Thigh Me a River

As before noted – lefty, ms. cyn? – panty-hose with shorts and sneakers? I don’t think so. Fitness? As if. Oh, and someone should teach this woman how to bevel. I mean, srsly.

Yes, cause Sarah Palin is all about substance, intelligence, integrity and emotional strength to overcome problems.

@Benedick: Oh, the pantyhose in this picture is the bane of my existence. Not to mention, real runners don’t go jogging with a full face of makeup that has been spatulaed on and the hair down.

And that US flag is treated with such respect there. I’m surprised she didn’t rip her clothes off and roll around nekkid wrapped in the flag.

you know
I was watching morning joe this morning while the dogs ate and there was an african american journalist woman who supposedly was present at the Oprah interview who was/is a huge Obama fan relating how she came in with all these opinions about Palin but doggoneit when she met her she was just so darn likeable. ‘you just can help but like her!’

Bush in a dress. Im tellin ya.

@Capt Howdy:
It’s not like that Sarah is a grossly incompetent female Snively Whiplash. She got pregnant 4 times. She got elected by Alaska.

Pretteh people do have an advantage. Sarah’s likeable in the same way puppies and babies are likeable. Doesn’t mean I want to vote for her.

@SanFranLefty:

The nekkid flag-rolling is doubtless only available on the b-roll, with exclusive distribution to the RNC and friends.

@ManchuCandidate:
I’m sure she’s a very nice person when the cameras are rolling and the conversation is going as planned – so was Hitler in the old movies from the Eagle’s Nest. Unfortunately, I’m sure the bugfuck insane is still there, just bubbling beneath the surface.

@ManchuCandidate:
please dont misunderstand. I am neither suggesting that I would or you should vote for her. I am only suggesting that others will.
you or me would never have considered voting for Bush either.
seriously, I spend some time at TalkLeft. which is mostly a leftish blog. but it is shocking how many people (not just women but mostly) there like and defend this woman.
and as for that statistic that 60% of people think she is unqualified to be president. I think its meaningless. by the time this book tour is over she will be in positive territory and number one in the republican presidential numbers.
that doesnt mean either that she will win the nomination or the presidency. but IMO we dismiss this person at our peril.

was anyone lucky enough to catch the Leonids last night.

That she would pose like that for any magazine, in connection with any topic, is the problem. That she lies, constantly, about all things great and small, for no reason and any reason, is the problem.

@Capt Howdy:
TalkLeft is a PUMA (disgruntled Hils Clinton supporters) homestead. Not surprised.

@ManchuCandidate:
well actually many (actually pretty much all of the real “out” pumas. they were made to know they were not welcome) of the real pumas left during the primaries and never came back.
but that is precisely my point. pumas are the ones we should be worried about. they are not really that few in number.
when you combine the pumas with the right wing crazies (which is who she wrote this book for, see creationism discussion) she has a base.
if the question is do you think she could win the presidency I think its doubtful but not impossible. every time you think she is to stupid think George W Bush. on the other hand I think it is entirely possible she could win the nomination. she is tapping into a wave of anti government sentiment out there that no other republican has shown any ability to tap into. the wave is real. the question is how big is it. and of course the other question is how dispirited and discouraged the democrat base will be by the 2010 and 2012 elections.

tas all Im sayin.

Hey, here is a great essay on Palin from The Nation: http://www.alternet.org/story/143922?page=entire

@Prommie:
I agree. a very astute piece.

@Prommie:

Those of us who reside in the parts of America Palin regards as unreal may secretly enjoy watching the bubble bounce along, relishing her run-on sentences and looney-tunes lines. But the more we chuckle, the more indignant and impassioned the Palin army becomes.

I would add one thing to that. they will not just love her more the more we hate her they will love her BECAUSE we hate her.
that was one of the things Bush supporters loved the most. the fact that “we” couldnt even stand to hear him speak. he was “one of us, in their face”. and that is just how they see her.

@Capt Howdy:
That number shrank down to 25% if I recall.

As for Palin, she will have her successes, but she will fail at the moment of truth when her delusion, lack of awareness/talent/endurance and greed will trip her up like they did when she was Gub of Alaska.

I don’t care. She can’t be the Reptilicon choice because she lacks the one essential for a president: a penis. (also a full head of hair, but he’s got that) She could only ever be a veep.

But srsly. If she’s gonna pull that crap she better learn to bevel. What the hell are they teaching at cheerleader camp anyhow?

@Benedick:
I actually always thought the first female president would be a republican.

but then I also thought the first african american president would probably be a republican.

Palin on vegetarianism:

“If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore: If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?”

I love meat. I eat pork chops, thick bacon burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou. I always remind people from outside our state that there’s plenty of room for all Alaska’s animals—right next to the mashed potatoes.

via digby

@Capt Howdy: You’re not serious about this quote, are you?

@Benedick:

sadly I am

She grosses me out so badly that I can’t even bring myself to make any jokes about having sex with her. Ugh.

@Capt Howdy: I could pick up on the I love meat/Levi aspect but don’t want to get Catt too excited. You know how he gets.

But as a long-term vegetarian this really does gross me out. Not the eating meat part, because I don’t do it doesn’t mean others shouldn’t, but the vile bragging attitude. Not that one is surprised but still. Thank you John McCain.

I have to go now and feed the dogs meat. They love it too. But steaming hunks of it. Any kind of meat. Just so there’s lots of it. Thick and juicy.

@Benedick:

If God didn’t want me to eat Levi Johnson, why did he make him out of meat?

@Tommmcatt is hunkered down in the trenches: Exactly.

@Capt Howdy: The only personable Democrat who lost in my lifetime was Humphrey. Even Gore won the popular vote.

Plus, Reagan and Bush were two-term governors of major states. Reagan in particular was in the public eye 35 years before he was elected president.

It’s like comparisons to the congressional elections of 1994: it falls apart in the details.

@nojo:
never underestimate the stupidity of the american voting public, one, and two, they have become even more stupid since Reagan.

seriously, you have met these people, right? can you honestly say they care if she was a two term governor or not?

one other thing. if they fuck up this health care reform thing I seriously think Obama is a one termer. it doesnt matter who the republican nominee is.

btw
there are other possibilities I find even more frightening than her. Haley Barbour for one. either of them would make the Bush years seem like the age of enlightenment

@Tommmcatt is hunkered down in the trenches:
speaking of God:

The Evolution of the God Gene

This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.

@Capt Howdy: Reagan taught me all about electoral stupidity — that was my touchstone last fall. I know very well that This idiot is gonna win feeling, and I didn’t feel it last year.

And no, I’m not saying that Ronnie and the MBA President ran on their resumes. I’m saying that as twice-elected governors of major states, they were proven electoral commodities — they had shown they were capable of winning major elections. Alaska’s population is 686,293. Portland, Oregon, has 557,706 souls. Not including the burbs.

Yes, Palin has a very excitable reality-challenged base. But it’s Huckabee who has the most to fear from her, not the Demrats, and even then I’m not so certain. We’ve seen her campaign for less than ten weeks, and tank her ticket in the process. We haven’t seen her run the endurance race that is the primary season.

You notice that the Talibunny’s jogging outfit uses exactly the same colors as a Nazi SS uniform: red, the color of sudden violence and black, the color of sexual betrayal. What is she trying to say?

@nojo:
I dont disagree with a word of that. all Im sayin is she has “got it”.
what she does with it is an open question. but IMO she has it.

and certainly I agree that winning the primary would be a lot easier for her than the election but there is something happening out there. maybe its because hes black or because he is a democrat they cant destroy the way they did Clinton but there is something strange going on out in the country and I think we are in very dangerous and unpredictable times.

meet some Palin voters

via Bruno

@Capt Howdy: Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection.

Pet peeve time.

No one ever gets this right. Natural selection doesn’t select in favor of things, it selects against them.

If religion got you killed before you could breed, it would be selected out. If religion didn’t get you killed before you could breed, it wouldn’t be selected out. It’s as simple as that. This may have the appearance of being some kind of affirmative selection, but it isn’t. The choice is exclusionary, and binary: does it kill you before your genes propagate themselves, or not?

There’s an argument to be made that positive attributes allow you to live longer or something, but it has to be argued with the understanding that natural selection also enthusiastically approves of every dipshit mutation that’s totally worthless but didn’t/doesn’t get humans dead before spawning.

ADD: Just reviewed that last paragraph, and I’m not calling out religion as a “dipshit mutation.” I’m just saying that we can’t call religion a good thing “because evolution favors it.” It’s not a rational argument.

@nojo: DC has nearly 600,000 people and our governor… oh, wait…

@IanJ: Speaking of Darwinian pet peeves…

Years ago — alas, I’ve never bothered to confirm this — I learned it was survival of the fit. Which made a lot more sense: You didn’t need to be best of breed, just hold out long enough to reproduce.

@IanJ:

Would the converse (or is it the reverse?) argument be true, then? In other words, does a lack of a propensity toward religious behavior get you killed before you can breed?

@Capt Howdy: Yes, the “it” she has — we all saw it the night of her convention speech, even if she was reading somebody else’s words. (Her career as a sock puppet started early.)

Happily, the it she doesn’t have is strategic planning. She could be very formidable if she did her homework.

@Tommmcatt is hunkered down in the trenches: Oh, make me dredge up Julian Jaynes, why don’tcha…

His argument is that religion is a function of language — the two developed concurrently, and intertwined. That would move us critters quite far along the evolutionary chain, well into our sapienism. All the heavy lifting of survival preceded it.

@IanJ: @Tommmcatt is hunkered down in the trenches: @nojo:
I was reading something the other day about sexual selection and the human mind. I will see if I can find it. but it basically said that our entire consciousness is the result of sexual selection. which does not necessarily or even usually produce the same things that other natural selection does. the writer used the example of a peacocks tail. it has no evolutionary value at all. in fact it can have the opposite effect of making the animal easier to catch but there it is. he thinks our expanded mind is more or less the same phenom. having all the phobias and complexes we have that come with an expanded awarness of ourselves does not help us.
but it may make us more sexy.
maybe the same is true with religion.

@nojo:

That thesis would mean that evolution no longer applies to us, right? As our ability to think and self-reflect has put us in a place where survival is no longer determined by physical characteristics.

@Capt Howdy: Sexual selection is the forgotten selection. Animals compete with other species to survive, but they compete within their species to mate. Sexual selection gets you all the completely bizarre effects of evolution, things like peacock’s tails, bowerbird nests, and diamond rings and Ferraris. In many species, as with peoples (except in religious cutlures that ensaleve women), females do the choosing, males are often bigger not so they can run down and rape the females, no, its so they can conquer all the other males, run for the most touchdowns, and attract the cheerleaders.

@Tommmcatt is hunkered down in the trenches: Sadly, no. Thinking overmuch is not a great survival skill. Teh stupids vastly out-reproduce the smart. And evolution cannot ever not apply to us, only the factors exerting evolutionary pressure will change.

@Prommie:
somehow I can see religion figuring into this

@mellbell: “DC has nearly 600,000 people and our governor… oh, wait…”

I enjoyed seeing last week that D.C. has taken the “Taxation Without Representation” up a notch beyond the license plates and now has that digital display outside the City Hall (or whatever it’s called – the Wilson Building over on 14th & Pennsylvania across from the Willard Hotel) that shows the ever-growing amount of federal taxes paid by DC citizens.

@Capt Howdy:

this is the guy I was reading

SEXUAL SELECTION AND THE MIND

One of the great surprises for David Buss, one of the leading evolutionary psychologists studying mate choice, was that when he did his wonderful study in the late ’80s of sexual preferences in 37 cultures all around the world, giving questionnaires to 16,000 subjects that just span all sorts of cultures with all sorts of languages with different traditions and different histories, he found that in every culture, the top two most desired traits in a mate, for both sexes, were kindness and intelligence.

(cute too)

@Tommmcatt is hunkered down in the trenches: does a lack of a propensity toward religious behavior get you killed before you can breed?

Not necessarily, but maybe. The thing about natural selection, like I said, is that you can only use it to explain how traits that fail are not propagated. Propensity toward religion could be anywhere on the scale from my poorly phrased “dipshit mutation” to “absolutely required.” That can’t be determined by invoking natural selection. All we know is that religion didn’t get selected out, although its presence in all human cultures says that it was a trait that came up very early in our evolution.

@nojo: survival of the fit

Pretty much. If it really were survival of the fittest, and not merely survival of those fit enough to get to breeding before croaking, we would now be a race of nearly identical supermen, or at most a handful of different lines of similarly perfect supermen. Interesting (if somewhat creepy) idea for a scifi story, actually.

@IanJ:
so
would sexual selection work in the opposite way? that is, not that traits that fail are NOT propagated but that traits that succeed ARE propagated?

larger tails. better bowers. bigger antlers. more sensitive?

@Capt Howdy: I dunno, I’ve never spent any time pondering sexual selection. All this natural selection peevishness came about because I’ve actually spent hours thinking about how natural selection actually works.

It does seem, on the face of it, like sexual selection would tend to select for traits instead of against them.

@Tommmcatt is hunkered down in the trenches: Evolution definitely still in force, but primates aren’t the quickest developers in the chain. Not like, say, viruses.

@IanJ:
it does seem to work the opposite of natural selection. in a lot of ways.
often against the interest of the thing evolving. which brings us back to religion.
if that guy is correct and the single biggest trait desired across cultures is “kindness” I could totally see how religion could be sold as a trait of kindness even if in practice it does not necessarily have a thing to do with it.

I wonder how the pope would feel about existing because of sexual selection?

@Capt Howdy: @IanJ: It seems like the strategic difference of natural selection vs. sexual selection is one of genetic quantity. Natural selection works if you get to pass on your genes at all, but sexual selection works if you get to pass on your more of your genes than the other gal/guy. That may set them at slightly cross purposes (i.e. the peacock tail, which may get the male killed but also gets him more “tail”–you’re free to resent me for that terrible pun, BTW), but I don’t think it means that sexual selection works against evolution. After all, evolution simply describes the process of a species adapting to its environment, not necessarily improving.

Also, as one of the self-professing Jeebus-lovers here, I do have to confess that it’s been kind of exciting to follow a thread about how religion may be sexy!

@flippin eck: Well, evolution describes the evolution (bad definition: includes defined word) of a species, not necessarily to fit their environment. Evolution also deals with random mutations, which may or may not prove fatal to the mutated individual.

On a different topic, if the most valued traits in a mate are “kindness” and “intelligence” why do the douchebags get so many hot chicks?

@IanJ:
granted this is not my area of expertise but I think women often date douchebags and marry the nice guy

as illustrated by this commercial

@IanJ: Also, said “hot” chicks are, in my experience, neither kind nor intelligent.

@IanJ:
I don’t blame you for feeling this way, but I’m with MellBell here.

In a lot of ways, those douchebags are doing you a favor.

@Capt Howdy: Now now, you are anthropomorphizing, evolution does not mean improvement, nor does natural selection mean someone or something is choosing something better, there is no positive and negative. Its just a drift in gene frequency based on random mutations which either increase or decrease the likelihood of passing on your genes.

@Capt Howdy: And yes, kindness and cooperation are positive traits in a species that lives in groups, tribes, or societies. I beleive “morality” is clearly genetic, we have an instinctive reaction of disgust to what we percieve as ‘wrong” when done to a member of our group (not so much when done to another group). But I am not buying a “god” gene or a religion gene, you have to have a pretty wide definition of religion to say its hard-wired.

One thing though, simply as a matter of brain wiring and chemistry, its common for people to have a perception of another, that there is someone else with them, speaking to them, when their isn’t anyone; this could be behind the idea of God, prophecy and all that.

The number of schizophrenics who all literally believe that someone implanted a radio transmitter in them and is reading their thoughts is fucking amazing, a physical illness causes exactly the same thoughts in so many people.

@mellbell: But you are kind and intelligent!

I am blushing, I flirted, I could not resist it, but now I am embarrassed.

Also, their willingness to pose with douchebags does not mean they prefer them. Although recently, along certain stretches of the Jersey Shore, it has been noticed that many nubile young women between the ages of 17 and 25 – aka ‘hotts’ – have become overly sensitized to the scent of Axe Body Spray thereby rendering them temporarily free of self-respect.

@Prommie:

You are cute, Prommie, when it comes to women you are a 15-year-old boy.

@Prommie:
ftr
I am not saying it. it was the NYTimes. I just like the idea that the pope is the result of sexual selection.

also
maybe schizophrenics are not crazy at all but simply attuned to something the rest of us are not. science now knows that some 90 or more percent of the universe is invisible to us.
maybe they are sensing it or maybe they are an evolutionary mutation and just misunderstood.

or maybe they are crazy.

@Capt Howdy: It’s the latter. Trust me on this one.

@SanFranLefty: Just got my copy in the mail today. For the record, I don’t think she’s wearing pantyhose in that picture. It looks like she’s just greased up.

The real scandal, however, is the electric plug in the background (just under the question mark). Only the bottom plug has a baby proofer because, apparently, Trig can reach the lower plug but not the one two centimeters above it.

@Tommmcatt is hunkered down in the trenches: Oh, I am, I so am, and always have been. It was a curse, I assure you, I never once could get up the nerve to ask a girl out, in my life, unless I slept with her first. True fact.

I am a acutely tuned to and feel overwhelmingly the awesome power of womanhood, and I am helpless in its presence.

I wish I had film, I wish I had video, of me, on so many occasions in my 20s, even 30s, with an attractive woman that I was very much interested in, flagrantly hitting on me, and me standing there, looking at the floor, tugging my forelock and pawing the carpet with my foot, never actually able to bring myself to believe that a wonderful and attractive woman was hitting on me, dithering in fear until she finally gave up.

@Capt Howdy: @mellbell:

In truth, isn’t it both?

@Promnight:

Ah, Prom, that could have been me, but I learned, to my detriment, that not only did I know what boys wanted, I knew what they needed. So the terrible, terribly attractive young man I became could be all things to all people, you see? To this day, I am ashamed of the hearts I broke and the hopes I dashed- all because I was so very greedy.

Tommmcatt is the name I used to use online to pick up guys, you see. It should give you a clue what I was like.

Better far to have been awkward and shy, and to have let myself fall in love with just one. I learned that only five years ago. I love Mr. ‘Catt as I love my life, but my youth would have been better if I had learned that lesson earlier.

@mellbell, ManchuCandidate, Benedick: I feel absolutely no attraction to the aforementioned “hot chicks,” that was just my tongue-in-cheek way of calling out the potential inaccuracy of the “kind/intelligent” thing.

I agree that I would much rather those hot chicks just keep hanging out with their douchebags, and that the whole thing stay as far away from me as possible. I long ago learned that I am completely unattracted to women who are “hot” on the outside with nothing else going for them.