Individual Liberty—Progress—Humanity—Ethics—Rule of Law
"...if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties—if that is what they mean by a "liberal," then I am proud to be a liberal."
There are probably more jokes about lawyers than there are about blonds and most are not very complimentary. Much as we grouse about them we still manage to elect a huge number of them to Congress and thirty-five of our Founding Fathers were lawyers or had benefited from legal training. Some had also become judges.
Now we have Ken Starr (whom many of you may remember as the attorney involved with Bill Clinton's impeachment investigation) stepping up to criticize Liz Cheney. SALON.com's Joan Walsh writes on why Starr's response to Cheney is right and proper.
"The first thing to learn
in intercourse with others
is non-interference with their own
particular ways of being happy,
provided those ways do not assume
to interfere by violence with ours."
William James (1842-1910)
The father of modern Psychology...pioneering American psychologist and philosopher trained as a medical doctor
Left , right no one is in the middle except the public.
Hillary Clinton stated that there was a vast right wing conspiracy aligned against her husband Bill when he was Presdient. Now the right is accusing the left of managing a conspiracy against them.
Here in an artcile about
Media Matters we might find some answers. At least you will learn a bit more about the opposing agendas.
Sunday. a day of rest. A day when one can kick back, relax, browse at leisure the Sunday papers and recharge our batteries for the coming week. For me it is a day when my brain likes to wander into all sorts of random territory. Some might like to say it has been lost in there for some time, however...
Let me say at the outset that I am very proud of being an American and one whose family has been here since the beginning. That also allows for them to have been part of some of the blackest periods in this country's history. The descimation of the Native American tribes, slavery, civil rights denial and presidential assasinations to name but a few, and yet each country has their black marks and ours is no different except that ours are fresher. We managed to move beyond these things, to make amends where it was possibe, and to create a great nation.
At this point in time though I see us as a country in decline. Our salad days are long past and yet we have those in positions of power who refuse to admit the need for change and are still riding that euphoric post WWII boom. That too has gone by and we need to stop pretending that we are the greatest country on earth. Our infrastructure is crumbling, we have an economy in gridlock, jobs have been moved overseas, President Obama has targeted healthcare reform as the biggest undertaking we need to move forward on and has made investment in a new high speed rail system a priority and yet we have a long way to go to get up to speed (pardon the pun). We have a poverty rate that runs between 13 and 17%...this in the richest country in the world.
As healthcare reform has been the major issue of late and we have a Senate that refuses to see what their negative position is doing to their constiuents, I think this article will point up what a mess we really are in with our healthcare and how great is the need to create a new equitable system
The "peanut gallery" has been more or less silent about David Axelrod, President Obama's chief political advisor and successful campaign manager. This commentator, yours truly, fingered Rahm Emanuel early on and mentioned Axelrod but once in eight months' worth of deconstructing the West Wing to the purpose of finding what ASIDE FROM OBAMA HIMSELF is causing the political ineptitude emanating (if leadership seeping slowly can be described as "emanating") from the Administration. In the Sunday edition of the New York Timeswe finally have an interesting article about Axelrod, and yes, it seems as if he has an attitude problem, too.
Happily, there is an excellent article in the Washington Post about the problems Toyota Motor Corporation has in finding the problems with its products, which up to now have dominated the automobile market on account of their high quality. It is an instructive essay because it very nicely points out that diagnosis is a tricky business in engineering and in medicine ... and now with a good analogy ... in politics. We cannot just rely on deconstruction of individual personalities, but must view the whole thing in action, then on the laboratory bench, then in terms of exogenous conditions, that is, the response of the organism to its environment. Key to the analysis is the notion that an "emergent" condition occurs, absent with any individual, but crucial (perhaps fatal) when the whole mechanism (or organism) is assembled. This, I believe, is the overarching problem with the Obama administration.
Vultures are scavenging birds, feeding mostly on the carcasses of dead animals.Vultures are found on every continent except Antarctica and Oceania and money vultures I suspect could also find a way to inhabit those areas as well.
The most despicable ones prey on those who have the lest to give and the most to lose. Greg Palast of the BBC has this report.
John Cory at RSN (Reader Supported News) is angry as so many others of us are. Here he speaks out about why he is angry and what he feels needs to be done.
Have we all had enough of winter yet? It always seems that spring will never arrive, although before we know it we will be complaining of the heat. It could be worse. 1816 was known as the year with no summer or 1800 and froze to death".
1876 - Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone. Born in Scotland, Bell settled in Boston when he was in his early 20s. He made his living as a teacher of the deaf; on the side he tinkered with transmitters and electromagnets. In the summer of 1876, Bell gave the first public demonstration of the "electrical speech machine" he had invented. A few months later he achieved his ultimate goal: transmitting and receiving spoken words over a telephone line. When Bell died on August 2, 1922, the nation's telephones went silent for one minute in a fitting tribute to a man who had done so much to further oral communication.
From infrequent listener, Joseph Wyatt we have a quick look at the lies that Rush Limbaugh tells on a daily basis. At least, as Wyatt points out at the end of the essay, the radio Station in Huntington, W.VA. carries Ed Shultz a liberal radio talk show antidote to the Drugster.
With the exception of more foreign autos and signs which are in a foreign language, these photos could have been taken in any part of the United States within the last week or two. So why are we always criticizing others and looking for differences? Globally, we are all in the same boat.
From the Universe Today we have this article about the demise of the dinosaurs. If you are of the notion that they were around when man was not and if you believe, as many do, that man was busy commuting to work at the local rock quarry (as did Fred Flintstone) by riding his faithful dinosaur, then you will also believe that they died out because they were over hunted for dino burgers and not by an asteroid impact.
We've remarked before on the lack of civility in today's society. Part of it, I suspect, is as it's always been (According to Plato, Socrates famously complained about the disrespect of the youth of his time and warned against the growing indolence of society). Part of it is the ease of anonymity of the internet age allowing you to express your basest self without fear of being known. But we have also become a society where facts matter less than emotion, where self-righteousness and demonization triumphs debate and understanding and too many people assume that you exercising your freedoms mean less for them. It all adds up to a society for which kindness is the least appreciated virtue.
Curiously, according to a recent study, that's actually going against our most successful instincts:
When I see the date April 19th, the date of the Oklahoma City Bombing, I cannot help but think of another incident that occured on that date 220 years earlier...the beginning of the Revolutionary War. I am sure that Timothy McVeigh had his own revolutionary thoughts but things certainly did not work out as they did the first time around.
As this article states, at the time it was a hard thing to realize that we had some among us who would wish their own countrymen harm. It is even sadder to realize that since that incident those who are of the same mind set are growing in number, and considering how easily they can obtain firearms or materials with which to wreck their havoc, how safe can we ever be when it is not only the enemy without that we need to watch for but also the enemy within.
I do try and stay away from writing anything of a religious nature, however, when one speaks about the right it seems somehow inextricably linked to Christian zealotry. Not to mention that this is so utterly ridiculous that it is good for a laugh for the day.
Explain to me their rationale for this...other than their citing of Biblical text. Surely we have moved a bit beyond what was acceptable (questionably) BCE.
1770 - Crispus Attucks, a black man from Framingham, and four other civilians were shot dead by British soldiers. Attucks worked on whaling ships and, between voyages, as a semi-skilled laborer around the port of Boston. There were many men--white and black--who resented the presence of the British Army, not so much as a threat to their rights as self-governing citizens but more as a threat to their already precarious economic position. They were ready to follow Attucks when he led them into a violent confrontation with a group of British Regulars. Although the soldiers were acquitted on the grounds of self-defense, the incident has been known ever since as the Boston Massacre .
1946 - Churchill gave his famous Iron Curtain Speech to a graduating class in Missouri concerning the Soviet Union and the Cold War.
Sadly, many young people today do not know about the Freedom Riders and what an integral part they were of the Civil Rights movement. The history being taught in our schools is lacking in so many areas or misleading in order to spread a glowing aspect on this country's deeds.
In this essay from The New Yorker we see two such Freedom Riders, meeting again for the first time after fifty years.
It appears that at this point in time those are the only two things which will bring about any sort of solution to the healthcare reform issue, or indeed to any further legislation which will be put forth by this administration as those on the right, it appears, are determined to block anything and everything which would benefit us Americans out here in the trenches.
This editorial from the Charleston, W.VA. GAZETTE explores both options, and
Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone ,in his irreverant way, says that those options may be a way for Obama to save his...errr...skin.
That was the reason that Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) gave for his filibuster. Strange for a Senator whose home state suffers from a very high unemployment rate. The legislation which he was so desperate to defeat is one which would have extended unemployment benefits to hundreds of thousands of Americans who are unemployed and who are currently collecting them and still unemployed. Even more distressing were the off the wall statements from Senator Kyl of Arizona who backed Bunning. They were nothing but mean and ignorant, as this editorial points out.
I have come to expect nothing less from those on the right whom I have come to call the Nancy Reagan Party...the party of Just Say No.
