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You may have heard about the middle-aged British couple that has finally decided to get married. One of the supposed problems is the status of the gentleman as he may become the titular head of the Church of England and he and his future wife are both divorced.

The raison d’être of the Church of England was to facilitate the divorce of the first head of the Church, Henry Tudor. Henry was certainly in favor of marriage: he had six of them, and divorce: he had two of them.

The Six Wives Of Henry VIII: Catherine of Aragon [m. 1509 – 1533, Divorced], Anne Boleyn [m. 1533 – 1536, Executed], Jane Seymour [m. 1536 – 1537, Died], Anne of Cleves [m. 1540 Jan. – July, Divorced], Kathryn Howard [m. 1540 – 1542, Executed], Katherine Parr [m. 1543 – 1547, Widowed].

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Digby has an interesting post on attempts to label liberals as supporters of terrorists.

I have a few questions:

Who were the liberals that gave chemical and biological weapons to Saddam Hussein?
Who were the liberals that sold weapons to the government of Ayatollah Khomeini?
Who were the liberals that opposed going after bin Laden following the bombing of the USS Cole?
Who were the liberals that ignored warnings and eliminated the FBI counter-terrorism budget on September 10, 2001?
Who were the liberals that ignored over 50 warnings to the FAA about the possibility of a hijacking and suicide mission in 2001?
Who were the liberals that advocated abandoning the hunt for Osama bin Laden to attack Iraq?
Who were the liberals that exposed a CIA operative?
Who were the liberals that turned down three plans to eliminate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before the Iraq invasion?
Who were the liberals that made killing American troops easier by failing to provide body and vehicle armor?

The liberals haven’t been making the decisions and spending the money. If the right doesn’t like getting blamed for the messes they create, they need to tuck tail and crawl back into their holes.

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Bush came into office talking about people’s money and how he was going to return it to them. He then proceeded to take the Social Security surplus and gave it to people who did not pay Social Security taxes. There was no income tax surplus; the income tax revenues were still a bit short of balancing the budget, all of the “extra” money belonged to those who paid FICA withholding taxes. Having done this he now claims there is a Social Security crisis because the taxes he has left can’t cover his profligate spending plans.

I went through this “Supply-side – borrow and spend” tripe under Reagan and Bush I, and the only way to described it, if you wish to avoid labeling it criminal, is fiscal mismanagement.

As people all over the world are beginning to worry about Bush’s ability to pay his debts, he presents a budget based on what his father described as “voodoo economics”. His current tax cuts produced no revenue or job gains, so he wants more. And to calm his critics while he awaits a monetary miracle he proposes to cut funding to women, children, college students – anyone with little income and little power.

When some call for changing the Medicare drug benefit to allow for negotiating prices, the normal practice in the free market, he threatens to veto any such bill. He has yet to veto a bill, so there is no way that the blame for any of this mess can fall on anyone except Bush.

Steve at Yellow Doggerel Democrat set me off with this post about a Krugman article.

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On this day in 1809 Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born. During their lives and after, it would be hard to find two men who generated such total polarization in the world. Heroes to some and the devil incarnate to others.

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Remember all the warnings about pilots being blinded by lasers? Gee, I guess some might be skeptical of NORAD’s plan to use lasers to notify pilots that they are entering restricted airspace around Washington.

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The people talking about Bush’s attempts to cancel the “Even Start” education program with his budget priorities for some reason fail to mention that it was his mother’s project when she was First Lady. Remember the Millie the First Dog book and reading to children.

Maybe it’s time to exhume the deceased First Dog, Spot, a daughter of Millie, who was born in the White House, and perform an autopsy. Eliminating your mother’s program is really cold. Perhaps the dog and the program reminded him of his own problems with books, the years of “See Spot run. Run, Spot. Run.”, were too much. Spot was also a witness to the pretzel incident.

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No doubt in response to stern warnings from the Bush administration, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has held its first election. Yes, democracy is spreading in the Islamic world. . .sort of. . .if you look at it in the right light, standing on one foot, and squint.

Only one in twelve Saudi citizens was eligible to register for the election, none of them women, and not many bothered. They are voting in local elections for councils, but only for one less than half of the council seats, the majority being appointed by the King.

From reports it would appear that the hard-line religious candidates have won all the seats. Both CBS and the BBC have reports on the elections which seem to track with the Iraqi elections indicating that when allowed to vote, Muslims vote for Islamic republics.

The freedom thing doesn’t seem to be working out for Bush any better than WMDs. It’s beginning to look like Bush couldn’t give away ice water in Death Valley during the Summer.

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