3301 Revising history

Friday, July 8, 2011

We are all born psychopaths, born without repressions.
Society teaches us the restraints of proper behavior and helps us develop a conscience.
-- Paul Levine, Night Vision --

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I mentioned to The Man the other day that, although I may be disloyal to my gender by saying this, I can't wait for the primary debate spitting match between Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. The two seem to be hatched from the same pea pod.

In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Ms. Bachmann referred to John Quincy Adams as a Founding Father, despite the fact that he was all of nine years old at the time. My thought was, ok, we're revising history again?

Well, someone went out to the Wikipedia entry for J. Q. Adams and altered the "life as a child" section to add "But even as an embryo, John Quincy Adams could feel pain and was a Founding Father."

Cracked me up. What cracks me up even more is that people seem to think it was a Bachmann supporter who did it. (Do we really give them credit for that much blatant stupidity?)

I know who did it. He lives about ten miles from my old house. He most definitely is not a Bachmann supporter.
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3159 The rich get richer and the poor, well, what do they matter?

Friday, November 12, 2010

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
-- Aristotle --

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Piper and I have some social and political differences. He is Republican to the point of thinking Sarah Palin makes sense. When you get him started he rails against lazy people who don't work, don't save, and who are experts at "working the system". Yeah, I saw a lot of that when I was doing court and family mediation, and I don't like it either. Where we differ is that he wants to eliminate all government social programs. He doesn't seem to realize that there are people who are in honest need of assistance. He seems to think that it is always their own stupidity that puts them in that position, and he shouldn't have to pay for their lack of planning.

Here's where that kind of thinking leads:

The real 'death panels' are coming from the GOP

Read the article. It's frightening, and I believe it to be absolutely true. Giving tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations, and giving tax dollars to the military industry, creates deficits that some people, mainly the beneficiaries of those programs, want to use as an excuse to reduce or cut out social programs.

My tin hat is buzzing so hard it's giving me a headache.
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3012 Cynical?

Monday, July 5, 2010

"Some things have to be believed to be seen."
-- Ralph Hodgson --

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Bristol Palin: "But I think abstinence is, like -- like, the -- I don't know how to put it -- like, the main -- everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it's not realistic at all.... because it's more and more accepted now." - from the February 16, 2009, FOX episode of "On the Record".

She is now the Teen Abstinence Ambassador for the Candie’s Foundation, getting around $25,000 for each speaking engagement. I wonder if the money had any influence on her opinion of how realistic abstinence is, or if she's just being hypocritical. I'd be more comfortable if she were speaking just in exchange for travel costs, in the belief that maybe she could help to change that "accepted now".

Either way, it's more than a bit patronizing for someone who has used her pregnancy as a springboard into a television and speaking career to lecture others on how teen sex can ruin their chances in life.
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2043 Thud

Sunday, September 28, 2008

A pro-Palin woman on a discussion panel on TV this morning insisted that Sarah Palin is still enormously popular - after all, she was at a rally in Florida the other day, and 60,000 people showed up to see her.

The evidence offered does not support the conclusion.

You can bet your last dollar that if Sarah Palin showed up anywhere around here, I'd show up, too! It might be more fun than a demolition derby. I might even cheer at something she said, just to encourage her to say more like it.

Everybody loves a good safe wreck.
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2038 The Conspiracy!

Saturday, September 27, 2008

I'm not going to footnote (i.e. link) anything because you can find anything you like on the internet, so have at it.

Ok. Here's what I've heard and/or read lately, no assurances that any of it is true, but when do you ever get assurances with conspiracy theories?

My Very Own Conspiracy Theory:

Point 1: The US economy is a mess. The debt is enormous. Tax relief, let alone anything like health care assistance will be impossible. Foreign affairs are a mess. The world hates us. We're in one war we can't win and another we don't dare lose, and we can no longer afford either.

Point 2: I hear that Sarah Palin's handlers are having fits. They've had some practice debates, and some mock news conferences, and they've been total disasters. They'd like to cancel the upcoming Palin/Biden debate, or postpone, but that doesn't seem possible. People are freaking. There are those in the GOP rarified levels that would like her to voluntarily withdraw (but I'll bet she keeps insisting she's ready), but it probably wouldn't help anyway (that "experience and judgment" thing McCain thinks he has going for him would be shot full of holes).

Point 3: I hear that Palin was recommended to John McCain by none other than Henry Kissinger.

Point 4: Of all the people in the world who suffers least from cognitive dissonance, I'd put Kissinger pretty far up there. I see him as coldly logical.

Point 5: I think Kissinger knew exactly what he was doing, and I think others were involved.

Conclusion: The GOP wants to lose this election. They will be happy to hand the whole mess over to the Democrats, who will be forced to do some unpleasant and very unpopular things to clean it up. The American public has a very short memory. In a few years, they'll forget who created the mess, and all the anger and frustration of the cleanup will be dumped on the Democrats (who not incidentally don't know how to use the media to the same effect as the right), and in 2012, the Republicans will be able to waltz right in, and look like saviors. And in running McCain and Palin, well, it's not like they sacrificed any of their valuable players.

How's that for a conspiracy theory?

(Oh, and don't forget what the Mayan calendar and Nostradamus and some interpretations of the Bible have to say about 2012.)
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