I have this empathy for embarrassment. I’m one of those people who has a really tough time watching things like Crank Yankers or America’s Funniest Home Videos or a sitcom where it’s the episode’s big punchline moment where someone’s caught in something really embarrassing. I get all squirmy and can barely look at the TV.

It’s because of this reaction that I’ve had a hard time watching clips of Couric’s interview with Palin, but I finally suffered through this one in its entirety because it carried the promise of Cafferty being a grumpy old man at the end:

Talking Points Memo | Cafferty: Palin’s a Friggin’ Laughingstock

(Personal to M.G.: Why do I think Palin should be laughed off the public stage? This.)

This scares me because I know exactly what she’s doing. I do that. Hit the popular phrases and the right-sounding words. I have a general confidence that if I just start running my mouth, I’ll either shortly have enough of an idea what I’m talking about, or I’ll be able to present it well enough to fool non-savvy people into thinking I know what I’m talking about. But I don’t risk it unless I have a general understanding of the topic and when I’m under less scrutiny.

But when I do it, I also have the confidence that, if I don’t pull it off, I have the safety net of apologizing, saying “oh, sorry, I got confused there,” and promise to get a better answer later after some research. I can work a crowd well enough that I can keep goodwill through that if I don’t try it too often, and people’s bullshit meters are usually thrown off by an admission that you don’t have all the answers.

But of course Palin doesn’t have that luxury. She can’t possibly say “I don’t know”—well, she can maybe a few times, but the number of times she can get away with that is very small—so she has no choice but to barrel through. And that’s what she’s doing here. I’ve heard a lot of people say “this sounds like a bad interview” because that’s exactly what it is. It’s a job interview with a candidate who has no right to be there, but she’s trying to bullshit through the interview and hoping for the best. If you were hiring a Safeway regional manager and she answered a question like this, you’d kick her out the door.

You know JOBS. Jobs and 1 in 5 and immigration. And oh yeah taxes! Taxes so hard-working Americans can 9/11 and jobs overseas the economy strong Israel and Iran porkbarrel spending bridge to nowhere. Russia.

edit: this guy does that riff better.

Again, protecting Palin from reporters. For some reason. Because she’s totally ready, and like, stuff.

Talking Points Memo | Palin bans reporters from meetings with leaders
Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who has not held a press conference in nearly four weeks of campaigning, on Tuesday banned reporters from her first meetings with world leaders, allowing access only to photographers and a television crew.

CNN, which was providing the television coverage for news organizations, decided to pull its TV crew, effectively denying Palin the high visibility she had sought.

Presumably until they show the proper deference. Man, it blows my mind, the banhammer that would come down on the Obama camp if any of them said that Obama wouldn’t talk to reporters “until they give him the proper deference.”

I dig the Republicans making this election about personality rather than issues, because it’s what they do. It’s what they understand. Nothing sinister about it, it’s just an argument that sort of person finds more persuasive. So Barack + proximity to William Aires = “hates America” for them fairly easily.

I just don’t get it. You look at his life, and what has he done that makes these people think he hates America or that he’s some sorta secret sleeper cell terrorist or something? It’s an indicator of how conservatives dominate the discussion that this isn’t asked much. What is it about Obama that says he hates America? you’d ask. And in some sense I guess some prominent pundits have already answered it…I seem to remember Sean Hannity saying he is afraid that, in his heart, Obama doesn’t love America, or similar.

Meanwhile you get this:

Palin touts stance on ‘Bridge to Nowhere,’ doesn’t note flip-flop: Politics | adn.com
Meanwhile, Weinstein noted, the state is continuing to build a road on Gravina Island to an empty beach where the bridge would have gone — because federal money for the access road, unlike the bridge money, would have otherwise been returned to the federal government.

So 1) not only did she support the Bridge to Nowhere, but 2) she is currently in support of a road to nowhere. Why? Because if Alaska didn’t use the money, they’d have to give it back. So not only is the “thanks but no thanks” a lie, but it covers up a greater falsehood: she’ll keep Federal money and burn it on something useless.

But somehow, in many people’s minds, the perky scrappy hockey mom image wins.

ABC News: Sarah Palin Defends Experience, Takes Hard Line Approach on National Security

On the anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, Gov. Sarah Palin took a hard-line approach on national security and said that war with Russia may be necessary if that nation invades another country.

I’ve just realized: this is why the neocons don’t want to do anything about global warming. Because it’d mean that Russian winters aren’t as bad as they used to be.

Via Talking Points Memo, I learned about intrade.com, “The Prediction Market”. It’s set up like a stock trading site, but really what it is, is online gambling taking bets on current events. Kind of a slick re-casting of the concept, really. There’s a wide variety of topics, from legal to entertainment to whatever. I’d kind of like to be active in stock trading, but I have a hard time getting involved because I know there’s a lot of stuff I don’t know, so I couldn’t adequately predict what will happen with them. But things like this, I feel like I could be closer to making informed guesses, so it has some appeal to me.

I haven’t made the plunge, but I’m starting to itch to bet on who’s going to win the presidential election. The problem I have here, though, is which one to bet on. I really think Obama’s going to win, so I’d like to cash in on that…but on the other hand I am wondering if I should hedge my bets on McCain. If he wins, my life’s going to get worse and my money’s going to be worth less, so maybe I should throw a bunch of money to bet on him, so at least if he wins I’ll have some extra cash to offset what I’ll essentially be losing in his presidency.

how — how do you — how can you even — and of course the press — the press will let them get away — the press will — I’m comin’ Lizbeth

Marc Ambinder (September 05, 2008) - No Interviews Till She’s Ready
A senior McCain campaign official advises that, despite the gaggle of requests and pressure from the media, Gov. Sarah Palin won’t submit to a formal interview anytime soon. She may take some questions from local news entities in Alaska, but until she’s ready — and until she’s comfortable — which might not be for a long while — the media will have to wait. The campaign believes it can effectively deal with the media’s complaints, and their on-the-record response to all this will be: “Sarah Palin needs to spend time with the voters.”

Not out of the question are appearances on lighter, fluffier television shows. But — not for a while.

Well, by the transitive property, anyway. Before Obama announced Biden was his choice for VP, one of the names kicked around was Governor Tim Caine of Virginia (who, before that, was mayor of Richmond). And of that possibility, Rove said this:

With all due respect again to Governor Kaine, he’s been a governor for three years, he’s been able but undistinguished. I don’t think people could really name a big, important thing that he’s done. He was mayor of the 105th largest city in America. And again, with all due respect to Richmond, Virginia, it’s smaller than Chula Vista, California; Aurora, Colorado; Mesa or Gilbert, Arizona; north Las Vegas or Henderson, Nevada. It’s not a big town. So if he were to pick Governor Kaine, it would be an intensely political choice where he said, `You know what? I’m really not, first and foremost, concerned with, is this person capable of being president of the United States?

Replace some names and a few pronouns and he’s talking about Palin, isn’t he? Holy crap I hope someone finds a public way of using this.

If you’re not aware, Congress has pretty much removed any right to privacy you might’ve thought you had. And while I think that’s a pretty bad thing, I was never really prepared for one of the easy core arguments against thinking it’s a big deal: “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.” I mean, it just feels instinctively wrong, but I couldn’t think of a good reason why, and I tend to mistrust my own feelings like that, as they might just be bourne of personal bias.

But the other day I had an epiphany, which is that the statement “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about” is false. Here’s the correct statement:

If you haven’t done anything that someone else thinks is wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.

When you work through the implications of that statement, losing your privacy seems like a much more worrying issue.

If being captured and tortured makes you ready to be president, there’s a whole Guantanamo full of candidates the Republicans haven’t even considered.

Consult your doctor if you elect a bonehead for more than four years.

The Republicans are working on “rebranding” themselves. This concept amuses me already, because it’s clearly based in marketing. They’re working on changing their image, rather than themselves, because clearly their underlying assumption is that they’re the Right Buncha Folks To Get Work Done, and the only problem is that the public misunderstands them. I mean somehow disregarding the fact that they’ve been running the country for the last seven years and it’s gone to shit, really anyone who buys gas or dies in a bridge collape or lives in a formaldehyde trailer can tell you how well they’ve done, but whatever.

Here’s a piece of the “leaked” message about the rebranding details, which really, my jaw just drops:

Washington is broken, the American people want it fixed, and Democrats in Washington have proven unable or unwilling to get the job done. Republicans will. Americans have seen first-hand the change Democrats are making, and it is moving America in the wrong direction. To the American people, we say that Republicans will deliver “the change you deserve.”

Uch. Yeah, the change we deserve. The change we deserve away from you. It’s just so…I mean, the change in the country because of Democrats? The part of that the Dems are actually responsible for is when they couldn’t find enough backbone to prevent the Republicans from doing whatever they wanted, ugh I just can’t even keep that in my head without getting all pissed about it.

But the fun part is, there’s some entertainment in building their brand around “the change we deserve”:

Crooks and Liars » GOP’s Inadvertently Fitting New Slogan

Think Progress » Republicans vote against Mother’s Day.

Seriously.

This is what the Republicans in the House have become. First they raise a bill about how great Moms are, and then it’s unanimously passed earlier in the week, and then somehow they bring it up for vote recount, and then they vote against it. For some reason.

I mean the overall reason is because they’re stalling. They’re pissed they don’t have control of the House and now the mortgage bill and the war apprpriations bill has been pushed to next week. I think they consider this a “win”. But after all that, why even vote against a fluff timewaster at all? Why not just ring up another unanimous vote?

Maybe they’ve had a change of heart and decided they don’t like moms anyway. Hell, they’ve already voted against nuns, maybe next week they’ll pass HR1157, “Finding adorable, precocious orphans shining shoes on the corner and taking their money and pushing them in the mud.”

edit: Oh, okay, I get it. They had the original vote, then Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.) had a motion to reconsider the vote.  Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) moved to table his revote request, which itself needed a vote, and that’s the one that the Republicans voted against. So it seems like sloppy reporting to this point, I mean, they didn’t vote against mothers exactly. Irritating that I had to go make sense out of that myself.

<spinn> so there’s a guy, john gilmore, who’s running for senate in virginia
<spinn> he just put out an announcement video on the youtubes
<spinn> generally being hailed as a flop by liberals, but whatever. but here’s the first sentence
<spinn> These are challenging times for our country. We’re threated by terrorism, concerned about a difficult war, stuck in traffic, dissatisfied with how our children are educated, and too often our culture seems more interested in the latest doings of tabloid celebrities than the debates that could decide our country’s future.
<spinn> which one of those things is not like the other
<raven> Obviously *someone* doesn’t commute.
<spinn> yeah but!
<spinn> I mean shit your right-out-the-gate mission statement
<raven> heh
<raven> “That’s my top five there!”
<spinn> TERRORISTS! WAR! THAT FUCKING INTERSECTION AT LAWRENCE AND KIMBALL!

edit: comments on that page indicate that “traffic” is actually a hot Virginia issue. Still reads weird from the outside, though.

Honestly, not only has the terror won in the “terrorists” sense, but the terror has won in the “when did the country becomes a big bunch of pussies” sense. I knew this was true when Ahmadinejad visited Columbia College and conservatives pitched such a shitfit about it, but I couldn’t put into words why this bugged me. Fortunately, a guy named Rick Perlstein worked it out.

Bed-wetter Nation | Campaign for America’s Future

I’m getting really sick of conservatives talking like the tough guys when they’re the ones that are being big goddamned babies about everything.

Mercer For President 2008

My Campaign Theme

The United States Government must regulate government sleepers and government regulations authorized thought, ideas, acts, actions, rights, wrongs, controversies, facts, issues and circumstantial evidence through intelligence research, law research, law enforcement research and criminal law research implementing ROTC communications research innovating education national and international.

Senator Craig resigned on Saturday, or should I say “resigned”, because Tuesday he called a mulligan. But in his Saturday speech…politicians always dispense easy, face-saving lies in these situations—”spending time with my family”—but it’s part of the script and everyone knows it and expects it. But reading his “resignation” speech on Saturday, it’s interesting what Craig is saying about his priorities:

…to pursue my legal options, as I continue to serve Idaho, would be an unwanted and unfair distraction of my job and for my Senate colleagues. These are serious times of war and of conflict — times that deserve the Senate’s and the full nation’s attention.

There are many challenges facing Idaho that I am currently involved in. And the people of Idaho deserve a senator who can devote 100 percent of his time and effort to the critical issues of our state and of our nation.

So essentially, by changing his mind, he’s decided his reputation is more important than the people of Idaho, the Senate, times of war and conflict, and the full nation’s attention. It’s like he had a press conference a few days later and said, “I went home and looked at my family, and you know, I don’t even like them very much.”