The Ojai Post

I think she would look more accurate if she was clinging to a Bible and a gun!

And just like Barbie, she needs her accessories!!! Does HER townhouse and camper van come filled with dead animal carcasses on all the walls. And for the extreme Palin fan – how about a log cabin decorated in Animals-Fresh-Off-The-Endangered-Species-List décor! Get ‘em now, kiddies while they last!

Oh, my, problematic on so many levels.

It's 9/11, let's reflect. Can't believe it's been 7 years.

Too bad she doesn't come in blow up or voodoo versions.

And the most life-like and accurate feature of this doll - you pull a hidden string on her back and she says the same three things - over and over and over again...

(Sorry Lisa!)

Now, how about a 1980's Pat Buchanan Doll? Wouldn't that be her ultimate Dreamboat Ken???

Please check this out! It is good fun. Enjoy!

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/61410aa4ff

"What can one do when faced with the absurdity of life but laugh!"
-- Beatrice Wood

Rumor is spreading that it there are plenty more Republicans than just these two commentators who think Sarah Palin was a REALLY pathetic choice, despite the obvious closing of ranks these past few weeks. Take a listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrG8w4bb3kg

My question is: How can these people keep a straight face while they continue to tow the party line? AND how can they sleep at night? It's mind-boggling!

I find it interesting that there are no Sen. Joe Biden action figures. Just pull the hidden string on the Sen. Biden doll and listen to him ask a fifty two part question that takes eight minutes to complete and your eyes glaze over. You can also hear him ask a paralyzed man in a wheelchair to stand up and take a bow. If that's not funny(or pathetic) enough, he states that Sen. Clinton would have been a better VP choice than himself. Sometimes the truth is funnier(or sadder) than fiction.

My personal favorite is the actress who poses as Gov. Palin and rips her clothes off to reveal her red white and blue bikini so she can go hunting with her 12 gauge. That was laugh out loud funny!!

As we watched Sarah Palin on TV the last couple of days, we kept wondering what on earth John McCain was thinking.

If he seriously thought this first-term governor — with less than two years in office — was qualified to be president, if necessary, at such a dangerous time, it raises profound questions about his judgment. If the choice was, as we suspect, a tactical move, then it was shockingly irresponsible.

It was bad enough that Ms. Palin’s performance in the first televised interviews she has done since she joined the Republican ticket was so visibly scripted and lacking in awareness.

What made it so much worse is the strategy for which the Republicans have made Ms. Palin the frontwoman: win the White House not on ideas, but by denigrating experience, judgment and qualifications.

The idea that Americans want leaders who have none of those things — who are so blindly certain of what Ms. Palin calls “the mission” that they won’t even pause for reflection — shows a contempt for voters and raises frightening questions about how Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin plan to run this country.

One of the many bizarre moments in the questioning by ABC News’s Charles Gibson was when Ms. Palin, the governor of Alaska, excused her lack of international experience by sneering that Americans don’t want “somebody’s big fat résumé maybe that shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment where, yes, they’ve had opportunities to meet heads of state.”

We know we were all supposed to think of Joe Biden. But it sure sounded like a good description of Mr. McCain. Those decades of experience earned the Arizona senator the admiration of people in both parties. They are why he was our preferred candidate in the Republican primaries.

The interviews made clear why Americans should worry about Ms. Palin’s thin résumé and lack of experience. Consider her befuddlement when Mr. Gibson referred to President Bush’s “doctrine” and her remark about having insight into Russia because she can see it from her state.

But that is not what troubled us most about her remarks — and, remember, if they were scripted, that just means that they reflect Mr. McCain’s views all the more closely. Rather, it was the sense that thoughtfulness, knowledge and experience are handicaps for a president in a world populated by Al Qaeda terrorists, a rising China, epidemics of AIDS, poverty and fratricidal war in the developing world and deep economic distress at home.

Ms. Palin talked repeatedly about never blinking. When Mr. McCain asked her to run for vice president? “You have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission,” she said, that “you can’t blink.”

Fighting terrorism? “We must do whatever it takes, and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.”

Her answers about why she had told her church that President Bush’s failed policy in Iraq was “God’s plan” did nothing to dispel our concerns about her confusion between faith and policy. Her claim that she was quoting a completely unrelated comment by Lincoln was absurd.

This nation has suffered through eight years of an ill-prepared and unblinkingly obstinate president. One who didn’t pause to think before he started a disastrous war of choice in Iraq. One who blithely looked the other way as the Taliban and Al Qaeda regrouped in Afghanistan. One who obstinately cut taxes and undercut all efforts at regulation, unleashing today’s profound economic crisis.

In a dangerous world, Americans need a president who knows that real strength requires serious thought and preparation.

I like it when people attack me for no good reason. It generally means I'm right.

No, it generally means you are clueless...

From CNN: Sarah Palin did not visit troops in Iraq, a spokesperson for the Republican VP nominee admitted Saturday, as new details emerged about the extent (or lack thereof) of the Alaska governor’s supposed foreign travel.

In July of last year, Palin left North America for the first time to visit Alaskan troops stationed in Kuwait. Palin said her itinerary included U.S. military installations in Germany, Iraq and Kuwait, and that she had visited Ireland.

In fact Palin visited Kuwaiti border crossing to Iraq — but never journeyed past the checkpoint.

Earlier, campaign aides confessed that Palin’s time in Ireland on that trip had only been for a re-fueling stop.

"The McCain campaign said Governor Palin opposed the Bridge to Nowhere, but now we know she supported it,” according to news wires.

“They said she didn't seek earmarks, but now we know she hired a lobbyist to get millions in pork for her town and her state. They said she visited Iraq, but today we learned that she only stopped at the border. Americans are starting to wonder, is there anything the McCain campaign isn't lying about?”

A Palin spokesperson also admitted that the governor had once visited Mexico -- but only on a vacation.

So what, big deal, who cares.

September 14, 2008
In Office, Palin Hired Friends and Hit Critics
By JO BECKER, PETER S. GOODMAN AND MICHAEL POWELL
WASILLA, Alaska — Gov. Sarah Palin lives by the maxim that all politics is local, not to mention personal.

So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as one of her qualifications for running the roughly $2 million agency.

Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.

When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.

And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.

“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”

An examination of Ms. Palin's swift rise and record as mayor of Wasilla and then governor finds that her visceral style and penchant for attacking critics — she sometimes calls local opponents “haters” — contrasts with her carefully crafted public image.

Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.

"Her governing style raises a lot of hard questions,” said Steve Haycox, a history professor at the University of Alaska.

Ms. Palin declined to grant an interview for this article. The McCain-Palin campaign responded to some questions on her behalf and that of her husband, while referring others to the governor’s spokespeople, who did not respond.

In Wasilla, a builder said he complained to Mayor Palin when the city attorney put a stop-work order on his housing project. She responded, he said, by engineering the attorney’s firing.

Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.

Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska professor, sought the e-mail messages of state scientists who had examined the effect of global warming on polar bears. (Ms. Palin said the scientists had found no ill effects, and she has sued the federal government to block the listing of the bears as endangered.) An administration official told Mr. Steiner that it would cost $468,784 to process his request.

When Mr. Steiner finally obtained the e-mail messages — through a federal records request — he discovered that state scientists had in fact agreed that the bears were in danger, records show.

“Their secrecy is off the charts,” Mr. Steiner said.

State legislators are investigating accusations that Ms. Palin and her husband pressured officials to fire a state trooper who had gone through a messy divorce with her sister, charges that she denies. But interviews make clear that the Palins draw few distinctions between the personal and the political.

Last summer State Representative John Harris, the Republican speaker of the House, picked up his phone and heard Mr. Palin’s voice. The governor’s husband sounded edgy. He said he was unhappy that Mr. Harris had hired John Bitney as his chief of staff, the speaker recalled. Mr. Bitney was a high school classmate of the Palins and had worked for Ms. Palin. But she fired Mr. Bitney after learning that he had fallen in love with another longtime friend.

“I understood from the call that Todd wasn’t happy with me hiring John and he’d like to see him not there,” Mr. Harris said.

“The Palin family gets upset at personal issues,” he added. “And at our level, they want to strike back.”

In the past three decades, socially conservative Oklahomans and Texans have flocked north to the oil fields of Alaska. They filled evangelical churches around Wasilla and revived the Republican Party. Many of these working-class residents formed the electoral backbone for Ms. Palin, who ran for mayor on a platform of gun rights, opposition to abortion and the ouster of the “complacent” old guard.

After winning the mayoral election in 1996, Ms. Palin raised the sales tax, and loosened the reins on enforcing zoning laws.

She fired veteran officials to make way for her own team. “She had an agenda," said Judy Patrick, a City Council member at the time.

She fired the town’s museum director, John Cooper. Later, she sent an aide to the museum to talk to the three remaining employees. “He told us they only wanted two,” recalled Esther West, one of the three, “and we had to pick who was going to be laid off.” The three quit as one.

Ms. Palin cited budget difficulties for the museum cuts. Mr. Cooper thought differently, saying the museum had become a microcosm of class and cultural conflicts in town. “It represented that the town was becoming more progressive, and they didn’t want that,” he said.

Days later, Mr. Cooper recalled, a vocal conservative, Steve Stoll, sidled up to him. Mr. Stoll had supported Ms. Palin and had a long-running feud with Mr. Cooper. “He said: ‘Gotcha, Cooper,’ ” Mr. Cooper said.

In 1997, Ms. Palin fired the longtime city attorney, Richard Deuser, after he issued the stop-work order on a home being built by Don Showers, another of her campaign supporters.

Your attorney, Mr. Showers told Ms. Palin, is costing me lots of money.

“She told me she’d like to see him fired,” Mr. Showers recalled. “But she couldn’t do it herself because the City Council hires the city attorney.” Ms. Palin told him to write the council members to complain.

Meanwhile, Ms. Palin pushed the issue from the inside. “She started the ball rolling,” said Ms. Patrick, who also favored the firing. Mr. Deuser was soon replaced by Ken Jacobus — then the State Republican Party’s general counsel.

Ms. Palin ordered city employees not to talk to the press. And she used city money to buy a white Suburban for the mayor’s use — employees sarcastically called it the mayor-mobile.

The new mayor also tended carefully to her evangelical base. She appointed a pastor to the town planning board. And she began to eye the library. For years, social conservatives had pressed the library director to remove books they considered immoral.

“People would bring books back censored,” recalled former Mayor John Stein, Ms. Palin’s predecessor. “Pages would get marked up or torn out.”

Witnesses and contemporary news accounts say Ms. Palin asked the librarian about removing books from the shelves. In 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book “Daddy’s Roommate” on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Ms. Chase and Mr. Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.

“Sarah said she didn’t need to read that stuff,” Ms. Chase said. “It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn’t even read it.”

Restless ambition defined Ms. Palin in the early years of this decade. She raised money for Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican from the state and sought to fill the seat of Senator Frank H. Murkowski when he ran for governor.

Mr. Murkowski appointed his daughter to the seat, but as a consolation prize, he gave Ms. Palin the $125,000-a-year chairmanship of a state commission overseeing oil and gas drilling.

Ms. Palin entered the 2006 primary for governor as a formidable candidate.

In the middle of the primary, a conservative columnist in the state, Paul Jenkins, unearthed e-mail messages showing that Ms. Palin had conducted campaign business from the mayor’s office. Ms. Palin put out a news release, demanded to know why Jenkins was “smearing” her. “Now I look at her and think: ‘Man, you’re slick,’ ” he said.

Half a century after Alaska became a state, Ms. Palin was inaugurated as governor in Fairbanks and assembled her cabinet. She surrounded herself with people she has known since grade school and members of her church.

The Wasilla High School yearbook archive now doubles as a veritable directory of state government. Ms. Palin appointed Mr. Bitney, her former junior high school band-mate, as her legislative director and chose another classmate, Joe Austerman, to manage the economic development office for $82,908 a year. Mr. Austerman had established an Alaska franchise for Mailboxes Etc.

Controversies have marred Ms. Palin’s credentials. In addition to the trooper investigation, lawmakers in April accused her of improperly culling thousands of e-mail addresses from a state database for a mass mailing to rally support for a policy initiative.

While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a “personal device” like a Blackberry “would be confidential and not subject to subpoena.”

Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business. On Feb. 7, Frank Bailey, a high-level aide, wrote to Ms. Palin’s state e-mail address to discuss appointments. Another aide fired back: “Frank, this is not the governor’s personal account.”

Mr. Bailey responded: “Whoops~!”

Mr. Bailey, a former mid-level manager at Alaska Airlines who worked on Ms. Palin’s campaign, has been placed on paid leave; he has emerged as a central figure in the trooper investigation.

Another confidante of Ms. Palin’s is Ms. Frye, 27. She worked as a receptionist for State Senator Lyda Green before she joined Ms. Palin’s campaign for governor. Now Ms. Frye earns $68,664 as a special assistant to the governor. Her frequent interactions with Ms. Palin’s children have prompted some lawmakers to refer to her as “the babysitter,” a title that Ms. Frye disavows.

Many lawmakers contend that Ms. Palin is overly reliant on a small inner circle that leaves her isolated. Democrats and Republicans alike describe her as often missing in action. Since taking office in 2007, Ms. Palin has spent 312 nights at her Wasilla home, some 600 miles to the north of the governor’s mansion in Juneau, records show.

During the last legislative session, some lawmakers became so frustrated with her absences that they took to wearing “Where’s Sarah?” pins.

Many politicians say they most often learn of her initiatives — and vetoes — from news releases, including her decision to veto $237 million from last year’s budget.

Mayors across the state, from the larger cities to tiny municipalities along the southeastern fiords, are even more frustrated. Often, their letters go unanswered and their pleas ignored, records and interviews show.

Last summer, Mayor Mark Begich of Anchorage, a Democrat, pressed Ms. Palin to meet with him because the state had failed to deliver money needed to operate city traffic lights. At one point, records show, state officials told him to just turn off a dozen of them. Ms. Palin agreed to meet with Mr. Begich when he threatened to go public with his anger, according to city officials.

At an Alaska Municipal League gathering in Juneau in January, mayors across the political spectrum swapped stories of the governor’s remoteness. How many of you, someone asked, have tried to meet with her? Every hand went up, recalled Mayor Fred Shields of Haines Borough. And how many met with her? Just a few hands rose. Ms. Palin soon walked in, delivered a few remarks and left for an anti-abortion rally.

The administration’s e-mail correspondence reveals a siege-like atmosphere. Top aides keep score, demean enemies and gloat over successes. Even some who helped engineer her rise have felt her wrath.

Dan Fagan, a prominent conservative radio host and longtime friend of Ms. Palin, urged his listeners to vote for her in 2006. But when he took her to task for raising taxes on oil companies, he said, he found himself branded a “hater.”

It is part of a pattern, Mr. Fagan said, in which Ms. Palin characterizes critics as “bad people who are anti-Alaska.”

Mr. Fagan has been inundated with critical calls. “Do you have any idea how much this state hates me right now?” he said.

As Ms. Palin’s star ascends, the McCain campaign, tries to control the words of those who know her well. Her mother-in-law, Faye Palin, has been asked not to speak to reporters, and aides sit in on interviews with old friends.

At a recent lunch gathering, an official with the Wasilla Chamber of Commerce asked its members to refer all calls from reporters to the governor’s office. Diane Woodruff, a city councilwoman, shook her head.

“I was thinking, I don’t remember giving up my First Amendment rights,” Ms. Woodruff said. “Just because you’re not going gaga over Sarah doesn’t mean you can’t speak your mind.”

Greenspan says McCain's economic policy not sound:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26689925/

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iE2JCSH5p9r2GBkQWS9TWAMzmuvQD9362OS01

what is rong with you demerals?
Don't you know Greenspan is funded by the vast left-wing conspiracy, including some remaining Bolsheviks who still worship Rasputin, the anti-Christ.
I hope you all burn in hell, now that is one global warming i would be proud of

Way to further devolve the conversation #17.

Say what? I was under the impression that Greenspan was appointed by RONALD REAGAN and considered himself and considers himself to be an “lifelong Libertarian Republican".

Am I wrong? And if, not - what's your point?

Say what? I was under the impression that Greenspan was appointed by Ronald Reagan and considers himself to be a "livelong Libertarian Republican".

Am I wrong? And if not - what's your point?

LTOR, #17 is an impersonater!

no i'm not!!

#17, #22 - knock it off. Thanks.

You also agree not to impersonate any regular authors or commenters with the intent to participate in deceptive dialogue. Violators may be banned.

In case you missed SNL last night:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/13/tina-fey-as-sarah-palin-o_n_126249.html

And we wonder why humanity appears to be stumbling from ditch to ditch, war to war, agony to agony....

Given her negligent and parochial expertise in the complex affairs of governing, McCain's choice of Sarah Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants, being different from “us” pure American types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism is a foreign threat.

Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, and a budget subsidized by the Federal Government. That reduces the job of governor to running a welfare state smaller than Ventura County

McCain & Palin are the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses.

McCain & Palin represent that part of the American psyche that mocks our aspirations, with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of “the other.”

While Obama calls for us to reach for our higher selves, McCain & Palin send a frightening call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to change and a higher vision.

Look at what McCain & Palin stand for:

~ Small town values — a denial of America’s global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism.

~ Ignorance of world affairs — a repudiation of the need to repair America’s image abroad.

~ Family values — a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don’t need to be heeded.

~ Rigid stands on guns and abortion — a scornful repudiation that these issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.

~ Patriotism — the usual fallback in a failed war.

~ “Reform” — an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who doesn’t fit your ideology.

The radical right marches under the banners of “I’m all right, Jack,” and “Why change? Everything’s OK as it is.”

The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the same time.

The Republicans have won multiple national elections by raising shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness.

It would be a shame to elect another smiling persona who is a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to the demoralized state we are in.

(JSB With an assist from DC)

OH. MY. GOD.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KKyEM-BDJI

OH. MY. GOD. (Part 2)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4aHL12vtEM