Monroe Anderson

Palin's a natural for comic relief on SNL

     Making fun of Sarah Palin is too easy. It's like shooting moose in a corral. So, naturally, Saturday Night Live had to bring Tina Fey back to take another shot. And, of course, it was another bullseye.
     In impersonating Palin, some of Fey's comedic lines were ripped virtually verbatum from the Katie Couric CBS News interview.  By comparison, it was at once painful and frightening to watch the network news interview, realizing that this unprepared candidate could conceivably be the leader of the free world anytime within the next four years and hilarious to have the Saturday Night Live parody have life imitate comedy.
     Here's the SNL script of Saturday night's skit (Videos of the skit and the CBS News interview follow):

POEHLER AS COURIC: "Did you enjoy your week in New York City?"

FEY AS PALIN: "You know I did, Katie, and I wasn't sure I would at first. New York is, of course, home to the Liberal Media Elite. But Todd and the kids had a great time goin' to the Central Park, F.A.O. Schwarz and that goofy evolution
museum."

POEHLER AS COURIC: "So, sounds like the trip was a success?"

FEY AS PALIN: "Well, there were some funny moments. For instance, I had fifteen to twenty false alarms when I thought I saw Osama Bin Laden driving a taxi. I was embarrassed to be wrong but mostly disappointed I wasn't right! Also, in an effort to bone up on foreign policy I went to the Times Square area to see a film called, 'The Bush Doctrine.' It was not about politics."

POEHLER AS COURIC: "You went to the UN for the first time. How was that experience?"

FEY AS PALIN: "You know, it was just amazing. So many interesting people. Though I have to say, I was disheartened by how many of them were foreigners. I promise that when Senator McCain and I are elected, we're gonna get those jobs back in American hands."

POEHLER AS COURIC: "How did the world leaders you met with, react to you?"

FEY AS PALIN: "They embraced me, Katie. Both figuratively and, a couple of them Pakistani guys, literally. But they were all so welcoming. Be it from Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan. Jalal Talabani, the President of Iraq. Or Bono, the King of Ireland."

POEHLER AS COURIC: "On foreign policy, I want to give you one more chance to explain your claim that you have foreign policy experience based on Alaska's proximity to Russia. What did you mean by that?"

FEY AS PALIN: "Well, Alaska and Russia are only separated by a narrow maritime border. (using her hands to illustrate) You got Alaska here, this right here is water, and this is Russia. So, we keep an eye on them."

POEHLER AS COURIC: "And how do you do that exactly?"

FEY AS PALIN: "Every morning, when Alaskans wake up, one of the first things they do, is look outside to see if there are any Russians hanging around. And if there are, you gotta go up to them and ask, 'What are you doing here?' and if they can't give you a good reason, it's our responsibility to say, you know, 'Shoo! Get back over there!'

POEHLER AS COURIC: "Senator McCain attempted to shut down his political campaign this week in order to deal with the economic crisis. What's your opinion of this potential 700 billion dollar bailout?"

FEY AS PALIN: "Like every American I'm speaking with, we're ill about this. We're saying, 'Hey, why bail out Fanny and Freddie and not me?' But ultimately what the bailout does is, help those that are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy to help...uh...it's gotta be all about job creation, too. Also, too, shoring up our economy and putting Fannie and Freddy back on the right track and so healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reigning in spending...'cause Barack Obama, y'know...has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans, also, having a dollar value meal at restaurants. That's gonna help. But one in five jobs being created today under the umbrella of job creation. That, you know...Also..."

POEHLER AS COURIC: "What lessons have you learned from Iraq and how specifically, would you spread democracy abroad?"

FEY AS PALIN: "Specifically, we would make every effort possible to spread democracy abroad to those who want it."

POEHLER AS COURIC: "Yes, but specifically what would you do?"

FEY AS PALIN: "We're gonna promote freedom. Usher in democratic values and ideals. And fight terror-loving terrorists."

POEHLER AS COURIC: "But again, and not to belabor the point. One specific thing."

(several seconds of FEY and POEHLER staring at each other)

FEY AS PALIN: "Katie, I'd like to use one of my lifelines."

POEHLER AS COURIC: "I'm sorry?"

FEY AS PALIN: "I want to phone a friend."

POEHLER AS COURIC: "You don't have any lifelines."

FEY AS PALIN: "Well in that case I'm gonna just have to get back to you!"

POEHLER AS COURIC: "Forgive me, Mrs. Palin, but is seems to me that when cornered, you become increasingly adorable. Is that fair to say?"

FEY AS PALIN: "I don't know, is it?" (She gestures 'cutely')

POEHLER AS COURIC: "Governor Palin, is there anything else you'd like to say other than 'Live from New York, it's Saturday Night?'"

FEY AS PALIN
Yes, Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!!!

     Here's the real Katie Couric interview:

    And here's the SNL comedic sketch:

     After she helps John McCain lose the presidential election, if the governor of Alaska tires of her day job, there's no doubt that she has a future playing Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin.

Right pundit is wrong: Palin's Good for America

 

     In a perverse sort of way, I’ve come to realize that contrary to my earlier thinking, Gov. Sarah Palin’s number two spot on the Republican presidential ticket is good for America.
    The last thing we need is four more years of wrong-headed, out-dated, Keystone Cops governance. We can’t afford it any longer. And we may not be able to survive it. That’s why we must thank the powers of creative intelligence for Sarah Palin. In her stumbling, bumbling way, the Alaskan governor has brought clarity to this presidential election, underscoring McCain’s lack of good judgment while highlighting why anyone who really cares for this nation will not be voting Republican this November. Only the most mentally challenged of the right-wing still sincerely think Palin is capable of filling John McCain’s shoes in the event of his untimely death.
    And, fortunately, some brave, true Country First conservatives are beginning to speak up. One, Kathleen Parker, was both clear and concise in her National Review Online commentary discussing why Palin is a not-ready-for-prime-time player in the highest level of national and international politics.
    For the sake of the GOP, Parker asks Palin to step down. For the sake of the United States of America, I beg to differ. I think we shouldn't tamper with the Palin/McCain pairing because the know-nothing governor is living proof that the Republicans have a ticket to nowhere.
    Here’s the beginning of Parker’s commentary:

Palin Problem
She’s out of her league.

By Kathleen Parker

If at one time women were considered heretical for swimming upstream against feminist orthodoxy, they now face condemnation for swimming downstream — away from Sarah Palin.

To express reservations about her qualifications to be vice president — and possibly president — is to risk being labeled anti-woman.   

Or, as I am guilty of charging her early critics, supporting only a certain kind of woman.

Some of the passionately feminist critics of Palin who attacked her personally deserved some of the backlash they received. But circumstances have changed since Palin was introduced as just a hockey mom with lipstick — what a difference a financial crisis makes — and a more complicated picture has emerged.

As we’ve seen and heard more from John McCain’s running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion.

To read the rest of Parker's Palin indictment, click here.
   

Code words for whitefolk

                                                                                 

      While attempting to sort through all the Republican game playing going down at the White House bailout meeting, its aftermath and its meaning, I dropped by the wearerespectablenegroes.blogspot.com site. They've explored the deep, pale secrets of coded words for White People used by politicians and pundits alike. In the general genuflecting to not just come out and say White, the media, the right-wingers and the public intellectuals have created more than a gaggle of euphemisms to describe these folks. So far the Respectable Negro count is at 67. More may be coming. Here are the first 30:

1. Values voter
2. Heartland
3. Mainstream voter
4. Hard-working Americans
5. Lunch pail voters
6. Soccer moms
7. Walmart Moms
8. Nascar Dads
9. Blue collar
10. Regular Americans
11. Real Americans
12. The Base
13. Culture War voters
15. Palin's Army
16. Joe Six Pack
17. Joe Lunch Pail
18. Hockey Mom/Hockey moms
19. American Workers
20. Work Force
21. Regular Folks
22. Ma and Pa Kettle
23. My (or your) neighbors
24. Average American Voter
25. Rural Voters
26. Non-elitists
27. My accountant
28. Small Town Voters
29. The Woman Vote
30. Middle America

      For the other 37, click here.

     I challenge the Respectable Negroes to match it with a list of coded words for blackfolk.

The ins and outs of McCain's change agents

   

     John McCain’s change agents are way more interesting—although not as real or competent—than Barack Obama’s. There’s Rick Davis, who is apparently a closet reformer, but publicly a big time lobbyist.  In performing the delicate dance of having it both ways, Davis, who has re-fashioned his boss and himself as true reformers, was claiming to have kicked his old lobbying ways, while his firm was being paid $15,000 a month—or $345,000 in total, according to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff.
    And, of course, there’s Gov. Sarah Palin, the mouse-hunting mom, who rejects earmarks when she’s not pursuing them.
    But here’s the McCain connection that may be the most revealing:  Mark Buse.
    According to People.com’s Michelangelo Signorile, Buse, McCain’s senate chief of staff, is gay.
    You might want to think of Buse as Superman gay in that he’s socially out of the closet but professionally still disguised as Clark Kent. Or, maybe Dracula works better as a metaphor—straight by day, gay at night.
    It makes no difference to me.  I think it’s a bad idea to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation because I believe that most folks are born with straight or gay tendencies, just like some are born right-handed and others left-handed.
    My problem with McCain is that like a lot of black preachers, he’s been a practicing hypocrite. There are hundreds of black ministers that will deliver an homophobic sermon right after their blatantly gay choir director, following a chorus of amens, has signaled to his singers to take a seat. Similarly, McCain has hired gays on his staff but has campaigned in support of anti-gay marriage amendments and for the continuation of the discriminatory “don’t ask, don’t tell” military policy.
    On her blog, Pam’s Houseblend, Pam Spaulding explodes the ins and outs of McCain’s hypocrisy and the reaction of the Log Cabin Republicans. Here is some of what she wrote:

LCR chides 'gay left' for discussing John McCain's gay chief of staff
by: Pam Spaulding

The fainting couch is needed for Scott Tucker over at BlogCabin. He's worked up over the reporting by Michelangelo Signorile and Mike Rogers about John McCain's professionally closeted Senate chief of staff Mark Buse and the hypocrisy it represents, given the Republican nominee's public anti-gay position on every major issue related to LGBT rights. (BTW, Mike Signorile has audio of an interview by Lisa Keen with yet another former Buse boyfriend who has gone on the record.)

The title of the post sums up the dilemma of the Log Cabin Republicans --  "The Politics of Personal Destruction at its Worst."

         Mark Buse has been openly gay for years and has acknowledged as      much.  So the notion that he has been "outed" is simply false.  But secondly-and this is the bigger point-this political stunt by Mike Rogers just proves what Log Cabin has been saying for years.  John McCain is an inclusive Republican who hires the best people, regardless of sexual orientation.

Then what is the "personal destruction" you are talking about? If Buse is out, then discussing the fact that Mark Buse is gay shouldn't be of any consequence -- unless there is something wrong with being out of the closet to the Republican base.

Isn't that the real problem here? If John McCain is personally inclusive, why can he not be so as a candidate? McCain might consider Buse a family friend and not fire him for being gay, but what about the young gay person working at a DQ with an anti-gay boss -- he has no protections from getting axed if that boss learns of his employee's orientation. It's not inclusion when it only means the people in your inner circle.

To read the rest of Spaulding's post, click here.

In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse--Not on Cavuto on Fox

      

        The worst financial crisis in America since the Great Depression was not caused by government deregulation or corporate greed or Republican governmental incompetence as Fox Cable News' Neil Cavuto understands it.

         Apparently, it's the fault of minorities.

        "Loaning to minorities and other risky folks was a disaster," in Cavuto's narrow little mind in his limited, little universe.

         Of course, I've got to wonder which "minorities" did he have in mind. Oprah? Billionaire Bob Johnson, the BET sell-out? Tiger Woods? Michael Jordan? You get the picture.

       In case you don't, Cavuto has footage of Barack Obama on screen while he grills a Democratic congressman.

       Here's a mind-expanding report and explanation by theyoungturks.com on YouTube.com:

Before Obama was Obama

   

   

      This is a radio interview with Barack Obama before he was the Barack Obama we now know and are following. This interview ran on March 15, 2004 on WBEZ-FM, Chicago's outlet for National Public Radio.

      At the time, Obama was a relatively unknown state senator, running against several better-known Illinois Democrats for the party's nomination for the seat U.S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald, a Republican, announced that he was vacating. During the interview on Chicago Public Radio's 848 show, host Steve Edwards thoroughly questions Sen. Obama on a laundry list of national issues.

      It's fascinating to hear what Obama had to say then and compare it with what he has to say now on immigration, the environment, farm policy, federal spending, if he's too elistist--for regular black folks, health, gays and lesbians, "the dumb" war in Iraq, the Patriot Act and his basketball skills. There are a couple of places in the interview where Obama admits that he's open to further investigating his position but, by and large, his positions then are his positions now.

     I'd love to hear comparable interviews from John McCain when he was running for the Republican nomination in 2000 or Sarah Palin when she was running for governor of Alaska a couple of years ago. The archival interview on Chicago Public Radio's blog lasts 23:30. Click here for a listen.

    

You can this one and others I've posted on Huffingtonpost.com.

Palin's positives gone negative

 

      That hissing sound you hear is the air rushing out of the Sarah Palin bubble. The vetting isn't over yet and already most thinking Americans are beginning to question if this former small town mayor,  governor of a small population state, is really prepared to become the leader of the free world.

      And while Gov. Palin is supposed to have an approval rating of 80 percent in conservative Alaska, those among the 20 percent are anything but the Silent Minority. Here's a post yesterday on the Progressive Alaska blog:

Saradise Lost - Chapter Sixty-Eight -- Palin's Positives Crash

Whatever her approval ratings might be in Alaska right now, Sarah Palin's national approval ratings are going down. Steadily and surely.

Additionally, I'm still waiting for an in-depth report by a credible national or international reporter who came up to Alaska since August 29th, who praises her record here. Anybody read one yet?

Palin's positives vs. negatives:

DATE------POSITIVE----------NEGATIVE----------------NET
9/11............52.......................35..........................+17
9/12............51.......................37..........................+14
9/13............49......................40...........................+9
9/14............47.......................42..........................+7
9/15.............47......................43..........................+4
9/16.............45......................44..........................+1
9/17.............44......................45...........................-1
9/18.............42......................46..........................-4

       My guess is that Sarah Barracuda's negative ratings are going to get worse before they get worst--and just like she took John McCain and the Republican ticket up, she's going to take them down.

      The three photos above are from what is being billed as the biggest political rally in the history of the Alaska. This women's rally took place last Saturday in Anchorage and was, as you can see,  anti-Palin.

McCain's fundamental economy

          Barack Obama needs to speak less like the University of Chicago constitutional law professor he was and more like the populous candidate for president that he needs to be. With the Dow free falling by 504 points yesterday, even those "hard-working" average Americans that the Democratic nominee for president has, for reasons of too much melanin, been unable to reach will eventually get the message: it's the stupid economy, genius!

          The housing market is in the basement, unemployment is at a five-year high, Americans on Main Street have to choose between gasoline in the car or bread on the table and Wall Street is bleeding red.
          So, rather than giving a mini-dissertation on how the Republicans got us in this mess and why John McCain was a part of the problem and will not be a part of the solution, Obama needs to speak more in soundbites. How about something like, "They screwed it up, I'll straighten it out."
          Running the numbers over and over again won't hurt either.
          The Electronic Village blog provides a cheat sheet for anyone wondering if, in the George Bush economy, we're better off now then we were seven years ago.

     Here's the gist of it:

What does John McCain have to say on this remarkably horrible economic day? "Our economy, I think still—the fundamentals of our economy are strong." —John McCain, speaking on the morning of September 15

Villagers, I think that you should simply ask yourself a simple question. Are you better off today than you were 7 years ago when the Republicans took over Washington DC?

Then: Overall debt was $5.7 trillion.
Now: The National Debt is $9.5 Trillion!

Then: - A gallon of gas cost $1.56
Now: - A gallon of gas costs over $4.00

Then: - Federal budget surplus over $200 billion
Now: - FY-2008 federal deficit over $407 billion

Then: - Unemployment was 3.4%
Now: - Unemployment hits 5-year high, 6.1%

      I have a couple of quick questions. What were the prices of lipstick and tanning beds back then? And what are they now?

 

Palin-Gibson interview reveals beauty's only skin deep

         Watching The Interview with Charlie Gibson, I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed for women, Republicans and John McCain. This was the Trophy Veep exposed. It was the Beauty Queen Interview II, but this time instead of Miss Teen South Carolina, it was way up north with the runner-up in the Alaskan beauty pageant, Miss Congeniality.

      It was not a pretty sight.
     Sarah Palin didn’t know WTF she was talking about—and when she did, or did not, she lied about it.  She didn’t know how NATO works. She didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was. She continued to spiel an alternate reality about the Bridge to Nowhere by doing some explaining that was reminiscent of Miss Teen USA contestant Lauren Caitlin.
    The big diff, obviously, is that Caitlin, the adolescent, was competing for an insignificant position that would do no harm. Palin, a woman who should know better,  is attempting to be vice president of the United States of America; the number two person to a 72-year-old man with a history of skin cancer. This time next year, under a worse case scenario, she could be the leader of the free world.
    How uninformed is she? Let me begin to count the ways.
    Her foreign policy experience can be summed up very quickly: On a clear day, she can see Russia from Alaska.
  Her reformer credentials can also be summarized just as easily: She may have kept The Bridge to Nowhere pork and abused earmarks in Alaska but when she goes to Washington, she’ll make sure such deals have transparency.
    Her maverick instincts boil down to this: when she and McCain get to Washington, the beltway boys had better watch out.
    Imagine what the right-wing fear and smear machine would be spewing out had Barack Obama spit out such inane answers to Gibson’s questions. Like I said, I feel embarrassed for women because this is only the second time in 20 years that they have one of their own on a major presidential ticket—and this one comes up blushingly short. 

    I am embarrassed for Republicans and McCain as well.
    Do they really believe the American public is so stupid that they’ll buy this pig in a poke—lipstick not withstanding?

Have Republicans made 9/11 their exclusive brand?

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        On the seventh anniversary of 911, the right continues to put forth the argument that President Bush's invasion of Iraq, suppression of the U.S. Constitution and torturing of suspected  terrorists have all contributed to our not being attacked since.
       Maybe. Maybe not.

       Islamic extremists bombed New York's World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, then again, of course, on September 11, 2001. That was slightly less than eight and a half years from one attack to the other. And that had nothing to do with any national, coordinated effort to make sure that the Towers--and America overall was safe.

       So, the argument that the Bush administration has kept us safe for the past seven years doesn't hold water--especially when you consider how incompetent it's been on the economy, the capture of Osama bin Laden, Hurricane Katrina and a list of other crisis too long and too depressing to revisit.

     Not long after the 911 national tragedy, Bush, Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani and other Republicans car-jacked it and have been claiming it's all theirs to make sure it never happens again. You saw their self-styled, self-serving manipulation of it during the 2004 elections via the Politics of Fear.  You saw it again at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. You've already been given a sneak preview of what's to come in the early stages of John McCain's "Country First" campaign.

      MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, on his show, Countdown, served up a powerful commentary last night. It runs 8:15. It's worth every second.