Sunday Funnies & Arts

As always, click to enlarge...

Big bird. And I mean big...

Blue heart in Donegal...

Scenic route...

Numbers, Thanksgiving week...

Weekly Address: Traveling Abroad for Our Economy at Home

Editilla reflects on the recent court ruling that established the Army Corps of Engineers as being at fault for much of the Katrina-related flooding of New Orleans...

Friday's Choice: The Cohen Brothers

52% of Republicans Are Paranoid and Delusional

It's all here.

The Lacuna

I've been reading The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver's new novel about the artistic and political maturation of a peripatetic young writer. I just completed a lengthy passage about the protagonist's relationships with Frida Kahlo (who serves as the writer's friend and muse), Diego Rivera, and Leon (Lev) Trotsky, the Bolshevist thinker and leader exiled from Russia after a split with Stalin.

Kingsolver has a genuine gift for finding and exploring the humanity of such iconic figures, as exemplified by this poetic, evocative paragraph describing Trotsky's wife Natalya:

Perpetua has walked down the street twice this week, to deliver some pottery Natalya liked especially. Her favorite is the white glazed platter with a fish leaping over it, a gift from Frida when they first arrived. Natalya thanked Perpetua and put it away in a cabinet, but today she has brought it out and set it against the wall. In the years with Lev her world has been so constrained, with so few objects of beauty in it. She is not a bulldog, only a woman pressed into the shape of a small jar, possibly attempting to dance in there. It shows in the way she places a seashell on a window sill, a red-painted chair in a corner: she is practiced in the art of creating a still life and taking up residence inside it.

And I Quote

"[People] are fed up -- frustrated and fed up and angry about the way in which our government does not work. And I think the filibuster has become not only in reality an obstacle to accomplishment here, but it is also a symbol of a lot that ails Washington today."

Quick, who said this? Was it Bill Clinton, frustrated by the Republican intransigence that blocked even minor appointments? Maybe Barack Obama in an unguarded moment, worried that a few small-state senators stood in the way of health care reform? Guess again: It was Holy Joe Lieberman who, back in 1994, introduced legislation to reform the filibuster. Today, of course, this unalloyed hypocrite threatens to use the filibuster to deny health care access to 35,000,000 of his fellow Americans. Christopher Hayes of The Nation has more here about the most undemocratic practice of our most undemocratic institution...

Calvin Trillin skewers Lieberman here...

Charity Hospital...

Thoughtfulness. Sometimes, a girl just can't win...

What Health Care Reform Is Up Against

The honesty of this headline from today's Seattle Times caught my attention:

Front groups target health bill

---

Attempts to influence public opinio

---

Sponsors shrouded in secrecy

The story is here. No attempts at false objectivity by quoting "studies" or "both sides." It's simply a reporter doing his job by exposing the vicious machinations of a North Carolina law firm that declines to identify its clients, claiming that "they want the message to be the important thing." Indeed. After all, who would want to be identified with shadowy efforts to intimidate Harry Reid, Blanche Lincoln, and Olympia Snowe?