I found it extremely distracting and annoying that wherever you could have written out some tidbit of information, you chose instead to post a link. That may be ok in the world of Livejournal but when you force your reader to choose between either interrupting what they are actually reading every two sentences, or reading without fully understanding your twelve billion references, all that happens is your audience loses interest and gets pissed off.

Stick to blogging until you can learn to actually write.

Robbing the rich to give to the poor sounds an awful lot like graduated taxing and social welfare to me.

Besides, wasn't there a certain book written by a certain woman loved by conservatives everywhere, in which a certain Robin Hood becomes a villain for precisely this reason?

Republicans may be able to claim that they are populists, but it is fully beyond their capacity to actually take any action in such a direction. It would be antithetical to their worldview.

I'm not sure who you're talking about. My dad is quite handy (a contractor, in fact) and he certainly doesn't do nearly as much of the labor around the house as my mom did. Even if you factor in all the snow-plowing he did (she did some of that too).

The fact is that chores generally performed by women take up significantly more time... hours per day... than the occasional fix-it task of the man of the house.

Why on earth would you waste your time and money on a liquor that tastes like nothing? Give me a good dry gin any day of the week.

Is that most Republicans live in an alternate universe in which only Republicans or other not-yet-Republican conservatives qualify as actual red-blooded Americans. When Republicans use terror tactics and divisive rhetoric, the end result is only to cull the rest of us seedy, flag-burning undesirables from these True Americans Patriots.

As far as Republican ideologues like Rove are concerned, we are the enemy, anti-American terrorists as much as any Arab who ever flew a plane into a building. The unity and 'courage' that the Republicans so laud in America is the lock-step ideological conformity and foaming-mouth willingness to violate any law or moral in order to utterly destroy any perceived threat to American conservative order.

No matter how hard we try to understand radical Republicans, we never will, because they are working off an entirely different worldview than we can even begin to comprehend, and according to that worldview, people like us (that is, increasingly, everyone outside the most radical fringe of the Party) are either self-destructively naive fools or willing accomplices to terrorism.

I should mention that my high school is primarily fed by my old middle school and one other, both of which utilized the same curriculum.

I was not particularly socially engaged in middle school, so I have few opportunities to use any of these skills.

However, I can definitely say that learning the vocabulary of escalating conflicts early on made it much easier, throughout my middle school and high school experience, to recognize when people were simply creating drama unnecessarily. I can also say that the biggest problem my public high school ever encountered from students was the occasional kid trying to smoke pot outside of class. We never had any genuinely violent incident during my four years there, and I never even heard of anyone getting beaten up or into any other kind of fight.

Perhaps our early education in conflict resolution had something to do with that, but I would say it is difficult to attribute it to one thing or another.

In my middle school in sixth grade, we spent half the year learning about conflict resolution in homeroom.

This would all be so much funnier if it weren't lifted, verbatim, from conservative pundits. It would be so much easier to laugh at this cartoon if it were an exaggeration.