"Now mind you, avoidance is fine if it's, like, on the scale of going out to get a pedicure because you had a bad day. Avoidance is not, however, the best M.O. when it comes to larger issues like, ya know, governance. I mean, sure, I wish we could stimulate the economy in a vibrating chair and, after giving all of the troubled banks a relaxing peppermint soak, use a pumice stone to slough away our national debt, but that's just not how it fucking WORKS." - Jon McAlister
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"From the Conventions to the First Debate in Three Minutes
Slate V recaps everything you need to know about the presidential race from the party conventions through the first debate." - Jon McAlister
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"As a result, the energy used per Google search is minimal. In the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will use more energy than we will use to answer your query." - Jon McAlister
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"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success. While accidents of history surely helped, it evidently satisfied a need for a system implementation language efficient enough to displace assembly language, yet sufficiently abstract and fluent to describe algorithms and interactions in a wide variety of environments." - Jon McAlister
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"What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian." - Jon McAlister
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It's ironic, because "being Christian" to the average Republican clearly doesn't mean following Christ. Unless by "love thy neighbor", Jesus really meant "kill them". - Gabe
The author of this article has pulled his punches. When you put horns on somebody and call them the Antichrist, that's not "otherizing" them, that's *demonizing* them. When you imply someone is in league with the forces of Evil, this is *not* "sublimating" concerns about them being "insufficiently Christian." - Karim
The irony being that McCain dropped napalm on non-combatants in Vietnam; McCain said he'll hate "hate the gooks" for as long as he lives; McCain came home and dumped his wife (who had been in a car accident) for a younger, prettier, and richer one; McCain was one of the Keating Five -- and yet McCain is supposed to be some paragon of Christian virtue compared to Obama? - Karim
I've never seen any evidence that McCain actually dropped napalm. Is there any proof that he really did that? - Gabe
Proof, as in "here's a link to the YouTube video, with interviews of his dead victims?" No. :-) But he did say this to the New York Times after the Forrestal accident: "Now that I've seen what the bombs and the napalm did to the people on our ship, I'm not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam." - Karim
When he was shot down, his target was a power plant in (to quote John McCain's words) "a heavily populated part of Hanoi." So perhaps on that run he was carrying 500- or 1,000-pound bombs and not napalm. EDIT: see http://www.thenation.com/blogs... - Karim
Yeah, Karim, that NYT article is the only connection between McCain and napalm I've seen also. It's my understanding that napalm was used mostly to clear jungle, while McCain was mostly bombing Hanoi. I don't think he was out napalming villages. - Gabe
his statement about not wanting to drop "any more of that stuff" is ambiguous... "that stuff" makes sense if he's referring to "bombs and napalm," whereas if he was only referring to bombs, it seems like he would have said "those things." - Karim
people do seem to think the difference is significant, for some reason -- as if napalming villages was the ultimate evil, but dropping 1,000 pounds of high explosive in built-up civilian areas is something people routinely do on Sunday afternoons after church service. - Karim
either way the point still stands -- John McCain rained death upon people, dumped his wife, and was caught up in the Keating scandal. Obama has done none of these things, and yet he's the one being demonized. - Karim
"But in buying bad loans before banks fail, the Bush administration would be signing up for a financial war of choice. It would spend billions of dollars on the theory that preemption will avert the mass destruction of banks. There are cheaper ways to stabilize the system." - Jon McAlister
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"opinion has swung behind the radical idea that the government should commit hundreds of billions in taxpayer money to purchasing dud loans from banks that aren't actually insolvent.... This is extremely dangerous." - j1m
"Billions in taxpayer money would be transferred to the shareholders and creditors of banks, and the banks from which the government bought most loans would be subsidized more than their rivals. If the government bought the most from the sickest institutions, it would be slowing the healthy process in which strong players buy up the weak, delaying an eventual recovery....Taxpayers would be spared the experience of wandering into a bad-loan bazaar and being ripped off by every merchant." - j1m
"The government should help not by buying banks' bad loans but by buying equity stakes in the banks themselves." - j1m
Yeah, I totally learned this in college from friends who would bring up things like "so you're not dating anyone?" and I realized that I was perfectly happy and their co-rumination demands and a conversation about it made me unnecessarily anxious. - Lilly Irani
