Problem with term limits is they don't limit terms nearly enough

I have never been a big fan of term limits, mostly because there are so many ways around them.

But with what is happening to our politics these days, I think maybe the biggest problems with term limits is that they aren't draconian enough.

I think we need to amend the Constitution and go, as it were. whole hog toward term limits. Here's the plan:

Everybody in Washington -- the president, the vice president, the Senate and the House of Representatives -- gets one term.

One six-year term, so that we are electing and replacing one third of the Congress every two years.

That one term doesn't mean 24 years holding office -- one in the House, one in the Senate, one as vice president and one as president.

It means one six-year term. Run for the House and win, you can never run for the Senate. Run for Congress and win, you're never going to be president or vice president.

Socialism, oligarchy or in between; exactly what is government for

It's pretty obvious these days that folks are getting fed up with the federales, and it could be that we actually are going to see a sea change in what people expect their government to do for them.

I will say one thing before I get into the question:

I am not a believer in states' rights at all. I think that's an issue that was settled in 1865. Until then, people said "the United States are ..." when referring to the country. Since then, the USA has pretty much been "is."

When I think of states, I always remember a joke by one of my favorite comedians.

Jake Johansen said that he grew up in Iowa and left when he was 21.

"Until then, I didn't know we were free to go."

Now I'm sure every state, no matter how bad, has its defenders. But the fact is, some states really are better than others. Anyone who doesn't think that has never been to Colorado ... or to Arkansas.

Having some fun with things that would never happen

About six years back, I created a list of things based on a Facebook meme that somebody sent me.

"Twenty things you will never hear about me"

I approached it as a way to be at least a little self-deprecating, mostly because I've always believed it hurts less to make fun of yourself than to have other people do it.

So the first 20 things here are the original list from Facebook, and the other five are ones I'm adding now just for fun.

1. There has never been a woman able to resist his charms.

2. He has a hair-trigger temper, and boy, when he loses it ...

3. Damn, he sings well enough that he could have been a star.

4. Michael Bolton and Kenny G never had a bigger fan.

5. If there's a harder-working guy anywhere, I'd love to meet him.

6. When they say "white men can't jump," they didn't mean him.

'Right to keep and bear arms' doesn't mean with no 'inconvenience'

If there's one thing certain in this life, it's that every time another lunatic loser breaks loose and kills other Americans, the Amen Chorus of the gun nuts will be all over the media standing up for their rights.

So a shooter (fill in name here) killed some (fill in number here) people in an American city or town (fill in place here), and wounded a number (fill in number here) of others before reportedly taking his own life (usually). The only thing shocking about this is that no one is shocked anymore. It happens at least two or three times a week.

We literally expect things like this to happen from time to time, and we also expect the loons of the far right to ignore all the statistics and say that guns don't kill people.

Michael Moore nailed it when he said "Guns don't kill people, Americans kill people."

Sadly, no matter what happens anymore, nothing gets done. A large majority of Americans think there should be tougher gun laws, but there aren't many of them who make gun control the single issue on which they cast their vote.

What possible reason can there be for still having states?

In our toxic political century, we've been hearing a lot about the original intent of the founding fathers, who we now just call the founders (even though they were all men).

Original intent is important to conservatives, who seem to believe that such wonderful things happened in the late 18th century that we should do our best to live exactly the way the founders did.

That's about as goofy as it gets, but they need to believe that because if they don't, all they're doing is looting the federal Treasury with tax cuts for the rich.

The fact is, their original intent was to do what they had to do to get 13 very different states to agree on enough things to surrender some of their sovereignty to form a central government.

That's why slavery was legal and why slaves were counted as only three-fifths of a person for population counts.

Media's problem isn't ideology, it's an obsession with non-news news

"The people have a right to know everything about everyone all the time."
-- RICHARD THORNBURG, "Die Hard 2"

 There are very few moments in the first two "Die Hard" movies more viscerally satisfying to the audience than when Bonnie Bedelia cuts loose on the media character played by William Atherton.

In the first movie, he gets punched in the mouth. In the second, he's tasered. Both times, the audience just loves it.

There are few people in the world more annoying these days than the self-righteous, blow-tried television reporters blathering about the public's "right to know."

We're getting closer to a time when there will be no newspapers

"It's too much for me. I just can't understand it anymore, so I just try not to think about it."
-- Allen Drury, PRESERVE AND PROTECT

If you have ever read Drury's six-book series that started with the Pulitzer Prize winning "Advise and Consent" in the late '50s and ended with nuclear war in the mid '70s, you probably will remember that by the second half of the series, the media had become a favorite target of the author.

The above quote, from the fourth book in the series, says almost all that needs to be said about why the media have become so powerful.

Average people just don't have the time, the energy or for the most part the education to keep up.

It doesn't say why the media have become so bad. That's a much sadder and stranger story. There are villains, but no heroes, and the story says a great deal about why so many things in our society are declining, not least of them the understanding of average Americans of how life works in the 21st century.

I need to state my prejudice in this right now. I love newspapers and have subscribed to at least one daily newspaper for almost my entire adult life. I have always believed that if you want to know what's happening and why, and if you don't have the time to investigate for yourself, the only real way to be knowledgeable is to read newspapers.

Let's get really serious about eliminating the public debt

Let's get rid of the national debt.

Whatever it is -- $18 trillion, $19 trillion -- let's just make up our mind right now that we're going to get rid of it.

My guess is we could do it within 20 years, maybe less, but not with these namby-pamby little spending freezes we've been talking about.

We only need to be bold. Here goes:

If food runs low ...

1. No more cost of living increases for Social Security. In fact, until the national debt is paid off, let's cut Social Security benefits by 50 percent. Old people have to bear their share of the burden too; a hell of a lot of them voted to support a lot of the wasteful spending that has been happening.

2. Medicare? Gone until we straighten things out. You stay healthy, you get to live. You get sick, we'll make sure there's a free clinic in your town. You need surgery that you can't pay for, tough luck.

3. Medicaid? Same deal. Oh, and forget Bush's prescription drug benefit. We can't afford it.

4. Defense spending? No more new weapons systems until all the old ones are paid for. The defense budget can be salaries and support for active-duty military and the occasional purchase of bullets. No more military-industrial complex. Let them bake cake. One exception. A dozen or so pork bombs, with a warning to radical Muslims that if they screw with us, the first one gets dropped on Mecca. No real damage, but buildings, vehicles and people get covered with pork remnants.

If you want to be happy from now on, do what you can for others

"... to dance beneath the diamond sky with one arm waving free."
-- BOB DYLAN

I was walking on a hiking trail in Lost Maples State Natural Area in South Texas some years back when I tweaked my knee and decided to sit down for a while.

Lost Maples

The atmosphere was incredible, and the sky was so clear I could see the half moon in the western sky at 10 a.m. I sat on a rock, pulled out my little notebook and started jotting down thoughts about happiness.

One thing I realized almost instantly is that unless you allow it, there isn't anyone in the world who can prevent you from being happy.

But along those same lines, the most useless piece of advice you can give anyone is to "try and be happy." The more any of us "try to be happy," the more elusive happiness becomes.

Living in our modern society has become a very difficult matter

This is a very tough world for an idealist. particularly one of the political variety.

My friend Mick has what he considers a perfectly consistent philosophy. He is opposed to big labor, big business and big government. In his eyes, any of the three gaining the upper hand results in a dysfunctional society.

I've got four words that I think put the lie to his ideal:

"Nature abhors a vacuum."

Two of the most opposite systems of government would appear to be communism and libertarianism, and neither is workable in the real world on anything more than a very small scale.

Communism's "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" can work in a small community where everyone knows everyone else and has chosen to be there.

But if you live in Indiana and are making shoes for people in New Mexico, it's difficult to maintain incentive. There's no real incentive to work any harder than necessary.

Libertarianism has a very different problem. Without a government to regulate economic transactions, the only possibility of the system providing the greatest good for the greatest number is if everyone is essentially moral.

Abrams' adaptation of King's '11.22.63' should be very interesting

I was 10 years old when John F. Kennedy was elected president and 13 when he was murdered in Dallas.

11/22/63

It was the day the world changed, and it never changed back. The day our young, energetic president was replaced by an old, grandfatherly type.

Lyndon Johnson did some good, especially on the domestic side, but he got us so deeply entangled in Vietnam that by the time the war ended late in the Nixon administration more than 58,000 Americans were dead.

If there's one thing that has been constant over the last 52 years, it's people wondering how different things have been if President Kennedy had not died in Dallas and had served out two full terms in the White House.

George Bernau took a shot at it in "Promises to Keep," a novel in which a Kennedyesque president is shot in Dallas but survives a terrible head wound. History changes, but not as much as you might think. Bernau had another novel, "Candle in the Wind," that questioned what would have happened had Marilyn Monroe not died in August 1962.

But it was Stephen King who took the most interesting look at the situation. Instead of writing about what would have happened if Kennedy had not been killed, he wrote about the possibility of someone going back in time to prevent the assassination in the first place.

As with most of King's larger works, there's too much story here to fit into one movie. "The Stand" was a four-part miniseries and "It" was done -- and not particularly well -- as a two-part TV movie.

"Under the Dome" was overdone more than could even have been imagined, with 39 one-hour episodes over three seasons on Amazon. The story was expanded and changed, making the original story almost unrecognizable.

King's "11.22.63" is getting a similar treatment, although it might just be nine episodes and one season. James Franco has the lead as the time-traveling teacher and Chris Cooper is the diner owner who discovers the route into the past.

Franco and Cooper

King handles the idea of time travel and all the possible paradoxes like the pro he is. What's especially interesting is the idea that the bigger the change, the more difficult the universe makes it to accomplish.

One real irony is that Kennedy himself once said no assassin had ever changed history. Whether that was ever true, it's difficult to imagine that JFK in office until 1969 would have left the country in the same shape credibility-wise that Johnson did.

And even if he had been killed in 1963, it's still difficult to imagine Richard Nixon winning in 1968 if Bobby Kennedy hadn't been killed in June in Los Angeles.

Of course none of that happened, but just as it's interesting to speculate, it will be interesting to see what King and filmmaker J.J. Abrams do with it.

It's nice to have something to look forward to.

There always seems to be someone Americans are afraid of

What's the biggest evil ever perpetrated in American history?

Certainly the genocide of Native Americans would be way up there, and chattel slavery is right there with it. But people are quick to dismiss those, saying sure they were bad, but both of those things ended long before any of us were born.

America, 1942

But 1942 wasn't that long ago, and even if most of us weren't alive then, it was a modern enough era that there are plenty of radio broadcasts and movie newsreels still in existence to remind us of what happened.

We have never been a particularly tolerant nation when it comes to other races and ethnicities. Many of us are descended from the British, who for all intents and purposes invented racism.

We justified what we did to Native Americans by saying they were savages, even though in some ways they were more spiritual than the average settler. We justified slavery with a Biblical fable about Noah's duskier son gazing on him when he was naked and passed out drunk.

Maybe it's unfair to call it racism. Maybe more than anything else it's just xenophobia. Nearly two-thirds of Americans have never traveled outside the U.S., and well under half even have a passport.

It isn't just about us not traveling either. Large parts of this country aren't big tourist destinations for international travelers. Folks living in Nebraska or West Virginia aren't likely to encounter tourists from Japan, Italy or Nigeria. So their knowledge of people from different cultures is limited to what they see on television.

Is there a way to deal with radical Islam and still have religious freedom?

Who would have thought that as we learn more and more about our world and our universe, religion would be dragging us closer and closer to the eve of destruction?

As I write this, there are terrorist attacks ongoing in Paris with more than 140 people dead, and it certainly appears that radical Islam is behind them.

Friday evening in Paris.

Theoretically, radical Islamists have one advantage the rest of us don't in this war or sorts.

Osama bin Laden explained it when he said Americans could not defeat Al Qaeda.

"They want to live. We are not afraid to die."

It's similar to what John F. Kennedy said when he said no president could ever truly be protected from an assassin. If someone is willing to trade his life for that of the president, the odds are very high that he will succeed.

A lot of people don't understand that we lost a lot more than people on Sept. 11, 2001, and it was all part of the plan. All you have to do is look at the Patriot Act and at all the NSA spying going on and you see that bin Laden succeeded in making us surrender a significant amount of our freedom.

One of my favorite travel memories is from 1990, when I was covering college basketball for the Reno Gazette-Journal. I was driving from Moscow, Idaho, to the Spokane airport when my rental car skidded off the road and got stuck in a snowdrift. By the time I got pulled out, I had 24 minutes till my flight was scheduled to depart and 23 miles to cover -- on snowy roads.

Spokane Airport

Thankfully, it was a small airport. I arrived with 2 minutes left, tossed the keys to the car rental people and sprinted to the gate. I got there with the door to the plane half-open.

Thanks to bin Laden, nothing like that will ever happen again.

But I've gotten away from my point. If there are a billion Muslims in the world, and only 1 percent sympathize with terrorism, that's still 10 million people. And if only 1 percent of that 1 percent actually participate in terrorism, that's still 100,000 terrorists.

That can make for a lot of Parises.

Of course we have more problems in this country than just Islam, although being Americans, most of the others don't seem to want to destroy property. We've got fundamentalist Christian preachers who apparently have enough influence to attract three Republican presidential candidates to a rally where they call for the death of gays and lesbians. We've got another candidate, Ben Carson, who has said he would go back in time to kill Baby Hitler if he could, but he would not kill Hitler by aborting him in his mother's womb.

Then there are the super-Orthodox Jews, who won't seem to give an inch in a possible compromise for peace in the Middle East. It's tough to blame them too much, because there doesn't seem to be any give from the Muslim side either.

The thing that may be the toughest to solve here is the problem just might be religion itself.

Sanders might not be the guy, but he's definitely part of the right party

“You know, I, for the love of me, I cannot understand why people who have billions of dollars are compulsively driven for more and how many people have got to die because they don’t go to a doctor, because you want to avoid paying your taxes?”
-- BERNIE SANDERS

I don't think Bernie Sanders is going to be elected president. In fact, I don't even think he'll be the Democratic nominee.

I would be willing to bet he isn't even that serious about being elected. Sanders will celebrate his 75th birthday two months before the election, which would make him five years older than anyone else ever elected before.

The only previous president who was even 70 on Inauguration Day -- William Henry Harrison -- got sick while making his inaugural address and died a month later. Ronald Reagan celebrated his 70th birth two weeks after taking office, but he was showing clear signs of a mental decline by early in his second term.

Wouldn't it be nice to be treated like intelligent voters again?

If you're one of those Americans who love to watch reality shows, you're in for a treat.

If, on the other hand, you would like to see the next president selected by intelligent voters on the basis of character and issues, you're probably out of luck.

Sanders and Clinton

We are still more than a year out from the 2016 election, but if you have been following what passes for news on cable networks and the Internet, you might think the fortunes of various candidates were rising and falling every day.

At one point several weeks ago, the media breathlessly reported that Hillary Clinton's support among Democratic women had fallen from 77 percent to 42 percent.

Of course we're just talking about preference polls, and even there, polls within the Democratic Party. Should Secretary Clinton win the nomination, as still seems likely, her support will certain return and probably even go higher.

People can own guns, but background checks are a true necessity

What's the most important of the Ten Commandments?

It may sound like a silly question, but it really isn't. If you look at the commandments, everything stems from the first one.

"Thou shalt have no other gods before me."

Honor your parents? Sure. Rest on the Sabbath? Good idea.

But the reason we listen to those and the others is that right at the beginning, God lets us know that he's in charge.

That's the way it usually works with a list. If your wife gives you a list of tasks to perform, the stuff at the top usually matters more than the stuff at the bottom.

When lists aren't written that way, it mostly seems to be done for dramatic reasons, to build suspense. If someone wins the jackpot on a TV game show, it may start with a year's supply of Turtle Wax and end with a new car or a trip around the world.

It's rarely the other way around.

Pretty difficult to justify unrestricted gun rights in modern-day America

Note: This column appeared in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin nearly 19 years ago, but the sentiments in it are as fresh as today for me.

A father is dead.

I never met Mario Navidad, the young LAPD officer who was killed in the line of duty just before Christmas.

I never knew he existed until I heard he was dead, but I know there are a lot out there like him.

We call them the Thin Blue Line, the only thing standing between us and anarchy, and I think there's a lot of truth to that.

We live in dangerous, desperate times. We live in an era when children carry guns and aren't afraid to use them, an era when it has never been more dangerous to be a cop.

Officer Navidad was little more than a kid himself. He was 27 when he died, a veteran of less than two years on the force. He had a wife and two young children.

He lived in Chino.

For a lot of young guys these days, joining the force is upward mobility. It's a way out of poverty. It's a way to buy a house and move your family to a safer neighborhood, to give your own children a better childhood than you had.

But escape comes at such a high price.

Every time you go to work, you've got to worry that somewhere out there is an idiot with a gun who'd think nothing of ending your life.

The criminal who killed Officer Navidad was 17 years old. He had stolen beer from a convenience store, two six packs. Hardly a major crime.

When he saw the police car, he didn't even try to escape. He shifted the beer to one hand, reached into his pocket for a semiautomatic pistol and started firing.

Navidad was hit six times. His partner returned fire, killing the assailant. Navidad died on a hospital operating table later the same night, outliving his killer by only a short time.

His children -- a 4-year-old boy and a 9-month-old girl -- will grow up without a father, all because their dad had the misfortune of running into someone who never knew what it meant to be a man.

I'm sure there are those among you who will wonder what societal pressures led a 17-year-old boy to open fire without warning at two police officers.

I've got to tell you, I don't much care why he did it.

I just want it to stop.

My grandfather was chief of police in a small Ohio town during World War II. He was one of the lucky ones. Except for a modicum of sleaze and sin in the railroad district, Crestline was a pretty quiet place.

He didn't get killed. I'm not sure if anyone ever even shot at him. He died in his bed at 89.

Yes, he was one of the lucky ones. He saw his children and his grandchildren grow to adulthood, and he even met a couple of great-grandchildren.

Some cops die of old age, but far too many die young. Far too many children of police officers out there are growing up without knowing their fathers.

We owe a lot to the Mario Navidads among us. If you think things are bad now, if you think crime is almost out of control, just imagine what sort of society we'd have if no one was willing to take the risks police officers take every day.

I don't know how to solve this problem. I'd like to meet someone who does. It's obvious that poverty, lack of education and a host of other issues contribute to it.

I do know one thing.

It's far too easy to get guns, waiting period or no waiting period.

Gun advocates say only outlaws will have guns if guns are outlawed. I don't care about that. I want us to keep guns away from sick, demented children.

Before you pick up your phone to tell me why private citizens should have the right to brandish semiautomatic weapons, take a second and think about this.

Think about Mario Navidad.

And while you're at it, think about two fatherless children.

'Zero tolerance' only keeps good people from doing their jobs

Zero tolerance.

It's getting so you have to be pretty old to remember a time in this country when there were rules and the people running things had the discretion of how to enforce them.

I don't remember exactly when the concept of zero tolerance got started, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if there wasn't a tie-in with attorneys being allowed to advertise their services.

That happened in 1977. And once they were allowed to run ads on radio and television and start putting huge billboards along the highways, Americans became the most litigious people in the world.

All of a sudden, lawyers were telling people that if anything bad happened to them, they could sue someone and make lots and lots of money.

So in addition to having to make good decisions and do the right thing, people had to be aware that they could be sued and have to defend their actions in court.

What made perfect sense at the time might not sound as good when explained to a jury of 12 people hearing it for the first time. So too many organizations decided to take away any discretion when it came to interpreting and enforcing the rules.

There were pretty much always rules against bringing weapons to school, but zero tolerance defined things as weapons that were anything but weapons. Guns that fired nothing more lethal than water -- squirt guns -- could be banned for their potential to disrupt classes, but plastic toy guns were nothing more than, well, toys.

As for discretion?

Forget it.

A classic case in Orange County, California, in the early '90s went far beyond stupidity. A little boy in first grade was waiting for the school bus one morning when he saw a razor blade in the grass.

He was afraid someone would be cut by it, so he picked it up. When the bus came, he tried to give it to the driver. The driver refused it and told him to give it to his teacher when he got to school.

So the little boy got to school, told his teacher about the razor blade he had found and tried to give it to her. She took him to the principal's office and told the principal he had brought a weapon to school.

Zero tolerance?

Yep, zero tolerance. The principal expelled the little boy from school for bringing a weapon onto school grounds.

This was something of a cause celebre in California at the time. A year or so later, when I found myself involved in a similar case, I was glad to find people intelligent enough to show some flexibility.

My son was in second grade when we got a call from the principal of his school. I went in to talk to her, and she told me that my son had brought a knife to school that day. It wasn't a bowie knife, a switchblade or even a Swiss Army knife. It was a tiny little penknife from the Roy Rogers Museum, with a blade small enough and dull enough to make it less dangerous than a paper cut.

She said two third graders had been bullying my son on the playground. Rather than complain to a teacher, he had tried to deal with the problem himself. As he told me later, he had no intention of hurting anyone. He just though that if he showed them the little knife and threatened to scratch them with it, they would leave him alone.

Heck, he was 7.

The principal asked me what thought. I told her I knew my son would never intentionally hurt anyone, but that I certainly understood that he couldn't be bringing weapons -- no matter how innocuous -- to school.

She seemed relieved to hear that. She told me she didn't want to punish my son, who was a good student and no trouble to his teacher at all. School district regulations said she should expel him, and she said if I had given the normal parent reaction ("It can't be my kid's fault!"), she would have.

But since I understood the situation and her reaction to it, she said I should just take him home for the rest of the day and he could come back to school the next day.

I thanked her for her kindness.

There's zero tolerance ... and zero tolerance.

The world changes more and more rapidly and some cannot cope

Sometimes our world changes almost overnight, and sometimes the change seems to take forever.

Technological changes are usually the rapid ones, while societal progress comes much more slowly.

But once in a while, things seem to happen almost overnight.

Even though they didn't.

It was only 15 years ago that voters in California passed a proposition restricting marriage to one man and one woman.

I voted for it, but I was a 50-year-old Roman Catholic who thought civil unions was a pretty fair compromise.

I was wrong.

Without a real news media, all people get is goofy entertainment

"Some days it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps ..."

-- EMO PHILLIPS

If the first couple of months of the 2016 presidential race are any indication, we could be in for the most ridiculous election season since 1988.

If you're old enough to remember -- or if you read Jack Germond's wonderful book "Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars?" -- you'll know that the 1988 campaign swung on three non-issue issues. George H.W. Bush attacked Democrat Michael Dukakis for being soft on the Pledge of Allegiance, for being a "card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union and for allowing Willie Horton out on a weekend furlough from prison.

Dukakis '88

Of course, Dukakis helped by being the worst possible Democratic candidate. If he hadn't already lost the election by then, the photo of him riding in a tank -- his "Rocky the Flying Squirrel" moment -- wrapped things up.

We have certainly had some silly elections since then, but the Republicans in particular have been getting goofier and goofier. Whether it was Sarah Palin and being able to see Russia or Mitt Romney saying corporations were people too, they became more and more difficult to take seriously.

Not a bad legacy for a band that only had two years in the spotlight

If you came of age in the late '60s, the odds are you wouldn't have thought of the Association as a particularly hip band.

The first song you would remember them for is "Never My Love," a No. 2 hit in the fall of 1967 that at the end of the century was honored by Broadcast Music International as the second-most popular song ever in terms of radio play in all its various versions.

The only song played more in the 20th century was "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling," and No. 3 was a pretty good one too -- Lennon and McCartney's "Yesterday."

The BMI survey was called the "Top 100 Songs of the Century," and two others by the Association made the last -- "Cherish" at No. 22 and "Windy" at No. 61. Only two groups had more songs on the list than the Association -- the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel.

But you could still look at those three songs and think "Windy" was pretty cool, but the other two were sort of what Paul McCartney was later to call "Silly Love Songs." "Cherish" in particular has some irritating little noises going on in the background.

But to listen to those three songs, you really wouldn't realize that the Association had gotten off to a really cool start. Their first hit, "Along Came Mary" in 1966, was anything but simplistic. A lot of people thought "Mary" stood for marijuana, especially with lyrics like this:

"And when the morning of the warning's passed,
the gassed and flaccid kids are flung across the stars,
The psychodramas and the traumas gone, 
The songs are left unsung and hung upon the scars.

"And then along comes Mary
and does she want to see the stains, 
the dead remains of all the pains she left the night before
or will their waking eyes, reflect the lies,
and make them realize their urgent cry for sight no more ..."




In fact, the legendary Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, which was three days of music with a more star-studded lineup than would be at Woodstock two summers later, included the Association doing "Along Comes Mary." It didn't make the original film, but when the Criterion Collection released its version of "Monterey Pop" a few years back, it's on a disc of outtakes.

They didn't have a long time in the spotlight, with five top 10 hits released in 20-month period in 1966-68. Less than three years later, the one time I saw them live in concert, it was in the basketball gymnasium at Fort Hunt High School in Virginia.

Then they were gone.

But how many bands that had such a short run can say they had three of the top 61 songs of the century, two of them songs that have been covered time and again and again?

And all five of the songs -- the four mentioned and "Everything That Touches You" -- still bring back memories.

Steve King was right.

It's the fabled automatic.

Scared people get stupid, and everyone who looks different suffers

Inderjit Singh Mukker is a 53-year-old American citizen who lives in the southwestern suburbs of Chicago.

He is not a Muslim.

I shouldn't have to say that, but if I don't, I'm sure there will be at least a few of you who will look a little bit askance.

Interjit Singh Mukker

He isn't Jewish or Christian either. Mukker is one of about a million Sikhs in the United States and Canada. Sikhs have been here for about a hundred years, and Sikhism is the fifth largest religion in the world. It was founded in the 15th century in the Punjab region of India. It is monotheistic and advocates equality for men and women of all races and religions.

Mukker was on his way to the grocery store when another driver began harassing him. Mukker pulled over to allow the other car to pass, but the other driver stopped his car right in front, got out and began assaulting him.

He was yelling, "Terrorist! Go back to your country, bin Laden!"

Mukker wound up in the hospital with cheek lacerations and a fractured cheekbone.

Sikhs have been taking it on the chin ever since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In fact, the first backlash victim was four days later when a "good American" killed Balbir Singh Sodhi in Mesa, Ariz. The killer said he was helping the government by getting rid of a terrorist.

Difficult to believe that Freedom of Religion will survive unscathed

We have taken the Bill of Rights for granted for a long time in this country.

So much so that I would be surprised if one American in 100 could enumerate all 10 amendments and what they contain. I know I can't, at least not off the top of my head. But if we're honest, we ought to accept the fact that we don't value all our so-called "rights" equally.

Those on the Left may love freedom of speech, and those on the Right may love the right to keep and bear arms, but there is at least one right which might not survive the next 10-20 years.

Be honest. Do we really still believe in freedom or religion? And more to the point, can we still afford it?

Let me start by saying that every religious person in this country certainly believes that they should be free to practice religion. Most folks who are truly religious doubtless believe their faith is the best way to live, and they have varying degrees of tolerance for those who disagree with them.

The years keep passing and memories become more and more faded

"Roger: I hope 1944 turns out well. They pass so quickly. Where do they all go?
"Biff Baxter: So quickly. Then we get old. And we never knew what any of it was about."
-- WOODY ALLEN, Radio Days

Everybody's got their memories, and as they grow older, memories fill more and more of the space in their brain devoted to remembrance.

I loved hearing my late grandfather tell me stories about seeing baseball players like Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Nap Lajoie and others. He owned a bat that he said had belonged to Lajoie, a bat that was bigger, longer and heavier than any bat I had ever seen.

My grandparents and my mother.

I loved his story about his strict father, who had emigrated from Germany in the late 19th century, and the Sunday dinner when his brother learned a lesson. The entire family, a dozen or so of them, were seated around the dining room table. My great-uncle, who I never met, complained that his plate was cracked. My great-grandfather came around the table, grabbed him and threw him through the open window into the yard.

A minute or two later, he threw a suitcase after him and said, "If you ever complain about your mother again, you can leave and never come back."

Talk about your tough love.

These days that would probably be called child abuse, but I'll be willing to bet one thing. I doubt that kids raised that way went out and killed people because they were bored.

On the whole, we weren't a generation that was all that interested in the past. People have accused baby boomers of acting as if the world started on the day we were born. I don't think that's completely true, but I know that my millennial son asked my dad more about his experience in World War II than I ever did.

Virgile had a report due in school. He asked, and was told.

I never asked. In fact, I'm not sure I ever asked any of my relatives about their lives in the years before I was born.

It took me a long time in life to understand that when you find other people's stories interesting, you're showing a certain regard for their humanity. And no matter how much you think you know, there will always be people who know more than you about something.

Interviewing Chris Evert in 1981.

Being a reporter helped. Especially when I was doing feature stories or columns about someone, I saw fairly quickly that the more I talked, the less they talked. And vice versa. I learned that short questions are more likely to yield long answers, and that waiting in silence when the answer is seemingly done can often result in even more information and better quotes.

There are so many great memories I ought to have, stories I wrote 30 years ago and didn't save.

I always thought there would be better ones, and there were, but I no longer remember the details of interviewing Chris Evert in 1981 or sitting and talking for an hour with Roger Maris in 1982.

I spent hours drinking vodka with Roger Kahn in 1983 and an entire evening watching baseball with Hank Aaron in 1984. I wrote stories every time and I no longer have any of them.

I do still have memories, a lot of them, but more of them are about my wife, children and grandchildren. The '80s are more of a blur to me now.

They pass so quickly.

Then we get old.

And we never know what any of it was about.

Republicans have us lurching toward a very strange 2016 election

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
-- W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"

If you have been a frequent reader of mine in the nearly 15 years I have been writing for various Internet websites, you can't be surprised to see me quoting Yeats. Good old Bill -- and particularly this work -- really resonates with me.

Great works of literature are multifaceted, yielding more of their secrets each time you study them.

Most of the time, I focus in on the first part of this quote. But for some reason, today it was the final part that struck me as important.

" ... the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Yesterday evening in Cleveland, 17 different candidates for the Republican nomination for president took part in two debates in Cleveland. The mere fact of the number ought to tell us that none of the candidates are some impressive that they're scaring others off.

That said, the worst and scariest of them are full of passionate intensity. They speak of going to war with Iran, of defying the Supreme Court and of shutting down private companies like Planned Parenthood. Several even say they would deny women the right to abortions if their lives were at stake.

And then there is Donald Trump, the present-day H. Ross Perot or George Wallace. Trump has certainly made things exciting, and it looks as if his election next year would enable us to mothball Air Force One for four years.

Trump does have one advantage over the other top-tier candidates. He might actually be sane, and he may be the only Republican running with a strong enough personality to actually say no to the lunatics in Congress.

He also doesn't give off that "religious fanatic" vibe, which is good, but he also doesn't look like a candidate who would care much about income inequality as president. The truly frightening part of it all is that of the other 16 candidates, most of them either haver worse drawbacks to their candidacies than Trump or are basically unelectable.

One candidate on the other side of the equation seems like he might be a good president. I like Bernie Sanders a lot, I respect his integrity and I'm very much in sync with his positions on most issues. That's why I've made two small donations to his campaign and will probably make more.

Sanders has two major drawbacks, though. First is that he'll be 75 years old on election day, five years older than anyone else who was ever elected.

Second is that of all the candidates in the race, Sanders is the farthest to the left, and American voters tend to elect the candidate who best presents himself as a centrist. That's why the most realistic hope is for Sanders to draw probable nominee Hillary Clinton a little to the left.

The real problem is that politics has changed so much. We used to be a country where one party was 10 degrees to the left of center and the other 10 degrees to the right. Most issues were settled by compromises and the country ran fairly well.

As author Thomas E. Mann says in his new book, "It's Even Worse Than It Looks," Republicans have swung so far to the right that few compromises are even possible anymore.

" ... the worst are full of passionate intensity."

When the center fails to hold, bad things happen. Will next year be a year that will see a return to a more centrist politics or will things keep getting worse?

It's difficult to imagine a Republican who could take things back to the center, and it's even more difficult to imagine a Democrat as president who wouldn't drive the right wing into a state of psychosis.

So maybe we end up wondering, as Yeats did, what will happen. As the poet said:

"... what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?"

A lot less time and a lot less aggravation in my personal future

I recently discovered the most useless possible way to spend my time and brainpower.

Posting opinions on Facebook.

Especially political ones.

I'm especially seeing that as we enter into another political campaign season. I try very hard to be civil to people on the other side, even though I have little or no use for the current state of conservatism in this country.

More and more, I'm finding that arguing politics is a complete waste of brain cells.

People who agree with me praise what I say, but I don't know anything I have posted that has changed anyone's mind.

So for at least a while, I'll check for news of family and friends and pictures of my adorable grandchildren, but when I see items like the one about guy who got caught porking a pig in his local Walmart, I'll stay away from them.

As for politics, count me out until at least January.

And maybe even past that. I certainly don't think the world is waiting with bated breath for whatever wisdom I might possess.

When I write something here, I'll post it the way I've been doing. But nothing is just for Facebook anymore.

Time wasted is time wasted.

Cut the political rhetoric and let's look for real immigration solutions

When it comes to welcoming immigrants to the United States, there has always been a gap between rhetoric and reality.

Most literate people are aware of the Emma Lazarus quote so often associated with the Statue of Liberty, but the full poem is even more eloquent.

It's called "The New Colossus," and it presents the idea that if someone has nowhere else to go, he or she can come here and find a home.

"Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, 

"With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

"Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

"A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

"Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

"Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

"Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

"The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"'Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!' cries she.

"With silent lips. 'Give me your tired, your poor,

"Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

"The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

"Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

"I lift my lamp beside the golden door!'"

Memories of a great career all together in one shadow box

Hard to believe how much of a life can fit into one shadow box.

Back in my single days, when classy decorations were one-sheet movie posters and cork boards covered with media passes, I probably had several hundred mementoes on my walls.

Now I have pictures in nice frames and cases of autographed baseballs. My movie poster are smaller and framed and I have some lovely night skylines as well.

The real prizes are an autographed John Elway jersey and an old, sepia-toned photograph taken in 1920 from my grandparents' wedding.

But this particular shadow box really covers the waterfront, so to speak.. Upper left is a pass from covering the Rose Bowl. Just below it is a clubhouse pass from the 1995 National League Division Series, and my press card from when I worked in North Carolina in 1982.

At the bottom on the left is my press pass from the 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York. Somewhere else I have passes from the GOP's shindig in 1996 in San Diego and the Democrats in 2000 in Los Angeles.

Upper center was my vanity license plate from the years I was a newspaper columnist in Southern California. My friend Mick said it stood for "clam nest," but he was just jealous that he didn't have a cool license plate.

The home-plate shaped pass underneath was from the 1992 baseball All-Star Game in San Diego and just to the right was a photograph of me interviewing John Elway that appeared in Sports Illustrated in January 1987.

The three smaller passes just below were from the 1991 Nissan Open golf tournament, the NASA launch of the Cassini spacecraft in 1997 from Cape Canaveral and a badge from the 1988 International golf tournament at Castle Pines in Colorado.

Bottom center is my press box card from the 1983 Peach Bowl game.

On the far right were two of the bigger events I covered in 1985 -- the World Series in St. Louis and the NCAA Final Four in Lexington, Ky.

It really was quite a good run.

*****

For the longest time, this 1979 Nicholas Meyer film was one of my very favorite movies.

It had such a great premise -- H.G. Wells chasing Jack the Ripper into the future and discovering modern-day San Francisco was anything but the Utopia he had imagined life in the future would be.

Malcolm McDowell has had a long and varied career, but he rarely plays the hero and even more rarely plays a romantic hero. In this he falls in love with Mary Steenburgen's modern woman, and he and his costar fell in love off the set and got a 10-year marriage and two children out of it.

In a movie celebrating time travel and hope for a better life in different eras, McDowell gets the best line when he professes his love in the final scene.

"Every age is the same. It's only love that makes any of them bearable."

*****

I have three wonderful grandchildren, and my lone grandson is the middle one. Lexington will be 4 years old in November, and he's about to live in the United States for the first time.

My daughter Pauline will be spending the equivalent of the next school year in Washington, D.C., learning Spanish for her three-year tour in Guatemala City. Lex will be in preschool, and big sister Madison will be in second grade.

The baby, lovely little Albanie, will be a year old this Halloween.

It's going to be an eventful year and something of a tumultuous one, but with Virgile and Sterling also in D.C., we ought to be able at least to have a nice Christmas.

Welcoming the grandkids back to America for a year or so at "home"

Welcome to Georgia.

The picture shows four -- well, three -- of my favorite people in the world.

My daughter Pauline is pushing the massive cart of luggage and car seats while also carrying little Albanie, nine months old today, on her back.

Next is Madison, the former Amazing Baby who starts second grade in September and will be 7 years old on Sept. 19th. On the right in the Spiderman shirt is Lexington, who will be four in November.

They're emerging from International Arrivals at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta, marking the end of a three-year tour in Jamaica.

They are pretty much racing for the next few days. Sunday they leave again for Seattle, for doctor visits and schmoozing with the other side of the family. At the end of August, they'll hop on a plane to take them to the other Washington -- D.C., that is -- where they'll be living for the next nine months or so while Pauline learns to speak Spanish.

This is my daughter's third time through the language program, and it should be the easiest. Her previous two visits were to learn Mandarin Chinese and Indonesian. After those two, Spanish should be a breeze.

"Que pasa?"

It's an exciting life, but a tough one for families. Maddie was born in Beijing, Lex was born in Seattle during the Surabaya tour and Albanie was born last Halloween in Jamaica.

Pauline's next tour will be the first in a long time that doesn't include time off to have a baby. Three, she says, are definitely enough.

The next year or so will be very different for the children. The only year Maddie spent in this country was from age 1-2. Lex has never really lived in the U.S.

Even though they will be nearly 700 miles away in Northern Virginia, I'm happy to have them so close. If things work out, we'll visit them two or three times between now and next May, when Pauline will be getting ready to go to Guatemala for three years.

Her life is definitely more interesting than mine.

Why isn't this a better world? Because we don't do 'difficult' things

"Imagine there's no heaven ..."

As the story goes, when John Lennon wrote "Imagine," he wasn't setting out to write an anthem. He just wanted to write a good song about all the things that stand in the way of people being truly happy and then ask people to consider what the world could be like without those things.

For a period of about four years, millions of young people in the United States, Canada, Europe and all around the world really believed we could build a world based on those principles.

No heaven.

No religion.

No countries.

No possessions.

"No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people sharing all the world ..."

People laugh at that attitude now and sneer at all the "naive" people who would work toward that sort of world. Too many bad people, they say. Too many predators. Human nature would never accept that sort of world.

Besides, we didn't care enough to fight for it. Some people tried, and some people are still trying. They're still fighting the good fight against racism, sexism, corporatism, militarism and all the other -isms.

What do we do? We call them old hippies and laugh at their naivete. Can't they understand, we say, that people can't make a difference anymore?

But our voices barely matter and can hardly be heard anymore. If you look at the generation now beginning to retire, we didn't just give up on changing the world. We put the worst among us -- the greediest, the meanest, the most sociopathic -- in charge of things.

We may not be to blame for Richard Nixon. Most of us couldn't vote in 1968, and 1972 was a whole different story -- they called it "All the President's Men."

But only the very last of the boomers were too young to vote in 1980, so we have to take responsibility for Ronald Reagan, and there's no way anyone else was to blame for George W. Bush in 2000.

The worst thing of all is that we are in complete denial about the fact that between 1981 and 2009, for 16 years of that time we had presidents with no intellectual curiosity, no subtlety in their thinking and not enough basic intelligence to grasp the difficult issues.

In Will Bunch's fascinating book "Tear Down this Myth," he quotes an aide who said that early in Reagan's time in the White House, he was having a meeting about a complex issue. As the discussion went on around him, it was apparent Reagan couldn't keep up and had no idea what they were discussing.

He wasn't a details guy. He had three basic beliefs -- anti-communism, smaller government and lower taxes. As long as the people working for him kept that in mind, they could pretty well do what they wanted.

Bush was actually worse. He pretty much left everything to his subordinates, and the neocons in his administration trashed our economy and our reputation in the world.

Did we care? Not much. We were rolling along in our careers, hitting our peak earning years and hey, how about that Viagra.

Stephen King pretty well summed up our generation in "Why We're in Vietnam," a novella inside his outstanding "Hearts in Atlantis":

"We never got out. We never got out of the green. Our generation died there.

"We're the generation that invented Super Mario Brothers,  the ATV, laser missile-guidance systems, and crack cocaine. We discovered Richard Simmons, Scott Peck and Martha Stewart Living. Our idea of a major lifestyle change is buying a dog.

"The girls who burned their bras now buy their lingerie from Victoria's Secret and the boys who f***ed fearlessly for peace are now fat guys who sit in front of their computer screens late at night, pulling their puddings while they look at pictures of naked 18-year-olds on the Internet.

"That's us, brother. We like to watch. Movies, video games, live car-chase footage, fist fights on the Jerry Springer Show, Mark McGwire, World Wrestling Federation, impeachment hearings, we don't care. We just like to watch. But there was a time ... don't laugh, but there really was a time we had it all in our hands.

"When did we lose it? When did we settle for a ridiculously materialistic lifestyle that is so over the top sometimes we just have to laugh our asses off at ourselves?"

 I figure it was sometime in the late '70s.

So you're blaming it on disco? 

Nah, I figure it was mostly Nixon's fault. The more papers and tapes that are released, the more we learn about what really was happening in his White House, the more Nixon starts looking like some political version of an American antichrist.

He killed our national spirit, and neither Gerald Ford nor Jimmy Carter could bring it back. Carter talked some sense about things like energy, but he wasn't saying anything we wanted to hear.

 So America voted for Reagan after a campaign that was little more than "U-S-A, U-S-A!" repeated again and again.

A month later, Lennon was killed in New York City, and a world of "Imagine" was pretty much gone.

No heaven? Don't tell Jerry Falwell.

No religion? The '80s were pretty much the time religious tolerance started to die and fundamentalists of all sorts went to war with each other.

 No countries? None that mattered except for the USA.

No possessions? Don't make me laugh. The '80s were the decade we started spending and never stopped.

In 2014, we're all about our possessions, baby. We've got more gadgets than we could possibly have imagined 40 years ago. Remember when big screen TVs first came along and you wanted one? Now if you're like a lot of us, you have more big screen TVs than you have people in your house.

Imagine no possessions isn't just ridiculous, it's all but impossible.

Did we change? Actually, the problem is that we didn't. When we had the chance to evolve and really change the world, we sat back and said one thing:

"No, that's too difficult."

Sad, but true. It's probably a good thing Lennon didn't live to see it, although we still have his wonderful song to remind us of how things could have been.

If we were better people.

We used to be able to laugh, but now we're the punchline to the joke

Note: This is a reworking of something I wrote six years ago, something that seems more and more appropriate all the time.


I can't believe I used to take politics seriously.

Now I don't know if there's anyone left in Washington I can take seriously at all except for my younger brother, and he's too intelligent to be a politician.

 Ever since I saw Newt Gingrich shut down the government because he didn't get to sit up front on Air Force One on the way to Yitzhak Rabin's funeral, ever since I watched Bill Clinton ooze sincerity (at least I think it was sincerity; the dry cleaners got it out) saying he never had sex with that woman, it has been harder and harder to look at politicians as anything but entertainers.

Consider this: Who's the guy who seems to take being a senator the most seriously right now? Yup, it's Al Franken, D-SNL, who actually used to be an entertainer.

Or maybe we jumped the national shark when Sonny Bono, R-Cher, got elected to Congress.

Actually, we have also elected Fred Grandy, R-Love Boat, and Wilmer Mizell, R-Pittsburgh Pirates, not to mention Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Alzheimers. One gopher and two baseball pitchers.

In 1976, Paddy Chayefsky wrote what at the time seemed like an apocalyptic view of television news. These days "Network" just seems like something else we would find if we whipped through our 500 channels fast enough.

Yes, Walt Kelly, we definitely have met the enemy and he definitely is us.

Network

We're dumber than dirt, fatter than pigs and we elect people to office we'd love to share our pallet-sized nachos and oil tanker-sized beer with.

Whatever happened to being better off when people smarter than we were ran the country?

These days we're ready to turn the keys to the Ship of State over to Goober, who's only in the show because Gomer left for the Marine Corps when they told him about Show Tunes Night at the local Officers Club.

We've torched our economy so badly that we may have to settle for 8-9 percent unemployment for the near future, but hey, no problem. Your cable company is about one good jump away from giving you a new feature -- Virtual Sex.

Max Frost

And when you can sit in your recliner -- or recline in your sitter -- and make love to Megan Fox or Britney Spears 24 hours a day, all they've got to do is hook up an IV and a catheter and you, sir, are no longer a problem.

So what can we do about it, assuming that enough people still give a shit?

I'm figuring if we still want to be anything more than a wholly owned subsidiary of Deutschebank, we probably need to write off everyone ever 30 years old.

Oh, I know that's not fair, that certainly some older folks could be part of the solution, but it's too late. We need to go Max Frost on their asses and set up those camps where all the old folks can sit in the sun, stay high on LSD and get out of the way.

Of course, we probably need to write off about half the folks under 30 too. I'm thinking the deciding factors there will be body mass index and how many hours a week they play video games.

Let the ones with lean and hungry looks run things, and I'm betting they could get us back to the days when men were men and sheep were very nervous, the times when the only thing Chinese we had to worry about was whether our chow mein was any good.

John Prine, "Sam Stone"

When people looked at America and saw Audie Murphy and Amelia Earhart, that was one thing. When they look now, they see Rush Limbaugh and Rosie O'Donnell, and that's another thing entirely.
People around the world laugh knowingly when they see Americans spend thousands of dollars to "upgrade" from a 60-inch television to a 66-incher. When they see us super sizing everything from Freedom Fries to Cialis.

Is it any wonder that Europeans look at us and call us the teenagers of the world?

In his wonderful song "Sam Stone," the legendary John Prine wrote that "there's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes." He was writing about heroin, but our holes are in our hearts and minds and we try to fill them with food and toys.

Once we were the envy of the world, for our freedoms and our dedication to preserving them. Now we argue over whether Jay Leno or Conan O'Brien should have the "Tonight Show."

They're not laughing with us anymore.

That's because we are the punch line.