"He who warned, uh, the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, uh, by ringing those bells, and um, makin' sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed." --Sarah Palin, botching the history of Paul Revere's midnight ride, June 3, 2011

http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/sarahpalin/a/palin-top-10.htm

When former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney addressed a tea party crowd in New Hampshire Sunday night, he again doubled-down on his assertion that “corporations are people,” a line he first used at the Iowa State Fair last month in explaining why he wouldn’t raise taxes on big businesses.

“I said ‘corporations are people,’ and the Democrats said, ‘Oh, he’s in big trouble now saying something like that,’” Mr. Romney said. “Well don’t they understand that we work for corporations?” Mr. Romney made his fortune as co-founder of the private equity firm Bain Capital.

It was a marked contrast from the approach Ms. Palin took during her speech in Indianola, Iowa, Saturday. After repeatedly accusing President Barack Obama of steering government to benefit corporate campaign donors, she turned to her party’s presidential candidates: “To be fair, some GOP candidates, they also raise mammoth amounts of cash,” Ms. Palin said. “What, if anything, do their donors expect for their investments?”

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/09/05/palins-attack-on-corporate-crony-capitalism-spotlights-gap-in-gop-field/?mod=google_news_blog

IT’S a foolish question, asking how smart a politician is.

It’s too vague. It ignores all the different wrinkles of intelligence and ways to measure it, along with the debatable link between brain power as it’s typically defined and skilled governance in terms of actual results. It’s a vessel for prejudices, a stand-in for grievances.

And yet it comes back around almost every election cycle, as it’s doing now.

Meet Rick Perry. At Texas A&M University, his grades were so poor he was on academic probation. He flunked advanced organic chemistry, which, in his defense, sounds eminently flunkable. He got a C in animal breeding, which doesn’t. For a “principles of economics” course, he attained a glittering D, as The Huffington Post detailed. You won’t be hearing him mention that much amid all his talk about Texas jobs creation.

His academic background, coupled with his rejection of climate change and fondness for gauzy generalities, prompted a story in Politico last week with this subtle headline: “Is Rick Perry Dumb?”

Based on grades alone, it seems so. But by that yardstick, even a politician as outwardly cerebral as Al Gore has some explaining to do. Gore got his very own college D — in a course about man’s place in nature, no less. Granted, this was at Harvard. But still.

Perry can’t dazzle in policy discussions. That’s also clear. The farther he ventures from Texas, the smaller he shrinks. When the radio talk show host Laura Ingraham recently tried to get him to say something specific — anything specific — about how America should deal with China, he clung so tightly to banalities that she was forced twice to plead: “What does that mean?”

But he’s savvy enough to have assembled a political team and adopted a political strategy that have him leading the (flawed) Republican field in a raft of recent polls. There’s something to that. Something more than excellent hair.

I’m less troubled by how thickheaded Perry may be than by how wrongheaded we already know he is on issues like evolution, which he says is just a theory, and homosexuality, which he has likened to alcoholism.

President Obama has those issues right. And can talk authoritatively about them and most others. A former editor of the Harvard Law Review, he has that kind of mind, that kind of fluency. In this one poised man, erudition and eloquence join hands.

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/sunday/bruni-pass-fail-and-politics.html?hpw=&pagewanted=print

With Representative Michele Bachmann's victory in the Ames, Iowa straw poll, and Texas Governor Rick Perry's triumphal entrance into the GOP presidential primary, there's been a sudden spike of attention drawn to the extremist religious beliefs both candidates have been associated with - up to and including their belief in Christian dominionism. (In the Texas Observer, the New Yorker, and the Daily Beast, for example.) The responses of denial from both the religious right itself and from the centrist Beltway press have been so incongruous as to be laughable - if only the subject matter weren't so deadly serious. Those responses need to be answered, but more importantly, we need to have the serious discussion they want to prevent. 

For example, in an August 18 post, originally entitled, “Beware False Prophets who Fear Evangelicals”, Washington Post religion blogger Lisa Miller cited the three stories I just mentioned, and admitted, “The stories raise real concerns about the world views of two prospective Republican nominees”, then immediately reversed direction: “But their echo-chamber effect reignites old anxieties among liberals about evangelical Christians. Some on the left seem suspicious that a firm belief in Jesus equals a desire to take over the world.” Of course, she cited no examples to bolster this narrative-flipping claim. More importantly, she wrote not one more word about the real concerns she had just admitted.

Dominionism is not a myth

"What In Heaven's Name Is A Dominionist?" Pat Robertson asked on his 700 Club TV show, one of several religious right figures to recently pretend there was nothing to the notion. Funny he should ask. In a 1984 speech in Dallas, Texas, he said:

"What do all of us do? We get ready to take dominion! We get ready to take dominion! It is all going to be ours - I'm talking about all of it. Everything that you would say is a good part of the secular world. Every means of communication, the news, the television, the radio, the cinema, the arts, the government, the finance - it's going to be ours! God's going to give it to His people. We should prepare to reign and rule with Jesus Christ."

read  more: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/09/2011948160923228.html

There were eight people on stage, but it looks increasingly like a two-horse race. Rick Perry and Mitt Romney publicly traded blows for the first time last night, in a debate between Republican presidential candidates which suggests that their rivalry will now dominate the weeks and months ahead.

The duo clashed on a wide range of issues including social security, healthcare, and job creation. They challenged each other’s previous legislative records, and demonstrated a growing willingness to shoot from the hip, even if that means being reduced to exchanging headline-friendly insults.

Perry, the Governor of Texas, has moved quickly to favouritism after announcing his bid for the White House last month. But yesterday’s two-hour debate was his first major test. It also represented the first time many Americans have seen him on a national platform...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/perry-and-romney-clash-in-republican-debate-2351152.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/10/us/10iht-currents10.html?_r=1&src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB

She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).

In supporting her first point, about the permanent political class, she attacked both parties’ tendency to talk of spending cuts while spending more and more; to stoke public anxiety about a credit downgrade, but take a vacation anyway; to arrive in Washington of modest means and then somehow ride the gravy train to fabulous wealth. She observed that 7 of the 10 wealthiest counties in the United States happen to be suburbs of the nation’s capital.

Her second point, about money in politics, helped to explain the first. The permanent class stays in power because it positions itself between two deep troughs: the money spent by the government and the money spent by big companies to secure decisions from government that help them make more money.

“Do you want to know why nothing ever really gets done?” she said, referring to politicians. “It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’ve got a lot of mouths to feed — a lot of corporate lobbyists and a lot of special interests that are counting on them to keep the good times and the money rolling along.”

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Let me reiterate what I wrote a couple of comments above:

So as that woman, Sarah Palin, tells the American struggling families they should stop "corporate capitalism" and "cronyism" in the USA... I shudder! It's a BIG AGENDA! Big big big... The United States of America was founded on slavery, cronyism and corporate capitalism. Apart from the slavery — shifted to China— cronyism and corporate capitalism have grown to underpin all the decisions US politicians make... For those who don't know, cronyism is "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours". This being a basic bilateral exclusive monkeysian relationship... Perry is quite blunt about it: "gimme money for my presidential election campaign and I'll do you favors". Obama is still learning that the EPA stands for protecting people's quality of air but he prefers to give the polluters a big break since they lobby so beautifully. Polluters — the essence of cronyism and corporate capitalism — have been at the core of making the USA so great...