Letters to the Editor
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@bethincary
I have three daughters, 24, 20, and 14.
I have learned to listen, mostly! I think I can tell from your posts that you will be good at that with your daughter. And I have always let them dress however they wish: I made so many embarassing mistakes when I was young, I figure they need their turn too!
Good luck with everything. Teen age years are astonishing.
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PD
All the usual caveats apply, I guess. One of which is, I'm not sure the candidates have all articulated positions (or voted on legislation pertaining to) the positions the compass questioned.
But I'm usually WAAAAAAY "Left".
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@Anonymust
I didn’t know about the younger sister dying. That does explain more about his insecurities. It’s sad that his parents and society at that time understood so little about teaching children to appreciate and get in touch with all their emotions and even sadder that we haven’t made all that much progress since. A person can’t take responsibility for others until they have taken responsibility for their own emotions and learned why and how to love yourself. It explains how so many can’t understand how to take responsibility for their decisions and spend so much time rationalizing and blaming.
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ASSH*LES!
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/005036.php
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@ Jkalos
Excuse me if I am getting into my teaching mode too much. Listening is a real key. Some people think that listening means that you hear the words. The person doing the talking often doesn’t believe that true listening is happening until there are actions that follow the words. True listening is a difficult skill for most of us and one that normally has to be worked on hard and I’m not sure I will ever truly master it as much as I want to.
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RMP
Yes: listening is one of the hardest skills to learn, I think. Being a teacher has given me a lot of practice. It's astonishing what can happen when you really stop and listen and ask real questions based on what you hear.
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electoral compass
No can complete. IMHO, it is poorly designed. Categories too broadly defined or too either-or. Too many of my responses were nuanced or contingent. Gave up half way through when my snarl-response kicked in.
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@ Bystander
electoral compass
No can complete. IMHO, it is poorly designed. Categories too broadly defined or too either-or. Too many of my responses were nuanced or contingent. Gave up half way through when my snarl-response kicked in.
I confess. I didn't even take it. We are Amerticans. We don't do nuance. Ain't that a French word?
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@bamage
There may never be an end to discovering the law breaking that has gone on by this administration. There seems to be one behind every Bush. Sorry. A young, inexperienced lawyer just got his case heard in the Supreme Court on the means for administering capital punishment. There has to be another lawyer out there that wants this case especially since a Senate Judiciary Committee staff has done all the research.
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@ Bamage, Anonymust
Maybe Bystander has a point. A poorly designed device. I should take the damn thing. Other friends who have completed it arrived at the same place you did, roughly. Maybe those Nederlanders have an Obama bias. Nobody likes Fred.
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according to the political compass, Obama is my twin .... I smell a rat ...
Actually, Obama-mania is giving me the creeps ... and it's not Barak Obama's fault... he can't control it... and it's not that I dislike Obama ...
I did a google on "magic negro" since after reading Kamiya's piece, the phrase surfaced from my memory banks (after "magic christian", I admit) and found the following editorial from the LA Times by Barb's son, David Ehrenstein. (click on my name for link, though registration is required)
final and "money" last two paragraphs -- written March 2007:
Obama's fame right now has little to do with his political record or what he's written in his two (count 'em) books, or even what he's actually said in those stem-winders. It's the way he's said it that counts the most. It's his manner, which, as presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Biden ham-fistedly reminded us, is "articulate." His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening, and he hasn't called his opponents names (despite being baited by the media).
Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn't project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.
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Buyer's remorse is the let-down that occurs after the item is purchased, when all the feel-good jazzy-vibe of making a big decision has left the room ... the decision may be good or bad ... the remorse is the second-guessing and the road not taken ...
I'm very uncomfortable at how the media -- and Salon's right there with bells on -- appear to be truncating this process. American Idol, indeed.
Annointing Obama based on Iowa or even Iowa-plus-New Hampshire is bullshit and the usual suspects and the disenfranchised disgruntled registered democrats will begin to nibble and quibble and whisper and second-guess ... and I suspect a third-party or two will emerge to further rat-fuck the process (yes, it's their right to do so ... but I suspect the GOP has sufficient party-discipline to keep any third party from hurting them too badly ... the Democratic party, not so much).
I'm not a happy camper ....
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@bethincary
Thanks. I wonder who the CIA anonymous sources were? The big piece, that the bomb was to eliminate evidence of the shooter, or the shooter himself, was around as a speculation within an hour (I wrote it in a comment on WaPo and I wasn't the first). Whoever it was missed some of the other pieces: Originally the two wounds were shoulder exiting the chest and neck exiting the head. And there is an eyewitness that said he saw someone take a shot with a Kalashnikov -- in fact he was close enough that he pushed the barrel away after the first shot. In the videos, the man with the hand gun fires 3 times, but there is an initial shot before those 3. Also in the videos, the resolution is terrible, but it appears there is blood on the sun roof rim before the explosion.
Musharraf has already prohibited the investigators from looking into the list Bhutto provided esp. Ejaz Shah. He's Musharraf's director of the Intelligence Bureau, and there have been rumors of ties between him and Lashkar e Jhangvi since the Daniel Pearl murder -- Omar Sheikh surrendered to him in circumstances that many said felt like a surrender to a partner in crime.