Jynnan Tonnyx

I just thought the last line of this interview with Robert Reich was funny. I read it and thought, man, he’s exactly right.

With the events of the last 3 weeks, we’re really looking at an interesting scenario for November. Hillary Clinton’s campaign continues to insist that it will court superdelegates to win the nomination, no matter the damage to the party, if she hasn’t won a plurality of committed delegates. It certainly doesn’t look at this point like either Democratic candidate will have a clear majority of delegates, and it doesn’t appear that either one (or, especially, their supporters) will go away quietly, either. I think there’s definite potential for a party split, especially if Hillary wins either because of superdelegates or by getting the Florida and Michigan delegations seated.

On the Republican side, even after Mitt Romney dropped out, Mike Huckabee started winning pretty substantial numbers in the remaining Republican primaries. Rush Limbaugh has been practically foaming at the mouth about how McCain’s “not really a conservative” - just because he doesn’t support trying to deport 12 million people en masse - how novel! The Republican winner-take-most allocations in those states means Huckabee’s not likely to cause a contested nomination, but it indicates that McCain’s support from “the base” is pretty thin. If he does get the nomination, will the Religious Right split the party?

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Some of the brouhaha recently with Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize got me thinking. Scientists recently have taken to raising alarms in political circles and the public arena, no longer content to simply publish their findings in a journal and let our elected officials do the right thing with the results. There’s one main reason for this: the politicos (especially the morally bankrupt sophists in the Bush administration) refuse to acknowledge the science, let alone do the right thing.

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That’s really all I have to say.

Every time I read another article or column about Republican schemes to cheat their way into the White House, I get steamed. This time, I was reading Bob Herbert’s pair of columns from the New York Times (Sept. 18, Sept. 22). What’s sad is that nobody even cares anymore - we all just shrug and say, “that’s what Republicans do.”

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Mark Helprin writes a rather disingenuous piece in the New York Times op-ed today, arguing that Congress needs to extend copyrights again, beyond the already-obscene author’s life plus 70 years.

What if, after you had paid the taxes on earnings with which you built a house, sales taxes on the materials, real estate taxes during your life, and inheritance taxes at your death, the government would eventually commandeer it entirely? This does not happen in our society … to houses. Or to businesses.

Once the state has dipped its enormous beak into the stream of your wealth and possessions they are allowed to flow from one generation to the next. Though they may be divided and diminished by inflation, imperfect investment, a proliferation of descendants and the government taking its share, they are not simply expropriated.

That is, unless you own a copyright.

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Being pro-war doesn’t make you patriotic, any more than being anti-war makes you unpatriotic. A century ago, we used the terms “hawk” and “dove” to describe those positions precisely because it is beyond insulting to use how you feel about a particular military conflict to pigeonhole you as patriotic or not.

While I’m on the subject, being against the war in Iraq, in particular, is about supporting our troops, in the sense that you don’t want to see soldiers’ lives wasted on a war that was fought based on a lie, in violation of international law, for no discernable purpose, to no clear end, and the results of which are likely to be worse for the security of America and the world than the foregoing regime.

Alright, I’ve been sitting on this for three or four days now, and I can’t stand it anymore.

Tom Cruise, take your Scientology and shove it up straight up your ass. (Oh, there I went and outed myself as an SP. Shoot.) Read more…