Serial Drillers

In their weekly radio riposte to Fredo's mindless jabber (full address here), the Democrats launch their usual tepid counter-proposals to the Id Party's longstanding mission statement:

Democrats sought on Saturday to drum up support for compromise legislation on offshore drilling, challenging Republicans to break from Bush administration policies that neglect development of alternative energy sources.

....

Salazar is part of the bipartisan group supporting a proposal that calls for both limited offshore drilling and taxing the oil industry, while funneling more money into renewable energy. Republican leaders have not embraced the compromise.

And they won't until there's some money in it for them and their fossil-fuel-industry owners. But some fundamental requirements are glaringly absent from Salazar's proposal. What about re-instituting fuel economy standards? How about a gas-guzzler tax? Conservation incentives, not just punitive measures? Research on mixed-use planning to prevent future sprawl, and maybe do something about the current exurban hells dotting the land?

Hell, you do all those things, a modest amount of offshore or ANWR drilling would be a more practical compromise. Needless to say, the Republicans are not looking for compromise; they expect capitulation, and their vivid descriptions of pointy-headed pencil-pushers tellin' good folks how to manage their obese modes of transportation and personal expression is sufficient to rouse the rabble.

Renewable energy and wind turbines and all that are nice, but to paraphrase Jenna Jameson, we're not going to blow our way out of this crisis anymore than we can drill out of it. Anyone can understand why the Democrats don't feel politically confident enough to make that the centerpiece of an energy strategy, even though it needs to be. But as with so many other things, they don't even try, they don't even bring it up.

Palin Truth Watch

I imagine you're as sick of reading and hearing about this dingbat as I am of writing and talking about her, but seriously, I cannot think of even one (1) thing she or McCain has said that has turned out to be even partially true. They're even overcounting their "crowds", and falsely attributing it to unwitting fire marshals.

Is that really even her family, or are they on loan from central casting? Was she ever really the governor of Alaska, or the mayor of Buttfuck, Alaska? Seriously, people, I'm starting to wonder if Sarah Palin has actually ever been to Alaska, or if it was just another refueling stop en route to the desolate Aleutian atoll that passes for her fevered, résumé-padding imagination.

My friends, that sum total of pure lies and the utter absence of a single true or substantive thing, that is desperation you can believe in. It's time to stick a fork in these lying assholes, and pimp-slap the next newbie cultist that proclaims, "I really like her!", because they think they're voting for a wacky new neighbor. Well, common sense, which is what these simps think they rely on, usually dictates that people who constantly lie and exaggerate about themselves are catastrophic when it comes to putting them in charge of anything important. Like, you know, your lives, your health care, job prospects, local/regional/national economy, social/foreign/energy policy, that sort of thing.

So shout it from the rooftops already -- she and Ol' Granddad are pathological liars. Call it what it is.

New Booty Alert

Meet Hugh Hefner's new girlfriend (more here) (both links NSFW). Personally I don't believe it. For one, she doesn't look like Hef's usual inflate-a-date type. I mean, I see Holly Madison and I practically want to check her ass for a valve stem. But Dasha Astafieva's tits appear to be real, which would be a departure for Hef. (I have nothing against fake tits; if I can see them, they're real. Still, natural is preferred. Tara Reid's boobjob (also NSFW), for example, looks like a blind man slung pepperoni at a couple of water balloons.)

Secondly, I don't believe that Astafieva is actually a Ukrainian Playmate, because she's not the size and shape of a woodstove and pulling a plow. (I keed, I keed; I've always found Eastern European women pretty hot, exotic, though I don't really have a "type". A hot chick is a hot chick, whether she's from Osaka, Mumbai, Kiev, or Laguna Beach.)

Anyway, nicely done once again, Hef. Damn you.

Special Needs Children

The reason Jonah Goldberg is deadly serious about pushing the lamest imaginable theories forward as irrefutable fact is a pretty simple one: he's a fucking moron. He probably has to wear a helmet when he blogs. Motherfucker has to wear either slip-on or velcro-strap shoes because he's too fucking dumb to tie them. And he counts on his audience to believe every stupid thing he says. More often than not, he's right about his audience. Clearly they'll believe anything.

If he was good at counting cards or memorizing addresses it'd be one thing, but he genuinely seems to have no marketable skill besides pulling things straight out of his ass. Get this, Pantload -- everyone knows that McCain is unable to raise his arms above his head to pitch a baseball with sufficient velocity to pitch a baseball. That is an entirely different kinesiological matter than being unable to type, even if you are some sort of moron who mounts the fucking keyboard at shoulder height. You who else can't type? Friend and enabler of Saddam and Osama (according to the people who bought Saxby Chambliss his Senate seat) Max Cleland.

Perhaps more than for any other specific reason, I despise this crowd's instinctive willingness to cynically use war injuries when it suits their purposes, while they belittle and calumniate wounded veterans when they turn out to be inconvenient to their political agenda. Eight years ago they started a whisper campaign that Johnny Mac's time in Charlie's tiger cage left him with snakes in his head, but this year's model is being bronzed alive by them. That's because they've never really fought for anything, and thus have no clue one way or the other. Nor do they care; it's just another cynical attempt to see if Rove and his fellow turd-burglars can regain their mojo and finish their grand project of ruining this country.

Sorry Charlie

Credit where credit is due: count me in as admitting that I misunderestimated Charlie Gibson, or at least he well exceeded my lowered expectations. He did pretty well and, contra my predictions, wasn't a shameless suck-up. He could have been more aggressive -- they can always be more aggressive, and without coming off like pushy assholes. But he got his main points across, avoided being unnecessarily deferential, and helped show Palin as she really is -- clueless, way out of her depth, dangerously ignorant and at least as unprepared for her job interview as Fredo was for his. How'd that one work out, newbie Palin cultists? Shit, Gibson came off as more qualified for the job. None of these humps had heard of Palin less than three weeks ago, and in another two weeks or so, they'll be sick of her and forget her, like whoever won the last American Idol.

Palin Comparison

On the anniversary of the day where, if everything didn't exactly change quite as much as advertised, at the very least our approach to foreign policy was completely upturned, it seems appropriate to peek in on our would-be future assistant decider:

GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?

PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?

GIBSON: The Bush -- well, what do you -- what do you interpret it to be?

PALIN: His world view.

GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.

PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that's the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.

GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

PALIN: I agree that a president's job, when they swear in their oath to uphold our Constitution, their top priority is to defend the United States of America.

I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.

GIBSON: Do we have a right to anticipatory self-defense? Do we have a right to make a preemptive strike again another country if we feel that country might strike us?

PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.

GIBSON: Do we have the right to be making cross-border attacks into Pakistan from Afghanistan, with or without the approval of the Pakistani government?

PALIN: Now, as for our right to invade, we're going to work with these countries, building new relationships, working with existing allies, but forging new, also, in order to, Charlie, get to a point in this world where war is not going to be a first option. In fact, war has got to be, a military strike, a last option.

GIBSON: But, Governor, I'm asking you: We have the right, in your mind, to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government.

PALIN: In order to stop Islamic extremists, those terrorists who would seek to destroy America and our allies, we must do whatever it takes and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.

GIBSON: And let me finish with this. I got lost in a blizzard of words there. Is that a yes? That you think we have the right to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government, to go after terrorists who are in the Waziristan area?

PALIN: I believe that America has to exercise all options in order to stop the terrorists who are hell bent on destroying America and our allies. We have got to have all options out there on the table.

It would be easier, I suppose, to just have her say "yes" and be done with it, pin that on her outright. But there's no confusion regardless; I don't see how she could be any more clear in enunciating her endorsement of the neocon precepts. Oddly, I keep hearing the voice of Marge Gunderson as I read Palin's responses. It's not nearly as much fun as it sounds.

Later, Palin also makes a point of ruffling Russia's feathers, but not before contradicting herself on a pretty fundamental point.

GIBSON: Have you ever met a foreign head of state?

PALIN: There in the state of Alaska, our international trade activities bring in many leaders of other countries.

GIBSON: And all governors deal with trade delegations.

PALIN: Right.

GIBSON: Who act at the behest of their governments.

PALIN: Right, right.

GIBSON: I'm talking about somebody who's a head of state, who can negotiate for that country. Ever met one?

PALIN: I have not and I think if you go back in history and if you ask that question of many vice presidents, they may have the same answer that I just gave you. But, Charlie, again, we've got to remember what the desire is in this nation at this time. It is for no more politics as usual and somebody's big, fat resume maybe that shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment, where, yes, they've had opportunities to meet heads of state ... these last couple of weeks ... it has been overwhelming to me that confirmation of the message that Americans are getting sick and tired of that self-dealing and kind of that closed door, good old boy network that has been the Washington elite.

Sooo....many foreign leaders come to Alaska for trade talks, but she has yet to meet with any of them, and it doesn't count anyway because the American people are sick of people who have that sort of [contemptuous sneer] experience and expertise. Also, that must be your friend in the, ah, wood chipper.

GIBSON: Would you favor putting Georgia and Ukraine in NATO?

PALIN: Ukraine, definitely, yes. Yes, and Georgia.

GIBSON: Because Putin has said he would not tolerate NATO incursion into the Caucasus.

PALIN: Well, you know, the Rose Revolution, the Orange Revolution, those actions have showed us that those democratic nations, I believe, deserve to be in NATO.

Putin thinks otherwise. Obviously, he thinks otherwise, but...

GIBSON: And under the NATO treaty, wouldn't we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?

PALIN: Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help.

But NATO, I think, should include Ukraine, definitely, at this point and I think that we need to -- especially with new leadership coming in on January 20, being sworn on, on either ticket, we have got to make sure that we strengthen our allies, our ties with each one of those NATO members.

We have got to make sure that that is the group that can be counted upon to defend one another in a very dangerous world today.

GIBSON: And you think it would be worth it to the United States, Georgia is worth it to the United States to go to war if Russia were to invade.

PALIN: What I think is that smaller democratic countries that are invaded by a larger power is something for us to be vigilant against. We have got to be cognizant of what the consequences are if a larger power is able to take over smaller democratic countries.

And we have got to be vigilant. We have got to show the support, in this case, for Georgia. The support that we can show is economic sanctions perhaps against Russia, if this is what it leads to.

It doesn't have to lead to war and it doesn't have to lead, as I said, to a Cold War, but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, again, counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia and Putin and some of his desire to control and to control much more than smaller democratic countries.

His mission, if it is to control energy supplies, also, coming from and through Russia, that's a dangerous position for our world to be in, if we were to allow that to happen.

There are quite a few positions from which to assault this, even from someone like myself, with only a rudimentary knowledge of geopolitics in general and Russian politics in particular. But let's start with the basics -- Russia will not tolerate its closest (geographically, culturally, and politically) former satellites becoming NATO members, for essentially the same reason we wouldn't tolerate Soviet "advisors" in Cuba or Nicaragua. They're just not going to, especially if we don't bother to at least pretend to make it worth their while.

Add to that the fact that, as jingoistic and paranoid as we can be about world affairs (remember, Saddam was on the verge of sending Predator-type drones to nuke Baltimore or something, even while we use actual Predators to bomb villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan), the Russians have had the market cornered on political insularity and paranoia for nearly a thousand years, and not entirely without reason throughout that course of time.

Next, despite Palin's claim that Russia attacked Georgia completely unprovoked, that's just not true. Saakashvili -- under urging, it appears, from McCain's own foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann, coincidentally enough a lobbyist for Georgia -- was emboldened to launch artillery strikes on South Ossetian and Abkhazian towns because he was at least led to believe that we would have his back if Russia retaliated. So he did, they did, and we didn't. We couldn't, but Saakashvili was misled to think we could. Economic sanctions? Does McCain or Palin think that Germany and France are going to cast Security Council votes that would affect their energy supplies?

The fact is that Russia is not entirely unreasonable in seeing our actions under the auspices of NATO expansion as provocative and antagonistic. Missile base in Poland to protect from an impending onslaught of Iranian missiles? Should Russia or China then strike a deal with Canada to build a missile base in Saskatoon, on the off chance of a missile strike from Mexico? Would we tolerate that for a split-second?

The thing is, even though Obama and Biden nominally support all these prospective NATO moves, chances are they are also aware of the inherent bargaining power of such proposals. You advance an untenable proposition, and haggle down to something that lets both sides save diplomatic face. Not real complicated. Except you assume that McCain -- and by proxy, Palin -- genuinely accept, from an ideological certainty, the urgency for undertaking such provocative steps.

Finally, as part of puffing up her supposed foreign policy acumen, we keep hearing how close Russia is to Alaska. Well, then why has she never been, not even right across the strait to Vladivostok, which is a tourism-driven boomtown these days? She clearly knows nothing about Russia at all, yet presupposes that mere geographic proximity grants her some keen insight to dealing with them.

I realize all this means nothing to the tedious buffoons who had never heard of Palin two weeks ago, but are already enthused about hitching their lives and sacred honor to her stupid lipstick jokes. But it bears attention from the people who have at least the pretense of serious interest in actual national security. Rule Number One, as Iraq has most recently shown us: Don't start shit with people you don't know a goddamned thing about.

Pig in a Poke

What Obama really meant to say was that he'd never come across such a pair of whiny, butt-hurt, hypocritical bitches like this Retardlican ticket, and that their entire platform and campaign isn't worth anyone wiping their ass with. I mean, Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, can someone inform Saint Straight Talk and his crew of merry morons about Teh Google and Teh YouTube and such, that it takes about ten seconds to pull up him using the exact same pig line about Hillary Clinton?

And Obama needs to stop explaining shit like this to people. If you're explaining, you're losing the argument. Anyone asks about it, he should just give them a puzzled look and say, "Seriously?". In a more rational world, his proper rejoinder would end with "and the horse they rode in on", but anything communicating bemused contempt will suffice.

Actually, the last few days have been heartening to observe. This is the best they've got heading into the homestretch, this lame-brained American Idol shit, buncha bozos showing up to see her instead of him, even though she's explicitly not allowed to do anything but regurgitate her already shopworn one-liners from the convention? Weird "the scary negro wants to molest your kids at school" ads? Palin repeating her stock lies, which really weren't worth telling in the first place, well after they've been debunked six ways from Sunday. What are they even showing up for, really? "Do that 'hahckey mahm lipstick' joke again!", as if that wasn't old thirty years ago. It's a novelty. She might as well be biting the heads off live chickens for their amusement.

The bounce is already gone, and the bandwagon dupes won't be remember her six weeks from now, and they'll return to their original apathetic stance about him. Some of the slightly less dim planarians among them might figure out through osmosis that she's just a small-town huckster in way over her head, who doesn't really stand for or know much of anything pertinent to the job for which she's applying. Then maybe they'll at least stay the fuck home and let rational adults handle things. That, my friends, is change you can believe in.

Employee of the Month

Clearly I've been in the wrong line of work all these years.

Devaney pointed to one supervisor in the Royalty-In-Kind program — under which oil companies are allowed to pay royalties owed to the federal government in actual oil rather than cash — who "engaged in illegal drug use and had sexual relations with subordinates, and in consort with industry."

Devaney said that between 2002 and 2006, a third of the Royalty-In-Kind staff socialized with, and received a wide array of gifts and gratuities from companies with which the government was doing business.

"While the dollar amounts of gifts and gratuities was not enormous, these employees accepted gives and gratuities on at least 135 occasions from four major oil and gas companies with whom they were doing business — a textbook example of improperly receiving gifts from prohibited sources," Devaney said. "When confronted by our investigators, none of the employees involved displayed remorse."

Remorse for accepting free gifts, money, travel, pussy? Uh-huh. Having never been bribed by anyone with anything of value, I can only imagine what the psychology is there. But if you're a middle-management tool getting a free jaunt to the Houston Hyatt, drinks and meals comped, and not much else to do after the meet-and-greets besides schmooze and get lit -- I mean, you couldn't cultivate this environment any more thoroughly if you tried. Ultimately they figure that it's the way things get done, and if they don't take the perks, someone else will.

Plus, you know, if there are two more egregious examples of the Peter Principle in play than the organizational cultures of federal government and oil companies, I have yet to hear of them. The Mustang Ranch probably has tighter strictures than the little rub-and-tug shows resource extractors run on their government benefactors.

Road to Nowhere

My friends, that is a taxpayer boondoggle you can believe in:

During Palin’s recent convention speech she sharply criticized Senator Barack Obama for wanting to end Bush's tax cuts. She pointed to her sister and husband who are new small business owners in Alaska, “How are they going to be any better off if taxes go up?”

But in fact, the way the hockey rink was built was by raising taxes. Palin funded the project by pushing a special referendum that raised the sales tax by 25 percent. City hall records show the referendum was passed by twenty votes.

One Wasilla resident who voted for the complex is Mike Edwards. He says he spends about an hour a day at the facility watching his son play. He says he’s glad government stepped in to build the new ice because privately run rinks are much more expensive, costing teams as much as $300 an hour to practice compared to $185 at the public rink.

CBS News obtained 86 pages of city council documents that show Palin sought to justify the tax increase to fund the sports complex in part because the private sector had not stepped in to fill the gap. She noted the strong support in the community as a reason to move ahead.

But her most striking argument for raising taxes is one you might not expect from a fiscal conservative. She writes that the rink offers an opportunity for government to stop a social ill like drug abuse or juvenile delinquency before it starts.

So it's like midnight basketball, then. I suppose "community organizers" were involved at some level, not that these bozos would ever admit it.

Even better, media folk are already starting to debunk Klondike Barbie's autopilot "thanks, but no thanks" schtick.

Since McCain tapped her as his running mate on Aug. 29 (hard to believe that was less than two weeks ago) Palin at every opportunity -- using virtually the same phrasing -- has told crowds that as governor of Alaska, "I told Congress, 'Thank but no thanks for that bridge to nowhere.' "

She re-ran the line again today at a rally in Lebanon, Ohio. But she did so in the face of a release from the Obama forces noting that a plethora of reporting shows her stance on the project -- which would have connected the small city of Ketchikan to the even smaller island of Gravina -- isn't so black-and-white.

And now it's a $24 mil road leading to the bridge that was never built, because Palin didn't want to have to give back the money. That's reform we can all believe in, my friends.

Extra points for the scathing ridicule emanating from the Obama camp on this bullshit ("next thing you know, she'll claim she sold [the bridge] on E-Bay"). Seems like after a rather wild week or so, with some oddball weekend polling, the honeymoon is already winding down, pending Granny Glasses Gibson's suckupfest later in the week. She wound up the rubes, but even they have people who might need health care or benefit from stem-cell research, etc. When it sinks into their thick skulls that this crew's answer to all that is "fuck you", it might mean something. Might.

Also, for the Clump for Growth idiots and the retards in the LA Times comments in the linked article, with their "what about Obaaaaama and Biiiiden voting for the briiiidge toooooo!!1!1!" whine, get this, you mouthbreathing fuckheads -- neither Obama nor Biden has staked a mythical maverick claim using this contrived episode as evidence of their ideological independence. Palin, on the other hand, has touted it as a prime character reference at every stop, even though it is not at all true.

Not that any of these, you know, facts stop this broad from repeating it, since she's not allowed to say anything extemporaneous, and her audience doesn't care about facts anyway. They just want a chance to publicly beat off to an image of what they think they are, when not a one of them -- including Palin and McCain -- are remotely the rugged self-made individualists they posture as.

And if they are, then by all means put your money where your pieholes are and quit sucking our tax dollars already.

Moose Droppings

Frank Rich distills the potent argument against Palin pretty well:

We still don’t know a lot about Palin except that she’s better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughter’s right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is fiction.

She didn’t say “no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere” until after Congress had already abandoned it but given Alaska a blank check for $223 million in taxpayers’ money anyway. Far from rejecting federal pork, she hired lobbyists to secure her town a disproportionate share of earmarks ($1,000 per resident in 2002, 20 times the per capita average in other states). Though McCain claimed “she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities,” she has never issued a single command as head of the Alaska National Guard. As for her “executive experience” as mayor, she told her hometown paper in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, the year of her election: “It’s not rocket science. It’s $6 million and 53 employees.” Her much-advertised crusade against officials abusing their office is now compromised by a bipartisan ethics investigation into charges that she did the same.

How long before we learn she never shot a moose?

Alaska, despite the claims of many of its inhabitants to be a bastion of rugged individualism, seems to be more of a classic welfare state, enabled by dysfunctionally inbred state politics and a population happy to hold out its collective hand for its annual windfall check. Usually people are not nearly as mavericky as they think they are, and Alaskans in general, and Palin and McCain in particular, prove that rule. They're mavericks like I'm a power forward for the Lakers.

Dead Cat Bounce

Coupla weird polls, and people start panicking. The CBS poll from Friday that showed the candidates tied at 42 had a pretty small sample size, for starters. And even today's Gallup poll showing McCain ahead by three could easily prove to be a statistical outlier as well.

Obviously, in a rational country with a grasp of actual issues, the Democratic ticket, flawed as it is, should be running away with this. They have a golden opportunity to hang Republican failures around McCain's neck, but can't resist the stupid urge to preface their attacks with tedious, predictable caveats about what a great guy he is. Perhaps a diagram would be in order.

It's as if the poll panickers are worried that yet another dirty Republican victory would, at long last, irrefutably confirm their sneaking suspicions that in the aggregate, we are an impulsive, ignorant, easily misled gaggle of miscreants. Well, duh.

This is not a terribly rational country: there, I said it. Look, there's a teevee show premiering tonight called Hole in the Wall, where contestants valiantly try to keep from being swept into a pool by, um, a moving wall with a cutout. I imagine this is Fox' bold attempt to counter the inherently elitist trappings of Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?. It makes sense that a large number of people would be at least momentarily distracted by the shiny penny of Sarahcuda Palin. Such people regard politics as just another iteration of Survivor anyway; actual policies and positions have fuck-all to do with it.

And there have been all too many horserace stories profiling the face-in-the-crowd donut-head, wowed by the newbie's rapier wit and borscht-belt schtick, claiming to have been an Obamanaut but converted literally overnight to a McCainiac. Friends 'n' neighbors, this is what we small-town folk call a crock of shee-yit. Such a person is by definition lying, ignorant, or completely delusional. In any case, good riddance. I think this story provides a more considered profile of what the hotly contested Vaginal-American demographic actually think about McCain's transparently cynical stunt-casting.

Trish Heckman, a 49-year-old restaurant cook and disappointed Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter, watched last week as the country's newest political star made her explosive debut.

She followed the news when John McCain introduced Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, paid attention to the raging debate over her qualifications, even tuned in to watch her dramatic speech at the Republican convention.

But when it came down to an issue Heckman really cares about -- sending a daughter to college on $10.50 an hour -- her desire to see a woman reach the White House took a back seat to her depleted savings account.

"I wanted Hillary to win so bad, but I saw Sarah, and it just didn't work for me," said Heckman, taking a break in the empty courtyard of J. Paul's restaurant in a downtown struggling to revive. "I have no retirement. Obama understands it's the economy. He knows how we live."

That's it in a nutshell -- The Economy, Stupid. All the major polling sites have accounted for these polling anomalies, and even Real Clear Politics, whom no one is going to confuse as being in the tank for Obama, calls this one for him even on their no toss-up map, which has McCain taking Ohio and Virginia, when one or both are likely to squeak to Obama. Most of the current electoral models have Obama with over 300 electoral votes.

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has probably the most reasoned current analysis of what's going on. All conventions, no matter how dismal or meaningless, get some sort of bounce in some poll or other. But it takes some time to see if the bounce is consistent across the spectrum, and the pick of an unknown running mate has thrown the signal-noise ratio out of whack, which is exactly what it was supposed to do. And the media pounce on these things because they have a vested corporate interest in keeping things close. You've been watching this reality show for two years now, folks, gotta stay tuned in for the big season finale.

But they can't hide her in the tundra forever, and while she can warm up her interview chops on the usual chumps and hacks, at some point someone will ask a question she won't like and can't deflect. Palin's record clearly indicates someone who doesn't handle dissent or disagreement well, whose self-styled reformist credentials are bogus, and whose actual executive expertise is grotesquely padded.

The media weasels, because they instinctively went after the soap-opera angle of her family rather than matters of policy, are temporarily thrown off. But a lot changes in two months, especially in the accelerated pressure cooker of the campaign homestretch. The main danger is excessively lowering expectations, thus enabling her to exceed them easily, which is what happened with Fredo. It will be enough to catch her in her lies and misrepresentations, emphasize the increasing unemployment rate, and ask people if they can get over themselves just long enough to not vote against their own self-interest for once in their misbegotten lives.

And if not, if their shameless lies and comical gestures work yet again on the goobers, and you get another round of the same boss? Hell, I dunno. Disengage. Opt out. Get yours and move on. Heighten those contradictions. I still think the system has failed and we are essentially where the British were a hundred years ago, by and large, but at least the Democrats are somewhat more likely to cushion the blow a tad for the peons. If the system hasn't quite yet failed, it most certainly will with clowns like McCain and Palin in charge. And a catastrophically diseased, debauched system will and should ultimately fail on its own terms, so instead of trying to further stand tall against the tide of stupidity in such an aftermath, look around for a board and ride the wave.

All Foxed Up

If you don't have the facts, make shit up. Sounds about right.

Elephant Gun

"My friends, that is a vacation cabin you can believe in!"

[Photo via Talking Points Memo]

Parting thoughts from the Inbred Asshole Club RNC:

• If the DNC is generally oleaginous piffle couched in encounter-group boilerplate, this is the vicious flipside -- unmitigated gall and inchoate fury; smug, defensive rhetorical gambits (i.e., lying) to impress these drooling chowder-heads with at least the illusion of plausible deniability. With this crowd, there's no doubt it worked. Two out of every three people in any given crowd pan looked like they'd have difficulty putting their fingers together in the dark. When Bob Eubanks asks the magical question, "Where's the most unusual place you've ever made whoopee?", these are the people who say, "Um, in the butt?".



• Party animals: Considering these people have chosen an elephant to represent the fundamental characteristics of their virtues and values, it's a bit ironic that they appear to be so forgetful about which party got us into this mess. Ah yes, the dhimmicrats, who have controlled Congress for about 22 whole months, and stood up to Bush approximately never.



• Has anyone ever had a week quite like Sarah Palin's? Sure, the base is energized for now, but it's still not enough. Her speech had 37 million viewers, nearly as many as Obama's 40 million, but what chunk of Palin's viewers were just tuning in to see how badly Straight Talk had stepped in it by picking her? And she raised $7 mil today for the GOP -- and $8 mil for Obama. Right now she's just an unknown milf with some Bushies writing some smartass barbs for her at an event she practically trained for, as a sportscaster/beauty pageant contestant. The novelty will wear off fast, and then she'll just be a hotter Marge Gunderson.



• Plus her "reform" talking points are already being debunked, pretty much every third word out of her piehole is an exaggeration or flat-out untrue, and some folks from that quaint hometown are already fleshing out the Norman Rockwell narrative she's trying to write for herself. Keep shitting on community organizers, sweetheart. That'll really pay off for ya.



• Meanwhile, back at the ranch: Noted diplomat and fellow hunting enthusiast Big Time is spending his last-minute vacay from the 'tard party to do what he does best -- stirring up shit. Consider it an extra present in the punch bowl for the next administration to deal with.



• Party animals, part duh: The other elephant trope is the one in the room -- or rather, the one not in the room. I suppose the Goopers had to ignore Nixon at the '76 convention, though I was too young to know one way or the other. But a sitting two-term head of the party, still inexplicably popular with the dead-enders in this crowd, gets a six-minute wank on an off-night, and that's it. No Cheney, no further mention of Bush by any of the speakers, no burbling by Count Chocula, in between his imprecations at Obama, of his apocryphal claim to have thanked god on 9/11 that Bush was in office. Let's face it, the Democrats could not have done as forceful a job of sheer repudiation as Bush's own party just did.



• I guess I had assumed at some point that maybe conservatards meant that shit about small-town values, at least to the extent that they might have some familiarity with what small-town governance is actually like. Apparently they don't or they'd realize that almost all a small-town mayor does is break ties in city council votes and cut ribbons for the local Chamber of Commerce. It's generally a ceremonial position. This is not exactly a secret; anyone who actually lives in a small town knows this. These morons would put Mayor McCheese on the ticket if you told them he was a moose-hunting, book-banning creationist.



The mayor must overcome a reputation for womanizing before he can be considered a viable contender in the upcoming Oklahoma gubernatorial race, a well-known stepping stone to national prominence.


• Meanwhile, back at the ranch again: The search for the elusive October Surprise is resurgent. Imagine, this administration taking advantage of Pakistani instability to launch Special Forces incursions into border villages. It can't possibly blow up in anyone's face.



• For people who have a hotline to What America Wants, they sure do seem hard-headed and thin-skinned. Wonder why that could be.

Already people are waging snark over whether Palin will allow Straight Talk to stay on the ticket, so underwhelming was his speech, to an underpopulated hockey arena, probably one-fifth the crowd Obama got in Denver. Surely Obama and his party do not deserve unthinking adulation, except compared to these knuckleheads. These people and their party just spent a week lamely attempting to spackle over their manifest failures with a lot of wild gestures and mumbo-jumbo. But Bush will become more conspicuous by his absence, the debates should be blowouts, and even the kool-aid chuggers in the Tearoom watching Rudy G and Cowboy Troy and all will realize that a three-peat would pretty much doom what's left of our standing in the world. And even these bozos know who's footing the bills these days.

Tales From the Crypt

Last week, it seemed like mining the RNC for ridiculousness and snark would be like shooting fish in a barrel, or finding stray clumps of popcorn chicken in Jonah Goldberg's footie jammies. But since it was a house-payment week, and I couldn't swing the Costco bottle of Jameson's, I just couldn't stomach the prospect of actually sitting through that mess sober. Life, as they say, really is too short.

But I did manage to sit through enough potent bite-size chunks so far to get the gist of it. A few observations:

• The more gallons in your hat, and the more buttons and/or bumper stickers it is festooned with, the more patriotic you are.



• I sure hope the Minnesota Wild has better luck filling this thing than the Republicans are having. You could put the living half of Milli Vanilli on stage with a karaoke machine and get this many people.



• Is there anybody at this fucking thing under 60 years old? Aren't they missing an oatmeal-and-Matlock marathon somewhere?



• I keep hearing that Republican chicks are hot. I've seen a lot of crowd shots the last few nights -- more than I care to think about. I have yet to see a single one I would fuck with Ann Coulter's cock.



• So being pregnant every few years and moose-hunting are now sterling quals for higher national office. Perhaps Sarah Palin can impress the neighbors by field-dressing Fred Thompson on stage.



• Seriously, this is the oldest fucking audience I have ever seen for anything. Is there an early-bird special and a live taping of Murder, She Wrote or something?



• Joe Lieberman is so far up John McCain's ass, it is technically a violation of the Geneva Convention. Which this crowd has never heard of, even though most of their Social Security numbers are in double digits.



• Loved Fredo's aphasic reference to his "resolute desk". That's where he keeps his "action pen" for signin' "freedom documints". There's also the collection of post-its he keeps in his "idea drawer". When the finally build that factory in Crawford, the one that makes cheese-filled hot dogs, they'll know who to thank.



• Just when I thought Ol' Fred and Holy Joe were runnin' neck-wattle-to-neck-wattle for the coveted Asshole of the Week award (which for this crowd is a pretty fuckin' deep bench to choose from), along comes Rudy. Breslin's line on Giuliani cannot be quoted too often: a small man in search of a balcony. The guy's such a flaming asshole, he's not Tony Soprano, he's Phil Leotardo. Five pounds of cousin-fucking shit in a ten-pound bag.



• Finally it's Marian the Librarian's turn. The thing about following Rudy G, even when he runs over into your segment, is that you could read aloud from Mein Kampf and still come off as more rational and contemplative. The expectations have been so severely lowered already for Palin, all she has to do is not sound like a complete moron. Or Joe Lieberman.



• The only thing remotely resembling a coherent policy statement is some vague thoughts here and there about "energy independence" and investment in "alternative energy", which for this crowd means nuclear plants and "clean coal". Does anyone really believe for a moment that any of them would be willing to live either next to a nuke plant or a mountain that is being blasted and melted?



• This may be the only major event in recorded history where they have to take a milk-of-magnesia break every 45 minutes. I would not be surprised to hear that this greasy monkeyfuck was sponsored by Metamucil and the estate of Lawrence Welk.



• There are several levels of grating intellectual offense. Obviously the professional grifters and propagandists scuttling to the microphone are the first level. Then you have the commentators, each trying to be the one that susses correctly the zeitgeist of a brainless, deadened husk of a failed ideology. So far, Campbell Brown of all people has grilled some fat trout, though Nooners' hot-mike slip-up tells you all you need to know about what the GOP insiders really think about their own circle-jerk.
  
  But the final, most irritating level is that of the drones on the floor, the delegates, the nameless morons from hither and yon (mostly, it would appear, yon) who, when asked what they think and why they think it, burble the most incoherent streams of nonsense imaginable. Why do they like Sarah Palin? Because she validates their own personal reproductive choices; because she seems like she'd be a good neighbor; because they feel like they can hang out at her house on weekdays and watch All My Children and get sloshed on gin fizzes.
  
  Who the fuck can tell? None of them make a goddamned lick of sense. You want to slap these fucktards and tell them that there are better ways to find friends than, you know, voting. It's like they're all in third grade -- which, hell, maybe they are. Bored with their own lives, they have aught to look forward to but sticking their wrinkled beaks into everyone else's, while keeping them off their lawn, I guess.
  
  I mean, I get the first two sets of insufferable assholes -- they're getting paid. Ol' Fred and Rudy G make bank to catapult the propaganda. Ditto Olbermann and Tweety for their orotund furbelows. But to get all these suckers to drive and fly hundreds of miles and not only listen to this bullshit, but repeat it? My friends, that is some stupidity you can believe in.

Switch to Decaf

Yet another example of what incredibly silly people they are:

I don't think it [sic] an exaggeration to say that this girl (and her boyfriend) have caused a crisis of global significance, and if her parents are serious about "the responsibilities of adulthood," Bristol ought to face the consequences, including about 45 minutes in front of the klieg lights while reporters shout stupid questions.

Right, that's not an exaggeration at all, dude. Jesus. Look, teenage girls in podunk towns get knocked up all the time. There's not much else to do. It even happens to the children of politicians, seeing as how they are just as vulnerable to the effects of hormones and such.

I think the situation is mildly humorous, in the sense that McCain's campaign has turned into one of those "if it warn't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all" narratives. Other than that, I couldn't care less. It's not a profound statement on Roe v. Wade either way, nor is it the "crisis of global significance" that pathological meatballs like Stacy McCain (no relation, one hopes, to Straight Talk) are howling about. Get a fuckin' grip, bro-ham.

Bristol Palin, like any other child of a politician, is probably proud of what her mother is doing, but she didn't sign on to have her life serve as a palimpsest for emotionally unstable cybergoons to trace their projected anxieties upon. Her situation might somewhat defuse the silly clamoring over how being a mother of five automatically translates into the kind of leadership skills required to manage a complicated, interdependent global empire. And it emphasizes yet again how little vetting was done by Straight Talk's team, and how impulsive he himself is when it comes to important decisions, which reveal more and more about his decision-making process, such as it is. And you would think it would make the abstinence-only obsessives (such as, um, Sarah Palin) rethink their ridiculous assumptions, but of course you'd be wrong on that one.

But that's about it. I'd bet that if most of us just stood back from this one, we'd see how quickly some of these goofballs descend on the poor girl, as if her personal choice was any of their goddamned business. By their fruits shall you know them, as they say.

[link via Atrios]

Corporate America

I rarely talk about what I do for a living, because frankly it's not all that interesting. The most interesting thing about it, I suppose, is that I am able to support my family on a single income, which is increasingly rare these days. This is not because I make a lot of money, mind you; I make shit, to be honest. But we're good at managing what we have, and living within our means. I don't have a cell phone, and I finally just got a vehicle from this century only because my 17-year-old Accord was about to blow after 225K miles. The only indulgences are DirecTV and Netflix.

I work, as I have through most of my adult life when I wasn't playing music, in manufacturing. I like the idea of making something tangible that has intrinsic value. These days it's a desk job in logistics, with a huge component of interdepartmental communications, including between departments that hadn't traditionally gotten along. I'm fortunate in that I like what I do, I'm pretty good at it, and I like the people I work with. I've found that for many people, none of those things happen very often.

When I first started with my current company a few years ago, the facility was basically a medium-sized fish in a small pond. Things were busy, which is always better than the alternative. About a year ago, all the facilities from our company were snapped up by a much bigger corporation. They immediately sent envoys from corporate headquarters to talk up their great health plans, tuition reimbursement opportunities, internal talent development, blah blah blah. Nothing like a good handjob on company time. And counterintuitively, despite oil and commodity prices ramping up drastically, we became busier and busier. Job security.

A couple of smaller places were closed during the spring and summer, and their workloads moved to our facility, but they had been glorified FDCs (forward distribution centers) anyway. If you can schedule things properly, lower and more efficient shipping costs can easily offset commercial rental space in metropolitan areas. And much of the additional work we took on fell directly in my lap. Hence the 50-hour weeks as of late. Again, not a problem. The extra cash offset the gas price increases in my 80-minute round-trip commute, and I appreciated that they felt that I could handle the extra work.

So it was a rude awakening last week for us to be collectively called up and told that the plant is closing. This is what happens when competitors buy each other, folks, and it ain't pretty. The severance package is a joke, and the only silver lining is that the closing will take some time. Many places do not have that luxury, obviously, so it can't really be taken for granted. But the whole thing is being framed as a necessary business decision driven by tough economic times, never mind that the ginormous corporation has sufficient resources to ride the storm out.

But it ain't the first time, and it won't be the last, and many people have faced far worse circumstances. Most of us land on our feet, eventually. But a couple things about this stick in my craw.

One is the basic idea worth considering, on this holiday which celebrates the working stiff, that perhaps people work better, harder, and smarter when they don't feel like they constantly have to look over their shoulders. Should people have to worry that, even as they're being glad-handed with all sorts of temporary blandishments, they are mere months from being sold down the river so that someone's stock rises half a point?

I think not; I think a large measure of Americans' chronic unhappiness can be found in that, besides being fat and teevee-addled, they know they have no real job security. They're afraid to take vacations, because they're petrified that the company might figure out they can get along just fine without them. They're stressed because frequently they're clinging to a job they despise, with people they detest, simply because the market sucks and they know they're lucky just to have a shitty PPO plan. I was lucky; as I said, I liked the work and the people, and the health plan was pretty good. Many people have to take what they can get.

But the thing that really pissed me off was when it was time to go in to discuss severance policies and what-not. The woman who had been sent over from corporate was polite and professional enough, and launched immediately into the hortatory nonsense of this being the beginning of an "adventure". Look, lady, I'm 41 and I have a family to support; I got that adventure shit out of my system over a decade ago.

Plus I work 50 hours a week, commute another ten, and had been planning on going for an MBA. That seems like quite enough "adventure". It connotes a feeling that we had become sedentary and complacent in our sinecured positions, obviously an inherently offensive insinuation. By taking on extra work, trying to be a team player, I had simply been cutting my own throat all summer. She didn't have an answer for that. They never do.

But they have to do what they're told, and when their turn comes, and a stranger gets dispatched from afar to cut them off at the neck, I'm sure they'll understand. We've all become used to the dynamic, which may be the worst part about it.

Social Distortion

As expected, Sarah Palin's nomination has excited only the already excitable. Already the usual suspects at the Corner of K-Lo Street and Pantload Boulevard are out on the sidewalk, sharpening their virtual crayons and juggling rhetorical lemons. We took a peek at the sideshow back on Saturday. Let's start with the inimitable comic stylings of one Mark Levin:

Over at his blog, David Frum asks: "If it were your decision, and you were putting your country first, would you put an untested small-town mayor a heartbeat away from the presidency?" Of course, the question is loaded.

This small town stuff is odd to me. If a candidate is mayor of a large town, does that make her more qualified for the vice presidency or presidency? Don't we need to know more? Is Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick more qualified than any small town mayor? Is any major city mayor more qualified than any small town mayor? I suppose the question can also be asked: Is a big state governor more qualified than a small state governor, based on the size and diversity of the state alone? Or don't we need to know more? So, Frum's line about a small town mayor is by itself useless in analyzing a candidate's qualifications.

Of course, that's not what Frum was asking, not at all. Frum correctly pointed out that McCain has made "Country First" a centerpiece of his campaign, that every decision he is making and plans to make will have the country's best interests at heart. This does not remotely jibe with the selection of someone who can only charitably be described as a political neophyte.

I don't think anyone's going to let Kwame Kilpatrick near much of anything anymore, but that's also beside the point. Only a complete dipshit would think that there's no substantial difference between being (even a corrupt and incompetent) mayor of a chronically troubled major city that, despite serious population declines, is still 50% larger than Palin's entire state, and being mayor of a very small town whose mayoralty is more ceremonial than operational anyway.

So, and I'm about the last person to defend David Frum, but Levin's rebuttal completely (and deliberately) obfuscates Frum's point, rendering it meaningless with a barrage of non-sequiturs and irrelevant rejoinders. If we are facing existential doom from the Islamojihadifascistas, and if experience and judgement are paramount, then McCain has very seriously contradicted himself with his choice. Means nothing to the rest of us, since we've come to expect it, but it should mean something to them.

Hey, hey, hey! Pantload's got somethin' to say.

I've been thinking about it and I think the bottom line on Palin is pretty simple. If she does a good job at the convention and survives about three weeks of serious media scrutiny — no horrible gaffes, no unforgivable I-don't-knows to gotchya questions (fair and unfair), no botched hostile interviews — she will emerge as the single most inspired VP pick in modern memory and she will give the Democrats migraines for a long time to come, assuming there are no terrible skeletons we don't know about. But, if she screws up in the next three weeks, gives the press and the late night comedians sufficient fodder to Quayelize [sic] her, she'll be seen as anything from a liability to an outright horrible pick. That's it.

Soooo....because we already have such low expectations (which was surely part of the strategy), she can appear merely adequate and exceed those expectations. Why not? It worked for Bush, and look how well that turned out. Thanks for the penetrating insight, Lunchbox. Didn't see that one coming up the road.

Of course, like potato chips, and most other trans-fat snacks, he can't stop at just one:

But I would rather have John McCain in office for two years with Palin going to school on the job than have Barack Obama in there from day one (particularly with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid running the Congress!). I think Obama is wrong on a whole lot of things, might not be up to the job and would give a blank check to Congress. And he's the guy running for president. Palin might not be up to the job, we'll have to see, but we're not voting for her to be president (a distinction countless liberal bloggers seem intent on deliberately blurring). Obama is wrong from day 1. Palin possible right from day 1, but almost surely right on day 1,082 if, God forbid, that day comes.

His faith is impenetrable here. Notice how smoothly he moves from conceding that Palin might not be ready, but would "almost surely" be ready three years in. Note also that the questioner was asking about a scenario where McCain passes a couple months in, not two, then three years, as in Pantload's hypotheticals.

No matter. Palin's competence would not be the issue anyway. McCain, as with Bush, would "almost surely" turn his policy-making over to whatever vulcans are still skulking through the halls of the Pentagon. Cheney would be sure to leave his rolodex and cell number. The transition from McCain to Palin would be smooth as silk, because neither of them would really be in charge, except for catering to the intellectual boobism that passes for "social conservatism" in this country.

This is the problem with leaving serious choices up to self-righteous fambly-valyews toads; they bray endlessly about how serious they are, then betray their sensibilities on sight of the first shiny object dangled in front of them. Hell, even Sully the Pooh gets it, but these people are mule-stubborn and brick-thick.

And now I'm off to lunch with Kathryn.

Too easy.

Mark Steyn, who actually could write fairly coherently pre-9/11, cobbles together some talking points almost ritualistically.

Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are more or less the same age, but Governor Palin has run a state and a town and a commercial fishing operation, whereas (to reprise a famous line on the Rev Jackson) Senator Obama ain't run nothin' but his mouth.

Well, and been president of the Harvard Law Review, and taught constitutional law. Not as romantic as living out Northern Exposure, I suppose, but it's something very few people can do.

Fifth, she complicates all the laziest Democrat pieties. Energy? Unlike Biden and Obama, she's been to ANWR and, like most Alaskans, supports drilling there.

Everyone in Alaska supports drilling there; the fact that Palin's husband works for BP is just gravy. Alaska is the biggest welfare state in the union. If they didn't get their piece of the oil action there they'd be stealing moose steaks out of each other's chest freezers during yet another interminable, besotted winter.

Sixth (see Kathleen's link to Craig Ferguson below), I kinda like the whole naughty librarian vibe.

I like milfs as much as the next guy, and I certainly don't mind having that hot-librarian itch scratched. It would just have never occurred to me, even as a goof, to vote one into the most powerful job on the planet. Then again, I never thought enough people could be stupid enough to vote for a person such as George W. Bush. In many ways, I still can't quite believe it. It's like going to your 25-year high-school reunion, and finding out that the kid who used to eat his own boogers in class and molest farm animals on the weekends is a high-powered CEO. Oh, he still eats boogers and fucks livestock, it's just that someone actually thought he was responsible enough to manage something more complicated than getting his socks on in the morning.

Finally, Special Ed lumbers onto Hot Air to offer a point-by-point refutation of the arguments against Palin's nomination. The points themselves are easy enough to counter-refute, and not really worth the effort.

But the comments, as these things usually are, are priceless. Too many to choose from, really.

[Update: Turns out that Palin's 17-year-old daughter is five months pregnant. Is it a setback or a boon for those coveted valyews? Oh, the hilarity! Will they have to set up a day-care center in the Oval Office?]

Russian Roulette

Couple more items of interest in analyzing the Russia-Georgia conflict, and our unwitting role in the whole thing -- including, of course, the blustery, mavericky incompetence of Poor Ol' Straight Talk. First this piece from the NY Review of Books, laying out the case for how we ineptly encouraged Saakashvili to lay his dick on the table, thinking we had his back. Sorry Misha, but maybe understanding what exactly it means when Bush is two or three times as popular in your country as he is here would be a clue in how that was going to go.

Then there's CNN's interview with The Man himself, Ol' Pooty-Poot. Putin is at once authoritative and discursive, even (for him) almost playing around, as the reporter goes to wind it up and Putin responds, "We could go on. I am in no hurry." This, as we've forgotten, is how people who are in charge of large countries are supposed to sound: clear, coherent, able to speak extemporaneously and at length about actual ideas, rather than endlessly babbled, fractured boilerplate and circular "in other words" handjobs.

While he's at it, Putin explains what he thinks of Faux Noise:

Let's recall, for example, the interview with that 12-year-old girl and her aunt, who, as I understand, live in the United States and who witnessed the events in South Ossetia. The interviewer at one of the leading channels, Fox News, was interrupting her all the time. All the time, he interrupted her. As soon as he didn't like what she was saying, he started to interrupt her, he coughed, wheezed and screeched. All that remained for him to do was to soil his pants, in such a graphic way as to stop them. That's the only thing he didn't do, but, figuratively speaking, he was in that kind of state. Well, is that an honest and objective way to give information? Is that the way to inform the people of your own country? No, that is disinformation.

Funny that a guy with his own, erm, tempestuous relationship with journamalists would have the nerve to point the finger, but point taken. Even he gets that Fox is a bad joke.

I don't think anyone's under the illusion that Putin's a "good" guy per se, but you have to have at least a grudging respect for him. Here's a guy who was handed an enormous basket case of a country that neither the West nor Yeltsin gave a shit about. Yeltsin was a thief and a drunk and a cheap thug, who let the country and its army fall apart in chaos and poverty, while he and his family enriched themselves.

And Putin turned that around, with his own thuggish nastiness, murdering journalists and imprisoning political opponents. But he cleaned up the nightmarishly undisciplined army and now even once-secretive outposts such as Vladivostok are thriving. No doubt he has wet his beak, but he seems content to enrich his cronies and consolidate power instead. He has been extremely effective in prioritizing Russian interests on the world stage, which -- get this -- is what he's supposed to do. I think many of us seriously think that guys like Putin are supposed to check with us first before making a move. Does your neighbor ask your permission before fucking his wife?

Of course, the reason Russia is now thriving is because of oil prices, which is our doing. Straight Talk McCain rhetorically asks what Saddam Hussein would have done with $110-120 oil. A look as Putin's record might give him a hint, albeit a more rational, less Stalinist one. But none of this happened in a vacuum, and our Serious Leaders keep pretending we had no role in any of it. Forget McCain not being fit to be president, the man's not fit to be a senator at this point, if he can't figure this one out.

Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

Media Matters catches yet another conservahack smugly inventing shit:

In an August 30 post on the National Review Online's Media Blog, Greg Pollowitz falsely claimed that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin visited troops in Kuwait "a year before Senator [Barack] Obama felt the need to go." Noting a July 24, 2007, Alaska Public Radio Network report that "Palin today visited with a National Guard unit from Alaska serving in Kuwait," Pollowitz wrote: "Unlike Senator Obama's staged trip to the Middle East, Governor Palin went to visit the troops in Kuwait before she was ever under consideration for Veep. ... And a year before Senator Obama felt the need to go," a reference to Obama's July 2008 visit. In fact, Obama also visited troops in Kuwait in January 2006. Indeed, the Coalition Forces Land Component Command's website posted a photo of Obama "listen[ing] to a soldier voice his concerns Jan. 7 during a dinner at Camp Arifjan's Zone 6 dining facility" and a photo of Obama "driv[ing] toward the basket during a game with soldiers Jan. 7 at Camp Airifjan's Zone 1 gym."

To his small credit, Pollowitz actually posted a correction to his idiotic assertion, even attributing his newfound wisdom to Media Matters. But the thing is that he clearly never bothered to check. How hard can it be to use Teh Google and punch in "obama visit iraq" or whatever? He didn't even try; he just assumed he had a cheap rhetorical opening. Or maybe he did know better and just figured he'd get away with it, as they so frequently do.

And if it hadn't been for Media Matters catching it and publicizing Pollowitz' grievous error, not only would it have sat there, the 'tards at The Corner (more on them later) would have repeated it incessantly as "fact". Because in their world, "facts" are simply things that you can gull people into believing. Like the old law aphorism: if the law is on your side, pound the law; if the facts are on your side, pound the facts; if neither the law nor the facts are on your side, pound the table.

Or in the case of these knuckleheads, the high chair.

This Just In

I still can't stand Geraldine Ferraro, and I doubt that will ever change.

In an interview with NPR yesterday, Geraldine Ferraro praised Sarah Palin's selection as John McCain's running mate, and defended Palin against the accusation that she's not qualified to hold high office. When asked who she was voting for, Ferraro played coy: "When I go into the booth I will make my decision."

I've already made my decision -- you're a preening, disloyal asshole who needs to grow the hell up and realize that there are more important criteria than plumbing. For example, on what basis is Ferraro even considered a worthy or insightful person to interview? What she did 25 years ago -- which, when you get right down to it, was to function as the anti-Viagra to an already hopelessly flaccid ticket -- is irrelevant today, in and of itself. What has she done since? What does she do now other than petulantly undermine her own party and give credence to old "circular firing squad" memes?

The only reason I registered as a Democrat this year is because in California, you cannot vote by mail as a "decline to state" or "independent". Other than that, I have very little patience with a party that seems to take pride in proving Will Rogers right about its lack of discipline and organization. They need to stop letting the Zell Millers and Joe Liebermans fester under the awning of the party; fucking put them out in the cold already.

There's having a big tent, and there's letting the crazy shopping-bag lady in the corner prattle on and waste people's time. Ferraro needs to either get down to Florida or Pennsylvania or something and help out where she can with whatever cred she still thinks she clings to, or just sit down and shut the hell up until it's over.

Unconventional

Sounds like the party's getting rained out, one by one:

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney will skip the Republican National Convention because of mounting concerns about Hurricane Gustav, the White House said Sunday.

His Homeland Security chief warned that Gustav could prove more challenging than Katrina and the nation's disaster response coordinator worried about New Orlean's fragile levees.

First lady Laura Bush still was scheduled to address delegates in St. Paul, Minn., on Monday, the opening day.

Really, they might as well just go to their convention; they have about as much to do with halting or alleviating the storm as Laura does. By the time this is over, it'll just be Fred and Rudy strutting around the stage, drunk on their false bravado, desperately trying to convince an emptying hockey arena that McCain and this chick he met back in February and didn't bother to vet thoroughly are the best option in a world full of serious threats. Or something.

I'm almost starting to feel sorry for them, if only just enough to hope that their demise is slightly more swift and merciful than previously envisioned.

(Won't) Get Fooled Again

Cool prefatory anecdote leading into one of the most concisely insightful comments I've seen in a while. Great stuff.

Of course it'll go right past Dreher and his fellow travelers, those things always do. They try to put a bland, benign, less malevolent face on the philosophical trappings, but then go and vote for the exact same people. That they think they mean well is irrelevant. They just can't bring themselves to quit being suckers.

Roger Codger

Lotta folks have already pointed out how ol' McCrankypants gets these days when the milk of magnesia runs out, or he makes a boom-boom and Cindy's not around with a fresh set. But the line that got my attention was this:

I can only imagine what Saddam Hussein would be doing with the wealth he would acquire with oil at $110 and $120 a barrel.

The thing is, I honestly don't know if that's just the usual red meat for the rubes, or if he actually thinks that oil would have skyrocketed as it has without parking a quarter-million troops in the Straits of Hormuz, unleashing sectarian hell in the only secular country in the region, and trying to goad Iran into a pretext for another misbegotten war.

I'm pretty sure that most every first-year macro student understands the concept of "risk premium", which makes it all the more perplexing that either McCain doesn't, or that he's counting on no one else to know what it means. As usual, probably a bit of both. Even when he's not grumping through the rest of the interview excerpt, he's so predictably on-message you wonder what the point of the exercise was in the first place, other than journamalists getting to say they interviewed John McCain.

The interview responses and his recent attitude toward the media in general, like today's Palin pick, seem to be his way of tacitly conceding the whole thing. The cookie-cutter Mad-lib answers to essentially every question, regardless of topic, convey that if he even has advisers, either they're out of ideas as well or just suck to begin with.

Kinda like the Republican Party itself. If I were Schwarzenegger I'd come down with the flu or something, anything to get out of being caught giving a pep talk to the losers milling around the Larry Craig Memorial TearoomXcel Energy Center.

[Update: Heh-indeedy. Looks like Ahnult decided to take my advice, and has ceded his Monday night speaking role to -- wait for it -- Ol' Fred Thompson. Schwarzenegger says that his cancellation was forced on him because of the continuing deadlock in the California budget process, otherwise known as "August". What difference he's supposed to make by staying in Sacramento on, you know, Labor Day, he doesn't mention. Maybe he'll spend the entire day crank-calling Fabian Nuñez and Don Perata.

Or maybe, as I sagely prognosticated, he realizes that there's no political upside for him appearing in the same room with these chowder-heads. Hell, they probably even buy his dog-ate-my-homework excuse.]

Shedding Skin

Just a friendly reminder of what we are blessedly getting rid of.

In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored ''road map'' for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman -- the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress -- mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

''I don't know why you're talking about Sweden,'' Bush said. ''They're the neutral one. They don't have an army.''

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ''Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.'' Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.

Bush held to his view. ''No, no, it's Sweden that has no army.''

The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.

A few weeks later, members of Congress and their spouses gathered with administration officials and other dignitaries for the White House Christmas party. The president saw Lantos and grabbed him by the shoulder. ''You were right,'' he said, with bonhomie. ''Sweden does have an army.''

This story was told to me by one of the senators in the Oval Office that December day, Joe Biden. Lantos, a liberal Democrat, would not comment about it. In general, people who meet with Bush will not discuss their encounters. (Lantos, through a spokesman, says it is a longstanding policy of his not to discuss Oval Office meetings.)

I love the penultimate point in that excerpt, the room going silent until the subject was changed. Was it that disagreement with Le Dauphin is punishable by death (or worse yet, downward career mobility)? Or is it that they understood instinctively what sort of person they had to deal with, and that it's always a waste of time to try to argue with a bratty, insolent child?

Think about it -- Lantos was originally from Europe, and had dealt with world issues in Congress for many years at that point, where by that juncture in Bush's abysmal tenure, he hadn't been to much besides Mexico and China, and was only a few years removed from not knowing who ran that quaint little overcrowded nucular backwater known as Pakistan.

And instead of dialoguing with and listening to Lantos' suggestion, he tried to punk him in front of everyone else, 'cause everyone knows that Sweden don't have no army, dumbass. Just a big wall of meatballs and Volvos surrounding Göteborg. Fuck, this guy would lose on one of those "how long do you cook a three-minute egg?" questions they give you in the warm-up round of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Every person in government who has failed to correct or engage this mendacious, clueless slob has done a disservice to the country and the world, whether they realize it or not. By humoring and ignoring his profound ignorance of even simple trivial points, they enabled an attitude of petulance and entitlement which engendered far worse things, which will take a generation to undo. Thanks for that, guys. At least Biden had the balls to share that one with the rest of us. I'm sure it's not even the 100th-worst example of enabled boobery in the past eight years.

A Modest Proposal

What's it like to go through life without a soul? Ask Karl Rove:

“The Republicans can’t seem to get a break when it comes to August and when it comes to the weather,” said Rove, a FOX News analyst.

Indeed. Poor Republicans! Perhaps if they offer Rove up as a sacrifice to their infernal nether-lords, strap him to an oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico while Gustav passes through, the dæmonic bloodlust would be temporarily sated. It's worth a shot.

Milf the Vote

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Free Speech Zone

Lest we forget that all political investitures are inherently corporate undertakings, here's a reminder:

DENVER -- An ABC News producer was arrested outside a downtown hotel here Wednesday while he and a camera crew tried to shoot footage of corporate donors leaving a meeting with a group of Democratic senators.

Asa Eslocker, who works with the network's investigative unit, was charged with trespass, interference and failure to follow a lawful order. He was released four hours later on a $500 bond.

"We expect to see this kind of behavior in Myanmar, not in Denver, Colorado, at a national political convention where a reporter is trying to videotape big-money donors trying to meet with elected officials," said ABC spokesman Jeffrey Schneider.

Naw, in Myanmar, the journalist leaves the police station feet first, or at least without his toenails and several teeth. Some sense of proportion is useful. Still, point taken -- corporate goons employ rented thugs to protect themselves from the prying eyes of the peons whose votes they wish to entice. Anything wrong with that picture?

The footage was shown on ABC's "World News" tonight. Eslocker was working with chief investigative reporter Brian Ross, who does stories on conventions and donors every four years. Schneider said the arrest was initiated by an off-duty sheriff's officer working as a security guard for the Brown Palace.

[emphasis mine]
Of course it was. The corporate paramilitary of privatized security. Here they can't get away with shooting up an intersection or openly truncheoning unfortunate passersby, or disappearing snooping journamalists. Yet.

It should be unacceptable to all people, regardless of political persuasion, that people can be pushed around and arrested in public areas, just for wanting to know. Fuck you, moonlighting hotel cop, I have a right to know who's renting my political representatives. If we don't even have that fundamental right, we got nothing.

Things to Do in Denver When You're Braindead

So I think we got it now -- Hillary has trumped expectations by being a team player after all, yet for the countless nattering nabobs of nincompoopery malingering at all points in and out of the arena, you wouldn't know it. She didn't praise Obama "enough", she outshone him with her orange pantsuit, blah blah blah. Jeebus knows that I had Clinton fatigue back in 1997, and I'm glad I don't have to worry about holding my nose and voting to reinstate another dynasty, but these people have a pathological need to archly ascribe ulterior motives that they seem to have pulled directly out of their asses.

It's all about the professional prattlers, as it always is, and how well they can preen their pet theories for the cameras. Failing that, one of these genius sets had a "body language expert" opine as to how much Hill was faking it. Christ, why not just break out a phrenologist while we're at it? They can't just let us watch the fucking thing (if we happen to be that bored) and decide for ourselves, you know, they have to turn to some sinecured knucklehead like Bobo Brooks and get his take.

Okay, anyone out there who really gives a fuck what Bobo Brooks thinks about anything, raise your hand and then jump off the nearest bridge.

Then there's MoDo, who rarely misses an opportunity to compete with Peggy Noonan in the "Most Likely to Project Her Not-So-Latent Daddy Issues" sweepstakes. Get a whiff of this trenchant analysis:

But this Democratic convention has a vibe so weird and jittery, so at odds with the early thrilling, fairy dust feel of the Obama revolution, that I had to consult Mike Murphy, the peppery Republican strategist and former McCain guru.

“What is that feeling in the air?” I asked him.

“Submerged hate,” he promptly replied.

There were a lot of bitter Clinton associates, fund-raisers and supporters wandering the halls, spewing vindictiveness, complaining of slights, scheming about Hillary’s roll call and plotting trouble, with some in the Clinton coterie dissing Obama by planning early departures, before the nominee even speaks.

So let's see if we have this straight -- you need an objective perspective on some funny vibe you're getting at the DNC, and you consult McCain's former strategist for insight. One assumes that her first impulse was to dig up Richard Nixon and hold a séance, but that would entailed setting down her Sea Breeze.

The next bullet point of the MoDo playbook is to either emasculate a male politician as a fey metrosexual just looking for a pole to smoke, or a catty suggestion of ballbusting passive-aggression on the part of an overly ambitious female pol. Talk about projection.

At a press conference with New York reporters on Monday, Hillary looked as if she were straining at the bit to announce her 2012 exploratory committee.

“Remember, 18 million people voted for me, 18 million people, give or take, voted for Barack,” she said, while making a faux pro-Obama point. She keeps acting as if her delegates are out of her control, when she’s been privately egging on people to keep her dream alive as long as possible, no matter what the cost to Obama.

Hillary also said she was happy about the choice of Joe Biden because he added “intensity” to the ticket. Ouch.

Many people have made the exact same observation about Biden's role on the ticket, without the automatic assumption of sour grapes. But this is part and parcel of the entire punditocracy's role at the convention -- to stir up shit, even if it's not there, even if the PUMAs turn out to be oppo stealth ops. Nope, Miz Thang has to go out and find the anecdotal voice of overripe, self-satisfied dissent to bolster her flimsy argument. Catch the barmy wisdom of the convention concern troll:

At a meeting of the Democratic women’s caucus Tuesday, 74-year-old Carol Anderson of Vancouver, Wash., a former Hillary volunteer, stood in the back of the room in a Hillary T-shirt and hat signed by Hillary and “Nobama” button and booed every time any of the women speakers mentioned Obama’s name.

She’s voting for McCain and had nothing nice to say about the Obamas. What about the kids, I asked. “Adorable,” she agreed. Well, I said, Michelle raised them.

“I think her mother does,” Anderson shot back, adding: “I wonder if Michelle would give the Queen one of her little knuckle punches?”

Yeah. See if that shit would play at any of the Republitard events, granny. They'll toss your ass out just for wearing the wrong t-shirt. Who cares what that anonymous, doddering cow thinks? The idea that some lone crank intrinsically possesses a genuine insight worth uncritically repeating is roughly equivalent to asking random panhandlers their opinion about that whole Russia-Georgia thing.

And no, moron, I don't think "Michelle would give the Queen one of her little knuckle punches". I'm not sure why anyone would consider any of the Times' columnist real estate worth pinching a loaf on. Seeing that one of their esteemed columnists considers it worth her time to stenograph the addled ramblings of some weird biddy having an extended Maalox moment gives a pretty clear idea that real-world property isn't all that's had a bursting of the ol' value bubble. This is the sort of inane jabber that's permeated practically all of the coverage I've been able to stomach.

On the other hand, KTVU polijourno Mark Curtis has a substantially different take on the goings-on there. Perhaps someone should tell him he'll get more face time with the A-team if he amps up the 1% loons and stirs some shit. Forget the issues, and the voters, and the corporate tools bankrolling this dog-and-pony show, this weeklong pageant celebrating the achievement of gutless incrementalism. It's all about you, baby, and the trouble you can invent.