Few of us were born yet and those who were, octogenarians today, were too young to be listening, but the thunderclap from those words still resounds today. The man speaking was accepting his party's nomination for the presidency, a candidacy that all but meant his election given the dire condition of the country as he spoke. What was needed, he said, was "a new deal for the American people."

Aren't you just a little bit jealous? Revolution is sweeping the middle east as those whose interests take a back seat to the oligarchs who have longed ruled the country got fed up. They collected together and forced change.

We watch with rapt attention as a "President" never elected in a remotely legitimate way see his "regime" crumble before the primogeniture he thought to be his due could be put in place. The Glenn Becks of the world notwithstanding, this is a purely middle eastern event, well described during the week by the remarkable journalists working under the most difficult circumstances imaginable.

It was just so over the top, and so wrongheaded that our usually fractious populace, and the politicians and hangers on who cater to them were, for once, united in their condemnation. After all what the congressman said was just, simply, out of bounds.

What the congressman said was this:

Maybe the Speaker started something. If men are now allowed to cry in public, the one writing these words have certainly availed himself of this new privilege in the past two weeks. From hearing that Congresswoman Giffords had opened her eyes and the heroism of so many who allowed her to live, and saved as many lives as possible when her fears were realized and a young man who was so easily able to purchase a gun to kill her, to hearing again the first words I can recall having been spoken as a president was inaugurated, the tears have flown very freely.

Sheriff Dupnik

To try to repeat or somehow add to what Articleman posted last night or what Sheriff Dupnik, a hero way before yesterday, but his heroism renewed last night, told the nation, is an absurdity.  They said it all.  Yet, all of us with a keyboard need to vent, and to say what we all know to be so.

If, as seems reasonable, you read everything posted under this name and carefully consider all the biases expressed here, you would know how much Rachel Maddow has contributed to what gets regurgitated every week. Hers is the most significant broadcast there is, and the sanity she projects in this land of crazy may be all that keeps us from just running outside and screaming into the night.

It was observed in passing yesterday, and probably not just here, that as a day of reckoning, today---New Year's Day---is a bit scary and never painless. The Jewish version of the new year adds the little "book of life contest"---who gets to be in it, and, ummmm, who not, but the secular version, with its resolutions and such, could drive a person to drink, which explains a few things. At least it is not the occasion a decade ago when we all had to consider how we managed to waste a whole millennium.

This is not my holiday, but it is hard to miss the signs that it is one celebrated by many others in this country, though Bill O'Reilly and his colleagues think otherwise. Oddly, by mystical coincidence, Shabbat and Christmas coincide this year. To many confused people, Chanukah is a supposed equivalent holiday to Christmas, but it's not. Shabbat, on the other hand, means Jews and Christians will be praying at roughly the same time.

There is nobody on "our side" of the political gulf who did not cheer, feel vindicated, or thought of the many people in their lives who just have to read the University of Maryland study of the misinformed viewers of what is laughingly called "Fox News." When we calm down a bit, it might occur to contemplate that a) what is being done is a deliberate political strategy and b) is working.

The founders of this nation did not, we have often been told, envision the formation of political parties and there remains a resistance to the idea that the party is more important than the actual office holder. There have been times, indeed, when the party label meant less than than the politics of the time. Stephen Douglas, for instance, was a Democrat when that party stood for slavery but, at best, it was unclear whether he did.

When we were young Joni Mitchell told us:

Thanks. There is no reason to repeat why this is a great holiday, whatever its supposed derivation, or the more accurate and quite understandable basis for it. It is, in the end, a day for us to become one: an entire nation eating roughly the same foods and celebrating together, as best we can.

Monday is November 22. That month with that date next to it always appears as dark, sad, searingly so. It is the date which needs no explanation to almost anyone who lived through it and, amazingly, of little significance to everyone else. It is the date on which Everything Changed.

They knew he had never
Been on their T.V.
So they passed his music by

When Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly were helping to define what news reported on television would mean determined that