From The Pgh Post Gazette
By Reg Henry

You know what I think is the greatest thing to come out of this presidential campaign season? The fact that Joe Six-Pack and the hockey moms are finally getting the respect they deserve.

We can thank Sarah Palin for that as we can for so much recent amusement, you betcha.

In the vice presidential debate, Ms. Palin challenged hockey moms and Joe Six-Pack to keep Wall Street honest. And why not? It’s not like they are encumbered by special knowledge that would complicate the task.

Joe Six-Pack and I go way back. Heck, he and I are like brothers in hops. I suspect some of you elitists have the impression that good ol’ Joe doesn’t know a thing or two. Excuse me, but Joe probably knows as many as half a dozen things, all of them cranky and negative.

You see, Joe Six-Pack is a man of fixed opinions. He does not like changing his mind because that could involve mental effort and be a distraction while screwing off the bottle caps. When he was in college, Joe majored in beer drinking, so was able to avoid the contagion of thinking, which can lead a young person to become a flip-flopper later in life.

Oftentimes I have seen him holding forth on his sofa or on a bar stool at the Lowest Common Denominator Club. Sometimes his cousins Joey Bagadoughnuts and the Man in the Street are there to hang on his wise words, which, well into the sixth bottle, become a little mangled, as you might expect.

Read more Joe Six-Pack

From The Pgh Post Gazette
By Tony Norman

Those of us with vivid memories of middle school have seen Gov. Sarah Palin’s type before. She was the girl who was always the first to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and the last to stop instigating fights in the cafeteria.

She was the girl who always had just enough self-awareness to know when the boys were paying more attention to her than to other girls. Her specialty was flattering the alpha boys around her. Terrified of losing her exalted place, she quickly perfected the art of saying nothing of consequence. She rambled because the boys thought it was cute. If she ever had an original thought in her head, she was discreet enough to keep it to herself. She was the conformist who fancied herself a leader.

From an early age, she knew the power of a strategically placed hand on the bicep of some jock. Girls like Sarah Palin knew how to secure a place with the “in crowd.” After all, she was the girl with the iridescent smile who provided the laugh track for the meatheads roaming the halls pulling wedgies on those who would never qualify as “their kind of people.”

Like a lot of bullies, Sarah Palin talks tough when she’s surrounded by people of like mind and even less imagination; the more gullible the mob of admirers, the better. That has always been the case with demagogues. Sarah Palin subscribes to the same strain of American anti-intellectualism and fake populism as Huey Long, Spiro Agnew and other media-savvy scoundrels from the last century.

The best that could be said for her is that she is made out of a lot more corn, chutzpah and plastic than earlier models — she’s Demagogue 2.0 for a new century.

In a much ridiculed post on its Web site last week, National Review editor Rich Lowry described Ms. Palin’s performance against Joe Biden in terms best reserved for risque infomercials hawking male enhancement pills:

Read more Schoolyard Bully

From The Virginian-Pilot
By Daryl Lease

To: Gov. Sarah Palin

From: The Honorable Dick Cheney

Re: An orderly transition

I hope you will pardon my hacking into your AOL account, particularly given your recent troubles in that regard, but I’d like for the two of us to create a back-channel means to communicate in the weeks ahead.

I think it’s in our nation’s best interests if you and I begin planning for the official transfer of power now. Are you available to meet me at my secure, undisclosed location — say, noon-ish Friday?

By the way, I applaud your use of a personal e-mail account to discuss state business. Very Rovian. And I fully understand your choice. The wolves in the liberal media elite and the so-called “good government” groups and the liberal judges are all so adamant about preserving every doodle, scribble and rendition order from my office that I’m also forced go to extraordinary means to safeguard the public’s business from prying eyes.

When you’re here, please remind me to introduce you to Ralph, a trusted aide who shreds and eats all of my important documents. You should get to know him.

Read more Chatting

From The S.F. Chronicle
By Mark Morford

Every white woman I know is positively horrified.

Wait, that’s not exactly true. It’s more accurate to say that every thoughtful or liberal or intuitive or open-minded white woman I know worth her vagina monologue and her self-determination and two centuries of nonstop striving for equal rights and sexual freedom and exhaustive patriarchal unshackling is right now openly horrified, appalled at what the addition of shrill PTA hockey-mom Sarah Palin seems to have done for the soggy, comatose McCain campaign — that is, make it not merely remotely interesting and melodramatic, but aggressively hostile to, well, to all intelligent women everywhere.

Truly, among women in the know and especially among those who fought so hard to bring Hillary Clinton to the brink of history, nausea and a general recoiling appear to be the universal reactions to Palin’s sudden presence on the national stage, stemming straight from the idea that there’s even a slight chance in hell such an antagonistic, anti-female politico could be within a 72-year-old heartbeat of becoming the most powerful and iconic woman of all time.

They say: You’ve got to be kidding me. They say: This is what we get? This could be our historic role model? Two hundred years (OK, more like 2000) of struggle, only to have this nasty caricature of femininity try to hijack and mock and undermine it all?

Read more McPalin

From The Pgh Post Gazette
By Reg Henry

As a change of pace, my column today will adopt a more even-handed approach to the coming presidential election.

Instead of criticizing just one camp, I will try to spread the love around concerning the trademark candidacies of Republicans John McCain (”Yesterday’s Man for Tomorrow’s Problems”) and Sarah Palin (”A Moose in Every Pot”).

I will bring the same impartial scrutiny to the Democratic rivals Barack Obama (”The Audacity of Change You Can Believe in While I Think About It a Bit More”) and Joe Biden (”I Would Just Like to Observe That We Looked at This Issue in the Senate Judiciary Committee and So Forth and So On, Etc. and Etc.”)

Of course, there’s no fooling you readers about my self-interested preference in this election. Looking at it from the comedic point of view, I think those madcap mavericks McCain-Palin are the clear choice.

Why, there will be laughs aplenty when John McCain forgets where he put the keys to the nuclear weapons and Saint Sarah fills important government posts with her pals from Wasilla. The way I figure it, the American people will need my help to smile bravely through their tears after a Republican victory.

But rather than promote one ticket over the other, I believe the best thing I can do today is define the words, phrases and declarations that have melded into new meanings in the furnace of this political campaign.

Read more Mumbo-Jumbo

From The S.F. Chronicle
By Mark Morford

1. You don’t talk like a normal person. Only normal people talk like normal people. Sarah “no questions please, I’m Alaskan” Palin, according to House Minority leader John Boehner, she talks like a normal person… if by “normal” you mean “chillingly antagonistic toward anything resembling progress or political insight or women’s civil liberties.”

2. According to the GOP, lower-middle-class voters with minimal educations really like it when people who thinkk they can run the most powerful nation on the planet and steer massive military juggernauts and immense economies and affect the destinies of millions, don’t actually speak like they have any idea how the hell to do it. Honey, if the Bush years proved anything, it’s that the dumber you sound, the more effective you are at leading the country. Into the sewer. Did you know this already? Typical elitist.

3. You are on a first-name basis with the sushi chef at Whole Foods.

4. You have been to Whole Foods.

5. Look at you, Mr. Fancypants, with your snobbish notion that not every piece of furniture in your bedroom must look like it came from the same 1978 Levitz fire sale.

6. The impressive dimensions of the strap-on system in your dresser would make your average Alaskan redneck hockey player scream in horror even as it openly titillated a dozen Republican senators from Colorado Springs to Idaho, though it would probably still get you arrested in Alabama.

Read more Elitist?

From Crooks and Liars
By SilentPatriot

Jon Stewart traces John McCain’s evolution from a straight-talking maverick to a shameless panderer who now embraces all the things he used to condemn.

Watch Video

From Think Progress
By Ali

Last night on the Daily Show, host Jon Stewart skewered Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly for claiming Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is “a personal matter,” when last year he pointed the finger of blame at Jamie-Lynn Spears’ parents — “who obviously have little control over her” — and called Spears an “incredible pinhead” when she revealed she was expecting. Stewart joked, “You see what happens with opinions over teen pregnancy is that they gestate over a period of months.”

Watch Video

From Crooks and Liars
By SilentPatriot

Jon Stewart recaps the current situation in Georgia (and the media’s ridiculous coverage of it), and calls out President Bush for having the chutzpah to condemn Russia for invading and disrespecting Georgia’s sovereignty — because only reckless bully countries with no disregard for international standards do that kind of stuff.

Watch Video

From The Progressive
By Matthew Rothschild

(In memory of George Carlin.)

It’s July 4th again, a day of near-compulsory flag-waving and nation-worshipping. Count me out.

Spare me the puerile parades.

Don’t play that martial music, white boy.

And don’t befoul nature’s sky with your F-16s.

You see, I don’t believe in patriotism.

It’s not that I’m anti-American, but I am anti-patriotic.

Love of country isn’t natural. It’s not something you’re born with. It’s an inculcated kind of love, something that is foisted upon you in the home, in the school, on TV, at church, during the football game.

Yet most people accept it without inspection.

Why?

For when you stop to think about it, patriotism (especially in its malignant morph, nationalism) has done more to stack the corpses millions high in the last 300 years than any other factor, including the prodigious slayer, religion.

The victims of colonialism, from the Congo to the Philippines, fell at nationalism’s bayonet point.

World War I filled the graves with the most foolish nationalism. And Hitler and Mussolini and Imperial Japan brought nationalism to new nadirs. The flags next to the tombstones are but signed confessions—notes left by the killer after the fact.

Read more Patriotism