This Guy Makes SENSE! (Or, Not)

Like Bill Kurtis, I found the Internet in the strangest place. Web surfing brought me to a dude who drank more than his share of the Dumbo Kool-Aid in St. Paul at the Republican National Convention. Mortimer Hayden Smyth is excited about Sarah Palin and he speaks for all of the lipstick-wearin' pit bulls aka Republican Women. If this is (fair & balanced) lunacy, so be it.

[x YouTube/Center For American Free Thought Channel]
I'm Excited About Sarah Palin
By Mortimer Hayden Smyth

[Mortimer Hayden Smyth is the Founder/Editor of Ka-Ching! Magazine, Director of The Center For American Free Thought, and Senior Policy Analyst/Director of Deviant Homosexual Studies. Smyth's interests and hobbies include: Morality, Investment, Missile Defense.]

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The Geezer's Losin' It!

The Geezer is given increasingly to the babble that precedes a diagnosis of senile dementia. He lapsed into Herber Hoover's defense of the "fundamentals of the economy" and then he referred to Spain as a "Latin American" country. What a nightmarish scenario: a senile POTUS and an airhead VEEP. The Dumbos covered up the village idiocy that is The Dubster and foisted him onto the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave for eight dark years. Now, the Dumbos want to saddle this poor, poor Republic with a senile Geezer and a juco flunkout. Lovely. If this is (fair & balanced) horror, so be it.

Again, use the clickable numeric links to jump to either portion of this blog entry; with thanks to Vannevar Bush and Tim Berners-Lee.

[1] McCain's Chart
[2] McCain's Age Might Matter


[1]
[Washington (DC) Fishwrap]
Tom Toles Charts McCain


[Tom Toles is the editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post and winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. For years Toles was closely associated with Buffalo, New York, where he worked for the Buffalo Courier-Express (1973-82) and then the Buffalo News (1982-2002). He was at the News when he won the Pulitzer. In 2002 he moved to the Washington Post, where he replaced longtime political cartoonist Herbert Block (better known as Herblock). Toles's signature device is a tiny caricature of himself inserted into the lower right corner of each cartoon, sitting at a drawing table and usually making a wry comment about the day's topic.]

Copyright © 2008 The Washington Post Corp.

_______________________________________________________________
[2]
[x New York]
The Real Reason McCain's Age Might Matter
By Peter Keating

Since Joe Lieberman has taken to calling Barack Obama a “young man,” isn’t it time to ask: Is John McCain too old to be president? The meme is out there. In springtime focus groups conducted by the Democratic National Committee, swing voters brought up McCain’s age without even being asked about it. A recent Associated Press–Yahoo News poll asked people to say the first word that came to mind about each of the presidential candidates; the top response for McCain was “old.” (Jimmy Kimmel joked last week that in another survey, the proportion of American women willing to carpool with McCain dropped to 2 percent once they were told he would be the one driving.) And just the other day, McCain himself told the Washington Post: “If I put in three or four eighteen-hour, twenty-hour days in a row, then I'm not sharp. It's just a fact. I can be sharp if I get a little more rest.”

Physically, the 71-year-old McCain is in better shape than you might expect. He suffers from degenerative arthritis and limited arm movement, results of his horrific war injuries. He has had a series of cancerous skin spots removed, including an invasive melanoma from his left temple in 2000. He has had kidney stones and benign colon polyps and was treated for an enlarged prostate in 2001. He takes simvastatin to control his cholesterol. But McCain’s cardiovascular system is in good shape, giving him the vigor of a younger man. His physician, John Eckstein of the Mayo Clinic, said in May: “Senator McCain enjoys excellent health and displays extraordinary energy.”

But when it comes to mental performance, McCain’s age carries risks. Twenty-two percent of Americans 71 and older are affected by mild cognitive impairment, a decline in brain function that causes memory loss and can lead to dementia. Further, 35 to 40 percent of older adults have neural deficits that lead to poor decision making.

Are McCain’s malaprops signs of something worrisome? After all, everybody commits gaffes. Barack Obama has said there are 57 states in the U.S., called Israel a great friend of Israel, and mixed up which concentration camp his great-uncle helped liberate. So it would be not only gratuitously cruel but dumb to blame McCain blunders like his call to “deliver bottled hot water to dehydrated babies” on his age. But many of McCain’s verbal mistakes over the past few months fall into a different category: Though unintentional, they are errors of political expedience.

In just the past six weeks, McCain has referred repeatedly to Czechoslovakia as though it still existed and to Vladimir Putin as though he were still president of Russia. More significantly, he has claimed that Iraq borders Pakistan, that the Anbar Awakening occurred after the surge, that the Iraq war was America’s first major armed conflict since 9/11, and that, unlike Obama, he would prefer to speak outside the country only after being elected president.

In May, McCain incorrectly said the U.S. had drawn down its forces in Iraq to pre-surge levels. In March, he wrongly claimed that Iran was training Al Qaeda operatives. Last April, he mistakenly said General David Petraeus regularly drove around Baghdad in an unarmored Humvee. In each of these “McCain moments,” political life would have been easier for the candidate if his statements were true. But none were.

What might be happening in McCain’s head? Gerontologists and retirement planners have learned that aging brains compensate for cognitive decline by relying on templates of familiar knowledge more than problem solving. That’s usually a good thing, but neuroscientists have also found that memory loss can lead people to substitute incorrect information. This phenomenon, called confabulation, rather than being random, often takes the form of untrue “facts” that make them feel better — giving them what scientists have called “the pleasantness of false beliefs.” So are McCain’s stumbles simply misstatements, or evidence of a mind filling in blanks with wish fulfillment? Well, we really have no idea. But neither does McCain: His aides told reporters in May that he has had no mental evaluations in the past eight years.

Now, cataloguing gaffes doesn’t constitute a diagnosis — medically or politically. McCain has gambled that he can make his age a virtue by slamming Obama’s inexperience, and that it’s okay to come across as something of a cranky old guy as long as he keeps audiences laughing. And so far, this has worked fairly well. When a 7-year-old asked McCain about his age in New Hampshire last year, for example, it really was pretty funny when he replied, “Thanks for the question, you little jerk.” But now McCain faces a press corps that is noticeably cooling on him, and may be more willing to report slipups. And he will have three nationally televised debates to get through in the fall. Sooner or later, as the campaign wears on, the issue of McCain’s age will start to show.

[Peter Keating covers national politics for New York Magazine in the "Daily Inteligencer" column. Previously, Keating covered consumer issues for Money Magazine.]

Copyright © 2008 New York Media

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For Talent, The Mighty Q Can Sing "You Picked A Fine Time To Leave Me, (Lake) Lucille"

Lovely. The Geezer is about to hide his own Easter eggs and The Mighty Quinnette has fouled her own nest. The Geezer likes to pretend that he is the second coming of TR, the greatest of Dumbo conservationists, but TR was also a hunter who tried to shoot every creature on earth and have it taxidermied (Pace, Roy D. Mercer). So, The Geezer has chosen a huntress — not a friend of the earth — to sit a heartbeat away from the button that would end all of our earthly problems. Salon's founder, David Talbot, joined the mob of scribblers who flew Up North after The Mighty Q was annointed. Read Talbot's description of Wasilla, AK and be very, very afraid. If this is (fair & balanced) rejection of avarice, so be it.

[x Salon]
Sarah Palin's Dead Lake
By David Talbot

Very old picture on Lake Lucille

Every morning she's at home here, Sarah Palin wakes up to a postcard view from her lakeside home. Out the windows of her two-story wood-framed house stretch the serene, birch-lined waters of Lake Lucille. Ducks go gliding by the red-and-white Piper Cub floatplane docked outside. With the snow-frosted Chugach and Talkeetna mountains looming in the distance, the scene seems to define the Alaska that Palin celebrates: rugged, majestic, unspoiled.

And, yet, the lake Sarah Palin lives on is dead.

"Lake Lucille is basically a dead lake -- it can't support a fish population," said Michelle Church, a Mat-Su Valley borough assembly member and environmentalist. "It's a runway for floatplanes."

Palin recently told the New Yorker magazine that Alaskans "have such a love, a respect for our environment, for our lands, for our wildlife, for our clean water and our clean air. We know what we've got up here and we want to protect that, so we're gonna make sure that our developments up here do not adversely affect that environment at all. I don't want development if there's going to be that threat to harming our environment."

But as mayor of her hometown, say many local critics, Palin showed no such stewardship.

"Sarah's legacy as mayor was big-box stores and runaway growth," said Patty Stoll, a retired Wasilla schoolteacher who once worked in the same school with Palin's parents, Chuck and Sally Heath. "The truth is, Wasilla is just plain ugly, it's not a pleasant place to live. It's not thought out. And that's a shame.

"Sarah fouled her own nest, and I can't understand why. I hate to think it was simply greed or ambition."

Among the environmental casualties of Wasilla's frenzied development was Palin's own front yard, Lake Lucille. The lake was listed as "impaired" in 1994 by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, and it still carries that grim label. State environmental officials say that leaching sewer lines and fertilizer runoff caused an explosion of plant growth in the lake, which sucked the oxygen out of the water and led to periodic fish kills.

"Sarah," a recent biography of Palin by Kaylene Johnson, features a photo of a beaming Palin, sitting in a rowboat on Lake Lucille clutching a fishing rod. But, according to local fishermen, the Republican vice-presidential candidate would have to be very lucky to reel in something edible.

The Alaska Fish and Game Department dutifully stocks the lake with coho salmon and rainbow trout each year -- but the fish don't last long.

Fishing on the lake "was tough," reported Alaska fishing guide Carlyle Telford on his Web site when he tried his luck on Lake Lucille last year, "because the vegetation is decaying and floating. When you retrieve every cast, the fly comes back with crud on it."

In a recent phone conversation, Telford said he hasn't returned to Lake Lucille since then. "I think the lake's pretty dead," he said. "That's why I haven't been back."

Wasilla, where Palin grew up and still resides, sprawls between two lakes -- Lucille and Wasilla Lake. Cottonwood Creek, which flows in and out of Wasilla Lake, has also been labeled "impaired" by state environmental officials, after foam was detected on the water surface and subsequent testing found excessive concentrations of fecal coliform bacteria.

The two lakes are the town jewels, the only eye relief along a harrowing corridor of strip malls, big-box stores and fast-food drive-throughs that is Wasilla. "Lord, help me get through Wasilla," reads one Alaska bumper sticker.

The population in Mat-Su Valley began booming in the 1970s with the Alaska oil pipeline and the influx of oil workers from Texas and Oklahoma. But while some valley towns tried to control growth -- like nearby Palmer, which was originally settled by Midwest farmers as part of a Roosevelt social experiment in the 1930s -- Wasilla took a frontier, boom-town approach. Soon the Parks Highway, which cuts straight through Wasilla, and its arteries were lined with a chaotic bazaar of quickie espresso shacks, moose-stuffing taxidermists, Bible churches, gun stores, tattoo and piercing parlors, mattress barns and the inevitable box stores with their football-field parking lots.

John Stein, Palin's predecessor as Wasilla mayor, tried gamely to get a handle on the commercial free-for-all. He made an effort to restore the health of Lake Lucille, which, he said, "was turning into a bog."

"We brought up a scientist to study both lakes," Stein recalled. "We also worked with the state to filter storm drainage from the highway."

Controlling runoff from the six-lane highway is a key to saving the lakes in Wasilla. Other cities have their industrial pollution problems; Wasilla has highway pollution. "Anything that comes off an automobile -- oil, antifreeze, de-icing agents, heavy metals -- all of that can run off into the lakes when it rains," observed Archie Giddings, Wasilla's public works director.

But while Mayor Stein tried to impose some reason on Wasilla's helter-skelter development, and its growing pressures on Mat-Su Valley's environmental treasures, when Sarah Palin took his place, she quickly announced, "Wasilla is open for business."

"That's for sure," Church said. "Sarah was so eager for big-box stores to move in that she allowed Fred Meyer to build right on Wasilla Lake, and her handpicked successor, Dianne Keller, has done the same with Target."

Under Mayor Palin's reign, Fred Meyer, an emporium that sells everything from groceries to gold watches to gardening tools, lost no time in leveling a stand of trees overlooking the lake for its big-box store. When Fred Meyer applied for permission to pump the storm drainage from its parking lot -- with all the usual automobile sludge -- into the lake, outraged citizens finally cried enough.

"We mobilized public opposition," said Church, who led the Friends of Mat-Su, a pro-planning group, at the time. "We forced them to put in ditches and grassy swales to catch the runoff.

"Sarah was such a great cheerleader for Wasilla, but she did nothing to protect its beauty. She'd go to these Chamber of Commerce meetings and say, 'Wasilla is the most beautiful place in the world!' And we'd just sit there gagging."

A city official in nearby Palmer, who has lived in the Mat-Su Valley his whole life, sadly admitted: "Sarah sent the growth into overdrive. And now they're choking on traffic and sprawl, all built on their ignorance and greed.

"I try to avoid driving to Wasilla so I won't get depressed," added the official, who asked for his name to be withheld, to avoid Palin's "wrath."

"You get visually mugged when you drive through there. I take the long way, through the back roads, just to avoid it."

Wasilla City Council member Dianne Woodruff hears the same lament about her town all the time. "Everywhere in Alaska, you hear people say, 'We don't want to be another Wasilla.' We're not just the state's meth capital, we're the ugly box-store capital. Was Sarah a good steward of this beautiful valley? No. I think it comes from her lack of experience and awareness of other places, how other cities try to preserve what makes them attractive and livable.

"The frontier mentality has prevailed for so long in Mat-Su Valley -- the feeling that 'you're not going to tell me what to do with my land,'" added Woodruff. "That's fine as long as you have endless open space. But when you start to fill in as a city, you can end up with a sprawling mess. With million-dollar homes next to gravel pits -- and dead lakes."

In recent years, after Palin's departure from City Hall, Wasilla has been "changing and learning," according to Woodruff. The city has taken steps to control toxic runoff into its two lakes.

But Wasilla still doesn't test the lakes' water quality -- that's left up to volunteer groups, which periodically take samples from the lakes, according to city officials.

Why is there no official effort to test the local waters?

"That's a good question," said Wasilla public works chief Giddings, after a long, thoughtful pause. "I guess we're still ahead of the curve. We haven't seen huge concerns about the lakes yet."

Giddings acknowledged that there has been some public concern about swimming in the lakes, but not enough to prompt the city to monitor the water quality. If the public did start complaining about skin rashes, diarrhea and other health problems, "the state would probably step in," he added.

Would Giddings let his own children swim in Wasilla's lakes? "Yes," he said.

But Laura Eldred, an environmental program specialist with the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, offered a more qualified response. She would swim in the local lakes, but would "take the usual hygiene precautions," without specifying what those measures were.

"Sarah did nothing to protect our lakes; in fact, she obstructed efforts to improve our water quality," said city watchdog Anne Kilkenny. The property surrounding Wasilla's two lakes is privately owned, complicating the city's efforts to protect these natural treasures. While her predecessor, Mayor Stein, moved to incorporate the homes surrounding the two lakes -- like the Palin family residence -- so the city could control runoff from the dwellings, Palin campaigned for "no more annexation."

"Sarah hasn't traveled outside of Alaska much," said Kilkenny. "She hasn't seen dead lakes and rivers."

Now Palin can see one right out her window.

[David Talbot is a pioneer of online journalism and graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Talbot founded Salon, an online magazine, in 1995 and remained its Editor in Chief and Chief Executive Officer until February 2005. He remains with Salon as Chairman of the Board. His book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, asks many questions about the official version of our history.]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Troup, Inc.

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