SarahPalin « Quotulatiousness

June 14, 2011

Random links

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: GaryJohnson, MargaretThatcher, Ontario, Photography, Police, SarahPalin — Nicholas @ 10:11

A few links which don’t lend themselves to becoming full blog posts:

Guardian: “[T]he police managed to violate both freedom of the press and the English language.“
Just as the rest of the country has suspected for years, Ontarians are shown to be a bunch of drunken pot-heads.
Lady Thatcher’s snub of Sarah Palin didn’t happen, says former Thatcher aide.
Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, excluded from the New Hampshire GOP debate, campaigns in Iowa instead. “I think the biggest issue facing this country right now is that we are bankrupt and on the verge of a financial collapse”
An Economist blogger decries the “whimsical choice to exclude from consideration the polls that would qualify Mr Johnson for participation in the debate“.
You like books? You need more bookcases? Here is a house for you: “a structure where books could line every surface.”
Best travel tips for locals to give to visitors. Including, from the comments, “As you can see via the weather network, the temperature at the Canadian border drops an average of 50 degrees as you enter from the United States. Dress appropriately.”

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January 19, 2011

You’d have to admit, it would be an interesting ride

Filed under: Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: ElectionWatch, Parody, SarahPalin — Nicholas @ 07:21

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October 18, 2010

L. Neil Smith finds some new hope

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: BarackObama, BarryGoldwater, JohnMcCain, Libertarianism, LNeilSmith, SarahPalin — Nicholas @ 12:06

Taken from a speech for delivery at a Hollywood convention:

Once again we find ourselves standing at the brink. In just a few more days, our neighbors will choose — for themselves, and, to an unfortunate degree, for us — whether they want to live brave and free or would rather cower with the boot-heel of collectivism on their necks.

As individuals, we can vote, too, which may or may not be a futile effort — it’s been a subject of debate within our movement for three decades. However that may be, we libertarians, as a movement, have little or no power to change the course of events — a virtual river of blood — flowing violently all around us. The best we can do is to plan for what will come afterward, no matter what that may turn out to be.

[. . .]

And then, as I said, something happened, something that many of you may sneer at, but something, I believed (and still do) will prove to have been of unprecedented historical importance. Even more than that, it made politics exciting and fun all over again — I found myself laughing at the political situation for the first time in months.

John McCain had accepted Sarah Palin as his personal savior.

It didn’t work, of course, not for McCain. He was beyond saving. But Sarah spiced up the American political scene again, rendered it refreshingly unpredictable, and managed to make an ass of Barack Obama and all his works. Sure, she’s a Republican — although plenty of Republicans despise her, and she despises plenty of them. She’s even put a few of them in jail. In that respect, she’s Barry Goldwater’s revenge.

She’s a church-lady, war-supporter, anti-abortionist, and I, atheist and anarchist that I am, count myself as none of those things. But she’s solidly, provenly, for limited government and unafraid to be photographed with a sport-utility rifle in her hands, and empty cases in the air overhead. She hunts animals bigger than she is, and she’s cute.

Get over it.

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April 26, 2010

P.J. O’Rourke definitely wasn’t an “A” student

Filed under: Education, Government, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: BarackObama, SarahPalin, SocializedMedicine — Nicholas @ 09:11

At least, based on his apparent contempt for “A” students:

America has made the mistake of letting the A student run things. It was A students who briefly took over the business world during the period of derivatives, credit swaps, and collateralized debt obligations. We’re still reeling from the effects. This is why good businessmen have always adhered to the maxim: “A students work for B students.” Or, as a businessman friend of mine put it, “B students work for C students — A students teach.”

It was a bunch of A students at the Defense Department who planned the syllabus for the Iraq war, and to hell with what happened to the Iraqi Class of ’03 after they’d graduated from Shock and Awe.

The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15 we have to pay somebody who got an A in accounting to keep ourselves from being sent to jail.

Now there’s health care reform — just the kind of thing that would earn an A on a term paper from that twerp of a grad student who teaches Econ 101.

Why are A students so hateful? I’m sure up at Harvard, over at the New York Times, and inside the White House they think we just envy their smarts. Maybe we are resentful clods gawking with bitter incomprehension at the intellectual magnificence of our betters. If so, why are our betters spending so much time nervously insisting that they’re smarter than Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement? They are. You can look it up (if you have a fancy education the way our betters do and know what the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary is). “Smart” has its root in the Old English word for being a pain. The adjective has eight other principal definitions ranging from “brisk” to “fashionable” to “neat.” Only two definitions indicate cleverness — smart as in “clever in talk” and smart as in “clever in looking after one’s own interests.” Don’t get smart with me.

Whole piece here.

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February 11, 2010

Sarah “Barack Hussein” Palin and the Tea Party

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: BarackObama, SarahPalin, TeaParty — Nicholas @ 12:01

Steve Chapman looks at Sarah Palin’s Tea Party performance and finds a certain Obama-ness to it all:

The tea party movement started as a welcome protest against the alarming growth of federal spending and federal control. It had a strong anti-statist flavor, or seemed to. But judging from the applause for Sarah Palin at its convention, the movement’s suspicion of government power is exceeded only by its worship of government power.

[. . .]

When it comes to economic affairs, the tea partiers agree that—as Palin put it—”the government that governs least, governs best.” When it comes to war and national security, however, her audience apparently thinks there is no such thing as too much government.

The conventioneers applauded when Palin denounced Obama for his approach to the war on terrorists. Why? Because he lets himself be too confined by the annoying limits imposed by the Constitution. “To win that war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law,” she declares.

[. . .]

The advantage of having a former law professor in the Oval Office is that he doesn’t have to be tutored in such elementary realities. But Palin evinces a bitter resentment of any information that contradicts her blind faith in a benevolent, all-powerful security regime. She’s more than willing to trade liberty for safety.

That went over conspicuously well in Nashville, where tea partiers cheered a leader who places excessive trust in government, disdains constitutional freedoms, and promotes a cult of personality. So remind me: What is it they don’t like about Barack Obama?

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December 29, 2009

Worst. Decade. Ever.

Filed under: Government, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: BarackObama, Debt, Fail, SarahPalin — Nicholas @ 18:30

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November 19, 2009

How could Sarah Palin become a viable presidential candidate?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: SarahPalin — Nicholas @ 08:46

Mike Potemra has a solid idea of how Palin could overcome her weakness in public perception . . . and it’s not even something she has to do:

According to this CNN poll, only 28 percent of Americans believe Sarah Palin is qualified to be president. For a person as well known to the public as Palin, that is an appallingly low number. For someone who is already so firmly fixed in the national consciousness — more: who has already reached a stratospheric level of celebrity — where is the room for growth in popularity? Who are the people who could possibly move from the 70-odd percent who declare Palin unqualified, into the 30-odd percent who believe she is qualified?

The answer is: people who become convinced that her current low public image is largely the result of unfair depictions of her in the media. [. . .]

If prominent media figures show an obsession with Palin that is so deep that they put the rest of the world on hold just because she wrote a book — then people might start suspecting that, yes, maybe there really is some animus in media elites, and maybe we should give Palin another chance. That’s when the 70-some percent starts to melt away, and a Palin presidency becomes conceivable. The second step, from “conceivable” to “likely,” is an even shorter step than the first.

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November 18, 2009

Your opinion on Sarah Palin is a political litmus test

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: SarahPalin — Nicholas @ 19:02

David Harsanyi provides the (political) science:

These days, where you fall on the crucial issue of Sarah Palin tells the rest of us all we need to know about your character. You’re either A) a scum-sucking, terror-loving elitist or B) a radical, tea bag-loving simpleton.

Yet believe it or not, one can (as I do) admire Palin’s charisma and roots, appreciate her dissent on the policy experiments brainy folks in Washington are cooking up, and, at the same time, believe she has no business running for president in 2012.

In fact, all you haters out there motivate me to root for her.

There’s nothing wrong, for instance, with The Associated Press’ assigning a crack team of investigative journalists to sift through every word of Palin’s book, Going Rogue, for inaccuracies. You only wish similarly methodical muckraking were applied to President Barack Obama’s two self-aggrandizing tomes — or even the health care or cap-and-trade bills, for that matter.

The widely read blogger and purveyor of all truth, Andrew Sullivan, was impelled to blog 17 times on the subject of Palin on the same day Americans learned that the Obama administration had awarded $6.7 billion in stimulus money to nonexistent congressional districts—which did not merit a single mention. To see what is in front of one’s nose demands a constant struggle, I guess.

I thought Palin was a daring choice for the VP slot . . . one of the few decisions I could applaud in the otherwise hide-your-eyes shambles that was the last Republican presidential campaign. I still think she’s not the right person to run against Obama in 2012. But the campaign would at least be fascinating to watch.

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July 28, 2009

And now, in our special poetry section, William Shatner

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: Alaska, SarahPalin — Nicholas @ 12:42

This is, according to Peter Suderman, “an actual, unedited passage from her speech”.

Shatner flubs a word or two right around the bit about “ice fogged frigid beauty,” but otherwise, this is lifted verbatim. Students of Washington are used to politicians who don’t make sense, but this is rather more brazen than is typical. I think I have to agree with Gawker’s Alex Pareene: Palin is growing steadily more incoherent as we watch.

Still, there may be an upside: With luck, the discovery of her lyrical talents will end Palin’s terrifying political career and usher in the happy day when aimless lit majors can spend four years puzzling over her “verbiage” in order to turn out papers with titles like “Gertrude Stein and Robert Frost: Sarah Palin’s Poetic Lineage.”

Update: And in a stunning, but not-at-all-unexpected move, NBC Universal has demanded that this clip be removed by YouTube. Idiots. Do they fail to understand that clips like this might bring untold numbers who didn’t see that part of the show live to watch the show now?

If you didn’t see it, it was a reading by William Shatner of a highly poetic (for certain values of “poetic”) section of former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin’s resignation speech. If you can find a non-interdicted-by-NBC-Universal-version, do watch/listen. It’s more than worth the price of admission.

NBC Universal, while your claim may be legal under current law . . . you demonstrate both your ignorance of popular culture and your contempt for the very people who made you successful in the first place. Nice work. Give yourself a bonus . . . while you’re still profitable.

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