Start Early- Get Used to It

[don]

Re: Start Early- Get Used to It

“Stupidity is infinitely more fascinating that intelligence.
Intelligence has its limits while stupidity has none.
To observe a profoundly stupid individual can be very enriching, and that’s why we should never feel contempt for them.”

the now-late Claude Chabrol

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Start Early- Get Used to It

Ted Koppel: Would "President" Gore have invaded Iraq? I doubt it. Would the nation's environmental policies be the same as during the Bush administration? Almost certainly not.
But when it comes to most foreign policy issues, presidents tend to be driven by the same motive forces: the perceived national interests of the United States, as presented to them by their top intelligence, diplomatic and defense establishment advisers. In that sense, you see the Obama administration today persuing many of the same policies as their predecessors.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...091005812.html

[don]

Re: Start Early- Get Used to It

Ted Koppel: Would "President" Gore have invaded Iraq? I doubt it. Would the nation's environmental policies be the same as during the Bush administration? Almost certainly not.

But when it comes to most foreign policy issues, presidents tend to be driven by the same motive forces: the perceived national interests of the United States, as presented to them by their top intelligence, diplomatic and defense establishment advisers. In that sense, you see the Obama administration today persuing many of the same policies as their predecessors.

You're half right, Thai.

In the United States it falls to Obama’s New Democrats to shepherd through proposals that Democrats would vote down if the Bush-Cheney Republicans had tried to enact them.

Hudson

[GRG55]

Re: Start Early- Get Used to It

Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho!

Love that new avatar flintlock!

[loweyecue]

Re: Start Early- Get Used to It

Winston Churchill

Classic.

[GRG55]

Re: Start Early- Get Used to It

Winston Churchill

Times have changed. The 2010 version should be...

"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with a U.S. Presidential candidate"

[do you think you could make it through 5 whole minutes with Sarah?]

[hayekvindicated]

Re: Start Early- Get Used to It

Times have changed. The 2010 version should be...

"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with a U.S. Presidential candidate"

[do you think you could make it through 5 whole minutes with Sarah?]

Obama vs Palin

What a choice! I would struggle to get through 1 minute with either of them.

Sometimes I wonder if the presidential candidate needs to appear like a bit of a dim bulb so that the average voter doesn't get put off too much. I cannot believe that there are no intelligent people in the Republican Party who would make good presidential candidates. They wouldn't get the nomination though.

On a side note, while there are a lot of things one can say to criticise British democracy, I don't think anyone would accuse Cameron of being "stupid". While I don't necessarily agree with his policies, he is well educated and bright. If you are British you don't need to cringe when he opens his mouth.

[fallout]

Re: Start Early- Get Used to It

Alright, our very own 'corn-pone Hitler'. Looks like J.H. Kunstler (clusterfucknation.com) will be right after all.

[SteveG]

Re: Start Early- Get Used to It

I started making this prediction as a drunken joke, but it's becoming more frighteningly true every day.

Palin's path to the Whitehouse:

1. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on dragging Obama's popularity down with them.

2. Economy "double dips" making the electorate very surly.

3. Dummy-crats renominate Obama because that's the kind of thing they do.

4. The Republi-con party splits 3 ways - Palin gets the tea party, Romney gets the millionare/corporate faction and the Religious right goes for a Huckabee type - someone with no great love for the moneyed elite.

5. In the first contested convention in 50 years Palin gets the nomination because the Christan right won't support Romney (Mormon) and the Huckabee type won't get the support of the big money people. Besides, the tea partyers act like the SA and strong-arm the nomination.

6. The coalition who elected Obama (young, people of color, old time liberals) don't show up on election day.

7. The Republi-cons use their machine to grab Florida or Ohio (like they did before).
8. President Palin (our new Fuhrer)

[GRG55]

Re: Start Early- Get Used to It

It just keeps on comin'...

Big night for tea party: O'Donnell wins Delaware

WASHINGTON – Virtually unknown a month ago, Christine O'Donnell of Delaware rode a surge of support from tea party activists to victory in the Republican Senate primary Tuesday night, dealing yet another setback to the GOP establishment in a campaign season full of them. A second upstart led for the GOP nomination in New Hampshire.

O'Donnell defeated nine-term Rep. Mike Castle, a fixture in Delaware politics for a generation and a moderate who campaigned with the strong backing of party officials in his state and in Washington. Nearly complete returns showed her with 53 percent of the vote...

...In New Hampshire, lawyer Ovide Lamontagne led former Attorney General Kelly Ayotte, 45 percent to 36 percent, with votes counted from 20 percent of the precincts.
A former chairman of the state Board of Education, Lamontagne campaigned with the support of tea party activists, while Ayotte had a coalition of establishment Republicans, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and other conservatives...

...Castle's defeat boosted the number of members of Congress who have lost primaries to eight, five Republicans and three Democrats. But that list does not include a lengthy list of GOP contenders who fell to tea party-supported challengers despite having the backing of party officials eager to maximize their gains in November...

...The Republican primary in Delaware took a sharp turn for the negative three weeks ago after the Tea Party Express, former Alaska Sen. Sarah Palin and Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina announced they would come to her O'Donnell's aid.

Castle, a former two-term governor and a veteran of nearly two decades in the House, was repeatedly assailed as a liberal, a Republican in name only...

[fallout]

Re: Start Early- Get Used to It

Yep. I wonder if this is how some Germans felt in 1932.
My own grandfather was one of them, and he always warned (and worried) that it could happen here too. The Milgram Experiments proved decades ago that we are not any different than they were.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Start Early- Get Used to It

America could be so radicalized in just a few years..

Chile’s Ghosts: The Tyranny of Forgetting

by Benjamin Dangl

Late in the afternoon on September 4th, 1970 a crowd gathered in central Santiago, Chile to celebrate the election of socialist president Salvador Allende. Among the participants in the celebration were the leftist folk singer Victor Jara and his wife Joan.

In her book, Victor: An Unfinished Song, Joan Jara recounts this scene "full of happiness, hugs and tears." People pushed through the crowd, eager to congratulate Allende. When Joan neared the president-elect she remembers embracing him in a cathartic, bear-like hug. Allende said to her, "Hug me harder, compañera! This is not a time for timidity!"

The hope of that day ended in bloodshed just three years later. On September 11th, 1973 Allende was overthrown in a US-backed coup. The military dictator Augusto Pinochet took power, and led the country in a reign of terror which left thousands dead, tortured and traumatized. Among the coup's victims were Victor Jara and Allende.

As part of the crackdown, armed forces searched the home of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Neruda told the soldiers, "Look around-there's only one thing of danger for you here-poetry." He died days later of heart failure, on September 23rd.

Though the dictator and many of his accomplices have escaped justice - Pinochet died in 2006 at age 91 - the horrors of Pinochet's reign are widely documented. The book Clandestine in Chile: The Adventure of Miguel Littín by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, tells the story of Littín's 1985 return to Chile after living in exile since the coup. The story was told from Littín's perspective.

Hunkered down in the Basque city of San Sebastián, the leftist laments cutting off his beard in preparation for his return to Chile under a new identity. "The first thing to go was my beard. This was not just a simple matter of shaving. The beard had created a personality for me that I now had to shed." To cushion the shock, he took the beard off gradually.

Reflecting on Chile under Pinochet, Littín remembers the tireless struggle of coal miner Sebastián Acevedo, who fought to end the torture of his twenty-two-year-old son and twenty-year-old daughter. The desperate Acevedo ultimately warned public officials, journalists and religious leaders, "If you don't do something to stop the torture of my children, I will soak myself with gasoline and set myself on fire in the atrium of the [Concepción] cathedral." Acevedo followed through with the threat, and became a haunting symbol of the fight against the dictatorship.

Non-violent demonstrations against Pinochet's crimes followed the death of Acevedo. Littín described the confrontation. "The police attacked the group [of protesters] with water canons while more than two hundred of them, soaked to the skin, stood impassively against a wall, singing hymns of love."

Before he left the country in 1973, soldier's burned Littín's books in a bonfire constructed in the garden of his home. Over a decade later, in 1986, Pinochet was still burning books. The dictator himself ordered 15,000 copies of Clandestine in Chile to be destroyed.

On September 11, 2010, over six thousand people gathered to mark the anniversary of the coup. Participants converged in homage to the victims of the dictatorship, as well as to demand justice and respect for human rights under the current Sebastián Piñera administration. Chile's right wing President Piñera, one of the wealthiest people in the country, did not participate in the acts that commemorated the start of the dictatorship.

"We are living under a right wing regime which participated in the dictatorship and even today is justifying the [dictatorship's] human rights violations," Mireya García, the vice president of the Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared, told Telesur.

Some members of Piñera's administration also worked in the Pinochet dictatorship and have not been brought to justice for their crimes. Speaking of the 37th anniversary of the September 11th coup, Piñera said that Chileans should move beyond the conflicts of the past. "We should not remain trapped in the same fights and divisions."

Allende warned against the tyranny of forgetting. In his final radio broadcast to the Chilean people, the president condemned the coup plotters, "I say to them that I am certain that the seeds which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever. They have force and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested by neither crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history."

[we_are_toast]

Re: Start Early- Get Used to It

I started making this prediction as a drunken joke, but it's becoming more frighteningly true every day.

Palin's path to the Whitehouse:

1. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on dragging Obama's popularity down with them.

2. Economy "double dips" making the electorate very surly.

3. Dummy-crats renominate Obama because that's the kind of thing they do.

4. The Republi-con party splits 3 ways - Palin gets the tea party, Romney gets the millionare/corporate faction and the Religious right goes for a Huckabee type - someone with no great love for the moneyed elite.

5. In the first contested convention in 50 years Palin gets the nomination because the Christan right won't support Romney (Mormon) and the Huckabee type won't get the support of the big money people. Besides, the tea partyers act like the SA and strong-arm the nomination.

6. The coalition who elected Obama (young, people of color, old time liberals) don't show up on election day.

7. The Republi-cons use their machine to grab Florida or Ohio (like they did before).
8. President Palin (our new Fuhrer)

A very real possibility, and that path ends up at the bottom of a cliff. Throw in some big money from some Oligarchs (Koch brothers, Coors...) and this becomes very scary.

Yep. I wonder if this is how some Germans felt in 1932.
My own grandfather was one of them, and he always warned (and worried) that it could happen here too. The Milgram Experiments proved decades ago that we are not any different than they were.

Along with the "right" to vote, comes the "responsibility" to be an informed voter. But like everything else, we're not willing to work to keep our democracy, we want our information handed to us in 30 second lie-mercials, news sound bites, and bumper sticker slogans. The inability to tell lies from facts gives an oligarchy funded bullhorn the ability to scream whatever story it chooses.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Start Early- Get Used to It

..The inability to tell lies from facts gives an oligarchy funded bullhorn the ability to scream whatever story it chooses.

Worth repeating.

[jneal3]

Re: Start Early- Get Used to It

No one seems to be remembering that Palin quit in the middle of her term as governor; she wants to be rich/famous/political, but not president, it pays too little and leaves her open to criticism, which narcissists don't handle so well. She knows that the best bang for the effort-buck in this country is celebrity, not power.

How could someone serious about holding even higher office quit the one she had?