Obama's great new line:
"If you believe that, I've got a bridge in Alaska to sell you."

Link

obama should use this and make a case for mccain being CONFUSED. nobody wants a bumbling president.

Um, Alaskans don't pay state income tax.

So the 'resource rebate' she gave of $1200 to each man/woman/child that qualified was actually paid out by oil tax revenue, and arguably paid for by consumers of gasoline from every state.

I also want to call CNN on their bullshit bio piece on her. They claimed her red-budget-pen was responsible for the budget surplus. Not so. It was due solely to the near doubling (then tripling and quadrupling) of oil prices.

Is it just me or does this seem pretty much like a non story? The average joe is never going to get the distinction. Let's move on to the next set of lies...

Palin didn't really have much choice about cutting back on earmarks. By the time she took over as governor, Ted Stevens and Don Young were already getting tons of flak about their excessive earmark requests and it was becoming politically impossible for Alaska to sustain the sky-high levels it had been getting when Murkowski was governor. The credit for the drop in Alaska's earmark requests certainly shouldn't go to Sarah Palin; it should probably go to various senators and congressmen, and even some journalists and citizens (and FBI investigators?) who finally blew the whistle on Stevens and Young.

McCain, Palin, this InBev's for you!

There is a lot of info here, but also a lot that is missing.
Palin may have rejected spending requests by her line item vetoes and STILL spent more than the previous governor. So how do her earmarks (asked for and received) compare with the previous governor and how does her spending compare? Vetoing the most spending can be a misleading statistic.

For the record, has Sarah Palin EVER sent any earmark money BACK to federal government? When I say "Thanks, but no thanks," I do not keep what was offered. But it seems as if Sarah Palin does. She just doesn't spend it on what Congress intended.

It's sort of interesting that the campaign is having Palin make the less false claims and McCain make the more obviously false claims.

All of these false claims again remind of the lies that were seeded into the debate over going into Iraq.

Bottom Line: McCain and his handlers have fully bought into Karl Rove's arrogant and duplicitous philosophy that, "We're an empire now and we create our own reality..."

Josh Marshall needs to correct his lead on TPM home page.

He wrote "half a million" instead of half a billion.

Isn't it about time that Josh allowed comments on his threads, instead of people having to jump through hoops to get word to him?

"Big Game Fib Hunting

Down in the underbrush beneath Sarah Palin's forest of lies there's been this line that even if she was a big time earmarker that she still vetoed half a million worth of earmarks as governor.

Well, not exactly.

--Josh Marshall"

Well, is it million or billion. This article sashays between both figures. Editor, stat!!

The Republicans measure campaigns in news cycles, as in "there are X cycles left before the polls close". Every cycle that's devoted to Palin, her lack of qualifications, her lies, whatever, is one less cycle devoted to a comparison of policies and positions on the issues, which the Republicans know they can't win. Too many Americans find the McCain narrative too compelling to be displaced by the current re-write. We need to move beyond the "truthiness" arguments and get to the policy arguments, or we lose.

Obama mocks McCain promise to bring change
"Can you afford to take a chance on someone who's voted against the minimum wage 19 times," Obama asked a crowd of thousands under a blazing sun at a rally in western Colorado at the start of a swing through contested Western states. "When it was $4, he was against it, when it was $5 he was against it, when it was $6 he was against it."

This needs to go to Ohio and PA say it like it is!

And of course she cut earmark requests. Congress is in Dem hands now and Stevens and Young will be out of office soon and on their way to prison. Why waste the paper for requests that will go nowhere?

Has anyone dug very deeply into this woman's past to see if she has a history of habitual lying? Did she lie throughout her youth to get what she wanted, trashing those around her if she didn't? I'm suspicious she did. I'm suspicious there are people in Wasilla with some very good stories to tell who won't tell them because they fear this liar will be back amongst them soon taking spiteful revenge.

Perhaps someone needs to set up a whistleblowers hotline so these people don't have to fear the wrath of the Palin clan upon their return. I bet that husband has quite a temper that's been used against more than one hapless Wasilla townfolk. They make quite a team. Not exactly what I'd call good Christians.

Just to add:

I think a lot of Republican legislators felt huge pressure (from Palin's anti-corruption rhetoric) to vote to increase the tax rate despite having voted against it in the earlier session. She made it pretty clear that a vote against the tax rate increase would tarnish certain legislators record/reputation.

This is why they hate her, mark my words she'll run a campaign against them (using Wasilla H.S. grads) claiming they are 'tax and spend Republicans'.

She effectively lumped ALL legislators as guilty because a few had tainted the vote - she had called the special session to re-debate and re-vote the oil tax rate.

She has the nastiest way of using (uninformed) public sentiment against her enemies, be they Democrat or Republican. But notice how most of the people that say they 'like' her are Democrat? This is because she bribed them with their Christmas wish list of spending this past year - leaving Republican represented districts high and dry.

She is amazingly manipulative.

Anyone remember Weird Science, the movie? I picture Karl Rove and John McCain getting together to create their 'dream woman' - only she'll have her own agenda, and I'll bet anyone $100 that she'll throw McCain overboard and ride the wave to the next presidential election.

'And yesterday, Palin seemed to suggest that she was aware of that same distinction, remaining technically truthful, if misleading, by telling a crowd in Nevada: "We reformed the abuses of earmarks in our state. I vetoed nearly half a billion dollars of wasteful spending in looking at it as an executive responsibility."'

No, no, no, no! This is not "technically truthful". It is a lie: an untrue statement made with intent to deceive.

Just because two statements are true individually doesn't mean that they're true when placed together. We don't speak in unconnected sentences. Sentences relate to one another and affect each other's meaning, especially when they're this close together.

Consider these two statements: "I'd like you to meet my brother. This is Mark." Am I telling you that this person Mark is my brother? Certainly. The two statements must be taken together. In Palin's statement, she is clearly equating "wasteful spending" with "earmarks".

Reminds me of that Holocaust survivor who was featured on a documentary recently "Language does not Lie"

http://www.sundancechannel.com/films/500062969

During the Nazi era, Victor Klemperer, a German of Jewish heritage, chronicled in his private diary the German government’s subversion of language as a means of thought control. Yet, Klemperer importantly noted, careful reading of totalitarian language always reveals the ideology hidden within the lie. Stan Neumann’s documentary considers the importance of Klemperer’s observation and the role of the witness in such situations, and reflects on how we must vigilantly observe how those in power manipulate language.

If I were a member of the so-called MSM I'd be offended that the McCain campaign is so willing to lie that it must be constantly betting that I am either:

1) too stupid to figure it out

or

2) too lazy to do my own investigation

That's horribly offensive. If, by chance, I were to do some research and the walls of the corporate media were put up to stop me from doing my job, well, I hope that I'd quit.

McCain/Palin: The bridge to nowhere.

And the American people said "Thanks, but no thanks" to that team of liars.

I'm fiscally conservative. In my speeches. So, I left Wasilla with $20M in debt. They'll pay it off with tourism revenue when I'm President. Oops. I mean VP. John is healthy. Really healthy.

We're all referencing how much in earmarks she actually got for Alaska during her short term, but is there any way to see how much she actually requested? There could be quite a difference....

Ya all are throwing too farging polysyllabic words at this. Half o' 'Mericans have I.Q.s under 108 on the Binet scale . . .

The KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) principle demands that we sound bite this:

Republicans lie. Republicans steal.

If challenged then you do the fact dump thus bamboozling with truth.

Homie - its been my experience that island dwellers do not want the bridges connecting their island to anything; until someone on the mainland realizes that investors would really, really, like to live on a connected island, and well, then the mainland guy buys up all the land he/she/it can, in order to make a killing on selling the now (or in the future if all goes as planned) connected island land to non-island people.