Letters to the Editor
Renegade Iconoclast
Published Letters: 660 Editor's Choice: 11
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Edwards is the best, so smear smear smear (but only because Kucinich is a chump)
[Read the article: Here come those "angry" Democrats again]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Dennis Kucinich is easily my favorite candidate, if not for his incredibly naive foreign policy. I was planning to protest vote for him, even though I knew he didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning, because I believed in his politics. He's a real populist, a consumer's advocate, a thinking man's Ralph Nader.
Until he appeared on Real Time and said he wouldn't kill Osama if he had the chance, even though Bill tried to talk him out of it for about 2 or 3 minutes. He said that war was off the table and he'd rely on the U.N.
I'm not going to turn this into a letter about the U.N., but I'll say that they only thing they ever seem to want to do is to censure Israel. They don't seem to give an owl shit about genocide. They don't care that a billion people are starving, and dying of diseases that corrupt drug companies have managed to over-extend the patent for the cure of.
But somehow they are going to keep us safe? I can't name one truly historically great thing that the U.N. has ever done. Having said that, I invite all of you to educate me. As far as I can see, the U.N. is a dragon with nine heads; it is so busy trying to devour itself, it doesn't even have time to eat the villagers.
Enter John Edwards, a true populist, and a former trial lawyer. Repugnookies would like to make trial lawyer a dirty word, but it means he made his money by fighting for consumer rights, against amoral, fictional entities known as corporations. He's not as liberal as Kucinich, but he's a hell of a lot more electable. So they're scared, not just of him, but also that his ideas will catch on. So he must be angry.
Obama makes pretty speeches, but so did Bill Clinton. Bill was the best Republican president we ever had. He sure as hell wasn't any sort of liberal, but he also wasn't Bush or Reagan or Nixon or Eisenhower or Hoover. Obama seems to be of the same mold as Bill. Did he join in on the pseudo penis comparison about who marched picket lines longer? I only read the article, didn't see the debate so I don't know. I kind of doubt it.
Edwards/Obama is the dream team. Anyone the Republicans put up against them would be a joke by comparison. The country would be run fairly well for a change, and after eight years Obama would be the first president with a lot of African ancestors.
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Canvas doesn't work everywhere.
[Read the article: Plastic bags are killing us]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I would need to carry about 20 pounds worth of canvas bags to hold the amount of stuff I typically buy at the grocery store. The amount I buy is not going to change, because I live in Texas. I can't just stop by the grocery store for milk on my way back from yoga, carrying my canvas bag with Abbie Hoffman's face on it. It's several miles away, like it is for most people here. It certainly doesn't make sense for me to eschew plastic bags in favor of several trips to the store in my car, does it?
It's very telling that Mieszkowski frames the solution as bringing a canvas bag to carry your milk home, and not a big pile of 10 or twelve bulky, heavy bags on your semi-weekly trip. Perhaps she hasn't really lived in a vastly spread-out city like Houston or Dallas or Austin or San Antonio.
Instead, most of the folks I know save their bags and put them to all kinds of uses. I've used them to tie down the trunk of my car carrying some bulky item home. I've used them as garbage bags, or to keep food in the pantry fresh and safer from bugs. I've used them to collect odds and ends. I've probably used them for at least a few dozen more purposes.
It used to be that people would eat McDonalds and drink Budweiser in their cars, and throw the whole thing out the window without giving it a second thought. Education made the difference, there were already laws against littering. I think a ban is dumb, but if you simply must, why not a tax that is tied directly to the cost of paper bags, so that plastic ones are 1 cent more expensive, with a total tax rebate for recycled bags? Wouldn't that tend to encourage the stores to find a solution, rather than subjecting us to a poorly thought out, reactionary government solution?