Posts by giovanni tiso
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I'm running out of ways to say wow.
I'm going to buck a trend here: I think the state polls of this morning show that the McCain campaign was right, and Noonan is wrong. The election was lost as of last week, they needed a game changer and, long as the odds may be, Palin still has more chances of being "it" than Romney, Pawlenty or the sane women mentioned by Craig. For starters, she's already provoked a rather unseemly bout of hysteria on the left, and some hope of a series of liberal missteps in how to handle her; secondly, she could perform incredibly well tonight and on the campaign, whereas the other choices were all known and completely uninspiring quantities.
I'm still pretty confident it's over, but less so than I was on page one of the Awesome thread.
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Winning a world cup wouldn't hurt.
Failing that, lessee... as far as the Air New Zealand cup is concerned, I think part of the problem is that New Zealanders don't hate their neighbours enough. Back home, every town has a variation of the following saying, mouthed in the example by somebody from Pisa:
Meglio un morto in casa che un fiorentino alla porta (it's better to have a dead family member in the house than a Florentine at the door).
That obviously helps with the ticket sales when the two teams play each other. But equally deep-seated antipathies can be developed over time also within the same town, if it happens to have two teams, or between far-away, seemingly unconnected places such Otago and North Harbour. You just need to know how to go about it.
And on top of that you need serious skirmishes between rival supporters, of course, so we should find a way to encourage gang-like behaviour and widespread looting and vandalism. It's a key ingredient, because it's something you can't get by watching the game on the telly. Ideally we'd want a situation where each city that happens to host a game on a given weekend has to be militarized, as well as the main routes to and from the place of origin of the away team. Last sunday for instance a group of Napoli supporters took over the train to Rome, threatening the other passengers and making millions worth of damage. Fixing all this damage create jobs and raises the country's GDP, which is a nice bonus. It also keeps the police and health personnel from idling on what would otherwise be a slow day.
In terms of human cost, what you want is a casualty per season, on average. More than that, it could keep families away; less than that, the hatred could dissipate.
Or you could take the view that things are fine as they are right about now.
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Iowa and Minnesota are no longer toss-up states - Obama up by 15 and 12 according to CNN. He's up by 2 (within the margin) in Ohio. These are the first swing-state polls since the dem convention.
Obama needs only 27 more electoral votes among all the remaining swing votes. Florida alone would do it, and Palin is going to hurt McCain there big time.
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Heh, Danielle beat me to the punch!
You were miked, Peggy. Will they ever learn?
Read her column in which of course she said the exact oppositeAs anybody linked to Buchanan and Scarborough laughing at the prospect of a Palin pick last Friday morning? That was pretty good too.
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Did no one else notice the dog-whistle about family safety in that second line?
Plus it's written in a graffiti scrawl. Apparently.
It also literally sounds like "Knot your loved ones"
Kinky.
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giovanni - I hope that is a piss take. Palin being a normal person might have considered that some time during the campaign it might become a little more obvious her daughter was pregnant and quietly disclose something to an msm that would then respect her daughters privacy.
I'm sure they hoped to release it at a time of their choosing, but they must have known that it could just as easily not go that way, and that there was a danger that the spotlight would be taken away from the convention. The family lives in a very small town, the chances of somebody talking once the Palins reached nationwide celebrity status were always very high. I find it very odd that it was the Kos 'story' that did it. I wouldn't have dignified it with a response, had it been me. But god knows what went on behind closed doors.
To be clear, though: I've been extremely critical of Kos' involvment in this, but Bristol's pregnancy constitutes a problem exclusively with the very base that her mum's nomination is trying to appease. It's a group of people that is unabashed in its desire to apply its own moral standards to the rest of the nation; it's the group that gave us Dan Quayle, the scourge of unwed mothers, and that produces the highest hate-speech per capita in the developed world. So there is a certain degree of poetic justice here, and I am sorry for Bristol, I truly am, but for her mum? Not for a second.
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The Kos stuff is clearly BS, we know that now, but the confusion about how Palin ended up on the ticket is not. And given her staunchly fundamentalist Christian views, the specific confusion about whether or not she was upfront about her daughter's pregnancy is fairly in the public interest (although clearly it is hard on the young woman herself).
Yes, that's exactly it. They must have known the pregnancy was going to become a political issue, seeing as they were after value voters after all, and did the Palins come clean to McCain or not, and if not, what does it say of Palin's integrity, and what of McCain's vetting process. The McCain's camp swears they knew but they've only come today to an agreement as to the how and when the information was conveyed to them, which is decidedly suspect.
I can't help thinking that had they known, they would have front-footed it.
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Lots of the people interviewed, church leaders and soldiers saying they'd not vote for McCain because he'd not clearly stated his Christian beliefs
That was before the Palin nod, though, right? It's not clear from the link.
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How Murdoch engineered the Fox-Obama Truce (courtesy: The Guardian)
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So, what does that mean -- Palin will be doing the conservative/evangelical media round, because it's certain she's not going to get any tough questions on policy or her record
That wouldn't work, unless really she's only there to galvanize that base. But then she'd become a drag on the ticket with the sane portion of the independent electorate. You know, the folks who believe in evolution.
Cheney and co. can afford never to give interviews because they are in power. She'd need to go on meet the press and all the rest, especially given how thin the republican ranks are. Plus the (legitimate) stories about her would circulate in the MSM anyway, and would keep hurting her and McCain even if she decided never to face up.
Her only possibility here is to do amazingly in her speech at the convention and turn this around in a big way. The questions wouldn't go away, but at least she'd have something going for herself.