I have deliberately waited several days before commenting on the events last Friday in Tucson Arizona.  My reasons for waiting were manifestly simple; I wanted to have more information. The earliest reports are always the most sketchy and the least reliable. Eye witness testimony is notoriously untrustworthy. (Consider that for decades we though the RMS Titanic was one piece because eye-witness testimony said is did not break up and sink, but merely sank.) Continue reading →

Thanks to the synergistic timing of Sarah Palin’s TLC Realty show and her daughter’s entry into the finalist rounds of Dancing with the Has-Beens, people are again freaking out over Sarah Palin and the thought she might run for president. Andrew Sullivan certainly in this pack and is always a twitter over the GOP being remade in Sarah;’s image.

Everyone should just take a deep breath and take a stress pill.

First off the idea that the GOP is being remade into Sarah’s image didn’t seem to pass the election test. The Candidates most like her in style and in substance, O’Donnell and Angel both lost. Angel very much avoided the main stream press and tried to get to the Senate without facing serious inquiry. Yes, she nearly won, against an incumbent who was hated in his own state, and on the wrong side of a wave election. That fact that she couldn’t beat Harry Reid is evidence just how weak of a candidate she truly was. Any sort of mainstream Republican candidate would have blow Harry out of the water in this election. The same goes for Delaware and Christine O’Donnell. So the Sarah Palin model — if there is such a  thing — is a losing one.

Yes, Sarah Avoids the press and only get interviewed by friendly press. So what? She is not running for anything. She is not a politician, she is a celebrity.

I maintain that she is not an idiot, in fact I am counting on her not being on idiot. She is in her happy spot, she had found her niche in the modern entertainment/political ecosystem. she gets paid loads of money, get all the friendly press and attention she could want, and has zero real responsibilities. I do not believe she is going to throw that aside.

Nope.

She’s not going to run. She’ll tease her base with it, ’cause that brings in teh support and love and the dollars, but she’s not going to do it.

I had done some research for a post about the candidate from Delaware for the U.S. Senate,  Ms. Christine O’Donnell. Frankly I could not imagine supporting such a person for the U.S. Senate. It is not that I am against balancing a terribly out of whack budget. I’m for that. We cannot go on spending money we do not have. The fiddler always shows up for his pay. Always.
It’s that firstly I do not think she is all that serious about budget issues, but beyond that she is simply too irrational to be worthy of support.
I abandoned the post because I realized it would serve absolutely no purpose. If you were supporting her now, you would no matter what I said.
Either her irrationalities are your own, and they do no seem irrational to you. Or you do not see them and do not want to see them. The ‘win’ for your team is more important than the idea that creationism and evolution are simply too co-equal points of view. If this is a trade off you are willing to accept for a win, fine, it is not one I am willing to accept.
Here is where I think our current political system is in real danger. There is no room anymore for someone to be wrong and not be evil.

A clue people, Obama is not Hitler. Bush is not Hitler, hell Saddam Hussein was not Hitler. (He’s literally no body now.) Hitler was Hitler that is the sum total in the Hitler mathematical set. Obama is a liberal, but that does not mean he is evil. Bush was conservative. (Oh, don’t you people on the right scream. There hardly a firestorm of protest against the man when he was in power.) But Bush was not evil.

This insistence that the opposition MUST some despicable evil, akin to Hitler always, and that Fascism or Communism is right around the corner unless we stop them is asinine and idiotic. It will only get worse before it gets better as thanks to fragmentation of the media people are more and more often selecting there information sources so that their biases as confirmed and their villain properly mocked and attacked. This is not information, this is not becoming educated on a subject, it is adopting a religion. A set of guideposts that tell you who is in your tribe, who is out of your tribe and who are the bad guys responsible for the ills of the world.

It is hokum.

Of course everyone is familiar with the phrase , is that glass half-full or half-empty as a test for a person viewpoint. I think I have another chart that serves a similar function for the political viewpoint.

So here is a chart showing federal revenues and federal outlays for the US government. As you can see that is a terrible disconnect between what we take in as a government and what we spend as a government. The ultimate source of this disconnect is that people want more services than they are willing to pay for.

If you are a Partisan Republican you focus on the dark blue line and insist that it be bent down until it is under the light blue line. (At least in theory. As the graph clearly shows, the republican did nothing to change the curve of the dark blue line while they were in power.)

If you are a Partisan Democrat you Focus on the light blue line and insist that it be raised until it meets that Dark blue line.  (Of course you ignore how sharply you turned that dark blue line up. That’s An Inconvenient truth.)

Aside from a brief period while the Government was split in the 90’s, we don’t live within our means regardless of the political party in power. It was very recently — election-wise — that Prominent  Republicans informed us that ‘Deficits Don’t Matter’™ before they discovered the horror if deficit spending — if it is a democrat doing the spending. Of course in order to try to curry favor with the majority of the population the Democrats are currently pushing ‘Tax The Rich’™, which of course returns us to people want services but are unwilling to pay for them.

Persoanlly I say both side of the equation must be addresses. We are spending too much and revenues must be raised. We are not going to get our of this hole with wishful thinking. Sadly that is the only thing we have a surplus of.