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Blueberry Pie Day
Great Poetry Reading Day
Teach Children to Save Day
Workers’ Memorial Day
National Hairball Awareness Day
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by NONA BLYTH CLOUD
This week, my husband and I are celebrating our 34th wedding anniversary, so I’m just going to give you a brief introduction to one of my all- time favorite poets, then let you explore on your own. Please pay close attention, because his work is so simple you could miss his deeper meaning, yet it’s always honest and direct.
Ted Kooser (1939 – ) was born in Ames, Iowa on April 25, 1939. He received his BA from Iowa State and his MA in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A very long list of his awards and honors is down at the end of this profile, but it took awhile for critics and academics to catch on to his poetry, so most of the awards have come later in his life.
Kooser was the thirteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry chosen by the Librarian of Congress. He used his time as laureate to further the cause of poetry with American readers. Partnering with the Poetry Foundation, he began the “American Life in Poetry” program, which offers a free weekly poem to newspapers across the United States, aiming to raise the visibility of poetry.
There’s a cosmic clock ticking in Ted Kooser’s poems, not loudly, just always there. He’s so aware of what once was but now is gone, of what is now, and of each change of season.
Kooser is solidly connected to his place in the world, the American Midwest. He uses the words of its pragmatic, hard-working people, with an unembellished eloquence like Sandberg and Frost, but full of the whisper of prairie grasses in a rhythm all his own, that ticking cosmic clock. But no matter where you’re from, you’ll find people you know living in Kooser’s poems, and some very familiar places.
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The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.
On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.
So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.
Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.
You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in the weeds,
clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like
waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.
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International Girls in Information and
Telecommunication Technologies Day
Mantanzas Mule Day
Poem In Your Pocket Day
Prime Rib Day
Take Our Daughters and
Sons to Work Day
World Tapir Day
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American Red Cross Giving Day
National Audubon Day *
World Denim Day *
International Guide Dogs Day *
National Pretzel Day
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While the left concerns itself primarily with potential street violence, the student group promoters of an Ann Coulter campus speech at UC Berkeley were trying to score obtuse RWNJ points while violence-prone groups looked for a place to clash,
Apparently, the $20,000 speaking fees, among other funds, were coming from YAF and organized by Berkeley College Republicans, with ultimate bankrolling from the now usual suspects, the Koch Bros and the DeVos Family.
The two student groups have filed a lawsuit that would exhaust funds much like those bulk orders of books designed to improve the ratings, because that’s the Trumpian PR metric. The free speech market is also under Citizens United, an auction, but not for pro bono ideas.
The reality seems to feature incompetent negotiating with the university by the student group(s) in terms of scheduling confirmation plus some reasonable and unreasonable demands and counter-demands, including a demand that students who engage in violence be automatically expelled.
Aside from the historical absurdities comparing free speech rights from earlier eras and the inability to appreciate the desire to maintain order, Coulter and the students seem more interested in the potential confrontation and its PR flack than in any accommodation offered in terms of rescheduling.![ezgif.com-resize_281_29_1_[1]](https://flowersforsocrates.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ezgif-com-resize_281_29_1_1.gif?w=313&h=220)
Her antics helped forward the current state of manufactured tension that includes racial division including white nationalism and anti-immigrant xenophobia.
The speech rescheduling offer to either May 2 or some day in September were still on the table. There are also reasonable arguments that there would be for scheduling the speech on a Reading Day as an opportunity for even more students to attend, and that whether day or evening, public events are just that.
Coultergeist claimed she would go to Berkeley on Thursday 27 April and attempt to speak on Sproul Plaza, time to be determined. From Twitter, it seems that she could have had in attendance some of the same RWNJ thugs from the recent confrontations in Berkeley.
![C-XWuDNXoAEBVKc[1]](https://flowersforsocrates.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/c-xwudnxoaebvkc1.jpg?w=491&h=368)
one person’s “censorship” is another’s “credible threat”
www.dailycal.org/…
Her absence is not because of the university police’s concern about a repeat of the Milo Yiannopolos incident. She wanted to appear because it manipulates the image of “Free Speech” and reinforces stereotypes about colleges with the possibility of confrontations and violence. She won’t appear because she won’t get paid to speak about “immigration”, although she gets “press”, regardless.
She wasn’t being paid $20,000 to speak in the public space of Sproul Plaza, but rather for the offer of a rescheduled speaking engagement in a “safe” UC Berkeley venue.
The whole affair seems less about Coulter speaking on immigration than helping local agents provocateurs looking to rumble. And then there would be MSM coverage if stuff gets trashed and folks get injured. Grifters gotta grift.
Pseudo-events and alternative facts will continue as she plans to appear on Hannity’s program to claim “censorship” by UC Berkeley and also perhaps offset the continuing saga of sexual misconduct at Fox News.
Another conservative nonprofit, Young America’s Foundation, also establishes student chapters at numerous universities and sends bigoted scholars and lecturers including Ann Coulter, David Horowitz and Ted Nugent to speak at their campus events free of charge. Bankrolling these nonprofits are conservative mega-donors including Charles and David Koch and the DeVos family, who by funding the organizations enable hate speech at institutions of higher education.
The University of California, Berkeley was just slapped with a lawsuit over its mishandling of Ann Coulter’s scheduled lecture on campus.
Young America’s Foundation (YAF) and the Berkeley College Republicans (BCR) filed a suit in federal court suing the school for violating their rights to free speech, due process, and equal protection on Monday. The suit, which is available on YAF’s website, names several Berkeley administrators along with University of California President Janet Napolitano as defendants. www.washingtonexaminer.com/…
“UC Berkeley has been working to accommodate a mutually agreeable time for Ms. Coulter’s visit — which has not yet been scheduled — and remains committed to doing so. The campus seeks to ensure that all members of the Berkeley and larger community — including Ms. Coulter herself — remain safe during such an event.”
Citing safety concerns, administrators called off Coulter’s Thursday appearance, saying the university needed more time to find a “suitable venue.” UCPD said it had credible, specific intelligence of threats to Coulter, attendees and protesters that could lead to a repeat of violence that preempted former Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos’ February appearance.
DNA Day *
Hug a Plumber Day
International Marconi Day *
Malaria Awareness Day
Zucchini Bread Day
Red Hat Society Day *
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By ann summers
Oh darn, more influence accrues to Russia and the clients of a passel of Manafort clients because Trump’s plans to cut federal agencies serve his accumulation of personal profit and …oh wait … those parties that helped him in 2016 and earlier. Remember those pesky coincidences of GOP RNC platform changes and meetings with #TrumpRussia players.
As if Trump cared about the Bannonist cynicism that could transform the US into a Russian client state. Influence in countries will swing eastward as the US ignores the diplomatic effects of foreign aid and surrenders the advantages to other countries.
Because President Bannon believes in NIMBY-nationalism, and because America Trump First, everybody who’s in the 1% gets paid.
Rex “don’t look at me” Tillerson hangs on amidst #TrumpRussia because “the wife” told him to and because of that $500B Exxon/Mobil payday with Russian energy interests, because sanction-lifting vampire squid pro quo.
In the case of Ukraine, it includes war profiteering and the benefits shared by Manafort cronies, among others who might make the Russian attempts to reinstate Ukraine as a client state that surrendered Crimean territory to Russian annexation.
April 24th is
Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day *
International Sauvignon Blanc Day
Library of Congress Day *
Pigs in a Blanket Day
World Meningitis Day
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Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
wordcloud9
Flowers For Socrates 