The Watercooler for 09/06/08 5:00 PM

Sarah Palin seems to be dominating the conversation.

Obama criticised her hypocrisy today, and went after McCain.

The sooner she becomes a footnote, the better

First the levees. 

The levee that protects 40,000 people from Lake Okeechobee is growing weaker.

Sadly instead of repairing it, they just keep draining and refilling the lake,  then draining it again as hurricanes come.   Republicans in charge of a state don't know how to run things and handle things.

More about Florida and the Republicans here with ugly attitudes.

Florida Republicans pat themselves on the back and brag about how divisive their convention was.

The Attorney General for Florida loves the attack stuff...the "slicing and dicing" he calls it.

"Rudy Giuliani sliced and diced," said McCollum. "Here's a guy that took the other guy apart, and we loved that last night."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/the-palin-choice-and-the_b_123012.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/a-line-of-attack-the-obam_b_124432.html

Palin needs to be hit hard and hit now. Hesitating to slam her with some well-produced attack ads would be like John Kerry failing to respond to the Swift Boaters.

Sarah Palin is this election's Grand Swift Boater -- the sooner the Obama camp recognizes this the better.

Joe Biden cannot allow the corporate media to kowtow him into going soft on Palin just because she has a pair of overactive ovaries. She is a liar and a fraud and a religious extremist, and the sooner the bark is stripped off her the better. Hillary Clinton, if she is forceful and diligent on the campaign trail, can be very effective in countering the Palin pander. Hillary might have to be just as bitterly sarcastic and caustic as Palin to counter her. I don't think she should hold back.

During the 2000 and 2004 campaigns, which helps to explain why I'm no longer a Democrat. Democrats seem obsessed with the meme that it's unseemly to respond in kind to Republican gutter tactics.

The Republicans unleash a vitriolic, completely false and slanderous attack on the Democratic candidate(s), and the Democrats respond (usually several days after the Republican lies have had a chance to sink in) with a tepid, rational, factual rebuttal, which draws a positive response from the choir, but has no affect whatsoever on the majority of voters.

The Democrats have already lost the opportunity to depict Palin as the know-nothing, lying, anti-democratic (small d) trailer-trash that she is. The reliably subservient media and the Repugs have canonized her as an experienced, tough, knowledgeable, Mary-Tyler-Moorish rootin' tootin', glass-ceiling smashing anti-Democratic Heroine.

Good Lord!!!!

Phil - The NE is on the case.  LOL.

-------

Andrew Sullivan's mission (strangely) is to make sure Barack is elected.  He's finally had enough.  So his blog has been a must-read lately.  Today he shares a panel of Britons as to their thoughts on Ms. Palin.  Think about this:

If she (Paline) were a he and a soccer (hockey) dad who was a PTA dad, former mayor of small town nowhere, etc.  he would be a laughing stock.  Guess what?  She is a laughing stock and the Republicans look like NUTS foaming over her.  I'm paraphrasing very loosely but you get my drift. 

Oh jeez.  Must proofread. 

Townhall.com (click blog) reports: Nice work by team Obama. Sure to inspire the nation. It's seems Republicans retrieved American flags thrown away at the DNCC and then McCain had some veterens bring them on stage in plastic garbage bags to an event he and Gov. Palin were at.  

Marty is down with library book banning. What an American.

I was at the convention and I saw NO flags left, from where I was. So get in their face.

Sad pieces of crap they are. Go nothing. How did they get on the floor? No One got on the floor at all unless they had FLOOR PASSES.

... to diss Howard again.

If the American people choose John McCain and Sarah Palin, the direction will be clear: more of the same and it will only get worse.  I thought Barbara Boxer said it well when she talked about the ridicule in Palin's speech.  And Bob Herbert talked about the lies repeated over and over.

Do you suppose that Americans are more than tired of the lies, demeaning, and ridicule that Rove has perpetrated for a decade or more?  Is this really what we want this country to be?

I read in the Christian Science Monitor that Germany is the world leader in alternative energy.  Instead of carbon credits, any small producer of wind or solar energy can get prime return by selling to the power grid.  It is a people first program and is wildly successful.

Another person is teaching people to raise their own food by giving away plants and educating school children in how to grow them.

We have the energy and vision I hope for a future.  Obama represents that furture.

the VP.

Obama said he is running against McCain (John "Bomb, Bomb, Iran" McSame) and that is who he is going to keep hammering on. As some have said, she may have been chosen to take the limelight off McSame

BO's surrogates, Palin's big mouth, her condescending nature and her own past will soon catch up to her without Obama or Biden lifting a finger. She just isn't worth losing valuable stump time talking about issues and his solutions.

Here's something for Marty, since he thinks townhall.com is Wikipedia, not the Republican Enquirer:

Fox News' Carl Cameron and Bonney Kapp reported that they had "been told" that "a vendor at Invesco Field found the flags, which were going to be thrown out, and turned them over to the McCain campaign."

[A] Democratic convention official says that's not true.

"It's pretty reprehensible on their part," he said. "Someone made an assumption, took the flags, and essentially lied about what was going to happen to them. I mean, c'mon, we were never ever going to throw out flags."

Emails to three McCain spokespersons inquiring where the flags were found and how the McCain campaign obtained them were not returned.

An excerpt from "Confessions of an RNC Security Guard" by Avi Steinberg in today's Salon:

"Two discussions about the war in Iraq suddenly take place.

"The first discussion is among a group of young Republicans standing in front of the Hyatt smoking cigars -- party favors from the Giuliani party. The men are all similarly clad in J. Press; some in houndstooth, some in navy blue blazers. The girlfriends, however, wear designer cocktail dresses.

"'I'm sick of this chickenshit,' says one guy, a sturdy Stanford 2L. 'I hear too much apologizing for the war. We should all get behind McCain and stand up proudly and use the "W" word. We have to tell the voters, "No, we're not just making gains, we are winning this war."'

"The second conversation takes place between me and Scott, a baby-faced Marine who has served two tours in Iraq (and is expecting to be called up again any day). We're standing 2 feet away from the Republicans. As Scott tells it, his platoon spent almost two years roving around western Iraq doing the bidding of various local tribal bosses, fighting fierce and undefined battles against enemies who had been allies a week earlier.

"His take on the war?

"'It's bullshit,' he says with a shrug. 'We got no business there. We get played by all the locals. Guys are dying for nothing. Everyone's losing their minds. It's a disaster.'"

I would call in Palinese or b.s.

http://openleft.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=0239BBE8FE76066EAE203D84C37542A9?diaryId=8020

http://parsifal79.blogspot.com/2008/09/master-is-back.html

This is a series of youtubes that will take your breath away especially the footage you have not seen before.  But it's the music that Parsifal has chosen where he is absolutely flawless.  A lot of the narrative is in German - who knew German could sound so sexy.  He sings a genuine rock n roll song with a rock and roll band, a kind of wistful folk song with guitar, the Torsten Rasch version of Rammstein's Mein Herz Brent in a music video, and there's a clip of him singing the Agnus Dei from the Missa Solemnis from the dedication of the rebuilt Frauenkirche in Dresden.  So what are you doing on this boring old political blog?  Huh? :~)

Then why does she scare everyone so much as a force in the election outcome???  Every blog site I go to is dominated by fear of her impact.  Maybe that is evidence that the joke may not be on her, only those who underestimate the impact of a new fresh face, rather than say, oh I dont know, someone like Joe Biden, the ultimate Washington insider.

...just played the remake of "the thin red line" again.  you know, the one with shawn penn and just about every other good male actor in LA.  this is, imo, one of the best, if not the best, ant-war war movie made.  very high brow and philosophical though.  where "private ryan" tried to lay it out in duty-death-survival terms, this film gets into the morality behind the actions at guadalcanal.  besides being a well shot and produced movie, a viewing in this campaign season might well bolster the moral side of our cause in electing obama/biden and the whole ticket down to dog catcher and waterboard member.