Video of the Year

Watch it. Commentary would be pointless.

How to stay hip

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Don't change. That's how to always be cool and on the cutting edge.

If you don't change, popular culture will keep coming back around to where you already are. For example, I looked like Nirvana a good decade before Nirvana looked like Nirvana and helped usher in "grunge."

AND KIDS keep complimenting me on my Chuck Taylors. I don't think they're being sarcastic, being that they're wearing them, too.

So we now have the above report from Today, part of the continuing rediscovery of vinyl. As in records. LP's. Phonographs, not CD players or iPods.

I have three turntables -- two of them quite vintage and quite nice. I quit counting how many LPs I had about 15 years ago, when the number passed 1,000.

And now. . . . Dude! I'm cool!

Not bad for a 48-year-old relic.

3 Chords & the Truth: As seen on '60s TV

This week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth has a lot to do with this. "This" being the video just above.

Of course, "a lot to do with" doesn't mean the Big Show is about nothing but the old Red Skelton Hour on 1960s television.

That's just our jumping-off point.

For instance, this week's program also could be said to have much to do with this:

OR PERHAPS this instead:

AW HELL, it's 3 Chords & the Truth, which means this week's episode could have something to do with most anything. That's just the way your Mighty Favog rolls.

Give it a listen and find out what's in it for you today.

Stop socialized space travel!

I miss the Soviet Union.

Without the Red Menace to push us and scare us -- without the dadblamed commerniss Russkies to goad us into transcending our inherent pettiness and whackjobbery to achieve greatness purely out of spite -- it's no wonder we can't get a damned thing done in this country nowadays.

In the 1960s, we had "dominoes" falling, commies lurking, nuclear war looming and college campuses overrun by Red-loving pinko freaks. In that most tumultuous of decades, national humiliation was just one cosmonautical feat of derring-do away.

Our response to all that psychic trauma was to send Americans to the moon and bring them safely home again.

The Soviet Union, however, fell apart in 1991. Damn.

NOW, THERE'S NOTHING -- no common enemy, at least -- to keep our all-American whackjobs on the reservation. In this country, somebody's always going to be looking for Reds to bait, and without a large, reliable foreign Red Menace supplier, homegrown paranoiacs are turning against their own government and president.

For example, this was the scene a reporter for The Advocate found in Baton Rouge, La., yesterday:

On the day after President Barack Obama asked the nation to back his planned revamp of the $2.4 trillion system that pays for health care, opponents and supporters squared off Thursday on the sidewalks surrounding the U.S. courthouse in downtown Baton Rouge.

Police officers kept the two groups — which police estimated to be about 125 people — apart as the sides shouted at one another.

The gathering was largely peaceful — police reported no arrests — but points made on health-care plans soon were overshadowed by arguments of whether the president is an American citizen.

(snip)

Steven Walker of New Orleans, state director of Louisiana’s Organizing for America, said he wanted a handful of people to share their struggles caused by inadequate health-care insurance.

Obama’s plan would lower costs and free up options for people with insurance while giving people without insurance access to policies, said Walker, whose group is affiliated with the Democratic National Committee, which is promoting Obama’s agenda.

Walker said Obama’s plan would allow individuals greater choice.

“But this is a campaign of smear and fear,” Walker said pointing to an opposition sign that condemned the president as a communist.

“These people are anti-Obama,” he said.

A few feet down the sidewalk, on the other side of a cordon of police officers, Kurt Wagner, a Port Allen insurance sales manager, asked the crowd: “Is he rightfully the president?”

“No,” responded his listeners.

TO WHAT'S LEFT of the conservative base, President Obama not only is a "socialist," he's a Red pretender who isn't even American. Even amid the Great Clinton Freakout -- which at least had Whitewater, a high-level suicide and bimbo eruptions to hang its hat upon -- nobody for a minute questioned whether Bill was anything but an all-American, skirt-chasing, not-inhaling, draft-dodging pinko scalawag.

This won't do.

We need the Soviet Union back. We need a credible existential threat -- at least until al-Qaida proves it can take out midtown Manhattan -- to help us get over ourselves and get our rears in gear.

Otherwise, Allah only knows (Obama the Muslim made us all convert) how long we'll be letting the lunatics drive the agenda. Picture Toonces.

Your daily dose of surrealism

I think moments of supreme awkwardness on television all through the '60s must have shaped my generation somehow. We acquired a certain je ne sais quoi from watching old people on nationwide TV act strangely in the presence of youth.

A NOV. 10, 1964 episode of the Red Skelton Hour (embedded above) is a classic of the Establishment Doesn't Know What to Make of Youth Today genre. Kids, watch this and have a few things you've wondered about Mom and Dad suddenly make sense.

With that brief preface, I present for your squirming (and/or nostalgic) enjoyment, Red Skelton meets the Rolling Stones.

Mahna mahna!

I remember this song being in a "moon creature" sketch on the Red Skelton Hour from the fall of 1969. Unsurprisingly, all things "moon" were big that year.

This version, performed by the Muppets on the Ed Sullivan Show, is also from that mooniest of years, 1969. But I sure would like to see the Red Skelton version again after 40 years.

Mahna mahna!

Of 'abortion mandates' and political stunts

Sound the alarm!

Powerful abortion industry lobbyists and Wasington [sic], D.C., politicians have just launched a massive effort to mandate taxpayer-funded abortions as part of their proposed trillion-dollar healthcare takeover.

This political power-grab is an effort to implement one of the cornerstones of the "Freedom of Choice Act" (FOCA), and could lead to a massive abortion industry bailout -- something the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose, and certainly cannot afford in these tough economic times.

"Sound the alarm"?

"Proposed trillion-dollar health-care takeover"?

"Political power-grab"?

Why am I thinking the organizers of this protest against public funding of abortion as part of health-care reform may be just as undone over "socialized medicine" as they are about paying for killing unborn babies?

YES, I REALIZE Democrats for Life is part of the protest effort -- and good on it for opposing the "abortion mandate" -- but the pro-life Dems aren't in the driver's seat on this one. Note all the red-meat conservative code words on the website.

I wonder why that is?

According to a "whois" search, stoptheabortionmandate.com, is registered to Students for Life of America, and the administrative contact for the domain is the group's executive director, Kristan Hawkins. Hawkins -- author of a recent op-ed piece opposing any "nationalized healthcare system" as a virtual death sentence for her son, who has cystic fibrosis -- is an alumna of Bush/Cheney 2004 and also has worked for the Republican National Committee.

And the Students for Life home page directs visitors to "SFLA’s new website dedicated to exposing the facts about national health care and how it will hurt all Americans." Unlike how, I suppose, having no health care . . . or losing one's health care with one's job . . . or being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions . . . or being denied coverage for lifesaving-but-expensive treatments apparently does no harm whatsoever to Americans now.

MEANWHILE, the Students for Life domain is registered to Josh Mercer of Ann Arbor, Mich. Mercer, a board member of Students for Life of Michigan, is an alumnus of the conservative Hillsdale College where, in 2000, he belonged to the College Libertarians and was its contact with the Libertarian Party of Michigan.

Mercer, communications director for the Catholic advocacy group Fidelis, also was a member of the anti-tax Club for Growth from 2001 through at least 2004.

The anti-mandate site's self-parodying scare language is the stock and trade of PAC attacks across the political landscape, and thus set off my BS detector. Trolling the Internet for information on who, and what, is behind the "URGENT nationwide webcast event" merely serves to confirm one's suspicions.

Which leads to an important question: Is this about principled opposition to an "abortion mandate" in health-care reform, or is it about partisan political posturing aimed at turning this most contentious of issues into President Obama's "Waterloo"?

Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan is one of 19 Democrats publicly bucking their party's leadership, declaring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi they will oppose any health-care reform measure that doesn't explicitly reaffirm standing congressional strictures against taxpayer funding of abortion. That is principled opposition to objective evil -- the evil being the taking of innocent human life in the name of "health care" -- and you can be sure those pro-life Democrats have paid, are paying and will continue to pay the price for their stand.

But Republicans shedding crocodile tears over an "abortion mandate" in a plan they'd be deriding as "socialized medicine" and a "political power grab" even if Mother Teresa were brought back from the dead to administer it? That's as disingenuous as it is cynical.

That organizations such as Priests for Life -- and even Democrats for Life -- have been suckered into being "useful idiots" for the Party of Greed's continuing war against ordinary Americans' economic and medical interests is damning testimony to the dysfunctional, codependent nature of our politics.

LET ME be unequivocal here -- abortion is evil. It is homicide directed against the most innocent and defenseless members of the human family. Financial support of this repulsive practice has no place in a health-care reform package.

Not only that, the presence of public subsidies for killing the innocent is philosophically incompatible with "reforming" a broken system that fails to affirm that medical care -- even life-saving medical care -- is a right based on one's humanity rather than a privilege based on one's ability to pay.

Both the deliberate taking of innocent life and the refusal to structure civil society so it values human dignity and worth over corporate profit and "the free market" are but variations on the world's oldest dodge. And we've been hemming and hawing on that count since Genesis, when God asked Cain a simple question and got a research paper from a PAC-funded think tank in reply.

Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let us go out in the field." When they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.

Then the LORD asked Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" He answered, "I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper?"

ONE WONDERS whether today's conservatives would be upset that Cain slew Abel if they weren't convinced that Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi put him up to it. One also wonders whether liberal Democrats could bear to inhabit a world where Eve slaying Abel in the womb would be just as unthinkable as Cain doing the deed some years later in the field.

It seems to me, however, that "abortion for all" Democrats and free-marketeer "pro-life" Republicans are more kindred in spirit than either side cares to admit. What it really boils down to is whether one prefers death by commission or by omission.

Legal abortion is one of the more obvious indicators of the "culture of death." But even if elective abortion disappeared tomorrow, the United States could not be considered a "pro-life" society so long as health care -- so long as treatment of serious and even life-threatening disease -- remained dependent upon one's ability to pay.

If Americans ended abortion today but still denied critical treatment to those who couldn't pay, we still would be sinning against human dignity. "Pro-life" nations don't make sick, old people choose between medicine and food.

Nations committed to justice don't have people with insurance still going bankrupt because of a serious injury or major illness.

IN TODAY'S "URGENT nationwide webcast event," we're going to see a variety of groups come out against "the abortion mandate" in congressional health-care reform bills. Great . . . we know what they're against. Heck, I'm against it, too.

What they won't be saying, though, is what they're for. Are they for equal access to medical care for all Americans? If "socialized medicine" is bad, what's their solution? Or are some Americans just more equal than others?

And since we're all into big "Stop the Abortion Mandate" events, it certainly is reasonable to ask whether the next "nationwide webcast event" will be a protest against the 86 percent of work-based health-insurance plans that pay for abortion services already.

Check that. Employment-based insurance that compels you to pay for elective abortions through your premiums.

Really, where are the protests against the massive -- and successful -- effort to mandate consumer-funded abortions as part of a corporate power-grab?

Does the present health-care system's free-market roots (and that it will likely leave 52 million Americans out in the cold by next year) mean we somehow haven't already been made accomplices in mass homicide? Or is killing somehow just a lot more icky when it's "socialized"?

ONCE UPON A TIME, John Lennon put it quite directly:

I'm sick and tired of hearing things
From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth

I've had enough of reading things
By neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth

What he said.

Calling out the wackos

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He's loud. He's bombastic. He looks like he's on the verge of drooling on himself or, perhaps, spitting all over the MSNBC cameras.

He's Chris Matthews of Hardball and, bless his heart, somebody had to look at the "Obama's not an American" wing of the Republican Party and call a bunch of loonies a bunch of loonies. Because the longer these nutjobs roam free from the attic where crazy aunts and uncles normally reside, the dangerouser it gets for the GOP and the USA.

Right now -- despite all the signs telling people not to feed the animals -- the Republican Party is throwing Twinkies to the baboons. And we all know how that worked out for Dan White once upon a time in San Francisco.

Omaha can't rely on cuts . . . or Erin Andrews

If you're running a mid-sized city and you're looking at starting the new fiscal year at least $11 million in the hole, you're pretty much looking at just three things you can do.

You can gut city services that already have been cut and cut again, thereby destroying your community's quality of life.

You can raise taxes.

You can sell nekkid pictures of Erin Andrews. And by that I mean not unclothed pictures of the ESPN sideline goddess, but rather pictures of the ESPN sideline goddess unclothed.

To his credit, Omaha Mayor Jim Suttle -- in a budget address that was anything but subtle -- rejected the first option out of hand, declaring it a supremely bad idea. Likewise, he recognized there's no way out of the second option -- that citizens face a choice between horrible and unpleasant, and sometimes you have to suck it up and fork over a little more to the community chest.

As for that last option (though it would be an exceedingly lucrative sideline for Omaha city government), the reality is that Erin Andrews' chest does not belong to the community . . . and neither do photographic representations thereof.

SO, IT LOOKS like the Omaha City Council will have to either like or lump what the Omaha World-Herald reports the mayor set in front of it this afternoon:

Omaha Mayor Jim Suttle wants to raise property taxes and impose a new tax on restaurant meals, movies and other entertainment to help the city climb out of a projected budget shortfall for 2010.

Both the property tax increase and new entertainment tax are part of Suttle's 2010 budget proposal, which he presented Tuesday to the Omaha City Council.

The 2 percent entertainment tax would affect anyone who sees a movie or goes out to dinner in Omaha. The tax would bring in an estimated $10.3 million at a time when the major revenue sources for city services — sales taxes and property taxes — are projected to remain essentially flat. Meanwhile, health care and other costs are projected to rise.

The proposed property tax hike would amount to an extra $36 a year for the owner of a home valued for tax purposes at $150,000. The $6.2 million in revenue would be used to pay off debt from the Qwest Center Omaha.

Whether either tax is approved ultimately will be up to the City Council. Omahans will get their chance to weigh in during a public hearing Aug. 11.

Suttle includes some new spending in his 2010 budget, including restoring the public safety auditor's position, as he had promised to during the campaign, and buying 44 police cruisers. His plan also includes some cuts to help address an $11 million shortfall, such as closing Westwood Golf Course and spending less money on street resurfacing.

Council President Garry Gernandt has said in the past that the council would be cool to the notion of increasing taxes and wants to look for further spending cuts.

But Suttle warned of the consequences if the council fights the tax proposals. The city would not open any pools next summer, he said, and libraries could close as well. He said both possibilities would be “a gross mistake.”

“If the council says no, then we've got problems,” he said. “There's just no place else to go (for cuts).”

LISTEN, tax hikes are going to be unavoidable. Not unless you relish life in a city remarkably less "user friendly."

But I have problems with the tax Suttle seeks to implement -- an "entertainment tax." Such a levy has the potential to hurt a local industry (encompassing everything from sports franchises to restaurants to concert venues) that's already being buffeted by people's lack of discretionary income amid economic hard times.

Obviously, the mayor wants to impose a tax that won't hit everybody . . . and one that has maximum "soak the out-of-towners" potential. There's three problems with that, though.

First, would it cause people to attend even fewer shows, skip the ballgame or decide to eat in rather than eat out? Second, would it make Omaha hotels and restaurants less competitive for the tourist dollar? In this tough economy, do you really want to roll the dice on that one?

And third, fiscal experts looking at Omaha's tax structure have said the city already relies too heavily on sales-tax revenue. That's what has bitten the city in the rear during this present downturn. Do we really want to increase that dependence, particularly on something as regressive as a sales tax? After all, an "entertainment tax" is nothing more than a targeted sales tax.

Better to just take the hit straight up, no chaser. Raise property taxes enough to cover both the shortfall and the Qwest Center debt -- the hike still wouldn't be exorbitant.

Of course, there's one thing Suttle could do tomorrow without council approval. He could implement the occupation tax on the books since the recession of the early 1980s. Denver and Kansas City already have.

Maybe that's Suttle's last-resort ace in the hole with the council. Or maybe an occupation tax is what's going to stave off municipal bankruptcy in the looming fire-and-police pension implosion.

Stay tuned.

Reeling in the years. . . .

I've saved this old copy of the Baton Rouge State-Times -- carefully wrapped by my 8-year-old self in a garbage bag labeled "20th century" -- for 40 years now.

THE NEWS of July 22, 1969 reflects an undertaking of historic, transcendent wonder amid a world in chaos. At least people then had enough perspective to recognize wonder when they encountered it.

This probably was because the Internet -- and right-wing talk radio -- did not yet exist. If it did, the moon landing probably would have been roundly condemned as a budget-buster conceived by a member of the evil Kennedy clan, the youngest of which had just driven Mary Jo Kopechne off a bridge and into a watery grave near Martha's Vineyard, Mass.

THE LOUDEST dissenting voices probably would have been the parents of these yahoos in Delaware.

Of course, it's important to remember that the stupidity we find ourselves awash in these days is not the exclusive domain of the red-meat right. The left has its nuts, cranks and flakes, too, and they likewise have access to the Internet and other forms of mass media.

Like the ABC Television Network.

Verily, Whoopi Goldberg is proof positive that one can fall out of the stupid tree, hit every branch on the way down and still manage to cobble together a successful career in "entertainment."

I HOPE Walter Cronkite -- somehow, somewhere in the Great Beyond -- has some idea of how much he will be missed.

Greatness: Much cheaper than avarice

When I was two months and one day old -- May 25, 1961 -- President Kennedy declared that the United States would shoot for the moon. Literally.

The goal was unimaginably complex for all its stated simplicity. Kennedy declared the country should "commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

What American, in the midst of an existential struggle with the Soviet Union, could be against beating the Russkies to the moon? To achieving mankind's greatest feat?

A STORY TODAY by The Associated Press answers that question:

"I thought he was crazy," said Chris Kraft, when he heard Kennedy's speech about landing on the moon.

Kraft was head of Mission Control. He was the man responsible for guiding astronauts to orbit (which hadn't been done yet) and eventually to the moon. Kraft first heard about a mission to the moon when Kennedy made the speech.

"We saw that as Buck Rogers stuff, rather than reality that would be carried out in any time period that we were dealing with," Kraft recently told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Houston.

Less than three months later, Kraft was in the White House explaining to the president just how landing on the moon would be done. Kraft still didn't believe it would work.

"Too many unknowns," he said.

It was the Cold War and Russian Yuri Gagarin had just become the first man in space. Kennedy chose landing a man on the moon because experts told him it was the one space goal that was so distant and complicated at the time that the United States could catch up and pass the Soviet Union, Kennedy adviser Ted Sorensen said.

The idea in a world where American capitalism was pitted against Soviet communism on a daily basis was "to prove to the world which system was best, which one was the future," Sorensen said.

"It's not just the fact that the president wanted it done," Sorensen recalled. "It was the fact that we had a specific goal and a specific timetable."

In another speech, Kennedy famously said America would go to the moon and try other tasks "not because they were easy, but because they were hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."

They weren't just skills with rockets and slide rules. Bringing together countless aerospace companies, engineers, scientists, technicians, politicians and several NASA centers around the nation was a management challenge even more impressive than building the right type of rockets, said Smithsonian Institution space scholar Roger Launius.

And it cost money. The United States spent $25.4 billion on the Apollo program, which translates to nearly $150 billion in current dollars — less than the U.S. spent in both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007.

IN TODAY'S MONEY, it cost us $150 billion to figure out how to get to the moon and back, then actually get to the moon and back. Several times. That first moon landing, during the mission of Apollo 11, came 40 years ago today.

The greatest feat humanity has ever pulled off, to put it another way, cost 3.19 percent -- again, in today's dollars -- of what it has cost us so far to bail out this country's financial sector. The financial sector. it must be noted, that precipitated the worst economic crisis the world has endured since the Great Depression.

The Apollo program . . . $150,000,000,000.

Bailing out a bunch of Wall Street swells who, of late, have taken taxpayers' money and gone back to business as usual: $4,700,000,000,000.

I think that says about all there is to say about the kind of country we were 40 years ago -- and the kind of country we are now.

The Bob

What I love about Omaha is that if you can't find something to do on a nice summer Sunday evening, you just aren't trying very hard.

Yesterday, a picture perfect day just cried out for taking a leisurely stroll to Iowa. So the missus and I did . . . brand-new Nikon Coolpix camera in hand.

And thanks to the new Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge across the Missouri River, you now can walk from downtown Omaha to Council Bluffs, Iowa, without the hassle of drowning in the Muddy Mo or dodging big rigs on the I-480 bridge.

Plus, you have the extra, added advantage of some really nice views of the Omaha skyline from the Iowa side of the bridge. I've been told this is what Council Bluffs wants to be when it grows up.

Of course, some refuse to focus on the advantages of a peaceful walk to our neighboring state, as opposed to a hair-raising, traffic-dodging, legally questionable scamper across the river on the Interstate.

Or the whole sinking and drowning thing on the river, sans boat.

And I think I really like the new digital camera.

And that's the way he was. . . .

Uncle Walter is dead.

That's a big thing if, like me, you grew up in a city that had only two television stations -- either Walter Cronkite or Huntley-Brinkley -- in a time before cable. For the most part, ours was a Cronkite house.

And that's the way it was in network news.

I WASN'T yet three on Nov. 22, 1963, when Uncle Walter (above) told a nation its president had been murdered. But I can guarantee you I was watching, both from my dim memories of that day, and because Walter Cronkite's first CBS bulletins on the tragic events in Dallas interrupted the popular soap opera As the World Turns.

As the World Turns was my mother's "story."

When I learned of Cronkite's death, I was preparing the previous post, reveling again in his coverage of Neil Armstrong's first footsteps on the moon, just as the CBS anchor reveled in that moment. It somehow felt fitting that he would leave us now, 40 years after one of our -- and his -- finest hours.

I could go on but won't. It seems to me all you need to know about Mr. Cronkite -- assuming you are too young to remember him from his work and his ubiquitous television presence more than a generation ago -- is this:

In Sweden, television news anchormen are called Kronkiters. In the Netherlands, they are Cronkiters. And the American term "anchorman"? That was coined to describe Uncle Walter, "the most trusted man in America."

May God rest his soul.

Here's the story from The Associated Press:

Walter Cronkite, the premier TV anchorman of the U.S. networks’ golden age who reported a tumultuous time with reassuring authority and came to be called “the most trusted man in America,” died Friday. He was 92.

Cronkite’s longtime chief of staff, Marlene Adler, said Cronkite died at 7:42 p.m. at his Manhattan home surrounded by family. She said the cause of death was cerebral vascular disease.

Adler said, “I have to go now” before breaking down into what sounded like a sob. She said she had no further comment.

Cronkite was the face of the “CBS Evening News” from 1962 to 1981, when stories ranged from the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to racial and anti-war riots, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis.

(snip)

His 1968 editorial declaring the United States was “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam was seen by some as a turning point in U.S. opinion of the war. He also helped broker the 1977 invitation that took Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem, the breakthrough to Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel.

He followed the 1960s space race with open fascination, anchoring marathon broadcasts of major flights from the first suborbital shot to the first moon landing, exclaiming, “Look at those pictures, wow!” as Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon’s surface in 1969. In 1998, for CNN, he went back to Cape Canaveral to cover John Glenn’s return to space after 36 years.

“It is impossible to imagine CBS News, journalism or indeed America without Walter Cronkite,” CBS News president Sean McManus said in a statement. “More than just the best and most trusted anchor in history, he guided America through our crises, tragedies and also our victories and greatest moments.”

Man on the moon

If you don't hear this week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth, there's a good reason for that. There isn't one . . . but just for this week.

Instead of doing the Big Show, I'm on the moon. It's July 1969, and once again I am 8 1/2 years old. Walter Cronkite is delivering the big news on CBS -- if you have to ask what the big news is, something's wrong with you -- and I'm sitting in front of the big Magnavox console TV watching history.

Some say 1969 was a time of turmoil. It was.

BUT THANKS to men like Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins -- the crew of Apollo 11 -- it is easier for us children of the Space Age to remember the '60s as a time of wonder. Greatness is strapping an entire planet onto your Saturn V rocket and carrying it with you to another world, allowing us to transcend our baser instincts, overcome our petty squabbles and fears -- even if only for a week or so.

Compared to such magic, all the ugliness that is our earthly stock and trade couldn't stand a chance.

People say America's best days are behind her. That might be so; it probably is so. I was blessed, however, to live when they weren't. When Americans reached for the stars, and men made it to the moon.

We as a nation once did these things, and my generation always will hold the memory of them close to our hearts.

One of these things is much like the other. . . .

Alerted by neighbors complaining of the stench coming from the little white house with the unkempt yard at 2857 Ida St., Omaha police Sunday broke out a window to get inside.

Allowing a swarm of blowflies to get outside.

In a bathroom, officers found severely decomposed products of conception in a bathtub, along with instruments designed to dismember the remains for disposal. The biological material had been covered with kitty litter to absorb the stench.

As far as they could tell, medical examiners say, the body had not been cut apart.

The legs and arms, however, had been bound with duct tape.

If this grisly scene had taken place 15 miles south, at Dr. Leroy Carhart's clinic in Bellevue, Neb., it would have been just another day in the late-term abortion business.

If it had taken place 12 years earlier, Angela Manns would be seen as courageously exercising her constitutional right to "choose," and woe unto any busybody who would tell her what to do with her own body.

Or that of her child.

BUT THE GRISLY END of Angela Manns' little boy, Michael Belitz, didn't come 15 miles south and 12 years earlier. It came sometime after the boy -- described as a "genius" and a great kid by his principal -- finished sixth grade at Minne Lusa Elementary School. The potential of his life was cut off after 12 years out of the womb, instead of 20-odd weeks inside it.

Michael Belitz, the "product of conception" of a tryst between an alleged drunk and an alleged addict, never did make it to the College World Series with his best friend and his best friend's mom.

He never did get to spend another weekend with his father -- a man with a bad liver and past accusations of methamphetamine use -- who had re-entered the child's life and was trying to make the most of it.

And he never did get to graduate as valedictorian, or go to college, or get married, or have children.

MEANWHILE, neither is Angela Manns being hailed as an upholder of the right to control her own body, nor of the right to choose whether or not to be a mother. Prosecutors, in fact, are charging her with first-degree murder, and the county attorney is trying to decide whether to seek the death penalty.

If prosecutors are right and Manns did hatch and carry out a plan to kill her son, circumstances suggest it was the senseless act of a tormented and desperate woman. Going by what has been reported in the Omaha World-Herald, Angela Manns -- and by extension her son -- had a dire existence:

Interviews with Michael's family suggest that problems in his home life were apparent well before friends say they last saw him in mid-June.

Angela Manns — who was born Angela Arbogast on Feb. 8, 1963 — worked as a cashier at the University of Nebraska at Omaha from 1999 until 2007, and bought the white house at 2857 Ida St. in the summer of 2003.

Earlier, Manns had given up two children for adoption, including her oldest daughter, Carrie, when the child was 3, and a son at birth.

Manns kept a daughter, who now is a teenager, and Michael. According to court records, the daughter ran away from home in 2007 and eventually went to live with Carrie, now 28.

Carrie, who agreed to comment on the condition that she be identified only by her first name, reunited with Manns in 2006 and tried to maintain a relationship with her biological mother.

Carrie's family grew close to Manns' remaining two children.

“When we first met her, she seemed normal,” Carrie said of Manns. “But the more we got to know her, the more we didn't want to be around her.”

Manns avoided attending family get-togethers and often would stay up late into the night painting her living room, tearing up carpet or doing yardwork. She drank heavily and frequently lost her temper with the children.

Dirty dishes piled up in the sink, and the refrigerator and cupboards were mostly empty.
Her half-sister told Carrie that Manns woke her up one morning by beating her with a broomstick until it broke.

“Some days, she'd never get out of bed or she'd stay up for three or four days at a time,” Carrie said. “A lot of people only knew a part of her. ... If you were inside and with her for a day or two, you saw a whole different person.”

I GUESS YOU might say she had her reasons. Allegedly.

Then again, we all have our reasons for committing evil in the hope that good might come of it, right? We have our reasons, the abortionist has his reasons, and mothers have their reasons for passing a death sentence on the lives within . . . just like Manns apparently had for, authorities say, carrying out a death sentence on the child she bore 12 years ago.

A senseless murder? When does it ever make sense for a mother to choose death for her child? How does Michael Belitz' death make less sense than what Leroy Carhart does for a living -- less sense than the taking of any innocent life?

What is sensible about a culture that places the line between a constitutional right and homicide somewhere along the birth canal? That's not the reasoned application of civilized standards; that's the law of the wild, where the big critters kill and eat the little critters.

At least in the wild, the big critters can cite "got to eat to stay alive" as a reason. Not so for us. And we thought we had outgrown "might makes right."

The question at hand in River City is this: Ultimately, who is the victim of a societal double standard? Is it Michael Belitz? Or is it Angela Manns . . . allegedly?

WE OMAHANS live in a city, a state and a country where we have plenty of money and desire for McMansions, multiple automobiles, electronic gadgets and overpriced concert tickets but not enough money or civic will to operate a Department of Health and Human Services capable of protecting vulnerable children.

We Americans have run up a massive national debt not while making sure women have every reason to welcome their unborn children -- or not kill those already born -- but instead while . . . doing what, exactly? Fighting imperial wars of choice? Creating a land of senseless excess where the second-richest man in the world pays a lower income-tax rate than his secretary?

What kind of people, at long last, decide to tackle health-care reform but only if -- as a condition of expanding access to affordable treatment -- we can mandate federal funding for abortion?

One on side, we have "progressives" so enamored of death as a solution to the problems in women's lives that they insist on provisions that almost assuredly will doom the entire push for health-care reform. On the other, you have "pro-life" conservative activists railing against pro-abortion provisions in the House and Senate bills, mainly as a pretext for sinking a "socialist" scheme they wouldn't have backed anyway.

Despite how many "good reasons" for abortion that affordable, universal health care might eliminate.

But we all have our reasons -- Don't we? -- for embracing death as an answer for the problems of life.

If a jury finds that Angela Manns killed her little boy (for reasons that seemed really good to her at the time), let's not merely say, "Ah, because legal abortion exists, she. . . ." No, what we need to acknowledge is the evil deep in the crooked little heart of every man . . . and woman.

Evil that leads us to confuse principle with the sophistry candy-coating our desire to revert to the law of the jungle "in just this one instance." Because it's easier that way.

It was easier, at least so authorities suspect, for a disturbed and alcohol-addled woman to kill her son rather than straighten up and fly right. Than it would have been for her to call her eldest daughter and ask her to take on young Michael for a while.

Just like it's easier for us to have an under-resourced, beleagured social-services agency -- one where kids too often slip through the cracks and into the abyss -- than it is for us to commit the willpower and the funding to save the children.

For it is better for us that millions should die instead of our illusions, so that the consumer society may not perish.

So much for Crime Stoppers

Single? Female? Hot? Under 16?

For a good time, call 911.

Ask for the AIM handle of Omaha police officer David M. Kass. It has been credibly alleged by LaVista, Neb., police that he's the guy for gals too old for the Jonas Brothers but too young to remember Nirvana.

At least so says the Omaha World-Herald, which probably needs to devote a special online index to stories about OPD officers hanging out on the wrong side of the law:

An Omaha police officer was arrested Wednesday afternoon, accused by La Vista police of initiating a graphic online sexual conversation with a person authorities say he believed to be a 14-year-old girl. On the other end was actually a La Vista detective.

David M. Kass of Omaha was taken into custody after investigators served a search warrant on his home, according to the La Vista Police Department.

Police siezed [sic] Kass's computer. It will be forensically examined.

Specifically, Kass is accused of enticement by electronic communication device, a felony with a maximum sentence of five years in prison, a $10,000 fine, or both.

Kass 25, graduated from the Omaha police academy in fall 2006.

SIGH. On a less snarky note, I'd be really interested to see some research on the arrest numbers -- by year and then broken down by age for each year -- for various sex crimes.

It seems to me there's been a lot of arrests lately of pervs under 30. What I'd like to get a handle on is whether this has always been so, or whether a young-perv trend is something we all can look forward to for a generation raised on pornography.

How do you think John Daly got his start?

Carrie Nation and Billy Billie Sunday took their campaign against demon rum -- and demon whiskey . . . and demon beer -- to Nebraska's demon-regulating panel today, seeking to save unsuspecting Omaha children from possession by evil spirits somewhere between the water(ing hole) hazard and the big windmill.

AFTER ALL, it's a proven fact that kids can develop lifelong addiction from watching Mom and Dad have a cold one on the miniature-golf course. And, remember, today's plastered Putt-Putters are tomorrow's drunken golf-cart drivers.

As a matter of fact, the siren song of the liquor-soaked road to perdition is so strong that I had the overwhelming urge to climb into a bottle just reading this story in the Omaha World-Herald:

Officials with two groups opposed to teen-age drinking told the Nebraska Liquor Control Commission that while similar family-oriented businesses already have liquor licenses, giving one to the Boulder Creek Amusement Park would further risk mixing underage customers with grown-up alcohol.

"We need to send the message to our children that alcohol is not the center of all social life, and that we don't need alcohol to have a good time," said Susie Dugan of PRIDE Omaha Inc., a group that seeks to keep kids from using drugs and alcohol.

Dennis Schuett, a partner in the Boulder Creek mini-golf/batting cage complex near 142nd and S Streets in the Millard area, said he has been forced to seek a liquor license because competitors for corporate outings already have them.

UNFORTUNATELY, Miss Nation had the fairness under the law argument going against her here. So it was left to Rev. Sunday and her Plan B argument:

Schuett and his attorney, Mike Kelley of Omaha, cited the Pizza Machine, the Fun Plex, Skate Daze and Dave & Busters as similar, family-oriented amusement facilities that sell liquor in the Omaha area.

A representative of another group opposed to teen drinking, Diane Riibe of Project Extra Mile, told commissioners that while that was true, the bigger issue was the wisdom of allowing liquor licenses "on every corner of this state."

BECAUSE we all know that if we can only try Prohibition -- or at least some half-assed local imitation of it -- one more time, crime will vanish, men will quit beating their wives, teen sex will give way to Wednesday-night church, rehab centers can close their doors and no one will ever wreck a car again. Just like the nirvana we experienced from 1920 through 1933.

Just like raising the drinking age to 21 has eliminated binge drinking on college campuses everywhere. And the last high-school keg party took place when . . . 1985?

Fortunately, the commission voted to give Boulder Creek that liquor license. And frankly, I really could use that drink about now.

Government by flim-flammery

When a hurricane comes, you need to watch out for the snakes after it goes.

They'll be all over, displaced by the storm and by rising water. Usually, folks are careful around tarps or piles of debris, because you never know when you're going to grab hold of a cottonmouth, copperhead or water moccasin -- or, more accurately, when one's going to grab hold of you.

After Hurricane Katrina, at least one Army three-star added the Louisiana capitol to his list of reptilian hiding places.

One day in late September 2005, Lt. Gen Russel Honoré rang up Gov. Kathleen Blanco. The plan was to tell her his men had restored New Orleans' Charity Hospital to working order.

THE PLAN was to get the city's biggest hospital back serving a city where precious little of anything still worked.

What Honoré didn't plan on was falling into a pit of vipers with a plan of its own -- to shake down the federal taxpayer for every possible penny. And now Honoré, retired a year and a half, has a plan of his own -- he's spilling his guts and yelling "rat" . . . uh, "snakes" to The Associated Press:

"'Ma'am, we got the hospital clean, my people report ... if you want to use it,'" Honore recalled telling Blanco. "Her reply to me: 'Well general, we're not going to open it, we're working on a different plan.'"

Honore's revelation raises questions of whether state officials used Katrina as an excuse to leverage federal financing for a new public hospital.

It comes as state and federal officials continue squabbling over how badly the hospital was really damaged and how much federal recovery funding should be allocated to it.

The state wants $492 million for a new hospital to replace the Depression-era building as part of a proposed $1.2 billion medical complex. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has offered $150 million for repairs. The dispute is on appeal at FEMA headquarters.

Blanco said she could not remember the conversation with Honore. She said she didn't know the military had scrubbed Charity until she was contacted by the AP.

But she said Honore's comments struck her as out of context. "I would not have made that statement because I would not have the first idea of having other plans for Charity at that moment," Blanco said.

Honore suggested that money, not medical judgment, was at the heart of the decision.

"This is about business, man," Honore said. "This is about rich people making more money. This is not about providing health care."

AND WHILE LOUISIANA shuttered a perfectly functional teaching hospital and world-class trauma center, FEMA and doctors were stuck trying to turn an abandoned downtown shopping mall into an emergency room. Private hospitals were stuck with a tidal wave of sick, uninsured, poor people.

A city is stuck to this day with a critcal lack of health-care facilities.

One "reform" governor later, Louisianians are stuck -- still -- with the same ol' same ol', complete with all the pathologies and deprivations stemming from that deviant status quo.

And President Obama is stuck dealing with his own private Chechnya . . . a thinly veiled criminal enterprise on his southern flank masquerading as a governmental subdivision. Obama to Putin in Moscow last week: "So, Vlad, how did you squash the bastards again?"

HONORÉ, however, isn't the Army's only star-studded squealer. Gen. William Caldwell of the 82nd Airborne Division had something to tell the AP, too:

About 150 soldiers and a team of medical professionals worked to get the hospital running, Caldwell said.

Meanwhile, a German military team's pumps sucked water out of the basement. Air sampling found no contamination — a concern, considering the flooding and bodies in the flooded morgue, Caldwell said.

Caldwell recalled telling Honore the hospital was nearly ready to receive patients. "We were actually thinking of having a ribbon-cutting ceremony, give a thumbs up and turn it over to the health care professionals," Caldwell said.

But then, Caldwell said a decision came to stop the cleanup.

Dr. James Moises, a former Charity emergency room doctor who helped clean the hospital after Katrina, said Charity was made usable, and the medical staff was eager to see it back in use.

Moises said state officials used Katrina as an excuse to close Charity and ask FEMA for the money to build a new medical complex. Moises said: "It was their orchestrated plan. It was, 'How can we manipulate the disaster for institutional gains?'"

DAT'S LOOSIANA for you! Some of us were loathe to believe that our home state's pols, apparatchiks and business leaders could be that crooked in the wake of its greatest disaster ever.

Stupidly, we thought Charity really had been ruined, and that reopening it wasn't an option.

Naively, we thought that even Louisiana could resist using unspeakable tragedy as just another excuse for a shakedown -- an opportunity to trick unsuspecting American taxpayers into building geegaws to adorn its politicians' résumés.

We thought it was only right that the federal government rebuild what its flood-control negligence destroyed. And, indeed, the Army fixed Charity Hospital within a month.

It was good to go.

But that wasn't good enough for some in the Gret Stet. And officials were perfectly willing to let hapless New Orleanians die rather than go back what they had no problem using previously.

AND NOW Louisiana's new reform governor, Bobby Jindal, is happy to flim-flam the feds in the same manner as the unreformed Blanco.

In the face of state pols and hospital officials so vile -- a state so corrupted that it sacrifices its poor upon the altar of Greed as it seeks to pocket money from the collection plate -- the question suddenly isn't "How much do we pay Louisiana over Charity Hospital?"

Instead, the question Barack Obama and FEMA ought to be asking themselves is "What would Putin do?"

Dammit, the doctor told me to cuss!

F***ing-A! You damn well know this MSNBC report hits the son-of-a-b****ing nail on the f***ing head!

Peggy Loper doesn’t know why, but she’s sure that the rapid hissed repetition of her favorite expletive somehow dulls the pain when she’s hammered her thumb rather than the nail she’d aimed for.

“Generally I start swearing even before the pain actually registers,” says the 48-year-old student from Salem, N.J. “And usually, the ouch-ouch dance, where I’m hopping from foot to foot, goes along with it. People have told me that I should try deep breathing, but I personally prefer to swear.” The F-bomb is her curse word of choice; that hard consonant at the end is particularly satisfying, she explains.

As it turns out, Loper may be right. British scientists have shown that swear words can have a powerful pain-killing effect, according to a new study published in the journal NeuroReport.

The researchers originally thought that swearing would make pain worse by focusing a person’s attention on the injury and its implications. To prove their hypothesis, they set up an experiment with 67 college students.

The students were asked to plunge their hands into frigid 41-degree Fahrenheit water for as long as they could stand the pain. Half were told to repeat their favorite curse word while their hands were submerged. The other half were asked to repeat a neutral word describing a table, such as solid or brown, while keeping their hands under water. Then the whole experiment was repeated with the two groups switching types of word. (Favorite swear words were, as you might guess, the ones starting with "F" and "S." But since the subjects were British, the researchers also got an earful of "bollocks.")

SO, THERE. Honey, I'm not a white-trashy, vulgar, low-class person. I am just withstanding pain -- of both the physical and mental varieties -- in a rational, systematic and medically appropriate manner.

If you don't like what you hear when I've stubbed my toe (or have just gotten off the phone with my mother), remember that I'm just doing what needs to be done. So back the @#!$ off!