KIKO'S HOUSE

America's Soul & Health-Care Reform: The Devil Is In D.C., Not In The Details

2009-11-04T00:10:00.001-05:00

Although the media, lobbyists, Joe Lieberman and even Nancy Pelosi may not see it my way, the debate over reforming the dysfunctional health-care system is been nothing less than a battle to define America's soul.

A decade into the new millennium, the U.S. remains the only industrialized country that allows a large percentage of its men, women and children to go uninsured while those who are fortunate enough to be insured pay through the nose. Canada, France, Germany and Japan, to name but a handful of nations with universal coverage coverage, have systems that have the inevitable warts, but overall they work very well.

Among the actors in this battle are Republicans and a few Democrats who not only are beholden to the billions of dollars in contributions from the health-care lobby but simply do not believe that being able to get help when you or your children get sick or come down with a life-threatening disease is a right like an education or voting.

Other actors are Democrats who believe in reforming the system, but only in ways that will not impact too harshly on the hands that reliably feed them each election cycle: Big Pharma, insurance companies and hospital systems more concerned with profits than quality of care.

Finally there are the Democrats who believe in nothing less than universal care, but know that as hard as they may try to shoot the moon, they will fall short and success must be judged by how many more people would be insured than the other major goal of reform -- reducing out-of-control costs.

* * * * *

While a large majority of Americans tell pollsters that they support health-care reform and that they support reform with a public option, that support wanes when they learn that they will be required to buy health insurance from their employer or a new insurance exchange or pay a penalty.

Such a so-called mandate is necessary for a couple of fundamental reasons that explain why enacting reform has been so damned difficult:

People who are uninsured tend to be less healthy and suffer more severe illness. They end up in emergency rooms, which drives up costs. But reforms won't work unless nearly everyone carries insurance because if there aren't a large number of healthy people then the costs through an insurance exchange will be too high.

* * * * *
After months of criticizing the Democrats' health-care proposals without offering one of their own, House Republicans will unveil legislation this week that to no one's surprise will be too little too late and too light on real reform.

GOP leaders are unable to say how much their bill would cost or how many Americans would be insured under their plan, but it will not bar insurance companies from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions nor will it give individuals income tax credits to buy them insurance, which the Democrats bills in both the House and Senate do.

Republican sentiments were nicely summed up by Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, who in a speech on the House floor revealed herself to be a soulless one.
"I believe that the greatest fear that we all should have . . . to our freedom comes from this room, this very room, and what may happen later this week in terms of a tax increase bill masquerading as a health-care bill," Foxx declared. "I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country."

And so this is the state of play one year to the day after Barack Obama was elected with the promise that he would work tirelessly to reform the health-care system. That he has, but what transpires in the coming weeks will tell us much about where his and our other leaders priorities -- and their souls -- really lie.

IMAGES (From top): "Washington Crossing the Delaware " (1851) by Emanuel Leutze; "The Marines at Tripoli" by C.H. Waterhouse; "The Gettysburg Address" (1931) by Mort Kunstler; "Boom Town" (1928) by Thomas Hart Benton; "New Deal Builders" (1934) by Charles F. Quest; "Freedom of Speech" (1943) by Norman Rockwell; "Martin Luther King" (2005) by Tim Okamura.

Cartoon du Jour

2009-11-04T00:09:00.000-05:00

Tom Toles/Universal Press Syndicate

NY-23: The Mouse That Roared

2009-11-04T00:07:00.012-05:00

You are a voter in a congressional district in upstate New York that has gone reliably Republican since the 19th century. Your Republican congressman is picked to be Army secretary by President Obama and your county GOP committee taps a woman with deep local roots and moderate credentials in keeping with the tenor of the district to run in a special election to succeed him.
But it is 2009 and that woman is not extreme enough for the national GOP, which foists a carpetbagging right-wing Glenn Beck acolyte with no experience and even less sense on you, driving the woman from the race.

Predictions that the right winger will win overwhelmingly do not take into account that the people of the district are deeply insulted that their election has been hijacked by uncouth loudmouths like Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, who may speak for what is left of the national GOP but not the good burghers of NY-23. Against all odds, the Democrat wins.
Oh, and people who see the Republican victory in the New Jersey gubernatorial race as a rebuke to Obama have their heads up their backsides. The incumbent was deeply unpopular and the victor is a moderate out of step with the national GOP.

Meanwhile, back at the World Series . . .

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1909-2009)

2009-11-04T00:02:00.000-05:00

MORE HERE.

What! No Nose Picker?

2009-11-04T00:01:00.000-05:00

Behold the Giant Swiss Army Knife.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

2009-11-04T00:00:00.004-05:00

Spiral galaxy NGC 7331 is considered an analog to our own Milky Way and lies about 50 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Pegasus.
Photograph courtesy of NASA

AfPak: Doing Right Thing A Non-Starter

2009-11-03T00:10:00.004-05:00

Nowhere do old attitudes die a slower death than on the battlefield, and so it comes as no surprise that some of the shopworn fundamentals of combat that should have been given the heave-ho in Iraq are back to haunt the U.S. in the increasingly bloody war in Afghanistan.

At the top of the list is the notion that the enemy is an identifiable group, or in this case groups -- the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Not so. As commanders are finding out the hard way in the immense and rugged South Asian country, that is a fiction. While some of the hundreds of localized groups arrayed against the U.S. are indeed aligned with the Taliban and AQ, they really only have one thing in common -- a hatred of the American occupiers.

This is the big takeaway from a much publicized resignation letter
by Matthew Hoh, a respected senior Foreign Service officer in Afghanistan and former Marine Corps captain in Iraq.

Wrote Hoh:

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan . . . (Grieving American families) must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made any more."

Coming as it did during the week that President Obama made an announced middle-of-the-night visit to Dover Air Force Base to honor 18 U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan, Hoh's thoughts are shocking despite their obviousness.

"It was a sobering reminder of the extraordinary sacrifices that our young men and women in uniform are engaging in every single day, not only our troops but their families as well," Obama said after returning to the White House from Dover.

True, but with every passing day it seems more likely that the president will order more troops to the war zone, although perhaps not the 40,000 that General Stanley McChrystal is asking for.

I have argued that Afghanistan is simply not winnable in any conventional sense. That as the Brits and Russians well know, there is no nation to build. Afghanistan is ungovernable, and no amount of leaning on President Karzai, infrastructure improvement, GIs fluent in Pashtun, bribe money or wishful thinking is about to change that.

Yet it seems inconceivable that Obama would say as much even if he knows as much. This is because while cutting and running would be the appropriate -- and yes, honorable -- thing to do, it would be politically unpalatable.

Top photograph by Chris Hondros/Getty Images

Cartoon du Jour

2009-11-03T00:09:00.000-05:00

Michael Ramirez/Investors Business Daily

The Dinos Come & The Dinos Go

2009-11-03T00:04:00.001-05:00

Welcome anklyosaur cousin and farewell hogwarts. We hardly knew thee.

The new anklyosaur subspecies of dinosaur was discovered in central Montana where it roamed 112 million years ago. Because its head is like an Army tank, it was named Tatankacephalus cooneyorum.

Meanwhile, a three-horned dinosaur named for the school attended by Harry Potter has been erased from the science books because because it has been found to not be a distinct species. The pachycephalosaur had been called Dracorex hogwartsia, "The Dragon King of Hogwarts."

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

2009-11-03T00:00:00.004-05:00

FESTIVAL OF LIGHT
(Diwali celebration, Bangalore, India -- 2003)
By Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos

State of Play In The USA: Too Big To Fail, Too Mighty To Nail, Too Puny To Matter

2009-11-02T00:15:00.002-05:00

When the term "Too Big To Fail" first reared its head back in 1991 in connection with a congressional report on the economic implications of whether the federal government should intervene to prevent huge financial institutions from failing, it was little noticed.

But by 2008 with the economy hurtling southward and some of those institutions teetering on the brink of collapse, the term was everywhere -- from regulators and politicians with furrowed brows to finger-wagging pundits to acid-penned bloggers.

"Too Big To Fail" became the catch phrase for the idea that the AIGs, Banks of America and GMACs are so huge and so interconnected that the federal government cannot allow them to go under because doing so would have a disastrous effect on the economy. The term was soon applied to General Motors and Chrysler and a few other non-financial sector players that received tens of billions of taxpayer bailout money beyond the hundreds of billions the banks, mortgage companies and insurers continue to suck up like heroin addicts jonsing for their next fix.

Well, a couple more terms need to be added to the lexicon:

'TOO MIGHTY TO NAIL'
Despite ample evidence of criminal behavior at the top of many of those financial institutions, few executives have received little more than a wrist slap, many have golden parachuted to soft landings and barracudas like Bernard Greenberg, who drove AIG into the ground, have emerged to create new firms that siphon off the best and the brightest from their old firms.

Greenberg's feint is especially shameless coming as it does at a time when the Treasury, in a rare bout of sensibility, has sought to limit obscenely high salaries and bonuses at AIG and other companies that receive bailout money, which in the case of AIG will hasten the exodus of its talent . . . into Greenberg's welcoming embrace.

So why, beyond a rogue trader or three like Bernard Madoff, have so few of the people who were instrumental in making the Great Recession the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression had to face the music while millions of us have had our homes foreclosed, our cars repossessed and our dreams of college put on hold?

Because the same financial and regulatory geniuses who were screwing things up with George Bush's acquiescence are doing the same thing with Barack Obama's acquiescence. Absent an opposition save for the occasional Barney Frank outburst and some op-ed page catterwalling, the Henry Paulsons, Timothy Geithners and Lawrence Summers simply do not have the interest or the balls to get to the bottom of what caused the recession, let alone make sure that the biggest perps pay for their sins instead of rolling over into new clover.

'TOO PUNY TO MATTER'
So much for the 1 percent. What about the other 99 percent? In a word, we're screwed and tattooed. (Okay, that's two words.)

Rivers of bailout money continue to flow to Wall Street, where it is supposed to stimulate loans to consumers and businesses but has not. The 3.5 percent increase in gross domestic product heralded last week would seem to be great news, but it's misleading because the increase was driven by bailout dough.

Even institutions like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase that are doing quite well, thank you, are racking up huge profits not through lending but through some of the same arcane financial instruments that caused the downturn. Once again, the Obama administration seems unwilling to make sure that the long suffering burghers of Main Street be allowed in on this manna.

Meanwhile, stimulus money has done more to keep jobs than create new ones as unemployment still hovers near 10 percent, which brings us to two other terms that are getting a vigorous workout these days even as the economy shows signs of growth -- "Jobless Recovery" and "Joyless Recovery."

It is of little comfort to Joe and Jane Sixpack that Reaganomics -- the voodoo theory that easing the tax burden on the wealthy and deregulating everything in sight would benefit everyone -- was a failure even before the recession.

The greater failure is that policymakers -- from Obama to Paulson-Geithner-Summers to Congress -- have in deed if not word found the 99 percent too insignificant to really matter.

THE BIG SUM-UP
Students of irony -- or is it black humor? -- will note that 18 years after "Too Big To Fail" entered the lexicon, a draft of a financial-reform bill being pushed through the House by that Barney Frank indirectly acknowledges that "To Big To Fail" firms are a fact of economic life but does not confront that reality head on. In fact, the bill was negotiated with the input of foxes in bankers' clothing who assure us that they're guarding the hen house.

As one pissed off economist put it in suggesting that Frank and his advisers have strapped on the knee pads that are such a big part of Washington wardrobe: "You don't employ a bomb squad to sit around and wait for a bomb to explode, you engage them to dismantle it as soon as they find one."

Cartoon du Jour

2009-11-02T00:14:00.001-05:00

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

Hanging Scooter Libby Out To Dry

2009-11-02T00:12:00.003-05:00

We've known for many years that Dick Cheney is a transcendently evil human being. But his repeated lies when he was interviewed by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in connection with the Scooter Libby grand jury investigation nevertheless astonishes. Marcy at emptywheel has the best sum-up.

Joe Cool Sets The NFL On Fire

2009-11-02T00:04:00.002-05:00

HERE'S WHY.

Photograph by George Sweeney Jr./Baltimore Sun

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

2009-11-02T00:00:00.003-05:00

SHOWER TIME
By Nicole Goggins

Poet Walt Whitman On President Lincoln: 'And The Great Star Early Dropp'd'

2009-11-01T00:04:00.003-04:00

Walt Whitman's two greatest post-Civil War poems were about Abraham Lincoln. The great poet-humanist and great president never formally met, although they passed frequently on the street in then small-town Washington.

As the war got underway, Whitman published "Beat! Beat! Drums!" as a patriotic rallying cry for the Union after the 42-year-old poet's brother George joined the army and began sending him vivid accounts from the front.

Reading a casualty list in the New York Tribune in December 1862, he came upon the name "First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore." Fearing that it was a reference to his brother, he made his way south and eventually found George alive with only a superficial cheek wound. But Whitman was profoundly affected by seeing the many wounded soldiers and heaps of their amputated limbs and vowed to do whatever he could for the Union cause.
In Washington, a friend helped him get part-time work as a clerk in the Army paymaster's office, leaving him time to volunteer as a nurse at Army hospitals. He would write of this experience in "The Great Army of the Sick," published in a New York newspaper in 1863, and 12 years later in a book called Memoranda During the War.
In September 1864, George Whitman was captured by Confederates in Virginia, but was released the following February because of poor health. The poet, meanwhile, was promoted to a slightly higher clerkship and published Drum-Taps, but his past soon caught up to him and he was fired on moral grounds.
That was because of "Leaves of Grass", a poetry collection first published in 1855 that Whitman would add to in subsequent editions for most of the rest of his life. The collection is notable for its praise of the senses during a time when such candid displays were considered immoral, and scholars continue to debate today whether there are veiled references to homosexual relationships in it.
Whitman's admiration for Lincoln following his death bordered on being a fixation.

He frequently gave a lecture titled "The Death of Abraham Lincoln" in which he relived the assassination, believing that tragic event to be a defining moment in American history because of Lincoln's efforts at social unification.

The first of his two famous post-Civil War poems was "O Captain! My Captain!". Written in 1865, it imagined Lincoln as the captain of the ship of state who was now fallen and bloody on the deck, and was memorized by many a school student of the era. "Oh Captain!" was a more conventional extended metaphor work with a regular meter rhyming scheme, and Whitman acknowledged he tired of reciting it over and over.

"Damn My Captain! Damn that poem!" he said on several occasions.

The second poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", also was written in 1865 and is considered one of Whitman's greatest. The blooming of lilacs are an allusion to April, the month of Lincoln's assassination, and served as the poet's yearly reminder of the president's death.

These are the opening lines of the 206-line elegy:

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd
And the great star early dropp'd in the western sky in the night,
I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.

O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night -- O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear'd -- O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless -- O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surround cloud that will not free my soul.

IMAGES (From top to bottom): "Walt Whitman" (ca. 1887) by Thomas Eakins; Sketch of Whitman from frontispiece of 1855 edition of "leaves of Grass."; Whitman about 1860; Lincoln in 1865; Frontispiece of 1883 edition of "Leaves of Grass; Lilac bush.

'He Once Again Felt Himself A Leader'

2009-11-01T00:02:00.003-04:00

LINCOLN'S COTTAGE AT THE SOLDIER'S HOME

39th of 45 excerpts from Lincoln by David Herbert Donald:

The rest of the summer [of 1863] was a relatively tranquil time for the President. Military affairs were under control, with capable professionals like Meade and Grant in command of the armies. The Congress had adjourned, and the President was not constantly badgered by demands from Capitol Hill. During the exceptionally hot weather Lincoln stayed mostly at the Soldier's Home. . . .

During this quiet period Lincoln had time to assess his administration, and on the whole he was pleased with what he had been able to accomplish. Now that he had roused himself from the torpor into which repeated military and political reverses had cast him, he once more felt himself a leader with a loyal constituency. Increasingly self confident, he relied less and less on the advice of his cabinet officers. In their separate spheres he recognized their expertise and let them have their own way. When Secretary Chase came to him with a set of complicated regulations for trading with the South, the President promptly signed them, saying, "You understand these things: I do not." But the cabinet as a whole he consulted only sporadically.

Lincoln was not being intentionally rude to his advisers. Sharing "the general impression that we near the end of the war," he simply did not think that they could offer any useful ideas on how to eradicate slavery and bring the Southern states back into the Union. The problems the President alone could solve. He did not shrink from the responsibility, and now that he had asserted himself as a popular leader, he rather enjoyed his role as leader of opinion. "The Tycoon is in fine whack," John Hay reported in August. "I have rarely seen him more serene and busy. He is managing this war, the draft, foreign relations, and planning a reconstruction of the Union, all at once. I never knew with what tyrannous authority he rules the Cabinet, till now. The most important things he decides and there is no cavil."

An Index To Abraham Lincoln Posts

2009-11-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

Abraham Lincoln was the greatest American president because none faced such enormous challenges, none grew more in office and none reinvented the United States to the extent that he did. All of that and the fact that 2009 is the bicentenary of his birth is reason enough to publish posts each Sunday on the great man.

Series highlights:

THE COMPLEXITIES OF MRS. LINCOLN (10/25) History has not been particularly kind to Mary Todd Lincoln and it's not difficult to understand why. LINK

CAPITULATING ON BLACK ENLISTMENTS (10/18) Lincoln had vowed to never use African-Americans in the Union Army, but that finally changed in advance of the Emancipation Proclamation LINK

HE MADE THE TRAINS RUN ON TIME (10/11) Lincoln was a superb railroad lawyer before he became a superb president, so it should come as no surprise that the American rail network grew during his four years in office not despite the Civil War but because of it. LINK

BRILLIANT, HUMANE & RUTHLESS (10/4) More recent authors have disputed Lincoln's brilliance as commander in chief. Military affairs expert Eliot A. Cohen says that they're wrong. LINK

THE WAR WITHIN THE CIVIL WAR (9/27) Lincoln knew virtually nothing about Native American affairs, an ignorance driven by the commonly held view that the U.S. government should disenfranchise Indians of their land because they were barbarians. LINK

'HIS AMBITION WAS AN ENGINE THAT KNEW NO REST' (9/20) Historian Richard Shenkman debunks several Lincoln myths. LINK

HOLLYWOOD'S OBSESSION WITH LINCOLN'S LOVES (9/13) The great man -- and his loves -- have been played by an eclectic range of actors and actresses over the last century. LINK.

THE MONITOR-MERRIMACK SHOWDOWN (8/30) The battle between the ironclads settled nothing but did change navies forever. LINK

'STAND BY OUR DUTY' (8/23) Lincoln's Cooper Union speech was probably his finest. Yes, greater than the Gettysburg Address. LINK

WAS HE DISHONEST ABE? (8/9) Historian-economist Thomas DiLorenzo says that scholars criticize Lincoln at their own risk, but there is plenty of bad about the man along with the good. LINK

THE TRENT AFFAIR (8/2) In 1861, Lincoln had little to do with foreign affairs. This myopia was to exacerbate a crisis early in his presidency that could have transformed the war into an international conflict. LINK

COMPLEX & IMPERFECT (7/26) Historian Edna Medford argues that we do better for Lincoln and for the nation -- and for understanding of the Civil War -- if we view him in all of his complexity. LINK

THE BOOK THAT CHANGED LINCOLN & AMERICA (7/19) Uncle Tom's Cabin shook the U.S. like an earthquake when it was published in 1852. LINK

SLAVE COLONIES (7/12) Lincoln believed that he found a way to deal with the problems caused by slavery in sending blacks back to Africa to colonize Liberia, but hee was wrong. LINK

A TRUE GENIUS (6/28) Historian Shelby Foote says that there has never been a president who functioned like Lincoln did, and despite having no executive experience, he was a miracle at it. LINK

INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE (6/21) Historian Harold Holzer leads an intimate walk-through of the very different presidential mansion of Lincoln's time. LINK

EVEN LINCOLN NEEDED A GOOD EDITOR (6/14) Guest blogger Michael Reynolds imagines how the Gettysburg Address might have turned out had the president had a good editor. LINK

MOST HANDS-ON COMMANDER IN CHIEF (6/7) The outcome of the Civil War in all likelihood would have been different had Lincoln not cajoled, taken over for and in some cases dismissed the generals who lacked his vision and courage. LINK

A SKIMPIER RESUME WOULD BE HARD TO FIND (5/31) David Herbert Donald, the recently deceased Lincoln biographer, writes that an inexperienced chief executive can cause the country immense heartbreak, but that with time and good common sense can grow into greatness. LINK

NOW ALIEN TO THE REPUBLICAN PARTY (5/11) Pete Abel writes in a two-part guest blog that while there are a few common traits between Lincoln and today's GOP, the differences are far more substantial. PART 1, PART 2

THE ASSASSINATION (4/22, 4/29, 5/4) It is rather amazing that so little is known about basic aspects of the assassination of John F. Kennedy while there is virtually no aspect of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln a century earlier that remains a mystery. PART 1, PART 2, PART 3

THE STRANGE BUT TRUE STORY OF THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS (4/5) It took fewer than three minutes to deliver the famous speech, but it was an afterthought on the day it was given and remained so into the next century. LINK

HOW VALID THE COMPARISONS? (3/29) With the nomination and election of Barack Obama, the comparisons to Abraham Lincoln have come fast, thick and furious. But do they hold up? LINK

A PATENTLY CLEVER PRESIDENT (3/22) That Lincoln was the only president to get a U.S. patent is not surprising when you consider that he was an inveterate tinkerer and had a lifelong fascination with mechanical things. LINK

A PRESIDENTIAL SCHOLAR ON LINCOLN (3/15) A wide-ranging interview with James Hilty on Lincoln's greatness, frailties and innate conservatism. LINK

A BUMPY RIDE TO HIS REWARD (3/8) There was a controversy over a photograph taken of Lincoln's open coffin, an attempt to steal his corpse and his body was exhumed an extraordinary 17 times. LINK

WAS THE GREAT EMANCIPATOR GAY? (3/1) No revisionist history of a famous person would be complete without a book on whether they were gay, or if they were gay whether they were bisexual, or if they . . . LINK

PRESIDENTIAL POWER GRABS (2/22) The infringements by Lincoln on civil liberties arguably were greater than during any period in American history, including the last eight years. LINK

EARLY ASSASSINATION PLOT (2/15) A March 1861 assassination plot was never carried out, but Lincoln's response to it sullied a carefully cultivated image of dignified courage. LINK

OH HE OF LITTLE FAITH (2/8) Beyond Lincoln's opposition to slavery there was no aspect of him more controversial than his spiritual bona fides. LINK

THE BOHEMIAN BRIGADE COMES THROUGH (2/1) Modern journalism can trace its roots to the Civil War, which because of the telegraph and steam locomotive was the first instant-news war, something of which Lincoln was very much aware. LINK

LINCOLN ON BLACKS & SLAVERY (1/25) His metamorphosis from a frontiersman who always opposed slavery but like most white Americans felt that blacks were unequal into the Great Emancipator was as complex as the man himself. LINK

LINCOLN'S CAUTION (1/18) Guest blogger Robert Stein writes that Barack Obama can learn much from the 16th president, who perhaps even more than wisdom and moral strength needed a highly developed political sense of the possible. LINK

THE FIRST TECHNOLOGY PRESIDENT (1/11) Arriving in Washington at the dawn of the age of the telegraph, Lincoln embraced this new technology of instantaneous communication with a passion and used it not just to communicate with his generals in the field during the Civil War, but to bend them to his will. LINK

LINCOLN LINCOLN BO BINCOLN (1/4) A substantial Lincoln mythology had taken hold in the American imagination even before his assassination in 1865. This canon of broad brush strokes and tall tales gave Lincoln his historic due but overlooked or willfully ignored the myriad complexities of our greatest president. LINK

The Archaeology Of Halloween

2009-10-31T00:05:00.000-04:00

We're keeping it semi-light today in honor of my favorite holiday. And why is Halloween my favorite holiday? Because it's so much fun, and underlying its crass commercialism are fascinatingly diverse cultural roots.

More here.

Hat tip to The Glittering Eye

Cartoon du Jour

2009-10-31T00:04:00.000-04:00

'Tears Are Only Made Of Salt & Water'

2009-10-31T00:02:00.000-04:00

AFTER HALLOWEEN
By Fairport Convention

Red and gold and Halloween have passed us by
The charcoal branches lean against the rosy sky
You are so far away and I could touch you if I may
But don't you worry now, I'm only dreaming anyway
You may be lonely, you may be just on your own
It could be anywhere, some place that I have know
But who am I and do we really live these days at all
And are they simply feelings we have learnt and do recall
Oh, the sea has made me cry
But I love her too, so maybe I love you
Tears are only made of salt and water
And across the waves the sound of laughter
October has gone and left me with a song
That I will sing to you although the moment may be wrong
Could it be the sea's as real as you and I?
I often wonder why I always have to say
I'm only dreaming anyway
Could it be the sea's as real as you and I?
I often wonder why I always have to say
I'm only dreaming anyway

Image: "The Halloween Tree" by Ray Bradbury

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

2009-10-31T00:00:00.004-04:00

IT'S HALLOWEEN TIME
By Barbara Orienti

Reflections On A Late October Morning

2009-10-30T00:15:00.003-04:00

I'm pedaling my trail bike through a woods carpeted with brightly colored leaves. There's a chill to the air but when I look down at my deeply tanned hands it's still summer.

The squirrels are in hyperdrive, and one in particular seems especially dexterous. I watch as he expertly peels the skins of one black walnut after another.

What more reliable sign of approaching winter than Canada geese forming up overhead into larger and larger formations that suddenly gel into half mile-long Vs, turning and cartwheeling and then finally finding a southerly heading with the inevitable few stragglers honk honking to catch up.

Away go the hummer feeders and out comes the big front yard feeder. It got quite a workout last winter and is caked with the powdery residue of the 75 pounds or so of seed that poured through it and all those little mouths.

Last week it snowed four inches, more in the higher altitudes. Two days ago I was wearing a wool ski cap, insulated gloves and a heavyish jacket. Yesterday there wasn't even a hint of a chill and I was bareheaded and in shirtsleeves.

It won't be long now before the evening cacophony of the crickets is silenced, but last night it was a four-part harmony. Oh, make that three parts. The fourth was a distant car alarm.

Photograph by Tracy

Cartoon du Jour

2009-10-30T00:14:00.000-04:00

Michael Ramirez/Investors Business Daily

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

2009-10-30T00:00:00.002-04:00

OCTOBER SNOW
By Norbert Maier