Picture this – Hillary Clinton is elected President and there’s a state dinner at the White House. Bill will be playing the role of host, as First Ladies have done for 200+ years. He will be hosting the spouses of dignitaries, of which a majority are women. I can see the headline:
Bill Clinton – blurring the lines of philanthropy and philandering.
So, it finally happened to me – I got tired of watching Fox News for all my TV-obtained news. I know my mother will never do this and please don’t tell her I did, she may disown me. I know a lot of you will say, wow, you finally got it?! Well it seemed to be unbalanced, like the media extension of the Republican party. So now I’m watching MSNBC at noon, sitting in for Andrea Mitchell and am surprised to see that Luke Russert is doing a great job of delivering balanced news. He was aggressive in talking with Hillary’s spokesperson about the email issue. I was expecting to see news about Cecil the Lion and why we shouldn’t put criminals in jail, not putting murderers to death, allowing 3rd trimester abortions and supporting Jerry Brown’s banning of the word “alien”.
I know I will go back to Fox News but I will continue with adding in news shows from other networks.
What TV network news do you watch most?
Other news sources: I get probably 1/2 my news online. Every morning I log on to google.com/news and read the news stories that way and on my Iphone I use Google News and USA Today apps.
Where do you get most of your news?
Seen in my in-box from my brother but I took liberty to modify it slightly:
So, I was walking through the mall and I saw that there was a “Illegal Immigrant Bookstore”
I was wondering what exactly was in such bookstore so I went in.
As I was wandering around taking a look, the clerk stopped me and asked if he could help me,
I imagine I didn’t look like his normal clientele, so I asked, “Do you have a copy of Donald Trump’s book on his U.S. Immigration Policy regarding Illegal Aliens?”
The clerk said, ” F—k off, get out and stay out!”
I said, “Yes, that’s the one. Do you have it in paperback?
Well there I was in San Francisco at Arena International’s Outsourcing in Clinical Trials West Coast meeting in February of this year. The first recipient in 2015 of a FOCM Membership card was Frank Di Stefano, at the time he was with Fisher Clinical and now he is with YourWay Transport. Also receiving their cards were: Lauren Jones with Barrington James; from Fibrogen: Beth Johnson (who it turns out went to summer camp at Friendly Pines Camp in Prescott, AZ in the late 1960’s when I was there), Mairead Carney and a colleague of theirs whose name I am tracking down, FOCM members Carole Gabos and Brian Langin (we’d worked together at Quintiles), Joanne Burns (who worked at Quintiles after I had, but we knew a lot of people in common), Jim Mitchell with Bioclinica and there are 2 people whose names I need. Any help is appreciated.
Yes, that’s what I said “artistic networking”. I was working from Yuma, AZ for a couple weeks in January and had some meetings in San Diego. And as I like to do, “not dine alone while traveling”, I arranged to meet my friend Kevin Boos for drinks and dinner. When we came out of the restaurant, we spotted our reflections in a motorcycle mirror and created the “art” shown below:
I spotted this FOCM Sticker on a truck across the street from the house I grew up in. It was parked at the Avery’s house. The person, along with his brother, in the truck was visiting Aaron Avery.
Turns out that it is my brother’s truck and I was with him. But that’s not important. What is important is that the FOCM logo can be seen all across this land. 
On January 8, 2015, FOCM member Kevin Collier was in Wilmington, NC on business. He and I met for lunch at The Basics on Front St. The Basics is a perpetually good restaurant for breakfast, weekend brunch, lunch and dinner. It is a local favorite
Kevin and i have known each other for 14 years, having first met while we were working for the Interactive Technologies Group of ICON Clinical Research. Kevin was a project manager based in Sugarland, TX and I was based in Durham, NC. 
I’m curious as to the origin of some ideas from politicians. The latest from Hillary is that it should be free for anyone to attend a public university.
I have a problem with that – it will cost ~$350 billion dollars, which means we’ll see taxes go way, way up.
And the other problem is the blatant hypocrisy, which Hillary pulls off without shame over and over again. She criticized “for-profit” universities. (Side note, since when did it become evil to make a profit? that’s how capitalism works HELLO!?)
But in criticizing “for-profit” universities, is she forgetting that she benefited financially from Bill receiving more than $16 million from 2010 to 2014 as honorary chancellor of Laureate Education, a for-profit education company.
I guess they’re not just all Clinton ideas; Bernie Sanders has them, too – make college free, make all entry level jobs pay at least $15/hour. Why stop at that, give everyone free electric mopeds, free internet, free cable TV. Profit is evil, we must find people making a profit and stop them (dripping with sarcasm). Oh wait, hey, maybe we make it a requirement that ex-Presidents cannot be compensated for speeches. #freexpresidentspeeches
Really?! Commemorating the 1 year anniversary of the death of a criminal in Ferguson, MO – really?!?!
What the hell is wrong with our country? A teen-ager steals cigars from a store, pushes the store owner, then attacks a police officer in his car, goes for the policeman’s gun, runs off, then turns back around and charges at the police officer.
Yes, his family and friends should get together and remember their son and friend on such a day. But his friend shot at police – that’s how he “honored” his friend.
If someone can find the news of that day or around then, I watched Eric Holder at a press conference, and he said “all lives matter”. But one week later people were villified for saying that.
I think that poverty of today isn’t like the poverty of the past – in America, our poor people are overweight from the availability of cheap, fast (unhealthy food), so they’re not like the thin, emaciated, starving people of Sudan. In America, 98% of homes have a color TV, 78% of American teens have a cellphone. I don’ t mean to make light of people living in poverty, but the quality of life for those living in poverty in America is vastly better than it was in the 1950’s.
Is it because of the expansion of government programs? It could be. But when I see that 31% of of the households receiving food stamps earned any income from a job that tells me there’s not enough incentive to work. I know this firsthand. When I was in between jobs and collecting unemployment, I had enough money to cover my bills plus a little extra. Oh and my loving landlord didn’t charge me rent while I was unemployed, which helped a lot. I thought I’d get the 99 weeks of Obama unemployment, but little did I know at the time, unemployment is state run. The election of a Republican Governor in NC resulted in changes such that you only get 20 weeks unemployment in NC. Well, what do you think happened? When the unemployment ran out, I made getting a job a much higher priority and started a job 4 weeks later.
The moral to this story is when you pay people enough to not work, they’re going to …… wait for it…… drum roll……. not work. When you give people incentive to work or disincentivize (possibly not a real word) the avoidance of work, they will work.