Okay, first gang, it's not three months. Sarah Palin was announced as VP on August 29. The election is November 4. That's slightly over *two* months, or 68 days. So $150K is about $2,200 PER DAY. This is just the cost of the clothes, and not the cost of her hair and make-up (her make-up artist reportedly billed over $13,000 for September).

You can put together a pretty nice outfit for $2,200, even in expensive stores. A whole new expensive outfit every day seems a little excessive, especially since she has "people" who can take care of things little things like picking up the dry cleaning.

What's I think it annoying is that the McCain/Palin campaign keeps talking about their opponents as being "elitist." What's more "elitist" than expensive designer clothes?

My thinking is with ShellyF -- after watching that video I'm more concerned about Piper than I am about Trig. Trig seems to be doing okay and be well-cared-for, but Piper (1) should be in school, and (2) should not be burdened with responsibility for an infant at the age of seven. Let Bristol practice her mommy skills and let poor Piper have some semblence of a normal childhood.

This reminds me of something that has stuck with me for over 30 years. In 1975 I was with a group of teenagers on a cultural exchange tour of Romania, which at the time was deep behind the Iron Curtain: no western media, very restricted travel, etc. One of the adults with our group was an imposing African-American man, and in the more rural areas, people would literally follow him down the street because they'd never seen a "black" person before.

One day our bus stopped for a break and he went across the street to an open air market and bought a small watermelon. As he got on the bus he shook his head regretfully and said "The only black man they've ever seen, and he's carrying a watermelon." So yeah, even if white people are ignorant of the watermelon as a symbol of racist stereotypes, it has a painful significance to African-Americans.

The GOP is not the "white people's party" -- that's an insult to all decent white Americans. What they are is the party of delusion. They're the perpetrators of an Orwellian mind-set that everything they say or believe is true, simply by virtue of the fact that they say it. Just as in "1984," what they say today is true, even if it's the direct opposite of what they said last week.

It's the party of faith over reason, which is why so many people find them scary: how can you reason with someone who rejects the entire concept of reason?

Gee, I expected some of the regular Republican-apologist letter writers to have explained to us by now that it was just an innocent misunderstanding. I guess even they can't figure out how to spin this one.

Things last forever on the internet and can easily be taken out of context. So why did Salon.com decide to perpetuate the presence of this bogus interview? And you're calling other people stupid and critizing their 'net savvy?

But what I really want to know is, where is New Hampshire in relation to "our neighbor Afghanistan"?

True enough, beigelife. I don't think there were ever as many "PUMAs" as the media said there were -- they were just very visible and vocal, and the media loved the story. Polls show that those Hillary voters who supposedly refused to support Obama, having had time to get over their disappointment, have very much decided to go for party unity; those who didn't probably weren't Democrats to begin with, but rather Hillary Republicans.

I actually believed in the myth of the PUMA -- I have a good friend who a few weeks ago said she was going to write in Hillary rather than vote for McCain or Obama. But she told me yesterday that she doesn't feel bad about voting for Obama. If PUMAs ever existed at all, they're extinct now!

I really object to the knee-jerk reaction of so many feminists who seem to say that any suggestion that a woman's behavior contributed to her rape is "blaming the victim." To use less emotionally fraught examples, it's like saying that you shouldn't tell people to wear seat belts, you should tell people not to get into accidents; you shouldn't tell people to lock their houses, because when you do that you're blaming them for having their house burgled.

It's all well and good to say that men shouldn't rape, but in the real world, women need to be aware of ways that their behavior can make them more vulnerable to rape, and abusing alcohol is the single most important contributing factor. Besides, the fact that someone in some way made themselves vulnerable to crime doesn't excuse the crime. If you leave your house unlocked and someone comes in and steals your stuff, it's still theft. The fact that a woman makes herself vulnerable doesn't mean she "deserves" to be raped.

I'm similarly puzzled as to why people choose a president by how much they'd like to socialize with them. I, too, would like the "leader of the free world" to be the smartest, best educated, clearest-thinking person on the planet. Considering the reputation "hockey/soccer/little league" parents have of berating and sometimes even beating up coaches and other officials who don't treat their little darlings the way they think they're entitled to be treated, I sure as hell wouldn't consider "hockey mom" a good description of someone with a finger on the nuclear button.