Category: Uncategorized

 

 

Poor Michelle Bachman, who doesn’t understand what she’s up against.  

Quotes from Newt Nixon:

If an individual wants to be a leader and isn't controversial, that means he never stood for anything. 

I want to say this to the television audience. I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service. I have earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I can say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got.

I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around a campfire but are lousy in politics. 

Politics and war are remarkably similar situations.

 

Brianne Murphy, a lawyer in Syracuse, is a Democratic candidate for the 25th Congressional District seat. She writes about how Newt Gingrich's recent comments about poor children are inaccurate and offensive in the Readers' Page of today's Syracuse Post-Standard.

Education, not manual labor, is the only way to break the cycle of poverty. Investing in education, offering students assistance and supporting programs like Say Yes to Education will create a more educated work force and level the playing field, just a little bit, for poor kids like me that want to do better than their parents. As a child of limited means, I was able to work my way through George Washington University and Brooklyn Law School, with the help of federal programs and hard work. As a server at Morton’s Steakhouse in Georgetown, every day was a choice between working and studying, and my need to pay rent often outweighed the importance of grades. Many nights I waited on my more affluent classmates. During college, I spent a year living on a friend’s couch and I graduated in three and a half years to save money. It was not easy, but it was worth it.

So to Gingrich, I would say: Poor kids work harder; their very survival often depends on it. Our children are not simply a source of cheap labor and method of cost-cutting for corporations; they are the future of this country. Instead of a broom, give them a book.

 

You can read her full comments here:

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2011/12/opinion_today_give_poor_studen.html

https://www.cpj.org/imprisoned/2011.php

No two things look alike. Memories of childhood are pure melancholy. Analogy is all we know for sure. That man's crutches are my grandparents. Shadows sway on the bookshelf. The third book on the left is like a house where Strindberg once lived and where he believed in ghosts. I once met a very old man in a working class bar in Helsinki who told me how he and his cousin used to knock on Strindberg's door and run away. 

This morning I am thinking of the Estonian poet Jan Kaplinski, Zen Buddhist and linguist. Now winter frost comes to the trees and early, too dark for neighbors, I bent to the frozen grass and found a maple leaf in ice–so perfect it was a child’s wish. And the moon, just past full, was imperial above black windows. My heart was loud under my shirt as I stood on the lawn. Soon the essence of things will be more visible. The leaves are gone now. 

 

"In 2000, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were born from the Millennium Declaration, which was an unprecedented global consensus to improve the condition of humanity throughout the world. 
Today the MDGs are seen as the centrepiece of the development agenda. 
Notwithstanding the breadth and the scope of the MDGs, persons with disabilities continue to experience inequalities that are closely intertwined to all the development challenges linked to the MDGs. Disability remains as both a cause and consequence of poverty. Reaching the Millennium Development Goals is unlikely to be achieved unless the rights and needs of persons with disabilities are considered in the process of development."

 

See full article at the Swazi Observer: http://www.observer.org.sz/index.php?news=33264

"A new study shows that it is more difficult to "move up" in America than other developed countries. In America, kids are more likely to stay at the bottom of the economic ladder if their parents had low socio- economic status. Weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz talks with Erin Currier, manager of the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts, about why the U.S. ranked worst for economic mobility among the countries in the study."

See the full story at NPR: http://www.npr.org/2011/12/10/143509344/moving-on-up-more-difficult-in-america

They are the cliche’s cliche, the alimentary canal’s exohpthalmic archetype, the bug-eyed hairy unmentionable, and the friend of Hollywood–which is a matter only explainable by the leisure class’ fascination with infanticide. Don’t kid yourself. Fatty Arbuckle was the Platonic model for the entire werewolf industry but nowadays you will have to look him up, which tells you how decadent the whole thing has gotten. I say bleep the werewolves with their industrial reaction formations and their vomit which smells of Thorstein Veblen and Carl Jung. Me? I give a shit about the polar bears. The polar bears are going extinct while America goes to the movies. A tinsel moon floats over Fatty Arbuckle’s bungalow and the screenwriter who lives there takes another Ritalin. Werewolves for everybody. There’s plenty of ersatz offal to go around.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

How beautiful to see we are still funny. Five people and no one is selling anything. Though one of us who has lost a lot of weight lifts up his shirt and I say if he keeps this kind of display up, a piano will fall on him. The dog walks into the room with her dish clutched in her teeth. A five point buck looks in the window. Any moment now, Dr. Doolittle will drop by for coffee. We are just laughing animals. Save the human textbook for tomorrow.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

My wife has purchased a product called a "Happy Light" which comes in a box with a picture of a twenty something woman doing a yoga exultation, arms out, broad smile on her face, seated before her lamp of Luxor. I remember that when I was twenty I had that same look most of the time. I'm excited because obviously this lamp is going to make me into a twenty year old woman. The box doesn't reveal whether the yogic girl is wise or curious or shrewd. Yoga is, in America, a semiotic signifier of eastern wisdom, but in the east, they know that any idiot can stand on one leg. I'm just saying. I'm going to approach this lamp with great care.