I started this blog on a suffragette platform…

Palin Punked by Radio Comedians (Palin Piégée par les justiciers masqués)

“Notorious Quebec comedy duo talks politics in prank call to Sarah Palin.”

J’adore les Quebecois!.  Doesn’t this just speak to the amazing vanity and stupidity of the McCain/Palin campaign??

Over the weekend, two Quebecois radio comedians who are notorious for making prank calls to celebrities easily reached Sarah Palin by phone, convincing her that she was talking to French President, Nicholas Sarkozy.

During the six minute interview, the well-known duo of Sebastien Trudel and Marc-Antoine Audette tease Palin right under her nose.  They give the wrong name for the Canadian Prime Minister (who was just reelected last month), they mention the “Prime Minister of Quebec” (which doesn’t exist), talk about seeing Belgium from the house, they even discuss the pornographic film “Nailin’ Palin” as a biography, and of course, they mock her in French. 

All the while, Palin gives her stump speech –I kid you not—mixed in with an over enthusiastic, “We love you!” (Is that diplomacy?), mispronunciations of Sarkozy’s first name (idiot!), and offers to hunt together.

This is not to be missed! Click here for the Transcript on Talking Points Memo.

 

 

 

A Message to all those who voted Bush/Cheney ’04 (Guest Blogger)

How did those last eight years work out for you? How’s the capture of Bin Laden coming? How’s this war situation sitting with you? Are you like millions of other Americans who are worried about trying to pay their mortgage? How’re your parents’ 401K and stocks looking right about now? Do they have to delay their retirement? What about your grandparents’ social security? Will they be able to pay their heating bills this winter? Will you be able to pay your heating bills this winter?

So my dear Bush/Cheney supporters, please ask yourselves: “Am I ready to condemn America to another four years of those same policies? Policies that lead us from a multi-trillion dollar surplus to a multi-trillion dollar debt? Policies that totally destroyed our once great reputation within the world community? Policies where golfing is more important than hunting down the ACTUAL terrorists responsible for 9/11?

 

Worse yet, are you ready to be held responsible for putting Sarah Palin in power over this country…the woman who wanted Alaska to separate from the US…as vice president, or worst case scenario, PRESIDENT!?  My cat is more qualified than Sarah Palin! And if McCain is elected, she will be “one 72-year-old-cancer-ridden geriatric’s heartbeat away” from running (destroying?) the free world. Can you live with that?

 

I can’t because I want a better America for my nephews, my kids, and my grandkids. So do the right thing this time and help fix your Bush/Cheney mistake! Get out and vote! (but be a real maverick & pull the left trigger, my friends!)

Alaskans Speak up about Palin

Just had to pass this along

Sarah Palin is America’s real Bridge to Nowhere
By Seth Kantner | Juneau Empire

I’m sitting on my bearskin chair beside the stove, in Kotzebue, while outside the ocean freezes over. Inside I have 49 things to say to you, America.

I’m an Alaskan – born in an igloo, enjoy whale muktuk, all that – and in case you aren’t sick of our state by now, I’ll start with an apology for one of our residents: Sarah Palin.

We Alaskans are not generally so magazine-pretty like her, nor are we so confrontational and vapid. Most of us don’t have peachy cheeks – we have sunburn, windburn, frostbite. Our fingernails are dirty from actually gutting moose, our hands chapped from picking thousands of salmon, not holding one up for the camera.
Having said that, here in Alaska we are accustomed to getting jobs we’re not qualified to fill. In our far-flung villages and towns we have big money surrounded by big wilderness; the combination causes warped career opportunities. Sort of an Edge of Nowhere phenomenon – cousin to the Bridge to Nowhere one.

For example, in the village closest where I was raised, I remember standing in my friend’s cabin when his dad got a call: “People are writing you in for mayor.”

“Nope!” my friend’s dad said. “Tell ’em no, I ain’t doing that.” He peered out at his generator, idling rough, an extension cord running under his door, to power a rerun of “Dukes of Hazard.” If he’d lived in Wasilla 25 years later, he could have responded, “Call Sarah, she’ll want it.”

Similar stories abound. Jimmy: who got the dogcatcher job by telling the interviewer, “I can shoot a shotgun, .30-06, .308…” Or my friend Ian, who this summer worked with computers, until he was named CEO of a $45 million corporation.
Tougher in Alaska? Not necessarily. Here you can be dogcatcher, city planner, governor, with little or no experience. That’s one beauty of our state, although, often the only thing keeping it all working is money.
Sitting on this worn-to-the-hide bearskin chair, scribbling, I glance at an old newspaper before I stuff it in the stove. Lo! There’s another photo of Palin; she’s sitting in a glass office, with a bearskin, too, draped across her expensive couch. Palin’s wearing heels. The bear’s wearing a fake head. In the foreground crouches something with pincers – a taxidermied king crab!

I’ll have to show this crab photo to my Eskimo friends I grew up with. We never contemplated such wanton unAlaskanness. Why not eat the damn thing? We ate this bear I’m sitting on, including the paws and jaw and fat.

By now the world knows Palin is an expert at swishing around, color coordinated, with her makeup and mooseburger and mean-spirited commentary. We can only hope people realize she’s a pretty atypical Alaskan, one who is simply skimming the gravy off our hard-earned Alaskan mystique to mix with her varnished nonsense.

Here where global warming is melting our world regardless of Palin’s lone charge against reality, her alleged appeal leaves many of us cold. With long winters and tough trails, we still value a beaver hat and common sense more than high heels and fancy clothes. We don’t want another leader less intelligent than we are.
Eight years with the cowboy and copilot Halliburton has been hard on our land. Too much polluting, an unnecessary war, and both men too cool for global warming. We can’t afford to turn now to a beauty contestant and an old guy acting like he’s run the Iditarod too many times without winning.

Come on, people. Our polar ice is melting. Your jobs are turning to dust. Everyone’s bank statements are on the verge of being firestarter. John McCain’s answers to these problems? Heck, I honestly don’t know what he stands for this week. But his running mate, we’ve heard her answers: She’s already sued the polar bears, now she’s chanting, “Drill, baby, drill!”

Wake up, folks. Palin is America’s bridge to nowhere.

From up here in the Arctic – not left or right but north of the campaign trail – the reality is clear and cold: When McCain chose Palin he wrote America out of his will. It’s time for us to write him out of our future.

Seth Kantner was born and raised in the Arctic and is a commercial fisherman in Alaska’s northernmost salmon fishery. He is the author of Shopping for Porcupine and the bestselling novel Ordinary Wolves.

Fashion Update: McCain/Palin Redefine “Frugal”

 Sarah Palin called the whole clothes thing “ridiculous”.

Hmmm… Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt, for once, and consider for a moment that at her many undergraduate institutions, the Governor of the Great state of Alaska never learned the definition of “ridiculous.”  I mean how could she possibly be expected to know that it means “worthy of ridicule or derision; absurd; preposterous; laughable” and that the definition is profoundly applicable to her complicity (ignorant or not) in the whole wardrobe debacle and in the level of frivolity that has followed her national political career to date?  

Perhaps we should also give equal latitude to Palin’s memory-challenged running mate as to his dim-witted partner in crime and assume that the definition of “frugal” has also escaped their collective understanding since they have both recently used the term to describe the Palin family.

“If people knew how Todd and I and our kids shop so frugally.” Palin stated late last week.

 “She lives a frugal life,” Mr. McCain said. “She and her family are not wealthy.”

Perhaps this is accurate according to Mr. McCain’s standards, whose own heiress wife wore an outfit estimated at $300,000 to the RNC, and who owns 7 houses, 12 cars, and a jet.  But to someone like me, who makes a truly average income, and perhaps to …hmmm….Joe the Plumber ?(whose house cost less than the value of Palin’s wardrobe, hair and makeup), “frugal” is not the word that comes to mind when one of Palin’s first acts of state was to install a tanning bed  in the governor’s mansion. And with an estimated net worth of $1.2 Million, how can anyone, except McCain, consider the Palins as anything but “wealthy”.

But I guess like many “facts” coming out of the McCain Campaign, word definitions are mutable and ephemeral.  After all, if Palin still can’t define what a VP does, or what a feminist is, it would be no surprise to me if she thought that “Joe Six Pack” refered to a guy with great abs.

But American families are being pummeled with hard truths and unrelenting facts.  They might be manipulated in speeches, and glossed over in slick presentations that hide the ignorance of the speaker, but to hundreds of thousands of Americans they still have a hard time paying for mortgage or rent, and for groceries and gas.  And to them, $150,000 on clothes, $23,000 on makeup, and $10,000 on hair in mere 2 months = frivolity, not frugality.

Dude!!! W.W.T.D??

According to numerous articles and in their own words, Sarah Palin’s husband, Todd, is her #1 advisor.

Though not an elected official, Todd Palin, or “The First Dude” as he likes to be called, plays a central role in his wife’s government of Alaska.  He has apparently become enough of a fixture in his wife’s administration that even among the Alaskan Gubernatorial  staffers the joke is “What Would Todd do?”

He has “encouraged” lawmakers to support his wife’s agenda by calling them and even lobbying in person.  He has reviewed and influenced decisions on the state budget (some say he helped write it!), sat in on official meetings with Cabinet members and legislators, and has even been regularly copied on administrative emails dealing with official state business (though Gov. Palin later had those emails labeled as “Classified” so that they could not be released to the press.)

Of course we all know how seriously Todd involves himself in Personnel/Personal? matters.  He was heavily involved in Troopergate, the scandal in which Sarah Palin has been found guilty of abusing her power by allowing impermissible and repeated contacts with the Palins’ ex-brother in law.  Todd Palin was also involved with having John Bitney, a former friend, fired for allegedly having an affair with the ex-wife of one of Todd’s buddies.

By any reckoning Todd has had an unusually strong role in the Palin administration in Alaska.  Would the same be true if, God forbid, there is a Palin administration on Capitol Hill?  All we know about Todd Palin is that he’s Sarah Palin’s high school sweetheart, a snow mobile champion who works for BP and a commercial fisherman, and father of five. While the Republican Party might like to have us believe that all that qualifies him to be a powerful figure of some sort, like his wife, it speaks little of his capability and knowledge in a  political, if not advisory capacity.  All we know on that end is that he has no more than a high school diploma and was once a member of the radical Alaskan Independence Party.

Gov.  Palin has given Todd all but free reign in Alaska’s administration.  Can we expect anything less for the office of Vice President?  And do we want a Vice President (Or President?) who would really have to ask themselves, “What Would Todd do?’

 

Special Needs Governor

So I’ve got this joke for you.  This presidential nominee walks into a crowded room… 

Well of course this wasn’t supposed to be a joke.  But with Palin, it’s always a joke. Here how this one goes:  Palin delivered her first policy address today on a subject close to her heart—special needs children. No, it’s not that kind of joke!!    

Yes,
Palin actually has a special needs child, whom she loves to wave as a rally flag at every opportunistic moment.  But almost a month ago, while campaigning on the same platform in Colorado, it was discovered that as governor, Palin vetoed $275,000 in Special Olympics Alaska funds (Page 100, SB 221 with vetoes)!!  I guess that was pre-Trig. 

And now she’s supposed to be engendering some sort of better-late-than-never gravitas for her reputation by requesting funding of the American’s with Disabilities Education Act.  As we could have predicted, political gravitas barely had a chance to manifest before it turned to disdain tinged with high school-cheerleader brand derision. 

Palin began by citing those darned budget earmarks and the bridges we’ve all heard about as the sources for funding for IDEA, reminding us simultaneously of McCain’s proposed spending freeze as well as her own Bridge to Nowhere debacle. 

This woman’s incompetence is dizzying. But the fun doesn’t stop there. 

With her new Do-these-make-me-look-smart-? glasses, Palin invokes the hot-button topic of autism in support of disabled children in general:

But then, in typical Palin fashion, she resorts to ridicule, contemptuously attacking the value of projects such as “fruit fly research…I kid you not”:

Anyone who took high school biology learned how important fruit flies are to biologic and therefore genetic research. Why?  Well among many reasons, the one they don’t usually let you graduate from high school without knowing is that fruit flies have a lifespan of barely 24 hours. Which means that experiments can test theories in a compact amount of time.

So, of course you know the punch line:  That the study of fruit flies is WIDELY used in autism research and has revolutionized the study of birth defects.

Ba Dum Bum 

So, You Think I Can Make This Stuff Up??

Well by now, we all know that Shucks!-vote-for-me-I’m-an-average-gal-just-like-you Palin spent $150,000 at high end department stores in the wicked anti-American Gamorrah that is New York City.  As my dear husband pointed out, it is “Saks Fifth Avenue“, not “Saks Main Street.”

She has also criticized Obama for …get this…being a faux feminist.   Since faux is a French word, I would have been surprised if xenophobe Palin actually knew what it meant.  She quickly proved that she didn’t though.  She thought that by surrounding herself with females and citing how Obama’s female staff gets paid less than his male staff she would make her point. (Ah, if only she understood the concept of EQUAL WORK, equal pay that she and McCain are against anyway). In typical Palin erroneous hyperbole she goes on to state that only one senator—can you guess who?—has higher paid women than men on his staff.

Well, so this was bound to happen:  I’m not sure if for the bungling McCain/Palin campaign this is typical (in the fact that they got caught in their own hypocrisy again) or atypical (in the fact that Palin was actually sort of right for once), but the New York Times broke the story today about how, the highest paid person on the McCain campaign staff is indeed a woman!!!  No, it’s not Carla Fiorina, McCain’s top economic advisor, nor is it Nicholle Wallace, his chief communications staffer.  Nope it was Emmy- nominated makeup artist from “So You think You Can Dance”, Amy Strozzi, who earned $22,800 for the first two weeks of October.  That’s a helluva lot of lipstick!

I’m pretty sure that by all standards all this measures up to a pretty loose and superficial reckoning of Feminism.  But loose and superficial “understanding” of pretty much everything has become Palin’s hallmark and the campaign would need to hire Industrial Light and Magic to cover that up.

—————–UPDATE——————-

Simultaneous break of two news stories: 

1.)  That Sarah Palin denies the $150,000 clothing tab.

2.) SNL costume designer claims Palin wanted nicer clothes “to fit her new image.”

Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up!

—-NEW UPDATE—Yeah, No Kidding!  Another update———- 

On Oct. 23, Sarah Palin was photographed wearing a scarf with the democratic donkey that says “Vote” and “Yes”.   What a Dumbass.

Conservatives on Palin: National Review

Writing in the National Review this week, Byron York said: “Watching press coverage of the Republican candidate for vice president, it’s sometimes hard to decide whether Sarah Palin is incompetent, stupid, unqualified, corrupt, backward, or all of the above.”

Palin on SNL: “She Killed!”… A moose, that is.

If Peggy Noonan had covered Palin’s appearance on Saturday Night Live, doubtless Noonan would have crowed, “She Killed!” That is to say that she surpassed excessively low expectations by accurately reciting dialogue and mugging for the camera.  Not unlike her previous live TV moment, the Vice Presidential debate, millions tuned in hoping for a major gaffe, if not heady guffaws.

Well we got the latter, if not the former this time. I usually detest watching her on camera because she so obviously revels in the attention and is witless enough to believe in her own superiority even when she is screwing the pooch.  But, like with most train wrecks, it’s impossible to look away.

The fun part of when political candidates come on SNL is when they finally get to spoof the spoofer, pulling into sharp focus how far off or dead on the mockery is.  But this didn’t (couldn’t?) happen here. Palin barely had lines at all, and the entire show was crafted to be a subtle recital on Palin and McCain’s ineptitude.

With bated breath we all watched to see who would show up at the mic at the opening of the show. ..Tina Fey blowing kisses!  She was conducting Palin’s first ever press conference—SLAM!  Making fun of McCain’s debate performance…SLAM!  Palin’s “Pro-America” comment is thrown on the table and Fey answers it in the way we’ve all mentally pictured Palin answering it, by listing the states expected to vote democratic as not “Pro America”. Fey puts the cherry on with a wink and starts her “fancy pageant walking.”

As the camera cuts to the real Gov. Palin standing with the show’s producer, Lorne Michaels, he reminds her that this is “heightened reality.”  Nice.  Then Mark Walhberg comes on, completely ignores Palin, and demands to know where Andy Samberg is. Michaels explains that Wahlberg didn’t like the impression Samberg did of him on the show, to which Palin replies “Tell me about it” and the stage is set for the comparison of the personification of Wahlberg and Palin. Later in the show Wahlberg tracks down Samberg to confront him about his hilarious spoof on last week’s show.  During this confrontation, Wahlberg conducts himself in the exact manner of Samberg’s impersonation, underscoring that Samberg’s impersonation was spot on authentic.  Hmmmm…Like someone else’s we know?

Back with Michaels, Alec Baldwin, who gave a very unflattering impersonation of Palin on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” comes onto set “mistaking” the governor for Tina Fey solidifying this conflation of the impersonation with the reality. The only nice thing he has to say is the same thing that Palin’s fans typically resort to: that she is “way hotter in person.”

Jabs and jibes of varying subtlety aimed at Palin and her ticket ran throughout the rest of the show:

The fateful Host, Josh Brolin, star of Oliver Stone’s caustic comedy, “W,” reminded viewers that we are already embroiled in 8 years of ruination brought about by an inept and numb-skulled Republican in the White House.

Three episodes of the hilarious and always-ending-in-tragedy McGruber segments fixated on the economy, reminding us just how bad it was out there.

Weekend Update also doted on the economy and used a recent news story to compare Palin to a former ridiculous notion cum VP, Dan Quayle. It also brought back the worst politician character on SNL, Tim Calhoun, boring us with his pathetic policy ideas, and setting the stage for another appearance of Palin. She was brought back out whatever reason to “refuse” to play along and sing a rap song about her.  The mic was handed to Amy Poehler who reduced Palin’s campaign to taglines and epithets– to which Palin proudly raised the roof.  It ended with Poehler executing a moose gang style. Then Palin stood in for the only role she’s actually been trained – mock TV journalist.

But the finest moment went to the Obama campaign, which had purchased air time to launch one of its toughest ads about halfway through the episode.

For most politicians, an appearance on SNL can help humanize them in front of the electorate.  That was the underlying problem with Palin’s performance.  She doesn’t need to be “humanized” — that’s all she’s got.  We already know she is deeply flawed and capable of being humorous  about the most inappropriate things. What she really needed was to help the electorate know that she has a more than a basic vocabulary about foreign and domestic policy. Something she could have done if she hadn’t chickened out of “Meet the Press” or “Face the Nation” in favor of confirming dead-on impersonations on SNL.