Thank you, John, for showing this as a debate with various points of view. In fact, as the Pen. Sec'y of Welfare says there, the woman who does take up a job has either to earn enough to be able to privately pay for a babysitter or has to have daycare subsidized by the State. Whatever was wrong with the AFDC should have been corrected. Let the government emulate Microsoft: you roll out a program based on good intentions and you do not simply give up if it stinks. You keep improving it all the time based on the feedback you get.

Originally written by Jacek K. on October 22, 2007 6:42 PM   ... as the sportswriter/philosopher Jimmy Cannon used to say, there are, for me, two facets to the American idea, one negative, one positive. The negative is the idea that we are better than other people, rather than just different -- "City on a Hill" and all that. The positive, the great saving grace of a nation striving to be great, is the freedom to fail and then reinvent yourself. F. Scott Fitzgerald, not quoted in The Atlantic, was totally wrong when he said there are no second acts in American lives. We are, with or without the grace of God, about nothing other than second acts -- and third, and fourth. One day we may get it right."

Cameron Todd Willingham failed and didn't even get a second chance to reinvent himself. Was he innocent? I dunno, but I find it strange, to put it mildly, that the Constitution doesn't forbid execution in the case of: '"... a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent.'"

Trial by Fire

Did Texas execute an innocent man?

by David Grann September 7, 2009

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann?currentPage=all

*** 

[…]

In June, by a 5-4 margin, the Supreme Court ruled that a prisoner did not have a constitutional right to demand DNA testing of evidence in police files, even at his own expense. "A criminal defendant proved guilty after a fair trial does not have the same liberty interests as a free man," wrote Chief Justice John Roberts. And two months later, Justices Scalia and Thomas went even further than the chief justice following an extraordinary Supreme Court order instructing a federal court to hold a new hearing in Troy Davis' murder case, after seven of nine eyewitnesses recanted their testimony. Scalia, dissenting from that order, wrote for himself and Justice Clarence Thomas, "[t]his court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent."

As a constitutional matter, Scalia is not wrong. The court has never found a constitutional right for the actually innocent to be free from execution. …

(emphasis NM)

http://www.slate.com/id/2227222/

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/09/22/literary_history/?source=newsletter

You could do a lot worse with the next 220 days of your life than to begin each one by reading an entry from the freshly published "A New Literary History of America" -- the way generations past used to study a Bible verse daily. You could do a lot worse, but I'm not sure you could do much better; this magnificent volume is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture. ...

"Literary," as defined by Marcus and Sollors, is a category so wide-ranging as to be nearly meaningless; the real determiners here are those "points in time and imagination." The subject of any given entry might be a book -- Marcus himself writes on "Moby-Dick," and African-American writer Ishmael Reed proffers a rowdy, score-settling weigh-in on "Huckleberry Finn" (somehow a diatribe about the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani's review of Toni Morrison's "Beloved" finds its way in there). But the subject might just as well be a famous speech or Supreme Court decision or movie or painting or sculpture or manifesto or comic strip. There's even an entry about the Winchester rifle. This book is not so much a history of our literature as it is a literary version of our history, told through the culture we've created to recount our past and conjure our future.

As the editors explain in their introduction, a survey of American literature has to be fundamentally different from a similar book on, say, France or Germany, countries that have "organic literatures or organic societies that long preceded the emergence of the modern French and German nations." America, by contrast, is "made-up," summoned out of a fusion of Enlightenment ideals, economic needs and geographic happenstance. It's a nation literally constituted out of documents, particularly the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Both of those literary works get examined in "A New Literary History of America," in fascinating entries (by Frank Kelleter and Mitchell Meltzer, respectively) that probe the contradictions within each. On the Constitution, Meltzer writes that the framers "turned away from the traditional reliance upon religious sanction and engineered a new paradox, what could be called a secular revelation," officially enshrining certain truths as emanations of the human heart and mind, not the word of God.

[...]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704204304574545663620908966.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

Race is singular and immutable. But Thanksgiving is a time to mark that in cities, towns and families across the country, people have grown to see ethnicity as merely one feature of our human makeup. To some, race will always overwhelm all other traits. But to millions more, it's just the way that small minds keep score.

When it comes to living with the risk of bigotry, I feel blessed to be able to take my chances—and more importantly, my children's chances—in America.