Did I miss that day in civics?

Newsflash from Washington DC. Vice-President Cheney announced last week that he is not required to abide by an executive order to release internal memos and records as the Vice-President's office IS NOT part of the Executive branch of our government! His position is based on the fact that the VP is also the president pro-tem of the Senate, and as such is not subject to the aforementioned Executive order (which of course only applies to an office of the executive branch, of which he has said his office is not a part of! And since he said so, how dare anyone question his authority on the subject!)

Ok. Somebody owes me some big money then! I want my grade adjusted from that civics class I took in high school because I opined the exact same position and my teacher marked it wrong...which then lowered my gpa enough to preclude me from getting in to that better college which ultimately kept me from that high level Halliburton job which would have ended me up in a very highly placed Washington political job from which I could unilaterally RE-WRITE THE CONSTITUTION as I saw fit.

I have to think even hard-core Bushies are shaking their heads and saying "WHAT THE F*%K??? What amazes me even more that the only people who seem to notice and/or care are Bill Maher, John Stewart and others of the comedic branch of our government...(that's right, bet you also didn't know there was a Comedic branch of our government...we learned about it the same day that they taught us that the VP office wasn't in the Executive branch!)

If this literal re-interpretation of our constitutional structure of checks and balances wasn't so egregiously Orwellian, (and of late commonplace) I would almost think that Mr Cheney was having a little joke on us all....I mean really?

Of course, figure this one will ultimately be supported by our Supreme Court (you know that other branch of the government...that one where the Vice President is also the back up Chief Justice and ultimate decider on what is and isn't constitutional???) Oh, I'm sorry. I'm getting ahead of myself. He doesn't issue that press release until next week.

If you build it...????

"If you build it, they will come..." Who doesn't remember that ghostly voice coming from Kevin Costner's Iowa cornfield that prompted him to carve out a baseball diamond in the middle of his farm? So okay, I built it. My blog is officially here. Where is everybody?

I mean, I've seen semi-psychotic musings from homosexual born-again illegal immigrant red-state living former alien abductees generate more traffic than my humble little site seems to do. (Okay, busted....I was one of those people who read that blog....and in fairness it WAS rather amusing... but that's beside the point. ) But I would hope that someone out there might be interested in a reasoned discussion /debate about stuff that at least has a little import in our daily lives. Or could it be that maybe I'm just not that interesting to the millions of peeps out there with nothing better to do than surf blogs all day?

How about if I lead with a Paris Hilton scoop about what she had for breakfast in jail today? (for the record, cereal and orange juice). Or maybe the latest Lindsay Lohan re-hab sighting? There's the always-classic Britney and Kevin Federline are getting back together again tease to get the juices of America percolating to a boil.

Oh well. If ya can't beat em.....About that Britney rumor......

Ok. I've finally done it...I have a Blog!

I have been writing columns for my organization's monthly newsletter (which has a small but mighty readership of 689 highly placed entertainment industry execs) for about three years now. I usually do some relatively self-serving viewpoint that ultimately ends up with me reminding people why they are members and all that sort of PR stuff. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely think that this ongoing communication with my constituency is incredibly important to the health and well being of our organization. And often, I get compliments on my creative ways of ultimately coming back to the PR line!

Ask anyone who knows me though, and you'll hear that pretty much all of my writing has been somewhat "watered down" as regards my actually fairly strong opinions about a great many things. So therein lies the reason for the blog. (actually, the whole reason I'm here is the new version of Microsoft Word 2007 had a button on the new page that gave me the option to create a blog. Curiosity being the better of me, I followed the links and here I am!)

No. I'm not really that succeptible to suggestion but I figured since I really did want to start blogging, then maybe this was the universe's way of kickstarting me!

So where to go with this new found power of the word? I can tell you I have a few things that I feel pretty strongly about. I'm certainly open to some guidance though as to where we want the duscussion thread to wander to. Maybe we can get an intelligent, reasoned discussion, debate, argument, etc. going here. If not, oh well. We live in the time when everyone can be a star (at least in the online world!) and you don't even have to have an audience. To be honest though, I would prefer to have my conversations/debates with at least one other person!

Let's start this thing with something that has been bugging me for a while now. I have a twenty year old daughter. I should point out that I love her more than anything, but am I the only one who notices that her generation sure as hell feels like the world owes them something. I'm going to sound like an old guy but I paid for my own first car. Insurance as well. Oh and college, it was JC for me and I had to pay for that as well. A Cell phone? Hell no...(though the phones back then looked like something they used in WWII and strapped to a soldier's back.)
How about rent? My folks didn't subsidize me...

Ok. I'll stop there before I become my grandfather who walked to school three mile uphill each way through the snow, etc....

I know what you're thinking. I've probably spoiled the kid. In fact, there's some truth to that. But isn't that what we as parents are supposed to do? Give our kids a better life than we had? I could, so I did, and now I think I'm regretting it. (like so many other choices in life as well!)

FYI. I'm sure I will start to get a bit more provocative in future posts as I'm just starting to decide the tone I want to go with on this. Bear with me and hopefully we can get some good discussions going. Let me know what you think.