NYTimes
A great piece by Frank Rich called Who's Scared of Barack Obama? LOVE it. To be contrasted with the piece by Karl Rove (a man to whose writings I have a strict policy of never linking) setting Obama up for failure, ie, "if you don't beat Hillary in Iowa it's all over for you." Says who, Rove? You? I can't imagine why you'd like to see Barack Obama out of the race and Hillary Clinton sail to the nomination...which brings us right back to Rich's point: the GOP running against Obama is in a much tougher race than running against HRC, so it's in their best interests to ensure she gets the nomination. I pray that we won't allow ourselves to get played by Rovian tactics like this ever again. If Hillary gets the nom, the 'Pubs will get the White House.
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Friday, November 30, 2007
What The Scots Can Do With $250K
That--and 6 months--is what it took for my peeps back in Albion to develop the following:
GLASGOW, Scotland, Nov. 28 (UPI) -- Scotland has replaced its airport signs proclaiming the country to be "the best small country in the world" with a new slogan: "Welcome to Scotland."
The new slogan, which was revealed Tuesday after six months of development and $250,000 spent on the project, is also printed on the posters in Gaelic as "Failte gu Alba," The Times of London reported Wednesday.
Folks, one can only imagine what we'd have created with a million dollars and a full year.
GLASGOW, Scotland, Nov. 28 (UPI) -- Scotland has replaced its airport signs proclaiming the country to be "the best small country in the world" with a new slogan: "Welcome to Scotland."
The new slogan, which was revealed Tuesday after six months of development and $250,000 spent on the project, is also printed on the posters in Gaelic as "Failte gu Alba," The Times of London reported Wednesday.
Folks, one can only imagine what we'd have created with a million dollars and a full year.
Stump the Chump
Okay, can anyone help me solve this math puzzle? I keep thinking I've got the answer only to get shut down. And, as your math teacher always said, "show your work." I want to know where I'm going wrong.
ArpatubesPuzzle
ArpatubesPuzzle
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Half Way There!
Today, Thursday, is my Official Six Months Post-Transplant Day. Where DOES the time go, darlings?! To treat myself I've got two choices: I can either go hang out with 10 friends and their sick kids, eat supermarket sushi, have some of those free samples in the bakery aisle, and use the public lavatory.
OR
I can do what I've been doing for the past umpteen days: sitting my bunda at home and avoiding germs.
I think I'll go with the latter. It's just good sense, no?
Especially since, as last week's post indicated, being half way there doesn't mean my immune system is "half way better" or "50% improved." When I caught a cold last week and managed to fight it off pretty quickly I asked if maybe my immunity was coming back. The NP said kindly, "It could be." Then put her work hat back on and said, "But I doubt it. You're on a lot of powerful medicines designed to help suppress viruses. Without them you'd be in a lot of trouble even from a cold." E gets shut down by reality!
Regardless of my continuing house arrest, which is made more bearable by walks when not too cold and newly-arrived workout videos that are literally kicking my tuchis, I'm still and always glad to be here. It has been an amazing journey. Not one I'd ever have asked for, not one I wanted in my wildest nightmares to embark upon. But amazing nonetheless.
I've learned that sometimes the only way out is through. That friends are God's gift to us for good times but most especially for bad. That your children give you gray hair, they ensure you never sleep a full, restful night again, they blow open a hole in your heart that can only be filled by their good health and happiness, they take years off your life. But they also save your life too. On bad days when I was so sick and thinking guiltily to myself, "This would be so much easier if I didn't have to worry about a kid," that was really me admitting that the stakes were too high to give up without a bench-clearing brawl of a fight. It sure would have been easier to not feel the desperate, overwhelming urge to get better and stronger if Bambina hadn't been around. Knowing that she needed me to not only feel better but act like I was better, talk like I was better, and make HER know I was getting better was a massive and profound daily kick in the pants to get over myself.
Which brings me to the other thing I've learned: No amount of positive thinking will make bone marrow grow. It will not cure cancer. It will not heal a spinal cord. It will not, in and of itself, save you from a damn thing. But it will make the journey easier, more bearable, more hopeful, and sometimes more successful. I decided that this could be either the worst year of my life (plenty of reasons to think so) or the best prelude to a second chance at life that anyone has ever been lucky enough to capture. I've always kind of subscribed to the theory that you should never have a sh*t time when you can just as easily (or perhaps with just a wee bit of effort) have a smashing time. Chemo, fevers and this ongoing daily slog of a recovery put that theory to the test, but I'm pleased to say that 10 out of 10 stem-cell-recipients-named-E-who-write-a-blog-with-the-word-Haggis-in-it find it to be a theory worth supporting.
Just my 2 cents on Day 183.
God Approves of Oral?!
A tongue-in-cheek but nonetheless incisive post about the drama at Oral Roberts University, over at Popehat.
And speaking of God, be sure to read Ken's next post down about Bible verses. Good times, good times.
And speaking of God, be sure to read Ken's next post down about Bible verses. Good times, good times.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
The Brown People Are Coming! The Brown People Are Coming!
Resident Asshat Pat Buchanan was on Hannity and Colmes to discuss his new book wherein he writes, "How is America committing suicide? Every way a nation can. The American majority is not reproducing itself. Its birthrate has been below replacement level for decades. Forty-five million of its young have been destroyed in the womb since Roe v. Wade, as Asian, African, and Latin American children come to inherit the estate the lost generation of American children never got to see."
Angry Asian Man says it best: "Ah, I see. So us Asian, African, and Latin American children don't really count as true American children. In fact, all we're here doing in the United States is taking the so-called inheritance of aborted American babies. "American" meaning white, I suppose..."
This man is such a racist a**hole I don't even know where to start. I mean, wasn't it Archie Bunker who used to say, "Blacks, Jews, Mexicans...and then there's your regular Americans" meaning "whites"? How can Pat Buchanan have any credibility whatsoever when he's espousing Archie Bunkerisms 30 years later?!
Media Matters has a whole piece on it. My favorite part is this from the H&C show where he's asked if he really really really thinks the fabric of America is being rended by immigration:
BUCHANAN: It is. It is. But take a look at the unity we had, say, in the 1950s and early 1960s. What have we gone through? You had a culture war that's divided us completely on matters of morality. You've got a wholesale invasion, the greatest invasion in human history, coming across your southern border, changing the composition and character of your country. You've got the melting pot that once welded us all together, which has broken down. All of these things are happening, Sean, and, frankly, I don't think we got the kind of solid, firm, strong national leadership you need to deal with this crisis.
Okay. Let's take this rhetoric piece by piece:
The "unity" of the 50's and 60's???!!! You mean back with Ozzie and Harriet when black people couldn't eat in your restaurant or vote? Or when it was perfectly acceptable to use words like "chink"? You know, that kind of "unity"? When people knew what a "joke" was?
A "culture war." Started by whom, Mr. Buchanan? Or have you forgotten your tirade in 1992 at the GOP convention that most people credit with finishing George Bush Sr's re-election chances? The only war being waged here is in your own diseased mind, Pat, where straight, white and Christian = American. Anything else is not.
"The greatest invasion in human history"? That would be Mexicans and Latin Americans immigrating to the US? How about the Europeans immigrating to the Americas--you know, the Pilgrims, Jamestown, etc? How about the 3 MILLION Russians, Poles and Germans who left for parts elsewhere during the Russian Civil War? Are you REALLY saying that the greatest, largest, most profound "invasion" in HUMAN HISTORY involves Mexicans coming to the US in the year 2007? And, while we're discussing it, why the pejorative "invasion" reference? Mice and roaches invade and infest your house. Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The US invaded Iraq. Are people immigrating here (the majority of whom are doing it legally, by the way) really to be painted with the broad brush of "invasion"?
"Melting pot...has broken down." It hasn't broken down, Pat. It's just less white. Which is what seems to be your issue. I can't imagine we'd have all this harrumphing from you if a million Irish Catholics and Scottish Protestants were streaming across our borders, bagpipes blaring to the tune of "We're Illegal and We Don't Care." Not unless those bagpipers happened to be brown.
Which gets us back to Angry Asian Man's point. Perhaps the most offensive aspect of Buchanan's tirade is his implicit assertion that children of Asian, Latin American and African descent are not actually American. I have friends of various ethnicities, born and raised in, like, New Jersey who are constantly asked where they're from. They answer, "New Jersey" and get asked, "No, I mean where are you originally from?" And they answer, "New Jersey," only to be met with a confused stare as if we don't grow 'em brown in America. People like Pat Buchanan contribute to that mindset, that someone of a different race must be foreign. Or as my Dad used to say while living in San Antonio, home to thousands of 8th generation Americans of Mexican descent, "I'm the most recent immigrant in town!"
In any case, I wish I could characterize Pat Buchanan's latest outburst as nothing more than the desperate ramblings of a sad act flailing against the inexorable tide of progress and posterity, but I can't. Not as long as there are people who will listen to this xenovomit and wonder if they aren't really, after all, in need of some "lebensraum."
Angry Asian Man says it best: "Ah, I see. So us Asian, African, and Latin American children don't really count as true American children. In fact, all we're here doing in the United States is taking the so-called inheritance of aborted American babies. "American" meaning white, I suppose..."
This man is such a racist a**hole I don't even know where to start. I mean, wasn't it Archie Bunker who used to say, "Blacks, Jews, Mexicans...and then there's your regular Americans" meaning "whites"? How can Pat Buchanan have any credibility whatsoever when he's espousing Archie Bunkerisms 30 years later?!
Media Matters has a whole piece on it. My favorite part is this from the H&C show where he's asked if he really really really thinks the fabric of America is being rended by immigration:
BUCHANAN: It is. It is. But take a look at the unity we had, say, in the 1950s and early 1960s. What have we gone through? You had a culture war that's divided us completely on matters of morality. You've got a wholesale invasion, the greatest invasion in human history, coming across your southern border, changing the composition and character of your country. You've got the melting pot that once welded us all together, which has broken down. All of these things are happening, Sean, and, frankly, I don't think we got the kind of solid, firm, strong national leadership you need to deal with this crisis.
Okay. Let's take this rhetoric piece by piece:
The "unity" of the 50's and 60's???!!! You mean back with Ozzie and Harriet when black people couldn't eat in your restaurant or vote? Or when it was perfectly acceptable to use words like "chink"? You know, that kind of "unity"? When people knew what a "joke" was?
A "culture war." Started by whom, Mr. Buchanan? Or have you forgotten your tirade in 1992 at the GOP convention that most people credit with finishing George Bush Sr's re-election chances? The only war being waged here is in your own diseased mind, Pat, where straight, white and Christian = American. Anything else is not.
"The greatest invasion in human history"? That would be Mexicans and Latin Americans immigrating to the US? How about the Europeans immigrating to the Americas--you know, the Pilgrims, Jamestown, etc? How about the 3 MILLION Russians, Poles and Germans who left for parts elsewhere during the Russian Civil War? Are you REALLY saying that the greatest, largest, most profound "invasion" in HUMAN HISTORY involves Mexicans coming to the US in the year 2007? And, while we're discussing it, why the pejorative "invasion" reference? Mice and roaches invade and infest your house. Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The US invaded Iraq. Are people immigrating here (the majority of whom are doing it legally, by the way) really to be painted with the broad brush of "invasion"?
"Melting pot...has broken down." It hasn't broken down, Pat. It's just less white. Which is what seems to be your issue. I can't imagine we'd have all this harrumphing from you if a million Irish Catholics and Scottish Protestants were streaming across our borders, bagpipes blaring to the tune of "We're Illegal and We Don't Care." Not unless those bagpipers happened to be brown.
Which gets us back to Angry Asian Man's point. Perhaps the most offensive aspect of Buchanan's tirade is his implicit assertion that children of Asian, Latin American and African descent are not actually American. I have friends of various ethnicities, born and raised in, like, New Jersey who are constantly asked where they're from. They answer, "New Jersey" and get asked, "No, I mean where are you originally from?" And they answer, "New Jersey," only to be met with a confused stare as if we don't grow 'em brown in America. People like Pat Buchanan contribute to that mindset, that someone of a different race must be foreign. Or as my Dad used to say while living in San Antonio, home to thousands of 8th generation Americans of Mexican descent, "I'm the most recent immigrant in town!"
In any case, I wish I could characterize Pat Buchanan's latest outburst as nothing more than the desperate ramblings of a sad act flailing against the inexorable tide of progress and posterity, but I can't. Not as long as there are people who will listen to this xenovomit and wonder if they aren't really, after all, in need of some "lebensraum."
Smells Like McCarthy
Carpetbagger
That's a link to a recap of the GOP's "loyalty oaths." Apparently VA Republicans will now have to sign one to vote in the primary in that state. And the state GOP in Kansas has formed a Loyalty Committee to ensure no one contributes to or endorses any Democrats for any office.
What next? Waterboarding for 'Pubs claiming to be "Independent"?
That's a link to a recap of the GOP's "loyalty oaths." Apparently VA Republicans will now have to sign one to vote in the primary in that state. And the state GOP in Kansas has formed a Loyalty Committee to ensure no one contributes to or endorses any Democrats for any office.
What next? Waterboarding for 'Pubs claiming to be "Independent"?
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