“The Missouri House of Representatives has approved a bill, the main feature of which, would create the crime of coercing a woman to have an abortion. It also would require abortion clinics to offer women information about alternatives to abortion and about the fetus. The bill now goes to the Senate.” [The Missourinet]
I tell people I’m from Bulgaria.
“If a person is relatively certain that going to war will end his ability to enjoy the rest of his life, one way or another, and the war does not present a plausible threat to the homeland, is such a person unpatriotic for dodging the draft to save himself?
The obvious answer is yes, he is unpatriotic. If your country calls on you, you need to go. End of story.
On the other hand, what is the point of a being patriotic to a country that intends to kill you for its own marginal benefit? Such a country would be your natural enemy, not your friend, so any question of patriotism would be nonsense in this particular situation.”
Like most of Mr. Adam’s posts, this one is well written and thought provoking. You need to read the full post before answering the (for the time being) hypothetical question.
A less-hypothetical quesion: Are you willing to sacrifice your son or daughter because George W. Bush wanted to prove something to his daddy?
There. I said it.
Given what we all know about the waste, corruption, inefficiency and stupidity of the people that run our government… and what we don’t know… a big chunk of what we all pay in taxes every year goes down the shitter or into some politician-turned-lobbyist’s pocket.
Remember the story about the $8.8 billion dollars (360 tons of cash) shipped on palettes to Baghdad? Pissed away, stolen, unaccounted for. My money was on one of those palettes. Along with yours.
You bet I’d cheat on my taxes if I knew I could get away with it. But I wouldn’t think of it as cheating. Because I would do something good (for others) with the money. Yes, I think I can help more people than the nimrods in DC. All I lack is the larceny and the nerve.
Viet Nam wasn’t going well. We needed more “boots on the ground,” so they re-instituted the draft on December 1, 1969 with a lottery. Low number, you’re on your way to Viet Nam. High number, you’re okay. My number was 213 (out of 365). The draft was frozen at 195 in December of 1970. I dropped out of law school the next day.
In 1968, we had 536,100 troops in Viet Nam (compared to our 140,000 in Iraq). If we had the draft today, the war in Iraq would be over by the Fourth of July.
Presidential Aide: Mr. President, two airliners have been flown into the World Trade Center Towers.
George W. Bush: Those are the big ones in New York, right?
Aide: Yes sir. We think there might be as many as 3,000 dead.
Bush: Who did it?
Aide: We think they were Saudis.
Bush: Damn, I’ve played golf with those guys.
Aide: No sir. These are probably extremists.
Bush: No shit. What are we gonna do about it?
Vice President Cheney: Mr. President, we have to invade Iraq but we need to invade Afghanistan first to make it look good.
Bush: Do we think that prick Saddam had something to do with it?
Cheney: Sir, we don’t know that he didn’t.
Bush: I’d like to nuke that fucker. Does he have nukes or chemical weapons or something.
CIA Director George Tennent: There’s no evidence of that, Mr. President.
Cheney: Take another look.
Tennent: Yes sir.
Cheney: When we invade, I think I can get my friends at Halliburton to pitch in.
Bush: Cool.
[Fast forward. The Liberation of Irag is not going well]
Bush: Goddamn it Rummy, I thought you said this thing would take a few weeks and we’d be greeted as liberators. Everyone going to Camp David with me and the First Lady, take one step forward… not so fast Rummy!
[Later]
Bush: Karl, we’re in the shit here. What should we do?
Karl Rove: Well, you’re in your final term… just drag the thing out and leave it for the Democrats.
Bush: Can we do that?
Rove: I don’t see why not. We can say things we’re looking good when we left.
Bush: But things look like hell!
Rove: Just wait. They’ll look a lot worse.
Bush: But won’t history show that I screwed the pooch on this?
Rove and Cheney: (Looking at the floor and ceiling respectively)
Cheney: Uh, no sir, Mr. President. All anyone will remember is the Middle East exploded on the Democrats’ watch. Uh, listen guys, I gotta run. I’m going skeet shooting with Scooter.
Update: Just in… a plan for withdrawal.
From George Mason University’s History News Network:
“In an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted over a three-week period through the History News Network, 98.2 percent assessed the presidency of Mr. Bush to be a failure while 1.8 percent classified it as a success.
“Asked to rank the presidency of George W. Bush in comparison to those of the other 41 American presidents, more than 61 percent of the historians concluded that the current presidency is the worst in the nation’s history.”
“The reason for the hesitancy some historians had in categorizing the Bush presidency as the worst ever, which led them to place it instead in the “nearly the worst” group, was well expressed by another historian who said, “It is a bit too early to judge whether Bush’s presidency is the worst ever, though it certainly has a shot to take the title. Without a doubt, it is among the worst.”
I bet they’re all Democrats. I think W will get his wish. He’ll be remembered for a long, long time.
From rawstory.com: “Former Attorney General John Ashcroft drew the ire of students at liberal Skidmore College this week when he confused the name of Barack Obama with that of Osama bin Laden.
“All I’m saying about the Patriot Act,” Ashcroft began, “is that the elected representatives of this country, including Osama …”
His words were met with a roar of disbelief and disapproval, as he continued stammering, “uh … you know … not … Obama.”
Ashcroft attempted to say “I’m sorry” but was drowned out by prolonged boos.
“I did not mean to … I’m sorry about that … I apologize publicly,” Ashcroft went on as the boos gradually subsided.”
Accident or strategy? Watch the video.
By now the Clinton strategists have figured out how the Obama campaign has been beating them. If not, they can read about in the March 20th issue of Rolling Stone. In an article titled The Machinery of Hope, Tim Dickinson provides a fascinating look inside the grass-roots field operation of the Obama campaign. A few nuggets:
“If you really want grass-roots participation, then you have to give folks at the grass roots some autonomy to do this in their own way. We had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who wanted to do things. The challenge was: How do you marshal them in an organized fashion?”
“They’ve married the incredibly powerful online community they built with real on-the-ground field operations. We’ve never seen anything like this before in American political history.”
“The Clinton campaign is the last, antiquated vestige of the top-down model. The top cannot organize caucus states; the bottom can.”
“The Obama campaign has succeeded not by attracting starry-eyed followers who place their faith in hope but by motivating committed activists who are answering a call to national service. They’re pouring their lifeblood into this campaign, not because they are in thrall to a cult of personality but because they’re invested in the idea that politics matter, and that their participation can turn the current political system on its ear.”
This article –coming on the heels of Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” — really clicked for me and contains the answer to my pals who wink and nudge each other in the ribs while asking, “What makes you think this guy will be any different than all the others?”
This just in… the young process information differently. According to this story at NYT.com,
“…younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.”
“A December survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press looked at how media were being consumed this campaign. In the most striking finding, half of respondents over the age of 50 and 39 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds reported watching local television news regularly for campaign news, while only 25 percent of people under 30 said they did.”
“Rather than treating video-sharing Web sites as traditional news sources, young people use them as tools and act as editors themselves.”
One quote in the story really jumped out at me:
“If the news is that important, it will find me.”
What does this mean for those of us in the news business?
Really interesting story at Politico by Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej about how YouTube is helping move us away from sound bite coverage to something more substantial.
“In the 1968 presidential election, the average amount of time given to a sound bite from presidential candidate on the network news shows was 43 seconds. In 1972 it dropped to 25. By 1988, it had shrunk to 9.8 seconds, and in 1996, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs and the Brookings Institution, to just 8.2 seconds. By 2004, a study by USC and the University of Wisconsin found that it had risen slightly to 10.3 seconds, but for all intents and purposes this was hardly much of an improvement.
Until now, all of national politics has operated within the context of those shrinking numbers. Since TV was the only way to reach millions of voters, and the only way to get your message across was to a) buy expensive airtime for 30-second TV ads or b) get free airtime by saying something memorable (and not damaging, unless aimed at your opponent), successful politicians have gotten very good at sticking to their talking points, speaking in sound-bites, and avoiding gaffes or detailed conversations as much as possible.”
My man Obama is proving these assumptions are out of date:
“So far, Obama’s videos have been viewed more than 33 million times on YouTube.com — and that’s not counting partial views, since YouTube only reports a full viewing as a “view.” His campaign has uploaded more than 800 video clips, and adds several more a day.”
In a pre-Internet era, the endless replayings on television of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sound bites denouncing America would probably have deeply damaged Obama’s candidacy. But millions of voters have been flocking to the web to watch his 37-minute response to the controversy.
Our longest newscast on our four state radio networks is 4 minutes. Only three of those being news. Even more popular –with affiliates– are our one-minute “capsules.” Formats which demand shorter and shorter sound bites.
But we now routinely post longer –sometimes complete– interviews with the stories we post to our websites.
I have to believe everyone is better served by new media alternatives.