Bay and city photo

Well, it's Friday and it looks like we may actually get some rain today.  It's raining and the skies are gray, with a stiff wind adding to the reasons to stay inside and perhaps do some binge watching.  To cheer things up, here is a photo I took last Saturday (Jan. 31) while taking a walk along the San Francisco Bay, shot from Alameda looking west across the bay to the City, which is several miles away.  I sure do love living where I live.  (Be sure to click on the photo to enlarge to full effect.)

Some nice Obama moments

After six years of enduring relentless attacks and inexcusable sabotage against the President, I'll admit I was tired and worn.  It seemed like it was getting harder and harder to muster up joy and hope over him and his presidency.  Then today I ran across this slideshow [you'll need to scroll to the bottom of the page to "Most Iconic Photoes ..."] and I could not help but smile and feel pride, remembering that I had never expected to live long enough to see a black man elected as President.  Just think what our lives would be like if he would have had a Democratic Congress.

An inheritance tax is moral

I just finished reading a really interesting and informative article by Michael Tomasky, one of my favorite writer/thinkers.  The subject?  Is the inheritance tax moral or immoral?  Wealthy conservatives claim the latter while Tomasky proves that the former is true.  I recommend reading the whole thing, but if you don't have time at least consider the following excerpt:

The conservative position here is not only immoral. It’s un-American, and explicitly so. Our Founding Fathers, as a group, loved inheritance taxes. Loved them. And it stands to reason—they were founding a nation that would throw off the old weights and chains of Europe. Those weight and chains very much included laws of primogeniture and inheritance that resulted in all those layabout royals and their massive estates. America, they vowed, would not be like that. Social position would be earned, not inherited.And so no less a figure than TJ himself led the fight in the Virginia legislature in 1777 to abolish primogeniture laws. Jefferson even went so far as to wonder whether all rights of inheritance should be abolished and most property basically reshuffled every 50 years. We didn’t do that of course, but every revolutionary state government followed Virginia’s lead.So the conservative position is immoral and un-American. It’s also un-conservative. I say this because well, on matters economic, who is the conservatives’ great hero? Maybe Hayek. But he’s like the Lebron. The Jordan is still Adam Smith. And Adam Smith believed in taxing huge wealth. He wrote this: “A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fullness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural. There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death.”

 Verrrrrrry interesting, no?

Andrew Sullivan - His blog will be missed

Today I learned that Andrew Sullivan will not be blogging any longer.  This after 15 years at the helm.  Andrew has always billed himself as a "true" conservative, which alone has put him at odds with the right wing greed-heads who try to pass themselves off as conservatives.  Of course Andrew being an out, and fiercely proud, gay man also set him apart.  But underneath all the convenient labels that get tossed around, Andrew is in a way a closet liberal.  Anyway, I will miss his blog.  You can read his farewell post right here. It's quite moving.

Rich Jerks

In today's SF Chronicle there is a front page article presenting a theory by which wealth is correlated to just how big of a jerk a person is likely to be.  A sentence from the article:  "Rich people are more likely to behave unethically even if they get very little benefit."  Why am I not surprised!  Anyway, it is a very interesting article and you can read it right here.

Toles nails it...

The sad truth about the President's state of the union speech.

Madeleine Peyroux makes me smile

I have always loved the tune "Smile," which was composed by Charlie Chaplin with Geoff Parsons and John Turner.  I hadn't heard it for a while, but a couple of days ago I heard a really sweet version of it sung by Madeleine Peyroux.  Yes, there is a high-quality version of it on YouTube, which you can listen to right here.

By my reckoning this should brighten up your day.  Nice, isn't it.