One bad sign for the future of media in the US is that CNN did not host its usual pre-dinner party at the 66th Annual Radio TV Correspondents dinner at the Washington Convention Center last night. The only news organization to host a cocktail reception this year was FOX. “We’re the only game in town,” said Chris Wallace, host of the public affairs show, FOX News Sunday. But the FOX party was closed to members of the other media and your name had to be on the tightly guarded list at the door to get a cocktail there.
At the huge dinner, which was held in a ballroom the size of Dulles airport, Vice President Biden filled in for President Obama, who stayed away to host his own St. Patrick’s Day party at the White House. Biden brought down the house with some of his remarks:
On Radio, Television and newspapers: “At least you guys still have an audience.”
On living in the Vice President’s Mansion, having commuted to Washington from Wilmington, DE during his Senate years: “I’ve voted for public housing all my life. But I never knew it could be so good.”
On freedom of the Press: “Liberty can’t be protected without freedom of the press, but the only news outlet that’s ever given me a fair shake is Amtrak magazine.”
On how words have a different meaning in the Nation’s Capitol: “I’ve learned that Reconciliation means war and a Senior White House Official means Rahm."
On being attacked in the press: "When Dick Morris is quick to point out every time I put my foot in my mouth, at least I can say it’s MY foot.”
On the 2,000 page Health Care bill: “ That’s more than Sarah Palin can write on her palm.”
On the Economic Recovery bill: “Republicans say the recovery bill hasn’t created any new jobs. Tell that to Scott Brown.”
On the wide screens surrounding the dinner crowd Biden showed a photograph of him with the family dog biting his cuff. “You can it’s a Democratic dog. It’s biting the hand that feeds you.”
The vice president was followed by Chinese-born comedian Joe Wong. “My childhood memories were totally ruined by my childhood, he began. Wong said that he recently became a US citizen after having to take many tests about American history. On one test he was asked to identify Ben Franklin.“Oooohhh,” he said, having been unsure of the answer. “The reason our convenience store gets robbed?” One question on the test was regarding the meaning of Roe v Wade. Wong answered, “Two ways of coming to the United States?” If Wong runs for president in the future he says he might run on a health care platform. “I know that most people die of natural causes. As president I will find a cure for natural causes.”
“I have a great foreign policy. I’m from China. I can see Russia from my back yard.” Wong said he would stay in close touch with US allies by text message, but he would only “text our enemies when they’re driving--’So you’re building a nuclear weapon. LOL.”
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Reconciliaton explained
On Capitol Hill today Bill Heniff from the Congresssional Research Service and Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, offered some insight into Reconciliation, the process which will most likely be used to pass Health Care Reform. Reconciliation is relatively new. It was first used in 1974 and is a legislative process in the Senate intended to allow consideration of a contentious budget bill without the threat of a filibuster. It is used specifically to change existing law, explained Heniff. It is referred to as an expedited procedure and must be reported by the Budget Committee, which is prohibited from making any changes to what has been submitted. That is left to the Rules Committee. Reconciliation goes to the heart of how the Senate operates. Under normal rules, Senators can debate as long as they like and offer amendments. Reconciliation strips Senators of those rights.
Unlike cloture, a procedure which allows the Senate to cut off debate with 60 votes and get to a final vote on a bill, (“After 30 hours they can vote. That’s how they did the Xmas Eve vote on Health Care Reform. They were able to calculate when they could vote,” said Heniff.) reconciliation does not guarantee a final vote. Senators can offer an unlimited number of amendments, allowing a determined opposition to indefinitely delay a reconciliation measure. And although those amendments cannot be debated, merely voted on, the only way to end the adding of amendments is “through exhaustion.”
In the reconciliation process there is also the matter of the Byrd Rule which stipulates that reconciliation cannot include “extraneous matters.” A matter is considered extraneous if it does not have any impact on the budget or reduce the deficit by $1 billion. A provision would also fit the definition of “extraneous” if it increases the deficit in any fiscal year in the future, whether in one, five, ten or 20 years. And there are “no bright lines,” said a Heniff. “It is very challenging to determine whether a proposal is extraneous.” However, The Bird Rule can be waved by 60 votes and has been waved on reconciliation measures before.
Green discussed recent polling which found the public is “fine with the Senate using reconciliation to pass health care reform,” as long as they “like the bill.” Green’s organization polled 9 key Senate States and found a majority of those poled, including 56% in Nevada, 65% in Washington Sate, 62% in Iowa, 62% in Minnesota, 57% in North Dakota, 61% in Virginia, 58% in Colorado, 57% in Missouri all like a bill that contains a Public Option and House districts favored Public Option by 64%-73%.
It is unlikely, however, that a Public Option will be included in any final bill that is passed simply because the White House has not offered strong support for the measure.
Unlike cloture, a procedure which allows the Senate to cut off debate with 60 votes and get to a final vote on a bill, (“After 30 hours they can vote. That’s how they did the Xmas Eve vote on Health Care Reform. They were able to calculate when they could vote,” said Heniff.) reconciliation does not guarantee a final vote. Senators can offer an unlimited number of amendments, allowing a determined opposition to indefinitely delay a reconciliation measure. And although those amendments cannot be debated, merely voted on, the only way to end the adding of amendments is “through exhaustion.”
In the reconciliation process there is also the matter of the Byrd Rule which stipulates that reconciliation cannot include “extraneous matters.” A matter is considered extraneous if it does not have any impact on the budget or reduce the deficit by $1 billion. A provision would also fit the definition of “extraneous” if it increases the deficit in any fiscal year in the future, whether in one, five, ten or 20 years. And there are “no bright lines,” said a Heniff. “It is very challenging to determine whether a proposal is extraneous.” However, The Bird Rule can be waved by 60 votes and has been waved on reconciliation measures before.
Green discussed recent polling which found the public is “fine with the Senate using reconciliation to pass health care reform,” as long as they “like the bill.” Green’s organization polled 9 key Senate States and found a majority of those poled, including 56% in Nevada, 65% in Washington Sate, 62% in Iowa, 62% in Minnesota, 57% in North Dakota, 61% in Virginia, 58% in Colorado, 57% in Missouri all like a bill that contains a Public Option and House districts favored Public Option by 64%-73%.
It is unlikely, however, that a Public Option will be included in any final bill that is passed simply because the White House has not offered strong support for the measure.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Valery Gergiev said he is dedicated to bringing more American artists to Russia and he sees music as an instrument of harmony between the United States and Russia. Gergiev came to see a film about himself at the Russian Embassy last night. The film, entitled, "You Cannot Start without Me," was directed by Academy Award winner Alan Miller and offered an intimate look into the demanding life of the celebrated Russian conductor, who has been in Washington conducting the Mariinsky opera and ballet at the Kennedy Center. Gergiev, whose unshaven face is his trademark, sat in the plush upholstered seats in the Embassy's theater surrounded by vips and watched as the scenes of his life growing up in Russia, or conducting planning meetings with artists and his staff backstage at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersberg, or travelling by train throughout Russia, or conducting orchestras all over the world rolled by. Valery showed enormous promise as a young boy growing up in the Caucasus, the high mountains, which shaped him and inspired him with their awesome snowcapped glory. He said one could almost hear the voices of grandfathers speaking in the winds of those mountains. His father died when he was only eleven but young Valery's enormous talent on the piano sustained him and gave him a way to prove his worth to his father. By the time he was 16 he realized he had been given the gift of comprehending how the various parts on the page--violins, cellos, brass, French horns, English horns, violins, tympani, all fit together as a whole. That gift has propelled him to the pinnacle of the conducting field and brought him fame and fortune. The camera focused on his sweetness as a father of two young boys and a little girl, but Gergieve explains that he regrets he has little time to spend with the children because he is travelling the world conducting a different piece every day. "What do you want to be when you grow up," he asks his five year old son who is sitting on his knee? "I want to drive an Ocean liner. A big one," the boy replies to Gergiev's amusement. The film portrayed Gergiev's intensity and charisma as he conducts Stravinsky or Wagner, weilding his baton with animal passion and ferocity. "The process is very alive," he said of conducting. "It's unpredictable." Gergiev is worried that the live classical concert may be lost on future generations who live by the Ipod. He is working to interest young people in music all over the world.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
If you want to decompress, reduce your stress and live a healthier life, here is the doctor’s prescription: go for a run, download your favorite piece of music to your ipod or repeat a single word or phrase. Fail to do so at your own risk!
So counsels Dr. Carol Scott, an emergency room doctor who works at a US Army hospital in Virginia. Speaking about her new book, Optimal Stress, at the Army and Navy Club in downtown Washington Wednesday morning, Scott, who was trained at Duke and Johns Hopkins and is a national stress reduction expert, told her audience that the stressors in American lives boil down to finances, family, relationships, job stability and health. Regardless of the source of the stress, the key ingredients to how someone handles stress are background and perception. Background counts heavily. If you’ve been exposed to trauma as a child, for example, you will handle stress differently than someone who had an easy childhood. Perception is most important. It’s how you look at the situation. Making lemonade out of lemons comes to mind. To illustrate, she showed a video clip of a soldier facing deployment to Afghanistan talking about how much stress he is already under at a US Army base just living a military life, working 12 hour shifts, raising a new baby, yet he enthusiastically looks forward to his deployment realizing he will be facing the ultimate stressful situation. “But I know that what I’ll be doing every day is changing lives.” Another positive-thinking soldier who had experienced a tour of duty in Iraq said the worst he had to do was to fly over the battlefield carrying patients. Dangerous and stressful, but he did not look at it that way. He was satisfied knowing he was taking care of those who needed him. “Purpose, prioritites and passions form your perceptions,” said Dr. Scott. “Purpose drives you and keeps you in the game. You do something because you’re committed to it.”
Acute stress, such as that experienced during a frightening moment is healthy, she said, in that it promotes attention and memory and allows for quick thinking on the spot. But in the long run stress, if not moderated and controlled, causes serious health problems: abdominal fat, heart disease, diabetes, hardening of the arteries, osteoporosis. The risk factor associated with stress is equal to the risk of smoking.
Know your stress signals, she said, whether it’s sweating, eating too much or flying off the handle. When your recognize a stress signal, head it off at the pass by changing your mindset. How you leverage stress is critical. Express only positive emotions. Smile. Show gratitude. Express feelings of love. Give positive feedback to your employees, ie, “You really did a good job on that.” Change your playlist. Instead of thinking to yourself “noone likes me,” take a power pause for even five minutes and listen to your favorite artist or your favorite song. Or pick a phrase or word such as “love,” “peace,” “harmony,” "Divine Order," and repeat the word or phrase over and over again in order to quiet the mind and cleanse it of negative thoughts. It helps if the word or phrase is linked to a belief system. True relaxation is not watching television or a movie, which are passive pastimes, she said. Go for a run. Running, she said is like the repetition of a word or phrase. The repetition of footsteps in the rhythm of running allows the mind to quiet and provides clarity. The main thing is to get rid of stress before it gets rid of you.
So counsels Dr. Carol Scott, an emergency room doctor who works at a US Army hospital in Virginia. Speaking about her new book, Optimal Stress, at the Army and Navy Club in downtown Washington Wednesday morning, Scott, who was trained at Duke and Johns Hopkins and is a national stress reduction expert, told her audience that the stressors in American lives boil down to finances, family, relationships, job stability and health. Regardless of the source of the stress, the key ingredients to how someone handles stress are background and perception. Background counts heavily. If you’ve been exposed to trauma as a child, for example, you will handle stress differently than someone who had an easy childhood. Perception is most important. It’s how you look at the situation. Making lemonade out of lemons comes to mind. To illustrate, she showed a video clip of a soldier facing deployment to Afghanistan talking about how much stress he is already under at a US Army base just living a military life, working 12 hour shifts, raising a new baby, yet he enthusiastically looks forward to his deployment realizing he will be facing the ultimate stressful situation. “But I know that what I’ll be doing every day is changing lives.” Another positive-thinking soldier who had experienced a tour of duty in Iraq said the worst he had to do was to fly over the battlefield carrying patients. Dangerous and stressful, but he did not look at it that way. He was satisfied knowing he was taking care of those who needed him. “Purpose, prioritites and passions form your perceptions,” said Dr. Scott. “Purpose drives you and keeps you in the game. You do something because you’re committed to it.”
Acute stress, such as that experienced during a frightening moment is healthy, she said, in that it promotes attention and memory and allows for quick thinking on the spot. But in the long run stress, if not moderated and controlled, causes serious health problems: abdominal fat, heart disease, diabetes, hardening of the arteries, osteoporosis. The risk factor associated with stress is equal to the risk of smoking.
Know your stress signals, she said, whether it’s sweating, eating too much or flying off the handle. When your recognize a stress signal, head it off at the pass by changing your mindset. How you leverage stress is critical. Express only positive emotions. Smile. Show gratitude. Express feelings of love. Give positive feedback to your employees, ie, “You really did a good job on that.” Change your playlist. Instead of thinking to yourself “noone likes me,” take a power pause for even five minutes and listen to your favorite artist or your favorite song. Or pick a phrase or word such as “love,” “peace,” “harmony,” "Divine Order," and repeat the word or phrase over and over again in order to quiet the mind and cleanse it of negative thoughts. It helps if the word or phrase is linked to a belief system. True relaxation is not watching television or a movie, which are passive pastimes, she said. Go for a run. Running, she said is like the repetition of a word or phrase. The repetition of footsteps in the rhythm of running allows the mind to quiet and provides clarity. The main thing is to get rid of stress before it gets rid of you.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Snowmageddon Came to My House and Almost Blew me Skyhigh
Snowmageddon came to my house and almost blew me sky high. I was well prepared for the monster storm. Or so I thought. I stocked the refrigerator days ahead of time. I developed an escape plan for my car. A trusty 4-wheel drive, it can plow through almost anything, but it had been snowed into my garage by a solid two foot wall of snow during the last big storm. This time to make sure it did not get barricaded in again, I drove it to the bottom of my street and parked it facing MacArthur Boulevard, which always gets plowed spotlessly days before the side streets even get touched. I had candles, matches, flashlights, batteries and ski clothes, and my snow boots. All set. Bring it on!
The blizzard began on a Friday night. The storm of the century blasted DC, dumping a foot or more overnight plus another foot the next day, bringing the nation’s capitol to a screeching halt. Congress did not work on the jobs bill. The Federal Government shut down. Schools closed. The nation’s capitol was immobilized. There was no motion and no sound at all-- no planes overhead, no buses going by, no newspapers plopping at the front door. Silent night became silent morning. Quite lovely for a city that thrives on hustle and bustle and is peopled by workaholics. I gave a sigh of relief that the din was stilled and sipped another cup of coffee, enjoying the solace as I surveyed the serene world of white outside. It was so quiet you could have dropped a two ton cannon and no one would have heard. The expression, “if a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear it?” came to mind.
Guess not. Sometime during the time I was enjoying my morning cup of Joe, a 60 foot high Leland Cypress next to my kitchen window collapsed under the weight of the snow, ruthlessly ripping the gas pipes right out of the side of my house as it toppled and wrenching the gas meter right off its moorings. The broken pipes spewed gas throughout the house and into the entire neighborhood, a scenario that would have proved problematic, to say the least, if someone had lit a match. One spark could have turned my home and everything in it, (including me) into a giant fireball and blown us all skyhigh. My house would have looked like the space shuttle taking off right from North West DC.
I had been upstairs getting ready to go out to enjoy the snow when I had smelled gas.The odor was really strong. Within minutes I began feeling sick from the vapors. I suspected a gas fireplace that must be malfunctioning because snow blocked the chimney. I went outside to seek help from a neighbor who was shoveling his driveway. It was curious I thought that so many neighbors were out there as well and they were all on their cell phones. Turns out, they were calling 911, the fire department and Washington Gas. Everyone in the neighborhood had smelled the gas and knew it could be only a matter of time before there would be an explosion. Fortunately, within minutes help arrived. Firemen. On foot. Because our neighborhood is at the top of a hilly street which becomes engorged with snow at the drop of a flake and never gets plowed for days, the emergency vehicles were unable to make it through the two plus feet of snow and the firefighters had to climb the hill and walk about half a mile to get to us. But within minutes of arriving they found the fallen Leland that had caused the damage and immediately turned off the gas supply to the house. House and neighborhood saved! Only one problem. That was the end of my heat and hot water. How soon could it be turned back on, I asked? Unfortunately, the firemen explained, gas service could not be restored until the entire tree was removed—root and all. “You’ll have to call a tree service!” The tree itself was a big enough problem, and half of it had crashed through my neighbor’s fence and was lying across her yard; but its root ball was massive and had enmeshed my gas pipes and meter in a giant mess of mud, snow and ice. And try finding a tree removal service during the blizzard of the century which had knocked out power to hundreds of thousands in the tri-state area because hundreds of trees had fallen on power lines! I spent the next six hours calling every tree service to no avail and figured that I would now be without hot water until summer! “We’ve just been hired by the state of Maryland,” said one company, “and have to remove hundreds of trees from fallen lines.” Most of the others were also booked or just didn’t answer. As evening fell and the temperature in the house dropped below freezing, in desperation I called a friend, Carter Cafritz. Luckily he happened to knew a tree guy, Ernie Shiflett, who he said often came on short notice. I called and only got Ernie Shiflett's voice mail. I left a message, thinking he too, must be out lifting trees off cars, homes and power lines. But deus ex machina, the following morning Ernie arrived, cigar in hand, to survey the scene. Ernie was no youngster, but went right to work sawing the fallen tree in half, carting off the wood and promising to be back the next morning. As promised, Ernie arrived Monday morning with a crew of 5 fellow cigar chompers --all of whom made me a bit nervous as they chopped away at the big root ball right tangled up with my gas line with lit cigars in their mouths. The root was stronger, it turns out, than they thought and their axes proved useless. The root ball was so defiant, the men had to park their cigars, surround it with cable, tie the cable to their truck and start driving away to get the root to budge. Finally the root popped like a bad molar! Now the trick was to get Washington Gas to show up. “Oh just call us in the morning and we’ll get someone out there they said.” Monday came and went and no Washington Gas.
It had been three days now with no heat or hot water. The house was frigid. Think Polar Bear swim. ( It’s one thing when you can crawl into bed at night with 20 layers of blankets to keep warm. It’s another when you have to get out of bed and your house is like the Arctic and you cant get warm no matter what you do and you cant take a hot shower, wash your dishes or your clothes and you cant find any place to sit that’s warm, but you have to stay and wait for the Gasman to show up.) This is when you start wondering how they survived in 16th Century Scotland in those castles without central heat. It’s also when you start thinking about solutions to problems like no heat or hot water. I was fortunate to have an electric stove. For three days I had boiled water and carried it up to my bathtub to bathe. I washed my hair in the kitchen sink with more boiled water. I boiled more water to wash the dishes. I was also fortunate to have friends who offered to have me stay with them until the heat was turned on. ( I stayed put. I was afraid to leave the house unattended, lest a pipe burst in my absence.) I was also fortunate to have good neighbors. One walked over and loaned me a space heater to keep my pipes from bursting. Another brought me a box of logs to burn. So frosty house notwithstanding, I toughed it out with ski clothes, boiled water and a wood burning fireplace. My car plan at least worked. I trudged down the snowladen hill, shoveled out my car and drove to a Superbowl party. And finally, three days later, the gas company arrived (at 8pm!), hooked up a meter and turned on the gas. (One never knows how good life can be until you have heat when it’s 25 degrees outside. To go from the Ice Age to the 21st Century makes one appreciate the simple gifts of heat and hot water.)
And so, I survived the blizzard of 2010 with good cheer, good friends and good neighbors. The Mother of All Storms taught me a lot. Storms bring out the best in people. Ernie Shiflett, the tree guy, was prompt, efficient and as nice as they make come. Neighbors are great. If it had not been for the folks who got the fire department to my house pronto, I could have been looking down at earth instead of up at the stars. If it had not been for the neighbor who brought me the space heater, my pipes probably would have exploded. If not for the neighbor who brought me wood for my fireplace, I would have been miserably frozen. I also learned that in spite of my best plans to survive the storm, Mother Nature always wins.
The blizzard began on a Friday night. The storm of the century blasted DC, dumping a foot or more overnight plus another foot the next day, bringing the nation’s capitol to a screeching halt. Congress did not work on the jobs bill. The Federal Government shut down. Schools closed. The nation’s capitol was immobilized. There was no motion and no sound at all-- no planes overhead, no buses going by, no newspapers plopping at the front door. Silent night became silent morning. Quite lovely for a city that thrives on hustle and bustle and is peopled by workaholics. I gave a sigh of relief that the din was stilled and sipped another cup of coffee, enjoying the solace as I surveyed the serene world of white outside. It was so quiet you could have dropped a two ton cannon and no one would have heard. The expression, “if a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear it?” came to mind.
Guess not. Sometime during the time I was enjoying my morning cup of Joe, a 60 foot high Leland Cypress next to my kitchen window collapsed under the weight of the snow, ruthlessly ripping the gas pipes right out of the side of my house as it toppled and wrenching the gas meter right off its moorings. The broken pipes spewed gas throughout the house and into the entire neighborhood, a scenario that would have proved problematic, to say the least, if someone had lit a match. One spark could have turned my home and everything in it, (including me) into a giant fireball and blown us all skyhigh. My house would have looked like the space shuttle taking off right from North West DC.
I had been upstairs getting ready to go out to enjoy the snow when I had smelled gas.The odor was really strong. Within minutes I began feeling sick from the vapors. I suspected a gas fireplace that must be malfunctioning because snow blocked the chimney. I went outside to seek help from a neighbor who was shoveling his driveway. It was curious I thought that so many neighbors were out there as well and they were all on their cell phones. Turns out, they were calling 911, the fire department and Washington Gas. Everyone in the neighborhood had smelled the gas and knew it could be only a matter of time before there would be an explosion. Fortunately, within minutes help arrived. Firemen. On foot. Because our neighborhood is at the top of a hilly street which becomes engorged with snow at the drop of a flake and never gets plowed for days, the emergency vehicles were unable to make it through the two plus feet of snow and the firefighters had to climb the hill and walk about half a mile to get to us. But within minutes of arriving they found the fallen Leland that had caused the damage and immediately turned off the gas supply to the house. House and neighborhood saved! Only one problem. That was the end of my heat and hot water. How soon could it be turned back on, I asked? Unfortunately, the firemen explained, gas service could not be restored until the entire tree was removed—root and all. “You’ll have to call a tree service!” The tree itself was a big enough problem, and half of it had crashed through my neighbor’s fence and was lying across her yard; but its root ball was massive and had enmeshed my gas pipes and meter in a giant mess of mud, snow and ice. And try finding a tree removal service during the blizzard of the century which had knocked out power to hundreds of thousands in the tri-state area because hundreds of trees had fallen on power lines! I spent the next six hours calling every tree service to no avail and figured that I would now be without hot water until summer! “We’ve just been hired by the state of Maryland,” said one company, “and have to remove hundreds of trees from fallen lines.” Most of the others were also booked or just didn’t answer. As evening fell and the temperature in the house dropped below freezing, in desperation I called a friend, Carter Cafritz. Luckily he happened to knew a tree guy, Ernie Shiflett, who he said often came on short notice. I called and only got Ernie Shiflett's voice mail. I left a message, thinking he too, must be out lifting trees off cars, homes and power lines. But deus ex machina, the following morning Ernie arrived, cigar in hand, to survey the scene. Ernie was no youngster, but went right to work sawing the fallen tree in half, carting off the wood and promising to be back the next morning. As promised, Ernie arrived Monday morning with a crew of 5 fellow cigar chompers --all of whom made me a bit nervous as they chopped away at the big root ball right tangled up with my gas line with lit cigars in their mouths. The root was stronger, it turns out, than they thought and their axes proved useless. The root ball was so defiant, the men had to park their cigars, surround it with cable, tie the cable to their truck and start driving away to get the root to budge. Finally the root popped like a bad molar! Now the trick was to get Washington Gas to show up. “Oh just call us in the morning and we’ll get someone out there they said.” Monday came and went and no Washington Gas.
It had been three days now with no heat or hot water. The house was frigid. Think Polar Bear swim. ( It’s one thing when you can crawl into bed at night with 20 layers of blankets to keep warm. It’s another when you have to get out of bed and your house is like the Arctic and you cant get warm no matter what you do and you cant take a hot shower, wash your dishes or your clothes and you cant find any place to sit that’s warm, but you have to stay and wait for the Gasman to show up.) This is when you start wondering how they survived in 16th Century Scotland in those castles without central heat. It’s also when you start thinking about solutions to problems like no heat or hot water. I was fortunate to have an electric stove. For three days I had boiled water and carried it up to my bathtub to bathe. I washed my hair in the kitchen sink with more boiled water. I boiled more water to wash the dishes. I was also fortunate to have friends who offered to have me stay with them until the heat was turned on. ( I stayed put. I was afraid to leave the house unattended, lest a pipe burst in my absence.) I was also fortunate to have good neighbors. One walked over and loaned me a space heater to keep my pipes from bursting. Another brought me a box of logs to burn. So frosty house notwithstanding, I toughed it out with ski clothes, boiled water and a wood burning fireplace. My car plan at least worked. I trudged down the snowladen hill, shoveled out my car and drove to a Superbowl party. And finally, three days later, the gas company arrived (at 8pm!), hooked up a meter and turned on the gas. (One never knows how good life can be until you have heat when it’s 25 degrees outside. To go from the Ice Age to the 21st Century makes one appreciate the simple gifts of heat and hot water.)
And so, I survived the blizzard of 2010 with good cheer, good friends and good neighbors. The Mother of All Storms taught me a lot. Storms bring out the best in people. Ernie Shiflett, the tree guy, was prompt, efficient and as nice as they make come. Neighbors are great. If it had not been for the folks who got the fire department to my house pronto, I could have been looking down at earth instead of up at the stars. If it had not been for the neighbor who brought me the space heater, my pipes probably would have exploded. If not for the neighbor who brought me wood for my fireplace, I would have been miserably frozen. I also learned that in spite of my best plans to survive the storm, Mother Nature always wins.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Health Care Radio Row
It seemed too good to be true. I’m not talking about the hope and change that President Barack Obama promised us more than a year ago-- I still believe it is far too early to judge whether we should throw up our hands in disbelief. I mean the prospect of universal healthcare, an initiative which tore through the 'socialist' labeling by the GOP and sought to unite Americans in the fundamental notion of helping millions of uninsured, and which was halted at the proverbial 'five-yard line' by the election of the new Senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, a Republican raring to change the direction of the country and to rob his great state of the legacy of his predecessor, Ted Kennedy.
With healthcare deliberately moved out of the spotlight at the State of the Union, we had a significant challenge here at Stroud Communications on behalf of our client, Families USA, as we began Radio Row at their National Grassroots Meeting: Health Action 2010 at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill, mere blocks away from the Capitol. We were tasked with addressing the subject of healthcare as relevant and timely an issue as ever, and to convey that all of our esteemed speakers and hosts from across the country were not gathering merely to discuss health care as theory or history, but as historic legislation about to be signed.
Senators, Congressmen, advocates, spokesmen poured into Radio Row. They, along with prominent speakers, physicians and human rights defenders spoke over the course of two days on 25 nationally syndicated and regional shows in 800 interviews about the prospect of healthcare in America--both its current state, what it was promised to be, and what it could eventually become. They spoke on behalf of their towns, their states, their constituents and their country. I'd like to think we made an issue which had been pushed to the backburner, relevant yet again.
Please stay tuned for our video on the benefits of hosting a radio row.
With healthcare deliberately moved out of the spotlight at the State of the Union, we had a significant challenge here at Stroud Communications on behalf of our client, Families USA, as we began Radio Row at their National Grassroots Meeting: Health Action 2010 at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill, mere blocks away from the Capitol. We were tasked with addressing the subject of healthcare as relevant and timely an issue as ever, and to convey that all of our esteemed speakers and hosts from across the country were not gathering merely to discuss health care as theory or history, but as historic legislation about to be signed.
Senators, Congressmen, advocates, spokesmen poured into Radio Row. They, along with prominent speakers, physicians and human rights defenders spoke over the course of two days on 25 nationally syndicated and regional shows in 800 interviews about the prospect of healthcare in America--both its current state, what it was promised to be, and what it could eventually become. They spoke on behalf of their towns, their states, their constituents and their country. I'd like to think we made an issue which had been pushed to the backburner, relevant yet again.
Please stay tuned for our video on the benefits of hosting a radio row.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
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