Rob Lowe, transitions, broken heart, Love Life: I should never sit down with my computer when I am in a funk …
When was the last time my heart was breaking?
The death of my mother was one time, but her passing was prolonged enough to let me prepare for it, to the extent anyone can. At the most intense moment, sitting at her gravesite, I felt like I could hear every leaf blower in a 50-mile radius, felt as if I could feel the sun’s rays turning my skin darker shades with each second, my skin irritated and jumpy, making me want to crawl out of it. I’m feeling it all now again, but no one has died.
When I was a boy, I had to leave my friends in the summer, just as Malibu was becoming Malibu, say goodbye to my first girlfriend and go to Ohio to stay with my dad. There is a little of that sense memory at play too, a feeling that I’m about to be left out of important events, separated from life as I know it, the world as I love it.
I am remembering and feeling the details of my parents’ divorce and our family’s forced march out of my home to an alien world across the country. The goodbyes to my father and my beloved grandparents; rationally I knew I would see them all again, but now I have the same body-deadening weight of the condemned, counting the minutes until the final moments of a life that’s all I’ve ever known. This encompassing, exhausting sadness I had mostly forgotten, or buried, until now.
via Rob Lowe on sending his son off to college: An excerpt from Love Life..
Atlanta Braves, Cobb County: And why do I care … I never go. I just don’t like change.
The Atlanta Braves and Cobb County have substantially completed negotiations on five major agreements that are necessary before construction begins on the new Cumberland-area ballpark.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution received hundreds of pages of the draft documents Wednesday under the Georgia Open Records Act.
In interviews with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution today, Cobb County Commission chairman Tim Lee and Braves executive vice president Mike Plant said the contract drafts released to the AJC are close to the final versions to be voted upon by Cobb commissioners on May 27.
“I don’t anticipate any substantial changes to any of those documents,” Lee said. That doesn’t preclude the possibility, he added, that small portions of the agreements might be reworked if something comes up “as our teams take a breath and step back and look at this.”
Said Plant: “Our teams are going to keep working for the next couple of weeks on tweaking a few of the things in there.”
One of the most important documents, the stadium development agreement, outlines the stadium project’s budget and taxpayers’ obligations toward funding construction.
The county and team have said consistently since announcing the Braves move in November that the stadium cost would be $672 million. But the current budget outlined in the stadium development agreement lists the “total project cost” at $622 million, with a “maximum stadium cost”of $672 million.
via Documents show Braves and Cobb close to final deal | www.ajc.com.
Monica Lewinsky, Clintons, global humiliation driven by the Internet, Washington Wire – WSJ: There was intentionality to get Clinton, but his actions were wrong. I feel sorry for Monica Lewinsky. The weight of a new era … digital media … came down on her: . “[T]hanks to the Drudge Report, I was also possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet.”
She adds: “I am determined to have a different ending to my story. I’ve decided, finally, to stick my head above the parapet so that I can take back my narrative and give a purpose to my past. (What this will cost me, I will soon find out.)”
In the piece, she says she had considered suicide in the wake of the scandal, but never attempted to kill herself. She writes of her mother’s fear that Ms. Lewinsky “would be literally humiliated to death.” In the Vanity Fair excerpts, she also mentions the role of the Drudge Report, which was first to break the scandal. “[T]hanks to the Drudge Report, I was also possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet.”
However cathartic all this is for Ms. Lewinsky, it’s hardly a welcome development for Mrs. Clinton.
via Monica Lewinsky Says Clintons Didn’t Pay Her to Stay Quiet – Washington Wire – WSJ.
Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights: I am sorry GOP, I do not understand your obsession with the second Amendment. I think gun rights (” the right of the people to keep and bear Arms”) are qualified by the Amendments introduction, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.”
Amendment II
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
And I think the GOP’s extreme right wing’s use/abuse of this JFK quote is interesting. JFK did not say we need armed citizens, but citizens who are not only prepared to take up arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as a basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom. We are given the right to bear arms collectively to protect our collective freedoms. But our individual right to bear arms is a privilege and should be restricted/regulated to the same extent we regulate other privileges such as driving an automobile.
This year, the celebrations of Roosevelt Day has special significance for Democrats everywhere; for we celebrate not only the triumphs of the past but the opportunities of the future.
Twenty-eight years ago Franklin Roosevelt assumed the leadership of a stricken and demoralized nation. Poverty, distress and economic stagnation blanketed the land. But it was not long before the great creative energies of the New Deal had lifted American from its despair and set us on the path to new heights of prosperity, power and greatness.
Today American is the richest nation in the history of the world. Our power and influence extend around the globe. Yet the challenges and dangers which confront us are even more awesome and difficult than those that face Roosevelt. And we too will need to summon all the energies of our people and the capacities of our leaders if America is to remain a great and free nations — if we are to master the opportunities of the New Frontier.
The dimensions of out problems overwhelm the imagination. At home millions are unemployed and the growth of our economy has come to a virtual halt. Abroad, we are faced with powerful and unrelenting pressure which threaten freedom in every corner of the globe, and with military power so formidable that it menaces the physical survival of our own nation.
To meet these problems will require the efforts not only of our leaders or of the Democratic Party–but the combined efforts of all of our people.; No one has a right to feel that, having entrusted the tasks of government to new leaders in Washington, he can continue to pursue his private comforts unconcerned with American’s challenges and dangers. For, if freedom is to survive and prosper, it will require the sacrifice, the effort and the thoughtful attention of every citizen.
In my own native state of Massachusetts, the battle for American freedom was begun by the thousands of farmers and tradesmen who made up the Minute Men — citizens who were ready to defend their liberty at a moment’s notice. Today we need a nation of minute men; citizens who are not only prepared to take up arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as a basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom. The cause of liberty, the cause of American, cannot succeed with any lesser effort.
It is this effort and concern which makes up the New Frontier. And it is this effort and concern which will determine the success or failure not only with Administration, but of our nation itself.
via John F. Kennedy Quotations – John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum.
Dennard's Clipping Service 