Who is steering the ship?

I refer of course, to the ship of state.
Ours being the United States of America.
Emergencies and drastic situations are all in the job description of President of The United States, regardless of who he or she may be.

I remember now Secretary of State and former Senator and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton airing a particularly effective campaign ad when she ran in the Democrat primaries against then Senator Obama.
The gist of this was, when the phone rings at 3:00 AM, will my opponent be able to answer it?

Lately it seems that his response now that he is President is to let the answering machine catch the call. Or perhaps he tells Michelle "Ah, tell them I'm not here! I'm walking the dog!"

So far this year, we've had Egypt in turmoil, now with a military government that is somewhat friendly to the U.S.
According to CNN and other media outlets, President Obama learned of former Egyptian President/dictator for life Hosni Mubarak fleeing Egypt while he watched TV in the Oval Office.

During the same time period, Algeria, Yemen and Tunisia were both caught in uprisings of their own.
We had a chance, with some skillful and direct leadership from the top to insure that all of these aggrieved people were protected from violence.
We also needed to insure that Islamic militants like the Muslim Brotherhood or some Iranian front didn't turn these nations into a Sharia state.

Our response from the White House was to sit and wait, and let events unfold.
The results were the results, we had virtually no input to shepherd these people in the direction of peace and democracy on some level.

And now we have Libya. Her poor people have been terrorized for decades by one of the worst lunatic tyrants in modern history, "Colonel" Mohamar Quadafy.
A man who also has the blood of many Americans on his hands through his direct and overt terrorist activity over the last thirty years.
Ronald Reagan dealt with him rather harshly , but every other President has been content to keep him penned up, instead of dealing with his crazed treatment of his own people, and his continued threats to the rest of the world.

Had we a strong leader, he could have been "coaxed" into leaving the country and going into exile very early on in this crisis. A live idiot with several millions of his peoples oil money in France beats having him committing genocide on his subjects in revolt.
Chances are strong assurance from the U.S. that we would bring down the wrath of God on his miserable head (and that of his son) ala' Ronald Reagan if he did not vamoose would have accomplished his removal without bloodshed.

Instead, we waited.
Depending on the ineffective and perennially weak U.N. to finally act in the Security Council was a disaster.
After placating the tyrannical Chinese government for over two weeks, the council finally passed a resolution last night for a no fly zone. 10-4 for, 5 nations too spineless to vote that abstained.
Yes, the same Chinese government that locks up Nobel Prize winners, and places his family under house arrest rather than let them attend the award ceremony for fear of world humiliation.

No one will ever know how many innocent Libyans were slaughtered by this madman and his supporters because we dithered and did nothing.
And it is now likely that the insane Colonel will be in power until he dies.
Then, just as it will be in North Korea his spawn of Satan son will succeed him.
After the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein stayed in power in similar circumstances.
He slaughtered hundreds of thousands of his own people, using Bio weapons against the Kurds.
George W. Bush finally had him removed, after 17 toothless U.N. resolutions over a 12 year period.

Word is leaking out that Secretary of State Clinton is furious with her boss for his inaction.
She saw the potential to get rid of this nut job with little risk.
It seems she was right about the phone call.

And now we have the natural disaster in Japan, with a Tsunami following a series of devastating earthquakes and nuclear meltdown potential.
Word from the White House "the fallout will have little potency if it hits the U.S. West Coast"
If, how much potency, who cares I don't have to go there etc etc.

Our Commander in Chiefs answer to all of this?
Raise money for his reelection campaign, play golf and fly to Rio for one of his patented political/luxury vacation trips abroad.
Were he to come back from Brazil with a new treaty agreement with them to buy their oil I would think it money well spent.
Their current number one trading partner is Communist China.
It should be us.
They have a booming economy, and are now ranked number seven in the world in that respect.

Heaven forbid, if we give this man four more years in the White House, they will surpass us.

We need someone else available to answer the Red Phone in January of 2013.

The Family Tree

My sister sent me a link to a new website for the State of West Virginia.
"Thanks, now I won't get anything of real value done for the rest of the day!" I told her.
There was a wealth of historical information to be found there.

In just over an hour, I downloaded Marriage "Contracts" and licenses all the way back to my
ggg Grandfather and Grandmother, in 1808.
The listings by the county clerk in the registers for that year were also there.

I learned that in olden days, it was indeed a contract between the groom to be, and his father in law, or the eldest living brother. The contract was with the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the name of the current governor.
The price of said contract? $150.00, serious money in that day.
Instead of receiving a Dowry, as it was in the old country the young husband had to do this in order to show that he was financially stable enough to support the woman.
If he hadn't been working long enough to save the cash, he didn't walk the man's little girl down the aisle, so to speak.

The ages listed on the license normally reflected that.
My ggg grandfather Joshua Harvey was 23, Sarah Swope, the matriarch of my direct line was only sixteen.
Their son James S. Harvey (my fathers name sake) was 22, his bride Eliza Cummins was
only 17. It took a young man that long to save that amount of money in order to marry.

As time marched on, and the contract was now only a marriage license the age of the woman advanced.
In fact, my grandmother Ollie Pearl Garten was 23, and my Pa Pa was only 22!
My great grandmother Louisa Baumgardner Harvey was very young at marriage though.
She was only 30 when she died after a difficult child birth. The child did not survive either.
My great Aunt Liza was only twelve at the time, and she helped with my granddad, who was six, and with his little brother Hobart who was one until she herself married at the age of seventeen.
My great grandfather never remarried, which tells me a lot about his love for his young wife.
It was commonplace for a man to quickly remarry in that day, especially when he had young children.
He raised the boys with the help of his married daughter, and later served as Sheriff in Monroe County. He died just before my father was born in 1921, living to see most of his grandchildren.

Seeing the flowing, formal cursive handwriting on these documents, with the names, ages and witnesses from the family of people I've heard about, and in some cases known as elderly was awesome.
I know the exact dates now of all of their nuptials.
One can easily imagine them as hopeful, excited youngsters, eager to set out on their own, much as we all have done.

Sarah and Joshua had seventeen children who survived to adult hood.
There were several sets of twins.
Most of them lived through the Civil War. Indeed, the men fought in it.
They were both blessed with a long life, even by today's standards.

I once met an elderly gentleman when I was in High School in 1970.
His name was Richard Harvey, and he and my Grandfather were third cousins.
He was a veritable wealth of information, lucid, articulate and engaging.
He remembers as a child meeting James S. Harvey, he knew my ggrandfather John S. Harvey well, and also knew several of his great Aunts and Uncles as very elderly people.
Joshua and Sarah's children and grandchildren!
Some of them were still living early in the twentieth century.
My dad told me later that he was 99 years old when I talked to him!

I have since confirmed everything he told me in his oral family history.
These recent documents added to my paper trail of documentation too.

Ah, but I love family detective work!