The condition of man… is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.
To be educated, a person doesn’t have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life.
Thomas More
Can you say AN/PDR-27R? ALPHA-NOVEMBER-PAPA-DELTA-ROMEO-TWO-SEVEN-ROMEO?
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Where have you gone, Carlos Estevez?
A nation turns its lowly eyes to you.
Woo woo woo.
What’s that you say, Carlos Estevez?
Tigerblood will burn away your soul,
lol lol lol!
lol lol lol!
This is an area of Charlie’s expertise. Winning. What does a vulgarian like Sheen mean when he talks about Winning? Only the most crass satisfaction of his most immediate and unexamined desires, as we know. Winning has nearly killed him but only nearly so. Mr Sheen, carry on, as the stubborn reprobate whoremonger has nothing on the nation at large nor the holders and seekers of our highest offices. Recall that Nancy Pelosi spoke for every Democrat in the country and many non-Democrats when she suggested that those irksome Constitutional requirements of this or that were to be overcome with polevaults or HALO drops; whatever it takes. The only important thing? Winning. And win they did. The contest was also the prize. Obamacare we call it though Obama and his hordes do not care for that name. Whether it is the man or the act that is slandered never is explained but they won. Through the most delicate acts of chicanery and treachery, they won. Despite the single voice of objection, they won. And we won. We Americans won an advance into the modern world, as it was said. Did you not know how America lagged behind the balance of humanity? It is true. Until this usurpation and corruption America was a global and historical disgrace; a moral slug-a-bed compared to prodigies in fairness and prosperity like Cuba. Like China. If the goal of the American Care Act, the true legal name of Obamacare, was to bring us closer to these states in our medicine and finances then truly it is a stunning victory. [Read more →]
The Island Hopping Campaign has been a wild success. Romunist advances have swept through the distant outposts of Guam, the US Virgin Islands and American Samoa which were left undefended. Only Puerto Rico produced some mild resistance from Rickist forces, crushed with the tried strategy of Divide and Scavenge. It may be a hard sell to blame malign and invidious Division for Mitt’s seventy-five point blowout. After all, how could one possibly get three-fourths of anything without smoothing over existing rifts and gently sweeping together the available bits? Such objections assume that Mitt Romney follows the Geneva Conventions. Nothing of the kind. Mitt went nuclear. Rick, that dope, never had a chance. He played it straight, going off to Puerto Rico for the old elbow-rubbing style of politics that is standard from Dicksville Notch down to Eureka, California. Taking on one of the main questions for our fellow Americans in the territory of Puerto Rico, the pasty but Catholic candidate said that any admission of that territory into the Union was contingent on English becoming the primary language of governance. It is unlikely that Team Santorum could be ignorant of the controversy and its potential for blowback. It is a century old. Only a seventh of Puerto Rico is fluent in English. For Crackologists, no es bueno, especially when Romney took the opportunity to declare that he was a-okay with Spanish being the chief language of the 51st State. [Read more →]
CORRECTION: IN MY ORIGINAL PIECE, I REFERRED TO MR. ZIMMERMAN AS A “WHITE GUY.” MR. ZIMMERMAN IS BEING DEFENDED AS BEING OF MIXED DESCENT, WITH BOTH HISPANIC AND ANGLO PARENTS. ACTUALLY, GIVEN THE CONTEXT, I FIND THAT EVEN MORE TRAGIC AND DON’T THINK IT CHANGES THAT MUCH. WHILE READING SOME MORE OF THE COVERAGE, IT BECAME OBVIOUS THAT WHAT LOOK LIKE PUBLIC STREETS EITHER AREN’T IN GATED COMMUNITIES OR IT’S NOW OK FOR LOCAL TWITS TO DRIVE AROUND LIKE THE GUY WITH NO SHIRT IN TRAILER PARK BOYS AND BUG PEOPLE, FOLLOWED BY SHOOTING THEM WHICH IS A STRETCH THAT JC TREMBLAY HADN’T QUITE REACHED. YET…
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born. –WB Yeats
When did Florida become Ulster or Pretoria 20 years ago?
When I say the name Trayvon Martin, does it mean anything to you?” Melissa Harris-Perry asked her MSNBC audience on Saturday. “If it doesn’t, it should.”
Harris-Perry then took some time to explain who Trayvon Martin is: a 17-year-old, unarmed black teenager who wasallegedly shot and killed by a man in Florida in late February, after the man saw him walking down a street and thought he looked suspicious. The case has attracted substantial attention, in part because the man, George Zimmerman, has admitted to shooting Martin but has not been arrested or charged with any crime.
I enjoy listening to Melissa’s work and discussions with her guests. I’m not sure why she was denied promotion to full professor at Princeton – They have a quota on attractive women, Black, Liberal Political Scientists who get opinion gigs on MSNBC and PBS? They still have investments in slavery? Paul Krugman scares them – but their loss is Tulane’s, the nation’s, and MSNBC’s gain. I was steaming over the Trayvon Martin situation anyway, and her commentary pushed a lot of buttons.
Usually at this time of year, I’m writing something about the Irish, or Ireland or Catholicism. I’ve been following An Problacht, (The Republic) and watching Rugby on both BBC and The Rugby Channel. Caught a brief bit of Young Cassidy last night on the way out to a very non-Gaelic supper that did include roast beef and cabbage. I wore a dark green t-shirt, a tweed jacket and a plaid scarf. I looked something like Rod Taylor in the damn movie. I saw some wild pictures of Shane McGowan looking like a punch-drunk old man and heard a bit of the Rocky Road to Dublin. I’ve got a copy of Fox Crow on my kindle that seems to be set in a cross between the Land of the 7 Kingdoms and Donegal. I’ve been getting primed, but what the hell, what for?
Mitt Romney has a good life. He has his health, a devoted wife, tons of money, exceptionally thick hair, seemingly dozens of sons who look exactly like him, and so on. Yet he’s decided this isn’t enough and is running for president, with the result he now spends his days forced to make conversation with people he normally wouldn’t let valet park one of his many luxury automobiles. And watching him makes me wonder, “Why would anyone enter a presidential campaign?” After some contemplation, these are the possible reasons: [Read more →]
In the 2008 election my bedrock, must satisfy requirement was fulfilled; not John Edwards. In like fashion it seems low expectations have paid off, my one absolute necessity, that Mitt Romney NOT stroll to the nomination like a frat boy into the Student Body Presidency has also been fulfilled, or will be so if a Super Tuesday triumph can be denied him. Triumph or even Victory have proven to be terms as slippery to the Romney camp as is was to Bill Clinton. Iowa was a crowning, crushing Triumph! until it was a narrow defeat… a tie, really, if you look at the stats. New Hampshire was a solid win but the trumpets blew briefly. Somehow Romney’s resident gunslingers had talked around the fact that Primary wins where you are expected to win, had better be crushing or they are losses just as narrow losses where you are expected to lose also have a point-spread. Team Romney never thought they would have to engage in such PR gymnastics. As modest an achievement as it may prove to be, still it has been worth it to muss up the princeling’s hair while we may do so.
It is not quite time for fatalism. Even casual observers have had Romney’s inevitability driven into their psyches by the blathering jack-o-lanterns. Nearly all of Mitt’s street-level support seems to be based on this assumption masquerading as a truism; He can win! Electoral Determinism is the frontrunner’s friend though it seems to be no one else’s. On the theory, possibly mistaken, that no one can predict the future, I resolve to take the tiniest bit of electoral action, subsuming my judgement, my apprehension and my gag reflex beneath a mantle of desperate tactical calculation as cold as a bone chisel. I propose to vote for Newt Gingrich in the upcoming Georgia Primary. [Read more →]
These are thoughts I’ve addressed before … but somehow they gained a new relevance for me, a new perspective after Rick Perry – our state’s governor – tossed his hat into the ring, seeking the Republican party’s nomination for President of the United States. And while that candidacy has long since come and gone, some of its impact still resonates within me. More than once Governor Perry used the states’ rights (some would say ‘secessionist’) rhetoric that has endeared him to so many here in the Lone Star State, encouraging that ‘Austin versus Washington’ or ‘Texas versus the rest of you guys’ attitude that still has its staunch defenders.
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Events have disappointed Massachusetts Mitt but not fatally. On the Monday before the Tuesday there were Rep Est douchebot gunslingers out on the airwaves openly speculating that if Romney couldn’t put Santorum away in Michigan!? Well, the muckies would have to entertain a late term abortion, drawing Romney out like a bi-racial bastard and replacing him, Torch-style… with whom? Jeb Bush seemed to be warming up but he did so by taking the contempt and revulsion Romney has for those who think the problem with the nation is excessive socialism, and doubling down. How this could be done, legally or even within existing Party rules is not discussed. As with the government proper, in the penumbras of Leviathan like the Party machinery there is not a disdain for the law, precedent or simple fairness. Rather these are alien concepts; really alinguist exhalations like the moan of a ghost to the bi-partisan, multi-racial and gender mixed claque of face-smilers and back-stabbers. Their enthusiasm for Jeb, the Chris Christie of the Dynastic Bushes, should be enough to cool the ignorant approbation his name and mug commands. But while Romney did NOT put away Rick, neither was he put away himself. It cost him some four times as much to earn his 41% as Santorum expended to get his 38% but what the hell? To Mitt, it’s only money. [Read more →]
My PC was on the fritz for more than a week, so it was hard for me to keep up with all the juicy February headlines. So many blog-worthy things have happened since Super Bowl Sunday: Whitney Houston died, Rick Santorum became a viable candidate for president, and America became obsessed with Jeremy Lin. I just bought a new laptop and I’m back. So what better way to tie all of these things together into one blog, than to give you an outrageous headline like the one above? [Read more →]
From Change we can believe in to It was like that when I got here. It’s not so great a leap, really. Who thought the ocean’s level was rising disastrously in June of 2008? Who believed that Obama’s seeing off the Hillary juggernaut would stop it? No one and no one. We have simply gone from optimistic nonsense to a fatalistic nonsense. Now, instead of a Bright New Tomorrow we are offered a Bleak Repetitive Today.
If you’re willing to put in the work, the idea is that you should be able to raise a family and own a home; not go bankrupt because you got sick, because you’ve got some health insurance that helps you deal with those difficult times; that you can send your kids to college; that you can put some money away for retirement.
10. George Washington never said “I cannot tell a lie” – though he did originate the phrase “gettin’ jiggy wit it”
9. President William Howard Taft was so fat, once, while entering the White House, he got stuck between two columns
8. During his Fireside Chats, FDR liked to roast marshmallows
7. Richard Nixon actually enjoyed lying to the American people
6. Bill Clinton was the recipient of more ‘Lewinskis’ than any other President
5. ‘Rough Rider’ was a nickname given to Teddy Roosevelt by his wife
4. George W. Bush was already reading at a third-grade level by the time he was nominated
3. Barack Obama has used the White House’s tanning salon less frequently than any other President
2. Abraham Lincoln was not gay – however, Mary Todd Lincoln was a man
1. Mitt Romney was unquestionably our worst President, irreparably destroying the country
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
The week’s big argument has been over whether or not the Catholic Church, the Insurance Companies, or the taxpayers should have to pay for a woman to have access to birth control. Let’s ignore the idea that the woman should have some responsibility in making sure she doesn’t get pregnant, and ask another important question: Why is it that no one is talking about the guy who sleeps with her? Why is the argument about making sure the woman has birth control; is sex now entirely her domain, or does the male half of the couple still have some responsibility?
Among the many abominations foisted on us is the merging of Lincoln’s Birthday with Washington’s and calling it President’s Day. Frankly, we need more holidays, and Federal Holidays should be made mandatory paid holidays. Like in civilized countries – double time for workers and everybody else is off doing their thing. Now, celebrating Lincoln and Washington makes a lot of sense – but, Jerry Ford? Grover Cleveland? Warren G. Harding? John Tyler? James Buchanan? Seriously, give us back our holidays and make the bastards give them to workers… [Read more →]
