Tomorrow being September 19th, we should all be polishing up our pirate vocabularies and seeking assistance from this estimable volume: The Pirate Life: Unleashing Your Inner Buccaneer. So that we’ll all be able to undertake this enterprise with proper seriousness, I offer the following musical assistance.
It would appear as well that the authors of The Pirate Life have been banned from Facebook on grounds they are not real persons. Hmmmm . . .
Huffington Post is reporting that charges against internationally renowned Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates, have been dropped. Gates was arrested after forcing the door of his own home in order to enter upon returning from an overseas trip, in a scenario that has every appearance of racial profiling. I’m sure the city of Cambridge would like to make the story go away.
I’ve beeen reading reactions to the murder of Dr. George Tiller. Reports that characterize Dr. Tiller as an “abortion doc” are bad enough. At last count, Politico presented 460 comments to its lead story posted by citizens who applaud Dr. Tiller’s death, or not; and they are mostly worse. I like New York governor David Paterson’s statement the best among those I have seen from Public figures.
Dr. Tiller was targeted for his belief in the right of women to make their own health decisions. He protected that right and sought to ensure that his patients were provided with the medical, emotional and spiritual counsel they needed to make the right choice for themselves and their families. He continued this work despite the threat of harmful retaliation, physical attacks and the destruction of his clinic.
I’m also distressed tonight that someone I know was severely beaten last Friday outside a gay bar here in St. Louis as he took a breather from a birthday party he was attending there. The events are similar and also radically different. And it’s ironic that my friend’s beating qualifies as a hate crime, but the murder of Dr. Tiller doesn’t.