Over it

I am so sick of Sarah Palin.



A week from now this will probably piss me off no end, but for now, it's hitting my funny bone.

57 States

Not that the people who keep bringing this up will read, or accept, this, but here is a little remedial exposition, not courtesy of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. Their candidate lost, largely due to the failing economy the Bushites handed all of us, but in no small part thanks to the dim bulb he was saddled with as a way of getting the religious right's support. I suppose it's understandable, if sad, that they need to keep hammering on any single point they can dredge up.

It shouldn't surprise me that Obama isn't allowed a simple and obvious mis-statement, saying 57 instead of 47, but the uber-conservative spunky Sarah Palin can make all kinds of mistakes, or just not answer questions at all because she doesn't know the answers, and still get votes. I guess she has an excuse - she's the victim of a piss-poor liberal educational system, right? Conservatives of all stripes and mouth sizes can say anything and get a retraction the next day. Bush can shred the Constitution, but he's a conservative so it's ok, we should just trust him and go along.

I wonder if the people who are making their ignorant digs now will be prepared to eat crow if the country doesn't become a black Muslim socialist state annexed to Syria and Saudi Arabia in the next four years. Mind you, I'm using the word “conservative” liberally, if you will excuse the expression. Hell, Rush Limbaugh couldn't define conservatism if you held a gun to his head - he can only parrot back what he was told by the very smart people who run things (like Karl Rove, who knows exactly what conservatism is). If the poor schmucks in the US ever figured out that conservatism is really about establishing and maintaining a small ruling class who control all and have most of the money, maybe they'd stop voting for the people to whom they have ceded their obligation to think. All anyone has to do is take a good look at who has the money and gets all the breaks in the US right now. Could it be any clearer? Wake up, Kansas, the neo-cons don't give a rat's ass about you, never did and never will, except during the next election. Then they'll be lookin' to buy y'all a can of Bud.

Carving the turkeys

The long knives are out. Hard to believe that Sarah Palin didn't understand that South Africa is a country on the continent of Africa, not a district in the country of Africa. She isn't so much younger than me that basic geography should have escaped her education. She couldn't name the countries in NAFTA, or those in North America?? WTF??



It's sad to see Bill O'Reilly almost tripping over himself to come to Palin's defense &mdash do you suppose he'd be as generous if a Democrat didn't know these things, would he say they could be “tutored” and brought up to speed on something they should have learned by the time they were in junior high? Reid Buckley has already paved that road.

Newsweek has been embedding reporters in campaigns for several election cycles now, with the promise that none of the revelations would be published until after the election. I'm thinking maybe that shouldn't happen when they have clear evidence that the person who will be second in charge of this country can't name the other two countries that share our continent. The GOP should be embarrassed and ashamed. They won't be; they'll blame the “liberal media” that has protected Shrub for eight years, or they'll somehow blame Clinton, but they won't accept responsibility for nominating a nincompoop to the second highest public office in the country.

Folks whose only news source is Fox will be stunned to see these reports, but they'll find a way to discount every one. Folks whose only news source is Rush Limbaugh won't have a thing to worry about, because they'll never hear about these reports, except in Limbaugh's twisted retelling. Too bad.

I have the audiobook of The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder by Vincent Bugliosi (of Helter Skelter fame). He makes a convincing case. The citizens of this country were lied to after 9/11, and swallowed the lies whole, in no small part because the press failed to do its job. At the time, the news was filtered to such an extent that very few people really knew what was going on. He goes a long way in exposing the media coverup for what it was and still is, along with the major players.

Whether you like John Kerry or not, and I'm not a fan, you have to be a complete GOP stooge to claim he flip-flopped on his Iraq war vote. He, like most others in Congress, chose to trust what turned out to be an untrustworthy administration. When he found out he had been lied to, he said had he known the truth, his vote would have been different. How that is a flip-flop instead of an indictment of the administration is something I never understood. I'm sure a Limburger could explain it to me. Or maybe I'm just not smart enough to get it, maybe it takes a special kind of intelligence, like Palin's, to understand why conservatives are always right. Personally, I think they should pull their collective heads out of Karl Rove's ass — I wonder if Palin knows who that is.

Guess who's coming to the White House?

Barack Obama is the President-elect and on January 20, 2009, will become the US's 44th President.

OMG, run for your lives! The scary black people are taking over, white women will be rounded up and forced to have abortions, five-year-olds will be sold as sex slaves, we're going to be bombed back into the stone ages by terrorists, you will be forced to have socialized medicine and your taxes are going to wipe you out!!

Seriously, only the most brainwashed conservatives really believe this country is going to be destroyed. If Shrub couldn't do it, it cannot be done. Period.

Remember how the conservatives were screaming that they had a mandate four years ago? Think they'll recognize one when they see it? I don't.

Speaking of Shrub, let's not forget he's still got a couple months to screw us over. Remember the brouhaha over Bill Clinton's pardons? Let's see what GWB has up his sleeve. He still has time to take away even more of our Constitutional rights, decimate environmental policy and pass tax breaks for his already wealthy friends. I hope Obama has somebody keeping track of the details.

Election Day

It's going to be an historic election, regardless of who wins (and I'm really hoping that the McPalin ticket loses). I have the luxury of being able to continue voting third party, since I live in a foregone-conclusion state. If I were still in PA, or maybe in FL, I might have to vote in an effort to push the conservatives out. This group has overstayed their welcome.

Fox News is reporting about voter intimidation in Philadelphia. If true, it is inexcusable. Anyone intimidating voters should go directly to jail for the next four-eight years, depending, and forfeit their right to participate in this election and maybe the next. If the Black Panthers, or the Klan, or anyone else, are stupid enough to be there intimidating anyone, poll workers, voters, whoever, they need to be thrown in jail pronto, and anyone who was so intimidated that they left needs to file a complaint and be allowed to vote, tomorrow if necessary. Seriously, they are in Philadelphia — have these morons forgotten MOVE? And no bullshit about how a guy in a para-military outfit holding a billy club isn't meant to be intimidating — would the same be said if he was in a white sheet and hood holding that same billy club?

I just read the David Brooks Op-Ed in the NY Times. What a jackass. Maybe if a masochistic mood strikes, I'll elaborate more fully. Suffice to say he continues with the lame conservative diatribe of whining about how Obama is a child of privilege, one of the dreaded “upscale educated class” ill-suited to be President, while McCain is “an old warrior with a record of making hard decisions and absorbing the blows that ensue.” He leaves out the parts about philandering and gambling. McCain is to be revered, Obama is to be feared.

Brooks writes that this country is coming to the end of a “long boom” economically, which tells me he is one of the feared upper-class richie riches, completely clueless how the majority of people in this country have lived over the last thirty years.

Perhaps he has made an inadvertent point, however. Early in the article, when he is describing the perfect storm of ending eras in which we find ourselves, he writes, “Politically, it probably marks the end of conservative dominance, which began in 1980.” He concludes with

We’re probably entering a period, in other words, in which smart young liberals meet a stone-cold scarcity that they do not seem to recognize or have a plan for.

In an age of transition, the children are left to grapple with the burdens of their elders.

And who's fault is that?

Yes We Can

The Tano Sokolow remix of Lee Dorsey's version of Alain Toussaint's Yes We Can is making the rounds as Obama's unofficial campaign song, but the version I remember is the Pointer Sisters cover, their first big hit:


Pointer Sisters With Gaylord Birch

Like, Socialism

From The New Yorker:

…The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.

Umm, what is the definition of Socialism again?

Palin's "Straight Talk"

Blogger Anil Dash has an interesting post about Sarah Palin and the linguistic choices she makes. I think it is fair to say the choices are hers, because her run-on sentences and semi-coherent ramblings can't possibly be the work of any speechwriter who is on the Republican payroll.

…I don't usually write about politics here; I leave the ugliness to those who seem to revel in it. But I think a lot about language, usually in a more lighthearted context like talking about yo mama jokes or lolcats. What's striking to me this election season, though, is that Sarah Palin has chosen to abuse her command of language so obviously without suffering any serious criticism for it thus far.

The crux of the issue is simple:

1. Sarah Palin has unequivocally associated Barack Obama with the idea of terrorism and specifically with "terrorists".
2. Republican President George Bush has defined in our National Security Strategy, and the Republican Party's platform affirms, that we may identify and strike at terrorists before they have committed any defined acts of aggression against American citizens.
3. George Bush has made clear, by stating before a joint session of Congress that "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."
4. Palin has used deliberate choice of language to avoid these connections being highlighted by the media, while increasing the likelihood that the target audience for her message will be incited by her statements.

Through these arguments, it becomes clear that Sarah Palin's assertions are designed not to prove that Obama is unqualified for the office of the Presidency of the United States. Rather, she appears to be attempting to convince a substantial portion of her supporters that Obama supports terrorism against the United States and thus should be, at the very least, incarcerated as an enemy combatant (which we are doing to American citizens already) or at worst, assassinated for supporting terror…

Dash makes some interesting points and he gives Palin credit for being intelligent enough to know exactly what she is doing, which is something too many Democrats have failed to do.

What I find fascinating about this election cycle is this: take anything Sarah Palin has said about Obama, and change her name to Joe Biden and Obama's to McCain, then try to imagine that the so-called liberal press wouldn't be taken to task by the biggest fascist mouths around. You'll spot them easily — they are the ones who call themselves conservatives, aka real Americans. You know, the multi-millionaire elitists who claim they are not elitists.

Bud Light

It's time for a little comic relief.



This is a few years old, but still funny. Let's hope that the new ownership doesn't change whatever advertising firm the old ownership used.

Palin's wardrobe malfunction

With 10 days until Election Day, long-brewing tensions between GOP vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin and key aides to Sen. John McCain have become so intense, they are spilling out in public, sources say.

Several McCain advisers have suggested to CNN that they have become increasingly frustrated with what one aide described as Palin "going rogue."

A Palin associate, however, said the candidate is simply trying to "bust free" of what she believes was a damaging and mismanaged roll-out.

McCain sources say Palin has gone off-message several times, and they privately wonder whether the incidents were deliberate. They cited an instance in which she labeled robocalls -- recorded messages often used to attack a candidate's opponent -- "irritating" even as the campaign defended their use. Also, they pointed to her telling reporters she disagreed with the campaign's decision to pull out of Michigan.

A second McCain source says she appears to be looking out for herself more than the McCain campaign…

Hey Republican Party, welcome to your karma.

Some aides to Sen. John McCain say they weren't happy that running mate Sarah Palin went off script Sunday and turned attention back to the controversy over her wardrobe.

The Alaska governor on Sunday brought up the recent reports regarding the Republican National Committee's $150,000 spending spree on clothing and accessories for the Palin family.

Palin denounced talks of her wardrobe as "ridiculous" and declared emphatically: "Those clothes, they are not my property."

"Just like the lighting and the staging and everything else that the RNC purchased, I'm not taking them with me," she said at a rally in Tampa, Florida.

A senior McCain adviser told CNN that those comments "were not the remarks we sent to her plane." Palin did not discuss the wardrobe story at her rally in Kissimmee, Florida, later in the day…

And I'll just bet she returns all the clothes. Sure she will. Just like she returned the money for that bridge to nowhere.