Two Seeds on a Blog

Tom and Judy Turnipseed have created this blog together.Both will post. Tom's posts will be mostly about peace, politics and social justice. Judy's will be mostly random. When not blogging we work at Turnipseed & Associates law firm. www.turnipseed.net

Sunday, March 10, 2013

COUSINS OF A DIFFERENT KIND

Birmingham-Southern College students to march to downtown Birmingham in April to commemorate 1963 stand by BSC student

BIRMINGHAM , Alabama -- In 1963, a 19-year-old student named Martha "Marti" Turnipseed heard on the radio that seven African-American students were staging a sit-in at a Woolworth's department store lunch counter in downtown Birmingham .

Marti Turnipseed later married Charles Moore and changed her name to Marti Turnipseed Moore.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Dr. King Had Other Dreams

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

LESSONS FROM MY SON 4

Monday, February 27, 2012

LESSONS FROM MY SON 3

He tailgates at every USC home football game with his law school buddies. Because he played soccer as a child and teen, he also follows college and pro soccer and watches it relentlessly on TV while all those around him are bored to death and clueless about what is happening. He tivo-es every soccer, basketball and football game of his favorite teams and will not let anyone tell him the outcome until he has had the opportunity to watch them himself.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

OUR ALMOST TRIP TO EUROPE

Today, traveling the Glass Road

while we hiked to Hitler's Eagles Nest

We did recover some of our costs. On September 2nd, 14 days before the plane flew, we found a good friend who was willing to buy the trip and some of our euros. We gave him a good deal and he found a friend to go with him. She applied for a passport renewal and received it 4 days before the departure date. We lost the cost of the plane tickets to Munich (unless we want to go sometime this next year.) and they had to fly out a day early because so many flights were full by September 9th, the day they booked, it was the only one available. But they made it and promised to return with many pictures, as did the rest of our fellow travelers.

The group returns at the end of this week. I hope they bring me awesome I-feel-sorry-for-you presents. They all said they would, but I don't know how long before thoughts of those they left behind were crowded out by the new experiences they have been encountering.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Differential Diagnosis II

into my arm for 4 1/2 hours. It was boring; It was painful--maybe because potassium is thick and doesn't want to go into the vein (I am guessing here). Tom stayed by my side, holding my hand almost the whole time, alert and sympathetic to my pain. When he could bear to see me suffer no more and had to take a break,he would slip out for a beer at the local bar. He could bear it no longer a lot. He had to take a break a lot . He drank some beer a lot. He did stay alert by my side a lot during that long 4 1/2 hours, and he did drive me home at 12:30 that night.

I have had no recurrence of thunderbolts.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Founding Fathers had many flaws

Tuesday's Letters to the Editors

Tuesday, Sept., 13, 2011

Worshippers of the Founding Fathers would return us to the “good-ol’ days” of 1787, when most African-Americans were slaves, many poor whites were indentured servants and women couldn’t vote. At the time the founders wrote the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Native Americans were being slaughtered for their land, and Mexicans indigenous to parts of what became the United States were included in the genocide. No women, Jews, Muslims, poor people or non-land owners were numbered amongst the founders, who were rich white men.

Conservatives seek simple solutions to poverty, violence and war that make rich folks richer while poor people suffer and weapons makers and war profiteers make big bucks while killing and injuring innumerable innocent people.

The problems are caused by big-moneyed interests with the help of simple-minded sycophants wearing colonial-styled clothes and holding signs with right-wing slogans.

They look backward, believing the mythologized Founding Fathers are more intelligent and moral than anyone today except a Rick Perry or Michelle Bachman.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

The cost of 9/11

These wars have cost more than 6,000 American lives. Hardly ever counted is the so-called “collateral damage.” By some counts, more than a million Iraqis have died directly or indirectly because of our war, most of them children. Hardly ever mentioned are the more than 600,000 American troops who have been treated so far in veterans’ medical facilities, many of whom will be physically and psychologically disabled for the rest of their lives. Hardly ever mentioned is the tremendous number of divorces and family breakups and veteran suicides, which have topped 18 per day in recent years.

These wars have been costly financially. When Noble Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimated the wars’ costs three years ago, his conservative tally was $3 trillion to $5 trillion. That doesn’t include future borrowing for war expenses, interest on the debt or the cost of replacing military equipment. Neither does it include the long-term disability and health-care costs of veterans, which Stiglitz projects will run $600 billion to $900 billion. We will be paying for these wars for a long time.

These wars have been costly to our national priorities. The tea party has tried to convince us that the reason for the deficit is that school teachers, policemen, firemen and other public workers are making too much. They conveniently forget the cost of these two wars over the past 10 years — the first wars in history paid for entirely on credit. In every other war, we raised taxes to help pay for it. President Bush inherited a budget surplus, which he erased with a tax cut mainly for the rich. Then, incredibly, when he declared war and with deficits already soaring from his first tax cut, he plunged ahead with yet another round of tax “relief” for the wealthy. You don’t have to be an economist or a mathematician to know that if you increase spending and cut revenue, you create a deficit. Let us be clear: Conservatives are now using the deficit they created to excuse their shredding of the social safety net and their slashing of programs to protect and empower our most vulnerable citizens.

These wars have been costly to our national soul. We have squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership in the world and sullied our global reputation. We have forsaken our precious civil liberties and violated our constitutional rights, authorizing the government to spy on its own citizens, wiretapping their phones and intercepting their emails without a warrant. We have rounded up thousands of civilians and sent them to prisons beyond the reach of the law, where they have been held indefinitely without formal charges, without legal counsel and without trial, and where they have been tortured. We have poisoned our national discourse with intolerance and fear and paralyzed our political process with distrust and acrimony.

We finally killed Osama bin Laden. But if his intent was to undermine the American economy and America’s moral authority, then he may have won.