John McCain has selected Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate. Palin has served as governor of the one of the least populated states in the union for only 20 months. After months of hammering Democratic candidate Barack Obama (who has 12 years of state or national service) as being "inexperienced" and "not ready to be commander-in-chief", McCain has selected one of the least experienced politicians in the country. Now that's a colossal flip-flop even for the world-champion flip-flopper!

McCain only met Palin six months ago, spending less than one hour with her at the Governors Conference. This week he brought her to Arizona, and the two met for just the second time before McCain annointed her his running mate. Unbelievable! There is no conceivable way that McCain truly knows this person... and now he is selecting this self-described "hockey mom" to be "a heart-beat away" from becoming President of the United States of America.

Sarah Palin has less than two years experience at the state or national political level... as governor of a state with a smaller population than 11 U.S. cities! Is Sarah Palin really the best Republican in the entire United States to serve as McCain's VP? If so, WOW! This party really is in shambles.

Is this another bone-headed decision by McCain? You bet. In fact, this may be McCain's worst decision ever... and that's saying a lot!

It turns out Palin comes with a whole lot of baggage. On the plus side, Palin also comes with some notions that will put a chill into the corporatists who really rule the Republican Party. She slapped the oil companies operating in Alaska with a windfall profit tax that put $1200 into the pockets of Alaskan citizens (over and above the rougly $2000 per year that they get from their regular taxation of oil companies, which no other state gets to do. What the hell is wrong with you, Texas?). Before the windfall profit tax, she proposed giving Alaskans a $100 gasoline credit card, paid for by the oil companies. We say "Hooray" to these ideas... liberals are all about taxing corporations making obscene profits, as well as the fat cats at the tippy top of the pyramid stuffing their pockets with average Americans' dough. Now how about bringing that idea to the lower 48, Sarah? Is anyone in the media going to ask her about that?

We liberals definitely appreciate her spunk and spirit, and certainly her self-generated success (something the last two Republican presidential candidates have sorely lacked, being full-fledged "Daddy's boys"). Hey, maybe Democrats could love this Sarah Palin.

Well, maybe not. Hillary Clinton she does not remotely resemble.

This woman is an authentic right-wing nut-job... and mean, too (well, OK, that goes with being a right-wing nut-job).

As a Pentacostal, Sarah Palin will be very welcomed by the Radical-Right Christian fringe. She speaks in tongues, and believes Adam and Eve fed strawberries to Tyrannosaurus Rex 6,000 years ago. In her run for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (a non-partisan position), she brought rabid Hard Right Christian and Republican issues and tactics to the fore, highly politicizing and polarizing the small community, which had never seen the likes of it before. She has no use for gays and lesbians, whole-heartedly supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage (which would be the first and only constitutional amendment restricting the rights of a class of citizens). She believes creationism should be taught side-by-side with evolution in the science classroom (even though the former is pure religious dogma and the latter is proven scientific theory). Palin believes Adam and Eve lived side-by-side with Tyrannosaurus Rex six thousand years ago. She is against abortion, even in the case of rape or incest. As mayor, Palin tried to pressure the town librarian into banning books she decided weren't in keeping with the radical Christian ideology she promotes. She slashed funds for preventing teen pregnancies and for providing a safe-house where teen mothers without a family support system, which was before she found herself with a pregnant teen. She is a rabid anti-environmentalist, supporting drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, opposing listing polar bears as an endangered species (that might cost the oil companies a dollar in profit), and as governor has circumvented federal law (and even the will of the people of Alaska) by supporting aerial hunting of wolves and bears. Animal lovers, this is NOT a person you want anywhere near the White House (see video below).

Fiscal conservatives should be afraid, very afraid of Sarah Palin! Though she campaigned as a "fiscal conservative", during her six years as mayor she increased expenditures over 33%, slashed property taxes, but still managed to raise taxes overall by 38% (primarily through a regressive sales tax that taxed even food). As mayor, Palin inherited no debt, but left the town with a debt of $22 million! As governor, she requested hundreds of millions from the U.S. government in "earmarks" (pork projects). She also charged the citizens of Alaska so her husband could fly to Washington D.C. for the Governor's Conference, and rang up their tab again so the entire family could traipse around Alaska watching Todd Palin compete in snowmobile races.

John McCain has a well-deserved reputation as an opponent of "earmarks" (pork projects), but then he goes out and brings in the "Pork Princess" for his running mate!. McCain touts how Palin "killed" the "Bridge to Nowhere", the $230 million boondoggle that Alaskan Republican Senator Ted Stevens foisted upon the American tax-payers. Palin has repeated claimed that she said, "Thanks, but no thanks" to the bridge. But wait! Turns out Palin was for the bridge -- running on a "Build the Bridge" platform for governor -- before she was against the bridge, turning against the project after the national uproar had ensued (though she hasn't given the U.S. taxpayers' money back). As mayor, Palin took trip after trip to Washington to hijack YOUR tax dollars!... coming home with over $27 million from citizens in places like Alliance, Nebraska; Topeka, Kansas; Montgomery, Alabama; Kissimmee, Florida, and other communities all over America. That's over five thousand dollars of YOUR money for every person in Wasilla, Alaska. That's world-class porking! Sarah Palin was great for Wasilla, but bad for America.

"Country First"? Hardly. McCain claims to be a moderate and wants to reach across the political aisle, and then he chooses one the most radical right-wing Christian conservatives in the nation? That's sure to further polarize the nation. This is a cold-blooded political maneuver designed simply to appearl to the wacko Christian right and to women, two demographic groups McCain was having trouble with.

Mind you, McCain will become the oldest president ever elected, and already suffers from cancer and other ailments. At his age and physical condition, there is an ENHANCED possibility that McCain might not make it through a first term as president... and he is setting up a hockey mom to become president???? Lord help us!

Now it seems that McCain really didn't do his homework in selecting Palin. She was barely vetted. Now Americans are learning that she once supported Alaska seceding from the union. Yeah right, that's American! She has basically been an MIA governor, prompting both Republicans and Democrats in Juneau to wear buttons asking, "Where's Sarah" when she repeatedly failed to show up in the state capital (but then charged the state for staying at home in Wasilla). Palin is under investigation for using her influence as governor to get a state employee (her brother-in-law who was embroiled in a nasty divorce dispute with her sister) fired, and then when the Public Safety Commissioner, Walter Monegan, wouldn't fire her brother-in-law, she fired Monegan!

As mayor, she fired just about everybody who wasn't on-board with her radical ideology, and installed her own high school buddies. She repeated the process as governor, now able to offer them plum $95,000 a year jobs. Not many like that in Wasilla. So we can already tell she's yet another conservative cut from the same cloth as George W. Bush... "Cronies First!" If we end up with a President Palin, we can assume that Sarah's BFFs from Wasilla will be heading up FEMA, the EPA, Interior, Treasury and State.

And Palin is so like Cheney in reveling in secrets and intrigue. Currently she is hiding thousands of official e-mail messages that may impugn her in the Trooper-Gate scandal. "The Palins are very big on secrecy," says one Republican admirer in Alaska. She even kept her recent pregnancy secret... from the people of Alaska, and from her own family.... for seven months! Why? What the heck is up with this family?

A lot, it turns out.

Oldest son, Track, it seems is something of a wild child, battling a serious cocaine and oxycontin habit (aren't all Republicans, eh Rush?). He was shipped off to a "hockey reform" school in Michigan, but came back just as messed up. So now he's been conveniently packed off to the Army and Iraq, deployed on, you guessed it, 9/11.

Her 17-year-old, unmarried daughter, Bristol, is five months pregnant. There is nothing particularly noteworthy about that private matter... except that unprotected premarital sex seems to run in the family. Seems Sarah Palin was about two months preggers on the day she and Todd scrambled to the Wasilla justice of the peace to get hitched, lacking rings or even witnesses to their holy union. But now really, this Palin proclivity for promiscuity does beg some questions. Unwanted teen pregnancy is a problem across America that deserves a better solution than conservatives have proferred. Hasn't the Christian Right (of which Palin is a card-carrying member) been lecturing America for decades about the importance of "good parenting" and "abstinence-only" premarital education as the proven route to preventing such unplanned pregnancies? If this were a black 17-year-old with an unwanted pregnancy on the Southside of Chicago, we'd be hearing how this was a graphic example of the failure of welfare, the failure of securalism, the failure of liberal values, the failure of her parents (who would be presumed to be Democrats). God bless Bristol Palin, and good luck to her, but really, just how did the Palins fail so badly as parents with this proven formula? Or is the formula itself really full of holes? Maybe Planned Parenthood isn't such a bad idea after all, eh conservatives? Maybe it wouldn't have been such a horrible, liberal, idea for Sarah and Bristol and their respective boyfriends to have been sex-educated about the wonderful benefits of... CONDOMS! Oh, and by the way, did we mention Governor Palin slashed funding for preventing teen pregnancies, and she and John McCain are against sex education in public schools.

Here's what Sarah Palin's mother-in-law, Faye Palin, says about her: "I’m not sure what she brings to the ticket other than she’s a woman and a conservative. Well, she’s a better speaker than McCain." Faye Palin adds, she might be voting for Obama.

Sarah Palin, Neanderthal right-winger, radical fringe Christian, Pork Princess, Cronies First, charge-and-spender, animal sadist, but against programs that actually help people.

Sarah Palin... rack it up as yet another pathetic excuse for a candidate... brought to you by the same folks who gave us Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle, Alberto Gonzalez, Harriet Miers, Michael Brown, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and of course, let us never forget, the worst president ever, George W. Bush.

-- Rusticus

MORE ON PALIN

A (rational) woman takes on Palin

What's the difference between Palin & Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick!

About Sarah Palin, by someone who butted heads with her in Wasilla, Alaska

How Sarah Palin turned her hometown into one big strip-mall, and fouled her own lake

Did McCain choose the WRONG Palin?