I am giving up blogging for Lent. (Not that I celebrate Lent, but it seems like a good excuse.) See you sometime after Easter.
(Oh, maybe one post, sometime in the next week or so, but that’s not blogging, strictly speaking.)
Last month was fairly successful, so trying this again:
Carried over:
New:
They told me that if I voted for John McCain, the CIA would continue GWB’s secret war on terror by launching missile strikes against Islamist targets, resulting in massive collateral damage and angering the Arab street. And they were right!
“If there are 14 000 in our disabled community, can you imagine the disabled community in the United States of America, England, Canada, and the other Caribbean islands, Germany, France [and so on], if we make Barbados fully accessible to the tourists coming here and enjoying the facilities?” Harper asked.
“If we can increase our tourist market by just 30 000 coming from these areas, then we are looking at a significant difference, and in today’s world where there are some challenges, one could quite easily understand what a benefit it would be to the tourism market in Barbados,” Harper added.
Excellent, excellent, could not agree more. If age or disability should put me in a wheelchair, I would hope to be able to continue to enjoy Barbados to the fullest extent. Barbados has severe accessibility issues that need to be addressed, and soon.
A kind person, seeing a panhandler on the street, might help him. A miserable person (your average right-wing troglodyte) might ignore him. A religious man might pray for him. But it takes a liberal to do something like this:
I stopped talking and reached into my pocket for one of the strips of laundry board on which I make notes when I’m interviewing people. On one strip of laundry board I wrote: “Please Support Pres. Obama’s Stimulus Plan, and begin right here … at the bottom … Thank you.’’ I handed it to him, and he said he’d copy the words on his sign and have it on display the following day.
Later that afternoon I returned home and printed those words in large type on my computer. After printing out two dozen copies, I taped each page onto separate pieces of laundry board (14 by 8 inches) that the dry cleaner sends home with my shirts.
The next day, on Sunday, and during the Monday holiday as well, I handed out these boarded messages at random to people who approached me for money, explaining why I thought their economy would be stimulated by my street signs. I further pointed out that the big bankers and industrial leaders the government was bailing out had lobbyists and public relations companies doing their bidding; but these wandering men who were seeking handouts in the street had to tap into the topicality of their plight, had to link themselves into the headlines and the top priority of President Obama. Stimulus, stimulus!!
See, this way, you’re not actually contributing to the lives of panhandlers, you’re just guilting the more prosperous into doing so, and radicalizing the panhandlers to support liberal social goals, which in turn will help the government grow larger and more activist. It’s what liberalism is all about.
“Bush Faithful Rewarded With Jobs,” the WaPo headline reads:
Nearly half of Bush’s appointments after Election Day were filled by donors who gave a total of nearly $1.9 million to Republicans since 2003, according to an analysis of the postings. At least 20 of the positions were filled by former Bush aides, plus others filled by old hands from the administrations of Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Aha! Corruption! Cronyism! The worst of the old regime! Except…
Most of the positions are unpaid and are valued more for their status than for monetary compensation.
Someone at the WaPo explain to me how an unpaid presidential appointment is a “job”. Because I’d like to know.
Carlos M. Gutierrez, Bush’s last commerce secretary, now sits on the board of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. James W. Holsinger Jr., whom Bush had nominated at one point to be surgeon general, snagged a seat on the fitness council, along with quarterback Eli Manning, figure skater Michelle Kwan and other athletic stars. Condoleezza Rice, in a customary move for former secretaries of state, was named to the board of trustees for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Only a media that is determined to be biased and unfair can headline a story about minor appointments as “Bush Faithful Rewarded With Jobs,” If it had been the Blessed Redeemer making these appointments, the headline would have read “Obama Inspires Sacrifice In Public Service.”
Now we know why Alex Fraudriguez left the Rangers: roid rage.
The bad news – not that there’s anything bad about this news, as a confirmed Pay-Rod hater, I couldn’t be happier if Santa Claus landed on my roof with the keys to a new minivan – is that this means that Jose Canseco told the truth. Again.
UPDATE: A-Roid. I love it.
Next question: who leaked the information to SI? I would bet a donut that it was Barry Bonds’s legal team. If anybody has an interest in tarring A-Roid with the steroids brush, it’s Barry Bonds.
Very nice article on the progress of the Rangers under Boy GM Jon Daniels, from the Dallas Observer, of all places.
Ben Sheets is looking at surgery. One doesn’t like to, you know, congratulate Boy GM Jon Daniels on not getting snookered into paying long-term guaranteed money for Sheets – not least because he did get snookered just that way into Jason Jennings last year. Still, though, a good move.
The Blessed Redeemer scales the heights of the WaPo op-ed page:
By now, it’s clear to everyone that we have inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression.
Who has inherited again? We? Is this the “royal we”? Or just the Glorious Administration of the Blessed Redeemer? We, forsooth. And anyone who says that this economic crisis is comparable to the Depression has entirely forgotten the 70′s. (Or else Obama, who knows what happened to Jimmy Carter, wants America to forget.)
Millions of jobs that Americans relied on just a year ago are gone; millions more of the nest eggs families worked so hard to build have vanished.
“Vanished?” Isn’t that a little extreme? My IRA and 403(b) got hurt as bad as anyone’s, but it didn’t vanish. Might be painful to look at, I admit. Unless he’s talking about the Madoff clients? I dunno.
People everywhere are worried about what tomorrow will bring.
I only agree with this because I don’t want to have to shovel any more snow. “People everywhere are worried about what tomorrow will bring,” rubbish. Everybody worries about everything nowadays. “Nation of whiners,” a smart man once said.
What Americans expect from Washington is action that matches the urgency they feel in their daily lives — action that’s swift, bold and wise enough for us to climb out of this crisis.
Contractors have a saying; you can get cheap, fast, or good – but only two out of three. You can get swift and bold (which is what the stimulus is). You can get bold and wise. You can get swift and wise. But bold, swift and wise? That’s a bit of a tall order.
Because each day we wait to begin the work of turning our economy around, more people lose their jobs, their savings and their homes.
Well, okay, but the stimulus package doesn’t spend the majority of its money tomorrow, or even in this year. A lot of the spending is in 2011 and 2012. We have to pass something right now to spend money in 2012? Explain, please.
And if nothing is done, this recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.
Straw man argument. No Republican anywhere except maybe Ron Paul is saying “do nothing”. What Republicans (and, well, me) are saying is do something, but don’t do this huge monstrosity of a thing. The choices are not “do nothing” or “do a trillion-dollar nightmare bill straight off of Nancy Pelosi’s wish list.” There are intermediate steps, you know.
That’s why I feel such a sense of urgency about the recovery plan before Congress. With it, we will create or save more than 3 million jobs over the next two years, provide immediate tax relief to 95 percent of American workers, ignite spending by businesses and consumers alike, and take steps to strengthen our country for years to come.
Wait, wait, wait. You just said if nothing were done, five million jobs would be lost, and now this will only save three million? I think the stimulus package proves Democrats can do addition, but subtraction seems to be lost on them…
This plan is more than a prescription for short-term spending …
You got that right, Mr. President.
it’s a strategy for America’s long-term growth and opportunity in areas such as renewable energy, health care and education.
None of which are directly related to economic stimulus. Again, I am not saying we don’t need a strategy, but such big huge items should be, you know, debated and discussed and stuff, and don’t need to be part of whatever stimulus floats your economic boat.
And it’s a strategy that will be implemented with unprecedented transparency and accountability, so Americans know where their tax dollars are going and how they are being spent.
There’s your problem! That’s why the stimulus is unpopular, because people know what’s in it. Doesn’t take a Harvard Law Review editor to figure that one out.
In recent days, there have been misguided criticisms of this plan that echo the failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis — the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems; that we can meet our enormous tests with half-steps and piecemeal measures; that we can ignore fundamental challenges such as energy independence and the high cost of health care and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.
Again, a straw-man argument. No one has ever said that tax cuts will solve all America’s problems. No one has ever said that health care reform isn’t needed. Distorting the conservative message won’t get you any points around here, sir.
I reject these theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.
Yeah, you won, rub it in.
They know that we have tried it those ways for too long. And because we have, our health-care costs still rise faster than inflation. Our dependence on foreign oil still threatens our economy and our security. Our children still study in schools that put them at a disadvantage. We’ve seen the tragic consequences when our bridges crumble and our levees fail.
None of which, again, has a connection to targeted, short-term economic stimulus.
Every day, our economy gets sicker — and the time for a remedy that puts Americans back to work, jump-starts our economy and invests in lasting growth is now.
I won’t reprint the rest of the article, because it continues on in this vein – now, now now. Deliberation be damned, the Senate be damned, democracy itself be damned. Now now now. President Obama is flat wrong about this – now is the time to wait. Now is the time to negotiate. Now is the time to — as you promised to do — go through this stimulus line by line and cut out the wasteful spending. It’s time for Congress to catch its breath, listen to the American people, and work out a compromise that stimulates the economy without bankrupting the country to pay for left-wing nonsense. We cannot afford a $800 billion dollar mistake.