Disgraced former governer lands job with Fox

[smuttleydfs]

(travis bickle @ Feb. 12 2010,11:26) Every time America wants a full scale war(rather  than  invading Grenada)they look for allies,not that they need them,but so they don't appear the warmongers they really are.When Vietnam was kicking off,they begged ,cajoled ,and finally tried to "bribe" the uk with sweetheart loans etc.THe Labour prime minister at the time told them to feck off,(remember Harold Wilson?)and they spitefully screwed the uk to the wall repaying debts from the 2nd World War.
 
There was no need to cajole  or beg Teflon Tony,he got down on all fours to take it up the arse before George dubya got his trousers off.

Your poor rebuttal of my earlier post convinced nobody smuttley,please tell me how George dubya led him by the nose.Tony didnt need leading,he was more than a willing follower.
Did he also outsmart the Australian prime minister?

You make my point for me TB.......in your own words blair bent over backwards and forwards to assist dumbass dubya in ending the expanding terrorist scourge and to find the mythical WMD to save mankind as we know it. If blair had a mind of his own he borrowed from someone else.

[smuttleydfs]

gee kathyLowClass slithers out from under her rock and once again spews her hateful and ignorant diatribe.

I hear Caribou Barbie is looking for someone with an IQ below 40 like herself to write crib notes in her palm for her next speech, you should apply you might get paid enough to get that double wide you've been praying to Pat Roberstson for. Besides just think of the beautiful music you two could make together    




 

[Thaime]

kathylc do you really believe the shit you are spewing?  WOW!

[smuttleydfs]

(kathylc @ Feb. 12 2010,19:29) So she elected to quit the governorship.
IS it really her fault she has a disabled child.........I don't really think so.
There has been nothing that BHO has done that has benefitted this country. All he has done is put us deeper into debt in a shorter time than the 8 years Bush was in office and many before him,. and he continues to do so. Only thing he is good at is making speeches and flying around in Air Force 1 wasting money on bullshit and lies.  He is a one term pres thank god. The entire lot of Dems are in the wake of being run out of dodge come November. They are all too dam ignorant to be disgraced.

Comeback on this forum in November 2012 low class and we'll see who is going to inaugaration day in January 2013.....the tea baggers and the rest of the GOP are so busy cutting each other to shreds all Obama will need to do is show up to win. They are doing a better job of dividing the neo cons then Perot did in 92

[guydesavoy]

(smuttleydfs @ Feb. 13 2010,09:35)

(guydesavoy @ Feb. 12 2010,02:47)
Again, no contradiction. My first post was referring to Blair being disowned by his Labor Party, as I have already indicated in my reply.

Not Bush.

Please read both posts again smuttley.... (more carefully)  

Dear oh dear smuttley. Let me break it down for you .

My original quote (emphases in bold and notes in brackets for your benefit). :
" Like him or not, agree with him or not, at least Blair could actually articulate his arguments in terms outside the narrow prism of pseudo armageddon 'theology' more commonly found in Watchtower editorials.  

The fact that most in his (still talking about Blair here) own Party disown him now amply demonstrates his ability to carry his own view.(Now here's the part you continue to miss...transition now...) As for GW, well, he still enjoys the full backing of Cheny, Rummy and the other back room  puppet masters.  Not to mention Rush, Palin and those other intellectuals of the Right   "

Got it now ?  

[Torurot]

>>IS it really her fault she has a disabled child.........


That's a straw man argument and NOTHING to do with why she chucked the governorship. WHY did she chuck it in.

Being able to shoot a caribou (a herd/pack animal) with a fcking big gun from the back of a big truck is hardly evidence of anything wonderful.

[Guest]

[strocube]

This is a cogent analysis of the Tea Bag "movement."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stuart-....83.html
Stuart WhatleyAssociate Blog Editor
Posted: February 9, 2010 06:43 PM

The Tea Party Movement Is a National Embarrassment

Last summer, when mass protests broke out in Iran following what was seen as a rigged election, Americans cried out in support of the uprising through all possible channels. Some commentators here went so far as to claim credit for the "revolution," as if it never could have happened without American political movements having already set the example. But despite the arrogance of that claim, the Iranian Green movement is indeed an exertion of democratic will that resonates closely with many Americans -- and for good reason.

America's rich history of successful social and political movements, from its genesis onward, lends profound familiarity to the Iranian uprising, most of which has remained nonviolent. The enduring American symbolic identity -- as a bastion of freedom and opportunity -- is mostly justified when one considers the relative success of the Civil Rights or Feminist movements of the 20th Century, or of the ongoing LGBT rights movement, which continues to make incremental gains today. American democracy, fueled by an active populace -- despite its numerous imperfections -- remains the gold standard around the world.

It is against this venerable historical backdrop that one must concede that the most well known, highly publicized American social/political movement today -- the Tea Party movement -- is a national embarrassment.

At its core, the Tea Party movement is rife with contradiction, incoherence and a willful contempt for facts or reason. It is but a parody of the legitimate movements for which American democracy has historically been held in such high regard. It is, in fact, the latest installment in quite another American tradition: the exploitation of frustrated, desperate, and susceptible people by monied interests and profiteers.

The impetus for the Civil Rights movement was centuries of racially based oppression at all levels of American government and society. The logic behind its call for equality was overwhelming. Now consider the Tea Party movement, whose foremost demand of a president who in his first month passed one of the biggest tax cuts ever...is for tax cuts. The movement's incoherence is only illuminated further when this demand is uttered in the same sentence as its call for deficit reduction.

Though the movement claims to have no defined leadership, there are public figures and entities who nevertheless carry that mantle, which has led to perhaps its greatest irony: a portion of the American populace who carries a populist banner against the coddling of greedy bankers is led by some of the country's most cynical and base profiteers.

When the movement was christened last April for a large tax day protest, it was derived wholesale from the efforts of a registered corporate lobbyist and a right-leaning cable news network, whose president recently pointed out that it's all about ratings. At the Tea Party's national convention last weekend, its keynote speaker was a former governor who quit midterm in order to peddle a book that she didn't write, but for which she collects most of the royalties. If this were Iran's Green Movement, these would be the people slinging marked-up green headbands on the street corner.

Of course, the Tea Party is not without its whistleblowers. The $500 per plate entry fee to last week's convention almost led to it being canceled altogether. But the exodus of reasonable elements will only homogenize the movement further towards a particularly polarizing worldview that opens itself to continued profit-driven exploitation.

In Authoritarianism & Polarization in American Politics, a revealing work of political science published last year that unfortunately went somewhat unnoticed, Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler describe a specific worldview -- authoritarianism -- which they argue lies at the heart of political polarization in modern American politics. (It should be noted: their use of the term is not related to the more quotidian and overly negative connotation associated with despotic regimes; rather, it describes a particular lens through which certain people view the world, based on a wide range of scholarly work spanning the fields of psychology, sociology, political science, and other cognitive sciences.)

According to Hetherington and Weiler, authoritarians tend to rely more on emotion and instinct in decision-making, view politics in black and white, resent confusion or ambiguity in the social order, and are suspicious of specific groups who they believe could alter that order (typically gays and immigrants). The difference between authoritarians and nonauthoritarians, according to the authors, becomes far more pronounced during tumultuous economic or social periods when there are more perceived "threats." During such times, authoritarians in particular lose accuracy motivation and, "become much less interested than nonauthoritarians in seeking information that [is] balanced in its approach, and much more interested in pursuing one-sided information that reinforc[es] existing beliefs." Or in other words, they are highly susceptible to misinformation campaigns, the likes of which pervaded the health care reform debate last summer.

Most every characteristic of an authoritarian worldview lends itself well to the impassioned rhetoric of the Tea Party movement and to the shrewd players operating behind the scenes and atop the soap box. The movement's overly simplified, often-confused solutions to complex problems align with authoritarians' Manichean worldview. That Tom Tancredo's anti-immigrant laced speech at last weekend's convention was well received comes as no surprise. And that this is the group who so often embraces proven falsehoods and spin-narratives to defend its anti-administration agenda should speak for itself with regards to accuracy motivation.

Despite the criticism it receives, the Tea Party continues to be praised as a political force. It is loud, passionate, and generally unconcerned with pesky things like facts or reasoned, practical solutions to the country's problems. This bodes ill for 2010's political environment, and it is a shameful representation of what constitutes an American political or social movement. While the Tea Party may alienate some who see it for the profit-machine that it is, others who share the fearful, intolerant authoritarian worldview that it is increasingly coalescing around will be lured in and pitted against the very people in power who could actually help them. That this movement has grown political legs is too bad, and by Hetherington and Weiler's account, it means even more polarization is yet to come.

[tscrazy]

Wow was that article written by Nancy Pelosi or Jeanine Garafolo ?

That is the most ludicicrous and intellectually dishonest comment on the tea party movement. Its funny how the Obama Administration and his crazy co-conspirators first tried to ignore the movement. Even the leftist media rarely covered the movement. Then they started calling them rascists, when that didn't work, they bagan attacking them as violent protesters. But after news agencies compared and contrasted the real violence of crazy lefties at the IMF meetings - the liberal leaning media stopped that tactic.

The fact remains that this movement is reaching critical mass with people from different political beliefs, different racial and ethnic backgrounds because Americans are waking up to what the Progressives in both parties have done steal the "American dream." To say that its disjointed fractured movement is just plain ignorance. Afterall, there is huge difference of opion within the Democratic or Republican parties. On the right you have religious conservatives, ecomonic conservatives, social conservatives, libertarians, isolationists etc... On the left you get commies, socialists, abortion activists, economic liberals, social liberals and rascists. Just look at the current administration and compare it to Clinton's centrist policy (especially after the first term elections). Any one who thinks that a group should have blind allegiance and mindless robotic who agree on every single agenda are probably nazis or stalinists.

People are pissed at Washington. It took that fool Bush and the liberal congress 8 years to screw the economy by creating a huge deficit and it took Comrade Obama 3 months to triple that deficit. And that moron still plans on spending billions only to create government jobs. Yes, that is the only employment sector on the rise in the U.S. People feeding off the tits of government largesse. Further increasing dependancy, stupidity and addiction for progressive policies. Evidence of this is clearly seen in D.C. -- its the only place where employment is up. The rest of the country is suffering with up to 20% unemployment rates in California, Nevada and Florida. True unemployment just slipped nationally below 10%, but whether it was a trend or not will only be known in a few months.

Keep America Free

[Torurot]

You can't be serious!

[strocube]

(tscrazy @ Feb. 14 2010,22:17) People feeding off the tits of government largesse.  Further increasing dependancy, stupidity and addiction for progressive policies.  

You mean "people" like AIG, Goldman Sachs,, Northrup Grumman, Boeing, Blackwater, et al?

[Torurot]

More from this certified loony. Article is chock full of links so if you want to follow any up go here http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/opinion/14rich.html

Palin€™s Cunning Sleight of Hand

Yet the laughter rang hollow. You had to wonder if Palin, who is nothing if not cunning, had sprung a trap. She knows all too well that the more the so-called elites lampoon her, the more she cements her cred with the third of the country that is her base. Her hand hieroglyphics may not have been speaking aids but bait.

If so, mission accomplished. Her sleight of hand gave the anti-Palin chorus another prod to deride her as an empty-headed, subliterate clown, and her fans another cue to rally. The only problem is that the serious import of Palin€™s overriding political message got lost in this distracting sideshow. That message has the power to upend the Obama presidency €” even if Palin, with her record-low approval ratings, never gets anywhere near the White House.

The Palin shtick has now become the Republican catechism, parroted by every party leader in Washington. Their constant refrain, delivered with cynicism but not irony, is this: Republicans are the anti-big-government, anti-stimulus, anti-Wall Street, pro-Tea Party tribunes of the common folk. €œThis is about the people,€ as Palin repeatedly put it last weekend while pocketing $100,000 of the Tea Partiers€™ money.

Incredibly enough, this message is gaining traction. Though Obama remains more personally popular than the G.O.P., Republicans pulled ahead of the Democrats in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, among others, in a matchup for the 2010 midterms.

This G.O.P. populism is all bunk, of course. Republicans in office now, as well as Palin during her furtive public service in Alaska, have feasted on federal pork, catered to special interests, and pursued policies indifferent to recession-battered Americans. And yet they€™re getting away with their populist masquerade €” not just with a considerable swath of voters but even with certain elements in the €œliberal media.€ The Dean of the Beltway press corps, the columnist David Broder, cited Palin€™s €œpitch-perfect populism€ in hailing her as €œa public figure at the top of her game€ in Thursday€™s Washington Post.

That Republican leaders can pass off deceptive faux-populism as €œpitch-perfect populism€ is in part a testament to the blinding intensity of the economic anger and anxiety roiling the country. It also shows the power of an incessant bumper-sticker fiction to take root when ineffectually challenged €” and, most crucially, the inability of Democrats to make a persuasive case that they offer anything better.

The Obama White House remains its own worst enemy. No sooner did Palin€™s Tea Party speech end than we learned of the president€™s tone-deaf interview expressing admiration for €œvery savvy businessmen€ like Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs. With that single remark, Obama ingeniously identified himself with the most despised aspects of both Washington and Wall Street €” the bailout and the bonuses. He still doesn€™t understand that to most Americans, Blankfein is a savvy businessman only in the outrageous sense that he managed to grab his bonus some 17 months after the taxpayers had the good grace to save him from going out of business altogether.

Instead of praising bailed-out bankers, the president might have more profitably instructed his press secretary to drop the lame Palin jokes and dismantle the disinformation campaign her speech delivered to a national audience. Palin, unlike Obama, put herself on the side of the angels, railing against Wall Street€™s bonuses and bailout, even though she and John McCain had supported TARP during the campaign. Palin also bragged that she had €œjoined with other conservative governors€ in €œrejecting some€ stimulus dollars when in reality she rejected only a symbolic 3 percent of those dollars €” soon to be overruled by the Alaskan Legislature, which took every last buck.

This disingenuousness is old hat for Palin, who hired lobbyists to pursue $27 million in earmarks while serving as mayor of the town of Wasilla (pop. 6,700) and loudly defended her state€™s €œbridge to nowhere€ until her politically opportunistic flip-flop. What€™s new is the extent to which her test-marketed dishonesty has now become the template for her peers in the G.O.P. €œpopulist€ putsch. Adopting her example €” while unencumbered by her political baggage €” the party is exploiting the Tea Party movement to rebrand itself as un-Washington while quietly conducting business as usual in the capital.

There€™s €œno difference€ between G.O.P. and Tea Party beliefs, claims the House Republican leader, John Boehner. Not exactly. The three senators named €œporkers of the month€ for December by the nonpartisan Citizens Against Government Waste were all Republicans: Richard Shelby of Alabama, Susan Collins of Maine and Thad Cochran of Mississippi. Shelby is so unashamedly addicted to earmarks that he used a senatorial €œhold€ to halt confirmation votes on 70 Obama administration appointees until his costly shopping list of Alabama pork projects was granted. Or so he did until his over-the-top theatrics earned him unwelcome attention and threatened to derail his party€™s pious antispending posturing.

While more brazen than his peers, Shelby is otherwise typical of them. Jonathan Karl of ABC News last week unearthed photographs of various G.O.P. congressmen posing in their districts with stimulus checks that they had publicly opposed. The Washington Times uncovered more than a dozen other Republican lawmakers who privately solicited stimulus money from the Department of Agriculture while denouncing the stimulus to their constituents and the news media, often angrily.

Even the G.O.P./Tea Party heartthrob of the hour, Scott Brown, is not the barn-coat-wearing populist he purports to be. In her speech, Palin saluted him as €œjust a guy with a truck€ who was doing €œhis part to put our government back on the side of the people.€ In reality Brown€™s Massachusetts Senate campaign benefited from a last-minute flood of contributions from financial industry donors €” with 80 percent of the haul coming from outside the state. It says all you need to know about our politics that his Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley, matched him by holding a fund-raiser largely sponsored by lobbyists for the health care and pharmaceutical industries.

Now that he€™s in the Senate, Brown is likely to junk the truck and side full time with Wall Street against Main Street. To do otherwise would be to buck his party€™s entire establishment. Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, has already signaled that he€™ll fight the Obama administration€™s push for a €œVolcker rule€ to rein in too-big-to-fail financial behemoths. The conservative message guru Frank Luntz has drafted a memo instructing G.O.P. legislators on how to defeat a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency while camouflaging themselves as populist foes of the very banks and credit card companies that that agency would regulate. That€™s a neat trick €” Luntz€™s nonpolitical clients include Merrill Lynch and American Express €” and it helps explain why Wall Street is now tilting its contributions to Congressional Republicans for 2010.

Yet it€™s the Democrats who are now most linked to corporate interests, thanks to all the backroom deals over health care. More Americans have heard of the Medicaid money shoveled to the Democratic senators Ben Nelson (the January €œporker of the month€) and Mary Landrieu in exchange for their health care votes than of Thad Cochran€™s $8.75 million earmark for the €œExchange With Historic Whaling and Trading Partners Program€ (a proposed cut in the Obama budget). The Republicans are so disciplined at claiming the fiscal-hawk high road that even Jenny Sanford, the wronged first lady of South Carolina, is still defending her husband, Mark, as an uncompromising defender of €œhard-earned tax dollars€ in her new tell-all memoir, €œStaying True.€ Though she gives us the skinny on her husband€™s philandering, she never mentions the subsequent revelations that expenses for his trysts and other personal travel were billed to taxpayers.

Before he was done in by his Argentine firecracker €” and before the emergence of Palin €” Sanford was floated by The Wall Street Journal editorial page and others on the right as an ideal ticket mate for John McCain in 2008. As a congressman he had slept on a futon in his office and voted against a breast cancer postage stamp as wasteful €œfeel-good legislation.€ As governor, he refused to take stimulus money despite the fact that South Carolina had the nation€™s fastest-growing unemployment rate. When an unemployed man from Charleston caring for a seriously ill mother and sister called in to C-Span last February begging Sanford for help, he didn€™t budge. But he did volunteer to pray for the caller and his family.

So it went with Palin last weekend. Her only concrete program for dealing with America€™s pressing problems came in the question-and-answer session. €œIt would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country,€ she said, €œso that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again.€ That pretty much sums up her party€™s economic program, at least: divine intervention will achieve what government intervention cannot. That the G.O.P. may actually be winning this argument is less an indictment of Palin than of Washington Democrats too busy reading the writing on her hand to see or respond to the ominous political writing on the wall.

[tscrazy]

What an Obamination !!!  

I'm so tired of that smug elitist socialist.  The way he responded to the Republicans at the Healthcare summit was disgusting.  The guy has such contempt for anyone who disagrees with.  It is so clear that the bastard had no real intention of "discussion."  It was a deceptive attempt to make the idiots in the public think that he was really interested in hearing another view point.  Like he said in the spring "Republicans should just move aside - after losing Virginia, New Jersey and Massashusetts he still thinks he still turns a deaf hear to Americans.  This weekend all the dem's have been talking about going ahead with Obamacare as is -  no surpirse either.  Let the scumbas do it, maybe the voters will celan house out of all these career politicians.



I'm also tired of his racism.  The earthquake in Chile this weekend was far stronger than the one Haiti and he could care less what happens to the Chileans.  Had Chile been a black (or mulsim) nation he probably would have done more.  Sure, he the damage was less because Chileans have not had ridiculously corrupt governments like Haiti; so th eChileans have invested much onto their infrastructure instead of manions for correct officals.

[guydesavoy]

Chile and Haiiti ? Interesting comparison. Slight difference in economies and topography.

Not to mention the death toll.

[rxpharm]

How can you make such a statement while Chile has not yet asked for aid? Do you expect President Obama to send US aid without permission from the Chilean government? Haiti asked for aid almost immediatetly, and of course with the amount of devastation they had to.

What planet are you from?