If that doesn’t set alarum bells to clangin’, I don’t know what will.
Good Idea alarms, that is.
After all, everyone knows that what’s good for CEOs is what’s good for America.
The trouble with all the tax theories is that they presume that taxes are the sole driving force for business expansion and contraction. They aren’t. Nobody died and made taxes king. There aren’t business execs shaking in their beds worrying about whether they should try to make another billion dollars if they can only keep 72% of it rather than 75%. We keep hearing that only if this oppressive tax burden were lifted, all these jobs will magically appear. Bullocks. Businesses will expand when they foresee market growth for their product. Taxes are but one of many factors to weigh.
This thread done been hijacked!
Crane
Once again on topic, recent polls put Huckabee at the top of the Republican primary heap. The top 4 are Huckabee, Romney, Palin and Gingrich.
In spite of this brief spurt of zeal, Huckabee is a non-starter. When he drops out his fan club will go to Palin, moving her even with Romney.
Crane
If Palin is the nominee, there is a 100% chance that Obama is a two-term President. Seriously, I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama gets down on his knees every night before bed and prays, “Please God, let Sarah win it.”
Palin seems to be out. She and Bachmann are pretty tight and it’s doubtful that crazy eyes would enter the race if she thought Palin was in. She is obviously in, so I think she has been tipped off by Palin that she won’t run.
Palin would actually have to answer questions if she ran. No way she’s ever going to do that.
I’m of two minds of this. I think Palin is making too much money by playing the “I think I might run if the country really, really needs me” game. BUT, I get the impression that her ego is too big for her to not run.
I think she believes her own hype.
I agree that she believes her own press, but she also needs to sustain her public presence (for income purposes). To do that she has to run.
She can even gain by refusing interviews and even debates. Her base will love it.
Crane
I can only think of a couple of republican candidates for whom this is not true.
I’m beginning to think that there’s a real possibility that Michelle Bachmann will get an early endorsement from Palin, which will focus a lot of the tea party on her and make her an early front-runner.
I wouldn’t underestimate her, either. I’ve completely discounted her up until now, thinking of her as ‘Palin-lite’. But from what I’m hearing, she’s more like “Palin with brains and an education”. At least, that’s the way she comes across to people who speak with her off-camera. She can apparently work a room pretty well and can be very charming in person - which could explain why she’s managed to raise so much money.
This says nothing about her policies or her beliefs - I haven’t followed her enough to know exactly what to think about that. But there’s certainly a lot of buzz starting to pick up about her in the Republican party.
What brains? What education? She has a fake law degree from Oral Roberts University.
I’m from her state. I can assure you she’s a moron.
Aside from her law degree from Oral Roberts, she has an LL.M in tax law from William and Mary law school, which is a highly ranked law school in the U.S. (ranked #10 by U.S. News and World Report’s law school ranking guide). She’s not an idiot.
By the way, she does not have a ‘fake’ law degree. Oral Roberts is a reasonably well-regarded university with full accreditation. She would never have gotten into W&M if her law degree was ‘fake’. She also spent five years as a practicing tax attorney, working for the commisioner of the IRS. Fake law degree indeed.
Once again, you skip any kind of reasonable debate over her qualifications and ideas, and instead toss out nonsense that’s easily discredited. You’re doing your side no favors. It’s baseless, bigoted arguments like that which make people defend Bachmann (and Palin) who otherwise would have no interest in doing so. You should stop doing that.
Oral Roberts has transcended the crazy Christian school thing and is, as Sam points out, a very good school. It’s been one of the Princeton Review’s top colleges in the Western region 3 of the last 4 years.
That being said, the law school never progressed beyond provisional ABA accreditation (and had its provisional accreditation pulled for a while because it required students to declare that they would practice only Christ’s law, or somesuch).
So it’s not a fake law degree, but it’s not a very good one either. Her LLM is much more impressive.
All that said, she is an idiot, and anyone arguing otherwise does himself a disservice.
She has an almost limitless ability to say ridiculous things whenever she starts talking. Remember how she called for investigations of the anti-American members of congress? This can be helpful with the Tea Party base, but gives her zero chance of being successful on a wider stage.
Pawlenty, on the other hand just scored a coup by hiring Nick Ayers to his staff. He is gathering a formidable campaign team.
For more reading in regard to Michelle Bachmann’s statements and intellect, you can go to factcheck.org or politicalfact.org and key on her name.
Another site which may have a political bias is dumpbachmann.com
William and Mary doesn’t offer an LL.M program (well it does, but only for foreign students). One thing you have to understand about Bachmann is that she is a pathological liar. Don’t believe everything you read on her wiki page. For the record, her official bio on her Congressional sute lists only Anoka high school and Winona University.
The Law school at Oral Roberts was unaccredited at the time Bachmann went there.
Her education is unimpressive, but that’s not the reason I call her a dummy. The reason I call her a dummy is because, as a resident of her state, I am all too familair with her propensity to say and do incredibly stupid things.
She said that FEMA was going to set up “reducation camps.”
She tried to force Minnesota public schools to teach creationism.
She belongs to a church that says the Pope is the antichrist.
She believes that homosexuality can be cured by prayer.
She thinks her husband, a flaming “pray away the gay” Christian "therapist, is straight. (you can see how not-gay he is right here).
She has repeatedly said that GLBT people “target children,” and that public schools teach children that “they should try homosexuality.”
I could go on all day. Practically everything she says is stupid. Just a week or two ago she told a crowd in Concord, New Hampshire that their town was the site of “the shot heard 'round the world.” A little while before that, she totally fabricated some hyperbolic allegatuions that Obama was going to spend $200 million a day on a trip to india, bring 2000 guests with him, put them up at “5 star hotel rooms” at the taxpayers’ expense and also bring a number of warships with him. The allegations had no basis in truth whatsoever. As I said, she is a pathological liar who doesn’t know or care what the truth is.
It would be impossible to either underestimate this dummy’s intellect or to overestimate her mendacity. She is a mental and moral midget.
It doesn’t offer one now, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t offer one then. You’d have to find a copy of their 1988 catalogue to prove that.
Not true; the J.D. Coburn School of Law was unaccredited from 1981 to 1983. It was provisionally accredited from 1983 to 1985, when it was shut down due to lack of funding, and its assets transferred to what is now Regent University.
What is interesting is that she supposedly graduated from Oral Roberts law in 1986.
But she’s not a witch.