What do you get from this excerpt from the Saturday, June 6, 2009, article entitled “Clinton Rejects Israeli Claims of Accord on Settlements” by Washington Post Staff Writer Glenn Kessler?
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton forcefully rejected yesterday Israeli claims that the Bush administration had secretly agreed to expanding Jewish settlements on the West Bank, [...]
Can your personal political morality stand the fairness test?
Compare Joe Lieberman and Arlen Specter. Each abandoned his party in order to assure or improve his chance of winning re-election. Pragmatic? Egomaniacal? Fighting the neverending battle for truth, justice, and the American Way?
Whom do you love?
Lieberman, 67, lifted high by the Democratic party (vice presidential candidate [...]
AIG is saved once, and then resuscitated again, because it is judged “too big to fail.” Billions are pumped into General Motors because it also is “too big to fail.”
I say step back and look at what “too big to fail” should have suggested long before the current financial cliff edge was reached: If it [...]
February 11, 2009 – 11:13 am
Born 200 years ago, February 12, 1809: Charles Darwin, who changed the way we think about a human’s place in the bios, and Abraham Lincoln, who changed the way we think about a human’s place in society.
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But perhaps these two Great Men were not born on the same day. Darwin’s birth was [...]
February 10, 2009 – 4:23 pm
Scores of articles have been written to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. One of the most interesting appeared in the February 2009 issue of Smithsonian magazine. I reprint it here in its entirety. The images and links are my choices.
Link to original article.
Lincoln’s Contested Legacy
Great Emancipator or unreconstructed racist? Defender of civil [...]
January 22, 2009 – 5:21 pm
James Michener’s short story collection, Tales of the South Pacific, a bestselling Pulitzer Prize winner in 1948, was eclipsed a year later by South Pacific, the blockbuster Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein musical that includes some of the most memorable songs written for the stage. One song, “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught,” includes this verse:
You’ve got [...]
January 19, 2009 – 3:07 pm
On August 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a speech in Washington, DC, to an immense crowd that filled the Capitol Mall. Revered and reviled in his time, King stood as the standard bearer in the fight for civil rights.
Clarence Jones, King confidante and one of those who helped draft the scripted [...]
January 6, 2009 – 12:14 pm
Following up my previous post on this topic, today I sent the letter below to the editor of the Finger Lakes Times in Seneca Falls, NY:
The struggle for women’s rights has an extraordinary history, and the struggle is ongoing.
My wife and I, on a recent vacation in the Finger Lakes area, made a special pilgrimage [...]
December 24, 2008 – 5:29 pm
The prophet is often unloved
There is great comfort in absolutes. It is the gray that wobbles us.
So we yearn for truth, the absolute truth. And if we find such sapphire clarity, it flattens our doubts. This is the great attraction of fundamentalism. Whether Hasidic, Shiite, or Evangelical, the acceptor has been presented with a revealed [...]
December 12, 2008 – 5:06 pm
A comment by Lanny on my recent post (Rule Book Racism: Can a Black Athlete Celebrate?) deserves a full response.
You write: “A young, black, athletic man will soon be our president.” Why don’t you call him white? He’s just as much white as black. Is my wife, Karina, yellow or white, Japanese or American? Her [...]
