Something for Barack Obama to think about on the golf course

The US government may be broke beyond our wildest imaginings but it still funds Barack Obama's lavish lifestyle, which this holiday season included an extra round-trip flight to Hawaii on Air Force One, enabling the president to resume his self-interrupted Hawaiian vacation. Working stiffs and other shlubs who pay for their own stuff (a.k.a. "taxpayers") might have expected the Obamas to tighten their belts (remember that one?) and rough it in DC over the holidays in the luxuriously appointed mansion already provided. Then they could have made one trip, together, to Hawaii, when Dad's schedule allowed it. But nothing says Christmas (to Obama) like golf. Seaside golf, that is. And if it costs the taxpayers a completely unnecessary $3.6 million, so be it. It's chump change, and I think you know who the chumps are.

We don't really expect President Obama to tighten his own, or the government's, belt. He doesn't have it in him. But there is an area in which he could do some real good. It's the crisis of fatherlessness in the black family. The Washington Times' Luke Rosiak reports some staggering numbers:

Among blacks, nearly 5 million children, or 54 percent, live with only their mother. Twelve percent of black families below the poverty line have two parents present, compared with 41 percent of impoverished Hispanic families and 32 percent of poor white families.

It's especially dire in the President's own back yard:

The schism is most apparent in the District, which has a higher portion of two-parent families among whites, at 85 percent, and a lower share among blacks, at 25 percent, than any state.

And in the rural South:

The largest geographic area of sustained fatherlessness contains the rural, largely black poor across Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana, tributaries of broken homes running 400 miles along the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tenn., where in some neighborhoods 82 percent of children live with their mothers alone, to Baton Rouge, La., in parts of which less than one-fifth of children have both parents at home.

But it's widespread:

In all but 11 states, most black children do not live with both parents. In every state, 7 in 10 white children do. In all states but Rhode Island and Massachusetts, most Hispanic children do. In Wisconsin, 77 percent of white children and 61 percent of Hispanics live with both parents, compared with more than 25 percent of black children.

"Something has to be done about it, and it starts with the culture and reversing the attitude that marriage is not important. The president has a role to play in that. He's a married African-American father who can probably make a huge difference with words alone," Mr. DiCaro said.

Maybe so. Certainly, President Obama is in a unique position to influence young black men for the good, but, as far as I know, he has confined his efforts to Father's Day events and a website featuring tips on how to be an involved dad. All well and good, I guess, or at least mostly harmless, but why not make the problem of the broken black family a high personal priority? What's more important than that?

Related: Columnist not in the mood to celebrate
No hope or change for urban schools

Many thanks to Michelle Malkin for the Buzzworthy link.

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About The Hobbit

I haven't seen it, but may I gently suggest that If you haven't done so, read the book to your children before taking them to the movie.

Jazz Shaw reviews the movie here. Spoiler alert:

The finding of the ring and how it was lost by Gollum is completely changed. The Riddle Game is abbreviated and made somewhat cheap. The prominence of the Goblins hunting the Dwarves before they’ve even left the Shire warps the original story. The encounter of the band of travellers with the mountain trolls and Gandalf’s role in it shifts a great deal from the story. The portrayal of the inherently flawed, yet noble nature of the Dwarves is spun to make them look like greedy, vacuous prima donnas. The list goes on.

I often wonder at film-makers who fundamentally alter the stories of the classics they supposedly love and value. Why do they do that? Do they really believe they're making them better?

I'm sure many, many viewers are enjoying the movie as a movie, with little or no connection to "the book version." But you've got to wonder what Tolkien would think. At least it wasn't made by Disney. JRR was not a big fan:

"It might be advisable [...] to let the Americans do what seems good to them — as long as it was possible [...] to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing)."

― The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, #13

"I recognize [Walt Disney's] talent, but it has always seemed to me hopelessly corrupted. Though in most of the 'pictures' proceeding from his studios there are admirable or charming passages, the effect of all of them to me is disgusting. Some have given me nausea"

Kind of how my older kids feel about the Rankin/Bass Hobbit, which I made the mistake of showing them back in the early 90s before they had all read the book, and thus ruining it for them, to some extent.

Then again, some people prefer that version to Peter Jackson's first installment. So go figure.

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Music break: You Won't See Me

Paul Brady's great take on this Beatles classic:



Rubber Soul is probably my favorite Beatles album but I can't listen much to the songs of my childhood. The grooves they burned into my brain are deep and permanent, so a little listening goes a long way. But I can enjoy Brady's excellent cover and will try not to wear it out with my usual all-or-nothing approach to music  (and everything else).

(By the way, another terrific Beatles cover is Suzy Bogguss and Chet Atkins' All My Loving. Alas, no MP3 is available, but you can hear frustrating snippets of it here.)

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Recipe: Hot fudge sauce

Happy 2013! It's our little tradition to make sundaes on New Year's Eve, but they're just as good on New Year's Day. Here's the easy recipe we use for Real Hot Fudge Sauce. (Sure, you could open a jar, or worse, just squirt Hershey's syrup on ice cream and call that a sundae, but you're better than that, aren't you?)

Hot Fudge Sauce

2 squares (2 ounces) unsweetened chocolate
2 T butter
2/3 C sugar
1/2 C evaporated milk
1/2 t vanilla

Melt chocolate and butter in a saucepan. Stir in the sugar, then the milk. Stir constantly over medium heat, taking care not to let sauce burn on the bottom, until it comes to small but definite boil. Remove from heat. Stir in vanilla. The HFS will thicken as it cools. Serve warm.

(To make with cocoa powder instead of squares of chocolate, substitute 6 T of cocoa powder and use 4 T butter.)

(My diet begins tomorrow with the bleak, gray dawning of January 2nd.)

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Sinatra: I'll Be Seeing You

If I could time travel I'd definitely stop in on this 1961 concert downunder:



Thanks for reading and have a great 2013.

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Johnny Cash: Away in a Manger

Merry Christmas!



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Steyn on Newtown

I was mildly heartened to find someone else objecting to the "these children are our children" line so frequently trotted out since the Newtown mass child-killings. From Jonah Goldberg's The Rush to Impose Reason on Horror:

Contrary to a lot of sloppy prepackaged rhetoric, these weren’t “our” children. They were their parents’ children. To claim otherwise is to try to purchase the sympathy rightly reserved for the grieving on the cheap. 

Right. Read the rest.

Then read Mark Steyn's eloquent The Massacre of the Innocents. A bit:

For those untouched by death this Christmas, someone else’s bewildering, shattering turn of fate ought to occasion a little modesty and circumspection. Instead, even by its usual execrable standards, the public discourse post-Newtown has been stupid and contemptible. 

President Obama is among those who have tried to tie the slaughter to a political agenda:

“Goodness,” Obama said. “If there’s one thing we should have after this week, it should be a sense of perspective about what’s important.”

“Right now what the country needs is for us to compromise, get a deficit-reduction deal in place, make sure middle-class taxes don’t go up,” . . . “Focus on issues like energy, and immigration reform and all the things that will really make a determination as to whether our country grows.”

The need to compromise on the fiscal cliff “has not yet taken up on Capitol Hill,” he said. “And when you think about what we’ve gone through over the last couple of months — a devastating hurricane, and now one of the worst tragedies in our memory — the country deserves folks to be willing to compromise on behalf of the greater good and not tangle themselves up in a whole bunch of ideological positions that don’t make much sense.”

It was a clumsy attempt, but it's the thought that counts, and his thought was "Never let a crisis go to waste." Stupid and contemptible, exactly.

More from Steyn:

It would not be imprudent to expect that an ever broker America, with more divorce, fewer fathers, the abolition of almost all social restraints, and a revoltingly desensitized culture, will produce more young men who fall through the cracks. But, in the face of murder as extraordinarily wicked as that of Newtown, we should know enough to pause before reaching for our usual tired tropes. So I will save my own personal theories, no doubt as ignorant and irrelevant as everybody else’s, until after Christmas — except to note that the media’s stampede for meaning in massacre this last week overlooks the obvious: that the central meaning of these acts is that they are without meaning. Herod and the Pennsylvania Indians murdered children in pursuit of crude political goals; the infanticidal maniac of Sandy Hook was merely conscripting grade-school extras for a hollow act of public suicide. 

Go read the whole thing and pass it on.
 
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All about him

Good heavens. Someone get out the hook. Obama's eulogy to Sen. Daniel Inouye is -- surprise! -- all about Obama. Though parts of his meandering anecdote about visiting mainland America as a child may be true, or truish, and his fondness for the motel pools and the ice machines is no doubt fascinating to his fanbase, his tribute doesn't seem quite suited to the occasion. But that's Barack Obama.

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More gift ideas

Just a couple of things to add to our longer list:

- #2 son asked me to recommend Clear the Bridge!: The War Patrols of the U.S.S. Tang by RAdm. Richard H. O'Kane, USN, which he says is awesome:


One Amazon reviewer calls it the "greatest submarine book ever written":

I could not put this book down. O'Kanes writing puts the reader inside the sub taking part in every detail of the Tang's patrols during WWII. I found myself refering to the maps every time he gave a description of the Tang's approach to enemy shipping and being able to see his detailed discriptions of the area thru the periscope. O'Kane's memories of details of shooting setups and the details of men at their stations in time of war is uncanny. This is truly a book that takes the reader to the dark days of WWII and the frustration of fighting with defective torpedos and equipment and the "jury-rigging" the crews had to do to make things work and in most cases make equipment better than what was issued. O'Kane was not only a great leader of men he is one of the great heros of WWII. It would be an honor to shake his hand. 

- Labyrinth: My kids loved this game when they were little. It's been unavailable for a while but Ravensburger is apparently making it again and a couple of my twenty-somethings are going to be getting it for Christmas. (Don't tell.)

Also available in an anniversary edition.

- There's a dangerous side-effect to Christmas shopping -- those tchotchkes you irrationally want to buy for yourself. I stumbled upon these this morning:

Only $21.17! But seriously, what would I do with them? I drink my tea from bucket-sized mugs (and those butterfly handles look really impractical). And they aren't even old. (I do have a few pieces of real chintzware that I'm very fond of but they sit hidden in the cupboard most of the time.)

What I really want for Christmas is a new sofa.

This is turning into a Pinterest page. Sorry, guys.

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