It's Thanksgiving, Not Turkey Day

Perhaps it’s contradictory to the spirit of Thanksgiving, but every time I hear someone say “Happy Turkey Day!” I want to punch them in the gizzard.Newsflash: the name of the holiday is Thanksgiving, not Turkey Day. In fact, turkey wasn’t even the centerpiece of the meal at the first Thanksgiving, so cool it.Also, just for the record, I’m not really going to punch you in the gizzard if you call it Turkey Day. I’ll probably just send a scornful glance in your direction. And also for the record, I’m not entirely sure what a gizzard is, and whether humans have them. So if I was going to punch you, it may or may not have been in the gizzard, depending on where the gizzard is, and whether you have one to begin with it. Got it?Now, where was I? Oh, right. Turkey Day.The day isn’t Turkey Day. It’s Thanksgiving. I understand that turkey is the star of the show (and it’s a really big star—I mean we want it to be on our table so bad we take care of the turkey-sex part!), but we’re not celebrating the turkey.We’re celebrating Thanksgiving. It’s the one day of the year when we can all come together and show a little bit of gratitude for the greatness in our lives. Gratitude, remember that? Appreciating things you have. Taking a moment to sit back, relax, and think, “I’ve got a lot of good stuff in my life.”It’s great to be alive, and that’s what we’re celebrating on Thanksgiving. We’re alive, and we’ve got all of these awesome reasons to be happy about it.That’s much better than saying, “Turkey! It tastes good.”Besides, what kind of demented person celebrates an animal by eating it? (Although, as a side note, there are bison burgers available at the restaurant adjacent to the bison exhibit at Brookfield Zoo. That just seems wrong.)It’s a mystery to me how Happy Turkey Day ever got started. I mean Thanksgiving isn’t that difficult of a word to remember, and it actually has the same number of syllables as Turkey Day. So whomever the first numbskull was to actually say Happy Turkey Day must not have had anything to be thankful for.“Thanksgiving? I’m just here for the turkey!”I’m thankful I don’t have to spend Thanksgiving with that unappreciative ingrate. See, this Being Thankful thing is easy as pie. Everyone can think of one thing to be thankful for. Like family, friends, good health, time, memories, steak, chocolate, diamonds, money, sunshine, and Elvis Presley.To me, Thanksgiving is probably the most important holiday. I mean it really encompasses everything, including all of the other holidays. Sure we’ve set aside separate days to recognize certain things, but Thanksgiving provides a time for us to actually realize that we’re thankful for Jesus Christ, American Independence, trick-or-treating, a new year, and veterans, among other things.So let’s give the day its due, and refer to it as Thanksgiving instead of Turkey Day. We don’t assign nicknames to other holidays.Christmas isn’t Virgin Mary Had a Kid Day! Valentine’s Day isn’t Chocolate Day. Memorial Day isn’t Summer Kickoff Picnic Day. Even Labor Day retains its name, and most people don’t even think about Labor Day.(The Fourth of July breaks this rule, since the day is actually called Independence Day, but it doesn’t fit my argument here, so I’m going to pretend like it’s not even a thing, okay? Besides, the date’s wrong anyway. The Declaration of Independence was actually signed July 2, and not July 4, so there!)Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving and if you’re like other Americans you’ll eat some turkey. We eat sixteen pounds of the fowl every year, you know. I hope you enjoy the turkey. And the stuffing, and the cranberries, and the mashed potatoes and all the rest.But mostly I hope you take a moment to think about all you have to be thankful for. Because it’s great to be alive, and reflection upon that idea deserves its own day.And if you can’t think of anything else to be thankful for, just be thankful I’m not standing next to you, getting ready to punch you in the gizzard.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Hey, did you like reading this? If so, you should Share it on Facebook so you can bring joy to others. You can also find tons of other posts by me here. And you can like my Facebook page, Brett Baker Writes. Please.

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Zenithichron, A New Holiday to Celebrate Summer

August is begging for a holiday. The weather’s always nice, it’s 31 days long, and it’s smack dab in the middle of one of the longest holiday dry streaks of the year. By my calculations, there are only two months—June and August—that don’t have a holiday of their own. Unless you count Flag Day, which I don’t.Call me unpatriotic.June does have the first day of Summer, so at least it has something. But the only thing August has around here is the first day of school. What a crock!So my new holiday will take place the third Wednesday in August. It’s going to require a complete shutdown of society. And I don’t mean everything’s shut down except McDonald’s and the gas station on the corner that sells fried chicken. I mean everything. Unless someone might die if you don’t work, then you’re not working.It needs a name. Let’s call it Zenithichron, from zenith, meaning high point, and chron meaning time. The time of the highest point. It also sounds like some sort of Transformer, but ignore that.Zenithichron is the day when we celebrate the best part of the best season of the year, summer. The traditions are many, the fun is endless, and the memories are forever.Some of the injuries are, too.The day starts with the water balloon ambush. It’s a long tradition for each person in a household to try to be the first one out of bed after sunrise so they can awaken everyone else in the household with a ceremonial ice cold water balloon over the head. Alarm clocks are not allowed. Waking up before sunrise is not allowed.The first person awake and throwing water balloons wears the Zenithicrown for the day. This is a crown that has been passed down through families for generations and is only worn on Zenithichron. If it has been previously blessed by a Bulgarian grandmother it will hold great powers that cannot be spoken of here.After everyone sits down to the traditional breakfast of chocolate covered mashed potatoes and cucumber water, the eldest person in the family recounts the oral history of that family’s Zenithichron celebrations. The entire history should be strictly fact-based.The oral history should take most of the morning. If it concludes before eleven o’clock all members of the household should go to the front yard to relax in vinyl lawn chairs until eleven o’clock, at which time the parade begins.The Zenithichron parade is unique to each community. Tradition will dictate the path of the parade, but it shall be agreed that each household watch as the parade passes their house, and then join the parade at the end.When everyone in town has joined the parade, all citizens will then go to the nearest open field—probably a soccer field at the high school, or a farmer’s field left fallow for this express purpose—and pour a pint of milk down the shirt of the person next to them. The milk signifies a mother’s love, and reminds us that we are all children of Mother Earth.The milk offering concludes the formal communal activities. All citizens can then return home, get cleaned up, and spend the afternoon with friends and loved ones.It’s encouraged—although not required—to turn the afternoon into something reminiscent of Field Day in elementary school. Wheelbarrow races, sack races, egg and spoon races, and egg toss are just some of the activities suggested. If at all possible, adults who are not responsible for children shall have consumed a fair amount of alcohol before beginning the afternoon’s festivities.During the early evening hours, families and friends should once again congregate around the kitchen table for a short discussion in which they recount their favorite day of the summer. The person who has the least exciting favorite day is then chased out of the house by egg-wielding loved ones in an effort to spice up their memory of the summer.By sunset everyone will be pretty well exhausted, so it’s expected that a number of community bonfires will take place. S’mores will be eaten, ghost stories will be told, and everyone will give thanks for Zenithichron, the summer that has passed, and the dwindling days of summer that remain.Only 267 days until Zenithichron!This post was written as part of ChicagoNow's Blogapalooz-Hour, in which we're given a topic and challenged to write a post in one hour. Today's topic was to create a new holiday.Hey, did you like reading this? If so, you should Share it on Facebook so you can bring joy to others. You can also find tons of other posts by me here.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Like my Facebook page, Brett Baker Writes right now! Please.

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I Wish I Could Live my Kids' Dreams

I think that most of the world’s problems would probably go away if we could remember what it’s like to be a child.A child doesn’t know they’re supposed to hate. A child doesn’t know there are limitations on what they can do in their life. A child doesn’t know there are bad people in the world. A child doesn’t have all of those things that adults have that make adults truly dreadful people sometimes.I might over-quote my favorite band, Pearl Jam, on this blog, but here’s another absolutely perfect lyric: All that’s sacred, comes from youth.If we remembered what it was like to be a child, the world would be different in more ways than we can imagine. Some very particular problems that are in the news today wouldn’t exist. But perhaps the most thrilling experience would be if we could inhabit their dreams.I’m not talking about wanting to be President, or walking on the moon, or living in a house filled with M&M’s. I’m talking about the dreams that fill their head every night.As a father to four kids, I can tell you that kids dream about some absolutely crazy things. I love talking to my four-year-old daughter and asking her what she dreamed about. Sometimes she remembers and she relays the dreams to me, and they’re frequently so bizarre that it seems like she might have eaten some hallucinogenic jelly for breakfast.And those are just the dreams she remembers. Imagine the dreams she forgets!This morning she told me that she dreamed about Santa Claus bringing everyone presents. Okay, that’s normal enough. But she also had a bad dream last night, which she wasn’t going to mention until my wife asked her about it.The bad dream was about her brother eating bugs. No big deal, but it reminded me of a dream she had a few months ago in which the same brother had a third eye. The poor girl was traumatized by this dream to such an extent that she literally refused to look at her brother for the next few days. She still doesn’t want to be left alone in the bathroom when a bath towel with a three-eyed alien is hanging on the towel rack.When my oldest daughter was eight or nine years old she’d wake up an hour or two after going to bed, come downstairs, and stare at us, then start speaking gibberish. My wife and I would try to wake her, but often she would just stop talking, mutter something, and go back upstairs to sleep. In the morning she’d have no recollection of ever having gotten out of bed.Scary.A few years ago, when my youngest son was three or four years old, he told my wife and me that a guy came to see him in the middle of the night. We were a bit freaked out by that, so we asked him some more details. He said the guy would come and play in his room and they’d have a lot of fun. Then he’d go away, and come back the next night.What…The…Hell!A few days later he revealed to us that the guy who came to play at night was Jack Skellington, a character from The Nightmare Before Christmas. He mentioned Jack’s nighttime visits numerous times after that, but at some point they just petered out.About two months ago I went upstairs to check on my sons before I went to bed. They were sound asleep in their beds. I fixed the covers on my oldest son’s bed and he stirred a little bit, looked at me, and said, “What’s that? You want it to be quiet? Here, how about I give you some rattles?”I’m not sure, but I think my son just threatened to beat the crap out of me!I’d love to spend an evening in a place that produces the sort of nonsense my kids have exhibited. And yes, we all have weird dreams sometimes, but children have a unique perspective that’s forever gone once it’s lost.We often think that children have so much to learn, but maybe they’re actually smarter than we are. Adults complicate things. We think we know what’s best. We’re “wise.” But children just are. They exist to exist, just like everything else in the world.Except human adults.Hey, did you like reading this? If so, you should Share it on Facebook so you can bring joy to others. You can also find tons of other posts by me here.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++For lots of other dreamy things you should Like my Facebook page, Brett Baker Writes right now! Please.

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Hey Kids, Michelle Obama Didn't Make your School Lunch

It’s been about nineteen years since I was in high school, but things appear to have changed a little bit since then. When I was in school we just had regular women as our lunch ladies. Now, apparently, the First Lady of the United States prepares school lunches.That must be what the recent #ThanksMichelleObama hashtag trend on Twitter is about, right?Actually, no.In case you’ve missed it, the #ThanksMichelleObama hashtag involves high school students taking pictures of their puny, pitiful and disgusting school lunches and then adding the #ThanksMichelleObama.The implication, or maybe the assumption, is that the unsatisfactory lunches that these students are being served are a direct result of Michelle Obama’s support for stricter school lunch guidelines.I’ve never understood the criticism that Michelle Obama has received over the past few years in regard to her Let’s Move! intiative. The program has the stated goals of encouraging healthier foods in schools, better food labeling, and more physical activity for children.Who’s against those things, and what alternatives do they propose? Foods that have more sugar, salt and fat? Kids who move even less than they do now? Or are they saying that nothing should be done?The following anecdote provides just one example of the problem.At a Congressional hearing during the debate over whether to implement a school lunch program in 1945, a general in charge of the Selective Service (the military draft) said that forty percent of all draftees were turned away because they lacked proper nutrition. In other words, they were hungry.Today, according to the Department of Defense, the number one medical reason for which recruits are turned away from the armed forces is obesity. Dozens of retired generals and admirals recently submitted a letter that called American kids “too fat to fight.”So obviously malnutrition is still a problem for American children, only the “mal,” or bad, part of the word refers to the overabundance of crappy food children eat, instead of not getting enough food, as was the case in 1945.Something obviously needs to be done.And since one-third of a child’s meals are eaten at school, it makes sense to try and make school lunches healthier. As part of Let’s Move!, Michelle Obama endorsed new guidelines for healthier school lunches that were proposed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.I know that some high school students might not have taken a government class yet, so let me explain that the First Lady of the United States does not pass laws. The United States Congress passes laws, and then the President signs them. So the First Lady can want something until she’s blue in the face, but nothing’s going to happen until the actual decision makers make it happen.The decision makers passed new guidelines that called for a reduction in the amount of salt in foods, and required more fruits and vegetables to be served, and eliminated sugary drinks.Of course these ideas ran into opposition, mostly from the big agribusiness companies who’ve made billions of dollars over the decades serving salty, fatty, processed foods that are slowly killing our children. These are the same folks who managed to get pizza to count as a full serving of vegetables because two tablespoons of tomato paste weren’t counted as two tablespoons of tomato paste, but rather as eight tablespoons of tomatoes, because they’d once been tomatoes.And how do these businesses make so much money? Because the U.S. government subsidizes their operations—through things like corn subsidies, which allow them to make all sorts of “food” from corn, while also providing cheap, unnatural feed to cows so they can get fatter quicker, and we can have cheap meat.So if we’re paying these companies to make food that is being sold in our schools and killing our children, then why don’t we just stop doing that? Good question, and I don’t have the answer.But improving the school lunch program is one step in the right direction. Requiring school lunches to contain actual healthy, whole, fresh food may be a tough sell to kids, but we can’t just say, “Forget it, let’s keep feeding them crap.”I’m off topic here though. Back to Michelle Obama and the kids tweeting pictures of their gross school lunches.I have a message for you, my dear young lads and lasses, Michelle Obama didn’t make your gross lunch. Your lunch was made by some nice ladies (very few men work in school cafeterias), who are doing their best, but don’t have the training, the resources or the money to implement the healthy lunch guidelines.And by the way, let’s get away from calling it hot lunch also. Better to call it fresh lunch. There’s a much better chance of getting a healthy, tasty, satisfying lunch if we focused more on fresh ingredients, rather than hot ingredients. And those schools that don’t have gourmet kitchens would have no problem concocting fresh lunches.So before you add to the #ThanksMichelleObama craze, think about two things.One, people have been complaining about school lunches almost since school lunches began. It’s not like school lunches were culinary delights until Michelle Obama came in and ruined everything. When I was in high school people had all sorts of wild speculation about school lunches.Two, you immediately lose the right to call any food “disgusting” or “gross” or “mystery mush” when you go through the Taco Bell drive-thru on Friday night, gorge yourself, and like it.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++For something that's sure to leave you satisfied, and likely won't kill you, Like my Facebook page, Brett Baker Writes right now! Please.

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How Did I Become a Beer Snob?

I was the rare high school student who literally never had even one drop of alcohol. I’m talking nothing. No beer with friends, no quick swig from a bottle of vodka, not even a taste of Purple Passion. Nothing.I didn’t start drinking until I turned twenty-one, and even then I didn’t really like the taste of beer. I drank it from time-to-time, but mostly I shied away from it.Then, before we got married, my wife and I were at our favorite pizza place in Michigan, and we ordered a pitcher of Miller Lite. Something changed in my brain that day and the Miller Lite tasted good.From then on Miller Lite and I became friends. We shared some good times, good food and good memories. All was well. I didn’t even spend any time going back and forth in the never-ending “Tastes Great, Less Filling” fight. Both were fine to me, so why choose?And then a few months back, I opened up a bottle of Miller Lite. I wanted a beer, it was cold, and I put the bottle to my lips expecting a little taste of pleasure.But it tasted gross.What? Gross? That’s not right. Miller Lite’s not supposed to taste gross. I mean we’d been friends for more than a decade. In my beer cap collection Miller Lite reigns supreme. I liked it so much I even cut them a break when they insulted my intelligence by trying to tell me that some grooves in the neck of their bottle created a vortex that made the beer pour and taste better.But taste buds don’t lie.In the past few months I’ve come to the conclusion that Miller Lite no longer tastes great because I’ve become a beer snob.I’m not happy about this. Snobbery has always been repulsive to me, and becoming a pretentious beer drinker makes me almost as sick as cheap beer. In the not-too-distant past I would have rolled my eyes if someone said they didn’t like to drink mass-produced beer.That’s where I am now though.When my wife and I talk about drinking beer, we talk about things that I’d never even thought of before, and use words that I never even knew before. Actually, I’m not even sure I know what they mean now, but I act like I do!Hoppy, stout, porter, ales, ambers, IPA, wheat. Whatever. I drink it, and if I like it, I drink it some more. Unfortunately, lately I’ve discovered that I’m more likely to want some more of it if it’s an expensive craft beer with a whimsical, or tough, or ironic name that has nothing to do with beer.I’m not going to be a jerk about this though. I mean if I come to your house and you offer me a beer and all you have is Miller Lite, or Coors, or even Pabst Blue Ribbon, I’m not going to turn my nose and say, “I’m sorry m’lord, I don’t drink that commoner beer.”I’ll pop off that cap and drink it down. No need to worry.And the maddening thing about this is that if I ate food that had the same bitterness that I enjoy so much in some beer, I’d spit it out and think someone was trying to poison me. Bitter is bad. That’s what I’ve thought my entire life.And now all of the sudden I’m asking for bitterness in my beer? Oh, and while you’re at it throw in a hint of cinnamon, pasilla chiles and cloves, too. That doesn’t even sound good. It probably is though. And sure, I’ll pay three times the cost of Miller Lite for that weird beer concoction.Let’s not get carried away though. Yeah, I like fancy beer, and yeah, I’ve turned my back on Miller Lite, but it’s just beer. It’s not life or death. The only thing more annoying than someone who’s pretentious about their beer is someone who’s super pretentious about their beer.So if you ever hear me refuse to drink a beer because the hops weren’t grown in the right state, or the color appeared a shade off, or it wasn’t served in the right glass, then please, pour a beer over my head.I’ll deserve it.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Don't be a Blog Snob. Like my Facebook page, Brett Baker Writes right now! Please.

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The Red Cross Really Wants my Blood

I wish the American Red Cross would quit calling me. They’re like that dude you were friends with twenty years ago just because he didn't have any other friends, but he still calls just to let you know he’s still around. “Oh, and by the way, if you’re not doing anything two weeks from Tuesday maybe you’d like to stop by!”No, American Red Cross, I would not like to stop by.It all began out of the kindness of my heart. Sort of like the friendship with that dude. I like to help people and when I found out that donating one pint of blood can help save three lives, I thought, “Hell yes, sign me up!”I mean who doesn’t want to help save some lives? As if giving life weren’t incentive enough, they also let me stuff my face with cookies and orange juice afterward so I don’t pass out. And then they give me a coupon for a free pint of ice cream.Are you serious? Can I give a pint of blood everyday?Unfortunately, no, I can’t. Apparently it takes eight weeks for the human body to replenish that pint of blood. So you have to wait eight weeks until you can donate again. At first I was sort of bummed about that. I wanted all-you-can-eat Nutter Butters again! Uh, I mean, I wanted to save three more lives.But soon it became clear that those eight weeks are more a period of blissful silence than anything else.The American Red Cross is smart, then relentless. They’re like patient lions watching a herd of zebra, just waiting for the right time to attack. They’re not going to waste their time calling you for those eight weeks because you’re no good to them. But as soon as eight weeks pass and you haven’t made an appointment to donate again, look out because your phone starts ringing off the hook!At first, I didn’t mind the calls. I’d talk to volunteer on the other end of the line, listen to what they had to say, try to find a donation appointment that fit my schedule. Inevitably, there aren’t any blood drives scheduled during hours that working people can actually attend. So I explain that I’ll check my schedule and call them back.Of course I never do, partly because I just never get around to it, but mostly because they don’t give me a chance! The phone rings the next day and another volunteer goes through the same spiel. “I just talked to someone about this yesterday. None of these times work for me.”“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Baker. Call us when you find a time that will work.”Not even twenty-four hours later, I see American Red Cross on the caller ID again. These people really want my blood. It’s like Dracula’s running things over there.Thankfully caller ID exists, so now I’ve reached the point that whenever I see American Red Cross calling I just endure four rings and then I don’t have to worry about it for another day.Things have really been getting out of hand lately, though. A few months back my do-gooder spirit transferred to my wife and daughter, and they gave blood. Since they haven’t made another donation appointment, the Red Cross is calling them as well. The lion has a couple more zebras.The Red Cross is a phenomenal organization, and they do a great job of helping people in need, but right now they can be most helpful by leaving me the hell alone!Look, I know that it’s more likely that I’ll actually make an appointment to donate blood if they call and badger me about it. But I also know that when it comes to donating blood, appointments mean nothing. You don’t get in and out of the donation center any faster than you do if you just walk in without an appointment.And if I don’t make an appointment I don’t have to worry about breaking the appointment and feel like I let anybody down.At some point I’ll go back in and donate more blood and eat more cookies. And although I’ll be super-psyched about saving three more lives, I might be even more psyched about the eight weeks of Red Cross phone silence.That will be bloody fantastic!UPDATE 11/24/14: I began working on this post about six weeks ago. After it went live my wife said, "I told them back in October not to call us anymore, that we'd call them, and they haven't called since." Then I thought about it, and my wife was right. I hadn't received any calls from the Red Cross in about four weeks. And then, a nice woman from the Red Cross e-mailed me this afternoon to apologize for the abundance of phone calls, and said she'd add me to their Do Not Call list. So apparently someone at the Red Cross saw this post.I'm impressed! It's that kind of lightning-quick response time that makes the Red Cross so effective. In fact, I'm so impressed that I'll be donating blood on December 2, during the blood drive at the community center near my house. Well done Red Cross!+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++I don't want to have to call and pester you, so you better Like my Facebook page, Brett Baker Writes. Please.

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Turkey Facts to Amaze Your Guests

Lately I’ve been thinking about Thanksgiving pretty much non-stop. With the help of my four-year-old daughter, I’ve already baked and frozen some dinner rolls, my wife and I have discussed the menu, and I’m watching my calories so I can have some guilt-free revelry next week.I can practically already taste the sweet potatoes, stuffing, roasted vegetables, cranberry sauce, and of course, the turkey! Since it’s the only food that pretty much everyone in the country—maybe even my vegetarian wife—consumes on the same day, and since you’re hopefully dining with other people, I figured I’d offer up a few facts about turkeys that you can use to amaze your fellow Thanksgiving diners.Don’t worry, these aren’t the sort of questionable, made-up “facts” that are often passed around on the internet. I’ve researched every single one of them, and they come from reputable turkeys, I mean people.--Almost every single turkey produced in the United States is the product of artificial insemination. Why? Because we like our turkeys to be like Dolly Parton! Back in the 1950s traditional turkeys were pushed out of agriculture by turkeys with larger breasts, and thus more breast meat. And in the years since, turkey breasts have become so large that male and female turkeys cannot physically mate.So in a very labor-intensive process, humans have to “acquire” the tom turkey’s contribution, and then inseminate each female hen turkey.No word on whether they use a turkey baster to do so.--Male tom turkeys gobble to attract females for mating in the spring. Imagine their disappointment when they discover the little tidbit above. Female hen turkeys do not gobble.--A turkey’s gobble can be heard up to a mile away on a quiet day. His disappointment after failing to mate can be heard from ten miles away. (Okay, I made up that last part.)--According to the National Turkey Federation (yes, that actually exists), Americans eat about 16 pounds of turkey per person, every year. Now, I like turkey, but with the exception of the occasional deli sandwich, I only eat turkey on Thanksgiving. I don’t think I eat 16 pounds of it though. So either those numbers are inflated, or somebody’s eating 30 pounds of turkey every year to make up for the 2 pounds that I eat.--Although commercially-raised turkeys cannot fly, wild turkeys can fly. They usually stay on the ground looking for food, so people assume they can’t fly, but they can actually reach flying speeds of 55 miles per hour. So Mr. Carlson was right, he just needed wild turkeys instead of commercially-raised turkeys.--Commercial turkeys have been bred to have white feathers because those feathers don’t leave spots on the turkey’s skin when plucked.--Contrary to a popular urban legend, turkeys are not so dumb that they’ll look straight above them in a rainstorm, and become so mesmerized by raindrops falling from the sky that they’ll drown.--Spatchcock refers to the technique of splitting open a turkey, removing the backbone, and cooking it flat on a pan. It cooks faster that way. I don’t really care about the technique, but the word is awesome. I’m definitely going to work it into some conversations. The person I’m talking to will probably think I’m either threatening them or cussing at them. Either way, I’ll be entertained.--Again, contrary to popular urban legend, Ben Franklin did NOT think that the turkey would make a better national bird than the eagle. The confusion stems from a humorous letter he wrote to his daughter in which he wished “the bald eagle had not been chosen as the Representative of our Country.” He goes on to call the turkey a “much more respectable bird” and an “original Native of America.”But when read in context, Franklin wasn’t advocating that the turkey be our national bird, but rather mocking people who complained that the eagle in the first Seal of the United States looked more like a turkey than an eagle.Okay, too much turkey talk. Time for a nap. (Myth.)+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Don't be a turkey, Like my Facebook page, Brett Baker Writes. Please.

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The President's Immigration Actions, and Our Response to Them

Immigration has been a difficult subject in the United States for a long time. Even before 1776 there were endless questions of how to protect borders. Just ask the Native Americans.Over the past few hundred years we’ve had various laws designed to limit immigration of a variety of people. Among them: Chinese, Southern Europeans, Russians, low-skilled immigrants, Filipinos, and communists. Then, in 1965 Congress did away with quotas based on national origin, leaving us with the system we have today, which emphasizes skills and family relationships.Of course that wasn’t the end of the immigration discussion in the United States, which is why the issue is in the news again today.The President, without approval from Congress, has unilaterally taken the following actions:--Revised interpretation of a law so that people who were in the United States illegally, and then left the U.S., and then used fraudulent documents to re-enter the U.S. would still be covered under the law, even though the law requires them to have never left the U.S.--Eased the rules for illegal immigrants who are seeking asylum so that they will not be deported if they have a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country, instead of proof of a clear probability of persecution.--Relaxed the deadline for when employers must verify identification documents for new employees to three days after hiring, instead of within 24 hours, as stated by law.--Issued rules that expansively interpret a law’s description of “perishable commodities” to include tobacco and Christmas trees to cover additional workers, beyond the intended limits of the law’s authors.--Issued new rules that permit illegal immigrants to remain in the United States if they have a spouse or child who is otherwise safe from deportation.Just to review, the President (whose Constitutional responsibility is to execute laws) unilaterally reinterpreted these laws from what Congress (whose Constitutional responsibility is to make laws) intended.Now, before you get caught up in the fury that’s all over the news today in which one Senator warns that the President is “provoking a Constitutional crisis” and that his action is “unconstitutional and illegal,” while another Senator threatens that people upset by the new rules might revert to “violence” and “anarchy,” there’s something you should know.All of the steps above were taken by Ronald Reagan.But wait a minute, if the President changed the enforcement of laws without approval of Congress why wasn’t he impeached? Why didn’t the country fall apart? Why wasn’t there a Constitutional crisis?Because the steps that President Reagan took in 1987, and the steps that President Obama is announcing tonight, are perfectly within the powers of the President of the United States.The Washington Post has an interesting tidbit about how the President has the power to limit deportations under the idea known as prosecutorial discretion. Basically, it means law enforcement officers choose which laws to enforce and how often to enforce them. Similar to how a police officer doesn’t get in trouble for not giving a ticket to every single car breaking the speed limit.The Lawfare blog examines the statute and finds that it doesn’t actually say the President MUST deport anyone.So if a previous President (the darling of so many Tea Party conservatives who are now up in arms no less!) took similar actions, and the current President is backed by sound legal theory, and, perhaps, the actual text of the relevant law, why are so many elected officials and their constituents raising such a ruckus?The sad truth is that it’s just easier.It’s easier to cry out, “He thinks he’s king!” than to point to the fact that he has the authority to do what he’s doing.It’s easier to warn of “violence” and “anarchy” than to sit down at the table and hammer out legislation that would supersede anything the President could do.It’s easier to wrap yourself in your supposedly superior love of the Constitution than to make difficult decisions that might be unpopular with some of the people who voted for you, but that are ultimately good for the country as a whole.It's easier to fire up uninformed voters by telling them the President is threatening our country, than to explain what you would do differently.Unfortunately, many of the people governing the country, and many of the people whose main civic duty is holding those people responsible, repeatedly do the things that are easy instead of doing the things that are difficult.NOTE: The above examples of President Reagan's actions were taken from news reports in the New York Times published on the following dates in 1987: October 9, July 9, May 1, April 6 and October 22.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++There's one easy thing you can do. Like my Facebook page, Brett Baker Writes. Please.

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