11.07.2011

Ain't no mountain high enough

“Never miss a good chance to shut up.”
- Detective Alex Cross, Cat and Mouse, James Patterson

Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned from years of blogging is this: you can pile up evidence mountain high, but if people don’t read it, don’t pay attention to it, don’t act on it, you believe somehow you have failed.

The same fictional detective quoted above also said, “Falling down is not a failure: not getting back up is.”

I have fallen down and gotten back up many times as a blogger. So, I am not going to consider myself a failure if I take this “good chance to shut up.”

Sincere thanks to all who have come this way and left your imprint.

BJ

11.04.2011

In flagrante delicto

I’m not going to run out and buy a “Cain Ain’t Able” T-shirt. The accuse-deny-accuse-deny coverage of allegations against GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain do not come close to this week's most important domestic news.

The important story just doesn’t involve sex.

For the third time, ALL Republicans in the U.S. Senate voted against job-producing legislation in order to protect that small and elite segment of our populatiio known as “the nation’s wealthiest.”

Yesterday ALL Republican senators voted against a measure which would have created 450,000 new jobs and rebuilt our nation’s highways, bridges and other deteriorating infrastructure.

ALL Senate Republicans, on October 11, 2011, voted down President Obama’s jobs-creating legislation, pitting millions of new jobs against their stance of not raising taxes on the top tier of American earners.

When a measure came before the Senate on October 20, 2011, that would have created 400,000 jobs for teachers, police officers and firefighters, ALL Senate Republicans again stood fast: no tax increase for richest Americans.

Long after allegations against Herman Cain have faded into oblivion, this week’s top story – the continuing refusal of the GOP to commiserate with Americans who need and want to work – will screw this country.

Ah, there is a little sex in the top story after all.

11.02.2011

'Trash heap of discredited ideas'

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Vice President Dick Cheney might be at odds, but both are out there hawking their books and agreeing that Bush’s invasion of Iraq somehow inspired the Arab Spring.

They fail to acknowledge the obvious: the people of Iraq did not voluntarily rise up against their tinpot dictator.

Book tour constraints must have been the reason Rice and Cheney missed the October 8 report in The Washington Post headlined “Iraq, siding with Iran, sends essential aid to Syria’s Assad.”

So, the Iraqi government is so thrilled with its newfound democracy – won with U.S. blood and treasure – that it is giving both “moral and financial support” to help quell democratic uprisings elsewhere?

Finally, Rice and Cheney must have missed the advice Steven Cook of The Council on Foreign Relations offered back in July:

“It is time to put the Bush boosters’ arguments where they belong: in the trash heap of discredited ideas. There is no connection between the invasion of Iraq and Arab efforts to throw off generations of dictatorship.”