SARAH PALIN KEEPS ON LYING

From Bob Cesca's Awesome Blog:

"She tweeted today that the Obama administration wants a "soldier pay decrease."

The more elegant word choice would be 'pay reduction,' but whatever. This is a complete lie regardless of her remedial writing skills.
"FACT: The Pentagon proposed a 1.4 percent pay increase, while Congress proposed a 1.9 percent increase.
"No one's decreasing anything. Except for Sarah Palin whose limited intelligence seems to be decreasing by the day."

AND SHE WAS ALMOST VICE PRESIDENT...

From Bob Cesca's Awesome Blog! Go!:

"The level of stupid in the following remark by Sarah Palin on last night's O'Reilly Factor is immeasurable.

'[O]ur Constitution, of course, essentially acknowledging that our unalienable rights don't come from man; they come from God. So this document is set up to protect us from a government that would ever infringe upon our rights to have freedom of religion and to be able to express our faith freely.'

"Steve Benen points out the obvious problem here: the line 'that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights' comes from the Declaration of Independence. Not the Constitution, which contains no mention whatsoever of any variety of 'God' or 'Creator.'

"And while we're here, I should point out that the Declaration didn't just declare that all American men are created equal and 'are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.' The Declaration stated that these human rights were endowed to all people -- regardless of religion, race, nationality or ethnicity. The Palins of this world tend to conveniently forget these details when it comes to topics like immigration and war.

"Back to Palin. So not only was she incapable of accurately describing the role of the vice president -- the job for which she was running -- but she's also incapable to telling the difference between two very different and distinct founding documents. Holy crap -- imagine the smoke billowing from her ears if someone were to ask her about the Articles of Confederation. My guess is her answer would involve Jefferson Davis and secession."

And finally, if any wingnut can show me a document written by either James Madison or any other participant in the Constitutional Convention that indicates the borrowing of Christian dogma for use in the Constitution, I will retract all of this and, I don't know, follow Sarah Palin on Twitter.

THE MOST RIDICULOUS POLITICAL QUOTE OF 2008

From a blog post by Bob Cesca, on the Huffington Post:
"[T]here was one jaw-droppingly ridiculous quote that went almost entirely overlooked, perhaps because it was one of seemingly hundreds of nincompoopish displays of nincompoopery -- all of which were unforgivingly compressed into a dense, rapid-fire three months of political insanity.
"This means only one thing. The quote comes from Governor Sarah Palin.
"As I'm sure you'll recall, Sarah Palin had trouble with things like 'facts' -- specifically and most shamefully, she had no idea what the Vice President of the United States does. I mean, no clue. "Which is fine, I suppose, unless you're actually running to become, you know, the vice president. On several public occasions (I can't even imagine the verbal fumbling during private rehearsals), she was specifically asked to describe the job and I'm reasonably certain she never once got it right. For example: '...a Vice President has a really great job, because no only are they there to support the President agenda, they're like a team member, the team mate to that President. But also, they're in charge of the United States Senate, so if they want to they can really get in there with the Senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom. And it's a great job and I look forward to having that job.'
"Yeah, it sounds like a great job, if she had been running for Senate Majority Leader, that is.
"And during the vice presidential debate -- the vice presidential debate! -- she was asked to describe the role of the vice president, and this was one of her two answers: 'Well, our founding fathers were very wise there in allowing through the Constitution much flexibility there in the office of the vice president. And we will do what is best for the American people in tapping into that position and ushering in an agenda that is supportive and cooperative with the president's agenda in that position. Yeah, so I do agree with him that we have a lot of flexibility in there, and we'll do what we have to do to administer very appropriately the plans that are needed for this nation.'
"What about that agenda and there also? Cooperative with the president's... whah? And yet the post-debate conventional wisdom was that she somehow nailed it. Mark Halperin gave her a "B" and wrote: '...she succeeded enormously. She had a solid 90 minutes of rapid, confident discourse... didn't leave Tina Fey much to work with.'
"Yeah, she couldn't accurately or coherently describe the job for which she was campaigning, but since she didn't choke on her own tongue, well then, great success! And as for Tina Fey? The vice presidential debate sketch was probably the funniest of the year. Good call, Halperin.
"But that wasn't the worst of it. Here now, The Most Ridiculous Political Quote of the Year, courtesy of Sarah Palin on October 4, 2008:
'Q: One of the things you talked about last night was the flexibility the vice president has-- 'PALIN: Yeah.
'Q: --Uh. What did you mean by that?
'PALIN: Uh. That thankfully our founders were wise enough to say we have this position and it's constitutional -- vice president will be able to be not only the position flexible, but it's gonna be those other duties as assigned by the president. A simple thing.'
"That last sort-of sentence -- 'a simple thing' -- was actually correct, believe it or not. The vice president's job description, according to the Constitution, is an extraordinarily simple thing. Which, consequently, makes it unbelievably difficult to butcher. Like Sarah Palin did. Multiple times. But in this instance, on the FOX News Channel with Carl Cameron, she couldn't even form actual sentences using words that line up to form a coherent thought. In fact, I would love to see the sentence structure for 'vice president will be able to be not only the position flexible.' Position flexible?
"That she wasn't summarily laughed off of the national stage right then and there is a testament to the forgiveness of horny middle-aged white Republican men. Yes, in 2008 the Republicans nominated for vice president a person who on multiple occasions couldn't accurately say: The vice president breaks ties in the Senate, and succeeds the president if he or she is killed or incapacitated. Instead we got something about 'position flexible' and a lot of winking.
"And she's already being championed as a favorite for the Senate in 2010 -- not to mention as a serious contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. This naturally means we'll get to hear more from Sarah Palin for many years to come as a de facto leader of the Republican Party. We can only hope that she'll be asked to describe these jobs many, many times along the way.
"Happy New Year Position Flexible There Also!"
BobCesca

WHY DO THE PALINS HATE AMERICA?

From Barry Eisler's Heart of the Matter:
"Imagine the reaction if Michelle Obama had belonged to a political party that advocated secession from America, a party whose founder ranted, 'The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government... And I won't be buried under their damn flag... I'm not an American... I've got no use for America or her damned institutions.'
"And imagine if Barack Obama had attended that party's conventions, even after swearing his oath of office to uphold the Constitution.
"But wait, this has nothing to do with the Obamas -- it's all about the Palins! For seven years, Todd Palin was a member of this party -- the 'Alaska Independence Party' -- and Sarah Palin repeatedly attended its annual conventions, even after she had been sworn in as Alaska's governor. The quotes above are from the party's founder, Joe Vogler.
"So where are Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and Peggy Noonan, the ardent defenders of America from the radicals who hate our freedoms and attack our values? Maybe these patriotic pundits just haven't heard about the Palins and their connection to the Alaska Independence Party? Because if they knew, I'm sure they'd be upset.
"I hope someone will tell them so they can expose the Palins for the America-hating radicals they are -- terrorist appeasers who pal around with people who despise our country and hate our freedoms!
"Please cut and paste or otherwise forward this message to every patriotic, country-first, red-blooded American you know -- I'm sure they'd want to know that the Palins have been palling around with people who hate America so much they want Alaska to be a separate country."

THE PALIN DEBATE FLOW CHART

From the Daily Kos, via Cynical-C:

PALIN: WRONG WOMAN, WRONG MESSAGE

Opinion piece by Gloria Steinam, in the Los Angeles Times:
"Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the "white-male-only" sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.
"But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.
"Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."
"This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can't do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn't say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience.
"Palin has been honest about what she doesn't know. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, 'I still can't answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?' When asked about Iraq, she said, 'I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq.'
"She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she's won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain's campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate's views on 'God, guns and gays' ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.
"So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain."
Click here to read the rest of this Los Angeles Times article.