Call It A Comeback
Not election wacko. I love that Aldrin just took off like a crusty old test pilot would. And he is 72.
In most circles, getting your butt kicked by a 72 year old when you are 37 would be cause for embarrasment. Then again, most people aren’t fruitcakes. I wonder if Aldrin ever tried to hit Irwin when he started talking about Noah’s Ark?
Rich Miller provides some good counterbalance to Birkett’s ads in the Trib. Oh wait, those are news stories. Actually they are and those stories are important. However, a bit of balance is in order. Madigan is far from perfect and her ties to her father’s machine are entirely legitimate for news stories. However, Birkett’s issues are just as relevant and this story is revealing. Too bad the Sun-Times and the Trib have left the work to Rich Miller.
In referencing another blog, Counterspin Central carries a story about DFS in Florida. Jeb ran against the utter incompetence of the agency 4 years ago. One would think he would have figured out that not cleaning up the agency might leave a challenger an opening now.
Zell Miller is one of my least favorite Democrats, but he voices my position nearly perfectly on Iraq. One caveat–I’ve convinced myself that action needs to be taken to remove Saddam. I’m open to the type of action, but the current administration can’t convince me of anything until they convince themselves of something, anything.
I suppose it is hard to point out that Hussein tried to take out a former President of the United States, when that former President is your father.
How bad are things in Illinois for the Republicans? This article seems to indicate the Rs are losing endorsements they should be winning. Topinka is competent and reasonable. If the Ds are rolling over everyone this hard, pulling out the Treasurer or AG race are going to be damn hard in the fall for the Rs.
Ryan should be careful about aboutbadrod.com or it might backfire. I’m all for airing the claims made as John Kass did back in February, but this sort of back handed attack has a way of raising more questions about the one doing the insinuation than the subject.
Bears win, Illinois loses. Looks like Champaign might have a good season, just with an unusual team…
Here is an exammple of what is wrong with Mollly Ivins these days. She writes a decent column about Bush claiming credit when he doesn’t deserve it, but she doesn’t tie it back to his past history of doing so. Like she documented in the friggen’ book she wrote!
Hitchens has a good article on exactly who the radical islamists are. Andrew Sullivan picked out the key paragraph,
“It is also impossible to compromise with the stone-faced propagandists for Bronze Age morality: morons and philistines who hate Darwin and Einstein and who managed, during their brief rule in Afghanistan, to ban and to erase music and art while cultivating the skills of germ warfare. If they would do that to Afghans, what might they not have in mind for us? In confronting such people, the crucial thing is to be willing and able, if not in fact eager, to kill them without pity before they can get started.”
The second great paragraph is here:
“I repeat what I said at the beginning: the objective of al Qaeda is not the emancipation of the Palestinians but the establishment of tyranny in the Muslim world by means of indiscriminate violence in the non-Muslim world, and those who confuse the two issues are idiots who don’t always have the excuse of stupidity.”
The Palestinians are just being used as tools for another movement of fascists. The US must address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for both moral and practical reasons, but al Qaeda is just another Middle Eastern fascist movement. Different in underlying ideology compared to the Baathists in Syria and Iraq, but just another group of fascists.
I wonder if Shrub would like to take on this line though:
“morons and philistines who hate Darwin and Einstein”
He wouldn’t want to alienate the Base, now would he–oh wait, that is base lower case…
Krugman hits the nail on the head. The Powell-Cheney fiasco was hysterical and the privatization debate is a joke–and a pretty funny one. However, Tapped played a fun game a week ago and bet that Kaus and Sullivan would have coniptions over a pretty damn inocuous passage, and I’ll take shot today.
This passage:
”
Is it inaccurate to say that personal accounts equal privatization? We could argue on the merits. Under the Bush plan, a worker’s personal account reflects any gains or losses on the stocks it represents. When risks and rewards accrue entirely to the individual, isn’t that privatization?
But wait, we can do better. The push to convert Social Security into a system of personal accounts has been led by the Cato Institute. The Bush plan emerged directly from Cato’s project on the subject, several members of Mr. Bush’s commission on Social Security reform had close Cato ties, and much of the commission’s staff came straight from Cato. You can read all about Cato’s role on the special Web site the institute set up, socialsecurity.org.
And what’s the name of the Cato project to promote personal accounts? Why, the Project on Social Security Privatization, of course.”
Let’s start the countdown to numerous complaints about how Bush has always varied just a teenie-weenie bit from the CATO line and so Krugman is unfair and part of the Rainesian conspiracy…and the NEA is involved somehow.
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