“When you do writing practice, sometimes you get high, feel happy and whole for the rest of the day, and you don’t know why. It is because you contacted first thoughts before they become fettered with second and third thoughts. You stayed with the real grit of your mind.”

— Natalie Goldberg

 

I’m sitting here reflecting the stars and stripes waving in the warm breeze that Jeanne remembers to place on the front porch. She might be more patriotic than I am.

In fifth grade, I was elected as the vice president while Tom Zitnak was president. In sixth grade, with some coaching from my sister, I spoke the words that helped me defeat Judy Hoeper with “Ask not what Banfield can do for you but what you can do for Banfield.”

It was interesting to see Lori Sturdevant’s column telling us “Decades spent studying Congress in Washington must have finally drained Norm Ornstein of his native Minnesota optimism. Ornstein — who has written with his scholarly sidekick Thomas Mann “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” — still holds to a thoroughly Minnesota notion: If more people voted and helped choose candidates, this state and nation would be better governed.

There is a changing population in Austin and no doubt there are minorities wanting to vote. I would prefer to see another word to describe “newcomers” to the community.

“What’s happened, as in some many states, is you’ve got Republicans in control of the machinery, who talk all the time about how government should be doing less, stepping in with the pretext of guarding against voter fraud, which is farcical on its face. There is zero evidence of not just massive voter fraud, but of anything beyond an occasional example of some individual who shows up at the wrong precinct. … It’s a pretext to try to narrow voter participation.”

And then there is Mitt Romney.

Denise Johnson tells us: Too often we’ve watched political standoffs delay or kill good legislation because making the other side fail was the primary goal. Somewhere in the fight to win, the facts and common good get lost.