Rhode Frog: Happy Thanksgiving

From The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell:

My sister, Amy, my then-seven-year-old nephew Owen and I visited [Plymouth] one summer. It is people by actors who will not, under any circumstances, break character... We then made the acquaintance of one Englishman Amy dubbed the "Pilgrim Archie Bunker." [Owen] told Archie about his collection of Hopi and Navajo kachina dolls he started the previous summer when we went to the Grand Canyon... Archie backed away from Owen and asked him if they're poppets. No, Owen said, "Not puppets - wood carvings." I told him a poppet is a doll used in witchcraft. "You know, like when Scooby Doo goes to Salem." Owen shook his head at Archie and said, "Kachinas are gods, Hopi and Navajo gods." Archie pointed his finger at Owen's chest and raised his voice, "Not the true God Jesus Christ!" Then he told Owen he's never shot an Indian personally but he wouldn't lose any sleep over it if he did, and that he would trade with the Indians, though he would never give them anything of value, perhaps "a pot full of holes." Then my sister grabbed Owen by the arm and said, "Come on, Owen. Let's get out of here before Mama punches a Pilgrim."

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.

Happy Thanksgiving

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