@SYNRON,
massagatto returns....why not just settle on **** for a screen name and leave it there? On ignore you go.
@firefly,
Quote:Palin certainly convinced me last night--she's a great candidate for president of the student council.
Gosh darn, that gal has spunk and style. She is just chock full of energy and adorable mannerisms like tilting her head and winking. And forget all that gloom and doom about the economy or our foreign policy challenges, just look at her dazzling smile, that means happy days are here again.
Whenever I listen to her, I keep thinking of the movie "Fargo."
@nimh,
Eh - I messed up the quote boxes there. obviously. O'Bill said what's attributed to Finn and I wrote what's attributed to O'Bill. But you'd figgered that out already of course.
Jesus! Is there a journalist anywhere more stupid than David Broder?
Quote:But it created a mystery of its own. Why in the world has the McCain campaign kept Palin under wraps from her debut at the Republican National Convention until this debate? What were they afraid of?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/03/AR2008100303305.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
@blatham,
I've seen quite a few on TV network news.
Re an earlier comment I wrote yesterday - Eugene Robinson gets it...
Quote:It's not that conservatives heard a different debate. It's that they were focused on a different election cycle. The conservative movement is looking for its next Ronald Reagan -- its next charismatic leader with game-changing communication skills, bedrock conservative principles and, well, barracuda-like political instincts. Some on the right believe they may have found that leader in Palin. Smart conservative political analysts aren't under the illusion that Palin can turn this election around; only John McCain can do that, if he can figure out how. But remember that the "movement" conservatives' embrace of McCain is based on pragmatism, not passion. He's just not their guy.
Palin, they suspect, may be their gal...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/community/groups/index.html?plckForumPage=ForumDiscussion&plckDiscussionId=Cat%3aa70e3396-6663-4a8d-ba19-e44939d3c44fForum%3a118311bf-3643-438e-bc41-c9fdc29ce4aeDiscussion%3a10f47f2c-e053-4b8f-a492-907babe23f5c
@blatham,
Therein lies the screw-up in their pragmatism. Their "choice" is way over her head; this is somewhat above mayor or governor of a small city and state. She has no depth, and she doesn't have the skills of a high school debater by ignoring questions. Even high school students know that! Conservatives find that "charming" in Palin.
Carl Bernstein Posted October 3, 2008
What the Palin-Biden Debate Really Told us
Who won the Palin-Biden debate? Barack Obama, I suspect.
Who was the big loser? In an historic fortnight that had already underscored his erratic nature, John McCain.
The fact that Palin was able to string her sentences together last night - which she couldn't manage to do in her unscripted interviews with Katie Couric -- shows only how low McCain has strapped his presidential quest.
Sarah Palin's task was an impossible one: to demonstrate that she is ready to be president of the United States. McCain put her in that impossible position; and her performance -- all prep and no depth -- demonstrated the bind he has put himself in.
Yes, he "energized the base" with his Hail Mary pick of Palin as a running mate. But he also demonstrated cynical disregard for the requirement of stable governance were he to be elected president, and then -- through his incapacitation or death -- Palin be called upon to exercise the powers of the presidency.
Just how scary a notion that is went on full display last night: She appeared to lack any semblance of the requisite depth, knowledge, or sense of history we should expect in a president or vice president; then she sought to excuse it by saying, "I've only been at this for five weeks."
Yes, she could wink, she could tell Biden, "Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again," and she could remind us again and again that she is a hockey Mom from the land of Joe-Six-pack (as if Western Republicans don't swill Pinot Grigio with the rest of the country at their fund-raisers). She seemed incapable of thinking through the American condition and responding to it except by scripted answers, theatrical gestures, and tested buzzwords -- and by announcing at the outset that she would decide which questions from the moderator to answer and which to ignore.
Yet Biden's performance (deeply knowledgeable, sensible, and generally responsive to the questions) was perhaps the best evidence that -- considered non-ideologically, but rather on judgment and temperament -- Obama may be ready to be president, and McCain -- who ought to be ready -- is not.
Time after time, Biden had to tell Palin what John McCain's real record is -- as instance after instance -- she misrepresented it (or misunderstood the legislative process), repeated easy slogans and bromides and, for the most part perhaps, offended the intelligence of voters who are not already die-hard, ideological proponents of right-wing Republicanism, creationism, or simplistic solutions to tough problems.
"Maverick," "Maverick," "Maverick," she kept repeating about John McCain and herself. Perhaps Biden's best moment in the best night of his career as a candidate (and I have heard him at his awful worst -- i.e., being his own worst enemy) came when he challenged McCain's constant claim to the Maverick title.
The tactical and intellectual deficiencies of the McCain campaign have been best analyzed by conservative and Republican commentators, and even politicians. George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Peggy Noonan, Chuck Hagel, come quickly to mind. (Hence, Krauthammer, following last night's debate: "You can't blame McCain. In an election in which all the fundamentals are working for the opposition, he feels he has to keep throwing long in order to keep hope alive. Nonetheless, his frenetic improvisation has perversely [for him] framed the rookie challenger favorably as calm, steady and cool.")
As a former White House (Republican) chief of staff said to me, "Palin is evidence of desperation; she is an embarrassment." That is the bottom line. (I generally check in with Republicans -- not Democrats -- to assess how the McCain campaign is doing.) He noted, "She wasn't vetted, really; it's an open secret in Washington, but the details of the negligence are better known to Republicans than Democrats." That doesn't mean she doesn't have a future in the Republican galaxy, lacks star power, or couldn't be a fine Secretary of the Interior in a McCain administration.
It's too bad. Earlier in his career, until the presidency finally seemed within his grasp, McCain had demonstrated a real willingness to seriously and thoughtfully take on both his party and the Washington establishment when he thought they were wrong -- albeit mostly on one issue: pork, an issue he has been heroic on.
But his real opportunity to show independence of his party's reigning dogma and cultural-warrior-infantry was in his choice of a vice presidential running mate. Instead, McCain, who has lectured us about duty, honor, country first, has left many independent-minded voters who might want to vote for him at an impossible, dangerous impasse: an unprepared vice presidential candidate running on a ticket with the oldest presidential nominee in history -- a 72-year-old with four cancer surgeries and medical records he has ordered sealed.
Conventional wisdom has almost always held (JFK-LBJ being a notable exception) that a presidential nominee's choice of vice president makes no difference in the outcome of the election.
This time it is likely to be determinate, because it tells us so much not only about Sarah Palin, but also John McCain's state of mind today, and the promise that his political career once held and now appears to have been left behind.
@cicerone imposter,
Quote:Therein lies the screw-up in their pragmatism. Their "choice" is way over her head; this is somewhat above mayor or governor of a small city and state. She has no depth, and she doesn't have the skills of a high school debater by ignoring questions. Even high school students know that! Conservatives find that "charming" in Palin.
CI
Once again, time to recall the WH advisor's statement to Ron Suskind (that advisor widely assumed to be Rove).
Quote:He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~immerman/play/opinion05/WithoutADoubt.html
Re the rah rah from parts of the right, Gail Collins points to the mind-wrenchinig idiocy here...
Quote:The people boosting Palin’s triumph were not celebrating because she demonstrated that she is qualified to be president if something ever happened to John McCain. They were cheering her success in covering up her lack of knowledge about the things she would have to deal with if she wound up running the country.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/opinion/04collins.html?hp
Dick Cheney, Role Model
Published: October 3, 2008
New York Times
In all the talk about the vice-presidential debate, there was an issue that did not get much attention but kept nagging at us: Sarah Palin’s description of the role and the responsibilities of the office for which she is running, vice president of the United States.
In Thursday night’s debate, Ms. Palin was asked about the vice president’s role in government. She said she agreed with Dick Cheney that “we have a lot of flexibility in there” under the Constitution. And she declared that she was “thankful that the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president also, if that vice president so chose to exert it.”
It is hard to tell from Ms. Palin’s remarks whether she understands how profoundly Dick Cheney has reshaped the vice presidency " as part of a larger drive to free the executive branch from all checks and balances. Nor did she seem to understand how much damage that has done to American democracy.
Mr. Cheney has shown what can happen when a vice president " a position that is easy to lampoon and overlook " is given free rein by the president and does not care about trampling on the Constitution.
Mr. Cheney has long taken the bizarre view that the lesson of Watergate was that Congress was too powerful and the president not powerful enough. He dedicated himself to expanding President Bush’s authority and arrogating to himself executive, legislative and legal powers that are nowhere in the Constitution.
This isn’t the first time that Ms. Palin was confronted with the issue. In an interview with Katie Couric of CBS News, the Alaska governor was asked what she thought was the best and worst about the Cheney vice presidency. Ms. Palin tried to dodge: laughing and joking about the hunting accident in which Mr. Cheney accidentally shot a friend. The only thing she had to add was that Mr. Cheney showed support for the troops in Iraq.
There was not a word about Mr. Cheney’s role in starting the war with Iraq, in misleading Americans about weapons of mass destruction, in leading the charge to create illegal prison camps where detainees are tortured, in illegally wiretapping Americans, in creating an energy policy that favored the oil industry that made him very rich before the administration began.
Ms. Couric asked Joseph Biden, Ms. Palin’s rival, the same question in a separate interview. He had it exactly right when he told her that Mr. Cheney’s theory of the “unitary executive” held that “Congress and the people have no power in a time of war.” And he had it right in the debate when he called Mr. Cheney “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had in American history.”
The Constitution does not state or imply any flexibility in the office of vice president. It gives the vice president no legislative responsibilities other than casting a tie-breaking vote in the Senate when needed and no executive powers at all. The vice president’s constitutional role is to be ready to serve if the president dies or becomes incapacitated.
Any president deserves a vice president who will be a sound adviser and trustworthy supporter. But the American people also deserve and need a vice president who understands and respects the balance of power " and the limits of his or her own power. That is fundamental to our democracy.
So far, Ms. Palin has it exactly, frighteningly wrong.
@BumbleBeeBoogie,
What is more frightening is that McCain doesn't challenge Palin on this issue.
@nimh,
You may be right or on the other hand, you may not be, but since you are so cerebral and full of information, as well as fecal matter, why don't you give us a lecture on how the people's government runs things in the Socialist Paradise of Hungary, where you live.
You gasp at the Unemployment rate in the USA but you tell no one that the crypto-Communist regimes in the EU are now saddled with a 7.2 unemployment rate. What's the matter, Numh, doesn't Crypto-Communism work?
@blatham,
Blotham--Have you had your heart bypass yet? Be careful and get a good Doctor. Some bypass patients fall victim to early onset Alzhemiers.
@Bi-Polar Bear,
I would take your suggestion seriously but I usually put little credence to self-described mental patients. Have you tried Zoloft?
@blatham,
Yes, Dan Rather. Shall I give you the particulars?
@cicerone imposter,
She may not have much depth but at least she hasn't had a dose of radiation to screw up her thinking processes.
@SYNRON,
It's written Alzheimers, a disease that would be redundant in your case. There
is absolutely nothing to lose.
@SYNRON,
That is the govt's "official" number on unemployment in the US. If you look at the "real" numbers back in April when we were at about 5% official unemployed the real rate was estimated between 8% and 13% in the US. What the fed's numbers do not include are underemployed, partially employed unemployed who have given up and those who have dropped off the rolls.
Back in 2005 a comparison was made of Sweden's 15.7% unemployment and the same analysis was used on the US numbers and we were at about 15%.
oh, btw - Hi all, I'm new here and just stumbled across this discussion.
@Mary Homemaker,
Welcome to a2k, Mary Homemaker. I can tell by your "first" post that you do your homework; good on ya!
