Gee, I wonder if a Steyn-Michelle Malkin hosted show on MSNBC would do better than Keith O (that's O as in zerO ratings)?
So what I want to know is how the propagators of the meme propose that we pay for a 60 million-plus person armed force. What programs should we cut to be able to afford to train, equip, feed, house, clothe, pay and insure all these troops? Education? Infrastructure? Anti-poverty programs? Social Security? Medicare? Medicaid? The welfare state as a whole? Foreign aid? And how much should we cut them? Even assuming that the armed force is not as large as 60 million (though it would have to be lest the remainder that stay civilians be subject to the "chickenhawk" insult), we're still talking about a lot of people that have to be admitted to the armed forces so that the polemical demands of a few misguided souls are satisfied. So again, I ask: How will all of this be paid for?
The bottom line is, the chickenhawk argument is an impediment to legitimate discourse and debate—and legitimate discourse and debate over national security is a necessity in a free society; and for that reason, those who raise the chickenhawk argument should be treated by everyone—right and left—as intellectual pariahs.
Of course, in practice, non-military personnel such as those who are quick to use the chickenhawk argument are themselves permitted to express an opinion on the war—provided it’s the correct opinion, namely, that the war is illegal and immoral...
Amendment 14: "nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"
Amendment 5: "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
Warner Bros. expensive comic book movie Batman Begins had a tepid opening weekend, taking in an estimated 446.9 million in domestic box office receipts despite positive critical reviews.
The results continue the movie industry's longest losing streak in 20 years in which weekend receipts have run behind those of a year earlier.
The latest weekend results are the 17th in a row to fall short of cumulative box office receipts for the same weekend last year-making this the longest year to date down streak since 1985.
Here's the Guantanamo narrative, and then tell me who it favors: Camp X-Ray is about detaining terrorists who want to kill Americans -- the al Qaeda kind of terrorists, the September 11th kind of terrorists, the comrades of Atta. Some on the left would like to dismantle Camp X-Ray over some perceived injustices. The injustices? Placing the Koran on top of a television set. (Pity the poor little terrorists.) And what do they propose we do with the friends of Atta? They won't say. Have we forgotten that we are at war with these people?
To be an English major is to live not only by questioning, but by being questioned. It is to live with a question mark placed squarely on your forehead. It is to live, at least some of the time, in a state of "existential dread."
To be a humanist, that is, means not only to see clearly the surface of things and to see beyond those surfaces, but to place oneself in opposition, however subtle, an opposition that society seldom lets you forget: What are you going to do with that?
To the recent graduate, American society -- in all its vulgar, grotesque power -- reverberates with that question.
It's not easy to be an English major these days, or any student of the humanities. It requires a certain kind of determination, and a refusal -- an annoying refusal, for some of our friends and families, and for a good many employers -- to make decisions, or at least to make the kind of "practical decisions" that much of society demands of us. It represents a determination, that is, not only to do certain things -- to read certain books and learn certain poems, to acquire or refine a certain cast of mind -- but not to do other things: principally, not to decide, right now, quickly, how you will earn your living; which is to say, not to decide how you will justify your existence. For in the view of a large part of American society, the existential question is at the bottom an economic one: Who are you and what is your economic justification for being?
English majors, and other determined humanists, distinguish themselves not only by reading Shakespeare or Chaucer or Joyce or Woolf or Zora Neale Hurston but by refusing, in the face of overwhelming pressure, to answer that question. Whether they acknowledge it or not -- whether they know it or not -- and whatever they eventually decide to do with "that," they see developing the moral imagination as more important than securing economic self-justification.
Oh vulgar America! Vulgar nation that emphasises the need to not be on the public dole! Oh silly man that thinks that you must be an English Major to develop a moral imagination. Woeful indeed are the English Majors not realizing they had to make a choice between love of books and marketable skills. I never realized I had to make that choice and now I know. I must give up the Bard before I continue my plebian path of earning a living.
I found myself lying on my back in a small apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reading the New York Times and the New York Review -- very thoroughly: essentially spending all day, every day, lying on my back, reading, living on graduation-present money and subsisting on deliveries of fried rice from the Hong Kong restaurant (which happened to be two doors away -- though I felt I was unable to spare the time to leave the apartment, or the bed, to pick it up). The Chinese food deliveryman looked at me dispassionately and then, as one month stretched into two, a bit knowingly. If I knew then what I know now I would say I was depressed. At the time, however, I was under the impression that I was resting.
remember: whether you know it yet or not, you have doomed yourselves by learning how to read, learning how to question, learning how to doubt. And this is a most difficult time -- the most difficult I remember -- to have those skills. Once you have them, however, they are not easy to discard.
| Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night |
| Sleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn, |
| Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse, |
| And follows so the ever-running year, |
| With profitable labour, to his grave |
"You think people can work all day and then pick up their kids at child care or wherever and get home and still manage to sandwich in an eight-hour vote? Well Republicans, I guess can do that. Because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives."
Well, you know, I don't know Laura Bush. But she seems to be calm, and she has a sparkle in her eye, which is good. But I don't know that she's ever had a real job — I mean, since she's been grown up.
I had forgotten that Mrs. Bush had worked as a school teacher and librarian, and there couldn't be a more important job than teaching our children.
The traditional man still exists in China, Le Louet said, and "is not ready to go". But in Europe and the United States, a new species is emerging, apparently unafraid of anything.Some thing tells me Le Louet has never been beyond Madison Ave. Plus, men's manliness is not defined by what they wear. In earlier centuries manly men were often more gaudily dressed than Liberace was this century. It takes a real man to wear hose, Elizabeth I would agree with me. I dare you to tell caber tossing Scotsmen they are unmanly because they wear a skirt.
Try reading Field & Stream or Everything I Ever Needed To Know I Learned From Mad Max Movies.
"I have been asked in closing arguments to send a message. I'm going to decline that invitation. This court is not in a position to fix deficiencies in the election process that this court heard about over the past nine days."He also slapped election officials with this statement:
He said it is up to voters to fix the problems by getting rid of elections officials who were not doing thier job. My questions are these: how do voters vote out election officials in a system many are convinced is beyond repair? How do you ask voters in Spokane to vote to fix problems in Seattle?
"It's inertia, it's selfishness, it's taking our paycheck but not doing the work."
The publisher, LBI Institute, has released this new Bible entitled: "Judith Christ of Nazareth, The Gospels of the Bible, Corrected to Reflect that Christ Was a Woman, Extracted from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John."
Then God said, "Let us make man(kind) in our image, in our likeness, let them rule over the fish of the sean and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth , over all the creatures that move along the ground."The Godhead is likened to a woman in Luke 15:8-9. Even Paul's much maligned passage about women's roles in church has this to say:
So God created man(kind) in his own image,
In the image of God he created him,
male and female he created them." (NIV)
In the Lord however, woman is not independent of man, nor man independent of woman. For as woman came from man, man is born of woman. But everything comes from God. I Corinthians 11:11-12These statements occur right after his admonishments of how women should behave. The point of the whole passage is this: everyone should be focused on God in church. If someone is being disruptive they need to be under authority of someone. In ancient Corinth, that authority was a man. Again, simply a reflection of what was and not a whipping post for an outraged false feminism.
"And the young lady piped up and said, now, Governor, just a second, I'm an Evangelical Christian. and we don't think there ought to be separation of church and state. We think this is a Christian Nation. And you could have heard a pin drop.....And after dinner I was thanking everybody for coming and contributing and everything. and I went up to her and said how is it that you managed to support me as an Evangelical Christian? There's some things you can't possibly agree with me on, such as Civil Rights for all Americans and a woman's right to make up her own mind about what kind of health care she has."Wow, Dean has actually talked to an evangelical Christian? I would never have guessed.
"I went back and reread the whole New Testament the other day. Nowhere in the three-year ministry of Jesus Christ did I find a suggestion at all, ever, anywhere, in any way whatsover, that you ought to take the money from the poor, the opportunities from the poor and give them to the rich people."That of course was John Kerry. It's not that he's wrong in suggesting that it is a Christian's duty to help the poor or comfort the widow, it's that he's making a factual error. See all he needed to do was read the gospels to find his error. Personal accountability and good stewardship are spoken of in the Parable of the Talents. More on that here.
