2008 USP(G)ET pt. II: counting the days to 2012 primary thread 1

seriously, does that guy realize he sounds like a soviet?

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/09/republican-vote-tampering-machine.html

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/memo-to-joe-biden-let-palin-talk.html

haha and what's video "is a video response to Who would win in a fight?(Kimbo Slice -VS- Chuck liddell"

drudge is a hilarious orgy of horror right now

When The Corner starts going batshit on House Republicans, you know that the economy is truly fucked.

Bad for McCain [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Not that it's the most important fallout, but this vote is very bad for McCain. He was trying to get House Republicans on board, after all, and he failed. Blaming the Democrats for the failure will not and should not work, given the ratios on both sides.

Irresponsible Folly [Jim Manzi]

Well, apparently the House Republicans have decided to run a neat little experiment to test the actual odds of the current financial crisis turning into another Depression in the absence of a bailout plan. What alternative do they propose that could realistically be enacted? How long do they think this would take, and what risks would we run during the period of uncertainty, even if it were successful?

I'm Stunned [Rich Lowry]

Ahaha. I'm laughing through my tears of quaking fear.

this cheered me momentarily.

"1-800-282-2882" [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

That's Rush's studio line. Sarah Palin should call it between 12 and 3 EST.And just be herself.

09/29 11:45 AM

k-lo, playing with dolls again

hahahaha keep it up you fucking loser

John McCain's campaign just weighed in on the House vote against bailing out Wall Street. "Barack Obama failed to lead, phoned it in, attacked John McCain, and refused to even say if he supported the final bill," McCain senior policy advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin said in an e-mail to reporters. "This bill failed because Barack Obama and the Democrats put politics ahead of country."

????

"And I do look forward to Thursday night, and debating Senator Joe Biden," said Ms. Palin, whose uneven performance in interviews and unscripted events have sown seeds of doubt in recent days among some conservative commentators who support her.
"I’m looking forward to meeting him, too," she said. "I’ve never met him before, but I’ve been hearing about his Senate speeches since I was in, like, second grade."
"I have to admit, though, he’s a great debater, and he looks pretty doggone confident, like he’s sure he’s going to win," Ms. Palin, 44, said of Mr. Biden, 65. "But then again, this is the same Senator Biden who said the other day that University of Delaware would trounce the Ohio State Buckeyes. Wrong!"

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/palin-says-she-is-looking-forward-to-debate/?hp&pagewanted=all

biden has been in the senate for many years lmfao

that quote is fake*

*hopefully

“Some people have criticized my decision to put my country first, but I will never, ever be a president who sits on the sidelines when this country faces a crisis,’’ said Mr. McCain. And Mr. McCain, who spent this weekend in Washington working the phones, but did not actually return to Capitol Hill , said: “I know that many of you have noticed, but it’s not my style to simply ‘phone it in.’ ”

lololololol

barney frank on the hurt feelings crisis:

Barney Frank is completely in his element with this whole mess, isn't he?

srsly is it a good idea for sarah palin to be making lol old jokes at joe biden? like she even went to second grade anyway.

she went to second grade at four different schools

(Xp) actually, she went to five second grades so stfu

X(

srsly is it a good idea for sarah palin to be making lol old jokes at joe biden?

Good ideas and Palin go together about as well as chocolate and tartar sauce.

no wonder she's so dumb, i mean if her second grade was spent focused on the speeches of joe biden. jeez, alaska!

Barney Frank is completely in his element with this whole mess, isn't he?

i just said that same thing to a friend this afternoon. his whole bearing is just like, i know this stuff, this is what i'm here for, amateurs step aside. (see also his exasperation at mccain's drop-in last week.)

i wish he was running for president simply for the lol factor but america is not ready for a 70-year-old queen to be president (ask hillary ba-dum-dum)

i just said that same thing to a friend this afternoon. his whole bearing is just like, i know this stuff, this is what i'm here for, amateurs step aside

Be careful about assigning him too much credit.

haha this fucking country:

Hasn't "MILF" jumped the shark yet?
from Feministing by Jessica

Just something quick a reader passed along: The url www.voteforthemilf.com redirects to www.johnmccain.com.

http://i36.tinypic.com/outtnm.jpg

she went to second grade at four different schools

lol

http://www.politico.com/blogs/jonathanmartin/0908/In_reintroduction_Palin_to_do_more_interviews_and_tell_her_story.html?showall

Sitting with McCain for their first joint interview a week after the widely panned sit-down with Couric, Palin interjected when the CBS anchor brought up a report about the Wasilla Assembly of God, the governor's childhood church and one she still attends at times, seeking to pray gays away from homosexuality.

"Sarah Barracuda showed up today," the aide said, reprising the feisty former point guard's high school basketball nickname and one that has been largely forgotten since her post-convention cosseting.

"We're encouraging CBS to run entire thing," the aide said of today's session. "Run it end to end online."

Of concern to McCain's campaign, however, is a remaining and still-undisclosed clip from Palin's interview with Couric last week that has the political world buzzing.

The Palin aide, after first noting how "infuriating" it was for CBS to purportedly leak word about the gaffe, revealed that it came in response to a question about Supreme Court decisions.

After noting Roe vs. Wade, Palin was apparently unable to discuss any major court cases.

There was no verbal fumbling with this particular question as there was with some others, the aide said, but rather silence.

How many more segments of the interview are there, and when will they be aired?

Decent opinion article from The Economist as reprinted in the Seattle Times

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/381050_nixononline30.html

In election season Republicans rely on Nixon playbook
THE ECONOMIST

Modern Republicans admire no one more than Ronald Reagan, the man who, in their view, destroyed communism, rolled back welfare-state liberalism and reintroduced God into American politics.

But when it comes to practicing politics, particularly at election time, the Republicans have a rather different hero, a man of frowns rather than smiles: Richard Nixon.

Nixon's great contribution to Republican politics was to master the politics of cultural resentment. Before him, populism belonged as much to the left as the right. William Jennings Bryan railed against the eastern elites who wanted to crucify common folk on a "cross of gold." Franklin Roosevelt dismissed Republicans as "economic royalists."

Nixon's genius was to discover that the politics of culture could trump the politics of economics -- and that populism could become a tool of the right.

Nixon understood in his marrow how middle-class Americans felt about the country's self-satisfied elites. The "silent majority" had been disoriented, throughout the 1960s, by the collapse of traditional moral values. And they had boiled with righteous anger at the liberal elites who extended infinite indulgence to bomb-throwing radicals while dismissing conservative views as evidence of racism and sexism.

Nixon recognized that the Republicans stood to gain from "positive polarization": dividing the electorate over values.

He also recognized that the media, which had always made a great pretence of objectivity while embracing a liberal social agenda, could be turned into a Republican weapon. He encouraged Spiro Agnew, his vice president, to declare war on the "effete corps of impudent snobs" in the media, with their Ivy League educations and Georgetown social values.

Many people predicted that 2008 would finally mark the end of the Nixon era. The issues were too grave to be swamped by a squabble about culture, the argument went. And the candidates, in the form of John McCain and Barack Obama, were too noble to be distracted by the siren voices of the culture war.

George Packer dismissed the remains of the culture wars as "the spasms of nerve endings in an organism that's brain-dead."

Andrew Sullivan hoped that Obama might finally take America "past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the baby-boom generation that has long engulfed all of us." This paper saw the two candidates as "America at its best."

Not quite. Two weeks after the Republican convention, America seems to be hellbent on repeating the 1972 election. Forget about the "sunny uplands" of post-partisan politics.

The American electorate is still trapped in Nixonland: a land where Democrats and Republicans exchange endless gibes about who despises whom, where simmering class and regional resentments trump all other political considerations and where the airwaves crackle with accusations about lies and counter-lies.

The Republicans now have all the material that they need to do what they do best. Obama is an Ivy-League-educated intellectual whose associates include unrepentant terrorists and swivel-eyed preachers. McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, is a Nixonian fantasy come true, perfectly designed to create a cycle of accusation and counteraccusation.

The "liberal media" cannot do its job without questioning Palin's qualifications, which are astonishingly thin; but they cannot question her qualifications without confirming the Republican suspicion that they are looking down on ordinary Americans.

"Here's a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators," Palin told the Republican convention, doing her best to channel Agnew. "I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion; I'm going to Washington to serve the people of this country."

Nixon's original insight remains as true now as it was in the late 1960s: Lots of liberals do, indeed, look down on flyover Americans as stump-toothed imbeciles and, for some strange reason, lots of flyover Americans resent them for it.

What is more, the culture wars have intensified since Nixon's last election, supersized by the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion in 1973.

Yet the Republican Party's decision to rely so heavily on Nixon's 1972 template is nevertheless depressing. Aren't Republicans supposed to deplore the politics of victimhood?

Conservatives make a good case that treating minority groups as victims diminishes America and institutionalizes dependency. But when it comes to election time they not only play the politics of victimhood, but play it with extraordinary relish, presenting ordinary Americans as the victims of diabolical conspiracies.

Haven't Republicans done quite well when it comes to power? They have controlled the White House for 28 of the past 40 years, and have a solid majority on the Supreme Court. And aren't Republicans rather good at getting their message across?

Nixon was justified in feeling that the press liked to kick him around. But the past 30 years have seen the emergence of a conservative media establishment that excels at kicking liberals around, not least Fox News and talk radio.

Nixon at least had the excuse that he spent his life as an outsider, despite his intellectual gifts and relentless hard work. McCain is the ultimate insider: the offspring of a naval dynasty, a bad boy turned war hero, the media's favorite Republican.

The bigger question is whether the politics of resentment will be enough on its own to win an election. Rick Perlstein, the author of "Nixonland," points out that, from Nixon's time onwards, "culture" has always been just one part of the Republican trifecta, which also includes economic management and foreign policy.

Richard Nixon and George Bush Sr. offered mastery of foreign policy. Ronald Reagan offered a revolutionary mixture of free-markets at home and assertiveness abroad. But this year the Republicans are left with nothing but a culture war to sell to the voters -- Richard Nixon with the redeeming features left out.

From The Economist magazine. Copyright 2008 Economist Newspaper Ltd.

way to steal your thesis from nixonland

hahahaha keep it up you fucking loser

― Shakey Mo Collier, Monday, September 29, 2008 4:25 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hahaha 1st graf gave me biggest IRL lolz of the campaign

That's a decent piece, but I'm pretty close to canceling my subscription to the Economist at this point. I read it because it has great international coverage and is sort of the embodiment of what I think of as "reasonable conservatism," even though I totally disagree with it. However, during election season the stench of the Tory bullshit comes out so strongly that it because nausea-inducing just to read the headlines of the articles. Their tack this year is how they just can't believe that Walnuts isn't living up to his maverick principles and that he's lying, incompetent, senile and running a Rove-ian campaign. Wow. Shocker.

If they endorse him, they will lose all credibility.

Er, that it because/that it becomes.

has Economist not noticed that Palin's numbers have tanked?

Making a similar point earlier on MSNBC, Holtz-Eakin said McCain deliberately "kept a low profile."

they did endorse kerry, you know

xp

EAT SHIT

1,000,000,000 FLIES CAN'T BE WRONG

-- THE ECONOMIST

I will say it one more time: since appointing their american bureau lead to the Editor In Chief spot, that magazine has gone right downhill in a damn hurry. I remember as soon as he got in charge all the picture captions went from occasionally-lol to po-faced-literal, and then after that everything else also got notably dumbed down. Fuck 'em.

K. J. Lopez discovers what her core constituency is like. Apparently this has surprised her a bit.

lol 'we knew you were a democrat you dirty person named lopez'

guys i am just so upset at jimmy carter for crashing wall street. SO UPSET.

and those house democrats! they hold the majority so obviously they are at fault for all those republicans who didn't vote for it.

(ugh. THESE are the straws they are grasping for. such a farce.)

gotcha journaism = some guy at the cheesesteak place asking you what yr gonna do if u get elected

there is some question about the economist's veracity in covering the globe at large, though i can't find the links in my current state. though at least they do cover it, which is more than most other 'newspapers' do. it's useful to keep in mind their guiding principles:

1. the utterly free market will save us all
2. america (or other capitalist hegemon) as global cop, however misguided, is better than an isolationist america (or other capitalist hegemon)
3. robert mugabe is totally on the way out, no shit
4. silvio berlusconi sux