In 21st Century America: It's still okay to beat up on women.

TOPEKA | The Topeka City Council on Tuesday [10/11/11] voted to repeal the city’s law against misdemeanor domestic battery, the latest in a budget battle that has freed about 30 abuse suspects from charges.
One of the offenders was even arrested and released twice since the brouhaha broke out Sept. 8.
It started when Shawnee County District Attorney Chad Taylor announced that a 10 percent budget cut would force him to end his office’s prosecution of misdemeanor cases, almost half of which last year were domestic battery cases.
With that, Taylor stopped prosecuting the cases and left them to the city. But city officials balked at the cost.
Tuesday’s 7-3 vote to eliminate the local domestic violence law was designed to force Taylor to prosecute the cases because they would remain a crime under state law.

Hey, all you totally misunderstood guys in Topeka who feel the need to smack around your women, good news!  As long as you don't get too heavy-handed -- blackening eyes, loosening teeth, leaving really ugly bruises -- your city officials are on your side.  

In a fledgling century of new lows this may not rank up there with the worst of them, but as an indicator of how low our new austerity drives have allowed us to fall, it's right up there.  Misdemeanor violence against women has now been approved by a city council for no other reason than to play chicken with a county prosecutor looking for creative ways to get around budget cuts.

Tack on top of that last week's action by the House to bully insurance companies into refusing to cover abortions.

From the Hill:
The House approved a bill that Republicans said would prevent last year's healthcare law from funding abortions, but which Democrats said would go far beyond that and make it much harder for women to exercise their constitutional right to have abortions.
The bill, H.R. 358, was passed in a 251-172 vote that saw more than a dozen Democrats join nearly all voting Republicans in support of the measure.
Republicans said throughout the day that the bill is needed because the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was approved without any limitation on funding for abortion rights. They also dismissed President Obama's Executive Order that Democrats say reinforces this prohibition.
"Thus ObamaCare, when phased in fully in November 2014, will open up the floodgates of public funding for abortion in a myriad of programs, including and especially in exchanges, resulting in more dead babies and wounded mothers than would otherwise have been the case," Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) said.

 I expect that sort of thing from the Republicans, but 15 Democrats bought into it, too.  It would still have passed without them, but that doesn't make me any less ashamed of them. (Here is the list.)  Don't tell me they're only doing what their constituents expect of them.  Either they're Democrats or they're not.  A real Democrat wouldn't be caught dead voting for something like that.

"This bill is a radical departure from existing law," House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said. "This legislation is bad public policy, it is the wrong priority for Congress, it is an assault on women's health, and women should know that it prevents them from using their own dollars to buy their own private insurance should they be part of an exchange."

 Never mind that this action by the House is as phony as the bill's moniker, the "Protect Life Act".   Where are the bills to protect jobs, to protect children already living, to protect the health and welfare of the citizens of this country?  Nowhere to be seen.  There are some battles we shouldn't still be fighting.  A woman's right to choose is sacrosanct. A woman's right to protect her own body is not now and never should have been up for debate. 

You protect life by respecting the living, by nurturing the living, by honoring the living.  You accept the job as representative of the people by promising to preserve and protect. This bill and the actions in Topeka turn those notions upside down, and do it in mean-spirited, draconian ways too many people are finding acceptable.  But change is in the air.  If we can keep it going, a great awakening is about to begin.  If we can keep it going, we'll be looking back on the last few decades of wicked wrongheadedness, wondering how we ever let it happen in our lifetime.

It can't come soon enough for me.

FRIDAY FOLLIES: Wagons and Trailers and Planes! Oh My!

Bob Dalrymple and his girlfriend, Kathy Neal, are leaving Michigan and heading for Colorado, because, Bob says, the economy's suffering, the winters in Michigan are too cold and it's time for adventure.  He wants to go someplace warm.  That's what he says.  His two kids live in Colorado, but apparently they've neglected to tell him there's a reason crowds of retired Snowbirds aren't descending on the Centennial State.  It's snowy and blustery and cold there in the winter!

Bob, disabled after a truck-driving accident, takes it slower these days but isn't about to take it easy.  “I figure you can sit there and exist or you can go on an adventure,” Dalrymple told a Muskegon News reporter. “We decided an adventure didn’t sound so bad....I sold my stuff and I’m going, and I’m not coming back.”

He and Kathy are going to take a couple of months to get there and I'm just hoping they really understand about winter.  They'll be traveling in a mini-caravan of two wagons pulled by five horses, accompanied by three dogs.  One "wagon" is really a kind of camper, but the smaller one, the supply wagon, looks like a true covered wagon (See gallery here and near-enough picture below).  Their friends have autographed it with well wishes and Bon Voyages and desperate pleas to reconsider.

This from the Muskegon News:

He had the horses. Building the wagons is what would take the most work. He turned to a scrapyard, where he found the materials that would do the trick: A 60-year-old hay wagon, an old pontoon boat and a Winnebago camper.
Eighteen feet in length, the camper includes a refrigerator, a stove, a queen-size bed and a sink. Pulled by three horses, the driver and passenger sit in two bucket seats taken from a 1970s Chevy Malibu.

As near as I can tell the two of them will be exposed to the elements whenever they're sitting in their Chevy Malibu seats.  They'll be going across the plains, the dusty, windy, frigid plains, and I'm not seeing a windshield.  I thought this story was going to be a lark.  It was supposed to be fun, but now I'm alarmed.  Bob says they have gloves and boots and they'll be all right, but I don't know.  I've read those stories about hapless, ill-prepared pioneers falling for that word "adventure".  The outcome can often be grim.  So if you happen to see these two wagons going down the road, give them a big Howdy and maybe check to see that they're doing okay.  They seem like nice people.

Not Bob and Kathy, but a close-enough wagon. (With apologies -- the Muskegon News wants me to pay for pictures.)

The story goes that this guy was out walking and he "stumbled" upon an unattended refrigerated beer trailer equipped with outside spigots and -- Good Lord Amighty! -- empty beer pitchers sitting on a nearby table.  When they nabbed him, many pitchers later, his perfectly reasonable, though somewhat wobbly explanation was that he thought he had died and gone to heaven.  Everybody sees Heaven in a different way.  I might see my sainted grandmother but this guy saw free beer trucks.  But here's the part that must have really convinced him:  He wasn't charged with anything!  Not with public intoxication, not with Grand Theft Beer Trailer.  Nothing.

A feel-good story if ever I saw one.

Not the real trailer, but I'm guessing pretty close

Or maybe like this

But get caught trying to bring a Snow Globe on a plane and see what happens to you.  Or big hair.

 CNN contributor LZ Granderson wrote and talked about it this week, and yes, it's to laugh, but no, it's not, considering what kind of nuts are out there. Even less funny was the search through LZ's dreadlocks.  At least to LZ.  I snickered a little over that one, I admit.  How does one search through dreadlocks?  Not with a fine-toothed comb, I'll tell you that. 

LZ himself

But enough about all that.  Do you know how hard it is to be a Liberal? Well, do ya?  Roy Zimmerman thinks he knows, and, okay, I had to laugh. (Not that I saw myself in any of it):

I don't know where I've been but I've just discovered Roy Zimmerman.  My near-loss, because he has some really funny songs to sing, at least from where I'm sitting.  But it appears there are plenty of people who already know about him, so I doubt he even missed me.   You can find more of Roy's songs on YouTube, or, better yet, on his website, where his songs are for sale.
 

Those Magic Moments -- Fall in Michigan, My Michigan  (All pictures mine):

Every Color under the Sun

Autumn Morning Mist

Maples in all their Chlorophyll-free splendor

Birches and Cedar

Cartoon of the Week

Mike Luckovich

It all comes down to this, America: Don't be Cruel

Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.
And in new signs of distress among the middle class, median household incomes fell last year to levels last seen in 1997. 
 Economists pointed to a telling statistic: It was the first time since the Great Depression that median household income, adjusted for inflation, had not risen over such a long period, said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard.
''This is truly a lost decade,'' Mr. Katz said. ''We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we're looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.'' 
 The bureau's findings were worse than many economists expected, and brought into sharp relief the toll the past decade -- including the painful declines of the financial crisis and recession --had taken on Americans at the middle and lower parts of the income ladder. It is also fresh evidence that the disappointing economic recovery has done nothing for the country's poorest citizens.
 The report said the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line last year, 15.1 percent, was the highest level since 1993. (The poverty line in 2010 for a family of four was $22,314.)

Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, September 14, 2011

 When all is said and done, if we can ever get beyond the grand-standing, the bloviating, the harumphing and the chest-pumping, the awful truth is that millions and millions of American citizens are now among the chronically hurt because of the current no-fault-of-their-own economic crisis, exacerbated by the current we'll blame them anyway political climate.

Families are hurting.  Our elders are hurting. Children are hurting.  Future generations will be hurting.  We've let yesterday slip by and tomorrow shows no great promise.  The time to do something is now.

Everybody knows that something must be done, but what keeps the wheels from turning, from moving us forward, is an ongoing, time-wasting argument about how best to appear to be saving the country while saving face, saving precious personal skins, saving the privileged elite.

There is no point wasting time talking about past history -- a couple of centuries worth of the same mistakes, the same indulgences at the top, the same misery at the bottom -- when nobody is in the mood to learn from it.

 We have now become one of those countries known throughout the world for deliberate cruelty to its own citizens -- the kind of despised country whose citizens we ourselves would have taken pity on not so long ago.

While it may be true that unprecedented numbers of America's children have experienced hunger or homelessness (or a desperate, unrequited need for health care) it's cruel to pretend that no single sweet child of ours is affected.  We're masters at shutting our eyes to real, live, scared and suffering kids.

It's cruel to play games with needed unemployment benefits by pretending they're one more example of undeserved governmental handouts to the lazy or misbehaving.

It's cruel to humiliate the jobless even more by pretending that anyone without a job isn't looking hard enough.

It's cruel to pretend that outsourcing and off-shoring have nothing to do with the loss of millions of life-sustaining jobs.

It's cruel to pretend that workers don't need or deserve representation when the need is so much greater now.

It's cruel for the richest country in the world to give private insurance companies the power to deny anyone health care and pretend that people aren't dying because of it.

It's cruel to allow profiteers to attempt to kill off one major historic source of national pride -- public education for every child without regard to race, creed, or income level -- and pretend that a) the public schools did it to themselves and b) no child is being left behind because of our negligence.

It's cruel to divert our national treasure, including and especially our young men and women, to foreign wars that don't concern us or affect us nearly as much as our own at-home social and economic wars.

But the cruelest reminder is that we almost had it in our grasp -- a fair and prosperous country we could be proud of -- and we let it slip away.

 There's no pretending it didn't happen.  There are enough of us still around who remember a different country, where it looked as if the American Dream would actually become a major possibility.  It was taken away from us, not by happenstance but by the mean and deliberate actions of politicians and power brokers.

You can say it a million different ways, but what it comes down to is cruelty by a thousand cuts. There was a time when we all would have fought against that sort of thing.  I'll say it again: This is some strange new century...

No Surprise: Erin Burnett doesn't get the Wall Street Protesters.

For her CNN "Out Front" debut on Monday, Erin Burnett went to the Occupy Wall Street protesters to see for her corporate-shilling self what the heck all the fuss was about.  She couldn't find a single person who knew why they were protesting.  Imagine that.

"I saw dancing, bongo drums, even a clown.... I asked several protesters what it was that they wanted. Now, they did not know.... They did know what they don't want."

 

This is not new.  I've heard many pundits question whether the people holding the signs have a real agenda or just want to be out there in front of the cameras holding silly signs, dressed in goofy garb, doing the Kumbaya thing. (Yes.  Wherever there's a protest, they'll be there, too.  Bless their hearts.)

 

But the claim is that nobody in that crowd really knows the reasons for the protests.  I guess if you were one who isn't listening, or more likely, refuses to listen, you might not get the message. 

 

This is it in a nutshell, from the Occupy Wall Street website:

 

Occupy Wall Street is [a] leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.

 

I probably won't spend a lot of time watching Erin Burnett's new show, but I've had her number for a while.  If you just look at that angelic face, those deep, darling dimples, you might miss who Erin really is.  

 

 

 

She is a Wall Street groupie who searches, but can only find eensy-teensy, little bitty problems with her chosen pals.  

 

She is about to marry a CitiGroup exec, thereby solidifying her affection for the Street.   

 

She is a supposed reporter who once told the folks on AM Joe to take a larger look at China, who might be as successful as they are because they don't coddle people by paying them when they're unemployed.  (Not in itself true, but she said it ever-so-sweetly, even apologetically, as if she really hated to spoil a perfectly good discussion, but it needed to be said kind of thing, so nobody jumped on it.)

 

And Rush Limbaugh loves her.

If you watch Erin Burnett's "Out Front", you're going to hear what sounds perfectly reasonable, because the person saying it is about as far from a Maria Bartiromo as one can get.  But I'm seeing nothing but love songs to Wall Street already, which is okay as long as CNN isn't promoting it as a family show.

FRIDAY FOLLIES: On Jesus toasters, Gray Panthers, Raging Grannies, and Fun with Medicare

WARNING:  Hot graven images ahead.  Turn back if you believe Jesus' image on toast should remain a miracle and not be used as a promotion by clever, sacrilegious Vermonters for a Made in China toaster.  (It's International Blasphemy Rights Day today, but I swear I didn't know that when I chose this segment.  Not that I'm not okay with it.  I am.)

As serendipity would have it, I was thinking about making myself a piece of toast in my conventional Fire Engine Red toaster last week when I happened to glance at my newest Twitter followers and saw that "Virgin Mary Toasters" was following me.  I was about to write them off because, really, @VirginMaryToast? Why me, faGodsake?

But I bit.  I clicked.  And now I'm crazy about Vermonters Galen and Owen (AKA Virgin Mary Toasters) and their website, Burnt Impressions, Inc. They have a growing line of actual toasters that entertain with pictures, but the Rapture Toaster is my so-far all-time favorite.  (Not yet for sale.  Must be a prototype):

In Honor of Older Persons Day, October 1 (and because I'm one of them, now entering my fourth year of septuagenarian bliss) I would like to take this time to remind the (relatively) young that we're not all out there playing Bingo or whining about gas or sitting on icebergs waiting to die.

Remember the inimitable Maggie Kuhn and The Gray Panthers?  She and a small group of retired friends organized the tiny grass-roots organization, using word-play on "The Black Panthers" to suggest an aggressiveness that probably wasn't really there, first to protest the Viet Nam war, and later to protest social and economic inequities.  They're still out there doing their thing, making my heart glad, but now they've got more friends and allies.

"Speak your mind - even if your voice shakes. Well aimed slingshots can topple giants."

Now we have The Raging Grannies, with chapters all over the country and all over the world. They joined the Wall Street protesters last week when members of the Canadian-based Grannies for Peace (Not be be confused with the Granny Peace Brigade) were pepper-sprayed and arrested.

Amongst those detained were two members of New York's Grannies for Peace. Both ladies are in their 70s and they were amongst the younger people, handcuffed and corralled, into orange mesh pens, in the street. The Raging Grannies saw their friends and decided it was time to show their support too.

"We have helluva job on our hands," said 96 year old Lillian Pollak, [Raging Grannies member] as she arrived in Zuccotti Park to join the Occupy Wall Street protesters camped out there. "We thank you. This is wonderful. I was getting down in the dumps about what was going on, but you have raised my spirits."

 Note:  We Senior Citizens also have another day, called "Senior Citizens Day", that falls on August 21.  That one was signed into remembrance by Ronald Reagan, the guy who started that whole Kill Social Security thing, from the party that hates Medicare, so I'm still a little wary about that one.  Plus, I hate that phrase, "Senior Citizen" and besides that, all Reagan expected on that day was for people to be nice to their elders.  I would say it's a start, but it wasn't.  His party is still trying to kill us off early.(Reminds me of deer hunters who rave over the beauty of the animal but lust after its blood.  Very odd.)

 Cartoon of the Week:

Nick Anderson - Houston Chronicle

The Religious Test is Alive and Kicking in American Politics. Again.

As a non-religious person I have faith that religion will always be with us.  It's the way of the world, and if I'm baffled by its constancy, by its influence, by the sheer numbers of people involved, I'm even more befuddled watching the move away from any pretense at goodness and mercy in favor of a peculiar form of public political bullying by the Religious Right.

There are many churches that do good works and act as sanctuaries in a cold, cruel world.  Their congregations are loving and generous and, by the way, have no problem accepting non-believers like me. We work well together.  There is that understanding that, while our goals are the same; the paths we take to get there take a different turn.

I've hesitated to get into this, mainly because I have family and friends who are religious and I love those people.  Most of them have enough respect for me to lay off any proselytizing, but I know that a number of them can't help but pray for my damaged soul.  I'm good at pretending that's okay.  They mean well.

But what's not okay is what brings me to this:  Rick Perry.  His phony piety, his bad acting, his destructive actions as governor of Texas showing him for the hypocrite he is.  It should have been Michele Bachmann's lame and lazy preaching that capped it, but Rick Perry has finally done it for me.  His performance at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University was as loathsome as Jimmy Swaggart sobbing open-mouthed on close-up for forgiveness or Jim Bakker weeping at the loss of his empire.  Rank insincerity is what bonds them all.  The significant difference is that, so far, Jimmy and Jim haven't aspired to be president of these United States.

Billboard in South Carolina

I listen to the calls to Jesus by Presidential candidates like Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, and even Ron Paul.  I see our presidents and members of congress fighting to one-up their Jesus-is-my-lord-and-savior status, and it's clear that  scrupulous avoidance of religious tests for political candidates is a thing of the past.

An avowed Atheist has never had a chance -- a fact that makes no sense in a democracy -- but even a quiet Christian wouldn't have a chance today.  If you're thinking of running for anything, you had better be out there professing your undying love of an accepted and specific God as defined by the one and only Holy Bible or forget about any future in 21st Century American politics.

This new century of ours is a puzzler.  It's suffering the worst kind of growing pains, but it's not as if it came from nowhere.  It's roots are in several centuries of ups and downs and lessons ripe for learning, yet it's as if American history is some quaint, nostalgic throwback having almost nothing to do with this modern world.

There are reasons for the need to see ourselves as a nation and not just as a country.  We're peopled with citizens as diverse as the world.  The fervent bleating of the more vocal Christian politicos cannot change the fact that not all Americans are Christians. We are not a Christian nation.  We never set out to be a Christian nation.  By clear Constitutional design,  there is no religious test for any candidate in this country.

If they can't get that one simple fact straight, one wonders what hope there is for understanding issues even more complicated.  Like the meaning of "Of the people, by the people, for the people", for starters.

FRIDAY FOLLIES: On Butter, Blankets, and Beauty. Then There's That Cartoon.

I can't believe it's not butter!  In Wisconsin there is a law on the books that forbids restaurants, schools, hospitals and prisons from serving margarine instead of butter.  This weaker version of a 1897 law has been on the dairy state's books for 44 years but most restaurants can get around it, since the interpretation of the law these days is that if a customer asks for margarine it's okay to give it to them.  No mention of how the margarine is delivered to table -- in plain sight or disguised as something else.  (The bovine version of for "Don't ask, don't tell".)

Butter Cow

But now that we're 11 years into the 21st Century,  a few lawmakers have finally decided that that other butter is going to be around for a while.  Might as well learn to live with it.

This is pretty delicious, too:  

The margarine-butter debate has a long political history in Wisconsin, where Sen. Gordon Roseleip, R-Darlington, a strong advocate for the state's dairy industry, fervently campaigned against the butter substitute in the 1960s, saying it tasted different than butter and arguing that it wasn't healthy--until another state senator challenged him to a blind taste test and he showed a preference for margarine, uncovering the secret that his family had been sneaking the hefty congressman the low-fat substitute, according to the Daily Reporter.

 This "OMG! Someone's going to be manufacturing in America!" feel-good story last week really hit home for me. (I'll explain in a minute.)  Minnesota's Fairibault Woolen Mill is planning to re-open after a shut-down so sudden two years ago there are still unfinished blankets on the looms.

Closed since 2009, Faribault Woolen Mill Co. is beginning a new life under new owners. Gov. Mark Dayton and other officials are scheduled to attend ceremonies Thursday marking the re-opening at the historic mill purchased in June by Edina businessmen Chuck and Paul Mooty.
The plant, which dates back to the 1890s, at one time had a workforce of about 80 and produced half the woolen blankets made in the United States. The mill is resuming production with 31 workers, including some former employees, said Paul Mooty. "Our goal is to build that back to one full shift with about 50 to 60 people," he said. Extra shifts could be added, depending on demand, he said.
At a time when most textile production has moved overseas, the Faribault mill is thought to be North America's only fully-integrated facility with equipment that washes, cards, spins and weaves wool into Faribo brand blankets and throws.

(More here.)

Fairibault Woolen Mill offices - 1897

I saw the story first on a TV news program and thought it would make a good FF story.  It wasn't until I saw that "Fairibault" was actually "Faribo" that I made the connection and realized I have one of those blankets.  It was here in our cabin when we moved in 17 years ago so I don't know for sure how old it is, but it really is something special.  It's lightweight and soft and seems impervious to both dirt and moths.  It's been laundered several times and still looks like new.

And it was made right here in the U.S.  Who knew even 30 years ago we would be this nostalgic for "Made in America"?  Just so sad. 

 But back to feel-good.  This video came from the Washington Post via Twitter:  A little Brazilian girl has surgery on her cleft lip and sees her new self for the first time. (Be prepared...)

Those Magic Moments:  Circling the earth with the space station:

Cartoon of the Week

FRIDAY FOLLIES: Tea Party Games, Rabid dogs, Sweet Old Fools, and Stories that Soothe.

 I swear, the weirdest thing going last week was the Tea Party debate hosted by Ted Turner's brainchild gone wild.  (When I heard that the once-venerable CNN was going to give free air-time and thus a large dose of credibility to yet another crazy bunch hell-bent on taking back every single right and privilege afforded us by hundreds of years worth of struggle by our more forward-thinking ancestors, this is what I said out loud:  "Waaaaaahhhhhtt??"  (Most people I know uttered a variation of WTF??? but it was all I could muster.  Trying to save an ungrateful country is exhausting.)

I admit I went into a deep funk over it for a while.  I did.  I sent out dozens of 140-character Tweets that were nothing more than pathetic variations of "Waaaaahhhhhtt??" (or WTF, if you lean that way.)

But then I read Bob Cesca's HuffPo piece on it and I had to laugh a little.  I especially liked this part:

I'm not sure if CNN knows it, but nearly everyone across the political spectrum thought the CNN presentation of the debate was ridiculously self-satirical -- a laughing stock only rivaled by the Fox News debate several weeks ago. It's almost as if the producers and planners were deliberately attempting to air something that Jon Stewart would definitely mutilate the following night (he did). 

 (Worth the read, too, for what he says after this:  "Whether it's print or broadcast news, the press is the only industry specifically named in the Bill of Rights, preserving for history the founding mandate that the press remain independent and unconstrained as a means of checking government power. Consequently, an unrivaled degree of integrity is required to fulfill that mandate.")
  
Then, only yesterday, I came across this post by Andy Borowitz, called "Rabid Dog Briefly Mistaken for Tea Party Candidate".  I laughed until the tears came, and it was just the lift I needed until I crashed again, remembering how hysterical I got at the crazy notion of someone like George W. Bush becoming president of anything.

Beware of Granddaughters with access to YouTube:  OMG, Bruce and Esther, I HAVE to do this! 
(Warning:  Do not watch this while eating or drinking.  Cover your keyboard and any other sensitive electronic components within spitting distance.  Okay.  NOW.)

(Note:  If  you read this you'll find they're okay with it.  They were shocked at first, but you just know they're having fun with it now.)

I love this story.  When Hurricane Irene washed out mountain roads in rural Vermont, teachers were shocked when kids from the far side of the mountain got off the bus as if it were just another day.  It happened like this:

When Vermont roads were washed out by Hurricane Irene,33 schoolkids made it to school from the other side of the mountain.  Their families had discovered a half-mile-long forest path that they could walk, from Route 4 across the mountain to their school bus. At first, the woods were still and unsettling. “My hands shaked a little bit,” said Jillian Bradley, a second grader.
But as Sophia Hussack, another second grader said, “Since Vermont got hit by the storm, people think we couldn’t, but we do.” And what townspeople do and have done is a thing to behold: they have taken that quiet trail and in two weeks’ time turned it into the I-95 of wooded paths. More than a 1,000 people a day now walk it to get to their jobs and go food shopping on the other side. So many cars line Helvi Hill, the dirt road leading to the path on this side, that handwritten no parking signs have been posted to make sure the road stays passable.

I love to get a glimpse of the places where writers write.  I never get tired of picturing them sitting in their spaces doing what they do.  Plush or sparse?  Window or no window?  Hard or soft chair?  Tablet, typewriter or new-fangled electronics?  Chatchkes or no?  Over in Buckinghamshire, they're trying to preserve Roald Dahl's hut. It's a good, good thing.

Those Magic Moments:  Mysterious paper sculptures are appearing in libraries in Edinburgh, Scotland.  The gorgeous works of paper art were produced by cutting up old books (which, okay, gives me the shivers) and were then placed on library desks without anyone being the wiser.  Notes of thanks accompany them, giving the libraries credit for creating an environment where books are treasures and reading is a gift.  What a loving thought.

 (Thanks to my daughter, Sue, for sending this to me.  I surely would have missed it.)

Cartoon of the week:

Mike Luckovich - Atlanta Journal Constitution

Ten Years After

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.  Ten years have passed -- an entire decade -- but for those closest to the terror, for those whose loved ones were caught in that unimaginable rage storm, for those who trained for this, who mobilized and fought so hard to try and save the lives already lost to them, we pay tribute by refusing to forget.

The pictures are all that is left.  They stay with us and resonate as terrible, beautiful works of art.

The agony of the men and women who could do nothing but stand by and watch the towers fall reflected and drove home our own agony -- even those of us in the hinterlands who watched the horrific events unfold on our TV screens, helpless to do anything but gasp and moan and rock with a kind of psychic pain most of us had never felt in our entire lifetimes.

 

As painful as the dredging up of the images of that terrible day is to us, there is no sense of dread as the annual anniversaries approach.  Every year, on September 11, we want to remember.  9/11 has become a watchword.  Nobody in America has to be told what those numbers represent.  

 As I write this, they're reciting the names of the men and women lost to us on September 11, 2001 in a ceremony to honor the dead.  The names are being read alphabetically.  For one brief moment the people live again.  We do this for their families and for us.  They're not just numbers or actors in an unimaginable event that became the catalyst for an entire decade that changed all of our lives forever.  We need to keep their memories alive in order to recognize their humanity, and possibly our own.

We remember.  We remember.  We'll always remember.

Toxic Politics will be the Death of Us Yet

While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?

You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.

The above is from a piece called, "Goodbye to all that: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult".  It was written for Truth-Out by Mike Lofgren,  a former professional staffer who worked on Capitol Hill for more than 28 years, a good portion of which were spent aggressively pushing the Republican line.  No more.  He's had enough.  But it's not as if he's seen the light and gone over to the Dem side.  He's giving them hell, too, the lousy self-serving cowards.

I think what's giving this essay legs -- it's all over the place; Google Mike Lofgren and you'll see -- is the recognition that we're slowly destroying our ancestor's dreams and our grand-children's futures by allowing our elected politicians to lead us down a path we know will come to no good end.

There are hundreds of partisan essays out there blasting both parties up one side and down the other, often with chilling accuracy, but what makes Lofgren's piece compelling is that the insider/author's indictment doesn't spare anyone.  Yes, he thinks the Republicans are worse than the Democrats (which, I admit, opened the door for him here), but his goal, as I read it, is to get us to open our eyes to the dangers we're facing right now, right this minute, that are, incredibly, being fueled by the very people who took an oath to uphold our constitution and work toward the common good.

I spent a good part of this Labor Day weekend looking for programs honoring our unions and our work force.  Precious little could be found, even though that's what Labor Day is all about.  Instead, Sarah Palin's rally was thoroughly covered, as was the Republican candidates' debate in South Carolina.  There was plenty of talk about President Obama's failing numbers and his capitulation to John Boehner over when he could come to Congress to give a speech on jobs.  (It'll be on Thursday, September 8, if you're interested.)

Obama himself gave the traditional Labor Day speech in Detroit, promising to defend the unions and hinting that his upcoming speech will be substantively about jobs.  I'm glad he was in Detroit on Labor Day, and I'm glad he's talking about jobs, but we all know it's going to take more than that.  He's also still talking about trying to work with the Republicans on a bipartisan plan to save the country.  If he can't get past trying to be friends with an enemy who keeps hitting him over the head with evidence of their intent, it's a safe bet things can only go downhill from here.

What Mike Lofgren is trying to tell us is right there in front of our noses:  The Republicans are not our friends.  The Democrats are afraid of them and are trying to save their own skins.  The country is being held hostage by Fat Cats, religious zealots, a media culture bored with real journalism and thirsty for entertainment, and by people who think holding Tea Parties while starving the government is the only way to go.

The politicians the electorate have put in office are either usurping or avoiding their constitutionally endowed obligations.  We're dyin' here and the only jobs crisis they see is their own re-election.

And here's the crazy part:  We're paying them for this.