Culture

by

Tsutomu Yamaguchi

Tsutomu Yamaguchi who died on Monday was the only officially recognized survivor of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  He was 93.  There were an estimated 165 nijyuu hibakusha twice bombed persons but none of the others were recognized.

According to his obituary in the New York Times,

Mr. Yamaguchi, as a 29-year-old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was on a business trip in Hiroshima when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. He was getting off a streetcar when the “Little Boy” device detonated above Hiroshima.

Mr. Yamaguchi said he was less than 2 miles away from ground zero. His eardrums were ruptured and his upper torso was burned by the blast, which destroyed most of the city’s buildings and killed 80,000 people.

Mr. Yamaguchi spent the night in a Hiroshima bomb shelter and returned to his hometown of Nagasaki the following day, according to interviews he gave over the years. The second bomb, known as “Fat Man,” was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, killing 70,000 people there.

Mr. Yamaguchi was in his Nagasaki office, telling his boss about the Hiroshima blast, when “suddenly the same white light filled the room,” he said in an interview last March with The Independent newspaper.

…

“I could have died on either of those days,” Mr. Yamaguchi said in an August interview with the Mainichi Daily News. “Everything that follows is a bonus.”

This picture is from NPR.

1_Japan_Obit-Bomb_Victim.sff.jpg

In his later years, Mr. Yamaguchi began to speak out about the scourge of atomic weapons. He rarely gave interviews, but he wrote a memoir and was part of a 2006 documentary film about the double-bombing victims. He called for the abolition of nuclear weapons at a showing of the film at the United Nations that year.

At a lecture he gave in Nagasaki last June, Mr. Yamaguchi said he had written to President Obama about banning nuclear arms.

If Mr. Yamaguchi view his life after the bombings as a bonus, he spent his bonus well.

by

Palindromes and Palin-dromes

Yesterday was a palindrome date: 01/02/2010. 

According to the Boston Globe

Jan. 2, 2010, is the second such date out of 36 that occurs this millennium. The first was 10/02/2001.

Aziz Inan, a University of Portland electrical engineering professor, has been studying this phenomenon and speaks with great enthusiasm as he describes the history of palindrome dates.

Before 2001, he excitedly pointed out in an interview yesterday, the most recent was in 1380, since days of the month never exceed 31. The next date comes next year: 11/02/2011.

This reminded me of the contest that Alex Beam (Globe columnist) ran during the 2008 Presidential election.  Beam asked readers to send it Palin-dromes.  And, this being Boston, many did.  Here are some excerpts from various columns.

Serial palindromist George Lovely chips in, “Woe! Dawns Sarah harassn’ Wade. Ow!” where Wade refers to Roe v. Wade, of course. Alison Merrill sent in a serious candidate for world’s longest Palin-drome: ” ‘Ah! I made veep.’ – S.P. Moody? Baby? Doom? P.S. Peeved am I, ha!” In contrast, brevity is the soul of Ira Richler’s wit: “Peeve: Babe veep.”Bob Treitman sent me ” ‘Hey, did I harass?’ Sarah: ‘I did, yeh.’ ” From Hastings, in the United Kingdom, Paul Barlow put down the podger long enough to send in eight, repeat eight, vice-presidential palindromes! On McCain’s vice-presidential announcement, he writes, “Avid dog delivers reviled god-diva.” On Palin’s election as Alaska’a governor, “Hara! She won snow eh? Sarah?”

The Sarah Palin-dromes are still pouring in, so I haven’t chosen a contest winner yet. (A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same backward or forward, the classic example being “Madam, I’m Adam.”) Barry Duncan of Somerville, who has the word “palindromist” in his e-dress, sent in 11 Palin-dromes – “a reversible number,” as he points out. I certainly like, “Ha! Rash Sarah!” and “Media harass Sarah? Aid ’em!” Duncan invokes the palindromist’s motto – length isn’t everything – and then submits the astonishing: “Put up SP? Won’t I. Reviled to no. two? Veto VP, I. True! So Palin (a tundra-hard nut, a nil, a poseur) tip vote? Vow to not deliver it now. P.S. Put up!”Professor Stephen Morillo of Wabash College in Indiana co-authored a seemingly endless Palin-drome with Bob Binstock of Cambridge that rivals Duncan’s for length, but I can’t understand it. I get the beginning and the ending (“OK, now I rep U.S. . . . I’m super! I won! K.O.!”), but the middle seems opaque to me. Their shorter submission, which I do understand, has a major wire service passing judgment on McCain’s nominee: “Palin nil! – A.P.” Cindy Kumin sent me “P.S. Do go, ‘NO!’ on (O, God) S.P.” and John Cabot kicked in, “All I saw? Wasilla . . .” and “Party animal, am I? Nay, trap!”

As promised, I have chosen the winner of the Sarah Palin-drome contest. (A palindrome is a phrase that makes sense read forward and backward – e.g., “Madam, I’m Adam.”) Thanks to the music of the blogospheres, I received well over a hundred submissions from around the globe. Yet, much like those phony “nationwide” job searches, I found the winners close to home.

First runner-up: “Party boobytrap,” which is both brief and clever. Second runner-up: “Women veep’s peev’n ’em, ow,” from Northeastern University student Eric Greenberg. The winner of a used copy of “Huckleberry Finn” – a book that many have tried to ban from our nation’s libraries – George Lovely of Milton, for “Yo, sure hot, top spot to her? U.S. Oy!” Congratulations!

We end with an Obama palindrome – the only one that Beam published and probably the only one he got.

In a touching gesture of bipartisanship, Carl Saras, whose last name is a palindrome, offered up a piece of Latin erudition: “Obama amabo,” or “I will love Obama.”

I have a feeling that we will still be having fun with Sarah in 2010.

by

Making Mochi – Mochitsuki

Last night I made mochi.  This is an annual family thing going back to my earliest memories when my grandfather, father, at least one of my uncles and, I think some friends used to pound the rice by hand.  I remember my grandmother being very fast at turning.  Even when I graduated to being the turner, I could never be as fast.  Now we use a fancy machine.

Mochi Making the Old Fashioned Way

This is mochi making the old fashioned way – a lot of hard work and pounding. In the photograph, you can see two people working the glutinous rice. One person is pounding and the other person is turning and wetting the mochi. They are working in sync with each other – good teamwork! And just as well – otherwise one of them could get hurt!

This could have been my family!  We made so much that the rice was soaked in a clean washtub. My grandfather made these square wooden steamer boxes that stacked with a cover for the top one.  I think they were lined with cheese cloth.  Each was filled with one batch of high gluten (sweet) rice and the whole thing was placed over a large pot of boiling water.  My mother and grandmother would watch carefully and when the rice in the bottom box was ready it would be removed and rushed to the basement to be dumped in the usu which was a largish stone mortar which was kept warm. 

Two of the men would use long-handled (I remember them resting in a bucket of water between use) wooden mallets, kine, (also made by my grandfather) and begin gently mushing the rice around.  After the grains were beginning to stick together, they would start pounding with alternate swings.  When the grains of rice had just about disappeared, it was time for a single and a turner.

When it was done, it was turned out onto trays covered with corn starch.  After cooling and resting for a day, it was cut into squares.  Some was kept for New Year’s Day o-zoni.  This is a soup made with various vegetables with toasted squares of mochi.  Some was given away to people in the city (we lived on a small farm) for their New Year and some was frozen for later use. 

Part of one batch was always eaten fresh with small balls of it dropped into grated daikon radish flavored with lemon and soy sauce.  We always have friends over to share.

This little movie was made a couple of years ago and shows our machine (which streams and then kneads) at work. You can hear our family discussion in the background.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFsupnwNDWo

Happy New Year!

by

12 Days of Christmas

Stories about the 12 Days of Christmas seem to be everywhere this year – or maybe I just never noticed them before.

Clyde Haberman of the New York Times tried to purchase a partridge in a pear tree.  He found the pear tree with difficulty but had no success finding a live partridge.

…“We’ve got pear trees all over the city,” said Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner.They are the Bradford Callery variety, often called ornamental. Their fruit is tiny and inedible. But their white blossoms are appealing, and they usher in spring. They are so pretty, “they were overplanted for many, many years,” Ms. Watt said. “As foresters, we’re trying to achieve a balance of species and not have too many of one species.”

“We try to steer people away from pear trees,” she said, “which is not helping you in your quest.”

No, it isn’t, but that’s O.K. The city has nurseries. The trouble is that they tend not to have pear trees at this time of year, just when it has dawned on your true love to get cracking. “They would certainly be scarce at any urban garden center,” said Phil Tietz, a salesman at the Chelsea Garden Center, on 11th Avenue in Manhattan. His store was out.

So you have to poke around a bit. It’s doable.

And here is a picture of a pear tree.  Not quite the real thing, but pretty anyway.

The live partridge is a different story.

Much trickier is finding a partridge in the city — a live partridge, that is. Several bird shops were contacted on a lark. None sold partridges. “I don’t know anyone who does,” said Roz Gibson at Birdcamp, a store on East 53rd Street.

Some poultry shops carry them. Chinatown is always a good place to start. But those partridges are almost always, um, dead. Somehow, presenting a slaughtered bird doesn’t seem terribly Christmassy or romantic, unless maybe you’re going out with Tippi Hedren.

“You could just say it’s sleeping,” suggested Jeffrey Ruhalter, who owns Jeffrey’s Meat Market in the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side. Thanks, but no. Mr. Ruhalter had a few partridges in his freezer, but it is “very rare,” he said, that anyone buys them.

There are evidently a lot of small birds that are referred to as partridges and here is one.

And then there is this news from NPR:  If you bought all the items on the list it would cost you $72,000 this year.

Buying the 12 Days of Christmas for your true love will cost you 10 percent more this year. PNC Financial Services Group calculates that turtle doves and French hens were way up — mostly due to avian flu restricting shipments from France, and the high cost of fuel. Lords-a-leaping and ladies-dancing were a bargain: Few dancers got raises this year. Starting with a partridge in a pear tree, it all adds up to $72,000.

This is just for one complete set.  My husband insisted when he heard this story that you had to have 12 partridges in 12 pear trees, 22 turtle doves, 30 French hens, etc. since you repeat the entire song every day for the 12 days.  Don’t think I’m even getting one set this year!

by

Michelle as Catwoman

I know there is a lot of serious stuff to write about:  The war in Afganistand, the progress of the health care bill, the election tomorrow, people who expected instant change when President Obama was elected, etc. etc..  But when the the last time the First Lady donned a costume to greet trick or treaters at the White House?  I don’t think it has ever happened.

According to the White House Historical Association,  Tricia Nixon was probably the first to hold a Halloween party in the White House.  She invited kids to a party.  No mention of Tricia donning a costume.  The Fords and Carters linked Halloween to charitable giving to groups like UNICEF.  Bush 1 held an anti-drug youth rally int 1989.

This appears to be the first all out White House party.

 Michelle and Barack Obama hand out candy to trick or treaters.  Pictures from Politico.com

The first family members took to the front steps for about half an hour, passing out treats including White House M&Ms, a sweet dough butter cookie from the White House pastry shop and dried fruit (cherries, apricots, pears, apples and papayas).

 The children aged 6 to 14, some with younger siblings in tow, came from 11 area schools — five in the District, three in Maryland and three in Virginia chosen by the Department of Education. One toddle burst into tears upon seeing the president, who said “happy Halloween” to each child as they passed.

 Also out front, red and yellow butterflies inside giant bubbles, two giant orange and black eyes peering out from first-floor windows, a giant black spider and cobwebs hanging over the North Portico, walking “trees” on stilts. Also Star Wars and other characters handing out candy. Most of the characters came from theatrical groups, including the Red Moon Theater in Chicago and D.C. companies.

The President stuck with tradition:  No costume.  There was also a party inside.

Inside, a couple hundred military families and White House staffers and their children roamed the first floor of the White House as an old-fashioned turntable played actual albums. Among those making the scene were Robert “Lord Vader” Gibbs and son Ethan; and Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice as Goofy.

 As the pool was being ushered out, the president spoke briefly. He told the military families “We are so grateful to you,” especially those who are separated from family members. He thanked staffers and their children, at which point FLOTUS piped in, “They’re so cute!”

 “They’re adorable,” POTUS said, “as is, by the way, my wife — a very nice-looking Cat Woman.”

But almost topping the First Lady was press secretary, Robert Gibbs.

Robert Gibbs dressed as Star Wars' Darth Vader, while his son Ethan sported a Boba Fett costume.

by

The President as Nobel Laureate

I’ve been following all the stories about President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize.  From imagining what he said when told ( bad word is likely) to Maureen Dowd’s conversation between Bill Clinton and George W. to the calls to give it back to the hysteria on the right to the disbelief on the left and a lot in between.

President Obama reacted to receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in the White House Rose Garden on Friday morning.

This picture from the New York Times shows the President making his statement about winning:  He will go to Norway to accept and he will give the money to charity.  And, yes, he was just like the rest of us, surprised.

While conservatives rather predictably expressed disbelief and disparaged the prize and the president, there also are many Democrats and those on the left who were scratching their heads early this morning. Nearly all agree it’s a rather stunning award for someone who hasn’t been in the presidency even a year, coupled with two wars, an economic downside, the Iranian threat as well as the intractable Mideast problems.

Two of the most interesting comments the collected on the Caucus blog are from Robert Krebs and John McCain.

Several people pointed to an article by Robert Krebs in Foreign Policy magazine last July, in which he argued that the Nobel peace committee’s intentions are always partisan:

And for good reason: The Nobel Peace Prize’s aims are expressly political. The Nobel committee seeks to change the world through the prize’s very conferral, and, unlike its fellow prizes, the peace prize goes well beyond recognizing past accomplishments. As Francis Sejersted, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in the 1990s, once proudly admitted, “The prize … is not only for past achievement. … The committee also takes the possible positive effects of its choices into account [because] … Nobel wanted the prize to have political effects. Awarding a peace prize is, to put it bluntly, a political act.”

…

“Oh, I’m sure that the president is very honored to receive this award,” Mr. McCain said. “And Nobel Committee, I can’t divine all their intentions, but I think part of their decision-making was expectations. And I’m sure the president understands that he now has even more to live up to. But as Americans, we’re proud when our president receives an award of that prestigious category.

 ”But the best comment is from Calvin Trillin in his “Three Possible Explanations from the Nobel Committee”

Don’t be surprised. Don’t gasp. Don’t faint.
We’ve simply said, “George Bush he ain’t.”

The prize diplomacy can reap’ll
Prevent this guy from bombing people.

Since Henry Kissinger has won,
You know that this is all in fun.

Thank you, Calvin.

by

The Justice of the Peace Who Breaks the Law

I first read this story in the Boston Globe yesterday and was struck speechless with astonishment.  According to the AP story

 A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”

Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.

Which part of the story is most racist?  The refusal to marry interracial couples or the fact that he thinks he isn’t a racist because he lets black people use his bathroom – and is proud of both.  Bardwell is convinced that interracial marriages don’t last and they hurt the kids.

In 2007, MSNBC ran a story about interracial marriage that disproves most of what Bardwell believes. 

The charisma king of the 2008 presidential field. The world’s best golfer. The captain of the New York Yankees. Besides superstardom, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods and Derek Jeter have another common bond: Each is the child of an interracial marriage.For most of U.S. history, in most communities, such unions were taboo.

It was only 40 years ago — on June 12, 1967 — that the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down a Virginia statute barring whites from marrying nonwhites. The decision also overturned similar bans in 15 other states.

That case was Loving v. Virginia.  The couple in question had grown up in a small rural community in Virginia where the black and white children often associated with each other and were friends.  The Lovings had known each other since childhood. And despite all the frustrations and obstacles, their marriage lasted through their lifetimes.

Factoring in all racial combinations, Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld calculates that more than 7 percent of America’s 59 million married couples in 2005 were interracial, compared to less than 2 percent in 1970.Coupled with a steady flow of immigrants from all parts of the world, the surge of interracial marriages and multiracial children is producing a 21st century America more diverse than ever, with the potential to become less stratified by race.

Interracial marriage is not always an easy path.  My grandmothers both recognized that it was unlikely that either of their granddaughters would marry other Japanese  Americans and they were right.  Others of their generation went to great lengths to get their daughters to “marry in the race”, often without success.  One family I knew as a child moved from Philadelphia to California where there were more Japanese American men for their daughter to meet; she married a white sailor she met in San Diego.

What Justice of the Peace Bardwell does is not only unconstitutional, but according to Louisiana laws he is required to any couple who meets the requirements.

According to the clerk of court’s office, application for a marriage license must be made three days before the ceremony because there is a 72-hour waiting period. The applicants are asked if they have previously been married. If so, they must show how the marriage ended, such as divorce.

Other than that, all they need is a birth certificate and Social Security card
The license fee is $35, and the license must be signed by a Louisiana minister, justice of the peace or judge. The original is returned to the clerk’s office.

He claims to have denied only a few couples and when he does so refers them to another Justice of the Peace.  This is supposed to make it all right.

The couple who were denied, Beth Humphrey and Terence McKay, intend to file a discrimination complaint.  May they prevail and have a long and happy marriage.  May Justice of the Peace Bardwell retire very  soon.

by

Nan Robertson

I’m sure there will be many words written about Nan Robertson and her personal struggles with toxic shock and alcoholism, but I read today about her death with a tinge of sadness.  Nan Robertson is responsible for what may be my only appearance (other than as a comentator on blogs) in the New York Times.

It was Miami 1972.  I a proud McGovern delegate to the Democratic National Convention.  She stopped me as I was making my way onto the floor and asked if she could interview me for a story about what women were wearing at the convention.  Mind you, I’ve never been a fashionista, but I was young and flattered.   I don’t have the link to that old article, but I have a copy. (Page 48, July 12, 1972)

Maya Hasegawa, a 25-year-old, tiny delegate from Richmond, Va, had suited up in a tank top and pants, with sunglasses perched atop her glossy locks.  “I’ve been marching since I was 13 years old,” she said proudly, “I’ve been very active in the peace and civil rights movements.”

And there is a picture of me, too – a head shot.  Everyone I know was excited.  And she spelled my name correctly which made my family happy.

She didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize for writing that paragraph about me, she won for her New York Times Magazine article about toxic shock which she suffer in 1981 .

The article unsparingly described the author’s swift, brutal encounter with the illness, which resulted in the partial amputation of eight fingers:
I went dancing the night before in a black velvet Paris gown, on one of those evenings that was the glamour of New York epitomized. I was blissfully asleep at 3 A.M.

“Twenty-four hours later, I lay dying, my fingers and legs darkening with gangrene.”

But I admired her book The Girls in the Balcony most of all. 

Ms. Robertson, who after a grueling rehabilitation was able to resume her career, wrote two books. The first, “Getting Better: Inside Alcoholics Anonymous” (Morrow, 1988), was both a history of the organization and a narrative of the author’s recovery from alcoholism. The second, “The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and The New York Times” (Random House, 1992), was in part about the suit brought by female employees against the newspaper in 1974.

Reviewing “The Girls in the Balcony” in The New York Times Book Review, Arlie Russell Hochschild called it a “warm, salty, wisecracking book.”

…

In 1963, Ms. Robertson began a decade as a reporter in the Washington bureau of The Times, where, as she said in an interview many years later, her de facto job description was to cover the “first lady, her children and their dogs.” Her years in Washington would furnish her with the title of “The Girls in the Balcony,” a reference to the cramped, second-story space in the National Press Club to which female journalists were then relegated.

“The Girls in the Balcony” was an account of the events surrounding Elizabeth Boylan et al. v. The New York Times, a federal class-action suit filed on behalf of 550 women at The Times over inequities including pay, assignments and advancement. (Ms. Robertson was not among the seven named plaintiffs in the suit.) In 1978, the suit was settled out of court for $350,000, with The Times agreeing to an affirmative-action plan.

(Nan Robertson in 1982 at the Times.)

Nan Roberton may have been sent to cover fashion at the 1972 Convention and give me a monment of fame, but she will be remembered by me  for very much more than that.

by

Cameron Todd Willingham and the Death Penalty

I haven’t had the chance to read the article in the New Yorker Magazine by David Grann but Bob Herbert has written a powerful op-ed in today’s New York Times about Cameron Willingham’s execution by the State of Texas.

There is a long and remarkable article in the current New Yorker about a man who was executed in Texas in 2004 for deliberately setting a fire that killed his three small children. Rigorous scientific analysis has since shown that there was no evidence that the fire in a one-story, wood frame house in Corsicana was the result of arson, as the authorities had alleged.

In other words, it was an accident. No crime had occurred.

Cameron Todd Willingham, who refused to accept a guilty plea that would have spared his life, and who insisted until his last painful breath that he was innocent, had in fact been telling the truth all along.

…

The fire broke out on the morning of Dec. 23, 1991. Willingham was awakened by the cries of his 2-year-old daughter, Amber. Also in the house were his year-old twin girls, Karmon and Kameron. The family was poor, and Willingham’s wife, Stacy, had gone out to pick up a Christmas present for the children from the Salvation Army.

Willingham said he tried to rescue the kids but was driven back by smoke and flames. At one point his hair caught fire. As the heat intensified, the windows of the children’s room exploded and flames leapt out. Willingham, who was 23 at the time, had to be restrained and eventually handcuffed as he tried again to get into the room.

According to Grann and Herbert,  an incompetent arson investigator decided the fire was arson, witnesses decided that Willingham had not tried to rescue his children and there was a jailhouse snitch.   Herbert continues

Willingham was arrested and charged with capital murder.

When official suspicion fell on Willingham, eyewitness testimony began to change. Whereas initially he was described by neighbors as screaming and hysterical — “My babies are burning up!” — and desperate to have the children saved, he now was described as behaving oddly, and not having made enough of an effort to get to the girls.

And you could almost have guaranteed that a jailhouse snitch would emerge. They almost always do. This time his name was Johnny Webb, a jumpy individual with a lengthy arrest record who would later admit to being “mentally impaired” and on medication, and who had started taking illegal drugs at the age of 9.

The jury took barely an hour to return a guilty verdict, and Willingham was sentenced to death.

He remained on death row for 12 years, but it was only in the weeks leading up to his execution that convincing scientific evidence of his innocence began to emerge. A renowned scientist and arson investigator, Gerald Hurst, educated at Cambridge and widely recognized as a brilliant chemist, reviewed the evidence in the Willingham case and began systematically knocking down every indication of arson.

The authorities were unmoved. Willingham was executed by lethal injection on Feb. 17, 2004.

The fundamental problem with the death penalty is that you can’t take it back. 

Now comes a report on the case from another noted scientist, Craig Beyler, who was hired by a special commission, established by the state of Texas to investigate errors and misconduct in the handling of forensic evidence.

The report is devastating, the kind of disclosure that should send a tremor through one’s conscience. There was absolutely no scientific basis for determining that the fire was arson, said Beyler. No basis at all. He added that the state fire marshal who investigated the case and testified against Willingham “seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires.” He said the marshal’s approach seemed to lack “rational reasoning” and he likened it to the practices “of mystics or psychics.”

Cameron Todd Willingham was executed by the State of Texas on no evidence.  Who will pay for his death?

by

What I did on my vacation

If I were President Obama, I would have to write something like this “I was going on vacation but there was a hurricane so I was late.  Then my advisors said I had to make an announcement about reappointing the Fed Chairman.  Then one of my best friends died and I had to write his eulogy and attend the funeral.  All I really wanted to do was to spend a week more or less out of the public eye and hang out with the family and the dog, maybe some friends.  Oh, well.”

Obamas on Vacation

I think we should actually be concerned that the President didn’t really have a vacation.    Here the First Family is arriving, full of hope for a fun time. 

Barack Obama goes biking with his daughters.

Then one of the few times he did something fun in public, he got criticized for not wearing a helmut. 

We need to lighten up.  There is a happy medium between the, to my mind, excessive vacationing done by George W. Bush and Obama’s measly, not quite a week.  There is also a medium between Bill Clinton many public times when he was on the Vineyard and W. hiding on his ranch.

As Susan Jacoby wrotes in the introduction to her discussion blog in the Washington Post

Why would a president, having just had the delightful experience of speaking at town hall meetings to which some upstanding citizens saw fit to carry loaded guns, need a vacation with his wife and daughters? Incredibly, President Obama is being criticized by the political right for his decision to spend a few more days on vacation with his family at Camp David next week. Of course, no president is ever really on vacation; his day always begins with a lengthy national security briefing and he is always out of touch with advisers on important issues. In this case, the family’s five days on Martha’s Vineyard have already been shortened by the inevitable political and personal duties associated with the death of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. It seems to me that there is an ethical blindness about this country’s obsession with working—or appearing to work—24/7.

I, for one, an suspicious of anyone who never takes a vacation.  Everyone needs some time away from the world in which they reside most of the time – a different location, a different rhythm to the day, a new experience.  I just do not understand those who think that President Obama should not vacation while there is a deficit or whatever the person’s issue is. 

I hope the President enjoys his few days a Camp David this week despite his daily briefings.  Come back and we will tackle health care, Mr. President.  With a public option.