I was immediately suspicious of Steele when I caught the ad with him petting the puppy. Not that Republicans don't pet puppies, but for some reason it set off my BS detector. It was pretty funny when a couple of days later I caught the Cardin ad telling people that it wasn't even his puppy.
That Democrat/Republican blurring was present in his ads all along. The handouts take the cake though. His campaign had the audacity to claim that they weren't trying to be misleading.
The problem is that this leaves Allen with nothing to do but campaign for President until 2008.
And with that very graceful concession speech he made, he might actually have a shot, at least here in Virginia. That would have been gone gone gone in a long, drawn-out recount debacle. He made the only sensible tactical move he could have made.
Reading the sidelight on how conservatives get called liberals I had an inspiration about how liberals get called communists. If conservatives who criticize George Bush are "liberals" then real liberals who actually espouse political views that differ from the conservative agenda *and* criticize George Bush must be some kind of hitherto undiscovered branch of ultra-liberal that conservatives have had to invent (or repurpose) terms for.
This is what is called a "swing to the right" in national politics.
At least I heard this morning that Bush's approval rating is down to 30%, Congress's approval rating is down to 30% and 45% think that the Democrats should be in power. So maybe there's a light at the end of the tunnel.
The correllation between Marxism (or Communism since they mean the same thing in the right-wing dialect) and abortion or same-sex marriage is that the right disagrees with them. Since the US government in various incarnations did such a wonderful job of demonizing the Soviet Menace, Marxism and Communism have become synonymous with evil in the minds of people who care not to question their government's motives. Therefore, in the right-wing mind, if you are calling something Marxist, you are calling it an evil attack on the American (or in this case I suppose, Canadian) patriot. It's totally erroneous, but they don't care.
This argument is what first sold me on George Lakoff.
I also do lobbying for a living here in DC.
Faxing letters is one option. The other option that works is to hand-deliver letters sans envelopes. These can either be hand-delivered to individual offices (a fairly time-consuming option) or if people are willing to pay postage (and put the correct buildings and offices on the letters), they can be "mailed" from a little office in the basement of one of the House office buildings (a very quick option--done it many times). I say "mailed" because they're really just sorted as interoffice communications, but you have to pay postage if you don't work for Congress. I don't know if Health & Human Services has a similar operation (and consulting my Federal Staff Directory, the FDA is in Maryland), but finding out wouldn't be too terribly difficult.
Since I live in DC, I'd be willing to hand-deliver letters if people would rather do that than fax.
The Narcolepsy Association doesn't seem to have a huge Washington presence, but a quick Google turned up another association, The National Organization for Rare Disorders, that does seem to have a Washington lobbying presence, does work on narcolepsy and might be helpful: http://www.rarediseases.org/
I know someone who does drug research for a living and he brought up an interesting point after I referred him to this thread for his thoughts. It may have been brought up already, but I'm a bit pressed for time today and can't go back and reread to figure out whether I missed any comments over the weekend.
He raised the point that there may be some benefit to contacting the manufacturers of Cylert to have the medication relabeled and reapproved for narcolepsy patients. Apparently it is very rare for the FDA to reverse a decision to remove a medication from the market, but that it has been known to grant approval to a medication to treat a different condition, especially in cases where there are relatively few patients to monitor. We're not talking about Vioxx here. The law in that case allows for an emergency reapproval of a drug for a different condition, which happens very much more quickly than an initial approval of a drug.
Obviously there are advocates who must be more aware of FDA policies and procedures than I am, but it's just another thought for those who might be interested in writing some letters. Perhaps the manufacturers would be more inclined to go through the time and expense if they knew they had a ready constituency of concerned people who would back them up in their efforts.
Duh, duh. Read the rest of the comments before you post, Alison dear. Sorry for the duplication of effort, Teresa.
The reason why Cheney wants the CIA to be able to legally torture prisoners is pretty clear: they already have and someone has evidence that he personally sanctioned it, which could lead to war crimes prosecution of himself and/or the President under international law.
It's just a guess.
Lucy: Very good point. Slumming=lack of respect. It's not the only way to have a lack of respect, but it's certainly one of them. And you got at the logical issue I was having too--taking two extremes and disregarding a middle ground.
I "meet" the most intelligent people here. Teresa and Patrick are so nice to let us come play.
Ace: What I'm saying is that not all values are of the "airy philsophical debates" variety. Do you go to a baseball game for "airy philisophical debates"? If you don't, is going to a baseball game then slumming? I don't think so.
But then, if you normally attend polo matches and then you go to a baseball game to laugh while all the silly little boys in their silly little white hats run around in circles, is that slumming? Yeah, I think it probably is.
By the way, you need a firmer grasp of logic if you're going to try to produce an argument here that people will respect. You can't argue that strip bars aren't "sociological nature walks" and then turn around and try to argue that they should have "airy philosophical discourse" in order to have value. No one here is trying to argue that a stripper doin' her thang with a pole is modern art (although, um, hi, actually some of them really are pretty talented).
We're saying that for someone who isn't interested in art or philosophy or "airy discourse" (or even for some people who are, like the politicians I mentioned above), it's just a hangout (albeit with tits), like your local sports bar or martini lounge or wherever it is that you like to discuss whatever you like to discuss with your friends and therefore definitely not slumming.
So, once again: Who doesn't slum at a strip bar? Who considers going to, or working at, a strip bar to be an elevating endeavor?
Plenty of people. I had a friend in college who worked as a stripper to pay her way through our very expensive private school. Not only was she not slumming because she valued the bar as a place where she could earn enough money to feed herself and pay her tuition, she habitually came home with stories of political leaders from both sides of the aisle lunching in her establishment. They weren't slumming either. They were having lunch to the accompaniment of pretty, dancing, naked girls. They weren't being smug or snide or arrogant. They placed value on naked girls who were willing to dance for them and then gave them money to express that appreciation.
If your sole experience of strip clubs is bachelor parties, you probably think all attendance is slumming, but for someone who regularly goes or works there, it's just their personal hangout. Girls who don't get something out of stripping, either in the form of money or attention or both, don't strip very long. I don't know any strippers who do it for the ironic, so-they-can-giggle-about-it-later reason.
Again, just because you can't see the value doesn't mean there isn't one. They might be mercencary, self-serving, morally reprehensible or disgusting values in your opinion, but that doesn't mean that the experience isn't in some way "elevating".
Wow, I hadn't realized that Lucy was pontificating. I thought she was giving a very well-considered and well-written definition of what people mean when they use the term "slumming". Her list of the features of slumming work as well with a gospel church as a strip club if the people attending the festivities have an I-am-above-this-but-isn't-this-fun-in-a-seedy (or campy or post-hip) sort-of-way attitude without attempting to have an understanding for what the real participants in a place are deriving from the experience.
By the way, Lucy, slumming works with people in addition to places--dating a cowboy because he might be fun to show off to your friends, for example--if you want to add to your very cogent definition. The word is used in this context in Dirty Dancing.
I don't know how many here went to fairly conservative east coast top-25 universities in the last ten years (or spent time in the halls of Congress lately), but if you had, you would have encountered many Karols and many Jessicas. I'm afraid it's a bit of an epidemic. They tend to be bright, well-educated, beautiful, charming and have figured out that men in certain circles find such bright, educated, beautiful and charming women threatening. So they espouse the viewpoints of the monied, conservative white men who hold the reins of power, knowing that this (and perhaps flashing a tanned, toned leg) will get them in the proverbial door. It's a whole generation of Ann Coulters.
The sorts of conservatives that Karol, Jessica and Yaron are definitely aren't culturally clueless or uptight. They just find it personally advantageous to appear so, when it is convenient. For those keeping score, that's the hypocritical part. They can dress provocatively, yet object to sex ed being taught in school; they can call TNH a feminist in a mocking tone, yet take full advantage of the cultural changes people of her political stripe and her generation have wrought; object to high taxes when "Gluttony is so in this year" (priceless). Having their cake and eating it too; enjoying the thrill yet looking down their noses, just as other commenters have said, not only in strip clubs, but in life.
Okay, so I know that AOL is not the best of news sources and I'm currently sorting through my own Katrina-related disaster so I haven't had time to check the transcript. (Remember Bush saying that all non-essential travel is currently out for federal employees--yeah, bad when you have an independent meeting for federal employees that was supposed to be in New Orleans and got moved to Little Rock that is now going to lose a whole lot of money.)
from AP, via AOL.com:
http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050927015209990001&ncid=NWS00010000000001
Brown in his opening statement said he had made several "specific mistakes" in dealing with the storm, and listed two.
One, he said, was not having more media briefings.
As to the other, he said: "I very strongly personally regret that I was unable to persuade Gov. Blanco and Mayor Nagin to sit down, get over their differences, and work together. I just couldn't pull that off."
A thousand people died and he thinks the biggest problem was that they didn't have enough media briefings? Because talking to reporters would have saved the thousand-some people who died, right? And it would have gotten food and proper facilities to the Superdome, right?
He doesn't regret being incompetant, he just regrets not having greater control over the spin.
Have you guys seen the comments Colin Powell made about race and Katrina this morning?
from CNN.com:
[...] He said he did not think that race was a factor in the slow response, but that many of those unable to leave New Orleans in time were trapped by poverty which disproportionately affects blacks. [...]
"I don't think it's racism, I think it's economic," Powell said. "But poverty disproportionately affects African-Americans in this country. And it happened because they were poor."
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/09/katrina.powell.reut/index.html
Patrick, I don't think either you or Will are wrong. Racism is an issue in this country and poverty is an issue in this country. The way they link up is that in the Katrina fiasco, much of the population of New Orleans is poor and much of the poor in New Orleans is black. Those are facts.
What we need to address is not why did Bush ignore the blacks, but why did Bush ignore the poor (Will). Oh, and by the way, why is it that so many blacks are poor (Patrick)? And, finally, why did Bush ignore anyone, poor, black, Democratically-inclined or anything else being put forward as a reason for the lack of response. They're all Americans, he is charged with protecting Americans and he failed. We need to be talking about all of it.
Things like racism and poverty are thrown into sharp relief in disaster because we have now seen what the consequences of ignoring poverty in this country are. And thanks to Katrina visuals we've been given of poor blacks slogging through polluted floodwater, it's hard to ignore the fact that race is a major factor in poverty--in New Orleans as well as in the rest of the country. Both of those hard questions need to be asked and it will suck if they get ignored in the face of the current problem.
And the current problem is failure. Bush or FEMA or Homeland Security or Congress failed in providing a way, regardless of race, wealth or political party, to get people to safety in the event of a real emergency. They failed, having acknowledged a problem in the levee system, to fix that system before the disaster occurred.
We do need to be talking about race and we do need to be talking about poverty and it is our duty as liberals to make people understand that poor isn't about collecting welfare, it's about not having a car to evacuate when you're told to and not wanting to evacuate because what if you could have saved your meager possessions and weren't there to do it. And race isn't about stealing jobs from white people via affirmative action, it's being predisposed to a life of poverty because you have fewer educational opportunities, no one in your family has ever made it out of the New Orleans slums and people being afraid to let you into their city because people of your skin color are being demonized as criminals.
This disaster has exposed the seedy underbelly of American society, but it has nothing to do with shooting at relief workers or looting. The toll of ignoring poverty and ignoring the role race plays in poverty in this country is American life, or more importantly, human life. Poverty kills, and not always in the ways people might expect. And it isn't fair or reasonable that anyone in a civilized society should be so poor that it kills them. I am not big enough to make sure that no one in this country is that poor, but the government is and should be and that, as far as I am concerned, is its primary function.
The rich and even the middle of us can and do take care of themselves. I learned this afternoon that a dear (yes, white) friend of mine lost her house on the Mississippi coast and I don't mean to diminish her loss in any way, but she is holed up in a hotel in Jackson and she has lawyer friends who will help her get her insurance settlement and yeah, this is awful, but she has options and help. I don't think too many black welfare moms have insurance settlements coming. Knowing her, my friend would say the same.
The most important lesson for me in this disaster has been that no matter how you look at it, the policies of this Administration through Iraq, through neglecting the infrastructure and through looting the social safety net and emergency programs in favor of their rich buddies, brought this result of Katrina on New Orleans. And that is frankly criminal.
I'm sorry this ended up being so long.
Taste has nothing to do with it. They don’t want people looking at pictures of the helpless and pitiable dead.
More of the same. The Administration did not allow reporters to take pictures of the bodies coming home in flag-draped coffins from Iraq either.
Dead people are the ultimate evidence. If they don't show it, it isn't there, right? Right?
Stefan:
If it has to be fresh, I get my bunny meat at a butcher out in the country that caters to hunters, but they stock it frozen at Whole Foods. Also, almost any competant grocery store butcher can order it for you frozen, but they usually need 2-4 days advance notice and some sort of interest in customer service.
If you can't find bunny meat near you though, email me and I'll tell you a story that will make you not want it.
Can I just have one CD? Anything with meowing electronic cats or barking electronic dogs gets the boot. I hate that stupid CD.
Otherwise, bring it on. I love Christmas music and would play it year-round if it were socially acceptable. In fact, I have a CD of Newfoundland Christmas music that I do play year-round, but it doesn't really sound like Christmas music unless you listen very carefully.
Actually, I'm not so sure he's stupid. I mean, look at what he says. He says that he got the message through the last election that Americans don't want gays to get married and probably really just don't like gays at all. And he's going to hitch his wagon to that star. He got a meeting with the President, after all. How many of us have had meeting with the President lately? Or ever?
Sounds like he's just as smart as can be, except for the whole gay-hating thing, which is pretty ignorant.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2006 | 7 |
| 2005 | 11 |
| 2004 | 8 |
| 2003 | 7 |
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