h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Drudge, like FoxNews, is one-sided about 98.6% of the time.

79.4% of statistics are made up on the spot!

that statistic has a +20.6/-79.4% margin of error.

And I'm 99.9% right 89.65% of the time!

open-ended statements are a nice way to say things 139% of the time with a margin of plus or minus 38.4%

Mock not. These are the kinds of statistics that win elections.

Noggin

Only 17.4% of the time!

Clark has endorsed Kerry. One talking head said he wants to be Secretary of State.

Does anyone except arch conservatives take Drudge seriously? I mean they are going to vote Republican anyway. He's preaching to the choir.

I have as little to do with anything rightwing as possible.

When one's lesson is unpopular to the populace in general, sometimes one has to preach to the choir...

I've very rarely read anything on Drudge that I considered seriously. I tend to look upon it as the comic relief of the news world - only slightly more so than Fox.

Seriously, though, I think that all media is biased one way or the other. They just picked sides and we need to at least pay a little attention to it all to find the middle ground which is more than likely the truth.

Media is inherently biased because all people are inherently ideological.

Ideology is the tool by which human beings filter information, everybody does this and it is unavoidable. Those of us who know we are doing it can compensate for that fact... but here is the trick... we still do it.

The media is just an exstention of this once we are used to our ideological filter we like to seek out news sources which already to a greater or lesser degree conform to it. Hence news media is partial on way or another... heck even the Beeb follows a predominantly centre/midly centre left concensus.

Do we have to "like" a candidate in order to deem him or her able to be president? Dubya, is, I hear, eminently likeable. But he's still a disaster as president.

Regarding consistency of voting record: I believe that a politician who never changes his vote, regardless of evolving or changing circumstances, is a zealot and greatly to be feared. The world and its concerns are changing ever more rapidly, and I deem adaptability to be a virtue in these latter times, so long as I can understand the philosophical premise of the candidate in charting his course. The current administration is a paradigm of rigid, non-adaptive thinking.

Except for the matter of getting elected, of course, which they've been working on since Bush took office. There have been all manner of "events" like having Bush strut down the runway of a carrier ship in a flight suit, which were intended as campaign material for this election. When the mission turned out to be un-accomplished, they scrubbed that.

Getting back to my first point, in my opinion like-ability is a great red herring; there are politicians I have met who I have found unctious or insincere or who got to my gut in some way, but who have turned out to be very good at their job, precisely because those qualities that repelled me were what got the job done.

If you're going to do high politics, the kind that take you to Washington D.C., you are going to have to shake hands with a lot of fifty-cent devils in order to get there. You have to do that if you even want to get anything accomplished at the village level. So insisting on purity of character is, imo, misplaced idealism.

The politican who won't compromise is not interested in keeping things working -- don't forget what became of Gingrich, who shut the government down because he thought he had the political clout to do so. Clinton's genius lay in his being able to sit down with hogs and keep grinning even with sh*t in his teeth if it meant he could inch the issue forward.

Consider what a Democratic president is going to find on the desk when he walks into the Oval Office. Do you think it will be High Ideals Day?? Of course not. He'll have to raise taxes -- what choice have the neo-Cons left him? He'll be years just starting to undo the damage that has been done to our international relationships. He'll be years undoing the legislative and actual damage that has been done to our environment. He'll be fighting (most likely) a partisan Congress. And that all presupposes he can give lots of time to those matters, that North Korea won't pop the cork or that Iran won't invade Iraq because the latter has collapsed into Somalia-hood.

And the world will still be rapidly changing as he tries to chart his course. It won't be the time for mapping the way to the moral high ground. It will be toppingly hard enough just to figure out what's going on.

Lil, I couldn't agree more. It's frightening when you consider how long it will take us to recover from 4 years of Dubya. Imagine where we'll be after 8 years of him.

The arch Republicans who are so concerned with a candidates moral character and who try to impose Fundamentalist Christianity on the rest of the world apparently don't understand that maliciously setting out to ruin a person's reputation is as bad or worse that what they're accusing the other guy of. Especially since they are often twisting the facts to make their point. Talk about hypocrisy.

Did I ever mention that the smellfungus is a breast-beating dyed in the wool Republican?

"Lil, I couldn't agree more. It's frightening when you consider how
long it will take us to recover from 4 years of Dubya. Imagine where we'll be after 8 years of him."

Remember Presidents tend to be more conservative (small c) during their first term of office. In the second when they do not have to face re-election they can be much more radical.

I would *hate* to see a RADICAL shrub.

It just doesn't bear thinking about.

Of course, there is always the increase of words in the American language that would happen in a second term. We'd need a whole new dictionary!

*mutters something about "Hispanically speaking" under her breath and sips *

I read somwhere that in 25 years more people will speak Spanish than English in the states

Given the propencity for Spanish classes and border jumping - can we tell I live in the beautiful state of Texas? - that wouldn't surprise me in the least.

And speaking of Texas, slightly off subject, it snowed here last night. I'm hoping this isn't a sign of "heck" freezing over and four more years of Shrub...

With any luck it'll be taken as a sign that God is angry with Shrub and that burning bushes are "a good thing."

Noggin

What, you saw snowflakes? Did they stick on the ground? Lol.

It is very true the most presidents tend to be rather conservative in their first term. I am also very afraid of what the Shrub would do were he re-elected.

We got two inches, thank you very much.