Three Dogs, a Stick, and a Beaver Pond

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Summertime

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Required Reading

Gail Collins on the SC governor. I mean, you can't help but be hilarious in discussing this story, but she's especially so.

“I spent the last five days crying in Argentina,” he said, completely ignoring all we have learned from Andrew Lloyd Webber.

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If Everything in Life Were a Freelancer-Client Relationship

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Tale of an Inkwell

The company that is the focus of this article has paid me $16.25 a month for many years, trying to make up (without interest, needless to say) the $3000+ they owe me for work done years ago. The article says it all.

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Required Reading

Gail Collins on Maloney v. Gillibrand:

So far, Gillibrand has all the endorsements, and Maloney seems to have cornered the market on rancor. On some points, they’re surprisingly similar. Both are hard-working, committed to women’s issues and diligent in collecting federal aid for the home base. The term “sharp elbowed” has been applied to each, but I think it is kinder to say that given the proper encouragement, either one would pander to a doorknob.

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Our Trip to Gettysburg & DC

Highlights: Horseback ride through the battlefields, tour of the Capitol, Aviva's wedding.

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History for Sale

My first-grade schoolhouse is for sale. It was converted some years ago into a residence and is for sale along with the church next door. Once upon a time, these were two one-room schoolhouses, with first and second in one and third and fourth in the other. Now kids here go all the way out to Enfield to school.

I never knew that both buildings had been part of the abolitionist movement in NYS. If these weren't right on 96, we'd look at them as a possibility for Diane L's summer home.

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Coup Coup

Now, I know the Ithaca Journal is no longer a local paper; I can tell when it features a story about teen pregnancy rising in the area that turns out to be about Broome and Chenango Counties. But the fact that the online NYT has nothing at all in its major headlines today about the coup in our state government is shocking. Bye-bye same-sex marriage, bye-bye health care reform. Tom Golisano has bought himself a couple of criminal lackeys.

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Bring on the Conspiracy Theories

My CNN feed says that the debris found in the Atlantic is NOT from Air France 447 and that Spanish pilots saw a bright flash where the flight went down and that David Carradine's closet hanging was foul play, not suicide. Now if we can just find the link between these incidents. . . .

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One Step Closer

The WaPo has this article on the states signed on to work on national standards. Can you guess the four holdouts? I guessed three out of four.

Of course, there are many roadblocks. The states are agreeing to standards but not necessarily to testing. The committees formed to create standards are doubtless fraught with impossible oppositions. But it's a start.

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Required Reading

Finally, Krugman lays the blame on the Great Communicator and his deregulatory machine.

Federal debt as a percentage of G.D.P. fell steadily from the end of World War II until 1980. But indebtedness began rising under Reagan; it fell again in the Clinton years, but resumed its rise under the Bush administration, leaving us ill prepared for the emergency now upon us.

The increase in public debt was, however, dwarfed by the rise in private debt, made possible by financial deregulation. The change in America’s financial rules was Reagan’s biggest legacy. And it’s the gift that keeps on taking.

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City Island

PZ sends this loving tribute to a place both he and DZ inhabited (and I often visited back in the day). City Island is a little-known haven in the midst of city life. The food is ridiculously expensive, the neighborhoods are as safe as any around, and the ambience is charming with a Bronx accent.

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