“A writer’s notebook is not a diary. Writers react. Writers need a place to record these reactions. That’s what a writer’s notebook is for. It gives you a place to write down what makes you angry or sad or amazed, to write down what you noticed and don’t want to forget. A writer’s notebook gives you a place to live like a writer.” - Ralph Fletcher
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
The elite deeply fears any art, literature, philosophy, poetry, theology and drama that challenge the assumptions and structures of authority. These disciplines must appear to the public only in bastardized forms, packaged as froth, entertainment or sentimental drivel that celebrates the established hierarchy.
Chris Hedges
(Source: truthdig.com)
With the presidency and total control of Congress up for grabs in this election year, the Koch-Randians are going all out to entangle the national policy debate in their lies, the essence of which comes down to this overriding whopper: Government is an immoral, blundering menace that must be shoved aside so a virtuous society run by gifted, self-reliant “strivers” and efficient corporations can flourish. If you swallow that bucket of Kool-Aid, you might then be able to accept all sorts of the right-wing’s current phantasmagoric policy proposals.
(Source: alternet.org)
We are facing a radical right that has abandoned all interest in truth and fact. We face not only their specific policies, but a kind of cultural decay that comes from not valuing truth, not trying to understand the complexities and nuances of our situation, and not making empathy a force with which to act. To oppose them requires us to be different from them, and that begins with both empathy and intelligence, which are not as separate as we have often been told.
Being different means celebrating what you have in common with potential allies, not punishing them for often minor differences. It means developing a more complex understanding of the matters under consideration than the cartoonish black and white that both left and the right tend to fall back on.
Rebecca Solnit
(Source: thenation.com)
In other words, the Mormon church was the biggest recipient of the Romneys’ largesse. And what does the other main recipient every year, the Tyler Charitable Foundation, do? It makes up for shortcomings in Romney’s donations to his church. According to the Daily Caller, Romney actually fell slightly short of the tithing requirement in 2009. But the Tyler Foundation gives to the Mormon church, and when you add in those contributions as Romney family money, they exceed the threshold. But that, in turn, is true only if you don’t also count the foundation’s income from its investments as Romney family income. If you did, the Romneys would fall well below the tithing requirement.
Ben Adler
(Source: thenation.com)
Some of them believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Others want to force raped women who become pregnant to have their child. There are those who vilify Obama as a socialist and want to do away with most of the federal government. A fair few doubt the theory of evolution or hold that gays can be “cured”.
As Mitt Romney arrives at the Republican national convention in Tampa, Florida, where he will be nominated to run for president, he faces the difficult task of dealing with a party base that has become one of the most radical in recent American history.
Paul Harris, The Observer
(Source: rawstory.com)
As House Budget Committee chairman, Mr. Ryan drew a blueprint for a government that would be absent when people needed it the most. Medicaid, food stamps, and other vital programs would be offloaded to the states, but the states would not be given the resources to run them. The federal government simply would not be there to help the unemployed who need job training, or struggling students who seek college educations. Washington would be unable to respond when a city cannot properly treat its sewage, or when the poor and uninsured overload emergency rooms as clinics close.
More than three-fifths of the cuts proposed by Mr. Ryan come from programs for low-income Americans. These cuts are so severe that the nation’s Catholic bishops protested the proposal as failing to meet society’s moral obligations, saying the plans “will hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable seniors.”
To Mr. Ryan, the poor will benefit when they no longer rely on government handouts. But his plans contain no pathway to self-reliance for the tens of millions of people who are either poor, unemployed or uninsured. In his world, they will be entirely on their own, or will rely on charity.
(Source: The New York Times)
In a post-Citizens United world of largely unfettered campaign giving, the only brake on the power of the wealthy within the political system may turn out to be social. What if it were considered déclassé to give large sums to candidates or committees within a democracy, and especially in a nation where so many have other needs? Further close observation of the people who attend major-dollar fundraisers could begin to bring about such a possible future.
Garance Franke-Ruta
(Source: The Atlantic)
