Two prominent Falls Church members among those who voted to defect from the Episcopal Church in 2006 played a major role in promoting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be selected as the GOP vice presidential candidate, according to an article in the Oct. 27 issue of the New Yorker magazine.
The revelation also comes amid new information about the prominent role of a clandestine Christian fundamentalist political action organization among the defectors' ranks.
by Jeff Huber
This is the first installment of a pre-election series of essays on John McCain and American militarism.
Having based his presidential candidacy on his prowess in national security affairs, John McCain needed a running mate who wouldn't show him up by understanding more about the subject than he did. This left his vice presidential search committee with a Herculean task, and one that they performed dutifully, but make no mistake. The top bimbo on the GOP ticket is not Sarah Palin. In the area where McCain claims to possess the most competence, he couldn't find his proverbial rear end if Joe Lieberman held the map for him and Lindsey Graham worked the compass.
To paraphrase Voltaire, witticisms can be the best way to make a point but they never prove anything. So while a couple of satisfying one-liners may illustrate the chasm between McCain's perception of his national security credentials and the stark reality of his fecklessness, it is vital that we examine the specific ways in which, as commander in chief of the United States military, McCain would be the most dangerous man in world history.
It's vital that we take this journey, even if it turns out that Colin Powell left McCain and his number two without a pot to go number one in. Every president for the foreseeable future will have to deal with the threat to U.S. security interests that McCain personifies: parasitic, malignant militarism.
Note: The cartoon is the logo of the real Joe the Plumber in Amarillo. Send him some business, I'm told that he's an Obama guy. If his website takes off because of all this attention maybe he can switch from actual plumbing to an online plumbing advice column. Bob
Interesting, direct and informative. Originally posted 2008-10-11 20:26:32 -0500. Bumped and promoted. -- GH
During the 1968 election, one of the keystones of Dick Nixon's campaign was his "plan to end the war in Vietnam." Of course he had no real plan, or, if he did it was a poor one, evidenced by the fact that the war dragged on for seven brutal years after that sad election season.
It has been said in some quarters that the "plan" Nixon alluded to, but never spelled out, was a nutty scheme (nutty schemes seem to abound in the halls of power) to have Kissinger convince the Russians that Tricky Dick was just batshit crazy enough to use nuclear weapons if the North Vietnamese would not come to the table and end the war on his terms.
History has shown that Nixon was nuts enough. So was and is, Henry the K, but the Vietnamese, after fighting a collection of Yankees, French, Japanese and Chinese among others, for uncountable hundreds of years weren't impressed with new and improved threats, from new and unimproved enemies.
Seems a few taking pics at a Palin rally hit on the same rational of who are these Sarah Palin supporters and the mentality of the group think.
I visited After Downing Street and Dave has a post up there from a curious woman wanting to find out for herself what was attracting people to Palin, certainly isn't her intelligence, experience nor non-writin rhetoric while at these rallies.
Though apparently those who are flocking to her seem to be on the same intelligence level.
This is getting to be depressing. Maybe it's time to go back to Mali, to Tombouctou—for the next month, at least, until after election day. After all, it's not too hot there right now, and the Niger River is still high enough for the riverboat to make its way from Mopti to Gao, a leisurely trip with not a lot to do but watch for Tuarags over the sand dunes along the riverbank. There, perhaps, Sarah Palin's dishonest, deceitful, and decadent (yes, decadent) head wouldn't be haunting my waking hours.
First off it's October 6th, and most days bring with them a history of the past, much forgotten quickly and lessons not learned.
Here's just one for today which I'll call The bush Families & GOP's Favorite Terrorist Pal, and no it's not the one nobody thinks about anymore, especially the little bush:
by Jeff Huber
Your plan is a white flag of surrender in Iraq…the surge worked.
--Sarah Palin
Like so many neoconservatives, Sarah Palin has an odd notion of what winning and losing wars means when you're history's first global hegemon.
"Surrender" in Iraq would consist of all of our troops dropping their weapons and raising their hands, and allowing the evildoers to take them to one of Saddam Hussein's old prisons and strip their clothes off, and put ladies' panties on their heads, and threaten to allow German Shepherds to attack them, and make them form human pyramids, and hook electrodes to their genitals and then rape them with chemical light sticks, and then chain a couple of them from the ceiling by their wrists and beat them to death, and if anybody gives the evildoers any guff about their treatment of prisoners, they blame it on a few bad apples and get away with it. And when our soldiers ask to appeal their imprisonment in a court of law, the evildoers tell them they don't have any legal rights because the evildoers have unilaterally declared them illegal.
That, fellow citizens, is what "surrender" in Iraq would consist of, and I want to go on record as saying I'm foursquare against it. I won't presume to speak for Barak Obama or Joe Biden specifically or of the Democratic Party in general, but I think it's a safe bet that they're against that sort of thing too, so that gosh darn Sarah Palin really ought to quit talking like they aren't.
Ah, that infamous "life and art" imitating each other and making for wondrous incidents of irony...
From the Disney film starring Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker.
Hmmm...let's take a look at Sarah's character, who was also coincidentally named "Sarah" --
_____
The most beautiful of the trio, Sarah is boy-crazy, extremely ditsy, and also unbearably stupid. Her primary power is a siren song: granting her the ability to control children's minds with her voice. She also possesses uncharacteristically-refined knowledge of spellcasting in general... _____
Oh, dear. That almost sounds like the GOP's recipe for McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin...Let's have some offbeat fun, after the break, in honor of the Halloween month and the spooky shenanigans of the scary, fear-mongering party, shall we?
Discussions I've happened across here and there have made mention of Sarah Palin's well-rehearsed and polished "folksy" / "cutesy" remarks and body language; one person even said that the "wink wink" was enough to make her sick.
My response?
"Wink, wink..." heh...reminds me of a song about a little eye that went a winkin'...
Halloween is coming fast, and the McCain Campaign is working overtime to give us hauntingly familiar strains of the same tired old tune, while GOP's steadfast wing of the radical punditry is striving hard to convince us that Conservative America's "Spooky Little Love Affair with Palin" is right on track, scarin' the rest of America out of our collective shorts.
This is an Open Thread.
During the 1968 election, one of the keystones of Dick Nixon's campaign was his "plan to end the war in Vietnam." Of course he had no real plan, or, if he did it was a poor one, evidenced by the fact that the war dragged on for seven brutal years after that sad election season.
It has been said in some quarters that the "plan" Nixon alluded to, but never spelled out, was a nutty scheme (nutty schemes seem to abound in the halls of power) to have Kissinger convince the Russians that Tricky Dick was just batshit crazy enough to use nuclear weapons if the North Vietnamese would not come to the table and end the war on his terms.
History has shown that Nixon was nuts enough. So was and is, Henry the K, but the Vietnamese, after fighting a collection of Yankees, French, Japanese and Chinese among others, for uncountable hundreds of years weren't impressed with new and improved threats, from new and unimproved enemies. 
