Blue Hearts

Blue Hearts 2-1-09

2009-02-01T17:24:00.036-06:00

Hey All,

Better late than never. I have some great shots of the Inauguration that I want to share with you. I've posted them on my Facebook page but I know many of you don't subscribe. (I just started last month!!)

My sister, April's, now famous Obama cookies - They're shortbread

Upon arrival, my sister picked me up and we returned to her place where she finished her work in progress. She gifted all the dinner attendees at our Monday and Tuesday night dinners. Yum.

Me with my Donkey friend in the lobby of the Ritz before our dinner at West End Bistro.

Having a drink before dinner from lower left: sister April, cousin Celine, cousin (Celine's brother) Alexander, Aunty Anna, me, Anna's daughter, Karen.

On the metro on the way to the inaugural ceremony. My sister April, friend Nicole and friend Tom. It's not even crowded yet. It was so tight and people kept trying to get on the trains. We were definitely familiar with the sardine experience.

The throngs leaving the Capital South Metro station.

While weaving through the line for the Orange section. It was like walking a labyrinth only in a figure 8. You couldn't find the end of the line if your life depended on it. You can see the security gate behind us.

Once we got into our Orange Section 12 (about 4 hours since we left the house that a.m.) who else was in our section but Bruce and Patty!!! This was my souvenir for Bill!!

A shot from my seat.

Our new president giving his wonderful speech. Oh happy day!

The crowd behind us without flags...

The crowd with flags. Keep in mind, this was with a telephoto lens at the end of it's capability.

Being among millions of people who were all so excited to be in this one place, anticipating such great things from this impressive man, was a truly amazing experience I'll never forget. Listening to the speech and hearing the speakers as they went back and back and back, we were about two sentences ahead of what the back of the crowd was hearing. Listening to the music of the quartet, albeit prerecorded, brought tears to my eyes.

As we were leaving, who was about five people in front of us but Oprah Winfrey. There was a fuzzy microphone over her as she was being interviewed while walking. She had been recording her show from DC, apparently. But I don't think they were with the show.

We slowly milled out of the seating area and headed toward the Library of Congress to attend my Aunt's party in the James Madison room. We felt so fortunate to have a place to go nearby where there would be bathrooms and food!!! If we didn't have that, it would have been possibly hours before we would have had access to either. Certainly the metro stations would all be packed.

Yum!

With James Madison, a lovely jazz ensemble. So civilized!

And we topped off the perfect day with a lovely family dinner at 1789 in Georgetown. What a perfect choice. It's an elegant, intimate dining experience. As it was built in 1789 all the rooms are very cozy. I was so happy to have ended the night like this.

The District celebrates our new president!:

The Newseum

The Willard Hotel

Now, just in case my pictures don't do it for you, here are some more to enjoy:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/01/the_inauguration_of_president.html

For your enjoyment:

Moneygall is a small village in County Offaly, Ireland. It has
a population of approximately 300 people, has a Roman Catholic church, five
shops, a post office, a national school, a police station and two pubs.

President-elect of the United States Barack Obama's
great-great-great grandfather, Falmouth Kearney, emigrated from Moneygall
to New York City at the age of 19 in 1850 and eventually resettled in
Tipton County, Indiana. Kearney's father had been the village shoemaker,
then a wealthy skilled trade.

And now for the SONG...Crank up your speakers.

http://www.oneeyedparrot.org/obama.html

And here's an article for your reading pleasure. Can you believe this is coming from Ed Rollins?

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/01/20/rollins.inauguration/index.html

Another reason to have hope.

http://www.salon.com/env/feature/2009/01/26/obama_cabinet/?source=newsletter

And finally and totally unrelated, if you are interested in receiving a free bone scan and body fat assessment, check this study out. I did it and it was easy. I've included Karren's description. She sent it to me.

Thanks for listening!!!!!!
Kristin

I recently was referred to an osteoporosis study that is being done by UMKC. It took me about an hour for the entire appointment. It involved a blood draw, wt., ht., waist and hip measurements and a total body scan for bone density and body fat (ugh). You have to go to Truman for the appt., and I was very impressed with the facility. The great thing about it is that you get a bone density and % of body fat report that would normally cost about $300. The results are printed out for you to take. The study will go on for approximately another year and is free to anyone of either sex age 18 or over. Plus, you get a free $25 gift card to AMC or Price Chopper. What a deal! The person to contact if interested is below.
Karren

Jillian Richwine
Director, Kansas City Osteoporosis Study (KCOS)
Human Genetics/Genomics Center
Departments of Orthopaedic Surgery and Basic Medical Sciences
University of Missouri – Kansas City School of Medicine
2411 Holmes, M3-C03
Kansas City, Missouri, 64108-2792
LABORATORY: 816-404-5414
FAX: 816-404-5415
MOBILE: 816-645-2048
E-MAIL: richwinej@umkc.edu

2009-01-19T14:49:00.002-06:00

Hi All,

And welcome to DC!! Well, actually Arlington, VA. I just arrived yesterday and I'm staying with my sister, April. Friend, Julanna, was on my plane and was met by daughter, Hayley, and husband, Adam. Seems like half of KC is here; Alison and Richard, Sonya, Jim and Gabe, Helen and Frank, John and Sharon. Do you think I'll run into them while out and about?

I'm a bit apprehensive about what to expect tomorrow. Will the taxi ever come? How many trains will it take before we get one with seats? How cold will it be? How long will we have to go without access to the facilities? How far will we have to walk to get to our destination? How long will the lines be? Can we bring our purses?

Fortunately April lives here and has several contingency plans. We'll see. And that's the attitude we'll need to have. Today we got some thermal underwear and wicking sock liners! Hope it helps. And after the inaugural ceremony we're going to Anna Eshoo's party where we have to look decent, so no ski attire, etc. Fortunately these are my big concerns. Lucky me.

Sorry to say my camera cable has the wrong-sized tip so I can't download photos while I'm here. I'll have to send them through Facebook if I can get my act together. If not, I can get it done upon my return.

Tonight we're headed into downtown to dine at The Ritz and people watch. Can't wait.

That's it for now.

xo,
Kristin

Blue Hearts 10-24-08

2008-10-24T18:20:00.005-05:00

Hey All,

Happy Birthday, Georgianne. No longer triplets for the next 10 months. : (
xo, Ke

Tomorrow I'm going to be overseeing a Canvass and hope you can help. (I just found out this afternoon that I'm doing it! Hence the late notice.)

We'll be meeting at 4235 Baltimore and you can come at 8:45 - 12:45, 11:45 -3:45, or 2:45-6:45. Please see the first item under LOCAL below. The details are from George Mayer (the guy who came to my house to train us on registering voters).

Please try to make it tomorrow. If you can't, come on Sunday. There will be one shift; come at 3 for the 3:30-6:30 shift. These are sort-of training sessions/dry runs for GOTV on Election Day.

And happy reading!
Kristin

HUMOR/LINKS

http://www.myamericanprayer.com/video.html

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DIc8jdra0o

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This group, Rednecks for Obama, was started by the grandfather of a good friend of a Blue Hearts member! Here's the website. K

http://www.rednecks4obama.com/
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What can I say? The Daily Show could be in every one of my blogs. This is particularly good! How many times am I reassured that I'm not living in an alternate reality when I watch John Stewart?! K

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=188638&title=understanding-real-america-in
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From the New Yorker. Sedaris is always funny. K

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2008/10/27/081027sh_shouts_sedaris?currentPage=all
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Love this! K

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/cc65ed650d
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Very funny. K

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/10/taking-back-t-4.html
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So You Think You Can Be Vice-President?
via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan by Andrew Sullivan on 10/24/08
The Palin story has now nuked the shark:

Who was the highest paid individual in Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign during the first half of October as it headed down the homestretch?

Not Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser; not Nicolle Wallace, his senior communications staff member. It was Amy Strozzi, who was identified by the Washington Post this week as Gov. Sarah Palin’s traveling makeup artist, according to a new filing with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday night.

Ms. Strozzi, who was nominated for an Emmy award for her makeup work on the television show “So You Think You Can Dance?”, was paid $22,800 for the first two weeks of October alone, according to the records.

Okay: $11,400 a week to do her make-up? And they were complaining about the Newsweek cover? This is no hockey mom. She's America's Next Top Super Model!

GENERAL

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This is a letter from an uncle to his nephew on why the uncle is voting for Barack Obama this year. It's very well thought out and worth sharing, I thought. K

In response to your question, and out of a desire to clarify my own thinking, I have undertaken to succinctly (not necessarily briefly) explain the reasons I have come to conclude that Barack Obama is the better choice to be our next president.

Tone and Approach to Campaign: Throughout the Clinton and Bush (43) administrations, and the associated campaigns, I have come to believe the single most destructive force in Washington, D.C. is the partisan tone of all discussions. I was pleased to hear both Obama and McCain promise to rise above this, and to run campaigns that were based on serious discussions of our pressing public policy issues, and to reject the politics of personal attack, as exemplified by Karl Rove and James Carville. Obama has kept his pledge. McCain has not. If you choose to employ the politics of personal attack to win the office, you will inevitably continue the game while in office to win a second term. During these times of such serious challenges and issues, we simply must get past this. I give Obama huge points for keeping his word on this, and it enhances my assessment of his credibility and integrity. McCain's approach hurts his credibility with me, and reveals a weakness in character. His approach shows his desire to win trumps his willingness to keep his word and do what he knows is in the best interest of the country. You want to fully understand how far out of hand this campaign rhetoric is getting? Read this Frank Rich column from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12rich.html?em

Intelligence and Education: Obama was raised by a single mother and grandparents. His father was absent. Did not come from money. Did not come from power or privilege. He studied at Occidental College for two years, and then transferred to Columbia University. And, of course, we all know he went to Harvard Law School where he became the first African-American to be named Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Law Review. He is smart. He is well educated. He had the discipline and drive to raise himself from the bottom to the top through working hard to get a good education.

McCain's track record is very different. It parallels that of George Bush. They are both underperforming third-generation men from powerful families. They are both men of modest intellect, poorly educated. Yes, they were educated at Harvard and Yale (Bush) and the Naval academy (McCain), but barely. Bush was a C student--which is all but a failing grade at the private institutions he attended. And McCain was nearly last in his class. Modest intellect, poor students, poorly educated. They have track records of disdain for education. They are where they are because of their fathers and grandfathers. Obama is intelligent, well educated. He is where he is despite his absent father. In a complex world full of pressing and complex issues, we need well-educated, intelligent leaders. Obama stands head and shoulders above McCain by this measure.

World View and Foreign Policy: What we see in Bush is a world view that sees the world as black and white, or good v evil--where we are defined as good and anyone who opposes us is evil. And what we have learned from Bush is that this world view is no longer workable. Under this view, we rely too heavily on our military power to impose our will. This is a mistake because we cannot afford even the level of military expenditures we are now incurring, and frankly what we are spending is not enough to make the rest of the world submit to our will. This is generational, in my view. McCain's generation sees the world through the eyes of the Cold War. US v Russia. Good v evil. Black and white. The world is more complex today. Less black and white, and more gray. Just like Obama.

Bush, McCain the the Neo-conservatives believe we need a larger military to achieve our objectives. I believe we need a smaller and more intelligent foreign policy. We do need to continue to compete in this world, and we need to do it effectively. We need to rely less on military might, and the mindset that accompanies it, and more on superior ideas, values and vision. Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese general, said: "To win 100 victories in 100 battles is not the acme of skill; the acme of skill is to win the war without fighting." Bush cannot comprehend this. And I don't think McCain does either. McCain--get this--still believes to this day that we could have won the war in Vietnam, if only . . . [fill in the blank]. This is scary--a Commander in Chief who still does not comprehend the lessons of Vietnam. He comes from a military family and that was his history--all he knows is trying to win battles. I believe Obama offers more hope and a greater opportunity in this regard. To succeed on the world stage, we need to be perceived differently. The world will perceive McCain as another Bush. Obama changes everything on the world stage. Here, I see Obama's inexperience as a strength; he is not impaired with the baggage McCain carries from his experiences in a world that bears very little resemblance to the world in which we live today.

Financial Crisis--The Danger Now: The danger now, in the midst of this financial meltdown, is that we will look to the people who created this mess to fix it. Who created this mess? Both parties bear responsibility. The lending criteria directives to promote home ownership for minority and low income home owners that brought down Fannie Mae was created by the Clinton Administration. The former CEO of Fannie Mae is one of Obama's advisers, and that in my view is a mistake.

But I think we have a far bigger problem in that regard on the McCain side. When the history is written on this financial meltdown--which we now see this week is a global financial meltdown--we will see that perhaps nothing set the stage for this more than a piece of legislation called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. It was signed into law by Clinton, very late in his final term. Thus, you might conclude it was the Democrat's fault. The driver behind this legislation, however, and the "Enron loop-hole" in the legislation, was Senator Phil Graham. Graham is one of McCain's close friends and advisers, and McCain was a leading member of the Senate who passed this a similar legislation and refused to rescind it despite many efforts of some to do so over the years.

The Act exempted from regulation most over-the-counter energy trades and trading on electronic energy commodity markets. What was the effect? This allowed Enron to be Enron, manipulating power markets in California that a few years ago brought the first rolling power outages to California since World War II. It lead to the fall of Enron, who built their house of cards on the back of this unregulated market system. And it has been the #1 driver of moving the price of oil out of the realm of actual producers and users of oil and into the realm of traders and speculators. This is how you get the spike we got recently to $150/barrel.

The Act also set the stage for the fall of AIG, an international insurer crucial to the health and well-being of the US and international economy. How? The act specifically banned regulation of credit default swaps. These unregulated instruments, insurance policies against default on financial institutions like Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns and risky investments like mortgage backed securities, are what necessitated the government bailout of insurer A.I.G. The unregulated market in credit default swaps has grown to some $60 trillion, and it remains a ticking time bomb that may yet cause more calamitous events. This fact illustrates the nature of these credit default swap transactions: the legislation decreed that they were exempt from the anti-gaming laws of the states. I have nothing against gambling in Vegas, but I do not think it should be permitted by the likes of A.I.G. I had credit default swaps explained to me three weeks ago by two guys who have spent their careers on Wall Street. Stated simply, this legislation allowed hedge funds to buy insurance on the credit worthiness of a Lehman brothers, for 2% down and 98% on margin, and then short the stock to put the institution on the brink of collapse. A more simple explanation: I buy $1 million of insurance on your $250,000 house, which I do not own. I pay 2% down and borrow the rest of the premium. And the next day I set your house on fire. This issue may yet bring this country to its knees. This massive financial deregulation has been a hallmark of the Republicans since 2000, and McCain has been a staunch supporter. We need accountability--we need to hold responsible those who are responsible--and McCain and his close friend and advisor Phil Graham were ring-leaders. This was primarily a Republican creation, and this factor alone weighs heavily in favor of throwing the Republican's out of power.

Negatives in Life Narratives: We have seen that both candidates have some negatives in their life narratives. McCain's negatives are summarized in the Rolling Stone profile on McCain, which tells the story of McCain's record from the Naval Academy, his military record, his POW record, and his political career. Many negatives. Obama's negatives are summarized in the Krauthammer column, which discuss Obama's past associations with people of ill repute, such as the pastor, the college professor that was a 1960s Weatherman, and the financier Tony Rezko. All fair game. One observation I would make--McCain's negatives are about him personally. His conduct, his behavior. Obama's focuses on his association with other people, who we find of questionable character and conduct. Fundamental difference. Still cause for concern on both sides, but we have to decide how to weigh the concerns.

The Sarah Palin Factor: As most know, I have a serious concern about the increasing influence of fundamentalist Christian thinking in our democracy. The reason for my concern is that this thinking is so often divorced from objective reality. Faith can be a powerful force for good. It can also be a powerful force for evil. I always admired Jimmy Carter's faith. My impression is that it was a source of strength for him. And I think his religious faith set a paradigm through which he saw himself as a humble servant of the people. The fundamentalist preachers who have decided to "go political", and the army of Christian fundamentalists who seek to infiltrate our government are of a different breed. They bear far more resemblance to Islamic fundamentalist extremists than they do to Jimmy Carter. They seek to integrate their distorted views into the fabric of our laws and our government. Sarah Palin is one of these.

McCain is not one of these. He is not a religious man. He is posing as one today to pander to this wing of the Republican party, which is rapidly becoming the only thing there is to the Republican party. When he ran against Bush in 2000, he was smeared by these people in South Carolina, and he was quite outspoken in declaring that these people had no constructive role to play in government. Which is why his selection of Sarah Palin ranks, in my view, as the single most cynical political act I have ever witnessed. McCain would have us believe he is a man of integrity; that he will not sacrifice principle for personal gain. That he is about country first. No objective person who is minimally informed can conclude that Sarah Palin would be in the top 100 most qualified VP choices in the Republican party. It was a desperate move to resurrect his campaign, and it established beyond debate that there is little McCain would not sacrifice by way of principle to get himself elected.

Where I come down on Palin is that if you take away the Assembly of God background and beliefs, and turn her into a mainstream Christian whose faith is personal and not a central part of her agenda, her selection still ranks as one of the most troubling and embarrassing developments of our time. This is a serious moment in our history. Palin is not a serious candidate. McCain's choice turns the race into a reality show. We like watching utterly average people strive for the prize on TV. Sarah Palin is well informed on virtually no issues of the day. I would love to see a journalist ask her about credit default swaps and the legislation that created them. You might as well ask me a question about molecular biology in Chinese. I could not comprehend the question. Yet, she brings what George Bush has brought on virtually every issue with which he has dealt as president--certitude. She knows virtually nothing, but she is certain she is the answer. As with Bush, this is related to her fundamentalist religious views. Throughout the history of time, no group of people have had more certitude on the issues of the day than fundamentalist religious extremists. It is true for Christian extremists, and for Muslim extremists. They are people without doubt; they have certitude.

In the end, I am relieved that I have concluded Obama is the better choice. If I believed McCain was the better choice, I would have to try to figure out how a vote to put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency would be consistent with my duty as a citizen. I don't think I could ever find a way to rationalize such a vote. I am not saying that fair-minded people cannot find a way to do it; I am saying that I cannot.

So, I said I would be concise. I did not say it would be brief. We live in a complex world with complex issues, and they are not susceptible to sound bite analysis. This hits the major points.
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Very interesting. K

The punditocracy's Seven Biggest Blunders of the 2008 election

Guess what? The Conventional Wisdom has blown it again in handicapping Obama vs. McCain in the homestretch.
By Mike Madden and Walter Shapiro

Oct. 23, 2008 |

This has been a campaign season when the conventional wisdom has fared about as well as Bob Barr's prospects for moving into the Oval Office.

During the primaries, the political prediction business -- all those glib quasi-certainties spouted by TV talking heads and embedded in the opening paragraphs of newspaper and magazine articles -- gave us such fantasies as Rudy Giuliani masquerading as a serious presidential candidate and mistakenly consigned John McCain to the GOP dust heap. Remember when Hillary Clinton was prematurely anointed as the nominee or the dire warnings that a protracted Clinton-Obama primary fight would, in a typical burst of Democratic self-destructiveness, cost the party the White House?

Of course, that was all long ago and everyone involved in these bum calls has been sent to their rooms without supper. But what about the errors of the last two months -- the equally fallacious theories about the fall campaign that have been the stuff of Sunday morning round tables and newspaper Op-Ed pages? Granted, we at Salon have sometimes stumbled on the road to omniscience. But that shared sense of humility does not dampen our glee in pointing out the punditocracy's Seven Biggest Blunders, homestretch edition.

1) The Cult of Sarah Palin

McCain's choice of a running mate on the eve of the Republican National Convention set off a wave of emotions that quickly veered from "Sarah Who?" to "Sarah Wow!" Even amid the initial gooey-eyed gush, there were dangerous signs that the McCain team had done a sloppy job in researching her background. But the boffo convention speech, the giddy poll numbers and Palin's rock-star crowds gave rise to half-baked theories about the veep pick's ability to transform the presidential race and even snare a chunk of the feminist vote. After the disastrous Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric interviews, however, the Palin pick seemed less a moose-hunter's delight and more like stale (Dan) Quayle. A Pew Research Center national poll released this week found that 49 percent of voters now hold negative opinions about Palin, compared to 32 percent voting thumbs down in mid-September. The Pew survey discovered that a stunning 60 percent of all women under the age of 50 currently have negative feelings about Palin.

2) Steve Schmidt Is a Genius

When McCain took the lead after the GOP convention in many national polls, the immediate reaction was to lionize top strategist Steve Schmidt for imposing order and discipline on the unruly campaign. But, in truth, Schmidt's ascension probably only intensified a problem that has dogged McCain from the outset -- a focus on day-to-day tactics over long-term strategy and a coherent rationale for the campaign. McCain often dominated the daily news cycle, but failed to dominate the hearts and minds of voters. Many in the Obama campaign believe that the turning point in the race came when McCain dramatically suspended his campaign on the eve of the first debate in order to fly to Washington to join in the ineffectual dithering over the economic crisis. Schmidt's war-room mentality (he ran the rapid-response team for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004) may have been ill-suited for a political year when McCain needed a Big Idea to compete with Obama.

3) The Price at the Pump Will Fuel the Mood of the Voters

The headline on the Aug. 20 Quinnipiac University national poll is enough to prompt instant nostalgia: "Gas Prices Gaining As Americans' Biggest Worry." Brooding about a $100 fill-up seems so overwrought two months later with a financial system in tatters. Who would have ever guessed back then that oil prices would drop below $70 a barrel before Election Day. The moral, of course, is that voters choose a candidate based on what is bugging them in November, not August. The danger in political soothsaying is to blithely assume that external events will not reshape the political landscape before Election Day. Things always happen, though rarely as dramatically as September's Wall Street whirlpool.

4) Obama Should Have Taken the Money ... and Run

Obama could have received a check from the federal government for $84 million as soon as he officially accepted the nomination. That is what McCain did in accepting public financing -- a decision that ruled out directly raising private money for his own campaign. Obama, by contrast, gambled that he could do better on his own by becoming the first presidential candidate in modern history to spurn public financing for the fall campaign. But right after the conventions, the Obama campaign appeared to radiate a whiff of desperation on the fundraising front. Meanwhile, Republicans were gloating. Not for long, though. Obama, of course, raised a staggering $150 million in September (or about $208,000 every hour), and McCain is being badly outspent in almost every major media market. An important symbolic moment in the campaign came when word seeped out that Obama was buying ads in video games -- an epic illustration of too much money chasing too few undecided voters.

5) Obama Was Guilty of Hubris in Trying to Expand the Map

In late June in Washington, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe narrated a PowerPoint presentation for the press in which he boldly sketched out all the ruby red Republican states that the Obama campaign intended to contest. Plouffe faced a host of skeptical questions about Obama making heavy investments in Virginia and Indiana, states that the Democrats had not carried in 40 years. Over the summer, both Democrats and Republicans alike were puzzled that Obama continued to contest North Carolina, even though McCain had a hefty lead in the polls. Sure, there were a few wrong calls (Plouffe saw Alaska as "competitive" in the pre-Palin era). But Obama is now forcing McCain to devote the bulk of his dwindling resources to defending once-safe GOP states like Missouri, Indiana and North Carolina, while Virginia has moved into the leaning Obama category.

6) Down-ballot Democrats Will Flee From Obama

This was a constant trope during the primaries, and continued into the summer: Democrats, particularly in red states, would cut and run from the party's ticket faster than you could say "Barack Obama and his liberal allies." Oklahoma Rep. Dan Boren made headlines in June when he vowed not to endorse Obama; other House members from conservative districts were expected to do the same. One economic collapse later, and instead, it's Republicans -- in such Democratic strongholds as, ahem, Nebraska -- who are fleeing McCain. Incumbent GOP Rep. Lee Terry, whose Omaha district is being targeted by both presidential candidates as a possible source of one electoral vote, ran newspaper ads this month featuring a hypothetical "Obama-Terry voter." It turns out that to most Democrats, the pluses of an unprecedented turnout organization, wild enthusiasm among supporters and a gazillion dollars in campaign ads outweigh the minuses of a weird name and a liberal voting record.

7) The Hillary Holdouts Will Never Come Back

During July and August, just about the easiest way to get on television was to announce that you were an angry Hillary voter who would never, ever support Obama. Of course, political science studies dating back three decades show that party loyalty invariably trumps hurt feelings by the time November rolls around. Guess what? For all the PUMA (Party Unity My Ass) nonsense that filled the airwaves over the summer, the Pew Research Center poll this week shows that Obama is beating McCain by a 91-to-5-percent margin among self-identified Democrats. So while independent-minded blue-collar voters who may have opted for Clinton in the primary are still being wooed by the Obama campaign in states like Pennsylvania, virtually all the dyed-in-the-wool Democrats have (surprise!) returned to the fold.

But that's Conventional Wisdom for you. Often wrong, but never in doubt.

-- By Mike Madden and Walter Shapiro

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited.

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Makes one hopeful, I think. K

Another election nightmare in Florida?

The Obama campaign has inspired a wave of early voters -- but the waits have been long and some fear havoc on Election Day.
By Mike Madden

Editor's note: This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

Oct. 24, 2008 |

Sure, Ted Ravelo likes Barack Obama. But two hours is a long time to stand in line to vote, especially considering that it's still October. "This has to be remedied," Ravelo, 72, said Wednesday morning, shaking his head, as he gave up on voting early -- at least that day -- at the North Miami Public Library, where a couple of dozen voting machines and their operators were struggling in vain to keep pace with a flood of citizens. "Something has to be done." A line stretched two blocks from the building, as other voters doggedly stood -- or sat on the folding chairs many of them had brought along -- for up to two hours while waiting to cast their ballots.

It may have been a bit too much for Ravelo. He said he'd probably have to give it another shot on Election Day, and that his daughters -- who have to work on Nov. 4, and who sent him to scout out the wait time -- might not get to vote at all. But compared to Monday here, when early voting opened, two hours on Wednesday was a breeze; on the first day, officials and community activists said, the wait was three times that long.

A visit to Florida in the waning days of the 2008 presidential campaign threatens to evoke a certain sense of déjà vu for another late October eight years ago. Once again, polls show the state is deadlocked -- and once again, there's a very real possibility that a lot of people who support the Democratic candidate could have trouble voting.

This time, of course, it won't be butterfly ballots or Brooks Brothers riots that get in the way, and there's no chance Pat Buchanan will pick up any votes from confused elderly Jews in Palm Beach or any other county (if only because he's not running). But even so, a combination of heavy turnout and widespread confusion over new I.D. laws at the polling places could overwhelm the system again. "I don't believe that anybody's going to be ready for the onslaught of voters," said Roger Weeden, an Orlando lawyer who's working with Election Protection, a national coalition of civil rights and public interest groups that will monitor problems with voting around the country through Nov. 4. The new law -- known as "no match, no vote" -- says you need identification at the polls, and your driver's license I.D. number or Social Security number must match what's in state or federal databases; if the data's wrong, you have to either cast a provisional ballot or fix the mistake. Rumors are flying, especially in minority communities, that the law is even more restrictive. On Tuesday night, Miami's "Hot 105" soul station spent a good 30 minutes during the evening rush hour discussing potential voting problems.

Another difference this time around, though, is that Obama's campaign seems to be ready for problems. Part of the reason early voting has been so busy (nearly half a million people voted in Florida in the first three days) is because the campaign isn't shy about telling supporters to get out and vote ahead of time. "You can vote early right here and right now," Obama told about 30,000 people at a downtown Miami rally Tuesday night. Aides were concerned enough that some of the wilder rumors would suppress turnout that they sent a campaign lawyer out to warm up the crowd before Barack and Michelle Obama appeared. "How many of you have heard the rumor that you won't be allowed to go to the polls and vote if you're wearing a Barack Obama button or T-shirt?" the lawyer asked, getting a big roar from the crowd. "Well, guess what -- that's just not true."

Obama's team has been gearing up to turn people out, focusing especially on getting them to vote early and avoid the crunch on Nov. 4. More than 100 field offices are set up around the state; deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand and his consulting partner Paul Tewes, the duo who engineered the field strategy for Iowa and other early primary and caucus states that helped Obama win the nomination, moved to Florida a few weeks ago to help run their massive operation here. So far, it looks effective: More than 54 percent of the early ballots in have been cast by registered Democrats, according to state statistics, which might help offset a Republican edge in requests for mail-in absentee ballots.

Judging from what some people were saying -- at the Tuesday night rally and among those voting the next morning -- Obama's campaign didn't have to scare anyone into participating early. "I didn't want to take a chance of something happening and me not getting my vote in," said Rony Francis, 43, who directs operations for a transportation company. He waited 90 minutes to vote at the North Miami library, where most of the voters who joined him were Haitians and other immigrants.

"It's always in your mind, especially after eight years ago," said Al Morrell, 51, a truck driver, also from North Miami. "So you gotta be a little wary."

The night before, Tasha Thomas, 26, who works at the University of Miami's veterinary school, had told me she'd been besieged by weird, panicky questions from supporters since she started volunteering at the Obama field office in her Miami neighborhood. People thought they couldn't vote if their voter registration card was starting to fade, or thought they had to go back to the state where they were born to vote, even if they lived in Florida now. "It was eye-opening, how much wrong information so many people have," she said.

Election Protection plans to have lawyers roaming from polling place to polling place around the state on Election Day, ready to help voters who can't find their precincts or have questions about the process. (Though the group is officially nonpartisan, there's not much doubt that anyone working hard to increase turnout is probably sympathetic to Obama.) "Voter suppression is something that anybody who has any sense of commitment to democracy or civil rights would want to fight against," said Weeden, a criminal defense lawyer who also helped monitor election sites in 2004. Back then, he and other volunteers encountered people who had been called and told their polling places had changed, or found suspicious characters lurking outside precincts with clipboards, asking people if they had met rigorous requirements to vote that went above and beyond what the law says.

While McCain is contesting the state as furiously as he is any other battleground -- he made several stops on a bus tour along Interstate 4 on Thursday, crossing from the Atlantic coast to the Gulf of Mexico -- his top surrogate, Gov. Charlie Crist, hasn't been entirely on message when it comes to issues surrounding the ballot box. (Some local Republicans say prospects for the McCain campaign here are looking dim anyway.) In most states, Republicans are busy whipping up a frenzy about alleged voter fraud, mostly trying to tie it to the community organizing group ACORN (which is a member of Election Protection) and, by implication, accusing Obama of trying to steal the White House.

Crist, though, isn't buying the party line on that one. "I don't think we anticipate much of a problem with voter fraud," he told reporters on a conference call organized by McCain's campaign Tuesday afternoon (which it probably regretted later). So far, the state government in Tallahassee hasn't moved to block a ruling that says voters whose I.D.s don't match their registration information can correct the problem in person on Election Day, rather than having to go to another office and fix it before their ballot is accepted. Perhaps as a result of Crist's calm, even McCain's die-hard supporters at a Thursday morning rally in Ormond Beach didn't seem too worried about voter fraud. Of course, that's a matter of degree; several insisted that Democrats always get away with some fraud, but they didn't expect things to be worse than usual this year.

If Florida were expected to go as easily for McCain as it did for George W. Bush four years ago (if not eight years ago), the issue might not matter that much. But the more people who show up to vote, the better the night is likely to be for Obama. Democrats are paying close attention. "We have a chance this year, as a nation, to go past that horrendous 48 percent of eligible voters who participate in presidential elections, with the unprecedented number of young voters, independent voters, minority voters, that are participating in this," New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson told Salon prior to appearing at an early-vote rally for Latinos in Kissimmee, Fla., on Wednesday. He noted that he's heard reports of rumors about voting problems among Hispanic communities in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico as well. But, he said of expected record turnouts, "It's very healthy for our democracy, and we should take advantage of it, not engage in negative tactics and voter suppression."

Obama's most passionate supporters, meanwhile, say they're ready to show up no matter what they hear. "We're smart," said Sherrie Kendrick, a retired phone operator from Miami, who will turn 54 on Election Day. "We may not look it, but we're smart."

-- By Mike Madden

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited.

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LOCAL

Here are the details for tomorrow until election day. Please come and help. K

You could be the difference between President-elect Obama and President-elect McCain in 2 very short weeks. You could also be the difference in allowing Barack’s coattails to help swing Missouri towards a bluer shade. We need your help now regardless of whether you’ve helped us before.

The campaign has unveiled its Get Out The Vote program and it promises to deliver enough votes to turn Missouri blue, but we can’t run the program without everyone’s help. If you can you help us then please reply to this message indicating whether you will help us canvass (the biggest need) or phone bank and which shifts you can work as described below.

What we need the most are door-to-door canvassers. This is the area where we really need your help. This is where we have the biggest potential to pick up votes. Studies have shown that we can pick up 1 vote for every 12 people we contact. So it becomes a numbers game much like voter registration where if you can talk with 36 people then you can be responsible for picking up 3 votes. That may not sound like much but when we have 1000 volunteers doing that each day in the state then we can turn the election.

For the next week, canvassers will be walking neighborhoods, knocking on doors for the purpose of identifying voters’ candidate preferences and identifying issues important to undecided or leaning voters. Beginning the weekend before the elections the canvassers will be knocking on the doors of supporters to leave literature and make sure that the voters know where their polling place is located, the hours of operation and identification requirements. On Election Day we’ll be knocking on the doors of supporters to make sure that they’ve voted.

Can you help us with canvassing?

Whereas canvassing is where we have by far the greatest need and where the campaign staff believes we can have the biggest impact on the election results, we also need to make a lot of phone calls. Right now we need to make calls such as this call to other volunteers to get them involved in the final push. We really would like volunteers who can make calls from their cell phones at a central location but have some opportunities for home-based calling as well. Could you help us with phone calling?

From this point on, volunteer activities will be coordinated out of our team’s Staging Location which is the red house at 4235 Baltimore. At that point Baltimore runs North/South between Main St and JC Nichols/Broadway. Come across 43rd St and then turn north onto Baltimore.

This Saturday (October 25), and then again next Saturday (November 1), we are going to have working practices of the GOTV program so that everyone will be trained and experienced and the operational procedures will have been tested and refined so that on Election day, the program will run flawlessly. We REALLY want all volunteers to have been trained and to have worked at least one shift before Election Day.

Can you help us this Saturday or next Saturday? If so, the schedules for this Saturday and next Saturday are

* Shift 1: 8:45AM – 12:45PM
* Shift 2: 11:45AM – 3:45PM
* Shift 3: 2:45PM – 6:45PM
* Volunteers who have canvassed or phone banked with OUR TEAM THIS YEAR can arrive 30 minutes after these shift times unless they would like to attend our training session again.
* Volunteers wishing to work 2 shifts should work the 1st and 3rd shifts, thus giving themselves a 2 hour break between shifts.
* Volunteers who can only work 1 shift but are flexible enough to work any of the shifts are encouraged to work the 3rd shift.

We’d like to get as many volunteers out both this Saturday and next Saturday because that will be the best way to test our plans so that they can be refined to optimize our effectiveness on Election Day.

In addition to the work to be done on this and next Saturday, we also have an ENORMOUS amount of doors to be knocked and phones to be rung in order to execute the campaign’s strategy to win Missouri. In keeping with that plan we will also be conducting the following shifts:

* Canvassing
* Sunday, 11/26 1 shift: 3:30PM – 6:30 PM
* Monday 11/27 – Friday 11/31 1 shift/day: 4:30PM – 6:30 PM
* Sunday, 12/02 1 shift: 3:30PM – 6:30 PM
* Monday 12/03 3 shifts: 8:45AM – 12:45PM, 11:45AM – 3:45PM,
2:45PM – 6:45PM
* Election Day Tuesday 12/04 3 shifts: 8:45AM – 12:45PM,
11:45AM – 3:45PM, 2:45PM – 6:45PM
* Phone Banking
* Sunday, 11/26 1 shift: 3:30PM – 6:30 PM
* Monday 11/27 – Friday 11/31 1 shift/day: 6:00PM – 8:30 PM
* Sunday, 12/02 1 shift: 3:30PM – 6:30 PM
* Monday 12/03 3 shifts: 8:45AM – 12:45PM, 11:45AM – 3:45PM,
2:45PM – 6:45PM
* Election Day Tuesday 12/04 3 shifts: 8:45AM – 12:45PM,
11:45AM – 3:45PM, 2:45PM – 6:45PM

Please allocate time and sign up for as many shifts and your schedule will permit. We cannot afford to let this historic opportunity to turn our country around to pass us by.

If you have any questions, or need to change your shift schedule, please email George Mayer or Mary Taves at gmayer @everestkc.net, or call them at 816 523-3535.

Thank you so much for your help!
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I mentioned this before but, just in case you haven't done this yet.... k

You are now able to vote at the Plaza Library M-F 10am-7PM. You just fill out an absentee form then proceed to vote. The source that gave me this info said that they are wanting as many people as possible to do this as they are anticipating election day to be insane. Please pass along to other Obama supporters……(Also, you can vote at the Election Board just north of Bob Jones shoes.)

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Sign up now to help us get out the vote for pro-choice candidates!
Please contact Victoria at victoria.pickering@ppkm.org or call 913-312-5100 ext. 257 to sign up or for more information!

Monday, October 27: Phone bank in Overland Park, 5:30-8:30pm
Tuesday, October 28: Phone bank in Overland Park, 5:30-8:30pm
Canvass in Clay County, 4:30 – 7:00pm (5005 NE Antioch Rd, KCMO)
Wednesday, October 29: Phone bank in Overland Park, 1:00-4:00pm
Saturday, November 1: Phone bank in Overland Park, 12:00-4:00pm
Canvass Against Question 1 in Johnson County, 12:00-4:00pm
Sunday, November 2: Phone bank in Overland Park, 12:00-4:00pm
Canvass in Clay County, 2:00 – 7:00pm (5005 NE Antioch Rd, KCMO)
Monday, November 3: Phone bank in Overland Park, 5:30-8:30pm

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Great way to help the campaign even if you don't have much time to give!!! K

From: Beverly Ahern [mailto:bja4@earthlink.net]
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2008 10:56 PM

Subject: Volunteers to make a Healthy breakfast foods for Obama campaign staff

Hi everyone,
I have been volunteering for the Obama campaign the last couple of weeks. This has brought me in contact with the loyal, hardworking young staff members who work day and night to help get out the vote and work with all of the local volunteers. As you all know, Missouri is till undecided for Obama so with just two weeks left before the election, there is a lot going on at the campaign headquarters.

The key staff members who are from all over the country, are very tired, looking worn down and generally not as healthy as they once were. They eat fried fast food and lots of sweets like cupcakes and Lamar donuts - evenings it is pizza- then they take vitamins. I asked the field coordinators if they would be interested in receiving healthy food. The answer was a relieved YES.

This original concept is to bring a healthy breakfast in the morning between 8:30 - 9:00 am - when the staff arrives and before all of the volunteers arrive. You should count on 20-25 people. The kitchen at the headquarters has a toaster, microwave, blender, sink, large fridge and lots of paper plates, plastic forks and spoons, napkins and some cups. I didn't see bowls. Hot or cold meals will work. Fruit, bagels, smoothies, breakfast sandwiches, granola, etc. Costco is really close by. It is up to you. Put your name on any plate, bowl or warmer you leave. I can help pick up anything left in the kitchen and get it back to you.

I would like to get the schedule filled in for this week to start a routine where the staff can count on good food in the morning. If it doesn't work out to bring breakfast you can always provide a meal later in the day. Just be aware there are lots of people there and you can't always guarantee it will go to the staff rather than the general volunteers. Also if it is a meal to be delivered later in the day, I would like to notify the contact person: Sheila Johnson so she can tell everyone that good stuff is coming at a certain time.

Here is the general info:
Obama Headquarters
3100 Gillham Plaza, Kansas City, MO 64109
Contact Person: Sheila Johnson - 816-585-7611

the dates are October 22 - November 4th.

October 22 - Wednesday - Beverly - hot egg roll-ups
October 23 - Thursday
October 24 - Friday
October 25 - Saturday
October 26 - Sunday
October 27 - Monday - Bonnie Winston and Beverly - whole wheat tortilla/egg wraps
October 28 - Tuesday
October 29 - Wednesday
October 30 - Thursday - Carol Bates and Suellen Dice -
October 31 - Friday
November 1 - Saturday
November 2 - Sunday
November 3 - Monday
November 4 - ELECTION DAY

Please let me know if you can help. Would appreciate suggestions, ideas, other people to ask.
Does anyone have Kathy Marchant and Susi Luaki's email. I would like to invite them to help too.
And thanks in advance. I know who I want for out next president and know this thoughtful generosity of spirit will help.

Best regards,
Beverly Ahern
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Can you believe MO is a swing state with a very strong chance of going for Obama? This can help make it happen. Please do what you can. Thanks, K

From: Sharon Hoffman
Date: October 22, 2008 12:59:36 PM MDT
To: Hoffman Sharon
Subject: WIN MISSOURI AND AND ALL THT JAZZ!

Ok, hopefully this is my last ask for the Obama campaign. Although the polls are looking good and the campaign raised a lot of money last month, we can't leave anything to chance. This election is too important to all of us and... America. The crucial game is on the ground and the campaign has set up a separate 'Committee For Change' to fund the battle ground states. We are definitely one of those. There are 1000 volunteers coming into town and thousands from here working the election. We need everyone of them, AND YOU, and more. And we need to be sure that we have the funds to keep the offices across the state going till the victory is in! So i'm asking you, one more time to donate, what you can to make sure we win THE STATE.. donate whatever you can $1000, $500, $100 or $50 to the COMMITTEE FOR CHANGE. We need to raise $40,000 by Friday. October 24th.. use this link to be sure it stays here in Missouri,
https://www.democrats.org/page/contribute/cfcmidwest?custom1=Sharon+Hoffman

AND LET'S HAVE SOME FUN...

JARDINES WILL BE HOSTING A “GET OUT THE VOTE” JAZZ EXTRAVEGANZA WITH JAZZ GREAT DAVID BASSE AND THE CITY LIGHT ORCHESTRA. MONDAY OCTOBER 27TH FOR OBAMA SUPPORTERS AND TUESDAY OCTOBER 28TH FOR MCCAIN SUPPORTERS.

LET’S ALL GATHER ON MONDAY, OCTOBER 27TH FOR THE 6:30pm PERFORMANCE , TO REGROUP, HAVE SOME FUN, AND REALLY SHOW MISSOURIANS THAT “YES WE CAN” AND “YES WE WILL” !!!!!!!!!

THE COST IS ONLY $100 AND WILL INCLUDE THE SHOW, DINNER AND 50% OF THE PROCEEDS WILL BE DONATED TO THE 'CAMPAIGN FOR CHANGE' which will be used in Missouri for the ground operation to wind up the election on november 4

MAKE YOUR RESERVATIONS NOW! SPACE IS LIMITED!
CALL HOLLY AT JARDINES 816 561 6480 OR E-MAILJAZZ4BEENA@GMAIL.COM (located at 4536 Main St.)
and email me so i know how much to count towards COMMITTEE FOR CHANGE.
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Forwarded from a friend. K

Kathryn,

About three weeks ago Lee Hirsch, a talented director friend of mine, told me his idea of LOCAL VOICES. He wanted to film commercials in small town battleground states highlighting local persons and their reasons why they support Obama. A kind voice helped me guide him to TRUTHANDHOPE.ORG, a pro-Obama PAC, whom helped move the vision fast. Here is the first ad:

http://truthandhope.org/localvoices/index.htm

I love the sense of urgency with this group as well their mission of winning over blue collar voters back to the Democratic Party. They know have 2 teams in other battleground states filming but need donations to buy more air time.

I'll hope you check it out and consider helping out. Any amount helps. Each ad only costs $40 to air. 21 days left let's not ease up.

Sincerely,

Houston
--
Houston King
1041 North Formosa Ave
Writer's Building Suite 317
LA, CA 90046
p: 323.850.2757 / c: 213.925.7535 / f : 323.850.2787
e houstonbking@gmail.com

Blue Hearts 10-22-08

2008-10-22T10:08:00.016-05:00

Hello All,

Here's the latest. Did you go to the rally in KC on Saturday? Wow! What a crowd, so diverse in every way. I LOVED it. And we couldn't even see the mass of people who could actually see the stage. 75K!
K

HUMOR/LINKS

This was sent to me. Definitely worth watching. K

Here is a little something my women friends and I put together, for girls and women everywhere.
Please watch and forward if you agree, to every woman you know.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart
Karin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6OsGjelmbo&feature=emailhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6OsGjelmbo&feature=email

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Not only click on doors, desk, windows but other items about the room... bridge, phone, pictures on wall, etc.... very funny. put up sound too

http://www.palinaspresident.com/
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From my buddy. K

so i'm friends with this young s.f. girl and somehow i commented to her totally creative and probably unemployed friend about his halloween card. he's now done this:

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Check this out. It's a fun way to be involved in the political process. K

http://yeswecarve.com/index.php
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Why I'd Be a Better VP than Sarah Palin

(Or, The Bridge to New Zealand)

by ROSANNE CASH
October 10, 2008

I'd like to formally submit myself to replace Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket. I feel confident that John McCain will see that the very attributes he desired in his VP choice can be met, and even exceeded in some areas, by me. For your consideration, my big, fat résumé:

1. Focus on the Family
I am the mother of five children, just like Governor Palin. I have known the demands of managing a full-time career and motherhood at the same time. I have juggled a breast pump and a BlackBerry, and I know when to put the BlackBerry down. (To be perfectly honest, I did once send a text to the baby and tried to nurse my bass player. You learn from your mistakes.)

2. Reproductive Issues

I also believe that a teenager's pregnancy is a "private family matter." In fact, I believe that every woman's pregnancy is a "private, family matter." (I bet the GOP never thought of making that leap!)

3. Church and State

Like the Governor, I now also believe that my will is perfectly aligned with God's will. When Governor Palin said that it was God's will for the Alaska pipeline to be built and asked for people to pray for that to happen, I was really inspired by her confidence in the absolute, seamless integration of her will and God's will. I have begun practicing this kind of supreme confidence on a smaller scale, but I am sure that I can quickly move to national issues. Starting with the sartorial, I know that it is God's will that I have the entire Chanel collection for the fall season, including those adorable high-heeled booties that were all over the runway shows.

(A couple things I'm still having trouble with regarding the will of God: I knew it was God's will that I win the Grammy in 2007 for my last record, but Bob Dylan won. This is clearly the work of Satan, but shouldn't my will/God's will have been strong enough to override that? And this Alaska pipeline--if it is God's will to have the pipeline built, then why isn't it built already? On a related topic, I don't own a single piece of Chanel.)

4. Environment

Along with Governor Palin, I don't believe that humans cause climate change.

(Okay, that is a bold-faced lie, but I've been paying really close attention to the campaign stump speeches, and I feel certain I am allowed a generous allotment of bold-faced lies.)

5. Foreign policy

Here's where I really shine. Governor Palin got her first passport in 2007. I got my first passport in 1970, when the Governor was only 6 years old! Not only do I have a passport, I have actually been outside of the United States, dozens of times. I have had relationships and conversations with real foreigners, in their own countries, in restaurants, shops, flea markets, museums, nightclubs, spas, hotels, all modes of public transportation, and even in their own homes. My foreign policies are fair, inclusive and sensitive to cultural differences. I don't ask for English Breakfast tea when I'm in France. I never call foreign currency "funny money" (even though it does look funny.) I don't shout at people to help them better understand English and, finally, I act on God's will when in Paris by going to Chanel, and to all the great boutiques, which is just an extension of God's will, as you can surely extrapolate by the above explanation of my will/God's will.

I know Governor Palin has one distinct advantage in living so close to Russia, in that she can keep a close eye on nefarious activity across the Bering Strait, but I, too, live very close to a foreign country. Canada is less than 400 miles from my home in New York City, and you never know when it might become necessary to invade a sovereign nation that has not attacked us, as we learned the hard way. Not only that, I have a girlfriend in Austin, Texas, whom I'm going to ask to keep an eye on Mexico.

6. Legal Experience

My understanding of the law is extensive, but here are a couple of cogent points: a photographer who thought I had used his photograph of me without his permission sued me. (I absolutely didn't use the photo without permission. When McCain does his meticulous vetting and background checks on me, I will explain the whole story. It was all a big misunderstanding.)

More importantly, I renegotiated my contract with the Sony Corporation in 1987. That was huge. You should have seen my legal bills. I negotiated an all-new contract with Capitol Records in 1995 and that, too, was an exhausting, contentious, but ultimately lucrative enterprise. Entertainment law is a blood sport, people. (Speaking of blood sports, I have to give it up to the Governor on the hunting issue. I have never shot a wolf from a helicopter, but I have thrown my cat off the bed. Hundreds of times.)

7. Higher Education

Governor Palin went to five different colleges to get her BS in journalism, but none of the colleges had entry requirements, whereas I went to a university that required a trigonometry credit before they would admit me. I had to take it the summer before school started. I don't remember a frigging thing, but I got a B. The other disparities in education are too numerous to mention, but suffice to say that I bet she never met Lee Strasberg.

It is true that I have no background in constitutional law, but I have read the Constitution, except for the amendments that don't have anything to do with me, and I watched the entire John Adams mini-series on HBO. Twice.

8. Ethics

I really think this whole investigation into the firing of the top state law enforcement official in Alaska, who wouldn't fire the state trooper who was mean to the Governor's sister, is just overblown. I once fired my assistant for making a pass at my husband, so I can totally understand this! And I would have fired an assistant who made a pass at my sister's husband, too. I love my sisters. Governor Palin loves her sister. People need to get over it.

But speaking of family, I've also had my fill of no-good boyfriends to my daughters, and boy, do I sympathize with the Governor over this Levi fellow and his MySpace page, with the guns and the cursing. My husband once took a broken chair out into the street to chase away a no-good boyfriend of my oldest daughter, and we didn't see the likes of him anymore. I have a zero-tolerance policy for miscreant youth, and I know I could help the Governor sort out her obviously conflicted feelings about setting limits for teenagers, just for her own peace of mind.

9. Iraq

The Governor says she hasn't "focused" on the war in Iraq, but I think she's just joshing us. No person in an executive position in the government of the United States could be so lazy that they would not familiarize themselves with every angle of what is potentially the greatest American debacle since the nation was founded, including all the terminology, like "Bush Doctrine."

If she's not kidding, then I respectfully submit the hate mail I received in 2003, at the beginning of the war, which came after my press conference with Musicians United To Win Without War, as proof of my "focus."

10. Executive Ability

Governor Palin was the mayor of a real town of 5,000 people. I have never been mayor of anything, but I have performed for crowds bigger than the population of Wasilla, Alaska, and I can tell you it's no picnic getting the monitors just right, working with cranky and egotistical musicians, changing clothes in dirty dressing rooms and eating bad backstage food, handling the hecklers and technical problems during a show, and then getting on the bus to go somewhere else and do it all over again the next night. Also, my last record sold about the population of Wasilla times forty, and they all seemed to like it. But dealing with the public is really difficult and they all have opinions about you, which are usually all wrong, so I've developed a thick skin, another requirement for life as the VP. Lastly, and the importance of this cannot be over-emphasized, the guy's head on the tail of the Alaska Airlines planes looks like my dad.

11. Maverick personality

Finally, there is one subject in which I find I am even more conservative than the Governor, and that is in the area of neo-natal responsibility. The Governor was eight months pregnant and in Texas to give a speech, when her water broke. She reportedly made her speech and then traveled eleven hours, dripping amniotic fluid, bypassing Seattle and Anchorage (major cities with world-class hospitals) to travel to a small hospital in Wasilla that had no neo-natal intensive care unit, and gave birth there. Call me a wimp, call me insecure, but you had better also call me a maverick, because I would have said "Damn the schedule! Damn the speech and the airline ticket!" If this had been me, as soon as my water broke, I'd be at the closest hospital and that baby would have been born in Texas! Just like my mom!

In summation, I present myself to the GOP as a woman, and I repeat, woman, who has held a passport for thirty-eight years, a lip gloss-wearing soccer-volleyball-softball-gymnastics mom of five, who can carry a six-pack home to her husband like nobody's business, whose will is firmly aligned with God's will, a neo-natal conservative and legally savvy public figure, a border-watching, trigonometry-credited, breastfeeding, BlackBerry-tapping, cat-throwing maverick whose daughters are out of their teens, therefore immune to teenage pregnancy (although this is a private, family matter), and whose dad's head (or an eerie facsimile) adorns a state airline.

I could offer more to recommend me to the job of vice president, but one last special quality that I share with Governor Palin is the fact that I also have a husband who wants his state to secede from the Union. Ever since the 2000 election, my husband has been all for the secession of not only New York, but the island of Manhattan! And I have to tell you, if Sarah Palin becomes vice president of the United States, he says we have to personally secede from the whole country. So please, people, write me in on the ballot in November, or write me in New Zealand, where I'll be making my new home.

Rosanne Cash is a singer-songwriter, and even though she has met Presidents Bush and Clinton (who appeared to note her décolletage with great appreciation), the ambassador to the Czech Republic and George Stevens, who produces the Kennedy Center Honors awards show, she does not think her knowledge of world leaders should be held against her, because her experience in Washington is limited to three days during the Million Mom March.

About Rosanne Cash
Rosanne Cash is a Grammy-winning singer and songwriter. Her fourteen record albums, released over the past twenty-five years, have charted eleven number-one singles. She has earned numerous accolades for songwriting and performance. more...
Copyright © 2008 The Nation

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GENERAL

Although I can't confirm this story, there's a SNOPES link below that verifies something just like this. K

Ken,

Mom "early voted" today. She said the machine kept flipping to Republican every time she tried to vote a straight Democratic ticket. At first they patronized her, "Honey, here's the way you do this." After it flipped to Republican 3 times, she made them get the judge.

I did some online searches and find out, that this is not uncommon. The big suggestion, online, is to take a video camera in the booth and tape the process. I will definitely be doing just that.

They are trying to steal the election, again!

We must stop them!

Bill

p.s. Check this out to go along with the story above.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/straightticket.asp
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Tuesday, October 14, 2008 (SF Chronicle)
McCain's political attacks inciting far right
E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post Writers Group

Are we witnessing the re-emergence of the far right as a power in American politics? Has John McCain, inadvertently perhaps, become the midwife of a new movement built around fear, xenophobia, racism and anger? McCain has clearly become uneasy with some of the forces that have gathered around him. He has begun to insist, against the sometimes loud protests from his crowds, that Barack Obama is, among other things, a "decent person."

Yet McCain's own campaign is playing with powerful extremist themes to denigrate Obama. When his running mate, Sarah Palin, first brought up Obama's association with 1960s radical Bill Ayers, who has become a centerpiece of McCain's attacks, she accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists." What other "terrorists" was she thinking about?

Because Obama was a child when Ayers was part of the Weather Underground, and because even Republicans have served on boards with Ayers, this is classic guilt by association. Ayers has been dragged into this campaign because there is a deep frustration on the right with Obama's enthusiasm for shutting down the culture wars of the 1960s.

Precisely because Obama is not a Baby Boomer, he carries none of that generation's scars. Most Americans (including most Boomers) are weary of living in the past and reprising the 1960s every four years.

Yet culture war politics are relatively mild compared with the far right appeals that are emerging this year. It is as if McCain's loyalists overshot the '60s and went back to the '50s or even the '30s.

What we are now witnessing is the mainstreaming of the far right, a phenomenon that began to take shape with some of the earliest attacks on Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

False claims that Obama is a Muslim, that he trained to overthrow the government, that he was educated in Wahhabi Muslim schools, are a standard part of the political discussion. These fake stories come from voices on the ultra right that have dabbled in other forms of conspiracy, including classic anti-Semitism. McCain and his campaign do not pick up the most extreme charges. They just fan the flames by suggesting that voters don't really know who Obama is, hinting at a sinister back story without filling in the details. That is left to the voters' imaginations.

The tragic irony here is that McCain was the victim of some of the very same extremist forces in the 2000 South Carolina primary.

To bring McCain down, some of President Bush's supporters on the far right peddled all manner of falsehoods about McCain, raising despicable charges about his time as a POW and suggesting (again falsely) that he had fathered an illegitimate child of color. In the past, McCain publicly condemned some of the very people who are now going after Obama.

McCain cannot be blamed for all of the crazies who see in Obama a chance to earn fame and fortune by concocting lies about him. And yes, we should defend the speech rights even of those whose views we find abhorrent.

But the angry McCain-Palin crowds, and particularly those who threaten violence or shout racist epithets, should be a wake-up call to McCain. The dark hints about Obama that McCain's campaign is dropping dovetail too nicely with the nasty trash floating around the Internet and the airwaves.

We are in the midst of what could become - and here's hoping it doesn't - the worst economic downturn in decades. The last thing we need is a campaign that strengthens fanaticism, tarnishes the authority of the next president, and whips up the worst kinds of prejudice. This works both ways: Obama should not be delegitimized if he wins, and McCain should not want to win in a way that would undermine his own capacity to lead.

When Christopher Buckley, a novelist and former speechwriter for George H.W. Bush, announced last week that he would vote for Obama (his first vote ever for a Democrat), he referred to words once spoken to him by his late father. "You know," the conservative hero William F. Buckley Jr. said, "I've spent my entire lifetime separating the right from the kooks."

McCain has an obligation, to his own legacy and the country he has served, to separate himself and his campaign from the kooks. Extremism in defense of liberty may be no vice, but extremism in pursuit of the presidency is as dysfunctional as it is degrading.

To comment, e-mail E.J. Dionne Jr. at postchat@aol.com.
Copyright 2008 SF Chronicle
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October 14, 2008
Bulls, Bears, Donkeys and Elephants
By TOMMY McCALL
Since 1929, Republicans and Democrats have each controlled the presidency for nearly 40 years. So which party has been better for American pocketbooks and capitalism as a whole? Well, here’s an experiment: imagine that during these years you had to invest exclusively under either Democratic or Republican administrations. How would you have fared?

As of Friday, a $10,000 investment in the S.& P. stock market index* would have grown to $11,733 if invested under Republican presidents only, although that would be $51,211 if we exclude Herbert Hoover’s presidency during the Great Depression. Invested under Democratic presidents only, $10,000 would have grown to $300,671 at a compound rate of 8.9 percent over nearly 40 years.

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FYI, from a MoveOn email. K

The GOP is trying to purge Democratic voters off the rolls to steal the election in states like Ohio, Florida, and Colorado.

We're hearing a lot about the trumped-up charges against ACORN these days—but very little about the massive voter suppression campaign being orchestrated by the Republicans. The GOP is trying to purge thousands of Democratic voters off the rolls in states like Ohio, Florida, and Colorado.1

John McCain and Sarah Palin are falsely accusing a community organizing group—ACORN—of voting fraud to distract the media from their own party's wrongdoing.2 Worst of all: It's working.

The truth is, McCain is vilifying ACORN to justify voter suppression—making it harder for Obama supporters to vote.

The GOP's voter suppression campaign could steal this election. But we can stop them with a rapid-response fund to support legal actions, run newspaper ads to get the media talking about GOP voter suppression, and prosecute anyone who tries to steal this election.

For over twenty-five years, Republicans have promoted the myth of voting fraud to argue for restrictive voting laws—but Bush's own Justice Department found virtually no organized voting fraud.3 Now McCain is attacking ACORN in order to justify a frenzy of lawsuits making it harder for Obama supporters to vote.
Here's what he's not telling you:

The only fraud committed was against ACORN itself. ACORN hired 13,000 workers to register a remarkable 1.3 million new voters. And a few of them turned in registration forms with inaccurate and even made-up names to get credit for work they didn't do. ACORN fired them and turned them over to the authorities.4

ACORN reported the fraudulent registration forms. In most states, ACORN is required by law to submit all forms collected whether they appear to be bogus or not—that way election officials, not partisan groups, can make the call. ACORN flags cards that may not be legitimate. And in many places, the charges of fraud only came up because ACORN was the one who flagged the cards!5

This won't have any impact on the election. No one is allowed to vote unless they are properly registered. And there is no evidence of false registrations actually leading to organized voting fraud.6
We can't let false charges of voting fraud distract us from the very real voter suppression campaign that is already well under way.

Republicans are looking for typos on voter registration forms, threatening to challenge homeowners facing foreclosure, and falsely warning that voters with outstanding traffic tickets may be arrested if they go to the polls.7

P.S. You can learn more about the false charges against ACORN by clicking here:

http://acorn.org/quickfacts

P.P.S. Republicans aren't just smearing ACORN—they're smearing Barack Obama, too, by sending around untrue emails about him.

Have your friends or family ever forwarded you an email with false attacks on Obama? If so, be sure they know the truth. Forward the email to The Center for Political Accuracy, and they'll reply with the true facts for you to respond with:

info@politicalaccuracy.org

Sources:
1. "States' Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal," New York Times, October 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/us/politics/09voting.html
"Check-off box delays thousands of voter registrations," Denver Post, October 14, 2008
http://www.denverpost.com/previous2/home/ci_10713377
2. "ACORN defends efforts amid voter-fraud allegations," Associated Press, October 14, 2008
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081014/ap_on_el_pr/voter_fraud
3. "In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud," New York Times, April 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html
"The Truth About Fraud," Brennan Center for Justice
http://www.truthaboutfraud.org/
4. "The Truth About ACORN's Voter Registration Drives," ACORN
http://acorn.org/quickfacts
"Group Answers Charges of Voter Registration Fraud," New York Times, October 14, 2008
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/acorn/
5. "Voter Group Admits Mistakes, Defends Work," ABC News, October 14, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31241&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=5
"Is there ACORN fraud in Florida?," Orlando Sentinel, October 15, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31239&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=6
6. "'Fraud' vs. 'Suppression'," Politico, October 14, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31240&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=7
7. "After A Surge in Registration, A Surge in Suppression," Brennan Center for Justice, October 7, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31236&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=8
"Democrats fear GOP will turn away foreclosed voters; GOP won't rule out using residency change to challenge a ballot," Indianapolis Star, October 3, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31237&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=9
"Vote-scam fliers target black neighborhoods," Philadelphia Daily News, October 2, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=31041&id=14429-9571044-ZN1WAux&t=10

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LOCAL

This is from Jason Kander. Here's a great way to get involved locally on election day. K

Let's get out the vote for Obama
On Monday, November 3rd (the day before election day), I'll canvass the 44th District, putting literature on doors to remind Democratic voters to go to the polls the following day.

Then, on election day, I'm going to do it again. We're going to get every last Democratic vote out of the Fightin' 44th.

I HOPE YOU'LL JOIN ME!!!!

We'll go from 2pm to 7pm on Monday and 3pm to 7pm on Election Day. It's not every door, it's not convincing anyone of anything, it's just leaving reminders on the doors of folks we have identified as likely Democratic voters. And it's right here in the 44th. This election could be decided in Missouri, and Missouri could be decided by the turnout in Kansas City. Time to step up.

If you want to help, reply to me at this email address or contact Sarah White at 816 822 1627 or swhite@jaynixon.com and we'll get in touch by phone to give you the details.

Other volunteer opportunities:
The Missouri Democratic Party needs your help with a variety of other work between now and election day. They are located at 8043 Wornall. Walk in and offer your services or contact Elizabeth Birks at 816 260 1902 or birks.elizabeth@gmail.com.

Yard Signs:
Finally, I have a few Obama yard signs left. Let me know if you want one, but realize that I'm just going to hit you up to spend some time volunteering for Obama. Also, you can get signs for pretty much the entire Democratic ticket over at the Democratic Headquarters at 8043 Wornall.

Two weeks until we make history!
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If you are hoping to get a gig with the election board in MO, please check out the following. K

Sent: Monday, October 20, 2008 12:00 PM
Subject: KC Election Board - Worker Positions

Per our conversation, please find the referenced information attached. Thank you. J

"Rae”melle A. Davis
Executive Secretary/Tabulation Specialist
Kansas City Board of Election Commissioners
1828 Walnut - Suite 300
Kansas City, MO 64108
816-842-4820
Fax: 816-472-4960
raemelle@kceb.org
www.kceb.org

Please consider being a part of our team on election day!
On election day, more than 1,500 election workers are needed to serve the voters of Kansas City, within Jackson County. This presents a great opportunity to serve your community and be part of the election process.

You can join our Election Worker Team by completing the Election Worker form and mailing or faxing it to the KC Election Board office. Our address and fax number are listed below.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Election Workers are the Gatekeepers of Our Democracy!
Count me in!
I am interested in joining the Election Worker Team!
PLEASE PRINT – RETURN VIA E-MAIL OR FAX
Name
Address
City MO Zip 64 Date of Birth________ SSN (last 4 digits)
Home Phone Res. Email
Cell Phone Bus. Email
Bus. Phone
U.S. Citizen? Y___ N___ Resident of Jackson County? Y___ N___ Registered Voter in KCMO Y___ N___
Describe any physical limitations that require work accommodations
Where did you pick up this form: _______________

Party Affiliation: _______Republican _______Democrat

I’M INTERESTED IN
____Election Judge ____Pick up Personnel ____Voter Assistant Specialist
____Deputy Commissioner ____Greeter/Locator

Signature Date

Qualifications
• Citizen of the United States
• Resident of Kansas City, within Jackson County
• A registered voter, at least 18 years-old
• Available to work in any part of the city

Hours
• Polls are open from 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
• Election workers report to their assigned location no later than 5:00 a.m. to prepare for 6:00 a.m. poll opening.
• Following the 7:00 p.m. close of polls, all election workers assist Supervising Judges in closing poll site.

Training/Compensation
• Required attendance at one training session
• Training pay applicable only if combined with election day work
• Compensation ranges from $25.00 to $125.00 depending on the position worked
• Training materials including laptops, cell phones and poll logs are provided
• Total election day payment mailed 7 to 10 days after the election

Benefits of Becoming an Election Worker
• Learning about and assisting others in the democratic process
• Showing your civic pride
• Giving back to the community
• Contributing personally to timely, free, fair, honest and accurate elections
• Promoting public trust and confidence in the democratic process
• Earning extra dollars!
POLL WORKER DESCRIPTIONS

*Supervising Judge
• Assign duties to election judges
• Provide directions for setting up poll
• Open poll at 6:00 a.m.
• Manage processing of voters
• Officially close poll at 7:00 p.m.
• Responsible for preparing designated supplies to be picked up at end of day

*Election Judge
• Assist Supervising Judges and share responsibilities including, but not limited to:
• Open and set up poll
• Check voter identification and ensure poll book signature
• Greet voters
• Assist voters as needed
• Issue “I Voted” stickers
• Assist Supervising Judges in closing poll

*Deputy Commissioners (DC’s) work in teams to visit assigned poll sites throughout election day to monitor and ensure compliance with voting procedures and laws governing elections in the state of Missouri. Authorized to report any irregularity or failure of duty, assist judges and voters – serves as the eyes and ears of the election board (must designate a party preference).

Voter Assistance Specialist (VAS’s) assist voters by verifying their registration, correct polling location or other information using the Missouri Certified Voter Registration database and a laptop computer, cell phone or poll log (provided by the election board).

Pickup Personnel (PUP’s) ensure timely retrieval of “digital” ballots and voting supplies from poll sites and deliver the supplies to the election board headquarters (a 3-4 hour shift).

Greeters/Locators help minimize lines at the polls by ensuring the voter is at the correct poll, has the correct identification and is in the correct line.

*Duties are performed in bi-partisan teams of two.

Blue Hearts 10-12-08

2008-10-12T15:35:00.012-05:00

Hey All,

You may know that I love a good thriller. But, in the real world I'm happy with a blow-out. My nerves can't take it.

However you look at it, it's getting exciting. How are you holding up?

Kristin

HUMOR OR CLIPS

John McCain wants you to forget about his role in our country's last major financial crisis and costly bailout: the savings and loan crisis of the late '80s and early '90s.

But voters deserve to know that the failed philosophy and culture of corruption that created the savings and loan crisis then are alive in the current crisis -- and in John McCain's plans for our economic future.

We just released a short documentary about John McCain's role in that financial crisis -- watch it now and share it with your friends:

http://my.barackobama.com/keatingvideo

Voters should know the facts about John McCain's poor judgment -- judgment that has twice placed him on the wrong side of history.

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The News from Britain...Britain is Repossessing the U.S.A.
A Message adapted and updated from Mr. John Cleese:
To the Citizens of the United States of America:
In light of the strong possibility you are about to elect an elderly gentleman with a bad temper and a lady who thinks she can run foreign policy because she can see Russia from her house, as President and President-In-Waiting of the USA and thus to risk Life As We Know It for everyone else on the Planet, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately.

Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths, and territories (except Kansas, which she does not fancy). She won't actually be in charge, but she'll greet foreign leaders as necessary and not put her foot in it or vomit on anyone at dinner.

Your new prime minister, Gordon Brown, will appoint a Governor for America without the need for further elections. He will choose someone who does not have his or her hand in the till and has significant experience in running Big Things. You have not had one of them for almost a decade and trust me, it is a big plus.
Congress and the Senate will be disbanded. They have given away too much of your money already to rescue incompetent business executives and soon your American Dollars will resemble Zimbabwean Dollars in total worthlessness. There is no free lunch you know. Although we originally let you get away with secession because King George was robbing you blind, recent events demonstrate that your present leaders are doing much worse things and unfortunately you have not noticed.

A questionnaire will be circulated next year to determine whether more than half of you still believe Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11. Information to the contrary will again be provided by the rest of the world and we request you read it this time and refrain from invading the wrong country ever again if you possibly can.
To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:

You should look up "revocation" in the Oxford English Dictionary.

1. Then look up aluminium, and check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it.

2. The letter 'U' will be reinstated in words such as 'favour' and 'neighbour.' Likewise, you will learn to spell 'doughnut' without skipping half the letters, and the suffix -ize will be replaced by the suffix -ise.
Generally, you will be expected to raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. (look up 'vocabulary').

3. Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises such as "like" and "you know" is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication.
There is no such thing as US English. We will let Microsoft know on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take account of the reinstated letter 'u' and the elimination of -ize. You will relearn your original national anthem, God Save The Queen.

4. July 4th will no longer be celebrated as a holiday. But we have a lot of Bank Holidays you will enjoy instead.

5. You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns, lawyers, or therapists. The fact that you need so many lawyers and therapists shows that you're not adult enough to be independent.
Guns should only be handled by adults. If you're not adult enough to sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist then you're not grown up enough to handle a gun.

6. Therefore, you will no longer be allowed to own or carry anything more dangerous than a vegetable peeler. A permit will be required if you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.

7. All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and this is for your own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we mean.

8. All intersections will be replaced with roundabouts, and you will start driving on the left with immediate effect. At the same time, you will go metric with immediate effect and without the benefit of conversion tables. Both roundabouts and metrication will help you understand the British sense of humour.

9. The Former USA will adopt UK prices on petrol (which you have been calling gasoline)-roughly $9/US gallon. Get used to it. Your driving armoured cars to buy groceries is unnecessary, boorish and killing the planet.

10. You will learn to make real chips. Those things you call French fries are not real chips, and those things you insist on calling potato chips are properly called crisps. Real chips are thick cut, fried in animal fat, and dressed not with catsup but with vinegar.

11. We will require that people running things, like your government, are at least moderately competent and not related by blood or bribes to those who benefit from their decisions. We know it makes you more cozy when your leaders know as little as you do, but, honestly, it is short sighted: you need doctors who know more about medicine, pilots who know more about flying and leaders who know more about leading.

12. We respectfully request you give up this notion that Politics is Entertainment, and that very complicated things can only be explained to you in less than fifteen seconds. If you wanted to have a democracy, honestly, you'd really need to have taken the time to understand things a bit more before you voted. And may I suggest the startling notion that politicians don't need to look good to do a good job? And it really is acceptable if they are a bit boring, so long as they do their homework. It's especially important if evidently you have not done yours. Poor old Al Gore. Poor old John Kerry. And by the way, are you happy now you chose a Governor for California based on his teeth?

13. The cold tasteless stuff you insist on calling beer is not actually beer at all. Henceforth, only proper British Bitter will be referred to as beer, and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be referred to as Lager. South African beer is also acceptable as they are pound for pound the greatest sporting Nation on earth and it can only be due to the beer. They are also part of the British Commonwealth - see what it did for them.

14. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as good guys. Hollywood will also be required to cast English actors to play English characters. Watching Andie McDowell attempt English dialogue in Four Weddings and a Funeral was an experience akin to having one's ears removed with a cheese grater.

15. You will cease playing American football. There is only one kind of proper football; you call it soccer. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which has some similarities to American football, but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like a bunch of nancies). Don't try Rugby - the South Africans and Kiwis will thrash you, like they regularly thrash us.

16. Further, you will stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to host an event called the World Series for a game which is not played outside of America. Since only 2.1% of you are aware that there is a world beyond your borders, your error is understandable. You will learn cricket, and we will let you face the South Africans first in their country. The six out of ten of you who don't own a passport will need to get one first.

17. You must tell us who killed JFK. It's been driving us mad.

18. An internal revenue agent (i.e. tax collector) from Her Majesty's Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all monies due (backdated to 1776). Although this will raise your taxes, remember that the Neoconservatives will no longer be robbing you blind and so your Dollars will stop shrinking. Didn't you know that inflation and government bailouts of huge companies were really paid for by you? We must do something about your educational system. What on earth is going on over there? Are you oblivious to the crushing debt you are leaving your children? You might as well throttle them now.

19. Daily Tea Time begins promptly at 4 pm with proper cups, never mugs, with high quality biscuits (cookies) and cakes; strawberries in season.

God Save the Queen. But at least God won't instruct your President to invade any more wrong countries.

Adapted from John Cleese.

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Love this one. K

http://slatev.com/player.html?id=1842856410

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GENERAL

This is from a fellow blogger: http://leishacamden.blogspot.

Mary lacked money to fly home to Norway – he saved her love

ÅSGÅRDSTRAND (VG): Mary was a newlywed and ready to move to Norway, but was stopped at the airport because she didn’t have enough money for the trip. Then a stranger turned up and paid for her.

Mary Menth Andersen was 31 years old at the time and had just married Norwegian Dag Andersen. She was looking forward to starting a new life in Åsgårdstrand in Vestfold with him. But first she had to get all of her belongings across to Norway. The date was November 2nd, 1988.

At the airport in Miami things were hectic as usual, with long lines at the check-in counters. When it was finally Mary’s turn and she had placed her luggage on the baggage line, she got the message that would crush her bubbling feeling of happiness.
-You’ll have to pay a 103 dollar surcharge if you want to bring both those suitcases to Norway, the man behind the counter said.

Mary had no money. Her new husband had travelled ahead of her to Norway, and she had no one else to call.
-I was completely desperate and tried to think which of my things I could manage without. But I had already made such a careful selection of my most prized possessions, says Mary.

Although she explained the situation to the man behind the counter, he showed no signs of mercy.
-I started to cry, tears were pouring down my face and I had no idea what to do. Then I heard a gentle and friendly voice behind me saying, That’s OK, I’ll pay for her.

Mary turned around to see a tall man whom she had never seen before.
-He had a gentle and kind voice that was still firm and decisive. The first thing I thought was, Who is this man?
Although this happened 20 years ago, Mary still remembers the authority that radiated from the man.
-He was nicely dressed, fashionably dressed with brown leather shoes, a cotton shirt open at the throat and khaki pants, says Mary.

She was thrilled to be able to bring both her suitcases to Norway and assured the stranger that he would get his money back. The man wrote his name and address on a piece of paper that he gave to Mary. She thanked him repeatedly. When she finally walked off towards the security checkpoint, he waved goodbye to her.

The piece of paper said ‘Barack Obama’ and his address in Kansas, which is the state where his mother comes from. Mary carried the slip of paper around in her wallet for years, before it was thrown out.
-He was my knight in shining armor, says Mary, smiling.

She paid the 103 dollars back to Obama the day after she arrived in Norway. At that time he had just finished his job as a poorly paid community worker* in Chicago, and had started his law studies at prestigious Harvard university.

In the spring of 2006 Mary’s parents had heard that Obama was considering a run for president, but that he had still not decided. They chose to write a letter in which they told him that he would receive their votes. At the same time, they thanked Obama for helping their daughter 18 years earlier.

In a letter to Mary’s parents dated May 4th, 2006 and stamped ‘United States Senate, Washington DC’, Barack Obama writes**:
‘I want to thank you for the lovely things you wrote about me and for reminding me of what happened at Miami airport. I’m happy I could help back then, and I’m delighted to hear that your daughter is happy in Norway. Please send her my best wishes. Sincerely, Barack Obama, United States senator’.

The parents sent the letter on to Mary.

This week VG met her and her husband in the café that she runs with her friend Lisbeth Tollefsrud in Åsgårdstrand.
-It’s amazing to think that the man who helped me 20 years ago may now become the next US president, says Mary delightedly.

She has already voted for Obama. She recently donated 100 dollars to his campaign.

She often tells the story from Miami airport, both when race issues are raised and when the conversation turns to the presidential elections.
-I sincerely hope the Americans will see reason and understand that Obama means change, says Mary.

*Not at all sure about this part of the translation. The Norwegian word used is 'miljøarbeider', I don't know what the exact English word for that is or even if there is one, and I don't know enough about Obama to say what job of his they're talking about.
**This is my translation of the reporter's translation of the letter. From English to Norwegian and back to English. So obviously it is not correct word for word.

This is not a big or important story. But it is a nice story and if one is voting for a person, and not just for a political platform, it might be interesting to hear it. Somehow I don't see this story being covered in American media much, so let's count this as one blogger's contribution to the news coverage of the 2008 election. :-)

If anyone wants to post this anywhere else, be my guest.
POSTED BY LEISHA CAMDEN AT 6:17 PM

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The GOP goes back to its ugly roots

McCain is resurrecting the GOP's oldest tactic: Smearing Obama as a scary black terrorist sympathizer. But he may meet the same fate as Barry Goldwater.
By Gary Kamiya

Oct. 07, 2008 | The End of Days is approaching for John McCain and Sarah Palin, and at least one member of the ticket is not likely to greet this development with religious rapture. Their numbers are tanking. Their campaign has had to pull out of Michigan, and they are trailing in most of the battleground states they must hold onto. Even Karl Rove has predicted an Obama win if the election were held today. McCain's hotheaded behavior during the Wall Street crisis and his numerous other erratic tactical swerves have backfired. And his biggest gamble, choosing Sarah Palin as vice president, is increasingly looking like a disaster.

McCain's all-too-predictable response: get ugly, as he did on Monday is his disturbing rant against Obama in New Mexico.

The man who incessantly talks about "honor" has checked his own at the door. Back in April, McCain -- himself the victim of a vicious, race-baiting smear campaign orchestrated by Karl Rove in 2000 -- disavowed a North Carolina ad attacking Obama for his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. "It's not the message of the Republican Party," McCain said. "It's not the message of my campaign. I've pledged to conduct a respectful campaign."

But that was before McCain faced imminent defeat. His "pledge" has turned out to be about as credible as his sudden incarnation as a lifelong enemy of Wall Street. On Monday, McCain rolled out a new TV ad, "Dangerous," that accuses Obama of being "dishonorable." "Who is Barack Obama?" a narrator ominously asks. "He says our troops in Afghanistan are 'just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.' How dishonorable."

Of course, this is an outrageous smear. Obama was simply pointing out the well-known fact that in fighting an insurgency, over-reliance on air power is counterproductive. That's because airstrikes inevitably result in civilian deaths, which turn the population against the side carrying them out. U.S. airstrikes and the ensuing civilian casualties are one of the biggest points of contention between the U.S. and Hamid Karzai's regime in Afghanistan, and they are a huge issue in Pakistan and Iraq as well.

But none of those facts matter, because McCain desperately needs to paint Obama as a traitor, an alien, a defeatist, and un-American. The rhetorical question "Who is Barack Obama?" is not accidental: It is intended to raise fundamental doubts about whether he is a real American. It ties into the online smears that accuse him of being a Muslim, a terrorist, of not saluting the flag, hating the troops, attending a madrassa, hating Israel, and so on.

In a fear-mongering speech on Monday, McCain continued this Mysterious Stranger tactic. "Whatever the question, whatever the issue, there's always a back story with Sen. Obama," McCain said. "All people want to know is: What has this man ever actually accomplished in government? What does he plan for America? In short: Who is the real Barack Obama?" Cue a subconscious image of a dark, menacing figure planning to impose sharia law on America.

Sarah Palin, confidently pronouncing on Obama's bona fides despite the fact that she has repeatedly revealed herself to a terrified world to be someone who must be kept as far away from the presidency as possible, joined in the smear campaign. Citing Obama's acquaintance with former Weatherman founder Bill Ayers, Palin said about the Democratic presidential nominee, "This is not a man who sees America as you and I do -- as the greatest force for good in the world. This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country."

Never mind the fact that Palin herself supported, and her husband belonged to, a secessionist Alaska political party that advocated armed opposition to the U.S. Never mind the fact that Obama's relationship with Ayers, as detailed in the very New York Times story that Palin cited as her source, was utterly casual. Facts are for those in the reality-based community. The point is to paint Obama not just as a terrorist sympathizer and America-hater, but as an alien. Hence Palin's description of him as "not a man who sees America as you and I do."

McCain is also using Palin to bring up the Rev. Wright. Prompted by GOP publicist Bill Kristol, whose intellectually vacuous, water-carrying New York Times column is one of the biggest embarrassments in that paper's storied history, Palin said that "I don't know why that association isn't discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country ... But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up."

Ah, the joys of having your vacuous, yet robotically perky, running mate do your dirty work for you, while she pretends that she isn't.

Calling Obama a traitor, un-American and dishonorable may be somewhat effective, but the best thing McCain and Palin have going for them is that Obama is ... black. The subliminal message of all their ads is "scary, black, unknown, black, alien, black, un-American, black." The challenge for McCain, however, is that he can't be explicitly racist: It's no longer acceptable to run Willie Horton-type ads. But ingenious minds find a way to get around this.

In a McCain ad called "Mum," Obama is portrayed as a tax-raising incompetent. But the real point of the ad, which is so nonsensical it's hard to believe anyone will pay attention to its ostensible message, may be to incite racial fears.

"In crisis, experience matters," a tough voice warns. "McCain and his congressional allies led. Tough rules on Wall Street. Stop CEO rip-offs. [An image of a grinning black man in a suit appears.] Protect your savings and pensions. [An image of an elderly white woman appears.] Obama and his liberal allies, 'mum on the market crisis.' Because 'no one knows what to do.' More taxes. No leadership. A risk your family can't afford."

This ad requires voters to have ignored reality in three ways. First, they must have somehow missed the fact that it was Republican congressmen, not Democrats, who stalled the bailout package. Second, they must swallow the fairy tale that McCain "led" the effort. And third, they must believe that McCain and the GOP have magically been transformed into sworn enemies of "Wall Street" and "CEO rip-offs." With all due respect for the incapacity of Americans, that's too much stupidity to ask for.

Which is why the real point of the ad may have been the image of the smirking black man who appears as the poster child for "CEO rip-offs." The man is Franklin Raines, former head of Fannie Mae, who resigned in 2004 under a cloud of scandal. It may seem odd that McCain's hit team selected a black CEO to illustrate the Wall Street meltdown -- there are about as many black CEOs as there are white defensive backs in the NFL. But it isn't odd at all. Using Raines serves the GOP's interests in two ways, both of them with explicit racial subtexts.

First, it furthers the bogus right-wing story that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, pushed by the Clinton administration to increase the number of minority homeowners, were responsible for the Wall Street meltdown. (In fact, as the New York Times has reported, rapacious Wall Street investors pushed Fannie Mae into the exotic, high-risk bundled deals that brought it down.)

More important, it associates Barack Obama with an allegedly corrupt black man. Few viewers are likely to know who that black face belongs to, but that doesn't matter. Working-class white voters have repeatedly told reporters that they're worried that if he's elected, Obama will turn the country over to black people. The "Mum" ad plays to those racial fears in a way that allows plausible deniability.

The GOP and its media allies are going into their two-minute drill, and it ain't pretty. Moving in lockstep with the GOP, as usual, Fox News ran a ludicrous Sean Hannity show Sunday night that painted Obama as a terrorist sympathizer and dangerous radical. And we can expect more smears, concealed race-baiting, overwrought accusations of "radicalism" and crude ad hominem attacks in the next month.

McCain's last-ditch smear campaign isn't surprising. The modern conservative movement came to power by playing on white racial fears, and McCain is hoping that there's one shot left in that gun.

The seeds of modern conservatism were sown by Barry Goldwater, whose anti-government ideology was crafted to appeal to Southern whites enraged at federal intervention into what they considered to be their own racial business. Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy" brought Goldwater's approach to fruition. By inciting populist white anger at do-gooder liberals and the black poor, Nixon was able to split the Democratic Party, peeling off the South and making deep inroads with blue-collar ethnic Democrats in states like Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Some analysts believe that the South will remain Republican forever, although demographic changes could weaken the GOP's grip. Ronald Reagan continued the strategy, kicking off his 1980 presidential campaign by giving a speech in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were killed, in which he promised to support states' rights -- a code word for institutional Southern racism.

The founding success of the modern conservative movement was that it convinced large numbers of Americans to reject "liberalism" and "big government," even if they themselves benefited from both, because they were associated with social programs aimed at helping poor blacks.

In one of the climactic political showdowns in American history, McCain and Palin are now using the GOP's time-tested tactics -- against a black man. The tactics always worked before, and one might think they would be foolproof now, with a black target. But a closer look at the very beginning of the GOP's rise to power reveals why they may not.

In fall 1964, Barry Goldwater was tanking in the polls, hammered by the media and by his Democratic opponent, Lyndon Johnson, as a radical who might start a nuclear war and would threaten cherished social programs like Social Security. As Rick Perlstein relates in "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus," Goldwater realized that he needed to scare Americans. So he turned away from his high-minded speeches about freedom and started talking incessantly about moral decay and social unrest -- subjects that had never been raised by a presidential candidate before.

To spread its message about scary blacks and moral rot, the Goldwater campaign let loose a bare-knuckle political operative named Rus Walton, who "was possessed of an almost desperate need to burn conservative truths into an audience's heart by whatever means worked -- high or low, fair or foul." Walton's staff cranked out brochures depicting black Harlemites caught in the act of smashing windows and attacking policemen, with captions like "Lyndon Johnson's Administration Is Too Busy Protecting Itself to Protect You." Another brochure read, "Are you safe on the streets? What about your wife? Your kids? Your property? What about after dark? Why should we have to be afraid? This is America!" A poster linked government with race riots, braying, "Government officials make millions while in public service. They let crime run riot in the streets ..."

Goldwater commissioned a bizarre documentary film, "Choice," that interwove images of a speeding Cadillac, wild revelers, shapely, twisting derrieres, civil rights protests, naked breasts, and criminals resisting arrest. Over these images Raymond Massey intoned, "Now there are two Americas. One is words like 'allegiance' and 'Republic' ... The other America -- the other America is no longer a dream but a nightmare." It was the first shot fired in what would later come to be called the culture wars. (Goldwater chickened out and disavowed the film.)

As Joseph Lowndes argues in his book "From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism," "race was probably the most compelling issue Goldwater had on his side." And Goldwater, though himself no racist, did his best to appeal to white fears. But it didn't work. He went on to lose in a landslide, carrying only a handful of Deep South states. The reason, as Lowndes points out, was that "[c]onservatism did not yet appeal to a majority of Americans, who saw conservatism and the Republican Party as representing wealthy, elite interests."

There are some uncanny parallels between Goldwater's campaign and McCain's. The American right has come full circle in 44 years, with two allegedly maverick senators from Arizona playing bookend roles, one at the beginning, one perhaps at the end. Goldwater was the prophet of modern conservatism, but he came too early. For his part, McCain may have come too late. He may be remembered as the last, failed Republican candidate to use the GOP's four-decade-old strategy of attacking big government, demonizing liberals and mobilizing white resentment of blacks.

McCain is playing dirtier than Goldwater did. But the smear game still may not work. And if McCain loses, it will be for the same reasons that Goldwater lost: because conservatism itself -- which means the GOP, since it no longer has a moderate branch -- has been discredited. The Republican Party under Nixon and Reagan succeeded because it was able to convince enough white Democrats and swing voters that it was the party of the "average American," oppressed by federal bureaucrats and do-gooder programs like busing and affirmative action. It was able to conceal the fact that it was the party of the rich beneath a populist, race-tinged appeal to white resentment.

But the truth is that America is not a particularly ideological country, and Americans' allegiance to conservative ideas has always been fairly superficial. Yes, our frontier mythology and tradition of federalism makes us less supportive of the welfare state than European countries -- but New Deal-inspired programs like Social Security and Medicare are deeply rooted in our society. A loose, de facto centrism is America's default position. By embracing cracked ideologies like trickle-down economics, by letting big corporations do whatever they want, and by religiously refusing to raise taxes, the GOP since Reagan has tilted much too far to the right. George W. Bush pushed the party over the cliff, with the final straw being his own unique contribution, a demented and pointless war.

Now the bills are coming due. The colossal failure of the Bush administration has destroyed the right wing's appeal to most Americans. In effect, conservatism has returned to being what it was in the days of Goldwater -- a fringe movement. McCain is desperately trying to disavow the movement he has followed all his life by painting himself as a "maverick," but as Joe Biden pointed out in perhaps the most devastating retort in his "debate" with Palin, he has not voted like a maverick on any issue of importance -- he has voted like a Republican.

Which is why so much hangs on this election. An Obama victory could signal a fundamental correction in the course of American politics, one that could last for decades. If McCain wins, it will mean that all the forces that led to the rise of modern conservatism -- racial resentment, unthinking anti-governmentalism and hatred of "liberals" -- still reign supreme. And that would force us all to stare into a national chasm, one deeper than any since McCarthyism.

-- By Gary Kamiya

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.

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One of my favorite articles. Please send this to friends worried about their taxes. K

October 8, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Palin’s Kind of Patriotism

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Criticizing Sarah Palin is truly shooting fish in a barrel. But given the huge attention she is getting, you can’t just ignore what she has to say. And there was one thing she said in the debate with Joe Biden that really sticks in my craw. It was when she turned to Biden and declared: “You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that’s not patriotic.”

What an awful statement. Palin defended the government’s $700 billion rescue plan. She defended the surge in Iraq, where her own son is now serving. She defended sending more troops to Afghanistan. And yet, at the same time, she declared that Americans who pay their fair share of taxes to support all those government-led endeavors should not be considered patriotic.

I only wish she had been asked: “Governor Palin, if paying taxes is not considered patriotic in your neighborhood, who is going to pay for the body armor that will protect your son in Iraq? Who is going to pay for the bailout you endorsed? If it isn’t from tax revenues, there are only two ways to pay for those big projects — printing more money or borrowing more money. Do you think borrowing money from China is more patriotic than raising it in taxes from Americans?” That is not putting America first. That is selling America first.

Sorry, I grew up in a very middle-class family in a very middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, and my parents taught me that paying taxes, while certainly no fun, was how we paid for the police and the Army, our public universities and local schools, scientific research and Medicare for the elderly. No one said it better than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.”

I can understand someone saying that the government has no business bailing out the financial system, but I can’t understand someone arguing that we should do that but not pay for it with taxes. I can understand someone saying we have no business in Iraq, but I can’t understand someone who advocates staying in Iraq until “victory” declaring that paying taxes to fund that is not patriotic.

How in the world can conservative commentators write with a straight face that this woman should be vice president of the United States? Do these people understand what serious trouble our country is in right now?

We are in the middle of an economic perfect storm, and we don’t know how much worse it’s going to get. People all over the world are hoarding cash, and no bank feels that it can fully trust anyone it is doing business with anywhere in the world. Did you notice that the government of Iceland just seized the country’s second-largest bank and today is begging Russia for a $5 billion loan to stave off “national bankruptcy.” What does that say? It tells you that financial globalization has gone so much farther and faster than regulatory institutions could govern it. Our crisis could bankrupt Iceland! Who knew?

And we have not yet even felt the full economic brunt here. I fear we may be at that moment just before the tsunami hits — when the birds take flight and the insects stop chirping because their acute senses can feel what is coming before humans can. At this moment, only good governance can save us. I am not sure that this crisis will end without every government in every major economy guaranteeing the creditworthiness of every financial institution it regulates. That may be the only way to get lending going again. Organizing something that big and complex will take some really smart governance and seasoned leadership.

Whether or not I agree with John McCain, he is of presidential timber. But putting the country in the position where a total novice like Sarah Palin could be asked to steer us through possibly the most serious economic crisis of our lives is flat out reckless. It is the opposite of conservative.

And please don’t tell me she will hire smart advisers. What happens when her two smartest advisers disagree?

And please also don’t tell me she is an “energy expert.” She is an energy expert exactly the same way the king of Saudi Arabia is an energy expert — by accident of residence. Palin happens to be governor of the Saudi Arabia of America — Alaska — and the only energy expertise she has is the same as the king of Saudi Arabia’s. It’s about how the windfall profits from the oil in their respective kingdoms should be divided between the oil companies and the people.

At least the king of Saudi Arabia, in advocating “drill baby drill,” is serving his country’s interests — by prolonging America’s dependence on oil. My problem with Palin is that she is also serving his country’s interests — by prolonging America’s dependence on oil. That’s not patriotic. Patriotic is offering a plan to build our economy — not by tax cuts or punching more holes in the ground, but by empowering more Americans to work in productive and innovative jobs. If Palin has that kind of a plan, I haven’t heard it.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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My sister and her friends have been doing their share in CA to help the cause. Here are some photos for our enjoyment.

Us selling food, signs and t-shirts

This is how we grow 'em in California. It's fun to be a Democrat in the Bay Area! Wish you were here. We send our encouragement to all you swing staters!
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Meet Sarah Palin's radical right-wing pals

Extremists Mark Chryson and Steve Stoll helped launch Palin's political career in Alaska, and in return had influence over policy. "Her door was open," says Chryson -- and still is.
By Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert

Editor's note: Research support provided by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund. For Salon's complete coverage of Sarah Palin, click here.

Oct. 10, 2008 |

On the afternoon of Sept. 24 in downtown Palmer, Alaska, as the sun began to sink behind the snowcapped mountains that flank the picturesque Mat-Su Valley, 51-year-old Mark Chryson sat for an hour on a park bench, reveling in tales of his days as chairman of the Alaska Independence Party. The stocky, gray-haired computer technician waxed nostalgic about quixotic battles to eliminate taxes, support the "traditional family" and secede from the United States.

So long as Alaska remained under the boot of the federal government, said Chryson, the AIP had to stand on guard to stymie a New World Order. He invited a Salon reporter to see a few items inside his pickup truck that were intended for his personal protection. "This here is my attack dog," he said with a chuckle, handing the reporter an exuberant 8-pound papillon from his passenger seat. "Her name is Suzy." Then he pulled a 9-millimeter Makarov PM pistol -- once the standard-issue sidearm for Soviet cops -- out of his glove compartment. "I've got enough weaponry to raise a small army in my basement," he said, clutching the gun in his palm. "Then again, so do most Alaskans." But Chryson added a message of reassurance to residents of that faraway place some Alaskans call "the 48." "We want to go our separate ways," he said, "but we are not going to kill you."

Though Chryson belongs to a fringe political party, one that advocates the secession of Alaska from the Union, and that organizes with other like-minded secessionist movements from Canada to the Deep South, he is not without peculiar influence in state politics, especially the rise of Sarah Palin. An obscure figure outside of Alaska, Chryson has been a political fixture in the hometown of the Republican vice-presidential nominee for over a decade. During the 1990s, when Chryson directed the AIP, he and another radical right-winger, Steve Stoll, played a quiet but pivotal role in electing Palin as mayor of Wasilla and shaping her political agenda afterward. Both Stoll and Chryson not only contributed to Palin's campaign financially, they played major behind-the-scenes roles in the Palin camp before, during and after her victory.

Palin backed Chryson as he successfully advanced a host of anti-tax, pro-gun initiatives, including one that altered the state Constitution's language to better facilitate the formation of anti-government militias. She joined in their vendetta against several local officials they disliked, and listened to their advice about hiring. She attempted to name Stoll, a John Birch Society activist known in the Mat-Su Valley as "Black Helicopter Steve," to an empty Wasilla City Council seat. "Every time I showed up her door was open," said Chryson. "And that policy continued when she became governor."

When Chryson first met Sarah Palin, however, he didn't really trust her politically. It was the early 1990s, when he was a member of a local libertarian pressure group called SAGE, or Standing Against Government Excess. (SAGE's founder, Tammy McGraw, was Palin's birth coach.) Palin was a leader in a pro-sales-tax citizens group called WOW, or Watch Over Wasilla, earning a political credential before her 1992 campaign for City Council. Though he was impressed by her interpersonal skills, Chryson greeted Palin's election warily, thinking she was too close to the Democrats on the council and too pro-tax.

But soon, Palin and Chryson discovered they could be useful to each other. Palin would be running for mayor, while Chryson was about to take over the chairmanship of the Alaska Independence Party, which at its peak in 1990 had managed to elect a governor.

The AIP was born of the vision of "Old Joe" Vogler, a hard-bitten former gold miner who hated the government of the United States almost as much as he hated wolves and environmentalists. His resentment peaked during the early 1970s when the federal government began installing Alaska's oil and gas pipeline. Fueled by raw rage -- "The United States has made a colony of Alaska," he told author John McPhee in 1977 -- Vogler declared a maverick candidacy for the governorship in 1982. Though he lost, Old Joe became a force to be reckoned with, as well as a constant source of amusement for Alaska's political class. During a gubernatorial debate in 1982, Vogler proposed using nuclear weapons to obliterate the glaciers blocking roadways to Juneau. "There's gold under there!" he exclaimed.

Vogler made another failed run for the governor's mansion in 1986. But the AIP's fortunes shifted suddenly four years later when Vogler convinced Richard Nixon's former interior secretary, Wally Hickel, to run for governor under his party's banner. Hickel coasted to victory, outflanking a moderate Republican and a centrist Democrat. An archconservative Republican running under the AIP candidate, Jack Coghill, was elected lieutenant governor.

Hickel's subsequent failure as governor to press for a vote on Alaskan independence rankled Old Joe. With sponsorship from the Islamic Republic of Iran, Vogler was scheduled to present his case for Alaskan secession before the United Nations General Assembly in the late spring of 1993. But before he could, Old Joe's long, strange political career ended tragically that May when he was murdered by a fellow secessionist.

Hickel rejoined the Republican Party the year after Vogler's death and didn't run for reelection. Lt. Gov. Coghill's campaign to succeed him as the AIP candidate for governor ended in disaster; he peeled away just enough votes from the Republican, Jim Campbell, to throw the gubernatorial election to Democrat Tony Knowles.

Despite the disaster, Coghill hung on as AIP chairman for three more years. When he was asked to resign in 1997, Mark Chryson replaced him. Chryson pursued a dual policy of cozying up to secessionist and right-wing groups in Alaska and elsewhere while also attempting to replicate the AIP's success with Hickel in infiltrating the mainstream.

Unlike some radical right-wingers, Chryson doesn't put forward his ideas freighted with anger or paranoia. And in a state where defense of gun and property rights often takes on a real religious fervor, Chryson was able to present himself as a typical Alaskan.

He rose through party ranks by reducing the AIP's platform to a single page that "90 percent of Alaskans could agree with." This meant scrubbing the old platform of what Chryson called "racist language" while accommodating the state's growing Christian right movement by emphasizing the AIP's commitment to the "traditional family."

"The AIP is very family-oriented," Chryson explained. "We're for the traditional family -- daddy, mommy, kids -- because we all know that it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. And we don't care if Heather has two mommies. That's not a traditional family."

Chryson further streamlined the AIP's platform by softening its secessionist language. Instead of calling for immediate separation from the United States, the platform now demands a vote on independence.

Yet Chryson maintains that his party remains committed to full independence. "The Alaskan Independence Party has got links to almost every independence-minded movement in the world," Chryson exclaimed. "And Alaska is not the only place that's about separation. There's at least 30 different states that are talking about some type of separation from the United States."

This has meant rubbing shoulders and forging alliances with outright white supremacists and far-right theocrats, particularly those who dominate the proceedings at such gatherings as the North American Secessionist conventions, which AIP delegates have attended in recent years. The AIP's affiliation with neo-Confederate organizations is motivated as much by ideological affinity as by organizational convenience. Indeed, Chryson makes no secret of his sympathy for the Lost Cause. "Should the Confederate states have been allowed to separate and go their peaceful ways?" Chryson asked rhetorically. "Yes. The War of Northern Aggression, or the Civil War, or the War Between the States -- however you want to refer to it -- was not about slavery, it was about states' rights."

Another far-right organization with whom the AIP has long been aligned is Howard Phillips' militia-minded Constitution Party. The AIP has been listed as the Constitution Party's state affiliate since the late 1990s, and it has endorsed the Constitution Party's presidential candidates (Michael Peroutka and Chuck Baldwin) in the past two elections.

The Constitution Party boasts an openly theocratic platform that reads, "It is our goal to limit the federal government to its delegated, enumerated, Constitutional functions and to restore American jurisprudence to its original Biblical common-law foundations." In its 1990s incarnation as the U.S. Taxpayers Party, it was on the front lines in promoting the "militia" movement, and a significant portion of its membership comprises former and current militia members.

At its 1992 convention, the AIP hosted both Phillips -- the USTP's presidential candidate -- and militia-movement leader Col. James "Bo" Gritz, who was campaigning for president under the banner of the far-right Populist Party. According to Chryson, AIP regulars heavily supported Gritz, but the party deferred to Phillips' presence and issued no official endorsements.

In Wasilla, the AIP became powerful by proxy -- because of Chryson and Stoll's alliance with Sarah Palin. Chryson and Stoll had found themselves in constant opposition to policies of Wasilla's Democratic mayor, who started his three-term, nine-year tenure in 1987. By 1992, Chryson and Stoll had begun convening regular protests outside City Council. Their demonstrations invariably involved grievances against any and all forms of "socialist government," from city planning to public education. Stoll shared Chryson's conspiratorial views: "The rumor was that he had wrapped his guns in plastic and buried them in his yard so he could get them after the New World Order took over," Stein told a reporter.

Chryson did not trust Palin when she joined the City Council in 1992. He claimed that she was handpicked by Democratic City Council leaders and by Wasilla's Democratic mayor, John Stein, to rubber-stamp their tax hike proposals. "When I first met her," he said, "I thought she was extremely left. But I've watched her slowly as she's become more pronounced in her conservative ideology."

Palin was well aware of Chryson's views. "She knew my beliefs," Chryson said. "The entire state knew my beliefs. I wasn't afraid of being on the news, on camera speaking my views."

But Chryson believes she trusted his judgment because he accurately predicted what life on the City Council would be like. "We were telling her, 'This is probably what's going to happen,'" he said. "'The city is going to give this many people raises, they're going to pave everybody's roads, and they're going to pave the City Council members' roads.' We couldn't have scripted it better because everything we predicted came true."

After intense evangelizing by Chryson and his allies, they claimed Palin as a convert. "When she started taking her job seriously," Chryson said, "the people who put her in as the rubber stamp found out the hard way that she was not going to go their way." In 1994, Sarah Palin attended the AIP's statewide convention. In 1995, her husband, Todd, changed his voter registration to AIP. Except for an interruption of a few months, he would remain registered was an AIP member until 2002, when he changed his registration to undeclared.

In 1996, Palin decided to run against John Stein as the Republican candidate for mayor of Wasilla. While Palin pushed back against Stein's policies, particularly those related to funding public works, Chryson said he and Steve Stoll prepared the groundwork for her mayoral campaign.

Chryson and Stoll viewed Palin's ascendancy as a vehicle for their own political ambitions. "She got support from these guys," Stein remarked. "I think smart politicians never utter those kind of radical things, but they let other people do it for them. I never recall Sarah saying she supported the militia or taking a public stand like that. But these guys were definitely behind Sarah, thinking she was the more conservative choice."

"They worked behind the scenes," said Stein. "I think they had a lot of influence in terms of helping with the back-scatter negative campaigning."

Indeed, Chryson boasted that he and his allies urged Palin to focus her campaign on slashing character-based attacks. For instance, Chryson advised Palin to paint Stein as a sexist who had told her "to just sit there and look pretty" while she served on Wasilla's City Council. Though Palin never made this accusation, her 1996 campaign for mayor was the most negative Wasilla residents had ever witnessed.

While Palin played up her total opposition to the sales tax and gun control -- the two hobgoblins of the AIP -- mailers spread throughout the town portraying her as "the Christian candidate," a subtle suggestion that Stein, who is Lutheran, might be Jewish. "I watched that campaign unfold, bringing a level of slime our community hadn't seen until then," recalled Phil Munger, a local music teacher who counts himself as a close friend of Stein.

"This same group [Stoll and Chryson] also [publicly] challenged me on whether my wife and I were married because she had kept her maiden name," Stein bitterly recalled. "So we literally had to produce a marriage certificate. And as I recall, they said, 'Well, you could have forged that.'"

When Palin won the election, the men who had once shouted anti-government slogans outside City Hall now had a foothold inside the mayor's office. Palin attempted to pay back her newfound pals during her first City Council meeting as mayor. In that meeting, on Oct. 14, 1996, she appointed Stoll to one of the City Council's two newly vacant seats. But Palin was blocked by the single vote of then-Councilman Nick Carney, who had endured countless rancorous confrontations with Stoll and considered him a "violent" influence on local politics. Though Palin considered consulting attorneys about finding another means of placing Stoll on the council, she was ultimately forced to back down and accept a compromise candidate.

Emboldened by his nomination by Mayor Palin, Stoll later demanded she fire Wasilla's museum director, John Cooper, a personal enemy he longed to sabotage. Palin obliged, eliminating Cooper's position in short order. "Gotcha, Cooper!" Stoll told the deposed museum director after his termination, as Cooper told a reporter for the New York Times. "And it only cost me a campaign contribution." Stoll, who donated $1,000 to Palin's mayoral campaign, did not respond to numerous requests for an interview. Palin has blamed budget concerns for Cooper's departure.

The following year, when Carney proposed a local gun-control measure, Palin organized with Chryson to smother the nascent plan in its cradle. Carney's proposed ordinance would have prohibited residents from carrying guns into schools, bars, hospitals, government offices and playgrounds. Infuriated by the proposal that Carney viewed as a common-sense public-safety measure, Chryson and seven allies stormed a July 1997 council meeting.

With the bill still in its formative stages, Carney was not even ready to present it to the council, let alone conduct public hearings on it. He and other council members objected to the ad-hoc hearing as "a waste of time." But Palin -- in plain violation of council rules and norms -- insisted that Chryson testify, stating, according to the minutes, that "she invites the public to speak on any issue at any time."

When Carney tried later in the meeting to have the ordinance discussed officially at the following regular council meeting, he couldn't even get a second. His proposal died that night, thanks to Palin and her extremist allies.

"A lot of it was the ultra-conservative far right that is against everything in government, including taxes," recalled Carney. "A lot of it was a personal attack on me as being anti-gun, and a personal attack on anybody who deigned to threaten their authority to carry a loaded firearm wherever they pleased. That was the tenor of it. And it was being choreographed by Steve Stoll and the mayor."

Asked if he thought it was Palin who had instigated the turnout, he replied: "I know it was."

By Chryson's account, he and Palin also worked hand-in-glove to slash property taxes and block a state proposal that would have taken money for public programs from the Permanent Fund Dividend, or the oil and gas fund that doles out annual payments to citizens of Alaska. Palin endorsed Chryson's unsuccessful initiative to move the state Legislature from Juneau to Wasilla. She also lent her support to Chryson's crusade to alter the Alaska Constitution's language on gun rights so cities and counties could not impose their own restrictions. "It took over 10 years to get that language written in," Chryson said. "But Sarah [Palin] was there supporting it."

"With Sarah as a mayor," said Chryson, "there were a number of times when I just showed up at City Hall and said, 'Hey, Sarah, we need help.' I think there was only one time when I wasn't able to talk to her and that was because she was in a meeting."

Chryson says the door remains open now that Palin is governor. (Palin's office did not respond to Salon's request for an interview.) While Palin has been more circumspect in her dealings with groups like the AIP as she has risen through the political ranks, she has stayed in touch.

When Palin ran for governor in 2006, marketing herself as a fresh-faced reformer determined to crush the GOP's ossified power structure, she made certain to appear at the AIP's state convention. To burnish her maverick image, she also tapped one-time AIP member and born-again Republican Walter Hickel as her campaign co-chair. Hickel barnstormed the state for Palin, hailing her support for an "all-Alaska" liquefied gas pipeline, a project first promoted in 2002 by an AIP gubernatorial candidate named Nels Anderson. When Palin delivered her victory speech on election night, Hickel stood beaming by her side. "I made her governor," he boasted afterward. Two years later, Hickel has endorsed Palin's bid for vice president.

Just months before Palin burst onto the national stage as McCain's vice-presidential nominee, she delivered a videotaped address to the AIP's annual convention. Her message was scrupulously free of secessionist rhetoric, but complementary nonetheless. "I share your party's vision of upholding the Constitution of our great state," Palin told the assembly of AIP delegates. "My administration remains focused on reining in government growth so individual liberty can expand. I know you agree with that ... Keep up the good work and God bless you."

When Palin became the Republican vice-presidential nominee, her attendance of the 1994 and 2006 AIP conventions and her husband's membership in the party (as well as Palin's videotaped welcome to the AIP's 2008 convention) generated a minor controversy. Chryson claimed, however, that Sarah and Todd Palin never even played a minor role in his party's internal affairs. "Sarah's never been a member of the Alaskan Independence Party," Chryson insisted. "Todd has, but most of rural Alaska has too. I never saw him at a meeting. They were at one meeting I was at. Sarah said hello, but I didn't pay attention because I was taking care of business."

But whether the Palins participated directly in shaping the AIP's program is less relevant than the extent to which they will implement that program. Chryson and his allies have demonstrated just as much interest in grooming major party candidates as they have in putting forward their own people. At a national convention of secessionist groups in 2007, AIP vice chairman Dexter Clark announced that his party would seek to "infiltrate" the Democratic and Republican parties with candidates sympathetic to its hard-right, secessionist agenda. "You should use that tactic. You should infiltrate," Clark told his audience of neo-Confederates, theocrats and libertarians. "Whichever party you think in that area you can get something done, get into that party. Even though that party has its problems, right now that is the only avenue."

Clark pointed to Palin's political career as the model of a successful infiltration. "There's a lot of talk of her moving up," Clark said of Palin. "She was a member [of the AIP] when she was mayor of a small town, that was a nonpartisan job. But to get along and to go along she switched to the Republican Party … She is pretty well sympathetic because of her membership."

Clark's assertion that Palin was once a card-carrying AIP member was swiftly discredited by the McCain campaign, which produced records showing she had been a registered Republican since 1988. But then why would Clark make such a statement? Why did he seem confident that Palin was a true-blue AIP activist burrowing within the Republican Party? The most salient answer is that Palin was once so thoroughly embedded with AIP figures like Chryson and Stoll and seemed so enthusiastic about their agenda, Clark may have simply assumed she belonged to his party.

Now, Palin is a household name and her every move is scrutinized by the Washington press corps. She can no longer afford to kibitz with secessionists, however instrumental they may have been to her meteoric ascendancy. This does not trouble her old AIP allies. Indeed, Chryson is hopeful that Palin's inauguration will also represent the start of a new infiltration.

"I've had my issues but she's still staying true to her core values," Chryson concluded. "Sarah's friends don't all agree with her, but do they respect her? Do they respect her ideology and her values? Definitely."

-- By Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.

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She's such an environmentalist, though...

Sarah Palin: The view from Alaska

Amid "Troopergate" and other government scandals, including killing wolf pups, an Alaskan writer explains why the Palin phenomenon rings hollow in his home state.
By Nick Jans

Oct. 11, 2008 |

I sat on the bank of the Kobuk River in northwest arctic Alaska on a mid-September morning. Upstream somewhere, wolves were howling -- their chorus filling the silence, close enough that I could hear the aspiration at the end of each wavering call. Behind me, the slate-gray heave of the Brooks Range spilled off toward the north, the shapes of some peaks so familiar I've seen them in my sleep. The nearest highway lay 250 miles away. This is the Alaska where I spent half my life, and the only place that's ever felt like home -- the land of Eskimo villages, waves of migrating caribou and seemingly limitless space.

Though I was beyond the reach of the Internet and cellphones, and life was filled with rutting bull moose, incandescent autumn light and fresh grizzly tracks, I knew that thousands of miles to the south, the rest of the country was getting a crash course on our governor, Sarah Palin -- someone who believes that climate change isn't our fault; is dead set against a woman's right to choose; has supported creationism in the schools; and was prayed over by a visiting minister at her church to shield her against witchcraft.

How was I to explain to all my lower 48 friends and writing colleagues how such a person could have been elected to lead our state -- let alone been chosen to possibly become vice-president? Truth be told, I was as startled as anyone when I heard the news. At first I thought the McCain campaign's announcement was some sort of bad joke.

In the broadest sense, Palin is a poseur. Alaska is too large and culturally diverse (it's only a bit smaller than the entire lower 48 east of the Mississippi, and once was divided into four time zones) to be summed up by some abstract, romanticized notion. And even if it could be, it sure wouldn't be symbolized by Palin. "The typical Alaskan? She couldn't be farther from it," says Alaska House Minority Leader Beth Kertulla.

Still, Palin is a genuine Alaskan -- of a kind. The kind that flowed north in the wake of the '70s oil boom, Bible Belt politics and attitudes under arm, and transformed this state from a free-thinking, independent bastion of genuine libertarianism and individuality into a reactionary fundamentalist enclave with dollar signs in its eyes and an all-for-me mentality.

Palin's Alaska is embodied in Wasilla, a blue-collar, sharp-elbowed town of burgeoning big box stores, suburban subdivisions, evangelical pocket churches and car dealerships morphing across the landscape, outward from Anchorage, the state's urban epicenter. She has lived in Wasilla practically all her life, and even now resides there, the first Alaska executive to eschew the white-pillared mansion in Juneau, down on the Southeast Panhandle.

Folks in the Mat-Su Valley, as the area is known, overwhelmingly support their favorite daughter's policies -- including a state-sanctioned program where private pilots chase down and kill wolves from small aircraft, and another that favors oil drilling offshore in the arctic sea ice and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. These same voters forage at McDonald's and Safeway in their hunter camouflage, and make regular wilderness forays up and down the state's limited highway grid with ATVs, snowmobiles and airboats in tow behind their oversize trucks. Sometimes I imagine I can hear the roar echoing across the state, all the way to the upper Kobuk, where easements for the highways of tomorrow are already staked out across the tundra.

Like many Alaskans, I resent Palin's claims that she speaks for all of us, and cringe when she tosses off her stump speech line, "Well, up in Alaska, we…." Not only did I not vote for her, she represents the antithesis of the Alaska I love. As mayor, she helped shape Wasilla into the chaotic, poorly planned strip mall that it is; as governor, she's promoted that same headlong drive toward development and despoilment on a grand scale, while paying lip service to her love of the place.

As for that frontierswoman shtick, take another look at that hairpiece-augmented beehive and those stiletto heels. Coming from a college-educated family, living in a half-million-dollar view home, basking in a net worth of $1.25 million, and having owned 40-some registered motorized vehicles in the past two decades (including 17 snowmobiles and a plane) hardly qualifies Palin and her clan as the quintessential Joe Six-Pack family unit -- though the adulation from that quarter shows the Palins must be fulfilling some sort of role-model fantasy.

Palin can claim to know Alaska; the fact is, she's seen only a minuscule fraction of it -- and that doesn't include Little Diomede Island, the one place in Alaska where you actually can see Russia. So she can ride an ATV and shoot guns. Set her down in the bush on her own and I bet we'd discover she's about as adept at butchering a moose and building a fire at 40 below zero as she is at discussing Supreme Court decisions. And that mountain-woman act is only the tip of a hollow iceberg.

Palin, and by extension, the McCain campaign, has hijacked our state for political purposes, much to the chagrin of the tens of thousands of Alaskans who loathe what she stands for. Her much-touted popularity among residents has eroded over the past six weeks to somewhere in the mid-60s -- not exactly what you'd expect in support of a home girl making a White House run.

There are no doubt a variety of reasons for this decline, but many Alaskans are embarrassed -- not just by her, but for our state and for ourselves. What's with the smug posturing, recently adopted fake Minnesota accent, and that gosh-darn-it hockey mom pitch? Maybe it plays well in Peoria (and presumably Duluth), but it's all an act. "She's definitely put on a new persona since she's been a vice-presidential candidate," says Kertulla, who has worked closely with Palin for the past 18 months. "I don't even recognize her."

Affectations aside, there's plenty about Palin we Alaskans do recognize, and all too well. She's already proven to us that her promises of transparent government, attendant to the will of the people, are bear pucky. We know about her private e-mail accounts and her systematic obstruction of the Alaska Legislature's investigation of the so-called Troopergate scandal. But let's turn to her environmental record, where a similar pattern of obfuscation continues.

First, Palin pushed hard, along with sport hunting and guiding interests, to help defeat a ballot initiative that would have stopped the state's current aerial wolf control program, which had been criticized by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council for flawed science. Now her administration has pointedly refused to respond to repeated public information requests (I'm one of the petitioners, and a potential litigant), regarding the apparently illegal killing of 14 wolf pups at their dens on the Alaska Peninsula this spring by state personnel, including two high-level Department of Fish and Game administrators. A biologist at the scene admitted to an independent wolf scientist that the 6-week-old pups were held down and shot in the head, one by one. This inhumane practice, known as "denning," has been illegal for 40 years. But a simple request for information on the details of this operation, including to what extent the governor was involved in the decision, has resulted in a typical Palinesque roadblock and a string of untruths.

Our I-love-Alaska governor was also instrumental in defeating a ballot initiative to stop development of a gargantuan open-pit mine incongruously known as Pebble near the headwaters of the most productive salmon watershed in the state, Bristol Bay. The current mine design calls for building the world's largest earthen dam to hold back an enormous lake of toxic waste -- this in a known earthquake zone. Crazy stuff, yet Palin openly opposed the initiative, in lock step with international mining corporations that invested millions of dollars in a misinformation campaign.

But Palin's certified anti-environmental whopper is her lawsuit against the Bush administration (of all outfits) for listing polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. She claimed Alaska's own experts had completed a review of the federal data and concluded that the listing was uncalled for. The truth was, state biologists had come to the opposite conclusion. But that report was never released, and her researchers had a gag clamped on them. Palin simply didn't want anything to get in the way of offshore oil drilling in moving pack ice -- where there is no way to contain, let alone clean up, catastrophic spills.

Whenever science or rules get in Palin's way, she blows them off. Says homesteader Mark Richards, co-founder of the Alaska Chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers (a moderate conservation group), "Palin, like Governor Murkowski before her, is part and parcel of the good-ol-boy network that says, 'Alaska is open for business.'"

Want to talk to Sarah? As governor, she has been accessible only on her carefully chosen terms, a trend we're now witnessing on the national stage. And how about those Katie Couric moments when she drifts just a skosh off a well-rehearsed script? Are those a recent phenomenon, brought on by all this new information, pressure and the liberal-gotcha media? Nah. She's been spouting "political gibberish" (to quote gubernatorial opponent Andrew Halcro) since she arrived on the Alaska scene. Yet somehow she continues to get away with it.

In the end, Palin's attempt to cash in on the Eau d'Alaska mystique as she supports its destruction sickens those of us who do love this land, not for what it will be some day, after the roads and mines and pipelines and cities and malls are all in, but for what it is now. What we see before us is the soul of an ambitious, ruthless, Parks Highway hillbilly -- a woman who represents the Alaska you probably never want to meet, and the one we wish never existed. That said, we're all too willing to take her back. The alternative is just too damn frightening.

-- By Nick Jans

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.

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Great news!!!

October 10, 2008
A Buckley endorses Obama
Posted: 07:08 PM ET

From CNN Ticker Producer Alexander Mooney

Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, is backing Obama.

(CNN) - No, hell has not frozen over, but a Buckley is backing a Democrat for president.

Christopher Buckley, the son of the late conservative icon William F. Buckley, said Friday he's decided to back Barack Obama's White House bid, the first time in his life he will vote Democrat.

"It's a good thing my dear old mum and pup [sic] are no longer alive. They'd cut off my allowance," Buckley, a columnist for the
conservative National Review, wrote on the Web site The Daily Beast Friday.

Buckley, who praised McCain in a New York Times Op-Ed earlier this year and defended the Arizona senator's conservative credentials against wary talk-radio hosts, said McCain is no longer the "real" and "unconventional" man he once admired.

"This campaign has changed John McCain," Buckley wrote. "It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget 'by the end of my first term.' Who, really, believes that?

"Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis," Buckley added. "His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?"

But Buckley made clear he's not just voting against McCain, praising Obama for his "first-class temperament and first-class intellect.

"Obama has in him-I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy 'We are the people we have been waiting for' silly rhetoric-the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for," Buckley wrote.

LOCAL

I write to you to encourage your vote on November 4th to retain all of the judges on your ballot.

The Missouri Bar has done an extensive job in screening our judges who are up for retention. In Missouri, under our plan to select judges, we have removed partisan politics from the process and we vote to either retain or not retain judges. The judicial performance review does more than just ask lawyers who practice in front of these judges if they meet up to 16 criteria, the Missouri Bar have also done surveys of jurors. If you would like to see the review for any specific judge, they are available at www.mobar.org. In short, I ask that you consider voting for the retention of all the judges. You should know that the review process is very serious and very thorough. In Jackson County, the results showed that all the judges deserve to be retained. That is not true for at least one judge in St. Louis. As you speak with folks, please spread the word about the judicial performance review and about voting to retain these important, non-partisan public servants. Please consider forwarding this email on to your neighbors, friends and colleagues.

Thanks for your help in spreading the word on this important issue on the November 4th election.
Stephen R. Bough
The Law Offices of Stephen R. Bough
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Blue Hearts 10-8-08

2008-10-08T18:22:00.023-05:00

Hey All,

Today is the last day to register voters for MO. I hope you're happy with the efforts you've made. If not, you can make up for it by working on GOTV. That will be the next step. If so, let's keep up the good work?

Thank you for all your hard work. That we are so close in MO is an achievement. How proud we can be of our state if we can bring MO back to Blue. And thank you to all our KS neighbors for all they've done in MO. Our successes are yours as well!!!

Moving on, I have a number of fantastic articles to bring to you. So, happy reading!

Kristin
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HUMOR & VIDEO

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1832128

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c&feature=related

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/04/tina-fey-as-sarah-palin-i_n_131964.html

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http://my.barackobama.com/447taxincreases

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If the Candidates were trains

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GENERAL
Absolutely spot on. K

Flirting her way to victory
Sarah Palin's farcical debate performance lowered the standards for both female candidates and US political discourse

Michelle Goldberg
guardian.co.uk, Friday October 03 2008 18:30 BST

Sarah Palin winks during the vice-presidential debate on Thursday in St Louis, Missouri. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP

At least three times last night, Sarah Palin, the adorable, preposterous vice-presidential candidate, winked at the audience. Had a male candidate with a similar reputation for attractive vapidity made such a brazen attempt to flirt his way into the good graces of the voting public, it would have universally noted, discussed and mocked. Palin, however, has single-handedly so lowered the standards both for female candidates and American political discourse that, with her newfound ability to speak in more-or-less full sentences, she is now deemed to have performed acceptably last night.

By any normal standard, including the ones applied to male presidential candidates of either party, she did not. Early on, she made the astonishing announcement that she had no intentions of actually answering the queries put to her. "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also," she said.

And so she preceded, with an almost surreal disregard for the subjects she was supposed to be discussing, to unleash fusillades of scripted attack lines, platitudes, lies, gibberish and grating references to her own pseudo-folksy authenticity.

It was an appalling display. The only reason it was not widely described as such is that too many American pundits don't even try to judge the truth, wisdom or reasonableness of the political rhetoric they are paid to pronounce upon. Instead, they imagine themselves as interpreters of a mythical mass of "average Americans" who they both venerate and despise.

In pronouncing upon a debate, they don't try and determine whether a candidate's responses correspond to existing reality, or whether he or she is capable of talking about subjects such as the deregulation of the financial markets or the devolution of the war in Afghanistan. The criteria are far more vaporous. In this case, it was whether Palin could avoid utterly humiliating herself for 90 minutes, and whether urbane commentators would believe that she had connected to a public that they see as ignorant and sentimental. For the Alaska governor, mission accomplished.

There is indeed something mesmerising about Palin, with her manic beaming and fulsome confidence in her own charm. The force of her personality managed to slightly obscure the insulting emptiness of her answers last night. It's worth reading the transcript of the encounter, where it becomes clearer how bizarre much of what she said was. Here, for example, is how she responded to Biden's comments about how the middle class has been short-changed during the Bush administration, and how McCain will continue Bush's policies:

Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced [sic] your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let's look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I'm glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? ... My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here's a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate.

Evidently, Palin's pre-debate handlers judged her incapable of speaking on a fairly wide range of subjects, and so instructed to her to simply disregard questions that did not invite memorised talking points or cutesy filibustering. They probably told her to play up her spunky average-ness, which she did to the point of shtick - and dishonesty. Asked what her achilles heel is - a question she either didn't understand or chose to ignore - she started in on how McCain chose her because of her "connection to the heartland of America. Being a mom, one very concerned about a son in the war, about a special needs child, about kids heading off to college, how are we going to pay those tuition bills?"

None of Palin's children, it should be noted, is heading off to college. Her son is on the way to Iraq, and her pregnant 17-year-old daughter is engaged to be married to a high-school dropout and self-described "fuckin' redneck". Palin is a woman who can't even tell the truth about the most quotidian and public details of her own life, never mind about matters of major public import. In her only vice-presidential debate, she was shallow, mendacious and phoney. What kind of maverick, after all, keeps harping on what a maverick she is? That her performance was considered anything but a farce doesn't show how high Palin has risen, but how low we all have sunk.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
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Dear Women Supporters of Senator Obama.

There are a couple of ways you can make your voice heard in this very important election. You can sign your name to show you support for women for Obama.

Next week the Obama campaign will roll out lists of hundreds of thousands of American women -- homemakers, teachers/educators, nurses, businesswomen (non-profit and profit), community organizers, medical professionals, et al - who publicly endorse Senators Obama and Biden as the next Democratic President and Vice President of the United States. This list, which will be made available to the media on request, will illustrate the breadth and depth of support for these candidates among American women across the country. Please send an e-mail - NOW - to Katheryn Rosen with your name, profession, city, and state at krosen@paforchange.com THEN , email this to 10 other women , ASAP.
(NOTE: Women who are affiliated with organizations that may not be appropriate for endorsement, can endorse on a personal basis rather than an affiliated basis).
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The Sarah Palin pity party

Everyone seems to be oozing sympathy for the fumbling vice-presidential nominee. Please. Cry me a freaking river.
By Rebecca Traister

Sep. 30, 2008 | Is this the week that Democrats and Republicans join hands -- to heap pity on poor Sarah Palin?

At the moment, all signs point to yes, as some strange bedfellows reveal that they have been feeling sorry for the vice-presidential candidate ever since she stopped speaking without the help of a teleprompter. Conservative women like Kathleen Parker and Kathryn Jean Lopez are shuddering with sympathy as they realize that the candidate who thrilled them, just weeks ago, is not in shape for the big game. They're not alone. The New Republic's Christopher Orr feels that Palin has been misused by the team that tapped her. In the New York Times, Judith Warner feels for Sarah, too! And over at the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates empathizes with intelligence and nuance, making clear that he's not expressing pity. Salon's own Glenn Greenwald watched the Katie Couric interview and "actually felt sorry for Sarah Palin." Even Amy Poehler, impersonating Katie Couric on last week's "Saturday Night Live," makes the joke that Palin's cornered-animal ineptitude makes her "increasingly adorable."

I guess I'm one cold dame, because while Palin provokes many unpleasant emotions in me, I just can't seem to summon pity, affection or remorse.

Don't get me wrong, I'm just like all of the rest of you, part of the bipartisan jumble of viewers that keeps one hand poised above the mute button and the other over my eyes during Palin's disastrous interviews. Like everyone else, I can barely take the waves of embarrassment that come with watching someone do something so badly. Roseanne Barr singing the national anthem, Sofia Coppola acting in "The Godfather: Part III," Sarah Palin talking about Russia -- they all create the same level of eyeball-squinching discomfort.

But just because I'm human, just because I can feel, just because I did say this weekend that I "almost feel sorry for her" doesn't mean, when I consider the situation rationally, that I do. Yes, as a feminist, it sucks -- hard -- to watch a woman, no matter how much I hate her politics, unable to answer questions about her running mate during a television interview. And perhaps it's because this experience pains me so much that I feel not sympathy but biting anger. At her, at John McCain, at the misogynistic political mash that has been made of what was otherwise a groundbreaking year for women in presidential politics.

In her "Poor Sarah" column, Warner writes of the wave of "self-recognition and sympathy [that] washed over" her when she saw a photo of Palin talking to Henry Kissinger. Palin -- as "a woman fully aware that she was out of her league, scared out of her wits, hanging on for dear life" -- apparently reminded Warner of herself. Wow. Putting aside the massively depressing implication that Warner recognizes this attitude because she believes it to be somehow written into the female condition, let's consider that there are any number of women who could have been John McCain's running mate -- from Olympia Snowe to Christine Todd Whitman to Kay Bailey Hutchison to Elizabeth Dole to Condoleezza Rice -- who would not have provoked this reaction. Democrats might well have been repulsed and infuriated by these women's policy positions. But we would not have been sitting around worrying about how scared they looked.

In her piece, Warner diagnoses Palin with a case of "Impostor Syndrome," positing that admirers who watched her sitting across from world leaders at the U.N. last week were recognizing that "she can't possibly do it all -- the kids, the special-needs baby, the big job, the big conversations with foreign leaders. And neither could they." Seriously? Do we have to drag out a list of women who miraculously have found a way to manage to balance many of these factors -- Hillary Clinton? Nancy Pelosi? Michelle Bachelet? -- and could still explain the Bush Doctrine without breaking into hives? This is not breaking my heart. It is breaking my spirit.

The Atlantic's Coates takes a far smarter, but ultimately still too gentle, approach to Palin in his blog. He writes, compassionately, "There are a lot of us lefties who are guffawing right now and are happy to see Palin seemingly stumbling drunkenly from occasional interview to occasional interview." Coates asserts that McCain "[tossed] her to the wolves" and notes that while she surely had some agency in this whole mess, "where I am from the elders protect you, and pull you back when you've gone too far, when your head has gotten too big."

Where I come from, a woman -- and especially a woman governor with executive experience -- doesn't have to rely on any elder or any man to protect her and pull her ass out of the fire. She can make a decision all on her own. (Palin was more than happy to tell Charlie Gibson that she made her decision to join the McCain ticket without blinking.) I agree with Coates that the McCain camp was craven, sexist and disrespectful in its choice of Palin, but I don't agree that the Alaska governor was a passive victim of their Machiavellian plotting. A very successful woman, Palin has the wherewithal to move forward consciously. What she did was move forward thoughtlessly and overconfidently, without considering that her abilities or qualifications would ever be questioned.

Christopher Orr writes sympathetically about the scenario that Palin may have envisioned, in which she tours the country on the wave of adoration that buoyed her out of St. Paul and through a post-convention victory lap. In his mind, she might well have continued to give winning, grinning interviews, charming the pants off regular folks all across the country, if the accursed McCain campaign hadn't nervously locked her in a no-press-allowed tower. Orr compares Palin to a talented athlete who, as a result of being over-coached, doesn't soar to new physical heights but instead gets "broken down, [loses] confidence in his game, [becomes] tentative, second guessing himself even to the point of paralysis."

Surely if Palin's political muscles were as taut and supple as Orr suspects, the campaign would not have been so quick to put her on a special training regimen.

It was so predictable that we would get to a pity-poor-helpless-Sarah phase. The press was already warming up for it on the day McCain announced her as his running mate, when NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell speculated that McCain's choice was designed to declaw scrappy Joe Biden, whose aggressive style would come off as bullying next to the sweet hockey mom from Alaska. Now, of course, we know about the hockey moms and the pit bulls; the more-powerful-than-expected Palin juggernaut forestalled the pity/victim/mean boy/poor Sarah phase.

So here it is, finally. And as unpleasant as it may be to watch the humiliation of a woman who waltzed into a spotlight too strong to withstand, I flat out refuse to be manipulated into another stage of gendered regress -- back to the pre-Pelosi, pre-Hillary days when girls couldn't stand the heat and so were shooed back to the kitchen.

Sarah Palin is no wilting flower. She is a politician who took the national stage and sneered at the work of community activists. She boldly tries to pass off incuriosity and lassitude as regular-people qualities, thereby doing a disservice to all those Americans who also work two jobs and do not come from families that hand out passports and backpacking trips, yet still manage to pick up a paper and read about their government and seek out experience and knowledge.

When you stage a train wreck of this magnitude -- trying to pass one underqualified chick off as another highly qualified chick with the lame hope that no one will notice -- well, then, I don't feel bad for you.

When you treat women as your toys, as gullible and insensate pawns in your Big Fat Presidential Bid -- or in Palin's case, in your Big Fat Chance to Be the First Woman Vice President Thanks to All the Cracks Hillary Put in the Ceiling -- I don't feel bad for you.

When you don't take your own career and reputation seriously enough to pause before striding onto a national stage and lying about your record of opposing a Bridge to Nowhere or using your special-needs child to garner the support of Americans in need of healthcare reform you don't support, I don't feel bad for you.

When you don't have enough regard for your country or its politics to cram effectively for the test -- a test that helps determine whether or not you get to run that country and participate in its politics -- I don't feel bad for you.

When your project is reliant on gaining the support of women whose reproductive rights you would limit, whose access to birth control and sex education you would curtail, whose healthcare options you would decrease, whose civil liberties you would take away and whose children and husbands and brothers (and sisters and daughters and friends) you would send to war in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and wherever else you saw fit without actually understanding international relations, I don't feel bad for you.

I don't want to be played by the girl-strings anymore. Shaking our heads and wringing our hands in sympathy with Sarah Palin is a disservice to every woman who has ever been unfairly dismissed based on her gender, because this is an utterly fair dismissal, based on an utter lack of ability and readiness. It's a disservice to minority populations of every stripe whose place in the political spectrum has been unfairly spotlighted as mere tokenism; it is a disservice to women throughout this country who have gone from watching a woman who -- love her or hate her -- was able to show us what female leadership could look like to squirming in front of their televisions as they watch the woman sent to replace her struggle to string a complete sentence together.

In fact, the only people I feel sorry for are Americans who invested in a hopeful, progressive vision of female leadership, but who are now stuck watching, verbatim, a "Saturday Night Live" skit.

Palin is tough as nails. She will bite the head off a moose and move on. So, no, I don't feel sorry for her. I feel sorry for women who have to live with what she and her running mate have wrought.

-- By Rebecca Traister

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.

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I thought this might be a helpful tool to send to your friends who are on the fence but worried about their small businesses, esp. taxes. K

Dear Kristin --

We're proud to announce a new way to get involved in this movement for change: Small Business for Barack Obama.

In times of economic uncertainty, it's more important than ever that small businesses have everything they need to thrive. American small businesses will be a key part of our nation's economic recovery, and we are doing all we can to let their voices be heard.

Sign up today to join Small Business for Obama.

Across the nation, more than 25 million local entrepreneurs and employers are creating jobs and opportunities. Small businesses keep communities growing, foster innovations that change the world, and sustain the American promise generation after generation.

But in the last eight years, Bush-McCain economic policies have driven up the costs of health care and energy, and given tax breaks to multinational corporations that ship jobs overseas.

Barack Obama will cut taxes on American small businesses with a Small Business Health Tax Credit that stands to cut employee health care premium costs by half. He will eliminate all capital gains taxes for small and start-up firms, and offer a $500 "Making Work Pay" tax credit for employees.

And Barack wants to make sure opportunities reach every community. He is committed to broadening access to capital and contracting opportunities for women- and minority-owned small businesses.

John McCain's record on small business is clear. He voted against $11 billion in tax relief for small businesses, against tax credits that provide health insurance for employees, and against targeted cuts in the capital gains tax for small businesses.

His economic plan would reward America's 200 largest corporations with almost $45 billion each year in tax cuts. And it would -- for the first time in history -- tax employee health premiums.

It's time to bring change to Washington and invest in the small businesses that are the foundation of our economy.

Sign up with Small Business for Obama today:

http://my.barackobama.com/SmallBusiness

As Barack said, "We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off to look after a sick kid without losing her job -- an economy that honors the dignity of work."

We need your support to grow this movement for change.

Thanks,

Obama for America

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The scariest thing about John McCain's running mate isn't how unqualified she is - it's what her candidacy says about America
MATT TAIBBI Rolling Stone Posted Oct 02, 2008

I'm standing outside the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. Sarah Palin has just finished her speech to the Republican National Convention, accepting the party's nomination for vice president. If I hadn't quit my two-packs-a-day habit earlier this year, I'd be chain-smoking now. So the only thing left is to stand mute against th fit-for-a-cheap-dog-kennel crowd-control fencing you see everywhere at these idiotic conventions and gnaw on weird new feelings of shock and anarchist rage as one would a rawhide chew toy.

All around me, a million cops in their absurd post-9/11 space-combat get-ups stand guard as ass holes in papier-mâché puppet heads scramble around for one last moment of network face time before the coverage goes dark. Four-chinned delegates from places like Arkansas and Georgia are pouring joyously out the gates in search of bars where they can load up on Zombies and Scorpion Bowls and other "wild" drinks and extramaritally grope their turkey-necked female companions in bathroom stalls as part of the "unbelievable time" they will inevitably report to their pals back home. Only 21st-century Americans can pass through a metal detector six times in an hour and still think they're at a party.

The defining moment for me came shortly after Palin and her family stepped down from the stage to uproarious applause, looking happy enough to throw a whole library full of books into a sewer. In the crush to exit the stadium, a middle-aged woman wearing a cowboy hat, a red-white-and-blue shirt and an obvious eye job gushed to a male colleague they were both wearing badges identifying them as members of the Colorado delegation at the Xcel gates.

"She totally reminds me of my cousin!" the delegate screeched. "She's a real woman! The real thing!"

I stared at her open-mouthed. In that moment, the rank cynicism of the whole sorry deal was laid bare. Here's the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.

And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she's a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed Middle American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant-size bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the Sizzlin' Picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else's, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because the image on TV reminds him of the mean, brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power. Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she's the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV, and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

The Palin speech was a political masterpiece, one of the most ingenious pieces of electoral theater this country has ever seen. Never before has a single televised image turned a party's fortunes around faster.

Until the Alaska governor actually ascended to the podium that night, I was convinced that John McCain had made one of the all-time campaign-season blunders, that he had acted impulsively and out of utter desperation in choosing a cross-eyed political neophyte just two years removed from running a town smaller than the bleacher section at Fenway Park. It even crossed my mind that there was an element of weirdly self-destructive pique in McCain's decision to cave in to his party's right-wing base in this fashion, that perhaps he was responding to being ordered by party elders away from a tepid, ideologically promiscuous hack like Joe Lieberman [reportedly his real preference] by picking the most obviously unqualified, doomed-to-fail joke of a Bible-thumping buffoon. As in: You want me to rally the base? Fine, I'll rally the base. Here, I'll choose this rifle-toting, serially pregnant moose killer who thinks God lobbies for oil pipelines. Happy now?

But watching Palin's speech, I had no doubt that I was witnessing a historic, iconic performance. The candidate sauntered to the lectern with the assurance of a sleepwalker, and immediately launched into a symphony of snorting and sneering remarks, taking time out in between the superior invective to present herself as just a humble gal with a beefcake husband and a brood of healthy, combat-ready spawn who just happened to be the innocent targets of a communist and probably also homosexual media conspiracy. She appeared to be completely without shame and utterly full of shit, awing a room full of hardened reporters with her sickly-sweet line about the high-school-flame-turned-hubby who, "five children later," is "still my guy." It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag.

Within minutes, Palin had given TV audiences a character infinitely recognizable to virtually every American: the small-town girl with just enough looks and a defiantly incurious mind who thinks the PTA minutes are Holy Writ, and to whom injustice means the woman next door owning a slightly nicer set of drapes or flatware. Or the governorship, as it were.

Right-wingers of the Bush-Rove ilk have had a tough time finding a human face to put on their failed, inhuman, mean-as-hell policies. But it was hard not to recognize the genius of wedding that faltering brand of institutionalized greed to the image of the suburban-American supermom. It's the perfect cover, for there is almost nothing in the world meaner than this species of provincial tyrant.

Palin herself burned this political symbiosis into the pages of history with her seminal crack about the "difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull: lipstick," blurring once and for all the lines between meanness on the grand political scale as understood by the Roves and Bushes of the world, and meanness of the small-town variety as understood by pretty much anyone who has ever sat around in his ranch-house den dreaming of a fourth plasma-screen TV or an extra set of KC HiLites for his truck, while some ghetto family a few miles away shares a husk of government cheese.

In her speech, Palin presented herself as a raging baby-making furnace of middle-class ambition next to whom the yuppies of the Obama set, who never want anything all that badly except maybe a few afternoons with someone else's wife, or a few kind words in The New York Times Book Review seem like weak, self-doubting celibates, the kind of people who certainly cannot be trusted to believe in the right God or to defend a nation. We're used to seeing such blatant cultural caricaturing in our politicians. But Sarah Palin is something new. She's all caricature. As the candidate of a party whose positions on individual issues are poll losers almost across the board, her shtick is not even designed to sell a line of policies. It's just designed to sell her. The thing was as much as admitted in the on-air gaffe by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who was inadvertently caught saying on MSNBC that Palin wasn't the most qualified candidate, that the party "went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives."

The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show contestants or sitcom characters. Hicks root for hicks, moms for moms, born-agains for born-agains. Sure, there was politics in the Palin speech, but it was all either silly lies or merely incidental fluffery buttressing the theatrical performance. A classic example of what was at work here came when Palin proudly introduced her Down-syndrome baby, Trig, then stared into the camera and somberly promised parents of special-needs kids that they would "have a friend and advocate in the White House." This was about a half-hour before she raised her hands in triumph with McCain, a man who voted against increasing funding for special-needs education.

Palin's charge that "government is too big" and that Obama "wants to grow it" was similarly preposterous. Not only did her party just preside over the largest government expansion since LBJ, but Palin herself has been a typical Bush-era Republican, borrowing and spending beyond her means. Her great legacy as mayor of Wasilla was the construction of a $15 million hockey arena in a city with an annual budget of $20 million; Palin OK'd a bond issue for the project before the land had been secured, leading to a protracted legal mess that ultimately forced taxpayers to pay more than six times the original market price for property the city ended up having to seize from a private citizen using eminent domain. Better yet, Palin ended up paying for the fucking thing with a 25 percent increase in the city sales tax. But in her speech, of course, Palin presented herself as the enemy of tax increases, righteously bemoaning that "taxes are too high" and Obama "wants to raise them."

Palin hasn't been too worried about federal taxes as governor of a state that ranks number one in the nation in federal spending per resident ($13,950), even as it sits just 18th in federal taxes paid per resident ($5,434). That means all us taxpaying non-Alaskans spend $8,500 a year on each and every resident of Palin's paradise of rugged self-sufficiency. Not that this sworn enemy of taxes doesn't collect from her own: Alaska currently collects the most taxes per resident of any state in the nation.

The rest of Palin's speech was the same dog-whistle crap Republicans have been railing about for decades. Palin's crack about a mayor being "like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities" testified to the Republicans' apparent belief that they can win elections till the end of time running against the Sixties. (They're probably right.) The incessant grousing about the media was likewise par for the course, red meat for those tens of millions of patriotic flag-waving Americans whose first instinct when things get rough is to whine like bitches and blame other people reporters, the French, those ungrateful blacks soaking up tax money eating big prison meals, whomever for their failures.

Add to this the usual lies about Democrats wanting to "forfeit" to our enemies abroad and coddle terrorists, and you had a very run-of-the-mill, almost boring Republican speech from a substance standpoint. What made it exceptional was its utter hypocrisy, its total disregard for reality, its absolute unrelation to the facts of our current political situation. After eight years of unprecedented corruption, incompetence, waste and greed, the party of Karl Rove understood that 50 million Americans would not demand solutions to any of these problems so long as they were given a new, new thing to beat their meat over.

Sarah Palin is that new, new thing, and in the end it won't matter that she's got an unmarried teenage kid with a bun in the oven. Of course, if the daughter of a black candidate like Barack Obama showed up at his convention with a five-month bump and some sideways-cap-wearing, junior-grade Curtis Jackson holding her hand, the defenders of Traditional Morality would be up in arms. But the thing about being in the reality-making business is that you don't need to worry much about vetting; there are no facts in your candidate's bio that cannot be ignored or overcome.

One of the most amusing things about the Palin nomination has been the reaction of horrified progressives. The Internet has been buzzing at full volume as would-be defenders of sanity and reason pore over the governor's record in search of the Damning Facts. My own telephone began ringing off the hook with calls from ex-Alaskans and friends of Alaskans determined to help get the "truth" about Sarah Palin into the major media. Pretty much anyone with an Internet connection knows by now that Palin was originally for the "Bridge to Nowhere" before she opposed it (she actually endorsed the plan in her 2006 gubernatorial campaign), that even after the project was defeated she kept the money, that she didn't actually sell the Alaska governor's state luxury jet on eBay but instead sold it at a $600,000 loss to a campaign contributor (who is reportedly now seeking $50,000 in taxpayer money to pay maintenance costs).

Then there are the salacious tales of Palin's swinging-meat-cleaver management style, many of which seem to have a common thread: In addition to being ensconced in a messy ethics investigation over her firing of the chief of the Alaska state troopers (dismissed after refusing to sack her sister's ex-husband), Palin also fired a key campaign aide who had an affair with a friend's wife. More ominously, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin tried to fire the town librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, who had resisted pressure to censor books Palin found objectionable.

Then there's the God stuff: Palin belongs to a church whose pastor, Ed Kalnins, believes that all criticisms of George Bush "come from hell," and wondered aloud if people who voted for John Kerry could be saved. Pastor Kalnins, looming as the answer to Obama's Jeremiah Wright, claims that Alaska is going to be a "refuge state" for Christians in the last days, last days which he sometimes speaks of in the present tense. Palin herself has been captured on video mouthing the inevitable born-again idiocies, such as the idea that a recent oil-pipeline deal was "God's will." She also described the Iraq War as a "task that is from God" and part of a heavenly "plan." She supports teaching creationism and "abstinence only" in public schools, opposes abortion even for victims of rape, has denied the science behind global warming and attends a church that seeks to convert Jews and cure homosexuals.

All of which tells you about what you'd expect from a raise-the-base choice like Palin: She's a puffed-up dimwit with primitive religious beliefs who had to be educated as to the fact that the Constitution did not exactly envision government executives firing librarians. Judging from the importance progressive critics seem to attach to these revelations, you'd think that these were actually negatives in modern American politics. But Americans like politicians who hate books and see the face of Jesus in every tree stump. They like them stupid and mean and ignorant of the rules. Which is why Palin has only seemed to grow in popularity as more and more of these revelations have come out.

The same goes for the most damning aspect of her biography, her total lack of big-game experience. As governor of Alaska, Palin presides over a state whose entire population is barely the size of Memphis. This kind of thing might matter in a country that actually worried about whether its leader was prepared for his job but not in America. In America, it takes about two weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you've been around for years. To a certain extent, this is why Obama is getting a pass on the same issue. He's been on TV every day for two years, and according to the standards of our instant-ramen culture, that's a lifetime of hands-on experience.

It is worth noting that the same criticisms of Palin also hold true for two other candidates in this race, John McCain and Barack Obama. As politicians, both men are more narrative than substance, with McCain rising to prominence on the back of his bio as a suffering war hero and Obama mostly playing the part of the long-lost, future-embracing liberal dreamboat not seen on the national stage since Bobby Kennedy died. If your stomach turns to read how Palin's Kawasaki 704 glasses are flying off the shelves in Middle America, you have to accept that Middle America probably feels the same way when it hears that Donatella Versace dedicated her collection to Obama during Milan Fashion Week. Or sees the throwing-panties-onstage-"I love you, Obama!" ritual at the Democratic nominee's town-hall appearances.

So, sure, Barack Obama might be every bit as much a slick piece of imageering as Sarah Palin. The difference is in what the image represents. The Obama image represents tolerance, intelligence, education, patience with the notion of compromise and negotiation, and a willingness to stare ugly facts right in the face, all qualities we're actually going to need in government if we're going to get out of this huge mess we're in.

Here's what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat fucking pig who pins "Country First" buttons on his man titties and chants "U-S-A! U-S-A!" at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas.

The truly disgusting thing about Sarah Palin isn't that she's totally unqualified, or a religious zealot, or married to a secessionist, or unable to educate her own daughter about sex, or a fake conservative who raised taxes and porked up earmark millions every chance she got. No, the most disgusting thing about her is what she says about us: that you can ram us in the ass for eight solid years, and we'll not only thank you for your trouble, we'll sign you up for eight more years, if only you promise to stroke us in the right spot for a few hours around election time.

Democracy doesn't require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in a while, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what your real interests are.

This is a very different thing from shopping, which involves passively letting sitcoms melt your brain all day long and then jumping straight into the TV screen to buy a Southern Style Chicken Sandwich because the slob singing "I'm Lovin' It!" during the commercial break looks just like you. The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn't require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.

And when it comes time to vote, all you have to do is put your Country First just like that lady on TV who reminds you of your cousin. U-S-A, baby. U-S-A! U-S-A!

[From Issue 1062 October 2, 2008]

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The dumbing down of the GOP

Why aren't more conservatives disgusted that their party nominated a person devoid of qualifications for the vice presidency (again)?
By Joe Conason

Oct. 04, 2008 | Sarah Palin's debate performance should signal the beginning of the end of her fad. But for the moment it is worth looking at the meaning of her nomination, without the protective varnish of what conservatives usually dismiss as political correctness.

Why should we pretend not to notice when Gov. Palin's ideas make no sense? Having said last week that "it doesn't matter" whether human activity is the cause of climate change, she said in debate that she "doesn't want to argue" about the causes. It doesn't occur to her that we have to know the causes in order to address the problem. (She was very fortunate that moderator Gwen Ifill didn't ask her whether she truly believes that human beings and dinosaurs inhabited this planet simultaneously only 6,000 years ago.)

Why should we ignore her inability to string together a series of coherent thoughts? As a foe of Wall Street greed and a late convert to the gospel of government regulation, along with John McCain, Palin promised to clean up and reform business. But when her programmed talking points about "getting government out of the way" and protecting "freedom" conflicted with that promise, she didn't notice.

Why should we give her a pass on the most important issues of the day? Supposedly sharing the fears and concerns of the average families who face the burdens of mortgages, healthcare and economic insecurity, Palin simply refused to discuss changes in bankruptcy law and proved that she didn't know the provisions of McCain's healthcare plan.

All the glaring defects so blatantly on display in her debate with Joe Biden -- and that make her candidacy so darkly comical -- would be the same if she were a hockey dad instead of a "hockey mom." In fact, the cynical attempt to foist Palin on the nation as a symbol of feminist progress is an insult to all women regardless of their political orientation.

There was a time when conservatives lamented the dumbing down of American culture. Preservation of basic standards in schools and workplaces compelled them -- or so they said -- to resist affirmative action for women and minorities. Qualifications mattered; merit mattered; and demagogic appeals for leveling were to be left to the Democrats.

Not anymore.

Actually, the Palin phenomenon is the culmination of a trend that can be traced back to Dan Quayle, the undistinguished Indiana senator whose elevation onto the Republican ticket in 1988 had nothing to do with intellect or experience and everything to do with the youthful appeal of a handsome blond frat boy. (That was how Republican strategists thought they would attract female voters back then, which must be why they believe Palin represents progress.) Quayle too was unable to articulate, let alone defend, the policy positions for which he was supposed to be campaigning. He too had to undergo the surgical stuffing of stock phrases into his head as a minimal substitute for knowledge and thought. And in the same sad way, he too benefited from the drastically reduced expectations applied to anyone whose inadequacy is so obvious.

Quayle deserved more pity than scorn, however, because he seemed to know that he was fighting far above his weight class. Palin evokes no such sympathy, with her jut-jawed, moose-gutting confidence in her own overrated "common sense" and her bullying insistence that only "elitists" would question her expertise.

As Biden showed quite convincingly when he spoke about his modest background and his continuing connection with Main Street, perceptive, intelligent discourse is in no way identical with elitism. Palin's phony populism is as insulting to working- and middle-class Americans as it is to American women. Why are basic diction and intellectual coherence presumed to be out of reach for "real people"?

And why don't we expect more from American conservatives? Indeed, why don't they demand more from their own movement? Aren't they disgusted that their party would again nominate a person devoid of qualifications for one of the nation's highest offices? Some, like Michael Gerson and Kathleen Parker, have expressed discomfort with this farce -- and been subjected, in Parker's case, to abuse from many of the same numbskulls whom Palin undoubtedly delights.

The ultimate irony of Palin's rise is that it has occurred at a moment when Americans may finally have grown weary of pseudo-populism -- when intelligence, judgment, diligence and seriousness are once again valued, simply because we are in such deep trouble. We got into this mess because we elected a man who professed to despise elitism, which he detected in everyone whose opinions differed from his prejudices. That was George W. Bush, of course. Biden was too polite and restrained to say it, but the dumbing down is more of the same, too.

-- By Joe Conason

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.

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I don't know about this one but thought I should send it just in case. I couldn't find anything on Snopes to confirm or deny. Let me know if you know about this. Thanks. K

Please send this email to everyone you know....I mean all of the Democrats you know! The electronic voting machines are not reliable. They have been proven to be hackable both at the site where they are located and through the transmission lines that send the results to a central tabulator. Security experts say it is the same way that hackers are stealing our credit card info at stores as they transmit your info over phone or computer lines, this information is being intercepted. At very best, they are computers that are subject to crashing. The ones with "paper trails" often have printer jams so no paper trail is printed. The potential for the election to be stolen by manipulating these electronic voting machines is great. We know that some of this went on in Ohio in 2004. Votes were flipped to the other candidate, votes were lost, more votes registered than there were voters! There is no reason it will not happen again. Any manipulation is hard to document because there is no paper ballot with these machines. The only solution is to request and use a paper ballot (or the old mechanical machines). If you have a choice, vote on the paper ballots. These can be verified and recounted. As with any computer, if junk has gone in, junk will come out. Do not take that chance.

Here is a map to show which states are using which methods in 2008. http://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/ Places like NY that have the mechanical machines and punch cards are okay. Some states give a choice. A good source of information on protecting the vote is www.bradblog.com. Another good source is http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ another good article from NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Protect your vote....use paper!!!!
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By BRENT STAPLES
It was not that long ago that black people in the Deep South could be beaten or killed for seeking the right to vote, talking back to the wrong white man or failing to give way on the sidewalk. People of color who violated these and other proscriptions could be designated "uppity niggers" and subjected to acts of violence and intimidation that were meant to dissuade others from following their examples.

The term "uppity" was applied to affluent black people, who sometimes paid a horrific price for owning nicer homes, cars or more successful businesses than whites. Race-based wealth envy was a common trigger for burnings, lynchings and cataclysmic episodes of violence like the Tulsa race riot of 1921, in which a white mob nearly eradicated the prosperous black community of Greenwood.

Forms of eloquence and assertiveness that were viewed as laudable among whites were seen as positively mutinous when practiced by people of color. As such, black men and women who looked white people squarely in the eye - and argued with them about things that mattered - were declared a threat to the racial order and persecuted whenever possible.

This obsession with black subservience was based in nostalgia for slavery. No sane person would openly express such a sentiment today. But the discomfort with certain forms of black assertiveness is too deeply rooted in the national psyche - and the national language - to just disappear. It has been a persistent theme in the public discourse since Barack Obama became a plausible candidate for the presidency.

A blatant example surfaced earlier this month, when a Georgia Republican, Representative Lynn Westmoreland, described the Obamas as "uppity" in response to a reporter's question. Mr. Westmoreland, who actually stood by the term when given a chance to retreat, later tried to excuse himself by saying that the dictionary definition carried no racial meaning. That seems
implausible. Mr. Westmoreland is from the South, where the vernacular meaning of the word has always been clear.

The Jim Crow South institutionalized racial paternalism in its newspapers, which typically denied black adults the courtesy titles of Mr. and Mrs. - and reduced them to children by calling them by first names only. Representative Geoff Davis, Republican of Kentucky, succumbed to the old language earlier this year when describing what he viewed as Mr. Obama's lack of preparedness to handle nuclear policy. "That boy's finger does not need to be on the button," he said.

In the Old South, black men and women who were competent, confident speakers on matters of importance were termed "disrespectful," the implication being that all good Negroes bowed, scraped, grinned and deferred to their white betters.

In what is probably a harbinger of things to come, the McCain campaign has already run a commercial that carries a similar intimation, accusing Mr. Obama of being "disrespectful" to Sarah Palin. The argument is muted, but its racial antecedents are very clear.

The throwback references that have surfaced in the campaign suggest that Republicans are fighting on racial grounds, even when express references to race are not evident. In a replay of elections past, the G.O.P. will try to leverage racial ghosts and fears without getting its hands visibly dirty. The Democrats try to parry in customary ways.

Mr. Obama seems to understand that he is always an utterance away from a statement - or a phrase - that could transform him in a campaign ad from the affable, rational and racially ambiguous candidate into the archetypical angry black man who scares off the white vote. His caution is evident from the way he sifts and searches the language as he speaks, stepping around words that might push him into the danger zone.

These maneuvers are often painful to watch. The troubling part is that they are necessary.

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October 4, 2008NYTimes
Dick Cheney, Role Model

In all the talk about the vice-presidential debate, there was an issue that did not get much attention but kept nagging at us: Sarah Palin’s description of the role and the responsibilities of the office for which she is running, vice president of the United States.

In Thursday night’s debate, Ms. Palin was asked about the vice president’s role in government. She said she agreed with Dick Cheney that “we have a lot of flexibility in there” under the Constitution. And she declared that she was “thankful that the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president also, if that vice president so chose to exert it.”

It is hard to tell from Ms. Palin’s remarks whether she understands how profoundly Dick Cheney has reshaped the vice presidency — as part of a larger drive to free the executive branch from all checks and balances. Nor did she seem to understand how much damage that has done to American democracy.

Mr. Cheney has shown what can happen when a vice=2 0president — a position that is easy to lampoon and overlook — is given free rein by the president and does not care about trampling on the Constitution.

Mr. Cheney has long taken the bizarre view that the lesson of Watergate was that Congress was too powerful and the president not powerful enough. He dedicated himself to expanding President Bush’s authority and arrogating to himself executive, legislative and legal powers that are nowhere in the Constitution.

This isn’t the first time that Ms. Palin was confronted with the issue. In an interview with Katie Couric of CBS News, the Alaska governor was asked what she thought was the best and worst about the Cheney vice presidency. Ms. Palin tried to dodge: laughing and joking about the hunting accident in which Mr. Cheney accidentally shot a friend. The only thing she had to add was that Mr. Cheney showed support for the troops in Iraq.

There was not a word about Mr. Cheney’s role in starting the war with Iraq, in misleading Americans about weapons of mass destruction, in leading the charge to create illegal prison camps where detainees are tortured, in illegally wiretapping Americans, in creating an energy policy that favored the oil industry that made hi m very rich before the administration began.

Ms. Couric asked Joseph Biden, Ms. Palin’s rival, the same question in a separate interview. He had it exactly right when he told her that Mr. Cheney’s theory of the “unitary executive” held that “Congress and the people have no power in a time of war.” And he had it right in the debate when he called Mr. Cheney “the most dangerous vice president we’ve had in American history.”

The Constitution does not state or imply any flexibility in the office of vice president. It gives the vice president no legislative responsibilities other than casting a tie-breaking vote in the Senate when needed and no executive powers at all. The vice president’s constitutional role is to be ready to serve if the president dies or becomes incapacitated.

Any president deserves a vice president who will be a sound adviser and trustworthy supporter. But the American people also deserve and need a vice president who understands and respects the balance of power — and the limits of his or her own power. That is fundamental to our democracy.

So far, Ms. Pal in has it exactly, frighteningly wrong.

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Here are a couple of non-political items.

1. If you are a Croc wearer, this is a great way to be green and help others. K

Dillards has a “drop-off point” for your old crocs. The crocs get sent back to the company where they clean them and melt them down to re-make crocs for people in undeveloped countries.

Watch this short video.
http://www.solesunited.com/

To find a location to take them...
http://www.solesunited.com/Locations.aspx

2. Subject: FW: Through a Rapist's Eyes (No Joke) I had my 14-year-old read this with me.

A group of rapists and date rapists in prison were interviewed on what they look for in a potential victim and here are some interesting facts:

1) The first thing men look for in a potential victim is hairstyle. They are mos t likely to go after a woman with a ponytail, bun, braid or other hairstyle that can easily be grabbed . They are also likely to go after a woman with long hair . Women with short hair are not common targets.

2) The second thing men look for is clothing. They will look for women who's clothing is easy to remove quickly. Many of them carry scissors around specifically to cut clothing.

3) They also look for women on their cell phone, searching through their purse, or doing other activities while walking because they are off-guard and can be easily overpowered.

4) Men are most likely to attack & rape in the early morning, between 5: 00a.m. and 8:30a.m.

5) The number one place women are abducted from/attacked is grocery store parking lots. The number two: office parking lots/garages. Number three: public restrooms.

6) The thing about these men is that they are looking to grab a woman and quickly move her to another location where they don't have to worry about getting caught.

7) Only 2% said they carried weapons because rape carries a 3-5 year sentence but rape with a weapon is 15-20 years.

8) If you put up any kind of a fight at all, they get discouraged because it only takes a minute or two for them to realize that going after you isn't worth it because it will be time-consuming.

9) These men said they would not pick on women who have umbrellas, or other similar objects that can be used from a distance, in their hands.

Keys are NOT a deterrent because you have to get really close to the attacker to use them as a weapon. So, the idea is to convince these guys you're not worth it.

10) Several defense mechanisms he taught us are: If someone is following behind you on a street or in a garage or with you in an elevator or stairwell, look them in the face and ask them a question, like what time is it?, or make general small talk: 'I can't believe it is so cold out here,' 'We're in for a bad winter.' Now you've seen their face and could identify them in a line-up; you lose appeal as a target.

11) If someone is coming toward you, hold out your hands in front of you and yell STOP! or STAY BACK! Most of the rapists this man talked to said they'd leave a woman alone if she yelled or showed that she would not be afraid to fight back. Again, they are looking for an EASY target.

12) If you carry pepper spray (this instructor was a huge advocate of it and carries it with him wherever he goes), yell I HAVE PEPPER SPRAY and holding it out will be a deterrent.

13) If someone grabs you, you can't beat them with strength but you can by outsmarting them. If you are grabbed around the waist from behind, pinch the attacker either under the Arm (between the elbow and armpit) OR in the upper inner thigh VERY VERY HARD. One woman in a class this guy taught told him she used the underarm pinch on a guy who was trying to date rape her and was so upset she broke through the skin and tore out muscle strands - the guy needed stitches. Try pinching yourself in those places as hard as you can stand it - it hurts.

14) After the initial hit, always GO for the GROIN. I know from a particularly unfortunate experience that if you slap a guy's parts it is extremely painful. You might think that you'll anger the guy and make him want to hurt you more, but the thing these rapists told our instructor is that they want a woman who will not cause a lot of trouble. Start causing trouble and he's out of there.

15) When the guy puts his hands up to you, grab his first two fingers and bend them back as far as possible with as much pressure pushing down on them as possible. The instructor did it to me without using much pressure, and I ended up on my knees and both knuckles cracked audibly.

16) Of course the things we always hear still apply. Always be aware of your surroundings,take someone with you if you can and if you see any odd behavior, don't dismiss it, go with your instincts!!!

You may feel a little silly at the time, but you'd feel much worse if the guy really was trouble.

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LOCAL

From a Blue Heart's friend. K

Check out this sign I saw walking along the Deer Creek Golf Course this morning, right here in ol’ Republican Johnson County! I’m encouraged!

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This is a great, FREE way to help. K

Dear Friend,

As you already know, we are getting closer and closer to Election Day on November 4, and we are poised to take back the White House in one of the most important Presidential elections in recent history. There is much at stake, and this election will be won or lost by votes cast in key battleground states across the country. Missouri is one of those battleground states, and we have a true opportunity to make a critical difference in the outcome of these elections. Our ability to win in Missouri relies heavily on our ability and capacity to get-out-the-vote and ensure that all supporters get to the polls on Election Day. We know that as a battleground state, and as close as elections historically have been here in Missouri, the difference really will be made by our organized get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation.

That is why I am contacting you today. There will be thousands of out-of-state volunteers from non-battleground states traveling here to help us achieve the massive effort we will need to put us over the top and win in Missouri. We are hoping to get 1,000 out-of-state volunteers right here in Jackson County. Can you imagine how many voters we can reach and get-out-to-vote with 1,000 more volunteers helping? The biggest need we have in achieving this goal is finding places for these volunteers to sleep as they help us in our state.

If you have a spare guest room, a spare couch or any space in your home to help, please respond immediately to this e-mail. Please respond with the following information:

1) How many people could you provide room for?

2) Can you provide space for 2 weeks, 1 week, or the weekend before and leading up to Election Day?

In addition to volunteer housing, we are seeking in-kind monetary donations for mobile phones (about $90 a piece) in order to reach voters on and before Election Day. We need several hundred phones to contact the number of voters we need to in Jackson County. Please also consider donating monetarily to meet this very specific need.

The more voters we are able to reach, the better our chances of winning in November, and the closer we come to achieving real change here in Missouri and in Washington. Thank you for your time and continued support!

Kelly Anthony
Regional GOTV Director
Jackson County
Missouri Campaign For Change
Cell: 816-633-2042

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MAINstream just published the PAC voter guide/endorsements. Please visit the website, www.mainvoice.org or Click here to view MAIN*PAC Endorsements to review the recommendations.

Blue Hearts 9-29-08

2008-09-29T08:33:00.009-05:00

Hey All,

Good news. The numbers are looking better and people are motivated and working hard. I walked precincts for 3 hours on Saturday. Although we encountered a number of "McPalin" supporters, we found a few undecideds and have reported them back to base camp. I'm hopeful all the work of so many people now will end up meaning targeted and effective work on 11/4.

Also, it's confirmed. Please come to an event Planned Parenthood is having that I'm co-chairing with Steve Chick. Christine Pelosi (speaker Nancy's daughter) is coming to town to give us a training session on her book, Campaign Boot Camp: Basic Training for Future Leaders.

She speaks about your call to service and how to be more effective in your efforts, whether it's for leadership or for your special causes.

When: Friday, Oct. 17
Time: 11:30-1:00
Where: 5252 Sunset Drive
Cost: $100, $500, $1000

Lunch and a book included!

Since I'm the one who asked Christine to come to KC (for the first time), I would REALLY appreciate your attendance at this event.

Also, if you're available, I'm co-hosting a fund raiser to help raise money to purchase Obama/Biden yard signs for out-state MO. This is a great way to be supportive of the cause, even if you're limited on time. The difference these signs can make in Republican areas might help sway voters. "If Joe is voting that way, I guess it's okay for me."

Please Join Us! Historic Journey: Round Two

Hosted By:

Pat Jordan/ Sharon & John Hoffman/ Marion Wheeler/ Robert Barrientos
Ursula Terrasi /Kristin Amend/ Gregory Glore /Marti Rigby

Barack Obama for President

Fund Raiser and Debate Watch*

5:00 pm to 7:00 pm

Thursday, October 2nd

Harper’s – 18th & Vine

Bring Your Contribution

$100 (or However Much You Can Give)

No Reservations Required

Stop by For Volunteer Sign Up
Pick Up Yard Signs/Bumper Stickers/Buttons

Obama Still Needs Contributions and Volunteers!!!
He Still Needs You!!!

For Further Information Call

Pat Jordan 816.645.1052
Sharon Hoffman 816.221.9920
Marion Wheeler 816.213.3194
Kristin Amend 816.729.1138
Robert Barrientos 816.589.3580

* Vice Presidential Debate – St. Louis, Missouri

Super thanks,
Kristin

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GENERAL

Wednesday, Sep. 10, 2008
Sarah Palin's Myth of America
By JOE KLEIN

Sarah Palin has arrived in our midst with the force of a rocket-propelled grenade. She has boosted John McCain's candidacy and overwhelmed the presidential process in a way that no vice-presidential pick has since Thomas Eagleton did the precise opposite — sinking his sponsor, George McGovern, in 1972. Obviously, something beyond politics is happening here. We don't really know Palin as a politician yet, whether she is wise or foolhardy, substantive or empty. Our fascination with her — and it is a nonpartisan phenomenon — is driven by something more primal. The Palin surge illuminates the mythic power of the Republican Party's message since the advent of Ronald Reagan.

To start with the obvious, she's attractive. Her husband ("And two decades and five children later, he's still my guy...") is a hunk. They have a gorgeous family, made more touching and credible by the challenges their children face. Her voice is more distinctive than her looks: that flat, northern twang that screams, I'm just like you! Actually, the real message is: I'm just like you want to be, a brilliantly spectacular ... average American. The Palins win elections and snowmobile races in a state that represents the last, lingering hint of that most basic Huckleberry Finn fantasy — lighting out for the territories. She quoted Westbrook Pegler, the F.D.R.-era conservative columnist, in her acceptance speech: "We grow good people in our small towns ..." And then added, "I grew up with those people. They're the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food and run our factories and fight our wars. They love their country in good times and bad, and they're always proud of America."

Except that's not really true. We haven't been a nation of small towns for nearly a century. It is the suburbanites and city dwellers who do the fighting and hourly-wage work now, and the corporations who grow our food. But Palin's embrace of small-town values is where her hold on the national imagination begins. She embodies the most basic American myth — Jefferson's yeoman farmer, the fantasia of rural righteousness — updated in a crucial way: now Mom works too. Palin's story stands with one foot squarely in the nostalgia for small-town America and the other in the new middle-class reality. She brings home the bacon, raises the kids — with a significant assist from Mr. Mom — hunts moose and looks great in the process. I can't imagine a more powerful, or current, American Dream.

Nearly 50 years ago, in The Burden of Southern History, the historian C. Vann Woodward argued that the South was profoundly different from the rest of America because it was the only part of the country that had lost a war: "Southern history, unlike American ... includes not only an overwhelming military defeat but long decades of defeat in the provinces of economic, social and political life." Woodward believed that this heritage led Southerners to be more obsessed with the past than other Americans were — at its worst, in popular works like Gone With the Wind, there was a gagging nostalgia for a courtly antebellum South that never really existed.

During the past 50 years, the rest of the country has caught up to the South in the nostalgia department. We lost a war in Vietnam; Iraq hasn't gone so well either. And there are two other developments that have cut into the sense of American perfection. The middle class has begun to lose altitude — there isn't the certainty anymore that our children will live better than we do. More important, the patina of cultural homogeneity that camouflaged 1950s suburbia has vanished. We have become more obviously multiracial. There are lifestyle choices that were nearly unimaginable in 1960 — the widespread use of the birth control pill, the legalization of abortion, the feminist and gay-rights revolutions, the breakdown of the two-parent family. With the advent of television, these changes became inescapable. They intruded upon the most traditional families in the smallest towns. The political impact was a conservative reaction of enormous vehemence.

Enter Reagan. His vision of the future was the past. He offered the temporal pleasures of tax cuts and an unambiguous anticommunism, but his real tug was on the heartstrings — it was "Morning in America." The Republican Party of Wall Street faded before the power of nostalgia for Main Street ... at least a Main Street that existed before America began losing wars, became ostentatiously sexy and casually interracial. In his presidential debate with Jimmy Carter, Reagan talked about an America that existed "when I was young and when this country didn't even know it had a racial problem." The blinding whiteness and fervent religiosity of the party he created are an enduring testament to the power of the myth of an America that existed before we had all these problems. The power of Sarah Palin is that she is the latest, freshest iteration of that myth.

The Republican Party's subliminal message seems stronger than ever this year because of the nature of the Democratic nominee for President. Barack Obama could not exist in the small-town America that Reagan fantasized. He's the product of what used to be called miscegenation, a scenario that may still be more terrifying than a teen daughter's pregnancy in many American households. Furthermore, he has thrived in the culture and economy that displaced Main Street America — an economy where people no longer work in factories or make things with their hands, but where lawyers and traders prosper unduly. (Of course, this is the economy the Republican Party has promoted — but facts are powerless in the face of a potent mythology.) Obama is the precise opposite of Mountain Man Todd Palin: an entirely urban creature. He lives within the hilarious conundrum of being both too "cosmopolitan" and intellectual for Republican tastes — at least as Rudy Giuliani described it — while also being the sort of fellow suspected of getting ahead by affirmative action.

The Democrats have no myth to counter this powerful Republican fantasy. They had to spend their convention on the biographical defensive: Barack Obama really is "one of us," speaker after speaker insisted. Really. Democrats do have the facts in their favor. Polls show that Americans agree with them on the issues. The Bush Administration has been a disaster on many fronts. The McCain campaign has provided only the sketchiest policy proposals; it has spent most of its time trying to divert the national conversation away from matters of substance. But Americans like stories more than issues. Policy proposals are useful in the theater of presidential politics only inasmuch as they illuminate character: far more people are aware of the fact that Palin put the state jet on eBay than know that she imposed a windfall-profits tax on oil companies as governor and was a porkaholic as mayor of Wasilla.

So Obama faces an uphill struggle between now and Nov. 4. He has no personal anecdotes to match Palin's mooseburgers. His story of a boy whose father came from Kenya and mother from Kansas takes place in an America not yet mythologized, a country that is struggling to be born — a multiracial country whose greatest cultural and economic strength is its diversity. It is the country where our children already live and that our parents will never really know, a country with a much greater potential for justice and creativity — and perhaps even prosperity — than the sepia-tinted version of Main Street America. But that vision is not sellable right now to a critical mass of Americans. They live in a place, not unlike C. Vann Woodward's South, where myths are more potent than the hope of getting past the dour realities they face each day.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1840388,00.html
Copyright 2008 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

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September 12, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Blizzard of Lies
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in
kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms.
Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy
Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?

These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.

Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.

But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.

Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.”

Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.

So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.

Or take the story of Mr. Obama’s alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for “age and developmentally appropriate education”; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.

And then there’s the claim that Mr. Obama’s use of the ordinary metaphor “putting lipstick on a pig” was a sexist smear, and on and on.

Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.

They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”

Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean, politics ain’t beanbag, and all that.

One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.

But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the 0Aheckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.

I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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chicagotribune.com
Memo to Obama
Dumb it down
Clarence Page
September 17, 2008

After months in the lead, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama has slipped in the polls to dead even with Republican challenger Sen. John McCain.

As we enter the season of high political anxiety, here's my advice to Democrats: Dumb it down.

I don't need to give that advice to Republicans. They've been dumbing it down for years. That's why they keep winning.

Do I sound condescending? Do I sound like I am talking down to Joe and Josephine Six Pack out there in working-class America? No way. I come from working-class America. I know. It takes smarts to dumb the issues down well enough to help people make an intelligent choice.

Winston Churchill was condescending. "The best argument against democracy," he is widely quoted as saying, "is a 5-minute conversation with the average voter."

But Churchill was old-fashioned. He apparently was raised, as I was, with the notion that voters in a democracy should seek the best and the brightest to run their governments. "Elites," in other words. Elite is a dirty word these days. It sounds too much like "elitist," which to most people is the same as a snob. Nobody likes snobs. Not even snobs.

Democrats too often have missed that point. Clark Clifford, a Democratic lawyer and Washington wise man, called Ronald Reagan an "amiable dunce." As if Reagan cared. The amiable dunce happily smiled his way through two successful presidential campaigns, right into the history books as a conservative icon.

President George W. Bush won re-election, too, although hardly anyone has associated him with the word "genius." His approval ratings have fallen to around 33 percent from around 80 percent after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Yet, the big message in his party's recent convention went sort of like this: Washington is messed up, so if you're looking for real change, vote for the same party that put you in this mess. The result? His party's ticket is well-positioned to pull off a victory. Why? A big reason, as everyone seems to know these days, is how McCain and Sarah Palin, his pick for vice president, have outmatched Obama's elegant charisma in winning the support of working-class white voters.

This is hardly a new problem for Democrats. Ever since the late 1960s, Republicans have achieved remarkable success with tagging Democrats as "limousine liberals," even when they don't have limousines. The term actually serves as shorthand for "people who are not like you" and "don't share your values." And, you know what? Sometimes the shorthand is accurate. It's not that Democrats don't share the values of ordinary hardworking Americans. It's just that their candidates sometimes have a hard time expressing those values.

That makes the upcoming presidential debates an acid test for Obama. He has shown great eloquence at speeches but uneven performances in debates. His college professor side tends to show. He gets too conversational. He does not speak in bumper stickers. His speech often hesitates and ponders too much—like someone who is still reconsidering their views. Debates are a time to speak not just eloquently but strategically. Even when you're uncertain, try to sound certain.

This problem showed itself almost painfully during a televised forum with McCain at the Saddleback Church in California in Obama's passionless answer to the question of when he thinks life begins. He said the answer was "above my pay grade." McCain simply said he believed life begins "at conception." The conservative crowd cheered. McCain won the moment by leaving the details of his belief, like his past support for embryonic stem-cell research, for some other time.

Michael Dukakis revealed a similar absence of human emotion when asked during a 1988 presidential debate whether his opposition to capital punishment would change if his own wife were raped and murdered. With his passionless answer, he lost the evening. You don't have to be a snob to sound like one. Or a zombie.

Al Gore ran into a similar problem back in 2000. The vice president obviously had a more confident command of the facts and policies than Texas Gov. George W. Bush. But Gore let his confidence get away from him. His audible, impatient sighs reminded many of the smarty-pants kid who could never let the rest of the class forget that he was the smartest kid in the school.

Bush, meanwhile, reminded everybody of the sociable but less-mentally-agile kid, the "amiable dunce" to whom everybody wanted to lend a hand.

That vision came to mind last week as I watched Palin try to answer ABC's Charles Gibson's question about "the Bush doctrine." She obviously didn't know much about what Gibson was talking about, but she gave a decent boilerplate version of Bush's foreign policy. Synopsis: We got to get them terrorists.

That's the kind of answer voters tend to like. Short and strong. It sounds resolute, even if it lacks the nuance or flexibility that virtues like wisdom and experience bring. We Americans like candidates who share our values and at least sound like people who know what they are talking about. We get fooled a lot.

Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. E-mail: cptime@aol.com

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune

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Op-Ed Contributor
Blocking Care for Women

By HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON and CECILE RICHARDS
Published: September 18, 2008

LAST month, the Bush administration launched the latest salvo in its eight-year campaign to undermine women’s rights and women’s health by placing ideology ahead of science: a proposed rule from the Department of Health and Human Services that would govern family planning. It would require that any health care entity that receives federal financing — whether it’s a physician in private practice, a hospital or a state government — certify in writing that none of its employees are required to assist in any way with medical services they find objectionable.

Laws that have been on the books for some 30 years already allow doctors to refuse to perform abortions. The new rule would go further, ensuring that all employees and volunteers for health care entities can refuse to aid in providing any treatment they object to, which could include not only abortion and sterilization but also contraception.
Health and Human=2 0Services estimates that the rule, which would affect nearly 600,000 hospitals, clinics and other health care providers, would cost $44.5 million a year to administer. Astonishingly, the department does not even address the real cost to patients who might be refused access to these critical services. Women patients, who look to their health care providers as an unbiased source of medical information, might not even know they were being deprived of advice about their options or denied access to care.

The definition of abortion in the proposed rule is left open to interpretation. An earlier draft included a medically inaccurate definition that included commonly prescribed forms of contraception like birth control pills, IUD’s and emergency contraception. That language has been removed, but because the current version includes no definition at all, individual health care providers could decide on their own that birth control is the same as abortion.

The rule would also allow providers to refuse to participate in unspecified “other medical procedures” that contradict their religious beliefs or moral convictions. This, too, could be interpreted as a free pass to deny access to contraception.
Many circumstances unrelated to reproductive health could also fall under the umbrella of “other medical procedures.” Could physicians object to helping patients whose sexual orientation they find objectionable? Could a receptionist refuse to book an appointment for an H.I.V. test? What about an emergency room doctor who wishes to deny emergency contraception to a rape victim? Or a pharmacist who prefers not to refill a birth control prescription?

The Bush administration argues that the rule is designed to protect a provider’s conscience. But where are the protections for patients?

The 30-day comment period on the proposed rule runs until Sept. 25. Everyone who believes that women should have full access to medical care should make their voices heard. Basic, quality care for millions of women is at stake.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a Democratic senator from New York. Cecile Richards is the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
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John McCain's hot air

He may claim to be green, but McCain's environmental record is every bit as dirty as that of Sen. James "global warming is a hoax" Inhofe.
By Joseph Romm

Sep. 20, 2008 | Few politicians in history have more successfully sold a phony image about caring for the environment than Sen. John McCain. His deceptions and distortions and lies would fill a book.

Understandably, an overwhelming majority of the public strongly believes we need a major push toward alternative energy. So as a presidential candidate, McCain has repeatedly claimed to be a long-standing supporter of clean energy.

"We must shift our entire energy economy toward new and cleaner power sources such as wind, solar, biofuels. It will include a variety of new automotive and fuel technologies," he claims in a recent ad. When it comes to breaking with the energy policies of the current and past administrations, and achieving energy security for America, he says, "I know how to do that, and I will do it."

If McCain knows how to do it, it is a better-kept secret than the location of Osama bin Laden. McCain has a two-decade history in Washington of consistently opposing all efforts to shift our economy to clean energy.

The facts are clear. All you have to do is look at his voting record. It reveals that McCain has long been one of the strongest opponents of clean energy in Congress, with a record matching that of James Inhofe, the most hardcore global-warming denier in the Senate, who comes from the heart of the oil patch in Oklahoma.

Recently the Associated Press noted that "McCain has not shown up for eight Senate votes last year and this year to extend [renewable energy] tax credits, which expire at the end of this year. The last such vote was July 30." Yet at an Aspen Institute meeting in August, when McCain was asked about those missed votes, he simply lied to the audience.

"I have a long record of that support of alternate energy," McCain said. "I come from a state where we have sunshine 360 days a year ... I've always been for all of those and I have not missed any crucial vote."

In fact, on Dec. 13, 2007, the Senate was considering a bill to spend $13 billion on renewable power over five years. The cloture vote to allow the amendment to be brought to the Senate floor required 60 votes; it received 59 for, 40 against, and one senator absent. Yes, you guessed it: No McCain. A spokesman later said he would have voted to block the bill.

Again, in February, the Senate tried to include in a stimulus package an extension of the renewable tax credit, plus nearly $3 billion more for alternate energy. The cloture vote again failed 59-40-1. And again, McCain's absence didn't kill an unpopular alternative energy bill -- it stopped a popular bill from even coming to a vote.

Yet McCain continues to insist: "I have not missed any crucial vote." He would seem to be either a practiced liar who can fake sincerity, a pathological liar who believes his lies, or a man with simply no memory of key events several months earlier.

As for McCain's "long record of that support of alternate energy," consider the votes on renewable energy funding and a federal "renewable portfolio standard" (RPS) that he did show up for this decade:

Tax credits for clean energy R&D (2001)
Require a 20 percent RPS where utilities buy 20 percent clean energy ('02)
Reduce 20 percent RPS requirement ('02)
Waive 20 percent RPS if utilities balk ('02)
Increase clean energy R&D funding ('05)
Clean energy incentives ('05)
An RPS to require utilities [to] buy some clean energy ('05)
Tax oil companies windfall profits to fund clean energy ('05)
In every case, McCain voted against renewables, as did Sen. "Global warming is 'the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people'" Inhofe. On the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the biggest congressional effort to push alternative energy in more than a decade, McCain voted against it along with just 11 other senators. Even Inhofe voted for it.

Why does McCain consistently vote against renewable energy, even though he comes from a state that has enough solar energy to power the entire country, a state rich in renewable-power entrepreneurs? Other than the fact that conservatives have a long track record of opposing renewable energy, McCain is technologically out of touch.

When few in the media were paying attention to his campaign last December, McCain said that "the truly clean technologies don't work." He claimed that "most every expert that I know says that if you maximize [renewables] in every possible way," the contribution they would make is "very small."

This quote reveals what a narrow circle of experts McCain relies on. Just what we need, another president in a bubble. And one that is unable to hear the truth, even when it is presented to him by another hardcore conservative. After T. Boone Pickens explained to McCain in person this summer that we could get 20 percent of our electricity from wind in one decade, McCain said he disagreed with Pickens, and that renewable energy can't meet much of the demand required over the next 20 years. Even the Bush administration's own Energy Department said we could get most of our electricity growth over the next two decades from wind power alone.

OK, McCain thinks renewables "don't work." What about fuel-efficient vehicles? McCain responded to a Science Debate 2008 question on global warming: "I have long supported CAFE standards -- the mileage requirements that automobile manufacturers' cars must meet."

That statement is somewhere between a lie and self-deception. The standards were in place before he got to the Senate, so his "support" was meaningless. In his entire 24 years in Congress, McCain had precisely one opportunity to vote for a serious bipartisan compromise on a major increase in CAFE standards. That was the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which required a 40 percent increase in fuel economy standards by 2020. This was the first time fuel economy standards were substantially changed since the 1970s. McCain didn't bother to show up. Back in 2003, a measure was introduced to improve the government system for testing fuel economy, which was notoriously unreliable and well known to overstate the actual fuel economy of cars. McCain and Inhofe voted against it.

What about energy efficiency and conservation? In 2002, the Senate voted to drop a measure encouraging the efficient generation of electricity. McCain and Inhofe were among those who voted to drop it. Another 2002 vote on weakening appliance-efficiency requirements passed by a mere 52-47. McCain and Inhofe both voted to weaken the requirements. This summer, McCain had the audacity to mock Barack Obama for talking about energy efficiency measures, like inflating one's tires, even though those measures would save more than 10 times as much oil as ending the moratorium on coastal drilling would.

What about McCain's support for the environment in general? Back in 1996, McCain wrote a New York Times Op-Ed titled "Nature Is Not a Liberal Plot" that laid out his vision of a green(washed) Republican Party. It touted his work with Morris Udall, the former Democratic congressman from Arizona, to safeguard Arizona wild lands, including the Grand Canyon. But the Op-Ed also explained the importance of maintaining and improving the Clean Air Act, Superfund, the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. McCain wrote, "Our nation's continued prosperity hinges on our ability to solve environmental problems and sustain the natural resources on which we all depend."

And yet in 1994, McCain had voted to let coal states bypass the Clean Water Act. In 1996, he voted against increased EPA funding to clean up Superfund toxic-waste sites, where he was joined by Inhofe but opposed by most of his fellow Republicans. Again, in 1996, he voted with Inhofe to gut nuclear waste disposal laws. In 2003, he voted with Inhofe against requiring polluters to pay for cleanup of Superfund waste sites.

When you add in McCain's legislative efforts to cut funding for the most energy-efficient form of national travel -- passenger rail -- you find that McCain has voted against clean energy and the environment -- or said he would have done so -- more than 50 times since the early 1990s. And McCain has voted with the Oklahoma oilman and global-warming denier a remarkable 42 out of 44 times.

But what about McCain's support for action on global warming? True, he and Sen. Joe Lieberman introduced a global warming bill several years ago that would have put in place a mandatory cap on emissions and then set up a trading system to establish a price for carbon. But even those bills contained not a single substantive policy to promote energy efficiency and conservation. And since beginning his recent run for office, McCain has moved farther away from a serious position on the issue.

He now says his carbon emissions cap is not "mandatory." He never even mentioned global warming or climate change once in his big convention speech, laying out his top priorities for the nation, and he chose a running mate who questions whether global warming is the result of human action. How committed to the environment does that sound?

The fact that McCain endorsed a gas tax holiday, a rollback of the small federal gas tax this summer, when gasoline prices exceeded $4, suggests that if energy prices rise in the future, as they inevitably will, he will roll back any significant carbon price too. And that would gut the whole effort to reduce emissions.

At this point, it is impossible to believe anything that John McCain says. The only thing dirtier than his lies is his environmental record.

-- By Joseph Romm

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.

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This is Your Nation on White Privilege

September, 14 2008By Tim Wise
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For those who still can't grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because "every family has challenges," even as black and Latino families with similar "challenges" are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a "fuckin' redneck," like Bristol Palin's boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll "kick their fuckin' ass," and talk about how you like to "shoot shit" for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don't all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you're "untested."

White privilege is being able to say that you support the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance because "if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it's good enough for me," and not be immediately disqualified from holding office--since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the "under God" part wasn't added until the 1950s--while believing that reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because, ya know, the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school requires it), is a dangerous and silly idea only supported by mushy liberals.

White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you. White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was "Alaska first," and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she's being disrespectful.

White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor--and people think you're being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college--you're somehow being mean, or even sexist.

White privilege is being able to convince white women who don't even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a "second look."

White privilege is being able to fire people who didn't support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.

White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God's punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you're just a good church-going Christian, but if you're black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you're an extremist who probably hates America.

White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a "trick question," while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O'Reilly means you're dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.

White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has referred to it a "light" burden.

And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren't sure about that whole "change" thing. Ya know, it's just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain.

White privilege is, in short, the problem.

Tim Wise is the author of White Like Me (Soft Skull, 2005, revised 2008), and of Speaking Treason Fluently, publishing this month, also by Soft Skull. For review copies or interview requests, please reply to publicity@softskull.com

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Mean girl

Sarah Palin has a way of using "old boys" -- then dumping them when they become inconvenient.
By David Talbot

Sep. 23, 2008 | Before Sarah Palin decided to run for the Wasilla mayor's office in 1996 against incumbent John Stein, the Palins and Steins were friends. John Stein had helped launch Palin's political career, mentoring the hockey mom during her 1994 run for City Council, along with veteran council member Nick Carney. Stein's wife, Karen Marie, went to aerobics classes with Palin.

But when she announced her candidacy for Stein's seat, vowing to overturn the city's "old boy" establishment, a different Sarah Palin emerged. "Things got very ugly," recalled Naomi Tigner, a friend of the Steins. "Sarah became very mean-spirited."

The Wasilla mayor's seat is nonpartisan, and Mayor Stein, a former city planner who had held the post for nine years, ran a businesslike campaign that stressed his experience and competency. But Palin ignited the traditionally low-key race with scorching social issues, injecting "God, guns and abortion into the race -- things that had nothing to do with being mayor of a small town," according to Tigner.

Palin's mayoral campaign rode the wave of conservative, evangelical fervor that was sweeping Alaska in the '90s. Suddenly candidates' social values, not their ability to manage the roads and sewer systems, were dominating the debate. "Sarah and I were both Republicans, but this was an entirely new slant to local politics -- much more aggressive than anything I'd ever seen," said Stein, looking back at the election that put Palin on the political map.

There was a knife-sharp, personal edge to Palin's campaign that many locals found disturbing, particularly because of the warm relationship between Palin and Stein before the race.

"I called Sarah's campaign for mayor the end of the age of innocence in Wasilla," said Carney.

Even though Palin knew that Stein is a Protestant Christian, from a Pennsylvania Dutch background, her campaign began circulating the word that she would be "Wasilla's first Christian mayor." Some of Stein's supporters interpreted this as an attempt to portray Stein as Jewish in the heavily evangelical community. Stein himself, an eminently reasonable and reflective man, thinks "they were redefining Christianity to mean born-agains."

The Palin campaign also started another vicious whisper campaign, spreading the word that Stein and his wife -- who had chosen to keep her own last name when they were married -- were not legally wed. Again, Palin knew the truth, Stein said, but chose to muddy the waters. "We actually had to produce our marriage certificate," recalled Stein, whose wife died of breast cancer in 2005 without ever reconciling with Palin.

"I had a hand in creating Sarah, but in the end she blew me out of the water," Stein said, sounding more wearily ironic than bitter. "Sarah's on a mission, she's an opportunist."

According to some political observers in Alaska, this pattern -- exploiting "old-boy" mentors and then turning against them for her own advantage -- defines Sarah Palin's rise to power. Again and again, Palin has charmed powerful political patrons, and then rejected them when it suited her purposes. She has crafted a public image as a clean politics reformer, but in truth, she has only blown the whistle on political corruption when it was expedient for her to do so. Above all, Palin is a dynamo of ambition, shrewdly maneuvering her way through the notoriously compromised world of Alaska politics, making and breaking alliances along the way.

"When Palin takes credit for knocking off the old-boy network in Alaska, it drives me crazy," said Andrew Halcro, an Anchorage businessman and radio talk show host who ran against her in the 2006 GOP primary race for governor. "Sarah certainly availed herself of that network whenever it was expedient."

With its frontier political infrastructure and its geyser of oil money, Alaska has become as notorious as a third-world petro-kingdom. In recent years, scandal has seeped throughout the state's political circles -- and at the center of this widening spill is Alaska's powerful patronage king, Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, and wealthy oil contractor Bill Allen.

Despite Palin's reform reputation, she has maintained a delicate relationship with Stevens over the years -- courting his endorsement for governor, then distancing herself after his 2007 federal indictment on corruption charges, and then cozying up again when it appeared he might survive politically. As for Allen -- the former oil roughneck whose North Slope wealth has greased many a palm in Alaska -- Palin found nothing wrong with his money when she ran for lieutenant governor in 2002.

But once a powerful patron becomes a major liability, Palin is quick to jettison him. Alaska state Rep. Victor Kohring, another key Palin supporter during her political rise in Mat-Su Valley, found this out after he became a victim of the FBI's oil corruption sting operation. Kohring, who used to accompany Palin on her campaign jaunts, angrily points out that he was abandoned by his fellow Christian conservative before he even went to trial. The former Alaska legislator, who now resides in the Taft minimum security prison outside Bakersfield, Calif., communicated his views of Palin through his friend, Fred James. Kohring, said James, feels "betrayed" by Palin.

"After Vic's indictment, she didn't give him the time of day," said James. "She never went to him personally and asked if the charges were true. This is a man who helped her get started in government. She turned her back on him well before he even went on trial. Vic resents the hell out of that. He thinks she's an opportunist, pure and simple. She saw how the press were moving on Vic, and even before he had his day in court, she called on him to resign his office. He regarded that as a great insult, a personal betrayal."

Palin's reputation as a reformer stems primarily from her headline-grabbing ouster of state GOP chairman Randy Ruedrich from the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission for flagrant conflict-of-interest abuses. At the time, Palin was heralded in the press as a whistle-blower, but it was later revealed that she was guilty of the same charge that she had brought against Ruedrich -- using state office equipment for partisan political business. (While still mayor of Wasilla, she sent out campaign fundraising appeals from her office during her race for lieutenant governor.)

Others suspect that Palin had self-serving reasons for taking on Ruedrich and resigning her seat on the commission. The state energy panel had ignited a public firestorm in Palin's home base, Mat-Su Valley, by secretly leasing sub-surface drilling rights on thousands of residential lots to a Colorado-based gas producer. Outraged farmers and homeowners, who woke up one morning to find drilling equipment being hauled onto their land, were in open revolt against the commission. While Palin initially supported the leasing plan, she was shrewd enough to realize it was political suicide to alienate conservative property owners in her own district. According to some accounts, she was also growing tired of commuting to state offices in Anchorage and poring over dry, tedious technical manuals for her job. All in all, it seemed like the right move to jump ship -- and going out a hero was an added plus.

"Sarah quit the commission to make political hay," Halcro asserted.

In the end, Ruedrich admitted wrongdoing and settled the ethics case by paying $12,000 in civil fines. But Palin did not drive the well-connected Republican operative into exile. In fact, he remains the party's state chairman and he could be seen on the floor of the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., hugging the newly crowned vice-presidential candidate and cheering her feisty speech against greedy old boys like, well, him.

"The idea that Sarah shook up the state's old-boy network is one big fantasy, it's complete bullshit," Halcro said. "She got all this public acclaim for throwing people who backed her under the bus -- but she only did it after they became expendable, when she no longer needed them.

"The good old boys in Alaska are still the good old boys -- they're alive and kicking. Randy is still running the Republican Party -- he wasn't happy about being turned into a national poster boy for corruption, but he went along with the program. Ted Stevens is still running for reelection. And [scandal-tainted Alaska Rep.] Don Young is, too. So where's the new era of change that Palin supposedly brought to Alaska?"

-- By David Talbot

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.

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Per Karren, this 5 min. film is one of the most thought provoking, and frightening, things I’ve seen or heard about the possible outcome of a McCain presidency. K

http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=PdJUCU1UH2w&rel=0&eurl=http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/9/55118/43459/1023/591906&iurl=http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/PdJUCU1UH2w/default.jpg&t=OEgsToPDskII4NUg-YFAZ-LARZrzvpes&use_get_video_info=1&load_modules=1&fs=1&hl=en&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=1

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The Huffington Post
SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Nico Pitney
McCain Wants A Time Out -- But Why?
September 24, 2008 03:30 PM

Why does John McCain suddenly want to suspend his presidential campaign and postpone Friday's debate? His campaign surrogates are saying it's a typical "maverick" move, that McCain is simply "putting country first." Let's look at the evidence:

1) As Ben Smith notes, McCain's move "is a mark, most of all, that he doesn't like the way this campaign is going. ... The only thing that's changed in the last 48 hours is the public polling."

2) The idea of uniting the campaigns to find a bipartisan solution to the Wall Street crisis wasn't even McCain's idea. A few minutes ago, Obama spokesman Bill Burton emailed to reporters:

"At 8:30 this morning, Senator Obama called Senator McCain to ask him if he would join in issuing a joint statement outlining their shared principles and conditions for the Treasury proposal and urging Congress and the White House to act in a bipartisan manner to pass such a proposal. At 2:30 this afternoon, Senator McCain returned Senator Obama's call and agreed to join him in issuing such a statement. The two campaigns are currently working together on the details."
3) John McCain has skipped more votes during this session than any member of the Senate except for Tim Johnson, who had major brain surgery. He hasn't cast a single vote in five months, since April 9. All of a sudden, McCain is demanding that the presidential race shut down so he can return to Washington?

4) A reminder: President Bush was able to debate John Kerry while he was president. For all of his sudden urgency, McCain acknowledged just yesterday that he had not even read the administration's three-page bailout proposal.

5) It's not at all clear that having McCain and Obama back in DC will actually help. "What does seem apparent, though, is that putting the two candidates in the negotiating room is far more likely to distract--and derail--negotiations than having them out on the hustings," Jonathan Cohn writes at the New Republic.

It's impossible to know why McCain chose this course, but it sure seems like more of a political stunt than a maverick moment.

Copyright © 2008 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. | Archive | User Agreement | Privacy | Comment Policy | About Us | Powered by Movable Type

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Don't forget to look at the two youtubes at the end! K

The economic crisis we are witnessing is a game strategy.

Zugzwang (German for compulsion to move) occurs when a player is forced to make an undesirable move. The player is put at a disadvantage because he would prefer to pass and make no move, but a move has to be made, all of which weaken his position. Situations involving zugzwang occur uncommonly, but when they do occur, it is almost always in the endgame, where there are fewer choices of available moves.

It's now being reported that the Paulson Plan is several months old. The plan was intentionally withheld from Congress until exactly one week before the election recess. It was held back to force the Democrats to make a move under intense time pressure. Think about it! Bush has used disaster after disaster to force concessions and grab power. This is a classic Bush/Cheney tactic and political extortion of the highest order.

When you are in zugzwang, any move you make is bad.

If the Democrats support the plan and win the election, they are left with no money for any social programs and effectively have their hands tied for four years. If they don't support the plan and allow more failures, they risk losing the election.

Marcy Kaptur's two minute speech before Congress needs to be seen by every American voter. Please send this to your friends. Get this out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S27yitK32ds&eurl=http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/radio/2008/09/23/sheehan/index.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbD62gNi9WE
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Where were the cops?

By Garrison Keillor
Published: September 25, 2008

It's just human nature that some calamities register in the brain and others don't. The train engineer texting at the throttle ("HOW R U? C U L8R") and missing the red light and 25 people die in the crash - oh God, that is way too real - everyone has had a moment of supreme stupidity that came close to killing somebody. Even atheists say a little prayer now and then: Dear God, I am an idiot, thank you for protecting my children.

On the other hand, the America's federal bailout of the financial market (yawn) is a calamity that people accept as if it were just one more hurricane. An air of crisis, the secretary of the Treasury striding down a hall at the Capitol with minions in his wake, solemn-faced congressmen at the microphones. Something must be done, harrumph harrumph.

The Current Occupant pops out of the cuckoo clock and reads a few lines off a piece of paper, pronouncing all the words correctly. And the newscaster looks into the camera and says, "Etaoin shrdlu qwertyuiop."

Where is the outrage?

Poor Senator Larry Craig got a truckload of moral condemnation for tapping his wingtips in the men's john, but his party proposes to spend 5 percent of the GDP to buy up bad loans made by men who walk away with their fortunes intact while retirees see their 401(k) go pffffffff like a defunct air mattress, and it's business as usual.

John McCain is a lifelong deregulator and believer in letting brokers and bankers do as they please - remember Lincoln Savings and Loan and his intervention with federal regulators in behalf of his friend Charles Keating, who then went to prison? Remember Neil Bush, the brother of the C.O., who, as a director of Silverado S&L, bestowed enormous loans on his friends without telling fellow directors that the friends were friends and who, when the loans failed, paid a small fine and went skipping off to other things?

McCain now decries greed on Wall Street and suggests a commission be formed to look into the problem. This is like Casanova coming out for chastity.

Confident men took leave of common sense and bet on the idea of perpetual profit in the real estate market and crashed. But it wasn't their money. It was your money they were messing with. And that's why we need government regulators. Gimlet-eyed men with steel-rim glasses and crepe-soled shoes who check the numbers and have the power to say, "This is a scam and a hustle and either you cease and desist or you spend a few years in a minimum-security federal facility playing backgammon."

The Republican Party used to specialize in gimlet-eyed, steel-rim, crepe-soled common sense and then it was taken over by crooked preachers who demand Americans trust them because they're packing a Bible and God sent them on a mission to enact lower taxes, less government. Except when things crash, and then government has to pick up the pieces.

Some say the tab might come to a trillion dollars. Nobody knows. And McCain has not one moment of doubt or regret. He switches from First Deregulation Church to Our Lady of Strict Vigilance like you might go from decaf to latte. Where is the straight talk? Does the man have no conscience?

It wasn't their money they were playing with. It was yours. Where were the cops?

What we are seeing is the stuff of a novel, the public corruption of an American war hero. It is painful.

First, there was McCain's exploitation of a symbolic woman, an eager zealot who is so far out of her depth that it isn't funny anymore. Anyone with a heart has to hurt for how McCain has made a fool of her. Never mind the persistent cheesiness of his attack ads. And now this chasm of debt and loss and the gentleman pretends to be shocked. He was there. He turned out the lights. He sent the regulators home.

McCain seems willing to say anything, do anything, to get to the White House so he can go to war with Iran. If he needs to recline naked in a department store window, he would do that, or eat live chickens, or claim to be a reformer. Obviously you can fool a lot of people for a while and maybe he can stretch it out until mid-November. But the truth is marching on. A few true conservatives are leading a charge against the bailout. Good for them. But how about admitting that their cowboy economic philosophy was at fault here?

Garrison Keillor is the author of a new Lake Wobegon novel, "Liberty." Distributed by Tribune Media Services.

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by Sam Harris:

Let me confess that I was genuinely unnerved by Sarah Palin's performance at the Republican convention. Given her audience and the needs of the moment, I believe Governor Palin's speech was the most effective political communication I have ever witnessed. Here, finally, was a performer who, being maternal, wounded, righteous and sexy, could stride past the frontal cortex of every American and plant a three-inch heel directly on that limbic circuit that ceaselessly intones "God and country." If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could.

Then came Palin's first television interview with Charles Gibson. I was relieved to discover, as many were, that Palin's luster can be much diminished by the absence of a teleprompter. Still, the problem she poses to our political process is now much bigger than she is. Her fans seem inclined to forgive her any indiscretion short of cannibalism. However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist who caused her to break stride, upon the camera operator who happened to capture her fall, upon the television network that broadcast the good lady's misfortune and, above all, upon the "liberal elites" with their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal.

The point to be lamented is not that Sarah Palin comes from outside Washington, or that she has glimpsed so little of the earth's surface (she didn't have a passport until last year), or that she's never met a foreign head of state. The point is that she comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of a nation. In her interview with Gibson, Palin managed to turn a joke about seeing Russia from her window into a straight-faced claim that Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia gave her some essential foreign-policy experience. Palin may be a perfectly wonderful person, a loving mother and a great American success story, but she is a beauty queen/sports reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the verge of stumbling into, or upon, world history.

The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that half the electorate revels in Palin's lack of intellectual qualifications. When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this country. "They think they're better than you!" is the refrain that (highly competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. "Sarah Palin is an ordinary person!" Yes, all too ordinary.

We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter's microphone, saying things like, "I'm voting for Sarah because she's a mom. She knows what it's like to be a mom." Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them.

Palin's most conspicuous gaffe in her interview with Gibson has been widely discussed. The truth is, I didn't much care that she did not know the meaning of the phrase "Bush doctrine." And I am quite sure that her supporters didn't care, either. Most people view such an ambush as a journalistic gimmick. What I do care about are all the other things Palin is guaranteed not to know or will be glossing only under the frenzied tutelage of John McCain's advisers. What doesn't she know about financial markets, Islam, the history of the Middle East, the cold war, modern weapons systems, medical research, environmental science or emerging technology? Her relative ignorance is guaranteed on these fronts and most others, not because she was put on the spot, or got nervous, or just happened to miss the newspaper on any given morning. Sarah Palin's ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years on earth.

I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn't: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events. Needless to say, she shares this belief with millions of Americans, but we shouldn't be eager to give these people our nuclear codes, either. There is no question that if President McCain chokes on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom, has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn't ready for? He wouldn't. Everything happens for a reason. Palin seems perfectly willing to stake the welfare of our country, even the welfare of our species, as collateral in her own personal journey of faith. Of course, McCain has made the same unconscionable wager on his personal journey to the White House.

In speaking before her church about her son going to war in Iraq, Palin urged the congregation to pray "that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God; that's what we have to make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan." When asked about these remarks in her interview with Gibson, Palin successfully dodged the issue of her religious beliefs by claiming that she had been merely echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times later dubbed her response "absurd." It was worse than absurd; it was a lie calculated to conceal the true character of her religious infatuations. Every detail that has emerged about Palin's life in Alaska suggests that she is as devout and literal-minded in her Christian dogmatism as any man or woman in the land. Given her long affiliation with the Assemblies of God church, Palin very likely believes that Biblical prophecy is an infallible guide to future events and that we are living in the "end times." Which is to say she very likely thinks that human history will soon unravel in a foreordained cataclysm of war and bad weather. Undoubtedly Palin believes that this will be a good thing as all true Christians will be lifted bodily into the sky to make merry with Jesus, while all nonbelievers, Jews, Methodists and other rabble will be punished for eternity in a lake of fire. Like many Pentecostals, Palin may even imagine that she and her fellow parishioners enjoy the power of prophecy themselves. Otherwise, what could she have meant when declaring to her congregation that "God's going to tell you what is going on, and what is going to go on, and you guys are going to have that within you"?

You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps. In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners enjoy "baptism in the Holy Spirit," "miraculous healings" and "the gift of tongues." Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin's spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of "the final generation," engaged in "spiritual warfare" to purge the earth of "demonic strongholds." Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria. Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians or to the Chinese: "All options remain on the table"?

It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of having a child with Down's syndrome and still find the time and energy to govern the state of Alaska. But we cannot ignore the fact that Palin's impressive family further testifies to her dogmatic religious beliefs. Many writers have noted the many shades of conservative hypocrisy on view here: when Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, it is considered a symptom of liberal decadence and the breakdown of family values; in the case of one of Palin's daughters, however, teen pregnancy gets reinterpreted as a sign of immaculate, small-town fecundity. And just imagine if, instead of the Palins, the Obama family had a pregnant, underage daughter on display at their convention, flanked by her black boyfriend who "intends" to marry her. Who among conservatives would have resisted the temptation to speak of "the dysfunction in the black community"?

Teen pregnancy is a misfortune, plain and simple. At best, it represents bad luck (both for the mother and for the child); at worst, as in the Palins' case, it is a symptom of religious dogmatism. Governor Palin opposes sex education in schools on religious grounds. She has also fought vigorously for a "parental consent law" in the state of Alaska, seeking full parental dominion over the reproductive decisions of minors. We know, therefore, that Palin believes that she should be the one to decide whether her daughter carries her baby to term. Based on her stated position, we know that she would deny her daughter an abortion even if she had been raped. One can be forgiven for doubting whether Bristol Palin had all the advantages of 21st-century family planning or, indeed, of the 21st century.

We have endured eight years of an administration that seemed touched by religious ideology. Bush's claim to Bob Woodward that he consulted a "higher Father" before going to war in Iraq got many of us sitting upright, before our attention wandered again to less ethereal signs of his incompetence. For all my concern about Bush's religious beliefs, and about his merely average grasp of terrestrial reality, I have never once thought that he was an over-the-brink, Rapture-ready extremist. Palin seems as though she might be the real McCoy. With the McCain team leading her around like a pet pony between now and Election Day, she can be expected to conceal her religious extremism until it is too late to do anything about it. Her supporters know that while she cannot afford to "talk the talk" between now and Nov. 4, if elected, she can be trusted to "walk the walk" until the Day of Judgment.

What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree to which she represents, and her supporters celebrate, the joyful marriage of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:

"Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?"

"Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid hunter."

"But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind."

"That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink."

The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.

I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency, the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The world is growing more complex, and dangerous, with each passing hour, and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to unite the entire world against us. When asked why she is qualified to shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history, Palin cites her refusal to hesitate. "You can't blink," she told Gibson repeatedly, as though this were a primordial truth of wise governance. Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization.

Harris is a founder of The Reason Project and author of The New York Times best sellers “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.” His Web site is samharris.org.
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McCain's looming debate debacle

Leading Republicans say that, short of total gridlock on the economic bailout, a McCain no-show on Friday would be "a huge political mistake."
By Walter Shapiro

Sep. 26, 2008 | As John McCain and Barack Obama met with George W. Bush at the White House Thursday afternoon on the economic rescue plan, the Republican co-chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates exuded optimism that the two candidates would debate Friday night in Mississippi as planned. Frank Fahrenkopf said in a telephone interview, "If they all come out and say there is an agreement, it would be very hard for John McCain not to go to Oxford."

Instead the initial impression after the White House meeting was that congressional gridlock trumped any effort to save greed-locked Wall Street. Even a glimmer of a deal on a bailout would probably bail McCain out of a tight spot. The Arizona senator threw the political world into a tizzy Wednesday when he suddenly announced that he believed it would be inappropriate to debate with Obama until the financial crisis was resolved. But 24 hours later, this hard-line position was facing GOP ridicule, at least in not-for-attribution conversations.

"Unless the negotiators are sitting in the Oval Office with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi at 8:59 p.m. on Friday night, it would be a huge political mistake for McCain not to debate," said a prominent Republican with longtime ties to McCain. It would be difficult politically to explain a no-show McCain if the lights were dim at the White House and Congress, if still in session, is just continuing to go through the motions.

A common misconception is that the 90-minute debate would feature Obama, moderator Jim Lehrer and an empty chair if McCain clung to his resolve to stay in Washington. But such a scene -- frequently invoked by talk-radio hosts and bloggers -- is about the only thing guaranteed not to happen on Friday night. "The law requires that there must be two candidates for a debate," said Fahrenkopf, a former GOP national chairman, who helped establish the bipartisan debate commission in 1986. "If we did anything else, we would be making an in-kind contribution to the Obama campaign."

Amid the market mayhem and economic anxiety, it had seemed odd that the first debate -- at the insistence of both candidates -- would revolve around foreign policy and national security. But assuming that the Friday night fight in Oxford actually comes off, the candidates will not have to go into contortions to turn every Iraq question into a Lehman Brothers answer.

"Long ago it was decided that this would be a debate on global affairs, and I can't think of a better opportunity to talk about a global financial crisis," Robert Gibbs, a senior advisor to Obama, said at a breakfast with reporters Thursday morning. Gibbs went on to reveal -- and Fahrenkopf later confirmed -- that the debate producers had informed both campaigns that there would indeed be questions about the financial meltdown.

Even though McCain has gambled that the voting public's clamor for debates can be delayed at least through the weekend, Obama has the most to gain or lose when the candidates finally stand behind their dueling lecterns. As a freshman senator, who was in the Illinois Legislature just four years ago, Obama must in the first 30 minutes or so of the debate establish himself as a credible 44th president. During the first presidential debate 48 years ago, this was the major hurdle that John Kennedy surmounted, putting to rest his image as a callow, playboy senator.

In the immediate aftermath, debates are rated by their gotcha moments and zinger one-liners. But what may linger in the minds of the 20 percent or so of the electorate who are still up for grabs are deeper perceptions about the candidates. Does Obama, for instance, come across as strong enough to survive GOP attacks claiming that he (like most Democrats) is weak on national security? McCain's burden is apt to be a certain president named Bush. Can the hawkish Arizona senator talk about Iraq or Iran without scaring persuadable voters that this is a movie they have already seen -- an administration that would be at war without end, amen?

But even if the debate rehearsals have been curtailed by the bailout bargaining in Washington, both Obama and McCain have a pretty good idea what will be coming their way on Friday night -- or whenever they finally face off. As Gibbs said candidly at the Thursday breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, "I think everyone has a pretty good sense of what the topics will be. We've been through a number of these debates and obviously a lot of what I think will be asked Friday night is what you read about in the papers. I don't think there are going to be a lot of surprises."

Of course, those words were uttered before the congressional negotiations started to resemble chaos theory. So even as debate preparations go forward in Oxford, the biggest surprise Friday night may be if John McCain actually shows up.

-- By Walter Shapiro

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.

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10 Things Everyone Should Know About John McCain

Sen. John McCain is not just the Republican candidate for president, he is also frighteningly out of touch on issues crucial to the women of the United States. By now, many people have heard about the wildly popular condoms the Planned Parenthood Action Fund passed out at the Democratic National Convention. On them, we pulled together the top 10 things every voter needs to know about John McCain before this Election Day. Check them out:

1. John McCain opposes equal pay legislation, saying it wouldn’t do "anything to help the rights of women."
2. John McCain opposes requiring health care plans to cover birth control.
3. John McCain opposes comprehensive, medically accurate sex education.
4. John McCain opposes funding to prevent unintended and teen pregnancies.
5. John McCain opposes funding for public education about emergency contraception.
6. John McCain opposes restoring family planning services for low-income women.
7. John McCain opposes Roe v. Wade and says it should be overturned.
8. John McCain wants to nominate Supreme Court justices who are "clones" of conservative Justices Alito and Roberts.
9. John McCain said he was "stumped" when asked whether contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV.
10. In his 25 years in Washington, DC, John McCain has voted anti-choice125 times!

Get the Facts on Governor Sarah Palin

Alaska Governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin is the wrong choice for women.

Choosing Sarah Palin as a running mate makes clear that Senator John McCain is completely out of touch on the issues that matter to American women.

Here are the facts:

· CNN reported that women were required to pay for their own rape examinations in the town of Wasilla, Alaska, while Palin was mayor.
. board saying she was as "pro-life as any candidate can be."
· pregnancy continued. I believe that no matter what mistakes we make as a society, we cannot condone ending an innocent’s life.” RHRealtyCheck.com writes: "This means that the health of the mother would never be a consideration, only if her life was actually threatened. She does not support abortion rights for victims of rape or incest either.”
· Gov. Palin backed abstinence-only programs during her 2006 race for the governor of Alaska.
· measure reducing and eliminating funds for programs she opposed. Inking her initials on the legislation — 'SP' — Palin reduced funding for Covenant House Alaska by more than 20 percent, cutting funds from $5 million to $3.9 million. Covenant House is a mix of programs and shelters for troubled youths, including Passage House, which is a transitional home for teenage mothers.”
· extreme restrictions aren’t as extreme as Palin’s personal views. She is on the record as opposing abortion even in the case of rape or incest.
· continued, saying, "the State Supreme Court has failed Alaska by separating parents from their children during such a critical decision, moving in the exact opposite direction from the law's intent." She also directed the attorney general to file for a rehearing.

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Subject: like rats leaving a sinking ship ...

September 26, 2008
Palin should step down, conservative commentator says
Posted: 02:27 PM ET

From CNN Ticker Producer Alexander Mooney

Palin was in New York City Thursday.

(CNN) – Prominent conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, an early supporter of Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin, said Friday recent interviews have shown the Alaska governor is "out of her league" and should leave the GOP presidential ticket for the good of the party.

The criticism in Parker's Friday column is the latest in a recent string of negative assessments toward the McCain-Palin candidacy from prominent conservatives.

It was fun while it lasted," Parker writes. "Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who is clearly out of her league."

Palin's interview with Couric drew criticism when the Alaska governor was unable to provide an example of when John McCain had pushed for more regulation of Wall Street during his Senate career. Palin also took heat for defending her foreign policy credentials by suggesting Russian leaders enter Alaska airspace when they come to America. Palin was also criticized last week for appearing not to know what the Bush Doctrine is during an interview with Charlie Gibson.

“If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself," Parker also writes. "If Palin were a man, we’d all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she’s a woman — and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket — we are reluctant to say what is painfully true."

Parker, who praised McCain's "keen judgment" for picking Palin earlier this month and wrote the Alaska governor is a "perfect storm of God, Mom and apple pie," now says Palin should step down from the ticket.

“Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves," Parker writes. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first. Do it for your country."

Parker's comments follow those by prominent conservatives David Brooks, George Will, and David Frum who have all publicly questioned Palin's readiness to be vice president.

"Sarah Palin has many virtues," Brooks wrote in a recent column. "If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she'd be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness."
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Must see video. K

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8__aXxXPVc

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The Huffington Post
SEPTEMBER 29, 2008
Carl Bernstein
Posted September 25, 2008 | 03:53 PM (EST)

The Palin Pick -- The Devolution of McCain
stumble digg reddit del.ico.us news trust mixx.com

In one of our many conversations as we crisscrossed the country during his campaign for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, John McCain said to me, "I've always tried to act on what I thought was the best for the country. And that has guided me.... The only thing I can do is assure people that I would act on principle."

I traveled with McCain for weeks that political season, stayed in Arkansas with him, Cindy, and their children, and - for a Vanity Fair cover profile -- filled dozens of notebooks and tapes with observations from and about a potentially heroic politician who seems far removed from the man running for president today.

Three weeks after the 2008 Republican convention, on the cusp (maybe) of the first presidential debate, it is time to confront an awkward but profound question: whether in picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain has committed -- by his own professed standards of duty and honor -- a singularly unpatriotic act.

"I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war," he has said throughout this campaign. Yet, in choosing Palin, he has demonstrated -- whatever his words -- it may be permissible to imperil the country, conceivably even to "lose" it, in order to win the presidency. That would seem the deeper meaning of his choice of Palin.

Indeed, no presidential nominee of either party in the last century has seemed so willing to endanger the country's security as McCain in his reckless choice of a running mate. He is 72 years old; has had four melanomas, a particularly voracious form of cancer; refuses to release his complete medical records. Three of our last eleven presidents (and nine of all 43) have come to office unexpectedly in mid-term from the vice presidency: Truman, who within days of FDR's death was confronted with the decision of whether to drop the atom bomb on Japan; Lyndon Johnson, who took the oath in Dallas after JFK's assassination; Gerald Ford, sworn in following the resignation of Richard Nixon. A fourth vice president, George H.W. Bush, briefly exercised the powers of the presidency after the near-assassination of Ronald Reagan.

Given that history, what does John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin -- the cavalier, last-minute process of her selection and careless vetting; and her over-briefed, fact-lite performance since -- reveal about this military man who has attested to us for years that he is guided by his personal code of honor? "Two things I will never do," McCain told me, "are [to] lie to the American people, or put my electoral interests before the national interest" -- an obvious precursor of "I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war."

McCain, I wrote for Vanity Fair, "often speaks of the duty to follow his conscience in politics, rather than polls or party discipline. This, he says, comes from having escaped death and becoming 'more aware of the transience of everything we do.'"

"I've always had a pretty good idea about how to define something as to whether it's right or wrong," he told me. "I don't mean that I'm better or worse than anybody else. I just mean that when I see an issue and think about it and talk to people, I do generally have the ability to know what's the right course of action, even if it may not be what the majority wants. So I have a certain amount of confidence that I don't have to have a majority opinion on my side."

It does not take a near-death experience to know that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be commander in chief, or that -- in choosing her -- McCain has ignored his own oft-avowed code of conduct. "McCain made the most important command decision of his life when he chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee," noted David Ignatius in the Washington Post. "....No promotion board in history would have made such a decision."

--------

Above all, the John McCain I covered in 1999-2000 was -- he said -- convinced that two factors were undermining the interests of the United States: its cultural wars, causing political gridlock in Washington and civic discontent across the land; and the unbending agenda of the right-wing of the Republican party that, in his view, had been captured by the Christian conservative movement and bore disproportionate responsibility for the poisonous state of American politics. Exhibit One: the scorched-earth campaign that George W. Bush was then waging against McCain's insurgent run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Yet, McCain, is, in fact, running the kind of campaign against Barack Obama that George Bush ran against him in 2000, which he regarded rightly as dishonest, dishonorable and diversionary in terms of the truth about him and about the nation's problems.

The conservative commentator George Will has been especially incisive of late about the "dismaying," "un-presidential temperament" of McCain and the sleazy tenor of his campaign. Karl Rove (!) has responded to the incessant lying of McCain's ads (one claims falsely that Obama has promoted "comprehensive" sex education for five-year-olds -- he had, in fact, endorsed legislation to insure that kindergartners were warned about sexual predators), by saying, yes, the McCain camp's mendacity has "gone one step too far."

Meanwhile, McCain's frequent invocations of the need for bi-partisan statesmanship are interspersed with the angry themes of cultural warfare and of the Republican convention orchestrated by his handlers, the most dominant of them practitioners from the campaigns of George W. Bush: attacks on "tax-and-spend Democrats," on the dependable liberal bogeyman, on "the angry Left," on Constitution-rewriting federal judges (including, incongruously, three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to uphold McCain's singular legislative achievement: the campaign-finance act he authored with Democrat Russ Feingold).

"If hypocrisy were gold, the Capitol would be Fort Knox," McCain once famously said. "Some of those guys," he said, referring to his fellow senators, "have they even had lives? What have they done?" He added, "Aw, jeez, this is exactly the kind of thing that gets me into trouble." Indeed.

McCain's first choices to be his running mate were former Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and Senator Joe Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-Independent from Connecticut, and former vice presidential nominee of his former party. Neither passed the ideological litmus test of the Republican-Right -- "The Base" -- because each holds pro-choice views. Certainly both are qualified to step into the presidency in terms of national security credentials -- regardless of whether one agrees with their particular politics -- in the event of the death of the president. McCain's "Hail Mary" pick -- Palin -- was hastily decided on the next-to-last day of the Democratic convention, by which time it was evident that Obama's convention was winning over independent voters; all that remained was the final night and the opportunity for Obama to deliver a speech that would further work to his advantage, and debilitate the McCain campaign. Only by exciting "The Base" could McCain remain competitive and win, it was calculated.

The distance from McCain's ads and assertions about his presidential opponent and Democrats generally, and his decision to run a "persona-based" campaign, as opposed to being specific on the issues, is of a piece with his choice of Palin to be his running mate. As another conservative commentator sometimes critical of McCain -- Peggy Noonan -- has noted, the "narrative" of a life [McCain's, Palin's], takes over from existential political fact in the type of campaign run by McCain and his handlers. We have heard an awful lot in the past few weeks, especially from Sarah Palin, about John McCain "The Maverick," just as we did in the convention narrative. But what McCain has actually been doing in this campaign, rather than actually being The Maverick, is conveying the appearance of iconoclasm, and playing to the crowd. (Hence, perhaps, "suspending" his campaign -- and trying to postpone the first presidential debate while his poll numbers are sinking -- to deal with the financial crisis?) At this point, the maverick claim seems no more genuine than Sarah Palin's charade foreign-policy tour of Manhattan with no witnesses -- reporters -- permitted to observe the proceedings.

The issue of Palin's relative ignorance about international affairs and the larger world beyond America's shores (compared to previous vice presidential nominees), her attendant arrogance in seeming to revel in it, and McCain's decision to subject the country to it in choosing a possible president -- is the biggest question in this election, or perhaps ought to be. It goes to the core of who the John McCain of this campaign is.

Another conservative commentator, David Brooks, wrote last week: "Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she'd be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness."

The more we learn, the more we realize the vetting process was -- given the rush of the circumstances -- hopelessly inadequate: McCain didn't know many aspects of Palin's record or her reputation (none of which is to say she wouldn't be a congenial fit as, say, Secretary of Interior in a McCain administration). McCain's first choices for a running mate -- Ridge and Lieberman -- were light years ahead of Palin in the vice presidential-qualification department. But they didn't meet the ideological test, exactly the ideological litmus test that McCain has attacked his whole political career and told us he would never succumb to.

John McCain is a serious man, as anyone who has spent time with him knows. But he has not run the kind of serious campaign he once promised.

Not for the first time, as many of his fellow Republicans (as opposed to friendly reporters and sympathetic Democrats) had long maintained, McCain's more reckless inclinations and lesser impulses prevailed. A great political movement that would transcend rabid partisanship and hard ideology does not seem in the cards.

And if he wins the election, Sarah Palin -- who in her first post-convention discussion of foreign policy indicated a willingness to go to war with Russia over Georgia -- stands a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Ultimately it is the choice of Palin, made in the moment when action speaks loudest, that may undermine a quarter-century of assertions by John McCain about the preeminence of duty, honor and country in his political schema.

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross." -Sinclair Lewis

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Who is the real John McCain?

From David Foster Wallace to Paul Begala, four authors trace the politician's journey from the liberal's conservative to flip-flopping hack.
By Edward McClelland

Sep. 29, 2008 | Twenty or 30 years from now, John McCain will occupy the same historical niche as John Kerry, Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis and Wendell Willkie, in my opinion: a decent guy who never made it to the White House.

McCain has run for the presidency twice, as two completely different candidates. His campaigns and his image have been shaped by the nasty partisanship of the late 20th and early 21st century, an era that may be remembered as the Late Culture Wars. McCain has never seemed comfortable with that style of politics. Despite his identification as a conservative, he's been willing to reach across the aisle to work with Democrats who shared his concept of reform. In 2000, McCain tried to be a liberal's conservative, holding stream-of-consciousness press conferences on his bus, bashing right-wing preachers as "agents of intolerance" and opposing repeal of Roe v. Wade. Republicans were unimpressed, so when McCain finally won their nomination, he picked as his running mate a woman who had less than two years' experience as a governor -- a woman young enough to be his daughter, or his third wife, even -- but who belongs to a Pentecostal church, baits the Washington media and wouldn't allow any woman to have an abortion.

McCain, who built his image on bipartisanship, is now finding he can only rally Republicans by campaigning as a Deep Red partisan. That conflict -- between his sense of self and the role he's playing to win the election -- may account for the fact that he's been melting down like HAL 9000 lately. The old McCain would never have threatened to cancel a debate, or run an ad comparing his opponent to Britney Spears. But the old McCain never won the Republican nomination.

When scholars of the Obama presidency try to answer the question "Who Was John McCain?" -- or, more pointedly, "Who Were the Two John McCains?" -- they should start by reading what journalists had to say about him. Four new books about McCain, by four liberal authors, show how difficult it's been for a politician with middle-of-the-road instincts to operate in a polarized era. Writers loved McCain during his first run for the presidency, in 2000. But eight years later, they think he's a flip-flopping hack.

Consider "McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express With John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope," by David Foster Wallace -- effectively the last book Wallace published, though it's actually the unedited version of an article that appeared in Rolling Stone. During the 2000 Republican primaries, Wallace spent a week aboard McCain's campaign bus, which was nicknamed the "Straight Talk Express" because the candidate loved to hold bull sessions with reporters in an on-board press lounge.

Wallace didn't get much straight talk -- as a writer for a magazine with an un-Republican readership, he was exiled to a trailing vehicle known as "Bullshit #1," where he spent most of his time hanging out with the TV cameramen. A McCain staffer nearly faked a seizure to avoid giving him an interview. Still, his book is worth reading because it provides context for the press's eventual disenchantment with McCain.

In 2000, McCain was, as Wallace points out, an "anticandidate" whose campaign seemed like an ironic riff on politics. Used to stuffy, humorless politicians, reporters were thrilled to hang out with a guy who campaigned with an edge of self-mockery. A hotshot Navy pilot, no less. "He's witty, and smart, and he'll make fun of himself and his wife and staff and other pols and the Trail, and he'll tease the press and give them shit in a way they don't ever mind because it's the sort of shit that makes you feel that here's this very cool, important guy who's noticing you and liking you enough to give you shit," Wallace wrote.

McCain and his journalistic entourage also had a common enemy: the Republican Establishment, personified by George W. Bush. It felt ennobling to travel with a candidate who whaled on Jerry Falwell, and whose underfunded campaign checked in every night at the Marriott. A lot has changed in eight years: By 2008, McCain had given a speech at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, had promised not to repeal Bush's tax cuts, had declared his opposition to Roe v. Wade, and was staunchly defending the war in Iraq. The anti-politician had learned that stiffing the Republican base was no way to win the party's nomination.

In his first run, McCain campaigned as a reformer who could win over independents. That was before anyone had heard the terms "red state" and "blue state." In 2008, there is no middle ground. There is a liberal America and a conservative America, each unable to acknowledge that the other side is intelligent, honorable or possessed of a reasonable opinion. To win his party's nomination, McCain had to campaign under the team colors. The man who had sworn he would never compromise his principles to win an election, had become ... a politician. That transformation helped McCain with Republican voters, but not reporters. Wait a minute, they seemed to say, we thought you were one of us. But you're nothing more than a, a ... conservative!

To sell books to this polarized public, McCain's critics must be equally partisan. It's not enough for them to disagree with his politics. Since he's on the other side of the divide, they have to attack his character as well. And they do, as eagerly as David Freddoso bit into Obama in "The Case Against Barack Obama."

Liberal journalist Cliff Schecter donated $20 to McCain in 2000 because "I thought he held informed, principled positions high above the fray of partisan politics." This year, Schecter published a broadside titled "The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him -- and Why Independents Shouldn't." Schecter divides McCain's career into three phases: McCain 1.0 was a Reaganite conservative. McCain 2.0 was the man known as Maverick. McCain 3.0 sucked up to Bush. To Schecter, Version 2 was the phony. McCain, he argued, adopted the maverick persona to beat a primary field full of conservative candidates, and to win over gullible journalists, like Schecter.

With his eyes now opened, Schecter saw the similarities between McCain 1.0, who jetted to the Bahamas at Savings & Loan fraudster Charles Keating's expense, and McCain 3.0, who hired lobbyists to run his 2008 presidential campaign.

"Another issue where one McCain has run up against another is taxes," Schecter writes. "When running for president in 2000, McCain claimed that candidate Bush's plan was skewed toward the wealthy. After the campaign, he and Lincoln Chafee were the only Republican senators to oppose President Bush's signature tax package in 2001." But when McCain began planning another White House run, "he jumped enthusiastically on the tax-cut bandwagon, voting in 2006 to extend portions of the Bush tax cut. If those tax cuts aren't made permanent, he said, it would be the equivalent of a tax increase, and 'I've never voted for a tax increase in 24 years' ... Granted, he's no Mike Huckabee, who would abolish the IRS altogether. But he's not the John McCain we knew in 2001." Campaign books have a short shelf life, but I hope Schecter gets his $20 donation back in royalties.

Something else has changed over the last eight years: A lot of Americans really, really, really hate George W. Bush. When Bush's head pops up on the TV screen, Democrats shout and swear and froth as though they're taking part in the Two-Minute Hate from "1984." Paul Begala has made a career out of hating Bush, and he isn't ready to let it go just because his nemesis is leaving office. Begala, a former aide to President Clinton, co-hosted CNN's "Crossfire," on which he played a cross between a debate team captain and a wrestler, defending, at high volume, everything on the Democratic platform. "Crossfire" was canceled in 2005, and the Bush administration is scheduled to be canceled in early 2009, but Begala has continued the crusade with a book titled "Third Term: Why George W. Bush (Hearts) John McCain," which presented McCain as the political reincarnation of Bush.

If you want to steep yourself in the bitterness and shallowness of political discourse circa 2008, "Third Term" is your book. Begala sees everything in red and blue. Except for a few lines praising McCain's service in the Vietnam War (while comparing it unfavorably to Bush's draft dodging), Begala depicts the senator as a corrupt, ill-tempered saber-rattler, determined to continue Bush's policies. The book is full of poorly photoshopped movie stills, pasting Bush's and McCain's faces onto the cowboys from "Brokeback Mountain," and the spaghetti-slurping dogs in "Lady and the Tramp." Scholars say newspapers are written on a sixth-grade level. "Third Term" certainly is, because its taunting message is that Bush and McCain love each other so much, they should be boyfriends. A McCain administration would be so gay! It's almost not worth mentioning any facts from the book, because Begala obviously cut-and-pasted it on his computer while toggling back and forth between Microsoft Word and a Google search page titled "Bush + McCain." But here's an example: "Under the Bush-McCain economic policies, the American economy has created a little over five million jobs. By contrast, the Clinton-Democratic policies brought twenty-three million new jobs." Ergo, not only will McCain continue Bush's policies, he shares responsibility for all those policies' failures over the last eight years.

Matt Welch's recent book "McCain: The Myth of a Maverick" is better-researched, and more evenhanded. It is particularly strong on how McCain's military background made him a rebel. In that regimented society, breaking petty rules and challenging superiors is a sign of esprit. There's also a fascinating discussion of McCain's favorite book, "For Whom the Bell Tolls." McCain discovered Hemingway in his father's library when he was a 12-year-old, looking for a heavy volume to press a four-leaf clover. Instead, he found a literary hero: Robert Jordan, who defies the orders of a cautious commander by blowing up a bridge, at the risk of his own life. But Welch, too, attacks McCain's personality. He devotes an entire chapter to calling McCain an elitist who prefers big-money fundraisers to mingling with little people who have nothing to offer but votes. He's a politician, man! When was the last time Barack Obama flew coach?

John McCain has never been as good as the media portrayed him in 2000, or as bad as he's being portrayed in 2008. One thing he is bad at: keeping in step with the nation's mood. On his first try at the presidency, McCain ran as a moderate, when Republicans wanted a conservative. Had he been nominated, he probably would have fulfilled his promise to beat Al Gore "like a drum." That would have spared the country the Florida recount and the Bush presidency. On his second try, he's running as a conservative, when the country is sick of that philosophy.

So what will be the answer to "Who was John McCain?" That more than once, he was the right man at the wrong time.

-- By Edward McClelland

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Warning, Warning. Check this out. K

If you're like tens of millions of others, you've gotten an email with a subject line like that. A forward of an email with a catchy, titillating subject.

Only they are never about John McCain. They're about Barack Obama. And they are almost always filled with distortions, misstatements, and outright lies.

We started TruthFightsBack.com to deal with smears, and those types emails were a big motivator for us. And, thanks to all of you, TruthFightsBack has been a great success.

But we can do better. We know that when you get a smear email, you want to get the truth fast, and you want it laid out in a way that can convince the undecided, swing voters. So we began a new project of TruthFightsBack.com called the Center for Political Accuracy focused specifically on this aspect of fighting anonymous smear emails in real-time, and we've got an exciting new tool to use in this battle.

You can email me at brian@politicalaccuracy.com with your smear and our system can read your smear and get me our researched response immediately, and I'll email back a reply debunking the original email. This can all happen in 10 minutes or less, so you can be armed with the truth and reply to everyone who got the original smear.

Just copy this email address into your address book, and make sure to email me right away next time you get a smear.

brian@politicalaccuracy.com

Thank you so much for joining the fight against smears.

Brian Young

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LOCAL

This is an incredible opportunity to meet Michele Obama, the next First Lady of the United States, and you can make it happen with your donation, and your volunteer efforts to get people to attend.... and get out the vote! This is the most important election in our history, and we have to make sure this time...we are the WINNERS. The Repulican National Committee is now raising millions of dollars and we have to stay even and have enough to finish the Victory Line..so please spread the word and give as much as you can.....

Save the Date!
Michelle Obama Fundraiser in Kansas City
Wednesday, 10/1/08!

Please join Michelle Obama and Governor Kathleen Sebelius for a very special fundraiser in Kansas City, MO on Wednesday, October 1st at 6:30 PM [before theTina Turner concert] close to downtown. We will have more details including a location shortly but it’s critical that we begin to spread the word and secure commitments. We have 42 days left and WE NEED EVERYONE to call and email as many people as they can and ask them to attend and contribute. If you can commit to raising $20,000, please let me know and you will be listed as the event committee on the invitation.

WHEN: October 1st at 6:30 PM

WHERE: Kansas City, MO – One Park Place

CONTRIBUTION LEVELS: General Reception - $1,000, or $2300 includes 'special pin and bumper sticker'
Host Reception - $5,000 per person includes a photo with Michelle!
Event Chair - $20,000-$28,500 includes a small group meeting with Michele
***NOTE: individuals who have contributed $4,600 to the obama Campaign can still contribute to the ‘Obama Victory Fund’ which has an individual limit of $28,500 per person. The Obama Victory Fund is a joint fundraising agreement between the Obama campaign and the DNC.

Please contact Ari Koban with questions, RSVP at akoban@barackobama.com (312) 819-2789,

or Sharon Hoffman skhoffman@kc.rr.com 816 309 8158

Thanks for your continued support!

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VOLUNTEERS -
For those of you who want to work on election day, MO is in desperate need for election judges and other workers. Please fax them this sheet and reference Yolanda Wheat. They told me that would be helpful. Keep in mind the lines that will most assuredly be there on 11/04 in combination with the average age of the current poll worker, 72. That is a recipe for a very long wait. Anything we can do to make sure our voters are not disenfranchised.

http://www.kceb.org/pdf/other_worker.pdf

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The effort to promote and protect the vote has begun -- and it needs volunteers.

Earlier than ever before, in a more comprehensive fashion than ever before, building on three years of base work and an extensive primary season, we're making sure that every eligible citizen who wants to vote can cast a ballot, and have it counted. To do that, we need you to volunteer to help us out on election day. You can do that here: my.barackobama.com/counselforchange.

If you're a lawyer, or law student, or just want to help protect the vote this year, we want to know.

We'll connect you to trouble spots, making sure that you're equipped and able to resolve problems before they happen. On Election Day, we'll have broader coverage than ever, using your talent and energy across the country to safeguard every vote that's cast.

Please sign up, at my.barackobama.com/counselforchange. The information on that form will feed directly into our voter protection efforts here in Missouri.

We look forward to engaging your talents in the months ahead. You are what makes the voter protection program possible.

Thank you.
Rebecca Ewing
Voter Protection Coordinator
Missouri Campaign for Change
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please Join
Hon. Claire McCaskill and Hon. Emanuel Cleaver, II
along with

Stephen and Andrea Bough
Mark Bryant
Jennifer Dameron
Grant and Amy Davis
Tim Dollar
Charles and Patricia Garney
David Johnson
Herb Kohn
Scott Lakin
Teresa Loar
Richard and Alison Martin
Dutch Newman
James and Annabel Nutter
James and Sonya Nutter, Jr
Gary and Anita Robb
Robert Rousey
Beth K. Smith
Guy and Liza Townsend
Dr. Kelvin Walls
Alan and Yolanda Wheat
David Welte
Dempsey & Kingsland, PC

for an evening supporting the re-election of
Robin Carnahan
Missouri Secretary of State

Tuesday, October 7th
5:30 – 7:30 pm
At Baja 600
The Plaza, 600 Ward Parkway
Kansas City, MO

Sponsor: $1500 Host: $1000
Supporter: $500 Friend: $250

For more information or to R.S.V.P contact Nicole Woodie at 866.567.2004 Nicole@RobinCarnahan.com

Senator McCaskill and Congressman Cleaver are not soliciting any donations from corporations, labor funds, or any other federally prohibited contribution sources.
Paid for by Robin Carnahan for Missouri, Tom Carnahan, Treasurer

Blue Hearts 9-24-08

2008-09-24T08:26:00.065-05:00

Hey All,

So much more to say so here we are again.
Kristin

p.s. I'm putting this one here so no one will miss it. (caveat: I do not know who Howie Silver is.):

"John McCain Campaign"~ deliberately sending "Misleading Absentee Ballot Applications" to registered "Democrats and "American Citizens" that have donated to Senator Obama's Campaign.~~~~~~~~~

From: Howie Silver ~~~~~~
Subject: Caging ~~~~~
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 03:07:32 +0000 ~~~~~~~~~~

The story is all over Progressive Talk Radio today about the McCain campaign sending absentee ballot applications to registered democrats or people that have donated to Obama's campaign. These ballots are deliberately misleading and have postage paid return addresses that are for an election clerk that is outside of your city or town. What this will end up doing is either having your vote not counted, or if you return one of these, they will cite you for election fraud, saying that you already voted absentee.

These ballots are only being sent out in 'purple states' and this is a big deal. This is called voter caging, and is a huge problem. The McCain campaign is stealing this election as we speak! Please get this information out to as many people as you can, and tell anyone you know who has received one of these ballots that they need to contact their city election clerk or the supervisor of elections immediately. Also call the local media and let them know what is going on. The main stream media is never going to cover this so we have to depend on our ground campaign to get the word out to our voters.
Howie ~~~

HUMOR

http://www.jibjab.com/originals/this_land

http://www.jibjab.com/originals/time_for_some_campaignin

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Hysterical! K

Subject: Les Misbarack

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/09/les-misbarack.html
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GENERAL

The lying game

Like George W. Bush, McCain and Palin have to lie. Because if they told the truth about their policies, they'd lose the election.
By Alan Wolfe

Sep. 18, 2008 | Eight years after the travesty of the 2000 election, in which the media were prone to emphasize Al Gore's exaggerations while letting George W. Bush off the hook, Republican politicians finally are being called out on their dishonesty. "The biggest liar in modern political history," writes Michael Tomasky, the editor of the Guardian America, about John McCain. There are indeed so many lies associated with the Republican campaign that one can pick and choose at random. My favorites are the efforts by the McCain campaign to portray Obama as being in favor of teaching sex education to 5-year-olds and the Spanish language ad accusing him of opposing immigration reform. Your favorites might include McCain's claim that Obama will raise taxes on the middle class or his statement to the women of "The View" that Sarah Palin never requested earmarks.

McCain's propensity to lie has become what political junkies call a meme, an idea or behavior that runs, seemingly unstoppably, from one media outlet to another. Some bloggers offer daily counts of how many falsehoods McCain tells while others wonder why the Democrats do not respond in turn. Even the mainstream press has gotten into the act. One of the pleasures of the 2008 campaign -- I admit they have been few and far between -- is watching all those who once admired John McCain for his truthfulness realize the true depths of his moral depravity. When McCain is linked to Palin, moreover, as he so frequently wants to be, lying experiences something of a multiplier effect. These candidates lie so much that they have taken to lying about their own lies.

Before we get carried away with enthusiasm about all this, though, we should keep two things in mind. One is that we are so quick to label McCain a liar that we tend to forget how much, and with what horrendous consequences, George W. Bush possessed the same character flaw. The other is that Republicans lie so frequently, not because the party just happened to settle upon one serial liar after another to run for high office, but because the form of conservatism to which they all adhere demands that if they are to win they have no choice but to lie.

In the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush, then something of a political unknown, claimed to be a compassionate conservative and promised the country a "humble" foreign policy. Lies both. Compassionate conservatism was a brilliant campaign slogan, an attempt by Bush to persuade independent voters that he was not a raving madman like Newt Gingrich, who had urged, in true Dickensian fashion, the building of orphanages to solve the welfare problem. Long before the public had ever heard of Rick Warren, Karl Rove understood that the evangelical base of the Republican Party wanted language more uplifting than traditional Republican red meat, and the idea that conservatives were in fact more compassionate than bureaucratic liberals provided it. In actuality, as we now know, Bush wanted to privatize Social Security, the most compassionate program ever adopted in this country, and was simply waiting for the right opportunity to do so.

Bush spoke in 2000 of a humble foreign policy for much the same reason. We now also know that the Bush-Cheney administration was intent on adopting the most aggressive American foreign stance possible, and that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, offered them the public justification for actions they had been secretly planning since taking office. We tend to forget that before Sept. 11, aggressive foreign policy moves were not all that popular. Americans wanted a peace dividend in the aftermath of communism's collapse and seemed hell-bent on turning inward to their private pursuits. In that context, offering them a humble approach while planning a militant one constituted as dramatic a lie as one can imagine.

I would never challenge the argument that John McCain's lies in 2008 are over the top. But if McCain is more serial a liar than George W. Bush, it is a matter of degree rather than kind. Bush's lies, after all, led to thousands of needless deaths, and none of John McCain's lies, at least to this point, have done that. Were he to find himself elected, McCain would no doubt lie about many things, such as whether the United States has engaged in torture or whether Iran is a genuine military threat to the United States. But the bar has been set way too high; given the mendacity of the Bush administration, I am at something of a loss to imagine that a McCain administration could lie more.

Why do Republicans lie so much? Why is McCain following the Bush script? Why, at the very moment when he wanted a "maverick" by his side, did McCain pick a congenital liar to be his running mate? Republicans engage in what I can only call "structural lies." To understand what this means consider this: Just about every significant lie uttered by Republican politicians is designed to make them seem less conservative than they really are.

The current lie du jour of the McCain campaign is that their man will aggressively take on the greed that is causing the collapse on Wall Street. Given McCain's lack of interest in the economy, wealthy campaign contributors, and ideological hostility toward government regulation, this stance is laughable. But McCain's lie unconsciously reveals an important truth, which is that when the economy goes into a tailspin, the public prefers a solution long identified with liberalism. McCain could tell the truth, which is that he is all for the free market and can barely wait until the crisis passes so the rich can go about the business of becoming ever richer. But if he does that, he will lose. McCain wants to win. Therefore he lies.

It is not just the economy that features this structural dynamic. If you were just tuning into the election now -- no doubt there are many Americans who have not quite tuned in yet -- you would think that the Republican Party loves workers, hopes to redistribute income to the lower middle class, embraces immigrants, favors environmental protection, and hates war. Some of the Republican lies, to be sure have nothing to do with policy, such as false estimates of the size of the crowds attending Republican rallies or Sarah Palin's announcement that she had sold the Alaska governor's plane on eBay, but of those that do, the overwhelming majority are designed to make the Republican ticket more humane and moderate than it actually is. Only on foreign policy, where McCain shows no interest in hiding his hawkish instincts, can the ticket claim to be taking an honest position even if the face of public skepticism.

Conservatism is an honorable political philosophy whose most eloquent spokesmen, such as John Adams and Edmund Burke, proclaimed the truth as they saw it. This is a tradition that continues among all those contemporary conservatives who have been appalled at the direction the McCain camp has taken and have been willing to say so publicly. In contrast, the conservative populism that has swallowed up the contemporary Republican Party lies because conservative populism is itself a lie. It claims to be guided by faith when it is run by corruption. It speaks of diversity but remains overwhelmingly white. It uses women to push an agenda that would expose women to harm. It speaks of reform tomorrow to slash the reforms of today. It seeks popular support to enact policies that, if revealed for what they were, would be wildly unpopular.

Like so many of John McCain's critics, I find myself astonished at the sheer brazenness of the lies he tells. But this is not because McCain is more dishonorable than Bush. It is because the conditions under which a truthful Republican could be elected in 2008 are much more difficult than they were in 2000. Through sheer incompetence and cronyism, George W. Bush showed Americans just how dangerous conservatism can be. Because he did, those conservatives who would succeed him face even more difficult obstacles placed in their path to power. In the past, they might have gotten away with lying occasionally. This will no longer do. Expect, therefore, as the country turns to the debates ahead, that John McCain, when addressing issues of foreign policy around which he has been remarkably honest, will begin to lie in that area as well.

-- By Alan Wolfe

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc. Reproduction of material from any Salon pages without written permission is strictly prohibited. SALON® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as a trademark of Salon Media Group Inc.

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I LOVE Frank Rich. Read his book "The Greatest Story Ever Sold: From 9/11 to Katrina" if you get a chance. He really is challenging the press to do its job. K

September 21, 2008
Truthiness Stages a Comeback

By FRANK RICH
NOT until 2004 could the 9/11 commission at last reveal the title of the intelligence briefing President Bush ignored on Aug. 6, 2001, in Crawford: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” No wonder John McCain called for a new “9/11 commission” to “get to the bottom” of 9/14, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off another kind of blood bath in Lower Manhattan. Put a slo-mo Beltway panel in charge, and Election Day will be ancient history before we get to the bottom of just how little he and the president did to defend America against a devastating new threat on their watch.

For better or worse, the candidacy of Barack Obama, a senator-come-lately, must be evaluated on his judgment, ideas and potential to lead. McCain, by contrast, has been chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he claims to have overseen “every part of our economy.” He didn’t, thank heavens, but he does have a long and relevant economic record that begins with the Keating Five scandal of 1989 and extends to this campaign, where his fiscal policies bear the fingerprints of Phil Gramm and Carly Fiorina. It’s not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.

McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protégé. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness. All campaigns, Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.

When a McCain spokesman told Politico a week ago that “we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say” about the campaign’s incessant fictions, he was channeling a famous Bush dictum of 2003: “Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter.” In Bush’s case, the lies lobbed over the heads of the press were to sell the war in Iraq. That propaganda blitz, devised by a secret White House Iraq Group that included Rove, was a triumph. In mere months, Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attacks and even that Iraqis were among the hijackers. A largely cowed press failed to set the record straight.

Just as the Bushies once flogged uranium from Africa, so Palin ceaselessly repeats her discredited claim that she said “no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. Nothing is too small or sacred for the McCain campaign to lie about. It was even caught (by The Christian Science Monitor) peddling an imaginary encounter between Cindy McCain and Mother Teresa when McCain was adopting her daughter in Bangladesh.

If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else.

You know the press is impotent at unmasking this truthiness when the hardest-hitting interrogation McCain has yet faced on television came on “The View.” Barbara Walters and Joy Behar called him on several falsehoods, including his endlessly repeated fantasy that Palin opposed earmarks for Alaska. Behar used the word “lies” to his face. The McCains are so used to deference from “the filter” that Cindy McCain later complained that “The View” picked “our bones clean.” In our news culture, Behar, a stand-up comic by profession, looms as the new Edward R. Murrow.

Network news, with its dwindling handful of investigative reporters, has barely mentioned, let alone advanced, major new print revelations about Cindy McCain’s drug-addiction history (in The Washington Post) and the rampant cronyism and secrecy in Palin’s governance of Alaska (in last Sunday’s New York Times). At least the networks repeatedly fact-check the low-hanging fruit among the countless Palin lies, but John McCain’s past usually remains off limits.

That’s strange since the indisputable historical antecedent for our current crisis is the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal of the go-go 1980s. When Charles Keating’s bank went belly up because of risky, unregulated investments, it wiped out its depositors’ savings and cost taxpayers more than $3 billion. More than 1,000 other S.&L. institutions capsized nationwide.

It was ugly for the McCains. He had received more than $100,000 in Keating campaign contributions, and both McCains had repeatedly hopped on Keating’s corporate jet. Cindy McCain and her beer-magnate father had invested nearly $360,000 in a Keating shopping center a year before her husband joined four senators in inappropriate meetings with regulators charged with S.&L. oversight.

After Congressional hearings, McCain was reprimanded for “poor judgment.” He had committed no crime and had not intervened to protect Keating from ruin. Yet he, like many deregulators in his party, was guilty of bankrupt policy-making before disaster struck. He was among the sponsors of a House resolution calling for the delay of regulations intended to deter risky investments just like those that brought down Lincoln and its ilk.

Ever since, McCain has publicly thrashed himself for his mistakes back then — and boasted of the lessons he learned. He embraced campaign finance reform to rebrand himself as a “maverick.” But whatever lessons he learned are now forgotten.

For all his fiery calls last week for a Wall Street crackdown, McCain opposed the very regulations that might have helped avert the current catastrophe. In 1999, he supported a law co-authored by Gramm (and ultimately signed by Bill Clinton) that revoked the New Deal reforms intended to prevent commercial banks, insurance companies and investment banks from mingling their businesses. Equally laughable is the McCain-Palin ticket’s born-again outrage over the greed of Wall Street C.E.O.’s. When McCain’s chief financial surrogate, Fiorina, was fired as Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive after a 50 percent drop in shareholders’ value and 20,000 pink slips, she took home a package worth $42 million.

The McCain campaign canceled Fiorina’s television appearances last week after she inadvertently admitted that Palin was unqualified to run a corporation. But that doesn’t mean Fiorina is gone. Gramm, too, was ostentatiously exiled after he blamed the economic meltdown on our “nation of whiners” and “mental recession,” but he remains in the McCain loop.

The corporate jets, lobbyists and sleazes that gravitated around McCain in the Keating era have also reappeared in new incarnations. The Nation’s Web site recently unearthed a photo of the resolutely anticelebrity McCain being greeted by the con man Raffaello Follieri and his then girlfriend, the Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway, as McCain celebrated his 70th birthday on Follieri’s rented yacht in Montenegro in August 2006. It’s the perfect bookend to the old pictures of McCain in a funny hat partying with Keating in the Bahamas.

Whatever blanks are yet to be filled in on Obama, we at least know his economic plans and the known quantities who are shaping them (Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker). McCain has reversed himself on every single economic issue this year, often within a 24-hour period, whether he’s judging the strength of the economy’s fundamentals or the wisdom of the government bailout of A.I.G. He once promised that he’d run every decision past Alan Greenspan — and even have him write a new tax code — but Greenspan has jumped ship rather than support McCain’s biggest flip-flop, his expansion of the Bush tax cuts. McCain’s official chief economic adviser is now Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who last week declared that McCain had “helped create” the BlackBerry.

But Holtz-Eakin’s most telling statement was about McCain’s economic plans — namely, that the details are irrelevant. “I don’t think it’s imperative at this moment to write down what the plan should be,” he said. “The real issue here is a leadership issue.” This, too, is a Rove-Bush replay. We want a tough guy who will “fix” things with his own two hands — let’s take out the S.E.C. chairman! — instead of wimpy Frenchified Democrats who just “talk.” The fine print of policy is superfluous if there’s a quick-draw decider in the White House.

The twin-pronged strategy of truculence and propaganda that sold Bush and his war could yet work for McCain. Even now his campaign has kept the “filter” from learning the very basics about his fitness to serve as president — his finances and his health. The McCain multihousehold’s multimillion-dollar mother lode is buried in Cindy McCain’s still-unreleased complete tax returns. John McCain’s full medical records, our sole index to the odds of an imminent Palin presidency, also remain locked away. The McCain campaign instead invited 20 chosen reporters to speed-read through 1,173 pages of medical history for a mere three hours on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. No photocopying was permitted.

This is the same tactic of selective document release that the Bush White House used to bamboozle Congress and the press about Saddam’s nonexistent W.M.D. As truthiness repeats itself, so may history, and not as farce.

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McCain Loses His Head
By George F. Will
Tuesday, September 23, 2008 WashingtonPost.com

"The queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small.
'Off with his head!' she said without even looking around."
-- "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does."

To read the Journal's details about the depths of McCain's shallowness on the subject of Cox's chairmanship, see "McCain's Scapegoat" (Sept. 19, Page A22). Then consider McCain's characteristic accusation that Cox "has betrayed the public's trust."

Perhaps an old antagonism is involved in McCain's fact-free slander. His most conspicuous economic adviser is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who previously headed the Congressional Budget Office. There he was an impediment to conservatives, including then-Rep. Cox, who, as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, persistently tried and generally failed to enlist CBO support for "dynamic scoring" that would estimate the economic growth effects of proposed tax cuts.

In any case, McCain's smear -- that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" -- is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people. McCain's Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law's restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending. (For details, see The Post of Sept. 17, Page A4; and the New York Times of Sept. 20, Page One.)

By a Gresham's Law of political discourse, McCain's Queen of Hearts intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised torrent of bailouts as a "dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions." This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while McCain's campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence, was airing an ad warning that Obama favors "massive government, billions in spending increases."

The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not McCain's party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale. Treasury Secretary Paulson, asked about conservative complaints that his rescue program amounts to socialism, said, essentially: This is not socialism, this is necessary. That non sequitur might be politically necessary, but remember that government control of capital is government control of capitalism. Does McCain have qualms about this, or only quarrels?

On "60 Minutes" Sunday evening, McCain, saying "this may sound a little unusual," said that he would like to replace Cox with Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic attorney general of New York who is the son of former governor Mario Cuomo. McCain explained that Cuomo has "respect" and "prestige" and could "lend some bipartisanship." Conservatives have been warned.

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

georgewill@washpost.com

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Loan titans paid McCain aide
Officials: Campaign manager hired to help Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae
By David D. Kirkpatrick and Charles Duhigg
The New York Times

Senator John McCain’s campaign manager was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say.

Mr. McCain, the Republican candidate for president, has recently begun campaigning as a critic of the two companies and the lobbying army that helped them evade greater regulation as they began buying riskier mortgages with implicit federal backing. He and his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, have donors and advisers who are tied to the companies.

But last week the McCain campaign stepped up a running battle of guilt by association when it began broadcasting commercials trying to link Mr. Obama directly to the government bailout of the mortgage giants this month by charging that he takes advice from Fannie Mae’s former chief executive, Franklin Raines, an assertion both Mr. Raines and the Obama campaign dispute.

Incensed by the advertisements, several current and former executives of the companies came forward to discuss the role that Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager and longtime adviser, played in helping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac beat back regulatory challenges when he served as president of their advocacy group, the Homeownership Alliance, formed in the summer of 2000. Some who came forward were Democrats, but Republicans, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed their descriptions.

'Didn’t really do anything'
“The value that he brought to the relationship was the closeness to Senator McCain and the possibility that Senator McCain was going to run for president again,” said Robert McCarson, a former spokesman for Fannie Mae, who said that while he worked there from 2000 to 2002, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together paid Mr. Davis’s firm $35,000 a month. Mr. Davis “didn’t really do anything,” Mr. McCarson, a Democrat, said.

Mr. Davis’s role with the group has bubbled up as an issue in the campaign, but the extent of his compensation and the details of his role have not been reported previously.

Mr. McCain was never a leading critic or defender of the mortgage giants, although several former executives of the companies said Mr. Davis did draw Mr. McCain to a 2004 awards banquet that the companies’ Homeownership Alliance held in a Senate office building. The organization printed a photograph of Mr. McCain at the event in its 2004 annual report, bolstering its clout and credibility. The event honored several other elected officials, including at least two Democrats, Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania and Representative Artur Davis of Alabama.

In an interview Sunday night with CNBC and The New York Times, Mr. McCain noted that Mr. Davis was no longer working on behalf of the mortgage giants. He said Mr. Davis “has had nothing to do with it since, and I’ll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it.”

Asked about the reports of Mr. Davis’s role, a spokesman for Mr. McCain said that during the time when Mr. Davis ran the Homeownership Alliance, the senator had backed legislation to increase oversight of the mortgage companies’ accounting and executive compensation. The legislation, however, did not seek to change their anomalous structure as private companies with federal support.

The spokesman, Tucker Bounds, also noted that the Homeownership Alliance included nonprofit organizations like Habitat for Humanity and the Urban League. “It’s not controversial to promote homeownership and minority homeownership,” Mr. Bounds said. More than a half-dozen current and former executives, however, said the Homeownership Alliance was set up mainly to defend Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by promoting their role in the housing market, and the two companies paid almost the entire cost of the group’s operations.

Financed by Freddie, Fannie
“They were financed largely, possibly exclusively, by Fannie and Freddie,” said William R. Maloni, a Democrat who is a former head of industry relations for Fannie Mae. “We thought it would be helpful to have someone who was a broadly recognized Republican to be the face of the organization, and that person became Rick Davis.” Mr. Maloni added, “Rick, for that purpose, turned out to be quite good.” (Several executives said Mr. Davis’s compensation was not unusual for the companies’ well-connected consultants.)

The federal bailout of the two mortgage giants has become an emblem of what critics say is the outdated or inadequate regulatory system that allowed the financial system to slide into crisis this summer.

At the time that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac recruited Mr. Davis to run the Homeownership Alliance in 2000, they were under new pressure from private industry rivals and deregulation-minded Republicans who argued that the two companies’ federal sponsorship gave them an unfair advantage and put taxpayers at risk. Critics of the companies had formed their own Washington-based advocacy group, FM Watch. They were pushing for regulations that would deter the companies from expanding into new areas, including riskier and more profitable mortgages.

Mr. Davis had recently returned to his lobbying firm from running Mr. McCain’s unexpectedly strong 2000 Republican primary campaign, which elevated Mr. McCain’s profile as a legislator and Mr. Davis’s as a lobbyist.

“You can say what you want about free-market distortions, but people like the system because it gets them into houses cheap,” Mr. Davis said to Institutional Investor magazine in 2000, adding that he would run the advocacy group out of his Alexandria, Va., lobbying firm.

The organization also hired Public Strategies, a communications firm that included former Bush adviser Mark McKinnon. Mr. Davis wrote letters and gave speeches for the group. In April 2001, he sent out a press release headlined, “It’s Tax Day — Do You Know Where Your Deductions Are? For Most Americans, They’re in Your Home.”

But by the end of 2005, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were recovering from accounting problems and re-examining costs, former executives said. The companies decided the Homeownership Alliance had outlived its usefulness, and it disappeared.

John Harwood contributed reporting.

This article, "Loan Titans Paid McCain Adviser Nearly $2 Million," first appeared in the New York Times.

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times
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Fascinating article. Must read. K

September 21, 2008
THE COLLEGE ISSUE
Case Study

By ALEXANDRA STARR

When Jaime Escuder, a University of Chicago law student, was searching for a professor to supervise an independent project on prisoners’ rights, he turned to Barack Obama, but not for his politics. As a student in Obama’s constitutional law class in 2001, Escuder was impressed by his teacher’s ability to see both sides of an argument. “I figured Obama would respect the stance I took in the paper, whether or not he agreed with it,” Escuder, now a public defender in Illinois, told me. In the project, Escuder forcefully advocated for prisoners’ having the freedom to procreate. Obama gave him guidance on honing his argument — but never told him if he agreed. When he did venture an opinion, it was to prod Escuder to consider real-world implications. On running into Escuder at the Hyde Park Co-op one weekend morning, Obama said: “I don’t think that you’re giving adequate consideration to how difficult it will be for prison officials to care for pregnant women. I’ve been dealing with this recently, and believe me, it isn’t easy.” Escuder assumed Obama was talking about being a father.

Obama taught at the University of Chicago Law School for a decade before he left in 2003 to run for the United States Senate. He emerged as one of the Senate’s most liberal members, and his voting record is often invoked in the current campaign, especially by his opponents. But the men and women who studied with him at Chicago echo Escuder’s observation that Obama was much more pragmatic than ideological. Even as his political career advanced, Obama’s teaching stuck to the law-school norm of dispassionately evaluating competing arguments with the tools of forensic logic. But Obama apparently was not attached to legal argumentation for its own sake. “It was drilled into us from Day 1 that you examined your biases and inclinations,” Richard Hess, now an attorney at Susman Godfrey in Houston, told me. “And then, when you made decisions, they were based on sound empirical reasons.” Escuder saw his professor as “a street smart academic”: “He wanted his students to consider the impact laws and judicial opinions had on real people.” According to Marcus Fruchter, who took constitutional law with Obama and now practices at the law firm of Schopf & Weiss in Chicago, “You never would have known he was going to be a liberal senator based on what he said in his courses.”

Obama’s rootedness in the real world shaped every aspect of his teaching. He laced his lectures with basketball analogies. When a student observed the death of Jam Master Jay of the hip-hop group Run-DMC by wearing the group’s trademark tracksuit to the racism seminar, Obama acknowledged the gesture with a nod and a smile. (“I can assure you, that would not have been a common response among the faculty at the University of Chicago,” Joshua Pemstein told me. He was in class that day and now practices at Foley Hoag in Boston.) Obama’s style resonated with students, who packed his classes despite the fact that his obligations as a state senator meant that when the Legislature was in session his courses were held early on Monday morning and on Friday afternoon. If his students begrudged the early risings and missed three-day-weekends, they didn’t take it out on Obama in their course evaluations: they routinely rated him as one of the best teachers at the law school.

I recently spoke to many of Obama’s former students and asked them to speculate about how the teacher they saw manage a classroom might try to manage a country. Some students thought Obama’s teaching offers a more accurate glimpse of his potential presidency than the oft-cited statistic that he holds the most liberal voting record in the Senate. “I don’t think that there is a ‘teacher Obama’ and ‘politician Obama,’ ” said David Bird, who works at Reed Smith in Pittsburgh. “He came across as very practical and down to earth. I think that reflects who he is as a person and his experience organizing and in the legislature.” Dan Johnson-Weinberger, who lobbies for progressive causes in Illinois, agreed that his former professor isn’t likely to emerge as an ideological liberal if he indeed makes it to the White House. “Based on what I saw in the classroom, my guess is an Obama administration could be summarized in two words,” he said. “Ruthless pragmatism.”

Obama’s status as senior lecturer in law was a rarefied one. At that time, two federal judges — Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook, both of the Seventh Circuit — held that position, and both men had been full-time, distinguished members of the Chicago faculty before joining the bench and reducing their course loads at the law school. So when the 34-year-old Obama told the law school’s dean, Douglas Baird, that he wanted the same post, Baird was somewhat taken aback. “He’s not a man possessed by self-doubt,” Baird told me with a smile.

It wasn’t that he didn’t think highly of Obama. Baird had recruited him from Harvard Law School, where Obama was the first African-American president of the law review. Baird arranged for the promising graduating student to become a law and government fellow at Chicago, providing Obama with a stipend and office so he could complete his first book, “Dreams From My Father.” In 1996, after winning election to the state senate, Obama decided he needed to supplement the salary he would draw as a legislator. And so over dinner at the Park Avenue Café in Chicago one evening, he and Baird hammered out an agreement whereby Obama would become a senior lecturer and teach three classes a year.

The dean reiterated a long-standing offer for Obama to take a tenure-track position, mentioning that it would require him to publish legal scholarship. “Douglas,” he replied, according to Baird, “that’s just not me.” Baird points out that Obama could have fudged the issue; it wasn’t as if they were inking a publication schedule. In any event, Baird pushed hard to get Obama the senior lecturer position. The newly minted state senator would have added diversity to the law school: at the time, there was only one person of color on the full-time Chicago academic teaching staff. And Obama had proved to be a skilled teacher. “You could tell from the course evaluations and enrollments that students had really taken to him,” Baird told me.

When Obama was promoted to the senior lecturer position, he had only taught his seminar on racism and the law. While his teaching schedule expanded to include constitutional law and voting rights, it was his original seminar that left the greatest impression on his students. In the class, Obama emphasized how people’s experiences and backgrounds could influence their perceptions of prejudice and the possible need for government action to curb its effects. “He wanted us to be aware of our biases so we could better avoid the pitfalls they can bring,” a former student, Bethany Lampland, who now practices in New York, told me.

He did that in part by sharing personal stories that revealed preconceptions he himself harbored. In the fall of 2003, for example, he related an uncomfortable encounter he had one evening on Lake Shore Drive. An Asian driver in a souped-up Honda cut him off; when the two men reached a stoplight, Obama shot him a dirty look. The driver’s response was to roll down his window and yell “nigger” at Obama before speeding off.

The professor described himself as initially shocked. But as he reflected on the episode, he told the class, he realized that the other driver wasn’t the only one harboring stereotypes. “I was thinking, Here’s some Asian kid on his way to a club,” Obama said, according to Richard Hess, who was enrolled in the course. Obama had stereotyped the driver as the kind of person who would never call him “nigger.”

Hess, who worked in Democratic politics before attending law school, told me he was impressed by his professor’s ability to coolly analyze such an unpleasant confrontation. “I thought it displayed a thoughtfulness,” he said. “He would talk about race in a way that I doubt anyone had heard from their professor before, or I had heard from a politician before.”

Tom Hynes, who took racism and the law in 1996, agrees that Obama’s openness and the seminar discussions he encouraged were highly unusual. “That class was a catalyst to examine biases you might have developed throughout your own life,” said Hynes, who now works in finance. “Obama had a way of getting you to think and talk about issues people generally don’t like to think and talk about.”

The class led Hynes to take a hard look at his experiences growing up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in racially balkanized Chicago. Under Obama’s supervision, he wrote an independent paper on the history of tensions between Irish immigrants and African-Americans. He was struck, he said, by Obama’s pragmatic take on race relations. “In his mind, the real problem wasn’t racist attitudes some people may hold, but the fact that some minorities were starting at such a huge disadvantage,” Hynes recounted. “Issues like poor public education and the lack of access to credit seemed more glaring to him.” When Hynes studied with Obama, his professor was starting a political career, a profession Hynes had seen up close: his father was president of the Illinois State Senate in the late 1970s, and his brother, Dan Hynes, currently serves as Illinois state comptroller. Four years ago, Dan Hynes campaigned for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate — and was beaten by Obama.

Dennis Hutchinson, who also teaches courses on race and the law at Chicago, pointed out that Obama’s racial background gave him a certain advantage. “Let’s be frank,” Hutchinson, who is white, said. “If you’re black, and you are teaching a group of mostly white students about sensitive topics touching on race, then you’re controlling the class.” But like any good law professor, Obama seems not to have used his position to produce a preconceived political result. When he lectured on a pivotal affirmative-action Supreme Court case, for instance, he emphasized that white contractors who lost out to minority businesses because of racial set-asides had a legitimate grievance. Similarly, Obama allowed that there was an argument to be made for paying out reparations for slavery. The class reading — including authors like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington — certainly bolstered the idea that some kind of atonement was warranted. But after making the theoretical case, Obama pushed his students to think about the implications of actually cutting checks to the descendants of slaves. It was possible, he pointed out, that the move would merely create resentment.

Obama kept his own thoughts on the topics he was teaching mostly to himself. Michael Turbes, a lawyer who now practices in Atlanta, learned within the first few weeks of his voting rights seminar just how inscrutable Obama could be. Turbes, who is African-American, knew Obama from outside the classroom: the two met while lifting weights in the gym and occasionally played one-on-one basketball. Despite the friendliness, Turbes is not sure exactly what transpired in early 1997, when Obama announced he wanted to change the time the voting rights class was meeting. Turbes was enrolled in another course at the suggested hour, and the window when students could make changes to their schedule had passed. He mentioned this to Obama, who said he would put the matter to a vote.

“I told him, ‘There are some things you don’t vote on,’ ” Turbes recalled.

Obama then invited the rest of the class to debate Turbes’s point and eventually asked for a show of hands. Turbes speculated that Obama regarded the impasse as a teaching moment and allowed the back-and-forth to go on because it was generating a spirited discussion. Since a majority of his classmates voted to keep the same time slot, he can’t be sure if his hunch is correct. “I’ve read that he’s good at poker, and that doesn’t surprise me,” Turbes said. “He is good at not wearing his opinions on his sleeve.”

Dan Johnson-Weinberger studied voting rights with Obama two years after Turbes did. He remembers Obama as an able observer of the allocation of power in the American democratic system. As Obama shepherded students through the evolution of how Americans elect their representatives, Johnson-Weinberger told me, he emphasized how important the rules of the game were in determining who won elections.

That background in voting law, the former student said, played a factor in Obama’s primary triumph over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. “He understood how important the caucus states would be, and he grasped that voters in African-American Congressional districts would have a disproportionate impact in selecting the nominee,” he said. “I think one of the reasons he said yes to this race is that he grasped the structural path to victory.”

Johnson-Weinberger, who has championed alternative electoral systems like proportional voting in Illinois, found Obama’s practical approach to be a welcome respite from traditional law-school fare. His former professor, he speculates, would bring a similar mind-set to the White House. “I don’t think he’s wedded to any particular ideology,” Johnson-Weinberger told me. “If he has an impatience about anything, it’s the idea that some proposals aren’t worthy of consideration.”

Johnson-Weinberger has long been an Obama fan. He volunteered for Obama’s losing 2000 primary challenge to Representative Bobby Rush and his triumphant Senate run four years later. But even he is a little stunned by how rapid Obama’s rise has been. “If I had told him then that he was going to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008, he would have laughed,” Johnson-Weinberger said.

Or maybe not. Obama offered many hypotheticals in his courses to help explain cases. In a constitutional law lecture more than a decade ago, he tossed out one asking his students to imagine him as president of the United States, according to one who was present. Some giggles ensued.

What, he asked, is so funny about that?

Alexandra Starr has written about politics and culture for The New York Times, Slate, The New Republic and The American Scholar.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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My candidate, myself

Even when faced with new facts and insights, most voters don't change their minds about their favorite candidates. A neurologist explains how they might.
By Robert Burton

Sep. 22, 2008 | "Let's make sure that there is certainty during uncertain times" -- George W. Bush, 2008

Last week, I jokingly asked a health club acquaintance whether he would change his mind about his choice for president if presented with sufficient facts that contradicted his present beliefs. He responded with utter confidence. "Absolutely not," he said. "No new facts will change my mind because I know that these facts are correct."

I was floored. In his brief rebuttal, he blindly demonstrated overconfidence in his own ideas and the inability to consider how new facts might alter a presently cherished opinion. Worse, he seemed unaware of how irrational his response might appear to others. It's clear, I thought, that carefully constructed arguments and presentation of irrefutable evidence will not change this man's mind.

In the current presidential election, a major percentage of voters are already committed to "their candidate"; new arguments and evidence fall on deaf ears. And yet, if we, as a country, truly want change, we must be open-minded, flexible and willing to revise our opinions when new evidence warrants it. Most important, we must be able to recognize and acknowledge when we are wrong.

Unfortunately, cognitive science offers some fairly sobering observations about our ability to judge ourselves and others.

Perhaps the single academic study most germane to the present election is the 1999 psychology paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments." The two Cornell psychologists began with the following assumptions.

Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.
To put their theories to the test, the psychologists asked a group of Cornell undergraduates to undergo a series of self-assessments, including tests of logical reasoning taken from a Law School Admissions Test preparation guide. Prior to being shown their test scores, the subjects were asked to estimate how they thought they would fare in comparison with the others taking the tests.

On average, participants placed themselves in the 66th percentile, revealing that most of us tend to overestimate our skills somewhat. But those in the bottom 25 percent consistently overestimated their ability to the greatest extent. For example, in the logical reasoning section, individuals who scored in the 12th percentile believed that their general reasoning abilities fell at the 68th percentile, and that their overall scores would be in the 62nd percentile. The authors point out that the problem was not primarily underestimating how others had done; those in the bottom quartile overestimated the number of their correct answers by nearly 50 percent. Similarly, after seeing the answers of the best performers -- those in the top quartile -- those in the bottom quartile continued to believe that they had performed well.

The article's conclusion should be posted as a caveat under every political speech of those seeking office. And it should serve as the epitaph for the Bush administration: "People who lack the knowledge or wisdom to perform well are often unaware of this fact. That is, the same incompetence that leads them to make wrong choices also deprives them of the savvy necessary to recognize competence, be it their own or anyone else's."

The converse also bears repeating. Despite the fact that students in the top quartile fairly accurately estimated how well they did, they also tended to overestimate the performance of others. In short, smart people tend to believe that everyone else "gets it." Incompetent people display both an increasing tendency to overestimate their cognitive abilities and a belief that they are smarter than the majority of those demonstrably sharper.

Closely allied with this unshakable self-confidence in one's decisions is a second separate aspect of meta-cognition, the feeling of being right. As I have pointed out in my recent book, "On Being Certain," feelings of conviction, certainty and other similar states of "knowing what we know" may feel like logical conclusions, but are in fact involuntary mental sensations that function independently of reason. At their most extreme, these are the spontaneous "aha" or "Eureka" sensations that tell you that you have made a major discovery. Lesser forms include gut feelings, hunches and vague intuitions of knowing something, as well as the standard "yes, that's right" feeling that you get when you solve a problem.

The evidence is substantial that these feelings do not correlate with the accuracy or quality of the thought. Indeed, these feelings can occur in the absence of any specific thought, such as with electrical and chemical brain stimulation. They can also occur spontaneously during so-called mystical or spiritual epiphanies in which the affected person senses an immediate "understanding of the meaning or purpose of the universe." William James described this phenomenon as "felt knowledge."

Feelings of absolute certainty and utter conviction are not rational deliberate conclusions; they are involuntary mental sensations generated by the brain. Like other powerful mental states such as love, anger and fear, they are extraordinarily difficult to dislodge through rational arguments. Just as it's nearly impossible to reason with someone who's enraged and combative, refuting or diminishing one's sense of certainty is extraordinarily difficult. Certainty is neither created by nor dispelled by reason.

Similarly, without access to objective evidence, we are terrible at determining whether a candidate is telling us the truth. Most large-scale psychological studies suggest that the average person is incapable of accurately predicting whether someone is lying. In most studies, our abilities to make such predictions, based on facial expressions and body language, are no greater than by chance alone -- hardly a recommendation for choosing a presidential candidate based upon a gut feeling that he or she is honest.

Worse, our ability to assess political candidates is particularly questionable when we have any strong feeling about them. An oft-quoted fMRI study by Emory psychologist Drew Westen illustrates how little conscious reason is involved in political decision-making.

Westen asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate negative (defamatory) information about their 2004 presidential choice. Areas of the brain (prefrontal cortex) normally engaged during reasoning failed to show increased activation. Instead, the limbic system -- the center for emotional processing -- lit up dramatically. According to Westen, both Republicans and Democrats "reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted" (cognitive dissonance).

In other words, we are as bad at judging ourselves as we are at judging others. Most cognitive scientists now believe that the majority of our thoughts originate in the areas of the brain inaccessible to conscious introspection. These beginnings of thoughts arrive in consciousness already colored with inherent bias. No two people see the world alike. Each of our perceptions is filtered through our genetic predispositions, inherent biologic differences and idiosyncratic life experiences. Your red is not my red. These differences extend to the very building blocks of thoughts; each of us will look at any given question from his own predispositions. Thinking may be as idiosyncratic as fingerprints.

As a result, we are all plagued by bias, self-deceit and poor character judgment. So, is there a better approach, a better methodology for assessing important personal qualities when the chips are down? After all, when that 3 a.m. emergency call comes, we won't care about a president's charm, church, oratorical abilities, cuteness of children, whether he or she wears designer glasses, is the world's greatest war hero, has an Arabic-sounding middle name or "feels like one of us."

Would we choose a neurosurgeon for those reasons? I would choose a neurosurgeon for his or her dexterity and decision-making. So I want a president aware of how his mind works, as well as what he suspects are his inborn biases and intellectual limitations. Ironically, the acknowledgment of intellectual limitations may be the best evidence for superior decision-making skills. Contrary to George Bush's belief, we do not want certainty in the White House. We want flexibility and an acknowledgment that certainty is often a sign of ignorance.

Unfortunately, sound bites, TV interviews and presidential debates often fail to reveal the candidates' real thought processes -- how each would approach a new or complex problem for which he or she doesn't already have a pat answer.

Ideally, I would like to put the candidates through a series of tests similar to those given to the Cornell undergraduates. The candidates would be given questions, including a variety of "thought experiments" for which they could not be prepared in advance. Then we could see their thought processes in action. We would have a better idea of how they reasoned and whether they rely on gut feelings and instincts. We could see their ability to step back from their own answers to judge their quality and accuracy.

As many of the most pressing issues of the day have a large science component, I would particularly want to focus on each candidate's intellectual grasp of scientific method, from choosing and evaluating evidence to seeing how they would respond to a well-constructed contrary line of reasoning. I would want them to answer difficult, complex questions about aspects of science such as global warming, stem-cell research or alternative energy sources for which they may not have adequate knowledge. I want to see how the candidates respond when stumped. Are they evasive, flustered or straightforward in admitting what they don't know or understand? Equally important, I would like to see how each responds when presented with evidence that his answers are wrong. Is he or she capable of admitting to having made an error? Would he or she be flexible enough to change an opinion?

And, when answers seem to conflict with traditional reasoning and scientific method, I would want the candidate to explain why he or she continues to hold such beliefs. For example, give me a reason-based, scientific explanation of speaking in tongues, or how one can objectively determine that one has "heard the voice of God," or that the Earth is 7,000 years old. This is not meant as a challenge to one's faith -- each of us is entitled to our beliefs. But as a public servant, each candidate has the obligation to explain how non-scientific beliefs are justified. If a candidate insists on a faith-based decision, such as "knowing" that the Earth is only as old as written in the Bible, I want to hear how that is justified in the face of contrary evidence.

Each of the candidates has repeatedly emphasized that this is a pivotal moment in American history. They are all experienced in interviewing potential co-workers, running partners and job applicants. I doubt that they would stop at allowing an applicant to simply recite his qualifications. So the candidates should be willing, even eager to submit to the most difficult personal interrogations themselves. After all, this is an opportunity to demonstrate their intellectual prowess and skills with decision-making. Conversely, no candidate should be allowed to retreat into canned speeches or evasive comments.

Many of the failures of post-9/11 American policy were caused by or aggravated by the inability of our president to recognize his intellectual limitations (including his choice of advisors), keep an open mind, evaluate evidence such as the presence or absence of weapons of mass destruction, and listen to all sides of a complex issue. Perhaps this could have been avoided if Bush had been forced to publicly answer serious multifaceted questions prior to the election. Let's not make the same mistake again.

The next six weeks are our only chance to elect the most qualified candidate. This is not a time for interviewer politeness and gentle repartee that sidesteps controversial or delicate issues. It is not enough to hear each candidate regurgitate memorized and rehearsed policy statements; we must know what they will do and how they will act in situations for which they have not been adequately prepared. Leadership is measured by the best decisions during the worst times.

-- By Robert Burton

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September 20, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Lipstick Bungle

By CHARLES M. BLOW
Mr. McCain, on Monday you repeated your delusional notion that the fundamentals of the economy are strong. Now, the federal government is working on a deal to save that economy from collapsing. You have admitted that the economy is not your forte, so you could have used a running mate with some financial chops. (Remember Mitt Romney?)

But no. Who did you pick? SnowJob SquareGlasses whose financial credentials include running Wasilla into debt, listing (but not selling) a plane on EBay and flip-flopping on a bridge to wherever. In fact, when it comes to real issues in general, she may prove to be a liability.

In what respect, you may ask?

It turns out that the Republican enthusiasm for Sarah Palin is just as superficial as she is. They were so eager for someone to cheer for (because they really don’t like you) that they dove face first into the Palin mirage. But, on the issues, even they worry about her.

In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted this week 77 percent of Republicans said that they had a favorable opinion of Palin. But when asked what specifically they liked about her, their top five reasons were that she was honest, tough, caring, outspoken and fresh-faced. Sounds like a talk-show host, not a vice president. (By the way, her intelligence was in a three-way tie for eighth place, right behind “I just like her.”)

When those Republicans were asked what they liked least about her, they started to sound more like everyone else. Aside from those who said that there was nothing they didn’t like, next on the list were: her lack of experience, her record as governor and her lack of foreign-policy experience.

Also, most Republicans think you only picked her to help with the election, not because she is qualified, and a third said that they would be “concerned” if for some reason she actually had to serve as president.

And Palin is proving to be just as vacant as people suspected. In her interview with Charles Gibson last week, she didn’t know what the Bush doctrine was. At your first joint town hall meeting with her in Michigan on Wednesday, in front of an invitation-only crowd of Republicans no less, she dodged substantive questions about the issues as if they were sniper fire, while issuing a faux challenge to the audience to play a game of “stump the candidate”. Seriously?

Many of your supporters will no doubt cry sexism. Fine with me. But that defense rings hollow. I find many of them to be sexist. Fresh-faced? Delegates on the floor of the Republican National Convention wearing buttons like “Hoosiers for the hot chick”?

Seriously.

E-mail chblow@nytimes.com.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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This was recently sent to me. I don't know its origins but it's still a great reminder of why we're out there and why this election matters. K

Just in case we take our right to vote for granted..............

This is the story of our Grandmothers, and Great-grandmothers, as they lived only 90 years ago. It was not until 1920 that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.

Thus unfolded the 'Night of Terror' on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote. The women were innocent and defenseless. And by the end of the night, they were barely alive. Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of 'obstructing sidewalk traffic.'

They beat Lucy Burn, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air. They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cell mate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.

For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms. When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was smuggled out to the press.
So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year because--why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining?

Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new movie 'Iron Jawed Angels.' It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.

All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote. Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege. Sometimes it was inconvenient.

My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women's history, saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked angry. She was--with herself. 'One thought kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,' she said. 'What would those women think of the way I use--or don't use--my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn.' The right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her 'all over again.'
HBO released the movie on video and DVD. I wish all history, social studies and government teachers would include the movie in their curriculum. I want it shown on Bunco night, too, and anywhere else women gather. I realize this isn't our usual idea of socializing, but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock therapy is in order.

It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn't make her crazy.

The doctor admonished the men: 'Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.'

Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know. We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic, republican or independent party - remember to vote.

History is being made.

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LOCAL

For those of you who want to volunteer, please sign up. I have! K

Our team has been hard at work over the past couple months. More than 175 volunteers have helped us collect over 1,700 voter registration forms in the north Waldo / Brookside / Plaza area. The registrations were collected one at a time by volunteers who were willing to take that small step from being a supporter to being an agent of change in this campaign. But time is running out. We only have 2 weeks left before the October 8 Missouri voter registration deadline.

We will be canvassing our area this weekend. If you’ve helped us before, we need your help now more than ever. If you haven’t been able to help us, now is the time to step forward and multiply your one vote by helping others register to vote so that they’ll be able to vote for Barack on November 4. Some of our friends in Kansas feel that their votes don’t count, but I know that their time counts when it’s spent in Missouri helping our supporters register to vote.

Please sign up to help us canvass our neighborhoods on:

Saturday at 10AM and/or 2PM: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gs7kjq

Sunday at 4PM: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gs73ls

We’re not asking for money. We’re asking for something far more valuable: your time. Your time can be translated into votes right here in OUR neighborhoods. Voter registrations combined with person-to-person communications are what is going to win this election and we only have 14 days left to register those people who will cast the winning votes!

We need several hundred volunteers to knock on doors, identify our supporters and help them get their voter registrations up to date so that they can cast their votes to make Barack Obama the next President of the United States of America.

3 hours is a small price to pay to help save our country. Will you give us those 3 hours this weekend? We’ll be running canvassing shifts at 10AM and 2PM on Saturday and one shift at 4PM on Sunday following the Chiefs’ victory over Denver. We’ll meet at the bus Park & Ride parking lot on the northeast corner of Gregory Blvd. and Wornall Rd.

If you can help us, please register for the shift(s) by clicking on the appropriate link(s) below and then following the instructions at the bottom of the web page to sign up for the event. Please provide an e-mail address and telephone number in the “Comments” box on the registration form so that we can send you a Canvassing Instruction Sheet and contact you should there be last-minute changes to our plans.

Saturday at 10AM and/or 2PM: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gs7kjq

Sunday at 4PM: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gs73ls

Please forward this e-mail to your friends in the area so that they too can help Barack win Missouri!

George Mayer
Volunteer

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Please join friends and neighbors for an evening supporting the re-election of

Robin Carnahan
Missouri Secretary of State

Tuesday, October 7
5:30 - 7:30 pm

at Baja 600 on the Plaza
Kansas City, MO

Suggested Contribution

$1500 - Sponsor $1000 - Host

$500 - Supporter $250 - Friend

Contributions should be sent to Robin Carnahan for Misssouri, P.O. Box 23190, St. Louis, MO 63156 or online at www.RobinCarnahan.com

For more information or to RSVP call Nicole Woodie at 314.367.2004 or nicole@robincarnahan.com

Paid for by Robin Carnahan for Missouri Committee, Tom Carnahan, Treasurer
P.O. Box 23190, St. Louis, MO 63156

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Excellent free opportunity. Please sign up if you're available. K

ACLU is holding a day-long activist training next weekend.

This training is very basic kind of activism:
-how to speak effectively with an elected leader;
-how to articulate one's position on an issue without embarrassing the cause;
-how to write effective letters to the Editor & so on. Very basic stuff.

You may not necessarily need this training but you probably know people who could benefit from it. Will you please pass this email and information on to them?

Young people are welcome. Registration is all that is required and that can be done easily online.
https://secure.aclu.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=nat_kansascity_missouri_training&JServSessionIdr001=6djitv5ro1.app23a

ACLU national staff will be in town to lead the training.

The cost is free; lunch is provided.

Sunday, 9/28/08
9 am - 4 pm
UMKC, Royal Hall, Room 111

Here's an article on the training from our website: http://www.aclukswmo.org/full_content.php?article_id=773&full=yes&pbr=1

Thanks for your help. I hope you are well.

Donnie Morehouse
Associate Director
ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri
3601 Main Street
Kansas City, Missouri 64111
816-756-3113 x 234
dmorehouse@aclukswmo.org

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Here's some Green News from our friend at It's Only Natural on Gregory at Wornall:

1. This one's a bit old - but its a good reminder that when you throw something away - there is no "away." All trash goes somewhere - a landfill. And our landfills are filling up way faster than anyone could have predicted.

Here's some info from KC Public Works: We used to have 4 landfills available but closed down three years early. The landfill in Lee’s Summit is expected to close in 2014, in Sugar Creek in 2026, and the Johnson County in 2027. It takes 15 years to site and build a landfill. 70% of the current residential collection could be recycled. Only 18% is being recycled as compared to the national average of 35%. Costs and fees are increasing. When the local landfills close, the closest sites are privately owned sites in Warrensburg and Lawrence. We will have to ship the trash further and incur larger fees on fuel, drivers, and truck maintenance

In a Kansas City Star article in November - it said that what 80% (!) of what goes into the Johnson County landfill (40% of which comes from Missouri) is recylcable items!!!

So - keep stepping up your efforts to reduce (buy less and buy things with less packaging), reuse (fix broken things, buy from garage sales, get free stuff from FreeCycle, swap with neighbors etc) and recycle. The earth will thank you!!

2. From The Kansas City Star, December 28, 2007, p. A8: "Frustrated by what they see as insufficient action by the federal and state governments, municipalities around the country are offering financial incentives to get people to go green:
*Free hybrid-car parking
*Cash rebates for installing solar panels
*Low-interest loans for energy-saving home renovations..."

Unfortunately neither Missouri nor Kansas City were listed in this group - but municipalities are reaping such benefits from these programs, I expect we'll start benefiting from local versions as well.

3. Everyone has heard about - and is probably already using (even if you didn't notice) - ethanol from corn and soy based sources. But the latest alternative that looks even more promising is algae. "An acre of one of the planet's fastest-growing plants can produce as much fuel in 10 days as the same amount of corn or soy could in a year. What's more, algae consumes CO2 (which helps it grow even faster), so the green stuff makes a dent in global warming before it enters a vehicle." A recent body+soul Magazine. Amazing!!!

4. Another great reason to buy green and to read labels carefully!!

"Shampoo, carpet, baby bottles, dental sealants... contain chemicals that disrupt the natural way that hormones work. The chemicals, known as endocrine disruptors, are all over your house, your clothing and your car. They promise to make skin softer, clothes smell fresher and food keep longer.

"The problem: Neither the companies that make these products nor federal regulators are telling you that some of these substances may be dangerous. Many have been found to cause life-threatening illnesses in laboratory animals." The Kansas City Star, December 2, 2007, p. A7.

The article mentions that hundreds of studies have shown that these compounds cause a host of problems in lab animals: cancers, early puberty, miscarriages, diabetes, ADD, asthma and autism - "all of which have spiked in people in recent decades since many of these chemicals saturated the marketplace." And while hundreds of products have been banned in countries around the world, the US is not acting to take them off the market.

5. From a recent Green Home column (House & Home section of the Kansas City Star): a great idea on what do you do with your old iPod - enter Ryan Arter, owner of Olathe based iResQ. iResQ repairs Apple products like iPods, iPhones and Mac computers - but if they can't be fixed they can be recycled. The company separates out the batteries, which are recycled and removes any parts that can be used to fix other iPods. The rest of the iPod is sent to be reused or repurposed. Check them out at www.iresq.com