I sincerely hope that John McCain lives a very long life, but like the rest of us, he is subject to the odds associated with a man his age.  According to Vol. 54, No. 14 of the National Vital Statistics Reports available from the CDC at

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54_14.pdf

the odds of a 72 year old white male American diying in the next four years are a bit over 16%.  You can calculate this using the table on Page 17.  Just add 1 to each of the probabilities for men from 72-73 through 75-76, take the product of those four numbers, and subtract 1 to get 16.1%.  Invert that percentage and you will see the the odds of VP Palin becoming POTUS Palin are only 1 out of 6.2.

Feeling lucky America?  No worries.  It turns out that the VP is sort of an internship or undergraduate program for one very lucky older student.  Perhaps we should let people compete for it on an American Idol-like program.

Earlier today, I heard Charles Black say that she did not need to know much about foreign affairs initially because she would spend the next four years learning at the feet of the master.  We should probably get a copy of the syllabus so we will all know exactly where she will be in her course of study if he dies before she earns her degree.

Katrina hit well to the east of the city.  New Orleans did experience hurricane force winds for a few hours, estimated to be Category 1 or 2.  However, since a hurricane rotates counter-clockwise and the storm hit to the east, these wind were not coming from the direction of the Gulf of Mexico and there was little storm surge.   If Gustav maintains its strength and hits to the west of New Orleans, it will be much worse than Katrina.  This is why we should not rebuild New Orleans, particularly the areas that are below sea level.  We are just wasting our money, it would much cheaper to move everyone inland and build a new city (not that we really need to do that either).  New Orleans is also much more vulnerable than just about any other city of the Gulf Coast.

For those who argue that The Netherlands is a good example of what can be done to fight the rise of the ocean, I would argue that isn't the same thing.  I don't believe The Netherlands has to deal with any hurricanes (not true hurricanes).  They also have a little more demand for land in The Netherlands, while we have quite a supply.  The Netherlands also spends a great deal of money and effort to fight the sea.

I grew up in the southern half of Florida and experienced hurricanes first hand on several occasions.  That's also why I moved away from the coast.  We should let nature reclaim some of the areas we have developed; it would be better for everyone in the long run.

There's a fool claiming that undecideds have gone "sharply against" McCain in the wake of his selection of Sarah Palin as VP nominee.

The person relies on a sample of approximately 11 voters surveyed during the first day of the above-mentioned selection.

Add to that the fact that in a 11 sample, the margin of error is magnified to what, 80%?, That is, it becomes much larger than the usual 2.5-4% MOE existent in a sample of hundreds of voters.

Why do I mention the number "11"? Because the Rasmussen poll in question has a sample of 1000 voters divided into 3 days of polling, which gives you 333 total voters. Since undecideds are approximately 10% of the voters, it's safe to assume that the total sample of undecided voters was 33.

But only around 1/3 of those 33 undecided were polled on the day that Palin was chosen.

Someone might find a mistake in my math, but even in that case, the total number of undecided will be pyrrhic.

So my advice to TPM readers is: learn how to read polls; learn how to wait SEVERAL DAYS in order to assess the effect of an event in the race; learn math;  and while you are at it, tell Andrew Sullivan to find another job.

Sarah Palin as a TV Sports Commentator

Virtually all the commentary on Gov. Palin's nomination has focused on Sen. McCain's age and physical health as risk factors for a possible succession.  But historically that largely misses the point.

In seven of the 11 Presidencies since 1944, circumstances arose in which the Vice-President became President or reasonablycould have done so. 

-- One President (Roosevelt) died in office of natural causes.
-- One President (Nixon) resigned.
-- One President (Kennedy) was assassinated.
-- One President (Clinton) was impeached (and was also the target of an incompetent assassination effort).
-- Three Presidents (Truman, Reagan, and Ford) were the targets of serious and nearly successful assassination attempts.  In addition, Arthur Bremer came close to attacking Nixon before eventually shooting George Wallace, then a candidate for President.

In only two of these cases (Nixon and Clinton) could the incumbents have prevented these events by their own actions in office.  (Roosevelt could have avoided dying in office in 1945 only by refusing to run for re-election at all.)  And of course in only one was the incumbent's physical condition involved.

As the history shows, events causing or raising the possibility of a Vice-Presidential succession have happened regularly over several decades; and most of these events have ben out of the President's control.  With that background, any prudent Presidential candidate would choose a Vice-Presidential nominee for whom at least a reasonable prima facie case of fitness for the Presidency could be made.  That Sen. McCain failed to do so does indeed reflect very damagingly on his  own character and fitness for office.

When Marilyn Monroe met Einstein, she famously joked that if they had children, they would have her looks and his brains.<br>"What if they have my looks and your brains?" he responded.<br>This seems to be a close analogue to the experience/judgement question of the two campaigns: Obama has good judgement if not that much experience, and Biden certainly has a wealth of experience on many fronts.  The combination of them only seems to reinforce each other.<br>My fear is the McCain campaign, by default, carries the judgement of McCain ... and the experience of McCain, and Palin as a lure to disgruntled democratic women who aren't paying attention.  I wonder if the possibility exists for Palin to inform the judgement of McCain--not that her judgement is anything to commend--I don't know much about her accomplishments.  Not likely anyway one looks at it.  <br>

Hi there, come on in.  No, it's all right, really.  She takes off like that sometimes when she's been waiting for me.  Opposable thumb problem, otherwise she could let herself out.  May I get you something besides a deep breath and a hug?  Oh, of course!  Thank you for that.  Now, a glass of wine coming right up.  Hope a plastic cup is OK!   Grab a seat on the sofa, save me a pillow on the floor next to you.  What?  Sure, whatever you'd like to listen to tonight.  I'm easy.

I hope everyone knows that within this space of ours life relaxes.  I need to be a part of that, we all need to feel the connection to each other as a whole.  Just for a few minutes.  Just to take a deep breath and sigh.  Let the world stop for an instant and allow us to collect our molecules.  I know that it's hard to climb down the ladder of insistance, to walk away from the absolute certainty that you're right.  To disengage from the the voices in your head telling you to get in the car.  Even when you know the driver is drunk.  It's hard ... but not impossible.  Just for a moment.

The Earth, the Moon, the planets and the stars are encased in the stillness of peace.  Not infinite peace, mind you, but enough to sustain their brilliance for the eyes that care to see.  So let's look to the skies and think of those in peril tonight, those facing unimaginable fear of the very nature we so admire.  May the storms be fleeting, and the rainbows endless.

Just for a moment.  Can we do that?

More fodder for the tireswing theory.  Check out this article from the AP:  http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jvnjGY5bN0OFXs6wcJMRJ6ZhcKCgD92SVAEG1

John McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin begs a burning question: Is McCain too risky to ever be president?

I would submit the answer is "Yes."

Palin's biography has already circulated among the blogging community, so I will spare you the particulars. Suffice it to say she is not ready to succeed to the presidency, nor is she likely to be ready anytime in the next few years. She lacks the national experience of Hillary Clinton and is no substitute for the esteemed senator from New York, who actually has earned her stripes in both the foreign and domestic policy arenas.

My objection to McCain's inscrutable logic involves his ludicrous suggestion that, if he were ever incapacitated as president, Palin would be an effective leader of our foreign affairs and a wise protector of our national security. That suggestion is beyond ridicule and implies that McCain either chose his running mate through a deeply flawed thought process or out of deeply cynical political reasons in premeditated disregard for the oath to "faithfully execute the office of President of the United States" and "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Taken together with McCain's saber-rattling bombast at the start of the Georgia crisis, his flippant "bomb, bomb, bomb — bomb, bomb Iran," his "hot-dog" record of crashing five Navy aircraft, and his support for virtually unlimited U.S. military presence in Iraq, McCain's choice of a foreign affairs neophyte shows a willingness to take unacceptable risks with American national security.

Lt. Cmdr. John Sidney McCain III appears less fit to assume the role of Commander-in-Chief and more likely to assume Humphrey Bogart's role as Lt. Cmdr. Philip Francis Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny":

"Ahh, but the strawberries that's... that's where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with... geometric logic... that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox DID exist, and I'd have produced that key if they hadn't of pulled the Caine out of action."

The worst aspect (from a Republican viewpoint) of the Palin pick is not that every editorial and news story mentions her youth and inexperience; it is that they all invariably remind us that John McCain is 72 years old and has been victim of a potentially fatal form of cancer on more than one occasion. Even McCain's campaign's manager Charlie Black released a statement saying most doctors believe McCain will survive his first term (emphasis mine).

This has been a topic that has been scrupulously avoided by the press. Both MSM and bloggers alike have treated the topic more gingerly than they have Obama's race: until now. With the Palin's selection apparently all bets are off.

Constant reminders of McCain's fragility can not be good news for McCain.

This may be one reason why Obama, Biden and even Clinton have responded so cordially to his choice.

My second favorite speaker at the DNC Thursday night will likely find it a sad irony that Sarah Palin's real estate portfolio is managed by Smith Barney.
There's a post about it at the wonk room.
Get Barney in some ads STAT!

From the NY times

I assume this is just the beginning, and I am pretty sure they will go at it full speed next week.

He alluded to the controversy surrounding Mr. Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “He said very publicly, and embraced, as well he should, the relationship he had with the minister in his church for 20 years,’’ he said. “But when things got really heated, two or three weeks later, suddenly he changed his point of view, towards that minister that he admired so much for 20 years.’’

And he criticized Mr. Obama for talking about how bitter people cling to issues like guns and religion, which caused Mr. Obama troubles here during the primary. “I got news for you, Senator Obama,’’ he said. “Check out the Bill of Rights, because we’ve been doing that since 1789.’’

And I am sure McWar will say , we are  not playing the race card...

The Washington Post' Charles Krauthammer has spent his life agreeing with anything, good or bad, that major Republicans do or say.

This is why his following take on McCain's Vice-Presidential choice, Sarah Palin, comes as a big shocker:

The Palin selection completely undercuts the argument about Obama's inexperience and readiness to lead...
The McCain campaign is reveling in the fact that Palin is a game changer. But why a game changer when you’ve been gaining? To gratuitously undercut the remarkably successful "Is he ready to lead" line of attack seems near suicidal.

For all his vain efforts to try and distinguish himself from George W. Bush, John McCain demonstrated in his first presidential decision that he's not just a carbon copy of Bush -- he's a clone.  More troubling is that McCain has chosen to emulate Bush in the area that has been the hallmark of the disaster that has been the Bush Presidency.  In selecting Sarah Palin -- an individual who, when McCain began his 2008 campaign for President, was still the Mayor of Wasilla, Akaska (Pop. 8,400) -- McCain proved that, like Bush, he is far more interested in politics than governing.  Think Harriet Miers and Heckuva Job Brownie.  Actually, that's not fair.  Harriet Miers has more government experience than Sarah Palin and she wasn't being nominated for Vice President.  Just think Heckuva Job Brownie.

After all of his bluster about the importance of experience and choosing somebody who can step into the Oval Office without missing a beat, McCain chose a person who's previous experience in handling confrontations with other governments was her ability to resolve a zoning dispute with the neighboring town of Moose Drool. 

McCain's recklessness becomes all the more stark when you consider that roughly one in five U.S. Presidents have died in office and none of them were seventy-two years old with recurrent bouts of cancer when they took office.  So if McCain is elected President and has a heart attack on inauguration night because he decided to celebrate by popping one of his little blue pills and having his annual romp with Cindy a couple of months early, does anybody really sleep well at night with the thought that Sarah Palin will be staring down Vladimir Putin on the morning of January 21, 2009?

Nobody can even seriously argue that this was anything but a political stunt on McCain's part.  Can anyone say with a straight face that if the newly elected Governor of Alaska and former Mayor of the village of Wasilla was named "Sam Palin," he would even be in the top 500 contenders for the ticket?  Of course not.  But, just like Bush, McCain is willing to gamble with this nation's future if there's political advantage in it for him. 

To put it bluntly, in light of John McCain's age and health, the statistical reality is that Sarah Palin's chances of becoming President of the United States are only slightly lower than McCain's.  Of course, at the end of the day it strikes me that John McCain is really the only citizen of this country who can rest easy with the thought of a Vice President Sarah Palin.  Because if Sarah Palin ever has to take over as President, John McCain won't be around to suffer the consequences.  Too bad he wasn't thinking of the rest of us when he made his choice.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/30/121350/137/486/580223

And this woman wants abstinence-only education in schools. Oopsie!

Andrew Sullivan's got the report on the latest Rasmussen poll since McCain picked the least qualified candidate for a major ticket in modern times. Turns out those who haven't made their minds up don't like this very much, and think it reflects poorly on McCain's presidential judgement.

Imagine that.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/08/undecideds-dont.html

"

The headlines are about the broad polling reaction to Palin. But the most fascinating part of the first Rasmussen poll on the matter is how those who are currently undecided in the election feel. They, after all, are the votes both campaigns are trying to win over with their veep picks. The key data is in the cross-tabs, which have been missed in some of the coverage so far.

On the critical question, "With Palin As Vice-Presidential Nominee, Are You More Or Less Likely To Vote For McCain," there's a striking result. Among those already for McCain, 68 percent say it makes them more likely to vote for him; only 6 percent say less; and 23 percent said no impact. Among those already for Obama, Palin made only 9 percent of them more likely to switch to McCain, 59 percent less likely, and 30 percent said it would make no difference.

But among the critical undecideds, the Palin pick made only 6 percent more likely to vote for McCain; and it made 31 percent less likely to vote for him. 49 percent said it would have no impact, and 15 percent remained unsure. More to the point: among undecideds, 59 percent said Palin was unready to be president. Only 6 percent said she was.If the first criterion for any job is whether you're ready for it, this is a pretty major indictment of the first act of McCain's presidential leadership.

One other striking finding. If McCain thought he could present Palin as a moderate, he was wrong. A whopping 69 percent view her as conservative (37 percent as very conservative), and only 13 percent see her as moderate.

From this first snap-shot (and unsettled) impression, Palin has helped McCain among Republicans, left Democrats unfazed, but moved the undecideds against him quite sharply. I totally understand why."

...or Hurricane Relief Telethon, whichever they settle on. From the WSJ "Among the options under consideration: canceling one day of activities; transforming the gathering into a giant hurricane relief telethon."

DNC Ad:

Video of McCain and Chris Wallace from tomorrow's Fox News Sunday with the following quote:

"It just wouldn't be appropriate to have a festive occasion while a near-tragedy or a terrible challenge is presented in the form of a natural disaster," McCain told Chris Wallace of "Fox News Sunday," in an interview taped for tomorrow.
from politico.com

Still photo of McCain and Bush on tarmac, cutting birthday cake the day Katrina made landfall. Include date stamp and text: George W. Bush and John McCain celebrate McCain's 69th birthday the day Hurricane Katrina devastates New Orleans.

Appropriately Scathing Voice-over, one suggestion: "John McCain doesn't want to accept his party's nomination while a major natural disaster affects the United States. But where was he during Hurricane Katrina?"

Video Transition to: Images of the aftermath of Katrina

-----------

Alright, so I don't make ads for a living, but they someone should run with this quote. At least tivo it tomorrow.

Recently, John McCain announced his running mate, the Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. She has spent not even 2 years as the Governor before become the VP of the Republican ticket. Her education is only a Bachelor of Science in communications-journalism from University of Idaho. How can we let a person into office if all they have is a BS in communications-journalism, some people argue that because of this she is more like the common man. What BS is this? Candidate's should be above the common person, not with them. Any candidate for office should be different from the average American, and they shouldn't try to portray themselves as one of us. I don't want any elected office being held by anyone that isn't smarter. wiser, and overall better than myself, or anyone that I know personally. That is the difference between the leader and the follower. We need someone that will understand all the technicalities of Washington and the world, and not an average joe. America deserves responsible leaders instead of people that barely understand what to do, and base life on lucky breaks. 

Here's the page. Someone needs to put together McCain's daily gaffes and chronicle them prominently. How many times has he confused Sunni with Shia, The Czech Republic with Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union with
Russia. If the RNC does this McCain, it's a huge opening for the DNC to respond in kind.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) restarted the countdown clock since Joe Biden’s last gaffe on August 27, 2008 at 10:49:52 p.m. MDT – the time at which the Democrat vice presidential nominee and chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee mixed up military “battalions” with “brigades.”  This comes only four days, 17 hours, and 59 minutes since his last gaffe, made shortly after beginning his vice presidential bid.

I am not an expert on politics or any kind of a professional pundit or blogger but I have watched Joe Biden in action on C-SPAN over the last eight years and  am pleased to see him enter the race as Obama's VP nominee.

Specifically, during the lead up to our invasion of Iraq, Biden's performance on the Foreign Relations committee was nothing less than prescient.

I watched him time and again ask the hard questions and refuse to accept the orchestrated answers which were being promoted by members of the administration in support of their decision to go to war. 

He was adamant that the American people needed to be told of the monumental costs that this war would entail - a financial cost in the trillions, the potential loss of our prestige and leadership position in the world, the probability of tying up our military assets for years to come and thus reducing our options in dealing with the world, and most importantly the loss of American lives. He scoffed at the assertions made by Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld that  Iraqi oil revenues would fund the reconstruction, that "the war will pay for itself", and he continually raised concerns about the effects of shifting our focus and resources away from the efforts in Afghanistan.

This was six+ years ago before the advent of shock and awe and all that has followed.  So I feel he has earned his reputation for understanding global events and the role America plays in the world.

Besides that, I just like listening to his stories. Even when I know he may be guilty of some exaggeration - what Irish-Catholic doesn't get carried away at times -  his anecdotes together with his humor, make him seem like a normal guy.  But luckily for us, a normal guy with an intellectual streak that shows up in his reasoned and thoughtful approach to many of the divisive social and moral issues of the day.

As a bookseller, I find his knowledge of and familiarity with literature refreshing.

Biden's life story, his dedication to maintaining a home outside of the beltway while meeting his responsibilities as a single father and never succumbing to the lure of a Washington lifestyle is the epitome of "family values", whatever that is supposed to mean.

And then on top of everything else, what a joy to have someone on the ticket who is passionate about our constitution but yet has enough legislative and practical experience to confront accusations of being an ivory-tower academic, putting constitutional rights ahead of America's security.

So while I would have liked to have seen Hillary have the opportunity, I am pleased with the prospect of Joe Biden as VP.

Cross-posted from my August 23, 2008, Politico blog.

John McCain has flip-flopped and flopped back and flipped again on many of the important issues in which he's involved himself over the past 8 years. All in a desperate ploy to be palatable enough with the right-wing of his party to get the nomination. He derided the Rovian tactics that unfairly smeared him in South Carolina in 2000, even going so far as to demand an apology from GW, calling him shameless. Now he embraces these tactics and lies about it repeatedly. John McCain is a cynical opportunist.

John McCain believes he is most qualified to lead our nation by virtue of his experience and years in Washington. He blasts Obama as a pretender, an amateur. Yet it is Obama who has been right on nearly every major decision of the past 8 years, while McCain has voted again and again to back the failed policies and lack of a plan to win in any war he's help lead us into. His domestic policies will be a continuation of the same policies that have left most Americans poorer and worse off than they were 8 years ago. John McCain has poor judgment.

John McCain claims a desire to help the burdened middle class of America. Yet when GOP policies helped make possible the setting for the mortgage crisis and left hundreds of thousands of Americans in foreclosure and even more with upside-down loans, he supported bailouts for the big money industry and offered nothing for Americans, while his primary economic advisor called us all whiners. He has demonstrated a dangerous lack of understanding of what the average American faces everyday as he loses count of the homes he owns and believes $5MM is the low threshold to be counted among the rich. By his own admission, he knows very little about economics. John McCain is out of touch.

John McCain feels hurt by the press' treatment of him. After years of getting a free ride, it troubles his vanity to have to share the spotlight or answer for his actions. He truly believes his POW experience should be a 'free pass' for every scandal, lie and misstep he's taken, invoking it so often that he's had to get it laminated for fear it might shred through wear'n'tear. He pathetically brings it up every time he has to defend himself. John McCain is a whiner.

John McCain has nominated a VP who he barely knows and has met in person just once. He did this because he felt she could help get him some votes and win the election, while shamelessly putting the phrase "Country First" on his bumper stickers. John McCain is a cynical opportunist.

John McCain has called national security, defense and the war on terror the vital questions of this election. His choice for VP has no qualifications in any of this. She has no experience in foreign relations and apparently does not know what the VP actually does. He has chosen a running mate who probably would be laughed about if she were selected to a Cabinet position. John McCain has poor judgment.

John McCain doesn't want you to think about any of this. That's why he uses the Rovian tactics, to distract and appeal to emotions, at a serious time when deep reflection and an intelligent approach to governing is most sorely needed. So when John McCain talks about his POW experiences, ad nauseum, ask yourself how it's relevant to the topic at hand, and why he feels the need to fall back on that when the truth should do just fine. When John McCain tells you Sarah Palin is the right woman for the job, ask yourself why he'd nominate a neophyte to a position a breath away from the White House, if it's not a cynical political gambit. When John McCain hammers away over and over at how urgent the times are, ask yourself why he'd nominate a VP who can offer him nothing from their own well of experience, if he's really serious about the urgency of our nation's problems. When John McCain tells you he understands the plight of the American worker, remind yourself that he chose the easy life and lives it to the fullest. When John McCain asks you to vote for him, think hard about whether it's right to support a whining, cynical opportunist with poor judgment who is out of touch with the average American.

I submitted this before but it didn't get posted, so apologies if a duplicate suddenly appears.  Check out bluehampshire, (http://www.bluehampshire.com/frontPage.do) which reports that websites are being scrubbed of Palin news.  Here is a cached quote of Palin supporting Stevens: "It is so encouraging to hear again that Senator Stevens and I are singing from the same sheet of music," said Governor Palin. "In his address, he pushed for action this year on a natural gas pipeline. I also have the Senator's assurance that once the state has acted on the AGIA, our Congressional Delegation will do everything it can do to expedite the federal review of the natural gas pipeline project."  Who is doing the scrubbing?

"Republican officials said that though they had time to collect surface-level material on Ms. Palin and her husband, they had done no examination of the rest of her family."

If you are using misogyny to advance your arguments against  John McCain's choice of running mates, you are giving disaffected women every reason to withhold their votes or use them for McCain/Palin.

DON'T do it.

Write about Sarah Palin's lack of foreign policy expertise and how badly that reflects on McCain's judgment, NOT how "babelicious" she is.

Feel free to blog about Palin's abuse of power as Alaska governor, but NOT while using the acronyms MILF, VPILF or similar demeaning terms.

Have a blast blasting her coziness to oil interests, but do NOT suggest she is "in bed" with said interests.

It's fine to discuss Palin's rabid anti-abortion views, but do NOT discuss her children — ANY of them. Attacking a candidate's family is off limits for all but the most wretched political slimers.

Belittle Palin's qualifications, NOT her achievements.

Treat Palin as you would any candidate, NOT as a woman candidate.

Let McCain's own misogyny inform voters, NOT yours.

Focus your blogging on McCain, NOT fascination with his odd choice of Palin. His brash choice is meant to distract our attention to her and keep the public and press from using the microscope where it is needed most: on McCain.

1) Don't say Sarah Palin's fifth child is actually her daughters.  It's an unsubstantiated rumor likely to make any mother angry and rally more people to McCain.  Above all, it looks like we don't have a legitimate case to make against her.  We do. 2) Don't talk about how hot Sarah Palin is.  It makes us look sexist and trivial.  It reinforces the idea that Palin can get by as an image projected by the GOP.
3)Don't criticize her for knowing nothing about foreign policy until she proves that she doesn't.  The last thing we need is to look foolish when Palin can speak fluently on national security issues.  She may be able to.
Having bludgeoned Obama with the celebrity sticker McCain has just gone out and got himself one.  We don't need to strengthen his hand by appearing petty and demeaning. 

1) Don't say Sarah Palin's fifth child is actually her daughters.  It's an unsubstantiated rumor likely to make any mother angry and rally more people to McCain.  Above all, it looks like we don't have a legitimate case to make against her.  We do. 2) Don't talk about how hot Sarah Palin is.  It makes us look sexist and trivial.  It reinforces the idea that Palin can get by as an image projected by the GOP.
3)Don't criticize her for knowing nothing about foreign policy until she proves that she doesn't.  The last thing we need is to look foolish when Palin can speak fluently on national security issues.  She may be able to.
Having bludgeoned Obama with the celebrity sticker McCain has just gone out and got himself one.  We don't need to strengthen his hand by appearing petty and demeaning. 

She has two entries on her resume that demonstrate executive experience

1. Gov, Alaska.  Alaska is a lot of things, but it's hardly a model of pluralist democracy.  It's a welfare petro-State tacked on to the Union populated mainly by people running away from their past or struggling to preserve their indigenous culture in the face of resource exploitation (which Palin supports increasing).

2. Mayor, Wasilla (pop ~7000).  To put this in perspective, a nearby high school has an enrollment of 4200 students.  If you count parents as part of the school constituency, and assume each child has two parents (a conservative assumption if you consider step-parents), the number is about 13,000.  That means that the principal of a nearby suburban high school has more executive responsibility than the Mayor of Wasilla.

And we would be loathe to forget Karl Rove's recent dismissal of Tim Kaine's executive experience, first term Gov of VA and former mayor of Richmond (pop ~200,000).  One might suspect that he was looking to eliminate a VP candidate who would have neutralized point for point the executive experience of McCain's (and Limbaugh's) choice.

You can find the article here. CNN reports that,

But in contrast with the mild reception that greeted the comment at the Ohio event, when Palin praised Clinton here for showing “determination and grace in her presidential campaign,” the Alaska governor was met with a noisy mix of boos, groans and grumbles around the minor league ballpark where the “Road to the Convention Rally” was held.

Not the best reception on her first day on the campaign trail, is it? Not to mention she's getting booed for one of main reasons that McCain took her: to appeal to disaffected Clinton voters. Apparently, that strategy is already backfiring.

From Fox News:

"In the (Gallup) poll taken Friday, 39 percent said she is ready to serve as president if needed, 33 percent said she isn’t and 29 percent have no opinion.

That’s the lowest rating any running mate has had since then-Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle was selected in 1988 to join George H.W. Bush’s team. "

From Fox News:

"In the (Gallup) poll taken Friday, 39 percent said she is ready to serve as president if needed, 33 percent said she isn’t and 29 percent have no opinion.

That’s the lowest rating any running mate has had since then-Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle was selected in 1988 to join George H.W. Bush’s team. "

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh-lW2opLyQ&feature=related

The above clip is from the Late Show with Craig Ferguson on CBS over a year ago.

Craig has been waiting for his citizenship to come through. Until then he has had a few state governors offer him honorary state citizenship. Sarah Palin actually sent her offer by video...and what an offer it was. (it had Craig almost drooling).

Not only does she 'blaspheme' by making cross gestures while deeming him a citizen, she also uses some interesting adjectives to entice him to visit. "We will let you partake of rich succulent Alaska salmon..."

For one who claims her boundless evangelical faith she is really edging the line. Is this any way for a governor to act?

Now lets look at the feminist aspect of this for a moment. She has been around the block, she knows she is pleasant to look at. So why the hell does she encourage this kind of thing? Far from being a feminist...she is perfectly ok with Craig using her attractiveness as comedy.  
 
There is just no way a late night punchline can be a heartbeat away from the presidency....please tell me this is not possible.

Cindy McCain is "offended" that that upstart Obama fellow would dare allude to her and John's vast wealth in his acceptance speech. 

"I'm offended by Barack Obama saying that about my husband," said McCain's wife Cindy.

When asked if Obama went too far in his criticism of McCain, Cindy responded, "I do. I do. I really do."

                      * * * 

"My father had nothing. He and my mother sold everything they had to raise $10,000," she said. "I'm proud of what my dad and my mother did and what they built and left me.  And I intend to carry their legacy as long as I can."

I wasn't aware that Cindy's father was running for President, nor am I clear on how her father's hard, if often questionable, work is in any way relevant to the effect Daddy's wealth has had on her husband.  (Its pretty apparent, however, that Daddy is still an ever present member of the McCain family.  Which is, of course, more than you can say for Daddy's other children.) 

This is like, what, the two hundredth time that Cindy has taken offense at the mere allusion to the fact  she is sitting on a vast pile of unearned wealth and that John married into it? 

One thing I've learned about rich people as an attorney: if you have a rich witness and you really want to put him or her on tilt, ask the witness a very straightforward series of questions about his or her money.  It just absolutely causes them to lose their shit, without fail.  Its like they're two years old and some other kid crawled into the sandbox and licked all their toys or something.  I have no understanding of why this might be. I simply have observed a correlation between action and consequence and learned to exploit it.  It just really makes them angry to have to answer questions about their money.  Even the ones who aren't already known for having explosive tempers. 

I've also noted that when they get mad, it does not sit at all well with judges and juries. 

That part I get. 

This is really troubling.

Do a Google news search for the dates of April 1, 2008 through April 30, 2008 for Sarah Palin.

Here, I'll do it for you.

Interesting that, in the month that she both gave a speech in Texas and gave birth to her son (only the second female governor to do so while in office), there's not a single news hit on the web about it. Zilch.

Something smells rotten in the state of Denmark, that's for sure.

The initial shock has worn off.  McCain picked Sarah Palin.  He stole a lot of Obama's thunder and got the media's attention big time; but one thought keeps popping into my head.  How long until Palin is an effective surrogate?  I'm specifically thinking about the last three weeks of the campaign season when the candidate and vice-candidate spend hardly a moment together as they try to maximize their message in the battleground states.  McCain will do anything he can to bring her up to speed on foreign policy issues but will she ready to stand alone in front of the press?  She seems smart and I believe she will be up to the task, but how soon?  Your thoughts would be appreciated.

For those of you too young to remember the state of relations between Jews and Christians before Pope John explained that it was not Kosher.  Specifically, in the fall of 1965, in the fourth session of Vatican II, the Synod of Bishops finally approved "Nostra Aetate" which absolved living Jews of complicity in any role in Christ's passion.  From the following page in Wikipedia 

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Vatican_Council

"True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ. Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone."[19]

Jews, Catholics and many Protestants born before JFK became President will remember well how this act changed interfaith relations every bit as much as the Civil Rights Act changed racial relations in the US.  People born too late to have experienced that directly may not be familiar with a term well known prior to Vatican II: "Jew Baiting." 

The term may be obsolete, but the action is not, at least in Sarah Palin's Alaska.  On October 23, 2006, while she was running for Governor, the Anchorage Daily News reported that just after her election as Mayor of Wasilla a supportive cable TV broadcast had pronounced her Wasilla's first Christian mayor.  The man she had replaced, John Stein, was not Jewish but as we all know too well from this year's campaign a little guilt by association never hurts in Republican politics.  Here is the link.
http://dwb.adn.com/news/politics/story/8334949p-8231037c.html

McCain should be ashamed and the old Jews in Florida who were adults in 1965 should take note.

I’m sorry to be so sophomoric with the title of my entry here – I know this is a place for more thoughtful discourse – but I want to be the first to predict the next Republican meme to try and excite male voters about Sarah Palin as McCain’s Veep choice.  We all know that FOX News has a hard time not objectifying and overly sexualizing women – so it’s just a matter of time before Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade (or even some of their non-brunette female staff) go off on a mindless rant over at Fox and Friends – and inappropriately refer to Sarah Palin is a MILF. 

I’m sure it will just be a harmless and cute attempt at trying to say that she’s an attractive, middle-aged mother – and I get that acronyms oftentimes sort of become their own ‘words’ in a way that doesn’t necessarily draw upon the actual words that comprise each letter – but it’s troubling nonetheless that we’ve slipped so far as a society that it is more likely than it isn’t likely that one of our major ‘news’ networks will use such a term to describe the next potential vice president of the United States.

I know it hasn’t happened yet – but you know it’s coming.  I can just feel the nausea setting in now – when those words are so easily batted around by idiotic Republicans – Sarah Palin is a MILF – and that’s reason enough to want to have her be a heartbeat away from assuming office as our President.

So it starts tonight – Saturday, August 30, 2008 – countdown to MILF-dom – how long will it take for Sarah Palin to receive the title that every 40-something mother of five so deeply desires. 

Please send me a link to the video once it has become available.

Watch it here!!

ENJOY!!

Bill Maher lights up Sarah Palin

Absolutely hilarious

From Tapped at The American Prospect:

The blogosphere has been awash in suggestions that Sarah Palin will be widely viewed as politically inexperienced, a lightweight beauty queen, and even a bad mother. But today polling is out, and it shows Palin has made a great first impression on the American public; she is viewed favorably by 78 percent of Republicans, 26 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of unaffiliated voters. Compare that to a roll-out favorability rating of just 43 percent for Joe Biden. Women seem to be more skeptical of Palin than men, but that is to be expected; on average, women are more skeptical of all conservative politicians and policies than men are.

Getting to Know You....you'll love this from JedReport

What would you caption this??

Video

I regularly post videos on YouTube and I regularly read TPM, but my two worlds rarely cross. This vlog, however, I feel is particularly relevant to both.

Viagra -Vagina '08

vs.

One House - One Spouse "08

So, McCain made his ground-shaking pick, and the media jumped all over it, as was presumably his design. McCain won his news cycle - but now, these MSM outlets have had time to fully digest the pick and its ramifications - and are finding all sorts of odds and ends while unleashing its vetting grinder on Palin.  If these editorials are representative of the campaign's new meme, McCain lost the election in the bargain.

Here's a collection of various op-eds around the country that are, on the whole, not very flattering to the first-term Alaska governor.

I believe this media reaction will be critical to the Obama campaign's strategy.  They can just quote all this beautiful stuff here, and not have to get involved in hitting Palin directly. 

Senator Straight Talk's judgment is being bashed in these, too.  It's really beautiful when the media actually does its job and reports the truth, you know?

Happy reading!

The Denver Post: 

“I served with Hillary Clinton. I know Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine. You, Sarah Palin, are no Hillary Clinton.” Sorry to steal Joe Biden’s thunder, but we didn’t want to wait for the vice presidential candidates’ debate to say the obvious. Yes, John McCain, who argues with a straight face that Barack Obama’s 12 years in the Illinois legislature and U.S. Senate aren’t enough to qualify him to run for president, has picked a running mate who just two years ago was serving as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, population 5,470. In short, the presumptive Republican nominee, an Old Soldier in all senses of that term, drafted the political equivalent of the Unknown Soldier as his co-pilot. McCain’s pick of Palin jettisons his attack that Obama isn’t ready to lead and looks more like a desperate “Hail Mary” campaign tactic aimed at female voters.

Detroit News: 

…Palin, 44, with less than two years as governor and no foreign policy experience, can’t be sold as ready to step into the presidency if called upon. Arizona Sen. McCain, if he wins, will be 72 when he takes office, and the question of succession is likely to be a concern for voters.

Kansas City Star:

But as this newspaper noted earlier this week, the most important question in evaluating a vice-presidential pick is whether that person is prepared to step into the Oval Office. Palin, with no national political experience and only a couple years in the Alaska governor’s office, is a very tough sell for the Republicans on that score. McCain’s age — he turned 72 on Friday — certainly doesn’t help. The Republican presidential candidate has emphasized the importance of military and national security issues, and taken shots at Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama the Democratic presidential nominee for having only four years of experience in the U.S. Senate. Yet McCain now suggests that someone halfway through her first term as governor is “exactly who this country needs” only one step away from the presidency.

Tampa Bay Tribune: 

John McCain can forget about trying to make a campaign issue out of Barack Obama’s relatively thin foreign policy resume. In an effort to blunt Obama’s post convention momentum, McCain made history Friday by choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, the first woman to be nominated for vice president by the GOP. It is a risky move that stunned even some party leaders who fear that voters will have trouble imagining the former beauty queen as commander in chief, if it should ever come to that. The 44-year-old Palin, a former small-town mayor serving her first term as governor, has no experience in foreign policy.

Bangor Daily News:

Sen. John McCain shook up the political landscape Friday when he picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. At a time when the Republican’s biggest criticism of Democrat Barack Obama is that he lacks the experience necessary to run the country, it is a big risk that the second seat on the Republican ticket was given to a first-term governor with no national political experience. Palin, 44, is in her second year as governor of Alaska. She was previously the mayor of Wasilla, a town of 9,000. She is the least experienced major party candidate nominated for national office since Spiro Agnew, then the governor of Maryland, was picked by Richard Nixon in 1968. “If you are going to go after Barack Obama on experience … this pick makes no sense,” says University of Maine political science professor Mark Brewer.

Seattle Times:

As governor for less than two years and before that mayor of a very small town, she’s inexperienced enough to give fits to people worried about McCain’s health and longevity. McCain turned 72 the day he announced her selection. If something happens to him, she does not have time to grasp all the facets of the job, especially in the area of foreign policy… Her office also is involved in an investigation about the firing of a state public safety commissioner who refused to fire a trooper involved in divorce proceedings with Palin’s sister. In a small boon to Democrats, selecting Palin mutes future Republican attacks on Sen. Barack Obama’s inexperience.

Register Citizen:

Palin is not ready The Alaskan economy is nothing like the rest of the country because it is boosted by oil and natural gas development profits… It’s obvious that McCain’s choice for running mate is a way for the Republicans to look progressive by putting a woman on the ticket (although it comes 24 years after the Democrats nominated Geraldine Ferraro as their candidate for vice president) and appeal to the conservative wing of his party. It’s also obvious that McCain, if elected, is counting on surviving a presidential term.

Dallas Morning News:

The presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is the most risky Republican pick for vice president since George H.W. Bush tapped Dan Quayle as his No. 2. Ms. Palin, 44, has been governor for only two years. The office she held before that one was mayor of a town about the size of Midlothian. This is the person Mr. McCain, 72, would install a heartbeat away from the presidency. The Palin pick means the Republicans have ceded the high ground on the experience issue.

Washington Post:

But the most important question Mr. McCain should have asked himself about Ms. Palin was not whether she could help him win the presidency. It was whether she is qualified and prepared to serve as president should anything prevent him from doing so. This would have been true for any presidential nominee, and it was especially crucial that Mr. McCain — who turns 72 today — get this choice right…In this regard, count us among the puzzled and the skeptical…Once the buzz over Ms. Palin’s nomination dies down, the hard questions about her will begin. The answers will reflect on her qualifications — and on Mr. McCain’s judgment as well.

New York Times:

Governor Palin’s lack of experience, especially in national security and foreign affairs, raises immediate questions about how prepared she is to potentially succeed to the presidency. That really is the only criteria for judging a candidate for vice president.

Los Angeles Times:

What happened to his insistence that a running mate be qualified to serve as commander in chief? …An even better example is George H.W. Bush’s choice of Dan Quayle in 1988. That selection, like McCain’s, was designed partly to placate restive Republican conservatives. Those are not persuasive precedents. In one respect, McCain is in even less of a position to gamble than were Mondale and Bush. His age makes it especially important that his running mate be prepared to assume the presidency at a moment’s notice.

Boston Globe:

In picking a first-term governor with no foreign-policy record, the Republican presidential candidate undermined his own central themes - experience and national security - and exposed the deep fault lines within his campaign…But the pick is hard to square with what Republicans have been saying all week: that Obama is too green to be president. Because Obama has bared his soul in a bestselling memoir and his decisions have been under a microscope for the last four years, voters can assess his judgment. Palin, in contrast, has next to no track record. Her ticketmate would be the oldest first-term president ever and has had health troubles in the past. McCain, meanwhile, is struggling to accommodate Palin within the logic of his campaign, which up to now stressed an existential threat from Islamic fundamentalism.

Journal News:

Hillaryites didn’t want a woman; they wanted that woman. If this is his attempt at wooing disaffected Hillary backers, he has sold all women short.

Miami Herald:

Political strategists say Clinton’s rank-and-file supporters will be tough for McCain and Palin to win. The ticket’s strong anti-abortion positions make them anathema to liberal Democrats concentrated in places such as South Florida…On Friday, she may have made her first official flip flop, saying that she opposed the so-called ”bridge to nowhere” that became a symbol of pork-barrel Washington spending. Yet in 2006, her spokesman told the Associated Press that she supported the project.

South FL Sun-Sentinel:

Another common concern: Palin’s perceived lack of experience, after less than two years as Alaska governor. Several voters said she’s not ready to take over the presidency, should something happen to McCain. He turned 72 Friday.

Philadelphia Daily News:

Franklin & Marshall College pollster Terry Madonna said that Palin’s personal story is an asset but that he would describe McCain’s pick in three words. “Risky, risky and risky,” Madonna said. “We just don’t know how she’ll handle the next nine weeks of campaigning, dealing with all these complicated national and international issues, debating [Obama's running mate] Joe Biden, and having every word scrutinized by an aggressive press corps.” The greatest unanswered question is whether putting Palin on the ticket will bring many Clinton Democrats into the McCain column. The Daily News reached five women who were Clinton primary-election supporters in a March poll, and none said Palin’s candidacy would change their vote.

Pittsburgh Tribune Review (money-losing right-wing rag published by Mellon descendant Richard Scaife):

The choice might undercut a theme promoted by McCain’s campaign. McCain has touted being more experienced than Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois. Palin is three years younger than Obama, 47, and younger than two of McCain’s seven children. Before becoming governor, Palin served as mayor of Wasilla, a city with fewer than 10,000 people…Democrats noted that Palin is the subject of a legislative investigation in Alaska over whether she forced out a top government official because he wouldn’t fire her ex-brother-in-law…”She is a risky choice,” said G. Terry Madonna, political science professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster. “Her record as a reformer and maverick is very helpful but how can she prep on so many national and international issues? She hurts the ticket because now the experience argument is weaker.”

Chicago Tribune:

John McCain has described national security, defense, the war in Iraq and the war on terror as “the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day.” So who did he choose for his running mate? Someone who has zero acquaintance with those issues. The first and last question to be asked about a potential vice president is: Is he or she prepared to take over immediately as president? Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden gave that matter the priority it deserves. The question is even more important for McCain because he’s 72 years old and has had serious health problems. The chances are considerably higher than usual that his vice president would have to step into the Oval Office without notice…this decision mocks McCain’s seriousness on the issues that are supposed to be his strength. It tells us that he puts his own political fortunes above the safety of the nation. McCain has done a lot of things for his country. He should have done one more and picked a running mate who makes a plausible commander-in-chief.

New York Times (Gail Collins):

He was looking for someone who was well prepared to fight against international Islamic extremism, the transcendent issue of our time. And in the end he decided that in good conscience, he was not going to settle for anyone who had not been commander of a state national guard for at least a year and a half. He put down his foot!…I do feel kind of ticked off at the assumptions that the Republicans seem to be making about female voters…The idea that women are going to race off to vote for any candidate with the same internal plumbing is both offensive and historically wrong.

AP (Ron Fournier - yes, THAT Ron Fournier!):

She is younger and less experienced than the first-term Illinois senator, and brings an ethical shadow to the ticket. Just 20 months ago, she was mayor of Wasia, Alaska, a town of 6,500 where the biggest issue is controlling growth and the biggest annual worry is whether there will be enough snow for the Iditarod dog-mushing race… Palin’s lack of experience flies in the face of GOP charges that Obama is not ready to be commander in chief. McCain himself has said he was determined to avoid a pick like Dan Quayle, the little-known Indiana senator George H.W. Bush put on his ticket in 1988 in a choice that proved embarrassing…But, as McCain suggested himself, his 72nd birthday is a reminder that age and experience matter.

Boston Globe (Peter S. Canellos):

McCain will have a hard time persuading people that he chose the most qualified person to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. Palin, at 44, has been governor of one of the nation’s least-populous states for just two and a half years.

TIME (Amy Sullivan):

It appears Sarah Palin was picked not just for her appeal to women voters but also to please social conservatives. If so, this could be Harriet Miers redux. And that didn’t work out so well the first time.

Chicago Tribune (Andrew Zajac):

John McCain may have some work to do with Republican Party pros regarding his selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate if the underwhelmed reaction of former Maryland GOP Gov. Robert Ehrlich is any indication… “I gotta go digest this choice,” he mumbled to a couple of acquaintances.

ABC News (Jake Tapper - yes, THAT Jake Tapper!):

Palin doesn’t exactly scream “experience,” which is McCain’s main argument against Obama. For a decade she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, which has a population of approximately 8,471, which the Obama campaign says is less than 1/20th the size of his former state senate district. Palin has been governor for two years. Some might argue that in terms of experience she makes Obama look like Robert Byrd. In July, Palin told CNBC’s Larry Kudlow that “as for that VP talk all the time, I tell ya, I still can’t answer that question until, until somebody answers for me ‘What it is exactly that the vice president does every day?”

TIME (Mike Murphy):

McCain’s mighty and oft-swung Obama swatting hammer of experience has been instantly changed from steel to rubber. VP examination stakes are a little higher for McCain, will she pass the ready on Day One test with less than two years in a (small) statehouse? Former full Colonel in the Pat Buchanan brigades...

Washington Post (Robert Barnes and Michael D. Shear):

When he ended months of speculation Friday, McCain did not laud Palin as immediately ready to take over, which he once said was his highest priority for a running mate.

Chicago Tribune (Mark Silva):

When Obama was looking at Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia as a possible running mate, Karl Rove, the “architect” of President Bush’s election campaigns, dismissed his experience - a governor for three years and mayor of 103rd largest Richmond. We’re not sure where Wasilla ranks.

Found on an Alaskan blog - worth reading.

---

As an Alaskan who lives in “the Valley” with Sarah - like everyone else who lives up here - I am stunned. Simply stunned. Bottom line: there is no possible way she is capable of being vice-president. No way. She knows NOTHING of international matters, very little of national affairs and struggles sometimes to articulate points about affairs of our own state. This is just unbelievable.

Here is my analysis of how differently the two genders react to Sarah. First, to both men and women she makes a “wow!” first impression. She is beautiful - and she, more than anyone else, knows this is her foundational appeal - that’s why she spends a tremendous amount of time getting her pedicures and manicures and hair extensions and shopping for the latest, greatest clothes and shoes. This is her primary appeal - her appearance. She knows this and focuses a lot of attention and time on this.

So, she makes a great first impression. If she’s working from a mostly memorized script or telepromptors she can come off sounding articulate. She can work a crowd in the rah, rah venue very well (like she did today in Ohio).

But here’s what happens - she’ll be asked a question that she clearly doesn’t know any specifics about and you can watch her pull out a 2-3 second delay wherein she is working feverishly to figure out what she is going to say. But during that little momentary delay she’ll sigh, or cock her head, or bat her eyes, or twist her lips, or some other kind of delay tactic.

Men and women respond very differently to this. Women see right away that she simply doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

Men, on the other hand, watch this, and it has enough of a feeling of mild flirtation - that they just eat it up. It’s like some sort of weird eye candy for their soul, this little drawing her audience in to this playful exchange with, usually it involves her eyes. It’s so weird, and if I hadn’t watched this thing play itself out over and over and over the past years, I would think a post like this was crazy.

But. But eventually the guys wake up. Eventually they realize that, no, Sarah is not a conservative (fiscally, at least) and that Sarah is not ethical (remember - she’s the only sitting governor under investigation for abuse of power in the Republic); Sarah, with her track record of calling people she doesn’t like, “haters,” and “dumbass,” and giggling like a school girl when, on a radio show, the DJ’s called a cancer-surviving grandmother she doesn’t like a “bitch” and a “cancer,” and no, Sarah’s hasn’t run the “open, honest and transparent” government she touts. In fact there are over 1,000 emails she doesn’t want to release (sources say it’s because they’ll paint the clear picture of how petty and vindictive she is). The status of the emails is most heading to court.

So, no. Sarah Palin isn’t the paragon of virtue she’s being touted as. She’s not the reformist. She’s not ethical and honest and open and transparent.

And when men wake up to the reality of who Sarah is, there is this weird sort of self-loathing phase they go through; it must be akin to what the morning after feels like to some guys. Especially men who fall hard for the Sarah line - when they have their wake up call, it can be painful to watch. Men don’t like to feel they’ve been had. Well, none of us do, I suppose.

Sarah has never faced true scrutiny before in her life. Ever. The Anchorage Daily News, early on realizing she was more liberal and more socialistic, has given her a free pass. But I can’t imagine that will continue. The national media won’t be so forgiving; so willing to turn a blind eye and deaf ear when she says silly, nonsensical things.

But mark my words about the differences in how men and women respond to her - and keep your eyes open for the “Flirtatious Pause” that she is well known for. It only lasts for 2-3 seconds, but men and women respond completely differently to it.

August 30, 2008 5:04 PM

I would think that after 8 years of Republican lies, distortions, deceptions, misdirections, and misinformation, that it would be a major campaign issue for a candidate to show that they are not reckless with the truth.

I just saw McCain say, in PA, that Sarah Palin rejected the Bridge to Nowhere and said that if they needed a bridge Alaskans would build it themselves. This is false. It is a lie. The truth is this(From the Anchorage Daily News):

Governor  Sarah Palin initially supported the bridge, but canceled it when the Alaskan delegation was unable to avoid changes to federal funding levels that more than doubled Alaska's portion of the bill from $160M(40.2%) to $329M (82%) of the bridge's cost.

For It Before She Was Against It

Now, she just repeated the same lie.

Hiya. Just opening up. Got the first weekend of college football on -- USC is wiping out Virginia, the beloved Gators won.So did the thoroughly despised Georgia Bulldogs and LSU Tigers. Can't begrudge LSU, though -- they've got to get home to pack. Storms make fans of us all.  Yeah, I know it's off topic, but with the pace of the week, everyone can use a slow drink on a Saturday afternoon. Don't worry -- I'll turn down the sound -- don't want the commentators getting in the way of the conversation, but every now and then it's nice to have a distraction out of the corner of your eye.

You want a drink? No problem. Sports is such an odd thing in this -- heck in any society. Kind of a bonding thing, kind of a divisive one. Certainly a distraction. But I tell you what, back in '90, I was in Gainesville. Danny Rolling had killed five students in a week. Everybody, students, professors, parents were scared out opf their mind. first week of classes, you know. A week went by, and we sort of calmed down, at least a little. The following Saturday, we went to to the game, 75,000 or so of us. And when the Gators scored their first touchdown -- man, I've never heard applause like that. It wasn't cheering as much as it was releif -- like the entire stadium exhaled, and started to beleive that things were going to be all right. Don't tell me sports doesn't matter.

Sorry, I rambled -- I get that way sometimes. Here's your drink. So tell me, who do you root for?

Could Sarah Palin really be the next commander in chief if our 72 year old Republican candidate is elected and is unable to fulfill his term? Click Here for an excerpt of an email distributed by MoveOn.org. Every piece of information is corroborated and can be independently verified unlike negative mailings sent out by the Right on Senator Barack Obama.

McCain disdains Senator Barack Obama's supposed celebrity while his candidate is plastered on many magazines. He claims Senator Barack Obama is not experienced enough though he served for many years in the state legislature and the US Senate as well as active involvement is social issues that had material effect on working people's lives while Palin has been mayor of a small town of 7000+ and governor of a sparsely populated state for 1.5 years.

We want a President that has good judgment. Good judgment dictates that we have the confidence that said president will appoint people he needs to fulfill the tasks of the country in a responsible way. He must appoint people based on their skills, education, and experience. McCain has failed desperately and with this picks proves that the slogan "Bush's 3rd term" holds true, as just like Bush has appointed unqualified people to vital offices, so will McCain based on his first executive decision.

http://politicaltruths.info

Here's something I haven't seen in a while...

Politico published a well-written article titled Scholars Question Palin's Credentials.  In it, they quote four different presidential historians, who all basically agree that Palin is the least qualified VP candidate in modern history.

McCain camp's reaction?  Force Politico to publish an "update" that reads:

After reading this article, the McCain campaign issued the following statement: "The authors quote four scholars attacking Gov. Palin's fitness for the office of Vice President. Among them, David Kennedy is a maxed out Obama donor, Joel Goldstein is also an Obama donor, and Doris Kearns Goodwin has donated exclusively to Democrats this cycle. Finally, Matthew Dallek is a former speech writer for Dick Gephardt. This is not a story about scholars questioning Governor Palin's credentials so much as partisan Democrats who would find a reason to disqualify or discount any nominee put forward by Senator McCain."

How unbelievable.  First that they feel the need to push back this hard (okay, maybe I can understand that), but put the shoe on the other foot....what if the Obama camp insisted that every time AP takes a turn on the tire swing that a disclaimer be added citing Fournier's desire to work for the McCain camp? 

Bunch of jilted whiners.     

In a  post on a muckraking blog of Alaskan politics called Mudflats a local gives the rundown on Palin.  The poster speaks of her history there, issues and gives a pretty detailed description of the Troopergate investigation.  It's a very interesting read.  Here is the lowdown on the investigation:

Sarah Palin’s sister Molly married a guy named Mike Wooten who is an Alaska State Trooper.  Mike and Molly had a rocky marriage.  When the marriage broke up, there was a bitter custody fight that is still ongoing.  During the custody investigation, all sorts of things were brought up about Wooten including the fact that he had illegally shot a moose (yes folks this is Alaska), driven drunk, and used a taser (on the test setting, he reminds us) on his 11-year old stepson, who supposedly had asked to see what it felt like.  While Wooten has turned out to be a less than stellar figure, the fact that Palin’s father accompanied him on the infamous moose hunt, and that many of the dozens of charges brought up by the Palin family happened long before they were ever reported smacked of desperate custody fight.  Wooten’s story is that he was basically stalked by the family.

After all this, Wooten was investigated and disciplined on two counts and allowed to kept his position with the troopers.  Enter Walt Monegan, Palin’s appointed new chief of the Department of Public Safety and head of the troopers.  Monegan was beloved by the troopers, did a bang-up job with minimal funding and suddenly got axed.  Palin was out of town and Monegan got “offered another job” (aka fired) with no explanation to Alaskans.  Pressure was put on the governor to give details, because rumors started to swirl around the fact that the highly respected Monegan was fired because he refused to fire the aforementioned Mike Wooten.  Palin vehemently denied ever talking to Monegan or pressuring Monegan in any way to fire Wooten, or that anyone on her staff did.  Over the weeks it has come out that not only was pressure applied, there were literally dozens of conversations in which pressure was applied to fire him.  Monegan has testified to this fact, spurring an ongoing investigation by the Alaska state legislature.  But, before this investigation got underway, Palin sent the Alaska State Attorney General out to do some investigative work of his own so she could find out in advance what the real investigation was going to find.  (No, I’m not making this up).  The AG interviewed several people, unbeknownst to the actual appointed investigator or the Legislature! Palin’s investigation of herself uncovered a recorded phone call retained by the Alaska State Troopers from Frank Bailey, a Palin underling, putting pressure on a trooper about the Wooten non-firing.  Todd Palin (governor’s husband) even talked to Monegan himself in Palin’s office while she was away.  Bailey is now on paid administrative leave.

As if this weren’t enough, Monegan’s appointed replacement Chuck Kopp, turns out to have been the center of his own little scandal.  He received a letter of reprimand and was reassigned after sexual harrassment allegations by a former coworker who didn’t like all the unwanted kissing and hugging in the office.  Was he vetted?  Obviously not.  When he was questioned about all this, his comment was that no one had asked him and he thought they all knew.  Kopp, defiant, still claimed to have done nothing wrong and said to the press that there was no way he was stepping down from his new position.  Twenty four hours later, he stepped down.  Later it was uncovered that he received a $10,000 severance package for his two weeks on the job from Palin.  Monegan got nothing.

It is also noted that Palin no longer enjoys 90% approval, her approval has dipped to 68% since the investigation started contrary to the current GOP narrative. Read the whole post, it's very interesting. 

As the title suggests, this is my first post.  And before I get into what I want to mention about this election, I feel it necessary to point out, in full disclosure, that I’m not from the U.S. I realize that this fact may dull any opinion I may have on the election. However, I’m a student of history and philosophy, and believe that these faculties are borderless. In this sense, I think its fair that I can at least say something when it comes to this election.

 

It’s obvious that this is an important election for the United States and the world for a number of reasons. The American economy is not as great as it should be and people are really hurting, its national security has never been a more important issue, and its addiction to oil can only end in tragedy if the problem isn’t addressed. On a global scale, there are two wars going on, crazy terrorists that want western ideals to perish have never been more vocal, and the global climate is in a state of crisis. But, you intelligent people know this already.

 

Since the beginning of this campaign, I’ve believed that there is something else at stake in this election that doesn’t get a lot of airplay.

 

Many of you know how your nation was formed and on what ideals it was founded on, and that those ideals laid out a blue print for the western world, or any willing nation, to follow suit. I truly believe that it are these ideals that are at stake, and it has never been so clearly confirmed, for me, than when John McCain chose Sarah Palin for VP that this is true.

 

The notions of truth, justice, and freedom have existed long before the U.S came into being. For the longest time, though, they were only accessible to those with power and riches. It was until the likes of John Locke, Jean Rousseau, and John Mill began to argue that every individual should have access to them in the form of inalienable human rights. And it wasn’t until a group of men, now known as the Founding Fathers, took these ideas and implemented into an almost perfectly governed nation.

Over 200 years later and it still these ideas that give America its power – not its culture, not its military, and not its economy. And it is on these ideas that the western world is now founded on. We do not just want freedom of the press, to privacy, of religion, or the right to due process, the right to dissent, no, we demand and expect them. Without America, this would not be the case. Because western societies and the U.S have become such symbiotic nations, its difficult to imagine what happens to the Western way of life if the American way of life is put in even more jeopardy.

 

This is another reason why this moment in history demands change.

 

The last 8 years has been a constant “fuck you” to this sentiment. This current administration seems to have no sense of this history and seem to be proud of that. They’ve eviscerated Habeas Corpus, the right to privacy is becoming a myth, “half-truths”, at best, have been used to justify war, and separation of church and state has never been more blurred. This administration believes that America is powerful, and it always has been, but they put their belief in the wrong kind of power. Military and might are not what makes America endure its influence. Doing what is politically expedient is not what makes America the force that is. Using fear to retain that power is what should eventually take that power away. Along time ago, there was a ruler named Vlad who used fear, albeit much more extreme. How was he remembered? Bram Stoker used him as inspiration for his infamous novel Dracula.

 

But, you all know of these indiscretions.

 

I once admired John McCain for most of the reasons he acquired his “maverick” image. I hoped that, perhaps, if Barack Obama, McCain would revert to that guy once he was president. Since May, though, it’s clear that he never really was a ”maverick”. McCain’s view of American power is the same as the current administration; that through the military America is strong. And he intends to keep in line by doing what is political expedient; this explains his views on oil drilling and why the Democrats should be cautiously optimistic about his VP choice.

 

He chose someone who is not different, when it comes to the issues, from McCain and Bush. Some have worried that this choice can blunt any criticism the Obama campaign may throw out. If she’s inexperienced, so is he! He’s from outside Washington, so is she! This misses the point; Obama does not, and never has, attacked these issues. He will attack the fact that McCain made a bad judgment call, or that she does not believe humans cause global warming. Most importantly, though, she is no different from those who’ve been running Washington this past decade. In this choice, it’s abundantly clear that McCain ambition is misdirected and he is intent on the presidency for the wrong reasons. He has shown no interest in rebuilding what America is losing.

 

Obama has talked a lot about change since this began; change Washington, change the economy, change the way foreign policy is carried out, change the status quo. This is great, and it is needed, but I’ve always felt that saying he wanted to “change the status quo” was not quite a right statement. In America, the status quo is not George Bush and his cronyism, not even close. In the history of the United States, George Bush is a fucking anomaly. The status quo is those ideals I mentioned above that every American values, treasures, and holds dear. They do, and always have, embodied those ideals. That is what makes them so infectious in countries where the majority lives oppressed. It is the embodiment of these ideals that gives America its power and its leverage in the world.

 

This election is just as much about change as it should be about a restoration.

 

Like I said, this does not get much airplay, as I’ve looked for someone, somewhere making this a legitimate campaign issue. I finally found someone doing just on Thursday night. Barack Obama himself. What he has demonstrated, which was highly amplified in his speech, is that he understands that both change and a restoration are needed better than anyone in the U.S. He’s able to articulate it in an accessible way; much like the Founding Fathers were able to take such complicated theories and make them accessible to the average citizen. Do not be mistaken; I am not comparing him to the Founding Fathers. What I am saying is that he understands what they were trying to do, that some of that has been lost recently, and will be even more so should McCain succeed. His VP pick only backs up this point.

 

Purple Thumb.

It has become the shorthand for free, fair and first elections in emerging democracies and in U.S.-conquered nations.  First used by Delaware’s Pete DuPont in the June 21, 2005, Wall Street Journal, “Iraqis held their third purple-thumb election last week ...” the purple thumb represents the unsaid guarantee that a free and fair election has taken place.

That same electoral hue was later adopted by our President, when he spoke to the UN General Assembly in September 2006:  “To the people of Iraq: Nearly 12 million of you braved the car bombers and assassins last December to vote in free elections. The world saw you hold up purple ink-stained fingers, and your courage filled us with admiration.”  [ White House press office ]
 
Yet, the concept of an admired and fair “Purple thumb” election seems to mean nothing in our “We’re Number One! God Bless America!” country; where suppressed turnouts and election day equipment ‘shortages’ and ‘malfunctions’ have become the expected norm on our national polling days.

With the appearance of George W. Bush on the national stage, each presidential election – upon which the stability of our nation and the world is dependent – has been guaranteed to feature numerous attempts by his political party to throw every obstacle possible to prevent or discourage voting among certain classes of voters; usually the poor and minorities, particularly African-Americans. [ People for the American Way ]

Yet our current president – widely noted as ‘the worst in our history’ [ History News Network ] – called the June 25 Zimbabwe election “a sham,” adding, “The Mugabe government has been intimidating the people on the ground in Zimbabwe.”  He termed this “an incredibly sad development.” [ PBS ]

Do you know what’s ‘incredibly sad,’ Mr. President?  How about the black voters in north Florida, who in 2000 experienced outright police intimidation, as they approached many precinct polling stations [ Business Network ] ....  And the reported examples of manipulated election 2004 results, caused by a deliberate low allocation of voting machines in high minority precincts. [ Fox News ]

In the President’s home state of Texas, the town of Prairie View - home of the historically black Prairie View A&M University - was the scene of a concerted attempt by white local officials to prevent Prairie View A&M students from voting in the 2006 elections.  The area’s Waller County Justice of the Peace, DeWayne Charleston, told the New York Times, “The cold war’s not over -- they just moved the fence from Berlin to the Texas border,” after he reported local election officials had not recorded thousands of black student registrations he had personally gathered prior to election day.

More often than not, these blatant attacks on U.S. citizens’ right to vote under our Constitution - the one Mr. Bush swore to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ - are successful; leading to another unfair, GOP-skewed final tally.

In 2000, as we all know, the Supreme Court awarded the presidency to Mr. Bush, following an extremely close count; twisted in his favor by a deliberately confusing ballot prone to miss-votes, the aforementioned police harassment in North Florida, and removal of alleged or redeemed felons from the voter registration rolls. [ Palm Beach Post ].  All carried out under the jaundiced and cynical eyes of Republican Secretary of State (later Congresswoman) Katherine Harris. [ The Guardian-UK ]

In 2004 the down-to-the-wire ballot tampering took place in voter operations overseen by Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell. [ USA Today ]

Who knows what the Grand Old Party will have lurking in the wings this election, seen by many as the most crucial in more than a generation? [ The Guardian-UK ]

That’s why Senator Obama’s campaign and the Democratic Party are hiring attorneys and poll watchers to stake out polling places for evidence of harassment and challenge any precinct voter rejections and/or ballot counting missteps.  [  South Florida Sun-Sentinel ]

Tragic, isn’t it, that the ‘greatest nation in the world,’ and the planet’s beacon for democracy cannot assure every eligible citizen that he or she will be able to vote; and can leave tens or hundreds of thousands (millions?) of its citizens with uncertainty as to whether his or her vote was counted.

If any nation on this globe needs purple thumbs, if any one country has a voting system that cries out for impartial international monitors, it is the United States of America.  The Land of the Free, and home of the heretofore suppressed voter.

Help make sure this will not happen, not this time, not this election.  Find out what you can do at the Verified Voting Foundation.

"The work begins anew. The hope rises again, and the dream lives on." [ Senator Edward Kennedy ]

According to this interview Cindy McCain has her itty-bitty feelings hurt. 

Oh, Cindy. Where to begin in the ways you offend?

How do I despise thee? Let me count the ways...

1. You cheated with a married man.

2. You cheated with a married man who had children and whose wife was disabled.

3. You are a drug addict.

4. You are a drug addict who stole drugs from her own charity.

5. You lied about Mother Tereasa. (Is there a spot in hell for that? Catholics help me out)

6. You  lied when you said you are ALWAYS proud of your country (either that or you are brain dead; who is PROUD of racism, sexism, or corruption? Love does not equal pride. I will always love my children, I am however not always proud of them)

7. You sat in the audience with tears of pride in your eyes as your husband lied to a preacher about his POW experiences.

And finally,

8. Your husband called you a cunt and you stayed.

Any I forgot? Add them on.

I certainly have to give credit to McCain for this: He got people talking. There has basically been an unbroken thread on Sarah Palin for the last 24 hours on TPM, probably everywhere else as well. But here's the thing I don't get about this. McCain may have made this move to "shake things up" or to steal the media spotlight from Obama. But why? Shining the spotlight on McCain is not good for him. He should know that. He had this election setting up pretty nicely as a referendum on Obama. Every grenade he lobbed had the talking heads chattering. And, as we all know, Obama was not benefitting from that chatter. Maybe the convention changed the calculus and McCain's people decided that if it's a referendum on Obama, they are going to lose because he's just got too much firepower. Whatever the reason, McCain has got the spotlight on himself now and suddenly this looks more like a referendum on Palin. Beside the obvious fact that she is not prepared to be president - even the McCain campaign admitting as much - we're going to have to "get to know" Palin and all the radical right wing positions she has. McCain's "hidden" policy agenda will now get exposed to the light of day, and all the ways that Palin either agrees or doesn't agree with them (I imagine before long she will agree with them). McCain and Palin will also have to answer the question of how it is that these positions - essentially the same as Bush as Obama has been saying - really constitute anything remotely resembling "reform" or "change". In a nutshell, it seems to me all the work that the McCain campaign had done to define Obama as a celebrity, as an empty suit, as being not ready to lead, etc, is flushed down the toilet and suddenly, it is the McCain/Palin ticket that looks like the less experienced, more risky choice in this election.
Is McCain crazy like a fox, or just plain crazy?

Reporters have pounced on the negligible résumé of John McCain's VP pick, Alaskan Sarah Palin. Unfortunately few picked up on the fact that it is even more meager than it initially appears.

The only elective office she has ever held, other than her 20 months as Governor, is the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. While many have referenced Wasilla's tiny size--it would more properly be classified a village rather than a town in any of the 45 more populous state--few have noted that the Mayor's office is largely a ceremonial position, similar to that of the Queen of England. The City Council is the real authority in Wasilla and, reading the Wasilla Municipal Code, it is apparent that the mayor is there to do their bidding.

Here are the first three (and presumably most important) duties of the mayor as listed in the Code:

1. Preside at council meetings. The mayor may take part in the discussion of matters before the council, but may not vote, except that the mayor may vote in the case of a tie;
2. Act as ceremonial head of the city;
3. Sign documents on behalf of the city;

Among the other duties of the mayor, as listed in the Code, are to "carry out the directives of the city council " and to "perform other duties required by law or by the council". By this and other language the Code makes clear where the authority for running the city lies in Wasilla, and it is not in the mayor's office.

The mayor's office is an ideal job for a Wasilla resident whose main or even only qualifacation is that she is well known such as a former high school basketball star or a former beauty queen.

It ought to concern citizens that if John McCain pulls a William Henry Harrison, that by this time next year we could have a President whose only valid experience is 20 months governing fewer people than the mayor of Austin, Texas.

(And don't even get me started on the judgement of a woman who would name one of her children after Roy Roger's horse.)

I know you're not supposed to just post links, but this video really speaks for itself.

Over 87% of Alaskans think their own governor is lying.

Palin Lies.

Given that the media needed a controversy narrative for this past weeks DNC; they poured everything they had into making a "drama" where none really existed. The point though, was to posit "questions" so that they could at least pretend to report on something....
   
By Tues Evening Sen. Clinton effectively trumped their ongoing narrative with a full-on endorsement of Sen. Obama and (I think) a heartfelt plea to consider the Real Issues of the Campaign more than her gender. The only question left was the CiC "endorsement test - which left some hanging on into Wed, and then Bill Clinton effectively Ended Any and All Questions on that score with an effective speech and validation of the Ticket Up and Down.
   
(I do wish the Clinton's had been good enough sports to stay for Obama's Acceptance Speech - as including them together in the visuals would have set the their speeches in stone as enthused supporters - their absence says a Lot about them as politicians and as people - why I didn't go for Hillary in the First Place)
    
Now with the GOP coming Up in two days the controversy narrative will need something to fill up a lot of otherwise Dead Air. I think the Palin nomination will provide precisely that extra question-drama for the media to pontificate about and leaves the GOP in a bind they'll have a very  hard time dealing with...
   
Given the Question: Is McCain a continuation of the Bush Legacy? They can't answer with a Yes or No as either reply is fraught with risks; so they'll dither, slither and hem and haw. So it is now with Palin - the controversy created by her on the ticket beggars the question Will she attract women to the ticket? Was she really the best available choice for McCain to make? Both of these questions present the classic double-bind as they bring up both reproductive rights issues and conjure up in the public imagination such classic GOP "picks" as Thomas for the High Court, Gonzales for DOJ, Meyers at White House Counsel etc.
   
Honestly, I can see all the possible Independents and Moderate Republicans scratching their collective heads at all of this as the GOP tries to sell Snake Oil in the Twin Cities next week.
   
I don't think it will work.

  

She is the all american, middle america type woman. Women can see themselves in someone who has five kids put still holds a top spot in a job. She isn't filthy rich and is totally pro-union. AMERICANS LOVE THAT. Bush won TWICE because of that BS. Now she is incredibly unqualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency HOWEVER, there are FAR too many voters who won't pay much attention to this considering how "one of us" she is. Now, you have the steady hand, the man with "experience" John McCain guiding her if need be. The repubs are counting on McCains experience on the top of the tickey accounting for Palin's lack thereof. The repubs are very interesting, don't underestimate this tactic. It troubles me to say the least.

How should Obama and/or Biden respond when they are inevitably asked this question about Sarah Palin?

Truth is stranger than fiction. Water had broken and she was having contractions 1/2 per hour and she boards a plane, did not ask or get her doctor's permission to fly and without telling the gate agents that she was in her 36th week. An airplane is one of the worst environments in the world for infection.

From the Anchorage Daily News - 4/22/2008

EARLY ARRIVAL

Palin was in Texas last week for an energy conference of the National Governors Association when she experienced signs of early labor. She wasn't due for another month.

Early Thursday -- she thinks it was around 4 a.m. Texas time -- she consulted with her doctor, family physician Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, who is based in the Valley and has delivered lots of babies, including Piper, Palin's 7-year-old.

Palin said she felt fine but had leaked amniotic fluid and also felt some contractions that seemed different from the false labor she had been having for months.

"I said I am going to stay for the day. I have a speech I was determined to give," Palin said. She gave the luncheon keynote address for the energy conference.

Palin kept in close contact with Baldwin-Johnson. The contractions slowed to one or two an hour, "which is not active labor," the doctor said.

"Things were already settling down when she talked to me," Baldwin-Johnson said. Palin did not ask for a medical OK to fly, the doctor said.

"I don't think it was unreasonable for her to continue to travel back," Baldwin-Johnson said.

So the Palins flew on Alaska Airlines from Dallas to Anchorage, stopping in Seattle and checking with the doctor along the way.

"I am not a glutton for pain and punishment. I would have never wanted to travel had I been fully engaged in labor," Palin said. After four kids, the governor said, she knew what labor felt like, and she wasn't in labor.

Still, a Sacramento, Calif., obstetrician who is active in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said when a pregnant woman's water breaks, she should go right to the hospital because of the risk of infection. That's true even if the amniotic fluid simply leaks out, said Dr. Laurie Gregg.

"To us, leaking and broken, we are talking the same thing. We are talking doctor-speak," Gregg said.

Some airlines have policies against pregnant women onboard during the last four weeks of pregnancy, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advises against flying after 36 weeks.

This was going to be Palin's last flight anyway, her doctor said.

Alaska Airlines has no such rule and leaves the decision to the woman and her doctor, said spokeswoman Caroline Boren. Palin was very pleasant to the gate agents and flight attendants, as always, Boren said.

"The stage of her pregnancy was not apparent by observation. She did not show any signs of distress," Boren said.

Palin never got big with this pregnancy. She said she didn't try to hide it but didn't feel a need to alert the airline, either.

They landed in Anchorage around 10:30 p.m. Thursday and an hour later were at the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center in Wasilla.

Baldwin-Johnson said she had to induce labor, and the baby didn't come until 6:30 a.m. Friday.

"It was smooth. It was relatively easy," Palin said. "In fact it was the easiest of all," probably because Trig was small, at 6 pounds, 2 ounces.

Palin said she wanted him born in Alaska but wouldn't have risked anyone's health to make that happen.

"You can't have a fish picker from Texas," said Todd.

Palin said she won't take maternity leave but will go with Trig to doctor's visits, physical therapy, whatever he needs. She's breast feeding and plans to bring Trig to work with her, just as she did with Piper.

"It just feels like he fits perfectly," Palin said. "He is supposed to be here with us."

Interesting post from an Alaskan. I added the emphasis:

As a medical professional who lives in Anchorage, I can safely assure you that this situation did in fact occur, and was reported in the April 22, 2008 Anchorage Daily News (www.ADN.com).

The medical community here in Anchorage was horrified of the news of this "heroic" adventure of Governor Palin. It was an incredibly egregious decision that risked the life of Palin's unborn child. It also set a poor example for others to follow....a public safety issue.

Several well-respected physicians spoke with my physician husband on different occasions and came up with the same conclusion: she was trying to kill the baby. No other reasonable explanation could be derived from this act of shear stupidity and shameless self-promotion. A Down's child would forever be a burden to her; many have already criticized her insatiable need for a national level political position over the necessity of raising a special needs child.

First, thetrophy wife, now a trophy running mate?

This quote is from a post:

http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/3395/sarah-palins-questionable-judgment

"One bit of weirdness associated with Palin concerns the birth of her youngest child. As the Alaskan media reported, Palin was attending an energy conference in Texas on April 18 when her water broke four weeks before her due date. After this happened, Palin didn't head to a hospital or even leave the conference, even though the premature rupture of fetal membrances is normally a cause for an immediate examination by an obstetrician, who will observe the fetus on a monitor to guard against infection and other life-threatening complications. Two other reasons for heightened concern were Palin's age, 43, and the fact that prenatal testing indicated the child had Down syndrome.

Palin stayed at the conference and delivered a 30-minute speech, then boarded a 12-hour Alaska Airlines flight from Dallas to Anchorage, neglecting to tell the airline her water had broken -- most airlines won't fly a woman in labor. The motivation for all of this appears to be the Palins' desire that the child be born in Alaska. Her husband Todd told the Anchorage Daily News, "You can't have a fish picker from Texas."

When she arrived home, Palin was hospitalized immediately and the baby was born prematurely after labor was induced in the middle of the night.

Maybe Palin's actions can be written off as Alaskan grit, since she's a macho hunting governor who jogs in freezing temperatures and dines on moose burgers. But as a parent myself, I think the Palins were extremely fortunate that their reckless stupidity did not end in tragedy. As middle-aged parents who already had four kids, the Palins had to be completely familiar with all the things that can go wrong in a pregnancy...."

WARNING: The following list may prove offensive to women, mothers, beauty queens (current and former), Alaskans, those with bladder conditions, those too senile to remember how many houses they own, middle class millionaires, gun-toting Bible thumpers, and members of the GOP. Management assumes no responsibility for psychological damage incurred.

10. Raising five kids is a lot like negotiating with Iran, Iraq, Syria, Israel and the Saudis.

9. If elected, there is at least a 50 percent chance she will know what branch of the government she works for.

8. Though governor for only 20 months, one month in Alaska is like a year anywhere else.

7. She doesn't believe human actions caused global warming. God simply hates polar bears.

6. As the former runner-up to Miss Alaska, she'll have a big advantage in the swimsuit competition at the next World Economic Forum.

5. She can still remember how many houses she owns (3).

4. As a supporter of Creationism, she's sure to always be by McCain's side – after all, she's made from his rib.

3. She'll be able to help McCain put on his diappies when he becomes completely incontinent.

2. With a 4-month-old baby she'll already be awake when that 3 am phone call comes and McCain is in an Ambien-induced coma.

... and the number one reason Sarah Palin is a great choice for vice president:

1. As a longtime NRA member, she won't hesitate to shoot anyone in the face.

from The WitList.

Thanks to JaneEyrez for pointing this out to me.

(Note: I would have given just the link rather than posting the play here, if Electoral-vote.com archived differently than it does. Though for the moment you can find the whole play right on the main page.)

Some of you know Electoral-vote.com -- well, in response to Sarah Palin's pick as VP, The Votemaster decided that, in this case, fiction is probably the best way to explain what the hell happened here. He said,

Sometimes fiction is a better vehicle for getting inside someone's mind. Besides, it's all we have. Here is a short play for two actors. Let's call them Schmidt, a tough, savvy consultant, and McCain, a candidate. All names have been changed to protect the innocent.

So, without further ado, here it is courtesy of The Votemaster:
The Veep: A Short Play in One Act
Schmidt: McCain, Get your ass over here and look at this map.

McCain: It's the U.S. with the states red and blue. Seen it before. What's your point?

Schmidt: Obama's gonna win all the Kerry States. You have a small chance to pick off New Hampshire but 60% of the people think you're pro choice. When they find out you've been pro life for 25 years, forget New Hampshire.

McCain: Where does that leave me?

Schmidt: Bush won 286 to 252.

McCain: Fine with me.

Schmidt: But wait a minute. Obama campaigned like crazy in Iowa. Won the caucuses big time. You barely set foot in the state. The people of Iowa take their caucuses very, very seriously. You insulted them. Make that 279 to 259.

McCain: I still win.

Schmidt: We're not done yet. Obama has been leading in New Mexico all year. State's full of Latinos. They preferred Clinton but they're still Democrats at heart. I think we're toast there. Now its 274 to 264.

McCain: A win is a win. Still better than Florida was.

Schmidt: Yeah, but now Obama is just 5 EVs short of a tie (which means it goes to the House and he'll win there) and 6 EVs short of a clean win. Look, there are six swing states this time: Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Colorado, and Nevada. We have to win all six of them. Can't lose a single state or we're dead meat.

McCain: I'm a fighter. You know that. The gooks couldn't break me. I'll campaign like hell in all six. Don't worry.

Schmidt: I'm worried. We're 50-50 on all six. It's like flipping a coin six times and getting six heads. One chance in 64, roughly 2%. We have to do something dramatic. Something that will throw all calculations out the window. Something that completely shakes up everything. Something that gives us a fresh start. Gotta hit the RESET button.

McCain: Have something in mind?

Schmidt: Yeah. Pick a black or a woman for Veep.

McCain: You mean I can't pick Joe? He's my friend and a great guy.

Schmidt: Half the convention would walk out. Besides, Jews aren't a novelty any more. Thank Gore for that.

McCain:. Shit. But blacks are fine with me. Colin Powell is a great American and one of the most respected people in the country.

Schmidt: He doesn't want the job

McCain: No sweat. Condi's the smartest woman I know. Mind like a bear trap. She'll run rings around Biden at the debate. She'll say: "I've been there. I talk to Putin every week. You're just an old windbag"

Schmidt: She's got "BUSH III" emblazoned on her forehead. And Obama is a happily married man with two adorable little girls, Condi's a single black woman who is apparently not much into families. Won't work. What about Kay [Bailey Hutchison (R-TX)]?

McCain: She's tired of the Washington rat race. She wants to go back to Texas. Be governor or something, you know like Ma Ferguson.

Schmidt: Ma's husband, the governor, was impeached and convicted. Ann Richards would be a better role model. What other women do we have?

McCain: Jodi [Rell] and Olympia [Snowe] are smart and popular but pro choice. The Base distrusts me already. They'd mutiny.

Schmidt: Elizabeth Dole? Susan Collins?

McCain: With either of those we lose a Senate seat. I don't want to have 60 Democrats to deal with over there. Reid might grow a spine. Can't encourage that.

Schmidt: Lisa Murkowski?

McCain: Her dad appointed her. She won on her own later, but I don't need to deal with nepotism and cronyism. Smells like Bush. I'm a maverick, remember?

Schmidt: Got it. Some businesswomen? Sarah Palin?

McCain: Carly [Fiorina] is great on economics, but she nearly she ran her company into the ground so the board fired her and then gave her $40 million so she wouldn't feel bad. The 20,000 people she fired aren't too keen on her. Meg Whitman did a fantastic job at eBay but nobody's ever heard of her.

Schmidt: So Palin's the only one left? What about her?

McCain: I met her once, at a governors meeting. Cute as a button. She ran for Miss Alaska. Came in second. I woulda voted for her. But it's a real Hail Mary pass. She's popular up north there where the sun never shines (except for some minor problems when she tried to fire her state trooper brother-in-law). She was pregnant with a Down syndrome baby and didn't abort him. The Base will love that. Her hobbies are riding her motorcycle and hunting moose. The coal miners in Appalachia will go wild over her. How fast can we print a million 8x10 color photos of her for their lockers?

Schmidt: Fast. But what about her experience. I mean, she's only been governor a year and a half. What did she do before that?

McCain: I think she was mayor of some village with six igloos. Who cares? I think you're right we have to shake things up completely. Change the game. The Base will eat her up on abortion, the Hillary fans will see that we respect women (unlike their guy). We grab the mantle of reformers. The white guys will be transfixed by this hot chick who hunts moose. I get to be Maverick-in-chief. Sounds like a winner.

Schmidt: What about the debate with Biden? What if the moderator says: "What would you do if Russia invaded Georgia again?" and she says: "I'll get on Air Force One and fly to Atlanta immediately."

McCain: Most Americans can't find Georgia the state on a map, let alone Georgia the country. I'll get Lugar to tutor her on foreign policy. He knows everything about it. I'm sold. Let's go for it.

Curtain falls.

I have seen this tactic at work before. In war, it is refered to as using cannon fodder. In an RTS, its reffered to as a meat shield. In whatever form you recognize it, it is clear, Sarah Palin is being user as an object to divert attention. From what?
From McCain.
John McCain is the problem, and he still sucks as a candidate, and Sarah Palin brings NOTHING to the ticket. The evangelical sheep? They have already fallen in line. On the major issues in this election, she has experience that is almost worthless. In substantive and important ways this was an aweful pick, but in the bullshit tabloid universe this pick is smart provided it is followed up by strategy. I think that strategy is going to be using her as a meat shield. That means the second that she is critisized for anything, and I mean ANYTHING, the entirety of the Republican party will in unison scream bloody murder about how cruel and sexist the Obama campaign is and how "this is just like what they did to Hillary." Calling Obama sexist will have two different aims:
1) trying to woo the cult of personality assholes who supported hillary (disclaimer: not all hillary supporters are/were cult of personality assholes, only a very small percentage. For the record there are cult of personality assholes who support Obama as well.)
2) another "issue" that concious or subconcious racists will use to excuse their racism. If theres one thing they hate more than a black man "stealing" a white woman, it's a black man beating up on a white woman, even if it's just a verbal beating.

The campaign will become all about Sarah Palin, who is much easier to sell visually than McCain. Your Bill Orallys of the world will jorney to the hights of hipocracy mountain with claims of "thats just wrong!". Then, cue the "misty eyes" and emotional appeal, and bingo, you have a rags to riches Cinderella story about her improbable rise to the national stage. By the way, I think we can all imagine how the media will eat this crap up. At that point, "Rove's law" comes into play;

-the crazier the claim and the more consistently it is made, the more likely that it will become "common knowledge", regardless of it's basis in fact.

Think of the most damaging rumor that could work in concert with this running story line. Then, get some rich bastard to put up the money for a random email operation. I think you get the picture.
Some say that Karl Rove's shop was not in charge of this decision, but I think it's the complete opposite. He is the master of one thing, and that is understanding how to fool stupid people. Besides, McCain called his wife a "Cunt" in public. Is it even plausible that he is some crusader for women's rights?
There is something I think the Obama Campaign can do to riposte this perfectly though, and it is very simple.

IGNORE HER.

And I mean big time silence. Her name or current situation should not come out of Obama's mouth anymore. At the VP debates, Joe Biden should not even say her name once. This campaign is for President of the United States, and the President will be the one who drives policy and act as the face of our nation. If word one is said about this woman, it should be praise for her time as governor and good values. If she make a gaffe or says something stupid...............
SO THE HELL WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!
She is irelevant. She is not the problem.

We cannot beat Rove on his field, but keep in mind that he can't beat us on ours. His field is talking about Palin and bringing the disscussion to the tabloid universe. Our field is talking about McCain and keeping the policy discussion going.

We keep hitting McCain, we win.
We hit Palin, we get another 4 years.

For god's sake, ignore her.

Rove babbles on and on and on about Obama's lack of exerience, and McCain about his lack of military experience, and the ability "to be CIC from day one".

Shall we cast on eyes on Bush 43?

He had business experience, of the failing sort.  He was picked to be a front man, for publicity purposes of a dubiously major league" baseball organization.  Then Mr. Rove thought he was JUST RIGHT to be groomed to be President, so Mr. Rove ran his campaign for governor of Texas.  In Texas the governor has next to zero REAL political power, which from Karl Rove's viewpoint was perfect.  Big state, no power, but a large pulpit.  So while running for governor Dubya was also starting his run for President.

And so it came to pass that a man with no political experience, dismal business experience, and no military experience became "Commander in Chief", and has the chutzpah to question anyone else's ability.  And the Democrats are not leaping on this?  Somebody's asleep at the switch. 

Then there's Cheney, another no military experience (except avoiding it) "expert".

I'll omit the brilliant military genuis those two picked to be commander of "shock and awe", Tommy Franks.  Or that other brilliant military tactician, Rumsfield.

And, yes, McCain endured terrible things as a POW.  If I didn't know about it before, I've certainly heard, and heard, and heard now.  Now, exactly HOW does being a POW give one the training and experience to command troops, and be a military tactician? His father was an Admiral, but I can find no great record of John McCain being much of a military leader. Only that if one has the temerity to bring it up, one is chastised for mentioning it, as he endured so much as a POW.  I somehow don't think he commanded many troops, nor planned many military exercises while he was a POW, so his CIC credentials are not all that great.

So, why aren't the people in charge in the Democratic side noticing this? 

Picking Sarah Palin for VP is like picking "Wonder Woman" (aka Lynda Carter) to do the job.

Palin, once all of the hype is over, will realize that she is being played just like McCain played Ridge, Pawlenty and Lieberman. 

Yes, Palin is a hail mary pass.  But she will be intercepted by the 18 million cracks that McCain thought would vote for him because he put a woman on the ticket. Those women will vote for Obama.

There's is a pattern here also.  Cindy was a rodeo queen. Palin was a beauty queen.  This is a 1970s type hire.  Find anybody so that you can appear progressive, regardless if they are qualified.  McCain did this for the old men who trade notes about their "girl."   Enough!

The only thing I ask of the press is that they send a experienced reporter to do a long, in depth interview of Sarah Palin and her foreign policy knowledge and policy views. As soon as possible. And don't let her get away with sound bites - force her to have a real discussion, not just repeat things she's been told to say in the last 72 hours.

And then let us know what happened. I am not assuming that she'd fail - she could be the idiot savant of foreign expertise. But I would like to know either way.

And I don't think that is too much to ask.

I wonder how Mitt Romney, Pawlenty, and the other candidates feel after the Palin move by McCain? He's obviously embraced the devils that he'd formerly condemned (the extremist evangelicals) for how much they've damaged the party. Now, it should be obvious to everyone that that's the only group he cares about, because they're the only ones who might go out and really work for his election.

But can you imagine how furious the other major GOP figures must be? Her choice is like getting smacked in the face by a dead cod. All your experience and dedication, all those surrogate interviews you did for McCain, all the money you helped him raise, all the rubber chicken dinners you had to eat.... and now this.

It's what the GOP has allowed itself to become, though. Still dangerous enough to do some more damage, but not a serious party of grownups any longer.

The selection of Sarah Palin as the VP candiate is designed to underscore McCain's mavericky goodness, the sum total of which seems to rest on their ability to get the media to call Palin a maverick too.

But there's a huge problem with this choice and how it interacts with McCain's dual messages of maverickness and Country First.  The choice points up the obvious contradiction between the two messages.  A maverick by its defintition cannot put country first.  A maverick is a maverick because he puts himself first.  It should be apparent to those reporting on the campaign's messaging that a maverick does not sacrifice for anyone or anything.  A maverick is a lone wolf who does what's best for him.

Hollywood loves the maverick story.  The story of the selfish hothead who refuses to see how his actions affect those around him has been literally one of most often told stories.  We need look no further than Top Gun for the best example of the maverick story.  Pete Mitchell only succeeds at the end of the film after he learns to sacrifice his selfish flying skills in favor of flying with the team (this post is not endorsing Top Gun as a good film, only a typical one).  In Hollywood, the maverick learns his lesson about sacrificing selfish goals for the good of the community.

Picking Palin reinforces McCain's selfishness and demonstrates his disdain for the community.  It's almost like he picked Palin to spite those campaign operatives who wouldn't let him pick Lieberman.  They wanted Romney or Pawlenty, but he wanted his little buddy Joe.  His biggest problem continues to be that he's always trying to stick it to his own party rather than the Democrats.  It must be sad for his party to know that they have a 72 year old who acts like a selfish teenage boy.

Just when giddy Democrats and muddleheaded media magpies expected John McCain to pick the obvious—a Michigan-winning, cardboard-cutout former governor of Massachusetts—McCain picked the least-obvious—the current governor of Alaska. And what a pick! Sarah Palin is smart, fearless, tough, Christian, poised, charming, persistent, undauntable, young, principled, likable, accomplished, and beautiful. Did I mention she’s a woman and energetic mother of five?

 

Even without kids, she’s no slouch. In 2007, Palin went to Kuwait to visit Alaskan troops, cancelled the bridge to nowhere and cut her state’s 100 federal earmarks in half with a goal of whittling them down to a mere dozen:

 

“We really want to skinny it down,” said Karen Rehfeld, Gov. Sarah Palin’s budget chief.

Rehfeld recently wrote a memo to all state commissioners telling them that to “enhance the state’s credibility,” federal earmark requests for money should be only for the most compelling needs.

They should have a strong national purpose, Rehfeld told the commissioners, not just to fill funding gaps in the state budget.

 

Palin has leadership credentials not limited to her home state. She has firsthand experience with education and energy issues, which are transferable to the federal level. And unlike the Bush administration, she seems to believe in the concept of oversight.

 

But the kicker? Palin can shoot a gun.

 

Yesterday, CNN repeatedly showed a video clip of Palin at a shooting range and mingling with American troops. They played it over and over and over and over. And over and over. Wikipedia mentions her early morning moose hunting expeditions with her dad when she was a kid. Articles are already calling her a gun-toting beauty queen. So I started thinking about that image of Palin shooting a gun.

 

Because we all know gun-toting + beauty queen = sexy. Think about Angelina Jolie being a heartbeat away from the presidency.

 

Suddenly, it hit me: McCain is not pandering to disaffected female Hillary voters. If McCain is pandering to anyone, he is pandering to men. I say this because of the TPM posts already calling Sarah Palin a babe. I say this because of the subliminal effect of media images that bombard us. I say this because research shows that if you want to win the presidency, you need to win a majority of the white male vote more than any other demographic. How cunning of the Republicans, therefore, to rile up the distractible Democrats with PUMAs and Paris while secretly selecting a talented all-American female for the second-highest job in the land.

Here is the thing folks:
John McCain was one of the worst students at the Navel Academy. Once a dunce, always a dunce.
Think about it. How can a dunce identify with any  a greater intellect. A Dunce will reality to it's own level. Hence Sarah Palin. She did not baffle him with conceptual intelligence that he would have been unable to grasp, so he felt comfortable with her.
Dunces embrace Dunces.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20080830/pl_politico/13001

Excerpt:

“I think she is the most inexperienced person on a major party ticket in modern history,” said presidential historian Matthew Dallek.

The only things that I have been reading in the TPM cafe is Palin this and Palin that. I sick of reading about McCain's stupid VP pick. There are other things to be concerned with such as the war in Georgia or Hurricane Gustav that might strick New Orleans. No offence to some TPM bloggers but you should keep your eyes on the bigger picture and not be obsessed with McCain's VP pick. 

After a night of sleeping wedged into a love seat just big enough for my cat and a surreal day of hunting for a ticket to Obama's speech at Mile High Stadium, I am in no mood for games. I've run into too many alleged "journalists" looking for disaffected Hillary delegates (of which I've yet to find) and I'm beyond patience.I want some fucking unity. I want it now.I've traveled from LA to Denver to be a part of history. Devoid of credentials, unable to get into the convention at the Pepsi Center, my world for the next few days will instead revolve around Denver's 16th Street pedestrian mall (think 3d Street Promenade). A lot of the bars are here, which means most of the delegates, which means all of the media, cops and protesters. I track down some fabulous expresso from the local lesbian coffee house and begin my day in earnest. The night before it had become pretty clear to me that my chances of getting a ticket for the Obama speech had gone from slim to none. Every person I asked had the same deer-in-the-headlights look on their face when I brought the subject up. Clearly drastic action was called for.Time to hit Craig's List.Out of the 70,000 tickets available, some 40,000 went to Colorado and other western swing states. They "sold" out within 24 hours (they were actually free). In an effort to keep down scalping, the Obama campaign didn't mail out the physical tickets only the week before. Recipients had to call in or log in on the internet and provide their names and contact information, along with the serial number on the ticket. Once registered, the tickets become non-transferrable. The told us if your ID doesn't match the info you provided when the ticket is scanned at the stadium they won't let you in (this turned out not to be true - they just scanned the ticket and let you in)Of course this didn't stop the scalping at all. I logged on to the Denver Craig's List and found half a dozen tickets for sale. Yet almost as soon I attempted to contact a potential seller, the link would be erased. What started out as straightforward illicit transaction quickly became a game of whack-o-mole.As the day wore on I watched as prices climbed from $100 a ticket to a $1,000 a pair. A $1,000 a pair for apolitical speech. No wonder McCain is do desperate to smear Obama as being a celebrity. He's green-eyed envious.But as the day wears on, the idea of paying for a piece of history just becomes depressing.  For hours I walk the Mall, my iPhone held out like a divining rod as I change tactics, trying to get an extra ticket from some of the few contacts I have in Denver. Low on battery, I'm almost ready to give it up when lightning strikes.The rest, as they say, is history.............If you like what you see, please donate to my fundraising page<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/CYZuq0IqRmg&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/CYZuq0IqRmg&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

I seldom agree with David Frum, but this is the lesson I think the Obama campaign ought to take from this truely bizarre decision by McCain:

<blockquote>* David Frum: "The longer I think about it, the less well this selection sits with me. And I increasingly doubt that it will prove good politics. The Palin choice looks cynical.... It's a wild gamble, undertaken by our oldest ever first-time candidate for president in hopes of changing the board of this election campaign. Maybe it will work. But maybe (and at least as likely) it will reinforce a theme that I'd be pounding home if I were the Obama campaign: that it's John McCain for all his white hair who represents the risky choice, while it is Barack Obama who offers cautious, steady, predictable governance.... If it were your decision, and you were putting your country first, would you put an untested small-town mayor a heartbeat away from the presidency?"</blockquote>

I think it's a real mistake to attack Palin overmuch for her beliefs and lack of experience. She is a governor (albeit of a state with a mere 600,000 residents), and might be excused for thinking that's the kind of executive experience that qualifies her to be, in effect, President of the United States and CinC.

Who among us could say that, in similar circumstances, that we would be strong enough or wise enough to say 'no thanks, Senator. I'm not good enough.'?

No, this is all on McCain.

It demonstrates, yet again, his style of leadership and his habits of thought.

It reveals his desperation.

It exposes his cynicism and disdain, for thinking that trotting out a woman will make other women vote for her just because they have the same internal plumbing.

He's the risky choice. He's the dangerous choice. He's old and unpredictable and, from more evidence that this decision shows, is unfit to be entrusted with the job.

--Six things the Palin pick says about McCain: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0808/12997.html

Historians say she's the least-qualified to join a modern major ticket: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0808/13001.html

Again, she's not the problem here. The problem is the guy who picked her. She's just not ready. Hillary (who I did NOT want to win), was more ready than Palin.

McCain ought to be charged with bait and switch, and fraud.

No wonder John McCain thinks Sarah Palin is qualified to be Vice President. On March 5, 2000 explained to Tim Russert why he was not interested in being George Bush's running mate.


"The vice president has two duties. One is to inquire daily as to the health of the president, and the other is to attend the funerals of Third World dictators. And neither of those do I find an enjoyable exercise.''

http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/06/mccain_vp_checks_pulse_does_fu.html

Explains a lot, doesn't it?

The bizarre GOP choice for VP has everyone giddy with disbelief. But why this person? The chief points have been identified: Christian, Maverick, Women, Inexperience, Celebrity, Reform, Change, Sex, Power, Crime, Communication, Scandal, Danger, Terror, Hope, Safety, ETCETERAS....

But why this choice? begs the more revealing question: How does the selection of Palin function?

From a macro-propagandistic and even cybernetic- process perspective, the function is to create short-circuitry in the political spectrum and confusion in the electorate, which can thereby be reconditioned along the preferred lines of thought.  We are in the midst of a process of the reproduction of the necessary illusions and a significant maneuver in the manufacture of consent.

The choice of Palin has already succeeded in shifting the headlines from the 40 million Americans who watched one of the best acceptance speeches ever given (Please note that I've never been won over by the conservative content of Obama's policies), to the bold or strange or inexplicable choice.

The central zone of discharge for this exercise is a sexy (or at least in memory) beauty queen--her Daddy's prize spread on a dead bear, a celebrity with an appalling lack of experience--who charges the atmosphere with myriad and diverse attractants and repellents. It does not matter which--only that they be hypercharged in this our political hyperreality. First come the simulation of effects; later the people will be made to understand which description goes with which candidate.

(I recall that Reich posited a psychological conditioning among the electorate similar to the way an abused child inexorably and uncontrollably identifies with his abuser and thereby grows up to be an abuser. The lessons become cathected and beyond the re-call of mere reason. Think of his portrait of the sexy ignorant young Nazi hailing the Fuehrer or the deluded white males in the deep South who performed the ghastly bitter-fruit works of their masters and then constantly voted for these same bastards, who would make life for their families a living hell, but full of pride, patriotic enthusiasm and psycho-sexual fervor.)

Remember how The Manchurian Candidate's mother browbeat her Senator Husband, when he asked her to give him a specific and fixed number of the communist in the defense department instead of changing it every time he spoke. He said he felt like an idiot. Her response was for him to DO JUST WHAT HE'S TOLD, THAT THE PAPERS AREN'T ASKING IF THERE ARE COMMUNISTS ONLY HOW MANY. Under the right force of energies the delegates would insist that this idiot Senator be named the presidential nominee.

Strange attractors seem to pull the fields of forces into a new different form. That is what Rove has in mind here. We are dealing with an entirely different way of thinking: a propagandistic application of chaos theory applied to mass politics. Once the high-charged wires are crossed, and the energies are translated, confusion sets in, a new-pattern emerges, and it is the GOP that brings change, reform, and SAFETY. It doesn’t bloody matter that it's false. In fact, the bigger the lie the more people will believe it. 

The surge is working.

John Kerry is a hero John Kerry is a coward.

Just the shift of a few words charged with the alchemy of the media in the cauldron of human psychology.

Now tell me just how does she turn you on somehow with her particular perversities?

Processes will reorganize themselves about the strange attractor (howsoever low or laughable) if said effects are not neutralized.
 

Campion

The following are parts of an article written By Greg Mitchell Palin Comparison? Karl Rove on CBS Had Mocked Obama Considering Kaine for Veep-- Only Governor 'For 3 Years'

Appearing on CBS's Face the Nation less than three weeks ago, Republican strategist Karl Rove singled out Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, who was on Obama's short list.

With all due respect again to Governor Kaine, he's been a governor for three years, he's been able but undistinguished," Rove said.

Rove also said: I don't think people could really name a big, important thing that he's done. He was mayor of the 105th largest city in America.

He added, So if he were to pick Governor Kaine, it would be an intensely political choice where he said, `You know what? I'm really not, first and foremost, concerned with -- is this person capable of being president of the United States?

I think he's going to make an intensely political choice, not a governing choice,' Rove said. 'He's going to view this through the prism of a candidate, not through the prism of president; that is to say, he's going to pick somebody that he thinks will on the margin help him in a state like Indiana or Missouri or Virginia. He's not going to be thinking big and broad about the responsibilities of president.

Palin has been governor of Alaska for less than two years. Palin was formerly mayor of a town that only has a population of about 9000.  Palin is under investigation by a special prosecutor for supposedly having her ex brother-in-law fired.

Talk about putting Foot in Mouth – Karl Rove did so -- Big Time. These comments need to be in an Obama ad – IMMEDIATELY or the day after the GOP Convention. The Ad should tell Americans what Karl Rove really thinks about a move such as John McCain just made by nominating Sarah Palin as his VP choice.

Video on CBS FACE THE NATION -- Last part of video

The question about Sarah Palin is not about her character or even her experience however thin her resume, it is about the depth of her knowledge.  She admits to limiting her focus to issues effecting Alaska which is fine for a governor.  She may also be content with returning the now powerful role of vice president to that of limited stand-in, but the truth is, however small the chance may be of her becoming our president, we cannot afford to have someone who is not only unfamiliar with national security issues, foreign and domestic affairs, and the economy, but someone has not given even minimum thought to the consequences of actions taken in these areas. Americans do not know what Sarah Palin thinks about our critical issues therefore we cannot judge how she will act if force to take up the reins of power. And we have only two short months to vet her. The press needs to question her fully and immediately; a single vice presidential debate is not sufficient.

The candidacy of not one but two women for the top jobs on a national ticket has been historic but with Hillary Clinton there was never any doubt of the depth and breadth of her understanding of each and every issue. Americans deserve nothing less of a vice presidential candidate in these treacherous times.

 

Sarah Palin is touted as a "clean government" reformer whose insistence on fiscal responsibility has been shaking up Alaska’s corrupt political culture.

The truth, as the Matanuska Maid story illustrates, is quite different, and far stranger.

Matanuska Maid was a failing, state-run dairy that had lost about $600,000 over two years when the state Creamery Board finally decided to shut it down in the spring of 2007.

Sarah Palin felt so strongly that Matanuska Maid should continue operating that she fired the entire state Board of Agriculture and Conservation, which appoints the Creamery Board, just to install new members who would reverse the Creamery Board’s decision and keep Matanuska Maid alive.

Sustaining a money-losing state-run business certainly doesn’t sound like fiscal responsibility.  But neither does increasing the price the hemorrhaging enterprise pays for milk, which is precisely what the Creamery Board did, making it even more likely Matanuska Maid would not be able to continue as a viable entity.

In June of 2007, Matanuska Maid eked out a small profit. In July, however, it lost almost  $300,000.  So, after first going to extraordinary lengths to keep Matanuska Maid alive, then imposing the equivalent of a death sentence (raising the dairy’s already high expenses),  Sarah Palin came to the same decision the fired Creamery Board had several months before – Matanuska Maid had to be shut down.

There are several puzzles here crying out to be deciphered.  Why would someone so frugal that she sold off the former Governor’s plane support a failing state-run business?  Why would she then raise its expenses and, when the expected result occurred -  a large loss – abruptly decide to shut the operation down?  Was her intention all along to get rid of a white elephant?  If so, why didn’t she simply go along with the original Creamery Board’s decision in the spring?

Things just continued to get stranger that fall.  Rather than sell off the assets of an obviously doomed enterprise, Palin decided to auction off Matanuska Maid as a going concern because "they would get more that way".   Why any frugal businessman or prudent investor would want to purchase a concern that couldn’t make money even with hefty state subsidies apparently didn’t occur to Palin, who set the minimum bid for Matanuska Maid at $3.3 Million.  The auction, held in December 2007, attracted exactly no bids, while the doomed dairy continued to operate at a loss.  The equipment of the Dairy was finally sold off for $1.4 million.

Most of the equipment, anyway.

For while the state was attempting to arouse interest in the Matanuska Maid that winter, Kyle Beus, who had been one of Alaska’s biggest dairy farmers in more flush times, took over another struggling operation November 1st outside Palmer, near Palin’s own hometown of Wasilla.

Beus faced what seemed like impossible odds: if a state-subsidized dairy was already losing hundreds of thousand of dollars, what were the odds he could make a go of it on his own, when all around him other farmers were going out of business?  Not to mention the possibility that someone with deep pockets and a lot of optimism might buy the Matanuska Maid at auction and immediately threaten his livlihood.  

But by December the remote possibility of competition(if it in fact even existed) was gone.  And by March, Beus began purchasing milk from local farmers, because things really started going his way.  According to a March 31st article from the Anchorage Daily News, "the state Creamery Board, which controls Mat Maid property, provided 71 pieces of equipment to Beus' nascent dairy for a monthly fee of $1,966 a month, or $23,601 a year," a lease figure based on an appraisal for most of the equipment at half its market value.

In other words, the Creamery Board appointed by Palin the prior June to give Matanuska Maid a new lease on life ended up giving Beus his own very favorable lease.

Perhaps this was coincidence, but it starts to look like Beus getting back into the dairy business was meant to be.

Even better for Beus, more help was on the way.  The Anchorage Daily News reported May 31st that Matanuska Creamery "got off the ground with help from a $643,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture grant and a lot of support from Stevens and from state Senate President Lyda Green, R-Wasilla".  Stevens and Don Young even turned out for a big ribbon-cutting ceremony, their presence testifying to the uncorrupt, newly responsible way things now work in Alaska, thanks to Sarah Palin’s vigorously cleaning house.

But while Dairygate looks definitely sleazy to me, maybe I’m taking a parochial, Lower 48 view. To an Alaskan, what Sarah Polin did just looks like an innovation in fiscal management.  After all, what happened here, aside from a little deception, insider-dealing and rank hypocrisy?

A failing state-run enterprise supported by Alaskan taxpayers ends up reborn as a private enterprise, run by a struggling local businessman and subsidized by Federal taxpayers.

To the locals, what a win/win: why should Alaskans have to support the local dairy farmers that bring them fresh milk and cheese, after all, when they have Uncle Ted and Uncle Don (and Aunt Sarah) around to make sure Uncle Sam picks up the tab?

Now for some links:

Palin Board firing:
http://dwb.adn.com/...
Milk Price increase:
http://dwb.adn.com/...
Mat Maid sale/no bids:
http://dwb.adn.com/...
http://dwb.adn.com/...
http://dwb.adn.com/...
Mat Maid equipment auctioned off:
http://www.adn.com/...
Beus leases Mat Maid equip:
http://www.adn.com/...
Matanuska Creamery opening/Grant:
http://www.adn.com/...

As I mentioned yesterday, going to adn.com and searching for "Matanuska Maid" gives plenty of related stories. One unexplored angle is the many suppliers, contractors and laborers who provided goods and services to Matanuska Maid and were apparently never compensated.  

In reality, not all the locals ended up winning - just the well-connected ones.

Everyone is missing the point about Gov .Palin.  Sarah Palin is Cindy and Karl Rove's pick.  She's young, attractive, a mom, has the right titles on her resume, and is republican. Both Karl and Cindy know that the VP pick would need to be weaker than McCain so that they could run the country with McCain has the puppet.  A strong VP would have blocked that.  Watch Cindy McCain at rallies, etc.  Rove called Lieberman to tell him to drop out of the running. She treats McCain like an old man who needs to be guided around. Imagine him in the White House.

Based on the published reports and available video, Palin is in way over her head. To be a governor, she is ignorant of the role of the VP of the United States.  That's rich!  She wants to make sure that the VP is a step up from being governor.  That's scary.

When John McCain saw photo again, he stopped listening to the reasoning why he should pick Palin.  All he needed to know was she someone to entertain him until Nov. 5, the day the country retires his jersey. 

If folks are surprised at the Palin announcement, perhaps the chosen venue - the Nutter Center (Ervin J.) - was an appropriate if not ironic choice for truely a head-twisting (twisted?) decision.

Whether or not this nutty choice will work politically, at the very least, it seems that the decision could be partially attributed to 'faulty intelligence,' something McCain has been susceptible to in the past. There are so many oddities in Palin's positions and recent conduct it makes it hard to believe that McCain's judgment is really as bad as it seems. More likely, McCain's advisors and the far-right over-sold Palin, whom he had never had a sit down meet with until this past wee (when he offered her the job!?!?).

A few examples:

1. Troopergate: All the Palin promoters (Reed, Rove, Kristol, et.al.) within and outside the campaign clearly must not have followed the Troopergate scandal that emerged last month and snowballed in the last 2 weeks. Why take the risk of what can happen with 2 on-going investigations? With Keating and various regrettable lobbyist tie-ins from the past, would McCain really choose someone facing abuse of power allegations, will soon be deposed by investigators, and is accused of witholding evidence ala Dick Cheney (maybe in GOP eyes that makes her qualified).

Remarkably, Palin also faced similar abuse of power allegations (also related to the firing of a police officer) when she first became Mayor of Wasilla. Meanwhile, the current, bipartisan investigation marches on, with an initial report due by Halloween. This year it could be a scary one for Republicans.

2. The Bridge to Nowhere: Palin's supposed opposition to the bridge may have been one of the factors that really seduced McCain. Well, it turns out the story that she opposed it isn't exactly true. It seems that she was actually for the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it (conveniently after the funding was cut)

3. Global Warming: According to Palin, global warming is not man-made? Did anyone point that position out to Johnny Mac? Probably not.

4.Creationism:  She wants to teach Creationism in Schools?
Hmm. After destroying schools with "No Child" under Bush, now we get this with McCain?

5. Environmental Opponent: Supports oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (which McCain supposedly opposes) and is fighting the Bush administration over listing polar bears as endangered. (By the look of all the bear carcasses in her office and parents home it seems that not only the polar bears are endangered by Palins).

6. Taxer (not a tax-cutter): Supported sales taxes as a city council member in her town of Wasilla. As governor she passed a tax increase on oil companies (similarly Obama proposes increasing taxes on oil company profits, and McCain opposes them).

7. The Inexperience Factor: In the formal Nutter Center ceremony Palin reportedly faced an audience of 15,000 that was nearly 3 times as large as population of the town she was mayor of 2 years ago. 80% of Palin's "executive level" public service experience is limited to her experience as Mayor of Wasilla, where the entire city staff isn't larger than a couple dozen employees. As she has a total lack of national or international experience even conservatives, with national security inclinations, are balking at McCain's choice of Palin.

8. Alaskans call it a Crazy Choice: According to the Anchorage Daily News:

"State Senate President Lyda Green said she thought it was a joke when someone called her at 6 a.m. to give her the news.

"She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?" said Green, a Republican from Palin's hometown of Wasilla. "Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the nation?"

And she's not alone in those sentiments.

A key point is being overlooked by people who want to argue that Obama supporters have no standing to challenge Palin's inexperience:  the role of the voters in the primaries. 
 
The -voters- chose Obama to be the nominee of the party.  They took the measure of him as a candidate, with his strengths and his weaknesses (including his relative lack of experience), and decided that the former outweighed the latter.  Voters, of course, did not get to choose his running mate.  That responsibility was entirely on his shoulders, and that authority was entirely his to exercise.  He knew that he had a grave responsibility to choose wisely, and he made a sound choice -- one that balanced the political advantages of choosing a running-mate with the need to ensure good government.

McCain, however, exercised this same power to select his VP in an irresponsible manner.  It says a lot about how he plans to govern the country.  If he becomes President, we can expect to hear more phrases like "Great job, Brownie!"

Palin has no electoral mandate, and hopefully never will. 

I think it's wonderful that both parties are finally over their long national hangups about surface characteristics like race and gender. The country is just a little closer to evalulating people on the content of their character, and it's about time.

That said, I guess Jesse The Body Ventura wasn't available.

The modern Republican doesn't care about the state of the world beyond his or her own death. This is clear across the board: No concern about putting the country deep into debt; no concern about ecological collapse; no concern about the peak oil crisis. Okay we know that. But look how well it frames McCain's Palin pick:

Palin is manifestly unqualified and unprepared to be commander in chief. Her penchant for denial of reality (e.g. "intelligent design," suing to keep the polar bear off the endangered species list, lying about her orders to fire her brother-in-law) can only lead to national tragedy if she's ever in that chair. But for McCain, as a Republican, there's no problem. In the event of Palin assuming the presidency, Mr. McCain will be dead.

What could more clearly show that his concern for America's future extends no farther than his concern for himself?

While the Palin pick has been compared to the idiocy of Dan Quayle the real comparison is going to come down to Sen. Thomas Eagleton by George McGovern in 1972.

After Eagleton was named it came out that he had a history of some pretty serious mental issues and had received electroshock therapy. That ended his nomination within a week.

Now with the rumors that Gov. Palin may not be the baby's mom but grandmother there will be a lot of digging done here as well. These rumors predate all the VP talk and have been bussing around Alaska since last spring.

I truly hopr this is not the case BUT the larger issue if they are not IS the decision by Palin and her husband to fly home after Sarah's water broke.

Someone willing to take even the slightest risk with their unborn child makes me very uncomforatble with their ability to make decisions that might affect the country.

If these latter rumors prove to be true then John McCain will get the electroshock torture of his life for his own rash decisionmaking...but not in Hanoi this time but from the American people.

Read this article.

She certainly sounds like she might be an "Obama-con."

The experience argument was a major one for McCain. Even one that worked. With the nomination of Palin he has forfeited that argument. How could he make a serious case against Obama without discrediting his own VP choice? If I was Obama I would pretend she's qualified and enjoy the immunity from McCain's only credible line of attack.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKkydrUnBZE&eurl=http://thepoliticalcarnival.blogspot.com/2008/08/audio-palin-laughs-as-host-calls-cancer.html

And here is a link to how John McCain laughed when his supporter called Hillary Clinton: "The Bitch".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLQGWpRVA7o

The experience argument was a major one for McCain. Even one that worked. With the nomination of Palin he has forfeited that argument. How could he make a serious case against Obama without discrediting his own VP choice? If I was Obama I would pretend she's qualified and enjoy the immunity from McCain's only credible line of attack.

This is a better version of what I posted in haste yesterday.

Sarah Palin is touted as a "clean government" reformer whose insistence on fiscal responsibility has been shaking up Alaska’s corrupt political culture.

The truth, as the Matanuska Maid story illustrates, is quite different, and far stranger.

Matanuska Maid was a failing, state-run dairy that had lost about $600,000 over two years when the state Creamery Board finally decided to shut it down in the spring of 2007.

Sarah Palin felt so strongly that Matanuska Maid should continue operating that she fired the entire state Board of Agriculture and Conservation, which appoints the Creamery Board, just to install new members who would reverse the Creamery Board’s decision and keep Matanuska Maid alive.

Sustaining a money-losing state-run business certainly doesn’t sound like fiscal responsibility.  But neither does increasing the price the hemorrhaging enterprise pays for milk, which is precisely what the Creamery Board did, making it even more likely Matanuska Maid would not be able to continue as a viable entity.

In June of 2007, Matanuska Maid eked out a small profit. In July, however, it lost almost  $300,000.  So, after first going to extraordinary lengths to keep Matanuska Maid alive, then imposing the equivalent of a death sentence (raising the dairy’s already high expenses),  Sarah Palin came to the same decision the fired Creamery Board had several months before – Matanuska Maid had to be shut down.

There are several puzzles here crying out to be deciphered.  Why would someone so frugal that she sold off the former Governor’s plane support a failing state-run business?  Why would she then raise its expenses and, when the expected result occurred -  a large loss – abruptly decide to shut the operation down?  Was her intention all along to get rid of a white elephant?  If so, why didn’t she simply go along with the original Creamery Board’s decision in the spring?

Things just continued to get stranger that fall.  Rather than sell off the assets of an obviously doomed enterprise, Palin decided to auction off Matanuska Maid as a going concern because "they would get more that way".   Why any frugal businessman or prudent investor would want to purchase a concern that couldn’t make money even with hefty state subsidies apparently didn’t occur to Palin, who set the minimum bid for Matanuska Maid at $3.3 Million.  The auction, held in December 2007, attracted exactly no bids, while the doomed dairy continued to operate at a loss.  The equipment of the Dairy was finally sold off for $1.4 million.

Most of the equipment, anyway.

For while the state was attempting to arouse interest in the Matanuska Maid that winter, Kyle Beus, who had been one of Alaska’s biggest dairy farmers in more flush times, took over another struggling operation November 1st outside Palmer, near Palin’s own hometown of Wasilla.

Beus faced what seemed like impossible odds: if a state-subsidized dairy was already losing hundreds of thousand of dollars, what were the odds he could make a go of it on his own, when all around him other farmers were going out of business?  Not to mention the possibility that someone with deep pockets and a lot of optimism might buy the Matanuska Maid at auction and immediately threaten his livlihood.  

But by December the remote possibility of competition(if it in fact even existed) was gone.  And by March, Beus began purchasing milk from local farmers, because things really started going his way.  According to a March 31st article from the Anchorage Daily News, "the state Creamery Board, which controls Mat Maid property, provided 71 pieces of equipment to Beus' nascent dairy for a monthly fee of $1,966 a month, or $23,601 a year," a lease figure based on an appraisal for most of the equipment at half its market value.

In other words, the Creamery Board appointed by Palin the prior June to give Matanuska Maid a new lease on life ended up giving Beus his own very favorable lease.

Perhaps this was coincidence, but it starts to look like Beus getting back into the dairy business was meant to be.

Even better for Beus, more help was on the way.  The Anchorage Daily News reported May 31st that Matanuska Creamery "got off the ground with help from a $643,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture grant and a lot of support from Stevens and from state Senate President Lyda Green, R-Wasilla".  Stevens and Don Young even turned out for a big ribbon-cutting ceremony, their presence testifying to the uncorrupt, newly responsible way things now work in Alaska, thanks to Sarah Palin’s vigorously cleaning house.

But while Dairygate looks definitely sleazy to me, maybe I’m taking a parochial, Lower 48 view. To an Alaskan, what Sarah Polin did just looks like an innovation in fiscal management.  After all, what happened here, aside from a little deception, insider-dealing and rank hypocrisy?

A failing state-run enterprise supported by Alaskan taxpayers ends up reborn as a private enterprise, run by a struggling local businessman and subsidized by Federal taxpayers.

To the locals, what a win/win: why should Alaskans have to support the local dairy farmers that bring them fresh milk and cheese, after all, when they have Uncle Ted and Uncle Don (and Aunt Sarah) around to make sure Uncle Sam picks up the tab?

Now for some links:

Palin Board firing:
http://dwb.adn.com/...
Milk Price increase:
http://dwb.adn.com/...
Mat Maid sale/no bids:
http://dwb.adn.com/...
http://dwb.adn.com/...
http://dwb.adn.com/...
Mat Maid equipment auctioned off:
http://www.adn.com/...
Beus leases Mat Maid equip:
http://www.adn.com/...
Matanuska Creamery opening/Grant:
http://www.adn.com/...

Going to adn.com and searching for "Matanuska Maid" gives plenty of related stories. One unexplored angle is the many suppliers, contractors and laborers who provided goods and services to Matanuska Maid and were apparently never compensated.  

In reality, not all the locals ended up winning - just the well-connected ones.

This is a better version of what I posted in haste yesterday.

Sarah Palin is touted as a "clean government" reformer whose insistence on fiscal responsibility has been shaking up Alaska’s corrupt political culture.

The truth, as the Matanuska Maid story illustrates, is quite different, and far stranger.

Matanuska Maid was a failing, state-run dairy that had lost about $600,000 over two years when the state Creamery Board finally decided to shut it down in the spring of 2007.

Sarah Palin felt so strongly that Matanuska Maid should continue operating that she fired the entire state Board of Agriculture and Conservation, which appoints the Creamery Board, just to install new members who would reverse the Creamery Board’s decision and keep Matanuska Maid alive.

Sustaining a money-losing state-run business certainly doesn’t sound like fiscal responsibility.  But neither does increasing the price the hemorrhaging enterprise pays for milk, which is precisely what the Creamery Board did, making it even more likely Matanuska Maid would not be able to continue as a viable entity.

In June of 2007, Matanuska Maid eked out a small profit. In July, however, it lost almost  $300,000.  So, after first going to extraordinary lengths to keep Matanuska Maid alive, then imposing the equivalent of a death sentence (raising the dairy’s already high expenses),  Sarah Palin came to the same decision the fired Creamery Board had several months before – Matanuska Maid had to be shut down.

There are several puzzles here crying out to be deciphered.  Why would someone so frugal that she sold off the former Governor’s plane support a failing state-run business?  Why would she then raise its expenses and, when the expected result occurred -  a large loss – abruptly decide to shut the operation down?  Was her intention all along to get rid of a white elephant?  If so, why didn’t she simply go along with the original Creamery Board’s decision in the spring?

Things just continued to get stranger that fall.  Rather than sell off the assets of an obviously doomed enterprise, Palin decided to auction off Matanuska Maid as a going concern because "they would get more that way".   Why any frugal businessman or prudent investor would want to purchase a concern that couldn’t make money even with hefty state subsidies apparently didn’t occur to Palin, who set the minimum bid for Matanuska Maid at $3.3 Million.  The auction, held in December 2007, attracted exactly no bids, while the doomed dairy continued to operate at a loss.  The equipment of the Dairy was finally sold off for $1.4 million.

Most of the equipment, anyway.

For while the state was attempting to arouse interest in the Matanuska Maid that winter, Kyle Beus, who had been one of Alaska’s biggest dairy farmers in more flush times, took over another struggling operation November 1st outside Palmer, near Palin’s own hometown of Wasilla.

Beus faced what seemed like impossible odds: if a state-subsidized dairy was already losing hundreds of thousand of dollars, what were the odds he could make a go of it on his own, when all around him other farmers were going out of business?  Not to mention the possibility that someone with deep pockets and a lot of optimism might buy the Matanuska Maid at auction and immediately threaten his livlihood.  

But by December the remote possibility of competition(if it in fact even existed) was gone.  And by March, Beus began purchasing milk from local farmers, because things really started going his way.  According to a March 31st article from the Anchorage Daily News, "the state Creamery Board, which controls Mat Maid property, provided 71 pieces of equipment to Beus' nascent dairy for a monthly fee of $1,966 a month, or $23,601 a year," a lease figure based on an appraisal for most of the equipment at half its market value.

In other words, the Creamery Board appointed by Palin the prior June to give Matanuska Maid a new lease on life ended up giving Beus his own very favorable lease.

Perhaps this was coincidence, but it starts to look like Beus getting back into the dairy business was meant to be.

Even better for Beus, more help was on the way.  The Anchorage Daily News reported May 31st that Matanuska Creamery "got off the ground with help from a $643,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture grant and a lot of support from Stevens and from state Senate President Lyda Green, R-Wasilla".  Stevens and Don Young even turned out for a big ribbon-cutting ceremony, their presence testifying to the uncorrupt, newly responsible way things now work in Alaska, thanks to Sarah Palin’s vigorously cleaning house.

But while Dairygate looks definitely sleazy to me, maybe I’m taking a parochial, Lower 48 view. To an Alaskan, what Sarah Polin did just looks like an innovation in fiscal management.  After all, what happened here, aside from a little deception, insider-dealing and rank hypocrisy?

A failing state-run enterprise supported by Alaskan taxpayers ends up reborn as a private enterprise, run by a struggling local businessman and subsidized by Federal taxpayers.

To the locals, what a win/win: why should Alaskans have to support the local dairy farmers that bring them fresh milk and cheese, after all, when they have Uncle Ted and Uncle Don (and Aunt Sarah) around to make sure Uncle Sam picks up the tab?

Now for some links:

Palin Board firing:
http://dwb.adn.com/...
Milk Price increase:
http://dwb.adn.com/...
Mat Maid sale/no bids:
http://dwb.adn.com/...
http://dwb.adn.com/...
http://dwb.adn.com/...
Mat Maid equipment auctioned off:
http://www.adn.com/...
Beus leases Mat Maid equip:
http://www.adn.com/...
Matanuska Creamery opening/Grant:
http://www.adn.com/...

Going to adn.com and searching for "Matanuska Maid" gives plenty of related stories. One unexplored angle is the many suppliers, contractors and laborers who provided goods and services to Matanuska Maid and were apparently never compensated.  

In reality, not all the locals ended up winning - just the well-connected ones.

This is a better version of what I posted in haste yesterday.

Sarah Palin is touted as a "clean government" reformer whose insistence on fiscal responsibility has been shaking up Alaska’s corrupt political culture.

The truth, as the Matanuska Maid story illustrates, is quite different, and far stranger.

Matanuska Maid was a failing, state-run dairy that had lost about $600,000 over two years when the state Creamery Board finally decided to shut it down in the spring of 2007.

Sarah Palin felt so strongly that Matanuska Maid should continue operating that she fired the entire state Board of Agriculture and Conservation, which appoints the Creamery Board, just to install new members who would reverse the Creamery Board’s decision and keep Matanuska Maid alive.

Sustaining a money-losing state-run business certainly doesn’t sound like fiscal responsibility.  But neither does increasing the price the hemorrhaging enterprise pays for milk, which is precisely what the Creamery Board did, making it even more likely Matanuska Maid would not be able to continue as a viable entity.

In June of 2007, Matanuska Maid eked out a small profit. In July, however, it lost almost  $300,000.  So, after first going to extraordinary lengths to keep Matanuska Maid alive, then imposing the equivalent of a death sentence (raising the dairy’s already high expenses),  Sarah Palin came to the same decision the fired Creamery Board had several months before – Matanuska Maid had to be shut down.

There are several puzzles here crying out to be deciphered.  Why would someone so frugal that she sold off the former Governor’s plane support a failing state-run business?  Why would she then raise its expenses and, when the expected result occurred -  a large loss – abruptly decide to shut the operation down?  Was her intention all along to get rid of a white elephant?  If so, why didn’t she simply go along with the original Creamery Board’s decision in the spring?

Things just continued to get stranger that fall.  Rather than sell off the assets of an obviously doomed enterprise, Palin decided to auction off Matanuska Maid as a going concern because "they would get more that way".   Why any frugal businessman or prudent investor would want to purchase a concern that couldn’t make money even with hefty state subsidies apparently didn’t occur to Palin, who set the minimum bid for Matanuska Maid at $3.3 Million.  The auction, held in December 2007, attracted exactly no bids, while the doomed dairy continued to operate at a loss.  The equipment of the Dairy was finally sold off for $1.4 million.

Most of the equipment, anyway.

For while the state was attempting to arouse interest in the Matanuska Maid that winter, Kyle Beus, who had been one of Alaska’s biggest dairy farmers in more flush times, took over another struggling operation November 1st outside Palmer, near Palin’s own hometown of Wasilla.

Beus faced what seemed like impossible odds: if a state-subsidized dairy was already losing hundreds of thousand of dollars, what were the odds he could make a go of it on his own, when all around him other farmers were going out of business?  Not to mention the possibility that someone with deep pockets and a lot of optimism might buy the Matanuska Maid at auction and immediately threaten his livlihood.  

But by December the remote possibility of competition(if it in fact even existed) was gone.  And by March, Beus began purchasing milk from local farmers, because things really started going his way.  According to a March 31st article from the Anchorage Daily News, "the state Creamery Board, which controls Mat Maid property, provided 71 pieces of equipment to Beus' nascent dairy for a monthly fee of $1,966 a month, or $23,601 a year," a lease figure based on an appraisal for most of the equipment at half its market value.

In other words, the Creamery Board appointed by Palin the prior June to give Matanuska Maid a new lease on life ended up giving Beus his own very favorable lease.

Perhaps this was coincidence, but it starts to look like Beus getting back into the dairy business was meant to be.

Even better for Beus, more help was on the way.  The Anchorage Daily News reported May 31st that Matanuska Creamery "got off the ground with help from a $643,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture grant and a lot of support from Stevens and from state Senate President Lyda Green, R-Wasilla".  Stevens and Don Young even turned out for a big ribbon-cutting ceremony, their presence testifying to the uncorrupt, newly responsible way things now work in Alaska, thanks to Sarah Palin’s vigorously cleaning house.

But while Dairygate looks definitely sleazy to me, maybe I’m taking a parochial, Lower 48 view. To an Alaskan, what Sarah Polin did just looks like an innovation in fiscal management.  After all, what happened here, aside from a little deception, insider-dealing and rank hypocrisy?

A failing state-run enterprise supported by Alaskan taxpayers ends up reborn as a private enterprise, run by a struggling local businessman and subsidized by Federal taxpayers.

To the locals, what a win/win: why should Alaskans have to support the local dairy farmers that bring them fresh milk and cheese, after all, when they have Uncle Ted and Uncle Don (and Aunt Sarah) around to make sure Uncle Sam picks up the tab?

Now for some links:

Palin Board firing:
http://dwb.adn.com/...
Milk Price increase:
http://dwb.adn.com/...
Mat Maid sale/no bids:
http://dwb.adn.com/...
http://dwb.adn.com/...
http://dwb.adn.com/...
Mat Maid equipment auctioned off:
http://www.adn.com/...
Beus leases Mat Maid equip:
http://www.adn.com/...
Matanuska Creamery opening/Grant:
http://www.adn.com/...

Going to adn.com and searching for "Matanuska Maid" gives plenty of related stories. One unexplored angle is the many suppliers, contractors and laborers who provided goods and services to Matanuska Maid and were apparently never compensated.  

In reality, not all the locals ended up winning - just the well-connected ones.

Palin does have lots of appeal on many levels but I also think she is, perhaps unintentionally, a monster in disguise. The White House has been owned by Big Oil for quite a stretch and the industry will do anything to maintain their grip—and to thwart sincere efforts toward developing alternative energy sources. For me the Palin choice is simply further proof that the Republican Party is possessed by Big Oil and McCain's choice is all about pleasing them—despite whatever Palin did to trim the oil industry's sails in AK.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so to see an image of McCain and Palin with X-Files black oil eyes, click here.

As regular readers know, I've been critical of our choice of Sen. Obama. I won't belabor that here - I think my reasons are clearly established. I see no reason to recant anything I've said, but I do feel it may be important to put my attitude into a larger perspective.  Allow me to free-associate a few observations, in no particular order, with no special effort to tie everything into a consistent narrative. (As an American, I take it as my right to be inconsistent if I feel like it):

(1)The Palin  VP nomination is impossible to view as anything but a travesty. Giving Gov. Palin all due credit for her achievements, the mind reels at imagining her in the Oval Office at this early stage of her career. Sen. McCain has botched the first important  public decision he has been called-upon to make. He has absolutely failed the first and really the ONLY test of truly national significance in a VP selection: She is marginally qualified at all to be President, and surely cannot be on the first page of any insider list of qualified Republicans. This is a nakedly and cynically TACTICAL choice. Were it to "work", it would be the first time in modern history that such a thing has happened. We can all thank the Good Lord that the wisdom of the American people  consistently turns these ploys back.

So what about Sen. Obama's roughly similar experience? Good try, but ultimately a foul ball: Sen. Obama was the choice of somewhere around 18 million voters over a grueling  and hotly contested primary season. He openly prevailed over a number of more experienced people who had every fair chance to be selected. Gov. Palin was chosen behind closed doors by ONE man, who had it within his exclusive power to choose anyone he wanted.

(2)THINGS THAT AREN'T TRUE (the BIG issue):

A recent near-great American President once said,  "It's hard to get the American people moving in the right direction,  when they are allowed to believe things that aren't true." Amen.

Here is a list of some of those things. Every single one of them is accepted as true by either Sen. McCain directly, or by the people around him who support him for President, or by the people who will try to vote him into office:

(1)Global Warming is either a complete myth and a wooly-headed fraud, or it is at best a nebulous, uncertain thing that we might justifiably postpone action on for decades to come, if ever. It might even be best to just let nature take its course.

(2)EPA, OSHA, FDA, SEC - indeed, ALL public regulatory functions -  are either Facist remnants of a totalitarian state and should be abolished, or they should be left barely standing  for PR value, while being drained of any capacity to do the jobs for which they are intended.

(3)America can and should club the whole rest of the world into accepting our ideas of right and wrong. Not only that, but when we start that boulder down the hill, we can foretell EXACTLY  what is going to be crushed on the way down, and  exactly where that thing is going to come to rest at the bottom.

(4)You can ad infinitum pay 500 billion dollars annually off the top for debt interest (and even increase it), and no harm is done. You can do that because the Federal Government is "different". The same commonsense budget priorities we all learned in grade-school arithmetic to keep the average family from financial disaster don't apply. The best thing for the government to do is to spend a lot, and earn almost nothing by comparison.

(5)It's really best if we don't get carried-away about "Science".  That time-honored, systematic way of objectively evaluating the physical world is really just "one" way of looking at things, roughly on a par with the Bible, or the Constitution,  or even with the rantings of certain esteemed delusionals. Just put it all out there, and let the people "decide". Sort of the same with courts of law: We "know" who's guilty, why bother with all this "process"?

I could go on and on, given time. I would hope that others could add something to this list, because it genuinely defines the difference between the worst type of Republican, and the best type of Democrat, and what is most truly at stake in this election, in my opinion.  I honestly think with all his perceived shortcomings, Sen. Obama DOES represent this "best type".  He does represent an open mind that is capable of being persuaded by evidence.

Certainly, it is only fair to point-out that are Democratic Party assertions that are questionable as to their basis in established reality - I would say just not so many, and not so greviously misguided in their willful and even proud ignorance of established fact, and  not so utterly harmful to the honest discussion and consideration of public policy.

That is essentially where we are in a nutshell, in my opinion. I cannot in good concience vote for people who allow their heads to be used in that fashion - I cannot imagine that we can go anywhere but deeper into trouble with that approach to the serious decisions we're inevitably going to be called-upon to take.
 
Every election eventually comes down to two imperfect alternatives. When one choice reveals itself as less imperfect than the other, that's where we have no honest choice but to go.

Check out Wasilla city hall where Palin served as mayor.

http://www.cityofwasilla.com/ftp/tour/cityhall/Tourviewer_cityhall.html

John McCain's first executive Decision, Sarah Palin. shows he cares nothing for this Country, is incompetent, and is not ready to lead. With all our economic problems, threats of terrorism, he picks someone with much less executive experience than Barack Obama, who by the way was 10 years in the state senate before being elected to the U.S. Senate (a bio very similar to Lincoln who is considered one of our greatest if not the greatest President we have ever had), and which takes away McCain's most ardent argument to date that Barack is an empty suit! Is this another Alan Keyes moment when GOP put up Mr. Keyes to run against Barack in Illinois just because he was Black?

In her speech on Friday, they already have Gov. Palin "lying" to the American people that she was always against the Bridge to Nowhere, however recorded information will prove that this is not accurate and that she was for the Bridge to Nowhere, before she was against it!

"According to the Ketchikan Daily News edition on August 8, 2006, this is what Sarah Palin rushed over to tell the voters of Ketchikan during the primary election campaign:
'People across the nation struggle with the idea of building a bridge because they’ve been under these misperceptions about the bridge and the purpose,' said Palin, who described the link as the Ketchikan area’s potential for expansion and growth. Palin said Alaska’s congressional delegation worked hard to obtain funding for the bridge as part of a package deal and that she 'would not stand in the way of the progress toward that bridge.'” AND

according to the Ketchikan Daily News on September 29, 2006 this is what Sarah Palin rushed over to tell the voters of Ketchikan during the general election campaign:
'Part of my agenda is making sure that Southeast is heard. That your projects are important. That we go to bat for Southeast when we’re up against federal influences that aren’t in the best interest of Southeast.' She cited the widespread negative attention focused on the Gravina Island crossing project. 'We need to come to the defense of Southeast Alaska when proposals are on the table like the bridge and not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative,' Palin says"
Taken from Blogger AndrewHalcro.com

Not only is Palin less experienced and less qualified than Barack, she seems to lack the intellectual curiosity, or unwillingness, and depth to probe and understand the important and complexing problems/issues knocking at our door today. For example, "What is it exactly that the vice president does all day?" Palin offhandedly asked CNBC anchor Larry Kudlow in July. And when asked about her stance on Iraq by Alaskan Daily Palin answers "I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq. I heard on the news about the new deployments"! Does this show someone who is ready for Prime Time! And, was she truly vetted? Sarah/McCain get ready for she is about to come under the "media" microscope!

McCain’s VP pick also shows a disdain for this country because if something were to unfortunately happen to McCain, Sarah Palin would be our next President of the United States. Can you imagine in her that role? This proves two things in my mind, McCain’s lack of love for this country and that he does not have the judgment to lead this country at this most profound time.

Some in the media call it Historic but in reality Is this decision Historic or Hysterical and a mockery to our political system? Some in the media label it a game changer but is it really a roll of the dice? And should a Presidential candidate play Russian roulette with the people's business? It is telling of McCain's character and judgment that with all the problems we face here today, he did not have the People's interest at heart in this V.P. pick but rather a desire to win for winnings sake and did not think of the consequences of his actions or maybe did not care what it would mean for this country if she were to be sworn in as President of the United States! And, ironically, the very things he accused Barack of being (which he is not) -- empty suit, no experience -- he got in his own V.P. Pick, Sarah Palin!

In McCain's/GOP's calculated ploy to pull Hillary women from Barack without consideration as to whether or not this woman has the ability and experience to lead the United States here and on a world scale shows a lack of sound judgment and it also shows that McCain is NOT READY TO LEAD in the 21st Centruy and is not serious about solving the monumental problems which must be faced -- problems which need serious thinking and not strategic games.

McCain's pick of Sarah Palin, a woman with very little executive experience, a woman who has approved a 26 billion dollar oil pipeline to a Canadian business instead of a business here in the United States, a woman who the Alaskan legislature approved a $100,000 investigation into her motivations in firing Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, on the allegations that Monegan's firing was the result of his refusal to fire Mike Wooten, a trooper who is Palin's former brother-in-law." has proven to the world how really pathetic the Republican party has become that they will try any trick in the book to keep the power in the hands of big oil and special interest and out of the hands of the people where it belongs.

"To any critics who say a woman can't think and work and carry a baby at the same time, I'd just like to escort that Neanderthal back to the cave."

UNFIT FOR COMMAND

John McCain has announced his VP pick – Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, for 1 1/2 years.
Before that she was a mayor of a town with less 10,000 people.

That she has no experience qualifications to be President is beyond obvious.
Yet McCain has said many times his pick would be ready on day one to step in as President if necessary.

This isn’t about Palin. It’s about McCain.
Experience isn’t everything, Palin may in fact have the qualities to be a decent President.
But nobody knows. McCain certainly doesn’t – he barely knows who she is.

This about McCain’s tendency to shoot from the hit hip.
His love of gambling, winning and losing big.
His cynical desperation and willingness TO DO ANYTHING to get elected.
His utter disregard of a prudent, reasoned plan to protect the American people.
His cowboy mentality that makes Bush look like the voice of reason and prudence.

Many people from the Left, Right and Middle are voicing similar concerns.
Once the far Right’s kool-aid high wears off, reality may set in – but probably not.

The pathetic Media might stop referring to this choice as ‘bold,
and start calling it what it is – a ‘risky, imprudent gamble’.

John McCain has proven he doesn’t have what it takes to be Commander in Chief.
He has selected a woman as his VP nominee for purely political purposes.
A woman who has no idea what she is getting into –
whom he has thrown into the political sea with the admonition - ‘learn how to swim, fast...you little jerk’.

He has betrayed his her, his party and his country.

We have all heard the trumped up story of Mother Teresa and the adopted Bangaledeshi daughter of the McCain's. The sad thing about that story is their true love and generosity is lost by lying about it. This little girl, Bridget is black.

Well here is the 'family portrait" for People of the Republican ticket. Notice anyone missing:

We have not seen her at all during the campaign, in any photos or anything. I wonder if we will see her at the RNCC?

I am the father of 3 and have been in the employee benefits and healthcare industry for more than 30 years and I find this entire story about Gov. Palin flying for more than 8 hours after her water broke as quite disturbing in terms of the personal judgment it exhibits.

 "In fact, a call to Alaska Airlines by Gambling911.com revealed that they will not allow a woman to board a flight whose water has broke.  It is unclear if the airline made an exception for Governor Palin. "

As an insurance professional there is NO way the sirlines would allow this, especially for a Governor unless there were all sorts of legal hold harmless documents signed. If that happened there would be proof they were told.

As far as her Doctor goes I find it incomprehensible that he would tell her it was OK to fly and in fact just for insurance purposes tell her not to and document it. If he did not he is a fool, espeically for a high profile public figure.

Of course we would all want to have the baby at home but... As a father there is no way I would have taken that risk for that long, with amniotic fluiod leaking especially with a baby already diganosed with Downs Syndrome. One complication for Downs babies are heart issues and premies often have lung development issues as well.

Taking the chance of a 4-5 week early birth of a special needs baby on an airplane with no medical and ICU capabilities would be insane, irresponsible and inexplicable.

So what does this say about Sarah Palin and her husband?

Northern Exposure was a cute TV show  and this whole rugged, tough, outdoor Alaska meme is cute but frankly is not relevant to the rest of the US.

Is Sarah Palin ready to make life and death decisions for America when the one decision we can judge is this one?

Fade in to a black and white picture of Joe Biden working into the night in his Senate office....

Voiceover lists Biden's many accomplishments within the Senate and concludes "Qualified"

Fade into a sign that says (whatever the town that Palin was the mayr of), Population 5,844. Camera drives through the quaint little town...Voiceover says "3 term mayor"....and concludes "Qualified???"