You don't want me to get started on the whole "stimulus" thing. It probably costs millions to send out the checks, and it's all funny money anyway, since we're into deficit spending on a grand scale. All the government has to do to get more money into the economy is to spend it: buy supplies for teachers, increase the food stamp program, reconstitute the CCC to work on our crumbling parks and infrastructure.

I'm with you, Susan. I'm always irritated when speakers conflate the Puritans, who busily persecuted other people looking for religious freedom, with the people who formed the revolution and wrote the Constitution. The far right is always talking about going back to the values of the founders. Do they mean the Puritan theocracy or do they mean people like Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, Adams and Hancock, whose religions were Deist, Deist, atheist, Unitarian and money.

I am so stoked that the next president of the US (you know, I think he'll win) actually has a command of the English language.

I completely understand *why* there can be racist connotations to saying that Obama is articulate, but whenever I've said that, I swear that I only meant that he's articulate compared to the drooling slack-jawed yokel currently in the White House.

Seriously, all partisianship aside, have we ever had a president with such a complete lack of understanding of the English language?

I'm pretty sure no.

Are republicans/conservatives embarassed by it? I'm not talking about the 30% wingnutters, just regular conservatives.

They have to be. Right? But probably won't admit it.

I loved Obama's speech, and y'all know I'm a supporter, but I have to admit that lines like this in anyone's campaign speech make me roll my eyes a little:

It's things like this that get my eyes rolling:

I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

I've heard Eisenhower was close. But they edited him a lot, so people wouldn't know.

Do they mean the Puritan theocracy or do they mean people like Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, Adams and Hancock, whose religions were Deist, Deist, atheist, Unitarian and money.

From what I've read of that crowd? Puritan theocracy, in some cases explicitly so. Ugh.

Do they mean the Puritan theocracy or do they mean people like Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, Adams and Hancock, whose religions were Deist, Deist, atheist, Unitarian and money.

Kind of off the point but Hancock will now always be John HOTcock in my mind now that Justin Theroux has played him.

I only meant that he's articulate compared to the drooling slack-jawed yokel currently in the White House.

OMG, I just realized Shrub isn't the POTUS, he's the CLETUS.

The fact that he's a faux-yokel makes it worse.

I agree that that crowd seems to yearn for a theocracy in which everything that is not compulsory is forbidden, but they say they're talking about the Constitution. I think it's rather remarkably self-centered to believe that it's going to be your religion that's running the show in a theocracy. In Massachusetts, most of them would be in the stocks.

Heh. A senior person in the firm just sent out a letter announcing his imminent departure that begins thusly:

Dear Colleagues,

I am sick of you all.

John HOTcock

It's terribly unfair of you to put that in my brain. I'm going to slip and say that at a VERY inopportune moment, I can already tell.