BRIGHTMOOR JOURNAL

CAT

2011-01-20T21:06:00.001-06:00

I'm going to start talking dirty, if it takes that to show: people and animals are not alike, I am taking Little Bit to the Dr. Monday morning, she will be fixed in reproductive failure forevermore; I say, "Oh well", she is devastated—she had her eye on the black cat next door; I put my foot down! And that means tough toenails! She will not meow a syllable to me, but I tell her she will thank me in the end.

I do not know what in blazes makes these female cats think that Mr. Alleycat cares, it is a fiction brought by passionate whispered mews and meows no one else can verify; I tell her it is lies! lies! One swipe with a brush of white paint and the world could see him for the polecat he is! I tell her he will not be back; the yowling has just begun—Little Bit chases her slice of hot dog across and around and round the kitchen instead of enjoying a snack, trying to slim down for Mr. Sophistication (ha-ha), she is skinnier now than when I rescued her from the hard life of a street cat—she wants is to be attractive to the tom across the road ...I won't stand for it and I tell her so! No possibility of misunderstanding exists! Confined to house if necessary—I have cut her off from the cat I call 'Sport Coat' for good reason. She will be forcibly sterilized Monday, damn if it seems Hitleresque...I will not have bad ear-lobe cats or a cat I cannot verify aryan ownership back to the 19th century. Careful? you bet!

I axed this cat to be cool—she ignores me and plays dice all night, night after night, making my life a living hell, waiting for the surgery, she plays dice and just squeaks to me-no meow. Someday she will thank me, I hope.

Robert Fitzgerald kennedy

2011-01-20T19:10:00.000-06:00

C H R I S T M A S

2010-12-24T08:05:00.002-06:00

Archdiocese of Chicago


In the manger with the Holy Family

Gospel Reading for Dec. 24

When the angels went away from them to heaven, the shepherds said to one another,
“Let us go, then, to Bethlehem to see this thing that has taken place,
which the Lord has made known to us.”
So they went in haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger.
When they saw this, they made known the message that had been told them about this child.
All who heard it were amazed by what had been told them by the shepherds.
And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.
Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God
for all they had heard and seen, just as it had been told to them.

Christmas Season Reflection:
What to say about Christmas? What can I possibly add that hasn’t already been said two hundred times over?

What can we say about God coming to us as . . .

A Baby?

—Adorable, vulnerable, precious, dependent, helpless, needy. —These are not our usual descriptions of God. —But then, perhaps, that is exactly the point, —God defies our decriptions, categorizations, and expectations. —We would do well to remember that God’s ways are not our ways.

A Person?

—One of us. —Emmanuel, means God is with us, —but Jesus being human further shapes this understanding, —God is with us as one of us. —God is tangible and familiar, able to know and be known by us. —Instead of some aloof faraway foreign concept, —God is immediatly, proximatly, intimatly in relationship with each of us.

A Gift?

—One that we can receive or reject, —but not choose, select, edit, or purchase. —In our culture of buying and selling, —of list making and gift reciepts, —we seem to have lost something. —The art of giving and receiving should be more —about the thought and the relationship —than it is about the loot.

A Child?

—Perhaps the greatest gift of all, a child is truly ours, —in many ways undeniably so, —but ultimately a person all their own, —over whom we hope to have influence —but can never really own or control. —We can love God and allow that love to shape our lives, —Our priorities, our decisions, and how we use our resources. —Yet the ultimate expression of that love is —the realization that we are not in control.

Questions for your prayerful reflection and response:
What did this past week’s Christmas season mean to you?

Tell us your favorite story about giving and receiving.

A POEM edited

2010-12-23T09:04:00.000-06:00

ORIGINAL VERSION

Wake up each day without your love to look forward to,
Picturing your bright smile as I sit here in solitude,
Looking back to a time where I made you whole,
Our hearts fit perfectly as one keeping our lives in control,
We have grown up since then so it will be not be the same,
Realizing our freedom has vanished which is such a shame,
Remembering days of endless time we spent together,
Our plans of our future with the words love is forever,
My feelings for you over these years have never changed,
All you can say is that I act distant as if my heart has rearranged,
I would walk miles just to see you so I could hold you so very close,
Embracing you in my arms so my love for you would clearly show,
Seperation between us led us to only wanting to see each other more,
The words you said made me know you still wanted me for sure,
Saying my love I gave you, you had taken for granted,
Yet towards the end of our relationship I felt so abandoned,
Putting on a mask every morning pretending you are happy apart,
Believing that time heals nothing but hours unable to heal your heart,
Stating that the door is wide open for me with brand new furniture,
So I walked to you to come see that face I once completely adored,
Love is indeed happiness, love completes people you told me,
God does not save people; love and harmony is what saves us you see,
Peace in the heart saves rather than the cherising of this so called god ,
Still I do everything to show you that I care yet it seems to never be enough,
Saying that you are heartless when I know you can remember back on us,
So many blissful times with a romance that only grew stronger over the years,
Wake up to the fact that I will always be here so never ponder in fear,
Wishing that you would be as in love with me as you were from the start,
Never forget that our love is too unconditional to ever be apart

MY EDIT JOB
(not hatchet job i hope)

Sending this poem I wrote to boyfriend of 2 years who's been acting distant lately, thoughts?

The free verse format can turn on you. A message meant to be melodic, and carry the tenderest wishes of the heart for your beloved can come off as a worse screed than normal letter writing. Your poem has all the right sentiments, except for one item, the line: “Yet towards the end of our relationship...”

You seem very willing to get back with him, in fact you're praising him and reminding him of all the good you have together.What you have together isn't easy to replace, where are you going to find someone you have a meaningful history with who will put up with you, much less love you to boot? ( -:

Boredom with job, the everyday grind may be mistaken for distance between you. People nowadays walk out on relationships at the drop of a hat, when what's needed is some growing up, emotional maturity and stability, and a little reaching out to one another. If you think it gets easier to find someone to couple with, as time goes by, in my experience it isn't .

When I was young I fell in love with a Jewish girl from the suburbs of Detroit named Sheryl, who acted like she couldn't live without me, We had a daughter together we named Robin. I got a kick out of both my girls, we got married. Money was tight, but we got by and it seemed for a long time that having each other meant we didn't need a whole lot of cash for running around or entertainment. I finally joined the Army for the health protection and stability I couldn't find around Detroit in 1981, when the auto industry first got sick, and prime lending rates were 18% or higher. While I was at boot camp, she moved in with the downstairs neighbor, who still had a UAW job and money to party, money just to spend. She took our baby girl and walked out on me, for the bread! I was pissed and bummed out—for sure.

Even then I was smart enough to be concerned for my relationship future. The likelihood seemed non-existant I'd find someone as suited to me, for each other. We knew each other in school since she was 14 and I was 15 ½, we would still be together if she hadn't slipped off while I was away, I have little doubt there. Plus I have no desire for any 2^nd family. I saw my cousins go through all that. Robin means too much to me to risk alienating her.

Robin's 30 now and attends grad school. She's pursuing a Ph.D. so she can be a college professor.

Sheryl's marriage to GM lasted a couple years, then they called it quits. I'm 50 and she's 48, we both are unmarried. We were lucky to have each other, and if she wasn't so conflicted with her guilt, we could be friends now. I never felt a connection to the girls and women I've known since, just had the fun I could, lived in sin a couple times, but the chasing has fallen off. We all hear about men who have money and use it to keep women around even into middle age. Beyond the envy money and its trappings bring us all to some degree, that's natural; holding a lady's interest that way holds little glamour out to me— that's like having a fair-weather friend who will ride shotgun until the good-times are over.

What do you think he will think of it? Do you think it'll make him change?

You ask if these written words will change him, I ask: change him into what? You repeatetedly sing his praises in verse. I'm thinking you like the guy as he is or you wouldn't go to this trouble to reach out to him. Both of you claim the other is distant, you (see above) and him (in about the middle of your poem).

Don't Let's Ever Forget

I still wake up picturing your smile

I always looked to you first each day,

like one may foresee the bright sun—

behind closed eyes that still sleep.

To make ready, even if it's a dream

My today's arrive without you to hold me,

In the midst of my grim solitude,

I'm often remembering back, in fact

I can see it perfectly now

Back to when it seemed I fit,

Then you said I made you whole,

Our hearts were in control,

We spent our lives together not just time

Nothing could get between us,

We just didn't allow it.

Our hearts were in control,

Will it be the same?

Our hearts are still in control, two lives one

Our perfect freedom still abides

Timeless days we had together,

Our future plans included Forever—

Our love is still in the forever column

Over these years my feelings for you haven't changed,

You say, “I act distant,“ like my heart's been rearranged,

But my feelings of love remain unchanged—

I would walk miles just to see you!

Just to hold you in my arms so very close,

Embrace you and display my love to you.

So my love for you would clearly show.

'Absence makes the heart grow fonder,'

Separation led us to each other more—

I believe you still want and care for me,

You still want the love I'm able to give—

Your words made me sure, when you said,

“You took my love for granted, the love I gave you...”

Yet I never felt so abandoned,

Forsaken even—as I did toward the end when we parted—

Our separation laid claim to some heavy dues,

An avalanche hit—the blues had me buried.

Putting on a mask every morning,

Pretending you are happy apart.

Keeping up a front;

You're really torn apart—alone,

Pretending, “Time heals all wounds,”

While knowing the truth all along—time heals nothing

The moving hands clocks possess heal no one

Passing hours won't mend a heart...

Stating, “The door is wide open for me with brand new furniture,”

So I walked to you; I went to see the face I once completely adored—

Love is happiness, indeed, “Love completes people,” you have told me—

God does not save people; love and harmony is what saves us you see,

Peace in the heart saves, rather than cherishing any so-called god ,

Still I do everything to show you I care yet it never seems to be enough,

I can't say you are heartless when I know you remember us,

Our romance that grew stronger over the years,

With so many blissful times...

I will always be here—wake up to that fact!

Never ponder in fear, wishing you were in love with me like it was at first,

Never forget—our love is too unconditional to ever stay apart.

Atom Ant - 09 - Mistaken Identity

2010-11-05T01:59:00.000-05:00

Deputy Dawg - Kin Folk

2010-11-05T01:53:00.000-05:00

FELIX

2010-11-05T01:41:00.000-05:00

felix the cat.

2010-11-05T01:37:00.000-05:00

Snuffles

2010-11-05T01:32:00.000-05:00

Robin Coleman Excels

2010-11-04T23:21:00.000-05:00

Not one but two scholarships have been awarded our favorite daughter.

Loughead-Eldredge Endowed Scholarship in Creative Writing

Joseph J. & Mary E. Yelda Endowed Merit Scholarship for English

We are proud!

Three cheers for Robin!

Sparky

2010-11-04T21:36:00.000-05:00

I may be the least qualified to eulogize George "Sparky" Anderson. I was at odds with him from 1979, when he replaced Les Moss, a team stalwart who earned the chance to manage. His "My way or the highway" hubris did not click with my long haired ideas.

Relinquishing Steve Kemp for Chet Lemon is still a trade I wouldn't make; the Schatzeder for LeFlore trade was the result of a hissie fit.

His Cincinnati credentials were marred by not winning more with the bulk of talent he supervised.

Sparky was a manager who made personalities too big of a deal.

What did I know? I played the game daily in the blissful absence of X-Box, My fourth grade class watched the World Series cinched by Mickey Lolich, Jim Northrup and Willie Horton. No studies for those few heady days, the 3-1 deficit brushed aside by 3 Tiger wins. Jose' Feliciano and the Star Spangled Banner. Brock declining to slide as football big Bill Freehan stood him up and tagged out the 'speed merchant'.

When Sparky was summoned north on I-75 I was yet stewing over Ralph Houk wrecking the "Bird" Fydrich's arm. The giveaways of Kemp, LeFlore and Jason Thompson were clearly at his behest.

I was an angry fan.

Working downtown at Nemos in the Ren Cen, we could walk in free after the 7th, and that meant something, the police were cool, inside Tiger Stadium, the world was polite, cheerful and benevolent. Sparky was a Red, he didn't know what the Tigs meant to us who grew up with them, the 100 loss seasons of the '70's didn't quench our love, and the memory of 1968 remained fresh, it had one hell of a shelf life..

In short order the man proved he had a method to his madness.

The 1984 season erupted, Morris' no-hitter, then 35-5; how do you argue with results.

He inaugurated CATCH, a singularly on the level charity for sick kids.

He started to remind me of my hard working Dad, then he had me, no one else could be manager.

I wish they would have kept Tiger Stadium; I have yet to see a game at CoPa. Detroit needs a great deal more than a luxury box for its redemption. Tiger Stadium was egalitarian, and it's demolition still gets me fighting mad.

Sparky grew on you, he was a real one in the truest sense. Bless his memory, and bless his family in this difficult hour.

Back to School—Click here for Library of Congress Access—You Paid for It

2010-08-25T06:18:00.002-05:00

Ginsberg reads his poetry webcast at loc (Library of Congress): http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=3658

Very cute cat book for you.

GINSBERG SPEAKS

2010-05-13T23:19:00.001-05:00

THE TRUTH CAME HOME

2010-04-20T00:35:00.000-05:00

THE TRUTH CAME HOME

When I sAW bILL CLINTON ON TV TAKLKING ABOUT HIS WIFE WHO HE HAS NOT PUBLICLY APOLOGIZED TOO, i KNOW WHAT DOOMED hILLARY FOR PREZ; THE DREARY IDEA bILL WOULD RETURN AS A CELEB, WHICH HJE ABVIOUSLY WANTS. wHAT HE DID AS PRESIDENT WILL REMAIN AMONG THE LIVING AS A LOW POINT IN HUMAN RELATIONS VIS-A-VIS THE HUMAN FUCKING RACE.

Hillary was disliked by self for a preachy teachy condescending tona and cadence; he is ok morally.

TALK ABOUT BONDS AND INFLATION AND HOW WE'RE IN GOOD SHAPE.

Rachel Maddow TV SHOW

2010-04-20T00:25:00.000-05:00

i know alot of girls cute as teenagers when they are 16-19, which is the plum age of every female human. It's when they get full grown and can act like this it matters

that show on Discovery-I.D., Most Evil held one intriguing fact I will display, All ages shapes and iq's of male humans were shown photos of women of various ages and dress, and 17 registered age the most attractively aged face and stuff.

my brother military, my money comes from the same place yours does; i just get less—put a rifle in my hands.

maddow dumps on the right, doesn't explain shit like i could about bonds and debt and the lies about debt.

WHY MAKE A TV SHOW OUT OF MCVEIGH I WANT TO SEE LEE HARVEY OSWALD NEXT IT'S JUST AS RELEVANT, WHOEVER did that shit knew an aftermath of unpredictable dimensions was certain, a futile, bloody, criminal act. MSNBC has sunk its news label with "The McVeigh Tapes", and in the present political discourse threw a firecracker in the room fuck them for it.

Anonymous

2010-03-25T19:55:00.000-05:00

You dropped your phone service and haven't contacted us; I know you are way too smart for this to be an oversight.

I owe you an apology, I apologize, I'm sorry. Please give your old Dad another chance.

I swear I will never be vulgar, needy or paranoid in front of you or drunk and inappropriate.

We are so proud of you, you and Grandpa have been close; I want it to be like that again.

VETERAN'S DAY

2009-11-11T14:25:00.007-06:00

southern transplants uprooted by the disruption of the agrarian way of life by Northern capital. The next plantation, the factory, operated on the same priciples as King Cotton, Cotton (and tobacco) generated enormous profits from overseas markets, supplying the cash wealth on which the young nation cut its teeth. Human exploitation was thematic in "The Wealth of Nations", by Adam Smith, the prissy tome still being touted as an 'economic bible' by denizens of the the Ronald Reagan campaign. A book that offered a more nonchalant portrayal of slavery than did the King James Version, although Smith's florid narrative practically echoed the cadence of God's Word, demonstrating that the egos of rich boys is truly of its own species, and the test of time proves it.

WE ALL WANT MONEY. When the secessionists allowed a tax deadline to come and go without delivering tribute upon the Treasury Department of the Federal Government by officials of another government from only one of the southern states, it was on.
United States Navy commenced bombarding Fort Sumpter that very next day. The economic impetus for seccession couldn't be more plain. Regardless of how many men of that era are portrayed by Hollywood as surprisingly enlightened on racial views; the American citizenry went along with allowing other men to work for nothing but the merest material means of survival, and the hope that working your ass off will continue to provide a reason not to shoot him on impulse, as many African captives purchased death by the hands of Master's son, for a wealthy youth is often petulent, and slaves were punished to put on a show; they call it terrorism and it's not a racial or ethnic or religious body more prone to utilize it. Terrorism is a tactic, used most commonly by the tremendously outnumbered, and militarily weak, in comparison to any standing army in today's world. Insignificant unless they continue the 'fight'. Like everyone else.

THE MANY ARE USUALLY INVISIBLE. THE FOLLOWERS OF ISLAM ENCIRCLE THE GLOBE. IF A MILLION individuals practicing fundamentalist Islam live a life of worship, sobriety, work and study; who commit fewer sins than the average fundamentalist Baptist; there are the fringe who live the lives of Muslim warriors, in very undeveloped and treacherous terrain; convinced the Arab hordes defeated the Russian Army—not the high tech weapons we gave them like candy bars on Halloween. We provided the Afghan people with the means to inflict enough casualties on the commies, that the enterprise would become stagnant without escalation, and increasingly redundant, vain. What do we hope to bring about in Afghanistan if our Department of Defense employees remain in south Asia until retirement age comes? In my lifetime I have experienced a sure uncommon being too young for one war too old for the next. Even without my criminal record, I lack the degree to become an officer and I was too old to become a Private, 34 is the cut off date, for brand new enlisted men.

AT THE CONCLUSION OF WWII, IN THE TIME JUST AFTER HOSTILITIES CEASED WHEN NERVES WERE STILL RAW, how many thought it was just a matter of time before we went at it again of the ones who knew they would return alive, with all their body parts, totally uninjured, with the aches and pains common to you in your football days; still with pretty good sense, as much as you ever had.
You train yourself to be Master of your Memory; The things you saw were of a nature that induces shock; A level of shock and mental numbness is what propelled you through those days, and the corps—the other guys. You were rarely lonely.
Suprised you are able to remember so much of it, it went by so fast, the experience is presently more vivid sitting in your easy chair remembering it, than you experienced when it happened. It throws you off balance. The human mind is such a fine instrument. To withstand the fear you grew accustomed to, to shoot at people with pure hate pumping through veins and arteries without ever seeing a face, and still recall the most delicate details of falling in love, still aware of the beauty in life and able to treasure it.

WHEN THEY RENAMED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR, AFTER DETAILS OF THE ATOMIC EXPLOSIONS IN JAPAN HAD LONG GAINED CURRENCY; AFTER THE CREATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS WITH ROOSEVELT'S WIDOW REALLY TRYING TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE; DID THEY DO IT FOR THE PURPOSE OF HOPE? War was all we studied in school; it seemed like the only reason anything got decided or changed. The energy and capital let loose during World War II, the industrial progress it required and the response of business will never be paralleled.
Those soldiers are our Department of Defense employees now. I wonder how the guys felt who changed the name of the Department of War, after over 40 million dead around the world. I remember when they ended the draft after Viet Nam. I was a kid, but I thought that was a pretty significant thing, making some amends, coming to grips with a sinful past.

CAPITAL GENERATED BY COTTON PROFITS FINANCED U.S. INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION; extensive inland waterways assured a regional advantage for attracting enterprise planning to provide a large volume of goods to be traded overseas, We have been told the story of Abe Lincoln all our lives, what a good guy he was. He was not a gentleman though, he was a tyrant; declared martial law; suspended habeas corpus. When

The Industrial North—death on an unprecedented, appalling scale; disease, almost universal dispossession, wrecked towns, homeplaces and landscapes. Plantation got knocked down to 'plant', as in "I always thought I'd end up working in the auto plant", Mechanization imposed economic displacement, forcing the largest migration of people from one region to whole differant region within our borders everand consolidation farmswith some high school, who had made the middle class team there in the victorious North, didn’t catch on and probably never asked anyone’s advice much less pick up a book for free at the public library.

DU-DUDE LISSEN

2009-10-28T18:52:00.001-05:00

NORMAN SAID the question is is property power? OR ARE THE PEOPLE POWER? THAT WAS THE QUESTION BEING DECIDED AT THE 1968 CHICAGO POLICE RIOT THAT RUINED ANY CHANCE THE DEMOCRATS WOULD WIN; LBJ had made some rich segregationists very angry; THE COUNTER REVOLUTION FUNDED WITH MONEY BEAT ANY FUCKING IDEA THAT PEOPLE WILL ACTUALLY SIT IN PLACES OF POWER, WHO DON'T WANT THE MONEY, THE SALARY, JUST THE JOB, i GOT ssi COMING IN FOR MY BATTERED BODY. lET ME BE A DECIDER LIKE GEORGE; ONLY I LISTENED AT LEAST 85% OF THE TIME, i RARELY GOT REALLY DRUNK BEFORE I MET MY EX. SHE WAS A REAL HEADCASE; GROWING UP hot child in the city; I LISTEN TO THAT NOW AND IT'S LIKE INAPPROPRIATE AS HELL i recall that song played nightly at the PINK PUSSYCAT HALFMILE WALK OFF nAVAL tRAINING CENTER, ORLANDO FLA. I STARTED MY 8 WEEK boot may 31, 1978; before my senior classmates got di[plomas; I was gonna flunk for the first time in my life tEMPATURES REACHED 110 DRILL WOULD STOP, WE COULD LAY ON OUR ASS AND SMOKE CIGARETTES AND SWEAT, WE'D GET TAP WATER I did little in the Navy but work off a little karma FOR BEING SUCH A POOR STUDENT WHILE getting a 248 on the GED and a 93 on the ASVAB WITHOUT ANY PREPARATION, Social promotion to each successive grade in public school. you are a personality JOSEPH HUGHES COLEMAN living the life of luxury in the Thunderstorm South with double coupons dial-up, few indulgences !!!!!!! beyond !!! cheap beer FRESH KROGER MEAT fat ass buds WOMEN!!! COPS& CAR SALESMAN NERVOUS unnecessary expense REPLACE WITH NEW EXPENSE?? Time to make free what belongs to us, man! The internet was completely funded by taxpayers every inch paid for outta the FEDERAL TILL paid up to date like the interstate highways of modern America then peddled by politicians the right to pimp the US population going to a numerous ally to the most advantageous friends FOR POWER RETENTION fuck all that! all bets are off motherfucker that autoworker who paid into a private pension plan, having to tell his kids no they can't have something Believing The Union Serving the Company as WhiteCollar dictates The US should have had ideological strikes many times since the laws giving blacks some protection from a guilty past Mainly to dismantle the Patrician Plantation Model of OWNERSHIP OF THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION tHESE COMPANIES MIGHT HAVE DEVELOPED FOR THIS DAY allowing automobilists to traverse to every numbered zeroed in on dwelling they might have made subdivisions golf cart territory! who would hazard an estimate of the number of heads rolled on the swords of white men wearing the colors of the militia or regular army??? Beheading was not uncommon when swords were more common than newfangled musket HA HA The focus of NBC NEWS and its little alphabet chicks follow BEHEADED SHOT THROUGH THE HEART GASSED BLOWN TO INVISIBLE HAMBURGER BY a very expensive bomb is GOODBYE MEAT BODY WE ALL THOUGHT 9/11 what a terrible way to go because we all saw it on that shared optic nerve we've adapted we view on a remote monitor outside our head. And some people will replay the tape, tapes, multitude of cameraland, until all must agree what happened this is undermining ourintelligence and our guts they put a ref on the field he's gotta BE A DECIDER that's what i saw I CALLED IT THAT WAY don't take the dignity of a human being away from zebras and give it to purveyors instead of the participants How did crooked ref OPERATE aNd AFFECT THE OUTCOME OF NBA GAMES 2 YEARS AGO Certain of a MEMORIZATION OF EACH 2 DIMENSIONAL FRAME OF STATIONARY VIDEO INPUT, NOT A REPRESENTATION OF WHAT HE PERCIEVED IN THREE DIMENSION WHILE IN MOTION, ON THE RODS AND CONES INSIDE HIS EYEBALLS PHENOMENON AND PHENOMENA!!! OR A CAMERA BEING AIMED BY ANOTHER HUMAN BEING TO WEAK TO SUIT UP! they go broke too IWAS GETTING HIGH LISTENING TO DYLAN IN THE ROOM, dylan muzak is how i REMEMBER THOSE HIGH SCHOOL DAYS. but we had fun ; THAT WAS WHEN ALMOST ALL COPS WERE MEN in confrontational assignments. LIKE PRISON GUARDS BEFORE THE COURTS FORCED STATES TO MAKE PRISON SAFE ENOUGH FOR any 'LEGALLY QUALIFIED FEMALE ALL AT PUBLIC EXPENSE, COURT ORDERS BEING ISSUED WOULD HAVE BLED ANY GROUP ENTITY "free" people perpetuated to FREE A SPOUSE TO BE ALMOST 100% PERCENT PARENT except when sweet husband lets her take off and go hogwild! deciding after a while i didn't want to hear lies BUT I DIDN"T WANT THE DETAILS EITHER WHICH SHE FLAUNTED either trying to get a rise out of me SHE KNEW HOW TO GET ME MAD AS HELL AND EXPLOITED IT like a bullfighter; i never touched her like i did the last real fistfight i started in sixth grade THERE WAS THIS KID TOWDY MY-ow-SKI, NO SPELLCHECK he was a chaldean kid who had a flattop haircut in JUNE 1972, KIDS HAD HAIR DOWN TO THEIR ASSES WHERE WE LIVED all white and jewish Southfield, NORTH OF BADDASS EIGHT MILE, SHS 2 MILES DUE NORTH OF SWANK HIGHRISE APT. BLDG. 12 storeys as the english, fuck 'em, U.K. Citizens own more of the United States than any foriegn group, property as-it-is in the States which the people, kids were able to win the police over to their side NEVER HASSLING THEM AT SCHOOL my dad fed them daily across 10 Mile; i knew a lot of cop faces; BUT NEVER ACKNOWLEDGED ONE save that "Big jim " chap his DAD'S age from North CAROLINA WHO (WAS IF NOT SHY, WAS taci turn, AMONG OURSELVES 'i think he told DAD he had kids and WHO WATCH THE BACKS OF THIS SET OF COLEMAN'S, way before MADD. Since they made prisons easy enough for a little blonde titty-dancer IN JACKSON PRISON level one; among a majority certain to parole AND LIFERS AND LIS MEN AMONG THE MOST, RATIONAL, EDUCATED, COWARDLY; POISED, it was a place you wanted your reputation to remain unsulleyed by snitching or homosexualty, and aced that, it is a myth that there is widepread OPEN HOMOSEXUALITY IN PRISONS except on the downlow EXCEPT FOR THE QUEENS SOME WHO LOVED IT THERE IN THE 1960'S , WHEN michigan was still an emerging GIANT WO MANIFESTED ITSELF AS A MAN born john engler, FUTURE GOVERNOR, who gluttonously fat, DENIED THE POOREST AND WEAKEST who married ol' girl in his 40's WHEN HE WAS ALREADY MORBIDLY OBESE, WHOSE STATELY BRIDE WAS REPORTED be consulting fertility specialists WHOSE ISOCILES TRIANGLE HEADED HUSBAND, SCORED A HAT-TRICK; TRIPLETS; fat ass engler getting himself off i a petrie dish of his wifes HARVESTED EGGS EXACTLY LIKE SOME BIBLICAL POTENTATE, he never worked outside of dad's farm, school, and government, because the family had the money to make him prominent and he was TALKING HEAD OF THE BANKERS AND EXECUTIVES THAT corrupt DON'T GET HIGH AND DANCE BUT HAVE CREATED CERTAINLY THE 'CENTRAL GOVERNMENT' he vocally opposed, A GEORGE WALLACE FOE ; TO PIPE that to a city THAT HAS CODDLED HIM since he wrote a book at 24 AND IT SOLD! TO LIBRARIES YO' DADDY'S FRIENDS KNOW!! GOOD LUCK!!) redfaced jIM amused a BANK TELLER WITH A CHECK FROM bank of the french broad. french broad RIVER RUNS between NC, TN, SC and GA, and was probably HAD A NAME Thats French For Broad; after being overtaken by the wild, stoic, toiling, ScosIRISH THATBIG REDNECK YOU'D SEEN EVERY fuckin time you was there with the place open...since 1966 WHEN YA TURNED SIX rEMEMBER 'uncle' GEORGE RIGHT DOWN THE STREET, his wife 'aunt' nelly:YEARS BEFORE HORROR FILM made it creepy to say; ABOUT CHOSEN FAMILY FRIENDS WHO YOUR PARENTS WOULD bestow the titles on like royalty! MAN!

terrain of profit

2009-07-24T01:47:00.000-05:00

When doctors weep it pours There is a terrain of profit the machine operator never learns of until he is jerked around by armed police forces, with paramilitary swat a syllable away—and needs lawyer doctor, and finally sees the faces behind glass of the luxury suite of the new baseball stadium and groks he is outside to be rained on with the weather that stopped games before greed became so fierce a kid can't by a baseball hat for 30 bucks and the new stadium removed a roof. Baseball isn't football until accountants get a hold of it. Bitterness in America, the States of is kept in banks of the sidelines lest freedom is denied or now terror is invoked. The crumbling of sturdy bricks at Michigan and Trumball so a parking concession went in the pizza boy's mcdonald pockets, a wig wearer. Now the cheap seats are exposed to rainclouds as ziggarat reversed, the men who drove gm and families to ground sit in a living room, at ground level, and imagination makes them one of the guys, who never swung a bat. Bitterness

BRIGHTMOOR INSTITUTE

2008-11-05T13:53:00.002-06:00

CONGRATULATIONS BARACK OBAMA I'M REOPENING THE INSTITUTE Obama's victory has inspired me. NEW POSTS ADDRESS FOR BRIGHTMOOR JOURNAL http://binstitute.blogspot.com

VOTE FOR THAT ONE he's good

2008-10-31T20:58:00.003-05:00

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama, as prepared for delivery Resources for the Future 1616 P Street, NW Washington, DC September 15, 2005 As the flood waters recede in New Orleans and the survivors of Katrina begin to rebuild their lives, one truth has become achingly clear over the past few weeks: Our government wasn't ready to save its own citizens from a catastrophe of biblical proportions. It wasn't even close. Despite years of planning, preparing, and warnings from countless scientists, experts, and government officials - that the levees would break, that our first responders didn't have the best tools for communication, that FEMA was under-funded and undervalued - despite all of this, Katrina caught the government off-guard, flat-footed, and dangerously disorganized. The most tragic consequence of this slow response was the incalculable loss of human life. But miles off the Gulf Coast, as the deadly storm first raged towards shore, another frightening consequence emerged from our government's failure to prepare. In the moments before the hurricane hit, Gulf refineries that made up one-eighth of our country's total capacity were evacuated and shut down. 95% of oil production was immediately suspended in a region where we find over a quarter of America's oil. And gas prices that were already at record highs shot up even further all over the country - reaching $6 a gallon in some places. Today, they're hovering over $3 - a price that experts say will remain for the rest of the year. And what we don't see on television is how in a few months, the price of home heating oil and natural gas will reach new heights as well. It would be one thing if this storm struck at a time of stability. But over the last few years, limited supplies and an unprecedented growth in demand have sent the global oil market itself teetering towards the edge of disaster. With our own Energy Department telling us that U.S. demand for oil will jump 40% over the next twenty years and countries like China and India adding millions of cars to their roads, the price of oil is reaching levels we just can't handle anymore. A few years ago, we paid just $25 for a barrel of oil. Today, we're paying around $63. Since this affects the price of everything from gas to airfare to groceries, analysts at Global Insight, an economic consulting firm, say that if we hit $100 a barrel, the U.S. economy could very well tumble into recession. Which brings me to one of the central lessons of Katrina, one that goes far beyond the gas hikes and the price gouging we're facing today: The days of running a 21st century economy on a 20th century fossil fuel are numbered - and we need to realize that before it's too late. Our persistent dependence on oil is a danger our government has known about for years. And despite constant warnings by researchers and scientists, major corporations and our own government officials, it's a danger they have failed to prepare for, listen to, or seriously try to guard against. It's a danger we can no longer afford to ignore. Katrina, after all, was a natural disaster that affected only our domestic oil supply. But just imagine the threat to our national security from a geopolitical disaster - a war or an embargo - that cut off our supply from the rest of the world, where we get most of our oil. Right now, we depend on some of the most politically volatile countries in the Middle East and elsewhere to fuel our energy needs. It doesn't matter if they're budding democracies, despotic regimes with nuclear intentions, or havens for the madrassas that plant the seeds of terror in young minds - they get our money because we need their oil. What's worse - it's oil that's not very well protected. Over the last few years, we know that terrorists have stepped up their attempts to launch attacks on the poorly defended oil tankers and pipelines of the Middle East. And a former CIA agent tells us that if a terrorist hijacked a plane in Kuwait and crashed it into an oil complex in Saudi Arabia, it could take enough oil off the market to cause more economic damage than a direct attack on the United States. At that point, $6 a gallon would look like a steal. Hopefully, this short-term, hurricane-induced oil crisis will subside. But the clear and present danger to our economy and our security from America's long-term dependency on oil will not subside - unless we act now. In fact, it will only get worse. As usual, the American people are already way ahead of Washington. Whether it's Galesburg farmers growing the corn that can fuel our cars or the Chicago factory workers making the microchip that let's us plug them in, people across the country have been taking America's energy future into their own hands with the same sense of innovation and optimism that sent the Wright brothers into the sky, led Dr. Salk to a cure for polio, and fueled Henry Ford's confidence that his workers could afford the cars they made. But for too long now, this can-do spirit has been stifled by a can't-do government that seems to think it has no role in solving great national challenges or rallying a country to a cause. One that's content with simply giving more tax breaks to energy industries without asking for anything in return. Content with sending $650 million a day to countries like Saudi Arabia to pay for our fuel. And content with energy legislation that takes on only the easiest parts of the problem. Now, I voted for the last energy bill. Because it took some baby steps in the right direction. It invests in the renewable, homegrown biofuels that could turn out to be some of the most promising alternatives to oil. It contains some provisions that would help us use alternative energy sources, increase our refinery capacity, and invest in clean coal technology. And recently, the administration made some executive policy changes that make it more difficult to classify cars as "light trucks," which would increase the production of more fuel-efficient cars. None of these provisions do any harm - and a few do some good. But the energy bill and the administration's reforms don't suffer from sins of commission. Instead, they suffer from sins of omission. The solutions are too timid - the reforms too small. A bill that reduces our dependency on foreign oil by just 3% when our demand is about to jump 40% is not a serious energy policy. We need to do more. The truth is, an oil future is not a secure future for America. Indeed, the rest of the world is already moving away from oil, and the longer we wait, the more difficult and painful it will be for our companies and our workers to catch up. Countries like China and Japan are creating jobs and slowing oil consumption by churning out and buying millions of fuel-efficient cars. Brazil, a nation that once relied on foreign countries to import 80% of its crude oil, will now be entirely self-sufficient in a few years thanks to its investment in biofuels. By getting more ethanol on the market and equipping their cars with the flexible-fuel engines that allow them to run on this fuel, Brazil has succeeded secured its energy supply while still giving consumers a break at the pump. So why can't we do this? Why can't this be one of the great American projects of the 21st century? The answer is, it can. We can do this with technology we have on the shelves right now; we can do it by saving, not crippling, our ailing auto companies; and we can do it by using the kind of clean, renewable sources of energy that we can literally grow right here in America. There's no silver bullet. A solution to our energy dilemma won't come overnight. But we don't have to accept the wait-and-see attitude anymore. It flies in the face of our history and our founding principles. Katrina has shown us what could happen if we don't move away from an oil economy, but it has also provided us with a moment to challenge that kind of a future. Now is the time to seize that moment. In the short-term, this probably means that we'll need to build even more refinery capacity and create not just a Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but also a Strategic Gasoline Reserve so that we can deal with the type of shortages we saw from Katrina. It means that we'll need to invest more in the clean technology that will allow us to burn more coal, our country's most abundant fossil fuel. And it means that we should continue to encourage the use of renewable fuels - by insisting that they make up 20% of our energy use and making sure that every new car in America has a flexible-fuel engine by 2010. But we need to take even greater steps than these short-term measures. We need solutions that strike at the very heart of our dependence on oil. Right now, the largest consumers of oil in this country are the cars we drive. And right now, we also have the technology to build cars that travel much further on a gallon of gas. We already have thousands of gas-electric hybrid cars driving around that can get 50 miles per gallon. Soon, plug-in hybrids will be able to get 75 miles per gallon. And experts believe that if we pump biofuels like E85 into a plug-in hybrid car, we can actually get up to 500 miles per gallon of gasoline. So the technology is on the shelf. It's ready and available for our car companies to use. If we made sure that all passenger vehicles built in the U.S. got 40 miles per gallon, we would save consumers up to $5,000 at the pump over the life of their cars. If we do this alone, we could reduce our dependence on foreign oil by over 1 billion barrels a year by 2020. For years, we've hesitated to raise fuel economy standards as a nation in part because of a very legitimate concern - the impact it would have on Detroit. The auto industry is right when they argue that transitioning to more hybrid and fuel-efficient cars would require massive investment at a time when they're struggling under the weight of rising health care costs, sagging profits, and stiff competition from Europe and Japan. But it's precisely because of that competition that they don't have a choice. As the demand and waiting lists for hybrid cars skyrocket, demand for SUVs - American car companies' biggest source of profit - is expected to plummet. The market is telling the auto industry to move away from oil - but so far only foreign companies are listening. China now has a higher fuel economy standard than we do, and it's got 200,000 hybrids on its roads. Japan's Toyota is doubling production of the popular Prius to sell 100,000 in the U.S. this year, and it's getting ready to open a brand new production plant in China. These companies are running circles around their American counterparts. Ford is only making 20,000 Escape Hybrids this year, and GM's brand won't be on the market until 2007. This isn't just costing us energy efficiency - it's decimating American businesses and costing American workers their jobs. There is now no doubt that fuel-efficient cars represent the future of the auto industry. These cars will be built and bought and mass quantities. The only question is where and by who? If American car companies hope to be a part of that future, if they hope to compete - if they hope to survive - they must make the necessary adjustments so that they can start building these cars. And we must help them do it. There are many ways to do this and many good conversations that already taking place. One option is to provide direct subsidies to the auto industries so that it can transition its production to more fuel-efficient vehicles. Others have suggested providing tax credits for consumers to buy these cars. Today I'd like to give you another example of a deal that Washington could make with Detroit. We'd start by raising the fuel economy standards in this country by 3% a year over the next fifteen years. But to help our auto industry make the transition - to give them the competitive edge they need against their foreign counterparts - we'd pay for part of the biggest costs they face today: retiree health care. Right now, health care costs represent $1,500 of the price of every GM car that's made. By picking up part of the tab for the health care costs of their retirees, we'd be lifting a huge burden off the auto industry so that they'll invest in the technology that will finally reduce America's dependence on foreign oil. These solutions - investing in more hybrids and renewable energy sources; raising CAFE standards and helping our auto industry transition to a fuel-efficient future - represent a road to energy independence that will require some tough decisions and difficult politics, but as we look toward the future, it's the road we must travel as a nation. We could open up every square inch of America to drilling and we still wouldn't even make a dent in our oil dependency. We could open up ANWR today, and at its peak, which would be more than a decade from now, it would give us enough oil to take care of our transportation needs for about a month. Clearly, this is not a solution. At the dawn of the Internet Age, Andy Grove of Intel famously said that there are two kinds of businesses: those that use email and those that will. Today, there are two kinds of car companies: those who make fuel-efficient cars and those that will. We can't follow the world anymore. We must lead. And if we don't act now, the economic and societal benefits that have always been the hallmark of American innovation will find a home somewhere else. There are few issues in American politics that have such a far-reaching effect on almost every aspect of our well-being as a nation, yet remain so absent from public interest and action. But as we cut through all the talk and the politics in the energy debate, we can see what the debate is really about. We see the family that thinks twice about what they'll spend at the grocery store this week, because they've been paying $40 to fill up the tank for the last month. We see the grandmother who isn't sure how she'll make her Social Security check cover January's heating bill. The autoworker who isn't sure what the future at Ford holds for him. And the mother who sees turmoil in the Middle East and worries that someday her son might have to fight to secure our oil supply. Ultimately, we see a nation that cannot control its future as long as it cannot control the source of energy that keeps it running. Recently, I returned from a trip to Ukraine, where I had the opportunity to meet the nation's third president, Viktor Yushchenko. Since the country first broke away from the Soviet Union more than a decade earlier, Ukraine has been trying to forge its own identity and assert its own independence from Russia. This culminated earlier this year in the Orange Revolution, a mass demonstration from thousands of protestors who stood by Yushchenko and his promise to move his country further from the sphere of Russian influence. President Yushchenko finally won. But today, Ukraine remains almost entirely dependent on - guess who -- Russia - for all it's oil and gas supplies. And it is widely expected that in anticipation of next year's parliamentary elections, Russia will triple the prices of both. Despite all the soaring rhetoric, the demonstrations and the courage, Ukraine still finds itself at the mercy of its former patron - a nation that can now influence every political and economic decision they make - all because of oil. This will not be America's future - but this is the stranglehold that fossil fuels can have on a nation's freedom. Ukraine may have little choice in the matter. The most powerful and wealthy nation on earth, teeming with brilliant minds and cutting-edge technology, surely does. The genius of the American people has already shown us the path towards energy independence, now they're just waiting for their government to take them there. Let's finally get it done. Thank you.

http://www.marijuana.com/democratic-candidates/33434-barack-obama.html

Thanks to Plainsman for #3

THE HOME STRETCH

2008-09-02T17:47:00.001-05:00

Barack Obama

A More Perfect Union

delivered 18 March 2008, Philadelphia, PA

[As prepared for delivery]

"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union." Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across the ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787. The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations. Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution -- a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time. And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part -- through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk -- to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time. This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign -- to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together -- unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction -- towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren. This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story. I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners -- an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible. It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts -- that out of many, we are truly one. Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans. This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either "too black" or "not black enough." We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well. And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn. On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike. I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely -- just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed. But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country -- a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam. As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems -- two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all. Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth -- by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS. In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity: "People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note -- hope! -- I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories -- of survival, and freedom, and hope -- became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish -- and with which we could start to rebuild." That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety -- the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions -- the good and the bad -- of the community that he has served diligently for so many years. I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.

I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love. Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias. But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America -- to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality. The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through -- a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American. Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students. Legalized discrimination -- where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments -- meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities. A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families -- a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods -- parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement -- all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us. This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them. But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it -- those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations -- those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings. And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races. In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience -- as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time. Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism. Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze -- a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns -- this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding. This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own. But I have asserted a firm conviction -- a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people -- that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union. For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances -- for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives -- by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny. Ironically, this quintessentially American -- and yes, conservative -- notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change. The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country -- a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen -- is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope -- the audacity to hope -- for what we can and must achieve tomorrow. In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past, are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds -- by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper. In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle -- as we did in the O.J. trial -- or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina -- or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies. We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change. That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time. This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together. This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit. This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned. I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election. There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today -- a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta. There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there. And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom. She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat. She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too. Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice. Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley." "I’m here because of Ashley." By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children. But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins. great religions demand -- that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

RUDE IS NOT DISRESPECT

2008-03-22T19:31:00.002-05:00

FERRARO: RUDE; TALKING HEADS: RUDER; SHARPTON: RUDEST

AS VOTERS WITNESSED THE FIRST AND ONLY FEMALE YET NAMED TO THE TICKET OF EITHER MAJOR PARTY, THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1984 ASSURED ITS MENTION IN HISTORY BOOKS. ELECTION NIGHT SAW A ONE-SIDED LANDSLIDE, RONALD REAGAN WAS REELECTED BY AN ALL-TIME RECORD MARGIN, WINNING EVERY ELECTORAL COLLEGE VOTE, EXCEPT THOSE CAST FOR RESIDENTS OF WASHINGTON D.C., MASSACHUSSETTS AND THE FELLOW MINNESOTANS OF THE VANQUISHED FORMER VICE PRESIDENT, WALTER MONDALE.

THE MOST NORTH MEDITERRANEAN CLIMATE ON THESE SHORES HAS SAN FRANCISCO IN IT, WHERE THE DOG DAYS OF SUMMER IN ORWELL’S YEAR PROVIDED A RARIFIED MILIEU; THOSE GATHERED OUT THE AIR CONDITIONED DRONE OF NEW YORK, CHICAGO AND COUNTRYSIDE IN AUGUST; MUST HAVE BREATHED DEEP QUAFFS OF UNTREATED AIR, TO NEED A SWEATER AT DUSK WAS LIKE NEW FREON. THEY WERE TRUE BELIEVERS AGAIN! DEMOCRATS! THE DELEGATES GOT GASSED ON THE CADENCE OF JESSE JACKSON ORATORY, MARIO CUOMO, ERUDITE, KEYNOTE ON THE TWO AMERICAS A PURE CHRYSTAL OF TRIBAL CREED WERE TRANSPORTED. WALTER MONDALE, A MINISTER’S SON, GAVE THE PROCEEDINGS ITS APOGEE, CHOOSING REPRESENTATIVE GERALDINE A. FERRARO OF NEW YORK AS A RUNNING MATE, THE ACCLAIMATION GIVEN TO THAT TICKET COULD BE FELT ALL THE WAY TO THE WEST SIDE OF DETROIT THROUGH THE CATHODE RAY TUBE AND SPEAKER ON THE COLOR RCA, AS I WATCHED, I KNEW I’D ALWAYS BE A DEMOCRAT, EVEN IF I GOT RICH; UNLIKE NEW DEAL DEMOCRAT RONALD REAGAN WHOSE IDEOLOGY DID A 180 DEGREE TURN WHEN THE PROSPERITY OF THOSE YEARS PUT HIM IN A HIGHER TAX BRACKET.

MORE APT AS CORPORATE SHILL THAN ACTOR. AFTER THE HOLLYWOOD GIGS DRIED UP, AS HOST/SPOKESMAN OF TV WESTERN “DEATH VALLEY DAYS” TOUTING 20 MULE TEAM BORATEEM AND LATER G.E. ACTOR; BANK ACCOUNTS AND PARTY AFFILIATION COULD BE CHARTED ON A GRAPH. THAT CONVENTION WAS FAMILY REUNION, TENT MEETING ALTAR CALL, ROCK AND ROLL, GROUP THERAPY, UNIVERSITY LECTURE HALL,THE LAST TRIBAL ONE.

NOW EXPERTS PREARRANGE; EXTRACT RANDOMNESS; ENGINEER UNITY, THE RESULT DREARIER EVERY FOUR YEARS WITH ALL THE ATMOSPHERE OF A HIGH SCHOOL ASSEMBLY, A ROTTEN TV VARIETY SHOW NOBODY WOULD WATCH IF THE NUCLEAR FOOTBALL WASN’T SOMEHOW INVOLVED. WANTING MOST JUST TO WIN, TO HOLD POWER, CANDIDATES ARE SO ADEPT AT STAGECRAFT, AND PARTY LINES ARE BLURRY AT BEST.

One of two political parties has nominated every human ever elected to the executive branch of U.S. government. The two party system has survived or Americans have survived it; it continues. Third Party candidates gin up the fervor of true believers in occassional quadrennials, gumming up the works for number-crunchers, party hacks and the big-party candidate whose support on the margins may be bled for irrational reasons; too much agreement on issues with #3, historic forces outside the ken of elected officeholders who wield only as much power and influence as a majority allows, splitting political loyalties, grudges held against LBJ for positions, decisions dictated by historic inevitability, by southern democratic grudges held against rended party identidy useless, despite longstanding concord on an array of issues other than Civil Rights; recreated the political landscape, and the “Solid South” that delivered its votes to the democratic candidate, except national hero Eisenhower, like clockwork each cycle since FDR, wavering in 1960 when JFK, a Roman Catholic was nominated; has been Republican fodder since 1968, when Alabama’s Democratic Governor George Wallace ran third party, support for Democrat Humphrey had all slack pulled out of it, giving Nixon a narrow victory.

FERRARO: RUDE; TALKING HEADS: RUDER; SHARPTON: RUDEST

After a paid speech last week at the Torrance Cultural Center in California, Geraldine A. Ferraro, 1984 Democratic Party nominee for vice-president, was quoted in a Torrance newspaper, The Daily Breeze: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”

The first I heard of the Bruhaha was MSNBC, whose on camera personnel is a subject of my closest observation since my disability checks started, OK even before that.

first impression : it was such a rude thing, that even the whole New York City personna thing, and hearing her accent (Bronx? Queens? Far Rockaway? Islip?) as The practiced replies of a welltrained politician flowed like city water from a kitchen faucet, to whichever, whosever camera was next; the whole set : including corect voice modulation, tone, volumes, each offering customized as approriate to fit whichever provisos, context, and juxtiposed reasons not to misunderstand her, or take her too seriously,…using her skills extemporaneous, improvising, theanswer quality varied with the esteem the asking reporter rated, personally, establishment-wise, tv ratings; so that her level of interest, annoyance, level of education and other valuations I won’t presume to label; a dazzling performance. Her bag of tricks were as comfortable to her as a pair of broke in shoes; even the reactions to her top shelf material; that revealed something more real, offering a glimpse, of how much more well educated she is than you or anyone else you know. probably almost anyone confronted in her political career required her to tone it down to avoid intimidating even some friends, and it was a lesson learned how offputting when men realize she is smarter than they ever thought true of their own self, smarter right now than they can get even in a make believe world or no matter if life extectancy doubled. In the span of time since academy days and satisfying enough ofher private mother-housewife lifescript she was psychologically unable to avoid, ethnic &cultural forces aside, raising her three boys still provided a stronger sense of achievement than anything else she set her hand to, especially the whole vice president episode; she realized before she said yes to walter it meant her name would appear in print and be read by schoolchildren for as long as america lasted or us history was taught in it; so many people had jabbered a rendition of the facts as if by a rare, uncommon sense and sensibility, they percieved what millions with good eyesight, and even correctable vision failed to, as if seeing through a glass darkly, the glass look being looked through has yet to be other than tv picture tube glass, of the tv set they were watching in august 1984, watching a tv channel as wall to wall convention coverage by all three networks preempted many favorite shows. a tv set then was the filter through which three networks and pbs offered pictures and descriptions of the outside world. with fewer outlets and before the vcr became more affordable (it wasn’t yet like a toasteroven for people our age), the information source most convenient and free was tv news and increased reliance cut across all lines: economic, racial, regional, generational, religious, Ethnic, less so across educational lines-studies seemed am at proving that the longer you go to school and read books causes a drop in the entertainment experienced watching tv.

As television eroded cultural boundries on every front, homogenizing american awareness of what was going on around them in both rich and poor, black and white, yankees, hillbillies, cowboys, indians and city slickers started talking more alike, and people of all ages enjoyed america’s funniest videos, cops and other programs like they were all the same age, tv watching provided common ground for jew and gentile, catholic and protestant to laugh at each other, and provided a view of atheists, aliens and/or foreigners (legal and/or illegal), poor people, criminals, and other miscellaneous outsiders, a non sectarian fear of the unknown, leaving all worship, dietary laws to the individual as jehovah commanded whatever flock, sect, etc. etc. to obey, in his segment of the judeo-christian opening to all us citizens who believe in at least jehovah and the old testament of the holy bible a framework of mutual understanding that any english speaking member of a recognized traditional judeao-christian following, temple, cathedral, etc. etc. will find unoffensive offering hope a future era of interfaith cooperation by agreeing together who are those we mutually need to keep an eye on and/or straighten out

Accomplishments and financial reward until enough time and freedom allowed her the mobility and contact outside the home to begin the formation of real world adult goals to pursue, that it was into a male oriented , Patrician paradigm she entered, where the view of women as objects to be dominated had the greatest circulation in the currency of ideas she expected was commonplace in a run of the mill business environment aspects demands lifescript requirements ithe course professional, political, and important social relationships surerank, . cunning the yokels her easily as Grandma might open the handsome wooden case that held her good rodgers silver on Thanksgiving when all the family’s there.

The meanness conveyed in her words was undeflected, and her minimizing couldn’t blunt what a sore loser she is and probably always has been. Senator Barack Obama winning votes she coveted for Hillary meant being African American was lucky this year; like some bratty kids I remember from my 2 seasons playing organized Little League baseball. Luck explained any success an opponent might have. No one likes losing but the big reason sports are encouraged in childhood development is learned by playing the game itself, by osmosis, without lectures and books. It even must dawn on slow-witted kids, the appreciation for the skill and effort of others; the value of hustle and effort, learning what a game is; only a game. One learns to accept loss; as well as how to be a good winner. It usually works.

I clearly remember seeing the first game of the 1968 World Series on TV: it was the first World Series game I ever watched, the whole 3^rd grade watched it together at school, the hometown Detroit Tigers played the defending World Champion St. Louis Cardinals, Bob Gibson pitched a shut-out, with 17 strike outs, still the single game record for World Series play. My unaided memory of the game is that the Tigers never had a chance (see box score below) after a 1^st inning double by Tiger legend Al Kaline, 4 singles and a walk account for all Tiger baserunners, with Mickey Stanley getting caught stealing. I don’t recall seeing a post season major league game even close to being as lop-sided as that one seemed. Bob Gibson won 24 games and ended the regular season with an astonishing compiled ERA of 1.12 earning both the 1968 National League Cy Young Award and MVP, receiving every first place vote cast for senior circuit MVP.

Baseball Almanac Box Scores

Detroit Tigers 0, St. Louis Cardinals 4

Game played on Wednesday, October 2, 1968 at Busch Stadium II

Detroit Tigers	ab	r	h	rbi
McAuliffe 2b	4	0	1	0
Stanley ss	4	0	2	0
Kaline rf	4	0	1	0
Cash 1b	4	0	0	0
Horton lf	4	0	0	0
Northrup cf	3	0	0	0
Freehan c	2	0	0	0
Wert 3b	2	0	1	0
Mathews ph	1	0	0	0
Tracewski 3b	0	0	0	0
McLain p	1	0	0	0
Matchick ph	1	0	0	0
Dobson p	0	0	0	0
Brown ph	1	0	0	0
McMahon p	0	0	0	0
Totals	31	0	5	0

St. Louis Cardinals	ab	r	h	rbi
Brock lf	4	1	1	1
Flood cf	4	0	1	0
Maris rf	3	1	0	0
Cepeda 1b	4	0	0	0
McCarver c	3	1	1	0
Shannon 3b	4	1	2	1
Javier 2b	3	0	1	2
Maxvill ss	2	0	0	0
Gibson p	2	0	0	0
Totals	29	4	6	4

Detroit	0	0	0		0	0	0		0	0	0	–	0	5	3
St. Louis	0	0	0		3	0	0		1	0	x	–	4	6	0


Detroit Tigers	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO
McLain L (0-1)	5.0	3	3	2	3	3
Dobson	2.0	2	1	1	1	0
McMahon	1.0	1	0	0	0	0
Totals	8.0	6	4	3	4	3

St. Louis Cardinals	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO
Gibson W (1-0)	9.0	5	0	0	1	17
Totals	9.0	5	0	0	1	17
E–Cash (1), Northrup (1), Freehan (1). 2B–Detroit Kaline (1,off Gibson). 3B–St. Louis McCarver (1,off McLain). HR–St. Louis Brock (1,7th inning off Dobson 0 on, 2 out). SH–Gibson (1,off McLain). CS–Stanley (1,2nd base by Gibson/McCarver); Javier (1,2nd base by Dobson/Freehan). SB–Brock (1,2nd base off McLain/Freehan); Javier (1,2nd base off McLain/Freehan); Flood (1,2nd base off Dobson/Freehan). U–Tom Gorman (NL), Jim Honochick (AL), Stan Landes (NL), Bill Kinnamon (AL), Bill Haller (AL), Doug Harvey (NL). T–2:29. A–54,692.

Game played on Wednesday, October 2, 1968 at Busch Stadium II

Baseball Almanac Box Score

Bob Gibson belongs among a rarified elite of clutch World Series performers. He appeared in three World Series during a five season span (1964, 67, 68) against three different teams, all required Gibson to start a decicive game 7 for all the marbles, pressure that Gibson, a peerless competitor, appeared to welcome. 2-1 in game seven starts, a 7-2 post-season performer before the playoff era makes Gibson one of the most sucessful non-Yankee World Series starters of all time, he equaled the World Series record 3-0 best pitching performance in a seven game series, and set a World Series game record for strikeouts, fanning 17 in game one against Detroit in 1968. Few athletes ever offered a team what Bob Gibson supplied. The difference winning requires at the championship level in a professional team sport cannot be measured just by crunching numbers, and made more difference to the winning St Louis teams of the 60’s than any one player I can name. Gibson shocked the baseball world in 1964 as St. Louis won its first pennant since 1946, over the Phillies dead body.

and they played all day games in the Series back then, Detroit had been absent from World Series play since Allied Forces achieved complete victory on VJ Day ending WWII, they beat the Cubs about two months after US bomber crews dropped a pair of A-Bombs on the Japanese mainland ( Cub fans know the 2008 season is the 63^rd since fielding an entrant to the fall classic). Our teacher, Mr. Perry rolled one of metal carts the 4 foot tall atop which B&W TV sets were mounted bolted or welded. Yet each set was heavily marked “A/V Dep’t” in black letters with a 1960’s era magic marker, Southfield School Board bought in bulk: Touching any known surface with the uncapped felt of the business end of one meant change of a permanence nature unfamiliara no going back permanent color (forget cloth), kept locked in their desk, away from kids not to mention cloth in case a little K-6 crook swiped one, these TV sets that to be as heavy as a kitchen stove, it could be identified.

Ms. Ferraro did not disavow the remark. Mrs. Clinton, while calling it regrettable, did not break with her. On Wednesday, March 12, who was on the Clinton finance committee, resigned from the campaign after being criticized by Mr. Obama’s advisers, among others.

She accused the Obama campaign of misrepresenting her remarks to hurt Mrs. Clinton, saying: “They have played the race card time after time after time. The campaign has a goal, which is to attack Hillary. They have to find a way and they can’t do it on experience, on issues, so they look for places. They came up with this, and, well, here we go.” She specifically accused David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, of using race as a tactical weapon and of implying that her remarks were racist.

Mr. Axelrod, responding in an e-mail message Wednesday night, said, “I never suggested that. I’ve known Gerry for a long time, and I don’t believe that. But what she said was plainly wrong and divisive.” Mrs. Clinton’s reluctance to sideline Ms. Ferraro drew a sharp rebuke on Wednesday from the Rev. Al Sharpton, the black political leader in New York and a former presidential candidate, who questioned whether Mrs. Clinton’s campaign was keeping the issue alive as a way to win white votes in Pennsylvania.

In addition to Ms. Ferraro’s remark, Mr. Sharpton cited Mrs. Clinton’s decision not to fire her top ally in Pennsylvania, Gov. Edward G. Rendell, for saying in February that some white voters there were “probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate. “When you hear the lack of total denunciation of Ferraro, when you hear Rendell saying there are whites who will never vote for a black, one has to wonder if the Clinton campaign has a Pennsylvania strategy to appeal to voters on race,” Mr. Sharpton said in an interview. “I would hope Mrs. Clinton would make it clear that she is not doing that.”

Both Sharpton and Ferraro made unsucessful bids to be New York’s Democratic Party candidate for U.S. Senate in 1992, losing the state primary to Robert Abrams.. Incumbent Republican Al D Amato won reelection over Democrat Abrams by 2.7% in a six-way race, in which candidates from the Libertarian, New Alliance, Natural Law and Socialist Workers Parties claimed 2..8% from voters that I’m guessing were sending a message to a Democratic Party seen by many traditional supporters as ideological deserters; abandoning principles desperately seeking power, using the coded hate speech of the right.

In 2001, she announced that she was suffering from multiple myeloma, a form of bone cancer

Ferraro Is Battling Blood Cancer With a Potent Ally: Thalidomide

he remembers hearing the word thalidomide half a lifetime ago, when she was a young mother in Queens and it was a pharmaceutical scourge that maimed children.

Now, Geraldine A. Ferraro punches a single tablet of thalidomide through a foil seal before she goes to bed every night. She swallows the pill that once was banned around the world, then sleeps like a rock for eight solid hours.

Thalidomide is prolonging her life, Ms. Ferraro and her doctors believe, in the teeth of an incurable illness.

After a routine physical in December 1998, her physician discovered that Ms. Ferraro was in the early stages of multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that erodes the bones and leads to death within five years for half of those with the diagnosis. For two years, Ms. Ferraro's disease was classified as ''smoldering myeloma,'' or inactive.

When blood tests showed that the cancer cells were increasing, she began to use thalidomide, one of the very first patients in her condition to receive the drug.

''Such a strange thing,'' said Ms. Ferraro, who is 65. ''What was terrible for a healthy fetus has been wonderful at defeating the cancer cells.''

Electoral success as seen in the Obama campaign comes from the ground up, vast numbers of uncounted non-voters whose dormancy has cast the most deciding votes in post-war elections. We have seen repeated examples how the nation survives mediocrity rising to the top instead of cream, is it more a republic or more a state afterward? money is allowed to control public discourse, dissemination of information and the political process with ownership of the airwaves by a shrinking elite, secure in the supremacy of property over people before the law, the skillfully crafted free speech argument will always prove the Constitution entitles one to all the speech he can afford; and conversely withholding the means of mass communication from an unsupervised public rabble by proof of ownership of the very means required. How American “Public Television” and “Public Radio” devolved from its origin as a protected cummunity enterprise into the commercial monstrosity it is currently, its very name requiring change to “The Corporation of Public Broadcasting” with corporate sponsors requiring the High Class Commercials seen on PBS; touting these donors not only for the value added product offered for sale as on CBS, ABC, NBC by the sponsor, but praising the dedication to culture, the generosity, the pioneer spirit of these ones made so rich by the labor of so many who now fork over the bread to show a government subsidized film of the natural habitat of far off varmints, ballet dancers it’s impossible to attract a viable commercial audience to; commonly a BBC ripoff, you can’t understand the limeys on; all this support of public betterment made tax deductible long ago, so what began as a sort of American BBC to be supported by tax revenue, was smothered in its crib, U.S. public ownership of anything has been dicey to even talk about even in one’s home muttering to himself, as any millionaire lawyer will tell you, in front of the judges appointed by politicians beholden to billionaires for any credible political campaign in a nation of our current population, increasingly more dependant on modern technology for communication.

Even hopes the future of human community may be less brutal and violent must be phrased correctly, to avoid alienating sources of capital required to keep the show on the road.

Patrick Healy

Jeff Zeleny

JIM DWYER

CAR CRASH

I am from Detroit so I've done a lot of freeway and winter driving, I was never in a serious accident and only saw one but it is enough. I was in a car near downtown with Dave a friend of mine in those days. We were both getting a ride from a third dude Dave knew in December. It was snowing and we were on I-375 a spur off I-75 everyone's heard of if they've been to Florida, it runs right through midtown by the Baseball stadium etc. any. The snow was deep but it was powdery, and since I noted you're in New York so I'm not telling you anything, If snow is powdery it's the safest snow to drive on because it hasn't melted and tires can get a grip on it almost like sand

We were going along about 35-40 in the flow of traffic and I could hear hear the tires rolling over the snow, which is cool, practically ideal winter conditions but you can't overcome the elements; a car came around us on the right all of a sudden going too fast; I was certain of that because we were going as fast as conditions allowed. (We were in the middle lane but I hate when people who pass on the right especially then-we had just passed Tiger Stadium and the roadway is below street level, for a couple miles there's a concrete barrier in the middle and a sheer sheer twenty feet of concrete a yardaway from the right lane both ways; there's nowhere to go)

The car got just ahead of us on the right and was coming over in our lane to pass another car and it was so wierd, because just an split second before anything happened my emotions went faster than my thinking and as pissed off as I was one second I got scared before a watch could tick; then the fucker started spinning, and time seemed change, to This

THE SHRINE

I found your Shauna Grant Shrine, about a month ago, it's the nicest thing I've seen about her on the web, well written and compassionate; Thank you for that,

I first heard of her after death, I watched an hour long documentary about Shauna Grant and the milieu.she entered, when she went to Southern California

after HS graduation seeking what every person her age were after, when they start West, possessing on average the funds to get there enough to eat for a week or so. I made that same decision in 1979; for the same reason as Shauna, any of the uncounted multitude who make California pilgrimage- American Mecca- seeking proof their life is some more than the dead end they departed.,

When Shauna got has more to do all later events then any factor involving morality, sex drive, rebellion or any of the code our right wing masters to blame the victim in the name of personal responsibility

Even University trained economists were unaware (or refused to warn us) :

Tthe forward march of technology, American Mercantilism, Sexual Repression, Hypocrisy, Sexist Double Standards, Supply and Demand, were about to converge; EXPECT CASUALTIES"

Perfecting mass production of affordable home video exploded the market for porn because millions of people that would not attend a public screening of X film because public stigma created risk (embarrassment, police raids, zoning law

requirements assured locations were either unsavory, inconvenient or both or worse).

Producing such a film requires performers willing to fuck for the camera; interpretation/perversion of law allowed police to regard the use or presence of photo graphic equipment as per se sex for renumeration.; detection of the equipment and people creation any commercially viable requiresof photogenic young women in Southern California in required a created porn a differant nd all I knew waswatched PBS documentary PBS compiled about her after her death, . it was like watching a car crash, in real life I mean. . Appealing as she is her story was so poignant, her angelic look still captivating.

Write back if you have time, please ; .

Over 20 years ago-

GAME 5

2008-03-22T17:46:00.001-05:00

Tiger Stadium, Attendance: 53,634

Monday, October 7, 1968 Time of Game: 2:43

Cardinals

Red Schoendienst

                1  2  3   4  5  6   7  8  9    R  H  E
              -  -  -   -  -  -   -  -  -    -  -  -
Cardinals       3  0  0   0  0  0   0  0  0    3  9  0
Tigers          0  0  0   2  0  0   3  0  X    5  9  1

W: M Lolich (2-0), L: J Hoerner (0-1)

Tigers

Mayo Smith

BATTING

St. Louis Cardinals          AB   R   H RBI   BB  SO    BA   OPS  Pit   PO   A  Details
L Brock LF                    5   1   3   0    0   0  .524 1.613         2   0   2·2B,CS
J Javier 2B                   4   0   2   0    0   0  .421  .974         2   1 
C Flood CF                    4   1   1   1    0   0  .300  .714         3   0   SB
O Cepeda 1B                   4   1   1   2    0   1  .238  .797         7   0   HR
M Shannon 3B                  4   0   0   0    0   1  .286  .651         1   2 
T McCarver C                  3   0   1   0    1   1  .350 1.109         6   0 
R Davis RF                    3   0   0   0    0   1  .000  .000         1   0 
  P Gagliano PH               1   0   0   0    0   0  .000  .000         0   0 
D Maxvill SS                  3   0   0   0    0   1  .000  .158         1   2 
  E Spiezio PH                1   0   1   0    0   0 1.000 2.000         0   0 
  D Schofield PR              0   0   0   0    0   0                     0   0 
N Briles P                    2   0   0   0    0   2  .000  .200         0   2   HBP
  J Hoerner P                 0   0   0   0    0   0  .500 1.000         0   0 
  R Willis P                  0   0   0   0    0   0                     1   0 
  R Maris PH                  1   0   0   0    0   1  .083  .434         0   0 
Totals                       35   3   9   3    1   8                    24   7

BATTING

2B: L Brock 2 (3, 2 off M Lolich).

HR: O Cepeda (2, off M Lolich; 1st inn, 1 on, 1 out to Deep LF-CF).

HBP: N Briles (1, by M Lolich).

TB: L Brock 5; O Cepeda 4; J Javier 2; E Spiezio; C Flood; T McCarver.

RBI: O Cepeda 2 (6); C Flood (2).

Team LOB: 7.

With RISP: 3 for 8.

FIELDING

DP: 1. M Shannon-J Javier-O Cepeda.

BASERUNNING

SB: C Flood (2, 2nd base off M Lolich/B Freehan).

CS: L Brock (2, 2nd base by M Lolich/B Freehan).

Detroit Tigers               AB   R   H RBI   BB  SO    BA   OPS  Pit   PO   A  Details
D McAuliffe 2B                4   1   1   0    0   1  .286  .747         1   2 
M Stanley SS-CF               3   2   1   0    1   0  .211  .602         2   3   3B
A Kaline RF                   4   0   2   2    0   1  .381 1.000         3   0 
N Cash 1B                     2   0   2   2    1   0  .333  .881         7   1   SF
W Horton LF                   4   1   1   0    0   0  .188  .850         1   1   3B,GDP
  R Oyler SS                  0   0   0   0    0   0                     1   0 
J Northrup CF-LF              3   0   1   1    1   0  .158  .516         2   0   IW
B Freehan C                   4   0   0   0    0   1  .000  .158         9   1 
D Wert 3B                     3   0   0   0    1   1  .091  .424         0   1 
M Lolich P                    4   1   1   0    0   2  .375 1.194         1   2 
Totals                       31   5   9   5    4   6                    27  11

BATTING

3B: W Horton (1, off N Briles); M Stanley (1, off N Briles).

SF: N Cash (1, off N Briles).

IBB: J Northrup (1, by N Briles).

TB: M Stanley 3; W Horton 3; N Cash 2; A Kaline 2; D McAuliffe; M Lolich; J Northrup.

GIDP: W Horton (1).

RBI: N Cash 2 (3); A Kaline 2 (4); J Northrup (2).

2-out RBI: J Northrup.

Team LOB: 7.

With RISP: 3 for 8.

FIELDING

E: N Cash (2).

PITCHING

St. Louis Cardinals        IP     H   R  ER   BB  SO  HR    ERA   BF  Pit-Str   GB-FB  GmSc  IR-IS
N Briles                    6.1   6   3   3    3   5   0   5.56   27     -       6-7     51    -
J Hoerner, BS (1), L (0-1)  0     3   2   2    1   0   0   3.86    4     -       0-0          1-1
R Willis                    1.2   0   0   0    0   1   0   0.00    5     -       2-2          2-0
Totals                      8     9   5   5    4   6   0          36     -       8-9          3-1

Detroit Tigers             IP     H   R  ER   BB  SO  HR    ERA   BF  Pit-Str   GB-FB  GmSc  IR-IS
M Lolich, W (2-0)           9     9   3   3    1   8   1   2.00   37     -       9-8     64    -
Totals                      9     9   3   3    1   8   1          37     -       9-8          0-0

J Hoerner faced 4 batters in the 7th inning.

Balks: None.

WP: None.

IBB: N Briles (1; J Northrup).

HBP: M Lolich (1; N Briles).

OTHER

Umpires: HP - Harvey, 1B - Haller, 2B - Gorman, 3B - Honochick.

Time of Game: 2:43.

Attendance: 53,634.

Field Condition: Unknown.

Weather: Unknown.

LINEUPS

   St. Louis Cardinals           Detroit Tigers                       
1. L Brock              LF    1. D McAuliffe          2B
2. J Javier             2B    2. M Stanley            SS
3. C Flood              CF    3. A Kaline             RF
4. O Cepeda             1B    4. N Cash               1B
5. M Shannon            3B    5. W Horton             LF
6. T McCarver           C     6. J Northrup           CF
7. R Davis              RF    7. B Freehan            C
8. D Maxvill            SS    8. D Wert               3B
9. N Briles             P     9. M Lolich             P

PLAY BY PLAY (explanation)

Top of the 1st, Cardinals Batting, Tied 0-0, Mickey Lolich facing 1-2-3
Scr/Out RoB  Pt Batter          Play Detail
+------+---+---+---------------+--------------------------------------------------------------+
          ---     L Brock         Double to LF (Deep LF Line)
   O      -2-     J Javier        Groundout: SS-1B
   R      -2-     C Flood         Single to RF; Brock Scores
          1--     O Cepeda        Flood Steals 2B
   RR     -2-     " "             Home Run (Deep LF-CF); Flood Scores
   O      ---     M Shannon       Flyball: CF
   O      ---     T McCarver      Strikeout Looking
                  3 runs, 3 hits, 0 errors, 0 LOB. Cardinals 3, Tigers 0.

Bottom of the 1st, Tigers Batting, Behind 0-3, Nelson Briles facing 1-2-3
   O      ---     D McAuliffe     Lineout: CF
   O      ---     M Stanley       Flyball: CF
   O      ---     A Kaline        Strikeout
                  0 runs, 0 hits, 0 errors, 0 LOB. Cardinals 3, Tigers 0.

Top of the 2nd, Cardinals Batting, Ahead 3-0, Mickey Lolich facing 7-8-9
   O      ---     R Davis         Groundout: P-1B (P)
   O      ---     D Maxvill       Popfly: SS
   O      ---     N Briles        Strikeout
                  0 runs, 0 hits, 0 errors, 0 LOB. Cardinals 3, Tigers 0.

Bottom of the 2nd, Tigers Batting, Behind 0-3, Nelson Briles facing 4-5-6
          ---     N Cash          Single to CF (Deep CF-RF)
   OO     1--     W Horton        Ground Ball Double Play: 3B-2B-1B
   O      ---     J Northrup      Groundout: P-1B (P)
                  0 runs, 1 hit, 0 errors, 0 LOB. Cardinals 3, Tigers 0.

Top of the 3rd, Cardinals Batting, Ahead 3-0, Mickey Lolich facing 1-2-3
          ---     L Brock         Single to CF
   O      1--     J Javier        Brock Caught Stealing 2B (C-2B)
   O      ---     " "             Groundout: SS-1B
   O      ---     C Flood         Groundout: 3B-1B
                  0 runs, 1 hit, 0 errors, 0 LOB. Cardinals 3, Tigers 0.

Bottom of the 3rd, Tigers Batting, Behind 0-3, Nelson Briles facing 7-8-9
   O      ---     B Freehan       Flyball: LF (Deep LF)
          ---     D Wert          Walk
   O      1--     M Lolich        Strikeout
   O      1--     D McAuliffe     Groundout: 3B-1B
                  0 runs, 0 hits, 0 errors, 1 LOB. Cardinals 3, Tigers 0.

Top of the 4th, Cardinals Batting, Ahead 3-0, Mickey Lolich facing 4-5-6
   O      ---     O Cepeda        Strikeout
          ---     M Shannon       Reached on E3 (Ground Ball); Shannon to 2B
          -2-     T McCarver      Walk
   O      12-     R Davis         Flyball: CF
   O      12-     D Maxvill       Strikeout
                  0 runs, 0 hits, 1 error, 2 LOB. Cardinals 3, Tigers 0.

Bottom of the 4th, Tigers Batting, Behind 0-3, Nelson Briles facing 2-3-4
          ---     M Stanley       Triple to RF (Line Drive to Deep RF Line)
   O      --3     A Kaline        Groundout: P-1B (P)
   RO     --3     N Cash          Flyball: LF/Sacrifice Fly (LF-CF); Stanley Scores
          ---     W Horton        Triple (CF-RF)
   R      --3     J Northrup      Single to RF; Horton Scores
   O      1--     B Freehan       Flyball: RF
                  2 runs, 3 hits, 0 errors, 1 LOB. Cardinals 3, Tigers 2.

Top of the 5th, Cardinals Batting, Ahead 3-2, Mickey Lolich facing 9-1-2
   O      ---     N Briles        Strikeout
          ---     L Brock         Double
   O      -2-     J Javier        Single to LF; Brock out at Hm/LF-C
   O      1--     C Flood         Flyball: LF (LF-CF)
                  0 runs, 2 hits, 0 errors, 1 LOB. Cardinals 3, Tigers 2.

Bottom of the 5th, Tigers Batting, Behind 2-3, Nelson Briles facing 8-9-1
   O      ---     D Wert          Popfly: SS
   O      ---     M Lolich        Strikeout
   O      ---     D McAuliffe     Strikeout Looking
                  0 runs, 0 hits, 0 errors, 0 LOB. Cardinals 3, Tigers 2.

Top of the 6th, Cardinals Batting, Ahead 3-2, Mickey Lolich facing 4-5-6
   O      ---     O Cepeda        Flyball: RF
   O      ---     M Shannon       Groundout: SS-1B
   O      ---     T McCarver      Lineout: RF
                  0 runs, 0 hits, 0 errors, 0 LOB. Cardinals 3, Tigers 2.

Bottom of the 6th, Tigers Batting, Behind 2-3, Nelson Briles facing 2-3-4
   O      ---     M Stanley       Flyball: CF
          ---     A Kaline        Single to LF
          1--     N Cash          Walk; Kaline to 2B
   O      12-     W Horton        Groundout: 1B unassisted; Kaline to 3B; Cash to 2B
          -23     J Northrup      Intentional Walk
   O      123     B Freehan       Groundout: SS-2B/Forceout at 2B
                  0 runs, 1 hit, 0 errors, 3 LOB. Cardinals 3, Tigers 2.

Top of the 7th, Cardinals Batting, Ahead 3-2, Mickey Lolich facing 7-8-9
   O      ---     R Davis         Strikeout
   O      ---     D Maxvill       Groundout: 1B-P
          ---     N Briles        Hit By Pitch
   O      1--     L Brock         Groundout: 2B-1B
                  0 runs, 0 hits, 0 errors, 1 LOB. Cardinals 3, Tigers 2.

Bottom of the 7th, Tigers Batting, Behind 2-3, Nelson Briles facing 8-9-1
   O      ---     D Wert          Strikeout Looking
          ---     M Lolich        Single to RF (Fly Ball to Short RF)
                  Joe Hoerner replaces Nelson Briles pitching and batting 9th
          1--     D McAuliffe     Single to RF; Lolich to 2B
          12-     M Stanley       Walk; Lolich to 3B; McAuliffe to 2B
   RR     123     A Kaline        Single (CF-RF); Lolich Scores; McAuliffe Scores; Stanley to 3B
   R      1-3     N Cash          Single to RF; Stanley Scores; Kaline to 3B
                  Ron Willis replaces Joe Hoerner pitching and batting 9th
   O      1-3     W Horton        Foul Flyball: 3B
   O      1-3     J Northrup      Groundout: 1B unassisted
                  3 runs, 4 hits, 0 errors, 2 LOB. Cardinals 3, Tigers 5.

Top of the 8th, Cardinals Batting, Behind 3-5, Mickey Lolich facing 2-3-4
                  Ray Oyler replaces Willie Horton playing SS batting 5th; Jim Northrup moves to LF; Mickey Stanley moves to CF
          ---     J Javier        Single to 1B (Ground Ball)
   O      1--     C Flood         Groundout: 2B-SS/Forceout at 2B
   O      1--     O Cepeda        Flyball: RF
   O      1--     M Shannon       Strikeout
                  0 runs, 1 hit, 0 errors, 1 LOB. Cardinals 3, Tigers 5.

Bottom of the 8th, Tigers Batting, Ahead 5-3, Ron Willis facing 7-8-9
   O      ---     B Freehan       Strikeout
   O      ---     D Wert          Lineout: P
   O      ---     M Lolich        Groundout: SS-1B
                  0 runs, 0 hits, 0 errors, 0 LOB. Cardinals 3, Tigers 5.

Top of the 9th, Cardinals Batting, Behind 3-5, Mickey Lolich facing 6-7-8
          ---     T McCarver      Single to CF
                  Phil Gagliano pinch hits for Ron Davis batting 7th
   O      1--     P Gagliano      Flyball: CF
                  Ed Spiezio pinch hits for Dal Maxvill batting 8th
          1--     E Spiezio       Single to LF; McCarver to 2B
                  Roger Maris pinch hits for Ron Willis batting 9th; Dick Schofield pinch runs for Ed Spiezio batting 8th
   O      12-     R Maris         Strikeout
   O      12-     L Brock         Groundout: P-1B (P)
        0 runs, 2 hits, 0 errors, 2 LOB. Cardinals 3, Tigers 5.

Retrosheet.org Boxscore:DET196810070

Play-by-Play Explanation

Scr/Out- This has a "O" for every out on the play and an "R" for every run that scored on the play. Some plays will have both in no particular order.
RoB- This gives the baserunner (Runners on Base) configuration at the start of the play. "1-3" would mean runners on first and third. Clicking on this will show the defensive players and baserunners on the field for this play. This is a subscriber feature, so non-subscribers are limited as to the number of times they can use this feature in a day.
Pt- When available, the number of pitches in this plate appearance. Clicking on this number will show the sequence of pitches thrown including, when available, things like runner going, ball blocked, attempted pickoffs and the like. We believe this data to be as accurate as humanly possible, but there are going to be some errors in the data, so please take it with a grain of salt. Clicking on this will show the defensive players and baserunners on the field for this play. This is a subscriber feature, so non-subscribers are limited as to the number of times they can use this feature in a day.
Batter- The batter at the plate when this play occurred. If the play is a baserunning event, then the batter's name will be repeated as indicated by quotes.
Play Detail- This is an explanation of the play that occurred. In some cases, batted ball location and type will be indicated within parentheses. Again, these are best efforts to the record the game as it happened. Also, plays made on the baserunners (including the batter as a baserunner) will be indicated in parentheses after the baserunner's name. Advancement of baserunners is given in cases where the advancement is not easily deduced or obvious from the play. For example, advancement for a walk will not be given, but for a single or double it will be given.

Please report any issues or strangeness you see with the description of plays given above. We have tested several hundred different types of plays, but, in all likelihood, there are still some errors or misinterpretations of the play-by-play data.

In some cases, the results from play-by-play data will contradict results in the official record. The official record has many, many errors, but we have not undertaken to reconcile those errors. Pitch-by-pitch data should not be taken as completely accurate, though we believe it to be as accurate as is currently possible.

Stats updated through October 28, 2007.

CONFESSIONS OF A POSER

2008-01-20T22:07:00.000-06:00

BUSH AND HUSSEIN SHOULD HAVE WRASSLED ON PAY PER VIEW Current mood: grumpy Category: MEAN News and Politics

CONFESSIONS OF A POSER Ever since I realized I was not bound for college, I have improvised a host of bit parts to realize my need to be important, and very righteous too. I did finally make to Wayne State University, and hope still kindled of a professional life of suit wearing and golf, but like instead a lot of work and reality was typical in the cave-in of auto economy, I remember fund raising events where people paid $5 to lay into a Toyota with a ten pound sledgehammer-all for a good cause. I married young and divorced young. The army washout, the Detroit factory rat, short order cook, sometimes savior of thirsty skid row inebriates in my hikes among the ruins of Motown, a capital of our history's productive industrial past. I was a flop, there was no Big 3 job waiting for me; but I listened to the pep talk in my head telling me it was for the good; I was a Bohemian, a reader of books and a museum spectator. I would publish a book some day, read the free Worker's Party rags, ubiquitous along my route walking from the bus along Woodward Ave. to a 'service sector' job cooking and bussing tables for those who already had it made. My blood boiled for the early days of the Union movement, the Wobblies, Workers of the World United, oh well. I just knew sooner or later I'd get a chance to be heard on my own Truth Telling Express, Depression and physical injury, surgery and metal screws and parts l attached to my neck bone and ankle bone, were not in that dream; but a chance to regroup, drink my beer and formulate my rap about the crooked politicians picking on the working man.My life's ambition of rabble-rousing was suddenly an afterthought when kamikaze Arabs steered the Boeings that killed more than had died at Pearl Harbor. The President, a mediocre prep school type, a grown rich kid, I previously ignored after his rise to power with unlimited funds, henchmen willing to say anything to besmirch John McCain a war hero and a Navy flyer like Dad, who was flying combat missions or confined in hellish squalor. Bush had arrived at Harvard chewing tobacco, wearing the cowboy boots he would traipse the venerable campus in a cocaine haze on occasion; later he did fly a jet in the skies above Alabama in service to the the nation. The mad dash he made to Renquist over the dead body of fair election, running arm in arm with more millionaire lawyers than OJ needed to be coronated by more gangster lawyers his Dad or "Uncle Ron" had hired, to sit on the Supreme Court and turn every progressive law passed since the 19th century on its head. HE HAD EVERYONE'S EAR after those hideous crimes. His words at first were attempts at fatherly comfort and raising up a stricken people, and beyond any but the pettiest criticism. As time advanced and the first U.S. President of the 21st century spoke of Muslims in the same breath with Hitler's Nazi minions, using the tautisms of the pulpit; It sensed an inner life and dialogue in Bush's head was at stake. As the son of a bonafide war hero, a decorated Navy flyer, like Sen. John McCain who had outshone him in every category except the old money one. By 2003 his act had narrowed to giving speeches demonizing Iraq and Hussein as Devil exceeding the Nazi-Fascist tandem history has long held guilty for inciting a war and racial haulocaust that claimed 40 million lives on the Eurasian land mass; leaving aside the Pacific Theatre of Operations, the biggest villian in recorded history. As more Americans run out of gas in the face of the pointlessness of continuing the placement of our combat in Iraq; Hussein's neck was streched long ago, the formation of independent regional militia despite U.S. military presence, and economic pressure has the appearance of mideval warlord rule. The slightest appearance that infidels have authority over them increases Iraqi resentment and worsens the Worldwide interfaith disconnect each day our deployment continues. The Iraqi death toll has been extremely high, and unreported, as many as 250, 000 are dead since the 2003 start of hostilities. We have blasted the countryside back to the stone age twice in less than twenty years. The interminible hatred and murder in Iraq, against a largely immobilized American detachment whose are largely incurred procuring and transporting supplies. There is little or nothing of lasting import that can now be done for Iraq or Iraqis by foreign troops. Material aid will be an indefinate (permanent) American obligation. Southfield High School had a run of several years leading the state in SAT scores (I made over 1600 on it in 1978.) . Southfield is just across Eight Mile Rd, but it was five miles from SHS to Detroit Country Day School, prep school to the rich kids of Beverly Hills, MI, I came to learn one of them was Mork from Ork Robin Williams, a millionaire many several times over, the result of depending on his wits.I made people laugh too. Those years and days were spent preoccupied with Claire Friedman, burning cheap gasoline in Detroit rustbuckets, a mammoth '64 Dodge then a '67 Buick Skylark with a 350; the abundant high grade pot, plus a legacy that VietNam bequeathed the class of 1978, an18 year old drinking age law. "If I'm Old enough to fight I'm old enough to have a beer." Due to genetic luck or freak of nature, at 15 I sprouted just enough dark follicles to fool Ike at the Party Store with my ugly little mustache. I bought beer as freely as a grandpa. Staying out of the direct line of sight of teachers and parents; speaking only when unavoidable, mostly in earnest monosyllables of apathy, they would leave me alone. We avoided supervision. We deserved whatever came our way. Memories of that misspent idle youth are priceless to me. Gas tanks full of Regular; a house party loomed one after another throughout the cold months, at some other kid's house. I partied in some beautiful homes then. The parents who weren't out of town, and put up with us were Martians to me. Were they more permissive than my parents? Hell yes. My practiced invisibility eased their middle age ordeal. No one in the group I was in got arrested, I never got a speeding ticket while I lived at home. I worked and bought my own clothes. Idealism had been dealt with way before 1974-75, as I stuck my head out in the world truly unattended by grown-ups. The impetus to change the world nurtured for years by postwar kids started with little things, it was the number of kids born in that generation, large families were the very scenery of "normal" then and parents, far outnumbered, eventually faced a political counterpart certain to eventually provide a real challenge to the two party system. The VietNam war was another test of American prestige like Korea; against a Soviet sponsored proxy far from American shores or tangible interests. War was waged for the political abstract. Influence, prestige, against the "threat of Communist domination" known by academics to be so remote the red label was aimed aimed beyond union organizers so innured to hearing and reading it, the charges were ignored. Wherever progressive land reform movements took hold automatic American opposition appeared. The French ran out of gas fighting Ho Ghi Mien's army 8 years before Johnson began sending organized combat detachments in meaningful numbers. Another Texan, he vowed not to be the first U.S. President to lose a war. far flung pponent supplied fight on neutral ground between produced a powerful social class with dissent providing the glue. Young people were receptive to the aims of Civil Rights, and , proved to be a catalyst group I was int among those both beyond the a with billy clubs, revolvers and machine guns. If we got geeked up about anything it was concert tickets at venerable Cobo Arena where Bob seger recorded the Rock Masterpiece "Live Bullet". The truly high quality of that Public Education was met with scorn and bitching by those of us whose nicotine fits meant hotboxing Kools between classes, even in bitter cold. Many lofty plans were hatched, some realized by that set of kids. War was over. For us, me, from the age of 12, when I watched POW's, perhaps McCain himself, get off a plane in Hawaii going home, on the RCA TV , in color; until I was 23 our troops were in the woodsides of America training. It was 1983 when Reagan mobilized the USMC and the Isle of Grenada was liberated! And it was an event many reacted to like the football team had broken a long losing streak. Honorably Discharged from service after two brief stints; much time spent hearing hungover noncoms tell me with hostile gusto I had an "attitude problem", a syndrome never explained or understood, as I was on a par with with all the other poor bastards. I hated the sound of the very words which were soon predictable, it was a favorite catchphrase, to get a recruit riled up, and the U.S military know their business, a combined experience of centuries underlay that psychological approach. When I came home and told the family the story, they all agreed with Sarge. They never explained it either.I discharged without hearing a shot fired in anger, so how can I bitch? . I cannot claim any military honors, and I'm no expert on combat. I've been intentionally shot at once, then years later a drunken neighbor came out of his apartment just as I was checking my mail in the lobby of that shabby but humble apartment building; when he let off an errant blast in my general direction through the 30 feet of hallway between us. I wasn't the only person in the hall, he may have hit; one of those 'miracles' of dumb luck you hear on the news. On both occassions a shotgun was the weapon of choice, the first was a sawed off, I'm sure. He was messing with my wife and I was yelling at him, and he shot through a window. "Fuck it." I said to myself, he wasn't raping her; so I got in my 1972 Detroit rustbucket Pontiac Catalina, a land yaght of a car, threw gravel as I left, struck by the experience. I shot countless rounds of M-16, and M-60 fire, but the idea of really shooting at someone so casual like was alien to me. My father-in-law used to like to talk to his daughter's suitors with his piece laying on a coffee table between them, so I hear, he never did that to me, but he was the type, brilliant; too fucking smart for his sanity, The sound of proximate, unexpected gunfire spoils the taste of the beer. It doesn't matter I was acquanted with both triggermen, both were neighbors that I freely spoke and drank with. In the flash of time between the noise of the gunshot and the first unsteady knowledge that you aren't belly shot or worse those dudes may as well been from China, Iraq or Tinbuktu. I never spoke to either again, unharmed we are dead to each other. The gun itself has a power over some. A trivial offense can occur and be percieved as a foul in a singular way on a particular day, it happens to all of us who live long enough. The person that has a pistol or a rifle is mathematically more apt to harm someone for reasons on one particular day, than they ever would attack with a knife or bare hands their whole life long. The freely available gun can occupy portions of daily thought life whether they often range shoot, or bought it at WalMart 10 years ago, and it remains unmoved in the closet from the date of sale. The instrument of certain death can occupy some part of thought life. The ability to retaliate a gun bestows is itself a warning. The Postal worker in Royal Oak, MI who randomly shot at and killed six coworkers, attacking them enmasse after arriving to have it out with his long seperated spouse, is one incident of thousands since, each a case study indicting the U.S. proliferation of guns. Many preach a gospel based on the 2nd Amendment of the Bill of Rights, that hinges on the premise Madison and that assembly of well educated for 18th century standards, predominently Aristocratic Masons believed the citizens of the young Republic needed a legally unstoppable Niagra of guns to repel the possible future tyranny of the very government devised by democratic parley they had pledged their lives and honor to, imperfect with race , gender and class bigotry, a society as backward as the British. The repudiation of Divine Right of Kings, and the commitment to live without Titles of Nobility, Royalty, and the warlord control of land and resources practiced throughout Europe by King's and those appointed members of the Royal Court. The extended process that forged a way of life, copied the world over was covened in the preindustrial world that ruled the mass of humanity with the guarantee of a life of constant toil for a return that body and soul might stay together. This guarantee was more binding than any right or priviledge written down. While terms had changed, the lot in life of citizens of the new United States went on unchanged for generations, in the uncleared surrounding teeming with danger from wild animals, starvation, disease, exposure to the elements and armed confrontation by indigenous peoples. The musket was essential for individual and family survival. The Constitution refers to the national future using the words "…we and our posterity…" a phrase roughly meaning'forever'. Such boldly stated intentions meant facing the risks posed by corruption. and officialsadministration could revert under color of law use a program of general disarmament of law abiding people, and revert the Americas to a European style fiefdom where landlords alone were armed had to be met by responsible menwafuture with with ought guns I will say I was brighter than many other my age and mental level back in those early post VietNam years, and lots of armchair generals, gripping a can of Schlitz, the griping about 'losing' the war. It was no secret from the late sixties the kill ratio was more than 20 asian dead for every one American. As horrible 56,000 U.S war dead was then, is now, and continues to be in the midst of current casualty reports, news that will mean the end of any joy in life for so many families. Those nearly 4,000 now dead are like the High School kid I was in those peaceful Carter years, whose thought life should center around staying out of trouble, falling in love and finding a way to get by in this dog eat dog world. There has come no words to my ears, or from the printed press from Iraq, that anything has transpired since the days of Nebuchannezzar 2,500 years; worthy of such sacrifice on their behalf. While their misery is undeniable and the betrayal of strongmen among their number who suffer them to live under tyranny even to this very day, most who are surely as fine, innocent and religious a population there is under God. It is a common fate Iraqis share with their darker skinned Muslims brothers and sisters across the few hundred miles of desert and sea from the Arabian Peninsula. Those poor souls in West Africa are as worthy in humanity and need for relief of dire suffering, and committed assistance of good people everywhere in the world. They do not walk upon ground as full of oil as it was went Jesus preached and fed the poor in Galilee. The conflagrations that were World War I and II, ended when one side had run out of bullets and the blood of its young to water the soils of every inhabited earthly continent . These wars are justly commemorated in remembrance of the bravery and sacrifice of the millions caught up the maelstrom of modern war, and for the will of political leaders to lead their people to defeat those who would steal their honor and spoil their nation, which for better or worse remains the larger unit of which the family unit is tied with unbreakable bonds. Victory brought real but short lived joy. Among the veterans of war is the shared grief of the waste of life and the horror of seeing one's fellow man and one's self as wholly other than the products of civilized man; much less the rearing Mom and Dad provided. The martial tones of sabre rattling will fade away leaving silence to fill the raucous space, once more.

1:31 AM -

NORMAN MAILER

2007-12-05T15:28:00.001-06:00

i RARELY CALL MYSELF "AN ARTIST", BUT THERE WAS A TIME WHEN i COULD LIE IN BED AND READ WITHOUT DOZING OFF, AND READ THOUSANDS OF PAGES OF THIS MAN'S HANDICRAFT, AND WAS ASTONISHED-AT THE TRUTH OF OBSERVATION, AT THE TRUTH OF THE FRAILTY OF THE OBSERVER-IF ANYONE WANTS TO UNDERSTAND AMERICAN POLITICS-READ MAILER'S COVERAGEOF THE 1960, 64, 68, AND 72 RED AND BLUE CONVENTIONS; WHEN THOSE AFFAIRS WERE FAMILY FIGHTS AND THE LEAST BRUISED BECAME A CANDIDATE. I WILL MISS NORMAN MAILER THE REST OF MY LIFE.

WHEN I SAY…

2007-12-05T14:53:00.003-06:00

Wow your eyes were wide

The first time we said hi

In that plastic box

You were more bulletproof than Kennedy

And the swaddling cloths

Didn’t occupy your time

Like the tangles

Babes before you

Squirmed in their struggles

Life’s first lesson;

And your giggles made me believe in mary

All was magic and new

And candy bars and snow mean something too

All the good the generation TRIED

Ended up enough

The cottage, yes the nest,

More gainly than the billy club

That represents the brutal past;

Thousands of years

Of murder and theft

SO WE BUMPED OUR HEADS WHEN WE WERE Young;

Just never wanted to count myself a bum

Never mind the crowd

That circle that gets you

In the embrace that you learn

Is all you take out the door

And the unbroken band

Is worth all you lavish

Spend the days staring

Blank at the hundred year old tree

Without thought til years after-when it seems all ago;

And man!

was it a drag the night John Lennon got shot

Cosell announcing football & murder-Monday Night dipsomania

In old armchairs at Butch’s

Who burned himself up with a pile of the Detroit News, April of ‘85

Leaving us all bewildered

His Ma, niece Terry and me,

Among the Firemen, Football Big

In the toxic patch of front yard

with cindered hair and brows from rushing in

To retrieve a friend;

Not a wall of fire nor a lake

A Small

pond or big

Puddle

Man sized hell

the cottage-a stoked furnace

was burning from all, paint, synthetic fiber, 360 degrees.

And when the dirt covered him over,

was that it?

Was that all there was as

The suited and gowned walked away?

Like December 8 1980, during halftime of Jets Miami.

The snow was deeper that year, 1980
We took a picture

8 foot piles along West Parkway

Work was still labor

But we had our hearts

And a neighbor,

So unlucky hears laughing chasing;

No one was hungry at bedtime.

And didn’t Edison cash in on Christmas

Better than 4^th of July booming in a single night

Human love and fealty requires

We present the small

With shiny enthrall

And smiles

It’s how we keep them

And they stay in our hearts.

And the approving cheer on the smallest face in the the house

Is worth another GD year of putting up with the crooks-

Our masters.

Who rely that

What’s in your wallet?

Is the same reindeer game

Of winners and losers

Kings used to play

and

The natural arrival of cruelty

Like water reaching its level

the Imperial treachery

is reliable

to keep one upon the throne?

The hounding

Of a civilization that won’t-can’t share what it has no matter what-

It didn’t make me hate all blacks when one hit me in the head with a brick

When my back was turned

In summer 1987

For smiling politely at “his woman”

Unconcious all night on Cass Ave. til the sun stirred my head

As light might pierce a cave;

I did wonder, “What the fuck?”

I went home and soaped up and went to work;

I made Coleman Young a Corned Beef Sandwich

At Trappers Alley before we gave way to the Mob;

And the fairytale jingle of coins, and lottery

Sitting a wake at the funeral of our work;

Buying shoes, hammers, TV’s, American flags

All made in China

All Hail WalMart and the Supreme Court!!!

I can see how

The gun’s a magnet

Without all that Oakland County School;

football and baseball mitts, and trips to Dairy Queen.

White faces peer through polished glass;

Car-bound making passage

The green zone from Farmington to the Fisher freeway

Sleep in the eye too

satin border of the blanket at home

Still moist with snore drool

;

Asking

“How did they allow these fine homes to fall down?”

Whose timbers the banks owned then-and still do

When Detroit was mostly white people

The mirror said they thrived,

Treading mortgage

The pre-suburban way;

I’ve been alive awhile and I’ve seen a lot-

Mostly on TV.

Thank God.

When I say

The usa

Is the greatest country in the world

Please remember

I have only been to Canada

(Windsor & Toronto)

Where the cigarettes all tasted stale.

When you hear it said

The usa

Is the greatest country in the world

Remember the parrot!

The places

Where everywhere else lives

Is a theory-words

Arabs

Terrorists

Oil kings

Religious NUTS

Sunnis and the Shia’

Gooks!?

Oh well like I say

Love the Buddah

Jesus would

The memory of Woodward Ave.

After dark when Hudsons was still open

7^th floor for mink coats

down in the basement for $5 pants.

When they laid cobblestone

Envisionoing a Mall on the street.

The banks refused to build

What the genius, Coleman A. Young wanted

(nervous across 8 Mile Rd.)

A prosperous black city

Black folk in Detroit

Must go to the suburbs to shop

Usurping the tax base of a city they will reconquer.

The white flyers.

It’s all unplanned and impossible to prove.

USA!!!!!!USA!!!!!!!!

WE’RE FREE TO DO WHAT THEY TELL US TO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Joseph Hughes Coleman

9:36 pm

Nov. 21, 2007-Thanksgiving Eve

Lawrenceburg TN USA

who killed who?

2007-10-10T19:09:00.000-05:00

JOSEPH P. KENNEDY, FRANK COSTELLO, AND THE MOB:

POINT: 9. JOSEPH P. KENNEDY, FRANK COSTELLO, AND THE MOB: "The most direct assertion of Kennedy involvement in bootlegging came from Frank Costello, the most powerful Mafia boss of the 1940'' and 1950's, who sought in his later years to cast himself as a successful business man. In February 1973, at the age of eighty-two, Costello decided to begin telling his story to Peter Mass, the prize-winning New York journalist. Ten days after he began, he suffered a heart seizure and died, before Maas could fully explore the Kennedy-Costello relationship. Maas later told the New York Time that Costello had confided that he and Kennedy had been 'partners' in the bootleg liquor business during Prohibition - a partnership that began, Costello said, after Kennedy sought him out and asked for his help. In an interview for this book, Maas said that Costello specifically recalled arranging for the delivery by sea of bootleg scotch to a Cape Cod beach party celebrating the tenth reunion of Joe Kennedy's Harvard class of 1912. 'We were in the liquor business,' Costello told Maas, adding that Kennedy was responsible for the shipping of liquor to the United States from abroad." "Similarly, in his 1983 memoir, A Man of Honor, Joseph Bonanno, the retired New York Mafia boss, said that Costello always told him, 'and I have no reason to doubt it, that during Prohibition he and Joe Kennedy of Boston were partners in the liquor business...I would sometimes go to Sag Harbor, Long Island, in the summer. This was one of the coves, so I was told that the Kennedy people used to transport whiskey during Prohibition." The Dark Side of Camelot, Seymour M. Hersh, p.48. Who was at the Court of St. James urging isolation while Hitler builded an army on US capital? Joe Sr. via FDR who the rich called a traitor to his class!! Because he cared AND DID SOMETHING FOR THE POOR OF THIS COUNTRY in his elevation to power which now happens magically as before 1932. The gangsters who send our youth to die by IED's and bullets; the same DuPont's and rich folk as alway.

Warriors of Economy

2007-10-09T20:15:00.000-05:00

The youth who enlist today are mostly economically deprived. This will only change with law forcing more to join; i.e. a draft which is even more unpopular than the current combat operations, which are not a war. The US is a republic; where the cream is supposed to rise to the top (Senate) and democratic votes are dicisive. Pure democracy exists in theory and very small groups only. But when elected voters, ie legislators are so under the thumb of banking and corporate forces to prevail in elections, because of the cost of mass media they own; our republic is a plutocracy.

"DON"T TAZE ME BRO"!!!

2007-09-19T16:38:00.000-05:00

What's next in the US Police worship? Nancy Grace stated 18SEP07 the police were RIGHT to taze student.

Lay of the Land intro2

2007-09-12T18:07:00.001-05:00

OUR POVERTY

By Joe Coleman - May 17th, 2007 at 8:00 pm EDT

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(What is this?)

· “African-centered thought, unlike Eurocentrism, does not assume superiority and look at everyone else as being inferior.”

· Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

· Link

· I support Sen. Obama very strongly. I post a blog on his website at Link

· One of the most dismal events in the last generation, was the Supreme court of the US granting certiorari in Cargill v Monfort of Colorado, immediately after the pious “so-called” abortion hating Mr. Reagan had raised Renquist to Chief Justice and sat J Scalia next to him on September 26, 1986, just in time for arguments in this obscure but nonetheless earthshaking case October 6, 1986; and render its mystifying and vexing decision December 9, 1986, in time for Christmas. Read this bewildering miscarriage of justice in its entirety at the site controlled by gangster lawyers who fake out the public: I wish I was half my age I would engage any of them in tackle football on any of the area's golf courses as we used to-Ibet none of them ever had a bloody nose before.

Here's the case!

U.S. Supreme Court

CARGILL, INC. v. MONFORT OF COLORADO, INC., 479 U.S. 104 (1986)

479 U.S. 104

CARGILL, INC., ET AL. v. MONFORT OF COLORADO, INC. CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE TENTH CIRCUIT No. 85-473. Argued October 6, 1986 Decided December 9, 1986

Held:

1. A private plaintiff seeking injunctive relief under 16 must show a threat of injury "of the type the antitrust laws were designed to prevent and that flows from that which makes defendants' acts unlawful." Brunswick Corp. v. Pueblo Bowl-O-Mat, Inc., 429 U.S. 477, 489 . Pp. 109-113.

2. The proposed merger does not constitute a threat of antitrust injury. A showing, as in this case, of loss or damage due merely to increased competition does not constitute such injury. And while predatory pricing is capable of inflicting antitrust injury, here respondent neither raised nor proved any claim of predatory pricing before the District Court, and thus the Court of Appeals erred in interpreting respondent's allegations as equivalent to allegations of injury from predatory conduct. Pp. 113-119.

3. This Court, however, will not adopt in effect a per se rule denying competitors standing to challenge acquisitions on the basis of [479 U.S. 104, 105] predatory-pricing theories. Nothing in the Clayton Act's language or legislative history suggests that Congress intended this Court to ignore injuries caused by such anticompetitive practices as predatory pricing. Pp. 120-122.

761 F.2d 570, reversed and remanded.

BRENNAN, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which REHNQUIST, C. J., and MARSHALL, POWELL, O'CONNOR, and SCALIA, JJ., joined. STEVENS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which WHITE, J., joined, post, p. 122. BLACKMUN, J., took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.

· Since the end of the gilded age, and the changes brought by the progressive movement around 1900, especially passage of ANTITRUST LAW, American workers and businessmen were protected from forced mergers, rapacious competition, and “price-squeeze” practices making it impossible to survive economically. The Court proceeded to stand antitrust law on its head, and destroy its utility, unless the Congress restores it with a law that defies such perverse confusion.

· It was held by that besotted assembly that antitrust law was written to “protect competition not competitors,” so the dam burst and we know how many concerns were swallowed up like fish in the sea. Despite improved productivity, American labor has never recovered from the Reagan Administration, a pandering Congress that sent him the deficits HE WANTED FOR HIS BUDDIES IN THE BOND MARKET, and the appointment to the High Court, of a group of fops that either never worked in their life or performed as few commercial functions required for social acceptability. Their problems were not those of the wage earner and vice versa.

· I heard something chilling on TV last night, Chris Matthews was discussing how some call this president a fascist “like Hitler.” Matthews informed us that Mussulini, the original Fascist and coiner of the term , defined those politics as the joining of “Corporate and Government power,” to control the masses. That is what we have today, but business is very crooked, so the ones who make decisions, and control capital are making it harder to earn a living than it was forty years ago.

· That this case received such scant scrutiny by the corporate owned media belies the fact the executives of RCA (NBC), Capital Cities (ABC), and the lone self-owned network CBS Inc. were made ecstatic by such legal alchemy, for dollar signs appeared before their eyes that crossed the bounds of reality, they were chasing leprecauns now, fuck the news!

· ABC was sold to Disney, CBS to Westinghouse Electric Corporation whotook on the name CBS henceforth as in marriage and to keep it on the down low, and GE just had to have NBC at any price. Holy Mussolini! The Corporations control the dissemination of information, so if they lock arms with politicians willing to run interference for them so their greed is kept abundantly sated, with rip-off tax cuts, military contracts, foreign reconstruction, a plethora of bonds issued on waves of deficit budgets and spending; those Corporation types will loyally supply whatever funds are needed to keep friendly politicians in office, through whatever conduit the politician legislates is kosher this election cyclelegal elected. And the wheel goes round and round.

· One of the saddest parts of this whole mess, is TV reporters, who the working class of modest or adequate education rely on, have continued to compare deficit spending by the government with household debt. It never crosses their lips that deficits are funded through the issuance of bonds; which the rich snap up like a hungry pit bull, because they are tax deductible; so, with the tax cuts Reagan, Bush&Bush gave to the rich anyway, their tax burden is further reduced by bonds; which funds the government; but they get it all back with a sweetener when the bonds mature from the Treasury at the expense of revenue paid in taxes. It’s really a nasty crooked deal.

· I’m one of these white people who is a descendant of settlers who arrived here so long ago we don’t know where they came from exactly. We call ourselves “Scotch-Irish,” (also known as ‘Borderers,’ from what I’ve read, they were no aristocrats, see scholarly treatment at Link. We don’t know anything about what ship they took unlike the Mayflower folks, and there is nobody in the old country to answer the phone.

· I grew up in a believing family, although we attended services rarely. My late Mother, Faye, was really pro civil rights. She was born in 1930 and lived near Tuscaloosa AL for her first eight years before moving to Detroit MI. See saw some of what the south was about, and she despised the racial shit. She told me she had a black playmate who wasn’t allowed at table with them when they at at a Dr.’s house who often watched my Ma, because her Dad died when she was 13 months old. She was a tender hearted person.

· I lived in a racially mixed area of Detroit (not the suburbs) for many years, went to school, worked, did time, served in the Army, and got drunk with black guys, and I never had any real personal issues come up. The social awkwardness that still exists is sometimes painful because the residue of our guilty history remains. I have heard the word European thrown around. I just tried to show I was taught, and believe by my actions that skin color doesn’t enhance and cannot hide the true qualities of any human.

· I didn’t finish any of the three semesters of college I enrolled in; but I don’t consider myself naïve’. Claims of a color-blind society are pie in the sky. Detroit is the most segregated city and metro area in the US. The segregation and discrimination that continues, is an economic and psychic drain and insult on a great people.

· It is a good thing to have this man run for president.

· I supported Jesse Jackson in ’84, and was mesmerized by his speaking ability, I felt the Holy Ghost when he spoke at the convention in San Francisco (I downloaded it free at Link and still listen to it). But facts are facts, and not one preacher has been elected president.

· I currently stay with my Father, Tom, in TN. I receive disability for stenosis of the spine, arthristis, nerve damage, PTSD, and depression. I find TN to be how I always found it, somewhat backward, The election of Chatanooga political hack Mike Corker over the brilliant and impressive Harold Ford Jr. was evidence of the racial prejudice in TN. The election of Corker was an outright sham, he is an imposter in the Senate as far as I’m concerned..

· Fundamentalist clergy and doctrine control a huge number of votes here. Fundamentalist Christianity is unquestioned truth to many in the south. Fundamentalist belief is normally taught from childhood, and accepted without examining its meaning, which I finally think I know. It isn’t holding any particular correct orthodoxy among the many to choose from. It is a relationship to a Holy Book that answers all the big questions and provides all the information humans ought seek from diety, some really worship the Bible, and shun seeking the living God outside its pages.

· While Americans virtually unanimously condemn Fundamentalist Muslims of any stripe for the violence they commit, American violence is just as real and far deadlier. We routinely wage these campaigns far away. Our civilians are distressed by the price of gas, as Iraqis flee for their lives, from the commited jihadists attacking US personnel, from US retaliation to guerilla tactics, from the various religious sects and ethnic groups settling old scores, and the spillover violence by those venting generalized hatred or driven mad by the constant tension and danger. While the murder and lesser violence driven by religious, political, ethnic and territorial hatred has persisted at close quarters for over four years, especially in Baghdad, where war has almost certainly imtimately touched everyone still alive with wounds, loved ones killed, and destroyed property, the US civilian population watches the constant haggling of politicians who with few exceptions never heard a bullet whizz by freezing there heart with fear. While in the comfort of our homes and SUV’s; our soldiers act as our proxies doing violence in our names. Because our government controls the kind of wealth and riches that seems unlimited, even the relatively modest sized military detachment deployed has the firepower to kill and destroy, that no similar number of soldiers has matched in history. So it appears that, if the American Army kills ten or fifteen Arabs to each dead GI, the brains in Washington and many churches deem such a ratio, “acceptable losses.” As the President of the United States, a devout Methodist, has repeatedly called all our adversaries “evil,” it stands to reason some US Christians may accept this judgement from their President, a man who has publicly announced he maintains a disciplined schedule of prayer and church attendence. The same way Muslims accept an order to kill, a fatwah, from an Ayotollah, President Bush acts commited to the task of keeping a righteous sense of wrath ginned up in those who will listen. However vigorously President Bush disputes the “Crusader” appellation given our troops by the Muslim hordes who believe it to the bone; if he is a rational man, he cannot deny the empirical reality of our presence in the dessert, as an almost exclusively non-Muslim or Christian foreign army, friends and comrades to the death with the British, the very colonial power that exploited their land for years. The US Army and Marine Corps are engaged in a mission to prescribe to the followers of Islam the future of their nation on our terms; refusing to leave until they mind what we tell them to do. It is a mission impossible. Perhaps only a man who avoided war on his father’s money, name, and war record, whose compulsory reserve duty encroached on the lifestyle of the rich young party boy and was as taxing and hazardous as a weekly round of golf; he alone could give the green light to our uniformed services, composed of the youth of a nation whose economic prospects for High School graduates, without the means to go to college; was crippled if not destroyed by the deficits of President Reagan, the man he worshipped, and President George HW Bush, Dad, who continued such massive deficit government spending, he was limited to the rarity of one term in office. Most one term presidents have left office feet first.

· Many observers, like Sen. Obama foresaw the removal of Saddam Hussein as a catalyst for chaos. It is fairly universally accepted Hussein was a monster, who followed the examples set by Hitler and Stalin, torturing, killing rivals with slow death, the gas attack inflicted on a village of minority Kurdish people, televised globally, will remain a memory for all who viewed it. However brutal he was, the present orgy of murder was unheard of while he held power. In layman’s terms, he kept a lid on the situation. As an American father of a daughter of military age, just like the president’s twins (all three remain civilians); if Iraq’s Arab neighbors were not compelled to assist their Muslim brothers and sisters out of tyranny, how in the name of Christmas is it our place?

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wow | Report to Admin

By vwcat May 17th 2007 at 8:45 pm EDT

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simply wow. You just wrote a fantastic blog and so filled with food for thought and deep insight. Excellent. I really liked the quote of Rev. Wright. The little I know of him he seems a fascinating man with a fascinating mind. I think Sen. Obama is lucky to have supporters like you who can write and make powerful posts.

Lay of the Land intro

2007-09-12T18:00:00.000-05:00

LIFER JOINTS

I BELIEVE Michigan has reached the point where those never getting out deserve their own motherfucking joint. Put all the fucking hopeless in together and guard ‘em with machine guns. I’m not sure what Michigan voters want; besides union jobs and 1^st class education. The neocon destruction done away with; and fucking jobs and factories!!!

THE DEATH OF US ALL

2007-08-12T21:41:00.000-05:00

THE ONE WITH THE CONVERSATION

We were sitting in the living room with the TV off, just talking.

Once again he started talking about houses for sale.

“There’s a place in the hills for 85 G’s. A real good hide-out.” He grinned.

“Shit; your sitting in a joint that’s paid for.”

“Across the street from the cop shop.”

“I know, you forgot about that when you bought it.”

“It didn’t matter, we bought it to flip it, not to live in.”

The front yard is a desert in the 100 august heat; inside the mammoth and ancient Carrier refrigerates the whole house to 70, and removed a bucket of water full of condensed humidity today. From the old houses I’ve seen, he’s sitting in a Cadillac.

The cement job with Darnell got started in casual conversation. I mentioned how some “experts” had told me it was impossible to repair the crumbling sidewalk without removing all the cement and starting over. Darnell said if the mixture is done right it will adhere to existing concrete. So far he is right!

The Primary Thought of Love

2007-08-05T03:10:00.001-05:00

The Primary Thought of Love

The primary thought of love is others

Not dwelling on self

Seems like the love and care of others

Is the primary thought of love

Like those people known to me who completely turned into Love

The Force of God

Visible in the world

Is there enough Love to overcome the insufficiency of all political systems, they all fail to produce consistent public approval in many crucial areas; our judiciary fails to reduce crime, military operations continue in spite of vast opposition in US polls, because confidence/no confidence votes with power to boot the Executive without a high crime and misdemeanor doesn’t exist in our Legislature. Britain has the system where the top dog can get the bum’s rush at any time. Perhaps our practice of bestowing a flat number of years was aimed at corrupt politization of each transaction of The Office to placate Parliament, and maintain the votes required to continue in office. This practice delayed needed reforms because the executive was never free to act on his own. Our President is given four years to sheepherd the nation. The constant ridicule of President Bush on TV is becoming disturbing to me, and I don’t agree with Bush in his policy or philosophy. But the old family feeling we Americans have for each other can bring a pang of protectiveness to anyone holding that office when the whirlwind of criticism, satire and the crasser insults, some are tasteless. Performers are becoming more bold in their displays of disdain for President Bush. Some Bush-Mockers stay so ‘in-character’ after a performance, one report has a surly fake news reader uncontrollably overcome by the bile of his own hatred of George W. Bush. Wailing and the knashing of teeth is the only logical next step to continue the trend toward the juvenile with ever more fighting words, crude innuendo, and scatological references.

People had begun in ‘03 speaking loudly that the death toll in Iraq was too high.

These deaths get laid at the President’s door, customary in US journalism. This carrying on is all speculation done to the tune Bush does an evil little Hitler dance to when he gets his news. That whole army could be where it is, or be in the woodsides of America training to do what it does now do. You don’t hear a single one of them bitch. At the end of my day I am happy it is not my decision whether shooting continues or stops. I have the idea Bush wants to get enough Iraqi’s on our side that the Army’s job will get easy, like Japan. Where they still play baseball. I also think Bush is an idiot and a war profiteer.

My sudden and mysterious twinge of rue for the mocking he takes came out of nowhere.

I was opposed to the election of President Reagan. His policies pandered to the rich, while the economic safety net was declared un-American.

When a low-income, disabled or jobless individual receives assistance it’s automatically called a hand-out.

Receipt of a check in the mail from stock holdings is a regular entitlement. No one is at his mailbox declaiming his dividend payment is arbitrary and undeserved. If the Stock Market operated like the Social Security Administration and Congress of the United States, Mr. Shareholder might find at any time the rules have changed and all his years of work will undergo a brand new calculation.

The moral relativism of real life demands constant mental weighing of the cost and benefit of each decision.

The President is unwilling to accept his sworn and moral duty to decide when our military operations will end. Unless fighting continues until all the ammunition is used up, there will be an end to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. This end will satisfy no one not already invited to the trough of money made on this misery. The war will end on paper without conversion to anything American.

The administration of President Bush has been a train wreck

Exponential growth in US debt incurred to operate the government in lieu of politically unpopular tax collection is the touchstone of the actual Supply-Side method of government. The “neocon” philosophy is faithful to the gospelling of President Reagan and his devoted followers.

The malleable Congress, always sleeping with one eye open toward reelection and a trusted ear to the ground listening for the next popular outcry from the public in response to outrageous government activity, that occur like clockwork, or more frat-house behavior by some government official serve to further trivialize the political discourse, non-voters tip the balance in many US elections. If one deems exercise of the franchise (the ri9ght to vote) a waste of time because years observing the government has convinced them our republic will continue as long as those enriched by it desire:

The wealthy executive and his many wealthy friends may play a round of golf with a congressman; no bribe is offered nor favor asked. The Congressman is treated with the respect befitting his office, fed, and donations make their way to him in plain white envelopes. All Mr.Wealthy Executive says to the eager congressman about their relationship Exec said as he led Mr. Rep to the front door and helped him into his topcoat.

“The XYZ business has been good to me. We think you’re a straight shooter. All we ask is that you consider the homes and well being of our people before votes that hurt us and make it more difficult to earn close to a decent living. I hope you have a pleasant flight back to Washington.”

( something as meaningless as buying a lottery ticket useless because the financial cost of a Presidential campaign ensures no one from his strata will ever win, I’ve heard useless become an invariablereverted to oftenhas was and decades old refusal to )

The agitators grousing for impeachment of President Bush are counterproductive. The impeachment of a president has yet to occur: taking Nixon’s example of resignation with a losing hand as precedent, it is highly unlikely to ever take place.

It is unlikely anyone can portray precisely how singular an individual our Presidents are. The trust of the country is his to protect four years at a time. We do not change Executives like European Parliamentarians. This President will have the job until January 20, 2009. There are ways to improve the lot of troopers in Iraq. The bitterness of White House coverage, and the ever increasing scorn he receives from a wide section of media is unprecedented in my memory. While some people had nothing but loathing for Richard Nixon, he was not accused of being stupid. President Bush has arrayed against him the snobbery of “all those who were right about the war.” Claiming he is stupid is a 5^th grader’s tactics. Talking heads could improve the dialog spending more time educating the public on what is taking place in our names in South Asia. Congressional speeches warning President Bush the money to prosecute the war may soon be withheld from him to force an end to the war was pure theatre.This was Little Rascals all the way…each declaimation a preface to outraged playacting. Nobody around Washington took it seriously. It is Constitutionally forbidden for a US Senator or Representative to approach a President to discuss matters relating to military operations, or bargain with a President. The idea any Congressional Democrat is so ignorant of the US Constitution or the way government operates or how money is actually disbursed down to the actual transfer of funds from the Treasury to Defense, the actual legal transaction. Any doubt about whether a single Democratic lawmaker did seriously believe any parliamentary rule empowered Congress to alter the amount or withhold funds to any segment of Department of Defense or the larger government with a budget in place carrying the force of law. The so-called “Constitutional Showdown,” President vs. Congress, to determine if Congress possesses the authority to demand a President make any change in foreign policy or ongoing military combat operations or supply lines supporting forces and enforce its will in a timely manner like a Court of Law can either rest assured or face the fact such action is beyond the scope of Congress..

The Corporate US Media; always the Equivalent Of any Government Controlled Media in both Authority and Purse, is devoted to the portrayal of violence as freedom of speech-to sell commercials. Anything to draw a crowd the law will allow is WHAT IS ON TV. It is FORBIDDEN to show a mother breastfeeding on Network TV, but all manner of mayhem, especially violence with THE GUN proves to be the “formula” for hit after hit after hit.

One does not cotton censorship. It is the ownership and control of the airwaves which require adjustment. Few Americans are aware of their 100% percent funding of the cable TV infrastructure, the way subcontract contracts were written when cable was strung on the Bell poles many unknowing and elderly taxpayers were underwriters of Cable TV who died before watching a minute of it. through both taxes and utility bills and NASA subsidized satellite launches the public has supported the TV business to the point we need to band together and deny them a single copper.

The middlemen between Producers of programming Content and subscriber are hogs.

US media is an oligarch, like tobacco.

The folding up of our economy like a road map because mergers are virtually unrestricted is represented by the numbers of channels a single corporation may operate on cable and satellite TV. NBC Universal Inc.controls USA, History Channel, A&E, Biography Channel, Sci-Fi, Bravo, Sleuth, Chiller, Telemundo, MSNBC, CNBC, Shop NBC all owned by the same Shareholders and Board of Directors who dictate the dissemination of information and provide entertainment based exclusively on the ability to draw draw a crowd for any spectacle allowed on the air. Commercial time is the business they’re in.

Is that in the public’s interest?

Is that the only alternative?

People yet to be shot with the evil tumbling deer rifle bullet the AK-47 and M-16 delivers still have a choice.

The trade deficit monster exists from the top down. WalMart peddles merchandise from Communist China, and consumers cannot be expected to alter the price or availibility of the vast array of products imported from China. The anti-protectionist gospel of supply-siders and neocons has far more acceptance amongst premium movie-star media than the public that doesn’t vote, they used tariff a thousand years ago.

Lacking confidence in Congress to obey the will of the public many have just tuned-out.

Opposing incumbents already in the money camp is a fool’s game. The same capital the political process is beholden to cannot be expected to promote the changes required to rein in business practices hurting average Americans while Wall Street views it all in a microscope it neither bought or has a mind to protect. As long as High School Americans wanting a job not McDonald’s is all that’s standing up for this country, we ought to be allowed to have some goddamn fun now and then. For the poor bastard who just wanted the “College Benefits” It’s not that simple.

George Will and the courts are in agreement that money connects to freedom of speech. This will guarantee the dominance of the two parties. Limiting the expense of elections to an equal sum for every political party would transform political discourse. Ideas should trump image, but that is not reality; as long as the US has the Federal Reserve in its form as a quasi-central bank, owned by a rather small unpublicized number of shareholders, expect the protectors of their interests to receive abundant donations.

I believe it is possible to drastically reduce crime in American cities with the Public Works projects pioneered by President Franklin Roosevelt. Economic alienation from the community is instrumental in developing the personality willing or daring enough to commit property crimes in addition to legitimate jobs.

This alienation is everywhere to be seen.

In 1951, 51% of US wage earners were represented by a Union demanding the benefit of collective bargaining. Collective bargaining is the only leverage Americans can use with an employer. His work is not a real asset under law. English Common Law states: “Labor is not property.” The US “labor movement" depends on current legislation. Protection of Union is not in our Constitution.

By the end of the Reagan years union representation of US wage earners was 11%. Reagan didn’t do it by himself.

Ronald Reagan was the photogenic TV politician the heavyweights needed. As a single-minded advocate for tax relief the American public took him at his word like a fevered patient takes an aspirin. The obscure economic theory that was his hallmark was an afterthought to those marked up by our loss in VietNam. About every action he took, the ones transmitted to me; were disagreed with.

When he fired the union represented airline air-traffic controllers for striking for a raise and started using military personnel as emergency flight controllers the end of labor progress in America was in sight.

Unless one has a professional degree, work must arise from the market for goods and services. The organic economic forces existing in all human community.

A Supreme Court that Nixon built upheld the firings to be lawful. The union movement never received a more crippling blow in the courts before or since.

Once the courts approved a practice of mass firings to resolve a strike for benefits; the right to strike was suddenly in flux legally, losing stature to bring a dollar bill from the pocket of an owner to a laborer’s jeans. The so-called global economy has been with us as long as there were ships at sea. The bastardizers of English communication would have the average GED moron believe something new is afoot. Trade existed in caveman times. The first guy to sell out his buddies was probably a caveman too.

If one derives benefit from slavery-like Chinese labor one is hand in glove with among the worst of all the God-denying governments ever on earth. Communist gospel states no one will believe in God in the envisioned result of human historical forces.

When collective bargaining is denied any group; we toy with jeopardy for any segment of the workforce who is dependant on agreed wages. Some loonies up north think schoolteachers should go to jail when they strike, because the letter of the law prohibits them to strike too, it is easy to dismiss the actions of others as too daring when we hear they fail. Reagan bet the courts would uphold his action and he bet right. This decision hurt the Union Movement irreparably; and without corrective legislation to address the issues the Court depended on to reach its holding it is case law. The legitimacy of the Union Movement is diminished, if mass firings can be used to enforce a letter of the law enforcement of laws forbidding strikes written during WWII when workers were frozen to their jobs and were de jure militarized; labor has become a housecat. Labor contracts are “for the already hired.” Ownership is still the worshipful apex of the social order.

So: as I observe a tribal gospel arise that “Reagan won the cold war” I direct the reader to PBS.com to find the Frontline episode documenting how heightened the threat of nuclear war was in those Reagan years. I view the Reagan devotees as believers in that phrase “All’s well that ends well.” Those who believe the world is safer because of the collapse of Gorbachev because of Russian treason are whistling Dixie. Oh we laughed and laughed, we won! We won! But what is our New World freer of the fear of nuclear confrontation than ever before in H-Bomb history?

It isn’t yet clear to me what system Russia practices. It looks like the mafia took over from the commies.

After the fall of the USSR military pensioners soon began receiving irregular payment then none at all. I never understood how US-USSR relations became so hostile immediately after victory. ESPECIALLY NOW THAT COMMUNIST CHINA PRODUCES EVERYTHING IN THE DEPARTMENT STORE!

The US warred against Germany and Japan TO END THE AGE OF EXPANDING BORDERS BY FORCE. WE DON’T WANT ANY MORE STATES. THE FORMATION OF THE U.N. RESTS ON THIS PRINCIPLE.

Bush’s failure to ease the persecution of drug abusers can hardly be seen as Christian; We don’t know what George may be snorting now. But his testimony that he bacame transformed from a rich kid testing nose candy whenever he craved to a tee-totaling, observant Methodist: that should mean something to prisoners, especially anyone taken into custody unarmed.

Illegal gun-toting should and could be seperated from sale and possesion of drugs. Having a gun or not should be like night and day in announcing drug sales and possession sentences. The least this might do is provide some incentive not to go into drugs “Big Time” meaning those heavily invested in a supply of illegal drugs become a target for thieves and robbers and require the same protection police officers demand. Many in the food chain of Dope receive currency indirectly enough to be protected from any criminal association. Yet they are the momentum of the dope problem now. They are never caught and never will be, because they’re doing nothing wrong. They are responding to ecomonic stimuli just like supply and demand requires. US Troops are presently engaged in combat operations to forcibly bestow upon the residents of ancient Babylon the ways and transactions of Jeffersonian Democracy.

Coca and Poppy cultivation could be attacked with about zero loss of life.

Beneficiaries of widespread drug abuse and promoting the status quo of draconian penalties that include Life Without Parole are numerous, the pharmaceutical Corporations, backdoor South American and Latin American Political players and their US contacts, the massive paramilitary Police and Corrections Workforce, Members of the Bar, TV Writers…

It is rarely conveyed to the public what a premium a prison cell is to the common good.

Current penal codes defeat the aim of corrections-keeping dangerous people under observation. With so much time being handed out for non-violent property crime it becomes impossible to keep all the right people behind bars. At any given time the demands of the mathematics of space guarantee the parole of an approximate number, a quota. I observed how this worked when I was in Jackson Prison for a per se drunk driving, meaning the car was parked and I wasn’t in it when the cops arrived . But I watched as the tatooed and ponytailed Joey S., who was in prison for shooting and killing a man after illegally entering his own home with a pistol was sent home like a graduate; while I, a drunk, was kept another year. Maybe a lucky drunk, I never seriously hurt anyone else or myself. That should mean something in court more than it does.

I remember my Parole Officer, a 5’4” dark haired college woman, really ambitious in her job and following “Zero Tolerance” gospel. She was shouting at me about “What might have happened”, and listing examples she’d pull out of her ass, making up alternate endings for real events, and she sent me back to prison for exactly that, what she said “might have happened.” That’s scary shit. The average person doesn’t realize how easy it is to wind up in prison.

One inmate I knew from Auto Mechanics class was in prison for fighting with people who refused to leave his house, he got Felonious Assault because he picked up a hachet in the back yard after the fight spilled outside, he didn’t use it, he didn’t hack anyone up, he just picked it up, he was bleeding from the head where three people struck and injured him. It was his house. His name was on the landlord’s paperwork. The Hazel Park cops treated ownership even like that’s unimportant.

Prison must be permanent .

Except for paying guards, Michigan Prisons were self sufficient 30 years ago. Now MDOC is a bonanza for commercial suppliers. MDOC is a money drain exceeding school funding for the first time in history.

Only the legislature can remedy laws written to mollify the public by long indeterminate sentences. I rode from Oakland County to the prison with Mike McKenney; his sentence was 4 years to life for punching someone in the mouth.

That’s fucking crazy.

Dangerous Offenders receive inadequate programs and are set free unchanged except for age; molesters of children, because the budget required to maintain maximum prisoner population requires restrictions in rehabilitation opportunities. College in US State prisons was completely eliminated by President Clinton signing the 1994 Crime Bill completely cutting off federal funding for Pell Grant assisted College in prison. This is the “Crime Bill” that also limits an individual’s right to file federal habeas corpus to one single petition no matter how long they are locked up. Really obscene shit. Of those in state prison released by petitioning for Federal habeas corpus, few were released on the first filing, some were not read without the persistence of the petitioner.

There is an evil algebra that’s mandatory required to manage a corrections environment.

Figuring ratios about space or the cost of housing those who should never get out while simutaneously processing those the court sends you. With so many long indeterminate sentences being handed out for such a wide variety of offenses, especially unarmed offenses. Courts are handing the real job of Judge to the less educated people employed in Corrections Departments. The buck stops nowhere in human sight. The actual sentence of most criminals run to a length no one knows who is uninvolved in the actual incident because bureaucrats must do the work that is politically dicey and perform for an audience of one, the poor bastard who wants out.

After one goes to the the penetenciary, the facts of a criminal’s crime get chewed up. The parole process is a corrupt personality contest.

After the minimum of any sentence for any crime the prisoner is legally eligible for parole. In all likelihood some really dangerous convicts will always regularly hit the street. The need for weeding out the dangerous from the merely greedy or thieving is where the rubber hits the road. It is violent crime that destroys families and ruins human minds.

The need to protect property would be secondary to any normal family member encountering an invader of his household.

The law as written doesn’t exactly see it that way sometimes.

Prison sentences should befit #1. Physical Injury to Victim, #2. prison space.

The Primary Thought of Love

2007-08-05T03:10:00.000-05:00

about me and the blog

2007-07-17T06:04:00.000-05:00

PEACE

2007-06-18T20:44:00.000-05:00

GIVE PEACE A CHANCE

BEST IMMIGRATION PLAN-LEAVE IT BE FOR NOW

2007-06-18T15:11:00.000-05:00

IMMIGRATION

It appears the forces in Washington are determined to adjust immigration policy, each in his or her own

image. That's godly of them. However out here on the frontier; Lawrence County, Tennessee, our main employer, the factory that relocated here from up north fifty years ago, shut its doors; leaving thousands in the lurch. They produced bicycles, lawn mowers and snow blowers. The impetus for Murray-Ohio to move its plant here was the prospect of less greedy workers, who forego union representation, and would accept less than those left behind in the victorious north. Now the country folk have been repaid; the bicycle work went to Germany, the lawn mowers to Mexico, but the snow blowers stay domestic! Back up north in Indiana.

Our friends and neighbors in Lewis County, adjacent to our northern boundry, lost hundreds of Dana Corporation jobs in 2005, the hub of its economy, along with earlier closedowns of the H. I. Seigal garment factory (they made H.I.S. jeans) and the Loredo cowboy boot plant; prospects are grim.

Sen. Obama, who I heartily support for President, has lent his voice to this misguided tinkering.

Many of the remarks he made on the floor of the Senate in support of his Amendment to Bush’s amnesty bill were as camoflage: “This is not who we are as a country. Should those without graduate degrees who spoke Italian or Polish or German, instead of English, have been turned back at Ellis Island? Should the immigrants from Asia who arrived at Angel Island to build our railroads have been told that they could only come for two years because they had no hope of passing a points test? How many of our ancestors would have been allowed to enter the U.S. under this new system?”

While this has emotional appeal, is good for hispanic votes, it is obscure gobbledy-gook. In the preceding paragraph he stated: “We live in a global economy, and I do believe that America will be strengthened if we welcome more immigrants who have mastered science and engineering. But, we cannot weaken the very essence of what America is by turning our backs on immigrants who want to reunite with their family members, or immigrants who have a willingness to work hard but who may not have the right graduate degrees.”

Which is it? Do we live in a global economy or the twilight world of the Islands Ellis and Angel. When the hordes of people we ALLOWED IN arrived, we needed as many strong backs as we could get. In the Golden Book Statue of Liberty version, the squalor of poverty endured for years by the new arrivals is as nothing! They were routinely cheated on wages. They were the underclass of that day and age. Because their European complexions worked in their favor, not a few climbed the mountain out of wage slavery to professional and executive positions in just three or four generations! Standing on the shoulders of those long dead, foreign language speakers who endured hovels and abuse for their meager bread, great-great grandchildren are prospering; perhaps merging companies, outsourcing our work.

Refrain from anymore homilies on the huddled masses! Please!

Mexico’s economy receives more hard cash from its expatriate workers than it earns from its entire oil industry. When fellow Democrats start expressing their Christian charity by admitting the neighbors to the eating table; without lifting a finger to provide the resources to train and employ native born citizens so that the bounty may remain undiminished, we have a problem.

As the Senator seemed moved to harken back to the days of yesteryear, with its wide open immigration; let us not forget how hucksters bilked the Polish and Italian poor of their little, playing travel agent spinning outrageous claims of Manifest Destiny awaiting them that longed to breathe free; it bears consideration how it was then-legal and illegal immigration was not outrunning our ability to provide work. Our industry was not being packed up and sent to Mexico like the carnival.

Our task in the next election is to learn whether government will ever again act on behalf of the wage earners or the underclass. Our entire political leadership (who are using the military like a teenager drives Dad’s car) is so dependent on corporate money; whether it comes in big wads from Mr. Brownshoes in the boardroom or in modest donations via the web from those idealists still lucky enough to have a good job; it remains to be seen if Democrats will outperform Republicans in reining in the corporate excess that has brought us to such a sorry state. When Mr. Neo Con Fascist and Mr. Corporate Greed would rather import foreigners with an education instead of raising up a self sufficient generation , the greed has gone far enough. Instead of the gentle tones of empathy and reconciliation, we need to hear some hellfire and brimstone, and see some righteous anger.

When it comes to this immigration bill, the best course is do nothing. All that was accomplished in 1986 was amnesty, despite whatever good intentions, if there were any beyond cheap help. We invited millions more to come in illegally. Appeasement of illegal workers already here attracted a flood of economic refugees to reunite with them. The status of illegal aliens ought stay illegal. If it is a hardship to be here illegally, steps already exist for its remedy. They can return home and lawfully apply for entrance. WHAT MANY ARE DEMANDING IS A GUARANTEED POSITIVE OUTCOME, don’t give it to them. My sympathy knows few bounds, I don’t propose to round them up and repatriate them.

We could start providing foreign aid to Latin America with benchmarks to keep it out of the crooked hands of those who have fostered the kind of poverty obliging so many of their countrymen as are able to abandon family, culture and language, to sneak into the U.S. to face a job market that is gruesome, that even a lifelong English speaker, a graduate of American public schools cannot get ahead in. Whatever labor they find, they are underpaid and must send money home, where it goes a lot further. I bet a quarter of what has been spent on Halliburton and Iraq could go a long way to keep them folks at home doing my old job.

We have over two million people rotting in prison, the majority for non-violent and property crime. This is a four or fivefold increase in the last twenty years. A fraction of these resources could fund Roosevelt-type programs like WPA or CCC that teach skills and build self-esteem and a desire to create. In some areas half our young people are not graduating school. The hope we had growing up in Detroit was “if all else fails, I’ll work in the factory”. The whole climate of work has been altered. The hope of finding an adequate living without twenty hours of overtime a week seems slim. We have teeming prisons and empty factories, and not the least reason why is deterioration of the relationship of boss vis-à-vis worker. The golden parachuting owners make 230x what his employee does; operate like Las Vegas high-rollers, with no restraints, concern for the welfare of those shoved out of companies-back to the frontier. Accounting tricks abound, they have multiplied! Do you believe that Sears or Kmart weren’t making any money? that the carving knife had to be used on the ONLY BUSINESS VARIABLE-labor cost? by merging and dispensing with the suddenly redundant, leaving an unknown number to face a future that won’t include a job as good?

GOD BLESS THE NEXT PRESIDENT

2007-05-30T01:45:00.000-05:00

IN THE SPIRIT OF:

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776 The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

hen in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred. to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. Our military organization today bears little relation to that known of any of my predecessors in peacetime, or, indeed, by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States cooperations -- corporations.

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

During the long lane of the history yet to be written, America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many fast frustrations -- past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of disarmament -- of the battlefield.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent, I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war, as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years, I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history...

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath -- America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land...

And finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers....

... So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days... ...Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy, the moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days, my friends, will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves, to our fellow men... ...

In the field of world policy, I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor: the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others; the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.

If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize, as we have never realized before, our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take, but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress can be made, no leadership becomes effective.

We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and our property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at the larger good... ...I could list the many problems which Americans have. I could list the problems which cause people to feel cynical, angry, frustrated: problems which include lack of integrity in government; the feeling that the individual no longer counts; the reality of material and spiritual poverty; the feeling that the grand American experiment is failing or has failed. I could recite these problems, and then I could sit down and offer no solutions. But I don't choose to do that either. The citizens of America expect more. They deserve and they want more than a recital of problems.

We are a people in a quandary about the present. We are a people in search of our future. We are a people in search of a national community. We are a people trying not only to solve the problems of the present, unemployment, inflation, but we are attempting on a larger scale to fulfill the promise of America. We are attempting to fulfill our national purpose, to create and sustain a society in which all of us are equal...

...

We are a party -- We are a party of innovation. We do not reject our traditions, but we are willing to adapt to changing circumstances, when change we must. We are willing to suffer the discomfort of change in order to achieve a better future. We have a positive vision of the future founded on the belief that the gap between the promise and reality of America can one day be finally closed. We believe that.

This, my friends is the bedrock of our concept of governing. This is a part of the reason why Americans have turned to the Democratic Party. These are the foundations upon which a national community can be built. Let all understand that these guiding principles cannot be discarded for short-term political gains. They represent what this country is all about. They are indigenous to the American idea. And these are principles which are not negotiable...

Like so much of the American story, once again, we face a choice. Once again, there are those who believe that there isn’t much we can do about this as a nation. That the best idea is to give everyone one big refund on their government -- divvy it up by individual portions, in the form of tax breaks, hand it out, and encourage everyone to use their share to go buy their own health care, their own retirement plan, their own child care, their own education, and so on.

In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it -- Social Darwinism -- every man or woman for him or herself. It’s a tempting idea, because it doesn’t require much thought or ingenuity. It allows us to say that those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford -- tough luck. It allows us to say to the Maytag workers who have lost their job -- life isn’t fair. It let’s us say to the child who was born into poverty -- pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And it is especially tempting because each of us believes we will always be the winner in life’s lottery, that we’re the one who will be the next Donald Trump, or at least we won’t be the chump who Donald Trump says: “You’re fired!”

But there is a problem. It won’t work. It ignores our history. It ignores the fact that it’s been government research and investment that made the railways possible and the internet possible. It’s been the creation of a massive middle class, through decent wages and benefits and public schools that allowed us all to prosper. Our economic dependence depended on individual initiative. It depended on a belief in the free market; but it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we’re all in it together and everybody’s got a shot at opportunity. That’s what’s produced our unrivaled political stability.

911

2007-04-15T02:31:00.000-05:00