Patiently standing guard in front of City Hall, and a short block north of County Hall, are four very large marble lions. Since their arrival in 1907, they’ve been majestically perched ground zero in the heart of the city, with a towering view in all directions.
Well, I say for nearly a hundred years, our lackadaisical lions have done little more than lounge around. It’s high time we put them to work.
Before Buffalo as a city became stupid, we used to be smart. After the turn of the century, our lions proudly watched as Buffalo became the eighth largest city in the U.S., able to tout a rich legacy of visionary foresight. They saw a city that was a mesmerizing magnet that attracted the very best and the brightest. Olmsted, Richardson, Wright, Sullivan and hundreds of luminaries in practically every field flocked here to do business.
Now, a hundred years, and several thousand bad decisions later, Buffalo is a mere shell of its former glory. Through a century of myopic leadership, we lost our vision and systematically discarded and destroyed the riches it helped create.
Fortunately, hope is beginning to raise its head above the ashes.
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by Keith Olbermann – MSNBC
Bush has been ‘making it up’ for too long, and the people have let him
We are, as every generation, inseparable from our own time.Thus is our perspective, inevitably that of the explorer looking into the wrong end of the telescope.
But even accounting for our myopia, it’s hard to imagine there have been many elections more important than this one, certainly not in non-presidential years.
And so we look at the verdict in the trial of Saddam Hussein yesterday, and, with the very phrase “October, or November, Surprise” now a part of our vernacular, and the chest-thumping coming from so many of the Republican campaigners today, each of us must wonder about the convenience of the timing of his conviction and sentencing.But let us give history and coincidence the benefit of the doubt—let’s say it’s just “happened” that way—and for a moment not look into the wrong end of the telescope. Let’s perceive instead the bigger picture:Saddam Hussein, found guilty in an Iraqi court.Who can argue against that?He is officially, what the world always knew he was: a war criminal.
Mr. Bush, was this imprimatur, worth the cost of 2,832 American lives, and thousands more American lives yet to be lost?Is the conviction of Saddam Hussein the reason you went to war in Iraq? Or did you go to war in Iraq because of the weapons of mass destruction that did not exist? Or did you go to war in Iraq because of the connection between Iraq and al-Qaida that did not exist? Or did you go to war in Iraq to break the bonds of tyranny there, while installing the mechanisms of tyranny here? Or did you go to war in Iraq because you felt the need to wreak vengeance against somebody, anybody? Or did you go to war in Iraq to contain a rogue state which, months earlier, your own administration had declared had been fully contained by sanctions? Or did you go to war inIraq to keep gas prices down?
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