The old standard, St. James Infirmary, has a timeless feel to it, but also seemingly an endless variety of lyrics, choruses, and melodies. On youtube, a 'Dr. H. Science' explains the infirmary as a clinic, as opposed to a larger hospital. He supposes the doctor is busy. And in the more traditional version, it seems the doctor checks on her, but goes to other patients, while she quietly dies on the "long, white table".

He makes the point that is lost in other contexts when people dispute this and that. Old folk tradition carries forward certain key elements of the incident or story. But the details, the background, are known to the people at the time and need not be restated. Once that generation passes, or the next, the tale becomes obscure because the original details and background have now been lost to later generations. Even today, as yesterday, it's difficult to tell the full story at the time because of bias. One believes the story should be such, and other details and background will be intentionally omitted, or even distorted.

Many artists have, and should have, their own rendition of this. Clapton and Dr. John. A beautiful version by Louis Armstrong. Bobby Bland. Roger McGuinn with the 'traditional' version. Jonas Jones slow Armstrong-like version as music for Fred Astaire and the sultry Barrie Chase, classic early television. And there's of course, Cab Calloway, who performed this on television (and also on the Ed Sullivan show, performed some excerpts from his Broadway role as Sporting Life in Porgy n Bess). It was from Calloway that I was introduced to the song via the Betty Boop cartoon, as were many. It's a take off on Snow White. Betty, her executioners Bimbo and Koko having accidentally fallen into a well when refusing to do her in, tumbles down a hill in a ball of ice which is quickly shaped by falling through objects on 'the trail' into an ice coffin. The coffin makes quick speed to the dwarves house. And they carry/slide it to the Mystery Cave. There the evil queen finds them, and the ghosts of Koko and Bimbo. And Cab Calloway sings for Koko, and Koko dances like him (obviously based on film of Calloway). It's a strange 'morphing' experience, some commenting have suggested, 'drug induced'. I don't know about that.

Calloway's take places himself, the singer, as the one who wishes the woman well. It's the same with Jones, Armstrong, and others. He sings that he seems to know she's dead, but that her spirit can search the whole world and not find someone as dangerous or conceited, well, as 'sweet' as himself. In that, it is much sleazier than the 'traditional' if one remembers that Calloway's Minnie the Moocher is almost interchangeable with this song, and perhaps is also how he interprets St. James Infirmary. Calloway liked to sing of the 'reefer', marijuana, in other songs. Perhaps 'poor Min', the druggie prostitute with the 'heart of gold', is laid out on the table at the infirmary. Calloway speaks of cocaine, and heroin, in Minnie the Moocher. It seems something added by himself, in keeping with what seemed to be his desire, in that era, to shock perhaps just for its own sake, perhaps to publicize his band, even bad publicity. Cab seemed to want to 'get a rise' out of people.

So when Cab gets to 'now that you have heard my story', there's not a lot of story there. But with the verse about the twenty dollar gold coin, the jazz band, the like-minded pallbearers who play craps, it might suggest he is the bad influence just as was Minnie's 'handler'. So if it's not stated in Calloway's version what happened to the girl to put her on the long, white table, one might think of Minnie's 'handler', perhaps. So the girl is dead, he knows it, and is so 'gracious' to let her go and find that he was the best thing that happened to her, basically. Then he speaks of his own death, and what a production it should be. The gold coin and 'standing there' might just further suggest the desire to portray himself in death as having been well-off, that he died standing up, that he died on his feet, went out standing on his feet, as the saying might go, etc.

The traditional version makes more sense, as a lyric. Here the singer isn't the one who had been living with the girl. But he knew her, likely admired her. And he's the one to find her on the bed in the infirmary, already describing her as if she's dead, or the princess who could be awakened with a kiss. This was the version of McGuinn and as explained by 'Dr. H'. He's distraught and heads for a bar. There he finds the man who had been living with her. And he's telling people that she disappeared on him, and he doesn't know where she is. Ah, let her go, and no hard feeling, he says. Perhaps he really does know where she is. Or perhaps he beat her, threw her out badly injured, and really doesn't know that she made it to the infirmary or was given assistance. But as an abuser, the 'let her go' has another meaning - not that of goodwill, but spite and indifference.

Now if the traditional version continues with his own plans for an elaborate funeral, it suggests that death was the topic and that as with the other versions, this guy in the bar already knew that she was dead, or could well be. Others might say, it just means that he or someone said, she's dead to you. And then he says what he'd want when he himself dies. Perhaps in explaining her absence, he painted her as the bully, nagging and making demands on him, setting an ultimatum, perhaps even storming out. How she wound up at death's door, then, he couldn't explain.

The origin of the song is said to be found sometime and somewhere in Ireland or Scotland, centuries ago. But that song likely changed a bit to become the classic associated with New Orleans, St. James Infirmary.

As the NFL keeps trying to make itself a religion - Sunday is the 'fun day' - well, upgrades are always . . a fun day. This is what I mean. Windows 2000 and XP seemed interesting. I had both for some time, and never installed. I always . . feared the hassle of incompatibilities, time to fix, time to research, etc, etc. And my fear was in no way misplaced. Ultimately, I 'repaired' my fresh Windows 2000 install. That had been the subject of my last article. The 'repair' essentially removed most every setting and installation I'd had. Then I ultimately reformatted the drive and completely reinstalled Windows 2000. No matter what, by some point, the darned thing was crashing with 'memory' errors. But the memtest tool, run off of floppy, showed no memory errors.

Sometimes, a memory error doesn't mean there's an error in memory. The routines and libraries were calling the wrong thing. So I have it working. It's unstable. I still haven't figured out what's not working. But it mostly sort of works, and particularly for some key apps.

But I was ambitious. So, the heck with an obsolete Win2000, I said. NT 5. On to NT 5.1, XP. (I think with the bad publicity for Vista, Microsoft is eager to move on with Windows-7, but they are going to identify it as - NT 6.1 - NT, the OS that wouldn't die). It seemed outfits, now gone and orphaning their wares, were more eager to update for 98SE - a fairly successful operating system - than for Win2000 SP4. But XP? That's only recently been proposed for the orphanage by Microsoft. So, I thought it might be easier to find compatibility, the latest apps and drivers, and so on.

So, yet another drive, another format, and on went XP. Activation went fine - I'd heard horror stories. I had SP2 on a second disk, from Microsoft. But for all the downloaded updates, Microsoft didn't have the brains to update their "sfc /scannow" utility which was still looking at the original D: CD-ROM, and couldn't find the files it needed. I changed a registry entry from D: to C:, copied the whole bloomin i386 directory from the original XP disk, and sfc worked fine. But . . darned. Microsoft - pick up the ball. Get in the game. This was a known problem. People shouldn't have to spend time researching why they get a slew of error messages from sfc.

You get Windows - and you gotta become some insider Microsoft systems programmer! just to get the thing to run or update. What the . . ?

Microsoft should be paying its customers for being on staff.

So apart from some continuing problems with ASUS system-level drivers and both 2000 and XP, updates were going fine. And then I made the mistake of copying over an app that didn't require install. You just unpacked from zip, and ran the app. Guess what!

CRASH! BSOD! And the blue-screen disappeared so quickly on reboot that I can't even see what it says. Something cryptic, I'm sure. One has to get into the Control Panel, System, Advanced tab and the Startup/Recovery button to turn off, Auto Restart. And keep the dump 'small', because the 'full' memory dump takes a lot of time.

So, okay, I said. XP needs a specific install. It must be tracking the running apps, somehow, by internals, or id, or filesize, or something. But I clicked then on some old practically-DOS-era apps, just to see. And they booted up just fine. An old Spirograph app, a Japanese kaleidoscope pattern maker, and some other thing. But then I hit another of these and - CRASH, BSOD, reboot. No consistency.

Dang!

Oh well, I said, a lot of the other apps had installed. So I went to an old MIDI app, a really neat orphanware package that the author had sent me with his own id as registration. It was so old it was on floppy disk. So, ran the install on floppy and - that's right - CRASH, BSOD, reboot. The thing ran just fine in Win2000.

This XP was looking less and less stable all the while. And I'd already successfully run SP2.

Oh well, I said. I hadn't downloaded the latest from Microsoft. SURELY, that . . would go well. So the update site recommended SP3, which consisted of a bunch of updates, IE7, and Winplayer 11. Okay, I said. I'll run the updates unattended, and take a moment for a film - the Eastwood movie about the Asian gang and how 'real men talk', etc. I got back, saw my screen - virus. I thought - a virus! There were blocks of random junk on the screen. And the system appeared to be hung. Well, it wasn't. The system wasn't frozen. I was able to close out of IE. And I was able to shut down, after some delay.

But oh the wonder upon reboot. Immediately, chkdsk started to run. It said - you don't want to run? Press any key. I looked for the any key . . no, I pressed a whole bunch of keys. And sure enough, chkdsk ran. It's a Core 2 with a fast FSB on a 100MB partition. Fifteen minutes. No errors. Reboot.

Guess what - it runs chkdsk a second time. No errors. And up comes Win XP with a whole bunch of error messages. Suddenly, I don't have a pagefile in my root directory. And there were a bunch of other messages about some directory $MFT, I assume some temp directory. That wasn't on the disk. And neither was the pagefile.sys that I'd seen there in the root directory, before. I went to the Advanced tab from the System icon in the Control Panel. Pagefile is just the latest in the virtual memory gimic Windows has had since I used 3.1. There was a setting. I set it. But it just kept saying - 0 used. I set it again. Nothing.

So, going to my Microsoft cubicle - or should have been - I poured through the company documents as it were and discovered that this is just what happens when you allow Microsoft to automatically install ie7 on your brand new XP SP2. When they say - Microsoft IS . . a virus . . really, they're not kidding. Apparently, the problem has to do with a 'malware' update acting like a startup or boottime virus check. If not that, then some other app. Hijack This may have a bootup app, or maybe Sypbot, something like that. If XP was installed, and then SP2 installed from a separate Microsoft CD, it seems that you must either use the stand-alone ie7 or have to get Microsoft to send you the SP3 CD.

And it left quite a mess. One immediate step was to turn off file indexing. That took a while because Windows literally goes through every file on disk to turn this feature, or bug, on or off. By this time, copying over a lot of data, I had over 160 thousand files on the HD. That worked for a couple of boots. And then $MFT, where are you, messages started to show again. And pagefile, Windows just wouldn't create one. So - of course - uninstalled ie7. Boot, shutdown, boot, and there was pagefile, and no more mention of $MFT - just a real lasting fear of . . ie7, let me tell ya.

For both Win2000 and XP, by the way, I'd read to disable the messenger service. Guess what happens when you have new installations? You get bugged by one outfit selling - regnow. NEVER . . buy regnow. They seem to be the only outfit using Windows messenger, just to scare you. So, Administrator Tools, Services, and disable Messenger.

I did use HiJack This 2.0.2. It picked out, in Windows 2000 a day after fresh install, the wmnncs, worm. Spybot had no clue. And HiJack shut it down. The wmnncs grabbed control of the connection going out and just flooded different ip's with stuff to the point that I literally couldn't surf the web. I wish I'd figured it out, sooner. My computer sent out a lot of junk. I don't know how it got in there, so fast, so soon after a fresh installation, but it seems to often hide in the Fonts directory, which Microsoft in its wisdom displays differently than other directories, by showing only fonts. So it's easy to hide a file there, unless you boot from another drive and use the problem drive as a second drive, where you can see all the files. There was another that got flagged, algs. Still don't know about that, but it's gone. Again, this was just in the Win2000 install.

So, I got malwarebytes and discovered in a 'full scan' not a single problem in any file in Win XP. Seemed like a good time to set a System Restore point. So I created one.

And so it goes, as I work my up in the Microsoft corporation - so it seems. They should be paying me to use their products. I should be on staff for all the research one has to do just to install apps, particularly their own.

And chkdsk. Dang it all, Microsoft. If a person don't want to run this app, give people a way to escape out of it. Period! It takes forever to run. And for all the times it was run on this ie7 botch-job, it always showed the drive was just fine. Windows falsely setting the 'dirty' flag was the problem, not the drive.

Onward and upward. I hoping for a corner office. And I'll update with my latest 'training' in updates, as it goes.

Yes, I know. Windows 2000. Microsoft doesn't even support it - well, not entirely, anyway. It's ancient - though many still use it (and also server 2003). Browser stat sites warn of old browsers because people have good, useful but orphaned software that wasn't upgraded to the latest Microsoft OS. And Microsoft's latest browsers won't run on anything prior to XP SP2. Other browsers, like Firefox 3, require at least Win 2000 (W2k). Microsoft, until Vista, was batting strong in all innings, with the breakthrough Win3.1 and truetype, which made the company, to Win95 with its networking and a design and screen appearance that has essentially been unchanged through Vista, to Win98 with USB support and large disk FAT32 (long before large GB drives were available or affordable), to Win2K with the more stable but problematic file system (what software easily installed in Win98SE might be a nightmare in W2k), to XP which also turned out to be a solid OS. With Vista, it's really their NT 6 - version 6. And what version 6 of software is ever any good? Five is often the pinnacle ap. And seven takes customers to the 'whole new level'.

I had a machine that essentially blew itself up from the heat inside the box. Graphics card, perhaps. Now in the old days these cards had fans, but no fan monitors. This fan was on the 'underside' of the 'low-power' graphics card. And so visual inspection would have been difficult. And the destruction was revealed only by looking right at the card, itself. The fan looked like it was made of paper, it was so dried out. And that heat caused the motherboard's capacitors, essentially a bank of them hidden behind the large processor fan, to blow. There was melted white 'crust' everywhere, down in behind the fan case. Probably good riddance to a somewhat flaky Soyo board, at any rate. It was the ambitious Dragon 2 series, from years ago; sort of a 'combo' board. But it never quite took to some hardware, maybe even some software (I can't remember). And the SATA and RAID drivers were primitive and unreliable, being leading edge.

But some of the software which I religiously use had not been upgraded. The companies are long gone. Thus, orphanware, already mentioned. And a Win98SE dockable drive had been used for those. And sure enough, the new boards . . the new cards . . . which I bought to replace the crashed system didn't have USB drivers, or even video drivers, for Win98SE (arguably the crowning achievement of the Win3.1 line, as XP would be arguably for the NT line, so far). The one thing that made Win98 still useful was USB compatibility, and USB 2.0 compatibility with one of Microsoft's last SE upgrades. So now it turned out that if one wanted to use readily available motherboards, say from Fry's, instead of waiting on mail order two weeks before Christmas, one could get a fairly old NVidia 6200 video card. That would be XP compatible. And it was the last NVidia for which there were also downloadable drivers for Win98. I considered it. But I'm glad I went with something built later. Because when I attempted a fresh installation of Win98SE on the new hardware, it just wouldn't take, likely some system level stuff in the installation with which the newer BIOS and chipsets are simply not compatible. [Fortunately, Microsoft released its Virtual PC for free, which it originally purchased from Connectrix (I believe) to compete with VM Ware. Problem there, VPC can't connect with some native hardware, particularly sound cards. And I needed those sythesizer sounds/patches, not whatever I could install as a 'virtual synth'.]

I decided to install an old W2k that I had never quite gotten to, back when. It would be marginally safer and more robust than Win98SE (I was hoping). Some of the old software had NT drivers. W2K is really NT 5, just like XP is really a version of NT (though what runs in W2k, may not - in XP). But I thought, perhaps 2000 would be just good enough, and close enough in time to the old software that it just might work. For some aps that was true. Yes, the NFTS file system is different. But W2k can also read FAT file systems, such as that on the old Win98 program and data drives. So. And some of the libraries/dlls even might be the same.

Now, I had first attempted this feat with a Gigabyle S-Series board, with 'double'-BIOS and 'guaranteed' robust performance, etc. Unfortunately, the BIOS or other chips seemed so geared toward Vista, in particular, that some of the old drives just weren't being recognized. Even a test run at installing a fresh XP crashed. None of the OS would get past the boot-to-disk phase. I called the Gigabyte support line, and got a tech with a thick Asian accent, almost a parody I thought, whose sole advice was - try different drives, try different cables, try different motherboard connections/channels. And I said to myself, maybe I should try another board.

So back went the Gigabyte. And I wanted a tried and true, branded name. This time - Asus. And Asus sells an almost innumerable series of P5 boards. This was the P5QC, a 'combo board', and a fairly recent 775 pin socket model (Intel's next 'upgrade' processor is supposed to have double the number - I guess Moore's law now applies to socket pins?). Lots of MBs with P5 in the name. So the connectors looked funny on my new Antec 'quiet' power supply. There was a four-pin for 12v power. Typical for ATX. And the board had an eight-pin, with a plastic cap over four. Nonetheless, the manual only spoke of an eight-pin connector. So I called the support line. Got a guy who spoke perfect English, who said the eight-pin would be needed for some overclocked, high-power set-up with a 'hot' video card. And some cards do have these four pin connectors (some have two such connectors). Otherwise - furget  . . etc. Clear, to the point. Booted up the OS. This time, copies from CD to HD, and now itbooted right off the HD. So the hardware bolted together easily, as they all do, these days (in the old days, there were - lots of wires). There still was the problem of no three wire connector for the power supply fan (not to run it, but to monitor it). And in fact, I used the thin SATA cables, just for better airflow, on two separate master - IDE - drives. PATA drives. There's a converter card/clip available, an adapter, SATA-cable to IDE connector. Retail, 20 bucks. Obviously, it's for slow ATA 100/133 IDE, now called, PATA, drives. But these worked fine with those drives and the ASUS P5QC. I even asked the tech guy about it in that same call. And he said we use those connectors/converters ourselves here at ASUS (pronounced - ay-SOOSE). You need two power supply connections into these clips, one for the IDE device, and a SATA power connection for the adapter itself (which is the same connector as for the old 3.5 floppy drives). And SATA or PATA in this way, one doesn't need worry about master/slave setups, anymore, since the newer boards have six or more SATA connectors. You can have six master drives (shunted as master drive on the HD itself), and the board will boot the first in order with an OS. Simple. So if you want to share data, one just puts the bootable data drive in a higher numbered bay. The lower numbered drive is the one that boots. And if one wants to boot the data drive, just switch off whatever is above it. When done, run them both again and the other OS can read whatever work you completed in the data drive. The reason for two is to have to OS. Virtual PCs are great. But there are limitations. To avoid those, you need an OS actually installed on a HD, and on the particular hardware.

But once the hardware ceased to be an issue, then came what I feared - installing a MIcrosoft OS. W2k isn't quite unsupported, just yet. You can download the patch, SPx, etc. But it's quickly going to be unsupported. Nonetheless, I downloaded the 'network'/download SP4. There's a smaller 'express'/user version of this. And you can also get a CD version, perhaps still. Now apparently Windows 2000 is pretty much useless without an SP2 upgrade, then SP3. And Adobe wouldn't launch without SP4. Even the ASUS board drivers wouldn't launch without some upgrade. So I downloaded SP4 straight off.

So fresh drive, newly partitioned and formatted by the W2k setup from CD. And in went the OS. Then the video driver. I quickly set up the 'appearence' and a tiled background I still use from Win95 or 98, namely the 'forest.bmp'. So I got the resolution and menu and font appearance to that which I was accustomed (I like the 1280 x 1024 for the still square graphics monitor I use, instead of the wide-style LCDs now being sold). I added some one or two key startup menu items. I installed a few software items. Firefox went in and then I downloaded the final upgrade for version 2. Version 3 also runs on W2k, and alongside 2 by loading specific profiles. And I had the latest Opera, as well. But I wondered if their installation with the latest Windows installer hadn't partly caused previous problems. So I'd hold off on that. I could 'surf' the web with FF3.

And then it was on to upgrading the ancient, and almost unusable IE 5.0 to a version 6, SP1. W2k shipped with IE 5.0. Oddly, some few people still report this at browser stat sites. But the upgrade 5.5 was marginal, and very good for its day. Even IE 6 SP1 is getting to be ancient, and to be fair, though again in late 2008 IE 6 still accounts for maybe 15-25% of browser usage, depending on what stat site one cites. It's still handy to check this version, even today. And I made a mistake. I left two drives up and running, the new W2k and a data drive, when installing this system software. Pretty soon, I think, the OS started linking between the two HDs. And sure enough, IE 5 would not upgrade. A message insisted, another 'upgrade' was in process. But shut down and restart as I would, I still couldn't upgrade. Bad to worse. I tried the SP4. It began installation just fine. After checking system 'contents', it crashed after giving a message - the installer INSIDE the package was not properly digitally signed by Microsoft (I believe the 'signature' is held in a similarly named 'cat' file, same directory). It was most likely a spurious message. But whether for that reason, or something that quickly followed, the software must have assumed this, or assumed that, and the assumption wasn't met. Search as I might, there were no satisfactory answers for any of this on the web. And I think, ultimately, that the problem was that with two drives up at the time of system upgrade, that the upgrade got 'greedy' and tried to affect both drives, messing up the OS, itself, in the process. At this point, software that previously installed just fine was choking on 'can't install' messages. Things had gone badly.

So since the new drive had information entirely copied from the other, now reduced to just a data drive, the only information to be lost in a reinstallation would be a handful of drivers I'd downloaded. So I just reformatted the drive, removing the temptation of the OS to try to incorporate INFs or registry settings already on the drive. This time, it went smoothly. There were no installation glitches. The 'digitally signed' nonsense never appeared with SP4. And once SP4 went in, suddenly other software seemed to suddenly again 'like' W2k, including Microsoft's own apps.

So, if anyone has attempted this, again for the purpose of trying to run good, but orphaned, software that may have had NT or specific 2000 drivers, but which may not work in XP or Vista, then any of this might prove interesting.

The day of 'judgment'. Mike 'Nowin' Nolan is gone. He finally got the call. He finally got his pink slip. He might even be joined by a very underperforming offensive line coach named, George Warhop (a good guy, decent guy, outgoing guy - but a questionable coach).

The 49ers were a winning team with Jeff Garcia and 'Mooch' Mariucci. Time might have passed 'Mooch' by. The same might be said for Mike Holmgren, but perhaps not for Mike Shanahan, another of the Walsh-tree winners who is still hanging on. For the time being, they'll move up to HC Mike Singletary, the HOF Bears linebacker, who has been in the no-man's land of 'assistant head coach' for some years now, as he concentrated exclusively on the middle linebacker position - Willis, Spikes and just a few others.

The Detroit Lions faced a similar 'malaise'. Fans were literally giving up on the team. They were watching other games, or going out on Sunday - or 'God forbid', spend more time devoting Sunday TO God and consideration of Scriptures, for example (not something the NFL exactly encourages). Finally they staged a small protest rally. And their hated enemy, the lovable Matt Millen, got his phone call. The 49ers fans might . . have been on the verge. But they didn't actually have to go down to 4949, next to Great America. In fact, the Yorks, the owners, were probably in Ohio, anyway.

So the deed is done. The weight has been lifted. The birds are singing. The flowers are suddenly in bloom. The air is just fresher. All that stuff. Nolan was in over his head, and compensated by descending into the stereotypical martinet bad boss, indeed incompetent boss, that we ALL know and despise. The guy never seems to get fired. So when one does, workers everywhere rejoice.

The team had lacked discipline. Nolan had been careless and clueless in challenging calls and controlling the clock during games. He made no changes to compensate for opponents making game-time adjustments. Etc. The practices were 'run-throughs', for fear of injury, instead of practices designed to instill patterns and moves as second nature, where everyone is also on the same page.

Singletary is unproven - the 'Palin' of no-experience (though Obama is the truer comparison, just in that). Many fans still think he can't last as HC. But let's see what he can do. The discipline is something he can help with. The players can respect him, where Nolan had lost them. There's 'newness' and freshness at 4949. And that can help, as well. Somebody 'up there', in management . . cares about football, say the players. For some, it's not just about winning the lottery with a big contract. For some, it's about the game. And when this kind of thing is done, it says to them, ownership knows you play football for a living, and wants you to win.

All to the good. Even this fan was about to go 'Detroit' and just give up on the team. This happened at the right time. The team has been literally stalled by bad coaching, and by coaching changes, for five years. The once great franchise has been held underwater, strapped down, unable to free itself. Here and there good players have come in. But now they have a chance to join the re-energized Rams, who just finished off two of the dreaded NFC East 'powerhouses' (least they were) after a similar mid-season coaching change.

They may not have a Tittle, a Brodie, Montana or Young. Mike Singletary is NOT Bill Walsh, and neither is Martz. The D line has been forced to a 3-4 without a dominant nose tackle, and now can return to the 49ers familiar 4-3. They're 'most experienced in the league' secondary is getting beat far too often. But better things lie ahead, only because it was HC Mike Nolan that had his boot on the neck of this team. It was Nolan who fastened the straps. He's gone now.

When Sarah Palin was selected by John McCain, presumeably against the advice of certain factions on his own campaign staff, she proved to be a breath of fresh air to the campaign, an 'everywoman', wife, mother, pro-lifer good to her word with a special-needs baby everyone wanted to hold when she would stop in at a Walmart on the campaign trail.

But when Barack 'Barry' Obama decided to meet and greet, recently, he ran into another flawed American, with problems and flaws - unlike Barry it would seem - who wondered about what had been vaguely rumored about a tax increase at the threshold of $250K. That's what he'd heard. He'd signed on at a small plumbing firm where the owner, at least until this week presumeably, had offered to sell this guy the business, at some point. A handshake sort of thing, I guess. And the business could well top this $250K threshold. Obama was walking by. He brought it up. His name was, Joe (going by his middle name, as many do - his first name is Sam).

Did Barry say - no, you will NOT see any increase, as Barry insisted at the third debate just a short while later? No, Barry made out like Joe the Plumber, as he's now called, and now somewhat of a metaphor for not just other firms of that name but of working people around the country not affiliated, perhaps, with a union, was somehow . . that Joe was overly privileged, perhaps. Instead, wouldn't he rather Obama 'spread the wealth around', give like Robin Hood to the poor? Remember, the topic was taxation. And Joe didn't like what he heard.

But then a lot of people didn't like what Barry had to say. Now, it could be rationalized as the dog devoured my homework by claiming that Barry suddenly wasn't talking taxes when he said that, but rather government 'assistance' to the 'disadvantaged'. Did Barry intend to borrow, again, putting out Treasury notes that with the trillions . . and trillions . . now being offered that Treasury might soon face problems selling such notes? Did Barry intended to use taxpayer money in order to play Robin Hood? Joe would probably have understood it, that way. But really in either case, Joe would have been right. The American people pay either way.

Barry has quite the history of surrounding himself and taking direction from not merely hate-America types; Ayers, Davis, the so-called 'Rev' Wright, the Chicago machine, even his own wife. But more to the point, those NOT proud to be American have taken, or been fed, the agenda of a militant Sovietism that many think died in the late 1970s. Apparently not. It's Robin Hood. But Robin is the king, and those he attacks are the villagers, giving to himself a percentage, and placing other villagers on the dole with the proceeds. The village is divided, unmotivated, and the kingdom collapses. And the king will never blame himself. Apparently the KGB, which supposedly is no more, is about to cash in on its 50-yr-plan. The entire leftwing cabal of Ayers, of Dorhne, of the Weather Underground, Black Panthers, to the co-ops and food banks, to the 'community organizing' of Alinsky, was the early path to formation for one, Barry Obama - or whatever he called himself, at the time. Barry made important decisions in Ayers own living room. He worked with him on projects, sat even recently on panels organized by his wife, Michelle, and said nothing to distance himself from such views. For almost twenty years, he sat and listened to the Panther/Communist rhetoric of so-called 'Christian' pastor, 'Rev' Wright. Only when Ayers came to light, only when Wright came to light, did he say - I do not know the man. All these agreed - America is evil.

It is ironic that where Farrahkan, and perhaps those in the Middle East and Kenya, have mentioned the word, messiah, in connection with Barry Obama, it is here that we have a messiah who denies his friends, not yet his friends who deny Obama.

ACORN was as much a part of sowing chaos against the 'evil that is America'. Hundreds of thousands of registrations are in doubt. Entire elections might have been stolen. Other arms of the leviathan encouraged risky and bad lending practices or else face charges of bigotry. Motor voter always included such a component. And Barry fought with ACORN for motor voter, long before his campaign just recently doled out $800K to the privileged organization. When more has come to light of ACORN's fraud, the 'messiah' has suggested he might even deny, ACORN.

As E.G. Robinson might have said to ACORN - where's your 'messiah' . . now?

I think Joe the Plumber understood. He earns the money. He figures - he earned the money. He knows there is a tax owed to government. He doesn't have to agree it must be a personal income tax, as opposed to a consumption tax. He knows a business might pay a tax, beyond all the taxes and fees demanded, otherwise. But a government that 'redistributes' income as an on-going policy is not a government Joe understands. It's not one Americans understand. It's the Soviet model. It leads to starvation and death. It leads to perpetually inaccurate reports. It leads to destruction, to poverty, to state of slaves who must only subsist. It is not freedom. The gulag must shortly follow. And Joe, I think, at some level, knows all of this.

Maybe a sufficient number of voters who understand it the same way will cast their vote. Maybe a sufficient number of fraudulent votes won't be counted, this time. Maybe.

There's one last, but important matter. Joe, it turns out, was an apprentice plumber. He was studying for his license. He had liens on his property, which perhaps has spurred him to try to consider making an offer on the business. No handouts. Just growing your way out, in order to pay off the bills. Oddly, Obama's own campaign treasurer has many liens against him, in an amount far exceeding Joe's. But that seems of no interest to anyone voting Obama. It would seem the situation was fine, until Joe dared to speak - in the United States of America. Now Toledo authorities are saying he needed to conclude his apprenticeship, last year, and needed to secure a license of his own, before now. Perhaps no one in the trade knew of this, I don't know. Now they wish to 'shut him down', entirely. This for daring to question a 'media' darling, the perfect 'messiah'. In fact, Joe filed his apprenticeship in NOV 2003. OH requires 5 yrs before even applying for a license. So the complaints from Toledo authorities sound very confused, indeed. But any politically based witch-hunt against any average citizen not previously in the public eye is not something we should tolerate - or else lose our freedoms out of fear.

And I wonder, will people remember his treatment, here? We all have secrets. We all are imperfect. There are forms we haven't sent that perhaps we didn't know that we needed to send, etc. Obama's own treasurer is immune from such investigation. But citizens are not. Joe may have done everything by the book, and the Toledo people might be the ones that are confused. So be it. But maybe there's other things to find out about Joe, or any one of us. And it's nobody's business. And in the privacy of the voting booth - will a sufficient number of citizens remember what happens if you 'cross' Barry? Will they remember that THEY . . and not free to speak in this country, either?  Will they prefer a politician in McCain, to a ruler in this 'messiah' about whom we really know so little?

I have my own websites, and other blogs. I've always liked Townhall, saw this 'blog' feature, and figured to add my opinion here, as well.

My opinion stems from a base of 'religious' Catholicism, that is, Catholicism as practiced up till Vatican II. I consider the Holy See to be vacant and the recent Popes frauds for saying to orthodox Jews that 'their messiah' has not yet come. Catholics, and Protestants, confess that Jesus Christ was Savior of all, Jew and Gentile, alike. The early Church followed the Messiah. The early Church was composed of Jews who formerly had worshipped at the Temple. And no real Pope would say what these 'popes' are saying. And never mind the wholesale and diabolical changes also made in the name of Ecumenism. It says simply that those calling themselves, Catholic, are heretics and apostates, and would be schismatics were there a valid Pope. They are the Arians that Athanasius confounded by saying - sure, you have the churches, but we, we Catholics, we have the Faith. St. Basil and others also fought the heretics of the 'era of Constantine', so that the real Church emerged, and not one stolen by its enemies. And Athanasius is now remembered as great church father, a great Saint, and one of the Doctors of The Roman Catholic Church.

Politically I'm obviously a Reagan Republican. I understand that Reagan imbided of a militant Protestantism at times, and may have even been more than merely an honorary freemason. He made many mistakes in trusting, but failing to verify, the irony of his famous line not lost on me. Yet of the simple tenets he proscribed, these have worked and conform with the understanding of our founders, who themselves in turning from The Church, studied the worldly empires of the pagan past.

Reagan believed in a government that provided as it ought, particularly for the common defense in ways that this country only embraced really after WW II, not even WW I. He embraced a simple morality ringing in his ears, that homosexuality was destructive and not an 'innocent' or 'victimless crime', for he saw the constant efforts to force acceptance of homosexuality on every sphere of life by the courts and by legislation. He knew permissive abortion was wrong. And he allowed for disagreements on the secular bounds when it came to rape or incest, though such children themselves continue to be innocents. He was the only President to write a pro-life essay while presiding in the Oval Office, quite a change of opinion from his days as CA Gov. not a decade before.

But his principal concern always seemed to be the 'evil empire', particularly the Soviet Union. Reagan was one to believe in freedom. He fought in Grenada, in what might have been far worse had he not - though having won, it became a 'token war'. He wasn't sure about Lebanon, and then with certainty withdrew after the bombing, which he admitted was yet another of his many mistakes.

He was a classic orator, speechwriter, politician. When he died, and a state funeral began, his enemies in the press, among the Democrats and the left, were stunned at the public outpouring for a man whose legacy they were still busy rewriting. Day after day, crowds were seen everywhere. More state leaders from the day appeared to pay their respects than had been anticipated. The last they had remembered from the man was a letter he published, when he spoke about the disease that soon made it difficult for him remember the least thing. The man of the quick comeback, the all-American self-defacing humor, was fading. And it was a most eloquent letter.

So while under no illusions about the man, and seeing all his many failures for what they were, for his trust and failure to verify, for his trust of a Democrat Party that even in the 1980s had proven they did not deserve the public trust with which they are still constantly granted, I am a Roman Catholic, in exile, and a Reagan Republican behind the lines.

And that's where I'm-coming-from.