@realjohnboy,
rjb, I am not into Alaska politics, and I don't think all that many other people are either. I think conservatives and Republicans will judge Palin on how they think she compares with other potential candidates running on the Republican ticket nationally. That comparison will consist of what she says and does in regard to issues during the campaign, when it actually begins in earnest. Whether Palin's endorsed candidate wins or loses might somewhat measure her current standing in Alaska, as compared to her very high popularity there in the past, but I doubt it is all that good of a measure nationally.
@plainoldme,
plainoldme wrote:
Do you have a handle on how Alaskans feel about her resignation?
No, I couldn't find a poll after she quit on July 3rd, 2009.
She was elected in Nov, 2006, by a margin of 48% to 41%.
In mid-2007, her approval rating in Alaska was a stunningly high 90% and stayed in the 80's during early/mid 2008. It slipped to 68% after she got the nod to be McCain's running mate. By June 18, 2009, two weeks before she resigned, it was down to 56%.
I do recall a lot of Alaskans were angry with her for quitting but I can't quantify that.
@realjohnboy,
Thanks for your research.
The son of friend moved to Alaska a little more than a year ago. According to him, many Alaskans are loners who like wide open spaces and distance between people. Many purposefully divorce themselves from politics and current events.
A lesson in right-wing politics:
Lee Atwater would be proud. Or ashamed. Or both.
Atwater, the famed GOP operative who ran George H.W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign, was the universally acknowledged master of the political dirty trick " his was the diabolical mind behind the "Willie Horton" ad that did Michael Dukakis in " until a deathbed conversion in which he regretted the "naked brutality" of his career. Atwater was also a native of South Carolina, and in recent months his home state has been living up to his political legacy in ways he never could have imagined " most recently with a Republican state senator using the slur "raghead" for GOP gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley, a Christian of Indian Sikh descent, and for President Obama.
South Carolina has always had a singularly mean-spirited and crafty political culture, especially on the GOP side, where dog whistles about race and religion come across loud and clear to its good ol' boy base. There were the rumors floated during the 2000 Republican presidential primary about a supposed illegitimate black child of Sen. John McCain, and there was the time in 1990 when political consultant Rod Shealy conspired to increase the turnout among anti-black white voters in the GOP primary by recruiting a black candidate (which he correctly reckoned would benefit his candidate) to run for Congress.
South Carolina has also of late become known for the sexual peccadilloes of Gov. Mark Sanford and the anti-Obama rage of one of its congressmen, Joe Wilson (he of the "You lie!" outburst during the president's address to Congress on health care).
And now the state's Republican primary for governor has tied those threads of political deviousness, sexual innuendo and white rage into an Atwaterian nightmare.
Front-runner Haley, an attractive "pro-family" candidate who has the backing of the tea party movement and Sarah Palin, has been the target of not one but two claims of infidelity to her husband " both lodged by conservative political operatives who claim to have slept with her. And on Thursday a state senator who is supporting one of Haley's opponents casually referred to her as a "raghead" and claimed that she is a Manchurian candidate launched by a "network of Sikhs" to take over the governorship.
During a visit Thursday to "Pub Politics," an online political chat show hosted from a bar in Columbia, S.C., state senator Jake Knotts said: "We already got one raghead in the White House; we don't need a raghead in the governor's mansion." Haley's parents are Sikhs of Indian descent; she has converted to Christianity but still attends Sikh religious ceremonies on occasion out of deference to her parents.
According to the Columbia Free Times, Knotts also claimed that Haley was a plant being controlled by nefarious handlers:
Knotts says he believed Haley has been set up by a network of Sikhs and was programmed to run for governor of South Carolina by outside influences in foreign countries. He claims she is hiding her religion and he wants the voters to know about it.
The "raghead" remark seemed like an inevitable grace note in the gubernatorial primary. Knotts is supporting South Carolina Lieutenant Gov. Andre Bauer's candidacy, and this week a campaign consultant for Bauer named Larry Marchant came forward to claim he had a "one-night stand" with Haley " a married mother of two " at a school-choice conference in 2008. That allegation came just a week after Will Folks, a right-wing blogger and former campaign worker for Haley, claimed to have engaged in an "inappropriate physical relationship" with her.
Haley has categorically denied the charges and says she has been "100 percent faithful" to her husband. Bauer, who fired Marchant and says he has had nothing to do with the charges of infidelity, has chosen a curious approach to staying out of the fray: He's demanding that Haley take a lie-detector test to prove that she never cheated on her husband. Haley, meanwhile, has pledged that if she's elected, she will resign if proof ever comes out that she did sleep with Folks or Marchant.
Neither Marchant nor Folks has come forward with proof of their claims, though Folks has released phone records showing that he frequently spoke to Haley on the phone late at night and claims to have seen a photo, allegedly taken by a private investigator, of himself and Haley in a "compromising position."
As for Knotts, he has issued an apology for the "raghead" comment, claiming that it was "intended in jest" and that the "humorous content was lost in translation." Though the "Pub Politics" show was webcast, host Wesley Donehue, a South Carolina political consultant, Tweeted that "technical issues" prevented Knotts' remark from being archived on the show's site, so no video of it was immediately available. But he later Tweeted that he had his own version, as yet unreleased. (To add to the insular, high-school nature of the campaign's glorious disarray, Donehue was the person Folks accused of first peddling Folks-Haley rumors to the press, allegedly prompting Folks' confession.)
Even in his apology, Knotts managed to get another underhanded dig in at Haley, whom he says "is pretending to be someone she is not." Bauer used identical language in his statement challenging her to a lie-detector test. The implication that she is, as Knotts put it, "hiding her true religion." Meanwhile, the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody published a story Thursday saying her emphasis on her Christian faith has evolved over the years.
Haley has thus far used the bizarre attacks to her advantage, painting herself as a victim of a corrupt political culture, and has maintained a healthy lead in the polls. The primary is Tuesday, which leaves only three more days for Haley's opponents to systematically eviscerate the myth of the Southern gentleman.
" John Cook is a senior national reporter/blogger for Yahoo! News.
@ican711nm,
I think the Census Bureau is a prime example of a bureacracy that is clearly out of control and needs revamping big time. To begin with, it is attempting to enumerate far more than what it was originally mandated to do.
@okie,
Enumerate is used incorrectly.
@okie,
okie wrote:
I think the Census Bureau is a prime example of a bureacracy that is clearly out of control and needs revamping big time.
To begin with, it is attempting to enumerate far more than what it was originally mandated to do.
You are correct in that they are attempting to inflate the numbers in certain
areas in order to give the administration more of a leg up in future elections.
@ican711nm,
ican711nm wrote:...
Some of what Rush Limbaugh in his May, The Limbaugh Letter, wrote:
"Statism takes what would otherwise be criminal behavior and treats it as virtue. They have institutionalized fraud, and they call it progress. It is depicted as compassion. "Look at what they do for people, look at how much they care for the disadvantaged." Wrong. They are stealing! They are printing money we do not have. They are bankrupting the country. They are destroying the very engine of wealth creation that has enabled them to redistribute the wealth in the first place."[/[/b]size]
Basically the same thing the great American, Dwight D. Eisenhower, said in in different words in 1964 in the article he authored in the Saturday Evening Post, titled "Why I am a Republican." Dwight D. Eisenhower knew well the evils of Leftist Statists, such as Hitler, Stalin, and others he had personally observed people having to die in efforts to defeat them.
http://able2know.org/topic/144183-1
These are 13 commandments I believe the human race must obey in order to survive:
1. Thou shall have no other gods before Me, the Lord thy God, and shall love Me and keep My commandments.
2. Thou shall not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; nor bow down unto them , nor serve them.
3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain.
4. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shall thou labor, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is a sabbath unto the Lord thy God, in it thou shall not do any manner of work.
5. Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
6. Thou shall not commit murder.
7. Thou shall not commit adultery or fornicate.
8. Thou shall not steal.
9. Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
10. Thou shall not covet thy neighbour’s house; thou shall not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his man servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour’s.
11. Thou shall love and root for thy neighbor.
12. Thou shall treat thy neighbor the way thou wants to be treated.
13. Thou shall not treat thy neighbor the way thou does not want to be treated.
@ican711nm,
How about adding this one, ican?
Thou shalt not make government or any politician your God.
@okie,
I notice libs have voted the post down in regard to what Eisenhower said. I will therefore provide some quotes from what Eisenhower said, proving my analysis to be correct:
Eisenhower wrote these things in 1964, but they are just as true and applicable today as they were then, if not moreso.
"That is why I am increasingly disturbed by the steady, obvious drift of our nation toward a centralization of power of the Federal Government. And in this fact is found the primary reason why I sincerely urge all voters, no matter their present political affiliations, to take a fresh, thoughtful look at the basic Republican philosophy and Republican performance as compared to that of the Democrats. For the hard fact is that under many years of Democratic Party leadership our country has been lured into the "easy way," a path of federal expediency which, like a narcotic, may give us a false sense of well being, but in the long run is dangerous to our future, our basic rights, our moral fiber and our individual freedom.
I assure you that I am not being alarmist for partisan purposes. I do not fear that the United States faces any immediate threat of moral or financial bankruptcy or a political tyranny. However, it seems all too clear that in many significant ways we have headed away from reliance on individual common sense and toward a "Poppa knows best" federal rule. Perhaps more than many of us realize, we are now suffering the cloying effects of federal subsidies which invariably are accompanied by an overbearing federal bureaucracy that seems unchecked in both size and power. To attempt to detail, item by item, the many areas in which Democratic regimes have concentrated political, social, and economic power in Washington would require an encyclopedia, but let me offer a few representative examples:
We are headed away from sharing responsibility among local, state, and federal governments . . . toward direct, overpowering federal action in such diverse fields as education, housing, health, health, urban affairs, agriculture, transportation and power.
.......
We are headed away from the known sound fiscal policies and balanced budgets . . . toward experimental and highly dangerous federal overspending which inevitably leads to inflation, deterioration of our currency and loss of world confidence in the dollar.
....
I know tht anyone who speaks up against deficit spending is accused by the "sophisticated" liberals of being more interested in money than in people. But I ask, what is more inhumane to more people than deliberately taking away the value of the money on which they must live in the future?
Let's be specific. The dollar you earned and saved 24 years ago is now worth just 45 cents. This loss is nothing we can shrug off with "Poppa knows best." It is a cruel injustice to people who worked hard all their lives who were frugal and self reliant in accumulating savings, insurance and pensions for their old age. But now the value of their retirement dollars has been cut to less than half of that when those dollars were earned, by easy-money and inflationary policies of the Government. and more of this shrinkage lies ahead, unless we elect a government with the courage and resolution to follow sound fiscal policies.
These examples demonstrate why we badly need to get back on the safe and sound main road, to halt and reverse this relentless flow of power to Washington. And now is the time to start returning to the principles of self-government and widely shared responsibility upon which the greatness of our country was built, lest history record our decline and decay in the sentence, "Here was where the United States, like Rome, went wrong - here at the peak of its power and prosperity when it forgot those ideals which made it great."
Stopping this drift does not mean turning back the clock, as power-seeking Democrats like to say. It does not mean depriving our Federal Government of the powers it needs to meet our national problems on a national scale, to provide for our national defense, or to help us to develop to the full our national opportunities.
.....
Republican aims are positive. they have been positive and forward-looking since the party was formed 110 years ago to preserve the Union. Starting with the Civil War and the dedication of Abraham Lincoln to the ideal of national unity, Republican doctrines always have sought to guide our nation away from federal domination on one hand and perilous division on the other. To me the key items of political faith that should always continue to be an inspiring guide to sound political action for any thoughtful citizen are:
1. Abiding faith in the individual. To believe that the essential unit in our democracy is the individual, not any group or class, and that the preservation of our form of government depends in the final analysis on respect o the individual's rights, initiative, judgement and opportunities.
2. Limited powers of government. To believe that the people themselves should retain all powers and responsibilities not specifically delegated to the Government. As Abraham Lincoln defined it, "The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves in their separate and individual capacities. In all the people can individually do as well for themselves, the government ought not to interfere." (I quote Lincoln not only because h has been the patron saint of the Republican Party from its beginning but also because modern Democrats are trying to steal him from us to capitalize on the reverence in which America holds his name.)
3. Freedom and Equality. Born in the bitter struggle to give flesh-and-blood reality to the American doctrine that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain unalienable rights , the Republican party never has wavered in its belief that freedom and equality are the right of all Americans. It was the Republican Party, led by Lincoln, which freed the Negro from slavery and secured amendments to the Constitution assuring every citizen of his political rights, regardless of race. It was the Republican Party which in 1957 succeeded in getting through Congress the first civil-rights legislation since the Reconstruction era after the Civil War.
4. National Unity. Since its beginnings the Republican Party has stoutly resisted any and all forces which might divide our nation by class, region, racial ancestry or economic interest. we are not for or against any minority of any kind. We are for every individual, whatever his ethnic, social or economic background, who enjoys the priceless privilege of United States citizenship.
5. World Responsibility. The Republican party has aided the United States in meeting its global responsibilities in hte spirit of the nation's enlightened self-interest; that is, not on the basis of mere do-goodism, but for the security and welfare of our own country within the family of free nations. "
More news from the American right:
Striking potential jurors solely on the basis of their race is unlawful, yet somehow, almost 135 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, people of color routinely find themselves excluded from jury service because of their race. This is especially true in southern states and in serious criminal trials and death penalty cases.
The information comes as a result of a comprehensive study conducted by the Equal Justice Initiative, and the results are as depressing as they are disturbing. For two years EJI conducted research in eight southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee), including interviewing over 100 African-American citizens who had been excluded from jury service based on race. EJI also reviewed volumes of court records and documents and found evidence of wide-spread, persistent racial discrimination in jury selection. According to Bryan Stevenson, EJI's Executive Director, despite efforts by courts to rectify the situation, there remains a substantial indifference to racial bias in the justice system, to the detriment of the entire system. "The underrepresentation and exclusion of people of color from juries has seriously undermined the credibility and reliability of the criminal justice system, and there is an urgent need to end this practice."
It's a problem the Supreme Court tried to tackle in the late 1980's in Batson v. Kentucky, but, as Stevenson points out, just wont go away. Part of the problem is that prosecutors have become less obvious in their racial bias, striking African Americans because they appeared to have "low intelligence", wore eyeglasses, walked a certain way, or dyed their hair. When these juror strikes were challenged by defense counsel the court stamped them as "race-neutral". The fact that there is a lack of consistency among states and counties in the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws that protect racial minorities from illegal jury exclusion only exacerbates this more nuanced and subtle form of bias.
And the numbers don't lie. In Houston County, Alabama, for example, 8 out of 10 African Americans qualified for jury service have been struck by prosecutors from death penalty cases. In Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, EJI found no effective African American representation on the jury in 80 percent of criminal trials. Given that African Americans are significantly over-represented as defendants in criminal trials, the fact that prosecutors are systematically doing all they can to keep them off of juries should make us all suspicious of conviction rates.
As a result of the study EJI came up with some specific and detailed recommendations that they believe would ensure full representation of people of color on juries throughout the United States within five years. Among the recommendations that would get the most push back include subjecting prosecutors to fines, penalties, and suspensions if they continue to repeatedly exclude people of color from juries. EJI recommends establishing community groups to engage in court monitoring that would help hold their district attorney accountable, including routine review of the use of peremptory strikes.
What the EJI report underscores most of all is that our criminal justice system remains racially entrenched, and because of that, the legitimacy of the hard, honest work of hundreds of thousands of people gets called into question. Our criminal justice system has, at its core, the premise that the rights of the individual should be paramount to the power of the state--it is what informs our Constitution and what informs the statutes supporting that system. But until these biases are removed, the entire system remains weakened, which ultimately serves no one well
@okie,
Okie, I certainly agree that:
"Thou shalt not make government or any politician your God.."
In fact, that is implied by the first commandment:
1. Thou shall have no other gods before Me, the Lord thy God, and shall love Me and keep My commandments.
But, atheists are not willing to accept the obvious: "The Lord thy God" is that entity which evolved by design, over six God days, the universe and all life within it. They refuse to accept the fact that the probability that evolution proceeded by chance is less than one chance in the number ten followed by far more than one million zeros.
Governments and Politicians did not have a thing to do with that evolution.
However, if we let them, government and politicians can for a time stifle or even terminate all of that evolution.
@plainoldme,
Plainoldme, slavery in the USA was legally terminated by the 13th Amendment on December 6, 1865.
Civil Rights Acts were asubsequently dopted:
(1) 1866 -- Negroes declared citizens of the USA;
(2) 1867 -- Negroes granted right to vote and be elected;
(3) 1868 -- July 28, Negoes citizens of the states in which they resided as well as citizens of the USA;
(4) 1870 -- March 30, 15th Amendment adopted;
(5) 1875 -- prohibited discrimination in puiblic places;
...
(6) 1896 -- US Supreme Court sanctioned state state segragation laws;
...
(7) 1957 -- August 29, Eisenhower -- protected Civil Rights of Negoes to vote;
...
(8) 1960 -- second Negroe Civil Rights law;
...
(9) 1964 -- July 2, Johnson strengthened Negroe Civil Rights to vote;
...
.
Today is June 7, 2010.
@plainoldme,
plainoldme wrote:
Striking potential jurors solely on the basis of their race is unlawful, yet somehow, almost 135 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, people of color routinely find themselves excluded from jury service because of their race. This is especially true in southern states and in serious criminal trials and death penalty cases.
Lawyers are crooked, pom, haven't you figured that out yet? I was thrown off a jury once simply because I don't drink, and the person on trial had been drunk driving, involved in an accident, and somebody was injured. All of us prospective jurors were asked to raise our hand if we did not drink, and there were maybe a half dozen of us that raised our hand, at which time we were told we were excused from the prospective jury pool. To cite the extreme, I think many defense lawyers would try to find all the people they could that had committed the same crime of the accused, so that they could find the most sympathetic people to their client.
It is obvious that lawyers will try to find jurors that are sympathetic to their client or their case, and there are many different angles that they may find that works, and no doubt race would be one that influences people in various ways. As I understand it, it is part of the law that people can be arbitrarily thrown out of a jury pool for unexplained reasons, but I agree I think the privilege of eliminating jurors can open up opportunities for skewing the judgement of a case. My experience of being thrown out was in fact a wake up call to me, in regard to the potential abuse of how it is done, after all I had committed no crime and I felt that I could judge the case on its merits whether I drank alcohol or did not drink alcohol. I do believe lawyers become very much aware and clever in regard to the tendencies of human nature and the psychological effects of various things like race, religion, social status, etc.
@okie,
Why would the following be voted thumbs down to a minus 3? After all, truer words have seldom been spoken, and in this case they were spoken by a great American, a great general, and a great president, so I am going to post them again, not only to irritate the libs but to give them another opportunity to actually read the words and learn something:
okie wrote:
I notice libs have voted the post down in regard to what Eisenhower said. I will therefore provide some quotes from what Eisenhower said, proving my analysis to be correct:
Eisenhower wrote these things in 1964, but they are just as true and applicable today as they were then, if not moreso.
"That is why I am increasingly disturbed by the steady, obvious drift of our nation toward a centralization of power of the Federal Government. And in this fact is found the primary reason why I sincerely urge all voters, no matter their present political affiliations, to take a fresh, thoughtful look at the basic Republican philosophy and Republican performance as compared to that of the Democrats. For the hard fact is that under many years of Democratic Party leadership our country has been lured into the "easy way," a path of federal expediency which, like a narcotic, may give us a false sense of well being, but in the long run is dangerous to our future, our basic rights, our moral fiber and our individual freedom.
I assure you that I am not being alarmist for partisan purposes. I do not fear that the United States faces any immediate threat of moral or financial bankruptcy or a political tyranny. However, it seems all too clear that in many significant ways we have headed away from reliance on individual common sense and toward a "Poppa knows best" federal rule. Perhaps more than many of us realize, we are now suffering the cloying effects of federal subsidies which invariably are accompanied by an overbearing federal bureaucracy that seems unchecked in both size and power. To attempt to detail, item by item, the many areas in which Democratic regimes have concentrated political, social, and economic power in Washington would require an encyclopedia, but let me offer a few representative examples:
We are headed away from sharing responsibility among local, state, and federal governments . . . toward direct, overpowering federal action in such diverse fields as education, housing, health, health, urban affairs, agriculture, transportation and power.
.......
We are headed away from the known sound fiscal policies and balanced budgets . . . toward experimental and highly dangerous federal overspending which inevitably leads to inflation, deterioration of our currency and loss of world confidence in the dollar.
....
I know tht anyone who speaks up against deficit spending is accused by the "sophisticated" liberals of being more interested in money than in people. But I ask, what is more inhumane to more people than deliberately taking away the value of the money on which they must live in the future?
Let's be specific. The dollar you earned and saved 24 years ago is now worth just 45 cents. This loss is nothing we can shrug off with "Poppa knows best." It is a cruel injustice to people who worked hard all their lives who were frugal and self reliant in accumulating savings, insurance and pensions for their old age. But now the value of their retirement dollars has been cut to less than half of that when those dollars were earned, by easy-money and inflationary policies of the Government. and more of this shrinkage lies ahead, unless we elect a government with the courage and resolution to follow sound fiscal policies.
These examples demonstrate why we badly need to get back on the safe and sound main road, to halt and reverse this relentless flow of power to Washington. And now is the time to start returning to the principles of self-government and widely shared responsibility upon which the greatness of our country was built, lest history record our decline and decay in the sentence, "Here was where the United States, like Rome, went wrong - here at the peak of its power and prosperity when it forgot those ideals which made it great."
Stopping this drift does not mean turning back the clock, as power-seeking Democrats like to say. It does not mean depriving our Federal Government of the powers it needs to meet our national problems on a national scale, to provide for our national defense, or to help us to develop to the full our national opportunities.
.....
Republican aims are positive. they have been positive and forward-looking since the party was formed 110 years ago to preserve the Union. Starting with the Civil War and the dedication of Abraham Lincoln to the ideal of national unity, Republican doctrines always have sought to guide our nation away from federal domination on one hand and perilous division on the other. To me the key items of political faith that should always continue to be an inspiring guide to sound political action for any thoughtful citizen are:
1. Abiding faith in the individual. To believe that the essential unit in our democracy is the individual, not any group or class, and that the preservation of our form of government depends in the final analysis on respect o the individual's rights, initiative, judgement and opportunities.
2. Limited powers of government. To believe that the people themselves should retain all powers and responsibilities not specifically delegated to the Government. As Abraham Lincoln defined it, "The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves in their separate and individual capacities. In all the people can individually do as well for themselves, the government ought not to interfere." (I quote Lincoln not only because h has been the patron saint of the Republican Party from its beginning but also because modern Democrats are trying to steal him from us to capitalize on the reverence in which America holds his name.)
3. Freedom and Equality. Born in the bitter struggle to give flesh-and-blood reality to the American doctrine that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain unalienable rights , the Republican party never has wavered in its belief that freedom and equality are the right of all Americans. It was the Republican Party, led by Lincoln, which freed the Negro from slavery and secured amendments to the Constitution assuring every citizen of his political rights, regardless of race. It was the Republican Party which in 1957 succeeded in getting through Congress the first civil-rights legislation since the Reconstruction era after the Civil War.
4. National Unity. Since its beginnings the Republican Party has stoutly resisted any and all forces which might divide our nation by class, region, racial ancestry or economic interest. we are not for or against any minority of any kind. We are for every individual, whatever his ethnic, social or economic background, who enjoys the priceless privilege of United States citizenship.
5. World Responsibility. The Republican party has aided the United States in meeting its global responsibilities in hte spirit of the nation's enlightened self-interest; that is, not on the basis of mere do-goodism, but for the security and welfare of our own country within the family of free nations. "
