I love language! It never fails to reveal what the zeitgeist of the times is.
Bill O'Reilly blames Air America for the U.S. losing the war in Iraq.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham now utters the "losing" word regarding the war.
And there have been others in the last week.
Folks, the damn has broken. The public has soured.
The war is lost.
Support the troops and bring them home.
Devised according to considerations in Washington rather than the situation on the ground in Iraq, a pullout would send a dangerous signal of weakness and fecklessness to our allies and enemies in Iraq and elsewhere. Iraqi government forces would be demoralized and could begin to hedge their bets by making deals with, or even defecting to, the insurgency. Insurgent groups would be emboldened to redouble their efforts against Americans to strengthen their claim to a military victory and attract more recruits. Many Iraqis who have been sitting on the fence, particularly in Sunni Arab areas, would have little choice but to support the insurgents in order to insure themselves against reprisal.
Iraq is not Vietnam. The Iraqi insurgents do not have the military strength, popular support, political unity, ideological cohesiveness, great power assistance, charismatic leadership, or alternative political program that the Vietnamese communists possessed. The insurgents are divided by ideology, religious affiliation, and factional rivalries into separate groups, including remnants of Saddam’s Baathist regime, Sunni Islamic radicals, Shiite Islamic radicals, tribal forces, and foreign Islamic radicals, such as Abu Musab Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda faction.
Standing shoulder to shoulder all the people on Earth would scarcely fill Delaware. All our copper, zinc, tin and deuterium could be culled from one billionth of the Earth's oceans. All our energy requirements for two thousand years could be supplied by one-quadrillionth of the thermal energy produced by radioactive decay in the core of the Earth. Suitably stacked and compressed, all our trash would fit in a pyramid just two miles high in southern Connecticut..
Where did I get all these numbers? I made them up. I could have dug up real ones from the extant Hard Green literature, and they would have looked much like the ones I invented, but why bother? People aren't going to live shoulder to shoulder in Delaware, or build pyramids in southern Connecticut. Exxon knows how to find gasoline, not deuterium. Annaconda knows how to extract copper cheaply from a mine in Utah, not from the sea, so forget about it. So that is what Forrester [a pioneer in computer modeling the environment] he forgot about it... He based his models on known technology, known mines, known reserves, known quantities of land...
Barnes & Noble currently has a 100% BuyBlue rating due to political contributions for the 2003-2004 election cycle. Barnes & Noble executives contributed heavily and exclusively Democratic in the past election contribution over $78K in total. Barnes & Noble does not have a political action committee.
Suppose two people have equal potential, but one takes on more demanding, consuming, lucrative jobs while the other places a higher priority on family. The one who makes work the focus will be more productive for an employer than the one who puts his or her home life first. The latter will get more of the pleasures of family. So he (and it tends to be "he") will make more money, even though she would be equally productive and equally rewarded if she made the same choices.
"Women and men look at their life," said Farrell, "and women say, 'What do I need? Do I need more money, or do I need more time?' And women are intelligent enough to say, I need more time. And so women lead balanced lives. Men should be learning from women."
One irony is that some people, especially young women, may make the choices that lead to the pay gap precisely because they have been taught the job market shortchanges women. Women who see the market as hostile may put their hearts into their homes instead of their careers -- thus making less money.
But the market isn't hostile. The market is just. It rewards you for the work you do, not for the work you choose not to do. If men want the family time many women have, we must accept lower financial rewards -- and if women want the money, they have to work like money-grubbing men.
"Mr. Tomlinson was first nominated to the board by the past administration and was renominated in 2003," said Erin Healy, a White House spokeswoman.
“Because of Bush’s tax cuts, I saved a million and a half in taxes last year. Does anyone think that’s fair?” Ben Affleck asked at a July 2004 John Kerry fundraiser.
The H.O.T. Tax would ease these statists’ pain. The IRS simply would add a small box to the 1040 tax form beside these words: “If you believe you should be taxed at a rate above that assigned to your income bracket, please indicate here the higher rate you prefer. Kindly calculate your tax liability, and send it in.”
With that easy step, congressional liberals and residents of Malibu and Martha’s Vineyard no longer would have to keep the tax cuts conservatives keep throwing their way. Instead, they could send 50, 75, or even 99 percent of their incomes to Washington, so the GOP, Congress, and President Bush can spend it even better than they can.
But the main Downing Street document does not introduce us to any hidden or arcane or occult knowledge. As Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate last week, it explains no mystery. As protagonist Jim Dixon observes in another context in Lucky Jim, it is remarkable for "its niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems." On a visit to Washington in the prelude to the Iraq war, some senior British officials formed the strong and correct impression that the Bush administration was bent upon an intervention. Their junior note-taker committed the literary and political solecism of saying that intelligence findings and "facts" were being "fixed" around this policy.
A war on schools
Several years ago, under the leadership of Gov. Tommy Thompson, the Republican Party declared war on public education in Wisconsin. While millions of dollars in voucher payments are going to unregulated private schools in Milwaukee, the public schools in Milwaukee and around the state are constantly being forced to cut their budgets.
The debate going on now in Madison over education funding should come as no surprise. The Republican budget increases for schools do not come close to matching the costs of running the schools. Instead of working at controlling health care costs - a key reason for many of our budget problems - the Republicans are more worried about closing down a few schools in Milwaukee or seeing class sizes increase or allowing athletic programs or other extracurricular programs be cut.
The Republican Party war against our public schools wages on.
Tom Frederick
Chippewa Falls
But, in all due respect, it's not up to 45 Democrats or 55 Republicans. It's up to the 14 that made this agreement.
