Posts by giovanni tiso
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This is my favourite comment. Since we seem to have formed the habit of posting whole.
Sorry, it's a fail. It started with a fine premise in paragraph one, read PJ O'Rourke if you care to continue that line of argument. But the rest is pure, unadulterated tosh.
My favourite bits:
If a liberal believes in something no human has yet been able to prove or disprove definitively (man-made global warming) he’s a hero. But if a conservative believes in something that no one’s yet been able to prove or disprove definitively (the ultimate origins of life on Earth), they’re slobbering morons who’d cast us back into the Dark Ages.
The science of global warming = the science of creationism. Brilliance.
And even more interesting, this is the same crowd that on the one hand believes George Bush is a virtual moron while on the other asserting that he’s managed to manipulate everything from the collapse of the WTC to the voting machines in Ohio without so much as leaving a trace.
Does anybody on the left believe that Bush was behind the 9/11?
And to add insult to injury, I am repeatedly told that if I don’t buy into this near-deification of a middle-aged underachiever
Middle-aged underachiever? Go jump into lake superior, dude.
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The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person
I thought I knew that about Sullivan too, before he played chinese whispers in the Trig grandma fiasco. But yes, it's not an isolated incident. Quite a few people who used to despise his politics but respect the man, now despise both. You could pinpoint and replay in slow-mo the exact moment in which Jon Stewart came to that particular conclusion, after he asked McCain to come down against the "Obama is Hamas' candidate" smear. Tomasky is another. All liberal commentators, to be sure, and it's not as if he could count on their vote to begin with. Which is way the political calculation, sadly, makes sense.
What I find even more inexcusable than the Rovian tactics (and btw, the Clintons went there too, didn't they?) is the Palin pick - that's just beyond irresponsible.
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You'd have to hope that a prospective VP - and possible future President - would be willing to face up to an open press conference where people got to ask questions, including the hard ones.
You know what this reminds me of, he said shuddering? Berlusconi's rise to power. He descended onto politics out of the blue, forming a new party shortly before a general election, when the right was in total disarray. He called it Forza Italia (Go Italy!), for chrissakes. He put together a list made up of his employees and friends. He behaved outrageously, making sure among other things that he would never be interviewed except by friendly reporters on his own television stations. From the time of the announcement to the date of the election, the left talked about nothing else except Berlusconi's lack of qualifications (and many, many disqualifications). And of course they lost, he romped in, going from absolutely zero executive experience to the prime ministership.
I think Angus as a point, insofar as behaving outrageously - by not going to the sunday morning shows or to Larry King, for starters - may not cost Palin much with the low-information voters that the campaign is trying to reach through her. If what we hear about the state of the media in small American towns is true, these people would be more likely to get their news in soundbite form or through a screaming talkback host. Or at church on Sundays. Eschewing the traditional media vetting is exactly what Palin should do right now, because it keeps her mistique alive - and we know at this point she has an approval rating between Lady Diana and Jesus. So why change anything? She's a soap opera, she's American Idol, not a politician. And she doesn't need to be a politician right now, just pull McCain back into the election by appealing to people who might have not bothered to vote, or who barely know who McCain and Obama are. We don't know quite yet how big this Palin demographic is, nor how many voters she's pushing into Obama's camp. But I think there can be little doubt that her and the campaign know exactly what they're doing.
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Fantastic, people still have governesses.
Our dear Sarah is more of a literary device than an actual person, but yeah, plenty of people have governesses these days. Except they call them nannies, I believe.
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Palin also routinely does government business from a Yahoo address, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, rather than her secure official state e-mail address, according to documents already made public.
Now I know why Sarah, our governess, couldn't get her preferred email address.
You saw the RNC....the only other places I can recall (putting up my Godwin barrier) that sort of nationalistic country-name chanting fervour was in the fascist states of the 30s, North Korea, BNP meetings in the UK and sports matches.
Except the chant of drill, drill, drill, that was more reminiscent of a Marx Brothers flick.
To be fair, though, people keep forgetting the jingoistic horror-fest that was the DNC convention of four years ago.
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That is just so silly.
Gotcha. Yes, the video I saw yesterday was a crucial couple of seconds short.
We'll file it under "the guy can't catch a break".
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Meh... spent most of Election Night '05 at a friend's birthday party. Can't say it was an evening ill spent.
We have an inordinately young family, our version of painting the town red at the moment is a trip to the mailbox. And she can't booze it up on account of the breastfeeding. I wouldn't count on my fabulousness alone to salvage the evening.
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And don't try and book a hall in Auckland on Saturday, November 8. You won't get one. For that is the date of the general election.
Damn. It's my partner's birthday. She's not going to be happy. Unless things go unexpectedly well, of course. Then I wouldn't even need to buy her a present. Say, you don't have the inside scoop of who's going to win, do you?
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Excuse me, Giovanni?
You have to admit that Obama saying "my Muslim faith" is a pretty unlikely slip of the tongue, unless the secret muslim chatter has got to him somehow. The lipstick on a pig is just bs, of course, but he deserves some punishment for resorting to the cliche (still, the man can't win, it seems: he scratches his cheek, he was giving Clinton the finger; he greets his wife, it was a terrorist fist jab; he alludes to the futility of porcine cosmetics... ah, screw it).
Hard to be combative against a woman for Obama, he has been there before, plus attacking the VP nominee is beneath him. I think he needs to change the subject from Palin. If he has a big endorsment up his sleeve (Powell?) now it'd be just the time.
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that's some great customer service
I'm sorry, y'all, but my bad customer service story cannot be beat.
My dad died suddnely when I was over here, in 1999. My partner and I were lucky enough to find two tickets to Italy via LA and Frankfurt that day (that's the good part - very helpful people there) and were treated in a lovely manner on the plane (another good part - thank you, crew members). But in LA it turned out that in the rush they hadn't printed the page of the ticket with the LA to Frankfurt flight, and the local Air New Zealand staff was determined not to let us on the flight.
Note that we had paid proof of the fare paid, and that it's not as if you can even buy tickets for a trip like that without the middle bit. Unfortunately it was Saturday night by that point in New Zealand and there was nobody they could contact for confirmation. So we were trapped in the little, horrid transit lounge, and they were boarding the plane, and they wouldn't listen to any sort of argument - threatened to have me restrained in fact (to be fair, the most - er - volatile elements of my heritage had come to the surface by then). Finally some sort of supervisor arrived and let us on board, in what could only be described as the very nick of time.
Had some nice experiences on Air New Zealand since, but not enough to make up for that particular time.