Palin's Pork

Update:
Via TPM the Washington Independent has some interesting art on Palin's earmarks as Mayor.


Turns out that at least three earmarks secured by Gov. Palin's lobbyist while she was the Mayor of Wasilla were on McCain's annual pork hit list.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Three times in recent years, McCain's catalogs of "objectionable" spending have included earmarks for this small Alaska town, requested by its mayor at the time -- Sarah Palin.

Now, McCain, the likely Republican presidential nominee, has chosen Palin as his running mate, touting her as a reformer just like him...

But records show that Palin -- first as mayor of Wasilla and recently as governor of Alaska -- was far from shy about pursuing tens of millions in earmarks for her town, her region and her state...

In 2001, McCain's list of spending that had been approved without the normal budget scrutiny included a $500,000 earmark for a public transportation project in Wasilla. The Arizona senator targeted $1 million in a 2002 spending bill for an emergency communications center in town -- one that local law enforcement has said is redundant and creates confusion.

McCain also criticized $450,000 set aside for an agricultural processing facility in Wasilla that was requested during Palin's tenure as mayor and cleared Congress soon after she left office in 2002. The funding was provided to help direct locally grown produce to schools, prisons and other government institutions, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

Read the whole thing yourself, it's a good piece.

Also of note, Think Progress has a Sarah Palin Digest up where they are compiling her statements on a variety of important issues.

Palin and the Press

As you probably are already aware, the press (main stream media included) has been fairly critical of Senator McCain's VP pick, Governor Palin. It even seems that the MSM may have finally woken up and decided to stop giving McCain a free ride.

Exhibt A - the now ubiquitous video of Cambell Brown refusing to let Tucker Bounds spew BS.



And now the McCain camp has been moaning about the coverage and 'attacking' of Palin on personal issues, only as Josh Marshall at TPM and Steve Benen at Political Animal recently pointed out it's the McCain campaign that's continualy pushing the personal part of Palin's story and deliberatly keeping her pregnant daughter front and center. C'mon now, if you want her left alone send her home to Alaska to be out of the spotlight with other relatives and friends. If, however, you'd like to keep the bright lights shining on her (and conviently pointed away from the growing revalations about Palin's other abuse of power, lobbying and earmark, and secessionist issues) then by all means fly down her baby's daddy.

Josh Marshall:

Since there is widespread agreement that the children of candidates should not become topics of campaign debate, it behooves us to note that the McCain campaign has almost singlehandedly made Sarah Palin's daughter a central figure in the Republican convention...Let's be clear about what's happening here. Overwhelmingly, reporters are pressing eminently reasonable questions -- her role in troopergate, her lack of experience, her connections to the AIP, her history of earmarking and lobbyists, etc. Meanwhile, the McCain campaign is going absolutely non-stop about Palin's daughter. It is unmistakable.

Steve Benen:

To add to Josh's point, there are two other angles to consider here. First, the more the political world obsesses over family drama and soap-opera-like theater, the less voters will hear about the legitimate, substantive critiques on Palin, and the criticism over McCain's comically inept judgment. For the McCain, that's obviously a net plus.

Second, if McCain aides and surrogates can keep talking about Palin's family by complaining about the coverage of Palin's family, the public will eventually collectively shrug its shoulders, and assume that all Palin-related criticism is trivial and should be tuned out.

If that is the Republican game plan (and at this point that's about the best they can even hope for) then they might want to get everyone on board with it. When you have most of the campaign advisors complaining bitterly about the coverage (running with the game plan) then you really shouldn't have the national co-chair of the campaign going on the air and saying that the coverage has been 'completely fair'

Here is Meg Whitman, McCain's national campaign co-chair on, of all places, Fox News:

I'm sure it'll get even more interesting before this is over...

Justice Dylan

Well Bob Dylan has long been hailed as a great lyricist, if not always as a great vocalist. And it turns out that judges in courts throughout the land agree.

Back in July (the things you miss when you're on vacation huh? Um, totally worth it) Chief Justice John Roberts of the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS, like POTUS) cited Dylan in his dissent to a case that the NY Times described as "an achingly boring dispute between pay phone companies and long distance carriers"

The absence of any right to the substantive recovery means that respondents cannot benefit from the judgment they seek and thus lack Article III standing, ‘When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.’ Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone, on Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia Records 1965).

Rolling Stone chimed in as did the online self described legal tabloid Above the Law. Everyone was all too happy to point out that the quote isn't quite right. While online lyric sheets, including Dylan's website, agree with the cite Rolling and the others say if you listen to the words its actually a double negative cause really 'When you ain't got nothing...'

In another interesting tidbit you'll find in the stories Dylan is the most cited musician leading his closest competition, Paul Simon, 26-8.

I got to this story while catching up on the Freakonmics blog.

If you want to see the whole researched paper follow this link.

Every time I see Dubya speak I hear the lyrics to Idiot Wind in my head...

Lost in the Shuffle

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson had his speaking slot moved from Wednesday night to Thursday afternoonish in order to keep from pushing Senator Biden's speech even later in to the night. (while I've been enjoying the headlining speeches they're keeping me up pretty late, just like playoff baseball)

Gov. Richardson actually gave a great eight minute long speech at Mile High. I'm not sure exactly where it fit into the schedule but it was still light out so it was fairly early. It's a fun eight minutes and he does a great job of delineating the differences between the candidates. and for me it's right up there as one of the best speeches of the convention.

Gov. Richardson got in a few real zingers too:

Lets be honest America John McCain may pay hundreds of dollars for his shoes, but we're the ones who will pay for his flip-flops...

John McCain called our recession psychological, his economic advisers say American families are whiners, but when the big oil companies whine John McCain says they need more tax breaks...

From Russia With Love?

Paul Krugman offered up this comparison and it struck me as such a great match that I stole it from him, right down to the screen shot from the Bond flick.

You be the judge, is Vladimir Putin really SPECTRE's Number 5?


























Apparently our President doesn't watch movies either.

Foto Friday - The Return

Not quite back with a blast because the image that I want to bring you today is actually a flash doohickey on the NY Times website.

So follow the link for an awesome view from atop the 10 meter (highest) platform at the Beijing Water Cube. Once again the NYT web team has provided an excellent interactive experience online they're definitely leaps and bounds ahead of any other newspaper website in terms of utilizing the opportunities provided by the web.

I got there via Kottke.

Next week real pictures, I promise.

Back with a Bang

Yes I have returned to civilization, no I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. While I get caught up with the world at large I'd like to bring Trouble the Water to your attention.

Trouble the Water is a documentary from the film makers who worked with Micheal Moore to bring us Fahrenheit 9/11, only they didn't shoot most of the footage. Kimberly Rivers Roberts shot it on her newly street purchased camcorder as Katrina came ashore and the water rose in the lower ninth ward.

Andrew O'Heir has a great write up on the movie and America over at Salon, seriously folks go read it. A few snippets because I don't trust you to follow the link without prompting...

In many ways, I think Kim Roberts' authorship, not just of her amazing storm footage or her music but of her life, is the true subject of "Trouble the Water." We can have a "national conversation about race" until we all turn blue and keel over from boredom -- Did we have it already? If so, what did we say? -- but people like Kim and Scott Roberts don't generally have their own voices, or any other kind of autonomy. A former drug dealer and drug addict, raised in dire poverty by a mother who died young of AIDS, may be understood by way of abstract categories: She's a symptom of criminal pathology or a symptom of racism, a victim or a perpetrator. She is hardly ever going to be seen as a complicated individual utterly free of self-pity, who believes herself fully in charge of her own destiny...

To me it is Katrina that puts the lie to any fantasy of a race-neutral America. And it's Katrina, not 9/11, that displays the nation's potentially fatal 21st century weakness. While countless billions have been spent converting our society into a police state to prevent another unpreventable attack by a handful of neo-medieval wackos, the story of the ongoing destruction of a historic, majority-black American city -- before, during and after that storm -- has been briskly swept under the carpet or, more accurately, abandoned to investigative journalists, documentary filmmakers, NGO social workers, corrupt or incompetent bureaucrats and other irrelevant social debris...

Now like I said go read the rest, oh ok you can watch the trailer below first. Trouble the Water will open tomorrow (August 22) in New York and LA, be shown adjacent to both conventions, and come to Landmark's E Street here in DC on September 26th.

Wait, you didn't think Katrina was over did you?