BLOG HAS MOVED

I have moved most of my blogs to WordPress and this one can be found at lynnsrants.com

If you were subscribed to this blog - you will need to re-subscribe [I think] after I set up all the plugins

Learning WordPress was not an easy task but enjoyed the exercise when I was not frustrated by all the possibilities and forgetting to click on a few thingies.

Laughing at Job Loss

It isn't just South Carolina and Minnesota that have Reps who keep us laughing - add Georgia to that fold.

That Gingrey finds it funny that 14,000 a day lose jobs [and health insurance] shows you exactly what these Republics think of anyone but themselves. See - it's the job loss that's funny and the FACT that your insurance goes along with your job is a secondary issue - not a main issue.

Why we ever tied insurance to jobs is a long story but it now needs to end - it's is a form of servitude.

Hate your job? Too bad! HA HA HA

Low wages but decent health insurance? We gotcha stuck here for life! HA HA HA

Got a health issue? Now you re really stuck because if you change jobs that's a pre-existing condition making you unrecoverable

Hey State of Georgia - you deserve better - fire this guy and find someone who doesn't laugh at your misfortunes.

Ted Kennedy; Boston and my political life

I moved to Boston in 1963 when Teddy Kennedy was a new Senator. Not having been very politically active in New York, I quickly jumped in the political frays of the '60s in large part due to my friend/professor Freda, who died in July. and the Kennedys who were my President and my Senator [although I remained a registered NYer for a while.] And I lived for years on Francis Street, near where Teddy's funeral mass was recently held.

Even after I left Massachusetts I continued to write to Ted Kennedy about political issues as I felt he truly represented ME! No other Senator or Representative since has come close to being "my" person in Congress and that is a sad commentary on the current crop of politicians. [But I have ranted about the state of being a DC insider elsewhere.]

So Teddy's funeral marked a weird kind of ending in my life. My political gurus and motivators both died this summer and I am left to wonder who will take their places for the up and coming generations ready and willing to jump into a fray.

Yes we have the ideologues ready to feed lies to a new generation and teach them to yell and scream louder than anyone else - but that's not a way to solve problems; only a way to create more. We have alleged liberals who sell their souls for corporate donations and vote for legislation that their Masters wish for.

Hopefully some energized people will come into politics and become the "new" progressives.

Guns, Guns and More Guns

After living in D.C. for a long time I grew to hate guns. They give their "owners" a sense of superiority in that they seem to think the gun in and of itself gives them power and makes what they say more "right" and what people like me say more "wrong." A gun does not have that power; but to hear the gun totters - might does make right - true in the sense that it's making the rabid right wingers more right [wing - not correct.]

Frank Rich has a great column today called The Guns of August. He says and quotes:

... the biggest contributor to this resurgence of radicalism remains panic in some precincts about a new era of cultural and demographic change. As the sociologist Daniel Bell put it, “What the right as a whole fears is the erosion of its own social position, the collapse of its power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world — now overwhelmingly technical and complex — that has changed so drastically within a lifetime.”

Bell write that in 1962 - but the Republican party today is in more dire straits - it's become a white southern group of scared persons who do not value public or liberal arts education and who refuse to listen. All they know is how to cause fear and to out shout reason - and the ones who represent them in congress go along with this and give them credence.

Why I was not here

A few days after my last post a good friend [actually my best friend] had a leg amputated due to gangrene. She seemed to re doing fine by the weekend and then went downhill rapidly and died on July 20th.

I then helped, with several others, to call mutual friends and tell them about her death and 2 planned memorial services. It was hard as I was re-connecting with other old friends with whom I lost contact over my last 2 moves and we had long conversations about past present and future.

Why does it usually take a death to make people who like each other re-connect? And now I am planning a trip to visit these old friends.

Of course nothing is normal weather wise this year so we in Portland where 90 is a rare event had a 10 day stretch of a brutal heat wave and I get heat exhaustion...and during those days me, the dog, cat and computer were all laying low and being very still. I don't have AC - very few in the Pacific Northwest do. Hard for me to get my political brain working under the conditions of grief and heat...

Stay tuned - I will resume as there is so much to say!