The Only Daily That Comes Out
Weekly
Issue #185
is brought to you by
Breyers - The Ice Cream for
Pedophiles!
The Only Daily That Comes Out
Weekly
Issue #185
is brought to you by
Breyers - The Ice Cream for
Pedophiles!
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WWW Disinfotainment Today |
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Posted May 8, 2006 Lame Excuse
Thanks for all your letters saying how much you
miss your Disinfotainment Today. My computer broke down. I'm using a borrowed
Win95 machine with a big 4 meg hard drive and 32KB of memory. It's like one
of those nightmares where you're running but the air is molasses. No getting
into fourth gear, stuck in first. Used to working with 10 windows
open, now using only four and it's SLOW. Takes minutes to do things that used to
take seconds. Didn't actually lose anything but none of it will load into this
computer. Sending this truncated issue out to let everyone know I'm okay but
definitely not up to speed. Doing the best I can with what I got.
Lamé Excuse
 This man (on the left wearing a fabulous
vintage
chiffon-lined Dior gold lamé gown over a silk
Vera Wang empire waist tulle cocktail dress,
accessorized with a 3-foot beaded peaked
House of Whoville hat, and the ruby slippers
Judy Garland wore in the Wizard of
Oz)
is worried that The Da Vinci Code
might
make the Roman Catholic Church look foolish.
- Betty
Bowers -
In an effort to present a "balanced" view
of last Monday's "Day without Immigrants," local NBC affiliate KMIR
interviewed people planning counter demonstrations, including a woman who was
livid when she found out that Mexicans were asking people not to shop, so she
planned on shopping non-stop all day in protest. Can you wrap your head around
that? Follow me, if you will, as I eavesdrop upon this woman's thoughts
while she browses through the items in her local antique store, picking up a
collection of turn-of-the-century doilies the price of which would feed a family
of four for a year. "I really shouldn't," she thinks, "but anything to let those
Mexicans know who's boss."
Is there anyone on this planet more deserving of a
smack in the face than this deliberate icon of all that's wrong with humanity?
One look at her and there are several things about this blowsy
pickalittletalkalittle nose in the air woman I believe it is safe to assume. She
is a housewife married to a millionaire. She has never worked a day in her life.
She is a Republican. Immigrants mow her lawn, clean her pool, and raise her
children (who may take a clue from the Menendez kids one day and blast her with
a shotgun). She calls herself a Christian but if Christ himself showed
up at her door she'd have him arrested for trespassing. She is distantly related
to Marie Antoinette.
The most frightening thing is that there are
others like her, who think that shopping is the cure for everything. Depressed?
Shop. The president lied to us about going to war? Shop. The unwashed masses
want a fair shake against the inbred cretins who own the earth? Shop. Half the
products in the marketplace are produced by slaves in foreign sweatshops? Shop.
The tired and poor who are yearning to breathe free have crossed your imaginary
line in the sand and trod across your lawn with the keep off the grass sign?
Declare them all felons and shop.
Since both sides seem to have some valid
arguments, I wasn't sure exactly where I stood in the incredibly complicated
immigration issue, maybe some sort of compromise was necessary, until I saw
this hifaluten dandy of a woman and realized that whatever side she was on was
unquestionably the opposite of mine. Our government isn't running out of money
because there are too many immigrants taking advantage of social services.
That's just a diversion from the corruption at the heart of our system that's
robbing from everybody but the 1%. The reason we can't find jobs is because
there are less jobs. If Mexicans REALLY want American jobs, they should be
moving to India.
If North Korea relaxed its emigration policies and
allowed its citizens to move to South Korea, the world would celebrate this new
rebirth of freedom, and South Korea would somehow cope with the new influx of
refugees. I don't remember anyone protesting the fall of the Berlin Wall just
because East Berliners took jobs that West Berliners wanted. And yet we're
contemplating building another wall, just like the one keeping the North Koreans
in, just like the one the Kremlin built in Berlin, and we're thinking of making
Mexicans felons for doing what all free people should have the right to do, to
move around, to look for work, to feed themselves and their families. Any law
that criminalizes millions of people for normal behavior is a bad law. Look how
effectively drug laws have stopped people from doing drugs and prostitution laws
have stopped all men from paying for sex. Might I point out that turning
undocumented workers into felons and stopping them from working while putting
them in jail, which houses and feeds them for free, will cost the US taxpayers
MORE money, not less?
We're all in the same boat, and this knee-jerk
reaction against immigrants is just the upper class passengers in the Titanic
complaining against the lower class passengers who are drowning in the hold and
pounding down their doors.
A day without immigrants made its point, but what
we really need is a day without ignorance.
MD
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship
with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than
the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower
class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while
there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
- Eugene Debs at his sentencing hearing after
being convicted for giving an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, in 1918. He was
sentenced to 20 years in prison. -
"Me too. As long as there's a man out of work, I
won't work. As long as there's a man who can't get laid, I won't get laid. As
long as there's a man without medical insurance, I won't see a doctor. As long
as there's a man without freedom of speech, I'll keep my mouth
shut."
- George W. Debs, Eugene's illegitimate son
-
The Party of the Master
Class
by John Sanford
In due time, the Republicans
took care of that; they got rid of the half that was free.
- from Intruders in
Paradise
 Unsolicited Plug of the Week
Searching for free music on the net is very much
like searching for free porn, menus lead to other menus and infinite pop-ups and
pop-unders and spyware and cookies that more often than not lead to something
that turns out not to be free after all. I'm sure I wouldn't have any idea
where to find the good free porn, but I'm happy to say that EasyMP3s turns out to be a major
site for relatively hassle free, and genuinely cost free music. The best thing
about it is it's NOT primarily focused upon rap like most MP3 sites. Yeah,
you've got to wade through pop-ups and it uses a small Java applet to download,
but if you click on "full albums" in the left menu, at this very moment you
can download the following new CDs in their entirety without charge: Paul
Simon's Surprise (worth the wait), Neil Young's Living with War
(major fantastic anti-war statements), The Red Hot Chili Pepper's
Stadium Arcadium (incredible double CD), Bruce Springsteen's We
Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (one of the best musical tributes of all
time), and Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris's All the Roadrunning
(subtle and beautiful), each and every one brand new and pretty damn good. One
caveat - though the site is called Easymp3s, the songs are in OGG format, the
latest open source compression technology which makes files much smaller than
MP3s. They sound just as good and play fine in Winamp.
Answer to Last Issue's
Stupid Question
I seem to recall I asked
what are your
hotel requirements? It also seems that all your answers are on my old
computer.
Stupid Question of the Week
The latest baby steps towards the decline of western
civilization include Deal or No Deal, the only game show in the history
of television that requires absolutely no skill whatsoever, and the incredible
magic trick of ABC managing to squeeze David Blaine holding his breath for nine
minutes into a tight two hour time slot.
Let's say there was a game show called "The Decline of
Western Civilization" hosted by David Blaine. What
would it be?
What the Bush
Administration Forgot to Get
Before it Invaded
Iraq
 Satan Doesn't Want
Me to Know
How to move all the information from my old computer
onto this one.
Don't Take My Word for
It
"You cannot imagine what it is like to be
described as a terrorist - and a dead man - when you are innocent and alive."
- Saeed Al-Ghamdi: One of the supposed hijackers portrayed in the film United 93 - "Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy. Both. I
want people to be afraid of how much they love me."
- Steve Carrell on The Office
-
"You will die with a whimper."
"What did I do to deserve this?"
- Fred Whimper, Moussaoui's new bunkmate
-
"It is told that a traveler, having come from far to gaze upon and marvel
at the redwoods, found a pair of woodsmen engaged in felling one of the great
trees. He asked why they were thus killing a plant seeded in the time of
Charlemagne, and they replied that they were making room for cabins. 'Cabins?'
the traveler inquired. 'Cabins for whom?' And they said, 'Cabins for people like
you, who come to see the trees.'"
- John Sanford: For the Sequoia
Sempervirens -
"Okay, now Libby is sent out with the leak in order to debunk
Joe Wilson's accounting of the truth about the non-existent Iraq-Niger uranium
deal. Libby actually makes language up that doesn't exist in the document to
further the lie that Wilson exposed. In short, Libby selectively used classified
information to try to smear the truth with more lies.
"Okay, it gets better (or actually, worse). When Bush is
exposed through Libby's revealing to Patrick Fitzgerald that Bush gave the green
light to leak a lie to cover up a lie and prevent more lies from being exposed,
Bush admits to leaking, but tells the American people that it was to get the
'truth out.'
"Are you following this?"
- A BUZZFLASH NEWS
ANALYSIS: Okay, So Let's Get
This Straight: On Monday, Bush Admitted That he Lied About Leaking a Lie to
Smear Someone Who Revealed the Truth About His Lying -
"We have created so much disease in this country,
and we have based our economy on it to such a degree that, frankly, we cannot
untangle this situation without causing economic distress. If there were a cure
for cancer, diabetes or heart disease tomorrow, where a person could wave a
magic wand and instantly eliminate those diseases, and if every person in the
country did that tomorrow, the sobering truth is that our national economy would
collapse overnight. It would collapse because there's so much money, so much
real estate, so much education and so much expertise and research invested in
disease that we could not financially survive in an economy based on health and
abundance, at least not the way things are configured right now."
"The moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the
light goes out."
- James Baldwin -
"There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple - my philosophy is kindness." - Dalai Lama -
"This administration doesn't
feel they need a mindful audience. They don't care about facts, logic or
consequences. They are the most cynical people that I've ever encountered in
politics. This is the most cynical bunch -- just think about that 'reality-based
community' quote. They create their own reality. I don't think I've ever seen
that kind of cynicism before, and I'm the guy who interviewed Richard Nixon.
"These guys are, as John Dean keeps pointing out, far worse
than the Nixon crowd because they think they can get away with it. Nixon, at the
end of the day thought it mattered what the New York Times said. He
felt that if there was a big contradiction, a big error, they would catch him
and there would be all hell to pay.
"There's no longer that feeling. Over the years, I'm not
getting cynical - they're cynical. If I were truly cynical I wouldn't be talking
to you, and I wouldn't be writing and teaching. Mark Twain said a lie gets
halfway around the world before the truth puts its pants on. Well, the fact is
the truth does get its pants on, it does catch up, and right now 65 percent of
Americans think Bush lied to them...
"When it comes to national security and foreign policy, the
public is particularly vulnerable. When you're writing about a local school
board race, or whether that traffic light should be moved, readers and voters
are very smart because they can figure it all out. They know whether the school
is working, and whether the light should be moved.
"When you're dealing with foreign policy, the information can
be kept from you. You can't tell someone that wants to know about police arrest
records that they can't be made public. Everybody knows that we have a right to
that information. You can't use the national security argument.
"In foreign policy, we have classification and secrecy, and
the public comes to believe that maybe it's necessary, that we can't be told
everything because lives are at stake. It's much easier for leaders on that
level to manipulate and to exploit our fears. What the Bush people are able to
do is say that we're in this endless war on terror, so we can torture, lie and
distort the facts. Hardly a day goes by that we don't have another credible
witness to the lying of this administration, and yet they can get away with it
because we're in this permanent war...
"I've been doing this a long
time, and if you want to reach people, you have to be ruthlessly honest about
what you don't know, what you do know, and where you're coming from. We need to
let people know there are real issues to think about, and that they're
interesting and exciting. They affect your life."
- Robert Scheer: Nothing Prepared Me for
Bush -
"Simply put: we can't get
opposition because we have one party with two names. It is not a party of the
people but a party of the corporate establishment. It is a party that came up
with a prescription drug plan that had the sole purpose of enriching the
pharmaceutical industry. It is a party that came up with a bankruptcy law with
the sole purpose of protecting the financial institutions. It is a party that
can't come up with a health plan that won't have the sole purpose of enriching
the insurance industry.
"We must face the fact that our votes are worthless. Our votes
only decide which politicians will carry out the agenda of the corporate
establishment. We must face the fact that we live under the tyranny of 'taxation
without representation.' We must face the fact that we have to take control of
our government."
- Lincoln fan
-
"As some of you may be aware,
according to the President and Congressional Republicans, a bill does not have
to pass both the Senate and the House to become a law. Forget your sixth grade
civics lesson, forget the book they give you when you visit Congress - 'How Our
Laws Are Made,' and forget Schoolhouse Rock. These are checks and balances,
Republican-style.
"As the Washington Post reported
last month, as the Republican budget bill struggled to make its way through
Congress at the end of last year and beginning of this year (the bill cuts
critical programs such as student loans and Medicaid funding), the House and
Senate passed different versions of it. House Republicans did not want to make
Republicans in marginal districts vote on the bill again, so they simply
certified that the Senate bill was the same as the House bill and sent it to the
President. The President, despite warnings that the bill did not represent the
consensus of the House and Senate, simply shrugged and signed the bill anyway.
Now, the Administration is implementing it as though it was the law of the
land.
"Several public interest groups have sought to stop some parts
of the bill from being implemented, under the theory that the bill is
unconstitutional. However, getting into the weeds a bit, they have lacked the
ability to stop the entire bill. To seek this recourse, the person bringing the
suit must have what is called 'standing,' that is they must show they were
injured or deprived of some right. Because the budget bill covers so many areas
of the law, it is difficult for one person to show they were harmed by the
entire bill. Thus, many of these groups have only sought to stop part of
it.
"After consulting with some of the foremost constitutional
experts in the nation, I determined that one group of people are injured by the
entire bill: Members of the House. We were deprived of our right to vote on a
bill that is now being treated as the law of the land...
"As many of you know, I have
become increasingly alarmed at the erosion of our constitutional form of
government. Whether through the Patriot Act, the President's Secret Domestic
Spying program, or election irregularities and disenfranchisement, our
fundamental freedoms are being taken away. Nothing to me is more stark than
this, however. If a President does not need one House of Congress to pass a law,
what's next?"
- Congressman John Conyers: Taking the
President to Court -
"If the American people should lose their
democratic institutions, it would not be because those institutions had failed
or because the ideals on which they rest are transient. Disaster will come only
if the American people themselves, because of indifference, carelessness, or
complacency, refuse to bestir themselves in time and to take the necessary steps
to practice and defend the ways of democracy."
- George S.
Counts -
"There is no 'other world.' I only know what I've experienced. You must be
hallucinating."
- Jalal-Uddin Rumi (1207-1273) Persian Sufi Mystic Poet -
"Those who like to fight and so exhaust their
military inevitably perish."
- Sun Tzu - "The secret of all good writing is sound
judgment."
- Quintus Horacius Flaccus -
"When they call the roll in the Senate, the
Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty'."
- Theodore Roosevelt - "I dote on his very absence."
- William Shakespeare - "With over 1200
Christian organizations, the USA has a greater number of Jesus fan clubs than
any other country in the world. The proliferation of variegated brands of
Christianity in America is so extreme that it acquires a comic dimension. One
might discern only a subtle difference in name between, say, the Evangelical
Congregational Church and the Evangelical Covenant Church, or the
Church of God in Christ and Church of Christ but miss a gulf
of doctrinal distinction.
"But then, who
is bothered about doctrine anyway? Denominations, a source of so much anguish
and bloodshed in the past, have diminishing importance in the era of evangelical
psychosis, mega-churches and apocalyptic blockbusters. The important thing is to
'have religion'. With 'religion' you are a patriot, defending the American way
of life; without religion you are a subversive radical, an enemy...
"Although awash
with so much love of Jesus, America is not the land of charity and compassion.
It is ruthlessly selfish and woefully violent...
"The antics of
whore-mongering, money grabbing egotists with an enthusiasm for Jesus would be
mildly amusing if it were not for the fact that they have political clout and
financial muscle. They attack rational education and have intruded an agenda of
doomsday scenarios and apocalyptic meltdown into the political mainstream. Their
propaganda extends far beyond the Bible belt and has global reach. 'World
missions' invasively erode other cultures, arrogantly assuming exclusive
possession of civilized values and moral rectitude. Their God-given mission is
to 'Bring Jesus' to the whole of humanity.
"Be afraid. Be
very afraid."
"Should not the shepherds feed the
flocks?"
– Ezekiel 34.2 -
"An important new opinion poll
reveals that Americans know more about The Simpsons cartoon TV show
than about the US Constitution. Conducted by the McCormick Tribune Freedom
Museum, the poll found that only 28 percent of those surveyed could name more
than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US
Constitution, while almost twice as many Americans (52 percent) could name at
least two characters from The Simpsons cartoon show. The survey found
that one in five Americans could name all five of the fictional Simpsons cartoon
characters, but only one in 1,000 people surveyed (0.1 percent) were able to
name all five freedoms granted under the First Amendment. The survey revealed
that 41 percent of those polled could name two of the three judges from the
American Idol television show - but only 8 percent could name three of
their First Amendment freedoms. About one in five polled (21 percent) believed
'the right to own and raise pets' is guaranteed by the Constitution, while one
in five thought the right to drive is guaranteed by the First Amendment. All
this from a country whose leaders claim to have a duty to spread democracy
around the world."
- Mark Vallen: You
Weren’t Using Your Rights Anyway -
"Some people posit that
legalized meth would send the wrong message to people about using meth. However,
the governments role is not to send messages to us about what is right or wrong
or good or bad. We don't need messages from government. Free people determine
for themselves how to run their lives. I have a right to be a self destructive
idiot if I choose. I own me.
"Additionally, the 'messages from government' objection
overlooks an important point. The concepts of legal and illegal are far
different from the concepts of right and wrong or good and bad. Because an
activity is legally permissible does not obligate people to conclude such an
activity is right or good. Merely because the law allows my kids to insult other
kids doesn't prevent my wife and me from successfully teaching them not to do
it. The unwillingness or inability of many people to invest the mental acuity to
distinguish between these concepts has contributed to an intellectual
feeblemindedness which is akin to a malignant tumor killing our society. The
messages from government objection nourishes that tumor. We should embrace the
concept that we are free to adopt personal standards of conduct which exceed the
minimal threshold defined by law."
- Marc J. Victor: Legalize
Methamphetamine! -
"If we don't believe in freedom of
expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."
- Noam Chomsky -
"If Belgium
becomes a nuclear power, the Dutch have no reason to believe it would be a
factor in, say, negotiations over a joint highway project. But Iran's nukes will
be a factor in everything. If you think, for example, the European Union and
others have been fairly craven over those Danish cartoons, imagine what they'd
be like if a nuclear Tehran had demanded a formal apology, a suitable punishment
for the newspaper, and blasphemy laws specifically outlawing representations of
the Prophet. Iran with nukes will be a suicide bomber with a radioactive
waist...
"What, after
all, is the issue underpinning every little goofy incident in the news, from
those Danish cartoons of Mohammed to recommendations for polygamy by official
commissions in Canada to the banning of the English flag in English prisons
because it’s an insensitive 'crusader' emblem to the introduction of
gender-segregated swimming sessions in municipal pools in Puget Sound? In a
word, sovereignty. There is no god but Allah, and thus there is no jurisdiction
but Allah’s. Ayatollah Khomeini saw himself not as the leader of a geographical
polity but as a leader of a communal one: Islam. Once those urbane socialist
émigrés were either dead or on the plane back to Paris, Iran’s nominally
'temporal' government took the same view, too: its role is not merely to run
national highway departments and education ministries but to advance the cause
of Islam worldwide...
"With the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a British subject,
Tehran extended its contempt for sovereignty to claiming jurisdiction over the
nationals of foreign states, passing sentence on them, and conscripting citizens
of other countries to carry it out. Iran’s supreme leader instructed Muslims
around the world to serve as executioners of the Islamic Republic—and they did,
killing not Rushdie himself but his Japanese translator, and stabbing the
Italian translator, and shooting the Italian publisher, and killing three dozen
persons with no connection to the book when a mob burned down a hotel because of
the presence of the novelist’s Turkish translator.
"Iran’s de
facto head of state offered a multimillion-dollar bounty for a whack job on an
obscure English novelist. And, as with the embassy siege, he got away with
it...
"Anyone who spends half an hour looking
at Iranian foreign policy over the last 27 years sees five things:
- Mark Steyn: Facing Down Iran: Our lives depend on it
(mandatory reading) -
"The Pentagon adviser on the war
on terror said that 'allowing Iran to have the bomb is not on the table. We
cannot have nukes being sent downstream to a terror network. It’s just too
dangerous.' He added, 'The whole internal debate is on which way to go' — in
terms of stopping the Iranian program. It is possible, the adviser said, that
Iran will unilaterally renounce its nuclear plans—and forestall the American
action. 'God may smile on us, but I don’t think so. The bottom line is that Iran
cannot become a nuclear-weapons state. The problem is that the Iranians realize
that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend
themselves against the U.S. Something bad is going to happen.'"
- Seymour M. Hersch: The Iran
Plans: Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the
bomb? -
"It is now
seven months before what could be a radically influential congressional
election, a vote that could very well give power back to the Democrats, who will
(with any luck) waste no time launching a number of long-overdue investigations
into Bush's failed war and the various scandals and lies and fiscal abuses that
led us all here.
"For Dubya, now is the time.
One last, desperate gamble. Slam that last drink, scrunch up your face, screw
the rules and let the bombs fly. What, you don't think he could do it? Don't
think a nuclear attack on Iran is possible? You haven't looked into the tiny,
ink-black eyes of Dick Cheney lately. You haven't seen Rumsfeld's arrogant sneer, seen Bush looking confused and lost, wondering where all
his 'capital' went, desperately hunting for a legacy and finding only
irresponsibility and self-righteousness and death."
- Mark Morford: Iran,
You Ran, Let's Bomb Iran - When all else fails and you're becoming Nixon
2.0, why not just nuke someone, and smirk? -
"I strongly urge that in breaking down the walls
of Marxist fantasies you do not fall into the prison of the West and the Great
Satan. I openly announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the greatest and
most powerful base of the Islamic world, can easily help fill up the ideological
vacuum of your system."
- Ayatollah Khomeini in a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989
-
"According to the Treasury
Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000
borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and
financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House
borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined.
Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has
turned it into the largest deficit ever - with an even higher deficit, $423
billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush - sounding much like Herbert
Hoover in 1930 predicting that 'prosperity is just around the corner' - insists
that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to
guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the
deficit in the first place!"
- Sean Wilentz: The Worst
President in History? -
"A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are
keeping."
- Kenneth Tynan - "Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind."
- Marston Bates - "There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge - observation of
nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection
combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination."
- Denis Diderot -
"Love thy neighbour as yourself, but choose your neighbourhood."
- Louise Beal - "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." - H. P. Lovecraft: The Call of Cthulhu - "Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see
them misunderstood."
- H. L. Mencken -
"Well, here they come: the
wannabe Rommels, the gaggle of generals, safely retired, to lay siege to Donald
Rumsfeld. This week, six of them have called for the Secretary of Defense's
resignation.
"Well, according to my watch, they're about four years too
late - and they still don't get it.
"It wasn't Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld who stood up in front of the UN and identified two mobile latrines as
biological weapons labs, was it, General Powell?
"It wasn't Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who told us our next
warning from Saddam could be a mushroom cloud, was it Condoleeza?
"It wasn't Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who declared that Al
Qaeda and Saddam were going steady, was it, Mr. Cheney?
"Yes, Rumsfeld is a swaggering bag of mendacious arrogance, a
duplicitous chicken-hawk, yellow-bellied bully-boy and Tinker-Toy Napoleon --
but he didn't appoint himself Secretary of Defense...
"Generals, let me give you a
bit of advice about choosing a target: It's the President, stupid."
- Greg Palast: Desert
rats leave the sinking ship -
"We live in an ever-shrinking
world thanks to technology; there's no logical reason why oceans and mountains
or even different languages and cultures need to hinder trade and commerce.
Likewise, there's no logical reason someone from another geographical region
should be prevented from emigrating to another. What's the difference between a
Chinese emigrating to New York and my moving to Brooklyn from Long Island?
Essentially, there is no difference. And who the hell has the right to prevent
me (or a Chinese or anyone else) from moving to where the grass is greener? What
arrogance!
"After all, borders are just
lines on a piece of paper called a map, to be obsessed over by presidents,
dictators, and military men eager to protect what they seem to think to be their
own personal property. In order to maintain their power, they have to stoke the
collectivist fires of racism and xenophobia...
"Attacks on immigration, legal
or otherwise, are attacks on individual rights, not to mention attacks
on the market and a free society. The only 'aliens' we should be concerned about
are those unsavory, ignorant, and politically-connected folks to whom freedom is
an alien concept."
- Marcel Votlucka: "Illegal"
Immigration Is a Phantom Problem -
"Campaign finance reformers
concerned about the pernicious role of private contributions on our public
leaders seem to have overlooked the simple principle that transparency increases
market efficiency and secrecy diminishes it. Most reformers instinctively favor
full disclosure as an essential element of campaign finance reform. There is a
powerful argument that this is precisely backwards
and that contributions, like votes, should be secret.
"Imagine a simple law, outlined four years
ago by two legal scholars at Yale,
under which a candidate could only receive funds
from a blind trust managed by the federal government. Citizens,
companies, parties, PACs, and lobbies could all contribute to any cause, party,
or candidate they wish - but their contribution would pass through the blind
trust. Candidates would receive the money but would
no more know the source of their contributions than they know with certainty who
voted for them.
"This provision would powerfully change a
donor's expected return on investment. If the candidate to whom you are
contributing cannot verify your generosity, you cannot invest with the
expectation of any return beyond the benefit of a leader who shares
your general political orientation. The need to restrict the size of
contributions would be vastly diminished. Why would Big Oil, Big Labor, or Big
Tobacco contribute to a campaign if there was no assurance of a payback?
And how can a politician pay back a contribution if
he or she cannot verify its source?"
- Martin Manley: All
Ballots Secret, All Contributions Anonymous -
"A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself and then
says them about other people."
- Peter McArthur - "There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one
of them is that he has taken to drink."
- Booth Tarkington: Penrod - "It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously." - Peter Ustinov - "Wars teach us not to love our enemies, but to hate our allies."
- W. L. George - "Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps." - Emo Phillips - "I quote others only in order to express
myself better."
- Michel de Montaigne
-
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The Best of Disinfotainment Today - 2005 A Year of Journalism with the Crap Removed  |
Last Disinfotainment Today,
Issue
#184, was much better than this one,
and so is Issue #186.
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