Sarah Palin: Will She 'Win' Just By Showing Up?

By Si Dunn

Republican operatives, deathly worried about Sarah Palin's absence of knowledge and experience in any areas vice presidential, are desperately trying to cram some complete talking points into her head, while also working feverishly to lower the bar for her "debate" against Democratic rival Joe Biden, Oct. 2.

According to some sources, the performance bar is now "on the ground" or "maybe even a couple of inches beneath the surface."

Her handlers will hail her as "The Winner!" immediately after she shows up and opens her mouth, and they will keep drumbeating that message no matter what she actually says in the debate.

The idea, of course, is to ensure hardcore conservative Republican voters continue listening to the drums and not to what their candidate actually is saying--or not managing to say in a coherent fashion.

However, if she does stumble through something about divine intervention and overturning Roe v. Wade as peachy-keen ideas for resurrecting America's economy, watch for Republican operatives to immediately release an edited quote beneath the following banner headline: "Sarah Palin Shows She's the New Spirit of St. Louis!"

Joe Biden will be the actual winner in the debate, of course. But he still won't get much respect, or attention, from his performance. All eyes will remain on Sarah Palin, waiting for something to happen to her hair, her glasses or her lipstick as she recounts how Vladimir Putin gave her important foreign policy experience just by flying over Alaska at 38,000 feet.

For the battered Republicans, their message no longer will have much resonance amid the economic wreckage they will leave the next President. So their new mantra will have to be: "All hail the (former Alaska beauty queen) messenger!"
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Robbing Peter to Pay Paul(son) and Golden Parachutes

By Si Dunn

In just one week, America's Republican-dominated economy has gone from "robust" and "fundamentally sound" to "in imminent danger of collapse" if $700 billion of taxpayer money isn't delivered immediately to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, so he can dole it out to Wall Street, banks, and other financial entitites.

This naked grabbing of money from average Americans' pockets supposedly will help keep the "robust" economy from going bust. But it also will help finance plenty of golden parachutes for the financial executives and leaders who got us into this mess and have been trying to conceal it until just after the end of the Bush Administration.

John McCain is no fan of this proposed bailout. But he can pretty well kiss his election to the White House goodbye. He's Republican, after all, and the Republican Party in general will suffer a very large, and very well-deserved, thumping at the ballot box Nov. 4, in the fallout from this fiasco.

Runaway deregulation plus rampant greed adds up to: (1) financial cycles that swing out of control; and (2) financial bubbles that explode.

The "trickle-down" economics famously championed by the Republicans has never worked. The upper class keeps getting more "upper," while spilling precious few drops of the money that is supposed to dribble down to the middle and lower classes.

Maybe it's time for some "trickle-up" economics, for a change.

To hell with the big financial institutions that lost sight of fiscal reality and got hooked on gambling with their--and our--money. Let them consolidate, downsize or die. Don't give them another dime.

Give most of the $700 billion, instead, to Main Street and small business, the real heart, soul and drivers of the national economy. And set aside some of it to help the thousands of lower-echelon employees in the financial industry who will lose their jobs, pensions and homes as a result of the avarice and selfishness of their corporate executives and the Republican political leaders.

Remind your Senators and Representatives in no uncertain terms: The buck starts here...well away from Wall Street and the Washington Beltway.

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Washington to Average Americans: "Bail Yourselves Out, Turkeys"

By Si Dunn

Thank runaway deregulation and greed for this: a free-market freefall that will cost the federal government (meaning us) upward of a trillion dollars. Suddenly, the only way to stop major banks and other financial institutions from collapsing under the weight of their own bad debts and stupid decisions is to throw mountain ranges of cash at them.

That cash, of course, will not be coming from a Strategic Money Reserve hidden deep under a Colorado mountain. It will come straight from our pockets, straight from programs we support or desire, and straight, no doubt, from China's Central Bank. (Someday we may discover that China now owns us, and we are just another province.)

With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also draining billions of dollars per month, the next Administration, Obama or McCain, won't be able to afford to offer us much of anything except platitudes and fervent appeals for us pull ourselves up by our frayed and knotted bootstraps.

Here, without any fanfare for the comman man, is the kind of bailout plan we can expect to receive on Main Street: (1) raise cash by selling your household goods on eBay; (2) raise more cash by selling off your personal library on Amazon; and (3) sell whatever is left over at a garage sale. And if anything remains after steps 1, 2, and 3, donate those items to Goodwill, so you can get a generous tax deduction of, say, fifty bucks or so. Then use the fifty bucks to buy a tank of gas so you can drive away from your foreclosed house.

Oh, and by the way, pay no attention to the golden parachutes now blossoming open all over the sky. It's just those silly clowns from the financial sector, still trying to get us to look up to them.

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Attack of the Killer Attack Ad Killers? (Huh? What?)

By Si Dunn

In a Sunday report from CNN, former Bush adviser Karl Rove declared that Sen. John McCain had pushed "one step too far" in some of his recent ads attacking Sen. Barack Obama.

The ads, Rove said, didn't pass "the '100 percent truth' test."

Rove, of course, has leveled similar charges at Barack Obama's campaign. And the former White House adviser has been accused of supporting the use of savage attack ads to help George W. Bush defeat Al Gore and John Kerry.

This time, Rove urged both McCain and Obama to "be careful" with their attacks on each other.

Has Karl Rove suddenly been infected with a "fair play" virus? Or is he beginning to realize he is backing a losing campaign and is trying to distance himself from the oncoming November train wreck? Or is he trying to reinvent himself with a newer, more neutral reputation so he can hire himself out as a political consultant to the Democrats after the Republicans are swept from power?

At some point soon, attack ads will have to be replaced by statements of substance and examples of proposed policies, legislations and programs. Otherwise, the 2008 presidential campaign will be much ado about nothing much except, maybe, "my change is better than your change" and "liberals don't know shit about eating raw moose meat."

But for now, the political Swift Boats are still making their high-profile runs, shooting themselves with their own torpedoes, and sinking beneath big clouds of smoke...and mirrors...and tubes of lipstick.

Is it November yet? Can't we please just vote now and send all of the clowns out of town?

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Putting Lipstick on This Pig of an Economy

By Si Dunn

Here come the Republican Swift Boats, right on schedule, firing tubes of lipstick at the Obama-Biden campaign.

That's all they've got, folks. Lipstick. They're trying to smear lipstick on the pig of an economy they have created (and looted) over the past eight years. They desperately hope you won't notice how ugly it is--and keeps becoming.

But lipstick attacks or no lipstick attacks, they can't hide the deep pig plop they will leave behind as their legacy once they finally get their butts booted out of Washington in 2009.

The Rove-McCain-Palin-Bush-Cheney ticket is smart enough to realize "It's still the economy, stupid." But with their long track record of economic misfires, lipstick is now all they have left to put into the Swift Boats' torpedo tubes.


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Special Education: The New Political Football...Again

By Si Dunn

So now we have Sen. John McCain's campaign rebuking Sen. Joe Biden for "raising a debate over who cares more for special needs children," according to a CNN report.

"The Republican camp's sharp response came after Biden said GOP advocates for children with birth defects should support stem cell research," CNN explained.

In my view, stem cell research should be conducted with the same scope and urgency as the Manhattan Project. I have never seen any signs that our Creator personally is attempting to block us from using our God-given brains and compassions to solve the sad, painful mysteries of birth defects. All I keep seeing are people who think they can speak for God and make rules on His or Her behalf.

Rather than shoot labels and accusations at each other, I would urge both political campaigns to immediately dispatch some of their aides to spend a day trying to help out in America's underfunded, understaffed special education programs in the public schools.

"Special needs" and "birth defects" stop being simple power plays in a political football game once you are inside the door of a special-education classroom.

Until you have spent at least one long, hard, challenging day working alongside special-education teachers and their aides in a public school, you really have no idea what "who cares more" for special needs children really means.

To both campaigns, I say: Quit using your fingers to merely point. Try using them, instead, to actually lend some helping hands to special needs children.

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McCain Predicts GOP Will Fail in Fall Election

By Si Dunn

You only thought John McCain was warning Democrats when he accepted the Republican Party's nomination for President of the United States and declared:

"And let me offer an advance warning to the old, big-spending, do-nothing, me-first, country-second Washington crowd: Change is coming!"

Actually, McCain delivered the perfect summation of the GOP's record in power during the two terms of the current Bush Administration.

It was a stern alert that McCain is now ready to storm back into the City of Power and stamp his feet while the Governor of Alaska barks at passing cars bearing lobby-coddled conservatives and those dreaded, evil limousine liberals to and from the halls of Congress.

Poor "Maverick." He really wanted to be his own man, with Joe Lieberman at his side on the convention podium. But the Republican powers who pull the puppet strings--i.e., Karl Rove and others--said hell, no! and brought in "the Babe," to use Rush Limbaugh's lustful term of endearment. A pistol-packin', moose-shootin' mama who, if Putin invaded the Ukraine, could lead a savage countertattack on his abortion record.

Not unlike the infamous Blues Brothers, John McCain and Sarah Palin now are on "a mission from God" to offer four more years of failing to meet the basic needs of most of the American people.

Hey, good luck with that.

Change, indeed, is coming to the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives this November. But the party of Lincoln and George W. Bush definitely is not going to like who and what will get changed.

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Karl Rove: The King Who Would Be Doofus?

By Si Dunn

So now we have the once-vaunted "architect" of the current Bush Administration calling Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden a "big blowhard doofus," at least according to CNN.

Biden has responded to the reported name-calling by wryly terming Rove "a great American..." and managing to keep "...pain in the ass" under his breath.

Over time, as the incredible wreckage from eight years of Rove-crafted neocon rule slowly is cleaned up, history likely will become less and less enamored of Karl Rove. (Already, it doesn't exactly think he is peachy keen.)

For starters, various committees and agencies with subpoena and indictment power will be looking at records and compelling sworn testimonies. And investigative journalists and determined historians will have greater access to people, papers and political autopsies left behind by Rove's "architecture" during George W. Bush's two four-year terms in the White House.

Will Karl Rove ultimately emerge as the biggest "blowhard doofus" of them all?

Stay tuned.

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