A list that could not possibly be comprehensive enough ( Read more... )

Monday's horrible news of the murders of a rabbi and three Jewish children in Toulouse, France shook loose a memory of casual, but chilling, anti-Semitism that I experienced several years ago. I'm not sure why, exactly, as the degree of difference can be measured in orders of magnitude, but it's bugging me and so I'm recording it here in hopes that ( Read more... )

They're everywhere this year, sadly, and they're louder, more obnoxious, and more brazen than they have been in a long time.

The one I just heard on "Talk of the Nation" is Carl Paladino. I won't be doing him the favor of linking to his campaign web site. If you want to get some idea of who he is, you can read this NY Times article from earlier ( Read more... )

A portion of the Vidui ("confession") prayer on Yom Kippur says (at least, the translation in the machzor I used tonight did):

"We are violent, we are wicked, we are xenophobic.
We yield to evil, we are zealots for bad causes."

Right now I think a whole lot of people in this nation ought to be thinking long and hard about atoning for that.

Oh, Amanda. You're being douchey again, not ironic. You might want to see to that. It's unbecoming.

When I have some spare cash again, I'm going to donate to the Southern Poverty Law Center in honor of Amanda Palmer...I'll even have them send her a card.

I don't know if this made the rounds during election season, but it deserves to: http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/this-your-nation-white-privilege-updated

If you think that anyone can be guilty of making a racist comment or performing a racist act, including you, and that you are willing to take ownership of your statements and actions, resist blaming the person who was offended, figure out why they were taken as racist, apologize, and not do it again, post this exact sentence in your journal.Not ( Read more... )

Herbert Hoover Lives: Frank Rich, NY Times: "The crisis is at least as grave as the one that confronted us -- and, for a time, united us -- after 9/11. Which is why the antics among Republicans on Capitol Hill seem so surreal. These are the same politicians who only yesterday smeared the patriotism of any dissenters from Bush’s 'war on terror.' ( Read more... )

In no particular order ( Read more... )

Judith Warner's blog entry Tears to Remember really struck a chord with me (and with 513 commenters) the other day.

I was one of those people who cried when the election was called for Obama and Biden, for intertwined reasons that took a while for me to tease apart. Warner articulated some of it here: It is, I suppose, in part a matter of ( Read more... )