Yeah, it wasn’t your neighbor’s cable line when three black SUVs turn up within minutes of you saying “That wasn’t suppose to be here.”
Classic move on AT&T’s part to try and stiff the construction company with the bill for the repair bill for a line not on the map.
No idea what I’m talking about?
And it will be pathetic. “We want to ask the American people what their hopes and dreams are”? Spoken like a guy wanting to get in a girl’s pants, but then again they are certainly out to fuck us.
Look at the list of losers that will be leading this effort and taking the GOP show to the people. It’s the same pack of narcissistic jagoffs that have been running the GOP in Congress for the last 5 years. Why would anyone think they are capable of new ideas and new thinking? They are like GM in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s–”OK, so what you are telling me is that Buick is a piece of shit? Great feedback. Now, what if we painted it blue?”
There was a piece on the radio show “The World” today about Sitara Achakzai, a woman born in Kandahar and relocated to Canada, a refugee of the Soviet war. During her early years, she grew up in a very different Afghanistan, one more like the first few chapters of The Kite Runner than the war-torn poppy producer of today’s headlines. She was encouraged to go to school and to walk into town without a viel by her father who taught her that “Rights are not given – they must be taken.” That seems universally and historically true – in our country we have honored that truth with a revolution, a bill of rights, myriad amendments to the law of our land, treaties and movements that have culminated in new laws.
Sitara Achakzai - Afghan champion of women's rights
Sitara continued to fight for the rights of Afghan women, moving back to Afghanistan in 2004 to become a provincial councillor. She spoke up for women and spoke out against such laws as the legalization of rape within marriage.
At the risk of sounding trite (which is not my intention), I would love to hear Ms. Achakszai’s opinion on gay marriage. Unfortunately that won’t be possible, as she was gunned down in cold blood in Kandahar this month.
Personnally, I shall seek advice from wise minds that have gone before as I think about the cruelty of her death. Alfred Lord Tennyson would have seen the good fight continue in spite of the loss of “The Warrior.”
To Sleep I give my powers away;
My will is bondsman to the dark;
I sit within a helmless bark,
And with my heart I muse and say:
O heart, how fares it with thee now,
That thou should’st fail from thy desire,
Who scarcely darest to inquire,
“What is it makes me beat so low?”
Something it is which thou hast lost,
Some pleasure from thine early years.
Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
That grief hath shaken into frost!
Such clouds of nameless trouble cross
All night below the darken’d eyes;
With morning wakes the will, and cries,
“Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.”
Pat Toomey, a former corporate shill head of the Club for Growth (motto: “rich people really shouldn’t have to pay taxes”), is challenging Arlen Specter in the 2010 primary. This, despite a former head of the Pennsylvania chapter of CFG begging him not to do so. Why not? Well, no reason…other than:
–Pennsylvania is clearly now a blue state, and the moderate Republican (by the current to-the-left-of-Jefferson-Davis standard) presidential candidate John McCain lost to Barack Obama by 10 points last November despite McCain and moose hunter VP Candidate Sarah Palin basically living there the last month of the campaign
–right-wing butt boy Rick Santorum got absolutely hammered in 2006 and lost by 18 points despite being the incumbent, and Toomey is to the right of Santorum somehow.
–any Democrat worth his salt can beat a Republican these days in Pennsylvania or most anyplace else in the Northeast, because the holy-roller anti-government Southern redneck image of the GOP scares the !@#$ out of people everywhere else in the country. And Pennsylvanians are old, right after Florida on the old scale, and that’s saying something. So you have a state of old people too poor to move to Florida who need services.
Absolutely asinine. A good opportunity for the Dems, because Toomey may well win the primary as all the former moderate Republicans around Philadelphia have fled the party in recent years. And he will get killed in a general election, probably by 25+ points.
Added bonus: one of the sweetest images I ever saw, politically, was Rick Santorum giving his concession speech in 2006, and his strangely dressed daughter (I hate the prosti-tot look as much as anyone, but this girl looks like a 12-year-old Mormon-cult third wife) bawling next to him. And I remember thinking, hon, your father equated homosexuals with people who f*** dogs. Someday, you will look back and realize your father is a dick.
I wonder if she has yet realized that.
Pieces like this (plus the accompanying article should be the goal of news organizations with a web presence. Both pieces (on an ambushed American platoon in Afghanistan) complement each other perfectly, with the narrated photo essay helping immerse you in the actual situation and the article providing the background. My heart goes out to the family of Pfc. Richard A. Dewater.
Would an adult male ever choose to be circumcised, even in the face of “overwhelming evidence” of health benefits? Should encouraging parents to have their sons circumcised be a public health policy?
Fortunately for all of us a good deal of time and effort has been spent on studying the effects of circumcision on male sexual sensitivity and disease transmission rates. When you have a newborn baby boy, you can Google for all sorts of data to help make the decision about whether to elect the surgery, and I won’t rehash the evidence or arguments here. Without a moral objection to circumcision, parents might feel that for a little cost and effort, they can do a little something to help out their future sexually active teenager. But let me present a little thought experiment, a perspective that I haven’t seen elsewhere: What if circumcision was a decision left up to the adult individual, to be elected sometime after they reach sexual maturity and can evaluate the data themselves? What man, considering a possible reduction in AIDS and HPV transmission rates during all that unprotected sex they plan to have, would choose the surgery? I’m guessing the same men that would have their tonsils and appendix pre-emptively removed.
I know that Mr. Obama wants to look to the future rather than dwell on the past, but as more Bush-era insanity is revealed I can’t help feeling that this will all happen again someday unless some of these jokers (like Yoo or Gonzalez) end up in jail or at the very least lose their license to practice law. To claim broad powers to set aside constitutional protections for US citizens in a time of war – arguably a war of opportunity unilateraly declared by the very president claiming these powers – amounts to a dictatorship and an obvious violation of the most basic founding principles of our nation. Yes, the Congress authorized the use of force in Afghanistan and (incredibly) Iraq, but even John Yoo’s initial public take on that authorization limited it to the use of force against foreign enemies.
For folks who just can’t get their head around what’s going on with the current economic downturn:
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
While it’s pretty simple (it sort of had to be) I think this is nice piece of work and does an admirable job of taking the worst economic situation most of us have faced in our lifetimes and presenting in just over eleven minutes.