Someone's a Fast Learner

Our new president is demonstrating that he learns quickly...very quickly:

Lessons Obama learned from stimulus deal.

• Take your case right to the American people.
  
• Don't let bipartisanship become the barometer of your success.
  
• Face up to criticism, be pragmatic without being unprincipled.
  

Yep, sounds like a good start to me.

But Really, He Loves America

Conservative bloviator Rush Limbaugh has told a publication regarding Pres. Obama, “I hope he fails.” The sordid details can be found on Joe Garofoli's blog in the San Francisco Gate.

Just another example of how much conservatives love America...

Jan. 20, 2009 - the End of an Error

Yes, we did :) [and BTW, the Whitehouse website just got a lot more useful]

Patrick Farley sums it up nicely in The Bush Years: All Circus, No Bread:

“Trying to explain what was wrong with the Bush Era feels like trying to vomit up a cannonball. I don't think my jaw can stretch that wide.”

Parker in the Wilderness

Kathleen Parker, one of the only halfway decent writers the Republicans had, has been cast into the outer darkness. Yes, she's lost her position at the National Review, to wander "the wilderness in rags and swaddling cloths, lamenting the loss of her soul and shaking her chains like Jacob Marley." [Wonkette]

Parker was one of the only conservative writers I thought had a decent handle on one of the main issues which caused the Republican implosion during the 2008 election. So of course it's no surprise that the conservatives expelled her. Hey, the truth hurts!

Luckily, you can still read Parker in the Washington Post.

QotD for 7 Jan., 2009

On the fate of the Church in the West, Counterlight writes in a comment thread over on Preludium:

I think that as goes Spain these days, so goes the rest of the West (including the USA); a greatly shrunken church dominated by fanatics who accelerate shrinking church attendance by alienating the rest of the population; a church that wears a heavy millstone of rightwing and reactionary politics around its neck in an increasingly cosmopolitan country.

Pretty much sums it up as far as I'm concerned. And although I'm quite certain TEC will stand as a thoughtful and liberal-minded counterpoint to that, I fear that thoughtful and liberal-minded Christianity will remain a smaller sect within a small sect.

The New York Times Mocks Absinthe

Eric Konigsberg of The New York Times says Care for an Absinthe? Ptooey!

If absinthe were a band, it would be Interpol, third-hand piffle masquerading as transgressive pop culture. If absinthe were sneakers, it would be a pair of laceless Chuck Taylors designed by John Varvatos for Converse. If it were facial hair, it would be the soul patch...You could say that absinthe is a kindred spirit of so many falsely subversive things: ear piercing for men, tattoos on women, those cigar bars, pole-dancing-aerobics classes, mind erasers, blogging about one’s bikini grooming...

QotD for 2 Jan., 2009

Sol Short once told me that mankind is divided into two basic sorts: those who find the unknown future threatening and those who find it thrilling. He says the rupture between those two sides has been responsible for most of the bloodshed in history. If change threatens you, you become conservative in self-defense. If change thrills you, you become liberal in self-liberation. He says the Threateneds are frequently more successful in the short run, because they always fight dirty. But in the long run, they always lose, because Thrilled people learn and thus accomplish more. ---Joel Johnston, lead character in Robert Heinlein & Spider Robinson's novel Variable Star