And Sarah Palin is a Christo-Fascist who charged women for their own rape kits when she was mayor, and is currently obstructing justice in order to win an election.

I'll take the Rev. Wright and his at least somewhat justifiable rage after 300 years of racial tyranny over the soccer-mom nazi any day of the week.

Way to backpedal, West!

Keep it up, guys.

You're just embarrassing yourselves.

So now it is all about scaring white people?

Again, that is because YOU CANT DEFEND THE PAST 8 YEARS!

I can argue that every non-white voter, and even every white voter who earns less that $5 million/year should be VERY scared of John McCain.

This nation is in its deepest ditch since the Great Depression, and you're crying "FEAR OF A BLACK PLANET"

The last refuge of the intellectually DEFEATED.

You guys are playing the race card now because you have nothing left.

Your party is morally, philosophically, and now...literally BANKRUPT!

Game over.
Step Aside.
You have failed this Nation and it is time you admit it.

Can you say..."RACIST"?

You guys are TOO predictable.

Is AIG the property of the US taxpayer or the property of the Federal Reserve Bank?

2 very different things,

The Federal Resere is a private bank.

Ed is a great guy

Umm...not many any more ;-p

The Palin-Whatshisname Ticket


By FRANK RICH
Published: September 13, 2008
WITH all due deference to lipstick, let?s advance the story. A week ago the question was: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? The question today: What kind of president would Sarah Palin be?


It?s an urgent matter, because if we?ve learned anything from the G.O.P. convention and its aftermath, it?s that the 2008 edition of John McCain is too weak to serve as America?s chief executive. This unmentionable truth, more than race, is now the real elephant in the room of this election.

No longer able to remember his principles any better than he can distinguish between Sunnis and Shia, McCain stands revealed as a guy who can be easily rolled by anyone who sells him a plan for ?victory,? whether in Iraq or in Michigan. A McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man, an even weaker Bush to her Cheney.

The ambitious Palin and the ruthless forces she represents know it, too. You can almost see them smacking their lips in anticipation, whether they?re wearing lipstick or not.

This was made clear in the most chilling passage of Palin?s acceptance speech. Aligning herself with ?a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri? who ?followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency,? she read a quote from an unidentified writer who, she claimed, had praised Truman: ?We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.? Then Palin added a snide observation of her own: Such small-town Americans, she said, ?run our factories? and ?fight our wars? and are ?always proud? of their country. As opposed to those lazy, shiftless, unproud Americans ? she didn?t have to name names ? who are none of the above.

There were several creepy subtexts at work here. The first was the choice of Truman. Most 20th-century vice presidents and presidents in both parties hailed from small towns, but she just happened to alight on a Democrat who ascended to the presidency when an ailing president died in office. Just as striking was the unnamed writer she quoted. He was identified by Thomas Frank in The Wall Street Journal as the now largely forgotten but once powerful right-wing Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler.

Palin, who lies with ease about her own record, misrepresented Pegler?s too. He decreed America was ?done for? after Truman won a full term in 1948. For his part, Truman regarded the columnist as a ?guttersnipe,? and with good reason. Pegler was a rabid Joe McCarthyite who loathed F.D.R. and Ike and tirelessly advanced the theory that American Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe (?geese,? he called them) were all likely Communists.

Surely Palin knows no more about Pegler than she does about the Bush doctrine. But the people around her do, and they will be shaping a Palin presidency. That they would inject not just Pegler?s words but spirit into their candidate?s speech shows where they?re coming from. Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, said that the Palin-sparked convention created ?a whole new Republican Party,? but what it actually did was exhume an old one from its crypt.

The specifics have changed in our new century, but the vitriolic animus of right-wing populism preached by Pegler and McCarthy and revived by the 1990s culture wars remains the same. The game is always to pit the good, patriotic real Americans against those subversive, probably gay ?cosmopolitan? urbanites (as the sometime cross-dresser Rudy Giuliani has it) who threaten to take away everything that small-town folk hold dear.

The racial component to this brand of politics was undisguised in St. Paul. Americans saw a virtually all-white audience yuk it up when Giuliani ridiculed Barack Obama?s ?only in America? success as an affirmative-action fairy tale ? and when he and Palin mocked Obama?s history as a community organizer in Chicago. Neither party has had so few black delegates (1.5 percent) in the 40 years since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies started keeping a record.

But race is just one manifestation of the emotion that defined the Palin rollout. That dominant emotion is fear ? an abject fear of change. Fear of a demographical revolution that will put whites in the American minority by 2042. Fear of the technological revolution and globalization that have gutted those small towns and factories Palin apotheosized.

And, last but hardly least, fear of illegal immigrants who do the low-paying jobs that Americans don?t want to do and of legal immigrants who do the high-paying jobs that poorly educated Americans are not qualified to do. No less revealing than Palin?s convention invocation of Pegler was the pointed omission of any mention of immigration, once the hottest Republican issue, by either her or McCain. Saying the word would have cued an eruption of immigrant-bashing ugliness, Pegler-style, before a national television audience. That wouldn?t play in the swing states of Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, where Obama already has a more than 2-to-1 lead among Hispanic voters. (Bush captured roughly 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004.)

Since St. Paul, Democrats have been feasting on the hypocrisy of the Palin partisans, understandably enough. The same Republicans who attack Democrats for being too P.C. about race now howl about sexism with such abandon you half-expect Phyllis Schlafly and Carly Fiorina to stage a bra-burning. The same gang that once fueled Internet rumors and media feeding frenzies over the Clintons? private lives now express pious outrage when the same fate befalls the Palins.

But the ultimate hypocrisy is that these woebegone, frightened opponents of change, sworn enemies of race-based college-admission initiatives, are now demanding their own affirmative action program for white folks applying to the electoral college. They want the bar for admission to the White House to be placed so low that legitimate scrutiny and criticism of Palin?s qualifications, record and family values can all be placed off limits. Byron York of National Review, a rare conservative who acknowledges the double standard, captured it best: ?If the Obamas had a 17-year-old daughter who was unmarried and pregnant by a tough-talking black kid, my guess is if they all appeared onstage at a Democratic convention and the delegates were cheering wildly, a number of conservatives might be discussing the issue of dysfunctional black families.?

The cunning of the Palin choice as a political strategy is that a candidate who embodies fear of change can be sold as a ?maverick? simply because she looks the part. Her marketers have a lot to work with. Palin is not only the first woman on a Republican presidential ticket, but she is young, vibrant and a Washington outsider with no explicit connection to Bush or the war in Iraq. That package looks like change even if what?s inside is anything but.

How do you run against that flashy flimflam? You don?t. Karl Rove for once gave the Democrats a real tip rather than a bum steer when he wrote last week that if Obama wants to win, ?he needs to remember he?s running against John McCain for president,? not Palin for vice president. Obama should keep stepping up the blitz on McCain?s flip-flops, confusion, ignorance and blurriness on major issues (from education to an exit date from Iraq), rather than her gaffes and r?sum?. If he focuses voters on the 2008 McCain, the Palin question will take care of itself.

more... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/opi ... wanted=2&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Dan Drezner Cuts To The Chase
By: John Cole September 12, 2008 at 10:21 am


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This was written by a Republican, btw.



Dan Drezner, after watching the Palin interview, asks a question:


Question to other GOP policy wonks: is it possible to support a candidate who campaigns on the notion that expertise is simply irrelevant?

The depressing thing is that this has been the GOP platform for years now. Expertise is overrated. Gut instincts, being "tough," and being "decisive," and not "blinking" are all far more important than actually knowing things.

Look at the thorough disdain for science the GOP has displayed for the past few years. Amorphous morals trump reason and science, and then those morals are conveniently discarded or altered when it becomes inconvenient for the GOP (see: family values, David Vitter).

The funny thing about all this is that the new savior of the GOP, Sarah Palin, is the one who is finally waking everyone up to what the Republican party really is all about. They are not serious about foreign policy (Fallows is just brutal). They are not serious (or honest) about scientific policy. They are not serious about economic policy (other than cutting taxes). They are not serious about an energy policy (just drill, baby, drill).

They just are not serious about, well, anything.

And Sarah Palin is the distilled essence of a wingnut. She has it all. She is dishonest. She is a religious nut. She is incurious. She is anti-science. She is inexperienced. She abuses her authority. She hides behind executive privilege. She is a big spender. She works from the gut and places a greater value on instinct than knowledge.

And most dangerous of all, she is supremely self-confident to the point of not recognizing how ill-equipped she is to lead the country. This from last night stood out for me:


Charles Gibson, the interviewer, asked her if she didn't hesitate and question whether she was experienced enough.

"I didn't hesitate, no," she said.

He asked if that didn't that take some hubris.

"I answered him yes," Ms. Palin said, "because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can't blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we're on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can't blink. So I didn't blink then even when asked to run as his running mate."


George Bush in a dress. The Palin interview should be a gut-check for Republicans and conservatives who think the last eight years have been a perversion of conservative principles. I am betting most of them will not even put down their pom-poms, though.

Asbury Park/ Ocean Grove...lovely!

And isn't it convenient that after Visa's IPO, JP Morgan Chase more than recouped the price they paid for Bear Stearns???

And diplomacy/ continued international pressure wouldn't have been a better idea?

Again...using this logic we should have invaded N. Korea for the same reason, right?

We knew they had nukes, while we were simply speculating in regards to Iraq...and we turned out being horribly, tragically wrong, considering the consequences.

Isn't diplomacy working wonders in N. Korea right now without a single dead soldier or civilian on either side?

YES! I've been going to Carla for years...a very cool all around experience and everybody there knows what they're doing...you can't beat the charm of the place either.

I Just think that it is sick that a community forum can't see that anything other than a 99cent store or another Chinese take-out place on Newark Ave is a step in the right direction.

Those of you who are nostalgic for the ghetto?

What do you think is going to happen when Trump's Tower is full...when those condos on C. Columbus and Marin are full??

Kiss whatever you think your neighborhood was goodbye.

It is all going yuppie heaven.

Every land owner on Newark Ave. has the right to build up to 15 stories....did you know that????

That was decided 3 years ago, kids.

WAKE UP!

Have you looked at Newark Ave.?

It is changing, but slowly.

If you get there after 8PM it still looks a lot like Central Ave in the Heights.

Playdates...a rumpus room for kids??? Are you high???

You need to be in the suburbs, baby...not in JC...not for at least 15 years.

Hoboken doesn't even have that stuff.

Again...WAKE UP!!!

And get a real damned name...unless you are actually RabbitRabbit...please...that is pretty damned stupid.

My point gets bigger by the second.

What in blazing hell does that mean???

And don't call me sweetie unless you mean it!

More positions than the truth?

You think I'm an acrobat...a contortionist...

No, I'm a brilliant, vital, and effective guy who is TIRED of you TIRED damned people in this TIRED damned city!!!

Jesus Christ...and I can say that because He is with me, and He is tired of all you gripers too.

Wake the hell up!!!!

You can't see what is right in your faces?
Ox is VITAL...you are not.

Period.

It is sad that the arrival of a vital new place like OX on the strip of 99 cent stores only inspires a conversation about "playdates'.

Please move to Montclair, you playdate seeking people.

We're trying to build a city, not a suburb, and no I am not connected to Ox in any way except that I know Ed and I commend he and Nicole for their effort.

JC

Reading all this DRIBBLE...and I mean DRIBBLE from most of you lame assed people who live around here...you're as bad, and as hostile to anything cool as the City Gov. is.

A bunch of broke-assed, artless crybabys.

Watching the thread on Ox restaurant showed me how desperately cheap and un-cool so many people are on this list. You're not only rent refugees, you're cultural refugees...you don't have any culture, or money, and you don't want any.

Is there anybody on this list who wasn't stupid enough to buy here and then be damned to a future of perpetual complaining???

Or anybody who wants a better environment in which to thrive with like minded progressives? People who like live music, art, diversity...a dynamic, inspiring environment?

Get smart and move to Brooklyn...ANYWHERE in Bklyn, but I'd suggest Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, Carrol Gardens, Boehram Hill, or even Bushwick. There are even still some good finds on the Williamsburg/Greenpoint border.

Downtown JC is done. Stick a fork in its ass.

And The Heights??? Forget The Heights for another 10 years.

Word,
JC

I just moved to the heights, and I'm going to put in a vote for Gino's on Central Ave. The Margherita is awesome, and the 6 topping special is the real deal if you're feeling super-indulgent.

And the only cool bar in the area is The Corkscrew on the corner of Congress and Webster.

Cool jukebox, Indie/Alt/Punk/Classic Rock DJ's & live bands on the weekends, Open mic on Mondays, Karaoke on Wed., and "Guitar Hero" Tournaments on Thurs.

Guinness, Stella, Brooklyn Lager, Yeungling on tap.

Good bar.