TEA Party at Pemberton Coffeehouse. As the last part of that reading I read a tease from the next project I was working on, a book about the Indivisible movement. Its basic premise was to use the statement that it was using the rules of the road laid out by the TEA Party as their own. I figured that I was a pretty good expert on how the TEA Party operates so who better to write a book grading the upstarts on their efforts?

Unfortunately, this is where I ran into a problem. I really have no passion for Indivisible; in fact, I still get their stuff and read it, alternately wanting to laugh hysterically and shake my head in disbelief that supposedly intelligent people believe some of this crap. Their being stuck on “orange man bad” makes them rather dull to consider, and there’s nowhere near the tension and conflict when the media has its back – or, really, more or less ignores them by comparison to the TEA Party. In short, there just wasn’t the desire to write 200 pages on the subject.

And then we have the whole book marketing thing. To be honest, as I noted in my latest edition of radio days, I really need a long format radio gig to feel comfortable and those are hard to come across. And even with all that, the books haven’t exactly been flying off the shelves – not for a lack of trying. I did sixteen different radio shows but what I didn’t tell you is that I contacted somewhere close to 200 in order to make that happen. There were probably eight to ten more gigs which fell through for various reasons, and by this point the book is far enough in the rearview mirror that its relevance has diminished somewhat. (For example, it’s silent on the whole impeachment saga that’s consumed political news during the latter half of 2019.) There’s a point where you can’t market old news.

I love the act of writing, but I don’t get nearly as much thrill from the acts of selling even though that’s what creates the market for the writing. It seems to me that finding someone to market books properly yet affordably is almost as unlikely as finding the winning lottery ticket on the sidewalk. I know I have people who believe in and enjoy my work, but I can’t make them give me reviews or market my book for me. I can say that I’ve written two books but I can’t say I was significantly better at marketing the second effort – which involved a lot more work than the first one – than I was with the first one seven years ago.

However, having said that, I think there is a market for my writing – it may be a small niche, but it exists nonetheless. Moreover, I’m very partial to short-form writing (such as blog posts, but also my contributions to The Patriot Post and before that PJ Media, Examiner.com, and my days as a struggling syndicated columnist) so why not bring those strengths into play? Plus I retain this venue as a good base of operations. (Eventually the Rise and Fall site will go away. I would like to have a writer site to market my writing, although there’s nothing which says I couldn’t just do it here. Something for me to think and pray about.)

Thus, I have a few writing goals in mind for this year. Some are relatively easy to achieve while others are more ambitious. There is also a longer-term political goal which will hopefully be kicked off by actions I take this year, but I won’t get into that just yet.

I begin with the fate of the Indivisible book. To date I have put about 4,000 words to paper, most of which went into the introduction while I also covered a little bit about the personalities and finance. Making this an 80,000 word book would definitely be a stretch, particularly since I had intended to complete it for this November – and, like I said, my heart wasn’t in it.

However, I also have a saying – don’t let good writing go to waste. I think what can be done with this beginning of a draft would be to serialize it into a four- or five-part series after I round it out a little bit, maybe adding a couple thousand words to make the points. It may be a good thing to start up around the time of Super Tuesday since Indivisible will be actively trying to manipulate the Democrats’ nomination process, similarly to how the TEA Party tried to influence the 2012 GOP nomination.

In the interim, I want to continue a series I’ve done on a quarterly basis since last summer: the State of the TEA Party. My next installment will come later this month, but by the summer I really want to take the concept in a new, exciting direction.

My vision for the State of the TEA Party is to eventually create a quarterly journal from it – whether print, online, or both – one which creates an academic-style look at the movement for a limited, Constitutional government that the TEA Party supposedly espoused at its creation. Obviously this entails more input from other people, and that’s where some of the contacts I had in the writing of Rise and Fall as well as the gravitas of writing a strongly-researched book could help bring that to a reality. I’d love to bring more perspective from those who directly assisted me with Rise and Fall as well as others in the TEA Party who have guided it over the last decade-plus. This could also help me with a non-writing goal I spoke about in the final chapter of Rise and Fall. (Go buy the book and you’ll see what I mean.)

Long story short: I may be done as a book author – although the Lord may have other plans, and some have suggested I write a book on the Shorebirds – but I’m a long way from throwing in the towel as a writer. It’s just that, given some of the various side hustles I have – not to mention my “real” full-time job – writing a little at a time and not trying to rush through a book I’m not passionate about is the move I think is best for me and my overarching agenda.

2019: a monoblogue year in review

2019 was an interesting year, to say the least.

It began with a pizza lunch that was better than the “day of action”, but I found more comfort in catching up with some of the best artists I had reviewed for monoblogue music – a feature that finally saw its first (and alas only) local record review and other quick hits. January continued with my amazement at how quickly our safe harbor from Presidential politics had receded, meaning it was time for a widget. It was also time for some odds and ends from the holiday season, too.

In this busy month, I revised and expanded remarks I had published in The Patriot Post about our coming Constitutional crisis and reminded folks once again it was School Choice Week. But the best time I had was cranking up a new hot stove via a three part series on my fantasy baseball team comprised of Shorebird of the Week Hall of Fame members.

I began February by considering the abortion question, and after the frivolity of odds and ends and so-called expert advice on running a blog, I noted the first casualty of the 2020 Democrat presidential race. We also endured our latest state of emergency and I remembered the rant that sparked the TEA Party. (Something I’m rather fond of.)

In March I reached a long-cherished milestone, my 5,000th post. In the days before that, I illustrated why $15 an hour is the wrong fight and talked about the “Jeremiah 29” conservatives. I also detailed how I got to hang out with the real pros of my avocation and with my Congressman at a local town hall meeting. But I also had fun with my version of March Madness, and checked out the newest ballpark feature before speculating who we would watch from it. Early in April I checked how I did, but it was a slow month (aside from another dose of odds and ends) because I finally released The Rise and Fall of the TEA Party and began its radio tour.

My March Madness featuring the Democrat candidates wasn’t enough, so I created a second, three part helping in May. I also detailed how one of those top seeds was losing the middle class and had his delusion of support.

Speaking of delusions, another was Maryland’s Governor Larry Hogan considering a Presidential run against Donald Trump. He couldn’t pull the trigger on it, as we found out in June, but in the shadow of Memorial Day I took an opportunity to promote an event for those who may have pulled a trigger in defense of our nation.

Many months after the field came into being, I detailed the initial effort of the 25th player in the Democrats’ madness, although the DNC was now beginning to do its level best to cull it through debate qualifications. There were still more odds and ends, but I had more fun making the second stop on my radio tour and attending the Downtown Salisbury Festival – allowing me to renew a long-dormant series for the first and only time in 2019.

In July I began a new project in earnest – and had still more odds and ends to go through – but most of the month was spent discussing my book’s radio tour as I covered my experiences with TEN different stations. Combine all that with some upheaval going on in my world, and it’s no wonder I could only discuss who was in and out of the Democrats’ second debates. There were two more parts of the radio tour discussed in August, with the first instance becoming more of a philosophy discussion thanks to an old friend. Again, it was a slow month as President Trump got a new challenger and we once again dealt with a mass shooting tragedy.

A very slow September brought my annual 9/11 message, a new ranking of Democratic contenders, and a subtle but very important change to this website. My focus changed thanks to a move about seven miles to the north. I was starting over from my little corner, as I detailed in October, and one of my first moves in that direction was in the realm of accountability. So what was the first election I began to cover? Naturally it was Salisbury’s.

More on that in a moment, but the month finally brought my delayed announcement of the Shorebird of the Year and my picks and pans for Delmarva’s team – a team perhaps placed at risk by prospective changes to the minor league baseball system on a scale unseen in nearly 60 years.

During the month I also debuted a feature originally begun on my book site in July, a quarterly look at the state of the TEA Party. It had little impact on November‘s election in Salisbury, which (as I guessed) sadly featured blowouts in all its races and more or less kept a leftist status quo. But at least people showed up, unlike the election in nearby Delmar.

But the TEA Party could muster up its remaining forces and go to work sounding the alarm on a proposed regional gas tax scheme that reminds me a lot of the RGGI boondoggle. And while I did the usual Thanksgiving message, the month closed out with another reminder on how to buy American.

December opened as usual with two big guns: my anniversary commemoration and the Shorebird of the Week Hall of Fame induction for the three-player Class of 2019. But I also revealed that a lot of people keep telling me how to blog as well as the state of play for the Democrats at that moment. (How they connect: I don’t think either of those groups have a clue.)

While I wished readers a Merry Christmas, the final weeks brought a burst of activity: the swan song of monoblogue music with one last review and the last top 5 list and a wrapup of my 2019 Rise and Fall radio tour closed the books on 2019, and not a moment too soon.

I remarked a year ago on site readership and how it had declined over the last several years as I reverted to part-time blogger status. This year the numbers fell a little more, down to 6,268 visits with a couple days to go. (This compares to 10,435 last year.) But then again this wasn’t an election year and my readership indeed rebounds for those occasions, so I’m not too worried. It’s still better to properly inform 6,000 readers than put up crap for a few times that many.

So my vision for 2020 (see what I did there?) is, for one, to cover the Delaware elections as best I can. I don’t see this as a state in play for Trump – particularly if creepy Joe Biden is the nominee from the Democrats – but it could be interesting to see what happens downballot. The GOP’s biggest handicap, as I see it, isn’t Donald Trump but a state party that doesn’t seem to mind losing. The beatings seem to be continuing until morale improves.

The second part of this vision is too lengthy to explain here, as it’s a multi-pronged approach to advancing the ideals I espouse here on a somewhat regular basis. In the first few days of the new year I will explain further; suffice to say it’s something of a different direction for me but also one with some familiar elements to it.

That, my friends, is called a tease. But isn’t that unrealized potential of a new year lurking around the corner always like that?