1. "Shooting Suspects in the Back is Bad" A minority view on the right about the border guard commutations. Not all of us think those two were some sort of persecuted heroes.
Representative Sample: I despise drug dealers as well. But the suspect's profession doesn't mitigate the decisions made by these two former officers, and in my opinion, they didn't deserve their commutations
2. "Obama’s First Act - Protect The Terrorists In GITMO" Terrorists? I thought they they were are all poor innocent victims of the evil Bush torture machine. I guess I've read too many left-wing blogs.
Representative Sample: Obama thinks he needs to appease the left wing nuts who think terrorists are just wayward people with a reasonable beef against America.
3. "CHINESE INDIAN ARMS RACE HEATS UP" How can this be? Don't they know that Obama was elected president? Where's the hope & change?
4. "Garrison Keillor Is An Ass" Obama-worshipping Keillor thinks Obama is the first president to have been an author.
Representative Sample: Hey moron, let's try Thomas Jefferson, to begin with. 1782. Notes On The State Of Virginia
5. "My “To Don’t” List for the Right" What not to do. Good advice for the right, especially our nut wing -- if they'd only listen. They won't.
Representative Sample: DON’T make it personal. We don’t need another Derangement Syndrome. We don’t need people doing things like emphasizing Obama’s middle name in a derogatory fashion.
Two comments:
ReplyDelete1. I don't know about China, but India has fairly low military spending. As of 2006, it spent 2% of its GDP on the military, which is on a par with modern Europe and lower than the US. Both India and China had very fast economic growth until this year, so they'd have to increase military spending by 9-10% a year in real terms just to maintain a constant military-to-GDP ratio. So a 17% increase in nominal terms is less significant than it seems. (Besides, standard international relations theory states that countries that prepare for war don't report their increased military spending; therefore, it's hard to learn whether a country is preparing for war based on reported figures.)
2. The "To don't" list for the right is really bitter, and consists mostly of attacks on the left masquerading as advice to the right. Items like "don't move to Canada" really don't apply to conservatives. A more honest post would scrub them and replace them with more relevant issues, like "Don't attribute McCain's loss to moderation," "don't even think of making Sarah Palin your standard bearer," and "persecute the racists in your party with the same ferocity that Humphrey persecuted the communists."
Alon,
ReplyDelete1. I'm not sure how significant it is either, although I have seen other reports about Chinese military expansion in various areas. The same with India, although I haven't seen as much.
2. "The "To don't" list for the right is really bitter, and consists mostly of attacks on the left masquerading as advice to the right."
Alot of it is saying don't act like the left, which is good advice.
It is good advice, but the right wing needs not only not to act like Michael Moore, but also not to act like Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin. McCain and Palin alienated a lot of people with their comments about "real Virginia" and "the pro-America part of America." Santorum showed he was out of touch with mainstream American values when he said women shouldn't work outside home. The Republican Party turned off Hispanics by courting the racists and nativists more.
ReplyDeleteKos says that the Republican who scares him the most right now is Huckabee. Huckabee is religious enough to keep the base, but unlike Palin, he doesn't come off as crazy or bitchy. He's sensitive enough to issues of poverty and racism that he can get support from minorities.