Rhode Frog: Big Brother and My Inner Child

Is it just me, or does the amazing weather we had this week make you want to go out and play? If not, you're no fun. But if you're like me, you went out and did just that.

Long story short, school was out, Cass Park was 5 minutes away, there were two kids' bikes in my car, and two insane co-workers were up for it. So, we spent our lunch hour pedalling around the park. Yes, the cop was watching us. Yes, the parents were curious. No, we did not care - we were having too much fun.

Speaking of cops watching us, has anyone else spotted Big Brother's eye in a tree at Cass Park, aimed directly at the pond? If you stand on the sidewalk of Cass Ave in front of the pond, find the giant bird's nest on a branch and look to the left - the camera is painted to blend into the tree, but it's there. Make sure you wave next time.

Bits & Pieces

Senator Al Franken has proposed a "Pay for War" resolution that would require Congress to raise taxes and/or cut spending before authorizing new acts of war, so that American foreign adventures can't contribute to the national debt.

In "The Long Road Home," historian Ben Shephard tells the neglected story of the refugee crisis the Allies faced when, at war's end, millions of displaced persons -- among them prisoners of war, slave laborers and survivors of concentration camps -- had to be repatriated to their homelands or resettled somewhere else.

For most of the last century, talk of secession, nullification and the rest of the extreme states-rights lexicon were relegated to the fringiest parts of the political fringe. But since Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, mainstream Republican rhetoric and proposed legislation at the state level have both warmed to the hoary idea that state governments can take their relationship with the federal government on what amounts to an a la carte basis or perhaps abandon it altogether.

Is the tantalizing dream of a universal library dead? Some scholars and librarians across the country fear it may be, now that a federal judge in New York has derailed Google’s bold plan to build the world’s largest digital library and bookstore.

...the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office... finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts. In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade the plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law.

...Republicans in Mississippi are divided over a wholly different wedlock issue: interracial marriage.

Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in this month's Vanity Fair about the corrosive, self-reinforcing wealth concentration that has hijacked American politics, in which the America's future is sacrificed to give ever more money to an ever-smaller group of oligarchs.

Big Brother and My Inner Child

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