It also shows what kind of mother and educator Palin is.
I don't think that the fact that a 17 year old girl gets knocked up says anything about her upbringing or her parents... 17 Year olds sometimes disobey their parents. Simple as that.
Oh, those are the wing nuts, from the right side of the car
What's wrong with shooting wolves out of airplanes? Those are good, old-fashioned values. Besides, you need all those skins to wrap your unexpected younglings in.
O'Reilly is such a bore. He doesn't debate, he shouts. He's made himself look like an idiot before. I'm sure Obama can handle him. Interesting move.
All you've got to do is choose love. That's how I live it now. I learned a long time ago, I can feed the birds in my garden. I can't feed them all. -- Ringo Starr, Rolling Stone magazine, May 2007
For all I know, Ringo might be a yogi disguised as a drummer! - George Harrison
"The good news is, Gustav has been downgraded to a tropical storm. Again, I don’t think President Bush really understands this stuff, you know? Like when he heard the levees were fine, he said, 'Thank God, but how are the Goldbergs?' ”
-Jay Leno
I love John, I love Paul, And George and Ringo, I love them all!
I don't think that the fact that a 17 year old girl gets knocked up says anything about her upbringing or her parents... 17 Year olds sometimes disobey their parents. Simple as that.
I wrote it because Palin promotes the Republican Party, only because of that. It turns out that they say one thing and do quite the opposite. The Democrats at least do not profess conservative family values.
Uh-oh: that hacking wheeze you hear is a thousand right wing radio talk show hosts doing their vocal exercises before going on the air to vent about the NYT again. All together now....
"The good news is, Gustav has been downgraded to a tropical storm. Again, I don’t think President Bush really understands this stuff, you know? Like when he heard the levees were fine, he said, 'Thank God, but how are the Goldbergs?' ”
-Jay Leno
^^^^^^^Too funny!!!!! Sounds just like "Dub-ya"...........
All I can and will say about this year's election is that it's a JOKE!!!! None of these "bozos" know what they're doing. I think two of us from this forum can get together and run and win by a landslide................
They'd better be fast learners: about seven hundred billion dollars is about to come out of the economy to pay for Wall Street's credit fiasco (which may not be done yet), and you can bet that the next two years at least are going to be very slow. Look after your money.
^^^^^^^I know, Geoff. I've been living by the "old adage" for a while now: If you can pay cash for it, you don't need it. Gonna tighten the belt a bit more after this election.....
One Thing I Can Tell You Is You Got To Be Free Words Of Love
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Good column:
This is the election you wouldn't want to win The bad news: November's victor could be a one-term disaster. The good news: a great president may follow him Gerard Baker The Times
Victorious Roman generals were reminded of the fickleness of their glory by a slave carefully positioned in earshot on the triumphal parade route.
“Memento mori,” the hapless servant would whisper to the wreathed victor as his chariot rattled along Rome's jubilant streets: “Remember you are mortal.”
They don't have slaves in America any more but perhaps the winner of November's presidential election should consider having one of his lower-paid deputy-assistants mutter something similar in his ear as he takes the tribute on Inauguration Day next January.
It is highly probable that that moment, the very hour that he takes office, will be the high point of his presidency. Whoever wins on November 4 will be ascending to the job at one of the most difficult times for an American chief executive in at least half a century. When the votes are counted his people might ruefully conclude that the victor is not Barack Obama or John McCain. The real winner will be Hillary Clinton, or Mitt Romney, or Mike Huckabee, or some now happily anonymous figure whose star will rise in the next four turbulent years.
2008 may be the best year there has been to lose an election.
This sobering reality was startlingly underscored this week by none other than Tom Daschle, the former leader of the Senate Democrats, the national co-chairman of Mr Obama's presidential campaign, and the likely White House chief of staff in an Obama administration. He told a Washington power breakfast that he thought the winner of the election would have a 50 per cent chance at best - at best - of winning a second term in 2012.
Consider the challenges.
The financial crisis and Washington's response to it have transformed the economic and fiscal environment in which the new president will take office.
The bailout/rescue plan/ socialisation of the banking system - whichever you prefer - has, in effect, already rendered null and void almost everything that the presidential candidates have been proposing for the past six months. It may not end up adding a straight $700 billion to the deficit over the next couple of years - the Treasury is surely right to insist that it will get some of that money back when the bad assets acquired from banks are sold off. But it would certainly not be prudent to expect there to be any room left over for promised tax cuts, spending increases on health, education or anything else.
The US already faced daunting fiscal challenges (admittedly smaller than those confronting most European and Asian countries). At some point reality will bite hard and politicians will discover that they simply cannot go on funding two wars, cutting taxes, creating vast new government health and pension programmes and doing the other essential things that the Federal Government does - all those bridges and roads and light-rail systems in parts of the country with closely fought congressional districts.
As some observers have noted, the bailout plan may simply have shifted the locus of the next financial crisis from the private to the public sector. This fiscal challenge is not just economic, but also geopolitical in nature. More government debt increases America's dependence on the financial interest of strangers; and not just any foreigners, but countries that hardly count as America's friends, such as China and Russia.
All this, and we almost certainly haven't even seen the worst of economic times yet.
For the past six months there's been a rather pointless debate in the US about whether the country is or is not in a “technical” recession, whatever that is. What is certain is that unemployment has risen and real incomes have declined, but now it seems that things are getting much worse. Yesterday - in one day - economic reports said that durable goods orders, everything from aeroplanes to television sets, dropped by more last month than in any month in almost two years; that jobless claims rose to their highest level since September 11, 2001; and that new home sales fell to their lowest in 17 years.
The US is now indisputably entering the darkest phase of a period that will not only produce real hardship, but could send further shocks through financial markets and cause deeper fiscal damage.
Then there is energy policy. Weaning America off its oil addiction might actually need to be a policy rather than a slogan in the next four years; but that will place new burdens on the budget and require sacrifices difficult to make in good times, let alone in economically distressed ones.
Compared with all this, foreign policy looks like a doddle.
The next president has only to complete the process of transition in Iraq, win the war in Afghanistan, face down a resurgent Russia, continue to keep its foot on the throat of stateless Islamist terrorism, stop Iran from going nuclear and figure out what to do about the challenge from China - the most serious threat to US global hegemony since America became top nation.
Oh, and I didn't mention Pakistan. Conversations this week with advisers to both campaigns suggest that both now see Pakistan - especially after last week's terrorist attack in Islamabad - as perhaps the most intractable and serious challenge of all in the next few years: they candidly admit that no one has much of a clue what to do about it.
You don't have to loathe President Bush to acknowledge that America's capabilities and standing in the world are seriously diminished at a time when its tasks are larger and more complex than they have been in decades. With its economic wherewithal now further impaired, the prospects for real success anywhere in the next four years look constrained.
Yet all this might be too gloomy a prognosis. Previous periods of apparently existential crisis in the US have certainly produced one-term disasters: James Buchanan in 1857, Herbert Hoover in 1929, Jimmy Carter in 1977 spring unpleasantly to mind. But the genius of America is that apocalyptic challenges have also, in time, produced the men to match them: Abraham Lincoln in 1861, Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, Ronald Reagan in 1981.
So perhaps, rather than simply assuring us that the man who wins in November is a sure loser, history suggests an unsettlingly binary possibility. Either the next president is destined for the cruel obscurity of one-term failure. Or he is set to join the pantheon.
Then again, look carefully at those dates and consider a crueller possibility for this year's winner: that desperate times like these actually produce both types of president, sequentially: a one-term disaster who paves the way for a true giant.
All you've got to do is choose love. That's how I live it now. I learned a long time ago, I can feed the birds in my garden. I can't feed them all. -- Ringo Starr, Rolling Stone magazine, May 2007
For all I know, Ringo might be a yogi disguised as a drummer! - George Harrison
The startling thing about Palin is that she wouldn't be out of place in a Disney movie. More depressing is the probability that her supporters wouldn't consider that an insult or a disqualification.
By the way, these are the current results from the Economist's poll:
The twelve votes for McCain are from El Salvador. I'll bet they're old contras.
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