is the need to piss us off.

I'm surprised it's taken so long for some people to realize that, but just today Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein start wrapping their heads around what I'd assumed to be an obvious truth. Republicans would lose the presidency just to piss us off, say by nominating the Marquis de Sade, putting him in only pink garters and having him address the Republican Convention talking about family values and Democratic elitism. What people mistake for Karl Rove's genius is simply his realization that you catch more flies with shit sandwiches than you do with honey, as well as the juvenile thrill people get by repeating "2+2=5" to get rid of all that faux intellectualism forced down their throats in public school (unlike the homeschoolers, who were taught 2+2 really does equal 5 and don't really get the joke even though they're the best at putting it over on others).

Now what's more worrying is that for the most part the Republicans can carry on its Theater of the Absurd *AND* get elected. So it's become a bit of bravado, which is quite frankly our only chance - if we tell the Republicans that they can't win the election by leading us into a pointless war, destroying the economy, *AND* running over the Constitution, they immediately bond together and cry, "Oh yeah? Watch this!!!" and off they go like the soulless blood suckers they are, seeking to top our hyperbolic dare with 3 hands tied behind the back. What's the new dare? Oh yeah, get the most anti-woman candidate you can find - as a female - and just blandly assume she'll take over the Democratic female vote. Don't think they didn't catch the sexist implications of this - the thought that a pro-choice woman might sing the body electric just for the chance to vote for a - oh golly gee, control the excitement already - a woman who wants to take away control over females' uteri. A family values advocate gayly (yes, next convention they'll go there) dragging her unmarried pregnant daughter and boyfriend on stage to show what exactly? IOKIYAR. It's something like Holy Water, the anointment, the baptism that erases all vestiges of sin once you're dipped in the waters of Republicanism. And now that Republicanism has become state religion, true conservatism doesn't stand a chance - it's simply not spiteful enough, can't sustain a movement. And as Bob Somersby notes, we never seem to think about fighting back - we always seem to infer that the public will come to its senses, that reason will triumph at the end of the day. I can't quite figure out why we would think that, but I'd guess it has something to with its own religiion - the religion of disinheritance, blessed are the meek. Well, good luck with all that. The best defense is an organized offense. Take them out early, take them out often. But you can't take out a high performance team with sloppy execution or reluctance to fight for the ball, and those are lessons we haven't quite mastered.

Anyone who says Sarah Palin doesn't have executive experience hasn't been looking.

She's been highly effective at getting her enemies fired, at grabbing quick money and exploiting state resources, at taking credit for things she didn't do, at flip-flopping while calling herself principled, at calling herself a traditional values person when she means old-fashioned cronyism, at treating the public coffer as her own personal credit card for which someone else has to pay the bills.

It's exactly this kind of executive experience and pathetic performance we've had these last 8 years. Sarah Palin would be perfect to step into the shoes of George Bush. She knows how to throw her weight around much more than her limited competence would allow for in a mere mortal. Meet the Gorilla from Wasilla. A heartbeat from disaster.

I stated this in my previous post, but it deserves its own post to highlight it.

Trying to show John McCain or Sarah Palin isn't a Maverick won't work. It's too tied to them now, they've branded themselves and the press can't keep from using Maverick and Straight Shooter no matter how off-target and pandering they are. Saying they aren't Mavericks just gives them more reknown, more stature.

So "Maverick" must return to its pre-James Garner nasty connotations - the cheater, the swindler, the guy with no moral scruples who's in it for himself, the one who doesn't play by the rules - who doesn't even know the rules and would be incompetent to play by them if he did. The loudmouth braggart, the one who shows up when work is done.

George Bush is the original Maverick - he stole the title from McCain in words and deeds, so deserves the title. Call it the Maverick Party - The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. Make being a Maverick the object of ridicule it deserves. These guys aren't off curing cancer in the middle of the night or building a new brilliant business model where none thought it could exist - they're simply lapping off easy profits from an unwitting public. Robbing the bank behind the scenes while playing an amiable game of poker in the parlor. But that's not a Hollywood bank - it's America's savings, natural resources and future wealth. No, we're not doomed, we'll manage afterwards, but the Mavericks have made our future and our children's future that much harder. For what? So they can live easier in Crawford and Kennebunkport pretending to be one with the people? Wrap the word "Maverick" around their necks and drive them from the town at sunset.

Okay, I haven't been watching that much of the convention, but a few thoughts surrounding politics the last few days.

How come the police in Bangkok are so much more restrained than police in Minnesota? The protesters at the convention did what exactly to deserve gassing and so many arrests? Is Thailand the new bastion of liberty in the world? What else will we outsource?

Joe Lieberman kept making me think of Squealer the Pig from Animal Farm, the way his eyes and mouth curled up at the edges. Man, if that speech doesn't get all his ties to Democrats cut, we have no spine.

Palin's lipstick joke - imagine Hillary saying that one and getting called out for using the "gender card". Even uttering the word "kitchen" was over the line last October. How things change - when you're not a Clinton.

Jay Rosen collects a list of likely GOP strategies to control & spin the Palin rollout. Well worth a read.

Byron York over at National Review Online goes where other conservatives don't, wondering how Republicans would respond if say the Democratic candidate brought his unmarried pregnant daughter's young black paramour up on stage.

The email from Wasilla pretty well defines Palin's weaknesses, if Democrats can only get it together enough to nail her on them.

But boy has it been impressive watching the Republicans pull together to portray Palin as a Saint even greater than St. McCain. And she's certainly held her own despite 18 million cracks in her story. But I can see why Republicans might expect the public and the media would suspend disbelief.

Nevertheless, I have a more optimistic feel than I had a few days ago, even though I think McCain and Rove executed a rather brilliant move with the Palin pick. She's rallying the troops, the excitement and media attention is so much better than with any other alternative - as Digby and others note, the first reality show candidate, though some might offer that to Obama - and when she goes down, which I now feel pretty sure she will, it'll be to be lifted up on the cross of the wrongs done by terrorists, liberals (do I repeat myself?), environmentalists and anti-Christians. I think Rove chose building the base over winning the current election, perhaps sacraficing the unwitting McCain in the process. Kay Bailey Hutchinson or Olympia Snowe or Carly Fiorina might have pulled in disaffected Hillary voters. Palin? No way. If Obama can focus on bread-and-butter issues and keep from killing Democrats' morale by giving in on wedge issues, he should have it won. The numbers are with him.

Speaking of Obama, where is he? Why's he so quiet? CNN has already given all its airtime to praising the Republicans - we can't just surrender all the media time to them, especially since some in the media are actually disgruntled and fed up with Republican tactics. 2 months left, no time to take a media sabbatical.

And yeah, Alberto Gonzales was found to have taken highly sensitive information on terrorism home and left it in his briefcase cause he forgot his safe's combination. And of course the Department of Justice decided not to prosecute, unlike say Sandy Berger who provided a field day for conservative pundits with his security breach.

Oh, mocking and irony in a speech? Yes, it's politics, folks. We do it here at TPM, Maureen Dowd has made a career of it as has Rush Limbaugh. It's part of the landscape. Fight back. But be carefull how to fight back against the lies - don't reinforce them as true, make them stand out as character flaws.

Palin's money grabs at state level and overspending $22 million at town level is the perfect analogy of the corporate nanny state. But take a page out of the Rove playbook - you can't just say she's not a reformer - you have to take the reform image and blow it up, bring out the warts and the ugly sides. Sure she's a reformer - she reformed her tax code to allow more pollution and provide windfalls for companies providing useless services and would reform environmental protection to drill drill drill and clearcut clearcut clearcut. She was so busy reforming for corporate America she never quite got around to reforming health care and roads. Kind of like another reformer, George Bush, who never got around to reforming his budget back to a surplus. Reformers - nice people, good intentions, lousy results.

Oh, 5000 people is a *town*, not a *city*, yet Republicans keep trying to sneak the 2nd word in (when not acting like Democrats are demeaning small towns). Alaska - our *biggest state*. I guess Dick Cheney was important coming from our 4th biggest, Wyoming (okay, I don't know if it's 4th and I don't care enough to look it up).

Perhaps someone should start a list of small town mayors who don't think they're ready to take over the presidency of the #1 superpower. "Humble mayors of America, we salute you". Balancing a small budget and building small roads is a valuable job, but somehow not the automatic makings of Abraham Lincoln v. 2.0.

As they say in the software industry - "Palin - just say no to alpha releases".

In 2003, federal spending for each Alaskan resident was $12,200. So for a typical family of 7 (snark), that means roughly $85K in government largesse. Now it's possible our new VP candidate can use her state governor's experience of our largest state and biggest welfare problem to solve one of America's more intransigent problems - the high rate of fatherless birth to minority mothers - by simply handing over what they get in Alaska, $36K per year to every new family with an additional $12K to each new unexpected child. As long as we don't call these payments "welfare", but instead call them say "incentive to deforest huge swaths of pristine Alaskan forest" or "a reckless effort to despoil long coastlines through inefficient drilling in hazardous climes", we can effectively end the welfare state as we know it (and re-introduce it as only the non-continental states know how to do). I know it's hard to imagine someone being more adapt at this kind of ripoff than our sparsely populated Republican agriculture states, but it's true. Alaska is our future, if it's motto is to be believed, so Go North, young family, and you'll be shooting moose and trapping beaver to your heart's content, presuming it doesn't freeze to a halt at -45 degrees. And you'll be part of God's great plan, the great giveaway whose name shall not be named except to call them "patriots".

So now that we have that little social issue out of the way, we can move on to a second ramification of our little Alaskan soap opera, the rate of shotgun weddings among backwoods white people. While I'm sure this homeschooled lad was fully versed in all sorts of good reasons to do the honorable thing by this young lady, and considering he's in Alaska where his minimum wage job prospects being 17 years of age and likely white mean $14/hour rather than the national level of $6.55, there is a part of me that questions, "Whither India?" Okay, it's not really a pre-arranged marriage, and I haven't heard of Alaskans building funeral pyres for living widows of fallen men, but it is likely that getting married at a very young age to someone you barely know has a high likelihood of failure. In fact, more fundamentalist Christians seem to have a bigger knack for this failure due to various reasons, due to younger marriages, less pre-marital co-habitation/getting acquainted, less flexibility in thinking about marriage, and so on. Not so surprisingly, devil-worshiping liberal Massachussetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country - likely because devil-worshipers have no reason to get married unless they actually want to live together, which kind of improves the chances of success, provided they happen to survive the satanic rituals. And while I can't speak for the child, I imagine a pair of grumpy parents that didn't want to be there in the first place really make charming examples to wake up to for the first 18 years or so of your life, perhaps driving the tot to drink or a self-destructive habit of voting Republican out of spite despite the obvious repeated failures and the inability to take responsibility for one's actions.

So now to finish up what probably lost its point some time ago, it's possible even that Palin quit that gas commission over moral dilemmas, rather than just that someone else's crook or crooked issue got chosen over her crook or crooked issue. Stranger things have happened. But let's not confuse naivete with wizened principles either. The world has lots of examples of once-principled actors like Mugabe or Marion Berry or Joe Lieberman who once served a useful, enlightened purpose and then turned into a cheap parody of themselves once drawn within the limelight. And it's not like Palin missed the chance to be greedy the 2nd time around, pushing through a quick profits tax on petrol companies to buy her state a few more snowmobiles. As George Bernard Shaw stated, "Virtue is insufficient temptation", and once Palin makes her way to Washington or perhaps as she's already discovered in Juneau, she'll find no shortages. But don't look for Republicans - they've made an institution of stealing as a means to smaller government and morals as a covering for their absence.

Should rephrase, "highly classified". Fredo forgot, and took them home Sandy Berger style (except these weren't old historic items) and forgot to store them in a safe place. This item will not make talk radio, there will be no accusations of treason, it's just business as usual in the Bush White House. Read more from Digby and Empty Wheel.and more Empty Wheel.

And don't forget as you kneel down beside your bed to pray tonight, that the biggest problem in Washington is the bitter. partisanship, and it's up to us to reach across the divide. I heard this on TV, so it must be true.

Uh, Senator Kerry, I don't know what you've been smoking in those 4 years since you ran, but defending Obama's foreign policy experience against Palin's complete lack of it by choosing "he took a foreign trip this summer" as your argument has to be one of the stupidest fucking statements I've heard in the last week, and that's facing some stiff competition. Lessee, Chevy Chase took a European vacation too. Is this the imagery you're trying to conjure up in your spirited defense of Obama? Please, Senator, maybe it's time to let someone else man the talkshow circuit, and you can get thee to rehab before you start wrecking cars and shaving your head.

Usually it takes about 15 or 20 years, the time until the expansion teams could for the title. Though in politics, it takes a bit longer than in sports. When did California send out its first serious candidate? Oregon? (ever?) Alabama AFAIK didn't have anything until the Civil War rolled around.

So now we're facing the '59 expansion kids, Hawaii and Alaska. Oddly enough, for their very different climates, they share the same record for their highest temperaturs - 100 degrees. And this year they're sending in quite different candidates as well. Will they have the same intensity in the end? We shall see, but it's next to certain we'll have an expansion kid in the White House come November. Maybe that will remove the asterisk next to their names in the record books (*non-continental). Maybe not. But it's the year the new kids on the block came into their own. Maybe one day we'll be watching a Puerto Rico - Wash DC playoff. And then again, maybe one day pigs will fly.