Month: September 2008

It appears that prime minister Zapatero is sometimes referred to as president Zapatero in Spain, because he is "president" of the government. In America, prime ministers tend to be called prime ministers, but for the record, Scheuneman can claim some technical validity here.

A reader writes:

I’ve been reading some of the hacked emails from Palin’s personal account (okay, I’m a small, small person), and couldn’t help noticing that whoever was trying to protect the account has quite the streak of genuine, small-town, redneck homophobia. Two examples:

". . . a moral fag changed the password…"

"SAVE AND POST, FAGGOT"

I have no idea about the authenticity of the screenshots of the account, how these emails might fit into some context, or anything else at all, and I have no judgment (or way of judging) any of this. But amidst much other profanity concerning the hacking, the faggot comments certainly jumped out at me.

I have to say that given Palin’s Christianist far-right base, this kind of internal language does not surprise me. Alas.

Noah Millman is wary of the AIG buy out.

Rove predicts interest in his Manchurian candidate will wane. He hopes so anyway. I’ll keep doing the vetting McCain didn’t, and will keep tabulating her serial lies. No relenting here. And no deference to public servants ever.

Ross takes a stab at it:

Palin’s fall, I suspect, has been driven primarily by negative press reports on her Alaska career (with the anti-Palin notebook dumps in the Times and the Post leading the way), ongoing coverage of the still-simmering Troopergate scandal – and especially by her widely-watched, none-too-impressive interview with Charlie Gibson, which aired the day her slide in the polls began. The Obama campaign, meanwhile, has busied itself going after McCain – for lying in his ads, for being out of touch on the economy, etc. etc. – and avoiding the "she’s just a small-town mayor" attacks that they trotted out immediately after the Palin pick was announced. Or at least that’s been my impression – it’s possible that there’s been a barrage of anti-Palin fire from the Obama camp that I’ve missed, but by and large it seems like they’ve been doing a decent job of just getting out of the way, and leaving it to the media (and Palin herself) to undo her initial spike in popularity.

Yglesias differs. I don’t think we have yet seen the real Palin crash. But I’m a patient man.

The interest is still overwhelming – and more people are searching for her than for any of the others (she’s blue, Obama’s red, McCain’s orange and poor old Biden’s green (with envy):

She’s even beating "boobies."

"I fear the government has passed the point of no return. We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest dreams. It’s pure crisis management. It’s the Treasury and the Federal Reserve lurching from crisis to crisis without a clear statement on how financial failures will be handled in the future. They’re afraid to articulate such a policy. The safety net they are spreading seems to widen every day with no end in sight," – Ron Chernow, a leading American financial historian.

"Sarah is that standard God has raised up to stop the flood. She has the anointing … Back in the 1980s, I sensed that Israel’s little-known Benjamin Netanyahu was chosen by God for an important end-time role. I still believe that. I now have that same sense about Sarah Palin," – an evangelical email now making the rounds. May God save us from these fanatics.

The Obama surge is real.