Spreading confusion over the internet since 1994
David Talbot writes: Imagine the uproar if Michelle Obama was revealed to have joined a black nationalist party whose founder preached armed secession from the United States and who enlisted the government of Iran in his cause?
…Simply imagine the uproar if an associate of Barack Obama voiced such an opinion of the United States – the gnashing of teeth could be heard as far away as the moon.
More discussion of last nights debate later (still half-formed in my mind, and you probably aren’t losing any sleep waiting for my opinion on it anyway), but this Palin lie jumped out: PALIN TONIGHT: “We have got to encourage other nations to come along with us with the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that. … FACTS: PALIN WAS NOT THE FIRST GOVERNOR TO ACT ON CLIMATE CHANGE OR REORGANIZE HER CABINET TO DEAL WITH IT In JANUARY 2007, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick Began Sweeping Cabinet Reorganization to Integrate Energy and Environment to Deal With Climate Change.
The other is how quickly she was able to shuck those props, master the thrust-and-parry of jousting with her opponents and inquisitors, and project confidence to an audience of television viewers watching from home. “That’s the Sarah Palin I remember from the 2006 debates: positive, confident and upbeat,” recalls Libby Casey, an Alaska public-radio reporter who served as a debate moderator on two occasions that year.
[Dinosaur Invasion – click to embiggen, if you aren’t easily frightened] ANCHORAGE — Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago — about 65 million years after scientists say most dinosaurs became extinct — the teacher said. … When he asked her about prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin said “she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks,” recalled Munger, who teaches music at the University of Alaska in Anchorage and has regularly criticized Palin in recent years on his liberal political blog, called Progressive Alaska.
Bob Herbert transcribes the train-wreck Palin Couric interview from this week : When asked again this week about her puerile linkage of foreign policy proficiency and Alaska’s proximity to Russia, this time by Katie Couric of CBS News, here is what Ms. Palin said she meant: “That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and on our other side, the land — boundary that we have with — Canada.”
Sarah Palin’s September 4 speech at the Republican National Convention, numerous print media, including the Los Angeles Times , the Chicago Tribune , Time Magazine , the Dallas Morning News , Reuters , and an article and a column by Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle, uncritically reported Palin’s claim that Sen. Barack Obama “is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform — not even in the state senate,” without noting that Obama has played key roles in the passage of reform legislation at both the federal and state levels.
If the Republicans are going to be all high and mighty about people digging into the lives of candidates’ families, all I can do is laugh, given the treatment that Michelle Obama has been given by Republicans — maybe not John McCain proper, but every surrogate beneath him. … They probably saw Obama’s speech and saw how incredible and dynamic and how powerful it was and realized that a safe pick wasn’t going to give them any hope of victory in November so they had to shake things up.
There was a flutter of attention when McCain campaign manager Rick Davis told a group of Post reporters and editors yesterday that his team was having to rework the vice presidential acceptance speech because the original draft, prepared before Gov. … ” While we all wondered to ourselves what might make a speech masculine or feminine, no one batted an eye at the underlying revelation: that the campaign was writing the nominee’s speech before knowing who the nominee would be.
via Greg Sargent who has an excellent roundup of this weekends bad news for McCain/Palin, including the fact that there is a team of 10 lawyers being dispatched to Alaska by the Republican Party to cover-up as much scandal as possible, and do a proper vetting of Palin, presumedly before she is officially nominated. … (( Eagleton wasn’t thoroughly vetted by George McGovern’s staff, and the press had a field day discussing Eagleton’s mental hospital visits)) The faux-pregnancy story turned out to be just a family affair, and perhaps a Rovian play for sympathy.
Sarah Palin said she “championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress” and opposed federal funding for a controversial bridge to a sparsely populated island. … And as mayor of the small town of Wasilla from 1996 to 2002, Palin also hired a Washington lobbying firm that helped secure $8 million in congressionally directed spending projects, known as earmarks, according to public spending records compiled by the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste and lobbying documents.
Rudy Giuliani is in the class of professional Trolls On Television that I try to ignore, along with his fellow grifters like Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, et al. The odds of any of these losers ever winning a plurality of delegates in a presidential election is extremely slim, in fact, the odds of any of them winning a majority of voters in any state is implausible, and yet they have made careers for themselves appearing on television news programs, spewing bile regarding the political topic du jour.
What makes this deceit particularly urgent for them now is that their only hope for re-branding and re-empowerment lies in a movement — the tea partiers — that has been (largely though not exclusively) dominated by libertarians, Paul followers, and other assorted idiosyncratic factions who are hostile to the GOP’s actual approach to governing. … Right-wing mavens like Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin and National Review are suddenly feigning great respect for Ron Paul and like-minded activists because they’re eager that the sham will be maintained: the blatant sham that the modern GOP and its movement conservatives are a coherent vehicle for those who believe in small government principles.
Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War, the current fiscal mess, these are all direct results of electing anti-government Republicans. now we are supposed to vote for more conservative Republicans because we learned from the last bunch of conservative Republicans that government just doesn’t work. That is the advice of Sarah Palin, Republican vice-presidential nominee, in last week’s debate with her Democratic counterpart, discussing the dread prospect of universal health care: “Unless you’re pleased with the way the federal government has been running anything lately, I don’t think that it’s going to be real pleasing for Americans to consider health care being taken over by the feds.”
or it’s some Sarah Palin acolytes looking to drill, baby drill, even in the West Loop.
On February 9, 2008, Governor Sarah Palin’s appointed Deputy Commissioner of Revenue spoke to the Alaska House State Affairs Committee on bipartisan HB 287, which would require the state to divest from Sudan. … On April 1, Commissioner of Revenue paid lip service to SB 227 in the Alaska Senate State Affairs Committee, saying that the bill “should be amended…in the Finance Committee” and said that the Department of Revenue was “working with the Department of Law… to actually take certain actions with regard to divestiture that would still be compliant with the state investment laws.”