In a news break, Renee Montagne said that the Romney campaign was upset because VP Biden said Romney/Ryan would” unchain Wall Street.”
And she stopped there; leaving the impression that the Republicans were upset that they were caught supporting Wall Street.
But that’s NOT what the Republican’s are upset about.
It was Biden following up the Wall Street comment by telling the largely African-American audience that the Republicans were going to “put you back in chains.”
By leaving out that pertinent fact, Montagne sanitized the ugliness of what Biden said and turned the incident into a de facto smear of Romney & Ryan.
I’ve been watching The Wire on HBO on demand and I have two things to say:
1.) Because of all the love this show got on NPR (Fresh Air in particular), cialis usaand I had always assumed The Wire was a liberal show on par with The West Wing. Plus, sildenafil I knew the writers of the show have said it was an indictment of capitalism and an argument to legalize drugs (which is a typically more liberal position).
But now that I’m half-way through the second season, I have to say I see nothing here for a liberal to be proud of.
In a city completely run by Democrats, the politicians are corrupt, and the unions that support the politicians are corrupt. Basically, government is a completely failure. I could understand if The Wire was written by anti-government libertarians, but it sure doesn’t make the Democrats seem anymore appealing to me…at least so far.
2.) If I hear one more character say, “yo,” I’m gonna pop a cap in someone’s ass.
Of course, even one mass shooting is one too many, but does 60 or so over 30 years really justify calling mass shootings an epidemic? The fact that 800 or so people lost their lives in these shootings is completely tragic and I’m not trying to trivialize the depth of that loss.
But I am calling for a little perspective: in that same period of time in the United States, there have been at least a couple of thousand people killed by lightning.
According to the New York Times, about 5,000 people in the U.S. die of food poisoning every year. If that average holds true over the last three decades that would translate to about 150,000 deaths.
And from 1976 to 2006 somewhere between 3,000 and 49,000 people died of the common flu.
Would we say that deaths by lightning, food poisoning, or flu are epidemic?
Probably not.
Then maybe we shouldn’t apply the word to these 60 horrible, but very uncommon, tragedies.
I’m sure gun control won’t stop them. Even if you could un-invent guns, people would just use bombs, or arson, or poison, or park trucks on train tracks, push generators into public pools or do a thousand more horrible things that I can’t even guess it.
It’s the people who are the problem, not the tool they choose. (A fact so self-evident, I don’t know why I even have to mention it. After all, millions of people have access to all these devices of mass murder and never even think about using them.)
But how do you control people? Especially in a free society?
Are the killers always mentally ill? Sometimes suicidal? Politically motivated? Religiously motivated?
Do we need different approaches to the different root causes?
I really just don’t know.
What I do know is we will never cure the problem while we keep focusing on the symptoms (the use of guns for example) instead of the diseases.
A Sheboygan man has been charged with attacking his girlfriend because she refused to marry his Mexican friend, who offered to pay them $5,000 so he could become a U.S. citizen, the Sheboygan Press reports.
Jerry A. Hilbelink is accused in a criminal complaint filed against him of choking the woman during a quarrel Saturday, the newspaper reports.
Hell, one of the reasons I went to Purdue University was that Neil Armstrong, Virgil Grissom, Roger Chafee, Eugene Cernan and other astronauts all went there.
Being in a wheelchair gives you a unique perspective on the world. This blog features many of my views on politics, art, science, and entertainment. My name is Elliot Stearns. More...
