Sunday Morning Coming Down

In the United States, Election Day is the annual day set by law for the general elections of federal public officials. It is statutorily set as "the Tuesday next after the first Monday in the month of November " or "the first Tuesday after November 1". The earliest possible date is November 2, and the latest possible date is November 8 . It might be convenient for a sitting president to postpone an election day to another day when the economy is better,  folks forget about scandals, or folks forget about avoidable mistakes. In more "normal" times I could almost imagine this suggestion being made and even considered "rational".  Public heath reasons at this time make standing in long lines to vote problematic at best. To further complicate matters there seem to be issues with Russia and China wanting to meddle in this election cycle to further divide and weaken us. Lot's of folks want tinker with our system of voting.  Women won the right to v...

A few days ago I read that if you really felt that Black Lives Matter you should be against abortion on demand. “Those who are most vocal about abortion and abortion laws are my white brothers and sisters, and yet many of them don’t care about the plight of the poor, the plight of the immigrant, the plight of African-Americans,” said the Rev. Dr. Luke Bobo, a minister from Kansas City, Mo., who is vehemently opposed to abortion. “My argument here is, let’s think about the entire life span of the person.”

Everybody has a collective history and they have their own individual history and they have multiple histories with family as parents, relatives, children friends, neighbors, co-workers, and they histories as consumers, producers, or responders.  The term family is also one that could be it's subset of histories because it is such a big launching pad. For the record I believe in  Black Lives Matter as an organization and that Black Lives Matter now.  Maybe it wasn't always that way because I grew up in Bensenville, Illinois.  My parents were naturalized citizens from Canada and my grandparents were Icelandic-Canadian-Americans.  On reflection my family connections were about as "white bread" as possible.  Today's Ball of Confusion Maybe if Hillary Clinton hadn't called out 1/2 of everyone who weren't  going to vote for her under any circumstances " as deplorable" the world would be a different place.  In retrospect the last presidential election...

16 April 1963 My Dear Fellow Clergymen: While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. This is the beginning of Martin Luther King's "Letter From  Birmingham Jail."  I was twelve years old when it was written and lived a very sheltered living in Bensenville, Illinois.  Through high school there were no black students in any of my classes and none in other District 2 or District 100 schools.  According to 2010 Census figures Bensenville has a population of about 18,000 and about 3.5% is African American. On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, King violated a court injunction prohibiting public civil right...

In 1993, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) coined the phrase  “defining deviancy down.”* Moynihan’s thesis was that, as a society, America has been “re-defining deviancy” so as to exempt conduct previously stigmatized, and quietly raising the “normal” level for behavior that was abnormal by earlier standards. ” When “deviance is defined down,” the standards by which society lives change; that change is never for the better. George Will: There is no such thing as rock bottom. So, assume that the worst is yet to come. He was speaking of the current president and the senate repubicans.

In a world long forgotten, the last great recession, the great or not so great State of Florida, and its not so great governor hired Hunting Deutsch to head the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity, the agency, that manages the state reemployment assistance program.  Reemployment Assistance (also called reemployment assistance insurance) provides temporary wage replacement benefits to qualified individuals who are out of work through no fault of their own.  This was a posting of mine from 2012. The conditions for receiving "reemployment assistance" require being available for work and actively looking for work.  99 weeks the maximum length of benefits was a long time to receive "reemployment assistance" then and it seems overly generous now.  Or maybe it's not so generous now.   Wednesday, December 5, 2012 Hunting Deutsch, executive director of the Department of Economic Opportunity resigned abruptly after disclosures that he collected unemp...

A high school classmate posted this on Facebook: Hey, I like both the anti-Trump and the pro-Trump people. Is there anyone else who doesn't hate either side? I think I understand where she is going with her comment but I'm going to break down my answer because living in the United States assumes a level of fairness which is too often forgotten, ignored, or getting lost in the tangle of equivalence, metaphors and similies.  Miami Dade County where I live has  determined that a "Living Wage" is $15.83 per hour or $633.00 for a 40 hour week or about $33,000 per year or sightly over 125% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines I've worked in the public sector for most of my personal and professional life and have tried to keep politics out of doing my job by explaining what services are available, when and if they would be available, how they would be provided, if there were eligibility criteria, and what documents were required to determine eligibility.  The Florida UI S...