Waiter: "Won ton?"
Patron: "Not now."
Get it? Thanks Tom W.


OLD EUROPE AND OLD AMERICA

Cheney may have gotten hold of a pretty good idea. Being from the old America, he could recognize the "old Europe", as he called it. Yes—Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, all that bunch, are old America with all that old time thinking. Isn't it time, we moved on to a new America, an America so just, so free and so humble that all nations would be drawn to become just like us? A nation in which, for the first time in history, no one is left behind? We could teach by example rather than by force. Let's cast off old America, the old ways, the old crowd, the old ways of empire and manifest destiny and social injustice, and enter fully into the 21st Century. Let's build a wholly new America!


CHARITY TERRORISTS

I don’t know if you’ve thought of it but...

As the American government becomes ever more efficient at stopping small revolutionary groups (some call them terrorists), ferreting them out of mountainous regions, out of homes and cities with urban tactics, spying on them from high in the sky and eavesdropping easily on their communications, our own chances to rebel against our government, if it becomes tyrannous, decline apace.

Don’t know if you’ve thought of it but...

Christians love to flaunt their charitable work and claim that liberals have no charitable tendencies. Wrong again. On the one hand, most religious charity seeks to use my tax dollars and someone else’s personal misfortune as an opportunity to preach religion at them, whereas all of my impulses over the last 45 years have aimed to create a social contract between us all, an equitable social system which is blind to religious, ethnic, gender, age and racial differences. My liberal impulse was to create a safety net that would be discrimination free and which would guarantee that any citizen who falls on hard times would deserve help until he or she could get on their feet again. No one was to feel they were receiving charity because our safety net was supposed to be there for every American. If someone is permanently damaged, that system would be there for them for a lifetime. In my system, no one ever needs to depend on charity. Finally, since poverty and social inequities damage us all, my goal has been to make sure that everyone contributes, through taxes, to making society safe and equitable. All of my LIBERAL impulses were generated by a humanistic concern for my fellow human animals who share this earth with me. Selfish people don't like such a system.


"I never trust a man unless I've got his pecker in my pocket." —Lyndon Baines Johnson (Another Texan I loved to hate.)


Now I'm off to be a delegate at the county district caucus for the first time in my life. That GW Bush is sure one hell of a motivator.