The Governor of Giant Frightening Beasts

Sorry... I've wanted some excuse to post this picture for days, and I finally decided to just post it cause I want to. Sarah Palin appears here, framed by her giant killer snow crab, star of the Discovery Channel show Ice Road Truckers, and leaning against the bear she accidentally killed earlier that day while hunting moose. Since she knows how to dress moose, she simply applied the same skills, creating this festive bear throw in 12 minutes flat.


Seriously, what is going on in this picture. I am, perhaps, somewhere on the extreme end of people who care about animals given that for the last 7 years I've chosen to only eat fish as a way of not condoning via participation the practices of the meat packing industry in America. Still, while I acknowledge my views may be a little far left... isn't this picture just kinda strange and ominous?

Ok... maybe you're thinking it isn't the only strange and ominous thing about the whole possibility that Sarah Palin could soon be either our VP or our President. Anyway, there it is, the picture I just couldn't help posting.

"I Need To Know if She Really Thinks Dinosaurs Were Here 4,000 Years Ago...

... because she's going to have the nuclear codes." That's only one of the cuttingly direct things Matt Damon says about his alarm at the idea of President Palin (watch below). One of the McCain camp's main lines of attack this summer against Barack Obama has been to paint him as a celebrity. Well, it's funny when actual celebrities have interesting stuff to say about the elections. Thanks to Purple State, for yet again tracking down interesting video the digs a little behind the lines of what is hitting the echo chambers. That is to say that Damon has nothing to say about lipstick.

Further Update! Pigs, Lipstick, "Dogs and Cats Living Together... Mass Hysteria"

Wow oh wow, this stupid lipstick thing has taken on a life of its own. McCain camp dunderheads are all over the cable news stations claiming Obama called Johnny Mac an old fish, and meanwhile somewhere somehow, sanity does occasionally shine through. Media Matters has a nice clip (below) showing one intervention on behalf of sanity.



Meanwhile, McCain is hoping to recruit the cast of Ghostbusters to give the following speech live on Faux News. Unfortunately for them, it turns out Bill Murray has standards.

Update: Day of Pigs, Fish, Chimps Ogres

Wow... cable news and the McCain Palin Campaign have done it again. This time I'm actually a bit flabbergasted. They went and took what I thought was a outlier oddball reaction to a fairly straightforward quote and churned it right up into a full-blown ridiculous web attack advertisement. In the ad, they accuse Barack Obama of calling Sarah Palin a pig. Really? REALLY!?!?!?!

Wow. This is awesome. And so third grade. "He called Sarah a PIG!!!! Make him sit in the corner!" WOW! Wtf.

Anyway, in brighter news, the cable news cycle that picked this spin up and spun it further and further and further did actually begin to result in an interesting thing: they are calling lies "lies," and the folks who tell them "liars." Now, this may sound pretty basic, but so much of Karl Rove's brand of politics relies on the media acting like lapdogs in this regard. They count on (and are too often right to do so) the fact that media will take an "unbiased" view, shying away from reporting when one political party is telling bald-faced lies about another.

All in all, today's development continue to signal to me and to many that the McCain campaign is truly adrift way far away from anything resembling integrity. Here's a bit of interesting writing on that subject from one-time-McCain-admirer Andrew Sullivan.

Possibly the Best Rick Rolling Ever Created

Thanks Purple State for posting this gem, a video of John McCain being Barackrolled at the RNC convention... I don't know what to say except that this is amazing:



Oh... Rick Rolling... how is it that you never get old???

Obama attacks Pigs and Fish, Biden to attack Chimps, Ogres

There's a bizarro-world storyline in the presidential election today, and it makes me kinda giddy because it's so so so ridiculous, you just have to love it. Obama recently rolled out a line about how John McCain wants to claim he's for change, but he advocates for many policies that seem fairly status quo. To drive home his point, Obama said:

"You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still gonna stink. We've had enough of the same old thing."

Now the McCain camp via former Mass Governor Jane Swift has come out in complete outrage over the fact that Obama called Sarah Palin a pig and John McCain a fish. The Obama camp will soon respond to McCain by sending out Joe Biden to call George Bush a chimp and Dick Cheney an Ogre. This is some great stuff. Here's an actual video of the somewhat reasonable context in which Obama made his oh-so-very unreasonable remarks.

"Bring Back the Real McCain"

Having been without an Economist for several weeks, I just finally saw their cover story about McCain. Amazingly, it was written before Sarah Palin was chosen as his running mate, which only makes the argument that McCain has sold out even stronger.

I would have liked to respond to John's post by arguing that McCain hasn't changed, that he's still immune from the far right's influence. I even started a post to that effect. I'm not sure I can. I feel like every day that goes by brings me closer and closer to voting against the man I've so long admired. It's hard to think about.

Perhaps it is not coincidental that McCain is surging in the polls. I have never voted for a winning presidential candidate, which means that Obama should be doing all he can to lose the Me demographic...

More from the South

ChimneyFlowerBees3, originally uploaded by Chambo25.

I've been derelict in my photoblogging of late, as usual, but this is one of my favorites from this summer's North Carolina trip! Today, while it's rainy as all get-out up here in the CT I thought it would be nice to toss a little color up on the ole blog.

I snapped this photo as we were preparing to climb up Chimney Rock. There were a slew of bees flying around in a patch of flowers. The purple you see in the background is cabbage, planted in the same flower bed.

Damn Statistics

Apparently Obama had a nice chat with Bill O'Reilly last week and Keith Olbermann as well... the two loud talkers went head-to-head last night airing their interview action, and among other things O'Reilly was particularly catty on the subject of taxes. He went after Obama, using some squirrely math to try and paint a picture that economic growth has been stellar under the Bush administration and was relatively limp in the Clinton years.

Obama didn't have the math on hand so couldn't respond in kind, but did react by offering a quote that there are, "lies, damn lies and then there there are statistics." What he didn't have in front of him were the analysis of O'Reilly's numbers that would have demonstrated how his stats weren't adjusted for inflation which would have put growth numbers from 2001 until now at around 5% compared with about a 30% growth rate from the start to the end of Bill Clinton's time in office. Oops. Salon's War Room did the math I'm quoting and you can check their work via the post here.

Still, I'm just as interested in some other math Salon did today to fact check Sarah Palin on the trail and on the attack over earmarks. See, the McCain camp still wants to paint Palin as a maverick fighter against the evil that is earmarks in spite of her extensive work with Ted Stevens and other indited hooligans to secure just as much earmark cash as possible for Alaska's pet projects. Palin claimed that Obama has spent his days in Washington greedily chasing pork $$ to the tune of about $1 million for every working day, a piece of math Salon checked over and said, "Ok, looks good." However, they also went on to compare apples to apples and found that if you use Palin's measuring standards on her own pork tally, you find she actually has chased slightly more earmark cash for Alaska on a $ per work day basis. Hmm... nicely done, Salon. I like your calculations.

Check it all out here: Post on O'Reilly and Statistics, Post on Palin and Pork Shadiness. Here we go folks... looks like we can expect a fall full of fun with more crap like this flying! YAY!

From Upside-Down World: The Presidential Ticket That Fights Republicans...

There's a new ad out this week from the McCain campaign, still pushing for John McCain to be seen as Mr. McMaverick, new and improved, now with extra Palin Power! My question and problem is this: do people who care about his once independent streak, and care about change really believe McCain is still the same change agent he once was?

If you knew nothing of context here and simply watched the ad below, what party would you believe these two are part of? Probably not the Republicans, right? Still, if you listened to the speeches at the GOP convention last week there wasn't exactly a lot of policy laid out that sounded all that new or different from the same ideas Bushie & Co. have been rolling around for years. So wazzup?

I'll give them this, it sure is a jazzy little ad, tantalizing like, say, a fancy speech might be to some. But what is it worth, if the Maverick storyline is either entirely in the past or largely trumped-up?



Weigh in, let me know what you think of the Original Mavericks!!!

"Words Mean Something!" - Obama

YES! This has been a rallying cry of mine for quite some time, and I was very extremely wonderfully pleased to read today on HuffPo that Barack Obama used a line I think everyone who gives a crap about the future, truth, and reality should adopt. The article linked in the last sentence reports on Obama taking his first direct attack on Sarah Palin, criticizing her for billing herself as an earmark fighter while she successfully chased over $4,000 a person worth of earmarks (that's over $27 million total) for the small city of Wasilla, AK while she was mayor.

In his remarks on the subject, Obama said:

"She's a skillful politician. But, you know, when you've been taking all these earmarks when it's convenient, and then suddenly you're the champion anti-earmark person, that's not change. Come on! I mean, words mean something, you can't just make stuff up."

Lazy Blogging

You know, I could post and pretend that I've got lots of original thoughts and interesting things to say about John McCain's speech at the GOP Convention, or I could just post the video from the start of yesterday's Daily Show. Brilliant!

Haven't heard about Walter Reed Middle School, Sarah Palin's love of Wasilla Earmarks, the giant gravestone image, or the phallic... er middle finger stage? Check it out.