yeah: great!

i know she's no scott brown, but she'd be a vast improvement for ca and the us senate!

She decimated HP. (share price before $52, when she left $17.)

And yet she's still better than boxer

As far as I'm concerned, the law degree and the MBA are both downchecks.

The last thing that any Western country, particularly the USA, needs is more lawyers in the legislature. And an MBA is a degree in asset-stripping.

Perhaps the USA (and to be fair the UK as well) ought to consider legal qualifications a permanent disqualification for office.

RINO.
And, let us not "get together and get something done". Let us instead learn to respect boundries, after we remember what they are.
Heir to Arnold.
P. J. O'Rourke to Carley and friends: We don't want to know how to make government work. We want to know how to make it stop.

Hear hear, Mr. Wilson.

Could care less about Carly, but I'm pretty sure I'd pull lever for the guy who did the voiceover. I mean, shit, it's effin' California, man: doesn't matter WHO we send to Washington - we're doomed along with Minnessota to hold down the bottom end of the senatorial curve.

Amusing. But way too long at 7:30 minutes for a political message; after 2 minutes it all becomes 'drone drone drone'.

Nice use of color saturation and darkness levels to establish the [subtle] contrast between the two.

Great, but too long: brevity is the soul of wit as the bard says. Excerpt 2 minutes of the Boxer material and make it its own spot. Boxer head falling into the ocean at the end: priceless.

Incidentally, her ad agency gets much better drugs than I do.

This ad would be improved by the addition of Boxer-borne battle lasers, scorching the earth everywhere she goes. Other than that... well done and - between this and the demon sheep thing - I want to sample the substances her advertising team has access to.

Also, please do not call Carly a "fireball". I do not want any "fireballs" in politics. I want politics to be populated by lethargic persons, prone to melancholy and a sense of pointlessness.

A yellow dog would better than Boxer-Shorts.

What's with the dyke haircut?

"What's with the dyke haircut?"

She has had breast cancer and after her surgery was treated with chemotherapy. [Source]

I don't know one way or the other. What I do know is that I'm done with judging candidates by their looks (case-in-point). There are far more substantive reasons to either support or to not support Fiorina.

Dear Mr. Vanderleun: The commercial will be useful in the general as part of the anti-Boxer campaign. But Fiorina had the same effect on HP that Stalingrad did to Germany. Nope, bring on Chuck Devore.

Sincerely yours,
Gregory Koster

Mr. Wilson, you want to make government stop? I take it that means you think any government at all is a bad idea. There is a place where your ideals are already being tried. Why don't you go and live there?

You mean you don't want to live in Somalia? Why not? No government that works, just like you asked for.

Fletcher Christian:

Although it seems pretty self-evident that Mr. Wilson wasn't speaking of a total lack of government as you so sagely conflated...For the sake of clarity regarding your manufactured dissent; Did you mean that Mr. Wilson should bugger off to a place like Pitcairn island where your apparent namesake (Fletcher Christian from near Cockermouth) and his rabble of proto-anarchist mutineers had enslaved the poor Tahitians who tagged along ended up slaughtering each other into near extinction over their disastrous miscalculation of the equitable distribution of female companionship?

monkeyfan; interesting. The short answer is yes. Any society needs government, and no society has ever had no government for very long - or in other words anarchy is unstable. Somalia, for example, has several governments; the trouble is that none of them are the official one - the people who run things are pirates and warlords and there is no effective check on them at all.

Government centered entirely on maintenance of property rights (as some rightwingers seem to want) also doesn't work. Why? Because in such a system, such things as company stores and rivers so polluted that nothing lives in them are routine. As are entire mountains being levelled for the ore in them, and virgin forests being converted into worthless desert because the timber is worth something.

There needs to be a balance between individual rights and the good of the majority. The argument is really about where that balance ought to be.

I still can't figure out if these fiorna ads are brilliant or just batshit crazy

Righto Fletcher.

So let's recap: You (blatantly?) misrepresented what Mr. Wilson said and based wholly upon the foundation of your manufactured straw man, you bid him bugger off to Somalia or some such place like the Pitcairn of your internet namesake's infamous doing; a place that represents the sum total of the moral accomplishments of your treasonous namesake who acted the [murderous] warlord to disregard the rule of law of his government; whose representatives he set adrift to die slow deaths in an act of 'mercy' befitting that of a Somalian pirate.

Is your chosen namesake intended to be hipster ironic, or is it rather the product of ironic parenting?

Either way, the juxtaposition of the provenance of your chosen handle with the blunted point of your straw-man argument, is well...Ironic.

The balance between liberty and socialism is socialism. Liberty cannot be sustained without absolute property rights, and never has been. The job of government in this is not to determine what is good and what is bad, but to ensure that ambition counters ambition, in the absence of any other motive that has ever worked.
What creates the conditions of environmental health is wealth, not government, or the communist nations whould have had the best living conditions on earth, not the worst.
No American forest in this century has been clear-cut that was owned by private interest. Those have all been cleared on leased government land.
The vast majority of government work is in addressing the result of previous government programs.

Mr. Wilson - Let me get this straight. You think that you ought to be able to do whatever the hell you like with or on your own property no matter what its effect on anyone else. So it's perfectly OK according to that viewpoint to dig a mine, leave huge piles of sulphur-bearing waste around the shaft entrance and watch as the sulphuric acid and heavy metals that they give off kill the river the mine is sitting by? Or to burn low-grade coal in your factory and ignore the fact that laundry bills for everyone within a mile are quadrupled because of the soot it's giving off? Both of those have happened in capitalist societies, and it was only government regulation that stopped them.

There was until recently a long-standing property rights dispute in the UK, which is rather crowded hence this particular problem. In many cases, one neighbour was severely affected (as in never seeing daylight, and their property value reduced) by another neighbour deciding to plant a Leyland cypress hedge along the boundary and then declining to trim it. This typically leads to a dark green, completely opaque mass of foliage up to 70' high springing up in a few short years. But according to your "absolute property rights" theory, there ought to be no recourse for the aggrieved party in such a case. After all, the trees are on the other guy's land, right? Well, our government disagreed.

How about "you have an absolute right to do what you like with your own property as long as nobody else is harmed by it"? Which, it seems to me, is essentially the rule in sane democracies.

"We don't want to know how to make government work. We want to know how to make it stop." That sounds to me like someone who wants government to stop. Maybe Mr. Wilson can clarify that point.

American government in the 1920's took 3% of the nations product. Although some will think the America of that day dirty and dangerous, all visitors from Europe saw it quite differently by the standards of the day. Obama has raised our obligation to the Federal State to 24%, on the way to 40 if he has his way. Any level--much less obscene levels of statism--mean ruination, not protection.
Government, not the State is costless. There is no domestic catastrophie that can be thought of that can not be settled by costless government, and no catastrophie that cannot be made permanent by the State. The vast majority of the work of the State becomes correcting problems created by the State.
The nature and intention of government are social. Government secures those rights by making justice costless and easily accessible to individuals and groups; beyond that it does not go. The State, both in its geneses and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social.

Mr. Wilson - Still no answer, I see. I'll put the question in even simpler terms. What does a society in which property rights are absolute do about it, when what one person does with his property damages the property of another (or many others, as in the cases I mentioned)?

I'll use an even more absurdly extreme example. Let's say you have absolute rights over what you do with your car. So what does the society you live in do about it, when you deliberately knock down someone else's garden wall with that car? How about if it's accidental?

I submit that there is no such thing as an absolute property right. In an anarchy there are no rights at all; in any society with any government at all, one member of it (and his property) have to be protected from the malice and/or negligence of another.

And that leads to the proposition that "State" and "government" are words semantically equal except for the loaded connotations of those words. Any government requires enforcement of its laws - sometimes by force - and that (or the people and/or equipment that carry out that enforcement) constitutes the "State".

The fact is, Mr. Christian, even as this evil brew is collapsing under us you will not acknowledge what will become obvious at our end, that the individual now lives to subsidize an insatiable state, and a powerful state does not nurture or even tolerate an exceptional citizenry. All state action is violence, even fundamental and necessary ones. We have given up all thought of limiting its use.
We see why it takes the death of a thing to remove our long accumulation of dear assumptions.
Will Rogers once remarked we should be thankful we do not get all the government we pay for. But that is no longer true.

Mr. Wilson, I heartily agree that the State has taken over far too much of life - and that applies even more in my country than yours.

But that is not what you said. You said that you want government to stop; and later on you said that you believe in absolute property rights. You are perfectly within your rights (at least so far) to believe in total anarchy; but anarchy is completely inconsistent with property or any other rights, absolute or otherwise.

I also submit that absolute property rights are a nonsense completely inconsistent with a functioning society, and I gave examples of possible problems that such rights might cause. I also think that a reasonable compromise is what I already said; "absolute rights to property as long as your use of it does not damage or inconvenience the property or person of another."

If the next door neighbours insist on burning waste plastic in their garden and creating clouds of toxic smoke, or playing loud music at 3AM when I am trying to sleep, then I think that I ought to have a right to (as a last resort) recourse to law to stop them doing it. You, apparently, do not.

In discussing such matters clarity is important. You have not achieved it. If you had said "the encroachment by government on society should stop" I would have agreed with you.