Politics
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- hallelujah0
"Glenn Greenwald, who had previously defended Palin from attacks:
But Sarah Palin's performance in the tiny vignettes of unscripted dialogue in which we've been allowed to see her has been nothing short of frightening -- really, as I said, pity-inducing. And I say that as someone who has thought from the start that the criticisms of her abilities -- as opposed to her ideology -- were much too extreme. One of two things is absolutely clear at this point: she is either (a) completely ignorant about the most basic political issues -- a vacant, ill-informed, incurious know-nothing, or (b) aggressively concealing her actual beliefs about these matters because she's petrified of deviating from the simple-minded campaign talking points she's been fed and/or because her actual beliefs are so politically unpalatable, even when taking into account the right-wing extremism that is permitted, even rewarded, in our mainstream. I'm not really sure which is worse, but it doesn't really matter, because with 40 days left before the election, both options are heinous.
Way too many on our side were willing, nay -- eager -- to give her a pass and concede that she was smart and wonderful and oh so pretty. Too many people were begging us to stop paying attention to her and instead focus all our attention on John McCain.
New Hampshire might be Exhibit A of what happens when people still like Palin.
McCain has actually gained ground in the Ras poll since August, even though it was in the field on Tuesday, in the midst of all the economic turmoil that has generally benefited Obama. So what could account for McCain's gains? It looks from the internals that the Palin effect is still very much in play in New Hampshire.
Take this result:
John McCain named Sarah Palin to be his Vice Presidential running mate. Was this the right choice for McCain to make?
Yes 51%
No 39%
Not Sure 10%"
- TheBlueOne0
Paulson's little plan will be about $150 billion short...they're leaving this bit out:
"It won't take many more failures before the FDIC itself runs out of money. The agency had $45.2 billion in its coffers as of June 30, far short of the $200 billion Whalen says it will need to pay claims by the end of next year. The U.S. Treasury will almost certainly come to the rescue."
- TheBlueOne0
Bush has lost WW3 without firing a shot. We are now China's bitch.
"``China is very worried about the safety of its assets,'' he said. ``If you want China to keep calm, you must ensure China that its assets are safe.''
Yu said China is helping the U.S. ``in a very big way'' and added that it should get something in return. The U.S. should avoid labeling it an unfair trader and a currency manipulator and not politicize other issues, he said.
``It is not fair that we are doing this in good faith and are prepared to bear serious consequences and you are still labeling China this and that, accusing China of this and that,'' he said. ``China knows what to do. We don't need your intervention.''
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/ne…
What absolute fucking shit. I mean....fuck...I am SOOOO FUCKING PISSED OFF. China has been antiethical of everything the US has tried to stand for...and now they fucking own us. Al because of these greedy bastards. China will be dictating terms to US? Fuck you Bush, Cheney, et. al. and all your bullshit Patriotic flag waving bullshit...you sold America out like the bitches you are...fuck them...
- that's what you get when you export Democracy©...robotron3k
- no tickey no washey Joe********
- well no - China have back all the money we borrowed IF they stop shooting artists and running over students in tanks.mikotondria3
- Nah man..China is over that whole democracy thing...they've reconciled confusius and mao and adam smith now..TheBlueOne
- smith now...they're on their own path...TheBlueOne
- Ampersanderson0
Add another poster to the stack
Limited silkscreened run on sale now: http://www.hyperakt.com/blog/200…
- Just ordered.TheBlueOne
- Nice! Hope you like.Ampersanderson
- Ramanisky20
HA
- TheBlueOne0
- That's great!Ampersanderson
- I always think these ladies are outside the Rovers Return.
If you know, you know.mikotondria3
- robotron3k0
From Roadkill Refugee, comparing Mccain to Monty Python skit:
"In this drama, McCain is Sir Lancelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the man who was so tragically overwhelmed by his own sense of glory he must fulfill as a Knight of the Roundtable. He assumed a note he received was from a beautiful maiden trapped in a castle, and set off to accomplish a daring and heroic rescue. He crashed the castle and slaughtered the wedding party inside en route to rescuing his victim, only to find, anticlimactically, it was the effeminate son of the castle owner.
So too McCain, instead of finding Hill legislators and a White House awaiting his courageous rescue, he will find the deal largely accomplished without him, and his only grateful victim to be, anticlimactically, a group of unruly conservative House Republicans who can’t help him win the election."
- monkeyshine0
So Bush is meeting with Obama and McCain right now. It's such a farce...does anyone buy into it? And the committee who has been negotiating this deal must be pissed that McCain is essentially intervening when they're close to a deal. Such stupidity.
- they have justed agree to a set of issues to agree on. it will take some time to enact and approve.robotron3k
- robotron3k0
- never liked her, never will. there is no one on this earth less funny.SteveJobs
- mcLeod0
SF Examiner Endorses McCain/Palin
- robotron3k0
the SF Examiner Owner:
Philip Frederick Anschutz (born 28 December 1939 in Russell, Kansas) is an American businessman and supporter of conservative Christian causes. With an estimated current net worth of around $7.8 billion, he is ranked by Forbes as the 31st richest person in the USA.
- tommyo0
Another long ass but informative letter from Ron Paul:
Dear Friends:
The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.
We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.
Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.
Still, at least a few observations are necessary.
The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?
We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.
Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).
Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk."
Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct?
Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.
It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.
The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.
F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:
Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.
To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.
The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.
The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?
Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people.
The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.
I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.
H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.
In liberty,
Ron Paul
- Nairn0
This should be in the politics thread.
- robotron3k0
i know there is a Republican joke somewhere in this picture, somewhere...
