for rich people and rich corporations, investments are the extra money they gamble with. For most working citizens, the only real capital accumulations they manage in their lives are paying off the mortgages on their houses and saving for retirement.
Actual quote from the September issue of Kiplinger's Personal Finance:
Q: Can I afford financial advice?
A: You don't have to be rich to get your questions answered. For a couple hundred dollars, you can find out whether you have the right investment mix or if you're saving enough for retirement. For $1000 to $2000, you can get more comprehensive advice.
I look forward to the day when I can afford to plop down a grand or two for financial advice. Because last I checked, having that sort of disposable cash is pretty damned close to what I'd call "rich."
(My subscription to Kiplinger's is free, incidentally, and worth every penny).
PJ Evans -- the bad news is that Scholastic's yanking of the materials is apparently temporary.
It gets better.
Here's the full text of his speech.
There are lots of highlights, but every time I read Rummy calling Guantanamo Bay "arguably the best run and most scrutinized detention facility in the history of warfare," I collapse in a gigglefit and can't get to the end.
Lizzie, that's where Avedon's comments about the media are dead on. Bush's campaign managed the media brilliantly, getting them to paint a pre-debate image of Bush as being less intelligent than a chimp. This accomplished two things: first, it allowed them to then play their "media bias" card, as if the spoon-fed media (who dutifully reported the bias story) were ever in a position to even think for themselves. Second, once Bush spoke more intelligently than a chimp, it allowed them to play it as a "victory" for Bush, because he wasn't supposed to even be able to string complete sentences together.
There's a reason that Rove has replaced Ailes when we talk about Republican strategists who lack moral compasses.
Avedon:
Frankly, I watched the campaign too. And if Gore wasn't as bad as the Repubs say he is now, I watched him utterly blow it in the debates (which, for better or for worse, have a huge impact), appearing to go in with almost no coaching on how to actually talk and be likeable (something that, as recent movies have shown, he's more than capable of). Likewise, I watched him distance himself from Clinton at every opportunity, something that only served to reinforce the idea that Clinton had done anything wrong in the first place.
I'm not saying it's the only thing worth looking at in the 2000 election (in fact, my original comment was that there were multiple factors in Gore's loss), and it doesn't excuse what Bush and his cronies did. But it certainly does mean that Gore and his campaign team have to at least look at themselves in the mirror and recognize that they share some of the blame.
Using a sports analogy, it's like blaming Bill Buckner entirely for the Red Sox losing Game Six of the '86 World Series, and not crediting the earlier error by Dwight Evans or the "pitching" of Schiraldi.
Martin:
Not that I disagree, but (as lots of folks, Michael Moore included, have pointed out), if Nader hadn't shot his torpedoes at the Dems, and if Gore hadn't run a campaign that was half-assed at best, Bush wouldn''t have been able to steal it (or, at the least, he would have had to work a lot harder for it).
I don't think I've ever seen another band do so much with kitchen appliances and a terrible case of plumber's crack.
“It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase ‘under God,’” he said.
Well, sure. That might have something to do with the brainwashing, don't you think?
As far as the Ken Stevens of the world are concerned, most of the words that come to mind to describe him and his ilk are uttered with great frequency on Deadwood
Wait, so Michael "global warming's a myth" Crichton's full of it? Say it ain't so!
On the "us and them" front, Patton Oswalt has a wonderful routine in which he talks about how shocked he is whenever he meets a Bush supporter and the guy turns out to be someone making $30K a year. He eventually ends up comparing such people to Michael Damien groupies. I wish I had a transcript of it (or, better yet, an audio file), as it's dead on (if not exactly obscenity-free).
I'm tempted to rip Tufts (one of the top thirty universities in the USA, according to whatever dubious formula US News uses) for letting someone like Blickstein graduate, but I think I should really rip them for letting him matriculate. The stuff you ripped him for is stuff he should have mastered in high school.
I'm amused by the fact that he's set up all these blogs, but he hasn't bothered changing the default link Blogger provides, thus leading to two "Edit-me" links and a link to Google News on his various blogs.
I also found his reading blog rather amusing -- a few legit business books, a bunch of books on direct marketing, and the one-two punch of The Prayer of Jabez and The Book of Mormon.
Sure enough, next thing you know there’s all these jerks from the New Jersey suburbs driving in over the George Washington Bridge, looking to score.
Let ‘em buy drugs in their own neighborhoods, sez I.
Damned Bridge and Tunnel People!
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|---|---|
| 2006 | 12 |
| 2005 | 1 |
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