Here’s a frightening thought, today Sarah Palin may have a greater probability of becoming president than John McCain. The betting markets are currently giving McCain about a 16% chance of winning. If McCain wins then let’s assume that all things considered Palin has a 40% chance of becoming president (either if McCain dies in office or as his successor). If McCain loses many people suggest Palin could be a future Republican leader so let’s put her chances of becoming president in that scenario at 12%. Thus:
Pr(Sarah Palin=President) = .16*.4 + .84*.12 = 16.48 > 16% = Pr(John McCain = President).
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foreign nations
I mean foreign nationals. Stupid autocomplete!
The quality of this thread has been so abysmally low,
and emotions are so high this close to the election, that
it is surely a waste of time to post. But, I cannot resist,
given that after 102 comments not a single person has raised
the obvious question. So, what has been the quality of this
“executive experience” that Sarah Palin has had, and does that
say anything about her qualifications to be VP or prez?
So, apparently the first thing she did as Mayor of Wasilla
was to fire anybody whom she did not feel exhibited sufficient
“personal loyalty” to her. She ran into a limit with the City
Council when she tried to fire the public librarian for not
being willing to allow Palin to personally ban books from the
public library. I love this, libertarians loving a would-be
book banner.
Then she set about redecorating her office for something like
$50,000 without authorization from the CC. When challenged on
this, she declared that she did not care and would do what she
wanted unless a judge told her not to. Of course, as governor
she charged the state for living in her own home, for transporting
her kids to a conference in New York, where they stayed in a posh
hotel. And now we have the $150,000 wardrobe, although the ultimate
blame for that seems to be unclear. Looks like a tendency to venality
and personal corruption to me, at every level she gets to.
As for policies in Wasilla, well, one might say that was a smooth to
shift the tax burden from property owners to big box store owners.
However, in a city with no sidewalks and sewage problems, she broke
the budget, leaving the city with a huge deficit in order to build
a sport complex. Well, maybe that was locally popular. After all,
it does apparently have a skating rink, and I am sure she is not the
only hocky mom in Wasilla.
So, then we get to the governorship. Ah ha! So, she has been the
great libertarian capitalist, raising taxes on the oil companies who
drill and pump out the oil that is, as Palin proudly described it,
“owned collectively by the people of Alaska!” in other words, state
ownership of the means of production. Boy, I really love it when
libertarians get all excited about supporting socialism.
Then she vigorously supported the “Bridge to Nowhere,” until, of course,
she didn’t, after everybody else attacked it, although she still kept the
federal money (although I am sure that was popular with Alaskans). There
is, however, the minor problem of her having claimed to have been opposed
to the Bridge to Nowhere as the centerpiece of her acceptance piece at the
convention. But, heck, what is some lying among politicians anyway?
There is also her claim to have negotiated a natural gas pipeline to run
through Canada to the lower 48, which has been loudly trumpeted and blown
to huge scale during the campaign. She did do so action on that, although
so far all that has been accomplished has been to pass a bill to fund a
Canadian consulting company to work on a possible plan for it. It most
definitely has not been negotiated, not with Canada anyway. So much for
foreign policy experience, although I know she did shake the hands of a few
foreign leaders in New York in September.
Then we get to this ugly matter of her being officially reprimanded by a
bipartisan investigation of her abuse of office in trying to get her former
brother-in-law fired. She was repeatedly warned, as were her aides (and husband)
doing her bidding on this, that this was illegal. She could not do this. But,
her attitude, as with redecorating her office in Wasilla without permission,
seemed to be that she is above the law, a supreme being. The details of her
vendetta against Mike Wooten are simply appalling. The most trenchant comment
came from the judge in the divorce case who asked the Palin family if they had
lost their minds, trying to get this man they wanted to pay child support fired
from his job! I am not the least surprised that a McCain aide has labeled her
“a wack (whack) job.” About time somebody close called it.
Finally, we have her view of the vice presidency. She agrees with Cheney that it
is some sort of extra-constitutional office, beyond the legislative and executive
branches. So, what we have is someone who is personally corrupt monetarily, who
behaes in a dictatorial and tyrannical way in office, engages in barely sane personal
vendettas (including allowing her husband to use her office who was close friends with
the leader of the Alaska Secession Party, who was blown up recently in the middle of
plastiques explosive transaction), and lies repeatedly, along with being massively
ignorant about important matters of state.
Some “executive experience.” The person who implied that she would be an improvement
over Cheney should be duly ashamed of such nonsense.
** Wow OPC..way to show your true colors as a sexist – you forgot though – even if you frequently disagree with Hillary (as do I), at least Hillary has some knowledge of the law, the constitution and international affairs. Palin is obviously smart, but lazy – too busy making herself look pretty to pander to “thinkers” like you, I suppose. Her blind ambition, combined with unwillingness to educate herself on major topics, is the part I find most frightening.
Everytime somebody opens a reply or retort with the the dismissal of [insert aggreived group adjective here]-ist, I wonder about the quality of their argument. Those charges have been so mal- and mis- applied that they’ve lost meaning. The great arsenals of sexism and racism are on the left. In the left’s view, people aren’t individuals, but members of some class or group that is collectively either benevolent or evil. I really lost patience with it a decade and a half ago when I intuited OJ was guilty and characterized the circus that was his trial as a miscarriage of justice and was hit with the “racist” by a “friend”. I’m still waiting for the apology.
But as to the point of Hillary’s supposed knowledge-I don’t buy that either. Given a chance to affect public policy (solely by virtue of being married to the President), she assembled a few hundred of her closest friends in Jackson Hole Wyoming to remake medicine in her image, without any public input or review. As disgusting an exercise in attempted oligarchy as we’ve seen, the seedier details of her plan included provisions for civil and criminal penalties for attempting to provide for medical care outside the confines of the government “system”. Apparently, she missed the lectures at Yale on things like freedom of association. Despite the fact she’s a lawyer, we’re supposed to accept her as an expert on healthcare-even by that pompous *ss, Newt Gingrich. Part of education is epistimological-Hayek should have convincing destroyed the notion of command and control centralized bureacracy for reasonable people and a person we are all told is so intelligent should know that. Trust me, as a former Medicare/Medicaid auditor, I have plenty of informed reason to distrust government provide healthcare, with its fraud, inefficiency and perverse incentives.
Beyond her academic career, and employment at the Rose Law Firm, everything Hillary has done has been obtained because of Bill. Am I to think for a minute that Bill’s place in Arkansas politics had nothing to do with her Walmart association?
Moreover, you overlook the obvious-and for the record-I seriously doubt Palin is perfect, because no one is-but Hillary’s peccability and “blind ambition” is far more pervasive, durable and institutional.
Nor am I convinced that Palin’s foibles-real or imagined are anything near as damning as Reverend Wright, Tony Reszko (once again, too lazy to check spelling), the curious flow of megabucks coming to a candidate claiming to represent the impoverished or his use of an earmark to reward his wife’s employer after she received a huge raise just after he was elected.
I do know that the left routinely engages in hero worship and seems incapable of recognizing it.
Routinely, the left attributes undeserved acclaim to its standard-bearers (FDR extended the depression, didn’t end it) or fails to allocate blame (mortgage crisis: CSR, Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd & the rest of the Fannie Mae cheerleaders) or delves in the idiotic (9-11 was an inside job by the “Jews” who were all at home, or Bush, or…) or imparts mystical power to people (Camelot).
Actually, the left should know all about unqualified-we had to have a law against Presidential nepotism, because the most qualified Attorney General candidate available to JFK was the President’s 30-something brother), who absent a murder would’ve been nominated in a hagiographic fit.
I am being thoughtful in voting for McCain, I decided that despite the infinitesimal marginal value of my vote, I won’t cast it for Barr or another third-party candidate I might prefer to McCain.
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Voting for president for me is just a means to an end — getting a person from the party most in line with my way of thinking into an executive position. What else can we do? Does anyone really believe that our political system selects the best, most qualified person to be president? Politicians run for the office, for God’s sake. It’s all a crap shoot on who would turn out to be a decent executive officer anyways. If the United States’ success was based on electing great leaders, we’d have been screwed long ago. So I don’t look for “the best person”. We don’t know who that would be. That guy was lucky enough to choose a career other than politics to go into.
The quality of this thread has been so abysmally low,
and emotions are so high this close to the election, that
it is surely a waste of time to post.
Your post lowered the quality even more.
Phil, Superheater, I wasn’t born during the Second World War. If you want to keep revealing yourselves as bloody racists, keep bashing people for their blood and their ancestors. “ooh, he’s Kenyan, ooh, he’s European, ooh his ancestors are such and such.”
Yes, Phil, you have relatives that died for some of my own relatives’ freedom. And I have some relatives that died under a dictatorship supported by other relatives of yours. Either way it’s only a racist however that thinks the virtue and the vice magically transfers itself through the BLOOD. Every word you speak makes you all more obvious you’re such a racist. It’s your WORDS that condemn you, not your blood.
And Phil, people have been tortured to death in Bagram. Innocent people. Taxi-drivers. Tortured TO DEATH. I’ve seen the photos, I’ve read the testimonies, why the hell haven’t you? Why the hell are you still ignorant enough to think that the Abu Ghraib photos represented the worst that US torturers have done?
And, Superheater, I LOVE America. I LOVE America far more than I like my own country. I want it to be the leader of a free world (since the EU is too weak and divided to achieve such leadership). That’s why it makes me so angry when I see Bush destroy any possibility of such. And that’s why I support Obama: the candidate that has the best chance to raise America to be the leader of the free world once more.
But you and Phil keep repeating things about your ethnic/racial virtues and my ethnic/racial shames. That’ll convince me for sure you two aren’t racists. Go on.
Well reading all those was sure fun. Such a nice break from reality I almost got off the couch and took action!
The check: the president doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to double taxes or start 3 more wars, and nobody is going to allow anyone who actually believes that to make any decision bigger than picking their own TV channel. Relax: your vote is important enough to be informed, but not important enough to panic about.
Still need a fix? Start with MikeDC’s Nov. 1st post. Insightful posts like that just do not come often enough.
Barkley Rosser – at first I assumed you were just a troll repeating all the Dem talking points.
But wow – I bet students with and open mind and even an ounce of intellectual curiosity feel pretty welcome in your classroom. With such original thinking spouted by the prof and all.
But thanks for posting. My high school senior read your rant, followed your link, and said, “Just another reason not to apply there. He’s an example of profs who don’t think for themselves.”
Oh, this is amusing. Two folks have replied to my
comment, neither of them even providing a phoney moniker,
just blank IDs. So, the first says that my comment “lowered
the quality” of the discourse, but then did not provide a
single instance of anything in my comments that deserved
such a description.
Then comes another comment, also from someone without a
moniker of any sort, perhaps the same individual. This
one seems to think that I do not allow open-mindedness in
my classrooms and quoted his/her senior-in-high-school
son as thinking that I cannot think for myself and that
the son does not want to apply to my school.
So, regarding my teaching, in over 30 years of doing it,
I have never had a student complain to anyone of me showing
political bias of any sort in my classroom (and I do not
discuss Palin or candidates in my classrooms). I encourage
students to express strong views in their papers, but I
also say that they will be graded on the logic and facts
that they bring to bear to support their arguments.
In any case, neither of these comments addressed the facts
that I put forward at all. Either they are correct (which
appears to be the case), even if they are “Democratic talking
points” (some of the GOP talking points about Obama are
correct), they are unimportant compared to her virtues,
whatever they are, or they are in fact good things that she
should be praised and commended for.
I have seen none of these argued or addressed in the comments
made, only silly remarks that are either wrong or misleading.
Anybody out there able to either show that Palin’s reported
efforts to fire the public librarian, mess up the Wasilla
budget, lie about the bridge to nowhere, engage in corrupt
spending of money for her offices and family, or engaging in
personal vendetta against her former brother-in-law by using
her office are either false, irrelevant, or good things?
You can buy and gain very cheap holic money.
Is it realistic?
It is enlightening!
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