good question

What does Pro-Life mean?

2008-09-02T13:06:00.000-07:00

I will preface this by saying that I am staunchly pro-choice and this is not an unbiased opinion. But this is what I have gathered from years of paying attention to what the population of pro-lifers have been saying. (This is primarily based off the platform that what most Republican candidates run on).

What does pro life mean?
It doesn't mean caring about the elderly
Because they don't care about social security
But they do care about pro life
And they don't care about orphanages or a foster care system that does not work
Because we don't want to aid single mothers who are struggling for an income
But they do care about pro life
They don't care about beggars on the street who don't have enough food to eat
Because they constantly talk about cutting welfare
But they do care about pro life
So what does pro life mean?
Does it mean that we only care about unborn life?
Once you've popped out of the uterus we are not responsible for you because you have become an actual human that is just leeching off society. No more aid for you. No more social care systems. Who needs to be socially responsible? Clearly not us.
Maybe I'm just starting to understand, pro-life means not actually being responsible for anything except interfering in the decision as to whether a woman is able to provide for her child or not. But I thought those same pro-lifers hated big government, so why is it ok to let big brother in on this instance? It's nice to have these rules be completely situational, isn't it?

i love tina fey

2008-03-05T07:48:00.001-08:00

so perhaps SNL is not the place to get your news but it sure is the place to make your news far more entertaining. like this "news" piece by tina fey that was basically a plug for hillary.

this primary season is enough to drive a person crazy. i will be truly disappointed if hillary does not get the nomination.

just for fun

2008-02-28T06:08:00.000-08:00

so i've been a bit quiet about things lately because i'm frustrated with the way the democratic campaigns are going. but i have found some amusement to make the rest of this campaign season bearable: http://gawker.com/360888/barack-obollywood-and-other-amazing-internet-attack-ads

michelle obama, fit to be first lady? i think not

2008-02-07T18:37:00.000-08:00

you know it's one thing to support your husband. that's great, i'm glad that we have a husband and wife team that work together but i have to say it is sorely disappointing to hear that she would have to "think about" voting for hillary should her husband not win the democratic nomination. i don't really think that's an appropriate answer for someone who would like to become our first lady. a first lady should know that it is quite important to actually vote in an election and if you are part of the democratic party one would hope that you would vote for the candidate that wins the nomination. i find it quite sad. this article goes more in depth on this. i have to say i have been a hillary supporter ever since kucinich dropped out but should i have ever questioned it, this would have definitely put me in the hillary camp for good.

why is it always a fight?

2008-02-07T08:54:00.000-08:00

i feel like the democrats these days feel like they have to fight all the time. it's as if every campaign is a fight. but why? why can't we just run a good campaign that doesn't feel like we're fighting all the time. i recently got this email about how "we're going to fight mccain". well but what if i don't want to fight. what if i want to hear whoever the democratic candidate is and to hear mccain and make an educated decision based on the two. i don't think it necessarily has to be a "fight". it could just be a debate and a good campaign that wins. or well i'd like to think it could be. perhaps i'm still too idealistic about politics.

seriously?

2008-02-06T08:29:00.000-08:00

ok so seriously do we have to be in a deadlock like all the time? i mean that's just not fair. also i'd like to mention that if you look at the places that obama is winning over hillary it's the more conservative part of the country like idaho, illinois, alabama, georgia. i know everyone was saying that oh those places are racist they'll never vote for a black man, but i'd like to point out that while they may be racist they're also sexist. and let me tell you they'll vote for a black man over a white woman or well any woman any day. see i'm not crazy, i'm not a conspiracy theorist i just happen to live in a man's world. i've always been a science geek and not just science but the boy kinda sciences like physics and comp sci, you learn a lot more about sexism playing with the boys than you do anywhere else. and it's not blatant sexism. i don't even think they mean it sometimes. it's just that if you asked them to choose who could do the job they wouldn't even consider any of the women in the dept because they wouldn't think of them. it's almost worse than discriminating because she's a woman it's not even acknowledging their presence. and it happens all the time. so yeah i'm rooting for hillary. obviously i could be wrong, i mean i don't know the demographics of who voted for whom just yet. and hopefully this crazy deadlock of super tuesday will wear off and we'll actually have a clear winner soon. at least i'd hope so.

obama vs. clinton

2008-02-01T14:06:00.000-08:00

so i'm not too thrilled with the candidates so far but if it has to be obama vs hillary then i have to say i am more of a supporter for hillary. i think she has the experience and the smarts to handle our lovely little recession that dubya will leave as his legacy. i mean let's face it there aren't many presidents that have done what bill did for us and therefore i have hope that she will be smart enough to use some of the resources she has through him to turn this economy around. i mean i know that it wasn't just him that part of it was the internet boom but he was also smart about how he managed the money that the internet boom brought with it. i mean there are judicious ways to spend money and stupid ways to spend money and i have faith in the clintons. and yes i do realize that if hillary gets elected that our country will have had either a bush or a clinton in office for 28 years but that doesn't bother me so much. i'd rather have someone that i think is competent regardless of whether this reminds us of fake democracies than allow another cowboy in office. because let's face it, all that talk about change, isn't that just what dubya did to get him in office. that our country needed a change. granted back then it was a change to be more conservative but still how is that any different from what obama is spewing. it's just jargon. and it's jargon i don't believe. and if caroline kennedy wants to support him as the new jfk well go right ahead but in my opinion jfk was one of the lousiest presidents in the history of the united states. the best part of his presidency was when johnson took over. now lbj that was a president. that was a man who did something. and unfortunately the history books have largely ignored him. but he was an incredible president. he did so much for education. he's a man that speaks to my heart. and not just him but if only the country were ready for a female president lady bird would have been awesome. *sigh* the elections these days just make me sad.

also, while i'm not ecstatic about either obama or clinton and apparently so are quite a few more leftist democrats i don't understand why so many dems are looking at the republican candidates as viable alternatives. i mean come on guys, just because our candidates aren't perfect doesn't mean that we should be bailing camp already. what is this? haven't we learned yet what happens when so many dems decide to vote based on "how they feel" and the republicans just vote party line. hello that's obviously how we got dubya in the first place guys. please tell me we've learned something. and yes i know i was at one point one of those voters. i mean when it was dubya vs. mccain and then all the loser dems, i was definitely considering mccain. but that's not true anymore. we don't have loser candidates. no candidate will be perfect. (well except kucinich but he's out already and obviously unelectable). when we've actually got a decent chance i think we should stop looking at the republicans as viable alternatives but rather look at them the way we should which is the opposition. know thine enemy but don't jump ship and join them!

it also makes me sad that no electable candidate will take up gay rights. why is it that al gore is the only person that questions how homosexual marriage threatens heterosexual marriage. i mean honestly why does it threaten heterosexual marriage? does it take away from the vows you made to your partner? does it change how you feel about your partner? cause if it does you may need to reevaluate your marriage and not the topic of why gays should be allowed to marry or not.

why can presidential candidates flat out lie and get away with it?

2007-11-02T13:50:00.000-07:00

how is it that we, the american people, are ok with our candidates lying to us. and ok, maybe i'll give us a little more credit and just assume that many of us are ignorant of certain facts. but rudy giuliani has been quoting around some utterly false numbers about the survival rates of men with prostate cancer in america vs. britain. so he's been saying that survival rates in america are ~82% (which is accurate according to medical journals) and that survival rates in britain are ~44% (this is completely untrue, but based on some conservative publication that he was reading). the actual survival rate in britain for men with prostate cancer is about 74.4%. so why aren't we actually hearing about that? also, mr. giuliani and his team have been enlightened that his figures are completely incorrect, yet his staff has said that they will continue to use the incorrect figures in his future speeches. how does this man resemble anything remotely similar to someone that our country would like to lead us? a man that will lie to us and not even admit his own mistakes. not to mention foreign policy, i mean it is actually quite offensive to britain to be misleading the public about their healthcare system. it would be one thing to be using accurate figures that may embarrass them but to use figures that are completely inaccurate is another thing. in fact i believe that it could be called slander. but hey, that's just me.

2007-10-22T12:54:00.000-07:00

wow, i haven't posted on here for a long time... but i think i'm back. at least for a while.

interesting things to think about... even though i'm not christian or religious

2004-11-14T21:23:00.000-08:00

KEEPING THE FAITH

A sermon preached at
Plymouth Congregational Church
Nicollet Avenue, Minneapolis
November 7, 2004

the Rev. James Gertmenian

Text: Psalm 46

The need for healing in our country after this erosive election - erosive not so much for the way it ended as for the acidic and grinding spirit it churned up in so many - is a palpable thing these days. Perhaps the losers, seeing their dreams slip away and fearing deeply for the nation, have the more immediate sense that healing is necessary. The winners, after all, may understandably enjoy their moment of elation and the sense of relief that accompanies the achievement of their goal. But thoughtful people on both sides of the electoral divide ought now to be looking across that chasm and setting out to bridge it. Thoughtful people on both sides know that neither the despair of the losers nor the triumphalist glee of the winners are affordable for more than a couple of days, since all of our resources - emotional, spiritual, political, and material - need now to be directed toward solving the intractable problems that lie before us. Those extreme responses - despair on the one hand and triumphalism on the other - are, rather, extravagances of emotion that will deplete the national will and ultimately cause more hurt than is sustainable in this great but weakened country. We are, after all, in this messy and dangerous world together - red states and blue, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, and we are, lest we forget, all partly responsible for both the mess and the danger. We have work to do, and in order to do it we should now be spanning the divide and joining hands with one another.

The bridge we need, however, cannot be built with gauzy phrases and balsa-wood promises. The desire for healing cannot alone replace the long, complicated work of healing. Jeremiah said, "They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying 'Peace, peace,' where there is no peace." And we should be careful that, in our hope for a new amity, and in facing the pressure of our common dilemmas, we not ignore the issues and behaviors that have separated us or pretend that they never existed. Let us at least muster from within ourselves the honesty to say that new rifts have opened up in our body politic - and, as I will say later, in the body of Christ as well - and that these rifts are real and formidable. Sentimental appeals for healing couched in the language of pietistic patriotism will never do the job of bringing our nation together. Wishful thinking won't make it happen, either, nor will the capitulation of one side to the other. The President, for his part, needs to do more than offer the sop of a few conciliatory phrases or the occasional appointment of a Democrat. He needs, instead, to make substantive moves toward a more inclusive agenda. And, on the other side, those who oppose the President must avoid charading cooperation while secretly hoping and praying for the administration to fail. Such disingenuousness does no service to the nation and ultimately undermines the very causes that liberals hope to advance.

No, the bridging that is necessary, and for which all people of good will yearn, needs more than a warm heart; it needs a clear eye and steely resolve, too. And when it comes to spanning the distance between this week's winners and losers, perhaps no line in scripture is so structurally reliable as the one from the forty-sixth Psalm in which a voice from beyond us all insists over the din of our political process: "Be still, and know that I am God." It is a profound calling that demands much of each side, and we stand together under its power. For those who equate their electoral victory to some eschatological triumph, and who suggest that with George Bush's re-election, God is in the White House (a direct quote from one of the President's supporters), the words "Be still," come as a firm, though loving corrective, a gentle demand for more humility, an invitation to stop ringing the victory bell just long enough to hear the authentic voice of the minority, to say nothing of the cries of the poor, the moans of the wounded, which also need to be heard and which are, after all, the true voice of God... God who is at the same time above every party, every interest group, every candidate, every administration, every religion, every nation. "Be still, and know that I am God," when addressed to the winners, is an unambiguous call for them to step back from the idolatry that would replace the transcendent God with a temporarily ascendant ideology or a partisan power. George Bush was, after all, elected, not anointed. A bit of that stillness, that humility, and that acknowledgement of God's place above all partisanship would be a welcome sign from the White House just now... and would go a long way toward nurturing the healing that the President claims he seeks for the nation.

On the other hand, the losers also need to hear, "Be still, and know that I am God," though, for them, the words carry quite a different message. When their laments and the woes, the cries of despair and the insults hurled against the other side, and the fusillades of black humor drown out any whisper of hope, any possibility of reconciliation, God says, patiently but firmly, "Be still." Despair, understandable as it might be, especially for those who invested so much of themselves in a losing cause, becomes, after a brief time, a self-indulgence, a self-pity that is unbecoming for those who truly believe in their cause. Yes, weep for a time. Yes, let a blast of anger clear out the sadness that clogs your heart. Yes, grieve, in the depths of your soul, what is clearly a real and significant loss. But then, sooner rather than later, the tears must be wiped away and the work taken up again. The anger, except just that part of it that fuels righteous effort, must be let go of. And the grief, if it continues, should do its work in some quiet corner of the soul, neither forgotten nor allowed to impede the more pressing work of the nation. Many of the saints whom we remember today are people who suffered loss after loss, but who, instead of giving up, instead of despairing, simply kept at the work to which they were called. They are noble examples of faithful courage, and can be inspiring models for those who felt defeated on Wednesday morning.

Respect for one another, a pervasive willingness to listen, the dropping of all pretension to moral or intellectual superiority on either side, and, above all, the practice of that common stillness before God is the hard work that our nation has before it... these, even while we do the equally hard work of forging, with others, a peace in the world, of caring for our most vulnerable citizens, and of securing the common weal. I wonder, in that context, what each of you - whether Republican or Democrat, Green or Independent - has determined to do to neutralize that acidity that has marked our national discourse. Note that I am not suggesting that anyone sacrifice their basic principles to achieve this balance, only that we seek, together, to lower our voices and elevate our conversation, recognizing that in these perilous times, any common ground we can find is surely holy ground.

With that as a somewhat lengthy preface, let me open a conversation that we will have to have more of in the months and years ahead, namely a dialogue that addresses the fault lines within American Christianity. I have heard more than one progressive Christian express a sense of near-complete estrangement from our more conservative or fundamentalist co-religionists, and some on the more liberal end have wondered whether they should even leave the church altogether rather than risk being painted, by the media or anyone else, with the same broad brush as those Christians who crowd toward the right. I confess to some of my own discomfort in the face of these strains, but I resist the impulse to run away, because I know that the higher calling and the nobler way is not to surrender the faith but to keep it.

-Keeping the faith, for progressives (and here I include Republicans and Democrats) means staying in the debate about what the core of Jesus' message was and is.
-Keeping the faith for us means learning to articulate liberal Christianity to a reductive press and a skeptical world so that a more expansive and inclusive vision of the Gospel can take root and flourish.
-Keeping the faith means insisting that the moral weight of Jesus' teaching is not primarily on narrow, personal sexual and reproductive behavior, but on the broad, public commitment to justice and peace.
-Keeping the faith, for progressives, means declaring that science and religion are not enemies, and it means exposing the hypocrisy of those who would enjoy the benefits of technology while denying the validity of basic scientific truths, like evolution and quantum physics, on which that technology is based.
-Keeping the faith means valuing and protecting the creation rather than continuing to damage and deplete it.
-Keeping the faith means rejecting the equation of power with righteousness, of Christianity with Americanism, and of public piety with true spirituality.
-Keeping the faith means praying daily for the safety of our soldiers even as we, with equal fervor and in the name of the Prince of Peace, abhor the machines of war they are forced to employ.
-Keeping the faith means having the humility before God to repent of sins like those at Abu Ghraib, not to treat them as anomalous lapses but to have the moral clarity to understand that they are the inevitable product of the confusion of our own power with God's.
-Keeping the faith means lining up with God's preferential option for the poor, so clearly propounded in scripture.
-Keeping the faith, for progressives, means abandoning rigid certainty as a way of being in the world, as a way of expressing religious belief, or as a way of doing politics.
-Keeping the faith means replacing legalistic and dogmatic absolutes with an awestruck wonder at the way in which God grows with us, changes withus, lives with us, dies with us.

In all of these things, churches like Plymouth offer an alternative view of Christianity, of religion, than that which seemed to emerge victorious in the election. With respect for those who differ, but with the firm conviction that this alternative voice must be heard... with a willingness to listen but the courage to dissent... with the humility to see our own faults but a joyful embrace of our own strengths, and with the patience of seeing the long view but the impatience of an urgent hunger for justice, those of us who understand ourselves to be progressive believers are called, in this time, to keep the faith, not to abandon it, to keep the faith and to ensure that it is not stolen from us by anyone with a narrower view or a louder voice, to keep the faith not as our own possession or as the sole answer but as a necessary and vital ingredient in a pluralistic world. This, I believe, is Plymouth's charter, and never could it be more important than it is today. This church has a charge to keep... and we will keep it.

In my closing minutes, I want to address a few, more focused words to those in our congregation who are Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, or Transgendered and to your family members and friends. A number of you have written or spoken to me in the last few days to say how dismayed you were to see amendments against gay marriage and, in some cases, even gaycivil rights, being passed by large margins in eleven states. Some of you spoke of feeling frightened, imagining, as well you might, that a new wave of hatred and fear is about to wash over you. You feel betrayed by a country that promised to value every human being equally... and perhaps even more damaging, you feel betrayed by representatives of a religion that claims love as its foundational value. I understand your fear. Many of us here at Plymouth do. But I want to remind you that this spasm of hatred is the lashing out of a dying dragon. This dragon, homophobia, is angry because it is dying. And it is frightened because it is dying. And in its anger and its fear it may even seem stronger than it really is. But it is dying. What is being born is the love of God which will show forth in a time in which your God-given value will be recognized by all. In the meantime, though, I want you to know this: Whatever happens anywhere else, in this place, and in this family, you need not be afraid. Even if every state in the Union were to pass an amendment, these walls stand to protect you. This is a sanctuary where your lives will be celebrated, and your loves blessed, and your relationships honored. And from this place we will go out and fight together for human rights for all. That is a solemn covenant which we here make with one another. And woe to this church if it should ever break that covenant, for in so doing it will have broken its own heart.

The forty-sixth Psalm says "there is a river whose streams makeglad the city of God." I want to close on a note of gladness, today. This is not a gladness of any particular party or any ideology, but the profound and elemental gladness that comes from knowing that God's purpose - which is peace and good will among people, equitable sharing in the things of the earth, and respect for the gift of creation - is working itself out even when we cannot see it. If, in order to drink from that Glad River (to use Will Campbell's wonderful phrase) we need to wade in right next to someone whose politics, or world view, or religious understanding is different from ours, then let us, by all means, begin wading. Somehow, there, with the current of God's love swirling around our legs, and with all of us nearly losing our balance for the sheer joy of it, we might be able to see one another for who we really are and understand, with a new vision, our essential oneness as human creatures. There, with the rush of God's justice flowing down inexorably is Micah promised it would, we might discover a new politics - a politics of generosity and abundance. And there, with the cooling spring of God's presence welling up in each of us, we might finally join hands with one another and become, in our very flesh, pilgrims across every human divide, seekers after reconciliation, and bridges of Peace.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

my thoughts on the election

2004-11-09T21:52:00.000-08:00

now for my thoughts on the actual election. i think it's pathetic that george bush won by such a small margin but at least he theoretically won it fair and square this time. well actually i'm not so sure that he did, because i've heard of tons of problems across the country of things that happened that nobody is publicizing but i feel that if we can't get him out of office by protesting i mean we saw how well that worked last time. so now that he's there we just have to deal with it, right? right. but the other thing that really annoyed me about this election is that the stupid man, who i refuse to adcept is from texas but since that's what he claims let's take a look at that, well he only got 55% of the vote in houston... or it might have been less than that but he won houston, which considering it's part of his "home base" as the largest city in texas and his theoretical hometown is pretty pathetic. hell kerry got 78% of the votes in boston. that's pretty lame when you can't even get your so called hometown to vote for you. but even more than that, he was actually born in new haven where he got only 18% of the vote. that's even more pathetic. or at least i believe these are true judging by cnn.com's results, if i'm reading them right. also, it bothers me that i know that there was bad campaigning and that there were people turned away from polls in such a manner that you could believe it was rigged. but i also think that that is a useless fight and we've got to find another way to battle the republicans now. but i don't really dislike republicans, it's really just the fanatical christian right-wing that bothers me. ah well. i'll go on about this later.

what's with all the apologies?

2004-11-09T21:43:00.000-08:00

maybe it's just me but why does everyone feel the need to apologize for the election? all these websites and all of the stupid things i keep hearing about everyone being sorry that bush was elected is really just getting to me. for god's sake people, no matter what we say he is still the president and he's still going to be here for four more years. why not stop apologizing about something we don't have control over and instead try and do something to salvage the values we think are important that are totally being ignored and/or eradicated in this god-forsaken country? yes perhaps i'm not quite sure of what to do yet but bitching and moaning and being depressed sure as hell aren't getting us anywhere with anyone anytime soon, other than us being annoyed at the state of our own government that we currently can't change. did we not learn anything from the last election that just talking about it is not going to get us anywhere? come on now people. ugh.
i mean i'm not happy about the election results either but there there and we can't change them, so why not move on and think about what we can do instead of apologizing for what we have no control over?!

the case against george w. bush

2004-10-13T10:37:00.000-07:00

THE CASE AGAINST GEORGE W. BUSH: PART III.
Hero Worship
by Noam Scheiber

Paul O'Neill probably knew what to expect when he showed up for a White House meeting about tax cuts in November 2002. Nearly two years as Treasury secretary should have taught him that the Bush administration never misses an opportunity to cut taxes for the wealthy. And, in case they hadn't, Vice President Dick Cheney clarified the White House's intentions at a meeting earlier in the month. When O'Neill politely suggested to Cheney that a cut in dividend taxes wasn't necessary, as Ron Suskind reports in The Price of Loyalty, Cheney coldly informed him, "We won the midterms. This is our due."

Still, not long into the meeting, O'Neill got the impression the president was open to debate on the matter, much to the discomfort of the usual tax-cut proponents, such as Karl Rove, National Economic Council Director Lawrence Lindsey, and Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Glenn Hubbard. George W. Bush asked Lindsey, "Won't the top-rate people benefit the most from eliminating the double taxation of dividends? Didn't we already give them a break at the top?" To Hubbard's reply that action was necessary on the supply side of the economy, Bush snapped, "This is about demand. ... I want this to work."

Then, just as soon as Bush voiced his dissent, Hubbard and Rove talked him down. "Eliminating the double taxation of dividends is a game-changer," Hubbard said, invoking what, according to Suskind, is one of the president's favorite expressions. "You should be basing the package on principle," Rove chimed in. This logic made eminent sense to the president, who considers himself nothing if not principled. "Why do we play our hand now, negotiate against ourselves? I want to stay with principle," Bush said a few minutes later. There, there, Rove seemed to respond, before leading into one of the tactical discussions that always soothed his boss. "We want to dictate the debate, Mister President. Not be too specific out of the box." Pretty soon, the storm clouds had passed. "Good, what I am hearing is that we roll out in mid-December." Rove could barely contain himself. "Stick to principle," he purred.

The episode is vintage Bush. Conventional wisdom holds that the president is a conservative hard-liner bent on upending the Middle East and the U.S. tax code. But, while those may be the practical implications of the decisions he's made as president, the way George W. Bush makes sense of the world isn't through ideology. It's through narrative. Bush has always been a sucker for a good storyline--and never more so than when it involves him. In his own mind, Bush is the central figure in an
ever-unfolding series of dramas. As such, Bush prides himself on possessing the qualities of a hero: compassion and justness on the one hand; boldness, principle, and resolution on the other. Bush almost always supports policies that appear to reinforce this image of himself; he opposes policies that appear to contradict it.

To be sure, these are qualities that often make Bush a decent, even likeable human being--as when he extemporaneously came out against legacy admissions (a policy he'd personally benefited from) at a recent conference of minority journalists in Washington, D.C. The problem with Bush's penchant for making decisions based on whether they reinforce his own internal storyline is that, when divorced from logical argument or empirical evidence--neither of which Bush has much patience for (see
Franklin Foer, "Closing of the Presidential Mind," July 5 & 12)--narrative is an essentially contentless proposition: You can construct equally compelling narratives to justify either side of just about any decision Bush has had to make as president. The Bush tax cuts could be framed as an effort to upwardly redistribute wealth (as Bush initially presumed) or as a bold, principled plan to turbocharge the economy (as Hubbard and Rove subsequently convinced him). Iraq could be framed as a disastrous
departure from the war against Al Qaeda or as an attempt to weaken Islamic fundamentalism at its geographic heart. Unfortunately for the country, during Bush's presidency, it's the advisers who favor the most radical policies who have been most successful at telling their stories.

Without Ideology

Bush's apparent reluctance to cut taxes for the wealthy might seem confusing coming from a man whose administration has done more to reward the wealthy than any in history. Then again, Bush has never been an especially ideological man. Pretty much the only real political conviction in evidence throughout his life is a vague cultural conservatism that came as a response to the 1960s. At Yale, Bush was constantly put off by "[p]eople who felt guilty about their lot in life because others were suffering," he explained to The Dallas Morning News in 1994. One of the
most searing experiences of Bush's early adulthood was an encounter he had with the Yale chaplain, William Sloane Coffin. Not long after George H.W. Bush lost a brutal U.S. Senate campaign in Texas in 1964, Coffin informed W., "Oh, yes, I know your father. Frankly, he was beaten by a better man." The memory of the exchange lingered for years. "What angered me was the way such people at Yale felt so intellectually superior and so righteous," Bush told a Texas Monthly reporter in 1994.

Still, these feelings never amounted to anything approaching a coherent worldview, certainly not one that was the product of any thoughtful deliberation. During his senior year at Phillips Andover, a roommate was shocked to find Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative on Bush's desk. He casually explained that his father had told him to buy a copy. "He was not obsessed by anything, or a cause. He didn't have an agenda, a timetable, a program," one of Bush's former Yale fraternity brothers told Bill Minutaglio, author of the Bush biography First Son. On the rare occasion that Bush talked about his post-college plans, they usually entailed getting rich as a stockbroker.

When Bush worked in politics, it wasn't as an activist but as a campaign operative--as the political director of a 1972 Republican Senate campaign in Alabama and later as a paid adviser to his father in 1988. The experiences did little to equip him with the kinds of ideas that might motivate a run for office. If anything, they seemed to make him even less ideological. Asked about his "political agenda for Texas" while flirting with a gubernatorial campaign in 1989, Bush was something less than profound, telling Texas Monthly, "I want to affect the lives of people. ... I want to make life better. I think politics is an arena where you can do that." Within the Bush family, George W. was known as the genial backslapper to his brother Jeb's brash ideologue. As "the old man" would later assess the differences between the two sons in his diary: "[W.] is good, this boy of ours. He is uptight at times, feisty at
other times-he includes people. He has no sharp edges on issues. He is no ideologue, no divider." When it came to Jeb, by contrast, "He is passionate and caring in his beliefs."

One of the key factors behind George W. Bush's success during the 1994 gubernatorial campaign was his relentless focus on four themes, dubbed the "four food groups" by the Texas press: education, tort reform, juvenile justice, and welfare reform. (This focus had the advantage of providing a concrete agenda while limiting the terrain Bush had to cover during the campaign.) None of these issues, as George H.W. Bush noted, had an especially sharp ideological edge. In fact, on education, the issue in
which W. took the most direct personal interest, some of his stands were downright liberal. Bush had come to believe, as he explains in his autobiography, A Charge to Keep, that financing schools with property tax revenue was "inherently unfair and unequal, because property values are different in different parts of the state." So, during the 1997 legislative session, he proposed an ambitious overhaul of the state tax system: Cut local property taxes by $3 billion and raise revenue through a
sales tax increase and a statewide "business activity" tax. The revenue from these taxes would be used to fund schools more equitably. (Bush ultimately settled for a radically scaled-back $1 billion property tax cut when business groups revolted at the prospect of a steep tax increase.)

If anything, Bush's impulses have been even more scattershot during his presidency. Take Bush's first encounter with Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 16, 2001. The nominal purpose of the meeting was for Bush to lay out his case for missile defense, nato expansion, and junking the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which is basically what he did. But, after the private discussion with Putin, the president deviated from his talking points. Bush had spent the previous several months talking tough with the Russians and complaining that his predecessor had over-personalized
relations with Boris Yeltsin; Condoleezza Rice had explicitly told European allies earlier that spring that the Russians only respected strength. But, during a joint press conference, Bush made a point of referring to Russia as a "partner." Bush also spontaneously invited Putin to visit his ranch in Crawford, Texas (Putin accepted), and, oh yeah, personally vouched for the goodness of Putin's soul. "I found him to be
very straightforward and trustworthy," Bush told reporters. "I was able to get a sense of his soul."

All the happy talk was a little dispiriting for the foreign policy commentariat, which alternately bristled at the description of Putin as trustworthy (Zbigniew Brzezinski) and groused that the Crawford visit had been deployed as a gift, not a carrot (Bill Safire). It was lost on no one that our new Russia policy had apparently been based on a mere peek at Putin's immortal spirit. As it happens, though, the reason for the policy shift was even creepier. Bob Woodward tells us in Bush at War that Bush was amazed to find Putin wearing a cross his mother had given him. Putin,
noticing Bush's reaction, promptly took his cue: "The rest of the story is, is that I was wearing my cross. I hung it on a dacha," he told Bush. "The dacha burned down, and the only thing I wanted recovered was the cross.... I remember the workman's hand opening, and there was the cross that my mother had given me, as if it was meant to be." "Well, that's the story of the cross as far as I'm concerned. Things are meant to be," Bush assured him, signaling his affirmation. The president appears to have been won over by a Sunday-school homily. And not even a very good one.

Judging from the Putin episode, Bush is a man with preternaturally strong vision. Not "vision thing" vision. The more mundane kind. We know this because, to the extent Bush can be said to make foreign policy, much of it happens on the fly, after emotional personal encounters with key players, at the end of which he invariably looks them in the eye. Bush's assessment of Putin's soul came after he'd "looked the man in the eye." Bush decided to go to the United Nations before invading Iraq mostly because Tony Blair had lobbied him hard for it, and Blair was a man with "cojones." According to Woodward, Bush was able to discern this by looking Blair in the eye. (Not, as you might think, in said cojones.) In late October 2001, as the Afghan campaign appeared to be stalling, Bush made the decision to stick with his original military plan, Woodward notes, after "look[ing] around the table from face to face ... mak[ing] eye contact, maintain[ing] it, saying in effect, 'You're on board, you're with me, right?'" Bush had Central Command General Tommy Franks trek to his Crawford ranch in December 2001 to discuss his options in Iraq so he could size up Franks's "body language, [his] eyes, [his] demeanor," writes Woodward.

Even when Bush neglects to make eye contact, his meetings have an emotional dimension that often leads him to shift course abruptly. Writing in The New Yorker last December, Connie Bruck reported how Bush became taken with the reformist Palestinian finance minister, Salam Fayyad, when Fayyad, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Texas, arrived at their first meeting with his pinkie and index fingers extended--"In the sign for Texas Longhorns!" according to one Israeli diplomat. "He and Bush got along very, very well," the diplomat recalled. At Fayyad's urging, Bush
subsequently demanded that the Israelis release Palestinian tax revenue they had frozen in 2000, telling the Israelis, "It's not your money. Why are you holding it in the first place?" (The Israelis had been convinced that, absent adequate controls, some of the money would end up financing terrorism.)

Bush also became outraged during a July 2003 meeting with then-Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, who presented Bush with a map of the Israeli-built security fence and pressed Bush to condemn it. Bush, again according to Bruck, became so emotional he threw the paper away and shouted, "You'll never have two states with this!" Shortly after the meeting, Bush shocked the Israelis by announcing at a Rose Garden press conference that "I think the wall is a problem.... It is very difficult to develop confidence between the Palestinians and the [Israelis] with a wall snaking through the West Bank." (Previously, American officials had gently noted their concerns in private.)

Bold and Resolute

Bush's habit of making snap decisions based largely on emotion would obviously be exasperating for an administration official trying to forge coherent policy. Aides have responded by heavily regulating the flow of information to the president. Meetings between Bush and his top officials are almost always choreographed. Woodward notes that "[Rice] liked to deliver the president clear, unambiguous summaries that reflected their thinking. The best way frequently was to orchestrate and script the next day's [National Security Council] meeting. They agreed on who was going to
say what, and in what order." Suskind writes in The Price of Loyalty (which drew heavily from interviews and documents provided by O'Neill), "Before most meetings, a cabinet secretary's chief of staff would receive a note from someone on the senior staff in the White House. The note instructed the cabinet secretary when he was supposed to speak, about what, and how long. ... [O'Neill] had been in many White Houses. He had never heard of such a thing."

The other reason aides have taken to scripting their interactions with the president is more sinister: It makes it easier to exploit Bush's view of himself as a tough, bold leader. Every other word out of Bush's mouth in the first few days after September 11 reads like a two-bit John Wayne impression. "That's what we're paid for, boys. We're going to take care of this," Bush announced to his staff aboard Air Force One the day of the attacks. "And, when we find out who did this, they're not going to like me as president." Not long after, Bush informed Cheney, "We're going to find out who did this, and we're going to kick their asses." In late October, when intelligence suggested an attack on the White House might be forthcoming, Bush refused to consider leaving, bellowing, "Those bastards are going to find me exactly here."

For top administration aides, this self-image is ripe for manipulation. One could plausibly argue that the bureaucracy most at fault for September 11 was the CIA and that CIA Director George Tenet should have lost his job in the aftermath of the attacks. But Tenet's genius in dealing with Bush after September 11 was to play to the president's preference for bold action. One of Tenet's masterstrokes was to haul his charismatic counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, into a National Security Council (NSC) meeting to sell the president on the CIA's plan for Afghanistan. Black, who had apparently done an extended tour in a Tom Clancy novel, was fond of saying things like, "When we're through with them, they will have flies walking across their eyeballs," and jumping up from his chair to emphasize a point. "Mister President, we can do this [mission]," he told Bush. "But, you've got to understand, people are going to die." This played perfectly to the president's bold streak. "Let's go. That's war. That's what we're here to win," Bush said.

A few days later, Tenet pressed Bush to launch a covert global war on terrorism, which, he argued, would require ceding the CIA "exceptional authorities" to snatch or kill suspected Al Qaeda operatives and to subsidize foreign intelligence agents. Tenet had titled his detailed proposal "Going to War" and had dramatically affixed a picture of Osama bin Laden with a red diagonal bar through his face to the first page of the document. By the end of the presentation, in which Tenet hopscotched through CIA plans in some 80 countries, senior aides like Donald Rumsfeld were a little uneasy about granting the CIA such broad latitude. But Bush was once again enthralled with the ambitiousness of Tenet's plan. "The president made no effort to disguise what he thought of Tenet's proposals," Woodward reports, "virtually shouting, 'Great job!'" Two days later, Bush approved the CIA request. "We are going to rain holy hell on them. You've got to put lives at risk. We've got to have people on the ground," Bush opined, echoing Tenet's and Black's language.

The problem, of course, was that the plan Bush endorsed didn't actually put many lives at risk--at least not American lives. Instead, it relied heavily on proxy forces, cruise missiles, and high-altitude bombing, which helped bin Laden and his minions slip out of Tora Bora and into Pakistan in December 2001. But Bush couldn't be bothered with details once he had decided the CIA shared his hunger for bold action. Worse, Tenet was able to leverage his risk-taking story into immunity for himself and his agency. As Woodward summarizes Tenet's thoughts after September 11: "The new factor was the absence of doubt at the top. Bush displayed no hesitation or uncertainty.... It was a new ethos for the intelligence business. Suddenly there seemed to be no penalty for taking risks and making mistakes." (This growing affinity between them would later lead the president to accept Tenet's assertion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction--"It's a slam dunk!"--even though the president found the
evidence lacking.)

Other top administration officials have been equally skilled at playing to the president's John Wayne complex. During a discussion of the Iraq war plan between Franks, Rumsfeld, and Bush in January 2002, Franks informed the president that support for Saddam Hussein's government would be directly related to Iraqis' assessment of U.S. intentions: The greater the buildup of U.S. forces in the region, the clearer Bush's commitment to ousting Saddam would be, and the more likely it was that Iraqis would begin to undermine the regime themselves. This made perfect sense. Unfortunatey, Franks and Rumsfeld had no idea whether it was actually true, since no one had any intelligence to back it up. But then, who needs intelligence? "Whatever the merits," Woodward writes, "the argument added to the momentum to war. ... [A]s they all knew, little was more appealing to President Bush than showing resolve."

By the summer of 2002, both sides in the internal debate over Iraq had realized that winning over the president required convincing him your position was more action-packed than the alternative. This bias generally favored the hawks, who, after all, wanted to depose a brutal regime half a world away. But not always. Having lost the debate over whether to go to the United Nations on Iraq, Cheney and Rumsfeld were dead-set against calling for a new resolution that would once again demand that Saddam disarm. They complained that the United States would only get bogged down in a "process solution," another Bush buzz phrase. But Powell was up for the fight. "You can't say all of this without asking them to do something," Powell complained when he noticed the call for a resolution missing from a late draft of Bush's U.N. speech. "There's no action in this speech." "He knew that the appeal for action would resonate strongly with Bush," Woodward explains. It did. Bush eventually announced to the world, "We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions"--this despite Rumsfeld's last-ditch appeal for the president to stand on principle.

The Anti-Clinton

In contrast to Powell and Tenet, other aides have taken a bank-shot approach to dealing with the president, defining what they oppose as weak and timid, and then encouraging the president to do the opposite. This is where Bill Clinton has proved exceptionally useful. Prior to 1992, Bush had understood politics as an ongoing conflict between Middle America and liberal Northern elitists. Clinton, despite not actually being from the North, became the face Bush affixed to this trope following his father's defeat. Much of what Bush did during the '90s was motivated by the idea of himself as a bulwark against creeping Clintonism. In what Minutaglio tells us was partly a dig at Clinton, Bush announced in his 1994 gubernatorial inaugural speech, "For the last thirty years, our culture has steadily replaced personal responsibility with collective guilt." During an annual White House dinner for the nation's governors, Bush informed anybody who would listen that "[Clinton] is in trouble in Texas." In A Charge to Keep, Bush condemned the cultural rot he felt Clinton epitomized, writing that, "The changing culture blurred the sharp contrast between right and wrong and created a new standard of conduct: 'If it feels good, do it' and 'If you've got a problem, blame somebody else.'" And, of course, on the campaign trail in 2000, Bush vowed to restore honor and integrity to the Oval Office.

From the earliest days of the administration, Cheney and Rumsfeld became expert at playing the anti-Clinton card with Bush. This had certain tactical implications. During the Afghan war, for example, Rumsfeld would cleverly deploy Bush's pet term for Clinton's antiseptic, cruise-missile approach to war--"pounding sand"--when confronted with a proposal he wanted to derail. ("How does the strategy work domestically? We don't want to look like we are pounding sand," Rumsfeld said in opposing a delay in bombing out of sensitivity to Pakistan. "Rumsfeld knew that [the term] was loaded," Woodward tells us.) But it also had important strategic implications. In Plan of Attack, Woodward describes a meeting between Rumsfeld and Bush during the presidential transition period, in which the future defense secretary claimed the Clinton era had been defined by constant retreat from foreign policy threats--"reflexive pullback," in Rumsfeld's lexicon. He argued that the Bush administration should adopt a "forward-leaning" posture, and Bush enthusiastically concurred. Cheney made a variation of this argument after September 11, maintaining that the Clinton administration's indifferent response to each terrorist incident
during the '90s essentially invited the next one.

These arguments shaped Bush's thinking, even if he occasionally mangled them. Bush told Woodward in 2002 that he believed the experience of Somalia had paralyzed the Clinton administration, preventing it from taking bold action in places like Afghanistan, where Clinton lobbed a few cruise missiles after the 1998 East Africa Embassy bombings, and Kosovo in 1999, where Clinton bombed Serbian troops from the safe remove of 30,000 feet. ... Wait, Kosovo? Didn't Bush only reluctantly support the Clinton administration's Kosovo campaign--and wasn't his concern that Clinton was too aggressive? (As one Bush adviser explained in the September 27, 1999, issue of The New Republic: "We don't believe in this emotional stuff. We don't believe in sending troops all over the place.") Oh, never mind. The important thing is that Kosovo happened on Clinton's watch.

Rumsfeld pressed his Bush-as-anti-Clinton line to begin laying the groundwork for Iraq in the aftermath of September 11. He pointed out that, unlike Afghanistan, Iraq actually had targets capable of being hit, which played to Bush's refusal to "put a million-dollar missile on a five-dollar tent," another allusion to Clinton-era cravenness. Rumsfeld also argued that the United States needed to demonstrate it was going on a global offensive, a contrast with the allegedly defensive posture of the Clinton era, which Bush seized on. The ploy worked. On November 21, 2001, with the military portion of the Afghan campaign winding down, Bush took Rumsfeld aside and asked him to begin preparing options for a possible invasion of Iraq.

Indeed, it was arguably Clinton who provided the coup de grM-bce on Iraq. By early 2003, administration hawks were claiming that, with tens of thousands of troops in the region, failing to invade would deal a devastating blow to U.S. credibility. In January, Rumsfeld told Bush, "The penalty for our country and for our relationships and potentially the lives of some people are at risk if you have to make a decision not to go forward." Cheney, according to Woodward, "felt that once the president had laid out his objective of regime change, and begun the process of troop deployments and CIA work, then if they didn't follow through, they would be like Clinton--a lot of bold talk and not much action." The logic had a certain circular beauty: Bush needed to take action up front (i.e., deploy troops), as Franks had advised, to make the war easier if he eventually decided to wage it. But, once he did so, it would constitute a Clinton-like retreat not to follow through with an invasion.

Echoes of Reagan

Bush isn't the first president to make sense of the world by reducing it to simple stories featuring himself in the starring role. As Lou Cannon writes in his definitive Ronald Reagan biography, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, "Reagan's reliance on metaphor and analogy for understanding made him vulnerable to arguments that were short on facts and long on theatrical gimmicks.... He made sense of foreign policy through his long-developed habit of devising dramatic, all-purpose stories with moralistic messages, forceful plots, and well-developed heroes and villains."

And yet, Reagan's presidency was less spooky than Bush's. One reason is that Reagan was, in some sense, more hands-off--some might say out of the loop--than Bush, which created a vacuum his advisers were forced to fill. That meant ambitious aides couldn't simply exploit the characterological weaknesses of the president. They had to duke it out among themselves in more traditional bureaucratic warfare. The corollary to this is that influential positions within the Reagan administration were more evenly distributed between moderates (like Treasury Secretary Don Regan, Secretary of State George Shultz, Chief of Staff James Baker), and hard-liners (like Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, many of the political appointees at Treasury, and, at least early in his tenure, Office of Management and Budget Director Dave Stockman). Hard-liners won on the 1981 tax cut and the administration's defense buildup; the 1986 tax reform package was a victory for moderates. In the Bush administration, by contrast, the list of high-ranking moderates consisted of O'Neill, Powell, and Christie Whitman, head of the Environmental Protection Agency. O'Neill and Whitman were early casualties. Powell was marginalized from the get-go.

Perhaps more important, the narrative Reagan clung to most stubbornly was, on the one hand, more dada than anything Bush could dream up, but, on the other hand, more detailed in its policy implications. Reagan, as Hendrik Hertzberg points out in his 1991 tnr essay on the Reagan presidency, was obsessed with saving the world from Armageddon, which he understood to mean nuclear holocaust ("The Child Monarch," September 9, 1991). Although the goal was grandiose, Reagan understood it in very concrete terms: eliminating nuclear weapons.

Bush's preferred narratives, by contrast, have always been vague enough to lead to almost any policy. One outgrowth of Bush's image of himself as a heroic leader has been a near-evangelical zeal to spread freedom around the world. Bush's response to Powell's plea in August 2002 about the potentially chaotic consequences of invading Iraq was, "[M]y job is to secure America.... And that I also believe that freedom is something people long for. And that, if given a chance, the Iraqis over time would seize the moment." Bush told Woodward in December 2003, "I say that freedom is not America's gift to the world. Freedom is God's gift to everybody in the world. I believe that. As a matter of fact, I was the person that wrote the line, or said it. I didn't write it, I just said it in a speech. And it became part of the jargon."

But, unlike Reagan's determination to save the world, Bush's SimM-sn BolM-mvar pretensions are ill-defined. Since restoring freedom in Bush's mind could simply mean toppling a tyrannical regime, it provided zero prescription for action once U.S. forces had ousted the Taliban and Saddam. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and others exploited this vacuum to push their vision of how the military should be employed. In Afghanistan, Rumsfeld and Cheney adamantly opposed using American troops for nation-building, and Bush parroted this argument back to them, unaware of the contradiction with his ostensible desire to build a democratic government. "Look, I oppose using the military for nation-building. Once the job is done, our forces are not peacekeepers," he said at an NSC meeting in mid-October 2001, as the Northern Alliance closed in on Kabul. By January 2003, two months before the invasion of Iraq, Cheney had recognized that establishing democracy was one of Bush's motivations. But, at the same time, the vice president's mantra in internal deliberations was that the United States needed to maintain a "light hand in the postwar phase." Bush, of course, endorsed this "light hand" approach. Partly as a result, the story of Iraq hasn't had a very happy ending--at least not outside the president's mind. Then again, to George W. Bush, that's the venue that's always mattered most.

October 7th
Copyright 2004, The New Republic

more on absentee voting in texas

2004-10-13T10:17:00.000-07:00

so i have sent in my request. granted it is a bit late but it's there and i hope to get my ballot relatively soon because ummm i do need it and maybe just maybe the texans will be smart this year and we will have learned from our past mistakes and not vote for dubya. i mean i know alot of democrats in texas. granted they are all my friends but you know... i'm sure there are more than the ones i know who exist. we do have quite a few house reps that are dems. now if only i could convince my best friend that he's making the error of a lifetime if he votes for bush. ugh.

still on absentee ballots

2004-09-19T18:26:00.000-07:00

i swear they make it incredibly difficult to get one for texas. honestly, do they just know that we're all democrats or something? just the simple fact that at my college they had it set up so that there are a bunch of people working on the kerry campaign who have an absentee ballot desk set up to send in your request to your home state for every single state except texas, because clearly texas makes it too difficult. it's really just not cool. oh well, i guess i have to do some more digging so i can get it together asap, otherwise i may have some problems.

absentee ballots

2004-08-19T12:39:00.000-07:00

i have a question: why do they make it so hard to get an absentee ballot? i mean if it's hard enough to get people to go out to vote in the first place, wouldn't you be jumping up and down for joy that someone actually cares enough to vote when they aren't even going to be in their home county to take a part of the voting? i mean honestly do they just *know* that we're all democrats and god forbid we get to vote in the first place. granted i'm sure my viewpoint is a little skewed being from texas and everything. but still, i just don't understand how we need to send in our request to vote "early" or mail it in no earlier than 2 months prior to the election. hello, i'm on top of things, i wanted to do it now. really would they forget if i sent it in in august instead of september? honestly now, it is their job to keep track of this stuff. ah well. such is the life of a college student from texas, now to get all the other texans in mass to register and send in their absentee ballot info on time.

hilarious!

2004-08-13T09:54:00.000-07:00

so, yesterday when i went to the park to see shakespeare outdoors a surprisingly normal looking nutjob after the show hand me this fantastic pamphlet about "A Real Democratic Platform for November 2004". and while that originally sounds normal "Children of Satan III: The Sexual Congress For Cultural Fascism". it's apparantly from Lyndon LaRouche's campaign. although i haven't had time to read it yet but crom the title and contents page this should make for amusing reading. oh politics. how amusing you can be.

and random side note: i love that shakespeare ends all of his comedies with a tid bit from himself that is generally amusing.

whoa conservative

2004-08-10T13:38:00.000-07:00

sweet mother of christ [pardon my swearing, i'm just a little bit shocked] there is the craziest conservative forum that i've found. and while ron reagan isn't exactly like his father, he's no flaming liberal either and they've chosen to roast him alive. it's a little frightening.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/browse

oh my god i take it back. it is more than just a little bit frightening it's like reading the scariest backwards christian fanatacism that appears to think that it's politics. i mean really for people to be able to talk about kerry and clinton the way they do. man oh man. but then again i guess the same would be said for me and the stuff i say about bush. but at the same time i think i give credit where credit is due, i mean i thought g.h. bush was an asshole but at least he was intelligent. and i could disagree with what he was doing but i didn't think he was a moron. same goes for ronald reagan. just because i don't like them doesn't mean i think all republicans are morons. on the other hand dubya is an exception. he is a prize jackass. and i would like to defend those people who are trying to roast kerry and clinton. also here's a snippet from there:

Kerry Fit To Lead? (Zot in waiting - Vanity)
Posted by Core_Conservative
On 08/10/2004 10:12:32 AM PDT · 71 replies

n/a ^ | 08/10/04 | Lyle Koch
This may get me flamed big time here at FR, but I think that all the talk about Kerry not FIT to be President is wrong.My reasoning behind this is that every person who is American Born (A US Citizen and US Born) should have the opportunity to become President. That said, I think Kerry is a piece of garbage and should never become President of the US, but if he is FAIRLY elected, then we will suffer through, just like we did for 8 years of President Clinton (God I hate having to capitalize that traitors name - but...

now perhaps you may not want kerry elected but i would like to note that george w. bush was not fairly elected. that was a complete and total hoax. so i think that those rightwing nutjobs need to start remembering this before shooting off their mouths. ugh.

kerry vs. bush

2004-08-10T11:34:00.000-07:00

wow. this little blog of mine seems to be rather politically oriented.

anyways. i think it's absolutely fabulous that there are a bunch of musicians who are willing to go on tour the month before the elections to the swing state to play for kerry. all by their little selves just 'cause they don't care for the government. and you know it is one thing to have michael moore dis you. it's totally something else to have ron reagan, esq. to basically say the same thing, only more eloquently. also, the dixie chicks will always be my most favourite country band simply because they have all the right political leanings. or well they have my political leanings and that's pretty much what i care about.

i am glad to know that there are some sane people in this country and just maybe "the times they are a changin'".

blog blog blog

2004-08-04T12:46:00.000-07:00

ok yeah i just like the word "blog" currently. it's amazing how you never realize just how much you use an item until you can't. that's what happened at work this week. last friday i left and the office was quiet and normal and everything was just like any other day at the office. but monday morning our phones were mostly out, the lines were crossing over and we couldn't figure out what's going on. in an office of 4 people, i'd say that's pretty impressive. none of us could really understand what's happening and unfortunately me being the secretary i was affected the most. my boss and warren ended up being out most of monday and tuesday and well john is still out today so he's not all too concerned about this. and actually i'd say linda got it pretty bad too because half the calls we get are for her and her phone was completely out. i mean at least mine still sortof worked, even if the lines were crossing and you could barely hear. i never thought having a phone was this important until now. thankfully they are working again and all has resumed normalcy. whoa i'm tired all of a sudden. if only i could leave early and still get paid, now that would be somethin'.

...

2004-08-03T10:55:00.000-07:00

so i'm still not entirely sure how useful this blog is. it kindof seems like a livejournal to me only i don't know anyone who uses this. probably because we're all outdated and still use lj but anyways. i'm still puzzled by this gmail phenomenon. and i want an account mainly because it sounds cool more than for any real reason. i mean honestly i only use my school email because it's accessible anywhere, all i have to be able to do is pull up a terminal and that's damn easy. at any rate i'm taking a break from work, the gigantic project that my boss has given me that theoretically was only a few days has now quickly expanded into more than a week. while it does make me mildly unhappy i do like this job much more than my previous one so i guess i must be ok with everything. i miss dreamweaver. and flash. that was the nice part of the other job... even if my boss did make me want to poke my eyes out. john is a much much better boss. he's really easy to work for. he knows what he wants, he tells you what it is and you are simply expected to do it. there is no watching your every move or waffling on what he wanted, no no simple clear instructions. makes life so much easier.

gmail

2004-07-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

this whole gmail thing has finally piqued my curiosity, what exactly is this all about? i am off to investigate all of this new stuff. perhaps i will join the mad dash of nerds out to get a gmail account. sounds interesting to say the least.

oh jib jab

2004-07-26T10:33:00.000-07:00

i don't really know what to do with this blog so hmmm i'll do this. it is absolutely priceless.

john kerry vs. george bush starring in this land.

and the lyrics to boot in case you can't hear it because it's just that funny. or well i think so:
GW (George Bush) JK (John Kerry) BC (Big Daddy Bill Clinton) AS (AHNOLD)

GW: This land your land
GW: This land is my land
GW: I'm a texas tiger
GW: You're a liberal weiner
GW: I'm a great crusader
GW: You're Herman Munster
GW: This land will surely vote for me

JK: This land is your land
JK: This land my land
JK: I'm an intellectual
JK: You're a stupid dumbass
JK: I'm a purple heart winner
JK: And yes it's true I won it thrice
JK: This land will surely vote for me

GW: You have more waffles
GW: Than a house of pancakes
GW: You offer flip flops
GW: I offer tax breaks
GW: You're a UN Pussy
GW: And yes it's true that I kick ass, HAH
GW: This land will surely vote for me

JK: You can't say nuclear
JK: That really scares me
JK: Sometimes a brain can
JK: Come in quite handy
JK: That's not gonna help you
JK: Because I won three purple hearts
JK: This land will surely vote for me

GW: You're a liberal sissy
JK: You're right wing nutjob
GW: You're a pinko commie
JK: You're dumb as a doornob
GW: Hey, you got that botox
JK: But I still won three purple hearts
Both: This land will surely vote for me

Indian: This land was my land
Everyone: But now it's our land
AS: From California
BC: To the New York I.. whatdidido?
JK: From liberal weinies
GW: To right wing nutjobs
JK: This land belongs
GW: This land belongs
Both: This land belongs to you and me
GW: Oh and Dick Chaney too