In what respect, Mikheil?

During her interview with ABC's Charles Gibson, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin described Moscow's action against its onetime subsidiary state Georgia last month as "unprovoked."

She went on to suggest that had the former Soviet republic been a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization at the time, America would have "perhaps" found itself at war with Russia.

Fortunately for the Alaskan governor, Gibson changed the subject before Palin could address exactly what the potentially disastrous implications of such a conflict and its escalation might be.

Senator John McCain, who hopes to ride the coattails of Sarah Palin's own extravagantly outsized ambitions to the U.S. presidency, unequivocally supported Georgia's leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, pronouncing then, "We're all Georgians today."

Comes now a lengthy report in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel revealing the spectacular naïveté of both Republican candidates' irresponsible politicking along with their ill-informed saber-rattling.

According to this [NATO] intelligence information, the Georgians amassed roughly 12,000 troops on the border with South Ossetia on the morning of Aug. 7.

At 10:35 p.m. on Aug. 7, less than an hour before Russian tanks entered the Roki Tunnel, according to Saakashvili, Georgian forces began their artillery assault on Tskhinvali.

The intelligence agencies conclude that the Russian army did not begin firing until 7:30 a.m. on Aug. 8 [and] did not begin marching through the Roki Tunnel until roughly 11 a.m. This sequence of events is now seen as evidence that Moscow did not act offensively, but merely reacted.

As noted previously, Saakashvili's escapade was in the works long before August 7, according to his former defense minister.

And there's quite a bit more to it than that, obviously, as evidenced by Der Spiegel's rightfully inquisitive headline:

Did Saakashvili lie?

Sarah Palin also mentioned that she'd once spoken to Mikheil Saakashvili on the telephone. She may have yet to meet a foreign leader — apart from a day trip to visit the Premier of Yukon — but it's certainly beginning to appear that she's already been duped by one. And so has John McCain, from the looks of it.

Which is not real encouraging on either of their behalfs.

No Eucharist for you

Conservative Republican law professor Douglas Kmiec, on being publicly snubbed by his own Church for the grievous sin of expressing support for Barack Obama:

Right there in that moment every Catholic good deed and good thought and good wish of love of neighbor that I once had seemed inconsequential and insufficient. Like a child feeling unfairly disciplined, but disciplined nonetheless, I pleaded with empty hand outstretched: "I think you're making a mistake, Father." His red complexion redder now, betraying righteous anger. His stretched hand over the top of the Ciborium, the container for the consecrated bread as if I was going to grab a handful and make a run for it, and then the pronouncement: "No, you are the one who made the mistake."

The Day I Was Denied Communion.

See also Emily Mills's tale of the Verona, WI music director fired from the Catholic Church simply because he happens to be gay.

Fiorina gets a golden muzzle

Top John McCain economic adviser Carly Fiorina was banished to the penalty box yesterday after insisting to reporters that neither her boy nor his small town protégé is fit to run a corporation even a fraction of the size of the federal executive department.

Meanwhile, both McCain and running soulmate Sarah Palin blamed Monday's 500 point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Fiorina, who three years ago received $45 million and the contents of her desk drawers in a cardboard box to get her to stop showing up for work at Hewlett-Packard.

Earlier, Ms. Fiorina had been offended by two comediennes impersonating two female politicians, saying it was "sexist."

What in the world is Sullivan talking about

Obama tries to silence his critics. This is a disgraceful attempt to intimidate journalists trying to get at facts and air them. There is nothing to fear from journalists asking questions or raising issues that campaigns should be eager to engage and refute if necessary.

Huh? Silence? Intimidate?

There is nothing to fear from callers to AM radio shows asking questions or raising issues that "journalists" [sic] should be eager to engage and refute if necessary.

There, fixed.

Engaging and refuting is all they were trying to do. Andrew Sullivan is all mixed up from reading those crazy internets libertarians. Also, if I see "oil pipeline" one more time I'm just going to scream.

John McCain invented the abacus

Don't they know RIM is a Canadian company?

Free speech under assault!!!!11

AK nut-right radio squawker suspended without pay

Last week Eddie Burke, host of a conservative daily talk show in Anchorage, called rally organizers Charla Sterne and Ilona Bessenyey "socialist, baby-killing maggots," read their phone numbers on the air and encouraged listeners to call them. The women said their voice mail quickly filled with angry, profane messages, some of them threatening.

Those wacky, madcap values voters! Always with the japes.

Quite the little jamboree they had up there anyway.

Because you can't get here from there

Before her election as governor, Palin opposed the idea of routing the pipeline through Canada, a version of which her predecessor, Frank Murkowski, had advocated. Instead she pushed for what she and other proponents called an "all-Alaska" pipeline — one that would go to the Alaskan port city of Valdez, from which the gas could be shipped to market [after being liquefied].

She even appeared in advertisements endorsing the all-Alaska option, and on the wall of her gubernatorial campaign headquarters in 2006 was a sign saying, "Canada my ass, it’s Alaska’s gas."

That didn't last long.

Less than meets the eye — CQ Politics

"This was a terrible blunder." — Walter J. Hickel

Sarah Paluxy man tracks

Here's an entertaining profile at Salon.com of one Howard Bess, a retired Baptist minister from the Mat-Su Valley of Alaska and author of a book called Pastor, I Am Gay. Of note:

I pushed [Sarah Palin] on the earth's creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she'd seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.

Yes, we've all seen them. They're a fraud. So much of a fraud that only the wildest of young earth creationists even mention them.

Why does Charlie Sykes hate free speech?

Milwaukee medium wave buffoon Charlie Sykes is beside himself that supporters of Barack Obama would dare to call in to a Chicago call-in radio show and challenge a notorious right-wing dissembler, David Freddoso.

OBAMA'S SPEECH THUGS STRIKE AGAIN, bellows Sykes. What's that all about? Apparently advance news of David Freddoso's appearance elicited this outrageous "Obama Action Wire":

Call into the "Extension 720" show with Milt Rosenberg tonight, September 15th, between 9:00 and 11:00 p.m. at (312) 591-7200.

Be honest, but be civil.

Be persistent. It may take a few attempts to get through to the show. Just keep trying. Your call is important.

Use the talking points below to help you speak confidently and concisely.

So what? In America, it's called "free speech." When people lie, you counter them. And 720 kHz is on a public portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, not incidentally.

But Charlie Sykes would obviously prefer the lies and the smears to stand unchallenged. Besides, Rosenberg could always do what Sykes does with callers who dissent from his nonsense — hang up on them.

Freddoso's embarrassing excuse for a critique has received virtually no critical attention, thanks to the right-wing press promoting it and the compliant mainstream outlets. A fawning story in the Politico called Freddoso's book "serious" and "a fact-based critique." According to the Politico, it occupies "a small island in the often-shrill sea of criticism of Obama." In reality, Freddoso's book is one more example of that polluted sea of criticism, filled with numerous factual errors, unproven innuendo, guilt by association attacks, and lunatic conspiracy theories that would be laughable if not for the seriousness of these false accusations.

David Freddoso's Hatchet Job.

"Leave David Freddoso alone!" wept Charlie Sykes.

Definitely not your father's GOP

h/t gnarlytrombone.

Bridges to nowhere

Remember Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's "masterwork" of a speech to the True Believers™ at the Republican National Convention?

Alluding to [Barack] Obama's stated willingness to personally meet with Iranian leaders as president, Palin charged, "Terrorist states are seeking nuclear weapons without delay; he wants to meet them without preconditions."

Her words were greeted by a chorus of appreciative laughter.

Hilarious! Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth ...

Five former secretaries of state, gathering to give their best advice to the next president, agreed Monday that the United States should talk to Iran.

The Bush administration has dragged its feet on even minimal contact with Iran under hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a course the five former secretaries of state implicitly criticized.

Which was Obama's point, I believe.

Then there was Palin's remark to ABC's Charles Gibson that America mustn't "second guess" Israel's exercising military options against Iran. Take it away, Warren Christopher et al:

Nor did [the five former secretaries of state] suggest the United States should keep its distance out of concern for Israel, which Ahmadinejad has said "one day will be wiped off the map."

"The military options are very poor," Christopher said. "And we have to tell the Israelis that."

As for Sarah Palin's claim that Russia's recent adventure in Georgia was "unprovoked":

It was "foolhardy," [Colin Powell] said, for Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to "light a match" with a military operation in South Ossetia to forcibly reassert its authority over the breakaway region.

So what experience does Sarah Palin have in the field of national security to offset the foregoing daftness?

Sez John McCain: "Energy. She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America."

But just the other day Palin claimed that Alaska supplies "nearly 20%" of U.S. domestic energy. Whoops. Not even close. Sorry about that, Chief. Would you believe a childhood love of cows?

About that "unprovoked attack"

Both Republican presidential candidates, campaigning on their foreign affairs expertise, characterized Russia's August military response against the former Georgian S.S.R. as "unprovoked."

Not exactly, according to somebody who might know:

Irakly Okruashvili, a close ally of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili who served as defense minister from 2004 to 2006, said he and the president worked together on military plans to invade South Ossetia and a second breakaway region on the Black Sea coast, Abkhazia.

"Abkhazia was our strategic priority, but we drew up military plans in 2005 for taking both Abkhazia and South Ossetia as well," Okruashvili said.

Reuters.

Racing stripe on a turd

I was only half-joking over a rationalization intended to present Sarah Palin as the "sole occupier in the field of lipstick imagery and metaphor," but apparently a local Republican politician is dead serious about it.

"Right now we think Sarah owns the name of lipstick," said a State Senator from the posh Milwaukee North Shore suburb of River Hills who owns the names of Alberta and Darling.

Meanwhile The View's Joy Behar and Barbara Walters forced John McCain to finally admit that when he described "putting lipstick on a pig," he wasn't talking about Senator Hillary Clinton, he was only making reference to her health care proposals.

No double standard there, nope. Not at all.

"Senator Obama chooses his words very carefully, okay? He shouldn't have said it," McCain admonished The View's hosts.

Actually it's McCain and his sleazy campaign managers who choose Obama's words carefully, exercises in cherry picking, quote mining, and deliberate distortion that would make a creationist blush.

Here's a round-up of McCain's most recent lies and falsehoods.

The Straight Talkin' McCain followed up his visit to The View with one to teevee chef Rachael Ray, who his own defenders have accused of supporting Palestinian terrorists.

Palin's perfectly perfect!

Milwaukee's leading apologist for Sarah Palin, law professor Rick Esenberg, sizes up the candidate's glaring unfamiliarity with any version of the so-called "Bush Doctrine." He makes an admirably chivalrous attempt at rescuing her from a faux pas especially shocking, given the position her outsized ambition is seeking.

Prof. Esenberg claims that ABC's Charles Gibson, who conducted an interview with Palin broadcast yesterday, was "owned."

One of things that I try to do as a law professor is break down generalizations into their comprehensible parts. Palin's request that he do so was perfectly reasonable.

But [Gibson] wouldn't do it because he wanted — just knew he could — [to] show her up. So much for intellectual subtlety. So she restated the question in a way that was, given his refusal to tell her what he meant, perfectly accurate and perfectly favorable to her side of the debate.

No, not hardly. She didn't ask Gibson to break anything into any parts; she didn't have a clue what Gibson was even referring to.

She effectively demonstrated that she had never heard a U.S. president's surname connected to the word "doctrine" at all, as I suspect most high schoolers have.

When Gibson asked for her observations on the Bush Doctrine, Palin was clearly stumped, and wondered whether by Bush Doctrine Gibson meant George W. Bush's "worldview."

So the issue isn't whether Palin was familiar with some version of a Bush Doctrine, as Esenberg purports to argue, although she proved convincingly that she had no idea what any such version might be, let alone having anything resembling an opinion of same.

The point is that Palin was so obviously baffled by the very existence of presidential foreign policy "doctrines" at all. As in, Monroe, Eisenhower, Reagan, etc. They aren't personal "worldviews."

Ronald Reagan's personal worldview was informed by horoscopes, prayer, and Hal Lindsey-style Armageddon, but thankfully those things played no part in any Reagan Doctrine. We hope.

Now we have the Esenberg Doctrine: Defend the indefensible, and shoot the journalist while you're at it.

With a straight face, even

Interviewer: What experience does [Sarah Palin] have in the field of national security?

John McCain: Energy. She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America.

Following the Palin pipeline

The New York Times ran a fairly substantial article yesterday on the proposed natural gas pipeline between Prudhoe Bay, AK and southern Alberta, the gist of which is that Sarah Palin massively overstated the current status of the project during her "masterwork" of a speech to the Republican faithful at their national convention.

That in itself is not surprising, as Gov. Palin has a demonstrated penchant for overstatement, exaggeration, and untruth.

A more significant aspect of the story is the second thoughts some Republican legislators in Alaska seem to be having for the process by which the State went about selecting the successful licensee, TransCanada Corp. of Calgary.

As I mentioned earlier, and the Times article isn't clear about, TransCanada was the only bidder. That appears to be at least one Alaska legislator's concern:

Lyda Green, a Republican and president of the State Senate, voted for Ms. Palin’s Alaska Gasline Inducement Act [AGIA] but said that in the interim, it has not “shown itself to be open and competitive, and it is a very expensive risk.”

“I regret the vote now,” she said last week.

In other words, the AGIA had the effect of excluding every potential bidder except for TransCanada.

While four other firms submitted applications, all were rejected for nonconformances with the AGIA. Two others declined to submit applications at all, and the oil companies that actually own the mining leases on the gas submitted alternate proposals which the Palin administration also rejected out of hand.

Therefore Alaska didn't even have one other bid with which to compare to TransCanada's on equal terms. That's an odd way of doing business, and most purchasing agents might revisit the terms of the request for bids to try and find some way to include more players in order to evaluate them on more closely competitive grounds.

Especially for a project of this size; that is, a massive one.

Now it turns out that one of Palin's top team members is a former lobbyist for Foothills Pipeline, Ltd., a subsidiary of TransCanada.

But, as the Times story suggests, a politician looks good running around shouting about standing up to "Big Oil." Except in this case, "Big Oil" is still very much in the game and Alaska may end up forking out $500 million without getting one stick of pipe in the ground.

And all of this, we are told, is the centerpiece of Gov. Palin's "executive experience." The Palin Doctrine, as it were.

Or, as the Report on Business puts it this morning, in discussing the project's Canadian hurdles, "The beauty of this from her point of view as a politician on the campaign trail in 2008 is that it could be years before anyone knows for sure."

Nine one one oh one

Alongside millions of others, I spent the morning of September 11, 2001, watching the teevee in equal parts horror and disbelief. CBS News was perhaps the first network to broadcast unedited amateur video and audio of the planes hitting the World Trade Center.

It was the first — and likely the last — time I'd heard someone yell “Jesus fucking Christ!” on network television. That pretty much summed up my initial reaction as well.

In the afternoon I had fortuitous occasion to be in a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee political science class called “Conduct of American Foreign Affairs” taught by Prof. Steven B. Redd. It was both timely and extremely helpful in terms of putting the morning's events in larger perspective.

While Prof. Redd was — and presumably still is — an unapologetic conservative Republican, I don't recall any attempt on his part to equate the views of the immediate suspect, Osama bin Laden, with the positions of the political left or Democratic leaders in Congress.

Nor were there any intimations of placing the blame for the bloodthirsty, murderous attacks at the feet of “Pagans, Gays, and the ACLU,” as the late, unlamented Jerry Falwell and the not-yet-late but otherwise similarly unlamented Pat Robertson did.

But he did do an exemplary job at facilitating fruitful discussion.

Every once in awhile we need to be reminded that there are thoughtful and even scholarly conservative Republicans, as opposed to the contingent of reactionary dimwits that populates the blogosphere and wake up every morning to go and genuflect before what Michelle Malkin commands them to be outraged about today.

Prof. Redd was so fair minded, in fact, that he awarded me a 96 for a paper arguing in favor of U.S. ratification of the Rome Treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, compared and contrasted with President Bush's Executive Order of November 13, 2001, which authorized the creation of military tribunals to hear cases against suspected al-Qaeda members.

It was a position, I suspect, in diametric opposition to his own.

I believe I lost the four remaining points mostly for formatting errors, although Prof. Redd did mildly chastise me for referring to Bush's power to institute the tribunals as “newly minted.”

I don't remember whether I subsequently defended myself over the use of the expression, which was partly facetious and mostly a response to the administration's attempt to equate the present tribunals with those established by the F. Roosevelt presidency.

Because, from a strictly constitutional perspective, Roosevelt's executive power was enhanced by a formal declaration of war by Congress, whereas the current administration's is not.

As for the formatting errors, I ascribe them to the fact that the paper was due only a couple of days after Bush's Executive Order appeared, and its issuance necessitated a drastic reorganization and rewrite of the material I had assembled to that point. There was a good deal of the proverbial midnight oil burnt, as I recall (a gallon of it was a lot cheaper then, too).

In retrospect I probably should have been awarded those remaining four points, because several of the military tribunals' constitutional infirmities that I described in my paper have since been recognized by a number of federal courts, including the highest one.

The moral of the story is that it didn't matter, in those days, whether you were a conservative Republican or a raving Trotskyite lobbying for aspects of world government. One of the effects of 9/11 was that it united Americans to a common purpose.

Indeed, it brought about a remarkable confluence of sympathetic international opinion toward the United States of America, including from the French and possibly even from Canadians.

And those days, of course, are long gone, thanks in large part to the Bush administration's “Conduct of American Foreign Affairs.”

Nevertheless, the memories of this day are not so easily shaken.

More McCain dishonesty

This item is by one of the journalists misleadingly cherry-picked for John McCain's sleazy television ad, "Education."

The ad itself doesn't bother explaining how the candidates differ on school vouchers, the subject of my column. Instead, it insults our intelligence by expecting us to believe that Obama thinks kindergarteners should be taught how to use condoms before they're taught to read.

This commercial doesn't tell us much about Obama. But it sure provides an education about McCain.

FactCheck.org has more.

"Serious distortions" — NYT

Today's John McCain is not the one I used to admire.

John McCain: "Above the fray"

Marquette University law professor Rick Esenberg, at the conclusion of a comic rationalization designed to portray Sarah Palin as the sole occupier in the field of lipstick imagery and metaphor, confidently pronounces: "And all the while, John McCain remains above the fray."

Is that so.

If by "above the fray" he means baldly lying about Barack Obama as favoring "comprehensive sex education" for kindergarteners, a bogus trope exhumed and recycled from Alan Keyes's abysmal failure of a 2004 Senate campaign, then I guess that counts as "above the fray."

Here's some information on the "Age Appropriate Sex Education Grant Program," the latest — as in, most legible — version of a State bill that Barack Obama, while an Illinois senator, deliberated on (neither sponsored nor, as John McCain's "approved message" falsely puts it, "accomplished") in committee, including a link to the full text of the proposed legislation.

For example:

Requires all instruction to be age appropriate

Requires teaching that abstinence is the only sure way to avoid pregnancy and/or sexually transmitted diseases

Allows for local control — local schools and other community groups still decide what they teach while this program gives them more choices

Arms youth with information on how to avoid unwanted verbal, physical and sexual advances, and in addition, on how not to make those advances

Horrifying, yes?

The last point, in fact, was Obama's main concern with the kindergarten set, and most definitely not that they would be treated to "comprehensive sex education," as he explained several years ago.

Indeed, the same concerns addressed in comic books distributed to the Cub Scouts. Is John McCain going to lie about them next?

Above the fray? Not quite. More like headlong into the gutter.

More selective, phony outrage

Right-wing bloggers can be a pretty pathetic, grasping bunch.

Barack Obama:

John McCain says he’s about change, too — except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics. That’s just calling the same thing something different. You can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig.

The "pig" obviously being — to anyone with adequate cognitive functions, at least — the aforementioned policies and the "lipstick" John McCain's recent and sudden alleged devotion to "change."

Have John McCain and his faux-outraged supporters never heard this ancient, hackneyed expression before? They should have:

When asked about Mrs. Clinton [after] his speech, [McCain] said her proposal was "eerily" similar to the plan she came up with in 1993, when she headed a health care reorganization effort during her husband’s administration. "I think they put some lipstick on a pig," he said, "but it’s still a pig."

Anybody accuse John McCain of referring to Mrs. Clinton herself?

Didn't think so.

Welcome back, Leon Young

To Wisconsin's 16th Assembly District (a.k.a. "home").
The Recess Supervisor celebrates.
MySpace friends fail in Ass. bid.
Fake democrats beaten like gongs.

No more Laphroaig and Cohibas for you

Mr Kim is absent from military parade — BBC

Sarah Palin Truth Squad to the rescue!

Margaret Farrow, a notorious Republican lobbyist and sometime lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, has been appointed by John McCain to the local branch of his Sarah Palin "Truth Squad," supposedly intended to counter "attacks" against McCain's veep choice and soulmate, reports the AP.

Margaret Farrow is also a former member in dubious standing of a Judge Mike Gableman "Truth Squad," which plied its disingenuous trade across the State earlier this year.

While Farrow has some experience with political attacks, having perpetrated a considerable number of them herself, whether she'll satisfy the "Truth" component is an open question.

Among the special versions of "Truth" that Margaret Farrow championed was this claim, dated February 1, 2008:

Louis Butler provided the deciding vote to overturn a sexual predator decision by a circuit court, resulting in the release of the predator into Milwaukee County.

More on that at this link and also at this one.

Richard A. Brown, the predator in question, was at that time and remains to this day safely ensconced in a Wisconsin Department of Corrections supervised living facility in Winnebago County.

That leaves the Sarah Palin "Squad," at least.

UPDATE: The freshly minted Sarah Palin "Truth Squad" swings immediately into robust action, inadvertently excoriating candidate John McCain for comparing Senator Hillary Clinton to a pig.

Conceived in liberty

So the Catholic Bishop of Madison, WI, Robert C. Morlino, is disturbed by something Senator Joe Biden said the other day:

"Any human being — regardless of his faith, his religious practice or having no faith — any human being can reason to the fact that human life from conception unto natural death is sacred," [Morlino] argued. "Biology — not faith, not philosophy, not any kind of theology — biology tells us, science [says], that at the moment of conception there exists a unique individual of the human species."

First of all, it's just slightly presumptuous — and a lot wrong — to claim that a human being "having no faith" will reason to the fact that all human life is "sacred," which is an adjective heavily larded with unproven and/or unprovable religious assumptions.

Secondly, I'm not aware that the study of biology makes any use of the term "conception." As far as I know, biologists refer to "fertilization," which is a process and not a moment, although there are obviously a series of moments inherent in any process.

Frankly, I don't see what the fuss is about. Biden is simply saying that he doesn't consider it prudent to enforce his personal religious views via the coercive power of government. It's not terribly interesting to me whether or not Morlino believes Biden is a good Catholic.

Hierarchical and fancy dress code considerations aside, it would be likewise every bit as unremarkable if Joe Biden believed Robert Morlino wasn't a good Catholic. And it's more than a little ironic that by virtue of Senator Biden's remarks, Bishop Morlino accuses him of violating the separation of church and state.

I hardly think Biden was or is acting as an official spokesperson for the Catholic Church in the United States Congress and in fact his expressed desire to differentiate between his personal religious opinions and his duties as a lawmaker is a respectable one.

That's at least the spirit of separation which, if not sacred, is certainly worth attending to and preserving.

Fundamentalisms observed

The most noxious belief that [Alaska Governor Sarah] Palin shares with Muslim fundamentalists is her conviction that faith is not a private affair of individuals but rather a moral imperative that believers should import into statecraft wherever they have the opportunity to do so. That is the point of her pledge to shape the judiciary. Such a theocratic impulse is incompatible with the Founding Fathers' commitment to tolerance and democracy, which is why they forbade the government to "establish" or officially support any particular religion or denomination.

Strong stuff from Prof. Juan Cole.

Cellphone anointing

"We just started going crazy." (YouTube, 9:59)

I'll say.

You stay moronic, Sykes

Milwaukee's ridiculous medium wave jackanapes Charlie Sykes notices a Ben Smith item at Politico.com — labeling it "Barry leaves 'em laughing about that uppity broad" — which inspires the following self-righteous admonitions: "YOU STAY CLASSY, BARRY. Why dont [sic] you just come out and call her ... a bitter clinger?"

So, what was Barack Obama's outrageous sin? Why, he paid tribute to John McCain's running soulmate, Sarah Palin, as a "Mother, governor, moose shooter" to reportedly comic effect at a campaign stop.

I wonder where in the world Obama came up with that.

Most likely the Republican Party's own official biographical video, broadcast to several million viewers from its own national convention in St. Paul last week, whose own dramatic narration begins: "Mother, moose hunter, maverick. Mayor, governor, maverick."

It's okay if you're a Republican, as the saying goes.

Meanwhile, it was a Republican congressman from Georgia, Lynn Westmoreland, who really did refer to the Obamas as "uppity."

Needless to say, Charlie Sykes did not see fit to disgorge his signature fatuous bilge in that instance.

Apparently he didn't get cc'd on the hypocrisy memo.

Thanks and yes thanks

Today, when Palin says "I told Congress, 'Thanks, but no thanks,' on that Bridge to Nowhere," it implies Congress said, "Here’s a check for that bridge" and she responded, "No thanks, that's wasteful spending; here's your money back."

That's not what happened. Fact is, Alaska took the bridge money, and then just spent it on other projects.

Long before Palin killed the project, Congress washed its hands of the bridge. In the transportation spending bill that included money for the Ketchikan bridge, Congress deleted the wording that would have directed money for the project, though it left the money in place so Alaska officials could decide which transportation projects to spend it on.

Why does the McCain campaign insist on repeating this complete nonsense? I just heard it again, moments ago, in a teevee spot: "I'm John McCain, and I approved this message.

Maybe Obama is right, they really do think people are that stupid.

And a knob end

Anyone who thinks the LHC* will destroy the world is a twat.

* Large Hadron Collider.

Apologies to Ricky Gervais.

More CERN: Lawsuit to forestall Apocalypse.

Sykesistrata by Aristophanes

Enjoy some random idiocy from Milwaukee's own squawking medium wave biped, Charlie Sykes. Notice that in the comments immediately following the list of "banned books," not one person is buying it.

About that pipeline

Today's Washington Post contains an editorial dealing with the proposed 1700-mile natural gas pipeline between Prudhoe Bay, AK and Calgary, Alberta, and concludes:

It is also a sign that Ms. Palin's outflanking of the oil companies injected some competition and urgency into a process that was previously stalled.

That may be, but on the question of competition, it's worth noting that not only was TransCanada the one successful bidder for the license to begin surveying* the proposed route — and receive $500 million in government money — it was the only bidder, period.

The Alaska legislature came up with the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act (AGIA), which is essentially a set of commercial and technical specifications, and TransCanada was the only company whose proposal was seriously considered, as TransCanada's proposal was the only one deemed initially in compliance with the AGIA.

So there weren't any commensurate bids with which to compare to TransCanada's, at least according to the terms of the AGIA.

Meanwhile, BP/ConocoPhillips is moving ahead with its own similar plans, because it isn't bound by the terms of the AGIA, and figures it can get by without the government investment. In fact it prefers to get by without the construction subsidies, from the sound of things.

So maybe the referenced competition is between the good old free market and government economic interference, with BP/ConocoPhillips representing the invisible hand while Gov. Palin's Alaska financially supports the foreign corporation.

* With help from Aero-Metric, a Sheboygan, WI firm.

Enjoy it while you can

Some GOP analysts fret that [Sarah Palin's] popularity has nowhere to go but down, as moderate women become more familiar with her staunch anti-abortion stance. And some are concerned that the conservative evangelicals who make up the party’s base — so jazzed by Palin’s selection — could sink back into a funk when they remember that Palin was just an appetizer while McCain remains the main course.

Seven things to watch.

"Jazzed" isn't the word I'd use — more like "line danced." Nevertheless, it's worth recalling that Barack Obama's running mate, Joe Biden, was immediately dismissed by Republicans because folks only vote for the "top of the ticket" in presidential elections.

Fortunately, we've since been instructed on hypocrisy.

Wasn't this Obama's idea?

The missile launch in North Waziristan comes amid a wave of stepped-up attacks by U.S. forces in Pakistan's border areas near Afghanistan. The strike Monday marked the fifth cross-border incursion by U.S. forces in about a week.

Meanwhile, John McCain searches for imaginary "Gates of Hell"

How to run a national election

Call it on September 7, hold the vote on October 14, and dissolve the legislature in the meantime so the candidates can devote themselves exclusively to campaigning for a grand total of five weeks.

By October 15, approaching 20 million ballots (more than three times that in Florida 2000) will have been cast and counted by hand and the electioneering will be over for another three or four years.

Harper could use a few more seats.

How do you measure extremism

The New York Times reports on Sarah Palin's church:

Adele Morgan, who has known Ms. Palin since the third grade, said the Palins moved to the nondenominational Wasilla Bible Church in 2002, in part because its ministry is less "extreme" than Pentecostal churches like the Assemblies of God.

"Extremism" is defined by the speaker in terms of standard Pentecostal fare like glossolalia, miracle healings, and how high in the air the congregants wave their palms during musical interludes.

But a featured sermonizer at Wasilla Bible Church just last month was a gentleman by the name of David Brickner, who "described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God's 'judgment of unbelief' of Jews who haven't embraced Christianity."

Maybe she has an idiosyncratic view of extremism.

Actual responsibilities. Plus costs. Plus fees.

WASILLA, Alaska — The biggest project that Sarah Palin undertook as mayor of this small town was an indoor sports complex, where locals played hockey, soccer, and basketball, especially during the long, dark Alaskan winters.

The only catch was that the city began building roads and installing utilities for the project before it had unchallenged title to the land. The misstep led to years of litigation and at least $1.3 million in extra costs for a small municipality with a small budget. What was to be Ms. Palin's legacy has turned into a financial mess that continues to plague Wasilla.

Last year, [an] arbitrator ordered the city to pay $836,378 for the 80-acre parcel, far more than the $126,000 Wasilla originally thought it would pay for a piece of land 65 acres larger. The arbitrator also determined that the city owed [a competing prospective buyer] $336,000 in interest. Wasilla's legal bill since [a more recent] eminent domain action has come to roughly $250,000 so far, according to [Tom] Klinkner, the city attorney.

Palin's hockey rink — Wall Street Journal

Plus escape clauses.

Also, here is a very interesting report from the Canadian press on Gov. Palin's natural gas pipeline, the one she proudly touted during her "masterwork" of a speech at the RNC Wednesday evening:

Alaska must resolve a $30-billion battle that pits Ms. Palin against energy giants BP PLC and ConocoPhillips Inc., two pillars of [Alaska's] economy. Calgary-based TransCanada Corp., Canada's largest pipeline company, is caught in the middle, enjoying legislative and some financial support from the State to build the 2,670-kilometre-long line that would ship four billion cubic feet of gas a day beginning in 2018.

But TransCanada is up against a rival pipeline project [dubbed 'Denali'] that would be built by BP and Conoco, the very oil companies TransCanada needs as its customers. Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest corporation, potentially holds the power to crown a winner by virtue of its sizeable gas production, but it has not yet picked a side.

It is a political poker game, and even though all the major parties say they are willing to work with one another, there is a plethora of ways they could stonewall the process.

The power poker chip — Financial Post

Seems it's not quite the done deal Sarah Palin presented it as, because there's no way there's going to be two 1700-mile, 48-inch diameter pipelines built.

At least TransCanada's posterior is well protected, however. In the still-possible event its current agreement is scuttled, the State of Alaska will reimburse its expenditures to that date plus a 200% mark-up, yet another contractual aspect of God's will.

It's little wonder that John McCain doesn't want her near any reporters; they might make an untoward attempt at vetting her.

Area talent in the news

I agree with [Milwaukee area "shock jock" Mark] Belling. By the time you're 74 years old, you're just too grizzled and old to be effective at anything. Seventy-somethings are just bitter about the fact that they're old, and they need to be put in their place! How dare these old people try and re-live the memories of their glory days, which are so far behind them they probably can't even remember them!!! Yes, old people are horrible.

— Kyle Broflovski

Local nut-right squawker finds a listener

Cease and desist, the porpoise said

Ann and Nancy Wilson of the 1970s band Heart are displeased with the GOP's use of their chart topping hit Barracuda to market John McCain's vice-presidential running mate.

The hard driving classic rock number pounded out over the P.A. system as the closing notes to this week's Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN to the delight of reveling conventioneers.

"I think it's completely unfair to be so misrepresented," [Nancy Wilson] said in a phone call to EW.com after [McCain's] speech. "I feel completely f---ed over." She and sister Ann Wilson then e-mailed the following exclusive statement:

"Sarah Palin's views and values in NO WAY represent us as American women."

Interestingly, some of the original band members were draft dodgers who moved to Vancouver, British Columbia just prior to Heart's heyday, and the Wilson sisters relocated there as well, although it's not clear whether the former POW John McCain and his supporters were grooving to their work or that of Canadian studio musicians.

The song's similarly unvetted lyrics refer to the Barracuda as "lying low in the weeds" and accuse the Barracuda of "mak[ing] up something real quick" if "the real thing don't do the trick."

In the past, the GOP paid much closer attention to its musical accompaniments, as when it broadcast The Who's Won't Get Fooled Again during George W. Bush's year 2000 celebrations, but well advisedly switched back to some NASCAR banjo music before the line, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

McCain consultants preemptively nixed any reprise of that song at this year's convention for obvious reasons, among which may be its remarkable applicability.

That damnable National Enquirer

Wasn't it only recently that certain vocal members of the conservative GOP punditry were excoriating the "mainstream media" for failing to follow up on the National Enquirer's delving into the affairs of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards?

Think they'll stay on message?

Biden will imprison entire Bush administration

"If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued," [Delaware Senator Joe] Biden said during a campaign event in Deerfield Beach, Florida, according to ABC.

Shocking.

Stand by for Obamanoia outrage redux.

Banned Books Week

In commemoration of the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, which begins September 27, an excerpt from a letter written by Anne Kilkenny, a resident of Wasilla, AK:

While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin’s attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the Librarian are on her enemies list to this day.

"Petty tyranny" is one of the phrases that spring to mind.

McCain admits defeat, endorses Obama

We were elected to change Washington, and we let Washington change us. We lost the trust of the American people when Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption. We lost their trust, when we valued our power over our principles. ... Change is coming. — John McCain

Four more years! — Jack Abramoff

"John Bush is very much his own man." — Tom Ridge

"Sarah Pawlenty, our next vice president."

"It's over." — Peggy Noonan

And Sarah Palin raised $10 million in 24 hours for Obama.

Community organizer

Thank you, Sarah Palin (YouTube, 2:55)

Jesus Christ was a community organizer.
Pontius Pilate was a Governor.

pwnt.

St. Paul stumbles on another Saviour

"Snide efficiency" is how Illinois Senator Barack Obama's campaign adviser David Axelrod described Sarah Palin's well-rehearsed teleprompted performance last night. That's about right. I haven't heard such a boring litany of Kulturkampf platitudes since I cancelled my subscription to Jerry Falwell's weekly political newsletter.

Predictably, local Palin apologists are hailing her tedious, Holy Ghostwritten sermon to the already safely converted "a masterwork." Yes, you read that correctly: "a masterwork." The work of a master. It's right up there with the Mass in B Minor, King Lear, and (most appropriately) Botticelli's Adoration of the Magi, don't you know.

Sean Hannity called it one of the greatest speeches "in history," as Karl Rove nodded sagely in agreement. That would be the same Karl Rove who derided Virginia governor and former mayor of the city of Richmond Tim Kaine's lack of executive experience while Kaine was under consideration as Barack Obama's running mate.

Now the less-than-half-a-term Alaska governor and former mayor of the village of Wasilla Sarah Palin's considerably less impressive executive experience is suddenly an embarrassment of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and she just delivered one of the greatest orations "in history."

"In history." Thucydides, meet Hannity.

The "masterwork" characterization, incidentally, issues from the same observer who just got finished wagging a righteously indignant finger at those who might mention Sarah Palin's daughter (in the course of mentioning Sarah Palin's daughter by name ten times across nine mercifully brief paragraphs — doubtless a Google-hit bonanza) but more recently gushes that "the youngest daughter is an adorable little ham."

No mention of the infant son passed off from hand to hand like a ham for Republican teevee cameras, however. Those children are off limits. Right. Except by way of praising the masterworks of a squadron of partisan masterworkers, apparently.

Oh, just let Sarah Palin be a proud mother and soon-to-be grandmother, so we are told, and I'm all for that. She's a creationist, you'd expect her to be creating, and creating to be expecting.

But don't tell me they're "off limits" at the same instant you're parading them around a national political convention on full saturation national network teevee in the hopes of soliciting votes by means of that parading. Not that I'm planning on taking any cheap slapshots, but don't say you aren't practically begging for them, hockey moms for Sarah, hottest governor from the coolest State.

Besides, didn't John McCain's own campaign manager just inform us that this presidential election isn't about the issues?

There were few raised last night in St. Paul. If there were, they were buried too subtly amongst the petty sniping, and the resounding on-cue ovations for same from the "family values" crowd (and a less-than-capacity one, at that — that was some clever camouflaging of the rows upon rows of empty seats).

As for whatever substance Sarah Palin did have to offer — and there was little that wasn't either fake or false — James Rowen correctly points to her condescending mockery of community organizers.

Everybody knows you can pretty much write your own ticket with a Harvard law degree. But Obama took his and went back to Chicago's South Side to work with the unemployed and other folks down on their luck. And for this he's scourged by the so-called Christian conservatives? That would be Christian as in Jesus who, if I recall correctly, was something of a community organizer himself.

Speaking of Jesus, how about that guest speaker at Sarah Palin's Assembly of God church last month who blames terrorist attacks in Israel on the Jewish victims' failure to convert to Christianity?

That's part of God's judgment, said the preacher. Another of God's judgments was awarding a $30 billion gas pipeline to a Calgary, Alberta company, according to Sarah Palin. Mysterious ways, etc.

Are these bizarre views off limits too? No more than is Obama's experience as a community organizer, I reckon. After all, Jeremiah Wright opened that door, did he not? And Michael Pfleger, another community organizer and Catholic priest who adopted three African American kids but who local gibbering primate and even more ridiculous Palin apologist Charlie Sykes famously called a "racist"?

And talk about elitism. What did warm-up act Rudolph Giuliani, an extremely wealthy man, do with his NYU law degree? Roll up his sleeves and head down to Bed-Stuy? No, he used it to, among other things, obtain a deferment from the Vietnam draft. Of course these days he's shouting up and down over John McCain's Vietnam service. He didn't have to be jealous; he needed that law degree, after all.

Never mind Mitt Romney, another of last night's featured Obama-bashers, whose personal net worth is approaching 10% of the entire Alaska State budget. They don't come any more elite.

Speaking of Alaska, don't they have community organizers up there? Maybe they aren't needed, because guess which State of the Union receives more per capita federal transfer payments than any other? You guessed right. Damn that pork, and damn those earmarks, eh?

Residents of Illinois, on the other hand, get about 45% of the federally transferred dollars their Alaskan counterparts do. And things are just a bit rougher on Chicago's South Side than they are in the village of Wasilla, AK. Albeit, fewer rampaging caribou, maybe.

And freshly minted GOP superstar Sarah Palin? As governor, she once did the official honor of auctioning off an airplane on eBay.* So take heart, America. While only some doctors believe a president John McCain's mortal coil might well stubbornly resist shuffling off for another four years, this week's featured seller, sarah_barracuda44, has 94.3% positive feedback.

Among hardcore Christian conservative Republicans, that is. Last night's televised festival of self-congratulation and typical Republican political mockery and divisiveness will convince few others, if any.

* Er, not quite.

Maverick power elites on parade

What a spectacle, Washington power elites praising other Washington power elites for the benefit of the hardscrabble Grand Old Party grassroots True Believers, who seemed to be eating it up, despite the weird dissonance.

'We're going to rearrange the Washington power elites,' cried the mavericky Washington power elites, one after another.

"Country First!" the Party Faithful exulted at the Party Convention, while outside, police arrested the journalist Amy Goodman on suspicion of exercising her First Amendment rights.

A seemingly befuddled George W. Bush, appearing live via hologram, was generously allotted a few brief moments to offer his obligatory support for the Republican candidate, John McCain.

Any more than those few minutes and it would have dawned on the Party revelers that not only has the War President's approval rating been hovering around 25% for ages, but that more than one-quarter of Americans polled consider him the worst U.S. president in history.

In their defense, they haven't seen Sarah Palin yet.

President Bush, who is also the Leader of the Republican Party, had barely gasped his final empty platitude when the control booth erased his familiar deer-in-the-headlights visage from the giant screen. Whew! Glad we got that over with.

And while Bush may be radioactive in the Plutonium-239 sense, an atomic half-life of 24,000 years is but a geological instant compared with Dick "Rubidium" Cheney, who will remain safely encased in his concrete bunker throughout the GOP convention.

Next up was Fred Thompson, the elite but sleepy Hollywood star who mounted his own reluctantly half-assed presidential bid for a week or two, and who the GOP has recently dragged from the mothballs to make the circuit. Unfortunately the Party organizers didn't see fit to provide Sleepy Fred with a noise gate for his microphone.

Thompson's folksy harangue was devoted to describing John McCain's harrowing experiences as a Vietnam prisoner of war in considerable detail, right down to the size of the boils underneath McCain's armpits (9 to 9.25 inches in circumference).

But in spite of this eidetic narrative, Sleepy Fred concluded, having been a POW does not a president make, although it may excuse you from not knowing how many houses and condominiums you own.

This was interesting, because when Wesley Clark, a 4-star general and decorated Vietnam veteran in his own right made precisely that identical observation, he was widely and loudly shouted down by the very same Party Faithful.

So evidently if you're an elite Hollywood star like Fred Thompson or Sean Penn, you can get away with it and indeed, be awarded with raucous applause (and some annoying goof in the front row yelling "Yeah!" throughout — why couldn't they have arrested him?).

But it turns out the Party Faithful's latest "Country First!" hero is none other than Country Joe Lieberman, an elite United States Senator of ancient and deeply entrenched standing from Stamford, Connecticut, which ranks Country First! in the nation among States by highest per capita personal income.

Joe Lieberman, it may be recalled, is a registered Democrat who, along with the widely despised Albert Gore, Jr., popularly defeated the Cheney/Bush ticket just eight years ago before the U.S. Supreme Court, in an admirable exercise of "judicial restraint," elitely stepped in to order Florida elections canvassers to stop counting votes just in case they found any more marked for Lieberman.

Lieberman — who Republicans used to call "Loserman" and "LIE-berman" — justifed the latter epithet when he related a tall tale from his Senate days "when Barack Obama was voting to cut off funding for our troops on the ground," a deliberate falsehood.

As its 29th most senior member, Lieberman knows better than most how the Senate works, and how bills circulate with various related and unrelated attachments. Most of all, he knows Obama never voted to "cut off funding for our troops on the ground," and he understands full well that the one vote in question had to do with the attachment of timetables that Congress was wrangling over in the spring of '07.

Even more bizarre was Lieberman's effusive praise for Sarah Palin, a former village mayor from Alaska currently the subject of a legislative investigation into an alleged abuse of the awesome power of that State's governorship. Lieberman had reportedly just met Palin for the first time only hours before. He's a quick study, I guess.

Either that or he doesn't read the news.

And as if Republicans are the only Americans who put "Country First." Isn't it odd that the GOP invited a registered Democrat, one from among they who impliedly put their country last, to prove the GOP's own key convention slogan wrong, and even present Joe Lieberman the opportunity to argue why it's wrong. Given more time to do so, in fact, than they provided the Leader of their own Party.

They can have him, and he can happily allow himself to be strummed like a violin. He's convinced himself to vote for McCain and his sidekick village mayor, that's clear. Whether he convinced anyone else is highly questionable. Although there's little doubt he's convinced many of his shameless political opportunism. And naturally the True Believers didn't need any convincing in the first place.

Earlier, local laughing stock Michele Bachmann offered further evidence that conservatives are generally immune to irony.

If I recall correctly, the cable news networks devoted very little time to actually broadcasting the speeches from last week's Democratic convention, concentrating only on the final speakers of each evening.

But last night, the same networks showed uninterrupted footage of at least the last four or five Washington power elites, including the sentimental videotaped homage to Saint Ronald Reagan.

That would be your liberal media in action.

Tonight's feature: A noun, a verb, and Rudy 91u1an1.

Former Wasilla, AK mayor speaks

So it can get a little more entertaining:

[John] 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.

Mayor Palin: A Rough Record.

McCain mini-meltdown

Wolf Blitzer is reporting that John McCain is some upset with CNN because one of his media flacks, Tucker Bounds, almost had to — horror of horrors! — respond on point to a fair question during a rare instance of a journalist actually doing her job for a change.

Watch.

The good stuff starts around 3:20. Poor babies! Even though Tucker Bounds gets to blather on tediously for seven minutes, gratis. Cue the world's tiniest string orchestra for the floundering McCain.

Canadian pipeline is "God's will"

Seriously. (By the way, it's a natural gas pipeline, Mr. Daily Dish.) But I agree the $500m advance is at least a slice of manna from Heaven.

No wonder all my erstwhile colleagues in the construction game are rejoicing. And no wonder Barack Obama is polling at more than 50% for the first time since this campaign began:

Rasmussen
Gallup

Get odds on whether Gov. Sarah Palin will withdraw. While you're at it, God likes the Giants on Thursday night, minus three-and-a-half.

Esenberg gets some competition

The Marquette Law School Faculty Blog

Michael O'Hear is one of the smartest people in the universe.

The week ahead in conservatism

How much more entertaining can the John McCain campaign get this week? Recent revelations will be hard to top.

Senator McCain, who once upon a time famously denounced Religious Right leaders as "agents of intolerance," has apparently acceded to their desires by setting aside his favored running mates for an unknown quantity whose main selling point seems to be her "social conservatism."

Unknown, as in unknown even to John McCain.

While Sarah Palin's private family life is her business, her public policy pronouncements are decidedly not, and it's more than a little ironic that an abstinence-only educator currently has an unwed teenage kid with a bun in the oven, while adding unintended new meaning to her own self-description as a "hockey mom."

She's certainly in no position to dictate her ineffective public sex-ed curricula to anybody else's children.

Then of course there is the McCain campaign's trumpeting of talking points that simply aren't true. She opposed a bridge construction when she supported it. She fought Senator Ted Stevens when she helped raise money and campaign for him. She eschewed federal earmarks while she lobbied Congress for them.

She rallied against corruption while she and her "first dude" fired administration officials to appease their feuding in-laws. She's a foreign policy expert by dint of the Aleutian Islands.

Now she's touted as ready from day one to take over the office of Abraham Lincoln while she's been playing at being Jefferson Davis.

Chuck Kopp, who Sarah Palin appointed as Alaska's top police officer after firing his predecessor and who she also had to get rid of two weeks later when she found out that Kopp had been reprimanded for sexual harassment, probably summed up the conservative devotion to Palin best when he testified, "While I have been portrayed in a negative light, my personal worth is found in the person of Jesus Christ, and not on the one who accepts or rejects me."

Quite so. Welcome to the faith-based public official.