A new Pope has apparently just been chosen. The coverage mentioned that the name he chooses will be an initial signal of his vision (traditionalist, carrying on John-Paul II work, etc.) It made me wonder whether cardinals have their secret pope name that they keep to themselves, reserved for their superhero daydreams.
You may think that you take the long view, that you see the big picture and can follow through on actions over extended periods. You would be wrong. Whoever did this has those qualities; you and I are just fiddling at the margins.
FOr some reason I’m strangely drawn to the Powerline blog at the moment, which is how I came up with this:
…he’s far from the only leftist to have compared Bush to Hitler — for example, moveon.org found merit in two such amateur campaign ads.
This is in reference to a piece by a university professor comparing Bush to Hitler. Impressively ‘The Deacon’ doesn’t just distort in this post, he actually lies. MoveOn.org didn’t ‘find merit’ in the ads; they left space open for people to submit any ad they wanted, and when the unpleasant nature of the ads was discovered (and as bad as I believe Bush to be, he isn’t close to being Hitler) they took them down. So there’s the lie, what about the distortion?
Well, the article points out that the treatment of prisoners in places like Abu Ghraib is unpleasant, but not lethal. That may be true, but we don’t know; we don’t even know how many prisoners there are at Gitmo, so how could we know if any of them died? The other distortion, or perhaps hypocrisy would be a better word, is that the author points out this behavior as being not just a loony-left thing, but relatively mainstream on the left. That’s a distortion because it depends on your definition of ‘left’ (there are people on the left who think Bush=Hitler, but that almost in itself defines them as not being mainstream left), and it’s hypocritical because of quotes like this from the Washington Post in 2000:
For example, retiring Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage (R-Idaho), commenting on one of Clinton’s national monument designations, said, “This president is engaging in the largest land grab since the invasion of Poland.”
Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) went a bit further a couple of weeks ago when Clinton designated Arizona’s Ironwood Forest a national monument. “I would draw a parallel to Hitler,” Shadegg said. “He eroded the will of the German people to resist evil.”
Definitions of mainstream vary, of course, but I think Republican representatives would count.
An article at Powerline complains that…well, here’s the quote:
A year and a half ago, American was said to be in the throes of a “jobless recovery.” President Bush predicted that, with his tax cuts in place, the economy would continue to grow and we would see that growth reflected in substantial net job creation.
This turned out to be the case.
A little digging around shows that in that time period employment has risen by about 161,000 per month. If we assume that ‘net job creation’ means more created than destroyed, then that seems pretty substantial. If we factor in the approximately 150,000 jobs per month needed to keep pace with rising populations, however, then the real net comes down to 11,000 per month. With around 7.7 million people unemployed, an extra 11,000 is better than nothing I guess, but it’s going to take us a little over 58 years to cut the number of unemployed in half. Now I know that technically that means this isn’t a jobless recovery, but it’s certainly pretty close…