COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Charlie Gibson Interviewed Sarah Palin and Barack Obama

Palin has been nominated for VP and Obama for point. Listen to the questions and answers. Look at the body language and demeanor of Gibson when engaging Obama and interrogating Palin. Is it me, or is one more affable and the other slightly hostile or at best challenging and disapproving? Enquiring minds want to know?



35 comments:

  1. Trish should have taken Sarah shopping on 5th Avenue. Better yet I'll volunteer. The brown suit has to go and I, by acclaim, have an excellent eye and taste in helping a lady select clothing.

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  2. I'll take Sarah shopping. You tend the bar.
    :)

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  3. We have upstyled OshKosh B'Gosh clothing out this way fit for a Coronation, much less a Vice Presidential run. I can fix her up. Trust me.

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  4. The interview makes ABC look bad, but does not make Palin look good. There are many things wrong with the Palin interview, and some have been pointed out. She should not have allowed herself to be jerked around by Charlie Gibson, and should not have allowed the kind of language, including body language and stage setup Gibson was using in the interview.

    Ultimately, it's not about Charlie Gibson, it's about Sarah Palin.

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. Biden releases his financial info.


    Joe Biden is a CHEAPSKATE.

    HERE

    Would rather give your momey.

    "Hi, I'm Joe Biden, and I'm a CHEAPSKATE."

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  7. Hmmm, there's a reason why he did that. Was it required?

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  8. If my math is correct that's a whopping $369 a year in giving by Biden.

    Hey, big spender....

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  9. Which is about a "Whopper" a day at Burger King, on 'special day', around here.

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  10. Obama turned down the woman that got 18 million votes in the primaries, in favor of a man that got 10,000.

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  11. I'd be a bit slow on this one, Bob. I smell a rat.

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  12. I don't know, Rufus. It's what they reported on their income tax returns. What you put in a collection plate at church, well, you could say you put $10,000 in there if you want to. Everybody takes what tax deductions they can for charitable giving, and that's what his returns evidently say.

    Bidens report giving fraction of income to charity.

    September 13, 2008

    WASHINGTON - Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, the Democratic nominee for vice president, and his wife reported giving a fraction of 1 percent of their income to charity during the past decade, below the national average, tax records show.

    A Biden spokesman said the couple has given more to charity than they claimed on their taxes.

    Biden and his wife, Jill, earned $319,853 in adjusted gross income and paid $72,787 in federal taxes last year, including $2,721 in alternative minimum taxes. They claimed $995 in deductions for charitable giving, about triple what they deducted in any of the nine previous years. Over the past decade they reported giving an average of $369 to charity.

    Their deductions for charitable giving - about two-tenths of 1 percent of their income - is lower than the national average of about 3.1 percent, according to JustGive.org, a nonprofit organization that connects donors with charities.

    Biden spokesman David Wade said the deductions on the tax forms "are not the sum of their annual contributions to charity." The Bidens "contribute to their church, and they also contribute to their favorite causes." He said the Bidens also do volunteer work with military families and for other causes.

    Biden is the least wealthy US senator, according to an analysis of financial disclosure records by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington research group.

    The Bidens' giving represents a smaller portion of their income than the $353 then-vice president Al Gore was criticized for donating on an income of $197,729 in 1997.

    Biden's running mate, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, and Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, are millionaires. Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Republican vice presidential nominee, hasn't released her tax returns.

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  13. Bob, "Normal" people don't give a lot to charity; and, Sarah, and Todd Palin are "Normal." Their charitable donations might very well come in less than Ol' Slo' Joe's.

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  14. The brown suit has to go and I, by acclaim, have an excellent eye and taste in helping a lady select clothing.

    Oh yeah, well I happen to know that the hot fall colors for the Ladies are gray and purple.

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  15. 2164th, you mentioned how you are, rightfully, suspect about the news from a variety of sources. Did you question the report(s) about the editing of the Palin interiew? Were they indeed edited as indicated in the bold type?

    The reason I ask is that I was browsing clips of the interview at the abc site and I distinctly remember hearing:

    "PALIN: You know, I don’t know if that was my exact quote.

    GIBSON: Exact words."

    Which your post indicates was edited out. Now I do know it is common that interviews are edited but were they, in fact, edited as claimed. If so, did different versions of the interview appear in different places. Or, maybe, the report you cite of the editing is false.

    I don't know but I do remember that one quote and I think before folks get their blood pressure dangerously high (rufus) they should examine the veracity of the reported editing and confirm the edits were done, and actually made her appear worse because of them.

    Here is a link to her interview, at abc's website and she does say the above supposedly edited stuff (maybe there are different versions floating about)

    http://www.abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=5782873

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  16. Ash,

    You make a good point but let me make a word of caution. The Palin nomination is an historic event. The purpose of the interview is to give additional insight to the American voting public so that they can make a decision. The interview should be uncut and not edited at all. Who is ABC to take out comments that Palin made? To be fair, it would be just as unacceptable to allow Palin to do a retake. But a retake would be just as valid as an ABC edit.

    ABC was just as condescending with the American public as was Gibson to Palin.

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  17. OshKosh B'Gosh doesn't recognize seasons, around here.






    Good point, Rufus.

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  18. 'Brain-raped' and other mishaps.



    Feminist author Cintra Wilson writes in Salon (a house organ of the angry left) that the notion of Palin as vice president is "akin to ideological brain rape." Presumably just before the nurse upped the dosage on her medication, Wilson continued, "Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She's such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty, it's easy to write her off and make fun of her. But in reality I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism."

    Have my friends and I...

    Gloria Steinem, the grand mufti of feminism, issued a fatwa anathematizing Palin. A National Organization for Women spokeswoman proclaimed Palin more of a man than a woman. Wendy Doniger, a feminist academic at the University of Chicago, writes of Palin in Newsweek: "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

    Feminist Army Aims At Palin

    The days of the feminist industrial complex are numbered.

    :)
    :)

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  19. Did they actually edit the interview and, if they did, did they do it as alleged? The one clip I reviewed indicated it wasn't as alleged. Technically it was edited as in it was presented as it's own clip but that comment was in there and the article (blog post?) you cited indicated it had been edited out. I guess the official 'interview' and thus the one that holds the answer is what is aired on the network.

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  20. For Sam, et.al.---(Kaku is the follow on Coast to Coast, also teaches and does physics as a sideline:) )

    Don't Buy Into The Supercollider Hype
    By MICHIO KAKU
    September 13, 2008; Page A13

    If you can read this sentence, congratulations! You just survived the official opening of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which an army of critics claim might create mini black holes that will devour the earth. This colossal machine outside Geneva, the largest machine of science ever created, went to full power for the first time on Wednesday, and by mid-October the first real collisions will take place inside the machine.

    Amusingly, the LHC criticism has backfired, similar to the way that media criticism of Gov. Sarah Palin has. The more the critics slammed the machine, the more curiosity and intense interest it generated. Subatomic particle physics and string theory, hardly the subject of dinner table conversation, suddenly became the talk of the town. There's now even a rap song about the LHC that's become an instant, monster hit on YouTube.

    At the heart of this debate is a truly mammoth machine, 17 miles in circumference, straddling the French-Swiss border. After $8 billion and 14 years of work by thousands of physicists and engineers, the LHC has finally been fired up. It's purpose is to accelerate two beams of protons to 99.999999% light speed in a huge tube in opposite directions and then slam them into each other to recreate the sizzling temperatures found at the instant of the Big Bang, and thereby unlock the greatest secrets of the universe.

    At the very least, physicists hope to find a new particle, called the Higgs boson, the last piece of the Standard Model of particles. But some physicists hope to do even better. The LHC might shed light on the "theory of everything," a single theory which can explain all fundamental forces of the universe, a theory which eluded Albert Einstein for the last 30 years of his life. This is the Holy Grail of physics. Einstein hoped it would allow us to "read the Mind of God."

    Today, the leading (and only) candidate for this fabled theory of everything is called "string theory," which is what I do for for a living. Our visible universe, according to this theory, represents only the lowest vibration of tiny vibrating strings. The LHC might find something called "sparticles," or super particles, which represent higher vibrations of the string. If so, the LHC might even verify the existence of higher dimensions of space-time, which would truly be an earth-shaking discovery.

    But why, some ask, is this machine being built in Europe, and not the U.S.? President Ronald Reagan originally wanted to build a much larger machine, called the Super Conducting Super Collider, outside Dallas, Texas, to maintain U.S. leadership in advanced physics. Congress allotted $1 billion to dig a huge circular hole for the machine. But Congress got cold feet and cancelled it in 1993. Then Congress gave physicists another $1 billion to fill up the hole! As a consequence, Congress guaranteed that leadership in advanced physics would pass from the U.S. to Europe.

    Still, critics cling to the fact that the LHC might produce mini black holes that will somehow destroy our world. They've even filed a lawsuit in a U.S. District Court in Hawaii demanding an injunction to stop the machine. (While the LHC is outside U.S. jurisdiction, many of its key components come from America, so the lawsuit could, theoretically, cripple the project.)

    But if the critics and scaremongers knew their physics, they'd be less frantic. First of all, Mother Nature can hurl cosmic rays of astronomically greater energy than anything the puny Large Hadron Collider can produce. In fact, the LHC is actually a pea shooter compared to what the universe has been hurling at the earth for billions of years. Yet the earth is still here.

    Second, these mini black holes are subatomic in size, so tiny they are invisible, like an electron or proton. Their entire energy would not even light up a single light bulb. Black holes, like cats, come in all sizes, from ferocious tigers and lions to purring pussy cats.

    Third, these mini black holes are unstable and decay much too quickly to do any damage. These subatomic black holes simply evaporate away (via something called Hawking radiation) faster than the blink of an eye.

    There is actually a parallel with the past, in which the media misled the people. Back in 1910, the media correctly stated that the earth would soon pass through the tail of Halley's Comet. The media also correctly stated that there might be poisonous gases in the tail. Almost overnight, these reports sparked mass hysteria around the world -- rumors spread like wildfire, gas masks were sold in the streets, would-be prophets warned of the Apocalypse.

    But the media failed to report that the tail of a comet is extremely rarefied -- all the dust in the tail could probably fit inside a suitcase. Eventually the headlines and the panic subsided, and scientists were given a bonanza as they analyzed the comet's tail. Similarly, once the hyperventilating critics get bored with the LHC and find something else to pounce on, science will move on to unlock the secrets of Genesis.

    Mr. Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at City University of New York, is the author of "Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Investigation into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel" (Doubleday Books, 2008

    ---

    Thus putting the end to bob's Theory of the Lifeless Universe.

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  21. The LHC might find something called "sparticles," or super particles, which represent higher vibrations of the string. If so, the LHC might even verify the existence of higher dimensions of space-time, which would truly be an earth-shaking discovery.

    spartticles
    higher dimensions
    beings
    time

    hyperdimensional
    beings
    mired
    in
    time

    We are hyperdimensional beings of some sort casting a shadow into matieriality, and that shadow is our bodies.
    Terrence McKenna

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  22. Ronald Reagan, the physicist's friend.

    Damn Congress. Damn the democrats.

    But why, some ask, is this machine being built in Europe, and not the U.S.? President Ronald Reagan originally wanted to build a much larger machine, called the Super Conducting Super Collider, outside Dallas, Texas, to maintain U.S. leadership in advanced physics. Congress allotted $1 billion to dig a huge circular hole for the machine. But Congress got cold feet and cancelled it in 1993. Then Congress gave physicists another $1 billion to fill up the hole! As a consequence, Congress guaranteed that leadership in advanced physics would pass from the U.S. to Europe.

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  23. Sarah Palin is made out of sparticles.












    Take that, Trish.

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  24. Obama's Mamma

    Rev. Manning presenting.

    I'm getting to like this guy.

    h/t maggie's farm

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  25. Many moons ago, I attended a college forum where Gloria Steinem spoke. She was arrogant, profane and doctrinaire. I challenged her on her intellectual premise, her logical contradictions and her lack of grace and public decorum. ( It was the first time I heard the F-bomb dropped in a public debate.) Her arguments were shallow, she was seething in anger and except for her groupies was roundly laughed at for her fatuous rant. However, she was quite attractive and not wearing a bra so of course I forswore our obvious political differences and asked her to join me for a drink for further discussions but she took a pass.

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  26. Huh?

    Obama Points to the Issues
    Washington Post - 1 hour ago
    By Jonathan Weisman MANCHESTER, NH (Sept. 13) -- Sen. Barack Obama brought his newly aggressive campaign against Republican opponent John McCain to an open-air rally here, castigating the senator from Illinois as a latecomer to the cause of change and ...

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  27. In a March 22, 1998 Op/Ed piece in the New York Times, Steinem effectively gave support to the notion that a man may: (1) uninvited, open-mouth kiss a woman; (2) uninvited, fondle a woman's breast; and (3) uninvited, take a woman's hand and place it on the man's genitals; and as long as the man retreats once the woman says "no" that this does not constitute sexual harassment. [14] This has become known in the popular culture as the "One Free Grope" Theory.[15]The Op/Ed piece was written in an attempt to defend then President Bill Clinton against allegations of sexual impropriety that had been made by White House volunteer Kathleen Willey.

    wiki

    Surely this is not well thought out. Surely a coarsening and falling away of cultural norms perfected by the troubabors, minnesingers, and others is evident here.

    Well, all I can say is, you had your chance, deuce, and proved yourself a man of the old noble traditions.

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  28. Gloria's ok. She had a hard go there for awhile growing up. May the Lord keep her.

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  29. I kid you not. Here is Gloria back in the day.

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  30. She had to struggle along with her mom when mom went bonkers, and dad took off. I've always had respect for her.

    That goofy 'one free grope theory' must have come from those Bunny days, is all I can figure.
    ----

    Canadian politics goes to the birds--

    If the last week is any indication, that polarization is only getting worse. On Sunday morning, Prime Minister Harper began the race by predicting "a very nasty kind of personal-attack campaign." Two days later, his party briefly released an ad that showed a bird defecating on the leader of the Liberal Party. So much for Canadians being nice.

    from an article too long and boring to post.

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  31. Under that goofy theory, a woman couldn't go to Albertson's or the post office without being manhandled once by every Joe all along the way.

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  32. The states are an ongoing laboratory of what to do and not to do in economic policy.

    If You Like Michigan, You'll Like Obama's Policies

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