Barking moonbats hardest hit.

I am not sure what the In-The-Tank Media consider the scandal here. That the RNC shelled out $150,000 (about the same amount of money that someone paid for a certain set of Greek columns) in wardrobe purchases for Palin AND her family members for use on the campaign trail...or that any real woman would have had all that stuff already in her closet ready to go.

A few weeks ago it was, "How many houses does McCain have?"

Now it is *GASP*, "Sarah Palin didn't have enough clothes in her closet to make it through 10 weeks of constant appearances, interviews, and travel."

Do I even need to mention that Nancy Pelosi has probably spent more on jewelry alone than what the Palins paid for their house?

"Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy," said Biden to a roomful of donors. "The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America."

"Remember I said it standing here, if you don't remember anything else I said," Biden continued. "Watch, we're going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

"I promise you it will occur. As a student of history and having served with seven presidents, I guarantee you it's going happen. I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate."

This is no doubt true--the pennyweight bullies of the world never waste a chance to see what they can get away with, and some of the bigger ones would jump in too. And we have the Chosen One who wants to sit down and talk to the most repugnant leaders, or dictators, on earth, without preconditions. Or even talk to them at all without unilaterally foretelling their future, which is the obligation of the civilized when talking to thugs.

Is this Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment? Are we going to have, in the squared circle, the Chosen One and Ahmadinejad? Joe the Biden tells us that fireworks are coming. Is this a playbill that we should welcome? Armageddon? It fits in with the messianic nature of this entire campaign. Is this just the blather of a man addicted to the sound of his voice? Or is it in vino veritas?

"I get this," Clinton said. "My view is ... why say, ever, anything bad about a person? Why don't we like them and celebrate them and be happy for her elevation to the ticket? And just say that she was a good choice for him and we disagree with them?"

OK. Who is this guy and what have they done with Bill?

The headline is not entirely accurate. It should read, "Palin pick puts many women never far from the Verge closer to some sort of Super Verge."

Look at these quotes:

"All of my women friends, a week ago Monday, were on the verge of throwing themselves out windows," an author and political activist, Nancy Kricorian of Manhattan, said yesterday. "People were flipping out. ... Every woman I know was in high hysteria over this. Everyone was just beside themselves with terror that this woman could be our president -- our potential next president."

[snip]

"What I feel for her privately could be described as violent, nay, murderous, rage," an associate editor at Jezebel, Jessica Grose, wrote just after the Republican convention wrapped up. "When Palin spoke on Wednesday night, my head almost exploded from the incandescent anger boiling in my skull."

[snip]

"When I see people crowing about her 'acceptable' speech last Wednesday ... I literally want to vomit with rage," a comment from Anibundel said.

And I love this one, coming from a woman in New York...the state where all the really smart people that matter live, you understand...but one that in 2000 apparently couldn't find anyone qualified to run for the U.S. Senate. So they imported Hillary Clinton, a woman brought to national prominence only because of her relationship to her husband and ran her for the Senate from their great state (precisely because of her husband's relationships with women not her) on the "She took several for the Party by not strangling Bill in his sleep after all that he has done to her and Chelsea, so let's give her a Senate seat" platform:

"I think a lot of women felt insulted by the idea you could just take any woman," a longtime editor of women's magazines, Bonnie Fuller, told The New York Sun. "A lot of women feel it was a very cynical decision. ... What got some women's backs up was the idea she didn't earn her stripes. It's been so hard for so many women to get ahead both in business and in the political worlds and she just seemingly slips in."

Here is the money paragraph:

A psychiatrist who wrote a book remotely psychoanalyzing President Bush, Justin Frank, said some women felt Mr. McCain was mocking them by naming an unqualified but attractive woman to the ticket. "You're put in the position of attacking her and going against your own gender. ... What makes it even worse is so many people are actually taken with her," Dr. Frank said. "It makes you speechless, almost apoplectic, if you're a feminist."

She has credentials that match up well with the top of the Obama/Biden ticket as far as actually operating a government in an executive capacity. She knows as much about energy as Obama knows about foreign policy. She was the Chief Executive of a state and was elected to that position on her own and not through her connections to her husband or daddy.

She. Got. Elected. On. Her. Own.

With the so-called "feminists" featured in this article it is all about liberal ideology first. They have to promote liberalism so that feminism can have a chance...so that women can have a chance.

So they have destroy that other woman's chances.

As stupid as that is, it is enough to get them to vote against Sarah Palin. But what drives their intense and visceral hatred of her?

They can rationalize it all they want...McCain's cynicism, the fact that she's Pro-Life, etc. But it doesn't take a high-dollar New York Psychoanalyst to figure out that what drives their most passionate hatred for Sarah Palin is that when she entered the room, all heads turned toward her.

I don't remember ever seeing such pictures of Hillary. Do you?

From Breitbart.com:

CHICAGO (AP) - Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama said Monday the upheaval on Wall Street was "the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression" and blamed it on policies that he said Republican rival John McCain supports.

"This country can't afford another four years of this failed philosophy," Obama said after the shock-wave announcements that financial giant Lehman Brothers was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy while titan Merrill Lynch was being bought by Bank of America for about $50 billion.

I am pretty sure that Mr. Obama would blame the recent failure of both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae on Republicans also.

I have to say that the evidence squares nicely with Mr. Obama's side of the story.

Because you have to figure that if the Republicans had been getting lots and lots of campaign moolah from Lehman and Freddie and Fannie (like Mr. Obama) that they would have taken a lot more interest in the welfare of those companies (like Mr. Obama)...and then maybe those companies would not have failed.

Or something.

From Opensecrets.org:

In the current Congress, 271 lawmakers have collected nearly $3 million [from Lehman and related entities] since 1989, with 72 percent going to Democrats. Democratic presidential candidates and senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama top the list of all-time recipients for the company, collecting $410,000 and $395,600 respectively.

Let's have a quick Household Name Death Match:

Ken Lay, CEO of Enron, who drove Enron into the ditch and was manipulating markets before George Bush even left the Texas statehouse.

Jim Johnson, former actual Obama campaign big (from Wikipedia):

From 1991 to 1998, he served as chairman and chief executive officer of the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), the quasi-public organization that guarantees mortgages for millions of American homeowners. Previously, he was vice chairman of Fannie Mae (1990-1991) and a managing director with Lehman Brothers (1985-1990).

[snip]

On May 22, 2008, Democratic Party officials confidentially divulged that Obama had asked Johnson "to lead the process" for selecting Obama's running mate. On June 4, 2008, Obama announced the formation of a three person committee to vet vice presidential candidates, including Johnson. However, Johnson soon became a source of controversy when it was reported that he had received loans directly from Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide Financial, a company implicated in the U.S. subprime mortgage lending crisis. Although he was not accused of any wrongdoing and was initially defended by Obama on the grounds that he was simply an unpaid volunteer, Johnson announced he would step down from the vice-presidential vetting position on June 11, 2008 in order to avoid being a distraction to Obama's campaign.

No contest. Ken Lay.

Meanwhile, the national mainstream press is hard at work in Wasilla, Alaska on an anonymous tip they received that Sarah Palin was juicing on steroids during her high school state basketball championship run.

[Emphasis in quotes above are mine]

From Wendy Doniger....excuuuuuuse me.....Professor Wendy Doniger, writing in the same "On Faith" column that Sally Quinn wrote in a few days back:

Her [Palin] greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican party's cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working class women.

Get that? Real women are outraged!

So it is time for a self-diagnostic check here, females of America: Are you outraged? Or are you also an inauthentic woman like Sarah Palin?

Boomerang!

KOS, Pandagon, and just about every liberal blog is now spinning the "Palin made Rape Victims Pay" meme. Marcotte at Pandagon spins the full story straight from KOS and others, including the lie about who repealed the policy:

I'm a little wary of this story about how Sarah Palin turned a blind eye when rape victims in Wasilla were forced to pay for their own investigations. Even if she is responsible---and she's so firmly anti-feminist it isn't hard to see that she could be---it's all too easy for the campaign to argue that it was an internal police matter that simply wasn't brought to her attention. The most damning evidence against her is that the Democrat who took her office after she left repealed the policy.

I wonder if she knows her former employer, John Edwards, great state of North Carolina is Still charging rape victims for their exams? From the News Observer, February 13, 2008:

Rape victims across the state are paying for their ill fortune in the most tangible of ways: a bill for the evidence kit needed to lock up the rapist. The vast majority of the 3,000 or so emergency room patients examined for sexual assaults each year shoulder some of the cost of a rape kit test, according to state records and victim advocates. For some, it's as little as a $50 insurance co-payment. For those without insurance, it's hundreds of dollars left when a state program designed to help reaches its limit.

Of course, it wouldn't be a boomerang if Obama's state paid for the kits. According the this US News and World Report story, they didn't back in 2004. Now how many years was Obama in the Illinois state house?

...according to a 2004 bulletin published by the NCVC, "[F]eedback from the field indicates that sexual assault victims are still being billed." Knecht says she's recently heard from caseworkers in Illinois, Georgia, and Arkansas reporting that rape victims continue to be charged for their forensic exams.

At the end of this US News and World Report story, Michelle Andrews, strikes the best analysis of the problem:

No one I spoke with tried to defend the practice of billing rape victims for their exams. Predictably, people cited a host of problems - from bureaucratic inefficiency to chronic underfunding of victim compensation funds - that partially explain but don't excuse it. Ironically, the nature of rape may actually make it more likely that victims will be billed for the evidence-gathering exam. Unlike a break-in, where police gather forensic evidence at the victim's home and send it directly to the crime lab, in rape the victim's body is the scene of the crime. In these cases, "there's a crossover between medical care and forensic care,"

UPDATE: Many of the KOS and lefty sites are touting Obama's co-sponsorship of legislation on this issue.

However, even their own posts show that Obama sponsored a "Reimbursement of out-of-pocket expenses" plan, but the the State of Illinois still bills a victims insurance company or their public aid account.

The Illinois Department of Public Aid will reimburse the costs of ER treatment if you do not have public aid or private medical insurance.

Which is oddly exactly what the Police Chief of Wasilla said was done there, and like Illinois, advocated for criminal restution to pay for those tests.

It's still a boomerang.

As I monitor the far left wing blog of a former Democratic Presidential Candidate's webmaster, I think it is safe to say the next Palin insult is locked and loaded:

I'm watching a tape of a Sarah Palin speech right now, and realizing that the woman is the GOP's Manic Pixie Dream Governor. Literally, her entire stump speech is just wacky shit she's done that's supposed to get the dispirited base thinking about what could be, a woman who brings a variety of oh-so-charming experiences to help John McCain stop being such a sourpuss.

This meme is hitting twitter space and the number of Google hits is growing, so I figure it will break out of the left at any time.

I can't believe the Left Wing is still so ignorant of the boomerang that exists for Obama when they attack Palin.

What do I mean, well, here's the definition of Manic Pixie Dream Girl:

Ah, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, that sentient ray of sunshine sent from heaven to warm the heart and readjust the attitude of even the broodiest, most uptight male protagonist. Coined to describe that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.

Like the Magical Negro, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is largely defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life. She's on hand to lift a gloomy male protagonist out of the doldrums, not to pursue her own happiness.

I guess this race really has become Palin vs. The One, because according to the netroots, they are playing the same archetype.

A cool article on Wasilla High School winning the 1982 Alaska State Women's Basketball Championship.

Hollywood couldn't have written a more dramatic script for Sarah Barracuda than her final basketball game. It was a David-and-Goliath match-up, with Wasilla the underdogs. The state championship was on the line, and Sarah was suffering from a fractured ankle.

"You've got to discipline yourself, you've got to push yourself to the max, so I think she showed that mental toughness," Nelles said.

She played through the pain. The Warriors were leading in the dying seconds, but their opponents were fighting back. Sarah was fouled.

She had the chance to clinch the game, and the state championship.

"Sarah Heath goes to the free throw line...the Warriors are ten seconds away from the 1982 state championship!"

Coolly, she made the throw.

No, I don't think that this is a qualification for office. I just think it is funny because I remember a fluff piece on Obama several months ago that really attempted to make 'cool' Obama's basketball skills. As opposed to all of those other guys who sail competitively, I suppose.

Yet here is eighteen year-old Sarah Palin, playing with a fractured ankle, sinking a clutch free-throw to ice the State Championship.

So even Obama's "basketball cool" image thing is blocked by an actual accomplishment by.....guess who.

So why do I bring this up? Well, I am not the one bringing it up.

What the Wasilla Warrior Hockey web page says above is:

Its probably too little too late but I have temporarily removed links to all roster information and photos. I wish that I had known how to do this four days ago, maybe it would have saved some heartache. I am sorry for any photos or information that slipped out to the media before I locked up this information.

Once the media tires of Wasilla, I will return the website to its fullest and we can all move forward with the new season.

Hot Air has more on this. Including the information that the Anchorage Daily News is getting calls from the media asking if Palin cheated her way to victory in the Miss Wasilla Pageant in 1984.

And had I been the webmaster for Wasilla Warrior Hockey, here is the web page that would probably have gotten me fired.

Melanie Phillips is an author, and blogger, for The Spectator, a Tory-libertarian British magazine. It is perhaps the best written and edited magazine of decent circulation that I read.

I have maintained for years that there is something seriously wrong with the left, which is shown by their viciousness, self-love, clannishness, and eternal love of totalitarianism. (This is, I suspect, why they will not condemn Islamism, but that's for another day.) I feel it comes from the embrace of moral relativism which destroys ethics, to have them replaced by tastes.

Ms. Phillips is, as is usual, less theoretical than I am, and here is a paragraph from her post:

But there's a deeper reason for the foaming vituperation of the left at Mrs Palin's candidacy. It is the same reason that they lash out at all those who are not on the left: their profound lack of confidence in their own belief system. At some subterranean level, they know they are wrong and that they cannot defend their own position. Which they simply cannot bear. This is because the left is always correct, everyone else is a conservative and therefore if they are wrong about anything they will also be -- a conservative! They'd rather pull out all their fingernails. Which is why they are so vicious: instead of reasoned argument with their opponents they resort to demonisation, intimidating and browbeating any opposition or dissent to shut them up altogether.

The post, in its entirety, may be read here.

[From the Site Admin: At the end of the article linked above there is this:

Maybe she'll [Palin] be found to have presided over a mafia cartel of illegal moose-slayers while in a polygamous marriage to a creationist abortionist who raped his mother.

Question: Wouldn't she still be, technically, a "community organizer" of sorts?]

But apparently, it took her less than 20 years to notice and *gasp* she switched churches outside of an election cycle. So...move along....nothing to see here.

One of the musical directors at the church, Adele Morgan, who has known Ms. Palin since the third grade, said the Palins moved to the nondenominational Wasilla Bible Church in 2002, in part because its ministry is less "extreme" than Pentecostal churches like the Assemblies of God, which practice speaking in tongues and miraculous healings.

Compare and contrast. Mr. Obama did not throw his mentor and long-time Pastor Jeremiah Wright under the bus because he found him extreme. He threw him under the Obamabus because he became aware that a desired voter demographic found him extreme.

Hope. Change. Judgment to Lead.

Link here. And Gawd do I hate linking the New York Times.

Quote: "I made the decision not to use my show as a platform for any of the candidates."

And on her website announcing the decision she made the mistake of leaving the comments open.

It's horrible. Awful. I want to look away, but I just can't.

UPDATE: I am just thinking out loud here....but with just one phone call...could Rachael Ray become the next Oprah?

UPDATE: Don't underestimate this. It is huge. As maddening as Keith Olbermann is, nobody watches him. Outside of the tin-foil-hat spittle-flinger demographic he has no audience. Oprah does have an audience. An audience of Sarah Palins.

And they, too, just found themselves thrown under the Obamabus. And with Oprah it won't be written down as just politics. This will be seen as a betrayal. And rightly so.

At this point there are 19 pages of comments running about 30 to 1 against her. How long before they all go down the memory hole?

UPDATE: I have screen grabbed the first 300 comments just in case.

UPDATE: Welcome NRO and Instapundit readers! And any HotAir readers still hanging around from two days ago!

Long time readers of Jessica's Well know that public transit projects are met with large amounts of skepticism around here. As a rule, public transportation projects are massive drains on Taxpayer money. The bad part is small town Mayors and Councils go along with these projects because they want to be for economic development projects that support regional and state objectives.

So, Sarah Palin was no different than hundreds of other Mayors in this regard and she is taking an undue amount of heat over it.

When the Washington Post came out with the Palin's Embrace of Earmarks story which is sourced to a group called Taxpayers for Common Sense, I was appalled by the lack of basic research into these large transportation "earmarks." The depth of reporting on this seems to be a Google search for "Wasilla" and "Earmark" and some quick math to come up with $26.9 million dollars for the SOLE benefit of Wasilla, Alaska. Great investigative reporting there WaPo, thank goodness the blogs will do your job for you.

The largest chunk is the $15 million dollar commuter line touted as the Wasilla to Girdwood line. According to the KOS Kids:

She got $27 million in federal funds (earmarks) for that little town including one that intrigued me since reading about it a few days ago: $15 million for a "railway" project. I assumed that it must be a connection to Anchorage since that was the only thing that made sense.

Wrong! She collaborates with Senator Ted Stevens, the indicted Alaskan Senator. Bingo, tiny Girdwood gets rail service from Wasilla.

First off, the KOS Kids might do well to look at a map and learn that Anchorage is on the rail line between Wasilla and Girdwood and there is a freaking Mountain Range that prevents direct travel from Wasilla to Girdwood. The truth of the matter is, this was a regional rail project meant to serve everyone between Girdwood and Wasilla with commuter rail access to Anchorage along the existing rail lines. It was also an integral piece to prepare the rail system for further upgrades to support a deep water port project for the Mat-Su area called Port MacKenzie and remove dangerous grade crossings and steep curves.

The project is really spearheaded by the Alaska Railroad Corporation and the regional transportation group called MASCOT. Here's one of the the ARRC's studies. and another. In all the Alaska Rail Road Corporation is projecting they will receive close to $200 Million in funds (pg 16) for their rail projects from the Federal Government, which includes the bulk of the transportation projects with Wasilla in the name. All of the sudden Palin and Wasilla don't seem to key to all that funding they are accused of getting.

As for the earmark claim, this comes from the fact this project was a specific line item in a Transportation Bill, which implies the project was not vetted by the executive bureaucracy for merit. This is false.

First off, all so called 5309 projects must be submitted by the Federal Transit Administration as a "Report to Congress" for evaluation and funding recommendation. This recommendation is provided to congress as a customary budgetary report, but as a matter of policy each 5309 project is directly funded to the entity, therefore every 5309 project comes across as an earmark, even though it was submitted for regular budgetary funding. Truthfully, until "earmarks" became a bad word, congressmen routinely plucked bureaucracy approved spending from their reports so they could brag to the constituents instead of letting the agencies take the credit.

So why would Palin be for this series of projects while Mayor? Well, while everyone seems to be keying in on the commuter rail service to Anchorage and the rest of the Mat-Su area, they overlook the opportunity for Wasilla to have the AARC RELOCATE the rail lines out of downtown Wasilla so the train can bypass the community and not have so many dangerous at grade crossings.

What small town mayor wouldn't sign onto a huge package supported by the regional transportation powers when it is going to get the railroad out of the middle of their town?

I guess it is more shocking for the WaPo to say that Wasilla ALONE, under Palin received $20.5 Million in "transportation earmarks" instead of saying the greater Anchorage area, including Wasilla and many other communities benefited from these funds which will improve REGIONAL commuter access, support tourism, trade, commerce and national defense. Saying a town received $6.4 Million in earmarks over a decade doesn't have the same ring.

So, to all those local elected officials with an eye for National Office, you should watch what regional grant request you sign on to in the name of economic development.

Mark Steyn. One swing of the bat. Five runs.

I would like to thank the US media for doing such a grand job this last week of lowering expectations by portraying Governor Palin - whoops, I mean Hick-Burg Mayor Palin - as a hillbilly know-nothing permapregnant ditz, half of whose 27 kids are the spawn of a stump-toothed uncle who hasn't worked since he was an extra in Deliverance.

How's that narrative holding up, geniuses? Almost as good as your "devoted husband John Edwards" routine?

There's more.

It is not that there is anything wrong or bad about being a "community organizer". All communities need organizers. In fact, all communities have organizers.

I'll go one further. At one time or another everyone has been a community organizer.

That is what makes it so laughable for someone to list it as some sort of qualification for the job of President of the United States.

But I guess you have to go with what you've got.

Just for fun, I did a search on Monster.com for "Community Organizer."

This meme was certainly not invented here, but after watching Sarah Palin's speech tonight I can't help but wonder if the ones that first thought of it aren't on to something.

So let's have some fun and come up with the official reason Joe will have to leave the campaign.

I think it will be cancer of the aftermarket follicles.

Also to be noticed in the MSM's narrative on Sarah Palin's unfitness as a mother because of her career is the implied uselessness of husbands and fathers in general and Todd Palin in particular.

Unless I missed the article that said that Todd and the rest of Sarah Palin's family would remain in Alaska should Sarah become Vice President, I am forced to conclude that the Palins have probably discussed all of this and that Todd will probably be giving up his career(s) in Alaska to come to Washington with Sarah.

Which would free him up to take on a lot of the responsibilities of running the family while his wife helps run the country.

Normally, this situation is feminism at its most sublime (if men are to be kept alive at all).

And this man is not some Alan Alda type either, thin of wrist, fine of feature, and soft of hand. Todd Palin, merely standing silently beside the most politically powerful men that Washington had to offer would remind each and every one of them of their essential softness. And yet he is obviously willing to take on these duties.

But the whole situation is being discussed as if Todd Palin doesn't exist. Or if he does....well...a man just can't be expected to do such things nor are they even so equipped as to try.

Let me see if I can guess the next meme should the MSM happen to even notice a husband/father figure in the Palin household:

If the Republicans win, Todd Palin would become a minority single parent and as such cannot possibly hope to raise a family without government assistance and direction....which he won't get unless Barack Obama is elected.

Hey, Pinch? Can I have job?