4um: Palin says she'd be honored to help Obama

Title: Palin says she'd be honored to help Obama
Source: [None]
URL Source: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/12/palin/index.html
Published: Nov 12, 2008
Author: CNN
Post Date: 2008-11-12 21:33:19 by christine
Keywords: None
Views: 2491
Comments: 157

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Gov. Sarah Palin said Wednesday that she would be honored to help President-elect Barack Obama in his new administration, even if he did hang around with an "unrepentant domestic terrorist."

The Alaska governor said in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer that she would be willing to help if Obama asked her for assistance on some of the issues she highlighted during this year's campaign, such as energy or services for special-needs children.

"It would be my honor to assist and support our new president and the new administration," said Palin, whom Sen. John McCain chose as his running mate in August.

"They would be willing also to seize this opportunity that we have to progress this nation together, in a united front." Watch CNN's Wolf Blitzer interview Palin »

But asked moments later about some of the tough rhetoric she hurled from the stump, she said she was "still concerned" about Obama's ties to former Weather Underground member-turned-Chicago college professor William Ayers.

"If anybody still wants to talk about it, I will," she said. "Because this is an unrepentant domestic terrorist who had campaigned to blow up, to destroy our Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol.

That's an association that still bothers me, and I think it's fair to still talk about it," she continued.

"However, the campaign is over. That chapter is closed. Now is the time to move on and make sure all of us are doing all that we can to progress this nation." Watch Palin discuss how she could help Obama »

Palin was attending the annual Republican Governors Association convention in Miami, Florida. She was interviewed for CNN's "The Situation Room" -- the latest of several high-profile appearances for the ex-VP candidate. She will also appear Wednesday night on CNN's "Larry King Live." iReport.com: See readers' questions for Palin

There's speculation that Palin, as well as other incumbent governors at the conference -- such as Charlie Crist of Florida, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota -- could all have designs on the Republican presidential nomination in the next race for the White House. All three governors were on McCain's list of possible running mates before he selected Palin. As the 2012 buzz takes off, a new poll suggests that just less than half of all Americans have a favorable view of Palin.

Forty-nine percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Wednesday have a favorable opinion of Palin, with 43 percent viewing her unfavorably.

That is lower than a previous poll, suggesting that favorable opinions of Palin are dropping among Americans.

"In early September, just after the GOP convention, her favorable rating among registered voters was 57 percent, and only a quarter of all registered voters had an unfavorable view of her," CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said.

"Palin is less popular than Vice President-elect Joe Biden, with a 64 percent favorable rating, or her boss on the GOP ticket during the just-completed campaign, John McCain, who is seen favorably by 61 percent of the public."

The poll also suggests that men have a slightly more positive view of Palin than women, with 51 percent of males viewing her favorably, 3 percentage points higher than female respondents. Forty-one percent of males have an unfavorable opinion of Palin, compared with 45 percent of female survey respondents. Watch what McCain says about Palin »

"With fairly high negatives and lower support among women, who should be a natural constituency for Palin, she's not starting off from a position of strength," Holland said. "The question is no longer whether Palin was a drag on the McCain ticket but whether her unfavorables could be a drag on a future Palin ticket." See viewers' video questions submitted for Palin »

Among Republicans, though, Palin's rating remains high, with 86 percent of Republicans questioned in the poll holding a favorable opinion of her. That number drops to 48 percent among independents and 27 percent among Democrats.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll was conducted November 6 to 9, with 1,246 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

I think it's time for her husband to take her home and "keep her busy" for a while, her mouth needs to be occupied so she can't talk.

At least it is nice, for a change, to hear someone talking in positive tones for the country. I don't have any qualms about people offering to help get a handle on things.........its gonna take a hell of a lot, if it is even possible, to get some turn arounds going.

The election has been over with for some time but it seems some people got into the "hate" mode and cannot disengage.

Obongo won fair and square. The majority for better or worse made a decision. Now instead of having Bush to kick around, we have Obongo.

Obongo is president elect, that is a fact, and everything he says and does is fair game, even bad weather can be blamed on him.

Bush is leaving, a bitter and beaten old man after eight long years of misery brought upon our shoulders. He will forever be scorned and I hope it torments him the rest of his life.

Mrs. Palin presents an image that is hotly and agressively rejected by the gay mafia.

Ferraro was thrown under the bus, Hillary is now under the same bus and it seems Palin will join them shortly.

This gender thing has me mystified. Looking back over the history of my lifetime, at the death, destruction and carnage brought upon this nation by men, I see no room for any man to raise their head in righteousness on behalf of their superior gender.

So far in our history (hello rob), no woman, no redneck, or poor, have ever declared war on any other country, and directed (or volunteered for lack of education, inbreeding, or affluence) the chilren of bureaucrats to the front lines to face actual bullets, dismemberment, death, and worse. And there is a worse. As we all know.

There are those that are quite happy to exterminate the reproductive males of society. And lets see, who might that segment of society be?

Ah well there is more, many many words from here at 4um, that we can place under the scope to study and hopefully learn the reasons why this game is upside-down.

The fact of the matter is, the female tendency to give up liberty and freedom for security has had an impact on where America is today.

And ANY female that gets vetted kosher by the Feral Reserve boyz sure as spit would bomb their own neighborhood if there was a standing order from above. g'dine f., hillary ! or Sar-o-con.

I really enjoy how a contingent of 4um 'men' eventually blame women for the actions of the men in charge.

So much so, they send their own children to public school, and cater to their masters for employment in the system.

In your 'more to come' column(s) on socialism beginning with wimmen, be sure to do a blurb on ol' Daniel Boone and what he encountered when he served in Congress.

I doubt it. Y'all are just as bad as the rest when it comes to owning up to truth.

BTW, I was not trying to be funny. I was making the point that 'socialism' was around long before wimmen voted.

Dont look now but the oldest SOCIALIST PROGRAM in this country is the public school system.

"Capitalists" abandoned core guiding principles and ended up wedded to the state.

Has Capitalism Failed?

[This article is excerpted from Part I of Pillars of Prosperity. An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Dr. Floy Lilley, is available for download.]

Congressional Record — US House of Representatives July 9, 2002

It is now commonplace and politically correct to blame what is referred to as the excesses of capitalism for the economic problems we face, and especially for the Wall Street fraud that dominates the business news. Politicians are having a field day with demagoguing the issue while, of course, failing to address the fraud and deceit found in the budgetary shenanigans of the federal government — for which they are directly responsible. Instead, it gives the Keynesian crowd that runs the show a chance to attack free markets and ignore the issue of sound money.

So once again we hear the chant: "Capitalism has failed; we need more government controls over the entire financial market." No one asks why the billions that have been spent and thousands of pages of regulations that have been written since the last major attack on capitalism in the 1930s didn't prevent the fraud and deception of Enron, WorldCom, and Global Crossings. That failure surely couldn't have come from a dearth of regulations.

What is distinctively absent is any mention that all financial bubbles are saturated with excesses in hype, speculation, debt, greed, fraud, gross errors in investment judgment, carelessness on the part of analysts and investors, huge paper profits, conviction that a new era economy has arrived and, above all else, pie-in-the-sky expectations.

When the bubble is inflating, there are no complaints. When it bursts, the blame game begins. This is especially true in the age of victimization, and is done on a grand scale. It quickly becomes a philosophic, partisan, class, generational, and even a racial issue. While avoiding the real cause, all the finger pointing makes it difficult to resolve the crisis and further undermines the principles upon which freedom and prosperity rest.

Nixon was right — once — when he declared "We're all Keynesians now." All of Washington is in sync in declaring that too much capitalism has brought us to where we are today. The only decision now before the central planners in Washington is whose special interests will continue to benefit from the coming pretense at reform. The various special interests will be lobbying heavily like the Wall Street investors, the corporations, the military-industrial complex, the banks, the workers, the unions, the farmers, the politicians, and everybody else.

"The only decision now before the central planners in Washington is whose special interests will continue to benefit from the coming pretense at reform."

But what is not discussed is the actual cause and perpetration of the excesses now unraveling at a frantic pace. This same response occurred in the 1930s in the United States as our policy makers responded to the very similar excesses that developed and collapsed in 1929. Because of the failure to understand the problem then, the depression was prolonged. These mistakes allowed our current problems to develop to a much greater degree. Consider the failure to come to grips with the cause of the 1980s bubble, as Japan's economy continues to linger at no-growth and recession level, with their stock market at approximately one-fourth of its peak 13 years ago. If we're not careful — and so far we've not been — we will make the same errors that will prevent the correction needed before economic growth can be resumed.

In the 1930s, it was quite popular to condemn the greed of capitalism, the gold standard, lack of regulation, and a lack government insurance on bank deposits for the disaster. Businessmen became the scapegoat. Changes were made as a result, and the welfare/warfare state was institutionalized. Easy credit became the holy grail of monetary policy, especially under Alan Greenspan, "the ultimate Maestro." Today, despite the presumed protection from these government programs built into the system, we find ourselves in a bigger mess than ever before. The bubble is bigger, the boom lasted longer, and the gold price has been deliberately undermined as an economic signal. Monetary inflation continues at a rate never seen before in a frantic effort to prop up stock prices and continue the housing bubble, while avoiding the consequences that inevitably come from easy credit. This is all done because we are unwilling to acknowledge that current policy is only setting the stage for a huge drop in the value of the dollar. Everyone fears it, but no one wants to deal with it.

Ignorance, as well as disapproval for the natural restraints placed on market excesses that capitalism and sound markets impose, cause our present leaders to reject capitalism and blame it for all the problems we face. If this fallacy is not corrected and capitalism is even further undermined, the prosperity that the free market generates will be destroyed.

Corruption and fraud in the accounting practices of many companies are coming to light. There are those who would have us believe this is an integral part of free-market capitalism. If we did have free-market capitalism, there would be no guarantees that some fraud wouldn't occur. When it did, it would then be dealt with by local law-enforcement authority and not by the politicians in Congress, who had their chance to "prevent" such problems but chose instead to politicize the issue, while using the opportunity to promote more useless Keynesian regulations.

Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven't had capitalism. A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank. It's not capitalism when the system is plagued with incomprehensible rules regarding mergers, acquisitions, and stock sales, along with wage controls, price controls, protectionism, corporate subsidies, international management of trade, complex and punishing corporate taxes, privileged government contracts to the military-industrial complex, and a foreign policy controlled by corporate interests and overseas investments. Add to this centralized federal mismanagement of farming, education, medicine, insurance, banking and welfare. This is not capitalism!

To condemn free-market capitalism because of anything going on today makes no sense. There is no evidence that capitalism exists today. We are deeply involved in an interventionist-planned economy that allows major benefits to accrue to the politically connected of both political parties. One may condemn the fraud and the current system, but it must be called by its proper names — Keynesian inflationism, interventionism, and corporatism.

What is not discussed is that the current crop of bankruptcies reveals that the blatant distortions and lies emanating from years of speculative orgy were predictable.

First, Congress should be investigating the federal government's fraud and deception in accounting, especially in reporting future obligations such as Social Security, and how the monetary system destroys wealth. Those problems are bigger than anything in the corporate world and are the responsibility of Congress. Besides, it's the standard set by the government and the monetary system it operates that are major contributing causes to all that's wrong on Wall Street today. Where fraud does exist, it's a state rather than a federal matter, and state authorities can enforce these laws without any help from Congress.

"We are unwilling to acknowledge that current policy is only setting the stage for a huge drop in the value of the dollar. Everyone fears it, but no one wants to deal with it."

– Ron Paul, 2002

Second, we do know why financial bubbles occur, and we know from history that they are routinely associated with speculation, excessive debt, wild promises, greed, lying, and cheating. These problems were described by quite a few observers as the problems were developing throughout the 1990s, but the warnings were ignored for one reason. Everybody was making a killing and no one cared, and those who were reminded of history were reassured by the Fed chairman that "this time" a new economic era had arrived and not to worry. Productivity increases, it was said, could explain it all.

But now we know that's just not so. Speculative bubbles and all that we've been witnessing are a consequence of huge amounts of easy credit, created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve. We've had essentially no savings, which is one of the most significant driving forces in capitalism. The illusion created by low interest rates perpetuates the bubble and all the bad stuff that goes along with it. And that's not a fault of capitalism. We are dealing with a system of inflationism and interventionism that always produces a bubble economy that must end badly.

So far the assessment made by the administration, Congress, and the Fed bodes badly for our economic future. All they offer is more of the same, which can't possibly help. All it will do is drive us closer to national bankruptcy, a sharply lower dollar, and a lower standard of living for most Americans, as well as less freedom for everyone.

This is a bad scenario that need not happen. But preserving our system is impossible if the critics are allowed to blame capitalism and sound monetary policy is rejected. More spending, more debt, more easy credit, more distortion of interest rates, more regulations on everything, and more foreign meddling will soon force us into the very uncomfortable position of deciding the fate of our entire political system.

"To condemn free-market capitalism because of anything going on today makes no sense."

If we were to choose freedom and capitalism, we would restore our dollar to a commodity or a gold standard. Federal spending would be reduced, income taxes would be lowered, and no taxes would be levied upon savings, dividends, and capital gains. Regulations would be reduced, special-interest subsidies would be stopped, and no protectionist measures would be permitted. Our foreign policy would change, and we would bring our troops home.

We cannot depend on government to restore trust to the markets; only trustworthy people can do that. Actually, the lack of trust in Wall Street executives is healthy because it is deserved and prompts caution. The same lack of trust in politicians, the budgetary process, and the monetary system would serve as a healthy incentive for the reform in government we need.

Markets regulate better than governments can. Depending on government regulations to protect us significantly contributes to the bubble mentality.

These moves would produce the climate for releasing the creative energy necessary to simply serve consumers, which is what capitalism is all about. The system that inevitably breeds the corporate-government cronyism that created our current ongoing disaster would end.

Capitalism didn't give us this crisis of confidence now existing in the corporate world. The lack of free markets and sound money did. Congress does have a role to play, but it's not proactive. Congress's job is to get out of the way.