Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more ridiculous, along comes Sarah Palin’s vacationing spokesperson Meg Stapleton. Her interview with Anderson Cooper last night was a continuation of the steaming pile of stupid we witnessed earlier from her boss, including another forced and even more bizarre basketball analogy:
Do you say then that a point guard charging down a basketball court is not leading when he passes the ball or she passes the ball? [...] When someone is driving down a basketball court , which is her analogy and I think it speaks well to where she is, and that is, I can’t effect change right now because of the political climate that’s there. I’m going to pass the ball. I’m going around it. And we still all have the same common hoop, but I’m going around the block and I’m passing the ball at this time because it’s best for Alaska.
“And we still all have the same common hoop.” That fucking rocks a million different ways. Cooper’s facial expressions during that mess were priceless. Highly recommended. The whole interview is great. You can watch it all here:
A year or so ago, Ms. YAFB and I went down to our local pub for a drink and met one of our neighbors, John. “Aha! Just the people I wanted to see,” he said, ominously. “What are you doing next week?”
In retrospect, we should maybe have treated his enquiry with a little more suspicion. What he was driving at was that at the last minute some people had dropped out of a little sailing expedition he was running on the square-rigger TS Royalist, and they were now desperately short of crew. The fact that Ms. YAFB’s and my experience afloat had hitherto been limited to ferry rides, rowing a dinghy round fishing lochs, and the occasional powerboat trip on Loch Lomond was not an excuse he would brook. “Can we give you an answer tomorrow? - We’ll need to see if we can reorganize work,” we pleaded. Twenty minutes later, we were booked up.
I just watched the Palin speech in its entirety. It is the funniest thing I have ever seen. Nobody warned me about the ducks and geese ("and I asked the most important people, my children what they thought"-- SQUAWWWWK! HONK! ERRRRRACCKKK! SKRAKKKKKKKKK!!!)
“Rambling” is a kind word for the disjointed word salad she offered up.
Know what would have helped her not seem quite such a birdbrain? A TELEPROMPTER. Like the grownups use.
Oh, there’s a crappy concentrate product you could buy—just add Bacardi rum!—from Barcardi. But better to make your own. This is the closest recipe I’ve found to Captain Tony’s Saloon in Key West, which is my benchmark for the Platonic Ideal of rum runners. If you know of a better one, please share it in comments:
RUM RUNNER
(serves several regular folks or one extremely drunk person)
• 9 oz dark rum (I use Appleton)
• 4.5 oz blackberry brandy
• 4.5 oz banana liqueur
• Healthy splash of Grenadine
• 9 oz. orange juice
• 9 oz. pineapple juice
Regarding the hurricane glass: The company I worked for during Florida’s hurricane summer of 2004 gave all employees a commemorative glass. I still see my neighbor’s roof flying off and remember the sensation of making coffee on the grill every time I see it. Good times!
Anyhoo, enjoy your rum runners, and remember to leave all your most salacious Governor Palin rumors in comments. Happy 4th!
by Andrew Hinkelman and Lori Tipton
Friday, July 3, 2009
ANCHORAGE, Alaska—Gov. Sarah Palin will resign her office in a few weeks, she said during a news conference at her Wasilla home Friday morning.
Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell will be inaugurated at the Governor’s Picnic at Pionner Park in Fairbanks on Saturday, July 25, Palin said.
There was no immediate word as to why she will resign, though speculation has been rampant that the former vice presidential candidate is gearing up for a run at the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.
Palin made the announcement flanked by Parnell and most, if not all, of her cabinet.
Parnell ran unsuccessfully against Rep. Don Young in the Republican primary last year.
The stunning announcement by Palin opens the floodgates for the 2010 gubernatorial race. Speculation that Palin might not seek re-election had fueled further conjecture of who might run.
The initial speculation was that she would announce she would not run for re-election. That would indicate she was gearing up for a presidential run. But resignation? Seems like that would hurt her national ambitions rather than helping them. It would be irresponsible not to speculate on the reasons behind this development.
The short version is this: CBO estimates that by 2019 the bill will cover 21 million people at a cost of $597 billion. But—and this is important—the HELP Committee’s bill doesn’t include the Medicaid expansion, because Medicaid is under the sole jurisdiction of the Finance Committee. But if Medicaid is expanded to 150 percent, it will cover an additional 20 million at a cost of about $1 trillion. Add in the savings that Finance is expected to get from reforming Medicare and you’re looking at a bill that will cost $1 trillion to $1.3 trillion and cover 42 million people (which would mean 97 percent of the legal population in 2019 would have health insurance) by 2019.
The proposal is able to control costs by imposing an employer mandate - $750 fine per full-time employee per year if you don’t provide health insurance coverage. For part-time employees the cost is $375. (Companies with fewer than 50 employees would be exempt from this.) The bill also provides a public plan option, expands Medicaid, provides subsidies for families making too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford health insurance and prevents insurance companies from disqualifying people with pre-existing conditions or from charging widely disparate rates to people based on age or health history. And I did not see a provision for taxing employer paid health benefits as had been speculated previously. Finally the bill provides many incentives for increasing preventive care and improving the quality of health care provided.
A couple of weeks ago the Congressional Budget Office scored the cost of the bill and came up with figures that indicated it would be much more expensive and cover a lot fewer people (causing certain Repub senators to go ballistic). It has been clarified now that they scored an incomplete version and the new cost estimates are much more accurate.
This bill and the companion bill from the Finance Committee are close enough to the House version that reconciliation shouldn’t be a painful procedure. The key, of course, is to get it passed by the Senate. Here’s where we come in again. Call, e-mail, fax, Tweet or just shout it out to your Senators that they need to step up to the plate and support this very realistic and badly needed legislation! Folks are dying for lack of health care. And many who are not dying are living lives of reduced quality because of lack of access to care and/or medications. Mr. Reid, that is a cause that is well worth flexing your muscles for.
Well, it’s official. The Senate majority leader is not actually a human being; he is the jokes Firedoglake makes about him given flesh. Like The Dark Half if M.U. Timothy Hutton had no charisma and farmed out the killing to insurers.
The new one-minute ad from Our Country Deserves Better PAC (mouthful!) compares Obama to Ahmadinejad and Hitler and still finds time to shiv ACORN (BLACKS WITH CLIPBOARDS!). It’s like the Tang crystals version of the Glenn Beck show. It puts the “dense” back in “condensed”:
One of the most annoying things about being an atheist is the way believers accuse you of that which they themselves are guilty of. Adherence to dogma! Unwillingness to brook dissent! No sense of humor! Martyr complex! Sorry, faith-havers, you’re engaging in a little something we call projec…
A few interesting things to report on, some funny, one, well, we’ll start with that and you can judge for yourselves.
Former CIA person and current crazy person Michael Scheuer, speaking to another crazy person, Glenn Beck, actually expressed his wish to see Obama bin Laden detonate a major weapon in the U.S. JUST TO SHOW EVERYONE!!!
The long article in Vanity Fair (titled “It Came from Wasilla” /snark) about Sarah Palin and the presidential campaign and all the infighting and name calling by staffers about her has sparked some great contemperaneous name callling and fighting, especially between Bill Kristol and Steve Schmidt. Here’s an example:
Asked about the accusation, Schmidt fired back in an e-mail: “I’m sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign.”
“After all, his management of [former Vice President] Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away,” Schmidt continued. “His attack on me is categorically false.”
Make some popcorn, settle back and read the whole thing at Politico.
My favorite senator is doing what he does best ... making sense:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), called on the White House and Democratic leadership in Congress to ensure that party members agree unanimously to support cloture on legislation that would revamp the nation’s health care system. Democratic senators on the fence, he added, could still oppose the bill. But at the very least they should be required to let the legislation come to an up-or-down vote.
“I think that with Al Franken coming on board, you have effectively 60 Democrats in the caucus, 58 and two Independents,” Sanders said in an interview with the Huffington Post. “I think the strategy should be to say, it doesn’t take 60 votes to pass a piece of legislation. It takes 60 votes to stop a filibuster. I think the strategy should be that every Democrat, no matter whether or not they ultimately end up voting for the final bill, is to say we are going to vote together to stop a Republican filibuster. And if somebody who votes for that ends up saying, ‘I’m not gonna vote for this bill, it’s too radical, blah, blah, blah, that’s fine.’”
“I think the idea of going to conservative Republicans, who are essentially representing the insurance companies and the drug companies, and watering down this bill substantially, rather than demanding we get 60 votes to stop the filibuster, I think that is a very wrong political strategy,” Sanders added.
