Don't forget about The Scarlet Letter! The spoils system played a big part in Hawthorne's career (ie he'd get fired from his cushy government jobs and be forced to write again whenever a democrat lost an election), all Obama is trying to do by bringing a blatant spoils system back is to spark an American literary renaissance... (after all, he can't do it on his own, how many autobiographies can Bill Ayers write?)

R. Craigen, that's very well put! Believe me, I thought about framing it along those lines (though less eloquently), but I just couldn't bring myself to do it, i'm too emotional about it to be successfully snarky!

CoveredUp, it's not graded like that, just based on attendance, a pass/fail sorta thing, it's not a real college class, just a once a month ethics seminar thingie when we're not training in the hospital.

Thanks to everyone else for your kind words!

Great catch!

as long as none of them get anxious over any teaching of moral guidelines, it's all good...

I went in to see a patient this week, a young boy, there with his whole family, and after greeting him, I said, "and what's your sister's name?" Turns out that was his brother, a 5 year old little boy with flowing brown locks down well below his shoulders. Never gonna ask that question again unless I see a skirt and a pink hello kitty top - though even then, these days, who knows...

Wow, great explanation, thank you!

Ready for a dumb, ignorant question? Hope so, cuz here goes. A very conservative Catholic whose blog I read (Ann Barnhardt) has been worried that the new Pope isn't genuflecting after the consecration of the Host or the Chalice, which seems to be a conscious choice and a departure from custom, and from general Mass practice. Are Ricochet's Catholics concerned about this, is it significant of some change in attitude towards traditional Mass, or is it all a non-issue?

To borrow a line from Kathy Shaidle, I believe Lithuania has one of the highest suicide rates in the world - is this because of anti-Lithuanian bullying?

Perhaps other factors are at play, but looking into those doesn't let us blame Christians, so who cares, right?

Great piece! And as you say, optimism doesn't just help you, it helps those around you, too.

Do all things without murmurings and disputings: That ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world

Just finished my psych rotation, and one thing that helped with a lot of patients was getting them, every day, to say one good thing about the day, or one good thing about themselves. It seemed very effective. Though of course the meds help, too...

I haven't seen either movie yet, because, you know, they weren't made in 1940, but I'm glad they had such a good message!

Details, details. Nevermind, then! Kinda sucks that their leader is such a royal jerk, though, and apparently still their leader despite that incident (the GOProud 'head,' according to the article, don't know what his relationship with the board is like).

To add to my comment above, the tweet linked in the story, from the man claiming they were kicked out because they're gay? Hmm, that twitter account looks familiar...

Way I heard it, GOProud "outed" a politician it disagreed with, which was viewed as not quite cricket, and that's why they got kicked out. Didn't anyone else hear that version?

 At my Ivy League school, the students were such bad writers the school had to institute a mandatory freshman writing class to teach them how to write a simple essay. Luckily, I went to a very good private school where we learned all that by seventh grade.

Another thing is that a lot of these kids get accepted not due to academic skill, but thanks to extracurriculars - organizing foundations to banish hate speech, chaining themselves to the white house to protest homelessness, etc. And that doesn't stop when they get accepted, many hardly even pay attention or contribute to class since they're busy in all their annoying activism.

As for networking, yeah, there's great networking, I have good connections with a bunch of liberal elitists who are working their way up to positions of power from which they can better run our lives - yay?

The grade inflation is nice, though!

Going to a neighborhood and campaigning in spanish is simply acknowledging that there are some spanish speaking neighborhoods around, just like going to a neighborhood and speaking in polish is acknowledging that there are some polish speaking neighborhoods around. I am stating the obvious here, but just trying to be clear, so forgive me. Now here comes the part where we disagree, hopefully you can try to do so civilly:

Going on national television and giving the exact same speech twice, once in english, and once in spanish, is not the same thing as simply acknowledging the reality of spanish neighborhoods as in the Buckley example - instead, it is implying that there are two equal and seperate national languages, that in effect the nation is divided in two along linguistic lines. To me, that is a significant and very damaging implication. Maybe it is not to you, but it is not the same thing as the Buckley example. I even used something very similar to the Buckley example in my original post, so obviously I am not the sad excrement-spouter you think I am, geez.

I would add, R. Craigen, that the self-evident absurdity of your Cantonese and French examples proves me right, there are so many French and  Chinese Americans who have made incredible contributions to America for ages, they assimilated seamlessly,  they never asked for leaders to give national talks in their native language, and if FDR had tried to do a fireside chat in mandarin they would have likely thought he was nuts.

Oh, I'm serious. And don't call me Shirley. I'll just repaste what I wrote in a comment above: 'conservatives should not take part in legitimizing an entirely separate spanish speaking public sphere. There's a difference between a talking head going on spanish radio and a major figure giving two back-to-back national addresses, one to the english nation and one to the spanish nation. '

Of course as implied in the post I'm not upset because he can, and as I wrote, no, I have no problem with a politician speaking chinese at a local rally. It's different, at least to me, on the national stage.  In Canada, the leaders have a debate in English, and then an entirely different one, covering different topics and priorities, in French. I think that's messed up, it reinforces the French in the belief that they're different and not part of the nation. I don't want that to happen here.