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Showing posts from May, 2013
My sister, Laurie posted a series of photos on Facebook from her recent visit with us. Looking at the photos of me, it strikes me that I have never looked older, heavier, happier or more in love with my family. Sure beats being young, fit, grumpy and lonely, as I once was.
So right on in today's DailyKos: The media has gone into high boil over the actions of a handful of IRS employees in Cincinnati. The IRS is deliberately targeting political groups! They even admit it! Can impeachment be far behind? Next step, tie this to Benghazi and any other fact-free psuedo-scandal close at hand. Step two, moan about the general incompetence and corruption of government. Step three, demand scalps — but not before there's time to spin out a good half dozen Sunday talk show seasons on Taxgazi, or Tax and Furious, or whatever brand the pundits decide has the most snap. You know this one must be the real deal, because every news channel, newspaper, local anchor, radio nutjob, and water cooler wag is singing the same tune. Hell, even Jon Stewart is on step two. There's just one minor problem: the exact purpose of the IRS office in question IS to look at political groups. Specifically, to weed out purely political groups that promote or oppose candidates
As much for posterity as any other reason, I'll post this here for future reference. My letter in today's Daily Local News: http://www.dailylocal.com/article/20130507/OPINION02/130509703/a-few-recent-headlines-contain-some-positives?nstrack=sid:593146|met:300|cat:0|order:4
This was an interesting article in the NYT last week about confidence in women and men. Some interesting quotes from the story and my reactions: “I firmly believe one of the unintended consequences of the feminist revolution has been that men in my generation are raised without a strong self-identity, and, in essence, grow up to be little more than boys looking for mothers.” As much as I'd like to believe that, I'm not sure men weren't looking to marry a woman like their mom back in the day anyway. It was just accepted that it was that way. Now a man is expected to do many of those things himself. We don't like it, but we understand it. One 58-year-old mom wrote that mothers “might as well have had, as a friend of mine puts it, ‘our vocal cords cut.’ We want to talk in nice voices and stay calm and sit down and have a heart-to-heart. Our children want the five-minute version — direct, to the point. They come back at anything we say with smart remarks that knock t
This is such a great article in last week's NY Times. I wanted to excerpt parts of it, but there's not much I wouldn't want to highlight. That said, here is the best of it: Democrats got 1.4 million more votes for all House positions in 2012 but Republicans still won control with a cushion of 33 seats. Look at how different this Republican House is from the country they are supposed to represent. It’s almost like a parallel government, sitting in for some fantasy nation created in talk-radio land. As a whole, Congress has never been more diverse, except the House majority. There are 41 black members of the House, but all of them are Democrats. There are 10 Asian-Americans, but all of them are Democrats. There are 34 Latinos, a record — and all but 7 are Democrats. There are 7 openly gay, lesbian or bisexual members, all of them Democrats.   Only 63 percent of the United States population is white. But in the House Republican majority, it’s 96 percent white.