Så ufattelig mange hjernedøde tullinger i GOP. Tenk at et så viktig land blir styrt av folk som ikke en gang har fått med seg barneskolens pensum i naturfag. De burde vært stengt inne på en institusjon.
""Får ikke et par barn via "naturmetoden" er det ikke meningen at de skal ha barn! Selv du Deph må da forstå at hvis mennesket da hjelper til med vitenskap så er det å bryte Guds vilje!!!! Og legekunsten er jo en gave fra Gud som ikke må misbrukes til slikt! Hvorfor tro du egentlig at Gud lot oss lære slike ting? For å drive med IVF? Du må jo være gal om du tror det! Å sa han at vi slulle "være fruktsommelige og oppfylle jorden"? Jo han sa vel det, men.........................??
Voldtekt, hadde ikke damen "bydd seg fram" ville jo ikke fyren ha vodtatt henne, - helt innlysende!! Og da ser du vel logikken i at hun må bære fram barnet? Det er straffen for at hun var en tøs!! Alstå dette gjelder selvsagt bare naboens datter! Gjelder det min datter så lynsjer vi voldtektsmannen og stapper abortpiller i henne, men DET blir jo noe annet! Det MÅ du jo forstå!!""
Det som imponerer meg mest med GOPerne er deres evne til "ulogisk tenking". Pussig at de ikke stopper opp og funderer litt over hvorfor de møter seg selv i døra så ofte? Men at slike skal sitte med en atomknapp er mere skremmende enn at en forfyllet Jeltsin gjorde det!
En tid tilbake mistet jeg entusiasmen for å oppdatere i American Revolution. Det å følge GOPs primærvalg, med et utvalg klovner som kandidater, var simpelthen deprimerende.
Nå tror jeg at det er mulig jeg kan bli religiøs. Det er mulig det finnes en gud.
Klovnegalleriet endte med at Mitt Romney ble valgt som GOPs kandidat. En mann som fikk en konservativ kommentator til å si at Nixon var en åpen bok i sammenligning. Romney har stengt arkiver vedr. sin innsats som guvernør i Massachussets, han har stengt arkivene vedr. sin innsats som leder av OL-arrangøren Salt Lake City, han har stengt sine arkiver når det gjelder sitt arbeid for Bain Capital og løyet om hvor lenge han var sjef for selskapet, og han har nektet innsyn i sine skatteoppgaver, med unntak for 2011 og 2010 (det var hans far som gjorde full åpenhet om sistnevnte til standard, da faren prøvde å bli president).
Romney er biskop i Mormonerkirken og utpekt leder av samme. Hans forhistorie som rabiat motstander av det vi i dag ser på som progressive nyvinninger er så ekstrem at det er vanskelig å tro det er mulig å være så ensporet.
Under kampanjen for å bli president har Romney løyet, og løyet og løyet, i slik utstrekning at kommunikasjonsforskere nå sier vi er kommet til en ny fase i idéhistorien. For det viser seg at det er effektivt å lyve uhemmet slik Romney har gjort, mens man inntil nylig anså at så store løgner, i full offentlighet, var diskvalifiserende for politiske kandidater i et demokrati. Hvilke perspektiver det åpner er skremmende. (Vi snakker altså om direkte løgn som enkelt lar seg motbevise av fakta, ikke politiske oppfatninger.)
MEN - så kommer superstormen Sandy innom. En fullkomment usannsynlig sammensmelting av værsystemer og planetkonstellasjon, en storm av vitterlig bibelske proporsjoner. Og Mitt Romney må, noen få dager før valget, prøve å forklare hva han mente med sitt utsagn i en primærvalgsdebatt om at "føderal katastrofehjelp er umoralsk."
NYTimes er ikke imponert.
[HR][/HR] October 29, 2012 A Big Storm Requires Big Government
Most Americans have never heard of the National Response Coordination Center, but they’re lucky it exists on days of lethal winds and flood tides. The center is the war room of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where officials gather to decide where rescuers should go, where drinking water should be shipped, and how to assist hospitals that have to evacuate.
Disaster coordination is one of the most vital functions of “big government,” which is why Mitt Romney wants to eliminate it. At a Republican primary debate last year, Mr. Romney was asked whether emergency management was a function that should be returned to the states. He not only agreed, he went further.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.” Mr. Romney not only believes that states acting independently can handle the response to a vast East Coast storm better than Washington, but that profit-making companies can do an even better job. He said it was “immoral” for the federal government to do all these things if it means increasing the debt.
It’s an absurd notion, but it’s fully in line with decades of Republican resistance to federal emergency planning. FEMA, created by President Jimmy Carter, was elevated to cabinet rank in the Bill Clinton administration, but was then demoted by President George W. Bush, who neglected it, subsumed it into the Department of Homeland Security, and placed it in the control of political hacks. The disaster of Hurricane Katrina was just waiting to happen.
The agency was put back in working order by President Obama, but ideology still blinds Republicans to its value. Many don’t like the idea of free aid for poor people, or they think people should pay for their bad decisions, which this week includes living on the East Coast.
Over the last two years, Congressional Republicans have forced a 43 percent reduction in the primary FEMA grants that pay for disaster preparedness. Representatives Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and other House Republicans have repeatedly tried to refuse FEMA’s budget requests when disasters are more expensive than predicted, or have demanded that other valuable programs be cut to pay for them. The Ryan budget, which Mr. Romney praised as “an excellent piece of work,” would result in severe cutbacks to the agency, as would the Republican-instigated sequester, which would cut disaster relief by 8.2 percent on top of earlier reductions.
Does Mr. Romney really believe that financially strapped states would do a better job than a properly functioning federal agency? Who would make decisions about where to send federal aid? Or perhaps there would be no federal aid, and every state would bear the burden of billions of dollars in damages. After Mr. Romney’s 2011 remarks recirculated on Monday, his nervous campaign announced that he does not want to abolish FEMA, though he still believes states should be in charge of emergency management. Those in Hurricane Sandy’s path are fortunate that, for now, that ideology has not replaced sound policy.
In the End, Vote for Obama Because Fuck Romney:
Finally, at the end of four brutal years of the 2012 presidential campaign, the Rude Pundit is exhausted. He's exhausted and disgusted, and there's so many factors as to why, some of them Sandy-related bullshit, some of them political bullshit, that he'll just bring it down to one: that we as a nation put ourselves through a four year-long campaign because, truly, once Jeb Bush and Chris Christie decided they weren't going to run for president, the election was over. Why did they take the 2016 off ramp? Because they knew the inevitable outcome and they didn't want to dim whatever gleams they have reflecting off them. They knew, as the Rude Pundit knew (demonstrably), that Barack Obama was going to win reelection. If they thought he could lose, they would have run. So the smart narcissists got out of the game, leaving only the dumb narcissists.
And the dumbest, richest narcissist of them all bought the nomination for himself because that's the only fucking way such an illegitimate, empty vessel of a religious fanatic, this charlatan, this con man could have gotten this far in our nonsensical system of choosing a leader.
The Rude Pundit wants Mitt Romney disgraced. He wants Romney pelted with rotting vegetables because Romney is also "Romney," the avatar of the avaricious, of the Kochs and Sheldon Adelson, of the bounty of disinformation that flowed because of the democracy-killing Citizens United decision (which Obama Super PACs took advantage of, too), who has no actual plans to do anything other than assure that the greedy are allowed to wallow in their shit-filled cash pits like the pigs they are and laugh while the rest of us argue over the scraps of issues like "abortion" and "education" and "health care," avoiding the real damage of income disparity, the confronting of which would necessarily take care of the other issues.
He wants Romney pantsed and whipped through the streets until he disappears, yowling into the wilderness, never to be seen again, because the Rude Pundit wants to kill the myth of the businessman-as-leader. Let's be clear: Romney had only four years of experience as an elected official of any sort, far less than Obama when he ran in 2008. So Romney's left with his Bain Capital experience, and we're supposed to believe that because he knows how to contort the finances of failing companies in order to profit his investors, he should be allowed to decide whether or not we should go to war with Iran.
Romney needs to have election results shoved up his ass and down his throat because he has approached the presidency as something that is his by some kind of rich white man's birth right. And that's not even getting into the lies, the shifting positions. People like to call Romney a "robot." That's not even close. He's like the alien in John Carpenter's The Thing, a horrific, oozing miasma of a being, devouring those near him and mimicking what they are in order to be accepted by others, a creature with no discernible shape of its own, one that exists for the sole purpose of taking over the world just because it thinks it can do so.
Romney has nothing, offers nothing, is nothing, other than white and rich, which is, sadly, to our great disgrace, enough for nearly half the nation. He never had a chance.
But, still, we allowed ourselves to be put through the four-year campaign. The pathetic, craven, soul-sucking media forced a narrative that allowed this race to even have the illusion of a close race. The pathetic, craven, soul-sucking media refused to acknowledge the truth, that Obama failed personally less than he was cock-blocked by Republicans (and cowardly Blue Dog Democrats) at nearly every step of the way. Why didn't he close Gitmo? Because Congress specifically blocked any funding to do so. Why didn't he get a jobs bill through? Because Congress said it might be successful and mustn't be passed.
Fuck, let's just narrow this down. Why didn't the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy? Because Senate Republicans would have prevented jobless people from getting extensions on their unemployment checks. Why didn't over 400 bills from the Democratic House pass? Because Senate Republicans. Why are there still so many positions unfilled in the government? Because Senate Republicans. That's the fucking story of the last four years. That's the story of the Obama presidency. That's the story that has been ignored, even by the Obama campaign, presumably because it seemed whiny.
No, Barack Obama ain't poor and he ain't perfect. And this blog has pissed off more than a few readers by pointing that out, especially on civil liberties, and even more especially on drone attacks. He could have been even more aggressive with those who opposed him. He could have developed a way to communicate what the health care reform law does, what the stimulus has done, and more. We could list a shitload of his accomplishments, and that would be enough.
But it's also enough to say this: Fuck Mitt Romney. Fuck him and everything he represents. Vote to make him pay in a way he never has had to in his entire awful life.
(Note to fellow liberals: If you don't wanna vote for Obama or want to vote for Jill Stein, well, it's your vote, motherfuckers. Do with it what you will. Some people spend all their money on meth. It might fuck up their lives permanently, but they sure feel good while they're doing it.)
Både i Florida og Ohio har republikanerne gjort alt de kan for å gjøre det vanskelig for minoriteter og antatte demokrater å avgi stemmer, og lett for antatte republikanere å gjøre det. Ganske utrolig.
Rachel Maddow om hvor vanskelig det er blitt for enkelte å avgi stemme i USA: “If you are one of those people being forced to stand in those long lines tonight, tomorrow or on election day, honestly, your country needs you to do it,” Maddow said. “Your country needs you to do it not only because it’s your civic responsibility, but also because there are people out there trying to profit politically off of you not doing it. People who are counting on you not having the time or the commitment. People who are trying to profit off of you giving up. It’s gonna be hard to vote this year in a lot of places where it is most important that you vote. Your country needs you to stick it out. No matter who you are voting for, your country needs you to do it.”
Valgforskere venter spent på utfallet av USAs første "post-truth" kampanje. Om Romney vinner regner man med at fremtidige kampanjer vil frikoble seg helt fra fakta, i jakt på oppslutning fra velgere. Taktikken har vært å sørge for å si noe som vil vende velgere til Romney, uavhengig av om det er sant, har oppbakning i fakta eller er logisk sammenhengende. The Morning Plum: Can a ‘post-truth’ candidate be elected president? - The Plum Line - The Washington Post
If Romney wins Ohio, every campaign in future elections is going to give much more serious consideration to lying and to open defiance of media rebuttals as a legitimate campaign expedient.
Her er noen kloke ord om kommende "Brave New World."
[HR][/HR] November 5, 2012
[h=1]The Real Loser: Truth[/h] [h=6]By KEVIN M. KRUSE[/h] Princeton, N.J.
THE director Steven Spielberg, whose “Lincoln” biopic opens Friday, recently said he hoped the film would have a “soothing or even healing effect” on a nation exhausted after yet another bitter and polarizing election.
But there’s one line attributed to Lincoln that Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays the president, doesn’t utter in the film: “You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.”
The omission makes sense. Not only is the line probably apocryphal, but also, this Election Day just might demonstrate that you really can fool all of the people — or at least enough of them — in the time it takes to win the White House.
Venomous personal attacks and accusations of adultery, miscegenation and even bestiality are as old as the Republic. Aaron Burr was the sitting vice president when he killed Alexander Hamilton.
But while the line between fact and fiction in politics has always been fuzzy, a confluence of factors has strained our civic discourse, if it can still be called that, to the breaking point.
The economic boom and middle-class expansion of the postwar era encouraged relative deference for officials, journalists and scholars. It’s true that reporters and politicians had far cozier relationships, but the slower news cycle allowed more time for verification and analysis.
Candidates accordingly believed that being caught in an outright lie could damage their careers. (As Daniel Patrick Moynihan reportedly said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”) They tended only to bend the truth, not break it.
In 1948, President Harry S. Truman denounced Republican financiers as “bloodsuckers” and “gluttons of privilege,” but grounded his inflammatory language in the facts of Congress’s legislative record. He denied his “give ’em hell” reputation, saying later only that “I used to tell the truth on the Republicans, and they called it that.”
Two years later, Richard M. Nixon, running for the Senate from California, said his opponent, Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, was “pink right down to her underwear,” a red-baiting remark, but one that referred to statements she’d made calling for global disarmament and civil rights for women and blacks.
The brass-knuckle 1964 campaign is remembered for Lyndon B. Johnson’s alarmist “daisy ad,” which suggested that Barry M. Goldwater’s election might lead to nuclear war. But it rested on statements Goldwater had made indicating a loose attitude toward nuclear weapons. (“Lob one into the men’s room in the Kremlin,” he once joked.)
The attack ads devised by the strategist Lee Atwater for Vice President George Bush in the 1988 campaign, one of the dirtiest ever, were grounded in at least a kernel of truth. Mr. Bush’s opponent, Michael S. Dukakis, might not have deserved blame for the furlough program that let Willie Horton commit additional crimes, but at least the program and prisoner were real. Atwater exploited these events, but did not invent them.
At least four factors since the 1970s have lowered the cost for politicians who lie and, more important, repeat their fabrications through their attack ads. First is the overall decline in respect for institutions and professionals of all kinds, from scientists and lawyers to journalists and civil servants.
Second are changes in media regulation and ownership. In 1985, the conservative organization Fairness in Media, backed by Senator Jesse Helms, tried to arrange a takeover of CBS and “become Dan Rather’s boss.” It failed, but two years later conservatives set the stage for an even bigger triumph. For decades, radio and television broadcasters had been required to present multiple viewpoints on contentious public debates on the grounds that they were stewards of the public airwaves. But in 1987, members appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the Federal Communications Commission abolished this “fairness doctrine.” The change facilitated the creation of conservative talk radio and cable outlets to combat perceived liberal bias. Liberals followed suit with programming (albeit less effective) of their own.
As this cacophony crescendoed, a third trend developed as political operatives realized they had more room to stretch the truth. In 2004, an aide to President George W. Bush dismissed a journalist for being part of a “reality-based community” of people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” But even Mr. Bush believed there were limits to truth-bending. The ads that attacked the military service of Senator John Kerry came from the ostensibly independent “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” After the ads aired, Mr. Bush belatedly called them “bad for the system.”
A fourth factor: most news organizations (with notable exceptions) abandoned their roles as political referees. Many resorted to an atrophied style that resembled stenography more than journalism, presenting all claims as equally valid. Fact checking, once a foundation for all reporting, was now deemed the province of a specialized few.
But as this campaign has made clear, not even the dedicated fact-checkers have made much difference.
PolitiFact has chronicled 19 “pants on fire” lies by Mr. Romney and 7 by Mr. Obama since 2007, but Mr. Romney’s whoppers have been qualitatively far worse: the “apology tour,” the “government takeover of health care,” the “$4,000 tax hike on middle class families,” the gutting of welfare-to-work rules, the shipment by Chrysler of jobs from Ohio to China. Said one of his pollsters, Neil Newhouse, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”
To be sure, the Obama campaign has certainly had its own share of dissembling and distortion, including about Mr. Romney’s positions on abortion and foreign aid. But nothing in it — or in past campaigns, for that matter — has equaled the efforts of the Romney campaign in this realm. Its fundamental disdain for facts is something wholly new.
The voters, of course, may well recoil against these cynical manipulations at the polls. But win or lose, the Romney campaign has placed a big and historic bet on the proposition that facts can be ignored, more or less, with impunity. Kevin M. Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton, is the co-editor, most recently, of “Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement.”
Om vi for et øyeblikk glemmer Tea Party, fundamentalismen, våpengalskapen, religionen og skepsisen til vitenskap i relativt brede lag av den republikanske velgermassen (som jeg egentlig tror Mitt Romney i hvert fall et lite stykke på vei er like skeptisk til som meg):
USAs største problem er den stadig minkende middelklassen. At man i et slikt perspektiv kan vurdere å velge som president en mann som representerer de 1% "filthy rich" og somde rmed personifiserer dette problemet, og som i tillegg har tjent sin formue på å outsource store deler av nettopp disse jobbene til utlandet, er meg komplett ubegripelig.
Obama har ikke vært noen stor president (selv om man tar høyde for at han har arvet mange rare utfordringer), men dog.
For dem som måtte mene at åpenhet er viktig i et demokrati, at åpenhet er målet i et folkestyre, er Romney en komplett tilbakevisning. Og som f.eks. Dr. Dong har påpekt, er slett ikke Obama hans motstykke når det gjelder åpenhet innen statsadministrasjonen.
MEN - Romney ber om folkets tillit etter å ha (1) båndlagt opplysninger om sin virketid i Bain Capital, (2) båndlagt opplysninger om sin rolle som biskop i Mormonerkirken, (3) båndlagt opplysninger om sine beslutninger som sjef for Salt Lake City vinterolympiaden, (4) båndlagt arkivene om sitt virke som guvernør i Massachussets, (5) nektet å fremvise selvangivelse for annet enn to år (og da begrenset).
Han nekter også å avsløre hva hans plattform faktisk går ut på, med henvisning til at da blir det lettere for motstandere å angripe ham.
Og han velger åpen løgn og forvrengning av virkeligheten som kommunikasjonsplattform.
Det er simpelthen utrolig at han er kandidat.
Årsaken til at han ikke vil frigi sine skatteoppgaver synes å være at han har benyttet seg av en mulighet for å avregne bidrag til sin religion mot skatteplikt, en mulighet som nå er borte; samtidig som han har flyttet penger gjennom ulike skallselskap i utlandet, for å unngå å betale skatt.
Og likevel har han tilsynelatende stor oppslutning. Valg avgjøres av reptilhjernen, ikke av vår evne til logiske resonnement.
Dette er en trist dag for USA. USA er på vei i samme retning som Hellas, Spania og Italia økonomisk sett. Som det blir nevnt, blir middelklassen mindre og hadde Romney blitt president hadde de rike fått mer og de fattige måtte seile sin egen sjø.
Problemet er at folk ikke skjønner at de rike tjener mer og de fattige får mindre under obama styre også. Han fører en politikk som gangner kun de rike.
Med Roney hadde det blitt en innsparingspolitikk uten like. Men de rike hadde fått lavere skatter for å skape jobber.
Det er en marxistisk ide at politikere kan påvirke økonomi ved å gi til de fattige og ta fra de rike uten å forstå at de rike skaffer penger til landet. De skaper jobber og påvirker markedskreftene.
Det er en marxistisk ide at politikere kan påvirke økonomi ved å gi til de fattige og ta fra de rike uten å forstå at de rike skaffer penger til landet. De skaper jobber og påvirker markedskreftene.
Heller Keynesiansk skulle jeg tro. Og at USA går samme vei som Hellas er i beste fall billig markedsføring av et politisk standpunkt, i verste fall vrøvl. Men landet står overfor store utfordringer, det er rett.
Politikk i USA ser ut til å vere akkurat som her heime: flaggviftekonkurransar. Det er forsvinnande lite prosentmessige endringar av ressursane som gjer seg gjeldande under dei ulike partia her heime, og vi må vel forvente at dei to presidentkandidatane gjer stort sett dei same tinga. Handlingsramma er trong, og berre på lang sikt kan ein tenkje at "change" er realistisk. Hyggjeleg at Obama får halde fram, for då kan han kanskje ha meir orden på det langsiktige enn det som hadde vore "støyen" frå eit presidentskifte no. Men eg er spent på om det kan gjerast noko med arbeidsløysa utan ein global dugnad og reduksjon i velstandsveksten, og om nokon vil ta dritten ved å stå i fronten for noko sånt...
Ingen av dem vurderer om det at republikanere ønsket å fjerne selvbestemt abort, ønsket å fjerne retten til lik lønn, ønsket å nekte abort ved voldtekt kan ha en liten innflytelse.
Veldig underholdende lesning, inntil man innser at de mener alvor.
Ingen av dem vurderer om det at republikanere ønsket å fjerne selvbestemt abort, ønsket å fjerne retten til lik lønn, ønsket å nekte abort ved voldtekt kan ha en liten innflytelse.
Veldig underholdende lesning, inntil man innser at de mener alvor.
Et av de mest sympatisk trekkene ved GOP er at de ikke har lagt skjul på sine planer om et mørkemannsregime. Det ville sikkert vært mer effektivt å la være å si noe om disse før det var for sent, og de ble valgt inn.
