I wish the GOP would stay out of my personal life..like aren’t they supposed ot be the party of no government interference? But I guess form what I recall about Lee Atwater, he felt that using religion in a Marxist way (opiate of the masses) he could win heart, minds and votes…

hey lisa – me too. i also wish they would apologize for fucking up everything from the constitution to the economy and, of course, there is that whole lying us into war thing.

What else do they have to apologize for?

Just about everything.

The dooming words are “where appropriate.” What sense do the Thugs have of what’s appropriate anymore?

Republicans want to keep government off the back of big business. They have no problem with government fucking around in the lives of private citizens. Our best solution is probably for every American to form a corporation.

How about Raygun lifting Springsteen’s anti-war “Born in the USA” as his theme music? As a Jersey boy, I couldn’t be any more offended…but it’s early.

Good idea. If they can have corporate personhood, why shouldn’t we have personal incorporation?

The Catholic Church apologized to Galileo 300 years after committing him to house arrest for accepting Copernicus’ model of the solar system, that the Earth was not at the center of everything.
Just in time.

Love that idea! All we want is the civil rights you afford the corporate states.

OMG, the Vatican just said nice things about Oscar Wilde

They might also want to apologize for being complete malignant douchebags.

Taking up space more productively filled by department store mannequins.

hell musta frozen over

As with Galileo, they waited until he was long dead and couldn’t benefit.

Damn it. That was a great song for the McCain campaign. “Runnin’ On Empty”.

Nobody wants their songs used by Rethugs except Lee Greenwoody. The Marine Corpse blast “Proud To be An Amerikan” all the time in basic training. I guess our government is paying royalty welfare to Greenteeth.

Anyway. The McCain/Palin Barracuda way is the Republican way. Steal it and worry about the potential consequences later.

Good heavens, what will they think of next? The earth is no doubt slightly off its tilt.

Debasing our national discourse.

They meant Cornell Wilde.

No, they meant Oscar the Grouch.

Valorizing stupidity and ignorance.

fro the review (linked above): Wilde was baptised into the Catholic Church shortly before he died. L’Osservatore Romano said that the “existential path” which the author trod “can also be seen as a long and difficult path toward that Promised Land which gives us the reason for existence, a path which led him to his conversion to Catholicism, a religion which, as he remarked in one of his more acute and paradoxical aphorisms, was ‘for saints and sinners alone – for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do’.”

BTW, the Vatican also is now cool about Harry Potter (sam elink)

Earlier this week the Vatican’s official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which had previously described JK Rowling’s books as presenting a “vision of the world and the human being full of deep mistakes and dangerous suggestions”, praised the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince for making it clear that good must overcome evil “and that sometimes this requires costs and sacrifice”.

They need to apologize Spiro Agnew, Tricky Dicky, Ronnie Raygun, both of the shrubs, Tom Delay, Dick Cheney and his daughter, Sarah Failin’, Clarence Thomas, etc… .

Why not use Charlie Daniel’s tunes? He’s a big ol’ Republican redneck.

There’s “Devil Went Down To Georgia” What else?

Or Bocephus –

All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down.

Cornbread and Iced tea have took the place of pills and 90 proof.

you don’t think….?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrU3TclLYaY

that sometimes this requires costs and sacrifice

Riiight. When is the last time anyone in the Catholic hierarchy ever sacrificed anything?

This just in, as the solar eclipse over Asia reached totality, millions of Chinese motorists stopped, exited their vehicles, ran around and reentered through the opposite door before proceeding on their journeys.

i’m telling ya, hell musta froze over.

or else pope bennie found himself facing an offer he could not refuse.

See mine at 3.

I thought they did that at all the red lights.

I think that they found out that Wilde had been sodomized by a priest.

Happy Eclipse, thanks for the reminder, ratfood!

Wilde was baptised into the Catholic Church shortly before he died. L’Osservatore Romano said that the “existential path” which the author trod “can also be seen as a long and difficult path toward that Promised Land

One’s Christian Walk might not follow the straight and narrow path.

or:

You can be a big ol’ fuck up and a total asshole, save for the last few seconds of your life when you ask Jesus to come into your heart. If you be Catholic, you’ll need a preist or at least a deacon around while you repent.

Here’s my small win against our campus bookstore.

I’m switching out texts for my intro stats course. I’m so sick of being on the edition treadmill that I’m using the selected chapters from a standard text and some of my own material as a custom text.

Just on a whim, I asked the publisher if they could bundle a graphing calculator with the custom text. They checked, and said, “Sure. We sell TI-84s out of the math group bundled with Algebra texts.” So, the prices come in, and our bookstore (run by a famous name we’d all recognize as belonging on dairy farm) said, “Cost to students for the package will be $235.” That’s a 45% markup, and $5 more than the text and calculator bought separately from the bookstore.

So I called the publisher, thanked them for their efforts but said the bundling thing wasn’t going to fly. The editor said, “Wait a sec. We’ll sell the bundle to your students who are willing to buy on line, 20% markup.”

I called the bookstore text manager back and told her, “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to send all my registered students an e-mail next week with the ISBNs for the custom text, the e-book version of the whole textbook, and the calculator bundle. I’ll tell them they have to have a TI-83/4 calculator, and I don’t care where they get it. I’ll also tell them where they can get the bundle. By the way, the publisher is selling the bundle at a 20% markup.”

There was silence on the line. Then, “Well, that is your right.”

“Yes, it is. Do you still need a 45% markup on the bundle, but a 20% markup on the text itself?”

“Yes, we do. That’s Corporate policy.”

“Thanks very much.”

WTF Lisa, you want a list? It would take tomes, madeah, tomes . . *G*

Nice post . . . ;-)

Is there anything they don’t have to apologize for?

More than one way to receive communion, apparently.

“Love that idea! All we want is the civil rights you afford the corporate states lords.”

Ya haz a wording . . . Iz fixed its. *G*

And I’m with it all . . yes. I want the rights the corporate lords have. As one of their vassals, I demand it! *G*

It is generally a toss up as to whether the textbook publishers or the bookstores are more evil.

Not sayin’ that was the case with Wilde. The man was a master artist. When he fell prey to Catholic dogma, he must have been a little weak. Perhaps he was just buying a little insurance just in case.

Hmm. Well, I think Limbaugh would be an asshole even if there were no Republican Party, but…no, never mind, they can apologize for him too.

In celebration, chocolate eclairs all around!

Now I am glad that I do not eat eclairs.

Oscar’s final days were filled with physical agony. May he RIP.

Well, I’m off of the new edition treadmill. And I’m grateful. The stuff I teach hasn’t changed in 70 years (pedagogy has changed, but the material hasn’t). But we get new textbook editions every 2-3 years.

I think I’d be inclined to give that one a pass.

wow. I actually could not afford to go to community college last year because of the cost of the text books for math which were more than the tuition. And each semester they slightly change the order of the problems and the pages so in order to actually the do the right assignments, you have to buy the book, which are custom to each campus!

If I don’t take math–intermediate and college algebra plus either stats or math for liberal arts I can’t complete my BA, despite being in a religion/history track! If I wanted to go for a psych major, I’d have ot take stats..and math is so intense for me I can only take it and no other classes in order to get a C…

We have the same problem in many ways, especially with intro texts. The discipline does change, especially in physical, but there really is no need for a new edition more than every five years. Damned things are over a hundred dollars new and there is very little that is different than when I took intro almost 40 years ago.

I recall my junior stats courses. Intro, and second semester. Had a great prof.

LOVE your story! *G*

What else do they have to apologize for?
Calling us terrorist sympathizers if we didn’t agree with the Iraq war. Calling us unpatriotic because we didn’t approve of Bush wiping his ass with the Constitution. Going along with Idiot Boy in every damn thing that was illegal, immoral, inhumane, unAmerican, stupid and corrupt.
And then fucking freak OUT when a smart person gets in office.

I used to work for a company that published the statistics textbook of the presidents spouse. They put out a new edition every year with 99 percent recycled material. A complete and shameless racket.

And now within the tea party movement there is a huge “end the war” presence!

Lisa, that makes me want to weep. I attended a community college in SoCal for my first two years. No tuition, no fees, just buy your textbooks.

I finished up at a State University, where I had to pay a nominal Material and Services fee each term. Essentially free. Oh yeah, I had to buy my textbooks.

I started gradual school at UC. Tuition was less than 10% of what it was at USC, Stanford, or Cal Tech (other places I thought about going). What has become of California’s public higher ed system? I want to weep…

Late Night: GOP Says They’re Sorry for Misuse of Artists’ Songs

If you believe them I have this beach front property in New Mexico that I am selling for a real bargain!!

I have seldom seen a “new edition” of an existing textbook with more than 5% new text. Sometimes they reorder the chapters.

What has become of California’s public higher ed system?

Republicans. Just one more thing that they have to apologize for, and it is not just higher education, but K-12 as well.

RF, the reason popular texts are on a short revision cycle is to kill the used book market. One of the reasons publishers are pushing the custom publishing thing is to kill the used book market — I use a slightly different set of chapters than my colleagues at U of Arizona or UT El Paso would use.

I was in the art department. Mostly we just changed the color scheme and fonts in the charts and graphs.

All that paper and ink…

In statistics they add new problems and delete old ones, too.

Obama began with a trillion dollar Bush deficit. We anticipated Shrub’s 500 billion dollar deficit which was bad enough. Then the bank bailouts came before Obama’s term began.

The wingnuts began rewriting in December 2008, the history on that budget- busting, treasury-looting Bush fiasco.

For a lot of my courses, I have largely abandoned textbooks altogether and have gone to articles and chapters from books posted online as .pdfs. Cheaper for the students and I get more precise coverage of the points and issues I want without a lot of crap that I do not want.

I’ve rendered a several thousand graphs in my day. Could probably do it with my eyes closed.

They’re only sorry because they lost.

I am a product of California community college/Chico State/ UC Davis. I am glad I got through when they were cheap.

I thought about joining an open textbook cooperative, but the state of the text just isn’t well developed enough. The literature in statistics is almost impenetrable to undergrads, so that option is out. I do assign reading in subject matter journals to illustrate particularly good (or in a few cases, truly awful) use of statistics.

Actually they are only sorry because they got caught.

That’s awesome! I love my history, anthro of religion and psych books which i have kept for the great reading (same wiht literature), but algebra is algebra and there’s no reason to keep wasting paper to print x(3+3)(4+5)= ?

you got that right. getting caught and losing are the only 2 sins republicans recognize in other republicans

Yeah, I know how that goes. I cannot use readings for my intro class, which is where the texts change about every other year.

Chaffey College/California State College, Bakersfield/UCLA/Kansas State here. And I’m glad I got through when it was cheap, too.

Math, brrr.
I had to take 2 remedial math courses before I could even take the beginning algebra. Very expensive, books and tuition.

I’m glad I spent all my time smoking dope instead of going to college. Think of all the money I saved. No, wait…

Oh like those creeps at C Street House?

The price of textbooks has really gotten completely out of hand and I finally decided that I had to do something. I could never find a text for most of my upper division classes that covered all the topics that I wanted to do and they often had stuff I was not interested in. That generally translated into several books for each course and a huge cost to students.

If you had been snorting coke, you would still have saved money at today’s prices.

perfect example. do as i say not as i do

What else do they have to apologize for?

Just to name a few:
War Crimes
Torture
Lying us into war
Obstruction of Justice
Outing a CIA officer
Bogus firing of USA’s
Declaring mission accomplished
Illegal warrantless wiretaps

Surely there is another one, Suz.

Let’s see… Nixon 1960 was sorry he was caught. Then he was sorry he lost.
Nixon 1962 was … sorry he lost.
Agnew 1973 was … sorry he was caught.
Nixon 1974 was … sorry he was caught.
Ollie North and Bush Senior and crew were … sorry they were caught.
Shooter was … sorry he was caught.
Dubya’s not self aware enough to be sorry for anything.
Sanford is … sorry he was caught.
Ensign is … sorry he was caught.

You win. The only recognized problems are being caught or losing.

There was a Frank Zappa/Mothers of Invention song in the early ’70s that suggested one could attain all the benefit of a higher education by simply rolling up a diploma and smoking it.

ya’ll forgot that up until this year, i was a lifelong republican.

That is Republican Holy Ground. It will be their version of Fatima.

What was the tipping point?

sorry that was to bct at 79

Only if you are a business or communications major.

bush-cheney

There is an episode of The Simpsons in which drunken Homer runs over the the foreign exchange student placekicker for the football team, severely injuring his leg.

Dr. Hibbert: “Well, at least you’ve got your degree to fall back on.”
kicker: “I’m a communications major.”
Dr. Hibbert: “Oh, dear God!”
kicker: “I know, is a PHONY major..!”

Aw, they were just misunderstood.:o)

I started out as a Republican, but I figured out in grad school that there was no room in the Regooplican Big Tent for me.

only misunderstood worth understanding

Probably not in the Republican Freak Show neither! *g*

Knowledge really is their enemy.

I wish in retrospect I had complete college when I was going to Loyola Marymount before there was a state math requirement. But it was 1984, Reagan getting elected and bilingual education being defeted in CA just bummed me out–and I loved my job in a bookstore and was terrified of like having to have straight job–so I dropped out. Bad move on one hand, great move on the other…I may never get a degree, but I have had an awesome, self created, self directed life…

Same for us in art history, thank heavens for JStor.

I love the matching Beatle suits. The Animals cast a pretty long shadow, considering they weren’t actually together all that long.

Headin’ out. Splendid evening to all.

Maybe one day, I’ll get an honorary degree from Miskatonic U in Chthonic studies!

Nightt ratfood!

Yep. Time for me to head out. Take care all.

Night.

Reality has a way of biting people in the ass when they ignore it.

Good night, RF, Dr.D.

waving g’nite to the leaving sleepy pups

Night Dr. D

If the GOP was to actually revive itself and become reasonable, what steps could they take–lower taxes have a place..I mena we are paying 9.75% here in CA–and frankly I think taxes should be higer on crap food, booze and cigs–and heck tax yachts and laborghinis!

but overall, can they become more moderate, get out of sex issues and religious trappings? Or wil that create a third party of NUTS?

Bargain CT – love your story about the textbooks – great work.

hey eg – gonna see you at nahant’s meetup saturday afternoon?

Oh hey, who’s going to Netroots Nation?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehal1eUG1jk

OMG, the Jim Nabors Show, wow. Gomer Pyle…

sweet

See ya here EG & Suz.. looking forward to this weekend *(:>))

i have to save up for dental work — i will be here at the lake and not in PA

I’ll miss meeting you.

Lisa, Prop 13 and its follow-ons have completely distorted the tax structure in California. You don’t tax the right stuff, and what you do tax is taxed counterproductively.

Most jurisdictions think that the property tax break between commercial and residential property (in terms of total receipts) is about 2:1. Last time I looked, California has that reversed. Property taxes form the tax base for local governments. Your sales tax is 9.75% because local governments are relying more heavily on sales tax revenues than they should.

The income tax in California used to be fairly progressive, the Republicans have flattened it significantly. That burden falls more heavily on the middle class.

Gray Davis got kicked out of Sac’to because he had the temerity to increase auto registration fees. User fees have cropped up all over the place, replacing tax revenues.

California has backed itself into a spot where I think that a new constitution might be needed to straighten out all the messes that have been created by the citizen initiative.

:( and me you

one of these day’s i’m gonna head down to dizzyland and i’m gonna do magic mountain (never been to that one). when i head south – i’ll let ya know so maybe we can hook up then

I hear Magic Mountain is being shopped to developers, better hurry.

twas one of those places i would pass and always say one of these days… dayam

Thank you. I also feel that the 2/3 legislature required to pass anything can really hold things up. The current housing problem will impact prop tax revenue…and sadly duirng dot co and housing bubbles the state spent, thinking these things would last forever. Saving and being super prudent would have bene wise…I think we may have expanded to rapidly on a number of state funded things.

I still wonder as I drive thorugh LA, how the heck people are paying for all the fancy cars I see on the streets, –are they fornting, leasing? That’s why I am looking forward ot Joan Rivers new TV show whihc is called “How did yo get so damn rich?” or somethig like that…like where the heck…?

“What else do they have to apologize for?”

uh, nominating a candidate for president in 2008 who was not born in one of the 50 United States and “has never proved he is an American citizen?”

Six Flags doesn’t run the security that Dizzyland does, and according to my brother they’re having gang problems. Attendance is down because of the gang trouble, which has dropped the park into a bad feedback loop.

It’s a real shame, because Magic Mountain really is roller coaster heaven. I’d much rather go to Magic Mountain than Dizzyland.

btw where the hell were my manners. great post lisa – i do look forward to your tuesday night late night posts – in addition to the posts here at la figa

I used ot love Magic Mountain. I started going there when it first opned, they had like 6 rides. Parents liked it because you oculd buy beer. Duirng the 80s all these cool band splayed there (ah the irony of Gang of Four gigging as part of Coca Cola Presents…” I saw them, Lena Lovich, Bow Wow Wow.

Disneyland is more my speed. I am going Thursday because it’s my roommate’s birthday and she can get in free! and July is a special 40th anniversary of Haunted Mansion, that will be sooo much fun!

Another big California problem is the incarceration rate and the Correctional Officer’s Association. COs in California are paid very well, and it drives your incarceration costs way up.

While prisons aren’t a total economic loss (prison industries turn out useful stuff for government use), they are nearly a total economic loss. Locking people away and keeping them there is really expensive. It’s more expensive than educating them…

And The Gold Rush was the roller coaster…

I liked Disneyland back then, because they ran a jazz festival in the summer. I saw Woody Herman, Buddy Rich, Count Basie and a bunch of other bands there. And you could get in for $5, because the rides were all ticketed.

Who knows what an E ticket ride is today?

Well, good night boys, girls and ‘pups. Hasta la later.

I second that. I am hoping that non violent offenders can find a better situation. And legalizing, regulating and taxing pot is a good idea, IMO. Most peopel cant be bothered to grow for personal use. Right now pharmacies just pay their licnesing fees and sales tax. Their prices are the same as street pot.

Evenin’ all !

WTF have the ReThugs delayed Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation vote ?

OMG nacny Grace is reporting they found the location of Michael Jackson’s body….
anyway, night all and thanks!

Taxing cannabis is a good idea, but the numbers that are being tossed around don’t hold up. Mark Kleiman at UCLA has looked at it carefully and called bullshit. Mark’s a major expert on this stuff, so if he calls bullshit I believe him.

Because they’re idiots, Petro. The four or five moderates that are left are going to declare for her, and some of the saner batshit crazies (like Orrin Hatch) are going to vote for her.

They might as well try to stop the tide from coming in.

Thanks Dude … I thought they’ve delayed it 1 week because they sense some votes might flip against her …

Collins came out today and said she was voting for her. I think Snowe has already given her a thumbs up.

I think Reid will apply something like party discipline if it’s necessary, but it won’t be.