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  1. just sirius is offline
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    Joined: Dec 2008 Location: San Antonio Posts: 1,209
    01-19-2010, 11:12 PM #1

    Wink Down goes coakley, down goes coakley

    GOP's Brown wins Mass. Senate seat in epic upset




    Looks like the Liberals have awakened a sleeping giant and they really do not like what they see.

    There is more carnage to come...Fall of 2010...get your popcorn ready!


    Sorry Lloyd...had to put 1 more post just for your reading enjoyment!

  2. Atypical is offline
    01-19-2010, 11:19 PM #2
    If you look at everything he has said and think that he is a good candidate and has the residents of Massachusetts in mind to do a good job, you are an ideologue.

    And I think, from what I have heard, that she was a bad campaigner. Which has nothing to do with her values or views.

    You apparently have no such conscience.

  3. Atypical is offline
    01-19-2010, 11:40 PM #3
    Why don't you explain your fawning over an unqualified candidate; a supporter of his said during a recent appearance by Brown (paraphrase) let's shove a curling iron up her backside. He smiled and said, "we can do that". Afterward, he said he didn't hear the comment. When confronted by the actual words he did not condemn the comment.

    We now know who YOU REALLY ARE.
    Last edited by Atypical; 01-19-2010 at 11:56 PM.

  4. just sirius is offline
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    Joined: Dec 2008 Location: San Antonio Posts: 1,209
    01-19-2010, 11:58 PM #4
    Unfortunately you are missing the point! I never said that he was a good candidate...doesn't matter...the people of the most Dem/Liberal state in our great country...just elected a Republican to fill the Senate seat vacated by one of the Most Liberal Senators in our countries history...Are you kidding me...It has absolutely nothing to do with Martha Coalkey being a bad campaigner...It has everything to do with the Liberal Agenda!

    Lest we forget...New Jersey and Virginia...Govenors elections...I guess that they were just bad campaigners as well...In both of those elections...The incumbent Liberal got CRUSHED!

    The people are rejecting every aspect of Pres Obama's agenda...

    Stay clueless my friend!

    That light coming at you in Fall of 2010...is the people's revolt...and it's going to take out many incumbent Liberals...and probably...a few Republicans...

    Oh and BTW...glad to see all those chicken shit Liberals deciding not to run for re-election...Gutless...DODD and Co. i will admit that it might give you liberals some hope...but in the end...the people will re-shape the House and Senate...and I can assure you...your super majority is going by the wayside.






    Quote Originally Posted by Atypical View Post
    If you look at everything he has said and think that he is a good candidate and has the residents of Massachusetts in mind to do a good job, you are an ideologue.

    And I think, from what I have heard, that she was a bad campaigner. Which has nothing to do with her values or views.

    You apparently have no such conscience.

  5. Atypical is offline
    01-20-2010, 12:32 AM #5
    Thanks for the reply.

    I was going to respond that Mass is not one of the most liberal states in the country (see R. Maddow tonight - she lives there); pres Obama's agenda; let's see. Bailing out corporations that have, because of greed, and no real regulations on that greed come close to bankrupting the country. You do know that (mostly conservative) corporations privatize profit and SOCIALIZE losses, right?

    Is that kind of socialism anathema to you?

    Oh, and keeping Summers, Geithner, Gates, and a whole lot of conservatives at Justice, and the government attorneys around the country that were appointed by Bush.

    Yeah, Obama is some flaming Liberal!

    Healthcare. You mean the bills that healthcare companies wrote. Obama let that happen. As an investor (I assume) you've noticed that these companies stocks have risen recently because the proposed laws are not expected to cause profit to fall. Have you read any Wendell Potter? Probably not. Know who he is? Check it out if you think the healthcare bill is really good for citizens.

    Peoples revolt. You mean the ones that show up wearing guns, carrying signs that show Obama as the Joker and as a Nazi. The people that carry signs saying "keep government out of my Medicare???. The birthers. Are these your heroes, those "people"?

    There are no moderates in the Republican party. They have been kicked out by the wackos and religious zealots. Review CONSERVATIVE sources for evidence of this. I have a reading list for you that will tell you how the world really works. Ask for it. I will gladly send it.

    But I won't bother with any of this (and there is lots more) because by your words and inferences you are clearly an ideologue. That means you want your side to win - **** the country! You want power to get only what YOU feel is right and to let greed rule. You actually believe liberals have nothing to offer. That's what an ideologue is - hates everything but his own opinion.

    Sad but that's what conservatives are now. Robots ruled by ideology and emotion and hatred of someone different with a different view. Democrats are only, unfortunately, marginally better because uncontrolled capitalism corrupts everyone.

    You did drink the kool-aid. Good, huh?

    PS. Incidentally, you obviously believe that people always vote rationally - you say that it is a rejection "of the liberal agenda". Too simplistic. It doesn't work that way. Plus the voting machines are from companies that have been found to have manipulated past elections. I am NOT saying that the election could necessarily have turned out differently than it did but only to show that there are many variables to consider. Nothing is as simple as most people think. But thorough analysis is too much work for almost everyone. And those that think simplistically are almost always wrong.
    Last edited by Atypical; 01-20-2010 at 06:46 PM.

  6. Havakasha is offline
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    01-20-2010, 01:43 AM #6
    Just Sirius,

    Even i had more class than to celebrate in your face when Obama won the Presidency and the Democrats the Congress. Congratulations none the less.
    30% (?) of the people of MA. have spoken and we move on from here.
    I think they voted more against something than for something and no i dont think it was a vote purely against the "Liberal Obama Agenda". They know something is wrong in this country, terribly wrong in fact,and it has always been much easier to take your anger out on the people in power than to ask for solutions from the opposition. So far the Repubicans have presented none. What i think they may have failed to think through is that the Republicans put us in this mess and the solutions were never going to be so easy. I wish we could have done an experiment and put the Republicans in power in 2008 only if to see how they would have handled this mess we are in. I feel very confident they would have made a much bigger mess out of it all. Unfortunately we dont get the chance to do that test. Anyway it should be a very interesting year 2010 and i will continue to support health care reform, energy reform, education reform, immigration reform, financial regulation reform etc with all my heart because i am comfortable in the knowledge that it is the right thing to do to help this great country of ours to reach its ideals.
    Good night.
    Last edited by Havakasha; 01-20-2010 at 01:56 PM.

  7. Atypical is offline
    01-20-2010, 02:19 PM #7

    Conservatism...Why?

    Can Threats and Living in a State of Anxiety Push People to Conservatism?

    By Lee Drutman, Miller-McCune.com. Posted January 18, 2010.


    Over the past year, a conservative right-wing movement has found a loud political voice in the United States. Strongly anti-government, the movement seems largely oriented around a message that anything the Obama administration wishes to accomplish is an attack on American tradition, and it is up to them to stop this radical socialist agenda emanating from Washington to preserve the country.

    This burst of activity has left some asking where such a rush of conservative energy might come from. Is it a response to the anxiety and uncertainty of tough economic times? Does having an African-American president have anything to do with it?

    According to some new research on the cognitive origins of political conservatism, the answers may be yes and yes.

    Miriam Matthews, a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the Claremont Graduate University, Shana Levin, an associate profess of psychology at Claremont McKenna College, and Jim Sidanius, a professor of psychology and African-American studies at Harvard University, have found evidence that both general feelings of threat and specific anxiety about other ethnic groups sometimes do lead individuals to embrace two tenets of political conservatism — support for the status quo and a belief that there is a natural social hierarchy to society. These tenets provide a salve for uncertainties and anxieties by offering a belief system in which there is a strong order to things.

    This theory was originally elaborated in a 2003 paper, "Political conservatism as motivated social cognition," by John T. Jost and colleagues. They posit that individuals embrace political conservatism to satisfy internal needs for order, structure and closure in the face of uncertainty, complexity and fear. The paper was based on a meta-analysis of numerous studies showing that people who were more uncomfortable with complexity and ambiguity generally tended to also be more conservative. (For more on Jost's work, see here and here.)

    But correlation does not provide causation, and Matthews and colleagues wanted to know: Did conservative ideas make people more anxious or vice versa? To evaluate how this process played out over time, they analyzed survey data on almost 1,000 undergraduates at the University of California, Los Angeles, as they progressed through four years of college. The findings are reported in Political Psychology.

    "The research is built on the idea that conservatism is an ideology that is in response to both motivations and cognitions, and that fear and uncertainty and threat stimulate certain motivations," Matthews explained.

    The survey first measured students' threat perceptions by asking them how much they agreed with the statement, "More good jobs for other groups come at the expense of fewer good jobs for members of my group." And it measured something scholars call "intergroup anxiety" by asking students to evaluate the statement: "I feel uneasy around people of different ethnicities."

    The survey also measured students' attitudes on something called the social dominance orientation scale (a measure of how much individuals believe in the superiority of certain groups over others and are thus unconcerned about inequality), and evaluated students' support for system justification (a measure of whether one believes that the current distribution of resources is fair).

    Finally, the students were asked about their political identification: How strongly did they identify as being either a Democrat or a Republican?

    By measuring how students' answers to these questions changed over the four years, the researchers showed that the higher a student scored on questions regarding threat perception and discomfort around other ethnicities as freshmen, the higher they scored on both the social dominance and the system justification scales as sophomores and juniors. (Not surprisingly, the two measures were highly correlated.)

    And sophomores and juniors with high social dominance orientation and system justification scores became more politically conservative as seniors. In other words, there was a process in which threats and anxieties led students to adopt particular political beliefs that helped them to deal with those threats and anxieties.

    "What makes it really interesting is that using very conservative methods, and looking at processes over time, we still found that there was a conservative shift in response to threat perceptions," Matthews said. "A lot of people just treat conservatism as a personality variable that doesn't change, but that doesn't seem to be the case. It seems to be influenced by the situation, and it can be affected by threat perceptions."

    Though this study looked only at individuals, it is not hard to extrapolate. Many studies have documented the extent to which national political moods shift rightward in response to external threats, such as 9/11. For example, one study found that, between 2001 and 2004, President Bush's approval ratings peaked in response to terrorism warnings.

    Currently, however, with unemployment now topping 10 percent, economic uncertainty is probably weighing more heavily. And there is good reason to think that this kind of uncertainty might be one factor underlying the current conservative movement.

    "There is a lot of research into the connection between economic threats and increasing conservatism," Matthews said. "And it makes sense because you've got this idea of resistance to changing the social system because the system seems so unstable, you want to stick with what you know, what seems familiar."

    And then, of course, there is the tricky issue of race. America now has its first African-American president. And as the research described here suggests, there seems to be a direct link from "intergroup anxiety" to political conservatism. If having an African-American president makes this anxiety more salient for certain segments of society, it might indeed heighten their turn to system-justifying and social-dominance feelings and lead to increased conservatism.

    In addition to offering some insights into the current political climate, the idea of conservatism as motivated cognition also points to some reasons why people tend to grow more conservative as they grow older. Fear of death may loom larger as a threat, as might a feeling of being increasingly out of touch with the world. This might lead individuals to worldviews that give them more security and stability, hence making them more conservative.

    Not surprisingly, this study has not sat well with conservatives. But Matthews wants to be clear: "We're not saying that conservatism is completely crazy. We're just trying to figure out what are all the possible factors that contribute to conservatism. And there can be a shift toward conservatism when managing uncertainty gets to be a little more difficult."

  8. Atypical is offline
    01-20-2010, 05:51 PM #8

    Hmmmm...

    Beck rips Brown: ‘This one could end with a dead intern’

    Supporters of Senator-elect Scott Brown winced as he offered up one of his daughters as "available" in his victory speech Tuesday night.

    On Wednesday, Glenn Beck took to his radio program to sharply criticize Brown's remarks. The controversial host suggested that Brown needed to be "monitored" because "this one could end up with a dead intern."

    '"I want a chastity belt on this man," Beck said. "I want his every move watched in Washington. I don't trust this guy. This one could end with a dead intern."

    "A dead intern?" co-host Pat Gray asked. "I wouldn't go that far."

    Later on in the segment, Beck added, "I'm just sayin', congratulations, now let's monitor him, let's put an ankle bracelet on him, let's know where he is at all times."

    During his victory speech Tuesday night, Sen.-elect Scott Brown introduced his daughters, Ayla and Arianna, to the world, thanking them for their help in the campaign.

    "And just in case anybody who's watching across the country, yes they're both available," he said.

    As a mixed chorus of laughter and boos roared up, Brown said: "No, no, no. Oo. Only kidding. Only kidding. ... Arianna is definitely not available, but Ayla is."

    "No!" Ayla Brown responded, half-laughing.

    "I can see I'm gonna get in trouble when I get home," Brown said.

    Beck's "dead intern" line may have been a reference to the Gary Condit affair of 2001, when one of the House Democrat's interns, Chandra Levy, was found dead.

    This isn't the first time Beck has expressed reservations about Brown. In a column he wrote for Fox News on Tuesday, he said: "I don't trust Scott Brown yet. Americans don't know him. He posed naked in Cosmopolitan magazine back in 1982. I mean — really? I question the judgment of man who thinks anyone wants to see the male body naked...."

    Beck's comments may be a sign that some on the political right aren't entirely comfortable with Brown, despite his being portrayed by some newscasters, like Keith Olbermann, as being dogmatically right wing.

    Although Brown believes the health reform package in Congress should "go back to the drawing board," he told a press conference Wednesday that he believes "it’s important for everyone to get some form of health care, so to offer a basic plan for everybody I think is important.” As state senator, Brown voted in favor of Massachusetts' health care reforms.


    I can't help it...I just have to...HEHHEHHEHHEHHEHHEHEH...Oh, Oh, Phew, HEHEHEHEHEHE.
    Last edited by Atypical; 01-20-2010 at 06:37 PM.

  9. Havakasha is offline
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    01-20-2010, 05:57 PM #9
    You beat me to it. I was goinig to post the Beck attack on Brown as a separate heading.

  10. Atypical is offline
    01-20-2010, 06:00 PM #10
    I did it here because it obviously refers to the Coakley loss.

    And because I need the exercise.

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