I begin the BLOG today with a picture of a place less than a mile from the location of yesterday's picture. Both the beautiful golf course in Mission Valley and the intersection of Interstate Highways 163 and 8 near my home belong to the people.  One, the golf course, is public property privately managed.  All of us may use it if we pay a fee.  That's fair.  The other is a public works project used regularly by millions of citizens.  It's not a toll road, so I drive on it almost every day without paying a fee each time I use it... because I helped pay for it when it was built, and I help pay for its maintenance  through a tax structure.  That's fair.  Some other people who use it only occasionally or never also helped pay for it.  If they are intelligent and reasonable, they don't complain because they know they benefit from public works projects which I may never use but which I support with my tax payments.  It's a bargain for all of us.  We all pay taxes. I am a thankful American.

Senator Eric Cantor’s solution to the economic problems of the poor is the same old song simply sung louder.  He said, “If you want money, go to work.”  Whaaaat?  What is it about the job market that he doesn’t get?  Has this leader of his party not noticed that there are as many Republicans as Democrats out there who can’t find jobs?  I’m guessing that just as many Republicans as Democrats are using food stamps to buy groceries.  Cantor’s remarks this morning along with Representative Paul Ryan’s insistence that he will not ever be in favor of raising any taxes... not ever... were reminders that a whole bunch of people in the Congress simply don’t get it.  Ryan said, “Not raising taxes has been my position for all of my career.”  It's unsettling to know that these men have been assigned key roles going into negotiations with other Republicans and with Democrats in Congress  to find a way to avoid letting the nation fall off the “fiscal cliff.”  

Coincidentally, after reading in the Los Angeles Times about the determination of Senator Cantor and Congressman Ryan to resist raising taxes on even the wealthiest Americans, I read that Orange County Republican leaders are shocked that any Latinos voted to elect Democrats.  Scott Baugh, chairman of the county’s Republican Party said that Latinos belong naturally to the GOP, citing a cultural emphasis on faith, family, education and the value of hard work.

O.K., O.K!  So that’s it?  The Republican leaders in the county just up the road from where I live are confused about which Americans value family, faith, education and hard work.  Let's take family values: Are Orange County conservatives implying that Democrats are the ones who are mainly at fault for the 55% divorce rate of marriages in the U.S.?  A statistic that is harder to verify is an estimate that 3/4 of the remaining 45%, at least at times, stay in unhappy marriages for the sake of children, finances, fear of being alone or simply too lazy or too busy to get involved in divorce.  I’m guessing Mr. Baugh and his committee believe that situation is also the fault of Democrats.  Don’t they know about Rush Limbaugh’s four marriages?  Didn’t somebody tell them that the third wife of Newt Gingrich, Calista Bisek, was his mistress while he was still married to wife number two?  John McLain was married to divorcee Carol Shepp before his marriage to his present wife, Cindy.  Don’t they know that the patron saint of the party, Ronald Reagan,  was married to actress Jane Wyman before he divorced her to marry another actress? Republican former-Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, fathered a child by a housekeeper in his home. Looking to role models like Donald Trump for examples of fidelity in marriage is too ludicrous to consider; but just to set the record straight, Trump is in his third marriage.  O.K., O.K.,  everybody in American knows about Bill Clinton’s blow job in the cloak room; and his wife (still his wife) Hillary Rodham Clinton was ridiculed by many for “standing by her man.”  Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi are favorite targets of derision by many Republicans who apparently haven’t bothered to notice that Nancy and Paul Pelosi have been married for 43 years and that Hillary and Bill Clinton are still a family.  Oh, yeah, now I remember... there was that sordid business with prostitutes by Governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in disgrace.  I’m not forgetting, and I’m embarrassed for him and sorry for his wife and family;  but I’ve noticed that there is little talk among the Rush Limbaugh crowd about the fact that his wife, Silda, made the decision to stay with him and work hard to keep their family together.  So... Let’s hear it, GOP, for the importance of family values. Let’s hear again why one of the party’s favorite lines is that allowing same sex couples to marry would be a threat to heterosexual marriages.  

Now...about the other three cultural emphases of the GOP:  Let’s begin with education. The education plank in GOP campaigns restates the old determination of the party to eliminate waste by cutting funding to education programs and to resist any suggestion that raising taxes would make it possible to keep nurses, librarians,  art and music teachers in schools, and to keep classes sizes down to manageable numbers, and to restore bus routes to make it easier for families to get their children to school. Local taxpayers associations typically speak for the Grand Old Party on the matter of what should be done to and for schools, and what they almost always say is that programs should be cut so taxes can be lowered.

I don’t even want to go into the faith issue because it dredges up not-so-pleasant reminders that some hard-line, fundamentalist Christians stay away from me and other “bleeding-heart liberals” because, I guess, we are considered to be faithless infidels. I hurry to say also that I have many wonderful, supportive friends and relatives who are not Democrats.  They have always accepted me in spite of my political persuasions and my BLOG rants.

The suggestion that the Republican Party is the party of workers and that the Democratic Party is made up of people who don’t like to work would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. My parents were Democrats. They worked hard, and I don’t remember ever hearing them complain about working.  Not because I had to do it for my family but because I was thrilled to be able to supplement a reasonable allowance, I took a part time job washing dished in a cafe after school when I was thirteen and in the eighth grade.  I worked in a department store restocking shelves  when I was fourteen.  It paid a little more than the dishwashing job, so I moved up. My family moved from Arkansas to California when I was in ninth grade. I worked weekends in springtime thinning peaches and apples, and all summer harvesting fruit and nuts, and on weekends in the winter pruning peach trees... until I got an after-school job in a grocery store when I was a senior in high school.  We weren’t a poor family, but my brothers and sisters worked, too, because our parents taught us to value the opportunities we had as Americans to work... to work and to become educated.  When I was in college, I worked.  After I retired at sixty from a job where I had worked for three decades with affluent people who had all the advantages America offers its citizens,  I took a job teaching in a secondary school in the poorest part of our city where I thought I’d do a pay-back year.  Instead of staying for just one year, I stayed in that teaching job for seven years, not because I had to do it but because what I was doing was worthwhile and because I liked doing it.  I was a Democrat.  It was work. I like work.

University Avenue belongs to all of us

and

a couple of apartment buildings at University 

and Park Boulevard provide subsidized housing 

for senior citizens with very low incomes

because all of us pay taxes to make such programs possible.