Gut Rumbles: I am tired
I do love a good rant.I swear to Bejus. If I ever have to do this again (which I will), I'm going to bring my golf-ball retriever to every one of those meetings, and when somebody starts "multi-tasking" or going off on a tangent, I'm going to whip that sucker out, telescope it to the necessary length and BEAT THE SHIT out of whoever needs it.
A liberal's condescension toward Hispanics slips out
In dealing with minorities, liberals have learned to try to keep a lid on their condescension. But sometimes it slips out.This isn't one man's foible. This is the entire basis for affirmative action today.It slipped out a few months ago when Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Lieberman, during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," took the liberty of crediting affirmative action for putting the highly capable Condoleezza Rice -- the first African-American woman to serve as national security adviser -- "where she is today."
And it slipped out again last week when another Democrat seeking the presidential nomination, John Edwards, dismissively boiled down the accomplishments of the highly capable Miguel Estrada, President Bush's nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to his having "the right last name."
Affirmative action is based on one giant insult: If you are a minority, you aren't good enough to acomplish anything on your own. You are too stupid, you're parents are too irresponsible, and you can't learn to assimilate into general society. That is what affirmative action says.
This is the natural outgrowth of where Democrats and Republicans differ. Republicans look at individuals. When Bush formed his cabinet, he picked the best people he could find. He ended up a white guy who has a dyke daughter (Cheney), a black killer (Powell), and a black woman from Alabammy (Rice). He even hired a Jew for media relations (Fleicher). You know why? Because they were the best for the job.
On the other hand, look at Clinton's "Cabinet that Looks Like America". It was the biggest bunch of race pimps and incompetents around. Why were they hired? Because Democrats know that if they put them in a few token (and I use that term intentionally) spots then he will get a few more votes.
Conservatives and libertarians look at individuals. When you look a the individual, you cannot come to the conclusion that Affirmative Action comes to. "This guy doesn't make the cut. He's black? So? Why does it matter that someone else who looks like him doesn't make the cut either?" When you look at it from the left and socialist view of seeing everyone as part of a group, you get to the Affirmative Action conclusion. "Let's see, Whitey has a lot of his people here, and we needs some more. Let's get some Darkies and some Messicans. But not those Yellow bastards. They've already got more than their share. Screw them."
Michael J. Totten: Revolutions Real and Imagined
This is important, people. It is important for people who are worried about the safety of America: Iran is part of the Axis of Evil for good cause, and if it becomes a democracy, remember that democracies don't go to war with each other. It is important for the safety of anyone who isn't a hard-line Muslim, because you are the infidels and the back-sliders that they want to shackle or kill. If is important for anyone who loves freedom, because I cannot be free unless they are free.Totten catalogs some of the lapses in the left media in covering this. As he notes, you have to go to the right side of the aisle to find anyone who wants to talk about that, and this is symptomatic of the malaise that is infesting the left.
Liberal hawks like myself, Meryl Yourish, and Jeff Jarvis pay rapt attention.Also, image of the day (warning: immolation photo) notes the situation in France and the disconnect they have (and that we share in some part) when it comes to Middle Eastern political groups:But the anti-war liberals aren't interested in the slightest. A revolution against tyranny is boring. They would rather discuss Howard Dean.
The radical left is another matter entirely. This is the crowd that says America is a fascist police state. The last thing they want to discover is that a real fascist police state exists in Iran.
Every Friday at 5:00 p.m. the Jackass Contingent marches in front of my building. They bang on drums and shriek against a war that's already over. They say dissent has been crushed, but the only thing that's crushed is the size of their rally. Look how brave and heroic I am, they proclaim. You idiots are wasting your lives in office towers while I'm taking on a dictatorship!
But they aren't taking on a dictatorship. They are wallowing in fantasy. If they pay any attention at all to Iran they'll see what dictatorship looks like. They'll see young people who really are brave in dissent, and who really are engaged in revolutionary activity. And they would look at themselves in the mirror and know they are frauds.
I feel sorry for them. I do. They live in the wrong country, and in the wrong time. They want to take a stand. They want to fight power. But there is no power to fight. America is a liberal democracy, the very sort of thing Iranians die for.
So they dream up a fight in their heads. "Welcome to Nazi Germany" is what someone scrawled on the side of my building.
The real Nazis are elsewhere. And they are fighting for their lives.
On Tuesday, France decided to crack down on the People's Mujahedeen of Iran, otherwise known as the Mujahedeen Khalq. This organization is listed as a terrorist organization by both the US and the EU.Maybe they are. I don't know. I do know that they say the Iranian government has killed 120,000 of them since 1979.
On Wednesday, this man and a few others in Paris and across Europe set themselves afire to protest the French crackdown. One woman died from her burns.
The crackdown happens at a very key point in history. Iranian students are protesting nightly in every Iranian city. The rule of the Mullahs there appears to be near an end in what may, with the greatest of hope, be a bloodless revolution.
The crackdown is seen as the French taking sides with the Mullahs.
Also on Tuesday, French foreign minister de Villepin said that the EU should not list Hamas as a terrorist organization.
It seems obvious that if you light yourself on fire, you are a Ghandi-like protester; if you light yourself on fire and in the process intentionally light others on fire, you are a terrorist. This simple math seems too difficult for French politicians, and their country will suffer for it.
Berlusconi slaps down France over Israel trip
Huzzah! I hope this helps Berlusconi get re-elected. Hell, I don't know enough about Italian civics to know if he was elected in the first place. Anyways:''They missed a good opportunity to shut up,'' Berlusconi told reporters in response to French criticism of his decision not to meet Palestinian leaders during a recent trip to Israel.Someone is irritated at the French? That's unpossible! Maybe this will lead to a war between France and Italy. That would be the biggest slap-fight the world has ever seen. It would be pretty entertaining as long as we can limit it to those two countries. It is hard to tell which direction Germany would go in that one.French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said this week that Berlusconi had ''not satisfied the European position'' by holding talks only with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon during his June 9 visit to Jerusalem.
''I went (to Israel) as the prime minister of Italy. There's no way France can issue criticism over something that was the sole right and responsibility of the Italian prime minister,'' Berlusconi said, clearly bristling with irritation.
More realisticly, this is a symptom of the power struggle that seems to be going on in the EU. I'm hoping that it is the sort of thing that pulls the EU down around Paris' ears.
Sex, Lies and Videotape on the Internet
I had originally planned to avoid this story. The reason is simple; O'Reily is writing this simply to get attention. He is too savy to actually believe this. And that is what I want to talk about.Billy is sagging in the ratings. He's old news. Other people, like Hannity, are batter at the "Ah-HA!" interview, and people are catching on. Billy has to do something to get attention. Unfortunately for him, he is still stuck in the TV mentality of "any press is good press." Bill has decided to apply that philosophy to the blogosphere, and I think it is going to bite him in the ass.
How do you get the attention of the mythical blogosphere? You attack it. So he did. And he got the attention of the 800 lbs. gorillas, who game him a a proper fisking, and now everything is right with the world, correct?
Not quite. I think that Bill has missed the effect of reputation on the Internet. Reputation is important. The people on the internet are not TV drones. They don't remember just that a name is familiar and watch what is familiar; they remember why that person is familiar, and if they don't there is a link there to remind them. He complains that you don't get corrections on the internet; he is right. What you get is immediate editing or withdrawl of incorrect facts. If you don't, then the person screwing up gets fisked and everyone laughs at him.
Pay attention to that word. When you screw up on the internet, people remember. Robert Fisk screwed up, and he did it often enough that he has a word named after him that embodies incompetence. He's gaining company. Maureen Dowd has her own word now (Dowdification), and I'm sure that there will be more. If O'Reily wants to keep tugging this chain, he might be the next one.
Why Europe still doesn't get the Internet
The all-but-final proposal draft says that Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs (or "blogs"), must offer a "right of reply" to those who have been criticized by a person or organization.I think I will comply right now. This is your compliance with the "Right To Reply" asserted in this proposal for any and all responses to this site, edited for content and space:
"Waah fucking waah."
You're welcome.
OrlandoSentinel.com: Income-tax code a welfare system? We should be proud
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."The Census Bureau reported recently that the percentage of poor children dropped during the 1990s. It's no coincidence that the working poor benefited from two Clinton administration policies during that time: an increase in the minimum wage and the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit.That's strange. I thought that correlation without any sort of mechanism to explain causation was coincidence. Hmm.
"Poverty" is defined by gross income. As in, "not net." That knocks the EITC out of the equation.
Most Republicans turned into Chicken Littles, predicting gloom and doom, but the economy simply kept growing. Growing despite a modest tax hike for the richest 2 percent of Americans and a hand up, through tax and wage policies, that brought living wages to workers in low-skill jobs.She seems to have a problem using words correctly. Instead of "despite", she should have said "in spite of".
Those two policies, which the majority of Republicans rejected, coupled with welfare reform and a strong economy, did more to nudge people out of poverty than any trickle-down theory ever imagined. That rubs the GOP the wrong way.I like that little aside, "coupled with". When it is her pet policy, "it is no coincidence", even if there is no way the pet policy had any impact at all. When it is a policy she isn't fond of, it is "coupled with" her pet program.
Even though I like welfare reform, I really don't think that it had much to do with it. It hasn't been around long enough for the effects to show fully. It is the strong economy, stupid.
If you want to talk about rubbing people the wrong way, how about this one: it takes 8 to 10 years for government policy to translate into economic effects. That means that the Clinton boom was really the Reagan-Bush boom. That means that the Bush2 slump is really the Clinton slump. The economy is pulling out now, and that is due to the welfare reforms that the Republican congress forced through in spite of the Clinton administration.
Alabama Republican Rep. Spencer Bachus says the earned income tax credit is a scam that turns "our income tax code into a welfare system."She is having problems with sentence structure, now. She says "gives a little extra to the poorest," but she seems to have mistakenly connected it to the "gives back" phrase. Surely she doesn't mean to imply that the welfare payment she is advocating gives back to the poorest, since they never paid anything in the first place. You can't give back what hasn't already been given.He's right. We should be proud of that. We are rewarding people who work with a tax code that gives back to the rich and gives a little extra to the poorest, too, because they deserve it, too.
Either she has a problem forming coherent, logical sentences, or she is deliberately lying to you.
Today, 40 million Americans qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit. In Florida, one in five children lives in poverty and one in three in a single-parent home. What does that tell you about our low-paying service economy and the strains it puts on children's well-being?How many of those children in poverty are living in single parent homes? She tries to make it sound like maybe half (notice that she doesn't say how many of that 5 lives in that 3.)
The other thing to remember is that the poverty line isn't anything but an arbitrary line adjusted for inflation. It doesn't relate to anything. Don't take my word for it. Look it up.
The political leadership's answer is ever more tax breaks for the richest because they pay most of the taxes. Well, yes, they also pay peanuts, as a percentage of their income, for housing, food and their manicured lawns.There we go. That's her pop-shot. "Millionaires can sleep soundly in their mansions." I hate to break to you -- no, actually, it fills me with glee to break it to you. Most millionaires don't live in mansions. Most millionaires drive old cars and live in regular suburban houses. Rich people don't stay rich by living like Jed Clampett. They stay rich by living like you and me, and putting a little away every month. No one ever got rich by spending money.Millionaires can sleep soundly in their mansions. This fight over the EITC isn't class warfare that seeks to punish the rich. It's about fairness.
Fairness. If that means a millionaire must give up a little of his take on the tax cut so that a family of four, with both working parents earning less than $26,000, can buy a refrigerator or fix the car, then, who would object?This one is too easy. The millionaire. Does his vote count for less? If anything, I think that someone who has managed to build up a million and keep it should have a little more voice than some idiot who manages to rack up not one but two kids on less than $26,000 a year.
This concludes our fisking.
FREEDOM ISN'T FREE!
Wow.Hours and hours of fun. I might have to archive the whole site before The Man tosses it down the memory hole. (Or this nut's credit card gets cut off.)
MKULTRA history, COINTELPRO history (current-day mind control's progenitors) and unclassified and commerical devices which can carry out this torture are firmly established facts. We are not asking for anything close to a "leap of faith", as we have ample factual material to convince most people of average open-mindedness who will take the time to learn the facts.Ooooh, boy... If nuts were cocaine, I just discovered crack.
