It might be worth going to CPAC this year, just to watch the monkeys fling poo at each other.

ALL RIGHT! The Goopers are dedicated to (im)Palin themselves on incompetence and irrelevancy! At this rate we can guarantee they wander aimlessly in the wilderness for at least forty years.

She will keep making jabs at Obama and digging herself deeper than she already is. Also.

watertiger! gotta remember the neiman-marcus credit card too

I said it when they nominated Caribou Barbie — Sarah Plain [sic] is the gift that keeps on giving.

I never thought that she’d keep giving through 2012, though.

Did I hear she was getting a 7 figure advance on her book?

What were the last polls before the election? Something like 60% of Americans a freaked out by this whackjob and they want to make her their poster child? I guess that is what happens when you do your navel gazing from the inside out.

These Repugs are all thinking with the wrong organ!!

eCahn, the 7 figure number was a best estimate.

Meaning: how much will Regnery pay?

Yeah, HuffPo has the details. I got to get me some of that wingnut welfare. Make a mill just for sitting around picking your nose with your head up your ass.

Ok pups Digg this post from watertiger!!
Sarah is the Darling of the Fundies! Maybe they should go start their own party! Lets see lets call it the Fundies Mental party or something or mabye doGs Party of the Creationists!

Yeah, their asses.

I might have had my feelings hurt by the phrase “zestful ignorance” but truth be told, I’m not all that zesty.

Yep, $7US million advance on her book.
http://www.canberratimes.com.a…..62216.aspx

Never heard of CPAC before. And as to keeping up with her 7 year-old daughter? Gotta put the kid in school a tad first. We’ve got a high school drop-out daughter, a high school drop-out future son-in-law (I’ll believe it when I see it), a problem kid who joined the service, and another girl who seems to be okay. One in five is pretty good, I suppose, in wingnutsville.

Nor ignorant.

I read 7 million somewhere. I’m sure that the money is out there.

If Palin is considered a rising star in the party it ain’t saying much for the party!

THe funny thing about that photo is Gopher in the Love Boat became a Goper congressman.

Saw a story today that the Alaskan drop out rate is twice the national average. Might explain a great deal.

Aw shucks. Now, what are the countries in NAFTA again?

If that’s the best ya got, you ain’t got nothin’.

Jello wrestling with Coulter, Lowry, and Goldberg?

Now that’s sparkly!

For a Vice-Presidential candidate’s kid though?

Gross too!!

The way the Ds are going, the Rs may well look better than them shortly.

OK. Now I just lost my lunch …. and breakfast and dinner. Where the heck did I park that tanker truck of brain bleach?

Seems like mud would be their preferred medium. Maybe they can root out some truffles while they’re at it.

You do know that Rich Lowry stayed behind to put out this week’s issue of National ReView while the rest of the staff, major donors, big-bucks subscribers, and assorted hangers-on?

Wasn’t thinking about it explaining her kids, just her popularity in her home state. The dropout kids are just part of her folksy charm doncha know. Somebody you would like to have a beer and a shot or six with …. for breakfast

Wow, watching Arianna’s rerun of Rachel — she DID say “speak softly and carry a big stick” when talking about the Democratic Senate caucus and Lieberman, exactly the headline that Egregious used for her breaking story about Carper this morning.

MSNBC writers need to learn to credit their sources when their sources are FDL.

Would this be the story??
Great record for the state with the most rethuglioans per capita and the most corrupt!

The Dems get their chance ,let’s see what they can do with it!

Yep, $7US million advance on her book.

OK, how many here think she will write or a ghostwriter will? If she writes it, they should pay the editor $7 million because he/she will earn every cent of it.

Teddy,

What color is the jello?

Somebody you would like to have a beer and a shot or six with …. for breakfast

Sounds like a major component of a Wasilla prenatal regimen to me.

Yeah, that’s the one. Seems to me there might be a causal link between the two phenomena you cite.

i think it’s safe to say that if they rip off this headline, we then have cause to really go after them. ;-)

Was a reply to DrDick @ 30.

Sounds like a major component of the Wasilla daily regime to me.

Hey what’s sauce for the AP is sauce for the Lake.

Arianna also quoted Jane Hamsher too.

-G

A book with one extremely long chapter, composed of one long ass, run on sentence !

With no grammar, coherence, or point.

If the IOC ever includes a synchronized puking event Wasilla is a sure bet to take the gold.

That’s the Sarah we all know and love!!!

O & the Ds are off to a great start.

Mud-colored, I guess.

anyone know who her poor ghost-writer is?

has Rachel quoted Jane yet?

if not, why not?

is ex-wonkette all she can handle?

You can almost see the producer off-screen telling Arianna to slow down, when she says, “The-man-who-singlehandedly-made-glasses-cool-again — Nate. Silver. of. Five. Thirty. Eight. Dot. Com. Welcome. Nate.”

anyone know who her poor ghost-writer is?

Anne Coulter? They seem like a perfect fit.

No, but it’s clear her speeches are Wholly Ghost-written.

The Baron Sacher-Masoch.

omg the shiba inus have woken up

Sounds like the name of a musical group!

Sarah make book.

Must find funnel for monies, somehow.

She be future of party of Lincoln.

(What da ‘heck’ be ‘they’ thinkin’)

(Dat not be thinkin’ jus’ empty noodles clinkin’)

Boosh redux woos …

What’s wrong with that?

;~P

That would represent an uptick.

DrDick, do you think Sarah would feel right at home in Butte, also?

As we said in college, Coors and cold pizza – the breakfast of champions!

She’d draw a lot of attention when she pronounced it, “booty.”

I think Payin’s advance was $7 million, but Rick Perry grabbed it and yanked back about $4 million for himself. Pour Sayrah.

Well, at least on St. Patty’s day. She might want to watch out for skinny dipping in the Berkeley Pit, however.

As we said in college, Coors Budweiser and cold pizza – the breakfast of champions!

Minor edit, no charge

Ya know if Barack picks Hillary for SoS (highly doubtful IMO), at least we’d have the first female SoS who has dodged sniper fire.

Hey, this was eastern Oklahoma in the early 70s.

I hear they have UFOs that fly into the sides of mountains and disappear. Sarah would probably be cool with that, also.

$29.95 hardcover doorstop !!!

This is a reply to DrBong at 65.

Well, that is according to the people who skinny dip in the Pit.

Too early to pass judgement yet,besides just about anything is better than Bush!

evening all. thanks WT

Ya know if Barack picks Hillary for SoS (highly doubtful IMO), at least we’d have the first female SoS who has dodged sniper fire.

Well at least she has had to answer those calls at 3 o’clock in the morning, course they were for Bill, but she has gotten them so that should count for something.

Time to sign off!

Nite all!

Yep. Lots of smoke, but no fires as yet. I will reserve judgment until he actually has been in office for a while. Of course I have very modest expectations (though he is emphatically the best on offer). Obama is a very moderate centrist with corporatist leanings (though less, I think, than Clinton). I do not expect any really radical changes (though some may seem so by comparison to the last 8 years).

I need to e-mail Rachel. Arianna sat
there
and
read
the

tele-
prompter.

Next time, get Sam Seder.

Night, BB!

sleep well

“Better than Bush”

Talk about your soft bigotry of low expectations…

True. Charley McCarthy would have been better than Bush.

The Dems get their chance ,let’s see what they can do with it!

not their first chance. in 2006 the dems won a decisive victory on the promise to end the war and place limits on bush’s power grabs. with the dems in control of both houses (even if just barely in the senate), what exactly did the 110th congress achieve?

Too early to pass judgement yet

I started this in the last thread and it got added on to.

Obama:

1. Reneges on pledge and backs FISA Amendments Act
2. Is instrumental in getting $700 billion Paulson bailout passed
3. Picks Rahm Emanuel to be his Chief of Staff
4. Names the pro-torture John Brennan to head his national security transition
5. Lobbies Senate to save Lieberman’s Chairmanship of DHS Committee
6. Has Robert Rubin and Larry Summers who deregulated markets under Clinton and set up the conditions for the current meltdown as his economic advisers
7. Wants to escalate the war in Afghanistan
8. Has Dennis Ross as his Middle East adviser.

So I guess my question for you is when will it be time to pass some kind of judgment on Obama’s performance because I’m seeing lots of data points already.

They are too cute!

As I said, off to a great start.

what exactly did the 110th congress achieve?

oh, i know! they passed telco immunity for fisa violations – something that according to glenn greenwald, even the R congress was unwilling to do when bush was still a popular president.

certainly, if nothing else, we can pass judgement on each of the individual actions?

Look, anyone who thought Barack Obama was a liberal/progressive was simply refusing to read the record. He was (and is) a centrist.

By all reports he was a good constitutional scholar. I think he’s going have decent instincts about changing some (not all) of Bush’s nastiness. But power gained is difficult to surrender, and I expect some of those around Obama (if not Obama himself) to want to hold on to some of that power that Bush/Cheney managed to wrench away from Congress and the Courts.

Obama is making the right noises: close Guantanamo, enact an Exec Order explicitly banning torture, and defining torture.

All we can do is watch, and remind President(-elect) Obama that we are his New Model Army. We may just stay home in 2012.

well, let’s wait and see what kind of dog he buys for the girls

When I cast my vote it was a vote for Obama not a vote against McCain

“managed to wrench away from Congress and the Courts”

I thought they sort of rolled over and handed it to him

I expect (and always did) that he will be a slightly less corporate, slightly better on social issues, and possibly more competent Bill Clinton. Knew that from the beginning. By the time of Montana’s last in the Union primary, he was the best on offer. Still is. On the other hand, I have been voting for the lesser of two weevils for more than 35 years.

Greenwald has an amazing Rahm story, if you haven’t already read it.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/g…..index.html

ot – barney frank’s hearing tomorrow (with paulson, bernanke and bair together in the first panel) is now scheduled to start at 9:30 am.

Yep. My point exactly.

So was mine, BB. So was mine.

But I didn’t hold any starry-eyed ideas that Barack Obama is the second coming of Eugene V. Debs or William Jennings Bryan or Huey “Kingfish” Long.

707! that is the funniest thing i’ve read all day.

:)

I understand where you are coming from but I just don’t buy it. I can’t square being a good Constitutional scholar with backing the FISA Amendments Act and its assault on the 4th Amendment. He could have torpedoed the whole deal or gone for an extension to kick it to his Administration instead he backed Hoyer, Reid, Pelosi, and Rockefeller’s push to get it passed before the election.

He is already backtracking from his promise to get out of Iraq. He says only that he will talk to the Joint Chiefs about it. No mention of the 16 months anymore. And of course there was all the wiggle room he left in his plan for troops to carry out other functions. My main hope here is that once he starts a withdrawal the dynamics of the situation won’t leave him any options but for a near complete withdrawal on the 16 month timetable.

julia’s upstairs

Thanks, there is still hope!

He said in the interview on Sunday that as soon as possible after he takes office, he will bring together the joint chiefs and his security team and draft a plan to draw down troops in Iraq. That is exactly what he has always said he would do. 16 months was always a hopeful target not an absolute number, but it still seems to be his goal if possible.

even quoted it in the previous thread.

Seeing Obama’s choices and decisions so far, you know he really could nominate Cass Sunstein to the Supreme Court. And I’m thinking that a lot of those investigations and accountability that we were all hoping for? We can kiss most of them good-bye.

USDA just announced that in 2007, before shrub’s economic apocalypse, 37 million Americans went hungry and 12 million were constantly hungry. To the best of my knowledge, no one starved under McCarthy. As Caligula’s reign comes to an end, millions are homeless and perhaps 1 in 5 will sometime this year go to bed hungry. Whatever y’all
might think Obama’s political failings, he has to bring an end to this nightmare. And I think we need to have some faith that he will (and I say this as someone who did not support him in the primary)

For all the nay sayers, I would just say that it really is too early to pass judgments until he can and has actually done something. I am not exactly thrilled with many of the people he has surrounded himself with, but neither am I entirely surprised. As BCT & I have both said, he is not and never has been a real liberal. He is a moderate centrist. He also seems to like to surround himself with divergent views. What he said on Sunday (and often with real passion) was encouraging, but we need to wait and see what he actually does.

i’m not planning on kissing anything good bye. i’d rather fight ‘em – just haven’t figured out how to do that.

Blub – Charley McCarthy was a ventriloquist’s dummy from the 50s. Point taken otherwise.

it really is too early to pass judgments until he can and has actually done something.

except that he already has done lots of somethings.

This is what strikes me about most of what we are hearing. Either he had a plan to withdraw from Iraq within 16 months or he didn’t. We made fun of Bush because he would portray his commitments as “aspirational”. It seems like this is what is happening with Obama. During most of his campaign he spoke in generalities. But there were some cases where he didn’t, but now what little there was that was concrete is becoming aspirational. You know he could have said I will consult with the Joint Chiefs to see that we get our troops out in 16 months. He didn’t.

He has not enacted a single policy nor introduced any legislation into Congress. We cannot judge how he will govern until he actually starts governing. So far he has not even named even a single cabinet appointment. After he does, we might – and I emphasize might – have some basis for judgment. Until then it is all reading tea leaves and not worth getting worked up over.

During the campaign he always said that he wanted to get the troops out within 16 months if conditions allowed and would consult with the military brass to get them out as soon as possible. He is not saying anything now that he has not said all along. I have no idea what you heard, but that is what he said.

From where I’m sitting Obama is not a moderate centrist. He’s a conservative, maybe not a winger, but not a moderate. I think that this is going to create a lot of problems for him because on many issues (just as happened with this last Congress) the country is to the left of him.

I would also point out that most of his economic team is made up of Chicago School neoliberal Washington Consensus DLCers and the way they think, the solutions they come up with, are not going to get us out of the current recession/depression/meltdown.

He has not enacted a single policy nor introduced any legislation into Congress.

That really isn’t true. He has already used his clout to get the FISA Amendments Act and $700 billion bailout passed. That legislation has his fingerprints all over them and neither would have passed or passed in their current form without his signing off on them.

We cannot judge how he will govern until he actually starts governing.

i am not judging him on what what he is going to do in the future (although i do think we are getting some major clues about that). i am judging him on what he has already done – not saying you have to do the same, but it’s not a blank slate we are looking at.

He is not saying anything now that he has not said all along. I have no idea what you heard, but that is what he said.

It is a difference in emphasis. During the campaign, the 16 months was the primary text and the qualifications were in the end notes. Now the qualfications are the main text and the 16 months appears relegated to the notes.

He is truly centrist on most issue, but veers slightly left or right on different issues. Yes the most of country is to the left of him, but I have been saying that for over a year. He is a Chicago Machine politician, which means he leans corporatist on many issues. It also means that this is modified by strong ties to organized labor (as well as to the communities he helped organize). His positions on trade and the minimum wage for instance are more progressive as a result. I think the fact that I was not an early supporter and have never been an really ardent supporter make me a little less excitable about this. I don’t expect him to change the world, just to make things better, to fix much of what is broken, and to govern competently.

Give it up, Dr. Dick.
Me? Glass of bourbon.

And as selise points out Obama is not a blank slate and it is precisely this (FISA, the bailout, all of the Clinton retreads who surround him, Lieberman) that brings into question pretty much anything he says whether it is about the Iraqi withdrawal or Guantanamo. When he wants to deliver something to someone, he seems more than able to do it. But when it comes to matters that are important to us, we get either silence, generalities, or hedging.

Not sure about the FISA vote. It looked at the time like the Congressional leadership was behind it. As for the current bailout, pretty much anyone reasonable (including Krugman and Delong – who both hate the Chicago School) backed it. What nobody counted on was that the administration would so egregiously fuck this up and fail to appoint the mandatory regulatory body. The biggest problem with the bailout is in the implementation, not the concept (though that is admittedly flawed). In retrospect there should have been more stringent oversight provisions and a phased appropriation of the money to insure that it was used properly, but the feeling at the time was that something needed to be done immediately. Obama seems to have followed the best advice available at the time.

I don’t expect him to change the world, just to make things better, to fix much of what is broken, and to govern competently.

This is where we differ. I don’t think the people he has around him can fix what is broken. Not being quite as bad as Bush is still bad.

Ok. I’m off to bed. More young minds to corrupt tomorrow.

nite doctor

What nobody counted on was that the administration would so egregiously fuck this up and fail to appoint the mandatory regulatory body

one nobody right here – my primary complaints about the bailout were: no transparency, no accountability, no regulation.

nite.

Re FISA, if Obama had wished to lead on it, the Congressional Democrats would have followed him on it as they did on the bailout or as the Senate is currently doing with Lieberman.

Re the bailout, perhaps I am one of those who would count as unreasonable because I thought it was a cruel and incredibly expensive hoax from the get-go. And no, it was never a question of oversight. There was tons of oversight written into the bill. The problem was that it was all a joke and CYA. And no it isn’t the implementation either. The whole concept was flawed. This too was known from the beginning and written about by a lot us here.

As I said before when Obama wants something done it gets done. However the two major instances when this has happened: FISA and the bailout are two of the most poorly thought through and stupid pieces of legislation I have ever seen.

Pretty typical of the North, actually.

Heard that figure for her book, too. Can’t imagine it will do well, as her fans are about as literate as she is. So who’s going to buy it? Maybe a few reporters seeking to find out what happened to all those expensive clothes bought in the “fake America” parts of the country.
In a few short months, the book will be consigned to the bargain bin at Half Price Books, where it belongs.