We have been wondering what October Surprise the Repubs would bring to try and influence the presidential election. Okay, so they are a week early. Every few hours now the preznit comes on TV with a regal backdrop to read slowly and carefully through the script someone has written for him. He repeats the word "crisis" for effect. I have to admit, he makes me nervous. Should I go to the bank today and take out all my cash? Will Wachovia be open on Monday? Or will I have to figure out how to apply to the FDIC to get my money at some future date, maybe months from now. Will my credit rating be destroyed by then because we can't pay our bills? I don't know what to do. But I'll say this. If you have money that you can take out in cash today and you don't have any operating cash at home. Go get several thousand dollars in cash and take it home today. If the banks are fine on Monday, you can put it back. If the Banks fail this week end, neither your checkbook nor your debit card are any good.

I heard yesterday that about 1/3 of the banks failed to create the great depression. There was no FDIC at the time and all investors just lost all their money. Hopefully the FDIC will work.

So with the boy who cried "Wolf" still running the show (Weapons of mass destruction! I'm a war president! Stockpiles of chemical weapons! Nucular weapons! The war will pay for itself! Al Quaida in Iraq!) there is zero confidence that the ship is actually about to run on the rocks. He has no standing to say anything and even the 28% approval rating crowd is abandoning him in his final days. While I'll continue to call them the 28%ers because ALL my relatives seem to be in that crowd wholeheartedly and it seems like they alone are 28%, the preznit's actual approval rating was at 19% yesterday.

McCane was down 12% in a new poll out today and he's suspending his campaign to rush to Washington (actually he hasn't made it there since April, but maybe they'll hold the vote for him) and appear to be leading the Repubs somehow. He's cancelled the Vice Presidental debate because of the crisis.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! That is a funny one don't you think? You had to know that was coming. She's in a political science rehab program trying to teach her something about the way the government works, because she knows NOTHING ABOUT ANYTHING (5 colleges in 6 years to get a bachelor's degree. Who does that? Do you know someone else who went to 5 colleges to get their bachelor's? I don't. Why do you go to 5 colleges? Well it's because you flunked out of several, maybe 4. We'll wait on the release of her transcripts).

And did you see the conditions under which the Treasury secretary wants to accept 700 billion dollars!!!!!!!? First and foremost . . . (you guessed it) NO OVERSIGHT. So he's standing there saying. "Look, we absolutely wrecked the ship of state, the USS United States of America. She's on the shoals. But you give me 700 billion to spread among my campaign supporters (Believe me Haliburton subsidiaries will get their share) or else I condemn you and you leftist leaning citizens to the great depression on steroids."

You've done a heckofa job Georgie.

Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, have all failed creating an unparalelled financial crisis in our history.

Who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that oversees banking deregulation?

John McCain

Is the Bush administration capable of killing Osama bin Laden at any time but waiting until October, a couple of weeks prior to the election to blast him to bits? There are those who think that is the plan.

I read the book "Escape" this weekend. The writer was the first woman to escape from the polygamist group, the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints which is now located in Texas. She managed to get away with her children while they were in Arizona a couple of years ago. This biography is a harrowing, unbelievable story of greed, power, mind control, sexual abuse, verbal and physical abuse. It starts out bad and then gets worse on every page. If everyone had read the book, the government would be intervening. It is shocking that children have been placed back in the homes of polygamists. They are not having a different but normal life. It is a cult in the worst sense. Their beliefs are shocking, all designed to keep women and children in slavery. Young men are routinely exiled when in their teens.

It is difficult to read because of the unrelenting abuse, but we all need to read it. I'm especially disturbed that some of the belief structure may come from the LDS that we see all around us. They should be leading the fight to end the FLDS unless of course, they support them.

I read today that "Drill, baby, drill," is about as useful as saying "typewriters, baby, typewriters." It is the answer for the last century. What if we could increase our oil production by the maximum, 3%? What difference would that make? How do we balance the loss of jobs and income of a spill on the Gulf Coast to having one more well to pump crude. I had a neighbor talking to me Saturday about how the Exxon Valdez spill and how little impact that actually has over time. Guess what? He's a retired Exxon employee. Exxon has agreed to pay about 375 million in clean up costs. The actual costs are 33% higher than that. Not to mention the lost jobs. Let's ask the fishermen and the tour guides if it made a difference to them.

We are always gearing up to fight the last war.

I say "hydrogen, baby, hydrogen!"

The lies being put forward by the McCain-Palin campaign are astonishing and go beyond anything that I have ever seen before in my lifetime. I thought Bush 44 was an amazing fabricator of fiction, but the entire McCain-Palin campaign now seems to be based on falsehoods.

See this website for lies. Don't fail to look at this link!

Palin claims that her state produces 20% of America's energy and is the number one producer of energy. Actually . . . no. Alaska produces 3.5% of the nation's energy, ranking 9th among the states, producing only 1/5th of the amount of Texas, 1/3 of Louisiana's contribution. Less than Pennsylvania or Kentucky. When confronted with the facts she revised to say that Alaska produced 20% of our oil and gas. Actually . . . no--Only 7.4% of the oil and gas, And these numbers are declining every year. This chart is stunning.

The woman from nowhere. Read to the end.

http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=12066224

New York Times editorial

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/opinion/13sat1.html?_r=1&ei=5070&oref=slogin&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print

Let's be clear. Sarah Palin is the queen of earmarks. She has never been against earmarks, rather as mayor of a small Alaskan town and as governor of Alaska, she has worked actively to successfully secure more Federal money for her constiuents than any other politician. She made $200,000,000.00 in requests this year for her 600,000 population state and that request is down $50,000,000.00 from last year.

Sarah Palin campaigned for governor by supporting the bridge to nowhere. She wore T-shirts to support it, made speeches. When it became a national embarrassment the U.S. Congress withdrew support for the project, but allowed Palin to keep $230,000,000.00 for that project or any other project she wanted. Since the bridge was going to cost an additional hundred million or so that the state would have to bring to the table, Palin withdrew her support, kept all the money and spent it elsewhere. She spent $10,000,000.00 plus on a road to the bridge after it was clear there would be no bridge. Go figure. I mean it was just ten million, right?

As an executive, she has fired numerous career employees, some because they would not take illegal orders from her. She has harrassed a former brother in law with all the power of the governor's office. She has an attorney on a
hundred thousand dollar retainer to defend her from criminal charges in this matter.

Sarah Palin has a checkered past at best, attending 5 or 6 colleges (no one seems to be sure how many) before graduating. She eloped as a pregnant young woman herself and her daughter is reliving that difficulty now thrust on a national stage by her unthinking parents.

Sarah has for most of her life been a member of the Assembly of God denomination. Pentacostal. Holy Rollers. Charismatics. They have very specific and unusual beliefs that most Christians, if they knew about them, would find ridiculous or even stupid. The hair style is part of her religion. Just as weird as the Mormon cult that was recently in the news. Videos of what passes for worship at her church are nothing less than shocking--members claiming to heal cancer victims in healing services.

What Sarah Palin does not lack is self confidence or an ability to smile while telling outrageous lies to TV cameras. At best she is a minitature Jesse Ventura style governor. At worst she a pitiful woman thrust forward in the falsehood that the Republican party represents women in some way, when it actually hates women. Palin herself is described as the anti-feminist.

Palin is an advocate of teaching creationism in schools, she is for abstinence only sex education (worked well for her family), and she raised taxes in Alaska by a large amount. She is a faux candidate.

When confronted by the lies about her campaign positions, she and John McCain have said they are not lying that they are telling the truth. Everyone can see they are lying.

Say the lie. Own it. Repeat it. Defend it. Be indignant when challenged. Condemn those who challenge you. Repeat the process as often as possible. Thank you Karl Rove.

Please America, don't fall for it again.

Why didn't the repubs just put up Ann Coulter as VP?

Vanity Fair gave this assesment of the outfits worn by Mrs. McCain and Mrs. Bush to open the Repub convention.

"So we asked our fashion department to price out their outfits.

Laura Bush
Oscar de la Renta suit: $2,500Stuart Weitzman heels: $325Pearl stud earrings: $600–$1,500Total: Between $3,425 and $4,325

Cindy McCain
Oscar de la Renta dress: $3,000Chanel J12 White Ceramic Watch: $4,500Three-carat diamond earrings: $280,000Four-strand pearl necklace: $11,000–$25,000Shoes, designer unknown: $600Total: Between $299,100 and $313,100 Wow!

Good middle class values represented there.

From the Washington Post: Only 36 of the 2,380 delegates seated on the convention floor are black, the lowest number since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies began tracking diversity at political conventions 40 years ago.

I'll bet you $1000 that Sarah Palin couldn't take a blank map of the world and place 50 countries on it correctly.

In his article in Military.com, Phillip Butler, a student at the U.S. Naval Academy with John McCain cites that McCain graduated 795th out of 800 in his class. He also questions whether he would have graduated at all had he not been the son and grandson of admirals.

Read his article here.

Sarah Palin has had 20 months of executive experience as governor of Alaska. She is commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard! Woo Hoo! She has more military experience than even George Bush.

Unfortunately Alaska has only about 1/5th of one percent of the people in the United States of America--.22 percent. The mayors of Austin, TX, Jacksonville, FL, and San Jose, CA are bigger executives.

Under Sarah Palin, Alaska has received more dollars per person than any other state in federal ear marks. Alaska has no state income tax, but 11.2 Billion in income, largely from the oil industry.

Oh and by the way. The wikipedia bio was scrubbed clean by someone the day before she was announced as the vice-presidential candidate. Lots of cool comments were added, like her nickname, Sarah Barracuda, for her intense play in basketball.

Let's see if I were a presidential candidate, I'd look for someone with a four month old infant and an pregnant unwed teenager to look after. I wonder who I'll pick for attorney general or head of the CIA.

Sarah Palin on the war in Iraq--

"I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq."

A while back I completely stopped reading the magazine I get from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. You'd think that as a graduate I'd want to see what was going on. But I don't wish to follow them anymore. It was the article by the president of the institution, Albert Mohler, that advocated no use of birth control methods as being what God intended. He said that every act of sexual intercourse should carry with it the risk of pregnancy. Albert wants his women subservient and pregnant. I guess he's envious of all those big Mormon families and their subsequent increases in baptisms as the Southern Baptist Convention has slipped into decline. Mohler is another member of the "Flat Earth Caucus," (okay so I stole that from John Kerry) denying science in the same ways that Christians fought against evolution in the 1890's. She denies global warming and species extinctions as well.

There are lot of these flat earthers. Sarah Palin certainly is a poster girl for them. An anti-feminist, she bore her 5th child, a Down syndrome boy, at age 44, and now we are subjected to watching her 17 year old daughter, 5 months pregnant herself, holding the baby so Mom can speak to the media. You have to realize that Bristol is going to raise both babies so Mom can go be powerful. Palin is, of course, against teaching birth control methods to children. She'd rather her own unmarried teenaged daughter were pregnant than that she understood birth control. Why if she knew anything about birth control, she might be promiscuous. Wait . . .

So the poster we will look at for this Vice-Presidential candidate is the woman standing in front of her five kids, one of them pregnant holding the baby, Dad standing behind in his waders, and gun racks and American flags filling the background. Palin has only been a Republican for 12 years. Before that she belonged to the Alaska Independence Party, that advocates that the vote to make Alaska the 50th state was illegal. The party calls for the seccession of Alaska from the United States. Palin gave the opening speech for the party convention in 2008. Yes, 2008. She attended four colleges before graduating from the Unversity of Idaho with a B.S. in Journalism. I wonder what her rank in class was. Why did she leave those first three colleges? (There is a question about whether she atted four or five colleges--isn't that unbelieveable?)

Sarah Palin had never been out of the country until she became governor, when she traveled to Kuwait and Germany to visit Alaskan soldiers. Have all the governors been to the middle east to visit their soldiers? She was a beauty pageant winner and then Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, a town about 1/4th the size of my town, Peachtree City, Georgia. So logically, any former mayor of PTC is 4 times as qualified as Palin to be Vice-President. If you read over her biography on Wikipedia, you'll quickly get the picture of a ruthless, dictatorial, leadership style, that destroys her opponents, and fires underlings for political reasons. Thus she fits right in with what has been going on in Washington for 8 years. She has lobbied against putting polar bears on the endangered species list because it might hurt oil and gas industries to do so. Alaska is so awash with money from the oil and gas industry that they have given $1200 to each taxpayer from taxes paid by this industry.

As mayor of Wasilla she lobbied for and got Federal emarks totalling 27 million dollars for the 9000 population town. That is $3,000 for every man, woman, and child in town, coming from the federal government. Sweet.

Radical right winger does not begin to describe this woman. Vicious, gun-toting, Cro-Magnon bible thumper, might be close. Fear her. She is no sweetie pie.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin