A very merry Christmas / And a happy new year / Let’s hope it’s a good one / Without any fear —John Lennon, Yoko Ono, “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” Positive Wishes, Sincere Resolutions We’ll see if we still feel so new and happy and resolved when the champagne wears off,...
Month: December 2009
Best Wishes for a Green and Peaceful Christmas Present
And Hoping for a More Prosperous New Year for All “The walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove, from every part of which, bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the...
“Winter of Our Discontent”
In the already-dark of the shortest day of the year, the first day of winter, rather than denying the obvious it feels appropriate to acknowledge a certain lowness of spirits, a mood that the holidays will warm temporarily but not dispel altogether. “Winter of our...
Obama, Lieberman, Emanuel—
All Skewered as Not “Tough Enough to Govern”
Joe Conason in a hard-hitting Truthout op-ed rips Joe Lieberman for demanding, and President Obama and his chief of staff and “self-styled tough guy from Chicago” Rahm Emanuel for bowing to the gutting of the elements of real reform in the Senate health care...
Copenhagen Climate Accord Better Than Nothing
(Sound Familiar?)
First they put the planet in square brackets, now they have deleted it from the text. At the end it was no longer about saving the biosphere: it was just a matter of saving face. As the talks melted down, everything that might have made a new treaty worthwhile was...
Senate Dems, Stop: Go to Reconciliation (51 Votes)
“Not Health, Not Care, Not Reform” Ed. Note: The writer of this post volunteered for about a half-dozen Organizing for America phone banks to ask voters to call their senators to press for a public option. The Senate Democrats’ over-compromised health reform...
Deeper into Afghanistan: 360 Degrees of Damnation
“we must rebuild our strength here at home . . . . the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.” —President Obama, Dec. 1, 2009 We wanted to take time to try to make sense of President Obama’s speech at West Point last week in which he announced his...
“We Need Strong Leadership” on Health Care Reform
Talking Points Memo reports that Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AZ), co-chairman of the House Progressive Caucus, released a statement Tuesday that calls “troubling” the White House and Senate Democrats’ compromises on the public option—by this point a mere shadow of the...
It’s Not About You—It’s All About Joe
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETAFMgGTMiQ&feature=player_embedded When long-serving Connecticut senator Joseph Isidore Lieberman lost the Democratic primary to telecommunications executive Ned Lamont in August 2006, rather than bow out as defeated candidates...
Wrong Call, Mr. President
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.” —Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953 Having taken a long walk after a filling Thanksgiving...