A quick note: it may seem that we are hammering hard here on Palin's record and character. And we are. But we're doing this because she is an unknown quantity, one breath from the White House. Obama, McCain and Biden have been in the public eye for a very long time. They've been examined and investigated and vetted many times over. Palin has not.
The governor also has charged the state for travel expenses to take her children on official out-of-town missions. And her husband, Todd, has billed the state for expenses and a daily allowance for trips he makes on official business for his wife.
. . .
She wrote some form of "Lodging -- own residence" or "Lodging -- Wasilla residence" more than 30 times at the same time she took a per diem, according to the reports. In two dozen undated amendments to the reports, the governor deleted the reference to staying in her home but still charged the per diem.
She also brought her kids along (and charged taxpayers for their flights) frequently on government trips, a practice eschewed by former Alaskan governors as kids rarely accomplish much business.
This is a very weird and fantastic film. Under appreciated, is what I'd call it. It had interesting moments where the rhythm of daily life would burst into song, which I can never decide if it meant to give us understanding of Zatoichi's way of hearing the world, of it's just playfulness from the director. Possibly both?
Do you remember back 8 years ago when a Democrat was in the White House and we had a budget surplus. Those were good days.
By dear friend of the Almanack Noah Berlatsky.
There is one female character in the movie; Meg Foster the putative romantic interest. But she’s hardly onscreen, appearing only long enough to establish her deep (and almost completely unmotivated) untrustworthiness. The real emotional tie is between the two men; an emotional tie which can only be expressed through violence and then end, inevitably, in tragedy. The movie itself ends with the aliens exposed for all to see. The last image, in fact, is of a nude woman copulating with the standard porn-star exhalations; she looks down and sees she’s riding an alien. The anxiety about concealment is an anxiety about sexuality — what is passing as who, and how can we keep them from fucking us?
This was pretty unique to her own town, as most other municipalities covered the cost of the kits. The democratic governor Tony Knowles eventually signed legislation preventing mayors like Palin from doing this.
Juan Cole, perhaps the most well-informed man in the world on the situation in Iraq and a professor at the University of Michigan takes aim at Palin's religious beliefs and finds them familiar from his study of the middle east.
McCain pledged to work for peace based on "the transformative ideals on which we were founded." Tolerance and democracy require freedom of speech and the press, but while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin inquired of the local librarian how to go about banning books that some of her constituents thought contained inappropriate language. She tried to fire the librarian for defying her. Book banning is common to fundamentalisms around the world, and the mind-set Palin displayed did not differ from that of the Hamas minister of education in the Palestinian government who banned a book of Palestinian folk tales for its sexually explicit language. In contrast, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it."
Palin argued when running for governor that creationism should be taught in public schools, at taxpayers' expense, alongside real science. Antipathy to Darwin for providing an alternative to the creation stories of the Bible and the Quran has also become a feature of Muslim fundamentalism. Saudi Arabia prohibits the study, even in universities, of evolution, Freud and Marx. Malaysia has banned a translation of "The Origin of the Species." Likewise, fundamentalists in Turkey have pressured the government to teach creationism in the public schools. McCain has praised Turkey as an anchor of democracy in the region, but Turkey's secular traditions are under severe pressure from fundamentalists in that country. McCain does them no favors by choosing a running mate who wishes to destroy the First Amendment's establishment clause, which forbids the state to give official support to any particular theology. Turkish religious activists would thereby be enabled to cite an American precedent for their own quest to put religion back at the center of Ankara's public and foreign policies.
As the bard says, more at the link dear fellows.
I love Rees' work. He combines an in-depth knowledge of the issues with an irrelevent sense of humor that I find refreshing. Plus, Voltron.
More videos after the jump.
The Sarah Jane Smith Adventures is the "child-friendly" spin-off of Dr. Who. The first season was fun and goofy and enjoyable. It's a charming concept: ex-companion to the Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith, continues to fight the good fight as a journalist on Earth and befriends two neighborhood kids and adopts a genetically-engineered boy genius. They investigate and fight aliens.
At times it manages to be even more angsty than Dr. Who and scarier. The heroes here have no real powers, no Time Lord experience to fall back on. So the stakes often feel higher.
I'm excited for season 2.
More shots at the link.
