You know, what's interesting to me is not the merit of Hillary's statement-- technically true, but also revealing that she thinks the real changes happen in government, when government in fact tends to ratify and codify what's already changed-- but just the stupidity of saying it.

The girl grew up near Chicago, for Christ's sake-- yet somehow she didn't get that you don't go into Avondale and insult Pulaski, you don't go to Taylor Street and mock Columbus, you don't go to Pilsen and suggest that Juarez was a bad guy. You suck up to them. You say you'd be proud to be the handmaiden to Martin Luther Kings of today, like the rev'run Jackson, in passing their agenda and dolin' out the jobs. She's got Daley machine people all through her campaign, and she doesn't get that?

Hillary, sorry, but we don't want nobody nobody sent. Downtown said to give that Obama fellow a job (he's got Daley people all over his campaign too), and it's his people's turn.

Posted at January 17, 2008 5:24 AM in response to Why Race Matters in South Carolina

And I say this seriously because I see no reason whatsoever, with the resources available to the WH and the congress, for the federal governmnet to ever make a fundamental error that gives that result.

You've got a lot to learn about how government really screws things up 90% of the time, son.

Posted at January 16, 2008 6:50 AM in response to Tim Russert, Will You Pledge

You're right, academia would never fall prey to trendy horseshit. My apologies.

Back to reading Black Athena now.

(It also wouldn't have humorless tools protesting a little too much on its behalf, I suppose.)

Posted at January 16, 2008 6:49 AM in response to Tim Russert, Will You Pledge

...to ask all the Republican candidates if they will pledge to cut off Federal aid to schools that teach the pseudo-science of "intelligent design"?

I'm not sure the Left really wants to open the can of worms of the Feds rooting out pseudoscientific nonsense being taught in universities. They've got a lot more to lose if the govt. really started looking at Chomskian political science, black and women's studies, pomo approaches, etc. than a few Bible-beater colleges do.

Posted at January 16, 2008 4:53 AM in response to Tim Russert, Will You Pledge

Well, I agree there. It proves that the momentous hire doesn't mean much to anybody. Oh no, there aren't any conservatives at a liberal paper in 2008! How could I possibly find one to read in this day and age? It's not like I have a box in my house that brings zillions of them to me...

Posted at January 16, 2008 4:43 AM in response to Bill Kristol and "the Mob"

Believe what you want, here in the echo chamber of the marginalized. Believe that the deregulation and inflation-busting of the Reagan era aren't the basis of all our prosperity today. Believe that the Soviet Union just fell because it felt like it. Believe the Carter years were a lost paradise. I don't care.

Just don't elect somebody who screws it up by believing that government can run the economy anywhere but into a brick wall.

Posted at January 15, 2008 4:33 AM in response to Thinking Like an Elephant

God, the things people give 5s to around here. Yee haw, Cleotis. You shore showed them city boys.

Posted at January 14, 2008 9:55 PM in response to Bill Kristol and "the Mob"

I love this argument. The Dow goes up 50 bazillion over 25 years, unemployment falls to near-record lows, and you say it's all shit because... the market crashed 21 years ago!

"We've been happily married for 25 years--"

"Wrong! You had a fight over where the car keys were in 1987! You're living in a house of LIES!"

Posted at January 14, 2008 7:37 PM in response to Thinking Like an Elephant

You seemed perfectly comfortable doing it before.

Posted at January 14, 2008 2:25 PM in response to Bill Kristol and "the Mob"

Actually, the public’s hostility toward government today is just as sane as it was during the Watergate era. When government fails abysmally, especially in ways that are patently antithetical to the Constitution, Americans become unhappy toward those responsible. It’s pretty obvious to much of the public that government under the control of conservative Republicans has failed in myriad manifestations.

There's the start of a good critique there, but it becomes so simplistically partisan so quickly that it just goes to hell faster than the new season of Heroes. So Republican government has failed, but the Great Society worked? Jimmy Carter's term worked? Always, 100%? Sad to say, the most successful Democratic president of the last half century is the one who bemoaned the fact that he was so hemmed in to Republican policies that his administration had become Eisenhower Republicans. Well, I like Ike, and although I think it will be healthy for both parties for the Democrats to win this time (and to have to take responsibility for a while, instead of voting for it after voting against it), here's hoping the next Democrat in office is more like Ike and less like Jimmy, too. And maybe Reagan's 25-year-boom can be a 35 year boom.

Posted at January 14, 2008 2:03 PM in response to Thinking Like an Elephant