Joey’s Take: The Dog Park

We’ve got a lot of problems facing our country right now. One of the biggest is the insane partisanship that’s ripping us apart. My years of experience as playground police at the dog park make me uniquely qualified to handle this situation. If the bullies in Congress – regardless of their party affiliation – get out of hand, I’ll be right there nipping at their heels until they get back to business in a civil manner. If that doesn’t work, I’m great at body slamming the pit bulls and rolling the little yelpers.

Speaking of the dog park. … I’ve noticed that what works in the neighborhood dog park doesn’t play so well on the Capitol Mall. Can you imagine 100 dogs, of every size and breed imaginable, running unleashed and out of control on the Mall? (OK, we’ve got that pretty much in the Senate!) Seriously, that many dogs chasing sticks, Frisbees, tennis balls and each other outside the confines of a dog park would create traffic jams, lead to some dog-bites-man non-news for the 24-7 news frenzy and result in a few dead Snoopys and Rovers. What works on a small scale usually doesn’t work on a national scale – whether you’re talking unleashed animals, health care or education.

The reason is accountability. In most neighborhood dog parks, the dogs get to know each other, and they’re accompanied by people who get to know each other. The end result is the people and the dogs begin to look out for each other. That doesn’t happen on a national scale populated by faceless masses and manipulated statistics.

Hillary (Clinton, that is) got it half right when she said it takes a village to raise a child. But when she “introduced” that African concept to the U.S., she mistranslated the word village. In most African countries, a village is simply a cluster of people united by kinship – and, thus, accountability and responsibility. In other words, it takes a FAMILY to raise a child, or care for their elderly, or tend to the sick within their midst, or look after the destitute among them. But in Hillary’s mind, village is translated as government, removing the need for personal accountability and responsibility.

As your representative in Congress, I’ll demand civility and do everything I can to remove the government from the village.

I’m Joey. I’m running for Congress. And I approved this message.

Tribute to a Grandmother

My grandmother, Mary Linn Farley, went to sleep Friday night and woke up in Heaven. She was three weeks shy of her 100th birthday.

For most of the world, Grandma's biggest claim to fame would be the length of her life and the events, technological innovations and shifts in society she witnessed. Born in a log cabin in the western hills of Kentucky March 13, 1909, Grandma did see a lot of changes. She went from traveling by horse and wagon to reading about her granddaughter serving on the fire crew for the space shuttles. She lived through two world wars, the Korean Conflict, the Cold War, the Vietnam War and two Gulf wars. She waved a son off to the Navy and boasted proudly of her two grandsons who served as Marines, a granddaughter who was in the Air Force and a great-grandson who is in the Coast Guard. And she went from a world of little opportunity to one that opened wide for her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.

Grandma's unfulfilled dream was to take art classes and become an artist. But orphaned at 6, she was passed from one foster home to the next with no money and no time for the luxury of art. Rather than complain, Grandma channeled her creativity into raising her children and making her humble house more of a home.

The world will never know what works of art Grandma would have created had she been given the chance to follow her dream. But the encouragement she gave her offspring may yet produce a work worthy of the Louvre or the Museum of Modern Art. Everyone of her grandchildren who put crayon to paper knew that the resulting "masterpiece" would be hung proudly on Grandma's kitchen gallery.

For those of us Grandma left behind, her imprint on our world is far more than a pretty painting, a curiosity of age, a mention in a newspaper or a name on a grave. Grandma was our rock of faith and fountain of prayer. Even though I lived hundreds of miles from her, I took strength in knowing that I was always in her prayers. Those prayers and her quiet, patient modeling of unconditional love helped me through many rough times.

Now, as I look back on all the life lessons she taught me, I know that the greatest tribute I can give Grandma is not in words but in following in her footsteps of faith and love.

I will miss you, Grandma.

Self-Reliance or Washington-Reliance?

In rolling out his Economic Recovery Advisory Board today, President Obama rightfully called for an end to the partisan bickering that has made government inept since before Bill Clinton came to town. But how quickly he forgets that until just a few weeks ago, he was a big part of the problem. His voting record in the Senate was among the most partisan of the Democrats -- even worse than Harry Reid's and Hillary Clinton's (according to the Washington Post's voting records for the 110th Congress). When moderate Democrats and Republicans came together to find a meeting place for agreement on troubling issues, Sen. Obama was never in the room.

But back to his speech today: "It is time to pass an Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Plan to get our economy moving again. This is not some abstract debate. It is an urgent and growing crisis that can only be fully understood through the unseen stories that lie underneath each and every one of those lost jobs. Somewhere in America, a small business has shut its doors; a family has said goodbye to their home; a young parent has lost their livelihood, and doesn’t know what’s going to take its place.

"These Americans are counting on us," Obama told Congress.

Perhaps that's the problem. Instead of counting on government to take care of our every problem, we should be relying on ourselves. Had our forefathers counted on government to take care of them, we'd still be part of England, we'd be huddled on the Eastern Seaboard and our national anthem would be "God Save the Queen."

Life isn't easy right now. But times have been tougher for our country and for many of us individually. It wasn't that many years ago that I was a single mom taking care of two kids on $17,000 a year. I lived in a trailer, chopped my own firewood, got up to stoke the fire a couple times a night because I couldn't afford for the furnace to kick on and came up with a lot of fun, free entertainment so my kids wouldn't realize what they were doing without. Recognizing I would never get ahead if I stayed put, I gave up the "security" of that job and my family support system to move with my kids across the country so I could go back to school. Relying on ourselves and God, we survived in student family housing on my 20-hour-a-week, minimum-wage student workstudy and what I could save from my school loan. In all that time, I didn't take any government aid -- no free lunches for the kids, no state health insurance, no food stamps, no welfare.

Had I counted on government, I'd still be back in Idaho living in a trailer, chopping my own firewood and scratching to make ends meet on poverty wages.

I freely admit I was blessed in that I had only to look to my mother for an example. The mother of three, she was widowed and homeless on her 30th birthday. Mom lived on faith in God -- not welfare. The sacrifices she made and the strength she exhibited helped me stand on my own two feet when I needed to.

America was built by generations of people who looked inward and upward to overcome adversity. If, in these difficult economic times, we trade our self-reliance for Washington-reliance, what role models will our children have when they need the strength to struggle through a crisis?