Good Sunday Morning to you all. We have sunshine again but we got enough rain that I don't think I will have to water the large containers. But the gardens are definitely winding down. I don't have a lot to do except harvest and dry some of the herbs.

I agree with you, Kay. Mercy over 'justice' any day. Most of us should hope for that. I put that in quotes because what justice is depends very much on who defines it, who is administering it and who is receiving it.

This article on HuffingtonPost should really not be a surprise. And in the middle of a nasty mid-term election, I would be very surprised if it did not become fodder for both sides. How could the poverty rate not go up when people are losing their jobs (and it takes so much longer to find new ones) and losing their homes (the major concentration of 'wealth' for the middle class)? I expect it will get worse as states and cities (who cannot run deficits) cut expenses any way they can. As I said both the Republicans and the Democrats will try to spin this to their advantage. The Republicans will say that the Democrats have been in power for the last two years and have had their chance ignoring the fact that their policies for the previous eight years laid the foundation for this recession. The Democrats will point that out while ignoring the fact that many of them supported the Republican policies and there is no fundamental difference between their philosophies. So what, you ask, tips me toward the Democrats? Mercy--with which the Democrats seem to be more aligned.

Here is another case where 'justice' not only violates any notion of mercy but, I think, any reasonable definition of justice itself--to the detriment of the powerless. Normally, I would agree that when one goes into debt one should have to pay the debt. However, with the chicanery that has become so much a part of the mortgage business (and every other part of the 'debt business), I have to wonder where the justice would really lie. The too-big-to-fail financial institutions had better hope that they will be judged mercifully rather than justly.