We’ve moved into the Lone Star state where we’ve started our Deep in the Heart of Texas Tour.  Once again, we continue to pride ourselves in originality…  Our first stop is in Orange, Texas (on the border), where we are meeting with pro-life advocates Paul and Ruby Mayeux.  They have 11 children.  Seven who are currently alive, three miscarriages and Michael.  Michael was three months old when he died in 2007.  During an ultra-sound when Ruby was pregnant with Michael, they learned Michael had a chromosome disorder.  The doctor recommended the couple go to Houston for more tests “…so they could consider their options.”  Implied in this was: abortion.  The Mayeuxs said that they were pro-life and “the only ‘option‘ was to have the baby.”  Michael was born a month premature, and not breathing.  He was resuscitated.  Michael had four holes in his heart and four cysts on his brain.  The official diagnosis was Trisomy 18, also called Edwards Syndrome.  The prognosis?  Incompatible with life, Paul said.  While the little baby struggled day to day, Mom and Dad rallied around him, the Mayeux children rallied around him, church members rallied around him, neighbors rallied around him.  And in all this, a tremendous amount of bonding and love happened between many of these people.  Michael, it turned out, had been a tremendous gift from God, said Paul.  “At Michael’s wake, our three oldest children spoke about Michael and how he had touched their lives,”  said Paul.  “While losing Michael was very painful, I would never change the gift of having him.”  Note:  Our administration would promote a Consistent Life Ethic, which means we are against anything that can end life prematurely. For more on our stance, see…

Our Louisiana Gumbo Tour continues…  While we’ve been down here, the Deep Water Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf 50 miles south of New Orleans.  As of today, the oil spill was at 42,000 gallons a day and had already spread out over 1,800 square miles.  And indications are it could get much  worse…  Earlier today, I talked with Jim Mathus back in Cleveland.  He recently retired from the Army Corps of Engineers as a marine engineer and he also worked for Shell on some of their oil rigs, also in the Gulf of Mexico.  Mathus drew a corollary between these rigs and, say, one’s car engine.  He said these oil rigs have a lot of working parts, just like a car engine.  If a piston in a car engine breaks, for instance, oil can spew out on a manifold, igniting a fire.  The dynamics can be somewhat simimilar (on a rudimentary level) to these oil rigs, Mathus said.  The bottom line with this is that, in a sense, it seems that we’re playing Russian Roullette with things that can be fraught with human error.   The gun being held to: the environment’s head.  Note:  According to a recent Newsweek article, environmentalists warn that the thousands of gallons of mud that deep water drilling unearths contain toxic metals — mercury, lead and cadmium — that may end up in the seafood supply.  What’s more, hurricanes Rita and Katrina led to 125 spills from platforms and pipelines on the Outer Continental Shelf, releasing nearly 685,000 gallons of petroleum products into the ocean, also according to the Newsweek article.  Note 2:  At Sunday Mass at St. Aloysius Catholic Church in Baton Rouge, we learned one of the parishioners here had been killed in the Deep Water Horizon explosion.  He was the father of two children.  Like with the coal miners, are these oil rig workers becoming part of the “inevitable collateral damage” of our energy gluttony in this country?

I was recently interviewed by WikiNews.  To see the rather in-depth article, go to…

We headed out of New Orleans yesterday toward Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  We picked a backroad (LA 18) that looked on the map like it was going to be a ’scenic byway,’ and it was.  That is, it was ’scene’ after ’scene’ of some of the biggest chemical plants we’ve seen throughout the country.  There was Monsanto, Dow Chemical, oil refineries… and even a nuclear power plant site.  Sandwhiched in between were small — and quite poor — primarily rural Black villages.  We stopped in Vascherie, where I talked to some older gentleman sitting in the shade in front of a general store.  At the town limits here is a sign that says:  “No Thanks Petroplex, our health is not for sale!”  According to the men, the citizens here were mounting a spirited fight to keep yet another refinery (with even more potential pollution, etc.) from coming in.  (Petroplex International is proposing a petroleum storage facility with a 10 million barrel capacity in St. James Parish, Louisiana.)  Note:  I couldn’t help but wonder that if this was a White affluent rural area, would there be all these toxic chemical plants, refineries, a nuclear power plant…?  Of course not.  Note 2:  In the last blog entry, I wrote about the phenomenal amount of toxic chemical farm runoff into the Mississippi River watershed. Much of this is farm chemicals from Monsanto.  And while Monsanto (some organic farmers refer to the company as: “Monsatan”) is part of the problem, so are the farmers using the chemicals, and so are all of us consumers creating a demand for this, in essence, “chemically treated” food.

Our Louisiana Gumbo Tour continues in New Orleans…  We stopped at St. Thomas Catholic Worker House in the heart of the city here on Constance St.  They take in homeless people, have set up a community garden, lobby for more low income housing…  While here, I was given a tour of a Hope 6 Project just east of the Catholic Worker House.  Several blocks used to be Housing and Urban Development Projects housing that incrementally got run down.  HUD came back in and contracted with a developer to put up new, less population dense “mixed housing.”  That is, there is now high income, middle income and low income housing mixed together.  While the neighborhood looks better and is safer, the problem then became that a significant number of low income people got displaced from neighborhoods they might have been living in for generations…  Just beyond this neighborhood is the Mississippi River.  It drains here into the Gulf of Mexico.  Because of the continual flow of toxic runoff (primarily farm chemicals) upstream, a huge “dead zone” is being created in the Gulf.  Also, where layers of sediment would have naturally leeched over the east and west river banks, high flood walls now keep the sediment ‘unnaturally’ moving south — and into the Gulf.  Where it, too, is creating environmental problems.  Common sense would say that maybe we  should start adapting more to nature’s ebb and flow…  I also talked at Jesuit High School in New Orleans today.  Topics included: the National Debt; abortion; Third World poverty; taxes… I turned it into a ‘town hall style meeting,’ of sorts, with the students becoming quite animated about many of the topics.   Note:  One of our Georgia supporters, Dr. Jonathan Davis just put together an absolutely excellent campaign photo album for us…

We have headed into southern Louisiana on our Louisiana Gumbo Tour.  (We, again, pride ourselves on originality.)  We stopped in New Orleans where I gave a talk to an in-home gathering in the heart of the city on Constance St.  The day before, President Obama had outlined his plans for prioritizing going to Mars.  He said we would now do space travel in a “smart” way.  During my talk, I questioned the use of the word “smart.”  I mean, all the best minds at MIT, Harvard, Stanford… have come up with these ultra-sophisticated, ultra-expensive spacecraft… to take us to places like Mars — where there’s no gravity, no oxygen and no food.  Duh!  Wouldn’t the billions we’re spending on NASA be better spent on things like, oh I don’t know, MAYBE ENDING WORLD HUNGER!  Maybe ’smart,’ the way we currently construe ’smart’ to be, should be trumped by common sense…   The neighborhood where I gave the talk in New Orleans is a hardscrabble one, fraught with a lot of violence.  In fact, the weekend before in New Orleans there were eight shooting deaths throughout the city.  Our cities (LA, Chicago, Cleveland…) are turning into absolute war zones.

We just drove through southern Mississippi along the Gulf Coast.  (We had toured this area a few months after Hurricane Katrina and saw the almost total devastation.) We stopped in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.  Along the coast here (as in many places), the shoreline mansions have gone back up.  Going through Gulf Port, Mississippi, also on the coast, we saw that all the glitzy casinos, etc., have gone back up as well.  (I shook my head thinking:  ‘It’s just like setting the bowling pins up again.’)  Our administration would push for these types of coastal areas to become federal parks where everyone, rich and poor, had equal access to the vistas, the beaches, and so on… The other thing we observed down here were “Katrina cottages.”  These cottages (about the size of a full- length RV) were placed on lots next to homes that had been damaged in the hurricane.  While some people refurbished their places, they lived in the cottages. These cottages got me to thinking…  It would seem to me if we want to stop the environmental cancer of urban sprawl that is incrementally eating away at cropland in this country, wouldn’t it make sense, common sense, to start putting similar cottages on, say, existing suburban properties, with people sharing land?  Note:  Incidentally, most of the Habitat for Humanity homes that are built in the Third World are actually smaller than the Katrina cottages.

More on our Sweet Home Alabama Tour…  Coming across the border from Georgia, we first stopped in Phenix City, Alabama.  This was once billed at “the most corrupt city in America.”  With the Army’s Ft. Benning nearby, soldiers regularly came to town here.  There were illegal gambling parlors all over, prostitution, taverns everywhere, mob influence…  At Patty’s 50s style diner here, one of the employees, Barbara, told me that in the mid-50s marshal law was declared in Phenix City, with federal troops descending on the town to shut down a lot of the illegal activity…  On the walls at Patty’s are old 45 records, pictures of Elvis Presley, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe…  And a whole wall dedicated to the Andy Griffith Show…  While in Phenix City, I gave a pro-life talk at St. Patrick’s Church.  I said that we’d just crossed the 50 million abortion mark in America and for this to end, pro-life people need to go to the streets and mount a dramatic, sustained protest — like the protests to end Segregation in the South.  While in Phenix, we met with Fr. Thom Weise who spent time with Mother Theresa and Dorothy Day (co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement).  He had an absolutely great sense of spirituality about him.  Fr. Thom gave us a tour of the town, including a stroll down a scenic river walk.  Fr. Thom, 74, road his push-scooter side-by-side with our son Jonathan along the walk…  The next day, I talked at Mother Mary’s School, an all Black elementary school in Phenix City.  The topic, again, was abortion.  Our daughter Sarah, 14, also talked to the students. She explained she had protested abortion all over the country.  She said she had prayed with others on the street, held protest signs, pleaded with mothers not to go into the clinic…  Sarah exhorted the students to consider doing similar things…  I then talked at an eighth grade class at St. Patrick’s School in Phenix City.  I asked the students:  “If you were president, what’s the first thing you’d do?”  One boy didn’t skip a beat, immediately saying:  “I’d end the war.”  I asked why.  “Because my father is over there.”  My heart fell as I looked at this kid…  After the school events, we got a tour of The Riverside Antique Mall, complete with the first Thunderbird model ever built (1955) and the last Thunderbird model ever built (1995).  Both were cherry red.  The antique mall also has the largest lunch box collection in the world — and I’m not making this up.  (It had just been featured on CNN’s Most Unusual Museums Show.)  These particular lunch pails primarily had scenes from movies and television shows.  The rarest was a metal lunch pail with Hop-a-Long Cassidy on it.  Cost: $600.  I decided to pass on that…  After the tour we headed south, stopping in Montgomery (see last entry), then it was on to Owassa where Jonathan and I passed out a flier to a man out watering flowers in his front yard there.  Unsolicited, he said he had an answer to gridlock in D.C.  “Throw everyone out and start over,” he offered…  Then it was further south to Evergreen, Alabama, where I put up a campaign flier at Piggly Wiggly Grocery Store.  (Ya gotta wonder why you would name a place where people were going to get there food: “piggly,” complete with a big graphic of a pig no less.  I mean what’s that going to do to the average shopper unconsciously?  Anyway… From here,, it was on to Atmore, Alabama, where we parked our camper for the evening in a dirt lot next to a Chevron station, amidst a few 18 wheelers.  It was late.  And after we got the kids to bed, I went into a small restaurant at the station to do some writing.  My table was right below a wall hanging that read:  You might be a redneck racing fan if:  1)  Your drive to the race track takes longer than the race.  2)  You can change a tire faster than you can change a diaper.  3)  You get in and out of your car through the driver’s window. (Incidentally, this is how I get in our campaign vehicle.)

We’ve started on our “Sweet Home Alabama Tour.”  (We continue to try to be as original as possible with the campaign.)  Yesterday we stopped in Montgomery at a park.  While the kids watched a youth baseball game, I got in a political discussion with a guy also watching the game.  He said a hot button issue for him was illegal immigration.  He said that if he were president, he’d end the wars, bring the troppos home and “…station them at the [southern] border.”  Then he would try to send all the illegal immigrants back.  “And if they tried to return, I’d order them shot, with instructions to leave the bodies where they fall — as a warning to others.”  I asked him if he had a particular faith.  He said he was a Christian.  I then asked him how he saw his plan squaring with the: Good Samaritan story?

I was interviewed by the Americus Times-Recorder yesterday.  I noted Koinonia Farm, where we’re currently doing some research,  has a perma-culture.  (This is a design system for sustainable human habitats that work in harmony with nature to provide an abundance for all our needs.  For instance, Konoinia’s perma-culture has fruit trees, berries, gardens, pastured livestock… all working together in a closed, organic eco-system.  People from all over the country come to Koinonia to learn about perma-culture.  I told the reporter that when we get to the White House, one of the first things we’ll do is tear out the toxic, chemically-treated green lawn (the one that’s polluting the groundwater) and put in an organic perma-culture.  And we’ll ask many Americans to do the same.  Note:  Koinonia is a Christian cooperative farming community located in rural Sumter County, Georgia.  It was started in the 1940s.