My dear friend Katie who is in grad school, asked one of her professors why governments do not in fact save up money for a rainy day. His answer, to summarize, is that taxpayers would get angry if they saw the government wasn’t using their money; they’d feel “over” taxed. Thank you Katie for your research. That actually leads me to a further thought: why doesn’t government just not OVER spend. Why don’t they live within their budgets?
New picture January 30, 2009
That’s me, standing in front of Ruby Beach on the Washington Peninsula. Gorgeous. The peninsula that is.
Peacemaker January 29, 2009
Not to be confused with pacemaker. I would like to be one. A peacemaker that is. There are certain people that I like. Alexis de Tocqueville for instance. He has good ideas and isn’t reactionary. Well, I guess he is because he was reacting to the French revolution, but he wasn’t angry (sidenote: I first spelled that “angery.” Doesn’t angery get the emotion across more?) but he was inquisitive, hopeful, intellectual, deep thinking. I am sure both conservatives and liberals like him. Right? I hope so. I am conservative through and through, but I don’t like angery (there it is again!), reactionary conservatism. I like deep thinking which I swear leads to conservative conclusions! I like understanding. I get mad sometimes, and those are the times when I want to come on and vent on my blog, but i don’t want to REACT. I want to ACT with thought. I guess it’s just easier to be spurred on by something, to react to it because it creates a lot of passionate furvor. Call me crazy. Or better yet, call me a peacemaker. A conservative one.
An Improvement September 3, 2008
I just found this blog post on National Review Online by Yuval Levin that more eloquently says what I was trying to say in my last post: here. Here it is fully quoted for convenience:
I have always tended to think that conservative complaints about the media are a little exaggerated. There are occasionally obvious instances of bias and clear examples of a double standard, but most reporters don’t want to fall into those and some conservatives are surely too sensitive to them. But this week has changed my view. I have never seen, and I admit that I could never have imagined, such shameful, out-of-control, frenzied, angry, condescending, and pathetic journalistic malpractice. The ignorant assault on Palin’s accomplishments and experience, the breathless careless airing of deranged rumors about her private life, the staggeringly indecent mistreatment of her teenage daughter in a difficult time, the ill-informed piling on about the vetting process, the self-intensifying circle of tisking nodding heads utterly detached from a straightforward political event, have been amazing and eye-opening.
The reigning emotion of it all has been anger—anger at being surprised, anger at being denied the spectacle of a Republican circular firing squad, anger that a conservative pro-life Republican could also be a woman and might represent the aspirations of other women, anger at being handed a person they did not know and who did not know them, anger that this upstart thinks she can ruin their coronation party. And the anger was fed by, and was indicative of, a profound elitism—a sense that we were dealing with some redneck moron from a state with no decent restaurants. The Republican candidate for president chose as his running mate a young, charismatic, female Republican governor—probably the most popular governor in the country—whose attitude and resume ring precisely of McCain’s kind of politics, and who has been on most people’s short-list since he won the nomination, and the press treats it as a symptom of some terrible and reckless madness.
Part of the fault was surely with the McCain campaign’s own press strategy. They kept the secret a little too well to begin with (in part surely because the idea that it might leak out in advance was declared to be disrespectful of the Democrats’ convention), so reporters were thoroughly surprised. And after revealing the pick, they chose not to have Palin do a round of press interviews right away, making some reporters so angry and hungry they began to eat the furniture. As Palin could no-doubt inform McCain’s press team, you should never surprise or anger a wild beast.
But inadequate animal husbandry cannot finally be blamed for the shocking stampede we have been witness to this week. The spectacle reveals a deep rot at the heart of the political press, and has been among the most shameful chapters in the history of modern American journalism. Not everyone has joined in, of course, but essentially all of the important institutions of our political press have played their part in one way or another. We can only hope those involved have begun to come to their senses, and that they recognize the magnitude of their failure this week. That doesn’t mean they should go easy on Palin: it makes sense to look into her past (as it would make sense to look into Obama’s past at some point before November too), and she certainly needs to prove herself tonight and beyond, as any vice presidential candidate has to. But the treatment she has received is not what just any VP candidate would get, and the attitude and assumptions underlying this week’s amazing assault raise very troubling questions about the cream of the crop of political reporters. They have shown themselves to be too insulated and too solipsistic to help the public better understand our politics, and too self-important to report on events as they happen. This is far more than media bias. Let us hope it is a passing episode.
And!! September 3, 2008
And, liberals are apparantly snobs. Democrats and liberals are supposedly for the people, yet they deride Sarah Palin because she is only an Alaska governor and so she therefore hasn’t thought anything about United States domestic and foreign policy? And how do they know? Does she need to go to school to learn those things? How does anybody get qualified to run the country? To be worthy, does a candidate have to be well-educated? Do they have to have the “smartest” people around them? Is their spouse not allowed to be a “blue collar” worker? Where is the liberals confidence in people who aren’t like them? Who are of a lower class monetarily and educationally? And that is the problem with liberal elites: they don’t care about or believe in normal people. They just want to take care of them. Their razing of Sarah Palin is a prime example. I don’t get it. You’d think liberals and Democrats would celebrate her, but they can’t, because she’s pro-life and pro-limited government.
The Media Doesn’t Think September 3, 2008
Need I say more? All I’ve read about Sarah Palin is about her daughter’s pregnancy. Where is any discussion of her philosophies? Her record? This is why the main stream media drives me crazy. I always feel dumber after reading it: that goes for the NYTimes, Reuters, AP, Yahoo!. I site, for example, the Yahoo! front page here (pick the topic of Palin) and NYTimes columnist Maureen Dowd here. We need some deeper thinking here than to go crazy over her daughter’s pregnancy. Her daughter’s pregnancy is sad and shouldn’t have happened in the first place. She is paying for the consequences. Liberals, of all people, should not be haraunging Palin for what her daughter does because she can’t control her. Even the best parents have children who make dumb decisions. Even if Sarah Palin is pro-abstinence and pro-life, doesn’t mean her teenaged daughter has proved her a failure.
The price of gasoline? It’s lame! August 11, 2008
But apparantly it’s not as bad we think? That’s according to these guys anyway: A Big Surprise on Gas. I’m torn. The price of gas is pretty painful, no matter how much Indur M. Goklany and Jerry Taylor, the authors, say it’s equivilant to the level of disposable income as it was in the 1960s. It’s still high. However. I do feel like people in the United States live too tightly–they live on the edge of their finances, and that makes it more painful still when things like gasoline go up. I think that’s why people are cutting back now–because before, they still had some discretionary funds left. But the rapid increases in gas pushed them to their limit. And that’s ok.
Oh Blessed, Blessed Blogs June 11, 2008
Blogs are so popular! Reading other people’s blogs and also reading the news sure has filled me with desire to write something myself…again. So, here I am over a year since my last post. It’s kind of like my journal…sometimes I’m so good at keeping it up. And then sometimes, I’m not. Today I have two stories that I feel I must write about.
The first (first only because I know where the link is to it, and the other, I have to do some digging for): Wow we have some sick judges in our country. Federal judges, no doubt. We have great and wise and honorable judges as well (I think all of the SC justices are decent people, as far as I know anyway), but some make me question our society. Okay, at least one does, at the moment: His name? Alex Kozinski, the 9th Circuit federal judge who is currently presiding over a case of extreme obscenity brought to him by the federal government (specifically, the U.S. Department of Justice Obscenity Prosecution Task Force). As the Drudge Report says, Kozinski has apparently put some pretty nasty stuff (immoral and sexually perverted stuff that is) on his own website, because he thought it was funny and wanted to keep it in case he wanted to share it with others. He said he didn’t think it was a public website, but he did share some of it with friends. And they think it’s funny? And he doesn’t think the stuff is obscene, just odd and a part of life. Here’s the article. Here is the article about the obscenity case he is presiding over: Obscenity Case. I wish I had deeper thoughts about this, but mostly I feel deep disgust and dismay.
Second: That’s going to have to wait, because we’re going to Wal-mart. Blessed, blessed Wal-mart.
Dear Harry Reid: You’ll be a Loser if you act like one April 24, 2007
I cannot believe what Harry Reid has said about the war. If you could see my face right now, you would see disbelief (and anger) written all over it. I think what really gets me so angry is that people like him fulfill their own predictions. Thomas the Train’s “I think I can motto,” wasn’t just a nice book for little children to read–confidence and proper vision define success! Saying the war is lost condemns us to lose the war unless the more optimistic vision of other major players can override Reid’s. I can’t help but compare Harry Reid to Winston Churchill whose unrelenting optimism probably help win WWII. Dear Harry Reid: please practice a little more Churchillian optimism!
(Some) Movies are filth. February 23, 2007
I actually love watching movies, but every time I go to a movie rental place I leave with low spirits. I sometimes browse the aisles–like I did last night to find a movie for my old buds’ weekly Movie Night–looking for some good movie that I have seen long ago or have yet to see and wanted to see. I really should avoid that practice though; it never fails to disappoint me. Most movies have scantily clad women on the covers–does anybody else not find that completely repulsive and outrageous? And the fact that we’re OKAY with it, in an age when women are supposed to have more rights, and be treated better than they have ever been?! And I can tell we’re okay with it because it shows up everywhere: its existence proves our acquiesence. Most movies revolve around sex which means they revolve around women as sex objects, and yet we wonder why rape and violence are such a problem?
