Posted on 04/14/2014 4:58:00 AM PDT by xsmommy
Word For The Day, Monday, 4/14/14
In order that we might all raise the level of discourse and expand our language abilities, here is the daily post of "Word for the Day".
bien-pensant; noun; adj.
1.Right-thinking, orthodox, conformist; conservative. [quotations ▼] 2010, Bagehot, The Economist, 23 Aug 2010: He hopes Mr Abbott wins the election in part because it would, he says, annoy bien-pensant British journalists and Leftists who oppose the Australian's positions on things like abortion, gay marriage or climate change. 2.Someone who accepts and/or espouses a fashionable idea after it has been established and maintains it without a great amount of critical thought.
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Etymology: French ; from bien, well + present participle of penser, to think
Rules: Everyone must leave a post using the Word for the Day in a sentence.
The sentence must, in some way, relate to the news of the day.
The Review threads are linked for your edification. ;-)
Practice makes perfect.....post on....
wasn’t there some endangered tortoise at issue also?
Very cute!
I’m going to guess that was a fatality
We have storms blowing in - was 73 less than an hour ago - I opened windows, turned off the air and it is now 65 and dropping
well done
yes -somewhere in there
This has been a sad month - I feel like I’ve been surrounded by death. A friend lost her husband, a friend of my daughter, who I have known since she was a baby, lost her baby and my husband’s mother passed away. I need some happy, wonderful news from someone....
i have to say, this paragraph had me howling aloud, and it sounds far more like something a LEFTIST would say, than a market forces believing conservative:
HOT lanes are often derisively referred to as Lexus lanesthat is, special roads where Richie Rich can speed along in his roadster, a monocle in one eye and hundred-dollar bills flying out the window. The defenders of HOT lanes dont like this term. After a Washington Post columnist questioned the Beltways HOT lane project in 2012 using the L-word, Toll Roads News, the industrys bible, ran an editorial calling the columnist a lame-brained lefty.
Call it whatever you like, just give me the opportunity to pay to drive freely down the road instead of sitting in the traffic-choked beltway traffic.
annnnd here you see where i got today's WFTD... The specter of induced demand was a good excuse to not build more highways, which has been the prime directive of environmentalists, urban planners, and other bien pensants of the administrative state for the last 35 years.
I’m sorry you have been surrounded by sadness. if you hear good news, please share it. i think quite a few people could use cheering.
So the lefty idea that a HOT lane can be used FREELY if there are several folks in the vehicle, but for someone to pay to use it is “richy rich”? Insane. I use toll roads if I want to - depending upon the time requirements and location of the tolls - If we are near ghetto I will pay anything to be up on those toll roads rather than near traffic lights and corners..... but that is my choice and it doesn’t surprise me that someone would decide that we can’t have that choice because it is unfair the the unwashed
Ugh I should have proofread - poor sentence structure, sorry - but you got what I was writing
I am guessing the feds backed off in order to de-escalate. The militias were looking for a battle.
Thanks! My contractor compadre and I were talking about going galt plans yesterday and he was saying that the situations we are seeing are how fires start-and I think he is right.
I think so, too-he does owe the grazing fees. My contractor compadre said yesterday that someone should set up a website to help Bundy with the back-owed grazing fees-then he could pay them, be in the right, and have a much stronger case. Makes sense to me...
And that stupid tortoise isn’t endangered any more, if it ever was-there is a sanctuary for it where there are so many that they are killing them off...
The situations that start fires...
But Jonathan V. Last is ostensibly a conservative, writing for the Weekly Standard. So what i don’t get, is the conservative case AGAINST HOT lanes. We found the article singularly unpersuasive. The cover photo for the story, had the HOT lanes and then a sign saying RIFF RAFF with an arrow to the regular lanes. LOL!!!He also says in the article that no one ROUTINELY uses the HOT lanes, which is untrue. I def do. the entrance to the HOT lane of the beltway going east is much closer to my house, so i routinely use that, instead of going out of my way, to go to the regular lanes, where i will sit in traffic. I have to believe that if we use it routinely others do too, bc we are not wearing monocles and throwing $$ out of the windows. But xhub does have a lexus, so there you go.
Maybe the point is that HOV lanes are meant to be an incentive to carpool. And simply buying your way out of those requirements does have a whiff of “let them eat cake.”
Now, if they are simply toll lanes, but one can be excused from the toll if they have more than one person in the car it is a different argument.
This makes me sick. They let our coach go this morning.
You do know that in cities like London and Singapore there are steep fees charged to drivers who enter the city center. This is supposed to prevent congestion, by making it only for those who have a real need to pay the steep fee.
This is like an artificial use of the market and price to limit supply (of cars/traffic).
A conservative argument may be that such fees (like your HOT) are meant to price out the lower segments of the populace. As such, they are elitist and counter-egalitarian. If there be roads to the city center, they should be roads for all.
well that’s exactly what it is, those with 3 or more pay no fee, but anyone else wishing to use it, pays the toll. I thought from what he was saying is that because they are under-utilized even with car-poolers, that’s why they added in the “pay to use”. Now were it ever to reach the point where it was nearly as congested as the other lanes, then its worth would be greatly diminished.
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