Month: September 2008

Alaska’s MudFlats blog:

Is Bristol fair game? Our first instinct is probably, no. Family is off limits. But what happens when family matters demonstrate decision making ability, criteria for judgment, and how the candidate will enact potential policy decisions? That changes things.

Sarah Palin has repeatedly said that having her baby is Bristol’s ‘decision’. And isn’t Bristol lucky to have a decision, and a supportive family, and someone who wants to marry her, and parents who are well-off and willing to help her, and the help of a nanny. Yes, she is. And, frankly, it would be a mistake to question the family’s decision because it is their decision, and that’s the point. The crux of this issue is that Palin believes other girls like Bristol should have no decision – not in the case of rape, or incest, or both. Not if you’re 12 or 20 or 55, rich or poor, married or alone, sick or well, able or disabled.

Palin believes her daughter should not have had a choice, even if she had been raped, even if she had been 12, and even if she had been a victim of incest, or all three. And she doesn’t think any other family should have a choice either.

A comment on McCain-Palin sex-ed policies:

just say no

it didn’t work with drugs…..how’s it gonna work with sex?

I’ve read several accounts over the years citing credible sources or written as first hand accounts that John McCain distorts his POW story.

PRISONER OR HONORED GUEST?

McCain’s 5½-year stay at the Hanoi Hilton (officially Hoa Loa Prison) has ever since been the subject of great controversy. He maintains that he was tortured and otherwise badly mistreated. One of many who disagree is Dennis Johnson, imprisoned at Hanoi and never given treatment for his broken leg. He reports that every time he saw McCain, who was generally kept segregated, the man was clean-shaven, dressed in fresh clothes, and appeared comfortable among North Vietnamese Army officers. He adds that he frequently heard McCain’s collaborative statements broadcast over the prison’s loud speakers.

On October 26, 1967, McCain’s A-4 Skyhawk was shot down over Hanoi. The fractures of 1 leg and both arms were reportedly due to his failure to tuck them in during ejection. According to U.S. News & World Report (May 14, 1973), McCain didn’t wait long before offering military information in return for medical care. While an extraordinary patient at Gi Lam Hospital, he was visited by a number of dignitaries, including, to quote McCain himself, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the national hero of Dienbienphu.

Jack McLamb is a highly respected name in law enforcement circles. After 9 years of clandestine operations in Cambodia and unmentionable areas, he returned home to Phoenix where he became one of the most decorated police officers on record. Twice McLamb was named Officer of the Year. He went on to become an FBI hostage negotiator. This man has stated that every one of the many former POWs he has talked with consider McCain a traitor. States McLamb, “He was never tortured…The Vietnamese Communists called him the Songbird, that’s his code name, Songbird McCain, because he just came into the camp singing and telling them everything they wanted to know.” McLamb further quotes former POWs as saying McCain starred in 32 propaganda videos in which he denounced his country and comrades.

These are not contested views although I think the writer of this article uses unattributed sources to excess and his facts are not thorough. It’s the first article I found with many important details.

Sarah Palin is not the only part of the ticket riddled with misrepresentation. The media mustn’t remain intimidated.

“Had he not been the son and grandson of admirals…’

War Secrets John McCain Hides
McCains’s military record is fair game
Military Record Shows He Is Unfit

“What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?…Lipstick.” – Gov. Sarah Palin

“What’s the difference between Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney?…Lipstick” – Anonymous

The Chicago Tribune has learned that Sarah Palin did not sell the state’s jet on eBay. Not a “luxury jet,” but used to transport criminals and sold $300,000 below listing to a campaign contributor.

“That luxury jet was over the top,” Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, said to loud cheers. “I put it on eBay.”

It’s a week of Sarah Palin. A few major media are reporting items already days old in the bloggosphere, but many outlets are either not aggressive or not declarative. Internet sites and bloggers are not afraid,

Sarah Palin’s values aren’t small town. They’re just small.

An Alaskan blogger, Own the Sidewalk, posted two charts describing her week of Sarah Palin:

Brain Before Palin and Brain After Palin. Cute.

“I can do my job there in developing our natural resources and doing things like getting the roads paved and making sure our troopers have their cop cars and their uniforms and their guns, and making sure our public schools are funded,” she said in June to ministry students at her former church. “But really, all of that stuff doesn’t do any good if the people of Alaska’s heart isn’t right with God.” – Sarah Palin

Candidate Palin insists she is to be described as merely a generic Christian. She “spent nearly three decades in the Assemblies of God church, the nation’s largest Pentecostal denomination”, reports the Chicago Tribune, while Governor Palin regularly speaks to pastors and ministerial students.

Palins’ former church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, is political and strident from the pulpit. “I’m not going to tell you who to vote for, but if you vote for this particular person, I question your salvation — I’m sorry.”

She insists she is independent, listing her membership in Wasilla’s Church of the Rock that preaches the purpose of the United States is to glorify God.

“This nation is a Christian nation!” Pepper said last fall in a recorded sermon. “God will not be mocked! I don’t care what atheists say! God will not be mocked!

Yet Pastor David Pepper states “Before running for Governor of Alaska she frequently attended Church on the Rock for approximately one year. Since that time she has visited on occasion and now attends Wasilla Bible Church with her family.”

“We’re just a community church”
Prior to a failed run for lieutenant governor, Palin joined the Wasilla Bible Church which attracts about 1,000 parishioners from tiny Wasilla and area. “We like to call this the Bible Belt of Alaska,” says Cheryl Metiva, head of the local chamber of commerce. [TIME]

Palin was attending when guest speaker David Brickner was introduced, “He’s a leader of Jews for Jesus, a ministry that is out on the leading edge in a pressing, demanding area of witnessing and evangelism.”

“I think it speaks volumes that she keeps an Israeli flag on the wall of her office,” Republican Jewish Coalition executive director Matt Brooks told Politico.

Friends have never heard her discuss Middle East policy in detail, continues Politico, and that she’d never visited Israel but has signed the Alaska-Israel friendship resolution. Tuesday after the RNC Convention, Palin was ‘shepherded by Lieberman’ to meet a pro-Israel lobby in St. Paul, “We had a good productive discussion on the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship.”

Attending a pastors conference as governor, she told … Assemblies of God clergy that Alaska had been dedicated to the Lord—”and I know the Lord is not going to take it back.”

Her Christian Heritage Week was created “to remind Alaskans of the role Christianity has played in the state’s history.”

While Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin attended the Juneau Christian Center, a large congregation of Pentecostal.

George Bryson and Rich Mauer writing for the Anchorage Daily News point out that all Palin’s churches insist on the inerrancy of the Bible – literally God’s spoken word and the Genesis version of creation.

The website ‘How Insane is John McCain’ is maintaining a running list of lies, misrepresentations, mistakes, vindictiveness, cheating, favoritism and general stumbling at Sarah Palin Scandals: The Complete List. A more detailed update is being kept at SameFacts.

I enjoy these words:

…the truth is, the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are quintessential monuments to Liberalism….. America is a Liberal Nation, and Progressives are simply attuned to the promises contained in these seminal documents.

Alaska’s Aboriginal people are “Arctic Arabs” and when Sarah Palin learned that Obama had won the presidential nomination, she said, “So Sambo beat the bitch!.”

How rough is it to surf the web to find out that humans are nuts? Oh thanks, he laughs.

Yes, it’s tough to see that millions of folks around the world are goofy. Wot? Enough of them are huddled in caves, have learned to fly into buildings, wrap TNT on kids, siphon pipelines, that the others in suits have become rabid too. All these years I was thinking Kissinger had worked a few things out!

But gee whiz, now we find out, of all things, that Matthew Hutson, a guy with the title of Therapy Director at Psychology Today, prints a little article to say God is my brain, God is in my brain in the same place as I’m in my brain, and there’s no chance to get out of the way.

But that’s not the half of it. This guy Nick Epley can prove over and over again in his top science lab that next to what I think is me, er, I mean God and me together of course, there are gays, murderers, my mother-in-law, rednecks, hey, preachers and politicians lurking in my brain!

To cap it all off, yeh, as if my brain is smarter than my liver, egology is a science we know nothing about because everything we know is in the same part of the brain as everything we don’t know.

Well, just how ??*&^?!NUTS is this?

There’s nuthin’ much to say except hello.

My mother says,

“Love Americans. They fight for every issue all the time. So what if they’re crazy? I love them. Don’t you dare think they aren’t the tops. What would this world be if Americans didn’t stand up? I love these people from the bottom of my heart. Nobody else tries for so much.”

I guess she’s saying “Find trouble. There’s an American.”

Neat.

oil’s bluegrass

o my boy did you die for me

is your blood why I’m free
what pain did you carry my young true friend
what gain can I bring to your very good end
o I’ll never lie
or skim from the pot

o my boy did you die for me

oil’s blues

The ‘other press’ from Bill Moyers:

As God is my witness, the [tear] gas hit just as Kate Smith was singing, “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.”

Yes, angry are our police.

Forty years ago, protestors in Chicago shouted, “The whole world is watching.” More and more, the whole world isn’t…

We are the watch of all is well.

Both flags and rainbow climb the sky, America. You have learned much in the last years and achieved much in two hundred. Now manage it. We will learn to do this within the scale and impact that prospers us or we will encounter the horrible pain of our limitations. Where we extinguish life we risk our own and where we plunder we destroy our sustenance. To society we have given much praise and to nature we have felt much remorse, but conceding to our machine imperative, nature is neutral, never frozen by our belief or melted in our reverence, but easily damaged in our huddle of currency and prize. We are wealth and pride and we are war and shame, capitol tokens that weaken the foundation of earth and the fountain of life or we are awareness and experience and substance and consensus, each and all we face today.

Cognitive humility is the revolution.

New Orleans – [NOLadder] – Klimt Added to Army Corps Training

Digging into records of the US Army Corps of Engineers, journalists in New Orleans are reporting on Federal earmarks in the region, but as recent Army Corps funding is uncovered, local citizens are calling it ‘Any Pork In A Storm’.

“It’s part of the completion training,” said a division commander, “The Army’s ‘Tree of Life’ training is an important component of our new ‘River Immersion Certification’ to assure each officer and engineer is briefed on levee systems and the impact scenario of waterway as implemented by the Army Corps.” After further questioning, he added, “Look, whatever it costs, this is a critical piece of recent policy formation that Congress has chosen to fund. This is innovative and advanced curricula we’ve added to the Army Corps’ “What Is A River” program on behalf of the American people and the rebuilding of New Orleans.”

The trees are telling secrets…

Today is the day I want to keep, sunlit
the way it is, and breezy. The trees
are telling secrets to one another with their
leaves. Even the crickets exclaim over the
sweet, soft smell of the meadow grasses
and the way the sun leans against
the trunk of the sycamore.

Pauline says with gratitude, “Let me keep today… “

Short listed Governor Tom Ridge,
minutes after his speech at the Convention,
is with Tom Brokaw on NBC TV.

Ridge said John Bush “is pretty much his own man.”

Yup, pretty much.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6ZnHTWWErM&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&fs=1]

This is the Presidential electoral map just after the Conventions.

It IS the southern and rural states voting Republican. There may be fewer people in these states, but it seems they actually turn out to vote.

The lighter colors are inconclusive and where this election will be won or lost. I don’t know why there are gray states in this analysis.

Hearing the drumbeat of drilling, pipelines, mining, coal power and remote nuclear sites is not unlike urban Americans hoping for crime reduction, child and health care, food safety….

“Look’, barks a Republican Congressman, “We’re gonna take advantage of our natural resources. We’re gonna take advantage of the things that we were God-given in this land. We’re gonna take advantage of our oil reserves, of our natural gas, of our abundance of coal.”

Americans in cities have competing needs, but for either political party, shaping their plank is one way they hope to get you to the polls.

Bill Moyers recently broadcast perhaps the nation’s top political analysts Merle and Earl Black to help us understand “the importance of demographics in predicting and understanding voting patterns in different states and regions”.

“Well, you can’t understand the nation just by looking at national outcomes. Because America’s too diverse.’”

Notice Alaska is not a shoe-in for Sarah?

Alaska isn’t really very hard to understand. It consists of a minority that loves the wilderness and an overwhelmingly Republican majority that wants to squeeze all the cash it can get out of the state before the oil dries up, the fish die out and the wildlife disappears. Nowhere else does the Republican formula of manipulating the suckers by playing on their silly hatreds and even sillier vanities play out more clearly than in Alaska.

How diverse is America?

“I’m not running for president because I think I’m blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need.” – John McCain

I knew yesterday that Palin’s campaign for ethics was initiated in a hurry.

Just minutes before news broadcasts of the corruption conviction of Alaska’s state representative, Palin introduced ethics reform in Alaska to help distance her administration.

I have just learned in the Kodiak Daily Mirror:

Todd Palin – oil worker, champion snowmobiler, hunter and commercial fisherman, cook, babysitter, hockey dad, abstinence educator, and special needs nurse – joined state officials on two trips with mining companies that want to dig for gold, zinc and lead in remote Alaska, as well as to extend permission to mine new deposits at existing facilities.

The First Dude’s costs were disclosed by his wife as gifts.

In other local news, Abstinence in Alaska

[Sarah] Palin’s oldest girl gets knocked up out of wedlock. It’s all over the media all week. I go to the pharmacy for some Sudafed. The entire shelf behind the pharmacist is loaded with three or four different brands of birth control pills. I said to the dude, “That’s a lot of pills.” He says, “Yeah, we’ve been filling a lot of prescriptions for them lately.”

A local Alaskan is commenting on Sarah Palin’s speech at the Republican Convention,

Kind of funny how all the members of the permanent political establishment at the convention are cheering as she makes a point of saying she’s NOT a member of the permanent political establishment.

White men are almost 70 percent of the delegates. A new segregation was in Minnesota. A “typical McCain event” – 67 people showed up for one of his town hall meetings, one was black.

It’s clear, Obama is not their candidate. Only 36 of the 2,380 delegates are black, the lowest number in 40 years. A southern RNC Congressman sends a racial reminder by calling Obama “uppity“

“I gotta admit, she looked very comfortable at the podium because it’s kinda like Alaska: you look out on that convention floor, nothing but white as far as the eye can see.” –Jay Leno

White males are not known for avoiding sexism such as this button spotted on a blazer during Palin’s speech: “good ole boys just loves themselves some VPilf“.

Too few women are at the Convention. McCain’s RNC Campaign instructs men to give up their seats in order to move women into the cameras.

Republican women are herded up the McCain-Palin plank for television. Sex and children are now a weapon to intimidate opponents. Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama endure anti-feminist hazing. Investigating women, media is stung as sexist.

Nor are white males universally praised for nurturing family and children. If the audience is Republican men, sex and children are common Republican smear. For example, about Chelsea Clinton when she was 13 years old, Rush Limbaugh’s TV show, “Everyone knows the Clintons have a cat. Socks is the White House cat. But did you know there is a White House dog?” And John McCain joked, “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father”.

More exploitation continues. A blogger said after McCain’s speech to this tilted audience,

“I challenge you to show me any American veteran, ever in history, that has so shamelessly milked and exploited his military heroism.”

“The media, who once worshiped his candor and openness now condemn his evasiveness and intemperate, robotic statements. One by one, they’ve awakened to find a man they no longer recognize.

‘He’s turned over his campaign to the same unprincipled smear artists who slimed him so that they could slime his opponent. And to help in that effort, he’s asking his unqualified running mate, a self-described “pit bull with lipstick” to do the dirty work.

“His campaign, now stripped of all integrity, and in complete denial about his responsibility for supporting the last eight years of failed policies, has become little more than pumped up self praise, relentless narcissism over a sense of honor he no longer displays, while smearing Obama’s character and lying about his energy and tax proposals.

“His strategy has been reduced to a Nixonian cultural war coupled with Rovean partisanship designed to divide the nation he claims to love, all as he cynically promises to end the “rancor” in Washington.

In the Republican manifest to take our government, these imperial words are white as Alaskan snow in the southern and rural zeal for supremacy:

“I think the people that elect us deserve to know what our plan is. The Republican side has come out with a plan. They say, “Look, we’re gonna take advantage of our natural resources. We’re gonna take advantage of the things that we were God-given in this land.

“We’re gonna take advantage of our oil reserves, of our natural gas, of our abundance of coal. We’re gonna take advantage of those things, and we’re gonna use the technology that we’ve been so good about coming up with. We’re gonna take and convert this shale to oil, [just as] Hitler did….

Much of this material is already in related Palin posts but just now appearing in some major outlets. We’ll say major news services have required a few days to carry out due diligence and confirm facts and sources.

Associated Press Writer Jim Drinkard in Washington points out false bravado and outright lies at the RNC Convention and steadies the truth:

Mitt Romney said, “throw out the big-government liberals”, but for most of the last eight years Republicans controlled Congress and the White House, a very poor eight years for America too.

Silly Huckabee said, “[Palin] got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States” but Biden collected 76,165 votes in 23 states before he quit the primaries – 10 times the entire population of Wasilla.

McCain said “she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities” but the smallest state guard of 4,200 does not report to the governor.

McCain said “[she’s] in charge of 20 percent of America’s energy supply” but the ability to tax oil is the only task granted any Alaskan governor. Supported by merely half of Alaska’s Republicans, Palin brought a major tax increase on state oil production only by piggybacking on Democratic efforts underway for years.

“She has succeeded in her own limited policy agenda as a Republican governor by having the Democrat caucus in lock-step with her.” [LATimes]

McCain said “She’s fought oil companies and party bosses and do-nothing bureaucrats and anyone who puts their interests before the interests of the people she swore an oath to serve.” but ‘no one is closer to the oil industry’.

In February, she said she’d ‘like to support McCain but felt she couldn’t at this particular time because of his stand on ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.’ [Anchorage Daily News 2/3/08]

Oil and gas lobbyists substantially fund her primary and general campaigns. She enthusiastically promotes her ties with offshore oil development, oil drilling in Alaska’s ice-filled waters and allowing oil companies into the Alaska wildlife refuge. Plus Palin is closely allied with promoters of pipelines, nuclear and coal….

To distance herself from backlash, Palin’s campaign for ethics was initiated just minutes before Alaska’s state representative was to be finally convicted of corruption.

Todd Palin – oil worker, champion snowmobiler, hunter and commercial fisherman, and cook, babysitter, hockey dad, abstinence educator, and special needs nurse – joined state officials on the two trips with mining companies that want to dig for gold, zinc and lead in remote Alaska, as well as seek permission to mine new deposits at existing facilities. The costs of his travel were disclosed by his wife as gifts.

Are Rove’s Republicans taunting Catholics by using a fungelical smear? With desperate lies and personal attacks, Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin mocked Barack Obama for his works as a community organizer more than two decades ago! Obama’s community organization was the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, a project of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. What does the evangelical church that Palin belongs to think of Catholics?

“The GOP wants to talk about small town issues, well being a community organizer, addresses just that.”

Palin said Obama “plans to raise income taxes, raise payroll taxes, raise investment income taxes, raise the death tax, raise business taxes, and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars” but Obama’s plan raises the income of most Americans 5 percent, $2,200 annually.

McCain’s plan will add $200 billion or $300 billion per year to American debt, slightly less than George Bush but as much as $5 trillion. And McCain hopes to alter our ‘voluntary tax system’ but to date has hidden the announcement as flat tax, tax reform and other sly insider terms. [link]

Palin said Obama has not passed “a single major law or reform” but both during his career in Illinois and in Congress, Barrack Obama has introduced or co-sponsored laws to

• cut tax breaks for oil companies,
• intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction,
• destroy conventional weapons stockpiles,
• control racial profiling,
• require recorded interrogations,
• overhaul death penalty procedures,
• provide income tax breaks,
• reform health care,
• increase aid to veterans,
• strengthen public oversight of federal spending,
• and major ethics reform – “the most far-reaching since the Watergate-era campaign financial disclosure law”. [link]

Pointing to more lies,
Sarah Palin’s lies,
she said “I have protected the taxpayers…”

Waspzilla doesn’t protect taxpayers.

“As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist – the former Chief of Staff of indicted Senator Ted Stevens – and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million for a small town now encumbered in debt, local conflict, lost careers, and unfunded infrastructure.

Wasilla was debt free before Palin, and almost 20 million in debt when she left office! To raise revenue, she lifted Wasilla’s sales tax by winning an election with only a 20 vote margin.

She doesn’t protect taxpayers:
“In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita pork in the nation.

Sarah Palin had been on Senator McCain’s list of irresponsible governors. Criticizing Palin by name, McCain said, “Earmarking deprives federal agencies of scarce resources, at the whim of individual members of Congress.” [link]

She didn’t sell “the plane on eBay”. She hired a broker. The plane was sold to an Alaskan at a $300,000 loss.

Palin said “In these times of economic uncertainty, this is great news for the state…” while Alaska’s natural gas was sold to Japan
, triggering the closure of refineries in Alaska because of gas shortages!

She doesn’t protect taxpayers:
“While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport, her opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a bridge to nowhere.” Palin promised locals she would complete the bridge. Later, she accepted this same amount of pork funding to build other projects!

In any case, Congress had canceled Ted Steven’s earmark thirteen months before she took office! She was never involved with sending the earmark back, and told Congress nothing. Earlier, the oil firm Veco, co-indicted with Stevens, had supplied 10 percent of her campaign fund.

The FBI possesses 100s of hours of wiretaps in the Veco case, there are rumors I won’t link to, that as the corruption indictments draw forward mud will appear to clear the air about Palin’s dealings in Alaska.

She doesn’t protect families either.
Sarah Palin failed to help pass a bill to raise the benefits for children and pregnant women from 175% of the poverty level to 200%. while other states already set them at 200% to 250%. [LATimes] “Her administration had the appearance of paying absolutely no attention to any of the rest of the unglamorous side of government, whether it be dealing with human services, public services, highways, all the routine aspects.”

Why don’t we insist on something much better?

You should know that since 1948, each Republican Administration has cost us more money than we would have had without them!

Oh woe, Rove and GOPAC have “got one of its own on the ticket, and you should expect her to deliver the goods every bit as much as they do.” Be curious. Find out what GOPAC is and why Republicans believe the same canned plank and say the same words.

Chris Locke warns us first:

Longtime readers know how hard I work to be dispassionate, fair and objective. However, I am sitting here tonight listening to the preposterous bilge coming out of the Republican National Convention and if I have to listen to one more of these self-satisfied true-believer low-down lying motherfuckers, I am going to vomit. Given that Sarah Palin is up next, I better get the bucket out.

And then Chris Locke informs us:

…how Cindy Hensley McCain’s daddy got [his] start in business…

Jim Hensley and his brother Eugene went to work after World War II for Kemper Marley, a wealthy wholesale liquor distributor. Marley, in fact, had once been a bookie, getting his start working for the Transamerica Wire Service, a betting service established by mafiosi [sic] Gus Greenbaum (who was murdered with his wife when their throats were slashed in bed in 1958). Until 1947, liquor was rationed by the government. Apparently Marley did quite well in spite of the restrictions, and in 1948 the reason why became clear. Eugene and Jim Hensley were convicted of falsifying records on behalf of Marley’s distributorship, United Liquor (along with fifty other Marley employees) to conceal the illegal distribution of hundreds of cases of liquor. Jim Hensley got a six month suspended sentence.

In 1953, Jim Hensley, then the General Manager for United Liquor, was once more charged for doing the same thing again. Marley paid for top notch legal representation though (future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist.) Hensley still went to prison, but took the fall when the rest of the company was cleared. According to an article in American Mafia.com, Marley rewarded Hensley for his loyalty to the organization:

When Hensley strolled out of the joint, Marley bought his silence with a lucrative Phoenix-based Budweiser beer distributorship.

Well, go read the entire sordid story.

I assure you these photos are not for the weak of heart, or anyone squeamish.

They are our good poor troops in utter pain.

They are our enemies simply stopped.

They are nearby and also dead.

Likely observers, er, lucky observers of the American election season have a chance to make cash by following our vote,

Here’s the Labor Day Odds. (Bet wisely.)

Sarah Palin is now an 8/1 shot (from 16/1) to be dropped off the Republican ticket prior to November’s election.

What surprise will the Alaskan Senator next spring on the American public?

Sarah’s Next Surprise
5/4 Driving Offense
7/4 Cheated in school or college exams
10/1 Arrested for flashing
25/1 Is a member of Church of Scientology
33/1 Moose burger addiction
40/1 Donated money to the Obama campaign
50/1 Wears Bill Clinton pajamas to bed
250/1 Breaking and entering an Igloo
500/1 Abducted by aliens

Will McCain drop Sarah?
8/1 Palin is dropped as Republican VP
20/1 Sarah Palin is dropped as the Republican VP candidate by Sunday 7th September

Next US President?
4/9 Barack Obama
13/8 John McCain

Ken Robertson political betting analyst for Paddy Power said, “We’ve had numerous requests from punters across the globe looking for odds on different stories to emerge regarding the Sarah Palin, breaking and entering an igloo at 250/1 is my personal favorite but I would consider it extremely unlikely!”

Jane Smiley’s view is there’s a very selfish group in charge.

“When we look at Bush, Cheney, McCain, and Palin, what we see are different varieties of selfishness. Bush’s selfishness is defensive, stubborn, and dumb. Cheney’s is power-mad. Those were bad enough, and even the Republican platform agrees that they have been destructive.

“McCain’s selfishness is impulsive and hotheaded, while Palin’s is simply heedless (and, judging by reports from Wasilla, vengeful). So, there you have it. The Republicans think that selfishness is a winning ticket that always appeals to something in the American people–would that be selfishness?

“Obama has made his opposition to selfishness explicit. That doesn’t mean he will win–unless the bookies are right.

“I hope they are.

“Because four or eight more years of lying, cheating, opportunism, war-mongering, refusal to prepare for things, and a lack of “vetting” will surely do us in. And let’s be clear. There is no one in the world, not even Putin, who can do us in. It can only be suicide.”

If lectern barkers at the Republican Convention must wobble left and right to read canned words to us, perhaps better celebrities can be found, true citizens with a memory, then if ever we overcome ‘dis belief, we can enjoy these fibs in a nickle’s theater.

If liar insiders must introduce agenda such as flat-% taxes on broadcast television at a Convention, perhaps we can ask journalists to dig, dig, dig, to shed a tear for us and not merely POW McCain.

If Republican ‘narrative‘ is a lie, and owners know so, where are our police?

Hotline: RNC officials asked all the male delegates to hand their seats to female alternates to provide the impression of vast female support for Sarah Palin during her speech.

Convention Speech Summary: “She misrepresented [Obama’s] record and simply lied about her own, claiming to oppose earmarks that she supported, and dissembling on her $1.5 billion tax hike and record of raising sales taxes by 25 percent in Wasilla.

“Reviewing the McCain Campaign’s bullying, “unprofessional” onslaught against anyone who notes Palin’s extreme positions and dishonest claims, Time‘s Joe Klein urged reporters to face facts:

I hope my colleagues stand strong in this case: it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is “a task from God.”

“By all accounts, Palin faced a huge task in St Paul. She had to prove she was up to the job of commander in chief.

“She struck out big-time — in a biting speech that showed the only job she was ready for is RNC Chair, another ruthless soldier in Karl Rove’s army.”

Listen up! Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy, two Republican insiders.

What they really think
versus what they feed us.

Noonan: It’s over.

Murphy: Still McCain can give a version of the Lieberman speech to do himself some good.

Todd: Don’t you think the Palin pick was insulting to to Kay Bailey Hutchison?

Noonan: I saw Kay this morning.

Murphy: She’s never been comfortable about that.. I mean (something unintelligible).

Todd: Is she really the most qualified woman?

Noonan: The most qualified no. I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives.

Todd: Yeah, they went to ‘narratives’.

Noonan: Everytime Republicans do that, because that’s not where they live and it’s not what they’re good at, they blow it.

But this is the pap they broadcast:

“Because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers and is Alaska Tough, as Time magazine put it; because she is conservative, and pro-2nd Amendment and pro-life; and because conservatives can smell this sort of thing — who is really one of them and who is not — and will fight to the death for one of their beleaguered own; because of all of this she is a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy.”

Cynicism should not be rewarded in this day and age. I hope this is the lesson America learns, o’ I truly do.

Nicely said from an Alaskan mother’s blog:

During the Democratic primary all of our nominees went through rigorous questioning regarding every aspect of their public and even private lives. They faced grilling on their family lives and their religious convictions. There was no area off limits… NONE. The commentators on both sides opened up on Democrats with both barrels.

Hillary was told that she must stand up to criticism like a man and that women who ran must act like a candidate, not a woman. Barack Obama was grilled to make sure he was white enough, black enough, American enough, and Christian enough. Not only that, the beliefs of those who were even loosely connected to Barack Obama were considered to be one and the same with his. How dare anyone stop scrutiny or the smearing of Democratic Candidates!

Into this scene John McCain stumbles and bumbles.

There is so much good work to do, so many top projects, very much grand ahead. Because of these beltway boondoggle, of little or no value, we are too easily distracted from our work. This is my motive for being involved with their replacement.

For a little relief, energy and healing, in case you missed it, here’s Dennis Kucinich’s rousing 6 minute Wake Up America! Now, where’s the OPEC DANCERS!?

iN tHE cASE oF pOLICE

i wish i could be that much a child,
as much a child as he,
wild,
and unjustified….

oh, what i could do for the world if i had the right of force!

imagine, says i,
we could all own a sandbox again
and strut so proud of our adventures:
all would follow in delight,
while only elders carry wisdom.

oh, what i could do for the world if i had the right of force!

imagine, say i,
we could assure justice again
and strut so proud of our lessons:
all our days would answer dignity,
and HOPE would be achieved.

Back to the running-mate question.

“Say the Democratic ticket is Clinton-Obama, a woman and a black man. You can see why the party might approach you.”

Sarah Palin: “That’s diversity right there, isn’t it? Wow! And who do the Republicans have? Good old rich white boys.” – Politico