Palinpalooza: the gift that keeps on giving

--- "So Sambo beat the bitch!" Shocktisayshocked to discover she's Rick Santorum Dick Cheney David Duke in a skirt.

-- Do you think anyone will get to question her about this, or the now fast-tracked abuse of power investigation known as Troopergate, or her ties to the fringe Alaskan secessionist political party before the debates? Even FOX? Doesn't seem likely.

My suggestion for the first question regarding that last: "Nice flag lapel pin, Mrs. Palin, but why does it only have 49 stars on it? And which 'Country First' is it you advocate -- the United States or Alaska?"

The more information that trickles out about this woman, the more horrifying it is to consider her presence a heartbeat away. So in the absence of the McCain campaign's ability to shape her narrative beyond "Miss Mooseburger" -- this will prove to be a critical failure in the post-November 4th analysis, I believe -- the more the rest of us are forced to do so. Howard Fineman:

On the floor and in the hallways of the GOP convention, the sentiment was a combination of aggressive defensiveness about her -- from evangelicals and other cultural conservatives -- to a cautious wait-and-see hopefulness from delegates who found it hard to believe that McCain had chosen Palin with what appeared to be a hurried-up, last-minute vetting process last week.

It was as if the skeptics were saying: OK McCain, we didn't like you that much to begin with, so you had better be right about Sarah Palin. But for the time being, until we hear her speak, we will give you the benefit of the doubt.

Friends of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, speaking not for attribution, were caustic. "She is unqualified for the job and everyone knows it," said one.

Whether or not that is true, it's hard to imagine anyone who would be qualified for the raft of personal and political challenges Palin faces. Over the next months, and all at once, a list of the things she'll need to deal with:

• her continuing duties as governor of Alaska
• a legislature-funded investigation into questions of whether she has abused her office in a vendetta against her former brother-in-law, a probe that prompted her to hire a personal attorney
• the care of her fifth child, Trig, born this spring with Down syndrome -- a condition that requires close parental attention and care, especially in the first year of the child's life
• the pregnancy and pending marriage of her teenage daughter Bristol, who is planning to wed the father before Election Day
• learning the routines and rituals of the national campaign trail, which she will be required to traverse on her own plane, with her own staff
• getting a sense of the Lower 48 states, most of which she has never visited
• figuring out how to deal with McCain, whom she barely knows
• handling whatever national press interviews the McCain campaign allows her to do -- and she will have to do some to prepare herself for later events
• prep for the nationally televised vice-presidential debate with Sen. Joe Biden, a legislator with 36 years of seniority, who is personally acquainted with the rulers of nations Palin may never have even heard of

-- Then again, as long as the Corporate Media keep regurgitating the lies she tells, the better off the Republicans will be. Have to watch and see if the Gestapo tactics being used -- which they began implementing in Minnesota this past week -- bully the talking heads into cowering submission.

NSFW Update: Seriously though, how far from reality could this be? We're living Idiocracy. (H/T to that nasty bastard McBlogger for the "Something Awful".)

"My days are numbered"

Harris County Commissioner Jerry Eversole said Thursday that he expects to be forced from office by an FBI investigation into corruption allegations that appears to be centering on the design of his home by a prominent retired architect.

The Precinct 4 commissioner said FBI agents have interviewed many of his friends, some as recently as this week. He said he expects to be called in for questioning soon and would not be surprised to be indicted, though he insists he is innocent.

"I guarantee they can take that information that they've got and the friends that they've talked to and they can make a case on me," said Eversole, who volunteered the update regarding the investigation when asked about recommended ethics changes at the county. "That's why I say my days are numbered. There's no doubt about it."

As the feds close in on him, let's reminisce:

The Harris County District Attorney's office is investigating Eversole's use of campaign funds to pay for collector-quality firearms and a trip to Florida. George Flynn, the office's spokesman, said he could not comment on the probe beyond confirming it was still under way.

The commissioner's $680,000 house in the Heights was designed by Leroy Hermes, whose former firm has been involved with county projects such as the Reliant Stadium complex and a new jail facility. The Republican commissioner said he had the home built in 2003 so he and his wife, who has cancer, would be closer to the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Eversole also was criticized for labeling hundreds of campaign expenses with vague descriptions such as "public relations" and "misc," offering little clue as to what was purchased or who benefited from those purchases. Among his "public relations" expenses was the $6,850 trip to Florida.

After acknowledging long-running problems with his campaign finance reports, the commissioner began explaining his expenses in greater detail this year. He also asked former County Judge Robert Eckels to review his current and past filings to ensure compliance with state disclosure laws.

Eversole's money management problems began early on in his 17-year career as county commissioner. Fourteen years ago, when his questionable expense reports first earned him attention and then legal scrutiny, a Democrat named Jim Lindeman running against him tried to link Republican Eversole to ... Ted Kennedy and former House speaker Tom Foley. That gives you an idea how red Precinct 4 was gerrymandered. First, the Chronic with the executive summary, from the previous link:

Eversole was indicted in 1993 on charges of perjury and unlawful record-keeping related to nearly $90,000 in campaign expenses.

And all the way from October of '94 and the Houston Press, with the details:

(D)espite a counseling session early in his term from the district attorney's office on Election Code rules regarding contributions and gifts, Eversole spent his lavishly endowed campaign account wildly on golf clothes, gifts and even several firearms. He justified the clothing purchases as items to be auctioned off. Asked to explain why the clothes all seemed to be in his own sizes, he allowed that by wearing them he made them more valuable items at the charity events. He regularly submitted monthly credit card tabs to be paid from the campaign account, and included billings for golf greens fees that were paid by others. The spending spree and questionable documentation earned him eight indictments for perjury and false campaign reporting.

Wayne Dolcefino at KTRK deserves most of the credit for digging up the recent dirt on Eversole, and now burying him with it ...

In the last year and a half, Eversole has spent nearly $15,000 just at golf courses and golf stores using campaign funds. On his sworn campaign finance report, he usually calls it simply 'public relations.' "I don't think he bought public relations at a golf shop," said campaign finance expert Fred Lewis.

Lewis has seen lots of campaign reports.

" When you start spending it on things like clothes, books, and Internet at your house, an exercise club, and meal after meal, you're starting to get where you're either on the line or over it," he said.

Jerry Eversole had no opponent last year and isn't up for reelection until 2010. Yet he's spent a whopping $750,000 in campaign money in just 18 months.

Most of it on golf, golf-related apparel and items, and even coffee. So he skated through the thin ice once early on, has never had a respectable challenger since, and now over a decade later has been discovered doing the same thing. Makes you wonder what happened during the years between investigations, doesn't it? More on this from the Harris County Republican Rap Sheet.

So long, Jerry. You had a good run. Sorry about your wife.

Jesus of Nazareth was a community organizer

... while Pontius Pilate was a governor. Other notable community organizers would include Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, Mohandas Ghandhi ...



And then there's Joe Klein with the body-slam:

Slowly, slowly, I am recovering from the extremely effective bilge festival staged by the Republicans last night. And while there is much to discuss, there was one item, in particular, that has to be considered infuriating: the attack on Barack Obama's service as a community organizer by the odious Rudy Giuliani -- he's come to look like a villain in a Frank Capra movie, hasn't he? -- and Sarah Palin.

This morning, I received a press release from a group called Catholic Democrats about the work -- the mission, the witness -- that Obama performed after he got out of college. Here's the first paragraph:

Catholic Democrats is expressing surprise and shock that Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's acceptance speech tonight mocked her opponent's work in the 1980s for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. She belittled Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's experience as a community organizer in Catholic parishes on the South Side of Chicago, work he undertook instead of pursuing a lucrative career on Wall Street. In her acceptance speech, Ms. Palin said, "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities." Community organizing is at the heart of Catholic Social Teaching to end poverty and promote social justice.

So here is what Giuliani and Palin didn't know: Obama was working for a group of churches that were concerned about their parishioners, many of whom had been laid off when the steel mills closed on the south side of Chicago. They hired Obama to help those stunned people recover and get the services they needed -- job training, help with housing and so forth -- from the local government. It was, dare I say it, the Lord's work -- the sort of mission Jesus preached (as opposed to the war in Iraq, which Palin described as a "task from God.")

This is what Palin and Giuliani were mocking. They were making fun of a young man's decision "to serve a cause greater than himself," in the words of John McCain. They were, therefore, mocking one of their candidate's favorite messages. Obama served the poor for three years, then went to law school. To describe this service -- the first thing he did out of college, the sort of service every college-educated American should perform, in some form or other -- as anything other than noble is cheap and tawdry and cynical in the extreme.

Perhaps La Pasionaria of the Northern Slope didn't know this when she read the words they gave her. But Giuliani -- a profoundly lapsed Catholic, who must have met more than a few religious folk toiling in the inner cities -- should have known. ("I don't even know what that is," he sneered.") What a shameful performance.

Prayer will "smite" McCain and make Palin president

There simply isn't anything that bothers me more than the Radical Religious Right co-opting God for their twisted political ends:

The more theocratic elements of the Religious Right have a disturbing habit, (more like a practice) of invoking "imprecatory prayer" -- a call for God to literally pour his wrath down on those they consider to be his enemies. Last year, for example, Rev. Wiley Drake, then a Second Vice President of the Southern Baptist Convention made news when he called on his followers to pray for God to smite members of the staff of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. (Drake was angry that the organization had reported Drake to the IRS for endorsing Mike Huckabee on church stationary, among other apparent abuses of his church's 501(c) tax-exemption.)

The most recent target of theoractic imprecations is none other than Republican presidential candidate John McCain. They hope that an act of God will make Sarah Palin president.

Antiabortion militant and all-round theocratic activist Jay Rogers of Florida, whose blog is called The Forerunner, writes:

Pray for John McCain's salvation and speedy death. (Google The Forerunner's articles on Imprecatory Prayer if you think this is harsh.)

And then there is this guy, a self-described Christian Reconstructionist whose blog handle is Ixion, and is apparently from Tennessee:

McCain's VP choice, Sarah Palin, suddenly made me want to vote for him, as long as the LORD smites him while he's in office. She's consistently conservative on all the issues, and if she's good enough for The Forerunner, she's good enough for me. The Forerunner agrees with me that McCain must be smitten, as well, so I'm obviously not alone in my viewpoints.

If you find this as disturbing as I do, just know that the cure is to go to work to elect Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And every other Democratic candidate on your ballot.

As white as rice-and-cream milquetoast

It doesn't matter how many times the teevee cameras show us "Uncle Tom" Williams, he's nothing but a fly in the oatmeal:

Organizers conceived of this convention as a means to inspire, but some African American Republicans have found the Xcel Energy Center depressing this week. Everywhere they look, they see evidence of what they consider one of their party's biggest shortcomings.

As the country rapidly diversifies, Republicans are presenting a convention that is almost entirely white.

Only 36 of the 2,380 delegates seated on the convention floor are black, the lowest number since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies began tracking diversity at political conventions 40 years ago. Each night, the overwhelmingly white audience watches a series of white politicians step to the lectern — a visual reminder that no black Republican has served as a governor, U.S. senator or U.S. House member in the past six years.

Shocked, you say. Shocked.

The lack of diversity is out of sync with the demographic changes in the United States. The Census Bureau reported last month that racial and ethnic minorities will make up a majority of the country's population by 2042 -- almost a decade earlier than what the bureau predicted just four years ago. Two-thirds of Americans are non-Hispanic whites, 12.4 percent are black and 14.8 percent are Hispanic, according to 2006 census numbers.

What has helped Republicans is that working-class whites, a bloc they rely on, are more likely to vote than other groups. "But if there is a loss this time, and it is attributed to a smaller and smaller base of white voters, there might be a rethinking" of GOP strategy, said Robert E. Lang, co-director of Virginia Tech's Metropolitan Institute, which studies demographics and other development patterns.

"If we don't get better at reaching out, we're in big trouble," agreed Michael Williams, a black Republican who chairs the Texas Railroad Commission and who spoke Wednesday night. "It doesn't take much to see that this is not what America looks like. . . . We're trying, but we're not there yet."

I don't think you're ever going to get there in my lifetime or yours either, Mike.

Of Lipstick and Pigs -- err, Pit Bulls

I don't think anything I can write could be more sexist than that joke, Sarah.

And we don't want to hear any whining about how "the boys are being mean to you" since you've taken the gloves off. Community organizers have to be ready to defend themselves against hostile neighborhood bullies, after all ...

(Following is a summary of what others are saying. Essentially the divide is continental; their side is positively orgasmic, our side is repulsed. Oh, and Matt in the comments in the prior posts is looking for a quarrel. Does anyone wish to accomodate him? I won't have time for that today. Or tomorrow. Maybe on the weekend ...)

Virtually all of the conservative commentariat, and a greater-than-would-care-to-admit-it share of the liberal commentariat think that Sarah Palin hit a home run tonight. I guess I'm just going to have to stick my neck out (along with Josh Marshall) and disagree. ...

I think some of you are underestimating the percentage of voters for whom Sarah Palin lacks the standing to make this critique of Barack Obama. To many voters, she is either entirely unknown, or is known as an US Weekly caricature of a woman who eats mooseburgers and has a pregnant daughter. To change someone's opinion, you have to do one of two things. Either, you have to be a trusted voice of authority, or you have to persuade them. Palin is not a trusted voice of authority -- she's much too new. But neither was this a persuasive speech. It was staccato, insistent, a little corny. It preached to the proverbial choir. It was also, as one of my commentors astutely noted, a speech written by a man and for a man, but delivered by a woman, which produces a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.

In exceedingly plain English, I think there's a pretty big who the fuck does she think she is? factor. And not just among us Daily Kos reading, merlot-drinking liberals. I think Palin's speech will be instinctively unappealing to other whole demographics of voters, including particuarly working-class men (among whom there may be a misogyny factor) and professional post-menopausal women.

The irony here, of course, is that hers was a purely political speech. No issues were actually addressed... none. A catalog of Republican talking points was delivered, very well I must admit (to the extent that crap can be presented artfully). It was red meat for the base, but it is very difficult for me to see how it was in any way intended to address, say, independents. Nothing at all was said about Palin's social conservative views... opposition to abortion even in cases of rape or incest, her introduction of religious cant into discussions of war, her attempts to remove library books because their content did not suit her "Christian" views, etc. There is a lot more to say about Gov. Palin than was revealed in this speech... and I am depending on Obama's campaign staff to say at least some of it. (For the record, none of what I am thinking of has anything to do with her family life. However, her possible abuse of power as governor in "troopergate" does come to mind...)

And honestly... any former Hillary supporter who flipped to McCain/Palin in response to this speech must not have thought things through very thoroughly. People do not, by and large, vote their gonads, and that's about all Palin has in common with Hillary.

I am at a wonderful age. I am young enough to appreciate a woman's pleasant packaging (Stella's, for instance) when it is relevant to her relationship to me, and old enough mostly to ignore such good looks when her role in my life is that of potential commander-in-chief. In the world of government, as the old saying goes, form follows function. I am more convinced than ever that Gov. Palin could not function effectively as president any more than could the much older top of the GOP ticket. Indeed... I believe she would be a disaster as president.

Now, we know Palin to be a fringe member of the Republican right. We know her to be a petty, small-town dictator bent on settling small scores, banning books, and generally operating in a manner beneath the dignity of an already insignificant office. We know that she carried that attitude to Juneau when she became governor 18 short months ago, and that she's under investigation for abuse of that office. We know that she was either a member of, or a fellow traveler with, the secessionist Alaska Independence Party as late as the mid-Nineties. We know that she believes that God wants her to build a natural gas pipeline in Alaska.

But she won't be a fringe character tonight.

She won't admit to corruption, or champion Alaskan secession, or proclaim that God gives her personal advice on infrastructure policy. She won't list books that she wants banned, or name US Marshals that she'd want fired if elected Vice-President. Nope. She's going to come across as a mainstream American soccer hockey mom, who can't understand why people are being so mean to her. She'll speak in vague generalities about the problems that face the nation, and will wrap herself in the flag and in motherhood. She's going to read a good speech, written by professionals, off of a teleprompter, and she'll do so with a smile. She's going to appear distressingly normal. And as such, she's going to, at least in some small measure, succeed -- at least for tonight.

Thanks to the soft bigotry of really low expectations.

(T)he media coverage of the Palin story has been well within the bounds of responsibility. (McCain campaign advisor Steve) Schmidt is trying to make it seem otherwise, a desperate tactic.

There is a tendency in the media to kick ourselves, cringe and withdraw, when we are criticized. But I hope my colleagues stand strong in this case: it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is "a task from God." The attempts by the McCain campaign to bully us into not reporting such things are not only stupidly aggressive, but unprofessional in the extreme.