ellck’s blog

The quote that White House Press Secretary Tony Snow mentioned about the Mark Foley White House Page scandal was very….interesting. It was interesting because it has raised a lot of eyebrows and opened a lot of thinking. First off, Tony Snow is a big Republican, leading a very long TV career as an anchor on many Fox News programs, including The Rush Limbaugh Show, The O’Reilly Factor, and The Tony Snow Show. Before he began his 1996 Fox News career though, he was also a chief speechwriter for President Bush senior and a Deputy Assistant of Media Affairs. Now Tony Snow is a White House Press Secretary for the second Bush administration. He has had quite a career though, even coloring President Bush with a couple of names like ‘impotent’ and ‘doesn’t seem to mean what he says’. This link has a couple of good articles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Snow

The Mark Foley White House Page scandal is the topic that Tony Snow was talking about. Mark Foley is a House of Representatives congressman from
Florida. While in Congress, he has tried to push many laws against child molesters. That struck everyone as ironic when this scandal came about. Congressman Foley was caught sending disturbing e-mails and instant messengers to White House pages who are high school juniors that work in the White House doing jobs like running messages and file work. It is a program that has been established for a while now, and that’s why it was never really noticed until this all came up. Information on what the Congressional Page Program is:

http://www.house.gov/watson/page_program.shtml

For information on Mark Foley and his political career:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Foley

Tony Snow made his comment about Mark Foley on CNN on October 2 during the morning show while talking to Soledad O’Brien. As his job, he has to talk to interviewers and answer their questions resourcefully and attentively. Doesn’t mean he has to tell the truth, but his answer could have been from being ‘on the spot’ under pressure and because of frustration. Tony Snow could also be referring to ‘there have been other scandals’ on Capitol Hill in regards to the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal. He could possibly have a point there, where former President Bill Clinton entered into cheating on his wife acts. His comment probably wasn’t even thinking about that either though, because from his tone of voice, he was really annoyed, so he just wanted to take a shot at Democrats any way he could. A good link and it actually has the video is:

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/10/02/naughty-emails/

In the end, Tony Snow is a Republican and the Democrats will try to use this to their advantage for the next elections. This could also make him even more annoyed while he was being interviewed, so being under pressure he kind of snapped. He probably didn’t mean it, but answering questions under fire is his job, so Tony Snow signed up for it.

Spiderman/Peter Parker has a couple of strong personality points, but I think the ones he has the most are perspective or wisdom, bravery, vitality, and kindness. He displays a lot of wisdom in the movies by listening to others, although he feels responsible for his Uncle Ben getting killed. Peter listens to Uncle Ben’s words to get him through the hard times, ‘With great power, comes great responsibility’. These words of wisdom empower Peter and Spiderman to defeat the villains and save the day. Peter displays bravery on multiple occasions in both movies. Using bravery, he beat the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus. With his bravery, he was able to stop the moving train from tumbling off the platform in the second movie. He was also brave enough to put back on the Spiderman mask and fight Doctor Octopus to defeat him and save
New York. Peter also had some displays of vitality in both movies. Using his vigor, he managed to find the strength to defeat the Green Goblin at the cemetery at the end of the 1^st movie. He also used his vitality to do the impossible, swinging from web to web to fight Green Goblin at the International Festival. With his vitality as well, he saved the citizens of
New York over and over again. Peter’s kindness might be his powerful trait though. Even at the end of both movies, Peter still felt sorry for his enemies. When Mary Jane was engaged to another guy, he still tried to comfort her even though they were both sad. Peter also uses his kindness to be there for Aunt May through all situations.

For all his hard work though, Peter could definitely take the easy way out simply by refusing to care. He made a good point in the second movie when he said he’s not obligated to give up everything he likes just to be a good guy. If he would just stop being Spiderman, Peter could probably have everything he wants. Peter could go to class regularly, do his homework, get a good job and even win over his girlfriend. Thankfully though, Peter understands sacrifice and keeps working to save
New York.

There are 3 different kinds of happiness. First, there’s the pleasant life which means you get happiness simply from having things. These make you happy because they involve what you like, your hobbies, and things that you are attracted to. The next form of happiness is obtained from admiring traits from others. This is like watching a painting from an artist, and admiring their hard and thorough work. These help us feel good because they are things we enjoy and when they are well done, we feel good about it. Finally, there’s the happiness we get from being a part of things, like community, family, school or religion. This is a happiness we get from being with others, doing things together with a group who are familiar with this organization and simply having fun. Signature strengths help all of these because they are inherent strengths that even though we can’t really touch them, we can feel them or see that they are there.

A couple of sites that helped me find these out are:

http://bestinspirationonline.com/?p=33

This site was cool because it had steps on how to help achieve happiness. It was a lot like the other blogs from the doctors and easy to read, understand, and tie in with the blogs.

The various characters of Precious and her Hair had some interesting “core strengths”. The main character Precious was a rather independent strong-willed character. When she doubted herself, she had a strong conscience that told her to go through with the odds because the outcome would be worth it. In the part where Precious enters the classroom, even through all the laughter of her classmates, she still entered, head held proudly and was not ashamed of what she had done. As a matter of fact, she ended up starting a new trend of hair. The character of Lucille, Precious’ mother, was a wise character that has the wisdom of ages on her side. She tried to explain to Precious that if Neville was interested in her, he’d be interested in her for who she is, not how she looks. Lucille’s beliefs were reinforced by her religious beliefs, saying God made you how he made you, so put that effort into being happy instead of trying to change.

I think that Precious was the one who changed the most in the story. Her biggest weakness was in her self, doubting how beautiful she really was. Even after doing everything that everyone else told her to do, the one person she never listened to was herself. If she had believed her mother, realized that true beauty is from the inside, what we’ve made for ourselves, and then she maybe could have just gotten the courage to simply talk to Neville. Precious was definitely living for the pleasure of happiness that all her actions were working for the end result.

If I was a counselor, I would have asked Precious about how meaningful the relationship with her boyfriend would have been if she had succeeded. If Precious only wanted to win over a boyfriend, to run on the beach with, then there could be relationship problems down the future, so there’s that to consider. That would be flow type of happiness.

I think my five signature strengths are my friendship, my humor, respect, creativity, and perseverance. These qualities have helped me out so much in my life by giving me the power to face hard times in my life, like family and school. They’ve also let me make long lasting friendships with awesome people and I love them all. Being able to share my qualities too, like my creativeness with others is cool too because they inspire me with new ideas to get better. My perseverance is also good too, because most times it makes me stubborn, but it helps me finish everything I start. I hope that for the rest of my life, these qualities keep helping me out.

There was time in my life when my best friend broke up with her boyfriend. She was so sad and depressed for a while that every time I tried to talk with her, she just didn’t want to listen. So what I did was finally just spend a day along, like ‘a girl’s day out’ kind of. We skipped school, but that’s how it always starts, she deserved it I felt. Then we went over to the mall just to hang out, going to the stores, just relaxing, then eating at the food court. I picked her up some Chinese food and we just started laughing at all the dumb things that had happened while they were together. She laughed so much it was almost like she wasn’t even sad or anything. After lunch, we caught a movie and had fun doing that. When the movie was done, we just chilled a bit longer, talking about nothing really until we finally had to go. This show of friendship my friend later told me was like one of the best things that had ever happened for her. I was really happy she felt better but more that I was able to help her out.

I think the “signature strengths” that people need to have are like friendship, creativity, intelligent, funny, honest, and caring. These qualities make people fun to be around and reliable on all situations. When someone is friendly, then they can make anything fun to do or just cheer up people. They understand that everyone’s different and are willing to do things they don’t need to do for others. Creativity is cool because things are always interesting and fun, like music or drawing. Intelligence is nice because when people know something you don’t, then they can help you out and you’ll learn something to help out someone else. Being funny means you can make a joke to cheer someone up, or make a situation fun. These “signature strengths” are all good qualities for people to have, and they definitely speak a lot for a person.

I chose the blog on Math, http://homeschoolmath.blogspot.com/ This blog would be cool for like my younger brother and sisters because its Math in a very simple and easy to follow way. The teacher uses a lot of examples too, and its kind of weird to still look at because I’m used to looking at math going up and down, not sideways, but since she explains everything a lot it’s a lot easier to see. This blog is also cool too because it gives even more links to other math blogs and sites so if you need more help or some exercises, you can check them out too.

Clyde William Tombaugh was born on February 4, 1906 and died on January 17, 1997. He was born in Streator, La Salle County, Illinois and his family moved to
Burdett, Kansas. It was there that he built a telescope and started sending copies of what he saw to the Lowell Observatory. They liked what they saw and gave him a job, and that’s where he discovered the 9^th planet Pluto.  It was recently that the board of astronomers decided that Pluto wasn’t a planet anymore, but rather a ‘dwarf planet’. They have put a portion of his ashes on the New Horizons spacecraft that they launched to Pluto.

I found this information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Tombaugh

A blog that I found kind of interesting was http://atlblogs.com/moderaterepublican/archives/002938.html This was a different blog because the author or owner of the blog is created this site to kind of remind Republicans of the origins or old beliefs they had. So he made this site for others to just discuss their views of today’s politics using ideas of the past. The topics they talked about were kind of different too, including Senator John McCain and his running for President and Democratic policies.

I learned a couple of things from this blog. There were a lot of discussions on this blog and it was almost kind of like a discussion forum, but the one talk they had about the comments of Jim Scarantino was interesting. He commented how moderate Republicans should leave the Republican party because they were not all on the same page, but the post writer responded by saying that comment went too far. Republicans are Republicans, and just because they aren’t the same on all topics, doesn’t mean they’re not the same on some.