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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Wake up. Read Krugman. He's right, of course. The baby Conservative sharing the page with him even agrees, and writes a column which seems to have it about right, too. Small world.

You can't say you weren't warned. It was repeated over and over again: just because there is no presidential election, does not mean that it is not as important to vote in 2010 as it was in 2008. The bleat in this space went this way:

We are at a very difficult point in our history. The moment we are in always seems more significant than those of the past, and I suspect this election, or this crossroads may not be as much a moment of decision as it seems today, but, as Rachel explained perfectly the other day, we almost seem to have lost the will to do anything but hunker down, tell each other why we don't trust one another and whimper about our broken political system. This is not the time to put one's head in the sand, or to complain about things we wish the President had done, but did not. Dreaming about third parties, or making ours more liberal, has no place as we approach this election.

It was May 5, 1961 when Commander Alan B. Shepard became the first American to be launched into outer space

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... this is not the time for Rockefeller Republicanism. We've got a country that is sinking. We've got a country that is on the verge of a crisis in the debt ceiling issue, and that's just one symptom of much larger problems.

---Former Minnesota Gov Tim Pawlenty on Meet the Press, July 10, 2011

This has become an annual rite: the recitation of a blogger, one who sees himself as a defender of all that is the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society about love for this so secular holiday and for this country in which we were blessed to live, and for the luckiest of us, to have been born here. It applies no less this year than any other even if the ties that have bound us all together as one, often frayed, and pulled apart, are really on the eve of destruction.

If anyone doubted this (and I suspect few outside the White House and Treasury did), there will be no "adults" coming to the rescue it appears. Congressman Cantor has announced that it will be impossible for him or his party to vote to extend the debt limit (to agree to pay our national obligations) without an agreement by Democrats not to seek a repeal of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest among us.