There are places outside of foxholes where it's not safe to be an atheist or even an agnostic. One of them is, no surprise, Congress. You can be a total lunatic fundamentalist Christian and people will happily vote you in, but disbelieve and it's hard to get elected dog catcher.
We free-thinkers are the minority group with the greatest differential between our size and our representation.
There's no reason to believe anything Jerome Corsi says, writes, or belches out onto the Internet.
He's in it for the money. Yours, mine, anyone's.
Lie, cheat, steal, it's all the same to him. Sue him and his wife owns everything.
Why is someone who couldn't buy credibility if it were half off at Credibility Barn on everyone's television? He's a bestselling bullshitter.
Two weeks ago, a dear friend phoned me to say goodbye. We've known each other for more than twenty years, but she felt herself slipping away from who she has been. With tenderness and toughness that I can hardly imagine, she wanted to spend ten last minutes with me before glioblastoma multiforme, diagnosed fifteen months ago, made that impossible.
After, I went outside into the bright spring sunshine and sat on the warped and splintering deck and wept. The three boys next door kept playing, laughing, living, just as my friend's three daughters will, I hope, in time. Then I went back inside to make the phone calls that she had asked me to make.
The first death that took someone I loved out of my life came from another glioblastoma multiforme. My grandfather went from vigorous septuagenarian to dust in a few short months. At fourteen, I spent his entire funeral struggling not to cry. That male imperative not to show my feelings was proxy for too-large grief.
No amount of experience with malignant glioma prepares you for another case. It's a dire diagnosis. Hope and pray is what we do even when there's nothing else to do. Especially when there's nothing else.
Sadly, the chance that Ted Kennedy will survive his glioma, whether it is GBM or merely grade III, is smaller than the chance his diagnosis is wrong. I don't want this to be true, but it's a brute fact.
Oh how I wish it were not.
Obama has posted his family's tax returns for 2000 to 2006. Hillary is waiting till later. From the Boston Globe, that's all you hear about.
Bloomberg notes that John McCain's are still MIA. But, he's busy now, trying to have his Bush and eat it, too!
Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.
I'm not happy to be proven wrong except in one situation - when my fear and cynicism are disappointed. I have a bit more hope now for the probity of the DNC Credentials Committee (not the Rules Committee, unless the DNC web site is out of date).
Jim Roosevelt is saying all the right things in a public way that is not easy to back down from. And I say thank you and hooray. Oh, and I'm sorry, too, for my earlier skepticism.
"Stream of spam offers little insight". I know I'm marginal, but what is Brian C. Mooney? Good phrase this: "relentless media coverage of the irrelevant and banal", but Mooney applies it to the Internet, not to the MSM.
As always, the bipartisan group of former diplomats and members of Congress is the serious group.
There is actually some policy coverage in this story:
[Giuliani] focused on economic issues, particularly his plans to cut the federal corporate tax rate, ease regulatory restraints, and provide generous tax incentives for individuals to buy their own health insurance. More than four months after sketching the outlines of a healthcare plan, Giuliani has provided no details on its impact on the US Treasury.It's not the topic of the story, which starts out as another poll-driven, horse race story, but at least it's in there in paragraph 9. And the rest of the story after the jump covers Giuliani's stump speech with actual context and a critique founded in reality. Bravo!
