Garrison Keillor | Suddenly, Once Again, Good Lord, It's Christmas

25 December 19

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So This Is Christmas and What Have You Done?

Christmas Day, 1971 - 2019

Yoko Ono and John Lennon

(Happy Christmas Kyoko)
(Happy Christmas Julian)

So this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun
And so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

A very Merry Christmas
And a happy new year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong
And so happy Christmas
For black and for white
For yellow and red ones
Let's stop all the fight

A very Merry Christmas
And a happy new year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

And so this is Christmas
And what have we done
Another year over
A new one just begun
And so happy Christmas
We hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

A very Merry Christmas And a happy new year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear
War is over, if you want it
War is over now

Happy Xmas

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25 December 19

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Garrison Keillor | Suddenly, Once Again, Good Lord, It's Christmas

Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes: "Coming through airports this week it struck me how kind everyone was, ticket agents, TSA people, cab starters, and then light dawned: it's Christmas."
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A CCTV camera linked into the Baltimore Police CitiWatch program is shown at Gilmor Homes in West Baltimore in this file photo. (photo: Amy Davis/Baltimore Sun)

Baltimore Police Back Pilot Program for Surveillance Planes, Reviving Controversial Program
Justin Fenton and Talia Richman, The Baltimore Sun
Excerpt: "Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said Friday he now supports a pilot program to fly three private surveillance planes over the city."
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Christmas time. (photo: JGI/Jamie Grill/Getty Images)

Jessica Valenti | Having a Good Holiday Season? Thank a Woman!
Jessica Valenti, Medium
Excerpt: "Holiday cheer is almost exclusively manufactured by women, often at a cost to our own happiness."
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Jane Fonda. (photo: Marvin Joseph/WP)

Jane Fonda Arrested: We Are in a Climate Emergency. I Have No Choice but to Put My Body on the Line
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Last Friday, a day before Jane Fonda’s 82nd birthday, the two-time Academy Award-winning actress and longtime political activist was arrested for the fifth time, as she has been nearly every Friday in Washington, D.C., since she started Fire Drill Fridays in October."
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People stand in line at the entrance to the Space Mountain at Disneyland Paris in Marne-la-Vallee in August 2015. French workers, unlike Americans, have guaranteed time off. (photo: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images)

Why the US Is One of Only a Few Countries With No Paid Time Off
Brigid Schulte, Vox
Schulte writes: "If Araceli Torres worked anywhere in

EXCERPT:

The United States is one of just a handful of countries — others include India, Pakistan, Suriname, and Papua New Guinea — that have no national policy guaranteeing workers paid annual leave. (It’s also among the few with no federal laws guaranteeing paid parental leave or paid sick days.) Any benefit offered to workers, like paid time off, is entirely up to the discretion of private employers.

US employers who offer time off give about two weeks on average — which is on the low end globally for industrialized nations. Close to one in four workers in the United States have no time off at all. Most of them are low-wage, hourly, or service workers like Torres.

In New York, this could soon change. Torres and about 800 other members of the New York Nail Salon Workers Association are lobbying for a bill before the New York City Council that would be one of the first legal guarantees of paid time off in the United States. The bill, which has been pushed by local politician Jumaane D. Williams since 2014, would guarantee workers at establishments with more than five employees 10 days of paid time off every year “for any purpose,” including vacation.

Under the legislation, an estimated 800,000 workers, including part-time and domestic workers who historically have been excluded from labor legislation, would accrue one hour of paid time off accrued for every 30 worked, up to a maximum of 10 days per year.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has been aggressively promoting the bill since January 2019, as he sought to position himself as a champion of workers’ rights in his failed presidential bid. He calls paid vacation the “sensible next step” for workers now that the city has passed paid sick and safe leave legislation guaranteeing paid time off for workers to recover from an illness or domestic violence or abuse, and raised the minimum wage to $15.

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Saudi women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul in an undated handout picture. (photo: Marieke Wijntjes/Reuters)

Don’t Forget That Saudi Arabia Is Imprisoning and Torturing Women’s Rights Activist Loujain al-Hathloul
Mehdi Hasan, The Intercept
Hasan writes: "I do not know her and have never met her. Yet, for some reason, every time I see her photo — every single time — my heart breaks."
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A new interpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 2017 means that as of now, companies are no longer subject to prosecution or fines even after a disaster like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 that destroyed or injured about one million birds and for which BP paid $100 million in fines. (photo: Lee Celano/Reuters)

Trump’s Relaxed Environmental Rules Allow Industry to Kill Birds With Impunity
Trump’s Relaxed Environmental Rules Allow Industry to Kill Birds With Impunity
Lisa Friedman, The New York Times

EXCERPTS:

And when a homeowners’ association in Arizona complained that a developer had refused to safely remove nesting burrowing owls from a nearby lot, Fish and Wildlife said that, because of the new legal interpretation, it could not compel the developer to act.

“Of course, we just got sued over that interpretation, so we’ll see how it ends up,” the enforcement officer wrote.

The revised policy — part of the administration’s broader effort to encourage business activity — has been a particular favorite of President Trump’s, whose selective view of avian welfare has ranged from complaining that wind energy “kills all the birds” to asserting that the oil industry has been subject to “totalitarian tactics” under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.

If landowners destroy a barn knowing it is filled with baby owls, they would not be liable, as long as the intent was not to kill owls, the opinion said. The illegal spraying of a banned pesticide would not be a legal liability either as long as the birds were not the “intended target.”

The loss of the Hampton Roads nesting area will devastate some bird species because it was the last they had. Other sites in the Chesapeake Bay have been lost to sea level rise and erosion.

The loss of the Hampton Roads nesting area will devastate some bird species because it was the last they had. Other sites in the Chesapeake Bay have been lost to sea level rise and erosion.

In Albuquerque, N.M., Alan Edmonds, an animal cruelty case manager with New Mexico’s animal protection agency, pushed back after the Fish and Wildlife Service gave only a verbal warning to a company that had trapped and killed a Cooper’s hawk. The agency replied that, without proof that the company wanted to kill the hawk, “we can’t do anything.”
“We don’t lose them a billion at a time,” she said. “We lose them from small incidents happening repeatedly over the vast geography of our country.”

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