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POPSRepublicans are back in Romper Room AGAIN! Back in July of 2003, I made a page referring to A Republican Romper Room. I have always thought the "R" party quite childish with their infantile rhetoric, and here we are in 2008 and they are back in ROMPER ROOM AGAIN! . Why don't they just GROW UP and maybe together we can finally have a world run by adults. WHAT? Not if the Republican Party has anything to do with it! Click here to see Republican Romper Room: http://www.thethinkingblue.com/romperroom.html Watch Video Here: Gingrich: 'loony tunes' to inflate your tires to save gas http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRwX6IrOPDY http://thinkingblue.blogspot.com
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POPSEnergy Rhetoric vs Reality
RHETORIC: Oil and natural gas companies are demanding greater access to America’s resources even though they own leases on millions of acres of federal lands that are already open to drilling. REALITY: Just because a lease is not producing oil or natural gas doesn’t mean it’s idle. Companies are actively exploring and developing the majority of their leases, but the entire process takes years and requires many steps, including securing government permits, analyzing seismic data and installing the machinery needed for drilling and production. Many leases prove not to contain enough oil and natural gas to be commercially viable, and companies can’t produce oil and natural gas where it does not exist. REALITY: At a time when we need all the energy we can find, increasing access to domestic sources of oil and natural gas would enhance our energy security. We have enough oil and natural gas resources to power 65 million cars for 60 years and heat 60 million households for 160 years.
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POPSReckless rhetoric or freedom of speech? South Africa has a democratic constitution that protects freedom of speech. In saying things like this is Bishop Tutu trying to place an unconstitutional limitation on freedom of speech?
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POPSObama Lays Out Plans for Continued War I am posting this as a perspective. I truly and very unsure of how I feel about Obama. I have seen too many broken campaign promises in my life I have never found an unbroken one that I can think of.
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POPSUS and Iran "Diplomacy" Starts--"Good Cop" Tactic But coercing Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment program is the goal. So earlier we saw "bad cop" war games and rhetoric by US and Israel, and now this multinational "diplomacy" will play "good cop", to force the will of the US and Israel on Iran. That is not diplomacy, and the shift is temporary, for the election season. The result (which might be a goal too) will be that the oil traders will sell and lower oil prices will come (as they already did on first news of this), and this game will probably be played between now and Nov. 5th (to help McCain), and then the war-mongering will start again, and possibly an attack by Israel ( per neocon John Bolton's clipmark earlier ) to force the next President's hand into the conflict. Bush does not change from his neocon advisers blueprint. This pragmatism is for political expediency and economic benefit for election season purposes.
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POPSThe New Meaning Of "Politics Of Change" * Obama repeatedly vowed to meet with various heads of terror states - most notably Ahmadinejad of Iran - "without preconditions." Then, with the nomination in sight, he zigzagged: "There's no reason why we would necessarily meet with Ahmadinejad. He's not the most powerful person in Iran." * In October, he supported NAFTA expansion. In March, campaigning in the Ohio primary, he called for a "reopening" of the trade pact's terms. This week, he called his own primary rhetoric "overheated" and said NAFTA has had a positive effect on the US economy. Change, yes. But "change we can believe in"?
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POPSLimbaugh tops his own bigotry with this one. It's hard to believe what can come out of the mouth (butt) of Rush Limbaugh but his latest tirade is beyond belief, beyond disgusting, beyond loathsome. Yes it's very hard to believe this mindless little man could stoop so low as to praise the flood victims in Iowa, Illinois who happen to be mostly white and at the same time, condemn the Katrina victims with the same old rhetoric, innuendos and outright bigotry that the KKK type people carry in their bags of hateful garbage. Those poor hurrican victims, who happen to be mostly of color are responsible in the intolerant brain cells of Rush, for their fate. I know beyond the pale, is too weak a phrase for this criticism from a genuine butt-hole. The only bewilderment I feel of such a creep sputtering into a microphone that goes out over the airwaves is, WHY THE HELL WOULD ANYONE LISTEN TO HIS SHIT AND STILL THINK OF HIM AS A CREDIBLE BEARER OF THE TRUTH? :-? http://thinkingblue.blogspot.com
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POPS Change "He Should Believe In" He would become a responsible voice within his party by challenging his constituents to embrace progress in Iraq. Using his considerable influence to rein in the reflexive and poisonous antiwar rhetoric that has become the Democratic party’s standard rallying cry against Republicans, he would seek to alleviate the bitter divisions that plague our country. Unfortunately, Sen. Obama has not been that kind of candidate. Instead, he has chosen the far easier path of exploiting the existing currents of public opinion for political gain. In his speeches, he downplays the gains achieved through the surge and dismisses as “spin” all evidence of progress, all the while repeating his call for a withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops within sixteen months of becoming president, no matter the conditions on the ground. Even worse, Sen. Obama’s rhetoric on the Iraq war is beginning to jeopardize his stated goal of repairing alliances that he claims are in tatters.
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POPSMideast Governments Tired of Bush Rhetoric As Well! Israeli commentators said the Egyptian mediation amounted to indirect negotiations between the Israeli government and Hamas, a group with which the United States refuses to have dealings. The Palestinian resistance organisation, which controls inside Gaza Strip (although it is still under Israeli occupation), was offering Israel a long-term truce which could make it easier for the rival Palestinian group Fatah to reach an agreement with Israel -- a goal which the United States says it is promoting. In his Sharm el-Sheikh speech, Bush also attacked the Lebanese group Hezbollah, calling it "terrorists funded by Iran" and "the enemy of a free Lebanon" Three days later in the Gulf state of Qatar, Hezbollah and other Lebanese groups reached an agreement ending the political crisis that had paralysed Lebanon for months.
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POPSHillary's Seeds of self-destruction But it’s an insult to white voters as well, including white working-class voters. It’s true that there are some whites who will not vote for a black candidate under any circumstance. But the United States is in a much better place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now.
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POPSThe Illusion That Is Barack Obama For all his Camelot-like rhetoric, Obama is a product, in significant measure, of the political culture that Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass described as "The Chicago Way" At no point did Obama, the would-be saviour of US politics, challenge this corruption, except for face-saving gestures as a legislator. Emil Jones, the machine-made president of the Senate, allowed him to sponsor a minor ethics bill. In return, Obama made sure to send plenty of pork to Jones's district. When asked about pork-barrel spending, Jones famously replied: "Some call it pork; I call it steak." Obama repaid the generosity. When he had a chance to back clean Democratic candidates for president of the Cook County board of supervisors and Illinois governor, he stayed with the allies of the Outfit. In the Illinois Senate, he made a specialty of voting present. Obama is such a down-the-line partisan that, in the past two years he has voted with the Democrats more often than did the party's majority lea
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POPSHillary's Bitter Victory Is there any relief in sight? When will this thing end? The short answer to this question is no, there isn't. Watching this scene, I was struck suddenly by the genius of the Clinton campaign — and also felt myself beginning to understand why this Obama-Clinton contest may yet prove to be one of those defining cultural clashes that come along once a generation or so, like Bryan-Darrow or Ali-Frazier. what we have in Hillary Clinton: a once-in-a-generation political pugilist who, like her much smoother adversary, is amazingly capable of turning weakness into strength. Pitted against physical beauty and inspirational rhetoric, Hillary made herself the champion of everything stylistically ordinary, superficially unimpressive and ignored. And while her opponent won all the attention and admiration, all the teen-idol gushings of the beautiful people, she went for something deeper — resentment at the lack of those same things.
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POPSTo Russia For Love Union. Add to Russia’s demographic bias towards women its rampant alcoholism, high prison numbers and near million-man conscript army and you can understand why it isn’t exactly raining eligible bachelors on the streets of Moscow. British men on the other hand, it would seem, are on the run from female liberation in the UK. All the men I speak to about their other halves said they found the quiet strength and femininity of the Russian women preferable to their pint-downing, man-eating British counterparts. "Russian women are stronger," says Glaswegian David. His Russian wife tells me this stems from perestroika times, when women went out to win the bread leaving their men at home, where they hit the booze. Whether the new economic stability will break them from such a spell is as yet uncertain. But in the meantime, foreign bachelors will have to cater for domestic demand, and it’s the British who seem to be plugging the gap.
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POPSThe science of terror To study ‘terror’ one needs not only to examine the insurgents in occupied countries, but also the terrorists at home, the ones who hide behind the jingoism and rhetoric of Western goodness while occupying countries and killing those that get in the way of their military, political, and economic goals. The neocon mind would be a great place to start. The mind -- neocon or not -- is a difficult thing to study. The mind of terrorism is equally complex and for it to have any validity it needs to begin at home where much of the global terror begins.
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POPSThe Audacity Of Rhetoric The irony is that Obama's sudden rise politically to the level of being the leading contender for his party's presidential nomination has required him to project an entirely different persona, that of a post-racial leader who can heal divisiveness and bring us all together. The ease with which he has accomplished this chameleon-like change, and entranced both white and black Democrats, is a tribute to the man's talent and a warning about his reliability. There is no evidence that Obama ever sought to educate himself on the views of people on the other end of the political spectrum, much less reach out to them. He reached out from the left to the far left. That's bringing us all together? Is "divisiveness" defined as disagreeing with the agenda of the left? Who on the left was ever called divisive by Obama before that became politically necessary in order to respond to revelations about Jeremiah Wright?
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POPSRescuing The Rust Belt.................. by Thomas Sowell Japanese auto makers like Toyota and Honda are hiring thousands of American workers. But they are not hiring them in the rust belts. They are avoiding the rust belts, just as domestic businesses are avoiding the high costs that have been piled on over the years by both unions and governments in the rust belt regions. Where does NAFTA come into the picture? International trade is just one of the many ways in which the competition of lower cost producers can cause higher cost producers to lose customers and jobs. Jobs are always disappearing. The big question is why they are not being replaced by new jobs. Rust belt policies that drove out old jobs also keep out new jobs. NAFTA makes it easier for politicians to blame the problem on foreigners. In fact, foreigners make ideal scapegoats for politicians. After all, people in Japan or India can't vote in American elections.
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POPSOops. Never count the Clinton's out. She is going to get a ton of mileage out of this and the Rezko thing. Man, this is gonna get ugly.
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POPSIf You Are Selling A Dream You Need The Best Possible Salesman Hillary attacked Obama this week on exactly this basis -- for selling dreams: "And you know the celestial choirs will be singing . . . and the world will be perfect." In her world "none of the problems we face will be easily solved." In her world, the real one, mediocre pols must be worked and massive bureaucracies pushed to do the right thing. And you know what? She just might be good at it. The bitter irony is that what the Democrats want is someone like the original Clinton, another figure who can make the old-time religion sound not like a government program, but personally uplifting. She can't. In the Cleveland debate Tuesday, even Brian Williams couldn't resist noting "a 16-minute discussion on health care." What Hillary Clinton has invested, given and endured for her party to get to this moment is hard to imagine. Then the Democratic audience says: What difference does that make? A star has been born.
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POPSPlanning Of course Hayek said the same thing, but in far more words.
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POPSHe Talk Like a White Boy. God bless those that raise the hand against the tyranny of opinion, those tearing down the walls and boldly facing the cynical. Any clippers read or heard about this book?
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POPS Mitt Romney Endorses McCain Called Him A True American Hero Romney today was gracious, lavishing praise in prepared remarks on the man who defeated him. "This is a man who tied his political fortunes to the fortunes of his country in a time of war," Romney said. "Such courage is not always rewarded in politics, but it was this time – and that is a credit to both the man and to the party he will lead in the election of 2008." The difference was especially stark compared to the last GOP nomination battle in 2000. As opposed to the week Romney took before endorsing, it took two months for McCain to get behind George W. Bush after that bitter contest. And when he did so in May of that year he initially declined to use the word "endorse." Only after being asked by a reporter why he wouldn't formally offer his blessing did McCain say "I endorse Gov. Bush" -- and then he said it over and over again as if to show his annoyance.
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POPSHillary vs. Obama: compare weakness
"The caricature of Clinton's self-defeating pragmatism isn't easy to reconcile with the competing caricature of Clinton's self-defeating rigidity. You can argue that the exaggerated pragmatism is an overreaction to the Hillarycare debacle, in which Clinton, arguably, was undone by her rigidity... Perhaps the resolution of this seeming contradiction is that once Hillary is done eliminating everything brave or original from a policy proposal, she defends it to the death." "Obama has hedged on single-payer, he's kept mentions of the Social Security fix out of his Web site's policy pages on taxes and the elderly, and he wasn't in the Senate when the war resolution was voted on. To some extent, Obama's hedging on many of his more controversial stands is smart politics. But an unfortunate result is that he often ends up hiding behind airy generalities and vague-but-uplifting rhetoric, and I can understand why Wolcott would conclude that Obama is too saintly for the Oval Office."
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POPS Why Republicans Like Obama Ethics and Public Policy Center When the Clintons were doing this in the 1990s, it was viewed by many Democrats as perfectly acceptable. Some applauded them for their brass-knuckle tactics. Now that the Clintons are roughing up an inspiring young man who appears to represent the hope and future of the Democratic Party, the liberal establishment is reacting with outrage. "I think we've reached an irrevocable turning point in liberal opinion of the Clintons." Barack is among the most impressive political talents of our lifetime. If he defeats Hillary , the question for the general election is not whether he can transcend his race but whether he can reach beyond his ideology While rhetoric and character matter a lot, politics is finally and fundamentally about ideas and philosophy. Whether we're talking about the Iraq war, monitoring terrorist communications, health care, taxes, education, abortion and the courts, the size of government, Obama embodies the views of the special-interest groups on the left
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POPSHow not to be Duped Political and media rhetoric use these two and other devices frequently to exploit a lack of literacy skills.
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