Calhouns Can(n)ons

Win A Lifetime Supply of Diapers!

Answer the questions correctly and win a lifetime supply of diapers. So, the mother of the octuplet, who has been in the new recently, already has six kids, ages 7, 6, 5, 3 and 2- year-old twins. By what stretch of the imagination does a woman with six kids, each born about a year apart, qualify for medical treatment for “infertility” treatment?

No, No President Obama, Don’t Use That Term. It’s a Trap.

President Obama recently gave an interview to Al Arabiya television. That’s good. But as he continues the dialogue with the world and with America, please, I hope to God he stops using the word “War” when talking about the “War on terror.” Like I hope everybody stops using the word “war.” Bad word, bad phrase.

One of the first mistakes ex-President Bush made after 9/11 was to use the word “war” when discussing the terrorist attack against the twin towers. Bad word. The men who planned and carried out 9/11 were not warriors, were not members of an army from an enemy state. They were criminals. Murderous criminals. Members of a small international criminal conspiracy. Like the Mafia (and/or other organized crime outfits in different countries) they had a “philosophy” and secret rituals and blood oaths and fierce loyalty. But they were and are no “army” except in their own minds.

They are criminals an as such, after 9/11, with the whole world both watching and standing ready to help, Bush had the perfect opportunity to isolate and separate Al Qaeda from the rest of the muslim world, isolate it, separate it, hunt it down using international police methods and a few authorized limited military-type strikes against it’s criminal hide-outs and training camps.

Then, year after year, the hunt for terrorist criminals would continue, a challenge and a tactic, but not a “war,” not a crusade. Just international police work tracking down criminals that are a threat to all civilized countries, including Muslim countries.

All this while the world watched. No invasion of Iraq and the bankrupting of America for that folly. No Guantanamo gulags. No torture staining this nation’s honor.

Instead, Bush got swept up in semantics, and Americans mindlessly followed. Proving that using the wrong word can send you into a trap. The same one this administration may be stepping into as he contemplates America’s continued involvement in Afghanistan. And unless he changes his semantics, and hence his tactics, America will find out what the Russians and the British and all the other “empires” throughout history found out the hard way: Anyone who starts a “war” in Afghanistan looses. Just a matter of time.

Update On 8

Supporters of Prop. 8 went to federal court to ask that the list of people who donated more than $100 in the last two weeks before the campaign be kept secret. Judge said, No. So the names will be made public Monday, which is the regular filing date.

Now, can we hope that some people who opposed Prop 8 and who behaved very badly after the election will get a grip and mind their manners? For all else, the last “dump” of names will allow the public a chance to check to see that no money laundering was going on, that everything was on the up and up & etc. Which is what the law was designed to do.

Your Saturday Poem

Honey At The Table
By Mary Oliver, from “American Primitive”

It fills you with the soft
essence of vanished flowers, it becomes
a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow
from the honey pot over the table

and out the door and over the ground,
and all the while it thickens,

grows deeper and wilder, edged
with pine boughs and wet bounders,
pawprints of bobcat and bear, until

deep in the forest you
shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,

you float into and swallow the dripping combs,
bits of the tree, crushed bees – a taste
composed of everything lost, in which everything
lost is found.