BROTHER-IN-LAW GOES THE EXTRA 8.2 MILES
Mike Offut, US Presidential Award winning A.P. Chem Teacher, upon learning that I had ridden my bike to Fox Lake, volunteers to come from Cary, IL, to Barrington, IL, to ride me up to pick it up! Without being asked!

We get to Fox Lake, taking the normal route, U.S. 59 to Wauconda, then North on U.S. 12/59 to Fox Lake, to the stop light at Grand Ave., in Fox Lake, and then to the Fox Lake train station, a trip of about 19.6 miles. Mike got the bike unlocked, and was able to break it down so that it fit, comfortably, in the back of his van. THEN Mike went that extra mile and agreed to go back via the route Mark biked it up to Fox Lake!

Now, using Google direction finder, it's merely 19.6 miles from Barrington, IL to the Metra Train station in Fox Lake. BUT, the way the big-butted Markus went, the trip was 28.2 miles, and it really left me feeling a WHOLE lot better knowing that it took me four hours to bike 28.2 miles, a pace of 7.05 miles per hour, as opposed to what I had thought to be a 20 mile bike hike at a pace of 5 mph. Thank you Michael Offutt for going that extra 8.2 miles for me!



BROTHER-IN-LAW BRINGS ME INTO TWENTIETH
CENTURY FOOTWEAR COMFORTS AND DELIGHTS!

Finally, he just couldn't take it any more! Mike Offutt, husband superb, father unfathomable, bother-in-law sublime, sin-in-law supreme says, “I'm gonna get chew a pair of Crocs! You may not like them, Gay doesn't, but I think they are the greatest! What's chore chew size?”

“Well, my feet are two different sizes. Size 10 for the one and 10-and-a-half for the other.”

“I'll get chew a pair of elevens,” says he, his eyes so fulled with the Holy Spirit of Joy that comes only from doing something nice for somebody else, that you can't believe it. His face absolutely radiated kindness, love, compassion. So, he goes and get the shoes, I try them on, and they are a perfect fit! Then he ups and says, “Now if you want a pair of twelves, I can get them for you.” I shoot him a look that would wither a John Holmes penis, and say, “Mike, I LOVE these friggin' chews.” And that's the end of THAT story!.


FATHER DOES THE MATH, REFUSES TO LEAVE SON THE
OPPORTUNITY TO LEAVE HIMSELF IN THE LURCH,
FINANCIALLY SPEAKING, THAT IS!

“So, how much money will you need for tomorrow?” dad asks me. “About fifteen should do it,” I reply. “I'm gonna give you twenty then. Will that be enough?” “That ought to be enough to cover every likely contingency that I will encounter,” I reply.

And thus he gave it, and I will start tomorrow out with two packs of Cheyenne's – one menthol, one regular! Whoop Dee Doop!

PLUS – Ralph is gonna give me a ride up to Trinity Evangeilical Lutheran Church around 9:15, which gets me there in time for ADULT BIBLE STUDY! I won't have to sweat taking the train in to Jeff Park, then walking to Forest Glen to catch the Metra going to Long Lake, nor fret the conducter forgetting to tell the engineer about MY flag stop at Long Lake. NICE going dad! What a champion. Did you ever know that you're my hero?



EDITORIAL PAGE
WHY WE NEED THE GOOD NEWS TIMES

As all consumers of what passes for news today on network television, the major dailies (New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal) knows, America is a very scary place. There are shootings, muggings, murders every day. Homeless people advance on you like the visigoths on Rome, trying to pry you away from your precious nickels, dimes, and quarters. The politicians ALL lie to your face, but, what the heck, it's the hand we wuz dealt, so DEAL with it. Plus, if you watch TV news, you get a belly full of Viagra ads, and ads for anti-depressant medication to that YOU can be your own medicine man, and go to the witch doctor psychiatrist and tell him just what you need to vanish your blues. So you can easily be forgiven for getting it ALL WRONG.

HERE's the news, America, that we need to know! Day in and day out, ten's of millions of times a day, citizens, immigrants, and illegals in our country go out of their way to help a stranger, to smile at a baby, to mentor a teen-ager, to offer a helping hand to the lady bogged down with groceries, to help an elderly man shovel the deep snow in his driveway, etcetera, etcetera, et-friggin-cetera.
And your staff here, at THE GOOD NEWS TIMES is committed to bringing such stories to you, so that you can pass along the GOOD NEWS! To your neighbors, friends, and relatives. And we want YOUR HELP! Send us your stories, anecdotes. Tell us of your heroes! Help us feel good about ourselves, our communities, our nation!


THIS IS MOST DEFINETLY WHAT WE ARE NOT ABOUT
It's Good News Week

1965 pop tune sung by Hedgehoppers Anonymous

It's good news week,
Someone's dropped a bomb somewhere,
Contaminating atmosphere
And blackening the sky,
It's good news week,
Someones found a way to give,
The rotting dead a will to live,
Go on and never die.

Have you heard the news?
What did it say?
Who's won that race?
What's the weather like today?

It's good news week,
Lots of floods in Asia now,
They've butchered up the sacred cow
They've got a lot to eat.

It's good news week,
Doctors finding many ways,
Of wrapping brains in metal trays,
To keep us from the heat.

It's good news week,
Someone's dropped a bomb somewhere,
Contaminating atmosphere
And blackening the sky,
It's good news week,
Someone's found a way to give,
The rotting dead a will to live,
Go on and never die.


Have you heard the news?
What did it say?
Who's won that race?
What's the weather like today?
(what's the weather like today?)

It's good news week,
Families shake the need for gold,
By stimulating birth control,
We're wanting less to eat.

It's good news week,
Doctors finding many ways,
Of wrapping brains in metal trays,
To keep us from the heat.
To keep us from the heat.
To keep us from the heat.


EDITORIALS FROM AROUND THE NATIONS;
FROM AROUND THE WORLD;
TO HELP US BETTER KNOW, AND THEN
TO BETTER LOVE OURSELVES!

BLACK PANTHER ADVISES US: WE THE PEOPLE,
THE POOR PEOPLE OF THIS NATION ARE ALL IN IT TOGETHER – BLACK, BROWN, YELLOW, RED, WHITE, AND TO EVER REALIZE THE DREAM OF DEMOCRACY, WE MUST WORK TOGETHER, ORGANIZE,
AND USE THE SYSTEM TO CHANGE
THE SYTEM THAT CHAINS US DOWN!


GUEST EDITORIAL: Keeping it Real By Larry Pinkney
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board
The Obama Spectacle: History, Hypocrisy, and Empire

The so-called democracy of the powerful U.S. elite continues to live up to its legacy of hypocrisy and deceit.
Now that the spectacle of the Barack Obama coronation as the “American” Empire’s first African-American emperor has run its course, and many, many millions of dollars have been spent on self-adulation by the power elite of this nation, the huddled masses will necessarily be compelled to return to a system of no universal, single-payer health care, increasing joblessness, insatiable corporate / military greed, homelessness, de facto racial disparity & discord, police brutality, a burgeoning U.S. prison population, and endless U.S. wars abroad. For yet again, this nation will have done what it all too often does: perverted its promise, including the dream of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., into a hypocritical nightmare of gigantic and historic proportions.
For the majority of Black, Brown, White, Red, and Yellow peoples, the “dream” to which the late Langston Hughes referred [in the poem A Dream Deferred] has not only been “deferred,” it has been obscenely and grotesquely disfigured and distorted into something almost beyond recognition. Barack Obama’s presidency is not a step forward nor is it a step towards the fulfillment of the struggles by Nat Turner, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and so very many others. Rather, he is the slick pro-apartheid Zionist antithesis and perversion of the fulfillment of these struggles.
Barack Obama has already begun to repeatedly and shamelessly call upon the people of this nation to make “sacrifice[s],” as if the everyday people of this country have not already made enormous, heart rendering sacrifices. How about having Obama’s elite corporate backers in Lockheed, Goldman Saks, and the insurance and banking industries make some meaningful, ongoing, and painful sacrifices?! How about reversing the government’s criminal financial bail out of the big corporations [which government bail-out Obama enthusiastically supported], and passing those billions upon billions of dollars back directly to the everyday people of this nation - no strings attached?! How about immediately stopping all U.S. wars of aggression, and bringing our men and women in uniform home right NOW - no strings attached?! So many of these men and women have made the ultimate sacrifice in the name of so-called U.S. “national security,” which false “security” has meant their being the perpetual working-class cannon fodder for Halliburton and other avaricious corporate components of the U.S. “military / industrial complex.”
Barack Obama, though the first African-American “presidential” figurehead of the U.S. Empire, is actually the last best hope of continuing U.S. international hegemony under the fake cloak of democracy and justice at home and abroad. Therein is Obama’s appeal to the political and economic ruling elites. He is a conscious, willing, and potent tool of the power elite, and should be understood and dealt with as such. He is neither a progressive, nor a leftist or socialist. He is a cynical opportunist and a shrewd politician, who cloaks his double-speak in glitzy so-called “progressive” sounding rhetoric. He is arguably the most dangerous U.S. politician, to the actual economic and political well being of everyday people of all colors, thus far in this 21st Century.
A reader of The Black Commentator recently reminded me of what is undoubtedly the most important, defining, and yet perhaps the least known speech of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is the speech that Dr. King delivered on April 4, 1967 at the Riverside church in New York City, precisely one year before he was shot down in Memphis, Tennessee, under the auspices of the U.S. Government. The speech is titled, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. Every discerning person who peruses this speech will quickly realize what a perversion, of the struggle for justice at home and abroad, the pro-apartheid Zionist Barack Obama really is. We can and must do so much better.

The installment of Barack Obama as U.S. president has not ushered in a “post racial” era in this nation. To the contrary, it has ushered in a heightened economic, political, and yes racial hypocrisy, which the masses of Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow peoples will ultimately not ignore.

The paraphrased adage, often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, that: “You can fool some of the people some of the time but not all of the people all of the time” is absolutely correct. And even though the U.S. corporate media (including CNN and PBS) is unabashedly complicit in their de facto mission to “fool the people,” the legitimate needs and aspirations of the people can be contained for only so long; Obama or no Obama.

To the people of this nation of all colors and ethnicities who are losing your jobs, your homes, and your families…to those with no health insurance… to those who cannot afford to send your children to college…and to those languishing in prisons… this writer says: Place not your faith in the rhetoric of politicians or the false promises of such cynical opportunists. Place your faith in yourselves and each other, in your / our ability to discern the difference between rhetoric vs. reality, and in our determination to find and create ways of organizing and coming together to bring about real systemic change dedicated to everyday people and not the corporate blood suckers of the peoples of this nation and world.
To the long-time freedom fighters, including Assata Shakur, Reverend Edward Pinkney (no relation), Leonard Peltier, the SF 8, and so many others who have held on and struggled for collective justice for so long, and to all political prisoners everywhere, this writer says: Please keep holding on, for the time is approaching when your struggles will be rewarded and that proverbial “day of reckoning” is hastening hither, sooner than some may realize.

To Cynthia McKinney, Rosa Clemente, and Cindy Sheehan: Thank you for your ongoing and brave examples of what it means to be truly for-real and in service to the people and not the blood sucking corporate / military / prison apparatus.
To the young people of this nation and world be you Black, Brown, Red, White, or Yellow: This writer understands your legitimate rage and your desire for a better world. You have every right to want a just and humane world. YOU are humanity’s present and future. YOU are why so many of us have struggled and died so that we might live through you. YOU must carry this struggle on.

To the peoples of Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, and elsewhere: Know that the peoples of the U.S. do not hate you and that those of us who are socially and politically conscious stand with you in your just quests to live free and strong, unfettered and unhindered by U.S. hegemony.

History does not repeat itself. People repeat history.

Let us commit and re-commit ourselves to the struggle for systemic change in this nation, and not be duped by this latest dose of U.S. hypocrisy in the person of Barack Obama.

Onward...

A DREAM DEFFERED – LANGSTON HUGHES


YOUNG GIRL UNLEASHES POET'S MUSE

If for no other reason than to meet Kayley Downer, it was critical for me to remain committed to the psych ward at Centetra, Woodstock, for the 11 days (four extras).
There comes a point at which you so totally believe that you are an instrument of God's work that you simply give it all, Up to Him; you don't question, and you sure as hell don't complain!

THINKIN' 'BOUT CHEW

I know, it sounds so incredible, but I swear
That we've met before, and I think it was on
An inbound train to the city.
Of course, you wouldn't recognize me now,
For then, I was a bald-headed man,
And weighed 35 more pounds.
What I remember about you is how beautiful
You looked, and it was more than your lovely
Face, and your piercing eyes, and soulful
Smile – it was much more than that!
It was the way you looked so much the mature
And talked, the mature young lady that I was
Stunned to see, that when you curled your hair
With your almost spastic ring finger, it was clear that you were
Still just a teen-aged girl, with the single solitary
Exception that you had never been given the
Opportunity to safely be a young teen-aged girl

Hanging out on weekend nights at slumber
Parties with your best friends forever,
Doing your nails with and for each other,
And talking and LAUGING so uproariously
About young boys, and how they would
embarrass themselves with you, not understanding
That their shyness and inexperience did not
Make them unattractive to you, but, au contraire,
Made them charming to you, especially when one
Of them would get out of his shellish world
And call you to talk on the telephone for
A while (what a joke, you'd have talked the
Night away with any one of them; you had
No favorite, just an empathetic understanding
That what they were going through, and what
You were going through, those experiences
They were not so different from one another

And how cruel it must have been, to have your
World betrayed by a trusted one, never again to
Be a teen-aged girl, protected safe in her own home,
The sound of the laughter of other teen-aged girls
Resounding throughout your house, and all the smiles
And goofy ideas for rationales for escape – oh Good
God in Heaven up above, you all could REALLY
Invent some doozies there. 'T'ain't no American
Politician on the planet better at self-rationalizing,
And they usually worked too, because you went
For cigarette butts in the best place here in town
(You had slumber party girl girl-friends here too,
That much I remember) at the restaurant Chelsie's,
Where the butts usually ounumber the customers,
And these butts are SUBSTANTIAL, so substantial that you
Knew for a flat-out fact, that this was an upper income
Town – who else can afford to toss away a two puff butt?

And now, that you've escaped high school, and have a job
All lined up in Colorado, the staff here is telling you that it's
You that is the big problem, and here, I would argue with them
I would be the big champion for you, but they are not going to
Hear me, and they would take it as evidence that my
Meds are NOT working, when in-fact, I feel more factfoid-
Filled and more logical argument winning now than when
My BAL is at the .120 window

So, yes, young lady, beautiful young lady, now you've got
That which you were seekin' that friend who is always there
For you, who can afford to give up what he's doin' and go on
Outrageous adventures – do the slumber party thang, HELL,
Beautiful Lady, I'll even let you do my toe nails, and wear
Clogs for the world to see … won't THAT give us a laugh and a half!

In fact, now I quite understand why Tull sang Goin' Back to the Family

My telephone wakes me in the morning --
have to get up to answer the call.
So I think I'll go back to the family
where no one can ring me at all.
Living this life has its problems
so I think that I'll give it a break.
Oh, I'm going back to the family
`cos I've had about all I can take.

Master's in the counting house
counting all his money.
Sister's sitting by the mirror --
she thinks her hair looks funny.
And here am I thinking to myself
just wond'ring what things to do.

I think I enjoyed all my problems
Where I did not get nothing for free.
Oh, I'm going back to the family --
doing nothing is bothering me.
I'll get a train back to the city
that soft life is getting me down.
There's more fun away from the family
get some action when I pull into town.

Everything I do is wrong,
what the hell was I thinking?
Phone keeps ringing all day long
I got no time for thinking.
And every day has the same old way
of giving me too much to do.

So, with me, the venue is pretty simple:
Monday the IPGA tournament, where with a little bit of luck
I can snag a bag and make half-a-hundred, and with a LOT of luck,
We can both snag bags and make the full C-note
Won't that be grand, almost too much money for us
But, we've been down that road before, and with you
As my body guard, and me as your assassin, we can safely
Ride the rails – get ourselves out to Yvonn'es, where the
Pitchers are, oh my God, check this out:
Three dollars a piece, and the pool table is FREE
Whoop Dee Doo
And the Depot, where my beloved Paul and Sheryl run
What will be the best Irish bar in the country, once they
Start opening at 7 a.m. – except their damn bar tenders
Are so slovenly drunk at that hour, that they'd give the damn
Place away.
Tuesdays – those will have to be your days, love
Wednesdays – open mic at Lamp's
Thursdays – open mic at Corkscrew Pointe
Fridays – karioke at the Deopt
Saturdays – karioke at the Depot
Sundays – chruch in Ingleside, where, quite literally
We can go to three services, plus a bible study,
And learn Spanish well enough to flit peaceably amongst
The crowd at the Spanish bar in Round Lake.

Soundin' like a whole lot of fun, dear.
Whoop Dee Doop!
Something to look forward too.
I got a friend, and she befriends me
I got a friend, we got a lot of worlds to see
She got a friend now, don't get better than this
She gots me, I gots her, we don't ever need to kiss
We shall hit the rails and roam
Never farther than 60 miles from home
I gots her, she gots me, I tell you what a lot of fun will have WE!

Whoop Dee Doop!

Of Dystopias and Alphas
By MAUREEN DOWD | WASHINGTON
President Obama was on the way to Alpha when a plea came for him to be, well, more alpha.
LuAnn Lavine, a real estate agent from Geneseo, a rural town (full disclosure – I've been to Geneseo and eaten in buffet at the pizza joint – it damn good food, and a damn fine town; don't really want NOBAMA foulin' it up!) just up the road from Alpha, Ill., the last stop on the president’s Midwestern bus tour, told The Times’s Jeff Zeleny: “Everyone was so hopeful with him, but Washington grabbed him and here we are. I just want him to stay strong and don’t take the guff. We want a president who is a leader, and I want him to be a little bit stronger.”
Hers was a gentler message than the sign stuck on a post outside Alpha: “One Term President.”
But her three words summed it up: Washington grabbed him. Why did this man whose contempt for Congress is clear, who ran on the idea that he could transform a broken Washington, surrender to its conventional timetable and bureaucratic language?
The “supercommittee” that’s supposed to save us just sounds like more government bloat — supersizing something just as unhealthy as McDonald’s.
Is Obama so isolated he can’t see that Americans are curled up in a ball, beaten down by a financial crisis, an identity crisis, a political crisis and a leadership crisis?
He got the job by blaming Washington. But once you’re in the White House, you are Washington. It’s like the plumber who came to fix the sink waiting for the sink to fix itself.
I covered the first President Bush when he took a slide from Iraq war hero to one-term president. A turning point came in the fall of 1991, when Americans were getting jittery about the economy. Conservatives urged Bush to adopt an aggressive agenda and a muscular stance toward Congress. But relying on the disastrous advice of his budget adviser Richard Darman, Bush waited for more than a month until the State of the Union address and repackaged the same tepid agenda.
President Obama bashed Congress on his bus tour. But after delegating to Congress time and again with disastrous results, he continues to play the satellite to Congress.
He shouldn’t be driven by the Washington schedule. He should be setting it.
At long last, he promised a clear economic plan. Unfortunately, he had the fierce urgency of next month, when Congress gets back to town.
Americans are rattled and want action. They don’t know or care what Congress’s schedule is. They just see the president not doing anything.
Cruising white Midwestern hamlets in his black bus, Obama tried to justify not calling lawmakers back to D.C. by saying they’d just continue to bicker. But what does he think they’ll do in September? The truth is, he doesn’t want them back in the capital any more than they want to be back. It would have screwed up his vacation and upset Michelle, who already feels trapped in the Washington bubble.
If Clinton wanted to be president 25 hours a day and W. wanted to be president four hours a day, Obama wants to be president for about 14 hours a day. And that’s fine, as long as you don’t look like you’re phoning it in when the country is dialing 911.

White House officials must be worried about the 10-day Martha’s Vineyard idyll because, in a rare move, they put out a picture of the president with furrowed brow and Nike shirt getting a briefing from John Brennan, his top counterterrorism adviser.

There were no pictures allowed of him at the Vineyard Golf Club, only shots of the president shopping for books with his daughters. He was seen in the Bunch of Grapes bookstore on Friday holding “Brave New World.” Maybe he was brushing up on dystopias and alphas.

He might also want to pick up a volume of Robert Frost for some insight on why Democrats waste time trying to reconcile with ruthless foes. The president still believes he can use his enchanting powers to convert the other side, even though Republicans regard every Obama legislative achievement as the beginning of a campaign to recall it. Heck, they’re still trying to repeal the New Deal.
Obama was truly stung by his budget experience with John Boehner. And now, Senator Tom Coburn, whom Obama called “not only a dear friend, but also a brother in Christ” at February’s National Prayer Breakfast, tells a town hall in Oklahoma that Obama’s views are “goofy and wrong,” and that the president wants to “create dependency” because “as an African-American male,” he had received “tremendous benefit” from government programs.
There is no way to sell the idea that being a black man in America gives you tremendous benefit.
How does Obama feel after his brother in Christ painted him as something akin to a welfare queen and an affirmative-action president?
Let us take today’s lesson from Frost, who deliciously wrote in “The Lesson for Today”:

I’m liberal. You, you aristocrat,
Won’t know exactly what I mean by that.
I mean so altruistically moral
I never take my own side in a quarrel.

Spent 11 days in a mental hospital
One Nurse's Empathy Made It All Worhtwhile
Finest facility of its type I've ever been in. And it still sucked. Best psychiatrist I've ever had. And he still sucked.

Most of their patients, they kept 5 working days plus the weekend. I was special. Simply another instance of me not being treated the same as other folks. They discharged a weenie-wagging, alcoholic, with a bi-polar diagnosis in 3 working days plus a weekend. Me, they keep 9 WD plus WE! Well, I didn't really change too much, except that I did acceed to their forced medications of me (believe me, they have a LOT of leverage over you). And then they wanted to shoot me up with a medication for schizoprenia. Ass holes. You've only labeled me bi-polar. So just let me take my bi-polar mood stabalizer and go home.

Well, it worked out just fine, I needed to meet one more resident before I booked, and I did, and all is well with the world. Amen.
BUT – I did get to tell my story (for about the fifth time) to a nurse whose eyes welled with tears as she understood my pain, my agony! Jesus Christ in Heaven above! Thank you for sending this angel to me. May Your Gentle Hand Always Guide her to continue to do your healing work here amongst the sick ones of THIS moment in time. AMEN!


MADISON COOK, IN SEERING PAIN, WRITES, WANTING TO KNOW,
AND TRUSTING HER FACE BOOK FRIENDS
TO HELP HER UNDERSTAND
I understand that with love, comes pain, but why did I have to love so much?
Steve Schmidgall because its who you are !!!!!!!

Mark Raymond Ganzer ‎'Tis a gift to be simple , 'tis a gift to be kind

April Marciniec Because your heart is so big and that is a beautiful thing, not something to regret
Shelli Traner Graves reports the following from Atlanta, GA
What a great night filled with family!


So, that's it for now, Issue #1, Volume #1 of the only newspaper with the courage, the honesty, and the intetrity to report to YOU THE PEOPLE the most self evident truths of all – the truths about yourselves: That you are perfectly formed children of God; perfectly formed; and that you are GOOD!

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