If you are so inclined…
Skippy reminds us of the vote to impeach site.
bush
Themes of Harry Potter 2
The other day I noted various Harry Potter themes that were being discussed. Today, courtesy of NZ Bear’s Blogosphere Daily News and Kevin Holtsbury I found this interesting discussion of The Politics and Personalities of Harry Potter 5. Greg, the author, in turn points to a Tony Adragna post in which Tony compares Harry to bush. Tony updates with a note that Glenn Reynolds and Betsy both make similar connections.
Reynolds, in the above linked post, takes Chris Suellentrop to task for this hammering of Harry:
Of course, Suellentrop is wrong……
What he brings to the table are personal qualities rather than talents. He’s loyal, and more importantly he inspires loyalty. And he has a clear vision of what matters. Everyone else is able to forget, or to convince themselves to ignore, the threat posed by Voldemort. Harry, on the other hand, never forgets.
Reynolds attributes these same traits to bush. And a strict reading probably supports this. In making his bush as Harry argument I wonder why he leaves out so many of the other points Suellentrop uses to bash Harry, for example:
…skates through school by taking advantage of his inherited wealth and his establishment connections.
What Harry has achieved on his own, …, stems mostly from luck and, more often, inheritance.
Harry’s other achievements can generally be chalked up to the fact that he regularly plays the role of someone’s patsy.
In fact, Harry rarely puts hard work or effort into anything.
Well, in the case of Harry Suellentrop is wrong. Harry is an actor (not in the theatrical sense) rather then an intellectual. Instead of hammering on Harry as does Suellentorp, who apparently thinks Harry’s development is at an end, I am eagerly looking ahead to see if Harry will build on his strengths, learn to work with his advisors and actually grow to a level where he might achieve his potential greatness. Oh, and we should note that Harry is never awol when the time comes to enter the fray.
This is one of the wonderful things about books: the story unfolds through the eyes of each individuals world. In contrast with the perspective presented by Tony, Glenn and Betsy how many of you also thought of the bushies as you read the book but as Voldemort and the Death Eaters?
And, since my last writing on this, Kevin Drum comments that he considers Snape the most interesting character in the book. There is interesting Snape discussion in the post’s comment thread.
Evil Canadian, Bad Soldiers
Jeffrey Kofman wrote this story and on Wednesday Drudge revisited old news identifying Kofman as both gay and canadian which to some, including Kofman, appeared to be new news:
Reached in Baghdad, the Toronto-born Mr. Kofman expressed surprise at being singled out because of his passport.
“I guess my secret is out now,” he said.
As they again use ad hominem arguments to protect themselves the bushies steamroll ahead squashing those who spoke out:
“It was the end of the world,” said one officer Thursday. “It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers.”
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don’t ever talk to the media “on the record” — that is, with your name attached — unless you’re giving the sort of chin-forward, everything’s-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
This appears pretty consistent with the bushie view that freedom of speech is ok as long as it speaks the bushie line.
Email the pres?
Forget it! I gave the new system a try. It took about 4 minutes to get to the second screen and that screen did not seem to be working. Your mileage may vary. This whole process must be part of the bushies desire to return to traditional values or some such thing and they do seem to encourage snail and fax mail:
If you are interested in commenting on other topics, or if your message is sensitive or requires personal attention, please do not use this system. Please write President Bush at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC 20502 or fax to 202-456-2461.
More details at the NYT. Via Sisyphus Shrugged who does not have a permalink to this post but it follows the one linked below.
You can still email the vicepres the traditional way at vice.president@whitehouse.gov though you may just want to impeach him after reading this from Sisyphus Shrugged.
The Deficit
The bushies would like to blame the economy. There are some other opininions though. For instance, a detailed analysis by The Angry Bear (via Thinking it Through) suggests:
Of the 80% of the deficit not related to terrorism, roughly 1/3 of the blame goes to increased spending and 2/3 to the Bush tax cuts
Max Sawicky isn’t that concerned with the size of the deficit:
Today’s deficit number is a yawn for we sad few who take the trouble to follow this. More annoying is what the Bushies are saying.
Quoth new OMB Director and reputed whiz kid Josh Bolten: “Restoring a balanced budget is an important priority for this administration,” he said, “but a balanced budget is not a higher priority than winning the global war on terror, protecting the American homeland, or restoring economic growth and job creation.”
Only trouble is, the war cost for FY2003 is only $90 billion, and the DoD increase is $80 billion. The rest is due to you know what.
but does think the composition of the deficit should be changed:
The real problem with the deficit for this and next year is composition. Given the opportunity, I wouldn’t reduce it a penny. Instead I would redirect the tax cuts to the working class, reserving a nice chunk of change for aid to state and local governments. This sort of tax cut could be designed to limit long-term deficit effects. The latter are the real problem, insofar as there is one. Now is a clear case where the distribution of the tax burden has an urgent macroeconomic policy significance.
Otherwise the Democrats’ harping on this has limited, if non-zero, value. Given the podium, I would emphasize the jobs gap, the holes in the Medicare drug benefit, children left behind by the tax cuts, and the potential problems with Medicare financing.
Kevin Drum agrees that the real problem is in the future:
By 2007 the economy should be booming and the government should be planning to run modest surpluses to cool things down a bit. Instead, it’s deficits forever, because seemingly nobody in this administration cares a whit about anything beyond the next election.
Good or bad the deficits will be used mercilessly to hammer bush and this along with the administrations repeated fabrication of reality will lead to a change of administration in 2004. History will judge whether this change will be good or bad.