Idiots, Damn Idiots and Sarah Palin

“It’s unbelievable. Unbelievable. No administration in America’s history would, I think, ever have considered such a step that we just found out President Obama is supporting today. It’s kinda like getting out there on a playground, a bunch of kids, getting ready to fight, and one of the kids saying, ‘Go ahead, punch me in the face, and I’m not going to retaliate. Go ahead and do what you want to with me.'” — Sarah Palin on the Obama administration’s new nuclear strategy.

If you believe the NYTimes that policy says,

“For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack.”

In other words we’re limiting ourselves to only using conventional weapons to bomb them back into the stone age. In case you weren’t aware of this – we have conventional weapons with as much explosive power as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. BTW, there’s an intentional loophole in this policy that still lets the US do whatever it wants.The policy explicitly excludes North Korea, Iran and other “outlier” nations which have violated or renounced the main treaty to halt nuclear proliferation.

The Prez had the comeback of the day: “I really have no response. Because last I checked, Sarah Palin’s not much of an expert on nuclear issues.”

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10 things a satirist gives thanks for

1. The Bush Administration
2. GM’s “leadership” (What’s the difference between the cub scouts and GM? Adult supervision.)
3. Sarah Palin and her handlers
4. The voters of Minnesota. Jesse Ventura! Al Franken! (someone’s spiked the 10,000 lakes).
5. Jaguar Land Rover for applying for a bailout.
6. Barney Frank: “These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”
7. The Chicago Cubs
8. Alan Greenspan
9. The phrase “too big to fail.” Econ speak for: About to bite the dust.
10. Joe Biden: “When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘look, here’s what happened.’”

Expert & McCain adviser says Palin couldn’t run Hewlett-Packard

When it comes to not being able to run HP it’s hard to get a more reliable source than former CEO Carly Fiorina.

“Do you think [Palin] has the experience to run a major company, like Hewlett Packard?” Fiorina was asked on a St. Louis radio show.

“No, I don’t,” Fiorina said without further explanation.

“I would just remind you that it is Barack Obama who is running for president,” Fiorina said. “Sarah Palin has more experience than Barack Obama has.”

Under Fiorina’s tenure at HP, the company’s stock went from 45.36 to 20.14.

Forecast: Mud with more mud followed by a storm of masculine bovine feces

I have no idea where he got it, but CollateralDamage Sr. sent along the following. No matter where you stand politically this seems to me to just be good comedy.

Elsewhere:

• FactCheck.org decries McCain misuse of itself — “A McCain-Palin ad has FactCheck.org calling Obama’s attacks on Palin “completely false” and “misleading.” That’s what we said, but it wasn’t about Obama. Our article criticized anonymous e-mail falsehoods and bogus claims about Palin posted around the Internet. We have no evidence that any of the claims we found to be false came from the Obama campaign.”
• WASHINGTON (AP) — The “Straight Talk Express” has detoured into doublespeak. … Even in a political culture accustomed to truth-stretching, McCain’s skirting of facts has stood out this week. It has infuriated and flustered Obama’s campaign, and campaign pros are watching to see how much voters disregard news reports noting factual holes in the claims.

Hard to believe that truthiness — the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true –was the 2005 Word of the Year.  Can you have a repeat winner?

OK and for the record … I was right when I said Palin was a brilliant pick for McCain. I just didn’t know how right I was. And for the record, I also predicted that Obama would win by a lot. Hmmmm …

Bitter dispute over sugar ad may bounce Czech government

A Czech government ad touting its turn to hold the presidency of the EU may and featuring a sugar cube may actually result in the downfall of the government.

The ad, built around the claim that the Czech’s invented the sugar cube (I always thought it Bjork), features the slogan, “We sweeten it for Europe.” However it “can also be translated in Czech as promising to give Europe a bitter lesson, making trouble for it or causing disgust. … [However] this has soured relations within the ruling coalition, with traditionally pro-European Christian Democrats attacking it.”

Apparently this kerfuffle is because the ruling party is split between pro & anti EU types.

Further confusing the issue is whether or not the Czech’s should claim ownership of the sugar cube. The ad claims it was a Czech invention dating from 1843. However reporters at the daily Lidove Noviny pointed out that the although it was created in what today is the Czech republic but was then an outcropping of the Austro-Hungarian empire by a Swiss named Jacob Christoph Rad. Speaking as a professional journalist, this is what’s known as a fun story.

Silly Czechs. How stupid to take an argument over sugar so seriously. They should follow our lead and argue about lipstick and whether it is placed on pigs or pitbulls.

For those of you not up on leading-edge political stupidity: The McCain campaign (slogan: “Truthiness is everything!”) is attacking O’Biden for saying “that Sen. John McCain’s claim that he will shake up Washington after agreeing with President Bush for so long is like ‘putting lipstick on a pig.‘”

It is a disingenuous attack, at best, given that McCain himself has used repeatedly, even to describe a health plan put forth by Hillary last year. Trotting out former acting Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift as the attacker is a nice sound-bite move that looks really dumb if you examine the facts.  True Ms. Swift is A) female, B) a mom and C) was sort of governor.

However her time in office was not a pretty one. She was named acting governor when her predecessor decamped to become ambassador to Canada. Despite having the governor’s office she couldn’t even carry her own party in her one attempt to win the job for herself and was defeated by Mitt Romney, a name you may have encountered. She was a notably inept governor:

By the end of her term, Swift was extremely unpopular with voters in the state (at one point having the dubious honor of a single-digit approval rating). This unpopularity was due in part to a perceived lack of effectiveness and in part to apparent abuses of her gubernatorial privileges, including: her use of a Massachusetts State Police helicopter to commute cross-state, from Boston to her home in North Adams; and, the use of State House aides to babysit her children.

Given all that is surfacing about Ms. Palin’s troubles in Alaska, Swift is not the best shade of lipstick for this issue.

Apparently the lesson Sen. McCain learned from his 2000 primary loss to Pres. Bush was that voters really don’t care that much about facts. I wish I could argue that it was a bad conclusion to come to.

BTW, Talking Points Memo has the following: A former McCain spokeswoman — who defended the senator when he made a joke about a woman raped by a gorilla — is also author of a book about being a political flack. The book’s title? Lipstick on a Pig.

During McCain’s 1986 Senate race, McCain was hit with allegations from women’s groups in Arizona that he’d told this knee-slapper (as quoted at the time by the Tucson Citizen)…

“Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, ‘Where is that marvelous ape?'”

McCain was defended by Torie Clarke who said, “John does not recollect telling that joke … And he has a very good record on women’s issues.” The reporter who wrote the original story disagreed then and now with Ms. Clark.

I want to see a pitbull put some lipstick on that pig.

The real question about Sarah Palin

I do not care about her kids. Anyone asking how she couldn’t be home with the new born and/or oldest daughter is a sexist idiot. I hope the experience with her eldest makes Gov. Palin give a long rethink on the topic of abstinence only education, but that is an issue that is for her and her heart and not germaine to what it is she will be asked to do.

I am fascinated by the fact that she is the only candidate who will get a raise if she wins. The governor of Alaska currently earns $83,280. The veep gets $208,100.

The chief reason I think she shouldn’t be a heartbeat away from becoming president has nothing to do with her gender. it is that she is a creationist. If she herself doesn’t believe in creationism she has said that it should be taught in schools. If you are going to teach creationism as science — as opposed to teaching the Bible as literature which I am all in favor of — then you must also teach the Cthulhu Mythos and Flying Spaghetti Monster as science.

Still there is one essential question that I am positive was overlooked in the vetting process: Has the governor or any one in her family ever played Dungeons & Dragons?

C’mon you intrepid journalists! This one has Pulitzer all over it!

The tea leaves continue to suggest that things are not going well for Sen. McCain. David Frum, NPR’s token conservative, said that the Palin pick came about because McCain had seen some troubling internal poll numbers that said he had to make a big risk if he wants to win.

Also Political Wire says

• Palin’s speech generated 37.2 million viewers, just a 1.1 million viewers short of Barack Obama’s record-breaking speech on Day 4 of the Democratic convention.
• A CNN/Time poll has a statistical tie in Ohio, Obama has double digit leads in Iowa and Minnesota. If Obama brings Al Franken into the Senate on his coat tails he will have much to answer for.

My prediction: This is not going to be close in the final count.

McCain returns fire brilliantly

The senator’s pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is brilliant. Far better than either of the two people I suggested yesterday. Now if he can just let her do the talking and get everyone else in the campaign to shut up.

Ooooh, it’s going fo be a fun 67 days. And by fun I mean really really ugly.