Ward on Words

Walmart is getting into the death market. As in caskets and urns used for cremains. When planning a funeral, I suppose it's good to know that there are bargains to be had... Here's a link to the AP story , if you want more details. It's got a great lead: "The world's largest retailer wants to keep its customers even after they die."

…Cannot stand. Thus spoke Abraham Lincoln in an address to Illinois Republicans that he gave in 1858, two years prior to his assumption to the presidency. In his mind, the nation could no longer live half-slave, half-free. Shortly after Lincoln became president, the Civil War began, a terrible and bloody war waged to determine whether we’d live all slave or all free. We know the outcome of that war. Slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. Today, this American house is again extremely divided... between the over-leveraged and the over-compensated. On the one hand, much of our house exists in chaos. Highest unemployment in decades (a rate that doesn't even include those who've given up the search for a job.) Hundreds of thousands of jobs lost each month. Consumer side of the financial system in a shambles. Still loaded with toxic assets. Still crumbling from the weight of consumer loans that consumers can no longer afford. Because as we’ve seen this y...

Richard J. Daley, the father, was known as "the kingmaker." As mayor and as head of Cook County Democratic Central Committee, he controlled the votes of one of the largest block of Democratic votes. Thus, back in the old days, when powerful Kennedys were plentiful, all Democrats seeking the highest political office in the land came to see Chicago's mayor, Richard J. Daley, the man from Bridgeport, hizzoner, the boss. The men who would be president would come to see to see this man who rose to prominence from very humble beginnings. Richard M. Daley, the son, is not a kingmaker. There's no one in America who thinks Daley is the reason Obama was elected president last year. The vast blocks of city voters have been chopped up, segmented into smaller chunks, often powered-up by single issues like abortion. In the third largest city in America, Daley is instead the king, ruling virtually unopposed in all areas. He came to power after a turbulent decade of non-...

He came to the swamplands of the Potomac swathed in a cloud of scandal. He's been ignored since the day he arrived at his new job. And today, my senator, Roland Burris, has me humming a little Janis Joplin right now (lyrics by the talented Kris Kristofferson)... "Freedom's just another word, for nothing left to lose And nothing's all that [Roddy] left me, yah." Yes, Roland Burris rolled into Washington with a a whole lotta nothing in his back pocket. He'd been handed the senate seat by a man charged with trying to sell it, Rod Blagojevich, the Kipling-quoting ex-gov of Illinois – and allegedly a future "Celebrity Apprentice" contestant. (Can one be The Donald's apprentice from behind bars? Because the ex-gov's someday going to stand trial on corruption charges and sometimes such things end up with a jail term....) So Roland Burris came to DC as a lame duck senator, with just two years left in the term Obama left when he became ...

What a strange world we live in. Rare film footage of the young girl whose diary became one of the most moving pieces of Holocaust literature has gone "viral." I find myself undeniably moved by the fact that the brief glimpse we have of Anne Frank in motion was shot to memorialize the wedding of a neighbor. Love and life amid the gathering storm clouds. The world depicted in that video seems unbearably normal. And yet all hell was about to break loose. Some links: NY Times story on the clip The Anne Frank Museum (If you ever have a chance to climb the steep stairs up to the secret annex, it's an experience I highly recommend.) From Anne's diary: "Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart."