News notes

I didn’t get any sleep last Thanksgiving night.

And I was about as thankful as a person can be.

I won – I had to fight for it – the right to stay up all night with our newest grandchild for the second night of her life.

From about 10 a.m. to about 6 a.m., I held little Kaylee, walked her around the hospital floor, laid her on my lap and generally enjoyed every minute.

Our family has grown by three this fall.

We got a new grandson on the first day of the fall semester, a new granddaughter on Nov. 1, and another granddaughter the day before Thanksgiving.

All three babies and all three mothers came through in great health.

We only have three children, so it was a three-for-three fall. Our oldest, a daughter, and her husband had their third child and first daughter. Our second oldest, a son, and his wife had their second child, both girls. And our youngest, a son, and his wife had their first, a son.

Because one lives in New York and one in South Carolina, we had quite a fall of traveling. But it was worth it. And we were able to spend Thanksgiving weekend close to home; our daughter lives in Saline.

I’ve always wondered why some men think they’re too macho to participate in the birth process, helping with all the little details of nurturing a new life through those first days.

They don’t know what they’re missing.

I’m amazed at how many people seem to know what is inside Barack Obama’s head.

The problem is, most of them can’t be right, because he can’t possibly be as good/bad, radical/pragmatic, leftist/centrist, forthright/sneaky, etc., as people seem to think.

And I’m not just talking about the far left and far right folks who see the world through such colored glasses that they distort everything.

I’m talking about smart, thoughtful, politically aware folks – both Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives - who seem to think they have the president-elect all figured out.

Frankly, I haven’t the slightest idea what he’s going to do next. He doesn’t have enough of a track record – certainly when it comes to things like governing the free world - for any of us to have much of an idea.

From the moment he burst on the scene with “the speech,” he has talked about building a new kind of political style. One that emphasizes non-partisan support for improving the lives of regular Americans and a more collaborative approach to the rest of the world.

Of course, no one really believes what politicians say. And why should Obama be any different?

Maybe he isn’t. Maybe that was all just what he needed to say to get elected. 

But somehow this new guy on the block has managed to kindle a tiny bit of hope – at least in my mind – that maybe he really means what he has said. The few decisions he has made so far have done nothing to dim the hope.

Yet people will continue to see his actions through their own perspectives, and cynicism is strong in America.

A good example is my friend Mike Ingels, who blogs as the Erie Hiker. In a recent comment on this blog, he talked about how Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi have an arch-liberal agenda for America. Generally, Mike is pretty right-on with these kinds of things. But I don’t know where he got this one?

Most of the complaints I’ve heard so far about Obama’s cabinet choices are coming from liberals. He seems to be choosing, smart, experienced, realistic professionals who will help his administration make good decisions. And he seems to be willing to look to unusual places – like Hillary Clinton and the current leaders of the military – for some of his choices.

Of course, Mike may be right. But I hope he isn’t. I hope Barack Obama really is what he promised voters during that painfully long campaign – someone who isn’t tied to any of the old, tired ideologies.

Mike and I agree on one thing. It’s important for Obama to stand up to the left-wing of the Democratic party, and make sure Congress doesn’t follow an agenda that is out-of-touch with basic American values.

It seems obvious that wouldn’t be very smart politically. It would be the fastest way to swing the momentum back to the Republican Party, which right now is badly in need some some kind of help.

I ran across a blog post this morning that got me thinking about when you should trust a blog you’re not familiar with.

There are millions of bloggers, and it isn’t easy to sort out who is credible and who is interesting or fun or fascinating – but probably not believable.

The blog post, by Ellen Hume on the “Media Shift Idea Lab“ site,  warns of the many blogs that pretend to be regular folks but are actually paid by one political party or the other to write bad things about their opponents.

Yes, that happens. When a friend sends you a link to a blog that “reveals” bad things about John McCain or Barack Obama, it could very well be a paid attack ad masquerading as a citizen blogger.

Ms. Hume, who is director of the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT, has organized a group of students and others to ferret out and expose these phony bloggers.

What does this mean for the world of “BlogsMonroe.com.” Several of the blogs dip into politics from time to time – in a few cases, most of the time.

 I don’t think any of the bloggers on this site are paid by the presidential campaigns. They aren’t paid by anyone – they blog because they enjoy it.

But Ms. Hume’s underlying point is still relevant – you shouldn’t believe anything you read on the Internet without critically analyzing it first.

Like most people who spend time on the Internet, I’m developing a healthy distrust of everything I read. I use the Internet for knowledge - when I need information, Google is my friend. Answers to any question are at your fingertips.

But my radar is constantly searching for questionable facts, intended or unintended bias, obvious omissions, conclusions based on skewed logic – the whole range of reasons not to trust a Web site or a particular post.

As a journalist – in the world before the Internet – I naturally developed pretty good antennae for that purpose. People are always trying to influence news reporters, and you have to be wary of anything anyone tells you.

But I’ve found I need to use those antennae much more aggressively on the WWW.

I think Ms. Hume is doing the right thing organizing an effort to expose fraudulent political bloggers. But the real answer is for everyone who uses the Internet to develop good antennae – and use them to recognize bad information when they see it.

This is a story about how silly – or outrageous – transportation costs can be in America.

My wife, Kathy, and I needed to visit a friend in Boston. But we also wanted to see our granddaughter in New York.

And I had heard about the inexpensive Chinese buses from New York to Boston. I checked, and sure enough it was cheaper to fly to New York and ride the bus to Boston than to fly round trip from Detroit to Boston.

So, crazy at it seems, we flew Friday night to New York, enjoyed the evening with our son, his wife and daughter. Then we caught the 7 a.m. bus to Boston, returning to New York on the 5 p.m. bus. That gave us 5 1/2 hours in Beantown to visit our friend. We spent most of Sunday in New York, then flew home Sunday evening. Besides the planes and buses, we also road the subway in New York and a commuter train in Boston.

Planes, trains, buses and subways, all in three days.

Here’s the crazy part. Check out the prices:

One round-trip plane ticket Detroit to New York – $330.

One taxi ride from the airport to Prospect Park in Brooklyn – $30.

One subway ride from Brooklyn to Chinatown (about the same distance as the airport to Prospect Park) - $2.

One bus ride (4 1/2 hours) from New York to Boston – $15.

One train ride from downtown Boston to Needham in the suburbs – $4.75.

That’s right. It cost twice as much for a 20-minute taxi ride than for a 215-mile bus ride. You can ride the subway for miles for $2.

In case you’re wondering, the bus ride, on the Fang Wah bus line, was pleasant and uneventful. The bus left and arrived on time. There was a 15-minute rest stop halfway. It was clean and appeared to be safe.

That contrasts with the plane, which left 90 minutes late, spent another hour on the runway in New York waiting for a gate, was crowded and noisy and generally unpleasant, with an extra charge for anything and everything.

I may never have the occasion to ride the bus from New York to Boston again. But it’s a great bargain. As are New York subways and Boston commuter trains.

As for the plane flight – next time we’re driving. We’ve made the drive before. It’s nine hours from our doorstep to our son’s, and it costs about $150 in gas.  

With all the delays, it took us 8 hours to get to our son’s doorstep. That includes driving to the airport (arriving 90 minutes early, as recommended), and at the other end waiting in a long line for a taxi.

Let’s see: $720 (two round-trip plane tickets and two taxi fares) for an 8-hour trip filled with aggravation.

Or $150 (price of gas for the round trip) for a relatively pleasant 9-hour drive through the hills of northern Ohio and Pennsylvania.

In fairness, the plane trip can take as little as 4 hours if everything goes right, from doorstep to doorstep. But it doesn’t seem like everything goes right very often these days.

John McCain and Barack Obama have been claiming from the beginning that they would run a different kind of campaign – less partisan, less nasty, less in attack mode.

While there already has been plenty of attacking and more is likely to come, both have shown signs of holding to their word.

McCain’s classy ad congratulating Obama the night he accepted the Democratic nomination was an example.

Obama’s Labor Day speeches in Detroit and Monroe, when he set aside politics in deference to the hurricane hitting New Orleans, is another. Same kudos to McCain for throttling down the Republican convention during the hurricane.

And Obama struck another kinder and gentler note when he declined to discuss Sarah Palin’s daughter’s unwed pregnancy, declaring in no uncertain terms that family are off-limits and that no one from his staff will discuss the subject.

While I’m not so naive to think that attack ads won’t be used this fall, maybe this pair of candidates finally understands that Americans will respond positively to candidates who run clean campaigns.

I mentioned in the discussion following a recent blog post that I have personal reasons to feel queasy about the Bush administration’s saber rattling with Iran.

In late 2002 and early 2003, in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, I was torn over what I should say – either in my own column or on the newspaper’s editorial pages.

I should quickly add that I was not employed by The Monroe Evening News at the time. I was at the Zanesville, Ohio, Times Recorder.

My newspaper had endorsed George Bush for president and supported the invasion of Afghanistan. But I was convinced that attacking Iraq – without a plan for what we would do with the country once we conquered it – was a mistake.

As the inevitability of the attack grew near, I several times sat down to write about why I thought it was the wrong thing to do, both for moral reasons and as national policy.

I didn’t want America to lose the moral high ground by becoming the aggressor – the country that started a war. I grew up thinking of America as the white knight, the country that came in when needed to save the day. Invading Iraq just didn’t feel right.

Further, and more important, I didn’t think it would work. I thought it would just give radical Muslims another reason to hate us, and more ammunition to recruit. And there was the huge question of what would we do with Iraq once we drove Sadaam out?

But I didn’t write that column. I stayed silent. And I have regretted it over and over during the last five years. It’s not that my column would have changed the president’s mind. It probably wouldn’t have changed the mind of a dozen readers of my newspaper. But it would have mattered to me. I would have done what I could.

Now, I feel the deja vu. The president is rattling swords about Iran, just like five-plus years ago with Iraq. He’s trying to convince the world that this is a black and white issue – either Iran gives up its nuclear program or …. or what? Another invasion of a country we can’t hope to change? Another example of the United States as the biggest bully on the block?

I hope not. This time, anyway, I won’t stay silent.

In my view, U.S. policy on Iran makes no sense. The president says he won’t negotiate until Iran halts its nuclear enrichment program. He’s drawing a line in the sand and giving Iran only two choices – even though he knows that Iran is not going to allow itself to be bullied.

He’s marching down a path that can only lead to war. And that’s absolutely the wrong path.

Editorial Page Editor Tom Chulski and I discussed earlier this week the challenge of finding something for the editorial page each Memorial Day.

We’ve both been in the newspaper business more than three decades. That’s a lot of Memorial Days.

Yet because we’ve written dozens of editorials on the topic of why Memorial Day is important, that doesn’t make the holiday any less relevant. Each year it’s just as important as the year before.

And since we’re currently at war, the holiday takes on even more significance.

This year, the task was made easier by Carleton resident John Durbin, who sent us a timely and well-written guest column reminding people to put aside their picnic baskets and turn off their television sets long enough to celebrate the holiday. It will appear in Sunday’s Evening News.

Oh, and Monday there will be an editorial from The Evening News, celebrating the patriotic men and women who have sacrificed protecting our liberties and reminding all of us that we have a responsibility, too.

This weekend, I have lots of yard work to do. And a few games to watch on TV. And I’d like to see the Indiana Jones movie. And we’ll probably fit in some grilling.

But we’ll make sure we set aside some time to think about my father, who served in Europe in WWII, and my wife’s father, who served in the Pacific, and our nephew in Iraq, and several other friends with children in harms way serving their nation.

I’m wrapping up a family vacation that was a little different this time.

I’ve been on vacations with my family at the beach before. But this time three of the five women were pregnant.

My two sons’ wives are due next fall, as is my daughter. Our number of grandchildren will double, from three to six, between August and December. There is a sort of symmetry involved. Our oldest is having her third. The next oldest is having his second, and the youngest is going to be a daddy for the first time.

There were four generations gathered together, because my mother joined us, too.

So what made this vacation so different?

Unless you’ve experienced it in person, you have no idea how many details there are involved in pre-, during and post-birth that need to be discussed.

And some of the details are, well, fairly personal.

But when three pregnant women are related, and gathered with their mother/mother-in-law and grandmother/grandmother-in-law, there are few inhibitions holding back the details, which get discussed over and over again.

I’m not complaining. I learned a thing or two. 

And you know that saying about how pregnant women have a sort of glow about them.  It’s true.

All three of them were beautiful, radiating with the joy of new life. 

And for all the complaining about nauseau and cramps and restrictive diets, it was wonderful being part of their lives for a few days.

I’m doing some research on parenting Web sites, and that led me to this article on babble.com, a national parenting site, on exactly how detailed we should be in our parenting.

We’re planning a major makeover for our MonroeParent.com Web site and its companion print product, Monroe Parent. That’s what led me to look around other parenting sites.

The article mentioned above, by Katie Allison Granju, explores whether today’s parents have become too involved in every detail of their childrens’ lives.

She started the article talking about how our mothers lived in a world that “had become so narrowly focused on one facet of their lives — homemaking — that all the joy had been sucked right out of them.”

She goes on to wonder whether today’s mothers aren’t living in a world that is just as stressful, but for different reasons.

“We may no longer be “professional homemakers,” but whether we stay home with our kids, or work outside the home, we’ve turned parenting into its own, highly stressful, endlessly demanding, often joyless undertaking. In fact, a recent study by research group Public Agenda found that seventy-six percent of American parents describe raising kids today as “much harder” than it was during their own childhoods.

But are we making it a lot harder than it has to be? I think so.”

I agree.

One of the most important skills that parents needed in yesteryear and still need today is knowing when it’s okay to leave children alone to learn for themselves, to experience life on their own terms, to make mistakes and learn lessons the hard way.

Love them. Support them. Give them every opportunity you can. But let them live their own lives.

But then it’s easy for me to give parenting advice. It’s been seven years since my youngest son graduated from high school.

Footnote: Worse that parents who overmanage their kids are parents who don’t care enough to provide the support, encourgement, education, discipline, etc., that kids need.