Garrison Keillor column today in the Denver Post print edition (for some reason it's not to be found on DenverPost.com, so link is to the same column in the Chicago paper) seems to be giving up any hope of things getting better.

Right next to Keillor in the Post's print edition is David Sirota's column with him complaining that no one is calling for belt tightening today like they used to in the good old days.

Taken together, these two thoughts compound into a bitter pill. Things are bad and they are only going to get worse. Is it any wonder that few people want to subscribe to the newspaper today?

John Wooten and Art Linkletter both died this week. Both were upbeat, wonderful men. Linkletter's most recent book was How to Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life. He and Wooten certainly did just that, not turning into the grouchy old men like Sirota and Keillor.


Last Sunday for Memorial Day PBS had a wonderful special. The challenges we face today are just as great as those faced in World War II, maybe even bigger. But they are not insoluble. "Whether you think you can, or whether you think you can't, you're right." Abraham Lincoln

 The Bell Curve
Joseph Bell

On the surface, Art Linkletter was a lightweight thinker, working early on with kids who supplied his richest material, then shifting to motivational speaking and finally turning both specialties into highly profitable businesses. That was the limit of my knowledge of him when I was first assigned to do a profile of him for a national magazine. And never had I been more wrong.

All of this came back to me when I pulled my Linkletter file and got reacquainted with him. Never far distant from his thinking was the suicide of his 20-year-old daughter, Diane, which he blamed on an LSD flashback frenzy. It set a course for Linkletter, from which he never wavered, to define and attack drug abuse out of knowledge, not emotion. In this process and his subsequent motivational speaking, I never detected a phony word or action.

"The idea of my being old," he once told me, "is the last thing I ever think of. I go to these senior citizen places to comfort people and suddenly realize I'm older than a lot of them. It's all in your attitude. You must set goals no matter how limited they are, and when you get to them, try the next thing. If you were to sit back and look at it coldly and dispassionately, you'd say this is like made work. Not real, so it isn't important. But that's not true as long as it is something to hope for."

So R.I.P., Art Linkletter. You've helped build a myriad of hopes. And you've earned a rest.

John T Wren: It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived. — General George S. Patton

 

Why is this expert being ignored? He's ideas have been used in over 700 oil well fires, he's the former head of the petroleum department at the University of OK: http://newsok.com/norman-engineer-has-own-idea-about-how-to-stop-gulf-oil-leak/article/3462317?custom_click=pod_headline_national-finance-news#ixzz0pTSpZYmr

Denver Post reports the Obama administration is OK with just letting it go until August!!! Where is the political will to get the leak stopped now?  http://www.denverpost.com/ci_15196139