josh [email] said at 10:27 AM 01-21-2004: Did Howard Dean's speech monday night not scare anyone else? After hearing it, I'm now positive I won't vote for him...
art said at 10:55 AM 01-21-2004: it scared the hell out of me. I was going to vote for him, but not now. He apparently has a history of anxiety attacks - not a good thing for someone looking to take reponsibility for 270 million people. There is a link here to an interview where all that comes out Dean Interview
linus [email] said at 11:05 AM 01-21-2004: Yeah, I was still starting to like him more but that put a serious kibosh on voting for him for now. Not that it matters. The Illinois primary is so late that the candidate will basically already be decided by then by other people.
myriam said at 12:32 PM 01-21-2004: you guys should find footage of his speech in NH (yesterday sometime)--he had totally changed. he came out and said, i'm not going to do those types of speeches anymore. the other candidates have adopted my anti-war position and now it's time for me to focus on other things. (almost verbatim) he didn't take off his suit-coat the entire time.
andrew [email] said at 5:11 PM 01-21-2004: here's part of the speech, courtesy of martin. i knew this guy was a little off. on second thought i'll put it in the sounds section.
Lisa T. said at 6:44 PM 01-22-2004: you guys are scaring ME!?!?!? you'll elect an alcoholic as president, but you don't want someone who's had a couple of panic attacks?? you'd be hard-pressed to find a single person in this country today whose never had a panic attack!! and kerry?? pu-leeze!! why don't you just clone bush and offer that as the democratic candidate? you'd end up with the same result either way...
as for the thing about his speech, i refer to my response in the "laughing at dean" thread.
brandon [email] said at 9:47 AM 01-21-2004: Now 'merica, regarding the 'con-uh- me. I'm gonna send out a thousand post cards with a list of 10 people per card. Now, your duty, as one of 100,000 people named on them post cards and as tha'merican people is to is to send 10 dollars to each person on your list, while adding your name to the bottom of this list. We think this 'nichitive will be 'specially effective in the negra community and with the latinos, 'cause they are close-knit and simple folks.
That being said, I'm unsure now whether I'm supposed to support marriage because I'm digusted by gays or because I distrust the latinos, blacks and poor white trash.
kiche [email] said at 9:48 AM 01-21-2004: yes. this is unbeatable. leave the center of the major international metropolis you live in, go out to the suburbs, the middle of the country, talk to some blue collar workers. what you hear will frighten you.
pokey [email] said at 12:53 PM 01-21-2004: I am pretty sure, in my group of 12, when I was blue collar for a few days, that I was the only one who didn't completely trust the guy.
kevin [email] said at 10:54 AM 01-21-2004: as president i would like to tell all the kids:
1) don't do the steroids like the athletes
2) and don't do any of the fun drugs either, cause at skool we will be testing your hair and pee( and excluding you from after skool activities if you do the drugs, which kinda gives you more free time to do the drugs, but, never mind that... cause we is going to mars! isn't that cool?)
3) and when you kids are suspended from skool for failing the fun drug tests, we know you will have lots of unsupervised time on your hands (unless your parents are jobless). and even though you may be tempted as the aroused high horny teenagers you be, i don't want y'all to be havin' the SEX . rememer yer abstinence lessons!(and no! i ain't gonna give you kids any birff control either!stop asking! disease and teen preggers is bad and the only way to prevent that stuff is to not have sex!).
3) and if you kids to decide to fuck and happen to get diseases, remember that gawd still loves you( well, except the gays and the evil judges that like the gays)
4)and if you are bad and go to prison when you get out we will find you a job (even though your parents are are currently unemployed)
kiche [email] said at 11:17 AM 01-21-2004: laugh if you guys will, but this speech was brilliant. bush will get re-elected barring some huge unforseen disaster (like he's discovered in bed with karl rove).
linus [email] said at 11:34 AM 01-21-2004: I don't disagree with that (esp. if they catch Osama. Then the Dems can just donate all their campaign money to charity or 08 or something). Still, though they may be simple, I don't think they are stupid and I think there's still a chance of appealing to something they need/want instead of playing on their fears and hatred. Clinton did. They're still the little man and perhaps could be brought around to realize that Dub doesn't represent their interests.
josh [email] said at 11:42 AM 01-21-2004: I think the only way the Dems can win if they manage to field a decent candidate AND some bad PR happens right before the election...
Woody said at 11:43 AM 01-21-2004: I have a question about Sen. Kennedy. I saw a couple shots of him and he was shaking his head, though he may have been asleep. Is he always like that? I didn't think you were allowed to shake your head (basically it was like he was rolling his eyes) while the president is talking. But maybe he's just old and shaky?
brandon [email] said at 11:45 AM 01-21-2004: Oh, and can someone tell me why steroid use among professional athletes, an issue with all the dry weight gravitas of "save the whales" and "cancer is bad" (I'm assuming this strange pronouncement was prompted by John McEnroe, a Brit who admitted taking legally prescribed steroids back in the 70's - in other words, irrelevant) made it into the State of the Union Address? If that's not total flummery and mawkish positioning, I don't know what is.
jake said at 12:08 PM 01-21-2004: I think it was more in response to the recent scandal around designer steroids being cooked up and shopped around to more than just professional athletes, and the fear that this may be the next wave of school-age drug use.
Plus, its a way to be moralistic and cast blame about drugs while ignoring the failed drug war and our failed foreign policy...remember the interim Afghan gov't replanted the opium fields that the Taliban destroyed!
Woody said at 3:14 PM 01-21-2004: I think the Brit you are thinking of is Greg Rusedski, a current ATP player recently "framed" for drug use. Though he's actually a Canadian.
rick [email] said at 4:00 PM 01-21-2004: Just out of curiousity and because I do not see Gen's head anywhere, what is a Canadian's political relationship to the Queen?
Woody said at 6:10 PM 01-21-2004: Mostly symbolic. We have our own constitution now (as of 1982). There are some legal things, but mostly rubber-stamping issues. Thankfully, we don't have to follow Tony Blair into war anymore.
ed [email] said at 6:32 PM 01-21-2004: Dogsleds don't do well in the desert. Nor would Canadians, bred to live in -3000 degree weather for 9 months out of the year.
Michael said at 7:14 PM 01-21-2004: Yes, but had they assisted they might now be eligible for those huge beer and hockey contracts which insead have gone to Haliburton.
amanda [email] said at 3:08 PM 01-21-2004: Tyler's clients at his job (people with cognitive disabilities) all hate Bush, and most of them can give legitimate (though simple) reasons why they think he's a bad president. One client drew a picture of the White House on fire, a stick figure, and an arrow at the picture with the caption "Gorge Bush do badd job." That client doesn't like Bush because he "start the war," instead of helping people. Another client thinks thinks that Bush is "all talk and no action."
When people with I.Q.'s in the 50's recognize that Bush is a bad President, and the general populus cannot, it frightens me.
Woody said at 3:17 PM 01-21-2004: Get those guys on CNN as political commentators. I would pay good money to see them debate with some Republican lackey.
anotherben.. said at 3:24 PM 01-21-2004: using the political mispellings of people with iq's in the 50's is an inneffective way of supporting a stance.
anotherben.. said at 3:44 PM 01-21-2004: i think my statement comes in their defense. she is using their iq as a means of indicating them as being generally accepted as less intelligent, then using there opinions to support her political opinion. it is a flawed structure not fit for second floor pianos. i didnt mean to sound harsh or condescending though. amanda has written far more that i agree with on sticky issues than most in this damp cave called killoggs. what is your favorite color?
brandon [email] said at 4:01 PM 01-21-2004: But surely, if nine out of ten mongloids dislike Bush, and the tenth has a mouth filled by crackers and smoothered clamors for a hug, this means something. I don't hate the mentally disabled. My favorite color is blue.
anotherben.. said at 4:11 PM 01-21-2004: err..written badly. she used their iq to denigrate them, then used them to support her statement. im just saying that putting people down for not being intelligent is not nice, and using people pointed out as unintelligent as support for political statements is flawed.
amanda [email] said at 5:05 PM 01-21-2004: I didn't intend to use their opinions to support my political opinion. It was merely an andecdote, and was more of a jab at the uninformed voters with supposed "normal intelligence," who cannot tell you a good reason why they approve of Bush, than it was an anti-Bush statement.
The only reason I even mentioned I.Q. was due to the term "cognitively disabled" encompassing such a broad field of disabilities. My aunt is technically cognitively disabled, but she has a close to normal I.Q.; she suffers from short-term memory loss. She can, however, still understand the political process and issues better than my husband's clients can, if she cares to.
All of my husband's clients vote, and take great pride in doing so. They might not understand the complexity of all of the issues, but they try to the best of their abilities. They understand that George Bush is not doing anything to help them and their families. Yet, the general population can't realize this. 45% of the population didn't even vote in the last Presidential election. That was the point I was trying to make.
rick [email] said at 6:50 PM 01-21-2004: Green is my favorite color. I like to think my eyes are green but the DMV said they were blue and I have had others tell me they are grey. But I want them to be green.
anotherben.. said at 5:37 PM 01-21-2004: but how can you speak so assuredly about the general populations grasp (or lack thereof) of the issues? i am not doubting the lack of thought by the masses put into anything beyond remembering what exit to take on the way home from work and what must-see-tv show comes on tonight. however, i am also not willing to accept that this group of people falls neatly into any political category, particularly one mascotted by a mule or a pachyderm. if we weed out the ignorant and the bile-spewing blind, i think we would most likely be left with approximately the same proportions of fools on both sides of the line.
amanda [email] said at 6:06 PM 01-21-2004: I am admittedly generalizing about the population, and I don't think that the population I'm referring to necessarily falls into political categories. I'm pretty sure if I went down to campus and talked to people who were anti-war, a good percentage of them would not be able to justify their opinion and would instead commence with smoking copious amounts of pot. While there will always be people who are ill-informed/ignorant/lazy, I'm alarmed at the seemingly-large and growing rate of this segment of the population.
I don't see how anyone -liberal OR conservative- can be pro-Bush. Please explain. What has Bush done for us?
anotherben.. said at 7:39 PM 01-21-2004: not a whole lot. the tax cuts were a nice move in the right direction.. unfortunately he did not couple them with smart budget cuts. and while his response to the terrorist attacks and the iraq problem may seem heavy-handed, there have not been any more 911's, and we can be pretty sure (whether they had them or not) that iraq will not be using or distributing wmd's. for that matter, it seems unlikely that any other middle eastern countries will adorn scrappy attitudes either. we still remain addicted to oil, and our job base is drifting out to sea faster than louisiana marshland..but i haven't heard any bright ideas from the other side of the aisle towards alleviating the problems with the oil issue or the alluvial analogy. john ashcroft, in retrospect, is worse than i might have imagined. he has returned some respectability to the office, though at the cost of the panache with which bill kept it entertaining. we have pissed a lot of people around the world off, which isnt good. but on the same side of the token, a lot of people around the world are pretending to be pissed off for entirely different reasons than they really are. i dont feel too bad about annoying hypocrites. he has stymied stem cell research in the u.s. = bad. he has made alternate lifestyle issues stickier than they have to be because of his friends in the c.c. = bad. and i could go on. but why? you all already think he is a shitty president. he certainly is not the best. he is, though, still..in my opinion.. a better option than dean by a long shot. i am pulling for rudy in 2008..though.. who knows. maybe even i will be living in canada or ireland by then.
josh [email] said at 8:11 PM 01-21-2004: Dean seems crazier than a shithouse rat.
Rudy ran New York with an iron fist... I don't think he'd be a very good president, he is too much of a micromanager and you can't really do that when you are president.
linus [email] said at 8:48 AM 01-22-2004: I'd heard that Rudy was maybe going to run for U.S. Senate from NY, thus pushing Hill not to run as she would get spanked from there to Arkansas and be burned entirely too bad for her some day humiliating presidential run.
Baby Duck said at 3:05 AM 01-22-2004: It all goes back to the literally brain damaged patients in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. They were all damaged in different ways, but their acute compensations could easily tell Reagan was lying his ass off. The one whose brain cannot parse tones in a voice, knew he was lying by his circumventing word choice. The one who could decipher tone, yet couldn't understand human speech (yet could hear just fine), knew Reagan was lying by the tonal fluctuations.
I'd also like to believe the cognitively challenged have intimate understandings of their own kind, and therefore knew W is lying.
milky [email] said at 6:29 AM 01-22-2004: If it ain't on Fox News these days, no one believes it.
(and in the study mentioned, there was a group that could not tell tone, only logic. They laughed because his speech made no logical sense whatsoever).
anotherben.. said at 9:25 AM 01-22-2004: this is not the todd i remember. what are you talking about? this is kichilky talk. have you ever read any of reagans speeches?
Milk said at 12:39 PM 01-22-2004: You should really read the book Todd and I talk about many times that we are discussing. It is science. You'd dig it but you might not like the logical scientific conclusions from that particular passage. Neuroscience, baby.
milky [email] said at 2:22 PM 01-22-2004: I'll read a book on psych over one on politics any day of the week. Not the pop culture psych stuff...the heady stuff you can lose yourself in. I like Sacks and Frankl, personally, Skinner...Reading all that stuff helps me connect other bodies of knowledge.
I'm reading about the "brass instruments" period of psychological testing, presently. When reaction-time and physical adeptness somehow equated intelligence on early scales.
That and I'm still stuck smack dab in the middle of A Confederacy of Dunces...haven't had but a few moments in the day to move slowly forward pages few.
rick [email] said at 2:39 PM 01-22-2004: And almost every fiction that I have read recently and that I enjoyed, was a theoretical situation that could happen in the real world.
brandon [email] said at 5:19 PM 01-22-2004: It was confessional, yet dishonest. Sacks pretends to be horrified by the aphasia that he in fact fetishizes. he subsumes herself to the myth of agnosia male hyper-cognition, but then doesn't follow through. Oliver thinks he 'respects the disabled,' she thinks they're 'cool,' 'exotic,' what a notch their therapy would make in his belt, but, of course, it all comes down to mandingo cliché, and they calls him on it. In classic differently-abled-ist tradition, he demonizes, then runs for cover. But then, how could he behave otherwise? He's just a spoiled suburban neuroligist with a options on "Awakenings". It's just my opinion, and what do I know... but I think it's a callow piece of writing.
martin said at 3:24 PM 01-22-2004: same here! i just started confederacy and its funny and all, but i just cant get into fiction sometimes. oliver sacks kicks ass. i love when a really great scientist or doctor or whatever is really great at writing for ordinary people. especially sacks and richard feynman.
Randy [ url ] said at 3:41 PM 01-22-2004: I can't read non-fiction, unless it's a bio. of someone really cool, or it's about music in some way.
Hooray for escapism!
reggie [email] said at 11:03 AM 01-22-2004: I was watching Fox News yesterday morning, not for news or anything just for amusements sake. Anyway, one of the anchors on Fox and Friends was surprised when the Democrats labelled the war with Iraq an "unprecedented pre-emptive war." She then went on to name Kosovo as an example of a pre-emptive war. She also mentined Pearl Harbor for some reason. I wrote an angry e-mail to Fox trashing them on the stupidity of their on air talent.
What part of Kosovo was pre-emptive? That conflict took place only after extended peace talks failed. Not only that but everybody and their mother knew what Milosevic was doing. We went to war with Iraq basically on the suspicion that Saddam POSSESSED weapons of mass destruction.
Anyway, I haven't gotten a response from them but I wish they would. The letter I wrote was very smug and condescending, much like Bill O'reilly.
rick [email] said at 1:30 PM 01-22-2004: Kosovo was controversial. A lot of conservatives were against it as it was not in our interest to undertake. Yugoslavia ( Serbia) gave its highest cinematic award to "Wag The Dog" which it said was now being played out in real life. And a lot of Europeans were against it. There were big protests in Greece and Romania. And if I had a dollar for every time some Eastern European student came up to me while I lived in Germany from 1999-2000 and demanded to know why the U.S. wanted to be policeman to the World, well, I could get gold slugs for all my teeth.
Anyway, I think in retrospect, it was overall, basically, the right thing to do. Kosovo is not under the heel of the Serbian nationalists and I myself feel that it hastened the exit of Slobodan Milosevic. There have been problems ( there is still a lot of ethnic violence there and not just anti-Serbian but also anti-Roma) but I feel eventually things will settle down and some agreement can be reached.
But what do I know? I am a naieve lad with who read a couple of books a couple of years ago.
reggie [email] said at 2:56 PM 01-22-2004: Okay so you would agree then that Kosovo was an act of intervention and not an act of prevention? Because according to that particular Fox anchor our conflict in Kosovo was a pre-emptive strike of some kind. That's my beef. Sure, both Milosevic and Hussein were tyrants, but Bush's motivation for going into Iraq capitalized on our nation's paranoia of further terrorist strike. The whole liberation of Iraq thing was, most likely, an afterthought.
rick [email] said at 5:03 PM 01-22-2004: I would definitely agree that Kosovo was an act of intervention.
Killoggs Fun Fact: Slobodan Milosevic made his name by giving a fiery speech in 1986 on the three hundredth anniversary of the Battle Of Kosovo Polje, telling the Serbian minority there, that no one would be allowed to push them around anymore ( he meant the ethnic Albanians who up until that point had enjoyed a good bit of autonomy).
I do not know what point I was trying to make except that I thought that it was a good thing to have ended the situation that had been going on for at least a decade in Kosovo.
And no, I do not think that any reason that was given for the Kosovo operation at the time has been at all discredited.
