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... we all wrote in Sarah Palin as President instead of VP?
On a separate but related thought, one of the things that I find most depressing about American politics is not just that the electorate is so deeply and bitterly divided between Democratic and Republican, but that both sides seem to invest so much hatred and vitriol in trying not to heal that rift, but rather to deepen and widen it still further. Sometimes it makes me wonder whether this century will see a Second American Civil War.
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WooHoo! This time, I say the West/South breaks away. We'll take Washington as our overly liberal red-headed stepchild, and oregon, because they're cool. California can fuck off. All other interior Western states stay together to the Dakota/Nebraska/Kansas/Oklahoma line. We take Texas to join up with the South. Florida is NOT invited. Maybe they can form an alliance with California, or something.
The Midwest, East and CaliFlorida are on their own.
Game On!
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But we can still be friends. We'll try to form an alliance with Vermont/New Hampshire, because you guys seem cool. Everything around you is pretty much a wasteland, though.
Massachusetts, prepare for an ass kicking!
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Fair enough. I'm trying to assemble all the states that have liberal gun laws. The east coast is going to be toast.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Glorieta_Pass
Colorado, which was still just a territory at the time, had its fair share of CSA supporters, but the only military action it participated in was in New Mexico, on behalf of the Union.
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She does have some impressive credentials, as you've previously mentioned. But ... I'm not sure they're really enough for me to overcome my "lets get rid of the Republicans for a little while" leaning.
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You can't ask any candidate for office not to have personal beliefs, really. There's not much more that you can reasonably ask than that they do their best to keep their beliefs and the performance of their jobs separate. And it looks like Palin does that.
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Actually, that IS worth considering. I'm personally not in favor of choosing abortions... but I absolutely think it should be an individual choice/right and not one the govt makes for us.
If she's of a similar mind with same-sex marriage and abortion, then that's great. I'd like her a lot more. But, the two examples you gave aren't what I just said. "doesn't consider contraception to be abortion" is great* ... but it's not the same as "considers abortion to be abhorrent but a protected personal choice". Same with your example wrt to same-sex partner rights.
(* let me rephrase that... "doesn't consider contraception to be abortion" is _compulsory_. Any candidate who did consider contraception to be abortion would be as viable to me as a candidate who believes in intelligent design and/or biblically-literal creationism)
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I'm just sorta making the point there that the Bush administration has, through policy, de facto declared it considers contraception equivalent to abortion ... so she'd be at least an improvement on that front.
I'd much prefer an honest social-conservative who actually tries to do her job in an objective and bipartisan way despite her personal beliefs, over (frankly) a mid-to-far-left demagogue who's wrapping himself in a cloak of false moderation until after the election, or an aging self-proclaimed maverick whose record belies the claim and whose policy positions are pretty much those of whichever recent lobbyist walked through his office door flashing the largest wad of money.
And as I've commented elsewhere, there is no perfect candidate. The only way anyone can ever get a candidate who perfectly matches their own views is to run for office themselves.
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(As a matter of fact, I think schools should be required to discuss and compare ALL the different major religions' creation myths at least once. It's a good way to learn — and teach — critical thinking skills, and at the same time inoculate kids against dogmatism.)
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1) A comparative religion / study of the bible as literature / etc. class.
2) A discussion of "how science works" and how the "theory" was discredited. i.e. a discussion of the scientific method, making predictions, paradigm shifts, etc.
3) A VERY brief mention of outdated theories in the area, if other outdated theories are mentioned in their appropriate sections. (I.e. the aether, etc.)
4) In a politics / constitutional law class, where the various court cases that decided it was an unconstitutional intrusion of religion into public schools is discussed.
Debate implies that there is some shred of merit to one of the opposing views. And there's not. We don't "debate" the geocentric model of the solar system and discuss epicycles and all that stuff. Anyone who's pushing for ANY mention of creationism in schools, other than as a historical curiosity, is scamming you. Logical people (like us) believe that the truth will be obvious, but, given many students' preconceptions, any mention at all of the alternate "theory" just makes it sound wishy-washy.
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Alternatively, debate is one way of showing if the opposing view has no merit. What's better — to simply declare "Creationism is indefensible" and have done with it, or to make people work out for themselves — by trying to defend it — that there is no actual supportable defense? (One of my physics professors used a similar approach one day in a class discussion of something very similar to the Abdelkader hollow-earth model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth) to illustrate that it is possible, with sufficient willing suspension of disbelief, to construct a false model sufficiently complete that it cannot be disproven by any feasible experimental test.)
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Unless you are doing a historical retrospective, there's just no reason to even mention it.
No.
Nobody gets to tell me to be a broodmare.
This is NOT a Brave New World yet. Thank heavens.
Re: No.
Re: No.
I am actively NOT choosing to be a mother right now.
Hence, contraception.
Should the unthinkable still come to pass, somehow -- I am *still* choosing not to carry a child. Period. Nobody ELSE gets to tell me how to make that decision. My body, my rules.
I applaud her for following her own morals on this. She is OK with that, and that's great. Being pro-CHOICE means I am just as OK with her carrying any child she wishes to term, just as OK as I am with me not wanting any, and being willing to abort if necessary.
Re: No.
I didn't ever claim she was a perfect Presidential candidate (if there is such a thing). I just said that as a VP candidate, she's in my opinion more likely to make a good President than either of the actual Presidential candidates.
Still, I'm sure she'd be even better after a term or two as VP....
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BTW, have you been seeing the reports of no-knock raids on progressives in Minneapolis (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/30/police_raids/index.html?source=newsletter)? Scary stuff.
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As far as the trooper/Monegan business, that's still under investigation, and I'm given to understand Palin's administration is cooperating fully with the investigation and actually initiated part of it. I do note that the "progressive" press tells only one side of that story, too — additional details seem to say that the trooper who was fired was, frankly, a disgrace to the force. I'm a little bemused why the progressive press isn't up in arms about him tasering his own pre-teen son.
As for the second link, yeah, I've seen it ... seen quite a bit about it. It's very similar to what's been happening in Denver to anyone who might be secretly conservative. Both just go to reinforce what I've been saying for years — that the similarities between the two parties greatly outweigh their difference, and they're equally rotten. The rottenness seems to have taken a sudden rather more disturbing trend just these last few weeks. Warrantless raids, ridiculously vague charges, possession of items as trivial as a computer or cell phone being taken as evidence of a crime? Uh, HELLO?
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C'mon, guy, what's there is there. You hate corruption. You hate anti-science positions. You dislike religion and especially religious authoritarianism. So why are you making excuses for her?
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I never said she was perfect. I'm quite certain she has her warts. All I'm saying is that she appears to be WORLDS better than either McCain or Obama, both of whom I fully expect to perform somewhere between "fiasco" and "disaster". If elected, I expect "moderate, for change" Obama's moderate veneer to evaporate within six months of the election and be replaced by typical left-wing liberal rhetoric about how we all need to be protected from ourselves for our own good while he does his best to marginalize conservatives. If elected, I expect "maverick" McCain to show within the first year that he'll do whatever the lobby with their hand up his ass at the time tells him while he does his best to completely ignore liberals.
On the other hand, I have some hope, based on such things as her readiness to bust members of her own party for corruption and her ability to form a Republican-Democratic coalition in her own state assembly, that Palin has the potential to do better. It's too early to judge for sure right now. Time will tell, if McCain is elected, and perhaps if he isn't. But the one thing I am almost completely certain of is that she can't possibly be worse than McCain or Obama. There just isn't that much suck left in the world after Feinstein et al consume their share.
As someone else already pointed out, right now George W. Bush has the lowest approval rating in history, and Congress, republican-led for six of the past eight years, is hard on his heels. (I add the observation that Congress's approval rating hasn't noticeably improved since the Democrats gained control; they have basically sat there and done nothing.) With that to run against, the Democratic party should have been able to run a tree stump for President and have a shoo-in. Yet Obama's struggling to keep even with McCain in the polls. If he's such the Great White Hope, McCain should be lost in his dust. So what's wrong?
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BTW, they've broken out the pepper spray and rubber bullets in Minneapolis (http://cliffschecter.firedoglake.com/2008/09/01/breaking-pepper-spray-and-rubber-bullets-in-the-streets/).
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You say she scares the hell out of you? Here's something that scares the hell out of me: A Presidential candidate who isn't even bothering to make any secret of his apparent belief that all of those pesky "inalienable" Constitutional rights should come with "reasonable restrictions". Like, the First Amendment apparently means "free speech unless you say something critical of me, even if it's true." He hasn't revealed yet what his "reasonable restrictions" on the Second are, but I'll bet it's not restricted to "comply with existing Federal law". When spoken by a liberal politician, "reasonable restrictions on firearms ownership" usually tends to mean something like "you can't have anything black or semi-automatic, you can't carry it, you have to register it, you have to store it unloaded and disassembled, you can only buy one box of ammunition a month and we'll expect every bullet to be individually numbered, we can inspect it at any time without warning, we want a ballistic fingerprint on file, you have to be certified mentally fit by a psychiatrist first, god help you if you ever use it in self-defense because better you should be murdered than that you use a gun on a poor misunderstood criminal, we'll take it away if you're ever mentioned in a domestic violence charge even as the victim because defending yourself against domestic violence is bad (and did we mention we consider raised voices to be domestic violence?), and oh by the way, you can't have one in a house a child ever enters, won't someone please think of the CHIIIIILLLDREEEEN?" Yeah, he's made vague noises about how he understands people in rural areas need guns. Like maybe a shotgun or a deer rifle.
[Gah. STUPID BLOODY LJ COMMENT LENGTH LIMIT. Continued in a moment.]
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As to her association with Stevens: yes, most Alaska Republicans were involved with Stevens. That is exactly the point; it's not clear to me than any major Alaska Republican, including Palin, is clean, and Palin was fairly closely associated with Stevens.
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Fiscally, I don't know. Historically, the Republican party has been small-government, the Democratic has been tax-and-spend. But last time we got a Republican administration elected on the promise of less government and no more tax-and-spend, who then proceeded to spend money as though it was going out of fashion. One would think that the Democratic party would be exploiting this and Clinton's success at actually ending his term with a record budget surplus, but instead, when I hear any of Obama's public statements, it's new program for this, expanded program for that, new program for the other ... where's the money going to come from?
I see us headed steadfastly up salt creek, and I have no faith in either McCain or Obama getting us turned around. While it's by no means a sure thing, I see some cause for hope that Palin mightdo so in the future, given a chance.
Sure, I could be wrong; I've been wrong before. When he was running for his first term, I thought Clinton was going to be the one to back; and we know how that turned out. He was fiscally successful, sure, but he sold White House influence to foreign powers, there was that whole utterly pointless AW ban that - as far as can be told - never prevented a single crime, there was the tacky business of renting out the Lincoln Bedroom, there was the lying to Congress about the Lewinsky affair (ahem), and let's not forget that it was Clinton's administration that invented the Designated Free Speech Zones. And that's without even getting into the whole farce of "Well, that depends what you mean by [insert word here]" or any of the various unproven/unresolved matters. (Two words by way of example: "Vincent Foster.") I think one could come up with a substantive argument that the events of Clinton's term led directly to the election of George W. Bush, "Worst President Ever."
I propose that the words "major Alaska Republican" above can be replaced with "national level politician" without loss of generality. ;)
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A lot of the stuff you're reciting about Clinton, except possibly the assault weapons ban, is either ripped out of context or flat false. If you want, I can get you chapter and verse on the rest, but it's all out there anyway.
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I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms, but I also identify with the need for crime-ravaged communities to save their children from the violence that plagues our streets through common-sense, effective safety measures. [...]
As President, I will uphold the constitutional rights of law-abiding gun-owners, hunters, and sportsmen. I know that what works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne. We can work together to enact common-sense laws, like closing the gun show loophole and improving our background check system, so that guns do not fall into the hands of terrorists or criminals. Today's decision reinforces that if we act responsibly, we can both protect the constitutional right to bear arms and keep our communities and our children safe. (http://time-blog.com/real_clear_politics/2008/06/mccain_reacts_to_scotus_gun_de.html)
"What works in Chicago"? There's a massive body of evidence it doesn't. "Gun show loophole"? The so-called "gun show loophole" is a complete fraud based on lying to people about what the law requires. In the real world, it doesn't exist. There is no "gun show loophole".
(Matter of fact, there's a yellow-journo out here, based down in Boston, who tried to come to New Hampshire and prove that there was a gun show loophole. He was most disappointed when the dealer he approached wouldn't oblige him. "I can't sell to you, you're not a New Hampshire resident, it'd be a violation of Federal law." Not to be defeated, he made his best effort to get a friend who lived in NH to help him try to make an illegal straw-man purchase. He didn't actually succeed — the gun never left New Hampshire or the friend's possession — but he misunderstood the law badly enough to think he had, he bragged about it in the papers, BATF got very interested, and he and his buddy are now under Federal investigation for attempted violation of Federal firearms laws. The existing laws work ... it's just that criminals seem strangely reluctant to obey laws. Oh, wait! That's why we call them criminals!)
"Common-sense laws" ... yeah, we've only heard THAT one about a thousand times before. Everything the Brady Bunch and the Violence Policy Center ever put forth is "common sense" or "reasonable" in their eyes. It's the same old tired Feinstein/Schumer/Boxer/Brady rhetoric polished up all shiny and new. "Reasonable" is used as in "Be reasonable and see things our way." "Out of the hands of terrorists" is another piece of pure Feinstein bullshit. Real terrorists don't need to go buy guns retail at gun shows ... it'd be one of the stupider things they could do, especially when they can get far more potent weaponry on the international black market - or just ask for some from their hidden and not-so-hidden backers, like say Syria or Saudi Arabia.
If he doesn't want to wear the shoe, he'd better start showing that it doesn't fit. He has yet to do so. He talks a great talk. The man can make a rousing speech, sure. But under the style, there seems to be a disturbing shortage of substance. I think it says something about him that on his recent European tour, he cancelled a scheduled visit to wounded troops in a military hospital because he was told he couldn't bring his press crew in. That's a pretty clear sign he wasn't there to visit the troops; he was there to be seen visiting the troops.
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Cronyism? I can see leveling that charge against Murkowski. He appointed his own daughter, fer crissakes. Blatant nepotism right there. But if there's cronyism ongoing in Palin's administration, it seems curiously absent from reports. (I assume you're not referring again to the ongoing, unresolved trooper/Monegan business.)
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In any event, I've said my piece; I'm going to let this discussion drop for a while.
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i don't really believe any one person can bring about the apocalypse or act as a savior... there's always countless factors affecting the flow of change in a country or the world.
and i'm less disturbed by any of these people than i was about the current officeholder and his cronies. particularly after all the evidence from the first term. so i don't see much reason to get up in arms about it.
but i do feel like writing the obama campaign a pretty direct comment about my support for the second amendment. for that matter, the fourth has been pretty beat up, too....