Are We Not Men?!

We Don't Do That...# who knows anymore..

2011-05-14T08:47:00.001-04:00

From www.CrooksandLiars.com

Turley: 'Torture Isn't a War Crime Because It's Never Beneficial. It's a War Crime Because It's Immoral'

By Heather - May 12, 2011

While I commend Sen. John McCain for speaking out on the Senate floor this week condemning those who have come out since the death of Osama bin Laden defending the use of waterboarding -- or as they want to call it, "enhanced interrogation" -- and claiming that the torture somehow worked to gain intelligence, McCain is still on the wrong side of the issue with saying he doesn't believe anyone should be prosecuted. Jonathan Turley rightfully pointed that out to Ed Schultz tonight.

He also expressed his disdain for the Obama administration and Attorney General Eric Holder's decision not to investigate and hold members of the Bush administration accountable for war crimes, which I share.

TURLEY: One of the most powerful things about McCain's speech is the truism that lies beneath it where he says, you know, being tortured is simply immoral. You know, I think much of the world is shocked by the debate that we're having. This whole question of did it yield usable intelligence has long been rejected by the world and by the United States and its treaties as a viable argument for torture. Torture isn't a war crime because it's never beneficial. It's a war crime because it's immoral, because it is a war crime.

And you can imagine how we look to the world in this debate when we have all of these officials who not only say that they ordered torture, but are trying to sell the American people on how good torture really is.

I also always cynically wonder about John McCain's political motivations any time he looks like he's doing the right thing. While I have no doubt that his personal experience with being tortured as a prisoner of war has as much to do with him speaking out as anything, he also still really doesn't have any use for any of the Bushies or George W. Bush after what they did to him when he ran against Bush for president and Karl Rove ran that whisper campaign against him in South Carolina. McCain always seems to have a penchant for doing the right thing if it means getting some digs in on his political enemies and ignoring wrong doings when it's politically convenient as well.

TPM has more on his Senate speech here: McCain Denounces Torture: 'The Very Idea Of America' Is At Stake (VIDEO):

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) took to the Senate floor Thursday to condemn waterboarding and other torture techniques, saying that the debate over these techniques is ultimately "about morality. What is at stake here it the very idea of America." [...]

In the time since Osama bin Laden was killed, a number of conservatives have sought to give credit for his death to George W. Bush, specifically for his decision to torture prisoners for information that they say ultimately led to bin Laden. McCain, who was tortured when he was a POW during the Vietnam War, has long been opposed to the interrogation methods implemented during the Bush Administration. [...]

He continued that he would oppose any legislation that would authorize a return to waterboarding or any other methods of interrogation that he believes "are torture, or cruel, inhuman, and degrading, and as such unworthy and injurious to our country."

McCain did offer some praise for those who implemented the techniques, saying that he understands why they were approved, "and I know that those who approved them, and those who employed them in the interrogation of captured terrorists were admirably dedicated to protecting the American people from harm." He also added that he doesn't believe anyone should be prosecuted for having used torture in the past.

McCain expressed similar sentiments in his op-ed at The Washington Post here -- Bin Laden’s death and the debate over torture.

And here's more from Turley's blog from guest writer Lawrence Rafferty -- Torture is still Torture, and it is Still Illegal.

I Love De Catholic Pope!

2009-04-19T00:02:00.002-04:00

The pope is an evil quack

Category: Religion • Reproduction
Posted on: March 18, 2009 9:14 AM, by PZ Myers

You've all heard the news by now, I'm sure: the pope was traveling to Africa, a continent plagued with widespread sexually transmitted diseases adn also, coincidentally, one of the few places where Catholicism is growing, and he dispensed a little medical advice:

Speaking to reporters on his way to Cameroon's capital, Yaounde, the Pope said HIV/Aids was "a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which can even increase the problem".
The solution lies in a "spiritual and human awakening" and "friendship for those who suffer", the AFP news agency quotes him as saying.

Consistent condom use is associated with a reduction in the incidence of HIV infection of approximately 80%. It does not increase the problem. I know the Catholic church is reliant on the denial of human nature, something demonstrated regularly by the activities of its own priests, but at some point they have to recognize a simple reality: people like to have sex. You aren't going to talk them out of it without warping their psychology in a truly pathological way (again, witness the Catholic priesthood), but you might be able to get them to practice sex in a way that protects their health.

Claiming that condoms increase the problem is disinformation and outright quackery — it's a lie that will kill people. That is what the pope is doing on his little tour, spreading lies, doing harm, and setting back efforts to materially help the afflicted. "Friendship" won't help the children of a woman dying slowly of AIDS, nor will gilt-robed old men whispering about "spirituality" do one scrap of good against a dangerous reality.

QUIVERFULL

2009-04-18T23:39:00.006-04:00

All God's children

The Quiverfull movement saddles women with a life of submission and near-constant pregnancies. One mother explains how she embraced the extreme Christian lifestyle -- and why she left.

By Kathryn Joyce

Photo courtesy Vyckie Garrison

Vyckie Garrison with her children, from left: Berea, 17; Chassé, 16; Wesley, almost 6; Hazelle, 13; Andrew, 10; and Lydia Jean, 8 (Angel, 23, not pictured).

March 14, 2009 | Vyckie Garrison wasn't sure she wanted to use her real name in this article. Until last year, Garrison (then Vyckie Bennett), a 43-year-old single mother of seven living in Norfolk, Neb., followed a fundamentalist pronatalist theology known as Quiverfull. Shunning all forms of birth control, Quiverfull women accept as many children as God gives them as a demonstration of their radical faith and obedience as well as a means to advance his kingdom: winning the country for Christ by having more children than their adversaries. This self-proclaimed "patriarchy" movement, which likely numbers in the tens of thousands but which is growing exponentially, bases its arguments on Psalm 127: "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They shall not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate." Quiverfull women commonly give birth to families of eight, 10 and 12 children, or more.

Unlike TV's "Big Love" polygamists or traditionally large Catholic and Mormon families, the Quiverfull conviction does not follow from any official church doctrine. It's a cross-denominational movement among evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants who have adopted some Catholic arguments against contraception and who have spread their ideas through the booming conservative homeschooling community.

Quiverfull has gained exposure through cable TV's fascination with extraordinarily large families, including the 18-child Duggar family. The Duggars, an Arkansas couple whose husband Jim Bob was a former Arkansas state representative, have appeared on several Discovery Health Channel specials about their immense brood and currently have a TLC reality show, "18 Kids and Counting," that focuses on the saccharine details of large family life.

While researching my book, "Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement," over the past several years, I spoke with dozens of women who follow the Quiverfull conviction. I also met a handful who had left the movement and now denounce the lifestyle as one of unceasing labor and exhaustion -- a near-constant cycle of pregnancy, childbirth and the care of small children -- for the women at its center.

Vyckie Garrison is one of those who lost faith in the movement. For years, she was among its lay leadership. She homeschooled her seven children, from her 23-year-old daughter, Angel, to her 6-year-old son, Wesley, and was active in Quiverfull's popular sterilization reversal ministries. She ran a monthly conservative family newspaper that published some of the movement's foremost advocates. The Bennetts were even named Nebraska's "family of the year" in 2003 by the Nebraska Family Council.

“You couldn't have found a more godly family,” says Garrison, a sharp-witted and frank woman who has updated her look since leaving the movement -- cutting her nearly waist-length blond hair and wearing light makeup to highlight an engaging smile.

She may have looked like the perfect Quiverfull wife, but Garrison was struggling to care for her seven children, three of whom have a rare bone disease, while juggling the demands of her husband and coping with difficult pregnancies. Though she preached patriarchy to her readers, practicing it at home required a major suspension of disbelief. Her husband, Warren, had been blinded in a work accident years earlier and had trouble keeping a job. Garrison founded her paper in part to create a sales position for him, to maintain the illusion of his heading their family. But Warren chafed against his dependency and was verbally abusive, Garrison says, browbeating her and the children into frightened compliance.
Garrison hadn't come to Quiverfull from a fundamentalist background. She grew up in an unstable household, moving frequently around Nevada with her mother and her mother's series of live-in boyfriends who molested her sister; she was rarely in school long enough to fulfill the potential her high grades indicated. At 16, she married a high school boyfriend in a friend's disheveled apartment and walked home in her wedding dress from a honeymoon in a nearby motel. They moved to Carson City, subsisting on Job Corps positions and crashing with hard-partying friends. In despair, Garrison found God while listening to a Christian radio station one night. When she began attending a Pentecostal church, a group of older, middle-class women shepherded the teenage Garrison through the basic lessons of biblical womanhood and submission, starting with the admonition that for wives, love is not a feeling but a choice. Garrison looked to her mentors as beacons of propriety, “like Princess Diana,” she says, giving her a glimpse of a better world.

Garrison's marriage ended, and she became pregnant with her oldest daughter, Angel, during a short-lived rebound affair. She moved to Iowa to be near her mother and met Warren at a church picnic. After getting married, Garrison followed a new pastor's counsel to homeschool her growing family, which eventually led her to the Quiverfull movement, where homeschooling, Quiverfull and submission are intertwined convictions. As Garrison says, "If you take one, you pretty much have to take it all eventually."

Accepting every pregnancy as a unilateral blessing meant some radical leaps of faith, however. Put into physical practice, Garrison says the lesson of leaders like Nancy Campbell, editor of the fundamentalist women's magazine Above Rubies and author of movement books like "Be Fruitful and Multiply," "was, if pregnancy can kill you, think of the missionaries who go off to foreign lands and put their lives on the line. It's no different if you're risking your own body or life." Indeed, Mary Pride referred to her mothers as “maternal missionaries.”

Garrison complied. She'd had her first three children by cesarean section, but after coming to the Quiverfull conviction, she was swayed by the movement's emphasis on natural (even unassisted home) birth. During one delivery, she suffered a partial uterine rupture and "felt like I'd been in a major battle with Satan, and he'd just about left me dead." The doctor who treated Garrison lectured her for an hour not to conceive again, but she felt that stopping on her own would be rebellion. When she turned to her leaders for inspiration, she received a bleak message: that if she died doing her maternal duty, God would care for her family. For six months, she couldn't look at the baby without crying.

For much of that time, her oldest daughter, Angel, effectively mothered the newborn -- not at all uncommon in the Quiverfull community, where daughters learn early to follow their mothers in domestic service and sacrifice.

The strain began to weigh on Angel as well, though, and Garrison says her daughter began acting out: feigning injuries, bruising her own face and exaggerating stories of trouble at home when Garrison sent her to intern for Nancy Campbell -- embellishments Garrison imagines sprang from Angel's inability to adequately convey her unhappiness to the fundamentalist believers around her. "She knew that something wasn't right, but she couldn't articulate it because we were family of the year."

Desperate, Angel made a clumsy suicide attempt with high doses of Tylenol and Maalox at the age of 21, checking herself into the emergency room after the attempt failed.

The episode shook Garrison, who drove from Norfolk to Nashville to retrieve Angel from a psychiatric ward. She began to see her younger children as joyless and traumatized. Trying to step between the children and Warren, she enraged him with her assertiveness. Her fatigue became overwhelming, and her blood pressure sank.

Garrison began corresponding with an intellectual atheist uncle whose gentle questions helped her acknowledge her mounting crisis of faith. She wrote her uncle: "If, as I kind of suspect, it turns out that I don't actually believe in a personal God, I know I'm going to be exceedingly pissed -- knowing that I've done my best with the hand I've been dealt and it's cost me a lot and it's worn me down -- only to discover midway through that the game is rigged and there's no way I can win."

Garrison fled to a friend in Kansas City for several weeks, though she eventually returned for her children, ending up in an ugly custody battle that she finally won.

When she told an editor at her paper that she was getting divorced, his first words were "Cheryl Lindsey" -- a reference to Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, an early Quiverfull leader who left her husband and the movement and was subsequently denounced and run out of business by her homeschooling peers. "I think he was warning me," Garrison says.

The experience of Garrison's friend Laura -- a mother of 11 who collapsed under the demands of the lifestyle -- also helps explain why many unhappy women are afraid to turn their backs on the movement, when they'll be left with scant financial resources, years without work experience, and a dearth of references from a community that often shuns them. Laura was near suicide when Garrison helped her leave; her husband took physical custody of all 11 children, and her oldest daughter seamlessly assumed Laura's duties and tended to the younger children, who now view their mother as a backslider deceived by Satan. “She feels so incredibly angry, so ripped off, so used. Her new motto is 'Fuck God.'"Me and Laura both say we hope we don't end up as atheists," says Garrison, with a laugh, though she can't think of herself as anything else. This month, Laura and Garrison began a blog, cheekily named “No Longer Quivering,” to describe their experiences exiting the movement. Currently, Garrison is attending a relatively liberal Salvation Army church in Norfolk. She doesn't go for the faith anymore, but for the people, people in "bad shape" who remind Garrison of her childhood friends. She affectionately jokes with the pastor's wife that she's glad they “don't take the Bible seriously.”

For Garrison, taking the Bible seriously is synonymous with the punishing claims of the Quiverfull movement. But having lost her faith in the Bible-proofed patriarchy principles she was taught, Garrison is unable to accept any of it anymore. "I don't think you can get equality out of the Bible. You can't get away from hierarchy, strictly defined roles for gender, authoritarianism, submission, dominating." Many believers might take issue with that, but to devout believers of Quiverfull, patriarchy is simply "the logical conclusion of what Scripture teaches," Garrison says.

As for herself, Garrison says, "I gave my life to Jesus, and he didn't do with it what I would have done.” She feels as though she's in free fall, her “feet planted firmly in midair,” as the evangelical luminary Francis Schaeffer once remarked of non-Christians.

Sometimes it's exhilarating, but often she wonders when she'll hit the ground. The chaos and confusion that follow leaving the movement is a powerful deterrent to other women who face losing their children as Laura did, or becoming overwhelmed like Garrison. “The only thing that keeps these mothers going is they have incredible motivation,” says Garrison. “They believe they're building the kingdom of God." Though her children are thriving in public school, Garrison struggles to find the energy to mother seven children without the incentive, and threat, that the Quiverfull conviction provides: a promise that obedient Christian wives may, through their meekness, their submission and their posterity, inherit the earth.

From SALON.com

TEABAGING FUCKTARDS

2009-04-18T23:13:00.002-04:00

This is what Frank Rich was talking about in his book "Whats the Matter with Kansas?"
How people can be leveraged to vote against their own best interests with knee jerk issues...

The "tea parties" are promoted as a "grassroots uprising" against "high taxes." Tea stands for "Taxes Enough Already." However, 95% of Americans will received a tax cut in the next year if the upcoming Obama budget passes. Only Americans with incomes above $250,000 will receive a small tax increase -- and even then their taxes will be much lower than almost any time in the last 80 or so years. This increase on the top incomes will help pay for some of the Republican-caused economic damage as well as reduce the budget deficits that the country has faced ever since the same income group received tax cuts after George W. Bush was elected. (This is similar to the tax increase in first Clinton budget that led to the great economy of the 1990s and large budget surpluses.)

The other complaint from tea party organizers is that President Obama is "spending too much." The increased spending in the stimulus package and upcoming budget funds education, unemployment checks, efforts to ward off foreclosures and other programs designed to help bring us out of the recession and provide jobs. These are programs that benefit regular people instead of big corporations and the rich.

So regular people who go to these corporate-organized tea parties are asking the government to undo their own tax cuts and reduce their own government services in order to keep taxes low for the very rich. I wonder if people have really thought this through?

And just so I don't forget:

They are not what they claim to be. They are not "spontaneous" or "grassroots." They are another corporate-funded campaign to trick people into supporting more cut taxes for the rich.

The idea is supposed to have started on February 19, when Rick Santelli of CNBC "spontaneously" complained about plans (click link for video) to help people avoid foreclosure, saying this is the government "subsidizing the loser's mortgages." Santelli called for organizing a "Chicago tea party" against helping people pay their mortgages. But investigators starting finding clues that the on-air rant was not spontaneous, and signs that the campaign was organized by the right-wing, corporate-funded Freedomworks . According to a March 2 New York Times story,

"Mr. Santelli's televised commentary appeared spontaneous to viewers. However, the Internet domain name ChicagoTeaParty.com was registered in August 2008 -- well before his commentary -- but not used until afterwards."

The events have been widely promoted by corporate-funded conservative PR professionals who specialize in "astroturf." This is a term for the use of money to create an appearance of widespread "grassroots" support. Currently the corporate-funded conservative lobbying groups Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity, are organizing the events and conservative media including talk radio and FOX News are widely promoting them. Support appears to be coming from Koch Industries, the largest privately-owned company in the country. According to the Think Progress blog post, Spontaneous Uprising? Corporate Lobbyists Helping To Orchestrate Radical Anti-Obama Tea Party Protests,

Dave Johnson

"Dave Johnson is a fantastic grandfather of the blogosphere."

Posted April 15, 2009 | 12:07 PM (EST)

Just, Go Away!

2009-03-07T17:34:00.001-05:00

“It must be Friday night because word leaks of yet another deadly executive order by President Obama,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, calling Mr. Obama’s intention “a slap in the face to Americans who believe in the dignity of all human life.”
Unless they happen to be Brown and from far away lands???

Some thoughts

2009-02-20T11:09:00.002-05:00

On the "Requirement" that everyone has to be insured, like having car insurance:

Health care reps — “from big insurance companies to lobbyists for consumers, doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies” — are “inching toward a consensus.” They agree that “comprehensive health care legislation should include a requirement that every American carry insurance.”

Of course big insurance wants a requirement that everyone be required to carry insurance. That’s all the more profit for them. If Obama does go for some kind of a hybrid of government coverage/private insurance coverage they at least deny insurance companies the right to discriminate. They also need to take some control over what premiums the companies can charge and put a cap on what profits they can make. But, most of all they need to deny insurance companies the right to overrule doctors when it comes to determining care for patients.

Of course the quickest and best thing to do would to put every American on medicare and then hire unemployed health insurance company employees to do the paperwork. But, that’s not going to happen until we come to a consensus in this country that health care should be a right and not a privilege for all citizens.

On a Truth Commission:

“not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments” means no justice. truth without justice is a public relations campaign. it is, frankly, bullshit. what mechanisms are in place to protect the whistle blowers?

this is just another opportunity to sweep criminal actions by the prior administration under the rug.

Jeez, Dems - show some spine for a change. Charge in with criminal indictments and do the job right! Quit dancing around the issue and either do it and do it right, or leave it alone. Wimps.

And when those facts point to crimes having been committed, what then? I think I know what Congress is doing here. They don’t want to directly go after the Bush Crime Family because that would cause a huge Republican’t backlash. So they will find out the truth and then they will have no choice but to ask for prosecution. At least I hope that’s what they are doing.

SCUMBAG!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2009-02-15T14:01:00.003-05:00

Bush Aide: Leahy Truth Commission Is ‘Terribly Dangerous’ Idea, Possibly ‘Deadly’»

Marc Thiessen, Bush’s former chief speechwriter, agreed. Not only would the investigations be hypocritcal, he said, but worse, they would be “terribly dangerous” because they would expose the “facts” of the U.S.’s interrogation techniques to Osama bin Laden:

THIESSEN: [T]he facts that they want to get out are the techniques we use to interrogate terrorists. The techniques that we used to intercept e-mails and communications and telephone calls. And when you get those facts out, it’s not just going out to the American people and to the viewers on television. It’s going out to Osama bin Laden. It’s going out to the terrorists who can use those information to get around our intelligence and plan the next attack.

So it’s very deadly — this is very deadly serious stuff. … And it’s terribly dangerous.

He also emphasized that the people Leahy might investigate “aren’t torturers, they’re heroes.” “They should be getting a parade on Pennsylvania Avenue,” he added.

YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SCUMBAG SHIT!

HEROES???!!!

I wonder how he would feel without Geneva Convention articles if he was a prisoner of an enemy of the US?

FUCKING YELLOW REPUBLICAN SCUMBAG!

WE DON'T DO THAT!

My Cousin, The War Criminal!

2009-01-28T16:28:00.003-05:00

"Michael Gerson called her “a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc.”

Well, Just Fuck You! Sailing around with a bunch of Fucking Neo-Con Cock sucking Fucking Killers! Sarah Palin?!!! This was your Next Fucking Evangelical move on this country you no good sack of fucking lunacy?!!.
Why are these people just allowed to return to society? Why are they allowed to reap the benefits of the pillage, raping and destruction they caused to this country and it's constitution, standing in the world, to the families of the soilders killed in that ginned-up war that lined the pockets of so many? Why????

From the New YorkerThe Insiders

How John McCain came to pick Sarah Palin.

by Jane Mayer October 27, 2008

While Brickley and others were spreading the word about Palin on the Internet, Palin was wooing a number of well-connected Washington conservative thinkers. In a stroke of luck, Palin did not have to go to the capital to meet these members of “the permanent political establishment”; they came to Alaska. Shortly after taking office, Palin received two memos from Paulette Simpson, the Alaska Federation of Republican Women leader, noting that two prominent conservative magazines—The Weekly Standard, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, Jr.—were planning luxury cruises to Alaska in the summer of 2007, which would make stops in Juneau. Writers and editors from these publications had been enlisted to deliver lectures to politically minded vacationers. “The Governor was more than happy to meet these guys,” Joe Balash, a special staff assistant to Palin, recalled.

On June 18, 2007, the first group disembarked in Juneau from the Holland America Line’s M.S. Oosterdam, and went to the governor’s mansion, a white wooden Colonial house with six two-story columns, for lunch. The contingent featured three of The Weekly Standard ’s top writers: William Kristol, the magazine’s Washington-based editor, who is also an Op-Ed columnist for the Times and a regular commentator on “Fox News Sunday”; Fred Barnes, the magazine’s executive editor and the co-host of “The Beltway Boys,” a political talk show on Fox News; and Michael Gerson, the former chief speechwriter for President Bush and a Washington Post columnist.

By all accounts, the luncheon was a high-spirited, informal occasion. Kristol brought his wife and daughter; Gerson brought his wife and two children. Barnes, who brought his sister and his wife, sat on one side of Governor Palin, who presided at the head of the long table in the mansion’s formal dining room; the Kristols sat on the other. Gerson was at the opposite end, as was Palin’s chief of staff at the time, Mike Tibbles, who is now working for Senator Stevens’s reëlection campaign. The menu featured halibut cheeks—the choicest part of the fish. Before the meal, Palin delivered a lengthy grace. Simpson, who was at the luncheon, said, “I told a girlfriend afterwards, ‘That was some grace!’ It really set the tone.” Joe Balash, Palin’s assistant, who was also present, said, “There are not many politicians who will say grace with the conviction of faith she has. It’s a daily part of her life.”

Palin was joined by her lieutenant governor and by Alaska’s attorney general. Also present was a local woman involved in upholding the Juneau school system’s right to suspend a student who had displayed a satirical banner—“Bong Hits 4 Jesus”—across the street from his school. The student had sued the school district, on First Amendment grounds, and, at the time of the lunch, the case was before the Supreme Court. (The school district won.)

During the lunch, everyone was charmed when the Governor’s small daughter Piper popped in to inquire about dessert. Fred Barnes recalled being “struck by how smart Palin was, and how unusually confident. Maybe because she had been a beauty queen, and a star athlete, and succeeded at almost everything she had done.” It didn’t escape his notice, too, that she was “exceptionally pretty.”

According to a former Alaska official who attended the lunch, the visitors wanted to do something “touristy,” so a “flight-seeing” trip was arranged. Their destination was a gold mine in Berners Bay, some forty-five miles north of Juneau. For Palin and several staff members, the state leased two helicopters from a private company, Coastal, for two and a half hours, at a cost of four thousand dollars. (The pundits paid for their own aircraft.) Palin explained that environmentalists had invoked the Clean Water Act to oppose a plan by a mining company, Coeur Alaska, to dump waste from the extraction of gold into a pristine lake in the Tongass National Forest. Palin rejected the environmentalists’ claims. (The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Coeur Alaska, and the dispute is now before the Supreme Court.) Barnes was dazzled by Palin’s handling of the hundred or so mineworkers who gathered to meet the group. “She clearly was not intimidated by crowds—or men!” he said. “She’s got real star quality.”

By the time the Weekly Standard pundits returned to the cruise ship, Paulette Simpson said, “they were very enamored of her.” In July, 2007, Barnes wrote the first major national article spotlighting Palin, titled “The Most Popular Governor,” for The Weekly Standard. Simpson said, “That first article was the result of having lunch.” Bitney agreed: “I don’t think she realized the significance until after it was all over. It got the ball rolling.”

The other journalists who met Palin offered similarly effusive praise: Michael Gerson called her “a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc.” The most ardent promoter, however, was Kristol, and his enthusiasm became the talk of Alaska’s political circles. According to Simpson, Senator Stevens told her that “Kristol was really pushing Palin” in Washington before McCain picked her. Indeed, as early as June 29th, two months before McCain chose her, Kristol predicted on “Fox News Sunday” that “McCain’s going to put Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, on the ticket.” He described her as “fantastic,” saying that she could go one-on-one against Obama in basketball, and possibly siphon off Hillary Clinton’s supporters. He pointed out that she was a “mother of five” and a reformer. “Go for the gold here with Sarah Palin,” he said. The moderator, Chris Wallace, finally had to ask Kristol, “Can we please get off Sarah Palin?”

The next day, however, Kristol was still talking about Palin on Fox. “She could be both an effective Vice-Presidential candidate and an effective President,” he said. “She’s young, energetic.” On a subsequent “Fox News Sunday,” Kristol again pushed Palin when asked whom McCain should pick: “Sarah Palin, whom I’ve only met once but I was awfully impressed by—a genuine reformer, defeated the establishment up there. It would be pretty wild to pick a young female Alaska governor, and I think, you know, McCain might as well go for it.” On July 22nd, again on Fox, Kristol referred to Palin as “my heartthrob.” He declared, “I don’t know if I can make it through the next three months without her on the ticket.” Reached last week, Kristol pointed out that just before McCain picked Palin he had ratcheted back his campaign a little; though he continued to tout her, he also wrote a Times column promoting Senator Joe Lieberman, of Connecticut.

Anyway, if you want to read the rest of this shit...go ahead, I'm not wasting bandwith on it.

We don't do That Part who the fuck knows!!!!

2009-01-12T16:02:00.002-05:00

Scarborough: ‘That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard’ that torture doesn’t work.»

Fucking retards! Give me 20 minutes with Joe Scarborough and I'll have him admitting to Fucking Micheal Jackson up the ass while Mika applied the lube! Fucking Idiots!!!!!!

Quote:

"Scarborough condescendingly asked Freeland, “Should we just bring them a birthday cake and ask them what soccer match they’d like to see?” In fact, the interrogator who successfully brought down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — and who has written and spoken publicly about how torture doesn’t work — told Laura Ingraham last month he broke one insurgent after he gave him a copy of Harry Potter ."

Woman's Clown - Car Vagina let's Out 18th Passenger!

2008-12-21T11:05:00.002-05:00

Michelle Duggar believer who endorses the Quiverfull movement and the teachings of asshat Bill Gothard, just brought her 18th child into the world yesterday, and husband Jim Bob said of the baby “The ultimate Christmas gift from God”, and they are looking forward to having more.

As someone said on an internet forum, there has got to be a pathology to this. Is the pathology her fundamentalism or is it something more? Just because someone can get pregnant doesn’t mean that they should keep doing so. It is unhealthy physically and her children cannot grow up in a mentally normal environment. The older ones are little parents to the younger ones and are slaves to the family “cult” as Michelle keeps spreading her legs for her husband and lays around growing babies inside her and getting lots and lots of media attention. Is that it? Do some women simply love the attention they get from the doctors, friends and family members when they are preggers?

Medical experts warn that a woman’s uterus has to be exhausted and extremely prolapsed from many pregnancies over the years, and that over the years a woman’s uterus loses the elasticity and strength to carry children safely. And with age, a woman also has a higher risk of producing children with birth defects and Down’s syndrome. Does this worry Jim Bob? Is he concerned about his wife’s safety? Nope…“We both would love to have more,” he said.

(A bit about this Bill Gothard from Wikipedia: Gothard was also accused by some of being hypocritical for not practicing what he preaches about conflict resolution,[16] and for his “quiverfull” teachings that married believers should eschew birth control and have as many children as possible, given that Gothard himself is unmarried and childless, even into his 70s)

And now for something completley different

2008-12-20T11:57:00.003-05:00

Jeff Beck and Jennifer Batten

Well, second one after the election, I believe...

2008-11-27T10:20:00.004-05:00

I think I will continue on with this little blog to store up and collect the two-faced hypocrites from the roght, who as Buch and company emptied our pockets and standing in the world, cheered him on. And so it begins: From CrooksandLiars.com

Bay Buchanan Suddenly Finds Religion on Waste, Cronyism, Corruption and Government Spending

From Larry King Live Nov. 25, 2008 while discussing the potential stimulus package Obama is proposing, Bay Buchanan suddenly finds religion on government waste, cronyism and corruption.

This Republican cheerleader suddenly doesn't like that these things might go on when she sat silent about them all through the Bush administration. Bay, where were you at while they were playing football with pallets full of our money in Iraq and while Halliburton was blowing up $70,000 trucks at cost plus to our government? Where were you when they were giving no bid contracts for Gulf Coast reconstruction and they used about ten middle men in the process before finally hiring some illegal alien to do the actual work and stealing our tax dollars?

I could go on, and I'm sure the readers here can give a longer list of the things that Republicans have ignored while Bush was in charge of the theft of our tax dollars. To see the feigned outrage from those who cheered Bush along the entire way now that we're in a mess of Bush's making so huge it's hard to imagine how we'll come out of it is nothing short of infuriating. Bay, you're a day late and way more than a dollar short.

About Sarah's Wiring

2008-11-05T11:18:00.003-05:00

View of a crowd in Sydney Australia after annoucement of Obama's victory

Well, this is a great day... and I'm looking foward to not having to collect all these tidbits about loonies on the campaign. So, one for the history books to ponder. The observation that is made clear on a Wonkette coments post by " Bearbait" about the way Sarah Palin thinks...and it is a very good window into the particular way her brain is wired:

bearbait says at 11:00 am, November 5th, 2008

Here’s a good ol’ fashioned Palin quote, just for old time’s sake. Got to get them in before she becomes, “Sarah Who?”:

And I do recognize this is an historical event, no matter which ticket of course prevails, there too, it’s so well for the progress this country is making, and barriers of course being removed and glass ceilings being shattered, again, as the representation on both tickets will show,” Palin said.

It’s not linear thinking, nor is it really circular…more like swirling, eddying thinking.

I Love it. And hopefully, we need not ever concern ourselves with her again. Just those like her, that do not think linear, but in a swirling method.

YES! Election Night Post!!!

2008-11-04T17:36:00.004-05:00

Well, It's here and I* have no info, not even exit poll crap. But I have a feeling..... And to celebrate that feeling, I'm posting some coments on Sarah Palin... lest we all forget in the days to come!
To set the stage, Sarah, the Snowbilly, has just stopped for some coffee in her home town of Wasilla, after voting today:
As she waited for her beverages, a local reporter asked the governor how she envisions her role in national politics if McCain loses the election. Palin did not hesitate to muse about a future that might not include being vice president come January.

“You know, if there is a role in national politics, it won’t be so much partisan,” she said. “My efforts have always been here in the state of Alaska to get everybody to unite and work together and progress this state.”

“It would certainly be a uniter type of role,” she added.

Asked if she had any regrets about the campaign, Palin bemoaned “the state of journalism today.”

“The blogosphere, the two-, three-hour news cycles, where just too much is reported based on gossip and innuendo and things taken out of context,” she explained, adding that she’d like to help improve the profession because she has “great respect for the world of journalism.”

And now, those amazing coments, via crooksandliars.com:

Palin as a uniter is a stretch. She describes herself as being 'hardcore' pro- life and appeals to the right's base. She's not someone who understands the root of ideological differences so she's not going to be able to discover a middle ground. She doesn't understand cities, liberals, and those who don't see things the way she does. Also, Bush used to call himself a uniter too. I think they just mean that people should unite behind their views.
Posted By: | November 04, 2008 at 02:14 PM

?The blogosphere, the two, three hour news cycles, where just too much is reported based on gossip and innuendo and things taken out of context,? she explained, adding that she?d like to help improve the profession because she has ?great respect for the world of journalism.? Yeah I think Barack Obama knows a thing or two about internet rumors. Palin had to put up with people dissing her wardrobe, Obama has had his religion and citizenship openly questioned in the "blogosphere".

The blogosphere she so resents is probably the only place she's qualified to pursue her career in 'journalism.' I think this woman will be lucky to stay employed by the people of Alaska after this election.

Posted By: maggs | November 04, 2008 at 02:18 PM

Well, based on these comments, it's obvious that Gov. Plain has the chutzpah for national politics. Unhappily, I think she's going to find out within a week or so that the same liberal east coast elites who picked her up, dressed her, and put the words up on the teleprompter for her to read are pretty much done with her. It's back to the great white north for you, honey. *wink*

Posted By: nhunter | November 04, 2008 at 02:22 PM

Palin says she has "great respect for the world of journalism".....so maybe that's why she refused to speak to so many journalists? Pure Palin logic, I guess. Go home, Barbie, practice and study a bit and perhaps you can return with some credibility when you learn to communicate in clear and acceptable English language sentences. Or, better yet....just go home!

Posted By: Susan | November 04, 2008 at 02:28 PM

Sorry Gov. Bemoan it all you want, presidential campaign news isn't sent by carrier pigeon. It's all about information in the 21st century. Campaigns can't control it once it's out, they can only react or not react. And simple platitudes don't cut it anymore.

Posted By: Sorry Gov. | November 04, 2008 at 02:39 PM

Maybe she could take one or two English classes before becoming the "world reknown' journalism savior. It might make it easier for the rest of the United States to be able to understand what the heck she is trying to say. But what the heck, she can try it out on the polar bears that are not in danger of extiction.

Posted By: Dismayed | November 04, 2008 at 02:53 PM

Caribu Barbie is about to fade into the Alaskan sunset... And will only be seen on SNL re-runs! And we will all muse, just what was he thinking - Sarah Palin for VP - preposterous!

Posted By: Hans Anderson | November 04, 2008 at 02:54 PM

Asked if she had any regrets about the campaign, Palin bemoaned "the state of journalism today."

"The blogosphere, the two, three hour news cycles, where just too much is reported based on gossip and innuendo and things taken out of context,"

Sarah, cry me a river!

You, John McCain, and the McCain campaign are responsible for disseminating almost all of the "gossip and innuendo and things taken out of context" in this Presidential campaign.

Posted By: nOoG | November 04, 2008 at 02:56 PM

"?great respect for the world of journalism.?"

(spit take) the blatant hypocrisy she spews deadpan is almost like it was written by SNL as an absurd sketch character. Wow.....

Well if this makes me an elitist snob I can live with that but I sure won't miss those over pronounced r's and that "folksy" cadence that accompanied the politics lite babble (wink)

Posted By: Wink Martindale | November 04, 2008 at 02:59 PM

I hate to pile on?oh, wait, I don't?but she really does lie outrageously. Not one single press conference! Not one! But she unites clear-thinking people in the opinion that she's a wack job, I'll admit that. I can't wait to hear the McCain people letting their hair down.

Posted By: MattinPA | November 04, 2008 at 03:00 PM

It's a little difficult to believe, but Palin actually has a journalism degree. She should have had training in college on conducting interviews, the difference between factual reporting and biased slant, etc. I know this because I also have a degree in journalism, so I know what is involved in the curriculum. Maybe it's because she skipped around to so many different schools before finally graduating - what was it, five different colleges in six years? Anyway - what I really don't get is that for someone who has a college degree in a communication field, one would think that she would have been better trained to communicate - prepared to be the object of interviews, think on her feet and answer "out of the blue" questions, etc. Based on her performance over the course of the campaign, I don't see her having the skills or experience to make any kind of difference in the journalism field. Not to mention that she's such a whack job that nobody outside the hardcore conservative right is going to listen to her anyway...

Posted By: John | November 04, 2008 at 03:11 PM

The funny thing is that the ONE degree Palin has (that took 5 schools and 6 years to get) is in JOURNALISM. She shot herself in the foot concerning the press. Couric's interview was entirely fair. She failed to name a single publication she reads AND a supreme court decision she disagrees with. She told the media she doesn't know what a vice president does. She trashes the MSM but even the campaign staff have trashed her for being a 'diva' and 'going rogue'. Stop whining about the media, Sarah. Enjoy governing Alaska until you fail to get re-elected.

Posted By: Renae | November 04, 2008 at 03:21 PM

Left Wasilla millions in debt, left its once pristine lake rimmed with strip malls and water so polluted the salmon are gasping for oxygen, lied about the bridge to nowhere, chased down a guy who used his office e-mail for private use & did the same thing herself, - defamed and slandered obama without losing a beat or looking back - and she thinks she has a future? not unless the voters have a collective lobotamy - back to wasilla for this right wing dunce - they can have her

Posted By: winchestereast | November 04, 2008 at 03:27 PM

Oh, that's rich. Sarah Palin, the woman who wouldn't know the Constitution from constipation, is now going to parachute in to save journalism? I look forward to that. If anything, the blogs and Internet-borne journalism SAVED this election cycle from the hyper-active smear-and-spin efforts of the McCain campaign. Mainstream media, bound by a rigid contract to proffer equal time and ensure an equivalency of ideas, allowed some truly caustic lies to be disseminated. Fortunately, those pesky blogs were there to hold McCain's vile propaganda operation to account. Go back to Alaska, Sarah. Hunt moose from helicopters. Engage in your fringe prayer warrior politics. And ham it up with Todd's secessionist pals. But leave the Lower 48 be in peace. We beg you. Seriously.

The scary and sad part is that she comes on like she really believes in what she says. McCains' own campaign handlers know everthing they wanted her to say and do was only a script to get votes but she REALLY seems to believed in all that hype and all the lies, that's why people in her own camp thinks she's a whack job. She's a perfect fit to be Grand Wizard of the KKK but certainly not Vice President of the United States.

Posted By: Joe the native american | November 04, 2008 at 03:45 PM

Well, Thats some. There are hundreds, literally!! But I just wanted to capture the emotion this evening ( afternoon for the comments).
OK, Theres history to be made!!!
Zambello!!

Good One From You Tube

2008-10-26T12:17:00.001-04:00

This Woman is just Fucking Dangerous!!!!

Palin Bizarre Rant Warns of Communist Nightmare State

The Whatsup Guys...8 years later

2008-10-25T17:06:00.000-04:00

Just want to save some of these...

2008-10-25T01:15:00.003-04:00

These are some comments from ThinkProgress.Org about Palin's "Fruitfly" statements of October 25th.
_____________________________________________________________________
OceanDog Says:

LOVED Richard Wolffe’s smackdown of Palin on Keith…

"I’m going to be as restrained and measured as I possibly can about this. This is the most mindless, ignorant, uninformed comment that we have seen from Gov. Palin so far, and there’s been a lot of competition for that prize. Fruit flies are … a standard scientific model in genetic research along with a whole range of other organisms and cells, including mice, rats, there’s nothing fluffy or funny about it."

satirev Says:

The profound depth of this woman’s ignorance is nothing short of astounding. Every time she opens her mouth, she proves what a buffoon she is. No wonder Rove wanted to sequester her. I have yet to observe her complete a complete original thought into a well-constructed, gramatically-accurate sentence! She’s one pathetic “tool” at this point. I’m anxious to see what occurs when she returns to Alaska at this point. I’ve heard talk ranging from total censure to impeachment.

Since it broke yesterday that when she became a “candidate” she called her staff and had them alter expense reports to make it appear that the good taxpayers of the state were paying for her children as “invited guests” instead of “citizen leeches” as they more aptly became.

In reading this outrageous abuse of power in using the taxpayer’s money, one instance comes to mind: Las Vegas - Governor’s meeting. She occupied a room for 5 nights to the tune of $700+ per night and attended only one (1) meeting which consisted of 4 hours!! She also had the taxpayers fund her kids transportation and meals.

The future for this woman becomes more grim by the moment. Just like Joe the Plumber who has descended into the male laughingstock and collateral damage of the capricious trainwreck called the McCain Campaign, Secessionist Simpleton Sarah has become Joe’s female counterpart. Her political future is over and she will even top Dan Quayle now in being the dumbest veep candidate ever in our history.

Thanks to Sarah, Dan Quayle’s political capital just went up!

CageyCretin Says:

Sciency stuff scares her. Fruit flies, stem cells, and all sorts of sciency stuff that attempts to slap gOD in the proverbial face. Well, Sarah says “thanks but no thanks” to science. Science cannot be wed with religion… I guess they’re the same gender, and we know how her gOD feels about THAT sort of thing….

Sarah Palin, bringing science back to the Dark Ages in the name of gOD.

Interesting that she did not say that research would be funded to seek cures: she offered a massive welfare program. (just pointing out the hypocracy — myself, I think that the welfare AND scientific research is needed).

Palin just continues to amaze us all. Not only with her ignorance (the novelty of that is starting to wear off, believe it or not), but the PRIDE she appears to take in her ignorance.

Drosophila research has yielded benefits for many physical conditions afflicting humans — autism, brain disorders, cancer — just to name a few. My mother is a retired developmental biologist who spent a great deal of time on fruit fly research, which was also the subject of her doctoral dissertation. She could enlighten us all on what the benefits of this research have done for us over the years far better than I ever could.

I suspect that Palin’s answer to people who have special needs consists of praying to God for healing. Anything else would be far beyond her comprehension.

Fuck You RNC

2008-10-22T23:37:00.005-04:00

Or Palin for that matter, Maybe she got the talking points from the RNC, or maybe they just came naturally to this dimwitt...
What ever, I found this short but cogent piece at the Smirking Chimp by RJ Eskow:
_________________________________
Excuse Me, But Didn't McCain and Palin Just Say That the Victims of 9/11 Weren't 'Real Americans'?
October 22, 2008 - 11:25am
Some questions about a colleague's work came up yesterday during a business call. We couldn't ask her about them, though. Why? Because she was somewhere between the 95th and 99th tower of the World Trade Center's North Tower on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Sarah Palin says that the 'real America' is in small towns and formerly red states. She says the people in the cities and in the North aren't 'pro-American.' Yet most of the people who lost their lives at the World Trade Center lived in the cities and suburbs.

Not real Americans? The firefighters who sacrificed their lives by going back into a burning building to save lives? Not real Americans? The friends and colleagues who died in pitch black crowded stairwells in some Boschean vision of hell? Or broke a window and jumped from the 101st floor rather than continue to feel their skin grow hotter and hotter?

Not real Americans? The wives and husbands who continue to grieve, the parents who lost sons and daughters, the children whose healing is yet to come?

They're saying that Northern Virginia isn't the real America, either. Joe McCain says it's "communist." Another McCain spokesperson says it's not even the real South.

Nothern Virginia. You know - where the Pentagon is.

I Guess this fits pretty well with the post directly beneath!

2008-10-19T17:36:00.004-04:00

History does in deed repeat itself, if good men and women do nothing

This one's for posterity.

2008-10-19T11:31:00.001-04:00

A year from now, I won't believe this.
From Crooksandliars.com:

First Matthews tried to get Bachmann to tell his audience, per Sarah Palin's homage to "pro-American places," what parts of America are anti-American. She danced around the question and kept harking on the talking points programmed into her playback. So then he tried another tack:

Matthews: How many Congresspeople, members of Congress are in that anti-American crowd you describe?

Bachmann: [Deer in the headlights]

Matthews: How many Congresspeople you serve with -- I mean, there's 435 members of Congress --

Bachmann: -- well right now --

Matthews: -- how many are anti-American in that Congress right now that you serve with?

Bachmann: You'd have to ask them, Chris, I'm focusing on Barack Obama and the people he's been associated with --

Matthews: But do you suspect that a lot of the people you serve with --

Bachmann: -- and I'm very worried about their anti-American nature.

Matthews: Well, he's the United States Senator from Illinois, he's one of the people you suspect as being anti-American. How many people in the Congress of the United States do you think are anti-American? You've already suspected Barack Obama. Is he alone, or are there others?

Bachmann: [Deer in the headlights]

Matthews: How many do you suspect of your colleagues do you suspect of being anti-American?

Bachmann: I would say, what I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look -- I wish they would. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America? I think the people would love to see an expose like that.

Hey McCain Palin...SUCK ON THIS!!!

2008-10-18T17:25:00.003-04:00

Obama draws a crowd of 100,000 in St. Louis!!!!
update: Barack Obama attracted 100,000 people at a Saturday rally here, his biggest crowd ever at a U.S. event.

What The Fuck is it with OHIO???!!!!

2008-10-17T00:09:00.001-04:00

Tina Fey on Palin: "If she wins..I'm leaving earth!"

2008-10-13T12:19:00.003-04:00

Tina Fey told TVGuide she'll be "done" if John McCain and Sarah Palin win the election next month.

The "SNL" veteran who has come back to play the Republican Vice Presidential candidate (and whose own show, "30 Rock," is still nowhere to be seen), said, "We're gonna take it week by week. If she wins, I'm done. I can't do that for four years. And by 'I'm done,' I mean I'm leaving Earth."

Fey also said it's a busy but exciting time for "SNL."

"Election time is always good for [SNL] and this is a bonkers election," she said. "And that lady is a media star. She is a fascinating person, she's very likeable. She's fun to play, and the two bits with Amy [Poehler], that was super fun," Fey says.

For the full story, pick up the October 20th issue of TV Guide, plus the following week's issue (October 27th) featuring TV Guide's cover story on 30 Rock's Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin.

THANKS TEXAS, FOR SO MUCH YOU'VE GIVEN SINCE 2000

2008-10-13T06:59:00.005-04:00

Yup, the "Purple Heart Lady"
This photo had become an image that had an historical effect on me.
It's one of those photos that achieve a certain landmark importance, that become time capsules, icons to a brief moment captured in an instant, alive for eternity. The sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square at the end of World War Two, The child running down the road with her skin burned off from Vietnam, etc...
This photo had become my own timeless capture of America at it's ugliest. This useless waste of cells, this veritable bag of shit, with a Purple Heart Band-Aid, poking fun at John Kerry's service, and by doing so, at every veteran who has ever received one. This walking sack of macaroni and cheese eating refuse had come to MY CITY, MY STATE, to show her "cleverness" and her support for the idiot-king boy child.
And what do I find on the net?
THE HORROR, THE HORROR! SHE"S BACK!!!!
And boy, all I have to say is it's way too bad the South did not win that fucking war! I really have come to believe that they have evolved some down-right faulty genes.
Thanks Texas, thanks for it all! Why don't you just go Fuck Yourself!?

She turns up at a dinner with John McCain, and is saluting a woman who is now in Jail on charges of shooting a Doctor who has performed abortions. Hmmm, this is who McCain hangs with. And they are up in arms about Obama and Ayers. Ayers, who has down something useful with his life. And this woman, a waste of cellular material.
From the dailyKos:

Purple Heart Lady - she's back

by The Australian

Sat Sep 06, 2008 at 05:13:33 AM PDT

I was watching the Daily Show online clips of the Republican Convention. When they showed shots of the crowd, I thought hey, I know that woman from somewhere. It couldn't be. Is it? It is. I'm pretty sure. Slightly more boofier hair now, but same angle-downed nose and receding chin when she laughs. Short of a DNA test I can't be 100% certain.

But dang, even if I'm wrong (many women may look similar), it sure as heck looks like her.

New hat this time around, and new buttons pinned to it.

Here she is this year at the 2008 RNC, cheering a long term Senator Vietnam war hero candidate who married an heiress who's family fortune was made from a delicious compliment to fries and burgers:

And here she is four years ago at the 2004 RNC, jeering a long term Senator Vietnam war hero candidate who married an heiress who's family fortune was made from a delicious compliment to fries and burgers:

Now, I can't even begin to fathom what goes through the mind of a person like this. And I'm not even going to express an opinion of how disgusting I found the whole thing four years ago, and I'm not even an American so I can't even imagine how you guys felt.

Any decent person would believe that she'd be too ashamed to show her face in public ever again. But nope, there she is in all her hypocritical glory.

Bugger me if this doesn't truly symbolise the modern American Republican party and its hypocrisy. Not just of the double-talking leaders and pundits, but the party faithful themselves.

UPDATE: At Gitmo Bay's suggestion in the comments, I googled her (even further info about her provided by boofdah in the comments):

Pat Peale is the woman in the photo wearing a "purple heart" band-aid, ... One of her sons works for Phil Gramm, ex-Republican Senator from Texas.
from the comments section:
She's a classic type that H.L. Mencken used to so brilliantly skewer.

"A [wo]man full of faith is simply one who has lost, or never had, the capacity for clear and realistic thought. [Sh]e is not a mere ass; [s]he is actually ill. Worse, [s]he is incurable."

Who is she? Well let's take a look: ( the blog is from 2004, so the links are all down)
from democraticunderground.com

September 7, 2004
By punpirate

I want you to remember the name Pat Peale.

Pat Peale is the woman in the photo wearing a "purple heart" band-aid, mocking John Kerry's war wounds. She's also mocking every soldier, sailor, airman or marine ever injured in battle, for whatever reason.

If you think she's just another mindless twit who happened to slap a joke on her chin on her way into the Republican National Convention, think again:

She's known Karl Rove since he was "a youngster."

She's fixed dinner for George W. Bush.

She's also whipped up lunch for that hungry Republican crew of "rioters" in Florida who were determined to stop that nasty ol' vote count from proceeding in the 2000 election.

One of her sons works for Phil Gramm, ex-Republican Senator from Texas, and the other of her sons works for Fred Thompson, ex-Republican Senator from Tennessee.

When Texas Democrats went to Oklahoma to prevent redistricting, she chased after them, doing her "chicken dance" for the cameras.

She's not an accidental delegate, caught with a stupid band-aid on her chin. She's one of the insiders of Republican Texas politics, and she had this to say about her wearing of a "purple heart" band-aid which she intended to shame John Kerry, but ended up shaming all with the medal:

Peale said she does not apologize for her comments or for the bandages, but that she did not mean to insult Purple Heart recipients.

"I'm not apologizing for what I did. It was in jest," she said.

Peale said her behavior pales in comparison to the antics of crowds of liberal protesters outside the convention center.

"There were certainly a lot of things coming from the protesters that were not in jest," she said.

She said along nearby 42nd Street, there were several demonstrations that took pornographic themes. Other protesters, according to Peale, rode bicycles and attempted to run delegates off of the sidewalks. Many were anti-war but shouted angry rhetoric about President George W. Bush.

"It's not fair for the police and the city of New York to pay to protect us from the protesters," she said, adding she believes in the right to protest but that many of the demonstrators have acted "belligerent."

Pat, you believe legitimate protest is horrible, compared to your denigration of a medal signifying suffering in battle. I've got some ABC-type news for you.

No apologies necessary on my part, Pat. Not for me, anyway. I managed to get through three years of military service during a war I despised. No Purple Heart for me. I was lucky.

But, there were the people I knew who didn't fare so well, some who died, some who were injured, one with his arm cut off in a wartime accident, and another, on patrol inside the Cambodian border, who had a grenade rolled at him while his trousers were down, taking a shit. Geez, Pat, it only took off his right hand and laid shrapnel up and down his right side. No big thing, huh?

I'll leave it up to my father to mention his injuries in the "good" war, if he wants, but I will say that they did involve falling out of a burning bomber, his face on fire, broken bones which the Germans did not set and months in prison camp.

Then there's my girlfriend's father, first a Marine in that same "good" war, later a Green Beret, earning, the hard way, a Purple Heart at Guadalcanal and a Bronze Star and Navy Cross in New Guinea.

Then there's all those injured in Korea, Viet Nam (including Kerry) and the first Gulf War.

Then there's the thousands of killed and wounded coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Quite a few people with brain damage and missing limbs.

No biggies. Band-aids would do, right?

What have the chickenhawks been teaching you about honor and sacrifice, Pat Peale? Nothing, from what I can see. They have been teaching you, however, how to smear a veteran who happens to be running for President against your favorite son. In doing so, you've mocked and smeared all veterans - even those haplessly partisan swift boat vets who would choose to lie out of mistaken loyalty to comrades or George W. Bush.

You can say you meant no disrespect, but that's the Republican way - smear and then say, "hey, that's not what I did." Believe me. You did just that - exhibit disrespect - on your chin.

The chickenhawks are the people who are in charge of this government of ours at this moment and who are seeking your vote, and who are claiming to be tough on terror. These people ran from danger, Pat Peale. Bush got preferential treatment to get into the Air National Guard ahead of hundreds of others to avoid Viet Nam (don't believe it? Watch 60 Minutes this Sunday and listen to Ben Barnes). Dick Cheney got five deferments, and applied for his parenthood deferment as soon as his wife, Lynne, was pregnant.

These people avoided service and are now making fun, by proxy, of people who were injured in battle. And they're using you to do it.

Read the following names of high officials in our current government and see if you recognize them: Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Cheney ("more important things to do"), Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Karl Rove, Spencer Abraham, Elliot Abrams, Don Evans, Andrew Card, Asa Hutchinson, John Ashcroft, Dennis Hastert (current Speaker of the House - his knees were bad, but damn, he could still wrestle in college).

None of these people served a minute in the armed forces as active duty soldiers, in any capacity. All found a way not to do what John Kerry volunteered to do.

Or how about these well-known personalities? They heavily promoted our most recent wars and/or a Draconian reactionary conservative agenda in this current administration and past administrations:

Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Bill Bennett, Newton "Newt" Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Reagan, Michael Savage, Joe Scarborough, Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Meldrim Thomson (former governor of New Hampshire who spent not a whit of time in the military, but introduced a bill to order the equipping of the NH National Guard with nuclear weapons), Jeb Bush, Saxby Chambliss (who beat triple-amputee veteran Max Cleland in Georgia by putting him on political posters next to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden), Tom DeLay (House Majority Leader, who once said there were no spots for him - a Caucasian man - in the military during the Viet Nam war because Blacks and Hispanics had snapped up all the spots) and Trent Lott (former U.S. Senate majority leader).

None of these people served, either. These are the people that you, Pat Peale, squeal over, fawn over, swoon to meet. Let's see, what name needs further mention?

Oh, yes, Pat Peale is very fond of George W. Bush. The very same guy who left the Air National Guard well before his term of service was up, refused to take two consecutive annual flight physicals (violations of regulations punishable by board of inquiry and courts martial, if necessary), and still can't prove where he was for months at a time.

Pat Peale, you're the woman who makes fun of people with Purple Hearts, and does it because you're a friend and admirer of George W. Bush, the man who wants all of us to re-elect him to the Presidency. Naturally, you couldn't have had your fun without the help of Morton C. Blackwell, who passed out the fun bandages with the neatly drawn purple hearts on them. Blackwell is another fun guy, who was a proud member of the Emergency Committee to Defeat Al Gore.

As with your friends above, Morton never was in the military, but he did manage to become a board member and executive director of the Council for National Policy, and to co-found The Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. He even found time to be a special assistant to Pres. Ronald Reagan.

Of course, Pat, you're entitled to favor whomever you wish in this political contest, are entitled to believe that the service your friends did not have to perform should be done by others, and that the rich and well-connected should suffer neither the same obligations as those who did serve nor the need to acknowledge the sacrifices of others. Go right ahead and vote for George. You'll make him and his friends very happy.

I'll bet you'd even send us one of those "purple heart" band-aids. If we pay for the postage and handling and make a nominal donation to George W. Bush.

But, Pat, I don't want your nasty little joke. And I'm betting that a lot of veterans out there don't want it, either. All they want is a little respect, and maybe some of the help with their injuries that the government promised them when they went away to fight on your behalf, something neither you nor the Republican Party are eager to provide.

In fact, I'm betting that, come November 2nd, a fair number of veterans won't want George W. Bush and his merry band of chickenhawks - and that they won't because of you and what you represent.

punpirate is a New Mexico writer who knows that a band-aid is all that veterans can expect to get from this new breed of Republican.

And Another Snippet from 2004:
Heads up Florida, Pat Peale (RNC bandaid lady) is headed your way

An excerpt from an article in the Gainesville Daily Register, Sunday, October 10, 2004 by Andy Hogue (cretin4 on free republic)

Pat Peale, former Cooke County Republican chairman (sic) is preparing to lead a batallion of political soldiers to the battle ground state of Florida. The group is participating in a statewide campaign called "The Mighty Texas Strike Force". The Republican Party of Texas, confident that George W. Bu$h will draw more voters statewide than Sen. John Kerry in the Nov. 2 general election, is hoping to share the wealth of GOP voters with "battleground states", according to a press release.

The mission: To campaign for Bu$h and other Republican candidates in the battleground states and to make sure that hurricane-damaged areas have polling places. The "Strike Force" is sending Texas Republicans sometime this week (the day and time of their departure is being kept "top secret", Peale said) to states where the polls indicate a narrow race between Bu$h and Kerry.

Peale's team will head to Palm Beach County, Fla., the site of a notoriously close election between Bu$h and Vice President Al Gore in 2000. "This time is even more important because with the damage from the hurricanes, people are more concerned with getting their lives up and going." Peale said, adding that votng could be a low priority for those rebuilding their homes and businesses. "Many polling places have been destroyed (by the storms). We want to be down there to see that we have no problems with the polling places".

"By making sure that we do not have the pitfalls that we had the last time, we protect the integrity of elections and make sure that votes are not disenfranchised," Peale said.

For more information on the Mighty Texas Strike Force contact Peale at (940)665-7708.

Sorry no linkee, the local paper doesn't put the Sunday edition on the internets.

Everyone should should safer now that Pat Peale, the RNC bandaid lady, is protecting the integrity of the elections in Florida.

And so I close the page on this photo. I now know the story behind it, and somehow it has become just a snapshot, what it should be seen as. I know who this piece of Texas shit is, and the genes behind her. What a fucking nightmare it's been.

2008-10-13T00:06:00.002-04:00

The Folks at Wonkette.com are bloody wack.
This piece on Nader had me on the floor tonight, so for posterity, I'm lifting it, along with the coments. You have to read the coments, right to the end. They get really progressivly sicker and funnier.
ENJOY!

…Or You Could Just Not Give Ralph Nader Money

Ralph Nader spent 1000 man-hours coming up with this fundraising plea: “I’ve had a lot of hummus. Hummus is nutritious. And delicious. It makes you stronger and healthier. So, Bloomberg’s report on the Lebanese claim to hummus got me to thinking about an idea that would help us raise funds to push our substantive agenda onto the front burner of American politics. If you donate to Nader/Gonazlez by midnight tonight an amount that has the number three in it (three being the number of lemons in my mom’s hummus recipe), we’ll e-mail to you Rose Nader’s hummus recipe tomorrow.” Eh, sorry, we don’t have e-mail. [Hotline]

COMMENTS:

FMA says at 3:39 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply How much for Bill O’Reilly’s falafel recipe? [Photo] Hamster says at 3:40 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply I like hummers too, Ralph. [Photo] El Bombastico says at 3:41 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply “I’ve had a lot of hummus. I know hummus. I worked with hummus. And babaganoush… you are NO hummus.” [Photo] shortsshortsshorts says at 3:41 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Nader’s been eating that hummus for years, and look how great he looks. [Photo] Hamster says at 3:41 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply What about McCain’s recipe for Cornpone? [Photo] McCainsThirdNipple says at 3:42 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Lamers is a REAL bus line? Well, I just learned something new today. [Photo] echoroc says at 3:44 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply WTF? x10. I voted for him twice, though. What can I say? I like me some hummus. [Photo] freakishlystrong says at 3:45 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply What the fuck?!! [Photo] SayItWithWookies says at 3:46 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply You need a recipe to mix chickpeas, garlic and lemon juice?! Geeze — send me three bucks and I’ll give you a fabulous recipe for grilled cheese sandwiches — passed on to me by a mysterious Indian shaman. FMA says at 3:47 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply McCainsThirdNipple: When I was in New Orleans this summer, I saw tour buses from a company called — seriously — Hotard. [Photo] Dr. Zoidberg says at 3:47 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Wait…what? [Photo] dannygutters says at 3:48 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Actually, that’s a freaking good hummus recipie. It’s in rose nader’s out of print cook book called It Happened in the Kitchen. It’s a pretty good book if you like ground lamb or being lectured to. [Photo] AngryBlakGuy says at 3:48 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply …if there is any justice in this world; the international market for hummus has just defaulted and crashed! [Photo] ManchuCandidate says at 3:48 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply This campaign is sponsored by the number 3 and the letters F and U. [Photo] Serolf Divad says at 3:48 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply I didn’t realize you could actually make hummus… or that you’d want to for that matter. [Photo] shortsshortsshorts says at 3:49 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Vigilante: your thoughts? [Photo] Texan Bulldoggette says at 3:51 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Hummus originated in the Middle East. I didn’t know Ralph & Mother Nader were also Islamic terrorists. longjohnson says at 3:51 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply You hummus! [Photo] mookworthjwilson says at 3:52 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply $.03 to Ralph…a good hummus recipe to me… [Photo] Vewol Mevemont says at 3:57 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply I have something for Ralph that’s kind of like hummus but a darker shade of brown. [Photo] Advocatus_Diaboli says at 3:58 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Is the hummus flavored with parrot, by any chance? http://wonkette.com/402815/ralph-nader-talks-sadly-to-bird-contemplates-wearing-bear-suit I like me some parrot-flavored hummus. [Photo] ProfessorJukes says at 3:59 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Hummus is friends with terrorists. [Photo] Serolf Divad says at 4:02 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Here’s your dilemme: Superduperawesome hummus recipe that’ll get you laid with that hottie canvasser from the Green Party when you tell her you made it yourself BUT John McCain wins the presidency. vs. Supermarket hummus that’ll score you points for “trying” even though it’ll take a few more dates to get to second base even BUT Obama wins the presidency. It’s your choice. [Photo] CrabtreesBludgeon says at 4:03 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Wait - this is REAL? This did not come from the twisted minds of our beloved Wonkette overlords?! I think my brain just sploded (it kinda looks like Hummus). [Photo] Doglessliberal says at 4:04 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply freakishlystrong: that is really the only reaction, yes Tra says at 4:05 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply … an idea that would help us raise funds to push our substantive agenda onto the front burner of American politics … Nader, nader … Oh, you mean the hummus guy? [Photo] lawrenceofthedesert says at 4:12 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Shameless pandering to the garbanzo lobby. [Photo] Doglessliberal says at 4:13 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply SayItWithWookies: and tahini, don’t forget the tahini! [Photo] Gopherit v2.0 says at 4:17 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Betcha vigilante is out buying pita chips RIGHT NOW!!! [Photo] Gopherit v2.0 says at 4:19 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Bill-o’s falafel with Nader’s hummus? That’s a guaranteed belly-ache right there. [Photo] TGY says at 4:21 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Thanks, thanks, Ralph Nader, for making us laugh at squashed garbanzo beans yet again. [Photo] JoeFannyPack says at 4:22 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply As I always suspected, Nader is 1/222nd Satan. [Photo] OzoneTom says at 4:23 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Blend
* 1 can garbanzo beans/chickepeas
* 1/4 cup olive oil
* 1 tablespoon lemon juice
* 1 teaspoon cumin Send me money. Or if you like it greek-style (yeah, I’m lookin’ at YOU): http://greekfood.about.com/od/appetizerssalads/r/hummustahini.htm [Photo] OuterBoroughPrincess says at 4:24 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply shortsshortsshorts: To be fair, he is older than Methuselah, a.k.a., John Sidney Walnuts! McCain MCMXXXVI. [Photo] TJBeck says at 4:38 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Holy crap, I thought that was some crazy thing you guys made up. I just came here to see how much more crack Jim had been smoking, but that’s the actual text from the Nader thing. [Photo] Maus says at 4:48 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply freakishlystrong: With enough light and time, most any third-party candidate is exposed as a nutbar. [Photo] NoWireHangers says at 4:54 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply I might have donated 3 cents if they mailed the hummus to me. [Photo] jagorev says at 4:55 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply I would kill for some hummus right now. I’m going to stop by the Israeli place on my way home. El Bombastico: Perfect. [Photo] Dave! says at 5:02 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply I tried to donate .03… but the minimum donation is $1. Oh well, back to store bought hummus. [Photo] sezme says at 5:47 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Thanks, Ralph, now I’ve got a craving for hummus. Tell you what, though. I’ll stake my hummus against your mother’s, and the winner gets all your campaign money. The loser, of course, will get the hummus. [Photo] shortsshortsshorts says at 6:51 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply sezme: Between the money and hummus, you might want to go with winner takes the hummus. Natard has not a dime to his wittle name. [Photo] Kaclon says at 8:18 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply dannygutters: If you repost the recipe here, none of us have to donate, and all of us get hummus! Everyone wins! [Photo] Weeping Jesus says at 9:50 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Is Nader’s partner really named “Gonazlez”? That’s pronounced: “Gone assless”, you know. Just guessing that Nader has done just that…just sayin’… not the most handsome dude in the world and all that, ya know? Cannaya says at 10:28 pm, October 9th, 2008 - Reply Wait, Ralph Nader’s mom is still alive? [Photo] Lascauxcaveman says at 12:49 am, October 10th, 2008 - Reply SayItWithWookies: YOU FORGOT TAHINI! (and Poland) Damn, I love me some hummus, but why would anyone want to go to the effort of making it themselves when the shit they sell at Costco is pennies a ton. That stuff with the blue and white lid, whateverthehell its called? “Mesa” or somesuch. Freaking addicting. And dirt cheap! I spread that stuff on Ritz crackers, wheat toast, nutter butter’s, my wife’s breasts; everything, man. Absolutley dee-lish. [Photo] JRD says at 2:14 am, October 10th, 2008 - Reply You know most of you people on this site deserve what our government is doling out to you.
Nader is brilliant, and has been right for a very long time. He deserves respect, not your idiotic blathering. GROW UP, or maybe you like bending over and letting our government shove it up your _ _ _. [Photo] NotLaughing says at 2:31 am, October 10th, 2008 - Reply JRD: What’s the first letter of - - -? [Photo] JRD says at 7:19 am, October 10th, 2008 - Reply I just knew you weren’t smart. Tra says at 11:33 am, October 10th, 2008 - Reply JRD: Look everyone! It’s the last Nader supporter! Take a picture, quick! Oh wait, it’s just Ralph. Never mind. [Photo] JRD says at 1:36 pm, October 10th, 2008 - Reply No it’s not Ralph, but it is a Ralph Nader supporter. I’ll give you half right. Your getting better!

Watch the Fucktard from the video below get scared about his Obama "Monkey"

2008-10-12T20:56:00.002-04:00

Posted by Gen. JC Christian, Patriot

Possibly the Best Fucktard Award!

2008-10-12T15:13:00.001-04:00

Racist Moron Palin Clowns Continue To Be Racist Moron Palin Clowns

The only thing “funny” about this latest video clip from a Palin Nuremberg Rally is that it happened in Pennsylvania, where Barack Obama holds a commanding double-digit lead. That’s right, these people will soon be the helpless subjects of a BLACK TERRORIST PRESIDENT, who will tragically extend their miserable lives by ensuring they have health care and social security, while employing their trucknutz-loving adult children on huge New New Deal infrastructure projects in Pennsylvania backwaters just like this one. [YouTube via Alex Balk/Gawker]
Thanks to Wonkette.com and Gawker

More Fucktards from the Mid West

2008-10-12T15:02:00.001-04:00

Tim Russo recently showed you the hate-filled ignorant base of support for McCain/Palin in Ohio. Make no mistake, that was no anomoly. The kind of conservatives drawn to Grampy and Bible Spice rallies in Bethlehem, PA look and sound as if they are playing from the same disgusting playbook of bigotry, ignorance and anger. They are proud to hold non-reality-based views, and attend rallies where these false messages are stoked for them by the two people on the ticket running for the highest offices in the land who know better. (KeystoneProgress.org)

Here's some of the dialogue:
Man #1: “That guy gets elected, he hangs around with terrorists.”
Filmmaker: “Who are the terrorists?”
Man #1: “Obama.”

Man #2: “Obama’s a terrorist! You know that?!”

Man #3: “Obama’s a Muslim, he’s a terrorist himself!”
Filmmaker: “Do you really believe that, sir, that Senator Obama is a terrorist?”
Man #3: “I believe that he supports terrorism.”

Man #4 (walks by, randomly screaming): ”Commie faggots!”
Woman #1: “Socialism! Communism!” (random people yell “Go to Russia!” “socialist swine” and “European socialist!")

Filmmaker: “You think they should die?”
Man #5: ”Everyone dies, don’t they?”

and look at this incredible exchange:

Protestor: “Palin voted to have women pay for their own rape kits. My friends shouldn’t have to pay for their own rape kits. How would you feel about that?”
McCain supporter: ”She should die!”
McCain supporter #2: ”She should pay double!”

I see her as a comentator on Fox...

2008-10-11T09:38:00.004-04:00

Liberal Alaskan Laws Smear Sarah Palin
So what’s the deal, is this gal a rotten crook? Will the Obama wolves throw her in the slammer with her corrupt robber friends? Lil’ impeachment action? We don’t know, you’ll have to ask Jeffrey Toobin or his rich lawyer commentator friends. The point: in 25 days, she’ll return to governing a state where everyone hates her slimy guts.

from wonkette.com

FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT ENJOYMENT - FUCTARDS FROM THE MID-WEST

2008-10-09T23:12:00.001-04:00

These People are totally fucking wired wrong. Period.

Just to lighten things up!

2008-10-08T18:04:00.003-04:00

From Wonkette.com

Sarah Palin To Drop Puck At Hockey Game Alongside Other Hockey Mom, Okay

On October 11 we’ll get a preview of Sarah Palin’s future career: a former insta-celebrity akin to a reality show star who flies around the country to show her face at sports games and clubs and say funny slogans like “Dontchaknow?” for five minutes to a bunch of drunks. Her rate will be $200 in scratch-off tickets, a Bud Lite-sponsored dildo and two baskets of fried shit for supper. This is her future, and it all kicks off October 11 when she drops the hockey puck at a Philadelphia Flyers game alongside some hockey mom contest winner. She has no idea what she’s getting into.

From a standard-issue “Free ____ Night!” sports promo release:

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the nation’s most popular hockey mom, will join the winner of the Philadelphia Flyers regional search for the “Ultimate Hockey Mom” contest and drop the puck at the ceremonial opening face-off as the home team Flyers host the New York Rangers at the Wachovia Center on Saturday, October 11 at 7 p.m.

“Because of the tremendous amount of publicity she has brought to our sport, we invited the most popular hockey mom in North America to our home opener to help us get our season started,” said Comcast-Spectacor Chairman Ed Snider who founded the Flyers in 1967. “We are very excited she has accepted our offer and we are very proud of the publicity she is generating for hockey moms and the sport of hockey.”

This will be hilarious, because Flyers season-ticket holders are rabid, drunk trash who will almost certainly (a) lead a chant of “SHOW YOUR TITS, SHOW YOUR TITS” and (b) throw batteries at her when she doesn’t show her tits. There will be vomit everywhere.

Dangerous and Sick People Part II

2008-10-08T04:45:00.003-04:00

What Happens When You Stack The Deck With Your Own Judges??

2008-10-08T04:40:00.002-04:00

From CrooksandLiars.com:

Federal Appeals Court Stays Miers/Bolton Subpoenas

By Nicole Belle Tuesday Oct 07, 2008 2:50pm

Former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and President Bush's current Chief of Staff Josh Bolten do not have to cooperate -- at least this year -- with a congressional committee investigating the firings of U.S. Attorneys, a three-judge federal appeals panel in Washington ruled Monday.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said as a practical matter, the case cannot be resolved before the current session of Congress ends, so a new Congress will have to decide whether to pursue the matter.

In June, Democrats controlling the House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena to Miers seeking to compel her to produce documents and to appear before the committee to testify about the firings of nine federal prosecutors.

The committee also issued a subpoena to Bolten to produce documents.

Both fought the subpoenas, and District Court Judge John Bates ruled Miers and Bolten must honor the congressional demands.

The appeals court reversed that ruling.

"The present dispute is of potentially great significance for the balance of power between the Legislative and Executive Branches. But the Committee recognizes that even if expedited, this will not be fully and finally resolved by the Judicial Branch ... before the 110th Congress ends on January 3, 2009," the ruling said.

Bush League Justice strikes again.

Dangerous and Sick People

2008-10-07T06:07:00.002-04:00

From Talking Points Memo:

Who They Are, What They're About

By Josh Marshall

So we have McCain today getting his crowd riled up asking who Barack Obama is and then apparently giving a wink and a nod when one member of the crowd screams out "terrorist."

And later we have Sarah Palin with the same mob racket, getting members of the crowd to yell out "kill him", though it's not clear whether the call for murder was for Bill Ayers or Barack Obama. It didn't seem to matter.

These are dangerous and sick people, McCain and Palin. Whatever it takes. Stop at nothing.

Just Fuck these People, They Are Not Worth The Air They Breath...

2008-10-06T21:18:00.006-04:00

From the Washington Post

In Fla., Palin Goes for the Rough Stuff as Audience Boos Obama

By Dana Milbank

CLEARWATER, Fla. -- "Okay, so Florida, you know that you're going to have to hang onto your hats," Sarah Palin told a rally of a few thousand here this morning, "because from now until Election Day it may get kind of rough."

You betcha. And the person dishing out the roughest stuff at the moment is Sarah Palin.

"I was reading my copy of the New York Times the other day," she said.

"Booooo!" replied the crowd.

"I knew you guys would react that way, okay," she continued. "So I was reading the New York Times and I was really interested to read about Barack's friends from Chicago."

It was time to revive the allegation, made over the weekend, that Obama "pals around" with terrorists, in this case Bill Ayers, late of the Weather Underground. Many independent observers say Palin's allegations are a stretch; Obama served on a Chicago charitable board with Ayers, now an education professor, and has condemned his past activities.

"Now it turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers," Palin said.

"Boooo!" said the crowd.

"And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'" she continued.

"Boooo!" the crowd repeated.

"Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.

(yes, that's right, that was yelled out from the crowd..., what a bunch of cretins this woman appeals to! CZ)

Palin went on to say that "Obama held one of the first meetings of his political career in Bill Ayers's living room, and they've worked together on various projects in Chicago." Here, Palin began to connect the dots. "These are the same guys who think that patriotism is paying higher taxes -- remember that's what Joe Biden had said. "And" -- she paused and sighed -- "I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America, as the greatest force for good in the world. I'm afraid this is someone who sees America as 'imperfect enough' to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country."

"Boooo!" said the audience.

Well, All I can say is "Fuck You Palin", go back to your ass backwards little town and wait for Jesus to return.

A very thoughtful Op-Ed from Gail Collins

2008-10-05T11:13:00.003-04:00

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: October 3, 2008

The Republicans were euphoric over Sarah Palin’s debate performance, particularly the part in which she stood tall and refrained from falling off the stage. “There are conservatives and Republicans across America who are ... breathing a sigh of relief,” said Pat Buchanan on MSNBC, adding that “of the four debaters we’ve seen, she was the most interesting, attractive of them all.”

Palin did indeed answer each question with poise and self-confidence, reeling off a bunch of talking points that were sometimes totally unrelated to the matter at hand. When she was asked to respond to Joe Biden’s critique of the McCain health care plan, she announced: “I would like to respond about the tax increases,” cheerfully ignoring the fact that tax increases had never been mentioned.

After the recent Katie Couric unpleasantness, Palin told the viewers that this time they were getting a chance to hear her “answer these tough questions without the filter.” And, indeed, her answers were murky in the extreme. She railed repeatedly about government regulations getting in the way of the private sector, then announced that the financial rescue plan “has got to include that massive oversight that Americans are expecting and deserving.” She said that she didn’t want to discuss what caused global warming, only how to ease its impact.

She appeared to agree with Dick Cheney’s manic theory that the vice president is a member of both the executive and legislative branches, although it’s hard to tell since she began her answer this way: “Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president’s agenda in that position.”

When the moderator, Gwen Ifill, asked under what circumstances the candidates would consider bringing America’s nuclear weapons into play, Palin said: “Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet, so those dangerous regimes, again, cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, period.”

It’s hard to remember that a month ago, very few people had ever heard of Sarah Palin. McCain sprung his vice-presidential selection on us at the last minute, possibly under the impression that the country felt things had gotten too boring lately, and would appreciate the excitement of having a minimally experienced political unknown serving as backup to a 72-year-old cancer survivor.

Since then, she has spent most of her time going from one Republican rally to the next, repeating chunks of her convention speech, which have grown more disjointed with every stop. (In an airplane hangar in Ohio recently, she told the people of Youngstown she was happy to be there because Alaska has, per capita, the nation’s most “small planes and small pilots.”)

For reporters hoping to question her, she has been determinedly unfindable, a Judge Crater from Juneau. And after the Couric debacle, you can bet your boots that the campaign is going to take Palin’s debate performance, declare victory and wrap her up until after the election.

This is all a terrible shame. For us, mainly. But also for Palin, whose intelligence and toughness may wind up buried under the legend of her verb-deprived ramblings.

Palin is, in many ways, a genuine heir to the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, which tried to make sure that future generations of American women would grow up feeling they had every right to compete with men for all the best rewards and adventures the world had to offer. She never seems to have had a single doubt that she could accomplish whatever she set her mind to. When she got involved in politics, she used the time-honored male route of cultivating powerful mentors, then pushing them out of the way at the first possible opportunity. When she was governor, she did what very few female politicians do, and ignored all the subsidiary issues in order to put all her bets on one big policy payoff in the form of a new state energy policy.

Then, somehow, she concluded that her success in clawing her way to the top of Alaska’s modest political heap meant she was capable of running the United States.

This entire election season has been a long-running saga about the rise of women in American politics. On Thursday, it all went sour. The people boosting Palin’s triumph were not celebrating because she demonstrated that she is qualified to be president if something ever happened to John McCain. They were cheering her success in covering up her lack of knowledge about the things she would have to deal with if she wound up running the country.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 4, 2008, on page A19 of the New York edition.

When All Else Fails

2008-10-05T09:50:00.004-04:00

Wait a minute, they have been lying since day one!
It's just going to get worse. I believe every time this idiot from
Alaska tells one of these talking point lies, she should be verbally eviscerated
for what she is, a faulty wired apparition that bleeped across the radar for a few weeks in 2008...
from Crooks and Liars:

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin brings up Bill Ayers at a campaign stop in Carson, California:

"Evidently there's been a lot of interest in what I read lately," she said. "I was reading today a copy of the New York Times. And I was really interested to read in there about Barack Obama's friends from Chicago. Turns out one of his earliest supporters is a man who, according to the New York Times, was a domestic terrorist, that quote 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and the United States Capitol.'"

Saturday's New York Times story, an investigation into whether Obama had a relationship with Ayers, concluded that the men were never close and that Obama has denounced Ayers' radical past, which occurred when Obama, who was born in 1961, was a child. It also found that he has downplayed their contacts.

"This is not a man who sees America as you and I see America," Palin said of Obama. "We see America as a force for good in this world. We see America as a force for exceptionalism. ... Our opponents see America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who would bomb their own country."

Classy.

And from Firedoglake.com:

Governor Palin is out of the loop on the strategic decisions -- like not campaigning any more in Michigan. She's also not paying attention to what Steve Schmidt tells her about The New York Times. Unveiling McCain-Palin2.0, the Character Assassination Edition, Caribou Barbie had this to say:

“Well, I was reading my copy of today’s New York Times and I was interested to read about Barack’s friends from Chicago,” she said. “Turns out one of Barack’s earliest supporters is a man who, according to The New York Times, and they are hardly ever wrong, was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol. Wow. These are the same guys who think patriotism is paying higher taxes.”

Of course, Steve Schmidt, McCain's campaign manager who used to work for Dick Cheney, has already called into question the journalistic integrity of The New York TImes:

“Whatever the New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization,” Mr. Schmidt said. He added, “This is an organization that is completely, totally, 150 percent in the tank for the Democratic candidate, which is their prerogative to be.”

He added, “Everything that is read in The New York Times that attacks this campaign should be evaluated by the American people from that perspective.”

I wonder if Sarah's ringing endorsement -- "they are hardly ever wrong" -- applies to the February 21st New York Times ?

OK - THIS GUY IS FUCKING SCARY!!!

2008-10-04T14:09:00.002-04:00

HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHHHH!

The Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart

2008-10-03T23:04:00.003-04:00

From Wonkette.com

How Sarah Palin Survived Ninety Minutes Without Spontaneously Combusting

This is pretty much perfect, except maybe somewhere you could squeeze in, “That Joe person is crying about his dead family?! –> Shout Maverick several times,” which is something that happened.

On The Lighter Side

2008-10-03T22:54:00.003-04:00

From Wonkette.com

Conservative Pundit Describes Boner He Got Watching Palin

There was nothing good about Sarah Palin’s debate performance last night, at all. But! Some party hacks are pretending to like it, or say she won, because of how well she avoided saying anything of substance. The “buzz word” regarding the key to her success (among no one) is that she spoke in very “folksy” tones, and they appeal to the Heartland. For the first time ever, our punditry is being lazy! “Folksy” is more of an Ann Richards thing. What Sarah Palin did was called “flirting.” And so far, at least one pundit on National Review’s The Corner blog has disclosed how much of a boner he got, in potentially the greatest Corner post of all time.

The key word here is “starbursts,” in a post called, “Projecting Through The Screen”:

A very wise TV executive once told me that the key to TV is projecting through the screen. It’s one of the keys to the success of, say, a Bill O’Reilly, who comes through the screen and grabs you by the throat. Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can’t be learned; it’s either something you have or you don’t, and man, she’s got it.

As our tipster pointed out, this sounds almost like a thrill running up Chris Matthews leg!

“It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.”

Remind us to use this once a day, forever.

Projecting Through The Screen [Corner]

Hmmmm, SO this is where Sarah Waits for a Debate.

2008-10-03T21:31:00.004-04:00

from God is for Suckers. com

Ah, the Joys of Stupidity

3 October 2008 by Bob

Faithful See Virgin Mary’s Image in Toilet Bowl

Cincinnati,OH—Hundreds of people are being drawn to the Creation Museum by what they say looks like an image of the Virgin Mary in a toilet bowl. As many as 300 people, some weeping, gathered outside the third stall of the Museum’s men’s room. They prayed, they took photographs, and they said the rosary. The museum curator said the cause of the image was not immediately clear, but he plans on talking to the head of the janitorial staff, Benedict. Sarah Palin, in the Museum preparing for this evening’s debate, said it was comforting to know that God’s spirit was there in this time of turmoil for the nation.

Ever wonder what planet you’re on?…

Oh, and if you need a good reason to vote, consider this one …

WASHINGTON — The next president will tip the courts, one way or another. Supreme Court openings are all but guaranteed, and that’s just the start: 44 trial and appellate federal judicial vacancies already await filling. There will be more. Consider this: President Bush has placed 316 judges on the bench during his two terms. One out of three federal judges now owes a lifetime-tenured job to the current president. Whoever replaces Bush will be likewise recasting courthouses, top to bottom.

Fundamentally Wired Wrong!

2008-10-03T19:53:00.003-04:00

From Huffington Post:

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Sam Stein

Palin On Fox News: Couric Annoyed Me

Appearing on a friendlier news outlet, Gov. Sarah Palin said she was "annoyed" with the way Katie Couric handled their interview and complained that the CBS Evening News host failed to give her the opportunity to take a proverbial axe to Barack Obama.

In a portion of her sit-down with Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron, Palin claimed that Couric's questions -- which produced a series of staggeringly embarrassing responses -- put her in a lose-lose position.

"The Sarah Palin in those interviews was a little bit annoyed," she said. "It's like, man, no matter what you say, you are going to get clobbered. If you choose to answer a question, you are going to get clobbered on the answer. If you choose to try to pivot and go to another subject that you believe that Americans want to hear about, you get clobbered for that too."

For the record, Couric asked her, among other things, what type of news sources she turns to for information, which Supreme Court decisions she disagreed with, why Alaska's proximity to Russia gave her foreign policy experience, her opinion of the bailout package for Wall Street, and where she thought Vice President Dick Cheney erred. Which one of those questions was designed to trip her up (as opposed to, say, give viewers a better sense of her character and views) is tough to ascertain.

Later in her interview with Cameron, Palin offered a sense of what she thinks would have been a fairer set of questions. Unsurprisingly, they all would have provided her the opportunity to rail against Obama.

"In those Katie Couric interviews, I did feel that there were lot of things that she was missing in terms of an opportunity to ask what a VP candidate stands for, what the values are represented in our ticket. I wanted to talk about Barack Obama increasing taxes, which would lead to killing jobs. I wanted to talk about his proposal to increase government spending by another trillion dollars. Some of his comments that he's made about the war, that I think may, in my world, disqualify someone from consideration as the next commander in chief. Some of the comments that he has made about Afghanistan -- what we are doing there, supposedly just air raiding villages and killing civilians. That's reckless. I want to talk about things like that. So I guess I have to apologize for being a bit annoyed, but that's also an indication of being outside the Washington elite, outside of the media elite also. I just wanted to talk to Americans without the filter and let them know what we stand for."

SELF EXPLANITORY

2008-09-30T21:18:00.004-04:00

Umm, These things don't even need titles anymore.
Just watch the video!

And A laugh to break up the Depression

2008-09-28T18:54:00.005-04:00

Russia is looking forward to, and recruiting allies for, a multipolar future -invoking 9/11 as the reason to do so.
“The solidarity of the international community fostered on the wave of struggle against terrorism turned out to be somehow `privatized’… It has become crystal clear that the solidarity expressed by all of us after 9/11 should be revived (without double standards) when we fight against any infringements upon the international law,” [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov] said.

Lavrov called for a new “solidarity” of the international community and a strengthened United Nations, saying only in the post-Cold War world can the organization “fully realize its potential” as a global center “for open and frank debate and coordination of the world policies on a just and equitable basis free from double standards.”

“This is an essential requirement, if the world is to regain its equilibrium,” he said.
Interesting.... from Crooks and Liars.com

Hmmmm, No Comment!

2008-09-28T18:47:00.005-04:00

from Crooks and Liars.com

Yet Another Distraction: The McCain Campaign Plans Bristol Palin’s Wedding

Yes, that is a tattoo of Bristol’s name on Baby Daddy Levi Johnston’s ring finger. Anyone else picturing Todd Palin brandishing a shotgun at the tattoo parlor? And just because this campaign can’t get surreal enough, from TPM :

(Given) what we’ve seen so far, I can’t say I’d be surprised if the moral jalopy that is the McCain-Palin Straight Talk Express sunk us even further into farce with something like this. From the Times of London …

In an election campaign notable for its surprises, Sarah Palin, the Republican vice- presidential candidate, may be about to spring a new one — the wedding of her pregnant teenage daughter to her ice-hockey-playing fiancé before the November 4 election.

Inside John McCain’s campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby. “It would be fantastic,” said a McCain insider.

If this actually sways a single voter, I weep for my country.

Throwing Stones at Rape Victoms

2008-09-28T13:05:00.003-04:00

from the NY Times:
Wasilla Watch: Sarah Palin and the Rape Kits
Editorial Observer
By DOROTHY SAMUELS
Published: September 25, 2008

Even in tough budget times, there are lines that cannot be crossed. So I was startled by this tidbit reported recently by The Associated Press: When Sarah Palin was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, the small town began billing sexual-assault victims for the cost of rape kits and forensic exams.
Skip to next paragraph
The Board Blog

The BoardAdditional commentary, background information and other items by Times editorial writers.
Go to The Board »

Ms. Palin owes voters an explanation. What was the thinking behind cutting the measly few thousand dollars needed to cover the yearly cost of swabs, specimen containers and medical tests? Whose dumb idea was it to make assault victims and their insurance companies pay instead? Unfortunately, her campaign is shielding the candidate from the press, so Americans may still be waiting for answers on Election Day.

The rape-kit controversy is a troubling matter. The insult to rape victims is obvious. So is the sexism inherent in singling them out to foot the bill for investigating their own case. And the main result of billing rape victims is to protect their attackers by discouraging women from reporting sexual assaults.

That’s why when Senator Joseph Biden, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, drafted the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, he included provisions to make states ineligible for federal grant money if they charged rape victims for exams and the kits containing the medical supplies needed to conduct them. (Senator John McCain, Ms. Palin’s running mate, voted against Mr. Biden’s initiative, and his name has not been among the long list of co-sponsors each time the act has been renewed.)

That’s also why, when news of Wasilla’s practice of billing rape victims got around, Alaska’s State Legislature approved a bill in 2000 to stop it.

“We would never bill the victim of a burglary for fingerprinting and photographing the crime scene, or for the cost of gathering other evidence,” said Alaska’s then-governor, Tony Knowles. “Nor should we bill rape victims just because the crime scene happens to be their bodies.”

If Ms. Palin ever spoke out about the issue, one way or another, no record has surfaced. Her campaign would not answer questions about when she learned of the policy, strongly supported by the police chief: whether she saw it in the budget and if not, whether she learned of it before or after the State Legislature outlawed the practice.

All the campaign would do was provide a press release pronouncing: “Prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault is a priority for Gov. Palin.”

Eric Croft, a former Democratic state lawmaker who sponsored the corrective legislation, believes that Wasilla’s mayor knew what was going on. (She does seem to have paid heed to every other detail of town life, including what books were on the library’s shelves.)

The local hospital did the billing, but it was the town that set the policy, Mr. Croft noted. That policy was reflected in budget documents that Ms. Palin signed.

Mr. Croft further noted that right after his measure became law, Wasilla’s local paper reported that Ms. Palin’s handpicked police chief, Charlie Fannon, acknowledged the practice of billing to collect evidence for sexual-assault cases. He complained that the state was requiring the town to spend $5,000 to $14,000 a year to cover the costs. “I just don’t want to see any more burden put on the taxpayer,” the chief explained.

“I can’t imagine any police chief, big city or small, who would take on the entire State Legislature on a bill that passed unanimously and not mention to their mayor that they’re doing this,” Mr. Croft said. Even if he didn’t inform her, the newspaper article would have been hard for her to miss.

In the absence of answers, speculation is bubbling in the blogosphere that Wasilla’s policy of billing rape victims may have something to do with Ms. Palin’s extreme opposition to abortion, even in cases of rape. Sexual-assault victims are typically offered an emergency contraception pill, which some people in the anti-choice camp wrongly equate with abortion.

My hunch is that it was the result of outmoded attitudes and boneheaded budget cutting. Still, Ms. Palin has been governor for under two years, and she’s running for vice president largely on her experience as mayor of tiny Wasilla — a far superior credential, she’s told us, to being a community organizer. On the rape kits, as on other issues, she owes voters a direct answer.

Tina Fey is Sarah Palin

2008-09-28T10:41:00.002-04:00

The incredible thing about this skit: She just about uses an answer line for line, verbatim!
OMG - WTF!

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States.

2008-09-27T16:32:00.007-04:00

This article, 'The Lies of Sarah Palin', from the venerable Matt Taibbi appears in the October 2nd issue of Rolling Stone . It is a MUST read, if nothing more, then to hear what you are thinking put into a very artful, controlled meltdown. Now I have an idea of how someone could be driven to dump a gallon of gas on themselves and strike a match, such as the Monks in the early 60's Vietnam...

Lifted with great thanks to Rolling Stone and the author.
________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Lies of Sarah Palin
By Matt Taibbi

I’m standing outside the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. Sarah Palin has just finished her speech to the Republican National Convention, accepting the party’s nomination for Vice President. If I hadn’t quit my two pack a day habit earlier this year, I’d be chain smoking right now. So the only thing left is to stand mute against the fit-for-a-cheap-dog-kennel crowd-control fencing you see everywhere at these idiotic conventions and gnaw on weird new feelings of shock and anarchist rage as one would a rawhide chew toy.

All around me, a million cops in there absurd post-9/11 space combat get-ups stand guard as assholes in paper-mache puppet heads scramble around for one last moment of network face time before the coverage goes dark. Four-chinned delegates from places like Arkansas and Georgia are pouring joylessly out the gates in search of bars where they can load up on Zombies and Scorpion bowls and other “wild” drinks and extramaritally grope their turkey-necked female companions in bathroom stalls as part of the “Unbelievable Time” they will inevitably report to their pals back home. Only 21st-century Americans can pass through a metal detector six times in an hour and still think they’re at a party.

The defining moment for me came shortly after Palin and her family stepped down from the stage to uproarious applause, looking happy enough to throw a whole library full of books into the sewer. In the crush to exit the stadium, a middle-aged woman wearing a cowboy hat, a red-white-and-blue shirt and an obvious eye job gushed to a male colleague – They were both wearing badges identifying them as members of the Colorado delegation – At the Xcel gates.

“She totally reminds me of my cousin!” the delegate screeched. “She’s a real woman! The real thing!”

I stared at her open-mouthed. In that moment, the rank cynicism of the whole sorry deal was laid bare. Here’s the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.

And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she’s good enough likeness of a loudmouthed Middle American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant sized bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the sizzlin’ picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else’s, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because that image on TV reminds him of the mean brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power. Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV – And this country is going to eat her up, cheering every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

The Palin speech was a political masterpiece, one of the most ingenious pieces of electoral theater this country has ever seen. Never before has a single televised image turned a party’s fortunes around faster

Until the Alaska governor actually ascended to the podium that night, I was convinced that John McCain had made one of the all-time campaign-season blunders, that he had acted impulsively and out of utter desperation in choosing a cross-eyed political neophyte just two years removed from running a town smaller than the bleacher section at Fenway park. It even crossed my mind that there was an element of weirdly self-destructive pique in McCain’s decision to cave in to his party’s right-wing base in this fashion, that perhaps he was responding to being ordered by party elders away from tepid, ideologically promiscuous hack like Joe Lieberman – Reportedly his real preference – By picking the most obviously unqualified, doomed-to-fail joke of a Bible-Thumping buffoon. As in: You want me to rally the base? Fine, I’ll rally the base. Here I’ll choose this rifle-toting, serially pregnant moose killer who thinks God lobbies for oil pipelines. Happy now?

But watching Palin’s speech I had no doubt that I was witnessing a historic, iconic performance. The candidate sauntered to the lectern with the assurance of a sleepwalker – And immediately launched into a symphony of snorting and sneering remarks, taking time out in between the superior invective to present herself as just a humble gal with a beefcake husband and a brood of healthy, combat-ready spawn who just happened to be innocent targets of a communist and probably also homosexual media conspiracy. She appeared to be completely without shame and utterly full of shit, awing a room full of hardened reporters with her sickly sweet line about the high-school-flame-turned-hubby who “Five children later” is “Still my guy.” It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag.

Within minutes, Palin had given TV audiences a character infinitely recognizable to virtually every American; the small-town girl with just enough looks and a defiantly incurious mind who thinks the PTA minutes are Holy Writ, and to whom injustice means the woman next door owning a slightly nicer set or drapes or flatware. Or the governorship, as it were.

Right-wingers of the Bush-Rove ilk have had a tough time finding a human face to put on their failed, inhuman, mean-as-hell policies. But it was hard not to recognize the genius of wedding that faltering brand of institutionalized greed to the image of the suburban American supermom. It’s the perfect cover, for there is almost nothing in the world meaner than this species of provincial tyrant.

Palin herself burned this political symbiosis into the pages of history with her seminal crack about the “Difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick,” blurring once and for all the lines between meanness on the grand political scale as understood by the Roves and Bushes of the world, and meanness of the small-town variety as understood by pretty much anyone who has ever sat around in his ranch-house den dreaming of a fourth plasma-screen TV or an extra set of KC HiLites for his truck, while some ghetto family a few miles away shares a husk of government cheese.

In her speech, Palin presented herself as a raging baby-making furnace of middle-class ambition next to whom the yuppies of the Obama set – Who never want anything all that badly except maybe a few afternoons with someone else’s wife, or a few kind words in The New York Times Book Review – Seem like weak, self-doubting celibates, the kind of people who certainly cannot be trusted to believe in the right God or to defend a nation. We’re used to seeing such blatant cultural caricaturing in our politicians. But Sarah Palin is something new. She’s all caricature. As the candidate of a party whose positions on individual issues are poll losers almost across the board, her shtick is not even designed to sell a line of policies. It’s just designed to sell her. The thing was as much as admitted in the on-air gaffe by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who was inadvertently caught saying on MSNBC that Palin wasn’t the most qualified candidate, that the party “went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives.”

The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflective prejudices of their demographic, as they would for a reality-show contestants or sitcom characters. Hicks root for hicks, moms for moms, born-agains for born-agains. Sure, there was politics in the Palin speech but it was all either silly lies or merely incidental fluffery buttressing the theatrical performance. A classic example of what was at work here came when Palin proudly introduced her Down-Syndrome baby, Trig, then stared into the camera and somberly promised parents of special-needs kids that they would “Have a friend and advocate in the White House.” This was about a half-hour before she raised her hands in triumph with McCain, a man who voted against increasing funding for special-needs education.

Palin’s charge that “government is too big” and that Obama “Wants to grow it” was similarly preposterous. Not only did her party just preside over the largest government expansion since LBJ, but Palin herself has been a typical bush-era republican, borrowing and spending beyond her means. Her great legacy as mayor of Wasilla was the construction of a $15 million hockey arena in a city with an annual budget of $20 million; Palin OK’d a bond issue for the project before the land had been secured, leading to a protracted legal mess that ultimately forced taxpayers to pay more than six times the original market price for property the city ended up having to seize from a private citizen using eminent domain. Better yet, Palin ended up paying for the fucking thing with a 25 percent increase in the city sales tax. But in her speech, of course, Palin presented herself as the enemy of tax increases, righteously bemoaning that “Taxes are too high” and Obama “Wants to raise them.”

Palin hasn’t been too worried about federal taxes as governor of a state that ranks number one in the nation in federal spending per resident ($13,950), even as it sits just 18th in federal taxes paid per resident ($5,434). That means all us taxpaying non-Alaskans spend $8,500 a year on each and every resident of Palin’s paradise of rugged self-sufficiency. Not that this sworn enemy of taxes doesn’t collect from her own; Alaska currently collects the most taxes per resident of any state in the nation. The rest of Palin’s speech was the same dog-whistle crap Republicans have been railing about for decades. Palin’s crack about a mayor being “like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities” testified to the Republican’s apparent belief that they can win elections till the end of time running against the Sixties. (They’re probably right.) The incessant pausing about the media was likewise par for the course, red meat for those tens of millions of patriotic flag-waving Americans whose first instinct when things get rough is to whine like bitches and blame other people – Reporters, the French, those ungrateful blacks soaking up tax money eating big prison meals, whomever – For their failures.

Add to this the usual lies about Democrats wanting to “forfeit” to our enemies abroad and coddle terrorists, and you had a run-of-the-mill, almost boring Republican speech from a substance standpoint. What made it exceptional was its utter hypocrisy, its total disregard for reality, it’s total disregard for reality, it’s absolute unrelation to the facts of our current political situation. After eight years of unprecedented corruption, incompetence, waste and greed, the party of Karl Rove understood that 50 million Americans would not demand solutions to any of these problems so long as they were given a new, new thing to beat their meat over.

Sarah Palin is that new, new thing, and in the end it won’t matter that she’s got an unmarried teenage kid with a bun in the oven. Of course, if the daughter of a black candidate like Barack Obama showed up at his convention with a five month bump and some sideways-cap-wearing, junior-grade Curtis Jackson (50 cent) holding her hand, the defenders of Traditional Morality would be up in arms. But the thing about being in the reality-making business is that you don’t need to worry much about vetting; there are no facts in your candidate’s bio that cannot be ignored or overcome.

One of the most amusing things about the Palin nomination has been the reaction of horrified progressives. The internet has been buzzing at full volume as would-be defenders of sanity and reason pore over the governor’s record in search of the Damning Facts. My own telephone began ringing off the hook with calls from ex-Alaskans and friends of Alaskans determined to help get the “truth” about Sarah Palin into the major media. Pretty much anyone with an internet connection knows by know that Palin was originally for the “Bridge to Nowhere” before she opposed it (She actually endorsed the plan in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign), that even after the project was defeated she kept the money, that she didn’t actually sell the Alaska governor’s state luxury jet on eBay but instead sold it at a $600,000 loss to a campaign contributor (who is reportedly now seeking $50,000 in taxpayer money to pay maintenance costs).

Then there are the salacious tales of Palin’s swinging-meat-cleaver management style, many of which seem to have a common thread: In addition to being ensconced in a messy ethics investigation over her firing of the chief of Alaska state troopers (dismissed after refusing to sack her sister’s ex-husband), Palin also fired a campaign aide who had an affair with a friends wife. More ominously, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin tried to fire the town librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, who had resisted pressure to censor books Palin found objectionable.

Then there’s the God stuff: Palin belongs to a church whose pastor, Ed Kalnins, believes that all criticisms of George Bush “Come from Hell” and wondered aloud if people who voted for John Kerry could be saved. Kalnins, looming as the answer to Obama’s Jeremiah Wright, claims that Alaska is going to be a “refuge state” for Christians in the last days, last days which he sometimes speaks of in the present tense. Palin herself has been captured on video mouthing the inevitable born again idiocies, such as the idea that a recent oil-pipeline deal was “God’s Will.” She also described the Iraq War as a “task that is from God” and part of a heavenly “Plan.” She supports teaching creationism and “Abstinence only” in public schools, opposes abortion even for victims of rape, has denied the science behind global warming and attends a church that seeks to convert Jews and cure homosexuals.

All of which tells you about what you’d expect from a raise-the-base choice like Palin: She’s a puffed-up dimwit with primitive religious beliefs who had to be educated as to the fact that the constitution did not exactly envision government executives firing librarians. Judging from the importance progressive critics seem to attach to these revelations, you’d think that these were actually negatives in modern American politics. But Americans like politicians who hate books and see the face of Jesus in every tree stump. They like them stupid and mean and ignorant of the rules. Which is why Palin has only seemed to grow in popularity as more and more of these revelations have come out.

The same goes for the most damning aspect of her biography, her total lack of big-game experience. As governor of Alaska, Palin presides over a state whose entire population is barely the size of Memphis. This kind of thing might matter in a country that actually worried about whether its leader was prepared for his job – But not in America. In America, it takes about 2 weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you’ve been around for years. To a certain extent, this is why Obama is getting a pass on the same issue. He’s been on TV every day for two years and according to the standards of our instant-ramen culture, that’s a lifetime of hands-on experience.

It is worth noting that the same criticisms of Palin also hold true for two other candidates in this race, John McCain and Barack Obama. As politicians, both men are more narrative than substance, with McCain rising to prominence on the back of his bio as a suffering war hero and Obama mostly playing the part of long-lost, future-embracing liberal dreamboat not seen on the national stage since Bobby Kennedy died. If your stomach turns to read how Palin’s Kawasaki 704 glasses are flying off the shelves in Middle America, you have to accept that Middle America probably feels the same way when it hears Donatella Versace dedicated her collection to Obama during Milan Fashion Week. Or sees the throwing-panties-onstage-“I love you, Obama!” ritual at the Democratic nominee’s town-hall appearances.

So, sure, Barack Obama might be every bit as much as a slick piece of imageering as Sarah Palin. The difference is in what the image represents. The Obama image represents tolerance, intelligence, education, patience with the notion of compromise and negotiation, and a willingness to stare ugly facts right in the face, all qualities we’re actually going to need in government if we’re going to get out of this huge mess we’re in.

Here’s what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat fucking pig who pins “Country First” buttons on his man titties and chants “U-S-A! U-S-A!” at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas

The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn’t that she’s totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and porked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: That you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we’ll not only thank you for your trouble, we’ll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for few hours around election time.

Democracy doesn’t require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in awhile, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what your real interests are.

This is a very different thing from shopping, which involves passively letting sitcoms melt your brain all day long and then jumping straight into the TV screen to buy a southern Style Chicken Sandwich because the slob singing “I’m Lovin’ It!” during the commercial break looks just like you. The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn’t require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.

And when it comes time to vote all you have to do is put your Country First – Just like that lady on TV who reminds you of your cousin. U-S-A, Baby. U-S-A! U-S-A!

An Interesting Comment

2008-09-27T09:04:00.004-04:00

Scrolling through various comments left by folks on different websites I came across this one . It seems to focus on a major difference between McCain and Obama, the difference between an ideologue and a thinking person.
comment from booksnmore4you:

"Worse is that John McCain stated that unless America takes a war, any war, to victory, that the blood spilled is lost, meaning that soldiers who died, died in vain and are not patriots. This is not only radically immoral but dangerously blind, necessitating the inference that even when a war turns out as a misguided endeavor it MUST be seen through to "victory". Obama countered this idea, stating that all soldiers who die in service to their commander-in-chief are patriots, and a war's outcome does not assail that fact."

Conservatives starting to panic over Palin? Yeah, and what's your Point??

2008-09-26T21:51:00.002-04:00

Conservatives starting to panic about Palin
Prominent conservatives are finally starting to realize that an unqualified half-term hockey mom from Alaska might not be the best choice to be a 72 year old heartbeat away from the presidency. Here’s the brutal roundup.

Kathleen Parker :

It was fun while it lasted.

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted. Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there.

Wingnut extaordinaire K-Lo :

I’m not where my friend Kathleen Parker is — wanting her to step aside to spend more time with her family and Alaska — but that’s not a crazy suggestion.

McCain campaign insiders, via Ed Schultz :

McCain Camp insiders say Palin “clueless”

Capitol Hill sources are telling me that senior McCain people are more than concerned about Palin. The campaign has held a mock debate and a mock press conference; both are being described as “disastrous.” One senior McCain aide was quoted as saying, “What are we going to do?” The McCain people want to move this first debate to some later, undetermined date, possibly never. People on the inside are saying the Alaska Governor is “clueless.”

Etc., etc., etc., etc.

I Fucking Love This Man!!!

2008-09-26T19:25:00.002-04:00

Jack Cafferty.
I grew up with Jack as a local newsman on the local stations.
Now he's the curmudgeon on CNN. Too think, this man just lost his wife of 35 years on September 5th, and finds it imperative to say what he feels on CNN. Good stuff. More people should be speaking up about the absolute BULLSHIT of this Republican campaign. Way to go Jack. I wish you the very best!

Ahhh Haa Haaah Fuctards!

2008-09-26T18:23:00.002-04:00

Evangelist Tony Alamo arrested in child porn case By: John Amato @ 2:45 PM - PDT , from Crooks and Liars
Another day and another sex scandal .

Evangelist Tony Alamo was arrested Thursday in Flagstaff, Arizona, on charges related to a child porn investigation, an FBI spokesman said.

The 74-year-old founder and leader of Tony Alamo Christian Ministries was arrested without incident at 2:45 p.m. (4:45 p.m. ET) as he was departing the Little America Hotel with his wife, said Manuel Johnson, spokesman for the FBI in Phoenix, Arizona.

The FBI, the Flagstaff Police Department and the Arizona Department of Public Safety were involved in the arrest, he said.

We Don't Do That, part...whatever

2008-09-26T16:19:00.001-04:00

This is just flying quietly under the radar...
from The Racheal Maddow Show:

Best Description of Palin Yet

2008-09-26T11:34:00.002-04:00

Paul Krugman described Sarah Palin very well on Democracy Now today. He said “I’m a college professor, and she reminds me of a student who didn’t open the textbook all semester.”

COUNTRY FIRST?????????

2008-09-26T09:24:00.002-04:00

This was found in the comments section of an MSNBC article on Barney Franks Comment on McCains "Hail Mary Pass" of flying down to Washington to straighten out the crisis. If you truley look back, it sums it all up!
"He cannot be trusted under any circumstances. He always has a game going. It Always McCAIN FIRST. Do not be fooled."

It's Judgment Day for McCain

2008-09-26T09:17:00.001-04:00

From The Wall Street Journal
SEPTEMBER 24, 2008

It's Judgment Day for McCain

By THOMAS FRANK

Last week, Republican presidential candidate John McCain called for a commission to "find out what went wrong" on Wall Street. It was an excellent suggestion: Public inquiries into Wall Street practices served the country well in the 1930s.

And Mr. McCain has a special advantage to bring to any such investigation -- many of the relevant witnesses are friends or colleagues of his. In fact, he can probably get to the bottom of the whole mess just by cross-examining the people riding on his campaign bus. So the candidate should take a deep breath, remind himself that the country comes first, pull the Straight Talk Express over at a rest stop, whistle up his media pals, and begin.

Topic A should be deregulation. Financial institutions are dropping everywhere after playing with poorly regulated financial instruments; the last investment banks standing are begging the government for stricter oversight; and some of our nation's leading champions of laissez faire have ditched that theory in an extraordinary attempt to rescue the collapsing industry.

The philosophy of government that has dominated Washington for almost three decades is now in ruins, and it is up to Mr. McCain to find out exactly why we believed it in the first place. Why did government stand back and permit all the misconduct that generated all this bad debt? What particular ideas led us to believe that government should just keep its hands off and let markets run their course?

Maybe the McCain Commission on Deregulation can kick off with a statement from the candidate himself. It will be helpful for the public, if painful for the senator himself, to hear about Mr. McCain's own close brush with one of the towering figures of financial deregulation, Charles Keating, the master of Lincoln Savings and Loan. Keating had a special, urgent interest in getting Big Brother off our backs: in 1986 some meddlesome agency suspected him of massive violations of S&L regulations. Keating fought back by recruiting a handful of legislators, including Mr. McCain, to pressure S&L regulators to leave his S&L alone. A few years later, Lincoln became one of the largest financial failures in U.S. history.

After that, Mr. McCain can get on to witness No. 1: Phil Gramm, a former adviser to the candidate on economic issues and for many years the heavyweight champion of financial deregulation. It was this very fellow who, as a senator, co-authored the Financial Services Modernization Act, largely trashing the old financial regulatory structure and allowed banks, insurance companies and investment houses to merge into what Mr. Gramm called "a supermarket for financial services" -- supermarkets whose lousy decisions are now the wonder of the world and whose losses we will be underwriting for years to come.

The public will be intrigued to hear that Mr. Gramm, who eventually became an executive at UBS, a bank known for its subprime profligacy, also regarded uncompensated environmental regulation as "nothing less than robbery." They will want to know if he would now apply the same term to the activities of the industry on whose behalf he has labored for so many years.

If Mr. Gramm's wife Wendy happens to be on the bus, Mr. McCain might want to sort out some of the controversies that have followed her own career as a deregulator. For several years Mrs. Gramm headed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where her tenure is best remembered by a decision to allow certain kinds of energy trades to go unregulated. A company called Enron turned out to be the greatest beneficiary of the decision -- there isn't space here to recall the statesmanlike things they did with their newfound freedom -- and they appointed Wendy Gramm to their board of directors just weeks after she stepped down from her government job.

Later Mrs. Gramm went to the Mercatus Center in suburban Virginia, a thundering fortress of deregulatory theory. And here we glimpse another promising avenue of any investigation of the laissez-faire faith: the market ideology industry in Washington. Any proper assessment of this industry would also include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, FreedomWorks, the American Enterprise Institute, and the minor stars in the libertarian firmament, including my favorite, Bureaucrash, where punk rock meets the gold standard.

There are others. Mr. McCain could call Kevin Hassett, one of his senior economic advisers, who declared back in March in the Bangkok Post that the blame for the current crisis could be laid at the feet of "out-of-control government regulation," mainly in the form of municipal smart-growth initiatives. (That's right: The man whispering in the candidate's ear seemed to once believe that not-in-my-backyard suburbanites caused the worst financial collapse since 1929.)

But maybe it would be best simply to agree that financial regulation really is in the country's interest. As Mr. McCain's hero Theodore Roosevelt said 98 years ago, "every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it."

Write to thomas@wsj.com

WTF!

2008-09-20T20:11:00.004-04:00

WHAT A BUNCH OF FUCKING BULLSHIT!

McCain Camp argues that a loose debate format could leave Sarah Palin vulnerable as a relatively inexperienced debater

By: John Amato, Crooks and Liars

OK, what gives?

The Obama and McCain campaigns have agreed to an unusual free-flowing format for the three televised presidential debates, which begin on Friday, but the McCain camp fought for and won a much more structured approach for the questioning at the vice-presidential debate, advisers to both campaigns said Saturday.

At the insistence of the McCain campaign, the Oct. 2 debate between the Republican nominee for vice president, Gov. Sarah Palin, and her Democratic rival, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., will have shorter question-and-answer segments than those for the presidential nominees, the advisers said. There will also be much less opportunity for free-wheeling, direct exchanges between the running mates. McCain advisers said they had been concerned that a loose format could leave Ms. Palin, a relatively inexperienced debater, at a disadvantage and largely on the defensive.

Don’t you think McCain should have thought of that before he picked her for his VP? Once again the American people are cheated out of an honest discussion of the issues.

McCain advisers said they were only somewhat concerned about Ms. Palin’s debating skills compared with those of Mr. Biden, who has served six terms in the Senate, or about his chances of tripping her up. Instead, they say, they wanted Ms. Palin to have opportunities to present Mr. McCain’s positions, rather than spending time talking about her own experience or playing defense…read on

I don’t know the rules of debates, but wouldn’t it be a smart move to force a more in depth debate between Biden and Palin? I mean, she’s the most qualified Republican for the VP job and shouldn’t have any problems at all. Right?

And Pigs Will Fly...

2008-09-20T20:02:00.003-04:00

AND FROM OUR NATIONAL NEWS ORGAN:

2008-09-20T13:48:00.002-04:00

Fox Attacks Obama Like Kerry in 04
From Bravenewfilms:

WHAT A COMPLETE FUCK-UP!

2008-09-20T13:41:00.003-04:00

THE BUSH LEGACY

I want to hear one fucking person defend this worthless piece of SHIT!

I REST MY FUCKING CASE!

2008-09-20T10:55:00.003-04:00

from think progress.com Just follow the links friends...

McCain: We should deregulate health insurance like we deregulated Wall Street.

Paul Krugman notes that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) published an article on his health care plan in the current issue of Contingencies — the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries. In his article, McCain attempts to make his case for deregulating the health insurance industry by extolling the benefits of the last decade of deregulation in the banking sector. He writes:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

As Yglesias writes, McCain is “such an enthusiast about financial market deregulation that he was bragging about his plan to make the health care system as awesome as the financial system.”

McCain health care adviser Al Hubbard has argued that Americans consume health care like caviar. John Goodman, another McCain health care adviser, previously said there are no uninsured Americans .

Ummm, Good One

2008-09-20T09:06:00.004-04:00

from an anonymous post somewhere out there

They mock universal health care as "socialized medicine" while shamelessly supporting "socialized corporate welfare." Just shows you who they really care about. " "Leave no billionaire behind" should be their new motto.

Dog of Flanders!

Great Illustration From THE NATION

2008-09-20T08:49:00.002-04:00

Just wanted this illustration for posterity
Lifted with great respect from TheNation

And Speaking of Dumbing Down America...

2008-09-19T22:15:00.001-04:00

From Crooksandliars:

Chuck Hagel slams Sarah Palin: “It’s a stretch to say she’s got the experience to be President”

“I think it’s a stretch to, in any way, to say that she’s got the experience to be president of the United States,” Hagel said.

“I think they ought to be just honest about it and stop the nonsense about, ‘I look out my window and I see Russia and so therefore I know something about Russia,’” he said. “That kind of thing is insulting to the American people.”

Sam Harris on the Dumbing Down of America

2008-09-18T21:21:00.005-04:00

From God is for Suckers.com
Sam Harris: average isn’t good enough 15 September 2008 by Stardust

Sam Harris sums up pretty well my thoughts and opinions about this election and how the American people have come to settle for so little. The dumbing-down of America seems unstoppable.

“As many people have noted, placing Palin on the ticket has made these final months of the already overlong 2008 campaign much more interesting. Is Palin remotely qualified to be president of the United States? No. But that’s precisely what is so interesting. McCain not only has thrown all sensible concerns about good governance aside merely to pander to a sliver of female and masses of conservative Christian voters, he has turned this period of American history into an episode of high-stakes reality television: Don’t look now, but our cousin Sarah just became leader of the free world! Tune in next week and watch her get sassy with Pakistan!

Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. No one wants an average neurosurgeon or even an average carpenter, but when it comes time to vest a man or woman with more power and responsibility than any person has held in human history, Americans say they want a regular guy, someone just like themselves. President Bush kept his edge on the “Who would you like to have a beer with?” poll question in 2004, and won reelection.

This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages — and loses — both necessary and unnecessary wars.

McCain has so little respect for the presidency of the United States that he is willing to put the girl next door (soon, too, to be a grandma) into office beside him. He has so little respect for the average American voter that he thinks this reckless and cynical ploy will work.

And it might. Palin’s nomination has clearly excited Christian conservatives, and it may entice a few million gender-obsessed fans of Hillary Clinton to vote entirely on the basis of chromosomes. Throw in a few million more average Americans who will just love how the nice lady smiles, and 2009 could be a very interesting year.

Tune in next week and watch cousin Sarah fuss with our nuclear arsenal … .”~ Sam Harris

Read Sam’s article here at Los Angeles Times or Atheist Nation via this link:

Sam Harris on Palin: average isn’t good enough

Some Thoughts on The Economy

2008-09-17T21:17:00.003-04:00

Well, the Fundamentals are strong, right Walnuts??!
Asshole!
From Susan at pottersville2

You're On the Hook (Shhh! (Forever))

Have any of the people who have benefitted from the recent financial catastrophes (cured somewhat by your kind largesse) said "Thank you" to you lately? Because once you read the following documentation about the upcoming economic changes guaranteed for life in the U.S. (and in many other countries as well), I'll bet you also will think that surely they should.

First they took your good jobs and shipped them overseas or to Mexico, then they took your savings (through your future debts to pay the off-book costs of the various wars being fought for the control of Middle Eastern and Asian oil resources and the bailout required because of the ongoing looting of the financial institutions (and the accompanying inflation arising from these actions)) - and don't forget that during this time their enablers at the top of the government ("Thank you! Cheney and Rummy and Ricey and Dicey) remained complacent (if not in outspoken denial) in the face of hot foreign engagements which steeply raised the price of energy - and then to cap it off, they accepted (even encouraged) the steep rise in unemployment, currently at a 5-year high (if not much higher due to the dubious accounting methods used today) and very unlikely to decrease any time soon (and you could also add in the commensurate rise in the number of "unemployables" in this economy who were replaced by H1-B employees working for half (or even a quarter, if overseas) of their former salaries (and therefore not paying very much in taxes, if any at all), with the savings from this decrease in expenditures going straight to the top of the earnings pyramid (which obviates the previous tax liability)).

Whew! I'm sure there are other factors I could include, but why bother? Isn't this compilation enough to give you massive heartburn for years to come? Wait for it, yes, of course, there's always reality TV to take the edge off, huh?

Oh, I almost forgot, as a result of this financial chicanery, what do you think will happen to the Social Security trust fund - which is only a trust fund as long as the financial system of the government of the U.S. remains trustworthy to its creditors in the rest of the world? Right.

They have solved the problem of what to do about the much-spoken-of Social Security shortfall, supposedly some 30 years in the future, by eliminating it altogether. Did you know that that was what you were voting for (or against) in the elections of 2000 and 2004? No?

Well, are you ready to listen to some "Thank-yous" now?

Good. I thought you might want to start looking for that long line of grateful receivers of your hard-earned providence. As for me, I think the Rethugli-Cons have done a standout job of selling the citizens of the U.S. on the fact that they are all above middle class and, thus, should continue to vote Rethugli-CON in 2008.

The two articles I've run below in their entirety are only the first two you should read thoroughly, and then begin to make a daily occurrence of such in your personal economics self education, so you can better understand exactly what happened to your money. (Emphasis marks and some editing are mine.)

Enjoy!

_____________________________________________________

Record Corporate Bailout Reveals the Bankruptcy of American Capitalism

Barry Grey

13/09/08 "WSWS" -- - The US government takeover of the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has dealt a shattering blow to the ideology of market capitalism, which has been used for decades to justify a relentless assault on the working class and a vast transfer of wealth to the American ruling elite.

The endless invocations of the virtues of private enterprise, individual entrepreneurship and self-reliance, used to demonize socialism and defend a system that exploits the vast majority for the benefit of a financial elite, have been exposed as frauds. When it comes to big capital, losses are socialized. Only profits remain private.

The same forces who year after year have inveighed against “big government” in order to justify the removal of all legal impediments to the accumulation of corporate profits and private fortunes, and carry out the destruction of social safeguards for the working class, have engineered a massive expansion of government power to safeguard the interests of the financial elite.

The bailout has as well exposed the real relations of political power and influence behind the façade of American democracy. The largest government bailout of private companies in world history—whose ultimate cost to taxpayers is likely to reach hundreds of billions—was sanctioned in advance by the Democratic Congress and given instant approval by the leadership of both parties and both of their presidential candidates.

There have been no investigations into the greatest financial scandal in world history. Neither party has any interest in bringing to light the swindling and skullduggery of the Wall Street moguls, because they are both bound hand and foot to those responsible for the financial debacle.

What has been revealed is the existence in the United States, behind the increasingly tattered veneer of democratic institutions, of a plutocracy—the political rule of the rich. When it comes to the basic interests of the financial aristocracy, both parties and all of the official institutions of society snap to attention and do the bidding of their Wall Street masters.

The bailout of the two mortgage giants—which account for 80 percent of new home mortgages in the US—is a demonstration of the historic failure of American capitalism and the profit system on a global scale. It was precipitated by the deepest economic crisis since the Depression of the 1930s, whose epicenter is the United States. The Bush administration moved to take over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under conditions of a rapid erosion of international confidence in the solvency of not only these two companies, but of the United States government itself.

Over the past several months, global investors, including central banks and government investment funds, primarily in Asia and Russia, have been dumping their vast holdings in mortgage-backed securities issued by the US government-sponsored firms. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have a combined liability of $5.3 trillion in mortgage-backed securities which they own or guarantee. The run on their assets has not only intensified the crisis of the two companies, which are massively leveraged and have suffered billions of dollars in losses as a result of the collapse of the US housing market, it has thrown into question the status of all US government debt, including US Treasury bonds.

The US, by far the world’s largest debtor nation, with a current account deficit of nearly $800 billion, is sustained by the inflow of hundreds of billions of dollars from abroad. It currently imports $1 trillion in foreign capital every year, or over $4 billion every working day.

But the assumption by the US government of the debts of the two mortgage companies, while averting an immediate financial meltdown, only compounds the crisis of American capitalism. As Martin Wolf, the financial correspondent of the Financial Times, wrote on Tuesday, “As a result, US housing finance has been brought under direct government control and, in the process, the gross liabilities of the US government, properly measured, have increased by $5,400 billion, a sum equal to the entire publicly held debt and 40 percent of gross domestic product.”

At a stroke, US sovereign debt has doubled and is now roughly equal to America’s gross domestic product. On July 14, one day after US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson called for legislation to give him unilateral and unlimited powers to use public funds to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Wall Street Journal editorialized on the implications of a government bailout of the two companies. It wrote: “But with financial woes mounting, some investors are betting they may profit from weighing the unthinkable question: Could the US government default?”

This immense increase in US government indebtedness can only further undermine international confidence in the credit-worthiness of US Treasury bonds, resulting in a further decline in the dollar and a sharp increase in the interest paid by the US to borrow from its international creditors.

The claims made by the Bush administration, echoed by the US media, that the bailout of the two mortgage finance companies will consume at most $200 billion in public funds—itself a massive amount that eclipses previous corporate bailouts, including the $160 billion bailout of the savings and loans industry less than two decades ago—are not credible. An indication of the sums envisioned by US policy makers is the fact that the legislation passed last July giving Paulson the power to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac raised the US debt limit by $800 billion, increasing the cushion between the debt limit and current government indebtedness to $1.1 trillion.

Some sense of the social priorities of the US ruling elite and its two parties can be gleaned from a comparison between the sums being extended to bail out just these two companies and those allocated by the federal government in 2008 for education ($67.5 billion), unemployment benefits ($37.3 billion), highways and mass transit ($53.1 billion) and housing ($7.4 billion).

Moreover, the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is only the prelude to a far broader use of public funds to bolster the balance sheets of major corporations. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and his Republican opponent John McCain are both supporting a $50 billion bailout of the US auto companies, which will inevitably entail further cuts in jobs and wages. And the plunge of the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers toward bankruptcy—the firm’s stock fell by 45 percent on Tuesday—poses another rescue operation similar to the $29 billion bailout of Bear Stearns last March.

It is already being widely broached that the government establish a permanent mechanism for using taxpayer funds to buy billions of dollars in failing assets from major banks and financial companies. The Wall Street Journal wrote on Tuesday, “Creating a government-backed entity to buy up these assets could jump-start the market for home loans and relieve banks and other financial institutions, which are taking big hits to their balance sheets as they fall in value.”

The Financial Times sounded the same theme, declaring, “The US government might end up having to support the recapitalization of a much wider range of financial institutions in order to curb the credit crunch.”

These statements give the lie to the attempt to portray Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as aberrations, which in their reckless speculation and pursuit of super profits departed from the norm. On the contrary, they typify the financial parasitism and outright criminality that have become pervasive characteristics of the workings of American capitalism and the social physiognomy of the US corporate elite.

The operations of the two government-sponsored firms are entirely in line with the unbridled speculation, based on an immense expansion of debt, that has become the hallmark of American capitalism. Their role in the housing and credit boom that has now come crashing down was of a piece with the creation of the vast edifice of paper values, engineered through the so-called “securitization” of debt, which sustained the super profits and immense salaries raked in by Wall Street.

In the wake of the bailout, press reports have noted the bloated salaries of the companies’ CEOs. Before they were sacked as part of the government takeover, Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd and Freddie Mac chief Richard Syron took in between them $29.5 million over the several years they headed their respective corporations. And they stand to receive another $29 million as part of their exit packages.

But these sums are by no means exceptional. The Financial Times reported last week that compensation for major executives of the seven biggest US banks totaled $95 billion between 2005 and 2007.

The collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is a paradigm of the US economy as a whole. Over the past three decades, the decay of American capitalism has taken the form of a vast growth of financial parasitism. At its heart, this involves the separation of wealth creation from the creation of real value in the production process. The American ruling elite has largely dismantled the productive base of the US economy, ruthlessly downsizing manufacturing at the cost of millions of jobs and the destruction of working class living standards, in order to reap higher profits from increasingly reckless forms of financial speculation.

The indices of the growth of financial speculation in the US economy are staggering: In 1982, the profits of US financial companies accounted for 5 percent of total after-tax corporate profits. In 2007, they made up 41 percent of corporate profits.

This process has generated ever greater levels of social inequality, the most telling symptom of the degenerate state of the US profit system. A report by the Congressional Research Service, updated July 31, provides a measure of the ever growing chasm between the ruling elite and the broad mass of the American people. It states that the share of national income accounted for by the top 1 percent of earners (as reported on tax returns) reached 21.8 percent in 2005—a level not seen since 1928. The report further noted that in 2006, corporate profits totaled 12.4 percent of national income, a level not reached in 50 years.
The cost of the ever-expanding bailout of American big business will be borne squarely by the working class. Even in the midst of growing unemployment and poverty and a flood of home foreclosures, there is much talk in the media about the American people “living beyond their means.”

That the next administration, whether headed by McCain or Obama, will sharply intensify the assault on working class living standards was spelled out by the New York Times, which editorialized Tuesday: “Senators John McCain and Barack Obama have both voiced support for the bailout, which shows good judgment. But what the next president will need to worry about, and both candidates need to talk about, is the depth of the country’s economic problems. It will take discipline and sacrifice to address them.”

The only alternative to a rapid lowering of working class living standards and the only rational and progressive solution to the financial crisis is a socialist program of nationalization of the entire financial system under the democratic control of the working people, with provisions to secure the investments of small depositors and share-holders. The wealth and resources of the country must be developed and allocated to meet the social needs of the population, not the money-mad strivings of financial speculators.

This policy can be carried out only through the independent political mobilization of the working class in opposition to the two-party system and the financial aristocracy which it serves. The Socialist Equality Party is dedicated to the building of such a mass socialist movement of the working class.

- - - - - - - - - -

Ralph Nader Talks Sadly To Bird, Contemplates Wearing Bear Suit

2008-09-16T23:00:00.002-04:00

America’s happiest moment in eight years was when that dude in a bear suit comically walked down the beach while that local-teevee reporter described some invisible pier, during Hurricane Ike. Poor old Ralph Nader wonders aloud, to his running mate, a bird named “Gonzalez,” if maybe he should wear a bear suit and fuck a panda at the National Zoo. Sure, why not. Nader also asks, sadly, why nobody wants to cover his campaign. The answer is simple: YOU RUINED EVERYTHING IN 2000, NADER. IT IS YOUR FAULT, ALL OF THIS.

From Wonkette , by By Ken Layne

Well, Not Everyone in Alaska is Batshit Nuts!

2008-09-14T15:37:00.004-04:00

From Huffington post

Please wait, your request is processed...

Palin Met By Over A Thousand Protesters In Anchorage

About two hours after Palin's speech Saturday, hundreds of people protesting the policies of Palin lined a busy Anchorage street, waving signs and chanting "Obama!"

In addition to Obama supporters, the protesters included those who don't agree with Palin's positions against abortion, her support for the Iraq war and other issues. One woman held a sign that read, "I'm Bail'in on Palin!" Another said, "Pro Woman, Anti-Palin." Another read, "What About Healthcare?"

"We're not alone. A lot of people are worried about the nomination of Sarah Palin," said rally organizer Angie Doroff, 46, as cars drove by honking their horns in support.

A Daily Kos diarist has pictures and more information on the women who organized the rally.

Despite overcast skies and a forecast for rain, there was a rally here today. Oh man, was there! In fact, it was by most accounts the largest protest rally in the history of Alaska. The Anchorage Daily News wrote that the rally drew an "estimated" 1500 people. Let me be clear: the organizers used a hand-clicker and counted at least 1,483 Alaskans, mostly women, who showed up to say that Sarah Palin does not speak for them.

And here's video:

Please wait, your request is processed...Palin Met By Over A Thousand Protesters In Anchorage

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Palin Met By Over A Thousand Protesters In Anchorage

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Palin Met By Over A Thousand Protesters In Anchorage

lease wait, your request is processed...Palin Met By Over A Thousand Protesters In Anchorage

Your "ONE STOP SHOPPING" site for all that Palin stuff.

2008-09-14T12:14:00.002-04:00

http://www.dailysource.org/palin
This Site is quite amazing. Every detail, including the most damming videos are here.
How can these people continue to lie with repositories such as this at our fingertips?
The Media better Wake up and start pointing out falsehoods when they are spoken!

TINA FEY IS A BIT SCARY AS PALIN!

2008-09-14T11:56:00.003-04:00

Love Hilary's last line!

A LITTLE SUNDAY PHOTOSHOPPING

2008-09-14T11:03:00.001-04:00

Ah, Yeah, This about sums it up.

What the Fuck, One More!

2008-09-14T08:27:00.004-04:00

Yeah, Get rid of them Museums and those Books! Can't have anything like that!
From the NY Times 9 14 08:
The new mayor also tended carefully to her evangelical base. She appointed a pastor to the town planning board. And she began to eye the library. For years, social conservatives had pressed the library director to remove books they considered immoral.

“People would bring books back censored,” recalled former Mayor John Stein, Ms. Palin’s predecessor. “Pages would get marked up or torn out.”

Witnesses and contemporary news accounts say Ms. Palin asked the librarian about removing books from the shelves. The McCain-Palin presidential campaign says Ms. Palin never advocated censorship.

But in 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book “Daddy’s Roommate” on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Ms. Chase and Mr. Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.

“Sarah said she didn’t need to read that stuff,” Ms. Chase said. “It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn’t even read it.”

“I’m still proud of Sarah,” she added, “but she scares the bejeebers out of me.”

____________________________________________________________________

Can we repeat that last one? Thank You.

____________________________________________________________________

“I’m still proud of Sarah,” she added, “but she scares the bejeebers out of me.”

Ummm, and from the Washington Post Today:

Palin also differed with the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons. The Frontiersman reported at the time that Palin asked Emmons three times in her first weeks in office whether she would agree to remove controversial books. The librarian said she would not. The McCain campaign has confirmed Palin's questions but said that she never demanded removal of any specific books. Palin also fired Emmons on Jan. 30 but reinstated her after an uproar.
____________________________________________________________________

I don't know about you guys, but this far from "scares the Beejeebus out of me"!

THE HUDSUCKER PROXY

2008-09-14T08:21:00.002-04:00

Laura Chase, the campaign manager during Ms. Palin’s first run for mayor in 1996, recalled the night the two women chatted about her ambitions.

“I said, ‘You know, Sarah, within 10 years you could be governor,’ ” Ms. Chase recalled. “She replied, ‘I want to be president.’ ”

Yes, and I want to be a fucking Astronaut!

Jesus Fucking Christ!

JUST FUCKING TYPICAL!

2008-09-13T20:31:00.003-04:00

From The Front Page of the NY Times:

In Office, Palin Hired Friends and Hit Critics

By JO BECKER, PETER S. GOODMAN AND MICHAEL POWELL

Published: September 13, 2008

WASILLA, Alaska — Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.

So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as one of her qualifications for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.

When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.

And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.

“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”

Ms. Palin walks the national stage as a small-town foe of “good old boy” politics and a champion of ethics reform. The charismatic 44-year-old governor draws enthusiastic audiences and high approval ratings. And as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she points to her management experience while deriding her Democratic rivals, Senators Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr., as speechmakers who never have run anything.

But an examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.

Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.

Still, Ms. Palin has many supporters. As a two-term mayor she paved roads and built an ice rink, and as governor she has pushed through higher taxes on the oil companies that dominate one-third of the state’s economy. She stirs deep emotions. In Wasilla, many residents display unflagging affection, cheering “our Sarah” and hissing at her critics.

“She is bright and has unfailing political instincts,” said Steve Haycox, a history professor at the University of Alaska. “She taps very directly into anxieties about the economic future.”

“But,” he added, “her governing style raises a lot of hard questions.”

Ms. Palin declined to grant an interview for this article. The McCain-Palin campaign responded to some questions on her behalf and that of her husband, while referring others to the governor’s spokespeople, who did not respond.

Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell said Ms. Palin had conducted an accessible and effective administration in the public’s interest. “Everything she does is for the ordinary working people of Alaska,” Mr. Parnell said.

In Wasilla, a builder said he complained to Mayor Palin when the city attorney put a stop-work order on his housing project. She responded, he said, by engineering the attorney’s firing.

Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.

___________________________________________________________________

THIS NEXT ONE IS ENOUGH TO HAVE THIS INDIVIDUAL IN JAIL IF YOU ASK ME, NO LESS RUNNING FOR FEDERAL OFFICE! WTF!
___________________________________________________________________

Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska professor, sought the e-mail messages of state scientists who had examined the effect of global warming on polar bears. (Ms. Palin said the scientists had found no ill effects, and she has sued the federal government to block the listing of the bears as endangered.) An administration official told Mr. Steiner that it would cost $468,784 to process his request.

When Mr. Steiner finally obtained the e-mail messages — through a federal records request — he discovered that state scientists had in fact agreed that the bears were in danger, records show.

“Their secrecy is off the charts,” Mr. Steiner said.

State legislators are investigating accusations that Ms. Palin and her husband pressured officials to fire a state trooper who had gone through a messy divorce with her sister, charges that she denies. But interviews make clear that the Palins draw few distinctions between the personal and the political.

Last summer State Representative John Harris, the Republican speaker of the House, picked up his phone and heard Mr. Palin’s voice. The governor’s husband sounded edgy. He said he was unhappy that Mr. Harris had hired John Bitney as his chief of staff, the speaker recalled. Mr. Bitney was a high school classmate of the Palins and had worked for Ms. Palin. But she fired Mr. Bitney after learning that he had fallen in love with another longtime friend.

“I understood from the call that Todd wasn’t happy with me hiring John and he’d like to see him not there,” Mr. Harris said.

“The Palin family gets upset at personal issues,” he added. “And at our level, they want to strike back.”

Hometown Mayor

Laura Chase, the campaign manager during Ms. Palin’s first run for mayor in 1996, recalled the night the two women chatted about her ambitions.

“I said, ‘You know, Sarah, within 10 years you could be governor,’ ” Ms. Chase recalled. “She replied, ‘I want to be president.’ ”

Ms. Palin grew up in Wasilla, an old fur trader’s outpost and now a fast-growing exurb of Anchorage. The town sits in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, edged by jagged mountains and birch forests. In the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration took farmers from the Dust Bowl area and resettled them here; their Democratic allegiances defined the valley for half a century.

In the past three decades, socially conservative Oklahomans and Texans have flocked north to the oil fields of Alaska. They filled evangelical churches around Wasilla and revived the Republican Party. Many of these working-class residents formed the electoral backbone for Ms. Palin, who ran for mayor on a platform of gun rights, opposition to abortion and the ouster of the “complacent” old guard.

After winning the mayoral election in 1996, Ms. Palin presided over a city rapidly outgrowing itself. Septic tanks had begun to pollute lakes, and residential lots were carved willy-nilly out of the woods. She passed road and sewer bonds, cut property taxes but raised the sales tax.

And, her supporters say, she cleaned out the municipal closet, firing veteran officials to make way for her own team. “She had an agenda for change and for doing things differently,” said Judy Patrick, a City Council member at the time.

But careers were turned upside down. The mayor quickly fired the town’s museum director, John Cooper. Later, she sent an aide to the museum to talk to the three remaining employees. “He told us they only wanted two,” recalled Esther West, one of the three, “and we had to pick who was going to be laid off.” The three quit as one.

Ms. Palin cited budget difficulties for the museum cuts. Mr. Cooper thought differently, saying the museum had become a microcosm of class and cultural conflicts in town. “It represented that the town was becoming more progressive, and they didn’t want that,” he said.

Days later, Mr. Cooper recalled, a vocal conservative, Steve Stoll, sidled up to him. Mr. Stoll had supported Ms. Palin and had a long-running feud with Mr. Cooper. “He said: ‘Gotcha, Cooper,’ ” Mr. Cooper said.

Mr. Stoll did not recall that conversation, although he said he supported Ms. Palin’s campaign and was pleased when she fired Mr. Cooper.

In 1997, Ms. Palin fired the longtime city attorney, Richard Deuser, after he issued the stop-work order on a home being built by Don Showers, another of her campaign supporters.

Your attorney, Mr. Showers told Ms. Palin, is costing me lots of money.

“She told me she’d like to see him fired,” Mr. Showers recalled. “But she couldn’t do it herself because the City Council hires the city attorney.” Ms. Palin told him to write the council members to complain.

Meanwhile, Ms. Palin pushed the issue from the inside. “She started the ball rolling,” said Ms. Patrick, who also favored the firing. Mr. Deuser was soon replaced by Ken Jacobus — then the State Republican Party’s general counsel.

“Professionals were either forced out or fired,” Mr. Deuser said.

Ms. Palin ordered city employees not to talk to the press. And she used city money to buy a white Suburban for the mayor’s use — employees sarcastically called it the mayor-mobile.

The new mayor also tended carefully to her evangelical base. She appointed a pastor to the town planning board. And she began to eye the library. For years, social conservatives had pressed the library director to remove books they considered immoral.

“People would bring books back censored,” recalled former Mayor John Stein, Ms. Palin’s predecessor. “Pages would get marked up or torn out.”

Witnesses and contemporary news accounts say Ms. Palin asked the librarian about removing books from the shelves. The McCain-Palin presidential campaign says Ms. Palin never advocated censorship.

“Sarah said she didn’t need to read that stuff,” Ms. Chase said. “It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn’t even read it.”

“I’m still proud of Sarah,” she added, “but she scares the bejeebers out of me.”

Reform Crucible

Restless ambition defined Ms. Palin in the early years of this decade. She raised money for Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican from the state; finished second in the 2002 Republican primary for lieutenant governor; and sought to fill the seat of Senator Frank H. Murkowski when he ran for governor.

Mr. Murkowski appointed his daughter to the seat, but as a consolation prize, he gave Ms. Palin the $125,000-a-year chairmanship of a state commission overseeing oil and gas drilling.

Ms. Palin discovered that the state Republican leader, Randy Ruedrich, a commission member, was conducting party business on state time and favoring regulated companies. When Mr. Murkowski failed to act on her complaints, she quit and went public.

The Republican establishment shunned her. But her break with the gentlemen’s club of oil producers and political power catapulted her into the public eye.

“She was honest and forthright,” said Jay Kerttula, a former Democratic state senator from Palmer.

Ms. Palin entered the 2006 primary for governor as a formidable candidate.

In the middle of the primary, a conservative columnist in the state, Paul Jenkins, unearthed e-mail messages showing that Ms. Palin had conducted campaign business from the mayor’s office. Ms. Palin handled the crisis with a street fighter’s guile.

“I told her it looks like she did the same thing that Randy Ruedrich did,” Mr. Jenkins recalled. “And she said, ‘Yeah, what I did was wrong.’ ”

Mr. Jenkins hung up and decided to forgo writing about it. His phone rang soon after.

Mr. Jenkins said a reporter from Fairbanks, reading from a Palin news release, demanded to know why he was “smearing” her. “Now I look at her and think: ‘Man, you’re slick,’ ” he said.

Ms. Palin won the primary, and in the general election she faced Tony Knowles, the former two-term Democratic governor, and Andrew Halcro, an independent.

Not deeply versed in policy, Ms. Palin skipped some candidate forums; at others, she flipped through hand-written, color-coded index cards strategically placed behind her nameplate.

Before one forum, Mr. Halcro said he saw aides shovel reports at Ms. Palin as she crammed. Her showman’s instincts rarely failed. She put the pile of reports on the lectern. Asked what she would do about health care policy, she patted the stack and said she would find an answer in the pile of solutions.

“She was fresh, and she was tomorrow,” said Michael Carey, a former editorial page editor for The Anchorage Daily News. “She just floated along like Mary Poppins.”

Government

Half a century after Alaska became a state, Ms. Palin was inaugurated as governor in Fairbanks and took up the reformer’s sword.

As she assembled her cabinet and made other state appointments, those with insider credentials were now on the outs. But a new pattern became clear. She surrounded herself with people she has known since grade school and members of her church.

Mr. Parnell, the lieutenant governor, praised Ms. Palin’s appointments. “The people she hires are competent, qualified, top-notch people,” he said.

Ms. Palin chose Talis Colberg, a borough assemblyman from the Matanuska valley, as her attorney general, provoking a bewildered question from the legal community: “Who?” Mr. Colberg, who did not return calls, moved from a one-room building in the valley to one of the most powerful offices in the state, supervising some 500 people.

“I called him and asked, ‘Do you know how to supervise people?’ ” said a family friend, Kathy Wells. “He said, ‘No, but I think I’ll get some help.’ ”

The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director and chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic development office for $82,908 a year. Mr. Austerman had established an Alaska franchise for Mailboxes Etc.

To her supporters — and with an 80 percent approval rating, she has plenty — Ms. Palin has lifted Alaska out of a mire of corruption. She gained the passage of a bill that tightens the rules covering lobbyists. And she rewrote the tax code to capture a greater share of oil and gas sale proceeds.

“Does anybody doubt that she’s a tough negotiator?” said State Representative Carl Gatto, Republican of Palmer.

Yet recent controversy has marred Ms. Palin’s reform credentials. In addition to the trooper investigation, lawmakers in April accused her of improperly culling thousands of e-mail addresses from a state database for a mass mailing to rally support for a policy initiative.

While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a “personal device” like a Blackberry “would be confidential and not subject to subpoena.”

The governor’s office did not respond to questions on the topic.

Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business. On Feb. 7, Frank Bailey, a high-level aide, wrote to Ms. Palin’s state e-mail address to discuss appointments. Another aide fired back: “Frank, this is not the governor’s personal account.”

Mr. Bailey responded: “Whoops~!”

Mr. Bailey, a former mid-level manager at Alaska Airlines who worked on Ms. Palin’s campaign, has been placed on paid leave; he has emerged as a central figure in the trooper investigation.

Another confidante of Ms. Palin’s is Ms. Frye, 27. She worked as a receptionist for State Senator Lyda Green before she joined Ms. Palin’s campaign for governor. Now Ms. Frye earns $68,664 as a special assistant to the governor. Her frequent interactions with Ms. Palin’s children have prompted some lawmakers to refer to her as “the babysitter,” a title that Ms. Frye disavows.

Like Mr. Bailey, she is an effusive cheerleader for her boss.

“YOU ARE SO AWESOME!” Ms. Frye typed in an e-mail message to Ms. Palin in March.

Many lawmakers contend that Ms. Palin is overly reliant on a small inner circle that leaves her isolated. Democrats and Republicans alike describe her as often missing in action. Since taking office in 2007, Ms. Palin has spent 312 nights at her Wasilla home, some 600 miles to the north of the governor’s mansion in Juneau, records show.

During the last legislative session, some lawmakers became so frustrated with her absences that they took to wearing “Where’s Sarah?” pins.

Many politicians say they typically learn of her initiatives — and vetoes — from news releases.

Mayors across the state, from the larger cities to tiny municipalities along the southeastern fiords, are even more frustrated. Often, their letters go unanswered and their pleas ignored, records and interviews show.

Last summer, Mayor Mark Begich of Anchorage, a Democrat, pressed Ms. Palin to meet with him because the state had failed to deliver money needed to operate city traffic lights. At one point, records show, state officials told him to just turn off a dozen of them. Ms. Palin agreed to meet with Mr. Begich when he threatened to go public with his anger, according to city officials.

At an Alaska Municipal League gathering in Juneau in January, mayors across the political spectrum swapped stories of the governor’s remoteness. How many of you, someone asked, have tried to meet with her? Every hand went up, recalled Mayor Fred Shields of Haines Borough. And how many met with her? Just a few hands rose. Ms. Palin soon walked in, delivered a few remarks and left for an anti-abortion rally.

The administration’s e-mail correspondence reveals a siege-like atmosphere. Top aides keep score, demean enemies and gloat over successes. Even some who helped engineer her rise have felt her wrath.

Dan Fagan, a prominent conservative radio host and longtime friend of Ms. Palin, urged his listeners to vote for her in 2006. But when he took her to task for raising taxes on oil companies, he said, he found himself branded a “hater.”

It is part of a pattern, Mr. Fagan said, in which Ms. Palin characterizes critics as “bad people who are anti-Alaska.”

As Ms. Palin’s star ascends, the McCain campaign, as often happens in national races, is controlling the words of those who know her well. Her mother-in-law, Faye Palin, has been asked not to speak to reporters, and aides sit in on interviews with old friends.

At a recent lunch gathering, an official with the Wasilla Chamber of Commerce asked its members to refer all calls from reporters to the governor’s office. Diane Woodruff, a city councilwoman, shook her head.

“I was thinking, I don’t remember giving up my First Amendment rights,” Ms. Woodruff said. “Just because you’re not going gaga over Sarah doesn’t mean you can’t speak your mind.”

An Excellent Essay by Katha Pollitt from The Nation

2008-09-13T14:10:00.007-04:00

Lipstick on a Wing Nut

Subject to Debate

By Katha Pollitt

This article appeared in the September 29, 2008 edition of The Nation.

September 10, 2008

John McCain chose the supremely under-qualified Sarah Palin as his running mate partly because she is a woman. If you have a problem with that, you're a sexist. She talks incessantly about being a mother of five and uses her newborn, Trig, who has Down syndrome, as a campaign prop. If you wonder how she'll handle all those kids and the Veep job too, you're a super-sexist. "When do they ever ask a man that question?" charges that fiery feminist Rudy Giuliani. Indeed, Palin, who went back to work when Trig was three days old, gets nothing but praise from Phyllis Schlafly, James Dobson and the folks at National Review, who usually blame all the ills of modern America on those neurotic, harried, selfish, frustrated, child-neglecting, husband-castrating working mothers. Even stranger, her five-months-pregnant 17-year-old, Bristol, gets nothing but compassion and respect from Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and others who have spent their careers slut-shaming teens for having sex--and blaming their parents for letting it happen.

If there were an Olympics for hypocrisy, the Republican Party would have more gold medals than Michael Phelps. And Palin would be wearing quite a few of them. It takes chutzpah for a mother to thrust her pregnant teen into the world's harshest spotlight and then demand the world respect the girl's privacy. But then it takes chutzpah to support criminalizing abortion and then praise Bristol's "decision" to have the baby. The right to decide, and privacy, after all, are two of the things Palin wants to deny every other woman, and every other family, in America. Palin's even said she would "choose life" if her daughter was pregnant from rape. Can't you just hear Bristol groaning, "Mo-om...!"

The Republicans bashed Barack Obama as a "celebrity," but now they've got a star of their own, so naturally the rules have changed. Nothing would suit them better than for the media to spend the next two months spellbound by the wacky carnival on ice that is the Palin family: Todd, aka the First Dude, the kids, Levi the hunky bad-boy dad-to-be--well, maybe not him so much after his expletive-adorned MySpace page briefly came to light ("I'm a fuckin' redneck"; "I don't want kids"--whoops). The snowmobiles, the moose burgers, the guns, the hair, the glasses that are flying off America's shelves (starting at $375 a pair, and she has seven). Fretting over the work/family issue alone should take up enough column inches to employ all the female journalists in America from now to next Mother's Day. And don't forget that op-ed staple, What Does This Mean for Feminism?

Well, I'm not playing. I don't care about Sarah Palin's family. I don't care if she's a good mother. I don't care if she's happily married, or who shops and who vacuums, or who takes care of the kids while both parents are at work. I don't want her recipe for caribou hot dogs, either. Life chezLeave It to Jesus?) or a scathing tell-all a decade or so down the road (Governor Dearest?). Either way, so what? This is an election, not The View. As for feminism's meaning, what can you say after you've said that her career shows that even right-wing fundamentalist women have taken in feminism's message of empowerment and that's good, but that Palin's example suggests women can do it all without support from society and that's bad? Sarah and Todd might make an adorable sitcom ( Leave It to Jesus?) or a scathing tell-all a decade or so down the road (Governor Dearest?). Either way, so what? This is an election, not The View. As for feminism's meaning, what can you say after you've said that her career shows that even right-wing fundamentalist women have taken in feminism's message of empowerment and that's good, but that Palin's example suggests women can do it all without support from society and that's bad?

Count me as a feminist who never believed that being PTA president meant you could be, well, President. The more time we spend on dippy ruminations--how does she do it? Queen Bee on steroids or the hockey mom next door? how hot is Todd, anyway?--the less focus there will be on the kind of queries that should come first with any vice presidential candidate, and certainly would if Palin were a man. Questions like:

§ Suppose your 14-year-old daughter Willow is brutally raped in her bedroom by an intruder. She becomes pregnant and wants an abortion. Could you tell the parents of America why you think your child and their children should be forced by law to have their rapists' babies?

§ You say you don't believe global warming is man-made. Could you tell us what scientists you've spoken with or read who have led you to that conclusion? What do you think the 2,500 scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are getting wrong?

§ If you didn't try to fire Wasilla librarian Mary Ellen Baker over her refusal to consider censoring books, why did you try to fire her?

§ What is the European Union, and how does it function?

§ Forty-seven million Americans lack health insurance. John Goodman, who has advised McCain on healthcare, has proposed redefining them as covered because, he says, anyone can get care at an ER. Do you agree with him?

§ What is the function of the Federal Reserve?

§ Cindy and John McCain say you have experience in foreign affairs because Alaska is next to Russia. When did you last speak with Prime Minister Putin, and what did you talk about?

§ Approximately how old is the earth? Five thousand years? 10,000? 5 billion?

§ You are a big fan of President Bush, so why didn't you mention him even once in your convention speech?

§ McCain says cutting earmarks and waste will make up for revenues lost by making the tax cuts permanent. Experts say that won't wash. Balancing the Bush tax cuts plus new ones proposed by McCain would most likely mean cutting Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. Which would you cut?

§ You're suing the federal government to have polar bears removed from the endangered species list, even as Alaska's northern coastal ice is melting and falling into the sea. Can you explain the science behind your decision?

§ You've suggested that God approves of the Iraq War and the Alaska pipeline. How do you know?

Yeah, Russia and Georgia, hmmmm...

2008-09-12T23:15:00.003-04:00

From Jesus General:
So Sarah Palin doesn't know what the "Bush Doctrine" is. You don't really have to understand the central doctrine driving our current foreign policy to be qualified to be vice president; you just have to be willing to kick some ass. Sure the Bush Doctrine, which says that pre-emptive war is justified in some cases, was our excuse for invading Iraq and our justification for a potential attack on Iran, but Gov. Palin doesn't need an excuse. She needs an apocalypse to usher in Our Lord Jesus' second coming.

So forget about "Bush Doctrine" segment of her interview with Charlie Gibson. The important part is where she talks about going to war with Russia. That’s our apocalypse. It’s a shame she wasn’t president a month ago, because we’d be ass deep in apocalypse right now, with a possibility of having Christ stop by for Christmas. Posted by Gen. JC Christian, Patriot at 5:08 AM Report to the General (32) |

Why, Those Women Were Asking for It!!

2008-09-12T18:28:00.002-04:00

Fucking Evangelical Fucktard!

New Evidence: Palin Had Direct Role In Charging Rape Victims For Exams

Despite denials by the Palin campaign, new evidence proves that as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin had a direct hand in imposing fees to pay for post-sexual assault medical exams conducted by the city to gather evidence.

Palin's role is now confirmed by Wasilla City budget documents available online.

Under Sarah Palin's administration, Wasilla cut funds that had previously paid for the medical exams and began charging victims or their health insurers the $500 to $1200 fees. Although Palin spokeswoman Maria Comella wrote USA Today earlier this week that the GOP vice presidential nominee "does not believe, nor has she ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test...To suggest otherwise is a deliberate misrepresentation of her commitment to supporting victims and bringing violent criminals to justice," Palin, as mayor, fired police chief Irl Stambaugh and replaced him with Charlie Fannon, who with Palin's knowledge, slashed the budget for the exams and began charging the city's victims of sexual assault. The city budget documents demonstrate Palin read and signed off on the new budget. A year later, alarmed Alaska lawmakers passed legislation outlawing the practice.

News of the controversial policy has leaked slowly into the press this week as the presidential campaign has heated up and Palin's record has been subject to increasing scrutiny. The practice of charging rape victims has called into question Palin's stated commitment to women's issues, her judgment as an executive and her honesty about her record.

The story of the Wasilla policy has made its way from comments on Daily Kos to the pages of USA Today. But clear evidence suggesting Palin knew Wasilla was charging the victims of sexual assault has been hard to find. Placing the city budget records, however, alongside a timetable of Palin's firing Chief Stambaugh and hiring Chief Fannon makes it clear the policy was put in place as a direct result of Palin's leadership.

The mayor of Wasilla before Sarah Palin, John C. Stein, was also a Republican, though the office was and continues to be non-partisan. Mayor Stein was defeated by Sarah Palin in a campaign that brought in the NRA, Republican partisans, and a whisper campaign that Mayor Stein was Jewish (he is a Christian, but is "proud of such a reputation"). He now runs the Sitka Sound Science Center, a marine research facility in Sitka, Alaska.

Mayor Stein told OffTheBus that he didn't "think victims were billed while [he] was mayor," but that he wasn't certain. He did mention that "Wasilla participated in establishing a Sexual Assault Response Team to set-up a one-stop forensic exam room for victims," evidence of a pro-victim police department. In order to confirm his assertion about the billing policy, he recommended I contact current police chief Angella Long for confirmation. She did not return my request for comment.

However, I was able to eventually track down Irl Stambaugh, police chief of Wasilla from the founding of the department until Sarah Palin fired him for "not fully supporting her efforts to govern." Stambaugh sued for breach of contract, but lost when a federal judge ruled that "police chiefs serve at the behest of the mayor unless otherwise specified." He later served as the executive director of the Alaska Police Standards Council.

It turns out that Wasilla did not bill sexual assault victims for the cost of rape exams while Irl Stambaugh was chief of police. As chief, he had included a line item in the budget to pay for the cost of such exams. He had only just heard about the Mayor Palin/Chief Fannon policy today, and was just as shocked to hear about it as I was.

Checking the budget confirmed former Chief Stambaugh's claim. He had included a contingency of $15,000 in his budget for the department's 1st year of existence (1993-1994), $5,000 for 1994-1995 and 1995-1996, and $13,000 for his final year as police chief in 1996-1997, spending $11,625.

Duwayne Charles Fannon, his replacement, halved the budget request in 1997-1998, with a request of $7,298, spending $3,454. However, it seems he began the "victim pays" policy in the 1998-1999 fiscal year. That year, he requested $3,000 but spent only $205. This data can be found in the Document Central section of Wasilla's website.

The Document for the 1998-1999 fiscal year begins with a message "To the Citizens of the City of Wasilla:"

The comprehensive annual financial report of the City of Wasilla for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1999, is hereby submitted. The City's Finance Department prepared the report. Responsibility for both the accuracy of the data, and the completeness and fairness of the presentation, including all disclosures, rests with the City. To the best of our knowledge and belief, the enclosed data is accurate in all material respects and is reported in a manner designed to fairly present the financial position and results of operations of the various funds and account groups of the City. All disclosures necessary to enable the reader to gain an understanding of the City's financial activities have been included. ...

At the end of the letter, under the words "Respectfully submitted," is the signature of Sarah Palin. Unless she made a false claim about the data being accurate to the best of her knowledge, she was aware of the change in billing policy orchestrated by Police Chief Fannon. The McCain/Palin campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

To see Palin's signature in Wasilla's 1999 Financial Report, download the full report here. [The 7-page letter written by Sarah Palin and the city's finance director as an introduction to the 1998-1999 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report makes it clear that the City of Wasilla, and hence the mayor, is responsible for oversight over the report. The letter discusses certain minor city actions, such as an extension by the city of the East Wasilla Water Main in order to serve the newly built Wal-Mart. The rest of the letter is a summary of the information contained in the report. However, it is notable that "the City of Wasilla is required to undergo an annual single audit in conformity of the Federal and State Single Audit Acts." Under the most recent amendments to that act at the time, an entity had to expend $300,000 in federal funds to be subject to the Single Audit Act; a look at page 88 of the full financial report shows the federal share of Wasilla city expenditures to have been $1,145,753, nearly $200/resident.]

Typical Florida Person Creates Year’s Best Campaign Sign

2008-09-12T17:39:00.002-04:00

“Lacasse put the sign in his front yard four days ago. ‘If I see anybody touching that sign, I got a club sitting right over there,’ Lacasse said.” [Central Florida News 13]
From Wonkette

More Shadow Government

2008-09-12T16:25:00.002-04:00

From http://www.andrewhalcro.com/

Shadow Governor?

Coming Thursday: The Shadow Governor

In the aftermath of the Walt Monegan firing, one question keeps surfacing over and over again; why does the governor's husband, Todd Palin appear to hold so much power?

After all, Nancy Murkowski or Susan Knowles were never accused of pressuring a commissioner or inappropriately sitting in on meetings that should have been private.

The stories started last year when Representative Ralph Samuels told me about going into a meeting, he thought would be private, with Governor Sarah Palin. Much to his surprise, Todd Palin was there and proceeded to sit through the entire meeting.

Other lawmakers have shared similar stories and were shocked at how inappropriate Todd's presence was at meetings with the governor. Yesterday on the Dan Fagan Show, Representative Jay Ramras mentioned that Todd was working lawmakers offices during the ACES debate.

But more importantly, Todd's fingerprints on trying to impact personnel decisions appear to go beyond the current scandal revolving around State Trooper Mike Wooten.

Consider the story of one of Governor Palin's former trusted advisors, John Bitney.

Bitney grew up with the governor, often telling the story of being in the same band class. He served as her Issues Coordinator during her successful gubernatorial campaign in 2006, spokesman for her transition team after the election and on December 1, 2006 he was named her Legislative Liaison.

Bitney was respected as a hard worker by people who knew him and worked with him. In six months, Bitney guided the governor's policies through the legislature, including her hallmark legislation; AGIA.

But John Bitney made the fatal employment mistake; he got on the bad side of Todd Palin.

In June of 2007, it became known that Bitney was dating the soon to be ex-wife of Todd Palin's good friend. Palin reportedly began demanding that Bitney be fired.

After a short time, Bitney realized that he couldn't remain in the governor's office due to the constant pressure and he worked out a deal with Chief of Staff Mike Tibbles to take a transfer to another department.

On July 3, Bitney was in the process of driving his vehicle back to Juneau when he couldn't get his state issued Blackberry to work. When he arrived in Tok he called his office and was told that his Blackberry had been turned off and that his name had been removed from the state employee directory.

His call was then transferred into Tibbles who told him the proposal they talked about was a no deal and the governor ordered him fired immediately. John Bitney was never given a reason why he was fired and never given a chance to make a graceful exit.

However reading the press statements from the Palin administration, you'd think otherwise.

According to the APRN on July 9, 2007, Governor Palin's spokeswomen Sharon Leighow said Bitney left for "personal reasons" and the departure was "amicable."

The Associated Press reported on July 10, 2007, "A spokeswoman for the governor says Bitney and Palin mutually agreed he would leave his post for personal reasons."

Bitney didn't leave his post, he was unfairly and unceremoniously fired and even after serving as a loyal employee was never given an answer as to why he was dismissed by the governor.

According to Bitney, "Todd's words have so much weight".

Confidential Emails

The most alarming indication of Todd Palin's reach into state government came just yesterday.

Last month, a group of Alaskans filed a freedom of information act for emails sent from the computers of both Frank Bailey and Ivey Frye. Along with several boxes of documents, they received a cover letter along with 78 pages detailing the emails that were not released due to "Deliberative Process and Executive Privilege". (Privilege log attached)

Page 1 of the list showed seven emails from both Governor Sarah Palin and Lt. Governor Sean Parnell within a three hour time frame on Feburary 1, 2008 that were described as "Email re Andrew Halcro".

The serious concern about these emails is that they were prohibited from being released to the public due to executive privilege, even though Todd Palin was copied on these same emails.

Todd Palin is not a member of the executive branch, nor is he even a government employee. Todd Palin is a member of the general public.

So why in the world is Todd Palin getting copied on emails that his wife's administration is classifying as confidential?

Furthermore there is something incredibly suspicious about these emails.

The first email was sent on Feburary 1 at 7:41am from Lt. Governor Sean Parnell to Governor Sarah Palin. Obviously something was burning Parnell to make him fire off an email to the governor so early in the morning about Andrew Halcro. This in turn set off a flurry of email activity that spanned the next three hours and encompassed five different people including Todd Palin.

Judging from the blogs I posted on January 31, the night before, this very well could be about the 2004 TransCanada proposal that Parnell help negotiate when he was an attorney in the oil & gas division that has been kept sealed ever since. TransCanada has insisted to this day that it remain confidential.

These emails should be released to the public...after all Todd Palin has no standing to claim executive privilege. By including him in the email loop, the Palin administration has arguably breached any claim of executive privilege.

After all, government can't pick and choose what private citizens get to see confidential material, that is exactly why freedom of information laws exist.

The attached print out clearly shows that something drove this administration into overdrive, hence the seven emails in under three hours. Since the executive privilege has been breached by sending them to Todd Palin, this administration should release those emails so all Alaskans can see them.

This is yet another example of why we need to get to the facts about how power is being used in the governor's office.

AS CRAZY AS A SHIT-HOUSE RAT

2008-09-12T11:18:00.001-04:00

This woman is just a Batshit Crazy Christian. Period.