SEE EDIT AT BOTTOM

In response to the headlines I posted yesterday, I was asked by wixer, "are there any local stories/headlines showing approval?"  I recalled seeing some semi-hysterical, exultant things immediately following the announcement of Palin's being picked to run with McCain and at the time my concern had been to counter them with some of the more appalling facts I knew about her past acts.  After telling wixer that I didn't think it was my job to promote something I don't support, I started preparing to blog about Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli.  Then Greyfox called. 

He mentioned that the Anchorage Daily News had been printing many letters from readers that used words such as scary, insane, ruthless, and dishonest, to describe Sarah Palin.  ADN today ran an editorial about those letters, which said that the mail they have received has been overwhelmingly negative on Palin.  These are letters from Alaskans, some of whom know Mrs. Palin personally, and all of whom have lived under her administration(s) as governor and/or mayor.  Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli will have to wait.  All stories linked below are from Anchorage Daily News.

Questions for Palin

Questions ADN would like to hear answered include Iraq, Troopergate, and her friends Don Young and Ted Stevens.  BTW, in another story today, ADN reported that the FBI has turned up more unreported gifts that Stevens received.  His trial on the federal indictment is coming up soon.  He failed to get the change of venue he sought.

Palin's leadership

After enumerating some successes and limitations, the article states:  "BOTTOM LINE: Palin is strong on vision and rallying public support; she's not so strong on the detailed work of governance."

Palin's stall - Governor is stonewalling the Troopergate investigation

Palin's night - She did the job expected of a vice-presidential candidate

A look at Palin's record

This editorial looks at her fiscal record, her views on gay rights and polar bears, and much more.

Palin makes history - A great day for Alaska, but for the country?

This editorial from the giddy days of late August reflects early ambivalence that has by now largely settled down into skepticism.

Say, America, here's the Sarah Palin we Alaskans know

ADN "asked readers what they'd tell the nation about Sarah Palin, in 50 words or less."

What's the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick
A theocrat is a theocrat, whether Muslim or Christian.

ArmsMerchant has posted an article on Palin's racism from LA Progressive.

My son is waiting for me to get out of his way here.

Some of you have expressed appreciation for my Alaskan perspective on national politics lately.

Below are some headlines from a couple of news sources you may not have noticed before:

Palin church: Alaska will be a 'refuge' for Armageddon

Gov. Palin hiding husband's correspondence related to trooper union

McCain ad re-spins false Bridge to Nowhere yarn

'Drill, baby, drill': Host says Palin the next Cheney on energy

Shrill, Baby, Shrill! Tactical Coups at the RNC and the Coming Out of Sarah Palin

Last night, the city of Adak, a fishing port in the Aleutian Islands, instituted rolling blackouts and is now only providing 11 hours of power a day to its consumers.

This Friday, all eligible Alaskans will begin receiving a combined payment of $3,269:  $2,069 from our annual Permanent Fund Dividends, and a one-time "resource rebate" of $1,200.  Those of us signed up for direct deposit will have the money immediately, and paper checks will soon start trickling in for the rest.  Our populist Republican governor bucked the conservative Republican legislature to get approval for the "rebate" because increased fuel prices have created an energy crisis throughout Alaska.

This summer, that legislative debate was closely watched by most of us.  It was not approved in the form in which Palin originally proposed it.  After much wrangling, to save administrative costs, the energy assistance was combined with the PFD, and PFD payouts were pushed forward a month, so that people would have the money to obtain heating fuel before cold weather sets in.

These payments to individuals probably won't be a great help to the City of Adak, which owes more than half a million dollars to its fuel supplier.  Who can blame Aleut Corp., the supplier, for cutting off the city's credit, with a debt of that magnitude?  It is also hard to blame the city.  Fish catches are down, fuel prices are up, and a customer in Norway has been very slow about paying Adak Fisheries for the fish they bought.  A few jingoistic Alaskans, already disgruntled over Team Norway's having been the first non-American winners of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, are ready to go to war with Norway over money and fish.

The money that we are expecting in coming weeks will help those consumers in Adak survive the rolling blackouts by buying fuel to run their generators to power freezers, respirators and other appliances.  Those who don't have generators will be able to buy them.  This will be a bonanza for the Honda, Homelite and Toro dealers in the Aleutians.

Adak is not alone in its fuel financing crisis.  In recent years, many bush villages have had their own problems.  Public buildings have gone unheated, causing pipes to burst.  Schools have had to close because they could not be kept at livable temperatures for the students.  Despite the drowning polar bears and the destruction of roads and buildings as the permafrost they are built upon thaws, some people think climate change isn't happening fast enough.  Others wonder why we're piping all that oil from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez and shipping it south.  The last few years, we are hearing again the old slogan of the Alaskan Independence Party from the 'seventies:  "Let them freeze in the dark."

I have my own little fuel crisis here.  We scrimped and squirreled away enough cash this summer to buy five cords of firewood.  Our wood seller doesn't take credit cards.  After delivering three cords, he called one afternoon last week to say he would be here around 8 PM with the fourth, and we have not heard from him since.  I hope the problem is mechanical and not medical.  I also hope that he either gets back on the road soon with my wood, or that we can find another supplier before we're snowed in.

I have just posted a reality check Tarot reading for the United States of America.

I had a serious conversation about politics with Doug this
morning.  Since I have a number of new readers, I'll repeat what others
already know:  Doug is my 27 year old son and caregiver.  It is rare
for us to have early morning conversations, because he usually goes to
bed a few hours before I get up.  This morning, he was washing dishes
as I was blending decaf with high test for a new batch of house blend,
and loading the coffeemaker.

On my way into the kitchen, I had
hit the power button on the radio, and the first words we heard on NPR
were, "Sarah Palin."  We groaned in unison.  After a few moments of
silent side-by-side work, I said to him I remember all the way back to
Eisenhower's first term and I couldn't recall another presidential
campaign quite as frighteningly intense as this one.  Even forty years
ago, I said, when my friend Jovano stood back in the trees of that
Chicago park with Robert Anton Wilson, smoking dope and watching
hippies and Yippies being mowed down in the police riot, "we were an
innocent nation."

Our eyes met, and with a flip of my hand I
acknowledged the tilt of his head with which he suggested that,
"ignorant" would have been a better word than, "innocent."  We sighed
in unison.  I said to him that although I'm not losing sleep lying
awake as Greyfox (my husband, the Old Fart, in case you don't already
know) is, worrying about the political situation, I do wake up each
morning with it on my mind.

I hadn't spoken out here on national
issues or candidates, but had reported a few times on Alaska's ongoing
corruption scandals.  Then, when our evangelical beauty queen barracuda
governor got into it, I couldn't restrain myself.  By speaking out
about her lies, evasions and abuses of office, suddenly I'm a political
animal as I haven't been since I ended up in prison through protesting
the Vietnam war.  Since the corrupt and inept politicians I have been
criticizing happen to be Republicans (as they would have to be,
currently, to hold office in Alaska), I have been accused of being a
"loyal Democrat."

Let me set the record straight on that.  I
refer to myself facetiously as a "liberal libertarian," knowing that
those two alliterative words combine to form a political oxymoron, but
sincerely identifying with some of the goals of each camp.  Note the
lower case initial letters.  I'm not a joiner.  I am registered as
independent, and in our split primaries, I vote the "combined" ballot
on which every party except the elite GOP is represented, not because I
reject the Republican party, but because it instituted that split
primary and excluded me. 

Back when I was a little girl asking
my mother about parties and politics, she told me she didn't vote for a
party, she voted for the person.  Knowing that in many things (at the
time, I would have said, most
things) my mother was an idiot, I flitted from party to party the same
way I was flitting from one religion to another during my adolescence. 
I don't recall which party or religion was the end for me, but
somewhere along the line I realized that I wanted the whole story, the
entire big picture, and none of those exclusive groups had it.

As
this campaign developed, I had nothing to say about Obama, McCain, Ron
Paul, and the rest, because I didn't know any of them.  I briefly, and
without fanfare, posted a banner in support of Mike Gravel because I
did know him and felt that he sincerely wanted to fix some of the domestic and foreign problems we have in this country at this
time.  I took down the banner when it became apparent that he hadn't a
chance.  Then, when a dangerous, deceitful, delusional Alaskan politician got a spot on the Republican ticket, I spoke out in opposition.

Now, I think I need to walk my talk -- the longtime talk such as, "Don't worry.  Be happy."  Years ago, decades even, I thought that absurdly corrupt and inept politicians could be good for this country if their blunders and crimes served to enlighten people.  I'm not about to shut up about issues and people in the news.  I'm just going to stop worrying about it.  What is, IS.  What people decide to make of it, is what will be.  Whatever happens, I'll either live through it, or I won't.  Either way, I'm okay.

   I was tottering around here this morning, trying to get my carafe and mug safely from the coffeemaker to the desk, listening to news on the radio, when I heard someone mention that the Republicans and Democrats agree that the candidates' families should be "off limits."  That idea had a familiar ring to it.  Some other prominent organization has such a policy... oh, yes!  ...the Mafia.

Then the newsreader seguéd into a story about a saucer-shaped car.  It had an amusing UFO hook, so I thought I'd blog about it.  The trouble was, I'd only caught a little bit of the story, so I had to Google for more.

My search terms, based on the little bit I had heard of the story, were, "Alaska UFO."  That search turned up more than I was looking for, but I'm not complaining.

Sexy photos of Sarah Palin

"The 38-24-34 DD-cup lovely apparently signed a pact with her alien
impregnators that promised her mother would become President of the
United States in exchange for Bristol bearing a human/ET hybrid son.

The
contract was signed in blood and semen and her former hymen archived
onto the craft mothership's library of useless Terran artifacts."

(image:  British rhyming slang 'Bristol Cities' !)

Wow!  I have lived in all of those top 6 UFO and Bigfoot states.  I have seen UFOs in Colorado and Alaska, but am still looking for signs of Bigfoot.

What did happen to summer this year?

Photo: Eric Engman newsminer.com

Sarah Palin is a liar.  You don't have to believe me on that.  Check her record.  One example:  she campaigned for governor on promises to get the Gravina Island Bridge built.  That's the infamous "bridge to nowhere," for those Outside Alaska who don't know where Gravina Island is.  Now, she boasts that she killed the dreaded bridge to nowhere, when the bridge was dead before she ever took office.  ...a pathological liar.

In my opinion, she is also a dangerous fundamentalist religious extremist who wants to impose her beliefs on not just the USA, but the whole world.  Here are a few facts to support my opinion.  As mayor of Wasilla, she tried to ban some books from the public library.  The librarians and friends of the library stood up to her, so she cut funding to the already financially strapped library, and tried to get the librarian fired.  In a June, 2008 speech to her church, she told the congregation to pray for her own version of Jihad, saying, "our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God," and, in reference to the $30 billion gas pipeline she wants to build, "I think God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that."

I know I'm largely preaching to the choir here, that most of my readers agree with me, and that Sarah's fellow fundies, if they read me at all, are only here to fuel their hatred and call me names.  It amuses me that they do that, and it pleases me that an occasional Xangan like TheCrimsonNinja comes along and speaks up for me when they do.

It also pleases me when some of the people close to Palin refute her nonsense.  Reportedly, Levi Johnston, the guy who allegedly fathered the fetus that Bristol Palin has been said to be happily bearing to term, and who the Palin camp says is willingly planning to marry the mom, wrote in his myspace profile that, "I'm a f - - -in' redneck," and,  "in a relationship," but then continues, "I don't want kids."  Poor kids.  Whether Sarah stays in Juneau or moves to DC, I'm sure we're going to hear more about that little love story.

I mentioned that my husband, ArmsMerchant, has been losing sleep over the threat that Mrs. Palin, who likens herself to a pit bull in lipstick, might inhabit the White House.  I have lost some tooth enamel over it, and continually find myself needing to consciously relax as I listen to the news.  I know we are not alone.  RobinAmyBass says she hates Palin.  Lupa is up in arms along with me, vowing to plaster my, "chickens voting," graphic all over the web.  Twotothefightingeighthpower is "nauseous," and BluePaNDoRa says, "This poltical circus is literally making me sick."  Ikwa cried watching Palin's speech last night.

Speaking of that speech, Ari Melber on The Nation, said:

For screamingly funny and bleakly black humor, I don't think we can beat John Ridley's Palinguage:

Comments by readers of Ridley's piece are turning up hundreds of additions to Palinguage.

I have work to do now, and my son is going to be using the computer this afternoon.  I will probably be back  tomorrow.

[EDIT]
I almost forgot... I had intended to mention this hilariously cynical maneuver Mrs. Palin attempted in order to move the investigation of her firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Moneghan out of the hands of an independent investigator and into a jurisdiction more favorable to her:  the state personnel board whose three members she appointed.  She filed an ethics complaint against herself.  As a self-defense tactic, it didn't work, but as a joke on her, it certainly works.

UPDATE - FRIDAY MORNING

On local news today, I heard a state spokesperson in Juneau say that the governor keeps saying she is cooperating with the Trooper-gate investigation, but, "she and her people have been sabotaging our efforts at every turn."

Related story.

Now I really do have to get to work.

It seems that all I really needed, to break my melancholy mood yesterday, was to get dumped on my ass.

I was sitting here shortly after I posted yesterday's entry, writing a comment on another Xangan's blog when, without warning, my ergonomic office chair fell apart.  I went over backwards, banging my knee on the keyboard shelf.  I came down hard with my lower back on the chair's base, and my shoulders half on and half off the files, pliers, screwdrivers, etc., sticking up in my tool caddy on the floor.

That was the nifty lightweight wood and bamboo seat Greyfox had gotten on the free day at the Big Lake thrift shop.  We are back to using the steel chair, sturdier but not really high enough for effective use of bifocals here.  Two little pillows folded double give me an extra boost in front of the monitor, but do nothing to ease the pain.

I can deal with the pain.  I must admit, though, that it got me down briefly to think that I had just stopped hurting from the fall I took off the porch less than a week before.

I don't have much to say right now, except that my attitude has improved.  One thing that helps is knowing that not all the women in the country are, as Greyfox says of so many of my misguided sisters, "creaming their jeans," over Sarah Palin.  I want to spend some more time closely reading the Globe and Mail article that quitchick linked for me, which her mother had sent her, and the Huffington Post article which was linked in a comment to that one.

Then I'm going to crawl in bed and try to find a comfortable position.  Maybe, with enough rest and relaxation, if I don't turn on the radio, I can get back to being my usual (and ideal) apolitical self for a while.  Ya think?

    I am feeling a little subdued today, not really depressed but definitely indented.  Frost has hit here during the past couple of nights.  Spring flowers were late emerging this year because of unbroken clouds and everyday rain, and summer never really arrived.  Now, a lot of the fireweed has turned autumn red and the flower buds are nipped by frost before they had a chance to open.

Politics...  what can I say?  Greyfox said, in a thread on totse, about Sarah Palin, that not since JFK's assassination has he felt so desolate and worried for the country.  He has been lying awake at night, worrying about this.  I sleep, but when I'm awake I frequently find myself distracted by hearing Palin's name on the radio, and troubled over things I'm hearing.

I console myself with this thought:  "Pride goeth before a fall." (Proverbs, Chapter 16)  The Palin family have spoken about how proud they were to have given birth to a Down Syndrome child, and now they are expressing their pride over the baby expected by their teenage daughter Bristol and her high school hockey player boyfriend.  If pride does indeed go before a fall, I do hope that she's really proud, and not just trying to put a good face on things.

For me, thinking about being funny is like the centipede in the old story, who couldn't walk when he thought about how it was done.  It's not that I can't be funny.  It's just that my funniest words or actions are usually spontaneous, and sometimes accidental.

I think some of my difficulty with humor is a result of dyslexia.  I know that when I was a kid and tried to tell jokes, I'd sometimes tell the punchline before the setup.  I can never remember whether a comedian is the one who says things funny, while a comic says funny things, or the other way around.  Whichever it is, I'm the one who says things in a funny way, rather than delivering funny lines.

I can't blame the whole thing on dyslexia, though.  All my life, I've had a tendency to get so tickled just thinking about a really funny joke that I spoil the telling of it by laughing so hard I can't talk. Usually, I don't try to tell jokes.  Most of the time, if I can remember the setup, I forget the punchline, and arsy-versy.

I do have one longtime favorite joke that I have no trouble remembering in its entirety, but it does have a few other troubles, such as being painfully dated and in regrettably poor taste:

A clown once accused me of having no sense of humor.  That was my friend Eugene Casteel, AKA Geno the Clown.  He was a drunk, the kind of scary clown that kids scream and run away from.  There was always a bottle of booze in the pocket of his baggy pants, and one in the door pocket of his Jeep.  He kept a pocketful of lemon peels, too, and thought that chewing on one would mask the alcohol smell.

One night at my place, he was out of makeup, falling down drunk, and making an unfunny fool of himself.  I wasn't laughing, and as he made his exit he made that accusation about my having no sense of humor.  I wrote him a three-page letter defending my sense of humor, telling him what sorts of things I thought were funny, and that I thought the mental and physical deficits accompanying alcohol intoxication were pathetic rather than funny.

Gene carried that letter around in his wallet for years, pulling it out occasionally to show it to someone, until it was falling apart at the creases.  I thought that was funny.

My sense of humor is quirky and somewhat dry.  Many of my attempts at being funny sail right over people's heads.  I wouldn't say they fall flat, because I don't pause for the laughter or feel any sense of failure when there are no laughs.  Occasionally, I'm the only one who sees the humor in a particular situation, and I'm often the first in a crowd to get a joke and laugh, a whole beat ahead of others.

The two guys in my life laugh at me a lot.  They get most of my jokes, and I get lots of laughs  from things they say and do.  We are a funny family.  Years ago, while Doug was still in high school, he once said that life with Greyfox and me was like living in a sitcom.  That's really funny, coming from him, because Doug is the best comic in the family, with smooth delivery and exquisite timing.

This morning when I got to the computer, I found that he had left this on the screen for me:

I think that's funny, in a mildly amusing way.  It's no side-splitter.  I delivered one last night that got an immediate loud guffaw out of Doug at this end and, a beat later, a rueful chuckle out of Greyfox on the speaker phone.

Greyfox had been ragging on me early in the evening, on an old theme, and I sighed and said to him that I was sorry I'd called, and I'd talk to him tomorrow.  Several hours later, significantly later than the time he usually calls at night, he phoned, talking fast, in a hurry to cover some business.  He said good night and broke the connection, and I hung up on my end. 

A moment later, the phone rang again.  Greyfox said that in the previous call he had tried to keep it under a minute but he went over anyway (earlier in the week we had used up three hours of cell time discussing car tires until we were both tired of the subject), and had cut me off mid-word.  He asked what I had been starting to say, and I told him I was just saying good night.  Then he said, "I don't like hanging up on you... when I'm in my right mind." 

I paused for a perfect beat, then said, "...and that is... when?"

It was funny at the time, in our family.  I guess you had to be there.  Did I mention that most of my jokes are in-jokes?

This entry is in response to the first of two Featured Grownups topics for September, 2008.