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That Anniversary Again

No time for something new.  This was written in 2009 and will have to do for today's sad anniversary:

 

 

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From Occupying Wall Street to Changing the World

Keith Olbermann was, for once, apoplectic.  They were doing it again!!!  The reactionary forces of the staus quo were at it again, sending the police after The People, intolerant of their cries of anguish and of their mission.   It was the Edmond Pettus Bridge again, Haymarket, the Moratorium Against the War, all wrapped into one.   And now, nobody would sleep on the slab of concrete off Liberty Street, between Church and Broadway a place laughingly called Zuccotti Park.

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Things to Think About

No time to blog so, instead, just a few reminders of comments past and references to things you might find interesting:

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Quick Hits

This weekend and next are not going to present enough time to thumbsuck through the many issues which should be discussed here, so, with a tip of the hat to the late, great Jimmy Cannon, herewith a few paragraphs to enrage a few and, perhaps, interest a few others:

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Tikkun olam. Repair the world.

The past few weeks said much about who we are, what kind of people we are and how we see our country and our mission.  It included, of course, the need to have our attention brought back to the day when we were attacked as a people and as a nation, and all of that caused many to both weep for what we lost that day, and for the mistakes and waste that followed.

These weeks also have encompassed, maybe illustrated better than ever, the vastly different views that many of us hold, from those of a large number of our fellow citizens.  In short order we have seen audiences applaud one presidential candidate for the large number of executions his state has undertaken since he became its Governor, and another suggest that a person without medical insurance who suddenly is in a coma, be allowed to die as a consequence.

We are told that liberals want a "mommy state" and that the government that does the least is the best government there can be.  We are all on our own.  Regulations should be curtailed.  If you want to eat food, you just have to be careful and take your chances.  If it is true that this view can elect a president and a Congress, then we are no longer the United States of America.  We are just random individuals sharing space. 

It is hard to believe we have sunk so low.

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Nine, Eleven (Slightly Updated)

My daughter was fifteen that day.  When she got home, after seeing some of her fellow high school students whose parents worked "downtown" be brought to the principal's office to receive news withheld from the rest of the students, she was wide-eyed and scared.  She said today that she still is.  The two young boys who lived next door and thought of her as that nice, big girl, lost their dad, a firefighter, that day.

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Me, My, Mine

Admit it. Many of us never really accepted the presidency of the person inaugurated in January, 2001. This blog, or whatever it was we did back then, insisted on referring to the occupant of the White House as "President" Bush since how he came to occupy that office was so bizarre and so wrong. 

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Post Partisanship

A friend, not usually one to be overtaken by excessive enthusiasm,said, during the few days after the 2008 election, that it meant that the United States was finally entering the post-racial period we thought might come about after the end of the civil war, after Brown v Board of Education, or, at the very least, after the enactment of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid 1960s and the abolition of the poll tax. We may be on our way there but, at least so far, we have not come close to that day, despite the election of President Obama.

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Hell in a Handbasket (a special Sunday post)

whatever a handbasket is, or why going to hell in it is notable, this is proof that it is happening. 

Where once a president, seeking re-election, said

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Calling Crazy Out

Guy comes back from a brief reunion with family members huddled around a beach to find that, in a week of rollercoaster rides on the stock market, brought on by what Paul Krugman aptly described as the "Wile E. Coyote moment" as we pause in our endless debate about how much to cut from our federal budget to discover that what we need is massive federal spending, the talk of the political folk is about whether Newsweek's cover unfairly portrays Congresswoman Bachmann as a crazy woman.

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