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Debate starts in ten, finishing up Survivor. I can’t wait to see what happens!
Oh, yeah: I think Ace’s accent is fake. There. I said it.
8:59 ~ OMG, someone just rickrolled MSNBC! “Never gonna give you up” sign behind Keith Olbermann prior to the debate. It’s gonna be a good night, I can tell.
9:06 ~ Yes, Sarah Palin. Fear. Fear of your party. John McCain’s bipartisan solution?
9:08 ~ OK, new rule: Vice Presidents and vice presidential nominees are not allowed to give the camera the wink and the gun.
9:10 ~ It’s not the American people’s fault that the economy is in trouble, but we should take it on ourselves to fix it? So sez Sarah.
9:14 ~ Go Joe!!! Nail her to the wall. And she’s “still on the tax thing.” And she admits she won’t answer questions? WTF?
9:18 ~ Clearly, Sarah Palin does not know what patritoism is. It may or may not be patriotic to pay taxes, but it surely isn’t telling government to fuck off. Nothing wrong with that, necessarily, but it’s not patriotic.
9:21 ~ BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Bridge to Nowhere!
9:23 ~ She’s trying very hard to stick to her talking points and it’s causing her to veer off the subject wildly.
9:27 ~ TIMBER!!! She’s comin’ down soon. The windfall tax thing shook her, good. Joe’s really stickin it to her.
9:27 ~ What did Sarah Palin just say she and John agree to? I gotta rewind the tape when I get a chance.
9:31 ~ “It’s just God hugging us closer.” If you’re not willing to talk about what’s causing the problem, how can you fix it? Meanwhile, if you’re wanting to limit emissions, doesn’t that mean you by proxy acknowledge the cause is man made? Yeah! What Joe just said!
9:34 ~ Largest and most expensive infrastructure project in Alaska? How expensive? How does it compare to the Bridge to Nowhere.
9:37 ~ Same sex mariage question is a sticky one, its good to see that both candidates have some sensitivity to the subject. Even if Sarah Palin merely pays it lip service, it’s good to see that Conservatives in this country are forced to do that much.
9:42 ~ “With all due respect, I didn’t hear a plan.” Uh-oh, she’s stuttering and talking about “retreat.” Falling back to talking points and it’s obvious she is.
9:47 ~ I do wonder if people are interested in the fact that Joe Biden is answering questions and Sarah Palin is repeating talking points? I’ve seen people (John Kerry) win debates and lose the election (sorta), because people aren’t really listening. Is that what’s happening now?
Sarah Palin just comitted John McCain to “diplomacy” with Iran. More than once, now. “Hard work by serious people.” Goes to my point: we need serious people.
9:54 ~ Is Joe advocating changing the regiems of Lebanon and West Bank?
9:55 ~ Palin ducks another one, asserting that the Bush Administration hasn’t failed in the Middle East (it has), but not saying why. She also just ducked out of saying when using nuclear weapons is acceptable by talking about Iran.
10:02 ~ NOoooo! Don’t talk about authorizing the war!!
10:03 ~ Snarky biatch!
10:06 ~ Note to Joe: stop defending, start attacking. She’s got you in her sights.
10:08 ~ Sneaking in the Bush Doctrine was a good choice.
10:09 ~ And again calling herself a maverick. That’s incredibly sad.
10:10 ~ Wait, she was asked to say what she’d do if McCain died. Instead, she just pitched herself for president on entirely separate grounds. “Wasila Main Street.” Which, by the way, is probably twenty feet long. Joe’s gotten back to his Scranton roots, which is good.
10:15 ~ Palin is dancing around the Vice President’s role, but she insists that there is “flexibility.” Actually, the Vice President’s role is not defined. Strictly speaking, that means he doesn’t have one.
10:19 ~ “Shining city on the hill” is from a sermon. That’s a religious song. Sung in a church. Idiot.
10:21 ~ Joe’s speech about his family is probably the most powerful thing I’ve seen in presidential politics. Sarah Palin’s response is quite hollow in comparison. More talking points and buzz words. Thank goodness, she’s returning to type.
10:24 ~ Joe’s fighting back hard and looking passionate and I think he’s probably reaching a lot of people.
10:25 ~ Joe’s baiting with Roe. (v Wade, not fish eggs.)
10:30 ~ “And I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free. . . ” Oyie.
10:32 ~ That was an amazing wrapup from Joe Biden.
I’m not sure that this whole “free Sarah Palin” movement has proven to be such a good idea. The original idea was that by allowing her to get face time with reporters, she could be her effervescent self and charm them. Granted, most of the interview segments we’ve seen have been from the same day, but honestly, take a look at this recently released bit:
Now, this is not a question of foreign policy. It’s not complicated macro-economic stuff and it’s certainly not as tricky as being asked what you read. This is also not foreign territory for Sarah Palin. Abortion and Pro-Life issues have been a standard for Palin since her candidacy was announced and well before. She’s campaigned on this platform long before she became the Vice Presidential Candidate to the Republican Party.
But what we see here is a person who has either not bothered to think too deeply on an issue she’s long held forth on, or at best a person whose not bothered to think through how to communicate her position. My feeling is that the latter is over-generous. It’s not a question of whether I agree with her – in fact, I’m not even sure what her position actually is, entirely – its that there’s a listless quality to this monologue that seems reluctant to stake out any position whatsoever on the issue. Isn’t it a little late for that?
Journalists are sneaky and nefarious types. Filled with hate and brimming with mischief. What’s more, their favourite pass-time is playing “Gotcha Journalism.”
How, precisely “Gotcha Journalism” compares and contrasts to “Gotcha Politics” is not entirely clear, but I presume they originate from the same evil wellspring of contempt for politicians not grown in vats at Harvard or in a Georgetown country club. Whatever is the case, both are equally unacceptable and it’s a wonder journalism hasn’t been made illegal yet. Let’s all hope the McCain-Palin ticket goes straight to the White House, so we can make that happen.
Case in point, in Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric, Mrs. Couric threw out the most devious of questions, sure to trip up any salt-of-the-earth politician: she asked “What newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?” And when Sarah Palin refuse to answer in specific (since, after all, education is a private affair), Couric drilled deeper, “Can you name a few?”
Can she name a few? What is this? Joseph McCarthy’s Communist trials? I mean, those were good, but this is outrageous.
But, with the cat-like intellectual reflexes we’ve come to expect from Mrs. Palin, she responded, “All of them.”
Well, if that doesn’t shut up critics, I don’t know what will.
Update: No Palin disaster story is truly complete without the video:
I figure a snappy headline should be about all I’m required to provide for this article. No further comment necessary.
Looks like the Palin handlers decided – at least initially – that allowing reporters to record what Sarah Palin did in her meetings with foreign heads of state was too risky to allow. They tried to block the reporters from bringing anything other than cameras into the room, then backed off after CNN threatened to pull the plug entirely. TPM has the story.
Plug pulling or no plug pulling, this was a monsterously stupid decision. And whatever the flacks say, it was a decision and it was intentional. That much seems quite clear. JMM seems to think that the press over-played its hand for a small victory, and that may be true. But I think the larger point here is that blocking the media from an event like this is so small that it matters even more than the big stuff.
I mean, if you try prevent reporters from talking to Carly Fiorina after her flub, that’s damage control. But if you block reporters from a photo op? What the hell is that?
I think most American mothers can identify with being an average hockey mom. I really do. And do you know what the difference is between a hockey mom and a pit bull?
A $2,500 jacket, of course. Were you thinking something else?
Listen to the audio:
Watch the video:
Read the article:
Hewlett-Packard top executive ousted
I believe the phrase “consider the source” is applicable, here.
Just a quick note early on a Saturday afternoon about Sarah Palin’s Bridge to Nowhere and what it cost. Setting aside the question of earmarks as policy, I’m just interested in discussing the price tag. The proposed earmark was to be a total of $400 million dollars. So, how much does it cost to build a bridge in the United States, on average?
That’s not an easy question to answer for a number of reasons. For one, cost of doing business varies from state to state. Another problem is that no two bridges are exactly alike, either in form or function. But it is instructive to note that the entire U.S. Department of Transportation budget for building bridges across the whole of the country is only $5 billion dollars. Equally instructive is the fact that the Frederick Douglass – Susan B. Anthony Bridge here in Rochester – a national award winning bridge in New York State, by the way – was built for a mere $38 million dollars.
Again in fairness, the Bridge to Nowhere was a considerably more grand project than the relatively modest spanning of the Genesee River. The Gravina Island Bridge was slated to be higher than the Brooklyn Bridge and longer than the Golden Gate. It was required to be so because commercial fishing boats needed to get under the bridge and the span is the narrowest point between the two bodies of land.
But to put it all together, 38 million dollars gets you an award winning bridge in New York State that carries an average of 77,000 cars a day. But in Alaska – which has a cost of living surprisingly similar to New York – you need $400 million dollars to build a bridge for 50 people.
Watch this video, which has been making its way around the Internet in bits and peices, of John McCain being inverviewed by a Maine reporter. About six minute in, the reporter points out – immediately after asking about whether McCain plans to make Maine competitive in the race – that Olympia Snowe has been in Congress longer even than John McCain has. Why, he asks, didn’t she get the nod rather than Palin. The gulp in the middle of the answer is positively priceless:
OK, I know I said I wasn’t going to blog today. Sarah Palin’s remarkably bad performance in what was to be a farce of a soft-ball interview forced my hand.
And I don’t like to swear in the titles of my posts. It’s just a thing. But the title of this post should have been:
worst. fucking. goddamned. interview. fucking. ever. ho. lee. shit.
It is entirely clear to me that every single answer she had was fed to her by Right Wing extremist handlers. . . but even they wouldn’t have been stupid enough to say the dumb ass things she said, just in the excerpt of the interview they showed on the ABC 6:30 news.
I mean, any of us who’ve ever interviewed for a job we were grossly unqualified for know that interview like the backs of our resume-holding hands. We all know the feeling – though perhaps not on the same scale – of trying our best to stare at the interviewer in a way that’s confident but not psychotic, while trying to maintain an aire of confidence (w00t! That should have been “Competence”). Of trying to turn any question we don’t know the answer to into something we do.
I mean, she couldn’t even define the Bush Doctrine and had to have Charlie define it for her. She couldn’t tell him if the United States has the right to invade Pakistan in the event that they believe they know the whereabouts of bin-Laden. She didn’t know what to say about Israel and Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
I danced. Oh, how I danced. And I cried a little.
Late Update: TPM has the video of the Bush Doctrine moment, easily the most painful of the entire interview (which is saying rather a lot, actually):
