Corrupt Bastards Club

Gov. Palin spoke Friday about having fought the old boys' network. Later I heard reference to the Corrupt Bastards Club and the name sounded so funny that I had to check it out. Turns out that such a thing actually existed.

The CBC was a group of Alaska politicians under investigation for political corruption. Supposedly some of them were in a pub one night when a citizen called them a bunch of corrupt bastards. They proudly adopted the name for themselves and even made hats and T shirts.

I guess they're not laughing now bc. 11 of 14 of them have been convicted. Of those, four have been sentenced and four are awaiting sentence. All of this according to my good friend Wikipedia.

What's so funny is not the club name so much as as the gall required for membership. The audacity. The impudence. These guys--and guys they all were--evidently were so confident they'd get away with it that they had shirts made up.

Well good for them.

Hil. disses Bill

The embedding on this has been disabled at YouTube so you'll just have to go there to see it.

But it's hilarious (sorry Patty)--Hillary completely rejects the affection of her husband. Too durn funny!

Time for a Field Trip

Now that Gov. Palin's the pick, how about a field trip to ANWR?

The Gov. could be the official docent. Even more impressive would be to have union member husband Todd be the guide since he has actually worked on the north slope.

McC can then learn for himself that drilling up there can be done and can be done right.

The important thing is to make a huge production of it. Take the press. Invite Brokaw, Williams, & Couric. "You went with Barry to Berlin, you should come with me. Let me give you the home town tour of ANWR from one who knows it." Invite O'Reilly, Rush, Matthews, and that guy on CNN. Invite Oprah and the girls from The View. Fill up that huge Straight Talk Express plane with a bunch of pressies and crank up the "North To Alaska".

To make it really good, invite Barry to come along. Invite him to do so from the stage at the GOP national convention. A bipartisan, patriotic, post-partisan thing to do.

The important thing is to take advantage of this issue.

No, the important thing is to start drilling up there.

McC Ad from Last Night

I meant to put this up last night. This was a class act and from the heart. The McC camp certainly didn't have to run anything like it.

It was, after all, an historical occasion.

Damn. . .

. . . she's better than McCain!

This is going to be a blast.

Here's the Obama response:

"Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency. Governor Palin shares John McCain's commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil and continuing George Bush's failed economic policies -- that's not the change we need, it's just more of the same."

If they're going to try to paint this spark plug from Alaska as "more of the same" of anything, Barry's going to be crushed. She is fantastic.

Rattled?

Just a quick thought before off to bed.

Did Barry seem a little rattled tonight? I say that bc. his strategy seemed definitely to change--from soaring, inspirational rhetoric with little substance to focus group-tested, Democratic cliche. One of the five or six notes I took says that now the gloves are off. It's changed from I'm-above-all-that to attack.

Me, I think that's great. Now we'll be in the sand box together, mano-a-mano. Great practice for dealing with the likes of Putin, Peking, and Abinominojaaaad.

All along I thought Barry was somewhat of a puss. But now I see the light. Anyone who can beat Billary is someone to be feared. And now the down and dirty, rough and tumble Chicago politician has arisen. Look out all you folks who thought he was above such mud slings.

When I say rattled, it's not that he's on his back. Only that he's changed tactics. Rattled in a good way for him for it shows he's willing to change tactics when needed. Look for Barry the attack dog to raise his ugly head.

One last thing, I stand by my post from last night. Bill was a ten but I'd only give Barry a 7.5.

Pick Palin, McC

My pref. is Governor Palin, Mr. McC.

Young, attractive. Oh by the way, did I mention she's a woman. Her integrity is impeccable, her values strong. Talk about outside the beltway--Alaska's as far as it gets. She recently signed into law a bill that will advance the construction of a new natural gas pipeline from Alaska.

She has five kids, the oldest in the Army, the youngest in diapers.

She's tough, honest, and McC's kind of gal. Wouldn't that be somethin'?

Here's the draft Palin blog. "New Energy for America".

The Master

Yes, he earned the distinction of being one of only two presidents ever to have been impeached. Yes, he was disbarred. Yes, he lied to his country. He lied to his friends and his family and then sent them into the world to defend him all the time knowing it was a lie. Some friend he. Yes, he got a snarlin from a 21 year old intern--on several occasions and while he was married and in the Oval Office. He might well be a rapist.

But no one alive today can give a speech like the one he gave tonight. He's the master. Obama-schmobama, you've been out shined.

This One for McC

Here's a blurb I posted over on The Chaliceblog in the comments section of a post asking folks to predict who will win in November. My prediction is McC.

Barry was doing well when all a candidate had to say was, "Pull out of Iraq." Now, it's much more complicated. They did the poll in the spring. The poll said people want change. My prediction . . . come November, apres le primary-frenzy, people won't want change just for change's sake. They'll want to look a little deeper. And what they'll see in Barry is not what they really want in a President. Or, at least, what they're willing to risk.

Here it is, my presidential prediction from The Chaliceblog:

If you believe in systems theory, you believe that systems resist change. Last spring everyone on both the right and left agreed the mess in Iraq was our biggest problem. There was enough focus on that one issue for enough people to agree that change was less scary than status quo.

Now Iraq has fallen from the headlines. Is there enough focus on our problems for America as a system to overcome its resistance to change? Our problems are many and great--the economy, energy, the environment, Supreme Court Judges, health care, social security/medicare, education, race relations, blah, blah, blah. But in such times of stress, my argument is that people will be even more resistant to change, even more afraid of taking a chance.

What's changed is focus. There's not a laser clear focus on one issue that produces enough fear for the system to overcome its resistance to change. Not among enough of the voters.

Enough voters will be laying there in bed waiting for that Ambien to kick in, worrying that the economy's bad but will raising taxes really fix it? Gas prices are high but will refusing to drill or to build nuclear plants help that? Health care is a mess but is turning more of it over to the government going to make it better or worse? Oh, and did I mention that he's black. And untested.

And it's not just the individuals within the American system who will fear change and vote against it. It's all the special interests and powers that be, corporate and otherwise, who will fight to keep what they've got.

I think it will be McCain because by the time all the attacks and fear mongering is done, the fear of change--the fear of the unknown--is what will actually decide the election.

10:31 PM, August 26, 2008

All Star Line Up?

If tonight's line up is supposed to be the Dems' all stars, I have to be thinking that maybe we Republicans don't have so much to fear. Pelosi, Kennedy, Carter, and Michelle?

Man, oh man, that's a little off the main stream, isn't it?

Whole Lotta Love

Jimmy Page, of The Yardbirds, Led Zepplin, and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame fame, reportedly will sing "Whole Lotta Love" tonight as Peking passes the Olympic flame on to London.

Guess he'll have to change that one line in the song, maybe from "Shake for me, girl/I wanna be your backdoor man" to something like "Jump with me/I wanna be your pole vault man". The Queen might not approve.

Any other suggestions?

"Hey, oh, hey, oh. . ."

So it's Barry-Biden

Biden: Thanks for picking me. I guess this means that I'm now The Chosen One.

Barry: No you're not. I'm still The Chosen One.

Biden: No, I'm The Chosen One.

Barry: No, I'm The Chosen One.

Biden: No, I'm The Chosen One.

Barry: No, I'm The Chosen One.

Biden: No, I'm The Chosen One.

Barry: No, I'm The Chosen One. . . .

The Russian Bear

Two interesting quotes flagged from the August 15 Wall Street Journal.

On A13 in Garry Kasparov's article, Russian Alexander Dugin is quoted as saying that "Russian forces 'should not stop until they are stopped.'" Kasparaov describes Dugin as a mouthpiece for the Kremlin.

Yaroslav Trofimov quotes a Russian soldier outside the town of Gori in his article on A6. Gori sits in a strategic location along the major east-west highway in Georgia. It's an hour drive from there to the capital of Tiblisi. Control of Gori cuts off access between Tiblisi and the town of Poti on the Black Sea. Trofimov queried as to the odds of the soldier's unit proceeding to Tiblisi, at which point the soldier "spat and answered, 'Anyone who stands up to Russia, we shall destroy them.'"

Now, my greatest accomplishment in the study of Soviet/Russian affairs occurred in Howard Davis's Soviet Systems class in November 1982. On the morning of a test, the Soviets announced that Leonid Brezhnev had gotten over his case of the flu by passing into the Realm Beyond. So Howard asked us, in a opportunity for extra credit (something completely unheard of at my alma mater), who we thought the next Soviet General Secretary would be.

I was completely correct predicting that it would be someone already on the Politburo with a KGB background--probably Yuri Andropov, former KGB chairman who had made a name for himself by calling in the tanks to crush the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The ten extra credit points meant that I earned a 99 on the test. It was the only time I can ever remember hiding my test from my classmates out of embarrassment for having done so well. No one got a 99 on a Howard Davis test.

Keeping in mind that that was the highpoint of my Soviet/Russian eduction, allow a few observations.

The Russians remain a bully on the Playground of World Affairs, led once again by a KGB-trained master of the art of realpolitik. As the second largest oil producer in the world, they reportedly have quadrupled defense expenditures in the last six years. They rank ninth in population (half the size of the U.S.), but second in military might. They have no problem invading Georgia or cutting off natural gas and fuel oil exports to Ukraine.

Now they are willing to fight for oil. They want their empire back. They'll never leave Abkhazia and South Ossetia again. And they don't much care about the UN or the rest of us.

I don't believe they will be stopped. . . until they're stopped.

Poll Changes

Can't say exactly why I haven't been writing. Been out of town some. Internet was down for a few days due to a defective cable modem. Time to get back into it, tho.

Last posting on July 29 had the projected electoral college vote count at 204 for McC and 334 for Barry. It's now 266 for McC and 272 for Barry. Remember, 270 wins it. McC's picked up 62 in just three weeks. Virginia and North Dakota are dead heats with McC getting those electoral votes in this particular count. All this from The Hedgehog Report blog.

At the Intrade futures market where one can put down real dollars on the election, McC can't seem to break above $40 with a close today of $38.60 while Barry has recently dropped from a high in the high $60s range back to a close today of $58.90. Intrade it turns out is very accurate in its election predictions. I believe it correctly predicted every US Senate race in '06.

It's great fun to watch.