Someone has calculated that today, September 19, 2012, is the 4000th day of the beginning of the War in Afghanistan: the day the bombing began, October 7, 2001. Except for isolated demonstrations, including one this afternoon from 5-6 p.m. at the Lake Street bridge in Minneapolis, there will be little attention paid to this anniversary. […]
For the past few, and for the next few days, this blog will be relatively inactive. The primary activity for this blogger is to help make a success of a major Minneapolis-St. Paul event called Franco-Fete which can be read about here, here and here. Succinctly, Franco-Fete is in four distinct parts: Friday evening Sep […]
9-11-2001 seems to have become a permanent fixture in the American psyche. I offer a reflection a little different from what appears to be typical this day. On this anniversary of 9-11-2001 the front page of the Minneapolis paper had a photo of a beam of one of the collapsed NYC towers as it is […]
September 9, 2012, was a remarkable day for me. It has taken till December 10, 2012, to complete this brief post. There were two events on September 9, one immediately following the other. That day I was to meet a young man I’d never met before, 15-year old Eric Lusardi, over in New Richmond Wisconsin. […]
Thursday night when we watched President Obama’s acceptance speech, a drop-in guest was a member of our family who is one of those 8% of Americans who are unemployed. In fact, he would qualify as one of those who are regularly interviewed on the evening news, or in the political ads, about how terribly hard […]
UPDATE Sep. 8: If you wish to watch the President Obama speech, here’s a link provided by a friend. Watching and listening to President Obama’s speech tonight at Charlotte I kept thinking back to one of the last campaign events we attended on October 13, 2008, at Macalester College in St. Paul MN. The event […]
UPDATE 10:30 p.m. CDT September 5, 2012: Watch or read President Clinton’s address if you can. Link is here. This is a long speech, very on point. Useful information resources if you are interested: Republicans should stop talking about the Moocher Class from Bloomberg News here and Economics for Voters here. See postnote at the […]
A number of years ago I began receiving what I’ve come to call “forwards”. I decided to receive them, not ask to be taken off the mailing list for them, fact-check them usually through snopes.com, and respond to the sender if not always, frequently. These forwards were uniformly false, either in fact or in implication. […]
UPDATE Tues Sep 4: This long post, Just Above Sunset, entitled “Another Labored Day”, pretty well describes the tension existing on this Labor Day, Sep 3, 2012. click on photos to enlarge them Last Friday I was at a very stimulating conversation about the future of my teacher’s union: the one for whom I worked […]
Today, September 2, 2012, is the fourth anniversary of the first day of Peace Island, “Hope in a Time of Crisis, A Solutions-Driven Conference”. Peace Island was a remarkable and exhausting Tuesday and Wednesday running at the same time as the Republican National Convention just two or three miles down the road in downtown St. […]