Breaking News

Sarah Palin is going to work for Fox News.



Remember, you heard it here first.

Christmas (Hanukkah) In July

Sarah Palin is resigning as governor of Alaska, most likely to run for president in 2012.

In related news, Rahm Emanuel had to leave work early today to change his pants, after a spontaneous, unpredicted, and powerful orgasm.

Know Your Audience

Alaska governor Sarah Palin is writing her memoirs. HarperCollins, the book’s publisher, announced it is slated for release in the spring of 2010, and denied rumors it would be released only in audio format.

Orders of Magnitude

There’s been a lot of adolescent name calling in this election, even more juvenile than usual. He-said, she-said, he did it first, he’s on my side of the car, he’s touching me he’s touching me. Stuff like that. Neither side has clean hands, despite what both promised would be a lofty and elevated discussion about the relative merits of each candidacy.

Whether both are equally guilty is a question of magnitude. Let’s examine two frequent Republican complaints: who’s running more negative ads, and why Joe Biden’s verbal gaffes don’t get the same attention as Sarah Palin’s.

Negative ads first. Each side quotes statistics to buttress its point. Obama’s overwhelming fundraising advantage allows him to run so many more ads, both sides are correct, regardless of whether they’re arguing his percentage is lower than McCain’s (as Obama does), or there are so many more of them (as McCain does).

As Mark Twain said, there are three kinds of deception: lies, damned lies, and statistics; call it a wash. What’s more important is the content of the negative ads. It’s one thing to say your opponent’s tax and health care policies won’t help the average Joe, plumber or not; it’s something else to say your opponent is un-American and consorts closely with terrorists. Especially when it’s not true.

Then there are Biden’s gaffes versus Palin’s. We’re not even going to discuss the percentage issue here; Joe Biden talks so much his misstatements could fill the Bible and he’d still be 90% accurate. Once again, it’s the quality of the gaffe that matters. Saying FDR spoke on television after the stock market crash of 1929 is dumb, but it reflect on his judgment. His knowledge of media history, sure, but the point he was making is valid: Roosevelt comforted the nation during the worst parts of the Depression. He did, admittedly, get the specifics wrong. All of them.

Compare that to Governor Palin’s oft-repeated assertion that she has foreign policy expertise because she can see Russia from Alaska. To quote a national columnist (I forget which one, sorry) I can see the moon from my front yard; that doesn’t make me an astronaut. Or an astronomer. I don’t “read everything they put in front of me,” but I can tell you what I do read. Biden’s a bit of a goof whose mouth has only a dial-up connection to his brain when it needs broadband; she’s an idiot.

What’s important are what mathematicians and physicists call orders of magnitude. If I say you’re wearing an ugly sweater and you reply that I’m a wife beating, child molesting bastard, we both insulted each other once. The insults are hardly equivalent.

Palin's Hidden Agenda

Conventional wisdom implies Sarah Palin’s recent campaign appearances indicate someone positioning herself for a presidential run in 2012 should John McCain come up short this year, which appears likely. There’s an abvious second choice no one seems to be picking up on.

Her campaign rhetoric has become even more shrill and veered rightward lately, opening differing with McCain’s to the point where he has had to specifically distance himself from her comments. Polls showing she has become a drag on his hopes with everyone except hard-core conservatives have not diminished her efforts.

Last week’s appearance on Saturday Night Live was telling. The opening was either edgy or unfunny; I lean toward edgy. Her later appearance on the Weekend Update segment was embarrassing. It’s depressing to think that a candidate for the nation’s second highest office would knowingly stand for something like that.

All of these would come back to haunt her in a future run. She might win some primary battles with her ultra-conservative base, but she is essentially unelectable when even more moderate (or even moderately thinking) Republicans start voting. She’s no more likely to become president than Michele Bachmann.

No, her recent acts, coupled with her pre-political history, argue her vision is set on a more practical goal: Fox News. Look for her to to become either a regular contributor, or get her own show, within a year of the expiration of her term as Alaska governor. If not sooner.

Go ahead. Laugh. Just remember where you heard it first.

Sarah Sixpack

Sarah Palin can’t go a day without some pander to her core constituency, personified by Joe Sixpack. I’m old enough to have been around when this stereotype was created, and young enough to remember it. Joe Sixpack comes home after work, plops himself in the family La-Z-Boy and pounds a six pack of beer sitting in his wife beater while watching a ball game.

Basically, a drunk.

So Sarah is proudly identifying her core voting block as drunks.

This might be the first thing she’s been right about so far.

A Qualified No

The McCain campaign got a bump when it started limiting his exposure to the media and sent Sarah Palin to the annex of Dick Cheney’s undisclosed location, away from any potentially embarrassing questions. Maybe they should lock the whole campaign down, since its surrogates can’t seem to keep their feet off their molars, either.

McCain’s economic advisors have a special gift for this. Phil Gramm famously declared this “nation of whiners” was undergoing only a “mental” recession. Just the other day Douglas Holtz-Eakin gave McCain credit for creating the Blackberry, which isn’t even an American invention. (It’s only fair to note the McCain campaign dismissed the comment and walked away from it immediately.)

Then there’s Carly Fiorina.

Submitting to an interview for St. Louis radio station KTRS yesterday, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO was asked if she thought Gov. Palin had the experience to run HP.

“"No, I don't," said Fiorina. "But that's not what she's running for. Running a corporation is a different set of things."

Carly, a contestant for this year’s Yassir Arafat Award for Never Missing an Opportunity to Miss an Opportunity, then appeared with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC to compound the error.

MITCHELL: You were asked whether Sarah Palin has the experience to run a major company ... and you said, "No, I don't, but you know what? That's not what she's running for."

FIORINA: “Well, I don't think John McCain could run a major corporation. I don't think Barack Obama could run a major corporation. I don't think Joe Biden could run a major corporation. But on the other hand, running a major corporation is not the same as being President or Vice President of the United States. It is a fallacy to suggest that the country is like a company. So, of course, to run a business you have to have a lifetime of experience in business. But that's not what John McCain, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin or Joe Biden are doing.”

The author of the Slate piece, Christopher Beam, goes on to say, “Her answer is completely natural and nondamning if you look at the entire paragraph. (Although you could take issue with the ‘fallacy’ line, since George W. Bush did suggest that business experience matters.)”

Beam misses the point. What’s damning is Fiorina’s hubris. While her Wikipedia article has received the Sarah Palin Good Housekeeping Sanitizing treatment, her tenure at HP was beneficial for anyone but her. She walked away with a $21 million severance after being asked to leave by the board. Dismissing someone with that kind of package can be interpreted less as recognition of a job well done—if so, why was she shown the door?—than as a bribe never to return. Palin, McCain, Obama, and Biden may or may not be qualified t run HP; Fiorina certainly wasn’t.

Beam also misses the validity of her “fallacy” comment. There is little comparison between running a major corporation and running the country. The president’s job is infinitely harder. A CEO’s toughest decision may be to decide how many people will lose their jobs; presidents are routinely asked to decide how many people will lose their lives. Her implication that running a company may be the more difficult job isn’t just a conceit; it’s distasteful. A successful president could sit in a CEO’s chair, hire a few niche-specific experts, and run the show as a vacation.

The truth is, all the talk about which candidate is qualified to be president is a straw man; no one is truly qualified to be president until he’s been doing it for a while. The current occupier of the billet has been there over seven years, and he still can’t do it. The best we can hope for is someone with an understanding of the terrible responsibilities of the position, and skills that can be adapted to its performance.

That is the crux of the criticism of McCain’s appointment of Palin as running mate. It’s not that she’s unqualified; we just haven’t had a chance to see if she appreciates the magnitude of the job; her comments to Charles Gibson imply she does not, or she would have at least pondered it before accepting. Nor have we had a chance to see if she has a skill set that can be adapted to doing it right. A year ago Obama was not my choice for president, for exactly that reason. I hadn’t seen him around enough to have a feel for how he’d respond to things. He’s been on the news every day since, so many of my concerns have been addressed. Sarah Palin is well short of that threshold. (In the interests of full disclosure, it should be noted Joe Biden was my original choice for president.)

One thing’s for sure: Carly Fiorina would almost certainly have a key role in a McCain administration. That should be enough to give even Sarah Palin second thoughts.

Executive Experience

Enough with family values and small town values and pigs with lipstick. Until Sarah Palin answers actual questions about her positions and philosophies,
her record is all there is to go on; let’s look at it.

Two terms as mayor of a town with less than 10,000 inhabitants
Twenty months as governor of a 47th most populous state, with a budget that ranks 38th in the nation.

It has been pointed out she has more executive experience than both Democratic nominees combined. No argument. Let’s examine the relevance of that argument.

Wasilla, Alaska, has, by the best figures I could find, 9,780 inhabitants. Lower Burrell, Pennsylvania—my home town—has 12,159, so it can reasonably be argued that I have a similar small town upbringing. Gov. Palin and I are both college graduates; she graduated from the University of Idaho (current enrollment 11,636); my alma mater is Indiana University of Pennsylvania, with a current enrollment of approximately14,000. Granted, it’s been quite a whole since either of us was a student, but the rough comparison still holds. Our demographic backgrounds are not so dissimilar to prevent either of us from sharing basic small-town sensibilities.

Gov. Palin bases much of her qualification derived from small town values, which she seems to think are universal. Lower Burrell and Wasilla are similar in size, but there do appear to be some differences in values. The most recent available figures for registered sex offenders shows Wasilla with one per every 133 residents; Lower Burrell has one per every 4,110. For comparison purposes, Washington DC has 1,030 residents for every registered sex offender. If you drop something on a Wasilla street, leave it there.

The most recent data I could find—2002, during then-Mayor Palin’s tenure—shows 68 city employees in Wasilla. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under the chairmanship of Joe Biden, has approximately 280 staff members. Granted, Biden has people to actually make sure things get done. So does the mayor. (Alaska has approximately 15,000 state employees.) Mayor is considered to be a part-time job in Wasilla, which can reasonably be argued diminishes the intensity of the executive experience.

Her mayoral experience is a straw man; no one would argue Don Kinosz’s experience as Mayor of Lower Burrell qualifies him to run the world’s leading democracy in turbulent times. Governor of Alaska is more relevant experience. Aside from this sentence, we will leave aside Karl Rove’s August assertion that, should Obama select Virginia governor Tim Kaine as his running mate, it would prove Obama’s willingness to place politics ahead of country, due to Kaine’s lack of experience as Virginia governor, though he has governed a state with over eleven times the population of Governor Palin and a budget over three-and-a-half times that of Alaska’s, for only forty-one fewer days.

One point jumps out from the above comparison. Virginia has eleven times the people, yet spends less than four times as much to run the state. Given that Alaska has great expanses of empty land that make many economies of scale impractical, it’s still costing three times as much per capita to run Alaska than it does to keep Virginia operational. Alaska ranks second in the nation in federal aid, and has the third highest unemployment rate. It passes out subsidies of $3200 per eligible citizen from its oil revenues. How this fits with the conservative mantra of less government remains to be seen.

A reasonable person could argue she’s only been in office twenty months. Hardly time for her policies to take effect. True, but Republicans can’t logically have it both ways. (Not that they don’t try.) If her twenty months of experience is enough to qualify her to hold the missile codes, then it’s enough to measure her performance.

This is where the essential disconnect occurs in the “executive experience” argument; the term “successful executive experience” would carry much more water. No president has ever had more executive experience than George W. Bush did when elected in 2000. Little of it could be called successful up to that point, so it should not be a surprise to see his executive decisions afterward lead to several calamities. Gubernatorial experience is no indicator of a successful presidency. Reagan and Clinton were governors; so was Jimmy Carter.

A senator’s lack of “executive experience” is also hardly a disqualifier. Senators have rarely been elected in the past sixty years. The two who were, Truman and Kennedy, did all right. Lyndon Johnson was a senator when elected vice-president. His presidency is generally considered to be a failure because of Vietnam, but Johnson is woefully shortchanged when it comes to passing out credit for civil rights advances in the Sixties.

Then there’s Eisenhower, the most recent war hero to become president. As impressive as his military resume was, it was his diplomatic skills that got him the job of Supreme Allied Commander, and it was those skills that allowed him to hold together the world’s greatest and most fractious alliance. Eisenhower’s executive experience was earned under fire, literally.

Governors have no equivalent experience; their most important decisions are managerial. Education, infrastructure, budgets. All important; none are life and death. Comparing a governor’s executive experience to what’s needed to be president is like comparing a football coach to a general.

Sarah Palin’s executive experience in Alaska is inconsequential when compared the world experience of the Democratic ticket. Asking her to step in on a moment’s notice to run what is probably the world’s most important nation would be like bringing a pitcher out of the minor leagues to pitch the seventh game of the World Series. The rookie might do all right, but no one’s going to bet their house payment on it.

(Figures cited above were obtained from the web sites of the institutions, US Census data, and www.city-data.com )

Oh, Puh-leese

Barack Obama is taking a lot of heat for allegedly referring to Sarah Palin when he made a comment about "putting lipstick on a pig" yesterday. It seems like a stretch, since he, and other politicians—mostly Republicans—have used the phrase many times in other circumstances. If the Republicans really want to take umbrage at a sexist remark, here are the

TOP FIVE THINGS BARACK OBAMA COULD HAVE SAID INSTEAD OF "PUTTING LIPSTICK ON A PIG."
5. Put some rouge on that ho.
4. Put some eyeliner on that bitch.
3. Put some mascara on that skank.
2. Put some exfoliating cleanser on that skirt.
1. Put some trollop-ey makeup on that cunt.

Sorry. I got carried away. John McCain already used that last one when referring to his own wife. Wouldn't want the Republicans to whine about plagiarism.

Palin Comparison

When questioned about my short, yet undistinguished military career, I readily admit that I spent three years in an Army band at Ft. McPherson, GA during the height of the Cold War. During that time not a single Soviet military musical unit penetrated as far as Savannah. I’m damn proud of that, and claim at least as much credit as Sarah Palin deserves for protecting us from the imminent invasion across the Bering Strait.

* * *

It’s only a matter of time before YouTube has a video titled, “Governator: The Sarah Palin Chronicles.” We already have pictures of her with weapons.

* * *

I agree with the Republicans: families should be off-limits. That includes the entire family. Don’t whine about the media hounding the pregnant daughter, then hold up the son who’s on his way to Iraq. Either neither can be used as a reflection on their mother’s character, or both. No cherry picking. (Thanks to a caller into NPR for pointing this out.)

* * *

All this talk about McCain’s courage is true. By choosing Palin as his running mate, he’s given die-hard conservatives and one-issue “we want a woman” voters a reason not to want him to complete his term. The man must have them like grapefruit.

Sarah Palin's Family...

…will not be discussed here, now or in the future. Opinions Governor Palin has that will affect other Americans are fair game.

One question comes to mind: will conservatives now feel the need to un-demonize pregnant, unwed, teens like they un-demonized drug addicts when Rush Limbaugh turned out to be one?