Sam: Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don’t need little changes. We need gigantic revolutionary changes. Schools should be palaces. Competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be getting six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge for its citizens, just like national defense. That is my position. I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet.
And my sister would like me to add – GO PHILS!
My sister gave me the idea to post a West Wing Quote of the Day during the remaining days of this crazy election. She is doing all the legwork and providing the quotes; I am simply the conduit for providing you with excessively idealistic, occasionally hilarious snippets. Frankly, we all could use some excessive idealism and occasional laughter right now.
Our hope is to remind you that regardless of your personal feelings, regardless of your political views, we all live in this country together. Together, we have the power lift each other up.
I also hope you’re reminded that Rob Lowe is completely smoking hot.
Josh: Tell me democracy doesn’t have a sense of humor. We sit here, we drink this beer out here on the stoop, in violation of about 47 city ordinances. I don’t know, Toby, it’s election night. What do you say about a government that goes out of its way to protect even citizens that try to destroy it?
Toby: God bless America.
In our current economy, it seems that everyone is revisiting their priorities in order to save some extra cash For the lucky ones, it’s as simple as eating out less, cutting down on extraneous shopping trips, taking lunch to work, going six weeks between haircuts instead of four, or skipping vacation this year.
However, some families have been forced to give up their pets because they can no longer afford them.
Ask anyone currently involved in pet rescue, and they’ll tell you all about the huge, recent upswing in the number of inquiries. The vast majority of those calling are in tough situations, distraught at the idea of having to give up their pets, but comforted at the thought of a new, happy, home for their furry family member.
Even more distressing are the stories of dogs and cats left to fend for themselves in foreclosed homes and abandoned apartments, some with no food or water.
If you’re thinking of adding a pet to your household in the near future, please consider adopting or fostering. If you’ve got some spare cash lying about, consider dropping off a bag of food at your local shelter or making a donation, however small. If you don’t have a local shelter to donate to, I’ll gladly pimp out the organization that saved Gus from certain death by neglect at the hands of an evil puppy mill.
If you find yourself in a situation where you can no longer care for your buddy, please, please, please contact a local rescue organization or shelter for help.
It’s been a while.
I intentionally planned to keep my blogging mouth shut until after this election, because I’ve been so angry and so nervous and so frustrated with the American political machine that I didn’t trust myself to say things that weren’t vitriolic and reactionary and stupid.
Somehow, poking fun at the minutae of my daily life seemed even less relevant in the midst of tanking markets and a devisive election.
But here I am. What pushed me over the edge?
Sarah Palin.
I resented the notion broached upon her nomination – that one woman is as good as another, that Hillary voters will fall in lockstep behind her because they wouldn’t care about or even notice the difference; that women would be happy to sacrifice their ideals at the altar of simple gender ascendancy. I’m still not convinced that she’s anything more than a poorly-thought-out stunt casting decision designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, quickly raise ratings, and quietly fall off the radar. If she’s not bothered by this, I’ll gladly be offended on her behalf.
Though Sarah Palin and I agree or virtually nothing, she’s entitled to her beliefs, I’m entitled to mine. I can’t begrudge her that. I’m as liberal as one can be, but even I wished her some success, even I wanted to see her take hits without flinching, hang with the big boys, deliver some knockout punches. At the very least, I thought, in ten or twenty or thirty years, we’ll be able to tell our daughters and granddaughters about the day that a woman was chosen again to run for one of the highest offices in the land. We could tell them we saw a woman being treated as an equal on the highest political stage, even if it was a woman that we some of us could never, ever vote for.
Whether or not Sarah Palin wanted to be a symbol is irrelevant. She is one. Whether or not Sarah Palin wants to set precedent is irrelevant. She’s setting them. I’m sick over the fact that the message she’s sending is successful political women should simper and wink and deliver cute, spoon-fed scripted, hokey one-liners. I wanted her opponent to slam her in the debate, and I wanted her to fight back even harder. Instead, we got shout-outs to elementary schools and hockey moms and lipstick.
She has failed to realize that, as a female candidate, there are people who expect her to fail, to be frivolous, to be a foolish stereotype of a woman. I don’t think Sarah Palin is necessarily any of those things, but perception is everything. She has failed to realize that the remedy for not being taken seriously is to be even more serious that you thought possible. In order to be an attack dog, you have to attack harder, faster, stronger, than any of your male compatriots. To be viewed as equal to the men sharing her stage, she had to be better than them.
There are plenty of woman in politics on both sides of the aisle who do everything I’ve enumerated, but few get the chance to do so with such an enormous scope. Sarah Palin had the opportunity to raise the bar.
Instead, she lowered it.
