Letters to the Editor
MAV in Florida
Published Letters: 274 Editor's Choice: 22
-
Something Ayn Rand said comes to mind
[Read the article: Matthew Dowd's not-so-miraculous conversion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yes, I said Ayn Rand - I read some of her stuff when I was younger. Lecturing us about apologists for communism, she said that the intellectuals will find themselves in a world of concentration camps and excuse themselves by saying "This isn't what we meant!"
And now we have Matthew Dowd, Bob Barr, David Brock and others in a world in which the United States can "disappear" people and the only question about torture is "how much is enough?" And all they can say is "This isn't what we meant!"
-
Ya gotta love it....
[Read the article: The Limbaugh-Cheney two-step]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A guy who filed five draft deferments and finally got his wife pregnant to stay out of the Army, and a guy who told his draft-board doctor that he had some sort of awful medical condition to get a draft deferment, and the two of them are sitting there gassing about how "Democrats want us to pack it in and come home in defeat." I mean, ya gotta love it.
-
Charlie Crist has left all of us in Florida a little stunned
[Read the article: Florida gives voting rights back to felons]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Perhaps it's just that, unlike the Jebster, he also spent years as a legislator and then as the state's attorney general, and learned that there IS give and take, and two sides (at least) to a story. Or perhaps it's just that he knows that Florida is a purple state, not a red one.
I suspect that much of the impetus for giving voting rights to almost all ex-felons (there are some exceptions for some of the more heinous crimes) is the realization that this was an increasingly rare holdover from the post-Reconstruction era. In other words, it's not so much an issue of civil rights or voting rights, but that it was a painfully embarassing anachronism. There's supposedly still a couple more states where this doesn't happen, I don't know which ones they are.
Some of our more rightie repub's down here are apoplectic about it -- especially because he first became prominent years ago as "Chain Gang Charlie" for advocating a return to chain gangs.
He claimed at the time he had been deeply impressed as a kid by seeing a chain gang while riding with his parents on a trip to Gainesville. Reporters who looked into the story could not find any evidence that any county along the route of his trip was using chain gangs at the time he supposedly saw them (the state got rid of them in `56). SO I guess it was one of hose stories like Bill Clinton's personal memory of church bunrings, or the Republican tale of government bureaucrats ordering that all buckets have a hole in them to keep kids from drowning in them.
Anyway, if he keeps up this kind of pace, the Democrats in 2010 may as well just concentrate on legislative and congressional races. His biggest problems would be the Flat-Earth Republicans who, in the last cycle, frothed and raged at him for being too liberal (i.e., reasonable).
-
Oh pul-eeze
[Read the article: Al Gore, anyone?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Every time I hear menton of Gore `08 I feel obliged to throw a bucket of ice water on the discussion as a therapeutic measure.
Look, I know Al Gore has grown over the years, but I also remember that he ran in 1988 and went nowhere against Michael Dukakis (maybe the memory of Tipper on the rock-n'-roll star chamber was too fresh). He ran in 1992 and had to settle for veep. In 2000 he had the nomination handed to him. He turned in a lame performance in the presidential debates (when Bush claimed that all three men who murdered a black man in Jasper TX were going to be executed, Gore could have easily pointed out that the Governor of Texas was mistaken, only two of them had been sentenced to death).
Personally, I think what lost Florida for him was when he came to Miami and claimed Elian Gonzalez should be separated from his Cuban father and be left with his manipulative fruitcake realtives in Miami. In doing so, he alienated 95% of Floridians who were appalled by the spectacle in order to try to win a few votes from the same voting bloc who supplied us with the Watergate burglars and who regularly vote somewhere to the right of G. Gordon Liddy.
Finally, I think there's a percetion among many voters that after a guy runs unsuccessfully a few times, he becomes another Harold Stassen. I see that at local levels, and we've seen in national elections that the candidates who drop out the soonest are the ones who have run the most times. Jimmy Carter got elected in 1976 because he was running against a field of Democrats who had run in 1964, 1968 and 1972 and were running again in 1976.
It's time for more new talent.
-
Looks nice for Florida
[Read the article: What was Charlie Crist thinking?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I went into this already over at War Room, so I won't repeat myself too much here. But I will say it's nice after the last six years to show the rest of the country that we are really a purple state, not a red state. That we are not a bunch of crabby old New Yorkers in condos, as portrayed in "Seinfeld." We are not a bunch of almost-dead union retirees from Ohio, as Jimmy Breslin once described us.
As for Disney, well, there's always sinkhole season. We're having a drought and the hurricane predictions are for plenty of storms. Plenty of rain atop dried-out karst formations, and it's amazing what goes down the holes!
-
1992
[Read the article: Al Gore, anyone?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Oops.
Sorry about that!
-
Did Gen. Petraeus also tell him to buy rugs?
[Read the article: Is there traction control on the Straight Talk Express?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]OK, I'll accept that a general on the hround is not going to want to lose a congresscreature on his watch, and that Gen. Petraeus laid on the security. But did Gen. Petraeus tell McCain to shoot off his mouth about how safe Baghdad supposedly is before he left the states?
Wait a minute, I think I know: McCain will say he was talking about Bagdad, Florida (near the town of Milton) being safe to walk around in!
-
Maybe we could set up a new web site to help!
[Read the article: Senators to Gonzales: Start remembering]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It would be www.gingkoforgonzales.com, and we could collect bottles of gingko to be sent to Washington to enhance the memory of the attorney general.