A reader sends in this link starring Representative Sinrud (R-Bozeman) and featuring his comments about the need to fight fires.
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Is it too late for the Republicans to consider a Burns-Sinrud ticket for the governor's race?
I don't mean to judge the good people at The Hardliner, as I understand that laying down astroturf, most likely at the Montana Republican headquarters, is pretty challenging, but you have to be one pathetic blog to block visitors who disagree with you.
The other day I posted a comment on the site, suggesting that the blog was perhaps something other than a grassroots movement. The next day, my comment was deleted. Today, my IP has been blocked from viewing the site.
Good luck getting your message out there, guys. Can I help invent the name of your next "commenter"?
Jonah Goldberg strikes again , reminding us that envy, a deadly sin, is in fact bad. After accomplishing this difficult intellectual task, he makes a real leap. He calls socialism "the ideology of envy", which thus, apparently makes it ungodly, a system to be rejected by true Christians of God's Country (America, if you haven't caught on).
The Seven Deadly sins gained popularity in the middle ages, having been written down in the sixth century. But the Christian faith (and the Jewish tradition is springs from) which Goldberg tries to draw in by using the language of sin was never quick to agree with his worship of money.
Basil the Great, a Catholic saint and one of the Three Holy Heirachs
in the Eastern Orthodox church, has this to say about the merits of private property: "The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry man; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the man who needs it;…the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor."
St. Ambrose, one of the fourth original doctors of the Catholic church, goes even further to identify what is actually the sin which corrupts human society and removes it from God's ideal: "God willed that this earth should be the common possession of all and he offered its fruits to all. But avarice distributed the rights of possession."
Where did these men get these crazy ideas?
Remember back in the good ol’ days when
people were expected to be minimally capable of independent thought
and action? This news item, from Education Week, suggests that
those days are long gone:
School buses across New Hampshire are getting safety
upgrades designed to prevent children from being left behind.A new device installed in the bus sounds
an alarm at the end of the driver’s route that can only be turned
off by walking all the way to the back of the bus. Officials say
that it will help prevent students who might have fallen asleep
from being left on a locked bus.First Student, a private bus company, is paying about $350 per bus
to outfit its entire fleet.First Student is outfitting 20,000 buses with the devices
nationwide.Rauseo has been transportation director in Nashua since 2005 and
couldn’t recall a situation where a student was left on a bus.The new alarm system eliminates the
possibility of a driver somehow overlooking a student, he said.“I’m thrilled to have it,” he said.
$350 per bus for something that could be avoided by having the
driver walk to the end of the bus at the end of his/her shift.
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Not more than eight hours after I posed a
criticism of Helena's focus on branding itself, I received an
e-mail from James Carville asking me to do the same thing for the
Democratic party. He writes:
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) is
launching a campaign to find the bumper sticker slogan that will
carry us through the 2008 elections. It'll be on their website, on
campaign literature and on the bumpers of jalopies coast to coast.
We need a turn of phrase that really jumps out and tells you right
off the bat what this election is all about. In 1992, it was "It's
the Economy, Stupid." In 2006, Democrats simply said "Had Enough?"
It was the only question America needed to ask.
I know James is a political consultant, and would like to believe
that Bill Clinton won in 1992 because of this clever slogan, and
that Democrats won in 2006 because of a slogan I never heard of,
but like most consultants working for the Democratic Party in
recent years, he's dead wrong. Bill Clinton and the class of 2006,
like Jon Tester and Jim Webb, won because of substance. In 1992,
Americans were ready for a change from the punitive social policies
and inept foreign policy of the Reagan/Bush years. In 2006,
Democrats won because they won the war of ideas, offering a new
vision for Iraq, tax policy, and ethics reform, among other things.
Political consultants don't like to believe that voters make
decisions on complicated things like evaluating competing policies
because that would limit their role.
Let's stop treating the American people like they are idiots. They
don't want slogans. They want leaders, people who articulate and
then implement good policies. Let's focus on that, and let the
"Mission Accomplished" crowd use slogans.
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