Suppose ...

[unixronin]

... 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.

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Wow. She doesn't need to make her own excuses when she has you to do it for her.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

You know, it's not making excuses to say something other than "Yes, every word you say must be true, she is the devil incarnate and the Sixth Sign of The Apocalypse." Why are you seeing everything in black and white?

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Because, as far as I can tell, she does and it scares the hell out of me. I don't want another president who thinks she's the rep of god on earth. Oh, BTW, it's now turned out that Palin was a director of Ted Stevens 527 (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/09/01/palin_was_a_director_of_embatt.html). Josh Marshall, over at TPM, is doing a great job of covering this stuff as it comes out (http://talkingpointsmemo.com/).

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/).

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

So she was involved politically with Ted Stevens. That hardly comes as a huge, shocking revelation. Could you be involved at state level in Alaska politics and not have some kind of political connections to the state's senior Senator? And Obama was involved with William Ayers. I haven't noticed her campaign staff calling for anyone to be jailed over the revelation yet, like Obama's campaign staff said the staff of the 501(c)4 that released the documentably-factual Ayers-Obama PSA should go to jail for it. I don't know if there's any significance to Obama's past relationship with Ayers, but I sure find his campaign's reaction to the PSA pretty significant.

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.]

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

What makes you think Palin will protect the second amendment? It seems much more likely that she will honor gun rights only when it is convenient, just as Bush administration does any other right. For them firearms advocacy is simply a way to get an influential faction on their side, and your rights matter no more to them than the rights of those protesters now being abused in Minneapolis. If they will physically attack people who threaten them only with dissent, how much more aggressively, given the reason and opportunity, will they attack people who threaten them with actual weapons?

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.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

What makes you think Palin will protect the second amendment? It seems much more likely that she will honor gun rights only when it is convenient, just as Bush administration does any other right.

Well, obviously no-one can predict the future. Her record so far has been pro-gun, and in general pro-individual freedoms. (Her personal position on abortion, and her apparent for-my-family position on birth control, excepted. But as far as I'm concerned, what goes on within her family is her own business.) While I'm less sanguine about McCain's integrity, having been bought out before, what I do know on that front is his statement on DC vs. Heller was unequivocally "The Supreme Court has affirmed that the founding fathers intended this to be an individual right", while Obama's was filled with the buzzwords and catchphrases that, from Democratic lawmakers, have always preceded more new gun-control laws more onerous than whatever they tried last time.

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."

it's not clear to me than any major Alaska Republican, including Palin, is clean

I propose that the words "major Alaska Republican" above can be replaced with "national level politician" without loss of generality. ;)

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I think that focusing on just one right leaves one vulnerable to manipulative pols. If one has firearms, but none of the freedom-of-thought rights: press, speech, and so on--how is anyone going to know what to do with the the firearms? Without freedom of assembly, how can one practice, or organize? Without control over our own bodies--and that doesn't just include the right to abortion, but also the right to be free of forced medical tests, like drug tests, and the right to be free of surveillance implants--does one have any freedom at all? It is hard to imagine any use of firearms that could save as many lives and free as many people as maintaining the legality of abortion! And yet we've every reason to believe that Palin, as a authoritarian religious radical, opposes all these rights. So when the balance sheet is totaled McCain and Palin come out looking very bad. That doesn't mean I think the Democrats are perfect on these issues; it does mean I think the balance is much, much, much better.

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.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Behold the power of assumption. (http://jezebel.com/5044027/bristol-palin-is-pregnant-let-the-opprobrium-begin)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Here's Obama on DC vs. Heller:
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.