Mountain Views News          Saturday, September 12, 2015

16

OPINION

 Mountain Views News Saturday, September 12, 2015 

SUSAN Henderson 

DICK Polman 

Mountain 
Views

News

PUBLISHER/ EDITOR

Susan Henderson

CITY EDITOR

Dean Lee 

EAST VALLEY EDITOR

Joan Schmidt

BUSINESS EDITOR

LaQuetta Shamblee

PRODUCTION

Richard Garcia

SALES

Patricia Colonello

626-355-2737 

626-818-2698

WEBMASTER

John Aveny 

CONTRIBUTORS

Chris Leclerc

Bob Eklund

Howard Hays

Paul Carpenter

Kim Clymer-Kelley

Christopher Nyerges

Peter Dills 

Dr. Tina Paul

Rich Johnson

Merri Jill Finstrom

Lori Koop

Rev. James Snyder

Tina Paul

Mary Carney

Katie Hopkins

Deanne Davis

Despina Arouzman

Greg Welborn

Renee Quenell

Ben Show

Sean Kayden

Marc Garlett

Pat Birdsall (retired)

SAVED ONCE AGAIN BY MY 
9 IRON


FOX NEWS BUSTS DICK CHENEY


A 9 iron is a golf 
club, one that 
is invaluable to 
my game. When 
traveling with 
golf clubs, I 
spend more time 
‘chipping’ in my 
hotel room with 
my 9 Iron, than practicing with any 
other club. It has saved me on the 
golf course countless times, and on 
day, 14 years ago, it saved my life.

 Most people remember where 
they were on that fateful day - 
September 11, 2011. I for one, 
remember where I was not. Except 
for middle aged fatigue and my 9 
iron, I may very well not have been 
here today to share this story. 

 In 2001, I was deeply in the throes 
of being semi-retired, consulting 
on various projects across the 
country. One of the projects was in 
New Orleans and fit the best of all 
my worlds. It was golf related and it 
served the youth of the community. 
I had taken my golf clubs forgetting 
how hot and humid it was in New 
Orleans in August. It’s a good 
thing I did though, because those 
clubs kept me from being another 
911 casualty. 

 Very early on Friday Morning, 
September 7th, I received a call from 
Fred Williams of the Venus and 
Serena Williams Tennis Academy 
in Los Angeles, informing me that 
Richard Williams had called and 
asked that the leadership of the 
academy and I come to Flushing to 
see the girls play. They had made it 
to the finals. I had just finished a 
very successful fund raiser for the 
academy in LA, and Richard and 
the Williams sisters extended this 
invitation in appreciation for my 
work on that event. Since I was 
in New Orleans flying to New York 
wasn’t a problem. Their match was 
on Sunday so there was plenty of 
time to make it. My initial thought 
was ok, I’ll change my flight and 
go. I also thought about calling my 
daughter who lived in Memphis at 
the time and having her meet me 
in NY so we could spend a day 
shopping on Monday. I would 
return on Tuesday, September 
11th via flight 93 and reschedule a 
meeting I had in the Bay Area for 
Wednesday. I knew the itinerary 
well, as traveling was a major part 
of what I had done for years. I 
knew that if I took that flight which 
was going to San Francisco, I could 
kill two birds in one stone, be done 
with my business in the Bay Area 
and come home uninterrupted 
for a few weeks without traveling. 
Sounded like a plan so my response 
was yes, but I told them not to 
book my flight until I was done 
with my last New Orleans meeting, 
probably mid afternoon.

 So, everything was set. I completed 
my NO meeting around noon and 
went back to my hotel room to 
pack and check out. I was really 
tired after several days of non stop 
meetings, but I started to pack 
anyway. I called Fred and missed 
him so I waited for his return call 
to tell him what to book. 

 Now, when you travel with your 
golf clubs, in addition to your 
regular golf bag, you have a ‘travel 
bag’ to protect them. It is a struggle 
to get that bag on, and when you 
are done, you have an object that 
weighs about 40 lbs and looks 
like a stuffed body bag. Just as I 
finished my cell phone rang and it 
was Fred. I asked him to hold on 
for a moment so I could steady my 
golf monstrosity against the wall. 
That’s when I saw it! I had done 
all that maneuvering and packing 
of golf clubs and inadvertently 
left my 9 iron out. That was it. I 
looked at that club, knowing that 
I had to reopen the monstrosity to 
pack it and almost cried. I began 
to feel every bit of my age. I would 
never muster up the energy to 
repack, hop on a plane to NYC, lug 
those clubs around, go to the US 
Open, and fly back to California all 
between Saturday and Tuesday. I 
and picked up the phone and told 
Fred that I would have to pass on 
the opportunity. After I hung up, 
I called the airline, got on the next 
flight out to LAX and was home by 
midnight to everyone’s surprise. 

 It wasn’t until about a week later 
while still reeling in disbelief over 
the events of 911,that I realized that 
I could have been on that fateful 
Flight 93 on my way to Northern 
California. Yes, I would have 
witnessed Venus’ historic victory, 
but I would not have been able to 
share it with a soul. Sometimes we 
just never know the little twists of 
fate that change our lives forever. 

I’d like to invite you to 
a barbecue with Dick 
Cheney as the main 
course. The long-
discredited former veep 
has been roaming the land 
lately, agitating against the 
nuclear deal with Iran. His 
timing is poor - President 
Obama has already secured 
enough Senate Democratic votes to sustain the 
pact - so there’s actually no need to heed the guy 
at all. But still, what happened Sunday on Fox 
News is worth a few paragraphs. It was almost 
as delicious as a holiday weekend dessert.

 Host Chris Wallace asked Cheney: “You 
and President Bush, the Bush/Cheney 
administration, dealt with Iran for eight years....
During your time - let’s put these numbers 
up on the screen - Iran went from zero 
known centrifuges in operation to more than 
5000. So in fairness, didn’t the Bush/Cheney 
administration leave President Obama with a 
mess?”

 Props to Wallace for pointing out reality. 
During the Bush/Cheney reign, from early 
2001 to early 2009, Iran’s nuclear program 
went from zero to 5,000 nuclear centrifuges, 
and the purported administration tough guys 
did nothing to stop it. There was no stick (no 
military action), and no carrot (negotiations). 
But here’s what Cheney said in response 
yesterday, when asked about the mess that he 
and Bush bequeathed to Obama:

 “Well, I don’t think of it that way. In fact, 
there was military action that had an impact 
on the Iranians, when we took down Saddam 
Hussein. There was a period of time when they 
stopped their program because they were afraid 
of what we did to Saddam we were going to do 
to them next.”

 Cheney is still defending his disastrous Iraq 
invasion, which he somehow thinks made 
Iran “afraid.” It’s pitiful what selective memory 
and willful denial can do to the human mind. 
Truth is, the Iraq invasion made Iran stronger 
in the region. Bush and Cheney “took down” 
Iran’s longtime enemy, and created a vacuum 
- which Iran promptly filled. After Hussein 
and his ruling Sunnis were forcibly removed, 
Shiites loyal to Shiite Iran took over. Iraq has 
essentially been a client state of Iran’s ever since. 
Compliments of Bush/Cheney.

 Anyway. Chris Wallace, to his credit, shrugged 
off Cheney’s propaganda and persisted: “But the 
centrifuges went from zero to 5,000.”

Whereupon Cheney, realizing that he was 
trapped, resorted to one of his favorite tactics: 
Falsehood. He replied, “that happened on 
Obama’s watch, not on our watch.”

But Wallace refused to swallow the lie: “No, no, 
by 2009, they were at 5,000.”

 Cheney, caught in his lie, finally surrendered: 
“Right.” But, alas, the moment was short lived. 
The next thing out of his mouth: “But I think we 
did a lot to deal with the arms control problem 
in the Middle East.” Wow. Invading Iraq, and 
flooding the Middle East with weaponry, was 
good for arms control? Clearly this guy spent 
too much time in that secret undisclosed 
location.

 At this point, the only people who listen 
seriously to Cheney are denizens of the 
neoconservative bubble, people who long ago 
lost all credibility on national security policy 
- and who have already lost the battle with 
Obama over the nuclear deal.

The saner option, on TV Sunday, was Colin 
Powell. Referring to the Iraq disaster, Powell 
said on NBC News: “Once you pull out the top 
of a government, unless there’s a structure under 
it to give security and structure 
to the society, you can expect 
a mess.” As for the nuclear 
deal with Iran, he pointed out 
that Iran will be cutting its 
centrifuges by 75 percent; and 
cutting its uranium stockpile 
from 12,000 kilograms to 300 - 
“a remarkable reduction....We’ve 
stopped this highway race they 
were going down.”

 Decide for yourself who’s 
right. As for me, I’ll take word 
of a career military man over the 
word of a desk jockey who got 
five draft deferments.


Mountain Views News 
has been adjudicated as 
a newspaper of General 
Circulation for the County 
of Los Angeles in Court 
Case number GS004724: 
for the City of Sierra 
Madre; in Court Case 
GS005940 and for the 
City of Monrovia in Court 
Case No. GS006989 and 
is published every Saturday 
at 80 W. Sierra Madre 
Blvd., No. 327, Sierra 
Madre, California, 91024. 
All contents are copyrighted 
and may not be 
reproduced without the 
express written consent of 
the publisher. All rights 
reserved. All submissions 
to this newspaper become 
the property of the Mountain 
Views News and may 
be published in part or 
whole. 

Opinions and views 
expressed by the writers 
printed in this paper do 
not necessarily express 
the views and opinions 
of the publisher or staff 
of the Mountain Views 
News. 

Mountain Views News is 
wholly owned by Grace 
Lorraine Publications, 
Inc. and reserves the right 
to refuse publication of 
advertisements and other 
materials submitted for 
publication. 

Letters to the editor and 
correspondence should 
be sent to: 

Mountain Views News

80 W. Sierra Madre Bl. 
#327

Sierra Madre, Ca. 
91024

Phone: 626-355-2737

Fax: 626-609-3285

email: 

mtnviewsnews@aol.com

 

LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN 

HOWARD Hays As I See It

MICHAEL Reagan Making Sense


“This report of my death 
was an exaggeration.”

- Mark Twain, 1897

I might have given a wrong 
impression in my column 
last week. Writing of a 
time when our workforce 
was based on strong 
unions and our economy 
on a strong middle-class, 
it may have come off as a nostalgia piece; a 
recollection of a bygone era.

 Events leading up to and over the Labor 
Day weekend, however, brought to mind 
Mark Twain’s above response to his premature 
obituary. True, union membership has gone 
from nearly a third of the workforce in the 
1950s to 11% in 2014, but the collective voices 
of our workers were heard loud and clear over 
the past couple weeks.

 The week leading up to Labor Day began with 
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce reporting that 
for the 2nd quarter of 2015, the 3.7% growth 
rate of our economy under President Obama far 
outpaced that of the rest of the developed world 
(Japan at 1.6%, the U.K. 0.7%, Germany 0.4%, 
etc.), with a lower unemployment rate than at 
any time under President Ronald Reagan.

 The focus, though, was on the workers 
responsible for that performance. 

 A report from the Institute for Women’s 
Policy Research showed the effects of union 
membership – particularly on women, who 
make up 45% of union workers. A woman 
worker represented by a union earns an average 
31% more than one who isn’t (the difference 
is 21% more for a man). The report shows the 
biggest effect among minorities. Black women 
see a 34% wage boost in union membership, 
with a 42% advantage for Hispanic women. 
There’s a gender wage gap among union 
workers, with women making 89% of what 
men do, but it’s narrower than the general 
workforce figure of 78%. 

 Figures released from the Bureau of Labor 
Statistics showed the impact of Seattle’s 
minimum wage law, passed last year raising 
it to $11 as of January this year and to $15 
by 2017. Republicans warned of massive job 
losses, particularly in the restaurant industry. 
The new figures show a net gain of 1,800 jobs in 
“food services” and bars since the law went into 
effect.

The week saw a landmark ruling from the 
National Labor Relations Board, which declared 
a California recycling plant a “joint employer”. 
The far-reaching ruling went against those 
who claimed that being a franchisee or sub-
contracting with staffing firms allowed them 
to ignore workers’ rights – including the right 
to organize. UFCW President Marc Perrone 
called it “a victory for hard-working men and 
women”. Republicans vowed to reverse it.

 President Obama on Labor Day signed an 
executive order requiring that federal contract 
workers be allowed to earn paid sick leave, to 
care for themselves or a family member. In 
his State of the Union address last January, 
he reminded that being “the only advanced 
country on earth that doesn’t guarantee 
paid sick leave or paid maternity leave to our 
workers . . . forces too many parents to make 
the gut-wrenching choice between a paycheck 
and a sick kid at home.”

 The order was signed while flying to address 
union members in Boston, where he called out 
Republicans for whom “the only way to help 
the country grow and help people get ahead is 
to cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires, 
loosen up rules on big banks and polluters . . . 
But that’s not how the economy works. That’s 
not how working people get ahead.” Referring 
to Republican presidential candidates, the 
president quoted Ted Kennedy; “What is it 
about working men and women they find so 
offensive?”

 At the Labor Day parade in Pittsburgh, Vice 
President Joe Biden laid out what’s at stake in 
collective bargaining; “Without the ability to 
sit down with the most powerful entities in the 
world, without that ability to negotiate . . . there 
is no shot for any American worker. I don’t 
mean labor. I mean every American worker.”

 Hillary Clinton made her commitment clear 
in Chicago; “This Labor Day, we celebrate 
advances that took a lot of patient, persistent 
effort – like the 40-hour workweek, overtime 
protections, workplace safety rules, Social 
Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and the 
Affordable Care Act. They all took sacrifice 
and courage on the part of American workers, 
from the factory floor to the emergency room 
to the construction crane. And thanks to them, 
our country became a better, fairer place. I 
will always stand with workers. I’ll always 
champion their right to organize. And I’ll 
always fight efforts to roll back union collective 
bargaining rights. Because when workers 
are strong, and working families are strong, 
America is strong.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders began the weekend by 
taking up a sign and joining a hundred workers 
outside a plant in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; “I want 
you to know being out on a picket line and 
standing with workers is something I have 
been doing for my entire life . . . This is what I 
do. This is what I believe in.”

 A Gallup poll released two weeks before Labor 
Day shows Americans’ support for organized 
labor climbing five points (to 58%) just in the 
last year – its highest approval in six years. 
(Other polls show the candidacy of Wisconsin 
Gov. Scott Walker, the Koch brother’s poster-
boy for union-busting, taking a nosedive.) The 
poll suggests that any report of the demise of 
organized labor in America should be regarded 
as, at best, “an exaggeration”.

 Hope everyone enjoyed their Labor Day 
holiday. But for one in four American workers, 
there are no paid holidays – or vacations, for 
that matter. We lead the rest of the developed 
world in economic growth. Our unions strive 
to ensure we don’t fall further behind the rest 
of the developed world in how we treat the 
workers responsible for it.

HUCKABEE PLAYS 

THE FOOL

Watching Republicans on TV is getting more 
painful by the week.

 And believe it or not, my pain has nothing 
to do with the successful candidacy of Donald 
Trump.

 The pain started Tuesday, when, joining a few 
score of my fellow Americans, I accidentally 
tuned into MSNBC.

 There was big Mike Huckabee, live, making a religious, political and 
constitutional fool of himself.

 He was standing in front of a public building somewhere in Kentucky, 
railing about “judicial tyranny,” damning the Supreme Court for upholding 
gay marriage, pretending to be crying now and then and openly pandering 
to Christian conservatives for their votes. 

 The event was supposed to be a rally for Kim Davis, the anti-gay marriage 
county clerk who’d just been released from jail after serving six days for 
refusing a judge’s order to issue marriage licenses to all couples, gay and 
straight.

 But it really was a campaign stop for Huckabee – and not a very successful 
one.

 When he urged the crowd to defy the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on gay 
marriage in the name of religious liberty or state rights, he only proved he’s 
not a constitutional scholar.

 When he said that what the Supreme Court decides is not the law of the 
land, he proved it’s time for him and his faith-based conservatism to quit 
running for the White House.

 And when Huckabee acted as if Ms. Davis was a cross between Rosa Parks 
and Joan of Arc, instead of a local bureaucrat who decided she wouldn’t do 
the job she took an oath to do, he insulted everyone’s intelligence.

 Huckabee clearly – and cynically -- used Davis and her dilemma to try to 
advance his own political cause.

 But all he actually managed to do was hurt the Republican Party’s already 
beat up brand and give the mainstream media another chance to make it 
look like the GOP’s Big Tent is crawling with freaks.

 Huckabee, who has become an embarrassment-by-association that hurts 
the other Republican presidential candidates, had the Davis case all wrong 
from the start.

 He tweeted that “Kim Davis in federal custody removes all doubts 
about the criminalization of Christianity in this country. We must defend 
#religiousliberty.”

 It’s true that religious liberty needs to be defended in the private sector, 
whenever the law is used to force owners of bakeries or photographers or 
preachers to violate their religious beliefs and take part in a gay marriage.

 But Davis is not a private citizen. She’s an elected public official.

 As a county clerk, as a part of the government, it’s her job to follow the law 
– including the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriages -- until 
it’s overturned.

 Or she’s free to quit if her moral principles won’t let her sign same-sex 
marriage licenses.

 Most Republican candidates – the smartest ones – stayed as far away as 
they could from Kentucky and Davis.

 But Donald Trump, who can say anything about anything without 
suffering the slightest political scratch, waded in right in – and was right.

He basically said America is a “nation of laws” and Davis should have 
followed the law or figured out a way to recuse herself from any gay marriage 
licensing process.

 That sounds like something Ronald Reagan might have said if he had 
been watching the Davis sideshow. I know he definitely would have followed 
the law, not Mike Huckabee.

 I also know my father would agree with me that the worst thing the Davis 
circus in Kentucky did this week was make his Republican Party look bad.

 Copyright ©2015 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President 
Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan 
Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder of the email service reagan.
com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at 
www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to Reagan@
caglecartoons.com. Follow @reaganworld on Twitter. 

 Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper 
syndicate. For info on using columns contact Sales at sales@cagle.com.

Mountain Views News

Mission Statement

The traditions of

community news-
papers and the 
concerns of our readers 
are this newspaper’s 
top priorities. We 
support a prosperous 
community of well-
informed citizens. 
We hold in high 
regard the values 
of the exceptional 
quality of life in our 
community, including 
the magnificence of 
our natural resources. 
Integrity will be our 
guide. 

Mountain Views News 80 W Sierra Madre Blvd. No. 327 Sierra Madre, Ca. 91024 Office: 626.355.2737 Fax: 626.609.3285 Email: editor@mtnviewsnews.com Website: www.mtnviewsnews.com