2005/06/22

Prudence and Frugality

Now that I have a good job (knock on wood) with an excellent salary, and my mortgage paid off, I seem to have more money concerns than ever. Stuff that hangs over my head and I never seem to get done. Consolidating a jumble of accounts scattered everywhere. Figuring out the stock market. Getting my insurance straight. Fixing up the house. Getting payments that the payee lost put back on the record somehow when the bank can't dig up the check from six years ago.

And just plain worrying about the future.

This stuff never seems to get any easier. Maybe it's just me.

2005/06/21

Durbin the Aider and Comforter

Senator Durbin:

I am writing to express my outrage and disgust with respect to your comments on the Senate floor about our military.

I have been to S-21, personally. If you do not know what I am talking about, you certainly do not have any business comparing our military to Pol Pot's regime. I have pictures I cannot bear to review. I have seen instruments of torture. They do not consist of a few hours or even days of discomfort. They maim, disfigure, and terrorize for life -- although only 7 people survived Tuol Sleng. If you think that is even remotely comparable to, much less the equivalent of, wet trousers or no air-conditioning, then you have a serious disconnect from all proportion and any reasonable capacity to evaluate inhuman indecency.

I have read the reports of our military's behavior. To compare the well-considered tough decisions of our men and women in service and in leadership positions, and even their mistakes and errors in judgment, to the amoral behavior of sadists like the people who implemented terror in Cambodia is an ignorant and wicked distortion, and the fact that you have made it from a position of authority -- ignoring the benefits, aid, and comfort you bring thereby to people who already think chopping off random civilians' heads is just fine and dandy -- truly sickens me.

Whoever runs against you in your next campaign will receive my donation dollars.

Sincerely,

2005/06/12

ObPileOn

Me, not the link, which goes to (one of) the original speculator(s) as to the peanuttiness of last year's Dim Dem candidate for the Presidency.

I was particularly struck by this passage:
"My point wasn’t that Kerry’s performance at Yale proved that he was intellectually inferior to Bush. My point was that there was absolutely no reason to believe that Kerry was an intellectual giant. Intellectual giants leave footprints indicating as much. Bill Clinton, for instance, didn’t receive four D’s during his freshman year at Georgetown and this was in spite of coming from Nowhere, Arkansas, where[as] Kerry had attended a series of the country’s (and Switzerland’s) finest prep schools."
(my emphasis)

You know, there is something about this that is just so despicable that I can hardly stand it. It's not the grades, obviously, although to be perfectly frank, as someone who never had any trouble in any school or any class on any subject if I may be so immodest -- despite, like Prez #42, growing up in the benighted South -- I will admit to feeling some contempt for four frickin' Ds in a year (semester?). But the constant deception and dismissal of skeptics while skating and embellishing a reputation he knows he doesn't deserve ... and if he didn't personally & publicly pontificate on his own mental prowess compared to M. George, he certainly did with interviewers in private and never discounted the "nuanced" assertions of others ... it's almost pathological.

As much as I never liked anything about TeRAYza, she never seemed to lack brains -- lack of sense, yes, but not fundamental brainpower. I wonder if she's content with the bargain she's ended up with, now. I'd hate to be a servant in that house.

Not that there's anything wrong with being a rich and powerful person who wants a boytoy around, but a pretentious, inept, and mildly cursed Lurch of a boytoy? Not exactly the deal of the day.

2005/06/06

Zowie!

James writes the best stuff:

"But if an infidel touches the book with the wrong hand and people react like a two-year-old whose peas are touching the mashed potatoes, well, I understand why this matters, but when measured against the sins of headchoppery and carbombs, it pales to an evanescent translucence."