Cheers for RR, Jr.

Ron Reagan, Jr. in Esquire.
[snip]
Politicians will stretch the truth. They’ll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken “normal” mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on.
[snip]
If you are dead center on the earning scale in real-world twenty-first-century America, you make a bit less than $32,000 a year, and $32,000 is not a sum that Mr. Bush has ever associated with getting by in his world. Bush, who has always managed to fail upwards in his various careers, has never had a job the way you have a job

A question about TIPS

The Boston Herald is reporting that Kerry and Edwards are supporting neighborhood watches for terrorists.
Well, somewhere between leaving everything to government and resorting to vigilantism, it seems to me, can be an intelligent approach to keeping an eye on our kids and our neighborhoods. We watch out for child molesters, con artists, pickpockets, and burglars — anyone who behaves in such a way as to make us think they might do harm to someone. So why not keep an eye out for anyone acting suspiciously doing stuff that terrorists might do? Now, there’s the rub. What exactly might a terrorist in our neighborhood do to cause us to become suspicious? I mean, a child molester might be noticed constantly hanging around a playground. Con artists call up and try to get old people to invest their savings. We keep our money in places where pickpockets can’t get to it. And we lock our doors and windows and put in alarms to deter burglars and keep an eye out for anyojne looking as though they’re trying to jimmy our neighbor’s window. But what is it we’re supposed to watch out for in terms of terrorists in our neighborhoods? That’s not a rhetorical question.

Twigs

“As the twig is bent, so grows the tree,” they say.
Amazing what gets unearthed when you’re cleaning out old folders. I found this photo of a much younger b!X marching in Washington on the way to the Pentagon to protest the bad things the CIA was helping to happen in Guatemala.
marching in WashingtonB.jpg