So Rudy Giuliani is floating the idea that Dick Cheney would be his Vice President.
Either he is completely insane, or he figures that Cheney is the only person constitutionally able to serve as VP who won’t appear to be more personable.
After this picture was taken, they both butchered and roasted the girl. Tim Russert thought that it made both of them look “presidential”.
So, Captain Oblivious is saying that the markets are ‘Strong and Solid’, and that it’s time to look at cut taxes some more.
Cutting taxes? With the dollar tanking because of out deficit?
I swear, if this man had hemorrhoids, he would think them a reason to cut taxes.
H/t to GNB.
Yes, that is John McCain calling for 100 years in Iraq, and yes, that is Joseph Lieberman on stage with him, and yes, they are both batsh$# insane, and yes, he’s toast.
Most Republicans want out, and the number is overwhelming in New Hampshire, particularly when you consider the independents who might vote for him.
He is toast.
I occasionally look at a bbs that a lot of my friends frequent, and I just found this post on Unschoolers, a variant of home schooling. The misspellings are in red:
As I stated I myself went to public school. The only knowladge I feel i retained was a bit of poetry and how not to get the snot beat out of me by the three mean bullies.
When my first two childern were in school, i started seeing some of the same things in them. one was a slow prcessor(by this I dont mean slow witted, I mean he could not get the work compleated on time so the grades were low because he needed longer. They tested him , his work was perfect but he needed twice as long to do it. He is quiet so it wasnt talking or other distractions.Just a differant form of process. If i didnt have the same issue I might not have picked up on it.), the other a bully of sorts(miss popularity) . I felt I needed to rescue them from such “hell”.
Now they are so wounderfull. they both read well. Fell good about who they are. There arent better kids anywhere. My younger childern are learning, all are at differant levels. but it is all natural. They want it ,cant get enough. They are driven by the things they want for them selves. the things they want to do. No my 8 year old does not read at his expected “level”. but all the seasoned unschoolers tell me that it will come. it is comeing.
My responsability as mom is to always be aware.if there is a problem fix it. (We have not had any yet) and to provide all the materials, encourage and support.
My elder son is into woodworking.This requires math, reading and fallowing a blueprint at this point. He is learning by doing. He is working through an aprintaceship. His passions also include birds.I cant tell you how many books he has read on this matter. He knows what steps he will have to take to get his falconers licence.”All this on his own”My eldest daughter is into sewing,nitting,and weaving. I cant help her directly here. I want to learn myself.We are looking for someone to teach us. We are trying to muddle our way through books on the matters. She has a dream to open a resturaunt. She is 11-12 tomarrow! She is a real good cook, and cooking for a family of 11 is giveing her lots of practice. (They are responsable for meals twice a week. No help from me.)We are working on shopping, and buddgeting. but her mine goal is to run her home when she has her own family. I want to give her everything I can to prpair her for that goal.
So to sum it all up “unschooling” in learning through life liveing.Much Of what Ive learned i didnt learn untill I was teaching my childern.
Hmmmm…who is teaching them spelling? Is anyone teaching them anything.
This is what happens when you take your eye off the ball, and go after someone who was a threat to no one but his own citizens.
KABUL, Afghanistan – The United States supports reconciliation talks with Taliban fighters
Would you like your capitulation with, or without mandatory Burkhas?
Yep, the RIAA is at it again.
This time, they are claiming that copying from a CD to your computer is a copyright violation, so if you want to mix on your iPod, you are SOL:
Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.
The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.
In the New York times book section, Robert Dallek* has a tremendously lame review of Elizabeth Bumiller’s book, Condoleezza Rice: An American Life, which also appears to be tremendously lame, at least based on the following excerpt:
Ms. Bumiller says that if President Bush and Ms. Rice can produce a settlement in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians and an end to North Korea’s nuclear program, it would give them claims on success that would significantly improve their historical reputations.
The classic rejoinder is the Yiddish, “Az der bubbe vot gehat baytzim vot zie geven mein zayde.” (If my grandmother had balls she’d be my grandfather.)
Mr. Dallek however appears to take this meaningless exercise as some sort of depth:
What distinguishes Ms. Bumiller’s book from other initial studies of the Bush administration and its principal actors is its absence of finger pointing or polemics. Ms. Bumiller’s biography is scrupulously fair and most notable for its above-the-battle tone. In Ms. Bumiller’s rendering Ms. Rice is neither hero nor villain but an ambitious woman whose achievements and shortcomings speak for themselves.
So Bumiller’s book is nothing. An active aggressive nothing. The sort of nothing that makes the TV show Seinfeld feel like it was about something.
No analysis, no thought, just stenography.
His further quote of Bumiller is instructive:
“It was obvious from Rice’s many metamorphoses that her real ideology was not idealism or realism or defending the citadels of freedom, although she displayed elements of all of them,” Ms. Bumiller writes. “Her real ideology was succeeding.”
If this means that she thinks that Condi Rice is primarily interested in advancing Condi Rice, then it’s an interesting point far too obliquely made, and if If she means that Condi cares about getting things right, I don’t think so, or as a commenter on another blog says:
Wow. Doesn’t tripe that insipid belong on the op-ed page under a David Brooks byline? I recognize that book reviews aren’t exactly news reporting, but this is ridiculous.
Robert Johnston | 12.27.07 – 9:04 pm | #
Condoleeza Rice has been egregiously and adamantly wrong about everything, but she has continued to fail upward.
*The doctor is right. Never trust a Dallek.
In his blog post, Memories of 2003, the great Paul Krugman notes:
Back in 2003 all the Kewl Kids, as a lot of my friends call them,
FWIW, I call them “very serious people”.
thought that to suggest that Bush was misleading us into war was, you know, shrill — it marked you as not being a Serious Person.
And here’s the thing: they still do. Even now, it’s better for your reputation not to have noticed until, say, 2005 that we had some dangerous people running the country. If you noticed earlier — or, worse yet, you caught on to the administration’s essential mendacity right from the beginning — it’s not a sign that maybe you had good judgment. It shows that you were an irrational Bush hater.
This is kind of like the term “Prematurely anti-fascist” that was big in the 1950s.
How can one be prematurely anti-fascist??? That’s kind of like being prematurely anti-baby eating.
It was a way of dismissing people’s ideas without any serious review.
It’s why the Democratic party should extricate from groups of “very serious people” like the Council on Foreign Relations.
Mr. Pogue is wringing his hands about how those meddling kids today don’t respect IP.
He relates how he wrote an article about PyMusic, a piece of software that strips the DRM out of iMusic downloads, and how he received a sh#@ when he said, “To me, it’s obvious that PyMusique is designed to facilitate illegal song-swapping online, nd therefore, it’s wrong to use it.”
He gets a bunch of nasty emails from readers (one of those things, it seems that upsets NY Times and WaPo writers) explaining how there are a myriad of legitimate uses for this, such as backup, using some other sort of MP3 player, etc.
So, he claims to get it, and recently he went before a young audience, and gave a number of examples, and asked if they were wrong.
The final one, and the one that shocked him, was when he only got 1 or 2 hands for, “You want a movie or an album. You don’t want to pay for it. So you download it,” and he gets 2 hands out of 500.
He’s shocked, but he is shocked because people understand the issue, Patent and Copyright Law is at its Core Public Interest Law.
IP meaning intellectual product, not intellectual property, is not and was never intended to be property as we understand it.
Congress under Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the constitution, has the power to, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
This is not property. After all, when I say, “Take my wife….please,” Henny Youngman still has the joke.*
IP is an infringement on a very natural state of creativity. Patents and copyright are not much more than 300 years old, but we have the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Gilgamesh, the Bible, the Christian Scriptures, and some really kick ass cave paintings, among thousands of other items.
These young students have looked at the world around them, and determined, for example, that record distributors steal from the artists and give them no money, so that their money does not “Promote … the useful arts”.†
David Pogue does not understand the underlying principles of the current IP regime, and these wet-behind-the-ears kids in his audience do.
*Of course his being dead for decades makes his being able to tell it academic.
†Of course looking at modern pop music, there is a question as to whether any of the stuff in the top 40 rotation qualifies as, “useful arts”, but that is a metaphysical question, not a legal one.
I understand his politics of hope. I understand how he thinks that this is the best way to go. I also understand how this is a central tenet of his campaign.
Still, in looking at his speech intended to close the deal in Iowa, it’s clear that he’s jumped the shark:
It’s change that won’t just come from more anger at Washington or turning up the heat on Republicans….
OK, I differ, but it’s consistent with his message.
Then, unfortunately, he goes on with his examples of how hope has won.
But I also know this. I know that hope has been the guiding force behind the most improbable changes this country has ever made. In the face of tyranny, it’s what led a band of colonists to rise up against an Empire.
Let’s run the numbers: 25,000 American casualties, 8000 in battle, 17,000 from disease including about 8000 who died as prisoners of war, and a slightly smaller number of British casualties. This isn’t hope, this is Bismark’s, “Blood and Iron”, at a cost of somewhere north of 1% of the population of the 13 colonies.
No one bowed before hope.
In the face of slavery, it’s what fueled the resistance of the slave and the abolitionist, and what allowed a President to chart a treacherous course to ensure that the nation would not continue half slave and half free.
In justification of what the slave owners considered their property, we have 110,000 Americans killed in action, with 360,000 total dead in US service, and 93,000 Confederate KIAs and 258,000 dead in CSA service, a number amounting to about 1 in 30 people living in the United States.
This was a battle against selfishness, and the costs were enormous, not a battle over “hope”.
In the face of war and Depression, it’s what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation.
World War II, huh? We have 73 Million dead.
Again, about 3% of the world population.
In the face of oppression, it’s what led young men and women to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through the streets of Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause.
Which ignores the bombings of school girls, tens of thousands of lynchings in Jim Crow land, resulting an ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Black Americans from the South to the North.
That’s the power of hope – to imagine, and then work for, what had seemed impossible before.
The people were not swayed by a desire for change and hope, they were forced kicking and screaming, and the sons of Jim Crow, in their heart of hearts still believe, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever“. Trust me, I’m white, and I’ve lived in the south, and I heard the “white to white” discussions during things like the OJ trial and following Katerina.
They believe it to this day, and they vote consistently Republican.
I understand the need to show “The Audacity of Hope“. It’s what you think will resonate, and you really believe it, but I’d be hard pressed to find one more counter factual example than all four that have been given here.
In his speach, he has not only rode his motorcycle over a tankful of selachians, but he has done so wearing a tutu and fairy wings.
He has left the realm of Matthew Yglesias’s Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics*, and gone straight to something I am calling the Tinkerbell Theory of Everything, wherein the noble tinkerbell (typically played by a follow spotlight) is saved by all the children in the audience clapping just as hard as they can.
If there is a problem with the Neocons, and other descendants of the Trotskyite intellectual tradition, it is the consistent denial of reality in order to confirm their theories, but Barack Obama makes them look like hard eyed realists.
H/t to Chris Bowers for the initial catch on the speach.
*To quote the other Matthew:
The ring is a bit goofy. Basically, it lets its bearer generate streams of green energy that can take on all kinds of shapes. The important point is that, when fully charged what the ring can do is limited only by the stipulation that it create green stuff and by the user’s combination of will and imagination. Consequently, the main criterion for becoming a Green Lantern is that you need to be a person capable of “overcoming fear” which allows you to unleash the ring’s full capacities. It used to be the case that the rings wouldn’t function against yellow objects, but this is now understood to be a consequence of the “Parallax fear anomaly” which, along with all the ring’s other limits, can be overcome with sufficient willpower.
Suffice it to say that I think all this makes an okay premise for a comic book. But a lot of people seem to think that American military might is like one of these power rings. They seem to think that, roughly speaking, we can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient military force. The only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower.
What’s more, this theory can’t be empirically demonstrated to be wrong. Things that you or I might take as demonstrating the limited utility of military power to accomplish certain kinds of things are, instead, taken as evidence of lack of will. Thus we see that problems in Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t reasons to avoid new military ventures, but reasons why we must embark upon them: “Add a failure in Iran to a failure in Iraq to a failure in Afghanistan, and we could supercharge Islamic radicalism in a way never before seen. The widespread and lethal impression of American weakness under the Clinton administration, which did so much to energize bin Ladenism in the 1990s, could look like the glory years of American power compared to what the Bush administration may leave in its wake.“
Oh my, Sally Quinn is shocked.
It appears that the House of Representatives has passed a resolution (H.R. 847) declaring that “Expresses continued support for Christians in the United States . . . acknowledges and supports the role played by Christians and Christianity in the founding of the United States . . . rejects bigotry and persecution directed against Christians, both in the United States and worldwide; and expresses its deepest respect to American Christians.”
She expresses concern that, “Earlier this year the House also passed resolutions honoring Islamic and Indian holidays but nothing that so equated a single faith with America and Americans”.
Gee, I wonder who might have created this.
I don’t know, maybe those people who valued pleasant DC cocktail party conversation over real discussions of issues and real values.
Maybe those who favored phony protestations of faith as a good way to “play the game” of politics”, because, of course, inside the Beltway, where all the important people live, policies don’t matter.
Whether you are a Washington Post editor (or just married to one), a congressional page, a lobbyist, a reporter, or a Washington DC pundit, you make decent money, are guaranteed steady work, have excellent health care benefits, and a pretty good retirement package.
You can’t take policy seriously, it gets in the way of your parties. It makes conversation stilted. It makes people think that you aren’t a “very serious person”.
Sound like anyone you know?
Cynthia McKinney is running for president as a Green.
One wonders how long before the Greens tire of her antics*.
*Trust me, it takes a lot for Greens to tire of someone’s antics, but Cynthia Mckinney will be able to do it.
What the hell are they thinking????
They just passed a bill extending SCHIP as it currently exists until March 2009. This is acutally a cut, because Bush has issued executive orders to reduce the scope of the existing program.
I understand the extension, but they could have extended it for 3 months, or 6 months, or 9 months, and forced the Republicans to come back to this tremendously popular program, again, and again, and again.
Instead of this, which is a win-win, the kids get their insurance, and the Republicans shoot themselves in the foot, they took it off the table.
**sigh**
Someone at Sadly, No! had to read Johna’s book, Liberal Fascism.
I just read the paragraphs that they scanned in.
The stupidity…It burns…..It Burns.
The comments are amusing though.
Yep, that’s what the Wall Street Journal says (subscription required):
The joint housing and mortgage-market crisis once again reminds us that all financial implosions stem from the same cause: borrowing short and lending long without enough equity to weather periodic storms in the gap between.
But this bubble was different. Besides being fueled by housing purchases and repackaged loans, each with inadequate equity — doubling down with other people’s money — at the end of the capital-gains rainbow was the right to take up to $500,000 of profit, tax free.
Thank you President Bill Clinton for your 1997 action, applauded by the banks, the realtors and all citizens in search …
What the hell was he thinking?????
He goes and suggests that when Hillary becomes prez, she sent people out to convince allies that the US is open to real diplomacy (good idea), and that one of the people she send out is George Herbert Walker Bush, father of George W. Bush?
Let’s see, you piss off the Democratic primary voters bu suggesting that Shrub’s DAD be a part of a foreign policy good will tour in which he repudiates his son?
This is wrong on so many levels, which Bush-the-elder clearly sees, as he said no bloody way.
I gotta figure that he was going off and trying to be the center of attention, and his mouth outran his mind.
This is a natural consequence of Bush and His Evil Minions™ completely idiotic decision to place an anti-missile system in Europe that points more at Russia than at Iran.
I can’t wait until there are some adults back in the White House.
And they acquitted number seven.
This case has been a ginned up clusterf%$# from the beginning. Someone found a group of nutbags, and either (the FBI or Prosecutors) thought that a terrorism bust would make their careers, or they (paid informants) thought that they were dumb enough to unknowingly play along with them so that they could stay on the Department of Justice gravy train.
These guys are too whacked out and too stupid to organize a PTA meeting, much less engage in terrorism. This is precisely the sort of manufactred bullsh&$ that seems to happen every time that Bush and His Evil Minions&trade need something to distract from the bad news coming out of the White House.
Remember the lamer paint ball terrorist wannabes (or maybe they were just guys who got encouraged to talk big by an unscrupulous government informant)?
Well, the jury is deadlocked.
No surprise. These guys could not have conspired to run a lemonade stand.