My father, who was a civil engineer in NYC at the time and a partner in the firm that supplied Rudy with the blueprints to the WTC (because one of the other partners was one of the engineers who designed the towers) and was involved in the post-disaster stuff tells me that Rudy's brilliance was in letting them do their job and letting them (and I'm paraphrasing Dad here) ignore regulations that would have slowed the projects down to a point where nothing could get done.

An autocrat is handy in a disaster.

I don't mean that snidely. It is a real skill and incredibly useful when the world has fallen apart. When people can't do it turmoil is amplified t glares at FEMA and Nagin and half the politicians in Lousiana

But on the other hand, dang thing needs an off switch.

Strange as it may seem to anybody who's ever taken a history class about Europe, the Holy Land, or the history of religion, you mean. The only people who get to claim that Catholics aren't Christian are the Eastern Orthodox, and that's more of a "Mooooooom! She's touching me!!" type of issue.

Look at you with all your books and history and fancyness!!!!!

Literal word of the bible, kid. And none of this idolatrous "saint" business.

I would think so, ita, see here: [link]

[link]

Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. The purpose of a splog can be to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed.

Count me in as another who thought Giuliani got 9/11 right. God, it was such a relief to see him that week. (We lived in CT at the time, so it wasn't the first time I'd encountered him or anything - I knew about the anti-ferret insanity and so forth.) I think he's a great crisis leader and a terrible most-of-the-time leader. Guess which happens more often?

Yeah, absolutely. At least SOMEone was doing SOMEthing.

From what ChiKat's told me, evangelicals have a tendency to think that Catholicism is the devil's religion and has nothing to do with their faith.

That's how schisms work. The smaller the differences in beliefs are, the more important they are. Compare all the fights that happen within a particular fandom to the ones that happen between fans of totally different shows.

Oh dear. Now I want Nutty to write the doctrinal history of Christianity as a Fandom Wank entry.

The immigration question on that quiz is very conservatively biased - every single answer included some form of "tighten border security." Hmph.

[Eta: And no surprise, it matched me with Kucinich.]

Huh. So "King James is the only proper version of the Bible" = "Buffy was a bitch to Spike"?

Compare all the fights that happen within a particular fandom to the ones that happen between fans of totally different shows.

The temptation to write a thoroughly blasphemous Christianity Fandom_Wank is overwhelming. All the atheists just read along and shrug, "I'm in it for the lulz, yo."

ETA:

Now I want Nutty to write the doctrinal history of Christianity as a Fandom Wank entry.

Let the record frighteningly show that certain great minds do think alike.