60. Toastmaster's Panther, Skunk Ape Sighting

Air-conditioning has come to America's sub-tropics! The morning was cool, and the blue jays had broken their silence and were enthusiastically calling as they flitted about the tree-tops. Last Saturday, the horses had drunk a recod tub and half of the second bucket in a twelve hour period. This morning the tub was only half empty, and the second bucket was untouched.
Yesterday, I talked to a man who had a friend while he was in the Army, back in 1985, who swore that he saw a skunk ape when he was twelve years old. His parents had a cabin on a creek off Lake Charles in Louisianna. They were at the cabin, and one evening dined on oysters and barbeque. That night, after retiring, the family heard some scuffling noises, got up, opened the door, and saw a skunk ape going through the opened oysters on the ground by the campfire. The man said the creature weighed about 200 pounds. The family quickly closed the door, and that was the end of the story.
Ellen Dube, the president of the Gainesville Toastmaster's Club, told us this story last Thursday in her speech about family roots: Her grandfather was walking through the woods in Stuart, Florida, near Vero Beach, and started to walk up a log when he looked up and saw a panther at the other end of the log. The panther was menancing, and all Grandfather had was a knife. But in the make-do spirit of the old pioneers, he used the knife to fight the panther when the creature sprang at him. He did kill the panther, but one hand, probably the hand that he tried to hold the panther off with as he stabbed the panther was mangled and was useless the rest of his life. Ellen did not know the color of the panther, but I will bet it was a black one as they are the fiercest which is supported by the over 500 panther sightings I have collected in the last ten years.
Today at Toastmaster's, I opened up during the extemporaneous speech section of the meeting, blaming the Democrats in Congress for the securities crisis. I named Barney Frank and Chuck Shummer and related their parts in opposing President Bush's attempts and Senator McCain's attempt to set up an oversight agency for Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac. When I finished, I got a very short applause. In addition to my fear of public speaking, I fear trying to speak in a hostile enviroment. This is why I quit the last Toastmaster's Club, the Gator Toastmasters, on the campus of the University of Florida. The membership appeared to be very liberal. You could tell from the speeches of the members, and the reception that I got as a Libertarian-Republican. However, today several male members came up after the meeting and congratulated me on my little speech. That was reassuring.
Early last summer, I read part of "Shadow Warriors" by Kenneth Timmerman, who wrote,"In closed door testimony before a House International Relations Committee Subcommittee in the fall of 2003, then Undersecretary of State John Bolton cited a half-dozen additional classified cables that pronounced more details on this ratline into Syria. The reports Bolton cited had been culled from nearly two dozen citings of convoys (presumably bearing WMDs from Iraq into Syria - Two-Guns' parenthesis). We thought these six or seven reports were credible," a Bolton aide said. "But the U.S. intelligence community tried to discount virtually all of them." page 128
Let me -Two-Guns- explain that the author told this story as just one of many examples of Democratic employees doing almost anything they could to make sure President George Bush would not look good. To me, this pointed out a great weakness Bush had. He was too detached. He thought that because he issued policy, all federal employees would follow policy. He didn't take into account that most of employees were Democrats and against him. If you want policy to work, you have to be sure the people involved in policy are with you. Bush was too detached. He should have been riding his trail bike from desk to desk making sure his employees were implementing his policies and not sabotaging them. Many did the latter.Two-Guns at peternickerson
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