Juno from Juneau

The internet has tackled every angle of the Sarah Palin story. I have little more to contribute. But this being a totally labor-free, Labor-Day Eve, I'm just sitting around picking sand from Stinson Beach out of my eye and arguing with 'Pockets about how to arrange the wires connecting our TV and cable box, so wtf. Why not? Bravely into the echo chamber...

1) She's okay-looking, I guess. Who am I to argue, but can we all just calm down with the Tina Fey comparisons? Yes, they both have brown hair and wear glasses, but the similarities end there -- both physical and substantive. While the 80's were a lot kinder to Sarah Palin than they were to Tina Fey, the millenium is all about the latter. It would be impossible and inappropriate to list her virtues and accomplishments here, but among them are Werewolf Bar Mitzvah and Who Dat Ninja?, and among them are not early and vocal support for the Bridge to Nowhere and an asshole commitment to ANWR drilling. Come on, America, I know you think every woman with spectacles and bangs plays for team sexy librarian, but let's try to tell them apart.

2) What's going on with identity politics in our country? The community organizer who married the independent lady with a collegiate interest in black consciousness runs on the Democratic ticket and transcends race, while the pro-life, shotgun-wielding beauty queen who thought Hillary was whining and didn't know what a Vice-President does now wants to shatter that highest, hardest ceiling. I can't wait to see future iterations of this phenomenon: the Arab-American who wants to double the size of Guantanamo, the gay man who himself thinks he's headed straight for hell. (I'm talking to you, Charlie Crist.)

3) Now the juicy stuff: Pardon the crassness, but there seems to be a raging debate about whether Sarah Palin hails from MILF Island or GMILF Island? Blog reader Anat asked us to cover the rumor that Caribou gov is not the mother of her youngest child, but is in fact covering for her eldest daughter. But we live in a time of abbreviated news cycles, and today even Daily Kos did a post on the story, so go there to read up on it.

Now, I have no real opinion -- I'm not particularly offended by the rampant spread of the rumor in the absence of decent evidence nor would I even be surprised in the slightest if the whole story ended up being true. But here's what gets me. All the photographic evidence in support of the theory (see the Daily Kos story) does nothing to convince me: a couple of pictures of Palin sitting, wearing jackets, not looking terribly with-child? One picture of a 16-year-old girl with the slightest bump? Who cares.

But the story itself is totally convincing: her daughter out with mono for months right around the time the baby was born; her water breaking and her finishing the speech she was giving before taking a 12-hour flight back to Alaska; the fact that her staff had no idea about the pregnancy.

It's all fishy, and fish pickers don't come from Texas.

UPDATE: HAHAHA:THE OLD "SHE COULDN'T HAVE BEEN GIVING BIRTH IN APRL BECAUSE SHE'S FIVE MONTHS PREGNANT NOW. Y'BURNT!" DEFENSE. THE LAST DAYS OF THIS ELECTION ARE GOING TO BE GREAT. I CAN'T WAIT TILL OLIVER STONE MAKES A MOVIE ABOUT IT.

Cute-off

Seriously, if you could Madonna only one of these two children, which one would you choose? Trying to measure and compare the relative cuteness might burn your synapses.

On a less cute note -- and I'm just sayin' -- but is it possible, maybe, just maybe, that the Obamas, who've steadfastly refused to exploit their little girls through election season, who've emphasized that they want these kids to be kids, made a strategic choice to, umm, straighten out their hair in anticipation of the big stage? In other pictures, the little ones rock braids, curls, faux-dreads, and tied-back naturals (see here, here and here), but now they're hair's decidedly less, shall we say, ethnic.

I'm not prepared to actually do a timeline analysis of pictures of the girls through the last couple of years and trace their hairstyles, so maybe I'm way off base here, but given the fact that in her speech Michelle Obama announced her unqualified patriotism, defined herself as wife/mother/daughter/sister (not as lawyer and community leader), and made every effort to counter, if implicitly, all charges of militancy unfairly lobbed at her, I think it's fair to say that last night she was concerned primarily with stagecraft, with presenting herself as a First Lady and the girls as potential First Daughters. We the electorate are dumb, we are lazy, and we are subconsciously racist -- we don't think it's inappropriate for our President's blonde underage daughter to cavort drunkenly at Smith Point, but we will not allow human sunshine herself to play double dutch on the South Lawn if she does so with black people's hair.

Now, if the Obamas made a strategic decision to straighten the girls' hair, I don't fault them for it -- I think it's sad and I feel bad for them that they have to, but they're right to do it. You make moral compromises if you want to be President. This is just one of them. Michelle, Sasha, and Malia Obama will be iconic stereotype-defying black women one day, but they live in a country that won't let them go overboard with the blackness before getting there.

tie die

i have an unnatural dislike of hippies. one of my coworkers pointed out that this is especially ironic considering that i grew up for the most part in the pacific northwest, where hackeysacks and treehugging are a way of life. i would say hippies rank below sci-fi and fantasy in my list of "things in which i have zero interest and actually kind of hate."

anyway, the laws of life are on my side. not that i'm literally wishing cancer upon anyone, but a shower sounds pretty good just about now, don't it?

the video doesn't relate to anything i've written. i just liked it.

PSA

if you are tv-less (or waiting for the price of tvs to drop) like me, you can catch the entire convention online. live! don't say howard dean hasn't done anything for you.

y'know, i intended the above video to be funny bc i just remember laughing my head off when i watched it back in 2000. now it makes my head hurt. or makes my head cry? oh gore-bot.

oh wait, this one is funny. whew.

IT'S BIDEN

That's the inside scoop -- in that it comes straight from my gut. Given the provenance of such a rumor, let's all celebrate with an oldie but goodie: Biden on what it's like to go to 7-11 and Dunkin' Donuts.

A Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name (Tar Heels and Blue Devils)

E, Let me cut you off at the pass. Yes, I'm a young, vulnerable, impassioned John Edwards supporter and I graduated from Duke, but I did not have sexual relations with that man.

Stephanie Tubbs Jones, 1949 - 2008

It may not mean much to some, but being the first black woman to serve on the Ways and Means Committee's kind-of-a-big-deal in our book. Also, mmmm, potato water.

Beau Knows

Things that are weird: both vice-presidential front-runners, Joe Biden and Evan Bayh (pictured above) have sons named Beau -- see here and here. White people be crazy!

huh?

is this for real??

mo'lympics

i enjoy the olympics in a very unironic way. yeah, i'm pretty sure everyone is drugged up and the chinese have infants on their women's gymnastics team or whatever, but still.

anyway, i do feel conflicted every 4 years. where do my loyalties lie? (un?)fortunately, the canadian olympic team seems unable to win a medal in a single event, so i guess i'm going to go with korea. i am sure we will sit comfortably in third until all the track and field events begin. what happened to canada? we used to win a medal or two in the summer olympics. [update: korea is now behind germany in the medal count. boo...]

i find it somewhat amusing that all of my not very patriotic friends get seriously peeved when i don't cheer for the USA. there also was this ridiculous new york times article expressing incredulity over the fact that the chinese are (gasp!) uninterested in michael phelps. yeah, guess what? not everyone cares about america. deal with it.

btw, did anyone happen to read this david brooks op-ed? is he accusing americans of "whining" over katrina? why did he wait until the final sentence to state his thesis?

Music Video of the Day: Lykke Li', "Little Bit"

I can't help it. I know I'm all into the saccharine, dancey, poppy electro fare coming out of Scandinavia these days, but this song is almost as cute as the Chinese Milli Vanilli girl. Okay, let's not kid ourselves. That girl is the cutest ever. Given a chance, I would totally Angelina Jolie that little girl -- or at least Madonna her (since, you know, she has parents). Anyway, Lykke Li makes cute songs, and I appreciate her graceless, totally unFeisty dance moves -- all herky-jerky shoulder thrusts and weird faux-breast-rubbing. Enjoy!

The Week That Was

So much happened this week. Blog readers Owen and Molly got married, though not to each other, but to people (Char & Shaw) who may or may not spend much time on the blog. Anyway, congratulations to all of them.

Also, John Edwards told everyone he's a narcissist and an egocentrist, and that's why he hooked it up with Jay McInerney's ex-girlfriend. Of course, my endorsement of Edwards for President means I am obligated to comment, so let me say this: I still don't give a shit about character. If you believe that John Edwards was a snake-oil salesman who used poverty alleviation for his platform only for political points, 1) you're wrong (since he didn't come close to winning because, you know, poor people don't have an office on K Street) and 2) you probably feel vindicated because he cheated on his wife and lied about it, so that makes him a fake, like you always knew he was. This is America, and that's your right. And if you think John Edwards is smarmy and Elizabeth is great, then you really, really hate him now. Fair enough -- even though it looks like Elizabeth encouraged him to run after he told her about the affair, so maybe we shouldn't ascribe all the naked and fool-hardy ambition to him alone.

But if like me, you think there is absolutely no connection between a politician's marital infidelity (and desperate and moronic attempts at covering up said infidelity) and his worth as a potential statesman, then you don't really come out of this whole mess with a new outlook on things: John and Elizabeth Edwards forced Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to talk about poverty and pushed the debate on universal health care in the primaries, thus paving the way for those issues to be prominent in a fantastical Obama Administration. It's that straightforward. Now even If he wanted to divorce Elizabeth and shack up with his mistress that makes him a bad husband and a bad father, but it doesn't change his politics. It didn't for Nicholas Sarkozy, and it didn''t for John McCain, who left his hobbled, ballooning wife, the mother of his children, for a blonde cheerleader, who thinks c**t is a term of endearment, and provides him with a lifetime supply of Bud Light Lime and money.

...But, while I credit Edwards for being needlessly self-punishing in his admission (what other politician owns up to narcissism?) and for sparing Elizabeth the Silda Spitzer sideshow treatment, I do have one hang-up about the affair: I don't care about the sex -- I care about the money. Rielle Hunter was paid six figures to make short documentaries about Edwards, and by at least one account, her hiring occurred after the start of their affair. Now, Hunter is what we would term a failed actress, with little experience in documentary film-making, and, apparently, her salary was paid out of the One America Foundation. That is, it would seem John Edwards used my contribution to pay his Yanni-worshipping girlfriend to hang out with him on the campaign trail. If this is in fact the case, then you -- Heidi, E., anonymousalex et. al -- were right, and John Edwards can go fuck himself.

I'm voting for Heath Ledger.

what the fuck is david brooks yapping about - part 5 (?)

in this part 5 (?) of what appears to be an infinite-part series, i again examine the latest and greatest david brooks column in the new york times and ask the question we've all been wondering: what the fuck is david brooks yapping about?

i knew today's david brooks column was going to be awesome as soon as i read the headline: lord of the memes. holy shit guys, TWO references in one pun-LARIOUS title! it also began with my favorite david brooks literary device, the Q&A. who's supposed to be kierkegaard, you daavid brøoks?

anyway, i didn't really read this shit in depth, but here are some choice quotes:

But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.

(In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)

Maximum status goes to the Gladwellian heroes who occupy the convergence points of the Internet infosystem — Web sites like Pitchfork for music, Gizmodo for gadgets, Bookforum for ideas, etc.

those are NOT WORDS. i know this is his attempt at humor or something, but seriously, who is this guy's intended audience?? is anyone laughing?

Great Powers, Great Responsibilities

Okay. Wtfuck, people? First, Estelle Getty dies -- on the heels of my malapropistic "Let sleeping dogs die" comment referencing Golden Girls -- and now comes word that Morgan Freeman was in a serious car accident last night (in a 1997 Nissan Maxima) -- just days after I took umbrage with his calling me out for liking three-button suit jackets. What the hell kind of symbiote has taken over my blogging abilities? If Wilford Brimley dies today, I am retiring from blogging. I mean, I probably should anyway because my Wilford Brimley post, it could be argued, was really an extended reference to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote The Gulag Archipelago, the source material for Cocoon.