America never ceases to amaze me.

Please tell me this is some kind of gem.

But as a head-fake and feign, it looks like it’s reasonably successful.  Sarah Palin made an appearance in Nebraska.  That is not quite as newsworthy as Palin finding her way to her role as a less dignified Spiro Agnew and what amounts to the fourth Hail Mary in Charles Krauthammer’s calculations – even if it is because Sarah Palin loves the “Nation’s Heartland”.   But even with this, it is probably worth trying to recall where Dan Quayle swooped about in 1992.  I think he poked his head in Yakima, actually.

From the Germans

Biggest Financial Scandals in history  (missing is the most famous of them all, Ponzi.)

Waiting for the Apocalypse, as the webbots prophesize on October 7.  Stock pile your Campbells, your tazers, move to the Hills, shoot anything that approaches your property:  We are all Ted Nugent now.

An American Carol.  And a target which hasn’t really be electorally relevant since… ?

Apparently it was aimed at Peter Defazio, but that does not make too much sense — he became something of the erstwhile leader of the Liberal wing of the great fringe-conservative / fringe-liberal / Squishy embattled Center coalition against the Bailout Bill, and was not going to vote for the thing.

The tax break thus becomes something even more worrisome than a usual pork barrel attachment: it greased the wheels to allow passage of the bill, but greased it for nobody.

I heard parts of it on the radio, and saw parts of it on the television.  The effect was that I missed some Palin winks, and saw other Palin winks.  Listening to it, I was sorting through the Tina Fey skit.  Clearly the show could not pull off what it did on Saturday, which was to actually just pluck one exchange from the Katie Couric interview and re-enact it, with no exaggeration, to widespread laughter.  But, seeing the television, I see that Tina Fey is going to wink a bit.  Throw in the home-spun homilies to a “heartland” she does not really belong to and you have the makings of a parody, as opposed to a transcription passed off as a parody.

There is something surreal in the “Expectations Game”.  Going in the consensus had seemed to become that Sarah Palin would, indeed, “Exceed Expectations” — she has a political career behind her and has personal skills, and the rules of the “Debate” play to her strengths in allowing her to never be tied down to having to answer a question.  She can flow throw cue cards, toss in a couple wittisomes against Biden, and, most importantly, wink.  But what does it mean when everyone expects an “exceeding of expectations”, and for her to meet the expected exceeded expectations?

I want to siphon Biden into these comments, but there is nothing much to say.  By way of theater review, he transposed words a little, flubbed awkwardly a number of times, and if anyone were really paying attention to Biden in this “Theater Review” sector they might be a little surprised by some things that don’t really matter all that much but are usually played up in the media anyways.  There was no sizzle there, and that is how he won the debate.  The thing was an anti-climax because Palin’s status in the public mind has already been cemented — the downside of the so-called “Expectations Game” is nobody is going to forget what lead to the low expectations in the first place.  The poll numbers show an absurdly high percentage saying they thought Biden looked “presidential” — upper 80 percentile — and that is all Palin and all Biden resisting the urge to play the attack dog.  Palin was in color; Biden was in black and white — and we just have to be happy with that.  One thing about Biden, which seemed telling, was he kept referring not to people watching at home but to people listening on the radio.  I don’t know if this was wishful thinking so people would not notice his Left eyebrow, or if he was snake-bitten by the whole “FDR On the Television” mistake.

Yesterday the news came out that showed it is now difficult to see how McCain wins this election, or probably a bit more unfadingly Obama is on a clear glide to a victory.  McCain pulled his campaign staff out of Michigan.*  McCain’s collection of states he needs to pull through thus becomes impossibly (or nearly so) narrow.  Take the polls and add up the states where Obama leads by more than five percentage points, and he sits at 269 electoral votes, which is a tie which is a win.  The effect was that I listened and watched thinking more along the lines of the future of Sarah Palin.  My take was that if she fell down to the unexpected expectations nobody thought she would fall to, her national career was over.  If she passed the “Pass / Fail” test, she would be back, in four years, in eight years, who knows?  The difference is how able her constituency can convince themselves, and project outwards, that everything bad they’ve seen was an aberation.  In the respect her introduction on the national scene in 2008 and, subsequent disappearance, is like Q introducing John Luc Picard to the Borg on Star Trek.  A foreboding of the future, the Borg would be back.  I suppose Palin will be better groomed next time, whether in a presidential contest or into the Senate — better able to meld winks with nods with plausible answers on what she reads for information.  Also be a little more attentive and flexible in responding to opponent’s heart-broken story of a wife being killed in a car accident — it is sort of necessary when running as, in part, a “Mom in Chief”.

* On the other hand, McCain opened up an office in the more competitive district of Maine, which splits some electoral votes by district.  Obama countered by doing the same in the other Republican heavy split electoal vote state, opening up an office in Omaha, Nebraska.

I can’t help but try to figure out how I would answer the questions which Palin flubbed in the Katie Couric interview.  (Is this thing being stretched out for maximum ratings or what?)  “What Supreme Court decisions do you oppose?”  “Um… that Imminent Domain decision… no, wait.  That one actually came out right.  Didn’t it?”  My ability to answer the Couric question would depend solely on my state of mind at the moment.   Naturally I expect more from a potential president, and the times and circumstances I’d allow one to go blank on such a question are close to nil, perhaps limited to shouting out the question as s/he is being chased in the Forest by a hungry Bear.

The one exception for this question, one that probably should come to mind with ease even when being chased by a hungry bear:  The Dred Scott Decision.   Perhaps Palin could not answer “Dred Scott” because it is a sort of fifth grade answer — Biden, for instance, provided an answer of a Supreme Court decision which struck down a law he wrote and passed — but it is better than nothing.  Further, it is a decision which politicians coming out from her socially conservative — read “pro-life politician” — milieu are trained to be chime in as a way of referencing “Roe v Wade” — supposedly a historical antecedent of a moral bankrupt culture that can think of some people as less than full peoples.  George W Bush, at one of the 2004 “Debates”, went off on a tangeant against Dred Scott for this purpose.  In that sense, even if it might have seemed a bit odd to some people, it would have been the right answer to some people. But, for whatever reason, she failed this basic Christian Conservative Politician test of being able to equate Dred Scott with Roe v Wade.

The Apocalypse Market.

Judge throws out ballot of Patty who filed a lawsuit because Patty Lovaas believes that Montana Republicans did not intend to select Bob Kelleher as their nominee.  Who, you know, they voted for.

Just as all of Bush’s Defenders tell us that History will Vindicate him as they did Truman, John McCain wants everyone to know that Sarah Palin is the Next Truman

PALIN: I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media —

COURIC: But what ones specifically? I’m curious.

PALIN: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.
…………………………………………………………….

In this Internet Age I am hard pressed to know what newspapers I read.  But the Internet is destroying some things hereabouts – plop a Founding Father person from the eighteenth century and have them watch someone doing this multi-tasking and they would be completely stunned and flummoxed and convinced that their Grand Experiment is Dead.  I almost might be able to get away with an “Um, all of them” answer if asked “What political magazines do you read?”, though clearly not true.  There’s not enough Z Magazine, Green Anarchist, or Black Holicopter Watch Monthly in my media diet.

Sarah Palin failed to answer one magazine she, evidentally, reads — or read at one time, or had put in front of her — and I wonder if she had this in her mind as a land-mine she had to avoid, and thus answer in that stunning manner.  “The New American” — the organ for The John Birch Society.  The magazine article she had in front of her?  Here it is.  This is what animated her imagination.

But The John Birch Society has seemed to simmer under the surface for our electoral politics for this election cycle.  Ron Paul has had a very clingy relationship with the John Birch Society, not surprisingly endorsed by the organization but at one point quipping sarcastically with eyes rolled something like “The John Birch Society.  Oooooh, scary.”  That South Carolina Democratic Senate candidate, railing against the South Carolina Liberal Elites running off the label of a “True Jeffersonian Democrat” — frequently the self-attached label of the old Dixie-crats stumping strongly for Segregation –, is fully endorsed and interviewed by The Birchers, which leads to this schizophrenic sighting:  Buzzflash, where  the Sarah Palin “John Birch Society” article is placed a few spots ahead of an endorsement for Bob Conley.  But that’s a bulletin board, I guess.

In summary, McCain wanted to take credit for pulling together a Deal and blame Obama for its high price tag.

Yesterday:  the 17th biggest percentage drop in its history.  Just a little perspective.

Canadian Sarah Palin piece pisses off some readers.