TPMCafe has had an impressive first week. Various top notch bloggers posted interesting and thought provoking stories and John Edwards even stopped by. TPMCafe is the new political collaborative journalism and activism effort by Joshua Micah Marshall. It joins the already established left leaning Daily Kos, MyDD, TalkLeft and the All Spin Zone online communities.
Question: Why can’t we just work together?
Drudge’s latest attack against Bill Clinton includes looking back on a 1998 article by Sally Quinn in the Washington Post. He misreads it real bad. Turns out, according to Eschaton, it’s “the biggest self-indictment of the beltway kool kids ever written”. Makes Clinton look all the more appealing if you ask me.
Read Howard’s post at Philly Future.
Thank you to all the soldiers and their families who have sacrificed so much to secure what me and so many of the rest of us take for granted – our freedom.
It occurs to me that the greatest way to honor that sacrifice is to use our freedom to the fullest: Have you made a life altering choice in the past year? Have you voted in the past two? Do you read the news to stay informed (this one is easy considering my readership!)? Do you take part in debate over the course of the country, of your town?
Times Online: Read the secret Downing Street memo. It’s shocking in the context of the time it was written. The major news media doesn’t seem to care. No heat on this at all.
Great questions were posted by the community and Dianah Neff came by to give detailed answers to each and every one of them. Thank you to all who participated.
Fundable is an interesting web service that lets groups of people pool money to raise funds or make purchases. The tool takes advantage of the distributed nature of the web and reminds me of one of the seven habits – “Win/Win or No Deal”. If goals aren’t reached – everyone gets their money back.
Lets see…
* Have a trip you need to finance that your community might chip in for?
* Have a non-profit you want to send money to that deserves more than what you alone could send?
* Have an event you need to fund but have no idea where to get the money?
The list goes on and on….
I try and tell myself that where I come from is a strength. That it doesn’t bear negative weight on who I am and where I am. But some days I just can’t shake the feeling that I don’t belong – that I am a creature of another environment – and that everyone knows it too.
The following quotes, from a NYTimes article on class, resonated with me:
…”I think class is everything, I really do,” she said recently. “When you’re poor and from a low socioeconomic group, you don’t have a lot of choices in life. To me, being from an upper class is all about confidence. It’s knowing you have choices, knowing you set the standards, knowing you have connections.”
…”The shock of going to live in wealth, with Joe and Virginia, it was like Little Orphan Annie going to live with the Rockefellers,” Ms. Justice said. “It was not easy. I was shy and socially inept. For the first time, I could have had the right clothes, but I didn’t have any idea what the right clothes were. I didn’t know much about the world, and I was always afraid of making a wrong move. When we had a school trip for chorus, we went to a restaurant. I ordered a club sandwich, but when it came with those toothpicks on either end, I didn’t know how to eat it, so I just sat there, staring at it and starving, and said I didn’t feel well.”
… “I couldn’t play Trivial Pursuit, because I had no general knowledge of the world,” she said. “And while I knew East Kentucky, they all knew a whole lot about Massachusetts and the Northeast. They all knew who was important, whose father was a federal judge. They never doubted that they had the right thing to say. They never worried about anything.”
Most of all, they all had connections that fed into a huge web of people with power. “Somehow, they all just knew each other,” she said.
…”The norm is, people that are born with money have money, and people who weren’t don’t,” she said recently. “I know that. I know that just to climb the three inches I have, which I’ve not gone very far, took all of my effort. I have worked hard since I was a kid and I’ve done nothing but work to try and pull myself out.”
The class a person is born into, she said, is the starting point on the continuum. “If your goal is to become, on a national scale, a very important person, you can’t start way back on the continuum, because you have too much to make up in one lifetime. You have to make up the distance you can in your lifetime so that your kids can then make up the distance in their lifetime.”
…And though in terms of her work Ms. Justice is now one of Pikeville’s leading citizens, she is still troubled by the old doubts and insecurities. “My stomach’s always in knots getting ready to go to a party, wondering if I’m wearing the right thing, if I’ll know what to do,” she said. “I’m always thinking: How does everybody else know that? How do they know how to act? Why do they all seem so at ease?”
Class Matters – Social Class in the United States of America – The New York Times
Philadelphia Inquirer: Abraham beats Williams in district attorney’s race.
I’ll have more when I collect my thoughts. Just know that even if Seth Williams lost this race, it was a special one for a number of reasons.
Details at Philly Future.