True Love

Now I have figured out what those folks mean about the ripple effect with marriage. I'm afraid to note that next people will be marrying instruments - that's right. Instruments.

Because I'll be honest. I've never loved a non-family member as much as I love my C trumpet.

Scary, isn't it? Look what happened - that horrible domino effect of Massachusetts allowing gay marriage led to, well virtually every state, passing amendments, er, banning gay marriage, which then made me want to marry my C trumpet.

Well, so maybe it's not quite the ripple effect they were talking about. But I sure do love my C trumpet.

So I had a dream one night that I met my bashert (I can explain more about that another time), but then I woke up. I didn't get to see her - our eyes met for a moment - a wonderful moment - and she just started to walk across the busy room, and once the crowd cleared to let her through, she disappeared. I was awake. In my room. No bashert.

But if you find her wandering around somewhere, feel free to let me know. I'm sure I'll find her eventually.

(Bashert basically means soulmate, by the way.)

I'm running for President in 2012 - just kidding.

That's right. I'm only kidding. I'm not running in 2012.

I'm not eligible until 2024.

So I'm running 2024. How I figure it, that should be the best time for me to run anyway. I feel that I can bring the change America will need in 2024.

See, President-Elect Obama is bringing change in 2009. Then people are going to love that change so much, the American people will re-elect him in 2012. In 2016, people will be tired of Democrats in the White House - because the last time one party held the White House for three consecutive terms was in the Great Depression under the Official Republican Whipping Boy: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So that means a Republican in 2016. People will give that president the benefit of the doubt (by the way, the next Republican president is - and I'm calling this now in all of my professional political analysis opinion - hey, if Sean Hannity can be called an analyst, why can't I? He doesn't have any more reason to analyze than I do - but anyway the next Republican president - well I'm not going to tell you. You're not ready to hear it. But I will give you a hint: he's a young man, who isn't yet age-eligible, and he's not from the south. Yes ladies, he.) and re-elect him in 2020. But then in 2024, they won't want another Republican and that's why the Democrats will win.

But why will I win the primary battle in 2024? Well it won't be an easy road. And I don't want it to be. My election campaign - if the current, ever-expanding length of the elections continue - will probably begin in 2016. But it will be worth it. I'll travel to all 57 states, campaigning as completely as I can. I'll mobilize huge masses of people to get my message of a new, smaller, smarter, cleverer government and - of course - lower taxes. I'll make taxes so low that revenue goes exponentially higher due to the rapid economic explosion. How's .1% sound to you guys? But back to the primary: Some old governor from Virginia will be the front-runner, but I'll hit him hard (but politely and gently - but hard, nonetheless) and win. It will be the biggest upset since Stanford beat USC at USC back in 2007.

Anyway, don't forget to vote in the runoff on December 2nd for Sara Doyle and a guy who served America in Vietnam and then Georgians in the State House in the 90s, Jim Martin.

And don't forget me in 2024.

Weintraub for America


(It should be noted that I'm in no way serious about any of this - except the line about the runoff.)




-Edit:
I apologize for historical falsitude: I completely forgot about the presidential elections in the eighties: President Reagan won reelection in 1984 and then President George HW Bush won in 1988, so that means the Republicans held the White House for three consecutive terms, but as I pointed out, that is not the norm. That was the first time since the Great Depression. And, it should be noted, the Republican hold was twenty years ago. President Clinton won decisively in 1992.


I'm running for President in 2012- just kidding by Samuel Weintraub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at musingsandmore613.blogspot.com.

Now's the Time

It's been done. The history has been written. The campaign is over.

The Republicans have long been known as better campaigners than Democrats, while the Democrats govern better. But let's see if that pattern continues.

Now is the time for governing. Now is the time for President-Elect Barack Obama to work with the lame duck President and Congress to start his own Deal. We can't afford for Mr. Obama to do what President Franklin Roosevelt did - only Senator McCain will remember - wink wink - but when President Roosevelt was elected, he refused to assist outgoing President Herbert Hoover in governing in the transition. The Democratic icon didn't want to share credit - the country cannot afford that. As President Truman wisely said, "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." (Seriously, President Truman said it long before President Reagan; I just looked it up. It's not exactly an uncommonly quoted, er, quote.)

Let's not care about credit. Let's get some things done.

An Apology

After Mr. Henson died, my post contained brief profanity. Now, for the most part, except in certain situations, I find profanity tasteless and superfluous. I don't think it was superfluous, but it did accurately reflect my frustration and anger at losing Mr. Henson.

To anyone that's read the post, please do not be upset by the intensity of the diction in that post.

Thank you.

Governor Palin's Fool-Proof Sex Education Plan?

I am quite certain it's been written in scores of other places, but after hearing about Senator McCain's pick of Governor Palin as his vice presidential candidate, my sister learned about the Alaska Governor's pregnant daughter. Then she noticed the Governor's "abstinence-only sex education" plan. It sure worked great for her family!

Mr. Henson

I’m selfish. In July of last year, Mr. Henson had pain in his lower back. A visit to the doctor revealed cancer. My understanding is it had something to do with the plasma of his blood, but it’s beyond my comprehension. But it's called multiple myeloma. When I emailed him to check on him, he was feeling well and was pleased to tell me, they caught it early. He expected to be teaching again in mere weeks. But he had a setback, and he ended up in the hospital. After his family kept sending updates on his progress, they joked they were spamming everybody, so they started a blog to update all his well-wishers. I continued to email him periodically to let him know I was thinking of him. At one point, in one of his bouts of hospitalization, the cancer had metastasized to his brain and lungs. I think he had something with his kidneys and liver at some point too. The most recent update as of yesterday said Mr. Henson was on “comfort care.” Now I hadn’t heard the term before, but I looked it up, thinking the brief description they had sounded like hospice care. They said he was on minimal antibiotics, oxygen, and a morphine drip for pain. He was in and out of “alertness,” as they put it. So I looked up “comfort care,” and it was indeed the same as hospice care. They had given up. His cancer had become untreatable, unresponsive to chemo, unresponsive to any therapies they had tried. They wanted to stop inflicting unnecessary pain on him – the pain caused by all these tests they had put him through. They were letting him go.
He died yesterday morning.

I kind of want to end on that note because nothing could better express the finality of the loss, but then I realized the trite cliché about the importance of celebrating life, not mourning loss. Well, I still think that’s bullshit. I think you celebrate life during a person’s life. You can’t celebrate the life immediately after death. You have to mourn first and feel the pain. Pain and suffering – so common in human existence. And Mr. Henson knew a lot of suffering, especially focused in his final year of life. He fought his battles so bravely and quietly. He often made great progress, only to fall ill with a fever, or find himself feeling weak, only to discover a resurgence of his cancer.
But I'm selfish. I didn't leave school even for a day to visit him when he was in the hospital. I did nothing for him when I was home from school. Selfish.
Selfish.
Selfish.
And now he's gone.
Random memories of Mr. Henson come to mind. In seventh grade – shoot, maybe it was eighth- we in the band were rushing horribly, and Mr. Henson was trying to correct us and change his conducting. Then he cut us off. He said, “You’ve got to stop rushing. Otherwise I start doing this – “ then he started jumping up and down waving his arms around – “and I’m not a horsey.” From then on, we kept asking him to “do the horsey” again. We did get him to do it once, but for the most part he was way too embarrassed to every do it again.
Goodbye Mr. Henson. You will always be loved, sir.

Torture in the World's Finest Nation

It’s America’s birthday; today we commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, that document in which our Founding Fathers committed high treason against the British Empire. If caught, these brave men would have been “hanged by the neck until dead” for their crimes. Because of their bravery in the face of a world empire’s destructions of basic liberties, we remember how over the seven years following the signing of the Declaration, we slowly defended the United States against British oppression and gained independence. Today we are 232 years old. Today we are the world’s most vibrant democracy, the oldest democracy. India may be the largest; Israel may be the only in the face of a sea of oppressive regimes in the Middle East. We may be an America that prides itself on superlatives, but most importantly, when we celebrate being the oldest “experiment in democracy,” we can be proud of our record of freedom and liberty.

America is one of the finest nations on earth. We need to act like it. The Bush Administration has done its damndest to end our clean record. A New York Times article revealed the following: "The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of 'coercive management techniques' for possible use on prisoners, including 'sleep deprivation,' 'prolonged constraint,' and 'exposure.'

"What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners."

This is incredibly disturbing. America, as Senator McCain has championed, is the land that fights against foreign brutality. We rallied against Soviet oppression, we were furious at the Soviet gulags, we were appalled by Nazi treatment of noncombatants (as well as Prisoners of War), we fought against vicious Viet Cong rebels who tortured prisoners, but we lose our morality and moral high ground when we resort to the evil techniques of our enemies.

I need to make challah for Shabbos. That takes something like four hours, so it's time to get started. More on torture later.


Torture in the World's Finest Nation by Samuel Weintraub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Abortion - A Short Weigh-In

Abortion is bad.

But you won't hear a politician say that. Well, they won't - but mostly because they have speech writers who write as impressively and wonderfully as Toby Ziegler (maybe eventually I'll have a post without referencing the West Wing). Perhaps they would say "abortion is immoral - it's murder." But they'd be wrong on that count. According to Jewish law, the collection of cells in a woman's uterus is worth less than a human being. And you can find this out by doing a simple Google search: read Exodus 21:22. Using the Etz Chaim (Jewish Publication Society's, the Rabbinical Assembly of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism) translation: "22:When men fight, and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results, but no other damage ensues, the one responsible shall be fined according as the woman's husband may exact from him, the payment to be based on reckoning. 23: But if other damage ensues, the penalty shall be life for life..." The verses establish that a baby does not have a nefesh. In Judaism, all humans have a nefesh, an immortal soul. As verse 23 elucidates, destroying a nefesh causes one to forfeit one's life. One will be put to death. Now here, if a man causes a pregnant woman to lose her baby, the Torah explains the man is not punishable for murder, but rather for the destruction of property, a much lesser crime. "An eye for an eye" ensures the punishment is just: according to the Etz Chaim commentary on the verses, in some ancient Near Eastern societies, murder victims' families could accept monetary compensation, but the Torah forbids this form of justice. To quote the commentary: "The guilt of a murderer is infinite because the murdered life is invaluable." It goes on to explain that there is a greater contrast between Torah and Near Eastern societies. While those societies called for the death penalty for "crimes against property," the only capital crime in the Torah is the destruction of life. And in this case, because the Torah only asks for monetary compensation, it clearly does not classify the crime as a capital one. So the Torah does not view the fetus as a full-fledged human life, which is what the Talmudic rabbis concluded.

However, that does not mean the fetus is not valued. It is valued highly because it has the potential for becoming a life. This is a mere introduction. The issue is much more complicated, as is the Jewish understanding of abortion. The very simple Jewish answer is that abortion is not murder but only acceptable in very limited circumstances: namely, when the fetus endangers the life of the mother.

I do not claim to be an authority on abortion and certainly not on Judaism. This was just my writing exercise for the day.

Abortion - A Short Weigh-In by Samuel Weintraub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

A Short Beginning

Everyone finds their own thoughts worthwhile. Everyone thinks their own thoughts would benefit those around them - if only the people around us knew what we were thinking. So we make these Blogs, and we post on them often, and we count our user clicks, and we hope to change the world.

I have no desire to change the world. I don't actually think my thoughts will help you live your life.

No. I like to write. Simple as that. I need an outlet for my own writing. I like to write about the day, news happenings, and Braves reports. I'm just looking for something akin to validation of my writing, so I can figure out how others would respond to the thoughts that I normally don't articulate. I am going to go exercise now, so that's it.

Okay, so what I love about writing like this is to the reader no time has elapsed, but to me, hours have passed: I've worked out, gotten fairly sweaty, showered, watched the West Wing.
More importantly than what I've done: Leo McGarry had a heart attack. Okay. He's not real. But it's heartbreaking to see the effects of Leo McGarry having a heart attack on the rest of the president's advisers' lives. Okay. Once again, they're not real. They're just fictional cast members on the West Wing, but still. Devastating.



A Short Beginning by Samuel Weintraub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.