Oddly fitting

Through mattapp, I discover my True Inner D&D Character:

( Delve into the mysteries! )

Surprisingly spot-on, though a) I've never played such a character in my life, and b) I can't figure out what questions it asked that made it think I was a bard, though.

Your One-Stop Shop for Political Outrage

Forget everything else. Forget the Patriot Act and its Central Scrutinizer approach to safety. Forget the EPA. Forget the system of compassionate promises backed by less than zero spending. Everything you need to know about why you should hate the current occupying power in Washington, DC, is laid out in this long blog essay by Arthur Silber from The Light of Reason. It details a long series of outrages which basically boil down to, huge amounts of government money--your tax money--being funnelled to cronies of the current regime.

( Cliff's Notes to The Stench of Moral Rot )

I'll let Silber have his own last word here:

One final point: I note again, as I did throughout my foreign policy series, that all these stories are interrelated. The various, intricate mechanisms of corporate statism influence, distort and corrupt this entire process at every single step -- and we now face probably more than a decade of huge wealth transfer payments being made from one group of Americans to another group of Americans: from hardworking American taxpayers to those companies with sufficient connections and pull to get the enormously lucrative contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq. The dangers of all this are tremendous: to our own economy's health, to our safety -- since our long-term presence in Iraq may well lead to a growth in terrorism, rather than its reduction, and to our own liberties and freedoms, since Bush is so fond of reminding us that we are now in an ongoing "state of emergency." But there is one aspect of this more than any other than I am truly fed up with at this point: the repeated insistence by many that Bush and his administration are noble exemplars of "true" American values -- of individualism, of free markets, of liberty.

(Thanks again to Jim Henley for the pointer. You don't have to hate the state to hate what's going on.)