"speak your mind, even if your voice shakes."
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." -- Dwight David Eisenhower, April 16, 1953.
this quiz takes foreeeeeeeeeever. but it's interesting. i, for the record, am tuesday, not friday. and i'll buy you something less expensive yet also thoughtful.
ben stein has some opinions on the tax system, our national debt, and fiscal prudence.
The final argument is the one I really love. People ask how I can be a conservative and still want higher taxes. It makes my head spin, and I guess it shows how old I am. But I thought that conservatives were supposed to like balanced budgets. I thought it was the conservative position to not leave heavy indebtedness to our grandchildren. I thought it was the conservative view that there should be some balance between income and outflow. When did this change?
Oh, now, now, now I recall. It changed when we figured that we could cut taxes and generate so much revenue that we would balance the budget. But isn’t that what doctors call magical thinking? Haven’t the facts proved that this theory, though charming and beguiling, was wrong?
THIS brings me back to Mr. Buffett. If, in fact, it’s all just a giveaway to the rich masquerading as a new way of stimulating the economy and balancing the budget, please, Mr. Bush, let’s rethink it. I don’t like paying $7 billion a week in interest on the debt. I don’t like the idea that Mr. Buffett pays a lot less in tax as a percentage of his income than my housekeeper does or than I do.
my ex's favorite movie was (and probably still is) _the magic christian_, which i never liked.
Just this: It's because Borat invites us to ridicule and belittle people for not realizing they are victims of a con.
It abuses people not only for their faults but for their trust and good will. It's like watching somebody get a chair pulled out from under them. The harder they hit the floor, the louder the laughter.
m. socks and that fine man she lives with are home from new zealand.
the server is currently back. it came back on when i turned it back on. i am looking to run diagnostics on it and see what's upset with me. but if you're looking for my server and it's not there, that's why.
for those of you who are wondering, my server is currently more rather than less dead. i am going to go see if i can get it to boot, but there's a good chance there's a new hard drive in my future. more updates as they happen.
twisty faster talks about dieting for "health" reasons, and its relation to feminism and the patriarchy. there isn't a quotable bit; please go read the whole damn thing.
Women are under attack. Femininity is a survival skill. Use it and delight, lose it and fight.
it's so true. we talked about this all the time in the cabal meetings. all the time! you should have seen the points that got suggested but voted down.
Now that the election is behind us, and the Democrats control one or possibly both houses of Congress, there's no reason not to admit it: the Right was right about us all along. Here is our 25-point manifesto for the new Congress.
wow.
GOP Must Go
On Nov. 7, the world will be watching as we go to the polls, seeking to ascertain whether the American people have the wisdom to try to correct a disastrous course. Posterity will note too if their collective decision is one that captured the attention of historians—that of a people voting, again and again, to endorse a leader taking a country in a catastrophic direction. The choice is in our hands.
oh, this is a great article, and i totally agree with this part of it. i have rheumatoid arthritis. i have permanent damage from it. it seems as unlikely that i'll be healed of the ra as the author here will be healed of his blindness. but tempering? what a great way to think about it. because i *am* well. and i am strong.
People who have disabilities or who are enduring an intractable illness are often faced with a different challenge, one that defies healing but which requires us to think about being well just the same. As a teacher with a disability who is increasingly researching the ways that culture influences our ideas about “ability” and “disability” I have come to prefer the old metallurgical term “tempering” to “healing” because it suggests that we are getting stronger without denoting a complete physical transformation.
the title of the quiz is meanspirited, but the quiz is kind of interesting.
Congratulations, you do not drink the Republican Kool-Aid. You haven't been brainwashed and are able to think for yourself rather than get your daily marching orders from the right-wing media. Mindless submission to our leader has no place in America. You, sir or ma'am, are a patriot.
Do You Drink Republican Kool-Aid?
i hate attack ads, you hate attack ads, everyone hates attack ads. so vote for the less poisonous set of attack ads. (okay, i really mean vote democrat! woo! but it's still true that by voting for the less awful set of ads you'll be doing that.)
Negative Democratic ads tie Republican candidates to President Bush, and to the Iraq war, or accuse them of being in the tank for the oil or pharmaceutical industries. But Democratic ads do not charge that their opponents 'prey on our children'—even though one recently resigned following accusations that he did precisely that. One can only imagine the ads Republicans would have made this year if Mark Foley had happened to be a Democrat.
In fact, the form, style, and content of the contemporary attack ad are a specifically conservative contribution to American politics. Republicans have developed most of the techniques, vocabulary, and symbolism at work in these spots over the last couple of decades. Some of the motifs go back to Nixon and Spiro Agnew, but you can trace most of the elements back to the presidential campaign Lee Atwater ran for George H.W. Bush in 1988, best remembered for the Willie Horton ad and the charge that Michael Dukakis was a 'card-carrying member of the ACLU.' What's different in this election is simply the ubiquity of the conservative calumny and, in some cases, the aggressiveness of the Democratic response. Spreading hatred and poisonous lies about one's opponent has become an ordinary and almost accepted part of running for office.
It shouldn't be. There may be no cure for dishonest attack advertising that isn't worse than the disease. But that doesn't mean that voters shouldn't be offended or that they should fail to react when politicians treat them as docile bigots. Republicans deserve to get walloped next week for this, if for nothing else.
