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When Heroes Have Clay Feet

by Norla Antinoro

The song captivated me even as its message was clear and in contradistinction to its lyrics.  I Need A Hero.  I wanted a Hero.  All the years of hard won wisdom fall beside the way when that yearning for a Hero takes over.

Times were tough.  Life was hard though not without beauty.  Every day was work just to make it to the next sunrise.  A Hero looked awfully good to my weary heart.

Perhaps because I was looking so hard and yearning so deeply, I found one.  Everything my heart could want.  Friend to share the ups and downs of every day.  Mentor in the things I still needed to learn.  Student for what I had to teach.  Strong for the times I was not.  Filled with determination for the times I wavered.  Steadfast.  Articulate.  Charismatic.  Attractive in my eyes and when you’re looking for a Hero those are the only eyes you can see through – your own. Read more

A Severe Case of Republenfreude

by George Thomas

The long, long, long election is over, and somehow right prevailed, and someone ought to tell Rush, Ann, Bill and Sean that it’s over and to get over it.

There.  That felt good.  Other waves of pundit-wannabe catch me up from time to time and I resist the urge to pontificate.  There are too many bruised egos, and the absurdity of the election is only now beginning to cool — unless one’s name is Rush, Ann, Bill or Sean.  Things are still too hot, and the battle-scarred landscape too covered with smoke and twisted bodies for very much rationality to stand out. Read more

A President for Cities, But Where’s the Money?

by Anthony Flint

Timing is everything.

As architects, planners, journalists, and city and nonprofit leaders gathered at the University of Philadelphia last week for the conference “Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design after the Age of Oil,” the staggering challenges of our time prompted a subdued mood. Read more

The Mini-Depression and the Maximum-Strength Remedy

by: Robert Reich

This is not the Great Depression of the 1930s, but nor is it turning out to be merely a bad recession of the kind we’ve experienced periodically over the last half century. Call it a Mini Depression. The employment report last Friday shows job losses accelerating, along with the number of Americans working part time who’d rather be and need to be working full time. Retail sales have fallen off a cliff. Stock prices continue to drop. General Motors is on the brink of bankruptcy. The rate of home foreclosures is mounting. Read more

End as the Beginning - Election Day

by Norla M. Antinoro

Here we are – Election Day.  We’re done with all the ‘hip-hype-hurray.’ The early voting is all in, waiting to be opened and fed into the counting machines.  We’ve watched and listened until even the most committed of us are tired of it all.  Now it’s down to the wire. Today we test the integrity and viability of our democracy.

All the predictions and wisdom from pundits to folks in the street is now moot.  Many of us have already voted.  Millions more will go to polls across the nation and exercise their rights and obligations as voting citizens of The United States. Read more

Regarding Iraq - Vietnam Revisted

by  Bill Burkett

Regarding Iraq - -  I remember the same things happening in Vietnam.  We were told over sixteen months prior to the overthrow of the South Vietnam government that they needed us gone if they had a chance to survive as a government.
As a nation, we decided that if the South Vietnamese government wasn’t in the nature and form we demanded, that we wouldn’t accept it so we stayed on until the overthrow. Read more

It’s easier to tour Iran than to tour the White House: My report from Iran # 5

by Jane Stillwater

For years now I’ve been complaining about how President [sic] Bush isn’t letting any of us Americans tour the White House.  He keeps claiming it’s for security reasons but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s OUR White House — not his — and we should freaking be allowed to take White House tours. Read more

Why I am supporting Obama for President

by Robert  A Letcher, PhD

The crucial issue this year isn’t an “issue” in the usual sense.  It’s whether we Americans will allow ourselves collectively to find ways to “un-divide” ourselves at least enough to allow the next President a chance to earn a working majority.  To succeed, and it is desperately important that the next President succeed, he will have to lead millions of individual Americans to transcend our Balkanized, no-compromise positions.  To succeed at that daunting task will require a leader who has not only the audacity to hope for a different America, but also the rhetorical skills to persuade us to dare to imagine doing the hard work of learning how to work together to get there; to imagine actually undertaking to learn how to get there together; to imagine actually doing the hard work together; and then, to actually do the hard work, together. Read more

Self Respect - America faces many tests–including national character

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

At the bottom of this piece, you’ll find a little questionnaire that a friend sent me today. In essence, it asks you to imagine if the personal stories and backgrounds of the principals were each that of the other side. “Obama/Biden vs. McCain/Palin, what if things were switched around?…..think about it. Would the country’s collective point of view be different?”

A sample question is “What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?” Read more

Thoughts about the Second Debate

by Harlan Bennett

Well, I’m re-watching the 2nd Presidential debate, and I SURE haven’t changed my opinion of Senators McCain and Obama. There was a clear winner there, and I will guarantee that it was not, in my humble opinion at least, Senator John McCain. Read more

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• Letter to the Editor: Good Cars need Good Teams - by R. A. Letcher, PhD

  Good cars need good teams -- designers, engineers, line workers… and learning-oriented managers by Robert A. Letcher, PhD [Author’s note: I submitted the following as a letter to the editor of The New York Times, after that paper carried an article under the headline, "To Fix Detroit, Obama Is Said to Drop Plan for ‘Car Czar’", 02/15/2009.] It is widely accepted that you can't win a horse race without a good horse. Of course, it helps to have a lot of money and a good plan for spending it. But, you still need a good horse. The authors reminded me of this when they wrote: “The companies’ plans are required to show progress in cutting long-term costs as a condition for keeping their loans.” I doubt GM and Chrysler can win this most important "automobile race" merely by having better accountants and more muscular negotiators: they still need a good "horse". That means the companies will have to show that their teams can still design and build cars that people are drawn to buy and willing to pay for: winners. I doubt they can. The problem isn't that they didn't know how to; it's that they don't know how to break out of the group-think that ensnarled them, their managers, their whole organizations, decades ago. I would be more optimistic, had the government also required the companies to include plans for transforming themselves into learning organizations. Aye, there’s the rub: learning entails risk-taking, not “yes people”.

• Bob's Bail Out Plan by bobl-tlm

  

• Fiscal Therapy - Getting the economy back on its feet, giving taxpayers a break, saving your retirement fund and your kid's college tuition? Done. And it won't cost you a penny.

  For years now, whenever I've been invited to lecture students on how our tax system works, I have asked a simple question: What is the purpose of the United States of America? The most common answer, be it at prestigious universities, elite prep schools, rural community colleges, or crowded urban high schools, is this: To make people rich. This should come as no great surprise. For anyone born after, say, 1970, the world has been shaped by Ronald Reagan's remaking of government's relationship with private interests—a vision of lower taxes, less regulation, and maximum economic leeway for those at the top. In this view, the pursuit of wealth is the warp and weft of America; everything else will follow. By contrast, the preamble to the Constitution tells us the nation's reason for being in 52 words that can be reduced to six principles: society, justice, peace, security, commonwealth, and freedom. Individual riches don't make the list. They are a product of American society, not its guiding purpose. Progress, then, must begin with a return to the best of the values that created this Second American Republic—one born, it's worth remembering, from the failure of the Articles of Confederation, whose principles (weak government, unfettered capitalism) found their resurrection in the economic policies of the past three decades.

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  read more at Mother Jones

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• How Do You Like Deregulation Now? graphic politics by Dicky Neely

  

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