So many years, so much sanctimony, and all the time the "Gray Lady" was nothing but a duplicitous bitch. The lectures, the indignation, the snide insinuations, the double standards, the pious "All the news that's fit to print.", the averted eyes of a smirking trollop, now so obvious, now so vile.
Her journalistic styles and integrity best exemplified by the rouged drag queen Frank Rich. Expensive perfume on an unclean body and filthy sheets her new signature. There is no gutter smelly enough nor sewer fowl enough for the New York Times. The New York Times exposes, with glee and on page one, above the fold and far to the left, the repeated tale of an unwed pregnant seventeen year old girl. The seventeen year old, picked by fate and the New York Times to be the subject of scrutiny and barely repressed delight.
God damn them all.
__________________
The top three stains on the Ho's sheets:
Disclosures on Palin Raise Questions on Vetting Process
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
The disclosure that Gov. Sarah Palin’s daughter was pregnant was one of several revelations that called into question how thoroughly Senator John McCain had screened her.
NEWS ANALYSIS
In Political Realm, ‘Family Problem’ Emerges as Test
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Republicans rallied around Gov. Sarah Palin, but the disclosure of her teenage daughter’s pregnancy brought uncertainty.
Palin Daughter’s Pregnancy Interrupts Script
By MONICA DAVEY
As people began learning about Gov. Sarah Palin, they were piecing together a portrait of her family life. it helps prolong life or prevent heart attacks.
Previous Articles in the Series »
Cold hand of order;
ReplyDeleteAnd the stiff marching routine;
You sound like Balbo.
Sure, McCain's vetters didn't find what everybody knew.
ReplyDeleteNot.
---
In Wasilla, Pregnancy Was No Secret
Wasilla seems at times to be utterly without guile. It's a large part of the town's charm, and it's exactly the quality that could make an unorthodox pick like Palin pay off. Don't get me wrong — she's a tough politician with sharp enough elbows on her own. But still, she appears to be more steeped in the values of her hometown than any politician I've ever come across.
Maybe that means Palin is a little too much Northern Exposure for America—after all, her father's good friend Curt Menard happily showed me a picture of the governor as a high schooler in 1981, in a root cellar with family and friends, helping skin and cube and cure a whole moose. It's enough to make you almost miss fake hunters like John Kerry and Mitt Romney.
People in Wasilla are Alaskan tough, so not only does a thing like teen pregnancy not seem like anyone's damn business, but it's also not seen as the calamity so many people in the lower 48 might think it is. This is dangerous country — it's not just the roughneck jobs on cable reality shows. It's real life here.
---
"It makes you realize that a thing like a little teenage pregnancy isn't such a big deal," his mom said. "Bristol—and lots of other girl like her out there — are going to be just fine."
"The fact is, regardless of what you will hear over the next few days, Bristol's pregnancy is not a legitimate political issue. Sarah Palin is a longterm member of a group called Feminists for Life, which is not opposed to birth control.
So you probably can't tag her for consigning young people to unwanted pregnancies."
So many real issues...
ReplyDeleteWho gives a crap about the personal life of the Gov's daughter?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThe issue is not the daughter and the pregnency, but the decisions the mother made concerning the daughter, before she was pregnent.
ReplyDeleteIf the mother was not trying to become Vice President, the daughter and the pregnency would be of no concerm.
This is Mrs Palin's current reality, and the case, made here at the Bar, was that Mrs Palin's family values are part of what qualified her to be a heart beat from the Oval Office.
The judgements she made, concerning her daughter are part of her own, thin, resume.
Mrs Palin's position of sex education in schools, and how that is reflected in her own family, that becomes a real issue. As public education and the course requirements are part of a Governors' portfolio.
The AP reports
McCain's record on issues surrounding teen pregnancy and contraceptives during his more than two decades in the Senate indicates that he and Palin have similar views. Until Monday, when the subject surfaced in a deeply personal manner, teen pregnancy and sex education were not issues in the national political campaign.
Palin herself said she opposes funding sexual-education programs in Alaska.
"The explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support," she wrote in a 2006 questionnaire distributed among gubernatorial candidates.
McCain's position on contraceptives and teen pregnancy issues has been difficult to judge on the campaign trail, as he appears uncomfortable discussing such topics. Reporters asked the presumptive GOP presidential nominee in November 2007 whether he supported grants for sex education in the United States, whether such programs should include directions for using contraceptives and whether he supports President Bush's policy of promoting abstinence.
"Ahhh, I think I support the president's policy," McCain said.
When reporters pressed McCain whether the government should provide contraceptives or counseling on contraceptives, he replied, "You've stumped me." McCain said later that he was sure he opposed government spending on contraceptives.
The McCain campaign on Monday did not respond to repeated requests for information.
In Senate votes, McCain has opposed some proposals to pay for teen-pregnancy prevention programs. In 2006, McCain joined fellow Republicans in voting against a Senate Democratic proposal to send $100 million to communities for teen-pregnancy prevention programs that would have included sex education about contraceptives.
So Mrs Palin, as Governor, opposed Sex Education in the Classroom and, it seems, did not provide it at home.
Rat, I got to disagree with you on this one.
ReplyDeleteWhat do we know about the content of the sex ed class at the school?
What is it exactly teaching?
I'd wager it probably has a real anything goes atmosphere, as long as you 'do it right'.
I can understand a parent not wanting to take part in that.
I also think, this is being blown way way out of proportion.
The girl got pregnant. This happens alot. They seem to be making the best choice they can under the circumstances.
If I were to criticise them, I would be criticising my own family in a way, though, by the Grace of God, we got through it, my daughter now being 28, and responsible for herself.
Without any sex ed classes.
As for me, I'm not joining Ash in the tsk tsk tsk brigrad.
Which in Ash's case, not in yours, is extremely hypocritical. In Ash's case, it reeks of it.
I'm sticking with Shakespeare on this one--things happen, Young Spring has its ways, and pushes out Old Man Winter, come what may, sex ed classes be damned.
So a strong mother deals with it.
You cast the first stone.
The new storyline, about McCain ...
ReplyDeleteWell, not new really, but one not seen a lot of, to date.
Gideon Rachman @ FT.com
Then there is the matter of temperament. Mr Bush is a sunny and optimistic person. Mr McCain is funnier, darker and angrier. Mr Bush steered clear of Vietnam. Mr McCain really is a warrior, whose autobiography begins “I was born into a tradition of military service” – and whose books are full of brooding reflections on the nature of honour.
In international crises, the character and instincts of the American president are critical. Mr Obama is by temperament a cautious, pragmatic conciliator. Mr McCain is aggressive, unorthodox and radical.
Sometimes, of course, the radical choice is the right one. Mr McCain would be an interesting choice for president. But safe? Forget about it.
And then a similar approach, from the WaPo
Whatever the political impact, so much for the John McCain we thought we knew. In choosing Palin, he cynically did what his party is always accusing Democrats of doing: He selected a running mate based on her potential ability to appeal to targeted segments of the electorate, rather than for her honestly assessed ability to lead the nation should the occasion arise.
The other thing we learned about McCain is that he is willing to take an enormous gamble based on limited information. He only met Palin once before summoning her for a final interview. He realized he needed to shake up the presidential race, and that's what he did. But we are reminded, if we did not realize it before, that the three things not to expect from a McCain presidency are caution, prudence and a willingness to always put the nation's interests above his own.
These low hanging fruit were mentioned, here at the Bar, before Ms Bristol Palin's being in a family way was public knowledge.
We could go back to discussing that, or how God saved New Orleans but still screwed the GOP Convention out of a prime time TV night.
What do we lmow, bob, about the content of the History courses, or the Business courses, or even the Sciences for that matter?
ReplyDeleteShould we not fund those type of educational classes, in Public Schools, too?
If abortion is to be made rare, it should not be a birth control option. For that to be the case, other options must be made more readily available, pre-pregnency.
In reading dueces list of illegitimates, I did notice none were born after the advent of oral contraceptives.
let em spew their venom at her. if she is a true believer, it will
ReplyDeletebounce back. this whole debacle could work in her favor if she is the right one and proves herself. (just stop ranting on the glass ceiling stuff, its a turn off).
I disagree...
ReplyDeletePalin was not put on the ticket because of her "sex education" resume...
It's a total bullshit issue..
As the public spotlight was swinging towards McCain, what with the Convention and all, it is interesting that Team Maverick has put Mrs Palin front and center, as a target, and sent John to New Orleans.
ReplyDeleteCancelling their first night of business at the Convention, because of a storm thousands of miles away.
A first glance the GOP is running scared, but maybe it's part of a plan.
The candidates have their issues form around them, wi"o".
ReplyDeleteThere is no telling what portfolio Mr McCain is or was planning to hand her, on 21Jan09.
It may well be domestic policy, of which Education is a large part. Since they have a fundemental disagreement on Energy policy, as re: ANWAR, doubt he'll make her the Energy Czarina.
You are postulating upon an unknowable, why just this past Spring Mrs Palin did not know the job description of the next VP, no one but the next President really does.
"Mr Obama is by temperament a cautious, pragmatic conciliator"
ReplyDelete---
He's a corrupt pathological liar, America hating demagogue.
Other than that a cool guy, inarticulate as hell, but cool.
Well, whatever you do, Deuce, Put Sarah Palin's name in the headline of every post for awhile. I'm reading that "Hits" go up something like 300% when the subject is Sarah.
ReplyDeleteSarah Palin's Secret Sex Tips, Sarah Palin's Affairs, and "I had three-way Sex with Sarah" might be good headlines. Then there's "The Nude Sarah Palin," and Sarah Palin in a Bikini as possibilities, also.
Oh, after this comment Blogger might melt down for awhile; Sorry.
dRat: There is no telling what portfolio Mr McCain is or was planning to hand her, on 21Jan09.
ReplyDeleteTrue. But somehow I just dont get the feeling she was tapped as the "education Vpotus"
A quick edit, tap the publish button and we will see if Rufus knows of which he speaks.
ReplyDeleteoff topic, but not really
ReplyDeleteHow Obama lost the election
By Spengler
DENVER - Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech last week seemed vastly different from the stands of this city's Invesco Stadium than it did to the 40 million who saw it on television. Melancholy hung like think smog over the reserved seats where I sat with Democratic Party staffers. The crowd, of course, cheered mechanically at the tag lines, flourished placards, and even rose for the obligatory wave around the stadium. But its mood was sour. The air carried the acrid smell of defeat, and the crowd took shallow breaths. Even the appearance of R&B great Stevie Wonder failed to get the blood pumping.
The speech itself dragged on for three-quarters of an hour. As David S Broder wrote in the Washington Post: "[Obama's] recital of a long list of domestic promises could have been delivered by
any Democratic nominee from Walter Mondale to John Kerry. There was no theme music to the speech and really no phrase or sentence that is likely to linger in the memory of any listener. The thing I never expected did in fact occur: Al Gore, the famously wooden former vice president, gave a more lively and convincing speech than Obama did."
On television, Obama's spectacle might have looked like The Ten Commandments, but inside the stadium it felt like Night of the Living Dead. The longer the candidate spoke, and the more money he promised to spend on alternative energy, preschool education, universal health care, and other components of the Democratic pinata, the lower the party professionals slouched into their seats. The professionals I sat with were Hillary Clinton people, to be sure, and had reason to sulk, for an Obama victory might do them little good in any event.
The Democrats were watching the brightest and most articulate presidential candidate they have fielded since John F Kennedy snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And this was before John McCain, in a maneuver worthy of Admiral Chester Nimitz at the Battle of Midway, turned tables on the Democrats' strategy with the choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.
Speaking to Obama supporters on the periphery of the big event, I was startled by the rapturous devotion elicited by the junior senator from Illinois. He is no symbol for identity politics, no sacrifice on the altar of white guilt, but the most gifted persuader of individuals that I have encountered in any country's politics, as well as a powerful orator on the grand stage. This is not a crowd phenomenon nor a fad, but the response of hundreds of people to an individual.
I sat in on a session with three leaders of Veterans for Obama, a group of retired young officers who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, courtesy of the New Republic's writer on the scene, David Samuels. With passion and enthusiasm, these young people spoke of their hopes for nation-building in Iraq. The George W Bush administration should have put twice the resources into the beleaguered country, they harangued me - not just soldiers, but agronomists, traffic cops, lawyers, judges, and physicians. The Department of Agriculture should have mobilized, along with the Department of Justice.
Nation-building? Doubling down on the US commitment to Iraq? Isn't that trying to out-Bush the Bush administration, while Obama campaigned on getting out of Iraq and spending the money on programs at home? Unblinking, one of the soldiers said, "That's what we think Barack will do." They believed in a more expensive version of the administration's program, and faulted Bush for half measures - and somehow they believed that Obama really agreed with them, all the public evidence to the contrary. And they believed in Barack with perfect faith.
Gandalf's warnings about the irresistible voice of the wizard Saruman in J R R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings come to mind. If these battle-hardened veterans of America's wars fell so easily under the spell of Obama's voice, who can withstand it? Obama's persuasive powers, though, are strongest when channeled through the empathy of his interlocutor. Everyone believes that Obama feels his pain, shares his dream, and will fight his fight and heal his ills. But that is everyone as an individual. Add all the individuals up into a campaign platform, and it turns into three-quarters of an hour worth of promises that echo all the ghosts of conventions past.
Obama will spend the rest of his life wondering why he rejected the obvious road to victory, that is, choosing Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential nominee. However reluctantly, Clinton would have had to accept. McCain's choice of vice presidential candidate made obvious after the fact what the party professionals felt in their fingertips at the stadium extravaganza yesterday: rejecting Clinton in favor of the colorless, unpopular, tangle-tongued Washington perennial Joe Biden was a statement of weakness. McCain's selection was a statement of strength. America's voters will forgive many things in a politician, including sexual misconduct, but they will not forgive weakness.
That is why McCain will win in November, and by a landslide, barring some unforeseen event. Obama is the most talented and persuasive politician of his generation, the intellectual superior of all his competitors, but a fatally insecure personality. American voters are not intellectual, but they are shrewd, like animals. They can smell insecurity, and the convention stank of it. Obama's prospective defeat is entirely of its own making. No one is more surprised than Republican strategists, who were convinced just weeks ago that a weakening economy ensured a Democratic victory.
Biden, who won 3% of the popular vote in the Democratic presidential primary in his home state of Delaware, and 1% or less in every other contest he entered, is ballot-box poison. Obama evidently chose him to assuage critics who point to his lack of foreign policy credentials. That was a deadly error, for by appearing to concede the critics' claim that he knows little about foreign policy, Obama raised questions about whether he is qualified to be president in the first place. He had a winning alternative, which was to pick Clinton. That would have sent a double message: first, that Obama is tough enough to make the slippery Clintons into his subordinates, and second, that he is generous enough to extend a hand to his toughest adversary in the cause of unity.
Why didn't Obama choose Hillary? The most credible explanation came from veteran columnist Robert Novak May 10, who reports that Michelle Obama vetoed Hillary's candidacy. "The Democratic front-runner's wife did not comment on other rival candidates for the party's nomination, but she has been sniping at Clinton since last summer. According to Obama sources, those public utterances do not reveal the extent of her hostility," Novak wrote. If that is true, then Obama succumbed to the character weakness I described in a February 26 profile of (Obama's women reveal his secret). His peculiar dependency on an assertive and often rancorous spouse, I argued, made him vulnerable, and predicted that Obama "will destroy himself before he destroys the country".
Alternately, Obama might have chosen a rising Democratic star like Virginia's 50-year-old governor Tim Kaine. A weaker choice than Hillary, Kaine (or someone like him) would have made a bold statement of self-confidence. Obama could have said with credibility that he would bring to Washington a new generation of outsiders who would change the old system. Instead, Obama saddled an old and unpopular Washington warhorse.
Curiously, Obama ignored the rising stars of his own party, offering the prime time speaking slots to familiar faces, including Senator Edward Kennedy and Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as his own wife, the first prospective First Lady to take the keynote spot in the history of American party conventions.
McCain doesn't have a tenth of Obama's synaptic fire-power, but he is a nasty old sailor who knows when to come about for a broadside. Given Obama's defensive, even wimpy selection of a running-mate, McCain's choice was obvious. He picked the available candidate most like himself: a maverick with impeccable reform credentials, a risk-seeking commercial fisherwoman and huntress married to a marathon snowmobile racer who carries a steelworkers union card. The Democratic order of battle was to tie McCain to the Bush administration and attack McCain by attacking Bush. With Palin on the ticket, McCain has re-emerged as the maverick he really is.
The young Alaskan governor, to be sure, hasn't any business running for vice president of the United States with her thin resume. McCain and his people know this perfectly well, and that is precisely why they put her on the ticket. If Palin is unqualified to be vice president, all the less so is Obama qualified to be president.
McCain has certified his authenticity for the voters. He's now the outsider, the reformer, the maverick, the war hero running next to the Alaskan amazon with a union steelworker spouse. Obama, who styled himself an agent of change, took his image for granted, and attempted to ensure himself victory by doing the cautious thing. He is trapped in a losing position, and there is nothing he can do to get out of it.
Obama, in short, is long on brains and short on guts. A Shibboleth of American politics holds that different tactics are required to win the party primaries as opposed to the general election, that is, by pandering to fringe groups with disproportionate influence in the primaries. But Obama did not compromise himself with extreme positions. He did not have to, for younger voters who greeted him with near-religious fervor did not require that he take any position other than his promise to change everything. Obama could have allied with the old guard, through an Obama-Clinton ticket, or he could have rejected the old guard by choosing the closest thing the Democrats had to a Sarah Palin. But fear paralyzed him, and he did neither.
In my February 26 profile, I called Obama "the political equivalent of a sociopath", without any derogatory intent. A sociopath seeks the empathy of all around him while empathizing with no one. Obama has an almost magical ability to gain the confidence of those around him. Perhaps it was the adaptation of a bright and sensitive young boy who was abandoned by three parents - his Kenyan father Barack Obama Sr, who left his pregnant young bride; his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetero; and by his mother, Ann Dunham, who sent her 10-year-old son to live with her grandparents while she pursued her career as an anthropologist.
Combine a child's response to serial abandonment with the perspective of an outsider, and Obama became an alien species against which American politics had no natural defenses. He is a Third World anthropologist profiling Americans, in but not of the American system. No country's politics depends more openly on friendships than America's, yet Obama has not a single real friend, for he rose so fast that all his acquaintances become rungs on the ladder of his ascent. One human relationship crowds the others out of his life, his marriage to Michelle, a strong, assertive and very angry woman.
If Novak's report is accurate, then Michelle's anger will have lost the election for Obama, as Achilles' anger nearly killed the Greek cause in the Trojan War. But the responsibility rests not with Michelle, but with Obama. Obama's failure of nerve at the cusp of his success is consistent with my profile of the candidate, in which I predicted that he would self-destruct. It's happening faster than I expected. As I wrote last February:
It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama ... Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama's father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals.
By all rights, the Democrats should win this election. They will lose, I predict, because of the flawed character of their candidate.
(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.
also a good read
ReplyDeleteObama's women reveal his secret
By Spengler
"Cherchez la femme," advised Alexander Dumas in: "When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman." In the case of Barack Obama, we have two: his late mother, the went-native anthropologist Ann Dunham, and his rancorous wife Michelle. Obama's women reveal his secret: he hates America.
We know less about Senator Obama than about any prospective president in American history. His uplifting rhetoric is empty, as Hillary Clinton helplessly protests. His career bears no trace of his own character, not an article for the Harvard Law Review he
edited, or a single piece of legislation. He appears to be an empty vessel filled with the wishful thinking of those around him. But there is a real Barack Obama. No man - least of all one abandoned in infancy by his father - can conceal the imprint of an impassioned mother, or the influence of a brilliant wife.
America is not the embodiment of hope, but the abandonment of one kind of hope in return for another. America is the spirit of creative destruction, selecting immigrants willing to turn their back on the tragedy of their own failing culture in return for a new start. Its creative success is so enormous that its global influence hastens the decline of other cultures. For those on the destruction side of the trade, America is a monster. Between half and nine-tenths of the world's 6,700 spoken languages will become extinct in the next century, and the anguish of dying peoples rises up in a global cry of despair. Some of those who listen to this cry become anthropologists, the curators of soon-to-be extinct cultures; anthropologists who really identify with their subjects marry them. Obama's mother, the University of Hawaii anthropologist Ann Dunham, did so twice.
Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with primitive peoples. He holds his own view in reserve and emphatically draws out the feelings of others; that is how friends and colleagues describe his modus operandi since his days at the Harvard Law Review, through his years as a community activist in Chicago, and in national politics. Anthropologists, though, proceed from resentment against the devouring culture of America and sympathy with the endangered cultures of the primitive world. Obama inverts the anthropological model: he applies the tools of cultural manipulation out of resentment against America. The probable next president of the United States is a mother's revenge against the America she despised.
Ann Dunham died in 1995, and her character emerges piecemeal from the historical record, to which I will return below. But Michelle Obama is a living witness. Her February 18 comment that she felt proud of her country for the first time caused a minor scandal, and was hastily qualified. But she meant it, and more. The video footage of her remarks shows eyes hooded with rage as she declares:
For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment.
The desperation, frustration and disappointment visible on Michelle Obama's face are not new to the candidate's wife; as Steve Sailer, Rod Dreher and other commentators have noted, they were the theme of her undergraduate thesis, on the subject of "blackness" at Princeton University. No matter what the good intentions of Princeton, which founded her fortunes as a well-paid corporate lawyer, she wrote, "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong."
Never underestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public. Early in Obama's campaign, Michelle Obama could not restrain herself from belittling the senator. "I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There's Barack Obama the phenomenon. He's an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or whatever it was, law professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right? And then there's the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy's a little less impressive," she told a fundraiser in February 2007.
"For some reason this guy still can't manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure the bread so that it doesn't get stale, and his five-year-old is still better at making the bed than he is." New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported at the time, "She added that the TV version of Barack Obama sounded really interesting and that she'd like to meet him sometime." Her handlers have convinced her to be more tactful since then.
"Frustration" and "disappointment" have dogged Michelle Obama these past 20 years, despite her US$300,000 a year salary and corporate board memberships. It is hard for the descendants of slaves not to resent America. They were not voluntary immigrants but kidnap victims, subjected to a century of second-class citizenship even after the Civil War ended slavery. Blackness is not the issue; General Colin Powell, whose parents chose to immigrate to America from the West Indies, saw America just as other immigrants do, as a land of opportunity. Obama's choice of wife is a failsafe indicator of his own sentiments. Spouses do not necessarily share their likes, but they must have their hatreds in common. Obama imbibed this hatred with his mother's milk.
Michelle Obama speaks with greater warmth of her mother-in-law than of her husband. "She was kind of a dreamer, his mother," Michelle Obama was quoted in the January 25 Boston Globe. "She wanted the world to be open to her and her children. And as a result of her naivete, sometimes they lived on food stamps, because sometimes dreams don't pay the rent. But as a result of her naivete, Barack got to see the world like most of us don't in this country." How strong the ideological motivation must be of a mother to raise her children on the thin fair in pursuit of a political agenda.
"Naivete" is a euphemism for Ann Dunham's motivation. Friends describe her as a "fellow traveler", that is, a communist sympathizer, from her youth, according to a March 27, 2007, Chicago Tribune report. Many Americans harbor leftist views, but not many marry into them, twice. Ann Dunham met and married the Kenyan economics student Barack Obama, Sr, at the University of Hawaii in 1960, and in 1967 married the Indonesian student Lolo Soetero. It is unclear why Soetero's student visa was revoked in 1967 - the fact but not the cause are noted in press accounts. But it is probable that the change in government in Indonesia in 1967, in which the leftist leader Sukarno was deposed, was the motivation.
Soetero had been sponsored as a graduate student by one of the most radical of all Third World governments. Sukarno had founded the so-called Non-Aligned Movement as an anti-colonialist turn at the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. Before deposing him in 1967, Indonesia's military slaughtered 500,000 communists (or unfortunates who were mistaken for communists). When Ann Dunham chose to follow Lolo Soetero to Indonesia in 1967, she brought the six-year-old Barack into the kitchen of anti-colonialist outrage, immediate following one of the worst episodes of civil violence in post-war history.
Dunham's experience in Indonesia provided the material for a doctoral dissertation celebrating the hardiness of local cultures against the encroaching metropolis. It was entitled, "Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: surviving against all odds". In this respect Dunham remained within the mainstream of her discipline. Anthropology broke into popular awareness with Margaret Mead's long-discreditedComing of Age in Samoa (1928), which offered a falsified ideal of sexual liberation in the South Pacific as an alternative to the supposedly repressive West. Mead's work was one of the founding documents of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and anthropology faculties stood at the left-wing fringe of American universities.
In the Global South, anthropologists went into the field and took matters a step further. Peru's brutal Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerilla movement was the brainchild of the anthropologist Efrain Morote Best, who headed the University of San Cristobal of Huamanga in Ayacucho, Peru, between 1962 and 1968. Dunham's radicalism was more vicarious; she ended her career as an employee of international organizations.
Barack Obama received at least some instruction in the Islamic faith of his father and went with him to the mosque, but the importance of this experience is vastly overstated by conservative commentators who seek to portray Obama as a Muslim of sorts. Radical anti-Americanism, rather than Islam, was the reigning faith in the Dunham household. In the Muslim world of the 1960s, nationalism rather than radical Islam was the ideology of choice among the enraged. Radical Islam did not emerge as a major
political force until the nationalism of a Gamal Abdel Nasser or a Sukarno failed.
Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother's milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.
There is nothing mysterious about Obama's methods. "A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is," wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world's biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis' cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power's portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech.
America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the peak of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation. With malice aforethought, he has sought out their sore point.
Since the Ronald Reagan boom began in 1984, the year the American stock market doubled, Americans have enjoyed a quarter-century of rising wealth. Even the collapse of the Internet bubble in 2000 did not interrupt the upward trajectory of household assets, as the housing price boom eclipsed the effect of equity market weakness. America's success made it a magnet for the world's savings, and Americans came to believe that they were riding a boom that would last forever, as I wrote recently [1].
Americans regard upward mobility as a God-given right. America had a double founding, as David Hackett Fischer showed in his 1989 study, Albion's Seed . Two kinds of immigrants founded America: religious dissidents seeking a new Promised Land, and economic opportunists looking to get rich quick. Both elements still are present, but the course of the past quarter-century has made wealth-creation thesine qua non of American life. Now for the first time in a generation Americans have become poorer, and many of them have become much poorer due to the collapse of home prices. Unlike the Reagan years, when cutting the top tax rate from a punitive 70% to a more tolerable 40% was sufficient to start an economic boom, no lever of economic policy is available to fix the problem. Americans have no choice but to work harder, retire later, save more and retrench.
This reversal has provoked a national mood of existential crisis. In Europe, economic downturns do not inspire this kind of soul-searching, for richer are poorer, remain what they always have been. But Americans are what they make of themselves, and the slim makings of 2008 shake their sense of identity. Americans have no institutionalized culture to fall back on. Their national religion has consisted of waves of enthusiasm - "Great Awakenings" – every second generation or so, followed by an interim of apathy. In times of stress they have a baleful susceptibility to hucksters and conmen.
Be afraid - be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself. When Barack utters the word "hope", they instead hear, "handout". A cynic might translate the national motto, E pluribus unum, as "something for nothing". Now that the stock market and the housing market have failed to give Americans something for nothing, they want something for nothing from the government. The trouble is that he who gets something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over.
The George W Bush administration has squandered a great strategic advantage in a sorry lampoon of nation-building in the Muslim world, and has made enemies out of countries that might have been friendly rivals, notably Russia. Americans question the premise of America's standing as a global superpower, and of the promise of upward mobility and wealth-creation. If elected, Barack Obama will do his utmost to destroy the dual premises of America's standing. It might take the country another generation to recover.
"Evil will oft evil mars", J R R Tolkien wrote. It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama. As he recalled in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Obama idealized the Kenyan economist who had married and dumped his mother, and was saddened to learn that Barack Hussein Obama, Sr, was a sullen, drunken polygamist. The elder Obama became a senior official of the government of Kenya after earning a PhD at Harvard. He was an abusive drunk and philanderer whose temper soured his career.
The senior Obama died in a 1982 car crash. Kenyan government officials in those days normally spent their nights drinking themselves stupid at the Pan-Afrique Hotel. Two or three of them would be found with their Mercedes wrapped around a palm tree every morning. During the 1970s I came to know a number of them, mostly British-educated hollow men dying inside of their own hypocrisy and corruption.
Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama's father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals - and nothing can be more terrible for the system. Even those who despise America for its blunders of the past few years should ask themselves whether the world will be a safer place if America retreats into a self-pitying shell.
Where's the "Publish" button, and what does it do?
ReplyDeleteThat Spengler gives a good stem-winder of his own:
ReplyDeleteEven the collapse of the Internet bubble in 2000 did not interrupt the upward trajectory of household assets, as the housing price boom eclipsed the effect of equity market weakness. America's success made it a magnet for the world's savings, and Americans came to believe that they were riding a boom that would last forever, as I wrote recently [1].
But by all means, let's pile onto the 17-year old while rerunning The Feminist Chronicles of the last century.
just stop ranting on the glass ceiling stuff, its a turn off - SSS
(no, I'm not stalking you but) one of several paths to defeat for the Republicans is wearing out their welcome on some of these subjects about which 'most of us' (I presume for the sake of presenting the argument) could not care less.
My advice to the hyperactivity of the news media: be cool.
And here’s the fundamental reason underlying all the rage on one side and amusement on the other over Sarah Palin: it’s all about … female fertility.
ReplyDeleteHuman beings have extremely strong emotions on the topic of fertility. It’s an obsession — look at the celebrity gossip columns these days. The who is sleeping with whom stuff bores people now compared to the pregnancy news. Thus, celebrities auction off rights to pictures of their new babies for millions, even though all newborns look alike. The top breeding stock parents — Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt — were looking to snag something like $6 million for the exclusive rights to the first photos of their twins.
Now, the Breeding Wars have moved into the political arena. Barack Obama launched his Presidential run at the 2004 Democratic convention by devoting the first 380 words of his speech to describing in great detail the two stocks from which he was crossbred. His message is that by uniting in his DNA the two races, he will end the racial conflict that has long plagued this land. (Noah should take a look at Henry VII’s speech ending Shakespeare's “Richard III” for the classic expression of the logic of dynastic merger, in this case between the Lancasters and the Yorks.) Obama left out the part about his mom being 17 when she got pregnant and his father already being married with a kid and another on the way.
Palin has horned in on all that subliminal symbolism with her own. She’s had five kids while shooting caribou (a picture of her and a daughter standing over a huge beast she shot is the LA Times most emailed article of the day even though it's not an article, just a picture) and throwing the crooks out, and now she has a 17-year-old daughter who is pregnant and will marry a handsome hockey player.
The Blue Whites are alarmed and outraged to be reminded that the Red Whites can afford to outbreed them and are outbreeding them. Modern people tell themselves they don't care about stuff like that, but they do, oh, they do.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/
It is not just the NY times. My local newspaper, Canada's National Newspaper had a big picture above the fold with this article, written by a woman who tends to the conservative side of the spectrum:
ReplyDeletePalin's drive for family values hits a bump
It's not so much about Palin as it is about McCain in my view:
MARGARET WENTE
September 2, 2008 at 12:26 AM EDT
Sarah Palin: Dan Quayle with an up-do.
When Sarah Palin's family was introduced to the whole wide world the other day, I wondered why their oldest daughter, Bristol, looked so distressed. You may remember her – she was the one holding baby Trig. Was it because all the folks back home are wearing T-shirts saying “Alaska: The coolest state with the hottest governor”? Or was it because she knew the entire universe was about to find out that she, Bristol, is unwed and five months pregnant? Hey! That means she could be giving birth on Inauguration Day!
Too bad her pistol-packin', diaper-totin' mama couldn't bear to say no to her country when it needs her – even if it meant sacrificing the privacy of her 17-year-old daughter to the global media machine.
John McCain did not pick Sarah Palin as his running mate because she was the best candidate around. He picked her because she was a young and photogenic conservative woman with a family-values trump card. That would be her fifth child, Trig, whom she carried to term at age 44 even though she knew he had Down syndrome. What better bona fides are there for an anti-abortion absolutist? John McCain figured that she would mobilize the sullen evangelical base – and it's worked. Since Friday, more than $10-million in fresh donations has flooded into the campaign coffers.
So what becomes of family values now? Everyone will put the best face on things. The Democrats won't touch this one with a barge pole. Bristol will marry the father (whose privacy is also finished) and raise their child with the help of her loving, loyal family. What voice did she have in these decisions? Who knows?
The McCain team says it knew all about the pregnancy (although there's much else they seem not to have known about). Yet the timing of this news – on the day the Republican convention was supposed to start – is not ideal, PR-wise. Perhaps the plan was to keep it under wraps until the two were safely wed. But once the rumour began circulating on the blogosphere that Trig was really Bristol's child, not Sarah's, and that Sarah had faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her daughter, further secrecy became impossible.
Astonishingly, some people are trying to claim that Sarah Palin's nomination is another breakthrough for women. In fact, it's an insult to women. It's a triumph of marketing, not governing. The message it sends is that after all these years of so-called equality, tokenism still trumps ability and experience. If Sarah's name had been Stan, she never would have got the nod.
The wretched irony is that Ms. Palin – not Mrs. Clinton, the first woman unarguably qualified to be president – could now be the first female to make it to the Oval Office. Given John McCain's age (he just turned 72), the odds aren't that long.
“I think she is the most inexperienced person on a major-party ticket in modern history,” says presidential historian Matthew Dallek. That includes the hopelessly incompetent Spiro Agnew (who was governor of Maryland for two years) and the hilariously clueless Dan Quayle (who couldn't spell “potato”). Nobody knows her views on foreign policy, because she doesn't have any. Let's hope no one asks her a trick question, like how to find Ahmadinejad on a map. Even so, some Republicans are gamely trying to defend her. As Cindy McCain said the other day, “Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia. So, it's not as if she doesn't understand what's at stake here.”
Why is John McCain so mesmerized by dishy younger babes? When he met Cindy (she was 24, he was 41), he fell in love at first sight. The same went for Sarah. He met her once, and now swears he's her soul mate. Unfortunately, this appears to be true. They're both mavericks with itchy trigger fingers, only she shoots moose.
The choice of Sarah Palin demolishes Mr. McCain's most promising campaign theme – that Barack Obama is too inexperienced and too risky a choice in a dangerous world. It also demolishes the picture of Mr. McCain as a seasoned man of judgment. Now we know the really risky choice is him. He's so impulsive that he makes decisions with his gut, not his head. He's so reckless that he's willing to gamble his own country in order to gain electoral advantage. As for Ms. Palin, she didn't seem to think too hard about the humiliation in store for her daughter. Such a little thing, when your country needs you."
P. S. I saw clips of G. W. Bush in Texas last night. The constant sniping and villification that he has endured have clearly taken their toll. Criminal. - Enscout (BC)
ReplyDeleteSaw what I think is the same clip and had the same thought.
So what? Speaks to temperament - McCain's in particular, in the context of the psychological profiles in contrast drawn by Spengler with Obama. Saw the story somewhere that McCain used to leave the weekly meeting of Congressional Republicans and go back to his office where he handed the meeting minutes of "talking points" to an aide with the instructions "Learn it. Love it. Live it."
Dr. James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family issued the following statement:
ReplyDelete"In the 32-year history of Focus on the Family, we have offered prayer, counseling and resource assistance to tens of thousands of parents and children in the same situation the Palins are now facing. We have always encouraged the parents to love and support their children and always advised the girls to see their pregnancies through, even though there will of course be challenges along the way. That is what the Palins are doing, and they should be commended once again for not just talking about their pro-life and pro-family values, but living them out even in the midst of trying circumstances.
"Being a Christian does not mean you're perfect. Nor does it mean your children are perfect. But it does mean there is forgiveness and restoration when we confess our imperfections to the Lord. I've been the beneficiary of that forgiveness and restoration in my own life countless times, as I'm sure the Palins have.
"The media are already trying to spin this as evidence Gov. Palin is a 'hypocrite,' but all it really means is that she and her family are human. They are in my prayers and those of millions of Americans."
the humiliation in store for her daughter
ReplyDeleteWords just fail me.
If that's the worst humiliation experienced by either mother, daughter, or grand-daughter, then thank whatever god you worship for planting you in your own special Paradise.
Puleease. I sometimes wish we could go back to a time when you had to qualify to have a communications platform.
You don't thinka 17 year old pregnant unwed mother having the rat pack of all the media from the NYTimes to The National Enquirer writing about you wouldn't be humiliating? I guess in your view the press always is respectful and prints the truth.
ReplyDeleteMaybe presidential qualifications should be revised to include psychological profiles, say the MMPI.
ReplyDeleteThe five factor model of human personality has gained great acceptance in non-pathological populations, and the PSY-5 scales differ from the 5 factors identified in non-pathological populations in that they were meant to determine the extent to which personality disorders might manifest and be recognizable in clinical populations. The five components were labeled Negative Emotionality (NEGE), Psychoticism (PSYC), Introversion (INTR), Disconstraint (DISC) and Aggressiveness (AGGR).
No Ash, I don't. You don't know the meaning of humiliation. That ain't it.
ReplyDeleteElsewhere, Mike said: those who on friday were positively beside themselves that sarah palin was everything they’d hoped for had to tap dance around the revelation that her 17-year old daughter was pregnant.
ReplyDeleteNo tap dance. The Palins choose life, always. Obama defended abortion-on-demand, saying he would never want to punish his daughter by making her have an unwanted child. The Palins tried to teach their daughter the importance of waiting until marriage, but when she fell short of perfection, they encouraged her to get a belated marriage and gathered around her as a family, the ultimate support network.
2164..Couldn't handle the truth about d. rats lies ...yea yea , I know since I put Rex W. in there it gave you cover to yake it out totally.Shit man you coudl have editied that but you need to protect that lying son of a bitch.
ReplyDeletePlus he's ID's himself on this bolg as publisher of that horsey magazine. What a pimp thing to do.
You above all should know I never threaten to rape anyone but you're gonna let your bosom buddy get away with anything he wants to say and never challenge it. There's no difference between your operation and the Daily Kos. And you know he's ID'd himself on this site so don't feed me a bunch of shit about naming names. Hell I didn't even use his last name or mention the pub or his home town of phone number or any number of other fqacts available. You just cratered. It's bull shit and you know it you've just lost your balls over this site since it's beginnings.....oak leaf cluster, etc come on do they get Field Marshall Batons too?
Or is it that you know he can't produce the evidence unless you guys fabricate it.
ReplyDeleteHabu, you've got to be one of the most insecure individuals I've ever come across on, and off, the net.
ReplyDeleteHabu, If someone wants to reveal who they are that is their business. I can gather the IP address of everyone who enters the site, but have no interest in doing so. You have no right to out anybody.
ReplyDeleteYou have the right to enter the site or not, comment or not. I do not understand your complaint. Do not read the site if you do not like it.
You can gloss over DR's posts. There are some serious unhinged people out there and if he wants to expose who he is, that is his option. You leave it alone.
Attack the ideas and state your own. That is interesting. Personal attacks are frankly boring.
Mike Rucker (elsewither):you have to ask yourself: what’s really happening here? for what exactly is she being hired?
ReplyDeletePalin creates a mirror image of Dem ticket, making a stark contrast this November: a rookie who mostly voted "present" in the Senate and a 35 year insider against a seasoned war hero and an outsider/corruption fighter. If McCain picked Lieberman (like I predicted) it would not have created a clear choice. Palin weaks the Entitlement Feminists who think they should be given everything from the Patriarchy rather than actually, you know, accomplishing everything. Palin garners 20% of Hillary's voters right away, just for being female. Palin garners another 20% of Hillary's voters as an opportunity for them to poke Obama in the eye for dissing them and Hil. Palin shores up McCain's support on the evangelical/Catholic right. And how! Palin sucked all the air out of Obama's post-convention bounce, which went splat. Even CNN polls show a dead heat. Palin gets OJT for a Palin/Jindal ticket in 2016 or even 2012 if something bad happens to McCain.
I just think it's all blown out of proportion.
ReplyDeleteI'm all for birth control, oral contraception, what have you, to keep the abortion rate down.
The young lady made a mistake, if it actually is a mistake.
It sounds to me like the family has opted for the best choice.
I just don't see it reflecting on Sarah Palin. It can happen to any family, and it's a constant worry.
I think McCain will probably change his outlook on drilling in Alaska. Over time he'll almost have to if the supply situation keeps getting worse, which it will. He can say, Sarah's convinced me I was wrong on this, etc.
It's in the nature of things that you choose the candidate that can help you out the most. Nothing to be ashamed of here. She's a young, bright attractive woman. I'd hope we wouldn't pass people over for having those qualities.
I wish her all the best.
Ok, I cannot tell a lie...
ReplyDeleteI am the Walrus...
The unbelievable has happened. I agree with Ash about the press. Anything to sell a copy. They ought to just leave the young lady alone.
ReplyDeleteWe can all help out by not buying a newspaper.
$6 million for a picture of the Pitt twins? You got to be kidding me, but maybe you aren't.
So Mrs Palin, as Governor, opposed Sex Education in the Classroom and, it seems, did not provide it at home.
ReplyDeleteWell, thinking it over further, you may have a prima facie case there.
And yet, the family is living by their lights.
And,
So many real issues...
Who gives a crap about the personal life of the Gov's daughter? WiO
That's pretty much how I feel about it.
Nough said.
For what it's worth, the WND poll on the subject has 56% showing real support for the Palin family, with lesser numbers showing lesser amounts of support, and almost no one thinking it's a political disaster.
ReplyDeleteIt may actually help. It shows this is a real family, and the daughter is doing the right thing by keeping the baby and getting married 32% (1374)
The way the Palin family is conducting itself is admirable, and endears them even more to voters 24% (1035)
Ashley,
ReplyDeleteIt might not be The Globe & Mail's commie propagandist Rick Salutin, but it still amounts to the same thing. Garbage. They can't even give that garbage away, let alone try to sell it.
The Globe & Mail = Garbage = The Toronto Star = The Toronto Sun
Rick Salutin, I believe had his commie propaganda published in all the three.
Looking at a picture of Bristol Palin's young lover, who does seem 'ruggedly handsome' as the article says, I can imagine the temptations a young girl might go through during those long, really long, l o n g cold c o l d Alaska winter nights.
ReplyDeleteWe should keep this in mind as well:)
One of the headlines over at RCP is The Libertarian Case for Palin, and she does seem like a Libertarian candidate in a way.
ReplyDeleteSurvival Strategy in Alaska.
ReplyDeleteInuit = Breed Early - Breed Often
Intercourse
Now,
and,
Unless
Interrupted,
Tomorrow
Been in the public eye for well over thirty years, have supped with Judges and Governors, Con and Congress men, Educators and Illiterates.
ReplyDeleteLots and lots of "Developers".
fatulance does not have a home, we here at the Bar are the only ones that'll even put up with his drivel.
Wonder if his slippers dried out, bet they're still a tad stinky.
That he thinks Rex is me, just goes to prove he does not understand families, corporate ownership, Trusts and the like.
what's is pissing me off today?
ReplyDeleteGilad Schalit is being held by kidnappers that receive more than 300 million dollars a YEAR...
Hezbollah is dispatching eams to kidnap wealthy jews for ransom and is NOW part of the Lebanese Government, one that the USA provides millions of dollars too...
NKor is still screwing around with plutonium & uranium
Pakistan is re-opening Saudi Funded Schools and they have nukes and KHAN is still free...
Russia is FINISHING Iran's power plant
and that's the short list...
the ISSUE that Palin's DAUGHTER had SEX and is Preggers is MEANINGLESS
Bobal: Looking at a picture of Bristol Palin's young lover, who does seem 'ruggedly handsome' as the article says, I can imagine the temptations a young girl might go through during those long, really long, l o n g cold c o l d Alaska winter nights.
ReplyDeleteI don't!
WiO: the ISSUE that Palin's DAUGHTER had SEX and is Preggers is MEANINGLESS
You can't have it both ways, WiO: If Obama is accountable for everything Reverend Wright said for 20 years, and he wasn't even kin, then Sarah Palin is accountable for her daughter getting a bun in the oven when she is kin. Why? This is the Year of Guilt By Association.
Bobal: I think McCain will probably change his outlook on drilling in Alaska.
ReplyDeleteLook what happened when the young daughter of Sarah Palin permitted drilling in Alaska.
T: You can't have it both ways, WiO: If Obama is accountable for everything Reverend Wright said for 20 years, and he wasn't even kin, then Sarah Palin is accountable for her daughter getting a bun in the oven when she is kin. Why? This is the Year of Guilt By Association.
ReplyDeleteWay off base there kiddo....
If we were COMPARING Obama's allowing his brother living in poverty, on ONE dollar a day vrs Palin's daughter's preg status that would be similar.....
Barry the Messiah PERSONALLY aligned himself to his own choice of friends that were destructive forces to America. Now if it turns out that Ms Gov had bad associations THAT would be open season.....
Google Chrome has gone public:
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome
It's fast, but for now FireFox 3 is much more useful. We'll see how it evolves.
Comments like this I avoid like the plague, but ...
ReplyDeleteUsing the Firefox browser, I am unable to cut and paste into any MS application. Have to pull up IE browser.
Little @holes.
Slade,
ReplyDeleteI use right click to Copy & Paste all the time on my Vista machine. Never had any problems.
You can also go to the FF3 menu:
View -> Toolbars -> Customize
And add Copy & Paste buttons to the tool bar.
I do right click Matt but the word processor shuts down - every d@mn time. I'll try the toolbar fix.
ReplyDeleteI also have Zone Alarm installed which I expect might be causing some issues.
A problem has caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.
ReplyDeleteSounds like a trick MMPI scenario. I wonder if MS hires shrinks to write their error messages.
Trying to drum up business?
And the imagery of the graphics - this little blue circle spinning round and round and round ...
ReplyDeleteIf I weren't such a grounded person ...
As to be expected, The National Organization for Women came out against Sarah Palin.
ReplyDeleteToo much woman for them, I quess.
Slade: Sounds like a trick MMPI scenario. I wonder if MS hires shrinks to write their error messages.
ReplyDeleteOne word: LINUX
Look what happened when the young daughter of Sarah Palin permitted drilling in Alaska.
ReplyDelete:)
I quess you could say she had a deep strike in the glory hole, or something.
Sometimes I forget this is a family bar.
Why does the National Organization for Women stay in business if they're not going to support someone like Palin?
ReplyDeleteThey've already got most of their agenda passed.
I wonder if they get federal money somehow.
Couldn't they at least say, our group admires Sarah Palin, but we urge our members to vote as best they see fit?
Is that asking too much?
jeez
McCain/Palin might win this, though it far from a certain thing.
ReplyDeleteObama screwed up royally when he didn't at least ask Hillary to be on the ticket. If he had done that, it would have been a walk for the dems this year, I think.
I can't understand why he didn't at least ask. Just hatred I quess, or pride maybe. He should have put it out there, Hillary, it's yours for the taking if you want it, good lady.
I don't buy Dick Morris's idea that Bill and his overseas dealings were too much baggage. The MSM would have buried it so deep most people wouldn't be aware of it.
But no, he taps everybodys Mr. Charisma, Joe Biden.
I can't understand it. Sometimes you got to dance with the Prom Queen, even if you really don't want to.
Dutch Intelligence--US to Strike Iran Soon
ReplyDeleteI wish I knew what was going on. Whether this is information, disinformation, or total BS to fill up the page before the 3 o clock publishing deadline.
WiO has been warning of war coming for months. He might be right.
NOW attacks Palin, says she is against America's women--
ReplyDeleteNot Every Woman Supports Women's Rights
August 29, 2008
Statement of NOW PAC Chair Kim Gandy on the Selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain's Vice Presidential Pick
Sen. John McCain's choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate is a cynical effort to appeal to disappointed Hillary Clinton voters and get them to vote, ultimately, against their own self-interest.
Gov. Palin may be the second woman vice-presidential candidate on a major party ticket, but she is not the right woman. Sadly, she is a woman who opposes women's rights, just like John McCain.
The fact that Palin is a mother of five who has a 4-month-old baby, a woman who is juggling work and family responsibilities, will speak to many women. But will Palin speak FOR women? Based on her record and her stated positions, the answer is clearly No.
In a gubernatorial debate, Palin stated emphatically that her opposition to abortion was so great, so total, that even if her teenage daughter was impregnated by a rapist, she would "choose life" -- meaning apparently that she would not permit her daughter to have an abortion.
Palin also had to withdraw her appointment of a top public safety commissioner who had been reprimanded for sexual harassment, although Palin had been warned about his background through letters by the sexual harassment complainant.
What McCain does not understand is that women supported Hillary Clinton not just because she was a woman, but because she was a champion on their issues. They will surely not find Sarah Palin to be an advocate for women.
Sen. Joe Biden is the VP candidate who appeals to women, with his authorship and championing of landmark domestic violence legislation, support for pay equity, and advocacy for women around the world.
Finally, as the chair of NOW's Political Action Committee, I am frequently asked whether NOW supports women candidates just because they are women. This gives me an opportunity to once again answer that question with an emphatic 'No.' We recognize the importance of having women's rights supporters at every level but, like Sarah Palin, not every woman supports women's rights.
###
hehehe
ReplyDeleteInfighting among the Republicans of Alaska--
Watching Palin operate over the past few years has been like witnessing a dramatic reading of All the King’s Men. In 2002, Murkowski( that would be Governor Murkowski) had interviewed but passed over Palin in selecting a replacement for the senate seat he vacated to become governor. In a grand act of nepotism, he chose his own daughter instead.
hehe--that would be current sitting Senator Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.
Don't say it Ash. I agree with you on that point.:)
hehe--and in so doing, Palin may be President one day, as daughter Murkowski languishes in the lowly Senate.
EU Eases Off on Economic Threats After Russia Suggests Troop Pullback
ReplyDeleteWashington Post - 2 hours ago
By Philip P. Pan MOSCOW, Sept. 1 -- The European Union on Monday backed off threats to impose economic sanctions on Russia but said it would suspend talks on a wide-ranging partnership agreement with Moscow until Russian troops withdraw from positions ...
For what it's worth...
ReplyDeleteI just received this in an email from a friend in Illinois, a lifelong, hardcore, pro-choice, liberal democrat, and apparently a PUMA:
I just donated another $100 to Hillary and decideid to vote for John. He can have his one term then Hillary can run and this time win. Stupid democrats anyhow.
She also added in a followup note that she also likes Sarah, but doesn't think she'll run in 2012.
Palin Coverage Focused on Daughter and 'Troopergate'
ReplyDeleteWashington Post - 49 minutes ago
As the GOP national convention rolls on, the coverage of John McCain's choice for running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, continues to revolve around her 17-year-old daughter's pregnancy and the much-discussed investigation in her home state about the ...
My hunch? This is the trend among a lot of voters who somehow never show up in the polling.
ReplyDeleteMan, the news from Georgia hit the back burner for awhile.
ReplyDeleteFred Thompson is giving a big speech tonight--
Thompson Speech Hits Media on Palin, Obama on Abortion
Fred Thompson will forcefully defend the selection of Sarah Palin tonight in a speech Republicans are characterizing as "red meat." He will argue that the feeding frenzy over Palin's is the result of "panic" from the Democrat-friendly mainstream media.
"What a breath of fresh air Governor Sarah Palin is. She is from a small town, with small town values, but that's not good enough for those folks who are attacking her and her family. Let's be clear, the selection of Governor Palin has the other side and their friends in the media in a state of panic. She is a courageous, successful, reformer, who is not afraid to take on the establishment."
Thompson will also criticize Barack Obama's answer on abortion from his recent appearance at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church. Warren had asked: "Now, let’s deal with abortion. 40 million abortions since Roe v. Wade. you know, as a pastor I have to deal with this all of the time. All of the pain and all of the conflicts. I know this is a very complex issue. 40 million abortions. At what point does a baby get human rights in your view?"
Obamas responded: "Well, I think that whether you are looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade."
Thompson will criticize Obama for dodging the issue: "We need a President, and Vice President, who will take the federal bureaucracy by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shaking. And we need a President who doesn't think that the protection of the unborn or a newly born baby is above his pay grade."
The bulk of Thompson's speech will be a testimonial on behalf of John McCain, his character and his leadership. John McCain has "the kind of character that civilizations from the beginning of history have sought in their leaders."
I've started a list of commenters that I just scroll on by:
ReplyDeleteyoshidad @ Coyote
benj @ BC
desert rat @ EB
Life's too short to deal with pompous assholes.
Even a coach for Team McCain agrees, it is not the candidates that really matters, it's not Joe or John or Barack or Sarah that really make the difference, it's the TEAM that counts.
ReplyDeleteOr so says Team McCain spokesman Senator Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina.
“She is more like the rest of us,” said Senator Graham, invoking what is already a definitive convention mantra. Delegates are finding increasing comfort in that observation, despite the fact that some of the news coming out about Governor Palin — such as her reported ties to a group that promotes Alaska’s right to vote on seceeding from the United States — sounds more fringe than mainstream.
Even as McCain campaign lawyers were reported to be spending time in Alaska for some belated vetting, Senator Graham portrayed Governor Palin in interviews as Oval Office ready.
Senator Graham saw no drawback in the governor’s lack of foreign policy experience. “Domestically and internationally, she’d be better for America than Senator Obama,” he told the gathered reporters.
Senator Graham insisted the governor was not a desperate last-minute choice to appease the GOP’s restless base of social conservatives. “John has been talking about her for months,” he said.
What does the Senator think about the prospect of Governor Palin becoming President — a prime consideration for a V.P. pick?
“The McCain team will be around her,” Senator Graham said, exuding confidence. “She’ll do fine.”
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete“John felt we are matching history with history,” he said.
ReplyDelete“Maverick picks maverick.”
He had no regrets about incomplete vetting, or about the string of revelations about Governor Palin that have emerged since Friday. “I think we played this very well,” he said.
As reported in the NYTimes.
David Harsanyi:
ReplyDelete..."Palin, for example, vetoed 300 pork projects in Alaska in her first year in office. She made a habit of knocking out big-government Republicans in her brief political career. For this, the 44-year-old mother of five enjoys a sterling approval rating in a state with arguably the nation's most libertarian-minded populace.
When it comes to healthcare, Palin says she wants to "allow free-market competition and reduce onerous government regulation." These days, any mention of the "free market" that's not framed as a crass pejorative is a sign of progress.
Culturally, there is little for the Heartland to dislike. By now, you've probably seen picture or two of Palin sporting a rifle. Apparently, she's left carcasses strewn across the Alaskan wilderness. In some places -- areas where the nation is growing -- owning a gun is not yet a sin. And unlike Obama, Palin seems to believe that the Second Amendment means the exact same thing in rural Alaska as it does in the streets of Chicago.
Yes, Palin is without argument a staunch social conservative. She is fervently opposed to abortion - even in cases of rape and incest, which will raise eyebrows, but is certainly more philosophically consistent than the namby pambyism of your average politician. The choice issue, after all, is complicated, even for many libertarians. And, as I was recently reminded, Ron Paul, the Libertarian champion of the 21st century, also opposes abortion.
Even when advocating for "moral" issues, Palin's approach is a soft sell. Palin does not support gay marriage (neither does Obama, it should be noted). Yet, in 2006, Palin's first veto as Governor was a bill that sought to block state employee benefits and health insurance for same-sex couples.
We cannot bore into Palin's soul to see her true feelings about gay couples, but, at the time, she noted that signing "this bill would be in direct violation of my oath of office" because it was unconstitutional. For most libertarians, the thought of politician following any constitution, rather than their own predilections, morality or the "common good," is a nice change of pace."...
I can understand why some people in Alaska might support an Independence Party, though I think it is short sighted.
ReplyDeleteI get upset being in the 9th Circus Court of Appeals, when we here really have no relationship to people in San Francisco.
And Alaska is so much further away.
It doesn't make any real sense though.
For one thing, they couldn't defend themselves, would have to still rely on the lower 48, like Canada does.
And, while it is tempting to contemplate all that oil money, they couldn't actually get it out of the ground without the Chevrons, BP's etc of the world.
And, I just had this thought--maybe Alaska is in the 9th Circuit too, they may be.
Which makes it all the more understandable, but unworkable.
To but a limit on the courts and the Federal Government does make some real sense to me.
Random ramblings.
The Christian Scieence Monitor
ReplyDeleteThe response, attributed to spokesman Michael Goldfarb, said Bumiller had “opted to make up her own version of events” in writing about the vetting process comparing her article to an Associated Press story.
...
“And Bumiller writes that Governor Palin “was a member for two years in the 1990s of the Alaska Independence Party.” Not true, and unsourced. Governor Palin has been a registered Republican since 1982.
“Ms. Bumiller, if you’d like to try reporting instead of writing fiction, here’s a link to our press line.”
The CSM also reports
ReplyDeleteIn attempting to put out what has become a media firestorm, McCain told reporters, “My vetting process was completely thorough, and I’m grateful for the results.”
...
The Anchorage Daily News however, spoke to a number of individuals from next-door neighbors, to former colleagues, to state legislators, to the FBI - all with the same story: No contact from the campaign.
“But in Alaska, it was hard to find anyone who had been contacted by McCain’s campaign,” the article reads.
“We’re not a very big state,” said a former Alaska Speaker of the House. “People I talk to would’ve heard something.”
Both of these reports could be accurate and true. Mrs Palin could have related the entire reality to Team McCain.
No need to go much beyond that.
And you could be full of shit.
ReplyDeleteWhat's new?
Rat wants beltway regulars, not normal folk.
ReplyDeleteShould work for the MSM.
A plagerizer and a Chicago Crook with an education he got on Crack, more qualified than a mother with a pregnant teen.
ReplyDeleteSinless,
ReplyDeletePalin is not against contraception however, as you no doubt know.
Fox News is reporting that North Korea is rebuilding a nuclear reactor.
ReplyDeleteQuestion:
Should we let them rebuild the reactor and then bomb it to rubble?
The world would howl but we could point to the millions and millions we have paid the thugs and the deal after deal that they have broken.
Hey Mat,
ReplyDeleteI thot you were all Mac, all the time?
I'm now using a 13 year old moniter after Vista Sp1 seemingly disabled my lcd.
...that's what I accomplished this AM with Vista!
I wish the Chinese would just put an end to Kim. They could do it. We ought to just tell them no more trade until you put in a sane group.
ReplyDeleteThey'd say:
ReplyDeleteNo moree Walmartee.
Why wait, whit?
ReplyDeleteBomb it early, bomb it often.
Or admit the collateral damage to Seoul makes bombing NorK right next to not to likely, closer to never happenin'.
The US is starting to pressed everywhere, at once.
As if by design.
We are all Georgians, as well as Koreans, Iraqis, Afghanis, Ukranians, Germans and Poles.
The US can no longer field a military that can fight two regional conflicts, at once.
Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq, where else should we escalate US involvement?
Then come to terms with what assets are available to US, after almost 7 years of the Long War on Terror.
"The US can no longer field a military that can fight two regional conflicts, at once."
ReplyDelete---
All part of the plan, continued by W.
...after 9-11.
If the Chinese took mat's advise and internalized their growth, instead of being dependent upon their export trade with the US, they could find themselves better off, long term.
ReplyDeleteTo our detriment
Be careful what you wish for. It took a long time and a lot of effort for US to get China where it is, today. Be thankful for the peace and tranquility that a engaged China provides, despite some of the costs.
"I can't understand why he didn't at least ask."
ReplyDelete---
Can you spell
M I C H E L L E ?
How is it known that he did not, ask?
ReplyDeleteNever said that Obama/Biden were more qualified, doug.
ReplyDeleteSaid there would be questions about Mrs Palin's judgement.
There are, now.
Said there was not much difference between McCain and Obama, and there is not, both are US Senators.
Both know criminals, both have had questionable financial dealings.
McCain's being a tad more dated, he being in office for 26 years, most of his "aid" was recieved "in the beginning", when he was not well known in AZ. Back when he ran for John Rhode's House seat, after Mr Rhodes retired.
McCain has a military background and is grounded in that collective. Obama is urban and represents about half the country. Sad as that may be, it is the reality of the day.
Neither will be crowned King.
44 Senators, loyal, brave, true.
Learn it, Love it, Live it.
TS-Si Government - Politics
ReplyDeleteJohn Gramlich
Wednesday, 27 August 2008
...
Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, another Democrat, would fill the Senate vacancy left by Republican candidate John McCain should he ascend to the presidency. Unlike Obama, McCain has not announced his running mate, but he is expected to do so before the Republican National Convention kicks off Sept. 1.
The three governors would choose replacements only to serve out the remainder of the senators’ terms, or until a special election can be called.
The rare presence of three sitting senators in the same presidential election has touched off a frenzy of speculation in the candidates’ home states about who their potential Senate substitutes might be. One thing, however, already appears certain: no governor’s appointment is likely to alter the chamber’s delicate balance of political power.
That’s because Napolitano is required by state law to choose a Republican to replace McCain if he prevails. Arizona is one of only three states where the governor must choose a Senate replacement from the same political party that vacated the seat, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The other states are Hawaii and Wyoming.
Can anyone else remember that other "Republican Senator" James Jeffords?
Any Republican Ms Napolitano were to appoint, could not be counted amongst the 44 LBT, at least not initially.
ReplyDeleteObama wants to Federally prosecute the producers of a political video, McCain authored the Law that criminalized that video's form of political speech within 90 days of an election.
ReplyDeleteNot much difference, there.
That prosecution will lead to "Good Government" in Mr McCain's previous statements.
ReplyDeleteWhen the discussion was of hyperthetical videos and elections.
So to protest the attempt to silence any of US, one must start with Mr McCain and Mr Feingold.
Obama just is playing the process those other "experienced" Senators created.
Michelle, that may be the reason. But, like Rat says, I quess we don't know for sure.
ReplyDelete"America's excited and they're going to be even more excited once they see her tomorrow night"
ReplyDelete-Mav
Rook said...
ReplyDeleteCold hand of order;
And the stiff marching routine;
You sound like Balbo.
Tue Sep 02, 04:02:00 AM EDT
So, Deuce, this young man seems to think you're a blackshirt fascist. Italo Balbo
Obama does seem to be getting some traction in the recent polls. Are we that fickle a nation that we bounce around so much over a convention and a speech?
ReplyDeleteSarah Palin’s Experience « Sigmund, Carl and Alfred
ReplyDeleteListening to her critics, one might think that John McCain’s chosen running-mate is a complete ignoramus when it comes to matters of national security. In fact, Sarah Palin’s background in Alaska, including most recently her service as that state’s governor, suggests that the judgment of the Republicans’ candidate for Vice President with respect to this portfolio is likely to be substantially better than that of either Barak Obama or Joe Biden. Consider the following factors:
Gov. Palin has spent much of her adult life dealing with matters long central to the Alaskan experience and now of surpassing importance to the nation as a whole - namely, energy security and how we can provide for it. Having managed her state’s department responsible for oil and gas exploration and exploitation, having negotiated a long-delayed natural gas pipeline through Canada to the Lower 48 and having been married for nearly two decades to a blue-collar worker in Alaska’s North Slope oil fields, she knows more about the subject than all three of the others on the two parties’ tickets put together.
Speaking of geography, Alaskan territory is also along the trajectory of ballistic missiles launched eastward out of Stalinist North Korea. For that reason, among others, Alaska’s Fort Greely was selected as the site for the principal U.S. ground-based defense against such missiles.
As that state’s governor, Sarah Palin would know more by osmosis - if nothing else - about the necessity for U.S. anti-missile systems than either Messrs. Obama or Biden. In fact, the Democrats have reflexively opposed such defenses and promise to starve them of funds if elected. Opinion polls suggest that the support missile defense enjoys among Gov. Palin’s Alaskans is shared by strong majorities of their countrymen elsewhere. Her judgment versus Sen. Biden’s on the question of whether America should be protected against present and growing missile-delivered threats will be one of the highlights of the vice presidential nominees’ debate.
In short, America is only beginning to get to know Sarah Palin. As we do, she will have plenty of opportunities to illuminate her views on national security. One thing is already clear, though: By virtue of her home state and its unique role in America’s energy, defense and power-projection and thanks to her own public sector service and that of her offspring in the U.S. Army, it is not only wrong but foolish to portray her as totally unprepared to contend with the epochal foreign and defense policy issues we are confronting.
hmmph, I was wondering what that post meant.
ReplyDeleteDon't get me wrong, I'm no fascist type, but one wonders if Libya is really better off under Khaddafi.
DR: The US can no longer field a military that can fight two regional conflicts, at once.
ReplyDeleteEach one of our Boomers can fight a whole region all by their lonesome. Won't be nothing left but a region-sized glass parking lot when they get done, but we only had the resources to build one nation anyway and Iraq was it.
So what, Whit?
ReplyDeleteObambi's expert says Buchanan is a Nazi Sympathizer.
"I've stood up to the old politics as usual, to the special interests, to the lobbyists, the big oil companies and the 'good old boy' network"
ReplyDelete-SP
Right Whit, I saw it. I looked at his bio and one of his old time fav music includes a little piece by the Red Army Choir. I actually liked some of his movies. He is just confused.
ReplyDeleteOn 28 June, while landing on the Italian airfield of Tobruk a few minutes after a British air attack, Balbo was shot down by Italian gunners and killed. The cruiser San Giorgio started firing on his Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 airplane (bearing the civil registration "I-MANU" in honor of his wife, Donna Manu),[14] followed by the airport's anti-air guns. It is still not clear which of them shot him down. The government in Rome maintained that the incident was an accident of friendly fire, but Balbo's closest friends and his family strongly believed that it was an assassination on Mussolini's orders. This idea was supported during Mussolini's next visit to Tobruk to review the Italian forces, during which he refused to visit Balbo's place of death. A 1997 interview with the gunner who shot him down claimed that Balbo's plane was simply identified as an enemy target,[2] as Balbo was flying low and coming in against the sun after an attack by British Bristol Blenheims.[15] But debate continues.
ReplyDeleteBalbo warned against siding with the Germans.
If the US would not deploy the B2s to stop Russian aggression, with conventional weapons, the chances of the US using nukes, in any of these "Brush Wars" is slim to none.
ReplyDeleteThose nukes, T. are necessary to try to keep the mega-peace, but don't seem like much use in Afghanistan, places like that.
ReplyDeleteI think Governor Palin is probably a fine woman but my gosh, we need to "hold our horses" here. Let's see what the woman is really all about before we go all bonkers like the Obamanoids.
ReplyDeleteObamanoid.
ReplyDeleteI just Googled it. It's only been used about a million times.
Robert Oppenheimer was quoted as saying the atom bomb didn't have much utility, said they were 'shit' or something to that effect. Though they seemed to prove him wrong by ending the war.
ReplyDeleteI think he said they were HOT Shit.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to learn more, Whit, read Gaffney's piece.
ReplyDeleteQuite compelling, although some ahem, might choose to discount.
---
Election Records show Palin to have always been a registered Republican since 1982, fwiw.
Gaffney's piece is the one above on energy and national defense.
ReplyDeleteHey Mat,
ReplyDeleteI thot you were all Mac, all the time?
==
I had 3 machines. All 3 were Macs. I sold my 20" iMac, and with that money I bought the HP Pavilion M9150F QuadCore + 24" Dell monitor. I'm very happy with the decision.
It seems the Feds and state failed its citizens again
ReplyDeleteWhat is the nature of your family ties with Balbo, Bobal?
ReplyDeleteAmazing, Mat.
ReplyDeleteDid you do it to have more choices and functionality software wise, or what?
Balbo, aka, Balbob, was an older uncle, who was disowned by the family before I was born.
ReplyDeleteIf McCain had chosen Louisiana's Gov. Bobby Jindal, elijah, just think of the spin miesters glee.
ReplyDeleteWould have made family matters pale in comparison.
Biden said he was there Balbo, er Bobal.
ReplyDelete(gave his blessing to your name once you became born due to family's disowning Bobal, er Balbo.)
ReplyDeleteAmazing, Mat.
ReplyDeleteDid you do it to have more choices and functionality software wise, or what?
==
I could run windows via VMware, so software wasn't really the issue. My HP machine is a full fledged media center, plus the specs on the HP machine are vastly superior to that of the iMac. With the 24" monitor included, the price delta was zero.
They called him Balbo the Bad, then didn't talk about him anymore.
ReplyDeletePalin 11.5% chance to be withdrawn before election. That's up 8.5% from yesterday.
ReplyDeleteIntrade
John Coale, a prominent Washington lawyer, husband of Fox TV host Greta Van Susteren and a supporter of Sen. Hillary Clinton, announced today that he was supporting John McCain for president. Coale, who traveled with Sen. Clinton, President Clinton and her family through out the primary season, complained of sexism, and said the Democratic Party is "being taken over by the moveon.org types" in an exclusive interview with Newsweek.com's Tammy Haddad.
ReplyDeleteNewsweek
I don't think I'd buy into that trade. It'd be a fiasco if she were withdrawn.
ReplyDeleteAsh would be hooting and hollering in howls of derision and laughter.
Shit, it's 14.3 now. Keeps going up.
ReplyDeleteAll of the "Tracking" Polls released today were from Sat, Sun, and Mon of Labor Day Weekend. These polls will skew, heavily, democratic. It will be Thursday before you get a decent number.
ReplyDeleteIf Palin can give a Good speech, tomorrow night, she will overcome "most" of the family issues.
I know I had to sleep on the family issues for a night before it started to sort itself out.
Carly Fiorina, chairwoman of the Republcian National Committee’s Victory 2008 fundraising effort, put the spotlight on the Citizens for McCain coalition at a news conference Tuesday. It’s a group of men and women with ties to the Clintons who have switched their allegiance to the McCain camp.
ReplyDeleteThe new group estimates it’s signed up 50,000 members since it started in June, and that more are on the way.
Cynthia Ruccia said some Clinton supporters who have publicly switched their allegiance have received death threats. “There are people who are going to vote for McCain who don’t want people to know about it,” said Ruccia, a former Ohio congressional candidate and women’s rights activist.
Clinton Supporters
If the only thing they have on Palin is that her 17 year old daughter is pregnant, that seems pretty thin to me.
ReplyDeleteShe made a good appearance when McCain introduced her. She should do ok, and she'll have a teleprompter too, which I don't think she had before.
I know I had to sleep on the family issues for a night before it started to sort itself out.
ReplyDeleteThat's an astute observation. There's a lot of that going around in the modern world - the violent swings in commodities, market indicators that no longer indicate, and invasions that are planned - or not.
Balbo - I thought that was from Lord of the Rings.
Maybe you could delete that before Deuce gets back, Mat, he'll get indigestion.
ReplyDeleteAlmost a year to the day before the Republican National Convention began, members of a self-described anarchist group gathered to talk about ways to disrupt it, including kidnapping delegates, sabotaging air vents at the Xcel Energy Center, blocking bridges and "capturing federal buildings"
ReplyDeleteUnbeknownst to the RNC Welcoming Committee, two police informants and an undercover investigator had infiltrated their ranks, according to an affidavit and search warrant application filed Tuesday. The informants and investigator accessed group e-mails, attended meetings, talked strategies with members and participated in camps and workshops.
Plots on the RNC
Ash has become unable to hear (or perhaps he hears but does not understand) the words:
ReplyDelete"More Executive Experience than Barry and Biden Combined."
Will 'Rat ever grant her credit for what Gaffney outlines?
You Decide!
2164...
ReplyDeleteIt is certainly obvious to all that I do not like or respect DR. The feeling from him is mutual, but when he claims I threaten to kill and rape a contributor and her daughter which he did a few days ago that is a bit much.
That I "outed" him?. I used a first name and another letter from the alphabet. If that is outing then your definition is pretty thin gruel. I didn't mention his home town, although he has in posts on this site. So be it no more "outing"....but reconcile this from today.
You said in part;
"Habu, If someone wants to reveal who they are that is their business. I can gather the IP address of everyone who enters the site, but have no interest in doing so. You have no right to out anybody.
Tue Sep 02, 11:56:00 AM EDT
so far so good. The DR says later and in part;
"That he thinks Rex is me, just goes to prove he does not understand families, corporate ownership, Trusts and the like."
Tue Sep 02, 02:02:00 PM EDT
So apparently your statement is a confirmation that I "outed" someone and his statement refutes that, claiming he is not Rex.
Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason stated that, something can and cannot be at the same time
So I either outed someone using one name and a letter, or as that person states I did not.
I believe it is a fair assumption to make that you know this person sub rosa of this site and that is fine, but somewhere along the line one of you has run afoul of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
I'll drop in from time to time but the EB is a day long event and as life goes by the ticking of the clock says get out and do something. That and I can't stand DR.
You also failed to address his outrageous claim that I threaten to kill and rape someone on this site. Now there’s really no use in pursuing that because we all know we can always be someone else or that something can be fabricated, but you I am confident would have barred a person making that claim and that the discussion of that infamous a threat would have garnered a good deal of comments….so it goes.
Finally I’d like to say that on those occasions where I have looked in (which are infrequent) your production and your writing have been top stuff.
Post Script:
Some of you are going to believe what you want to believe regardless of any evidence or "gut" feeling but I have to say that Teresita is not Habu. She does however have a lot of guts because I know use to joust with her, other have also , and yet she keeps com'in on and on. But Habu and Teresita are not the same person.
Thanks for your time.
Standard Practice Barry Politics, Sam.
ReplyDeleteWasn't that Bilbo Baggins?(I had to look it up)
ReplyDeleteThe Lord of the Rings, The Eternal Story, and Joe Campbell
A cheap joke for cheap times Bob.
ReplyDeleteI let the hosts handle this stuff.
The world turned very strange in the short course of a year. The persistence of violent market gyrations an indicator of unusual forces - economic and otherwise. I can only absorb so much at any given time.
Rucker: i still expect some kind of october surprise out of this administration.
ReplyDeleteIt's going to be a November surprise this time. A day or two after the election, either Israel, or the US, or Israel jointly with the US, will bomb the living bejeezus out of Iran.
or alternatively, those citizens failed themselves
ReplyDelete..........
Iran - let's all hope they are smarter to retaliate against the U.S. for Israeli actions
They depended upon the State, elijah. Believed the promises.
ReplyDeleteEven the wunderkid Governor could not make that big a difference.
Enough to have the refugees avoid any discomfort.
Anytime 2,800 people are living communally, in a Sam's Club building, your're gonna have discomfort.
The people got on the buses.
ReplyDeleteThe few scenes I've seen, of the New Orleans rebuilds, the houses are being built at grade, not elevated above the flood plain.
Which could be from 6 to 18 feet, if memory serves, depending upon the locality.
So the next time the levees fail, they will, the homes will be lost, again. Pretty much nuts, seemingly.
Lieberman was good.
ReplyDeleteThompson, where was that guy on the campaign trail?
Saw Gingrich afterward, thought he was gonna crack his face, smilin'
Played as good an offense for Mrs Palin as I've seen, yet.
Seems crazy to me, building under the water level. I think they ought to just give it up.
ReplyDeleteI suppose the tax payers are footing the bill for the new construction. How would any insurance company insure there?
Hey, 'Rat,
ReplyDeleteDidja hear?
We're gonna be a bombin them Iiiranians!
Geeze!
Got any money on that one yet?
Mat,
ReplyDeleteWhat did you pay for that Dell?
I think I'm in the market for a moniter.
This is the 15th major prediction of a bombin @ BC.
ReplyDeleteHell, even Mat gave that up, didn't he?
I've been listening to Michael Saveage. His view is that McCain blew it big time with Palin. Terrible pick, he says. Inexperience.
ReplyDeleteI don't agree with him. Kind of came as a surprise, I thought he'd be supportive. Said that Texas senator would be better, Kay Hutchison. Everyone has a little different opinion.
Always just beyond the near horizon, bombin' those Mullahs.
ReplyDeleteBut the target list has not shrunken, the Israeli do not have the planes, to do anything but prick 'em.
Always got a Amero or two, to speculate with, doug.
It took how many dead Piecekeepers, in Georgia, before the Russians answered with force?
ReplyDeleteHow many Russians are at that centrifuge site in Natanz?
Can military strikes destroy Iran’s gas centrifuge program?
Probably not.
By David Albright, Paul Brannan, and Jacqueline Shire
August 7, 2008
Those three from the Institute for Science and International Security do not see much chance for success, in setting back the Iranian centrifuge and enrichment progams with limited military strikes.
Where to attack?
The use of military strikes to try to cripple Iran’s enrichment efforts assumes that the attacker knows what to attack. Gaps reportedly exist in U.S. and foreign intelligence on the precise location and vulnerabilities of Iran’s nuclear facilities.
U.S. participants reportedly left recent meetings between senior U.S. and Israeli military commanders “unconvinced that the Israelis have enough intelligence on where to strike, and with little confidence that they will be able to destroy the nuclear program.” 1
If Fred Thompson had give more speeches like that, he might be the candidate.
ReplyDeleteI think if the Israelis go, we'll get sucked in to it somehow anyway, so we might as well go with them. It's hard to feature them not throwing something back our way.
ReplyDeleteCongress get to vote on starting that war, bob?
ReplyDeleteOr are the Israeli going to decide US policies on War and Peace?
ReplyDeleteDoug, the monitor was about $260 CAD w a coupon for Dell Canada. It's average in all respects. Nothing to really recommend it.
ReplyDeleteBtw, Google Docs is way kewl.
I think I still have about a week or two left on that prediction.
ReplyDeleteDon't know, Rat, about Congress. The President might claim it's already covered. He's got ninety days, isn't it, anyway.
ReplyDeleteUnder my scenario, it would appear the Israelis have a say, as a practical matter, in our defense policy. Or better, the Israelis and the Iranians. Surely they'd make some attempt to close the gulf.
My CRT Dell is mediocre pos, but at least it still works.
ReplyDeleteThis is the SECOND Princeton moniter that's failed!
At least the first was under warranty.
...and I suspect sp1 fried this one
My 13 year old moniter that came with my Micro still works a lot better than the Dell, but it's a 14 inch CRT!
"Micron" ...a microscan ADI
ReplyDeleteThat is why the US has to secure Iraqi airspace from foreign intrusions, bob.
ReplyDeleteIt is part of our security mandate, from the UN.
Quite a few Google things still don't run on Apple, right?
ReplyDeleteSavage hates retards, everybody knows that!
ReplyDeleteQuite a few Google things still don't run on Apple, right?
ReplyDelete==
The web apps are all good.
They might go in through Syria and Turkey. Without Iraq, it does look hard to do. Risky, and outcome uncertain.
ReplyDeleteRemember the painting elephants?
ReplyDeleteSeems they can do Math, Too
:)
ReplyDeleteBetty Martini is on a crusade to rid the world of dangerous chemicals--
Tue 09.02 >> C2C
On a mission to rid the world of unhealthy chemicals and additives, Dr. Betty Martini will join a panel of other experts (James Turner, Dr. H.J. Roberts, & Stephen Fox) to tell the story of how aspartame was approved for human consumption and the new worldwide effort to ban the artificial sweetener.
Fair enough Habu. Patrons come and go as suits their taste and time. In life, remember another of Murphy's laws, friends come and go, enemies accumulate. Fear not, it all ends the same.
ReplyDeleteMore than Can Be Told
ReplyDeleteAccording to Campbell, an essential element of the Monomyth is "a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told." Tolkien, who was writing The Lord of the Rings as Campbell was writing his book, said in a letter to his son: "A story must be told or there’ll be no story, yet it is the untold stories that are most moving. I think you are moved by [the story of] Celebrimbor because it conveys a sudden sense of endless untold stories: mountains seen far away, never to climbed . . ." He deliberately echoes this idea in Chapter VIII of Book One, "Fog on the Barrow-Downs," when the hobbits stand on the hill behind Tom Bombadil’s house with Goldberry and look around them:
Eastward the Barrow-downs rose, ridge behind ridge into the morning, and vanished out of eyesight into a guess: it was no more than a guess of blue and a remote white glimmer blending with the hem of the sky, but it spoke to them, out of memory and old tales, of the high and distant mountains.
The Monomyth feeds our hope that there is always something more to be learned, something more to be discovered. We like to think that there is still some kind of Terra Incognita we might explore someday; that we might venture into those places that are still blank on the map, marked only with the warning "Here be dragons!" And the great revelation is that this frontier exists within us. We do not fully know ourselves; the Monomyth is, in essence, the story of learning just how much more there is to each of us than we ever guessed.
from my post above
I am the author of 300 untold storys.
ReplyDeleteI've written many unpublished poems, made love to dozens of imaginary princesses...
ReplyDeleteI am the one.
ReplyDeleteTell people about your experience when you experienced me.
Habu: Some of you are going to believe what you want to believe regardless of any evidence or "gut" feeling but I have to say that Teresita is not Habu. She does however have a lot of guts because I know use to joust with her, other have also , and yet she keeps com'in on and on. But Habu and Teresita are not the same person.
ReplyDeleteThis should have been obvious. Generally, people who have been raped don't toss around the word "rape" casually, like a joke, any more than a veteran of Omaha Beach will talk about how cool a gory shoot-em-up video game is. All the other stuff, Habu, the CIA/company stuff, the Japanese atrocity stuff, that was just me playing with my food. Peace Be Upon You.
Sarah Palin, at the beginning of her outdoorswoman years.
ReplyDeleteA small RC helicopter will not only bring more love between you and your son, but also make your son learn something he never knows; he will become more curious about science. Maybe a great scientific is being brought up by you. Despite the success of programs like EnterTech, rc helicopterthe video-game industry hasn't been proactive with schools. Educational game sales make up only 7 percent of the software market for console games, and computer titles haven't generated enough sales to be ranked, according to the Entertainment Software Association. Many commercial titles offer just drill-and-practice lessons, which some experts believe defeats the purpose of using video games.With the Super-Tac, Streamlight debuts new C4 led flashlight technology that is three time brighter than standard leds and delivers up to 135 lumens of intense white light for up to 3.5 hours. When combined with Streamlight's proprietary deep-dish parabolic reflector optics, the Super-Tac delivers a superior long-range targeting beam, with ample peripheral illumination for navigation.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteCheck out my web-site: cordyceps