Tuesday, September 02, 2003

Bush's Labor Day Charade
Richfield, Ohio is not convinced:




''If I had George Bush's economic record, I'd stay at Camp David on Labor Day,'' said Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, whose congressional district includes Richfield. "President Bush has the single worst economic record of any president since Herbert Hoover led the country at the onset of the Great Depression", Brown said."

I'll bet the Labor Day reception wouldn't have been much warmer in Galesburg, Illinois.


Defying the Dependent Deity

Defying the Dependent Deity
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, September 2, 2003


"...All over the world, people are hideously butchered in the name of God, which is to say condemned to death on account of an accident of birth. (This, after all, is how most of us get our religious convictions.) Religion can have a hard time being tolerant. To many adherents, the stakes are too high.
I am at a loss to explain this mentality...
...I am at a loss, too, to explain why the all-powerful deity needs some schoolteacher to lead a prayer -- why, for instance, the religious do not tend to this matter before their children leave for class. I do not understand why a God who once smote with abandon and authored miracles that science could never explain needs a statue here or a display there to remind us of his omnipresence......"




Salem Pax's home gets busted

From The Peking Duck blog: Salem Pax's home gets busted

Peking Duck writes:

"A shocking story over at Salem Pax about a recent raid of his house by American troops. It's not that they did anything brutal or cruel. But it certainly isn't the way to win friends and influence people. It told me me how much the Iraqis must despise us.

SP is educated, erudite and urbane, probably more so than your average Iraqi. So imagine how they must feel during events like this, which are apparently quite commonplace now. Are we welcomed and beloved by most Iraqis or feared and despised? My common sense tells me it has to be the latter, in which case I wonder, how can we ever succeed there? The whole thing was based on the premise that we'd be greeted with open arms and welcomed as liberators, if not saviors. And to a certain extent, we were. But as so many of the "weasels" and "anti-Americans" feared, there was no realistic plan to deal with the aftermath. We over-reached, the most common blunder of heady conquerors."



Fellow blogger Salem Pax tells the story firsthand at his weblog. Link HERE.