....please place your bets now to see if you reap the rewards of a V.P. withdrawal before this Friday....

Will it be Baby-gate that brings Gov Sarah Palin down? I doubt it....

Will it be Trooper-gate(with the help from DUI-gate, Earmarks-gate and Secede-from-the-Union-gate) that brings her down?

More likely....at least the impropriety of the investigation certainly won't help the Republican brand this fall....

And, added from ABC posting site:

John McCain: " We are all Sarah today"

Not my favorite movie.

The US paid $7,200,000 for Alaska. If AIP wants independence, they should at least offer to buy it instead of just planning to steal it.

What is Seward's non-Folly worth today factoring in the North Slope, ANWR and the USGS's recent assessment:

90 Billion Barrels of Oil and 1,670 Trillion Cubic Feet of Natural Gas Assessed in the Arctic

Of the estimated totals, more than half of the undiscovered oil resources are estimated to occur in just three geologic provinces - Arctic Alaska, the Amerasia Basin, and the East Greenland Rift Basins. On an oil-equivalency basis, undiscovered natural gas is estimated to be three times more abundant than oil in the Arctic. More than 70 percent of the undiscovered natural gas is estimated to occur in three provinces - the West Siberian Basin, the East Barents Basins, and Arctic Alaska.

And don't forget that melting ice caps make the oil and gas more recoverable.

I wonder how AIP expects an independent Alaska to defend against Russian imperialism.

Get your new avatar, here, Rotwang!

Sarah: "John McCain raped me but...I'm still gonna have the baby...."

(Roars and cheers from the Convention floor)

John McCain; Putting the country first!

Why is everyone afraid of Palin?

What possible harm can she do to experienced candidates like Obama and Biden?

Don't you trust the American voter?

Why is everyone afraid of Palin? Because if you had the choice to be stranded on a desert island with either Hillary, Palin, or Pelosi, it would be overwhelmingly Palin. For a whole host of reasons.

The truth is, that Palin is even more like George Bush than JM is. What is wrong with

People were saying that Hillary was being dissed by not being chosen VP...that makes me wonder if all the Romney lovers and Pawlenty friends, and Crist voters, etc, will also feel insulted enough to vote for Obama...

Why isn't the Trad Med asking about this?

I'm sticking a fork in this thread. It's done.

Children of candidates are off limits!!!

Oh, why then did McCain meet the children at the airport today? Why were they paraded on camera twice tonight? Bringing an infant to a convention? He is the most exploited baby I've ever seen.

What a beautiful family, McCain said, but her family are "off limits."

They are trying to have their cake and eat it too. They made her into a pleasant home town gal at the beginning of her speech and then turned her into a screeching scold in the end. Her belittling of Obama was so outrageous when you consider the difference between their intellects.

I don't care what anyone says, I still like your old black and white picture better than this colorized version!

As T.S. Eliot said, or maybe it was Jon Lovitz, great poets do not borrow; they steal.

Actually, I think it was Aaron Sorkin. In a fit of self-portraiture, he placed words to that effect into the mouth of one of his characters on the TV show "The West Wing".

,,,,or perhaps Audrey Hepburn.

SOME THOUGHTS ON SARAH PALIN

First of all, it is true that liberals and pundits and such 'misunderestimate' Palin politically at their peril. Even many of the things that it is a matter of religious dogma to consider to be necessarily liabilities (eg w/the Christian Right, none of whom seem to mind in her case as in others before her) ain't necessarily so.

There are references to her good looks. Don't leave out her husband (maybe it's stereotyping of the most egregious kind, by I always envision small-scale commercial fishermen as having leathery skin and gravelly voices. Some say that's just the tequila-and-Hemingway talking, while others note that there's less sunlight (???) at the Alaska altitudes. Todd looks a bit like how I'd envision Matthew Perry in a sequel to Friends as thirtysomethings, except that Todd is distinctly better looking. And then there's the future son-in-law, another made-for-soap-opera-TV persona; funny, neither the McCains nor the Bidens nor the Obamas, as FAMILIES can compare.

And the soap opera notion, which others have mentioned before at TPM Cafe and elsewhere, is not to be merely touched upon obliquely or even simply dismissed as laughable. Think Eva Peron (who also could KO Palin, who is apparently notorious for petty vendetta in Wasilla & in Alaska politics, on that score), or the mesmerizing of the British public (which is after all much better informed on average than the US) with the royal family. Soap opera politics is NOT merely something of a bygone era -- indeed it feeds off a television age and is none the worse so far for the rise of the internet.

In this context, the various family dramas, such as the pregnant teenage daughter, turn into assets, all the MORE so as people try to bash them for it. No one can be more DEFENSIVE against Scarlett letter politics than the purveyors of it.

And Palin delivered her speech with real natural skill. She's no Dan Quayle, with his robotic following the cue cards and his dear-in-the-headlights stance when the situation requires fast thinking on one's feet.

And she has people to spin a narrative for her -- and if there's one thing we should learn from all the post-modernist bullshit artists, it's that narrative can INDEED be more powerful than fact --
that is tailor made for that great apolitical mass out there.

OK, so she supported the bridge to nowhere, ditching the idea when it became a political liability, and the strategy of the Alaska GOP was to negotiate as a team (and please don't tell me it's not obvious at least to political cognoscenti that she, like McCain, is a counterfeit maverick) to get the AMAZING deal that Alaska got (keeping ALL the money while ditching the bridge!!!!!????) which I haven't seen people mentioning, even in venues where I'd expect it. (Surely it HAS been mentioned here and there, I've just eaten right past it).

And so she supported tax increases, and has a politics that is a wet dream for the sophisticated oil elite (sans any sign of bribery, which is another big plus).

And one of my favorites. This reference to Palin's small town America apparently, to more than one observer, is laughable when they look at Wasilla, a sprawling suburb where, according to Wikipedia, at least 35% of the workforce works in Anchorage. Here's a description of Wasilla (disclosure: I've never visited Alaska, but if I could overcome my disability, it's one place I'd like to see) also from Wikipedia:

Charles Wohlforth, in a Frommer's travel guidebook on Alaska, described Wasilla as "the worst kind of suburban sprawl of highway-fronting shopping malls and gravel lots".[14]^

14 Wohlforth, Charles (August 29, 2008). "Dispatch From Alaska: Palin? Really?". The New Republic. Retrieved on 2008-08-30. “I had written a Frommer's travel guidebook about Alaska (I live in Anchorage and was on the Municipal Assembly here at the time).

My point here is NOT (as some have done) bashing Wasilla. It's to note that Palin was able to spoon feed the mass public on the notion of this town as if it were Mayberry, and the press? See: McCain the Maverick (major spin of many years duration, systematically fostered by the MSM)

The larger point is that we have seen the face of 21st century faux populist politics, and her name is Sarah Palin.