Black Voters Align With Democrats Against Bush — Washington Post Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Politics
French Marines
From a Wall Street Journal article on the arrival of French troops in Haiti: U.S. Marines set up a security perimeter at the airport, kneeling in the grass as about 80 French Marines arrived in C-160 transport planes. The French Marines’ supplies included crates of bottled Evian water. Read more →
Separated at Birth
Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Steve Urkel Read more →
Issue of the Day
People my age or a little younger may remember some years ago, when the issue of burning the American flag suddenly became the most important issue in the country. People were so riled up about it that a constitutional amendment was proposed to make flag burning illegal. Read more →
Mass Confusion
The biggest problem I find is that many black people don’t support the gay and lesbian civil rights movement because they don’t see black people as gay. And I think a lot of that comes from what they see on television because there are one or two characters who are both black and gay. — Jasmyne Cannick, board member of the National Black Justice Coalition, quoted on PlanetOut.com Now that’s the looniest statement I’ve heard today — although I do think the number of people unable to distinguish television from real life has been trending sharply upward . . . Read more →
Recall
We have a new governor in California: Does the punishment of a humiliating recall fit Davis’ crimes? Maybe not. But the issue isn’t fairness to Davis. It’s the future of the state. If the voters brutally and unfairly punish a state-of-the-art pol who overspends in boom times and puts off tough decisions until after he’s reelected, that doesn’t seem to me a terrible precedent to set. It seems a useful precedent. — Mickey Kaus Read more →
Vagueness and Sheer Incompetence
This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems to be able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed; prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. — George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1945) I am so glad to hear that, because I try to read political commentary every now and then, and I can very rarely figure out what if anything is being said. I thought it was just me. Read more →
Janeane Garofalo
From an OC Weekly interview with Janeane Garofalo: OC Weekly: With war brewing, are you venturing into foreign policy? Janeane Garofalo: I can’t think of how to say something funny about how I feel about a preemptive strike in Iraq. But I am on top of all the news, and I am endlessly disappointed in the news. I am extremely angry. . . . Read more →
Geography
This is probably why geography has not really been taught since World War II — to keep people in the dark as to where we are blowing things up. — Gore Vidal Read more →
Don’t Tell Strom the Babysitter’s Dead
Strom Thurmond’s former babysitter dies at 109 Read more →