Furthermore, that article's selective outrage is on par with the17sss's conniptions. How is it reprehensible that Andrea Mitchell (wife of non-partisan Alan Greenspan) interview Sarah Palin after she quit her job, but perfectly acceptable that Greta van Susteran (wife of Sarah Palin's PAC founder, and personal friend of the Palin family) get exclusive interview rights? I mean, hell, Todd Palin was Greta's personal guest to the National Correspondents Dinner in DC a few months ago.

And the snark against "Middle America" is amusing considering the author uses that as a defense of Palin. Sure, people in "fly-over territory" are simple people concerned with families and the way America used to be, not with big issues and policy debates. Great defense of someone who could have been VP.

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I heard she could make 20mil per year off of a couple of book deals and doing a series of speeches and such.

If I was a governer making 1XX thousand per year, and I was lookin at a 20million dollar pay cheque instead, I'd quit too.

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Captain Planet is gey.
Water, Fire, Earth, Wind, Heart???
These forces are supposed to combine to create Captain Planet?
Bullshit.
Those forces combine to create a soaking, boiling mudstorm on Valentine's Day.

quote:

A Farewell to Harms Palin was bad for the Republicans—and the republic. By PEGGY NOONAN Sarah Palin's resignation gives Republicans a new opportunity to see her plain—to review the bidding, see her strengths, acknowledge her limits, and let go of her drama. It is an opportunity they should take. They mean to rebuild a great party. They need to do it on solid ground. Her history does not need to be rehearsed at any length. Ten months ago she was embraced with friendliness by her party. The left and the media immediately overplayed their hand, with attacks on her children. The party rallied round, as a party should. She went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be. She was hungry, loved politics, had charm and energy, loved walking onto the stage, waving and doing the stump speech. All good. But she was not thoughtful. She was a gifted retail politician who displayed the disadvantages of being born into a point of view (in her case a form of conservatism; elsewhere and in other circumstances, it could have been a form of liberalism) and swallowing it whole: She never learned how the other sides think, or why. In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. "I'm not wired that way," "I'm not a quitter," "I'm standing up for our values." I'm, I'm, I'm. In another age it might not have been terrible, but here and now it was actually rather horrifying. McCain-Palin lost. Mrs. Palin has now stepped down, but she continues to poll high among some members of the Republican base, some of whom have taken to telling themselves Palin myths. To wit, "I love her because she's so working-class." This is a favorite of some party intellectuals. She is not working class, never was, and even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and just lets others say it. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the sleds and think they're working class "tropes." Because, you know, that's what they teach in "Ways of the Working Class" at Yale and Dartmouth. What she is, is a seemingly very nice middle-class girl with ambition, appetite and no sense of personal limits. "She's not Ivy League, that's why her rise has been thwarted! She represented the democratic ideal that you don't have to go to Harvard or Brown to prosper, and her fall represents a failure of egalitarianism." This comes from intellectuals too. They need to be told something. Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College. Richard Nixon went to Whittier College, Joe Biden to the University of Delaware. Sarah Palin graduated in the end from the University of Idaho, a school that happily notes on its Web site that it's included in U.S. News & World Report's top national schools survey. They need to be told, too, that the first Republican president was named "Abe," and he went to Princeton and got a Fulbright. Oh wait, he was an impoverished backwoods autodidact! America doesn't need Sarah Palin to prove it was, and is, a nation of unprecedented fluidity. Her rise and seeming fall do nothing to prove or refute this. "The elites hate her." The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon. "She makes the Republican Party look inclusive." She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated. "She shows our ingenuous interest in all classes." She shows your cynicism. "Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues." Mrs. Palin's supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone. She can memorize the names of the presidents of Pakistan, but she is not going to be able to know how to think about Pakistan. Why do her supporters not see this? Maybe they think "not thoughtful" is a working-class trope! "The media did her in." Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it's arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they're perfect in every way. It's yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy. "Turning to others means the media won!" No, it means they lose. What the mainstream media wants is not to kill her but to keep her story going forever. She hurts, as they say, the Republican brand, with her mess and her rhetorical jabberwocky and her careless causing of division. Really, she is the most careless sower of discord since George W. Bush, who fractured the party and the movement that made him. Why wouldn't the media want to keep that going? Here's why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think. Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate. The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted. There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the time to look for those who can. And so the Republican Party should get serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do. It's not a time to be frivolous, or to feel the temptation of resentment, or the temptation of thinking next year will be more or less like last year, and the assumptions of our childhoods will more or less reign in our future. It won't be that way. We are going to need the best.

By none other than Peggy Noonan, obviously a member of the liberal media. The Republican Party had better starting to take a good look in the mirror and realizing that embracing stupidity and ignorance is not a good path to victory.

___________________
"Go back to bed america your government is in control
Here's American Gladiators, here is 56 channels of it,
Watch these picturary retards bang their fuckin' skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom,
Here you go America you are free to do as we tell you
We want your soul
Your cash, your house, your phone, your cash, your house, your life" -Adam Freeland - We Want Your Soul

quote:

Originally posted by Q5echo now or then? are you talking about W's medicaid prescription drug benefit? to my knowledge W couldn't get any work done on Social Security even though it was one of his main platforms for re-election in 2004.

Yeah, not that I disagree with the purpose of such welfare entitlements, but im also a strong believer in being able to afford them too, which means not making cuts to tax the country could ill-afford.

quote:

GREG IP, The Economist: They tried not even including the cost of that war in their budgets. They would say, "We'll deal with that with supplementals." And supplementals are basically budget bills which are set outside the normal budget process. And so from the get-go, there was a refusal to even do the accounting in an honest way about what these wars were costing us. FORREST SAWYER: Bush's campaign for a second round of tax cuts met with resistance even from members of his own party. In Washington, Senate Republicans did not have the 60 votes needed to pass the tax cut and block a certain Democratic filibuster. So George Bush's party used a little known parliamentary maneuver called reconciliation that allows passage of a budget bill by a simple majority of 51 votes. DAVID ROGERS, Politico: Reconciliation was always used for deficit reduction. The design of reconciliation was to make tough decisions about savings, deficit reduction. The idea is that this is so important to reduce the deficit that we will not require the 60 votes. That's the premise of it. What the Bush people did was turn that on its head and it was allowed to be used for tax cuts. FORREST SAWYER: [on camera] Basically, it's an end around- DAVID RODGERS: Exactly. FORREST SAWYER: -the 60 votes that are required in the Senate. DAVID RODGERS: That's right. That's what happened. FORREST SAWYER: So it's just a political maneuver. DAVID RODGERS: Yeah. They had a friendly parliamentarian. FORREST SAWYER: [voice-over] Vice President Cheney presided over the Senate as it voted on the tax cut. Vice Pres. DICK CHENEY: On this vote, the yeas are 50, the nays are 50. The Senate being equally divided, the vice president votes in the affirmative, and the conference report to accompany HR2- FORREST SAWYER: One of the largest tax cuts in American history was passed with Vice President Dick Cheney casting the deciding vote. Two wars, two enormous tax cuts, deficits and national debt rising, but the Bush administration was not done. Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH: Now I'm honored and pleased to sign this historic piece of legislation, the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003. FORREST SAWYER: Commonly known as Medicare part D, or the prescription drug benefit for seniors. Medicare itself is the government program that pays the cost of medical coverage for people over 65. Like Social Security, it's extremely popular among a very large part of the voting public, seniors. DAVID WESSEL: When Medicare was invented in the '60s, medicine, prescription drugs, were not a big part of health care spending. Over the years, medicine became a bigger part of health care spending, so there was a lot of pressure on Medicare to be expanded to cover prescription drugs, a totally reasonable thing to do. But there was no way to pay for it. FORREST SAWYER: But the Bush administration pushed for passage of Medicare part D anyway. Rep. BILLY TAUZIN (R), Louisiana: Health care is not a partisan issue! FORREST SAWYER: It was one of the most contentious congressional debates in recent time. Rep. BILLY TAUZIN: -something that seniors desperately need- Rep. ROBERT ANDREWS (D), New Jersey: Shame on the Republican Party for turning its back and releasing a torrent of red ink. Rep. MIKE PENCE (R), Indiana: -creating an all new, massive federal entitlement- FORREST SAWYER: Republicans railed against the huge cost. Rep. TED STRICKLAND (D), Ohio: This bill was written by and for the pharmaceutical companies! Rep. JOHN DINGELL (D), Michigan: -no competition whatsoever! FORREST SAWYER: Democrats called it a sell-out to the big drug companies. Rep. PHIL GINGREY (R), Georgia: Who is going to provide the prescription drugs, the chocolate chip cookie company? Give me a break! Rep. TED STRICKLAND: Shame! Shame! Rep. ELIOT ENGEL (D), New York: Shame on this Congress for betraying our seniors and ramming this bill through in the middle of the night. FORREST SAWYER: Voting in the House lasted until 6:00 in the morning. Rep. JOHN DINGELL: No wonder they want to do this at 2:00 o'clock in the morning! FORREST SAWYER: It finally passed by five votes. [on camera] Why would a small government conservative initiate a program that is so massive? JACKIE CALMES, The New York Times: Politics. FORREST SAWYER: What do you mean? JACKIE CALMES: There's no group that votes at the rate and in the numbers as those over 55, and 65 and over certainly. And Democrats, as well as Republicans, want to please seniors, and that's why our entire budget is tilted towards programs for seniors. FORREST SAWYER: [voice-over] The reason that the Bush administration could pass Medicare part D was that the Republican Congress in 2002 had let a rule called "pay as you go" lapse. It was a rule established by the first President Bush and a Democratic Congress to enforce fiscal discipline. GREGG IP: His father endured some very serious political pain to do the right thing to get the deficit down. And one of the steps was that a rule called "pay-go," or pay as you go. And this rule basically meant that if you wanted to introduce a new tax cut or a new spending program, you had to find a way to pay for it with an offsetting tax increase or spending cut. Well, in 2002, that rule expired. ALICE RIVLIN, Dir., Office of Management & Budget, 1994-96: In the Clinton years, we had the "pay-go" rule, pay as you go, and that meant we couldn't pass a lot of good-sounding ideas, including Medicare prescription drugs. It's not that nobody thought of that in the '90s. A lot of people thought of it. But we couldn't pay for it. To pay for it, we would have had to have done a tax increase or cut out some other spending in major proportions, and nobody wanted to do that, so we didn't do it. FORREST SAWYER: But the Bush administration did do it. With "pay-go" no longer restraining spending, they had pushed through Medicare part D, a program that's projected over time to cost as much as $8 trillion. DAVID WESSEL: They did not come up with a way to raise taxes or cut spending somewhere else to pay for it, so they just passed this thing. It goes into law. It's a promise to elderly people that we'll pay- subsidize their drugs, and we borrow every year to pay for it. And in the end, it's more expensive than the war in Iraq because the war in Iraq ends at some point. Certainly, it will end now that Obama's president. But the prescription drug benefit will go on forever. FORREST SAWYER: It will go on forever because it's a promise made by the federal government to its citizens. Seniors are entitled to this benefit, just the as they are entitled to Social Security and Medicare itself. These entitlements are all enormously popular, but they're also enormously expensive. Medicare part D alone will cost $60 billion this year. JACKIE CALMES: The expense of that over time, unfunded liabilities for the government, at a time when more people are reaching retirement age and qualifying for Medicare, added more to the long-term obligations of the government than all of Social Security. FORREST SAWYER: Medicare part D was the largest spending bill the president signed, but there were dozens of others. During his first five years as president, with a Republican-controlled House and Senate, George Bush never vetoed a spending bill. Fiscal conservatives in his own party accused him of being the biggest spender since World War II.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/front...etc/script.html

quote:

Originally posted by Q5echo an $800 billion stimulus? uh, no. on top of a monster budget? hell no TARP I, yes even tho i was initially against it. a more balanced budget, maybe even a budget freeze. and a more targeted and less pork laden stimulus maybe on the order of 1/3 of TARP II <-- an arbitrary number, really.

where was Q5's fiscal discipline obsession during 2000-2008? and what makes him think the republican offering was going to be any different/better than what we got?

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quote:

Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN where was Q5's fiscal discipline obsession during 2000-2008? and what makes him think the republican offering was going to be any different/better than what we got?

If it's to go to war, any cost will do for Q5.

Here's an excellent article I invite everyone to read. Frank Rich is a New York Times columnist whose writing is lucid, objective, and easy to read. I find it hard to believe that some conservatives could seriously dispute what he says here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/o.../12rich.html?em

She Broke the G.O.P. and Now She Owns It

quote:

SARAH PALIN and Al Sharpton don’t ordinarily have much in common, but they achieved a rare harmonic convergence at Michael Jackson’s memorial service. When Sharpton told the singer’s children it was their daddy’s adversaries, not their daddy, who were “strange,” he was channeling the pugnacious argument the Alaska governor had made the week before. There was nothing strange about her decision to quit in midterm, Palin told America. What’s strange — or “insane,” in her lingo — are the critics who dare question her erratic behavior on the national stage. Sharpton’s bashing of Jackson’s naysayers received the biggest ovation of the entire show. Palin’s combative resignation soliloquy, though much mocked by prognosticators of all political persuasions, has an equally vociferous and more powerful constituency. In the aftermath of her decision to drop out and cash in, Palin’s standing in the G.O.P. actually rose in the USA Today/Gallup poll. No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base” of the Republican Party that liberals and conservatives alike tend to ghettoize as a rump backwater minority. It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it in the Barack Obama era. That’s why Palin won’t go gently into the good night, much as some Republicans in Washington might wish. She is not just the party’s biggest star and most charismatic television performer; she is its only star and charismatic performer. Most important, she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind. Palin gives this movement a major party brand and political plausibility that its open-throated media auxiliary, exemplified by Glenn Beck, cannot. She loves the spotlight, can raise millions of dollars and has no discernible reason to go fishing now except for self-promotional photo ops. The essence of Palinism is emotional, not ideological. Yes, she is of the religious right, even if she winks literally and figuratively at her own daughter’s flagrant disregard of abstinence and marriage. But family-values politics, now more devalued than the dollar by the philandering of ostentatiously Christian Republican politicians, can only take her so far. The real wave she’s riding is a loud, resonant surge of resentment and victimization that’s larger than issues like abortion and gay civil rights. That resentment is in part about race, of course. When Palin referred to Alaska as “a microcosm of America” during the 2008 campaign, it was in defiance of the statistical reality that her state’s tiny black and Hispanic populations are unrepresentative of her nation. She stood for the “real America,” she insisted, and the identity of the unreal America didn’t have to be stated explicitly for audiences to catch her drift. Her convention speech’s signature line was a deftly coded putdown of her presumably shiftless big-city opponent: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” (Funny how this wisdom has been forgotten by her supporters now that she has abandoned her own actual responsibilities in public office.) The latest flashpoint for this kind of animus is the near-certain elevation to the Supreme Court of Sonia Sotomayor, whose Senate confirmation hearings arrive this week. Prominent Palinists were fast to demean Sotomayor as a dim-witted affirmative-action baby. Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, the Palinist hymnal, labeled Sotomayor “not the smartest” and suggested that Princeton awards academic honors on a curve. Karl Rove said, “I’m not really certain how intellectually strong she would be.” Those maligning the long and accomplished career of an Ivy League-educated judge do believe in affirmative-action — but only for white people like Palin, whom they boosted for vice president despite her minimal achievements and knowledge of policy, the written word or even geography. The politics of resentment are impervious to facts. Palinists regard their star as an icon of working-class America even though the Palins’ combined reported income ($211,000) puts them in the top 3.6 percent of American households. They see her as a champion of conservative fiscal principles even though she said yes to the Bridge to Nowhere and presided over a state that ranks No.1 in federal pork. Nowhere is the power of resentment to trump reason more flagrantly illustrated than in the incessant complaint by Palin and her troops that she is victimized by a double standard in the “mainstream media.” In truth, the commentators at ABC, NBC and CNN — often the same ones who judged Michelle Obama a drag on her husband — all tried to outdo each other in praise for Palin when she emerged at the Republican convention 10 months ago. Even now, the so-called mainstream media can grade Palin on a curve: at MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last week, Palin’s self-proclaimed representation of the “real America” was accepted as a given, as if white rural America actually still was the nation’s baseline. The Palinists’ bogus beefs about double standards reached farcical proportions at Fox News on the sleepy pre-Fourth Friday afternoon when word of her abdication hit the East. The fill-in anchor demanded that his token Democratic stooge name another female politician who had suffered such “disgraceful attacks” as Palin. When the obvious answer arrived — Hillary Clinton — the Fox host angrily protested that Clinton had never been attacked in “a sexual way” or “about her children.” Americans have short memories, but it’s hardly ancient history that conservative magazines portrayed Hillary Clinton as both a dominatrix cracking a whip and a broomstick-riding witch. Or that Rush Limbaugh held up a picture of Chelsea Clinton on television to identify the “White House dog.” Or that Palin’s running mate, John McCain, told a sexual joke linking Hillary and Chelsea and Janet Reno. Yet the same conservative commentariat that vilified both Clintons 24/7 now whines that Palin is receiving “the kind of mauling” that the media “always reserve for conservative Republicans.” So said The Wall Street Journal editorial page last week. You’d never guess that The Journal had published six innuendo-laden books on real and imagined Clinton scandals, or that the Clintons had been a leading target of both Letterman and Leno monologues, not to mention many liberal editorial pages (including that of The Times), for much of a decade. Those Republicans who have not drunk the Palin Kool-Aid are apocalyptic for good reason. She could well be their last presidential candidate standing. Such would-be competitors as Mark Sanford, John Ensign and Newt Gingrich are too carnally compromised for the un-Clinton party. Mike Huckabee is Palin-lite. Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal — really? That leaves the charisma-challenged Mitt Romney, precisely the kind of card-carrying Ivy League elitist Palinists loathe, no matter how hard he tries to cosmetically alter his history as a socially liberal fat-cat banker. Palin would crush him like a bug. She has the Teflon-coated stature among Republicans that Romney can only fantasize about. Were Palin actually to secure the 2012 nomination, the result would be a fiasco for the G.O.P. akin to Goldwater 1964, as the most relentless conservative Palin critic, David Frum, has predicted. Or would it? No one thought Richard Nixon — a far less personable commodity than Palin — would come back either after his sour-grapes “last press conference” of 1962. But Democratic divisions and failures gave him his opportunity in 1968. With unemployment approaching 10 percent and a seemingly bottomless war in Afghanistan, you never know, as Palin likes to say, what doors might open. It’s more likely that she will never get anywhere near the White House, and not just because of her own limitations. The Palinist “real America” is demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists” crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day. Its voice can be found in the postings at a Web site maintained by the fans of Mark Levin, the Obama hater who is, at this writing, the No.2 best-selling hardcover nonfiction writer in America. (Glenn Beck is No.1 in paperback nonfiction.) Politico surveyed them last week. “Bottomline, do you know of any way we can remove these idiots before this country goes down the crapper?” wrote one Levin fan. “I WILL HELP!!! Should I buy a gun?” Another called for a new American revolution, promising “there will be blood.” These are the cries of a constituency that feels disenfranchised — by the powerful and the well-educated who gamed the housing bubble, by a news media it keeps being told is hateful, by the immigrants who have taken some of their jobs, by the African-American who has ended a white monopoly on the White House. Palin is their born avatar. She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P. that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her. For a week now, critics in both parties have had a blast railing at Palin. It’s good sport. But just as the media muttering about those unseemly “controversies” rallied the fans of the King of Pop, so are Palin’s political obituaries likely to jump-start her lucrative afterlife.

___________________
"The favorite American pastime is not baseball, it's moral crusades."

quote:

Palin Hints At Independent Conservative Movement Excerpts from TammyBruce.com Enter now Sarah Palin with very encouraging comments that lead one to believe that she is indeed planning to do what she must: build an independent conservative movement and take this nation back from the liberals which now control both parties.Thanks liberals, for provoking Sarah into the national scene while vetting that family at the same time. One thing I will say, the Washington Times with their headline for this exclusive interview reveal an anti-Palin stance. She is, don’t doubt, a threat to every existing political status quo. I hope the Washington Times and their editors realize, sooner than later, that the Palin movement is unstoppable and their credibility would be saved simply by reporting the news instead of becoming a GOP version of the NYT. http://www.sarahpac.com/news/news51.aspx

A Palin party?

Mind you this comes from the official SarahPAC site.

quote:

Originally posted by josh4 A Palin party? Mind you this comes from the official SarahPAC site.

If Palin starts her own party and manages to pull the crazy whackjobs with her, I might start voting Republican again. I won't keep my hopes up however. The 23%ers are tenacious experts at destructive failure and they won't rest until the Republican party is completely marginalized.

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Retro ...

quote:

Originally posted by occrider If Palin starts her own party and manages to pull the crazy whackjobs with her, I might start voting Republican again. I won't keep my hopes up however. The 23%ers are tenacious experts at destructive failure and they won't rest until the Republican party is completely marginalized.

I'm probably with you. If you take out the extreme evangalical element of the republican party, i may be willing to vote republican simply for economic reasons. The major focus on social conservatism is an enormous turn-off.

quote:

Originally posted by jerZ07002 i may be willing to vote republican simply for economic reasons.

and when exactly were the republican party awesome economic managers?

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quote:

Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN and when exactly were the republican party awesome economic managers?

lol - i never said it was because they ran the government or the economy well. i should have stated more specifically, my own personal economic reasons.