CT Liberty Forum
My home state of
Now if y’all will excuse me, I have to go practice being pithy.
posted by Jennifer Abel at 7:36 PM
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Now if y’all will excuse me, I have to go practice being pithy.
About Me
- Name: Jennifer Abel
Jennifer Abel is an American writer who began her career in print media three minutes before the Internet killed the industry. After starting at a small Connecticut daily she moved to the Hartford Advocate, an alt-weekly where her journalistic coups included infiltrating a Furries convention and working on a phone sex line (which fired her six hours later). Since then she’s written for, or been reprinted in, dozens of print and web outlets, including Playboy, the Guardian, Salon, AlterNet, Mashable, the Daily Dot and pretty much every website with the words "cannabis" or "legalize it" in the title. Once, when she was young and naïve and needed the money, she unwittingly edited SEO copy for a spammer. However, in light of the spambot comments she’s deleted from her own blogs since then, she figures she’s more than repaid that particular karmic debt. Jennifer is currently looking for professional, non-spam writing jobs; interested editors are enthusiastically invited to e-mail her.
Links
- Jennifer's Eponymous Professional Website
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- Jennifer's Columns for the Guardian
- Jennifer's Articles for the Daily Dot
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- The New England Curmudgeon
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12 Comments:
recommended motto: “Without us, people traveling ’twixt Boston and New York would have no place to stop for bathroom breaks”
CT provides great drama when people like me plot the rare drive from NYC to Boston. Take I-95 or the Merritt? I-95 is probably clogged full of losers, but the Merritt is smaller and winding-er and who knows where the hell it goes? Does it have streetlights? Online directions don't seem to reach a consensus. What fun!
The Merritt Parkway is a joke we play on out-of-state tourists who think that "quaint" is a good word to apply to a modern roadway system.
Thinking you should provide your fans with more eye candy and use a different picture for their site.
They just grabbed the picture off here, Moose. Since I got a new driver's license yesterday I'm not feeling super-photographable right now, anyway.
Actually, I've noticed that bathroom breaks aren't particularly convenient in CT. You know, tootling along towards Springfield, MA, and realizing that you might not be able to find your way back on to 91 if you tried to reach that bizarrely-placed service station? I blame civil unions.
Hmm, I meant that "civil unions" comment to be a minimally humorous non sequitur, until I saw the Liberty Forum speaker list. Some of those people actually blame the gays for quite a bit, along with other less-powerful minorities. I was considering coming by and throwing my panties onstage during Ms. Abel's panel, but now I'm afraid Jim Gilchrist might shoot me just for coming into the hotel.
Seriously, can't we have Robert Levy and Katherine Albrecht at a conveniently-located event on individual liberty without the Minutemen and the Family Institute of Connecticut?
...Oh, sweet Jeebus in cracker form, "Separation of School and State"? What's the closing ceremony for the forum, a Sarah Palin coronation?
It's a sad-but-true fact that not everybody has the same definition of "liberty." Personally, I've never subscribed to "liberty" being defined as "the right to outlaw everything I personally find offensive."
Sad but true, indeed. And well, besides Ms. Abel, there are some other genuinely libertarian-minded people in there. And the others certainly deserve the right to be heard. I just wish that libertarianism didn't so easily get conflated with social conservatism in the public eye.
Connecticut is odd, mds: the Democrats have had a lock on power here since time immemorial (I can not only predict Connecticut will vote for Obama this November; I also predict we'll go for the Democrat in 2012, 2016 and 2020), so protesting government misbehavior forces one to become an anti-Democrat almost by default. Nothing about the Democrats per se; it's just that whenever one party gets a lock on power, that party will thus become incredibly corrupt.
Connecticut is odd, mds: the Democrats have had a lock on power here since time immemorial
Well, except for the governor's mansion. And currently, Joe Lieberman, who effectively won last time as the Republican candidate. And Lowell Weicker, God bless his cold, cold heart.
See, the reason I was toying with Liberty Forum attendance is because I live in Connecticut, and hence am aware of all political traditions. Also, I'm standing right behind you.
True. But despite people like Herroner the Governor and Senator Lieberman (who only calls himself a Democrat because his lips can't form the words "I am a Republican" whilst superglued to Geroge W.'s ass), the majority of state- and local-level power is in Democratic hands.
But I'm not being partisan; if the reverse were true and we were a mostly Republican state with a few token Democrats and Democrats-in-name-only, the state would still be a mess, albeit in different ways.
I'd agree with contrarianism and anti-majoritarianism as a general rule. I'm slightly less concerned with Democratic majorities, though, due to the old saw about "belonging to no organized political party." Remember how Democrats finally achieved "veto-proof" majorities in the legislature, and how they were therefore able to ram everything through despite Rell? Excuse me while I point and laugh at them. In modern times, Republicans have much more of a disturbing tendency to act like the Borg. (And as I keep noting, if Obama thinks that he'd have an easy time with Congress because of substantial Democratic majorities, he's still taking those illegal drugs from his youth.)
Anyway, it turns out I wasn't really standing right behind you; it was Paul Bass in a red wig. In my defense, the room was dark, and I'm already drunk.
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