Posting will be later today as Jay Spacebubs and I will be amongst other things checking
Simone Maynard's exhibition out.
This painting makes me laugh.
A Place To Bury Strangers - Exploding Head
14 minutes ago
Thursday, 23 October 2008
Avert your eyes jonger
Posting will be later today as Jay Spacebubs and I will be amongst other things checking
Simone Maynard's exhibition out.
This painting makes me laugh.
Wednesday, 22 October 2008
"Ve haff ways of making you laff."
Stewie, the obnoxious baby character at the center of the series, and Brian, a talking dog, travelled back in time to Poland during the 1939 German invasion. The characters ambush Nazi soldiers in an alley and steal their uniforms so they can travel without drawing attention. Putting on an overcoat, Stewie notices a McCain-Palin campaign button affixed to the lapel. "Huh, that's weird," Stewie remarks.Rest of world prefers Obama over McCain for US president: poll
If the rest of the world could take part in the US presidential election, Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama would win four times more votes than his Republican rival John McCain, a poll showed Tuesday.
In surveys conducted by the Gallup Organization in 70 countries representing nearly half the world's population, 30 percent of people said they would choose Obama as president of the United States against eight percent who said they preferred McCain.
In four close US partners in Asia -- Australia, Japan, Singapore and South Korea -- residents came out clearly in favor of Obama.
Two-thirds of Japanese and Australian respondents said they preferred Obama to McCain, who only scored about 15 percent in the two countries.
In Singapore and South Korea, meanwhile, the pro-Obama vote outpaced the pro-McCain vote by around two to one.
"McCain and Obama have each pledged to reinvigorate and strengthen partnerships with the four developed Asian countries and take a more active role in Asian regional organisations," Gallup wrote.
Nine out of 10 people polled in India and Pakistan and seven in 10 in Bangladesh said they had no opinion about whom they would prefer to see in the White House in Washington come next January.
Gallup said the disinterest among South Asians revealed "a great disconnect between many of the world's poorest inhabitants and the politics of the United States."
Latin Americans showed a similar disconnect, with 68 percent of those polled in central America and Mexico and 58 percent in South America voicing no opinion about the US election.
Middle Easterners in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories chose Obama over McCain by a margin of at least two to one, although three-quarters of Palestinians said they didn't think the result of the US election would change much in their country.
A majority of Europeans in 14 countries said they wanted an Obama victory, with the Dutch and Norwegians the strongest Obama supporters in Europe: nearly three-quarters in both countries said they preferred him to McCain.
In France, 64 percent chose Obama against four percent for McCain, and in Germany, where an Obama rally in Berlin gathered some 200,000 people in July, the Democratic presidential contender was supported by 62 percent of those polled compared with 10 percent for McCain.
In Africa, a median of 56 percent of poll respondents chose Obama -- meaning the percentage who chose the African American presidential contender was higher than 56 percent in half the 22 countries polled and lower than 56 percent in the other half.
A median of nine percent chose McCain, who did not beat Obama anywhere in Africa, even though the current US administration of Republican President George W. Bush has a high approval rating on the continent.
Bush in July signed legislation tripling funds to fight the killer diseases of AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in Africa under an initiative launched under his administration in 2003.
In Kenya, where Obama's father hailed from, the Democrat was supported by nearly nine in 10 poll respondents; McCain had the support of three percent of Kenyans.
Around 1,000 people were interviewed face-to-face earlier this year in most of the countries that took part in the surveys.
Survey sizes in Kuwait, Japan, Pakistan, Mexico and India were 484, 750, 804, 873 and 2,000 people respectively.
Man Smart, Woman Smarter* (Buffalo 1989)
Belated Birthday wishes to Brent Mydland too!
1952 - 1990
* (Sarah Palin excepted.)
"Uh - Oh"
McCain cites nuclear threat in warning against Obama
John McCain told voters Tuesday his White House rival Barack Obama was unprepared to handle a national security crisis, citing the US-Russia standoff in 1962 that put the world on the brink of nuclear war.
Struggling to overcome rival Barack Obama's strong lead in the polls with just 14 days left in the epic presidential race, former fighter pilot McCain emphasized that the next president "won't have time to get used to the office."
"I sat in the cockpit on the flight deck of the USS Enterprise off of Cuba. I had a target," McCain said, referring to the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis.
"I know how close we came to a nuclear war and I will not be a president that needs to be tested. I have been tested. Senator Obama has not."
The Republican senator warned voters at a rally in Moon Township, Pennsylvania that the United States faces "many challenges here at home, and many enemies abroad in this dangerous world."
"We know Senator Obama would not have the right response," he said.
McCain, trailing Obama by seven percent in national voter surveys, according to an average by independent RealClearPolitics.com, acknowledged that he was "a few points down" in the polls and castigated the national media for writing him off.
He told supporters "nothing is inevitable" and vowed to continue to fight for hard-working Americans.
He kept up his attack on Obama's economic policies, casting the Illinois senator as a shifty, job-killing socialist bent on "redistributing wealth."
"Senator Obama's more interested in controlling who gets your piece of the pie than growing the pie," McCain said.
In Florida Obama shot back, accusing McCain of turning a blind eye to the financial crisis and offering up out-dated ideas for fixing the country's troubled economy.
"The financial crisis that states, businesses and families are facing didn't just spring up full-blown overnight," the Democratic candidate said.
"This has been a long time coming, and the warning signs have been very clear, but while President Bush and Senator McCain were ready to move heaven and earth to address the crisis on Wall Street, President Bush has failed to address the crisis on Main Street," Obama said.
McCain "has failed to fully acknowledge it. Instead of common sense solutions, month after month, they've offered little more than willful ignorance, wishful thinking, and outdated ideology."
He also accused McCain of just making "stuff" up as time runs out before election day.
He hammered McCain over the Republican's claims that he attacked "Joe the plumber," an Ohio voter who has become an emblem of the middle class tax debate.
"It was really amazing, he's decided to fabricate this notion that I've been attacking Joe the plumber," Obama said, after noting he had watched a speech by McCain earlier in the day on television.
"John McCain is still out there, just saying this stuff, just making it up."
Accompanied by Internet giant Google's chief executive Eric Schmidt and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, Obama led a round-table talk on economic policy at a community center near Palm Beach, using the venue to push his jobs and economic recovery plans.
The talk aimed at wooing voters in a region particularly hard-hit by the US real estate and banking crash, with hopes that Obama might be able to win Florida in the November 4 election, a state earlier thought solidly in Republican hands.
As Florida voters flocked to early voting sites for a second day Tuesday, polls suggested Obama now has a slight lead over McCain in the state, which was crucial in President George W. Bush's win over Al Gore in the 2000 election.
Nationally, the latest daily tracking poll of registered voters by Gallup showed Obama expanding his lead to 11 points. The daily Rasmussen survey, however, had McCain narrowing the race to four points, trailing Obama by 46 to 50 percent of voters nationwide.
With Obama stepping out of the race on Thursday and Friday to be with his ailing grandmother in Hawaii, McCain will be able to dominate media coverage as he campaigns aggressively in battleground states.
He and will meet up with running mate Sarah Palin, who has been instrumental in rallying the Republican party's conservative base, in Ohio Wednesday following a that afternoon before flying to Florida for a Thursday rally.
(Sydney Morning Herald)
With your propensity for crashing American planes John, thank God you only sat in the cockpit!
Dennis Cooper says
Richard Hell - Dennis Cooper - Ishmael Houston-Jones"...Mona, Hey. Oh (...) yeah, I remember. You were in Amsterdam when I was there? That's crazy. Crazy 'cos I had no real friends there, so I wish our paths had crossed. It's great you're going to do something on Mike Hart. I can't remember if I ever met him properly -- probably -- but Compendium was such an important and great place, and even though I don't get to London often, I miss it terribly when I'm there. The last reading I did in London was there. Your new blog is lovely. I'll be a reader, and let me alert the folks around here. Everybody, Mona, friend of and occasional commenter on this blog, has a terrific new blog that brings all kinds of things to the fore, from the great Lizzy Mercier Descloux and Miles Davis, for instance, to decisive backroom stuff on nasty Sarah Palin and much more. Check it out..."
What can I say apart from a BIG humble 'thanx' and you can find Dennis's blog here.
Could've been written by me
In Search of the Dark Star
I'm a music collector, of sorts. Obsessive and arrogant. With pendantry bordering on unbearableness, some might say - and some do say. I collect the likes of Coil, Sun Ra, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Nurse With Wound, Can. Erratic, esoteric, obscure. Lately I've been into Dark Star. Not the band or the record label, but the track by the Grateful Dead. Come to think of it, I've always liked the Dead. Especially their 1969 album Live/Dead which I bought in the mid 1970s. It's got Dark Star on it. A whole vinyl album side long. It was like nothing I'd heard before. It has these weird guitar lines going on for eternity, making worm holes in the brain. I couldn't match any of them on my acoustic guitar, although I had mastered the intro of Smoke on the Water by then. But Jerry Garcia wasn't in the same league as Ritchie Blackmore - Jerry wasn't even on the same planet, judging by his freeform experimenations on the seventy or so live versions of Dark Star that I've collected so far.From 1968 till 1974 Dark Star was the ultimate Grateful Dead song, the centre piece of their legendary marathon concerts. Although originally recorded as a 3 minute single (with lyrics by Robert Hunter) Dark Star became the vehicle for improvisations that could take up 30 minutes or more and saw Garcia soaring and ascending to unknown regions. For Garcia as a solist Dark Star became what Chasin' the Trane was for John Coltrane, or Voodoo Child for Jimi Hendrix, and Starship for both Sun Ra and the MC5. Exploration of inner and outer space. Dark Star was prototypical of the early Grateful Dead. The track contained everything Jerry and the Dead stood for. Americana, psychedelic rock, free jazz. All in one long guitar solo aided by a fearless band - and inspired, I might add, by Owsley's finest.
'Dark star crashes/pouring its light into ashes', wrote Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead's lyricist. Cosmic hippie stuff? You bet! But although the Dead was an unashamed hippie band the musical structure of the song itself was far removed from the typical West Coast sound. Sure, in concert Dark Star was an extended jam, but compared to the jams that their peers, like Jefferson Airplane or Quicksilver Messenger Service played on stage it must be noted that Dark Star was not derived from the traditional 12 bar blues format. Where guitarists like Jorma Kaukonen and John Cipollina based their improvisations mainly on blues licks, Jerry Garcia seemed to draw from an all together different source. A source rich with all kinds of American (folk) music but transfigured and expanded by the influence of LSD. Let us not forget that Garcia and the Dead were heavilly influenced by the time when they worked as the house band for the (in)famous Acid Tests conducted by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Maybe more than other musicians of his day and age Jerry Garcia's views on music in general and guitar playing in particular were dramatically altered by the use of chemicals. The blues element in the Dead sound was personified by Ron 'Pigpen' McKernan (organ, harmonica, vocals) who usually kept a low profile whenever Dark Star was played. During the 80s, when Dark Star was very rarely to be found in a Dead set, keyboardist Brent Mydland used to ruin it for me with his pseudo-jazz noodling on what sometimes sounded like a plastic honky tonk piano. The best versions of Dark Star were performed in the early 70s, like for instance the magical and rather subtle Dark Star from 1971 in Columbus, Ohio (released on Dicks' Picks Volume 2) or the mesmerizing 37 minute version performed one year later in Philadelphia (Dick's Picks Volume 36). Of course, Jerry Garcia's cryptically fluent and warmly organic playing made Dark Star into the most celebrated Grateful Dead piece. But praise should also go to Phil Lesh, whose 'lead bass' never failed to mark new routes in space for Garcia to explore.
Great versions of Dark Star are easily to be found in the extensive discography of the band. Besides Live/Dead and the two Dick's Picks, I also recommend the version from the 4 CD set Steppin' Out With The Grateful Dead, Engeland '72. Those of us who can't get enough should check out www.archive.org where a few hundred (!) concerts by the Dead can be found. It's a real treasure trove for Dead Heads with downloadable gigs (mostly lofi-ish audience recordings) and streams (excellent soundboard recordings). A very special Dark Star that I've found on archive.org is from a Hollywood Paladium gig dated september 10th, 1972, where half way through Dark Star the band is joined by David Crosby on 12-string electric guitar.
Advanced Dark Star fans should try the double CD set Grayfolded by sample-artist John Oswald. Phil Lesh invited Oswald, who is wellknown and rather infamous in the music industry for his 'Plunderphonics', to have a go at the Dead catalogue. Oswald choose Dark Star for obvious reasons. He took some 50 versions recorded between 1968 and 1992 and transformed them by way of layering and 'folding' bits and pieces, speeding up and slowing down, and turning 'm inside out. The results, as released on Grayfolded, are impressive yet very beautiful - even for Dead-purists.
(Written by Q-Base @ Crummy-tapes.blogspot)
Defunkt!
The longest live 'Dark Star'
The Grateful Dead.
European tour 1972.
The first unofficial live recording I ever heard of the Dead was a bootleg I picked up at the age of 14 in Glasgow.
A Robert Crumb cartoon of 'Mr. Natural' on the cover.
A dreadful quality recording of what I now know to be Hamburg on the 29th of April 1972.
(At one point Bob Weir announces the result of the England vs West Germany soccer match.
3 - 1 to Germany at Wembley if you're interested.)
I fell in love with 'Dark Star' and in those days it wasn't easy to get hold of different versions but I tried.
Boy did I try.
What started as a 2 minute 45 second single in 1968 became the starting point for the band to improvise culminating in the longest version (45 minutes & 11 seconds) played in Rotterdam on the 11th of May 1972.
It was played live 219 times over their 40 year history.
The first unofficial live recording I ever heard of the Dead was a bootleg I picked up at the age of 14 in Glasgow.
A Robert Crumb cartoon of 'Mr. Natural' on the cover.
A dreadful quality recording of what I now know to be Hamburg on the 29th of April 1972.
(At one point Bob Weir announces the result of the England vs West Germany soccer match.
3 - 1 to Germany at Wembley if you're interested.)
I fell in love with 'Dark Star' and in those days it wasn't easy to get hold of different versions but I tried.
Boy did I try.
What started as a 2 minute 45 second single in 1968 became the starting point for the band to improvise culminating in the longest version (45 minutes & 11 seconds) played in Rotterdam on the 11th of May 1972.
It was played live 219 times over their 40 year history.
This will get you both the shortest and longest versions of 'Dark Star'.
(Over the coming weeks I will bring you every one one of the 'Dark Stars' from that 1972 tour.)
You can still get 'Dark Star' (Veneta OR 08-27-72) here.
You can still get 'Dark Star' (Veneta OR 08-27-72) here.
Tuesday, 21 October 2008
Rosa Yemen (AKA Lizzy Mercier Descloux)
The late Lizzy Mercier Descloux pictured here with Richard Hell and at top with Patti Smith.
You can get the 'Rosa Yemen' (L.M.D. - vocals & guitar and JD Barnes - guitar) EP which came out on ZE Records in 1979 here.
This was one of my favourite releases in the first wave of ZE 12" which included James Chance, Mars and DNA.
Bonus track of 'Morning High' (a bi-lingual reading of Arthur Rimbaud's poem 'matinee d'ivresse') by L.M.D. & Patti Smith here.
Colin Powell - What's wrong with being a Muslim in America?
"Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. That's not America. Is there something wrong with a seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion that he is a Muslim and might have an association with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.I feel particularly strong about this because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay, was of a mother at Arlington Cemetery and she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone, and it gave his awards - Purple Heart, Bronze Star - showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death, he was 20 years old. And then at the very top of the head stone, it didn't have a Christian cross. It didn't have a Star of David. It has a crescent and star of the Islamic faith.
And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan. And he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was fourteen years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he could serve his country and he gave his life."
(Burning Cane)
How Palin Got Picked
from The Insiders
by Jane Mayer
The New Yorker, 10/27/2008
Upon being elected governor, Palin began developing relationships with Washington insiders, who later championed the idea of putting her on the 2008 ticket. “There’s some political opportunism on her part,” [former Palin aide John] Bitney said. For years, “she’s had D.C. in mind.” He added, “She’s not interested in being on the junior-varsity team.”
During her gubernatorial campaign, Bitney said, he began predicting to Palin that she would make the short list of Republican Vice-Presidential prospects. “She had the biography, I told her, to be a contender,” he recalled. At first, Palin only laughed. But within a few months of being sworn in she and others in her circle noticed that a blogger named Adam Brickley had started a movement to draft her as Vice-President. Palin also learned that a number of prominent conservative pundits would soon be passing through Juneau, on cruises sponsored by right-leaning political magazines. She invited these insiders to the governor’s mansion, and even led some of them on a helicopter tour.
[...]
In February, 2007, Adam Brickley gave himself a mission: he began searching for a running mate for McCain who could halt the momentum of the Democrats. Brickley, a self-described “obsessive” political junkie who recently graduated from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, told me that he began by “randomly searching Wikipedia and election sites for Republican women.” Though he generally opposes affirmative action, gender drove his choice. “People were talking about Hillary at the time,” he recalled. Brickley said that he “puzzled over every Republican female politician I knew.” Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, of Texas, “waffled on social issues”; Senator Olympia Snowe, of Maine, was too moderate. He was running out of options, he recalled, when he said to himself, “What about that lady who just got elected in Alaska?” Online research revealed that she had a strong grassroots following; as Brickley put it, “I hate to use the words ‘cult of personality,’ but she reminded me of Obama.”
Brickley registered a Web site—palinforvp.blogspot.com—which began getting attention in the conservative blogosphere. In the month before Palin was picked by McCain, Brickley said, his Web site was receiving about three thousand hits a day. Support for Palin had spread from one right-of-center Internet site to the next. First, the popular conservative blogger InstaPundit mentioned Brickley’s campaign. Then a site called the American Scene said that Palin was “very appealing”; another, Stop the A.C.L.U., described her as “a great choice.” The traditional conservative media soon got in on the act: The American Spectator embraced Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, praised her as “a babe.”
Brickley’s family, once evangelical Christians, now practice what he calls “Messianic Judaism.” They believe that Jesus is the Messiah, but they also observe the Jewish holidays and attend synagogue; as Brickley puts it, “Jesus was Jewish, so to be like Him you need to be Jewish, too.” Brickley said that “the hand of God” played a role in choosing Palin: “The longer I worked on it the less I felt I was driving it. Something else was at work.”
Brickley is an authentic heartland voice, but he is also the product of an effort by wealthy conservative organizations in Washington to train activists. He has attended several workshops sponsored by the Leadership Institute, a group based in the Washington area and founded in 1979 by the Christian conservative activist Morton Blackwell. “I’m building a movement,” Blackwell told me. Brickley also participated in a leadership summit held by Young America’s Foundation (motto: “The Conservative Movement Starts Here”) and was an intern at the Heritage Foundation. He currently lives in a dormitory, on Capitol Hill, run by the Heritage Foundation, and is an intern with townhall.com, a top conservative Web site.
While Brickley and others were spreading the word about Palin on the Internet, Palin was wooing a number of well-connected Washington conservative thinkers. In a stroke of luck, Palin did not have to go to the capital to meet these members of “the permanent political establishment”; they came to Alaska. Shortly after taking office, Palin received two memos from Paulette Simpson, the Alaska Federation of Republican Women leader, noting that two prominent conservative magazines—The Weekly Standard, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, Jr.—were planning luxury cruises to Alaska in the summer of 2007, which would make stops in Juneau. Writers and editors from these publications had been enlisted to deliver lectures to politically minded vacationers. “The Governor was more than happy to meet these guys,” Joe Balash, a special staff assistant to Palin, recalled.
On June 18, 2007, the first group disembarked in Juneau from the Holland America Line’s M.S. Oosterdam, and went to the governor’s mansion, a white wooden Colonial house with six two-story columns, for lunch. The contingent featured three of The Weekly Standard ’s top writers: William Kristol, the magazine’s Washington-based editor, who is also an Op-Ed columnist for the Times and a regular commentator on “Fox News Sunday”; Fred Barnes, the magazine’s executive editor and the co-host of “The Beltway Boys,” a political talk show on Fox News; and Michael Gerson, the former chief speechwriter for President Bush and a Washington Post columnist.
By all accounts, the luncheon was a high-spirited, informal occasion. Kristol brought his wife and daughter; Gerson brought his wife and two children. Barnes, who brought his sister and his wife, sat on one side of Governor Palin, who presided at the head of the long table in the mansion’s formal dining room; the Kristols sat on the other. Gerson was at the opposite end, as was Palin’s chief of staff at the time, Mike Tibbles, who is now working for Senator Stevens’s reëlection campaign. The menu featured halibut cheeks—the choicest part of the fish. Before the meal, Palin delivered a lengthy grace. Simpson, who was at the luncheon, said, “I told a girlfriend afterwards, ‘That was some grace!’ It really set the tone.” Joe Balash, Palin’s assistant, who was also present, said, “There are not many politicians who will say grace with the conviction of faith she has. It’s a daily part of her life.”
Palin was joined by her lieutenant governor and by Alaska’s attorney general. Also present was a local woman involved in upholding the Juneau school system’s right to suspend a student who had displayed a satirical banner—“Bong Hits 4 Jesus”—across the street from his school. The student had sued the school district, on First Amendment grounds, and, at the time of the lunch, the case was before the Supreme Court. (The school district won.)
During the lunch, everyone was charmed when the Governor’s small daughter Piper popped in to inquire about dessert. Fred Barnes recalled being “struck by how smart Palin was, and how unusually confident. Maybe because she had been a beauty queen, and a star athlete, and succeeded at almost everything she had done.” It didn’t escape his notice, too, that she was “exceptionally pretty.”
According to a former Alaska official who attended the lunch, the visitors wanted to do something “touristy,” so a “flight-seeing” trip was arranged. Their destination was a gold mine in Berners Bay, some forty-five miles north of Juneau. For Palin and several staff members, the state leased two helicopters from a private company, Coastal, for two and a half hours, at a cost of four thousand dollars. (The pundits paid for their own aircraft.) Palin explained that environmentalists had invoked the Clean Water Act to oppose a plan by a mining company, Coeur Alaska, to dump waste from the extraction of gold into a pristine lake in the Tongass National Forest. Palin rejected the environmentalists’ claims. (The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Coeur Alaska, and the dispute is now before the Supreme Court.) Barnes was dazzled by Palin’s handling of the hundred or so mineworkers who gathered to meet the group. “She clearly was not intimidated by crowds—or men!” he said. “She’s got real star quality.”
By the time the Weekly Standard pundits returned to the cruise ship, Paulette Simpson said, “they were very enamored of her.” In July, 2007, Barnes wrote the first major national article spotlighting Palin, titled “The Most Popular Governor,” for The Weekly Standard. Simpson said, “That first article was the result of having lunch.” Bitney agreed: “I don’t think she realized the significance until after it was all over. It got the ball rolling.”
The other journalists who met Palin offered similarly effusive praise: Michael Gerson called her “a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc.” The most ardent promoter, however, was Kristol, and his enthusiasm became the talk of Alaska’s political circles. According to Simpson, Senator Stevens told her that “Kristol was really pushing Palin” in Washington before McCain picked her. Indeed, as early as June 29th, two months before McCain chose her, Kristol predicted on “Fox News Sunday” that “McCain’s going to put Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, on the ticket.” He described her as “fantastic,” saying that she could go one-on-one against Obama in basketball, and possibly siphon off Hillary Clinton’s supporters. He pointed out that she was a “mother of five” and a reformer. “Go for the gold here with Sarah Palin,” he said. The moderator, Chris Wallace, finally had to ask Kristol, “Can we please get off Sarah Palin?”
The next day, however, Kristol was still talking about Palin on Fox. “She could be both an effective Vice-Presidential candidate and an effective President,” he said. “She’s young, energetic.” On a subsequent “Fox News Sunday,” Kristol again pushed Palin when asked whom McCain should pick: “Sarah Palin, whom I’ve only met once but I was awfully impressed by—a genuine reformer, defeated the establishment up there. It would be pretty wild to pick a young female Alaska governor, and I think, you know, McCain might as well go for it.” On July 22nd, again on Fox, Kristol referred to Palin as “my heartthrob.” He declared, “I don’t know if I can make it through the next three months without her on the ticket.” Reached last week, Kristol pointed out that just before McCain picked Palin he had ratcheted back his campaign a little; though he continued to tout her, he also wrote a Times column promoting Senator Joe Lieberman, of Connecticut.
On October 6th, in another Times column, Kristol cryptically acknowledged having been entertained by the Governor. He mentioned meeting Palin “in far more relaxed circumstances, in Alaska over a year ago.” The column featured one of the few interviews that Palin has granted to the national media since becoming McCain’s running mate. Kristol quoted Palin saying that the debate had been a “liberating” experience, then wrote, “Shouldn’t the public get the benefit of another Biden-Palin debate, or even two? If there’s difficulty finding a moderator, I’ll be glad to volunteer.”
On August 1, 2007, a few weeks after the Weekly Standard cruise departed from Juneau, Palin hosted a second boatload of pundits, this time from a cruise featuring associates of National Review. Her guests, arriving on the M.S. Noordam, included Rich Lowry, the magazine’s editor and a syndicated columnist; Robert Bork, the conservative legal scholar and former federal judge; John Bolton, who served as the Bush Administration’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 2004 to 2006; Victor Davis Hanson, a conservative historian who is reportedly a favorite of Vice-President Dick Cheney; and Dick Morris, the ideologically ambidextrous political consultant, who writes a column for The Hill and appears regularly on Fox News.
As Jack Fowler, National Review’s publisher, recalled it, when the guest speakers were invited to come to a special reception at the governor’s mansion, “We said, ‘Sure!’ There’s only so much you can do in Juneau.” The mansion itself, he said, was modest—“not exactly Newport.” But the food was great, and included an impressive spread of salmon. Palin, who circulated nimbly through the room, and spoke admiringly of National Review, made a good impression. Fowler said, “This lady is something special. She connects. She’s genuine. She doesn’t look like what you’d expect. My thought was, Too bad she’s way up there in Alaska, because she has potential, but to make things happen you have to know people.”
Hanson, the historian, recalled Palin in high heels, “walking around this big Victorian house with rough Alaska floors, saying, ‘Hi, I’m Sarah.’ ” She was “striking,” he said. “She has that aura that Clinton, Reagan, and Jack Kennedy had—magnetism that comes through much more strongly when you’re in the same room.” He was delighted that Palin described herself as a fan of history, and as a reader of National Review’s Web site, for which he writes regularly. She spoke about the need to drill for oil in Alaska’s protected wilderness areas, arguing that her husband had worked in nearby oil fields and knew firsthand that it wasn’t environmentally hazardous. Hanson, a farm owner, found it appealing that she was married to an oil worker, rather than to an executive. Bolton, for his part, was pleased that Palin, a hunting enthusiast, was familiar with his efforts to stave off international controls on the global flow of small weapons. She spoke knowledgeably about missile defense, too, he said, and discussed his role, in 2001, in guiding the Bush Administration’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Jay Nordlinger, a senior editor at National Review, had a more elemental response. In an online column, he described Palin as “a former beauty-pageant contestant, and a real honey, too. Am I allowed to say that? Probably not, but too bad.”
According to several accounts, however, no connection made that day was more meaningful than the one struck between Palin and Dick Morris. “He had this very long conversation with her,” Fowler recalled. Lowry laughed in remembering it: “The joke going around was that he was going to take credit for making her.” (Nordlinger’s column went on to say, “Her political career will probably take her beyond Alaska. Dick Morris is only one who thinks so.”)
In fact, in an admiring column published in the Washington Post two days after Palin was chosen, Morris wrote, “I will always remember taking her aside and telling her that she might one day be tapped to be Vice-President, given her record and the shortage of female political talent in the Republican Party. She will make one hell of a candidate, and hats off to McCain for picking her.”
Morris offered Palin some advice during their encounter in Juneau, several of those present recollected, which he shared with the rest of the gathering in a short speech. As Lowry recalled it, Morris had warned her that a reformer, in order to be successful, needed to maintain her “outsider cred.” In a similar vein, Simpson recalled that Morris “gave a little speech” in which he warned that “what happens to most people is that they campaign as outsiders, but when they get into power they turn into insiders. If you want to be successful, you have to stay an outsider.”
Clearly, Palin has taken this advice to heart. Still, when the moment came for Morris and other guests to depart, Palin was sad to see the Washington insiders go. Hanson recalled, “She said, ‘Hey—does anyone want to stay for dinner? We’re going to eat right now.’ She also invited everyone to come back the next day. ‘If any of you are in the area, all you have to do is knock. Yell upstairs, I’ll be right down.’ ”
By the end of February, 2008, the chorus of conservative pundits for Palin was loud enough for the mainstream media to take note. Chris Cillizza, reporting for the Web site of the Washington Post, interviewed Palin and asked her if she’d accept an offer to be McCain’s running mate. Though she dismissed the notion as a virtual “impossibility this go-round,” Palin, who had been in office for only fourteen months, said, “Is it generally something that I would want to consider? Yes.”
By the spring, the McCain campaign had reportedly sent scouts to Alaska to start vetting Palin as a possible running mate. A week or so before McCain named her, however, sources close to the campaign say, McCain was intent on naming his fellow-senator Joe Lieberman, an independent, who left the Democratic Party in 2006. David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, who is close to a number of McCain’s top aides, told me that “McCain and Lindsey Graham”—the South Carolina senator, who has been McCain’s closest campaign companion—“really wanted Joe.” But Keene believed that “McCain was scared off” in the final days, after warnings from his advisers that choosing Lieberman would ignite a contentious floor fight at the Convention, as social conservatives revolted against Lieberman for being, among other things, pro-choice.
“They took it away from him,” a longtime friend of McCain—who asked not to be identified, since the campaign has declined to discuss its selection process—said of the advisers. “He was furious. He was pissed. It wasn’t what he wanted.” Another friend disputed this, characterizing McCain’s mood as one of “understanding resignation.”
With just days to go before the Convention, the choices were slim. Karl Rove favored McCain’s former rival Mitt Romney, but enough animus lingered from the primaries that McCain rejected the pairing. “I told Romney not to wait by the phone, because ‘he doesn’t like you,’ ” Keene, who favored the choice, said. “With John McCain, all politics is personal.” Other possible choices—such as former Representative Rob Portman, of Ohio, or Governor Tim Pawlenty, of Minnesota—seemed too conventional. They did not transmit McCain’s core message that he was a “maverick.” Finally, McCain’s top aides, including Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis, converged on Palin. Ed Rogers, the chairman of B.G.R., a well-connected, largely Republican lobbying firm, said, “Her criteria kept popping out. She was a governor—that’s good. The shorter the Washington résumé the better. A female is better still. And then there was her story.” He admitted, “There was concern that she was a novice.” In addition to Schmidt and Davis, Charles R. Black, Jr., the lobbyist and political operative who is McCain’s chief campaign adviser, reportedly favored Palin. Keene said, “I’m told that Charlie Black told McCain, ‘If you pick anyone else, you’re going to lose. But if you pick Palin you may win.’ ” (Black did not return calls for comment.) Meanwhile, McCain’s longtime friend said, “Kristol was out there shaking the pom-poms.”
McCain had met Palin once, but their conversation—at a reception during a meeting of the National Governors Association, six months earlier—had lasted only fifteen minutes. “It wasn’t a real conversation,” said the longtime friend, who called the choice of Palin “the fucking most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” Aides arranged a phone call between McCain and Palin, and scrutinized her answers to some seventy items on a questionnaire that she had filled out. But McCain didn’t talk with Palin in person again until the morning of Thursday, August 28th. Palin was flown down to his retreat in Sedona, Arizona, and they spoke for an hour or two. By the time he announced her as his choice, the next day, he had spent less than three hours in her company.
“It certainly was a risk—a risk a lot of people wouldn’t take,” Dan Coats, a former Indiana senator and now a volunteer with the McCain campaign, said. “But that’s what I like about John. There’s a boldness there.”
The thoroughness of the campaign’s vetting process, overseen by the Washington lawyer and former White House counsel Arthur B. Culvahouse, Jr., remains in dispute. The campaign insists that Palin’s record and personal history were carefully examined. (Culvahouse declined to comment for this story.) The Los Angeles Times, however, reported that the campaign never contacted several obvious sources of information on Palin, including Lyda Green—a Republican state senator in Alaska, and a former ally turned opponent. Also in dispute is whether Palin disclosed to the campaign, as she and officials have said, that her unwed teen-age daughter was pregnant. “I am a hundred per cent sure they didn’t know,” McCain’s longtime friend said. Another campaign source, however, insisted that McCain’s team knew about the pregnancy.
[...]
Palin initially provided the McCain campaign with a boost, but polls now suggest that she has become a liability. A top Republican close to the campaign said that McCain’s aides have largely kept faith with Palin. They have been impressed by her work ethic, and by what a quick study she is. According to the Republican close to the campaign, she has sometimes discomfited advisers by travelling with a big family entourage. “It kind of changes the dynamic of a meeting to have them all in the room,” he told me. John McCain’s comfort level with Palin is harder to gauge. In the view of the longtime McCain friend, “John’s personal comfort level is low with everyone right now. He’s angry. But it was his choice.”
(Burning Cane)
by Jane Mayer
The New Yorker, 10/27/2008
Upon being elected governor, Palin began developing relationships with Washington insiders, who later championed the idea of putting her on the 2008 ticket. “There’s some political opportunism on her part,” [former Palin aide John] Bitney said. For years, “she’s had D.C. in mind.” He added, “She’s not interested in being on the junior-varsity team.”
During her gubernatorial campaign, Bitney said, he began predicting to Palin that she would make the short list of Republican Vice-Presidential prospects. “She had the biography, I told her, to be a contender,” he recalled. At first, Palin only laughed. But within a few months of being sworn in she and others in her circle noticed that a blogger named Adam Brickley had started a movement to draft her as Vice-President. Palin also learned that a number of prominent conservative pundits would soon be passing through Juneau, on cruises sponsored by right-leaning political magazines. She invited these insiders to the governor’s mansion, and even led some of them on a helicopter tour.
[...]
In February, 2007, Adam Brickley gave himself a mission: he began searching for a running mate for McCain who could halt the momentum of the Democrats. Brickley, a self-described “obsessive” political junkie who recently graduated from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, told me that he began by “randomly searching Wikipedia and election sites for Republican women.” Though he generally opposes affirmative action, gender drove his choice. “People were talking about Hillary at the time,” he recalled. Brickley said that he “puzzled over every Republican female politician I knew.” Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, of Texas, “waffled on social issues”; Senator Olympia Snowe, of Maine, was too moderate. He was running out of options, he recalled, when he said to himself, “What about that lady who just got elected in Alaska?” Online research revealed that she had a strong grassroots following; as Brickley put it, “I hate to use the words ‘cult of personality,’ but she reminded me of Obama.”
Brickley registered a Web site—palinforvp.blogspot.com—which began getting attention in the conservative blogosphere. In the month before Palin was picked by McCain, Brickley said, his Web site was receiving about three thousand hits a day. Support for Palin had spread from one right-of-center Internet site to the next. First, the popular conservative blogger InstaPundit mentioned Brickley’s campaign. Then a site called the American Scene said that Palin was “very appealing”; another, Stop the A.C.L.U., described her as “a great choice.” The traditional conservative media soon got in on the act: The American Spectator embraced Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, praised her as “a babe.”
Brickley’s family, once evangelical Christians, now practice what he calls “Messianic Judaism.” They believe that Jesus is the Messiah, but they also observe the Jewish holidays and attend synagogue; as Brickley puts it, “Jesus was Jewish, so to be like Him you need to be Jewish, too.” Brickley said that “the hand of God” played a role in choosing Palin: “The longer I worked on it the less I felt I was driving it. Something else was at work.”
Brickley is an authentic heartland voice, but he is also the product of an effort by wealthy conservative organizations in Washington to train activists. He has attended several workshops sponsored by the Leadership Institute, a group based in the Washington area and founded in 1979 by the Christian conservative activist Morton Blackwell. “I’m building a movement,” Blackwell told me. Brickley also participated in a leadership summit held by Young America’s Foundation (motto: “The Conservative Movement Starts Here”) and was an intern at the Heritage Foundation. He currently lives in a dormitory, on Capitol Hill, run by the Heritage Foundation, and is an intern with townhall.com, a top conservative Web site.
While Brickley and others were spreading the word about Palin on the Internet, Palin was wooing a number of well-connected Washington conservative thinkers. In a stroke of luck, Palin did not have to go to the capital to meet these members of “the permanent political establishment”; they came to Alaska. Shortly after taking office, Palin received two memos from Paulette Simpson, the Alaska Federation of Republican Women leader, noting that two prominent conservative magazines—The Weekly Standard, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, Jr.—were planning luxury cruises to Alaska in the summer of 2007, which would make stops in Juneau. Writers and editors from these publications had been enlisted to deliver lectures to politically minded vacationers. “The Governor was more than happy to meet these guys,” Joe Balash, a special staff assistant to Palin, recalled.
On June 18, 2007, the first group disembarked in Juneau from the Holland America Line’s M.S. Oosterdam, and went to the governor’s mansion, a white wooden Colonial house with six two-story columns, for lunch. The contingent featured three of The Weekly Standard ’s top writers: William Kristol, the magazine’s Washington-based editor, who is also an Op-Ed columnist for the Times and a regular commentator on “Fox News Sunday”; Fred Barnes, the magazine’s executive editor and the co-host of “The Beltway Boys,” a political talk show on Fox News; and Michael Gerson, the former chief speechwriter for President Bush and a Washington Post columnist.
By all accounts, the luncheon was a high-spirited, informal occasion. Kristol brought his wife and daughter; Gerson brought his wife and two children. Barnes, who brought his sister and his wife, sat on one side of Governor Palin, who presided at the head of the long table in the mansion’s formal dining room; the Kristols sat on the other. Gerson was at the opposite end, as was Palin’s chief of staff at the time, Mike Tibbles, who is now working for Senator Stevens’s reëlection campaign. The menu featured halibut cheeks—the choicest part of the fish. Before the meal, Palin delivered a lengthy grace. Simpson, who was at the luncheon, said, “I told a girlfriend afterwards, ‘That was some grace!’ It really set the tone.” Joe Balash, Palin’s assistant, who was also present, said, “There are not many politicians who will say grace with the conviction of faith she has. It’s a daily part of her life.”
Palin was joined by her lieutenant governor and by Alaska’s attorney general. Also present was a local woman involved in upholding the Juneau school system’s right to suspend a student who had displayed a satirical banner—“Bong Hits 4 Jesus”—across the street from his school. The student had sued the school district, on First Amendment grounds, and, at the time of the lunch, the case was before the Supreme Court. (The school district won.)
During the lunch, everyone was charmed when the Governor’s small daughter Piper popped in to inquire about dessert. Fred Barnes recalled being “struck by how smart Palin was, and how unusually confident. Maybe because she had been a beauty queen, and a star athlete, and succeeded at almost everything she had done.” It didn’t escape his notice, too, that she was “exceptionally pretty.”
According to a former Alaska official who attended the lunch, the visitors wanted to do something “touristy,” so a “flight-seeing” trip was arranged. Their destination was a gold mine in Berners Bay, some forty-five miles north of Juneau. For Palin and several staff members, the state leased two helicopters from a private company, Coastal, for two and a half hours, at a cost of four thousand dollars. (The pundits paid for their own aircraft.) Palin explained that environmentalists had invoked the Clean Water Act to oppose a plan by a mining company, Coeur Alaska, to dump waste from the extraction of gold into a pristine lake in the Tongass National Forest. Palin rejected the environmentalists’ claims. (The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Coeur Alaska, and the dispute is now before the Supreme Court.) Barnes was dazzled by Palin’s handling of the hundred or so mineworkers who gathered to meet the group. “She clearly was not intimidated by crowds—or men!” he said. “She’s got real star quality.”
By the time the Weekly Standard pundits returned to the cruise ship, Paulette Simpson said, “they were very enamored of her.” In July, 2007, Barnes wrote the first major national article spotlighting Palin, titled “The Most Popular Governor,” for The Weekly Standard. Simpson said, “That first article was the result of having lunch.” Bitney agreed: “I don’t think she realized the significance until after it was all over. It got the ball rolling.”
The other journalists who met Palin offered similarly effusive praise: Michael Gerson called her “a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc.” The most ardent promoter, however, was Kristol, and his enthusiasm became the talk of Alaska’s political circles. According to Simpson, Senator Stevens told her that “Kristol was really pushing Palin” in Washington before McCain picked her. Indeed, as early as June 29th, two months before McCain chose her, Kristol predicted on “Fox News Sunday” that “McCain’s going to put Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, on the ticket.” He described her as “fantastic,” saying that she could go one-on-one against Obama in basketball, and possibly siphon off Hillary Clinton’s supporters. He pointed out that she was a “mother of five” and a reformer. “Go for the gold here with Sarah Palin,” he said. The moderator, Chris Wallace, finally had to ask Kristol, “Can we please get off Sarah Palin?”
The next day, however, Kristol was still talking about Palin on Fox. “She could be both an effective Vice-Presidential candidate and an effective President,” he said. “She’s young, energetic.” On a subsequent “Fox News Sunday,” Kristol again pushed Palin when asked whom McCain should pick: “Sarah Palin, whom I’ve only met once but I was awfully impressed by—a genuine reformer, defeated the establishment up there. It would be pretty wild to pick a young female Alaska governor, and I think, you know, McCain might as well go for it.” On July 22nd, again on Fox, Kristol referred to Palin as “my heartthrob.” He declared, “I don’t know if I can make it through the next three months without her on the ticket.” Reached last week, Kristol pointed out that just before McCain picked Palin he had ratcheted back his campaign a little; though he continued to tout her, he also wrote a Times column promoting Senator Joe Lieberman, of Connecticut.
On October 6th, in another Times column, Kristol cryptically acknowledged having been entertained by the Governor. He mentioned meeting Palin “in far more relaxed circumstances, in Alaska over a year ago.” The column featured one of the few interviews that Palin has granted to the national media since becoming McCain’s running mate. Kristol quoted Palin saying that the debate had been a “liberating” experience, then wrote, “Shouldn’t the public get the benefit of another Biden-Palin debate, or even two? If there’s difficulty finding a moderator, I’ll be glad to volunteer.”
On August 1, 2007, a few weeks after the Weekly Standard cruise departed from Juneau, Palin hosted a second boatload of pundits, this time from a cruise featuring associates of National Review. Her guests, arriving on the M.S. Noordam, included Rich Lowry, the magazine’s editor and a syndicated columnist; Robert Bork, the conservative legal scholar and former federal judge; John Bolton, who served as the Bush Administration’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 2004 to 2006; Victor Davis Hanson, a conservative historian who is reportedly a favorite of Vice-President Dick Cheney; and Dick Morris, the ideologically ambidextrous political consultant, who writes a column for The Hill and appears regularly on Fox News.
As Jack Fowler, National Review’s publisher, recalled it, when the guest speakers were invited to come to a special reception at the governor’s mansion, “We said, ‘Sure!’ There’s only so much you can do in Juneau.” The mansion itself, he said, was modest—“not exactly Newport.” But the food was great, and included an impressive spread of salmon. Palin, who circulated nimbly through the room, and spoke admiringly of National Review, made a good impression. Fowler said, “This lady is something special. She connects. She’s genuine. She doesn’t look like what you’d expect. My thought was, Too bad she’s way up there in Alaska, because she has potential, but to make things happen you have to know people.”
Hanson, the historian, recalled Palin in high heels, “walking around this big Victorian house with rough Alaska floors, saying, ‘Hi, I’m Sarah.’ ” She was “striking,” he said. “She has that aura that Clinton, Reagan, and Jack Kennedy had—magnetism that comes through much more strongly when you’re in the same room.” He was delighted that Palin described herself as a fan of history, and as a reader of National Review’s Web site, for which he writes regularly. She spoke about the need to drill for oil in Alaska’s protected wilderness areas, arguing that her husband had worked in nearby oil fields and knew firsthand that it wasn’t environmentally hazardous. Hanson, a farm owner, found it appealing that she was married to an oil worker, rather than to an executive. Bolton, for his part, was pleased that Palin, a hunting enthusiast, was familiar with his efforts to stave off international controls on the global flow of small weapons. She spoke knowledgeably about missile defense, too, he said, and discussed his role, in 2001, in guiding the Bush Administration’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Jay Nordlinger, a senior editor at National Review, had a more elemental response. In an online column, he described Palin as “a former beauty-pageant contestant, and a real honey, too. Am I allowed to say that? Probably not, but too bad.”
According to several accounts, however, no connection made that day was more meaningful than the one struck between Palin and Dick Morris. “He had this very long conversation with her,” Fowler recalled. Lowry laughed in remembering it: “The joke going around was that he was going to take credit for making her.” (Nordlinger’s column went on to say, “Her political career will probably take her beyond Alaska. Dick Morris is only one who thinks so.”)
In fact, in an admiring column published in the Washington Post two days after Palin was chosen, Morris wrote, “I will always remember taking her aside and telling her that she might one day be tapped to be Vice-President, given her record and the shortage of female political talent in the Republican Party. She will make one hell of a candidate, and hats off to McCain for picking her.”
Morris offered Palin some advice during their encounter in Juneau, several of those present recollected, which he shared with the rest of the gathering in a short speech. As Lowry recalled it, Morris had warned her that a reformer, in order to be successful, needed to maintain her “outsider cred.” In a similar vein, Simpson recalled that Morris “gave a little speech” in which he warned that “what happens to most people is that they campaign as outsiders, but when they get into power they turn into insiders. If you want to be successful, you have to stay an outsider.”
Clearly, Palin has taken this advice to heart. Still, when the moment came for Morris and other guests to depart, Palin was sad to see the Washington insiders go. Hanson recalled, “She said, ‘Hey—does anyone want to stay for dinner? We’re going to eat right now.’ She also invited everyone to come back the next day. ‘If any of you are in the area, all you have to do is knock. Yell upstairs, I’ll be right down.’ ”
By the end of February, 2008, the chorus of conservative pundits for Palin was loud enough for the mainstream media to take note. Chris Cillizza, reporting for the Web site of the Washington Post, interviewed Palin and asked her if she’d accept an offer to be McCain’s running mate. Though she dismissed the notion as a virtual “impossibility this go-round,” Palin, who had been in office for only fourteen months, said, “Is it generally something that I would want to consider? Yes.”
By the spring, the McCain campaign had reportedly sent scouts to Alaska to start vetting Palin as a possible running mate. A week or so before McCain named her, however, sources close to the campaign say, McCain was intent on naming his fellow-senator Joe Lieberman, an independent, who left the Democratic Party in 2006. David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, who is close to a number of McCain’s top aides, told me that “McCain and Lindsey Graham”—the South Carolina senator, who has been McCain’s closest campaign companion—“really wanted Joe.” But Keene believed that “McCain was scared off” in the final days, after warnings from his advisers that choosing Lieberman would ignite a contentious floor fight at the Convention, as social conservatives revolted against Lieberman for being, among other things, pro-choice.
“They took it away from him,” a longtime friend of McCain—who asked not to be identified, since the campaign has declined to discuss its selection process—said of the advisers. “He was furious. He was pissed. It wasn’t what he wanted.” Another friend disputed this, characterizing McCain’s mood as one of “understanding resignation.”
With just days to go before the Convention, the choices were slim. Karl Rove favored McCain’s former rival Mitt Romney, but enough animus lingered from the primaries that McCain rejected the pairing. “I told Romney not to wait by the phone, because ‘he doesn’t like you,’ ” Keene, who favored the choice, said. “With John McCain, all politics is personal.” Other possible choices—such as former Representative Rob Portman, of Ohio, or Governor Tim Pawlenty, of Minnesota—seemed too conventional. They did not transmit McCain’s core message that he was a “maverick.” Finally, McCain’s top aides, including Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis, converged on Palin. Ed Rogers, the chairman of B.G.R., a well-connected, largely Republican lobbying firm, said, “Her criteria kept popping out. She was a governor—that’s good. The shorter the Washington résumé the better. A female is better still. And then there was her story.” He admitted, “There was concern that she was a novice.” In addition to Schmidt and Davis, Charles R. Black, Jr., the lobbyist and political operative who is McCain’s chief campaign adviser, reportedly favored Palin. Keene said, “I’m told that Charlie Black told McCain, ‘If you pick anyone else, you’re going to lose. But if you pick Palin you may win.’ ” (Black did not return calls for comment.) Meanwhile, McCain’s longtime friend said, “Kristol was out there shaking the pom-poms.”
McCain had met Palin once, but their conversation—at a reception during a meeting of the National Governors Association, six months earlier—had lasted only fifteen minutes. “It wasn’t a real conversation,” said the longtime friend, who called the choice of Palin “the fucking most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” Aides arranged a phone call between McCain and Palin, and scrutinized her answers to some seventy items on a questionnaire that she had filled out. But McCain didn’t talk with Palin in person again until the morning of Thursday, August 28th. Palin was flown down to his retreat in Sedona, Arizona, and they spoke for an hour or two. By the time he announced her as his choice, the next day, he had spent less than three hours in her company.
“It certainly was a risk—a risk a lot of people wouldn’t take,” Dan Coats, a former Indiana senator and now a volunteer with the McCain campaign, said. “But that’s what I like about John. There’s a boldness there.”
The thoroughness of the campaign’s vetting process, overseen by the Washington lawyer and former White House counsel Arthur B. Culvahouse, Jr., remains in dispute. The campaign insists that Palin’s record and personal history were carefully examined. (Culvahouse declined to comment for this story.) The Los Angeles Times, however, reported that the campaign never contacted several obvious sources of information on Palin, including Lyda Green—a Republican state senator in Alaska, and a former ally turned opponent. Also in dispute is whether Palin disclosed to the campaign, as she and officials have said, that her unwed teen-age daughter was pregnant. “I am a hundred per cent sure they didn’t know,” McCain’s longtime friend said. Another campaign source, however, insisted that McCain’s team knew about the pregnancy.
[...]
Palin initially provided the McCain campaign with a boost, but polls now suggest that she has become a liability. A top Republican close to the campaign said that McCain’s aides have largely kept faith with Palin. They have been impressed by her work ethic, and by what a quick study she is. According to the Republican close to the campaign, she has sometimes discomfited advisers by travelling with a big family entourage. “It kind of changes the dynamic of a meeting to have them all in the room,” he told me. John McCain’s comfort level with Palin is harder to gauge. In the view of the longtime McCain friend, “John’s personal comfort level is low with everyone right now. He’s angry. But it was his choice.”
(Burning Cane)
Monday, 20 October 2008
London Calling
The Ray Lowry designed sleeves for the 'London Calling' album and 12" (and the original inspiration).
Go here for 'London Calling' by The Clash from the new release 'Live At Shea Stadium'.
Ray Lowry 1944 - 2008
Just found out that Ray Lowry died last week.
For anyone brought up on the NME in the 70's & 80's you will know his work.
He designed the 'London Calling' sleeve for The Clash and went on tour with them to America in 1979, dubbed the 'war artist' by Joe Strummer. The resulting drawings were used in Road Manager Johnny Green's Clash book 'A Riot of Their Own'.
There is an obituary from MOJO here.
One of my favourite cartoons of his was of a blues player's funeral procession with the words ..."well apparently I didn't wake up this morning" coming from the coffin!
Sunday, 19 October 2008
Kiki et Loulou Picasso - BAZOOKA GRAPHIQUES
Unfortunately not that well known outside of France.The Bazooka crew have been graphic terrorists since the mid seventies.
Killer Luka's Amazing Dolls!
Killer Luka has five of her incredible creations over at Dennis Cooper's blog today.
Please check them out.
They are truly amazing.
The doll above is 'Edie as The Broken Girl'.
Please check them out.
They are truly amazing.
The doll above is 'Edie as The Broken Girl'.
March 6th 1970 Fillmore East NY
'Miles Runs The Voodoo Down'(Early & late show versions.)
here.
Imagine Miles Davis as the opening act for Neil Young? But that's the deal in the '70s, especially when you wanted to play New York's Fillmore. The Davis Sextet opened for Neil Young and Crazy Horse and The Steve Miller Blues Band for two nights at the Fillmore East, March 6-7 (Friday-Saturday).
This was the Miles who had released In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew less than a year before, had put out Live-Evil the previous month and would release Jack Johnson the following month.
If playing support act bothered Miles, it didn't show in his music. Miles wrote in his autobiography of that period: "The sound of my music was changing as fast as I was changing musicians, but I was still looking for the combination that could give me the sound I wanted. Jack DeJohnette gave me a certain deep groove that I just loved to play over, but then Billy Cobham gave me a more rock-like sound. Dave Holland played the stand-up bass and I could groove behind that in a way that I couldn't when Harvey Brooks brought in his electric bass sound. The same thing with Chick (Corea), Herbie (Hancock), Joe (Zawinul), Keith (Jarrett) and Larry (Young), too. I was seeing it all as a process of recording all this music, just getting it all down while it was flowing out of my head."
There were two shows each night. Columbia recorded both nights, but this show remains unissued. This two-night gig was Wayne Shorter's last as a member of the Sextet. (He did remain with Davis for a studio date on March 17.) Columbia finally released the March 7 show as It's About Time in 2001. This series of shows at the Fillmore in the '70s was available at Miles Trees and the general consensus was that this March 6 recording sounded much better than the official March 7 release.
As an aside, between these two shows Bill Graham brought in a Sabrett hot dog vendor off the street to feed the bands, the crew, and some members of the audience.
If you like the electric Miles or the jazz-rock Miles, this one's for you.
Lineup:Miles Davis - trumpet
Wayne Shorter - tenor & soprano saxophones
Chick Corea - electric piano
Dave Holland - acoustic & electric basses
Jack DeJohnette - drums
Airto Moreira - percussion
(BigO)
Dear Red States...
Dear Red States,
We're ticked off at the way you've treated California, and 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 Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota , Wisconsin , Michigan, Illinois and all of the Northeast.
In case you aren't aware, that includes Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota , Wisconsin , Michigan, Illinois and all of 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 Nancy Pelosi. You get Sarah Palin.
We get the Statue of Liberty. You get WalMart.
We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom.
We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss.
We get 85 percent 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 percent 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 percent of the country's fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation's fresh fruit, 95 percent of America's quality wines (you can serve French wines at state dinners) 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, 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 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.
We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.
Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals than we lefties.
By the way, we're taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico .
Sincerely,
Blue States
(thanx to smeggers)
(thanx to smeggers)
JAY SPACEBUBS! - This post is for you...
Why did Piglet go to the toilet?He was looking for Pooh!
J - there's a bear in there -
in the 'com-pooh-ta'!
love Daddy
X
X
X
Saturday, 18 October 2008
Stormin' Normisms - Happy Birthday George Wendt (for yesterday)
George is a big (no pun intended) music fan.
There were always reports in the 80's NME that he was at this gig or that one in London.
Mostly post-punk bands.
There were always reports in the 80's NME that he was at this gig or that one in London.
Mostly post-punk bands.
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