Now, having said that, take a look at the contrasting answers given by each VP candidate to Katie Couric this past week in regards to Row v Wade, quite possibly one of the most famous, and often argued Supreme Court case. It almost always comes up in major political debate and this is no exception. You’d think of ANY Supreme Court case that the McCain camp would have prepped Palin in, it would have been this one.

Watch for yourself and decide who seems to be more versed on the matter.

I’ve never been this excited for the first Vice Presidential debate. When was the last time that anyone cared THIS much about the VP debate? Sure, Gore/Cheney and Edwards/Cheney were somewhat entertaining. But this particular debate, I believe, will decide the elections. All those “hockey mom’s” that were so excited for Palin are finally going to realize what an idiot Palin really is. I want to like Palin, I really do.  She’s brash. The mom next door. She’d make a great PTO council member. But Vice President over the largest economy (as of now as least) and the greatest military army in the world? Palin and McCain aren’t even on the same page on foreign policy.

And when’s the last time you saw the Presidential candidate practically hold the VP hand during an interview? Um… is she 5, or 45?

Al I know is that there’s going to be many many more Tina Fey appearances after this Thursday.

THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.

In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher.

Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.

Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.

But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama”

“She doesn’t have any foreign policy credentials,” Hagel said in an interview published Thursday by the Omaha World-Herald. “You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I mean, I don’t know what you can say. You can’t say anything.”

Could Palin lead the country if GOP presidential nominee John McCain could not?

“I think it’s a stretch to, in any way, to say that she’s got the experience to be president of the United States,” Hagel said.

McCain and other Republicans have defended Palin’s qualifications, citing Alaska’s proximity to Russia. Palin told ABC News, “They’re our next-door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”

Hagel took issue with that argument. “I think they ought to be just honest about it and stop the nonsense about, ‘I look out my window and I see Russia and so therefore I know something about Russia,”‘ he said. “That kind of thing is insulting to the American people.”

Hagel, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been a vocal critic of the Bush administration since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In July, Hagel traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Though he didn’t expect to be asked, Hagel had said he would have considered serving as Obama’s running mate.

Palin was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, population 6,500, before becoming Alaska’s governor in December 2006.

Palin visited soldiers in Kuwait and Germany last year and said in an interview with ABC News that her only other foreign travel had been to Mexico and Canada. She also said she had never met a foreign head of state.

Hagel told the newspaper that other governors have been elected to serve in the White House without experience in Washington. He said judgment and character were also important for the job.

“But I do think in a world that is so complicated, so interconnected and so combustible, you really got to have some people in charge that have some sense of the bigger scope of the world,” Hagel said. “I think that’s just a requirement.”

This, of course, has not stopped her from making the same claim dozens of times since it’s been discredited. But what’s even more interesting is that she apparently kept as much of the money as the federal government sent her. What happened to thanks, but no thanks?

Though the entire financing for the bridge did not pan out, the US government has set aside $73 million for the project. So far, a lot of money has been wasted building access roads to bridges that don’t exist and never will. Of course, people get rich off these projects, so they don’t give a damn where they lead as long as the money leads right back into their pockets.

So, I’d like to start a simple campaign called “Give the Money Back.” If Sarah Palin is going to claim how much she dislikes earmarks — despite the fact that she asked for over $250 million in earmarks this year for Alaska and asked for more earmarks per capita for Wasilla than any other city in the country — let her prove it. Why doesn’t she give back the $73 million set aside for this useless project?

Remember that’s our money. Republicans love to talk about how it’s the taxpayer’s money and they know how to spend it better than the government. In this case, I agree. I certainly know how to spend it better than the Alaskan government. So, give it back.

Pass this message on. Demand that Sarah Palin give back our money. That $73 million is now sitting in the bank account to nowhere. It’s time that it be returned to its rightful owners — us!

One of the striking similarities between George W. Bush and John McCain is their blatant contempt for education and “thinking” in general. It amazes me that the Republican Party wants the US of A to be led by dunces for twelve consecutive years.

George graduated from Yale with a “C” average.  George’s father and grandfather were also Yale graduates and they had donated thousands of dollars to the school prior to Georges admission. After his graduation, and just before his draft number came up in the SSS lotto, he applied for acceptance into the Texas Air National Guard as a “Jet Fighter Pilot.” This was to keep him out of Viet Nam. George had no prior pilot training. No one other than George had ever been seriously considered for that position without an aviation background including a pilot’s license. George took a competitive “Pilot Aptitude Exam” for one of the four pilot slots that had opened up in the Texas Guard. Only the “best of the best of the best” were to be selected. George scored a whopping 25% on the exam. (It’s interesting that he “happened to score exactly 25%, because a score of 24% or less would have completely eliminated him from any consideration for the slot.) But, regardless of this technicality, “the worst of the worst of the worst” was accepted into the program, taught to fly an airplane – eventually a jet, and awarded the position as a commissioned officer … all at the taxpayers’ expense. I guess it helps a little when your father is a wealthy US Congressman from Texas.

Both John McCain’s father and grandfather were Admirals in the US Navy. John decided that he wanted to continue the family military tradition and applied for admission into the U.S Naval Academy. He was accepted. (I haven’t seen any information about his academic record in high school, so I have no idea whether he earned his slot, or was admitted because the two generations ahead of him attained the highest pay grades possible in the Navy. But, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he earned the admission based on his prior academic record.)

John went on to graduate from Annapolis. He didn’t quite finish Magna cum Laude (like Barack Obama finished Harvard), in fact, there were 899 cadets in Johns’ graduation class. John finished fifth from the bottom … a truly prophetic number for John. He went on to complete pilot training. His favorite pastimes were driving his Corvette, drinking, dating strippers and gambling. His performance in flight school was considered dismal at best. But, who’s going to challenge your conduct and academic performance in the Navy with all of that brass on your dad and grand pappy?  The plane that got shot down in Nam was not his first crash … or his second … or his third … or his fourth … BUT, HIS FIFTH CRASH. That’s five military jets destroyed with John McCain as the pilot-in-command??? Oh my God!

I recently retired with twenty one years as a federal Air Traffic Controller and prior time as a controller in the US Navy. I took flying lessons as a young man and completed my first solo flight with less than nine hours of dual time. I have quite a background in aviation and let me tell you, finding any pilot with FIVE crashes under his belt is quit rare – for any military or civilian pilot. (The only exception would possibly be for test pilots.) John was never a test pilot. Perhaps if John had really applied himself, cracked the books, and he had actually “tried” to achieve a minimal level of competence he wouldn’t have cost the Treasury Department the millions of dollars associated with his five military jet crashes.

Can’t they do any better than this?

Over 1400 women came out in Anchorage protest against Palin.

Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage. The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state. I was absolutely stunned. The second most amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs up as they drove by. And even those that didn’t honk looked wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing by the minute. This just doesn’t happen here.