When it began getting dark I was seriously getting curious about what was really going on and then I remembered that tucked in the basement was a battery powered radio. I think I tuned in four or five stations over the next couple of hours and was treated to this speculation and that speculation, but no real answers accept that the blackout was wide spread.

When the power finally came back on I of course turned on the TV and watched my local news, the CBC news, and CNN and once again got way too much speculation as to what caused the blackout and where it originated from. That was until I heard New York Governor George Pataki blaming the power outage on Canada. This is what he said:

“the New York independent systems operator says they are virtually certain it had nothing to do in New York state. And they believe it occurred west of Ontario, cascaded from there into Ontario, Canada, and through the northeast.”

Really?

By this time I had already heard some facts about the blackout and data had proved the origin was somewhere in the US.

In February 2004, the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force released their final report, placing the main cause of the blackout on FirstEnergy Corporation’s failure to trim trees in part of its Ohio service area. The report said that a generating plant in Eastlake, Ohio (a suburb of Cleveland) went offline amid high electrical demand, and that strained high-voltage power lines (located in a distant rural setting), which later went out of service when they came in contact with “overgrown trees”. The cascading effect that resulted ultimately forced the shutdown of more than 100 power plants.

The whole process of discovering what happened was great fun to follow, but for one thing that still burns me today, Governor George Pataki publicly blaming Canada for the blackout with no real data to back that up. It couldn’t be the US, it had to be Canada right? I couldn’t believe what I heard from his mouth. Let’s blame Canada because it couldn’t be us.

Of course, in the end the outage was born in the USA.

Canada isn’t a scapegoat for Pataki and neither is anyone else. Politicians need to get their facts straight before they open their mouths.

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The issue of schools serving healthier meals has been a long standing topic and one that so obviously should have been dealt with long ago, but still lingers on. Now the PCRM has decided to take action by including the Obama children in their new ad campaign to bring attention to their cause. Here’s a little of what they had to say,

“The direct comparison is: You have affluent children with access to healthy foods, and disadvantaged children have the same rights to the same kinds of healthy meals as affluent kids. And we are fighting for that fairness, so we felt that making that statement as directly as we could was important.”

On one hand they do have a point. All children deserve healthy meals period, but unfortunately children get used as pawns by adults all the time, the same adults that preach time and time again we shouldn’t put children in the middle of adult disagreements. In this argument, children are the issue but specifically the Obama children are not. This is where exploiting children for our benefit comes in because there is no credible reason to use President Obama’s daughters as pawns in a serious issue that involves all children.

There is another argument against using the Obama children in the ads and that is that no president, prime minister, celebrity, or anyone else in the media spotlight should have their children exploited in any way shape or form. The Obama children are not the issue, all children are and in my opinion they should be left out of adult problems at all cost.

It’s too bad the PCRM’s good intentions have been ruined by a lack of common sense.

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