Say Anything Blog

Palin wants to run for President. Would you support a poorly educated, religious fundamental who does not believe in diplomacy in a bid for POTUS? Does it matter if it is a she or a he? Is Palin saying that identity politics are good for the GOP? Is that accurate?

MIAMI — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, in her first public appearance since the Nov. 4 elections, suggested on Wednesday that it would be a good for the Republican party to have a woman on the presidential ticket in 2012.

The GOP vice presidential nominee, who has not ruled out another run at national office, spoke with reporters attending the Republican Governors Association meeting.

She was responding to speculation about her as the future of the party.

“I don’t think it’s me personally, I think it’s what I represent,” Palin said. She added: “Everyday, hardworking American families —a woman on the ticket perhaps represents that. It would be good for the ticket. It would be good for the party. I would be happy to get to do whatever is asked of me to help progress this nation.”

Sparkie’s psychic prediction: Palin will loose, abysmally, unless Obama rapes his new puppy. The GOP has alienated the old guard, the fiscal conservatives, the state’s right’s crowd, the swing voters, etc. and now they think that Sarah ’Class War‘ ‘If-you-aren’t-a-Republican-then-you’re-a-terrorist’ Palin can save their ass? IMO, we just had a referendum on all that and, well, it didn’t pan out too well.

Four years can make a big difference, I’ll grant that, but the GOP might want to reflect on who Palin appeals to. Keeping the ‘hard core’ happy does not mean a national electoral victory. The hardliners risk marginalizing themselves, politically, even more. Moreover, the ‘socialist bashing’ rhetoric is fairly impotent, as this last election proves.

One may want to recall the story of the boy who cried wolf. Someday, it may be important to call out a real socialist. Does the GOP want to remove the meaning and power from their rhetoric by over-application? If the GOP wants people to take them seriously, there will need to be some careful deployment of the standard rhetoric over the next few years.

...is all you guys bitch about. Any problems, real or perceived, when the going gets rough, can often be couched in various places. Popular scapegoats include: democrats from deep history, the commie-infiltrated or subdued or conditioned masses, the biased media, the biased education system, and so on.

Implicit here an arm-waving at the idea that the right-wing outlets are not-biased or, barring that strong language, more objective than the MSM. Some (such as el Rushbo) laud their bias as a bullshit or truth ‘detector’, or some such thing. If only they knew how idiotic that idea is. One knows from the getgo that their ‘core’ ideology will never have any problematics couched in it. It is purely error-proof, the rigid foundation on which they stand. All errors, mishaps, bad upshots are deflected away from this ideology. One finds the exact same thing on the far left.

There is a certain, old version of conservativism that is pluralistic. It acknowledges that many different sorts of people will stand on many different sorts of foundations. The only method this conservativism apologizes for is variety. The understanding is that people are different and that variety gives an advantage, when it is time to deal with new complications. Imagine running a company where everyone knew the same stuff, interpreted everything the same way, and so on. The R&R meetings, the brainstorming sessions, would be abysmal. Interaction among one’s employees would be useless. Uniformity becomes the problematic.

We often hear cries that the commie left is about to impose this upon us. These cries are juxtaposed with epithets about what is patriotic, what it is to be an American. Neither the right or the left has one wit of reflexivity left. How they take themselves seriously is beyond me. The excuse making, the preservation of their ‘cores’, has become entirely neurotic. No one will admit blame, error, etc. Bush has failed because he wasn’t really a conservative. McCain failed for the same reason.

We are wondering when the right, the left, the MSM, the alternative medias, etc. are going to gain enough awareness and reflexive ability to fess up to reality, admit when problems arise, respect plurality (and acknowledge one’s biases), and take responsibility like normal adults.

...that reminded me of you guys!

Our sense of plausibility is a fragile reed. There can be little doubt that it is socially conditioned. Being surrounded by people who take a particular view seriously, or, alternatively, simply dismiss a view as unworthy of serious consideration, is likely to have an effect on one’s own assessments of plausibility. If those around one are well attuned to the truth, this may be a fine thing. But in less optimal circumstances, where one’s epistemic community is badly misguided, one’s own sense of plausibility may be distorted as a result. What passes for good reasoning in such communities may have little connection to the truth.

Hmmm.
After all the whining about voter fraud from the right… reports of problems in the urban areas of the swing states. Just problems? Sabotage?

Where are the reports of problems from the rural areas of the swing states?

Obama this, Obama that.

How’s about your guy, old what’s-his-name? Oh, you know him, the one who’s just like Linc Chaffee and Jim Jeffords. The sacrificial lamb.

Nice gratuitous name placement. Is Obama cutting checks for you hecklers? Lining up a Union job for you?

OC, Caulifloweria

Orange County has long been a political Eden in GOP circles, the place Ronald Reagan once described as “where all the good Republicans go to die.”

Before becoming SEC head in 2005, Cox served as the congressman to Newport Beach, one of the wealthiest cities in the U.S. During a tenure stretching from the Keating 5 to the collapse of Enron, he consistently voted to expand tax loopholes for corporations and soften punishment toward them. Tellingly, around the time of Cox’s nomination, BusinessWeek reported that lobbyists for these companies were “almost giddy at the prospect of Cox” as SEC head. While in office, Cox cut his agency’s enforcement budget, defanging the very watchdogs who were supposed to ensure Wall Street didn’t get us into debacles like the one we’re experiencing now.

One of the trouble spots Cox should have been monitoring, the subprime mortgage industry, also has proud roots in Orange County. The late Roland Arnall pioneered the scheme while head of Long Beach Savings, mentoring many of the CEOs who went on to start other similar companies. Long Beach Savings (actually located in Orange Country) evolved into Ameriquest Mortgage Co., the nation’s largest originator of such loans, and the subprime arm of Washington Mutual, which recently became the largest bank to fail in American history. For his vision, Bush appointed Arnell as ambassador to the Netherlands.

Read the whole thing. Its a nice snapshot of the rich, stupid, elitists that lay the seeds of all the GOP’s ‘gems’. Now that they are presenting themselves as a ‘worker’s party’, putting the ‘red’ in red state, its interesting to peek into the elitist genetics of some of the GOP’s current politics.

See a synopsis of state laws here.

The state who respects the 2nd amendment more than any other state was colored in blue last year.

D’oh.

a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.

“Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?”

Mr. Greenspan conceded: “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”

All of the sudden, Greenspan is inspecting the difference between dogma and reality. Better late than never.

Many Republican lawmakers on the oversight committee tried to blame the mortgage meltdown on the unchecked growth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government-sponsored mortgage-finance companies that were placed in a government conservatorship last month. Republicans have argued that Democratic lawmakers blocked measures to reform the companies.

But Mr. Greenspan, who was first appointed by President Ronald Reagan, placed far more blame on the Wall Street companies that bundled subprime mortgages into pools and sold them as mortgage-backed securities. Global demand for the securities was so high, he said, that Wall Street companies pressured lenders to lower their standards and produce more “paper.”

“The evidence strongly suggests that without the excess demand from securitizers, subprime mortgage originations (undeniably the original source of the crisis) would have been far smaller and defaults accordingly far lower,” he said.

Oh my god. The man understands causal systems! Someone call those who are isolating Fannie and Freddie as the scapegoats and tell them to take notes. Greenspan could’ve avoided this embarrassment… if he listened to the socialist back in ‘03. Conceding the point, 5 years later, must be a little embarrassing for the ‘Maestro’.

We are always arguing about morality. Mike is suggesting our politics is a surreal cartoon. Perhaps we can discuss something less partisan. Consider these approaches to answering the question,

“How may moral judgments be supported or defended?”

Here are the basics of theories that are used to answer this question. Which do you prefer?

Empiricism is the [family of] doctrines which [hold] knowledge is gained primarily through observation and experience. Meta-ethical theories which imply an empirical epistemology include ethical naturalism, which holds moral facts to be reducible to non-moral facts and thus knowable in the same ways; and most common forms of ethical subjectivism, which hold that moral facts reduce to facts about cultural conventions and thus are knowable by observation of those conventions. There are exceptions within subjectivism however, such as ideal observer theory which implies that moral facts may be known through a rational process, and individualist ethical subjectivism which holds that moral facts are merely personal opinions and so may be known only through introspection.

Moral rationalism, also called ethical rationalism, is the view according to which moral truths (or at least general moral principles) are knowable a priori, by reason alone. Some prominent figures in the history of philosophy who have defended moral rationalism are Plato and Immanuel Kant. Perhaps the most prominent figure in the history of philosophy who has rejected moral rationalism is David Hume....

Ethical intuitionism, on the other hand, is the view according to which some moral truths can be known without inference. That is, the view is at its core a foundationalism about moral beliefs. Of course, such an epistemological view implies that there are moral beliefs with propositional contents; so it implies cognitivism. Ethical intuitionism commonly suggests moral realism, the view that there are objective facts of morality, and more specifically ethical non-naturalism, the view that these evaluative facts cannot be reduced to natural fact. However, neither moral realism nor ethical non-naturalism are essential to the view; most ethical intuitionists simply happen to hold those views as well. Ethical intuitionism comes in both a “rationalist” variety, and a more “empiricist” variety known as moral sense theory.

Moral skepticism is the class of meta-ethical theories all members of which entail that no one has any moral knowledge. Many moral skeptics also make the stronger, modal, claim that moral knowledge is impossible.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has opened up a 10-point lead over Republican opponent John McCain two weeks before the November 4 U.S. election, according to Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released on Tuesday.

``The royal family and other elites would like to see McCain,’’

That’s right. The folks who brought you the post-Bosnian war charities that bankrolled 9/11 would like to see McCain elected on the 4th.

U.S. forces are needed to counter the spread of Iranian influence from Iraq, which many Saudis believe ``now is ruled by Iran,’’

The Saudis like it when we bankroll their security while they bankroll the mass murder of Americans. Also, apparently those with a slightly closer perspective on the Iraq war don’t feel as good about the results of the surge as the GOP does. Iran is ruling Iraq? That’s what the neighbors, the terrorists, the McCain supporters see.

The latest newsletter by an Inland Republican women’s group depicts Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama surrounded by a watermelon, ribs and a bucket of fried chicken

Under Bush, America has witnessed a consolidation of power and the deployment pre-debate stigma that has arisen in the name of ‘patriotism’. For years, any dissent or questioning of the powers that be or even any form of diverse skepticism was derided, shouted down, silenced, in the name of ‘patriotism’. Democrats, left libertarians, etc. have been consistently referred to as ‘terrorists’, ‘appeasers’, ‘unpatriotic’, and so forth. Like a smoker, the GOPs short term pleasures have clouded their long term health.

Now, having witnessed their own effective deployment of these bullshit tactics, the GOP and right wing interests in America are beginning to get a bit nervous. One can see them thinking, “imagine if the left could successfully do that to us?”

Its too ironic. The lack of reflexivity that one sees evidenced in the behavior of the right wing politicians, commentators, and citizens is just laughable. Now, in their continued screeching, the right wingers just might be risking their own self-marginalization under the weight of the internal inconsistencies of their rhetoric.

Do I hope they get payback? No. If the Bush administration has taught us anything, its that open debate is important. Efforts to prestigmatize, en masse, entire blocks of the population, entire lines of argument, etc. is dangerous, scary, and - dare I say it - unpatriotic. I understand that this word has become tainted of late, but I hope to deploy it in this case without it being tied to either popular political ideology in this country. The word or the phenomenon it denotes entails serious and unstigmatized debate. A responsible ‘patriot’ does not sew his ears shut in the name of ‘patriotism’.

On a more serious note, can we expect the same from the left in the ensuing few years, given their at least crushing control of the legislature that many are predicting? Hopefully not. Anyone with open eyes and firing neurons knows full well that conduct is political poison.

paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew power.”

Disturbing, isn’t it, the sorts of folks that originate the memes that Joel, Neiman, and their cohorts like to run with.?