Will Sarah Palin please go home now?

Kentucky just lost out on hundreds of millions of federal dollars for education. Apparently, the Race To The Top money will go to Tennessee or Delaware instead. Those states have nearly 100% buy-in from the school districts and legislature. Kentucky, on the other hand, has some ideological qualms about accepting money from the feds because the President is not of their political party. Thank you, Republicans!

Two years ago, every tiny dot on a map was grabbing for homeland security grants. Training fire crews in how best to handle a burning sky-scraper is worthwhile. An air conditioner for a police station in Carrollton, KY – less so.

The feds buying office equipment for small counties is really protecting us from terror. Bettering our education system is SOCIALISM.
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Supposedly, it was left-wing media bias that was keeping the good news from Iraq and Afghanistan out of the papers. Now with a Democratic majority, there still isn’t much in the paper. News reporters aren’t going to broadcast how many soldiers didn’t get hurt because an IED was discovered and diffused. The papers aren’t going to splash a banner headline about how a fragile peace is holding in Anbar for another day. That’s not liberalism, that’s the nature of the business. “If it bleeds, it leads.”
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Why won’t Sarah Palin just shut up and go away? She wrote in an op-ed http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/08/AR2009120803402.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 . If any publication denied her as much space as she demands, she’d sic the partisan hounds of bias accusation against them. Yet, given enough space, she rambles on with pretzel logic.

She calls into question the science behind global warming in one paragraph, essentially saying that climatologists have no idea what is going on. The next paragraph begins with the unsupported assertion that the warming is part of a “natural, cyclical environmental trend”. She says that we can’t be sure that the effects are man-made, yet in the very next sentence she is unequivocal. “Any potential benefits of proposed emissions reduction policies are far outweighed by their economic costs.” Does she know what the benefits are? Some scientists predict that global warming will destroy as much as 25% of the global GDP. The top 50 economies currently generate a combined $40 trillion. Saving more than $10 trillion is certainly a potential benefit that would outweigh the mere billions of projected cost. The cost savings are not guaranteed, but she did use the word “potential”.

Even according to global warming skeptics, the benefit would be that the world population would simply live in a cleaner environment – which still has value. Take as much money as you would pay to live with better air and water quality for you and your kids and multiply by the 6.5 billion people who breathe air on this planet. The benefit is somewhere between that number and the trillions in global output saved. It’s a big number.

She makes a big deal about the emails from the University of East Anglia. But did she actually read them? If she did, she’d see that most of the brouhaha is really finding suspicious phrases and twisting them to mean something damning. She uses the word “damning”, too. Essentially, she and her right wing compatriots are really doing the same thing that she disparaged the media for doing to her. Take some awkwardy worded statement and divining the innermost core thoughts of that person or group. On the other hand, Rush Limbaugh makes truckloads of money by doing that.

And let’s just say that the East Anglia emails were obtained illegally by partisan hackers and may have been selectively edited in the process.

And since she’s a creationist, what the f*ck does she know about science anyway?
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Why do the Israelis insist on building settlements on disputed territory? They complain about being constant targets of the Palestinians, and then they want to build on ground after signing a treaty that said that they wouldn’t. The Israeli ambassador compared it to Jews in Manhattan not being allowed to build in Queens. Well, they wouldn’t be allowed if that area in Queens was a nature preserve.

Don’t they get it? Israel has few friends in the world. If the US ditched them, they’d be falafel.
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I like this headline: “Private guards kill Somali pirate for first time”. The second time he was killed it was by publicly funded law enforcement, and the third time that pirate was killed it was by a well-armed vigilante. The fourth time was quite accidental; something involving a 7-speed blender and a noxious mixture of bleach and ammonia. By then, he was so feeble that he got knocked off for the fifth time by a boy scout trying to earn his eagle badge.
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I agree with David Frum, conservative writer. He chides the Republicans for putting all their effort to blocking any kind of a health care bill instead of working to incorporate the things that they wanted to see in it. Tort reform and cutting costs could have been in it in exchange for their support. Instead, they didn’t understand the limits on the legislative power of an underwhelming minority.

But they’re still at it, trying to undo a law by using the legal system. Ironic that the party dead set against frivolous lawsuits so often resorts to this tactic.

Little known fact: The first lawsuit filed in the 2000 presidential election was by the Bush lawyers. Sore winners then, sore losers now.