Pause for the Claus

A man dressed as Santa Claus walks the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. US. stocks rose further on Monday [of Thanksgiving week] after data showed U.S. existing-home sales fell in October about in line with expectations, adding to earlier gains on the government’s $20 billion injection of new capital into Citigroup. [Reuters via The Independent]

Looks like top of the commercial line theatrical costume rental.. as well.  We don’t want any ratty old down at the edges childrens’ Santa for Wall St… oh nooo.

Surprised they did not slap Old Glory patches on his shoulders, as some on the trading floor wear on their jackets…

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In the last thread…Madman had popped up the link to the Center for Constitutional Reform’s opposition to Warren…

From the close:

We understand that there will be compromises and decisions we won’t agree with in the coming years, and we will be right there challenging them. But to begin it all in this way, is a terrible signal to send to the people who worked day and night to elect President Obama. He should withdraw his invitation. At the very least, he should ask someone else to officiate as well, someone with decency and eloquence who can balance the presence of Rev. Warren. If the president is at a loss for ideas, allow us to suggest two women who could ably fit the bill: Bishop Katherine Jeffords Schori,  the presiding head of the Episcopal church who supports the ordination of gay ministers, and Susana Heschel, a feminist theologian and daughter of Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Jewish leader who worked hand in hand with Martin Luther King.

Let’s not start off on the wrong foot and hobble progress before we’ve even begun.

I was surprised what a strong statement it was… but of course Obama just points to Lowery and says that takes care of it.  Either of the two women clerics would have been an amazing, bracing, invigorating choice.

Change and forward motion,  written all over it,  Lowery there as benediction, a balm and blessing for safe passage (we need it).   Too much for Ob to handle, is my take.

Instead we get schlock.

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Someone popped me this by email…  I think of it as Christmas future, for America, as we gift the earth with endless war, more than the various people of the world could think up or manage on their own…  I don’t hear us making any plans to stop.  Quite the opposite.

[A]nd when they benefit from the carnage no longer, their yellow ribbon patriotism and shallow concern fade quickly to apathy and indifference. The living refuse of war that returns are heroes no longer, but outcasts and derelicts, and burdens on the economy. The dead, they mythologize with memorials and speeches of past and future suffering and loss. Inspiring and prophetic words by those who sanction the slaughter to those who know nothing of sacrifice.

I used to try to explain war to help them understand and to know its horror, naively believing that war was a deficiency of information, understanding, discernment and vision. But being crazy has liberated me, allowing me to see that war is not a deficiency at all, but an excess of greed, ambition, intolerance and lust for power. And we are its instruments, the cannon fodder, expendable commodities in the ruthless pursuit of wealth, power, hegemony and empire.

And now, I accept and celebrate my unorthodoxy, my insanity, as an indictment of the hypocrites and the arrogant, of the ignorant and the narrow-minded for a collective responsibility and guilt for murder and mayhem, and crimes against humanity. And I offer my insanity as a presage of their future accountability – to humankind in the courts of history, and to the god they invoke so often to sanction and make credible their sacrilege of war.

Amen – to a secular prayer.

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