Posted by Teresa at 12:48 AM * 58 comments
The McCain campaign has stepped up their campaign of fraudulent personal attacks on Obama. They’re coming down hard on tenuous connections between Obama and Bill Ayers, who was a Weatherman back in the Pleistocene, and other supposed connections that are equally inconsequential. It’s complete BS—the kind of thing you used to only see coming from marginal cranks—but the McCain campaign has apparently given up even the appearance of legitimacy.
I don’t know what they can be thinking. Obama’s past is well documented and as close to squeaky clean as real humans get. McCain’s past is the one that doesn’t stand close scrutiny. All I can say is, please pass on the following:
The Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis website, which just went live, was paid for by Obama for America. There’s nothing underhanded about it. This isn’t a bunch of artfully deniable statements about undefined “ties” to undefined “terrorists”. It’s a mass of research, documentation, and news story reprints about McCain having been in the thick of the Keating 5 scandal and the collapse of the Savings and Loan industry. Short version: it started with respectable-sounding “deregulation”, and quickly turned into massive fraud, the collapse of a formerly stable area of the financial services industry, and a bailout that cost taxpayers about $120 billion. IMO, the biggest thing we learn is that between that financial scandal and the current one, McCain professed to have learned his lesson, but actually learned nothing at all.
As of this Monday morning, 06 October 2008, with the global economy severely destabilized and in panic mode, here’s the McCain campaign’s take on the important issues.
Amy Silverman’s Postmodern John McCain: the presidential candidate some Arizonans know—and loathe is a mother lode of local Arizonan coverage of McCain’s vile past. It’s a big article. Pack a lunch. If you need help sorting out Silverman’s article, John McCain Detested in Arizona is a summary of the high points, and Phoenix Reporter Details McCain’s Sordid Political Past breaks it out as a timeline.
Make-Believe Maverick, subtitled A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty, is a long and very solid article from the latest issue of Rolling Stone. Early on, it quotes the nearly legendary Air Force Lieutenant Colonel John A. Dramesi. Not long after McCain and Dramesi were released by the North Vietnamese, they fell to comparing notes about their next career moves:
“I’m going to the Middle East,” Dramesi says. “Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran.”John McCain’s Sweet Ride. Sheikhs on a plane! Remember how all flights were grounded after 9/11, only somehow a bunch of highly-placed Saudis managed to get themselves quietly flown out of the country? And remember that blonde lobbyist, Vicky Iseman, who certainly was getting a lot of favors out of McCain for a while there? Watch the discreditable connections stack up in all directions.
“Why are you going to the Middle East?” McCain asks, dismissively.
“It’s a place we’re probably going to have some problems,” Dramesi says.
“Why? Where are you going to, John?”
“Oh, I’m going to Rio.”
“What the hell are you going to Rio for?”
McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.
“I got a better chance of getting laid.”Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. “McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man,” Dramesi says today. “But he’s still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in.”
Further discreditable connections involving Vicky Iseman, from the Huffington Post.
The U.S. Veteran Dispatch is a somewhat obsessive site, and I certainly don’t agree with everything on it, but they have interesting information. (1.) McCain’s divorce. Came home from Vietnam, ditched the crippled wife, and married a beer heiress seventeen years his junior. (2.) Not that that kept him from jumping anything that moves. (3.) Did you ever think we’d see a major national politician whose military record would make George W. Bush’s look like a string of peccadillos? Try John McCain: Unfit to Serve as Commander-in-Chief.
Meanwhile, we have Governor Palin proclaiming that Barack Obama is a good buddy to terrorists. When the AP Truth Squad reported today that Ms. Palin’s attacks on Obama were bogus, she replied that the AP is wrong. Essentially, she’s given up all pretense to being a serious politician, and is letting herself be used as a cheap right-wing attack bimbo in the style of Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. It’s an ill-advised long-term move for her. Politicians have established careers and regular salaries, even after they get boring. Attack bimbos are only as good as their most recent numbers.
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 06:54 PM * 26 comments
What delicious New England treat shall we discuss today? The famous Brown Bag Apple Pie!
You know about tin foil dinners, and dinners cooked in parchment pouches, and suchlike good things—more a steaming process than anything else.
You can do the same with apple pie. The trick is to slide the pie into a large brown-paper bag (your basic grocery-store bag), fold over the end until it’s tight (paper clips and staples are allowed), then bake it on a cookie sheet at 350-400 degrees F for a about an hour.
Herewith, a recipe:
Brown Bag Apple Pie
Take a metal pie plate (if you’re using disposable aluminum pie plates, use two). Put in a layer of your favorite pie crust. Slice up Apples Sufficient to Fill the Pie Plate. (Depending on size of apple, six to eight will probably do the trick.) Mix the apples with 1/4 cup of brown sugar, 1/4 cup of granulated sugar, a half teaspoon of nutmeg, a quarter teaspoon of ground cloves, and a teaspoon of cinnamon. If you used red apples add a couple of teaspoons of lemon juice. Mix the sugar and spices and apples and put them into the pie shell.
Make a topping from 1/2 cup of brown sugar, 1/2 cup flour, and 1/4 cup butter. Blend with a pastry cutter until it’s coarse-meal textured. Put on top of the pie.
Slide the pie into a large paper bag. Fold over the end. Put the pie onto a cookie sheet, and put it in the oven, 350 degrees for 60 minutes. Or put it over a charcoal grill for the same time.
Remove from heat, cool until warm (rather than Scalding Hot) and serve with ice cream and/or cheddar cheese.
[UPDATE]
Brown Bag Apple Pie from Cooks.com: Filling is just apples, 2 Tbsp of flour, and a half-teaspoon of cinnamon. Crumb top.
Brown-Bag Apple Pie from Leite’s Culinaria. Filling is apples, flour, spices, and lemon juice. Includes an unusual and dramatic way to present the pie.
Apple Pie Baked in a Bag from the Food Network: Uses a top crust rather than a crumb topping. Includes instructions on browning the top.
Jake’s Grandmother’s Brown Bag Apple Pie from the Christmas Place Blog: Uses apples with skins and all. Apple slices are tossed with sugar-and-spice mix.
Brown Bag Apple Pie from applepierecipe.net: Filling includes a quarter-cup of Half-and-Half.
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 10:22 AM * 55 comments
It’s October, and that means it’s time to get your annual flu shot.
Getting that flu shot helps protect you two ways: First, by making it less likely that you’ll personally get the flu. Second, by creating a firebreak between someone who does have influenza and someone who hasn’t gotten the immunization for some reason.
Remember to always wash your hands (the simplest and easiest of the public-health measures you can take).
Now’s the time to inventory and restock (as necessary) your Flu Pre-Pack.
Get lots of rest, drink plenty of fluids, and if you’re feeling sick, don’t go out. Stay safe, happy, and healthy.
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 07:53 PM * 27 comments
The autumn leaves are peaking this weekend through next weekend in New Hampshire.
I’ve mentioned visiting to see the leaves before. A year ago, in “Let’s Go” I gave some routes that Leaf Peepers might like to try. (See the comment thread also for more Local Color.)
Here’s another trip: Your best route to I-93, then whip up to the end of the road in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. When you get there, visit the Fairbanks Museum. Miss Teresa visited there, the trip where she saw a moose. The Lovely and Talented Miss Teresa was amazed by the patriotic pictures made from beetle shells. (They also have fossils, a stuffed moose, Jeff Davis’s checkerboard, and many other wonders.) The Eye on the Sky weather reports on Vermont Public Radio are broadcast from the Fairbanks Museum. The museum is open all year Tues - Sat 9 AM - 5 PM and Sunday 1 - 5 PM. Closed Mondays.
As long as you’re in St. J, drop by Maple Grove Farms to get a factory tour and visit the shop (maple sugar candy seconds, very good, very cheap, and samples of all kinds of grades of maple syrup). No matter what kind of painting of Happy Rural Life in Vermont you see on their catalogs’ covers, the actual Maple Grove Farms is a concrete building on a railway siding. It’s a farmers’ cooperative and this is their central location.
When it isn’t maple season they make a wide variety of other foodstuffs in their factory. They’re located on US Rt. 2, on your right as you head east out of town.
Speaking of places to go, for dinner there’s Angelica’s Restaurant in Bethlehem, New Hampshire. Bethlehem (for no obvious reason) bills itself as the Poetry Capital of New Hampshire. But this has nothing to do with Angelica’s. It’s located in the middle of town, across from the stone horse-watering trough, (2085 Main St Bethlehem, NH 03574 (603) 869-5420) The owner is a gent of Portuguese extraction whose family is in the fish business in New Bedford, MA. He gets fresh fish at family prices by whipping down I-93. Which is why he specializes in fish and other seafood (scallops! yum!).
Other places to eat on your trip: Diners in New England.
If the weather is cloudy (or even rainy) that just makes the autumn colors a bit more glowing. Do pack a sweater.
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 10:04 PM * 35 comments
A tee-shirt that lights up when you get close to a wireless hot-spot.
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 07:08 AM * 143 comments
There exists a Twitter election feed. It scans the Twitter stream for candidate names and echoes them in a single list, to which users can also deliberately post tweets.
Usually it’s full of talking points, scrolling slowly by. I note that the McCain ones tend to worse grammar and spelling than the Obama ones, and more often posted from users who haven’t even bothered to attach a picture to their profiles*.
The feed also includes a section at the top for “Hot election topics”, with the phrases that are appearing most often in the stream at the moment.
The current ones are “Latest Palin, Kathleen Parker, Tina Fey, National Review, Oh Dear God, Couric, Republican, SNL, Bush, House”
I think somebody’s in trouble.
This entry is not affiliated with any previous entries of a similar name, and any likeness is entirely coincidental.
* Update: for clarity, what I mean by this is that the people in question had created Twitter accounts with normal-sounding names, but with none of the peripheral details that make the accounts plausible as ordinary ones; the lack of userpics was only one aspect of that. I should also have mentioned that the accounts I was looking at had no apolitical tweets, nor any history before the election. The overall impression of these accounts was that they were astroturf, and very poorly constructed astroturf at that.
I apologize to anyone who felt that my use of this phrase was indicative of my attitude to people who choose not to use userpics.
Posted by Avram Grumer at 03:21 AM * 66 comments
Jim Henley blogged a few days back about how the world’s navies (led by ours) have been falling down on the job of keeping the international sea lanes safe from piracy. Vice Admiral Bill Gortney wants to shift the burden to the shipping industry. I hadn’t realized just how much piracy was going on around Somalia:
The Malaysian ship MT Bunga Melati 5 has been released by its Somali pirate captors after the payment of a US$2 million ransom. Another Malaysian ship is still being held.
The luxury yacht Carre d’As, and the retired French couple who own it, were seized by pirates earlier this month, and freed in a surprise raid by French commandos. A larger yacht had been captured earlier this year, and after the ransom was paid and hostages released, the same commandos captured the pirates.
Somali pirates have captured a Ukrainian cargo ship, the Faina, loaded with Russian tanks en route to Kenya, and demand US$20 million ransom. Apparently US dollars are still worth something in certain circles.
The most interesting pirate story, via BoingBoing: Yet another group of Somali pirates has captured an Iranian ship, the MV Iran Deyanat, supposedly carrying “minerals” and “industrial products”. Some of the pirates are coming down with strange symptoms — burns and hair loss — within days of taking the ship. Some have died.
Almost as strange is the group of pirates claiming to be acting in the name of environmentalism.
This BBC story from January 2006 says there had been 35 incidents of piracy off Somalia’s coast in the previous nine months. This story from the Atlantic Council of the US says there have been at least 60 attacks in the area so far this year, at distances from the coast of up to 250 nautical miles.
The Pittsburgh Pirates, on the other hand, have been having a lousy year.
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 07:11 PM * 276 comments
We are torn between anxiety and hope, wondering what that is precious today will have value tomorrow. It’s a bad time. But I am reminded of something Rilke once said: no poet would really mind going to jail, since he would at last be in a position to plunder the treasure-house of his memories unhindered. In that spirit, I think it’s time for a parlor game with a difference. Let’s plunder our memories together, and string together our favorite anecdotes like pearls.
The rules:
- Each person tells a true story from their own experience. (Obviously, we can’t tell if you’ve made things up. That is between you and your conscience.)
- Keep it brief; we’re looking for vignettes and koans, not epics
- Each story has to be linked to a previous anecdote by some shared concept, some common theme or element.
- Cite the element you’ve used as a link. Try to go for solid links: physical objects, specific words (punning encouraged).
- This is a multi-stranded string of pearls, like one of Elise’s necklaces. A single story can spawn more than one successor, and an anecdote can combine more than one antecedent.
- Poetry is, of course, encouraged
- Do I need to mention that this is a non-political thread? If your story is political, try not to make it partisan.
I get to start.
While walking in the woods one day, in the hills behind his monastery, my friend and I came upon a single volume of an encyclopedia lying neatly closed on the ground. I opened the front cover and found a map of the United States. As always when I look at maps, I sought and found the tiny spot in Northern California where two rivers join and a small cabin stands among the Douglas firs. I placed my finger on it. “If I could be anywhere in the whole world right now,” I said, “I would be there.”
He took the book from my hands and peered at the map. “If I could be anywhere,” he replied, “I would be right here.” And he placed his finger on the spot where the woods grew thick behind his monastery, on just the sort of hillside where a person might leave a neatly closed encyclopedia.
Tell me a story about monasteries, hiking, encyclopedias, maps, or cabins, or any other matter touched on above.
Posted by Avram Grumer at 10:41 PM * 139 comments
Didn’t get home till 9:30 or so.
9:52 PM: Lurking behind every presidential-level discussion of military matters is the unspoken worry about maintaining the self-esteem of our troops. It’s as if the world’s most powerful fighting force were a bunch of sulky grade-schoolers.
9:56 PM: Also, of course, the ridiculous notion that we should be willing to invade any country in the world that fails to take its hat off when we walk into the room.
9:57 PM: McCain really likes to start sentences with “I think Senator Obama fails to understand…”.
10:00 PM: Now they’re talking about their bracelets. Perhaps the debates should include a fashion accessorizing competition?
10:04 PM: John Sidney McCain III, you motherfucker! How dare you invoke the holocaust to justify your goddamn war-loving scare-mongering!
10:06 PM: Obama’s at least got the sense to realize that the Iraq War strengthened Iran. He’s still buying into the nuclear scare-talk.
10:08 PM: When did talking to foreign leaders become such a political football?
10:10 PM: Hey, Obama mentions that Ahmadinejad isn’t actually the leader of Iran!
10:13 PM: Apparently the US president can’t sit at the same table with the president of Iran because the Iranian said something mean about our friend Israel. This really is just high school writ large, isn’t it?
10:19 PM: Russian “aggression” against Georgia. Neither one of them mentions that South Ossetia is nominally independent.
10:24 PM: Nuclear? Obama says we’re going to need to use nuclear energy. That could get interesting.
10:29 PM: Obama says that a suitcase nuke is a more likely threat than a nuclear missile, then turns around and says he supports missile defense.
10:32 PM: Both of them acknowledge that we’re spending too much money. Both of them want to solve our problems by spending more money.
OK, over. My off-the-cuff impression is that McCain probably came off better than Obama, at least from what I saw. I think he did a better job of pushing Obama onto the defensive. I don’t know if this’ll help him in the polls, since he’s already polling as more capable in foreign policy.
Posted by Patrick at 03:38 PM * 64 comments
Charles Stross notes that many of us are alive right now only because, 25 years ago today, Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces lieutenant colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov exercised judgment under pressure. For which he subsequently lost his job and suffered a nervous breakdown.
His story has been covered before, but you know, I think “saving the world from thermonuclear annihilation, with seconds to spare” merits more than one attaboy.
Posted by Avram Grumer at 02:46 PM * 231 comments
Via Nick Mamatas, I see that Forbes has given us a bit of background about that big bad check the government is trying to get us to cash:
“The secretary and the administration need to know that what they have sent to us is not acceptable,” says Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn. The committee’s top Republican, Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, says he’s concerned about its cost and whether it will even work.
In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.
“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
I guess we should be relieved that they didn’t consult any mathematicians or physicists for advice about really large numbers.
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 12:43 PM * 436 comments
Psalm 114, King James version:
1 When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language;
2 Judah was his sanctuary, and Israel his dominion.
3 The sea saw it, and fled: Jordan was driven back.
4 The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs.
5 What ailed thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest? thou Jordan, that thou wast driven back?
6 Ye mountains, that ye skipped like rams; and ye little hills, like lambs?
7 Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob;
8 Which turned the rock into a standing water, the flint into a fountain of waters.
I would just like to remind all readers of this blog that if the skipping of mountains like rams and hills like lambs is followed by a sudden retreat of the sea, it’s time to find some higher ground.
I am not a exegetist. I can neither interpret nor analyze. This post is presented for entertainment purposes only. Nothing here is meant to be advice for your particular translation or denomination.
Posted by Patrick at 12:09 PM * 72 comments
“He’s the Sir Robin of the 2008 Presidential election.”
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 08:10 PM * 113 comments
No need to rig voting machines. The best way to rig an election is to keep voters away from the polls in the first place.
Democrats: GOP clerk discouraging Colorado students from votingWASHINGTON — Colorado Democrats accused a Republican county clerk Wednesday of falsely informing Colorado College that students from outside the state could not register to vote if their parents claimed them as a dependent on their tax returns.
At a news conference in Colorado Springs, Democrats also charged that county clerk Robert Balink took several steps to dampen voter registrations among college students, who are likely to favor Democrat Barack Obama. Balink was a delegate to the Republican National Convention.
“When election officials spread false information about who is eligible to vote and remove, not add, polling places, we need to be concerned that eligible voters will be denied their right to vote,” said Pat Waak, chairwoman of the Colorado Democratic Party.
Balink’s actions marked the second time in recent weeks that local election officials have sought to discourage college students from voting. Democrats recently have made a series of accusations that Republicans are attempting to suppress the Democratic voter turnout in the November presidential election.
The New York Times reported on Sept. 8 that a local registrar at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Va., issued two releases that incorrectly suggested dire consequences for students who registered to vote, including the possibility they no longer could be claimed as dependents on their parents’ tax returns.
Martha Tierney, an attorney for the Colorado Democratic Party, said she obtained emails showing that Balink’s office sent to the Colorado College president’s office a flier to provide students with voter-registration information.
The flier stated: “What this means is that if your parents still claim you on their income tax returns, and they file that return in a state other than Colorado, you are not eligible to register to vote or vote in Colorado.”
Balink didn’t immediately return a call for comment.
Last week, Democrats filed a lawsuit in Michigan, seeking a court order barring Republicans from using lists of people facing mortgage foreclosure proceedings as a basis for challenging their voting eligibility. Michigan Republicans denied using foreclosure lists to cast doubt about voters’ qualifications.
And in Ohio, a pivotal state that was mired in allegations of voting irregularities in the 2004 presidential election, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has taken several steps to safeguard residents’ voting rights. On Wednesday, Brunner advised county election boards across the state that the listing of a voter’s name on a foreclosure list is insufficient, on its own, to sustain a challenge to his or her residency status.
“Ohioans faced with the pain and turmoil of a home foreclosure should not be targeted by the forces of disenfranchisement on Election Day,” Brunner said.
Brunner also recently took action to prevent a tactic known as “vote caging,” in which returned mail sent to a voter’s home is used to challenge the voter’s eligibility. Brunner advised counties that the return of a non-forwardable notice is not enough to sustain a challenge on its own, and she has ordered that all challenged voters have rights to hearings before the election.
Posted by Patrick at 12:26 PM * 63 comments
On Martha’s Vineyard to teach the twelfth Viable Paradise, Teresa and I are shocked to hear of the sudden death of longtime SF and fantasy editor Brian Thomsen. We were young in the industry with him—he was the junior SF editor at Warner Books in 1984 when Teresa worked a long-term temp job in their promo department. He gave us both a lot of freelance work, most notably the job of writing a “readers’ guide” to Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings. Later he ran the fantasy line at TSR, and more recently was one of Tor’s many consulting editors. He was a genuinely good egg, an enthusiast for his authors, and startlingly creative in the collegial give-and-take of figuring out how to sell particular books—I treasure his description of one of my projects, Jo Walton’s Farthing and its sequels, as “dark cozies.” He was also a passionate political liberal; for the last several years, whenever he visited Tor, we would converse hilariously about the latest outrages of the right.
He evidently died today of a sudden heart attack. Good God.
Posted by Abi Sutherland at 04:16 AM * 346 comments
If you all recall, back in May we identified a glaring gap in the holiday market. There are a plenitude of days for celebrating your parents and getting together with your family. There aren’t a lot of days when you can admit that your parents actually drove you completely bats, or that you’d rather learn autotrepanning with a Black and Decker than sit down with the people who made your first 18 years a misery. And some people need that, because that’s the truth of their lives, and pretending otherwise is poison to the soul.
Today is the autumnal equinox. Things are in balance, but shifting toward the darkness. What better day to use for this purpose? (For Southern Hemisphere readers, today is yet another day when your experience is overridden by the thoughtless majority, which is an equally valid reason.)
Obviously, there is the objection that Hallmark is inventing enough holidays without our assistance. But I think we need a day like this, when it’s OK to admit that the bonds of blood can be bloody awful, without anyone telling us to give things just one more chance.
No discussion of this would be complete without a reference to Mary Dell’s excellent Harkonnen card for the occasion (warning: Dune series spoilers), plus this nifty letter generator I found while Googling around the topic.
Now, I’m not really qualified to discuss this matter, because, well, I kinda like my family My mother, in particular, broke the patterns of a difficult upbringing to give me nothing much to talk about on days like this. So let me yield the floor to those whose day this really is. What are you doing today, to either live with your past or transcend it?
Posted by Teresa at 08:27 AM * 248 comments
Patrick, Jim, and Fragano say I’m doing it wrong, and that the long comment I posted in the thread following Jim Macdonald’s entry Obeying the Law Is for Wimps should have been a separate front-page post.
I can go along with that, though I’ll keep my original format. The first part of my essay, about John McCain’s melanoma, began as a response to Kelly McCullough (#24). The second half, about Sarah Palin’s personality disorder, was a response to Paula Helm Murray (#2). Jim Macdonald’s entry, the background to all this, is about a story on the McClatchy News website—Palin fires back in ‘troopergate,’ calls official insubordinate—and the descriptive chronology of Troopergate posted in the story’s comment thread by a reader who goes by “DobermanTracker.”
Just read. It’ll all come clear.
Kelly McCullough (#24): “I’ve got a third option. McCain and his vetting team are so incompetent he didn’t know (or understand) she was under serious investigation.Kelly, I’ll take “Arrogance and Bad Vetting” for $600. Their vetting process seems to have only taken a few days, and to have been conducted from Washington and on Google. The centerpiece of it was a long questionnaire they went over with Palin in person.
I take their belief that Palin would self-report any problems as evidence that they didn’t know the woman. The same goes for expecting her to know what happened to Thomas Eagleton when he failed to report a lurking problem.
There are multiple reports from people in Alaska (big state, small community), and particularly people in the Alaskan government, who said they’d never been asked anything, and that they didn’t know anyone else who’d been asked either. In addition, one of the employees at the Wasilla newspaper (which is only partly available online) let drop that prior to Palin being named the Republican candidate for Vice President, no one had looked at the newspaper’s hardcopy archives in months
If you want to set yourself up for unpleasant surprises, that’s one way to do it.
For a different and grimmer take on McCain’s reasons for selecting Palin, check out Maggie Jochild’s John McCain: Dead Man Walking? at Group News Blog. She makes a good case for McCain having terminal cancer, an Après moi, le déluge attitude, and a deal with the Council for National Policy: the fundies give him their support, and he in turn accepts their hand-picked choice of his successor. A couple of quotes:
Last week, when I got the letter from Robert Greenwald talking about John McCain’s refusal to release his medical records to fair scrutiny, the fact that there are 1,000 pages of them (I create medical records for a living, 1,000 pages is EXTREME), and the news that he has had malignant melanoma, deep primaries with removal of lymph nodes, my immediate thought was “Then he’s dying.” If he were to be elected, he’d have an almost 2 out of 3 chance of having a recurrence if he doesn’t have one already. This is not the kind of cancer you count on escaping from. This is not Stage II, as it has been reported: Stage II by definition does not have lymph node involvement. By definition, it must be either Stage III or Stage IV.At the beginning of this next section, Jochild is quoting an article by Kathy Geier:
I posted a comment in their thread (as is only polite):“For years, releasing a candidate’s complete medical records has been standard practice for major party presidential candidates. The way the McCain has dealt with the medical records issue is highly unusual, to say the least. …[I]f the medical records really were unproblematic, they wouldn’t hesitate to release the whole enchilada to any reporter who asked, with no conditions and no strings attached.”If he is in fact a Dead Man Walking, then the choice of Sarah Palin as Vice President also becomes more than a Hail Mary pass intended to destroy any bounce from the wildly successful Democratic Convention. It becomes reckless in the extreme: Choosing an heir apparent who lies, engages in petty revenge, wants to know how to ban books, faithfully attends a church which believes dinosaurs were around 4000 years ago and Jews are punished by God for not believing in Jesus, has less foreign policy experience than a Delta flight attendant, doesn’t know what the Bush Doctrine is, and has less than two years experience governing a state with a population less than that of Wichita, Kansas or Raleigh, North Carolina.We know that the secret cabal, the Council for National Policy, who hopes to replace American democracy with religious rule (THEIR religion, not yours), are the people who investigated Sarah Palin and “chose” her for McCain as his VP. Since he accepted their decision, fundamentalist organizations have thrown themselves behind his campaign in a way they had not before. It raises the question of a deal: What would a dying man have to offer power brokers in order to have their backing for the U.S. Presidency?
…[I]f McCain were as chock-full of pride, integrity, and truth as he pretends to be, he would never have spoken to Bush again after the South Carolina primaries in 2000. What Bush did there was utterly dishonorable. Instead, McCain sulked for a while, then did a 180 and became the good little toe-the-line Bush supporter he never was before the 2000 race. It’s an easy guess that Bush promised to back him for the 2008 race. At this very moment, McCain’s organization is full of Bush’s old people.There’s always that temptation to refer to them as Bushpeople, but it would be unfair to the real ones.
(If I were really speculating, I’d say the reason the Republicans have had Joe Lieberman on a string all these years was because he was promised the Vice-Presidency under McCain.)I won’t claim I conveyed any great insights, beyond “McCain has turned into something you’d fish out of Dubya’s private office wastebasket.”Eight years of going down on his knees for Bush, Cheney, and their cronies must have irked the hell out of McCain. Whatever the truth of the matter, he’d put a lot of work into cultivating the appearance of integrity. Bush spent his reputation as recklessly as he spent Tony Blair’s, Colin Powell’s, and all the others. I can imagine McCain laboring to suppress his gag reflex while silently repeating his mantra to himself: “Shut up, go along with it, and you’ll get to be president.”
Then, after all those years of lip service, he discovered he wasn’t going to live long enough to collect his payoff. Such irony! Did he accept the news with resignation? Of course not. Are you kidding? McCain’s a senator, he’s the son and grandson of admirals, and he’s married to Arizona’s answer to Meadow Soprano. He never takes a fall if he can make someone else take it for him. (In this case, I think it was Joe Lieberman.)
So there it is: McCain thinks he’s got the presidency coming to him, and he’s damned well going to see that he gets it—no matter how much ruination it brings on the country he claims to love.
Paula Helm Murray (2): “Sounds like if they get elected, it will just be the same old same old. She sounds either dumber or more blindly self-centered than the Shrub. Or maybe both.My instant reaction to the Troopergate chronology was that we’re looking at a clinical personality disorder, located somewhere in the immediate vicinity of narcissism. If I’m right, Palin is basically out of control, and unlikely to improve.
Have you ever dealt with a full-blown narcissist? “Self-centered” is too mild a description. They’ve got a weirdly information-deprived worldview; they can’t process criticism, failure, or noncompliance; and they have a constant need for external validation of their grandiose self-images. It can lead them to do amazingly stupid things.
What I immediately noticed was that Palin hasn’t bothered to keep track of the stories she tells. It’s not that she can’t; she’s not that stupid. Rather, it hasn’t occurred to her to do so. She isn’t thinking about other people’s reactions. That isn’t bad judgement, or an absence of judgement. It’s a pathological lack of interest in the subject.
Here are my comments on the Troopergate chronology that “DobermanTracker” posted at McClatchy:
* First she would not tell us (Anchorage, Alaska) why she fired MoneganHe was in a high-profile position; he’d already had a middlin’-distinguished career; Palin appointed him in the first place; when she fired him, she offered him another state job; and there just doesn’t seem to be much evidence of general dissatisfaction with his work, or of preexisting disagreements between Palin and Monegan that didn’t involve Wooten. It was bizarre of Palin to not realize she’d be expected to explain that, or that there might be repercussions. I’d expect a candidate for county dogcatcher to know better than that.
* Then, finally, she said she wanted to take the department in a new direction.“Taking the department in a new direction” is not the same thing as “firing for cause.” It’s one of four unrelated issues Palin has cited as her reason for firing Monagan. She dropped the second one—that he was not adequately filling state trooper vacancies—after Monegan pointed out that the police academy was about to graduate its largest class ever. The third, that he wasn’t doing enough to fight alcohol abuse problems, is problematical in light of the fact that the state job she offered him at the time of his firing was Executive Director of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. The fourth, that he “did not turn out to be a team player on budgeting issues,” could mean anything. (Subsequent, equally meaningless accusations—viz., “egregious insubordination,” “obstructionist conduct”—are irrelevant to this discussion, since they were cooked up by the legal attack dogs the McCain organization sicced on the case.)
* Took forever (week at least) to get her to state what that direction was.
Oh, and Palin also said, early and often, that it had nothing to do with repeatedly pressuring him to fire her ex-brother-in-law, which she never did, and didn’t know about either.
Now, the thing about (1.) taking the department in a new direction, (2.) attracting more recruits, (3.) focusing more on alcohol abuse, and (4.) being a team player on budget issues, is that whether or not Monegan mishandled them (evidence: still not in evidence), they shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise to him when he first heard about them; i.e., after he was fired.
Those are all policy and structure issues. Any one of them would have required Palin to do a fair amount of talking and memo-exchanging with Monagan before she could even tell they were a problem, much less a problem on whose solution she and Monegan were irreconcilably opposed.
When you’ve got a guy who by all-but-one accounts was doing a good job, only you want him to take things in a different direction, the first thing you do is talk to him about taking it in a different direction. Firing him comes a lot later, after flurries of memos plus maybe a few F2F tiffs, tizzies, and scenes. By the time it finally happens, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.
Next point: what are the odds of anyone having four different large-scale administrative problems so serious that every one of them warrants firing him on zero notice, yet none of the problems are interrelated? It’s improbable, is what it is. Also, what are the odds that someone could be screwing up his job like that without pissing off an underling so badly that they’d be willing to talk about it to a friendly and understanding reporter? Should be news stories. Aren’t.
And one more bit about that “taking it in a new direction” thing. Palin replaced Monegan with Chuck Kopp, former police chief and acting city manager of Kenai. Whoops! Turns out Kopp had been suspended, investigated, and given a letter of reprimand by the City of Kenai for sexually harassing an underling. Kopp departed, clutching his $10,000 severance package. (Monegan got no severance.) Palin then appointed Joseph Masters, a former security director for a private petrochemical firm. Asked in an interview whether Gov. Palin had discussed her vision of the department with him before hiring him, Masters said “Gov. Palin didn’t give me any guidance or direction or mandates for the department.” It appears that Palin’s “new direction” is as unfindable as evidence of Monegan’s misdeeds.
Oh, who are we kidding? She didn’t fire him for cause. She ran out of patience one day with his continuing refusal to proceed illegally against her ex-brother-in-law, fired him, and only afterward realized that people would notice and have opinions about it. Even then, she didn’t realize that giving four or five different excuses would present a problem.
Every time I try to imagine Sarah Palin at work, what comes out of her mouth is Glory’s dialogue from Season Five of Buffy.
* Finally she said Monegan was not doing a good job of working on bootlegging in the villages and in recruiting new troopers—she forgot that 3 weeks prior to this announcement she had stated on TV news that he was doing a great job in both of these departments.“I did it in self-defense—and besides, I didn’t push him, he jumped. Furthermore, I can prove I was in another city when it happened.”
* She even stated she had offered him a job on the Alcohol Board (while firing him as commissioner) simply because he was doing such a good job in this area.
* Then, couple of days ago, she stated, he was not fired at all, that he quit.
If you stack up too many stories, you eventually reach a point where they all fall over.
* Now, she is stating he was fired and it was because of “egregious insubordination.”That’s one of the accusations cooked up by McCain’s people. If you don’t buttress it with details, all it means is “He didn’t do something I wanted.”
* She is asking the Personnel Board - 3 people appointed by Palin - to dismiss the ethics complaint which she filed against herself in order to get it before the Personnel Board - because some out-of-context e-mails sent to Monegan prior to his having been (fired/quit) “exonerate the Governor totally and completely, once and for all.”The story gets complicated. I highly recommend the Wikipedia entry, Alaska Public Safety Commissioner dismissal: a first-rate piece of work that’s like a vision of what Wikipedia could be in a better world than this.
(Digression: an interesting subplot: If you read the whole entry, pay attention to how many of the charges and complaints made against Mike Wooten, the ex-brother-in-law, turned out to not amount to much; how few of them are based on testimony from people who aren’t close to Sarah Palin; and how much time passes between Wooten’s supposedly scary and threatening words and deeds, and the dates on which Sarah Palin and her sister Molly get around to mentioning them to anyone else. I’m not saying Mike Wooten is a suffering saint; I’m saying the case against him shrinks considerably when you examine it. Three under-reported facts: (1.) Part of the basis for Mike Wooten being made an Alaska State Trooper in 2000 was the fulsome character reference provided him by Sarah Palin. (2.) The Domestic Violence Protection Order (DVPO) granted Molly McCann (Palin’s sister) at the time she filed for divorce was later quashed because McCann’s counsel was unable to produce any evidence of acts of physical or implied violence. In fact, McCann told police at the time of filing that Wooten had never physically abused her. Sarah Palin has since lied about the episode, saying the DVPO was lifted after Wooten’s supervisors intervened. Both Palin and the McCain campaign have subsequently cited the DVPO as evidence that Wooten was violent towards Molly McCann. (3.) At the McCann/Wooten divorce trial,
a representative for the Alaska State Trooper’s union testified that the union viewed the dozen complaints filed by McCann and her family against Wooten as “not job-related” and “harassment”. Judge Suddock repeatedly warned McCann and her family to stop “disparaging” Wooten’s reputation or risk the judge granting Wooten custody of the children. At a court hearing in October 2005, Judge Suddock said “disparaging will not be tolerated - it is a form of child abuse … relatives cannot disparage either. If occurs [sic] the parent needs to set boundaries for their relatives.”)(Another interesting subplot: Keep an eye on Todd Palin. The guy isn’t a state employee, but he accesses confidential files, sits in on personnel meetings, and generally works Sarah Palin’s will. Just yesterday he announced that he was also going to ignore his subpoena. If you think Executive Privilege is a shaky theory, try Executive Privilege by Marriage.)
Back to the main thread: The only reason Troopergate isn’t a bigger mess is that McCain sent a legal team to Alaska in order to obstruct justice. Once they were up and running, Palin’s words and deeds got a lot less random, ditto candid. Still, the uncontaminated pre-legal-team sample of her behavior is enough to establish that her emotional reactions are way off normal.
I’m going to bring up a touchy subject: the early reports suggesting that Trigg Palin is the son of Bristol rather than Sarah Palin. That was a nasty episode. Whose fault is that? Sarah Palin’s, first to last. She didn’t give birth to Trigg all alone in a cave. There have to have been multiple witnesses to the labor and birth. None of them could step forward without violating patient privacy. All Sarah Palin had to do was give a couple of them permission to say they’d been there, and that she was the mother.
But she didn’t do that. Why not? IMO, because it made her look like an injured party (she obviously enjoyed that, and got loads of mileage out of it), and drew attention away from the rest of her problems. The other consequence of leaving the story in play was that seventeen-year-old Bristol Palin got dragged through a cubic mile of mud, then paraded in front of the RNC on primetime television as a Moral Example. It’s fatuous to claim it was Bristol’s choice. Even grown men who have the law on their side would think twice before crossing Glorificus Palin; and Bristol is her resourceless minor child.
* She filed this complaint against herself because she felt the legislative committee investigation (10 Republicans and 4Democrates) is politically motivated even though the investigation was started before McCain selected her.Yup! All those people on her immediate staff, plus her husband, independently took it upon themselves to try to pressure the Alaska Public Safety Commissioner into firing Palin’s former brother-in-law from his job as a state trooper. That was amazingly brave of them, considering that one of the accusations McCain’s legal team has cooked up against Monegan is that he failed to get Palin’s explicit permission to petition the feds for additional funds for law enforcement.
* There is another ethics complaint filed against her for “demonizing” Trooper Wooten. A judge —in the child custody case—hard warned Palin’s family that their constant attacks on Wooten were becoming a form of child abuse.
* During all this, Monegan stated he was pressured to fire Wooten while Palin denied ANY pressure from ANYbody was put on him I.E SHE HAD NO KNOWLEDGE OF ANYONE CONTACTING MONEGAN ON THIS ISSUE
As of this August, months and months after Troopergate started, Palin finally got around to saying “Pressure could have been perceived to exist, although I have only now become aware of it.” So, which is it? Liar, or incapable of running her own staff, much less anything bigger?
* Palin repeats her campaign promises of “open and transparent” governing policy—-while Poll by TV station shows 87% no longer think she is open and transparent—so much for the supposed 80% approval rating!A person with a normal sense of potential consequences would be more prudent at every step of the way.
* Palin states, “Hold me responsible.” Regarding the legislative investigation, “Bring it on!”
* Legislature hires independent investigatorI believe this is the investigation the majority-Republican voted unanimously to undertake, long before Palin became McCain’s running mate.
* Palin suddenly has Atty General ( who, it ends up also pressured Monegan) start investigating and immediately finds phone call from her staffer Frank Bailey to Troopers - Bailey claims it was his idea and govenor had no input. He is put on PAID leave and remains that way today.And survives to this day with no worse blemish on his honor than being the recipient of Sarah Palin’s approval.
* Seems approximately 24 contacts were made with Monegan, from Todd Palin, Bailey, Attorney General, other staffers and PALIN HERSELF.Consider the implications. Sarah Palin had already fired Monegan on zero notice, denied him severance, publicly traduced him, and hired substandard replacements to fill his position. He had absolutely no reason to cover for her. On top of that, he’d had many years of administrative experience, and he’d been aware for some time before he was fired that Palin and her staff were pressuring him to take improper action in re Mike Wooten. Of course he’d be keeping a record of these contacts.
I take it as further strong evidence of a grandiose and unrealistic worldview, and an abnormal absence of basic human empathy, that Palin didn’t expect this story would come out.
* Despite having previously denied anyone contacted Monegan ( Todd did so in the Governor’s office !) Palin states these contacts did NOT constitute pressure on Monegan.If they weren’t intended as pressure, why were they made at all? If Palin and her staff are in the habit of taking completely ineffectual actions, she’s too incompetent a manager to hold important positions.
* Palin has done nothing but refuse to cooperate with legislative investigation and now states she will not submit to questioning, i.e. she is “totally and completely exonerated” by Monegan’s supposed “egregious insubordination.”Nope. First, even if she (or rather McCain’s legal team) has come up with decisive evidence in her favor, everyone still has to observe the normal legal procedures. Having the evidence may curtail those procedures, but the system still has to establish (to variable levels of precision) what happened, who did what to whom, and which rules (if any) were violated. (Note: this is a very rough description.) Palin’s evidence can then be examined in that context. She doesn’t get to declare that her evidence is so good that it doesn’t have to be looked at. That’s like saying you’ve been dealt such a killer Bridge hand that you should just be awarded maximum points without playing out the round.
Second, as I’ve already pointed out, “egregious insubordination” is close to meaningless if you don’t establish what that insubordination consisted of, the state of understanding between Palin and Monegan, and whether his actions were in fact egregious. This is not going to be established without going through normal or near-normal procedures, and Palin is going to have to be involved.
If she’s so incapable of taking responsibility for her actions that she can’t even answer for herself at a state-level inquiry, she’s not fit for high office. Leaders take responsibility. It’s part of the basic spec.
* While Palin makes public the selected e-mails to Monegan, she illegally witholds other e-mails (there is legal action to obtain them) which may show her direct and intentional participation in the pressuring of Monegan to fire Wooten.After all these successive instances of the story coming out, she still thinks the next part of the story won’t come out.
You can’t have it both ways. Either the woman is so stupid that Dan Quayle has to phone her long distance to tell her to come in out of the rain, or she’s wired wrong for assessing and predicting the consequences of her actions, and how others will react to them.
One more datum and I’ll quit for now. This is a parallel story, like Troopergate writ small: