By Bill Devol
I learned that it was counterproductive to begin teaching 9th grade English with the assumption that my students had learned enough from the previous 8 years. It would be like trying to teach swimming to people that never learned they can’t breathe under water.
We are halfway through 2009, and it looks like we assumed too much and need to do some reviewing:
Out of the past 8 years and 5 months, Barack Obama has been the President for only 5 months.
I was walking to get a cup of coffee last week when I fell in beside a coworker in search of a cup for himself. He asked me how long I thought it would be before Barack Obama quadrupled the national deficit.
I reminded my coworker of the short tenure of the current President and reminded him of the length of time the last guy had the job. I reminded him that when the President before Barack Obama took over there was no deficit. He stared at me blankly and then asked again how long it would be before Obama quadrupled the national deficit.
We have had things that record sounds and images for a very long time and they are used whenever prominent citizens appear in groups or individually.
During a trip to Berlin before the election, Barack Obama made a speech in which he said he was a citizen of the world. Earlier this week, Newt Gingrich made a speech in which he said that Barack Obama’s citizen of the world statement was “intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous.”
Once, in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly, President Ronald Reagan introduced himself as “both a citizen of the United States and of the world.”
In your face, Newt!
History proves that you can never kill all of the people you hate and that homicidal maniac is not a good career choice.
Recent events in America should serve to remind us that we should fear the loose nuts walking around and not some Gitmo prisoners held in super-max federal prisons. I’m talking about the racial supremacists, holocaust deniers, anti-abortion crazies, religious holy warriors, and the other assorted nuts that believe that if they get the genocide ball rolling the rest of us will follow along.
If making something illegal could stop it from happening, all we’d need for a perfect world is a legislature.
The Temperance movement believed the following words added to the United States Constitution by way of the 21st Amendment in 1933 would solve what they saw as America’s greatest problem.
“The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or Possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.”
I wonder how that worked out for the Temperance Movement.
When ever anyone in authority wants to keep something from you for your own protection, it is almost always for their protection.
Senators Lindsey Graham (Republican from South Carolina) and Joe Lieberman (Independent from Connecticut) threw a tandem tantrum Tuesday.
It seems they damn near busted a gasket when they learned that members of a House-Senate conference committee working out the differences between the House and Senate versions of the supplemental war spending bill were ready to remove an amendment proposed by Graham and Lieberman that would block release of detainee abuse photos that have yet to be published.
To be fair, President Obama doesn’t want the photos released either. All those opposed to release of these photos say they want to protect Americans from retaliation.
Here’s the best part…by trying to repress the photographs, the Senators and the President make us all want to see them even more.
Besides, if you had photographs of abuses of my family that were so bad you were scared to show them to me for fear of retribution, I’d start kicking your ass anyway.
Those photos are going to get leaked no matter what. Some day soon Perez Hilton or TMZ will get them from somebody and post them online.
You can lead a horse to water, but if you pour it up his nose, it’s torture.
Did I miss the minute when we stopped arguing about using torture and started arguing about if it works or not?
Dick Cheney would have felt right at home during the Inquisition…”Well, yes, he did die, but he admitted he was a Devil-worshiping demon from Hell before he bled to death.”
People are still dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I don’t have a joke for this one; I just thought someone should mention it. We are up to 4,311 dead people and still counting. If you add in the dead from Afghanistan, we have 5,011 dead Americans and nothing to show for it except Steven Colbert’s buzz cut.
