Rhode Frog: Overheard in the Bellingham Barnes & Noble

Ditsy waitress to girl behind me who was sitting alone studying and drinking coffee: "Are you lonely?"
Girls, confused: "No, why?"
Waitress: "Cuz you're just, like, sitting here alone, you look lonely."
Girl: "No no, I'm fine, I'm studying."
Waitress: "Oh, cuz I was, like, should I call eHarmony of something?"

Conversation had I been involved:
"Are you lonely?"
"F*** off."

Honestly, drinking coffee and reading in a cafe, alone, is one of the sacred parts of life, enjoyed by women (and men) all over the world. If interrupted by a server projecting their emotional issues onto you, profanity is called-for.

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.

Overheard in the Bellingham Barnes & Noble

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