Barefoot, Pregnant, Etc., Etc.

They told me that if I voted for Mitt Romney, sexism would win.

And they were right!

Biden, greeting Senator-Elect Heidi Heidtkamp (D – ND): “Spread your legs, you’re gonna be frisked!”.

Remember – Biden is on the ticket for all of that “gravitas”.

29 thoughts on “Barefoot, Pregnant, Etc., Etc.

  1. I looked at the economy and I thought there’s no way that Obama would be re-elected. And then I looked at Romney and thought there’s no way Obama could lose.

    To me, Mr. Romney was a good candidate who was wrong for 2012. What’s Romney’s strength? Pragmatism. Deal making. Cutting to the chase. It’s how Romney made money in business. It’s how pretty much any of us make money in business. That should have been Romney’s brand.

    But not in 2012, not with the Tea Party and this current version of the Republican Party. Where pragmatism is seen as weakness. Deal making is compromise and cutting to the chase is selling out.

    I remember in the worst days of the 2008 campaign, my brother’s father-in-law asked me how I expected to vote and I told him that John McCain seems to be doing everything he can think of to make me vote for Obama but I refused to be manipulated. Romney-Ryan, however, managed to pull it off.

  2. Ok Emery, you’re a Liberal, all you have to do is admit it – its the first step toward recovery.

  3. kel, Did you notice how Romney started his ascent in the polls while moving towards the center?

  4. Emery, your point escapes me. It sounds as if you’re blaming Republicans for Romney’s loss. If every Republican had voted for him, he’d still have lost because there aren’t enough Republicans. He needed to pull more Independent voters but had nothing to sell them. His positions were just diluted Obama.

    Also, Emery, please note that SITD readers are wise to election polling shenanigans. You should read some of the archives to catch up.

  5. Emery’s point is that any attempt to even moderately rein in the out of control growth of government is FAR too radical for a “conservative” like himself. Emery likes big government and wants more of it.

  6. How is it possible to look at Obama’s record and Romney’s record and see Obama as the moderate?
    It defies common sense.

  7. Terry, when you are further left than Obama is, it’s easy. I’m not trying to claim that is where Emery plants his stake in the ground, however, I will posit there is a “birds of a feather” mentality on both sides: Where each side views themselves as reasonable and the other side as radical. I’m sure that comes into play here as well. The fact that Romney was highly religious and unbending on his anti-infanticide morals, probably cast him as beyond radical, even evil, to a lot of the left.

    One other thing to keep in mind: Once Pawlenty bowed out of the race early (a HUGE mistake in my mind), and each “more conservative” candidate took their turn at ascendancy, the MSM laid into each and every one of them. Not only magnifying and exaggerating their weaknesses, but, dumpster diving to highlight the tiniest little questionable activity, and I firmly believe in the case of Herman Cain, outright manufacturing something where nothing existed. Perry did a good enough job of making himself look like an ass that the MSM didn’t need to work too hard on him. But Bachmann, Cain, Santorum and Gingrich were absolutely savaged by the MSM. Romney was their perfect candidate because he was the weakest one, and they worked their ASSES off to make sure he got the nomination.

    I think if Pawlenty had weathered it out, he would have had a good chance. He has just as clean of a background as Romney, and a bit more conservative bona fides. Romney did flipflop on a lot of issues (gun control and abortion being the biggies). Pawlenty never changed his stance on those social issues. He also had a good budgetary record to run on from his 2 terms as Gov here, successfully refuting the incessant call from the DFL to raise taxes and spending. In my opinion, his biggest weakness from a conservative standpoint was his friendliness to the ethanol industry. However, given that corn farmers were a large part of his rural constituency here, it was, unfortunately, something he had to do.

  8. Bill C., I look at Biden and Obama and I see a thousand things they’ve said, or votes that they’ve cast, or causes that they’ve championed, that puts them outside of the mainstream.
    They don’t get called on them.
    You will not see Obama questioned about his sincerely expressed belief that God became incarnate in the birth of Christ and that this redeemed his his sins, which he explained were ‘being out of alignment with my values’.
    You will not see Biden — who makes a great deal of his Catholicism — asked how he can call himself Catholic when he holds views on abortion that expressly forbidden by Catholic teaching.
    If you are a Republican, however, the only thing you can ever say about abortion that will not be the subject of a months-long hate fest by the media is that you believe it should be available on demand and be paid for by the taxpayers.

  9. This is where Kermit’s gem is wisdom comes into play: If it weren’t for double standards, the left would have none.

  10. After reading a few of Emery’s posts, I have to say that they are very similar to those of another resident lib troll, Sanity.

  11. nate says:
    “It sounds as if you’re blaming Republicans for Romney’s loss.”

    Republicans blaming Mitt Romney for losing the public are actually having an argument about their own party. Well, to hazard a theory, I think that conservatives launching backward-facing attacks on Mr Romney are actually waging a different fight, about the future internal power dynamics of the party.
    Thoughtful Republicans know that their party base is crammed full of people, some of them out-and-out tea party types, some not. Lots of the activists or partisans who turned up to Republican campaign events were very angry indeed about redistribution and welfare, and convinced that America had been rotted from within by a vast expansion of welfare, paid for by ever-rising taxes (and never mind that the overall tax burden is broadly lower now than a generation ago).

    There is a case to be made that the 2012 election was lost by Republicans during the presidential primaries, precisely because candidates had to push the buttons of those sorts of activists. Locked into angry, sour rhetoric about a country being wrecked by the feckless, the Republicans ended up looking like angry men who more or less resented the extension of the franchise beyond demographically challenged white males.

    As the party looks ahead to future elections, I have a hunch that men such as Mitch Daniels, and even Ted Cruz (at once a tea party favorite but also a man who knows that Hispanics will have to be won over if his party is to prosper), know how damaging it would be for the next wave of candidates to remain in the same, inward-looking mindset, in which their opponents’ voters can be dismissed as somehow illegitimate.

    It is depressing that Mr Romney felt he needed to make his 47% comments to please his core supporters, and dismaying that a majority of Republicans agreed with them. But they matter now, after the election, not because they were the moment that Mr Romney lost the election. They matter because of what they say about the Republican Party, now and in the future.

  12. Emery, you choose to believe what the media tells you about the two major political parties.
    Republicans are no more characteristically angry then are democrats.
    Do you seriously believe that the rhetoric of Romney/Ryan was more angry and devisive than Obama/Biden?

  13. The danger in the US is not so much that we’re divided between Republicans and Democrats; that’s just politics. The danger is that the elite (establishment) in each party are so desperately out of touch with the general populace. When we hear what the rich and powerful think about the rest of America the contempt is so clear. The anger with politics in America stems from the widely held and accurate belief that we are forced to choose between the two sides of an elite, both of which are completely out of touch with the reality of life in America, and both of which hold most of America in utter contempt. The problem with politics in America is the difference between what candidates say and do to placate their donors and what they then say to the public. That gap is growing, and politicians are finding it hard to bridge it while maintaining any credibility or legitimacy.

    If I could have waved a magic wand, I’d have put in a Democratic House with a 5 vote majority, a Democratic Senate with a 2 vote majority, and a President Romney. Electing Romney would likely have lead to a big defeat of Tea-partiers in 2 years. Which I believe would have been a positive result.

    The southern takeover of the Republican party was never complete and is reversible. As the generation that created the Moral Majority in reaction to the 60s and 70s dies off, the younger generation of Republicans are more likely to carry a copy of Atlas Shrugged than the Bible. The Republican governors who are making a name for themselves are all reformers who battle public sector unions, shrink bloated bureaucracies and balance budgets without raising taxes. There’s not a bible thumper among them, and there’s quite a few who are immigrant-friendly. That’s who will be running next time, and the primary voters will be desperate enough for a winner to avoid the Santorums and Gingrichs.

    Republicans were putting money behind some truly stupid ideas. The Democrats have no ideas, only opposition to Republicans. Things could change quickly if the Republicans pick better people to put their money behind.

  14. What an incoherent mess, Emery! ‘Things could change quickly if the Republicans pick better people to put their money behind’. Are you playing with a magic 8-ball?
    The Tea Party was formed to oppose the ‘Washington elites’, and has been rather successful at doing so. Lugar, among others, is gone. Tea Party favorite Ted Cruz is the new senator from Texas. On the other side the Dems put DC insider Elizabeth Warren in the Senate and tossed out DC outsider Scott Brown.
    Your ignorance of the simple nuts and bolts of politics is breathtaking. A five seat majority in the House is not effectively different than a fifty seat majority.

  15. Most of the Tea Party blogs I have read spend a great deal of time insisting that they are against incumbents of all types and Washington in general. Being opposed to some of the longest serving Senators may simply be an outgrowth of this. Their opposition may be just as much simple dislike of anyone associated with Washington, no matter how in line with their views, as much as it is an insistence that their representatives refuse to work with the other party.

    I knew that the Tea Party was against business as usual. What I hadn’t realized was that the Tea Party defines business as usual as “passing legislation.”

  16. What ‘Tea party’ blogs have read, Emery? If Tea Party congressman are against passing any and all legislation, they are in the wrong job, aren’t they?
    You seem a little schizo. First you write The danger is that the elite (establishment) in each party are so desperately out of touch with the general populace. When we hear what the rich and powerful think about the rest of America the contempt is so clear. The anger with politics in America stems from the widely held and accurate belief that we are forced to choose between the two sides of an elite, both of which are completely out of touch with the reality of life in America, and both of which hold most of America in utter contempt.

    And then you write:


    Most of the Tea Party blogs I have read spend a great deal of time insisting that they are against incumbents of all types and Washington in general. Being opposed to some of the longest serving Senators may simply be an outgrowth of this. Their opposition may be just as much simple dislike of anyone associated with Washington, no matter how in line with their views, as much as it is an insistence that their representatives refuse to work with the other party.

    When Washington pols work with each other, who are they working against? Any freshment level poli-sci textbook will tell you that all three branches of the Federal Government have grown immensely in power in the 20th and 21st centuries, and that this growth came, not at the expense of one another, but at the expense of the rights of the states and the rights of individuals.
    Biden is very proud of his sponsorship, in the 1990’s, of the Violence Against Women Act. is it really proper for the federal government to enforce laws against wife beating? If so, what jurisdiction can be reasonably denied the federal government?

  17. Now for something completely different.

    I was ice fishing the other day with friends in the financial industry. We were discussing LIBOR. There are banks that allegedly manipulated LIBOR, which is an interbank interest rate. At $800 trillion, the market is the largest ever to have been rigged.The point of the discussion was how best to detect this fraud.

    Some seemed to think a quick Benford test would have pointed to LIBOR anomalies long before one of the colluding banks chose to own up. My back of the envelope math concluded that in order to beat the Benford test one needs to use a random number generator to set the second derivative of the quantity in question and then integrate to produce your fudged quantity. Depending on how you do your math, the result will be exponential or sinusoidal random walk, which is the pattern that Benford observed. This pattern is the result of a physical world governed by second order dynamic differential equations. For instance, F=ma, force is proportional to the second derivative of distance. Mass and heat transfer obey similar equations, as do some of the equations governing tisk in finance, and many other examples. This is why we find so many sinusoidal and exponential phenomena governing our lives. While in theory it should be possible to detect a random number generator in the second derivative (because random number generators aren’t random enough), it would be much harder, requiring much more data, and subject to much more uncertainty.

    It’s time people running frauds and cartels started hiring some people who can do grad school level math to cover their tracks. I would suggest a statistician, maybe a physicist, or an engineer who works in control theory.

    You seem like a guy with an opinion. What say you? ;^)

  18. You seem mightily confused, Emery. The reason that examining the material world reveals so many exponential and trigonometric identities is that the real world world is not linear. It’s self-explanatory, and Newton figured that out over three centuries ago.
    When you figure out the tricky equation that precisely maps risk to return, you’ll be a trillionaire.
    I don’t think you’ve reached that point, yet.

  19. Terry,
    You never disappoint me.

    The analysis will be done with a computer with statistical software. There are a lot of other tests that can be easily done that are more powerful and flexible than Benford’s rule. If you don’t generate your fake data/prices/whatever with those statistical tools in mind, any decent statistician should be able to tell that your data is artificially ordered or structured in some way. An individual picking data points just to fool Benford’s rule would fall afoul of other tests. There are in fact lots of Benford’s rules if you understand and have studied what real data sets look like.

    Investment managers will thrive for as long as people are prepared to think they can get something for nothing, that gambling can produce long term positive returns, or that an expert can know significantly more than the market without breaking the law and eventually being caught. In other words, indefinitely.

  20. Emery:
    First, you need to start a new thread if you want to discuss detecting financial securities fraud.
    Second, a good place to start a discussion of financial fraud (or price-fixing) would begin with a study of the current techniques of doing so, rather than building cloud castles.
    Seriously. Make an arbitrary stock pick. Devise a way of consistently pricing its future value better than the market, long term. Collect all the money on the planet and retire.

  21. Mr. Berg
    Yes, just look at it, a comment on this Blog without condescension or venom. Truly a ‘man bites dog’ moment. The very banality is dazzling. My point, of course, is that the comment section of this blog is not representative of much of anything.

    Terry,
    I strongly encourage you to actively manage your own investments. Speculators such as yourself keep the market liquid and drive costs down for indexers like myself. More importantly, I don’t know you from Adam, and don’t care that you’ll likely fall on your face, later if not sooner. So let that arrogance flow. Take a testosterone supplement before you make your stock picks. The market needs active traders, or the whole indexing strategy fails. I thank God there’s a sucker born every minute, and many of them have money to invest. Not you, of course, Terry, I’m sure you’re different.

    Good engineers understand complex systems but only demand that those systems are coherent with themselves…..

  22. I have no freakin’ idea what you are talking about, Emery. It’s as though you are responding to a commenter on a blog I’ve never heard of. Did you bang your head or something?

    I strongly encourage you to actively manage your own investments. Speculators such as yourself keep the market liquid and drive costs down for indexers like myself. More importantly, I don’t know you from Adam, and don’t care that you’ll likely fall on your face, later if not sooner. So let that arrogance flow. Take a testosterone supplement before you make your stock picks. The market needs active traders, or the whole indexing strategy fails. I thank God there’s a sucker born every minute, and many of them have money to invest. Not you, of course, Terry, I’m sure you’re different.

  23. Speculators such as yourself
    I have written nothing that identified me as a ‘speculator’, Emery.
    I ask again: did you bang your head or something?

  24. Emery said:

    “Do you actually read what you write or just post your comment?”

    A question better asked of Emery, I think, but I don’t know if hit his head or not. He seems pleased to blather on and on and apparently wishes to be judged on quantity, not quality.

  25. It’s hard to be an engineer of any type if you take a cavalier attitude towards evidence — being unable to explain how you know certain things — or falling back on the ‘baffle then with bullshit’ plan.

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