on money (in the abstract)

[Michael Bailey]

 Mark Kohut wrote:
> Agreed. Obama (and team) won this back when they negotiated the automatic
> cuts....(which O stuffed back at 'em with his "[Hell] No, I'll veto")
> $600 billion dollars in military cuts......WIN......(No, our security won't
> be threatened.


William Vollmann imagines John Smith (of Pocahontas fame) reading Machiavelli:
(paraphrase)
You can either please the people or the soldiers.
If you choose to please the soldiers, the people will rise up.  But
the soldiers will crush them.
------------------------------------------------------
Obama - much as I like him, and I do - didn't wow me by talking about
middle-class tax cuts the way he did.
Everybody knows he went to Harvard.  He doesn't *have* to dumb it down
as much as he's been doing.
What would be nice would be a spirited defense of a progressive tax code.
Even unpopular personalities attract attention to intellectual
citations -- case in point: remember when one of those videos of Osama
bin Laden surfaced in which he cited the book _Killing Hope_ by
William Blum all about CIA interventions since WWII?
Sales of that book went waaaaay up on Amazon!

so, Obama, deal me out some stuff from the scholar deck, eh buddy?  Please?