2. She's one of the most popular figures among the nutjobs that makeup today's Republican party.
3. Her comments often go beyond typical brainless conservative talking points, and into a new frontier of beautifully nonsensical right wing buzzword formulated word vomit. When that happens, I dare you to find better comedy.
With these pros and cons weighed, these are her actual, unedited comments on Egypt: (via 6.54's twitter)
Nobody yet has explained to the American people what they know, and surely they know more than the rest of us know, who it is who will be taking the place of Mubarak and I’m not real enthused about what it is that, that’s being done on a national level and from D.C. in regards to understanding all the situation there in Egypt.
And in these areas that are so volatile right now because obviously it’s not just Egypt but the other countries too where we are seeing uprisings, we know that now more than ever, we need strength and sound mind there in the White House.
(Deep Breath)
Read it again for the full effect.
Some years from now when it's revealed that Sarah Palin was the greatest piece of performance art ever constructed, we need to look back at these remarks as the artist's finest hour.
Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are holding an event in Alaska on 9/11, to honor the innocents murdered nine years ago. Then again, they might not have enough time for "honoring," since they'll be so busy counting their blood money.
It appears that this event, on 9/11, is very much for-profit. These shitbirds are charging between $73.75 and $225 for entry, with the most expensive tickets offering a "meet and greet." There will be a bar, too! You just have to get the "wet" section tickets.
This makes sense as the next logical step to last year's 9/12 rally that Beck hosted to celebrate how great everyone felt the day after 9/11. Uh... yeah.
This year's 9/12 teabagging event may not have Beck, but it will have us! After our highly successful tour last year, we're back for more with some new signs and much of the same crew. If you'll be around during the day on Sunday, send me an email and feel free to join us for a great time teabagging with crazy people.
Sarah Palin's political action committee spent some $3,800 in the past quarter on "gift bag items" from an Alaskan company called Indian Valley Meats, according to SarahPAC's latest FEC reports
Indian Valley, according to its (drool-worthy) web site, sells gift boxes full of Alaskan meats: smoked salmon, caribou sausage, musk ox jerky, reindeer hot dogs, trail sticks, honey mustard sauce and more.
Palin apparently spent the nearly $4,000 on gifts for supporters at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference back in April. According to a report in Business Week, more than 3,000 delegates walked into Palin's speech to find "an Alaska snack from SarahPAC"-- Indian Valley's teriyaki sticks with caribou meat.
It must be nice to have lots of really stupid people give you truckloads of money for doing absolutely nothing.
"I knew that we'd be buddies when I met her when she said, 'Drill here, drill now.' And then I replied, 'Drill, baby, drill' and then we both said, 'You betcha!'"
-- Sarah Palin, quoted by the Wall Street Journal, recalling a previous meeting with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).
It's worth noting that no matter what else Obama does, if unemployment stays this high in the run up to 2012, there is a very real possibility that Sarah Palin is elected president.
Next time this blog is ranting on about how much Summers, Geithner and Bernanke suck, keep that in mind.
Former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has anounced [sic] she will resign as governor of Alaska on 26 July and not run for re-election.
Mrs Palin's term of office was due to end in 2010.
There has been speculation that Mrs Palin, who is very popular with the Republican Party base, might make a bid for the White House in 2012.
Surprise! But wait for it...
"I'm taking my fight for what's right in a new direction...
Once I decided not to run for re-election, I also felt that to embrace the conventional Lame Duck status in this particular climate would just be another dose of politics as usual, something I campaigned against and will always oppose," she said.
Ah yes, that makes total sense. Obviously, there's no point to politics if you aren't trying to get elected again. Why should she wait until THE LAW mandates her term's end, when she could skip out on all that hard work it takes to run a state NOW? In fact, I'm sure we all have responsibilities during the next year. Why don't we all just up and take our fight for what's right in a new direction? I'm just sure that there's something more important for us to do than whatever we initially committed to.
As for the chance that she'll run for prez in 2012, my stance remains unchanged: bring it. Who doesn't want a repeat of the Sarah Palin Show? Particularly now that she's demonstrated such hilarious disregard for actual governance.
At the same time... when is she going to just shut up and leave us alone?
Okay, Sam, I swear I will stop talking about Sarah Palin sometime soon. But this is just too much. Way too much. My god, I actually feel deeply sorry for her. I mean, the sound of hope in her voice when she thinks that someone might be taking her even a little bit seriously... it's just heartbreaking.
But really, did they honestly expect Nicklaus Sarkozy to give Palin a personal call? Really? Who in gods name runs this campaign?
Best bit:
"I must say, Governor Palin, I loved documentary they made on your life. You know Hustler's Nalin Palin?"
"Oh, good, thank you, yes."
"That was really edgy."
"Well, good."
"I really loved you."
I kid you not.
Now, let's contrast this sordid episode with an arguably more sordid, but drastically more self-aware, phone encounter with Barack Obama in 2006. As Gawker reported the other day and two years ago, Obama made fun of the babyface of a young reporter named Nicklaus Lovelady at a press conference, which apparently killed his chances with a cute intern. Lovelady, rather than deal with the issue professionally, promised to withhold his vote until Obama publicly apologized.
Obama's response? To call the guy and apologize. For "messin' up his game." Listen on:
The Republican National Committee has spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August.
According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.
The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September.
The RNC also spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup through September after reporting no such costs in August.
The cash expenditures immediately raised questions among campaign finance experts about their legality under the Federal Election Commission's long-standing advisory opinions on using campaign cash to purchase items for personal use.
What would Joe the Plumber think? (WWJTPT?) With money like that, she could start her own plumbing business... or at least pay Joe's back taxes.
It may have cost $150,000, but it least it won some voters:
Ladies and gentlemen, your third entry for best photo of the 2008 campaign!
This was probably inevitable, though that doesn't make it any less shocking. But this post is not so much a repeat of last week's discussion of racist mobs as it is an opportunity to talk about the free speech issues raised by this extraordinary political campaign.
As Kos commenter Lorelei points out in Tariq Nelson's recced post on the subject, the openly racist activity showcased in the above video is protected speech under the First Amendment. Interestingly enough, the circumstances that gave rise to the landmark 1969 Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio bear an eerie resemblance to this incident, as it was about a Ku Klux Klan member, in Ohio, preaching racism and antisemitism in the presence of a television crew.
In the most significant piece of the ruling, SCOTUS overturned the Ohio law that allowed Brandenburg's conviction: "Freedoms of speech and press do not permit a State to forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." So there must be a threat of imminent action and specific direction towards that action for something a citizen says to be illegal. Otherwise it's just (mere) hateful speech.
That's a very powerful, and very specific, ruling. It places the question of the legality of speech outside the bounds of the speech itself, and forces us to ask in each instance: where is that line between (mere) hateful speech and hateful speech designed to incite someone to action? It's probably somewhere beyond both this and this, but you do have to wonder about the degree of McCain and Palin's responsibility for their supporters' actions. Legally, they're safe: the link between "Obama pals around with terrorists," "Obama is a terrorist" and "kill terrorists!", for example, has not been made explicit. This is particularly true because there's no way to know the severity of the threat to Obama's life – it isn't the sort of question that gets answered until it's too late.
But just because a line of reasoning isn't explicit doesn't mean that its purveyor is not responsible for its consequences, and the force of the argument behind outlawing rabblerousing hate speech absolutely applies to this instance. Members of the press, after all, were physically and verbally attacked by McCain/Palin supporters shortly after the campaign charged the media with bias detrimental to McCain's image. Furthermore, it's important to note that presidential candidates are, by definition, the leaders of the country (or the parts of it they represent). As such, their actions have far greater potential to incite, empower and implicitly condone the actions of their followers, and they must be extraordinarily careful with their message. If they are to follow the spirit and not the letter of the law, then, they are bound by a higher moral burden than the ordinary citizen.
This is precisely why McCain and Palin's refusal to explicitly denounce the racists among their supporters is disgustingly political enough to transcend politics. No, they didn't ask that man to hang "Obama's Ghost," and I'm sure they'd be disgusted with the display. But they can't claim that this campaign isn't about race, either – there's no "race card," there's just the situation. Pressing back hard against the racism here, rather than encouraging it, would lose them supporters. But it would the right thing to do at a time when the choice has real consequences.
Now, I'm not running a political campaign, and lack this influence to affect change in the republican base. But nor am I standing in front of the Supreme Court, and I am not bound by the government's responsibility to impartially uphold a legal decision. I'm perfectly free to call that man – Mike Lunsford of Fairfield, Ohio – a despicable human being whose disgusting beliefs have led him to take deplorable action. He should be ashamed of himself, and I am ashamed by the fact that racism is so unrepentantly present in my home country.
I'm also saddened by John McCain's inability to overcome his political situation, and scared by Sarah Palin's penchant for tapping into the darkest passions of her followers. Both of them are failing in their moral responsibilities as leaders of the United States. It hardly matters whether it's because of ignorance or intentional manipulation. America deserves better.
(In what may be the coolest bit of legal trivia I've ever seen, by the way, Brandenburg was defended in part by DC’s own Eleanor Holmes Norton, who was the assistant legal director of the ACLU at the time. Aside from reminding me of this old Onion article, the image of her standing up in front of the Supreme Court in the late '60s on that particular case is some mad poetic justice.)
Feel free to call me crazy on this one, but I can't help but read Sarah Palin's recent statement about the "best of America" as applying, more than is usual for politician-speak, to DC residents rather than just the federal government:
"We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe" -- here the audience interrupted Palin with applause and cheers -- "We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation."
I agree with her that there's something really great about American small towns, when they're not just strip-malls. But there's something just as real and just as great about growing up in DC. Furthermore, just because a place (or a person) overwhelmingly refuses to vote for you doesn't mean that they're unamerican. With all due respect, my natural patriotic inclinations probably outstrip Palin's. I mean, hell, I was enough of a nerdy pro-America kid to force my parents to hang a flag outside our house in the early '90s, and memorize all four verses of the Star Spangled Banner. The notion that I'm somehow less American than someone else because of where I happened to grow up isn't just insulting, it's stupid. It's bad politics.
John McCain got a call from Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was on the phone to Barack Obama, and to his Democratic running mate, Joe Biden. Nobody called Sarah Palin.
Their reasoning?
"Senator Obama is the Democratic presidential nominee and, obviously, is an important political figure in the United States," McCormack said. "(Either) one of Senator McCain or Senator Obama are going to be president come January. And so just in terms of the courtesy and protocol aspects of this and the practical aspects of this, we thought it was appropriate to make those calls."
Absolutely. I couldn't have said it better myself. Sarah Palin is not an important political figure in the United States, nor does she have any intellectual or political influence on people who are not insane. She therefore does not deserve the privileges of "courtesy and protocol" at a national scale.
It's on us to keep it that way, and ensure that she never, ever, ever holds national office.
While reading a deeply disturbing piece about the historical use of lynching photographs by Dora Apel entitled Lynching Photographs and the Politics of Public Shaming, I couldn't help but be constantly reminded of the displays of race-driven anger and fear at McCain/Palin rallies over the last week. I know this has been pointed out before, but the structures of the two situations truly do mirror one another – not only in the symbolism of words and actions, and in the mediums (photographs and video) used to describe them, but in the reactions of those not involved.
As Apel describes it, the psychology behind lynching was driven by the perception of a shifting or unstable power relationship between whites and blacks. This is also the case now, as we are poised to cross arguably the largest symbolic barrier to black power in the United States, in the face of a decently-sized racist reaction. While the sexual dimension is not as explicit as it was a hundred years ago, the overtones of fear about white women's purity in the face of supposed aggression from black men (sexual or just-not-quite physical) are undeniable. Apel describes a typical fantasy on the bottom of page 57: "In the scenario of a white woman terrified at the sight of a young black man at her door asking for food, the hysteria of the white woman is the implicit counterpart to the danger of the hypersexed black male. Both are "excessively saturated with sexuality," to borrow a phrase from the film theorist Linda Williams. The very condition of the black male's proximity to the white woman became an assault, not on her person but on her senses, causing irresistible feelings of panic, frenzy and fear, which she presumably would not have felt had he been a white male stranger. Thus the position of the white male as protector and defender of the helpless white woman is legitimized."
It is therefore telling that Sarah Palin, not John McCain, first introduced Obama's "dangerous" ties to Bill Ayers, and that the most egregiously racist moment – the verbal and physical attacks on black members of the press and stage crew – took place during a speech of hers. As noted, the situation is not as sexually charged as the scenario Apel describes, but given that it's 21st century national politics, it's not far off. Both Palin and Obama are as close to sex symbols as politicians who aren't Kennedy get, after all.
Even the slogan "Who is Barack Obama?", written so as to allow the listener's worst imaginings to fill in the answer, taps into the archetypal unknown and "dangerous" black man, as in the scene that Apel describes, quoted above. And again, it's worth pointing out that the narrator's voice in the ad is female and worried, and is followed by a shot of McCain's stern countenance and assurance that he approved the message.
After reading about the apparent strength of the lynching ritual in not-as-distant-as-we-would-like American history, it's clear that this sort of thing, and the fact that it works on a certain demographic, should come as no surprise even to people of my (younger) generation. But the points Apel makes about the power of shame caused by lynching photographs are equally well taken, and help to explain why race-driven attacks and displays of frenzied communal anger have thus far only solidified Obama's lead. As the public is exposed to a number of videos of open bigotry and proud misinformation, the shame about that piece of national heritage, based on cultural memories of lynching and personal memories of lynching photographs and descriptions, is explicitly on most peoples' minds. And as Apel notes, the photographs didn't capture the frenzy of the mob's moment. But the video does. In a way, this is one of the first times that the country as a whole has been exposed to the sound and movement, the emotions, of a lynch mob.
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the nation's most popular hockey mom, will join the winner of the Philadelphia Flyers regional search for the "Ultimate Hockey Mom" contest and drop the puck at the ceremonial opening face-off as the home team Flyers host the New York Rangers at the Wachovia Center on Saturday, October 11 at 7 p.m.
"Because of the tremendous amount of publicity she has brought to our sport, we invited the most popular hockey mom in North America to our home opener to help us get our season started," said Comcast-Spectacor Chairman Ed Snider who founded the Flyers in 1967. "We are very excited she has accepted our offer and we are very proud of the publicity she is generating for hockey moms and the sport of hockey."
I'd like to know where they got most popular hockey mom out of national punchline, but whatever. And while it's fun to compare the similarities between the Flyers fans and Sarah Palin (their mindless stupidity, their uncanny ability to distort facts(See the update), or their team's willingness to cheat in order to secure a victory), I'm not expecting a lovefest when she drops the puck. In fact, I'm thinking that letting a politician attend a Philadelphia sports event has to go up there with the dumbest moves a campaign can make.
This can go two ways. If she gets booed, we can all laugh at the McCain campaign for sending her out there, and if she doesn't get booed, well then the Flyers fans are even bigger assholes than we thought they were! So basically, it's a win win. You Betcha!
Barack Obama, [Palin] told 8,000 fans at a rally here Monday afternoon, "launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist!" This followed her earlier accusation that the Democrat pals around with terrorists. "This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America," she told the Clearwater crowd. "I'm afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country." The crowd replied with boos.
. . .
Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."
When you build a party on racism and prejudice, you grow and fuel those feelings among your supporters. Prejudice and Hatred don't occur in a vacuum, this is the result of years upon years of the Republican party and the right wing media feeding this beast.
Over the last week or so, CBS has released (or leaked) several pieces of what is probably the single worst televised interview with a national candidate of all time.
It's actually quite sad, and more than a little scary. When Palin isn't spouting hilarious gibberish, the startling political incompetence and genuine ignorance she displayed was truly unprecedented, even to hardened ears.
But the following clip represents something a little different:
Though her stress on the personal experience of global warming is a little misguided, most of Palin's answer is pretty fantastic when you consider who it's coming from. By rights, the admission of the reality of climate change and call to action should be really reassuring.
And then we get to the last sentences of her answer:
"Kinda doesn't matter at this point, as we debate, what caused it. The point is, it's real, we need to do something about it."
Now, unlike some of her other answers, this is not nonsense on a logical level. Nope, this answer betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue, and of the role of science in government, and of, let's be honest, reality. Cause here's the thing: if we don't know how global warming was caused, how do we know what to do about it? How can we possibly do anything about it at all?
If it wasn't man-made, there's almost certainly nothing that we can do. Pragmatically speaking, saying that the causes of climate change don't matter is precisely the same as denying that it exists. Her casual dismissal of the work of scientists who have been struggling for years to answer precisely these questions – with some success, I might add – is astounding. And what does this say about the "something" we need to do about the crisis? Insofar as it will be anything at all, Sarah Palin's "something" will be a token solution at best, with no scientific consultation.
Seriously, fuck Sarah Palin for even pretending to know about climate change.
