Letter re Enemy Combatants in Boston

Dear Editor:

In your editorial “Enemy Combatants in Boston,” Review and Outlook, April 22, 2013, you make many sound points regarding Miranda rights due perpetrators of attacks against the American sovereign and the larger role of due process with regard to enemy combatants. You were, however, mistaken about one detail: The Boston Marathon bombing was not the most successful terrorist attack since 9/11, as you claimed. What about the brutal Benghazi attacks on our embassy, every inch American soil in Libya, or the 13 American soldiers killed and 30 injured at Fort Hood in 2009, both attacks inflicted in the explicit name of Jihad?

We can discuss exactly what is the best way to protect American citizens’ civil liberties, or the role of due process in this murky twilight between war and peace. But make no mistake: The U.S. homeland is most certainly part of the terror battlefield. It is Ground Zero.

Friday Poetry: Spring

[in Just-]

BY E. E. CUMMINGS

in Just-

spring          when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it’s

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far          and             wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s

spring

and

         the

                  goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles

far

and

wee

 

 

(via Poetry Foundation.)

Concise summary of true love for my demographic

This quote from very funny, newlywed fashion blogger Man Repeller perfectly sums up exactly what I’m looking for:

“Leandra: [S]eriously, I’m married to the most understanding human on this planet. We don’t have fights about these types of things and that’s why I keep pushing him because I feel like we’re at this stage in our lives where we can be so wholly selfish without having to wonder what’s going to be because, at the end of the day, we come home to each other. It’s not like I’m working really hard on the blog and also wondering what’s going to happen to my personal life.”

From Into the Gloss.

Isn’t that EXACTLY what calm is: predictability?

Good advice for a productive 2013

Great advice. I especially love these lines:

When do you listen to music? I’m guessing on the way to and from work. Me too.

Here’s something I’ve already begun to do – I’ve stopped listening to plaintive, delicate Dad Rock on the way to work, it’s going to be rap only from here on in. On the way to work, it’s going to be all aspirational, no reflection. Don’t get me wrong, I respect accordion skills and lyrical romanticism as much as the next guy – but whom do I want to emulate more in my business dealings each day – the Decemberists or Dr Dre? One of them is worth $260 million and just built and sold the Beats Audio headphone company as a side project.

The other one is really great at tying scarves.

On the way home, feel free to wallow in the fiddle & banjo Americana ambiance of the Lumineers and the Avett Brothers and the Wilcos and the Bands of Horses as well as Mumford and his sons. That stuff is great for decompression and chilling out. But you musn’t subject yourself to this Sad Bastard Music en route to the battlefield. Primarily because you’ll be playing against people like me, who’ve been main-lining an overdose of corner-holding bravado while you’ve been listening to an art major lick his own violin. Switch it up – aggressive and inspirational in the AM, plaintive and beautiful in the PM when the fightin’s done. Try this for a week, watch what happens.

 

 

Letter to the Editor Regarding: “The GOP’s Epic Senate Fail”

Kimberly Strassel calls the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s staggering Senate loss candidates “professional malpractice” (“The GOP’s Epic Senate Fail,” Potomac Watch, Nov. 8). While Ms. Strassel is correct, she fails to explore the historical irony behind leaving Senate elections vulnerable to this particular brand of malpractice: The whole point of the American founders’ decision to divide the legislature in the first place was to protect states’ rights in one house, free from bungling attempts like the NRSC’s to direct the popular will and influence special interest groups.

Enacted in 1913, the 17th Amendment restructured the government so that there is no difference between how Senators and Representatives are elected. This is in stark contrast to how the American Constitution imagined the country would be run.

The Constitution outlined a legislative branch in which Americans didn’t actually directly elect senators, state legislators did. This reflected the fact that the House was intended to represent individuals’ rights, while the Senate stood for states’ rights. Individuals, the founders believed, would be better represented overall with two separate levels of accountability before submitting to the ultimate will of the federal government on high.

Federalism was an important principle for the American founders, and federalism holds states’ rights paramount. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has gone so far as to note that since the 17th Amendment was ratified, “you can trace the decline of so-called states’ rights throughout the rest of the 20th century.”

America was founded not as a democracy, but as a Constitutional Republic—a community of individuals and states responsible to constitutional procedures designed to promote divided government. The 17th Amendment changed the process to make the Senate democratically responsible to the people rather than, as in a republic, responsible to the states.

It is no wonder, then, that so many other American principles have also ceased to resemble the constitutional principles of 1776.

Kathryn Ciano

Arlington, VA

Watercolors

Today’s moment of Zen: Artist Ahmet Sahin paints directly onto water. It’s mesmerizing.

via Jonathan Turley — “Cezanne was a wimp.”

Family Decals

Today’s xkcd:

The hovertext: “My decal set has no adults, just a sea of hundreds of little girl figures closing in around a single cat.”

Capitalism in context

Obama didn’t kill Osama.

“Obama didn’t kill Osama. A Navy SEAL did, who, less than a month ago, Obama was debating whether to pay at all.” – a Marine

Friday Poetry: Thomas Lux

Grim Town in a Steep Valley

Thomas Lux

This valley: as if a huge, dull, primordial axe
once slammed into the earth
and then withdrew—X millennia ago.
A few flat acres
ribbon either side of the river sliding sluggishly
past the clocktower, the convenience store.
If a river could look over its shoulder,
glad to be going, this one would.
In town center: a factory of clangor and stink,
of grinding and oil,
hard howls from drill bits
biting sheets of steel. All my brothers
live here, every cousin, many dozens
of sisters, my worn aunts
and numb uncles, the many many of me,
a hundred sad wives,
all of us countrymen and women
born next to each other behind the plow
in this valley, each of us
pressing to our chests a loaf of bread
and a jug of milk. . . . The river is low
this time of year and the bedstones’ blackness
marks its lack
of depth. A shopping cart
lies on its side in center stream
gathering branches, detritus, silt,
forcing the already weak current to part for it,
dividing it, but even so diminished
it’s glad to be going,
glad to be gone.

Friday poetry: Two short ones featuring food

Haiku Ambulance
Richard Brautigan (1950)

A piece of green pepper
fell
off the wooden salad bowl:
so what?

This is just to say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

– William Carlos Williams

(1934)

Friday poetry classics: John Donne, The Flea

The Flea
John Donne

Mark but this flea, and mark in this
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou knowest that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered, swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do.

O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, we’re met
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that, self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumphest, and sayest that thou
Findest not thyself nor me the weaker now.
æTis true. Then learn how false fears be:
Just so much honor, when thou yieldest to me,
Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.