ih8music

My list would be something like:

1) The Incredibles

2) Finding Nemo

3) Nightmare Before Christmas

4) Shrek

5) Monsters, Inc.

and my out of left field nomination - Twice Upon a Time. Anyone else remember this one from the early 80's? I absolutely LOVED that movie.

lol. just found a crappy version of it online. guess what i'm doing for the next 73 mins?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2120572902430934061

Sarah Palin 2006 debate video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1-B-OyQ-KI

 

Haven't really gotten the chance to watch this (working), but in the 30 seconds I did watch she seems at least more collected than she has appeared in 2008.

She's comfortable and eloquent when talking about stuff in her wheel house - gay marriage, abortion & euthanasia. That should come as no surprise.

We'll see how well she can do on topics such as foreign policy, the economy, healthcare, education, etc. that are likely (hopefully) going to be the focus of Thursday's debate.

"[After] all my discussions with presidents, both while in office and after they left, and their advisors, while in office and after they left, and in my reading of history, particularly presidential history, I am ever more convinced that a leader cannot make tough decisions unless he or she is asked tough questions. It is the only vehicle that brings them to closure, that forces any sense of intellectual rigor, that forces them to find a way to reconcile the political advice or the political pressures brought to bear. It will not be enough in a democratic society to simply have those on the left or right who are the pamphleteers and unwilling to challenge the views of people they support. Tough questions need not be the loudest or most sensational or the most theatrical, but rather probing and, hopefully, incisive." -- Tim Russert

interesting take on how the vote broke down based on whether the representative was in a tightly contested re-election bid, or was in "comfortable" shape (or not running at all). this appears to have been a (bipartisan) CYA move by many members of the house.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/swi...men-doomed.html

Some people still believe in the notion of separation of church and state.

 

Personally, I'm against abortion - my 50% stake in the decision with my mate will always be against it. However, I do not believe in legislating that decision for others.

ditto.

The house dissed that buy-in. Kind of a surprise to me.

we're all fucked.

SNL has NOT always been this one-sided. The Bush/Gore debate skits were fantastic....and they bashed both candidates very well. Same with the Bush/Kerry election. Carvey's parody of HW Bush was kinda harsh, but damn funny.

 

 

I think the problem is that SNL hasn't figured out how to make Obama funny. If he's elected, I'm sure they'll figure it out over the next 4 years. But right now, they're not skilled enough.

SNL is on the side of making a funny show. Like you mention, they've been willing to take stabs at Kerry, Gore & both Clintons in the past. I think it's just that they haven't figured out how to make Obama funny/comic.

But in their defense, I have yet to see a funny Obama impersonation anywhere. Some guys can get the cadence pretty accurate, and there are no doubt some funny skits/videos out there related to Obama - but they're funny not because of the impersonation, just the situation/topic.

Maybe someone needs to come up with an impersonation ala Chevy Chase's Gerald Ford. Didn't look like him, didn't sound like him... but Chase was hilarious in his portayal of Ford.

Fey is just a lazy writer:

that bears in Montana DNA joke is at least two years old.

i found it interesting that when he was railing against "pork" spending and the evils of earmarks, he failed to mention a certain $300M infrastructure improvement project in a certain sub-arctic state of ours. isn't that also a pretty good example?

Of course he shouldn't be smug and dismissive, ala McCain last night, but if she pulls out one her nonsensical answers she's been prone to giving in interviews lately, he needs to drop the kid gloves and go for the knockout. Don't let up because of the "sexy knees" somebody mentioned above, debating her should be no different than debating any other candidate.

In a perfect world, I agree with you - but Biden is going to have to walk a careful line because if it looks like he's "going after" Palin that's only going to make things worse and serve as a distraction in the press. let her hang herself and let that be the lead story on Friday/over the weekend - don't make it look like you're the one fitting the noose around her neck.

ok, could have probably used a better analogy...

Have you guys seen this? McCain reportedly saying "horseshit" twice in response to obama.

too bad they stopped the clip there - pretty sure he was saying "of course."

I also thought Obama won the debate slightly - but given that i'm not at all objective about the race, that probably means McCain actually came out slightly ahead.

Neither one scored a damaging blow, and neither one had a major gaffe (although Barack's clumsy "I have a bracelet, too" comment was awkward as hell).

It was obvious what the McCain plan was going in to the debate - be dismissive, call him naive, inexperienced, etc and don't even give him the respect to look him in the eye. Make it seem like he has no business being in a foreign policy debate with you. I read this comparison somewhere - it was like that SNL skit from a ages ago where John Lovitz was Dukakis and mid-debate turns to the camera and incredulously says "I'm losing to this guy?"

But - to me, at least - McCain just came off as angry and annoyed. Obama was cool & confident.

the VP debate next week will be very interesting. One thing is for sure - if Biden is as dismissive to Palin as McCain was to Obama, he'll be branded as a sexist and she'll become the great martyr. Biden should just answer his questions and not engage Palin directly at all - it's pretty obvious that she's gonna screw something up eventually (especially if they follow the same format as tonight w/ plenty of follow-up questions).

Does anyone know of anywhere on the web to get the Republican take on things? The only reason I ask is because I know where to find opinions that pretty much line up with my own and I've gotten a steady diet of it, so I'd like to know what these other people are thinking.

http://townhall.com/

one dude's black-ish.

and he's unfortunately named after his father.

The downside is that he would PO the so called "Values voters" whom he was trying to suck up to by including Palin. And the right seems to disdain smart people so he would have to be careful about who he brought on board to be the smart one on the ticket.

true, but would he still get brownie points for the effort?

and there's gotta be at least one creationist, god-loving, witch-hunting, economist out there who could be branded as The One Who Can Fix Everything (And Still Loves Jesus Like You).

I could totally see a VP switch. It would be very Maverick-y thing to do to replace Palin with an "economic guru" right now. Think about it, it would be a win-win-win (at least) for McCain:

1) reinforce the Maverick brand which they are hell-bent on perpetuating. who in their right mind would do something like this so late in the game? only a Maverick like McCain.

2) reinforce the Country First brand - he's so "serious" about the economy that he's willing to risk the election to "do the right thing"

3) and most importantly, remove the trainwreck that is Sara Palin before she embarasses herself & McCain any further.

 

Paul Westerberg - 49:00

ditto.

honorable mention:

Man, as if I couldn't get any more disenchanted with politics in our country, we find a situation that is fucking over the average American big time that both sides are responsible for.

 

If not responsible for, they both sat idly by and let it happen because when times are going good, nobody wants to risk losing their free meal by pointing out that it's a house of cards.

I'm not much of a Ron Paul fan, but it's hard to argue with him on this topic:

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

the ideals haven't changed. you could, however, make the argument that the label has been hijacked.

"Conservative" is a term used by a wide range of people and ideals - social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, neocons, etc. While you may consider the true meaning of it to lean toward the small government, fiscal conservate definition, I think the majority of Americans who currently identify themselves as "conservative" are referring to social conservativism (the pro-life, "family values" crowd).

I stand corrected. Couric is obviously asking unfair questions and they're just splicing up the tape to make Palin appear to not have a clue.

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4478156n

Does anyone thing McCain might do the old switch-a-roo with his VP pick? I kind of have a feeling that if this whole debate thing doesn't work in his favor, he'll dump Palin for Romney. There will be a huge surge in the polls again because of it and he'll be back on top, right in time for the election.

Interesting idea - it would be quite the Maverick

I'd forgotten what an awesome album this is...

her study sessions must not be going well...

Obama rejects McCain's call to delay debate

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080924/...JQISkisndg.3QA

"It's my belief that this is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person who, in approximately 40 days, will be responsible for dealing with this mess," Obama said at a news conference in Clearwater, Fla. "It's going to be part of the president's job to deal with more than one thing at once."

so what's McCain's next move? stand firm and not show up at the debate? send Palin in his absence?

NEW YORK - Republican John McCain says he's directing his staff to work with Barack Obama's campaign and the debate commission to delay Friday's debate because of the economic crisis.

 

In a statement, McCain says he will stop campaigning after addressing former President Bill Clinton's Global Initiative session on Thursday and return to Washington to focus on the nation's financial problems.

 

McCain also said he wants President Bush to convene a leadership meeting in Washington. Both he and Obama would attend the session.

Smart stunt move by McCain - if Obama agrees it'll look like he's following McCain's lead. If he disagrees, it'll be tough to explain why he's not putting Country First