The Goat Pen

no, most Fox viewers are just plain stupid, not misinformed.

The poll has a chicken and egg problem. Is it FoxNews dumbing them down, or are they choosing FoxNews because they intentionally want to be ignorant of certain issues?

I think williams on nbc offers the most unbiased/educational natuional news. forget the news networks

Winners and losers from the GOP’s 12th debate


http://blog.chron.com/rickperry/2011/11 ... ry-debate/

As the eight Republicans who would be president gathered Tuesday evening for their 12th debate – yes, 12! – at the majestic Daughter’s of the American Revolution Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., a martial song from the past lodged in my brain.

With national security the scheduled focus, I kept hearing the lyrics, “Give me some men who are stout-hearted men/who will fight for the right they adore. . . .” (For those of you too young to remember, YouTube renditions of the song feature singers ranging from Nelson Eddy to Barbra Streisand.)

The candidates’ previous forays into national security, including a debate in South Carolina a couple of weeks ago, have been exercises in leapfrogging bellicosity, with candidates vying to see who could trump the other’s toughness. Here’s former House Speaker Newt Gingrich last Saturday night in Des Moines, Iowa: “I would say to the government of Iran today, you have a very short time to solve this on your own, and if you don’t, we will solve it for you, and we frankly could care less what the rest of the world thinks. We’re going to get it done.”

Michele Bachmann’s double-fence along the entire U.S.-Mexican border (not to mention Herman Cain’s electrified one), Mitt Romney picking a trade fight with China, Rick Perry (“commander-in-chief of over 20,000 troops”) yanking US out of UN, as well as standing tall for waterboarding — these folks want the world to know this country is not to be trifled with. Only the libertarian in the crowd, Texas Congressman Ron Paul, has eschewed the pugnacity.

Should the winner-loser designation go to the toughest-sounding candidate – Gingrich’s aforementioned answer, after all, was a huge crowd-pleasing winner – or the candidate who seems the most sensible (which may be Jon Huntsman’s only hope)? I tried to opt for the latter.

As it turned out, it was a good and spirited debate, with candidates for the most part offering more thoughtful and nuanced answers than they have in the past.

THE TOP TIER

1. NEWT GINGRICH

The former speaker, now the frontrunner in most polls, continued to rely on his experience, his historical awareness and his supreme self-confidence. What will be interesting is whether those qualities will help him fend off efforts to “Perry” him over his thoughtful remarks on immigration, remarks that will sound a whole lot like amnesty to those same tea party folks who abandoned the Texas governor because of his stance on in-state tuition for the children of undocumented immigrants.

2. JON HUNTSMAN JR.

The former governor of Utah and President Obama’s ambassador to China scored with his awareness of the connections between national security and the economy and his views on China.

3. MITT ROMNEY

The former governor of Massachusetts wasn’t particularly interested in attacking his rivals tonight, as he directed his salvos at the president. He wasn’t the driving force of the debate; Gingrich was. He’s obviously knowledgeable, although tonight he resorted to clichés and sloganeering that added little to the debate.

SECOND TIER

4. RICK SANTORUM

Like Gingrich, Santorum can call upon his experience in Congress, and he almost always answers questions thoroughly and thoughtfully. Tonight was no difference, although his problem continues to be that he just doesn’t make much of an impression.

5. RON PAUL

The libertarian congressman from Texas, rising in the polls in Iowa and elsewhere, offered a spirited defense of his isolationist views, however at odds they are with the Republican mainstream.

6. RICK PERRY

The Texas governor was on the cusp between the second and third tier. He talked more than usual and offered some interesting ideas, but as usual too often substituted an adamant tone (“totally and absolutely”) for depth, nuance and complexity. He was strong on immigration, as usual, although he was probably lucky that no one really pressed him on his idea for a no-fly zone over Syria.

7. MICHELE BACHMANN

The Minnesota congresswoman, like Perry, was in the mix tonight, but her answers usually lacked depth. She’s determined to blame the nation’s every problem on the sitting president.

THIRD TIER

8. HERMAN CAIN

The former pizza chain executive, talk-radio host and motivational speaker was out of his depth tonight, lost without his 9-9-9 slogan. “It depends …” is his default answer to issues he knows little about.

LINES THAT MIGHT STICK, FOR GOOD OR ILL

NEWT GINGRICH:

“Timothy McVeigh succeeded.”

“Einstein came here as an immigrant.”

“I do not believe that the people of the United States are going to take people who have been here a quarter-century, who have children and grandchildren … separate them from their families and expel them.”

RICK PERRY:

“I think it’s time for a 21st century Monroe Doctrine.”

RON PAUL:

“The drug war was mentioned. I think that’s another war that ought to be canceled.”

Today on the grand jury I got to hear a young woman who was raped repeatedly by her grandfather for 6 years and threatened to throw her and her father out on the street if she told her father or anyone else. If she didn't perform the sex to his satisfaction, he'd ground her (apparently the father trusted the grandfather with disciplining his daughter). When she finally worked up the courage to tell her grandmother, the grandmother called her a whore and disowned her.

Normally when polling the jurors I say "all in favor to indict". On this case I said "all in favor of him rotting in hell"

I was disgusted. I wanted to apologize to her on behalf of all men after hearing her story.

Horrible shit. Humans are oftentimes horrible, horrible people.

Juarez Hitman

long read, but I liked it...

http://variousenthusiasms.wordpress.com ... n-harpers/

She asked for it. Dressing like that.

Owlman wrote:The poll has a chicken and egg problem. Is it FoxNews dumbing them down, or are they choosing FoxNews because they intentionally want to be ignorant of certain issues?

that's not the same kind of chicken and egg problem that ecat has when he's dining at the vacation buffet.

That's a shrimp problem. Totally different.

Stu, Thank you for standing with the OWS protesters. we live in a world where corporations are considered people and we rack up trillions of dollars in debt while sending billions to our enemies. it's a fucked up situation and adding a little humanity to it cant do anything but help.

well, I don't mind the OWS crowd but that was hedge in the video

sorry. I got you mixed up. blame it on the belgian corporate bastards that got me drunk on budweiser. mea culpa.

Saint wrote:

Owlman wrote:The poll has a chicken and egg problem. Is it FoxNews dumbing them down, or are they choosing FoxNews because they intentionally want to be ignorant of certain issues?

that's not the same kind of chicken and egg problem that ecat has when he's dining at the vacation buffet.

ahhh...memories

worst .....vacation.....ever

http://www.missilebases.com/properties

I want one. That Titan Missile site outside of Denver...210 acres and 45,000 sqft of space. Yeah, they want 2.8, but I bet you could get it at around 2.


Of course, there are moderately priced ones as well.

I saw a story where a guy bought one and turned it into his home. He had conduit going down the missile silo to provide electricity. This was like 20 years ago and I think he paid like close to a million after everything was said and done.

That sounds like some Logan shit there

was there a 14 year old filipino transvestite involved? if so, could be your boy.

When did the GOP lose touch with reality? by David Frum

http://nymag.com/news/politics/conserva ... m-2011-11/


Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama whatever his policy errors is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.

We used to say "You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts." Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.

more from Frum

"Some liberals suspect that the conservative changes of mind since 2008 are opportunistic and cynical. It’s true that cynicism is never entirely absent from politics: I won’t soon forget the lupine smile that played about the lips of the leader of one prominent conservative institution as he told me, “Our donors truly think the apocalypse has arrived.” Yet conscious cynicism is much rarer than you might suppose. Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves. Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him—and yet that is done too.

Conservatives have been driven to these fevered anxieties as much by their own trauma as by external events. In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump. Along the way, the GOP suffered two severe election defeats in 2006 and 2008. Imagine yourself a rank-and-file Republican in 2009: If you have not lost your job or your home, your savings have been sliced and your children cannot find work. Your retirement prospects have dimmed. Most of all, your neighbors blame you for all that has gone wrong in the country. There’s one thing you know for sure: None of this is your fault! And when the new president fails to deliver rapid recovery, he can be designated the target for everyone’s accumulated disappointment and rage. In the midst of economic wreckage, what relief to thrust all blame upon Barack Obama as the wrecker-in-chief."

When did Liberals become so unreasonable?

http://nymag.com/news/politics/liberals ... t-2011-11/


......Which brings us back to Obama. Is it understandable to believe that his administration has been a disappointment to date? Of course. On the other hand, maybe there is something to learn from the frequent (anguished) comparisons liberals make between Obama and FDR. Part of the reason Roosevelt’s record looms so large from a distance is because historians measure these things differently from political activists. Activists measure progress against the standard of perfection, or at least the most perfect possible choice. Historians gauge progress against what came before it.

By that standard, Obama’s first term would indeed seem to qualify as gangsta shit. His single largest policy accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, combines two sweeping goals—providing coverage to the uninsured and taming runaway medical-cost inflation—that Democrats have tried and failed to achieve for decades. Likewise, the Recovery Act contained both short-term stimulative measures and increased public investment in infrastructure, green energy, and the like. The Dodd-Frank financial reform, while failing to end the financial industry as we know it, is certainly far from toothless, as measured by the almost fanatical determination of Wall Street and Republicans in Congress to roll it back.

Beneath these headline measures is a second tier of accomplishments carrying considerable historic weight. A bailout and deep restructuring of the auto industry that is rapidly being repaid, leaving behind a reinvigorated sector in the place of a devastated Midwest. Race to the Top, which leveraged a small amount of federal seed money into a sweeping national wave of education experiments, arguably the most significant reform of public schooling in the history of the United States. A reform of college loans, saving hundreds of billions of dollars by cutting out private middlemen and redirecting some of the savings toward expanded Pell Grants. Historically large new investments in green energy and the beginning of regulation of greenhouse gases. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for women. Elimination of several wasteful defense programs, equality for gays in the military, and consumer-friendly regulation of food safety, tobacco, and credit cards.

Of the postwar presidents, only Johnson exceeds Obama’s domestic record, and Johnson’s successes must be measured against a crushing defeat in Vietnam. Obama, by contrast, has enjoyed a string of foreign-policy successes—expanding targeted strikes against Al Qaeda (including one that killed Osama bin Laden), ending the war in Iraq, and helping to orchestrate an apparently successful international campaign to rescue Libyan dissidents and then topple a brutal kleptocratic regime. So, if Obama is the most successful liberal president since Roosevelt, that would make him a pretty great president, right?

Did liberals really expect more?