Ward R. Jones

05/21/2016

Like a lot of people who own houses, we have a basketball goal mounted on a backboard, a pole by the driveway. Once white, the net of this goal is now gray. A ball tossed through it might shred the cotton, rain in tufts of white to the ground. Our son and grandsons haven't lobbed a ball at this net in decades. It doesn't sway much, even on windy days. It just is until a ball is tossed, swished. The new owner might from a short or long distance do that. In the meantime it hangs, waits, gray as my hair.

04/03/2016

The news this a.m. has dire predictions for the GOP's standard barer, who "has become unacceptable, perhaps irreversibly so, to broad swaths of Americans," women are mentioned along with nonwhites, Hispanics, voters under 30, and those with a college education. Not mentioned, Hillary's relationship with Sidney Blumenthal, which has come to light recently, her "aid" sending classified information by email to her Blackberry. Currently under investigation by the National Security Agency and the FBI. Other news, the possible, probable, murder of a once pal of Putin's who got on his bad side, the wealthy Russian fled to the U.S. started buying property in Los Angeles, had several mansions some he planned to sell when he went to a fundraiser outside of Washington D C and was found dead. An autopsy revealed he was bludgeoned not cardiac arrest as reported by Moscow. What happens when you lose favor with Putin. A sadder, crueler, but more significant story involves a poor woman in Guatemala whose husband was away in the fields when truckloads of soldiers and police officers swarmed into her one room house blocking her exit and helping themselves to what food there was in the shack. They evicted her claiming the land belong to a Canadian mining company, then took turns ra**ng her, and then dragged her from her one room house and set it on fire. Someone reported what had happened, it became a story, and with help from those in sympathy she has taken her case to the courts, not in Guatemala, in Canada, her suit is against Hudson Bay Mineral, Inc. which has sent shivers through the mining industry. Let's hope they freeze to death.

03/28/2016

The Republicans don't want a moderate jurist to serve on the Supreme Court, they want a staunch conservative. There are few among our millions of voters who are moderate, which is why Mitch McConnell and his brethren preach to their choir of conservatives. Harry Reid, were he still the Majority Leader, would preach the same sermon to his liberals. Divided we are, more deeply than at any time in our nation's history. A Franklin Roosevelt, a Ronald Reagan, can't unite the country, when we need it the most.

03/15/2016

Carelessness, another example of it from Hillary Clinton, who trying to win white working class voters bellowed: "We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business." America Rising, an anti Clinton super PAC said the comment showed a "brazen disregard for men and women who help power America." Had she given some thought to her comment, as Bernie does so consistently, she could've used American Rising as a symbol of his duplicity, his double dealing on the issue of Super Pacs he's used so successfully to tie her to big money interests. Instead she dug a hole for herself. Not the first time, or the last. Passion, if not controlled like Bernie does so masterfully, can ruin a bid for the ultimate prize.

02/16/2016

What would George Washington have thought on this day that honors him, about Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, who so eagerly berate each other, debate after debate? Hillary and Bernie aren't as vicious, but they don't agree on anything. Yes, Washington was a war hero, a person admired by virtually every citizen for freeing them from tyranny. But what we have now is a love and hate fest where personality, dare I say it, trumps character, integrity, a sense of decency, honesty.

02/13/2016

Bill and Hillary earned $7.7 million for 39 speeches to big banks including Goldman Sachs and UBS, another $1.8 million for Hillary when she gave eight speeches to big banks. $225,000 an hour. Her rejoinder for this $3,750 dollar speech, this after Bernie mentioned her Super Pac's raising $15 million from Wall Street, was: "You're the only one on this stage that voted to deregulate the financial market in 2000." What she didn't mention was his vote was cast in support of her husband's Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Bill later admitted he made a serious mistake in signing the bill, saying he didn't understand the extent to which these deals went bad. Which says something about how deep his wife had to dig to find something she could use to hide her greed.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/live-from-charleston-sc/20/01/hillary-clinton-goldman-sachs-speaking-fees-217920

01/27/2016

The Silence of the Lambs continues here in Houston. Not a whisper of our $10 billion dollar debt from City Hall or elsewhere. That one report by Bill Balleza has been removed from the internet.

10/11/2015

The Times featured my old neighborhood, River Oaks in Houston, where when I was growing up there were families a lot wealthier than mine. Now wealth is even more concentrated, seven families live in mega mansions shown on the front page. Of the seven, three families gave $2 million to Republican candidates, the rest hundreds of thousands. As the headline notes, half the cash for the race for president came from just 158 families. Bernie Sanders is going to be all over this Tuesday night, as will Hillary, if not as passionately. And there is something wrong when wealth is concentrated like it is, one percent owning 70 percent of the wealth in our country. Huey Long is looking up from below, wishing he were alive.

10/02/2015

The latest shooting was influenced, if not encouraged, by the social media. A chance to let people know how deranged he was.

“The 4chan post that shooter allegedly posted warning students https://t.co/NB921tfUip??”

09/03/2015

The United Nations Refugee Agency has 9,300 employees in 23 countries to protect, its website says, millions of refugees. Those millions are in a few countries, Hungary the current roadblock. Shouldn't there be a migration, by air, of these thousands of UN employees to where these millions of desperate people are?

For 733 migrants crammed aboard two tiny boats somewhere between Libya and Italy, a leaky hull was neither the beginning nor the end of their troubles.

09/03/2015

A baffling decision in light of what's specifically written in the Collective Bargaining Agreement: Article 42 Club Discipline, Sec. 1. (xv) Conduct detrimental to Club—maximum fine of an amount equal to one week’s salary and/or suspension without pay for a period not to exceed four (4) weeks.

The decision on Thursday was a blow to Commissioner Roger Goodell, who argued that the labor agreement gave him authority to carry out the suspension.

09/02/2015

Facebook's coercion/extortion when $30 dollars isn't enough to "boost" for barely a day, your add:

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