Famille Du Pentium

I read HERE that airlines will be trying out all kinds of new fees this summer.  Since flyers have previously refused to pay fare increases (simply by not flying), they figure they can slip in a fare increase by charging you for things that you've obviously taken for granted previously, like requesting a window or isle, or a pillow or blanket. 

My favorite is the "fuel surcharge".  Like they've never chraged you for the fuel before.  Southwest doesn't charge a "fuel surcharge".  You know why?  Because back in 2000-2001, Southwest did what every other airline should have been doing - buying Jet Fuel futures at the prices they were paying then.  The contracts only cost a couple bucks each, and if the price of oil doesn't go up, you don't have to exercize.  So Southwest was basically doing what every other airline should have done.  Why can I say that authoratively?  Because every other airline used to do it, until they decided it wasn't worth the money any more.

So insteead, now those airlines are charging you for their incompetence, by charging you a surcharge for something that they always used to charge you in the fare, but now that fuel prices have gone up but customers won't pay a fare increase, they have to charge it another way.

So here's my response to airlines:  I'm driving to Orlando this summer.  When I check into a hotel, the pillow and blanket  that I pay for will not have a "surcharge".  And while I'm driving on the tollways, they will not charge me a baggage surcharge for taking my clothing with me on the trip.  When I go fill up my gas tank, I'm pretty sure that gas stations won't be charging me a "fuel surcharge" for the fuel I just paid for.  Maybe airlines should learn from them. 

Posted by Michael Humphries-Dolnick at 05:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is the time of year where we haven't had any holidays, vacations, or other family events to use as an excuse to take pictures of the kids.  So just 'cause it's spring, here are some pics we took this week.  (Actually, this was a birthday party for our next door neighbors at the Skokie Exploratorium).

See The Latest Pics HERE 

Posted by Michael Humphries-Dolnick at 04:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Federalism.  Lassez Faire.  Fiscal responsibility. Global leadership.  Eisenhower.  Goldwater.  Nixon.  Reagan.  These are words so lost in our past that even the son of a man who looked up to these men can't seem to find them anymore. 

Barry Goldwater told us that someone should kick Jerry Fallwell's ass.  Eisenhower defined a global leader that would serve as a model for decades.  Reagan reduced the overall size of the federal government, transferred more authority to the states, and reformed a punitive tax system that disouraged hard work.  Even Nixon, yes, Nixon; despite his obvious blunders in trying to hard to win a re-election that he probably would have won anyway, Nixon guided the nation through one of the worst inflation eras of the twentieth century and established a diplomatic relationship with China. 

Leaders like this, we haven't seen in a while folks.  Bush defines his own "conservatism" on largely religious context.  He blocks stem cell research.  He courts the religious right, and advances their agenda, sometimes at the cost of reason.  Yet he spends money like there is no tomorrow, he alienates our allies and foments anger and hatred amongst our enemies.  He has lost America's leadership in the world; although he remains the President, he is no longer the "Leader Of The Free World".

And that needs to change.

Posted by Michael Humphries-Dolnick at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It may seem like that there's a recent trend in my Politics posts - I'm criticizing Alberto Gonzales a lot lately.  Aside from the recent U.S. Attorney firing scandal, which really - in the big picture of things - isn't a huge constitutional issue, why am I so hard on the guy?

Well of course there's lying to congress.  When Gonzales first appeared to testify about the firings, he claimed that he's a big-wig cabinet minister and can't possibly be expected to know every single detail of his department's day-to-day business.  OK, I'll buy that.  Except, it was a lie.  Later one of his aides testified that he was in meetings where the firings were discussed, and had first-hand knowlege of them.  So then, he claimed that he simply couldn't remember these details.  Again, that's typical cowardly government toady-speak for "I probably did something wrong, but I'm certainly not going to tell you about it," not a constitutional crisis.  Whatever.   

But here's where it gets dicey.  In January of 2007, AG Gonzales testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that there was no right of Habeas Corpus in the United States Constitution.  For those of you keeping track, Habeas Corpus is considered by most to be the foundation of our legal system - it, in general grants or enables the granting of the right of a trial before you are jailed, the right to tell someone that you have been arrested, the right to legal counsel, even the right to protest your innocence.  Without it, you don't even have the right to claim you're innocent.  And AG Al says it doesn't exist.  Why?

It's a matter of his interpretation of the constitution.  See if you can follow along.  The constitution says:

"The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

AG Al says, "That doesn't explicitly grant it, it just says it can't be taken away.  It was never given in the first place, hence it does not exist."  

It's no coincidence that this is the same man who claims that the Geneva Convention is "out of date" and therefore doesn't apply, and who argues that the government should have the power to secretly tap your phones, intercept your computer communications, and (of course) arrest and jail you without due process (as we are already doing today).  This is the man that is charged with ensuring that U.S. Citizens receive the protections they are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.  

The man is a constitutional crisis waiting to happen.  The sooner he steps down, the safer we'll all be. 

Posted by Michael Humphries-Dolnick at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Admit it, you don't like to be lied to.  You also don't like having your intelligence minimized, or being patronized.  Unfortunately, this is just what the White House is doing.  Or, at least, President Bush, as it seems even his senior advisors have defected from his side in his obstinate support of an Attorney General who has lost the confidence of his own department, the U.S. Congress, and the people he is supposed to serve.

If you didn't bother listening to his testimony, here is a quick summary:  He didn't change his tune.  He personally signed off on the firings, but can't remember the details.  As far as misleading Congress in his first testimoney, he admits that "mistakes were made" (there's that passive voice again) and he's very sorry.  

Forget for a moment that only coward use the passive voice, to avoid accepting blame. 

Here's where the double talk starts.  He said more than sixty times that he "could not recall" certain details surrounding the firings.  Not that he didn't know - because his fallen aids have repeatedly and consistently testified that he did know the details - no, he just can't remember them.  And the President's perspective on his testimony?  "President Bush was pleased with the attorney general's testimony today. After hours of testimony in which he answered all of the senators' questions and provided thousands of pages of documents, he again showed that nothing improper occurred."

So the Attorney General answered "All" of the congressmen's questions.  Except for the more than sixty that he didn't.  And the President is hoping that you're not smart enough to figure that out.  How do you like your president hoping that you're stupid? 

Posted by Michael Humphries-Dolnick at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was spelunking through the site logs recently and noticed that a lot of people are using the search function to try to find the French version of this site.  I understand their frustration, what with "Famille" being a French word and all, I guess somehow it follows that the entire site should either be in French, or at least have a French translation.  So, to make sure that this post comes up whenever they search, I am putting the following search terms in to ensure that their search efforts get a hit:

en francais

french site

There.  Now that you're here, here is a message that Google Translator told me to give you:

Posted by Michael Humphries-Dolnick at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The following blog post violates several of my own personal rules:

1.  I will not comment on any current contrived crisis involving the entertainment industry

2. I will not get involved in gender or racial discussions

3. I won't say nice things about Al Sharpton

Well, if you're still with me, I guess you asked for it.

Al Sharpton said today: "We cannot keep going through offending us and then apologizing and then acting like it never happened. Somewhere we've got to stop this."

And he's absolutely right.  I am sick and tired of people like Gibson, Richards, and now Imus thinking that they can say whatever the hell they want, regardless of who it demeans and diminishes, and then simply apologize later and it'll all go away.  It is time to stop saying "we forgive you."  It is time to draw the line.   

http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/04/12/imus.rutgers/index.html

Think it's a first amendment issue?  Really?  

If I said what Imus said in my workplace, I would get fired.  No questions asked.  Have they violated my first amendment right?  No.  Because it's not a first amendment issue.  It is about common decency really, but more to the point it's about not fostering an environment that encourages discrimination.  

MSNBC and CBS Radio are all workplaces.  Imus can rail about the IRS or the Justice Department or President Bush or Hillary Clinton all he wants, and I will stand up for his right to do that.  But when he helps foster discrimination, he has broken the law himself and must be fired, just as any other person working in the US would be if they uttered those words in their workplace.  What makes Imus so special that he can violate these laws and employment regulartions, huh?  What, just because he has a microphone in front of his bigotted snout, it's protected speech?  

Hogwash. 

Posted by Michael Humphries-Dolnick at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Recently, President Bush has been stumping for Iraq again, as has Vice President Cheney.  Puzzling, given the overwhelming evidence that a vast majority of Americans do not support him on Iraq.  In fact, not only do Americans dislike the job that Bush is doing in Iraq, they overwhelmingly support his detractors who seek to stop him.  And some of you know damn well I say that as an ardent conservative Republican, so no "your Bush bashing again." 

No, that's not what I'm talking about today.  What is strange to me, puzzling even, is that even going in to an election cycle, Bush and Cheney are still stumping.  They could, ostensibly, just keep their mouths shut - continue fighting their war, continue spending money, and just quietly drift into the sunset.  Who knows, maybe we'll actually make progress before Inauguration Day, and the next president won't have as huge a mess to clean up.

But still.  They keep stumping.  It's puzzling.  If they'd just shut up, they'd give some Republican moderates the chance to get elected as the next president.  But no, it's more important that they run off at the mouth about how "despite what 78% of you Americans think, I'm right about Iraq" yadda yadda yadda, pushing more Republicans to have to take a stand, playing right into the Democrats plans of making the next election all about the Iraq war.

Maybe he has a grand plan.  It could happen, you know.  What if he's egging the Democrats to play out their hand until the Iraq card is the only one they have left, or the only one they know how to play?  Then, what if something nutty were to happen, like say three months before election day, Bush pulled the ability to play that card out from under them, say by reaching a deal with the Iraqi government to take over substantially all remaining security operations in Iraq?  Hey, I'm not saying it'll happen, but what if?  What would the remainder of the Democratic ticket have to play, if not the Iraq card?  Hmm, it would sure bode well for candidates like McCain.  And bad, particularly, for candidates who made Iraq and pulling our troops out the main platform of their campaign.  

I don't seriously think that our current administration is actually thinking this way.  But hey, you never know :) 

Posted by Michael Humphries-Dolnick at 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier I described the road trip we'll be taking to Disney later this year.  Our return trip is not quite as interesting, we stay an extra day in Orlando this year so we need to make a direct and quick run home, but the trip still deserves some color.   So open the map in a separate window and follow along.

Keeping with my previously explained practice of treating Orlando as one of our "stopovers", we'll actually be traveling 11.3 miles / 24 minutes from our Disney Resort to our first stopover, the Royal Pacific Resort near Universal Orlando.   We actually will spend one day at Univeral Orlando park, then that evening we will go watch Blue Man Group (Sssh! It's a surprise for Aaron...) and then get some sleep.

Starting fresh and early on Friday morning, we first head west on I-4, then north on I-75 to Atlanta, Georgia where we once again stay at a Holiday Inn Express (Hey, what can I say - points, pools, jacuzzis, and free breakfast.)

The next day we continue north on I-75 to about Chattanooga, where we turn northwest on I-24 toward Nashville, and then it's back on I-65 northbound, where we'll stay until we complete most of our journey.  We want to make tracks on our trip, so rather than stopping over in Louisville, we'll keep going north on our second day until we reach Scottsville, IN, where we stay at our last Holiday Inn Express. 

Then we make the four hour trip back to Chicago via I-65 to I-90/94/80 where we'll be staying overnight at Chez Humphries-Dolnick's, and going back to work :(.

Posted by Michael Humphries-Dolnick at 07:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some people think I'm crazy.  I like taking family road trips.  We've conditioned our kids from an early age to be fairly good road trip-ers.  This started as they were barely weeks old, and we would load them up in the car and take them to Lake Camelot in Wisconsin, four hours (at 80 MPH) from our house.  So, they like road trips too. 

Getting there is, indeed, half the fun.  So I'm going to share some of that fun with you now.  Here is a Google map of our entire outbound trip - you can open this in a separate window and play along as I narrate.  You might have to use the Google "grabber hand" to reposition the map so that the entire trip is visible.

First, there's the route.  Outbound, we're going due south until we hit Louisville, Kentucky.  On our last trip, that was our first stopover.  But that was barely 5 hours into our first day, and we had hit the road at 6AM, so we actually got the hotel about 2 or 3 PM.  Too early.  So this time, we're still hitting the road early (6:30 AM) but stopping later.  Anyway, at Louisville, we turn east for a while, then south again toward Knoxville.  But the first day, we stop short of Knoxville, in London Kentucky.  We stay overnight at a Holiday Inn Express in London.

Day two, we continue south to Knoxville and then head somewhat southeast toward the Atlantic coast.  We go through North Carolina and South Carolina and then turn south toward Savannah, Georgia... where we stay overnight for the second night (again, a Holiday Inn Express). 

Day three is a real easy one.  Day one and two were eight hour drives (according to Google), now we're driving about 4.5 hours from Savannah to Orlando, strait down I-95 and the Atlantic coast until we hit Daytona Beach, then I-4 back inland to Orlando.

We always treat our destination as a "stopover" - I.e. we get there one day earlier and get settled.  So we are actually staying in a different hotel on Day three PM than our Disney resort.  This time, we decided to try out the Nickelodeon Hotel in Orlando.   This looks like a lot of fun for the kids, albeit expensive.  Hey, it's also a Holiday Inn, I get Priority Club points for it!

Finally after Nick Hotel, we make our way across town (if you use the zoom tool in Google maps, you can see our last leg) from Orlando to Lake Buena Vista, the official city name (well, one of them) for Disney World.  We're staying at the Port Orleans Riverside resort, near Downtown Disney.

I'll cover the road trip home in a separate entry.

Posted by Michael Humphries-Dolnick at 05:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I won't go into the whole Passover story, like I did for Purim.  However, I thought this was an interesting side note.

Most of us know the story about the Jews escaping from hard labor in Egypt.  Not enough time to rise the bread, so we eat Matzah, yadda yadda, and then the parting of the Red Sea.

What few know is that actually, it didn't go like things did in The Ten Commandments.  The Jews didn't arrive at the banks of the Red Sea and suddenly things just opened up for them.  In fact, at first, (the story tells us), nothing at all happened.  It wasn't until every Jew had completely immersed themselves before the miracle of the parting of the Sea occurred.  In fact, the story goes on to say that most had to go in far enough that they actually could not breathe until the sea was parted.

This was an extraordinary leap of faith.  No one knew for sure what to do next or what would happen, only that their God would see them through.  And only when things got as bad as they possibly could get (as with the faithful who dove in over their heads) did divine intervention save them.  

This story tells us a lot.  First, that faith - most importantly - is required for God's intervention.  Second, even when God was imposing his will in the form of miracles that saved the Nation of Israel, personal human choice was required to make those miracles happen.  Faith first, and choice second.  That's the way it has always been, even in the days of the Passover.

Happy Passover. 

Posted by Michael Humphries-Dolnick at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For those of you who feel that Guiliani, McCain, and even Romney aren't far enough to the right for your taste, you now have the heir apparent to the extreme right void left by these candidates - Tommy Thompson. 

I like Tommy.  He was a four-term Wisconsin governmor during the years that I was vacationing up there.  He did a pretty good job.  And he's very, very clear about what his candidacy is about: "I am the reliable conservative, my record shows that," he said. "All that people have to do is look at my record, and I am one individual that they can count on."  (http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/04/01/election.thompson/index.html). 

I wish I could rely on Conservatives practicing the Conservative values of the likes of people such as Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater.  Unfortunately, today a "Reliable conservative" means someone who will kow-tow to the religious right, and we don't need more Jerry Falwell clones in office.

Posted by Michael Humphries-Dolnick at 06:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)