So she was a foil to begin with. McCain knew he was going to lose, knew it was the right thing to do (lose), and he chose someone to help cement him in the imaginations of the wingnuts determining professional longevity as a true believer. It's not her fault. She reached the peak of her usefulness working as an oil company liason/Governor of AK, and would probably have gone on to be the chief hen at the bitching society.

And now we know she's a quitter. She isn't getting the attention she wanted, so she's going to march to her own drum and personally fail the half of Alaska that wanted her to be their governor. If I'd known she was such a flight risk, the prospect of her standing in line for succession might not have been so... unsavory.

But real quick, let's look at the qualifications that made her an ideal candidate for the RNC but a disaster to anyone from parts of the United States with reliable electrical service and more than a few thousand sober people:
1) Fox News
2) Small-town beauty queen
3) From the fringes of society
4) Moose Burgers
5) Bleeding from the eyes with anger (hockey mom)
6) Husband is apparently a professional snowmobile racer
7) Living off the state and flying her kids around like the state's royalty
8) That upstate/backwoods accent and complementary backward reading of what's around her
9) Inability to express anything more complex than paranoia about the media.

She was out of the media. Nobody cared anymore, except for the piles of American Alaskans of her home state who wanted to hound her out of their lives. The wannabe vibe I got from her immediately is somehow returning, as she goes out in a blaze of irrelevant ignominy. I don't think I ever mentioned her pregnant daughter and attempted shotgun wedding. I didn't watch Katie Couric skewer her (we expected a fluff bath, but got blood???).

I think it's great that unqualified women who are by the numbers textbook amoral assholes from the extreme fringe can now be considered credible RNC candidates. I wonder if Sarah knows American Blacks were given the right to vote before American Women. I wonder if Sarah knows any people of African descent (not Afrikans).

Census Data Here shows the diversity of Alaska's population by race

I've had the (swine) flu 10 days now, and the cough is getting stronger. So I went to check in with my doctor, since nobody in the house but me would be able to hear the gurgle of pneumonia using my stethescope. I'll be damned if I'm going to go get looked at for a virus.
As I told the receptionist/biller, insurance is still a scam, so we'll pay cash. It was a doctor visit, and it cost $75. He gave me samples of the antibiotic.
The rules are made by the insurance companies. Your doctor (if you're insured) doesn't work for you- he's subcontracted through your insurance company. They don't sell health, they restrict your access to it and keep the prices high. But now, after finally seeing my doctor after three years of relative health, I'm impressed by the economics.
Last time I paid the racket, they had just jacked me up 20% a third time to $650/month. So this doctor visit would be somehow worth $23,400 in premiums. How many poor people would be insured from this excessive payment? None. Any new drugs discovered? No. Anything innovated, except more efficient billing? Nope.
If I needed an X-ray, which was really commercialized in time for World War I, I'd be impressed that this ancient technology, really unchanged since they stopped burning skin, I'm sure the free market would have assigned a $25 dollar price tag, because that's what an X-Ray is worth. It's worth a few bucks to have it interpreted, but hell- you can lie on a parking lot and receive enough radiation to expose film lying under your body.
Anyway, if it weren't for the absence of a playing field, the playing field wouldn't be level. If you call the insurance agent or if I do, we'll get different quotes because of our zip codes. There is no 'group', but the population is 300,000,000. All at risk for diabetes since you're all lazy sugar addicts. All at risk for high blood pressure. All at risk for unseen heart attacks. All likely to have a car accident.
Insurers should be forced to observe the one single group (300,000,000 Americans), and use population statistics instead of their narrow groupings.
But none of this will make any sense until Congress establishes a national health insurance company, state lines disappear, and the insurers get very finely accounted.

I'm sure a prostitue would give a much better massage than your wife, who probably doesn't care how it ends....

The Republican Status Quo is what it is. Democrats get caught with gaudy baubles and half-ass money stings.
Is is because of the basic Victorian obsession of control, or is a mania caused by campaigning hard for Sharia-style behavior codes and beating the Gun-Ho drum about Lady Liberty?
I think the people who sell it best, that is the 'moral decline' and anti-'moral relativism (As if morality were anything but situational) blabbers are fascinated with control and sovereignty because these red-light ideas keep them awake at night otherwise.
I went to college, and I went to high school. I know the prudes lost their minds as soon as they tasted that tiny, intense pleasure. Now they have them lining up to give blowjobs, using their abstinence pledges as a bib.
Want a good time, check out the College Republicans sorority.  

I want to thank David Kurtz for synthesizing something's been bothering me since I first noticed a difference between principle and simple peevishness. 
There's only a few things government can be used for. FIrst, you can allocate public resources and maintain things. Then you can either work to start something or to end something. Then there's a Democratic way, with studies and forums and shouting matches and eventually 50% of what was desired may come out of a committee. And then there's the Republican way, which seems to take no steps along any clearly defined path to learning or development of the topic.
Simply admitting they understand the opponent's position is impossible for one reason. They aren't here to govern, just to allocate and confuse the issue- because the constituency the RNC panders to is now perfectly, Orwellian-style, senile, maleducated, void of perspective, or 'Walking the Appalachian Trail' munching on Combos they bought with money earned from saying 'People shouldn't walk the Appalachian Trail'.
I still have a 100degree fever, so I'm done. But thanks again.

I used to have health insurance. When I stated my business, I became a group in league with the local Chamber of Commerce. Me and my wife would be insured for ~$450/month. The boy would cost $8.
The following year, my rate went up to $550. Next year to $650. That's when I said 'no more'. You see, I was clearly being screwed. Nothing drives the cost of my health up by 20% in a year. But more frustrating is the real basic what-you-get and what-you-really cost thing.
My wife and I are very healthy. We eat well, we exercise, don't smoke, don't usually drink to excess. Sure, she goes for the annual OB/GYN, but I've been to the doctor's office once in the past five years. But what's crazy, I mean bat-shit insane, is the young one. At the time, he was at the practice every few weeks. For $8/month. In my area, a recent development boom brought lots of new bedrooms and babies, so there were hundreds of these little $8 guys sucking up all the health for peanuts. Are phony low rates being subsidized by exorbitant adult rates?
Why does it cost what it costs to insure people? Because it's a business interested in profit, and it doesn't make what it sells. Basically, this is retail, but they don't buy the product. They just sell it. Meanwhile they pile up money and expenses. Administrative assistants, garage attendants, junket budgets,. The health economy is really screwed up, if only because nobody has calculated what it costs to insure a healthy family.
I want a government-run health insurance company with fixed salaries, nobody gets a second secretary, and no bonuses will be given out. It will force the real companies to react, because in the first month of this project we would all be crazy to stay with the crap we have.
Instead of a silly 'office of consumer protection', we might be better off with an office of Consumer Attention. Pay attention, you! And stop getting screwed! As in other cases, the economy would have sorted this out a long time ago were it not for the huge money, many enablers, and our general confusion as customers.

So once again, if the Republican 'deny it, do nothing and go find money' policy toward public health was going to work, it would have worked. Open a new Insurance company, FHIC, drive a lot of companies out of business, or force them to correct themselves. I don't believe people will ever not want to become doctors, but I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to be an insurer. Just take some of those top salaries out of the math, and we're golden. 

The Republicans are just stupid, the only ones left are soaking up extra doses of whatever gas leaks into their filthy, evil dungeon club house. So to quickly dispense with their objections I will simply say that nobody but us Irish Philadelphians could possibly be right about anything, because only we make sense. It's not racism, it's humanity. We enjoy the right to a perspective, and if from that perspective we do a pretty good job, then we accidentally and fortunately got born here with the right to express it.

All my life I've been fascinated by the Iron Curtain countries and the underground movements there. The Slavs, Poles, Czeks, all those -anians had a serious tough streak and refused to forfeit to hegemony. But that was in Europe and Eurasia. Asian countries seem to have taken a different approach to it.

"I was right and he is wrong. You like me, since I'm the tough guy. Can't run a quarter mile, and my wife's lesbian novel isn't in print.I took every deferrment I could get to avoid Vietnam.But those bastards in the Federal Gvernment changed the rules. Said I had to have a kid. So I had a kid, and now she's a lesbian. You need to understand where my priorities are. Were. Now it's all about war, patriotism, all that crap. I'd volunteer right now, but the damned feds won't let me kill anything more exotic than a tied-up pigeon, or a lawyer, but I think that's legal anyway.

Cheney's right. Their entire platform was fear. Now we've upended it, and gotten to work on work, and Cheney's worried his Presidential Legacy will be the lack of RNC Presidents.

It's not easy, being smart, accomplished and creative, and still find yourself called upon to serve your country. Usually those people get sucked up by industries and allowed to fend for themselves together. Imagine the 'smartest guys in the room' at Enron. The Dark Side is Seductive.

Speaker Pelosi didn't torture. She didn't hire her buddies to go build special barracks with electrocution showers to kill US soldiers. She didn't make any IEDs, and she didn't make any decisions that resulted in bare-skin Hummers, insufficient body armor, pathetically insincere troop levels.

I'm cancelling my subscription to the Philadelphia Inquirer because they popped a scoop of John Yoo atop a smelly sundae of Rick Santorum and Charles Craphammer. Craphammer has been most strident in repositioning everything he's said as a tougher and smarter version of it. Santorum is lokoing for his Q, something he could use to get pop star attention from like-thinking assholes. But those are just wanna-be influencers, politicians.

Arlen Specter and I have some things in common. We orbit the same basic political ideals, we both stick out lick a cowlick, and we've been driven to the Democratic Party by the comic book sensibilities of the Republican National Committee. Das Committee.

Ideals exist in idealand. Absolutes exist at the edge of reality. Consistency is to be expected from a rock, or a moon, or blue. These are concepts. So when life, or cataclysmic change comes at you don't flinch. Stay there. When it's over, and you're interred in a box they will say, "Wow- he held on to his rigid superstitions and stuff despite overwhelming opposition from reality. Must have been either a crackpot or a genius."