Sarah Baxter in Washington
September 28, 2008
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.
The ‘Stop Making Sense’ Campaign Just Did
“Never mistake motion for action.”
– Ernest Hemingway
In one of the topsy-turvy, fun-house-mirror aspects of this election, the hypothetically conservative Palin-McCain bid for the White House is being run as the most post-rational, incoherent, chaotic, image-driven, short attention span, non-factual, theatrical, emotional, ‘truthiness’-spewing political campaign in our history, worthy of the amorphous meanderings of a liberal French deconstructionist or a parody of reactionary outrage by Stephen Colbert.
Sure, we know that the Bush neocons like to create their own reality and let the rest of us catch up but, eventually, as has happened to King Junior, reality does come thundering down — as it has in Iraq, in Katrina, in our economy — where it can’t be ignored anymore, but the wildly lurching Palin-McCain extravaganza has decided to tempt fate and test the limits of the public gag reflex one more time by resurrecting every sordid, dishonest battering of reason and civility that Atwater and Rove have ever dreamed up.
Like the TV show “Seinfeld,” it is really a campaign about nothing: McCain’s economic policies – cut taxes and wait for a miracle – are a sour joke that we are feeling the punch line to as BushCo asks for a $700 billion bailout for trying the same thing; McCain’s phony Surge – which was really mostly just bribing the warlords to keep quiet — has worked successfully to keep our combat forces tied down in Iraq with no end in sight; his health care proposals will actually cost middle-class families more money for health insurance, and on and on it goes. Slip the rug out from under the rubes and call it real conservatism while you soften the fall of your rich cronies with golden parachutes – McCain should more accurately use the campaign slogan, ‘Country Club First.’
That McCain, a man who once campaigned against the interference of religion in secular politics, signed on as his Veep pick a born-again Christian zealot who knows more about the Rapture than she does the world she lives in and wears her narrow-minded ignorance and screwball religious beliefs as a badge of pride, to cynically solidify his hold on what remains of the Republican base says more about the current corrupt state of his character than five years in a POW camp in North Vietnam thirty-five years ago.
So, this is the shell game McCain and Palin are running: It’s not about what he or she would do as president or vice president – that’s archaic thinking — but rather the two-word message and the photo-op – McCain putting ‘Country First’ by suspending his campaign, yet still airing ads and keeping his campaign offices open, and jetting to Washington to appear for the cameras as if he’s already president, supposedly to deal with our economic crisis that he helped create and still doesn’t fully understand. That he just sat on his hands with no real authority is a reality trumped by the man-in-motion image – or so his Rove-trained advisors hope. There’s Palin, now appearing in several interviews and displaying her keen memory for brief neocon clichés and homey aphorisms provided by her handlers, but little grasp of what she’s babbling about, culminating in the low spot of her performance thus far, appearing in frothy TV talk-show spots with Hamid Karzai, Bush’s installed president of Afghanistan; a bulbous and lethargic Henry Kissinger, and a bemused President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, wondering if this insipid woman will help him get more foreign aid if he cooperates. She discussed babies with Karzai, emitted vacuous platitudes with Uribe, and flattered Kissinger’s obese ego in his blubbery senility. (Perhaps, for a fleeting moment, he thought he was dating Jill St. John again.) She increased her knowledge not one iota, but she ‘knows’ world leaders – see we have pictures!
“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.”
One small step for McCain; one giant leap backwards for women.
Sarah Palin: Phyllis Schlafly with Better Make-Up?
A couple of weeks ago, Gloria Steinem wrote an op-ed worrying about Sarah Palin’s views on so many issues that are crucial to progressive voters — reproductive choice, the teaching of the Bible vs. science in public schools, global warming, gun control, and sex education for our kids.
And she compared Palin, rightly, I think, to Phyllis Schlafly.
It’s scary enough to think about Palin in those terms. Not because they both share a love of outdated up-dos. But because of their shared commitment to an extreme conservative view of what American government should look like.
Cadbury says Chinese-made chocolate have melamine
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080929/ap_on_re_as/as_cadbury_chocolate_recall
CHINA STRIKES AGAIN!
It appears that one more time China strikes again! The Heinz Company evidently has their dry baby cereals manufactured in China, and they are finding traces of melamine in the cereal. Heniz is doing a voluntary recall of the products. So for those of us who use baby cereals and mix with baby meats when we have dogs with an upset intestinal system, you may want to choose Gerber products which are made in the US. This also effected the Silang House steamed potato wasabi crackers as well. I had never used them, but just in case someone else does.
Just a heads up, you may have friends with human babies that may use the Heinz products.
Is it just me, or does China have such an abundance of melamine that they have to figure out new and inventive ways to get rid of it??? How many times do they have to get busted on this before they get the message???
The scheme is actually pretty simple. Please forgive my primitive graphics abilities.
The fund will buy mortgages from the banks at market value, and then re-sell them back to the banks at a discount. The fund will then repurchase those mortgages from the banks, who will sell them back to the fund again. The same product (perhaps an ill-advised mortgage for a half-million dollars taken out on a house in the distant suburbs of Las Vegas) will be bought, then resold, then re-bought and re-resold in an endless spiral of profit-taking. The taxpayer will lose on every transaction, the banks robbing the treasury each time each mortgage, or package of mortgages is swapped.
It is amazing to observe the greatest transfer of wealth in history, from Main Street to Wall Street, from the many to the few. What is even more amazing is that nobody seems to be stopping it.
Sarah Palin has been talking up her “foreign policy experience.” Palin has said that because Alaska is right next door to both Russia and Canada, her time as Governor has given her some experience in international relations as she deals with leaders in the region. I live in Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory, so I am one of Palin’s neighbours. To be honest, I didn’t know much at all about Palin prior to her emergence on the national stage. I did a little reserach on Palin’s neighbourhood visits, and learned that although she has never had a meeting with Governor Alexey Kuzmitsky of Kamchatka Oblast, or Governor Roman Kopin of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug or whoever the Governor of the Koryak Autonomous Okrug is, (trust me, Palin doesn’t know either) she has met with with my Premier, Dennis Fentie.
In fact, prior to the photo ops with various heads of state at the UN the other day, Yukon Premier Dennis Fentie was the only foreign leader that Palin had ever had a meeting with. (more…)
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The Tattlesnake – McCain Failin’ ’08 Edition
Or, The Rake and Raquel Drop Down the Well
You Can’t Make This Up: Sarah Palin blows the two interviews she has with CBS’ Katie Couric, so she comes back for a rematch bringing her Grandpa John to help out. In-frigging-credible. Palin already looks lame, so you make her appear even lamer by sticking McCain in there for another sit-down with Katie? Whose idea was it to put that on the air? Is Grandpa going to go onstage and hold her hand during Thursday’s debate with Biden, too?
McCain also invoked what was perhaps one of the dumber ripostes in a campaign festooned with them when he accused an average voter, asking a question of Palin about attacking terrorist camps in Pakistan, of playing the ‘Gotcha’ game. So now asking St. Sarah about anything to which she gives the wrong answer is playing ‘Gotcha’? Should be an interesting debate Thursday – “Uh, that question you just asked me about borrowing money from China is a ‘Gotcha’ question and I don’t answer ‘Gotcha’ questions, sir.”
Latest Big Media Euphemisms for McCain’s Lies and Flip-Flops, collected over the past couple of weeks from various sources: “His position has evolved,” “He’s finding a new mechanism to present his case,” “He’s altering his message,” “He’s appealing to the Republican base,” “He’s responding to change by changing,” “He’s proving his maverick streak,” “He’s reforming his position on the issue,” “He’s looking for the right message here,” “He’s fine tuning his message to the base.”
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