Verbal Storm

These Legs Will Carry Me Far

acerunner — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:04:47 +0000

Feelin’ “Palinly” Painful

acerunner — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 18:02:27 +0000

How much can of this can you take? I don’t know about you but the train wreck that is Sarah Palin is just plain gruesome. SNL did a skit this week and they didn’t even have to make stuff up. Most of the things in the skit, from the comments to the gestures came straight from the actual interview Palin did with Katie Couric earlier. The carnage is so severe the weak of stomach should not even attempt to watch clips of this in either format. But in case curiosity gets the better of you and you haven’t seen it already here’s the SNL clip.

more about “untitled“, posted with vodpod

McCain’s Letterman “No Show” Explained…

acerunner — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:41:39 +0000

So a McCain spokesperson explained McCain’s apparent last minute decision to skip the Letterman show and give an interview to Katie Couric instead:

“…(It) wasn’t a night for comedy.”

“We deeply regret offending Mr. Letterman, but our candidate’s priority at this moment is to focus on this crisis…”

So it wasn’t a night for comedy. I get that. But given the choices the American people are faced with these days, showing a little class and being honest in all of your dealings, even when deciding to skip one interview in favor of another, could go a long way toward showing that you are indeed ready to be the next President of the United States of America.

David Letterman Outs McCain As A Liar, And Likes It

acerunner — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 05:57:57 +0000

Ok just when you thought the lies from John McCain just might stop. Check out what happens when he tells David Letterman he can’t make his show because he has to go back to Washington because of the financial crisis and Dave finds out that he is doing an interview with Katie Couric instead.

Think You are Free? Think Again.

acerunner — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 04:05:17 +0000

I’ll say this simply. In life you must choose. This is the essential nature of life. Nothing is created until a choice is made. Even in not making a choice, ultimately you choose. There is no way around it. One of the most fundamental choices we in this century and in this country are confronted with is the choice surrounding our security as individuals and as a nation. As a result of 9/11 we now have threat levels, security checks, and RFiD’s in passports. Passports that are now required to move between Mexico and Canada to the US. GPS and traffic cameras and credit card/ATM networks track our every move. Whether we have explicitly chosen or done so tacitly with our silent complicity, we have all chosen security above all else. But here’s the thing. All of this security comes with an immense price. You see security and freedom exist on two different ends of the same spectrum. As we choose in favor of security, we inherently become less and less free. So any goal that would have as its outcome a more secure nation or more secure individual, will also create equally less free versions of both.

We could argue that our time in Iraq might have actually made us more secure. But just as easily we could also discuss how in pursueing our security in Iraq we have become financially, emotionally, and physically captive in this country as well. Regardless of your feelings on the topic, Colin Powell’s prophetic semtiment of “You break it, you own it” still rings true. Now as we deal with our financial problems at home how much more limited do our solutions become? It isn’t just about the erosion of freedoms from things such as the Patriot Act — though indeed that is a part of the problem with this choice. No, its more than just the limitation of movement or a loss of privacy, its also the loss of opportunity, the loss of ideas and expressions which craft creative and unique solutions that allow us to actually experience our lives fully and grow as individuals and as a nation into something greater. This is what we ultimately lose in seeking security above all else.

Check out this link from TED

Whose Administration is it Anyway?

acerunner — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:53:28 +0000

Well according to Sarah Palin, it is a “Palin, McCain” administration. Man she got up to speed fast. Obviously the Dick Cheney school on “How to Run a Country From Behind the Oval Office” offers a crash course for times such as these when you need to get up to snuff in less than 60 days. Anyway here’s a clip.

You can read an article here if the clip isn’t enough. Man if this wasn’t so scary, it’d be comical. Next I’m off to see if I can find clips of where McCain indicates He’d attack Spain when Palin is done with Russia. Jeez.

Sarah Palin’s Email Gamble – You’ve Been P0wn’d!

acerunner — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 04:45:50 +0000

So on the surface, if you are a public official out to limit your exposure to an open records request, keeping your email off government servers and thus off limits to the public might actually make sense. But here’s the thing. When your account is something like “gov.sarah@yahoo.com” how is that even tacitly personal? Why not something catchy like “sarahbara44@yahoo.com”? That would seem like a personal account to me. And if you really didn’t want the account to attract the wrong kind of attention then something like “eskimopie44@yahoo.com” might serve your purposes a little better as well as remove any hint of an attempt at skirting open records requests.

But I digress. I’m not here to talk about sketchy ethics. I’m here to point out if you want to be a “heartbeat” away from being President of the United States, then your judgement is going to be at issue. And at issue here is the practice of conducting most of your email correspondence on easily accessible and guessable email accounts. How do you justify this? Maybe you can while you are still governor of Alaska. But once you become a major party Vice Presidential candidate, then all bets with the Yahoo! account are off.

Because you have the possibility of government business being conducted from these accounts, (and you can reasonably assume this is the case given the names of the accounts and the list of contacts the accounts contained) then the issue of exercising good judgement becomes paramount. And here’s the thing. Once the name of a Yahoo! email account is known, it is just a dictionary attack away from being hacked. I doubt it took 15 minutes to gain access. So not only do you have to question John McCain’s judgement to put a novice like Palin on the ticket, you also have to question her judgement on the use of a public email account while being a public servant.

If you missed the articles on this you can find a source here

I Never Change McCain…

acerunner — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 00:07:22 +0000

In the last week or so the number of news articles asserting the McCain campaign and McCain himself are forging into new territory concerning whether or not the next President of the United States can actually lie his way into the job has exploded exponentially. What is so troubling, and what has never been observed before is that when called on simple inaccuracies most candidates simply correct and move on. The McCain camp, and one must assume McCain himself has concluded that it is better to stick with a lie, even in the face of the facts in order to win. So here is the gist of what I’m saying excerpted from the article published here. The excerpt below describes an exchange between John McCain and Judy Behar on The View.

‘…McCain looked irked when Behar asked him whether he had jettisoned his independence as a candidate by appearing to be in “lock step” with President Bush’s policies.

“What specific area have I, quote, ‘changed?’ Nobody can name it,” McCain said.

McCain has changed positions on significant issues. For example, he once opposed Bush’s tax cuts but now supports making them permanent. He had opposed lifting the ban on additional offshore oil exploration but now calls for drilling off the U.S. coast. He had been against mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions but now favors them….’

Little did we know one year ago that this campaign would be a true fight of good versus evil. I wonder which one Americans will Choose?

Why I Love Sarah Palin

acerunner — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:00:03 +0000

Ok. I’ll admit it. I’m actually glued to the whole Palin-McCain thing like someone who can’t tear their eyes away from a train wreck. But when the same train just keeps plowing into objects over, and over, and over again especially those that are completely avoidable, I feel as though if I take my eyes away, even for a second I might just miss something juicy. But even with my eyes focused completely on the ball as it were, I’m still having a hard time keeping up with all the scandals/skeletons in her closet. The more I think of how Palin has been accepted within the party with a fervor that just borders on completely inexplicable for someone nobody had heard of more than a week ago, I can’t help but wonder if the party’s anticipated savior might just wind up being its complete undoing? And because of this, I’m not ashamed to say that what accounts for actual investigative journalism in this country may now rest solely with that bastion of all the news that’s fit to print, The National Inquirer.

All I have to say is if you aren’t reading the blog Mudflats, you should. Especially if you want the Alaskan’s analysis of all things Palin, and by association, McCain. This stuff is just priceless. I’m just sayin’.

Here’s a link: http://mudflats.wordpress.com/2008/09/05/this-is-getting-ugly-new-palin-rumors-fly/

Why Were We There? I Forget.

acerunner — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:45:09 +0000

In case you forgot this is why we felt compelled to start a “preemptive” war with Iraq according to a news article found here.

“Bush argued that the U.S.-invasion of Iraq in 2003 was necessary to remove a threat from Saddam Hussein and help spread democracy in the Middle East.”

So in case anyone outside the white house has forgotten, WMD means Weapons of Mass Destruction. That is why the need for a preemptive strike was deemed necessary all philosophical issues aside of course.