US POLITICS: AMERICANS, PLEASE WELCOME YOUR NEW PRESIDENT... SCOTT BROWN!

The Bush "miss me yet" is evidence towards my long-held suspicion that if W had the ability to run a third time he would actually have a good chance of winning. And yes I think that little of my fellow countrymen and women.

upon further reflection, and seeing the video of her checking it...

come on guys. The notes on the hand thing was mega stupid. Quayle stupid. So stupid that it's fair, not just "gotcha," to bring it up in the context of "is this person so fucking dumb/out of it that she's unelectable?"

Dont try to defend fox y fwiends. i assure you they are all repellant

I'm seriously thinking back on it now as dumber than anything quayle did/said.

Maybe in time it's gonna sink in?

Did the rightwing media do as good of a job of brushing off his idiocy as they do Sarah's? I remember in my youth thinking that he was just a joke and would never be a serious presidential contender, and that this was the accepted narrative.

Labor's lost year:

For American labor, year one of Barack Obama's presidency has been close to an unmitigated disaster....

By my count, this marks the fourth time in the past half-century that labor's efforts to strengthen workers' ability to organize have been deferred by the Democratic presidents and the heavily Democratic Congresses they supported. In 1965, about the only piece of Great Society legislation not enacted was the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act provision that gave states the power to block unions from claiming as members all the employees in workplaces where they had won contracts. In 1979, as American management was beginning to invest heavily in union-busting endeavors, the first effort to reform labor law failed to win cloture in the Senate by one vote as President Jimmy Carter stood idly by. In 1994, President Bill Clinton responded to a similar labor-backed effort by appointing a commission to recommend changes in labor law to the next Congress -- which turned out to be run by Newt Gingrich. And last year, by asking his labor supporters to wait, Obama ensured -- unintentionally, of course -- that the next effort to revive organizing must wait until the next overwhelmingly Democratic Congress....

What will life be like in an America with almost no private-sector unions or collective bargaining? We had a glimpse of that during George W. Bush's presidency, in which the unionization rate was already so low that median household incomes declined even as gross domestic product rose. It's also apparent that a deunionized private sector won't readily support -- politically or economically -- a unionized or expansive public sector....

No nation has ever been home to a middle-class majority absent a sizable labor movement. In their failure to advance labor's prospects, the Democrats condemn themselves to a future of fewer Democratic voters and their nation to a future of mass downward mobility.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/09/AR2010020902465.html

I remember in my youth thinking that he was just a joke

Same here. I was 6-9 years old when he was VP, but even then, just by occasionally observing NBC nightly news in the background, I thought that he was a complete idiot.

anybody who cites michael barone's analysis of anything approvingly, well, good luck to you

Quayle represented the statistical means of intelligence for a veep.

you're right about labor getting a shitty deal, and you'd also be right to blame the worst institution in the US, the senate, again:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-02-09/becker-labor-board-nomination-held-up-after-senate-cloture-vote.html

The capper on the whole hand-note thing is how she wrote "budget cuts" and put a line through "budget" and wrote "tax". Not only is it something a C-student would do when writing a paper in high school, it demonstrates the how little she has mentally invested in her policies.

Like she's presented this MADLIB: "Republicans have long stood for _______ cuts" and she writes budget. Despite the fact that she campaigned as the republican vice presidential candidate! She doesn't believe any of it, which is why she couldn't remember the easiest political MADLIB in the book!

It also displays the imagination land that the GOP platform resides in, which is something Obama pointed out at the Q&A when reading from their health care reform package. You can cross out "budget" cuts and put in "tax" cuts and somehow there are no fiscal consequences. I want to see their math!

If anything, the hand notes incident will probably just help Palin rather than harm her. I think a good portion of the country has moved from wanting a leader who is not an "elitist" to wanting someone who is demonstratively unintelligent and who goes to great lengths to show it. At this point, the more foolish and ignorant she looks, the more her profile goes up.

"Last night Piper asked me to tell her a bedtime story and I said 'YOU BETCHA,' let me tell you about two brothers named Abel and Cain..."

want something horrible to happen to this lady and fast

sorry but it is true

if you wish that, she can't be the GOP nominee in 2012. think of all the lozls that would be lost.

sorry, "lols." all the lols are yearning to be free.

nate silver with some data: first look at palin's primary math

Why are all the nerds doing this lady's homework for her?

haha yeah i had the same reaction when i read that post, "hmm veddy interesting mistah silvah, now i must destroy you lest this plan fall into the WRONG HANDS"

i don't think palin has a chance, even if nate silver became part of her staff

Also am trying to LOL at Sullivan going apeshit about Palin instead of joining him in an o_0 at her whole end times/prosperity gospel bullshit.

Being a journalist/writer/whatever, I do think it would be fairly impossible to elect someone who wasn't prepared (either in the homework or the attitude sense) to take difficult questions from the press. It's not possible to hide from the media forever, even when a network is helping you.

Palin is so fucked - I look forward to her being a drag on the Republican Party for years to come

wish i had your confidence. i'd rather she just go away.

she's like Perot, a spoiler figure. she has limited appeal, she's an idiot who won't be able to run a decent campaign, a majority of the public already hates/distrusts her, the GOP establishment doesn't like her - how many obstacles in her way are enough for you?

i have to say, though i agree palin is a spoiler figure who will never hold elected office again, that one of the things that troubled me the most about the whole sordid john edwards affair saga, is that the national press corps knew something was up, and sat on it or didn't pursue it.. that, and hearing commentators like chris matthews say that he always thought edwards had no substance. really? you thought that & thought it was a-ok that he is able to present himself via the media, to the american public, as someone who is qualified and knowledgeable?

what does having an affair have to do with "substance" anyway?

wish i had your confidence. i'd rather she just go away.

what worries you about palin? when she was first nominated for GOP VP, i was worried, because i saw her debate in the alaska governor's race on youtube and she seemed competent, kind of moderate, and sharp (and good-looking). but at this point it's obvious she's in above her head, and she's committed to a lazy ascent to the top of the GOP via transparently empty sloganeering. palin once had a chance to be something more, but at this point, shakey's right: she will be a drag on the GOP for a long time to come.

(also her speech at the GOP Convention was kind of awesome, if intellectually-dishonest and mean-spirited)

Fidelity issues perhaps speak to overall perception of honesty in an individual. Also WRT Edwards, press probably didn't go there because his campaign fizzed out after NH - how do we know that insiders discovering an affair didn't impact on how quickly the campaign folded, or how Edwards suddenly went out of contention.

Palin's speech at RNC was 'awesome' in how it showed the mindset of the current party as nyah-nyah and essentially immature.

i don't disagree. but it was also a showstopper: well-written, all sharp elbows and aggressive charges, and made the best possible use of palin at the time.

Yeah it was total red meat - my mom and I were on the phone 'watching it together' like you do and she was responding to it like some stand-up routine. Palin's only shots are cheap ones.

rt. and, as we learned over the next few months, cheap shots are the only shots she had.

which is why i'm not worried about her

Where are the religious people who are willing to point out that a close examination of the religious right's leaders shows us nothing but Pharisees? The way to be an intellectual threat to these assholes (and the threat there is they wouldn't be able to go 'oooh, look at the book smarts' while being schooled on their book) is to hit them with chapter and verse there. The best part of being a literate atheist is being able to contradict bashers' beliefs

Yeah it was total red meat - my mom and I were on the phone 'watching it together' like you do and she was responding to it like some stand-up routine. Palin's only shots are cheap ones.

― spay or neuter your blue dog (suzy), Wednesday, February 10, 2010 5:44 PM (1 hour ago)

This is kind of why she worries me so much. I think our culture is shifting toward a frame of mind where the person with the best zings wins. Thanks, internet!

Also, she is more willing than any other prominent politician (Republican or Democrat) to go for pure red meat speeches that will say whatever underhanded things are necessary to get people to pay attention. Very few popular politicians are quite this shameless.

One of the amusing things about the whole palin tele prompter thing is that at the RNC 2 years back whe was completely incapable of learning how to work with one and most of all understanding that there was a man backstage somewhere controlling it and this was so it went at her speed as opposed to being there to regulate her speech. Her staff then built this into a minor blogosphere talking point to account for her terrible convention speech. It all probably had a lot to do with the fact that they assigned a cretinous campaign volunteer to be her teleprompter operator rather than employing a professional as they did for McCain and everyone else.

Ed, you should send that info to a responsible media outlet, maybe?

Take it from a zinger: snappy, mean comebacks are 'battle' victories, not 'war' victories. In a figure like Palin, who has not been subjected to the cross-examination most Americans expect an elected official to undergo, it really is all she's got because she can't be kept in that bubble of inaccessibility forever.

what's funny is that now she has the time to get the seasoning and policy briefings to become a serious politician, but she seemingly has no interest in it (given how she's behaved). becoming a serious politician is either above her capabilities or below her interest level, or both.

is it out of her reach or interest, or is it just that the less she does that kind of thing, the more her people love her? that's what bothers me the most about her, the ability to turn any condescension directed at her into one more reason she's just like them and getting picked on by all those assholes in the media.

yeah. all US politics can be understood this way:

And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

(obviously about the 2004 bush/kerry election, but makes a useful point)

Whatever. The thing is, this worm can turn, because even when you're on the side of someone who cries victim with justification, if they start doing it all the fucking time, it lessens its effectiveness. In politics, it's throwing red meat to the opposition one meatball at a time.

Based on my own assessment of her personality, she's a great believer in the sound of her own voice and the 'you think you're better than us' rhetoric she points at anyone who condemns her lack of bona fides indicates she's the one with the superiority complex, but it's of the 'you're going to hell and I'm not' variety. Certitude like that means she's going to say that one thing that pisses off her handlers (and she does have neocon handlers) plus mainstream folksy folks and they'll find some other stooge that can actually read from a teleprompter to take their money and march in time.

generally, you're right. palin can't win a general election. depending on how things play out between now and 2012, she might be able to win the GOP nomination, tho.

can't imagine there wouldn't be sizable majority of folks (of all parties) that would be terrified at the thought of that woman at the levers of power.

sort of hope she just flames out in a sex scandal or something, or it turns out she's been poisoning her aides... something that will prevent her from seeming victimized.

though falling off the side of the earth would work too.

Pretty sure she thinks it's flat so that sounds like a plan, yo.

Esq: Nah. This time after the '04 cycle nobody thought Obama would run for anything except his second Senate bid. We seriously thought we might've been looking at a President Giuliani.

I really think much of what Obama's facing from the center-right is down to the authority they are willing to accept from a President who is black, whether this resistance is subliminal or public, stated or not. I'm sure Obama gets it (see: 'no sudden moves') but because of see above: victim shit, he just grits his teeth and gets on with it. Yes, it is frustratingly slow but previous Presidents had all that white privilege to carry the day, no joke (and Roosevelt was so patrician anything he did to help people was totally painted as noblesse oblige, not socialism).

roosevelt was accused of socialism in his day!

also of fascism!

We seriously thought we might've been looking at a President Giuliani.

ugh, never say those words.

Yeah, but to be fair there were numerous Socialists and an American Bund then and nobody tried to portray him as Hitler.