If you don't laugh at these jackasses, you'll go crazy. The House of Representatives votes to cut interest rates on student loans, and the White House opposes the bill because (I swear I'm not making this up) "the bill would encourage more student borrowing...encouraging more student debt can also fuel today's upward tuition spiral."
Tony Snow, Tony Snow, Tony Snow. Maybe if you say it three times in a row, real fast, you can get back to the reality side of the mirror.
This will come as no surprise to anyone who really understands bureaucracy and capitalism, but it's still infuriating--when "security" meets "marketing," guess which one wins?
Madison Avenue gave us the Pepsi Generation, pop culture gave us Generations X and Y, and WWII gave us the long and exhaustingly chronicled Baby Boom generation. A quarter of a century of Reaganism, globalization, and free marketeerism have given us "The Aldi Generation."
Apart from the very real possibility that Iraqis are now so anti-American that no policy supported by the U.S. could possibly get Iraqi public support, and that no Iraqi politician seen as really supporting the U.S. could possibly manage to survive in Iraqi politics, I think all of us need to ask the President and all our elected federal officials a single question: What if the new "surge" goes as badly as all our other policies have gone?
Someone wrote in to the editor/opnion section of The Arizona Republic newspaper, expressing a concern many of us have of late...
As years go it has hardly been a great commercial for the idea that religion is balm for the soul.
Depressingly it has rather reinforced the impression, developed over the centuries, that religious belief only deepens and strengthens Man's propensity for hatred and self-destruction.
Gerard Baker, in
The Peninsula, Qatar's English language daily.
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Criminalizing statistically normal behavior trivializes lawbreaking.
Mark A.R. Kleiman (full text available only to subscribers), in
Dopey, Boozy, Smoky--and Stupid, from the January/February issue of
The American Interest, discussing the foolishness of the "war on drugs."
Proving once again that modern public officials tend to be a whole lot more partisan, zealous, and short sighted than public officials from our distant past, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs actually implied that American businesses could and should boycott law firms who represent people held in detention because they are accused of being terrorists.
Some of us didn't, some did...watch Chimpy's addy to the nation last night, about his desire to send even MORE troops into Iraq...
You've undoubtedly heard about the ongoing scandal of allowing corporate executives to make millions off their stock options by the simple device of back-dating the grant of the option to guaranty huge profits. But did you know that the current popularity of the stock option as a means of compensating the expensive but empty suits was part of a "reform" effort that tried to tie executive compensation to executive "performance?