Letters to the Editor
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Privatize profits. Socialize debt.
L.W.M.,
A friend and I were talking about this issue on Friday in talking about the fallacy of the "free market." This was before I heard about the entire Bear Stearns fiasco. My only addition to your statement would be the following: Privatize (corporate) profits. Socialize (corporate) debt.
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RMP - I'm crushed!
Actually, I pulled one of those M$M deceptions out of you know where and exaggerated a little. The truth is that my subscription needed to be renewed and I didn’t renew it.
-- Retired Military Patriot
Monday, March 17, 2008 09:10 AM
Rats! I was so sure you had discovered the secret code to make them actually cancel a subscription. Mine doesn't run out until May.
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L.W.M. This is not a Saint Patrick Dat note: Monday is not a 'get drunk' as an iguana day.
There is a worry you will forget the lyrics to 'Danny Boy' and 'Rhinestoned Cowboy'...
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TIME magazine, 1969: "Nixon [...] is doubtless correct in saying that the majority supports him on the war."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,840400,00.html
The Silent and Unsilent
Friday, Nov. 28, 1969The "silent majority" is becoming one of the Administration's catch phrases. Richard Nixon appealed to it on Nov. 3 to stand by his war policies. Its opposite, of course, is the unsilent minority, which Spiro Agnew, who has been running regular Thursday-night beat-the-press shows, defines as "an arrogant few" dissenters. [...]
Nixon—who was elected President by a minority of the voters—is doubtless correct in saying that the majority supports him on the war, and it is an important fact. [...]
- - TIME magazine, 11/28/1969
Right. The majority supported Nixon's tactics and strategies. That's why Nixon did those secret bombings and secret invasions? (Not secret from the people getting bombed, of course, just secret from the "silent majority" that might not have approved.)
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@Celery
All the ducks are quacking madly (while all the honchos are hiding in the duck blind) because they're trying to catch all the jumping "mackerels in moonlight." There's a lot more jumping than usual this year. Good for the ducks.
Quack! Quack!
They know something's up, even if Time's "majority" doesn't.
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Don't worry Aycharaych
I'm sure Michael Gordon and Time are just waiting to tell us this until it gets closer to Wednesday.
Who could believe that so much of the truth about the Busheviks and Iraq has come out and what we hear from the M$M is the success of the surge and how a secular Iraq is on the way as soon as the Shi'a government decides it is the right time and does the right thing?
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Is there *anything* Time....
... can do well anymore? Or, reliably? I mean, do they even have an occasional useful movie or book review?
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O/T for Aycharaych:
The saloon closed before I had a chance to thank you for the second time you've made me laugh out loud (the redneck jumps back and yells, "Don't touch me!). Yesterday, the laughs were as healing as the bike ride. Thanks. I needed that.
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bucky1
Why do they pretend that they know that the Bush administration has been acting only to protect we poor citizens from the big bag blue meanies of the world?
The answer to why escapes me today.
Have you read Dr Bob Altemeyer's book "The Authoritarians" yet?
If not, then read it posthaste.. It really makes a lot of things much more clear when you know how authoritarian followers "think".
Essentially their thought process boil down to "if it's good for my side or me personally then it's not only OK but perfectly moral".
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
These people are authoritarian followers and their "side" is the neo-cons..
I've spent enough time online arguing with drug warriors and fundies to have a pretty good idea that their "morality" was quite flexible and their reasoning ability nearly nil, but reading the results of decades of research into the mindset of authoritarian followers was illuminating to me.
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sysprog
Spiro Agnew called everybody a hippie. He was a Ocean City, Maryland real-estate criminal tycoon. What's new? All the politicians seem to be engaged in bank-fraud, real-estate, flip-flop, resell White Collar Crime schemes.
He was a ocean hippo in male clothes?
His sad disgraced family is sad... O yep.
`
If he was born in Hippo Regius? Annaba?
Maybe Spiro Agnew? Not Saint Augustine?
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Not a lobotomy, Blue Meme...
...but rather a severed corpus callosum. ;->
Of all the syndromes in neurology and of all the discoveries in brain research, none is more wondrous than the behavior of a split-brain human patient. Everytime split-brain patients are examined, they reveal truths about how brain enables mind. Split-brain effects have to be exposed in a laboratory, where special techniques separately test each half-brain. From such tests we can discover the amazing effects of disconnection. Over the years hundreds of experiments have been carried out, and they mainly reveal that the thoughts and perceptions of one hemisphere go on outside the realm of awareness of the other.
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro00/web1/Vasiliadis.html
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Anonymust and GC
If you really want to get your message across, you might return the mag to Stengel in some other form, e.g., shredded, or with the stories or ads you object to torn out and marked with exclamations, etc. (along with a copy of your request to cancel and for your balance to be returned).
You might even hear from the retention department.
-- Anonymust
Monday, March 17, 2008 09:14 AM
If not shredded, maybe after being used to clean up pet barf?
Good Celery - I recycle newspapers as mulch, but I worry the colored ink and slick paper of TIME make it as detrimental to my veggie garden as it is to the public weal.
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@L.W.M.
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/03/eliot_spitzer_resigns.php
"Spitzer was able to do this through the power of the Martin Act, which gives the New York State attorney general practically despotic powers to go after fraud. Among the provisions: the prosecutor does not have to prove that there was intent to commit fraud, that any transaction took place, or that anyone was actually defrauded; he can interrogate potential defendants with no rights to an attorney or against self incrimination; he can keep the investigation secret or make it public, just as he pleases; and can subpoena just about anything. Practically the only limitation on the AG is his goodwill and sense of fair play. Eliot Spitzer was not overgenerously endowed with either.
Banks and others came to the table because Spitzer would launch these investigations and then use a carefully orchestrated series of press releases and leaks to torpedo their stock price. But many of the more spectacularly incriminating sounding excerpts from subpoenaed documents were so misleadingly taken out of context that they would have been grounds for a libel suit if he'd been a journalist. Don't get me wrong--many of them were guilty. But this kind of tactic doesn't distinguish between the guilty and the innocent; anyone in a credit-dependent industry whose stock value is plummeting would have to negotiate, because Spitzer's inquiry could shut them down. (Can and did, in some cases--indeed, he apparently nearly shut down Merrill's asset management business until a judge reversed the order.) Often, these shaded into personal vendetta--Dick Grasso's pay package seems like he was grossly overvalued, but what business is it of Eliot Spitzer's how much a private body pays it's CEO? This has nothing to do with the reasons we regulate financial markets.
Moreover, all his quick settlements screwed the investors he was supposed to be protecting. The unjust settlements extorted money from those firms' shareholders and dumped it into state coffers. And the just ones did nothing for investors: the money went to the states, not to the people who had allegedly been defrauded. Shutting the investigations down quickly forestalled discovery that would have helped clients sue. Eliot Spitzer got the headlines; investors got nothing.
Felix Salmon argues that it was a good thing that Eliot Spitzer put the fear of God into Wall Street, and I take his point--the cozy practices that had become common by the end of the nineties needed to change. But it's not clear to me that these prosecutions gave them anything but a fear of Eliot Spitzer. Whoops. In a liberal democracy, it matters how you punish people for their crimes--"they got Al Capone for tax evasion" is not a triumph, it's tyranny. "