La Rubujo

Okay, let’s see what happens. I just turned on the audio stream, and Thom Hartmann says that last night Sarah Palin proved she isn’t a ditz, and stopped the McCain-campaign hemorrhaging, and that now McCain is going to move up in the polls. My take, influenced by Talking Points Memo, is that Palin had raised the bar with his gibberish, and so now had to provide proof she wasn’t a fool, and that she failed.

(Okay, Hartmann’s talking economic collapse again, off you go—click! And has anyone else noted that he sounds like he’s taking uppers or something? I’m sure it’s just his endocrine system being abused by his brain, but it’s actually the main reason I find it uncomfortable to listen. His voice tone is terrible.)

See http://pundits.thehill.com/2008/10/03/joe-biden-hit-a-home-run-for-barack/

I have to say, if I were president I’d want Joe Biden to be my VP or a high-ranking cabinet secretary, because I think I could count on him to give frank opinions, and they would be reasonably thoughtful opinions, regardless of whether I agreed with them.

Watch Cokie Roberts demonstrate her indifference to dictionaries and encyclopedias, and complete unfamiliarity with The Internets: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/221642.php

FYI: Bosniaks

(And, yes, I’m still after people like Randi Rhodes who have claimed ‘decider’ is not a word, even though it is specifically given in the rather conservative American Heritage Dictionary, and those such as Keith Olbermann who has claimed that a certain ‘definition’ of Fascism is the classic dictionary definition, even though it appears in no dictionary I’ve looked at. The key to my particular criticism here is that these things are easily checked, but the habit of checking first wasn’t there.)

See http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/10/03/iraq/index.html

I’m glad I didn’t watch on one of those channels that had an on-screen focus-group meter.

Brent Budowsky was just on the Randi Rhodes show, and they winked and blew kisses at each other Palin-fashion. Then Budowsky explained that the pundits talking about Palin holding her own and so forth don’t understand what happened last night. Budowsky said that there is a term in electoral politics, ‘cementing’—we’ve heard it before, perhaps, without understanding that it was as an actual jargon term. Essentially, people want to vote for Barack Obama, and last night helped ‘cement’ that desire.

OT: Something to watch: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/03/mccains-could-give-up-on_n_131634.html

Randi Rhodes just pointed out what I did, that John McCain doesn’t know what ‘strategy’ means. (Randi was in the Air Force, albeit as a working stiff. She got to see the world, if by ‘the world’ you mean Maguire AFB.)