I was in between my junior and senior year in High School. All my friends had their drivers license and me, well I was kind of stuck out in the middle of nowhere. They also were all over 18 and could hit the bars. I was only 16 that year.

We lived in the farm area of our town that was about to explode with development. It was hard to get in and out of our house so I was kind of isolated. I also had a raging case of acne that forced me to the sidelines of the dating game..

So I immersed myself in books. The Razor's Edge was my first "adult" novel that wasn't force fed to me by the English Departments. Even though I was in Honors English, we were reading Homer, Shakespeare and the Bible as literature, I still kept looking for that book, the book that would, well for lack of a better phrase, speak to me.

I found it in the Razor's Edge. Of course it borderlines on the salacious, but there was enough stuff about finding oneself to make it interesting for an isolated kid who continued to walk the batter when pitching woo.

So I spent hours that summer reading what was interesting to me. Now there was no internet to look about to find something, so I was left to tagging along when my mom went to the mall. I would slip away and head on to the book store and look for books that might surprise me.

I found the Razor's Edge and was drawn in after reading the first chapter. The main character, Larry, was a man who had seen the brutality of war as he served as a ambulance driver in WWI, or "The Great War" as they called it back then. After the war, Larry wanted more than being defined by a job or even a career.

Years later, I was excited the Bill Murray did a remake of the movie. It followed the book pretty but Bill was miscast. I was glad to find out that Tyrone Power was the first Larry.

The idea of searching for something to believe in has always been a part of our humanity. Over the years I have become far more cynical than I was way back there in 1974. So I read the book at just the right time.

The book showed me how to look for the meaning of life by just trying to empathize with the people around you.

Why did I post this in the General Forum? Well, because I think there are a lot of Larry's who flock to the democratic party because we look for solutions to problems that are just as well as functional. The other party seems to have the cloak of "what's in it for me" blanket that stifles all compassion.

Politics should be an exercise in compassion because if you have no empathy toward your fellow man, what, dear god, are you here for....

And so, read the book or watch the original with Tyrone Power

voting election and challenge the voting status of White People.

Think about it, these Voting Activists aligned with the Tea Party are going to African American voting areas and stand their watching people vote. It's intimidating, especially when they show up when the older folks come to vote. These folks remember voting intimidating, and Jim Crow and all sorts of voting suppression aimed at the African American community.

I have been wondering about this since I was coordinating voting workers when i was an officer of the democratic party here in the Cleveland Area...

that they are certainly not Christians and the are almost always wrong...

To me, they live in this century with a nomadic herd mentality best suited for survival in a semi arid climate.

They accept everything up until Jesus appeared on the scene, skipped right over that nonsense of loving thy neighbor and casting stones when you are guilty and embraced the psychotic rantings of a hermit better known as Revelations.

If you concentrate on what Jesus allegedly said and did then these self-professed true believes would be cast out of the temple.

It's just fucking crazy.

I do believe that when one person is denied the right to vote because of some arcane law or practice is an affront to our democracy. Having political hacks at the state and local level cheapens the whole idea.

If I was Black or Brown and saw that far more of us were going off across the globe to do the dirty business of capitalism and "democracy", I would expect that our community would be respected by giving us the benefit of the doubt to vote.

We make it so easy for a Black or Brown person to take up arms and defend the capitalists properties or access to resource and now the party that supports war at the drop of the hat wants to make it more difficult for the families of those Black and Brown men and women to vote.

If I was a Black or Brown person I would be out there calling bullshit with a megaphone.

They love their bodies when they are in uniform but when it comes to allowing that person to vote...

Forget about it...

Election member is one of the most dedicated and selfless political person I met in my 20 years of working with and around the Ohio Democratic Party.

He is taking the fight to keep the expansion of voting hours in Ohio as far as he has to go.

He was always one of those guys who is in it because he truly believes that the Democratic Party is the right party for those who can't afford to mingle with the rich and famous. When you get to the state level, it is the wealthy and well connected who dominate the politics of both party's.

Denny is a great guy and I can tell you he is doing this because, quite frankly, no one else will.

Godspeed, Denny Lieberman and thank you for showing what it means to be a dedicated Democrat, especially in this critical time when money can wash away even the most strident beliefs...

He was on Rachel Maddows show tonight...

The Beatles were from a generation before me and I was 12 when they broke up, but their music is timeless...

The reason why their will never be another band like the Beatles is simply because they knew music from every genre that was alive up until then.

When they were cutting their teeth in Hamburg, they would have to play ten to twelve hours a day and play every kind of song that the sailors shouted out.

They took bits and pieces of tunes and mashed them together in order to create music that is still loved by millions of people.

That's why they were so good for so many albums, they dared to stretch their music and refused to be stuck in any formulaic pop genre.

Look at their cord structures in their songs, look at the pacing, the lyrics matching the music in tone and meaning.

They wrote and recorded over 150 songs in the span of about seven years and they never repeated themselves.

George was cool, but the other two, weill they gave us pop music with a base in everything from High Classical to show tunes to Jazz and did it well.

I wondered why I still love the Beatles today It wasn't because the music takes me back to a better time. Those years that they were on the top of the charts was the worst years of my life. But maybe I was so infatuated with their music because it made me think of something beyond my shitty room, my crappy home life and my seriously awkward social skills..

Anyway, Sir Paul is getting on, he looks and sure he struggles, but he is still out their doing what he loves and what is wrong with that. You can turn the music off, no one was forcing anyone to watch the show.

Every time i see a crowd of liberals I see a whole lot of young faces with home made signs and interesting costumes...

On the conservative side, well, a lot of gray haired people my age and older holding up either signs that show these folks can't spell for shit or slick signs made at tea bag central.

A lot of scowls on the GOP side while the Democrats seem to attract people who are excited about the campaign and hope for the future, big smiles and a lot of kinetic energy.

It's amazing that we are finally seeing the selfish conservatives shuffling off stage while the young faces are bursting all over...

I'm still worried about Pennsylvania but here in Ohio, anyone can vote absentee.

If we lose PA and keep Ohio, that would be okay, not great, but okay.

The number one priority of the National Democratic Party is to do what ever they can to get into those states that have blatant voter suppression rules and fight them.

He is basing most of his campaign on the fact he is a really good business person and yet he wants us to trust him on a very important part of his financial life.

No one in their right mind would buy a used car from someone who says trust me, this car is in tip top condition.

So why does Romney want us to trust him when he tells us he has paid a 13.0% tax rate for all of these years.

Now the very fact that someone who reports in excess of $20 million in "TAXABLE" income and is only paying 13% is ridiculous when people in my tax bracket pay something like 20%-25% and would be lucky to have earned 10% of what Romney reported for one year in a life time of working. Let's put this aside.

But for the life of me, I can't believe he would expect anyone in their right to trust him on his word when that word is, so far in the campaign, well, basically fungable...

I had watched the Triangle Fire that PBS did while I was in the Hospital back in February.

What I am wondering is, will it take something like this to happen to pull us out of our replay of the Gilded Age?

We let people like Mitt Romney get this close to the presidency, a guy who has no idea, not even a clue of what it is like to be an American who survives by working their body to the limit? He has no clue about the men and women doing mind numbing work just so they can scape together enough to eat for the next week.

There is this sense of entitlement that surround both Romney and Ryan, that they were to the manor born, that they were the best and the brightest that this country has to offer....

But what they don't have is a sense of empathy, something that ties them to the humdrum lives most of us live as we take each struggle in strides, hoping for a better day.

These men of providence think it is their right to reap as much as they can because they feel entitled to it simply because of who their parents were and who their parents knew....

I remember when I was campaigning in Union Halls here in Cleveland as I ran first for State Rep and then for the State Senate. I can't tell you how many times I heard I am never going to vote for you because you are going to take my gun or you are going to allow my daughter to get an abortion...

I wonder how many of those workers still have Union jobs now that they have been voting for republicans for a generation.

Anyway, I just get all worked up when someone like President Obama is called out of touch by men who never once in their life had to wonder when their next meal was coming from...

That's it.

Good Night!

I read The Fountainhead, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, On Walden Pond...

Then I read To Kill a Mockingbird, Blue Highways and the Tolkien Trilogy, The Razors Edge and Tom Sawyer a Gore Vidal's novel Julian.

I reread all of these again, over the last few years except for The Fountainhead.

Even as a young man who was fresh out of my childhood, I realized that the Fountainhead was basically the glorification of adolescence.

Think about it, in Randonia you are basically allowed to run free and do what ever you want and that anyone who challenged your ideas or freedom was a big fat sissy face...

There is a catch, you have to be strong and able to crush who ever stands in your way with withering prose designed to make those who stand in your way as sissy faces....