Saturday, during President Obama’s time in Minneapolis, a friend of mine did a little experiment with the protestors outside. Bruce explains it best: “At the Obama rally on Saturday, I approached several anti-reformers as a panhandler asking for a handout to help me pay my lapsing health insurance premiums, Some told me to ask the […]
Overnight I had a vivid dream, which usually means something has been on my mind. This one was in a large room, filled with many people, many “mad as hell” about the descent of their local newspaper into (they felt) irrelevance. In my case, the dream was about the newspaper we subscribe to and read […]
UPDATE at end of this post A family wedding occupied our time on Saturday September 12; absent that I probably would have stood in line to try to get into the local Target Center in Minneapolis to hear President Obama on Health Care Reform. As expected, he filled the house with more than 17,000 local […]
At my age, it’s a given that I’ve been to many weddings over the years. Yesterdays was a bit more special than most, even though I had no direct involvement with it, other than attending and participating as a guest (the bride-to-be was my wife’s niece). Sometime after the wedding and the dinner, somebody mentioned […]
#mce_temp_url# NOTE FROM MODERATOR: This YouTube video, produced by Marion Brady, is a simple very well done video message to today’s students, educators and policy makers. I would highly recommend that educators and leaders and policy makers for public education be made aware of the video. For 77 years Marion Brady has been immersed in […]
A reluctant churchgoer, some power pushed me there recently as the title of the sermon was particularly poignant. It was, “When you open your mouth.” On the same weekend there was an opinion piece in the local paper titled, “If you know you shouldn’t say it, then just don’t.” Both the sermon and the editorial […]
At 6:09 p.m. September 9 came a brief e-mail: “My mother slipped away this morning, after a rally the last couple of days. I was with her and she was not in pain, so it was not as difficult as it might have been. She hated hospitals and did not want any more procedures.” […]
Since anyone and everyone is predicting what Pres. Obama will say tonight, and what he means by what he says, I have my right to my own opinion, which is, I would say, as informed (and uninformed) as that of anyone else. I am deliberately posting this before Obama’s speech, rather than after. As […]
Under ordinary circumstances I may not have heard that President Obama was going to give a televised talk to America’s school children at 11 a.m. today. I’m long retired with no direct ties to public schools. But these are no ordinary circumstances. Last Friday morning, I got an e-mail, later withdrawn, in which the sender […]
Van Jones is now history, at least insofar as an office in the White House is concerned. I heard Van Jones speak in person twice. The last time, in March, 2009, was apparently his last public speech before joining the Obama administration. I bought his book, “The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix […]