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Palin not running

Audio and statement here.

128 Replies to “Palin not running”

  1. Jabez01 says:

    I actually would have been upset if she chose to run. She would do nothing but cause chaos and split the ticket. Besides, if it took her this long to decide, what does that say? She would be great running RNC.

  2. Seth says:

    Damn shame.

  3. happyfeet says:

    I respect her decision

  4. Joe says:

    She would be great at the RNC.

    I thought she has had doubts about running by the delay. If she does not want to run she really should not.

  5. McGehee says:

    Andrew Sullivan hardest hit.

  6. sdferr says:

    Point guards distribute the ball.

  7. serr8d says:

    We are well and truly fucked, then.

    Happiest man in the U.S.A. today? Barack Hussein Obama.

    (next to ‘feets, of course.)

  8. sdferr says:

    You must disagree awful bad with Gov. Palin then serr8d, since she doesn’t seem to see it that way.

  9. newrouter says:

    eric erickson is an asshole that is all

  10. Richard Cranium says:

    ‘feets is Protein Wisdom’s version of Althouse’s Titus.

  11. serr8d says:

    I think she’d be the best candidate to represent my personal views of things, sdferr, so I’m very disappointed. Of course what she’s said is carefully chosen to veil her emotions, but she’s disappointed too I think.

    She’s disappointed in the vitriol and savagery of the Left, that’s mirrored in some of those on the other side of the aisle as well.

  12. LBascom says:

    I don’t want Palin as RNC. She needs to remain a symbol of the TEA Party; independent of the establishment.

    I expect her to run interference against the media to help elect the most conservative candidate we can muster.

    Well, that’s what I think she’s good at and I hope that’s what she does.

  13. serr8d says:

    This means I have to seriously look at Perry and and the rest of those midgets? All this time, they’ve been back-burnered AFAIC, waiting for Mrs. Palin to come forth.

    Well, except for Herman Cain, of course. He’s The Man now.

  14. sdferr says:

    I understand your disappointment serr8d. Just, it isn’t that “we’re well and truly fucked” at all, it’s that we have to do the work to put things back to right, and that this must be a doable thing in Palin’s view, without her having to put her name in the ring, or possibly, even better, to make more of a difference on this path as she sees it by staying outside the contention of a primary race. In any case, I personally think things have been looking up for weeks now as it becomes clearer that Obama is toast and that the majority of people are less likely to settle for second best.

  15. Abe Froman says:

    Drudge says Steve Jobs is dead.

  16. leigh says:

    RIP, Steve. We hardly knew ye.

  17. dicentra says:

    Steve Jobs, gone to the great Apps store in the sky.

    May his auto-correct not change “Hello” to “Hell.”

  18. serr8d says:

    She’s put out a note on Facebook.

    Jobs was 56. That’s not old at all, really.

  19. newrouter says:

    rsm

    UPDATE IV: Lonely Con: “Nicolle Wallace must be so disappointed.” Yeah, and now there’s nothing to stop Palin from suing Joe McGinniss.

    Link

  20. BT says:

    Damn

    This helps both Cain and Perry. Might help Bachmann. Don’t see how it affects Romney.

  21. serr8d says:

    Huh. I never owned an Apple device. What’d I miss?

  22. sdferr says:

    Mozart at 35, Schubert at 31, Gerschwin at 39, so 56 isn’t too bad.

  23. serr8d says:

    And Jim Morrison at 27. Now that was a damned shame.

  24. newrouter says:

    a commercial for the age of baracky

    1984 Apple’s Macintosh Commercial

  25. dicentra says:

    Gershwin at 39

    That was by far the worst. The wonderful things he would have composed!

    Jim Henson went at 53, still way too young, and acoustic guitar genius Michael Hedges at 43.

    It’s nice to know that if I die tomorrow, it’ll still be in the “too young” category.

  26. serr8d says:

    In the coming weeks I will help coordinate strategies to assist in replacing the President, re-taking the Senate, and maintaining the House.

    Replacing the President is paramount, although having a Republican House and Senate with BHO suffering in the White House might be the result.

    Suffering, because he could not push a damned socialisty thing through. He would be emasculated.

    Would M’chelle notice I wonder ?

  27. sdferr says:

    Of the three I listed, looks to me as though Schubert fits better with Morrison than either of the two others, at least if the conventional accounts of his cause of death are to be believed. Party hearty dudes, and leave a pocked corpse.

  28. pdbuttons says:

    hop hop sarah save the easter

  29. sdferr says:

    We don’t have time for another four years of Obama I’m afraid. Besides, nothing he can do will win himself re-election at this point. Palin’s efforts, therefore, may best be focused on winning a filibuster-proof Senate majority.

  30. serr8d says:

    Rick Perry, who is dancing a jig on a certain rock in Texas…

    “Sarah Palin is a good friend, a great American and a true patriot. I respect her decision and know she will continue to be a strong voice for conservative values and needed change in Washington.”

  31. sdferr says:

    We might stand back a bit and see Steve Jobs and others like him, like say, Edison or Ford, each different in their way, as commercial world conquerors, gathering and organizing the world through persuasion and benefit in a way in which Alexander the Great could not do through the mightiest force of arms and discipline then known.

    Then we think, what are these Owwwie fools fighting against again?

  32. iron308 says:

    I’m with you Serr8d. I’m not sure Cain or Bachmann can make it through the primaries and expect all of the others, if one is elected, to sit on the new status quo with an occasional tweak around the edges.

  33. serr8d says:

    The negativity of all these things…Sarah’s not running, Jobs are dying, Occupy Wall Street is swelling; the symbolism of it all is disheartening. Our little Republic is being rocked, and not in a good way.

  34. Darleen says:

    Bachmann is already toast … she stuck her foot in it once too often.

    Unless Perry can also stop with the stooopid insults, he’ll keep fading.

    Someone needs to grab hold of Cain and point out to him the media traps they are anxious to set out for him. As nasty as the business world can be, it’s nothing compared to what happens in politics. This ain’t just business to them, it is their zealot-like religion.

    Paul should be shoved off the stage

    …and Huntsman with him

    Romney is stumbling with his craven negative attacks … shouldn’t he learn from Bachmann? Still, he’s the flavor of the Establishment and he should take a page from what happened to McCain … the MSM flattering and building him up to turn on a dime and savage him.

    I like Newt, but he’s too damaged to be a contender (and a lot of it was self-inflicted, like his attack on Paul Ryan)

  35. leigh says:

    sdferr, it’s odd to think that my children have never lived in a world that wasn’t digital. I agree with you about the pioneer spirit of Steve Jobs. He became the giant whose shoulders others have stood on.

  36. sdferr says:

    Cain on the Owwwies.

  37. Jeff G. says:

    I don’t agree that Bachmann is toast. Long way to go, and as the field dwindles she’ll stand out more. Especially with Palin out of the mix. And no Hillary. Yet.

  38. leigh says:

    I have felt the chill wind that is Hillary. Don’t be surprised if she throws her witches hat in the ring.

  39. sdferr says:

    There’s an older, sort of hidden sense leigh, in which I haven’t ever lived in a world which wasn’t digital too, just that it wasn’t so widespread. Born in ’53, my pop was working as a programmer on a Univac machine for Southland Life Insurance Corp. even then.

  40. pdbuttons says:

    hop hop sarah save the easter
    shoot the bunnies[not them tasty chocalate ones]

  41. leigh says:

    That’s fascinating, sdferr. You’re just a few years older than me and I can remember watching the filmstrips at school talking about the space race and showing the Univac (I think) “computing machines” and lots of solemn looking men in white lab coats carrying clipboards. It was a faraway world from mine where my dad and I took the vacuum tubes from our television set to test out on a big machine at the Safeway.

  42. sdferr says:

    We did that too, though pop had a background with his own dad being a Ham radio man, so most of our tubes were from the station, rather than the tv. Pop went on to work for IBM on the space program for years, in huge basements in DC filled with a single machine, or later two.

  43. serr8d says:

    I’ve programmed with punch cards. Fortran IV; a miserable language, as I recall. Much happier I was with assembly-level machine code.

  44. sdferr says:

    I remember one night in the late ’60s when my dad came home from work with a silicon disk divided but uncut into chips, all excited to show and tell us how many transistors were fitted on the thing. We were like, wha?

  45. leigh says:

    Is Pops still with us or at least around long enough to see a PC or a Mac? Oh, the tales he could tell, I’m sure! On the downside would be watching the dismantling of the space program.

  46. Pablo says:

    I think the rise of Cain spells the end of Bachmann, unless he screws up royally. If he’s taking the Tea Party, what does that leave her? Not much.

  47. leigh says:

    Fortran sucked and so did Cobal. Good riddance.

  48. sdferr says:

    Oh, nope, he passed in 2005. One of the last things he worked on was the TDRS system for the Space Station though. Man did he ever bitch at the wastefulness of the redesigns Congress would cause year after year on the Space Station though. Hated it (the costly indecision, that is).

  49. leigh says:

    May he rest in peace. If he was the kind of guy to enjoy pranks, I hope he is poltergeisting the crap out of Ways and Means Committee. Not unlike my wish that Abe Lincoln spends his evenings tearing Obama a new asshole for comparing himself to Honest Abe.

  50. sdferr says:

    I swear to God I just found this by way of Insty. Can’t disagree with the assessment though. heh

    Although the HP Way was Silicon Valley lore, it wasn’t a touchstone to the general public. Apple’s rapid success, by contrast, made quite an impression. Before long, the ideal of the loyal company man working his way to the top was being replaced by the ideal of the brilliant, arrogant college dropout conquering the world before he was 30: the entrepreneur as Alexander.

  51. leigh says:

    Jung was right about that Collective Unconscious thing.

  52. sdferr says:

    And bh about the lesions.

  53. Jeff G. says:

    I think the rise of Cain spells the end of Bachmann, unless he screws up royally. If he’s taking the Tea Party, what does that leave her? Not much.

    Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? If she and Cain are the remaining two Tea Party types, they’ll have to distinguish themselves one from the other. At which point Bachmann’s experience — and her demonstrated willingness to buck the GOP establishment and go full bore after ObamaCare — might prove a big selling point.

    The point is, there’s a ways to go. We can take our time. I don’t need to listen to Rove or Hewitt or anyone else telling me I must pick Romney or Pawlenty or Huntsman NOW! This is an election of enormous import. And I don’t think the GOP establishment realizes just how willing some of us are to let Romney and the GOP braintrust try to win without us.

  54. motionview says:

    I am at a loss. I’d decided that if Palin did not announce by kickoff last Sunday I was moving on. Then Cain fell for 3 diversionary attacks in 72 hours.

    The enemy is playing for keeps. It’s time to get our shit together.

  55. sdferr says:

    A.B. Stoddard tells us Cain isn’t really running for President: he’s just conducting a book tour. So there’s that.

  56. newrouter says:

    “A.B. Stoddard tells us Cain isn’t really running for President: he’s just conducting a book tour.”

    because meeting your supporters is really stupid.

  57. serr8d says:

    WTF is an A.B. Stoddard? And why should I care?

  58. newrouter says:

    “A.B. Stoddard tells us :

    don’t listen to ab stoddard

  59. newrouter says:

    this is bj stoddard(via wiki)

    “Personal life

    Her father is Brandon Stoddard who was the president of ABC Productions, ABC Motion Pictures, ABC Entertainment and a partner in Ancient Mariner Films in Los Angeles. Her mother is Alexandra Stoddard, a prolific author, interior designer and lifestyle philosopher. Her aunt is Barbara Johns Waterston, owner of Providence Magazine. Her cousin is James Smallwood Waterston, an actor. Her great-aunt is Ruth Elizabeth Johns, renowned social worker.

    She was married September in 1997 to Peter Scott Roberson[1][2]”

  60. sdferr says:

    She’s a senior editor of The Hill, I think, and most likely a lifelong Democrat. I listen because I think sometimes they’ll tell you who they fear, even if they don’t know that’s what they’re doing. Then again, sometimes not.

  61. geoffb says:

    Jobs program.

    Jobs was sometimes criticized for not being a philanthropist along the lines of Bill Gates. Take this article, for example:

    Last year the founder of the Stanford Social Innovation Review called Apple one of “America’s Least Philanthropic Companies.” Jobs had terminated all of Apple’s long-standing corporate philanthropy programs within weeks after returning to Apple in 1997, citing the need to cut costs until profitability rebounded. But the programs have never been restored.

    CNN, being CNN, misses the point. Mr. Jobs’s contribution to the world is Apple and its products, along with Pixar and his other enterprises, his 338 patented inventions — his work — not some Steve Jobs Memorial Foundation for Giving Stuff to Poor People in Exotic Lands and Making Me Feel Good About Myself. Because he already did that: He gave them better computers, better telephones, better music players, etc. In a lot of cases, he gave them better jobs, too. Did he do it because he was a nice guy, or because he was greedy, or because he was a maniacally single-minded competitor who got up every morning possessed by an unspeakable rage to strangle his rivals? The beauty of capitalism — the beauty of the iPhone world as opposed to the world of politics — is that that question does not matter one little bit. Whatever drove Jobs, it drove him to create superior products, better stuff at better prices. Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase is without intellectual content.

  62. newrouter says:

    “Alexandra Brandon Stoddard (born circa 1967) is an associate editor of The Hill newspaper, a regular contributor to the paper’s Pundits’ Blog and a regular guest giving political commentary on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, PBS, HBO, BBC, CSPAN and Court TV.”

    effin elitist scrunt

  63. sdferr says:

    My bad, make that Associate Editor, not Senior.

  64. newrouter says:

    jobs didn’t do free money for bolsheviks program

  65. serr8d says:

    So, A.B Scrunt has reason to diss Cain. Two, actually: Romney and Huntsman.

  66. leigh says:

    A.B. always looks like she can’t wait to beat it out of the studio, spark up a smoke and head to a cocktail lounge.

  67. sdferr says:

    Woah, that’s not the way BrewCrew, not at all.

  68. Benedick says:

    First shovel-ready Jobs of this administration.

  69. newrouter says:

    she’s bj on the mittens dog cage

  70. Obstreperous Infidel says:

    Damn, there goes my bumper sticker campaign:

    When your country is stuck in a rut
    It’s time to vote for the hillbilly hoochie cumslut!

    Good for her. I think she can effect more change in this capacity.

  71. sdferr says:

    Imma go hug the tv and say a few incantations over a Bratwurst and a beer. Granny used to make necklaces out of snake-rattles, so maybe I’ll pull one of those out too and mock the spirit of the reptiles: “Couldn’t get out of the way of an 85lb 70 yr old with a .22, fools! Serves ya right.”

  72. serr8d says:

    “The spirit of the reptiles”, and symbolic of the despair contained in this thread, brought to you by the Lizard King.

  73. leigh says:

    Despair? No way. Now we can get down to the business of picking a candidate and not a contestant on the American Idol version of the presidency.

  74. serr8d says:

    Now we can get down to the business of picking a candidate and not a contestant on the American Idol version of the presidency.

    Hmmmph.

  75. happyfeet says:

    these are shockingly weak arguments against Herman Cain

  76. McGehee says:

    I think this pushes conservatives to finally get serious about who they think will stop Romney. If she comes out with an endorsement it’s all over for anyone else.

    If not, I think the smart money’s on Herman.

  77. newrouter says:

    ” In the days ahead I will propose removing the roadblocks that have slowed our economy and reduced productivity. Steps will be taken aimed at restoring the balance between the various levels of government. Progress may be slow—measured in inches and feet, not miles—but we will progress. Is it time to reawaken this industrial giant, to get government back within its means, and to lighten our punitive tax burden. And these will be our first priorities, and on these principles, there will be no compromise. 22
    On the eve of our struggle for independence a man who might have been one of the greatest among the Founding Fathers, Dr. Joseph Warren, President of the Massachusetts Congress, said to his fellow Americans, “Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of…. On you depend the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important questions upon which rests the happiness and the liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves.” 23
    Well, I believe we, the Americans of today, are ready to act worthy of ourselves, ready to do what must be done to ensure happiness and liberty for ourselves, our children and our children’s children. 24
    And as we renew ourselves here in our own land, we will be seen as having greater strength throughout the world. We will again be the exemplar of freedom and a beacon of hope for those who do not now have freedom. 25
    To those neighbors and allies who share our freedom, we will strengthen our historic ties and assure them of our support and firm commitment. We will match loyalty with loyalty. We will strive for mutually beneficial relations. We will not use our friendship to impose on their sovereignty, for our own sovereignty is not for sale. 26
    As for the enemies of freedom, those who are potential adversaries, they will be reminded that peace is the highest aspiration of the American people. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it; we will not surrender for it—now or ever. 27
    Our forbearance should never be misunderstood. Our reluctance for conflict should not be misjudged as a failure of will. When action is required to preserve our national security, we will act. We will maintain sufficient strength to prevail if need be, knowing that if we do so we have the best chance of never having to use that strength. 28
    Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have. It is a weapon that we as Americans do have. Let that be understood by those who practice terrorism and prey upon their neighbors.”

  78. happyfeet says:

    is that from the bible?

  79. sdferr says:

    McGehee swings, singles, loads the bases bringing the tie-run to the plate!

    That’s more like it, stupid snakes.

  80. Ernst Schreiber says:

    That’s from the Book of Reagan. It’s like the Bible. But different.

  81. happyfeet says:

    reagan gets numbers?

    get on with your bad self ron ron

  82. Darleen says:

    . At which point Bachmann’s experience — and her demonstrated willingness to buck the GOP establishment and go full bore after ObamaCare — might prove a big selling point.

    with all due respect, I think Cain has Bachmann beat on experience hands down. Who said someone has to have been a government worker to be qualified to be President? IMHO Cain’s resume is much more compelling.

    Yes, he’s a little behind the game playing … he hasn’t quite transitioned from office politics to the stuff on steroids that passes for national politics.

  83. Ernst Schreiber says:

    In line with geoff’s 61:

    The late Mr. Jobs stood for something considerably better than politics. He stood for the model of the world that works. . . . That old Motorola cinderblock would cost about $10,000 in 2011 dollars, and you couldn’t play Angry Birds on it or watch Fox News or trade a stock. Once you figure out why your cell phone gets better and cheaper every year but your public schools get more expensive and less effective, you can apply that model to answer a great many questions about public policy. Not all of them, but a great many. . . . I was down at the Occupy Wall Street protest today, and never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them — and for us — is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the Barney Franks and Tom DeLays an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords. And they — and we — will be poorer for it.”

    Kevin Williamson via Glenn Reynolds

  84. happyfeet says:

    Cain’s fed experience is novel impressive and relevant

  85. McGehee says:

    My baseball-ter ego had a good night, I take it?

  86. Ernst Schreiber says:

    There’s a reason that Willliamson thing is in line with the piece geoff quoted. Which I would have known if I had looked at the right link.

  87. McGehee says:

    Ah, a cousin — and the game’s not over yet according to my phone app.

    I probably was aware I had a cousin with the Brewers but had forgotten about him lately. Ordinarily I prefer teams from the non-coastal West, but…

  88. Jeff G. says:

    Who said someone has to have been a government worker to be qualified to be President? IMHO Cain’s resume is much more compelling.

    No one said that. Bachmann’s got experience both in business and in dealing with the GOP leadership. Two, two, two mints in one.

  89. Ernst Schreiber says:

    I like Cain/Bachmann or Bachmann/Cain

    if only for the entertainment value

  90. geoffb says:

    Sorry Ernst. I decided to include the link to the CNN article which Mr. Williamson had linked to too.

  91. geoffb says:

    Cain/Bachmann or Bachmann/Cain

    Cue Democrat miscegenation jokes in 3 – 2 – 1…

    You do know they will go there. BAMN is more than a motto, it’s a lifestyle.

  92. BT says:

    I could see a Cain/Gingrich ticket being very balanced. But to be honest i still think Perry has a good chance, even though there is no way he is a small government type.

  93. sdferr says:

    Mike Lee seems a statesmanlike fellow fit for VP, albeit more experienced in the Judiciary and the Legislature than in the Executive, but I don’t think the lack disqualifying.

  94. Fuggit. Cain/Rice 2012

  95. geoffb says:

    Christie, Palin, and Rubio, all out in the past 24 hours. Rubio, I do like the cut of his jib in this showdown.

    The president of Univision, the top Spanish-language network, made an apparent attempt to extort a TV appearance from Sen. Marco Rubio in exchange for not broadcasting dirt on a relative. Can it go any lower?

    Good on these five too, “Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, John Huntsman, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain — have honorably declined to appear at Univision’s president debate, scheduled to be held two days before Florida’s Jan. 31 primary.

  96. Sarah Rolph says:

    You don’t think Bachmann is toast after the vaccine comment?

    I do.

  97. Blake says:

    I don’t mind holding my nose a bit and voting for Perry.

    Cain has really caught on and I hope he gets better.

    With any luck, Santorum, Perry and Cain can bury Romney.

    Romney continues to turn my stomach.

  98. serr8d says:

    The phrase is without intellectual content.

    Sums up the entire ‘Occupy’ movement, really.

    What do these mental midgets want, exactly? Why, to be given things they haven’t earned. To be handed a cradle-to-grave existence, with equal outcomes for every person regardless of their ability or desire to work for it.

    They want a permanent womb formed by Government, succoring them for life.

    Damn Democrats for leaving the path of our founding documents and pandering to these sorts, for their votes.

  99. JHoward says:

    A few points: Doesn’t 9-9-9 turn into 9-18? Don’t all private purchases end up taxing the spender twice, once on income and again on expenditure?

    How is 9-9-9 assured to not turn into a Reid-Pelosi-Obama 20-20-20? Or whatever.

    Does anyone know the extent of Cain’s insider status as the presumed result of his running a federal reserve bank?

    The national income tax is the only sensible tax because it’s a single-layer tax, it only taxes use of the economy, it pains the spender where he’s most sensitive (keeping eternal voter pressure on the Congress and constraining government’s budget within the ebbs and flows of a real economy and not the unbalanced fiat economy the bastards currently create and manipulate) and it leaves the individual as free as any tax can. But Cain’s version of it does not seem sensible.

  100. Slartibartfast says:

    Fortran sucked and so did Cobal. Good riddance.

    Fotran was only good for people who actually wanted their programs to do something; not so good for people who made their entire livelihood from being programming-pedants.

    Cobol I never had any use for. Which is not the same as saying it’s “bad”.

    There’s a reason why engineers now prototype algorithms using Matlab script: because it’s Fortran-like in that you don’t have to fuck with pointers and addresses, and because it’s fast, and because few organizations support Fortran anymore. Matlab is basically the new Fortran.

  101. Slartibartfast says:

    Andrew Sullivan hardest hit.

    Literally, I’d hope.

  102. Pablo says:

    A few points: Doesn’t 9-9-9 turn into 9-18? Don’t all private purchases end up taxing the spender twice, once on income and again on expenditure?

    How is 9-9-9 assured to not turn into a Reid-Pelosi-Obama 20-20-20? Or whatever.

    You could call it 27 if you like, as the consumer ultimately pays the corporate income tax as well. As for the 9’s creeping upward, remember that 9-9-9 is Phase 1. It goes away in Phase 2, which is the Fair Tax.

  103. happyfeet says:

    they promised me a phase 2

    I’d like my phase 2 now please

    c’mon I said please

  104. cranky-d says:

    I was traveling yesterday, so this is the first I heard about Palin not running. For me, the only upside is that I won’t be reading any more crap about her from the electric hamster. I hope.

    Up until her comment about Cain, I liked A.B. Stoddard. Perhaps she’s acting, but she usually comes across as conservative. I suppose she’s just another establishment type.

    I like Cain. I think the GOP establishment will keep him out somehow. I can live with Perry, for now. Bachmann is probably redeemable. Romney is a non-starter.

    This will likely be the election in which the GOP establishment discovers we will not vote for whichever statist they prop up. They need to learn that business as usual is no longer viable. That probably means Obama will win.

    We need a filibuster-proof majority in the House and Senate.

  105. sdferr says:

    Phase II

    Heh

    Gallup -11, Rassmussen -14, Quinnipiac -14, ABC/WaPo -12, FoxNC -8, CNN/OR -7, CBS tie/flat/0 : RCP Avg -9.4

    Outlier? What outlier?

    -11

  106. LBascom says:

    “This will likely be the election in which the GOP establishment discovers we will not vote for whichever statist they prop up. They need to learn that business as usual is no longer viable. That probably means Obama will win.”

    Obama is done I think. If he is re-elected with his record, I’m going to quit voting because it’s an empty gesture.

    I’ve mentioned my dream ticket before, but I still think Perry will likely be the next president.

  107. LBascom says:

    Actually, being as we use the electoral college, and I live in California, my vote is a gesture at best anyway.

  108. sdferr says:

    Rumor of landslide might should hold weight even in geologically young California, where shifts of ground aren’t exactly uncommon.

  109. cranky-d says:

    Remember that while the electoral college elects the president, everyone still mentions the popular vote along with it. Symbolism matters for many people. Also, since I live in MN, my vote will likely not count either. I will still vote, though, if the candidate is acceptable. If not, I will leave it blank but vote for the other offices.

  110. happyfeet says:

    hispanics here aren’t very motivated to re-elect bumble they’re probably not gonna vote in huge numbers unless Team R really goes out of their way to piss them off

  111. LBascom says:

    I still vote, but just so when they make the map it will continue to show California, by area, 95% red, with a thin strip of blue on the coastline from the Mexican border to San Fran, and a splotch in Sacramento.

    I can predict California elections with 95% accuracy, including ballot measures, by picking the opposite of what I vote for. Even my vote for someone other than the R or D for governor was meaningless, because Brown won by more than all the votes cast for other candidates, other than Whitman, combined.

    I mean, even my vote to tell parents when their 12 yo daughter was having an abortion was all wrong as far as California is concerned. About the only one I got right(twice) was the definition of marriage thing, which otta tell happyfeet something. Even then, the fucking republican governor denounced my vote, and they’re still working diligently to steal my vote thru the courts.

    *sigh* OK, I’m depressing myself…

  112. LBascom says:

    The fucking republican governor I didn’t vote for, by the way.

  113. cranky-d says:

    Brown has been around entirely too long in CA politics. I don’t think he’s ever earned an honest day’s wages.

  114. sdferr says:

    Yeah, yeah, things have been stupid shitty in California for years and years. But in some ways, all the more reason a sudden shift of ground becomes more likely. I mean, Scott Brown for fuck’s sake? Who, in 2006, would have predicted a Republican sitting in the same Senate seat then occupied by Ted Kennedy?

  115. motionview says:

    Slarti on the plus side I can try 20 things in Matlab in the time it would take to code it once in C. On the minus side, I can try 20 things in Matlab instead of thinking really hard and then coding it once correctly in C. I don’t far back enough for Fortran on punch-cards serr8d you old coot but I did spend a little time with Fortran on a micro-vax.

  116. McGehee says:

    I could see a Cain/Gingrich ticket being very balanced.

    They’re both Georgians though. The one element of “balance” in the Constitution regarding presidential tickets is that the two people on one have to be from different states.

    Gingrich could register to vote in D.C. or something. I doubt anyone would look askance.

  117. LBascom says:

    True sdferr. I actually had my hopes up last election, but we were the only state untouched by the T party effect.

    I keep hope alive, but Babs Boxer crushed my faith.

  118. sdferr says:

    Obazzma has the pretend-press sucking his cock again today I hear. So what’s new? He fesses up to loving the Owwwies. Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!

  119. Slartibartfast says:

    I do go back far enough to remember Fortran on punched cards, but it was Fortran 77.

    On a CDC mainframe for which there were relatively few “dumb terminals”, so you had to throw your code in via the card reader.

    Motionview speaks VAX Fotran? Fossil.

    I can code in C++, but I noticed over the years that the better my code was, the longer it took to put together and the harder it was to modify.

    So nowadays I try to stick with Matlab, for algo development, then migrate it to C++ and (hopefully) pay a real software person to do that migrationin some sane way.

  120. geoffb says:

    California dreaming.

    When he was elected to the city council, Reed says, “I hadn’t even thought about pensions. I can’t say I said, ‘Here is my plan.’ I never thought about this stuff. It never came up.” It wasn’t until San Diego flirted with bankruptcy, in 2002, that he wondered about San Jose’s finances. He began to investigate the matter. “That’s when I realized there were big problems,” he says. “That’s when I started paying attention. That’s when I started asking questions: Could it happen here? It’s like the housing bubble and the Internet bubble. There were people around who were writing about it. It’s not that there aren’t people telling us that this is crazy. It’s that you refuse to believe that you are crazy.”

    He hands me a chart. It shows that the city’s pension costs when he first became interested in the subject were projected to run $73 million a year. This year they would be $245 million: pension and health-care costs of retired workers now are more than half the budget. In three years’ time pension costs alone would come to $400 million, though “if you were to adjust for real life expectancy it is more like $650 million.” Legally obliged to meet these costs, the city can respond only by cutting elsewhere. As a result, San Jose, once run by 7,450 city workers, was now being run by 5,400 city workers. The city was back to staffing levels of 1988, when it had a quarter of a million fewer residents. The remaining workers had taken a 10 percent pay cut; yet even that was not enough to offset the increase in the city’s pension liability. The city had closed its libraries three days a week. It had cut back servicing its parks. It had refrained from opening a brand-new community center, built before the housing bust, because it couldn’t pay to staff the place. For the first time in history it had laid off police officers and firefighters.

    B y 2014, Reed had calculated, a city of a million people, the 10th-largest city in the United States, would be serviced by 1,600 public workers. “There is no way to run a city with that level of staffing,” he said. “You start to ask: What is a city? Why do we bother to live together? But that’s just the start.” The problem was going to grow worse until, as he put it, “you get to one.” A single employee to service the entire city, presumably with a focus on paying pensions. “I don’t know how far out you have to go until you get to one,” said Reed, “but it isn’t all that far.” At that point, if not before, the city would be nothing more than a vehicle to pay the retirement costs of its former workers.

    San Jose = GM

  121. geoffb says:

    Second year of college my choices in computer classes were Fortran, Cobol, and RPG all on punch card run on an IBM 1401 IIRC. They upgraded to a System/3 shortly thereafter. None of that interested me.

    A year or so later discovered that in a basement room in a tech building they had a DEC PDP [8?] running Basic on teletypewriters with papertape readers to IO your program. No one stopped me from setting down and playing with it. That was when I got interested in computers. Interactive was the hook.

  122. LTC John says:

    Jumpin’ Jesus on A pogo stick, geoffb! That is hugely depressing – tho’, as an Illinoisan, I can say now that it does appear someone else will go bust first comforts me in a sad and terrible way.

  123. cranky-d says:

    Fortran 77 on the VAX/VMS to start in 1982. Followed that with Pascal on the IBM PC-AT (we had a networked hard drive with 10 MB storage!) and assembly on a Terak that used 8in floppy drives. I taught myself C on my Amiga and C++ on various Suns, and taught both in the labs. I currently write C# code in VS2010 to make my rent.

  124. cranky-d says:

    Oops, I forgot about Matlab. I used that for my research in grad school. It can be pretty slick for matrix-vector stuff if you know how to take advantage of it.

  125. leigh says:

    I admire youse guys who can do coding. I took several classes back in ancient times in Fortran, Pascal and Cobol and I hated them all. I’d rather listen to Dead Heads debating Phish fans than write code.

  126. PCachu says:

    Andrew Sullivan hardest hit.

    You’re kidding, right? I mean, she just single-handedly killed any prospect of a career for that persistent crapstain, Levi “Ricky Hollywood” Johnston.

    And that means SARAH PALIN DESTROYS JOBS!!!!eleventy!!

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