Displaying 91 To 120 Of 253 Comments Do you think he got the message across yet? Or will he have to write it out in really big block letters, with maybe some of the words simplified? » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 28, 2011 @ 5:39 pm 🙂 » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 28, 2011 @ 5:28 pm When Reagan died, I had the thought that Nixon essentially operated in relation to a human and moral world, howevermuch observed in the breach, and was recognizably human – in contrast to his But, well, yes, one still doesn’t want to be called “ strange ” by Nixon . . . When Reagan was President, my father would talk about how sometimes you would see him with a cold, hard, reptilian look on his face ( in contrast to his supposedly genial public image ). » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 28, 2011 @ 5:27 pm The recent passing of Geraldine Ferraro reminded me of an earlier pioneer – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Chisholm First African American woman elected to Congress and founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, 1968. First African American to run for a major party Presidential nomination and first woman to run for the Democratic nomination, 1972. She visited George Wallace in the hospital soon after he was shot. They later worked together on a bill to extend the minimum wage to domestic workers. I remember my father mentioning her several times. According to him, she stated that her qualification to be President was that she was the most intelligent candidate ; and he said she was right. » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 28, 2011 @ 3:48 pm There’s a similar page, with some of the same material, some different – This is my favorite item, I find it very significant somehow – Nixon Called Reagan ‘Strange’ COLLEGE PARK, Md.(AP) – President Nixon didn’t think much of fellow Californian and Republican icon Ronald Reagan, calling him “strange” and not “pleasant to be around,” newly released White House tapes show. [ Talking politics with White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman at Camp David in August 1972 . . . ] “Reagan is not one that wears well,” Nixon said. “I know,” Haldeman agreed. “On a personal basis, Rockefeller is a pretty nice guy,” Nixon said. “Reagan on a personal basis, is terrible. He just isn’t pleasant to be around.” “No, he isn’t,” Haldeman said. “Maybe he’s different with others,” Nixon said. “No,” Haldeman said. “No, he’s just an uncomfortable man to be around,” Nixon said, “strange.” . . . Later, Nixon said Reagan’s economic policies were unduly harsh and cautioned against giving him too much credit for winning the Cold War. “Communism would have collapsed anyway,” he told Monica Crowley, a Nixon aide in in his last years, according to her 1996 book, “Nixon Off the Record.” » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 28, 2011 @ 2:01 pm I like this bit [ from Abby’s link, not mine ] : Ronald Reagan’s Record “Firsts” 20.First to have an admiral plead the Fifth Amendment. 21.First to have a stealing, lying, gutless wife abusing Marine LT. Colonel plead the Fifth Amendment. 22.First to have a sitting cabinet member indicted. 23.First to have an Assistant Secretary of State indicted. 24.First to have an Asistant Secretary of Defense sent to prison. 25.First to have over 100 members of an administration charged with crimes. 26.First to have more members of his administration charged with crimes than the cumulative total of all other presidents in the twentieth century. 27.First to testify “under oath” 130 times that “I don’t remember”. 28.First to have an Admiral with a photographic memory testify 128 times ” I don’t remember”. » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 28, 2011 @ 1:55 pm Finally. Finally. “ The Cronon affair, then, is one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become. ” Of course, it would have been better if the column itself were titled “ The Republican Party is Un-American ”, maybe in all caps and boldface, and published on the front page. But it’s a start. » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 28, 2011 @ 8:15 am Awwww . . . I really did mean just to compare the reactions to actions of the current and previous Presidents. But then I started to think of the broader historical context . . . » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 27, 2011 @ 4:15 pm [ WARNING : This comment went severely off course. I don’t know how to fix it right now, so – I’ll just let it land where it may. 🙂 ] Hookay – The worst person ever to serve as President ( parse my wording 😉 ) – and I do not say that in a kneejerk way : after all, there were the ilk of Hoover and Coolidge ; but G. W. Bush is, indeed, clearly, hands down, the worst ),George Walker Bush — after transparently stealing the Presidency, as everyone knew ; and, being, besides everything else, a public grotesque disgrace to the office in his personal character and demeanor, as everyone knew — unilaterally invaded a sovereign nation against unprecedented massive world opposition and what everyone knew to be brazenly false pretenses ( I was reading about Scott Ritter in the local free newspaper weeks beforehand ) – and got 80-90% approval ratings. Our current President — clearly, shall we say, one of the ten greatest to ever serve, at a conservative estimate 😉 — participates in a multilateral humanitarian action — unprecedentedly uniting United States, European, and Arab interests, in a watershed moment in history — to prevent mass slaughter by one of the most infamously capricious dictators of the past century – Well . . . I will admit, the headlines on this morning’s Los Angeles Times brought a smile to my face : Kadafi’s forces are in retreat. I even vaguely thought last fall, when our President continued to be vindicated and legitimised — as certain Midwestern Governors are now not — by his continued support, that he would be further, and crucially, glorified by an unexpected test of world circumstances ; and I try mean that in the least cynical way possible, although an element of cynical calculation is impossible to deny in such thoughts. And it has come to pass – without cynical calculation, without manufacture, without dishonourable action proferred as honourable. Interesting times – of the great variety. And to think – it is only a preview of the second term. For the first time ever, an apology for the atomic bombings – the most supremely atrocious single act in history ; the unspeakable, unmentionable stain upon our nation – is not inconceivable. Finally, the full equal protection under the law gauranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment : full civil equality under the law, including marriage. Concrete, substantial, watershed steps – such as is happening now – towards that world unity the necessity of which was first recognised in the aftermath of 6 and 9 August 1945. Ultimately, it is, indeed, not inconceivable that our Great Forty-Fourth may be, perhaps, eventually, the Great First : the Washington » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 27, 2011 @ 3:14 pm Now playing : He was riding his bicycle. He was forty-four years old. He had written one opera, one symphony, one concerto, and one string quartet. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century French music is one of the supreme jewels in the crown of human achievement. It is the Valinor of music ; its radiant extreme beauty is unlike anything in all of art. It is full of pieces for any of which I would trade the complete works of the German masters. This is one of them. Ernest Chausson : Symphony in B flat, first movement.
» Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 26, 2011 @ 5:56 pm Haha, I thought of asking you what you think the overall impact of khat is in Yemen. I got the impression from Megan K. Stack’s Every man in this village is a liar ( an absolutely gorgeous book, unlike anything I’ve read ) that everyone is pretty much whacked out all the time. » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 26, 2011 @ 5:37 pm Stick to Goodwill. The Salvation Army practices hate and forces prosetilyzation on the desperate. They harm people far more directly and viciously than any corporation ever could. » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 26, 2011 @ 5:30 pm The petition is to the international service providers who carry it. They are broadcasting Rwanda-like incitements to hunt down the opposition, and coded orders to loyalists. » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 26, 2011 @ 5:23 pm Thank you, I was just about to post that. They are broadcasting Rwanda-like incitements to hunt down the opposition, and coded orders to loyalists. » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 26, 2011 @ 5:20 pm Well, you know, “ radical ” means, well, you know . . . all those people are radicals, except for the ones who learn how to behave, like Allen West . . . » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 26, 2011 @ 3:17 pm Re your fly on the elephant, I found the bit about “ cutting off the funding for Libya ” to be the most shamelessly absurd part of Kucinich’s grandstanding. You are absolutely right, it’s just a drop of what’s already in the pipeline. » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 26, 2011 @ 3:10 pm What is a shiftless would-be plumber doing hanging around with an Anti-American Fascist and an Anti-American Domestic Terrorist? Curious . . . http://www.care2.com/causes/politics/blog/three-joes-and-an-anti-obama-action-committee/ » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 26, 2011 @ 1:45 pm Aw, and I liked “ bloviation ” . . . 🙁 » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 26, 2011 @ 1:41 pm You will find people posting “ and if they run, you can shoot them in the back ” in any thread about immigration on Yahoo. » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 26, 2011 @ 1:38 pm While I don’t know much of the details, I find our current situation in that regard analogous to the late 19th / early 20th century, when agitation over immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe — who were, horrors!, not only non-Anglo Saxon but also Catholic and Jewish ( Garry Wills in Head and heart states that the term » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 26, 2011 @ 1:21 pm I am trying to be conscious of a certain tendency to *****bot ( it was the only way to stay sane at HP ). But I’ve been wanting to post this all day, so what the hell. A reader comment on a good Timothy Egan post, ‘ In Defense of “ I’m a 62 year old Republican, and I cringed as I pulled the lever to help elect Obama. Young, high brow, intellectual, Chicago. Lots of questions. He is the best president we have had in my lifetime. He is not dithering, and we need to cut the gratuitous rhetoric. It plays into the hands of the far right ( eye of Newt…)who are the most self-serving, shallow political class in my lifetime. ” » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 25, 2011 @ 10:43 pm I did a drive-by today and plugged the Salon article, and my comment’s still up. 🙂 “ When I left (after the AOL buy out) I had more than a thousand fans and faves! When Arianna cashed us all out I left and quit. I am much happier now. I didn’t realize how negative the site was. It really did depress me. ” Indeed. » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 25, 2011 @ 10:28 pm Pah. I’m holding out for a free handgun with $100 in groceries. » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 25, 2011 @ 3:25 pm That’s a bit above my grasp of economics ( which is limited to Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans, the occasional Krugman column, and Michael Hiltzik in the LA Times ( who’s very good ) ), but I think I get the gist of it – does that boil down to Alan Greenspan’s “ flaw in the ideology ”, roughly speaking? And “ the generation of value through the semiotic exchange and transfer of immaterial assets ” – the no-discernible-abilities eight-to-ten-figure-income “ best and brightest ” trafficking in financial Betancourt’s outlook seems eerily reminiscent of Baudrillard and his simulacra in which “ it is no longer possible to locate the process of the real ” ( now there’s an unforgettable phrase ) – coincidental, presumably, but there is probably a deep connection somewhere. I’ve been learning, finally, to pay attention to Al Jazeera – they had Slavoj Žižek on last month, that was a blast! » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 25, 2011 @ 3:00 pm Well, given that he’s a cofounder of Color of Change, the organisation that called on AH to stop giving a platform to Breitbart’s race-baiting, I would imagine the relationship is a little frayed . . . » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 25, 2011 @ 1:06 pm So did I, I didn’t know there was a word for it! Well, I still don’t, but at least now I know there’s a word for the study of it. » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 25, 2011 @ 1:01 pm “ . . . our favorite new word is “agnotology.” According to the website WordSpy, it means “the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt,” a concept developed in recent years by two historians of science at Stanford University, Robert Proctor and his wife, Londa Schiebinger. Believing that global climate change is a myth is one example of the kind of ignorance agnotologists investigate. Or the insistence by the tobacco industry that the harm caused by smoking is still in dispute. Or the conviction that Barack Obama is a closet Muslim, and a radical one at that, who may not even be from America. Those first two illusions have been induced by big business in a cynical attempt to keep pumping profits from deadly pollutants, whether fossil fuels or nicotine. The third, dreamed up by fantasists of the right-wing fringe, is in its own way just as toxic and has been tacitly, sometimes audibly, encouraged by certain opponents of President Obama who would perpetuate any prevarication to further blockade his agenda and deny him and fellow Democrats reelection. None of them is true; rather, they fly in the face of those of us who belong to what an aide to George W. Bush famously called “the reality-based community [who] believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” ” http://www.salon.com/news/npr/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/03/25/moyers_winship_npr » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 25, 2011 @ 12:32 pm That’s disappointing to hear – I’m not up on the CAIR issue ( beyond knowing they are demonised in some quarters ), and don’t pay much attention to Boxer ( to me she’s just a typical unappealing politician who I suppose passably serves a purpose just by being a California Democrat, more or less ) ; but it is true that things connected to Palestine / Israel tend to elicit unfortunate positions from politicians. It’s a bit personally ironic for me to hear that about Durbin – as I originally commented, I was astonished by his record ( 100% ratings from all the right groups and 0% ratings from all the wrong ones, plus the DREAM Act, the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, and a number of very admirable positions), when in terms of the most general awareness he seems to just be one of those perennial “ names ” without anything in particular associated with it. And, more irony, one of the things that particularly impressed me was his ( apparently sincere and principled ) reversal of his position on abortion [ from anti- to pro-choice ]. I guess we have to hope he’s done it again. » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 25, 2011 @ 9:06 am Hooray! Heute Salon, auf Morgen die Welt! “ Hundreds of people — many of them idiots, frauds, and liars — have blogs at the HuffPo. ” Heehee! Take that, gunnut scumbag Martin Luther King defamer Dennis Santiago! “ ( Also there is apparently no prohibition on constant, practically obsessive race-baiting, but whatever. ) ( And obviously there is no prohibition whatsoever on spreading toxic bullshit about autism and other assorted crimes against science. ) ” Oooh, ouchies for Queen Bee, how sad . . . 🙁 . . . who, though, is still a lying twofaced dumpsterfull of pigshit . . . “ Andrew Brietbart’s ad hominem attack on Van Jones . . . violates the tenets of debate and civil discourse we have strived for since the day we launched. [ But publishing James O’Keefe’s hatchet job on Shirley Sherrod does not. ] As a result, we will no longer feature his posts on the front page. He is welcome to continue publishing his work on HuffPost provided it adheres to our editorial guidelines, as the two posts he published on HuffPost did — guidelines that include a strict prohibition on ad hominem attacks. Our decision today recognizes that placing posts on the front page [ such as Richard Grenell, Ken Blackwell, and Schmuley Boteach ] is an editorial call that elevates some posts over others, and is an indication of how seriously we take these judgment calls. ” [ So he’s not “ banned ”, why does article say he is? ] P. S. This post, of course, is a disgraceful lapse from my usual standards. I sincerely apologise to the PlanetPOV community, and promise that it will never, ever happen again. » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 24, 2011 @ 4:46 pm I don’t know what the five characteristics are offhand, but I imagine that is just a rule-of-thumb sort of thing. There really is no firm line between what is living and non-living ; if I’m not mistaken, it is debated whether viruses are alive. Prions, which cause kuru and mad cow disease, are single protein molecules which replicate. » Posted By For America and Roosevelt On March 24, 2011 @ 4:32 pmComments Posted By For America and Roosevelt
There’s been a clear message since his very first statement, followed by the weekly address ; it somehow seems as if part of the point of the speech was the fact of his having to repeat himself. I would like to think that at some point, something like an unspoken concensus will develop that it, after all, reflects poorly on the nation’s prestige to ignore the President.
Republican successors. So when I came across this recently, it was very striking.
I find it very interesting how he says “ Maybe he’s different with others ” – it seems very humane somehow, suggesting an effort at compassion ; perhaps something from his Quaker upbringing. I just found right now that Noam CHomsky called him “ the last liberal President ” ( ! ) – some of his policies would be unthinkably extreme Left today.
I watched the 1964 TV film of Hemingway’s The Killers, in which he plays one of the heavies ( it was his last major role ) ; and he has that look throughout. It is actually almost disturbing – it almost doesn’t seem like acting.
She won 28 delegates during the primaries and received 152 votes on the first ballot at the convention. There were three assassination attempts ( she was uninjured ).
Cowboys and Idiots
http://www.angelfire.com/co/COMMONSENSE/reagan.html
Dec. 10, 2003
I don’t recall seeing this before in the MSM.
In today’s column, Paul Krugman says the Republican Party is un-American. Not some small part of it, not some fleeting trend in it ; he says the Republican Party, itself, the whole thing, is un-American.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/opinion/28krugman.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212
and there’s an uproar? And he patiently explains our action to the nation again, and again, and will yet again – with no mention of crusades, or mushroom clouds, or “ bring it on ”?
of the New United States.
I have an excerpt I copied down I could post if you like, it’s a bit long though.
“ Judeo-Christian ” dates from the Eisenhower era, and signalled a then-new attitude of inclusion ) – led to the election of the Ku Klux Klan President, Calvin Coolidge ( among a string of our worst Presidents before G. W. Bush ; and so much for the wingnut talking point “ the KKK were Democrats”, incidentally ) and the closing of the borders with the immigration acts of the 1920s.
Having encountered first-hand talk of how our current immigrants “ are Catholic and they have the large families ” — so much for it being about economics — I know these attitudes are very much alive today.
‘ Dithering ’ ’ –
I do plan on staying away from there, it is just unhealthy. A comment on the Salon leapt out at me :
“ products ” . . . I have a lingering suspicion that in the deep background of all this is a sort of broad culture war wherein, insofar as the arts and sciences tend towards liberalism, there has been a concerted effort by the Right to assert an equal status for business, with business schools producing MBAs who couldn’t run a lemonade stand ( to borrow their disparagement for academics ), whole systems of largely meaningless jargon not coincidentally resembling crackpot pseudoscience
( Six Sigma might be an example, or anything to do with marketing, public relations, et cetera), and the assertion of business as the repository of all values
( you know, like freedom, morality, and so on ), along with a system of values that oh-so-conveniently accords prestige to standardisation, dumbing down, and the repetition of empty jargon. But I digress.
For awhile now I’ve thought of it terms of whether one operates on a basis of cognition and responding to reality as it is; or on the basis of an acquired ideology which is anti-cognitive and requires heavy filtering of reality ( and is unable to deal with most of it ).
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Good to remember when creationists say things like “ how could a cell spontaneously arise ”.
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