Taro T

I couldn't help but think that when I was there that Fred Sanford would show up at any minute. (Yeah, I know they lived in Watts, they wouldn't slum that bad.)

The line seems to be a lot better since Mouse left as well. Let's see how it looks next Sunday and (hopefully) in the near future when Jason is back.

If she worked a "normal" 9-5, then I could see taking issue w/ her taking an hour or 2 out of the day to get her child to the Dr's office. My guess is that she puts in far more than 40 hours / week. No idea how she works campaigning in w/ her "day" job, but there are at least 3 other people moonlighting this fall, so it'll probably work out.

No, I can honestly say I have never gone to the Daily Kos's website. Gee, I must really be missing some riveting commentary.

Piper, Willow, Bristol, Track, and Trig. That's 5 rather unfortunate names. I assume there are 5 kids that go w/ those names.

A large amount of criticism that Bush has gotten, some rightfully so (Meiers, Rumsfeld) has been that he surrounds himself w/ cronies and doesn't look for the best person for the job. Now McCain is getting criticized for not choosing a crony. People are regularly hired after an HR department and others have vetted a job candidate and the hiring manager has only limited 1st hand experience w/ the candidate. Hiring managers rarely "really know" their hiree. Even when they are hiring their buddy they don't necessarily "know" the person. McCain apparently trusts that his staff have vetted her. How good a job they did on that will come out over the next 2 months. McCain isn't the final hiring manager either, the electorate is. If she is as horrible a hire as you appear to believe, McCain most likely won't get hired himself. Was Palin the best choice? Time will tell. If McCain wants to make the focus of his campaign government reform, to counter Obama's "change" message; at 1st glance it does look like a good choice. Based on the info that has been mentioned about her, she appears to have far more experience at reforming government (read: challenging entrenched politicians) than the other VP options McCain had available to him.

CBB, I don't envy you being from Houma right now. Lived in Red Stick for a few years and was there when Andrew hit. Good luck w/ it. I hope you don't suffer a direct hit. Stay safe.

Agree that his best strategy will be to keep it focused on McCain (and hers on keeping it focused on Obama). If he politely engages with her on the issues of McCain and Obama, he'll probably be OK. If he "politely ignores" her, he's probably seen as dismissing her and all heck breaks loose for him. Kind of like when Gore kept sighing through his debate w/ Bush. As mentioned before, I am actually looking forward to the VP debate for once because it actually has promise to be interesting.

You are absolutely correct in that statement. However, in the real world, if Biden is seen as "picking on" Palin, then he is toast. Look back to the Clinton-Lazio debates. The race was close (far closer than it probably should have been) and then Lazio "attacked" and "intimidated" Clinton by walking a petition over to her podium. She never gave up the double digit lead after that. Granted Lazio was in WAAAAY over his head, but the defining moment of that election was Lazio walking across the stage. I'd be very surprised if part of the reason McCain chose Palin wasn't to neutralize some of Biden's "attack dog". The VP debate will be very interesting, for once.

Did they call him that during one of their news shows or one of their opinion shows? If it was during a news show, that is as bad as the MSNBC breaking news crawl. If it wasn't, do you deny that he "accidentally" walked out w/ documents stuffed in his pants?

IF they didn't vet her properly, then that would be one more similarity to the Souter nomination. They've had a few months to review this, how well McCain knows her isn't as critical as the staffers / hired investigators doing their job properly. I'd agree that McCain would have known what he was getting with Lieberman; the others, he'd be going off the work his staff did.

Only if he marries their mother.

Meiers had worked for W for years, and Conservatives hated the nomination and eventually got W to back down. Yes, Dems hated the choice as well, but that wasn't why her name was withdrawn. There is little, if any, history between McCain and Palin. Which is similar to Bush 41 and Souter. Palin is "unknown" to most, as was Souter. The Dems, especially the more liberal ones, were opposed to the nomination initially, and the Republicans went along with it even though there was not much of a record to indicate whether he'd be conservative or liberal. Bush nominated Souter because there wasn't much of a history and he thought it would be a relatively smooth confirmation in that the Dems didn't have much ammunition to use against Souter. Turns out the Dems were unable to "Bork" Souter, but it looks like that has worked out to their advantage in the long run. The short term politics of getting the nominee through to office appears to have been more of a concern than how the nominee would perform in office. Obama's campaign will more than likely have to revise their strategy on how to "attack" McCain/Milf vs how they were going to go after McCain/Romney or McCain/more traditional VP. So, this choice, assuming there is no monster skeleton in her closet and assuming that she doesn't do something mindnumbingly stupid on the campaign trail will increase McCain's odds of getting elected. (Whether it gets him elected remains to be seen, but it does increase his chances.) Much as Souter was confirmed with less of a fight (only 9 Senators said "no") than a more widely known conservative jurist would have had. (Thomas anyone?) Bush thought Souter would be conservative on the bench, but he was mistaken. It looks like McCain's choice is more solidly traditionally conservative, but it isn't a slam dunk that she'd be of more help to him after the election than other "more conventional" choices would be. I'm not trying to say that this is a repeat of Souter, just that there are several superficial similarities. IMHO, far more than the Meiers' nomination.

If 14% of Canadians are Americans, then what are the other 62% of Canadians? Eskimos? Mexicans that didn't stop at the 1st border? Other?

So you would like to see the economy go down, so that class warfare begins / escalates? I'm pretty sure that's not what you mean, but it's late and I'm tired and that's what I am taking from your message.

How are you defining "class struggle"? Back to SDS's q, I doubt anyone gets fired over it as no one at MSNBC seems to understand why they are the last place channel. It probably has something to do w/ little things like that or Olbermann stating the day Hillary addressed the convention that Hillary would support Obama because of some joke McCain supposedly made about Chelsea when Chelsea was a teen. Funny, I thought she'd support him because they are BOTH democrats.

Does anybody else see shades of David Souter in this selection?

You've stated before that you don't want McCain to be President and don't want any republican to win this election. In the post I originally responded to you, you called McCain Bluefire's candidate. Implying that Obama is your candidate; did I infer that incorrectly? Perhaps I should have stated "Mike and those on the left" rather than Mike and others from the left. Either way, I'd expect anyone that doesn't want McCain AND wants Obama should be very happy with this pick as McCain "just threw away the election". Doesn't that lead to the outcome you'd prefer?

I was referring directly to Mike's claim that this "candidate just threw away the election". I didn't mean to imply any of the "talking heads" from the media or either side had said it was a terrible choice. Again, if she IS a horrible choice as a running mate, I'd expect Mike and others from the left thinking that she was a great choice. It seems to me that he doesn't necessarily think that McCain threw the election away.

It's not 1/2 the Republican party going "huh, who?" right now; it's 90% of it; and 95% of the Dems are doing the same thing. It doesn't appear that Obama's crew had much of an inkling that this choice was coming, or the 1st statement out of the campaign wouldn't have been "cool, experience, or lack thereof, is now officially off the table". Obama and Biden were much more "presidential" in their statement, not surprisingly. I'd be interested in reading what Darin has to say about her, as he probably has actually heard of her; unlike most of the posters in this thread. It is definitely an interesting pick and it has done one thing McCain wanted, it got last night's speech nearly totally off the radar. I'm a little confused though about 1 thing in this thread. If this does, in fact, torpedo McCain's chances why do most of the Democratic candidate supporters seem upset by this? Shouldn't you be elated at this choice? The people on the left and right already have their minds made up. Who wins this one is the one that gets the most independents and Reagan democrats to come over to their side. At 1st glance, this looks like a good choice for McCain. She gave a good speech and would appear to have the right background to help McCain make inroads with Hillary supporters. On the surface, both candidates made good choices for VP.

I'm not sure how the experience card is completely off the table. Obama hasn't increased his experience any with this choice nor has McCain decreased his. For Obama to hit McCain on the VP's lack of experience, he has to highlight his own lack of experience. I'd expect when the McCain camp does hit Obama on experience, if Palin's experience comes up in response, that they will focus on her having been a governor (albeit for a short time and for a "small" state). It'll be interesting to see what Hillary voters think of this. As that is clearly who he's pandering to.

You're probably right in that the speech seeming weaker than his typical speeches probably won't matter when you've got the cult of personality already forming/ formed around him. Watching CNN after the speech, I thought the chick in the blue (Campbell Brown?) was going to have to excuse herself as she could barely contain the moans of ecstasy she was clearly experiencing. Obama has been campaigning as an "agent for change", a new type of politician, and able to work across the aisle, for the past 10 or so months. The attacks on McCain sure did look an awful lot like a typical liberal Democratic politician. It'll be interesting to see how his "message of change" holds up in what is looking to be set up as a pretty good old-fashioned mud-slinging donnybrook. If he can maintain the aura of change, he wins; if he comes across as more of the same-old same-old, then the Dems have found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory once again.

My bad. Forgot about Kay.

Unfortunately the only one mentioned to date to be under consideration is Carly Fiorina. It's bad enough we have politicians in office, I really don't want to see a marketer in the #2 slot.

Totally depends on how they get there. If they end up injury depleted and going on a 4-0 run to make it into the playoffs (that last win also knocking the Cheatriots* out) and end up losing to a 14-2 Colts team, then yeah, considering it's been 8 years, that is acceptable. If they end up on the wrong end of another homerun throw forward after having had a huge lead late in that game, after having had a huge lead in the division only to lose it in December, then probably not.