Just a couple of quick thoughts from the morning paper.
One of my least favorite right wing airheads, Chatty Kathy Parker, wrote a decent but painfully obvious column about how we are a really dumb country. She finishes, though, with this little zinger
Who will govern a free nation if no one understands the mechanics and instruments of that freedom? Maybe one day, a demagogue.Hmm, Chatty, just idly speculating about the future? I think not. Unfortunately, her demagogue reference is to our articulate, inspiring and intelligent future president.
Kathy, if you REALLY want to know what happens in that situation, look behind you. Look at the last eight years, of incompetence, imperial aggression, corruption and a betrayal of all that should be American. THAT is what you get.
And Lula, this is an Illinois-centric question,but an issue here involves our imprisoned ex-governor (we have a long history of felon governors here, and the current occupant may soon join that list). He was the epitome of the two-bit crook, but the tragedy is that he was doing his two-bit crookery as Secretary of State, giving away drivers' licenses for bribes to unqualifieds and ineligibles. Now he is old and infirm and the question of commutation comes up. I'm somewhat torn. He is a miserable old bastard, yet what is the public good of continued imprisonment?
Thoughts?
of you have sat, and perhaps thought, with us!
3 comments:
George Ryan can host the welcome to prison party for Blagy, and the two of them can rot behind bars.
This is a toughie... On the one hand, George Ryan is a scumbag, complicit in the deaths of several people - including a whole family killed because he was willing to accept bribes from unqualified idiots who would up driving around in giant trucks. On the other hand, he saw the inequity of the legal system in cases where the death penalty was invoked. He did use his office to commute a slew of death penalties - and AFAIK there have been no state-sponsored death penalties carried in IL in at least 8 years. And so now he is old, decrepit, sick, and STILL and unrepentant convicted felon... I am betting that he receives a get-out-of-jail-free card from W - how ironic!!
Hmm ... It should be noted that Parker stole liberally from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute to cut and paste her column. The question they raise isn't an original concept either; it's from the fertile mind of Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democratic Party:
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
While cut & paste Kathleen smugly sits in judgment of the American people, recycling the Institute's findings in her column, here's what I found curious: nowhere did she say whether she'd taken the test.
The link is in the lead paragraph of the news story reporting these findings. Anyone can take the test online before reading the specific findings. So Kathleen, before bitching about the "dumbing down of America" on the basis of this test, come clean lady. If you don't take the test and publish your score, well then ... STFU.
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