RE: James Carville's stupid attack on Howard Dean last week.

I think James Carville did make a huge mistake attacking Howard Dean. I used to like Carville a lot, but his mind has been destroyed by his Bush-Cheney-loving Republican wife.

Howard Dean is a national hero who engineered the 2006 mid term elections landslide. Dean is by far one of the most effective and smartest men in our Democratic party. Everything he has ever said has been proven to be true.

James Carville you have been corrupted and converted to a right-wing-madman-nut by your ultra right wing wife, shame on you!

I love Howard Dean. Thank you and BRAVO Howard Dean , you are a genuine national treasure!

by Fritson (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 11 comments) on Sunday, November 19, 2006 at 4:54:31 PM
 

George W Bush

Is Bush really responsible for his actions. The man appears to be some sort of an idiot-savant. A master politian but incapable of reason and lacking the ability to modify his preconceptions. How could a rational man tolerate the public humiliation that he has subjected himself to and not go off the deep end (get drunk).

by sam kelly (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1 comments) on Saturday, December 16, 2006 at 7:07:55 PM
 

Law giving multi-national oil companies Iraq's oil

Tell me why not one news cast, not one TV channel, not one person from Charlie Rose on PBS to Shrill Obriley on TV ever ever mentions the word oil when they speak of Iraq? Tell me why OpEd news posts very very few comments on the fact that America is in Iraq for the oil? Tell me why the law giving big oil companies rights to Iraq's oil is never discussed or written about? This law giving the big multi-national oil companies 65% of the oil they extract from Iraq is never revealed in any media in the US?  This is what the Iraqi's are fighting for and will fight to the last man for.  It's the only thing they have.

by ron (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 2 comments) on Wednesday, May 9, 2007 at 1:58:17 PM
 

Democratic Congress as Cowardly

Dems in Congress as Cowardly

Rob: You do a lot of great things, and I agree with your views 99% of the time. BUT, I heard you with Tony on the Ed Shultz show today and both you and Tony suffer badly from naivete. I have been a yellow-dog Democrat for over fifty years and have worked in every presidential campaign since JFK, except for LBJ's 1964 run. (I was in West Africa with the Peace Corps during that campaign, and it was a walk for us anyway). One of the FIRST things I learned in politics is that you must know how to count. With Tim Johnson unable to vote in the Senate, and with Lieberman threatening to turn the Senate over to the R's unless he gets his way, there was NO WAY the Dems could cut off the funds for the Iraq war and make it stick. NO WAY AT ALL. Get real. You and Tony and Big Ed need to revisit your logic and face up to this very stubborn and utterly irreducible FACT. What you all are doing instead is undermining our party by trashing it incessantly on the basis of an entirely erroneous idea.

If you think the Dems have not been making a difference, add up the hearings held by the R's during Bush's six years and examine the roster of witnesses appearing at the few hearings that occurred. Compare this to what has been happening under Pelosi and Reid. The result ought to be to get you all to stifle your off-base criticisms and to give credit where a lot of it is in fact due. Rome was not built in a day, and the Dems are quite busy constructing. Keep a sharp eye on Pat Leahy. Tim Griffin resigned today. Why? I believe that he is going to be in the pokey fairly soon, because of hard work done by the Senate committee.

As for impeachment, the energy, time and resources it would take to go after Bush and Cheney would stop our progress on all other issues. If the drive succeeded, Bush would probably have a month or two left in office, and the population would blame the Dems for wasting so much time, energy and money on the effort. Bad idea, despite the thirst for vengeance that it would clearly satisfy.

My basic message to friends who think as you guys do on the Iraq funding issue is, LEARN TO COUNT. Larry O'Brien

by fumdazzle on Thursday, May 31, 2007 at 1:41:57 PM

by LJ (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 2 comments) on Thursday, May 31, 2007 at 1:45:58 PM
 

Your apology

Thanks for your apology. While I feel Roberts was a wrong choice for the Supremes, your comments were not proper in a civilized society. I am glad to see someone apologize for something without making the listener/reader responsible, as did the Archbishop of LA who apologized to those were offended. By my count that puts you in a list of 2 who apologized this way - Howard Stern being the first.

by Appleperson (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1 comments) on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 at 9:51:46 AM
 

Crooks, Suckers, and Lazy Cowards

.09.17.07

> Article for Sojourners (Also printed in Thomas Paine)

Crooks, Suckers, and Lazy Cowards
>
> I have always wanted to have a good argument with
> Thomas Hartmann on Air America Radio (sucker).  But
> the constraints of money and time make it
> impossible.  He exemplifies the best of the liberal
> tradition in his broad intelligence, sensivity and his respect for facts and ideas.
> Compared to know nothings like Rush Limbaugh and Ann
> Coulter he is like a cool shower after an encounter with a six pack of stale vomit.
>
> The only problem with this picture is that Rush
> Limbaugh and Ann Coulter (crooks) are right about
> the human race while Hartmann is dead wrong
> (sucker).  These crooks know  that the human race consists of
> crooks, suckers, and lazy cowards, while Hartmann
> thinks that it is good and even educable  in important ways.  Liberals
   believe that people are moral actors, but
> experience shows us that nothing could be further
> from the truth.  Despite overwhelming evidence to
> the contrary, liberals still give lip service to the idea that people are good.
>
> Hartmann thinks that the founding fatheads (crooks)
> thought well of men and their potential, while I think they were just the opposite.  I think that the
> best of them, including Jefferson,  were suspicious of both themselves and
> others.  That is why they went to great pains to approve a
> Constitution that would set one institution against
> another in a sort of perpetual greedy gridlock.  Of course, after all this work,
> they gave themselves a generous tip and the right to
> steal by doing nothing to balance the power of money
> or property (crooks).  This omission has led to one catastrophe after another from the Civil War to commercial television.
>
>


   But, I digress.
   Basically Calvin knew his stuff (if you omit pre-destination)
   Why does it matter whether one thinks well or ill of
> mankind?  Is it true that liberals are starry-eyed
> idealists that think a better class of humans can be
> produced in classrooms (suckers)?  Or is it also
> true that Conservatives (crooks) view man as
> depraved and therefore a ripe target for every sort
> of contemptuous scam. I can only reply that I have
> always been a liberal, but I fail to entertain any
> hope for the world, this country, or anyone in it.
> It is possible to have the cynical vision of H. L.
> Mencken without becoming a snobby blockhead or
> hypocrite (smarts).  It is possible to get rid of the crooks, knowing that we have fallen for everything we get.
>
> Republicans can walk and chew gum, but they rarely
> compare and contrast anything, since all major ideas have been set in concrete since 5th grade.  They seem
> inherently incapable of entertaining more than one
> idea at a time.  It is this lazy ignorance
 that makes them do their politics of
> destruction with no sense of blowback.  They are so afraid of loosing their
> stolen wealth (crooks) that they try to demoralize
> an ignorant and cowardly population so that will think that they are more virtuous if they don't vote.
   This crookery works because Republicans
> prey on every human weakness.  They mine Pride,
> Envy, Sloth, Anger, Cowardice, and Lust with gay
> abandon in or out of the political season. They know that weak emotions lead, while
> thoughts just tag along. They particularly like to exploit moralism and moralizing because it is the lazy man's way of feeling superior to everyone else.
>
> So what is the point of all this anyway?  As long as
> liberals appeal to ideas and facts they can have a
> lot of good moralistic conversations (suckers), but
> they mean nothing to lazy cowards who like a good
> story which feeds conceit, lust, or fear (lazy
> cowards).  Almost all Republican jokes appeal to
> conceit because they are usually racist or sexist, and they give a little lift to the second-rate juveniles who enjoy Republican filth.
 Republican friends send me these jokes
> and I always analyze them in terms of the tawdry
> satisfactions they produce.  Then I send them back since I get the satisfaction of pissing them off.  
.

> Today's Republicans have all the characteristics of
> the Nazi movement (crooks).  They are triumphal,
> ignorant, lazy, vicious, and they think that the use
> of lies and intimidation is the road to success.
> They love symbols, flags and media just like the
> Nazis did; and they have even built a few
> "internment" camps for the "homeland".  This time,
> they have turned Muslims into the bogey man, while
> the Jewish Neocons and the Pentagon are sporting the
> swastikas. (crooks).  They are even starting wars for
> bucks all over the world so that they can reap a
> bonanza from weapons, oil, graft, opium, and even
> museum treasures (crooks).  This great adventure
> started with the 9/11 stunt
> (crooks).  This protection racket has reaped trillions from a
> gullible public (lazy cowards).

Republicans have a problem with their sexuality, but Democrats have a problem with hatred.  Anger has its problems because it is tiresome and sometimes outright dangerous.  But a cold, black hatred is always serene and detached.  Hatred is a natural response to liars and bullies.  It is the source of all real thought and action.  It is not a fist, but a compass.  It is a radar that keeps us pointed in the right direction so we don't get the next sucker punch.  It is blowback with smarts.  It is not Osama or George.  Republicans are always angry because they are afraid they will lose their stolen wealth.  Their anger makes them clever like juvenile delinquents.  My black hatred of them however makes me free to think up many annoyances for them.  I would prefer government by Genghis Khan to these lazy half-dead second-rate bums.

Since liberals can't allow themselves to develop hatred, they prefer to develop a culture of peace.  The problem with this is that the only real peace is the peace of the grave.  Otherwise peace is just a period when crooks set up the next war.  This idea of a Beulahland democratic heaven is just a childish fantasy. Man is and will always be more like a jackal than an angel.  Hitler preyed on this sentimentality with his warm Nazi posters showing healthy farm girls holding infants in wheat fields.  Everything a Nazi does is for a "higher good",  just like a liberal is supposed to provide an example of the one true moral way to a "higher good".  I have attended many liberal meetings where some blowhard bullies the proceedings and no one says anything for fear of falling off their moral pedestal (lazy coward).  A Laramie peace group that I am in now, is almost paralyzed by one professional female veteran who courts physical attacks, dominates and controls, and actually censors newsletter communications.  All of her stunts are done with a lot of moralizing and remembering the "higher good".  Yet, the moralizers do nothing.  Whenever I try to even start a conversation about this person, I get silenced down.  For all I know, she might even be an agent provocateur!  For all I know, the whole group might be an agent provacateur!

John Hanks
portage@uwyo.edu

by John Hanks (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 550 comments) on Thursday, September 20, 2007 at 7:48:39 PM
 

Abortion Defense

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    Go to Original

    Telling the Stories Behind the Abortions
    By Cornelia Dean
    The New York Times

    Tuesday 06 November 2007

    Dr. Susan Wicklund took her first step toward the front line of the abortion wars when she was in her early 20s, a high school graduate with a few community college credits, working dead-end jobs.

    She became pregnant. She had an abortion. It was legal, but it was ghastly.

    Her counseling, she recalls, was limited to instructions to pay in advance, in cash, and to go to the emergency room if she had a problem. During the procedure itself, her every question drew the same response: "Shut up!"

    Determined that other women should have better reproductive care, she began work as an apprentice midwife and eventually finished college, earned a medical degree and started a practice in which she spends about 90 percent of her time on abortion services. Much of her work is in underserved regions on the Western plains, at clinics that she visits by plane.

    In her forthcoming book "This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor" (Public Affairs), Dr. Wicklund describes her work, the circumstances that lead her patients to choose abortion, and the barriers - lack of money, lack of providers, violence in the home or protesters at clinics - that stand in their way.

    But she said her main goal with the book was to encourage more open discussion of abortion and its prevalence.

    "We don't talk about it," she said in a telephone interview. "People say, 'Nobody I know has ever had an abortion,' and that is just not true. Their sisters, their mothers have had abortions."

    Dr. Wicklund, 53, said that at current rates almost 40 percent of American women have an abortion during their child-bearing years, a figure supported by the Guttmacher Institute, which researches reproductive health policy. Abortion is one of the most common operations in the United States, she said, more common than tonsillectomy or removal of wisdom teeth. "Because it is such a secret," she said, "we lose sight of how common it is."

    But Dr. Wicklund acknowledges that abortion is an issue fraught with dilemmas. In the book, she describes witnessing, as a medical student, the abortion of a 21-week fetus. She writes that at the sight of its tiny arm she decided she would perform abortions only in the first trimester of pregnancy. She says late-term abortions should be legal, but her decision means she occasionally sees desperate women she must refuse to help.

    Dr. Wicklund describes her horror when she aborted the pregnancy of a woman who had been raped, only to discover, by examining the removed tissue, that the pregnancy was further along than she or the woman had thought - and that she had destroyed an embryo the woman and her husband had conceived together. And she describes the way she watches and listens as the women she treats tell why they want to end their pregnancies. If she detects uncertainty or thinks they may be responding to the wishes of anyone other than themselves, she says, she tells them to think it over a bit longer.

    On the other hand, Dr. Wicklund has little use for requirements like 24-hour waiting periods, or for assertions like those of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who said in a recent Supreme Court decision on abortion that the government had an interest in protecting women from their own decisions in the matter.

    "It's so incredibly insulting," Dr. Wicklund said in the interview. "The 24-hour waiting period implies that women don't think about it on their own and have to have the government forcing it on them. To me a lot of the abortion restrictions are about control of women, about power, and it's insulting."

    Dr. Wicklund said she would put more credence in opponents of abortion rights if they did more to help women prevent unwanted pregnancies. Instead, she said, many of the protesters she encounters "are against birth control, period." That is unfortunate, she said, because her clinic experience confirms studies showing that emphasizing abstinence rather than contraception may cause girls to delay their first sexual experience for a few months, but "when they do have intercourse they are much less likely to protect themselves with birth control or a condom."

    According to the Guttmacher Institute, about a quarter of pregnancies in the United States end in abortion. Dr. Wicklund says that is why she believes far more people favor abortion rights than are willing to admit it in polls. For example, she said in the interview, an abortion ban that seemed to have wide support in South Dakota was put to a vote and "when people got behind those curtains and nobody was watching it was overwhelmingly defeated. Unfortunately, people are not willing to say what they really think."

    One of these people might be a woman she recognized as one of the protesters who regularly appeared, shouting, outside a clinic where she worked. Only now the woman was in the waiting room, desperate to end an unwanted pregnancy. Dr. Wicklund performed the procedure.

    And then there is Dr. Wicklund's maternal grandmother, a woman she was afraid would disapprove of her work. But it turned out that she had a story of her own. "When I was 16 years old, my best friend got pregnant," is how the story began. Her friend turned to her and her sister for help. They did the only thing they could think of - putting "something long and sharp 'up there,'" according to the book. The girl bled to death, and the cause of her death was kept secret.

    "I know exactly what kind of work you do," the grandmother told Dr. Wicklund, "and it is a good thing." One question Dr. Wicklund hears "all the time," she said, is how she can focus on abortion rather than on something more rewarding, like delivering babies.

    "In fact, the women are so grateful," Dr. Wicklund said in the interview. "Women are so grateful to know they can get through this safely, that they can still get pregnant again.

    "It is one of the few areas of medicine where you are not working with a sick person, you are doing something for them that gives them back their life, their control," she added. "It's a very rewarding thing to be part of that."

  -------

by John Hanks (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 550 comments) on Tuesday, November 6, 2007 at 6:35:38 PM
 

Articles Listed in Writers' Archives

Why are articles listed in the Writers' Archives deleted by other than the author?  On 2/7/08 there are 39 articles listed under "Ransel".  Today, 2/8/08, two of those articles are missing from the list:  "Ballad of the Jingo Kid" and "The Driver".  How did that happen?  I thank you for your time and interest, and I look forward to hearing from you.  Best regards, Vi Ransel  rosiesretrocycle@yahoo.com

by Vi Ransel (60 articles, 0 quicklinks, 7 diaries, 1 comments) on Friday, February 8, 2008 at 7:33:12 AM