Miserable Failure

Screenshot from Irish TV

Culture Of Life

I think that no one could have said this any better...

Olbermann, Limbaugh, Sharpton and the GOP Mindset

The Right, as embodied by Limbaugh, Frist, Bush, Hastert, DeLay. They would move heaven and earth to save the life of one White Woman in Florida to combat the very idea of euthanasia (which technically it was not). A woman that a decade earlier had lost her ability to so much as ask for help, much less have coherent thoughts about the quality of her own life.

And they would sit on their ass[es] and watch as tens of thousands of poor men, women, children, babies, and elderly bake in the New Orleans heat surrounded by water, sewage, gasoline and an abandoned city, now devoid of anyone with the means to have escaped ahead of the storm.

This is the culture of life. The culture of life wants to save brain dead white women and unborn children. The culture of life wants you to watch endless non-news about the disappearance of one white teenager in Aruba. The culture of life wants you to support your nation as it kills tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in its Quixotic quest against a non-threat. The culture of life wants a zero-tolerance for looters policy to sound authoritative as babies die of dehydration. The culture of life expects you to take care of yourself, and if you can't, then it is your own fault for getting into that situation in the first place. Fuck off. You had your shot. Station in life, where you hang your hat, and whether you have the $40 at the end of the month to pay for the overpriced gasoline to get out of that home in time is all up to you.

Celebrate Oil Prices

From the Letters section of the August 27th Chicago Tribune

People ought to stop grumbling about rising oil prices and consider the many positive virtues of that development.

Increased oil prices inevitably will result in decreased use of automobiles, trucks and airplanes.

That will result in less environmental pollution, less traffic congestion, fewer air travel delays, and fewer deaths and injuries.

It will reduce pressure to build more roads, bridges, airports and parking lots, which will result in more open space, lower taxes and more commercially productive and job-producing land use.

The incentives to create rural subdivision sprawl will be diminished, two important consequences of which will be preservation of farmland and reduced need to increase local school taxes.

Consumer interest in mass transit and car-pooling will increase.

People will take more interest in walking and biking, which will produce increased personal fitness and decreased need for medical services.

Political support for serious alternative energy development and for serious research to identify ways to use energy more efficiently would be expected to increase.

More money spent for gasoline and heating oil will mean less money spent for foreign-manufactured goods, particularly non-necessity goods.

That will reduce money flows to foreign nations and consequently reduce the financial ability of foreigners to bid up world oil prices.

Reduced spending on non-necessity goods will result in reduced pressure on local landfills.

Reduced use of oil will also make the U.S. less dependent on foreign energy producers, and our political leaders in turn will be less inclined to embarrass us by launching foreign wars.

Our national image both here and abroad will improve.

These consequences obviously are good and will only improve as oil prices increase.

Oil price increases, therefore, should be cause for celebration.

Robert E. Mann
Geneva, IL

George W. Blah, Blah, Blah...

photo: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

When he speaks, he says things that we already know. "It's going to require hard work," he blathered, about relief for the Hurricane Katrina devastation.

"We've saved a lot of lives, we're going to save a lot more," he said yesterday during a "looking Presidential" interview with Diane Sawyer.

Molly Ivins' column from yesterday (Why New Orleans Is in Deep Water) precisely pinpoints what a huge chunk of the electorate in this country seems to have ignored last November... that politics affects people; that how you vote really, truly affects the lives of others.

This administration's only priorities are power and wealth... whatever it does with regard to social or economic issues serve merely as a means to its ends.

If this guy had two heads, both of them would be up his ass!