Mick Arran's Open Salon Blog

Friday Palin: Book, Schmook (Updated)

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:11:23 -0500

Well, the predictable orgy around Lynn Vincent's autobiography of Sarahcuda has begun, shot out of Oprah's cannon and into a vat of oatmeal gravy. Newsday noticed that Oprah's main concern seemed to be...herself (go figure) and that Teh Cuda never even mentioned the guy who made her a STAR.

[S]he...came across as a whiner at times - as an ingrate, and mean-spirited, as someone who declined or refused to give John McCain so much as a nod of appreciation, barely even acknowledging him. How would that have hurt her? Just a "I'd really like to thank him for the tremendous opportunity..etc. etc." But nothing - or at least nothing generous. It felt feckless, mean-spirited. (But that's what the book is about in some parts, so...)

Let's go through the interview:

Oprah asks if she was "snubbed" when Oprah declined to have her on.

Palin: "...it didn't even register." In other words, she had bigger things to worry about than whether O wanted to have her on the show or not.

Well, maybe it didn't register with Sarahcuda who had, after all, major wardrobe decisions hanging fire at the time, but it sure registered with the Big O who was downright testy about it. McCain, otoh, may be thanking his lucky moonz that she ignored him.

Anyway, that turned out to be the most impertinent question asked by O - or by anybody else so far, for that matter. Obviously Sarah Rules are in play or Sarah won't. Which, it has been noticed, doesn't faze the Villagers.

The avalanche of free Palin publicity being generated by the press continues unabated. And that's why Palin and her marketing team must be having a good laugh at the press' expense these days.

Specifically, Palin still has not allowed herself to be interviewed by an actual, professional political journalists this week. Palin has completely snubbed Beltway media elites (the same ones who won't stop writing and talking about her), yet there hasn't been a single murmur of discontent.

In other words, Palin's using the Beltway press to generate free publicity. And then Palin snubs that same Beltway press corps. I'd think that kind of smack-down would sting. But apparently not. I guess political journalists think it makes sense that a high-profile political figure would launch a very political book and begin paving the way for a possible 2012 political campaign and, y'know, not talk to the political press.

Despite the small fact that, based on "her" "book" (quotes are because it isn't hers and it's only barely a book), 2012's most visible GOP candidatress seems to have a fairly serious problem with, like, reality.

Palin: "Democrat lawmaker ... complained that I wasn't as 'sparky.' " Palin mocks the "political buckshot" her "critics fired" at her, writing: "[L]ocally, the opposition would criticize me for focusing on national issues -- as if I suddenly needed to become parochial and think of Alaska's issues as irrelevant to the nation. In Juneau, one Democrat lawmaker complained that I wasn't as 'sparky' as before and that Piper and I no longer brought around bagels like we used to." [Going Rogue, Page 344]

"Democrat lawmaker" actually a Republican. Palin appeared to be referring to a January 31 AP article that quoted Alaska state Sen. Bert Stedman -- a Republican -- describing Palin as "[n]ot so sparky." The article also reported that a separate Alaska lawmaker, a Democrat, mentioned that Palin, before the 2008 election, "walked around the building with (her daughter) Piper handing out bagels. I think those days are gone."

Which is No 7 in a partial list of 11. Dave at LG&M could barely get through the first chapter.

I should note at the outset that Going Rogue is substantially worse than even I could have predicted.

A swift Amen to that. Michelle Goldberg (no relation to Jonah that I know of; for one thing, she can write and for another she's not a idjit) wonders if some of this doesn't have "pathological" written all over it.

All politicians may lie, but not all politicians lie like Sarah Palin. Many people in public life lie to avoid getting caught when they do something wrong; call them “I did not have sex with that woman!” lies. Or they mislead about their own experiences and accomplishments, like Hillary Clinton and her untrue tales of dodging bullets in Bosnia.

Palin, however, lies when there’s little to be gained by lying, and she lies when everyone knows the truth. If Bill Clinton were a Palin-style liar, he’d still be insisting that his relationship with Monica Lewinsky was entirely chaste, or he’d claim that he never denied it in the first place. If Hillary Clinton lied like Palin, she’d put the Bosnia anecdote in her next memoir. Palin’s new book, Going Rogue, coupled with her recent media appearances, evinces a dishonesty that seems as much clinical as opportunistic. Maybe Palin really does suffer from narcissistic personality disorder.

See, some of it may be stoopidity -

To be sure, some of the factually incorrect stuff in Going Rogue may be the result of ignorance as much as dishonesty. On page 391, she writes, “Ronald Reagan faced an event worse recession. He showed us how to get out of one. If you want real job growth, cut capital gains taxes and slay the death tax once and for all.” Every assertion in these sentences is untrue. The current recession is far worse than anything Reagan faced. Reagan did not get rid of the estate tax, which Palin calls the “death tax.” And capital gains taxes are lower now than they were during the Reagan administration. But Palin might not be being deliberately misleading; maybe she just doesn’t know any better. The same could be true when she claims that Barack Obama “opposed laws that would protect babies born alive after botched abortions.” Maybe it was ignorance rather than deceit that led Palin to sound off about “death panels” a few months ago.

(emphasis added)

- but how do you explain the rest?

Surely, though, Palin knew that she told the McCain campaign, in writing, that Bristol was pregnant, and so her story about McCain’s ace investigators digging the information up on their own was a lie. Either she was lying last year, when she told Sean Hannity that before accepting the offer to join the McCain ticket, she’d taken a family vote, or she was lying on Monday, when she told Oprah Winfrey she’d done no such thing. Emails released by former McCain staffers show that she was lying about her eagerness to appear on Saturday Night Live. A number of reporters and bloggers have tirelessly catalogued all this mendacity, particularly Palin nemesis Andrew Sullivan.

The Associated Press fact-checked Palin’s false claims about relying on small donations in her political campaigns, allowing for open, competitive bidding on a natural gas pipeline and avoiding conflicts of interest as Wasilla mayor. (Palin accused the AP of doing “opposition research,” as if any attempt to hold her accountable for her own words must be a partisan plot.) As the Boston Globe reports, there’s overwhelming evidence that Palin is lying when she disavows all responsibility for her infamous $150,000 shopping spree.

So what's this all in aid of? TBogg astutely picks up Sarah's newest catchphrase as she's making the rounds of the not-news shows and he's pretty sure he's got it figgered out: Teh Cuda Party. To be called the Compassionate Conservative...no, wait, that was the other guy. The Commonsense Conservative Party. Yeah, that's it.

It is entirely likely (should Sarah Palin decide to form her own political party since the Republican establishment is not exactly seeing birds suddenly appear every time she is near) that Sarah will probably form her own political party. Since the Connecticut for Lieberman Party name is already taken and American Teabaggers sounds like a Naughty America video series, it is likely to be called the Commonsense Conservative Party. This is not to be mistaken with those losers (LOOOO-SERS!!!) over at the Conservative Party.

That Third Party Sarah just got a big boost (if you want to look at it that way) when she got attacked for not being sufficiently right-wing enough on abortion. I kid you not.

Well, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few Sarahs. IAC, it don't mattah much cause her fans are lining up like it was a Miley Cyrus concert.

Sooo awesome!

UPDATE: (2.45pm) Roy Adroso in the Village Voice has some...surprising...excerpts from the book. Surprising because they sound like Sarah, not Lynn. I think he got a contaminated copy.

1. On accepting the Vice-Presidential nomination:

I was sitting next to the stove, patching up little Gopher's North Face jacket, when I got the call, and I figured, gosh-a-mighty, why not? Well, they scoot me down to Dayton -- and let me tell you, that place could use a new coat of paint -- and they tell me I have to talk to this crowd, but I say, "Oh, no -- there'll be big-town reporters there, and they'll twist and turn my words so I look like an idjit," but ol' John, he says, don't worry, they're gonna love you, and then he goes into a room in the back of the place they have there and starts beating on the walls and yelling in a foreign language. So I went out there and sure enough, people were cheering and waving flags like I was Clay Aiken, even before I said a word. They kept on cheering when I commenced to speak, but I don't know what-all I said, because I kept looking over and seeing ol' John picking at his hands, probably to soothe the cuts he got on his knuckles pounding on that wall.

Now that's more like our Sar.

A Little Test

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:11:36 -0500

OK, class. Let's see if you've been paying attention. How does this -

Just two days before the New York Fed paid A.I.G.’s partners 100 cents on the dollar to tear up their contracts with the insurance giant, one bank volunteered to take a modest haircut — but it never got the chance.

UBS, of Switzerland, alone offered to give a break to the New York Fed in the negotiations last November over how to keep A.I.G. from toppling and taking other banks down with it. It would have accepted 98 cents on the dollar.

But UBS’s good-faith gesture was quickly drowned out by Goldman Sachs and the top French bank regulator. They argued, with others, that it would be improper and perhaps even criminal to force A.I.G.’s trading partners to bear losses outside of bankruptcy court.

The banks and the regulator were confident that the New York Fed was not willing to push A.I.G. into bankruptcy, because earlier in the fall the New York Fed had stepped in with $85 billion to prop up the insurer.

The New York Fed, led then by Timothy F. Geithner, who is now the Treasury secretary, therefore had little leverage in the negotiations, according to a post-mortem of what has emerged as the most inflammatory episode in the rescue of A.I.G.

- connect to this?

GMAC Financial Services, the former lending arm of General Motors, replaced its chief executive on Monday as it negotiates for another round of bailout financing from the federal government.

The company’s directors appointed Michael A. Carpenter, a former Citigroup executive and current GMAC director, to succeed Alvaro de Molina, who had run the company since April 2008. Mr. Carpenter said the board believed that he would be more appropriate as chief executive than Mr. de Molina, who resigned at the board’s request.

(emphasis added as a hint)

Extra points if you can predict the effect of either set of facts.

If Democrat Healthcare “Reform” Was...

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:11:06 -0500

...Applied to Other Kinds of Insurance

Life Insurance

1) “I’m sorry but your husband died of cancer and that’s not on our Approved Causes List.”

“Approved Causes List? What causes of death do you approve?”

“Strangulation by an enraged artichoke.”

Pause.

“Um, is that all?”

“Yes. We consider everything else to be uncovered.”

Consumer flips frantically through several hundred pages of Coverage Information. “It doesn’t say anything about artichokes in here.”

“No. You should have asked.”

“About artichokes?”

“It was your responsibility. Don’t look at me. The Congress says so.”

***

2) “Your father isn’t covered because he died of old age.”

“But that’s why he bought life insurance. You mean dying of old age isn’t allowed?”

“Well, it’s allowed but we don’t pay benefits. Old age is a pre-existing condition. Page 3012, Paragraph 1600 Z-Prime, Line 5478 under the heading Unimportant Definitions You Don’t Have to Pay Any Attention To and Should Ignore Completely. Here. Use my magnifying glass.”

***

3) “I’m sorry. No Benefits.” Stamp stamp stamp.

“Wait a minute! My mother paid her premiums on time for 46 years.”

“Not relevant.”

“Not relevant?”

“In looking at her past medical history – “

“Hey! How did you get that?”

“Tut. We’re an insurance company, dear. We are om-nee’-po-tent. In looking at your mother’s medical history I see that she drank at least one cup of coffee every day, smoked cigarettes for several years when she was in college, and admits to an ‘occasional’ (yeah, right) glass of wine. Clearly her lifestyle was in violation of our Healthy Bodies clause.”

“My mother was hit by a bus. What’s her college days have to do with it?”

“They prove a pre-disposition to risky behavior. She was probably drunk when she stepped in front of the bus. Or high on caffeine. In either case, she violated her policy. Death benefits denied. Next!”

Car Insurance

1) Dial dial dial.

“Hello? Um, I had an accident – “

“Claim denied.”

Click.

Dial dial dial.

“Hello? I just called and we were cut off.”

“That’s because I hung up on you. Claim denied. End of story.”

Click.

Dial dial dial.

“Yes?”

“But you don’t even know how it happened.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re not covered.”

“What? Why not?”

“Look, do you know what would happen if we actually paid claims? We wouldn’t be able to pay our investors 37% per year and our executives wouldn’t be able to buy fancy cars and ocean-going yachts and then what would happen to the economy? Crash, that’s what. And that would hurt you. So we decided not to pay any claims. That will save the economy. We’re doing it for you. We’re heroes. [Via] So quit bitchin.”

***

2) “So this paper says my accident isn’t covered and I want to know why.”

“It’s very simple. You’re a woman and you made a left turn.”

“Howzzat?”

“At least 12% of the population are against left turns. We here at GetItWhileYouCan Auto Insurance believe that we should not offend this very important if hopelessly marginal segment of our target market because they’re very noisy and we’re scared of them. The Congress of the United states agrees. Therefore we have decided that no women who make left turns will be covered. Right turns are acceptable.”

“What’s the difference?”

“The hopelessly marginal but loud people say left is immoral but right is OK.”

“But I live on a one-way street and my house is on the left.”

“Leave your car on the street.”

“What happens if it gets vandalized?”

“You won’t be covered.”

“Then why am I buying car insurance if I’m not covered for anything because I’m a woman?”

“Because we made the government make it a law that everybody who drives has to have insurance.”

“Even if it doesn’t cover them?”

“Especially if it doesn’t cover them. That’s the beauty of it. You’re pure profit to us.”

Friday Palin: The Magic of Facebook Cuda Is So Awesome!

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:11:30 -0500

There is no longer any doubt that Sarah Palin comes alive on Facebook, able to express herself so much more better than she can when she rambles on verbally to insufficiently genuflecting liberal weenies and left-wing intellectuals like, say, Katie Couric, or even her own hand-picked, carefully vetted, supporters. The difference between the two is so extreme that there can be only one legitimate explanation: magic Facebook pixie dust.

Remember in last week's episode when Teh Sarah was going to give a secret speech that nobody was going to be allowed to copy down and use against her? Well, some people suggested that somebody would and, actually, somebody did. Politico, that she let them in there because they always been friendly but then they went and stabbed her in the B-A-C-K when she wasn't looking and then printed it in their stoopid little paper or whatever it is, and boy are they in T-R-O-U-B-L-E!

Cause it seems the Cuda had just the teensiest bit of trouble making any, um, sense and going off her speech and talking about stuff being "bogus" and "awesome" and it was just like when that cheerleader who ran for Miss Universe or something was asked what she would do to end hunger and she said the govt should "take all the poor people to McDonald's" only Sarah was all about the trickery about the dollar coin that, like, nobody has even hardly seen yet but it was awesome bogus just the same because they insulted god by not putting him in the top place as we all know he oughta be because god's really the president and the US is, like, the Holy Land only with Dairy Queens.

[S]he began her remarks with a puzzling commentary on the design of newly minted dollar coins.

Noting that there had been a lot of “change” of late, Palin recalled a recent conversation with a friend about how the phrase “In God We Trust” had been moved to the edge of the new coins.

“Who calls a shot like that?” she demanded. “Who makes a decision like that?”

She added: “It’s a disturbing trend.”

A dastardly conspiracy unearthed, maybe, except...um, to answer her question about who made the decision?

[T]he new coins – concerns over which apparently stemmed from an email chain letter widely circulated among conservatives – were commissioned by the Republican-led Congress in 2005 and approved by President Bush.

This was a mistake so gratuitous, so obvious, so stoopid that - hang onto your hat, you're not gonna b'lieve this - even FoxNews found themselves fact-checking Our Sar, actually reporting, on air, that their dear Cuda was, you know, wrong.

But not to worry. Teh Cuda's got lots of options 'cause, like, that's only one of many plots against America anyway because wouldn't you know it? those GD libruls are all pimping health care so they can kill seniors and babies and people in wheelchairs and stuff.

Speaking to a fund-raising banquet of Wisconsin Right to Life, the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee asserted that if policy-makers don’t believe a child in the womb is valuable, then “perhaps the same mind-set applies to other persons.”

“What may they feel about an elderly person who doesn’t have a whole lot of productive years left,” Palin asked an audience of about 5,000 who paid $30 each to hear her speak in an airplane hangar-like exhibition hall at the Wisconsin state fairgrounds just outside of Milwaukee. “In order to save government money, government health care has to be rationed… [so] than this elderly person that perhaps could be seen as costing taxpayers to pay for a non-productive life? Do you think our elderly will be first in line for limited health care?"

Um, Sarah? It's, like, the conservatives who think unproductive people ought to be shoved out to sea on a small raft with a loaf of bread and a canteen of water where hopefully a superhuge killer whale will end their dependency on govt tax hand-outs, and it's, like, liberals who don't think handing sick people a voucher to pay for the raft is quite sufficient and maybe they ought to get healthcare and, like, liberals who fought for and passed Medicare over the strenuous objections of conservatives like you who said it was socialistic/communistic/alien-lizard-people-ish and would end all life on Earth only it, like, didn't.

So the Talking Doll Sarah sort of didn't really get it and went off on tangents and stuff.

Palin had remarks prepared but frequently wandered off-script to make a point, offering audience members a casual “awesome” or “bogus” in discussing otherwise weighty topics.

As in: “It is so bogus that society is sending a message right now and has been for probably the last 40 years that a woman isn’t strong enough or smart enough to be able to pursue an education, a career and her rights and still let her baby live.”

Anybody know which Society that is? Cause they oughta be sterilerized.

But if the Talking Doll Sarahcuda has a bad hard drive and a warped disc, the Facebook Sarahcuda is all graduate-studenty, using Big Words with more than 2 syllables and even remembering one of them furrin marky thingys they put on their alphabet letters to make things hard for Real Murrikins to unnerstand. FDL's Blue Texan was so way blown away about how good Teh Cuda writes on Facebook compared to how she talks that he thinks it's not magic pixie dust but that somebody must be writing it for her.

The latest update from the ‘Cuda begins:

Twenty years ago, the ultimate symbol of the division between freedom and tyranny was torn down. The Berlin Wall was constructed for one purpose: to prevent the escape of East Germans to the freedom of the West. The Wall’s cold, gray façade was a stark reminder of the economic and political way of life across the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

I’m sorry, but 1,000 Sarah Palin clones chained to 1,000 typewriters would not produce a sentence like that in 100,000 years. Let alone include the cedilla in “facade.” Let alone use the word “facade.”

Well, OK, but I think he must be a cynic. I believe in the magic Facebook pixie dust and if I'da known they had it I wouldn't've cancelled my Facebook page and this would be a much better post than it is. I might even have got around to using an umlaut. You never know.

So Now That They've Saved The Rich, We're Next, Right? Uh...

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:11:58 -0500

There's almost $300M in TARP money that hasn't been disbursed yet. You know, the tiny part that was supposed to go directly to job creation and the business lending Wall Street continues to show no interest in. We've been waiting months, since before Obama was elected, expecting that that mnoney would be released momentarily since it only took a few days for the govt cough up Wall Street's $3T worth. But here we are, a year later, and despite Wall Street's ideal "jobless recovery" hasn't exactly worked, we still haven't seen squat for anybody except bankers.

Now, FDL's David Dayen notes that according to the WSJ, Obama may dump the job-creating thing and use our money to make the bankers happy in a different way - by reducing the debt.

Despite tea partiers and many liberals savaging President Obama for bailing out the banks, for the most part this has been the province of the Federal Reserve. The Obama White House actually hasn’t used most of the TARP money inherited by them from the $700 billion dollar bailout passed by Congress in 2008 and signed by President Bush. At last count over $210 billion remained, with another $50 billion expected to come back in over the next year.

There was discussion a few weeks ago of Obama using that money to give to community banks for the purposes of lending to small businesses, which could create jobs and finance new projects. With a lending drought continuing, this seemed like an excellent idea. However, today the White House floated a different plan, taking over half the remaining TARP money and just plugging it back into the budget to fill the deficit.

Yeah. Half for now, and then when the deficit hawks scream that isn't enough, the rest of it will go too, and Obama will move from creating jobs to offering programs for unemployed folk to help them find jobs that, you know, no longer exist because they've been shipped to Argentina or wherever.

Oh, wait. He's already announced it.

President Barack Obama announced Thursday that he'll host a White House summit next month on combating the chronic joblessness that continues to be a drag on a struggling economy.

"We are open to any demonstrably good idea to supplement the steps we've already taken to put America back to work," Obama said before taking off for a trip to Asia, where U.S. and global business prospects will be among the key issues under discussion.

Speaking at the White House, the president called a report showing fewer claims for jobless benefits "a hopeful sign." But with millions of Americans out of work, Obama said the government has "an obligation to consider every additional responsible step we can" to get people back to work.

Um, how do you "combat chronic joblessness" without doing anything to create more jobs? Anyone? Anyone?

Somehow I just knew that when it got to be our turn they'd find somewhere else to put the money. Somehow I just knew that calming Wall Street's "fears" of deficits - fears which don't seem to function when it's Wall Street that's causing those deficits - would turn out to be more important than helping us erase our deficits by creating jobs and incomes.

And so it goes. No surprises here.