Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“They all knew.”

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

Books are my comfort food!

The lights are all blinking red.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

Innocent people do not delay justice.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Republicans do not trust women.

T R E 4 5 O N

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Archives for 2003

Amusing Review

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P.J., at his best:

IF YOU PLAN not to read this summer, “Living History” is just the book. Hillary Clinton’s new memoir is more than 100,000 pages long. At least I think it is. There are only 562 page numbers, but you know how those Clintons lie. A mere ream of paper could not contain the padding that has gone into this tome. Hillary–with the help of at least six ghostwriters–nails the goose of a manuscript to the barn floor and force-feeds it with lint.

We are informed, for instance, that Jackie Onassis was once, herself, a first lady and later married a Greek shipping magnate. We learn how a chief executive walks to the podium to deliver a State of the Union speech: “The president greets members of both parties who, by tradition, sit on opposite sides of the aisle.” Even Hillary’s grief over the death of her dad is padded: “My father would not be at the table vying with Hugh and Tony for one of the drumsticks or asking for more cranberries and water-melon pickle, two of his favorites from childhood.” And then there are the fulsome tales of official junkets–unimportant, uninteresting, uneventful, and unending. “I had given a lot of thought to how Chelsea and I should dress on the trip. We wanted to be comfortable, and, under the sun’s heat, I was glad for the hats and cotton clothes I had packed.” And I was glad for the scopolamine transdermal patch.

If you read only one book review this summer, make it this one.

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The Day is Soon Coming

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Every time I hear stories like this, I get infuriated:

If July 4 is a little sweeter in Fresno this summer, it’s for good reason. Only days ago this California city was the site of an early Independence Day, when 24-year-old Sarah Saga stepped off a plane onto the first American soil she’d touched since being taken to Saudi Arabia at age six.

Her freedom affords two timely lessons. The first is that Washington is fully capable of arranging the liberation of our women and children held in Saudi Arabia against their will, with the right backbone. The second lesson is that someone needs to light some firecrackers under the State Department if the many others still trapped there–including Ms. Saga’s two young children–are ever to taste their freedom.

I hope that the corrupt House of Saud falls like Hussein’s regime. Soon.

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Why Investigate?

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Love the Euro-trash:

Oxford University is investigating whether a university geneticist, Andrew Wilkie, violated its anti-discrimination rules by rejecting an Israeli student’s application to work in his laboratory on the basis of the student’s nationality, citing disapproval of Israeli policies toward Palestinians.

In a brief message last week rejecting the application from the Israeli student, Amit Duvshani, Wilkie wrote: “I have a huge problem with the way that the Israelis take the moral high ground from their appalling treatment in the Holocaust, and then inflict gross human rights abuses on the Palestinians because they (the Palestinians) wish to live in their own country. I am sure that you are perfectly nice at a personal level, but no way would I take on somebody who had served in the Israeli army. As you may be aware, I am not the only U.K. scientist with these views but I’m sure you will find another suitable lab if you look around.”

I am not sure what they are investigating- they guy has admitted that he did it. Are they investigating whether or not this is discrimination? Just insert the word ‘blacks’ every time you see the word Israelis. Shouldn’t we be in the punitive stages now?

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Nice Rhetoric

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This is irritating. I think discriminating against homosexuals is wrong, but I think PRIVATE organizations should be able to discriminate and to choose who is part of their organization. Thus, this rhetoric is just a touch annoying:

WHAT’S THE difference between the Taliban and the Boy Scouts?

This is not exactly a rhetorical question, but it’s not exactly a joke, either. Given the latest Boy Scout flap, we can’t help being disturbed by similarities between the Afghan fundamentalist group and the homophobic American shapers of youth.

*** Update ***

A banner day for Taliban references:

In a period when the United States finds itself threatened by an international network of religious intolerants fuming at modernity and equality, you’d think some GOP notables might step up to condemn the like-minded intolerants in their own ranks — indeed, atop them. Is there no decent Republican with the guts to note that his party could do better than be led by a rats’ nest of bigots?

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Bitching Soldiers

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I am still one of the few people out there who does not think that everything in Iraq is going to hell in a handbasket, even when I read reports like this:

To Staff Sgt. Charles Pollard, the working-class suburb of Mashtal is a “very, very, very, very bad neighborhood.” And he sees just one solution.

“U.S. officials need to get our [expletive] out of here,” said the 43-year-old reservist from Pittsburgh, who arrived in Iraq with the 307th Military Police Company on May 24. “I say that seriously. We have no business being here. We will not change the culture they have in Iraq, in Baghdad. Baghdad is so corrupted. All we are here is potential people to be killed and sitting ducks.”

One thing anyone who has had more than just a brief experience with the military understands is that the best way to see that your soldiers are alright is to see if they are bitching. When they stop complaining, then you have trouble. At any rate, I read these reports, and I find them appalling- I would never, never, not in a million years, have bitched to reporters when I was on active duty. Yeah, there were a lot of times when things REALLY sucked, and I really was in a lousy mood, but I just would never have bitched to anyone outside my unit. I guess times have changed- and we have to keep in mind that in many cases, these are Reservists and Guardsmen, and many of them do have a right to feel as if they have been sold a bill of goods.

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The Real Party of the Rich

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Interesting admission from the NY Times:

The public may be surprised to learn these results, but Democratic Party leaders are not. In getting behind the badly needed drive to end soft money as a device for buying candidates and favors, the Democrats knew they would have considerable catching up to do to broaden their base for the new campaign world of limited hard money. The one category the Democrats led in was among fat-cat donors, with the party garnering 92 percent of the contributions of $1 million or more in 2002, the last year soft money was permitted. No wonder Terry McAuliffe, the Democrats’ soft-money maestro, is emphasizing an urgent new direct-mail effort to enlist many more smaller donors.

Amusing.

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