Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Why do Democrats hate private accounts?

The left's insistence that private accounts must come off the table before they will allow any progress on Social Security reform is incomprehensible to me.

Wait a minute. No it's not. They want us to remain dependent on government. Well, that's part of it. The other part is they want the MONEY. Private accounts reduce the slush fund congress has been raiding for years. Is any of this fair to retirees? The ranting about changing a great benefit and turning it over to Enron-types is smoke and mirrors to hide the real agenda.

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Try these fun hoaxes. My personal fave:

Buy a pie at a pie shop, carefully remove the upper crust, and then gently lower a family of live gerbils into the pie. Replace the crust and storm back into the pie shop, indignantly pointing out the five little heads poking up through the crust. Collect ten million dollars and appear with the gerbils on “Larry King Live.” Repeat in all fifty states, with different pastry-rodent combinations so as to elude detection.

Shut-up-and-sing watch

Coldplay bashes it's evil record company's stockholders, who, by the way, have given the band a hugely profitable career. My heart bleeds.

Monday, May 16, 2005

Thanks, Newsweek

As is predictable with religious zealots who hate America no matter what, Muslim and Taliban leaders don't accept Newsweek's retraction. But it's very telling that Newsweek wouldn't retract at first, attempting to weasel around their culpability in the riots that followed their erroneous story. Someone on their staff lied and now much of the headway we were making with Muslims in Afghanistan and elsewhere has been destroyed. And 16 people (or more) are dead in wake of violence.

Zealots will be zealots, I guess, but we don't need our most visible media handing them a club to beat us with.

Naturally the left's answer to this is "Well, George Bush lied and a lot more people died." This is old stuff, and not really true, either -- Bush didn't lie. And our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan have had largely GOOD results, if the press would bother to mention them. Newsweek has screwed up in their drive to make Bush and America look bad, and now they can't even tell the truth and be believed. The source-checking appears to have been almost non-existent on this story. What happened to real journalism?

Whether or not this newly threatened Jihad against the US will mean anything in the long run (the zealots hated us BEFORE, so nothing's really changed), it will certainly escalate conflict and death in the short run.

Good job, Newsweek. Howard Dean and Ted Kennedy are probably proud of you, but no one else is.

Hitchens on the Religious Right

This guy is brilliant. I didn't see this article when it first appeared in OpinionJournal a couple weeks ago, but it was called to my attention today. I do worry about an overzealous religious right that can't see any parallels between its own agenda and that of jihadists. Yes, I do worry about our society getting more repressive as people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson get a bigger audience with our government.
Salient quote:
At the last election, the GOP succeeded in increasing its vote among American Jews by an estimated five percentage points. Does it propose to welcome these new adherents or sympathizers by yelling in the tones of that great Democrat bigmouth William Jennings Bryan? By insisting that evolution is "only a theory"? By demanding biblical literalism and by proclaiming that the Messiah has already shown himself? If so, it will deserve the punishment for hubris that is already coming its way. (The punishment, in other words, that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson believed had struck America on Sept. 11, 2001. How can it be that such grotesque characters, calling down divine revenge on the workers in the World Trade Center, are allowed a respectful hearing, or a hearing at all, among patriotic Republicans?)

Rock on, Hitch.
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