The governor’s budget is a painful reminder of how badly our elected officials have managed the state’s finances for years. No one likes the plan (or more, accurately, the pain it passes around), but no one has come up with any legitimate alternatives. So, as the Star-Ledger writes today, it is the plan we must live with.
Channel Surfing, The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
A poem on Memorial Day:
Dulce Et Decorum Est
By Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Channel Surfing, The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
Today’s editorial in The New York Times offers another reminder of why we should get out of Iraq.
American forces can never be a substitute for Iraqi soldiers and police officers who take seriously their duty to protect all the people, regardless of religion or ethnicity. Mr. Bush’s premise that American troops should simply stay on the ground until Iraq gets things right and defeats all insurgent forces and terrorist groups, however long it takes, is flat wrong. The United States presence is dangerous — to the soldiers themselves, to American standing in the world, and most tellingly to large numbers of innocent Iraqis.
The currently emerging story about what happened last November in Haditha, where at least two dozen Iraqi men, women and children were apparently shot by a small group of American marines, is only the latest indication of what terrible things can happen when soldiers are required to occupy hostile civilian territory in the midst of an armed insurrection and looming civil war. A military investigation is currently deciding whether any of the marines should be charged with murder, and whether a cover-up took place. All these questions have awful resonance for those who remember Vietnam, and what that prolonged and ultimately pointless war did to both the Vietnamese and the American social fabric.
Channel Surfing, The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
Charles Taylor in the Star-Ledger pens an ode to one of the great country-pop songs of all time, Glen Campbell‘s “Galveston.” The song, as he reminds us, remains relevant today, as American soldiers fight deadly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the American government pretends their deaths mean little — so little, in fact, that we cannot see the coffins returning.
Channel Surfing, The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The targeting of Mexican immigrants completely misses the manner in which border breaches now occur. Read this from The Washington Post.
And read this.
Channel Surfing, The South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
Hank Kalet 