UConn James

We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk? By Garrison Keillor Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned-and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor. In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. “Bipartisanship is another term of date rape,” says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy. The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous. Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure sign of Divine Grace. Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of tragedy-the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president’s personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good. Our beloved land has been fogged with fear-fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich. There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn’t the Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it’s 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn’t the “end of innocence,” or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn’t prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time. Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or getting off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on the 90th floor, the morning paper under their arms, I think of that non-reader George W. Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people with a little economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to victory in November and proceed to get some serious nation-changing done in his second term. This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads. They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm. The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them. This is a great country, and it wasn’t made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we’re not getting any younger. Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear reader. It’s a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life than winning. Excerpt from Keillor's new book (© 2004)

Yep. We get their games often. Peyton Manning he's not. But is a good college player b/c he's smart and does his part w/in their system.

Can you kick a 42 yard FG? I can kick extra points and up to about 25 yards with about 90 percent accuracy. Which is better than the UConn kicker..... Think my eligibility's gone tho.

Uhhmmm. OK, you can find file types on Google. Just type, in quotes, "Parent Directory" and ".xls" and it'll give you some lists of Excel spreadsheet files. Hope that answers your query....

I haven't gotten Sketches b/c Jeff wanted to scrap it and start over before his drowning. But Grace is HIGHLY recommended. Just recently got the Legacy Edition remaster. He basically started the "emo" genre, but that's reductive to his entire style. Great voice and actual FEELING in the words and music. I can't tell you how many artists name him as a big influence. I'd also suggest Jane Monheit - "Come Dream With Me"

What's antagonizing about the lead? It was a simple question. You think you can get the real story from a PR firm? which is what the White House Press Office is. You want to distrust all media and simply want them to report/broadcast the Official Approved Version, you're free to, but it's not much different than listening to that hilarious Iraqi Information Minister. I actually majored in journalism. I'm also in Phi Beta Kappa -- read: Top 1% of graduates, so you're not dealing with a dumb a$$ (I'm sticking to the graphic design, but I did all the aspects). Yes, we all know about the problems of the media, and it's a pretty consistent rate of flubs in every newsroom, CBS, FOX, the Pat Robertson Network, whatever. 99 percent of reporters do not intentionally try to skew news. 100 percent are suseptible to reporting the opinions of people who are lying or have an agenda. They'll be set straight eventually, in the process noted before. Sensationalism.... Yep, sometimes, dead horses are beat. That's under the auspices of "Giving people what they want" when a lot of old newspeople don't *know* what people want. Some themes are hyped, as you say. (I don't know what you're watching (tho it's better to READ your news!) but the "disease era" reporting never went away, and for good reason.) Just b/c you don't see it in the Buffalo News this week doesn't mean it's not being covered somewhere. There's a finite space in a newspaper or 30 minute broadcast. Editorial decisions are made. If you think you can do it entirely w/o criticism, man, feel free to try! B/c everyone's intent on shooting the messenger these days when they don't like what the news is. Sometimes it's warranted, many times not. Do I look over your shoulder at your job and yell that you're cooking my steak wrong? 'Well, it's like the prostitute once said - it's not the work, it's the stairs.' -- Elaine Stritch

When has he taken the Howard Dean approach, short of the Talking Heads saying he has, that we never should have gone into Iraq? He has said that the war is being run by a jackass instead of letting the generals do their jobs (much the same way LBJ micromanaged Vietnam and killed more troops than the VC...), and getting a true international coalition (by opening the contracts up to more than Haliburton, b/c it's all about the money, sad to say). Short of that, we'll need more troops in there. The strategy isn't working, you can be bull-headed or you can propose solutions. Everything can't be summed up by a six-word sentence. Simply accusing someone of being a flip-flopper, a charge that's been used in Pres. races since the '50s, but that still doesn't make it true. "The only issue that isn't complex is one you haven't yet looked at in detail." -- A great nutrition science prof.

OK, Jimbob. Why don't you put the blindfold on and reach out to have Ari Fleisher and Dan Bartlet lead the way. Media is only as good as the sources who come forward. CBS got taken hook, line, sinker. It happens when you think someone's being square with you. We thought Bush was being square with us in his Saddam-is-getting-uranium-from-Africa speech. His source for this was Chalabi(?) who is in jail for myriad offenses. To blame all media (and especially since this is TV news, which let's face it....) for a CBS schlump is dangerous for our democracy. That's what the first amendment was for; so we'd be able to learn all of the facts. Guess what? The first amendment worked here. Those Framers really knew what they were doing, huh? And just b/c they're retracting it, doesn't mean that Bush was Audie Murphy reincarnate. Did he get favors b/c of his name? Pro-bab-ly. A lot of guys did. Does it matter? Not all that much. Maybe we can have some real debate about the future.

That's a lot like how the Raiders (and every team, unless they're stupid enough to provide bulletin board material) say they respected the Bills the week before the game. Then on Sunday afternoon, they laughed their pitutes off.

Okay, then. Let's NEVER put JP in as the starter b/c he might break a nail!! When the doctors say he's ready to go, he can go. PERIOD. And sorry to say, but Brady and Pennington were 2nd year players on paper only. That, and, Manning was probably the strongest part of an otherwise weak Colts team his first season. Just like the Drew apologists, you can't blame him for the faults of others. Only, Manning was able to succeed and get better despite his surrounding cast, then last year they should have gone to the SB when they had the cast assembled. We've got the players assembled around Drew, we actually have a D. But he's too old to learn new tricks and he doesn't fit the offense, folks. That's how Brady is able to succeed. We're still trying to jam the square peg into the round hole.

Well, yeah, I thought I had that point in there but it wasn't.... That too. You think some of them would have learned. Barring leaving the country and letting happen what's going to happen anyway be it next week or in 50 years, namely destruction, chaos and an "Islamic democracy," contractors should be given a few grenades they have on them at all times. Maybe these asssshats wearing bedsheets on their heads would think twice.

Don't forget, We needed to provide humanitarian relief to the Iraqi people. Which, of course, made him more of a bleeding heart than the supposed bleeding heart liberal like Dean who said we should not have gone in at all, in any form. Single-handed paradigm shift from 70+ years of conservative ideology, and getting in the White House with the phrase "no nation-building." Welp, looks like that brilliant strategy went breasts-up 6 months in.... Wow, maybe the Dems were right with the philosophy that it's better to spend a $40M worth of the carrot than $200B and 1,000 soldiers worth of the stick. That's why W and his ilk are labeled "neo-cons." They left conservativism in the dust on their way to the extremist right.

HUH? About 5 percent of cargo containers are checked. Steve Croft on 60 Minutes, *walked into* a chemical plant -- open gates! -- with a reporter in Penn. who did a story that many plants around the country were the same way. Tests of nuclear plant security are done by the same security company who know the details beforehand, and they don't release the results, pro'ly b/c they aren't good. Several governors have called for increased security at nuclear plants and got none. This is a matter of record. And yeah, if Gore were pulling the same stuff as Bush, he probably would have been impeached, drawn and quartered last year for lying to the country when all of his promises were considered false by all but the True Believers. And yeah, when it's a matter of some gravity, I believe the President should be considered "Under Oath" when he's speaking to us.

What I don't get is, why not fight back? In some of the videos, their hands were free to hold up IDs. Why not try to grab a gun and see how much damage you can do? Instead they sat there and endured what must be a very painful death, and I for one, wouldn't want my death to be propaganda. You think they're going to release tape that shows one of their guys getting hit alongside the face? Might get shot, but what're they going to do, cut your head off? NEVER GIVE UP.

They said that about Jim Kelly. When is JP supposed to start the NFL growing pains? And actually, this so-called poor rookie season didn't seem to happen for Brady, Manning or Pennington. Too many people are in the McNabb-McNair mode of thought that by holding them back a year, they'll magically be better than they were. And for the ones who start right away and tank, they weren't good enough for the NFL to begin with(!) --- Leaf, Boller, Mirer, etc. I think JP's got that special quality/fire you need to be a great QB.

Hear, hear! (Or is it "Here, here!"?)

A panda walks into a bar and orders a sandwich and a beer. After seemingly enjoying his meal, he pulls out a revolver and plugs the piano player. "What are you doing?" asks the bartender. "I'm a panda, and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. Look it up!" replies the panda as he walks out the door. Wondering what that was all about, the bartender opens a dictionary, the only reference book he has, and there it is. Panda: A large bear-like animal. Eats shoots and leaves.

When my uncle had his first, which showed no problems, he asked for a certificate from the protologist that he was a "Perfect A $ $ h o l e." He always comes out with one-liners like that....

Bills 51-3.

Yup. The U.S. is as strong a democracy as it is b/c we fought off oppression on our own. "The harder the conflict, the more glorious the truimph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only that gives everything its value." -- Thomas Paine FREEDOM® for Iraq is largely via another country's troops, weapons and money. There is no loyalty to what we're installing. Does anyone think that government will last one iota longer than we occupy the place, be it 6 months or 50 years?

Read a few pages. Interesting. But to say we've regressed probably goes too far. On averge, it's probably about the same level of illiteracy. Not many things change in the course of human history, we just think they change. That said, I think universities and professors rely FAR too much on multiple-guess exams. Sure, it's easier to grade in a class of 300, and it produces a nice simple Bell Curve, so everything's hunky-dory, right?... Right? I don't get why people think English majors are useless. Wasn't my major but those were some of the most challenging classes I ever had, b/c you actually have to think and come up with ideas of your own while writing papers. A lot of other majors use the crutch of the BubbleSheet --- where you just need to retain info for about 24 hours. Education is big business nowadays. That really needs to change.

A lot of times, it fall under the category of "I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person." When I do bother to talk to many righties, people agree with all the points I make about what Bush has done to this country, then say they're still voting for him. It boggles the mind! and you shouldn't waste your breath debating about it. If you can't explain something in six words and without subordinate clauses, the Bush masses won't hear you. Not that Kerry is the next coming, but he's better than what we've got -- a weak-minded(1) former cocaine addict(2), alcoholic(3), pathological liar(4). And, AD, I refuse to throw my vote away on a third-party candidate. Two-party system is what we've got until major reform / revolution happens. The first order of business is to get this liar out of office. (1) By his own admission. (2) Per his ex-sister-in-law, who's now recanting b/c you don't mess with the Bushes. (3) This is a matter of record. (4) Per his Harvard MBA prof. "He showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him." When asked to explain a particular comment, said Tsurumi, Bush would respond, "Oh, I never said that."

17-7 The D is holding them a lot better than last time. The O has been a force under Orlovsky the past two years. If only our kicker didn't royally, royally suck.... Missed 3 FGs so far. He's been the difference in so many games, it's not funny. Kind of parallel to the Bills kicking situation.

Huh? I wasn't talking specifically about 1945 when I wrote that. I was talking about Axis Powers Part III, the non-country-specific version, w/ N. Korea or Iran's nukes, Al Qaeda's minions, plus whatever other group wants to get into the mix (and it may suprise you) of the 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend' equation. This is in large part a result of the goading of the "Axis of Evil" speech combined with the pre-emption doctrine. It's just a matter of time the way things are spiraling, and we're just being pulled deeper and deeper into it. You pick a fight, you better be able to win it, and the extent that the military is stretched, we might not. The Roman Empire found that out. But, "Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it too, that's a little history joke." -- Michael Herr in "Dispatches"