Category: Politics

Palin’s Teen Daughter Is Pregnant; New G.O.P. Tumult – NYTimes.com

To be sure, Palin is sticking to her guns. She opposes abortion in any circumstances. So, her daughter is going to have a child and get married instead of going to college. Too bad she also stuck by her guns in her opposition to sex education and contraception, otherwise this might not have happened in the first place. I love the hypocrisy on the republican side about this. Rather than admit that these events might call in to question the party’s stance on “family values,” they claim that this is ok and that it happens all the time. If Chelsea was pregnant in high school, you don’t think that the right wing wouldn’t have been twenty-four-hours-a-day slamming the Clintons? You know they would.

Palin’s Teen Daughter Is Pregnant; New G.O.P. Tumult – NYTimes.com

ST. PAUL — The 17-year-old daughter of Gov. Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate, is five months pregnant, Ms. Palin announced today, adding a new element of tumult to a Republican convention that had already been disrupted by Hurricane Gustav.

The daughter, Bristol, plans to marry the father, the statement issued by Governor Palin and her husband said.

“Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned” Ms. Palin’s statement said. “As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows that she has our unconditional love and support.”

The announcement was intended to counter rumors by liberal bloggers that Ms. Palin had claimed to have given birth to her fifth child in April when, according to the rumors, the child was her daughter’s.

John McCain running mate Sarah Palin misled Republican supporters – Telegraph

I wonder if we’ll see a press release that she needs to “spend more time with her grandson son” soon…

John McCain running mate Sarah Palin misled Republican supporters – Telegraph

The Governor of Alaska gave a misleading version of events over a controversial bridge project in her home state when she made her maiden speech as the presumptive nominee.

Mrs Palin told a cheering audience in Ohio that she had turned down an offer from the US Congress to build the so-called “Bridge to Nowhere”, which would have connected Gravina Island with Ketchikan International, an airport in Alaska’s southeast serving just 200,000 passengers a year. Mr McCain routinely cites the £100 million project as a symbol of wasteful central government spending.

As she introduced herself to Republicans and the American public on Friday, the virtually unknown Mrs Palin said: “I championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. In fact, I told Congress … ‘thanks, but no thanks’ on that bridge to nowhere. If our state wanted a bridge, I said we’d build it ourselves.”

However it emerged that in a 2006 interview with the Anchorage Daily News during her gubernatorial campaign, Mrs Palin had a different view of the bridge.

Asked “would you continue state funding for the proposed Knik Arm and Gravina Island bridges?” she replied: “Yes. I would like to see Alaska’s infrastructure projects built sooner rather than later. The window is now – while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist.”

When Congressional funding was withdrawn because of an uproar in Washington about the expense of the project, she cancelled it, but in a regretful tone.

“Despite the work of our congressional delegation, we are about $329 million short of full funding for the bridge project, and it’s clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island.”

Yow! Who is in charge of the Republican presidential campaign?

Choosing Sarah Palin seemed like a serious hail mary play when it was first announced. An attempt to out-history-make the democrats. Choosing the Alaskan govenor gains John McCain nothing in the regionally-balancing-the-ticket game. She is so incredibly right-wing that she makes him seem like a socialist. Maybe the idea is that she could bring the evangelicals and super conservatives back to the table. Especially since the chances aren’t small that she would end up finishing his first term if she won. However, she is so radically right that there is a big chance that she’ll scare away any of the moderates that might have voted for McCain. At least any of the moderates that bothered to read a newspaper.

Now it seems like this was a real hail mary play since it looks like no one bothered to vett their VP choice. She fundamentally disagrees with most of McCain’s positions on the environment, abortion and Iraq. She is in the midst of an ethics scandal, troopergate. It looks like she may have lied about her fifth child, that it was actually her daughters’. Even if she didn’t lie, she showed some serious lack of judgment in how she handled the birth. Then there is Dairygate.

All this is just in the first few days after the announcement. Sarah Palin has spent a tiny amount of time in government, but it looks like she is out-scandaling the pros already.

I’d love to gloat over this and laugh about how the republican’s are prepping for an electoral loss that will make Dukakis look like George Washington, but we all know that the democrats can snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory like nobody’s business. Lets just hope that the American people see through the right wing propaganda this time.

Although if they still think off-shore drilling is going to lower the price of gas anytime soon, I doubt it.

Bob Costas interviews President Bush (updated)

A sports journalist asks all the hard questions, leaving a smirking Bush probably wondering what he got himself into. I love it! He sits down thinking he’s going to talk about basketball or some bs like that and Bob Costas gets into Darfur and the Russia/Georgia situation and GWB looks like an idiot yet again! Can we maybe move the change of administrations to November 5th to get this idiot out of power?

[Update 8/11/08 2:12pm]
Youtube removed the original video embedded here, but Huffpost has the video also. See comments below for a link to the transcript.

Bush administration gives carte blanche to destroying 10% of arctic polar bear population

Companies get OK to annoy polar bears (AP)
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2004477335_appolarbearsoil.html

Less than a month after declaring polar bears a threatened species because of global warming, the Bush administration is giving oil companies permission to annoy and potentially harm them in the pursuit of oil and natural gas.

The Fish and Wildlife Service issued regulations this week providing legal protection to seven oil companies planning to search for oil and gas in the Chukchi Sea off the northwestern coast of Alaska if “small numbers” of polar bears or Pacific walruses are incidentally harmed by their activities over the next five years.

Environmentalists said the new regulations give oil companies a blank check to harass the polar bear.

About 2,000 of the 25,000 polar bears in the Arctic live in and around the Chukchi Sea, where the government in February auctioned off oil leases to ConocoPhillips Co., Shell Oil Co. and five other companies for $2.6 billion. Over objections from environmentalists and members of Congress, the sale occurred before the bear was classified as threatened in May.

Polar bears are naturally curious creatures and sensitive to changes in their environment. Vibrations, noises, unusual scents and the presence of industrial equipment can disrupt their quest for prey and their efforts to raise their young in snow dens.

This is ridiculous, I can’t believe the gall. In the closing days of a hated administration, rather than try to reclaim some goodwill, they get progressively more evil. I guess they hoped that no one would notice.

Frank Rich hits it on the head

Wow, this op-ed from Frank Rich really summed up this point in the race for me and crystallized some vague thoughts around the race. Definitely worth a read

Op-Ed Columnist – Frank Rich – One Historic Night, Two Americas – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com

WHEN Barack Obama achieved his historic victory on Tuesday night, the battle was joined between two Americas. Not John Edwards’s two Americas, divided between rich and poor. Not the Americas split by race, gender, party or ideology. What looms instead is an epic showdown between two wildly different visions of the country, from the ground up.