Barely one in five Americans — 22 percent — say they believe that the insurgency is getting weaker while 24 percent believe it is strengthening. More than half — 53 percent — say resistance to U.S. and Iraqi government forces has not changed.
WP
WP
I never spent much time at the old site, but I must say at first glance (and a little poke here and there) I like the new Democratic Party website.
I like the organization, the layout, the blog feature. I don’t know if previously there were areas of “local”, “national”, and “people/communities” but all excellent in my opinion. Throw in a top navigation bar items of “action” and “agenda”, and I think it’s a very clean, effective presentation.
Must.Decontaminate.Self
I snuck a peek at the RNC site, and our site is better than their site :p
I like it too.
Whoa. And this is on the front page!
Nearly four years after Osama bin Laden murdered nearly 3,000 Americans in the September 11 attacks, President Bush has abandoned his promise to get the terrorist leader “dead or alive.”
A little shot back at Rove, perhaps?
The front-paged call to “Tell President Bush: Get Osama Bin Laden Now” is outstanding — as long as it doesn’t get stale, it could be a great rallying/action area.
The RNC will (for now) have their “Talking Points”, which have become a caricature for those who pay attention to the parroting of topics through the course of a weekly news cycle on the RWCM.
The DNC can respond through grassroots action.
Barely one in five Americans knows how to read past a first grade level…
Pax
http://www.americanliteracy.com/literacy_figures.htm
Worse than that.
That makes me want to cry..and a good indicator of how/why the country’s status as number one in so many areas(technology, medicine, etc)is going downhill along with no money being funded for so many programs.
The statement was “Barely one in five Americans knows how to read past a first grade level…” This survey shows that only one in five Americans reads at that level.
Still, I think this shows a great potential for progressives. Literacy has strong progressive tendencies. It increases your ability to make complex connections, see inter-relationships, understand complex causality, understand and learn from multiple points of view. Of course by itself it won’t make you more progressive, but it enhances the potential for developing a more robust progressive politics. So it makes very good sense for progressives to organize politically to enhance the level of American literacy.
An ironic note: Jonathan Kozol’s classic, Illiterate America, is apparently out of print, if Amazon.com is to be believed. But their page of customer reviews shows a pretty high level of illiteracy among the reviewers.
The very definition of irony.
As for worse, I think those show it is. It means that nearly half of America isn’t literate enough to follow complex instructions or form higher-level thoughts. It means that critical thinking is probably non-existant.
True, quite a few Americans can’t read anything more complex than Nancy Drew (I’d argue with the 20% literacy rate). But this is more than literacy. This is about the thinking skills that compliment literacy that are required to FUNCTION above a first-grade level.
Barely one in five Americans — 22 percent — say they believe that the insurgency is getting weaker while 24 percent believe it is strengthening. …
More believe that the strength of the insurgency is increasing than those who believe it is decreasing. Thank goodness that people aren’t accepting the crap that Cheney (and others) have been spewing. Hopefully this will apply accross the board to other issues.
I couldn’t figure it out at first.
The thin column in the centre with lots of margin
on the sides was similar to TalkingPointsMemo whose
Josh Marshall complimented Kos on the redesign.
Today, while reading comments justifying the bombing
of Afghanistan, it dawned on me. DKos has a pro-military
look. The letter on the logo echo military stencils
used for labelling. The stars everywhere echo military
decoration.
As per Markos’ statement (over the weekend, I believe), the military look is intentional as we are currently at war. And it’s edgy.
Yup. He explains some of that here and here. Here’s the part about the militaristic look:
Like I said before, the narrow fixed width can be solved with a stylesheet change. It’ll happen at some point in the near future. I also plan on having a a column switcher to flip the ad and navigation/diaries column around. I grayed up the site a hint to cut down on the excessive white. I toyed a tiny bit with line spacing, but that’s the kind of thing you’ll get used to. There were many who had trouble reading the last version of the site, and it seems that crowd is satiated (judging by my emails and several comments).
Will everyone be happy? Of course not. There’s too damn many of you for that to happen. And I won’t water down to the lowest common denominator. I like having an edge. Believe it or not, the old design was once considered “edgy” by many. I consider edginess to be a secret to this site’s success.
And to me that’s exactly the wrong Toby Keith type of mindset-that we’re at war so…if anything I would think a very aggressive pro-peace design(that would have been truly edgy) would have been better for a new look. But I guess I’m one of those low common denominator people.
“We are at war” is White House talk. It is more like:
“we are occupying two countries, two hostile countries as it turns out.”
Daily Kos is a lot of things but it sure is not edgy.
Military decor is traditional not ‘avant garde.’
But in the end it’s the pro-war comments that bother me.
Gang of Four
(This is edgy…20+ years later)
Time with my girl I spent it well
I had to be strong for my woman
(you must be joking, o man you must be joking)
She needed to be protected
The good life was so elusive
Handouts, they got me down
I had to regain my self-respect
So I got into camouflage
The girls they love to see you shoot
I love a man in a uniform
I love a man in a uniform
I love a man in a uniform
I love a man in a uniform
To have ambitions was my ambition
But I had nothing to show for my dreams
Time with my girl I spent it well
(you must be joking, o man you must be joking)
The good life was so elusive
Handouts, they got me down
I had to regain my confidence
So I got into camouflage
The girls they love to see you shoot
I love a man in a uniform
I love a man in a uniform
I love a man in a uniform
I love a man in a uniform
I need an order
(shoot, shoot)
I need an order
(shoot, shoot)
I need an order
(shoot, shoot)
I need an order
(shoot, shoot)
To have ambition
Was my ambition
Time with my girl I spent it well
(you must be joking, o man you must be joking)
The girls they love to see you shoot
The girls they love to see you shoot
I love a man in a uniform
I love a man in a uniform
(they love to see you shoot)
I love a man in a uniform
The girls they love to see you shoot
I love a man in a uniform
(they love to see you shoot)
The girls they love to see you shoot
I love a man in a uniform
(they love a… they love a… they love a…)
(they love to see you shoot)
The girls they love to see you shoot
(bang bang you’re dead)
I love a man in a uniform
(they love a… they love a… they love a… bang bang)
(they love to see you shoot)
The girls they love to see you shoot
I love a man in a uniform
(they love a… they love a… they love a… bang bang)
(they love to see you shoot)
The girls they love to see you shoot
(bang bang you’re dead)
I love a man in a uniform
(they love a… they love a… they love a… bang bang)
(they love to see you shoot)
The girls they love to see you shoot
(bang bang you’re dead)
(they love a… they love a… they love a…)
(I love a man in a uniform)
It is not ‘edgy’ in the context of design as Kos was
using it.
Handouts, they got me down
I had to regain my confidence
So I got into camouflage”
This verse really dates the song. People joined up to
escape the great depression of the 1930’s.
Today’s desert uniforms really are not very attractive
especially when they come knocking on your door to raid your home at midnight.
Gang of Four was a UK band. The “Depression” was Thatcher’s. Plus, the US Army wasn’t really on a hiring binge in the 1930s.
Thanks for the correction.
The verse still could describe the historical
fact that thousands of people signed up at the
end of the 1930’s Depression, 1939, to be exact,
in the British commonwealth. Poetry is ambiguous.
Plus, the US Army wasn’t really on a hiring binge in the 1930s
The USA is not the world.
That’s the second time I wrote that today.
Last time was when someone wrote that “the
world” approved of the attack on Afghanistan
by the US. When I objected, they explained
that both the Republicans and the Democrats
had approved of the attack.
Well, yes, it was my point, too, that the USA is not the world. What with it being Maggie Thatcher’s Depression and all.
And if you’re talking about camo getting to be unstylish, I simply refuse to believe that could ever happen to the French. They’d sooner die.
The US declared war on Iraq. Yes, junior declared mission accomplished a long time ago. But for all intents and purposes, the US is at war. Neither you nor i agreed to that undertaking, but it happened. The US is at war.
As for the pro-war comments, i took him as referring to the feeling that a lot of the non-braindead people have that stopping the neo-cons has become a war. Kos himself has stated openly that his site is a tool of battle against them.
Plus the fact that the US is at war with itself, of course.
And the avante-garde often is a new perspective on traditional notions. Lots of it fails, of course. But it’s not necessarily always something you’ve never seen before. Just different.
I agree that the US is at war with itself.
“We are at war” is still a White House expression.
It’s their military speak that allows them to take
away civil rights at home.
Is that like bitter chocolate? /snark
1/4 of Americans don’t understand planetary motion enough to say that the Earth revolves around the sun (some NSF study).
I wonder if there’s a correlation here somewhere?
I can imagine that most of them are the wingnuts of the theocratic reichwing religious right, that still believes the earth is flat.
Benjamin Franklin spins in his grave…
“Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.”
LINK:
http://psstpsstpsst.blogspot.com/2005/06/unleashing-resistance.html
“Liberty” is also a concept George W. Bush favors. He said “liberty” fifteen times in his 2005 inaugural speech, second only to his 25 mentions of “freedom.” Bush didn’t specifically advocate the murder, or even the restraint, of the state. On the other hand, perhaps he did.
The way ahead is clear. We should promote our Great Leader’s love of liberty and resist, resist, resist!
You have been reading excerpts from Unleashing the Resistance, by retired USAF lieutenant colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who spent her final four and a half years in uniform working at the Pentagon. For more information, see the original article: lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski113.html. To read more from Karen Kwiatkowski, please visit this page: lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski-arch.html.
The death of the actor John Fiedler, who was the voice of Piglet in Disney’s Winnie the Pooh films.
Some of you might remember him better from the original Star Trek series.
He played the magistrate Hengist in the episode, “Wolf in the Fold,” who was possessed by Jack the Ripper.
“Redjac, Redjac, Redjac! Ahhh…hahahahahahahah!” His voice possessed the computer, too before he was vanquished.
Fiedler always played nebbish guys who was always found to have still waters running deep within.
Also the death of ventriloquist, inventor and thinker Paul Winchell, who voiced Knucklehead Smiff and Jerry Mahoney, and in later years, created one of the first artificial hearts, supported the Tilapia project, and voiced Gargamel on The Smurfs.
Thanks, Winchell was also Tigger.
I just noticed a typo in the CSS for the site. In style.css, for body, you have:
font-family: verdana, gerogia, arial, sans-serif;
I’m trying to track down what is causing certain text to look so crappy all of a sudden – anything bold looks like junk. This is a new install of fedora core 4, viewing in mozilla 1.7.8. The only font prefs i’ve changed is to set proportional to 14px and min size to 12.
Oh wait – i just rememberd i installed the microsoft core fonts RPM today for mplayer. I’ll uninstall and re-load the browser before doing anything else.
I’ll be just a moment.
So, problem’s on my end. No worries.
Except that typo, of course.
CBC Documentary, Newsworld’s “The Passionate Eye”
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO BUSH
Sunday October 17, 2004 at 10pm ET/PT (2 hours)
Repeating Friday October 22 at 10pm ET/PT
Repeating Monday November 1 at pm ET/PT
Repeating Sunday July 3, 2005 at 10pm ET/PT
Who are the Bushes? Apparently, they’re the “quiet dynasty” of modern America-but in reality, their “dynasty” is one of inconceivable family secrets, painstakingly concealed. The current president’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, made his fortune by managing Nazi companies after Hitler seized power. In 1942, his companies were confiscated for collaboration with the enemy. George Bush Sr., president from 1988 to 1992, armed and financed Saddam Hussein. He approved the shipping of germ warfare strains to Iraq, enabling the country to launch a chemical attack against Iranian troops and the Kurdish population.
The World According to Bush aims to show how the Bushes, father and son, have not only dined with the devil, but have often invited themselves to his table. The bin Ladens and the Bushes have been longtime business partners, and the family of the future terrorist chief indirectly financed George W. Bush’s political career. This unnatural alliance has continued since the Sept. 11 attacks: Bush Sr. is a top official in one of the biggest private investment funds in the USA, Carlyle, a group that has invested heavily in the arms industry. The Bradley tanks and the missiles used in the latest war against Iraq are made by firms controlled by Carlyle… and the bin Ladens. For the latter are Bush’s associates within this investment fund.
Much of The World According to Bush takes the form of one-on-one interviews and includes Bush’s speech writer David Frum; former weapons inspectors Hans Blix and David Kay; presidential adviser Richard Perle; Secretary of State Colin Powell; former CIA director James Woolsey; and former UN secretary-general Javier Perez de Cuellar.