टिमोथी एगन nyt

September 17, 2008, 9:06 pm
Moo
People should stop picking on vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin because she hired a high school classmate to oversee the state agriculture division, a woman who said she was qualified for the job because she liked cows when she was a kid. And they should lay off the governor for choosing another childhood friend to oversee a failing state-run dairy, allowing the Soviet-style business to ding taxpayers for $800,000 in additional losses.

What these critics don’t understand is that crony capitalism is how things are done in Alaska. They reward failure in the Last Frontier state. In that sense, it’s not unlike like Wall Street’s treatment of C.E.O.’s who run companies into the ground.

Look at Carly Fiorina, John McCain’s top economic surrogate — if you can find her this week, after the news and her narrative fused in a negative way. Dismissed as head of Hewlett-Packard after the company’s stock plunged and nearly 20,000 workers were let go, she was rewarded with $44 million in compensation. Sweet!

Thank God McCain wants to appoint a commission to study the practice that enriched his chief economic adviser. On the campaign trail this week, McCain and Palin pledged to “stop multimillion dollar payouts to C.E.O.’s” of failed companies. Good. Go talk to Fiorina at your next strategy session.

Palin’s Alaska is a cultural cousin to this kind of capitalism. The state may seem like a rugged arena for risky free-marketers. In truth, it’s a strange mix of socialized projects and who-you-know hiring practices.

Let’s start with those cows. A few years ago, I met Harvey Baskin, one of the last of Alaska’s taxpayer-subsidized dairy farmers, at his farm outside Anchorage. The state had spent more than $120 million to create farms where none existed before. The epic project was a miserable failure.

“You want to know how to lose money in a hurry?” Harvey told me, while kicking rock-hard clumps of frozen manure. “Become a farmer with the state of Alaska as your partner. This is what you call negative farming.”

That lesson was lost on Palin. As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, Governor Palin overturned a decision to shutter a money-losing, state-run creamery — Matanuska Maid — when her friends in Wasilla complained about losing their subsidies. She fired the board that recommended closure, and replaced it with one run by a childhood friend. After six months, and nearly $1 million in fresh losses, the board came to the same conclusion as the earlier one: Matanuska Maid could not operate without being a perpetual burden on the taxpayers.

This is Heckuva-Job-Brownie government, Far North version.

On a larger scale, consider the proposal to build a 1,715-mile natural gas pipeline, which Palin touts as one of her most significant achievements. Private companies complained they couldn’t build it without government help. That’s where Palin came to the rescue, ensuring that the state would back the project to the tune of $500 million.

And let’s not talk about voodoo infrastructure without one more mention of the bridge that Palin has yet to tell the truth about. The plan was to get American taxpayers to pay for a span that would be 80 feet higher than the Brooklyn Bridge, and about 20 feet short of the Golden Gate — all to serve a tiny airport with a half-dozen or so flights a day and a perfectly good five-minute ferry. Until it was laughed out of Congress, Palin backed it — big time, as the current vice president would say.

Why build it? Because it’s Alaska, where people are used to paying no state taxes and getting the rest of us to buck up for things they can’t afford. Alaska, where the first thing a visitor sees upon landing in Anchorage is the sign welcoming you to Ted Stevens International Airport. Stevens, of course, is the 84-year-old Republican senator indicted on multiple felony charges. He may still win re-election thanks to Palin’s popularity at the top of the ballot.

Alaskans will get $231 per person in federal earmarks — 10 times more than people in Barack Obama’s home state. That’s this year, with Palin as governor.

If Palin were a true reformer, she would tell Congress thanks, but no thanks to that other bridge to nowhere.

Yes, there is another one — a proposal to connect Anchorage to an empty peninsula, speeding the commute to Palin’s hometown by a few minutes. It could cost up to $2 billion. The official name is Don Young’s Way, after the congressman who got the federal bridge earmarks. Of late, he’s spent more $1 million in legal fees fending off corruption investigations. Oh, and Young’s son-in-law has a stake in the property at one end of the bridge.

Some of these projects might be fully explained should Palin ever open herself up to questions. This week she sat down for her second interview — with Sean Hannity of Fox, who has shown sufficient “deference” to Palin, as the campaign requested.

One question: When Palin says “government has got to get out of the way” of the private sector, as she proclaimed this week, does that apply to dairy farms, bridges and gas pipelines in her state? I didn’t think so.

Gov. Palin’s Worldview

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/opinion/13sat1.html?em

NYT

As we watched Sarah Palin on TV the last couple of days, we kept wondering what on earth John McCain was thinking.

If he seriously thought this first-term governor — with less than two years in office — was qualified to be president, if necessary, at such a dangerous time, it raises profound questions about his judgment. If the choice was, as we suspect, a tactical move, then it was shockingly irresponsible.

It was bad enough that Ms. Palin’s performance in the first televised interviews she has done since she joined the Republican ticket was so visibly scripted and lacking in awareness.

What made it so much worse is the strategy for which the Republicans have made Ms. Palin the frontwoman: win the White House not on ideas, but by denigrating experience, judgment and qualifications.

The idea that Americans want leaders who have none of those things — who are so blindly certain of what Ms. Palin calls “the mission” that they won’t even pause for reflection — shows a contempt for voters and raises frightening questions about how Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin plan to run this country.

One of the many bizarre moments in the questioning by ABC News’s Charles Gibson was when Ms. Palin, the governor of Alaska, excused her lack of international experience by sneering that Americans don’t want “somebody’s big fat résumé maybe that shows decades and decades in that Washington establishment where, yes, they’ve had opportunities to meet heads of state.”

We know we were all supposed to think of Joe Biden. But it sure sounded like a good description of Mr. McCain. Those decades of experience earned the Arizona senator the admiration of people in both parties. They are why he was our preferred candidate in the Republican primaries.

The interviews made clear why Americans should worry about Ms. Palin’s thin résumé and lack of experience. Consider her befuddlement when Mr. Gibson referred to President Bush’s “doctrine” and her remark about having insight into Russia because she can see it from her state.

But that is not what troubled us most about her remarks — and, remember, if they were scripted, that just means that they reflect Mr. McCain’s views all the more closely. Rather, it was the sense that thoughtfulness, knowledge and experience are handicaps for a president in a world populated by Al Qaeda terrorists, a rising China, epidemics of AIDS, poverty and fratricidal war in the developing world and deep economic distress at home.

Ms. Palin talked repeatedly about never blinking. When Mr. McCain asked her to run for vice president? “You have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission,” she said, that “you can’t blink.”

Fighting terrorism? “We must do whatever it takes, and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.”

Her answers about why she had told her church that President Bush’s failed policy in Iraq was “God’s plan” did nothing to dispel our concerns about her confusion between faith and policy. Her claim that she was quoting a completely unrelated comment by Lincoln was absurd.

This nation has suffered through eight years of an ill-prepared and unblinkingly obstinate president. One who didn’t pause to think before he started a disastrous war of choice in Iraq. One who blithely looked the other way as the Taliban and Al Qaeda regrouped in Afghanistan. One who obstinately cut taxes and undercut all efforts at regulation, unleashing today’s profound economic crisis.

In a dangerous world, Americans need a president who knows that real strength requires serious thought and preparation.

turbulence - notorious

a fire bun!

yah hear mi
hey notisha over the beritta
michelle over haskel
pat over the uzie and glock

life ova death
you know seh a turbulence the future..never solo
hey let me tell yu dis again
i could have been one of the most notorious
i got saved by the king and his grace is so glorious
i could have been one of the most devestating
i got saved
by the king and his love is everlasting

woah
burn away the wicked lifestyle and the wicked image
and the wicked man dem profile
im so happy to be.... rastafari's child
and me ova come the wicked with just a smile
den me start to live my life and do things worth while
in a love n harmony i try not to be vial nah bow to wealth
selassie will provide
hey my conscience is clear me na nuttin a hide
rastafari

i could have been one of the most notorious
i got saved by the king and his grace is so glorious
i could have been one of the most devastating
i got saved
by the king and his love is everlasting

wooah
easy to squeeze leads in their foreheads
but we know the solution is not blood shed
positive actions and a firm med (meditation)
well let the school, let the school, let us persue
a better to be a part of the strong side
the right side
couldn't be the wrong side
amlock tell you seh from you can avoid avoid
slip with the king den you know you shall slide

i could have been one of the most notorious
i got saved by the king and his works is so glorious
i could have been one of the most devastating
i got saaaavvveeeed
by the king and his love is everlasting


woooah... oooooooh...
yow cut out all ruption
corruption
pollution
positive movements ooooooooh.
heeeyyy
by the strengh of jah i live longer
by the lenght of my locks i get stronger
they say grevious words stir up anger
but i am bigger than that never go under

iii could have been one of the most notorious
i got saved by the king and his love is so glorious
i could have been one of the most devestating
i got saved by the king
I got saved

i could have been one of the most notorious
i got saved by the king and his grace is so glorious
i could have been one of the most devestating
whhhyy i iiii iii

wow
burn away the wicked profile and the wicked image and the wicked man dem lifestyle
Hey I rather to be rastafari's child me go ova come the wicked with just a smile
den me start to live my life and do things worth while
in a love and harmony
try not to be vial
nah bow to wealth
jah will provide
yow My conscience is clear
mi nah have nothing ah..

i could have been one of the most notorious

i got saved by the king and his love is so glorious
I could have been
i could have been one of the most devastating
devastating
I got saved by the king

dubai

Dubai is retarded

crappy songs

You know what song really sucks?

The one that goes 'if you, want to call me baby, just go ahead now, and if you want to buy me flowers, just go ahead now'

cops

How come police wear the most uncomfortable looking pants of any profession?

Don't they need flexibility?

Why not sweatpants or something with sneakers?

wtf?