I want to be a kitten
Jon Carroll explains why, not that reasons should really be necessary...
Rove knows liars
Karl Rove:
McCain has gone, in some of his ads, similarly gone one step too far in sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100% truth test.
Spread the word
Palin-tology
“She scares the bejeebers out of me.”
James Wimberley calculates the odds a VP Palin would have to take over from POTUS McCain: one in four.
Meanwhile, Mark Kleiman writes:
I don't knock Palin for not knowing some stuff I know; she knows some stuff I don't know. As Will Rogers said, we're all ignorant, just about different things.
But Palin also appears to be deeply incurious. That, plus her habit of bluffing instead of saying "I don't know," might well insulate her from the learning we would all need her to do. So far, her approach to learning the stuff she doesn't know that's relevant to being President is that of a student who has partied away the semester and is now cramming for the exam. Not encouraging.
When I first heard the announcement, Palin reminded me of Dan Quayle, another vice presidential candidate chosen for supposed appeal to female voters. The more I've learned about the way Palin's governed in Wasila and Alaska, the more I think of John DiIulio's description of the current administration -- Mayberry Machiavellis:
staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible.
Of course, he wrote this in 2002, so neglected to mention all the pork-barrel patronage they push, which seems an equally important goal. Just look at the fortunes of Halliburton and KBR.
Today's New York Times profiles Palin, under the succinct headline, Once Elected, Palin Hired Friends and Lashed Foes. It only confirms this association:
WASILLA, Alaska — Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.
So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.
Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.
[... A]n examination of her swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents "haters" — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.
Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.
[...]
Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.
Petty narrowminded greed and an unwillingness to learn matters outside their comfort zone.
Do we really need more of this among our elected officials?
Update: Josh Marshall sums it up:
[Sarah Palin is] a small-minded person who populates her administration with cronies and grade-school friends, fires those who dare to criticize her and uses the power of her office to pursue personal vendettas. In other words, someone in the habit of abusing official power who should not be let within a mile of being president.
Update2: TChris has the winningest soundbyte so far: "Palin's Governance: Vindictive, Secretive, and Hypocritical."
Oh foo...
An announcement from the commenting service I've been using on this blog:
YACCS will discontinue its service on December 23, 2008. After this date, you will no longer be able to access comments, either on your site or through the YACCS homepage. Please download/archive your comments before this date. Thanks to all the supporters, translators and bloggers who have supported YACCS over the past seven years.
As if I didn't have enough on my plate already...
Can anybody recommend other blog commenting services? I don't like Blogger.com's built-in system.
LiveJournal
