Arkansas Blog

"stupefyingly simplistic" = dumber than a sack of hair.

But seriously, the battle is between those who see the gray areas of life and those who are desperate to make every issue black and white, between people who are comfortable struggling with an issue and those who are too lazy and too afraid to work toward complicated solutions to complicated questions.

Sarah Palin is simply a physically beautiful image for those who romantically long for a simpler time that never was and, unfortunately, she has handlers who understand how much money they and she can make by being that image. She's simply a political "model" who walks the right-wing catwalk, standing for a perceived "truth, justice, and the American way." But she's actually a thinly veiled shill for corporate interests, as are most all right wing pols.

The Palin effect is easy enough to understand. Half of all American voters are below average in intelligence.

Well, yes, Sarah Palin and the conservative mainstream media know their patrons, sort of like the Democrat-Gazette mirrors its readership. Simon Maloy puts it pretty well in Media Matters:

"From the moment Sarah Palin was airlifted out of the Alaska hinterlands by John McCain and plopped onto the national stage, she's been telling anyone who will listen how poorly she's been treated by the media, the Democrats, the blogosphere, etc. After she did her part in scuttling McCain's already foundering campaign, she added to her list of personal persecutors the same McCain staffers who made her a household name in the first place. The conservative media have cheered on her personal pity party every step of the way, adamantly refusing to acknowledge that Sarah Palin -- perfect Sarah Palin, conservatism's hockey-mom messiah -- has done anything wrong."

There's more that's just as accurate. Click the blue handle.

And, yes, Dowd and Rich are right: we cannot count on Americans' growing up.

"visceral appeal" is easy when you have no job, when you didn't inherit two losing wars, and an economy hemorrhaging 75,000 jobs per month.

"visceral" once worked for Obama.

You know when a major political party's 2 top picks are Huckabee and Palin...that they've lost their pea-pickin minds! If only we had the information that was on all those crushed hard drives.....Huckabee would be wearing a prison suit and have grimy hand prints all over his ears today.

Sarah Palin will never be President because that's not her aim in life. Her one goal is to suck up more money than Oprah and she's well on her way. She's having the time of her life and hauling the cash to the bank in dump trucks. Let the dimwits trail after her, we don't need them messing in adult matters anyway.

I can only hope the Republicans pick a Palin-Huckabee ticket for 2012. Should they goof up and win they can skip the Inauguration and just have a big whooping Covenant Marriage service with Sarah's witchdoctor leading the way. By then I'll have completed my 10 foot cinder block wall around the compound and have slapped my dogs to the height of their meanness.

Silver, to quote J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, "think about how stupid the average person is, and by definition half the people are even stupider than that."

Are there that many speech writers and political consultants in the known universe that ex-Governor and ex-Vice Presidential candidate Palin can get along with to make a campaign possible and viable for the two to three year marathon of a Presidential campaign?

Could someone explain to me why LSU did not go ahead and try to substitute their field goal unit and take a delay of game penalty in the LSU - Ole Miss game last night. I missed part of the commentary at the end.

It there a rule that prevents the offensive team from taking a delay of game penalty, moving the ball back five yards then kicking the field goal? Perhaps, the commentators mentioned some arcane rule that prevents this while I was busy?

Oh. It's worse than that. I'm pretty sure they still had a time out left. There wasn't a whole lot of thinkin' going on out there last night.

Dott,

The clock only stopped to move the first-down markers (the ball was caught within the field of play, not out of bounds). The clock resumed when the markers were in place - not at the start of the next play. And no, the game WILL end on an offensive penalty (not a defensive penalty).

The most galling thing for LSU fans was allowing 18 seconds to elapse before calling their final timeout before the fourth-down play. That - not the botched final play - sealed their fate.

Anyway you slice it, Miles is incompetent.

(No Bop, they were out of TOs)

Thanks SisterToldja. I thought the offensive penalty ending the game was a rule, but weas not sure.

It just seemed like such a monumental screw-up for a program of the caliber of LSU. From Billy Cannon through the Chinese Bandits, I've never heard of the Bayou Bengals self-destructing when they had a chance at winning the game in their grasp like that.

Couldn't agree more, Dott.

The clock management by the LSU coaching staff in the final minute will go down as one of the worst gaffes in NCAA history.

I just sat back and laughed as an impartial observer. I can't imagine what the average LSU fan was thinking.