Doubt Palin, do you? Well, listen to her own words, as quoted in tonight's Joan Walsh column, talking about the Couric interview:

I think it also showed, though, that certainly as a Washington outsider and not one to just I guess play even the campaigning media game that is played, in just repeating, perhaps, memorized lines in a, in a interview, that's not me.

Fuckin-A-right, Camille: just like Coltrane. Falling down the stairs. Through a vibraphone.

PS: Camille and TrueHawk, and everyone else pushing your little passive-aggressive leading questions about, "Ooohh, Obama and Ayers: What else don't we know?": put up some new evidence, or Shut The Fuck Up. You're wasting our time otherwise.

I don't love Rahm, myself. When it was Dean vs. Rahm, for instance, I was on Dean's side. Rahm's too DLC, too AIPAC, etc, etc.

But people complaining about this choice forget who's going to be in charge here. Obama runs one hell of a tight ship. Who ran a more disciplined campaign, Obama, Hillary, or McCain? Who do you think will have had a more disciplined administration, Obama, or Bill Clinton? (Look, love him or hate him, Bill's White House was kind of a mess.)

And you may compare this to the Bush White House, which is yes, more internally disciplined, but Bush is not really in charge. For all his tough-guy bluster, Bush is really a pretty weak President, and has let Cheney and his pitbull, Addington, run all over him. In contrast, Obama's campaign has been, ultimately, his work, and his alone.

Rahm will be Obama's pitbull. He will not go rogue. If he did, I have no doubt that Obama would toss him in a Chicago minute.

No further comment necessary!

They had been extended forever, of course, not by the Dirty Fucking Hippies, but by the kulturkrieg types, who could not get over their obsession with The Decade When It All Went Wrong no matter how long time stretched on. And so, this election we heard endlessly about the Weathermen, and finally even the Black Panthers (!).

Sensibly, most of America greeted this nonsense with, "Who the fuck cares?"

Today, the answer to the question, "What's a community organizer?" is to simply point at the electoral map and say, "THAT'S a community organizer!"

As for Mr. "Sour Loser" Derbyshire (one adjective too many, innit?), I would just say, "That's President-Elect Wonder Boy to you, punk."

I can't be bothered with his ilk today. Today, my motto comes from Dieter from Shprockets: "Now ve dance!"

Have you ever seen a life form evolve?

Has anyone ever seen a life form evolve?

*sigh* Populations of life forms evolve, not individual life forms. But if you (or, more realistically, anyone else) want to know about populations of multicellular, sexually-reproducing species branching off into new species--i.e. speciation--click on my sig for a link, courtesy of Talk Origins. Scroll down for examples of (mostly) induced speciation; observed natural examples are listed in the article linked to the right.

Yeah, evolution's real. And it's been working well past "during the cambrian [sic] explosion." (Good grief! You've never heard of dinosaurs, land-based plants, and, um, mammals? They weren't exactly around during the Cambrian.)

the man swam about in a racist, paranoid cesspool for 20 years

We've been hearing about the abominable Rev. White for eight months now, and if his church has always been a "racist cesspool," then how come we keep hearing the same "God DAMN" snippets again and again and again? If he's the Christian equivalent of Farrakhan (sp?), couldn't anyone find anything else from the past 20 years? I'm sure I said a few intemperate things in the past 20 years, and I'm willing to bet you have too. Hell, I'm sure you could find 30 seconds of nasty stuff from just about any preacher's sermons over the past 20 years.

Or, to make the task simpler, you could just look over Rev. Hagee's sermons, or those of Palin's preacher, for the last month. Which probably explains why McCain hasn't pushed this line of attack too much.

She's from College Station, Texas, right? It follows that she's an Aggie, who tend to be right-wing and, well, none too bright. So she could have claimed she was attacked by a group of angry Longhorns who held her down and tried to carve "BEVO" in her face (backwards, of course, backwards), but hey, she managed to kick them off before they finished the foul deed! Yee-haw, gig 'em Aggies*!

(*And no, I don't know what the hell that means.)

As someone mentioned Charles Stuart above. I'd like to second that comparison.

On October 23rd (!!!) 1989, Stuart shot and killed his pregnant wife, while the (white) couple were in his car in Mission Hill, a largely-black Boston neighborhood. After shooting himself and giving the murder weapon to his brother (who turned out to be the weak link in the scheme), he then told police that "a black man" did the deed as part of a robbery.

Remember, this was just a few years after Boston had been wracked by racial conflict over busing, and that the BPD still didn't exactly have the greatest reputation for dealing fairly with black people. So Stuart wasn't just coming up with a convenient alibi, he was cynically using one he knew the police would, stupidly, take at face value.

There's no comparison between a false report and a murder and false report, of course. However, Todd was also playing to a gullibly racist, or borderline racist, audience, in a situation with potential for racial strife. Disturbed as she may be, I have no sympathy for her.

There are three different pictures from this event at the Getty site (one of them is repeated twice). They show different perspectives, McCain expressions, expressions of the Chippendale rejects, etc.

Yahoo has other photos, credited to two additional photographers.

Then again, they faked the moon landings, didn't they? [/sarcasm]