Year: 2011
Verbatim
You have to look at it and see, what are they like when they’re tested,what are they like when they’re not scripted, what are they like when they’re pushed. And I would contend to you that if Governor Palin never does any of those things, she’ll never be president, because people in America won’t countenance that. They just won’t.
— New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), in an interview with the New York Times.
Surrounding Herself with Amateurs Has Put Palin’s Future in Jeopardy
Here’s a little bipartisanship for you. I, a bona fide member of the unprofessional left, agree with Jennifer Rubin, a conservative columnist for the rightward-tilting Washington Post op-ed page and who until recently wrote for right-wing Commentary magazine, that Sarah Palin is facing a career crisis of her own making, and that the crisis is a result of her decision to surround herself with amateurs and sycophants rather than seasoned political pros. Rubin writes:
It has been reported that that she is exceedingly insulated from experienced voices by a mini-staff in Alaska and her husband … A case in point is:
Rebecca Mansour who especially personifies the amorphous yet fervid network of Palin World. Mansour said . . . “I majored in English and history and minored in philosophy, but I’ve never been a Beltway person, so that does confuse people.”
And this person is “Palin’s primary speechwriter, researcher, online communications coordinator and all-purpose adviser.”
It was Mansour who went on a righty radio show hosted by former liberal (and current gay Stockholm-syndrome victim) Tammy Bruce last weekend to road test a new lie about the infamous crosshairs map Palin’s camp released last spring on which Giffords’ district was targeted, along with 19 others:
Verbatim
She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted … I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us — we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our childrens’ expectations.
— President Obama, remembering 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, who was killed by the gunman in Tucson last Saturday, at a memorial service for the victims Wednesday night.
Poll: Approval of Dems in Congress up to 53%, 5 Points Higher Than Republicans
53%
Percentage of voters who approve of the performance of Democrats in Congress, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll. That’s five points higher than approval of Republicans, which is evenly split at 48 percent. Approval of Pres. Obama is also 53 percent.
Palin’s ‘Blood Libel’ Is a Centuries-Old Anti-Semitic Term
Writing on Business Insider, Glynnis McNichol notes that Sarah Palin’s use of the term “blood libel” to describe the media response to her use of crosshairs in a campaign ad a few months before Rep. Gabriela Giffords was shot in Tucson last weekend is “reprehensible,” given the etymology of the term:
Says Palin in her post:
But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.
Again, emphasis mine. Blood libel is a strong term with historically violent connotations and one wonders if Sarah Palin is familiar with its actual definition and history. From Wikipedia:
Breaking: Hey Right Wing, You Can Have Jared Loughner Back
Someone’s finally sorting out the mess that is Jared Loughner’s mind and discovering what most of us have suspected all along. Loughner has much more in common with rightwing extremists than with the political left. Justine Sharrock at Mother Jones explains what Loughner’s obsession with grammar means to people in the “sovereign citizen” movement, which among many other things, maps out strategies to avoid paying taxes.
Glenn Beck would no doubt be envious of the hairpin logic used by the “sovereign citizens”
Many of his seemingly random statements—on “grammar,” “the ratifications,” “the new currency,” and more—echo the teachings of the “sovereign citizen” movement, a right-wing school of thought alleging that Americans have been surreptitiously stripped of their God-given rights.
These are not random parallels, as I discovered in reviewing Loughner’s YouTube videos. In multiple instances, he uses the precise talking points sovereign-citizen theorists teach via a thriving cottage industry of books, websites, bogus legal companies, and seminars; one popular theorist, David Wynn Miller, told the New York Times that Loughner has “probably been on my website.”
The Fire Next Time: Can We Build a Recession-Proof Economy?
As we climb out of the recession, which we clearly are and were before the freshmen Republicans in the House took their oaths of office last week, it’s a good time to remember we are not all on the same page about how we got into an economic mess, nor about how to go forward from it.
There are people out there who believe, thanks to FOX News and Rush Limbaugh, that the whole housing market collapse was because of groups like ACORN trying to help people who couldn’t afford them buy houses.
Keefe: ‘We can either summon the collective will to invest in our common future or continue to stumble along hoping the next asset bubble temporarily bails us out while entering into a period of long national decline’
There are others, like me, who witnessed the mortgage crisis from closer to the inside and know firsthand that the wealthy led the way into economic ruin with such instruments as no-money-down mortgages, interest-only mortgages, five-year balloons, and other highly creative arrangements dreamed up for folks who wanted to make even more profit by flipping second and third and fourth houses than they were by investing in shaky stocks.
Most of those in the latter group were just one slow-selling property away from bankruptcy and foreclosure, which we all got to find out together. Of course, most of them will just wait out the seven or so years it takes to clear one’s credit record if one is of a certain income bracket, and go forth to sin again.
And since we’ve never collectively gotten straight about the causes, why should we expect to agree on the remedies? Sadly, we shouldn’t.
Joseph F. Keefe, president and CEO of Pax World Mutual Funds, says we can’t fix what’s wrong in this country, or in the world, by looking for the next boom. (Emphasis that follows is added.)
