Conservatives Brexit, Conservatives broke it. 'It' being the UK.

The vote to leave the UK was along party lines, being overwhelmingly a vote by Conservatives both conventional 'mainstream' conservatives, and the more rabid UKIP crowd, comparable to our teabaggers and birchers. Conservatives not only were willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces, they were willing to slit their economic throats to express their hatred of immigrants.

Sarah Palin demonstrated her deep ignorance on financial and foreign policy matters, speaking as a surrogate for Donald Trump, peddling ridiculous conspiracy theories about the EU, and advocating even more ridiculous policy positions that are not even remotely similar, about the UN.  From FB

Sarah Palin June 24 at 10:48am ·

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another...
The UK knew - it was that time. And now is that time in the USA.
The Brexit referendum is akin to our own Declaration of Independence. May that refreshed spirit of sovereignty spread over the pond to America's shores!
Congratulations, smart Brits. Good on you for ignoring all the fear mongering from special interest globalists who tend to aim for that apocalyptic One World Government that dissolves a nation's self-determination and sovereignty... the EU being a One World Government mini-me.
America can learn an encouraging lesson from this.
It is time to dissolve political bands that connect us to agendas not in our best interest. May UN shackles be next on the chopping block.
- Sarah Palin

The WaPo covered it very well:

As the United Kingdom prepared to leave the European Union, British Prime Minister David Cameron announced his resignation, the value of the pound fell and HBO had to assure worried “Game of Thrones” fans that future Northern Ireland film shoots were going to be fine, Sarah Palin came forth with her own take.
On Friday, the former Alaskan governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate congratulated the “smart Brits,” likening the June referendum to the Declaration of Independence. After all, as she noted in a Facebook post, the citizens of the United Kingdom may have avoided nothing less than the end of the world.
Palin, a Donald Trump supporter, applauded the “leave” voters for outfoxing “globalists” who would bring about an “apocalyptic One World Government,” she wrote on Facebook. That is because the European Union, in her words, is a “One World Government mini-me.”
Palin’s comments marked a public embrace of a conspiracy theory popularly known as the New World Order. Palin did not elaborate what, exactly, the apocalypse would look like. But the details of who or what make up the New World Order depend on the theorist — it is a secret organization of politicians, banks, the Illuminati, the media or, perhaps, lizard people. Distilled, the main goal of the organization is a totalitarian regime that will emerge from the shadows: One World Government to rule them all.

So far as I can discern, the whole one world order nonsense is reminiscent of J.R.R. Tokien's lines from the Lord of the Rings saga:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

Crackpot conspiracy theories like the One World Order play to the lowest, and basest common denominators of the ignorant, acting as propaganda to divert those it affects from rational and fact based thought to emotional thinking that ignores fact.  It plays as well on the worst tendencies and beliefs of those it affects, in this case promoting an evil form of nationalism and the worst of "Us vs. Them" thinking.  It is notably anti-immigrant, with people wanting to 'take back' their country from those bad brown people who are 'not like us'.

Beyond the political conservative vs liberal division, voters for Brexit were older, white, and less educated, and tended to be more rural, which has correlated with less educated generally.   In other words, the Brexit voters were the Brit equivalent of Trump supporters specifically, and more extreme right wing conservatives in the US generally.  They are the resentful and bigoted "I shouldn't have to know anything" scientist and other 'elite' hating folks.

What do I mean by 'breaking' the UK?  Financial decline, certainly.  The why and how of that is outlined here very well by the prestigious London School of Economics (and political science).

The British stock market has already faced serious losses, and foreign investors are talking about pulling out of the UK -- or at the very least, phasing out manufacturing and instead taking their new investment to the continental EU.  The Guardian article here addresses the example of the Japanese investors.

From the Guardian:

It echoed a plea in May by the prime minister Shinzo Abe for Britain to remain in the EU, pointing out that those Japanese companies employ around 140,000 people in the UK.
“There would be an immeasurable impact on their businesses” in the event of a victory for the Leave campaign, he said.

...Several Japanese firms have voiced alarm at the prospect of Britain leaving the EU.
Hitachi has said Britain’s membership of the EU had influenced its decision to open a train maintenance depot in west London last year.
“We built the plant because Britain is part of the EU and we are considering expanding into the EU,” the Asahi Shimbun quoted Toshiaki Higashihara, Hitachi’s president, as saying this week, adding that he opposed a Brexit.

Tatsuya Tanaka, the president of Fujitsu, whose information technology arm employs 14,000 people in Britain, has said that a vote to leave the EU would be “a huge negative” for the electronics firm’s business in the UK.
Abe has voiced support for David Cameron’s campaign to keep Britain in the EU, warning British voters that leaving could threaten Japanese investment and put more than 100,000 jobs at risk.

But more than that, Scotland where a close vote regarding independence failed, is looking at a new vote, with a change in support for leaving the UK now that the Brexit vote has succeeded.  Scotland voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU.  Looks like they won't vote to stay in the UK however.

It has begun, as reflected in this news coverage from France:

EU leaders meet without UK for first time in wake of Brexit

Cameron flew back to London after Tuesday's summit, as Scotland's first minister headed in the opposite direction to test the waters in Brussels for her country joining the bloc as a separate entity.

And we have this about Northern Ireland wanting to stay in the EU - even if it means leaving the UK, which it happens was provided for in a 1998 accord between the UK and Ireland.

Then there is the post-Brexit vote news about Australia wanting to leave the Commonwealth, for their own economic reasons.  This underlines how Brexit makes the UK less influential and successful.

Palin got it so very wrong, as she always does. Apparently a lot of anti-Brexit voters want to take back their respective countries, not from the EU or the UN, but from the UK, because Brexit so badly damages the UK both politically and economically in the world.  It is clearly an attempt by those other parts of the UK to dump the dummies, the crazy conservatives, the petty and fearful bigots, to go their own way without the conservative baggage that is an anchor dragging them down, down, down.

Once again, conservatives demonstrate that they are poorly informed on factual, substantive matters,, and that they cannot, or will not (same effective result), participate in mature, responsible, informed democracy.  Rather conservatives act like petty children badly in need of a time out until they can conduct themselves properly.

Long term, Brexit will no doubt do for the UK what the conservatives would not do for themselves, resulting in a massive breakdown of the conservative side of the political spectrum, leading to a purge of the destructive controlling factions and eliminating their influence for a period of time.

We can probably expect the same thing as conservatives in the US implode with the nomination of Donald Trump destroys the existing GOP.

Conservatives: Inaccuracy, Hypocrisy, Vulgarity and Lack of Accountability – part 2 / Palin

It appears that in the course of endorsing Donald “turnip-top” Trump, the tea party bimbo Sarah Palin has attempted to blame President Obama for her son’s PTSD, and his domestic violence charge.  Palin claims that Obama’s failure to respect the troops is responsible for her idjit son Track’s violence towards women and chronic abuse of alcohol.

Instead, Palin appears to either be hoping very much that this claim will slide by the crazy, ignorant base who doesn’t give a tinker’s damn if Trump (and his supporters) are factually accurate or even vaguely truthful.  If not, her endorsement might quickly prove to be more of a liability than a benefit to the eccentric right winger leader.  False claims about military service are one of the few things that might antagonize Trump’s ignorant followers.

Here are the apparent problems with Palin’s claim:

1. there appears to be no credible diagnosis of PTSD from a health professional re Track, and there is a huge questionmark over Track Palin having been in combat;

2. there is no credible evidence that how a president feels or doesn’t feel affects anyone having PTSD, re the subjective perception of respect for the military;

3. Track enlisted in 2007, served for a year in 2008, BEFORE Obama became president.  If anyone is responsible for problems resulting from Iraq, it would be Dubya, not Obama; and

4. the entire Palin clan is prone to drunken violence, without the rest having served anywhere in our armed forces.  It is a ‘Palin’ family thing, not a PTSD problem.  The family appears to be a bunch of armed alcohol abusing louts, such that a more plausible explanation for Track’s behavior is that he learned it at home.

From Politicalgates.blogspot.com we see that it appears that Track Palin served a little over a week of active service under the Obama administration’s first term of office; further that his prior year of active service does NOT appear to have been in combat, from the available description on his discharge papers.  There have been vets who have been in theaters of conflict in other countries WITHOUT having themselves been in combat.  I would further underline that nowhere (so far) have I found Track Palin himself making the claim he was a combat veteran, OR that he suffers from PTSD.

From Politicalgates.blogspot.com on how one checks combat service records, which indicates Track Palin is NOT a combat veteran, via the Veterans Disability blog:

That was the case today when speaking with a Veteran about combat. His question was: “What exactly makes anyone a combat Veteran?” Some may be quick to say that serving in combat makes you a combat Veteran, but there is more to it than that.
The VA lists several different ways in which a Veteran can prove he or she was in combat.
· If you received a combat service medal, then you are considered a combat Veteran
· If you received hostile fire pay, imminent danger pay or tax benefits
· If you received military service documentation that documents combat theater
So, does serving in a foreign country automatically qualify me as combat Veteran? Not necessarily. Even if you served in Iraq or Afghanistan during the past ten years, it does not guarantee that you are a combat Veteran.
How can you find out? Well, your DD-214 is a great place to start. Your Discharge won’t automatically say that you were a combat Veteran though…that would be too easy. Box 13 on more modern DD-214’s is where they list medals, awards and ribbons. The VA does recognize certain medals etc. as a qualifier for combat service. (That list will appear in an upcoming blog.)
Also listed on your DD-214 is the type of pay you received. Box 18 would be the place to find out if you received Hostile Fire Pay, or the Imminent Danger Pay. It is important to note that this can appear in box 13, though it is rare for it to appear there.

And a vet who has served in combat, and who has served with Track Palin, is quite adamant he is not a victim of PTSD, nor have I found anyone who served with him who substantiates that Track Palin was a combat veteran or was symptomatic for PTSD.



From Salon:

…if this wasn’t about a 26 year-old grown man currently charged with fourth-degree assault, fourth-degree misconduct involving a weapon and interfering with a report of domestic violence.
Earlier this week, Track, who divorced his first wife in 2012, was arrested over an incident at the Wasilla home he shares with his parents. Police noted his current girlfriend had “bruising and swelling around her left eye” and described Track as “uncooperative, belligerent, and evasive with my initial line of questions.” A breath sample registered his blood alcohol level at 0.189. In her conversation with the police, Track’s girlfriend claimed he had threatened to kill himself, and an unloaded AR-15 was found near the scene. Palin denied using a weapon but told police “that they were spread throughout both residences on the property.”
Track Palin was serving in Iraq as an air guard in the “Arctic Wolves,” the Army’s 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, during his mother’s 2008 bid for vice president. He is routinely described in the press as a combat veteran, though some within the veteran community, based on Palin’s discharge paperwork, dispute his actual combat duty.

Unless, perhaps, we want to redefine the acronym PTSD to mean (Sarah) Palin’s Totally Stupid Dypsomania (alcohol abuse)?

Here is a review of the charges against Track Palin.

This entire family of Alaskan hicks (the adults anyway) act more like trailer trash than pious folks demonstrating those wholesome family values they give such annoying lip service.  For example, we have anything-but-chaste Bristol Palin, who took a ton of $$$$ to espouse abstinence having yet another child out of wed lock, and brother Track, who is dad to a daughter born 3 months after his wedding, (a fitting repeat of his parents behavior – Track was also conceived before his own parents’ engagement and elopement) and we have this past example of Palin family drunken brawling from less than a year and a half ago.

These are NOT ‘law abiding people’, these are not ‘family values people’ who present a clear understanding or example of how people behave morally and ethically in a civil society.  These are over-privileged cretins with too little judgement and too much money, and a mind-boggling capacity for ignorance and bad behavior, and a grotesque degree of hypocrisy and a false sense of entitlement apparently.

What they are NOT is personally accountable — but apparently, on the right, that’s just a requirement for OTHER PEOPLE.  Another example of right wing do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do morality, the kind that holds other people to a higher standard than they hold themselves.  How apt that Palin endorses the oh-so-vulgar Trump; they are noisy, garish birds of a feather in a  gold paint gilded cage, hip deep in their own guano baggage, a ‘yoooge’ ‘classy’ gilded cage.

As noted by multiple other individuals who are far better entitled to address the topics of the US military and PTSD:

‘Palin is using PTSD as an excuse to shift blame away from her son’s domestic violence,’ Brandon Friedman, the former digital media director for the Department of Veterans Affairs, said in an interview with Huffington Post.

‘She never mentioned the actual victim. She portrayed her son as the victim, but never talked about his girlfriend, apparently crying and hiding under a bed because he beat her.’

Friedman also said; ‘The fact is, veterans who have PTSD are far, far more likely to harm themselves than they are to harm others.’

As for Palin’s comment about President Obama, Friedman said; ‘It’s ironic that people like Sarah Palin are in the party of “personal responsibility” but as soon as someone in her family is arrested for domestic violence, it’s Obama’s fault.’

Paul Rieckhoff, who heads Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, seemed to reiterate this statement, telling NBC News; ‘It’s not President Obama’s fault that Sarah Palin’s son has PTSD.

‘PTSD is a very serious problem, a complicated mental health injury, and I would be extremely reluctant to blame any one person in particular.’

He also said that he hopes Palin does not turn this into ‘a political chew toy in a political campaign’.

Anti-Immigration Lies and the Fundamentals of Propaganda

There are three essential, defining characteristics of propaganda.

The first characteristic is that it is fully, substantially, or significantly false, not accidentally but deliberately inaccurate.

The second characteristic is that it elicits emotional thinking rather than logical or critical thinking. The emotions it is supposed to arouse are usually negative, most often fear and/or suspicion, anger, resentment or hatred, and intolerance and bias such as racism or anti-religious feeling leading to demonizing or demeaning an individual or group, or both, by linking them together.

The third characteristic is that it is part of a larger pattern demonstrating that it is part of a planned, intentional, calculated agenda that serves someone's purpose, usually political in nature, such as contrived wedge issues used to turn out voters. A perfect example of that would be the anti-gay marriage campaign issue used by Karl Rove and George W. Bush, for which the Bush campaign leadership later apologized, or the use of racial politics, dog whistle for ginning up racism, especially southern conservative racism.

A fourth characteristic, not as essential as the preceding three, but common, is to create a sense of belonging to an aggrieved group of people with shared negative feelings towards the individual or group targeted as the subject of the propaganda. Examples would be Islamophobic propaganda, anti-LGBT propaganda, and anti-immigrant or racist propaganda.

The following image from Face Book features all of the defining characteristics.



The clear implication is that Obama is offering preferential treatment in employment to undocumented immigrants, and that Obama is somehow responsible for anyone who is not employed.

This is factually inaccurate -- the first criteria or characteristic of propaganda.

From fact check.org, back in 2010 (conclusions which continue to be true as supported by additional years of data and research):

Summary

Do immigrants take American jobs? It’s a common refrain among those who want to tighten limits on legal immigration and deny a "path to citizenship" — which they call "amnesty" — to the millions of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. There’s even a new Reclaim American Jobs Caucus in the House, with at least 41 members.
But most economists and other experts say there’s little to support the claim. Study after study has shown that immigrants grow the economy, expanding demand for goods and services that the foreign-born workers and their families consume, and thereby creating jobs. There is even broad agreement among economists that while immigrants may push down wages for some, the overall effect is to increase average wages for American-born workers.

So, who are those economists, those experts?  What studies?

Nat Journal has some specifics, from 2013:

Left and Right Agree: Immigrants Don't Take American Jobs

March 22, 2013 As Congress considers immigration reform, experts across the political spectrum say American jobs are safe.

That immigrants take the jobs of American-born citizens is “something that virtually no learned person believes in,” Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, said at a Thursday panel. “It’s sort of a silly thing.”

Most economists don’t find immigrants driving down wages or jobs, the Brookings Institution's Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney wrote in May. In fact, “on average, immigrant workers increase the opportunities and incomes of Americans,” they write. Foreign-born workers don’t affect the employment rate positively or negatively, according to a 2011 analysis from the conservative American Enterprise Institute. And a study released Wednesday by the liberal Center for American Progress suggests that granting legal status to undocumented workers might even create jobs.

The CAP study, led by the visiting head of the Washington College economics department, sought to predict what would happen under immigration reform. The researchers considered a handful of scenarios. In each, it was presumed that the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants would be immediately granted legal status. They then looked at the effect of those undocumented immigrants not being granted citizenship at all over a decade, getting it immediately, or getting it in five years.

Legal status alone would lead to the creation of 121,000 extra jobs annually over the next 10 years, they found. Getting citizenship within five years would increase that to 159,000 jobs per year. And receiving both legal status and citizenship this year would create an extra 203,000 jobs annually.

So, clearly NOT FACTUAL; tick off the first requirement of propaganda.

Undocumented people STEALING American jobs? That gins up fear, resentment, anger, a sense of being victimized, especially if you accept the premise without fact checking or critical thinking. Tick the box for the second requirement of propaganda as well; this propaganda creates the perception of a threat.

This kind of propaganda is rife on the internet, routine on right wing sources like F*cks News, and other right wing 'media' and right wing politicians.  For example we have this from Sarah Palin, via the propaganda site Breitbart.com:

To make matters worse, Palin said that the “forgotten man” who cannot catch a break will now see their tax dollars go to help take care of illegal immigrants while they are forced to compete with them for shrinking resources and jobs.

And we have Ted Cruz, presidential candidate in the running for the 2016 election, making the same claim as Palin -- and while Palin is an empty-headed dunce, clearly Cruz knows, or should be expected to know that his claims about joblessness is a lie.  Cruz is well educated, but all too willing to pander to the worst elements on the right.
From the Washington Examiner:

Ted Cruz: Immigration will increase US joblessness

But March organizers — including the Black American Leadership Alliance and Tea Party groups — do support curbing legal immigration, saying it could take jobs away from “millions of American citizens.” Cruz also claimed the Senate immigration reform would cost Americans’ jobs but without specific reference to legal immigrants.
“If this bill is passed, it will increase unemployment,” Cruz, R-Texas, said. “If this bill is passed it will increase African American unemployment. If this bill is passed it will increase youth unemployment. If this bill is passed it will increase Hispanic unemployment.”

Palin and Cruz are just two of many pushing this propaganda lie, giving us the third criteria of propaganda, that it is repetitive in serving a larger, calculated agenda; tick off that box as well.

And lastly, we see the demonizing of immigrants (both documented and undocumented)and the link to the president in an attempt to discredit him, and to portray both immigrants and President Obama as the enemy, as the villain, as the bad guys, when they are the opposite factually.

We have conservatives banding together in their ignorant, manipulated animosity. Tick off the fourth box identifying the criterion of propaganda.

Propaganda is the tool of tyrants and dictators, of the corrupt in power, or seeking power.  It is propaganda and those manipulated by it, not immigrants, that is the enemy of democracy and of America.

Remember when? Right wing Putin Loving

Over the past summer and fall months leading up to the 2014 elections there were endless examples of the right wing nuttery carrying on and on and on about how great a leader Russia’s Vlad Putin was.

He made quick decisions, he got things done, blah blah blah.   Why couldn’t No-Drama-Obama be more like Putin, blah blah blah.

We saw the Obama-bashing Putin-praising from the whole range of right wing media and punditry, including the Popsie Palin:




And that ‘the real leaders get it done’ line was then used to prop up the failures of Republicans, like Christie using it to promote Republican governors, who really do NOT have a good track record of accomplishment. It was the 2014 THEME du campaign.

From a CNN interview:
 

CHAIRMAN OF THE REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS ASSOCIATION, GOV. CHRIS CHRISTIE (R-New Jersey): You have Bruce Rauner win in Illinois, Charlie Baker win in Massachusetts, and Larry Hogan win in Maryland, that’s a really good night for Republicans to win in those blue states, and as a blue state governor myself, and as a Republican, I was particularly gratified.
CNN: So, to what do you attribute that success particularly in the blue states for governors?
CHRISTIE: Well, I think that they’ve seen Republican leadership in other states, and it’s been enormously effective. We had a lot of folks last night who said a lot of Republican incumbents were going to lose, but Rick Scott won in Florida, Rick Snyder in Michigan, Scott Walker won in Wisconsin. So I think they saw — they like governors who get things done and you saw that across the country. If you’re a governor who gets things done, the voters rewarded you.

But here’s the thing; NONE of those leaders, not Putin, not the Republican governors, are ‘getting things done’, or at least, not getting things done WELL, that benefit their respective jurisdictions.

Not a peep about Putin’s great leadership out of Popsie Palin while she was rambling along incoherently in Iowa, warming up crowds of the indifferent to her intention to run for president in 2016.

Wonder why that was?

Could it be because like the many downgrades of state credit ratings under right wing nut bullying leadership, Russia just had their credit rating reduced to JUNK status? All while Obama is basking in higher approval ratings (double those of Republicans, double those of Congress) and while Obama is getting well deserved credit for GOOD economic outcomes under his less-confrontational more-measured leadership?

Here’s what you WON’T hear from the whole range of right wingers, from Christie and the more serious RWNJs, to the totally foolish Palin. That style of leadership is all macho shine without substance; it’s bluff and bravado. Bottom line hard reality: it’s rubbish, it is ineffective, it produces negative outcomes; it is nothing but bullshit and bullying to look tough and to fake competence they don’t have.

From Bloomberg:

Russia Credit Rating Is Cut to Junk by S&P for the First Time in a Decade

(Bloomberg) — Russia’s foreign-currency credit rating was cut to junk by Standard & Poor’s, putting it below investment grade for the first time in a decade as policy makers struggle to keep economic growth alive amid sanctions and falling oil prices.
S&P, which last downgraded Russia in April, cut the sovereign one step to BB+, according to a statement released on Monday, the same level as countries including Bulgaria and Indonesia. The ratings firm said the outlook is “negative.” Russian stocks declined and bonds fell for a second day following the announcement, which came after the close of equity trading in Moscow.
The world’s biggest energy exporter is on the brink of a recession after oil prices fell to the lowest since 2009 and the U.S. and its allies imposed sanctions over President Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine. The penalties have locked Russian corporate borrowers out of international debt markets and curbed investor appetite for the ruble, stocks and bonds.
“Russia’s monetary-policy flexibility has become more limited and its economic growth prospects have weakened,” S&P said in the statement. “We also see a heightened risk that external and fiscal buffers will deteriorate due to rising external pressures and increased government support to the economy.”
Ruble, Stocks
The ruble, which has weakened 19 percent against the dollar since S&P first put Russia’s rating on review on Dec. 23, gained 1.4 percent at 2:18 p.m. in Moscow, after closing Monday at a record 68.799. The dollar-denominated RTS Index of stocks fell 0.8 percent following Monday’s 4.8 percent decline. The yield on five-year government debt climbed 16 basis points to 15.41 percent.
Some investors are prevented from owning debt rated speculative grade. Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings still have Russia as investment grade.
“The ruble weakened only modestly as the market anticipated such a decision following an explicit warning from the rating agency at the end of December,” Piotr Matys, an emerging-market strategist at Rabobank International in London, said by e-mail. “The odds that a full-scale financial crisis could unfold in the coming months has increased, given that S&P’s decision will undermine the Bank of Russia’s efforts to stabilize the ruble.”
“We believe that Russia’s financial system is weakening and therefore limiting the central bank of Russia’s ability to transmit monetary policy,” S&P said. “The central bank faces increasingly difficult monetary policy decisions while also trying to support sustainable GDP growth.”
Russia’s wealth funds are “puny” given the challenges the economy is facing, S&P’s head of sovereign ratings Moritz Kraemer told Bloomberg TV Tuesday. Increased interest rates may prevent capital outflow, which reached $151.5 billion in 2014, he said. That compares with $61 billion of outflows a year earlier.
While policy makers spent $88 billion in interventions last year to prop up the currency, President Vladimir Putin last month scolded the regulator for not reacting to the crisis more quickly. The central bank replaced its head of monetary policy in January, selecting Dmitry Tulin to take on Ksenia Yudaeva’s role in the biggest leadership change since Governor Elvira Nabiullina took charge in June 2013.
Fitch Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service both downgraded Russia to their lowest investment grades this month.
Investors often disregard ratings companies’ credit grade and outlook changes. France’s 10-year yield, which was 3.08 percent when S&P removed its top rating in January 2012, tumbled to a record-low 1.339 percent on Aug. 15 this year.
“The trend of deteriorating ratings is more important than the rating cut itself,” Aleksei Belkin, chief investment officer at Kapital Asset Management LLC in Moscow, said by e-mail. “The cut was rather widely expected and for all practical purposes was well telegraphed and discounted. I am afraid we will see more selling, not panic selling, but positions will be trimmed again.”

It’s not just Russia. All those Republican policy states, with Republican policy leadership — they’re in the giant governance toilet just like Russia, going around and round and down.

No, popsie Palin, we are not a Theocracy, and this is a bad, UN-American Idea

Women's History Month - 4

In the 2012 campaign, it is a lesson of history we should learn from the 2008 presidential race.

Sarah Palin at the time, appeared to those of us not blinded by the obsessive loyalty, or driven by ideology and partisan conformity, to be a disaster, an umitigated and unqualified mistake.  There have been many women in politics and roles in government, on both the right and the left, who are not so severely flawed as Palin was and is.

I find myself wondering about the qualifications for this year's right wing candidates, and how many of them are a significant improvement.

Or NOT much of an improvement at all?

Palin just announced she would not 'close the door' on being the candidate selected by a brokered GOP convention.   IS the GOP that stupid, that desperate, that flawed?  Palin certainly hasn't appeared to learn her lessons, to improve and correct her mistakes or to strengthen her weaknesses.

Anything is possible, but those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

A dramatization of that very history lesson, one which is more accurate than say Tennessee Tea Partiers attempts to make education more dishonest, untrue, and factually INaccurate is this:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Certainly neither of these women in right wing presidential politics, Palin or Bachmann, have the qualities that one finds in women like Hilary Clinton or Condi Rice.  It is about quality, not gender, and not ideology, that success and failure hang.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Michele Bachmann would have had different flaws, mostly different weaknesses, but would have been in many ways a poor choice for the GOP and the Tea Party for the same reasons as Palin. The party and the voters appeared to have figured that out; Bachmann, not so much, based on her assertions throughout the campaign before she quit. I guess either God changed his mind after telling her to run for the Presidency, OR, she has been hearing voices in her head that aren't really there all these years.  I have always been deeply unconvinced, profoundly skeptical, of the premise that God likes some people, or some countries, better than others.

In any event it appears the religious right, at least some of them, wanted her out, because they did not feel that it was appropriate for a woman to fill the role that was in authority over so many men. Some of our citizens, on the right, are not fully living in the current century, when they believe such things. Heck, if you go back to the Victorian era, and further, you could successfully argue they have missed some very important eras of world history relating to strong women leaders.

Sadly, not only is the right making the same mistakes which have garnered for them record high DISapproval ratings, worse for the Republicans than the Democrats; worse for the Tea Party than the Republicans; but they are doubling down on those mistakes, going further right, hurrying faster off the cliff of extremism and over-reaching arrogance.

This Is the Funniest Thing I've Seen in Ages

On the one hand, it is terribly sad, and humiliating that Michele Bachmann is a national joke, and a Congresswoman who has been elected more than once to represent Minnesota.  We lose all credibility as a state with good education and responsible, reasonable citizens every time Bachmann opens her mouth.

But this IS funny, and pretty well addresses the reality of what passes for history among the tea partiers, be it Bachmann or the dumber bunny, popsie Palin.



If you are having trouble playing this video, try this link, to play it on the colbert report web site:

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/388583/june-06-2011/paul-revere-s-famous-ride?xrs=share_copy

Factcheck.org Busts Palin for Lying about Obama, and the National Debt, and Oil Imports

Palin Whoppers on Debt, Oil Imports


June 1, 2011

Sarah Palin made two wildly inaccurate claims on the debt accumulated under President Obama and oil imports. She wrongly said that the debt had grown more under Obama than "all those other presidents combined." She also was way off when she claimed that the U.S. is going to spend "$8 billion a day" on oil imports this year and next year to make up for declining oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. The actual amount is less than $20 million a day.

Wrong on the Debt
The former Alaska governor granted an interview to Fox News' Greta Van Susteren from her tour bus. She said about the debt:
Palin, May 31: Look at the debt that has been accumulated in the last two years. It's more debt under this president than all those other presidents combined.

The public debt on Jan. 20, 2009, when Obama took office was $6.3 trillion. So "all those other presidents combined" were responsible for $6.3 trillion in debt. Under Obama, it has grown by $3.4 trillion to $9.7 trillion, as of May 27, the most recent figures available. The debt is certainly a major issue these days — Democrats and Republicans are still wrangling over spending and the debt ceiling. But Palin is off by several trillion dollars.

Even if we look at the total outstanding debt, which includes money the government owes to itself, Obama hasn't accumulated more debt than all other presidents. Total outstanding debt was $10.6 trillion when the president was sworn in; it has increased by $3.7 trillion to $14.3 trillion.

Palin isn't the first Republican to make more of debt accumulation under Obama than the facts warrant. Two years ago, Sen. Jon Kyl made a claim similar to Palin's, saying that Obama's "budget adds more debt to our country’s future than all of the debt from 1789 when George Washington was president right up through Franklin Roosevelt and – and Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush." Wrong. The budget projected at that time showed the debt nearly doubling in 10 years. Even if the budget played out as envisioned then, the debt growth wouldn't have been particularly historic. The debt nearly doubled under Bush and nearly tripled under Reagan.
Wrong on Oil Imports

Palin also was wrong when she said that the U.S. is going to spend "$8 billion a day" on oil imports this year and next year to make up for declining oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. She's not even close. It is more like $13 million a day in 2011 and $19 million a day in 2012 — assuming oil remains at the $100-per-barrel level.

Jon Stewart and Sarah Palin, a Study in Laughter and Contrasts

Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, with Sarah Palin (insert)

On Tuesday evening, January 18th 2011, Comedy Central's Jon Stewart did a marvelous send-up on the Daily Show justifiably lampooning Sarah Palin, Queen of Quit and Twit......er, Tweet for being a hypocrite and pseudo-martyr. 

Stewart continues his crusade for sanity that he began with his Washington D.C. rally last fall, (in contrast to Fox's Hannity) with grace and an exemplary measure of fairness rather than meanness, in a segment entitled 'Petty Woman' (a word play on the title 'Pretty Woman").

A word about the words 'Blood Libel'

I applaud one of the blogs linked on our blog roll for having provided some insighrt into our political language recently, dealing with the terms vitriol and now blood libel.  I offer it here because it provides more light, and perhaps a little less heat, with more understanding for Palin's possible meaning, and for more understanding of the reaction to her choice of words. This post is about understanding language, not about politics. Well done, Hot Word!

The tragedy in Arizona continues to command national attention as well as launch unusual words like “vitriol” into the national vocabulary. Today Sarah Palin referred to accusations that imagery and rhetoric associated with her may have contributed to recent violence as a “blood libel.” Why has this phrase stirred up so much additional strife?


While Palin caused a linguistic sensation in 2010 with her coinage “refudiate” as well as other colorful malapropisms, our hope here is to shed some light on the current uproar rather than add to it.


Blood libels are allegations that a person or group engages in human sacrifice, often accompanied by the claim that the blood of victims is used in various rituals and/or acts of cannibalism. Its use is nearly always excluded to sensationalized accusations and high emotions. Throughout history, these claims have been frequently made against Jews living in Europe and even resulted in lynching and persecution of whole Jewish communities.


Pundits say that the reason this phrase has provoked so much anger is because Palin is using the specific and intense sense of “blood libel” to refer to verbal criticisms, implying an equivalence between both circumstances. The famous linguist Deborah Tannen speculated today that Palin and her advisors are unaware of blood libel’s historical meaning, and that the whole episode is a case of semantic bleaching, a phenomenon where a word or term with a specialized meaning takes on a more generalized set of associations with time. In this scenario, the term may simply be thought to mean “a false accusation regarding responsibility for harm to others.”


If you have any questions regarding meaning surrounding the situation in Arizona or the current political environment, let us know below, and we will try to provide useful terms to help. Dictionary.com is a source for authority regarding words – not political actions or opinions. It’s in everyone’s interest to fully understand words and their context to make meaningful connections that are not lost among high emotion and, in the case of the tragedy in Arizona, grief, anger, and more.

Face the Nation, about Facing the Responsibility

On Sunday January 9, 2011, Robert Schieffer made an excellent observation on Face the Nation, after interviewing members of the House and Senate from both the Republican and Democratic side of the aisle.  The entire half hour was devoted to the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, ending  in a personal segment by the ever-articulate Schieffer, entitled :

"Rhetoric and Its Consequences: Violence Stirred by Inflammatory Political Discourse Endangers Our Way of Life"

We live as we were reminded yesterday in a dangerous, hair-trigger time, where tempers always seem near the boiling point and patience seems a lost trait.
Democracy's arguments have never been pretty, but technology has changed the American dialogue.

Because we can now know of problems instantly, we expect answers immediately. And when we don't get them, we let everyone know in no uncertain terms.

I was particularly taken by this next part, given the numerous recent posts here, about the number of false accusation made by the right without regard for the consequences.To put this observation in perspective, let me summarize - and these are only a few; by no means is this an exhaustive list.

We had the ice-cream bribery voter fraud hoax, then there was the 103 frivolous ballot voter fraud hoax, followed by the disabled voter fraud hoax, followed in the past few days by the TSA harassing returning soldiers hoax, the factcheck.org indictment of the 'job-killing and budget-busting' inaccuracy, the various false claims that earned pants-on-fire ratings for false accusations about government jobs versus private sector jobs, the false statements that earned the lie of the year award for false statements about health care reform, the Glenn Beck lie about the city in Ohio doing just fine without accepting federal assistance that he uses as an example of why no one should need any assistance, oh and the snow plow slowdown in New York City.....this is just a partial list of false claims and accusations made by the right.  The right making up false accusations about liberals, democrats and unions is practically a cottage industry.

Schieffer went on to say:

We scream and shout - hurl charges without proof. Those on the other side of the argument become not opponents but enemies.

Dangerous, inflammatory words are used with no thought of consequence. All's fair if it makes the point. Worse, some make great profit just fanning the flames. [emphasis mine - DG]

Schieffer continues:

Which wouldn't amount to much if the words reached only the sane and the rational, but the new technology insures a larger audience. Those with sick and twisted minds hear us, too, and are sometimes inflamed by what the rest of us often discard as hollow and silly rhetoric

And so violence becomes part of the argument.

Meanwhile the Republicans on Face the Nation and all the other 'Talking Heads' programming are desperately trying to distance themselves from their own inflammatory rhetoric, claiming the crime was not political, that there is no connection between their attempt to inflame and people responding in an angry or violent way.

"Sarah from Alaska", a book review

The Sudden Rise and Brutal Education of a New Conservative Superstar

by Scott Conroy & Shushannah Walshe

published 2009 by Public Affairs Press,
ISBN 978-1-58648-788-1 (hardcover), 301 pages

I added this book to my reading list after hearing it described as a biography which was fact-based, and which was credited with seriously striving to be as unbiased as possible. Author Shushannah Walshe was a producer at Fox News from 2001 to 2008; author Scott Conroy worked for CBS News and CBSnews.com as a producer. Both were embedded in the Vice Presidential Campaign of Sarah Palin as reporters.

I read this book in a very short period of time, so as to have my impressions from reading it fresh in my mind when I write this. The book appeared to me to be meticulously researched, with five pages of small print notes broken down by chapter, following the main body of the book. Those notes detail meticulously many of the 190 interviews for this book which they completed in research, in addition to their own shared observations from the campaign, and the additional several pages of acknowledgments. The authors point out that they give credit where they can, a few other sources did not wish to be identified in the book's pages. These sources encompass family and friends, political allies and foes - and some individuals who had been both at different points in time. One of the qualities in the writing of this book that most impressed me was the determined effort of the authors to avoid a celebrity hype piece, or a hatchet job, or sensationalism (pro or con).

My favorite quote, although long, insightfully sums up what was said by many of the people interviewed reads:

(quoting Republican State Legislator Ms. Lesil McGuire from Anchorage, who served prior to and during the Palin partial term as governor, pages 277-278)

"I am proud of her for entering the fray, for coming out and being strong with a full family and all of those obligations that she struggles with. And I am very proud of the person that she was when she entered the race. She was very real and plain spoken. But what I see as having happened now is that you had a really good person thrust way up ahead of where their experience level was. Maybe it would be like asking someone who had observed or read medical textbooks to go and perform a surgery. No matter how competent you are as a person and your character and what you stand for, it doesn't mean that you have the experience necessary to govern. People take that for granted. I think they think that when they are voting for someone, it's a personality contest. Well, if I like them, if they are attractive to me, if they seem like a good person, maybe I want them to be my neighbor, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are qualified to govern. And it may mean they are qualified to govern later on in their life, not at that particular point. So she got ahead of her experience. Because of that, in my opinion, her self-confidence deteriorated. She stopped having one-on-one meetings, because, frankly, the conversations would get into details that she wasn't able to answer. That then begets a whole other series of problems. People feel like you are not respecting them because you are not meeting with them. You are evasive; you are aloof. You're not doing it necessarily because you're mean, because you are rejecting the public; it's because you're maybe out of your league and then now you compound this with this national exposure, and she never got an opportunity to define to the world who she was prior to that."

I have been skeptical of the allegations made in the recent gossipy book "Game Change", which included the idea that Sarah Palin was so poorly educated on such a wide range of topics that she did not know why there was a North and South Korea, and that she had to be educated on the fundamentals of the history of WWI and WWII. In the section of "Sarah from Alaska"dealing with the preparation for the Vice Presidential Debate, the participants involved in prepping Palin assert that Palin had very much that kind of ignorance. They describe foot tall piles upon piles of flash cards intended to try to cram as one would for an exam to bring her up to speed. Palin appears to be not only appallingly ignorant, and unqualified to serve in a major political office, she shows no indication of attempting to remediate her deficiencies, or to even acknowledge that she has such deficiencies. Palin has, correctly, been compared unfavorably to the widely viewed as unqualified Vice President, Dan Quayle.

On page 38, Palin's own father is credited with explaining Sarah Palin's leaving the University of Hawaii at Hilo, in a comment that is in some ways descriptive of Palin (and her friends) subsequently leaving the office of Governor after the Vice Presidential campaign "It just wasn't what they expected," he says. "They were a minority type thing and it wasn't glamorous, so she came home." A similar lack of glamour is given as one of the causes, but by no means the only cause, for Palin leaving office without serving out her full term. It also reflects a very parochial, narrow comfort zone for Palin prior to being thrust upon the national stage.

I won't try to summarize the entire contents of this book. It covers Palin's entry into state level politics, it addresses many of her relationships, both family and friends, and political colleagues and adversaries. "Sarah from Alaska" provides an excellent look behind the scenes of the 2008 McCain / Palin Presidential and Vice Presidential campaigns, and follows her up until shortly after her resignation as Governor of Alaska after the campaign was over.

I was impressed with the effort by these two journalists to be as objective and fact-based for their statements as is humanly, reasonably possible. I was impressed at the level of collaboration as authors, especially given the rivalry of their employers. For those who have a continuing interest in Palin, whether as a supporter or a detractor (or the few who remain neutral), I would encourage adding this book to your reading list. It is a significant source for anyone trying to form a well-grounded opinion of Palin in anticipation of the 2012 electoral race.

I would particularly appreciate comments from any other readers of this book for their reactions to the content.