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OPINIONOPINION

 Mountain Views NewsSaturday, December 28, 2024

RICH JOHNSON 

NOW THAT’S RICH

STUART TOLCHIN

MOUNTAIN 
VIEWS

NEWS

PUBLISHER/ EDITOR

Susan Henderson

PASADENA CITY 
EDITOR

Dean Lee 

SALES

Patricia Colonello

626-355-2737 

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John Aveny 

DISTRIBUTION

Peter Lamendola

CONTRIBUTORS

Michele Kidd

Stuart Tolchin 

Harvey Hyde

Audrey Swanson

Meghan Malooley

Mary Lou Caldwell

Kevin McGuire

Chris Leclerc

Dinah Chong Watkins

Howard Hays

Paul Carpenter

Kim Clymer-Kelley

Christopher Nyerges

Peter Dills 

Rich Johnson

Lori Ann Harris

Rev. James Snyder

Katie Hopkins

Deanne Davis

Despina Arouzman

Jeff Brown

Marc Garlett

Keely Toten

Dan Golden

Rebecca Wright

Hail Hamilton

Joan Schmidt

LaQuetta Shamblee

PUT THE LIGHTS ON


KNOWING WHAT YOU NEED TO 
KNOW

NEW YEAR'S RESOLUT....EXCUSES

It has been said, “A New Year's resolution is something that goes in one 
Year and out the other”.

 

I have a revolutionary New Year’s resolution we should all adopt…never 
mention New Year’s Resolutions again…ever. Resolutions are a useless exercise 
in futility. A better description would be “future failures”.

 

Why am I so resolute about resolutions? Why start each year with promises we rarely live 
up to? Time would be better spent equipping ourselves with a truly useful tool… excuses!

 

Excuses hold an important place in our lives. They exist to defend questionable behavior. 
Lord knows I’ve spent a lifetime engaging in questionable behavior. No, not the malevolent, 
immoral or illegal kind of bad behavior. More like the stupid kind where I am usually the 
victim of my own poor choices.

 

Ring a bell? I’m not surprised. Think of resolutions as pandemic. We should all make the 
following last resolution…resolve to simply make better excuses. For many of us the earliest 
excuse we manufactured in our youth: “The dog ate my homework”.

 

Hey, it can happen. No less than John Steinbeck had to ask his editor for more time to finish 
his classic novel “Of Mice and Men” because the manuscript had been half eaten by his 
Irish Setter. Or so he says. 

 

Excuses take practice. Honesty? I tried it once and it didn’t work. I sent this message to my 
boss. “I can’t come into work. I’ll call back when I think of a good excuse.” My boss sent me 
the employment section of the want ads. Hoping to help you avoid unemployment here are 
a list of tried and true excuses. Commit them to memory.

 

My puppy asked me to stay home. Bow wow!

I accidentally got on a plane.

I was stuck in the company elevator

Someone stole all my shoes.

I have no clean clothes.

I was bitten by a duck.

I climbed a tree to save a cat and now I’m stuck.

I got my fingers stuck in a bowling ball.

My cat has hiccups, and I can’t leave her.

Sorry I can’t make it; I’m stuck under the bed.

The Wi-Fi and I had a falling out.

I was having an out-of-body experience.

My watch stopped.

 

Alright, I’m only half serious about excuses. If you really want to make improvements in 
your life toss the excuses and start a plan. Blame me. I’ve been a class clown for as long as 
I can remember. I learned in first grade there was nothing as intoxicating as saying something 
funny and having people laugh.

 

I write this column because I said something funny in a restaurant years ago and a lady 
named Susan Henderson overheard me and asked me if I would like to write for her new 
newspaper. I said, “but I’ve never written anything before.” She handed me a pen and said, 
“Write!” So I wrote. And because Susan puts my picture next to what I write in the paper, 
people occasionally stop me on the street and tell me how much they like reading my 
column. Wowsers! I’m hooked and am now working on a book. Will I succeed? Hope so.

 

People who achieve beyond mediocrity do something most of us would like to do but never 
get around to it. They have a dream. They ignore all the excuses to not pursue the dream 
and make a plan. They then spend their energy putting one step in front of the other working 
the plan. Forward momentum no matter how many little steps are taken will get you 
out of a rut and somewhere. Inc. magazine says “Jeff Bezos tells us overnight successes take 
10 years”.

 

And finally, Thomas Edison showed us tenacity, when he was asked about the thousands of 
experiments that failed looking how to make his light bulb work. Edison said, “I have not 
failed, not once. I’ve discovered ten thousand ways that don’t work.”

 

So, let’s welcome in the year 2025 as a year of success and change! And a profound thank 
you for reading my column.

Yesterday was 
Christmas Day and 
my regular routine 
was greatly altered. 
Instead of my regular 
Wednesday golf 
game, my son and 
I went with my wife (who is not his 
mother) to a Holiday celebration at her 
cousin's home. Because of the Covid virus 
we had missed the last two celebrations. 
During the last year we attended 
I had sat next to a young girl who had 
just flown to California from the Midwest. 
She had just arrived and really had 
not previously met anyone in the room 
other than the son of one of my wife’s 
cousins who, of course, was also present. 
She was quite nervous as she had flown 
all the way here in order to meet that son 
whom she had previously only communicated 
with via-the internet.

 Nevertheless, at that time, here 
she was, amazed at her own bravery, sitting 
in a room full of strangers. Now, 
three years after that first meeting everything 
was very different. The young 
woman, the former stranger, sat comfortably 
with her now husband, the once 
upon a time internet correspondent, 
balancing their nine-month-old son 
on her knee. Also present in the room 
were the child’s loving grandparents, 
aunts, uncles, and cousins. Everything 
had worked out well and I reminded the 
young mother that I had met her at a 
quite different time just a few years ago 
and had tried to make her comfortable. 
She laughed and said “yes, it was you 
who made it all work.”

 Also present was another one of 
my wife’s cousin's daughters and her two 
young beautiful well-behaved children. 
She was with her husband, a charming 
guy from England, who I had spoken 
with before. We talked a little this time 
and I learned that he too had communicated 
with his future wife only on-line 
prior to meeting and had flown to California 
to meet and everything worked 
out in just the way they hoped. I asked 
him if this meeting online business 
generally works that well. He explained 
that this is often the case because, prior 
to flying across the world or across the 
Country, the parties had communicated 
enough to know enough about their on-
line future possible mate without being 
distracted by other urges and other people’s 
opinions. Anyway, there they were, 
two more proud parents surrounded by 
loving relatives.

 As my wife drove us home, I 
thought about what I had learned during 
the day. I compared what I had heard to 
the experiences of myself, my friends, 
and my neighbors. Seemingly all of the 
first marriages had ended in divorce and 
dispute. Second marriages, like mine, 
have worked out much better. Being 
me, I thought of this in my relation to 
my missed golf game. Lately, I have had 
a great deal of trouble with my putting. 
I have regularly failed at sinking very 
makeable shots. I have done a little internet 
reading about putting and learned 
that there is much more to it than just 
trying to hit the ball straight. First you 
need to be aware of your balance and 
alignment with the hole. You should 
be very aware of the angle at which your 
club face hits the ball and pay attention 
to the proper speed of your putt. 
To do this, it is necessary to be aware 
of the slant of the green, the length of 
the grass, the wind conditions, and be 
relaxed and not distracted by your own 
thoughts and doubts when you strike 
the ball. Everything you know is important 
and you can overthink the putt, and 
in fact, strike the ball when your body 
is not yet ready. Golfers, especially bad 
golfers, will know what I mean.

 Today, I correlated these golfing 
thoughts with my thoughts about 
relationships and first marriages. Really, 
you need to know as much about 
yourself and the other future mate as 
you possibly can. You can worry about 
whether marriage is right for you and 
worry about how your parents and 
friends will react to the other person. 
Often there are more distractions than 
information. My first marriage quickly 
failed as my wife, and I, realized that we 
had rushed into the marriage without 
knowing ourselves and each other well 
enough. A painful lesson for ourselves 
and our children. Life goes on but there 
are regrets and I wish I had known more 
of what I needed to know. 

 Perhaps, today’s online communicants 
will have better luck and broken 
marriages, and saddened children 
can be avoided. Hooray for future possibilities 
and happier people.

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HOWARD Hays As I See It

“More people may have voted for former President Trump than 
for Vice President Harris, but absolutely nobody voted for a President 
Musk.” – poster @kushibo on X

 

I’m reminded of that immigration bill from last Spring. After 
months of work, compromises were reached on a bill where nobody 
got everything they wanted, but a result seen as a major 
accomplishment. Then an un-elected outsider told Republican 
members to scuttle the whole thing and they did as they were told.

 

Back then that outsider was Donald Trump. He’d been leaning on 
immigration in his presidential campaign and feared action to address it would hurt his 
argument. It was better to prolong the problem than lose a campaign issue.

 

This past week the bill was the Continuing Resolution to keep our government open – 
at least through March. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) managed a compromise 
with enough bipartisan support to get it through the House, along with assurance it 
would pass the Democratic-controlled Senate and be signed by President Biden.

 

The outsider this time who had Republicans kill the deal was Elon Musk - the world’s 
richest person and the country’s largest campaign donor. He threatened Republicans 
with being primaried if they didn’t pull their support for the bill, and they did as they 
were told. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) explained, “we struck a bipartisan deal. But 
then they blew it up because of a tweet from a billionaire. Insane."

 

Musk’s wealth has increased $200 billion since the election – an amount that by itself 
would make someone the fifth-wealthiest person on the planet; a return 800X his initial 
$250 million investment to get Trump elected.

 

Plans have been announced to scrap mandated crash reporting of self-driving cars - the 
vast majority coming from Tesla. The funding bill Musk helped kill had restrictions on 
high-tech trade with China that would affect his interests. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) 
accused Musk of acting “in order to protect his wallet and the Chinese Communist 
Party at the expense of American workers, innovators and businesses.”

 

In lobbying against the funding bill, Musk again just made stuff up. He claimed the bill 
included a 40% raise for Congress, when it was more like 3.8%. He said it included $3 
billion for an NFL stadium in Washington, which was basically just a title transfer of 
land to D.C. He warned of “bioweapon labs”, but it was biomedical research to prepare 
for future pandemics.

 

His most misleading claim was that it wouldn’t be a big deal for the government to simply 
shut down until after Trump’s January 20 Inauguration. No big deal for Musk, but a 
major one for thousands of federal workers furloughed over the holidays, those affected 
by unavailable services and active-duty military having to report but with paychecks 
indefinitely deferred. Our last shutdown under Trump cost the economy $3 billion. 

 

Trump and running mate J.D. Vance did come out against the funding bill, but hours 
after Musk had already killed it. In crafting a substitute, it seems Speaker Johnson 
didn’t consult as much with the incoming president and vice-president (both elected) 
as with Musk and “Government Efficiency” partner Vivek Ramaswamy (neither having 
been elected to anything).

 

That substitute bill, however, came with a provision that hadn’t been discussed and took 
most everyone by surprise – doing away with the “debt ceiling”, traditionally used by 
Republicans as a cudgel to get concessions from Democrats.

 

It seemed Trump wanted to do away with it entirely – which some Democrats would 
be fine with. But then it became a “suspension” until January 2029, and then January 
2027. Trump just didn’t want to deal with any debt limit for as long as he was president, 
or at least as long as he’d have Republican control of Congress until the midterms. He 
wanted unfettered ability to add trillions to our debt with more billionaire tax cuts 
(and/or immigrant detention camps) – then leave whatever problem of paying for it to 
the Democrats when they were again in control.

 

Trump insisted this be passed right away – so whatever the consequences could be 
blamed on something that happened under President Biden.

 

Republicans acceded to Musk’s demands, but dropped Trump’s demand he be given 
a blank check to further run up our debt. Trump threatened to have primaried any 
House Republican who voted for this final version that didn’t include suspension of the 
debt ceiling. 170 of them ignored that warning and voted for it, anyway. Musk’s threat 
was taken seriously by House Republicans. Trump’s threat – not so much.

 

Democrats and pundits had a field day referring to “President Musk”. Rather than simply 
ignore the crack, Trump’s spokespeople found it necessary to respond by assuring 
that the president-elect is, in fact, still the one in charge; while Trump, at a recent rally, 
thought it important to note that Elon Musk is ineligible to be president, anyway (having 
not been born in this county). 

 

Those responses show that questions raised are indeed being taken seriously as a major 
concern for the Trump camp. To demonstrate that the president-elect nonetheless 
remains undistracted and focused on serious matters as he prepares to lead our country, 
Donald Trump is now talking about reclaiming the Panama Canal and purchasing 
Greenland. 

 

All this while we’re still some three weeks out from the Inauguration. To again quote 
Rep. Jayapal, “Insane”.


Mountain Views News

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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