Alaska delegates were wearing plastic hard hats that said, “Drill Here. Pay Less.” They sported reflective construction vests with photos of caribou grazing at the Prudhoe Bay oil fields on the back
Gov. Sarah Palin wants a state board to review the circumstances surrounding the dismissal of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan—taking the unusual step of making an ethics complaint against herself. [...]
“It appears that the Governor has filed an ethics complaint against herself. ... This is very unusual because ethics complaints typically are filed against others,” [Tom Daniel, an Anchorage labor and employment lawyer,] wrote in an e-mail responding to a Daily News query.
BTW, don’t miss watching the video of Palin speaking at her old Wasilla church in June that Betty linked to in her earlier post. Sarah Palin makes Dubya look like Richard Dawkins. Sweet jeebus. (Videos here or here)
Jews for Jesus, one of those “grab the pamphlet and giggle” operations, has been a running joke of the subway system here in New York City for decades now. I’ll give you one guess who was absorbing their bullshit two weeks ago...
[...] [Sarah] Palin’s church, the Wasilla Bible Church, gave its pulpit over to a figure viewed with deep hostility by many Jewish organizations: David Brickner, the founder of Jews for Jesus.
Palin’s pastor, Larry Kroon, introduced Brickner on Aug. 17, according to a transcript of the sermon on the church’s website.
“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,” Kroon said.
Brickner then explained that Jesus and his disciples were themselves Jewish.
“The Jewish community, in particular, has a difficult time understanding this reality,” he said.
Brickner’s mission has drawn wide criticism from the organized Jewish community, and the Anti-Defamation League accused them in a report of “targeting Jews for conversion with subterfuge and deception.”
Brickner also described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God’s “judgment of unbelief” of Jews who haven’t embraced Christianity.
“Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television. It’s very real. When [Brickner’s son] was in Jerusalem he was there to witness some of that judgment, some of that conflict, when a Palestinian from East Jerusalem took a bulldozer and went plowing through a score of cars, killing numbers of people. Judgment — you can’t miss it.”
Palin was in church that day, Kroon said, though he cautioned against attributing Brickner’s views to her.
As much as I hated the endless weeks of dog-whistling the media was doing about Rev. Jeremiah Wright, it definitely opened Sarah Palin up to this kinda scrutiny. It’s going to be a goshdarn joy to watch the same people who howled “how could Obama go to that church for twenty years?” try to dig there way out of this Pile O’ Palin. In addition, I can’t wait for Todd Palin having to prove that he’s proud of America even though he wanted to secede from it.
This really couldn’t have been scripted any better.
Governor Palin and I have something in common – and it’s not just our lady plumbing. We were both raised under the influence of a particularly cuckoo strain of Christianity. It didn’t take in my case, perhaps because my exposure was intermittent, occurring only when my mom flaked out and fled for the ashram or took an EST course or something, leaving my poor siblings and me in the care of her Southern Baptist missionary parents.
But Palin continues to drink the cuckoo Kool-aid, as evidenced by these excerpts from a speech she gave in June to a graduating group at her family’s church:
While describing her family, Palin told students about her oldest son, 19-year-old Track, who is set to be deployed to Iraq this month with the U.S. Army. She urged students to pray “that our leaders—that our national leaders—are sending [soldiers] out on a task that is from God.”
“That’s what we have to make sure that we are praying for: that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.”
About God’s role in her work as governor:
“I can do my part in working really, really hard to get a natural gas pipeline, about a $30 billion project that’s going to create a lot of jobs for Alaska. … [but] I think God’s will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that,” she said. “I can do my job there in developing our natural resources, in 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. But really that stuff doesn’t do any good if the people of Alaska’s hearts aren’t right with God.”
It wasn’t all serious, though. At one point during the address, Palin praised the graduating class as “a bunch of cool-looking Christians.” Then she picked out one student in the crowd and said with a smile, “Ben, I don’t know you well enough yet, but looking at you, I’m thinking, people are going to interested in Jesus Christ through you because of the way you look - this red-headed Sasquatch for Jesus. You look good!”
Apparently, this speech was posted on the church’s website (I get a 404 when I try to access it at the MSNBC site, but you can view the scary details here), but McCain’s campaign didn’t know about it. Hmmm.
In addition to Palin’s biblical bigfoot reference, her pastor seems to have outdone Jeremiah Wright:
A review of recorded sermons by Ed Kalnins, the senior pastor of Wasilla Assembly of God since 1999, offers a provocative and, for some, eyebrow-raising sketch of Palin’s longtime spiritual home.
The church runs a number of ministries providing help to poor neighborhoods, care for children in need, and general community services. But Pastor Kalnins has also preached that critics of President Bush will be banished to hell; questioned whether people who voted for Sen. John Kerry in 2004 would be accepted to heaven; charged that the 9/11 terrorist attacks and war in Iraq were part of a war “contending for your faith;” and said that Jesus “operated from that position of war mode.”
So, how will it play? The Palin pick seems to have galvanized the theocrats who were tepid about McCain. Will it scare away the independents McCain needs to win? In a sane world, picking a clueless, inexperienced, unvetted scandal machine would doom a ticket that was already tethered to the albatross of an historically unpopular incumbent, an economy in shambles and a wholly unnecessary, ruinous war.
So why is it even remotely close? Because it was always going to be incredibly difficult to elect a black man in this country. Let’s be honest about this – if Barack Obama were the exact same candidate except that—instead of a black man, he was a white man named Ben Overton or something—he’d have a 20 point lead in the polls right now and would be cruising to a landslide victory. There was an excellent post about the race factor at the Driftglass blog last week. If you didn’t see it, I encourage you to read the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt:
…100 years from now, the Tale of Election 2008 will be the story of several million ignorant, white, working-class voters – both Democrats and Independents (the Republicans are a lost cause who will remain an unashamedly morally bankrupt open-sewer for at least another 30 years) and which way they turned.
If the Republican brand wasn’t so thoroughly trashed right now, there’s no doubt in my mind which way they’d turn—to the guy who looks more like them. It’s not 1960. We’ve come along way. But we’re not a post-racial society, not by a long shot. This was brought home to me vividly a few months ago when I was visiting my hometown (it’s just down the road from a little place called Rosewood – perhaps you’ve heard of it), and one of my relatives spotted the Obama sticker on my car and asked if I were really going to vote for “that coon.” In the ensuing rather heated conversation, I learned that this relative used the word “coon” in deference to my tender sensibilities, since I’d asked him previously to refrain from using the “n” word in my presence.
People like him will never vote for Obama, of course, no matter how horrendously bad for their personal interests continued GOP misrule would be. And fortunately, he and his ilk are dinosaurs lumbering toward the tar pit. But my fellow Democrats, let’s not be lulled into a false sense of security, no matter how much crazy continues to spill out of the Palin volcano. Crazy is normal to a whole lot of people, as are red-headed sasquatches for Jesus.
Four years later, [Sarah Palin] took on her former workout buddy in a race that quickly became contentious. In Stein’s view, Palin’s main transgression was injecting big-time politics into a small-town local race. “It was always a nonpartisan job,” he says. “But with her, the state GOP came in and started affecting the race.” While Palin often describes that race as having been a fight against the old boys’ club, Stein says she made sure the campaign hinged on issues like gun owners’ rights and her opposition to abortion (Stein is pro-choice). “It got to the extent that — I don’t remember who it was now — but some national antiabortion outfit sent little pink cards to voters in Wasilla endorsing her,” he says.
Vicki Naegele was the managing editor of the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman at the time. “[Stein] figured he was just going to run your average, friendly small-town race,” she recalls, “but it turned into something much different than that.” Naegele held the same conservative Christian beliefs as Palin but didn’t think they had any place in local politics.
“I just thought, That’s ridiculous, she should concentrate on roads, not abortion,” says Naegele. [...]
Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving “full support” to the mayor.
The article concludes by stating that Palin has the “uncanny gift of knowing exactly what voters are looking for at a particular moment.” There’s only one problem for Sarah ... she’s not in Alaska anymore.
MORE: This email from a Wasilla resident who’s known Palin since ‘92 is making the rounds and some Google searches do back up the authenticity of the name. Whether or not she really wrote it is still up for discussion.
I hadn’t planned on doing open threads for the RNC like we did for the DNC, but with the Bush/Thompson/Lieberman tri-feckless tonight and the introduction of the Wasilla PTA’s National Security Czar tomorrow, loading up some open threads as a guffaw catchers is probably a good idea.
I’m open to the politics of this being smart for McCain. I don’t they are, I’m open to it. But I’m not much interested in the politics of it. I think when you pick a running mate, you have one obligation. You have an obligation to pick someone who’s manifestly ready to be president. That’s what Bill Clinton did. It’s what George Walker Bush did. It’s what Al Gore did. They all won the popular vote ... umm, at times, because they did the right thing. And I think as impressive as Sarah Palin is, as much as she has credentials that make her a fine young leader in America. It’s impossible to argue that she’s qualified, I believe, and it’s certainly equally impossible to argue that John McCain knows she’s qualified. He spent less time with her, as others have said, than one spends hiring an assistant manager at a Target store. And I think the responsibility that he had to pick someone qualified—then he can worry about the politics—he failed that and I think I think it makes him a significantly less serious candidate for this office and I think that’s [how] the American people will see it, whether or not all of the scrutiny that Nina [Easton] said Sarah Palin is getting right now causes her to blow up in some way.
Halperin called McCain a “less serious candidate” again a bit later in the show and when fellow guest Matthew Continetti (associate editor at The Weekly Standard) tried to roll out some pro-Palin malarkey about “a great divergence between elite opinion and popular opinion,” Halperin was having none of it:
These are dangerous times. I’m all for listening to popular opinion and not just going with elite opinion, but nothing in her resume suggest she’s ready to be commander-in-chief. If that’s elitist, then I’ll say I’m an elitist, but I can’t understand that.
The listener calls are pretty great overall, as well (including one fence sitter from MA and one swing voter from NC who are now supporting Obama because of the Palin pick). Definitely worth a listen (starts at about the 12:00 mark after Gustav coverage).
Saturday I told my lovely wife Chris it would take the media until after the convention to get over their giddy and self-interested delight about the human interest story that is Sarah Palin and start with the inevitable exclamations of “you’ve gotta be fucking kidding us!” I never thought the (dis)grace period would have ended this early. To quote one of my favorite Replacements songs, color me impressed.
Whatever you do, don’t show that blithering (and inordinately creepy) dimwit diarist BellyArcXIX this photo of Sarah Palin with McCain strategist Steve Schmidt…
The drive-through window is on the left. Honk twice if no one shows up to take your order.
The Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has announced that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child. [...]
“The despicable rumors that have been spread by liberal blogs, some even with Barack Obama’s name in them, is a real anchor around the Democratic ticket, pulling them down in the mud in a way that certainly juxtaposes themselves against their ‘campaign of change,’” a senior aide said.
Never mind that exceedingly few liberal bloggers touched this rumor (several more, in fact, openly scolded people for spreading it) and that the only A-list blogger I know of who pushed it out there was Andrew Sullivan, who’s anything but a liberal; here comes yet another manufactured controversy that Obama will have to deal with even though his campaign had nothing to do with it. Of course, the media won’t highlight all of the vicious rumors directed at Barack and his family while they’re mass-producing sympathy cards for the Palin clan.
That said, regardless of how folks feel about Sarah Palin’s views on abstinence and a woman’s right to choose, Bristol’s pregnancy shouldn’t be considered “fair game.” She’s a young woman who, along with the father of her child, made a careless mistake and her situation shouldn’t be used as a campaign prop by either side of the political spectrum.
UPDATE: Maha seems to agree with me (read her comments as well) and Steve M. doesn’t. I think they’re both really wise and politically-savvy folks (as are several of our commenters who have many different takes on this below), so I guess this shows what a difficult subject this will be to juggle going forward. Who knows who’s right? My gut still tells me I think we should leave this alone, but my gut also thought it was a good idea to pour a merciless amount of Dave’s Insanity Sauce on my hot dog last weekend, so take that for what it’s worth.
Twenty-seven. That’s the number of times I urped in my mouth watching pundits drool over the human interest story that is Sarah Palin on today’s Sunday morning shows. Several of them admitted that the only reason they thought it was a good pick by McCain is because it will spice up a convention none of them were looking forward to covering. They really are that transparent and self-interested.
And check out Face the Nation‘s lineup: Rudy Guiliani, Joe Lieberman, Carly Fiorina and David Brooks. The only way they could have made the show more pro-Palin was if they added a hundred cheering hockey moms (if that many actually exist) and a really angry aborted fetus.
But, hey, I’m still not worried. The media’s love affair with her will be short-lived, more Palin gaffes and past dirt will quickly unspool in the next few weeks, and I still stick with my prediction that this pick will be a large net-negative for McCain when it comes to the undecideds. Hell, her mother-in-law isn’t sure who she’s going to vote for.
Asked about Palin’s credentials, Cindy McCain told ABC-TV’s “This Week:” “The experience that she comes from is with what she’s done in the government. And also, remember: Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia. So, it’s not as if she doesn’t understand what’s at stake here.”
Yesterday people were wondering aloud if McCain and Republicans thought women were that stupid. Today we can safely ask if they think women and men are that stupid. According to McCain, we are all Doocys now.
Republican strategist Karl Rove said on Face The Nation Sunday that he expects presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama to choose a running mate based on political calculations, not the person’s readiness for the job.
“I think he’s going to make an intensely political choice, not a governing choice,” Rove said. “He’s going to view this through the prism of a candidate, not through the prism of president; that is to say, he’s going to pick somebody that he thinks will on the margin help him in a state like Indiana or Missouri or Virginia. He’s not going to be thinking big and broad about the responsibilities of president.”
Rove singled out Virginia governor Tim Kaine, also a Face The Nation guest, as an example of such a pick.
“With all due respect again to Governor Kaine, he’s been a governor for three years, he’s been able but undistinguished,” Rove said. “I don’t think people could really name a big, important thing that he’s done. He was mayor of the 105th largest city in America.”
Rove continued: “So if he were to pick Governor Kaine, it would be an intensely political choice where he said, `You know what? I’m really not, first and foremost, concerned with, is this person capable of being president of the United States.”
OUCH: Palin giggled when a radio host called one of her female political adversaries a “bitch” and didn’t object when he referred to her as a “cancer,” even though the woman is a cancer survivor. Did the McCain camp vet this woman at all? I think we may have the Republican’s first Eagleton imploding before our eyes. And it’s been only one day since the announcement. Someone tell Pawlenty and Romney not to make any big plans for the next couple of months…
ABC’s Jan Crawford Greenburg reports: It wasn’t until Sunday night that John McCain, after meeting with his four top advisers, finally decided he could not tap independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut to be his running mate. One adviser, tasked with taking the temperature of the conservative base, had strongly made the case to McCain that it would be a disaster for the party and that the base would revolt. McCain concluded he could not go that route.
As I wrote in the comments there:
Was the base upset that Lieberman didn’t have enough solid PTA experience? Or was it because Hadassah is TEH SUCK on snow machines?
MORE SOMEWHAT RELATED: From marindenver below in comments…
Absolutely loved that story on the Clintonistas website because that is the exact same thing my 84 year mom told me about a couple of her friends she talked to this morning. She is a moderate Republican who has been supporting Obama for awhile but her friends have been on the fence. The are all Obamacans now thanks to his terrific speech and McLoonyTunes ludicrous response to it. Th-th-th-thas all folks!
I guess Darragh McCainphy and her merry band o’ de-clawed dimwits have decided that the PUMA brand has been irreparably damaged, because now she’s forming “The New Democratic Party,” which represents ... oh, the fuck if I know...
We are NOT Republicans, though millions of us will vote McCain/Palin in November.
Our Platform is the Platform of the TRUE Democratic Party
* Healthcare for All
* Equal Rights for women, LGBT, and people of color
* Reproductive Rights
* Worker Protections
* Envmtl Protections
* Fair Immigration Policy
* Help for working class college students
* Good public schools
WE MUST PREVENT A REPUBLICAN TAKEOVER OF THE ELECTORATE.
I was having a discussion with icebergwedge on the phone yesterday and we were trying to decided who’s dumber, PUMAs or nutters? Personally, I’m stumped.
