micah holmquist's irregular thoughts and links |
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Welcome to the musings and notes of a Cadillac, Michigan based writer named Micah Holmquist, who is bothered by his own sarcasm. Please send him email at micahth@chartermi.net. Holmquist's full archives are listed here.
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Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution) Aljazeera.Net English Blogs that for one reason or another Holmquist would like to read on at least something of a regular basis (always in development) Thivai Abhor |
Friday, April 30, 2004
Micah Holmquist's off the top of his head words to end April Both Democrats and Republicans are likely to say whatever works to make the partisan point they want to make at the moment without regard for consistency or principles. (Many of other affiliations or non-affiliations do the same, FWIW.) Yesterday's edition of Sean Hannity's radio show provided three examples of Republican partisans doing this... -Sean Hannity frequently criticizes Democrats for engaging in "class warfare" whenever they mention economic inequality in the U.S. or that the bulk of the savings from Bush's tax cuts go to the very wealthy. And yet yesterday Newt Gingrich and Hannity were making fun of John Kerry for having a personal assistant who made sure Kerry had access to water, aspirin and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and because Kerry preferred strawberry jelly to grape and whole wheat bread to white. If that's the best they got on Kerry's blue blood ways, they don't have anything. -Ted Nugent was on and, amongst other things I won't get into, said Karl Marx and Mao Tse Tung were responsible for coming up the phrase "redistribution of wealth." That's idiotic in and of itself. Marx died in 1883 and Mao wasn't born till 1893. Nugent went on to ask, "what right" does one "man" have to take what "another man" has "earned"? Fair enough, except that he went on to praise the U.S. Armed Forces for defending "freedom", even though the last time I checked they were, for better or worse, the product of taxes and redistributing wealth in other countries. -Those were nothing compared to Hannity saying Saddam "couldn't wait" to give WMDs to terrorists. If that is the case, and I have no doubt that it is because Hannity is a big star and I'm not, then what took Saddam so long? *** The guest host on yesterday's edition of Mike Reagan's radio show was complaining about a piece written by University of Massachusetts grad student Rene Gonzalez in his university's student newspaper that said Pat Tillman "got what was coming to him." Think what you want about that, but this guest host went on to say that Gonzalez was probably getting most of his education paid for by others, be it his parents or taxpayers, and didn't know anything about sacrifice. The host had no evidence of this but was just assuming it to be the case. What is known, and yet went unsaid, is that Tillman received a scholarship to play college football at school that is publicly funded and without this experience he almost certainly never would have been able to earn millions in the NFL. First football, then a government job, damn I hate people who just sponge off of hard working American tax payers their entire adult life. The guest host also said that he had attended a recent speech by Karen Hughes at Santa Barbara City College and outside of the speech there was a protest that we listeners were told was organized by "professors." The guest host was mad that his tax money went to pay these people's salary. It apparently never occurred to him that they might be mad that their tax dollars help to pay for speeches by the likes of Hughes. *** Bush isn't too keen on U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners: A year ago, I did give the speech from the carrier, saying that we had achieved an important objective, that we'd accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein. And as a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq. As a result, a friend of terror has been removed, and now sits in a jail. I also said on that carrier that day that there was still difficult work ahead...I'm shaking my head in disgust [please note that the previous link contains some horrific images and looking at them won't do a whole lot of good, unless you doubt that "the men and women who defend our freedom" are capable of torture] and disbelief. Note that Bush has to be asked about this. Decency doesn't come naturally, I guess. |