Donald's Blog
June 19, 2012 A light moment I like it when a newspaper makes me chuckle. Rising Republican star and Tea Party favorite Senator Marco Rubio voted against reforming the sugar quota program, that costs consumers on behalf of a small number of farmers. The Wall Street Journal editorialized, "...the Floridian was not a profile in courage on this issue, or even a profile." June 19, 2012 In today's paper Bret Stephens, who I usually disagree with, has written a thougtful piece about democracy and its shortcomings around the world.
Despite the usual gratuitious sneer at Carter, I had to smile ruefully. Tackling the Middle East, Stephens points out that in Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey and Gaza,"popular majorities have made a democratic choice for parties that put faith before freedom and substitute the word of God for the rule of law." Now we may think it ominous that the military in Egypt seems intent on retaining its power, but what is the alternative? Perhaps the real danger, Stephens writes, is that
Strong stuff. Stephens hopes that "Egyptians may have a wider conception of freedom in 30 years or so, about the same amount of time it took Khomeinism to lose the masses in Iran." But I think he's right that we'll have a lot more argy-bargy in the foreseeable future. June 19, 2012 More options! Arghhhh! Wallowing in my new freedom to play with my stuff, I am dubbing LPs onto CDs so I can dump the files in iTunes, send a noisy LP through ClickRepair and all that fun stuff. And I have a fun and useful program called XLD for converting files, except that I can't get it to work most of the time. And my word-processing program and my iPhoto on my new computer have been pointlessly redesigned to make them more complicated and confusing, in other words, less useful. Firefox works just dandy, but they keep wanting me to download a fancy new home page that I can customize myself! Problem is, I want to play with my music, not the #%&! software.
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