I said to Tessa that is kind of sad “30″ minutes. She went onto tell me that 30 minutes of her attention meant no phones, no computers, no one else, not her husband , her work. She went onto explain that she had noticed that when she took the time to give Anna her undivided attention that that type of attention really filled many of the needs of her child…undivided attention.

I went onto to use this strategy with my three daughters (did a great deal of single parenting ex with a serious addiction problem). Spending undivided attention with each one almost every day

You are making very wise decisions with the Peanut. It is such a precious time of life and goes by rather quickly

Bob in HI

Terri Gross doing a show on the “convoy of death”
http://woub.org/index.php?section=2

Have done my share of bringing attention to Terri Gross repeating unsubstantiated claims about Iran. But got to give it to her for shedding light on this issue. Amy Goodman stepped up to the plate immediately after the Documentary came out
http://woub.org/index.php?section=2

Let’s hope Rachel, Chris Matthews, Olbermann or Ed demonstrate some chutzpah and start to report about this seven year old story. If they ever stop reporting about the “birthers” and “Sarah”

It’s as though the nation has decided collective amnesia about what we allowed in all of our names is the prudent option. Justice, be damned.

Thanks for this updated version of J’Accuse!

The Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal which divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It involved the conviction for treason in November 1894 of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent. Sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly having communicated French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris, Dreyfus was sent to the penal colony at Devil’s Island in French Guiana and placed in solitary confinement.

Two years later, in 1896, evidence came to light identifying a French Army major named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy as the real culprit. However, high-ranking military officials suppressed this new evidence and Esterhazy was unanimously acquitted after the second day of his trial in military court. Instead of being exonerated, Alfred Dreyfus was further accused on the basis of false documents fabricated by French counter-intelligence officers seeking to re-confirm his conviction.

Word of the military court’s framing of Alfred Dreyfus and of an attendant cover-up began to spread, largely due to a vehement public protestation in a Paris newspaper by writer Emile Zola, in January 1898. The case had to be re-opened and Alfred Dreyfus was brought back from Guiana in 1899 to be tried again. The intense political and judicial scandal that ensued divided French society….

[After years of public outcry, pressure from the press and advocates for justice] the accusations against Alfred Dreyfus were demonstrated to be baseless. Alfred Dreyfus was exonerated and reinstated as a major in the French Army in 1906.

That wikipedia summary of the Dreyfus case (emphasis mine) is truncated. The scandal was about morality, administrative competence, social justice and religious intolerance and fear, as much as it was about a brittle military and rigid politicians fearful of offending it. That summary fails to rekindle the outrage, the humiliation and torture, and the years of activism from an outraged public that were necessary to overcome bureaucratic inertia. More than inertia, it was necessary to overcome the opposing pressure from vehement anti-Semites and leaders who put the prestige of their institutions – the army and the executive – above basic justice and the welfare of their people.

The Dreyfus Affair was about wrongfully imprisoning a single man in a tropical hell hole. It was also about the frailness of a state and a military unable to admit error and apologize to a Jew. It was, too, about the self-serving machinations of top army and political figures who were determined to hide their wrongs and promote their careers at the expense of one man’s freedom. Change “Jew” to “Moslem” and the parallels are more obvious.

Governments and institutions of power – the Roman church and its sexually predatory priests, for example – protect themselves and realize their ambitions before protecting the general welfare.

The Dreyfus affair shows what can be done through public pressure and a free press. But we have a harder to task. Our press may be free, but the state and corporate interests opposed to the open exchange of information have co-opted it. There are hundreds or thousands of Dreyfuses who have wrongfully been imprisoned and remain there precisely because our leaders are more afraid than we are.

Thanks, again, Christy.

But when the large fundamental institutions that govern our country have flown out of control and threaten to destroy not only themselves but everything else. We need something more than a nudge.

ding ding!

the axe I’m grinding forever is that the Democratic Party is obviously one of those ‘large fundamental institutions’ that needs more than a nudge.

a hard case to make with many who have such unrequited affection for the (D)’s.

checked out the Garbus links real quick . . .

hmmm . .. I’ve dealt a little bit with fire codes, fire marshals – those who have seen the aftermath have quite an understanding of how humans packed in, and panicking in a fire, act very differently, how something small and innocuous in an exit path can indeed be a hazard . . .

on a tangent here, but a panicked crowd needs an outlet, a channel, or it can go somewhere stupid, and get stuck.

the analogy here is to this country under severe economic duress – which way will it surge?

there had better be an authentic left populist outlet, because the Right populist outlet(s) are standing ready . . . .

And this brings me back to the subject of this post. We have seen rampant lawlessness and the trampling of the rule of law for 8 years. And what is Obama’s response? A wink to those who committed and sanctioned criminality and a nudge, not really to stop those crimes and excesses, but to be more circumspect in how they go about doing them.