McCain and Palin Go For the Throat – Each Other’s

The giveaway was the morning after the vice-presidential debate when Sarah Palin let slip that she had learned of the McCain campaign’s decision to pull out of Michigan when she read it that morning in a newspaper. To quell any doubts, she then proceeded to criticize McCain’s decision and said she and Todd could have worked the state if McCain wasn’t up to it.

It was obvious that McCain hadn’t consulted Palin about the Michigan decision. He hadn’t even informed her. She had to find out about it from a newspaper well after his campaign had announced it to the press. Her response put McCain’s wisdom, even courage into question. Ouch, ouch, ouch and ouch.

Since then, Palin hasn’t minced any words about what she sees as McCain’s weakness in going after Obama. She has repeatedly criticized McCain’s refusal to go after the Reverend Wright issue.

Now, as reported by Canadian Press, it’s come to open warfare among McCain’s and Palin’s insiders:

“The tattered remains of their ticket were everywhere Sunday, with both McCain and Palin insiders publicly on the attack to hold the other side responsible for their candidate’s woes on the campaign trail.

“She is a diva – she takes no advice from anyone,” an unnamed McCain adviser told CNN over the weekend.

“She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else … also, she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: Divas trust only unto themselves, as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom.”

It was their decision to limit Palin’s media contact to interviews with ABC’s Charlie Gibson and a series of chats with CBS’s Katie Couric parcelled out over several cringe-worthy days. They proved to be disastrous for both the Alaska governor personally and McCain’s campaign.Wallace sent an emailed response to several news organizations over the weekend: “If people want to throw me under the bus, my personal belief is that the most honourable thing to do is to lie there,” she wrote.

In recent weeks, Palin has publicly parted ways with the McCain campaign on various fronts, leading many to speculate she is attempting to distinguish herself from the flailing Arizona senator and forge her own identity in preparation for a run for the White House in 2012.”

 

Your Daily Giggle

McCains Brain – video powered by Metacafe

 

Who Said Racism Isn’t Alive & Well in America?

I realize this is from al Jazeera but you can find plenty of similar stuff from concerned Americans on the web. This one shows a segment of the crowd that’s flocking to Sarah Palin.

 

There Are Terrorists and There Are Terrorists

McCain and his supposed sidekick Palin are, in a word, unscrupulous.

With their inability to get any traction on the issues troubling American voters, they’ve decided to “change the subject” to smearing Obama.

Palin, whose integrity has never been questioned if only because no one can find a sign of it, is now accusing Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” There’s something you had better worry about, no? She’s referring to one Bill Ayers, who had been a member of the radical Weather Underground during the 60’s – and an education professor at the University of Illinois for two decades afterwards.

Harold Meyerson, writing in today’s Washington Post, puts that despicable smear under a spotlight:

The story of Obama’s interaction with Ayers is drenched in irony, since it is basically a tale of Obama being co-opted into Chicago’s civic establishment. In 1995, Obama, then a young lawyer with political ambitions but as yet no office, was recruited to chair the board of a school reform organization funded and established by the Annenberg Foundation — a group that distributes the wealth of the estate of Walter Annenberg, Richard Nixon’s ambassador to Britain. It was only then that Obama met Ayers, who already was a board member and a figure in Chicago’s education-policy elite. (Mayor Richard Daley, that known radical, told the Times that he had consulted Ayers on education issues for years.)

But, Meyerson notes, if we want to examine the candidates’ relationship with scurrilous types who’ve caused great damage to America, we could always start with McCain’s close pal and onetime campaign advisor, Phil Gramm:

“Gramm was always Wall Street’s man in the Senate. As chairman of the Senate Banking Committee during the Clinton administration, he consistently underfunded the Securities and Exchange Commission and kept it from stopping accounting firms from auditing corporations with which they had conflicts of interest. Gramm’s piece de resistance came on Dec. 15, 2000, when he slipped into an omnibus spending bill a provision called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), which prohibited any governmental regulation of credit default swaps, those insurance policies covering losses on securities in the event they went belly up. As the housing bubble ballooned, the face value of those swaps rose to a tidy $62 trillion. And as the housing bubble burst, those swaps became a massive pile of worthless paper, because no government agency had required the banks to set aside money to back them up.

The CFMA also prohibited government regulation of the energy-trading market, which enabled Enron to nearly bankrupt the state of California before bankrupting itself. “

As Steve Croft showed on 60 Minutes, it was those very Credit Default Swaps – deviously unregulated insurance policies – that brought down Wall Street because the outfits that sold them – remember Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG – never had the resources to make good on them, never, ever.

Thanks to McCain’s close pals – and he and Gramm were tight, very tight – the American taxpayers for generations to come will be paying off the trillion dollar Wall Street bailout.

If clowns as disreputable as McCain and Palin can take over America’s executive branch, that country is screwed beyond redemption.

 

Sarah Palin Didn’t Debate

Sarah Palin didn’t show up to debate on Thursday night. Despite all the coaching prep she received from the McCain campaign, they threw in the towel and sent her out with a stack of cue cards.

The toughest thing Sarah Palin had to do was to riffle through the cards, find one roughly on topic, and then read from it. When she didn’t have a card for the question, she simply ignored the question and changed the subject.

 

Palin’s Hidden Agenda

Eureka! There it is, Sarah Palin’s secret agenda.

No question that the Beauty Queen and the Old Geezer don’t see eye to eye on a bunch of policies, they don’t. Strangely enough, she hasn’t backed down one inch to bring herself into line with the Geezer’s thinking either.

So, what gives? I figured it out. Michigan is the dead giveaway.

McCain decided to cut his losses and drop Michigan from his campaign, write the whole thing off. Did he confer with his running mate on this fundamental shift? Not a chance.

Palin learned about it – get this – when she read it in a newspaper (see, she reads more than diner menus). From Associated Press:

In an interview with Fox News Channel Friday, the Alaska governor said she was disappointed that the McCain campaign decided to stop competing in Michigan. In an indication that the vice presidential candidate had not been part of the decision, she said she had “read that this morning and I fired off a quick e-mail” questioning the move.

Yeah, that’s right, she fired off a quickie questioning the decision. No, she apparently didn’t raise holy hell that she hadn’t been consulted or even informed. You might have thought Johnny Boy would have remembered to give Palin the skinny before he spilled the beans to the press.

No she didn’t complain about being kept out of the loop, she questioned the move and then – worst of all – told Fox News that she and Todd were ready and willing to carry on the campaign in Michigan that McCain had already shut down.

It doesn’t get better than this folks. Sarah Palin just became Sarah Pain to her supposed boss, John McSame.

First, she admitted that he didn’t even mention this change to her, showing just how much the Old Geezer values her input and – cough – partnership. Then she told Fox News that the guy who is her supposed boss, to whom she owes her fealty, was wrong, as in just plain nuts. And then she puts McCain even deeper in the dung by saying she and Todd would be happy to do what McCain can’t, try to pull out a victory in Michigan.

I got it figured out. She’s hoping that McCain wins. Then she consults a couple of shrinks expert on geriatric malfunction and gets the Old Bugger declared incompetent (as in “batshit crazy”). Out goes Johnny, slick as crap through a goose, and in comes Madam President Sarah and Vice-Regent Todd. They live happily ever after until she goes for the nukes and brings on the Rapture.

John, you crazy bastard, there’s still time. Go for your guns! What were you thinking? Isn’t this the same way she became mayor of Wasilla in the first place – by turning on the mayor who used his organization to get her on the council just a year before? She turned on the guy and turfed him out, running against the “Old Boy” network. Then she got to be governor of Alaska running against the “Old Boy” network. Now you’ve brought the Black Widow into your camp and, you dumb hump, who’s the “Old Boy” now?

Postscript – It’s bad enough that the Republican presidential nominee thinks his cynically-chosen running mate is such a Bimbo that he doesn’t consult her – or even inform her – that he’s abandoning the field in Michigan. It’s ten times worse that he doesn’t feed her a spin on it. Breathtaking, utterly breathtaking. She’s left to admit – on their electronic media of choice no less, Fixed News, that she discovered it from reading a newspaper. Apparently not even one reporter could be bothered to ask her about it until the following day.

What possible reason could McCain have had to keep her in the dark? Res ipsa loquitor – the thing speaks for itself. He was afraid she’d blurt it out and bungle his already hapless explanation. He doesn’t trust her. She sure as hell doesn’t trust him. A marriage made in – what does she call that “special” place anyway?

 

Palin Debate Flow Chart

A friend just sent me this in an e-mail. It’s hilarious – if you can read it.

 

Even Republicans Get It – Sarah Palin Is Qualified to Be – a Soccer Mom!

It’s hard to imagine how low you have to set the bar to make Sarah Palin seem qualified to be heir apparent to a cancer-riddled old geezer in the Oval Office. Unfortunately, McSame hasn’t been able to keep Palin from bleeding out through her ears before the vice-presidential debate tomorrow night.

Everybody, even Republicans, are on to her. We all know she’s breezed through previous debates with homespun homilies. We’re ready for that. It won’t work again, save for some old grannies and Republican party extremists. Where Obama looks increasingly likely to turn this election into a sweep, with the independents and undecideds, her fortunes have already narrowed – massively.

A Pew Research Poll found 63 per cent said Biden was qualified to serve as president if necessary, while 37 per cent said the same of Palin. That’s not two-to one Biden, just very, very close.

Never in the history of American electoral politics has a senior candidate screwed up so badly, so repeatedly, in such a short span of time. People who compared her to Dan Quayle are now apologizing – out of fairness – to Dan Quayle.

The very idea of some disease such as cancer or other mishap placing a person this unaware, indifferent and incompetent at the helm of the world’s most lethal nuclear power – someone who believes she’ll meet God in her lifetime (rapture talk) – isn’t just scary, it’s insane. I know we got sort of accustomed to Dick Cheney but – people – this one is the much greater threat!

Buy Bristol a bassinet and a stroller and line Todd up with a muscle-snowmobile and tell Sarah Alaska still needs her and let’s wrap up this manipulative miscue.

 

It "Kind of Doesn’t Matter"

John McCain says she could just be the next Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. Yes, McCain did say that about his sidekick, Sarah Palin. See, I told you the guy just gets goofier by the day.

And now for something completely different. Oh, sorry, that was the other Palin, the one with a functioning brain.

Sarah Palin says it kind’a doesn’t matter what causes global warming.

“I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate because the world’s weather patterns are cyclical, and over history we have seen changes there.”

“But it kind of doesn’t matter at this point in the debate what caused it. The point is it’s real, we need do something about it.”

Okay, maybe Palin was just having a Reagan moment or a McCain “senior” moment but, still, for a journalism grad – the only one I’ve ever heard of who had to go to five universities to get her bachelor’s degree – and a local TV sports broadcaster to boot – that’s pretty bad grammar.

So, we can’t “solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate.” Of course you can’t, Sarah. That’s why your country still has capital punishment. It climate change was solely to blame for all of man’s activities, including armed robberies and murders, why you might have to electrocute clouds (you’ll never get a needle to work on cumulus).

Did anyone see the footage where Katie Couric asked her where she got her information on world affairs? She said she reads magazines. Couric asked what magazines. Palin said, “oh, I read’em all.” Like what, Sarah? Try to name at least one, something maybe that doesn’t rhyme with Cosmo. She couldn’t (or wouldn’t) come up with the name of one magazine that she reads. Maybe she’s smart enough to realize that People doesn’t count.

Meanwhile, head drover, John S. McCain took time out to mix it up with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register. From McClatchey Newspapers:

“…He bristled when accus[ed] of running false charges against his opponent in ads, defending them as “100% accurate” and going beyond that saying in his entire career he had been wholly accurate in all matters.

McCain also replied sharply when asked about the qualifications of his running mate, declaring that he “uncategorically” believed she was fully capable, citing her years as mayor and governor — and even at the PTA. Going well beyond poll results, he stated that the American public “overwhelmingly” embraced her. A new Pew survey finds today that 51% of Americans now believe that Palin is unqualified, up from 37% after her announcement.

A full report and videos are at the paper’s site:http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081001/NEWS09/810010377&theme=CAMPAIGN_2008

 

Palin’s Election Pump

This one is almost too good to be true. The Times of London speculates that Sarah Palin may be gearing up to give the McCain campaign a popularity boost by marrying off her pregnant daughter, Bristol, to her high-school dropout boyfriend, Levi, just days before the November 4th vote.

The paper claims the McCain camp sees this as a blessing to be milked for everything it’s worth:

“It would be fantastic,” said a McCain insider. “You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week.”

Who would’ve imagined that a 17-year old’s uterus could play a pivotal role in a US presidential election?