The Secret Service agents who guard the four candidates and their families have the job of giving them code names, which the Washington Post is now reporting. And leaving aside the questionable publicising of supposedly secret codes, the names are surprisingly relevant to the personalities of Obama, McCain, Biden, and Palin.

Continue reading...

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly was cutting in his disapproval after Jamie Lynn Spears, the 16-year-old sister of pop star Britney, announced her pregnancy last year. So plenty of sharp-eared bloggers were ready to call him out when O'Reilly cautioned this month against judging the family of Sarah Palin in the wake of her teenage daughter Bristol's pregnancy.

If O'Reilly considered young Spears' parents "pinheads" who have "little control over" their daughter, what made Palin's situation different? Well, the host himself gave a strange answer today ...

Continue reading...

The presidential election may just be getting a lot funnier.

It seems that Tina Fey and the producers of Saturday Night Live are discussing her return to the show this year to play Sarah Palin, for whom she's an undeniable dead ringer - spectacles and all.

In her much anticipated interview with Charlie Gibson on ABC news last night, Palin invoked Abraham Lincoln in backing away from Gibson's suggestion she thought the war in Iraq is a "task from God".

GIBSON: You said recently in your old church, Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PALIN: Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right, also for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GIBSON: Are we fighting a Holy War?
PALIN: That's a repeat of Abraham Lincoln's words, when he said, first he suggested, never presume to know what God's will is, and I would never presume to know God's will or to speak God's words, but what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that's a repeat in my comments, was, let us not pray that God is on our side, in a war, or any other time. But let us pray that we are on God's side. That's what that comment was all about, Charlie.

According to historian Jim Oakes of the City University of New York, Graduate Centre, she misinterprets Lincoln's beliefs about God's role in war.

Continue reading...

Washington anti-tax organisation Club for Growth was quick to applaud McCain's pick of Sarah Palin. About an hour before the official announcement August 29, a spokeswoman for the group praised her as "a genuine reformer who has taken on wasteful spending in her own state".

President Pat Toomey said:

At a time when many Republicans are still clinging to pork-barrel politics, Governor Palin has quickly become a leader on this issue. She is a principled reformer who understands how badly wasteful spending has marred the Republican brand.

But since then Republican narrative of Palin as the killer of the "bridge to nowhere" has been exploded by the news media, and it's been revealed that far from rejecting pork barrel money, as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin hired a lobbyist to secure $27m in federal funds for the town. Meanwhile, in fiscal year 2008, Alaska received more federal pork-barrel funds, also known as earmarks, from Washington per capita than any other state, and more than 10 times the national average.

I called up Club for Growth spokeswoman Nachama Soloveichik to see if the group had any second thoughts, and to see if I could get her to walk back the initial support. The group is sticking with her, but Soloveichik's basic message had altered slightly.
Continue reading...

What's this? Another Palin-inspired political storm brewing?

After Sarah Palin's spirited attacks on elitist media during her acceptance speech at the Republican convention last week (a tactic, surely, to prevent such a trend continuing), there was a school of thought that she had made herself fairly immune to further criticism - for a while at least.

But the American press is getting on with things, and the Washington Post has obtained a log of Palin's expenses and carried out an analysis of what it reveals. Continue reading...

The Politico and the Washington Post are using the word "ad-lib" to describe Sarah Palin's joke last night about the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull (answer: lipstick).

But if you believe the dictionary definition of the term, Palin's unscripted one-liner was hardly improvised. A McCain aide recalls Palin making the same joke earlier this week. One pro-Palin blogger remembers her including the joke in a newspaper op-ed column before she ran for governor.

Having trouble following the media 'feeding frenzy' over Republican vice presidential pick Sarah Palin? Blog 23/6 promises 'some of the news, most of the time', and it delivers with a 60 second distillation of US cable news coverage of the Sarah Palin nomination.

Tip of the hat to Charles Arthur over at Guardian Technology for sending us the link.

Republicans, RNC08, Sarah Palin

The Republicans are hitting back against not only the Democrats but also against what they see as unfair treatment by the media. The folks at non-partisan FactCheck.org haven't got around to Fisking the speech by Rudy Guiliani or vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, but the Republicans are showing their usual discipline on hammering home talking points. FactCheck has reviewed the speeches of Democrat turned independent Senator Joseph Lieberman and former presidential candidate and Republican Senator Fred Thompson. FactCheck found:

• Lieberman said Obama hadn't "reached across party lines" to accomplish "anything significant," though Obama has teamed with GOP Sens. Tom Coburn and Richard Lugar to pass laws enhancing government transparency and curtailing the proliferation of nuclear and conventional weapons.
• Thompson repeated misleading claims about Obama's tax program, saying it would bring "one of the largest tax increases in American history." But as increases go, Obama's package is hardly a history-maker. It would raise taxes for families with incomes above $250,000. Most people would see a cut.
• Lieberman also accused Obama of "voting to cut off funding for our American troops on the battlefield." But Obama's only vote against a war-funding bill came after Bush vetoed a version of the bill Obama had supported - and McCain urged the veto.

The Republicans always hammer the Democrats on taxes, even if many of their attacks run foul of the facts. FactCheck documents their reports with links off to original reporting or source material such as John McCain press releases. They also check the facts on political advertising, and they took the Obama campaign to task for an ad that they are running in Michigan claiming that John McCain does not support loans to help the beleaguered auto industry in the state. It was true, but it isn't now.
If you like your fact-checking with graphics, check out PolitiFact's Truth-o-meter. They have a point-by-point fact check of major points made in adverts, by candidates, by their running mates and by groups such as MoveOn.org.
In other news, a video of Republican strategist Mike Murphy and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan criticising McCain's choice of Palin for VP is the political viral video of the day.

RepublicanConvention, Republicans, RNC08, Untitled

I'm totally baffled by Mitt Romney's speech to the GOP convention, which just ended. The conventioneers responded like the crocodiles being fed raw meat in the Bond flick Live and Let Die. But taken even on their face, his words are an indictment of the Republican party whose nomination he spent roughly $35m to win.

Continue reading...

The National Institute on Money in State Politics, an indispensable source for statehouse reporters, yesterday put together a nice analysis of Sarah Palin's campaign finance reports from her runs for lieutenant governor in 2002 (unsuccessful) and her primary and general gubernatorial races in 2006.

I compared the numbers to her predecessor Frank Murkowski's campaign finance reports from 2002, his last successful run. At the very least, the numbers indicate she ran outside the state GOP establishment, if not against it.

Continue reading...

A new advert from the McCain camp pits GOP veep candidate Sarah Palin up against Barack Obama. Never mind that MSNBC's First Read blog finds it mostly inaccurate, the novelty is in the match-up of a VP candidate and a presidential candidate. I don't recall ever seeing anything like it, certainly not in my lifetime.

March Ambinder, for one, ponders: "Is the frame of the race now Obama v. Palin? Is that the way to elect John McCain? Will she be more popular than he?"

The comparison has been made ad nauseam already, but the saga of Bristol Palin is eerily similar to the plot of last year's award-winning movie Juno. Are we missing any similarities here?

Juno MacGuff: Strangely named small-town girl who is impregnated by her brown-haired athlete boyfriend, Paulie. She must navigate a whole lot of unwanted attention to bring her baby to term -- getting an abortion is quickly ruled out -- while developing a stable long-term relationship with the boy.

Bristol Palin: Strangely named small-town girl who is impregnated by her brown-haired athlete boyfriend, Levi. She must navigate a whole lot of unwanted attention to bring her baby to term -- getting an abortion is quickly ruled out -- while developing a stable long-term relationship with the boy.

Republican vice-presidential pick Sarah Palin doesn't seem to think much of the government's role in promoting culture.

In light of Time's revelation today that she threatened to fire a Wasilla, Alaska librarian who refused to help her ban books, I was keenly interested to learn that she sought to downsize the three-member staff of the Wasilla city museum in 1997 even as the city was flush with cash.

Continue reading...

The Republicans, whom Ann Friedman at the American Prospect called the party of "faux-feminism" for their pick of anti-choice Sarah Palin as vice-presidential nominee, hopes to rally supporters by describing as sexist legitimate criticism of Palin's record as Alaska governor.

I just got this note from the RNC press office. It's a comment from former HP CEO and chairman Carly Fiorina, who has taken on new life as a Republican hachet-gal:

I am appalled by the Obama campaign's attempts to belittle Governor Sarah Palin's experience. The facts are that Sarah Palin has made more executive decisions as a Mayor and Governor than Barack Obama has made in his life. Because of Hillary Clinton's historic run for the Presidency and the treatment she received, American women are more highly tuned than ever to recognize and decry sexism in all its forms. They will not tolerate sexist treatment of Governor Palin.

American women know sexism when they see it. But with comments like this, and by invoking Hillary Clinton when it's totally inappropriate (what does she have to do with attacks Obama has made on Palin's record?), the GOP makes a mockery of legitimate denunciations of sexism.

Criticising Palin's record as guv isn't sexist, it's what politicians are supposed to do.