In the Eye of the Beholder: I have been having email correspondence with a relative in Chicago who operates a left wing blog and a radio station, too, that is to the left of left. How left is that? I don't know, pretty LEFT I would say. I told him I could not talk about Israel with him and what does he slip in there of course? This is what he said when I told him he lost me as he touted the glories of the Arab press Al Jazeera. He said:

"Lost you? I want freedom, respect for every one, the law. Al Jazeera is a mouthpiece for facts, not the garbage from the people you follow. You're intelligent. I'm shocked you fall for it. I know the facts. I've seen and read Al Jazeera. I can separate fact from fiction. What too few here can do so they're effectively brainwashed - our greatest problem.

Hamas and Hezbollah aren't terror groups. Another disgusting lie. They're legitimately elected governments. Hamas for Palestine. Hezbollah as part of the Lebanese govt. Don't you know this?

For sure, Israel like America practices state terror, the worst kind, another topic I addressed in general in an article few years back. Again indisputable unless you close your eyes to facts. I never do and base all opinions from them."

I responded in ballistic fashion: Here is what I said:

Facts are in the eye of the beholder. You have turned your back on your OWN people. You have sided AGAINST the people of the Holocaust and have sided WITH people who would DESTROY Jews, who would destroy Israel, who would destroy YOU most especially because even if you are a self loathing Jew you ARE a Jew nonetheless. You side with people who chant death to America, to Israel and death to ALL Jews.

I agree that this country has its faults and I am willing to concede that there is a small group at the top who have all the chips BUT we do NOT agree that one should listen to Hamas, Hezbollah OR Al Jazeera and take instruction from them as to what the world should look like. You say you want freedom, you say you want respect for everyone and respect for the law. See how much respect you get, see how much freedom you get or how fair the law is if groups like Hamas or Hezbollah had their way as they chant death to America and death to Israel.

You side with those who would kill your own people en mass. They would LOVE nothing else but to drive them to the sea and have said so OFTEN. I believe them. I take them at their word. In the 30's the Jews, the ones who LOVED Germany, who fought for Germany in WWI, did not take nascent German fascism seriously and did NOT take Hitlerian belief seriously or believe it was what Germany was really about. Oh it's just words they said; the majority to do not believe that way. MY posterior they didn't. They DID believe that way and proved it.

The six million are inscribed on my genetic code. I LOVE my people, I LOVE my nation despite its shortcomings and MOST importantly, I DO NOT give a RAT'S PETUTI that Hamas was democratically elected and worse that Hezbollah put its own unwanted imprint on Lebanon. It has killed Christians (and Muslims too) by the carload. The Nazis were elected too. That does NOT matter. The content of their character and what they say DOES matter. We do NOT agree. Those religious fundamentalist nations are the scourge of our planet. They want to kill you, they want to kill me and they want to destroy this nation IF they can.

I say put your money where you mouth is. Go live among them but you must live among them as a Jew. See how long you last. No wonder the right gets furious! Even I do at the PREPOSTEROUSNESS of the fringe left. NO one with any integrity and ability to look at things from both sides would or could EVER tout Al Jazeera as the ultimate fact. No one could laud Hamas or Hezbollah as ANYTHING but what they are -- murderers and slaughterers of innocents who would NOT THINK TWICE about eliminating Israel entirely, or me OR YOU for that matter as the Jews that we are. You can NEVER erase your genetics. You are a Jew and it matters not that you are a Judas to your own people. Has the US conducted rancid foreign policy? YES. I believe we can right that wrong short of blood running in the streets.

This is why I often loath the left. The Jewish people can NEVER win. We get it from the rancid LEFT and we get it from the anti Semites on the right. That is why we are rabidly vigilant. There is a world out there made up of Muslims, Christians and left wing Jews who would betray us for some misguided interpretation of erroneous facts. What they want is all Jews dead. IT has been attempted before and most of them, I believe, would love nothing more than to finish the job!

This is why I cannot talk about Israel with you. I am STEADFAST in my support of the Jewish state and I am steadfast too in my love for my own country which has often been misguided and needs to right its ship of state. The question is who will do it. I KNOW it will never be Hamas! I HOPE it will be some in the Democratic Party because it is ALL we have. The basic nature of our country ain't changing any time soon so you better find a way to work with the nation we have not the pipe dream in the sky you THINK it could be. IT WON'T not in THIS lifetime or any other.

Changing the Polls: The polls between Republicans and Democrats are closing. The obstacle to our Democratic party keeping the majority in both the House and possibly the Senate is the ENTHUSIASM factor. THAT poll seems to be in the Republican favor. Simply put Republicans are more enthusiastic than are Democrats about voting in November. The Republicans are for November what Democrats were for in November, 2008. We had a YEARNING, a ZEST, a FERVENT desire for change and for SIGNIFICANT change of the playing field and we did just that. That kind of enthusiasm is EXACTLY what we need this November as well.

There is a TON at stake. The Republicans in their own inimitable way, are talking about significant investigations of the Obama administration in their attempt to take him and his administration down for 2012. This tie up of the legislature is a vehicle they can use and HAVE used to gum up the works. Moreover, they have FURTHER threatened IF they gain power to repeal every bit of legislation including and most especially health care which is one of the Democratic crown jewels. It wasn't perfect BUT it was hugely better than we had and it was a start. That would mean, among many other things, that insurance cancellation for a preexisting conditions would go back to as it was for decades. That is just ONE of the things they could, in fact, repeal even over an Obama veto IF they take both the House and the Senate. They want to take away Social Security an absolute success story dating back to FDR and place it at the whim of the stock market. Wow what a horror story THAT would have been in December, 2008 had they done that. They want to keep the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans thereby keeping the deficit high by reducing the tax base. Lets reduce the tax burden of the middle class while those who make millions pay a slightly higher rate similar to the Clinton era. It was not a bad rate but Republicans, after the 2000 election, showed they are NOT about most of us.

No one who voted for Barack Obama as I did wants that. We may not have gotten all we wanted but we STILL got a lot and over years it can truly work in our favor even more. Just today a judge lifted the stay on stem cell research. This was another promise by the president in which he came through for us. Because of him IMPORTANT CURES for many horrific diseases and conditions could be the future in medicine. It COULD improve existing life for millions. We also got hate crimes legislation for sexual orientation. A possible repeal of don't ask don't tell may become reality.

We simply cannot go back. The Republicans are SO extreme, so divisive, SO obstructionist and SO hateful it would NOT shock me if they repealed Democratic legislation over and above a certain veto from the president.

The stakes could not be higher. It is JUST as important as it was to rid ourselves of the Bush/Republican FAILED policies which took decades to create and drove us into a huge ditch as it is EQUALLY important to KEEP our majorities in both the House AND the Senate.

So, we need ALL Democrats, ALL progressives, ALL independents who KNOW what the Republicans say is so often lies, to VOTE in November for Democrats. Republicans are bought and sold by the corporation so we TRULY WILL have a REAL oligarchy if they get majorities. Economically, things are just BEGINNING to be improved. The bailouts were repaid. These bailouts, while difficult to swallow, are proving to have been a lifesaver despite a slow recovery. It takes a LONG time when and entire nation of 350 million has to be lifted out of a ditch. GIVE OUR PRESIDENT A CHANCE to do what I KNOW he will and what he already has, in pertinent part, done IF the Congress will not defeat his agenda.

Politics is the art of compromise. Our president knows that and tries to govern that way. The opposition, however, will NEVER compromise on any of their horrific plans. The Republican party is NOT about you. It is about the top 2% wealthiest of our nation. Republicans are about the art of the UNCOMPROMISING.

Please VOTE Democratic in November, tell your friends and family to VOTE Democratic in November, tell ANYONE who will listen who is an ally to our cause to VOTE Democratic in November. We can reverse this rancid possible voting trend IF we get the vote out for Democrats! YES, we can, YES we DID and YES we WILL do again IF we get out the vote!

Power on a Platter -- Iraq's Irony -- the genius of Frank Rich NYT editorialist. Frank Rich's column -- link below is brilliant.

I am stunned by the utter ineptitude of our government, the gullibility of our people, and with a volunteer military, I wonder occasionally about the men who signed up for a mission they did not scrupulously analyze which could and did get many singularly killed. Iraq was and still is a war waged with few sharing its burden. If a nation goes to war then an ENTIRE nation should go to war and not simply sit back like an audience in a theater and watch the fireworks in absentia like a Fourth of July celebration gasping in shock and awe of every blast. People were on the other end of those blasts and MOST of our lives were NOT on the hook. Most made little to no sacrifice for our war. How corrupt is this Great Gatsby nation to allow that barbaric orgy of the killing fields of war for no reason as we sipped our Starbucks while another nation was being hammered by the wrecking crew?

If I were married to a man, had children with him and he signed up for service in Iraq I would split a gasket in anger. How dare someone relinquish the most important duty a man can have and that is to the children he MADE by risking his death in a war he was not compelled to fight and which rationales for that war were dubious at best and false at worst!

If I were a man and was utterly outraged by 9/11 I would have made DAMN sure that the response to that event was insightful, smart and made with overwhelming evidence as to why my nation was going to war against another. If I were a man ESPECIALLY with a family I would NOT abrogate my obligation to them and further would not sign up to kill another man UNLESS there was CLEAR evidence that country had DIRECTLY attacked my nation.

I admit, during that time, to the fury I felt at the Trade Center/Pentagon attack and Shanksville, PA Flight 93 crash. It was not until later that I saw how much in error and how destructive to our national security our nation's war with Iraq in particular, our Middle East strategy in general and, indeed, most all of our post WWII foreign entanglements have been. I did not see it because I did not look. I did not look because I simply bought the lies my government spewed, I wanted revenge and my government said it had the goods on Iraq. It CLEARLY did NOT and NOW I am angry at those leaders who made such catastrophically bad and deceitful policy which cost thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis lives, displaced four MILLION people, ruined infrastructure, utterly fractured the Middle East and cost us ONE TRILLION, yes I said a TRILLION bucks. How's that for deficit caring Republicans? I heard few if any of them screaming about that!

We have committed tremendous destruction and atrocities on a nation which did nothing to us! Moreover, the US handed power on a platter to Iran which now has nearly free reign in the chaos of that troubled region and worse Iran soon will have nuclear capacity of its own and no one is in a position to stop them. But CLEARLY the most troubling consequence of our Iraq war is a destabilized Pakistan. Pakistan is a fragmented mess with thousands buried in floods and mud up to their neck. The Taliban and Al Qaeda seem to be the only ones ready to capitalize on the chaos driving the rig to extricate people headed for the mud pits of the abyss and, guess what? Pakistan, in fact, has REAL nuclear weapons. The destabilization of this country has put its people near a stage of civil war with real nuclear weapons in its arsenal. If civil war breaks out where WILL those weapons end up? Who knows. One hopes NOT in the hands of Al Qaeda or the Taliban which would love nothing more then to bestow a gift upon us in our own backyard!

Why did we perpetrate a war called Iraq? We did it for revenge and because we could. We did it for our military industrial base which lines its pockets with the blood of OUR soldiers and the blood of another nation's people who posed no imminent threat to us. We did it to destroy countries, governments, human beings and civilizations wily nily for profits of oil. We did it to set an example to the world of our military might. We did it for ALL those things and now we are reaping what we have sown in the Middle East. We are like those whom we waged war upon, as Frank Rich said, in his insightful editorial, at war with ourselves, angry, divided, fragmented, sad and bankrupt. Ironically, we are the mirror image of the very nations we sought to change and that is EXACTLY what some in that neck of the woods wanted. Frank Rich got this irony completely correct on every point. His insightful article is linked below.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/opinion/05rich.html?src=me&ref=general

The Train: I posted on the MDN blog my response to a couple whose 16 year old grandson had died. They shared in their letter their memories of him by using a metaphor of the train they were riding through North Station. I post THEIR letter to the Metro West Daily News below and share my own thoughts about it.

This is one of the BEST letters I have read on MDN! Mr. and Mrs. Cerrati, your letter is profound. I think about what you have written often in my own mind and have used the train analogy as well to describe our journey through this life and the darkness visited upon all of us at one time or another.

It is those very thoughts which make me see the unnecessary futility of conflict in the world and between ourselves. I suspect many think their existence immortal and their journey on this planet forever as often our minds reject the reality of what lies ahead for everyone. We find out quickly through the cold blast of winter's death of our family and friends taken from us, often randomly, and some too soon that even our own demise is a certainly so why not all simply TRY to get along? How much easier it would be as the harshness of life visits its own cruelty upon us at will. I believe, we need each others' soft and reassuring embrace to get through the good times and the certainty of the bad.

I hope the memories of your grandson continue to sustain you and fill your mind with the joys of his life. My heart is with you.

http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/opinions/letters_to_the_editor/x1757234014/Cerrati-Coping-with-the-loss-of-a-child

Pulling Teeth: Every day in the a.m. when I read the headlines and the projections for the November Congressional midterms my heart sinks into depression. Can the American people be THAT ill informed and unaware as to elect candidates who were and are the very ones who created the economic and international mess under George Bush and who intend stalling Obama on absolutely EVERY policy vote which COULD propel us out of our quagmire? Republicans absolutely at all costs maintain their strategy and that is to say NO to everything Obama and Democrats propose hoping not only for a Democratic loss in the 2010 midterms but, after that, the eventual sinking of our president in 2012.

It is crystal clear. If the president ONLY had the support we would have gotten all the things so necessary to our survival. That is NOT what the Republicans are about. They are NOT about country's survival. They are about themselves, the big corporations and the big banks who support them and who ran the country near the abyss. It matters not whether it is a Republican of old or the newer brand Tea Partier. The goal is the same to unseat this black man from the presidency and his family from the White House. As bad as the criticism was against Clinton BEFORE Lewinsky it was nowhere NEAR the vitriol that is expressed now against Obama. One would have to be utterly ignorant not to see and hear the racist tone to the venom.

Just recently in Mass. in a liberal town the Tea Party wrecking crew was out complete with Obama signs, so cleverly and artistically (I say with sarcasm) magic marker drawn with a Hitler mustache. They tried to hook even ME. One can imagine the choice words I saved up and delivered.

Still, in view of the fact that most Democrats have well thought out prescient policies touted by experts it matters not, as some people will react not by careful thought but by knee jerk reaction mixing race into the toxic brew. Either I must watch closely what is happening and tend toward depression because I cannot STAND this horror show or I can prod people to ACT and GET THE DEMOCRATIC VOTE OUT! This did NOT NEED to happen if the president and ALL our Democratic Party incumbents played it smart and were as disciplined as the Republican Party has been.

I do not know what the president is thinking but as Joan Walsh said in Salon.com if he has something up his enigmatic sleeve now would be a VERY good time to show it. If we think the successful vote on economic reform of Wall Street or on Healthcare was like pulling teeth, we should wait for the next act if Republicans overturn Congress. The teeth will not only be hard to pull, they will be impacted and we will be cooked maybe for decades without even a pair of dentures to chew the non existent food! DEMOCRATS, GET OUT TO VOTE IN NOVEMBER and TELL ALL YOUR DEMOCRATIC FRIENDS TO VOTE FOR DEMOCRATS AS WELL. THERE IS TOO MUCH AT STAKE!

Signs of the Times: I went to Newton Four Corners to meet someone for lunch. As I approached Whole Foods on Beacon Street there were two or three men with signs and a table set up to "Stop Obama." Moreover, the sign had the usual racist insulting picture of Obama with a Hitler mustache. Evidently, they thought that would play well in that area. I have news for them it won't. As I traveled beyond that and coming to my destination a van was parked COVERED with so called conservative, anti Obama, anti gay, anti choice and pro Republican bumper stickers.

My point is these people from the hostile opposition are operating, it seems, specifically in Newton but I imagine they operate in more cities and towns than that. When I arrived at the luncheon place there were two men trying to convince us to vote for one of them, a Republican, running in the 4th Congressional District against Barney Frank. He even told me that the Republican party is the party of Lincoln and that Martin Luther King was a Republican. I have two witnesses if this sounds preposterous to you as it did to me. It would be funny IF it were not so serious. I had to walk away from the man rather than have my blood pressure soar!

Needless to say, they were NOT received warmly by me as you might imagine. ME vote against Barney Frank? I don't think so. It brought home the point how much we have to loose and how committed these people are to ultimately bringing down our president.

I am relating this in my effort, no matter how difficult, to GET THE VOTE OUT for Democrats EVERYWHERE in November. If you can help any Dem at risk in this state do so. If you can help a Democrat at risk in any other state so much the better. This is a serious time as all of our efforts could be undone. That is NOT, I think, what any of us who call ourselves Democrat want.

The opposition is energized and I feel it. They sense a big victory in November. My mind rejects that because it is utterly unacceptable to me as I am SURE it is to you. That is why I ask you, fervently, if you are able, to get the vote out for Democrats to at least diminish the November Republican onslaught. The Republicans we all know are not for the average American but they get many to believe they are and vote AGAINST even their own economic interests. They will do anything to win and we should too. I HOPE every day that we will.

Revamping Depression: I am rethinking my depression. PERHAPS, this Glen Beck dreck was not the big deal people think. The people on the mall were mainly old, gray haired Social Security receiving mostly WHITES with, I think, MANY racist jerks mixed in too. Some have SOME legit claims but not many. It is not hard to get a crowd if you have been planning the event for six months, have the mega bucks of Fox News Corp. and it is a beautiful summer's day. If I tried hard enough and had the media platform maybe I could engender tens of thousands. Well, okay maybe not but Glen Beck has made himself a multi-million dollar name. Most at the DC Mall, I believe, generally, cannot stand the fact that we elected a black man and put him and his family in the White House. Too bad. Get USED TO IT and I for one am THRILLED even with some of my policy criticism. He is YARDS better than what ANY Republican would have been!

The truth is the REASON there were no signs is that they TOLD them NOT to bring in their anti-Obama racist signs. Those signs and guns ruin their cause but it IS what they are about. We need to bang the drum loudly that there were no signs because they spread the word NOT to BRING signs but you can be sure what those signs said before is what the majority of the Beck/Palin supporters believe. There were FEW if any black people or other minority groups there. I could count them on one hand.

So we STILL have many whites who are liberals, moderates and progressives in our camp. We have Hispanics, we have black people, we have Jews who remain on the Democratic side. We have the unions, minority groups and CERTAINLY gays. ALL of those MILLIONS of people we have but we NEED to get them OUT TO VOTE in November like we did for the president in 2008!! GET OUT THE VOTE FOR DEMOCRATS in NOVEMBER! Republicans just may not take as many seats as they smugly THINK they will.

Email away. NEVER give up. NEVER give in. Save our nation -- VOTE DEMOCRATIC IN NOVEMBER and tell all your friends across the country to as well!

My very essence and core is that I am in love with knowledge, discovery and science even though I have no brain for math. :-\ I just eat up those documentaries, science discoveries, historical and anthropological truth that shed LIGHT on things that seem so enigmatic or shrouded for thousands of years in myth and superstition. I LOVE learning which uncovers the truth of why we are what we are. It is an endless journey. This is a wonderful program I am sure. You may be interested too! Scroll to view email from WGBH.

I have to learn how to embed a pic but this is about the following from WGBH:

NOVA
This week:
Becoming Human:
First Steps

Airing Tuesday
August 31 at 8 pm on PBS
(Check local listings)
Watch the program
NOVA Topics Pages
Physics + Math
Becoming Human Part 1


Where did we come from? What makes us human? An explosion of recent discoveries sheds light on these questions, and NOVA's comprehensive, three-part special, "Becoming Human," examines what the latest scientific research reveals about our hominid relatives. Part 1, "First Steps," examines the factors that caused us to split from the other great apes. The program explores the fossil of "Selam," also known as "Lucy's Child." Paleoanthropologist Zeray Alemseged spent five years carefully excavating the sandstone-embedded fossil. NOVA's cameras are there to capture the unveiling of the face, spine, and shoulder blades of this 3.3 million-year-old fossil child. And NOVA takes viewers "inside the skull" to show how our ancestors' brains had begun to change from those of the apes.

Toxic Brew: The November elections of 2010 are as important as the 2008 election and maybe more because there is SO much at stake. The opposition is simply mean, cruel and utterly racist. The NERVE of right wing white racists organizing at the foot of where Martin Luther King, perhaps the GREATEST black civil rights leader in this country gave his memorable speech 47 years ago today, is astounding and makes me physically ill. I wish I had the physical ability to help but I cannot walk for any length of time. Whatever I can do from the computer I do. I have emailed hundreds, blogged thousands of times over the past two years, contributed what I am able to causes for social justice. I cannot impress upon us enough how much is at stake. It is HUGE.

WHATEVER criticisms we may have had over the past two years of Democrats NONE of that matters now. The stakes are too high. I NEVER throw around words like fascist or tyranny lightly. To do that is to obviate their meaning BUT the tea party is made up of many and some are, indeed, nationalistic fascists in some ways truly similar to Germany of the 1930's. The groups run the gambit from NRA gun toting extremists, American Nazis, Birchers, White Citizens Councils, anti tax groups, to those who simply hate the economy, health care and are scared of the times including the changing demographics they see. Some would roll back Social Security and Medicare, the greatest social safety nets ever instituted in this country which have saved countless lives.

What is facilitating this toxic brew, is the most significant economic recession in our history instituted by most especially George W. Bush, et al. The total global economic system COULD have collapsed and Bush himself signed the bailout. Scapegoating is what happens when economic conditions deteriorate. The rightwing attacks one minority after another. Today it is Hispanics, gays, African Americans, innocent Muslims and sometimes Jews as well. Tomorrow it could be any of us. The Beck rally on one side of Washington, D.C. and Rev. Sharpton on the other is ominous.

The main thing is to remain cool, calm but committed to what we have to do and that is GET OUT THE VOTE EVERYWHERE IN NOVEMBER and not just in Mass. but other states as well! Check out the tea baggers that are in play in other states like Bachmann idiot of Minnesota, Scott in Florida, Rubio in Florida and MOST of all that disgusting jerk Angel of Nevada. We MUST keep Harry Reed AND Pelosi. It would be nice if Murkowski did not fall in Alaska but absentees might not do it. I am hoping beyond hope she can prevail. At least she is moderate, a dying species in Republican world.

We MUST do what we can. Despite criticism of our president he has done his best, I think, with the rancid and corrupt environment, economy, and wars he was bestowed after eight years of illegally corrupt Bush rule. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS now but to stop this movement in its tracks. This threat is the most significant systemic threat I have seen in over 40 years of watching the American political scene because it is directed at the legislature and Republicans of power are taking advantage of the climate. They will OVERRULE all the good that has been done so far and devote themselves, IF they gain power, to continuous investigation of the Obama administration and offer nothing but the mired ruinous rule they have for decades.

Make no mistake Republicans will not be as kind to Obama as he has been to them. They will do everything they can to take down this administration including impeaching and convicting our president. As ridiculous as this seems given the honorable intentions of our president and huge problems he inherited, it is true. In view of all the illegalities committed by Team Bush, a Republican controlled legislature would be a prosecutorial theater of the absurd. The hypocrisy would be glaring. It is a toxic brew.

I am not a praying person BUT I have become one! I send my good will to ALL of you who help in any way you can.

The Best of Greenwald: Glenn Greenwald writes for Salon.com. He is one of my favorite writers of political analysis. He has written, in my opinion, one of his best pieces entitled “Racial and Ethnic Exploitation of Economic Insecurity.” It is a brilliant analysis of the current toxic political, economic and racist climate that has invaded our country since, I believe, the Civil War. It is an explanation of why Obama and Democrats face such a perilous journey to the November elections which could overturn much of the amazing hope we held in November, 2008. I quote two of the most pertinent paragraphs from this insightful article and then paste the link to its entirety below. I urge you to click on that link or cut and paste it into your browser to read what the article says in full. In the article Greenwald pastes links to other writers you can read among them Matt Taibbi (another one of my favorites) who writes for Rolling Stone Magazine. His article is entitled "Tea Party Rocks Primaries."

Greenwald says in pertinent part: ...


"Rather than emphatically stand up to the bankers and other oligarchical thieves, they coddled and served them, and thus became the face of the elite interests oppressing ordinary Americans rather than their foes. How can an administration represented by Tim Geithner and Larry Summers -- and which specializes in an endless stream of secret deals with corporate lobbyists and sustains itself with Wall Street funding -- possibly maintain any pretense of populist support or changing how Washington works? It can't."

“There are few more bitter ironies than watching the Republican Party -- controlled at its core by the very business interests responsible for the country's vast and growing inequality; responsible for massive transfers of wealth to the richest; and which presided over and enabled the economic collapse -- now become the beneficiaries of middle-class and lower-middle-class economic insecurity. But the Democratic Party's failure/refusal/inability to be anything other than the Party of Tim Geithner -- continuing America's endless, draining Wars while plotting to cut Social Security, one of the few remaining guarantors of a humane standard of living -- renders them unable to offer answers to angry, anxious, resentful Americans. As has happened countless times in countless places, those answers are now being provided instead by a group of self-serving, hateful extremist leaders eager to exploit that anger for their own twisted financial and political ends. And it seems to be working.”

“It is indeed difficult to believe that the country will so quickly return to power the same Republican Party -- in an even more warped and primitive form -- that virtually destroyed the U.S. over the last decade through a mix of extreme corruption, recklessness and lawlessness. But nothing is more foolish than underestimating the dangers that come from this potent mix of economic oppression and the aggressive fanning of racial and ethnic resentments.”

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/

Know-Nothings: Someone said "You have a right to your own opinion but you do not have a right to your own facts." I was sent the following article by my cousin. It was written by Timothy Egan of the New York Times entitled "Building a Nation of Know-Nothings." It is one of the best opinions I have read trying to understand the absolute degradation of the intellect of our nation. Maybe this tendency always existed but now, the media being what it is, ignorance is PROFOUNDLY evident and even lauded.

It is sad and it is a shame. We will DEVOLVE without intelligence into a perpetual warring species who cannot advance with time. Our nation, as it goes through economic upheavals brought on NOT by this president but by decades of unregulated capitalism which and presidents (most ESPECIALLY George W. Bush) who preceded him over the last 30 years. The American memory is about five minutes in length. I call it the McDonald's mind. It wants things instantly and forgets about it five minutes after its esophageal journey has ended but, ultimately, it will kill.

The link is below. It is WELL worth reading:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/building-a-nation-of-know-nothings/?hp

Sent an email to Scot Lehigh addressing his August 25, 2010 editorial: "Inside Tea Party Lines." Link below

Boomerang: Scot, Your August 25, 2010 The Boston Globe editorial "Inside Tea Party Lines" was, I thought, most interesting. Hard as I try I cannot define the now-in-the-news Tea Party movement. One can look at racist signs and cringe, one can become sicked as one sees gun toting partiers standing near where the president will speak or one can look at some of the attendees at Tea Party events and see people genuinely concerned with our country's debt, deficit and those who are philosophically opposed to "big government." I get the latter. It is the other aspects of the so called Tea Party movement that are both depressing and frightening.

It is, indeed, a struggle to define those in the movement. When you say at the end of your editorial "... some who celebrated the protests as the start of an anti-Obama backlash may find the movement has boomeranged on them in ways they never imagined" I can only say from your mouth into God's ears! The essence of our republic and what our forefather's gifted to us can be erased by a single mark in the voting booth. I hope for the best but cannot help worrying that I expect the worst.

Boycott Fox: I received this email today from "TheColorofChange" (link to email below underneath the poem) and thought it might be good to forward. Feel free to forward this to anyone you know who could be persuaded to turn OFF the rancid station of race bating, Fox News. It does nothing but spread lies most especially about our president but not only about him. It ratchets up discord and division in our nation and some on its stations like Glen Beck encourage especially white people toward violence against minorities. There is NOTHING good one can say about Fox News and Newscorp's empire. It is anything BUT the "fair and balanced" news it allegedly it purports to be.

Since, of course, we believe in the free expression of information the only way to get at these deliverers of hate and division is to get them where it hurts -- in their pocketbooks by never tuning in. I urge you NOT to turn on Fox News network and to persuade your friends not to as well. Glenn Beck, O'Reilly, Hannity and others on Fox serve NO other purpose than to create division and sew the seeds of hatred in this country to do one thing advance their ridiculous agenda. They do not heal the historic wounds of our culture. They keep open its toxic sores threatening to destroy our body politic with poisonous lies.

Do not let them do this. Scroll down and read what the "ColorOfChange" email says and then proceed as you think you should. We must save our nation as the all inclusive welcoming beacon of true freedom it is supposed to be and as the poem inscription on the base of our Lady Liberty penned by Emma Lazarus says below. It is what we always have been and what we should CONTINUE to forever be.


The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"


http://mail.aol.com/32447-111/aol-1/en-us/Suite.aspx

Lighten Up? Jeff Jacoby's editorial in the Boston Sunday Globe entitled "Lighten up, Mr. President" (Link below) gave me pause for thought and at the same time angered me. I responded:

Jeff, your editorial today, struck a nerve. I ruminated about your thoughts for hours trying to figure out why I felt you were correct and find a rationale for why it is that our president seems besieged. He seems like the heavy burden of the presidency was not what he envisioned. It seems in his eyes that he is serious, even angry and that he is not free. He is not free? The president of the United States is not FREE? The presidents you mentioned Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Clinton and Reagan had, despite the terrific burdens, an eternal flame in their soul and a twinkle in their eye despite the grueling weight of the office. Why does this man whom I thought fate had determined would save our nation from its national nightmares look weighed down, sad, serious and dare I say scared?

The presidents you mentioned were white. Yes, of course, I will talk about race. I believe while President Obama had that gleam once it became dissolved in a sea of anger, rancid race bating and an incredulousness at the epithets he hears, sees, and reads about every single day of his life. It has been said he has received more death threats in one week than any other president has received during their entire tenure. Have you seen the signs? Have you seen him portrayed as something less than human, as an animal this man who graduated Harvard Law School? Could it be that this man who attained the highest office in the land by sheer determination and grit to become the first black man to ever occupy the US presidency feels the weight of the office oppressive?

Yet, he is only HALF black but it does not matter that the other half is white. White is not in his presidential description. Have you heard the reports from reputable sources that white supremacist groups are larger now than at any other time in our history with the exception of the Civil War era? Our president is under constant attack. Maybe he is under attack like Lincoln? Did the pictures and descriptions of Lincoln say he was lighthearted? No, I think not. Lincoln looked serious and under siege because he WAS under siege.

The anger, the hatred, the vitriol and the threat of violence against our president has been of Herculean proportions. He is threatened, black members of Congress are spat upon, his birth is relentlessly challenged and he is hunted by the extremist right like an animal of prey. How would YOU feel if you were he? How would YOU feel if you could jump into his black skin? I suspect you might think it difficult to "lighten up."

How light would we feel if every minute of every day we had to hear a Jewish epithet hurled at us like a weapon? How did our brethren feel as they were hunted down like dogs because of who they were? I suspect, to a degree, it is how our president feels. He feels hunted, hated, tormented by an economy he did not make or wage wars he did not begin and if that were not enough his words "This is not a black America. This is not a white America. This is the United States of America. We are one people ... " ring hollow. Oh really, we are one America? Tell that to the man who carries a shot gun within yards of the president -- this president -- this one half black president who after 300 years of racial hatred, I suspect still does not feel free. Lighten up, Mr. President? That's easy for you to say, Jeff. You are white!

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/08/22/lighten_up_mr_president/

Pulitzer Prize of Photojournalism: I do not know what photojournalism's Pulizer Prize is but whatever it is this photograph should get it.

Click on the link or copy and paste it in your browser. Scroll up to one of the most moving pictures I have ever seen of war. It reminded me of the Ira Hayes photo of the flag raisers in Iwo Jima. This belongs as a sculpture memorial in Washington DC. U.S. Marines carry a comrade wounded by an improvised explosive device (IED) to a waiting medevac helicopter, near the town of Marjah in Helmand Province, August 21, 2010. It says it all!!


http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/08/21/4946425-helping-the-wounded?threadId=1051644&commentId=16786368#c16786368

Rachel Maddow Excellence in Journalism: After watching Rachel Maddow report from Baghdad as American troops seemingly leave Iraq I felt compelled to write to her during the American so called exit eight years after the longest war in American history -- longer than even World War II. We, of course, have left ONLY in part. Over fifty thousand troops remain and 7000 private security forces which may grow over time. Her efforts were worthy of many kudos!

Rachel, I taped your show last evening which was broadcast from Baghdad with NBC reporter, Richard Engel as your tour guide. Both of you have given us and your nation the BEST in television news journalism. I am staggered by Richard's brilliance and excellent efforts from the very beginning of the war, throughout its chaos to its recent pseudo-end. You, however, especially in the last five minutes of your broadcast last evening, brought home to us the essence -- the very revelatory essence -- of what this egregious war has meant. You have made it more than statistics of 40 deaths here and 60 deaths there. The deaths are simply numbers to most Americans who, generally, were and are uninvolved in its violence or its history. They listen to the news and go off to Starbucks.

Watching you I actually FELT the terrible sometimes 115 degree HEAT of Iraq. It was a metaphor for the intense heat of war. Again and again I realize why it is so important, as our forefathers so presciently knew, for the President to ask and Congress to DECLARE war so that things as terrible as what has happened in Iraq do not happen cavalierly again. Our bombs blast human beings creating death and mayhem while Americans at home are far removed from what our government has done in our name. People need to FEEL the terrible chaos of war and YOU last evening have reported it in a way that, I believe, few journalists have before. You are a gift to us, to your nation, and to journalism.

We are smitten by your excellence. Although it gets redundant, I know, you are the BEST that journalism has to offer and I can only hope that one of the joys of our life will be to continue to listen to you on MSNBC from 9:00 pm. to 10:00 p.m. every weekday without fail! I hope you will be home soon SAFELY.

Thank you for your excellent work!

AND furthermore, I see today "Dr" Laura is kvetching about her "First Amendment" freedoms being abridged ....oh poor poor Laura, has suffered for years not having free speech like everyone else -- RIGHT, tell me another lie. May I just be crude and say BALONEY, Laura, you sanctimonious, venomous incompetent advice giver. Since WHEN did anyone on planet earth not allow you to spew your self righteous rants? Answer: NEVER. The shrill, cacophonous, acrimonious tones have been heard on the airwaves until DEAF do us part.

That, perhaps, you received some very angry criticism is merely EVERYONE else exercising THEIR free speech to say your advice on so MUCH is not only WRONG and based on NOTHING but your opinion but often times hurtful to large groups of human beings.

That you are paying the price by perhaps having the free market tell YOU what to do, OH well I guess that is the true value of the laisez fare capitalism you love so much. Your public and your sponsors can tell you to take your advice and put it where the sun does not shine. Good. They know the difference between vituperative, mean and angry advice from a kind, helpful and professional one.

YOU, "Dr." Laura are NOT the last word on ANYTHING. Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone. Even a nice Jewish woman like me can know prudent advice when she sees it!

Complaining about free speech, oh sure...GIVE ME A BREAK! You blew it. Now admit it and GO AND SIN NO MORE!

Posted at 9:59 AM on Aug 18, 2010 by

The "N" word--Laura Schlessinger in the Crosshairs.: Since Laura Schlessinger does not give her own email address and I do not want to join her "family" I have sent this to her webmaster email. I HOPE that it gets related to her.

I am a white Jewish woman. I could NOT believe Laura Schlesinger’s insensitive response to the black woman caller who stated she often had to endure racist comments of her white husband’s family. It is INCONCEIVABLE to me that Schlesinger, an allegedly orthodox Jewish woman of principle, could have been SO utterly insensitive by giving such mean-spirited advice to the woman caller whose feelings were PROFOUND. Laura Schlesinger completely dismissed the woman’s valid sentiments calling the woman "over sensitive" so that Schlessinger could spew her own right wing insensitive and cruel talking points. Her words to that woman were HURTFUL and they were erroneous!

If Laura Schlesinger cannot understand how a black woman in a mixed marriage could feel assaulted by the comments concerning race she received by white members of her husband's family I am at a loss to understand why. It is abhorrent that Laura Schlessinger whose career is about giving advice, has allegedly advanced degrees and who is supposed to understand human emotion could utter such a vile response to this innocent caller even uttering the "N" word the black caller herself would not say.

The damage she may have caused the caller, in my opinion, could be profound. It is quite different when a white person utters a stereotypical comment against blacks from a black person uttering the same comment. It is different when Michael Richards spewed the words of his racist rant from Eddie Murphy or Wanda Sykies using similar words. They can say those things and Richards cannot. There is something permissible when someone like a Jackie Mason or a Jon Stewart makes comedic references about the cultural Jew but it would be totally unacceptable for someone who was NOT Jewish to say the same things. The woman DID not and YOU SHOULD not have repeated the "N" word to anyone for any reason much less utter it to a black caller. It is and you were DISGUSTING!

The words that your caller had to hear, in MY opinion, were tantamount to someone saying "oh gee I don't know why Jews are so sensitive about the Holocaust, get over it" That is exactly analogous to what you said to her by telling her she is too "sensitive" about race when CLEARLY those people SHOULD NOT have said what they did.

Black people have suffered for centuries at the hands of racist whites. They have been killed, mutilated and slaughtered. For her to, in the history of her DNA, carry down that legacy is NOT wrong. It is as right as it is for a Jewish person to look askance at an anti-Semitic comment made by a non Jew when they have suffered at the hands of the non-Jews. Jewish people have been at the forefront of the struggle for civil rights with black people. We have given up careers and even our lives so that our fellow man could enjoy the blessings of liberty which both they and we all-too-often have been denied.

The black woman caller at the center of this issue was quite correct to be upset at the barrage of comments she received at the husband’s family gathering. She had NO ONE to help her not even her remiss husband who SHOULD have immediately come to her defense. That woman is RIGHTEOUS in her anger. Her mistake was not to have been adamant in her objection and not to have indicted her husband as well. Her husband and the people in that family gathering were COMPLETELY insensitive to her and so were you, Laura , as you so often are.

You are one who CLAIMS to give profound and understanding advice to help people. You have been inhumane, cruel and negligent to your callers. You are a sham who has inordinately capitalized, like other extremist right wing media, on the rancid and cancerous division which invades our culture. You have exacerbated it, have decided to make money from it and from those in our culture who would love nothing more than to DISMISS this country's historical reality. Moreover, you have hurt the Jewish people as well. I am ashamed!

Finally, after three centuries a half black man runs for and achieves the presidency after blacks have been shut out in a powerless desert for centuries and YOU cannot understand how other blacks might identify with that and give him their vote? Shame on you for being so politically stupid, historically unaware, sociologically backward and psychologically ignorant.

That African American woman caller was EXACTLY correct and you were CONSUMMATELY wrong. You owe her and your listeners a heartfelt apology. Maybe you should RETHINK the mean-spirited and unqualified opinions you give. You have often poisoned the airways, hurt our country and the people you claim you want to help.

A NICE video -- happiness in solitude.

http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/index.html?story=/mwt/broadsheet/2010/08/11/how_to_be_alone&source=newsletter&utm_source=contactology&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Salon_Daily%2520Newsletter%2520%2528Not%2520Premium%2529_7_30_110

Stream of conscious: I go onto Huffington. Things seem SO bad. You know what? I give up. Uncle. I'm pulling in my own blog and not going to send letters, or call Congress or do anything. I think it's just beyond anyone's control. I'm cashing in my chips, crawling into a fetal position and watching old reruns of I Love Lucy -- a time when I remember that we had SO much hope, loved this country for its WWII heroism and an economic system that seemed to work. The middle class is gone. Things seem over to me they just do. The Internet has fueled horrible people and causes that are from Pluto. The world is boiling over from climate change, famine, flood, fires, icebergs breaking off, rampant racism, terrorism and HUGE debt. Honestly, IF I believed in Revelation which I am NOT a believer but IF I were, I can see how this meets their definition of end times. I really can. For the first time in my life of decades I fear for this country and all of us in it. I really do. I had so much hope but it's gone.

Wake me up when it's over unless there is no me left in which case just leave me! :( bad mood this a.m. after reading Huffington Post and the news!

Countdown to Madness -- a documentary: “Countdown to Zero” is a documentary about nuclear war directed by Lucy Walker. It is one worth seeing to remind us exactly what the destructive capacity of a nuclear explosive device means. One has to see it to really understand it and to impress upon us the reality of the effects of nuclear war for those who might either not know of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have never seen pictures of it or if they have seen it have forgotten about it. After viewing this documentary it makes the storm cloud under which mankind sits difficult to forget.

The documentary retells the history of the construction of the nuclear bomb during World War II, Oppenheimer’s horror of what he and others had accomplished through the Manhattan Project, the science of it and, of course, the attempts, however minimal, at nuclear non proliferation treaties signed by the United States and Russia throughout the decades. The documentarian interviews a host of experts on nuclear proliferation including Valerie Pflame (the woman who worked for the CIA exploring the link of terrorism to nuclear weapons whom Rove, Cheney and their henchmen in the Bush administration outed) as well as Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair, the late Robert MacNamara and others including profound statements by Ronald Reagan, John Kennedy and Barack Obama.

The minutiae of the historical facts behind the building of the nuclear bomb, although interesting, are not what staggers me. What staggers me is the fact that the US, Russia and seven other countries have the capacity now, as I write this, to annihilate life on earth many times over in a matter of seconds and how relatively easy it could be done whether by mistake, terrorist attempts at purchasing and/or stealing nuclear material, smuggling nuclear devices into ports or simply bad policy – VERY bad policy and how close we have come in the past to having that happen.

Moreover, it is astounding the relative ease of creating a nuclear device IF one has the appropriate materials and how many have already attempted such a thing including A.Q. Kahn, the hero of Pakistan’s nuclear weapon program. Nuclear weapons in the hands of unstable nation states like Pakistan are a clear and present danger. A destabilized Middle East created by the Iraq War is a threat. A nuclear device either secured on the black market by terrorists or possessed by rogue states like North Korea which does have access to nuclear material or Iran which wants to have access to it is a doomsday scenario. It would take but a single mistake or malfeasance to propel the planet and man on it to extinction.

The documentary catapults the viewer into the reality of a nuclear explosion with views of the flash point, evaporation of people and miles of destruction to everything near the blast as well as the destruction from the ensuing tornado like wind and radiation poisoning that follows as the blast eradicates everything. It is a mind numbing experience but one which, I believe, is necessary for all to see. The horror of it is beyond the power of human imagination to truly comprehend. Man in his genius could be the genius behind his own demise. That is the irony and that is the fear.

Zero nuclear weaponry world wide is the goal but who do we trust to pursue it? This documentary, in my opinion, is a must see for all who care about the preservation of life on earth for its own sake and for the sake of the generations which come after us. The earth is a gift the beauty of which we must not squander for any reason. Let us hope everyone else thinks that way as well.

Education and our broken Senate -- two complementary articles: One of my favorite NYT editorialists, Bob Herbert, wrote a wonderful article in the NYT today entitled "Putting Our Brains on Hold." It speaks to the issue of the poor state of American education and its lagging-behind-other-cultures youth. He places a great deal of the blame on deep state budget cutting and other issues. The reasons though, I think, are even more profound and complex than even HE stated. If you haven't already read it I paste it below.

I also paste the link to a rather lengthy but well-worth-reading article from the New Yorker Magazine entitled "The Empty Chamber: Just how broken is the Senate" by George Packer. It is about the implacable Republican/Democratic divide that exists now in the US Senate as it never has before in our history.

It seems out entire culture is in a frozen state of discord, division and angry rhetoric. We do not speak to each other and really hear. Mea culpa, I am guilty of that too. The economy, the media, and the explosive cultural change is partially responsible for some of it. It is, of course, more than simply that. Both articles reflect the frozen, stupefying, inactive nature of our culture hanging in suspended animation unable to move. What has gone wrong? There must be a rainbow somewhere. I just cannot seem to find it.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/07/opinion/07herbert.html?_r=1&hp

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/09/100809fa_fact_packer?currentPage=1

Polio Rising: There was a rather lengthy article in The Boston Globe today (Link below). It has been reported that polio is rising again this time in Tajikistan. As a polio survivor who contracted paralytic polio in the 1950s and suffered its debilitating effects as a child as well as significant post polio issues as an aging adult, I shake my head in disbelief. Once thought to go the way of small pox the scourge of polio with its accouterments of braces, crutches, casts, surgeries, respirators and more is still with us despite valiant efforts to eradicate it worldwide by Rotary, WHO and other organizations. This hard-to-believe-but-true fact reports polio is still raising its ugly head in Tajikistan and from there it even traveled to Russia. In our trans global age the World Health Organization is concerned it will travel easily to other nation states as well. This among many other reasons makes me say God bless America. Truly, even on our worst days, it is better to live here than almost anywhere else. Vaccination against polio is mandatory and should remain so. Efforts to help countries which are plagued by war, religious and other obstacles of superstition and myth, helping to prevent vaccination of their people against this dreaded disease, must be overcome.

I criticize US foreign and domestic policy sure but one cannot deny the fact that people overcome Herculean obstacles to get here. They must be doing that for a reason. Perhaps, despite our shortcomings, it is better -- a LOT better -- here than many other places on earth. Articles about the hideous disease of polio again rising in the underdeveloped world and even in the not so underdeveloped world never ceases to bring that point home to me!

http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2010/0 /05/tajikistan_outbreak_sets_back_effort_to_end_polio/

THANK YOU!: The federal court in Northern California handed down yesterday a decision which declared Proposition 8, banning marriage between homosexuals in California, unconstitutional. I composed an email which I sent to Chief Justice Vaughn Walker of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California who wrote the most beautiful and errorless opinion I have ever read on this issue. I posted the letter I sent to him on my blog:

Justice Walker: I do not know how to say this well enough so that you understand how important your decision is to those of us who either are gay, have children, relatives or friends who are. You have given hope to MILLIONS and I might even aver you have saved lives. Thank you, sir, for what you have done. Your decision was historic, complete, brilliant and absolutely on point.

I am old enough to remember a time when people, friends and relatives I know almost took their life and for what? They almost did so because they could not crawl out of their skin and there was seemingly no other way out of a life of unhappiness. People faced the rejection of even of their own families. One could proudly be Jewish, Irish, Italian, African American or any other ethnicity but any one person within those groups could be rejected and thrown out on the street by the families who are supposed to provide unconditional love and support. This is, in the final analysis, about love and the ability to share one's life with whom one wants enjoying the benefits that everyone else takes for granted.

I cannot thank you enough for the hope you have brought to so many. Now, I suppose, ultimately, this will go to the US Supreme Court. It only takes one justice there now -- only ONE -- to restore hope to millions who for centuries had known none. If upheld it will be, in my opinion, as important as the Brown decision and surely as IMPORTANT as it was to clear the path for interracial marriage so that ANYONE could marry whom they wanted. Truly, it is not the business of the state to deny a CIVIL right to a huge group of people when others in that society take that same right for granted.

Thank you again, sir. Yesterday you have done a GREAT, GOOD and MORAL thing and I know YOU have saved lives in the process. Religions have stated to save ONE life is to save the world entire and, I believe, you have done just that.

A War to Share: I paste below Bob Herbert's NTY op ed piece entitled "The Lunatic's Manual" about the Afghanistan soon-to-be-ramped-up war which is thought provoking. I emailed him the following:

Mr. Herbert. I kept in touch with Howard Zinn mostly via email since his view of history spellbound me as a student at Boston University. I never got him out of my blood. About two weeks before his death I saw him at a local restaurant near Boston and exchanged a few words. In his last email to me, discussing current events, he counted you as one of his NYT favorites. I can see why. Your editorial today was brilliant as it always is. I hear Prof. Zinn's voice through your opinion, most especially, on utterly endless futile war.

I am stymied, though, unlike he was, about, most especially, Afghanistan. I simply do not know. Prof. Zinn, of course, came down heavily on the anti-war side in nearly ALL of America’s excursions since WWII. I agreed with him on most things and yet I have a question mark about this one.

What I wanted to happen after 9/11 when the world was on our side was to go into Afghanistan which we did, topple the Taliban which we DID and then go after Bin Laden and Mullah Omar which we did BUT someone close to the top nixed that important order to take them out. Why? My guess is because of Iraq, Bush’s senseless war which he wanted to wage at all costs and even if we did not have the money to pay for it. Iraq now is decimated. The people who are left there live lives of desperation. Had we done what I just explained, we could have killed Bin Laden and Mullah Omar in Tora Bora, TRULY declared victory and left but we did not. We are now in an existential NO EXIT war. There is NO question, as I understand things, that there will be one or two or three or 3000 new indoctrinated Al Qaeda recruits who will do ANYTHING, including obtaining a nuclear weapon, possibly from Pakistan, to get us.

Pakistan is in TERRIBLE shape. There are floods, suicide bombings and the Islamists are taking full advantage of the chaos. The ten million dollars the US has given in aid is lost in the crowd. Academics have often said PAKISTAN is the REAL threat. I am worried. Thankfully, I am not the one making the decisions. I simply do not know WHAT the correct move should be. What risk should we all be willing to take? Bush made the stakes even higher than they had to be and this president, I believe, does NOT know what to do with the cards he was dealt. Some Americans, the president is quite correct, have historical amnesia. This quagmire was not Obama's idea. Iraq depleted US forces making it nearly impossible to succeed in Afghanistan which clearly we could have done then and may, indeed, still NEED to do now.

What you say about the country not sharing the burden is correct. War MUST be declared AND must be fought with the majority of the country’s support. It is what propelled us toward success against a fearsome Nazi and Japanese foe in WWII and it is what should propel us now. Five tours of duty for a soldier should be ILLEGAL. This is NOT what our Founders envisioned because they KNEW leaders could take advantage of troops they did not see and fight wars they themselves did not personally fight. The draft is the ONLY equalizer. The rich, the poor, the uneducated and the educated MUST be in the effort together. I am sure if that were the case our leaders, now, would think twice, three and even four times before they EVER waged war again!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/opinion/03herbert.html?hp

A Monument and a Name: A relative alerted me to an EXCELLENT series published online by historians at the Jewish memorial to the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, in Israel entitled "Insights and Perspectives from Holocaust Researchers and Historians." (Link below) These are fifteen VIDEO short lectures on the Holocaust as it relates to anti-Semitism, Holocaust history, the rise of Nazism and the experience of the Jews of the Holocaust as well as how it pertains to the establishment of the State of Israel.

No matter what your viewpoint, these lectures are worthwhile because they are given by academics who relate the scrupulously documented evidentiary truth of this still incredulously flaming "debate" about the veracity of the Holocaust, the present day virulent anti-Semitism accompanying Holocaust denial, and truth behind the establishment of the State of Israel. The lectures are fascinating if you are interested in this subject. Look to the left of the web site for the various short lectures for those which may interest you. The video short lectures include:

The Auschwitz Bombing Controversy
Icons of the Holocaust
The Holocaust and the Establishment of the State of Israel
The Righteous Among the Nations a Unique Program
The Nature of Modern Anti-Semitism
The Uniqueness of Nazi Anti-Semitism
Why Did World War II Break Out
Confronting Holocaust Denial: A strategy
Where Did the Nazis Take the Term "Ghetto" From and Why
The German Judiciary in Eastern Galicia and its Contribution to the Holocaust
Dutchmen in Europe and the Dream of a Greater Germanic Empire
The Development of the Final Solution
Women in the Holocaust
The Catastrophe of Salonikan Jewry and the Looting of Their Property
Hanging by a Thread: Reflections on Being a Jew During the Holocaust

I submit the history of the Jews and the Holocaust is enmeshed with the general history of all of us in modernity and it is, of course, a profound element of our current Middle East dilemmas of war and peace. Yad Vashem literally from the Hebrew means: a Monument and a Name.

http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/insights/video/modern_antisemitism.asp

A Metro West News letter writer, Lloyd Kaye, has written an editorial entitled: "Use Tax Dollars for Peace." It was well constructed and says the following:

I have seen many films and documentaries about wars. I remember seeing the first one back in 1968 in a large auditorium with about 700 other teenagers, watching a single B-52 bomber as its bomb bay doors opened and bombs started to drop on Vietnamese villages. From one bomber, not 10, not 30, not 70, not 85, but what I found out years later as many as 110 bombs from one B-52 bomber on one run.

I found, in that moment, that what we were doing as a nation was criminal; that bombing villages of woman and children and old men in their homes was a crime beyond the blood and burnt and melted flesh that resulted from it.

Yesterday at the Ashland Library I witnessed a documentary that went beyond that film. Watching a film about the children of Gaza was almost too much for me. It was too much to know my tax dollars are paying for shrapnel embedded in the brains of teenage Arab children; that Jewish and Arab children cannot live in peace and enjoy their lives because of selfish men with agendas and dreams based on blood and money and of empires of the past.

I have given my government too many dollars for too many lies, and too many children have died too many horrible, lonely destructive deaths since my own birth.
I'm tired of those lies. It's time to end the war machine and to spend those dollars on the great problems of today which are all easy to solve if we focus on building and cleaning our world the world of the 21st century.

Over and over, peace comes only after too many people have died for reasons that never legitimize those deaths. Too many have died in the Middle East and I'm not interested in the reasons any more. I have heard them all since sitting in Hebrew school in that same year of 1968, the year two men of peace were murdered and a president elected who lied to Americans and bombed Cambodians and Vietnamese by the millions. There is a peace in the Middle East, and it is attainable.

It's time to put my tax dollars to work for peace. I will do what it takes to stop these endless, illegal wars.


I gave his piece Another Look: It is hard to argue with anything Mr. Kaye has written. I understand and empathize with all of it. Documentary is a powerful journalistic tool to actually show what history and, in its specificity, war perpetrates. I, too, remember my first, my VERY first documentary about war. It was at age 10 shown at the St. George Theater in downtown Framingham. It was about, of course, since it was around 1958, what the Nazis had done and most specifically showed the dead bodies of the Jews of Auschwitz and Dachau. It showed HEAPS of skeletal remains of bodies upon bodies being bulldozed by Allied soldiers because of the stench and disease they posed. It also showed the ovens where Nazis, in their haste to get rid of the evidence, burned the bodies of my brethren. Multiply that and get six million so that that number becomes unfathomable and burns like a branding iron into the synapses of ones brain. As a ten year old, I became literally physically nauseated as I gagged and nearly threw up at my seat. I will NEVER forget that film because it introduced me to the history which was responsible for the horror.

Since that time I have honed my political beliefs and do, despite what some may think, place myself left of center. That single event would ensure I always remained so as I could see the right, had little humanitarian heart.

One must, I think, though, as Mr. Kaye says, play the ball where it lies and not return to the same tired excuses one after the other keeping a nation perpetually at war for the aggrandizement of a few. It is heinous thing.

Still, as much as I am opposed to war as a means of dispute resolution one MUST understand what is a real threat and distinguish that from what is not. I LOATH what happened in Gaza to the innocents. I wish it never happened. I wish for once, too, however, a documentary could be shown about the thousands upon thousands of innocents that fundamentalist religious brutality and immorality has perpetrated on old men, women, and children, sitting at mosques, walking on a street, attending a funeral, sitting in a school and hundreds of other benign locations where religious extremism perpetrates its dastardly deeds upon innocent others.

I say to Mr. Kaye I understand your feelings BUT you cannot be blind (or you can to your peril) to the depth and malicious destruction that the radical fundamentalist wants now to bestow upon our culture, our nation and even to the west at large. It cannot be denied. Our struggle has morphed. It does not matter what the US or Israel has done in the past.

What DOES matter is that if all the things for which you may want to indict the US and Israel did not exist do you think for one minute NOW that those who hate this country would cease and desist from what they want to do even IF it means exploding a radiological device or biological agent to kill and sicken millions?

I suspect not. If every Jew in Israel lived in Alaska instead of Israel do you think the Middle East would be a bastion of peace? I HIGHLY doubt it. To deny the murderous quality of the radical fundamentalists’ intentions is to place your head in the sand and risk your life as well as ours. They will NEVER stop no matter how much you protest because it now, for them, is a religious cause which gives meaning to their lives and madness to their hearts. We are in an existential nightmare and there is, as I see it, literally no way out.

I agree with ALL you have said, Mr. Kaye, and yet I ask this question: how many Islamic fundamentalists throughout the world would lay down their arms even IF we became the most peaceful non-violent nation on the face of the earth. My guess: FEW!

Do you Cindy take Helen?: I posted my opinion about a letter on another blogging news site which involved the topic of homosexual marriage. I wrote the following:

The entries about gay marriage on this site seem to be less negative. More are positive toward homosexual marriages and they do well articulating evidence to back up their opinions. I possibly am in error but I believe this issue is losing steam for a number of reasons: (1) there are many more important issues to address like the economy, war, and oil (2) the generation emerging is MUCH more accepting of alternative lifestyles and homosexuality in general because homosexuals are more visible. (3) The younger generation knows more gay people and more gays have come out within their own families than ever before. It is obvious homosexuality is a universal phenomenon. It appears in all cultures and in other species as well. It is a sexual variation NOT a pathology and through science the courts are able to see that the major ingredients in the successful raising of children are the LOVE, caring and support of them they receive in the home.

Many pathological heterosexual marriages spawn troubled, dysfunctional, and psychologically impaired children. Heterosexuality is NO yardstick for good parenting. In fact, because homosexuals have to go out of their way to have children, the children are wanted and are not simply conceived after frivolous activity. Moreover, I submit, while abuse exists among gays, it does so less often because the relationship between the partners is biologically more equal. Simply put, men are stronger than woman and easily can abuse them and do.

I will go out on a limb and say, generally, if one takes the factor of children OUT of the rationale for heterosexual marriage each sex has more in common with their own gender than they do with the opposite one. (Before anyone screams at me I KNOW this is not true for everyone.) One hears many women say I want a man to have the characteristics of my female best friend. She may not be attracted to women or want to sleep with them but women often like the qualities of other women better than they do the qualities of their own husbands or male partners.

The sexes are INTRINSICALLY and psychologically different and many would rather share, can share and do share those psychological intimacies with members of their own sex. The fact that heterosexuals are together is primarily biological for the making of children. Heterosexual reproduction reforms and evolves DNA weeding out the genetically mutant bad genes while keeping the good ones. It ensures biological variation and diversity of the species but it does NOT ensure the qualitative dimension of happiness.

The Equalizer: This is a comment on a blog in Salon.com which I link below. The Salon article by Ashley Womble is about a woman who goes searching for her homeless brother who is schizophrenic. It is, indeed, a story of pathos and why we must try to do the best we can in the time we are allotted. I said:

My aunt used to tell me that life is a vale of tears and I know all too often for friends, relatives, and for me, too, it has been and is just that. My heart goes out to Ms. Womble. There but for the grace of God or fate go any of us.

I had a cousin who was institutionalized his entire life. His hell was Schizophrenia. He was an only child of a beloved aunt. After her husband died her son, after years of torment in mental hospitals of the 1950's where he suffered abuse, the loss of an eye, and the loss of himself, merciful death took him from a seizure before it took his mother. He was only 49. Later my aunt, well into her 80’s, ultimately joined her son, buried side by side in the family plot.

I grieve for her to this day, for the family often suffers as much as the victim did. In that era there was not even much medication to ease the mental disorder. Later, when I was a student in a psychology class, I saw my cousin in an institution for the mentally ill in which we did class field work. I went over to him and looked into his sad, staring eyes and introduced myself to him. I called him by name and said “I am your cousin.” He continued to stare and in monotone said "Oh." That was it "Oh." It was a metaphor for the sum total of his life. What a cruel disease Schizophrenia is. The mechanics of the body worked but the mechanics of his mind were a tangled web of dysfunction. He was dead BUT he was alive. That was the curse. Alzheimer's disease, which a friend’s mother has, does nearly the same thing. The mixed emotions are that we love them but can we love them like this? If one could bring my friend’s mother’s mind back to normalcy I hear her saying, in her own inimitable style: "Well THAT was just AWFUL!"

I am not Christian. Still, one can take profundities of other beliefs and use them to shape one’s own character. I hear Jesus saying: “If you do it unto the least of these my brethren you do it unto me” or “The first shall be last and the last first.” Why do humans fall SO short of living those beautiful words where the poor, the hungry, the dispossessed, the nation less, the rejected of family are loved and accepted DESPITE their shortcomings? I do not know why. Humans, we know, often fall short of what is good and right.

The Hebrew Bible tells us God instructs us to “be kind to the stranger for you were once strangers in a strange land.” The president in his Cairo speech said “the Holy Koran says ‘whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.’ ” Why do we not live the principles so continuously uttered from the instruction of our varied religious backgrounds?

I do not know. If I could waive a magic wand I would make the last first and the first last. Better still I would simply treat others as I myself would want to be treated. We all fall far short of what our best teachings instruct. In truth, through DNA we are all connected. Why often we cannot feel that connection I further do not know. Most try, I think, to do the best we can with our own sack of sorrows and at the same time lend a sympathetic kindness to another person who may be in need. In the final analysis that is all anyone can try to do and we should do it as time grows short, and we know, as no other animal does, in the end we will, each and every one of us, lie side by side as death, the great equalizer, awaits us all.

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/07/27/my_homeless_brother/index.html

Can't Let it Go: I have listened and am often critical of two supposedly left wing Sirius radio talk show hosts, Alex Bennet and Lynn Samuels. Most particularly Lynn Samuels is vitriolic in her hatred of Israel and often waxes nauseatingly anti Jewish EVEN THOUGH both of them ARE, in fact, Jews. Who would have thought it? I decided yesterday and today I had had enough and thought it imperative to address their views which I adamantly oppose.

Yes, I'm still listening to both Alex and Lynn at times. Often, your shows go on unconsciously to me in the background of my home. Occasionally I catch a clip that propels me to respond. The Holocaust is one such issue that does. It never ceases to amaze me when Jews themselves like you, Alex, or like Lynn Samuels MOST ESPECIALLY, speak about the Holocaust and will often say well we should not forget the others who were killed. OF COURSE, we should not forget the others who were the targets of the Nazi killing machine. How could one who has sensitivity about depriving anyone of the right to live not include in remembrance other groups among those who suffered the Nazi onslaught? We SHOULD and we DO. BUT and it is a big qualification: The Jew stands alone as the PRIMARY recipient of the horrors of the Holocaust. That does NOT ... let me repeat .. does NOT mean that one is insensitive to inhumanities directed against others even in our own time.

Often, when one says that the Jew should not claim the Holocaust's exclusivity, it is an EXCUSE to minimize that slaughter against the Jewish people singularly. It demeans it and makes Jews just another part of it like everyone else. I would even venture to say many who really are anti-Semites use a similar tactic as well as if it could somehow absolve them or maybe their relatives of anti-Semitic complicity in that horrific event or at least neutralize the slaughter against the Jew by making it universal and not specific.

Yes, it is the slaughter of the six million during the Holocaust that looms larger and more distinct for the Jew than any other group. The Holocaust did NOT come out of nowhere. You sit in your air conditioned offices, lead I am sure a relatively prosperous lives and thank God or fate or something that YOU, as Jews, did not live among the unlucky eleven million then who were targeted for extinction having committed no sin other than that of being Jewish. A Catholic, a homosexual or even a Gypsy could camouflage their being and did. Even some Poles were omitted from the Final Solution because they "looked" too Aryan. Others took up arms to fight against the Nazi menace. In Europe of that era a Jew could do none of those things. He had no weapons with which to fight and he could not cover up his identity by looking too Aryan. The Jew was always, without exception, ultimately condemned to death in the gas chambers and to the ovens of Auschwitz and camps like it. There was no get out of jail card for him. There was literally no way out.

Moreover, from Babylon to Greece and Rome, from western Europe to the Eastern European states and to the pale of settlement including Russia and, in modernity, in nearly all Arab states, the Jew was and is still hunted like a dog. He was historically killed when it served the political purpose of certain states. When it did not that state USED the Jew for his intellectual prowess, his financial expertise and his labor BUT we remained a separate entity and a world apart. The Holocaust did not simply magically appear. It appeared for a reason and you will have to look to Jewish history and even to New Testament text to find out why this was and is so to better understand how the monstrosity of the Holocaust against the Jew could ever have happened as well as why the Jewish experience is unique and different from all other groups.

Israel exists because of the historicity of these facts over millennium. Israel fights for its life EVERY day. Would Gazans care about the Jew? Of course, the answer is NO. Would they care about YOU? The answer is, again, NO. The Jew is NEVER free from attack and that includes you, Alex and Lynn who rail and pontificate against State of Israel. Lynn, in particular, uses the most disgusting bilious stereotypical epithets against the Jew as IF she is not one. She does not care WHAT she says and HOW mean spirited she says it and what credence it gives to anti-Semites everywhere. They love it when even a Jew is against Jews. It is shameful and SHE is shameless.

Israel will NOT die UNLESS every Jew there is wiped off the face of the earth. Apparently some surely do not care if Hamas prevails. Guess what? Both you AND Lynn could be swept up by such a horrendous possibility as well. You may deny it and with vituperative invective indict Israel all you want and worry about the poor Gazans whose Hamas they elected so they could lob thousands of rockets into Israel daily and kill Jews. You are FREE to say what you want but listen well: Jews fight for Israel's existential survival. The enemy of Israel is your enemy too as they surely would, IF they could, target you simply because you are a Jew. Gazans are NO different NO different from any other people during 5000 years of Jewish history of those who have tried to rid themselves of the Jew.

You, Alex, Lynn and I are among about ONLY 14 million others who are Jews. We will remain so as long as we live and there is NOTHING you can do about it. You should kiss the ground of the State of Israel because if its enemies have their way any who have a drop of Jewish blood flowing through their veins could feel their wrath no matter where we live. The hatred of the Jew is out there. It is all pervasive and it threatens all of us. Ask not for whom the state of Israel exists. It exists for you and for me and for all Jews if we need it because for centuries the world wanted us to cease to exist and it surpassed even its own wildest expectations by doing everything it could to ensure that fact. They got six million of us. Next time we may not be so lucky!

Poems and Profound Thoughts: I thought these poems and quotes both beautiful and profound as I think about the 96,000 secret Defense Department and Pentagon files which have been exposed and our delusional propensity to think war in this nuclear age is winnable.

The first is taken from the July 26, 2010 NYT: Rupert Brook -- "The Soldier " (about an English soldier days before he died on his way to Gallipoli during World War I in 1915) -- substitute Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan or the next sad endless weary war in a long line of wars yet to come:

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

and yet another on a Turkish Memorial. It is the Memorial of Anzac (Australian) Cove, commemorating the loss of thousands of Turkish and Anzac (Australian) soldiers in Gallipoli.

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives… you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours… You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.
— Atatürk 1934

From Wikipedia about the Gallipoli campaign:

"The conditions at Galipoli, on both sides, were notorious. In the summer, the heat was atrocious, and in conjunction with bad sanitation, led to so many flies that eating became extremely difficult. Corpses, left in the open, became bloated and stank. The precarious Allied bases were poorly situated and caused supply and shelter problems. A dysentery epidemic spread through the Allied trenches in both Anzac and Helles. Autumn and winter brought relief from the heat, but also led to gales, flooding and frostbite."

This is the reality of war. This is why war should never be but, alas, seemingly always will be as it satisfies man's endless unquenchable thirst for human blood and the power that blood bestows. Jesus said to his disciples, "It is inevitable that stumbling blocks come, but woe to him through whom they come" Luke 17:1.

Woe unto to us as we are in a time where war ultimately can be neither won nor lost because in the end there will be no human beings left to fight it. Imagine man, the only animal we know of who does little to preserve the earth YET is the ONLY animal who can understand the earth and appreciate its majesty. Why, why, why would anyone not want their children to see its awesome splendor? I shake my head in disbelief that war is even thought an option. How many tours of duty in a dusty hellish place can a man take?

This country once so heroic and strong is diminished by its penchant for eternal war held hostage to the filth of oil and Wall Street avarice which cares NOTHING except stuffing their pockets with gold crafted by the sweat of others. "Eli, Eli (pronounced A Lee) (my God, my God), words spoken by King David in Book of Psalms 22:2-3- : "...My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me, and art far from my help at the words of my cry? O my God, I call by day, but Thou answerest not; and at night, and there is no end for me..."

The New York Times took a survey of opinion of decisions of this extremist right wing Supreme Court and included a section where we could post our general view. I stated the following:

Recalibrating the Scales of Justice: I am an ardent progressive on most issues. I think our nation is in the most dangerous condition since the 1896 malevolent Plessy decision much due, in pertinent part, to the extremist right wing activist judicial decisions the present-day majority of this court has handed down. It is reflected by the disgusting decision of Citizens United granting the same political contribution rights to multi-billion dollar corporations as it would to any other person no matter how poor they may be. That decision is not to be outdone by the many other mean-spirited decisions according rights to whites as IF whites were EVER denied those rights in our country in the first place. Whites, most assuredly, have suffered from NO lack of power.

Every day I pray that just one of the loathsome four so called "conservatives" -- Roberts, most ESPECIALLY Thomas, Alito or Scalia either resign for some reason or retire so that these horrific decisions sinking the egalitarian promise of our nation fade into obscurity. I hope some day that these corrupting decisions are reversed by an entirely progressive court. That is my dream however unlikely.

Thomas, our only African American justice stays mostly silent when arguments come before the Court. He has chosen to turn his back on so many with whom he should have been able to identify. It is HE who possibly may NOT have been in the position he is if it were not for the liberal decisions of the past which have tried to apply the equal protection clause of the Constitution to minorities and make up for the centuries of the nation's shameful discriminatory past. If not for affirmative action Justice Thomas probably would NOT have gone to the schools he did. He possibly would NOT even be married to the woman he is if it were not for the liberal federal decisions that overruled states which heretofore outlawed miscegenation. I dare say he even risked bodily harm by racist groups who took a DIM view (to say the least) of interracial dating MUCH LESS marriage. And yet, he has the unmitigated gall to vote as he does attempting to overturn all that has been gained for minority rights including his own personal rights.

Lives are in jeopardy as the activist court, conservatives SAY they are against, dismantles one by one those decisions which have helped people overturn racial discrimination against African Americans and other minorities. Other decisions which have helped equal the playing field for the middle class are at stake if they are not obliterated already. Moreover, the most fundamental right of a woman to control her own body is slowly being eroded in the extremist right's pathological hope to eradicate Roe v. Wade so women can die a painful needless death at the hands of quack doctors or pay inordinate amounts of cash, some cannot afford, to go somewhere else.

These four justices helped plant a festering sore on this nation. The sooner the nightmare they have perpetrated is over the better!

My Sentiments Exactly: I thought of creating a blog on the Sherrod incident. Frankly, I'm tired of it. The right wing extremists through the capture of the media got their 15 minutes of fun and fame in their attempt to wrest power through lies and at any cost. Unfortunately, I think they want much more. I read, on Huffington, an editorial entitled: "What the President Didn't Seem to Learn from the Shirley Sherrod Incident" by Richard Eskow which states my sentiments exactly. Time marches on. I hope the president has a "learnable moment." As Jason Robards said to his Washington Post fledgling reporters Woodward and Bernstein in Alan Pakula's film "All the President's Men" about Watergate leading up to the Nixon resignation. "You better get this right. Only our lives, our country and the fate of the free world depend on it." I post the Escow opinion below for your reading pleasure.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/what-the-president-didnt_b_657307.html

The Not So Mad Alternatives to Mad Men: I loved Matthew Gilbert's article in the "G" Section of July 23, 2010 Boston Globe on Mad Men! I particularly enjoyed his drawing parallels to actors of that bygone era who COULD have played the Man Men roles. I could not disagree with many of them. However, Gregory Peck as Don Draper might not have worked as Peck usually played such good men -- too good for that part. Peck in my mind solidifies that goodness in Atticus Finch ("To Kill a Mockingbird") and Phil Green who writes on anti-Semitism by going undercover as a Jewish man in ("Gentleman's Agreement") and would not, I think, fit the dark side of Don Draper well although admittedly "Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" drew parallels. My pick: Laurence Harvey. Who could forget the intensity when he played the maritally unfaithful Westin Liggett opposite Elizabeth Taylor's courtesan Gloria Wandress in "Butterfield 8" or in his role in Somerset Maughum's "Of Human Bondage" playing the obsessed, tortured and smitten med student who falls for a woman beneath his social class.

I would LOVE to have seen Lee Remick as Betty. What a wonderful actress Remick was. She combined beauty with emotional heft as exemplified in one of the all time great films "The Days of Wine and Roses." January Jones is problematic for me to judge. In a way she is PERFECT for that role with her Grace Kelly lovely looks and a hint that something is going on behind those beautiful eyes DESPITE the less than good SNL appearance. She does portray some depth of an unhappy unfulfilled lonely woman and does so with a kind of silence Mr. Gilbert so correctly observed about the initial Mad Men. Kim Novak as well could have been perfect for that role as I remember her co-starring with Kirk Douglas in "Strangers When We Meet." She too like Betty played an unfulfilled lonely woman in her marriage and fell for a more exciting man to compensate despite the ever-present social taboo of doing so.

A wow goes to Ava Gardner as Joan but a definite NO to Jayne Mansfield filling that role. In life Mansfield was not dumb but she almost always played the dumb blond trying her best to mimic, quite unsuccessfully I might add, Marylin Monroe. Mansfield was too typecast as that for the role of Joan. Joan is exceedingly smart. Ava Gardner would have been perfect!

I might add one more possibility for the role of Peggy. I can see Lyn Redgrave and most especially Patty Duke in that role but I'd throw in a young Shirley Maclain too remembering her intense role in Lillian Helman's "The Children's Hour" and as the woman in love with a married man in "The Apartment." Maclain could play it funny or serious but whatever role she took on she was, I think, the consummate professional.

I LOVE this series and will be watching it without fail as my own life bridges the culture divide of the 1950's,
the mid-sixties and beyond. The series has much to say and, as I remember that time, does so brilliantly. People may not realize it but much of what we now think, say and do has its etiology in that era whether we like to admit it or not.


http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/2010/07/23/remaking_the_cast_of_mad_men/

http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/2010/07/23/with_season_4_the_removed_reality_of_mad_men_grows_unsettlingly_familiar/?page=2