Weekend Update - Dead Poet's Edition

• Sorry to start out this week with something so sad, but Howard Zinn, lifelong dissident and peace activist and historian, who joined many of the struggles for social justice over the past fifty years, died suddenly Wednesday of a heart attack at the age of eighty-seven. Uncle Bob and I had the pleasure of attending his lecture in Eugene several years ago.



• What happened to my bonus? What happened to my job? What happened to my country? Why can't it all go the way it's supposed to go? Mark Morford ponders why it is that everything's so awfully disappointing.



• Many Americans were more eagerly anticipating Steve Jobs’s address in San Francisco on Wednesday morning than the president’s that night because they have far more confidence in Apple than Washington to produce concrete change. Or so says Frank Rich in "The State of the Union Is Comatose."



• Maybe The Onion ultimately said it best: In this big dramatic production that didn't do anyone any good (and was pretty embarrassing, really, if you think about it), thousands upon thousands of phonies across the country mourned the death of author J.D. Salinger, who was 91 years old for crying out loud. "He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers," said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don't have to look at them for four years. "There will never be another voice like his." Which is exactly the lousy kind of goddamn thing that people say, because really it could mean lots of things, or nothing at all even, and it's just a perfect example of why you should never tell anybody anything.



• Here's another one, probably only of interest to us local older folk. Ed Ragozzino died yesterday at age 79. Ed was, amongst other things, a very talented drama teacher at South Eugene High School in the early 60's and managed to bring out the inner actor in many of us, if for only a brief shining moment. For many of us, he was one of the most inspiring people in our lives.



• In one of the most fascinating pieces of political theater we've seen in a long while, President Obama spoke to House Republicans at their annual policy retreat last week, and made most of them look like whiney little kids. Click here. And just for fun, here's the take on all this from DailyKos.



• Glenn Beck states bravely "don't know much about history," or economics, it turns out, or anything else for that matter, but it sure doesn't stop him from vomiting misinformation all over his listeners. For example...



• Bad Hat's Idiot of the Week Award goes to James O'Keefe, that conservative "filmmaker" who posed as a pimp to target the liberal activist group ACORN. Seems he got arrested with the son of a federal prosecutor and two other men and accused of plotting to tamper with the New Orleans offices of Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. Oops. Guess he's not going to be the righties equivalent of Michael Moore after all. Tsk tsk.