We’re almost there!!!

 

Our last push raised $770.00 and in the last couple days, we’ve been able to bargain the cost from $1200 to $1000 for a plot at Calgary Cemetery, in Herkimer NY (Rhonda’s hometown’s only Catholic cemetery, located side by side with Oak Hill), and even got the funeral home owner to donate the necessary vault for free. 

 

We’re almost there. 

 

We need another $230 to allow Rhonda the dignity of finally being settled, and then we have time to get her the marker and such.  The spring has arrived in Herkimer, and we need to get her home and safe for good.  Please help us get this phase of the effort done.  Our Rhonda needs her rest.  It’s been a nightmare for her and we need to be there for her to bring it to a close.

Thank you, and may God bring wonderful people to your aid in your time of need as well.

TO CONTRIBUTE: Please give whatever you can afford, no matter how small, every dollar helps. Fund in Memory of Rhonda DuPont

For more information, see the previous post.

Please Help

TO CONTRIBUTE: Please give whatever you can afford, no matter how small, every dollar helps. Fund in Memory of Rhonda DuPont

An old photo of Rhonda M. DuPont holding her son Ryan R. Peeler.

On January 19th, Rhonda DuPont, a wonderful woman that I grew up with, was brutally murdered by her own son, Ryan, in a psychotic rage, as the paranoid schizophrenia he suffers finally claimed him for good.

 

Murder victim’s fiance details Monday night’s events

 

She fought a lonely battle for years to get him the help he needed, and died trying to simply deliver food to him as he sat in a cheap, lonely motel room – the best she could manage for him as she faced one crushing set back after another. 

 

The DuPont homicide: Is mental illness behind family slaying?

 

Her tragedy immediately became tabloid fodder in the Upstate New York area where we both grew up, and now threatens to become a complete farce as her family hasn’t the money to provide her with a grave, and some members have become publicly belligerent about the insult to injury this financial issue presents.

 

Rhonda Marie DuPont Memorial Website

 

I take care of the memorial website linked above, and noticed the posted comment (Journal page) referring to the financial issue yesterday (March 25).  Her sister posted that the amount needed is $1,000, and I am hoping that this amount will now be raised by decent and caring folks who can appreciate the justice in allowing Rhonda’s memory to be spared the indignity of a public spectacle surrounding her family’s inability to pay for her plot and burial expenses. 

 

Any and all donations will be properly administered through a 3rd party fund manager, and directed to the Oak Hill Cemetery for purchase of the plot itself, as well as to the appropriate professional recipients for the specific burial expenses involved. 

 

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I hope you will find it in your heart to add to the funds being gathered on Rhonda’s behalf.

 

Rick Carroll

TO CONTRIBUTE: Please give whatever you can afford, no matter how small, every dollar helps. Fund in Memory of Rhonda DuPont

A Perfect Storm

Todd Gross, the affable Boston weatherman, didn’t invent the phrase, but he certainly coined it for popular use back in the fall of 1991, as three powerful weather fronts crashed as agents of true serendipity to create as he so succinctly described, “A Perfect Storm”, over the waters of the Georgia Banks to forever change the way we view causation and the sheer brutality of circumstance.  The movie, of the same name, detailing the drama of a small Glouster fishing boat’s tragic contribution to that moment in meteorological history, drove that moniker

A Moment in History

I have absolutely nothing to add to this. Enjoy this moment in political history.

In 1960, no one knew that Jack Kennedy would someday be seen as John F. Kennedy. They knew he was charismatic and capable as a politician, but that’s all they knew. They, who were there at the time, now know better

Good Ol’ Time Spam

I got this spam email today from one of my GOP loving pals. It was kind of nostalgic in how it shilled the 2004 GOP talking points as if the last few years had never happened. I don’t believe that anyone actually still agrees with this laundry list of assertions, but I felt like putting them all into 2008 perspective. Sort of a “let’s look at where we are now” kind of thing.

A Gospel of Controversy

So, I actually took a few days off from the political stuff to delve into my other hobby. Playing music in nightclubs. I love that part of my life, and I’m glad I didn’t “grow out of it”, making it something I miss. I still get to jump up there and make way too much noise for small money and tips.

It’s good to be back at my keyboard though. It seems like there’s been some noise being made out on the DNC campaign trail while I was busy. Something about a fire and brimstone preacher pissing off the white folks

The Lies that Matter

It’s been a hell of a couple weeks for lies and the liars that tell those lies. With all the veiled and not-so-veiled lies about Barack Obama’s fitness for the presidency, to the man’s choice of gods to focus his devotion to, to who approved what for whose surrogate to toss out into the sewer of public discourse, to ex-NY Governor Eliot Spitzer and his lies to the woman he married, one might begin to get the impression that the Democratic Party couldn’t get its moral compass to center on true north if the future of mankind depended on it.

Which it just might.

I’ve even gotten sucked up into the vortex of it all, as it’s swirled and spun around me. The pull is strong, and I’m as much a sucker for controversy as anyone. In fact, I tend to get even more emotionally involved in it all that some. I don’t know. Maybe I need yet another hobby in my life?

Today, however, I woke up and had a quiet moment

“What the hell are you thinking?”

Okay, so I’ll admit that I don’t always see things the way that most people see them.In fact, I think it’s fair to say that I often don’t see things the way that most people see them.It might even be suggested that I have a way of seeing things that lies just on the other side of “What the hell is he thinking?” from just about everyone that I know.And yet, I have a high enough rate of successfully nailing the truth behind complicated issues and convoluted scenarios to allow me to feel

Old News is Good News

So, I had a few emails come in yesterday that were pretty insistent that I weigh in on that Eliot Spitzer story. That’s the one about the NY state governor who got caught in a call girl sting operation. Another “surprise” investigation of a Democrat governor (shades of Alabama) by a GOP controlled Department of Justice that has been in the headlines in the last couple years for politicizing the legal system.

To me, it’s a clear case of an idiot with his own money, blowing some of it on a hooker while on a business trip. Nothing spectacular, except for the fact that he’s the guy who ran through Wall Street like the Black Death, and then turned that holocaust into

A Blue State Strategy

Okay, so when was the last time planning a fall presidential general election around the traditional Blue States campaign strategy for a Democratic nominee actually worked out to give that candidate a 51% majority of the votes cast? If you say 1996, then you’d be wrong. Remember Ross Perot? Yep, Bill Clinton never broke the elusive 51% barrier in either wins, and we all know what happened to Al Gore and John Kerry – framing that sea of red with isolated smatters of blue for back to back losses against a pretty weak GOP offering. George Bush had his core constituency, but the man was no Ronald Reagan when it came to electrifying the electorate across ideological lines.So again, when was that old standby – the Blue State Strategy – ever a winning strategy for the DNC?The answer is – never.The truth is that this idiotic reaction to the easily disrupted GOP political strategy that leans entirely on nebulous and unattainable goals like Christian family values, morality in government, and the Holy Grail of “Right-To-Life” legislation, has