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Yet another rotten email

   Back in the day when I was still viewed as respectable by my fellow military officers I used to get a lot of emails. Some of them were funny. Some of them surprisingly steamy. But a number of them...

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The very high cost of our second amendment right

Last week a seven year old girl was killed with a gun. The incident happened during a botched robbery that sparked a gunfight between the resident of the house and the robber. It was not clear from...

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What I shall do with my tax cuts

   Good evening. Let me introduce myself to those who do not know me. I have been on DK for awhile now, occasionally posting, mostly making sardonic comments about this or that piece of cant, hypocrisy...

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Michigan Congressman: HR3 and the introduction of the reproductive police state

   Being a progressive in Michigan is relatively painless compared to being one in Oklahoma, Tenessee or Utah; in fact it is one of the advantages in living in a state with an otherwise depressed...

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Books that Changed My Life: Dhalgren, Samuel Delaney and a Refreshing breath...

   "To wound the autumnal city"    So howled out the book to me    And demanded a reading and a read-over after I had finished.

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In Memorium: The death of a real compassionate conservative

Yesterday it was announced that Bernadine Healy M.D., had died of complications from cancer at the age of 67.For all this bullshit that we used to get exposed to about 'compassionate conservatism' -...

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"R&BLERS":Tuesday Newsletter: The kindle, the lendle, the luddite and the...

                     "In the heart of every notary lies the moldy remains of a poet"                                                            Gustave Flaubert "Madame Bovary"This is a diary that was...

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A Book so Bad it Changed my Life. . .and bring out the Brickbats: The...

I suppose it's just as well I am writing this on Thanksgiving because I am going to delve into a work that many would consider a genuine turkey: 'The Fountainhead', by Ayn RandMy God, this is a troll...

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A Book that Can Change Lives: The Swerve

In writing the intro I came across a diary documenting a felow Kossack's conversion, one would say journey, from belief to atheism. You can read it here. I certainly sympathize with the diarist, and...

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My Favorite Authors: Inaugural Edition The 400 year Old Blogger

Co-Editors Note: This is the first of what we hope to be an ongoing series of Readers and Book Lovers writing about their favorite authors. It is intended to be complementary to diaries dealing with...

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My Favorite Authors: Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.

For this installment of favored authors, I thought I would write about a writer who was also an illustrator, in a very distinct style. It is interesting that he majored in English, not art when he was...

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My Favorite Authors: JRR Tolkien, the Lord of Fantasy and Imagination

   I would like to say at the outset I had a little hesitation in e-penning this particular diary; not because I don't feel strongly on the topic - there isn't much that is literary that I don't feel...

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My Favorite Authors: J.R.R. Tolkien and more on the Lord of Fantasy and...

Tolkien is hobbit forming                                       -Anonymous American Graffito    One of the hallmarks of a professor is never knowing when to stop talking. Or writing. I had thought I...

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Awards: The good and the bad

As a followup of some of my previous diaries, I cannot resist announcing the following award:A Pulitzer prize for non-fiction for one of my favorite books of all times, one I have recommended...

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My Favorite Authors: Rudyard Kipling, the man who wrote stories just so.

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.                                                                                      Rudyard Kipling Greetings Kossacks. For this...

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In Which I Smack Down 'The Economist' for an Unnatural Display of Mitt-love

I find that many people on this board, being broad minded, intellectually curious and interested in the world around them, read a variety of journals. This, at any rate, is my excuse for reading The...

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My Favorite Authors: What Progressives can get out of Kipling's verse

OK, I promise, this is the last in the my favorite authors series I am going to be doing about dead white European males - not that I have exhausted the subject, but I fear I get tiresome on this, and...

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My Favorite Authors: Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra and the Glass Ceiling of Antiquity

As promised I am taking a break from dead white European males to write about an author who is 1) living, 2)a woman and 3) Doesn't even write fiction,. but there is nothing in the MFA bylaws that says...

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My Favorite Authors: Stephen King, his Vampires, and the Meaning of Fear

                                              I am standing up in the water's edge in my dream I cannot make a single sound as you scream It can't be that cold, the ground is still warm to touch We...

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My Favorite Authors: A Call for Contributors

Greetings Kossacks. In place of our usual praiseworthy prose pumping our favored scribblers - and the occasional subtle insertion of a moral or historical tale, or even the assertion that a certain...

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Vagina Dialogues at the Michigan Capitol

This is one of the few times I can sort of liveblog an event as I was there today as Eve Ensler and a number of women Michigan State Representatives and State Senators - assisted by a core of very able...

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My Favorite Authors: Siddhartha Mukarjee, exploring the vast realm of the...

Here death may deal not again for ever;     Here change may come not till all change end. From the graves they have made they shall rise up never,     Who have left nought living to ravage and rend....

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My Favorite Authors: Russell Banks Writes about the Futility of Blame and the...

By homely gift and hindered Words The human heart is told Of Nothing—"Nothing" is the force That renovates the World—                                            Emily DickensonFor this installment, I...

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My Favorite Authors: Carole King "A Natural Woman". Just the kind I Like.

When the Jazzman's testifyin' A faithless man believes He can sing you into paradise Or bring you to your knees It's a gospel kind of feelin' A touch of Georgia slide A song of pure revival And a style...

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My Favorite Authors: Algernon Charles Swinburne; The Personal is Poetical

Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day that we die.                              Algernon Charles Swinburne  The Heptalogia (1880)As another is a series that...

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My Favorite Authors: Paul Krugman, a prize for Cassandra and a clarity of...

We do not err because truth is difficult to see.  It is visible at a glance.  We err because this is more comfortable.                                ~Alexander Solzhenitsyn    Given the events of the...

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My Favorite Authors: Barack Obama, the Audacity of the Man and the...

    Let's start this one in Iraq. Not because of the way the political leadership has dealt with the country, or because of the importance of the war as a central issue during most of the first decade...

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My Favorite Authors: Christopher Hitchens and Confronting One's Own Mortality

Now, ballad, gather poppies in thine hands And sheaves of brier and many rusted sheaves Rain-rotten in rank lands, Waste marigold and late unhappy leaves And grass that fades ere any of it be mown; And...

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My Favorite Authors: Marguerite Feitlowitz, The Argentine Dirty War and the...

Tonight, in this city without altar I hope the dead souls can see my eyes and turn my watchful gaze into the flicker of a candle flame Not the sacrificial spirit money for the ancestors not the raging...

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My Favorite Authors: Larry Heinemann, Letting Us Know About the Scars of War

I Can't Remember Anything Can't Tell If this Is True or Dream Deep down Inside I Feel to Scream this Terrible Silence Stops MeNow That the War Is Through with Me I'm Waking up I Can Not See That...

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My favorite Authors: A return to Dr. Seuss, and an Indulgence of Sacrilege

I admit that I am not normally a religious person, but for this diary, lets have a go at one of the Gods that is worshipped fervently in this country.I'm not discussing the God, whoever or whatever she...

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Indigo Kalliope: Poems From the Left: Elegy for a Mitthead

Although this seems to be beating a dead issue, I am in an elegaic mood for personal reasons. And so, for my promised contribution, I offer this in memory of a soul-less slippery bloodsucking eel of a...

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How Nice: Someone at The Economist takes down a racist bonehead

As I have written before, I subscribe to The Economist but have mixed feelings about it. The magazine (or the 'newspaper' as it prefers to style itself) has a lot of good info and a droll and erudite...

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My Favorite Authors: Jonathan Swift and an updated Modest proposal

We are all fans of reasoned discourse here. This is a political site devoted to serious topics, like the deficit, and wealth inequality, and access to affordable health care, and the need to move past...

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An even dumber idea: Medicare means testing

President Obama is in the midst of a so-called 'liberal pile on' (by that meaning his base taking him to task for a cruel, pointless and politically stupid manoever of releasing a budget proposal that...

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The Grieving Room: Amour, my Version

When I'm strong and feeling fine maybe When I can look at you without crying You might look like a friend of mine But I don't know if I can Open up enough to let you in Here come those tears Here come...

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The Grieving Room—On the Spectrum of Sorrow: Grief, Complicated Grief and...

So when exactly do you pathologize a normal human process?I have been thinking quite a bit about this recently because I remember, as the second anniversary of my wife's death approaches, a time where...

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The Grieving Room: The Little Princess

On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. ("One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.")...

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The Grieving Room: Yeah, it's Complicated

As I go through the second holiday season since the death of my wife, I have been thinking again about the process of healing, why it is so difficult sometimes, and what happens when it cannot happen.I...

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The Grieving Room Valentine's Day Edition: The Lover's Heart

Neither me nor my former wife was ever really into Valentine's DayIt was certainly not the case that we weren't romantic types; we had a very passionate relationship in many ways, at least until she...

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Why Piketty is correct, in one blurb

It has been somewhat less than two years since Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" was published, and less tthan a year since its English translation was made available to those who do not...

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Lancaster Rallies Blue - an Effort to stop the repeal of the ACA

    Today was the seventh anniversary of the day the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed into law. Involving Herculean efforts, months of compromises and false starts, and almost...

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The Language Of the Night: JRR Tolkien and Let's go Back to Middle Earth One...

 Hearing I ask | from the holy races, From Heimdall's sons, | both high and low; Thou wilt, Valfather, | that well I relate Old tales I remember | of men long ago.I remember yet | the giants of yore,...

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The most uplifting Gathering of Defeat you ever did see

Yesterday Lancaster Stands Up, the foremost progressive activist organization in ancestrally red Lancaster PA held a post election meeting in Lancaster City. We heard from a lot of people, and the...

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Ash Tuesday

 If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent If the unheard, unspoken Word is unspoken, unheard; Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, The Word without a word, the Word within The...

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Just did my Biden/Peters Phone banking

So I did it, a man of my dignity and years and position just did the second day of phone banking for Biden and Gary Peters. My initial reaction to phonebanking is probably similar to most people: it is...

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