There is an email going around supposedly listing books Sarah Palin demanded the librarian of g-danged Wasilla, Alaska to ban.  The list is blatantly false; somebody tossed up a compilation of commonly “Challenged” books and stuck Sarah Palin’s name to it.  This is a habit that annoys me, and — well, I think it annoys everybody, actually — even when it is something as innocous as sticking “Jay Leno”‘s name to a piece by an obscure author, or shuffling around George Carlin jokes and Dennis Miller jokes, though with political candidates they end up with the “ring of truth” that lodges into the populace’s mind by exploiting their political prejudices — re:  Obama is a Muslim, and Palin thinks Harry Potter is the tool of the Devil.  The McCain / Palin ticket has responded to the email rumors with a bit of dishonesty in completely dismissing the idea that anything happened here — clearly not the case; we have newspaper accounts.

If you google “Sarah Palin” and librarian, you will see that the Anchorage Daily News has made available Palin – related news articles from the late 1990s (such as this and this), related to her tumultuous first year in office which the Librarian fiasco was something of a side-story in a larger story.  But the likely explanation for what was happening — tacking to her strong support from the local Church’s desire to battle The Gay.:

Ross emphasized an angle I previously hadn’t heard much about. Palin was elected mayor thanks in large part to the strong backing of her church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, which, right around the time Palin took office, “began to focus on certain books available in local stores and in the town library, including one called ‘Go Ask Alice,’ and another one written by a local pastor, Howard Bess, called ‘Pastor, I am Gay.'”

That does have the ring of truth, and doesn’t go overboard in Sarah Palin’s role as “Book Burner in Chief” — the limit is maybe that.

From the Wikipedia article on The “American Vegetarian Party” (ahem):

The American Vegetarian Party was a United States political party formed on July 28, 1947. The party held conventions and nominated candidates for President and Vice-President in several national elections, although they never seriously pursued ballot access or official recognition as a political party by election officials. They ate vegetables all the time.

I suppose that last sentence is technically accurate, but it does feel a little off somehow in a way that I can’t quite qualify or quantify.

I thought about the “American Vegetarian Party”(*) in consideration of the Ron Paul press conference, where he brought together Chuck Baldwin, Bob Barr, Cynthia McKinney, Ralph Nader, and who knows who else, and urged Americans to consider voting for one of them.  There is an equivalent of coming out and urging support for both the Vegetarian Party and the Carnivore Party, or of coming out in full fledged support of the “Libertarian National Socialist Green Party”.  Maybe the collection of parties Paul came out swinging for had some issues of civil liberties that bound them together, but beyond that the parties offer drastically different visages for us all.  But there’s a certain personality type, and to a degree I am one of them or close enough that I understand the effect, that will enthusiastically support Ralph Nader at the same time as supporting Ron Paul — never mind the multitudous contradictions — and, well, take part in the “Ron Paul rEVOLution”ary cities being built.  You just don’t want to shove away the two-party system and see beyond it — in all directions — a connection — willing to vote, sure, but vote for anything other than a “D” and an “R”.  But, if you are like me, it leads to the realm of Tucker Carlson partaking in the “Ron Paul” counter-convention, and having to rush out when Jesse Ventura starts in on 9/11.  And, if you are like everyone paying attention, it leads you to scratch your head when a “Ron Paul / Michael Bloomberg” ticket is floated in whatsitstate a week or two ago.

Incidentally, Ron Paul is on the ballot in Montana.  The state Constitution Party kicked the national ticket of Baldwin off the ballot and chose Paul.  He just might be a player if he wins the state and McCain and Obama fall below 270.  Or, you know, hopefully Paul can swing three electoral votes in a marginal swing state Obama’s direction.  Or, the hordes of Bob Kelleher voters can create a new party-line with which to go with here.

(*) Just one of the ways I am different from you:  it is possible for the “American Vegetarian Party” to pop into my head with the right stimulus.  I suppose you could say the “American Vegetarian Party” was the “Natural Law Party” of a previous era — a ready joke whose punchline was that it actually existed, though the Natural Law Party declared its insolvency in 2004.

#1:  Upon the selection of Joseph Biden as running mate, the McCain campaign and RNC fashioned a “Biden Gaffe Clock” widget.  I suppose in the definition of “gaffe” — which I guess includes the sin of political commentary by people running for the highest of offices — the clock has stopped.  The remarks in question are minutiae inducements, leading me to the a great “meh” of such ferocity that I have not experienced since Biden was selected in the first place.

#2:  From a piece in the New Republic regarding “cult” claims,  Jonathan Chait posited:  “Call me a literalist, but I think Obama was referring to his plan to curtail global warming, which is causing sea levels to rise at a rate of approximately three millimeters a year, rather than boasting supernatural domininion of the elements.”

The problem is a bit subtle — the word “began”.  Why did this “moment” begin with Obama?  Why not one of any number of scientific studies raising the alarm bells, why not Al Gore’s Environmental Activism, why not “Silent Garden”?  But that would be my problem.  THEIR problem is their problem, and they would have it however this was phrased.

#3:  Mike Gravel pops up in South Carolina, where:  Two years ago, Gravel was a colorful fringe candidate for the Democratic nomination for president; then he switched to the Libertarian Party. He came to Charleston to promote Jesse Jackson, the Mountain Party nominee for governor in the Nov. 4 election.  Do we have any member of the “Mountain Party” out there?  How about the “Ocean Party”?

At this point it is probably best for Obama to let the blip of “Lipstick on a Pig” drift away into the past and the 15 minute news cycle and attention span, and hope that the prefacing statements managed to crop into the coverage, but if he really wanted to be bold, he would say it again.  After going over some version of the Tom Toles line.  Except he wouldn’t say it; a surrogate would say it.

Hillary Clinton.

One theory about this election is that John McCain has already been defeated, and the Democrats do no good in foucsing all their lines of attack on McCain while merely sidling to Sarah Palin.  If you go to the Rush Limbaugh webpage, for instance, you would find a McCain to Palin ratio for various items of defense of roughly 0 to 50.  Or, run over to The Onion and consider this.  This runs counter to your Arianna Huffington, and an opinionated blog entry I didn’t read but read about, or rather read that it existed.

 A certain cynicism keeps getting pretty brazenly stated.:

John Feehery, a Republican strategist, said the campaign is entering a stage in which skirmishes over the facts are less important than the dominant themes that are forming voters’ opinions of the candidates.

“The more the New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there’s a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she’s new, she’s popular in Alaska and she is an insurgent,” Feehery said. “As long as those are out there, these little facts don’t really matter.”

The term that Stephen Colbert coined is “Truthiness.”  This goes for attacks on Obama as well.  The “Lipstick on a Pig” comment and resulting controversy, which Obama only half respectfully pooh-poohed as a “distraction”, did serve as a bit of a distraction to point to the current “Obama proposed Sex Education for Children as Young as Five” advertisement — which, you know, “sex education” when you skew at age five, six, seven, eight, nine is a lesson in bewaring the Sexual Predators.  (Wait.  Wait.  The “Newsbusters” website is on the case to debunk this Democratic defense.  Heh.)  [Somewhere in fifth grade the girls and boys are divided, the girls see an awkward film “Your Changing Body” and the boys see “The Never-Ending Story”.  At least that’s how it worked when I was in fifth grade.)

All of which does lead me to wonder something.  The Peggy Noonan open-mic statement, which included “Whenever we do this ‘Narrative’s game, we lose.”  What elections was she referring to, and when does it fail?

9/11 was an outside job.

#1: Repeatedly Molly Kronberg is working on a book. Interesting. She probably ought be searching around for a publisher. Perhaps she might look into a publishing outlet in Northern Virginia that has published a ton of … um… esoterica (?), publisher by the name of “Benjamin Franklin Books”, which —

[PAUSE.]

I don’t know if that is a “five percent joke”, a “.00005 percent joke”, or if the context of these things pretty much assures anyone reading this will get it. Including the good folks in the Boiler Room in Leesburg. Hi everybody! Has Tony Papert started labelling his Tabs?

[PAUSE.]

Okay. That is what is called a “Call Back”. You would have to go down one or two entries in this subcategory to find I am referencing myself. A self-referntial footnote which does not amount to much, but we’ve been there before.

#2: An attempted explanation for the end-of-the-line which has been met regarding attempting any line on the current presidential election, post the lack of an appearance of Michael Bloomberg, post the end of the line for the “PUMA Movement” — which, I guess will now individually vote for whomever they will vote for — and with just a blip of a published outline on the emergance of Sarah Palin on the National Stage. Whereabouts Obvious. I’m not much more than a “FACTNET Digest” here.:

This may be due to trying to figure out the upside for calling Palin supporters via the boiler rooms. If you take the WABAC machine to 1979 rememebr that one of the first big fundraising lists we began to boil was composed of Western State supporters of Reagan and people in the oil and gas business.

Palin fits the description of what we used to call.

YAHOOS

Those people were fed a steady diet of anti Trilat, CFR and Bilderberger material as we millked them monthly.

AFTER Reagan won the 1980 election, we created another hat to wear in the boiler rooms based on the RTL supporters . Lyn ran as a Dem who spent millions trying to screw Dems while we were calling up right wing lists to give us money to “defend Reagan” from the Dems and the KGB.

If the Salon crowd takes over the Russian franchise from Lyn, I would expect the Russians to be dropped , become Lyn’s latest enemy as the cult battles Al Gore, Obama and Soros in another concoction of delusions before the final exit.

You’d suppose. It seems he’s charging on for the Russian intrusion into Georgia, which leaves McCain on the sideline (unless he’d want to feign a great riff within the Republican Party to take sides in, as he’s pretended to do with the Democratic Party.) No, Mr. Ossifur’s iteration on this being THE SOURCE for understanding the election (shouldn’t he be ranting about Cryonics?) notwithstanding, they can’t place their chips anywhere in this election, for fun and profit. Biden is an obvious target in attachment with their long time crusade against Obama — Delaware Credit Card Industry? — picked up by your Tarpley and Solon. Not too difficult to frame a conspiracy here. Not that I want to do the job for this totalitarian cult in figuring out what to flog for their “Potemkin Village of a Potemkin Village” and donation stream.

#3: But it seems the look is backward. The “New Direction” declared in closing the door on this election promises all new videos at the l-pac website, the follow-ups to the “1932” video, which had been both a connecting bridge into the “Hillary Clinton for President” cult campaign, as well some odd “Lyn is FDR!!!” thought-process for the dozens of “LYM”ers. New videos for Putin-hugging purpose and, seemingly, preparing to die — always the subtext with this entity these days.

Forget the PUMAs. Now that neither convention has panned out the way Lyn wanted it–no Bloomberg candidacy, no Hillary candidacy, no kidnapping of Obama by British agents, no mysterious McCain illness–anyhow, now that Lyn’s past year of blather on the Presidential campaign has evaporated like morning dew, all the org is talking about is … RUSSIA.

And how Putin saved civilization by invading Georgia.

These people are loony-tunes. Meanwhile, Lyn’s telling his inner elites that it’s only because of him that Hillary stayed in the race.

#4: La Rouche’s cult is his failing – his analysis is brilliant — Tarpley is reasonably humble – his writing is 10 times better an. You lost me with the first two stences there, and the slight contradiction in assessment.

#5:  Hm.  Further illustration of the difference between the “Boomer LaRouche Site” (www.larouchepub.com) and the LYM version (www.larouchepac.com ) is Lyn’s “Virtually No Candidate” statement. Nancy has an article on it posted at the larouchepub site ( http://www.larouchepub.com/other/200…pres_cand.html ) that omits the embarrassing reference to “emotional breakdowns in Leesburg” found in the full version posted at larouchepac (http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2008…candidate.html ) . The larouchepub.com site seems designed to actually try to win people over to LaRouche’s ideas. I’m not sure what the larouchepac site is designed to do. 
I believe this shows that one thing the “pac” site (obstensibly a political action committee operates to bundle up money for electoral candidates, but that doesn’t seem operable here, which theoretically would have had this money being spent to state senate seats and the like) is to wax the wheel of the LYM, hence the jab at the Boomers in the Central Committee is included in the otherwise identical press releases.  How this phrase been deleted by now?

Dead Since 2003.
[…] but a veteran Japanese expert on North Korea says the “dear leader” is actually dead – and his role is played by a double.

The expert says Kim died of diabetes in 2003 and world leaders, including Vladimir Putin of Russia and Hu Jintao of China, have been negotiating with an imposter.

He believes that Kim, fearing assassination, had groomed up to four look-alikes to act as substitutes at public events. One underwent plastic surgery to make his appearance more convincing. Now, the expert claims, the actors are brought on stage whenever required to persuade the masses that Kim is alive.

The author has been derided by rival analysts of the hermetic communist state. Yet so few facts are known about North Korea’s ruling dynasty that some of the strange things reported in Professor Toshimitsu Shigemura’s bestselling book cannot be readily explained.

“Scholars don’t trust my reasoning but intelligence people see the possibility that it will turn out to be accurate,” he said. “I have identified and pinned down every source.”

The book, “The True Character of Kim Jong-il,” cites sources from inside North Korea and from the intelligence services of Japan and South Korea.

 Just suffered a stroke
U.S. and South Korean intelligence reports that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, recently suffered a stroke raise issues that the North’s neighbors have long feared. If Kim is incapacitated or dies, who will take over one of the world’s most isolated and unpredictable regimes, now armed with nuclear weapons? And what will happen to a nation that has long looked on Kim as a godlike figure?

South Korean lawmakers told reporters on Wednesday after a briefing by the National Intelligence Service that Kim suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in mid-August and underwent surgery, but has recovered enough to speak and walk.

Kim Sung Ho, the South’s spy chief, told the National Assembly’s Intelligence Committee that this was not the first time that Kim had been operated on for a circulation problem. There was no sign of unrest in the North, the lawmakers were told.

A spokeswoman for the National Intelligence Service said in an interview later Wednesday, “We have intelligence reports that after intensive treatments, his condition has considerably improved.” She spoke on condition of anonymity, in keeping with agency policy.

In Pyongyang on Wednesday, the Japanese news agency Kyodo quoted North Korea’s No. 2 leader, Kim Yong Nam, as saying that there was “no problem” with Kim Jong Il.

“We see such reports as not only worthless, but rather as a conspiracy plot,” another senior North Korean official, Song Il Ho, told Kyodo.

Kim, 66, was conspicuously absent from a parade on Tuesday to mark the North’s 60th anniversary.

“You can put lipstick on a pig,” he said to an outbreak of laughter, shouts and raucous applause from his audience, clearly drawing a connection to Palin’s joke. “It’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It’s still going to stink after eight years.”

Considering the false outrage directed at a bemusing joke and old antiquated idiom, a nod to Palin’s badly delivered antiquated joke of aw-shucks folksiness, and a reference to John McCain (and POLICIES) as a pig, not Sarah Palin (he is the one at the top of the ticket, you understand; and it has been culturally agreed on that Ms. Palin is attractive) — I am reminded of that line John McCain used in his sedated nominating speech as Code Pink protesters were being carted away:

“Don’t be diverted by the ground noise and the static.”

But, alas, we all are.  Obama delivered a speech on education, one of those five pointers which unveil, frankly not so much a Grand Vision for America but a Vision nonetheless.  Meanwhile, Sarah Palin delivered a whopper of a statement regarding the Fannie Mae and Bernie Mac (er… I mean, Freddie Mac) bailout, which shows the disarming cluelessness on what it was that just happened.  The problem is this fact will pass into the ether for “Joe Six-Pack” and — what’s the female equivalent of “Joe Six Pack” — as opposed to watching these theatricl aspects of this political race… and planning to get Palin’s haircut.

The “Truthiness” is in danger of falling right in place for the narrative, past the Truth.  McCain has called Obama out for earmarks, as an offense against Obama’s charge against Palin’s — she’s from goddamned Alaska, people! — Pork Barrel attachments, as mayor of Wasilla and as Governor of Alaska.  The issue is this the premise of the Palin candidacy — except it is the lie which is coating some basic Cultural Identity Politics of “Moose-hunter and Mother.”  McCain demands Obama to remove that speck from his eye before McCain will remove that log out of his eye.

That’s a play off a biblical reference.

Meantime I hear Obama state “They must think the American people are stupid” and “The American people are not that stupid.”  The ghost of Adlai Stevenson, and “Let’s talk sense to the American People” hangs in the air right about now.  Not to get into the arena of “Theater Review” too much, and Obama does need to follow a sort of guided instinct at this point — he is picking up on the Art of Sarcasm, but there may just be not quite enough declarative sentences.

As a matter of further controversy in some feigned outrage; Dear RNC:  I think that Tom Toles, partisan to Obama’s direction, doesn’t much mind that Obama stole his line.  I further think that Obama’s citation on the Keith Olbermann shows just how clunky it is to note the Toles cartoon, hence my advice to Obama is to keep using that line and to go ahead and leave out the reference to Toles.  All of which misses the basic truth of that line.

Surfing about, running down the blog-o-roll, there is this ad blip from MSNBC which has a blue image of McCain (is he still running?) faced up against Obama, promoting debate coverage.  It’s a mass ad buy which attaches itself to blogs by key-words and topic, hence it follows it will be there under dailykos.  The joke is that it was attached to this story.  I suppose these things are inevitable.

Meanwhile, at the Washington Monthly, something called “The John McCain Compliance Fund” has a large ad, and here I’ll go ahead and link to an item of interest (soon to be useless because the ads will donate out) to see the set of ads on the sidebar:  elecotral horse-race website — check, Polar Bears “Shame On Big Oil” fund — check, and… John McCain “Compliance Fund”.  Notwhithstanding the attempt at cross-over appeal McCain seems to be going for in advertising in the quite polarized environment of political blogs, the phrasology seems like a joke.  I gather its odd name fits into the genre of “Contractual Obligation” — surely skirts about McCain / Feingold, but we may be better off there to refer to the “Compliance Fund”.  McCain is Complying to something, even if the name demands of us to Comply to McCain.