A Champaign County Community Blog

Obama Still Smoking': a Modern U.S. President

Obama Still Smoking

Tea and Sympathy

For the Tea Party there is no such thing as a moderate Republican; no such thing as a loyal opposition; no such thing as compromise.  Incumbent Republicans who cast votes of conscience are regarded as Republicans in name only to be summarily excluded from the Party of No and their voices stilled.  The Tea Party marches to the beat of a different drummer and those who can’t keep the cadence are banished to the wayside.  There is simply no room for individual opinions that point out the contradictions in its shoddily woven platform of slogans that boil down to a resounding “NO!”  It is a movement devoted to destruction; to ending, not beginning.

The Witching Hour in Delaware

"I dabbled into witchcraft -- I never joined a coven. But I did, I did. I dabbled into witchcraft. I hung around people who were doing these things. I'm not making this stuff up. I know what they told me they do, One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn't know it. I mean, there's little blood there and stuff like that. We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a satanic altar."  

That is what Tea Party Darling Christine O’Donnell had to say in an October 29, 1999 taping of the Bill Maher show Politically Incorrect.  It is 11 years later and Ms. O’Donnell is the Republican nominee to fill the Senate Seat vacated by Vice President Joe Biden.  Now 41 she was 30 when she made the remarks describing her experiences dabbling with witchcraft; experiences she now says dated back to her high school years. 

DEATH AND TAXES

In 1789 Benjamin Franklin wrote to Jean-Baptiste Leroy saying, "'In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."  He borrowed and paraphrased the epigram from Daniel Defoe’s A Political History of the Devil published in 1726.  Death is an inevitability of life and, so long as human society has been organized into communities, taxation has been an inevitability of human existence in order to finance the community’s common services and improvements.