Nor should anyone expect to be appointed U.S. senator on the grounds of being the daughter of a revered President. We have at least learned that the offspring of Presidents don’t necessarily make good politicians themselves.
Haha yes. And in 37signals land, they’re somehow still a startup, you only have to work 32 hours per week to be successful, multiple anecdotes = data, and feelings trump reality.
More worrying still, there are vicious enemies and rogue states in increasing positions of influence throughout the world (one of the episodes that most condemned the Republican campaign was its attempt to slander Sen. Joe Biden for his candid attempt to point this out), yet many Obama voters appear to believe that the mere charm and aspect of their new president will act as an emollient influence on these unwelcome facts and these hostile forces. I can’t make myself perform this act of faith, and I won’t put up with any innuendo about my inability to do so.
This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just “people of faith” but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.
[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he’d rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn’t think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.
John McCain wanted to have 10 of these?
Um, you know what? I’m proud Barack Obama’s running for president. You know? If it was Flavor Flav, would I be proud? No. I don’t support Barack Obama because he’s black.
In a mysterious and inexorable process that seems to transform all that is low culture into something high, permanent ink markings began creeping toward the traditional no-go zones for all kinds of people, past collar and cuffs, those twin lines of clothed demarcation that even now some tattoo artists are reluctant to cross.
The most important thing to emerge from the discussion is the larger role functional programming will play. It seems like a safe bet. This year has seen the explosion of interest and creation of functional languages such as Apple OS X’s Nu, Java’s JVM using Scala and Microsoft Research’s .Net language F#.
It’s unfair to claim that George W. Bush is the worst president of all time. He’s merely the fifth worst. In the White House Hall of Shame, Bush comes behind four other Oval Officers whose policies were even more disastrous: James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and James Madison.