Dear Red States:

If you manage to steal this election too we've decided we're
leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the
other Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware, that includes
California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin,
Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast. We believe this split will
be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.

To sum up briefly:

You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states.
We get stem cell research and the best beaches.

We get the Statue of Liberty.
You get Dollywood.

We get Intel and Microsoft.
You get WorldCom.

We get Harvard.
You get Ole' Miss.

We get 85% of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs.
You get Alabama.

We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states
pay their fair share.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22% lower than the Christian
Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families.
You get a bunch of single moms.

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and
anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at
once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have
kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no
purpose, and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their
children's caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq , and
hope that the WMDs turn up, but we're not willing to spend our resources in Bush's Quagmire.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80% of
the country's fresh water, more than 90% of the pineapple and lettuce,
92% of the nation's fresh fruit, 95% of America's quality wines, 90%
of all cheese, 90% of the high tech industry, 95% of the corn and
soybeans (thanks Iowa!), most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living
redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools plus Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with
88% of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs),
92% of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100% of the tornadoes, 90% of the
hurricanes, 99% of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100% of all
televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.

We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.

Additionally, 38% of those in the Red states believe Jonah was
actually swallowed by a whale, 62% believe life is sacred unless we're
discussing the war, the death penalty or gun laws, 44% say that
evolution is only a theory, 53% believe that Saddam was involved in
9/11 and 61% of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties.

Finally, we're taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed
they grow in Mexico

Peace out,
Blue Staes

Someone give that moron a map!

McCain Proposes Sending Troops to South America to Invade Spain...

GOP presidential nominee John McCain said today that if elected he would send U.S. troops to South America in order to invade "one of America's deadliest enemies," Spain.

Sen. McCain accused Spain of "picking a fight" with the U.S. in recent days, but warned that their "aggression and bellicosity will not stand."

"Spain can run, but it cannot hide," he told his audience at a rally in St. Louis. "I am fully prepared to invade Spain, and if that means sending troops to South America, where Spain is located, then so be it."

The Arizona senator seemed momentarily caught off-guard when a reporter suggested that Spain might be located in Europe, and not in South America, but Mr. McCain soon shot back, calling the reporter's comment "naïve."

"That's the old kind of thinking that I'm going to change when I get to Washington," Sen. McCain said. "My friends, when I am President, I will redraw the map."

His running mate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, agreed with Sen. McCain's placement of Spain on the world map, telling the St. Louis crowd that "Spain is much closer than any of us realize."

"If you stand on the southern border of Mexico and get up on your tippy-toes, you can practically see it," she said.

by: andy borowitz

Oh Simple Sarah...

I just heard Simple Sarah Palin say that Obama tells people to protest McCain. I guess she believes he must have secret meetings telling a secret underground network to protest. What Simple Sarah Palin, Six year Sarah, Six School Palin doesn't understand that a majority of people don't agree with so-called neoconservative policies and they come out to say so. Nobody tells them to protest. People have that right here in the lower 48 (well so far...)

Simple Sarah, maybe you should go back to school and get a degree in something other than journalism. And please, stop lying...

We should be worried...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-foner/were-in-big-trouble_b_124686.html?page=2&show_comment_id=15491709#comment_15491709


by: Naomi Foner

We're talking to ourselves.

And we're not saying anything that's going to help win this election.

Everyone who cares knows that Sara Palin is a born again, right wing Republican. That she's a right-to-life, anti-gay, anti-global-warming, book-banning kind of gal.

No one seems to care.

The package and not the content is what's attracting interest. How cute she is when she says it. How cute she is when she skins a caribou. How cute are those barely grown expectant children of hers.

My first instinct was to scream from the roof tops that no self respecting woman was going to fall for this McCain manipulation. But apparently, plenty have. Plenty share her views and the crowds and the TV ratings are growing. The same way they grow for American Idol and other reality shows. Seems like we would rather watch ourselves, however diminished, on TV and in the public eye than people watch people with actual skills and talents. Watching people just like ourselves eating bugs and falling into vats of peanut butter has become a favorite American past time. And apparently, we would rather have an ill informed, inexperienced leader than one with experience and education. Experience has been denigrated to the level of liberal as a word. It's to be laughed at and ridiculed. And a lot of people are buying it. And we're supposed to slink away, like the nerd in high school being attacked by the football player.
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But this isn't high school and we're supposed to know better. We have got to take back these words and what they stand for. Leaders need to be chosen from the most talented among us, not from the bottom of the barrel. And we shouldn't be afraid to say so.

What kind of misplaced chivalry would keep the Democrats from calling Sarah Palin what she is? An ignorant, misinformed, inexperienced, bigoted fraud. And unless we find a way to do it, she will be running the country before we have time to turn around.

This will not be easy. I spent hours on the telephone to Ohio Democrats last presidential election. There was no way I was going to convince these working class Democrats that they were wrong to vote for Bush. Kerry scared them. And no manner of logic would turn it around. They voted against their own economic interests, against college for their kids, against their own medical care, against their first amendment rights. Why, because they had been told that Kerry was going to challenge their belief systems. He was "for abortion", "against the troops."

We're going to have to frame the argument in the same way. Who is Sarah Palin? A woman for sure. The package is nice, but the content is out of date and spoiled. If she gets anywhere near power we can expect global warming, the destruction of the constitution, the end of Choice, and books banned in our libraries. And we've got to make people understand this. And even if we can frame it this way, the question remains, are there many Americans who would care? Enough to sustain the constitution? Life as we know it?

I am terribly afraid that we are counting on good sense, and decency and it has gone the way of the ten cent subway ride. We are not thinking about each other. We are thinking about ourselves. Why else would we even consider a woman who tried to get her brother in law fired from his job for daring to divorce her sister. Who tried to get a local librarian to remove books she disapproved of from the library.

Politeness is not in order. We need to be scared. Terribly scared. We need to pull out all the stops. She's not going to self destruct in front of an audience who likes these things about her. Who abhors the clarity and thoughtfulness of Obama. There is no drama in it. There's drama in teenage pregnancy, political scandal and moose hunting.

McCain seems to have known just what he was doing. Now the question remains, do we?

Sarah Palin - George Bush in Lipstick

by: Nico Pitney

A core Democratic talking point against Sarah Palin is beginning to take shape: she is, critics say, the female counterpart of the current President of the United States, not only in terms of policy and social conservatism, but even personality.

"She's not a pitbull in lipstick," said one female Democratic operative, referencing a line from Palin's convention speech. "She's George Bush in lipstick."

From her hard-right stances on abortion and contraception and the deep affection she engenders from conservative evangelical leaders, to her involvement in a possible "abuse of power" scandal in Alaska and even her charming demeanor, some see in Palin the second coming of the 43rd president.

The Palin-as-Bush theme comes just in time: with less than two months before election day, Democrats have a limited window to define McCain's vice presidential pick in the eyes of voters. Her relatively sparse record, particularly on key national issues, made finding a line of attack more difficult. And the McCain campaign's efforts to paint the media coverage of Palin as sexist, and to link the Obama campaign to that coverage, only complicated matters further.

Obama himself made the Palin-Bush comparison during his Sunday appearance on ABC's This Week, calling her "somebody who may be even more aligned with George Bush - or Dick Cheney, or the politics we've seen over the last eight years - than John McCain himself is."

Later, Robert Gibbs, senior aide to the Democratic nominee, fleshed out the case in an interview on CNN. "Sarah Palin doesn't think climate change is man made. Both John McCain and Sarah Palin want to outlaw abortion, even in the case of rape and incest. I'll let you decide who you think is extreme, but you've got a candidate in Sarah Palin who says she's against the bridge for nowhere, but she campaigned on it. She says she's against lobbyists getting pork for her state when she hired a lobbyist to get pork for her state. And now she stands in the way of an ethics investigation to look into her actions that was approved by the Republican legislature. I'm telling you...she's going to fit in just great at Washington because that's what happening right now."

Moreover, on a relatively high-profile environmental issue, Palin actually went to court to take on the Bush administration from the right, objecting to the president's decision to list polar bears on the endangered species list. (The UK Independent, in its understated form, noted that Palin "has an environmental policy so toxic it would make the incumbent, George Bush, blush.")

The McCain campaign's reply to this message was summed up by Nancy Pfotenhauer, who responded to Gibbs on CNN: "That is a total crock, Robert, and you know it." McCain staffers say the ethics investigation in Alaska will find Palin did nothing improper, and that she has worked against earmarks as governor.

Unfortunately for McCain, however, it is not only Democrats who see ties between Palin and the current President.

On Saturday, former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote on his National Review blog, "George W. Bush had very slight executive experience before becoming president. His views were not well known. He won the nomination exactly in the same way that Palin has won the hearts of so many conservatives: by sending cultural cues to convince them that he was one of them, understood them, sympathized with them. So that made everything else irrelevant in 2000 - as it seems again to be doing in 2008."

But in the end, Frum wrote, Bush lacked "important aspects of leadership which is how we got into the mess from which he needed to rescue the country and himself."

A talk between a RNC security guard and Charles Hunter, Delegate of NH

Charles Hunter, an environmentalist delegate from New Hampshire and a veteran of Republican conventions going back to the 1980 coronation of Ronald Reagan at Detroit's Joe Louis Arena, can't sleep at all.

"This is my last convention," he tells me, lighting a cigarette.

"Why?"

"I'm a real McCain guy. I served. But I liked the old McCain -- when he was a true hero, before he signed on with the yahoos. I actually believe in 'country first.'"

"Not a fan of Palin?"

"If I were McCain I'd probably bring her onto my ticket, too. That's exactly the problem. I guess I tricked myself into thinking that McCain, even after he watered himself down for the election, could somehow restore sanity. The Democrats tried to paint him as a twin of Bush. Not true. But Palin ... she does remind me of Bush. McCain has made a devil's pact and sealed this party's fate."

Even though he's older, he smokes his cigarette like a young man, with earnest haste, before he flicks it off into the dark.

"That's it," he said, "we're through. Even if we win, we've lost."

What Inexperience looks like...

Palin's Hockey Rink Leads
To Legal Trouble in Town She Led
By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS
September 6, 2008

WASILLA, Alaska -- The biggest project that Sarah Palin undertook as mayor of this small town was an indoor sports complex, where locals played hockey, soccer, and basketball, especially during the long, dark Alaskan winters.

The only catch was that the city began building roads and installing utilities for the project before it had unchallenged title to the land. The misstep led to years of litigation and at least $1.3 million in extra costs for a small municipality with a small budget. What was to be Ms. Palin's legacy has turned into a financial mess that continues to plague Wasilla.

"It's too bad that the city of Wasilla didn't do their homework and secure the land before they began construction," said Kathy Wells, a longtime activist here. "She was not your ceremonial mayor; she was in charge of running the city. So it was her job to make sure things were done correctly."
[Hockey rink]
Associated Press

Ms. Palin, now Alaska's governor and Republican Sen. John McCain's running mate, has pointed to her two terms as Wasilla's mayor, from 1996 to 2002, as evidence that she has enough executive experience to take on the presidency, should the need arise -- more than Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, who touts his own background as a community organizer in Chicago.

"I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities," Ms. Palin said Wednesday in her acceptance speech at the Republican convention.

Litigation resulting from the dispute over Ms. Palin's sports-complex project is still in the courts, with the land's former owner seeking hundreds of thousands of additional dollars from the city.

Hockey is much loved in Wasilla, and Ms. Palin, whose son was a star player, wanted to build an indoor rink, with a track, basketball courts and soccer field. In the late 1990s, the city sought a 145-acre parcel owned by the Nature Conservancy, which wanted to sell the land to buy more environmentally sensitive property elsewhere. City officials negotiated a price of $126,000. Months passed without the city's securing a signed purchase agreement, according to the city's attorney, Tom Klinkner of Birch, Horton, Bittner & Cherot.

At the same time, Gary Lundgren, a Fairbanks real-estate investor, was in talks with the Nature Conservancy to buy a larger adjacent property. As discussions between the environmental group and the city dragged on, Mr. Lundgren said, he purchased the entire site for about $1 million.

The city sued Mr. Lundgren and the Nature Conservancy, arguing that Wasilla had had a deal. In 2001, a federal district court judge ruled in Wasilla's favor. Mr. Lundgren appealed, but the city believed it would prevail, according to Mr. Klinkner.

Ms. Palin marched ahead, making the public case for a sales-tax increase and $14.7 million bond issue to pay for the sports center, which was to feature a running track, basketball courts and a hockey rink. At the time, the city's annual budget was about $20 million. In a March 2002 referendum, residents approved the mayor's plan by a 20-vote margin, 306 to 286. The city cleared roads, installed utilities and made preparations to build.

Later that year, Ms. Palin's final one as mayor, the federal judge reversed his own decision and ruled that the property rightfully belonged to Mr. Lundgren. Wasilla had never signed the proper papers, the court ruled.
[In Wasilla, Alaska, the construction of an indoor sports facility (shown above), initiated during Sarah Palin's term as mayor, has led to years of litigation over property rights and at least $1.3 million in extra costs for the town.]
Greg Hensel /Alaska Stock
In Wasilla, Alaska, the construction of an indoor sports facility (shown above), initiated during Sarah Palin's term as mayor, has led to years of litigation over property rights and at least $1.3 million in extra costs for the town.

Mr. Lundgren said he had offered to give smaller parcels to the city free of charge, but the city held out for a larger tract. The former chief of the city finance department, Ted Leonard, says he doesn't recall such an offer.

After Ms. Palin left office, the city decided to take 80 acres of Mr. Lundgren's property through eminent domain. An Alaska court confirmed the city's right to do so and ordered that an arbitrator determine the appropriate price.

Last year, the arbitrator ordered the city to pay $836,378 for the 80-acre parcel, far more than the $126,000 Wasilla originally thought it would pay for a piece of land 65 acres larger. The arbitrator also determined that the city owed Mr. Lundgren $336,000 in interest. Wasilla's legal bill since the eminent domain action has come to roughly $250,000 so far, according to Mr. Klinkner, the city attorney.

Mr. Lundgren has appealed the decision, arguing that the arbitrator should have awarded him more interest. "It has been 10 years; it's just insane," said Mr. Lundgren, who now lives in Panama. "All [Ms. Palin] had to do was close the transaction."

The McCain-Palin campaign referred questions about the sports complex to Mr. Leonard, the former city finance chief. He blamed the Nature Conservancy for dealing with two different potential buyers at one time. "That's what caused the confusion," he said.

"At the time, with the information she had, [Ms. Palin] made the right decision," Mr. Leonard said. "But you know what? Litigation happens."

The sports facility is finished, set against forest and mountain ranges. Inside, locals kick soccer balls and skate laps on the rink. Last year, it hosted a statewide wrestling tournament.

"All I can say about the sports complex is that it was done on time and under budget," said Donald Moore, a Palin ally who managed the construction. "It was done legally, and for someone else to say it could have been done differently in a better way, that's strictly their opinion."

Ms. Palin cited her mayoral duties as partial evidence of her executive experience. Dianne Woodruff, a Wasilla city councilwoman and critic of Ms. Palin's performance, agreed.

"If people are going to be voting on her based on her experience as Wasilla's mayor, then they should know how she did in the job," Ms. Woodruff said, "the good, the bad and the ugly."