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.

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?

You can't get them out of your mind, so you decided to inflict them on us? I didn't even play the videos -- my brain pulled those out of the memory banks, dusted them off, and now they're stuck in my mind! Thanks. Thanks a lot.

I agree that phrase "the other folks" is not necessarily a racist locution. But look at who said it, where it was said, the audience it was intended for, and the historical usage of black voter suppression techniques and code words like "other" -- in this specific context I think it's reasonable to interpret it as such. At the very least, Chambliss knew that many people in his audience would interpret "other folks" as meaning "black people." After all, the whole point of using racial code words is that they have a defensible benign interpretation.

Sarah Palin doesn't really *mean* to call people who aren't her core constituents "anti-American" -- except that she does, or she wouldn't say it over and over, even after she's been called on in. It's disingenuous of people making these kinds of statements to protest that they don't mean to imply what they clearly implied, and naive of people to believe their excuses.

"....the McCain campaign “hope[s] the strip proves to be as predictive as it is consistently lame.”

Let's analyze:

Strip = consistently lame.

Hopes proves predictive = consistently lame.

Therefore

Strip = hopes proves predictive.

So what he actually said is that he hopes the strip is predictive, which would mean an Obama win. How typical of the McCain campaign's utter inability to craft a coherent message and/or their penchant for making a Freudian slip. Or maybe he's one of the rats secretly deserting the sinking ship!

I don't think that Obama is campaigning in Arizona to rub McCain's face in it. I think it's the logical continuation of the Howard Dean/Obama 50-state strategy that has been working so well.

For many years, Democrats in "red states" have felt more marginalized than their actual numbers warrant. For all they've had a strangle-hold on the national political discourse, Republicans are a minority party. Only about a third of all registered voters are Republicans, and yet they've managed to turn "liberal" into a dirty word and made many liberals afraid and ashamed to voice their convictions. One thing the broad-based campaign has done is allowed Democrats in "red" areas to come out of the closet and empowered them to let their views be heard.

In addition, for Obama and the Democrats to be successful in accomplishing their agenda, they need to have a mandate. For the last couple of years, even with a majority in Congress, the Democrats have still been knuckling under to the Republicans on a lot of issues. Running up the popular vote by maximizing the votes even in "red" states will hopefully give them the confidence they need by reminding them that despite their claims, the Republican view is *not* the majority view and there's no need to apologize for being "liberal" when the majority of the country shares those values!

Alex is right on: McCain seemed so much more relaxed and coherent on SNL than he has on the campaign trail the last few weeks. It just confirmed my perception that he hasn't been comfortable with what he's been saying (although I'm not giving him a break on that: it's even more reprehensible to say the things he's been saying if he doesn't believe in them).

The Keith Olbermann sketch was dreadful. It wasn't funny, and it wasn't funny for waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long (that clip is almost nine minutes!). It was is if they thought if they kept going, maybe eventually they'd make someone laugh and instead they just became more and more irritating. I don't blame it on Affleck, though. The script didn't give him anything to work with, and nine minutes with nothing to work with is a loooong time to be on stage.

You know what really scares me? The number of people who will reject reasoned, fact-based analysis in favor of some weird theory from some crackpot on the internet. And the more rational people try to prove it's not true, the more they see that as proof that there's a conspiracy. It's the kind of circular thinking that guarantees that you will never accept anything that doesn't jibe with existing beliefs and preconceptions.

This phenomenon is not just applicable to McCain/Palinites -- people with thought processes like this have existed for a long time and across both political and nonpolitical ideological spectra. But it seems to be a group that the McCain campaign is particularly targeting/encouraging, which is more than a little alarming.