Word Prisms

Verklemmpt -  A Yiddish word meaning overcome with emotion or choked up.  It’s a new and weird feeling to support the party in power after having lived in Alberta all my life.    And so I found myself paying $100 a ticket to attend a fundraiser in Falher, Alberta.    Falher is just south of Peace River and very close to Donnelly if that helps.    We were late.    I’d had to ask directions from a couple of guys in “The Source” who were only too happy to help.    We’d driven into town on the wrong road.    If we’d come in past the giant bumble bee we would have driven right past the Knights of Columbus Hall.  The interior is a big open space with a stage on one end, kitchen at the other and glaring florescent lighting.    I spotted Rachel's body guards before I spotted her.  I got the same surreal sensation I get spotting any celebrity.    It’s like, “Hey I know you,” and I’m about sa...

Two as in $2 a day.  That’s what 1.5 million households [in the U.S.] and roughly 3 million children survive on in any given month.  This number that had doubled in just 15 years and does not just reflect single-mother families.  More than a third of the families are headed by a married couples and nearly half are white.  The rest are African Americans and Hispanics.  How can this be? you wonder.   Well, in 1996 Bill Clinton ended the welfare system in the U.S. and introduced a system of job creation.    In theory, sounds great.   Subsidies were provided to employers to hire former welfare recipients, minimum wages were increased nominally and government assistance was provided for the working poor for a period of five years.   After that, they’re on their own, no longer be eligible for welfare, even if they happen to be living off only $2 a day.   At the height of the old welfare system in the States, 14.2 million peop...