Why would Tiger Wood's wife use a golf club when the door wasn't blocked?

There's something strange about the whole Tiger Woods accident, when you read CNN it says:

Police Chief Daniel Saylor said two Windermere police officers were the first to arrive on the scene.

"There was Tiger Woods laying on the ground in front of the vehicle with his wife over him rendering first aid," he told reporters.

"He was in and out of consciousness with lacerations to his upper and lower lip," Saylor said. "He was mumbling but didn't say anything coherent."

Woods' wife, Elin Nordegren, told the police she was inside the house when she heard the accident. She said she went outside and used a golf club to break out the rear window of the vehicle, then pulled him from the SUV.

Yet when you look at the pictures here it looks as if the passenger side of the truck is completely accessible...

After thinking this, apparently I'm not alone, I did some searching and TMZ is reporting:

Tiger has yet to be formally interviewed by the Florida Highway Patrol -- that should happen this afternoon. But we're told Tiger had a conversation Friday -- with a non-law enforcement type -- detailing what went down before his Escalade hit a fire hydrant.

We're told he said his wife had confronted him about reports that he was seeing another woman. The argument got heated and, according to our source, she scratched his face up. We're told it was then Woods beat a hasty retreat for his SUV -- but according to our source, Woods says his wife followed behind with a golf club. As Tiger drove away, she struck the vehicle several times with the club.

And a more recent update suggests Tiger's wife has changed her story.

Divorce Rate Up .2% for military with Country's 9th Year at War more women in military divorce

I don't normally cross post, but I thought this post that I wrote on Glass City Jungle this morning might interest some of the readership here as well...

I saw this headline on WTOL then did some further searching to see if additional information was reported. The basics:

WASHINGTON (AP) - The divorce rate in the armed forces increased slightly again in the past year as military marriages continued to bear the stress of the nation's ninth year at war.

The Pentagon says that in the budget year that ended Sept. 30, there were an estimated 27,312 divorces among the nearly 765,000 married members of the active-duty Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

That's a divorce rate of about 3.6 percent, compared with 3.4 percent a year earlier.

An increase of .2% doesn't seem high, until you compare it with this information reported by CBS News:

Friday's reported 3.6 percent rate is a full percentage point above the 2.6 percent reported in 2001, just as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America propelled the United States into the war in Afghanistan.

"The force is under tremendous stress, and that stress finds its way into marriages," said Joe Davis, spokesman for the organization Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Yet, as CBS News also points out:

There's no comparable annual system for tracking the national or civilian divorce rate, though the Centers for Disease Control said in 2005 that 43 percent of all first marriages end in divorce within 10 years.

This additional link was interesting, it doesn't have the numbers for 2009, but in 2006, 2007 and 2008 female members of the military experienced more divorces than their male counterparts, by quite a bit higher of a percentage...That made me wonder as to why that is. It would be interesting to learn who actually filed for divorce, was it the female military members or their husbands at home versus was it the wives at home who filed or the husband's at war...this article, while not recent offers some speculation:

Benjamen Karney, lead researcher for the Rand Corp., which studied divorce in the military from 1996 through 2005, said there haven't been any studies on the military divorce rate for women. "It wasn't until my report came out in 2007 about divorce in the military that we learned that divorce in the military was substantially higher among females than males.This has been true for more than the last decade even when there was no war going on."

Karney said there is speculation, however. "One thought is that support services available for military families are geared for supporting civilian wives of male servicemen," he said. "Another possibility is that women who are service members are different than men in the military in important ways. It has been said that the military recruits the most traditional men in our society. But the military recruits the least traditional females in our society. They are not the women who are most invested in the general role assigned to women. A third possibility is that it may be more stressful to be a civilian husband of a military wife than it is to be a civilian wife of a military husband. We don't know the answers. But we recommend there needs to be more research done on women in the military."

Happy Thanksgiving!

A Happy Thanksgiving to those of you out there in blog land. Ours was a bit lower key than normal with the work schedules of some of my bunch and the fact that my oldest daughter was not able to come home for Thanksgiving. While many are focusing on stuffing their turkeys, she's been getting ready to stuff shipping boxes since she's moving from the San Jose area to the Phoenix area because of her job.

I didn't even make turkey this year since there were fewer of us, I made stuffed Cornish game hens, though I had to convince one of my daughters that they were not baby turkeys...They turned out great though, and the upside? A much shorter baking time than what I normally spend on Thanksgiving...

Obama object of hatred from the right and mild disappointment to his allies

Not that many listened, but one of the concerns I had during the whole presidential election process was that too many believed as is quoted in this piece by E.J. Dionne that then presidential candidate was "capable of parting raging seas" -- the unrealistic expectations created by the Obama campaign that people were silly enough not to be able to separate reality from campaign rhetoric. And now? Obama has a problem of his own making. So while I point this out as interesting reading, and recommend the full article:

You wonder if Obama will use this brief respite for reflection to ponder how, in a year, he has been transformed from a man once seen as capable of parting raging seas to the object of a terrible hatred on the right and mild disappointment among his allies. His opponents are on the march, his friends are grumpy.

Obama might fairly repair to the comforting thought that he inherited an unparalleled combination of disasters in the economy and foreign policy, and created such a surge of hope that he was expected, unrealistically, to have put everything right by now.

He will eventually get to claim a great victory on health care. He helped the country avoid financial catastrophe. And isn't he doing pretty well in the polls, given the afflictions of unemployment and other forms of economic carnage?

This line of thinking animates the White House. Obama's aides say it reflects a side of him that many have found attractive: a cool, detached confidence in the long-term that refuses to be disturbed by passing controversies and criticisms.

Yet there is a lesson for the president in the rote quality of his Thanksgiving proclamation that is significant only because it reveals Obama's underlying problem: What the document lacked was any sense of fighting spirit, any larger purpose, any gauntlet thrown down before his foes.

Obama and some Democrats gave the Republicans fodder to attack with and after 8 years of Democrats attacking Bush and Republicans? It should have been expected, very few realists really believed Obama would be this great uniter, we all know what happened to the last president who proclaimed, "I'm a uniter not a divider" -- The problem comes in when people believe the bs thrown about by both sides.

That however is a larger problem...

Inbound verus outbound call centers...

Telemarketing has gotten a bad rap, but the reality is most of those who work in a call center environment deal with inbound calls versus outbound calls. While many of these jobs have moved over seas, there still are quite a few companies that use call center operations from here in the United States. With many companies trying to cut back on staff actually employed by them, subcontracting the customer service portion of the business has continued to be a regular business practice. This enables the business to not have to worry about staffing or training, that is contracted out.

I worked in a call center environment for almost two years, it was one of the more enjoyable jobs I had, we took inbound calls for level one tech support for a cable internet provider but the same company I worked for also handled a variety of products, from cell phones to food products. Unfortunately that company closed our location with those jobs going out of the country, but many areas now are finding that hundreds will turn out to apply for call center jobs.

Ever just want to pack it up and try someplace new?

There are days when the day to day dealing with people of this area that don't seem interested in moving towards the positive but appear to be determined to actually make things more difficult than they need to be gets tiring. While perhaps the grass always seems greener on the other side of the septic tank, I admit it's appealing at times to think about just calling up some cross country movers and going west. Into the mountains, where I'd be a hermit, write books and revel in solitude, only visiting the uncivilized society we now live in when necessary.

:-)

Geither will not last long into 2010

I admit he was never one of my favorite choices, back in February of 2009, the underwhelming of Geithner was a post topic here.

It still continues, with The Gathering Geithner Storm in Forbes. Part of which:

It was jarring last week to see the Treasury Secretary under intense fire before Congress, being asked to resign for the good of the country. It was more like Prime Minister's Questions in the British Parliament than the more deferential mode we are used to. Timothy Geithner fought back vigorously, but he lost his cool. His team at Treasury was said to be happy to see him showing a little moxie. Unfortunately the episode didn't add to his gravitas, which is in short supply.

Several blog and media outlets are speculating on who would replace Geithner...

Cold winter of discontent for the warm-mongers

Or is it? There are two items that I think should be pointed out, first it's being reported that the earth has not warmed at all in the past decade but the sea level is rising because of ice melt in Greenland.

Does this mean the end of global warming as a theory? Not completely, since it was based on more than mean temperature, it was also measured on co2. Ten minutes from Al Gore that makes that point...



Last winter here in Ohio, it was the coldest winter since 1994, so it's clear that the temperature in our area has not risen. What is the answer? Beyond knowing that pollution and man does have an impact on the environment, does that mean that all of the concern for the environment should be tossed out because the mean planet temperature has not raised? Then there is the computer hacking story, should it be a bigger story? Is the MSM not covering it enough? Perhaps not, but if the computer system was hacked into, how does one know for certain what is being released was really written? It's not that hard to change material...If the material released wasn't altered, does that make the concerns go away?

Not all of them, at least not if you have paid attention to all of the issues, taking them into consideration with what we do know, and that is co2 numbers are rising, glaciers are melting, the sea level is rising. Something is causing that...How much of a degree does man impact that has and is still the issue.

Slowly getting back to normal...

Despite an election period that would make almost any blogger have dark eye circles under her eyes, I'm almost to the point where I'm caught up. I am working on several stories that have involved quite a bit of research which is part of the reason I have not been blogging here as much as I'd like.

I'm still behind on emails, but I'm slowllyyyy getting caught up on those too.

:-)

Jon Stewart busts Fox in a mistake...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Sean Hannity Uses Glenn Beck's Protest Footage
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Too good to not share, what is even funnier is while it's said the mistake was "inadvertent" if you listen to the actual discussion? It doesn't sound that way.

For what it's worth...on paranoia striking deep

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away

Are we going back to that time period when there was such a huge divide? Reading Paranoia Strikes Deep by Paul Krugman could make you ponder that...Part of the recommended read:

The state of mind visible at recent right-wing demonstrations is nothing new. Back in 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay titled, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which reads as if it were based on today’s headlines: Americans on the far right, he wrote, feel that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” Sound familiar?

But while the paranoid style isn’t new, its role within the G.O.P. is.

When Hofstadter wrote, the right wing felt dispossessed because it was rejected by both major parties. That changed with the rise of Ronald Reagan: Republican politicians began to win elections in part by catering to the passions of the angry right.

Until recently, however, that catering mostly took the form of empty symbolism. Once elections were won, the issues that fired up the base almost always took a back seat to the economic concerns of the elite. Thus in 2004 George W. Bush ran on antiterrorism and “values,” only to announce, as soon as the election was behind him, that his first priority was changing Social Security.

But something snapped last year. Conservatives had long believed that history was on their side, so the G.O.P. establishment could, in effect, urge hard-right activists to wait just a little longer: once the party consolidated its hold on power, they’d get what they wanted. After the Democratic sweep, however, extremists could no longer be fobbed off with promises of future glory.

Comparing women to smokers...

One of the things that always amazed me was that health insurance companies will pay for Viagra and other male products designed to help a man have a sex life but the coverage is not equal when it comes to birth control. Let's look at the statement that's created some political outrage:

In promoting the House health bill, New Jersey Democrat Frank Pallone made reference to discrimination by insurance companies, citing their reluctance to insure people with preexisting conditions and differences in costs based on gender. "But that's not against the law," Texas Republican Pete Sessions said.
Pallone replied, "No, but we would make it against the law. Why do you have a problem with that?" he asked. "Why should a woman pay more than a man?"
"Well, we're all different," Sessions explained. "Why should a smoker pay more," he said before getting interrupted by a burst of chatter throughout the room.

Let's first flash back to how long the Viagra versus Birth Control debate has been happening...1998 where in Viagra: A Tale of Two Pills it's stated:

Compare the erection-in-a-bottle with the basic contraceptive needs of all heterosexually active women who do not wish to become pregnant. While many health insurers are guaranteeing free or low-cost romps to men, they are by and large denying most women the contraceptive coverage that is a fundamental health care necessity for 20 - 30 years of their adult lives (the alternative being, on average, a potential 8 - 15 pregnancies in a woman’s lifetime). According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, 33 million American women are in need of contraceptive services and supplies, yet most women using birth control pay for it themselves. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) notes that two-thirds of U.S. women of childbearing age rely on private, employer-related plans for their health coverage. While 90% of these health plans cover prescription drugs and devices, a large majority exclude prescription contraceptives from coverage. Only 33 percent of large group health plans cover the birth control pill. Other contraceptive methods are even less financially accessible. Is it any wonder that women of childbearing age pay 68% more in out-of-pocket medical expenses than their male counterparts?

Things have changed a little since 1998, 27 states have regulations that require health-insurance plans that cover prescription drugs provide equitable coverage for contraceptives, but it's far from equitable.

What about smokers? Interestingly enough, insurance companies will pay for smoker cessation products and programs, with more each year...Medicare does allow payment for physicians who provide counseling on smoking cessation and since 2006 they have included some smoking cessation products prescribed by physicians to be covered.

Medicaid does not cover family-planning services that promote fertility, which means in the states that cover birth control or family planning to prevent pregnancy and the places that will pay to help men get an erection and will pay for smoking cessation; if you can not conceive? Too bad...It is rather ironic that insurance companies will pay for an abortion, but many of them will not pay for fertility treatment. That's an inequity most people don't talk about...

Would Dansko mean dance?

Still in word association mode, if you saw something for Dansko shoes would you think of dancing? I did, and I was wrong, they actually have a rather nice line of a variety of shoes, not related to dancing either. I'm a fan of clogs, they have some nice ones for both men and women. I do have to say though, as a huge fan of red boots, they had some nice boots, but no red...They do however have a really nice patent leather clog in claret...

What would be an unnatural fat burner?

Sometimes words/products make me think, let's say as an example it's popular to tout different types of natural fat burner yet, they don't call ones that are not from nature, "unnatural fat burners" -- what if they did? Would visions of witchcraft dance in your heads? Some magical unnatural presence appears to make the fat go *poof*? Ancient shamans appearing at your doorstep to make the fat go away?

As I ponder that, I also ponder why it is whenever I write about any type of diet or fat burning product I'm always hungry for something totally not a diet food...

Pondering Fort Hood...

I'm not sure if I believe that Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan yelled "Allahu Akbar" as he went on his recent murder spree at Fort Hood or not, I'm hesitant to automatically believe it since it's not been confirmed and it's not as if the initial reports of the shooting were accurate. It was initially stated the gunman was "neutralized" and it was believed more than one person was involved. I do not disbelieve that Hasan was harrassed, teased, called names, we live in a fairly cruel society where racism and bigotry still reign. I'm not sure however, that a psychiatrist, even one being sent to the Middle East, against his will, would murder people based on that alone. It's not as if he was being sent into combat...

This left me with thinking that there had to be more to this, I understand the desire of some to make Hasan a more sympathetic figure. In all of the cases I've followed, locally and otherwise, most times the family of the murderer shares with you their disbelief, telling you what a "great guy" the killer was. Very few say, "Yeah, we knew he'd turn out like that, it was a matter of when."

I'd like to think that William Murchison, is wrong in his opinion piece where he suggests:

It makes sense to ponder deeply -- I did not say "conclude," I said ponder deeply -- the possibility that in Maj. Nidal the Army had, unwittingly, in its bosom a treasonable viper; a supporter of Islamic jihad against the West and the United States; a soldier who, in violation of military oath and citizenship, opened fire on soldiers as he cried, "Allahu Akbar." "Allahu Akbar" is the familiar cry of Islamic terrorists all over the world as they pounce on the unwitting.

As I said, first I'd have to discount the "Allahu Akbar" portion, but even then, something happened to make Hasan decide to turn into a murderer. We may never know his real motivation, and in a way it is racist to assume since he was Muslim that he could have been some type of a psycho closet case Islamic terrorist that fooled us all. Yet when something happens we try to make sense of it, it's possible the bullying and harassment could have driven him to kill, others have, yet thousands have managed to endure and not turn into killers...

You need to have cheese with your wine...

I'm the only "real" wine drinker in the family, it something I learned to enjoy thanks to my father as far as tasting the different varieties and cooking with wine. Which means while I have a nice collection of wine glasses, they are regulated outside of my kitchen since it is so small. However, when I started to do some online browsing, I did not realize that some of the wine glass racks for sale were so inexpensive.

I found several wine glass racks that would work in my small kitchen that were well within my price range. I also noticed that GlassStemwareRacks.com not only offers to meet prices but is currently offering free shipping on most of the stemware racks that I saw on their website. They also had some really neat wine furniture that when we finally get done with the renovations at our house, would be really nice to have since our space is going to triple...

Six months of peace until the next election cycle begins...

It was a semi-disappointing local election season. Some of those I would have liked to have see won did, but some of those I really hoped wouldn't win did...

I was busier this time than previous elections, in part because in typical Lisa style, I tried to do everything I was doing before the political season ramped up and to be perfectly honest, Glass City Jungle has become a full time job in itself. I've made some changes there that have helped cut down on my having to monitor things so closely, but it's still a 60 to 70 hour a week gig in non-election seasons if I cover what I want to cover.

So, this blog was not cherished as much as it should have been, I'm behind on emails to friends, and I got behind on assignments that I earn income on. Rather than jump back into the fray, I'm slowly getting back to where I was, with some time to kill in Mafia Wars, that is still a great stress reliever. (smile)

I'm behind on national stories, I was so involved in what was happening locally that I didn't even realize some of what was happening globally or nationally. That I'm also getting caught up on. Thanks to those of you who kept reading, most of you have been with me since I started this, or shortly after. I appreciate your loyalty.

One of the most fun aspects of this past election was my first time on television as a political "expert" on FOX Toledo. One of the great guys from FOX Toledo took a picture of the panel I was a part of while he was filming one of the Mayoral candidates victory party event and Shaun Hegarty, one of Fox Toledo's anchors was kind enough to email it to me, so I'm sharing it here, with you instead of on GCJ.



:-)