Thursday, June 16, 2011

A Bald Eagle.

Yes, great excitement here at The Lake and in the Liddle household as we observed a Big Beautiful Bald Eagle in our little backyard! I was sitting in our bedroom, which has an expansive view of our garden, The Lake and its Flora & Fauna, when all of a sudden a large bird flew straight towards me and landed in a tree not more than 50 or 60 feet from me. I shouted to Julia to come. She grabbed the binoculars and confirmed my diagnosis - a Bald Eagle was standing proudly in a maple tree just outside of our bedroom window! How exciting is that?
We watched breathlessly as it bobbed up and down, appearing and disappearing behind the dense leaf cover. Then it took off and landed in a dead tree next door. A perfect view. But more to come, ANOTHER Bald Eagle appeared and landed in the dead tree. At first I though it was the mate of the first bird, but Julia soon corrected me, it was in fact an immature Bald Eagle. We watched them both for several minutes, small birds seemed to be dive bombing them. I guess they are a danger to their nests. After a few more minutes they both took off and landed in yet another dead tree several hundred yards away before flying off.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

I missed the GOP debate last night.

I meant to watch it, but something else got in the way, I think it was the sunset or something.

But I remembered it when I got up this morning and thought I would put in a couple of cents worth of my opinion.

The last time we had a Republican president - George W Bush - here are some figures that should be of interest. He took over from Bill Clinton (Democrat) who left office with a budget SURPLUS!!! Unheard of. He also had in place a plan to pay off the National Debt within 10 years. Bush immediately sent everyone in the country a check for $300 (Remember his promise, "If you vote for me I will send everyone $300.00."?)

The Dow Industrial Average was 14,000 when Bush came in to office. It was 6,000 when he left. (It is now 12,000)

Gas was $1.25 when Bush came in and $4.10 when he left. (It is now $3.50)

The National Debt was $5.7 Trillion when he came in and $10.7 Trillion when he left - almost DOUBLE.(It is now $14 Trillion, a long way from double, and not even as much as Bush added to it)

The reason for such a disaster? He gave RICH people a HUGE tax cut - at least $1.3 Trillion, cut taxes to Big Business, gave free drugs to senior citizens and started two wars. He did all of these things and made NO provision to pay for ANY of them!

That was his huge failure, no provision to pay for any of his largesse. If you cut taxes in one area (Say to your rich friends) then you need to raise taxes on another sector (As the Republicans want to do - on the poor and the middle classes.) or you need to cut expenses elsewhere. (As the Republicans want to do by cutting services to the poor and the middle classes.

Bush cut taxes to the rich, on the theory that it would get the economy going again. It's been more than 10 years now and it has not worked. It never worked when tried in the past. The only thing that happens is that the very wealthy get even wealthier and the poor and middle class get poorer. Oh yes, and the greedy Politicians get rich too from a grateful bunch of rich people!

One final rant. The income gap in the US is bigger than it has EVER been, and not just here in the US but ANYWHERE, in other words the income gap HERE, in the US, NOW, is bigger than it has ever been at any time anywhere, including anywhere in the entire World!! The rich are richer than they have ever been at any time in our history AND they pay less in taxes than they have ever paid at any time in our history!! They pay less in taxes than you and I pay!! The top 1% to 2% in the US pay only 16% of their income in taxes while the average American pays 30% of their income in taxes!!!!! What kind of sense does that make? AND THE CONSERVATIVES WANT TO CUT TAXES TO THE RICH EVEN MORE!! They want to cut them even further! Insanity. These people are already obscenely rich and we want to give them even more of our money to make them even richer. Are we mad?

Sunday, June 12, 2011

It was a British Movie.

What was? "Men Behaving Badly." was, and how appropriate a title is it nowadays?

I am not even going to try to list the l o n g, l o n g list of men who have behaved badly! It would take up too many pages in my always too long a Blog anyway. But you know most of them, from Presidents to Governors to Senators to Congressmen, to Representatives, to Leaders in other fields such as Sports, Religion, etc.

When you were thinking through the list of these men who cheated on their wives with women, men, prostitutes and so on, did you notice that they were all men?

When was the last time that you read a story about women in politics, who behaved badly? I can't remember one, can you?

Lets think about it. Obviously women must have affairs with other men, other women etc. So why don't we hear about them? Could it be that they are smarter than us men? Could it be that they realize that if they are in the public eye they should not indulge in that kind of behaviour? And if they do, is it possible that they don't tell about it, that they don't Tweet, Facebook or e-mail about it - reveal it ON LINE!!! If that is the case, I put it to you that yes, they must indeed be smarter than us men. In which case it is more than obvious that we need to have more women in politics and other positions of power.

When was the last time you saw Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi or any other woman politician biting her bottom lip, in the glare of the TV lights, while making a teary eyed confession and apologizing for their infidelity, lies and mistakes?

I put it to you that the world would be a better place if we had more women politicians. Right now we are depending on these "men" to make decisions for us about our Health Care, our Money, our Children, our Taxes, even War & Peace. You only have to look at their marriages to see the quality of their decisions making powers! With this kind of decision making judgement do we really want them making other more important decisions affecting us, (Like the decisions they make in apparently, to them, unimportant areas of their lives like their wives and children.)

(An aside here, did you know that out of the 180 other countries in the world the USA ranks 90th in the number of women politicians? Countries with a larger % of women politicians include Uganda!, Argentina, India, Bangladesh, Eritrea, Tanzania, Egypt, and even Iraq, Iran, Cuba, South Africa and on and on!!)

Our Lake is a nursery.

We were seated in the sitting area of our bedroom this morning watching The Lake and its inhabitants when the pair of Canada Geese with the three large babies swam into view near our pier. As we idly watched them, Julia with several Oh and Ahs, another pair of the beautiful birds swam into view with two Goslings. But something was wrong, these two were almost as large as the triplets that we could still see. We knew that there were two tiny babies, but they could not possibly have grown to the size of their large cousins in just a day or two. As we pondered this mystery the two tiny babies paddled into view. The mystery was solved - we now had three sets of baby Goslings!

How these two had escaped our notice we do not know. Apparently these birds must spend large amounts of time elsewhere on The Lake, and have only just got around to visiting us here.

So, it is a wonderful sight indeed to now see three sets of young Geese, each being displayed by their proud parents.

It is still a mystery why there are such small broods this year, usually there are batches of 8 to 12 Goslings in each group and we do usually have 2 or 3 groups. So the question is have they had fewer babies this year because that is a natural cycle or because an animal ate some of the eggs - which seems unlikely, they would probably eat them all - or did the DNR oil some of their eggs leaving just a few to relieve pressure on The Lake. Or is there yet another explanation?

Meanwhile we continue to enjoy it all.