[asterisk-biz] Re: OT: Gore Still Ahead

Thu Oct 5 15:01:36 MST 2006

On Thu, 2006-10-05 at 12:02 -0500, James wrote:
> OK,
> 
> Send your kid to public school.
> If he survives the random shootings and the drugs,

	Practically everyone survives public school without any shootings. The
drugs are even worse in private schools (I can attest), as can be the
violence (ditto). Home schooling can create kids with even worse
antisocial problems.

> then you can send him to 
> the District of Columbia to be an aid.
> There he can be influenced by powereful men (and women) to do some really 
> neat things.

	That is clearly the problem. The power of politicians to escape
responsibility exactly when they must be *more* responsible than the
general public. The government as a whole is infected: cops can kill
someone without justification and just get fired, when anyone else would
go to jail. America has reversed our fundamental philosophy of
distrusting the government, running it so wrongdoers are more easily
caught, into creating a privileged class (which is increasingly
hereditary, in dynasties).


> He can live in a city where violent crime is high and civilians can't buy a 
> handgun to protect themselves.

	Or in the country where people shoot each other because they can get
away with it. NYC was much less safe when we could easily buy handguns.
The violent crime rates are usually higher where guns are easier to get.
More urban states are more or less in the middle, so clearly there's
another controlling factor than whether a target lives in a city or not.


> While he is learing how to avoid being raped or mugged, he can dodge the 
> terrorist plane crashings.

	I don't think a single incident has any statistical significance. I
don't think the 9/11/2001 planebombings indicate anything about what
it's like to live in a city, or have anything to do with any of this.
Except maybe a reflection of how you hate NYC, and find an excuse to say
those planebombings are "just another bad thing that happens in NYC". As
a New Yorker, I think that sucks.


> Responsibility starts at home, with the parents.  Would you really want to 
> send your child out to play on the "Hill"?
> Most aids come from affluent households with educated parents.
> I would guess that there's not a one of them that would have morgatged thier 
> house and loand Foley the money for a year, but they freely hand over their 
> children...

	The bigger point being made about Foley's child molesting is how it was
being covered up by his fellow Republicans. How are the kid's parents to
blame for that? Even if what the abused page's sponsoring Rep, Rodney
Alexander (R-LA), said was true, that the kid's parents, when
"informed", said they didn't want to make a big deal over it, that
doesn't excuse the rest of those Republicans from ignoring their
responsibility to protect the rest of the pages.

	It's hard to blame most parents for trusting that their kids won't be
sexually abused by letting them work for Congressmembers. Until now.
Which is some of the extreme damage done to our country by Foley and his
coverup conspiracy.


> Foley screwed up and I think the latest remarks about alcoholism and being 
> molested as a child are copouts.

	That's clear to us individuals watching closely, but already yesterday
I heard a 5-second radio news bulletin that mentioned Foley as a child
molesting Congressman, contextualized with "Foley claims he was abused
as a child by a clergyman". Millions of people are hearing this story
peripherally to their real lives, boiled down to those two details.
Foley deliberately threw that out there to define himself as "the
molested Congressman" rather than "the molester Congressman". What a
scumbag. And if others in his coverup conspiracy planned that media spin
with him, they should burn, too.


> Yes, it is time to clean house.  Five year term limits for a couple of 
> generations will do more to cure these problems than any arguments about 
> Republicans or Democrats.

	I don't think that term limits do nearly as much as reporting
politicians' records to voters. When incumbents are found manipulating
the electoral process, that is a reason for term limits. But when their
party is conspiring to cover up their lawbreaking, their exploitation of
children in the government's care, then term limits mean nothing. Unless
you mean forced turnover of a party's majority, which is clearly
antidemocratic, though perhaps consistently republican (small letters
intended). The real reform is to outlaw parties as illegal conspiracies,
which they of course always are, even when they're not conspiring to
protect child molesters. Maybe just outlaw exclusive party membership,
but then criminal conspirators will game that system.

	I say we start by throwing out the party which has specifically proven
it is covers up child molestation by its members. Republicans were
getting thrown out anyway - it's a gift to them that they can blame
Foley for "losing Congress", rather than everything else people are
holding against them this year.


> James Taylor
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra at baylink.com>
> To: <email at mattruby.com>; "Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk 
> Discussion" <asterisk-biz at lists.digium.com>
> Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2006 10:04 AM
> Subject: Re: [asterisk-biz] Re: OT: Gore Still Ahead
> 
> 
> > On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 12:03:28AM -0400, Matthew Rubenstein wrote:
> >> Are you looking for ways to excuse the child molesting Foley did just
> >> because he continued carrying on after the boys were legally men?
> >
> > Let's be *perfectly clear* here, shall we?
> >
> > "Talking dirty" to them does not constitute "child molestation" under
> > any construction of anyone's law that I'm aware of.
> >
> > And 16 isn't exactly a child, either.
> >
> >> What kind of depraved child molester protector are you? Other than
> >> "Republican" - that much is so obvious that it's redundant. Now tell us
> >> that I shouldn't go so hard on Foley, because it's not his fault that
> >> god made him gay.
> >
> > You can go as hard on Foley as you like.  I hope he takes the whole,
> > sordid, hypocritical Republican establishment down with him.  just lets
> > be hard on him for the right reasons: he owed a duty to his
> > constituency not to get embroiled in a scandal, and he owed a duty to
> > those pages *specifically*, because he was or had been in a position of
> > direct power and control over them.  He failed in those duties.
> >
> > Would this have been less likely to have happened had he been out about
> > his preference?  (For men, I mean, not for boys.)  Yeah, probably.
> >
> > Is it society's fault that he felt he needed to be even partially in
> > the closet?  Yes?
> >
> > Am *I* gay?  No.
> >
> > Do I want people to confuse me for Donald Rumsfeld?  Not even on your
> > birthday.  :-)
> >
> > You can tell the repubs apart from the dems because, by and large, the
> > dems utilise the tools of rational argument, and are calm and cool, and
> > the repubs appeal to emotion, fear, and (dare we say this) terror.
> >
> > Not all of either side, certainly, but a statistically significant
> > majority.
> >
> > Alas, demagoguery works better with the electorate than pedagogy.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > -- jra
> > -- 
> > Jay R. Ashworth 
> > jra at baylink.com
> > Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 
> > 2100
> > Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 
> > e24
> > St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 
> > 1274
> >
> > "That's women for you; you divorce them, and 10 years later,
> >   they stop having sex with you."  -- Jennifer Crusie; _Fast_Women_
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(C) Matthew Rubenstein