Would You Like a Slap With That Burger?

This was written during my employment as a cocktail waitress during the summer of 2002. It is a brief thought on why children act the way they do in front of their parents and complete strangers. Speaks briefly of my conservative values.

Would You Like a Slap With That Burger?

An account of one of many memorable waitressing experiences and what’s wrong with kids today.

By: Noelle Franzen

“Hey, where’s my burger?!” Ahhh, the wonderful sounds that come from the mouths of children. This surprising yet shocking statement did indeed come from a child. A child, from the looks of him, who really didn’t need that burger his parents had ordered for him. But alas, they are on vacation…so why not order the chubby kid a burger or two.

I spend my summers working as a poolside waitress at an upscale resort in Southern California, and these little “incidents” as I like to call them often spur a chain of reasoning in my own mind about the world today. Not just about kids, but their parents and the behaviors allowed and ignored by those parents. Suffice to say, the majority of these families are in the upper-class bracket of society. This does not justify, by any means, the behavior noticed by my co-workers and me. There are just as many middle-class kids who are as rude, but what struck me about this particularly jovial child was that as he so adamantly demanded his food, his parents sat right beside him and didn’t even flinch at his use of, shall we say, “smart ass” tone with me. ‘Hey Lisa, see that kid over there?’ ‘The fat one?’ ‘Yeah, the fat one, he’s a little jerk.’ ‘They’re all f***in’ jerks, Noelle.’ ‘Thanks Lis.’

Now let me offer that I am not yet myself a parent, however, if I had ever used that tone with any adult, let alone a complete stranger who was doing me a service, I would have been reprimanded appropriately (spanking). Who was this kid? Who was he to think he could speak to another human being like that…someone twice his age, who was bringing him food for the simple purpose of earning a tip from his “permissive” parents. ‘Mom, can I have a coke?’ ‘No. Water or milk.’ ‘But mom….’ ‘Don’t use that tone with me young lady!’

I kindly explained to the child that I was a waitress and not a cook, and that the cooks make the food in a certain order and when it was done I would bring it to him. He did not respond. I thought to myself an array of tones and explicatives I would have enjoyed using to combat the child’s rudeness, however, I like to think I am a kind and patient person who knows better than to lower myself to a 12-year olds realm of idiocy and irrationalism.

‘Hey kid, how many calories do you consume in a day?’ ‘What the hell is a calorie?’ ‘That’s what I thought you little porker.’

This child is obviously not told “no” a lot in his home, I’m sure. And why not? Well, lets evaluate the situation. Judging from the absurd amount of money these people were spending at the hotel, and the pool alone, this child and his siblings, God forbid there are more of them, are probably spoiled rotten. His mother probably works outside the home and is not there to “mother” him during the day or after school. His father has probably been swept up, as many men today have, in this “feminist empathizer” way of life: afraid to act like a man who is responsible for his family, the actions and appearance of his children and reluctant to put his foot down and appropriately punish his children for doing wrong. Hence, the blatantly rude and shocking words that so effortlessly tumbled from his child’s mouth.

‘Hey dad, bring me a damn beer!’ ‘But son, you’re only 11!’ ‘I said now!’ ‘Yes son.’

Kids get what they want and that is a sad fact of today’s world. Their parents don’t like to say no for fear of “hurting the child’s feelings” or something stupid like that. WHAT? Yes, that’s what I said…their feelings. Let me clarify: I do believe children have feelings—of course they do, but a parent needs to be rational when deciding what is or is not good for a child. And that includes limits, and ultimately, saying no to unnecessary wants.

For example: the toy aisle in the supermarket. Why is that there? What moron decided to put toys in the supermarket? I know, I know, its marketing and profits blah, blah, blah. Growing up, the supermarket was NOT a fun place. We knew what came out of that store: food. And maybe something to drink. Things we needed to sustain life on this planet and in our house. We had this ridiculous thing called a budget, God forbid, that allowed my mother to purchase enough food to make it through the week (hopefully) on the amount of money my father supplied to her from working hard to keep a roof over our heads. If we ever asked for a toy while in the supermarket we would get what we fully expected: a glare from my mother and a firm “no”. Looking back, I’m glad she said no, over and over and over again. I understand needs and wants, the difference between excess and necessity and I’m not afraid to assert my opinion on the matter, nor will I be when I have children of my own.

It’s funny what a kid who has probably consumed one too many hamburgers in his short pudgy life can make you think.

High School takes the P.C. Route

There is a girl in Oregon who just wanted to show how proud she was of her Marine brother by bringing a picture of him into school for the "where are they now" bulletin board. He happened to be holding a gun. As all Marines and Marine families know, Marines' guns are a part of their being.

Her teacher was told to edit the photo. Read on...www.marinecorpsmoms.com

My letter to the school board appears there.

St. Thomas Here I Come!

On Vacation until March 14.

Have a great week.

Notice how the writer calls this man a "victim."
What a load of you-know-what.
This is a self-inflicted disease from having unprotected--and wildly promiscuous--sex. It's no one's fault but his.

Only a liberal would have the gall to blame someone else for this.

Super-HIV manhad sex with 100
BY PAUL H.B. SHINDAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
BOSTON - The New York man who sparked fears of a powerful new strain of HIV had drug-fueled, unprotected sex with more than 100 men in the months before his diagnosis, a top researcher said yesterday.
Dr. David Ho of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in Manhattan will unveil today a case study of the unidentified man, who his team believes may harbor a mutant strain of the deadly virus.
Skeptical AIDS researchers from around the world believe the case is isolated and not the beginning of a new epidemic.
In a preview of the study, Ho said the new strain is resistant to 19 of 20 drugs used to fight the HIV virus and becomes full-blown AIDS in months, not years. The development led city health officials to send out a dire warning earlier this month.
"We don't know if this is an isolated case or if there are more cases out there," Ho told the Daily News.
The victim, who's in his mid-40s, participated in wild orgies fueled by crystal meth before becoming sick, Ho said.
City Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden said yesterday health workers have been "working to identify [the man's] sexual partners, and urge them to be tested."
But he declined to say how many of those partners they'd been able to reach.
Despite the fears of a superbug, other experts have pointed out that rapid progression of HIV is not new, nor is resistance to multiple drugs.
Instead of being a new strain, the virus could have rapidly developed into full-blown AIDS because of something unique to the patient, said Dr. Douglas Richman of University of California at San Diego.
But even officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have acknowledged the case is alarming. Originally published on February 25, 2005

Child of Liberals

So, since this blog is really supposed to be about work and politics, I will recount to you a startling comment made by a child of one of my coworkers. I believe he is 10.

I work for a financial investment firm. We have a large television in our office. This television is tuned to CNBC for market news and analysis all day. They occasionally touch on daily news (outside finance) and one day, a few days before the election in Iraq, my coworker happened to be in the office with her children as she had just picked them up from school and had to come back for some reason (her husband is President and CEO of our company). She technically only works part-time, if that, so this whole kids-in-the-office thing isn't a common occurance. (Which, by the way, is a different story because it bugs the hell out of me that I am trying to work and there are two little kids running around stealing my good pencils and slamming doors....)

So this report on the elections in Iraq showed U.S. Servicemen setting up barriers and such to prepare for the election.

The boy asks a question, and his father, my boss, says something to the effect of "they are preparing the cities for the election this weekend and the soldiers will be keeping them safe."

The boy then says: "Finally, they are doing something good in Iraq."

WHAT?

And his mother, nonchalantly says "you think that because you have liberal parents." And laughed.

The part that angers me most is that I am sitting 10 feet away and everyone knows that I have a brother who spent 7 months in Iraq, who not only didn't do bad things, and most certainly contributed to the humanitarian relief our government is providing though these brave Marine and soldiers. I felt like slapping that kid on the back of the head and sending him to boot camp to learn about discipline, integrity and how to shut up. This kid isn't growing up in a realistic world...it's too bad his parents 1.) have exposed him to the adult world without preparing him and 2.) when his ready to discuss adult events, teach him how to make an argument.

It sickens me to know that this child will grow up jaded and uninformed, but then again so are his parents.

I thought this was so good, I posted it here, in full, and on my other site.

February 18, 2005, 7:37 a.m.

Grand Old Party

Blacks might be surprised to compare Republican history with the Democrats’.

Today marks the 90th anniversary of a very special White House ceremony. President Woodrow Wilson hosted his Cabinet and the entire U.S. Supreme Court for a screening of D. W. Griffith's racist masterpiece, Birth of a Nation. The executive mansion's first film presentation depicted, according to Griffith, the Ku Klux Klan's heroic, post-Civil War struggle against the menace of emancipated blacks, portrayed by white actors in black face. As black civil-rights leader W.E.B. DuBois explained: In Griffith's 1915 motion picture, "The freed man was represented either as an ignorant fool, a vicious rapist, a venal or unscrupulous politician, or a faithful idiot."

Thumbs up, Wilson exclaimed. The film "is like writing history with lightning," he remarked, adding, "it is all so terribly true."

This vignette — recently recounted in Ken Burns's PBS documentary, Unforgivable Blackness — was neither the first nor last time a prominent Democrat plunged a hot knife in black America's collective back. Each February, Black History Month recalls Democrat Harry Truman's 1948 desegregation of the armed forces and Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson's signature on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the greatest black legislative victory since Republican Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery in 1863. This annual commemoration, however, largely overlooks the many milestones Republicans and blacks have achieved together by overcoming reactionary Democrats.

The House Policy Committee's 2005 Republican Freedom Calendar offers 365 examples of GOP support for women, blacks, and other minorities, often over Democratic objections. Among its highlights:

"To stop the Democrats' pro-slavery agenda, anti-slavery activists founded the Republican party, starting with a few dozen men and women in Ripon, Wisconsin on March 20, 1854," the calendar notes. "Democratic opposition to Republican efforts to protect the civil rights of all Americans lasted not only throughout Reconstruction, but well into the 20th century. In the south, those Democrats who most bitterly opposed equality for blacks founded the Ku Klux Klan, which operated as the party's terrorist wing."

Contemporary partisan hyperbole? Consider this 1866 comment from Governor Oliver Morton (R., Ind.), who is immortalized in the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall: "Every one who shoots down Negroes in the streets, burns Negro school-houses and meeting-houses, and murders women and children by the light of their own flaming dwellings, calls himself a Democrat," Morton said. "Every New York rioter in 1863 who burned up little children in colored asylums, who robbed, ravished, and murdered indiscriminately in the midst of a blazing city for three days and nights, calls himself a Democrat."

White supremacists worked club in hand with Democrats for decades:

May 22, 1856: Two years after the Grand Old party's birth, U.S. Senator Charles Sumner (R., Mass.) rose to decry pro-slavery Democrats. Congressman Preston Brooks (D., S.C.) responded by grabbing a stick and beating Sumner unconscious in the Senate chamber. Disabled, Sumner could not resume his duties for three years.

July 30, 1866: New Orleans's Democratic government ordered police to raid an integrated GOP meeting, killing 40 people and injuring 150.

September 28, 1868: Democrats in Opelousas, Louisiana killed nearly 300 blacks who tried to foil an assault on a Republican newspaper editor.

October 7, 1868: Republicans criticized Democrats' national slogan: "This is a white man's country: Let white men rule."

April 20, 1871: The GOP Congress adopted the Ku Klux Klan Act, banning the pro-Democrat domestic terrorist group.

October 18, 1871: GOP President Ulysses S. Grant dispatched federal troops to quell Klan violence in South Carolina.

September 14, 1874: Racist white Democrats stormed Louisiana's statehouse to oust GOP Governor William Kellogg's racially integrated administration; 27 are killed.

August 17, 1937: Republicans opposed Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Supreme Court nominee, U.S. Senator Hugo Black (D., Al.), a former Klansman who defended Klansmen against race-murder charges.

February 2005: The Democrats' Klan-coddling today is embodied by KKK alumnus Robert Byrd, West Virginia's logorrheic U.S. senator and, having served since January 3, 1959, that body's dean. Thirteen years earlier, Byrd wrote this to the KKK's Imperial Wizard: "The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia." Byrd led Senate Democrats as late as December 1988. On March 4, 2001, Byrd told Fox News's Tony Snow: "There are white niggers. I've seen a lot of white niggers in my time; I'm going to use that word." National Democrats never have arranged a primary challenge against or otherwise pressed this one-time cross-burner to get lost.

Contrast the KKKozy Democrats with the GOP. When former Klansman David Duke ran for Louisiana governor in 1991 as a Republican, national GOP officials scorned him. Local Republicans endorsed incumbent Democrat Edwin Edwards, despite his ethical baggage. As one Republican-created bumper sticker pleaded: "Vote for the crook: It's important!"

Republicans also have supported legislation favorable to blacks, often against intense Democratic headwinds:

In 1865, Congressional Republicans unanimously backed the 13th Amendment, which made slavery unconstitutional. Among Democrats, 63 percent of senators and 78 percent of House members voted: "No."

In 1866, 94 percent of GOP senators and 96 percent of GOP House members approved the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing all Americans equal protection of the law. Every congressional Democrat voted: "No."

February 28, 1871: The GOP Congress passed the Enforcement Act, giving black voters federal protection.

February 8, 1894: Democratic President Grover Cleveland and a Democratic Congress repealed the GOP's Enforcement Act, denying black voters federal protection.

January 26, 1922: The U.S. House adopted Rep. Leonidas Dyer's (R., Mo.) bill making lynching a federal crime. Filibustering Senate Democrats killed the measure.

May 17, 1954: As chief justice, former three-term governor Earl Warren (R., Calif.) led the U.S. Supreme Court's desegregation of government schools via the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. GOP President Dwight Eisenhower's Justice Department argued for Topeka, Kansas's black school children. Democrat John W. Davis, who lost a presidential bid to incumbent Republican Calvin Coolidge in 1924, defended "separate but equal" classrooms.

September 24, 1957: Eisenhower deployed the 82nd Airborne Division to desegregate Little Rock's government schools over the strenuous resistance of Governor Orval Faubus (D., Ark.).

May 6, 1960: Eisenhower signs the GOP's 1960 Civil Rights Act after it survived a five-day, five-hour filibuster by 18 Senate Democrats.

July 2, 1964: Democratic President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act after former Klansman Robert Byrd's 14-hour filibuster and the votes of 22 other Senate Democrats (including Tennessee's Al Gore, Sr.) failed to scuttle the measure. Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen rallied 26 GOP senators and 44 Democrats to invoke cloture and allow the bill's passage. According to John Fonte in the January 9, 2003, National Review, 82 percent of Republicans so voted, versus only 66 percent of Democrats.

True, Senator Barry Goldwater (R., Ariz.) opposed this bill the very year he became the GOP's presidential standard-bearer. However, Goldwater supported the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts and called for integrating Arizona's National Guard two years before Truman desegregated the military. Goldwater feared the 1964 Act would limit freedom of association in the private sector, a controversial but principled libertarian objection rooted in the First Amendment rather than racial hatred.

June 29, 1982: President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Republican party also is the home of numerous "firsts." Among them:

Until 1935, every black federal legislator was Republican. America's first black U.S. Representative, South Carolina's Joseph Rainey, and our first black senator, Mississippi's Hiram Revels, both reached Capitol Hill in 1870. On December 9, 1872, Louisiana Republican Pinckney Benton Stewart "P.B.S." Pinchback became America's first black governor.

August 8, 1878: GOP supply-siders may hate to admit it, but America's first black Collector of Internal Revenue was former U.S. Rep. James Rapier (R., Ala.).

October 16, 1901: GOP President Theodore Roosevelt invited to the White House as its first black dinner guest Republican educator Booker T. Washington. The pro-Democrat Richmond Times newspaper warned that consequently, "White women may receive attentions from Negro men." As Toni Marshall wrote in the November 9, 1995, Washington Times, when Roosevelt sought reelection in 1904, Democrats produced a button that showed their presidential nominee, Alton Parker, beside a white couple while Roosevelt posed with a white bride and black groom. The button read: "The Choice Is Yours."

GOP presidents Gerald Ford in 1975 and Ronald Reagan in 1982 promoted Daniel James and Roscoe Robinson to become, respectively, the Air Force's and Army's first black four-star generals.

November 2, 1983: President Reagan established Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a national holiday, the first such honor for a black American.

President Reagan named Colin Powell America's first black national-security adviser while GOP President George W. Bush appointed him our first black secretary of state.

President G.W. Bush named Condoleezza Rice America's first black female NSC chief, then our second (consecutive) black secretary of State. Just last month, one-time Klansman Robert Byrd and other Senate Democrats stalled Rice's confirmation for a week. Amid unanimous GOP support, 12 Democrats and Vermont Independent James Jeffords opposed Rice — the most "No" votes for a State designee since 14 senators frowned on Henry Clay in 1825.

"The first Republican I knew was my father, and he is still the Republican I most admire," Rice has said. "He joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did. My father has never forgotten that day, and neither have I."

"We started our party with the express intent of protecting the American people from the Democrats' pro-slavery policies that expressly made people inferior to the state," wrote Rep. Christopher Cox (R., Calif.), who authorized the calendar last year as House Policy chairman. "Today, the animating spirit of the Republican Party is exactly the same as it was then: free people, free minds, free markets, free expression, and unlimited opportunity."

"Leading the organized opposition to these ideas 150 years ago, just as today, was the Democratic Party," Cox continued. "Then, just as now, their hallmarks were politically correct speech; a preference for government control over individual initiative...and an insistence on seeing people as members of groups rather than as individuals."

But what about racial preferences? The GOP's embrace of color-neutral policies parallels Martin Luther King's dream of racial equality over racial scale tipping. "The constitutional amendments that the Republican party supported after the Civil War did not advance preferences by race," Cox told me. "They made government view every person as an individual, not as a member of a racial group."

Alas, even as Republicans promote work over welfare, educational choice, and personal retirement accounts, all of which would empower blacks, some 90 percent of blacks vote Democrat as reflexively as knees kick when tapped with rubber mallets. After inspecting the Democrats' handiwork — e.g. the tar pit that is public assistance, the Dresden that is the ghetto school system, and the pyramid scheme that is Social Security (which robs too many blacks who die before recouping their "investment") — black Americans should ask Democrats: "Yesterday's gone. What have you done for us lately?"

— New York commentator Deroy Murdock is an advisory board member of Project 21, a Washington-based network of black free-market advocates.

Happy Presidents' Day

When I was a kid, we had both Washington and Lincoln's birthdays off. Oh well.
I'm off to Washington D.C. for the long weekend.
See you soon.