Thank you all very much. Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. (Applause.) And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.
April 30, 2008
Fighting in Baghdad's Shi'ite slum of Sadr City made April the deadliest month for Iraqi civilians since last August and for U.S. troops since last September, figures obtained on Wednesday showed.
For months, I've been trying to decide who I was going to vote for today. One by one, the various candidates dropped out, and though their names remained on the ballot I cast about three hours ago here in Massachusetts, only two really mattered anymore.
And so I was left with a difficult decision. You see, based on the way they have run their campaigns, the policies they have been promoting and promising, their conduct and the conduct of their staffs, their voting records, their rhetoric, and myriad other concerns, I felt like I could choose to decide between the better of two adequate candidates, or I could write in "Russ Feingold" as a protest, as a mark of what kind of Democrat our eventual nominee should be.
Because the worst rhetorical excesses and abuses of the most rabid partisans notwithstanding, what Senator Obama's supporters have criticized so loudly about you, Senator Clinton, is largely true, and what Senator Clinton's supporters have criticized so loudly about you, Senator Obama, is also largely true.
Ah, the joys of the season! When various groups celebrate Chanukah, Solstice, Eid ul-Adha, Kwanzaa, Christmas, or other holidays, you'd think it would be a more festive, peaceful time.
You'd think that. But you would be wrong. Perhaps I should start at the beginning.
My fiancee and I are moving soon from our comfortable home here in Madison, Wisconsin, so we decided to have some close friends over tomorrow, before we really start packing everything to ship to Boston. Of course, we needed a few things for the gathering, so I was sent on a little shopping trip. I suppose it was inevitable, then, that I would come across one of the Salvation Army pots with accompanying bell ringer, asking for a donation.
I'm venting here, but this is originally posted at dKos.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
And so the founding of our country was declared, with a statement of the universality of basic human rights. Yet even then, we did not practice what we preached. We denied women basic rights, including the franchise, for most of our national history, and in many ways we continue to do so today; for instance, women's wages are still just 76.5% that of men in the US (warning: big PDF file). And we denied even the basic personhood of black folks, counting them as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of congressional representation in Article I Section 2 of the Constitution until the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.
And we continue to deny basic rights to our LGBT brothers and sisters.
Some of my friends on dKos have asked me to write a little something about Yom Kippur; this is my humble attempt to acquiesce.
From Friday night from just before sundown until just after sundown on Saturday night, Jews around the world will be observing Yom Kippur, the "Day of Atonement," when we ask God to pardon us for any sins we may have committed against Him/Her/It over the previous year; by tradition, God judges our fate for the coming year on this day.
Last year, several folks over at dKos asked me questions about Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which begins this year on Wednesday night at sundown. The questions were largely in response to recipes I posted for the Recipe of the Day feature in the nightly Top Comments diary. As I noted in this diary, there are ample resources on the internet for anyone who just wants a general overview, and even Wikipedia has a respectable entry.
In last year's diary, I recounted the story of the Martyr of Mayence and its significance for the holiday. This year, I will talk about the shofar, the ram's horn blown on Rosh Hashana to mark the new year -- and a few other things, too.
We should be used to it by now. The Republicans do it all the time. When we supported Ned Lamont in the primaries last year, Joe Lieberman did it, too. Your friend Bill O'Reilly -- Falafel Boy himself -- and his minions took their shot, even going so far as to call us Nazis and Klansmen. And now it's your turn, Mr. Ford.
In your capacity as the chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, you said this morning on Meet the Press that we're a bunch of Jew haters here.
Those of you who have read my comments in some of the other diaries know my personal stance on forgiveness. I'll start with my personal perspective here, then I'll explain why it fits so well in the Jewish tradition.
To me, forgiveness has a few prerequisites:
The wrongdoer must confess wrongdoing -- and not to some third party, but to his/her victim.
The wrongdoer must repent.
The wrongdoer must ask for forgiveness from the person s/he has wronged. This is the only optional step in my book, but it's the option of the person granting forgiveness, not the person asking it.
The wrongdoer must be held accountable and responsible for the damage s/he has done.
I know some of you are headed to the YearlyKos convention in a couple of weeks, and I know some of you are regulars over at dKos. I know those of you who are aware of the slander perpetrated against dKos and its users by Falafel Boy in his Centrifuge share my disgust, and I know many of you are appalled at the cowardice displayed by JetBlue in choosing to side with the Lying Loofah Loser against us. Accordingly, I am crossposting this here; the original is here.
