Blogging Blue

• It’s hard to believe it’s December 21st and the 2008 election is still not over. Al Franken now leads incumbent Norm Coleman by 35-50 votes in the Minnesota U.S. Senate recount, but things aren’t over yet. Officials still have to sort and count approximately 1,600 absentee ballots that were mistakenly rejected before the vote is certified, so it could be a bit longer before any winner is formally announced.
• The inauguration of president-elect Barack Obama, which is expected to draw over 2 million people to our nation’s capital, is also expected to have a big price tag. Officials in Washington D.C. have requested an additional $15 million from Congress to help the city cover costs. That would double the $15 million Congress has already allocated to pay for all national events and demonstrations in Washington during 2009, making the Obama an inauguration a truly pricey affair.
• Sherry Johnston, the mother of Levi Johnston, was arrested Thursday in Wasilla, Alaska on six felony counts of misconduct involving a controlled substance. You’ll remember Levi Johnston as the young man having a baby with the daughter of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. The undercover investigation that resulted in Sherry Johnston’s arrest “had been going on for a while,” according to Alaska State Police, and it seems a little far-fetched to believe no one in the Johnston family knew anything about what was going on.
• Thanks to the latest snowfall we received, this December has been the second snowiest on record in Milwaukee. With three storms expected to dump 7-15 inches of snow on the Milwaukee area during the coming week, the record of 49.5 inches that fell in December 2000 could be in jeopardy.

CNN is reporting Wasilla Bible Church was severely damaged on Friday night in what authorities in Wasilla are categorizing as a “suspicious” fire. Despite church members being in the building at the time of the fire, no one was seriously hurt, and shortly after the blaze, former Republican vice presidential candidate, Gov. Sarah Palin, issued a statement offering an apology to the assistant pastor of the Wasilla Bible Church “if the incident is in any way connected to the undeserved negative attention the church has received since she became a vice presidential candidate.”

Obviously it’s too early to say if the fire was definitely set intentionally or not, and if it was, it will be hard to determine a motive behind the fire unless the culprit is caught, but I certainly hope that if the fire at the Wasilla Bible Church was set intentionally, that it wasn’t done so to make a political statement. After all, “political statements” should never involve burning down a church, no matter what your politics or the statement you’re trying to make.

Just a few tidbits that caught my eye as I was surfing the intertubes today…

• It turns out Chris Matthews is likely not running for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, as it’s being reported Matthews is close to signing a contract extension with MSNBC. Personally, I’m glad Matthews might be out of the Pennsylvania Senate race.
• How bad has the economy gotten? So bad that some folks have taken to torching vehicles they can no longer afford, driving them into lakes or faking thefts and then collecting the insurance money on the vehicles. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, there was a 14% increase nationally in the first six months of this year in the number of vehicles recovered burned, compared with the first six months of 2006. No doubt these numbers will rise if the economy continues to worsen, and to be completely honest I’m surprised we haven’t heard of individuals doing the same thing to houses they can no longer afford.
• Apparently Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau forgot that lots of people use Facebook. According to CNN, photos of Favreau at a recent party appeared on Facebook Friday, and in one of the photos Favreau was dancing with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of future secretary of state Hillary Clinton, while in a second photo, a friend was offering the cutout a bottle of beer while Favreau stood beside the likeness with his hand on the cardboard New York senator’s chest. Considering how internet savvy the Obama campaign was, it’s surprising to see a member of the campaign posting embarrassing pictures of himself on Facebook.
• William “Cash in the freezer” Jefferson has been voted out as the Congressman for Louisiana’s Second Congressional District. Jefferson, a Democrat, has been battling scandals and a federal indictment for the past three years, and I can’t think of any Democrats that are shedding a tear now that Jefferson’s been voted out of Congress. Good riddance, I say.
• Even though president-elect Obama is still more than a month away from being inaugurated, a new national poll shows former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee leading Alaska Governor Sarah Palin among potential 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls. Thirty four percent of those polled favored Huckabee, while thirty two percent favored Palin. To be honest, I’d love to see Gov. Palin get the Republican presidential nomination, because barring some catastrophic collapse in the next few years, President Obama would like have an easy path to reelection.

Just a few random tidbits on this cold Thursday night…

• The Politico is reporting Chris Matthews, the host of “Hardball with Chris Matthews” on MSNBC, is inching closer to challenging Republican Arlen Specter Specter’s U.S. Senate seat. As I said last week, I just don’t see Chris Matthews being the best possible candidate Pennsylvania’s Democrats can muster to oppose Sen. Specter. There’s been speculation Matthews’ flirtation with running for the Senate might be a negotiating ploy to give him leverage in contract negotiations, with his contract due to expire in June 2009, but according to Politico, being a U.S. Senator was a childhood dream of Matthews. In my opinion, Matthews brings too much baggage to the table to be the strongest possible candidate for Democrats in Pennsylvania, and if he does run, I don’t see him making it out of what would undoubtedly be a hotly contested Democratic primary.
• As the economy has taken a nosedive, over 500,000 retirees in the state of Wisconsin retirement fund have seen the value of the fund drop 26% for the Core Fund and 36% for the Variable Fund. The drops in value means retirees will be faced with smaller pension checks next year, with cuts of nearly 1.5% likely, but cuts of up to 3.5% possible if the retirement fund loses 30% of its value for the year. Let’s hope the economy picks up soon, because retirees are often the last people who can afford to have their retirement checks cut.
• As Dan Cody pointed out earlier this week, it appears Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin still hasn’t returned all the clothes that were bought and paid for by the Republican National Committee after Palin was named as Sen. John McCain’s running mate. Politico is reporting today that the RNC will report it spent an extra $30,000 on clothes and accessories for Gov. Palin during her vice presidential bid. I wonder….has Gov. Palin returned those clothes and accessories as well, or is she still sorting through her closet and suitcases?

That’s all I have….have a great Thursday!

No, you didn’t read the title of this blog entry wrong. At a press conference today, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin said she and her fellow Republican governors were ready to put aside “extreme partisanship” and act if Washington fails to provide the leadership America needs, according to CNN. Gov. Palin even went so far as to praise President-elect Barack Obama, saying, “If he governs with the skill, and the grace, and the greatness of which he is capable, we’re going to be just fine.”

Now here’s where things get a little weird. In the 48 hours before Gov. Palin appeared at today’s press conference, Gov. Palin had given television interviews in which she defended her previous claims that President-elect Obama had “palled around with terrorists,” a reference to his past work with William Ayers, the Vietnam-era domestic bomber. However, by today Gov. Palin was singing a different tune, praising President-elect Obama as mentioned above.

Sarah Palin, thy hypocrisy knows no bounds!

At least, that’s the thought of Ken Duberstein, the Chief of Staff for President Ronald Reagan from 1988 to 1989:

“I think [selection of Gov. Sarah Palin as a running mate] has very much undermined the whole question of John McCain’s judgment. You know what most Americans I think realized is that you don’t offer a job, let alone the vice presidency, to a person after one job interview. Even at McDonald’s, you’re interviewed three times before you get a job.”

Now I understand Sen. McCain took a gamble in putting Gov. Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket, and I’ll acknowledge she’s done wonders to energize the Republican Party’s base, but shouldn’t someone who’s going to be a heartbeat away from the presidency have more than one brief interview before she’s picked to be on the ticket?

H/T to Subject to Complete Defeasance.

For all the squawking some on the right have done about Sen. Barack Obama’s supposed socialist leanings, it appears Gov. Sarah Palin is a socialist herself:

For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.”

Sharing the wealth….that sounds an awful lot like socialism to me. I just hope those same folks who’ve attacked Sen. Obama so strongly will now attack Gov. Palin as well, in the interest of being consistent in their attacks.

H/T to illyT.

Yesterday Gov. Sarah Palin gave a policy speech in Pittsburgh dedicated to the issue of special needs children. I’ve been curious to hear Gov. Palin speak on this issue, because it’s an issue near and dear to my heart, but I was sorely disappointed by some of Gov. Palin’s remarks, more specifically her mocking of federal earmark money being spent to study fruit flies:

This is a matter of how we prioritize the money that we spend. We’ve got a three trillion dollar budget, and Congress spends some 18 billion dollars a year on earmarks for political pet projects. That’s more than the shortfall to fully fund the IDEA. And where does a lot of that earmark money end up? It goes to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good — things like fruit fly research in Paris, France, or a public policy center named for the guy who got the earmark.

What bothers me the most about Gov. Palin’s remarks has to do with the fact that this seems to be her “issue of expertise,” yet she doesn’t seem to understand just how valuable research projects like those being done with fruit flies can be to better understanding and treating autism, Fragile X, and other related disorders. In fact, researchers at Emory University in North Carolina have cited their use of fruit flies to identify drugs and small molecules that reverse some features of Fragile X:

Scientists using a new drug screening method in Drosophila (fruit flies), have identified several drugs and small molecules that reverse the features of fragile X syndrome — a frequent form of mental retardation and one of the leading known causes of autism. The discovery sets the stage for developing new treatments for fragile X syndrome.

Perhaps before the next time Gov. Palin speaks, someone should brief her on the fact that not all research projects are “wasteful spending” or junk science, and that there are tremendous benefits to be found from even fruit fly research.

H/T to illyT.

From the files of “Strange but True” comes this little tidbit:

According to Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, if she and husband Todd had had a sixth child, they already had a name in mind. “I always wanted a son named Zamboni,” Gov. Palin said in an interview with People magazine.

Zamboni….that sure rolls off the tongue.

A special shout out to my friend Kevin for providing the link to the source story.