For those of wyou who don't know this is my favorite band. Not a great song but a good one for them, new sound, sort of industrial like NIN but not as harsh. I wish they would back off politics, but these lyrics can be interpreted in many ways so it could be pro-military or pro-US depending on how you look at it but it is a good, almost great, song.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
Failblog/FML friday
Today, I was teaching a woodshop class. We were using power tools, including drills, and pieces of pine wood. While helping a kid to hold a piece to practice drilling, he went too far forward with the drill. It went through my hand. FML
Today, in the middle of an exam, I was escorted out by the campus police due to suspicion of a concealed weapon. The officers couldn't stop laughing for 20 minutes when they found out the weapon was metal knitting needles. FML
Today, completely excited, I told my mom about this guy from high school, that I had really liked and who had found me on Facebook. He said he regretted not asking me out in high school and offered to fly me out to visit him. Her response? "Has he seen what you look like now?" FML
Today, I was locked inside my dorm room. Yeah, inside. How? Some of my floormates decided to stick pennies in the door frame, which jammed the handle. I was stuck inside my room and had to pee really bad. I couldn't call an RA to get me out either. Why? I am the RA. FML
Today, I found out that my sister who is 16 years older than me is actually my biological mother. She and my parents decided it was best that I didn't know who my real mother was, and to be raised by my grandparents as their child. I've always hated my sister. FML
Today, a buttmunch customer brought in $7 worth of pennies I had to count and roll. As I was putting them in the deposite box at the end of my shift, I fumbled and dropped the rolls. All but one broke, spilling their contents on the floor. FML
Today, I was in a bad mood after being stuck in traffic for 2 hours and late for work. I was walking to my building when I saw a 100 dollar note flying my way. A man called after me for it, but being selfish I took the note in my pocket as a little reward. That man was my boss. Yes, I'm fired. FML
Today, my boyfriend called me and told me he wanted me to stay the night. I decided to wear my sexiest outfit for him so I put on my kinky nurse outfit and drove over to his house. I let myself in his front door, to which I found 40 of my closest friends staring at me for my surprise birthday party. FML
Today, I had to pretend to give birth in a play. I wanted to make it a realistic as possible but ended up crapping myself on stage by accident. FML
Today, my mom said I was the worst of her 5 children. My IQ is 130, an honor student, I don't smoke, I don't drink alcohol, or do drugs. I'm the "worst" because I don't go to church every Sunday. FML
Today, I was at soccer camp and was hit in the face with a ball. I walked to the nurse and asked for a napkin or tissues to help stop the bleeding. The only thing she could come up with? A tampon. I spent 20 minutes with a tampon shoved up my nostril in front of my laughing teammates. FML
Today, I locked my keys in my car. My spare keys are 45 minutes away in my dorm room. My dorm room keys are attached to my car keys locked in my car. Security said they would let me in as long as I had my school ID. It's on my keychain. FML
Today, I was playing FarmTown and got into a fight with a 14 year old boy. I threatened him with physical violence, and he reported me. I'm 23 years old and got banned from a virtual farming game for threatening children. FML
Today, I had a Biochemistry quiz. I studied all night but took a nap to get some rest because my quiz was in the morning. I woke up at 10 feeling very confident. My quiz was at 9. FML
Today, I realized that my virus protection program now has a virus. FML
Winston Churchill: one of my heroes...
I don't use that term lightly, I have very few heroes in my life. Some of my heroes off the top of my head would be Abe Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, General George S. Patton, Ike Eisenhower, JFK, Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, George H.W Bush, and Gerald Ford. I would almost put Nixon on that list but he screwed up too much, history is starting to come around to him and I did read his 1100 page autobiography back in 7th grade for a school project (in retrospect I'm sure my teacher was thrilled about having me do that) and that probably planted the seeds of my conservatism. But anyway, on RCP today there was a great article on Churchill that I just had to put up on here. Please read as much as you can, I know its long but its a great read... even though its from the freaking NewYorker
Seventy years ago this summer, in June of 1940, an aging British politician, who for the previous twenty years had seemed to his countrymen to be one of those entertaining, eccentric, essentially literary figures littering the margins of political life, got up to make a speech in the House of Commons. The British Expeditionary Forces had just been evacuated from France, fleeing a conquering German Army—evacuated successfully, but, as the speaker said, wars aren’t won that way—and Britain itself seemed sure to be invaded, and soon. Many of the most powerful people in his own party believed it was time to settle for the best deal you could get from the Germans. At that moment when all seemed lost, something was found, as Winston Churchill pronounced some of the most famous lines of the past century. “We shall go on to the end,” he said defiantly, in tones plummy and, on the surviving recordings, surprisingly thick-tongued. “We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” Churchill’s words did all that words can do in the world. They said what had to be done; they announced why it had to be done then; they inspired those who had to do it.
That fatal summer and those fateful words continue to resonate. Revisionism, the itch of historians to say something new about something already known, has nicked Churchill without really drawing blood. In American conservative circles, he is still El Cid with a cigar, hoisted up on his horse to confront the latest existential threat to Western civilization (though his admirers tend to censor out the champagne or cognac glass that this ferocious Francophile kept clamped there, too). In Britain, it’s a little different. Just as J.F.K. is adored abroad and admired at home—where by now he’s seen as half liberal martyr, half libertine satyr—Churchill in Britain is revered but quarantined, his reputation held to the five years of his wartime rule. The Labour grandees Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey treat Churchill in their memoirs as a historical figure deserving of affection and respect but not really part of the story of modern Britain. (Jenkins eventually wrote a life of him, and ended up surprised by his own high opinion.) The revisionism from Churchill’s own side is more marked; some on the British right even see him as the man who helped lose the Empire in a self-intoxicated excess of oratory that was the sort of thing only Americans would take seriously. It is typical of what his American fans can miss that a writer for the Wall Street Journal recently quoted Gore Vidal calling Evelyn Waugh a kind of prose Churchill, and thought this flattering to Waugh. In fact, Waugh disliked Churchill, prose and politics alike—his alter ego, Guy Crouchback, calls him “a professional politician, a master of sham-Augustan prose, a Zionist, an advocate of the popular front in Europe, an associate of the press-lords and of Lloyd George”—and his dry-eyed, limpid, every-pebble-in-its-place language was utterly remote from Churchill’s sonorous, neo-Latinate sentences, and meant to be so.
But book after book about Churchill still comes: in the past few years a life by the omnivorous biographer Paul Johnson, “Churchill” (Viking; $24.95); a complete collection of Churchill’s quotations, “Churchill by Himself ” (Public Affairs; $29.95); and new and more specialized studies of Churchill at war, Churchill at Yalta, and Churchill in the memory of his countrymen. All these supplement the standard biographies, which include Martin Gilbert’s official multivolume history, published in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Jenkins’s single-volume life, from 2001, and John Keegan’s crisp and authoritative life, from the year after. Meanwhile, the American historian John Lukacs’s decades’ worth of books about Churchill—slicing fine tranches of the crucial months and weeks and even days—remain the most insightful studies of Churchill’s psychology and political practice. Reading all these, one finds a Churchill who is a good deal more compelling than the eternal iron man. Goethe wrote that Hamlet was a man who was asked to do something that seemed impossible for that man to do. Churchill is a kind of Hamlet in reverse, a man who was called on, late in life, to do the one thing he was uniquely able to do, and did it.
Churchill’s life is so complex that he would have justified a biography or two had he died in 1931, when he was hit by a car on a New York street. The American connection was anything but incidental. He had an American mother, a loyal American audience, and, twice in his life, a determination to bring America into a war. (The editor Maxwell Perkins once said that he seemed to be “much more like an American than an Englishman.”) During a period when Britain was to the world what America is now, the No. 1 nation with a widely admired élan, Churchill always kept a friendly, steady eye on the oncoming American chariot.
At the same time, Churchill was never entirely trusted by the upper crust to which he belonged, and certainly never by its organized voice, the Conservative Party. To be born both at the top of the tree and out on a limb is an odd combination, and that double heritage accounts for a lot of what happened to him later. Some of this oddity he owed to his mother, the New York heiress Jennie Jerome. But he owed more to his father, Randolph, who had been a meteor across the sky in British politics in the eighteen-seventies and eighties.
Randolph came from an old family—Churchill could never get enough of his descent from the first Duke of Marlborough, who defeated French and Bavarian troops at the Battle of Blenheim—but he belonged to a new generation of British politicians. After the golden age of the gentleman-gladiator, the eighteen-sixties and seventies of Disraeli and Gladstone, came a time of professional politics played as a blood sport. Randolph Churchill and his close collaborator (and, later, competitor) Joseph Chamberlain, who made his fortune as an industrialist in Birmingham, represented a new brutality: both were ambitious, driven, and ruthless, with an imperial turn of mind that Winston absorbed as second nature. Randolph, as Secretary of State for India in a Tory government, presented Burma as a “New Year’s present” to the Queen. The imperialism of the older Churchill and Chamberlain appealed to tribal honor in military conquest, cutting right across class lines and limitations.
It may seem mysterious that jingoism should appeal so overwhelmingly to the working classes, easily trumping apparently obvious differences in interests between them and the economic imperialists. Why should conquering Burma be of significance to a Cockney? But imperialism is the cosmopolitanism of the people, the lever by which the unempowered come to believe that their acts have world-historical meaning. This understanding was the spine and bone of the younger Winston’s politics. In his mind, British modernization and progress—and throughout the first part of his career he was seen, above all, as a progressive—were always tied up with the cult and religion of Empire. For Churchill, imperialism and progressivism were parts of the same package. You kept the Empire together by making sure that its very different peoples felt cared for by a benevolent overseer at home. (This faith in government as the essential caretaker led him later to support the creation of a national health service, “in order to ensure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.”)
Lord Randolph resigned in 1886, at his moment of maximum influence, apparently thinking that he could get a chunk of Parliament to follow him. He was wrong, and it is a sign of the changing mood that, where Gladstone resigned and returned as regularly as a soprano, Churchill’s resignation was a death sentence to his hopes. In the spring of 1894, he became mentally unstable. The old story that his sudden decline was due to progressive syphilis now seems untrue—he is thought to have had a brain tumor—but the son must surely have suspected that his father died from venereal disease.
Winston recalled only a few intimate conversations with his father, and one of these, though couched as an apology, stayed with him: “Do remember things do not always go right with me. My every action is misjudged and every word distorted. . . . So make some allowances.” Winston’s own life had, up until the summer of 1940, the same shape of overreach and frustrated hopes. Something subtler came to him as a legacy, though. Having his father’s work to finish, he also belonged emotionally with him in the nineteenth century, in a world of giants of the grand gesture, like Disraeli and Gladstone, who had the self-confidence to let the slightly loony inner man shine through the public mask.
After attending Sandhurst, in the eighteen-nineties, Churchill set out to make a reputation as an imperial warrior. He went adventuring, in South Africa and elsewhere, in a very “Ripping Yarns” spirit, and wrote very “Ripping Yarns” journalism about it. “The British army had never fired on white troops since the Crimea, and now that the world was growing so sensible and pacific—and so democratic too—the great days were over,” he wrote of this period in his life. “Luckily, however, there were still savages and barbarous peoples. There were Zulus and Afghans, also the Dervishes of the Soudan. Some of these might, if they were well-disposed, ‘put up a show.’ ”
He entered politics in 1902, on the strength of his imperial adventures and his family name. If no man is a hero to his valet, every man can be best judged by his personal assistant, and Winston’s longest-serving private secretary, from the time he was elected to Parliament, was the remarkable and ever-admiring man of letters Edward Marsh. It was Marsh who recorded Churchill, on a visit to a poor neighborhood in Manchester, saying, with his odd and signature mixture of real empathy and inherited condescension, “Fancy living in one of these streets—never seeing anything beautiful—never eating anything savoury—never saying anything clever! ”
Churchill earned his way forward by means of his vibrant skills as a debater and a phrasemaker. (“If you want to make a true picture in your mind of a battle between great modern ironclad ships,” he said in Parliament, “you must not think of it as if it were two men in armour striking at each other with heavy swords. It is more like a battle between two egg-shells striking each other with hammers.”) As First Lord of the Admiralty at the start of the Great War, he believed that the slugging match on the Western Front showed a lack of imagination, and his pet project became the doomed invasion of the hinterland of the Turkish Empire, summed up in the name Gallipoli. The idea was to make an amphibious assault on the Gallipoli peninsula, on the European side of Turkey, and, though one official rationale was to open a route to Russia, then an ally, Churchill plainly saw it as a coup de théâtre that would take Constantinople, break the logjam of the war, and astonish the world—a brave imperial coup, another Burma at a still bigger moment.
On the night, the ill-prepared British and Allied troops met grimly resistant Turkish troops, got bogged down and bloodied, and had to be withdrawn. It is an article of faith in Australia and New Zealand that their troops were used by Churchill as cannon fodder, just as it is in Canada that the Canadians were taken by the Brits to serve a similar role at Dieppe, nearly three decades later. This seems on the whole unfair—the incompetent mass destruction of helpless infantrymen was a déformation professionelle of the entire British leadership, playing no favorites. Yet it burned into Churchill’s reputation the idea that he was indifferent to the welfare of the ordinary soldier, and that his theatrical instincts were a mortal danger to privates and political parties alike.
Those who considered him an eccentric rider of hobbyhorses were confirmed in their view when, in the early nineteen-thirties, he routinely denounced Gandhi and Indian nationalism, breaking with the Conservative Party over it. “A seditious Middle Temple lawyer now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East” was among the milder things he said. One of the reasons that well-intentioned people didn’t take seriously what he soon was saying about Hitler was that he had recently been saying the same kind of thing about Gandhi.
Only when Hitler came to power, in 1933, did Churchill’s great moment begin. Magnanimity in victory was a core principle for Churchill, and he had been generous about Hitler in the beginning, recognizing that a defeated people need a defiant leader. But he soon caught on: “In the German view, which Herr Hitler shares, a peaceful Germany and Austria were fallen upon in 1914 by a gang of wicked designing nations, headed by Belgium and Serbia, and would have defended herself successfully if only she had not been stabbed in the back by the Jews. Against such opinions it is vain to argue.” People sometimes say that Churchill was quick to spot what Hitler was about because he was a student of history. But everyone in England had a historical line on Hitler: he was a second Mussolini, three parts bluster to one part opportunism; he was, at worst, another Napoleon, with continental ambitions but hardly a monster. Churchill saw that he was a fierce nationalist who had found a way of resurrecting and winning the obedience of the great engine of recent European history, the German Army. “You must never underrate the power of the German machine,” he said, “this tremendous association of people who think about nothing but war.” And then Churchill understood in his bones that Hitler was an apocalyptic romantic, who genuinely wanted a war. Churchill had always been perfectly willing to negotiate with bad guys, even with people he thought of as terrorists: one of the high points of his political career was the agreement for Irish independence that, as Colonial Secretary in the Lloyd George government after the war, he arrived at with the I.R.A. leader Michael Collins, a man who, in Churchill’s mind, was simply a murderer. Churchill not only negotiated with Collins but came to admire his character and dash. Churchill’s point, in the thirties, was not that bad guys should never be placated but that Germans possessed by a big idea and a reformed military are extremely dangerous to their neighbors. For Churchill always thought in terms not of national interest but of a national character that could trump interest. The Germans “combine in the most deadly manner the qualities of the warrior and the slave,” he said firmly. “They do not value freedom themselves and the spectacle of it in others is hateful to them.” Or, as he put it more succinctly, “They are carnivorous sheep.” We do not think this way anymore. (Except during the World Cup, when we do.) As an intellectual exercise, defining Germans seems perilously close to defaming Jews. Churchill did not see it this way. Germans for him are disciplined, servile, and dangerous when their servility meets a character out of Wagner; Russians are sloppy, sentimental, and brutally effective in the long haul; the French are brilliant, gallant, but prone to quick collapses through an excess of imagination and blind, vindictive self-assertion—these are the clichés of European history, but they are Churchill’s touchstones. The Germans were trouble because they needed a nanny and they had got a nihilist. “This war would never have come,” he said, after it was under way, “unless, under American and modernising pressure, we had driven the Hapsburgs out of Austria and Hungary and the Hohenzollerns out of Germany. By making these vacuums we gave the opening for the Hitlerite monster to crawl out of its sewer on to the vacant thrones.”
This habit of thinking about peoples and their fate in collective historical cycles, however archaic it might seem, gave him special insight into Hitler, who, in a Black Mass distortion, pictured the world in the same way. Both Churchill and Hitler were nineteenth-century Romantics, who believed in race and nation—in the Volksgeist, the folk spirit—as the guiding principle of history, filtered through the destinies of great men. (It is startling to think that, even in the darkest depths of the Second World War, J. R. R. Tolkien was writing the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, which contains, with the weird applicability available only to poetry and myth, the essential notion that the good gray wizard can understand the evil magi precisely because he is just enough like them to grasp their minds and motives in ways that they cannot grasp his.) Of course, Churchill and Hitler were, in the most vital respects, opposites. Churchill was, as Lukacs insists, a patriot, imbued with a love of place and people, while Hitler was a nationalist, infuriated by a hatred of aliens and imaginary enemies. But Churchill knew where Hitler was insecure and where he was strong, and knew how to goad him, too. When war began at last, Churchill was ready. In September, 1939, he joined the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, but there was nothing automatic about his rise to the premiership. In May of 1940, Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, was open to negotiations with Hitler, by way of Mussolini, to see what terms were available, and he had the confidence of the Conservative Party, and of the British establishment, in a way that Churchill never would. “If we got to the point of discussing the terms of a general settlement, and found we could obtain terms which did not postulate the destruction of our independence, we should be foolish if we did not accept them,” Halifax said bluntly. Churchill grasped the sort of terms that would likely be on offer from the Germans: the same sort of terms offered to and accepted by Vichy France in June. He could even name those whom Hitler would surely have picked to be the Pétains and Lavals of England: the Fascist Oswald Mosley as Prime Minister; King Edward called home from abroad; and Lloyd George brought out of retirement. The list of internees already existed. The usual explanation for Churchill’s advancement is that Halifax, as a peer, would have had to lead the government from the House of Lords, an implausible situation. But Lukacs argues persuasively for the importance of Churchill’s genuine magnanimity to the defeated and ailing Neville Chamberlain—an ancient rivalry of fathers brought forward into a new generation and healed—which kept Chamberlain from opposing his old rival Churchill. And the Labour ministers who had been brought into the coalition in the War Cabinet were thoroughgoing anti-Hitlerians; Churchill ascended with the crucial support of the socialists.
So, with nothing else to be done, Churchill began to speak. He gave six major speeches, in Parliament or on the radio, in the next four and a half months, and much of his reputation rests on those. His admirers, including Isaiah Berlin, who wrote a study of Churchill’s diction soon after the war, point to his several stylistic sources: the suave ironies of Gibbon in “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” the portentous periods of Macaulay, Dr. Johnson’s Latinate constructions. Gibbon, in particular, is present everywhere—in the urge to balance every clause at the beginning of a sentence with a companion clause at the end, and in the paragraph play of slow build and snappy payoff—and not the least of modern ironies is that Gibbon’s style, invented for a book whose implicit point was that the entire thousand-plus-year adventure of “Christian civilization” had been a comedown from the pagan past, got invoked to save it.
Reading the speeches today, you see the power of the elevated, “artificial” rhetoric that offended the ear of avant-garde taste in the nineteen-twenties, when Churchill was mocked for old-fashioned pomposity; the critic Herbert Read criticized his stale images, violent metaphors, and melodramatic atmosphere. Churchill could sometimes achieve a monosyllabic simplicity that brings tears to the eyes with its force and defiance:
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind.
We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.
You ask, what is our policy? I will say it is to wage war by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us, to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.
You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word:
Victory.
Victory at all costs—Victory in spite of all terror—victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.
Even at such moments, though, the language is remarkably abstract and impersonal. There is more loft than lucidity. (“Victory at all costs”: but how, exactly?) “We shall fight” is also a fine slogan—and yet a slogan is what it is. Churchill’s greatest passages are exhortations before they are explanations, exercises in elemental morale building rather than in explanatory eloquence.
In the “We Shall Fight” speech of June 4th, the exhortation is grounded in a slow buildup of blankly reported fact that includes a report to the nation, sparing none of the gruesome details of a defeat: “Our losses in matériel are enormous. We have perhaps lost one-third of the men we lost in the opening days of the battle of 21st March, 1918, but we have lost nearly as many guns—nearly one thousand—and all our transport, all the armored vehicles that were with the Army in the north.” Even the repeated use of the verb “fight” obscures the real nature of the battle ahead. Fighting implies a fist cocked and a banner waved. But that wasn’t the task at hand. The task at hand was standing and dying in a bombing attack, or waiting to be burned alive on the ground, or just doing without. Fighting was the action, but not the act. It is not merely mischievous to point out that Churchill’s language in 1940 employs almost all the elements that Orwell, in his fetishized essay on politics and language, from later in the decade, condemns: Churchill’s rhetoric is dense with “dying metaphors” (“The light of history will shine on all your helmets” was his farewell to his War Cabinet), sentimental archaisms, and “pretentious diction.” “A monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime”—this was exactly the sort of grandiosity that Orwell deplored. Yet it works. Words make sense only in context, and sentences find meaning only in circumstances. Churchill ought to sound absurdly archaic—“Every morn brought forth a noble chance /And every chance brought forth a noble knight,” he says, quoting Tennyson in the middle of the June 4th speech. Instead, summoning up a bygone rhetoric, he places the day’s horrors in a nation’s history. The “monstrous tyranny” and the “lamentable catalogue” add to Churchill’s trumpet a ground bass of memory—the history of the rhetoric of his own people.
Compare a typical, often praised speech by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin:
Very little, if anything has been said today about one of the greatest difficulties which we find facing us in dealing with this question, and that is that fighting instinct which is part of human nature. I propose to say a few words about that first, with a view to explaining how, in my view, we have to attempt to eradicate it, or, at least, to combat it, so as to produce that will to peace without which all efforts by legislation, arbitration, rule or otherwise, must be vain. . . . We find it even among men whose political views can be classed as pacifist, and that is the reason why we have often found in history that men of pacifist views were advocating policies which must end, if carried to their logical conclusion, in war.
This has Orwellian virtues. It is lucid, clear, intelligent, and even subtle. It is also flat, fatuous, and commonplace, three things Churchill never is. Churchill was a cavalier statesman who could never survive roundhead strictures on ornament and theatrical excess in speaking. That’s why he could supply what everyone needed in 1940: a style that would mark emphatic ends (there is no good news), conventional ideas (we are an ancient nation), and old-fashioned emphasis (we will fight). Perhaps the style never suited the time. It suited the moment. The archaic poetic allusions in the June 4th speech—the reference to King Arthur’s knights, the echoes of Shakespeare and John of Gaunt’s oration on England—are there to say, “What’s to fear? We’ve been here before.” The images are stale, the metaphors are violent, the atmosphere is dramatic—and the moment justifies them all. (And, when the instant was past, the speaking stopped; Churchill’s important public oratory ceased even before the Battle of Britain was over.)
Churchill’s telepathic sense of Hitler also allowed him to grasp that shaking a rhetorical fist in his face might make the dictator act with self-destructive rage. Peter Fleming, Ian’s more gifted older brother, summed it up well in the decade after the war ended: It required no profound knowledge of the British character to realise that threats would strengthen rather than weaken their will to resist; but it did require more imagination than Hitler possessed to see what immense advantages might have been gained if in June 1940 he had turned his back on England instead of shaking his fist at her. Churchill, understanding that Hitler wanted not just to conquer but to be recognized by the British Empire he admired, knew that he could provoke in Hitler the rage of a spurned suitor. When, in late August, a German bomber hit London, perhaps by accident, Churchill shrewdly retaliated, though to no particular harm, against Berlin—but the insult to Hitler’s pride was so intense that he discarded the strategic plan to take out airfields and aircraft factories, and began the terror bombing of London, just to show them. This killed a lot of people, and let the R.A.F. regroup. The worst was over, and the war, though hardly won, would surely not be lost. “The forces that he has long been preparing he is now setting in motion, sooner than he intended,” Gandalf says of his enemy, Sauron, after he has panicked him into acting too soon. “Wise fool.” Wise fool, indeed. Churchill, asked once what year he would like to relive, answered, “1940, every time, every time.” It really was his finest hour. After that, the great speeches decline into a handful of brilliantly ironic remarks, and the battle-making became more dubious, to American eyes, anyway. Churchill’s controversial leadership in the rest of the war is the main subject of Max Hastings’s “Winston’s War: Churchill 1940-1945” (Knopf; $35) and of Richard Holmes’s “Churchill’s Bunker” (Yale; $27.50). On the whole, Hastings, whose father was a well-known British wartime correspondent, is more sympathetic to Churchill’s strategic outlook than most Americans were then or have been since. The central issue was simple: the Americans, from the time of their entry into the war, in 1941, wanted a decisive pitched land battle in which an Allied Army, designed to outnumber the Germans, would destroy them on a battlefield in Europe. Hastings repeatedly makes the grim point that the British Army was, throughout the war, largely exhausted and unhappy with its leadership (as it demonstrated by throwing for Labour when it had the chance), and that Churchill knew it. He didn’t want his soldiers or generals fighting big pitched battles, because he wasn’t sure they had it in them. Instead, why not descend through Norway, or rise up through Sicily, or charge up on a knife edge through the Balkans, the “soft underbelly of the Axis,” as Churchill called them? He always insisted that a brilliant stroke somewhere or other would produce a victory that he blanched to imagine in a pitched battle with the Wehrmacht. (Since Hitler had a similar love of the grand coup, he shared Churchill’s Norwegian fantasy, and stationed many troops there, to little point, throughout the war.) The Americans believed that such gambits, though they might produce front-page “victories,” would do little to advance the real task of destroying the German Army. Hastings ascribes Churchill’s military preferences to his temperament—“He wanted war, like life, to be fun”—but surely the mystic chords of national memory played as large a role. British military history between Waterloo and the Great War was mostly peripheral, in the sense that relatively few pitched battles and lots and lots of opportunistic skirmishes, raids, and bluffs had made an empire. On the other hand, the strategy that the Americans believed in rhymed and chimed with the strategies of Sherman and Grant: find the enemy, attack him as directly, and stupidly, as necessary, lose men, make the enemy lose more, and then try to do it again the next day. Neither army was eager to waste lives. But the American theory of keeping men alive meant not throwing them away in sideshows; the British, not inserting them in meat grinders.
There is also the reality that war-making, which ought to be the most brutally empirical of studies, is as likely to be caught up in theoretical moonshine as any department of English. Both Roosevelt and Churchill were convinced that sea power was decisive, even though, as Hitler had grasped, the combustion engine had made the old calculations moot. Churchill invested far too much emotion and money in special forces. And yet his fancies were not entirely foolish. He stubbornly supported the development of Hobart’s Funnies, weird military contraptions. These included swimming tanks that would float on inflatable canvas water wings as they were unleashed from the landing craft, and then make their way ashore. (Other specialized tanks were equipped with flails for mine clearing.) Some Americans dismissed this as another piece of pointless Churchillian cleverness. Yet the tanks’ presence helped explain why the British and Canadian advances on the morning of D Day went more smoothly than that of the Americans.
The other great question about Churchill involves his role at Yalta in 1945, the conference that divided Europe. Though it was anathematized as a betrayal by generations of Eastern Europeans, S. M. Plokhy’s new book, “Yalta: The Price of Peace” (Viking; $29.95), makes a persuasive case that, given the Russian troops already in Poland and elsewhere, there was really nothing else to be done, and that Churchill actually played a pitifully weak hand rather well—keeping Greece, for instance, out of the Russian orbit simply on a handshake. “Decades after the conference, with the benefit of hindsight, new archival findings, and tons of research, it is still very difficult to suggest any practical alternative to the course that they took,” Plokhy says of Churchill and F.D.R. There was a fine difference between Stalin and Satan, and Churchill grasped it. In Antony Beevor’s history of the Battle of Stalingrad, the brutality and waste of the Stalinist regime—prisoners left to die in the snow, political commissars ordering the execution of innocents, the dead of the great purges haunting the whole—is sickening. But the murderousness of the Nazi invaders—children killed en masse and buried in common graves—is satanic. It is the tragedy of modern existence that we have to make such distinctions. Yet that does not mean that such distinctions cannot be made, or that Churchill did not make them. His moral instincts were uncanny. In 1944, after the deportation of the Jews from Hungary, when the specifics of the extermination camps were still largely unknown, he wrote that the Nazis’ war on the Jews would turn out to be “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.”
In 1945, just as the war was ending, Churchill was ejected by the British people, in an overwhelming victory for Labour. David Kynaston’s “Austerity Britain: 1945-1951” (Walker; $45) tells the story of that defeat, and of the new Britain, largely indifferent to Churchill and his values, that emerged afterward. Yet there remains a central question: Why did the war exhaust the English economy while it energized the American one? Britain had worn itself out by fighting, spending its “treasure,” the story goes—but there is no fixed sum of treasure in a country apart from its productivity, and Britain was building planes, too. Though Britain had to borrow the money from us, we had to borrow it from ourselves in the form of bonds and deficits. Perhaps the question itself is misleading. Britain’s statist approach took as its fundamental goal not the expansion of a consumer economy but the provision of health, education, and housing to a population long denied it. In Kynaston, one finds stories of cold homes and rationed butter—but also heady stories of boys and girls emerging from generations of endurance into new landscapes of opportunity. What was felt as austerity by some was felt as possibility by many more. Certainly, in every working-class memoir one reads—in Harold Evans’s, in Keith Waterhouse’s—the period is described as a long history of endurance met by a sudden explosion of ambition. While people who had been at Mrs. Dalloway’s party before the war had a harder time buying the flowers and managing the servants, their sense of diminishment was the last thing that working-class boys evoke. Most American stories from the Depression are of interrupted good fortune: we lost the department store, the business, the farm, endured with F.D.R., and swelled again with Ike. The British stories tell of hanging on grimly through it all, just as we’d done as long as we could remember, until the war was over, and then our Alf got to go to university and Granny got false teeth from the National Health.
Yet in an odd way the Tory defeat in 1945 sealed Churchill’s historical place: there and then gone. He did do more. Barbara Leaming, in her new biography of the older Churchill, “Churchill Defiant: Fighting On, 1945-1955” (HarperCollins; $26.99), italicizes what Lukacs has already established: that, in the early fifties, Churchill was desperate to make a “supreme effort to bridge the gulf between the two worlds” and seek some kind of European understanding with Stalin and then with his successors. He was defeated by the rigid anti-Communist ideology of Eisenhower and, particularly, his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. “This fellow preaches like a Methodist Minister,” Churchill said of Dulles, in despair, “and his bloody text is always the same: That nothing but evil can come out of meeting with Malenkov”—the post-Stalin Russian leader. It was, it turns out, the iron-clad Churchill who wanted to talk peace, and pragmatic Ike who was caught in a narrow ideological blinder. What is Churchill’s true legacy? Surely not that one should stand foursquare on all occasions and at all moments against something called appeasement. “The word ‘appeasement’ is not popular, but appeasement has its place in all policy,” he said in 1950. “Make sure you put it in the right place. Appease the weak, defy the strong.” He argued that “appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace.” And he remarked on the painful irony: “When nations or individuals get strong they are often truculent and bullying, but when they are weak they become better-mannered. But this is the reverse of what is healthy and wise.” Churchill’s simplest aphorism, “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war,” was the essence of his position, as it was of any sane statesman raised in nineteenth-century balance-of-power politics. In the long history of the British Empire, there were endless people to make deals with and endless deals to be made, often with yesterday’s terrorist or last week’s enemy.
Churchill’s real legacy lies elsewhere. He is, with de Gaulle, the greatest instance in modern times of the romantic-conservative temperament in power. The curious thing is that this temperament can at moments be more practical than its liberal opposite, or than its pragmatic-conservative twin, since it rightly concedes the primacy of ideas and passions, rather than interests and practicalities, in men’s minds. Churchill was a student of history, but one whose reading allowed him to grasp when a new thing in history happened. What is most impressive about his legacy, perhaps, is that he is one of the rare charismatic moderns who seem to have never toyed with extra-parliamentary movements or anti-liberal ideals. During all the years, and despite all the difficulties—in decades when the idea of Parliament as a fraud and a folly, a slow-footed relic of a dying age, was a standard faith of intellectuals on left and right alike—he remained a creature of rules and traditions who happily kissed the Queen’s hand and accepted the people’s verdict without complaint. Throughout the war, as Hitler retreated into his many bunkers and Stalin stormed and even Roosevelt concentrated power more and more in his single hand, Churchill accepted votes of confidence, endured fatuous parliamentary criticism, and meekly left office after triumphing in the most improbable of victories. A romantic visionary in constitutional spectacles can often see things as they are. ♦
Seventy years ago this summer, in June of 1940, an aging British politician, who for the previous twenty years had seemed to his countrymen to be one of those entertaining, eccentric, essentially literary figures littering the margins of political life, got up to make a speech in the House of Commons. The British Expeditionary Forces had just been evacuated from France, fleeing a conquering German Army—evacuated successfully, but, as the speaker said, wars aren’t won that way—and Britain itself seemed sure to be invaded, and soon. Many of the most powerful people in his own party believed it was time to settle for the best deal you could get from the Germans. At that moment when all seemed lost, something was found, as Winston Churchill pronounced some of the most famous lines of the past century. “We shall go on to the end,” he said defiantly, in tones plummy and, on the surviving recordings, surprisingly thick-tongued. “We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” Churchill’s words did all that words can do in the world. They said what had to be done; they announced why it had to be done then; they inspired those who had to do it.
That fatal summer and those fateful words continue to resonate. Revisionism, the itch of historians to say something new about something already known, has nicked Churchill without really drawing blood. In American conservative circles, he is still El Cid with a cigar, hoisted up on his horse to confront the latest existential threat to Western civilization (though his admirers tend to censor out the champagne or cognac glass that this ferocious Francophile kept clamped there, too). In Britain, it’s a little different. Just as J.F.K. is adored abroad and admired at home—where by now he’s seen as half liberal martyr, half libertine satyr—Churchill in Britain is revered but quarantined, his reputation held to the five years of his wartime rule. The Labour grandees Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey treat Churchill in their memoirs as a historical figure deserving of affection and respect but not really part of the story of modern Britain. (Jenkins eventually wrote a life of him, and ended up surprised by his own high opinion.) The revisionism from Churchill’s own side is more marked; some on the British right even see him as the man who helped lose the Empire in a self-intoxicated excess of oratory that was the sort of thing only Americans would take seriously. It is typical of what his American fans can miss that a writer for the Wall Street Journal recently quoted Gore Vidal calling Evelyn Waugh a kind of prose Churchill, and thought this flattering to Waugh. In fact, Waugh disliked Churchill, prose and politics alike—his alter ego, Guy Crouchback, calls him “a professional politician, a master of sham-Augustan prose, a Zionist, an advocate of the popular front in Europe, an associate of the press-lords and of Lloyd George”—and his dry-eyed, limpid, every-pebble-in-its-place language was utterly remote from Churchill’s sonorous, neo-Latinate sentences, and meant to be so.
But book after book about Churchill still comes: in the past few years a life by the omnivorous biographer Paul Johnson, “Churchill” (Viking; $24.95); a complete collection of Churchill’s quotations, “Churchill by Himself ” (Public Affairs; $29.95); and new and more specialized studies of Churchill at war, Churchill at Yalta, and Churchill in the memory of his countrymen. All these supplement the standard biographies, which include Martin Gilbert’s official multivolume history, published in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Jenkins’s single-volume life, from 2001, and John Keegan’s crisp and authoritative life, from the year after. Meanwhile, the American historian John Lukacs’s decades’ worth of books about Churchill—slicing fine tranches of the crucial months and weeks and even days—remain the most insightful studies of Churchill’s psychology and political practice. Reading all these, one finds a Churchill who is a good deal more compelling than the eternal iron man. Goethe wrote that Hamlet was a man who was asked to do something that seemed impossible for that man to do. Churchill is a kind of Hamlet in reverse, a man who was called on, late in life, to do the one thing he was uniquely able to do, and did it.
Churchill’s life is so complex that he would have justified a biography or two had he died in 1931, when he was hit by a car on a New York street. The American connection was anything but incidental. He had an American mother, a loyal American audience, and, twice in his life, a determination to bring America into a war. (The editor Maxwell Perkins once said that he seemed to be “much more like an American than an Englishman.”) During a period when Britain was to the world what America is now, the No. 1 nation with a widely admired élan, Churchill always kept a friendly, steady eye on the oncoming American chariot.
At the same time, Churchill was never entirely trusted by the upper crust to which he belonged, and certainly never by its organized voice, the Conservative Party. To be born both at the top of the tree and out on a limb is an odd combination, and that double heritage accounts for a lot of what happened to him later. Some of this oddity he owed to his mother, the New York heiress Jennie Jerome. But he owed more to his father, Randolph, who had been a meteor across the sky in British politics in the eighteen-seventies and eighties.
Randolph came from an old family—Churchill could never get enough of his descent from the first Duke of Marlborough, who defeated French and Bavarian troops at the Battle of Blenheim—but he belonged to a new generation of British politicians. After the golden age of the gentleman-gladiator, the eighteen-sixties and seventies of Disraeli and Gladstone, came a time of professional politics played as a blood sport. Randolph Churchill and his close collaborator (and, later, competitor) Joseph Chamberlain, who made his fortune as an industrialist in Birmingham, represented a new brutality: both were ambitious, driven, and ruthless, with an imperial turn of mind that Winston absorbed as second nature. Randolph, as Secretary of State for India in a Tory government, presented Burma as a “New Year’s present” to the Queen. The imperialism of the older Churchill and Chamberlain appealed to tribal honor in military conquest, cutting right across class lines and limitations.
It may seem mysterious that jingoism should appeal so overwhelmingly to the working classes, easily trumping apparently obvious differences in interests between them and the economic imperialists. Why should conquering Burma be of significance to a Cockney? But imperialism is the cosmopolitanism of the people, the lever by which the unempowered come to believe that their acts have world-historical meaning. This understanding was the spine and bone of the younger Winston’s politics. In his mind, British modernization and progress—and throughout the first part of his career he was seen, above all, as a progressive—were always tied up with the cult and religion of Empire. For Churchill, imperialism and progressivism were parts of the same package. You kept the Empire together by making sure that its very different peoples felt cared for by a benevolent overseer at home. (This faith in government as the essential caretaker led him later to support the creation of a national health service, “in order to ensure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.”)
Lord Randolph resigned in 1886, at his moment of maximum influence, apparently thinking that he could get a chunk of Parliament to follow him. He was wrong, and it is a sign of the changing mood that, where Gladstone resigned and returned as regularly as a soprano, Churchill’s resignation was a death sentence to his hopes. In the spring of 1894, he became mentally unstable. The old story that his sudden decline was due to progressive syphilis now seems untrue—he is thought to have had a brain tumor—but the son must surely have suspected that his father died from venereal disease.
Winston recalled only a few intimate conversations with his father, and one of these, though couched as an apology, stayed with him: “Do remember things do not always go right with me. My every action is misjudged and every word distorted. . . . So make some allowances.” Winston’s own life had, up until the summer of 1940, the same shape of overreach and frustrated hopes. Something subtler came to him as a legacy, though. Having his father’s work to finish, he also belonged emotionally with him in the nineteenth century, in a world of giants of the grand gesture, like Disraeli and Gladstone, who had the self-confidence to let the slightly loony inner man shine through the public mask.
After attending Sandhurst, in the eighteen-nineties, Churchill set out to make a reputation as an imperial warrior. He went adventuring, in South Africa and elsewhere, in a very “Ripping Yarns” spirit, and wrote very “Ripping Yarns” journalism about it. “The British army had never fired on white troops since the Crimea, and now that the world was growing so sensible and pacific—and so democratic too—the great days were over,” he wrote of this period in his life. “Luckily, however, there were still savages and barbarous peoples. There were Zulus and Afghans, also the Dervishes of the Soudan. Some of these might, if they were well-disposed, ‘put up a show.’ ”
He entered politics in 1902, on the strength of his imperial adventures and his family name. If no man is a hero to his valet, every man can be best judged by his personal assistant, and Winston’s longest-serving private secretary, from the time he was elected to Parliament, was the remarkable and ever-admiring man of letters Edward Marsh. It was Marsh who recorded Churchill, on a visit to a poor neighborhood in Manchester, saying, with his odd and signature mixture of real empathy and inherited condescension, “Fancy living in one of these streets—never seeing anything beautiful—never eating anything savoury—never saying anything clever! ”
Churchill earned his way forward by means of his vibrant skills as a debater and a phrasemaker. (“If you want to make a true picture in your mind of a battle between great modern ironclad ships,” he said in Parliament, “you must not think of it as if it were two men in armour striking at each other with heavy swords. It is more like a battle between two egg-shells striking each other with hammers.”) As First Lord of the Admiralty at the start of the Great War, he believed that the slugging match on the Western Front showed a lack of imagination, and his pet project became the doomed invasion of the hinterland of the Turkish Empire, summed up in the name Gallipoli. The idea was to make an amphibious assault on the Gallipoli peninsula, on the European side of Turkey, and, though one official rationale was to open a route to Russia, then an ally, Churchill plainly saw it as a coup de théâtre that would take Constantinople, break the logjam of the war, and astonish the world—a brave imperial coup, another Burma at a still bigger moment.
On the night, the ill-prepared British and Allied troops met grimly resistant Turkish troops, got bogged down and bloodied, and had to be withdrawn. It is an article of faith in Australia and New Zealand that their troops were used by Churchill as cannon fodder, just as it is in Canada that the Canadians were taken by the Brits to serve a similar role at Dieppe, nearly three decades later. This seems on the whole unfair—the incompetent mass destruction of helpless infantrymen was a déformation professionelle of the entire British leadership, playing no favorites. Yet it burned into Churchill’s reputation the idea that he was indifferent to the welfare of the ordinary soldier, and that his theatrical instincts were a mortal danger to privates and political parties alike.
Those who considered him an eccentric rider of hobbyhorses were confirmed in their view when, in the early nineteen-thirties, he routinely denounced Gandhi and Indian nationalism, breaking with the Conservative Party over it. “A seditious Middle Temple lawyer now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East” was among the milder things he said. One of the reasons that well-intentioned people didn’t take seriously what he soon was saying about Hitler was that he had recently been saying the same kind of thing about Gandhi.
Only when Hitler came to power, in 1933, did Churchill’s great moment begin. Magnanimity in victory was a core principle for Churchill, and he had been generous about Hitler in the beginning, recognizing that a defeated people need a defiant leader. But he soon caught on: “In the German view, which Herr Hitler shares, a peaceful Germany and Austria were fallen upon in 1914 by a gang of wicked designing nations, headed by Belgium and Serbia, and would have defended herself successfully if only she had not been stabbed in the back by the Jews. Against such opinions it is vain to argue.” People sometimes say that Churchill was quick to spot what Hitler was about because he was a student of history. But everyone in England had a historical line on Hitler: he was a second Mussolini, three parts bluster to one part opportunism; he was, at worst, another Napoleon, with continental ambitions but hardly a monster. Churchill saw that he was a fierce nationalist who had found a way of resurrecting and winning the obedience of the great engine of recent European history, the German Army. “You must never underrate the power of the German machine,” he said, “this tremendous association of people who think about nothing but war.” And then Churchill understood in his bones that Hitler was an apocalyptic romantic, who genuinely wanted a war. Churchill had always been perfectly willing to negotiate with bad guys, even with people he thought of as terrorists: one of the high points of his political career was the agreement for Irish independence that, as Colonial Secretary in the Lloyd George government after the war, he arrived at with the I.R.A. leader Michael Collins, a man who, in Churchill’s mind, was simply a murderer. Churchill not only negotiated with Collins but came to admire his character and dash. Churchill’s point, in the thirties, was not that bad guys should never be placated but that Germans possessed by a big idea and a reformed military are extremely dangerous to their neighbors. For Churchill always thought in terms not of national interest but of a national character that could trump interest. The Germans “combine in the most deadly manner the qualities of the warrior and the slave,” he said firmly. “They do not value freedom themselves and the spectacle of it in others is hateful to them.” Or, as he put it more succinctly, “They are carnivorous sheep.” We do not think this way anymore. (Except during the World Cup, when we do.) As an intellectual exercise, defining Germans seems perilously close to defaming Jews. Churchill did not see it this way. Germans for him are disciplined, servile, and dangerous when their servility meets a character out of Wagner; Russians are sloppy, sentimental, and brutally effective in the long haul; the French are brilliant, gallant, but prone to quick collapses through an excess of imagination and blind, vindictive self-assertion—these are the clichés of European history, but they are Churchill’s touchstones. The Germans were trouble because they needed a nanny and they had got a nihilist. “This war would never have come,” he said, after it was under way, “unless, under American and modernising pressure, we had driven the Hapsburgs out of Austria and Hungary and the Hohenzollerns out of Germany. By making these vacuums we gave the opening for the Hitlerite monster to crawl out of its sewer on to the vacant thrones.”
This habit of thinking about peoples and their fate in collective historical cycles, however archaic it might seem, gave him special insight into Hitler, who, in a Black Mass distortion, pictured the world in the same way. Both Churchill and Hitler were nineteenth-century Romantics, who believed in race and nation—in the Volksgeist, the folk spirit—as the guiding principle of history, filtered through the destinies of great men. (It is startling to think that, even in the darkest depths of the Second World War, J. R. R. Tolkien was writing the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, which contains, with the weird applicability available only to poetry and myth, the essential notion that the good gray wizard can understand the evil magi precisely because he is just enough like them to grasp their minds and motives in ways that they cannot grasp his.) Of course, Churchill and Hitler were, in the most vital respects, opposites. Churchill was, as Lukacs insists, a patriot, imbued with a love of place and people, while Hitler was a nationalist, infuriated by a hatred of aliens and imaginary enemies. But Churchill knew where Hitler was insecure and where he was strong, and knew how to goad him, too. When war began at last, Churchill was ready. In September, 1939, he joined the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, but there was nothing automatic about his rise to the premiership. In May of 1940, Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, was open to negotiations with Hitler, by way of Mussolini, to see what terms were available, and he had the confidence of the Conservative Party, and of the British establishment, in a way that Churchill never would. “If we got to the point of discussing the terms of a general settlement, and found we could obtain terms which did not postulate the destruction of our independence, we should be foolish if we did not accept them,” Halifax said bluntly. Churchill grasped the sort of terms that would likely be on offer from the Germans: the same sort of terms offered to and accepted by Vichy France in June. He could even name those whom Hitler would surely have picked to be the Pétains and Lavals of England: the Fascist Oswald Mosley as Prime Minister; King Edward called home from abroad; and Lloyd George brought out of retirement. The list of internees already existed. The usual explanation for Churchill’s advancement is that Halifax, as a peer, would have had to lead the government from the House of Lords, an implausible situation. But Lukacs argues persuasively for the importance of Churchill’s genuine magnanimity to the defeated and ailing Neville Chamberlain—an ancient rivalry of fathers brought forward into a new generation and healed—which kept Chamberlain from opposing his old rival Churchill. And the Labour ministers who had been brought into the coalition in the War Cabinet were thoroughgoing anti-Hitlerians; Churchill ascended with the crucial support of the socialists.
So, with nothing else to be done, Churchill began to speak. He gave six major speeches, in Parliament or on the radio, in the next four and a half months, and much of his reputation rests on those. His admirers, including Isaiah Berlin, who wrote a study of Churchill’s diction soon after the war, point to his several stylistic sources: the suave ironies of Gibbon in “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” the portentous periods of Macaulay, Dr. Johnson’s Latinate constructions. Gibbon, in particular, is present everywhere—in the urge to balance every clause at the beginning of a sentence with a companion clause at the end, and in the paragraph play of slow build and snappy payoff—and not the least of modern ironies is that Gibbon’s style, invented for a book whose implicit point was that the entire thousand-plus-year adventure of “Christian civilization” had been a comedown from the pagan past, got invoked to save it.
Reading the speeches today, you see the power of the elevated, “artificial” rhetoric that offended the ear of avant-garde taste in the nineteen-twenties, when Churchill was mocked for old-fashioned pomposity; the critic Herbert Read criticized his stale images, violent metaphors, and melodramatic atmosphere. Churchill could sometimes achieve a monosyllabic simplicity that brings tears to the eyes with its force and defiance:
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind.
We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.
You ask, what is our policy? I will say it is to wage war by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us, to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.
You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word:
Victory.
Victory at all costs—Victory in spite of all terror—victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.
Even at such moments, though, the language is remarkably abstract and impersonal. There is more loft than lucidity. (“Victory at all costs”: but how, exactly?) “We shall fight” is also a fine slogan—and yet a slogan is what it is. Churchill’s greatest passages are exhortations before they are explanations, exercises in elemental morale building rather than in explanatory eloquence.
In the “We Shall Fight” speech of June 4th, the exhortation is grounded in a slow buildup of blankly reported fact that includes a report to the nation, sparing none of the gruesome details of a defeat: “Our losses in matériel are enormous. We have perhaps lost one-third of the men we lost in the opening days of the battle of 21st March, 1918, but we have lost nearly as many guns—nearly one thousand—and all our transport, all the armored vehicles that were with the Army in the north.” Even the repeated use of the verb “fight” obscures the real nature of the battle ahead. Fighting implies a fist cocked and a banner waved. But that wasn’t the task at hand. The task at hand was standing and dying in a bombing attack, or waiting to be burned alive on the ground, or just doing without. Fighting was the action, but not the act. It is not merely mischievous to point out that Churchill’s language in 1940 employs almost all the elements that Orwell, in his fetishized essay on politics and language, from later in the decade, condemns: Churchill’s rhetoric is dense with “dying metaphors” (“The light of history will shine on all your helmets” was his farewell to his War Cabinet), sentimental archaisms, and “pretentious diction.” “A monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime”—this was exactly the sort of grandiosity that Orwell deplored. Yet it works. Words make sense only in context, and sentences find meaning only in circumstances. Churchill ought to sound absurdly archaic—“Every morn brought forth a noble chance /And every chance brought forth a noble knight,” he says, quoting Tennyson in the middle of the June 4th speech. Instead, summoning up a bygone rhetoric, he places the day’s horrors in a nation’s history. The “monstrous tyranny” and the “lamentable catalogue” add to Churchill’s trumpet a ground bass of memory—the history of the rhetoric of his own people.
Compare a typical, often praised speech by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin:
Very little, if anything has been said today about one of the greatest difficulties which we find facing us in dealing with this question, and that is that fighting instinct which is part of human nature. I propose to say a few words about that first, with a view to explaining how, in my view, we have to attempt to eradicate it, or, at least, to combat it, so as to produce that will to peace without which all efforts by legislation, arbitration, rule or otherwise, must be vain. . . . We find it even among men whose political views can be classed as pacifist, and that is the reason why we have often found in history that men of pacifist views were advocating policies which must end, if carried to their logical conclusion, in war.
This has Orwellian virtues. It is lucid, clear, intelligent, and even subtle. It is also flat, fatuous, and commonplace, three things Churchill never is. Churchill was a cavalier statesman who could never survive roundhead strictures on ornament and theatrical excess in speaking. That’s why he could supply what everyone needed in 1940: a style that would mark emphatic ends (there is no good news), conventional ideas (we are an ancient nation), and old-fashioned emphasis (we will fight). Perhaps the style never suited the time. It suited the moment. The archaic poetic allusions in the June 4th speech—the reference to King Arthur’s knights, the echoes of Shakespeare and John of Gaunt’s oration on England—are there to say, “What’s to fear? We’ve been here before.” The images are stale, the metaphors are violent, the atmosphere is dramatic—and the moment justifies them all. (And, when the instant was past, the speaking stopped; Churchill’s important public oratory ceased even before the Battle of Britain was over.)
Churchill’s telepathic sense of Hitler also allowed him to grasp that shaking a rhetorical fist in his face might make the dictator act with self-destructive rage. Peter Fleming, Ian’s more gifted older brother, summed it up well in the decade after the war ended: It required no profound knowledge of the British character to realise that threats would strengthen rather than weaken their will to resist; but it did require more imagination than Hitler possessed to see what immense advantages might have been gained if in June 1940 he had turned his back on England instead of shaking his fist at her. Churchill, understanding that Hitler wanted not just to conquer but to be recognized by the British Empire he admired, knew that he could provoke in Hitler the rage of a spurned suitor. When, in late August, a German bomber hit London, perhaps by accident, Churchill shrewdly retaliated, though to no particular harm, against Berlin—but the insult to Hitler’s pride was so intense that he discarded the strategic plan to take out airfields and aircraft factories, and began the terror bombing of London, just to show them. This killed a lot of people, and let the R.A.F. regroup. The worst was over, and the war, though hardly won, would surely not be lost. “The forces that he has long been preparing he is now setting in motion, sooner than he intended,” Gandalf says of his enemy, Sauron, after he has panicked him into acting too soon. “Wise fool.” Wise fool, indeed. Churchill, asked once what year he would like to relive, answered, “1940, every time, every time.” It really was his finest hour. After that, the great speeches decline into a handful of brilliantly ironic remarks, and the battle-making became more dubious, to American eyes, anyway. Churchill’s controversial leadership in the rest of the war is the main subject of Max Hastings’s “Winston’s War: Churchill 1940-1945” (Knopf; $35) and of Richard Holmes’s “Churchill’s Bunker” (Yale; $27.50). On the whole, Hastings, whose father was a well-known British wartime correspondent, is more sympathetic to Churchill’s strategic outlook than most Americans were then or have been since. The central issue was simple: the Americans, from the time of their entry into the war, in 1941, wanted a decisive pitched land battle in which an Allied Army, designed to outnumber the Germans, would destroy them on a battlefield in Europe. Hastings repeatedly makes the grim point that the British Army was, throughout the war, largely exhausted and unhappy with its leadership (as it demonstrated by throwing for Labour when it had the chance), and that Churchill knew it. He didn’t want his soldiers or generals fighting big pitched battles, because he wasn’t sure they had it in them. Instead, why not descend through Norway, or rise up through Sicily, or charge up on a knife edge through the Balkans, the “soft underbelly of the Axis,” as Churchill called them? He always insisted that a brilliant stroke somewhere or other would produce a victory that he blanched to imagine in a pitched battle with the Wehrmacht. (Since Hitler had a similar love of the grand coup, he shared Churchill’s Norwegian fantasy, and stationed many troops there, to little point, throughout the war.) The Americans believed that such gambits, though they might produce front-page “victories,” would do little to advance the real task of destroying the German Army. Hastings ascribes Churchill’s military preferences to his temperament—“He wanted war, like life, to be fun”—but surely the mystic chords of national memory played as large a role. British military history between Waterloo and the Great War was mostly peripheral, in the sense that relatively few pitched battles and lots and lots of opportunistic skirmishes, raids, and bluffs had made an empire. On the other hand, the strategy that the Americans believed in rhymed and chimed with the strategies of Sherman and Grant: find the enemy, attack him as directly, and stupidly, as necessary, lose men, make the enemy lose more, and then try to do it again the next day. Neither army was eager to waste lives. But the American theory of keeping men alive meant not throwing them away in sideshows; the British, not inserting them in meat grinders.
There is also the reality that war-making, which ought to be the most brutally empirical of studies, is as likely to be caught up in theoretical moonshine as any department of English. Both Roosevelt and Churchill were convinced that sea power was decisive, even though, as Hitler had grasped, the combustion engine had made the old calculations moot. Churchill invested far too much emotion and money in special forces. And yet his fancies were not entirely foolish. He stubbornly supported the development of Hobart’s Funnies, weird military contraptions. These included swimming tanks that would float on inflatable canvas water wings as they were unleashed from the landing craft, and then make their way ashore. (Other specialized tanks were equipped with flails for mine clearing.) Some Americans dismissed this as another piece of pointless Churchillian cleverness. Yet the tanks’ presence helped explain why the British and Canadian advances on the morning of D Day went more smoothly than that of the Americans.
The other great question about Churchill involves his role at Yalta in 1945, the conference that divided Europe. Though it was anathematized as a betrayal by generations of Eastern Europeans, S. M. Plokhy’s new book, “Yalta: The Price of Peace” (Viking; $29.95), makes a persuasive case that, given the Russian troops already in Poland and elsewhere, there was really nothing else to be done, and that Churchill actually played a pitifully weak hand rather well—keeping Greece, for instance, out of the Russian orbit simply on a handshake. “Decades after the conference, with the benefit of hindsight, new archival findings, and tons of research, it is still very difficult to suggest any practical alternative to the course that they took,” Plokhy says of Churchill and F.D.R. There was a fine difference between Stalin and Satan, and Churchill grasped it. In Antony Beevor’s history of the Battle of Stalingrad, the brutality and waste of the Stalinist regime—prisoners left to die in the snow, political commissars ordering the execution of innocents, the dead of the great purges haunting the whole—is sickening. But the murderousness of the Nazi invaders—children killed en masse and buried in common graves—is satanic. It is the tragedy of modern existence that we have to make such distinctions. Yet that does not mean that such distinctions cannot be made, or that Churchill did not make them. His moral instincts were uncanny. In 1944, after the deportation of the Jews from Hungary, when the specifics of the extermination camps were still largely unknown, he wrote that the Nazis’ war on the Jews would turn out to be “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.”
In 1945, just as the war was ending, Churchill was ejected by the British people, in an overwhelming victory for Labour. David Kynaston’s “Austerity Britain: 1945-1951” (Walker; $45) tells the story of that defeat, and of the new Britain, largely indifferent to Churchill and his values, that emerged afterward. Yet there remains a central question: Why did the war exhaust the English economy while it energized the American one? Britain had worn itself out by fighting, spending its “treasure,” the story goes—but there is no fixed sum of treasure in a country apart from its productivity, and Britain was building planes, too. Though Britain had to borrow the money from us, we had to borrow it from ourselves in the form of bonds and deficits. Perhaps the question itself is misleading. Britain’s statist approach took as its fundamental goal not the expansion of a consumer economy but the provision of health, education, and housing to a population long denied it. In Kynaston, one finds stories of cold homes and rationed butter—but also heady stories of boys and girls emerging from generations of endurance into new landscapes of opportunity. What was felt as austerity by some was felt as possibility by many more. Certainly, in every working-class memoir one reads—in Harold Evans’s, in Keith Waterhouse’s—the period is described as a long history of endurance met by a sudden explosion of ambition. While people who had been at Mrs. Dalloway’s party before the war had a harder time buying the flowers and managing the servants, their sense of diminishment was the last thing that working-class boys evoke. Most American stories from the Depression are of interrupted good fortune: we lost the department store, the business, the farm, endured with F.D.R., and swelled again with Ike. The British stories tell of hanging on grimly through it all, just as we’d done as long as we could remember, until the war was over, and then our Alf got to go to university and Granny got false teeth from the National Health.
Yet in an odd way the Tory defeat in 1945 sealed Churchill’s historical place: there and then gone. He did do more. Barbara Leaming, in her new biography of the older Churchill, “Churchill Defiant: Fighting On, 1945-1955” (HarperCollins; $26.99), italicizes what Lukacs has already established: that, in the early fifties, Churchill was desperate to make a “supreme effort to bridge the gulf between the two worlds” and seek some kind of European understanding with Stalin and then with his successors. He was defeated by the rigid anti-Communist ideology of Eisenhower and, particularly, his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. “This fellow preaches like a Methodist Minister,” Churchill said of Dulles, in despair, “and his bloody text is always the same: That nothing but evil can come out of meeting with Malenkov”—the post-Stalin Russian leader. It was, it turns out, the iron-clad Churchill who wanted to talk peace, and pragmatic Ike who was caught in a narrow ideological blinder. What is Churchill’s true legacy? Surely not that one should stand foursquare on all occasions and at all moments against something called appeasement. “The word ‘appeasement’ is not popular, but appeasement has its place in all policy,” he said in 1950. “Make sure you put it in the right place. Appease the weak, defy the strong.” He argued that “appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace.” And he remarked on the painful irony: “When nations or individuals get strong they are often truculent and bullying, but when they are weak they become better-mannered. But this is the reverse of what is healthy and wise.” Churchill’s simplest aphorism, “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war,” was the essence of his position, as it was of any sane statesman raised in nineteenth-century balance-of-power politics. In the long history of the British Empire, there were endless people to make deals with and endless deals to be made, often with yesterday’s terrorist or last week’s enemy.
Churchill’s real legacy lies elsewhere. He is, with de Gaulle, the greatest instance in modern times of the romantic-conservative temperament in power. The curious thing is that this temperament can at moments be more practical than its liberal opposite, or than its pragmatic-conservative twin, since it rightly concedes the primacy of ideas and passions, rather than interests and practicalities, in men’s minds. Churchill was a student of history, but one whose reading allowed him to grasp when a new thing in history happened. What is most impressive about his legacy, perhaps, is that he is one of the rare charismatic moderns who seem to have never toyed with extra-parliamentary movements or anti-liberal ideals. During all the years, and despite all the difficulties—in decades when the idea of Parliament as a fraud and a folly, a slow-footed relic of a dying age, was a standard faith of intellectuals on left and right alike—he remained a creature of rules and traditions who happily kissed the Queen’s hand and accepted the people’s verdict without complaint. Throughout the war, as Hitler retreated into his many bunkers and Stalin stormed and even Roosevelt concentrated power more and more in his single hand, Churchill accepted votes of confidence, endured fatuous parliamentary criticism, and meekly left office after triumphing in the most improbable of victories. A romantic visionary in constitutional spectacles can often see things as they are. ♦
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
and you thought our governors race was close...
Apparentnly there is this crazy ass 5-way democratic primary for governor up in vermont, these are the latest numbers and no im not making this up, here are the numbers...
Precincts
(Dem) M. Dunne 21% 13,458
(Dem) D. Markowitz 24% 15,588
(Dem) D. Racine 25% 16,327
(Dem) P. Shumlin 25% 16,357
(Dem) S. Bartlett 5% 3,428
Total 228/260
Yeah 30 votes, ill update as things change
Precincts
(Dem) M. Dunne 21% 13,458
(Dem) D. Markowitz 24% 15,588
(Dem) D. Racine 25% 16,327
(Dem) P. Shumlin 25% 16,357
(Dem) S. Bartlett 5% 3,428
Total 228/260
Yeah 30 votes, ill update as things change
Monday, August 23, 2010
What do you call a conservative beating a liberal in a debate?
Simple, a racist. Listen to this crazy ass logic done by someone on a lefty blog named Alec Timmerman...
It goes like this: You say something completely and obviously racist, even if you aren't a racist-->We call you on the racist thing you said--> you refuse to examine your racist statements and make the lame excuse that the left will just call everything you said racist.
Obama may have done a lot of things you don't like. That is great to discuss. However, NOTHING he has done is unprecendented. Nothing he has done is socialist or communist or traitorous. The only unprecedented thing Obama has done as a President is be black. You say a lot of racist things Ben, even though you may not be a racist yourself.
First off I, to my knowledge, have not said anything racist about Obama unless you consider saying he sucks is somehow racist. Obama has done the stimulus package and healthcare "reform" those are pretty unprecedented things Alec. I want to know about the "completely and obviously racist" statements I've made. Behold the perfect example of liberal logic (or lackthereof). Go ahead and search my blog and my comments, I challenge you. You have made a serious allegation with little to no factual basis.
It goes like this: You say something completely and obviously racist, even if you aren't a racist-->We call you on the racist thing you said--> you refuse to examine your racist statements and make the lame excuse that the left will just call everything you said racist.
Obama may have done a lot of things you don't like. That is great to discuss. However, NOTHING he has done is unprecendented. Nothing he has done is socialist or communist or traitorous. The only unprecedented thing Obama has done as a President is be black. You say a lot of racist things Ben, even though you may not be a racist yourself.
First off I, to my knowledge, have not said anything racist about Obama unless you consider saying he sucks is somehow racist. Obama has done the stimulus package and healthcare "reform" those are pretty unprecedented things Alec. I want to know about the "completely and obviously racist" statements I've made. Behold the perfect example of liberal logic (or lackthereof). Go ahead and search my blog and my comments, I challenge you. You have made a serious allegation with little to no factual basis.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
You know you are unpopular when...
A sitting congresswoman can only get one, count em, one supporter to show up for a parade and your opponent has this...
To all the doubters out there, Teresa CAN pull this off. I'm not saying that just because I intern for her but because she is smart, articulate, and will run circles around Betty in a debate.
To all the doubters out there, Teresa CAN pull this off. I'm not saying that just because I intern for her but because she is smart, articulate, and will run circles around Betty in a debate.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Mark Dayton, wuss...
I remember that back when Emmer did his 3-day bus tour around the state, finishing at his new HQ he casually pointed out his DFL tracker. We all laughed. Mark Dayton on the other hand can't take it, maybe it's because he knows sooner or later he's bound to say something stupid in public and have it caught by cameras. Mark my words (haha unintentional pun), he will have a "Macacca" moment very soon.
DFL gubernatorial hopeful Mark Dayton said Monday that GOP operatives harassed him at an outdoors expo over the weekend and prevented him from talking to Minnesota voters.
By following him at close range with inexpensive Flip cameras, Dayton said the video trackers "made it impossible for me to conduct normal campaign activities."
Republicans say that the staffers they hired to track and record Dayton were polite and that Dayton overreacted to a time-worn tactic that political parties use to keep tabs on rivals.
"When you interfere with the ability of Minnesotans to walk up to another candidate and have a civil conversation, you have gone too far," Dayton wrote in a letter to state GOP chairman Tony Sutton. "It is intentional harassment, disruption of our campaign activity and intimidation of Minnesota voters."
Dayton called on all three parties to stop using so-called candidate trackers except at public events like candidate forums and debates. He said that trackers should clearly identify which party or candidate they work for.
GOP spokesman Mark Drake said that Republican party officials won't change their use of trackers.
"I am sure Mark Dayton would like to hide from the voters for the next three months, but that's just not going to happen," Drake said. "This isn't 1982. Tracking is a routine part of politics now. ... I've never seen this sort of bizarre, weird, erratic reaction."
DFL gubernatorial hopeful Mark Dayton said Monday that GOP operatives harassed him at an outdoors expo over the weekend and prevented him from talking to Minnesota voters.
By following him at close range with inexpensive Flip cameras, Dayton said the video trackers "made it impossible for me to conduct normal campaign activities."
Republicans say that the staffers they hired to track and record Dayton were polite and that Dayton overreacted to a time-worn tactic that political parties use to keep tabs on rivals.
"When you interfere with the ability of Minnesotans to walk up to another candidate and have a civil conversation, you have gone too far," Dayton wrote in a letter to state GOP chairman Tony Sutton. "It is intentional harassment, disruption of our campaign activity and intimidation of Minnesota voters."
Dayton called on all three parties to stop using so-called candidate trackers except at public events like candidate forums and debates. He said that trackers should clearly identify which party or candidate they work for.
GOP spokesman Mark Drake said that Republican party officials won't change their use of trackers.
"I am sure Mark Dayton would like to hide from the voters for the next three months, but that's just not going to happen," Drake said. "This isn't 1982. Tracking is a routine part of politics now. ... I've never seen this sort of bizarre, weird, erratic reaction."
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Republican take over of Senate? It's possible
Well I just got thsi from Rasmussen Reports and this is my lazy post. No post tomorrow probably since its my bday.
New polling from Pennsylvania shifts that state’s Senate race from Toss-Up to Leans Republican in the Rasmussen Reports 2010 Balance of Power. To find out how Rasmussen Reports determines its Balance of Power rankings, click here.
Other polling released today finds that Ohio's Senate race has also shifted from Toss-Up to Leans Republican.
Also in recent polling, the first post-primary survey in Connecticut moves the state's senate race from Solid Democratic to Leans Democratic.
With three months to go, Rasmussen Reports polling shows that Republicans are poised to pick up Democratic-held Senate seats in three states— Arkansas, Indiana and North Dakota. One other is leaning that way--Delaware. Arkansas' Blanche Lincoln is the only incumbent senator currently projected to lose a seat. The others are open-seat races following retirements by Democratic incumbents.
At the moment, no Republican-held seats appear headed for the Democratic column.
Currently, there are four states in the Toss-Up category. Outside of the Toss-Ups, projections indicate that Democrats can probably count on having 51 Senate seats after Election Day, while Republicans will hold 45.
Three of the four Toss-up states are currently Democratic seats, while one is held by the GOP.
Among the three Democratic seats in the Toss-Up category, two are open seat races (Colorado and Illinois). The Democratic incumbent in the Toss-Up category is Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.
The Republican Toss-Up is found in Florida, where Republican Marco Rubio is essentially even with Independent Charlie Crist.
The state results and overall projections will be updated whenever new polling data justifies a change.
In the table below, the states marked in red currently have a Republican senator. Those in blue currently have a Democratic senator.
There are two independents in the Senate today, and Charlie Crist is running as an independent candidate in Florida. For purposes of the Balance of Power projections, all three are counted as Democrats.
New polling from Pennsylvania shifts that state’s Senate race from Toss-Up to Leans Republican in the Rasmussen Reports 2010 Balance of Power. To find out how Rasmussen Reports determines its Balance of Power rankings, click here.
Other polling released today finds that Ohio's Senate race has also shifted from Toss-Up to Leans Republican.
Also in recent polling, the first post-primary survey in Connecticut moves the state's senate race from Solid Democratic to Leans Democratic.
With three months to go, Rasmussen Reports polling shows that Republicans are poised to pick up Democratic-held Senate seats in three states— Arkansas, Indiana and North Dakota. One other is leaning that way--Delaware. Arkansas' Blanche Lincoln is the only incumbent senator currently projected to lose a seat. The others are open-seat races following retirements by Democratic incumbents.
At the moment, no Republican-held seats appear headed for the Democratic column.
Currently, there are four states in the Toss-Up category. Outside of the Toss-Ups, projections indicate that Democrats can probably count on having 51 Senate seats after Election Day, while Republicans will hold 45.
Three of the four Toss-up states are currently Democratic seats, while one is held by the GOP.
Among the three Democratic seats in the Toss-Up category, two are open seat races (Colorado and Illinois). The Democratic incumbent in the Toss-Up category is Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.
The Republican Toss-Up is found in Florida, where Republican Marco Rubio is essentially even with Independent Charlie Crist.
The state results and overall projections will be updated whenever new polling data justifies a change.
In the table below, the states marked in red currently have a Republican senator. Those in blue currently have a Democratic senator.
There are two independents in the Senate today, and Charlie Crist is running as an independent candidate in Florida. For purposes of the Balance of Power projections, all three are counted as Democrats.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Failbook/FML friday (sunday edition
this is a few days late but better late than never
]
Today, the gas station right in front of my apartment had people listening to loud music all night. I have this 3 hour test at 7:30am and didn't get any sleep. Worst of all, here in Brazil, calling the police won't help a thing. Instead of actually helping, they'll stop and join the party. FML
Today, I went to my Russian language class after days of being sick. We must speak in Russian. The professor asked how I felt. I said "like shit." I didn't know the word I used was the verb, not the noun. So I told an awesome prof and class I was "feeling like I was in the process of defacating." FML
Today, I was going at a big concert in my university. I paid around a hundred-twenty bucks for my ticket. Outside the venue, people were handing out the tickets. For free. FML
Today, during our championship field hockey game, my mouthguard fell into a mass of geese poop. The referee made me put it back in my mouth. FML
Today, I joined a dating website and spent all day filling out and improving my profile. My first match is a guy who relentlessly tried to date me for all 4 years of high school. Now he just has more reasons to tell me how much we're meant to be. We're a 97% match. FML
Today, I found out I'm sterile. My wife and I have three kids: 14, 11, and 4. FML
Today, I was preparing to perform with my marching band at a competition. Right before we went on, a tuba player friend of mine offered to help me stretch. He wound up snapping my bra. I'm a drum major, and had to conduct the entire show while my boobs were falling out. FML
Today, I woke up at 3 in the morning and realized I forgot a 30 page english essay that was due the next day. Knowing I still had 12 pages to research and write, I bolted. I worked until 12PM and was almost done when my dad came in and unplugged the computer because I "need to go outside more." FML
Today, I had a meeting with the CEO about a promising job with good pay and benefits. Upon meeting, we immediately recognized each other. He was someone I used to make fun of in school all the time. He responded by refusing to interview me and had security throw me out by force. Karma bites. FML
Today, I talked to a girl on the phone who had previously told me her last relationship "ended very badly." I said, "So let me guess, that jerk cheated on you?" She paused for a few moments and finally replied, "No, he died in a motorcycle accident." FML
Today, I learned to check inside the oven before you preheat it. Sometimes children hide their pet rabbit in there. FML
Today, I learned that if you're going to tell your mother you are gay, make sure she isn't holding a frying pan filled with hot grease. FML
Today, in the middle of the night, I was punched in the face by my frightened girlfriend who had just been awakened by her own fart. FML
Today, during an argument with my daughter she screamed "everyone hates you!" and stormed off. I flopped down on the couch in frustration where the cat jumped on my lap. "You love me, don't you?" I asked the cat. She crapped on my leg and went to my daughter's room. FML
Today, I broke up with my boyfriend. I found out he was seeing someone behind my back: my ex-boyfriend. FML
Today, I retook my ACT. I have been fighting a cold all week and have been very sneezy lately. Midway through the test, I got the urge to sneeze. Since it was very quiet and I didn't want to disturb the peace, I tried to hold my sneeze in. I ended up letting out a huge fart instead. FML
Today, I was teaching a woodshop class. We were using power tools, including drills, and pieces of pine wood. While helping a kid to hold a piece to practice drilling, he went too far forward with the drill. It went through my hand. FML
Today, in the middle of an exam, I was escorted out by the campus police due to suspicion of a concealed weapon. The officers couldn't stop laughing for 20 minutes when they found out the weapon was metal knitting needles. FML
Today, completely excited, I told my mom about this guy from high school, that I had really liked and who had found me on Facebook. He said he regretted not asking me out in high school and offered to fly me out to visit him. Her response? "Has he seen what you look like now?" FML
Today, I was locked inside my dorm room. Yeah, inside. How? Some of my floormates decided to stick pennies in the door frame, which jammed the handle. I was stuck inside my room and had to pee really bad. I couldn't call an RA to get me out either. Why? I am the RA. FML
Today, I found out that my sister who is 16 years older than me is actually my biological mother. She and my parents decided it was best that I didn't know who my real mother was, and to be raised by my grandparents as their child. I've always hated my sister. FML
Today, a buttmunch customer brought in $7 worth of pennies I had to count and roll. As I was putting them in the deposite box at the end of my shift, I fumbled and dropped the rolls. All but one broke, spilling their contents on the floor. FML
]
Today, the gas station right in front of my apartment had people listening to loud music all night. I have this 3 hour test at 7:30am and didn't get any sleep. Worst of all, here in Brazil, calling the police won't help a thing. Instead of actually helping, they'll stop and join the party. FML
Today, I went to my Russian language class after days of being sick. We must speak in Russian. The professor asked how I felt. I said "like shit." I didn't know the word I used was the verb, not the noun. So I told an awesome prof and class I was "feeling like I was in the process of defacating." FML
Today, I was going at a big concert in my university. I paid around a hundred-twenty bucks for my ticket. Outside the venue, people were handing out the tickets. For free. FML
Today, during our championship field hockey game, my mouthguard fell into a mass of geese poop. The referee made me put it back in my mouth. FML
Today, I joined a dating website and spent all day filling out and improving my profile. My first match is a guy who relentlessly tried to date me for all 4 years of high school. Now he just has more reasons to tell me how much we're meant to be. We're a 97% match. FML
Today, I found out I'm sterile. My wife and I have three kids: 14, 11, and 4. FML
Today, I was preparing to perform with my marching band at a competition. Right before we went on, a tuba player friend of mine offered to help me stretch. He wound up snapping my bra. I'm a drum major, and had to conduct the entire show while my boobs were falling out. FML
Today, I woke up at 3 in the morning and realized I forgot a 30 page english essay that was due the next day. Knowing I still had 12 pages to research and write, I bolted. I worked until 12PM and was almost done when my dad came in and unplugged the computer because I "need to go outside more." FML
Today, I had a meeting with the CEO about a promising job with good pay and benefits. Upon meeting, we immediately recognized each other. He was someone I used to make fun of in school all the time. He responded by refusing to interview me and had security throw me out by force. Karma bites. FML
Today, I talked to a girl on the phone who had previously told me her last relationship "ended very badly." I said, "So let me guess, that jerk cheated on you?" She paused for a few moments and finally replied, "No, he died in a motorcycle accident." FML
Today, I learned to check inside the oven before you preheat it. Sometimes children hide their pet rabbit in there. FML
Today, I learned that if you're going to tell your mother you are gay, make sure she isn't holding a frying pan filled with hot grease. FML
Today, in the middle of the night, I was punched in the face by my frightened girlfriend who had just been awakened by her own fart. FML
Today, during an argument with my daughter she screamed "everyone hates you!" and stormed off. I flopped down on the couch in frustration where the cat jumped on my lap. "You love me, don't you?" I asked the cat. She crapped on my leg and went to my daughter's room. FML
Today, I broke up with my boyfriend. I found out he was seeing someone behind my back: my ex-boyfriend. FML
Today, I retook my ACT. I have been fighting a cold all week and have been very sneezy lately. Midway through the test, I got the urge to sneeze. Since it was very quiet and I didn't want to disturb the peace, I tried to hold my sneeze in. I ended up letting out a huge fart instead. FML
Today, I was teaching a woodshop class. We were using power tools, including drills, and pieces of pine wood. While helping a kid to hold a piece to practice drilling, he went too far forward with the drill. It went through my hand. FML
Today, in the middle of an exam, I was escorted out by the campus police due to suspicion of a concealed weapon. The officers couldn't stop laughing for 20 minutes when they found out the weapon was metal knitting needles. FML
Today, completely excited, I told my mom about this guy from high school, that I had really liked and who had found me on Facebook. He said he regretted not asking me out in high school and offered to fly me out to visit him. Her response? "Has he seen what you look like now?" FML
Today, I was locked inside my dorm room. Yeah, inside. How? Some of my floormates decided to stick pennies in the door frame, which jammed the handle. I was stuck inside my room and had to pee really bad. I couldn't call an RA to get me out either. Why? I am the RA. FML
Today, I found out that my sister who is 16 years older than me is actually my biological mother. She and my parents decided it was best that I didn't know who my real mother was, and to be raised by my grandparents as their child. I've always hated my sister. FML
Today, a buttmunch customer brought in $7 worth of pennies I had to count and roll. As I was putting them in the deposite box at the end of my shift, I fumbled and dropped the rolls. All but one broke, spilling their contents on the floor. FML
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Its primary day bitchez!
The long awaited day has finally come. I am doing my second round of predicitions on this blog (first was back in November 2009) and to show I'm serious lets recap how I did the first time around... (only the governors races though, NY-23 had way too many variables, plus I kinda got it dead wrong)
This was my analysis of the NJ GOV race...
Breakdown
NJ Governor
10/27 Corzine +9, Christie +4,+3
10/28 Corzine +5,
10/29 Corzine +5, Christie +1, tie
10/30 Corzine +1, Christie +1,+7,+3
11/1 Christie+1
11/2 Christie+2,+6
So since 10/27 there have been 14 polls taken, 4 have Corzine leading by an average of 5%. 9 have Christie leading by an average of 3.3% and one tie. Right now it looks like it SHOULD be a virtual tossup thanks to Daggett siphoning off votes from Christie, unless he pulls a Scozzafava and drops out Christie is going to possibly have to sweat it out until the early morning hours Wednesday. My prediction
Christie 49%, Corzine 43%, Daggett 7% with the remaining going to fringe candidates. The PPP poll today is huge because it leans democratic in its idealolgy so Christie may have a 8-10% point lead which could cause some of his supporters to get overconfident and stay home on election night.
my prediction: Christie 49% Corzine 43% Daggett 7%
actual results: Christie 48.5% Corzine 44.9% Daggett 5.8%
Not too bad for an amatuer political scientist huh?
Now my take on the VA GOV race
Breakdown
VA Governor
10/27 McDonnell +17
10/28 McDonnell +18,+13
10/29 McDonnell +17,+14,+10
10/30 N/A
10/31 N/A
11/1 McDonnell +12
11/2 McDonnell +14
Pretty depressing for Deeds considering Obama actually won this state last year and has had a Democratic govenor for the last 8 years. Since 10/27 8 polls have been released all showing McDonnell with at least a double-digit lead (average 14.5% lead). "Bold" prediction by me, McDonnell wins by a minimum 60-40 due to strong GOP turnout and democratic indifference, leaving the fact that Deeds was probably the worst that the state dems could do for a nominee of the 3 contenders there were. This thing was over before it started. Even Obama essentially gave the middle finger to the Deeds camp. He never stood a shot.
ok granted this wasn't as hard but I did reach by saying McDonnell wins by at least 20 percentage points when no one had him up by that much
my prediction: McDonnell wins by a minimum 60-40
results: McDonnell 59% Deeds 41%
once again not too bad, and on election night McDonnell was up at 62-63 percent.
Ok enough with me patting myself on the back, to today folks. Here is a recap of polls compiled by RCP of the primary race: (and the margin of error, MOE, put in by me)
Polling Data
Poll Date Sample Dayton Kelliher Entenza Spread MOE
SurveyUSA 8/2 - 8/4 510 LV 43 27 22 Dayton +16 +/-4.4%
Star Tribune 7/26 - 7/29 RV 40 30 17 Dayton +10 +/-4.5%
SurveyUSA 6/14 - 6/16 500 LV 39 26 22 Dayton +13 +/-4.5%
Minn.Pub.Radio 5/13 - 5/16 A 38 28 6 Dayton +10 +/-n/a
Ok I'm throwing the MPR poll out because it's the oldest and Entenza has had a massive media blitz since then so that skews all the numbers
analysis factoring in MOE in parentheses
Survey USA #1- Dayton 39%(43.5-34.5%) Kelliher 26%(30.5%-21.5%) Entenza 22%(21.5%-12.5%) 87% total which means 13% undecided in this poll. So according to this poll its a virtual tossup between Dayton and Kelliher with Entenza really pulling up in the rear by a lot. It sampled 500 Likely Voters over 6/14 - 6/16 so this poll is nearly 2 months old but it shows that Dayton is the frontrunner.
Weight of poll scale 1-10: 5
Star Trib- Dayton 40% (44.5%-35.5%) Kelliher 30% (34.5%-25.5%) Entenza 17% (21.5%-12.5%) 87% total which means 13% undecided for this poll. Kelliher closed the gap even though Dayton gained a little. Interesting to note both polls have 13% undecided/uncommitted poll was taken 7/26 - 7/29 so its recent.
Weight of poll scale 1-10: 7
SurveyUSA- Dayton 43% (47.4%-39.6%) Kelliher 27% (31.4%-22.6%) Entenza 22% (26.4%-17.6%) 92% which means only 8% are uncommitted. This poll doesn't mean as much as you might think which is why I will do no further analysis of it.
There is going to be one major, independent variable, that determines the outcome of this primary today. The WEATHER! It is going to be miserably hot out today and humid so MAK relying on her ground game could cost her and Entenza relying on the pot-head youth vote is a bad idea. His supporters would rather smoke a bowl in their parents Air-Conditioned basement today than go out and vote for him. Dayton is the winner in this scenario because seniors are his base and they will vote, but maybe not today because of the weather. All 3 lose because of the weather, who loses the least? Dayton. Why? Because a lot of his senior support have already voted absentee. Dayton will win as a result of his supporters already casting a ballot (legally) before primary day. MAK is toast because she will rely on her Union ground game and the Teamsters aren't really known for their work ethic. Entenza is a wild-card though. I think he will finish second because of his debate performance. He might even cause the Dayton camp to really sweat it out tonight I think with MAK finishing a distant third. My prediction is this...
Dayton- 38%
Entenza- 36%
MAK- 26%
Now to see how accurate I am, I need to wait about another 14-15 hours. Of which I will probably be sleeping none...
This was my analysis of the NJ GOV race...
Breakdown
NJ Governor
10/27 Corzine +9, Christie +4,+3
10/28 Corzine +5,
10/29 Corzine +5, Christie +1, tie
10/30 Corzine +1, Christie +1,+7,+3
11/1 Christie+1
11/2 Christie+2,+6
So since 10/27 there have been 14 polls taken, 4 have Corzine leading by an average of 5%. 9 have Christie leading by an average of 3.3% and one tie. Right now it looks like it SHOULD be a virtual tossup thanks to Daggett siphoning off votes from Christie, unless he pulls a Scozzafava and drops out Christie is going to possibly have to sweat it out until the early morning hours Wednesday. My prediction
Christie 49%, Corzine 43%, Daggett 7% with the remaining going to fringe candidates. The PPP poll today is huge because it leans democratic in its idealolgy so Christie may have a 8-10% point lead which could cause some of his supporters to get overconfident and stay home on election night.
my prediction: Christie 49% Corzine 43% Daggett 7%
actual results: Christie 48.5% Corzine 44.9% Daggett 5.8%
Not too bad for an amatuer political scientist huh?
Now my take on the VA GOV race
Breakdown
VA Governor
10/27 McDonnell +17
10/28 McDonnell +18,+13
10/29 McDonnell +17,+14,+10
10/30 N/A
10/31 N/A
11/1 McDonnell +12
11/2 McDonnell +14
Pretty depressing for Deeds considering Obama actually won this state last year and has had a Democratic govenor for the last 8 years. Since 10/27 8 polls have been released all showing McDonnell with at least a double-digit lead (average 14.5% lead). "Bold" prediction by me, McDonnell wins by a minimum 60-40 due to strong GOP turnout and democratic indifference, leaving the fact that Deeds was probably the worst that the state dems could do for a nominee of the 3 contenders there were. This thing was over before it started. Even Obama essentially gave the middle finger to the Deeds camp. He never stood a shot.
ok granted this wasn't as hard but I did reach by saying McDonnell wins by at least 20 percentage points when no one had him up by that much
my prediction: McDonnell wins by a minimum 60-40
results: McDonnell 59% Deeds 41%
once again not too bad, and on election night McDonnell was up at 62-63 percent.
Ok enough with me patting myself on the back, to today folks. Here is a recap of polls compiled by RCP of the primary race: (and the margin of error, MOE, put in by me)
Polling Data
Poll Date Sample Dayton Kelliher Entenza Spread MOE
SurveyUSA 8/2 - 8/4 510 LV 43 27 22 Dayton +16 +/-4.4%
Star Tribune 7/26 - 7/29 RV 40 30 17 Dayton +10 +/-4.5%
SurveyUSA 6/14 - 6/16 500 LV 39 26 22 Dayton +13 +/-4.5%
Minn.Pub.Radio 5/13 - 5/16 A 38 28 6 Dayton +10 +/-n/a
Ok I'm throwing the MPR poll out because it's the oldest and Entenza has had a massive media blitz since then so that skews all the numbers
analysis factoring in MOE in parentheses
Survey USA #1- Dayton 39%(43.5-34.5%) Kelliher 26%(30.5%-21.5%) Entenza 22%(21.5%-12.5%) 87% total which means 13% undecided in this poll. So according to this poll its a virtual tossup between Dayton and Kelliher with Entenza really pulling up in the rear by a lot. It sampled 500 Likely Voters over 6/14 - 6/16 so this poll is nearly 2 months old but it shows that Dayton is the frontrunner.
Weight of poll scale 1-10: 5
Star Trib- Dayton 40% (44.5%-35.5%) Kelliher 30% (34.5%-25.5%) Entenza 17% (21.5%-12.5%) 87% total which means 13% undecided for this poll. Kelliher closed the gap even though Dayton gained a little. Interesting to note both polls have 13% undecided/uncommitted poll was taken 7/26 - 7/29 so its recent.
Weight of poll scale 1-10: 7
SurveyUSA- Dayton 43% (47.4%-39.6%) Kelliher 27% (31.4%-22.6%) Entenza 22% (26.4%-17.6%) 92% which means only 8% are uncommitted. This poll doesn't mean as much as you might think which is why I will do no further analysis of it.
There is going to be one major, independent variable, that determines the outcome of this primary today. The WEATHER! It is going to be miserably hot out today and humid so MAK relying on her ground game could cost her and Entenza relying on the pot-head youth vote is a bad idea. His supporters would rather smoke a bowl in their parents Air-Conditioned basement today than go out and vote for him. Dayton is the winner in this scenario because seniors are his base and they will vote, but maybe not today because of the weather. All 3 lose because of the weather, who loses the least? Dayton. Why? Because a lot of his senior support have already voted absentee. Dayton will win as a result of his supporters already casting a ballot (legally) before primary day. MAK is toast because she will rely on her Union ground game and the Teamsters aren't really known for their work ethic. Entenza is a wild-card though. I think he will finish second because of his debate performance. He might even cause the Dayton camp to really sweat it out tonight I think with MAK finishing a distant third. My prediction is this...
Dayton- 38%
Entenza- 36%
MAK- 26%
Now to see how accurate I am, I need to wait about another 14-15 hours. Of which I will probably be sleeping none...
Monday, August 09, 2010
Michelle Obama's trip, that no one in the MSM bothered to cover...
Can you imagine if Laura Bush, Barbara Bush, or Nancy Reagan did anything close to this? And if they did the media would be outraged (and I would be with them, honestly). But since Queen Michelle "Marie Antionette" Obama took her insanely lavish vacation its okay. Because she is black and the wife of a black President and could get away with murder if she so pleased. The article from the NY Post, done well by a liberal.
A foolish trip
Michelle Obama's PR disaster
The first lady's well-publicized, expensive vacation in southern Spain last week was a PR gift to her husband's opposition. After all, we're in the middle of a major recession, with many Americans suffering terribly. President Obama himself, in discussing American economic woes with George Stephanopolous in January, said, "Everybody's going to have to [sacrifice]. Everybody's going to have to have some skin in the game."
"Sacrifice for thee but not for me" is not a great campaign slogan. Plus, Obama's worst political weakness has been with white-working class voters, who've viewed him with suspicion at least since the 2008 primaries. Mrs. Obama's jaunt through an expensive resort town in a one-shouldered Jean Paul Gaultier top won't help on that front.
It also plays into a favorite right-wing attack: branding Democrats as elitists who can't relate to average Americans' struggles.
In 2004, Citizens United ran a 30-second ad that called the Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John Kerry, "another rich liberal elitist from Massachusetts who claims he's a man of the people." And no one will forget the famous wind-surfing ad.
In 2008, Obama himself fed it with his comment about voters' "clinging to guns and religion." Media elements used "Joe the Plumber" to "prove" that the candidate hated the middle class. Meanwhile, John McCain -- whose father and grandfather were Navy admirals -- managed to avoid this tarnish despite being married to an heiress worth more than $100 million. George W. Bush, the Ivy-educated scion of a wealthy political family, managed to come off as just plain folks -- despite once joking to rich supporters, "Here we have the haves and the have mores. Some call you the elite; I call you my base." Man of the people, indeed. Yet the facts don't matter much. Earlier this year, Sean Hannity branded Obama as an elitist for putting Dijon mustard ("a very special condiment") on his burger. (The monitors at Media Matters dubbed it "Dijon Derangement Syndrome.") The Drudge Report recently linked to a story about Michelle Obama's commissioning a London designer to make her a coat. Clearly, no issue is too trivial to support the "Obama doesn't care about you" meme. But if the right will try to use mustard as a political weapon, it's foolish to hand them a lavish foreign vacation, too. Yes, the initial reports of Michelle Obama's traveling with a 40-person posse were wrong; it's actually two friends and four of their daughters, a couple of aides and advance staff members. But at this point, it hardly matters; the damage has been done. Better to take a pointer from Laura Bush -- who, as first lady, continued her 15-year tradition of vacationing for a week with four girlfriends at Washington State's Olympic National Park, where they stayed in the Lake Crescent Lodge and went hiking. Some argue that Michelle should be able to travel wherever she wants if she's paying for it herself. This is naive. She is the first lady at a time when Americans are experiencing great economic pain. There are endless great locations here at home that she could put on the map with a visit -- American hotels and restaurants that would be grateful for the business generated by such a high-profile visitor. If it's a huge sacrifice for her, so be it. Sacrifice is actually a noble trait, last I checked. Plus, if she keeps this up, she will be able to vacation anywhere she wants in about two years.
And now everyone the comments...
It also plays into a favorite right-wing attack: branding Democrats as elitists who can't relate to average Americans' struggles.
Well, the reason rightwingers choose this "attack" is because it's true. Democrats talk the talk about the little guy, but they certainly don't walk the walk. Sure they throw working people a few bones, but this is done in the hopes people don't notice how much money Democrats are shoving into their pockets. Democrats are elitists and snobs at heart and it's the reason the Hollywood set favors them over Republicans. Michelle Obama shows her arrogance, because she thought she wouldn't be called on this trip, because she knows Democrats get a pass by the so-called "mainstream news media". She may have miscalculated this time.
Kristin still seems to be blinkered as to why this is so grating to so many Americans. This wasn't a one-off moment of indulgence, this is their MO. The Spanish fly-over was Michelle's SEVENTH summer vacation, from which she had to hurry home to prepare for her EIGHTH summer vacation. And, oh dear, will it conflict with those star-studded Wednesday night galas at the White House? Will her daily hectoring of Americans about what they eat interfere with her ice cream runs? Initially the galas, jaunts, and midnight French fry requests were billed as one-time indulgences, but it's become glaringly apparent that this is the norm at Chez Obama. Personally, I don't care if they want to fawn over Spain as it crashes and burns beneath the weight of it's bloated nanny state, and I don't care if they eat burgers until their arteries turn to glass -- I just don't want to pay for Michelle's delusions of grandeur or listen to either of them lecturing the rest of us on the evils of capitalism. Apparently, the high life is only contemptible if you earned the money to pay for it yourself. If you live like a cheap segment of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous on the backs of taxpayers struggling to make ends meet -- no problem!
And that's all for tonight folks, check back tomorrow for my DFL governors primary prediction before the exit polls are released.
A foolish trip
Michelle Obama's PR disaster
The first lady's well-publicized, expensive vacation in southern Spain last week was a PR gift to her husband's opposition. After all, we're in the middle of a major recession, with many Americans suffering terribly. President Obama himself, in discussing American economic woes with George Stephanopolous in January, said, "Everybody's going to have to [sacrifice]. Everybody's going to have to have some skin in the game."
"Sacrifice for thee but not for me" is not a great campaign slogan. Plus, Obama's worst political weakness has been with white-working class voters, who've viewed him with suspicion at least since the 2008 primaries. Mrs. Obama's jaunt through an expensive resort town in a one-shouldered Jean Paul Gaultier top won't help on that front.
It also plays into a favorite right-wing attack: branding Democrats as elitists who can't relate to average Americans' struggles.
In 2004, Citizens United ran a 30-second ad that called the Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John Kerry, "another rich liberal elitist from Massachusetts who claims he's a man of the people." And no one will forget the famous wind-surfing ad.
In 2008, Obama himself fed it with his comment about voters' "clinging to guns and religion." Media elements used "Joe the Plumber" to "prove" that the candidate hated the middle class. Meanwhile, John McCain -- whose father and grandfather were Navy admirals -- managed to avoid this tarnish despite being married to an heiress worth more than $100 million. George W. Bush, the Ivy-educated scion of a wealthy political family, managed to come off as just plain folks -- despite once joking to rich supporters, "Here we have the haves and the have mores. Some call you the elite; I call you my base." Man of the people, indeed. Yet the facts don't matter much. Earlier this year, Sean Hannity branded Obama as an elitist for putting Dijon mustard ("a very special condiment") on his burger. (The monitors at Media Matters dubbed it "Dijon Derangement Syndrome.") The Drudge Report recently linked to a story about Michelle Obama's commissioning a London designer to make her a coat. Clearly, no issue is too trivial to support the "Obama doesn't care about you" meme. But if the right will try to use mustard as a political weapon, it's foolish to hand them a lavish foreign vacation, too. Yes, the initial reports of Michelle Obama's traveling with a 40-person posse were wrong; it's actually two friends and four of their daughters, a couple of aides and advance staff members. But at this point, it hardly matters; the damage has been done. Better to take a pointer from Laura Bush -- who, as first lady, continued her 15-year tradition of vacationing for a week with four girlfriends at Washington State's Olympic National Park, where they stayed in the Lake Crescent Lodge and went hiking. Some argue that Michelle should be able to travel wherever she wants if she's paying for it herself. This is naive. She is the first lady at a time when Americans are experiencing great economic pain. There are endless great locations here at home that she could put on the map with a visit -- American hotels and restaurants that would be grateful for the business generated by such a high-profile visitor. If it's a huge sacrifice for her, so be it. Sacrifice is actually a noble trait, last I checked. Plus, if she keeps this up, she will be able to vacation anywhere she wants in about two years.
And now everyone the comments...
It also plays into a favorite right-wing attack: branding Democrats as elitists who can't relate to average Americans' struggles.
Well, the reason rightwingers choose this "attack" is because it's true. Democrats talk the talk about the little guy, but they certainly don't walk the walk. Sure they throw working people a few bones, but this is done in the hopes people don't notice how much money Democrats are shoving into their pockets. Democrats are elitists and snobs at heart and it's the reason the Hollywood set favors them over Republicans. Michelle Obama shows her arrogance, because she thought she wouldn't be called on this trip, because she knows Democrats get a pass by the so-called "mainstream news media". She may have miscalculated this time.
Kristin still seems to be blinkered as to why this is so grating to so many Americans. This wasn't a one-off moment of indulgence, this is their MO. The Spanish fly-over was Michelle's SEVENTH summer vacation, from which she had to hurry home to prepare for her EIGHTH summer vacation. And, oh dear, will it conflict with those star-studded Wednesday night galas at the White House? Will her daily hectoring of Americans about what they eat interfere with her ice cream runs? Initially the galas, jaunts, and midnight French fry requests were billed as one-time indulgences, but it's become glaringly apparent that this is the norm at Chez Obama. Personally, I don't care if they want to fawn over Spain as it crashes and burns beneath the weight of it's bloated nanny state, and I don't care if they eat burgers until their arteries turn to glass -- I just don't want to pay for Michelle's delusions of grandeur or listen to either of them lecturing the rest of us on the evils of capitalism. Apparently, the high life is only contemptible if you earned the money to pay for it yourself. If you live like a cheap segment of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous on the backs of taxpayers struggling to make ends meet -- no problem!
And that's all for tonight folks, check back tomorrow for my DFL governors primary prediction before the exit polls are released.
DFL pre-primary debate wrapup
ok I will be analyzing the hour-long debate MPR hosted last night (I think it can also be heard at midday today on afternoon edition, I wouldn't know though outside of this debate the amount of time I listen to NPR/MPR is basically zero) between the 3 DFL governor candidates; Mark Dayton, Matt Entenza, and Margaret Anderson-Kelliher. For the longest time I have thought that Dayton would be the easiest for Emmer to win against this fall but I am seriously rethinking that opinion. Tonight's debate will clear my opinion on this matter. I will also analyze the strength and weaknesses of each of the potential nominees, I will have a prediction either late Monday or early Tuesday on the outcome of the DFL governors primary. note: I got some of these quotes from MPR's twitter page of the event, to see a detailed live blog of the entire one hour debate go here)
(note I'm going to go through question by question, if you look at the question and it bores you, skip it, this is going to be one long ass post.)
Q: You talk to DFLers, they say they're happy with any of you. why should they pick you.
Dayton: I would be the candidate to raise the most revenues on the "richest Minnesotans."
Dayton: The difference is I'll raise the most revenue by making the richest pay more taxes. Right now taxes in Minnesota are deeply regressive. The richest Minnesotans making over $1 million are paying only 2/3s of the share everyone else is making.
Kelliher: "I don't quit, i don't back down." (A shot at Dayton and Entenza who left their posts in 2006)
Entenza: "We have to understand that we can't tax our way to greatness" ( a shot at Dayton).
Editorial: you can bet if Dayton wins the primary that quote is going to be in A LOT of Emmer and pro-Emmer ads this fall. Thanks for the soundbite Matt.
(notice the colors I have put in, this is just for me, dark blue is Dayton most liberal, Entenza is light blue the most moderate, and Kelliher is in the more liberal than Entenza, but slighly less than Dayton)
Q2: Dayton, why is your tax plan better than the other plans?
Dayton: The Democratic wing of the Democratic party pushes for progressive taxes. He said Entenza and Kelliher don't go far enough. Why shouldn't people making $240k a year not pay a single dollar more? It surprises me to be criticized by fellow Democrats for suggeting the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes. My two DFL friends are proposing plans that aren't progressive. Kelliher refers to a police offcer and nurse, police make about $51k. Nurses make about $73k. My tax plan wouldn't affect that couple. the flip side is I've asked my two friends here, "why do you think peopl emaking over $240k a year shouldn't pay more taxes"
Kelliher: Minnesotans have paid more in property taxes. We'd be higher than Hawaii. We need a balanced approach. There needs to be changes for how costs are accounted for. We didn't get here overnight, we got here over 12 years. To do it over two years is going to be a difficult thing. There will be cuts to nursing homes if we do it over two years. I think whenyou're talking about reality, you need to work in the art of the possible. Becoming the highest-tax state in the country is going to work.
Entenza: We're a state far away from other markets. High taxes will diminish business climate in state.
Editorial: Wow Entenza with another bitch slap at Dayton, go Matt!
Entenza: I have sympathy for what Mark is trying to do. Whentimes are difficult, those whoare high income must pay fair share. I would put rates back to what they were in 1998. No one can argue that the economy wasn't going well then. Let's face it: We're a state that is far away from a lot of markets, if we put our rate at a rate higher than nay other state, we're not going to succeed well.
Editorial: boy for all the dissing the DFL does of Emmer, it sounds like Matt is outright lifted parts of his "opinion" from Emmer speeches, maybe someone should look in to this?
First audience Q: What specific proposal will you put forward on K12?
(oh this is going to be GOOD)
]]Kelliher: "Educating our littlelest learners will be my first prioritiy. I'm going to work with the Legislature. What refreshing words are those. Funding that's fair, equitable and stable. I'm the only one who has a firm committment to make sure that happens. Reinvestment in higher education.
(translation: if the Teachers Union asks me to jump I ask how high. They own me.)
Entenza: "One of the best ways not to put people in jail is to let them know they're welcome in society. We have to be careful: If we promise we're going to fully fund, we have to say how we're going to do it. Under my plan, one of the first things we'll do is make a long-term investment.
(investment= high teacher pay, while making it nearly impossible for any real reform in the educational situation)
Dayton: Pawlenty vetoed early childhool education improvements. I volunteered with Head Start as a senior in college. Today, less than half of kids who could take part in Head Start do. In Minnesota, it's a third. I'll make sure there'll be state funding for all-day kindergarten. our budget is about value and priorities. GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty vetoed projects for ECFE in bonding bill. He said budget is about values - and will focus on ed.
(psst- Mark you aren't running against T-Paw, you might want to up that medication you are no doubt on. It's not 2006, its 2010)
Q from audience: Will you support Vikings stadium with public money?
Entenza: I voted against first three deal the Twins put forward because they wanted general fund money. At the end of the day, I was part of crafting a proposal that worked (tell that to the Hennpein county legislators who felt they got ganged up on). At the end of the day, th Vikins is an asset and building a stadium creates job and a major league envornment. Zygi Wilf is a millionaire because he spends other people's money.
Dayton: I don't support spending $970 million in taxpayer money and give to Vikes but will look at every option to fund Vikes.
Kelliher: We have to look at the issue seriously. (you think?) First, we must balance our budget. First, new school funding, health care, and after thatit's important to entertain this idea. I would not use any general fund tax dollars. Some form of a partnership. I was there when we did the Twins swtadium.
(Now the candidates go after each other. Praying for a damning quote from each one just to have our bases covered)
Dayton to Entenza: What replaces No Child Left Behind?
Entenza: It's been disastrous . We need a clearaing house for best practices. Entenza says he wants training program for new teachers. He also wants to promote public schools and "not beat them up."
Entenza to Kelliher: What taxes would you raise, what would you cut?
Kelliher: My budget will be a jobs budget etc. I don't think current school funding is working. We need to scrap it and come ...and I have a plan to fund schools equitably over the next six years. It's going to relieve property taxes by $600 million. I have a full balanced budget proposal on my Web site.
Entenza asks Kelliher what cuts would you make? Kelliher says she's focused on job creation. Didn't answer question
(Ok through the first half-hour Entenza is far and away winning this debate. I thought about voting for him on Tuesday, no more. This guy is a threat)
Kelliher to Dayton: I appreciate all of your service (the hammer's coming when a question starts like that), what do we say to the police officer marridd to the nurse who is going to pay more under your plan? How do you answer being the highest tax state in a time of recession?
(And we have our first smackdown folks, how will the Trust Fund Baby respond?)
Dayton: "It's simply not true, Margaret." (applause). The average cop makes 51k , the average nurse makes 73k. That's 124k. My plan starts with 150k . Thios couple is well below that. The tradeoff is if you don't make the richest Minensotans pay their fair share, if the CEO of United HealthCare is making much more and paying less taxes, then other people are going to suffer.
(NOTE TO EMMER CAMPAIGN, PLEASE PUT THIS QUOTE UP, HE JUST CHOKED ON HIS FOOT, and totally dodged the question)
(also, what if a cop makes 65k and a nurse makes 85k? They would be hit by his "taxing the rich" plan)
John from Brainerd (Kelliher supporter): Please be specific on how you will work with legislative branch.
Dayton: I learned from Rudy Perpich. any commissioner who's not at the legislature when the legislature is in session, is working at the wrong place. I'll work the same way I did in the U.S. Senate. Working both sides of the aisle, got funding for Beyond the Yellow Ribbon (hardly a partisan issue, there)
(Once again, the US Senate is NOTHING LIKE a state legislature working with a governor, you clearly failed Civics 101 at Blake and Harvard. Or Yale, I'm sorry I forgot which Ivy League elitest school you went to mr.common man)
Kelliher: As speaker I did some pretty big things, standing up to Gov. Pawlenty, including that transportation override. I was able to build a coalition (note: The coalition was 6 Republicans). You don't quit until the work is done. Transportation. Legacy Amenment. Being able to bring people together. When I earned the endorsement, the number of legislative supporters weren't just Democrats, but a number of Republicans and Independents.
(HAHAHAHAHAHAHA, oh Marge you kill me! Oh and I heard you didn't so much earn your endorsement as you wrestled it away from RT with your Union thugs)
Entenza: I nkow there's folks out there who want to stick with status quo, but it's not working. I will scrap No Child Left Behind. tha's the kind of leadership we need. In 2005, when we were in a govt. shutdown forced by Tim Pawlenty, I had to Republican legislators coming to me saying "we know you'rewilling to compromise," but the governor had his feet in cement. That's why I'm pleased to have Dave Jennings, former republican speaker of the house, support me.
(another reason to not vote for Matt, he's way too sane. Then again a schizo would probably seem sane standing next to Dayton and Kelliher)
Dan from Northfield (undecided): Wtih Tom Emmer's campaign imploding, Tom Horner looks like the person to beat. Why is your message better?
(Gee I wonder how that PLANT got in?! MPR for shame, Emmer's campaign isn't imploding, its reorganizing. Just because you wish it was imploding doesn't make it so)
Kelliher: It's a long time to november. I've taken on Tom Emmer. I know his tricks and I know his buttons. The DFLers were correct when they chose me to beat Emmer but they were also thinking about Tom horner. I'm the first DFL candidate who can attract independents and hold DFLers in our camp because of my collaborative style. I have a lot of experience with that.
(uh-huh, you got bullied by T-Paw despite being 4 votes short of a veto-proof house this last session. What were you major accomplishments? And don't say the transportation bill that got 6 RINO's to sign on with you, that was actually pretty shameful)
Entenza: Let me take you back to 2002, Wellstone's death, DFLers went into the miniority and almost lost control of the Senate. Pundits said the DFL was dead. A week later, I was elected to lead the Democrats
(It is true, too bad we couldn't have finished them off when they were on life support)
Dayton: I ran against a conservative Republican in a statewide election and I pointed out that a vote for an independent is a vote for the conservative candidate. He, has been involved in representing special interests. Do people want that, someone reprsenting the far right wing, or someone reprsenting Minnesotans.
(If you think you represent Minnesota Mark I have some great coastline property land I want to sell you, in Nevada)
Q from Eichten: Should the state have single payer health care?
(Only in a DFL debate could this still be debated, the vast majority of Americans, around 60%+ say no to this)
Entenza: No, the state can't afford single payer but I committed to getting everyone covered.
(What a weasel answer Matt)
Dayton: We need something different. I was in Luverne. A woman in her 50s said she's paying over 14k in health insurance, but have to pay the first 10k in health care because "these health care giants are reporting huge profits." That's why I favored a single payer program. I'll work for that here.
(boy talk about the gift that keeps on giving!)
Kelliher: Describes a woman who lost her health care and died. That's why I have passion about the issue. No one should die in Minnesota because they dont' have health care.
(shameful, but then again these are democrats)
Entenza asks Dayton: Should MN go to a clean energy economy?
Dayton: I agree
Kelliher Q to Entenza: Can state afford to become "No new taxes state to all new taxes state?" Entenza: that's a q for Dayton.
(Entenza made a funny, cute)
Entenza differs to Dayton. Dayton defends plan because state would go from 9th highest to 7th highest if enacted.
(sounds like they are ganging up on Dayton here. Question, if/when Dayton wins will all the Entenza-Kelliher people go over to Dayton? Somehow I don't think they will)
Dayton Q for Kelliher: Could you say why Rep. Emmer opposed Legacy Amendment? She said that's why DFLers picked her for endorsed
Kelliher said "you don't quit, you stay and do the job," which I think is a shot against Dayton shutting his office because of a terrorist threat and he didn't run for re-election. The debate has now reached the "candidates are talking code" stage. Very Minnesotan.
Q from audience: Why the DFL drought in gov's races in MN?
Dayton: I unabashadly run as a Democrat. Touts higher tax plan
(I think that's part of the problem Mark, in this environment saying your "unabashadly Democrat" and going to run as one, is like saying you are for clubbing baby seals)
Elizabeth from Golden Valley (undecided): How will you generate a thriving Minnesota. Where will new jobs come from?
Kelliher says she has a comprehensive jobs plan. touts track record of working with business
Entenza says state needs focus and "clean energy economy" should be that focus
Will you actively support the other candidate if you don't win: All 3 say yes
(I'll believe that when I see it, Seifert said he'd support Emmer in the general election and you haven't heard a peep from him since the convention back in early May)
Closing statements
Dayton: "More than any other candidate, I'll lead MN in a new direction."
Entenza: We need a gov who gets it, calls to scrap No Child Left Behind.
Kelliher: I am going to be that fearless person to fight for Minnesotans
Well there you have it folks here is my mini recap
Mark Dayton- Grade D+
He sucked big time in this debate and I think that he said some things that will be repeated this fall in ads. Assuming MAK or Entenza doesn't upset him on Tuesday of course.
MAK- Grade B
She did a good job of positioning herself inbetween the 'guys'. Less liberal and extreme than Dayton but still more liberal than Entenza.
Matt Entenza- A+
Ok this guy officially scares me. If he has an organized ground game he might be able to pull off a big primary upset and honestly he does scare me much more than Dayton. He seems like a likeable guy and could win people over. Plus I think he could hold his own with Emmer in a debate. Very concerning indeed. He took shots at both candidates and called MAK on her non-answer during this debate.
Summation: VOTE MARK DAYTON IN THE DFL PRIMARY REPUBLICANS! He is by far the easiest of the 3 to beat. Period, end of story, thats all folks...
(note I'm going to go through question by question, if you look at the question and it bores you, skip it, this is going to be one long ass post.)
Q: You talk to DFLers, they say they're happy with any of you. why should they pick you.
Dayton: I would be the candidate to raise the most revenues on the "richest Minnesotans."
Dayton: The difference is I'll raise the most revenue by making the richest pay more taxes. Right now taxes in Minnesota are deeply regressive. The richest Minnesotans making over $1 million are paying only 2/3s of the share everyone else is making.
Kelliher: "I don't quit, i don't back down." (A shot at Dayton and Entenza who left their posts in 2006)
Entenza: "We have to understand that we can't tax our way to greatness" ( a shot at Dayton).
Editorial: you can bet if Dayton wins the primary that quote is going to be in A LOT of Emmer and pro-Emmer ads this fall. Thanks for the soundbite Matt.
(notice the colors I have put in, this is just for me, dark blue is Dayton most liberal, Entenza is light blue the most moderate, and Kelliher is in the more liberal than Entenza, but slighly less than Dayton)
Q2: Dayton, why is your tax plan better than the other plans?
Dayton: The Democratic wing of the Democratic party pushes for progressive taxes. He said Entenza and Kelliher don't go far enough. Why shouldn't people making $240k a year not pay a single dollar more? It surprises me to be criticized by fellow Democrats for suggeting the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes. My two DFL friends are proposing plans that aren't progressive. Kelliher refers to a police offcer and nurse, police make about $51k. Nurses make about $73k. My tax plan wouldn't affect that couple. the flip side is I've asked my two friends here, "why do you think peopl emaking over $240k a year shouldn't pay more taxes"
Kelliher: Minnesotans have paid more in property taxes. We'd be higher than Hawaii. We need a balanced approach. There needs to be changes for how costs are accounted for. We didn't get here overnight, we got here over 12 years. To do it over two years is going to be a difficult thing. There will be cuts to nursing homes if we do it over two years. I think whenyou're talking about reality, you need to work in the art of the possible. Becoming the highest-tax state in the country is going to work.
Entenza: We're a state far away from other markets. High taxes will diminish business climate in state.
Editorial: Wow Entenza with another bitch slap at Dayton, go Matt!
Entenza: I have sympathy for what Mark is trying to do. Whentimes are difficult, those whoare high income must pay fair share. I would put rates back to what they were in 1998. No one can argue that the economy wasn't going well then. Let's face it: We're a state that is far away from a lot of markets, if we put our rate at a rate higher than nay other state, we're not going to succeed well.
Editorial: boy for all the dissing the DFL does of Emmer, it sounds like Matt is outright lifted parts of his "opinion" from Emmer speeches, maybe someone should look in to this?
First audience Q: What specific proposal will you put forward on K12?
(oh this is going to be GOOD)
]]Kelliher: "Educating our littlelest learners will be my first prioritiy. I'm going to work with the Legislature. What refreshing words are those. Funding that's fair, equitable and stable. I'm the only one who has a firm committment to make sure that happens. Reinvestment in higher education.
(translation: if the Teachers Union asks me to jump I ask how high. They own me.)
Entenza: "One of the best ways not to put people in jail is to let them know they're welcome in society. We have to be careful: If we promise we're going to fully fund, we have to say how we're going to do it. Under my plan, one of the first things we'll do is make a long-term investment.
(investment= high teacher pay, while making it nearly impossible for any real reform in the educational situation)
Dayton: Pawlenty vetoed early childhool education improvements. I volunteered with Head Start as a senior in college. Today, less than half of kids who could take part in Head Start do. In Minnesota, it's a third. I'll make sure there'll be state funding for all-day kindergarten. our budget is about value and priorities. GOP Gov. Tim Pawlenty vetoed projects for ECFE in bonding bill. He said budget is about values - and will focus on ed.
(psst- Mark you aren't running against T-Paw, you might want to up that medication you are no doubt on. It's not 2006, its 2010)
Q from audience: Will you support Vikings stadium with public money?
Entenza: I voted against first three deal the Twins put forward because they wanted general fund money. At the end of the day, I was part of crafting a proposal that worked (tell that to the Hennpein county legislators who felt they got ganged up on). At the end of the day, th Vikins is an asset and building a stadium creates job and a major league envornment. Zygi Wilf is a millionaire because he spends other people's money.
Dayton: I don't support spending $970 million in taxpayer money and give to Vikes but will look at every option to fund Vikes.
Kelliher: We have to look at the issue seriously. (you think?) First, we must balance our budget. First, new school funding, health care, and after thatit's important to entertain this idea. I would not use any general fund tax dollars. Some form of a partnership. I was there when we did the Twins swtadium.
(Now the candidates go after each other. Praying for a damning quote from each one just to have our bases covered)
Dayton to Entenza: What replaces No Child Left Behind?
Entenza: It's been disastrous . We need a clearaing house for best practices. Entenza says he wants training program for new teachers. He also wants to promote public schools and "not beat them up."
Entenza to Kelliher: What taxes would you raise, what would you cut?
Kelliher: My budget will be a jobs budget etc. I don't think current school funding is working. We need to scrap it and come ...and I have a plan to fund schools equitably over the next six years. It's going to relieve property taxes by $600 million. I have a full balanced budget proposal on my Web site.
Entenza asks Kelliher what cuts would you make? Kelliher says she's focused on job creation. Didn't answer question
(Ok through the first half-hour Entenza is far and away winning this debate. I thought about voting for him on Tuesday, no more. This guy is a threat)
Kelliher to Dayton: I appreciate all of your service (the hammer's coming when a question starts like that), what do we say to the police officer marridd to the nurse who is going to pay more under your plan? How do you answer being the highest tax state in a time of recession?
(And we have our first smackdown folks, how will the Trust Fund Baby respond?)
Dayton: "It's simply not true, Margaret." (applause). The average cop makes 51k , the average nurse makes 73k. That's 124k. My plan starts with 150k . Thios couple is well below that. The tradeoff is if you don't make the richest Minensotans pay their fair share, if the CEO of United HealthCare is making much more and paying less taxes, then other people are going to suffer.
(NOTE TO EMMER CAMPAIGN, PLEASE PUT THIS QUOTE UP, HE JUST CHOKED ON HIS FOOT, and totally dodged the question)
(also, what if a cop makes 65k and a nurse makes 85k? They would be hit by his "taxing the rich" plan)
John from Brainerd (Kelliher supporter): Please be specific on how you will work with legislative branch.
Dayton: I learned from Rudy Perpich. any commissioner who's not at the legislature when the legislature is in session, is working at the wrong place. I'll work the same way I did in the U.S. Senate. Working both sides of the aisle, got funding for Beyond the Yellow Ribbon (hardly a partisan issue, there)
(Once again, the US Senate is NOTHING LIKE a state legislature working with a governor, you clearly failed Civics 101 at Blake and Harvard. Or Yale, I'm sorry I forgot which Ivy League elitest school you went to mr.common man)
Kelliher: As speaker I did some pretty big things, standing up to Gov. Pawlenty, including that transportation override. I was able to build a coalition (note: The coalition was 6 Republicans). You don't quit until the work is done. Transportation. Legacy Amenment. Being able to bring people together. When I earned the endorsement, the number of legislative supporters weren't just Democrats, but a number of Republicans and Independents.
(HAHAHAHAHAHAHA, oh Marge you kill me! Oh and I heard you didn't so much earn your endorsement as you wrestled it away from RT with your Union thugs)
Entenza: I nkow there's folks out there who want to stick with status quo, but it's not working. I will scrap No Child Left Behind. tha's the kind of leadership we need. In 2005, when we were in a govt. shutdown forced by Tim Pawlenty, I had to Republican legislators coming to me saying "we know you'rewilling to compromise," but the governor had his feet in cement. That's why I'm pleased to have Dave Jennings, former republican speaker of the house, support me.
(another reason to not vote for Matt, he's way too sane. Then again a schizo would probably seem sane standing next to Dayton and Kelliher)
Dan from Northfield (undecided): Wtih Tom Emmer's campaign imploding, Tom Horner looks like the person to beat. Why is your message better?
(Gee I wonder how that PLANT got in?! MPR for shame, Emmer's campaign isn't imploding, its reorganizing. Just because you wish it was imploding doesn't make it so)
Kelliher: It's a long time to november. I've taken on Tom Emmer. I know his tricks and I know his buttons. The DFLers were correct when they chose me to beat Emmer but they were also thinking about Tom horner. I'm the first DFL candidate who can attract independents and hold DFLers in our camp because of my collaborative style. I have a lot of experience with that.
(uh-huh, you got bullied by T-Paw despite being 4 votes short of a veto-proof house this last session. What were you major accomplishments? And don't say the transportation bill that got 6 RINO's to sign on with you, that was actually pretty shameful)
Entenza: Let me take you back to 2002, Wellstone's death, DFLers went into the miniority and almost lost control of the Senate. Pundits said the DFL was dead. A week later, I was elected to lead the Democrats
(It is true, too bad we couldn't have finished them off when they were on life support)
Dayton: I ran against a conservative Republican in a statewide election and I pointed out that a vote for an independent is a vote for the conservative candidate. He, has been involved in representing special interests. Do people want that, someone reprsenting the far right wing, or someone reprsenting Minnesotans.
(If you think you represent Minnesota Mark I have some great coastline property land I want to sell you, in Nevada)
Q from Eichten: Should the state have single payer health care?
(Only in a DFL debate could this still be debated, the vast majority of Americans, around 60%+ say no to this)
Entenza: No, the state can't afford single payer but I committed to getting everyone covered.
(What a weasel answer Matt)
Dayton: We need something different. I was in Luverne. A woman in her 50s said she's paying over 14k in health insurance, but have to pay the first 10k in health care because "these health care giants are reporting huge profits." That's why I favored a single payer program. I'll work for that here.
(boy talk about the gift that keeps on giving!)
Kelliher: Describes a woman who lost her health care and died. That's why I have passion about the issue. No one should die in Minnesota because they dont' have health care.
(shameful, but then again these are democrats)
Entenza asks Dayton: Should MN go to a clean energy economy?
Dayton: I agree
Kelliher Q to Entenza: Can state afford to become "No new taxes state to all new taxes state?" Entenza: that's a q for Dayton.
(Entenza made a funny, cute)
Entenza differs to Dayton. Dayton defends plan because state would go from 9th highest to 7th highest if enacted.
(sounds like they are ganging up on Dayton here. Question, if/when Dayton wins will all the Entenza-Kelliher people go over to Dayton? Somehow I don't think they will)
Dayton Q for Kelliher: Could you say why Rep. Emmer opposed Legacy Amendment? She said that's why DFLers picked her for endorsed
Kelliher said "you don't quit, you stay and do the job," which I think is a shot against Dayton shutting his office because of a terrorist threat and he didn't run for re-election. The debate has now reached the "candidates are talking code" stage. Very Minnesotan.
Q from audience: Why the DFL drought in gov's races in MN?
Dayton: I unabashadly run as a Democrat. Touts higher tax plan
(I think that's part of the problem Mark, in this environment saying your "unabashadly Democrat" and going to run as one, is like saying you are for clubbing baby seals)
Elizabeth from Golden Valley (undecided): How will you generate a thriving Minnesota. Where will new jobs come from?
Kelliher says she has a comprehensive jobs plan. touts track record of working with business
Entenza says state needs focus and "clean energy economy" should be that focus
Will you actively support the other candidate if you don't win: All 3 say yes
(I'll believe that when I see it, Seifert said he'd support Emmer in the general election and you haven't heard a peep from him since the convention back in early May)
Closing statements
Dayton: "More than any other candidate, I'll lead MN in a new direction."
Entenza: We need a gov who gets it, calls to scrap No Child Left Behind.
Kelliher: I am going to be that fearless person to fight for Minnesotans
Well there you have it folks here is my mini recap
Mark Dayton- Grade D+
He sucked big time in this debate and I think that he said some things that will be repeated this fall in ads. Assuming MAK or Entenza doesn't upset him on Tuesday of course.
MAK- Grade B
She did a good job of positioning herself inbetween the 'guys'. Less liberal and extreme than Dayton but still more liberal than Entenza.
Matt Entenza- A+
Ok this guy officially scares me. If he has an organized ground game he might be able to pull off a big primary upset and honestly he does scare me much more than Dayton. He seems like a likeable guy and could win people over. Plus I think he could hold his own with Emmer in a debate. Very concerning indeed. He took shots at both candidates and called MAK on her non-answer during this debate.
Summation: VOTE MARK DAYTON IN THE DFL PRIMARY REPUBLICANS! He is by far the easiest of the 3 to beat. Period, end of story, thats all folks...
Sunday, August 08, 2010
Sanity wins! (for once)
Ok, I feel obligated to do this, one because its good news (rare) and two because it rights an injustice. Remember that Lemonade Stand story I put up a few days ago (if you don't just scroll down and you will find it) well the girl can sell her lemonade!
From Oregon Live:
No need to jack up the price of a glass of lemonade. Turns out kids won't have to shell out $120 for a health permit to run their lemonade stands after all. Multnomah County's top elected official apologized Thursday for health inspectors who forced a 7-year-old girl to shut down her stand last week because she didn't have a food-safety permit. Chairman Jeff Cogen also said he has directed county health department workers to use "professional discretion" in doing their jobs.
(Lets hope they fire that health inspector)
Inspectors told Julie Murphy and her mother, Maria Fife, to stop selling lemonade at the monthly Last Thursday arts festival in Northeast Portland last week. State law technically requires that even lemonade stands have temporary restaurant licenses, which cost $120 for one day. Cogen said the inspectors were "following the rule book," but should consider that food-safety laws are aimed at adults engaged in a professional food business, not kids running lemonade stands. "A lemonade stand is a classic, iconic American kid thing to do," he said. "I don't want to be in the business of shutting that down." Cogen talked with Fife for five to 10 minutes to apologize. Fife said she appreciated his apology after the furor and her daughter was happy because "she's starting to see it had some effect." Fife also said a radio station has offered to sponsor a lemonade stand for Julie. The mother and her daughter had gone to Last Thursday because it seemed like a fun place for Julie to open her first lemonade stand, said Fife, who lives in Oregon City. But after 20 minutes of selling lemonade made from their gallon jugs of bottled water and Kool-Aid packets, a health inspector asked for their license. They didn't have one, and the inspector warned them to stop or face up to a $500 fine.
(but sainty wins! Enjoy this folks, it doesn't happen too often)
Initially, vendors at other booths encouraged them to stay, but the inspector returned with another woman. The crowd surrounded the two inspectors, who felt threatened, Cogen said. Fife and her daughter, who left the street fair crying, packed up and the two inspectors left. Several people who read about the stand in The Oregonian offered to pay the girl's fee so she can sell lemonade. In addition, one of the Last Thursday vendors is planning a "lemonade revolt" at the festival this month. Cogen and health department officials said they aren't sure what their response will be if people set up unlicensed lemonade stands, as the protest calls for. Cogen emphasized that his employees' safety is also a top concern for him. The problem illustrates an ongoing dilemma for the health department -- and other local agencies -- in regulating aspects of Last Thursday, Cogen said. Unlike other events including the upcoming Bite of Oregon or the Cinco de Mayo festival, the free-form Last Thursday fair along Northeast Alberta Street doesn't have a single organizer who takes charge of signing up vendors. People set up booths on a first-come, first-served basis. They don't have to register for space in advance. The county health department still needs to monitor the food operations at Last Thursday for public health reasons, said Wendy Lear, director of business services for the county health department. Instead of dealing with a single organizer -- who typically has a list of participating vendors and could provide the basic sanitation and hand-washing facilities -- health inspectors have to check with each vendor. The festival has grown in scope and in cost to taxpayers. In February, the city said it spends about $10,000 a month in the summer for police, security, barricades and traffic control for Last Thursday. Residents have complained of festival-goers urinating and vomiting in front of their houses and other drunken and rowdy behavior. City Commissioner Amanda Fritz said she and Mayor Sam Adams will present a plan for Last Thursday in the next two weeks. She declined to discuss details, though she noted that vendors at Last Thursday don't pay vendor fees, which she said is "different from any other street fair" in Portland. She added she believes the health inspectors were right to shut down the lemonade stand. "When you've got 15,000 people, it's no longer a neighborhood event, it's a regional event," she said. "The county has the responsibility to fairly enforce the rules on permits and food handlers' permits."
From Oregon Live:
No need to jack up the price of a glass of lemonade. Turns out kids won't have to shell out $120 for a health permit to run their lemonade stands after all. Multnomah County's top elected official apologized Thursday for health inspectors who forced a 7-year-old girl to shut down her stand last week because she didn't have a food-safety permit. Chairman Jeff Cogen also said he has directed county health department workers to use "professional discretion" in doing their jobs.
(Lets hope they fire that health inspector)
Inspectors told Julie Murphy and her mother, Maria Fife, to stop selling lemonade at the monthly Last Thursday arts festival in Northeast Portland last week. State law technically requires that even lemonade stands have temporary restaurant licenses, which cost $120 for one day. Cogen said the inspectors were "following the rule book," but should consider that food-safety laws are aimed at adults engaged in a professional food business, not kids running lemonade stands. "A lemonade stand is a classic, iconic American kid thing to do," he said. "I don't want to be in the business of shutting that down." Cogen talked with Fife for five to 10 minutes to apologize. Fife said she appreciated his apology after the furor and her daughter was happy because "she's starting to see it had some effect." Fife also said a radio station has offered to sponsor a lemonade stand for Julie. The mother and her daughter had gone to Last Thursday because it seemed like a fun place for Julie to open her first lemonade stand, said Fife, who lives in Oregon City. But after 20 minutes of selling lemonade made from their gallon jugs of bottled water and Kool-Aid packets, a health inspector asked for their license. They didn't have one, and the inspector warned them to stop or face up to a $500 fine.
(but sainty wins! Enjoy this folks, it doesn't happen too often)
Initially, vendors at other booths encouraged them to stay, but the inspector returned with another woman. The crowd surrounded the two inspectors, who felt threatened, Cogen said. Fife and her daughter, who left the street fair crying, packed up and the two inspectors left. Several people who read about the stand in The Oregonian offered to pay the girl's fee so she can sell lemonade. In addition, one of the Last Thursday vendors is planning a "lemonade revolt" at the festival this month. Cogen and health department officials said they aren't sure what their response will be if people set up unlicensed lemonade stands, as the protest calls for. Cogen emphasized that his employees' safety is also a top concern for him. The problem illustrates an ongoing dilemma for the health department -- and other local agencies -- in regulating aspects of Last Thursday, Cogen said. Unlike other events including the upcoming Bite of Oregon or the Cinco de Mayo festival, the free-form Last Thursday fair along Northeast Alberta Street doesn't have a single organizer who takes charge of signing up vendors. People set up booths on a first-come, first-served basis. They don't have to register for space in advance. The county health department still needs to monitor the food operations at Last Thursday for public health reasons, said Wendy Lear, director of business services for the county health department. Instead of dealing with a single organizer -- who typically has a list of participating vendors and could provide the basic sanitation and hand-washing facilities -- health inspectors have to check with each vendor. The festival has grown in scope and in cost to taxpayers. In February, the city said it spends about $10,000 a month in the summer for police, security, barricades and traffic control for Last Thursday. Residents have complained of festival-goers urinating and vomiting in front of their houses and other drunken and rowdy behavior. City Commissioner Amanda Fritz said she and Mayor Sam Adams will present a plan for Last Thursday in the next two weeks. She declined to discuss details, though she noted that vendors at Last Thursday don't pay vendor fees, which she said is "different from any other street fair" in Portland. She added she believes the health inspectors were right to shut down the lemonade stand. "When you've got 15,000 people, it's no longer a neighborhood event, it's a regional event," she said. "The county has the responsibility to fairly enforce the rules on permits and food handlers' permits."
Saturday, August 07, 2010
Torii Hunter meltdown...
It almost pains me to post this because I liked (and still like) Torii. He is usually a class act.
The video above here doesn't show the entire picture of what led up to this though. Strike 1 was up and in and Hunter looked back and him and the ump traded words. I watched this on Baseball Tonight last night and after that pitch you knew there was going to be a problem. And as the announcers said the ump must have said something back to him because this staredown was George Brett like. He "bumped" him with the bill of his batting helmet and is suspended 4 games (I thought it would be 7, and he would have deserved it). He isn't appealing it though and I give him credit for that because he know he was in the wrong even if the ump said something to him. I hope MLB does investigate this and find out if the umpire was in the wrong in this too. With a showdown this bad, it always takes two to tango.
obama message booed at the boy scout national jamboree 2010
Looks like the future of this country is bright. Even the kids hate Obama now.
Friday, August 06, 2010
Failblog/FML friday...
Ok I haven't done this in awhile but now its back. I have moved from Failblog to Failbook because Failblog doesn't offer HTML hot links to their pics.
Now some FML...
Today, I got an email from the company that manages my Cat's microchip informing me that I had to update my information that had been entered by the local Humane Society. Apparently, they listed my cat "Coral" as the owner, and me as the pet. To change it, they needed the cat's signature. FML
oday, I was walking out of class when I saw a girl enthusiastically run to her boyfriend, jump on him, and smother him with kisses. I thought to myself "I wish my girlfriend did that." When the girl jumped off and turned around I realized she did, just not to me. FML
Today, I was refereeing a kid's soccer game, and noticed that on the field next to me was a referee I hated working with. I told the other referee I was working with that he was the laziest and most dumbass referee I had ever worked with. She then slapped me, and told me that it was her grandpa. FML
Today, a customer at work became violent and started hitting me and my coworker. Not wanting him to get the shit beat out of us, I used a move that pinned the guy on the ground. The police came and he was arrested. I was then fired for assaulting a customer. FML
Now some FML...
Today, I got an email from the company that manages my Cat's microchip informing me that I had to update my information that had been entered by the local Humane Society. Apparently, they listed my cat "Coral" as the owner, and me as the pet. To change it, they needed the cat's signature. FML
oday, I was walking out of class when I saw a girl enthusiastically run to her boyfriend, jump on him, and smother him with kisses. I thought to myself "I wish my girlfriend did that." When the girl jumped off and turned around I realized she did, just not to me. FML
Today, I was refereeing a kid's soccer game, and noticed that on the field next to me was a referee I hated working with. I told the other referee I was working with that he was the laziest and most dumbass referee I had ever worked with. She then slapped me, and told me that it was her grandpa. FML
Today, a customer at work became violent and started hitting me and my coworker. Not wanting him to get the shit beat out of us, I used a move that pinned the guy on the ground. The police came and he was arrested. I was then fired for assaulting a customer. FML
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