T’S NOT GOING SO WELL FOR THEM

IT’S NOT GOING SO WELL FOR THEM: White House tries to explain Obama’s claim that all Americans can keep health plans.

Here’s the explanation: They couldn’t have passed the bill — which barely passed — without lying. So, they lied. And it worked until after the election.

A STENY HOYER CONFESSION: Top Dem Admits: ‘We Knew.’ “House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer conceded to reporters today that Democrats knew people would not be able to keep their current health care plans under Obamacare and expressed qualified contrition for President Obama’s repeated vows to the contrary.”

The GOP ought to be able to identify the people whose plans are being cancelled and mail/message them. They should be an angry group — and at 16 million, bigger than Obama’s winning margin.

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WAIT, I THOUGHT THE TEA PARTY WAS A SPENT FORCE: 42% Identify with Obama Politically, 42% with the Tea Party. Now just imagine how it would be if the press treated Obama the way it treats the Tea Party movement, and vice versa . . .

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!

What’s the reason for the Halloween season?  All souls’ Day?  All Saints’ Day? Heck no!  The reason for the Halloween season, according to America’s greatest living philosopher, Earl Pitts - SUGAR.  And he can’t be wrong.

Quo Vadis?

Quo Vadis?

Where can the tea party and other conservative Americans now be found?  Underground.  I just read that pre-deployment U.S. Army soldiers were told that to join or associate with tea party organizations or Christian-based American Family Association would result in disciplinary action under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Can this action based on a lie really be happening in America?  Not in my America.
We tea party and conservative patriots have become like persecuted Christians during the dark days of  Imperial Rome. We the right and just people must hide in the catacombs in order to preserve our Faith.  Beaten down, persecuted,  repressed, libeled and slandered, we have no choice but to skitter like cockroaches under cover from Big Brother, Emperor Obama and his lying, liberal, privileged ruling class.
I can’t believe how sad I am.  Yet, the Christians remained cheerful, hopeful, secure (even to death) knowing that their beliefs based upon a Redeemer’s sacrifice would ultimately triumph.  Where go we now?  We might be praying in solidarity in the shadows for the survival of our righteous cause, but I repeat with confidence: “In the tea party lies the salvation of America.”  

THE PRICE OF ‘FREE’ OBAMACARE:

THE PRICE OF ‘FREE’ OBAMACARE:
Pam Kehaly, president of Anthem Blue Cross in California, said she received a recent letter from a young woman complaining about a 50% rate hike related to the healthcare law.

"She said, 'I was all for Obamacare until I found out I was paying for it,'" Kehaly said.

THEY’RE EVEN NOTICING AT THE NEW YORK TIMES: Health Care Woes Undermine Obama’s Vision of Government. “The implicit promise of Barack Obama’s presidency, delivered during the 2008 campaign and again repeatedly since then, was that government would not face a debacle like the recent malfunction of the technology behind the president’s new health care marketplaces. . . . The breakdown of the federal HealthCare.gov Web site could emerge as a test of Mr. Obama’s philosophy, with potentially serious implications for an agenda that relies heavily on the belief in a can-do bureaucracy.”

Actually, what’s big isn’t that they’re noticing, it’s that they’re talking about it.

ROGER SIMON: Obama Should Be Impeached . . . For Cluelessness. “When I read Sunday evening in the Wall Street Journal that Barack Obama was ‘unaware’ until last summer that the U. S. spied on thirty-five world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, I was frankly stupefied. No wonder Obamacare and practically everything else from foreign policy to energy policy is an unmitigated mess. This president and his administration have taken hands-off leadership and leading from behind to unprecedented levels. What exactly does our president do for a living? What’re we paying him for?”

He reigns, but does not rule. He leaves the actual work to the likes of Valerie Jarrett, people formidable enough in their milieu but rather narrow in skills and knowledge.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Ted Rall: ‘Truth Behind ACA Mess Is Obama and His Gang of Golfing Buddies Are Idiots.’

 USA TODAY COLUMN ON THE OBAMACARE DEBACLE: Big government project, big failure. “Even Obama himself is evidence of this problem. His 2012 presidential campaign was famous for its mastery of technology, building up an electronic campaign infrastructure in just a few months that helped him win the election. But, of course, it wasn’t a government operation. Obama without the government — a technological success. Obama within the government — a technological embarrassment.”

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Posted at 8:59 am by Glenn Reynolds

Didn’t the NAZI SS & Communist NKVD Always strike in “PREDAWN” Raids?

Didn’t the NAZI SS & Communist NKVD Always strike in “PREDAWN” Raids?
PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Washington Times Launching Legal Action After Armed Agents Seize Reporter’s Records, Notes.
Reporter Audrey Hudson said the investigators, who included an agent for Homeland’s Coast Guard service, took her private notes and government documents that she had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act during a predawn raid of her family home on Aug. 6.

The documents, some which chronicled her sources and her work at the Times about problems inside the Homeland Security Department, were seized under a warrant to search for unregistered firearms and a “potato gun” suspected of belonging to her husband, Paul Flanagan, a Coast Guard employee. Mr. Flanagan has not been charged with any wrongdoing since the raid.

The warrant, obtained by the Times, offered no specific permission to seize reporting notes or files.

The Washington Times said Friday it is preparing legal action to fight what it called an unwarranted intrusion on the First Amendment.

It’ll be interesting to see how other media organizations respond to this rather Putinesque episode.

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ARMY TO TROOPS: Al-Qaeda IS MODERATE & TEA PARTY ARE TERRORISTS

ARMY TO TROOPS: Al-Qaeda IS MODERATE & TEA PARTY ARE TERRORISTS:
BUT I’M SURE ACORN OR THINKPROGRESS WOULD BE FINE: Fort Hood soldiers say Army warned them off tea party, Christian groups.

Don’t donate to the tea party or to evangelical Christian groups — that was the message soldiers at a pre-deployment briefing at Fort Hood said they received from a counter-intelligence agent who headed up the meeting.

If you do, you could face punishment — that was the other half of the message, as reported by Fox News. The briefing was Oct. 17, and about a half-hour of it was devoted to discussion about how perceived radical groups — like tea party organizations and the Christian-based American Family Association — were “tearing the country apart,” one unnamed soldier said, to Fox News.

Among the remarks the agent allegedly made: Military members who donate to these groups would be subject to discipline under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the soldier reported.

Liberty Institute has stepped in to investigate. Michael Berry, one of the nonprofit’s attorneys, said he has been advising the soldier about his options — but that in the meanwhile, he said the American public should be on guard.

They’re politicizing the military, like they’ve politicized the IRS, because they politicize everything. That’s who they are, that’s what they do.

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Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

There are two types of human beings

“There are two types of human beings: people who want to interfere in the way other people live their lives, and people who are content to mind their own business.  Which type of people do you think go in to politics?”
Ed Crane’s Wisdom
Posted: 24 Oct 2013 05:09 PM PDT
(Don Boudreaux)
I had the pleasure of attending a talk that Cato’s president emeritus, Ed Crane, delivered this evening on George Mason University’s Fairfax campus.  Ed said many wise things – but his single best line of the evening, in my opinion, is this one:
“There are two types of human beings: people who want to interfere in the way other people live their lives, and people who are content to mind their own business.  Which type of people do you think go in to politics?”
The answer is as obvious as the question is important.
Politics is the domain of busybodies.  Politics attracts, with a kind of socio-supermagnetism, people with unusually bloated egos and excessively high opinions of themselves – high opinions that assure them (falsely, to be sure) that they are not only competent but also entitled to lord it over lesser folk.  Politics is the natural occupation of people who, not content to tend to their own affairs, itch to control also the affairs of others.  The ranks of politicians swell with egotistical, arrogant, and officious buttinskies who are constitutionally immune to any sense of humility or decent regard for the privacy and personal preferences of others.  Politics is the home of intolerant bosses – petit fuhrers – sure of their own superiority and confident of the incapacity of ordinary men and women to survive without being leashed and led by those to whom heaven, in its incontestable wisdom, has given political power

Anne Dillard about nature and life

Anne Dillard about nature and life:  “The wonder is - given the errant nature of freedom and the burgeoning of texture in time - the wonder is that all the forms are not monsters, that there is beauty at all, grace gratuitous, pennies found, like mockingbird’s free fall.  Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator’s exuberance that grew such a tangle, and the grotesques and horrors bloom from the same growth, that intricate scramble, and twine up and down the conditions of time.”

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION VERSION OF “DON’T ASK - DON’T TELL”

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION VERSION OF “DON’T ASK - DON’T TELL”
Blue Cross rep in North Dakota: The feds asked us not to reveal the number of people who’ve signed up for ObamaCare
TOTAL STATEWIDE ENROLLMENT - 20!

POSTED AT 3:21 PM ON OCTOBER 23, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
Milton Wolf: But they’re still trying to keep them, if only to spare themselves an extra iota of humiliation. That’s what the Most Transparent Administration Evah has come to.

During a Monday forum in Fargo for people interested in signing up for coverage via the exchange, James Nichol of Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota told the crowd his company received the request from the federal government earlier Monday. Nichol is a consumer sales manager for the company.

Still, a spokeswoman from Blue Cross Blue Shield says about 14 North Dakotans have signed up for coverage since the federal exchange went live Oct. 1. That brings total statewide enrollment to 20 – less than one a day.

Spokeswoman Andrea Dinneen said Tuesday that while Blue Cross generally does not release its internal sales numbers, it has in this case because the problematic rollout of the federal health care exchange is a “unique situation.”
Wolf @ Breitbart.com
Career politicians are a curious breed. They are the only species known to man that creates grand catastrophes and then expects praise for quietly slinking away and pretending it was someone else’s mess all along.
This month, Kansas Senator Pat Roberts (R) ran to the cameras and called for the resignation of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Of course Kathleen Sebelius should resign, or if we lived in a sane world, be fired unceremoniously. That much is true. But what Senator Roberts hopes you won’t realize is that we wouldn’t be in this mess today if he himself had not supported Kathleen Sebelius’ nomination to become the head of ObamaCare.

ATTACKS ON THE TEA PARTY

ATTACKS ON THE TEA PARTY
IMMIGRATION AND BIG BUSINESS ATTACKS ON THE TEA PARTY: Why are the Chamber of Commerce and the GOP establishment going after the Tea Party all of a sudden? It’s battlespace preparation for the immigration reform/amnesty fight. In case you were wondering. Response? Punch back twice as hard.

Posted at 6:57 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THE ESTABLISHMENT HAS SPOKEN: Norman Ornstein: Buck Stops With Obama on Rocky Rollout of Health Care Plan. “I view the problem in a broader way. It is the larger failure of public administration that has been endemic in the Obama White House, and is probably the president’s most significant weakness.” He’s not very competent, and like most people who aren’t very competent, he tends to hire people who are no more competent than he. As they say: First rate people hire first rate people. Second rate people hire third rate people.

EVOLUTION AND FREE WILL

Modern science directly implies that there are no inherent moral or ethical laws, no absolute guiding principle for human society...We must conclude that when we die, we die, and that is the end of us... Finally, free will as it is traditionally conceived - the freedom to make uncoerced and unpredictable choices among alternative courses of action - simply does not exist... There is no way that the evolutionary process as currently conceived can produce a being that is truly free to make moral choices.  AMEN?   So an atheist, scientist in 1988 ‘believed.’

GOVERNMENT = GOONS = EXPLOITERS

GOVERNMENT = GOONS = EXPLOITERS
Posted: 23 Oct 2013 02:09 PM PDT
(Don Boudreaux)
Suppose that a group of wily, greedy, shameless, and often duplicitous criminal masterminds – call them Goons – exist who routinely prey on Innocent people.  These predators, these Goons – while seldom resorting to outright violence – are forever conning Innocent people out of money, colluding with each other to strip Innocent people of opportunities, and generally making life unpleasant and insecure for the great majority of us Innocent and gentle folk.
And unfortunately, most of us Innocents are helpless to avoid the predations of the Goons.  We are doomed by our very innocence, gullibility, and poor and limited information to be victimized repeatedly.  The more intelligent and forward-thinking of us Innocents conclude that our only salvation from Goons lies in some collective arrangement through which we organize ourselves into a force to counter these terrible people who are so skilled and clever at preying upon our vulnerabilities.
So….
Why does anyone suppose that these goony predators who exhibit enormous skill and no hesitation to further their own narrow and greedy purposes at the great expense of countless Innocent people will not be the very people who infiltrate the institutions that we Innocents establish to protect ourselves from them?  What makes the allegedly more intelligent and forward-thinking of us Innocents confident that our creation of concentrated power for the purpose of fending off the Goons will not be captured by the very Goons from whom we seek protection?
If each of us Innocents is too dim-witted, too ill-informed, or too weak-willed to avoid being victimized by Goons, why will each of us Innocents, when called upon to choose from our ranks – and to bestow special privileges and powers upon – battalions of fellow Innocents to protect us, choose wisely?  How will we identify those other Innocents who can be trusted to have the mental acuity and wherewithal to work together effectively to form an effective protective force against the Goons?  Do such Innocents even exist?  Will not our enemies the Goons attempt with much success to disguise themselves as especially trustworthy Innocents and, in doing so, gain disproportionate position and rank in the collective institutions that we Innocents innocently established to protect ourselves against the Goons?
Might it even be the case that some would-be Goons – unable without access to any great concentrations of power to prey as they desire upon us Innocents – themselves stir up hysteria and tell horror stories about imaginary predations of Goons, their hope being that the resulting fear among Innocents will prompt us Innocents to create and trust the very concentrations of power that the clever Goons realize they can then hijack and deploy for their own purposes of becoming truly effective predators?
What are the answers to these innocent questions?
   

A take on evolution vs. creationism

A take on evolution vs. creationism

What about the creation story at the very core of the Judeo-Christian narrative being in conflict with evolution, the story of our origins?  One view confirms the story detailing our species and all others brought abruptly into existence by the direct action of the Creator.  Another view, the great legacy of the scientific age understands that neither evolution nor Biblical creation is scientifically correct.
Originally, the answer was found not in religion itself, but in the customs, traditions and even social views of a past age.  When the view of the heavens was disturbed by the new technology of astronomy, however, it was easy to see threats to the very idea of God.  Four centuries later, theologians found their God and his domain enhanced by scientific discoveries.  Natural selection, variation and mutation entered the scientific picture of our origins.
It’s high time we grew up and left the Garden. We are indeed Eden’s children, yet it is time to place Genesis alongside the geocentric myth in the basket of stories that once, in a world of intellectual naivete, made helpful sense. As we walk through the gates, aware of the dazzling richness of the genuine biological world, there might even be a smile on the Creator’s face - that at long last His creatures have learned enough to understand His world as it truly is.

We are so hungry!

We are so hungry!

Last year, one in six Ohioans struggled with hunger. In Fayette County, 21.8% of residents live at or below the federal poverty level, and over 19,000 residents are deemed food insecure which means they do not to eat enough food each day to live active healthy lives. These community conversations will bring together a diverse group of organizations, businesses, and residents to examine the strength of the County’s current anti-poverty and hunger-relief efforts and to develop strategies to build on those efforts. - See more at: http://fayetteadvocate.com/archives/11982/2013/10/22/fayette-county-comes-together-for-a-community-conversation-about-ending-hunger/#sthash.CZcejFIj.dpuf

This year Chillicothe had to cancel Free Thanksgiving Dinners because 13,000 people were there last year

Please send us Food Packages, suggestions:
Fanny Mae
Lobster
Kobe Beef

Beans and Rice slurped down with Chicken Soup made by boiling old bones is so boring.  But anyone with $9.99 can buy a deluxe 4-flavor New York Style pre-sliced 12 pieces of Cheesecake from Aldi’s!  Really!

We are trying to trap Chipmunks for fur and meat; the cat is helping us.
Mom & Dad

RULE BY IDEOLOGY OVER REASON

                                 RULE BY IDEOLOGY OVER REASON

After a bloody one-party Communist takeover of Zanzibar in 1964, the New York Herald Tribune observed: “Today any mob, any agitator who wins power can expropriate property, arrest aliens at will, or indulge in outright murder... and if this done in the sacred name of nationalism and popular will ( for the Blacks), there is no redress.”
Have things changed so much in 2103, when in Brooklyn yesterday a ‘gang’ of Blacks dragged whites from their car, terrorized and assaulted them within an ‘inch of their lives,’ calling them “whore” and “crackers?”  What reaction will follow from liberals sympathetic to the ‘black’ cause?
The 1960's were notorious for bloody uprising between blacks and whites not only on the African continent, but also around the world including the U.S.A.  The ‘struggle’ continues today driven by the Obama administration and his minions.
How sad.

All is contradiction

  All is contradiction

All is still contradiction in our insane use of language.  Two ads today present examples of this sad truth. 1.  A car dealership advertises “transparent pricing and minimum negotiations.” If something’s transparent, does it require haggling? 2. An ad about paralyzed veterans wants you to help them find “the jobs they need..”  What kind of work can a paralyzed person do that would not take a job away employment from a ‘whole’ applicant?   Two ads feature obvious contradictions but obviously no listener is supposed to notice or care. Duh!  This is the sad, cultural phenomenon.

THE MORE YOU SPEND, THE MORE YOU SAVE!

THE MORE YOU SPEND, THE MORE YOU SAVE!
21ST CENTURY GOVERNANCE: “We must increase our debt limit so that we can pay our bills.”

OCTOBER 18, 2013 4:00 AM
Grilling the Park Service Bullies
The House Oversight Committee wants to find out why the Park Service behaved so bizarrely.
By John Fund
Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing about the closures of national parks and monuments during the government shutdown, proved one thing: Under President Obama, The traditional “Washington Monument Strategy” of closing popular services first has become the “Washington Bully Strategy.”

Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, a former prosecutor, almost drove National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis into incoherence with his relentless questioning. Gowdy wanted to know why Jarvis had allowed “pot-smoking” Occupy Wall Street protesters to camp overnight illegally in Washington’s McPherson Square park for 100 days, yet put up barricades to keep veterans out of war memorials on the first day of the shutdown. By not issuing a single citation to the Occupy campers, Gowdy argued, the Park Service was treating them better than the nation’s military veterans. “Can you cite me the regulation that required you to erect barricades from accessing a monument that they built?” he demanded.

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Jarvis responded that, while he was required by the Anti-Deficiency Act to close all parks and memorials, any veterans who wanted to enter the war memorials could have done so if they had “declared” they were there to exercise their First Amendment rights.
“Who were they to declare it to? A barricade?” Gowdy sniffed. Representative Darrell Issa was equally stern with Jarvis, noting that, since the Park Police weren’t furloughed during the shutdown, “an open-air monument was guarded by the same number of people to prevent Americans from getting in as would allow them to safely go in and out.”

Then Jarvis had to contend with Representative Pat Meehan of Pennsylvania, another former prosecutor. Meehan was irked that 20 of his constituents had been handed $100 tickets for jogging through the Valley Forge National Historical Park in his district. Cars were still allowed to drive through the park but no one was allowed onto the jogging trail adjacent to the road. Jarvis said he had no discretion that would allow him to waive prosecution of the joggers.

How did the National Park Service, the well-loved stewards of everything from the Grand Canyon to Yellowstone, become a villain? Gale Norton, the Interior secretary for President George W. Bush, explained to NRO’s Andrew Stiles last week that the Park Service’s reality is a bit more complicated. They “often choose the most dramatic type of action in order to get their message across,” she said. “It’s something I had to guard against when I was secretary — not letting them play budget games.”

Dramatic doesn’t even begin to describe some of the horror stories of the last two weeks:

 The Park Service closed the Claude Moore Colonial Farm near Washington, D.C., even though it is privately funded and operated and relies on Fairfax County police protection.

 When closing Yellowstone National Park, the Park Service confined four dozen elderly foreign tourists in a hotel on park property for two days, and also blocked them from taking photos on the grounds. Rangers then prevented their bus from stopping for a restroom break when they were finally thrown off park property.

 At Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, the Park Service closed turn-offs along a state highway so that tourists couldn’t pull over to enjoy the view and take photos.

 The Park Service closed the City Tavern in Philadelphia, a meeting place for those who signed the Declaration of Independence, even though the tavern, at Independence National Historical Park, opens directly onto two major city streets. Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute joked to Representative Issa’s committee,  “had King George III’s ministers in the colonies had the authority and the foresight to close [the tavern] down, they might have prevented the American Revolution.”

Ebell also noted the number of barricades and printed signs needed to close 401 parks and monuments on the shutdown’s first day required foresight and planning. The speed of the closures and the procurement of barricades has also convinced former secretary Norton that a lot of thought had gone into how to conduct the Park Service’s blitzkrieg. “I imagine that the decision was made at the highest levels of Park Service leadership, in co-operation with the White House,” she told NRO.

Politically, the shutdown ended on President Obama’s terms. The administration’s attitude was clear from Day One. “We are winning,” a senior administration official told the Wall Street Journal on the fourth day of the impasse. ”It doesn’t really matter to us how long the shutdown lasts.”

But now that the shutdown is over, it’s important for Chairman Issa and others to figure out how it was manipulated politically. Because if the Park Service can become a pawn in the Obama administration’s political wars, does anyone doubt that the integrity of other even more vital agencies wouldn’t be at risk in any future budget showdown?

— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO.

Just words

Just words

All we hear are words.  From Washington to my radio.  No phoney government shutdown curtails the daily insanity that I hear.   Over the radio, I continue to hear meaningless words and empty rhetoric.  What is a “higher return on experience,” as promised in an ad?  Do repetitions of words like “issues,” “lateral” and “process,” advance knowledge of a subject discussed?  And, it seems that the “more you owe the more you save,” nowadays in the motto in this irresponsible, debt-laden, victimization-centered society.   Lordy,  truth disconnected from reality and Godliness is alive and well.

DIAMOND MATCHES

After a brief hiatus, this blog should record something worth the wait.   Right?  Did you know that Diamond matches, made in the USA since 1881, now have a ”green light” match tip?  Did you know that the matches are “sourced  from responsible forests?”  Did you know that their logo is trademarked TM as “earth in mind solutions”?  Can you believe this company still exists in the age of Obama?

How Federal Workers Became Obama’s Private Army

How Federal Workers Became Obama’s Private Army
EDWARD MORRISSEYThe Fiscal Times

HOPEY-CHANGEY: How Federal Workers Became Obama’s Private Army. “Seventy-four years later, the civil-service system has been exposed as a failure – at least in this administration. Instead of an independent workforce of professionals who implement federal regulation in an even-handed and competent manner, we have returned to the era of partisan retribution and politically-motivated malevolence. . . . It’s part of a disturbing pattern emerging in the second term of Barack Obama. When law enforcement and tax enforcement become rankly political, Americans can no longer trust in their federal government, even when it’s not shut down – and that won’t stop after Obama leaves office, either. We are getting a clear lesson on the risks of larger government and regulatory overreach, and those risks go far beyond incompetence.” It’s also disturbing how little pushback there has been from the supposedly nonpartisan civil service — which, of course, is composed overwhelmingly of Democrats.

As I’ve suggested before, a return to the “spoils system” would be more honest — and politicians might be less willing to grant so much power to the government if they knew that sooner or later it would be in the hands of their political enemies. It would also mean, of course, that a government job would no longer be a lifelong proposition — but that might not be a bug, but a feature, too.

NUDGE, SHOVE, SHOOT II

NUDGE, SHOVE, SHOOT II

IRS AGENTS USED TO BE FEARED BUT RESPECTED. NOW THEY’RE LOOKING LESS RESPECTABLE: Dr. Ben Carson: I had my first encounter with the IRS after challenging Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Reminder: In 2009, President Obama “joked” about having the IRS audit his enemies.

I DON’T KNOW IF THIS DR. CARSON’S ‘NUDGE’ OR HIS ‘SHOVE’ BUT I WORRY ABOUT THE ‘SHOOT’ THAT COMES IF HE DOESN’T ‘KNOW HIS PLACE’.