Sarah Palin's interview:says nothing much

[eeoror88]

All of you can debate all you want.

But one thing is certain: The Republicans will lose because the "Ci Sun Bark Jee" of McCain and Palin clashes !!

 

[Alu862]

Good one The H.

 

[Porfirio Rubirosa]

From most of Friedman's recent stuff I would say that he is possibly inclined to agree with Fareed Zakaria, LKY/LHL, Hu Jin Tao rather than Krugman and Obama

Now I don't think he appears to be a great fan of the McCain/Palin ticket but I think he has got the pulse on Mrs/Ms White Mid Town America. Palin has thus far turned out to be McCain's best secret weapon yet. However as they say a week is along time in politics but Obama's camp certainly need to get their thinking caps on to address the Palin meteor

Thomas Friedman has always been a Democrat; he's a liberal inclined columnist, as like Paul Krugman. And he has often stated that McCain and Palin, no matter what the choice Palin is, that both of the Republican ticket are simply wrong, almost wrong.

So yes, his column about McCain and Palin possibly winning the November elections despite being with Bush 95% of the time is a timely reminder to the Democrats- but its not say, PeasantJudge, that McCain would change tack just after he's elected.

 

[Alu862]

Read this http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/09/the-most-import.html

She even has a webpage for her son on a state website?!!!

 

[The_Latest_H]

From most of Friedman's recent stuff I would say that he is possibly inclined to agree with Fareed Zakaria, LKY/LHL, Hu Jin Tao rather than Krugman and Obama

Now I don't think he appears to be a great fan of the McCain/Palin ticket but I think he has got the pulse on Mrs/Ms White Mid Town America. Palin has thus far turned out to be McCain's best secret weapon yet. However as they say a week is along time in politics but Obama's camp certainly need to get their thinking caps on to address the Palin meteor

It hasn't been a good August for Obama, I agree- but I do believe that the Democrats had 3 weeks now to put the case right, and emphasis on not just the issues that the Democrats have been right all along, but also on why McCain and Palin are wrong by following the Bush doctrine.

And simply put, Obama has to set up a long string of appearances with prominent Democrats on the stage with him, besides Biden. I mean, if you can get both Hillary and Bill alongside you, and do it in the swing states like Michigan, and Ohio, imagine the frenzy & excitement that will create. The same goes for those Democrat politicians who are of blue collar..go on stage with them, get them into a bus tour and do the rope lines, and show that Obama is just like them, likable and is trustworthy enough for them to vote for him. I do hope that Obama do ask both Clintons to join him together on a bus tour, or on parts of a bus tour through the swing states- the Clinton frenzy would just help him, especially with women vote and some of the white male vote.

 

[Alu862]

Obama appeals to the black crowd, whether or not he was a son of the soil

Palin tries to appeal to the Hilary crowd, but they should know better

 

[Alu862]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/14/america/palin.php

Sounds so Bush like

 

[Porfirio Rubirosa]

The_Latest_H,

Looking at the US political system model, you don't necessarily get a "qualified leader" but you do get a "populist leader", LOL.

I must say that Palin has surprised by her ability to enage "Mrs/Ms White Mid Town" America with her "hockey mum" style and rhetoric. Mostly presentation and fluff but heck it seems to have worked wonders thus far. Game on with the "Holy Mary" pass

Cheers

 

[The_Latest_H]

Here's something funny from Saturday Night Live, starring Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, and Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton.

<object type='application/x-shockwave-flash' data='http://widgets.nbc.com/o/4727a250e66f9723/48cd3b64ddb82bd0/48cd0cf97d529c95/be940ef3' id='W4727a250e66f972348cd3b64ddb82bd0' height='283' width='384'><param value='http://widgets.nbc.com/o/4727a250e66f9723/48cd3b64ddb82bd0/48cd0cf97d529c95/be940ef3' name='movie'/><param value='transparent' name='wmode'/><param value='all' name='allowNetworking'/><param value='always' name='allowScriptAccess'/></object>

 

[Alu862]

Read IHT. She runs Alaska's administration like Bush. More like Mao.

 

[The_Latest_H]

I read that article on the NYT website; IHT is the sister publication in Europe and the rest of the world.

I know the article was about her appointing unqualified people, mainly friends from her high school, instead of people who knows these stuff and have the credentials for it. Also she has blurred the lines between professionalism and being personal. It seems that if anyone opposes her, she would try all means to force the opponent to get off and get out; but if one's her friend, and a loyal-till-the-end type, this friend(s) would get rewarded.

Even friends who enquired about some basic accountability were immediately casted aside; it shows how sensitive she is to personal criticism and her attitude towards accountability.

In any case, here's something from Eugene Robinson, a Washington Post columnist:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy.../09/15/AR2008091502471.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

 

[Porfirio Rubirosa]

Charles Krauthammer: Obama couldn't soar forever in such thin air
Monday, September 15, 2008 3:15 AM
By Charles Krauthammer

The Democrats are in a panic. In a presidential race that is impossible to lose, they are behind. Obama devotees are frantically giving advice. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman tells him to "start slamming down some phones." Feminist author Camille Paglia suggests, "be boring!"

Meanwhile, a posse of Democratic lawyers, mainstream reporters, lefty bloggers and various other Obamaphiles are scouring the vast tundra of Alaska for something, anything, to bring down Sarah Palin: her daughter's pregnancy, her ex-brother-in-law problem, her $60 per diem, and now her religion. (CNN reports -- flash! -- that she apparently has never spoken in tongues.) Not since Henry II asked if no one would rid him of his turbulent priest, have so many so urgently volunteered for duty.

But Palin is not just a problem for Obama. She is also a symptom of what ails him. Before Palin, Obama was the ultimate celebrity candidate. No presidential nominee in living memory had the gap between adulation and achievement been so great. Which is why John McCain's Paris Hilton ads struck such a nerve. Obama's meteoric rise was based not on issues -- there was not a dime's worth of difference between him and Hillary Clinton on issues -- but on narrative, on eloquence, on charisma.

The unease at the Denver convention, the feeling of buyer's remorse, was the Democrats' realization that the arc of Obama's celebrity had peaked and had now entered a period of its steepest decline. That Palin could so instantly steal the celebrity spotlight is a reflection of that decline.

It was inevitable. Obama had managed to stay aloft for four full years. But no one can levitate forever.

Five speeches map Obama's trajectory.

He burst into celebrityhood with his brilliant and moving 2004 Democratic convention speech (1). It turned an obscure state senator into a national figure and legitimate presidential candidate.

His next and highest moment (2) was the night of his Iowa caucus victory when he gave an equally stirring speech of the highest tones that dazzled a national audience just tuning in.

The problem is that Obama began believing in his own magical powers -- the chants, the swoons, the "we are the ones" self-infatuation. Like Ronald Reagan, he was leading a movement, but one entirely driven by personality. Reagan's revolution was rooted in concrete political ideas (supply-side economics, welfare-state deregulation, national strength) that transcended one man. For Obama's movement, the man is the transcendence.

Which gave the Obama campaign a cultlike tinge. With every primary and every repetition of the self-referential rhetoric, the campaign's insubstantiality became clear. By the time it was repeated yet again on the night of the last primary (3), the tropes were tired and flat. To top himself, Obama had to reach. Hence his triumphal declaration that history would note that night, his victory, his ascension, as "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."

Clang. But Obama heard only the cheers of the invited crowd. Not yet seeing how the pseudo-messianism was wearing thin, he did Berlin (4) and finally jumped the shark. That grandiloquent proclamation of universalist puffery popped the bubble. The grandiosity had become bizarre.

From there it was but a short step to Paris Hilton. Finally, the Obama people understood. Which is why the next data point (5) is so different. Obama's Denver acceptance speech was deliberately pedestrian, State-of-the-Union-ish, programmatic and only briefly lyrical.

The problem, however, was that Obama had announced the Invesco Field setting for the speech during the pre-Berlin flush of hubris. They were stuck with the Greek columns, the circus atmosphere, the rock-star fireworks farewell -- as opposed to the warmer, traditional, balloon-filled convention-hall hug-a-thon. The incongruity between text and context was apparent. Obama was trying to make himself ordinary and serious but could hardly remember how.

One star fades, another is born. The very next morning McCain picks Sarah Palin and a new celebrity is launched. And in the celebrity game, novelty is trump. With her narrative, her persona, her charisma carrying the McCain campaign to places it has never been and by all logic has no right to be, she's pulling an Obama.

But her job is easier. She has to remain airborne for seven more weeks. Obama maintained altitude for an astonishing four years. In politics, as in all games, however, it's the finish that counts.

Charles Krauthammer writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

 

[Alu862]

For more juicy yert creidble stuff on Palin, Andrew Sullivan's website is also a good read

 

[The_Latest_H]

The recent turmoil in the markets have now once exposed McCain's incompetency in even understanding the basis of economics and economical policy.

With Sarah Palin firmly in the background, and McCain backtracking on his unwise comments made on Sunday evening/Monday morning, it shows the lacking of leadership on the part of Sen. McCain.

And with his economical advisers essentially backing the same Bush policies that had been in place, and now claiming that McCain was the guy who invented the Blackberry, its pretty much down the ridiculous route by Sen. McCain and his campaign.

Sen. Obama has something to say about this:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/HlZt5iN96iM&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/HlZt5iN96iM&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

 

[Porfirio Rubirosa]

The Palin-Whatshisname Ticket

By FRANK RICH
Published: September 13, 2008
WITH all due deference to lipstick, let’s advance the story. A week ago the question was: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? The question today: What kind of president would Sarah Palin be?

It’s an urgent matter, because if we’ve learned anything from the G.O.P. convention and its aftermath, it’s that the 2008 edition of John McCain is too weak to serve as America’s chief executive. This unmentionable truth, more than race, is now the real elephant in the room of this election.

No longer able to remember his principles any better than he can distinguish between Sunnis and Shia, McCain stands revealed as a guy who can be easily rolled by anyone who sells him a plan for “victory,” whether in Iraq or in Michigan. A McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man, an even weaker Bush to her Cheney.

The ambitious Palin and the ruthless forces she represents know it, too. You can almost see them smacking their lips in anticipation, whether they’re wearing lipstick or not.

This was made clear in the most chilling passage of Palin’s acceptance speech. Aligning herself with “a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri” who “followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency,” she read a quote from an unidentified writer who, she claimed, had praised Truman: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.” Then Palin added a snide observation of her own: Such small-town Americans, she said, “run our factories” and “fight our wars” and are “always proud” of their country. As opposed to those lazy, shiftless, unproud Americans — she didn’t have to name names — who are none of the above.

There were several creepy subtexts at work here. The first was the choice of Truman. Most 20th-century vice presidents and presidents in both parties hailed from small towns, but she just happened to alight on a Democrat who ascended to the presidency when an ailing president died in office. Just as striking was the unnamed writer she quoted. He was identified by Thomas Frank in The Wall Street Journal as the now largely forgotten but once powerful right-wing Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler.

Palin, who lies with ease about her own record, misrepresented Pegler’s too. He decreed America was “done for” after Truman won a full term in 1948. For his part, Truman regarded the columnist as a “guttersnipe,” and with good reason. Pegler was a rabid Joe McCarthyite who loathed F.D.R. and Ike and tirelessly advanced the theory that American Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe (“geese,” he called them) were all likely Communists.

Surely Palin knows no more about Pegler than she does about the Bush doctrine. But the people around her do, and they will be shaping a Palin presidency. That they would inject not just Pegler’s words but spirit into their candidate’s speech shows where they’re coming from. Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, said that the Palin-sparked convention created “a whole new Republican Party,” but what it actually did was exhume an old one from its crypt.

The specifics have changed in our new century, but the vitriolic animus of right-wing populism preached by Pegler and McCarthy and revived by the 1990s culture wars remains the same. The game is always to pit the good, patriotic real Americans against those subversive, probably gay “cosmopolitan” urbanites (as the sometime cross-dresser Rudy Giuliani has it) who threaten to take away everything that small-town folk hold dear.

The racial component to this brand of politics was undisguised in St. Paul. Americans saw a virtually all-white audience yuk it up when Giuliani ridiculed Barack Obama’s “only in America” success as an affirmative-action fairy tale — and when he and Palin mocked Obama’s history as a community organizer in Chicago. Neither party has had so few black delegates (1.5 percent) in the 40 years since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies started keeping a record.

But race is just one manifestation of the emotion that defined the Palin rollout. That dominant emotion is fear — an abject fear of change. Fear of a demographical revolution that will put whites in the American minority by 2042. Fear of the technological revolution and globalization that have gutted those small towns and factories Palin apotheosized.

And, last but hardly least, fear of illegal immigrants who do the low-paying jobs that Americans don’t want to do and of legal immigrants who do the high-paying jobs that poorly educated Americans are not qualified to do. No less revealing than Palin’s convention invocation of Pegler was the pointed omission of any mention of immigration, once the hottest Republican issue, by either her or McCain. Saying the word would have cued an eruption of immigrant-bashing ugliness, Pegler-style, before a national television audience. That wouldn’t play in the swing states of Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, where Obama already has a more than 2-to-1 lead among Hispanic voters. (Bush captured roughly 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004.)

Since St. Paul, Democrats have been feasting on the hypocrisy of the Palin partisans, understandably enough. The same Republicans who attack Democrats for being too P.C. about race now howl about sexism with such abandon you half-expect Phyllis Schlafly and Carly Fiorina to stage a bra-burning. The same gang that once fueled Internet rumors and media feeding frenzies over the Clintons’ private lives now express pious outrage when the same fate befalls the Palins.

But the ultimate hypocrisy is that these woebegone, frightened opponents of change, sworn enemies of race-based college-admission initiatives, are now demanding their own affirmative action program for white folks applying to the electoral college. They want the bar for admission to the White House to be placed so low that legitimate scrutiny and criticism of Palin’s qualifications, record and family values can all be placed off limits. Byron York of National Review, a rare conservative who acknowledges the double standard, captured it best: “If the Obamas had a 17-year-old daughter who was unmarried and pregnant by a tough-talking black kid, my guess is if they all appeared onstage at a Democratic convention and the delegates were cheering wildly, a number of conservatives might be discussing the issue of dysfunctional black families.”

The cunning of the Palin choice as a political strategy is that a candidate who embodies fear of change can be sold as a “maverick” simply because she looks the part. Her marketers have a lot to work with. Palin is not only the first woman on a Republican presidential ticket, but she is young, vibrant and a Washington outsider with no explicit connection to Bush or the war in Iraq. That package looks like change even if what’s inside is anything but.

How do you run against that flashy flimflam? You don’t. Karl Rove for once gave the Democrats a real tip rather than a bum steer when he wrote last week that if Obama wants to win, “he needs to remember he’s running against John McCain for president,” not Palin for vice president. Obama should keep stepping up the blitz on McCain’s flip-flops, confusion, ignorance and blurriness on major issues (from education to an exit date from Iraq), rather than her gaffes and résumé. If he focuses voters on the 2008 McCain, the Palin question will take care of itself.

Obama’s one break last week was the McCain camp’s indication that it’s likely to minimize its candidate’s solo appearances by joining him at the hip with Palin. There’s a political price to be paid for this blatant admission that he needs her to draw crowds. McCain’s conspicuous subservience to his younger running mate’s hard-right ideology and his dependence on her electioneering energy raise the question of who has the power in this relationship and who is in charge. A strong and independent woman or the older ward who would be bobbing in a golf cart without her? The more voters see that McCain will be the figurehead for a Palin presidency, the more they are likely to demand stepped-up vetting of the rigidly scripted heir apparent.

But Obama’s most important tactic is still the one he has the most trouble executing. He must convey a roll-up-your-sleeves Bobby Kennedy passion for the economic crises that are at the heart of the fears that Palin is trying to exploit. The Republican ticket offers no answers to those anxieties. Drilling isn’t going to lower gas prices or speed energy independence. An increase in corporate tax breaks isn’t going to end income inequality, provide health care or save American jobs in a Palin presidency any more than they did in a Bush presidency.

This election is still about the fierce urgency of change before it’s too late. But in framing this debate, it isn’t enough for Obama to keep presenting McCain as simply a third Bush term. Any invocation of the despised president — like Iraq — invites voters to stop listening. Meanwhile, before our eyes, McCain is turning over the keys to his administration to ideologues and a running mate to Bush’s right.

As Republicans know best, fear does work. If Obama is to convey just what’s at stake, he must slice through the campaign’s lipstick jungle and show Americans the real perils that lie around the bend.

NYT

 

[Xisiqomelir]

Anyway they will lose because the " ci sun bark jee" of her and McCain bad !!

Bro, what does "ci sun bark jee" mean?