2012 republican presidential nominee III: can romney get santorum out of his hair?

but for our benefit not for the Earth’s benefit.

It's immoral hubris to assume you know how many future generations before Judgment Day (Mark 13:32)

Genesis 1:24-28 don't necessarily imply that humanity's dominion over God's creatures means we have to be dicks about it. It says dominion over the fish. What would happen should we kill all the fish? What would the theological implication be then, except that we were particularly bad stewards of God's creation.

"Here, have a gift."

"Thanks, I really can't wait to fuck this shit up!"

"Uh, you're, uh, welcome."

I mean he's blessing all these creatures and seeing that they were good, so maybe we shouldn't be playing basketball in the same parlor as the family porcelain just because it's 'our house'.

This what happens when Catholics spend too much time w/Protestants, imo. Santorum is hardly positioning himslef as a mainstream Catholic w/that kind of thinking but then, considering his anti-fascist grandfather was a dedicated commie, perhaps expecting too much coherence from him is asking too much.

it's worth noting that the Catholic church's official stance on climate change is that we should take it seriously:

In the new pope’s first social encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate,” he proclaimed there is a “covenant” between humans and the environment, and “responsibility is a global one, for it is concerned not just with energy but with the whole of creation, which must not be bequeathed to future generations depleted of its resources.” He highlighted in particular the responsibility of wealthy developed nations to take the lead on these efforts.

Caritas (charity, being the greatest of the three virtues) is often taken quite seriously by the Church or at least given lip-service, hence the concern for the poor and down-trodden, etc...

“We went into a recession in 2008. People forget why. They thought it was a housing bubble. The housing bubble was caused because of a dramatic spike in energy prices that caused the housing bubble to burst,” Santorum told the audience. “People had to pay so much money to air condition and heat their homes or pay for gasoline that they couldn’t pay their mortgage.”

Complete bullshit.

― Ham House showdown (Dan Peterson), Tuesday, 7 February 2012 19:30 (3 hours ago) Permalink

is it?

oil prices going into the stratosphere in 2007-2008 just a coincidence?

it's MOSTLY bullshit, but complete... not really. Energy prices were a reason the housing bubble popped when it did imo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFqK50d2jbU

Pareene's latest wire from the kulturkampf front:

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/07/santorum_surges_as_culture_wars_heat_up/singleton/?mobile.html

All of these, most of all the last one, are perfect stories for a candidate like Rick Santorum, so long as this remains a contest to win over outraged elderly ultra-conservatives. And indeed, Santorum has launched an unfair-ish attack on Romney, accusing him of forcing Catholic hospitals to provide emergency contraception. Santorum wants the voters to know that he’s always been the candidate most dedicated to protecting women from the responsibility of having any agency whatsoever over their role in the reproductive process!

(Would it be conspiratorial to note that these divisive cultural issues began attracting a great deal of right-wing attention very soon after the release of a positive jobs report? A little bit, probably.) (Also: Remember when the Tea Party meant the GOP was going all libertarian and abandoning social issues? Ha, ha.)

Whatever merit there is to Santorum's assertion, the housing bubble was essentially unsustainable and energy prices respond to the market and this sleight-of-hand, 'drill, baby, drill' argument doesn't respond to the fact that we don't have the oil reserves, even in Alaska, or the refining capacity to have staved it off, not to mention the fact that a cavailer attitude to extraction and consumption just means that whatever gains we might have made would be eaten up by inefficiency and waste. It's not a serious look at our predicament, it's shameful pandering to a spoiled electorate, i.e., the opposite of leadership.

Remember when the Tea Party meant the GOP was going all libertarian and abandoning social issues? Ha, ha.

W/due respect to a man I like and admire, this is horsefeathers. Teapartiers were always culturally reactionary, however loud they may have been yelling about liberty.

if you look at santorum's phrasing, he's trying to get people to believe that the bubble itself was due to high energy prices xp

Pure fantasy

Conceivably, it's in fact the opposite. The energy and commodities price increases we saw in the late oughts were 'caused by speculation fed by an economy overheated on housing growth.

Ppl can put off buying real estate easier than they can put off consuming (directly or not) energy.

well, global oil production plateauing in 2006 didn't help.

yes well that's the kernel of truth i guess. every speculative bubble gets popped by some kind of return to the real. this bubble was particularly vicious because of the absurd rube goldberg financialization machine sitting on top of it.

some (right of center, probably) economists have indicated that a rise in energy prices meant a rise in mortgage defaults. that's pretty commonsensical.

but to spin it out to "jeez, don't blame banks, blame ENERGY!" is just stupid. he's stupid! rick santorum is stupid. that's my opinion, anyway, if you're interested.

Yeah, sorry, I don't usually just pop in and say 'bullshit' w/o discussion; got riled and then distracted. Are oil prices involved tangentially? Probably.

But Santorum was saying similar stuff in Florida last month, discussed here.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/24/rick-santorum/rick-santorum-says-2008-spike-oil-prices-caused-fl/

To think that housing bubbles, energy availability and the 'rube goldber' financialization aren't connected is foolish. I work at an investmnt bank and they lost a lot of money, too. If they were so clever they would have known when to cut their losses and where to flee to value, too. This is precisely what has always happened in less regulated markets; they lurch between fear and greed, so I'm not sure why that's Shangri-La for the laissez-faire crowd, except that they are very, very attached to some ppl losing their shirts and being able to crwo about it later and the more dogmatically attached to the ideology, the less stupid and unlearning they seem to realize they are.

in a 'normal' economy, an energy price rise would eat up household spending going anywhere else, sure, and you'd see some forecosures, bankruptcies, maybe layoffs, whatever. it'd be bad but normal, it wouldn't "matter".

but if there is an enormous, shadowy credit bubble that has attached itself to housing finance and has fueled a housing price bubble in the meantime, a slight downturn becomes, well, recent history.

anyway sorry to be pedantic, i think we all know this is crap!

National City Bank (RIP) offered me a home loan back in '07 that they claimed I could afford but I knew I couldn't. I'm sure many other people took them up on their offer. I am so glad I decided to stay out of the real estate market. But yeah, high energy prices certainly didn't help either.

I'm glad we bought in late '01 and equally glad that we really hardly use heat except for hot water. I'd wager most or at least half of my energy consumption is indirect.

I wish I lived in san francisco

i have coworkers (all nice liberal decent folk mostly) who have these midwestern crabby attitudes towards people in their neighborhoods who go into short sales or strategic defaults, and say crabby stuff about loan mod programs or big writedowns or anything like that, that it's "unfair" or "people are so stupid" etc. i get that empty properties in their proximity is kind of a pain but come on.

i have to say, "responsibility goes for the lender too, moreso if they knew their borrower was weak and they didn't give a rat's about the neighborhood anyway". but mostly i just have to smh.

everybody wants the housing market fixed but they don't want any of the "wrong people" to get a free ride. well, sit and suffer then, dipshits! it makes me so mad.

I wish I lived in san francisco

The weather is definitely a huge factor but we're also Carter-era kids who were relentlessly told not to waste and the heating in our flat is very inefficient so we just turn lights off and wear sweaters and whatnot.

Also faux fur throws

global warming will help all of us save on our energy bills. it's a problem that solves itself!

*cranks AC*

no no no, everybody will just be naked all the time

lol i forgot gingrich didn't make the missouri ballot

lol what a chump

http://i.imgur.com/BCt0A.png

cant wait for that to come up at the next press conference

it's too bad for him, because i remember back last fall when everyone was like "no one would ever vote for gingrich", he was tanking in early polls in every single state - except for missouri, where he was leading for some stupid reason.

Gingrich was out giving history lessons on the Wright Brothers today. No matter where he goes, he always achieves lift-off.

Please bring back the moon colony, Newt. It is the centerpiece of your campaign!

cant fly no first airplane ever to the moon newt!

show me the moon state

moon colony versus real life jurassic park

jurassic park obvs

Space travel's in Newt's blood, there ain't nothing he can do about it. Long journeys wear Newt out, but he knows he can't live without it.

RickSantorum Rick Santorum
7M Californians had their rights stripped away today by activist 9th Circuit judges. As president I will work to protect marriage.
2 hours ago

btw this fn guy

moonbase jurassic park obv

http://i.imgur.com/c0VaX.png

Makes perfect sense: Santorum, Romney, and Paul are floating just above them, but Obama and the boy have just spotted Gingrich out in hyperspace.

is that J0rdan to Bam's left

ha

everyones saying santorums gonna win minnesota fwiw

When I saw that picture on Sullivan earlier today, my first thought was to issue a personalized invitation to Morbius for a caption.

But something fun--"drone" not allowed.

post pictures of people who are not j0rdan S