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I am still sick. With any luck the flu will actually tail off before the weekend ends.
As a sign of just how sick I've been... I got home on Tues. I've been working my way through the backlog, and only this evening got to the recent messages. I don't know how many I lost in the course of that.
I've also been noticing that if I go back (and since we're talking about entries that were more than a week old we have a frame of reference) sometimes there are new messages tucked in between things I've already read. I wonder how many things I miss because they post to my f-list late.
Part of this is because I can't really concentrate in my usual way. I've done a bit of side reading as well.
Social Security: One of two things is going on here. Bush, et al., completely misread the amount of, "capital" the election gave him (I can believe this) and dove into it, certain that a bit of flim-flam would suffice to get all the Party faithful on board, and that would force the Dems to roll over again.
On the other hand maybe someone did know the math, and it's part of some deeper game, whereby the initiative gets shot down, but the meme of 1: SSI = welfare (which it doesn't, or it wouldn't be regressive) and 2: is broken; in need of massive repair and that can be used to make more tax shelters for the well to do.
Here's a couple of pieces with details for shooting down those who are arguing all but the tax shelter end of the deal.
MSNBC on SS and What SS does, that the new plan won't
In the realm of the silly, I did the what kind of "Macaroni and Cheese are you." I'm sure all my friends are surprised.
For those who want to tell you the press is liberal... 34 Scandals that never became Whitewater The only thing most of these have that Whitewater didn't, is a soupcon of truth.
Robertson and Falwell are liars Not that this will persuade those who think they aren't (and I somehow doubt I have many of those, but hey... I like the writing) but it points out they made statments they knew were false, in the interest of defaming people so as to increase support for their agenda.
In my reply to Mr. Stevenson's comment yesterday, I mentioned one example of Robertson's dishonesty and demagoguery. After his American Center for Law and Justice won the Lamb's Chapel case before the Supreme Court, Robertson went on national TV on his own show, the 700 Club, and declared this a great victory over the ACLU. The problem? The ACLU was on the same side in that case. The ACLU had filed a 15-page brief (and thank you to Mike Litrownik at the ACLU office for faxing me a copy of it) on behalf of Lamb's Chapel in which they argued that denying them access to the school facilities could not survive constitutional scrutiny because it was obviously viewpoint discrimination.
What Mr. Robertson said was a lie. It wasn't a mistake. The chief counsel of the ACLJ, who had argued the case before the Supreme Court, was standing right there next to him and could certainly have pointed out that the ACLU had filed a brief on behalf of their client; he did not. And it was a lie that could only have been told for a particular purpose: to distort the positions of the organization that his group relies upon as a boogey man in their fundraising efforts. Now that would be bad enough if this was just your run of the mill activist; the fact that this particular activist claims to speak both to and for God, and claims that all morality must flow from his own religious faith, it more than deserves the labal of a fraud. And, I would note, a fraud perpetrated upon the millions of followers who rely upon the truth of his word because they view him as a man of God.
There are more examples.
To close this piece Shakespeare's Sister tells us where the liberal framing of the debate on homoseuality is screwed up. The medicine to fix it isn't palatable, because it demands liberal stop being accomodating. On the flip side all it requires is for us to actually stand up for a principle. A truly conservative principle.
As a sign of just how sick I've been... I got home on Tues. I've been working my way through the backlog, and only this evening got to the recent messages. I don't know how many I lost in the course of that.
I've also been noticing that if I go back (and since we're talking about entries that were more than a week old we have a frame of reference) sometimes there are new messages tucked in between things I've already read. I wonder how many things I miss because they post to my f-list late.
Part of this is because I can't really concentrate in my usual way. I've done a bit of side reading as well.
Social Security: One of two things is going on here. Bush, et al., completely misread the amount of, "capital" the election gave him (I can believe this) and dove into it, certain that a bit of flim-flam would suffice to get all the Party faithful on board, and that would force the Dems to roll over again.
On the other hand maybe someone did know the math, and it's part of some deeper game, whereby the initiative gets shot down, but the meme of 1: SSI = welfare (which it doesn't, or it wouldn't be regressive) and 2: is broken; in need of massive repair and that can be used to make more tax shelters for the well to do.
Here's a couple of pieces with details for shooting down those who are arguing all but the tax shelter end of the deal.
MSNBC on SS and What SS does, that the new plan won't
In the realm of the silly, I did the what kind of "Macaroni and Cheese are you." I'm sure all my friends are surprised.
For those who want to tell you the press is liberal... 34 Scandals that never became Whitewater The only thing most of these have that Whitewater didn't, is a soupcon of truth.
Robertson and Falwell are liars Not that this will persuade those who think they aren't (and I somehow doubt I have many of those, but hey... I like the writing) but it points out they made statments they knew were false, in the interest of defaming people so as to increase support for their agenda.
In my reply to Mr. Stevenson's comment yesterday, I mentioned one example of Robertson's dishonesty and demagoguery. After his American Center for Law and Justice won the Lamb's Chapel case before the Supreme Court, Robertson went on national TV on his own show, the 700 Club, and declared this a great victory over the ACLU. The problem? The ACLU was on the same side in that case. The ACLU had filed a 15-page brief (and thank you to Mike Litrownik at the ACLU office for faxing me a copy of it) on behalf of Lamb's Chapel in which they argued that denying them access to the school facilities could not survive constitutional scrutiny because it was obviously viewpoint discrimination.
What Mr. Robertson said was a lie. It wasn't a mistake. The chief counsel of the ACLJ, who had argued the case before the Supreme Court, was standing right there next to him and could certainly have pointed out that the ACLU had filed a brief on behalf of their client; he did not. And it was a lie that could only have been told for a particular purpose: to distort the positions of the organization that his group relies upon as a boogey man in their fundraising efforts. Now that would be bad enough if this was just your run of the mill activist; the fact that this particular activist claims to speak both to and for God, and claims that all morality must flow from his own religious faith, it more than deserves the labal of a fraud. And, I would note, a fraud perpetrated upon the millions of followers who rely upon the truth of his word because they view him as a man of God.
There are more examples.
To close this piece Shakespeare's Sister tells us where the liberal framing of the debate on homoseuality is screwed up. The medicine to fix it isn't palatable, because it demands liberal stop being accomodating. On the flip side all it requires is for us to actually stand up for a principle. A truly conservative principle.
