New and Improved 3-ply election thread...

[Party @ the Moontower]

Muthee implored his audience to wage "spiritual warfare" against "the enemy."

NUTS! So it was Jesus that took her to the g's mansion..... and soon to the beyond, back to Alsaska.

 

This scares me the most-

Muthee

[fatheadfred]

It's on bitches. McCain is gonna show up to the fight after school.

[John Smith]

kwall I'm with you on this one if it's any consolidation. Conservatism is a set ideals, some I agree with, that neocons don't really practice.

 

I'm not arguing that it is a set of ideals, I'm arguing that those ideals have either been changed over the last thrity years or they have been hijacked/corrupted. Now the common definition/picture of a conservative is not at all what conservatisim once was. Opps broke my pledge of no more on this topic. I'll put the topic on ignore now.

[Party @ the Moontower]

The recent Palin interview with Katie Couric would, if we lived in a sane world, put to rest any suggestion that she is qualified to be VP, or much much much worse, president. I can laugh at just about anything, but given the current state of the nation, this shit is just not funny anymore.

 

 

It's not funny anymore. McCain seems to be insane and making some really strange desperate moves similar to that of a teenage girl with a serious crush she'll do anything to keep. Palin is not only stupid, she's scary. If she becomes VP, and possibly Prez this country will be a laughing stock mess.

[kwall]

I'm not arguing that it is a set of ideals, I'm arguing that those ideals have either been changed over the last thrity years or they have been hijacked/corrupted.

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

[quarter23cd]

It's on bitches. McCain is gonna show up to the fight after school.

Not so fast. There are several hours left before the debate. There might be a kitten in a tree that needs saving. Not that McCain would save it...but he'd be there for the cameras, at least. For the good of the country.

 

And I think you meant to say "Its on, witches!"

[NightOfJoy]

I'm not arguing that it is a set of ideals, I'm arguing that those ideals have either been changed over the last thrity years or they have been hijacked/corrupted. Now the common definition/picture of a conservative is not at all what conservatisim once was. Opps broke my pledge of no more on this topic. I'll put the topic on ignore now.

 

You are 100% correct sir.

[Analogman]

The Great Schlep

 

Sarah Silverman wants Jews to gets their butts down to Florida for the Great Schlep. (language warning)

 

www.TheGreatSchlep.com

[MrRain422]

I saw that earlier. Laughed loudest at "All of their friends are dying."

[Party @ the Moontower]

he's a douchebag blowhard.

 

duh

[Party @ the Moontower]

Not so fast. There are several hours left before the debate. There might be a kitten in a tree that needs saving. Not that McCain would save it...but he'd be there for the cameras, at least. For the good of the country.

 

And I think you meant to say "Its on, witches!"

 

"Its on, witches!"

 

McCain will bring his game, but will somehow make Palin invisible until after the election. That, or create a fake situtation that leaves her in a coma so he can sub Marsha Blackburn, or some other chick. I think it has to be a woman so as not to piss any woman off.

[fatheadfred]

Not so fast. There are several hours left before the debate. There might be a kitten in a tree that needs saving. Not that McCain would save it...but he'd be there for the cameras, at least. For the good of the country.

 

And I think you meant to say "Its on, witches!"

 

Yeah, no kidding. Don't give them any ideas. I wouldn't put it past the dillhole brainchildren Tucker Bounds & Rick Davis.

[ih8music]

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).

[fatheadfred]

"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).

 

Good point.

[Sal]

It's not funny anymore. McCain seems to be insane and making some really strange desperate moves similar to that of a teenage girl with a serious crush she'll do anything to keep. Palin is not only stupid, she's scary. If she becomes VP, and possibly Prez this country will be a laughing stock mess.

 

 

Best analogy I have heard yet.

[bobbob1313]

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.

[ih8music]

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

[Good Old Neon]

From CNN -

 

John McCain will debate Barack Obama as planned tonight, his campaign announced. McCain said earlier this week he would bow out of the first presidential debate if a deal had not been reached on a $700 billion bailout plan for U.S. financial institutions. By midday, McCain's campaign said he believed enough progress had been made for him to participate.

 

[quarter23cd]

 

Thank goodness that's settled.

[kwall]

"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).

well, by all means, let's dispose of the true meaning and just go with what you think.

[Edie]

The disingeuous injection by McCain into this mess in DC (couched in Country First®-speak) and his ever-present flailing about would be laughable, except that he is playing chicken with my kid's future. Fuck him, and I really mean it.

[Party @ the Moontower]

White Privilege, White Entitlement and the 2008 Election

 

by Tim Wise

For those who still can't grasp the concept of white privilege , or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

 

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

 

White privilege is when you can call yourself a "fuckin' redneck," like Bristol Palin's boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll "kick their fuckin' ass," and talk about how you like to "shoot shit" for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

 

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

 

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don't all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you're "untested."

 

White privilege is being able to say that you support the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance because "if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it's good enough for me," and not be immediately disqualified from holding office

[sweetheart-mine]

mccain has been striking me as increasingly erratic and not all there. i don't even mean politically, necessarily -- as a human being. do mccain followers perceive this at all? it feels like a non-partisan observation on my part. i'm just watching the guy and he truly seems numb or something.

[Party @ the Moontower]

mccain has been striking me as increasingly erratic and not all there. i don't even mean politically, necessarily -- as a human being. do mccain followers perceive this at all? it feels like a non-partisan observation on my part. i'm just watching the guy and he truly seems numb or something.

 

fear

[sweetheart-mine]

fear

maybe. probably. but you know, when he picked palin, which was a pretty crazy move given what we've seen (and not) of her, weren't he and obama basically tied in the polls? i don't understand the desperate moves, when it seemed obama would have a double-digit lead starting a long time ago but has never had it. and during the past two weeks you'd think obama's lead would have jumped more than it did; i don't think mccain is losing supporters, despite some odd and sometimes disturbing behavior.