the week (and 2500 years) that was

9-4-09—President Obama’s plan to deliver a speech to public schools on Tuesday has set off a revolt among conservative parents, who have accused the president of trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas and are asking school officials to excuse the children from listening.—NYT A1
--Obama Advisers are Split on Size of Afghan Force—NYT A1
9-3-09—For FDR was a divider, not a uniter, and he unabashedly waged class war.—NYT A25
9-2-09—[A Senate report ] makes clear that one of the principal means by which Forest [Laboratories] hoped to persuade psychiatrists, primary care doctors and other medical specialists to prescribe [their drug] Lexapro was to put money into doctors’ pockets and food into their mouths. NYT B1
--...health care is not an individual commodity to be bought and enjoyed like other products. That the health of each of us depends on the health of the rest of us, as epidemics from the Middle Ages to this year’s flu have demonstrated. ... You have to share [health care] with others in order to protect your own health. Yes, Democrats can prove that America pays more for health care than other countries; yes, they have won the dispute that private health insurance is needlessly expensive. But what they’ve lost is the argument that we are a society.—WSJ, Frank, A13
9-2-09—Abe Grady settled in Kentucky in the 1820s and married a freed slave. One of their grandchildren, Odessa Lee Grady Clay, give birth to [Muhammad] Ali—then Cassius Clay—in 1942 ... Ali’s wife, Yolanda, said her husband’s Irish blood might help explain his legendary ability to bludgeon his opponents with blarney as well as punches. –SBT A1
9-1-09—Decades from now, the crisis of 2008 might not be remembered as the last days of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, but as the moment the dollar lost its undisputed No. 1 ranking among world currencies. ---WSJ C1
9-1-09--Japan’s opposition party won an overwhelming victory at the polls on Sunday pledging to increase social welfare, better protect workers and do away with American-stle pro-market reforms to lead the country out of its long slump. NYT A1
8-31-09—As Banks repay bailout money, US sees profit. NYT A1
--Raft of deals for failed banks puts US on hook for billions. WSJ A1
--[Japan’s newly elected prime minister] has spoken of the end of American-dominated globalization and of the need to reorient Japan toward Asia.—NYT A1
--1996 (1975)—Again experience showed that expeditionary forces were severely troubled by consistent irregular or guerilla warfare, especially in rather remote mountainous areas where the foreigners lacked local support. The Russians struggled for decades against such resistance in the Caucasus, and the British gave up the attempt to control Afghanistan directly.. HOBSBAWM, THE AGE OF CAPITAL: 1848-1875, p 117.
~420 BCE--Few indeed have been the large armaments, either Hellenic or barbarian, that have gone far from home and been successful.”—Hermocrates of Syracuse [quoted by Thucydides]