doll lady… how strange. for years woman wanted to be included and railed against the ‘ole boy network.’ they accused the men of discrimination. … now you propose we do the same!?!?!?

frank, found it: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/19/wuspols2…

frank… it was in one of the british papers yesterday. i lost the link, i will see if i can find it.

woodstock, over 500,000 participants and NO fights. can you imagine 500,000 people drinking booze in the same environment? pot, if used in moderation, does not cause one to drive recklessly, quite the contrary. it does not cause loud, bellicose behavior, does not radically transform one’s personality, does not cause one to ‘pray to the porcelain god’ the next morning. much more civilized in my humble opinion.

ruth… get your facts straight. your comment: “it was Hillary Clinton who took on the tough issue of healthcare. Political analysts have since labeled it a debacle. The truth of the matter is that her first political undertaking was doomed due to the Republican controlled congress.” is revisionist history, to say the least. when hillary bungled and set back the chance of anyone passing legislation on universal health care for decades, the dems were in control of BOTH the senate and the congress. the truth of the matter is she worked behind closed doors, would not deign to consider any suggestions to ‘her’ plan, alienated both her party and the republicans. if she could not pass legislation with her party in the majority… when can she pass it? check out her senatorial record… what has she accomplished, of merit that is. read camille paglias take on clinton: Camille Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts (Philadelphia). Why women shouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton By Camille Paglia Last Updated: 9:04am BST 21/04/2008 Is Hillary Clinton the saviour of feminism? Or its albatross, dragging feminism backwards under a weary weight of old-guard victimology and male-bashing? # Hillary Clinton’s family home reflects Democrat divide # Toby Harnden: Democratic activists lashed by Clinton # Janet Daley: Can Barack Obama survive his remarks? The scrum is on! Feminist grand panjandrums like Gloria Steinem have leapt back into the arena, while younger women have seized the feminist banner to proclaim Hillary the messianic Wonder Woman, destined to smash the glass ceiling of the presidency. All women, on pain of excommunication from the feminist claque, must now support Hillary. Never mind her spotty record or her naked political expediency. Any woman with the temerity to endorse Barack Obama (as I do) is condemned as a “traitor” to her sex. “Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life,” trumpeted Steinem earlier this year in an article promoting Hillary in the New York Times. Barriers of race, class or economics are waved away as mere frippery. Hillary Clinton among the women of Scranton: Why women shouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton Back to her roots: Hillary Clinton among the women of Scranton As a resident of Philadelphia, I am currently under siege by the firestorm of political adverts heading toward Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary, which Hillary has long been expected to win. She has roots in this state: her grandfather was a Welshman who settled in the coal-mining city of Scranton, which remains conservative and working-class. Women there are tough and blunt, with few illusions about life. Hillary’s voter base consists of middle-aged to elderly white women who identify with her caustic, stubborn, bulldog resilience. Humiliated and upstaged by her philandering husband, Hillary is the champion of an army of women who were stymied, betrayed or outmanoeuvred by men. Over the past year, whenever her cowed male opponents mildly rebutted Hillary in debate, her campaign jumped into über-feminist mode: male bullies, they screeched, “ganging up” on a helpless damsel. Losing ground with other core groups - notably her own cohort of upper-middle-class, baby-boom career woman - Hillary played the gender card to the max. When polling showed she had seemed too harsh to the caucus-goers of Iowa, she rolled out teary eyes for New Hampshire, which handed her a primary victory. Hillary will scratch, claw, and morph through every gender trick if it rakes in votes. This symbol of raw female ambition has never comfortably fitted into a conventional sex role. As the first child of a hard-working and authoritarian father, Hillary absorbed his willfulness, competitive drive and suspicion. Excelling academically, Hillary felt ill at ease with the feminine persona so deftly deployed by pretty, popular girls in that era. Frumpy, stumpy and myopic, she identified with the new idolatry of shiny careerism promulgated by the second-wave feminism of the late 1960s, when she emerged from posh Wellesley College. US presidential election 2008 Though she would specialise in women’s and children’s issues, Hillary’s public statements have often betrayed an ambivalence about women who chose a non-feminist path. “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies,” she sneered during Bill’s 1992 presidential campaign. Then, defending her husband against the claims of a 12-year affair by Gennifer Flowers, Hillary snapped: “I’m not sittin’ here like some little woman, standing by my man like Tammy Wynette” - a sally that boomeranged when Hillary had to make an abject apology. The irony is that Hillary had offended the very group of stoical, put-upon, working-class women who are now proving to be her staunchest supporters. advertisement Whatever her official feminist credo, Hillary’s public career has glaringly been a subset to her husband’s success. Despite her reputation for brilliance, she failed the Washington, DC bar exam. Thus her migration to Little Rock was not simply a selfless drama for love; she was fleeing the capital where she had hoped to make her mark. In Little Rock, every role that Hillary played was obtained via her husband’s influence - from her position at the Rose Law Firm to her seat on the board of Wal-Mart to her advocacy for public education reform. In a pattern that would continue after Bill became president, Hillary would draw attention by expressing public “concern” for a problem, without ever being able to organise a programme for reform. Hillary has always been a policy wonk, a functionary attuned to bureaucratic process, but she has never shown executive ability, which makes her quest for the presidency problematic. Hillary’s disastrous botching of national healthcare reform in 1993 (a project to which her husband rashly appointed her) will live in infamy. Obama may also have limited executive experience, but he has no comparable stain on his record. The argument, therefore, that Hillary’s candidacy marks the zenith of modern feminism is specious. Feminism is not well served by her surrogates’ constant tactic of attributing all opposition to her as a function of entrenched sexism. Well into her second term as a US Senator, Hillary lacks a single example of major legislative achievement. Her career has consisted of fundraising, meet-and-greets and speeches around the world expressing support for women’s rights. Hillary Clinton Hillary Clinton is aiming to become the first female president of the United States What feminist supporters have recently denounced as troglodytic misogyny in media portrayals of Hillary has in fact been a function of her own strange sexual accommodations and ambiguities. Yes, she may surround herself with luscious, multicultural babes (such as her minder, Huma Abedin, or her now sacked aide, Patty Solis Doyle), but Hillary, despite the rumours, is no lesbian. She’s a crucifix-wearing, Methodist do-gooder who confidently thinks she’s God’s agent. There’s no room for random eroticism in her calendar. Genuinely disturbing are the caricatures of Hillary (called “Hitlery” or “the Hildebeast” on the web) that rarely accrue to male candidates: she’s portrayed as a hectoring nag, a witch on a broomstick, or a castrating bitch. But if such images were truly generated by simple fear of female power, we would expect to find them around other women politicians too, such as the current female Speaker of the House. No, Hillary was demonised by the American electorate long before she sought elective office. It is Bill Clinton who is responsible for the tainted sexual aura around his wife. Furthermore, Hillary’s mythomania and her chameleon-like daily alterations of persona and voice are unsettling. (Even Hillary’s eye colour is fake: she wears blue contact lenses.) No male candidate enjoys Hillary’s options as a woman to tailor her costume to the audience. Hillary’s recent remarks about politics as a “boys’ club” resistant to uppity women was sheer demagoguery. By progressing farther than any woman presidential candidate, she has become a role model for future aspirants. But by attaching herself so blatantly to anti-male rhetoric - particularly in view of her debt to her husband - she is espousing a retrograde brand of feminism no longer applicable to the US. If Hillary loses, batten the hatches against a mass resurrection of paranoid, paleo-feminist martyrs, counting their wounds and wailing at the blood-red moon.

i sleep in the buff… the thread count of the sheets and the fabrics they are made from are the most important factors.

and i also own guns, but i am not doing it to create an image of myself that is totally false. hillary [see 1999] is virulently anti gun… ask the nra.

by properly funding the pell grants for one. in the’60s pell grants paid for about half of the costs, it is now down to paying about a third.

today george will wrote a scathing diatribe on obama and ‘elitism.’ i was taken with one of the responses from one from another country: woody21 wrote: This is so pathetic I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. First, it just makes me laugh how Americans try to denigrate someone who attended an Ivy League School by calling them elitist. So I guess all those people calling Obama an elitist don’t want their children to attend Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, Brown or Harvard? You Americans truly are a funny lot. You keep going on about improving education and when someone is fortunate enough to get a good education you immediately tear them down as being out of touch. Talk about the ‘Dumbing Down of America.’ It’s bad enough the world had to endure Ronald Reagan and two Bushes simply because Americans cared more about personality than policy. And now Hillary Clinton is swigging back Whiskey and Beer just to show the electorate what a good ol gal she is - hell, she’s just like everyone else - give or take $100 million. Oh please, stop the presses, I think I’m starting to break out in corybantic laughter (whew, there’s a big elitist word for you!). And now people from all over the world are rolling their eyes at the United States because someone finally comes along who speaks ‘truth to power’ and what does America do? It skewers him for being an elitist. Yea, those Elitist Community Organizers - they sure are a bunch of snobs! Hey, but I could be totally wrong. After all, America knows best, right? I mean who better to be President of the United States than someone who can’t remember who Al-Qaeda is without the help of Senator Lieberman or someone who dodges imaginary bullets. Of course Obama is no saint but given the choices, it seems pretty clear he would make a far better president than Senator McCain or Senator Clinton. Oh, forgot: going to a top university is bad. Really really bad.

hmmm, michelle obama has a tin ear and hillary clinton has what? perhaps a tin soul, one that reverberates in a discordant fashion when called upon to tell the truth, one thats’ dissonance pervades when pandering for votes[see shots of royal crown followed by beer chaser or hillary the huntswoooman,] one thats’ strident and jarring waves unsettle the entire democratic party. the republicans would LOVE to run against hillary… they are chomping at the bit.

it is all very well to wax philosophic, this from the horses mouth: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=…

the long and winding road… the press, the same press that treated hillary as the presumptive nominee for over a year, is now the problem? men, who do not want a woman for a president, misogynists all, are part of the problem? other candidates, picking on the poor woman, are part of the problem? spin, ladies, spin. learn to recognize it when you see/hear it. obfuscation, prevarication, triangulation all part of the old political paradigm. if one has the time, as i do, to watch every little maneuver, one begins to see a pattern… a bold, garish, unsettling pattern. … and the sound waves and distortion are coming from the clinton camp. it is very hard to smear a decent man. newsweeks richard wolffe has been on the campaign trail for over a year with obama and today on the tim russert show wolffe told tim that basically, obama really believes that we can have a new type of politics. he actually[obama] believes and practices what he says in his speeches. wolffe also said that obama, contrary to the spin, is very detailed and can go on, ad nauseum, in great detail about his policies and the questions posed by the audiences. we need no more ‘confusion,’ about bosnia, the irish peace accords, nafta, columbia and on and on and on. whatever the reason… hillary clinton lies. haven’t we had enough of that for the last 7 years?

ariadne - 12/31/1969 6:00 PM i feel guilt… huge amounts of guilt. we castigate the iraqis for not standing on their own two feet, for not putting their country back together again, for not settling their differences, for not appreciating the ‘democracy’ we placed in their ungrateful hands. how fast we forget… we ruined their secular country, one where women were educated and not forced to wear the veil. we destroyed their infrastructure, we murdered their children and now we sit back and bemoan our fate. it is a quagmire, a bottomless pit, a nightmare of our own making. and now we sit, looking at what we have created and we try to determine how to leave… what have we done?

ariadne, she showed theseus the way through the labyrinth. i was a troubleshooter in one of my past lives.