November 22, 2009, 10:39AM
It means only one thing to those of us of a certain age. It was the day of days, the event of our national lives. That it no longer is the focus of every succeeding November 22 tells us that one day even September 11 will pass without substantial notice. Yet whether cable television devotes every moment to reliving a national nightmare, its importance remains the same and, as Mad Men showed so well a few weeks back, any recollection of that day can trigger many floods, even among those who, unlike some of us, were very, very young that day.
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November 21, 2009, 5:35PM
This is a busy week for many people, and even busier for this once a week blogger. The annual memorial to the President who first inspired the guy who writes under this name to become a public servant will, work permitting, appear here tomorrow, but there is so much else to write about.
After watching Senator Lincoln (how does she get to call herself that) channel Richard Nixon ("let me make myself perfectly clear" she tells us) in deciding to let the Senate debate health care so long as it passes nothing of any use to anybody, it seemed wrong to let her have the last word on this subject, or anything close to it.
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November 16, 2009, 2:44PM
These goons never miss a moment to demean our President. Never. Politics stops at the water's edge? Not when the President is a Democrat. It is enough to make one think there is a vast right wing conspiracy against our President.
Yesterday it was the Known Traitor Hoekstra (having disclosed highly secure information he received as a member of the Intelligence (cough, cough) Committee), on Face the Nation:
I think that the government has been too slow in giving us information. There hasn't been enough transparency for members of Congress, for the press, or for the American people. You know, I think that we need to move very, very aggressively and do a full-scale investigation as to who knew what and where.
You know, this Awlaki guy in Yemen. He's been on our radar screen since 2001, 2002. What -- my sources tell me we had evidence back in 2002 that would have enabled us to prosecute him. Why didn't we prosecute him then?
The other thing I want to know is people want to know who Hasan has been talking to in the Middle East. I want to know who Awlaki is talking to in the United States. And have we been able to capture those communications? I want to know what's going on between the intel community, the Department of Defense, and the FBI.
I think we had a lot of information on Hasan, but I'm not sure that we put all of these things in place so that we would have been in a position to perhaps stop what happened at Fort Hood last week.
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November 14, 2009, 12:39PM
There were so many other things that seemed to be good subjects for a post this week. Then this jumped out of today's New York Times :
Margit Arias-Kastell lost her husband, Adam Arias, in Tower 2. She, too, could not countenance the prospect of the suspects being defended by lawyers in a court in her city. She was among scores of relatives who had signed a letter opposing regular criminal trials for them.
"It's totally unfair," she said. "Why do we have to constantly relive this? When do we get to be at peace? They should be hung."
and everything else that seemed worth writing about was washed away by the answer to that question.
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November 7, 2009, 12:20PM
Do we miss him yet? Republicans surely don't, but maybe the rest of us, motivated by the daily mess created and exacerbated by the least competent person to serve as president since either Andrew Johnson or James Buchanan, do. It was, after all, his blundering and constant attempts to feather the nests of his benefactors and friends that showed our less progressive friends and relatives that assault on government was inspired by nothing more than greed and was not in the best interests of anybody but those who directly benefited from the bizarro operation of government by those dedicated to its destruction.
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November 3, 2009, 9:44AM
President Kennedy's inauguration on January 20, 1961 is the first Great National Event which I can actually recall. The flights of Alan B. Shepherd and John Glenn, leading to the actual exploration of another celestial body in 1969 also come to mind, as does the fall of the Berlin Wall, a tribute to the airlift in 1948 in President Truman's administration and President Kennedy's endorsement of the hopes of "free men everywhere" as it is to anything or anyone else.
And then there is Election Day, 2008. Hope. Freedom. Renewal. Long lines of people in states where their vote has no real bearing on the outcome, wanting to be part of something. And they were. And we are on our way to becoming once again, the land of the free and the brave; the last best hope for mankind.
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October 31, 2009, 5:19PM
I came late to the bash Lieberman party. Orthodoxy, or knee jerkism has never much appealed to me and I do not expect or even want politicians to agree with me on every issue. I voted for Presidents Carter and Clinton twice in general elections each even though their version of a Democratic Party is not mine, nor that of Presidents Franklin D Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, but they were better candidates than their opponents, so I did what one does.
Moreover, the state Attorneys General who fought back when the Reagan Justice Department abandoned so many of its traditional functions (at least since the Kennedy years), included Connecticut's Lieberman and that was worthy of some respect, it seemed to me.
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October 27, 2009, 2:20PM
A great piece which really explains the issue, how backward we have become in this area and what the stakes are. They report:
While every American may be entitled to at least adequate health care, he is not getting it, and will not, until a momentous national debate reaches election-year levels of acrimony and is somehow resolved.
... Apart from such standpatters ... and its arch-conservative Republican allies, there is a growing consensus that some national insurance blanket must be thrown over the ailing body of health care.
Rarely have I seen such excellent reporting in the mainstream press. The fact that this article appeared in its issue dated March 11, 1970 should not diminish our gratitude to Time for its excellent coverage of this problem.
October 24, 2009, 11:36AM
If you are of a certain age, you have heard this so many times, you can probably probably feel the beat when it gets played again and again.
As we watch a nearly dysfunctional legislative process try to accomplish what strong majorities of Americans want them to doagainst the will of the torrent of money dangled as campaign contributions before the very eyes of those privileged to serve as our Senators and Representatives, those words, from a cold and snowy January day more than 48 years ago, deserve another reading:
In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.
Now the trumpet summons us again -- not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need -- not as a call to battle, though embattled we are -- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation," a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.
Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?..
I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it. And the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.
My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
...[W]hether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.
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October 17, 2009, 1:38PM
The forums created by modern technology allowing for the expressions of pain that some of us feel so often to be heard by those willing to listen provide for sort of an inexpensive therapy, and there is always the chance somebody will read what is posted and be motivated to do something good for us all. We are reaching the point, though, where those voices better start getting louder and louder because we are in real danger of destroying whatever it is that has connected us as a nation.
Nothing less than our very system of government is at stake. We are watching the spectacle of a Congress beholden to the contributors who make possible their continued hold on office unable to respond to the call of a vast majority to reform health care, to protect our posterity from the doomsday path on which we have placed our nation and to regulate wizards of finance whose obsession with their self-interest have put the financial security and well being of the rest of us in permanent jeopardy. This is a recipe for disaster all by itself and placed side by side with the fact that we are no longer able to have civilized discourse over opposing views, the future looks bleak indeed.
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October 16, 2009, 3:15PM
The link here is to the Official Explanation of why, in the current view, the mere threat of a filibuster, is the same as an actual filibuster and why it takes sixty votes to pass a bill in the Senate and not just a simple majority. The link does not explain how, in that event, major legislation has been passed with fewer than the votes needed for cloture nor why advocates for, say, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, stayed with the bill until they got the votes for cloture, rather than just mark it off calendar.
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October 11, 2009, 4:24PM
I know. These pages are meant for the weighty issues of our time, but I have written my diary of the week about such things and now find it is time to contemplate the winter.
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October 10, 2009, 2:22PM
I do not know what to do about Afghanistan. Though I was in high school when this question arose about another war, I did not know what to do about Vietnam either, but I did learn a few things watching what happened and reading about it for many years since.
And it is this: deciding what to do is not helped by politicians announcing what they would do or suggesting that anything other than saluting and doing exactly what some field commander is treasonous, wimpy or surrender.
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October 3, 2009, 11:20AM
Forty-six years ago, the President of the United States, the youngest ever elected as President, addressed the civil rights issues facing the nation and explained the core reason why they had to be resolved:
We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.
The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?
This year, President Kennedy's youngest brother, the one who survived into the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and most of the decade which followed, wrote for what he called a "final time" to a new President he helped to elect about the cause of his own life, a guarantee to American citizens of affordable health insurance to insure that care for those who need it, and almost all of us will, does not depend on one's bank account:
you have also reminded all of us that it concerns more than material things; that what we face is above all a moral issue; that at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.
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September 27, 2009, 11:55AM
Something is very wrong. You know it and, as Senator Robert Dole used to say in another context,"the American people know it." We no longer sound like the people of the United States. We are not the country of hope and light, the beacon to the oppressed of the world which we have been in the best moments of our national history.
We are now becoming increasingly selfish, stupid and self-delusional and there can be little question that each of those benchmarks of what passes for political "thought" in this country, carry seeds of disaster and of our demise as a great nation.
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