Introducing the next VP of the United States

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NEWS FLASH!!!

I've decided to become a right-wing Republican Christianist!! Having given it loads of thought, here's my rationale:

1) What a relief not having to care what happens to anyone who isn't just like me! All I care about is me, me, wonderful ME!!! Oh, and fetuses. I'm BIG into fetuses, now. What happens to them once they're out in the world is not my business, but while they're in a woman's body, I just want them to know this: Fetuses, I have your back!

2) I totally agree that we need to go back to what the founding fathers intended. All this legislating from the bench is the reason this country has problems; That, and not enough people wearing flag lapel pins---because as we all know, THAT'S WHAT PATRIOTISM IS. This, logically, leads me to the following two points:

2a) SORRY LADIES, but you can't vote, anymore. It was a noble experiment, but our founding fathers (not mothers!) never intended for you to have the same rights and privileges as men. And all this nonsense about equal pay...that has to go, too. You'll be SO much easier to deal with when I'm the only one bringing money into the household, which is how God and the founding fathers intended it.

2b) African Americans, now don't go getting all bent out of shape, just hear me out: Don't you think it's probably time to reconsider this whole 'freedom' thing? Think of the advantages: You'll be fed and clothed and have a roof over your heads, just as the founding fathers intended. Why, it would be selfish and rude of you not to take advantage of such a generous offer, don't you think?

3) Everything will run much smoother as soon as everyone out there realizes that the Christian bible is the infallible, true word of God and must be taken literally. Creationism is science! People who eat pork are going to hell! And I'm SO sorry, but all of you who work on the Sabbath (which we all know is Sunday, no matter what you zany Jews and Seventh Day Adventists think) will have to be killed. You, too, gays! And at long last, we respectable, normal, small-town values people will be able to reclaim that beautiful word.

Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I feel much, much better (which is all that matters; see how that works? It's genius!)

At long last, all us normal, respectable, small-town values people won't have to put up with the rest of you.

I've seen the light!
 
LOL @ Frigilux!

And remember, regarding your item 1): not only do you not need to care about those who may be different than your esteemed self, you don't even have to be civil to them! Manners only matter amongst the chosen. This makes it really easy to tell those of other faiths, races, political parties and sexual orientations exactly what you think of them without worrying about being nice. I mean, isn't that what Jesus would have done?
 
Panthera, I thought you would answer my question about Sarah

But I do know this, I think it would help if a President or Vice President had subjects like math, chemistry, social studies, psychology, health, and environmetal science since many of the issues we face today are about these issues. Knowing about hockey and religion isn't going to help much.

That said, I would like to nominate one of our own for VP: Rich, I think you would be a very good candidate. You seem to know about chemistry, physics, manufacturing, CADD, energy use, welding, machining, and interior design that I think you should call Obama and offer to be his VP candidate.
 
In an email today ...

Eve Ensler, the American playwright, performer, feminist and activist best known for "The Vagina Monologues", wrote the following about Sarah Palin:

Drill, Drill, Drill

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, "It was a task from God.

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialog and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, "Drill Drill Drill." I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

Eve Ensler
September 5, 2008
 
Speaking of Palin

Tina Fey did a dead-on-balls accurate parody of her Saturday on SNL. OMG--I don't think I laughed so much at that show since Gilda Radner left.
 
Sorry, Bob

I thought I had answered it, guess it didn't get posted. Before six in the morning, I am not really all that swift.
A-Hem.
Actually, the women who attend our polytechnic are among the brightest of the brightest. Many are Americans who can not afford to go to college in the US. Since brilliant Americans are virtually guaranteed jobs in Europe, they usually stay on.
I do know what you are referring to, tho'. A friend of mine teaches home economics at a college here in Colorado. She says a good fifty percent of the freshmen students try to major in home ec. to avoid the real academic courses. They still get flushed out by the end of the second semester, at the latest.
Oh - a minor, but interesting note. There are two countries with outstanding schools which lose a specific group of professionals to Western Europe. The two countries: Poland and the US. The group: Homosexuals.
It's statistically significant and it does hurt both countries. Me, I am thankful for it. Gay and lesbian students are among the best, the dual-hemisphere brain really proves itself when working in two languages at once.
 
I wonder Panthera, do they have those college majors like home ec and phys ed and communications in Germany? Why do I have the feeling they don't.

I also have to ask, and I don't mean to sound stuck up, that isn't it odd that in this country some people brag about they don't know math and science?

For an example of this, you may want to catch "Little People Big World" on (what is supposed to be) The Learning Channel. The Roloff family have both dwarf and average size members. The oldest, Jeremy, is having trouble in school, but Matt the father wants to get him into Wharton School of Business. Meanwhile, the family never reads, they play soccer all the time, their house is a chaos bin full of junk, they buy, buy, buy, all the time, there's always a project going on, they never discuss current events (our parents did that) and Jeremy brags about he has bad grades. They are setting him up for failure and happy about it!

Speaking of homosexuals, you may know of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh one of the best in the nation. I heard rumors that you can go there for 2-3 years and if the faculty think you are gay, you end up being expelled. Now, it's just a rumor since I never went there, but it that what you are referring too.

Oh, and what would you do if you had a Sarah Palin in class?
 
Of course we do,

and they are just as tough as they are here in the US.
Don't underestimate the level of academic competence required to earn a degree in these disciplines.
I checked my alma mater's stats. this morning. Ninety-five percent of students who begin their studies towards a degree in Home Economics flunk out of the university their first year.
Those who are left are genuinely competent.
Now, one course which falls into the underwater basket weaving category which we don't teach is 'Creative Writing'.
For which I am devoutly thankful.
The education courses I took in college (showed up for every lecture, sat in the front, stood up at least once a week, said my name, asked a question which I knew the prof. could answer, read the books cover to cover to learn the smell and color of the shit to write. My term papers and research projects were always based on whatever topic the prof. had written his or her dissertation on, being careful to always arrive at the same wrong-headed idiot conclusions they had found...and always got straight A's, 'cause I knew the sort of bull-shit answers they wanted to hear in the final exams...), yikes, no wonder so many of us are bad teachers. I learned more about teaching in graduate abnormal psych. than in all the education courses together.
 
But Panthera, why must you swear so much?

My father always said that if someone swears it makes them look like they cannot express themselves without using swear words and makes them look uneducated.

I did notice at the college I went to (actually it was a branch campus of Penn State University) that the students who majored in elementary education (and there were some guys too) would actually say they did it because "Math/chemistry/engineering/nursing were too hard". So scary and makes me kind of glad I will never have kids.

I think what I am trying to say is that someone who is going to run for President or VP and be the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth, I would like to see them have a background in subjects like biology, Earth science, psychology, a lot of different kinds of social studies, health, chemistry, economics, and maybe even nuclear science. They will also need advanced math to know any of these subjects. Many of the issues they will face in office, like nuclear issues, global warming issues, pollution, health issues, energy issues, and job issues, it would help them make decisions if they had known these subjects, but oh, they are So Hard!.

If Sarah Palin took any of these subjects, she sure isn't bragging about it. In fact, she brags that how she went to 6 colleges in 6 years because one of them was "too hot". How could a parent let their son or daugher do something like that without intervening?

I am a little disappointed in John McCain too: I thought the United States Naval Academy was one of the best schools in the world but I read that he made trouble the whole time and he doesn't appear to know these subjects.
 
"Just get me a fucking faith-based thing. Got it?"
-- Karl Rove, quoted in David Kuo's book "Tempting Faith"

"The self-control that had served him so long broke down in public on June 22 on the floor of the Senate during a photo session. As Cheney was posing with members, Senator Patrick Leahy ambled over. Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the judiciary committee, had recently been critical, along with other Democrats, of no-bid contracts in Iraq granted to Halliburton, the company Cheney had run and in which he still holds stock options and receives deferred compensation (despite his prior claims to the contrary). "Go fuck yourself," the vice president greeted him.

Cheney's spokesman appeared to deny that those words had been spoken: "That doesn't sound like language the vice president would use." But Cheney raced onto Fox News to hail himself as courageous for emotional authenticity. "I expressed myself rather forcefully, felt better after I had done it." Then he elaborated that his ejaculation was an administration policy: "I think that a lot of my colleagues felt that what I had said badly needed to be said, that it was long overdue." Leahy's seeming civility, he explained, was just a charade: "I didn't like the fact that ... he wanted to act like, you know, everything's peaches and cream."

www.guardian.co.uk

Sidney Blumenthal: When Cheney's mask slips, it reveals Bush

Sidney Blumenthal: Nothing will persuade the president to drop his mentor from the team, not even an explosion of expletives.
www.guardian.co.uk www.guardian.co.uk
 
Bob,

I'm sorry if it bothers you. We just don't do the political correctness thing-y in Germany and I tend to forget that Americans are awfully sensitive about anything stronger than: drat! durn! dirty laundry!
Seriously, in both countries we need people leading us who are intellectually up to the task. People who have traveled to other countries and actually spent some time getting to know other cultures.
Example: No other major country is lacking in health insurance. All of the other Western countries have general health insurance. All of us, without exception are doing a better job for our citizens - for less money per capita - than in the US. Because so many Americans are isolated, they really do fall the for the republican nonsense (not the word I wanted to use :-) about socialized medicine. Leaders like Bill and Hilary Clinton had lived abroad and they knew the difference between the very bad system here in the US and what the rest of us enjoy.
By the way, our Chancellor is a nuclear physicist, just like Jimmy Carter was...and she still has trouble putting two words together the right way. I do wish education alone were enough.
 


Obwohl meine Großeltern von Deutschland waren, bin ich geboren in Amerikaner bedenkt, dass mich selbst Amerikaner folglich ich mich auf Den Kanzler von Deutschland als Ihr Kanzler nicht Unseres beziehen würde. Jetzt, wenn ich zu denouce meine amerikanische Staatsbürgerschaft war, und sucht Deutsch dann er wäre Unseres.

Thanks to translation service.

Does anyone really think Germany gives a popcorn fart about we Americans? hell-to-the-no.
 
The Worm Turns...

Today 3 prominent right leaning columnists came out AGAINST Palin.

David Brooks writes:
In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation's founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn't just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

...

Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she'd be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

Ross Douthat writes at The Atlantic:
Now that we've seen the entirety of the Palin-Gibson tete-a-tete, I concur with Rich Lowry and Rod Dreher. The most that can be said in her defense is that she kept her cool and avoided any brutal gaffes; other than that, she seemed about an inch deep on every issue outside her comfort zone. Yes, the questions were tougher than the ones that a Tim Kaine or Tim Pawlenty probably would have been handed, but they were all questions that a vice-presidential nominee needs to be able to answer. And there's no way to look at her performance as anything save supporting evidence for the non-hysterical critique of her candidacy - that it's just too much, too soon - and a splash of cold water for those of us with high hopes for her future on the national stage.

And in the Washington Post, Richard Cohen writes:
McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains -- his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that's all -- but just as honorably. No more, though.

...

His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir -- the person in whose hands he would leave the country -- is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

They are not even damning with faint praise.

www.huffingtonpost.com

Conservatives Turn On McCain-Palin

Conservatives Turn On McCain-Palin
www.huffingtonpost.com www.huffingtonpost.com
 
iheartmaytag

Well, actually, we do give a damn - our soldiers are dying in Afghanistan, fighting for our (yours, ours, all of Western Civilization) freedom against the bastards who attacked America.
To come to the point. My parents are Americans. My partner is an American.
Hell, my cat lives here.
Since I love and honor my parents, because I am very much in love with and devoted to my partner, as I love my cat nearly as much as the other three...well, I spend time in the US.
Despite vicious attacks by some of the conservatives on this blog, the US government has seen fit to grant me a green card.
So that's my dog in the fight - I am just as entitled to worry about this country as you are...the people I love are here and that, I do believe, is your reason.
As near as I can tell, you are one of those very conservative people who define their patriotism as unvarying obedience to the republicans. OK, I can live with that.
But you folks don't seem to be willing to let those of us live our lives who happen to place loyalty to the US Constitution above simple-minded obedience to a group of thugs who have taken over the republican party.
Look, we are never going to agree, so let me just apologize for rattling your cage.
 
"Does anyone really think Germany gives a popcorn fart about we Americans? hell-to-the-no."


You can read the article at the linked page or just browse a while. Have a look at the Business section.

The first day of the floods in New Orleans, it was Germany that sent one of the largest water pumps built to the U.S. Ironically, it arrived before water at the Superdome.

The world does pay attention to us, perhaps you should to rephrase your statement.

www.dw-world.de

Obama's Incarnation – DW – 07/25/2008

German papers on Friday generally applauded US presidential contender Barack Obama's Berlin speech. But some also added that Germans now had to wake up and smell the coffee.
www.dw-world.de www.dw-world.de
 

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