Julia may be right.
Declan has been known to be taken in before and since, but sometimes he is alarmist for the right reason.
They are counting the ballots in secret. How do we know they will get them counted accurately? How do we know they didn't vote for who they wanted to in all those other elections where Saddam "won". Why should we trust this election any more than we trusted those?
I'm getting scared. My mother wants me to come home for a visit and all I can think of is the terrible things that could happen.
(I have to admit that in this context, I think "sissy" is kinda funny, but I do prefer that we remember: W stands for Wimp.)
I would like to take this opportunity to remind Chris that we have no evidence that 80% of Americans didn't vote against the little wimp, either.
I'm with Emma. I don't think the Christian right has been engaged in social justice at all. They aren't adding new programs, they are just demanding that they can either evangelize while performing the old ones (in some cases programs that Catholic and mainstream Protestant communities were already performing without the evangelizing) or they derail existing programs and divert their money to commercial enterprises.
If you want to stop abortion, the first thing you do is find out why women want abortions. When you learn that there is a direct relationship between rates of abortion and economics, you try to improve the economics. Banning abortions, in that context, isn't social justice, it's inhumane.
It's like why I defend pornographers and pornography. I never cared about porn. I wanted to know why sex crime happens because I wanted to stop it. It doesn't take 25 years of study to learn that sexual repression has a direct connection to rape and other sex crime, including sexual abuse of children. That's one of the first things you learn once you start studying sex crime. And the next thing you learn is that an obsession with punishing people is entirely unhelpful. It protects no one and just creates more sex criminals. So if you care about preventing sex crime, you absolutely do not run around trying to make people feel sexually guilty and repressed. Only two kinds of people think shame and repression and punishment are the answer: people too lazy and ignorant to bother to find out where the problem actually arises, and people who are more interested in repression than in preventing sex crime.
The administration and its minions don't actually give 15 billion additional dollars to fighting AIDS, they just say they will do so and divert what resources they do contribute to far more expensive plans that - surprise, surprise - benefit the pharmaceutical industry while by-passing the experienced and dedicated communities that have already been addressing the problem. Given that these are the same people who loudly announced that AIDS was sent by God as a punishment, it is unlikely they have any intention to treat or cure it.
Evangelicals who think it's more important to evangelize than to ameliorate poverty and disease are not charitable or Christian, they're just self-righteous. Every school child learns the story of the Good Samaritan. How did these people fail to take it's message? The Samaritan did not first demand conversion before he would help someone in need. The whole point is that the name of one's god or faith or tribe is far less important than one's works. The faith-based initiatives of the White House are not about the works (which were already allowed in law), they are about the evangelizing. If we are not supposed to want government's help for simple, material things, why should we allow politicians to "help" us in evangelizing?
The so-called social justice of the Christian right is about forcing their views on others and punishing those who don't agree with them. It's about preventing abortion to "save" babies and then allowing them to die of starvation and disease. And then terrorizing the rest of us with the prospect of converting or being similarly cut off from the means of survival.
If that's what "social justice" has come to mean, it is less than worthless.
Schmitt was right; Matthew has just been conned.
And not only that, but they didn't even proofread the byline:
By David C. Rapoport, David C. Rapoport, professor
I am grateful to Mr. Rapoport and his editors for once again making me feel like both my memory and my proofreading skills are not comparatively pathetic after all.
I've never met anyone who was against globalization per se. I've met a lot of people who were against globalization the way we've been doing it - globalized privatization without globalized labor standards.
I'm actually in favor of the sorts of protests that don't actually involve going too far out of your way. I like the "Great American Shout-Out" idea of everyone going to their window just before Bush's speech and shouting, "Feggeddabout it!" and keeping lights going all night and candle-lit vigils and stuff like that, but I don't like the idea of lots of people marching through the streets or anything else that involves confronting the cops.
I am also in favor of people taking into account such things as what they are physically up to (I'm no longer young and strong and up to marching), and the requirements of their profession, and stuff like that.
So I have no problem with P&T not marching.
But I don't understand the idea that someone who thought he should march has decided not to because P&T aren't going. I can think of a number of reasons not to march, but "Some people who I think should march aren't going to" is not one of them.
I love Will Shetterly's books, and had one of my favorite all-time dinners with him, Emma, Mike Ford, and Rob Hansen. Nevertheless, I do not understand the logic of voting for third-party candidates when in our system the result will be that everyone ends up pretending the result means the Democratic Party is "too far left."
The Democrats need to win big, and move much farther to the left first, before any more democratizing steps can be expected. It's pretty silly talking about changing the entire system when we can't even eliminate the bias in the Electoral College toward "red states", or even the Electoral College itself.
As someone who also lives under a parliamentary system and watched for years as a leader who 60% of the voters had rejected ran the country so far to the right that eventually a supposedly left-wing candidate was able to win even though he campaigned as being just like her, I'm not all that thrilled with the idea of 3rd-party candidates being able to wield significant power. Perhaps under a different voting system, such as instant run-off or something else, but not in the first-past-the-post system that both Britain and America use.
What we have in America is a situation in which only Bush or Kerry can win. If you think Bush should win, your best option is to vote for Bush. If you want Bush out of the White House, your best option is to vote for Kerry. Those are your choices. And by now it should be clear that allowing Bush to remain in the White House vastly reduces our chances of having better choices next time. Or even having a next time.
No, Tony, the whole country has not moved to the right. The public consistently polls to the left of both parties on the issues.
And if you were watching the speeches last night, you might have noticed that the real party leadership was up there kicking ass, saying what everyone in their right mind already knows, and talking the liberal talk - but talking it the way ordinary Americans understand "moderate" and classic American values. I wish I'd actually made little marks on my notepad every time someone mentioned healthcare, for example.
The DLC itself is looking pretty sickly these days now that Al Gore has completely jumped ship - and look at that man go! That's the guy who won the 2000 election! And a lot of people know it. In 2000 his DLC buddies were whining because his speech at the convention "veered left" but that speech gained him the lead in the polls after he'd had a 15% deficit. And after what happened during the Selection, Al went off and grew his beard for a few months and came back stripped of the remainder of that DLC "caution".
I keep getting the feeling that the rest of the DNC is starting to get the realization that the distance between "the base" and the real center is actually infinitesimal and that "playing to the base" and playing to ordinary voters is the same thing. As long as we can keep them paying attention to that fact, we have a very good chance of moving the party back on track - not merely "to the left", but back to reality.
Erik, you need to listen to some Fats Waller. I am serious. Like I told Patrick, it's like taking drugs, except that it works.
Also: Look, the right-wing spent years infiltrating everything from the most local level and working their way up. The left has never bothered to do that - they sit on the sidelines and gripe for four years, then they gripe some more when the nominee turns out to be someone they can't fall in love with. That's how the DLC types have managed to take and keep control of the party. It's been going on all my life. No one runs for anything, no one works for anyone local, they just wait 'til the last minute, or they back someone for the national ticket in the primaries and when that guy loses they take their ball and go home.
If we want to win, we have to want to win all year long every year, and we have to be prepared to start from the bottom. Concentrating only on presidential elections is precisely what kills the possibility of real grass-roots candidates winning national elections. It forces a top-down structure on the whole system.
And it's why Ralph Nader blew it a long time ago - not by running in 2000, but by failing to run for local office before that. He could have been in Congress any time he wanted to, but oh, no, he had to run for president.
And the kind of people who just echo his rhetoric are supporting the same mistake. Yes, the national party bites, but it bites because we've just sat back and left it in the hands of people who bite.
It should be in the hands of people who listen to Fats Waller.
Matt, the reason it doesn't translate into overwhelming Democratic victories is because Democrats don't generally mention it. Single-payer can't be called a Democratic policy until the Democrats make it one. Mostly, they haven't had the nerve.
I thought "God helps those who help themselves." Silly me.
Meanwhile, Claire, take heart, and listen to a lot of Fats Waller. (Also, the Rascals' "Ray of Hope" is good.) It's the price of liberty, you know.
Aw, Kip, this is how we stay sane. I have been so freaked out all week even my jokes don't feel like jokes.
[breathy] I need you, baby. [breathy]
I would just like to say that I have quite enjoyed this thread.
Want a job? Pledge allegiance to the Ba’ath party. Want an apartment, a car, etc? Show loyalty.
And George Bush was green with envy, too.
(I hear Democrats are still allowed to work for small left-wing publications. Or Wal-Mart.)
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| 2005 | 4 |
| 2004 | 32 |
| 2003 | 13 |
| 2002 | 19 |
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