No words necessary

Laden, redux

Last April 27 I posted this picture. My friend Beth saw the title and thought I was writing about bin Laden – prescient, I realize now, because five days later Obama got him.

This same tree is has now been bearing its heavy load again for several days. We’re at least two weeks early here.

He hasn’t done much about global warming (“climate change,” which for some Republican reason everyone now seems to say instead), but at least he’s eliminated the Laden confusion.

They got him already

If you’re going to be a mole, the first thing you need to learn is how to steal a video without leaving electronic tracks. And since his second post was about the bathrooms at Fox News, I’m not sure we’ll be missing much now that he’s been evicted from his burrow.

But I guess it says something about me that I’m going to keep reading.

There’s a mole in the Foxhill!

According to Gawker today:

What follows is the inaugural column of a person we are calling The Fox Mole—a long-standing, current employee of Fox News Channel who will be providing Gawker with regular dispatches from inside the organization.

I predict the “regular dispatches” will cease rather quickly. The Fox will very soon find its prey.

And I would have changed the caption on this video the mole stole, to “Romney’s not a robot after all!” He’s disarmingly human here – even though most of us humans don’t have multiple horses.

 

 

The heavy weight of politics

I heard Rachel Maddow on Fresh Air yesterday, and she was so smart and engaging that I decided I just had to record her show (record, not watch live, because as even she described after listening to Terri Gross play one of her incisive interviews with a homophobe, it made her blood pressure rise so much she wasn’t sure how her listeners could stand the tension, and 9 pm isn’t the best time for a spike in my own blood pressure).

So today I watched her opening monologue, and tension doesn’t begin to describe it. She began back in the infamous year of 2000, the year we’ve all tried to forget, when the Supreme Court, with its current conservative posse joined by Justice Kennedy, gave Bush the election. Those same 5 justices decided that corporations were people, so that elections could be influenced even more by the rich. And now … well, we all know what they’re doing now.

According to a Bloomberg poll, 75% of us think their decision will be more influenced by politics than by legal, i.e. constitutional, considerations. The real question, posed by Maddow, is: Do they care?

I think not.

I am writing this because I really hope to be able to look back and say I was wrong, not I told you so.

Water, falling

911 Memorial

We saw this first: One World Trade Center, fog lifting, unfinished; eerily evocative of the smoke and deep blue sky on that awful day.

Water falls in the footprints of the towers:

Only one tree from the plaza survived that day, its charred stump removed, nursed back to health, replanted:

And the names, deeply etched, of those who died.