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Pinsky in Slate takes a look at The Poet to see if he's a modernist or not. There was a time I too was interested in such questions.
He tossed his pipes, too hard to teach
A new-world song, far out of reach,
For a sylvan sign that the blue jay's screech
...And the whimper of hawks beside the sun
...Were music enough for him, for one.
These days I tend to think Frost's songs were guided more by the sound of words and the sight of what those words described than any particular genre or movement, but that's because New Hampshire's Poet and Rome's Poet occupy the same spot in my head when I read them.
Veteran Rep. Babette Josephs (D., Phila.) last Thursday accused her primary opponent, Gregg Kravitz, of pretending to be bisexual in order to pander to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender voters, a powerful bloc in the district.
"We've hit a new high point when candidates are accused of pretending to be gay to win a seat," said Mark Segal, publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News and a pioneering civil rights advocate.
When the shearer cut to your nakedness in April
and you dropped black eyes in shame,
hiding in barnyard corners, unable to hide,
I brought grain to raise your spirits,
and ten thousand years
wound us through pasture and hayfield together,
threads of us woven
together, three hundred generations
from Africa's hills to New Hampshire's.
...Now the black-faced sheep have wandered and will not return,
even if I should search the valleys
and call "Ke-day," as if I brought them salt.
Now the railroad draws
a line of rust through the valley. Birch, pine, and maple
lean from cellarholes
and cover the dead pastures of Ragged Mountain
except where machines make snow
and cables pull money up hill, to slide back down.
Carol Shea-Porter this week presented "World War II veteran Harry Trott of Silver Lake with the WWII Victory Medal, American Campaign Medal, Asiatic Pacific Campaign Medal with 3 bronze stars, Presidential Unit Citation Ribbon, Combat Action Ribbon, Discharge Button, Honorable Service Lapel Pin (Ruptured Duck)."
More of Carol's honoring of veterans can be found here.
An excerpt from Doris Haddock's campaign announcement for US Senate, 2004:
Look at our beautiful state--its waters, its air, its great forests and mountains--and, oh, it's people! We do not need much to live well here. We need to be left alone in matters where our freedom overrules government meddling. We need to join together in matters where joint action can create great resources for our children and each other. We of this Granite State are blessed with common sense and a high sense of community. I should be most honored to represent these things of ours in Washington, and let them see what flint we are made of when they try to take away our peace, our justice and our common treasure.
In this way, the right-wing leanings of a few people have distorted entire industries, including television news. Political leaders are quickly infected in this trickle down reptilism --trickling down from the people who write the checks for political campaigns and who control political news.
And the reptilism trickles down further, to the weaker minds listening to talk radio or silly enough to spend too much time watching cable television news --people who buy the lies, who are simply suckered into forking over their own political best interests to the con artists who attempt to pick their pockets at the same moment they are pointing out others who, they say, are the real trouble makers. About twenty-five percent of our people are susceptible to this kind of con, and they then give us problems by standing against any reasonable reforms. They have been spiritually twisted by the cheap poison of a hundred Rush Limbaughs into the angry, unthinking agents of the superrich.
On my long walk across America, a man driving a garbage truck told me that the biggest problem facing America today was the inheritance tax. I didn't have to ask him if he had a radio in his truck.
From a long HuffPo piece on the struggle within the Democratic party for true progressive voices:
There are examples of conservative voters electing populist, liberal-leaning candidates in the House, too. Perriello, who won a 2008 race in rural Virginia, is probably the most visible example, the subject of a recent New Yorker profile. Niki Tsongas and Carol Shea-Porter are two more. Then there's Alan Grayson, the outspoken freshman from a Orlando-based swing district. In 2009, he helped pass a bill that would open up the Federal Reserve to a historic audit that could end up changing the makeup of the institution.
...Grijalva, too, says he wants better Democrats. "Polis is a good example, Shea-Porter is a good example, Tsongas is a good example of progressive people who had to fight their way in. And I think we have the capacity to really help those people. Help them get in and then keep them," says Grijalva
Or you could go the Jeb Bradley approach. Bradley, twice defeated by the voters of the first district for US Congress, wants to put a donut hole back into seniors' prescription coverage, allow companies to deny kids' coverage over pre-existing conditions, and stop the tax breaks for small businesses. That sounds like a great plan.
I think my favorite new local blog is from Wolfeboro's Michael Bloomer, age 13. Here's a snippet from his Tomorrow's Progressives:
Those great, failed handouts to the rich, the Bush tax cuts, which have cast us into the abyss of the Great Recession- were those bipartisan? No. I believe the GOP used budget reconciliation and had to have VP Cheney's vote to finalize one wave of the Bush tax cuts. Was 2003's Medicare Part D bipartisan? No! They had to use budget reconciliation again, and it remains, to this day a handout to Big Insurance. The Bush Administration failed, day in, day out, to provide bipartisanship during his administration.
Lastly, let us look at an oft-ignored point. If the GOP has such great ideas for health care reform, why didn't the Bush Administration try health care reform?
I've added Michael's blog to our roll, along with The Burt Cohen Show and Ben Swainbank's Bank Slate.
So, what are some of your favorite web reads these days? And if you have New Hampshire-based suggestions for the BH blog roll, please let us know in the comments.
Never be discouraged from being an activist because people tell you that you'll not succeed. You have already succeeded if you're out there representing truth or justice or compassion or fairness or love. You already have your victory because you have changed the world; you have changed the status quo by you; you have changed the chemistry of things and changes will spread from you, will be easier to happen again in others because of you, because, believe it or not, you are the center of the world.
...My dream of political reform will come true. I may live to see it from this side of life, or I will smile to see it from the other side. But it will happen. It will happen because people love this country so, and this democracy so, and because they have given their sons and daughters and the best years of their own lives to defend it. They will not let it be destroyed before their eyes by these obscene floods of special-interest money that come into our elections from big business. I know we will end that outrage and we will be able to run our communities and our nation to look after the interests of the common people, for that is what a democracy is all about.
