The journey from there to here
Gideon MacLeish's Articles » Page 36
June 21, 2006 by Gideon MacLeish
On another article, a blogger expressed support for a student in Las Vegas, Nevada, who dared to use offensive language that caused the school board to rush in a panic to cut off the student's microphone. This evil, hate speech permeated the auditorium, and the ears of sensitive listeners and clearly had to be quashed! The offensive word? The "G" word (I'm afraid to say it on my blog, I might wind up getting sued or something). Yup, that's right, this student dared to utter the word "God" in ...
June 21, 2006 by Gideon MacLeish
I had a bit of a personal conflict early in the week. It's been a tough run emotionally, and I was pretty much spent. While I am making progress on working to fight CPS, progress has been slow...too slow, at times, and there's a lot of infighting among would be activists. Couple that with the facts that CPS is one of those government agents you don't dare criticize without being branded a fringe radical, and the fact that the natural instinct of a family who has been falsely accused of abuse or ...
June 21, 2006 by Gideon MacLeish
Ann Coulter should be writing a check to the DNC. In fact, I think the Democratic Underground should set up an affiliate link to her website. Here's why: I'm not a Coulter groupie. Never HAVE been a Coulter groupie. Despite two years of reading LW's blogs, most of which espoused a similar if not identical philosophy to that of Coulter, I really wasn't solkd on her books. Sure, I know she's compelling and has a biting sense of satire, but the fact is, on the issues where I agree with her, she ...
June 21, 2006 by Gideon MacLeish
As we're getting further and further along in the campaign, I'm discovering a definite upside, from my perspective as a writer. While my volume of mail has increased, much of it has been either the endless solicitations from campaign advertising companies (useful information if I had a war chest, really) or questionnaires from various political groups (some of these are interesting...I may share some later as a blog topic). But I was VERY excited about a booklet I received in the mail today. ...
June 20, 2006 by Gideon MacLeish
For those of you who aren't Christian, I would like for you to indulge me for a moment as I tell one of my favorite Bible stories as a metaphor to explain why I not only abandoned my leftist beliefs, but did so with a pretty strong contempt for all things left. It's a gross paraphrase (The "Gideon Standard Version"), so I don't need correction for my slight inaccuracies. In the bible, there is the story of the Jewish patriarch Jacob. Jacob went looking for someone to marry, and found the love...
June 20, 2006 by Gideon MacLeish
So much has been written on the plight of the poor in America. Yet everything that has been written to solicit government funding for pet programs for the poor has ignored a single, provable fact: the fact that the vast majority of the poor in America are essentially suffering the consequences of their lifestyle choices. While there are certainly exceptions, as there are to every rule, the simple, hard truth is that the best remedy to poverty is to give people the information they need to e...
June 19, 2006 by Gideon MacLeish
As many in America try to use guilt to enforce oppressive taxation to pay for pet programs to feed the poor in America, they do so without hard stats, using conjecture and limited anecdotal information to guide their agendas. But taking a look at the hard facts would seem to indicate that the problem of hunger in the United States is not as pervasive, at least, as we thought. There IS a world hunger problem, I will readily concede, but its origins are different from that which we've been led to ...
June 19, 2006 by Gideon MacLeish
Yesterday, I chronicled the plight of Dustin Diamond, the former child star who played in such totally memorable roles as "Screech" onm "Saved by the Bell", and himself onn "Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star". Seems Mr. Powers has been in financial trouble (from a former child star? You don't say!), and, rather than go the route of other former child stars like Todd Bridges and Dana Plato, he's trying to raise money to save his home by hawking tshirts on the internet. Well, I'm to the point i...
June 18, 2006 by Gideon MacLeish
An article in today's Yahoo! News has me wondering if we should continue our national parks program or if we should explore the possibility of more effective means of preserving our national resources: Link The story is about the problems that Organ Pipe Cactus National Park is facing with illegal immigrants crossing, and conflicts with border patrol agents. And, while it would seem to be an isolated case, I know several stories from our brief time in Nevada that advised against visitin...
June 18, 2006 by Gideon MacLeish
When Ann Coulter mentioned the fact that the liberal organizations have paraded victims about to advance their agenda, insisting those victims are above criticism, she only scratched the surface. In my writings about my Libertarian philosophies, I have found that liberals are just as hostile towards attacks on any of their pet programs. They will attack with venom and force anytime these pet programs are even QUESTIONED, and the character of the individual will be called into question. They will...
June 17, 2006 by Gideon MacLeish
Link House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi announced the Democrats' plan if they retake the House in the November elections. Far from being the sweeping mandate that led to the last changing of the guard (1994's GOP "Contract with America"), the Democratic plan is a perfect model of why we shouldn't vote Democrat. The three promises are a higher minimum wage, lower prescription drug costs, and lower student loan interest rates. Why should these concern us? Let's take a look at them, shal...
June 17, 2006 by Gideon MacLeish
OK, Here's MY "Random Facts" article (interestingly enough, the facts you choose say a lot about your interests): I am a 14th generation American (the continent, not the country, obviously) on one branch of my family, 11th generation on another, and have Cherokee ancestry. None of my ancestors arrived in America after 1800. I am related to William Bratton, who was part of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and who most notably appears in their journals because of a lengthy illness. He did ma...
June 17, 2006 by Gideon MacLeish
From the "You can't make this stuff up!" Department: Link   Every once in awhile, there comes a time when we all must step up; when we all must give of ourselves for a greater cause to help our fellowman. This is not one of those times. Dustin Diamond, the distinguished child actor, whose numerous credits include "Saved by the Bell", and, umm, "Saved by the Bell: the college years", is in trouble of losing his house. His Port Washington, Wisconsin home is in danger of bein...
June 17, 2006 by Gideon MacLeish
From the "You can't make this stuff up!" Department: Link   Every once in awhile, there comes a time when we all must step up; when we all must give of ourselves for a greater cause to help our fellowman. This is not one of those times. Dustin Diamond, the distinguished child actor, whose numerous credits include "Saved by the Bell", and, umm, "Saved by the Bell: the college years", is in trouble of losing his house. His Port Washington, Wisconsin home is in danger of bein...
June 17, 2006 by Gideon MacLeish
We've all heard the news about Darryl Hannah being pulled from the tree in which she was perched to assist in a protest of the development of a piece of land being used as an urban farm. It's the second major celebrity tree related story of the last two months (leading me to ask: do the TREES really WANT this publicity? But that is a subject for another blog entirely,). At first I was inclined to dismiss this, as one radio talk show host did, as another stupid celebrity story, but then I hea...