May I be the first to say Charles Krauthammer is a RINO?

There’s a really good Chris Christy-Moby Dick joke in there, but I’m not sure the new comment guidelines will allow for it.  Probably for the better…

Sorry Dr. Strangelove, but Noonan’s “Angry Attack Muffin” is more effective than a reference to “Moby Dick” with just about any audience.

I’m pretty sure that hundreds of thousands of enraged, inarticulate conservatives have beaten you to it.

Have you noticed the number of this sort, however, who use “RHINO”?

Newt defends GSE’s, trashes fiscal policy as “right wing social engineering”, plays class warfare, and trashes free enterprise with the same gusto as Paul Krugman.

Will you Democrats be willing to take him off of our hands?  Please.

The Newt is and shall remain thine, and we covet him not.

“From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee. For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee!” Khan

Sadly, you’re correct.

But if you change your mind, let me know.  Don’t forget – he’s really good at securing tax payer dollars, loves for government to help poor people get into homes they can’t afford, and is willing to fight global warming with Nancy Pelosi.

No, no, no.  Petulant Newt is the great white whale, Mopey Dick.

Here is a question for those on the left here – Can you tell me how you think Gang greenich may have had an iceberg’s chance in hell in this reality and not an alternate one?

Newton has some good ideas, but he is about as discplined as a 5 year old on a sugar high.

Let’s be fair.  Newt plays the same nasty little class warfare game that you are playing, blaming poor people for the economic collapse (instead of the real culprit, Wall Street deregulation) and is perfectly willing to deny (as you are) that CO2 molecules absorb heat.

If Newt was the frontrunner, you’d be posting comments supporting him. Just admit it.

Name one of those “good ideas” for the rest of the class.

I’m not blaming the poor, Mr Wood.  I’m blaming a big fat bloated government that tinkers in the marketplace every chance it gets.  Nobody suffers from this more than the poor.

And you don’t have to believe or disbelieve in AGW to understand cap and trade would do NOTHING to reduce CO2.

Let’s not forget, that while there are plenty of democrats who stray on their spouses, Newt’s hypocrisy on the issue makes him a natural republican

.

Your intellectual dishonesty and boring partisanship under a picture of Carl Sagan makes me sad.

Oh yes, it was the government’s fault that the commodities market was deregulated, allowing for the explosion of the derivatives market, which caused the collapse.  It was the government’s fault because people in government inexplicably believed the freemarkit lies of folks like Phil Gramm (R).

Cap-and-trade is a freemarkit utopia idea, so of course it isn’t going to be terribly effective.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Presence-of-Mind-Blue-Sky-Thinking.html

Welfare reform was one.

Well, 75% of the republican voters like variations of bat-shit crazy candidates so it isn’t a reach that they would vote for Newt to go against Obama.

I disagree with Kraut. I still think Newt deeply believes (in his forthcoming attacks) that he or any other “real conservative” have a real chance to take out Romney if they coalesce around one candidate. The problem is, who exactly?

As was demonstrated by IA, there is no viable conservative alternative to Romney.

My thing is that while Romney is not Reagan II, he is not exactly a reincarnation of FDR either.

Republicans are yearning for something that I don’t even know exists – that true rock solid conservative that will rescue them from their castle imprisonment.

A guy who can boil down the economic mess we are in and pin it on the poor and a government “over regulation” commenting on dishonesty is pretty rich. I guess you forgot the two wars the republicans put on a credit card and the giveaway to the rich on tax breaks as well as letting Wall Street treat the economy like a Ponzi scheme had nothing to do with the problem.

PS.  Yes, I can sometime resort to levels of sarcasm and hackness not indicative of Carl’s life and achievements, so you have me there.

I argue about this time and time again on here.  I provide links to the CRA.  I provide all of the links and facts regarding Fanny and Freddy and the legislators who pushed for the lowering of credit standards.  I provide links to the experts who warned again and again what was happening as the housing market inflated more and more.

It gets boring.  Nothing can force a liberal to look at a situation soberly when the words “deregulation” and “greed” are thrown in.

And as far as cap and trade being free market, that explains why you’re confused about the housing crisis.

When government planners artificially inflate the price of fuel, that is another example of market tinkering.  NOT a “free market utopia idea.” 

And cap and trade disproportionally hurts the poor, like most ideas that involve a centralized government approach.

Our National debt is 16 trillion dollars.

As of today we have 61.6 trillion in financial promises unpaid for.

And for the first time since WW2, our debt exceeds the size of the entire US economy.

This is not from war, not even close.  Military expenditure is only 4.7 % of GDP.

These figures are why I’m a fiscal conservative.

The whole Wall St/deregulation/greed/tax breaks routine is a sideshow.  

Yeah, the CRA, passed in 1977, caused an economic collapse 30 years later.  That’s the ticket!!!

Look, I know this is pretty much gospel in Rightwingistan (because it allows you to blame poor people for the housing crisis), but it doesn’t actually make any sense. 

The biggest offenders of the subprime crisis were independent morgage companies like Countrywide, which were never ever regulated by the CRA.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/10/12/53802/private-sector-loans-not-fannie.html

“And as far as cap and trade being free market, that explains why you’re confused about the housing crisis.”

Cap-and-trade was a freemarkit approach, as the article I cited details.  It was a right wing response to actual emissions regulations. Freely trading pollution credits as opposed to abiding by emissions reguations.  It was implemented and advocated by GHWB.

Henry Wood, these back and forth arguments really do get boring.  Saying that regs put in place in 77 makes no difference today sounds good…but it’s just not true.

Politicians left and right have added to and used the CRA to take action over the years.

Including George HW Bush who signed the Institutions Reform Recovery and Financial Enforcement Act that included
provisions to the CRA.

This is how regulation works, it just is.

We’re going to have to agree to disagree on this.  I’m not going to change your mind, and you’re not going to change mine.

It’s a little depressing that documented fact isn’t going to change your mind.

But I guess that is what makes Freemarkitism a religion rather than an economic theory.

This website is named “Mediaite”, which means its PURPOSE is critical discussion of media coverage — not all that typical DsaidRsaid useless jibber-jabber snark that only goes to prove that the hesaid-shesaid MSM has succceded in conditioning many TV political news viewers (*cough*Mediaite regulars*cough*) into performing a home basement version of Crossfire.  

So let’s get to it.  

Here’s a prime illustration from Fuppet News of the type of propaganda that George Orwell referred to as “priming”, as in priming the pump – which, for those of you who’ve never had to prime a ye olde daze well water pump, describes the action of have to dry pump a number of times in order to pull enough air out of the space in the pipe between the water table & the mouth of the pump, that the water rises from vacuum energy (in other words, to create a suck, which is probably something at least the few adults who post here have a vague memory about from a few decades back).  

Note that Billold makes it clear, by the expedient of saying so, several times, that the feature message on the Roger Ailes School of Audience Indoctrination tv network tonight is the program directly following Billold’s nightly pre-digested gruel, a Stewart Varney ‘special’ (special in the sense that a supposedly untraceable concealed firearm used to be called a Saturday Night Special) production, explaining to all the oldies how that nice man Mitt, the one with the nice white skin (which is all of them) in the nice suit (again, all of them, but Mitt’s is Italian), with the nice hair (okay, not much help there), with the nice wife (…), with the nice white kids (in his case, sons Matt, Mett, Moot, Mutt & Mytt), none of whom are sitting U.S. Senators or whose corpse the other kids had to do a sleep-over with, is being slandered, libelled, called words that ain’t in the bible, by the other nice white men in nice suits with nice hair, nice white wives & nice white kids, acting as dupes for the super duper secret stealth agents of the supercalifatin’ Islamoterrorist presitender to the white house shining on the hill, for his kajillion jobs creationist charity consulting work in helping rid all those poor Ma & Pa white people (Corporations are people!) of those vile, nasty labor union thugs for free, effectively (since under the Mittens Plan, Bain mostly took its fees right out all those ill-gotten pension monies looted from Ma & Pa by those vile, nasty labor union thugs for their vile, nasty labor union thugee retirements). 

Note that when Billold first (he did it several times) previewed the Varney progaganda piece to follow, der Kanadian Kraut’s face went right through the entire range of its emotive potential (his eyebrows went up) & he responded, ‘I understand that’. 

As I’ve commented previously, some innocent-type yokels with the memories of disordered lemmings may THINK there’s actually a contest going on here, but in fact this is just like every Republican presidential primary show since 1964 — the one & only time since 1912 that the big money boys in the back room failed to fix the selection process while making it sort of seem like a groundswell populist coronation, giving the impression of the pre-selected winner having been somehow ‘vetted’ when something like the exact opposite is happening:  

It’s actually the American VOTER who’s being ‘vetted’, conditioned to buy into a fairy story just enough of the Opposite Day crap the GOP constantly throws up in an effort to get Republican voters to believe this latest nice white man in his nice suit with his nice white wife & nice white kids is One Of Them, a Troo Cornservative in the cut of St. Ronald de Reagan, & to get independent voters to believe this man is so nice & white with such a nice suit & a nice wife & nice kids because he’s been Chosen By Jeebus – rather than what he really is, which is a graduate summa cum loud of the Republican School for Scoundrels & a thorough-going grifter of proven ability in every con in the book from 3 Card Monte to Read My Lips to Deficits Only Matter When the President Is a Democrat to Lying The Country Into War or at least into Bombing the Latest Brown-Skinned Evil Enemy Back Into The Stone Ages.  

And this cycle’s edition of Republican Fairy Tale Theater has a particular challenge: they have to convince the rubes that a locust capitalist on the scale Dr. Death himself, Robert Oppenheimer, meant when he paraphrased the Bagadhavad Gita (in this case, Now, I am become Misery, the Destroyer of Jobs & Pensions, for Pete’s sake), is in fact The Bringer of Jobs For All – Gud* Jobs, Really.

(*Nothing like those Crappy Low Wage Service Jobs hawking pens & paper at Staples & slinging pizza at Dominos.)

Newt has become a loose cannon.  I know he prides himself as an intellectual,  but I’ve noticed that the tone of this campaign has gotten a lot more negative and personal ever since Newt became the front runner.  I know it’s not his fault and others were attacking him as well, but he sets a very big target on himself and I think he’s the biggest problem the Republicans have in the primaries.  

I heard one good thing about Newt He is the one candidate who wants to expand NASA & manned space exploration.

The former being a good thing - & the latter being a nutty thing. 
The thing we are all of us prone to failing to get any sort of handle on about space & time is their sheer SCALE.Our dinky little oxygen-&-water-media-filled planet is associated with a run-of-the-mill star on an outer spiral of a run-of-the-mill galaxy containing ~200,000,000,000 stars, in a universe containing ~200,000,000,000 galaxies –   a 4 followed by 22 zeros worth of stars, the NEAREST of which, the star Proxima Centuri, is ~4.3 LIGHT years away –  that is, if earthlings could travel at the speed of light, it would take >4 years to travel there;  but since we can’t, consider that at the rate of the absolute fastest spacecraft we’ve ever built, it would take >70,000 years just to travel THERE — or more than 140,000 years for a single round trip (excluding time spent on the beach working on a tan, on taking in a few shows, at general chilling, etc.). 140,000 years is longer than the total time that modern humans have existed.  It’s >40,000 years more than the time since proto-h. sapiens first emigrated out Africa, & thereafter ran into Cro-Magnons, Neandertals, Denisovans & other hominids. It’s ~100,000 years longer than the time following the second Out Of Africa emigration when  all the other hominids died out (possibly helped by modern humans killing off the last of competition).  It’s ~120,000 years longer than the time since we first started working with anything more sophisticated than stone tools,  ~130,000 years longer than the time since we first figured out how to work with iron, ~136,000 years longer before the Giant Spaghetti Monster said “Let there be pastafarians!”.   If we were able to send a group of humans off Earth tomorrow, and assuming they were somehow able to avoid being destroyed in transit or all die off from starvation or disease, by the time they got back here they would be at least 2 standard deviations distinct from anything we would call a modern h. sapiens – as will be any of our hominid descendants there to great them. 

If “we” ever get to another habitable planet in this universe, it’s going to be as robots.

All of the stuff that Fox News does, that you describe as sinister “indoctrination”, seems more like an attempt at persuasion to me. You may not agree with the message, fine, but that is no reason to castigate the messenger for essentially doing what any advertising executive does every day to sell products. Fortunately, more and more, we have educated consumers who are not so easily played.

It is absolutely hysterical watching the angry Fox News cast blabbing about Newts Pac attacking their candidate Romney! The FNC has not even “checked up” in their out right support for what they all showcase as the GOP nominee. They continue to promote anyone left or right, that will spit their collective venom towards Newt, lol!  Where was the outrage when Romneys Pac and the Kook ron Pauls adds were blasting Newt in Iowa? Huh?  Even in the FNC interviews with Newt, they ask him only about the attack adds, not about Newts policy differences with Romney, wonder why? 

I can see some basis for your first point (though I didn’t use either the word “sinister” or the word “indoctrination”; I used “propaganda” & particularly “priming”, neither of which is necessarily the same as “sinister” or “indoctrination”.); but I disagree strongly with this:
“Fortunately, more and more, we have educated consumers who are not so easily played”

I don’t know of any evidence that supports the implication that the percentage of consumers has become either more “educated” & therefore less “easily played”, or that Americans are any less “easily played” now than they’ve been in the past. If you’re aware of any such evidence, please post a link to it.  

But I don’t think you’ll find any such evidence, because the evidence of the underlying components to resisting “priming” or any of the other devices Orwell described under “propaganda” suggest the opposite to your assertion. For example, the U.S. is right now objectively quite a bit less competitive with other countries, particularly those with western  democratic institutions & traditions, than it’s been at any time since before World War II at least; I recall that we’re ranked somewhere in the mid-to-high 40s in average national education standards, with countries like Turkey & Lithuania. Secondly, on a related measure, we’re among the more religiotic & anti-science nations, again with the likes of Turkey, which contributes to our people being on average substantially quite a bit more credulous, gullible & vulnerable to distortions, lies & misinformation that say the Scandinavian countries, the U.K., & Canada. Exacerbating those factors is that we are also pretty much the worst western democracy in terms of economic equality & mobility, & we have a deeply ingrained mien aversion to a number of political philosophies which have proven effective in ameliorating those disadvantages in other western democracies, including in particular socialism, but also liberalism, labor unionism, marxism & of course communism, along with an historical credulity towards fascism in the form of bellicose & extremist populism, & we continue to struggle with racial & gender biases as much if not more than the other western democracies.  

That isn’t to say that there are not MORE such “educated consumers”, in terms of raw numbers, simply by virtue of the dramatic growth in the nation’s population – but the average level of education etc. has gotten distinctly, measurably, objectively worse, & so the level of credulity has risen, in recent decades, certainly over the last two generations at least.  

Yes.
Children on the playground throwing around dirty words when they do not know their meaning.

I wasn’t talking interstellar, maybe Mars, Moon or Venus. Space travel has not only technological spinoffs, but it is good for national pride

CHARLES KRATHAMMER,
You are so right about Newt Gingrich!  You describe it the best.  Peggy Neuman made the statement that, “Newt Gingrich is a whining little muffin.”  Thanks, Charles.
Delores Smith
Delores109@cox.net

You said: “Roger Ailes School of Audience Indoctrination tv network”. Doesn’t that cover what I said? Perhaps I jumped to the conclusion of sinister, though I suspect you would approve of my description, except for argument sake.

Isn’t it kind of silly to be saying that Americans are not better consumers now, with the internet and cable tv, than they were thirty years ago? Surely we are more informed.