The Rake Magazine

Does this flight suit make me look fat?

It's not too late to run out and get a gift for your favorite soldier. For tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of the end of hostilities in Iraq.

I don't know what you can put on the card, but maybe something like "Thanks for your service; it's not your fault your commander in chief is delusional. Please come home soon."

When I was a kid, we often took votes at the dinner table. More often than not, the count was four to one, with my Dad being the one. After the count, he'd invariably announce, "Well, I won again."

When we'd protest, he'd explain, "My vote is the only one that counts." (My brother soon devised another vote to counter dad, though. The question was, "Who thinks Dad's a dork?" The vote was still four to one, but on that one, his vote was the only one that didn't count.)

Of course, Dad's vote counted because, well, he was the boss of the house. (Mom voted with us just to be nice. She really agreed with Dad.) Aside from being the boss, he had more sense than his three sons have ever been able to muster, and his decisions were usually right. I particularly remember once when he refused to let me drive to my girl friend's house during an ice storm--a decision that has been recalled to me three times when my own children have wrecked cars on icy days.

So, I had to laugh this morning when reading the story of the New York Times' annual meeting at which one class of shareholders voted to oppose the current board of directors' way of running the paper. The Times is a patriarchy if there ever was one. There are two classes of stock, one owned by the public, and one controlled by the founding Ochs-Sulzberger family. The family stock is the vote that counts.

And that's why we have a newspaper like The Times, which spends all sorts of money to hire people like reporters--2,000 of them--and spreads them all over the world so those of us who appreciate breadth and nuance in reporting have somewhere to get it.

Along with The Washington Post and a few other papers who still are under family control, they're significant contributors to the fabric of democracy, and are so evaluated by their families, who are indeed wealthy, but measure their wealth in more than mere stock prices.

That's a lot like our family, I'm proud to say.

This from the St. Cloud Times about our gal Michele being one of seven Republican House members to vote against a bill that would require the IRS to notify tax payers if there was evidence their identity had been stolen.

Why the hell would anyone vote against that?

But then I read down a bit more in the story: "The bill also would require the IRS to notify low-income workers that they qualify for a tax break known as the Earned Income Tax Credit."

That, undoubtedly, is the rub. Michele can't in good conscience vote for any measure that might limit the amount of tax that can be collected from the very people who are rightfully burdened already: the poor who benefit from the EITC.

Thank God Michele is on the job. Otherwise those poor folks who have to worry about the onerous 15 percent capital gains tax might have to pick up the slack.

You might want to read this from the NY Times. It seems that the states out west, where mostly Republican buffalo roam, are fighting among themselves for the little bit of water they have available.

The funny part is that, except for California's governor, that big actor, many of the pols out there aren't big believers in global warming.

Of course, we here in the land of 10,000 lakes can laugh. But as soon as they figure out a way to pipe our water over the Rockies, those pictures of the high and dry docks on Lake Superior will become just as common as the ones of those mud holes out west.

You know how those western movies about the water rights wars between the cattlemen and the farmers always turned out bad for the farmers? We're the sodbusters, I fear, and there's no Shane in sight.