Mary Jo Took One For the Team

Good Grief.

Well at least this takes the discussion of Mary Jo Kopechne out of the truther/birther/deather/tenther realm of oddball progressive/radical discussion points.

Melissa Lafsky in a post on HuffPo wonders what Mary Jo would have thought of Ted Kennedy's career after Chappequidick.

...for the most part, we realize that there are few lives on which we can slap a "Good" or "Evil" label and expect it to be accurate.

Which, let's face it, is one of the reasons the Ted Kennedy story is so fascinating. The huge achievements, weighed against the huge sins. 

She says Mary Jo is more than something a bombthrower would toss:

Mary Jo wasn't a right-wing talking point or a negative campaign slogan. She was a dedicated civil rights activist and political talent with a bright future -- granted, whenever someone dies young, people sermonize about how he had a "bright future" ahead of him -- but she actually did.

The clincher is this:

We don't know how much Kennedy was affected by her death, or what she'd have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history. What we don't know, as always, could fill a Metrodome.

Still, ignorance doesn't preclude a right to wonder. So it doesn't automatically make someone (aka, me) a Limbaugh-loving, aerial-wolf-hunting NRA troll for asking what Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted's death, and what she'd have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded.

Who knows -- maybe she'd feel it was worth it.

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Is This the Washington Post or Examiner?

Perhaps we are becoming fellow-travellers of the editorial staff at the Washington Post.

NO ONE LIKES to be the bearer of bad news -- especially when it could threaten your multibillion-dollar health-care reform bill.

The Elephant in the room that is barely being mentioned is the new deficit figures leaked during a Friday afternoon drop by the Obama administration and given formal release this week.

The administration has a point when it argues, as budget director Peter Orszag did yesterday, that it inherited a terrible recession as well as a number of unpaid-for programs (prescription drugs, two wars) and tax cuts from the Bush administration.

yet...

Still, the Bush administration's irresponsibility notwithstanding, it is time to stop crying "we inherited it." The Obama administration needs its own clear, credible plan for restoring fiscal sustainability once the worst of the recession has run its course. Unless it can at least limit the growth in debt to the growth of the economy, investors will gradually lose faith in Treasury obligations, increasing the government's borrowing costs -- and turning a deficit crunch into a deficit spiral.

The problem clearly lies with the Administration

The new deficit numbers make it even more urgent that any health-care reform not only be fully paid for and certifiably budget-neutral in the eyes of independent analysts such as the CBO but also promise meaningful reductions in the cost growth of health care. So far, none of the plans under discussion measure up. The time is fast approaching for the president and Congress to face that reality, too

Perhaps it's time for some truthful talk to the proressive base that they can't go for the whole game but need to scale back to prevent economic collapse.

Is Obama using Arts for Political Purposes?

This from Big Hollywood:

I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to take part in a conference call that invited a group of rising artist and art community luminaries “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda - health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”

Attending the meeting/conference call were:

Yosi Sergant, the Director of Communications for the National Endowment for the Arts; Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement; Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for United We Serve; Thomas Bates, Vice President of Civic Engagement for Rock the Vote; and Michael Skolnik, Political Director for Russell Simmons.

Significant in this group were the Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement and the Director of Outreach for United We Serve. If you do not know, United We Serve is the White House Effort to organize a National Service Movement built around Americorps.

According to the NEA website, the NEA's purpose is to:

The National Endowment for the Arts is a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education. Established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, the Endowment is the nation's largest annual funder of the arts, bringing great art to all 50 states, including rural areas, inner cities, and military bases.

I do not see how the purpose of the NEA matches anyone desire to steer the organization to further "health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal."

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I Find This Instructive

From the Online Museum on Communism:

Nominally, the FF government represented a broad coalition that included, in addition to communists, agrarians, social-democrats and independents. In practice, however, the communists, buoyed by the logistical and political support of the Soviet Army, immediately took complete control over the state’s coercive mechanisms and began to terrorize their political rivals. Some of BCP’s leaders –like Georgi Dimitrov and Vulko Chervenkov, were in Moscow, while others like Traicho Kostov and Anton Yugov were in Sofia. But all communicated to their followers a simple and compelling message: the time had come to get rid of the “bourgeois scum.” By the end of November 1944 approximately 5,000 Bulgarians were killed, including teachers, priests, civil servants, writers, journalists and civic leaders.

Why are the first targets of a communist take-over usually "Teachers, priests, civil servamts, writers, journalists and civic leaders"?

Aren't these the backbone of the progressives in the United States?

What I will be thinking of on 9-11

I will not be thinking of this:

I will be remembering this:

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