He had such promise. When he was blotto he was intolerable but on those rare occasions when he felt comfortable, he could be charming, funny and productive.

I remember him hitting my mother, having fist fights with his sister, who also was a drunk.

There were times when he was charming, engaging and smart, very smart.

He was a man of dreams but never had the ability to stay on task long enough to reap what he had sown.

There was this eight year period when he stopped drinking. He didn't go to AA. He stayed sober by working his ass off to pay my brothers way to John Carrol University.

He was a modern John Henry, trying to compete against the computers that were taking the skill out of the Tool and Di profession.

He finally got a shot at something big. He won a bid to make molds for aluminum casings for X-ray machines. He underbid and over promise but he worked like a man possessed. The tolerance was tight, less than .02 of a millimeter either way. He had to take the blueprints and then calculate by hand, no affordable calculators back then, what he was going to cut the next day.

He stopped drinking.

But when the company making these X-ray needed more molds to be made, they cut my dad out of the bidding process and so he was defeated.

Soon enough, he started to drink again. About three years later I was living with him. I was drinking hard then. I fooled myself that I wasn't an Alcoholic because I didn't drink to oblivion like my dad did night after night...

I got up one day to go to work and I saw my dad passed out on the floor. This was a crucial time in my life. When I came home that night I saw he was still on the floor. He had had a stroke. well, I drank that weekend and showed up to my job drunk. They sent me home and the next day I signed up for AA.

As soon as my dad recovered enough to go home, he started to drink again.

He died shortly after my wedding two years down the road.

I don't have many fond memories of my father but every now and then I am reminded of how he could be but chose not to be, if that makes any sense.

So happy fathers day to all of you dad's out there who take your role seriously but not too serious. Sometime it's just fine to enjoy being every sons first best friend.

Raising the cost of College by increasing the interest rates new students coming on line will charged, lets face it, for the bulk of their lives and Drilling baby Drilling so that we can push forward the implementation of clean energy when they can gain control of that as well.

This, to me at least, sounds like a recipe for disaster especially in a country that has become nothing more than a small number of money changers at the top while everything else for the rest of us 99% is stagnating or crumbling.

I went to this Church on the Rise here in Westlake, Ohio for over a few months, I wrote an on-line piece about the pastor and other church speakers going right up to the edge of non-partisan and stuck a toe or two over the line.

For instance, they would set up special political forums that were non-partisan in name only. There would be nothing but republican elected officials as well as GOP candidates. They never mentioned the political party but there were no democrats in any of the three or four "non-partisan" forums we attended.

These mega churches collect gobs of tax deductible "offerings" and pay their preachers hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary and percs, such as luxury cars for the church big wigs to motor around in because nothing says Jesus than cars that cost more than the shelters for the poor.

It sickens me. BTW, the UU church I was a board member also paid the pastor very well although we did not get into any political stuff. We did have democrats and republicans out to talk to the flock after services on Sundays. We did it as well just not as brazen or as pervasive.

Parsing out what is left of our democracy waiting for a dictator.

Remember twas the Roman Senate that was dysfunctional and impotent that let loose the 400 years of tyrants and megalomaniac strongmen.

Since it was in Cleveland, all the Irish were out and about. The event would take place the day after St. Paddy's day.

This was back in about the middle of the 90's. Can't remember the correct dates because, after a while, these events seem to bunch all together. This was also when the River Dance was coming to Cleveland every year in March.

So there are about 30 people sitting at the front table. I was sitting next to Chairman Demora and that is when the four little kids came out and started to do the Irish Dance where the backs are straight, the arms carefully kept stiffly on the sides while the legs were to let loose, with the aid of some clog like shoes so there was a rytheme that blended together as one beat helped on by and accordian player and a young girl at the piano.

But this was about the 15th variation on a themes and so there efforts were blendng in with all the other Irish dancing I had scene over the last month or so.

Anyway as it was winding up I turned to the Chairman and said I guess this was the Creek Dance and for some reason she started to talk and gasped out a few Creek Dance to those around us and it became a running joke for the next four years...

CBS this morning had the two women who created a documentary updating of 1968 CBS documentary on today....

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50142961n

It really is shocking at how hard it is for those of us who can't find a proper range of needed foods. Food Deserts are popping up all over America as mostly the poor, working classes have no meaningful access to fresh fruits and vegetables, only processed foods filed with empty calories.

This film pretty much proves that unfettered Free Enterprise can't provide the needs of the people. There is no viable profit model to serve the needs of those forced to live in these huge pockets of nutritional wastelands. Markets were not designed to provide a just allocation of resources. It's as simple as that.

What "free market" conservatives like Rep. Paul Ryan preach when confronted by stuff like this is to fall back on hoary bromides such as pull "themselves up by their bootstraps and just get to work." Same old crap Reagan promoted back in the 70's and 80's. It didn't help back then and obviously it isn't working now.

What bothers me the most about all of this is the only people on "our" side of the aisle who bring issues such as this are shuffled off to the side out of the way by those DC insiders who don't want to make waves on stunningly ignored social problems such as these food deserts.

How long ago was it that Nickel and Dimed in America was published and yet everything pointed out by Ms. Ehrenrech is still there and getting worse.

Christian Nation my fucking ass...

This seminal American Art Form binging all that we have dragged to this nation from every bit of the world that wanted something more out of life and splashed it all across the stage.

I can't pick out my favorite, but I would have to narrow it down to Across the Universe, West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof. All three of these are built on traditions smacking into the quickening fast change that was propelling everything and anything right here in the US of A.

But I have more, A Chorus Line, for one, that captures the love of art and what we do for love whether it be personal or with your craft.

And there are so many others that I love almost as much as I love these three that I watch whenever they come on the cable. Cabaret, the first M rated movie I saw. My babysitter took me to see it on a saturday afternoon when I was 12.

Then there is Showboat with it's defining the American Musical welding story to song completely,

Jesus Christ Superstar, the first rock and roll event that I saw way back in 1970 blew me away.

Two years ago I saw In the Heights and just loved it.

Camelot which capture the spirit of the Kennedy Administration and then Man of La Mancha came along.

Cleveland has refurbished a whole block of old theaters that were this close to be demoed. There are four large halls and a couple of small venues that bring six Broadway traveling shows each year and a whole lot of other stuff. It really is a gem.

I am lucky. I was able to see 20-25 Broadway plays as well as 20 of Shakespeare's plays, the last being MacBeth which, I believe, was the first I saw way back in 1968. Tom Hanks got his start in Show Business here in Cleveland when did a summer internship at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Fest and since 1965, the company has performed one tragedy and one of the more whimsical shows.

I grew up loving the theater which is probably why I was drawn to the greatest show of all, politics.

Say what you want about Cleveland but we have so much here that is top notched live entertainment that most other cities of the same side would love to have.

If you are looking for a vacation surrounding the arts, coming to Cleveland would be a great place to start looking. Live theater, World Class Restaurants, Professional Sports including Roller Derby, great museums, one of the best Orchestras in the world, the theater district, a great amusement park just a couple hours up the coast of Lake Erie, the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame and the Polka Hall of Fame.

Well, that's my rant for the day...

Catholic catechism.

There were many things that I questioned, being that I had already started to explore alternative faiths, stuff that was different from the rote religious experience that was offered by the churches in the Irish and Eastern European neighborhoods where I was raised. So I was skeptical at the onset.

She wanted me to be confirmed even though my parents had divorced and my mother thought that continuing a spiritual upbringing in spite of her being to suffer a de facto excommunication by the Vatican. She felt sure that I should not be tainted by her blasphemous action against god and church for kicking my alcoholic and abusive father to the curb.

Which, of course, of being sound mind, I thought the actions taken by the church against my mom was more than enough for me to walk away, thank you very much. But she wanted me to be confirmed so that I could be sanctioned into the Army of God in case there was a new Crusade against the heathens who control the Holy Land and I had been a problem child, I agreed.

But I never promised my mother that I would suffer the religious rhetoric gladly. So I girded my loins and attended in full ostentation and made it clear I was in attendance against my intellectual protest with the cock assurance only a 10th grader can have.

Now I had just finished studying Inherent the Wind in my 10th grade Honors English as well as reading the bible not as a spiritual exercise but as part of a literary exploration of where story telling developed which also included The Odyssey and The Iliad.

In the classroom, I challenged and compared in every single way I could. The poor woman trying to teach a class after doing what she did all day to earn her keep did not deserve my puffed up chest and posturing and questioning everything and anything.

Finally, she asked why I was bothering to attend the class if I was so dead against these matters of faith.

I told her about my mothers' situation after class and found out that she was in fact a nun who had left the order. She asked me to have my mother call her and she would talk to her about me.

Turns out the woman met with my mother and brought up annulments that were being given in other cities that had Cardinals that are more liberal. My mother had her first marriage annulled and was able to find peace with her faith.

Me, I never went back to those classes but maybe, just maybe, especially looking back from 40 years on, there was a divine spark that set the action leading up to my mother finding peace with her god

Just wondering, you know this corporation as people idea. If they are, well then all profits should be taxed after the fact 7.65% on the "Person" and then kick in the other 7.65% that the corporation, acting as a company, should pay the match.

Just wondering.

We can send them checks when they retire on the Cayman Islands and pay for all their medical costs. They can relax and hang out at the pool with the Limited Partnerships and S-Corporations. You know what they say about S-Corp, those little devils....

Ratings for most news shows have been tanking for decades. The only upticks have been when Fox adopted their bellicose stance against everything liberal.

But after this election, a funny thing happened on the way to the Sunday shows and that was the realization that maybe there was something about this recent election that might be worth looking at.

And sure enough, the ratings for Fox News started to drop while noted progressive talks show like Rachel Madow have found a base and have built a growing audience of people who want to hear more about what is really going on.

The truly epic election night meltdown of Karl Rove was proof that Fox News was nothing more than a partisan hack and the "moderates" had had enough.

The best part is the GOP has no idea how to fix the problem with the changing demographics. It seems they have adopted a double down posture and so we get overblown bullshit that turns the tragic deaths of Benghazi into a political talking point and the mindlessly grandstanding over Republican Hegel nomination for Defense Secretary.

In the end, have they no shame...