http://www.lewrockwell.com/…

It’s long been my contention that if the demonrats would just jettison the relatively small elitist wing of their party–the condescending limousine liberals, the middle-America and normalcy-hating “urbane” and cosmpolitan condescending types–and just have a mildly populist, redistributionist, soft-socialist but culturally conservative platform, they could clean house and recapture all the inexplicably Republican Joe Sixpack types who are their natural constituency (but who are alienated by Barbra Streisand’s screeching). (See my How the Democrats Could Win.) But their stupidity knows no bounds. Why they need to anchor their image to the vapid Hollywood and libertine types is beyond me. Apparently abortion is all that matters to them.

Their inexplicable self-destructive behavior is on fully display in their reaction to the Sarah Palin VP nomination. A few choice quotes and examples below:

As I noted here, after Hillary Clinton’s speech during the Democrat convention, Susan Estrich admitted that because of female demonrat disappointment over Hillary’s loss to Obama, if McCain just picks a woman VP, “it’s Cha-Ching” (i.e., he’ll rack up many female votes that otherwise could have gone to Obama). So, she said, “As a democrat, I hope McCain doesn’t pick a woman VP.” So she wanted McCain to discriminate against women. Nice.

In this post on HuffPo, David Sirota explains why Palin “is a pretty smart choice”:

1. Putting a woman on the ticket is McCain’s best hope to peel off some disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters

2. Palin comes from an energy state, and specifically, an oil and gas state. With Democrats’ pathetically (yet predictably) tepid behavior on the drilling issue, the GOP senses an opportunity to exploit it, and you can bet Palin will be making the drilling case, with first-person narratives and anecdotes.

3. It will be difficult — though not impossible — for the Obama campaign to make an experience argument against Palin. Even though Palin is probably the most inexperienced candidate for vice president in contemporary American history, the Republicans have spent months attacking Obama’s supposed lack of experience. So when gnats like Rahm Emanuel issue silly, over-the-top press releases about Palin’s career, they re-open an experience debate that John McCain probably wants to have with Obama.

4. As the Nation’s Chris Hayes reports, Palin is a die-hard right-winger who could help McCain solidify the Republican base.

Sirota fails to mention, however, another important factor: the condescending the way the left is sure to react–is already reacting–belittling normalcy, middle class, “beauty queens,” “small” states is also going to hurt them.

A good example of liberal condescension (and hypocritically sexist, at that) from Jane Smiley: “If the red phone rings in the middle of the night and she’s breastfeeding, will she answer it?” The contempt for normal America–the bizarre, sneering sexism–just oozes out of this liberal vitriol, doesn’t it? Think middle America won’t pick on up on this? Why vote for those who feel they are superior to you and who relegate normalcy to peon status?

And another, by “Michael Seitzman”:”She’s never actually used the word Shiite in a sentence before. She’s never had to. She’s never given any thought whatsoever to nuclear proliferation. She’s never had to. She’s never thought about Israel, Russia, Korea, or Iran. She’s never even thought about Mexico.”

How in the world does he know? He’s implying that unless you are a federal politician, or some savvy DC Denizen, you haven’t “thought” about …. Russia, Korea, etc. Hell, even mere state governors are peons and not worthy to sit at the table with the benighted Beltwaytarians–if you are only governor of “small state”, that is. Gee, I wonder what citizens of, say, most states outside Yankeeland, California, and DC think about that snub? These condescending attacks on Palin, small-town america, “small” states, and normalism are just amazing to behold.

And what’s that say about, say, housewives and career women? I guess they’ve never “thought about” these weighty matters either? I guess they’re too busy breastfeeding or running in beauty pageants or merely being mayors of “small” towns.

Hell, Alaska is even more backward and lacking of culture and interesting people than Auburn, Alabama. And forget about liberals for a sec–how could the Kochtopus support this ticket? Jesus. Listen to these cackling hypocrites. Is dissing Alaska as some hick backwater supposed to help them with voters?

Seitzman continues: “There is not a fireball’s chance in Alaska that Sarah Palin could make that argument in a debate with Joe Biden. She lacks the gravitas, she lacks the knowledge, she lacks the experience. If she were a news anchor we’d say she reeks of local.”

Read that again: She REEKS OF LOCAL? Oh my God, if only I were a Republican so I could enjoy this self-immolation. These clueless condescending nabobs are going to just bury themselves, the condescending, these “cosmopolitan”, “urbane,” “hip” morons!

As a friend noted, “I must admit I found the statement about “mayor of a town of 9,000″ particularly stupid. If somebody could pull out a map for me and show me where, precisely, they intend to pick up electoral votes with such a statement, I would be thrilled. In fact, if ever a party were determined from the outset to find a way to win the popular vote and lose the electoral college, it would look an awful lot like what the D’s are up to these days. Of course, maybe they are trying to lose both - here I had thought that the popular vote was a foregone conclusion, but Obama, et al. are trying to lose even that.”

Finally, see this collection of demonrat comments on Palin. It’s just incredible. As a friend of mine might say, LOL Democrats!

Update: S.M. Oliva notes in a post on the Mises blog: “… it seems to me that “experience” is more about the possession of certain credentials then time spent furthering the evils of the state. Mr. Obama may not have any particular legislative achievements or “executive” experience, but he does possess an undergraduate degree from Columbia and a law degree from Harvard. Mrs. Palin, in contrast, has only an undergraduate degree from the University of Idaho - her fourth stop in an extended college career - financed partially through her winnings as a beauty pageant contestant. She is, as one Democrat told me yesterday, one step removed from white trash.”

Some people want to know how the Democrats could loose this election? This is how. Sarah Palin deserves to be criticized. She appeared to be a relatively decent, more traditional, small government Republican. Her husband and oldest son aren’t registered to a party and she talked highly of Ron Paul. Her selling of her soul to the neocons however has completely tainted her. Or at least it should. But this limousine liberal, high and mighty, attitude will likely not fly with the average voter. Obama already has this aura of elitism. This ’she’s a local’, ‘one step removed from white trash’ will just push blue dog democrats and centralists to McCain, IMO.

http://kotaku.com/…

Melissa Batten, 36, a software development engineer in Microsoft’s Xbox division, was murdered by her estranged husband, who then shot himself to death, earlier this week.

Batten, a Harvard-educated lawyer, was a Software Development Engineer in Test for Microsoft, supporting Rare on its 360 titles work. She had worked for Microsoft since 2002, earning credits in Halo 3 and Gears of War as an SDET. Earlier, as a lawyer, she had been a public defender for the Mecklenburg County (Charlotte, N.C.) Public Defender’s Office.

Her husband, Joseph Batten, was also 36. He had also worked for Microsoft but most recently worked for Wizards of the Coast, publisher of hobby games such as Magic: the Gathering. Melissa had obtained a restraining order against her husband on July 21. Another news story describes Joseph Batten as obsessive and verbally abusive, and when she learned he had obtained a handgun, she sought the protection order.

If our society put greater emphasis on self defense and personal responsibility likely these happenings would occur less often. It looks like Washington state has fairly liberal gun laws, if that is in fact where it happened, she could have armed herself in addition to requesting protection. Instead she went with begging the government to protect her… something which the SCOTUS has said the government has no obligation to do.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…

The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.

Since the Reagan years, free-market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing.

You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn’t matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to “grow the pie” is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is “protectionism.”

The old script is in rewrite. “We are in a worldwide crisis now because of excessive deregulation,” Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview.

He noted that in 1999 when Congress replaced the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act with a set of looser banking rules, “we let investment banks get into a much wider range of activities without regulation.” This helped create the subprime mortgage mess and the cascading calamity in banking.

While Frank is a liberal, the same cannot be said of Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Yet in a speech on Tuesday, Bernanke sounded like a born-again New Dealer in calling for “a more robust framework for the prudential supervision of investment banks and other large securities dealers.”

Bernanke said the Fed needed more authority to get inside “the structure and workings of financial markets” because “recent experience has clearly illustrated the importance, for the purpose of promoting financial stability, of having detailed information about money markets and the activities of borrowers and lenders in those markets.” Sure sounds like Big Government to me.

This is the third time in 100 years that support for taken-for-granted economic ideas has crumbled. The Great Depression discredited the radical laissez-faire doctrines of the Coolidge era. Stagflation in the 1970s and early ’80s undermined New Deal ideas and called forth a rebirth of radical free-market notions. What’s becoming the Panic of 2008 will mean an end to the latest Capital Rules era.

In the campaign so far, John McCain has been clinging to the old economic orthodoxy while Barack Obama has proposed a modestly more active role for government. But the economic assumptions are changing faster than the rhetoric of the campaign. “Reality has broken in,” says Frank. And none too soon.

Is this a joke?

A Massachusetts liberal writing an article about the failures of capitalism using another Harvard grad, NJ born, Massachusetts representing liberal as a source?

Using the fact that the head of the Federal Reserve, which is about as anti-free market as you can get, wants to increase the organization’s power as evidence that free market conservatives are giving up on the free market? Who said Bernanke is conservative? Who said a central bank was free market?

Using the Great Depression as more evidence of free market failures?

Claiming John McCain is a free market conservative?

I’m just astounded by the amount of steaming feces coming off of this article.