There is a popular belief that Mohawks have no fear of heights. Though part Mohawk, I apparently did not get the part that is fearless about heights: I am terrified of heights. But, I believe a person should not be ruled by fear and so never let that fear control me. This explains how I ended up falling off the roof and tearing my quadriceps tendon, thus showing that too much philosophy can bust you up.
Michael LaBossiere, Philosophy Professor
Well. That was quite a show, don’t you think?
Some thoughts, in no particular order.
Carly Fiorina has a titanium backbone, and knows how to behave in public. I like her.
Planned Parenthood did not deserve the trashing it received (including, disappointingly, from Fiorina). Multiple state investigations have established that the organization does business ethically, and that the videos released by the so-called Center for Medical Progress were heavily edited to create a false impression.
Watching those videos, I found myself taken aback by the sometimes cavalier attitude of the Planned Parenthood representatives. Then I remembered that every profession has its sarcasms, its gallows humor based on public misimpressions of who they are and what they do for a living. Civil engineers give themselves ulcers fighting with developers in order to maintain environmental and construction standards — and then make jokes about their project to pave the Garden of Eden. Lawyers are overwhelmingly an ethical group of people who work hard for their clients; anybody who can’t point to at least one lawyer with real gratitude for their services has lived a boring, disengaged life — and then they make jokes about how they’re going to the courthouse to fleece Ma and Pa Kettle out of their last pig. So, too, doctors and, probably, medical researchers. I don’t know that’s what informed the remarks about hot cars, but I suspect so; and let’s not forget — every investigation has found Planned Parenthood blameless of wrongdoing.
Jeb Bush is w-a-a-a-y too gentlemanly to ever successfully mix it up with slime like The Donald; he needs to ignore Trump, noticing him only over a downcast nose.
Incidentally, I think Bush is right to support Common Core, and I think he has a realistic attitude toward immigration. His just-released tax plan is too-heavy with tired and disproved cliches, however, and his shabby conduct during the Schiavo grotesquerie remains problematic to me.
It was embarrassing to watch the candidates mournfully agree that the Democrats just don’t want to solve the immigration problem, because neither do Republicans or the great bulk of the American people.
Do we really not know that, since before the founding, America has fed itself on slave and near-slave labor? Have we forgotten Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame broadcast?
Watch it now, then.
What America wants is cheap invisible labor that makes no demands on its social safety net, and that doesn’t slow-down the checkout line at Wal*Mart while the clerk scurries to find a translator.
Those days are over, folks. Over.
I incline toward a generous immigration policy and stringently applied expectations. We should be happy to welcome anybody with gumption enough to pick-up the family and travel to a remote part of the world to create a new life — those are the kind of people who enrich both our culture and our wallets. But we should be no-nonsense about demanding that immigrants learn about their new home, uphold its ideals, and obey its laws.
We ought to face the reality that we’re not going to round-up and evict all those who are here illegally. And let’s be clear — it isn’t just because it’s hard and expensive to do. The American people simply won’t stand for it when they learn it means the sweet old lady down the street that you can always touch for emergency babysitting, the guy who was the first neighbor to show-up with a chainsaw when that tree hit the house, that well-mannered kid in your son’s cub scout troop, that handsome young couple at church, that always helpful clerk at the bank. It isn’t going to happen, and the candidates ought to stop their blustery howling and get serious.
Community and military service in lieu of unpaid public obligations and taxes? Yeah, something like that.
The only competitive ticket the Republicans have is Fiorina/Bush. Even a boring, insincere hack like Hilary Clinton will trounce any other combo.
Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great.
— President Obama (@POTUS) September 16, 2015
If you don’t already know the story, a Muslim kid down in Texas built a clock at home and brought it to school as part of a science project. Just so’s you know, he was wearing a NASA t-shirt, which faculty swiftly discerned was merely a clever ploy to misdirect.
Lights, sirens, half-a-dozen burly cops because — HEY! — when a moozlim shows-up with an electronic thingy in his backpack, it can mean only one thing: ISIS has arrived to wreak medieval vengeance on the good, decent, godly people of Texas.
The kid was arrested and led out of the building in handcuffs. I hope he take the Prez up on his offer and, once again, good for him for making it. I hope, too, he sticks with science and gets out of the numbskull south just as quick as he can.
An Iowa radio host consoles himself with the thought that those conservatives who didn’t rally to Kim Davis are going to suffer especially when they get to hell.
“Beware of those in a culture war who write, you know, really principled and highly intellectual thought pieces for conservative or Christian outlets, and then in a time of crisis and confrontation like this, they say, oh this is not the right hill to die on,” he fumed. “What they really mean, Bob, is there’s never a right time to stand for anything nor is there ever any hill to die on. And these are the people, they’re going to hold the jail cell open for us when the Marxists throw us inside too.”
He added that his only comfort was that those conservatives are on their way to Hell: “It reminds me of the famous quote from Dante, that the hottest places in Hell are reserved for these kind of cowardly quislings. And I’ll just flat-out say it on the radio, the mere thought of that comforts me. The mere thought of that statement being true comforts me, because it confirms that God is just and they have received their award in full.”
As I said last week, there is an upside to the Kim Davis flap: No clearheaded adult can have any excuse whatever for failing to understand how ignorant and malicious the evangelical right actually is. They have finished themselves as an important political force.
How can our country function when one half of the ruling political class bases its strategies and policies on nothing but the phantom voices in their heads? — Gary Legum
I agreed when Bobby Jindal said the Republicans need to stop being the stupid party, and I was disappointed when I learned he wasn’t sincere.
You’ve said a lot of stupid and repellent things, Mr. Trump, but your comments about Carly Fiorina in the course of your Rolling Stone interview were intolerably crass. You’ve no business in the White House, and you’ve no business at the dinner table in the home of decent people.
Kim Davis is not Joan of Arc or, even, Gomer Pyle. She is a grievously troubled person being cynically exploited by amoral predators with deeply un-American ambitions.
To demand that America lives up to the secular ideals of its founding does not constitute an attack on religious freedom; it is the only workable, not-bloody defense of religious freedom.
We need to stop indulging morons and pretending that creationism is intellectually respectable, and initiate a Sputnik-like focus on STEM education.
America’s middle-class was built by the unions who, at often terrible personal cost, made living wages and health care available to almost everyone.
Governor Walker, explain yourself.
The Affordable Care Act advances the unions’ work and makes health care available to the working poor, and we have disgraced ourselves by our relentless opposition and expressed determination to end it. It will probably need a generation of legislative tinkering to make our implementation of universal health care a smooth-running machine, and we shouldn’t hesitate to make the needed improvements. But it is here to stay, and all sane and decent people should be glad for that.
For almost 8-years we have single-mindedly devoted ourselves to frustrating the operation of government, at times actually abandoning our stated position and changing course when President Obama offered to meet us halfway — as if we had no aim but to destroy him personally, as if we had no policy but hatred of the president, and our recklessness has irrevocably changed the lives of millions of Americans for the worse. Seriously: We need to stop being assholes.
Throughout the history of this party, there has always been a faction of radical right-wing ideologues tugging at us. They opposed Reconstruction, favoring punishment of the South following the Civil War; have we forgotten who demanded the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, and why? They opposed Teddy Roosevelt when he built the National Park System, they considered Dwight Eisenhower a communist, they considered Richard Nixon a traitor for opening a relationship with China, they considered George Bush-I a traitor because Desert Storm stopped before reaching Baghdad.
They run around spouting pieties, but are animated by nothing but feverish malice. For almost 150-years we kept them out and on the fringes, but Karl Rove and Bush-II gave them the key to the front door. We need to take it away and change the locks. Woe is us if we don’t.
