This is an off-year election, but nonetheless with very important local issues. It brings to mind the 2009 local election in my town, which I wrote about in this space a year ago. You can read it here. If you don’t care to read the piece linked above, succinctly: there were ten candidates for four […]
A few days ago three of us (photo of the other two at the end of this post) engaged in a brief conversation about the Big Three safety net programs of the U.S. Government: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. I am six years into my Medicare years so I know from experience how it works (very […]
Heritage #5,the originating post, is here. The comments as received via e-mail are below. One person commented in the ‘comments’ box at the end of Heritage #5 (see Dan, below). I express my own thoughts at the end of this post. There were several comments at Twin Cities Daily Planet posting. They can be accessed […]
UPDATE November 4, 2011: All comments are accessible in the November 3 post, accessible here Further comments will be added to this post if/as they are received. Check back from time to time. PRE-NOTE: Heritage #1-4 begin October 5. What motivates this rather long column on religion and the politics connected with it is a […]
NOTE FROM DICK BERNARD: An advantage of having even a small network to communicate with is the ever present, and increased, possibility of a nugget dropping in unannounced and unexpected. Such is the October 16, 2011, sermon “A Culture of Contempt” of Rev. Dr. James Gertmenian, pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis. Rev. Gertmenian’s […]
When I made the decision to create this blog two and a half years ago, I had to decide how to label myself. It was not a difficult choice: “moderate pragmatic Democrat” is what I called myself then, and I’ve not seen any reason to change the label. Each word, of course, carries its own […]
COMMENTS AT THE END OF THIS POST, as well as a photo of the Busch farm in the summer of 1907, soon after the sod-busting of 1905: Previous Heritage postings: here, here and here. “One had to be impressed with the silence. All you could hear was the jingle and creaking of the harness and […]
Last night we attended August Wilson’s play, Two Trains Running, at St. Paul’s Penumbra Theatre. It is a play first performed in the late 1980s, and set in the 1969 African-American community of the Hill District in Pittsburgh. The Penumbra engagement runs through Sunday, October 30. (click on photo to enlarge) Two Trains Running is […]
Last week I had the time to act on a long avoided task. I took on our long neglected bookshelves. Among the collected works that caught my eye was a book I had purchased in 2005, “Clueless at the Top, While the Rest of Us Turn Elsewhere for Life, Liberty and Happiness” by Charlotte and […]
An October theme for this writer came to be the topic of Heritage. Previous posts on this topic are here and here and here. October 18, found me in a classroom with multi-cultural students of French at Macalester College in St. Paul MN. We were listening to Professor of French and French in America scholar […]