I'm sure none of us saw this coming

It seems that a mother's burgeoning political ambition isn't the solid foundation for a marriage that some thought it would be.

".exactly these cans." horn

[i'm working through an obstacle with exactly these cans on my ears. dual volume controls! i am enjoying very much the new Deerhunter and Lambchop records, and speaking of Lambchop the newest Giant Sand would go well between your Lambchop and your Testface records.]

The Interview: Barack Obama - Person of the Year 2008 - TIME

don't even think about not reading this, because it's lengthy and candid.

Palin leads top 10 list of memorable political economic quotes - Politics- msnbc.com

what a year of politics we've lived through? huh. this is a pointed kind of scrapbook, this list.

Electrical Audio - Best Albums of 2008

outside of our immediate circle, this is where the real top 10 conversation goes on. i am having a great time preparing my top ten...especially since i've already leaked the identity of my #1 on the other blogo.

Golden Girls Jewelry! » Is The “Thank You For Being A Friend” Necklace The Best Christmas Gift Since Christ Was Born?

i come to Best Week Ever exclusively for Paul F. Tompkins. but they've got me by the elbow now. shoegaze and pop-gossip, merry New Year!

blog.aflcio.org, "double-standard-critics-of-big-three-loan-subsidize-foreign-competitors"
again, i keep wondering why it took labor so long to get this winning message out to people!

back to work.

What circular firing squads look like from the outside

Get the popcorn ready, because the GOP implosion is just beginning. The first order of business, it would seem, is to torpedo any possibility of Sarah Palin having a shot at national office. This morning we saw wardrobegate become more embarrassing, and now FOX (of all networks) airs this report:



And there's more to come.

While I'm certainly going to enjoy the show, it only increases my anger towards the conservative movement. It looks like Palin's dangerous lack of qualifications was an open secret in right-wing camps, and they didn't fucking care except to make her the first to take the fall. Fucking appalling.

No. Fucking. Shame.

John McCain is a fucking liar:

"I think she's most qualified of any that has run recently for vice president, tell you the truth," McCain said, citing her experience as a small-town mayor and Alaska governor. He added: "Bill Clinton was pretty well derided when he came out of a small state to run for president of the United States," and he pronounced himself "amazed" at the criticism.

The "most qualified of any that has run recently for vice president." More qualified than George H.W. Bush. More qualified than Al Gore or Jack Kemp. More qualified than the man who is currently running our government - Dick Cheney.

And Bill Clinton. Who had a law degree from Yale. And was a Rhodes Scholar. And was governor for over a decade. She's at least as qualified as Bill was, probably moreso.

OMFG.

It was enough to foist her upon us in the first place and pretend that she was qualified to run the country. But to offer this stunningly over-the-top endorsement is a transparent lie. And he knows it.

Over/Under

On number of times Palin accuses Gwen Ifill of "gotcha journalism" during Thursday's debate: 2

Place your bets.

Chris Matthews' Advice for Joe Biden

"Ignore her nice stories" and go after John McCain.

Jack Smack

from Josh at TPM.

I can't wait for the VP debate....
I guess I will have to get my fix from tonight's tryst at ole miss.

See ya'll at the OG live blog.

OMFG

If even Katie Couric is looking at you with undisguised contempt...



In other news, some rube from Alaska got mugged in New York today.

Revenge fantasies of the impotent

Sometimes the tools I use to keep on top of the information I need for my job send me on some wild trips through the ninth sphere of the blogoverse. And today I found Woody, who hepped me to this thoroughly satisfying little journey through the land of "What if?"

What caught my eye is that Woody approvingly cites the WTF? first paragraph of this Washington Times bit:

Call them the "Doomsday" scenarios -- On Nov. 5, the presidential election winds up in a electoral-college tie, 269-269, the Democrat-controlled House picks Sen. Barack Obama as president, but the Senate, with former Democrat Joe Lieberman voting with Republicans, deadlocks at 50-50, so Vice President Dick Cheney steps in to break the tie to make Republican Sarah Palin his successor.

As far as the Times go, they've certainly got my attention. That Woody gushes over the most unlikely, improbable scenario possible is just kinda creepy. Aside from the obvious point that the certification of the Electoral College vote would proceed under a newly-seated Congress (presumably with a majority (not necessarily working) that doesn't include Joltin' Joe), I simply don't see any reason Joe Lieberman would do that. Voting to confirm Palin wouldn't land him a job in the administration of the (previously confirmed) President Obama, and it would certainly be followed by the words "I will not be seeking another term as the Senator from Connecticut" for all intents and purposes. And that assumes he has the Joementum to survive the recall vote sure to await the man who put the Least Qualified Veep Candidate Ever over the top. The whole scenario is just obnoxiously far-fetched.

The rest of the Times article presents a fair, if somewhat wishful, presentation of the possible politics behind a tie in electoral votes - standard fare. But I just can't get over that first paragraph. It's like the hook must include something that their readers think really sticks in the craw of the Left, and then they slap the trappings around it. After that, we're blessed with the opportunity to witness Woody's arousal at the thought of liberals so driven mad with rage that the National Guard would have to be brought out, and yadda yadda yadda President Palin nukes us to Heaven!

Woody scores additional points for having admitted that this particular revenge fantasy was crushed by the batshit insane prognostications of DHo, who, through a quick look at some Zogby polls, predicts a McCain landslide. And thus begins the turgidity brought on by the thought of a massively popular President McCain who drives liberals so mad with rage that the National Guard would have to be brought out, and yadda yadda yadda Jesus go BOOM!

Before I end, I'd be remiss if I didn't inform you that no visit to Woody's site is complete without a glance at the "Random Obama Facts" generator. My current "fact":

FACT: Tony Rezko once offered Obama a sweetheart land deal, but Obama said "no" because he wanted his family to stay within the community of which he was the organizer.

Kinda reads like a really bad fortune cookie, huh?

Psychoanalysts are totally loving this election

A few weeks back, we noted how a certain vice presidential campaign revealed deep-seated mommy issues amongst some of our conservative colleagues.

Now we have a delightful smattering of "kill daddy":



At one point, we thought her sole selling point was a rootsy genuineness and the ability to stay on script. Turns out she's not even good at that.

Jesus Muffins or, Soon We'll All Live in Wasilla

A friend remarked this week that it would suck to live in Wasilla -- and I responded that if the Democrats fuck this up, we'll all be living in Wasilla soon. What I want to write tonight isn't about Sarah Palin per se (although I need to get back to that soon); instead, I am trying to process something I experienced yesterday that gave me a little taste of what I think it will be like to live in Sarah Palin's America.

A colleague and I had a meeting yesterday with representatives from a local organization called Pregnancy Support Services and a campus group called Carolina HOPE (an acronym for "Helping Our Peers with Encouragement"). PSS is a "crisis pregnancy center." You probably already know what that coded language signifies, but I encourage you to check out their web site. At the very least, stay long enough to enjoy the over-produced flash video on their home page. Go ahead, I'll wait...

...Crazy, huh? This is precisely the kind of through-the-looking glass nonsense that will shape our reality with Sarah Palin in/near the White House. Somehow we are expected to swallow the notion that this "pro-woman" organization is all about "choice" and "empowerment." (Hell, given that, you might even go so far as to characterize it as a feminist organization! In exactly the same way that Palin is a feminist candidate!) As with McCain's running mate, a fundamental dishonesty permeates everything about this organization. And the woman they sent to talk to me and my colleague? Also fundamentally dishonest to her very core.

(Actually, just as an aside, the woman actually reminded me of Sarah Palin in many ways. Very put together, confident, aggressive, and never for a second deviating from a carefully-crafted set of talking points.)

Anyway, the PSS rep was the handler (and puppet master) for a sweet, painfully earnest staff person for Carolina HOPE, a "a student-led Christian organization dedicated to assisting individuals facing the challenges of unplanned pregnancy, encouraging sexual abstinence outside of marriage, and educating individuals regarding the consequences of sexually transmitted diseases and other health concerns." (We initially agreed to a meeting with the student group; the PSS rep showed up uninvited.)

Why were meeting with these people, you might ask? (And believe me, I asked that many times myself.) I was there representing the Women's Center mainly to do some proactive damage control. Those of you who remember the PopTart days may recall me writing about the Women's Center's past unpleasantness with anti-choice student groups. It's a long story (one that involves these fuckers, who essentially orchestrated the whole mess from behind the scenes), but it resulted in, among other things, a ruling from our University Counsel that, unless we agree to represent "both sides" of the issue equally (which we will not do), we can't advertise or promote any program related to reproductive rights. Un-fucking-believable, but true. That was three years ago, and my director and I, both of whom came to the University after that debacle, have been fighting to change this. But that means for now we need to stay off the radar screens of the anti-choice crowd and their backers. So when the "HOPE" woman asked me to meet with her, I agreed to go and politely hear what she had to say.

My colleague is a sexual health educator with our campus Wellness organization. Her boss sent her because, on paper, HOPE claims to do exactly what she does: counseling and programming around sexuality, healthy relationships, and STI awareness/prevention.

So we sat and listened to their pitches, then got to ask them some questions. I'm mostly going to leave the HOPE woman out of this, because, although her organization clearly has an agenda that I vehemently oppose, she (as an individual) was just one of those "blissed out on Jesus" types who could just as easily have been teaching Sunday school as working for this campus organization. In other words, I got the sense that she does what she does just because she loves Jesus. Whatever. Then again, it's hard to completely let her off the hook when I think about what disastrous consequences abstinence-only education has had on so many young people's lives. NC is (shock!) an abstinence-only state. Coming to the University is, for many students, the first opportunity they've had to get comprehensive information about sex. If this group had their way, even that would be off the table. That saddens me. And it pisses me off.

But far, far worse was the (personal and institutional) agenda of the PSS woman. Evil lying liar. She said with a straight face that one of the things she loved about her organization was that it was "not political" and "didn't advocate for one side or another of any issue." (They don't support abortion rights and won't give referrals to anyone who wants to terminate their "crisis pregnancy" and the information they provide about abortion procedures are misleading and inaccurate--again, check out their web site to see what I am talking about; you really have to see this to believe it...but this, apparently, is "not political.") Their "open, tolerant, non-judgmental" approach is a result of their "Christian philosophy."

But Christian love is not the only unexpected benefit you can get if you show up at their clinic for a pregnancy test or STI screening. If the test says preggers, you will be treated to a free ultrasound. Isn't that awesome?! Other physicians charge for this, but they give first-trimester ultrasounds away for free--whether you want it or not! Why? So you can find out how far along you are and if it is a viable pregnancy. Oh, and also so you can see God's beautiful creation that you might monstrously choose to destroy. But that's neither here not there, of course. If you remain unconvinced and are hellbent on murdering a baby, you get pre-abortion counseling. Here you will find out how brutal, painful, and permanently emotionally-damaging abortion is. Also, PSS woman told us, at this point many people find it comforting for their health care provider to pray with them. What if the patient is not Christian or religious, we asked? Well, you might be interested to know that at moments of crisis many people find that they develop a newfound faith. Really, it happens! Such is the nature of god's (completely apolitical and value-neutral) love! And she noted that she herself likes to take the time to ask her patients about how their crisis pregnancy fits into their "worldview" while she has them in the examining room. (Let me just interject a big WTF??? at this point. Can you imagine this? You're sitting there freaked out, having just gotten confirmation of something huge and life-altering--and probably not in a good way, or you would be at your OB-GYN's office, not a crisis pregnancy clinic. And at that moment of profound vulnerability, some jesus freak swoops in and starts probing you about your beliefs and trying to pray with you. So. Not. Cool.) This course of action is known as helping you "consider your choices." (By the same token, their 800 number is known as the "option line.") See, they're not anti-choice! That's just propaganda from the pro-abortion crowd!

Even before students get knocked up, they can visit the clinic for free STI screening or information about birth control. Now this is a little dicey, since the organization subscribes to an abstinence-only philosophy. But in addition to free (free!!!) services, they'll give you the straight dope: about how condoms almost always fail and the huge number of fornicators who get painful, incurable diseases, and the detrimental physical, emotional, and spiritual effects of sex outside of marriage. Will Planned Parenthood tell you all that? No sir! And Campus Health may give you medically accurate information, but without any information at all about how Jeebus wants you to save yourself for marriage (or how you're going to hell if you don't). That, my friend, is real choice.

It was really hard to sit and listen to this. My Southern politeness was definitely put to the test. But at the end of our conversation (wherein I accomplished my mission of assuring them that we at the Women's Center were not preforming abortions in our back room, deflecting their attention away from our organization, and not being incarcerated for homicide), the HOPE woman presented me and my colleague with tins of muffins (two kinds!) with a note that read "Thanks for taking the time to meet!"

Initially I planned to abstain, on principle, from the Jesus muffins. But they were sweet and tempting and I was hungry. So I ate two of them. And I don't feel guilty. Not. One. Bit.

Anyway, all this to say that we cannot lose this election. Seriously, we can't fuck this one up. The consequences are just too scary. And I doubt they'll come with muffins.

Broken face

It appears that the Eleventh Commandment might no longer be operative:




(h/t tbogg)

To be sure, there's a bit of self-interest reflected in these vids. The former is the beta testing for Mitt! v.2012 (see update below). I have a sneaking suspicion that the latter reflects the propagandists at FOX recognition that their ratings bread will be buttered by flinging poo at an Obama administration rather than carrying water for Bush's third term.

However, I think there's something more interesting going on here (and with Rove's recent posturing) that lies beneath the surface. As dr has pointed out, there is a ferocious power struggle within the GOP right now, with three different constituencies fighting over who will control the party's corpse.

It's not news that McCain is not a particularly popular figure with the party faithful, and his campaign strategy of running against the GOP while promoting the party's ideas seems to me an impossible task. But with his selection of Palin, he's essentially sold his soul to the social conservatives who are a big enough plurality of the party so as to call the shots.

There's also a lack of recognition among the GOP about the bankruptcy of conservatism as a governing philosophy (a point which Obama is starting to hammer) - they basically think that their shit is an essential ingredient in eau de toilette.

All of this is to say that I think the internecine backstabbing within the GOP is to prepare McCain as a patsy for a loss in November. You'll note that Palin, despite her inexperience, corruption, and cronyism, is spared any criticism from the right, presumably in the belief that she is the amiable Bush-like character who can sell the extremist Republican agenda four years down the road. Should the GOP ticket lose in November (a possibility which many Republican pooh-bahs either recognize or are now actively abetting), the blame can be fixed on McCain's inept campaigning rather than the obvious shortcomings of conservatism (which, of course cannot fail - it can only be failed).

updated: via kos and Stoller, the Mitt! video is from the primaries. But I'll still stick with my conspiracy theory.

First contact

There's a reason they sequestered her away from the press:

Moral Relativism

You all know that I am not a smart man, so help me out here.

Having sex outside of marriage is a sin, yes? But apparently, not that big of a sin.

From what I understand, abortion is murder, which is a huge sin. Big time. Not having an abortion qualifies someone to be vice president and definitely overrides the sin of having premarital sex.

But, volunteering to participate in a war of conquest and killing someone (be they combatant, or, as is more likely, innocent civilian) is not murder nor a sin.

Do I have this right? Because, if so, it seems to me that it is fair to say that the decisions one makes are influenced by a particular set of circumstances and what is "right" or "wrong" can depend on those circumstances or even a particular point of view.

Hmmm.

The Times, They Are A-Changin'

Dear Editor of the Register Guard,

Back in my day, August 2008, there was a certain stigma attached to being an unwed teen mother. Now that Bristol Palin has received a standing ovation at the Republican National Convention, I am relieved to assume that this is no longer the case.

I am also assuming that organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, Dobson's Focus on the Family, and the Family Research Council will be joining with groups like Planned Parenthood and Doulas Supporting Teens in working to make sure teen mothers have all the support and information they need as they navigate difficult times.

Now that conservatives and liberals have joined together in recognizing that unwed teen mothers need society's support and encouragement, I also assume that we will see an expansion in the number of programs designed to help young mothers and an increase in funding for those that already do, no matter which party wins the presidential election.

Lastly, as long as I am making assumptions, I will go ahead and assume that, now that the Republicans are celebrating unwed teen mothers, we will be hearing a lot less about abstinence-only education, as we have just seen that no one really takes it seriously.

Murphy and Noonan Off Message

Oops.

MCCain campaign has responded with "So what?"

Palin and Sexism

The Daily Show: Boom!

What the Hell Kind of World Is This?

James Walcott is on fire with the Palins and the GOP. It's writing like this that gives me hope that even when if we lose this election, there will be other sane people crying with us.

You might want to check into that

I had the feeling that Palin wasn't carefully vetted before being offered the veep slot. Turns out I was wrong - she apparently wasn't vetted at all.

When ratfucks go bad

At this early stage in the game, it appears that the Maverick's gambit to select Sarah Palin as his running mate in order to woo disaffected Hillary voters isn't working out as planned. It's partially due to her Boss Hogg-esque levels of incompetence, but I think when it's all said and done, historians will point to the GOP being bitten in the ass by their own Rovian ratfucking operation.

It was clear way back in June that it would've been politically impossible for Obama to select Hillary as his running mate, mainly because it would have been construed as political weakness on his part. As the summer wore on, the media latched on to those who demanded that if Obama picked a female veep, anyone but Hillary would've been an insult to her supporters and a cravenly political move (which, in retrospect, I think the latter is true). I don't discount a fair number of Clinton supporters feeling this way in reaction to the perceived and actual sexism of the primary season, but I think it was Republican operatives who were most responsible in keeping that narrative alive in the hopes of sowing Democratic disunity.

However, in choosing Palin, the McCain campaign is running into the very buzzsaw that Obama would have run into had he selected Governor Sebelius of Kansas (or any other woman): they created an environment where any woman selected (especially one who hadn't earned her stripes like Hillary had) would be seen as a cynical ploy to attract Hillary's female supporters. Had the Republicans not spent all summer pushing the "no woman but Hillary" narrative, the Palin gamble might have had an outside chance of working. In this environment, however, I think a lot of people are seeing it for the blatantly political charade that it is.

Reap what you sow, motherfuckers.