The sharpest contrast isn't between Newark Mayor Cory Booker shoveling snow and New York Mayor Bloomberg pontificating or Govenor Christy heading for Disneyland, its between hard pressed state and local governments generally and a House that wants to take hostage Social Security and healthcare before it will vote to fund the government.
The contrast between concerns over death and taxes is pretty stark, and there are a lot of people right here in the US choosing right now between keeping the house warm enough that the pipes don't freeze and knowing where the next meal is coming from.
On New Years Day all the blackbirds fell out of the sky in Arkansas.
There was a time when that sort of augury or omen of the End of Days would have been pretty scary, the Rule of Heaven would have been seen as failing and kings and emperors would have paid the price.
We are coming into a period when the a new House full of rabid crazy people has bitten deeply into the necks of the Party of NO convincing them that its a sensible thing to hold hostage the government they are a part of, threaten to put themselves out of business, then tell us that our only choice to save them is at the very least to let them take away our social security, and healthcare.
We are to believe that either we let them yank the daily bread and beer which has always been our share of sustenance from our mouths, or tell them to go to hell.
For the corpocracy an end to government means an end to regulation. No more taxes no more rules. They can rape and polute the environment as they please, ship jobs overseas where labor is cheaper, forget about any sort of services, fairness or consequences; the current plight of Haiti is the very model of what works for them.
Some of us see somebody who needs help and we just go help cause its the right thing to do, but we have a limited attention span and there are a lot of problems that need to be solved out there.
With 75,000 deaths from Cholera following a disastrous flood that came straight through the earthquake refuge sites Haiti is still waiting for the promised US AID. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia... US aid agencies have discovered there aren't enough diapers to go around and some people are left just shoveling the shit.
Some of us see somebody who needs help and we change the channel, expect somebody else will take care of it, rationalize that we can't afford it or its cold outside, or there's a big game today or go to a podium and loudly proclaim that we are doing all we can and do nothing to help.