I love it when my country of origins' greats get the attention they deserve. Of course, Jose Saramago, the Nobel Laureate, is often enough mentioned, lately for all the wrong reasons. But outside of intellectual and literary circles who has ever heard of Pernando Pessoa, the poet with the madness and the 4 heteronyms plus who knows how many other poets inside him. Maureen Dowd, the New York Times commentator, whom I've at times criticized for some of her past follies, but unfailingly read, in today's review mentions him and I will take this opportunity to quote this most fascinating of poets:
The poet is a pretender
Who's so good at his act
He even pretends to be pain
The pain he feels in fact

I quote Paul Krugman:" Fox Business News is available in 49 million homes and has 21,000 viewers.That is all."

Observation: I'm driving along the idyllic roads of Ulster County apple orchard country where I now reside and looking in the fields, I see all but Blacks in the fields and ask myself. Where are these people and where do they live. Uncle John, the go to man on all things labor explains to me that what I'm seeing are Jamaican laborers, who are kept from view , get shipped in to pick the apples and shipped out at the end of the season. They live in the middle of the orchards, in trailers and I presume have all their needs met by the owners of said orchards. Will have to investigate.
Interesting dichotomy: Middletown, streets full of African American, mostly Puerto-Ricans and Hispanics, whites hiding out somewhere. New Paltz, that bastion of liberalism, all pretty white students and no people of color.

Ted Kennedy died. And so I assume will universal health care. Let Obama vacation on Martha's Vineyard, while the poor and the wretched continue to do what he was elected to help eliminate: Suffer...
Ah! the politics of the poor and the race politics in this country! where to begin?

Here is another interesting blog...Searching the Inner Me