Readerrider you'd make an excellent pimp bro.

Right. That's the theory.

People forget that when Ben Bernacke speaks of "extraordinary" action, he isn't kidding. His program has never been tried before.

Every other major recession in American history has been followed by monetary retraction, not expansion. The concept has been to force the economy to a bottom, then allow for a quicker recovery. In the depression of 1893-1896, Congress took silver out of the currency as an immediate reaction and it still took four years to recover.

But why focus on such unpleasantness in the midst of a thread devoted to Sarah Palin? Okay, it's getting late for me. I've said a nice word about Obama. Your task for tonight is to think a nice thought about Palin.

When it came down to it, Sarah Palin wasn't up to the job of selling Sarah Palin. She was too quirky, too green, maybe even too daft.

Palin is dumb. That's about it. Dumb and incapable of self-control. She's hardly the brilliant-but-idiosyncratic figure Amanda Fortini seems to be looking for half of the time in her weird paean to political mothers.

Fortini would do well to reconsider her own basic thesis. The strange attraction she's trying to get a handle on is simply that age-old appeal of populist demagogues since the Greeks invented the word "democracy." Men of that ilk have plagued the American body politic since the founding of the republic, and now there are women who do so as well. Vive la difference.

She showed us the appeal of the strong, confident, maternal woman. Maybe she couldn't handle it herself, but it will surely survive as a meme.

Sarah Palin is none of strong, confident, or maternal. Hillary Clinton is strong and confident, and probably more genuinely maternal than Palin, whose idea of motherhood is aptly (if unintentionally) characterized by her own use of the analogy to a half-ton crazed, raving, clawed animal.

Palin is a garden-variety professional public psychopath, of no great talent or achievement, with whose kind we ought to be quite familiar after 8 years of George Bush. There is nothing extraordinary about her except the lengths to which otherwise sensible commentators will go to grant her some fig leaf of reputability.

I don't know what you all are smoking down there in the lower 48, but let me tell you that as an Alaskan, a republican, and one of those born again Christians the left can get all uptight about, Palin cannot be trusted and is, in fact, dangerous. Her campaign last fall reminded me of the Hunter S. Thompson quotation "We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear -- fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer." Palin plays on peoples' fears. And if she and MCCain had won '08, Obama might well have found himself inside of one of our detention camps pallin' around with domestic terrorists as he did. Seriously, nothing is too far fetched with her. If that's the kind of country my fellow republicans and Christians want then support Palin. She'll get the job done. But God help us if she ever achieves higher office. Nothing but her slogans suggests she believes in democracy, the Bill of Rights (other than the right to bear arms), or real freedom, and nevermind the Golden Rule.

If she can sell the American Public with a cheap gag like this, God help us all... My ex-girlfriend from high-school has a better line and she is a (successful) realtor. Both 40-ish, both shallow and both undeserving of higher office. Thank Christ my ex is more interested in money and listings rather than power for it's own sake or there might be two Sarah's to contend with.

Please with this drivel.

Maybe coaches of high school athletic teams don't say it any more (and that would be a blessing):

When the going gets tough, the tough get going!

So far as Ms Palin is concerned: When the going gets tough Sarah quits.

She gamed the system to get an appointment to the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission - a plum political job which, once she'd been on the payroll for a year, she learned was simply a regulatory agency that provided its commissioners no political thrills at all - and quit.

Now she has learned that being governor in a time of declining revenues isn't much fun - and she quit. In the more than forty years I've lived here I've never thought I'd welcome the day we got a garden variety hack politician as governor - but I do now.

Actually, Andrew Johnson was probably the most illiterate president of the 19th century. He never attended school and was taught to read by his wife when he was 17.

By the way, there is no virtue in being a moron-- despite whatever other qualities a person my have!

A meme for maternal stupidity, maybe.

Now, Amanda, would you shut the f*** up?

Thanks.

Palin is curious as a political figure, constantly setting the bar higher than she is capable of reaching, thus failing on her own terms and contradicting an image she herself created. If she's such a tough mama, which indeed is the image she created for herself, what "pit-bull with lipstick" ducks and runs when attacked? What politician who cares only about serving her state walks away when there's no future glory in finishing the job? What "regular American" (whatever that trope means) leaves a job unfinished? And how does one serve a state better by leaving its service?

I think you're entirely right that is was her image as a mother—and not a willowy helpless mom, but a tough, fiercely protective one—that intrigued people. She was photgenic, and we all know about the guys that wanted to hit it, but I don't think that increased her popularity by many votes. The "mom meme" did. Yet in typical Palin style, she created an intersting image, then flubbed it. Probably because there was no substance beneath the image.