The exodus of McCain staffers from political life, that is. Marlys Popma is a pillar of the Iowa pro-life and Republican community, and after serving as McCain's Iowa outreach coordinator to the evangelical community, she's decided to withdraw from politics and "do what grandmothers like to do", namely spend more time with the grandkids.

I know a lot of people in the Iowa evangelical community consider her a "sellout" for going to work for McCain, but she's been fighting for pro-life causes since back when li'l Russ was walking to elementary school every day, so I'm going to choose to give her a virtual hearty handshake and a "thanks for all your work over the years" as she rides off into the sunset.

And if you're interested in the 2012 race already, Bobby Jindal is scheduled to give a speech here in Iowa on Saturday, November 22. I'll see if my paltry contacts in Republican politics can get me a ticket to hear what he's got to say, and if possible, I'll report back to the Moron Political Clearinghouse.

Posted by: Russ from Winterset at 08:28 AM | Comments (185)
Post contains 187 words, total size 1 kb.

From what I can tell, commentators are lashing out for a few reasons.
(1) They're simply angry and they're looking for likely targets.
(2) All the cool kids inside the beltway hated on her, so the wannabes are just copying.
(3) Folks aren't quite ready to admit that McCain bears ultimate responsibility for the shitty race he ran.
(4) Republican campaign dweebs are looking for attention from the media; bashing Palin seems to work pretty good. (See also: Clinton, Hillary.)

In other words, Governor Palin is a convenient target who the media is already predisposed to treat poorly. I don't know what 2012 has in store for us; we've got to deal with 2010 first! But right now I support Palin.

Thank you, Governor, for your hard work.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 06:45 AM | Comments (513)
Post contains 136 words, total size 1 kb.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:57 AM | Comments (81)
Post contains 8 words, total size 1 kb.

In the first episode at the family BBQ, everybody had just shown up and were standing around until Cousin Sarah appeared. In today's episode, we join the family BBQ two kegs in and somewhat worse for wear.

Yes, you have been to those kinds of parties, even with the family, where some folks have obviously tapped the keg one too many times. There they are, holding court in the middle of the yard, drunk as hell, yelling at the top of their lungs all of the deep dark family squabbles while sloshing that half empty plastic cup of beer around. The squabbles that everybody agreed to never speak about at family gatherings except in whispers for the very reason that we see now: somebody gets pissed off and leaves the party.

Even if somebody finally gets Uncle Dumbass or Aunt Big Mouth under control and gets their spouse to drive them home, it is too late. The party is over and everybody is making excuses and exiting stage left as if the last great plague had just descended.

Of course, it usually leaves the big mess for the host and hostess to clean up. If they are lucky, a few stragglers are too embarrassed to just leave the mess for somebody else, so they stay to help out.
more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 01:45 AM | Comments (79)
Post contains 1251 words, total size 7 kb.

Stan says it's funny.

I don't know. I don't know if I'm in the mood to find it funny.

But maybe you will.

New Link to South Park Studios, the official South Park site.

Posted by: Ace at 10:56 PM | Comments (69)
Post contains 44 words, total size 1 kb.

The "Anti-Palin Faction" accused Palin of "going rogue" by saying Obama was "palling around with terrorists,"among other things.

There's a faction within the McCain campaign has begun to whisper about Gov. Sarah Palin to reporters. The faction includes staff members and advisers who consult with staff members. It does not seem to include any members of the senior staff, although the definition of the senior staff here is a bit elastic.

This faction has come to believe that Palin, perhaps unwittingly subconsciously or otherwise, has begun to play Sen. McCain off of the base, consistently and deliberately departed from the campaign's message of the day in ways that damage McCain. ("palling around with terrorists" was a line that escaped HQ's vetting... Palin's criticism of the campaign for pulling out of Michigan was greeted by anger internally... Palin's expressed opinion that Rev. Wright is a legitimate issue -- which subtly knocks McCain for not raising it -- was perceived as an attempt to preemptively blame McCain's wobbliness for his loss, which would theoretically enhance Palin's standing with the base.) The complaints extend all the back to Palin's vice presidential vetting. Major disclosures, issue positions and associations did not come up, and the campaign was so overwhelmed with new information early on, it largely abandoned an effort to defend them individually. This is the claim, anyway. For the record, senior adviser Mark Salter, accurately identified everywhere as the aide who is closest to McCain, calls this scenario "bullshit."

I consider all that paranoid, incidentally. She cannot be a perfect parrot for McCain -- especially since McCain's thinking itself is often muddled. Every once in a while she's going to be pitched a question, and, not having memorized McCain's inconsistent answers fully, she's going to have to (gasp) offer her own opinion.

Barack Obama himself said that Wright was a legitimate issue. I think McCain did himself, even as he stated that it was wrong for that state GOP ad to link a Democratic candidate to Wright through Obama. (He didn't elaborate on why it was wrong -- just that it was, and that he didn't want to talk about it.)

McCain himself decided he wouldn't run on the subprime crisis -- no matter how much his aides screamed at him about this (and I, in turn, screamed at some of his staffers, not realizing... they agreed with me) -- and himself decided to put the whole election on fucking Bill Ayers.

The whole election.

Now, Palin, having been told that was the Master Plan, may have made up her own off-the-cuff language for it ("palling around with terrorists") -- but excuse me, how was she to know that that particular locution was off-limits?

What, it wasn't calibrated to the thousandth of an inch enough for Team McCain? Everything with this guy is calibration ladled on contradiction. Who the fuck can guess?

No schwerpunkt. It's Palin's fault that McCain lacked a schwerpunkt?

At any rate, these are minor deviations from the Great Master McCain Plan which never existed in the first place, elevated to Mighty Betrayals of The Clear and Unambiguous Message Everyone Understands.

And so Scheunemann fired back:

Just read your post. This is on the record. This is cleared by HQ. It is a fact that Barack Obama was palling around with terrorists. It was a fact before Governor Palin said it in a fully vetted speech and it is fact today. It is bullshit to claim or write anything else.

Anyone get the feeling that perhaps some within the McCain camp did in fact have it in for Palin? Elevating silly shit like this into a treacherous stab at "going rogue"?

Note in this instance, the Anti-Palin Faction leaked first, dishing dirt to Ambinder before the election, not even waiting until the election to start denigrating Palin.

Scheunemann fired back in response.

But notice who was fired.

And who was not fired.

I realize Schmidt was probably too senior to fire.

Fine.

Tell him to shut the fuck up then.

Incidentally... Dan tells me that it was Schmidt who suggested Palin as a veep in the first place, and also smoothed things over when Palin and her husband became pissed off about how their handlers were handling them.

So, he suggests, it's unlikely Schmidt is one of the anti-Palin leakers.

Not sure myself. Just posting this defense.

Sheunemann Not Fired: Not sure what's up here. Some say he was fired -- CNN reported it.

He says he wasn't.

Wallace: I'm not to blame for that $150,000 shopping spree. Fred Barnes, it turns out, later apologized for claiming she was.

The NYT, by the way, claims it was Palin herself who bought all those clothes. (See above "He says he wasn't" link.)

Frankly, this is, was, and always will be a stupid story. Obama spent millions on a fucking Greek temple to himself. Appearances matter. And yet the MSM manufactured a fucking scandal out of someone -- whoever it was -- buying Palin a wardrobe that would show her to maximum effect on the campaign trail.

I feel stupid that I've even been tricked into discussing this again.

Thanks to WilliamA.

Posted by: Ace at 09:51 PM | Comments (254)
Post contains 884 words, total size 6 kb.

A "McCain aide," who we can now reasonably conclude is the fired Randy Scheunemann, predicted precisely this.

He names names. Schmidt and Wallace.

Are they behind this? I don't know. But he predicted they'd do this. And now it's been done.

Even as John McCain and Sarah Palin scramble to close the gap in the final days of the 2008 election, stirrings of a Palin insurgency are complicating the campaign's already-tense internal dynamics.

Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline.

"She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.

"I think she'd like to go more rogue," he said.

The emergence of a Palin faction comes as Republicans gird for a battle over the future of their party: Some see her as a charismatic, hawkish conservative leader with the potential, still unrealized, to cross over to attract moderate voters. Anger among Republicans who see Palin as a star and as a potential future leader has boiled over because, they say, they see other senior McCain aides preparing to blame her in the event he is defeated.

"These people are going to try and shred her after the campaign to divert blame from themselves," a McCain insider said, referring to McCain's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, and to Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush aide who has taken a lead role in Palin's campaign. Palin's partisans blame Wallace, in particular, for Palin's avoiding of the media for days and then giving a high-stakes interview to CBS News' Katie Couric, the sometimes painful content of which the campaign allowed to be parceled out over a week.

"A number of Gov. Palin's staff have not had her best interests at heart, and they have not had the campaign's best interests at heart," the McCain insider fumed, noting that Wallace left an executive job at CBS to join the campaign.

Is it true? Again, I don't know. I feel bad tossing out names myself-- but the cowardly people smearing Palin force us to speculate.

So step out into the spotlight. You've got a lot to say. Stand behind your fucking words.

Neither is a Romney loyalist, as far as I know. So if it's these two jokers, the Romney-loyalist theory is wrong.

Thanks to locus.

Posted by: Ace at 09:16 PM | Comments (209)
Post contains 512 words, total size 3 kb.

Michelle's angry.

Red State launches Operation: Leper.

Posted by: Ace at 08:41 PM | Comments (124)
Post contains 41 words, total size 1 kb.

The Incredible Hulk. I don't know how to rate this in stars -- three stars seems too many for a superhero movie, but two and a half (my minimum for a decent movie) seems too few. I think I have to go with three, even though that seems goofy. more...

Posted by: Ace at 07:32 PM | Comments (47)
Post contains 1390 words, total size 8 kb.

Limbaugh started this, and its a good idea that needs to continue, but have its scope expanded into something more positive.

I've been a registered independent my whole life, but that is about to change. Florida doesn't have open primaries, so I didn't get to vote in any of them. IMO, the best way to nudge the democrat party back towards sanity is from within, so I'll be registering as a democrat and voting in their primaries from now on.

It can be played a couple of different ways. If it looks like the republicans might have a viable non-idiot candidate, then you promote one of the democrat cranks that might be nominatable, but can't win. If the republicans look to be putting forth their own crank, then you promote the most reasonable democrat.

On a local level here in Palm Beach County, this is really the only viable option for me. The place is 70% democrat and republican winners are so few and far between openly going that way only leads into the wilderness. Even if only 20% of the 30% republicans in the county shifted party affiliations, we could impact local primaries and runoffs in a significant way.

The RNC needs to work a better top down strategy at the national level of course, but local politics are also important. Everyone on the national stage got their start locally. If the local moonbats are infiltrated with 5th columnists keeping tabs on their local machinations and recording and filing away a lot of video and audio, the chances of being able to preempt future Obamas increases.

One of the problems with Obama was tracking down his past. A lot of the juicier vid clips and audio pieces appeared too late to be game changers. We need to start developing dossiers on any local politicians that seem to have greater ambitions (from both parties). We can't rely on the media to accumulate this information. We will have to do it ourselves. If there's a Foley lurking out there rising through the ranks, they need to be purged at the local level before they can generate national damage. They need to be purged at a time of our choosing, not the media's or the oppositions where political points would be scored.

Eliminating the scumbags and crooks is something that needs to happen at the local level. Its too damaging to allow them to attain national visibility before they blow up.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 07:20 PM | Comments (108)
Post contains 427 words, total size 2 kb.