Sarah Palin has apparently never read a newspaper

This just keeps getting worse and worse for Sarah Palin. Depending on how you interpret this, she's either read every newspaper in America... or none of them.

Youtube link

In Honor of Rosh Hashanah...

If you haven't seen it already, check out Sarah Silverman's political message:

Youtube link

Fed throwing around almost $700B anyway?

Fed Pumps Further $630 Billion Into Financial System

By Scott Lanman and Craig Torres

Sept. 29 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve will pump an additional $630 billion into the global financial system, flooding banks with cash to alleviate the worst banking crisis since the Great Depression.

The Fed increased its existing currency swaps with foreign central banks by $330 billion to $620 billion to make more dollars available worldwide. The Term Auction Facility, the Fed's emergency loan program, will expand by $300 billion to $450 billion. The European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan are among the participating authorities.

Bloomberg

The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (aka The Bailout)

The bailout bill has ballooned from 3 pages to over 100. Here's a short summary from the House Committee on Financial Services:

I. Stabilizing the Economy

The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA) provides up to $700 billion to the Secretary of the Treasury to buy mortgages and other assets that are clogging the balance sheets of financial institutions and making it difficult for working families, small businesses, and other companies to access credit, which is vital to a strong and stable economy. EESA also establishes a program that would allow companies to insure theirtroubled assets.

II. Homeownership Preservation

EESA requires the Treasury to modify troubled loans – many the result of predatory lending practices – wherever possible to help American families keep their homes. It also directs other federal agencies to modify loans that they own or control. Finally, it improves the HOPE for Homeowners program by expanding eligibility and increasing the tools available to the Department of Housing and Urban Development to help more families keep their homes.

III. Taxpayer Protection

Taxpayers should not be expected to pay for Wall Street’s mistakes. The legislation requires companies that sell some of their bad assets to the government to provide warrants so that taxpayers will benefit from any future growth these companies may experience as a result of participation in this program. The legislation also requires the President to submit legislation that would cover any losses to taxpayers resulting from this program from financial institutions.

IV. No Windfalls for Executives

Executives who made bad decisions should not be allowed to dump their bad assets on the government, and then walk away with millions of dollars in bonuses. In order to participate in this program, companies will lose certain tax benefits and, in some cases, must limit executive pay. In addition, the bill limits “golden parachutes” and requires that unearned bonuses be returned.

V. Strong Oversight

Rather than giving the Treasury all the funds at once, the legislation gives the Treasury $250 billion immediately, then requires the President to certify that additional funds are needed ($100 billion, then $350 billion subject to Congressional disapproval). The Treasury must report on the use of the funds and the progress in addressing the crisis. EESA also establishes an Oversight Board so that the Treasury cannot act in an arbitrary manner. It also establishes a special inspector general to protect against waste, fraud and abuse

Here's a 6 page summary (pdf)

And here's the full bill (pdf)

I haven't had the chance to read it yet, so I won't pass judgment on it. I thought Bailout 1.0 was crap though, so we'll have to see...

update: The full bill is 109 pages. This is 109 pages of double spaced, large font, short sentences. I copied it over to word and took out the double spacing and made it a uniform 12 point font and it became 73 pages. The lines rarely go more than halfway across the page and each are preceded by a line number. There's also a lot of lines of blank space, dates, and filenames. If I took the time to edit this down to just the actual text, I would guess this thing fills no more than 30 or 40 pages.

update 2: There are a number of ugly provisions in this bill - including suspending FAS 157 - but it looks like the bill failed by a count of 228-205, so this might be moot.

You can't make this stuff up

So you know that solution to the financial crisis that Henry Paulson came up with? You know, the $700 Billion bailout plan? You would think that the $700B number would be based on financial models, forecasts, and actuarial analysis. At the very least, you'd think it was based on SOMETHING. Well, you'd be wrong:

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

Oh holy crap.... You seriously can't make this stuff up

Intrade Betting is Suspicious

FiveThirtyEight has an interesting look at some Intrade irregularities concerning the POTUS prediction market.

"It's pretty obvious that this is not some sort of random walk. Rather, every so often, some individual trader or some small group of traders are shorting all the Obama contacts in bulk and resetting the entire market. The markets then organically climb back upward until the rogue trader strikes again six or eight hours later. The volumes on these contracts have been very high for the past week as a result."

It's hard to summarize the whole post, so take 5 minutes and check it out.

Inflationtastic

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) just put out the September Producer Price Index data. "The Producer Price Index (PPI) program measures the average change over time in the selling prices received by domestic producers for their output." The BLS also puts out the Consumer Price Index, which is the "monthly data on changes in the prices paid by urban consumers for a representative basket of goods and services." However since I only have PPI data available in excel format, that's the one I looked at. (It's easier to parse than a pdf)

The first thing I noticed is that wheat has become a lot more expensive across all the categories:

Hard red spring wheat - up 218% over last year
Soft white wheat - up 204% over last year
Hard amber durum wheat - up 181% over last year

The list goes on and on, but I have no idea what the different types of wheat actually are. Has anyone noticed bread getting a lot more expensive?

Potatoes have also been hit especially hard:

Round white potatoes - up 241%
Round red potatoes - up 218%
Russet potatoes - up 135%

Food items seem to be the hardest hit across the board:

Tomatoes - up 167%
Celery - up 165%
Green peppers - up 139%
Cauliflower - up 136%

Other random stuff has increased significantly as well:

Iron and steel scrap - up 111%
Crude petroleum (domestic production) - up 106%
Fertilizer materials - up 95%
Sulfuric acid - up 50%

There are also just some bizarre stuff on the list:

Small arms ammunition - up 34%
Prefab metal buildings - up 32%
Slaughter ducks - up 32%
Reproduction of audio disks and video media - up 3%
Candles - up 8%
Fire extinguishers - up 25%
Burial caskets - up 5%
Blood and blood derivatives for human use - up 6%

Some things have also plummeted in price:
Dry onions - down 80%
Celery - down 78%
Lettuce - down 54%
Crabs - down 50%

Make of this what you will. I have no commentary to share, I'm just throwing some numbers out there...

New Wario Game For Wii

The game doesn't look like anything special, but this is a pretty nice piece of viral marketing:

http://www.youtube.com/experiencewii

The Persistence of Political Misperceptions

This is an interesting study, but since I'm lazy, I'll let the Washington Post summarize it for you:

"Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

A similar "backfire effect" also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.

In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might "argue back" against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same "backfire effect" when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration's stance on stem cell research."

You can read a PDF of the full report here. So the conclusion is that political lying works...and refuting the lies makes the lies worse? Well isn't that just reassuring... I guess I can stop sending out all those links to Snopes.com then.

Deja Vu

Last week, the Bi-partisan Alaska Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed 13 people in the Sarah Palin troopergate investigation. This week, the Republican Attorney General of Alaska said, "state employees would refuse to honor subpoenas in the case." 10 of the 13 people subpoenaed are state employees. Alberto Gonzalez has taught this guy well...

This is just ridiculous.

Yesterday the McCain campaign said that Palin wouldn't cooperate with this investigation because it was "tainted" by Obama operatives and it was a partisan witch hunt.

Really partisan witch hunt? I thought it was "bipartisan consensus, formed by a unanimous panel before Palin became McCain's running mate, that her firing of the state's public safety commissioner justified the ethical investigation."

If she has nothing to hide, she needs to let this investigation run its course. If she does have something to hide, she shouldn't be running for the second highest office in the land. We can't have, yet again, an administration who thinks that they're above the law.

edit: I do believe that Palin is meant to be a distraction from the real issues. I think the economic turmoil we're going through right now is a far bigger deal. It's just that, to write a post about the economy, AIG, Lehman, Phil Gramm, etc., I would need to write a really long post. Maybe I'll get around to doing that this weekend.

McCain's healthcare plan is a disaster

Health Affairs, the health policy journal, has published their analysis of John McCain's health insurance plan. In short, it's a terrible idea. You should really read the whole thing, but here's some tidbits:

Their one sentence summary:

Achieving John McCain's vision would radically transform the U.S. health insurance landscape, with negligible gains in numbers of covered Americans, and an expected decline within five years.

Their abstract:

Senator John McCain's (R-AZ) health plan would eliminate the current tax exclusion of employer payments for health coverage, replace the exclusion with a refundable tax credit for those who purchase coverage, and encourage Americans to move to a national market for nongroup insurance. Middle-range estimates suggest that initially this change will have little impact on the number of uninsured people, although within five years this number will likely grow as the value of the tax credit falls relative to rising health care costs. Moving toward a relatively unregulated nongroup market will tend to raise costs, reduce the generosity of benefits, and leave people with fewer consumer protections.

A couple of key quotes:

The main effect of establishing a national market would be to undo state laws designed to establish minimum levels of coverage and protect consumers. In a national market where state licenses are not required, insurers will charter in places where regulations are scarce--much like credit card companies do today. As a result, people guaranteed basic benefits today would find those benefits eliminated under the McCain plan. People in most states would lose access to procedural protections, such as requirements that disputed decisions by managed care plans be subject to external review. People also would lose access to many benefit protections. For example, forty-seven states now require mental health parity, forty-nine states require coverage of breast cancer reconstructive surgery, and twenty-nine require coverage of cervical cancer screening. All of these requirements--as well as regulations in several states that limit the rates that can be charged to higher-cost consumers and that limit who can be excluded from a health plan--would be eliminated under the McCain plan. Without legal requirements in place, plans would no longer offer these benefits at all in many markets, even if many consumers want them.

[I]nitially there would be no real change in the number of people covered as a result of the McCain plan. However, people are likely to have far less generous policies than those they have today.

His plan would see deregulation of health care and make it harder for people with pre-existing conditions to get coverage. His plan would make employer-provided health care a taxable expense. His plan would mean less people with health insurance. His plan would mean that people who do have coverage would receive worse coverage. I'm struggling to find anything good with his idea...

Great Garrison Keillor Article

Garrison Keillor, of A Prairie Home Companion, wrote a great, snarky article about McCain-Palin.

So the Republicans have decided to run against themselves. The bums have tiptoed out the back door and circled around to the front and started yelling, “Throw the bums out!” They’ve been running Washington like a well-oiled machine to the point of inviting lobbyists into the back rooms to write the legislation, and now they are anti-establishment reformers dedicated to delivering us from themselves. And Mayor Giuliani is an advocate for small-town America. Bravo.

Read the rest here.

Hurricawesome

A look at voting systems

Ron Paul held a press conference today extolling the virtues of third party candidates, but the American two-party system doesn't give them much of a chance. Our system of voting isn't the only option though. Here's a quick rundown of the various options (brought to you completely by wikipedia) :

Plurality Voting: This is what we have now. It's a winner-take-all system. The only real advantage to this system of voting is that it preserves the one person, one vote principle. I'm not entirely convinced that's an advantage, but who am I to argue with wikipedia? The disadvantages are far stronger. The most obvious one is, Duverger's Law, which we can also call Nader's Law. The winner-take-all system inevitably leads to our two-party problem and no one can vote for a third candidate for fear of electing the person they like the least.

Approval Voting: In this system, "each voter may vote for (approve of) as many of the candidates as they wish. The winner is the candidate receiving the most votes. Each voter may vote for any combination of candidates and may give each candidate at most one vote." With this system, Floridians could have voted for Nader without taking votes away from Gore.

Range Voting: Range Voting is similar to approval voting, but rather than a straight yes or no, voters can give a score to the respective candidates. The candidate receiving the most points wins. To use our 2000 example, if a voter really liked Gore, they could give him the maximum score. (Let's say 99) If they also liked Nader, but not as much as Gore, they could give him a 75. If they didn't like Bush at all, they would give him a 0. This system allows people to vote with a much higher degree of detail. It also complicates the system, though, as voters have to figure out how many points to assign to each candidate. There's also the issue of the hanging chads - if people couldn't even handle punching a piece of paper, how are they going to handle an intricate scoring system?

Borda Voting: In this system, "voters rank candidates in order of preference. The Borda count determines the winner of an election by giving each candidate a certain number of points corresponding to the position in which he or she is ranked by each voter. Once all votes have been counted the candidate with the most points is the winner. Because it sometimes elects broadly acceptable candidates, rather than those preferred by the majority, the Borda count is often described as a consensus-based electoral system, rather than a majoritarian one." This is just like range voting, but you get less expression in how much you like or dislike a candidate. This system would also get confusing if there were too many candidates.

Condorcet Voting: This system is a little confusing just to understand, so I'm not sure how well it would catch on in the real world. Voters rank the candidates like in a Borda system and "the count is conducted by pitting every candidate against every other candidate in a series of imaginary one-on-one contests. The winner of each pairing is the candidate preferred by a majority of voters. The candidate preferred by each voter is taken to be the one in the pair that the voter ranks highest on their ballot paper. For example, if Alice is paired against Bob it is necessary to count both the number of voters who have ranked Alice higher than Bob, and the number who have ranked Bob higher than Alice. If Alice is preferred by more voters then she is the winner of that pairing. When all possible pairings of candidates have been considered, if one candidate beats every other candidate in these contests then they are declared the Condorcet winner."

Instant-Runoff Voting: Again, voters rank their candidate choices like in Borda. " If no candidate receives a majority of first preference rankings, the candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated and that candidate's votes [are] redistributed to the voters' next preferences among the remaining candidates. This process is repeated until one candidate has a majority of votes among candidates not eliminated. The term "instant runoff" is used because IRV is said to simulate a series of run-off elections tallied in rounds, as in an exhaustive ballot election." The IRV system is used in Australia, Ireland, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and other places around the world. IRV can produce some wonky results though. "Like all runoff processes with forced elimination, Instant runoff voting fails the Monotonicity criterion. In certain scenarios, raising the rank of a winning candidate on some ballots, which originally had ranked that candidate last, could counter-intuitively result in the winning candidate becoming a loser."

For colorful charts and simulations, check out http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

Fun With Flags

The Union Jack, the flag of the United Kingdom, is a pretty well known symbol, but do you know where it comes from? This might be common knowledge, but I had no idea and I found it interesting...


From wikipedia

Stop, Hammertime!

What's the deal with crazies attacking sleeping people with Ipods? A couple months ago, there was the kid who was decapitated on the greyhound bus in Canada. Now it's a guy on the subway in Philly? It's amazing that this guy survived though, and even more amazing that he was able to get himself to the hospital. He's going to have one heck of a story to tell at parties...

Electoral Fun

I just came across 270 to win, which is a great website for playing around with possible electoral votes. You can view the country from all sorts of different starting points and then flip the states back and forth to see the outcome. It automatically counts electoral votes, possible routes to victory, probabilities, and historical facts.

You can also view the electoral maps and election facts going all the way back to the beginning - the election of 1789. Did you know that in the election of 1792, George Washington received 132 electoral votes, but George Clinton received 50? This country could have ended up a completely different place with P-Funk as a founding father...

Next Up: Taxes

In this campaign, there's been a lot of talk about taxes, but it's really hard to get to the bottom of the candidates' actual intentions. I watched both conventions and heard Obama and McCain talk about their tax plans, but then when I went to their respective websites, I was unable to find details of what they had mentioned. So far, the best source of information that I've been able to find is the Tax Policy Center. "The Tax Policy Center is a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. The Center is made up of nationally recognized experts in tax, budget, and social policy who have served at the highest levels of government."

Tax is a subject that I hold near and dear, but I understand that most people's eyes tend to glaze over before they finish the first paragraph on tax policy. I'll try to keep it simple and concise, but if you want more detailed analysis, check out the Tax Policy Center's report here. (It's 58 pages, but worth reading) Unless I say otherwise, the TPC's report is my source for all facts and figures in my discussion.

First off, I keep hearing the Republicans say that Obama wants to spend and spend without having any way of paying for it. McCain wants to cut taxes pretty radically too, but I haven't heard many people make the same complaint about him. So what's the truth? Well, to put it simply, both candidates want to cut taxes and spend, but neither one has a real plan to pay for it. How much each plan is going to cost depends on how you want to measure it, but using the Congressional Budget Office's measurement comes out with Obama's plan adding $3.5 trillion in debt, while McCain's plan adds $5 trillion.

Another hot button issue I keep hearing mentioned is the estate tax. (You may also know it as the "death tax" since this term gets thrown around for dramatic effect.) Under the current Bush law, the estate tax is being phased out each year until it is completely repealed in 2010. Then, in 2011, it comes back as it was before Bush's changes. The first $1M is tax free, everything thereafter is taxed at 55%* So even if neither candidate made any changes to the estate tax, your first $1M of inheritance would be tax free. That's probably enough to reassure most people, but just in case you're in line to receive a hefty sum, I'll continue. Obama's plan calls for the first $3.5M to be tax free, with a rate of 45% thereafter. McCain's plan would make the first $5M tax free with a rate of 15% thereafter. These hefty exemption amounts mean that pretty much everyone in America will be free from the estate tax. McCain's estate tax will only hit about 4,000 estates (or the top 0.2%) and Obama's will only hit about 8,000 (or the top 0.3%).

Now that we've established that both candidate's plans lead to an increase in debt and that neither one is going to rob you of your inheritance, let's get down to what you really care about - how is your yearly tax bill going to change? McCain and Obama have very different strategies, but for simplicity's sake, I'll cut to the bottom line. In a nutshell, Obama wants to tax the top 1% and to give tax breaks to everyone else (with the biggest benefits going to the poorest Americans). McCain wants to give tax breaks to everyone (with the biggest benefits going to the richest Americans).

Here's a couple of charts I put together using the information from the TPC report. They both show the average net change in after-tax income by percentile. In other words, positive numbers are good for your bottom line and negative numbers are bad. The first chart shows the situation in 2009 and the second shows 2012. The reason for the difference is that some of each candidate's changes phase in or phase out over time.

And in case you were wondering, the percentiles are as follows:

Percentile	Income
20%	18,981
40%	37,595
60%	66,354
80%	111,645
90%	160,972
95%	226,918
99%	603,402
99.9%	2,871,682

As you can see, on average, unless you're making some serious money, neither candidate is planning to raise your taxes.

There's a lot more to these two tax plans, but I just wanted to cover a few key issues to clear up the confusion and "mis-truths" that have been floating around. If you want more information, I suggest that you read the TPC report that I linked to above.

I tried to keep my opinions out of this analysis and simply present the facts (as determined by the TPC). I'm actually pretty critical of both candidate's plans, but I'll save that criticism for another day.

* This phase out, repeal, restore policy leads to a potential problem. Imagine for a moment that an elderly patriarch is worth, say $100M. If he dies in 2010, his beneficiaries get this $100M estate tax free. If he dies in 2011, his beneficiaries get around $45M after taxes. I'm not saying that anyone would kill their parent/grandparent for $55M, but that patriarch may want to watch his back in 2010.

Fine, have some more...

Since people are saying the candidates' families are off limits and since people don't seem to care about the overwhelming hypocrisy related to all this, I'll go ahead and stick to the purely political issues here.  There are certainly enough things wrong with Sarah Palin that I don't even need to mention her children.

1. See my last post about Troopergate.  Sarah Palin has shown that she has no problem abusing her power.  She's currently under investigation and the findings are supposed to be released four days before the election.  The Alaskan State Senator running the investigation is claiming that McCain is trying to stall his progress.  Big surprise there.  

2. See also my last post about Palin's firing of the Wasilla police chief.  Again, she's shown that she's willing to throw her power around for personal gain.

3. See my last post one more time for reference to Palin's support for Ted Stevens.  If you don't know anything about Stevens, check out his wikipedia page.  The section on his ethical issues and federal investigations is six paragraphs long.  There's plenty of dirt there.

4. And speaking of Stevens, it's interesting that Palin claims to be against Washington business as usual.  She claims that she's opposed to the Congressional pork that Stevens is known for and that McCain is actively campaigning about.  There's just one problem -  She's not.  When she was Mayor of Wasilla, the town of 6,700, she "employed a lobbying firm to secure $26.9 million in federal earmarks." Why does a little town of 6,700 in rural Alaska need nearly $27 million in federal funds?  $15 million of it went to a rail project to connect Wasilla with Girdwood, the

home town of Ted Stevens. (Girdwood has a population of around 2,000.)

5. Sarah Palin wanted to use her mayoral powers to ban books from the Wasilla library because they had "inappropriate language" in them.  Seriously.  When the librarian rightfully refused, Palin threatened to fire her.  Good old book banning with a side of abuse of power.

So there you go, 5 baby-free reasons that Sarah Palin really shouldn't be our nation's second in command.

This election has become a well-cast reality show

For now, let's forget about Hillary' s journey from shoe-in Democrat dynasty queen to lowly railbird. Let's forget about the fact that Joe Biden's family was killed in a horrific car accident prior to his inauguration and forget about his daily commute to Delaware. Let's forget about Barack's rapid ascent from party newbie to party leader and forget his historic position as potentially the first black President. Let's forget about McCain's time as a POW and forget his bizarre second marriage circumstances. Let's focus this week's episode on Sarah Palin. Of all the craziness that is election 2008, Sarah Palin leads the pack in Maury-esque nuttiness.

The announcement of Palin as McCain's VP took the country by surprise. She was the unknown Governor of Alaska - a state with less of a population than Columbus, OH. So who is Sarah Palin and how did she end up in a position to possibly become the second most powerful person in America? For brevity's sake, I'm going to put this little history into bullet-point form:

• In 1982, she began her college days at Hawaii Pacific College in Honolulu majoring in Business Administration.
• In 1983, she transferred to North Idaho College. At some point thereafter, she transferred again to the University of Idaho.
• In 1984, she won the Miss Wasilla beauty pageant and went on to take second place in the Miss Alaska competition.
  
• In 1987, she received her BS in communications-journalism from the University of Idaho. She minored in political science.
• Palin worked as a sports caster for KTUU-TV in Anchorage before being elected to the Wasilla city council in 1992.
  
• In 1996, she was elected Mayor of Wasilla, a town of about 6,000 people.
• Shortly after taking office, Palin fired the Wasilla police chief for not supporting her campaign for Mayor. Local residents formed a group called Concerned Citizens for Wasilla to organize a recall campaign, but it never came to fruition. The police chief sued for wrongful termination, but the court ruled that Palin had the right to fire him even if it was for her own political reasons.
• In 2002, when term limits forced her out of the mayor's office, she unsuccessfully ran for Lieutenant Governor of Alaska.
• She then went on to chair the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in 2003 and 2004.
• During the same period she served as director of Ted Steven's 527 group, "Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc." (Yes, that's the Ted Stevens recently indicted on 7 counts of corruption)
  
• In 2006, with Ted Steven's endorsement, Palin was elected Governor of Alaska.

So there you have it. That brings us up to the present. Now's let's run through the list of crazy.

1. Let's go back to her time as Mayor of Wasilla. She fired the police chief because he wouldn't support her political campaign. Sound familiar? She would fit in really well in Washington when it came time to fire US Attorneys for political reasons.

2. Troopergate. On July 11, 2008, Palin dismissed the Alaska Public Safety Commissioner, Walter Monegan. This wouldn't normally be news, but Monegan claimed that he was dismissed in retaliation for his reluctance to fire Palin’s former brother-in-law, Alaska State Trooper Mike Wooten. Palin denied that there had been any pressure on Monegan to fire Wooten from her or anyone in her administration. Case closed then right? Who are we going to believe, the disgruntled former employee or the highest state official? She later disclosed that her staff had contacted Monegan or his staff about two dozen times regarding Wooten, including many from her chief of staff. Awesome. She's again proving that she would fit in with Washington's Republicans. She seems to have no problem lying through her teeth to her constituents. An investigation of the Monegan dismissal, currently being conducted by an independent investigator hired by the Republican Alaska Legislature, should be completed in October.

3. Babygate I. Palin has five children - Track (19), Bristol (17), Willow (14), Piper (7), and Trig (4 months). Trig is the child at the center of Babygate I. Shortly after Trig was born, (and still long before anyone considered Palin a VP contender) speculation began that Trig was actually Bristol's baby. This post was made to Reddit, the social news site, 4 months ago. Rumor has it that Bristol gave birth to Trig, but Sarah pretended to birth him herself in order to protect her. Pictures floated around showing Sarah Palin looking skinny while Bristol had a mysterious baby bump. Official Alaskan government websites were mysteriously wiped clean and pictures were deleted. There was obviously something going on, but it was all speculation, so let's turn to a more reliable source, the Anchorage Daily News.

The article says that Palin was in Texas for an energy conference of the National Governors Association when she experienced signs of early labor. "Palin said she felt fine but had leaked amniotic fluid and also felt some contractions. "

So she headed immediately for the hospital, right?

""I said I am going to stay for the day. I have a speech I was determined to give," Palin said. She gave the luncheon keynote address for the energy conference."

Are you kidding me? She was leaking amniotic fluid as she was delivering the keynote address? She went right to the hospital after the speech then, right?

"After the speech, Palin flew from Dallas to Anchorage, stopping in Seattle."

What?! She was leaking amniotic fluid, she was having contractions, and she was flying cross-country? Am I just overreacting or is that nuts?

"A Sacramento, CA obstetrician who is active in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said when a pregnant woman's water breaks, she should go right to the hospital because of the risk of infection. That's true even if the amniotic fluid simply leaks out, said Dr. Laurie Gregg."

So what does the airline think about all this?

""Palin was very pleasant to the gate agents and flight attendants, as always," [spokeswoman Caroline Boren] said. "The stage of her pregnancy was not apparent by observation. She did not show any signs of distress."

So she had been leaking fluids and having contractions for hours, she was about to give birth, and the airline couldn't even tell anything was out of the ordinary? "They landed in Anchorage around 10:30 p.m. Thursday and an hour later were at the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center in Wasilla." Why on earth did she delay for nearly 24 hours before she went to a hospital? "Palin said she wanted him born in Alaska."

No, this is just ridiculous. We have two options here. Option 1 is that her teenage daughter had an illegitimate child and Sarah Palin lied to pretty much everyone and plans to raise the child as her own. This would go against her uber-Christian values of abstinence before marriage, this would go against the Honor Thy Mother and Father commandment, and it would be seriously freaking crazy for an elected official to take part in such a ridiculous ruse, not to mention the fact that this poor child would never know his true mother.

Option 2 is that Trig really is Sarah Palin's child - Sarah Palin just doesn't seem to care about his well-being. She risked his (and her own life) by flying after her water broke. She wanted to deliver a keynote address rather than seek medical assistance. She wanted to fly across the country and delay medical attention by nearly a day so that Trig could be a native Alaskan. I'm not sure which option is worse. Either way though, this seems like a big deal.

4. Babygate II. In the midst of Babygate I, Palin announces that her daughter Bristol, famous from Babygate I, is 7 months pregnant. They say that she made the announcement to put an end to the rumors of Babygate I. Now we have to go through some more options.

Option 1. Bristol was really the mother of Trig. Bristol isn't really even pregnant right now. We have to wait and see if she "miscarries" in the next few weeks.

Option 2. Bristol was really the mother of Trig. Bristol is also really the mother of - let's call him /her Freedom Palin because they all have such stupid names and Freedom sounds like a name they'd give it. She's really pregnant with Freedom, but she's actually 2 or 3 months pregnant, not 5.

Option 3. The most likely scenario - Sarah really gave birth to Trig and Bristol is really pregnant with Freedom. In this case, Sarah Palin really is the negligent mother who risked her baby's health to deliver a speech in Texas. She really did go against conventional medical wisdom in order for Trig to be a native Alaskan. Bristol Palin is the 17 year-old, unwed mother who goes against much of what Sarah Palin and the Republican party believe in. Trig and Freedom are going to end up going to school together. It'll be cute when they sit next to each other on the first day of school...Freedom Palin and his uncle Trig can help each other with their math homework.

See how ridiculous this is? It doesn't matter what the truth is at this point because Sarah Palin is piling on the scandals. No one is disputing the fact that she supported the corrupt Ted Stevens, no one is disputing the fact that she's under investigation for an ethics violation as Governor, and no one is disputing the fact that she fired a police chief for political reasons. But since American voters don't seem to care about actual issues like this, they have a pair of baby scandals to hold their attention. Even in the Republican's best case scenario, Sarah Palin proved that she's a negligent mother. Sarah Palin has proven that her abstinence-only education idea doesn't work.

So what does the Republican base, the religious right, think about all this? Lucky for us, we can see what they said about Jamie Lynn Spears just a few months ago. It was basically the same situation, so they should be reacting in a similar fashion. The Voice magazine, a conservative Christian publication, called it a "breakdown of good role models for our nation’s teenage girls." One of their readers posted a comment saying that she would boycott Nickelodeon if they promoted tolerance towards teenage mothers. So then is she going to boycott John McCain's presidential bid? What about the right's beloved Bill O'Reilly? "On the pinhead front, 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant. The sister of Britney says she is shocked. I bet. Now most teens are pinheads in some ways. But here the blame falls primarily on the parents of the girl, who obviously have little control over her..." I'm sure he's blaming Sarah Palin for this then, right? I could go on, but you have google too. If you want more examples, there are hundreds of them out there.

What it comes down to is this. No, I don't think politicians' personal and family lives should be in the public eye. Ordinarily. In this case, however, Sarah Palin feels that the government should regulate our personal lives and our family lives. She's strictly anti-abortion, even in the case of incest and rape. She believes in abstinence-only education. If these policies don't even work for her own family, how are they going to work for the country as a whole? She claims that she represents family values, so let's see how her values work in her own home. And even if you just can't bring yourself to peer into someone's personal life, focus on her public scandals. There's too much here to ignore.