Not Putting Country First

Fareed Zakaria, as usual, giving an excellent take on the current Palin fiasco. However, in seeing the obvious - that Sarah Palin is unqualified to be near the White House, we must not forget it was a result of John McCain's disastrous judgment and incompetence choosing her:

Can we now admit the obvious? Sarah Palin is utterly unqualified to be vice president. She is a feisty, charismatic politician who has done some good things in Alaska. But she has never spent a day thinking about any important national or international issue, and this is a hell of a time to start. The next administration is going to face a set of challenges unlike any in recent memory.

Obviously these are very serious challenges and constraints. In these times, for John McCain to have chosen this person to be his running mate is fundamentally irresponsible. McCain says that he always puts country first. In this important case, it is simply not true.

Are the Wheels Coming Off?

They (initial Palin enthusiasts) are finally coming around to deal with the reality that Palin is the biggest farce in the history of American politics. Here is Kathleen Parker from the National Review:

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.

Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there. Here’s but one example of many from her interview with Hannity: “Well, there is a danger in allowing some obsessive partisanship to get into the issue that we’re talking about today. And that’s something that John McCain, too, his track record, proving that he can work both
sides of the aisle, he can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.”When Couric pointed to polls showing that the financial crisis had boosted Obama’s numbers, Palin blustered wordily: “I’m not looking at poll numbers. What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who’s more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who’s actually done it?”

If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.

He Will Be Missed

Michael Medders
Nov 4th, 1982 - Sept 24, 2008

Updated Article

Funeral Coverage

Thou Shall Not Bear False Witness

Once Sarah Palin was announced as McCain's running mate, partisans and right-wing Christians became elated and completely energized. Enthusiastic supporters did not hesitate to point out Palin's Pentecostal religious background and more broadly speaking, that the GOP is supposedly the party for conservative Xians.

We have seen over the past decade these so-called Xians becoming obsessed with judging others in violation of the Ten Commandments, especially in regards to sexual sins (lets not mention David Vitter, Larry Craig, the fact that evangelicals are divorcing at the same or higher rates than non-evangelicals). However, they pay no attention to the blatant and continuous lies of the McCain Campaign and more specifically the documented and compulsive lies of Sarah Palin.

Do only certain commandments apply to the Republican Party? Do Xian standards and morals loosen when a candidate has an "R" next to their name? I would argue absolutely not, but it appears that the now-defunct GOP and conservative Xians supporting the GOP will answer that question in the affirmative. Whenever I hear anyone say the Democrats (and I'm not really a fan of them either) don't possess Xian morals but the Republicans do, I want to puke.

Here, Andrew Sullivan documents the lies Sarah Palin has been campaigning on. Not only is she telling the lies, but even when her lies have been proven wrong, she continues to tell them and refuses to correct her statements. Thank God Andrew Sullivan has maintained his steadfast conservative views throughout this election season and during the time the GOP has abandoned its conservative principals. If you don't have time to read his whole post, I'll lay them out quickly:

So for the record, let it be known that the candidate for vice-president for the GOP is a compulsive, repetitive, demonstrable liar. If you follow the links, here is the proof. I repeat: proof:
- She has lied about the Bridge To Nowhere. She ran for office favoring it, wore a sweatshirt defending it, and only gave it up when the federal congress, Senator McCain in particular, went ballistic. She kept the money anyway and favors funding Don Young's Way, at twice the cost of the original bridge.
- She has lied about her firing of the town librarian and police chief of Wasilla, Alaska.
- She has lied about pressure on Alaska's public safety commissioner to fire her ex-brother-in-law.
- She has lied about her previous statements on climatechange.
- She has lied about Alaska's contribution to America's oil and gas production.
- She has lied about when she asked her daughters for their permission for her to run for vice-president.
- She has lied about the actual progress in constructing a natural gas pipeline from Alaska.
- She has lied about Obama's position on habeas corpus.
- She has lied about her alleged tolerance of homosexuality.
- She has lied about the use or non-use of a TelePrompter at the St Paul convention.
- She has lied about her alleged pay-cut as mayor of Wasilla.
- She has lied about what Alaska's state scientists concluded about the health of the polar bear population in Alaska.

You cannot trust a word she says. On anything.

End the Fed!

Critics dismissed Ron Paul as a "fringe" candidate or lunatic when he claimed the Fed creates the bubbles that destroy the value of the dollar. They also laughed when he said the US financial system is heading for a collapse.

Well, seems he wasn't too far off. From Ron Chernow, a leading financial historian:

I fear the government has passed the point of no return. We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest dreams. It’s pure crisis management. It’s the Treasury and the Federal Reserve lurching from crisis to crisis without a clear statement on how financial failures will be handled in the future. They’re afraid to articulate such a policy. The safety net they are spreading seems to widen every day with no end in sight

Quote of the Week

Wick Allison, a former publisher of The National Review no less, endorses Obama...another conservative disgusted with the current GOP:

But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history.

That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask. Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth. This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

End Drinking Age Restrictions

Will Wilkinson of Forbes writes a convincing, coherent and rational argument in favor of repealing all age limitations on drinking. He argues our current restrictions increase the abuse of alcohol and abandon the principals of individual responsibility and freedom.

UCLA professor of public policy Mark Kleiman, an ex-advocate of age restrictions, told PBS that he came around to the no-limits position when he saw a billboard that said, "If you're not 21, it's not Miller Time--yet." Age limits make drinking a badge of adulthood and build in the minds of teens a romantic sense of the transgressive danger of alcohol. That's what so often leads to the abuse of alcohol as a ritual of release from the authority of parents. And that's what has the college presidents worried. They see it.

It's too bad the debate is constantly framed around irrational, emotionally led arguments predicting doom and gloom. It's tempting to label the leaders of those arguments as demagogues.

Then there are the car crashes. It is an article of faith among much of the U.S. government that raising the drinking age to 21 averted thousands of grisly traffic deaths. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with deceptive five-figure precision, puts the number at 21,887 through 2002. But even this statistical factoid, the neoprohibitionist trump card, deserves scrutiny. A recent research paper by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron and his former student Elina Tetelbaum shows that states that raised the drinking age to 21 since 1984, in response to Congress' road-funding threats, enjoyed no statistically significant decrease in traffic fatalities for 18- to 20-year-olds. They point to the decades-long, steady decline in the rate of
traffic fatalities (deaths per billion passenger miles), a decline due in large part to safer cars, improved driver education and better medical technology. Raising the drinking age did little or nothing.

Conservatism w/out GOP Spin

And from Powerline, of all sources. Paul Mirengoff writes:

But some argue instead (or alternatively) that Sarah Palin's credentials are adequate. These arguments are mostly laughable. We are told that she was a courageous whistle-blower. But whistling-blowing isn’t evidence of leadership skill, administrative ability, or familiarity with vital policy issues. We are told that Palin challenged an incumbent governor and called him out for his corruption. But mounting an insurgent’s campaign for governor isn’t evidence of fitness for the presidency either. We are told that she is responsible for her state’s national guard and visited its troops in Iraq. How this amounts to foreign policy or national security experience, or otherwise qualifies Palin for national office, is unclear.
What’s clear is that if Democrats made these sorts of arguments on behalf of a candidate for national office, conservative commentators would excoriate them for it...That's why those who defend Palin's qualifications typically end up moving to more defensible terrain -- the argument that her credentials compare favorably to Obama's. This may constitute an additional reason to vote for McCain, but it's not a defense of McCain's selection of Palin.

Quote of the Week

The problem is the inherent oddity of the incumbent party running on change. Here were Republicans -- the party that controlled the White House for eight years and both houses of Congress for five -- wildly cheering the promise to take on Washington. I don't mean to be impolite, but who's controlled Washington this decade?
- Charles Krauthammer