Pull Quoting

“Conservative activists don’t want to have a conversation,” said Jennifer Crider, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “They want to disrupt.”

Hm... that sounds familiar. Maybe a bit like the liberal activists while Republicans were in power?

Can somebody actually have a conversation sometime, please?

Health Plan Opponents Make Voices Heard - NYTimes.com

In the wake of recent events

As is often the case, Dave Barry's humor column makes an important point.

You know what I miss? I miss 1960. Not the part about my face turning overnight into the world's most productive zit farm. What I miss is the way the grown-ups acted about the Kennedy-Nixon race. Like the McCain-Obama race, that was a big historic deal that aroused strong feelings in the voters. This included my parents and their friends, who were fairly evenly divided, and very passionate. They'd have these major honking arguments at their cocktail parties. But unlike today, when people wear out their upper lips sneering at those who disagree with them, the 1960s grown-ups of my memory, whoever they voted for, continued to respect each other and remain good friends.

What was their secret? Gin. On any given Saturday night they consumed enough martinis to fuel an assault helicopter. But also they were capable of understanding a concept that we seem to have lost, which is that people who disagree with you politically are not necessarily evil or stupid. My parents and their friends took it for granted that most people were fundamentally decent and wanted the best for the country. So they argued by sincerely (if loudly) trying to persuade each other. They did not argue by calling each other names, which is pointless and childish, and which constitutes I would estimate 97 percent of what passes for political debate today.

The rest of the column is good and funny, but this bit struck me as immensely poignant.

(hat tip to Doc Searls)

Dave Barry: And the winner is . . . the man with the martini | MiamiHerald.com

Today's WonderMark

Very good...

(And, oddly, the only WonderMark comic so far in which I haven't seen any 'tooltip'-style text come up when I hold my mouse over the comic image.)

Wondermark by David Malki ! - 289: In which a Visitor is shunned

Quote of the Day

Howard Nemerov: "Absolute power corrupts absolutely; and if you surrender your personal responsibility to a government which promises to take care of you, they will only take care of themselves."