Mon 30 Apr 2007
Following the massacre at Virgina Tech, the conventional wisdom was that the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, had “slipped through the cracks.”
This weekend’s horrific murder on Laurel Street shows that the so called “crack” in our society’s mental health care system is larger than we would like to admit. (more…)
Fri 27 Apr 2007
We have a minimum wage law, why not a maximum wage law? Read about
hedge fund managers making way too much money doing stuff even some economists don’t understand and see what you think. Is it too much to ask someone to live on a salary in the low seven figures? After buying the third vacation home and the 100-foot yacht, the Lamberlinguini and the private jet, maybe it’s time to say “Enough”.
Thu 26 Apr 2007
When I went to college I was surprised to find out that the majority of the nation wasn’t Catholic. Virtually everyone I had known up until then had at the very least been trotted through the motions of baptism/first communion/confirmation.
I’m also pretty familiar with how Catholics like to put their beliefs and their medical care in a tumbler and shake that cocktail till it’s good and frothy. My grandmother was horrified at the thought of ending up in an emergency room other than St. Francis’. This was even after her sister was paralyzed there in the immediate post-war period from a botched epidural. I was told that according to my grandmother and her mother, medical malpractice was fine for secular doctors, but You Do Not Sue Priests and Nuns. For any reason, ever.
Perhaps sitting snug in this infallibility for decades can explain how stunned CT Bishops seem that their hospitals might have to be accountable to the public for some things after all. (more…)
Thu 26 Apr 2007
I sent a letter yesterday to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia demanding that he prosecute the Attorney General of United States for perjury and other crimes. (more…)
Wed 25 Apr 2007
I no longer recognize this place I call home. It is not the people who live here that I don’t recognize, it is the way we act towards one another that I fail to recognize. The horror of Virginia Tech and the death of nine GI’s today in Iraq and the killing of hundreds of Iraqi civilians make me feel as if we all suffer from what is known as facial aphasia. That is the failure to recognize the human face. As the Buddhist say, sangha, the community is the foundation of humanity. As we destroy the social contract that supports us all we risk losing our humanity.
That social contract is what ensures that we provide for each other. The public schools have been slowly dismantled by the corporate ethics that reward market segmentation and Wall Street greed. We do not need a $90,000 a yr corporate money chaser. We do not need consultants who take the money and run. We do not need public relations officers who serve as gate keepers to keep the people away from the superintendent. The teachers, para’s, secretaries, guidance, facilites and security officers are the grunts who make everything work. I am so happy to hear that several teachers at HPHS are so enraptured that the school has one of the rarest telescopes and workable planetarium that they have offered to help get it ready to be part of a science curriculum. Talk about a rising star for Hartford. (more…)
Tue 24 Apr 2007
Let’s face it. If we don’t get our asses in gear pretty soon, we’re screwed. There’s only so much oil left in the ground and no new dinosaurs rotting into crude sludge. There’s also little political will at the federal level to take any serious pro-environment, pro-future-of-humanity steps to stave off what appears will be a vicious withdrawal process from our oil addiction. Hartford and other municipalities should be more proactive in their own future, and the future of the species. (more…)
Mon 23 Apr 2007
Alberto Gonzalez is one of President Bush’s best friends. Gonzalez was Bush’s first White House Counsel, where he argued that the United States should arrest American and foreign citizens without warrants, then to secretly detain and torture them. After the 2004 election, Bush nominated Gonzalez to become the United States of America’s first Latino attorney general. This grandson of undocumented Mexican immigrants now pays his rent by using the mostly fascist PATRIOT Act to tear families apart through unprecedented deportation raids all over the country. Under Gonzalez’s leadership, the Justice Department has also been censured for using “National Security Letters” - a way for the government to secretly search your home/business without a warrant, and keep you from talking about it - at least 20% more often than they really needed to.
Shockingly, all the above wasn’t enough for the senators to worry about this guy’s competence. But no one, NO ONE, tells US Senators they shouldn’t have opinions. (more…)
Fri 20 Apr 2007
While the Democrats are scrambling to put on an anti-war face in Congress, and are putting the bungled Iraq war at center stage in the presidential race, they should also do what the Republicans are probably doing: think about 2012. The Bush administration is lost. It will never recover from its criminal failures. The big question is whether or not there will be prosecutions. But, there’s more than stubborness and nearsightedness in Bush’s relunctance to the end the war in Iraq. There’s “strategery.” (more…)
Thu 19 Apr 2007
Alberto Gonzales was asked today why he values his continued tenure over the integrity of the federal system of justice, public confidence in which, according to opinion polls, is down below one in three Americans. The attorney general didn’t give a coherent answer. He sniveled. (more…)
Thu 19 Apr 2007
Let’s remember Kurt Vonnegut some more. His comments on the madmen running our country deserve wider circulation.