Your generous
donations help keep
this site running.
Visa/MC/PayPal accepted.
We speak today, instead, on the subject of verbizing. Verbizing, for those who have never heard the term, is the process of turning innocent nouns into verbs. This verbizing interlude is brought to you today by the trademark: "Etch A Sketch."
Which brings us back to John Quincy Adams. In 1825, newly-installed in the White House, Adams bought a billiard table for $50 (to liven the place up a bit, one assumes). He used his own money for this purchase, and one would think it wasn't really all that big a deal. One would be wrong.
There's an element to American political campaigns which everyone hates and almost everyone loves to denounce: the negative campaign advertisement. From now until November, many will fulminate against the "coarsening" of our political culture these ads supposedly usher in, and many will call for Mitt Romney and Barack Obama (and all the candidates further down the ballot) to renounce negative campaign advertising -- to absolutely no avail. The mudslinging will continue apace right up until Election Day, for one very simple reason: such ads work. They are effective. Which means -- especially for those living in "battleground" states -- that the only way to avoid the onslaught of political negativity will be to stop watching television altogether, until the election is safely over.
To put it another way: don't expect things to get better any time soon. Campaign season 2012 is off to an insanity-laced start, folks! No wonder so many across this great nation have decided that today would be a good day to celebrate tetrahydrocannabinol instead. You can see their point... through the billowing clouds of smoke.
So I say, in defense of hookers everywhere, let's legalize prostitution in the nation's capital. The kind that involves sex, I mean. Because the other kind is not only legal, it is actually how we create our laws. And if we as a nation are fine with that, I don't see why we should have a problem with bringing Hooker's Army back to the banks of the Potomac.
OK, anyone still left reading? Here we go. Every year, Congress is supposed to pass a federal budget. This budget "pie" is sliced up between all the different federal agencies, for all the things the federal government does. The House of Representatives and the Senate (and the politicians within), haggle and struggle over what dollars should go where.
Last quarter, Google made $2.9 billion in profit (not gross earnings, but actual profit). If they keep this pace up all year, they will earn $11.6 billion for the year. Good for them, and good for their stockholders.
As we enter the general election season, the political punditry will (once again) trot out many shallow and trite phrases and concepts to be consumed as easily-digestible mental pap for their audiences. It is, after all the silly season. I don't even exclude myself -- I'll probably oversimplify a few things from now until Election Day, if the past is any prologue. But I just wanted to address the worst of these inane and facile statements right here at the beginning of the race: the false dichotomy that "this election will either be a choice or a referendum." Mostly because I'm already sick of hearing such tripe, and it is only April.
The big political distraction at the end of the week was a reopening of what used to be called the "Mommy Wars," by Democratic insider Hilary Rosen. This came about largely because the political chattering class was bored, now that their GOP nomination horserace is all-but-officially over, and they needed a new toy to blow up with metaphorical firecrackers. Of course, they leapt at the chance to do so with all the fervor of a nine-year-old with a pocketful of Black Cats and his sister's Barbie doll, heading into the woods for some pyromaniacal fun.
President Barack Obama is using the week before income taxes are due to make a full-court press for the vote next week in the Senate on the so-called "Buffett Rule" (which would force people making a million bucks a year to pay higher taxes than their secretaries). Today, he mentioned what could turn out to be the biggest weapon in this fight, and made a joke about what it should be called instead. Obama shouldn't be treating it as a joke, though. He should take his own advice and publicly rename the idea the "Reagan Rule" -- and then run a television ad explaining why to the country.