Peevish some, Tammy?

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• myolivercat

  Where are the death notices for  1/26/12 and 1/27/12 ? ?

  • 15 hours ago
• 
  Tammy McGee , Moderator for TheOlympian.com

  Will you PLEASE contact The Olympian when you have a complaint or a question, rather than posting in the comment threads? The comment threads are for commenting. If you have a question or a complaint, call the newsroom.

  • 15 hours ago
  • in reply to myolivercat

http://www.theolympian.com/2012/01/25/1962900/missing-headline-for-25deathss.html
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Doesn't look like we need to worry about Ron Paul

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What Did Ron Paul Know, and When Did He Know It?
By Megan McArdle, JAN 27 2012

The Washington Post is reporting that Ron Paul actively signed off on the not-so-veiled racism in the newsletters published under his name in the 1980s.  I'm sure that in the next few days, there will be some hot denials, and some Paulistas and paleolibertarians complaining about the Koch-funded conspiracy to destroy him.  (See, liberals?  You're not the only ones who think that Charles Koch is spending his massive fortune to destroy America). 

I think the arguments and counter-arguments about what he knew and when he knew it will be rather beside the point.  It is simply not credible that Ron Paul never saw any of the newsletters published under his name, and so the minimum working thesis has to be that whether or not Ron Paul believed that the biggest problem America faced was all those black folks getting one over on the white man, he was perfectly willing to encourage such sentiments if doing so would advance his political goals.  This alone should disqualify him from office, so we shouldn't need to waste time litigating other charges on the indictment.

Now, if Ron Paul were to sorrowfully admit that he had once harbored such beliefs--or failed to understand what it really meant to encourage such thoughts in others--then I would probably agree that we should forgive and forget.  But that is not what he has done.  What he has done is to cravenly attempt to avoid responsibility by blaming his subordinates.

Even if it were actually true that Ron Paul had allowed a newsletter to be published under his name without ever reading it, this would not do; the first thing that any aspiring leader should learn is that you are responsible for what is done by your subordinates, whether you knew about it or not.  "I am the kind of leader who allows my subordinates to run a multi-year racist newsletter under my name without ever once stopping by, or even picking up the damn newsletter, to see how they were getting along without me" is not mitigation.  Rather, it should be the first count on the indictment.

Moreover, since even before the Post report, it seemed really unlikely that this was what had actually happened, Ron Paul is not merely guilty of unmanly buck-passing, but also of lying like a truant teenager.

Such behavior is unworthy of the Oval Office.  Fortunately, it looks like he won't get there, so we don't need to devote much more energy to the question.
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Democrats should be pushing for Gingrich!

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Lunar Colonies, Lunacy and Losses

By CHARLES M. BLOW, Published: January 27, 2012

Newt Gingrich is spaced-out. Literally.

Anyone who remembers him from his days as speaker of the House in the ’90s remembers how erratic, unpredictable and off-the-wall he could be, but, so far, this campaign season he has managed to conceal his many absurdities and eccentricities.

Furthermore, many Republican primary voters seem willing to forgive and forget his past. Others seem not even to remember it. He has been able to pass himself off as a wise elder statesman — a historian without a history — able to capture the anger and anxiety of the right and articulate it with force, lucidity and gravitas.

Oh, it is to laugh! That is if you’re on the left.

But for those on the right with firsthand knowledge of working with Gingrich when he was in Washington, this is a nightmare scenario. The outside possibility that Gingrich could win the nomination and wreck the party scares them to death. Their panic over this has reached a fever pitch.

And this is not without merit.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released this week found that Gingrich now enjoys a 9-point lead nationally among registered Republican likely primary voters. However, Gingrich fared worse than all other Republican candidates when tested against Obama. The poll suggested that Obama would trounce Gingrich by 18 points.

(Luckily for Mitt Romney, Gingrich’s surge in Florida may be fizzling. A Quinnipiac poll of likely Republican voters in that state found that Romney leads Gingrich by nine percentage points. If that holds, Romney and the establishment Republicans will have dodged a bullet like Neo in “The Matrix.” A Romney loss in Florida would call his candidacy into question and send the party scrambling for a more attractive replacement.)

One of the latest establishment Republicans to try to avert the Gingrich catastrophe is former Senator Bob Dole, who wrote a letter to the Romney campaign on Thursday saying: “I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich, but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late.” It only got better from there. Dole continued, “hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him, and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice.”

Dole’s concern in his statement, and the concern of countless others, is: “If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state and federal offices.”

As Peter D. Hart, a Democratic pollster, told MSNBC, “Gingrich is Goldwater.” He continued, “In the general election, Gingrich not only takes down his ship, he takes down the whole flotilla.”

Part of the reason for this is Gingrich is thoroughly unlikable among the electorate at large and utterly nonsensical in his approach to real problem-solving. The fact that he has convinced some primary voters that he is an intellectual is one of the best electoral sleights of hand I can recall. As Dole said of Newt when he was in Washington: “Gingrich had a new idea every minute, and most of them were off the wall.”

To that point, Gingrich told a crowd on Florida’s so-called Space Coast on Wednesday that “by the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the Moon. And it will be American.” And he said that he would push for the introduction of a “Northwest Ordinance for Space” so that when the number of colonists reached 13,000, they could petition for statehood.

(By the way, I find it interesting that Gingrich didn’t insist on answering the question about Puerto Rican statehood at Thursday’s debate, yet he’s advocating for a state on the Moon. Earth to Newt: phone home.)

In the speech, Gingrich implied that he was “bold” and “romantic” and called himself “visionary” and “grandiose” in the vein of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and the Wright brothers. Gingrich is a virtual supernova of megalomaniacal madness.

In a way, the space speech made sense. Gingrich was doing what he does: tossing out random ideas like darts at a board, hoping to score. He was repackaging the idea of Manifest Destiny for the Moon and appealing to an area of the country whose pride and purpose were wounded by the ending of the space shuttle program.

But, on the other hand, this is exactly the kind of election-year lunacy that establishment Republicans have been worrying about. Florida has one of the highest state unemployment rates in the country and has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country. The last thing that people who can’t hold on to their jobs and houses here on Earth want to hear about is a colony on the Moon. The whole thing bespeaks a man detached from the real world concerns of real people.

As Dole’s statement went on to say, “In my opinion, if we want to avoid an Obama landslide in November, Republicans should nominate Governor Romney as our standard-bearer.”

The truth is that the Republican Party has no good choice at this point. It only has bad choices and worse choices. And the American public is beginning to recognize that. As the Republican courtiers of incompetence beat up each other, knock down each other and reveal each other’s flaws, a number of recent surveys have found that President Obama’s poll numbers on a number of metrics have begun to trend upward.

That’s because an election is a choice, a zero-sum game — the worse the Republican field looks, particularly if Gingrich is at the front of it, the better President Obama looks by comparison, regardless of one’s misgivings about his first term.

Establishment Republicans understand this simple, painful truth: Romney is no guarantee of victory, but Gingrich is an absolute guarantee of defeat. At least here on Earth.

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Will Newt be going down with the ship?

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A patriotic voter is quoted saying....

"They’re making me actually Show Up at that disease-ridden ‘tard corral that is jury duty, tomorrow. f@$^inghell."

Now, guess which local blog this quote came from.

It might be fun to hang out near the courthouse.....

Up and Powered

Power back at 9:30 last night.

Hopefully Anonymous will get back online.

Meanwhile, we welcome others to post.

Here's to having power back on!!!

Hope the rest of you ThursonBloggers are staying warm and if you don't currently have power, get it back soon.

More about Santorum

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How Rick Santorum Ripped Off American Veterans

By Andy Kroll

| Wed Jan. 18, 2012

A controversial land deal by the presidential candidate robbed a vets' home of tens of millions of dollars.

Like any good presidential candidate, Rick Santorum heaps praise on America's soldiers and veterans. He's pledged [1] to "make veterans a high priority" if elected president, adding, "This is not a Republican issue, this is not a Democratic issue, it is an American issue." But as a US senator, Santorum engineered a controversial land deal that robbed the military's top veterans' home of tens of millions of dollars and worsened the deteriorating conditions at the facility.

The Armed Forces Retirement Home, which is run by the Department of Defense, bills itself as "premier home for military retirees and veterans." The facility sprawls across 272 acres high on a hill in northern Washington, DC, near the Petworth neighborhood. The nearly 600 veterans who now live there enjoy panoramic views of the city—the Washington monument and US Capitol to the south, the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception to the east. At its peak, more than 2,000 veterans of World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War lived at the Home.

But with the rise of the smaller all-volunteer military, the Home began to run into serious financial problems. It was clear that one of its primary sources of revenue—a 50-cent deduction from the paychecks of active-duty servicemembers—wasn't enough to keep the Home operating fully. In the 1990s, the Home scrambled to find ways to avoid insolvency [2], trimming its staff by 24 percent and reducing its vet population by 800. Still, the money problems began to show, with its older historic facilities slipping into disrepair and decay. To grapple with its worsening shortfall, officials running the Home eyed a valuable, 49-acre piece of land worth $49 million as a potential financial lifeline.

Under one scenario, by leasing the parcel of land and letting it be developed, the Home could pocket $105 million in income over 35 years for its trust fund, David Lacy, then-chairman of the Home's board of directors, told Congress in 1999. Lacy stressed that the Home wanted to keep the property, and not offload it to a buyer. "Once land is sold," he said, "it is lost forever as an asset."

Enter Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.). At the behest of the Roman Catholic Church, and unbeknownst to the Home, Santorum slipped an amendment into the 1999 National Defense Authorization Act handcuffing how the home could cash in on those 49 acres. The amendment forced the Home to sell—and not lease—the land to its next-door neighbor, the Catholic University of America. Ultimately, the Catholic Church bought 46 acres of the tract for $22 million [3]. The Home lost the land for good, and by its own estimates, pocketed $27 million less than the land's value and $83 million less than what it could've made under the lease plan. Santorum's amendment sparked an outcry from veterans' groups and fellow US senators, who barraged his office with complaints.

Laurence Branch, then the executive director of the Home's board, says Santorum's amendment was "a travesty" and the Church's lobbying for the land a case of "coveting thy neighborhood's goods." To this day, Branch says he blames Santorum for the Home not receiving more money for the 49-acre parcel of land. "I'm convinced Sen. Santorum is no friend of veterans," Branch says. (A spokesman for Catholic University did not respond to a request for comment.)

At the time, Santorum said the amendment was the product of "a consensus agreement" and "was certainly not an attempt to shortchange the veterans." (A spokesman for the Santorum campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Santorum's advocacy for Catholic University isn't at all surprising. A practicing Catholic, Santorum embodies the church's anti-abortion and anti-gay-marriage positions as well as its support for charities and alleviating poverty. While in Congress, he was a fierce advocate for the Catholic Church. A former Santorum aide told [4] New York Times Magazine in 2005 that the senator was "a Catholic missionary who happens to be in the Senate." That same year, Time magazine named him [4] one of America's ''25 Most Influential Evangelicals.''

Meanwhile, the $22 million from the land sale hardly stanched the flow of red ink at Armed Forces Retirement Home. Financial records, court documents, and government reports from the 2000s show how the Home cut back on the services it provided veterans as it grappled with funding problems. The slashing of services got so bad that in 2003 veterans living at the Home filed a class-action suit against the Home and its director, Timothy Cox, alleging shoddy health care and less access to that care. As a result of cutbacks and declining quality in care, the suit claimed, the suicide rate at the Home spiked from 59 in 2000 to 131 in 2003.

In 2007, an investigation by the Government Accountability Office came to similarly troubling conclusions. The watchdog's head, David Walker, reported that one Home resident had been admitted [5] to the hospital with maggots in a wound. Other vets were admitted with bad pressure sores, suggesting they'd been left unattended for dangerously long stretches of time by the Home's health care employees. In the aftermath of the GAO's investigation, Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) demanded an independent investigation into the quality of health care at the Home.

Yet today, despite some improvement in the Home's financial health, its campus is pocked with boarded-up, decrepit buildings. All but one of the Home's gatehouses is shuttered, as are some of the Home's more elegant buildings, including the historic Grant building (named after the Civil War general) and the red-brick hospital that now sits empty, bearing a sign warning off trespassers. Some veterans believe the Home's constant financial struggles have led to a slow-motion decline of the Home. As longtime resident and Navy vet Robert Devaney says, "I like to call it demolition by neglect."
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In my opinion, Santorum should be forced to live in that facility without any of the comforts he's accustomed to having!

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Lighter Shade of Pale

And yet Glenn Church tried to say he's not a racist -

For a guy who seemed to say that “black people” shouldn’t get handouts, Rick Santorum keeps stepping into sticky racial issues even when he is not trying too.

As he traveled across South Carolina on Thursday, Mr. Santorum urged voters to dismiss the conventional wisdom that Mitt Romney has an upper hand in the nominating contest. He said the party can win back the White House only by offering a “clear contrast” with President Obama.
“We need contrasts,” Mr. Santorum said, “not just a paler shade of what we have.”

It doesn’t help that Santorum made this statement while trampling through South Carolina and shouting the praises of Strom Thurmond.

Wikipedia, Craigslist and other popular sites shut down for the Internet's first such stoppage

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Websites flexing muscle in push against online piracy bills
The temporary shutdown by thousands of Internet sites is the latest salvo fired in a battle against Hollywood's efforts that has Washington lawmakers caught in the middle.

By Jim Puzzanghera and Richard Verrier, Los Angeles Times.  January 18, 2012

Reporting from Washington and Los Angeles— 

Until this week, entertainment industry executives thought they had the votes for new federal legislation cracking down on foreign websites that traffic in pirated movies and music and cost them billions.

They lined up support from the powerful pharmaceutical industry and labor unions, and organized an impressive bipartisan coalition in Congress.

Then Silicon Valley struck back and appears to have outflanked Hollywood.

The result was on full display Tuesday night as Wikipedia, Craigslist and other popular sites shut down for a threatened 12- to 24-hour strike, said to be the Internet's first such stoppage. As many as 10,000 others had also threatened to go dark.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, said the strike was meant to protest the legislation's "frightening precedent of Internet censorship for the world." Visitors to Wikipedia's English-language site and others participating in the strike were met with a page urging them to write to Congress to oppose two proposed bills.

The swelling online opposition persuaded the White House to call over the weekend for lawmakers to remove the legislation's most controversial provision, which would have required U.S. search engines and payment networks to block access to websites focused on pirated materials. Supporters of the legislation say it would target foreign websites trading in stolen intellectual property, including movies and music. Critics say it would unfairly penalize legitimate websites too, such as the online classified ad service Craigslist or the photo sharing service Flickr.

Congressional sponsors are expected to remove the site-blocking provision, and to try to forge a compromise that focuses largely on cutting off the money to foreign piracy websites.

While Hollywood and other backers focused their firepower inside the Beltway, tech giants such as Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., along with websites and online activists, made a broader case and took it mainstream.

They successfully shifted the debate from piracy to Internet freedom, calling the legislation a threat to free speech that could stifle the massive Web economy. And they waged an unprecedented online campaign to slow the momentum of the fast-moving bills and endanger their passage.

"It was assumed by everyone that the content owners were going to get what they asked for," said Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law. "What's happened is that the opposition campaign has gone viral. It's not just Silicon Valley speaking up, it's the public at large."

USC media professor Marty Kaplan said the Motion Picture Assn. of America is partly at a disadvantage because tech companies have a higher "brand appeal" in the general public.

"In the fight between a message that says, 'The sites you love will be shut down' and 'The expensive content you love won't be available,' I think Silicon Valley wins that argument," Kaplan said.

Although all sides agreed foreign piracy sites are a problem and preached the need to find consensus, that could be difficult given the inflamed rhetoric.

"It's time to move forward on a narrowly crafted bill," said David Hirschmann, president of the Global Intellectual Property Center at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a major backer of the legislation. "Whether the politics in an election year will allow for that, I still don't know yet."

The proposed legislation aims to cripple foreign-based websites that trade in pirated or counterfeit material by cutting off money from U.S. credit card companies and ad networks as well as removing the sites from search engine results and in some cases blocking access.

Opponents said the legislation risks entangling legitimate websites and adding onerous legal costs to Internet start-ups.

"The definitions and language and provisions are extremely broad and extremely vague," said Erik Martin, general manager at Reddit. "It would seem to be written without anybody who knew the technology."

But supporters of the legislation said opponents are mischaracterizing it and criticized the protests.

Former Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, now chief executive of the MPAA, called the strike a "gimmick" and "PR stunt." House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said Wikipedia and other sites participating in the blackout were "promoting fear instead of facts."
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FROM WIKIPEDIA'S HOMEPAGE DURING THE BLACK OUT:

Imagine a World
Without Free Knowledge

For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia.  Learn more:

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FROM CRAIGSLIST'S HOME PAGE DURING THE BLACK OUT:

STOP PIPA (Senate 968) & SOPA (HR 3261) 

Imagine a world without craigslist, Wikipedia, Google, [your favorite sites here]... 

News Corp, RIAA, MPAA, Nike, Sony, Comcast, VISA & others want to make that world your reality.

80 Members of Congress are in their sway, 30 against, the rest undecided or undeclared.

★ ★ ★ Please take a minute to tell your Members of Congress you OPPOSE PIPA & SOPA ★ ★ ★

CLICK HERE for MORE INFO & EASY ACTION ITEMS

PS:  corporate paymasters, KEEP THOSE CLAMMY HANDS OFF THE INTERNET!

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Sheesh, Sarah, fuhgeddaboutit! Why do you think we care?

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Sarah Palin slams Newsweek for giving ‘conspiracy kook writer’ Andrew Sullivan cover story
By Dylan Stableford, January 17, 2011

Like many conservatives, Sarah Palin is up in arms over this week's controversy-baiting Newsweek cover story by Andrew Sullivan, who asks, "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" Unlike many conservatives, Palin's beef with Sullivan is personal.

"Know what's truly 'dumb'?" Palin wrote in a Twitter message to Newsweek. "Giving a cover story to the Trig Truther conspiracy kook writer who thinks I didn't give birth to my son."

The former Alaskan governor and vice presidential candidate is referring to the birther-like conspiracy theory--fueled by Sullivan and others--that she is not Trig Palin's real mother, and that Palin "faked the pregnancy to avoid embarrassment for her daughter [Bristol] or for political gain or some combination of reasons."

Sullivan's response?

I have no idea, as I have said time and time again, whether Sarah Palin gave birth to Trig, and have never written such a thing. All I ever asked for a person who could become president was some basic evidence for her insane story, like medical records that most candidates have no problem providing. She never provided any, and preferred to withdraw from seeking public office rather than do so. Of course, no response to the substance. She doesn't do substance. Neither, it seems, does much of the rightwing blogosphere.

The cover story drew the ire of conservative bloggers in particular. Joel Pollak wrote what amounts to the official conservative blogger response on Andrew Breitbart's Big Government in post entitled, "Why Is Andrew Sullivan So Dumb?"

"You'd have to be stupid, fanatical, and dishonest to argue—as Trig Truther Sullivan does—that Barack Obama's failures are part of an ingenious 'long game' that is destined to succeed," Pollak wrote. "If this is the best Obama's supporters can do, Obama's only hope for re-election is the weak Republican field."

During a Fox News segment on Sullivan's article on Monday, the network blurred out Sullivan's name when showing the Newsweek cover.

"They are far too afraid to have me on to defend it," Sullivan wrote. "I've been on the blacklist for years. Like Ron Paul, too dangerous for Fox."
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Pseudonymous comments are of higher quality

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Fake Names Better on Comments: Study
By John P. Mello Jr., PCWorld    Jan 16, 2012

People who use pseudonyms when they participate in online communities make higher quality comments than those who use real names or are anonymous, according to researchers.

That's the finding of a study of some half a billion comments made by more than 60 million users of the Disqus comment platform.

Disqus based its findings on user ratings of comments made at websites that use its platform. Its analysis found that comments by people using pseudonyms were "liked" or replied to by 61 percent of the people who read them. That compares to 51 percent for commenters using their real names and 34 percent who were anonymous.

Pseudonym users also have higher participation rates than others, 6.5 times that of anonymous commenters and 4.7 times that of those who use their real names.

Disqus admits that its exercise in comment quality isn’t an exact science nor can its methodologies be considered "lab-quality."

Moreover, the service does have an interest in website owners allowing their visitors to use pseudonyms, since it competes with Facebook, which some websites use as a comment platform. Since Facebook requires use of real names, it benefits Disqus if website owners believe they're diminishing the quality of their communities by screening out users who want to use pseudonyms as a condition for participating in those forums.

Use of pseudonyms has been a controversial subject among online communities. When Google's social network, Google+, instituted its real names policy last year, it was greeted with protest.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department is supporting expanding its power to prosecute people who violate a website's terms of service agreement. Such agreements sometimes have requirements that people use their real names when opening accounts on a website.
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"What the Right Gets Right".... (if anything?)

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What the Right Gets Right
By THOMAS B. EDSALL, January 15, 2012

With the competitors for the Republican presidential nomination engaged in an intriguing and unexpected debate over the dangers of capitalism’s “creative destruction,” this is the appropriate moment to explore the question: What does the right get right?

What insights, principles, and analyses does this movement have to offer that liberals and Democrats might want to take into account?

I recently posed a question to conservative think tanks: If given a free hand, how would conservatives deal with the unemployed, those dependent on government benefits (food stamps, Medicaid), and, more generally, those who are losers in the new economy — those hurt by corporate restructuring, globalization and declining manufacturing employment?

The Heritage Foundation, rather than answer the question, sent me links to the following papers: “Extended Unemployment Insurance Payments Do Not Benefit the Economy,” “A Free Enterprise Prescription: Unleashing Entrepreneurs to Create Jobs,” “Confronting the Unsustainable Growth of Welfare Entitlements: Principles of Reform and the Next Steps,” and “An Effective Washington Jobs Program: Do Less Harm.”

A conservative policy intellectual from a different think tank sent me an email suggesting that I read Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, “The Path to Prosperity: Restoring America’s Promise.”

All the answers evaded the question posed and, in my view, amounted to ideological pap.

I decided it might be better to ask liberals what they liked about conservatism. I submitted a new question to a small group of academics and activists on the left: what does the right get right?

The answers they gave describing the strengths the right has were illuminating and help to explain why the Republican Party has won seven of the last eleven presidential elections; controlled the Senate from 1981 to 1987 and from 1995 to 2007; and controlled the House from 1996 to 2006 and 2011 to 2013.

Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union (one of our era’s few highly successful labor organizations) and now a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Richman Center, made five points about conservatives in an email to me:

“They appreciate more instinctively the need for fiscal balance.”
“They understand people’s more innate belief in hard work and individual responsibility and see government as too often lacking that understanding.”
“They are more suspicious from a philosophical point of view of big government as an answer to many issues and are suspicious of Wall Street institutionally and not just their high salaries, and bad practices.”
“They respect the need for private sector economic growth (although their prescription is lacking).”
“They are more pro-small business.”

Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, is the author of “A Divider, Not a Uniter,” a harsh critique of the presidency of George W. Bush, whom Jacobson treats as a conservative apostate. Genuine conservatism, in Jacobson’s view, has a number of strengths:

It recognizes “the importance of material incentives in shaping behavior, and the difficulty in keeping bureaucracies under control and responsive to citizens.”
It is skeptical of “the application of social science theories to real world problems” and cognizant of “human fallibility/corruptibility.”
It places a high value on “liberty/autonomy.”
It places a similarly high value on “good parenting.”
It acknowledges “the superiority of market systems for encouraging efficient use of resources.”

Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is a liberal Democrat who has spent much of the past decade exploring the competitive strengths of conservatism. In his new book, “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion,” which will be published in March, Haidt makes several points. Conservatives, he argues, “are closer to traditional ideas of liberty” like “the right to be left alone, and they often resent liberal programs that use government to infringe on their liberties in order to protect the groups that liberals care most about.”

“Everyone gets angry when people take more than they deserve. But conservatives care more,” Haidt writes. And social conservatives favor a vision of society “in which the basic social unit is the family, rather than the individual, and in which order, hierarchy, and tradition are highly valued.”

What’s more, conservatives

detect threats to moral capital that liberals cannot perceive. They do not oppose change of all kinds (such as the Internet), but they fight back ferociously when they believe that change will damage the institutions and traditions that provide our moral exoskeletons (such as the family). Preserving those institutions and traditions is their most sacred value.

Haidt is sharply critical of some aspects of liberalism. Liberals’ determination to help victims often leads them “to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital.” For example, “the urge to help the inner-city poor led to welfare programs in the 1960s that reduced the value of marriage, increased out-of-wedlock births, and weakened African American families,” he suggests. “It’s as though liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really does need help) even if doing so damages the hive.”

Haidt, Jacobson and Stern described the positive or “flattering” view of conservatism; they were not asked about their opinions of conservatism’s shortcomings.

Much of the 2012 general election campaign will be taken up by the struggle between Obama and Romney — and, more broadly, between Democrats and Republicans — to define conservatism and the Republican Party in either favorable or hostile terms.

Two scholars, Philip E. Tetlock, professor of management and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Gregory Mitchell, a professor of law at the University of Virginia, have done provocative and useful work analyzing the pluses and minuses of liberalism and conservatism.

In “Liberal and Conservative Approaches to Justice: Conflicting Psychological Portraits,” Tetlock and Mitchell argue that the liabilities of conservatism include the following:

“Conservatives are too prone to engage in zero-sum thinking (either I keep my money or the government takes it). They fail to appreciate the possibility of positive sum solutions to social conflicts.”
Conservatives hold “the laissez-faire ‘minimal-state’ view that, although we have a moral obligation to refrain from hurting others, we have no obligation to help others. Conservatives cling to the comforting moral illusion that there is a sharp distinction between allowing people to suffer and making people suffer.”
“Conservatives fail to recognize that even if each transaction in a free market meets their standards of fairness (exchanges between competent adults who have not been coerced or tricked into contracts), the cumulative results could be colossally unfair.”
“Conservatives do not understand how prevalent situational constraints on achievement are and thus commit the fundamental attribution error when they hold the poor responsible for poverty.”
“Conservatives overgeneralize: From a few cases of poor persons who exploit the system, they draw sweeping conclusions about all poor persons.”
“Chance happenings play a much greater role in success or failure than conservatives realize. People often do not control their own destinies.”

The tensions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ conservatism have already surfaced in the controversy over the corporate acquisition practices of Bain Capital when Mitt Romney was C.E.O. Both Romney and the firm are proponents of capitalism’s “gale of creative destruction.” The question is, has Bain produced enough creation to justify the destruction?

The ideological war has begun in earnest, even a little early. It pits the right, seeking to depict a conservatism that is essentially good and a liberalism that is essentially bad, against a left attempting just the opposite. Looked at another way, the two sides are fighting over what the role of government in redistributing resources from the affluent to the needy should and shouldn’t be.

While neither Romney nor Obama fits comfortably into the role of doctrinaire standard bearer, they have both been shaped by political and economic pressures that have forced them into philosophical confrontation. Political campaigns, especially re-election campaigns, are highly ideological, and this one will be no exception as the nominees try to determine the direction the country will take over the next decade.

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Mitt Romney-- serial killer?

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The new ad from Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC:

“As head of Bain Capital, he bought companies, carved them up, and got rid of what he couldn’t use. If Mitt Romney really believes ‘corporations are people, my friend,’ then Mitt Romney is a serial killer.”

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Romney; god helping the Broncos

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Illustrating the very real power regular people have...

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Lawmakers Begin SOPA Retreat, Positive Signs For Free Speech Online
By E.D. Kain

Concerns over anti-piracy bills in congress are finally beginning to influence lawmakers. SOPA [Stop Online Piracy Act] architect Lamar Smith is, apparently, listening – especially now that the Obama administration is voicing its own concerns over the legislation.

In a statement, Smith said he will remove controversial DNS-blocking rules from the bill, though his counterpart in the Senate, Patrick Leahy, has only mentioned changing those rules.

“After consultation with industry groups across the country,” Smith said in a statement released by his office, “I feel we should remove DNS-blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the [U.S. House Judiciary] Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision.

“We will continue to look for ways,” Smith continued, “to ensure that foreign Web sites cannot sell and distribute illegal content to U.S. consumers.”

Cory Doctorow, writing at BoingBoing, points out that “Even without its DNS provisions, SOPA remains terminally flawed, creating a regime that would be terminally hostile to any site that contains links and any site that allows the public to post comments on it.”

Andy Greenberg also reports that Rep. Darrell Issa, an opponent of the bills, is delaying a hearing on the matter in light of the new concessions. The hearing would “have included Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, domain name system researcher Dan Kaminsky, and other outspoken opponents of the bill from the tech industry,” according to Greenberg.

I’m a little nervous about the whole thing, honestly.

While this is good news for free speech advocates and the tech industry, the risk as it stands now is that minor concessions are made and then still very deeply flawed legislation pushes its way through congress. The Obama administration, meanwhile, has made positive noises about the bills but can’t be fully trusted to stand behind its statements.

Either way, at least we finally have a real debate on the issue and, for now at least, momentum has slowed, prompting Matt Yglesias to write:

“It increasingly looks like the SOPA/Protect IP fights are turning into an example of how the political system sometimes does work correctly after all. The con forces on these bills initially looked numerically overwhelmed in congress and hugely outspent. But opponents really mobilized vocally, got people and institutions who don’t normally focus on politics to write about this, and perhaps most important of all demonstrated that more people genuinely cared about this issue than most members of congress initially realized. Now the momentum has slowed incredibly and the White House technology policy team has come out against these bills.

To look a gift horse in the mouth for a second, however, I note that the White House statement does contain a “reasonable” to-be-sure line stating that “online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs.”

I’m not sure this is our political system “working” so much as it illustrates the very real power regular people have, using technology to work together to raise awareness. The political system “working” too often means bipartisan efforts to do very bad things.
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Republican candidates don't deserve the job they seek

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Romney’s rivals serve up a heaping helping of pious baloney
By Kathleen Parker, Published: January 11
[snipped]

Sometimes people need to be fired, and sometimes they shouldn’t be hired at all.  That’s reality.  The further, obvious reality is that several of those who do not deserve to have the job they seek are running for president of the United States.

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Karma's a bitch!

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And here we were all thinking that Edwards was heartless!
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Judge: Ex-presidential candidate John Edwards has serious heart condition; trial delayed


By Associated Press, Updated: Friday, January 13, 2:50 PM

GREENSBORO, N.C. — Ex-presidential candidate John Edwards has a serious heart condition that will require a medical procedure next month and his illness limits his travel including for an upcoming court case over possible campaign violations, his doctor told a judge, who delayed the trial.

Federal Judge Catherine Eagles did not disclose the exact nature of Edwards’ illness Friday or what procedure he needed. However, she said the two-time presidential candidate had “three episodes” and indicated his condition could be life-threatening if left untreated.

[snipped]
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Gee, I didn't know that speaking a foreign language disqualified someone from running for President!

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This is ridiculous!  We're being encouraged on one hand to learn foreign languages so we can interact with the rest of the world, and yet GingrichTheFool mocks Romney (and Kerry) for speaking French!
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Gingrich mocks Romney for speaking French

Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich may have backtracked from a recent campaign ad attacking Romney as a job-killer during his tenure at Bain Capital, but he’s still accusing him of another act that may nettle some conservatives: speaking French.

In a web ad titled “The French Connection,” a deep-voiced narrator describes Romney as a liberal governor who authored government-mandated health care and raised taxes in his state of Massachusetts but who now masquerades as a conservative.

The narrator says, “Massachusetts moderate Mitt Romney, he’ll say anything to win — anything. And just like John Kerry, he speaks French.”

The ad then cuts to a video of Democratic Senator John Kerry saying haltingly, in French, “Let the good times roll!”

During the 2004 presidential campaign, Kerry was criticized for his connections to France, where he spent summers during his childhood. Romney, too, lived in France, where he served as a missionary for more than two years in the 1960s.

The ad closes with indisputable proof that Romney is Francophone–a shot from a video of Romney speaking in French to volunteers for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, which he helped organize. He says, in French, “Hello, my name is Mitt Romney.”

[Video at the site]
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"What we're doing in Gitmo isn't American, isn't justice, and doesn't work" -- a fellow blogger's opinion

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A system that doesn't work

Is this all true? How would we know? We don't take these people to court. We don't give them a trial. We don't let them have representation. Our government can do anything it wants and keep it all a secret. So how would we know?

Once they're taken to Gitmo, often on extremely flimsy evidence, that's it. And now they can take American citizens there, too. They can even take American citizens arrested on American soil. No trial. No habeas corpus. No rights at all. Whomever government officials want to lock up, they can.

President Obama did try to close Gitmo, I'll give him that. Of course, the Republicans wouldn't go along with it. The Republicans automatically oppose anything the president wants to do. And the Democrats themselves were too cowardly to support him in this. Big surprise, huh?

But Obama gave up pretty easily, too. You know, he should never give up. He's supposed to be a constitutional scholar, so let's see him stand up for the constitution!

Republicans are going to hate him no matter what he does, so why doesn't he stand up and fight for our side? I don't care if the rest of the Democrats are complete cowards. I don't care if it's unpopular. I don't care if Fox "News" goes ballistic. They will, anyway.

This was one of the great errors, one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration. We must close Gitmo! And if Obama can't close Gitmo, then he should never stop trying.

The fact that he failed doesn't bother me, not really. What bothers me is the fact that he gave up.

The American system of justice works. But what we're doing in Gitmo isn't American, isn't justice, and doesn't work.

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