David Sedaris observes...

David Sedaris, on undecided voters

“I look at these people and can't quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention? To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it? To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked."

WAVE THAT FLAG

remaining GRATEFUL DEAD ROCK FOR OBAMA

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - Tie-dyed T-shirts and political slogans made for a heady mixture as the four surviving members of the rock band GRATEFUL DEAD put on a concert in support of BARACK OBAMA.

Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart hit a Penn State University stage Monday night to play for about 15,000 people.

It was the quartet’s first show together since a 2004 reunion tour. Hart, Weir and Lesh had already jammed together in support of Obama in February in California.

Before his set Monday, Hart said in an interview backstage that he was most impressed with Obama’s views on climate change.

“I believe him enough to be able to get up in front of my constituency, these people out there,” Hart said, pointing out the door to his dressing room, “and tell them ‘I believe.’ That’s really important. The Grateful Dead does not take this lightly. We’ve never really done something quite like this.”

Andrea Mead, spokeswoman for the Obama campaign in Pennsylvania, said Monday night the main goal was to stir up voter outreach efforts in a critical battleground state.

After Gregg Allman and Butch Trucks of the Allman Brothers Band opened the show, Obama supporters including Penn State assistant football coach Jay Paterno and cornerback Lydell Sargeant took to the stage to endorse him. A taped video message from Obama himself also was projected on a scoreboard.

Then it was on to the main attraction as the lights dimmed and the Dead opened with their classic, “Truckin.”’ Minutes later, fans were tipping balloons in the air and the arena floor filled with an earthy aroma.

The Dead officially dropped “Grateful” from its name to honor the memory of its lead singer, Jerry Garcia, who died in 1995. Mead said the Dead approached the campaign earlier this year offering help in a battleground state with a large fan base.
THE DEAD 10.13.08 Bryce Jordan Center, State College, PA
Truckin' > U.S. Blues, Help on the Way > Slipknot! > Franklin's Tower Playing In The Band > Dark Star > St. Stephen > Unbroken Chain > The Other One > Throwing Stones > Playing Reprise
E: Phil Donor Phil Rap > Bobby Rap > Touch of Grey > Not Fade Away

THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND 10.13.08 Bryce Jordan Center, State College, PA
Revival, Statesboro Blues, Who's Been Talking, Midnight Rider, One Way Out, And It Stoned Me, Dreams (w/ Ron Holloway, sax), Don't Think Twice (w/ Susan Tedeschi, guitar & vocals; Ron Holloway, sax; James van der Bogert, drums) Anyday (w/ Susan Tedeschi & Oteil, vocals), Melissa, Trouble No More, Ain't Wastin' Time No More, Jessica
E: Whipping Post

McCAIN'S LAST STAND
The Republican senator's final debate performance was marked by oddball characters and marginal attacks, as hopes of his political resurrection appeared to fade.

By Walter Shapiro for SALON


What may well have been the final debate of John McCain’s political career featured oddball characters who seemed like refugees from Sesame Street -- Joe the Plumber (an Everyman from Ohio), Senator Government (a Freudian slip moniker for Barack Obama) and a sometimes petulant 72-year-old Republican trying to be Mac the Knife. While instant debate verdicts are always suspect, there was scant evidence that McCain, despite a strong showing during the first 45 minutes of the debate, landed a haymaker at Hofstra. As the debate clock wound down Wednesday night, along with McCain’s hopes of political resurrection, the Arizona Republican ended by arguing with Obama over a nearly irrelevant issue at a time of economic crisis -- school vouchers.

The opening that McCain had been craving came early in the evening when Obama pointedly contrasted the Bill Clinton economic record (a budget surplus) with the scorecard on George W. Bush (doubling the national debt in eight years). “Sen. Obama, I am not President Bush,” McCain declared. “If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago. I’m going to give a new direction to this economy in this country.” McCain, to his credit, delivered the obviously rehearsed lines with conviction. But the Arizona senator then spoiled the moment by immediately veering off to talk about Obama’s tax votes in Congress and the “completely out-of-control” budget.

Historians of the angry autumn of ’08, when 700-point drops in the Dow Jones average became the new normal, will undoubtedly be fascinated to discover that Bill Ayers -- that blast-from-the-past 1960s Weatherman -- received far more debate airtime than Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. (Neither Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke nor his predecessor Alan Greenspan was ever mentioned, but, hey, who cares about the financial system anyway?) McCain, whose TV ads refer to Ayers more often than earmarks, backed into the subject gingerly, saying, “I don’t care about an old washed-up terrorist.” But seconds later, McCain was channeling his inner Richard Nixon as he demanded to know “the full extent of that relationship” between Obama and Ayers. (Obama’s response was a reprise of his oft-stated position that he and Ayers had merely served on foundation boards together in Chicago.)

This was not a debate in which Obama had many lines destined for the sound-bite hall of fame, but the Democratic nominee did pull off an impressive smile of astonishment on the split-screen TV picture as McCain, without missing a beat, switched from berating Ayers to claiming “my campaign is about getting this economy back on track.” Obama, who long ago learned that there is never a moment during a debate when a camera is not ready to record his expression, also contributed an amused laugh when McCain hyperbolically claimed that the left-leaning independent voter-registration group, ACORN, was on the verge “of destroying the fabric of democracy.” Leading in the polls, with all the momentum going his way, Obama accomplished his simple but vital mission on Wednesday night – don't make any blunders.

In late September, before the first debate, Bill McInturff, a McCain pollster, predicted that the contours of the race would not be known until a few days after the final debate when public opinion finally had a chance to settle. That is why McCain’s fate will probably be dictated by whether the weekend polls tighten or Obama continues to flirt with a double-digit lead in the national surveys and state-by-state scenarios that could give him as many as 350 electoral votes. Unless McCain makes up ground quickly from either Wednesday’s debate (unlikely but possible) or the simple force of gravity (Obama’s outlandish lead comes back to earth), the Republican nominee will soon be facing a stark choice. Does he want to go out railing about Ayers and ACORN, or does he want to step back and play out his string as a principled conservative, the reputation he held before this down-and-dirty campaign?

Sitting with Obama at the round table at Hofstra -- actually it looked more like an old-fashioned partner’s desk -- McCain tried to play it both ways. For all of his attack lines, there were also moments when viewers could glimpse the other McCain, the senator who excelled at working with Democrats. Asked about Supreme Court appointments, McCain spoke about his opposition to “litmus tests” and his votes to confirm Clinton appointees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. But then McCain, perhaps remembering that it requires more than Sarah Palin to appease the conservative base, added that his search for “the best people in the world” would probably not include “someone who supported Roe v. Wade.”
For his part, Obama carefully avoided spelling out any new detail about the real policy decisions that would confront him on Jan. 20, 2009, if the current polls hold up. Asked about the choice between expanding benefits and controlling healthcare costs as the federal deficit spirals out of control, Obama said, “We’ve got to do both -- and that’s exactly what my plan does.” Asked about whether American schools require more money or more reform, Obama gave the same both-sides-now answer when he said, “Now, typically, what’s happened is that there’s been a debate between more money or reform, and I think we need both.”

All three 2008 presidential debates (not to mention the Palin-dominated circus) had a time-warp quality about them. There was never a sustained discussion by either candidate about how the Wall Street whirlpool had totally transformed the domestic agenda of the next president. At a point when the government is taking ownership stakes in the nation’s leading banks, it seemed comically irrelevant to have an old-fashioned political scrap over whether Obama’s plans would put Joe the Plumber in a higher tax bracket. Somehow the phrase “class warfare” brandished by McCain takes on a new meaning when Wall Street gamesmanship appears to have thrown the entire economy into a severe recession.

Obama met the now-famous Joe the Plumber (aka Joe Wurzelbacher) in Springfield Township, Ohio, earlier this week as he was shaking hands between rounds of debate prep. Wurzelbacher challenged Obama on his tax plan so vigorously that Obama said afterward, “I’ve got to go prepare for this debate, but that was pretty good practice.” It was practice that came in handy Wednesday night as Obama probably deprived McCain of his best last chance to turn Campaign 2008 back into a horse race.

Here is some more from FRANK SCHAEFFER (a writer and author of "CRAZY FOR GOD -- How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back")

I am an Obama supporter. I am also pro-life. In fact, without my family's involvement in the pro-life movement it would not exist as we know it. Evangelicals weren't politicized until after my late father and evangelical leader Francis Schaeffer, Dr. Koop (Reagan's soon-to-be Surgeon General) and I stirred them up over the issue of abortion in the mid-1970s. Our Whatever Happened to the Human Race? book, movie series and seminars brought the evangelicals into the pro-life movement.

(Dad's political influence persists. Last week one of my father's followers -- Mike Huckabee -- was interviewed by Katie Couric, along with all the other presidential candidates. Couric asked the candidates if they were to be sent to a desert island and could only take one book besides the Bible, what would that that book be? Huckabee answered that he'd take my father's book Whatever Happened To The Human Race?)

Fast forward...

In 2000, we elected a president who claimed he believed God created the earth and who, as president, put car manufacturers and oil company's interests ahead of caring for that creation. We elected a pro-life Republican Congress that did nothing to actually care for pregnant women and babies. And they took their sincere evangelical followers for granted, and played them for suckers.

The so-called evangelical leadership -- Dobson, Robertson et al. also played the pro-life community for suckers. While thousands of men and women in the crisis pregnancy movement gave of themselves to help women and babies, their evangelical "leaders" did little more than cash in on fundraising opportunities and represent themselves as power-brokers to the craven politicians willing to kowtow to them.

Fast forward...

Today when I listen to Obama speak (and to his remarkable wife, Michelle) what I hear is a world view that actually nurtures life. Obama is trying to lead this country to a place where the intrinsic worth of each individual is celebrated. A leader who believes in hope, the future, trying to save our planet and providing a just and good life for everyone is someone who is actually pro-life.

Conversely the "pro-life" ethic of George W. Bush manifested itself in a series of squandered opportunities to call us to our better natures. After 9/11, Bush told most Americans to go shopping while saddling the few who volunteered for military service with endless tours of duty (something I know a little about since my son was a Marine and deployed several times). The Bush doctrine of life was expressed by starting an unnecessary war in Iraq that has killed thousands of Americans and wounded tens of thousands more.

The society that Obama is calling us to sacrifice for is a place wherein life would be valued not just talked about. As he said in his speech delivered on February 6 in New Orleans, "Too often, we lose our sense of common destiny; that understanding that we are all tied together; that when a woman has less than nothing in this country, that makes us all poorer." Obama was talking about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but his words also apply to our overall view of ourselves.

Regardless of the official position of the Supreme Court on abortion, a country in which all Americans are offered some sort of dignity and hopeful future would be a place conducive to the kind of optimism each of us must hold in our hearts if we are to welcome children into this world. But if our highest aspiration is to be a consumer with no thought or care for our neighbor, we will remain a culture in which abortion is not only inevitable but logical.

What we need in America is a spiritual rebirth, a turning away from the false value of consumerism and utilitarianism that have trumped every aspect of human life. To implement this vision we need leaders that inspire but to do so they have to be what they say they are. It's not about policy it's about character.

Obama's rivals for the nomination -- the Clintons -- do not inspire. When the Clintons were in the White House they talked about humane values while Bill Clinton betrayed every single person who voted for him by carrying on an unseemly sexual dalliance in the Oval Office with a young woman barely out of her teens. Since that time the Clintons have enriched themselves through their connections to a point where they're able to make a $5 million personal loan to their campaign.

For someone who says she has spent "the last 35 years of my life as an advocate for children" and/or "fighting for healthcare" that's a lot of money to have collected through doing good works. Presidential Mother Teresa wannabes shouldn't be doing deals with uranium mining outfits in Kazakhstan while schmoozing with the likes of President Nursultan Nazarbayev and wealthy mining magnates -- not if they want the moral authority to lead.

Similarly the Republicans have also been hypocrites while talking big, for instance about their pro-life ethic. But what have they achieved? First, through their puritanical war on sex education they've hindered our country from actually preventing unwanted pregnancy. Second, through the Republican Party's marriage to the greediest and most polluting earth-destroying corporations they've created a climate (both moral and physical) that has scorched the earth for-profit, with no regard to future generations whatsoever. The Republicans are to the pro-life movement what the Clintons are to selfless public service.

The real solution to abortion is to change the heart of America, not the law. We need to stop seeing ourselves as consumers. We need to stop seeing ourselves as me and begin to think of we. Our country needs someone to show us a better way, a president who is what he seems, someone with actual moral authority that our diverse population can believe in who has the qualities that make us want to follow him. Obama is that person.

AN OPEN LETTER TO JOHN McCAIN
by Frank Schaeffer

Senator John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as "not one of us," I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.

At a Sarah Palin rally, someone called out, "Kill him!" At one of your rallies, someone called out, "Terrorist!" Neither was answered or denounced by you or your running mate, as the crowd laughed and cheered. At your campaign event Wednesday in Bethlehem, Pa., the crowd was seething with hatred for the Democratic nominee - an attitude encouraged in speeches there by you, your running mate, your wife and the local Republican chairman.

Shame!

John McCain: In 2000, as a lifelong Republican, I worked to get you elected instead of George W. Bush. In return, you wrote an endorsement of one of my books about military service. You seemed to be a man who put principle ahead of mere political gain.

You have changed. You have a choice: Go down in history as a decent senator and an honorable military man with many successes, or go down in history as the latest abettor of right-wing extremist hate.

John McCain, you are no fool, and you understand the depths of hatred that surround the issue of race in this country. You also know that, post-9/11, to call someone a friend of a terrorist is a very serious matter. You also know we are a bitterly divided country on many other issues. You know that, sadly, in America, violence is always just a moment away. You know that there are plenty of crazy people out there.

John McCain, you're walking a perilous line. If you do not stand up for all that is good in America and declare that Senator Obama is a patriot, fit for office, and denounce your hate-filled supporters when they scream out "Terrorist" or "Kill him," history will hold you responsible for all that follows.

John McCain and Sarah Palin, you are playing with fire, and you know it. You are unleashing the monster of American hatred and prejudice, to the peril of all of us. You are doing this in wartime. You are doing this as our economy collapses. You are doing this in a country with a history of assassinations.

Change the atmosphere of your campaign. Talk about the issues at hand. Make your case. But stop stirring up the lunatic fringe of haters, or risk suffering the judgment of history and the loathing of the American people - forever.

We will hold you responsible.

Jolly Good article

FLIRTING HER WAY TO VICTORY

Sarah Palin's farcical debate performance lowered the standards for both female candidates and US political discourse

from THE GAURDIAN (London) Friday 3 October 2008



At least three times last night, Sarah Palin, the adorable, preposterous vice-presidential candidate, winked at the audience. Had a male candidate with a similar reputation for attractive vapidity made such a brazen attempt to flirt his way into the good graces of the voting public, it would have universally noted, discussed and mocked.
Palin, however, has single-handedly so lowered the standards both for female candidates and American political discourse that, with her newfound ability to speak in more-or-less full sentences, she is now deemed to have performed acceptably last night. By any normal standard, including the ones applied to male presidential candidates of either party, she did not. Early on, she made the astonishing announcement that she had no intentions of actually answering the queries put to her. "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also," she said.
And so she preceded, with an almost surreal disregard for the subjects she was supposed to be discussing, to unleash fusillades of scripted attack lines, platitudes, lies, gibberish and grating references to her own pseudo-folksy authenticity.
It was an appalling display. The only reason it was not widely described as such is that too many American pundits don't even try to judge the truth, wisdom or reasonableness of the political rhetoric they are paid to pronounce upon. Instead, they imagine themselves as interpreters of a mythical mass of "average Americans" who they both venerate and despise.
In pronouncing upon a debate, they don't try and determine whether a candidate's responses correspond to existing reality, or whether he or she is capable of talking about subjects such as the deregulation of the financial markets or the devolution of the war in Afghanistan . The criteria are far more vaporous. In this case, it was whether Palin could avoid utterly humiliating herself for 90 minutes, and whether urbane commentators would believe that she had connected to a public that they see as ignorant and sentimental. For the Alaska governor, mission accomplished.
There is indeed something mesmerising about Palin, with her manic beaming and fulsome confidence in her own charm. The force of her personality managed to slightly obscure the insulting emptiness of her answers last night. It's worth reading the transcript of the encounter, where it becomes clearer how bizarre much of what she said was. Here, for example, is how she responded to Biden's comments about how the middle class has been short-changed during the Bush administration, and how McCain will continue Bush's policies:
"Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced [sic] your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let's look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I'm glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? ... My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here's a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School , you get extra credit for watching the debate."
Evidently, Palin's pre-debate handlers judged her incapable of speaking on a fairly wide range of subjects, and so instructed her to simply disregard questions that did not invite memorised talking points or cutesy filibustering. They probably told her to play up her spunky average-ness, which she did to the point of shtick - and dishonesty. Asked what her achilles heel is - a question she either didn't understand or chose to ignore - she started in on how McCain chose her because of her "connection to the heartland of America . Being a mom, one very concerned about a son in the war, about a special needs child, about kids heading off to college, how are we going to pay those tuition bills?"
None of Palin's children, it should be noted, is heading off to college. Her son is on the way to Iraq , and her pregnant 17-year-old daughter is engaged to be married to a high-school dropout and self-described "fuckin' redneck". Palin is a woman who can't even tell the truth about the most quotidian and public details of her own life, never mind about matters of major public import. In her only vice-presidential debate, she was shallow, mendacious and phoney. What kind of maverick, after all, keeps harping on what a maverick she is? That her performance was considered anything but a farce doesn't show how high Palin has risen, but how low we all have sunk.

MUD PIES

POLITICS OF ATTACK from The New York Times

It is a sorry fact of American political life that campaigns get ugly, often in their final weeks. But Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin have been running one of the most appalling campaigns we can remember.

They have gone far beyond the usual fare of quotes taken out of context and distortions of an opponent’s record — into the dark territory of race-baiting and xenophobia. Senator Barack Obama has taken some cheap shots at Mr. McCain, but there is no comparison.

Despite the occasional slip (referring to Mr. Obama’s “cronies” and calling him “that one”), Mr. McCain tried to take a higher road in Tuesday night’s presidential debate. It was hard to keep track of the number of times he referred to his audience as “my friends.” But apart from promising to buy up troubled mortgages as president, he offered no real answers for how he plans to solve the country’s deep economic crisis. He is unable or unwilling to admit that the Republican assault on regulation was to blame.

Ninety minutes of forced cordiality did not erase the dismal ugliness of his campaign in recent weeks, nor did it leave us with much hope that he would not just return to the same dismal ugliness on Wednesday.

Ms. Palin, in particular, revels in the attack. Her campaign rallies have become spectacles of anger and insult. “This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America,” Ms. Palin has taken to saying.

That line follows passages in Ms. Palin’s new stump speech in which she twists Mr. Obama’s ill-advised but fleeting and long-past association with William Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground and confessed bomber. By the time she’s done, she implies that Mr. Obama is right now a close friend of Mr. Ayers — and sympathetic to the violent overthrow of the government. The Democrat, she says, “sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

Her demagoguery has elicited some frightening, intolerable responses. A recent Washington Post report said at a rally in Florida this week a man yelled “kill him!” as Ms. Palin delivered that line and others shouted epithets at an African-American member of a TV crew.

Mr. McCain’s aides haven’t even tried to hide their cynical tactics, saying they were “going negative” in hopes of shifting attention away from the financial crisis — and by implication Mr. McCain’s stumbling response.

We certainly expected better from Mr. McCain, who once showed withering contempt for win-at-any-cost politics. He was driven out of the 2000 Republican primaries by this sort of smear, orchestrated by some of the same people who are now running his campaign.

And the tactic of guilt by association is perplexing, since Mr. McCain has his own list of political associates he would rather forget. We were disappointed to see the Obama campaign air an ad (held for just this occasion) reminding voters of Mr. McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five savings-and-loan debacle, for which he was reprimanded by the Senate. That episode at least bears on Mr. McCain’s claims to be the morally pure candidate and his argument that he alone is capable of doing away with greed, fraud and abuse.

In a way, we should not be surprised that Mr. McCain has stooped so low, since the debate showed once again that he has little else to talk about. He long ago abandoned his signature issues of immigration reform and global warming; his talk of “victory” in Iraq has little to offer a war-weary nation; and his Reagan-inspired ideology of starving government and shredding regulation lies in tatters on Wall Street.

But surely, Mr. McCain and his team can come up with a better answer to that problem than inciting more division, anger and hatred.

THE WINNER OF THE DEBATE? THAT ONE

Arianna Huffington succinctly put it this way:

In Debate II, John McCain twice laid out the criteria for how the American people should judge the candidates: In tough times, we need someone with a steady hand on the tiller. By that measure, Obama was the clear winner. He was centered where McCain was scattered. Forceful where McCain was forced. Presidential where McCain was petulant. In the first debate, McCain wouldn't look at Obama. In this one, he referred to him as "that one." The contempt was palpable, and unpalatable. At the end of the debate, Brokaw asked McCain to get out of the way of his Teleprompter. He might as well have been speaking on behalf of the future: Senator McCain can you please get out of the way so we can get on with it?

and HERE'S JOHNNY...

McCAIN has his own UNSAVORY links

It's been known for some time already that John McCain was affiliated in the early 1980s with a right-wing anti-communist organization, the U.S. Council for World Freedom. But the nature and extent of the candidate's former ties to the group went largely ignored until this week, when the McCain campaign attacked Barack Obama for his connection to former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers.

Now that McCain is attempting to tar Obama with his association with extremists, McCain's role in the Council is receiving more scrutiny. McCain joined the group's board at the behest of General John Singlaub, a friend of his father. Singlaub himself had taken the helm of the group after being dismissed from his command in South Korea for criticizing then-President Jimmy Carter's decision to draw down American troops. It was under Singlaub that the US Council for World Freedom became well known for its role as a front working with Oliver North to raise money for the Nicaraguan contras in the late 1980s. The organization began, however, as an affiliate of a worldwide group, the World Anti-Communist League, allegedly funded by the Taiwanese and South Korean dictatorships.

The group's early roots were firmly planted in the far right. In 1981, the Anti-Defamation League called the WACL "a gathering place for extremists, racists and anti-Semites." Singlaub himself said in 1985 that some chapters of the League contained former Nazis and had been "terribly anti-Semitic," though he claimed that he had purged out the League's extremist elements, "certainly by 1984." In 1982, the U.S. Council for World Freedom received tax-exempt status, which it lost in 1987 for its role in supporting the contras.
from Gabriel Winant also on SALON
Singlaub sought out McCain as a board member when the now-Senator was serving in the House of Representatives. "It looks good to have names on a letterhead who are well-known and appreciated," Singlaub told the Associated Press this year. He also told the AP he doesn't recall any active role played by McCain. McCain claimed in 1986 that he had left the group two years earlier, though some Council letterhead continued to list his name through that year, and he appeared at a Council event in 1985 honoring Afghani anti-Soviet fighters. (Tom Loeffler, then a Republican congressman from Texas who was the McCain campaign's national finance co-chair until this spring, was also in attendance.)

In 1983 and 1984, Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson wrote a series of columns linking the League's (expelled) Latin American affiliates to death squad assassinations. Two weeks after Anderson's column on the group's links to violence, McCain asked to be taken off the advisory board, saying he no longer had time for the council. In 1986, he reiterated his request, and said, "I didn't know whether (the group's activity) was legal or illegal, but I didn't think I wanted to be associated with them."

also, by the way, doggone it, those double standards just get it the way, don't they? You betcha

THE PALIN'S UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES

Imagine if the Obamas had hooked up with a violently anti-American group in league with the government of Iran.

By David Talbot for SALON

Oct. 7, 2008 | "My government is my worst enemy. I'm going to fight them with any means at hand."

This was former revolutionary terrorist Bill Ayers back in his old Weather Underground days, right? Imagine what Sarah Palin is going to do with this incendiary quote as she tears into Barack Obama this week.

Only one problem. The quote is from Joe Vogler, the raging anti-American who founded the Alaska Independence Party. Inconveniently for Palin, that's the very same secessionist party that her husband, Todd, belonged to for seven years and that she sent a shout-out to as Alaska governor earlier this year. ("Keep up the good work," Palin told AIP members. "And God bless you.")

AIP chairwoman Lynette Clark told me recently that Sarah Palin is her kind of gal. "She's Alaskan to the bone ... she sounds just like Joe Vogler."

So who are these America-haters that the Palins are pallin' around with?

Before his strange murder in 1993, party founder Vogler preached armed insurrection against the United States of America. Vogler, who always carried a Magnum with him, was fond of saying, "When the [federal] bureaucrats come after me, I suggest they wear red coats. They make better targets. In the federal government are the biggest liars in the United States, and I hate them with a passion. They think they own [Alaska]. There comes a time when people will choose to die with honor rather than live with dishonor. That time may be coming here. Our goal is ultimate independence by peaceful means under a minimal government fully responsive to the people. I hope we don't have to take human life, but if they go on tramping on our property rights, look out, we're ready to die."

This quote is from "Coming Into the Country," by John McPhee, who traipsed around Alaska's remote gold mining country with Vogler for his 1991 book. The violent-tempered secessionist vowed to McPhee that if any federal official tried to stop him from polluting Alaska's rivers with his earth-moving equipment, he would "run over him with a Cat and turn mosquitoes loose on him while he dies."

Vogler wasn't just a blowhard either. He put his secessionist ideas into action, working to build AIP membership to 20,000 -- an impressive figure by Alaska standards -- and to elect party member Walter Hickel as governor in 1990.

Vogler's greatest moment of glory was to be his 1993 appearance before the United Nations to denounce United States "tyranny" before the entire world and to demand Alaska's freedom. The Alaska secessionist had persuaded the government of Iran to sponsor his anti-American harangue.

That's right ... Iran. The Islamic dictatorship. The taker of American hostages. The rogue nation that McCain and Palin have excoriated Obama for suggesting we diplomatically engage. That Iran.

AIP leaders allege that Vogler, who was murdered that year by a fellow secessionist, was taken out by powerful forces in the U.S. before he could reach his U.N. platform. "The United States government would have been deeply embarrassed," by Vogler's U.N. speech, darkly suggests Clark. "And we can't have that, can we?"

The Republican ticket is working hard this week to make Barack Obama's tenuous connection to graying, '60s revolutionary Bill Ayers a major campaign issue. But the Palins' connection to anti-American extremism is much more central to their political biographies.

Imagine the uproar if Michelle Obama was revealed to have joined a black nationalist party whose founder preached armed secession from the United States and who enlisted the government of Iran in his cause? The Obama campaign would probably not have survived such an explosive revelation. Particularly if Barack Obama himself was videotaped giving the anti-American secessionists his wholehearted support just months ago.

Where's the outrage, Sarah Palin has been asking this week, in her attacks on Obama's fuzzy ties to Ayers? The question is more appropriate when applied to her own disturbing associations.

Maureen Dowd gets it Right

from Sunday's NYT

SARAH'S POMPOM PALAVER
By MAUREEN DOWD

I had hoped I was finally done with acting as an interpreter for politicians whose relationship with the English language was tumultuous.

There’s W.’s gummy grammar, of course, like the classic, “Is our children learning?” And covering the first Bush White House required doing simultaneous translation for a president who never met a personal pronoun he liked or a wacky non sequitur he could resist.

Poppy Bush drew comparisons to Warren G. Harding, whose prose reminded H. L. Mencken of “a string of wet sponges. ... It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.” When Harding died, E. E. Cummings lamented, “The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.”

Being mush-mouthed helped give the patrician Bushes the common touch. As Alistair Cooke observed, “Americans seem to be more comfortable with Republican presidents because they share the common frailty of muddled syntax and because, when they attempt eloquence, they do tend to spout a kind of Frontier Baroque.”

Darn right. And that, doggone it, brings us to a shout-out for the latest virtuoso of Frontier Baroque, bless her heart, the governor of the Last Frontier. Her reward’s in heaven.

At Sarah Palin’s old church in Wasilla, they spoke in tongues. Maybe that’s where she picked it up.

Hillary Clinton and John McCain ran against Barack Obama by sneering that their prose was meatier than The One’s poetry. Sarah’s running against the Democrat’s highfalutin eloquence by speakin’ in homespun haikus.

We could, following her strenuously folksy debate performance, wonder when elite became a bad thing in America. Navy Seals are elite, and they get lots of training so they can swim underwater and invade a foreign country, but if you’re governing the country that dispatches the Seals, it’s not O.K. to be elite? Can likable still trump knowledgeable at such a vulnerable crossroads for the country?

Did Joe Biden have to rhetorically rush over to Home Depot before Sarah could once more brandish “a little bit of reality from Wasilla Main Street there brought to Washington, D.C.?”

With her pompom patois and sing-songy jingoism, Palin can bridge contradictory ideas that lead nowhere: One minute she promises to get “greater oversight” by government; the next, she lectures: “Government, you know, you’re not always a solution. In fact, too often you’re the problem.”

Talking at the debate about how she would “positively affect the impacts” of the climate change for which she’s loath to acknowledge human culpability, she did a dizzying verbal loop-de-loop: “With the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that, as governor, I was the first governor to form a climate change subcabinet to start dealing with the impacts.” That was, miraculously, richer with content than an answer she gave Katie Couric: “You know, there are man’s activities that can be contributed to the issues that we’re dealing with now, with these impacts.”

At another point, she channeled Alicia Silverstone debating in “Clueless,” asserting, “Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet.” (Mostly the end-all.)

A political jukebox, she drowned out Biden’s specifics, offering lifestyle as substance. “In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been, you know, all our lives,” she said, making the middle class sound like it has its own ZIP code, superior to 90210 because “real” rules.

Sometimes, her sentences have a Yoda-like — “When 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not” — splendor. When she was asked by Couric if she’d ever negotiated with the Russians, the governor replied that when Putin “rears his head” he is headed for Alaska. Then she uttered yet another sentence that defies diagramming: “It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there.”

Reared heads reared themselves again at the debate, when she said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “were starting to really kind of rear the head of abuse.”

She dangles gerunds, mangles prepositions, randomly exiles nouns and verbs and also — “also” is her favorite vamping word — uses verbs better left as nouns, as in, “If Americans so bless us and privilege us with the opportunity of serving them,” or how she tried to “progress the agenda.”

Poppy Bush dropped personal pronouns and launched straight into verbs because he was minding his mother’s admonition against “the big I.” Palin, by contrast, uses a heck of a lot of language to praise herself as a fresh face with new ideas who has “joined this team that is a team of mavericks.” True mavericks don’t brand themselves.

SNL does the VEEP DEBATE

to help follow Sarah Palin's strategy:

Well doggone it this here is truly blessed

DUMB AND DUMBER

THE DUMBING DOWN OF THE GOP

Why aren't more conservatives disgusted that their party nominated a person devoid of qualifications for the vice presidency (again)?

By Joe Conason on SALON

Oct. 4, 2008 | Sarah Palin's debate performance should signal the beginning of the end of her fad. But for the moment it is worth looking at the meaning of her nomination, without the protective varnish of what conservatives usually dismiss as political correctness.

Why should we pretend not to notice when Gov. Palin's ideas make no sense? Having said last week that "it doesn't matter" whether human activity is the cause of climate change, she said in debate that she "doesn't want to argue" about the causes. It doesn't occur to her that we have to know the causes in order to address the problem. (She was very fortunate that moderator Gwen Ifill didn't ask her whether she truly believes that human beings and dinosaurs inhabited this planet simultaneously only 6,000 years ago.)

Why should we ignore her inability to string together a series of coherent thoughts? As a foe of Wall Street greed and a late convert to the gospel of government regulation, along with John McCain, Palin promised to clean up and reform business. But when her programmed talking points about "getting government out of the way" and protecting "freedom" conflicted with that promise, she didn't notice.


Why should we give her a pass on the most important issues of the day? Supposedly sharing the fears and concerns of the average families who face the burdens of mortgages, healthcare and economic insecurity, Palin simply refused to discuss changes in bankruptcy law and proved that she didn't know the provisions of McCain's healthcare plan.

All the glaring defects so blatantly on display in her debate with Joe Biden -- and that make her candidacy so darkly comical -- would be the same if she were a hockey dad instead of a "hockey mom." In fact, the cynical attempt to foist Palin on the nation as a symbol of feminist progress is an insult to all women regardless of their political orientation.

There was a time when conservatives lamented the dumbing down of American culture. Preservation of basic standards in schools and workplaces compelled them -- or so they said -- to resist affirmative action for women and minorities. Qualifications mattered; merit mattered; and demagogic appeals for leveling were to be left to the Democrats.

Not anymore.

Actually, the Palin phenomenon is the culmination of a trend that can be traced back to Dan Quayle, the undistinguished Indiana senator whose elevation onto the Republican ticket in 1988 had nothing to do with intellect or experience and everything to do with the youthful appeal of a handsome blond frat boy. (That was how Republican strategists thought they would attract female voters back then, which must be why they believe Palin represents progress.) Quayle too was unable to articulate, let alone defend, the policy positions for which he was supposed to be campaigning. He too had to undergo the surgical stuffing of stock phrases into his head as a minimal substitute for knowledge and thought. And in the same sad way, he too benefited from the drastically reduced expectations applied to anyone whose inadequacy is so obvious.

Quayle deserved more pity than scorn, however, because he seemed to know that he was fighting far above his weight class. Palin evokes no such sympathy, with her jut-jawed, moose-gutting confidence in her own overrated "common sense" and her bullying insistence that only "elitists" would question her expertise.

As Biden showed quite convincingly when he spoke about his modest background and his continuing connection with Main Street, perceptive, intelligent discourse is in no way identical with elitism. Palin's phony populism is as insulting to working- and middle-class Americans as it is to American women. Why are basic diction and intellectual coherence presumed to be out of reach for "real people"?

And why don't we expect more from American conservatives? Indeed, why don't they demand more from their own movement? Aren't they disgusted that their party would again nominate a person devoid of qualifications for one of the nation's highest offices? Some, like Michael Gerson and Kathleen Parker, have expressed discomfort with this farce -- and been subjected, in Parker's case, to abuse from many of the same numbskulls whom Palin undoubtedly delights.

The ultimate irony of Palin's rise is that it has occurred at a moment when Americans may finally have grown weary of pseudo-populism -- when intelligence, judgment, diligence and seriousness are once again valued, simply because we are in such deep trouble. We got into this mess because we elected a man who professed to despise elitism, which he detected in everyone whose opinions differed from his prejudices. That was George W. Bush, of course. Biden was too polite and restrained to say it, but the dumbing down is more of the same, too.