I knew this feeling of the change we can believe in was somehow familiar... :)

Today I've bumped across something on my music player's playlists, I don't know if this song was anything big in the US, but in Europe it was definitely not only a huge hit but a symbol of the time when it was written.

Each year at this time I re-read the Declaration of Indpendence to remind me how this great country came into being and the philosophies underlying our independence. It always also reminds me of just how radical this document is.

Each year I read The Declaration of Independence, to remind myself of how radical and revolutionary that document is.  Below, to me, are the operative sections (you can listen to my rendition of these excerpts here):

This is the third essay in a series: Condemned to Repeat It: Myths and Lessons of the 20th Century.  The previous essays addressed Die Dolchstoßlegende and the decisions that led to Stalingrad.  The series is based on George Santayana's axiom:

Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it.

December 7, 1941.

September 11, 2001.

I'm new here, and I've never written a blog before, so please bear with me, and don't take offense until I've finished. :)

One of the reasons I finally had enough and decided to out myself as a Clark-loving Dem has been the ongoing debate on the troop surge in our much-vaunted houses of Congress. Apart from getting ill over the notion that supporting our troops means letting them stay so more can die, I've heard a bunch of absolutely inaccurate renderings of the history of this country and the world.

There has been much discussion today about the Israeli response to Hezbollah's cross-border raid. I confess to believing that the people of Israel have the right to live free of terror AND that the peoples of Lebanon and the Palestinian refugees have the right to a life of dignity, free of the collective punishment that Israel has become so adept at handing out.

Read about the UN proposal to partition Palestine in 1947 and feel free to discuss.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_UN_Partition_Plan

"On 29 November 1947 the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine or United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, a plan to resolve the Arab-Jewish conflict in the British Mandate of Palestine, was approved by the United Nations General Assembly, at the UN World Headquarters in New York. The plan partitioned the territory of Western Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, with the Greater Jerusalem area, encompassing Bethlehem, coming under international control. The failure of the British government and the United Nations to implement this plan and its rejection by Palestinian Arabs resulted in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War."