Sherry Chandler » 2006 » June » 22
If you want to raise the minimum wage, your best bet seems to be a senator who is either an Aquarius or a Scorpio. Avoid Virgos.
And why would the Washington Post break down a vote by astrological sign?
Maybe they miss the Reagan years.
Link from War and Piece.
This post was written by sherry
From yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle:
AT&T has issued an updated privacy policy that takes effect Friday. The changes are significant because they appear to give the telecom giant more latitude when it comes to sharing customers’ personal data with government officials.
The new policy says that AT&T — not customers — owns customers’ confidential info and can use it “to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.”
The policy also indicates that AT&T will track the viewing habits of customers of its new video service — something that cable and satellite providers are prohibited from doing.
Moreover, AT&T (formerly known as SBC) is requiring customers to agree to its updated privacy policy as a condition for service — a new move that legal experts say will reduce customers’ recourse for any future data sharing with government authorities or others.
The company’s policy overhaul follows recent reports that AT&T was one of several leading telecom providers that allowed the National Security Agency warrantless access to its voice and data networks as part of the Bush administration’s war on terror.
Sez Have Coffee Will Write, where I found the link:
And now that [AT&T] has completed the resurection of Ma Bell with the reabsorbtion of Bell South, the bitch is back and she’s kickin’ ass and takin’ names.
Do we really want the telephone companies in control of the internet?
This post was written by sherry
Radio Open Source is featuring this quote from Jeff Nelson, editor of the newly published Encyclopedia of American Conservatism:
Really one of the big differences in contemporary conservatism as it has developed in America is the increasing polarization of the conservative movement. Sort of almost devolving from ideas and discourse and debate to where it’s an ideological crusade. [Conservatism] has always been a way of life, a habit of thinking, with certain fundamental perspectives among them, like the importance of the transcendent or religions, government operating best at the localist level and being the least obstructive…[But] we’ve become more a shouting class than a thinking class.
The Open Source consersation that airs tonight will ask Jeff Nelson and others these questions: “How do the ideological roots differ from the contemporary political manifestations? And what is its future direction? ”
Currently available for download: America’s Dirty Elections and Steal This Election.
This post was written by sherry
Two things, then, are essential to satire; one is wit or humor founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd, the other is an object of attack. Attack without humor, or pure denunciation, forms one of the boundaries of satire. It is a very hazy boundary, because invective is one of the most readable forms of literary art, just as panegyric is one of the dullest. It is an established datum of literature that we like hearing people cursed and are bored with hearing them praised, and almost any denunciation, if vigorous enough, is followed by a reader with the kind of pleasure that soon breaks into a smile.
…
For society to exist at all there must be a delegation of prestige and influence to organized groups such as the church, the army, the professions and the government, all of which consist of individuals given more than individual power bythe institutions to which they belong. If a satirist presents, say, a clergyman as a fool or hypocrite, he is, qua satirist, attacking neither a man nor a church. The former has no literary or hypothetical point, and the latter carries him outside the range of satire. He is attacking an evil man protected by his church, and such a man is a gigantic monster: monstrous because not what he should be, gigantic because protected by his position and by the prestige of good clergymen. The cowl might make the monk if it were not for satire.
—Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
This post was written by sherry
