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If you only have time for one of these links, my recommendation is in italics.
April
From the Washington Post’s The Once and Future Republic of Vermont: “Vermont was once an independent republic, and it can be one again. We think the time to make that happen is now. Over the past 50 years, the U.S. government has grown too big, too corrupt and too aggressive toward the world, toward its own citizens and toward local democratic institutions. It has abandoned the democratic vision of its founders and eroded Americans’ fundamental freedoms. Vermont did not join the Union to become part of an empire. Some of us therefore seek permission to leave.”
From the NY Times’ For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too: “For all their accomplishments and ambitions, the amazing girls, as their teachers and classmates [at Newton North High School, just outside of Boston] call them, are not immune to the…message: While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart. You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one [amazing girl], Kat Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on her SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, ‘It’s out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.’ ‘Effortlessly hot,’ Kat added. If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything.”
From TIME Magazine editorialist, Joe Klein’s An Administration’s Epic Collapse: “The three big Bush stories of 2007 — the decision to “surge” in Iraq, the scandalous treatment of wounded veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys for tawdry political reasons — precisely illuminate the three qualities that make this Administration one of the worst in American history: arrogance (the surge), incompetence (Walter Reed) and cynicism (the U.S. Attorneys)….I’ve tried to be respectful of the man and the office, but the three defining sins of the Bush Administration–arrogance, incompetence, cynicism–are congenital: they’re part of his personality. They’re not likely to change. And it is increasingly difficult to imagine yet another two years of slow bleed with a leader so clearly unfit to lead.”
For those of you who like your Vermont messaging to come in the panels of a comic strip, this week’s Doonesbury deals with Vermont’s vote to impeach the President.
From Pyschology Today’s Is One Kid Enough?: “Interestingly, second and third children don’t add to parents’ happiness at all. In fact, these additional children seem to make mothers less happy than mothers with only one child—though still happier than women with no children. “If you want to maximize your subjective well-being, you should stop at one child,” concludes Kohler, adding that people probably have additional children either for the benefit of the firstborn or because they reason that if the first child made them happy, the second one will, too.”
From Political Affairs Magazine’s Please God, deliver us from the banality of evil: “Fed a steady diet of carefully crafted agitprop from cradle to grave, many of us zealously pursue the American Dream of suburban utopias bordered by white picket fences. Utterly oblivious and indifferent to the staggering cost we impose upon the rest of the world, we ignore the stack of bloodied corpses on which we climb as we reach for the sacred brass ring. Ready-made delusions eagerly provided by our corporate masters assure us that we are entitled to all that we desire, convince us that we are morally superior to those we bleed dry to gratify ourselves, and shield us from the grim reality that we are the ‘monsters on Maple Street.’”
