Perhaps the toughest part of fatherhood for me was keeping a straight face when my insides were trying to burst from an eruption of laughter. Mind you, it wasn’t very often that I had to correct Kyle as he had a natural compass that directed him right from wrong and it rarely failed.

One early afternoon, when Kyle was seven or eight, he was in his room playing a Spider-Man video. I was in the living room reading when I heard him drop a loud and angry f-bomb.

Quietly, but quickly I hurried down the hallway, asking, “What did you say?”

Kyle looked up at me in a sheepish way and said it again. He then explained that he got mad at the game and it popped out of his mouth by accident. He followed it up with a sincere apology and stated he wouldn’t happen again.

Satisfied, I let him off the hook and we each returned to our activities – he playing his video, I reading a book. A few minutes later he came wandering down the hall with a look on his face that said he was thinking hard about something.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I don’t understand,” Kyle began, “You’ve been teaching me how to write in cursive, but I’m not allowed to talk in cursive.”

“Talking in cursive?” I queried.

“Yeah, you know – saying bad words,” he answered.

I smiled, “You mean cursing.”

Kyle frowned and in a serious tone, responded, “No. It’s cursive.”

Knowing I should explain the difference to him, I couldn’t help myself as I was curious about how he came to the idea that cussing was cursive, so I asked, “How so?”

“Fuck is fancy talking, like cursive is fancy writing,” he stated flatly.

Yes, I knew right then I had some explaining to do. But it would have to wait as I busted a gut trying hard not to laugh.

It began yesterday when I stopped at the store to buy myself a pair of new suspenders – bright red one to replace my broken black ones. They reminded me of my step-dad, Delmar Middleton, who wore red suspenders all the time.

The memory slipped from my mind until this morning. That’s when I read a note from Pastor Paula White-Cain that said: “Mountains don’t move unless you speak to them.”

That’s when I knew I had to write about an incident that involved Del, my mom and me one morning back in 1993. The three of us went into the hills to an area recently cleared by some large logging outfit, to cut up some deadfall for my folk’s fireplace.

Del and Mom were on the down side of the road, the part we had jus’ travelled up and I was on the upside with Del’s winch-equipped truck. I had jus’ finish setting the choke on a thick branch-sized log and was awaiting Del’s signal to fire up the winch.

As the winch tugged and the choke tightened, the log failed to move. Thinking I had misset the damned thing, I turned off the winch and started back up the hillside.

Del hollered at me to go back and crank the winch up all the way. I could hear he and Mom talking as she wondered if the winch had enough power to do the job.

“Oh, yeah, “Del exclaimed, “It’s got enough juice to move a mountain.”

Right then I threw the thing into max-power and watched as the log shifted and started to slide down the hill. As if moved, I noticed that the dirt beneath it was also moving.

“Mudslide!” I yelled, but by that time Mom and Del were racing down the road.

Not wishing to be outdone, I took off in the opposite direction, leaving the winch in gear. Had I tried to get around to the front of the tuck to power it off, I probably would’ve been run over or sliced into by the cable as it violently shifted farther down hill from the vehicle.

As we watch, the truck began to bounce up and down, moving a couple of inches at a time, then by a foot or two. By the time the mudslide and truck stopped, the log was jammed against the grille of the truck and the truck was hanging off the edge of the gaping wound that replaces the road and hillside.

It took us a couple of hours to get the truck back up onto the roadway and the rest of the day to find another way off the hill. We teased Del the rest of the day, warning him to be careful how he invoked God’s word.

At first, I sat at my desk with the intent to write another page of information about the U.S. Constitution and it application during this rebuilding period of America, but I’m sidetracked this morning. My mind is thinking about my past, the good, the bad and the way I now deal with everything that happens in my life.

It used to be that I whined and complained when I saw someone get ahead of me and into a position that I figured I should have gotten. Eventually, I grew up – matured – and got over such things, though admittedly I carried a secret resentment around that I didn’t speak about.

After a while, that too disappeared as I came to understand that not everything bad in my life was meant to be a negative. Yes, that sounds exactly like an oxymoron, so I’ll explain a little more.

When I was seven, I ran face first into a wall while I had a paper towel tube in my mouth. I caused serious damage to my tongue, having cut half of it off.

Sparing you the details, it was surgically reattached and after a while I was allowed to start eating real food and talking. With the food, I had no problem – but my speech turned into a serious stutter for which I needed years of therapy.

While I still have that stutter when I’m overly exhausted or really excited, I have learned to control my tongue well enough to go on to a career in radio broadcasting. Hell, I even earned a spot in Nevada’s Broadcast Hall of Fame.

A better story still — a friend of mine is preparing to run in her sixth full-marathon. This is after having had her left leg amputated two-years ago when doctors found a deadly bone cancer.

Before this devastating and life altering event, she was a couch potato and smoked a pack and a half a day. She never ran a day in her life and yet today, she’s out in the rain, pounding the pavement, happy to be alive and enjoying the freedom a few miles of running gives her.

So, you see? Not everything bad is negative – it’s all in the way you choose to look at it — and eventually use it.

It’s an even bet that you have something bad in your life that you are looking at as a negative. Identify it, call it out and then turn it into a positive — I promise your life will be better for it.

Using terminology like “…represents a substantial, multi-billion-dollar private investment in our Nation’s energy infrastructure…” it’s difficult to see how an Executive Order can fall into the gray-zone of being unconstitutional, but two of President Trump’s orders appears to be tippy-toeing in that area. While hating to be the bearer of bad news, let’s begin with a quick look at the background of Executive Orders.

The Executive Order is designed to be used by the President of the United States to constitutionally maintain the agencies that fall under the Executive Branch of the federal government. When the U.S. Constitution was first ratified, there were only four agencies as opposed to the 16 we have today.

These agencies have been created by law through Congress. The idea behind each creation was to make government run in a more practical and less bureaucratic manner. However, what Congress created instead are agencies that now usurp the very body by which it was created, meaning they place more Legislative power under the Executive branch.

Reviewing the order reinstating the construction of the Keystone Pipeline is a case in point. This creates preferential treatment of a corporation, a foreign one at that, over the individual, which goes against everything in the Constitution.

As for the Dakota Access Pipeline, we again see that the corporation favored over the individual in violation of the Constitution. This isn’t meant as support for those protesting the pipeline, rather the rancher who build a stock pond on his land and is now in jail for supposedly damaging the environment.

In April 2016,  77-year-old disabled veteran and Montana rancher Joseph David Robertson was convicted on two counts of ‘unauthorized discharge of pollutants into waters of the United States causing damage to public lands’ and one count of ‘injury or depredation of United States property.’ He was later sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $130,000 in restitution.

So, contrary to the Obama administrations assertion, we cannot have the federal government picking winners and losers. We allowed this to happen one with all the so-call stimulus money being floated around that it damned near destroyed our entire economy.

We must stay vigilant, holding ourselves to the highest of standards in the land.

An investigation accusing the Bureau of Land Management’s Dan Love of misconduct and ethics violations could end the feds case against Nevada’s Cliven Bundy and others. Love was the special agent in charge of operations during the 2014 Bundy Ranch standoff.

Though not named specifically, the report does offer enough details to identify Love as the agent in question. Formerly with the Federal Air Marshal Service, Love was special agent in charge of Utah and Nevada between 2012 and 2015, and whose ouster was called for by Utah’s governor in 2014, while having four Utah counties pass resolutions saying he posed a threat to public safety, and he was the agent in charge of a 2009 raid of the home of Utah doctor James Redd.

A January 30 report by the Department of Interior’s Office of the Inspector General (IG) raises questions about Love, a key witness in the Bundy case. The report cites events that happened during the 2016 Burning Man in Northern Nevada.

Love is accused of requesting flushing toilets, laundry facilities, 24-hour access to ice cream, buying three tickets to the sold-out Burning Man, using five on-duty BLM officers to escort his father, having a family friend and a girlfriend attend the event and changing the hiring process so a friend could be hired. Then during the burning of the effigy, Love claimed 72 hours of official work time over a three-day period.

Love is also reported to have also called other employees and encouraged them not to cooperate, telling them ‘I don’t recall’ was a valid answer to the IG’s questions. He’s also accused of intimidating co-workers into not speaking with the IG.

The IG’s report goes directly to credibility of the government’s case if Love is identified as the agent. Federal officials said the BLM agent’s name was withheld from the report because he is not a top official within the agency.

In January 2016, Ammon and Ryan Bundy became part of a so-called siege at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, near Burns, Oregon and were eventually arrested following the murder of LaVoy Finicum by federal officers. A federal jury later acquitted both of the Bundy’s and five other defendants of all charges.

Cliven Bundy was arrested in 2016 for his part in the 2014 Nevada standoff as he was heading to the Oregon refuge. His sons and 14 others are also charged and are being held as political prisoners in a detention federal facility in Southern Nevada.

The 17 defendants are charged with conspiracy, assault on a federal officer, using a firearm in a crime of violence, obstruction of justice, interference of commerce by extortion and aiding and abetting a crime. If convicted, they could spend the rest of their lives in a federal prison.

If you live in Washoe County, Nevada, you’ve no doubt heard we are no longer in ‘a drought situation.’ However you’ll be forced to act as if we were still in that situation because of what the county commission has done for developers.

Evidently, they have decided that county residents should pay for the majority of the water to be used by incoming developers, and not force the developer to pay for that water themselves. The commissions’ reasoning: if the developer isn’t given some sort of break, they will take their business elsewhere.

What B.S.! I say let the developers take their business elsewhere –either that or pay their fair share of the water they use and not force county citizens to pick-up their tab for something the developer and not the citizen will directly financial benefit from.

As for me, I’m tired of paying and paying for government approved activities, like schools, apartment complexes and the sort that do not benefit me or mine. It is time that our local government start listening to the people who elected them and quit worrying about lining their pockets for the next election cycle.

Personally, I’m tired of paying for their elections. Their actions and this future price increase and faux-drought is nothing more than another form of tyranny!

It shouldn’t be any surprise that Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Propaganda Minister’s credited with saying, “A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”

The quote is highly reflective of our fake-news media. And the irony is that it’s a form of soft-propaganda because it’s been repeated so often we have come to think of the ‘lie becoming the truth,’ as being true.

During the late 60s and early 70s we were constantly fed stories that proved that the people marching, protesting and violently demonstrating in the streets across the U.S. not only had the right, but were righteous because of whatever cause they were espousing. However, the real under pinning to any and all of these made-for-news events was simply a defiance of authority.

Eventually, these same violent demonstrators, protestors and marchers grew up to become the gatekeepers to that very same institutional authority they sought to defy. As the threat to our national security intensified and our sense of liberty faded, these same people have attempted to create a slowly-rising utopian society.

And for the last eight-years, that creation seemed to be coming to fruition. But, as every man and woman, educated in the ways of liberty, understands that Utopia on earth cannot exist – and the closest human kind has every come to this dream is through the U.S. Constitution.

We’re now watching the same thing happen as the fake-news media peddles its soft-propaganda, electronically celebrating the people exercising their righteous indignation at authority. From clamoring for shared the wealth, stopping police on Black violence, to advocating for abortion and battling a supposed Muslim immigration ban, we are witnessing our nation being torn apart by a power that doesn’t exist except through the will of the people.

It’s time to recognize this ‘style of journalism,’ for what it really is and to call it by its real name – propaganda — and to begin countering it with the truth.

It’s not jus’ the news media that’s ‘fake,’ so is the Democratic Party. After all, for all its purported indignation over the so-called “Muslim ban” one would think they’ve never supported such a thing. But then, that’s where the ‘fakery,’ comes in.

In 2011, the Obama Administration stopped processing Iraqi refugee requests for six months after discovering that Waad Ramadan Alwan and Mohammed Shareef Hammadi, two known al Qaeda-Iraq terrorists, had entered the U.S. as refugees. In fact, Alwan had built bombs in Iraq that killed U.S. soldiers and still he made it into the U.S.

The State Department, which Hillary Clinton led at that time, was in charge of refugee requests when the ban was imposed. Given the fact that the majority of the population in Iraq is Muslim — this is a Muslim ban — like the one President Trump recently signed temporarily halting immigration from Syria and other countries.

Simply put, the Democrats, through Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, supported a ban against refugees from a Muslim country before, but the media with it’s marching and protesting allies in the streets and judges in the courthouse, are doing their best to keep this fact hidden.

In May of 2011, then-President Obama proclaimed ‘completed’ a security fence along the border between the U.S. and Mexico  Yet, there are records indicating that the fence was not finished and that the monies to be used for that construction were spent elsewhere.

This research comes on the heels of President Trump ‘ordering,’ Congress to build the wall. His ‘ordering’ of Congress appeared on the surface as unconstitutional, but after learning a few obscure facts behind Trump’s Executive Order, it is completely valid and in line with the U.S. Constitution.

Over 10 years ago – October 26, 2006 to be exact – Congress passed and George Bush signed into law, the ‘Secure Fence Act,’ creating funding for a 700-mile long fence along that same border. So far, the Government Accounting Office hasn’t been able to answer what became of the $1.2 billion that Congress authorized to build it.

Finally, no one, including Democrats, Republicans or the media, brought up the 2006 Act during the run-up to the Presidential election. Instead the Washington D.C. power-elites and their cronies created the false narrative that Trump is a ‘racist’ and a ‘bigot,’ all the while knowing that this act existed.

We’ve been lied to again and cannot let down our guard now — or ever!

The two-party system is not in the U.S. Constitution, and they are not a part of the federal government. Rather they are a private corporate club, and to actually become a card-carrying member, you must pay to join.

This means that the primary gathering and the election are nothing more than a paid get-together for factions within the political parties to lobby and push for one candidate over another. Finally, there is absolutely nothing about this that is constitutional.

On the other hand, the Electoral College is in the U.S. Constitution. It’s designed as a check and balance against the possibility of any political party gaining autocratic control over the election system and it’s supposed to keep that power within the wheelhouse of the States.

But now the federal government wants to take control of the election system through an unconstitutional agency borne out of fear and a desire for security over liberty. The Department of Homeland Security has issued a policy change denoting the system as a part of the U.S. ‘infrastructure,’ which DHS wants to ‘protect.’

Finally, we haven’t had a truly constitutional presidential or vice-presidential election in this nation since before Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And no, the U.S. Constitution was not changed allowing this to happen – Congress simply ignored its duty and it has never reverted back since FDR.

On nine occasions in our nation’s history, the Vice-President has assumed the Presidency. This means should this happen now, that person will have been elected via a political party structure and not the pure-will of the people, making the Constitution’s checks and balances ‘null-and-void.’

It is time to abolish the two-party system, the DHS and return the Vice-President’s election to its constitutional origin.