Republicans Raising Taxes?! Oh, Wait.

In a decade of frenzied tax-cutting for the rich, the Republican Party just happened to lower tax rates for the poor, as well. Now several of the party’s most prominent presidential candidates and lawmakers want to correct that oversight and raise taxes on the poor and the working class, while protecting the rich, of course.


Full article.

New York Needs to Bring It Down a Notch

I'm glad to have been out of NYC during Irene if only to realize how awfully self-absorbed we/NYC can be.

Instead of snarking that the storm didn't hit the city hard or complaining about lack of transit, everyone should take a minute to reflect on those who weren't so lucky and be humbly grateful.

Start with this slideshow
Or this article

Just because it doesn't happen to New York doesn't mean it doesn't happen.  And matter.

Everyone Stop Telling Me To See "The Help"

I don't want to see that movie.  I don't want to read the book.  I haven't been articulating why very well, I just get an icky feeling from the commercial with the worn-out types: Sassy Black Maid, Hoity-Toity White Upper Class Lady, Sympathetic White Woman Who Will Turn Out Okay.  The white-person-as-hero feel-good flick that glosses over a host of problems that one person ain't solving is not my genre, which is also why I will not waste two hours on The Blind Side, not that I need a reason beyond Sandra Bullock (though Crash was awesome, and imho her only watchable moment).

This op-ed makes a related point:

To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not.

Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud. It’s the fallacy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a movie that never fails to move me but that advances a troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to these struggling individuals.

But that wasn’t the case...

...Cultures function and persist by consensus. In Jackson and other bastions of the Jim Crow South, the pervasive notion, among poor whites and rich, that blacks were unworthy of full citizenship was as unquestioned as the sanctity of church on Sunday. “The Help” tells a compelling and gripping story, but it fails to tell that one.

Stuck

So, yes, I blog less when I have more work to do.

But lately, I've also been hesitant to post because I have been reducing my news consumption, which makes me feel less capable of posting a remotely intelligent commentary on anything going on. [insert joke in the vein of "well that never stopped you before!" har har.]

In other words, there have been lots of things I want to bring up but haven't felt like I can form a succinct post/argument/narrative/story.  But my thoughts and feelings on the things - political, cultural, etc - that I am pondering are strong, and worth pointing out.

Then I realized: maybe the point is just to raise some questions.

Let's give it a try...