Mark Knows It All

Woodstock (Written by Joni Mitchell; Performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young) Life’s full circle comes in the most unexpected places. Sometimes I have flashbacks back to the day when I hear a song while driving my car, or when I am in a place that reminds of something from way back then; back to the glory days of bra and draft card burning, unbridled idealism, and the smell of tear gas in the air. This time I found it in my physical therapist's office at 8:00 in the morning. While doing my pelvic thrusts in an effort to rebuild my wasted hip muscles and heal my broken vertebrae, I came across a child of God who was a few years older than me, still walking along the road to Yasgur's Farm. Betty was mid 60’ish and unkempt with waste long frizzy hair, no makeup, second hand store clothes and a mouth that would sink a battleship. She was annoying, and loud, and abrasive. She was the aging hippie personified. I tried to do everything I could to ignore her, but she loved to talk

The Ohio 6th Congressional District is a mish mosh of a political entity put together by frustrated politicians trying to eliminate Jim Traficant. Its northern border is Boardman, Canfield, and Poland in Mahoning County, and then sprawls 300 some odd miles down along the Ohio River up to and including Sciota County. Once out of Mahoning County, cities along the way include East Liverpool, Steubenville, Marietta, and Athens, Ohio…home of Ohio University. It is stunning in its diversity, from the white collar suburbs of Youngstown, down along the heavily industrial Ohio River corridor bordering West Virginia and Kentucky making it an extension of Appalachia and its attendant poverty. This is coal country. Coal is mined on both sides of the river and shipped down the Ohio. There is mile after mile of closed steel mills and pottery factories. It is a district that seems to include every modern day horror story of de-industrialization. It is literally a rust belt around the southeastern bor

Conservatives generally believe that everyone should benefit from a continually expanding economic pie. If government policy encourages private sector growth, the economy will expand at an acceptable rate A rising tide raises all ships. Liberals, and especially the current administration, believes that everyone should receive a small piece of a stagnant economic pie. The end result: those pieces will continually get smaller because the pie won’t remain stagnant, it will start to shrink. Nowhere is that more evident than in Obama's proposed NASA budget cuts; scrapping the renewed effort to put a man on the moon and beyond. The shuttle program is scheduled to end in 5 months, and America will be totally neutered when it comes to space exploration, reliant on the Russians and the Chinese for flights into space to honor our space station commitments. That is pitiful and shameful. To someone like Obama, a liberal academic community organizer, this kind of cut makes perfect sense. Why wo