If she does get elected, I hope she hires this pianist to accompany her whenever she gives a speech.

Originally seen here courtesy of Da Neural MC. (Don’t ask.)

Sorry, I spoiled the punchline. Of course, so did MSNBC’s headline. It was just too awesome. Gotta love Olbermann.

You’d think we were back in the middle of the Cold War, what with all of the talk of “socialism” from the McCain-Palin campaign lately. Aside from the fact that, absent the bad word itself, if you described to the average American the major tenets of socialism, you’d probably encounter little resistance, and mostly outright acceptance.

Beyond the false pejorative, you have the greater problem that, well, Barack Obama’s ideas just simply aren’t socialist, at least not any more socialist than the way things already were in this country before George W. Bush took office. Read more »

This is the least-scary scenario I could ever have imagined: PalinAsPresident.us

Read for yourself that the Anchorage Daily News, which (apparently) has historically treated the governor favorably, is calling her out for claiming vindication in the scandal over the firing of her state trooper ex-brother-in-law. To wit:

She claims the report “vindicates” her. She said that the investigation found “no unlawful or unethical activity on my part.”

Her response is either astoundingly ignorant or downright Orwellian.

Page 8, Finding Number One of the report says: “I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.”

In plain English, she did something “unlawful.” She broke the state ethics law.

I have felt from the beginning that we could best learn about Sarah Palin by studying the statements of Alaskans who are far more familiar with her policies and actions than most of us in the “lower 48″ are. And what I’ve gotten from that has been almost unanimously negative.

Not my words.

I just finished reading a great article on “verbage” [sic] in the New Yorker. It discusses both Republican disdain for Barack Obama’s linguistic skill and Sarah Palin’s extraordinary meat-grinder approach to the spoken word.

Along the way it does something undeserved, though: it credits the governor with coining the term “verbage,” which apparently she did not. It gets the meaning of the term correct though, and I suspect that she is as unaware of her mispronunciation and its associated alternative meaning as she is of the fact that she says “nucular” (a verbal tic she shares with our current president). Read more »