Wes & Elisa - Delfosse Winery

I ventured down to the Charlottesville area to photograph Wes and Elisa's Sunday September 20 wedding. Elisa is originally from Canada, Wes is originally from Bolivia. They met at the University of Oklahoma and now live in Houston. Family and friends were coming from all over the world, so they decided to have the wedding in Virginia, even though neither had any connections here. I was referred to them by Ashley, Elisa's maid of honor and childhood best friend, who was in a wedding I photographed two years ago. The wedding took place at the Delfosse Winery, about 20 miles southwest of Charlottesville. Great wedding and a great weekend spent with some cousins who live near Charlottesville. Click on images to enlarge.

The Art Of Selling

If I have a car that I have owned for 5 years and I want to sell that car to you, I would want to tell you about how great the car has been for me. If my intent was to be honest, I would tell you that it leaks oil and that my mechanic told me it would need about $2000 of repairs sometime in the next 6 months. If my intent is to sell you this car, I would skip all of that and just tell you about how great the car has been for me. The negative stuff would just discourage you, and I really want you to buy this car. I'm not being dishonest . . this really has been a great car for me. And if I am a really good salesman, all those questions you have about the condition of the car would be easily dismissed by pointing out how great this car has been for me.

With health care, President Obama and many of his fellow Democrats are trying to sell us a used car . . one that is a lemon. So far he has been all talk. Whenever you hear Obama talk about his health care plan (actually there is no Obama plan), listen to all the negatives he points out about the plan. There are no negatives. In his sales pitch everything about his plan is positive. Hhmmmm, that's strange. Almost sounds too good to be true.

In fact, Obama has all along been giving us one long sales job; and I know that I, for one, am getting really tired of it. Not worn down tired. I'm not anywhere near ready to buy this clunker. In fact I have already walked away, long ago realizing that this would be one big mistake of a purchase. Obama is everywhere: talking to school kids, addressing Congress, Leno, Sunday talk shows, and on and on. It seems to me the more he talks, the more people he is driving away. Add to that his Acorn associations and his crazy czars, plus tea party rallies and ridiculous charges of racism, soon Obama will lose the large part of the American public. It's already happening. His poll numbers are really, really low. People still seem to want to like him, but his policies are a whole different story. People just don't buy it. That's a good thing. The American public does not need a used car destined to break down, that is unless we pump even more money into it. We've all been there before, owning a car or an appliance that keeps breaking down. We keep spending money on repairs, to the point that we have to wonder if it is worth repairing anymore. Social Security, Medicare, Postal Service, Education . . all programs desperately in need of fixing. We pour more and more money into them, and they continue to break down. People are starting to wonder, is it worth it any longer?

Mark & Alicia at Bluemont Vineyard

September 12 at Bluemont Vineyard. Fun wedding . . great friends . . close family. All went well. More photos to come on the website.

Litter

I remember hearing a speaker talk about what it means to be a servant . . a servant of God that is. Part of what it means is not considering yourself to be any better than someone else, or to put it another way, not looking at someone else as being lower than you. What I remember most from this person's talk was when he said that is why he hates litter. He mentioned McDonalds and the tendency for people to leave their tray of trash on a table rather than putting it in the trash can. He said that when you do that, you are basically saying that there is someone else around who is lower than you who will come along and pick up your mess. To me, what the speaker said makes sense, and it is something that I personally try to live out in my own life, whether it is cleaning up after myself in McDonalds or by not leaving trash anywhere where someone else would have to come and clean up after me.

All of this to bring you these photos: one from Obama's inauguration, the other from this past weekend's Tea Party event in Washington. Both events brought hundreds of thousands of people to Washington. The inauguration was understandably mostly a liberal crowd. The Tax Protest was mostly a conservative crowd. Liberals love to talk about the environment. They also love big government and happily turn over responsibility for their own lives over to that big government. Conservatives are big believers in smaller government and personal responsibility. Liberals believe there will always be someone else who will come along and clean up their mess, conservatives don't. Dare I say that liberals believe in being a servant to that big government, conservatives believe in being a servant to God. And the result? I think the pictures tell you pretty clearly. The difference is pretty stark.

Random Questions About Health Care

It seems to me the more President Obama talks about health care reform, the more questions there are about health care reform. No doubt it is a complicated issue; but there is a definite disconnect between what Obama says (promises) and what would actually take place in a real world. Is he lying? . . or is he naive? . . or is he right? I lean toward thinking he is just naive and that he really doesn't understand real world economics. Here are a few reasons why I think this:

Insurance Companies. When Obama says that he will demand that private insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions, and that

"They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime. We will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses.... And insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care",

he seems to believe that insurance companies can just absorb all of this without any affect on them or on policy holders. Or he is after one or both of the following: 1) he wants to force the private insurance companies to go out of business, and/or 2) he believes that insurance companies should not be profit making enterprises in the first place. This should scare any business owner. Imagine the government deciding that it is ridiculous how much barbershops charge for haircuts. Why should a person earning $30,000 pay the same amount for a haircut as someone earning $130,000? We will require barbers to charge less to people earning under $50,000. We will also require barbershops to cover, with no extra charge, routine shaves. To keep barbers honest, the federal government will set up public barbershops, offering discounted and subsidized haircuts. Yeah, this would have no affect on barbers.

Illegal Alien Coverage. This is a hot topic. Most Americans seem to believe that illegal aliens should not be covered under national health care. The president has made promises to that affect, even though he co-sponsored earlier in his career legislation that specifically included illegal aliens in health care coverage. On a practical level though, my question is this: Let's say that all Americans are covered, so people are supposedly not going to the emergency room for routine illnesses. Because everyone is covered, there is no longer a need to require emergency rooms to not turn people away. In fact emergency rooms would tell people to go see their government paid doctor using their government covered insurance to take care of their poison ivy rash. But on a practical level, what happens when an illegal alien shows up to the emergency room. Will the government or civil right organizations tolerate hospitals not providing health care to someone in need, even if they are here illegally? I doubt it. Will illegal aliens be covered? It might be through the back door, but yeah, they will be covered.

Fraud and Waste. The president says we will pay for health care reform largely through savings experienced by identifying and eliminating fraud and waste, particularly in Medicare. It would be really, really, really great if we could eliminate fraud and waste. So why have we not done it so far? On day one Obama could have tackled this without one piece of legislation. Has he tried yet? It doesn't appear so. Instead he wants to grow the very beast that seems to encourage fraud and waste. If my house was built with a lot of wood that easily rots, and I later build onto my house using that same kind of wood, how stupid is that? Wouldn't I have even more rotted wood five years from now? Compounding the issue is the notion that any monies saved by eliminating fraud and waste should go right back into additional spending, rather than paying off debt or perhaps even saving it, or giving it back to its rightful owner (the American public). This promise is a scam. Anyone who believes that Obama is serious about tackling corruption will believe anything.