Attempting to put the issue to rest, once more, [White House Press Secretary Robert] Gibbs assured reporters: “The president was born in Honolulu, in the 50th state of the greatest country on the face of the earth…There are 10,000 more important issues for people in this country to discuss, than whether or not the president is a citizen when it’s been proven ad nauseam.”

Yup, that’ll do it.

Sarah Palin fell victim to a prank call from a couple of Canadians pretending to be Nicolas Sarkozy.

Four years from now, remember just how close this country was to electing a fascist idiot to the Vice Presidency.

Fans here had waited 25 years for a championship parade down Broad Street. The Phillies gave them one Friday, and so many fans showed up that they nearly shut down the city.

. . .

The parade drew fans from beyond the region, too. Greg Packer, 44, of Huntington, N.Y., drove in for Game 5 of the World Series and stayed for the celebration. He arrived on Broad Street near City Hall at 5 a.m. to secure what he considered the best spot.

“In New York right now, we have no Mets, no Yankees, no stadiums,” he said. “I came here to represent and cheer our neighbors.”

But even worse than a hack Greg Packer quote — one of zillions — is that the hack Times writer missed the true quote of the day. Lame!

Methinks the person who monitors this is going to be rather busy.

What’s more, they’ve effectively just used the savings of the American middle class to bailout the shareholders of the financial industry — mainly rich white guys, with a few Arab and Chinese sovereign funds thrown in to boot.

We’ve effectively turned into Argentina, only without the great soccer team.

You, and I, and everyone in this country not about to retire will be paying this off for a generation.

Just when I thought Bush couldn’t possibly add to his legacy of corruption, reactionary-ism, and general stupidity, now he’s got a new one — socialism.

But I’ve been convinced otherwise.

Reason?  Palin’s values — notably her adamant anti-choice stance and her firm opposition to sex education in schools — are very much central to her candidacy.  Thus, as our listener noted, the fact that Palin’s own personal life (in particular the pregnancy of her teenage daughter) is Exhibit A in the case against those values makes her personal life fair game for criticism.

So, accept Palin’s stance against sex education as a personal decision if you want to.  But then you also have to accept that teenage pregnancy is a well-known consequence of a failure to educate.  Do you really want someone who hews so closely to discredited ideas (ideas that are discredited by HER OWN LIFE EXPERIENCE!) to be your Vice President?

I don’t think so.  But if Palin wins, get ready for four more years of Bush-style “so what if I’m wrong” governance.

As part of her argument that she has the best experience and instincts to deal with a sudden crisis as president, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton recently offered a vivid description of having to run across a tarmac to avoid sniper fire after landing in Bosnia as first lady in 1996.

Yet on Monday, Mrs. Clinton admitted that she “misspoke” about the episode — a concession that came after CBS News showed footage of her walking calmly across the tarmac with her daughter, Chelsea, and being greeted by dignitaries and a child.

The backpedaling was a rare instance of Mrs. Clinton’s acknowledging an error, and she did so on a sensitive issue: She has cited her “strength and experience” since the start of the presidential race, framing her 80 trips abroad as first lady as preparation for dealing with foreign affairs as president. That argument was behind her campaign’s “red phone” commercial, which cast her as best able to handle a crisis.

…what’s even worse about the Clinton campaign? The fact that they’re mobilizing their Rapid Response Team against freakin’ Sinbad. I mean, these people are desperate…

So what’s worser than even worse? Perhaps having the Washington Post dig into the conflicting stories and declare Sinbad right? That might qualify. Here’s the Post’s Fact Checker:

Far from running to an airport building with their heads down, Clinton and her party were greeted on the tarmac by smiling U.S. and Bosnian officials. An eight-year-old Moslem girl, Emina Bicakcic, read a poem in English. An Associated Press photograph of the greeting ceremony, above, shows a smiling Clinton bending down to receive a kiss.

The Post story includes a picture of Hillary and Chelsea Clinton greeting Emina Bicakcic on the Tuzla airport tarmac. I was tooling around in the tubes today, and I found quite a few Clinton advocates disparaging the authenticity of the photo–suggesting that it might be faked, or suggesting that it might have been taken at another location during her trip to Bosnia.

Thankfully, an enterprising soul somewhere remembered that even though it was only the ’90s and they didn’t have TiVo way back then, there was TV and primitive tools for recording what was on it. So instead of arguing about the picture, we can go straight to the video.

A former driver and aide to former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey yesterday made the bombshell claim that Dina Matos McGreevey must have always known her husband was gay – because he was the other man in bed with them.

. . .

“We called it the Friday Night Special,” Pedersen said. The “intense” escapades, he said, usually began with a “couple of drinks” at a local T.G.I. Friday’s and culminated in “a hard-core consensual sex orgy” between the three of them at McGreevey’s Woodbridge condo.

He said the action also spilled over to out-of-town business trips, during which Pedersen, a handsome, clean-cut Rutgers grad, would share a single hotel suite with Jim and Dina – right under the noses of other McGreevey staffers.

The threesomes began in the late 1990s, while Dina and Jim were dating, continued after their October 2000 marriage, and had ended by the time McGreevey was elected governor in November 2001, Pedersen said. “He liked watching me, and she would watch me while she was [performing sex acts] with Jim,” Pedersen said. “In my opinion, me being a part of their sexual relationship enhanced it for both of them.”

In other words, as incredible as it might seem, Rudy Giuliani—whose presidential candidacy is steeped in 9/11 iconography—has been doing business with a government agency run by the very man who made the attacks on 9/11 possible.

You think this looks like 9/11 Truth Out bunkum but you’d be wrong . . .

Sound Transit/RTID Proposition No. 1

VOTE NO

The joint roads and transit ballot measure shackles expansion of Sound Transit’s popular light-rail system to a massive roads- expansion package that could never have passed on its own.

That’s it. I think I’m about to officially go apoplectic at the political culture in this town. MUCH better if we spend another 15 years sitting on our thumbs giving the hairy eyeball to our cro-magnon cousins across Lake Washington … riiiiiight.

EDIT

Goldy agrees:

I do respect some of the people who are against Roads and Transit. But to play the “useful idiot” for Kemper Freeman Jr. by killing our first chance in 40 years to create a regional mass transit system, that’s too much.

Dan, Brendan, and Co. — 25 years from now when your kids all leave town to live in a “real” city, you’ll be kicking yourself for this.

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani urged NATO to admit Australia, India, Israel, Japan and Singapore on Wednesday as part of proposals to combat Islamic extremism …

Among his proposals for the United States and Britain to take the lead in “winning this war, [on global terrorism]” Giuliani urged the two countries to push for an expansion of NATO into a global body.

“We should open [NATO's] membership to any willing state that meets basic standards of good governance, military readiness (and) global responsibility, regardless of location,” he said.

“I think we should consider countries such as Australia, Singapore, India, Israel, Japan … and there are probably a whole group of others that we could put on that list,” he said.

Leaving aside for a minute the fact that it’s the NORTH ATLANTIC Treaty Organization [heck, what's in a name, anyway?  if the Big Ten can have 11 teams, I suppose NATO can have members not actually in the North Atlantic], this proposal shows an incredible amount of naivety on Rudy’s part.  Singapore?  It’s a dictatorship.  India? Not a party to the NPT, and still buying weapons from the Sovi …, er, “Russians.”  Israel?  A country who’s very existence is taken as a legit causus belli by many of our own malefactors.

Shameless pandering, maybe.  But Rudy — my respectometer is register dangerously close to zero when I wave it in your direction these days.  And to think, I used to think you were a contender.

[sigh]  Is it really too much to ask that candidates for president stop conflating “leftist” with “liberal”?  I’ve been standing on my soapbox on this for a long time … all I’ve managed to accomplish is a slight increase in my blood pressure.  But still …

Rudy, face it.  You’re as “liberal” as Bruno and I are.  That’s the only reason why I wouldn’t puke in my breakfast if you somehow manage to make it through the Republican primaries.