Is this for real? RedState is claiming Sen. John McCain has just written a vicious, snarky letter to Barack Obama accusing him of duplicity and demagoguery on congressional ethics reform efforts:

 The Honorable Barack Obama
United States Senate
SH-713
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator Obama:

I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere. When you approached me and insisted that despite your leadership’s preference to use the issue to gain a political advantage in the 2006 elections, you were personally committed to achieving a result that would reflect credit on the entire Senate and offer the country a better example of political leadership, I concluded your professed concern for the institution and the public interest was genuine and admirable. Thank you for disabusing me of such notions with your letter to me dated February 2, 2006, which explained your decision to withdraw from our bipartisan discussions. I’m embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble. Again, sorry for the confusion, but please be assured I won’t make the same mistake again.

Is somebody goofing here? Did McCain really write this? If so, it's completely unacceptable, and should be waved in the face of any Democrats who might have been contemplating collaboration in a bipartisan ethics reform bill. 

The administration has helpfully chosen as its new Director Randall Tobias, who's done such a bang-up job heading up PEPFAR and guaranteeing that the billions of dollars the US spends on ARV drugs for the poor will all flow back to expensive brand-name US pharmaceuticals, rather than being spent on inexpensive generic drugs which work just as well.

The problem with putting USAID under the direction of US foreign policy is a simple one. Development assistance is different from charity in that it's aimed at teaching people to help themselves in the long run, rather just helping them directly in the short run; but it's similar to charity in that if people think you're only giving it in order to gain their friendship, you don't get any credit for it. Charity to your cronies is not charity, and neither is development aid. Development aid should not be awarded on the basis of foreign policy objectives; it should be awarded despite such objectives. That's how a country really gains credit for benevolence, and that's how effective development work gets done.

US development aid is already surrounded by clouds of suspicion in many countries, which believe it's a stalking horse for the US to get its fingers in their economies and societies in order to accomplish subsequent diplomatic and strategic goals. Making the link between US aid and US foreign policy explicit is an idea so stupid that only the Bush administration could have come up with it.

Have we really defined lying down this far? What the Frey controversy shares with last year's Swift Boat affair is the sense that the exposure of a self-serving campaign of egregious mendacity can be turned into a he-said, she-said affair, where what really matters is whether or not the liar shares the listener's values.

A few years ago, Harvard philosophy professor Hilary Putnam delivered a series of lectures at Northwestern University Law School which he then issued as a book, entitled "The Collapse of the Fact-Value Dichotomy". Spoiler alert: Putnam thinks this collapse is a good thing. He's no woolly-headed PC deconstructionist, nor is he a the-heck-with-evidence, I-know-what-I-believe values conservative. Rather, he thinks the old saw "there's no arguing over values" is bogus, because facts and values are all mixed up with each other, and arguing about one is just as legitimate as arguing about the other. To simplify the book's argument without, I hope, getting it wrong (I'm not exactly a philosophy Ph.D. - my apologies), Putnam thinks the fact-value dichotomy, though it traces its roots to Hume's observation that "one cannot derive an ought from an is", is mainly associated with the sort of logical positivism that held sway in the early 20th century, before physics and math got really weird. The logical positivists, like Carnap and the young Wittgenstein, thought that every statement could be teased out into propositions that depend on pure logic; propositions that depend on empirical evidence; and propositions that don't really depend on anything, and are thus objectively meaningless - which is what they thought most values were. Later, Wittgenstein and many others grew up and realized this was nonsense, that language can't be chopped apart that way and that logic, empiricism and evaluation are irreduceably intertwined. Putnam follows this up to argue that many, even most, of the terms we use are "thick" with both fact and value: like the statement "she is a cruel woman", they combine empirical facts with implicit values in ways that can't be teased apart. And for this reason, we ought to treat disputes over values as every bit as legitimate fields of persuasion as disputes over facts are.

Putnam delivered his lectures in 2000. What has since happened is that, rather than treating their values like facts, Americans have come to treat their facts like values. You have your facts, I have mine. Who's to say whose facts are "objectively" true? Who you gonna believe - a bunch of flip-flopping, America-hating terrorist-coddling liberals, or a bunch of detainee-torturing, Bill of Rights-scrapping warmongering conservatives? We have lost our understanding that empiricism, the determination to remain true to publicly, objectively demonstrable fact, is itself a value, perhaps the most powerful value which the 20th century bequeathed to us.

Towards the end of her essay, King's critique gets stronger, and she comes closer to the mark:

As John Cheever said, "I lie, in order to tell a greater truth." But Frey lied to tell a lesser truth: he lied to make himself look like a hero. He lied--about the crimes he supposedly perpetrated and the tragedies that befell him--because on the one hand he wants the reader to feel sorry for him, and on the other he wants to be held in awe.

The fact that Frey lied to make himself look like a tough guy, instead of a milquetoast, makes him pathetic. His book is a pile of crap, easily recognizable as such at face value. It would be lousy whether or not it were true; and, as King writes, its lousiness is all of a piece with its falsehood. Still, while lousiness is good reason not to read a book, it's not a reason for the publisher to pull it from the shelves. Lying, in a book that represents itself as nonfiction, is a reason to pull it from the shelves, or should be, or, I think, used to be. But the American public, and American publishers, no longer feel that this is the case. We no longer recognize a sphere of commonly accepted fact, and public discourse these days looks less like Hume's world than like Hobbes's, a war of all about all. Frey's response to the controversy on his website was meant as dismissal, but in contemporary America, it sounds more like an invocation: "Let the haters hate."

It follows - to mix a logical statement, an empirical statement, and a value statement - that we are in some serious trouble.

A suicide attacker with explosives strapped to his body drove a motorbike into a holiday crowd watching a wrestling match in an Afghan border town, killing at least 20 people and wounding more than 30 others.

 - http://ww1.mid-day.com/news/world/2006/january/128759.htm

I feel that way about wrestling, too.

Sorry. Bad joke.

Here's an idea: how about before the US engages in another military adventure, we consider the question of whether we would support an invasion if we lived in the place that was about to be invaded?

For example, we could ask that all the tubthumpers currently baying for a strike against Iran move to Teheran for a while. Then, after a few months, we can see how sanguine they are about a "surgical" bombing campaign.

Vietnam is being rocked by wildcat strikes, and it's upsetting the entire balance of the low-cost East Asian manufacturing economy. Several days ago the head of the Vietnamese Labor Federation, the government-controlled body that's supposed to control all unions, announced there had been 940 wildcat strikes in the country last year. In veiled terms, she criticized the Communist Party for being so lethargic to approve strikes that workers have ceased to use the government-sanctioned system or to work through the Labor Federation, instead going wildcat.

In response, the government raised the minimum for workers at foreign-invested firms by 40%, effective Feb. 1. A 40% raise in the minimum wage! To take effect in 3 weeks! Taiwanese firms have already begun discussing the possibility of pulling out of Vietnam.

There are two lessons to take away here. The first is the extent to which opening up an economy does inevitably generate democratic grassroots political pressure and force governments to increasingly take account of the views and desires of civil society.

The second is, once again, the urgent need for the US labor movement and US progressives to come out forcefully in favor of fair trade and international fair labor standards. There is no reason why the fair trade movement should be seen as pie-in-the-sky irrelevant idealists, unable to deliver on any real alternatives in the globalization debate. 940 wildcat strikes in Vietnam says that international labor is a force to be reckoned with in the globalization of manufacturing - if only someone will take the time to reckon with it.

“WASHINGTON - U.S. health care spending increased 7.9 percent to nearly $1.9 trillion in 2004, once again outpacing wage growth and inflation on its way to chewing up a record 16 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, according to a new federal report.”

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/13568006.htm

So as the cost of health care rises, that translates into more people who just cannot afford health care insurance. Adding to the problem is the cost of prescription drugs, a necessity for the elderly, but Bush’s prescription drug plan is a nightmare for many elderly whose very lives can depend on getting their medication.

“Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said the problem affected all segments of society.

"We must build on steps already taken - the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit, advancing health-information technology and encouraging a prevention-oriented society - to find innovative, market-based ways to control costs," Leavitt said.”

Well that sounds fairly reasonable or is it?

“WASHINGTON - Many of Medicare's poorest and most sickly patients are going without their medications because of administrative glitches, misinformation and confusion surrounding the new Medicare prescription drug benefit.

Experts had warned that many of the 6.4 million low-income people who get benefits from Medicare and Medicaid could miss out on their life-sustaining medicines when their drug coverage shifted on Jan. 1 from Medicaid to private plans sponsored by Medicare. In interviews, advocates for the elderly as well as lawmakers and seniors themselves indicated that that's happening.”

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/13568006.htm

"There's almost nothing that isn't going wrong," said Jeanne Finberg, an attorney for the National Senior Citizens Law Center in Oakland, Calif. "People are crying. They're calling their legislator's office in tears."

The elderly face many problems, targets of scam artists, often their own children, confusion brought on by dementia and other mind affecting diseases, and they are expected to weave their way through the maze of a poorly thought out and executed Medicare drug plan, another disaster for Americans, and a great big Mission Accomplished for the Bush administration.

Dumbass moron. Why don't people in Western society have more babies? Might it be because there's no decent daycare available? And we live in societies where multigenerational families don't live together anymore, while women are required to have jobs, because wages haven't grown fast enough for one working parent to provide a full family income?

If you look at societies where birthrates are really falling fast, you'll see a clear trend: wealthy societies where women are still restricted to extremely narrow social roles have the lowest birthrates. Italy, Japan, South Korea.

If Western societies want to encourage larger families, we need to do two things: 1. create excellent government-funded day care from age 2 and up. 2. Pay people high enough wages to allow single-earner families.

I'm fascinated as to how exactly Steyn thinks higher defense spending encourages women to have more babies, and would be curious to see his thoughts on this subject, so that I can wipe my ass with them.

It's not the sound of the other shoe dropping, but it may be the sound of a shoelace being untied. From today's WashPost:

But on Monday came the latest recent sign that China has grown worried about tying its savings so closely to the dollar, a currency that many economists think is due for a fall. A senior economist at China's State Council -- the equivalent of the cabinet -- said in an interview that China is moving toward a new policy of buying fewer U.S. Treasury bills while shifting slightly toward buying assets that trade in other currencies.

China now boasts the world's second-largest stock of foreign exchange reserves after Japan, and with roughly three-fourths of those holdings now invested in the U.S. dollar and dollar-backed assets such as bonds and real estate, even a slight shift in the composition of China's investments could push the value of the greenback down, some analysts said.

I get paid in dollars, so I'm not crowing about this. Then again, I believe in the forces of gravity. And if the dollar is due for a plummet, I hope it comes before 2008, you know?

Too much amazing stuff in this film to go over. Walt Rostow, the Doug Feith of his era, declaiming bombastically from the porch of his Cape Cod vacation home, showing the form that led someone in Halberstam's "Best and the Brightest" to say he was "an absolute idiot whom everyone in Washington respected because he smoked a pipe and said everything in a voice of utmost conviction and gravity, even when he didn't have a clue what he was talking about" - saying "Ho Chi Minh couldn't have gotten elected dogcatcher in South Vietnam in 1956." Daniel Ellsberg responds: "Ho Chi Minh - dead - would have beaten any candidate we ever might have put up."

Ellsberg, later in the film, says, "It's not surprising that in a poor country, you will find people who are willing to put on another country's uniform, for money. But we refused to acknowledge the extent to which the whole of South Vietnam was a creation, underpinned by our money, and that the Diem government would never have been in power if not for the United States. If not for our intervention, there would have been no war there. There's been a lot of talk about whether we backed the wrong side in the Vietnam War. We didn't back the wrong side. We were the wrong side."

Senator Fulbright comes off looking magnificent, too. Incredible little speech about the pathos of Ho Chi Minh's six letters to the US government in 1946, asking for support in his country's struggle for independence from France - all unanswered.

And this unbelievable, fast-talking black vet named William Marshall, like a vet Chris Rock, incredible comedian in a tie-dye shirt and an eight-inch fro, mau-mauing the s** out of the camera: "They all like go over there and be a hero, yeah! And then '68, and it's all like, oh, no, come back now, but don't talk about that s**, don't remind us of it, cause it's upsetting. You damn right it's upsetting! It upset some people so bad, they're dead!"

I come away with the conclusion that the United States should have a military fully capable of defending its territorial borders - and no more. We can't be trusted with anything else.

From today's NY Times review of "Beasts of No Nation", a young writer's debut novel about child soldiers:

Mr. Iweala set his story, which became his senior thesis at Harvard, in a country similar to Nigeria because he was familiar with its landscape and culture. His mother, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, is the country's minister of finance and spends part of the year there.

"Part of the year"? Oy, vey.

I spent 2.5 years living in a West African nation where the educated class actually lived, psychologically and to some extent physically, in Paris. Nothing wrong with that - hell, I'd like to live psychologically or physically in Paris, as much of the time as possible. But you would think that a country like Nigeria would demand at least that its Minister of Finance live full-time in, you know, the country whose government she serves in. Rather than D.C. Much as I love D.C., too.

At one level, obviously, Miller was right. Getting access to people who know what's going on is one of the sine qua nons of being a journalist. But in retrospect, it's become clear that for Miller, the inverse was also true: if somebody important does talk to you, then you do have a story.

It's that attitude that has gotten Miller into all this hot water: the confusion of access with truth. Having talked to someone important is not the same as having discovered what's going on. Miller's willingness to accept the storylines that were peddled to her by people in power - storylines which look rather ludicrous in retrospect - has made her the most glaring symbol of the Administration's successful efforts to seduce, bully and coopt the media, and to turn The News into a propaganda tool.

In many ways, Judith Miller is a vastly better journalist than I'll ever be; her talent for cultivating sources is clearly extraordinary. (Please, spare me the flames: Miller is a criminal, blah blah blah. I think she should probably be fired, but you'd have to be an idiot not to recognize that in a flat-out day-to-day sense, she is very good at her job. Bob Woodward, too, is a sycophant who often seems to have had a judgment-ectomy; and? Did you break Watergate?) But she has deservedly become an emblem of the perversion of mainstream media culture in the 21st century. Hopefully, her fall will make journalists a little more skeptical towards those hot-dooty Senior Administration Officials who are so hard to get on the phone, and a little less likely to print whatever nonsense they're fed for the privilege of getting another call through next week.

Michael Ignatieff in the New York Times Magazine:

 Millions of acts of common decency and bureaucratic courage will be necessary before all Americans, and not just the storm victims, feel that they live, once again, in a political community and not in a savage and lawless swamp.

A political community, not a savage and lawless swamp. Our America is a political community; theirs is a savage and lawless swamp. Use it. 

On Sept. 22, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that "Operation Offset" claimed savings of $139 billion this year and $544 billion over five years.

But the current document only claims savings of $102 billion this year and $370 billion over 5 years. Taking out the three-orders-of-magnitude transcription error on the foreign agricultural attaches knocked out roughly a third of the savings they were claiming.

Unbelievable. You underfund education for 30 years, and this is what you get - congresspeople who can't add. 

I have two points here. First: you moron, shut up. Okay, it'll have to be three points. Point two: I wear sandals basically every day, because - guess what? - it's hot! I live in a city where the temperature has not dropped below 90 fahrenheit in the past five weeks. Point three: the other thing I like about sandals is that they make me "seem vaguely European". Sometimes I wear shirts with mandarin collars because they make me seem vaguely Asian; sometimes I wear Doc Martens because they make me seem vaguely English; sometimes I wear jeans because they make me seem vaguely American. I would expect that anyone with any passing acquaintance with how fashion works would understand that virtually any characteristic look can be mined precisely in order to make one "seem". And the idea that anything which makes men look European should be excluded is utterly bizarre - not only on these general grounds, but on the particular grounds that, in the wake of over a decade of increasingly widespread followings for European electronic music, the notion that Europeanness is unhip is just totally weird. One half expects to see Fortini write "Disco Sucks!" in her next paragraph. Where did Slate press-gang this fashion-able seaman from? 1987? Fortini continues:

The lone permissible type is the soccer sandal; its athletic associations render it properly masculine and its David Beckham affiliation elevates it to sexy.

I do not know what a soccer sandal is. I nonetheless respond: shut up, you sick freak. "Properly masculine?" Do you live in Kansas?

Bizarre.

On those, like Thomas Friedman, who argue that democracies don't make war on each other:

 "The genius of republics (say they) is pacific; the spirit of commerce has a tendency to soften the manners of men and to extinguish those inflammable humours which have so often kindled into wars. Commercial republics, like ours, will never be disposed to waste themselves in ruinous contentions with each other. They will be governed by mutual interest, and will cultivate a spirit of mutual amity and concord....Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found, that momentary passions and immediate interests have a more active and imperious controul over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility or justice? Have republics in practice been less addicted to wars than monarchies? Are not the former administered by men as well as the latter?" - Federalist No. 6

On Guantanamo:

"Many of the English who were taken on the Spanish coasts were sent to dig in the mines of Potosi; and by the usual progress of a spirit of resentment, the innocent were after a while confounded with the guilty in indiscriminate punishment." - Federalist No. 6

On the national debt:

"There are even dissimilar views among the States, as to the general principle of discharging the public debt.  Some of them, either less impressed with the importance of national credit, or because their citizens have little, if any, immediate interest in the question, feel an indifference, if not a repugnance to the payment of the domestic debt, at any rate." - Federalist No. 7

 On tensions in the EU:

"There is perhaps nothing more likely to disturb the tranquility of nations, than their being bound to mutual contributions for any common object,  which does not yield an equal and coincident benefit." - Federalist No. 7

What an amazing thinker. What a lucky country, to count him among its founders.

I know our Congress does not consider such partisan divisions to be important, and I'm happy to report that in the immediate aftermath of my election, the House of Representatives restored $100 million to our budget which they had voted to cut under my predecessor. I hope we can all emulate their exemplary commitment to non-partisanship.

In the spirit of making a fresh start, I'd like to let you all know about a few initiatives I'd like to propose to help make our programming fresher, more contemporary, and more reflective of where America stands today.

First off, I am proposing an amendment in Congress to change the name of our organization to the Corporation for Patriotic Broadcasting.  While the Corporation for Public Broadcasting may have been an excellent name in the 1960s and '70s, it seems out of step with the times today. There is also a possibility that some may view it as divisive, as it could be seen to imply that there is something wrong with private broadcasting, or with private ownership more generally. I know no one in our organization would misunderstand our name to imply class warfare, but I think we can all agree that it would be better if our brand represented only values which all Americans can stand behind, such as patriotism and freedom of religion.

Second, while our flagship program, Sesame Street, has been a great American institution for over 35 years, it cries out for a few adaptations to bring it up to speed with the America of 2005. Here is my short list of suggestions:

• The gritty urban environment in which Sesame Street takes place does not look like the America in which most of our children are growing up. The signage and street scenes clearly indicate Sesame Street to be located in New York City, which, while it is a great American city, is not in the mainstream of America today. I would advocate moving Sesame Street to a beautiful suburban area in a Sun Belt-type environment, with brand new ranch- or colonial-style homes, where most families possess the 2+ automobiles which the average American household enjoys, rather than taking buses or subways, which most Americans do not experience as part of their daily lives.
• While Sesame Street's device of having individual episodes "sponsored" by letters and numbers is very cute, it has a bit of a sarcastic feel, almost as if there were something wrong with shows being sponsored by actual corporations. We might be able to save the public money by having episodes sponsored by corporations which begin with the relevant letter - C is for Coca-Cola, H is for Halliburton, and so forth.
  
• Bring back the Cookie Monster! Recently, Sesame Street has eliminated this great old character, who my kids grew up on, because it was felt he might be contributing to America's growing problem of childhood obesity. This seems to me to be selling our kids short. Cookie Monster should be brought back and used as a way to teach kids about the importance of personal responsibility. Our kids are perfectly capable of making the right choices about how many cookies to eat if we teach them moral values and give them the right information, as a lobbyist for General Mills pointed out to me yesterday.
• Teaching kids how to count in Spanish sends a mixed message about what language is the real spoken language of America. Sesame Street should stick to English. The time for America's youth to learn Spanish is later, when they grow up and go to work as corrections officers.
• The kids and puppets on Sesame Street take part in all kinds of activities - playing sports, going to school, cooking, drawing, and so forth - but one activity is conspicuously absent: going to church or synagogue. This sends a message that going to church or synagogue is somehow weird or wrong. There should be room on Sesame Street for characters to pray in houses of worship, which is something that 86.95473% of Americans do on a biweekly basis or more, according to NSA low-earth-orbit satellite video monitoring and cell-phone intercepts. Kids should be reassured that freedom of religion and attendance at church or synagogue is a great part of our American tradition.
• Oh, and mosques. Right.
• The uniformed services as depicted on Sesame Street tend to focus on the police, the fire department, and the post office. What about the military? It is part of our mission as an educational institution to prepare our children for life with firearms.
• There should be at least one red, white and blue puppet on Sesame Street. I favor Big Bird, but am open to suggestions.

That's all about Sesame Street for the moment. My third and final proposal has to do with what I think is one of CPB's strengths: our positivity. While other elements of the media fall prey to a negativistic spirit of running things down, we at CPB always seem to find a way to focus on the positive, be that spirituality, wildlife, or fixing up old houses.

I think we should bring this spirit into the 21st century with new shows focusing on some of the positive things that are happening in America today. We might do a show about a great new restaurant that's opening up in the Green Zone in Baghdad, and how happy the Iraqis who work there are to be making some dollars. Or about the new prescription drug benefit for seniors, and how glad those old folks are about it. Or about the new missile defense system recently completed in Alaska, and how much safer it's making Alaskans feel.

I really look forward to working with all of you, and I'm especially looking forward to your suggestions! In fact, to encourage participation, I've decided to make response to this email mandatory for those who wish to continue working for CPB. Please include your name, which shows you've worked on, and whether you've made any political contributions in the last six years and to which side - we need this information to help us eradicate any impression of partisanship.

It's great to be here!

All the best,

Patricia S. Harrison
President and CEO
Corporation for Public Broadcasting

 

 

Here are a few lines I like to reread when it seems like things are going from crappy to crappier, and the majority of my fellow citizens seem by principle opposed to everything I believe in, and it looks like me and my kind are going to lose.

A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,
A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,
Our army foil'd with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating

- Whitman, "A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown", 1865

 

I saw old General at bay,
(Old as he was, his gray eyes yet shone out in battle like stars,)
His small force was now completely hemm'd in, in his works,
He call'd for volunteers to run the enemy's lines, a desperate emergency,
I saw a hundred and more step forth from the ranks, but two or three were selected,
I saw them receive their orders aside, they listen'd with great care, the adjutant was very grave,
I saw them depart with cheerfulness, freely risking their lives.

- Whitman, "I Saw Old General at Bay", 1865

 

          &nbsp ;          &nbs p;                             Still
The world out-Herods Herod; and the year,
The nineteen-hundred forty-fifth of grace,
Lumbers with losses up the clinkered hill
Of our purgation

- Lowell, "The Holy Innocents"

Ice, ice. Our wheels no longer move;
Look, the fixed stars, all just alike
as lack-land atoms, split apart,
and the Republic summons Ike,
the mausoleum in her heart.

- Lowell, "Inauguration Day: January 1953"

 

I drink to our demolished house,
To all this wickedness,
To you, our loneliness together
I raise my glass --

And to the dead-cold eyes
The lie that has betrayed us,
The coarse, brutal world, the fact
That God has not saved us.

- Akhmatova, 1934

 

And, though the choice is a bit obvious...

<pre>Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.</pre&gt

- Auden, "Epitaph on a Tyrant", 1938

Mario Cuomo in this morning's NYT, arguing for divorcing stem-cell policy from the President's private religious convictions, counters the argument that right-to-life religious conservatives might see their tax dollars used in ways they find morally objectionable:

Every day Americans who abhor the death penalty, contraceptives, abortions and war are required to pay taxes used in part for purposes they consider offensive. That is part of the price we pay for this uniquely successful democracy.

Damn straight. Why don't liberal politicians say this more often? You don't get to choose where your tax dollars go. I don't get to defund ballistic missile defense or abstinence-only sex ed; you don't get to defund stem cell research. We still live in one country, under one government - for the time being anyway, until we just can't take this crap anymore and the liberal intifada breaks out.