That Palin will step aside, or that McCain will dump her.

Thing is, he could then pick someone like Romney or Ridge or Lieberman. He's already seen that shoring up the base alone likely won't get him where he needs to be. So why not throw another Hail Mary and trade Palin for someone who would appeal to the moderates, indies, some conservative Dems, and the portion of the base that would rather be found dead in a ditch than vote Dem and that don't want to sit out the election.

He would lose the hardcore values conservatives for whom choice is a make or break issue. But they wouldn't vote for Obama either. Would Barr then be their man, and could he take enough votes away from McCain to assure an Obama victory?

I have no flippin' clue.

Reading live blogs. Some think Obama did better. Others think McCain trounced him. People looking at the same thing and interpreting it altogether differently. Which pretty much explains the last eight years.

Snagged in its entirety from John Cole because it pretty much says it all afaic:

"Apparently there is a debate tonight. The funny thing about it is I really don’t even care. There is, quite honestly, nothing Obama could say that would make me not vote for him. His opening statement could be “My name is Barack Hussein Obama, and I am a muslim, and winning this election is all part of a plot to turn the United States into my own personal caliphate,” and I would shrug and vote for him anyway because at least he would go about it in a competent manner. Compared to the last eight years with C+ Augustus and Darth Cheney and the possibility of four more with Johnny Drama and Bible Spice, that would be preferable."

But there's a Debate Drinking Game, if you're interested.

I'll be bookin' it.

I can't keep track

Hmm...this does correlate with my tendency toward, well, messiness. but as the article said, there's likely a fair amount of overlap.

Conservatives and liberals leave behind distinct "behavioral residue" that can be picked up by savvy scientists and possibly other observers, according to the study by New York University psychologist John Jost and his colleagues. The results are set for publication in a forthcoming issue of the journal Political Psychology....

...Conservative rooms tended to be cleaner, more brightly lit, better organized, less cluttered, and also more conventional and ordinary in terms of decoration,"...Liberals' rooms on the other hand were marked by more clutter, including more CDs, a greater variety of CDs, a greater variety of books and more color in the room in general.

And this interesting bit of trivia:

The terms of left-right political leanings was originally based on the seating arrangement of those in the French parliament during the time of the French Revolution.)

Allons, les enfants de la Patrie...

Watching Letterman. McCain blew him off this evening. OMG, is he pissed.

"Are we suspending it (the campaign) because of the economy, or because the poll numbers are sliding?"

In other news,
About why Secretary Paulson asked for seven hundred billion dollars:

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

With that, satire writers sadly capped their pens and added monster.com to their bookmark bar.

You know it's time to lay off the political blogs when you start dreaming about poll numbers.

A very interesting analysis. Thanks to scbutler for pointing it out.

"Anyone who's spent time around radical leftists knows that one of the worst insults you can level at them is "liberal". Liberals aren't socialists, or radicals, or anything like that. Liberals want to keep capitalism and reconfigure it to satisfy their ideas of fairness and equality; to a socialist, this is all a matter of quibbling over the terms of oppression rather than abolishing it. A liberal, then, to a socialist, is someone who speaks about equality and fairness while acting to ensure that neither will come about. The goals of socialists and the goals of liberals are completely at odds with one another, and to conflate the two is to make it difficult to talk about either liberalism or socialism, and by extension makes it difficult to discuss other political ideas which are similar-or completely dissimilar- to them."

Discussions like this are why I'm an LJ addict.

64 years ago, someone (the source is questionable) referred to presidential candidate Thomas E Dewey, a short man with a mustache and a stiff way of holding himself, as looking like "the bridegroom on the wedding cake." Up to that time, Dewey had been expected to beat Harry Truman, but some people felt that that comment poked a hole and let just enough air out of his image to drive some folks over to Truman. The election will be close, and anything can happen, but if McCain/Palin lose, I wonder if someone will look back at Tina Fey's spot-on impersonation of Palin and look at the polls and determine that the air started leaking out of the image around that time. Granted, I was never a fan, but I can't look at that woman now without hearing "I can see Russia from my house!"

Interesting day yesterday.

I will vote for whoever wins the Democratic nomination. I'd prefer Obama, but will vote for Clinton. Like others, I take exception to those "it's 3am--do you know who will answer the red phone" ads. But Clinton is, I think, trying to draw those Obama Republicans and Indies who worry about her strength. Judging by yesterday's outcomes, the ploy may have worked.

I'm not convinced idealism will carry the day here. Call me a cynic.

The thing I fear is that if Clinton wins it all, she'll just about get her footing when her husband will get caught in some scandal, sexual, financial, or other. It's possible he may behave for 4 years, but I admit that I don't trust him to not give his self-destructive streak an airing. If that happens, that's all the press will report for two years at least. Congress will have hearings, all the resident moralists will tut-tut, and nothing of worth will be accomplished for the balance of Clinton's presidency. Then the Republicans will have a much better shot in 2012.

I want to be wrong. But we're top-heavy with hypocrites in this country, sexual and otherwise, and if Clinton-the-ex-pres puts a foot wrong, Clinton the current pres will pay the price.

As a follow-up to the previous post...

How many times over the next two years will The Press inform us that Nancy Pelosi "scolded" the President, or Republican representatives, or any other group of mostly males on the Hill. Men castigate. Men yell. Men argue. But when it's a woman politico doing the castigating, I have often, if not always, seen it referred to as "scolding", with all the Mommy/Nanny "she never lets us have any fun" sticks-thumb-in-mouth-and-sulks that this implies. Not flattering to the woman, but is it any more flattering to the adult males who have been relegated to the status of playroom prankster who put the dead mouse in his little sister's bed?

"Nags". That's the other one. Because if she isn't scolding, she's nagging, and we all know what that means.

Bitch deserved it.

Not the biggest fan of The Huffington Post, but I liked this:

When people write, "Is America ready for a female president?" they need to know how insulting that is to women. These are the doubt planters. Tell 'em to go to hell. They're not asking, they're undermining. If you want to make someone feel unwell, don't say, "You look terrible", because he'll immediately bounce back with, "I feel fine!" But if you ASK, if you say, "Do you feel all right?" the doubt sets right in. "Why? Why do you ask? What's wrong?" That's what they're doing. "Is America READY for a woman president?" "Why? What's going to happen??"

Do Republicans really not see the irony when they complain the the Democrats are shoving legislation down their throats?

As the Washington Press Corps and the various pundits trot out the same old same old about fractured Democrats and the non-reality-based perceptions of Nancy Pelosi's weaknesses (laced with some sexism just to add flavor), pardon me while I pick myself off the floor and ponder the name of the man who allowed her some credit for what she's accomplished, Tom freakin' Delay:

On a panel discussing the possibilities for Time's Person of the Year award, Delay said:

"I'm going to shock you," said he. "I think the real Person of the Year ought to be Nancy Pelosi, the new speaker of the House. She worked for years putting a strategy together, building a huge coalition. She held the Democrats together in the House like I have never seen before. She is going to change America!"

Hey, journalists? When Tom freakin' Delay gives a better sense of Nancy Pelosi's accomplishments than you do, I think you should rethink what you're doing.

Me again, admitting that I am not looking forward to all the subtle and not-so-subtle misrepresentations of Pelosi that I'll be hearing from Dana Milbank (sp?) and his ilk over the next few years.

I do read the Huffington Post most every day, just to see what the headlines are. I should have learned by now that this isn't always the best way to learn what's going on. They cherry-pick. Today's example, a headline that blared "Throw the bums out!" So I check out the story the headline links to, and find a pretty evenhanded article in the LA Times about differences in the Repub and Dem approaches to canvassing and persuading potential voters. The HuffPo headline came from the following paragraph:

That contrast underscores a central question to be answered Tuesday in this South Florida House district and other competitive races across the country: Which political force will prove stronger — the niche-marketing effort, led by GOP strategist Karl Rove and powered by computerized outreach methods, or the classic "throw the bums out" (my bolding) mood of an electorate uneasy with the Iraq war and unhappy with one-party rule?

The headline HuffPo chose to post implied a more partisan, emotional article.

This isn't the first time they've done this. Their headlines linking to stories about the Haggard scandal implied that Haggard had confessed to an affair with Mike Jones, when at the time he had done no such thing. I can't recall other specific examples offhand, but there have been several instances where I've read the linked article and thought that the headline they posted was misleading.

As much as I sympathize with their general POV, my feeling is that if you can't nail them with the unvarnished truth, wait until you have some truth in hand that you can nail them with. Don't invent it. Don't speculate and don't pick selected facts and blow them out of proportion. We've seen enough of that over the past few years. Just the facts. Bloody hell, aren't those enough?

"Kerry screwed up one line. The Repubs have screwed up six years."